Intangible heritage governance,

cultural diversity, ethno-nationalism

Mary N. Taylor

Abstract: Since the early 1990s, language used to speak of cultural practices once
thought of as “folklore” has become increasingly standardized around the term in-
tangible heritage. Supranational intangible heritage policies promote a contradic-
tory package that aims to preserve local identity and cultural diversity while
promoting democratic values and economic development. Such efforts may con-
tribute to the deployment of language that stresses mutual exclusivity and incom- Összemerhetet
lenseg
mensurability, with important consequences for individual and group access to
resources. This article examines these tensions with ethnographic attention to a
Hungarian folk revival movement, illuminating how local histories of “heritage
Text
protection” meet with the global norm of heritage governance in complicated
ways. I suggest the paradoxical predicament that both “liberal” notions of diver-
sity and ethno-national boundaries are co-produced through a number of pro-
cesses in late capitalism, most notably connected to changing relations of property
and citizenship regimes.
Keywords: cultural diversity, cultural property, ethno-nationalism, intangible her-
itage, late capitalism

In the past two decades, language used to speak
of cultural practices once thought of as “folk-
lore” has become increasingly standardized and
codified around the term intangible heritage.1
Culminating with its 2003 Convention for the
Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Her-
itage (ratified by ninety-seven nation-states at
the time of this writing), UNESCO’s gover-
nance of intangible heritage relies on the idea
that the reproduction of practices of “cultural
groups” promotes the preservation of cultural
diversity and the awareness of a common hu-
man heritage necessary for both a democratic
worldview and sustainable development. The
bureaucratic practices in the implementation of
heritage policy require that distinct groups be
defined and connect these with particular cul-
tural practices. In order to gain access to re-
sources related to heritage, therefore, actors and
groups must conform to “places of recognition”
delineated by agencies sponsoring heritage
projects and the expectations of consumers.
The articulation of what constitutes intangi-
ble cultural heritage and its instrumentalization
as a form of property, while said to sustain the
life of communities, may also facilitate pro-

