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Ament-Kovács Bence – Eitler Ágnes (szerk.): Örökségképzés, kulturális emlékezet, identitás. 403–444. |
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Ágnes Eitler: The Narrative of Heritage. Personalites and Institutions, Motivating and Deterring Factors Behind the Staging of Folk Culture |
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Abstract: Research trends focusing on heritage – whether they approach it from the philosophy of history, focus on the social and political embeddedness of heritagization, on heritage discourses, or the functioning of institutional systems built on the heritage paradigm, or even look for the cultural logic behind the practices of certain groups – all identify the development and existence of a reflective approach as the essential core of the phenomenon. A perspective that looks at its own past, its environment, and the empirical world with an express intention: it accentuates certain elements in order to meet a need for “preservation” and ensure a transition to the future. It typically looks to the past but actually “works” for its own present in treating the local lifeworld reflectively. My work is a case study that summarizes the outcomes of a field research carried out in Transylvania, in Szentgerice in the Nyárád Valley (Niraj Valley). At the center of the heritagization process analyzed in the example is a set of phenomena that, from the 1940s, has been staged as “folk culture” from the local lifeworld as a whole. Certain elements of local (folk) culture can exist as heritage if they are able to act as a condensation symbol – in Anthony P. Cohen’s sense – triggering an emotional identification with the locality and thus ensuring the occasional experience of belonging to the community. The condensation symbol of local heritagization efforts – the protagonist of my case study – is the “Szentgerice bottle dance”. When explaining the process of accentuation, I present the development of reflection as an approach and treatment (formative institutions and key actors), and also describe how seeing it as heritage functions. I emphasize that local heritage is a construct, an idea that was put together over decades as a result of a canonization process involving multiple actors. For this reason, mapping the occasions and actors of canonization and narrative circulation is essential for heritage-focused studies. The key to the success of references made to the condensation symbol is the knowledge and use of the grammar of heritage conservation on the part of those who experience a layer of local identity that is occasionally connected to the accentuated local element, and thus the locality. Observing, recording, and analyzing the local functioning of this grammar can deepen investigations focused on the cultural logic of heritage. |
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Kulcsszavak: színpadra vitt népi kultúra, sűrítő szimbólumok, kanonizálás, vidéki örökség, identitás. |
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Keywords: staged folk culture, condensation symbols, canonization, rural heritage, identity |
