From Possession to Relation: Rethinking the Governance of Intangible Heritage

Abstract

This chapter critically examines the tension between the relational ethos of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) and the possessive logics through which it is often governed. Although the 2003 UNESCO Convention conceptualises ICH as living, dynamic, and community-based, its implementation frequently translates mobile and interconnected cultural practices into bounded elements associated with particular communities, territories, and nation-states. Drawing on relational sociology and critical heritage studies, the chapter proposes an alternative framework that understands heritage not as a cultural possession but as a relational infrastructure sustained through four interconnected processes: circulation, recognition, narration, and power. It develops this argument through the case of batik, tracing connections across China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and wider transnational networks. Batik demonstrates how practices produced through long histories of mobility, exchange, ecological knowledge, gendered labour, and cultural adaptation can become fragmented through national heritage regimes and mobilised within symbolic competition and cultural diplomacy. A relational approach instead shifts safeguarding towards sustaining the social, ecological, institutional, and translocal relationships through which cultural practices endure. The chapter argues that moving from possession to relation can reorient ICH governance from territorial ownership and cultural competition towards shared stewardship, plural recognition, and transnational dialogue. Show more