Focaal—European Journal of Anthropology 55 (2009): 41–58

doi:10.3167/fcl.2009.550104
42 | Mary N. Taylor
cesses of the unequal redistribution of re-
sources not unrelated to what David Harvey
(2005) has called “accumulation by disposses-
sion”, through the production and reproduction
of boundaries. Such boundary-making sits at
the intersection of a number of projects, in-
cluding those involved with defining the nation,
which serve to reify culture (Kaneff and King
2004). An understandable over-attention to lib-
eratory aspects of intangible heritage governance
deriving from its connections with Indigenous
activism and the protection of minority groups
may obscure the role of the discourses and tech-
nologies of intangible heritage protection in
ethno-national boundary-making projects in
Europe, often connected to territorial auton-
omy and self-determination. Heritage projects
supported by UNESCO may therefore in some
cases converge with the very kinds of ethno-
national projects viewed as the opposite of the
tolerance and democratic values that the organ-
ization aims to cultivate.
This article examines the dynamics of intan-
gible heritage projects concerning the promo-
tion of a contradictory package of the defense
of local identity rooted in territory, and the pro-
motion of cultural diversity, democratic values,
and economic development. I first discuss how
liberal cultural heritage policies intersect with
romantic conceptualizations of the nation, and
then trace the emergence of UNESCO intangi-
ble heritage policies, situating heritage gover-
nance as a “global norm.” I then discuss how
cultural heritage governance provides “places of
recognition” in a process that contributes to the
reification of culture and its association with
territory. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork
among Hungarian folk revivalists, I go on to il-
lustrate ways in which efforts at the reproduc-
tion of intangible heritage are tied to the making
of boundaries. The article elucidates how the
making of ethno-national boundaries and the
redistribution of property are related to charac-
teristics of contemporary capitalism and the rise
of “cultural fundamentalism” (Stolcke 1995) or
“culture talk” (Mamdani 2005) as exemplified
by heritage governance.
Romantic (neo)liberalism?
Struggles around the definition and reproduc-
tion of intangible heritage should be viewed as
tied up in processes of boundary-making that
define access to limited resources—whether
through the delineation of property or of citi-
zens/members of the “nation”—in the dialecti-
cal production of nations and nation-states. As
is well known, the history of projects oriented
toward the cultivation (or enculturing) of citi-
zens reveals shifts between (or shifting combi-
nations of) romantic understandings of culture
as something representing the essence of a group
and those which stress that culture (cultivation)
is an ethical pedagogy aimed at producing citi-
zens (Eagleton 2000: 6). Given the origins of
national ethnography and folklore in romantic
nationalism, the idea that folklore or intangible
heritage might inform ethno-national projects
might not be terribly surprising. Yet, the con-
temporary governance of intangible heritage al-
lies romantic notions of collective entitlement
with liberal technologies—most notably with
the expansion of mechanisms meant to protect
human rights and property rights—in a mo-
ment characterized by a weakening welfare state
(Chanock 2000: 34).
Thomas Hyland Eriksen (2001) has pointed
to a tension between the liberal and humanistic
intentions and the “archipelago” image of cul-
tures presented in the UNESCO document “Our
Creative Diversity.” “The political conclusions
to be drawn from the description of the world
inherent in the report,” he argues, “are not nec-
essarily the liberal, tolerant and universalistic
ones suggested by the authors” (Eriksen 2001:
134). Indeed, actors across the political spectrum
“could find a sound basis for their isolationism
and political particularism in the report, not-
withstanding its periodical assertions to the
contrary” (ibid.). The rise of intangible heritage
governance, I argue, is an instance of a roman-
tic “cultural turn” evidenced across the political
spectrum. Its focus on the democratic values to
be derived from the protection of diversity ob-
scures its tendency to produce and reproduce
 Intangible heritage governance, cultural diversity, ethno-nationalism | 43
difference, thus meeting the imperatives of the
redistribution of resources—new property
mindenüt forms and new relations of production.
t The ubiquity of the language of intangible
jelenlet
heritage and its ties with romantic notions of
culture can be illustrated with an example from
my ethnographic research. Between 2000 and
2005, I conducted fieldwork among Hungarian
folk revivalists at weekly dance events in Buda-
pest and at summer folk dance camps in villages
in Transylvania (Romania) to which we traveled
to learn “authentic” regional dances. Archival
research I conducted on this revival that emerged
in the 1970s revealed a shift in the language that
revivalists and cultural managers used to speak
about the activities of revival. A language em-
phasizing cultivation, discipline, and folk art
had been eclipsed by one emphasizing authen-
tic tradition and heritage. One place where this
shift manifests itself is the establishment of the
state-funded institution “Heritage House” that
revivalists managed to win for themselves in
2001.2
Managers explained to me that the emergence
of Heritage House as an entity independent from
the Hungarian Institute for Culture (in which
most of the activities of what would become
Heritage House had previously taken place) was
a great victory, in that there now exists an insti-
tution dedicated solely to the “nursing and re-
vival of the folk traditions of the Carpathian
basin” (Hagyományok Háza 2008; see also Tay-
lor 2008b).3 Although the revival itself emerged
from such a context, revivalists are pleased that
it must no longer share an institutional home
with other traditions of Hungarian cultivation
and public education, such as the “amateur art
movements and groups, self-motivated commu-
nities of culture, learning communities, extra-
curricular learning activities, [and] constructive
and free-time activities,” now the domain of the
Hungarian Institute for Culture (The Hungar-
ian Institute for Culture and Art 2009). The in-
stitutional split that produced Heritage House
as distinct from The Hungarian Institute for Cul-
ture illustrates the diversion of two approaches
toward culture: one that attends to “public cul-
ture” and community-building and the other to
the preservation and revival of authentic tradi-
tion, or heritage.
UNESCO’s adoption of heritage protection
as a way to promote peace, democratic values,
and sustainable development cannot be exam-
ined without taking into account the long histo-
ries of “heritage protection” tied to patterns of
empire and nation-state making. The rise to
prominence of the language of heritage through
the mediation of supranational agencies such as
UNESCO can be seen as an instance of the local
institutionalization of international norms
noted by John Meyer et al. (1997) and Yasemin
Soysal (1997), who have pointed out the influ-
ence of worldwide models in shaping agendas
deemed legitimate on the local level. Meyer et
al. note that the application of such models is
often marked by extreme variance between
functionalist models and results on the local
level. Sponsored by nation-states, such programs
“increase the number and density of types of
actors, as groups come forward to claim newly
reified identities and the resources allocated to
them” (1997: 152). Projects pursuing interna-
tional norms therefore incorporate actors on a
number of levels who come together provision-
ally to activate relationships with funders (and
other resources) by slotting into “places of
recognition” (Sylvain 2005).
It is only in the past two decades that the
term intangible heritage has come to replace folk-
lore to refer to “living expressions and the tradi-
tions that countless groups and communities
worldwide have inherited from their ancestors
and transmit to their descendants, in most cases
orally” (UNESCO 2009). The ubiquity of this
global norm of intangible heritage protection,
with all of its contradictions, is indicative, I ar-
gue, of a particular political-economic moment,
and the liberal language of peace, respect for di-
versity, and development helps to obscure pro-
cesses of resource redistribution. The next two
sections offer a brief account of the development
of UNESCO’s intangible heritage policy, fol-
lowed by a discussion of how heritage discourse
reifies culture and ties it to territory. While the
44 | Mary N. Taylor
connection with self-determination is overt
when speaking of Indigenous rights, it has been
obscured in discussions of European heritage,
despite the recent proliferation of nation-states.
Supranational heritage governance:
Genealogies of a global norm
A dense network of international law has devel-
oped over issues of cultural heritage, under-
stood as “a form of inheritance to be kept in
safekeeping and handed down to future gener-
ations,” linked with group identity as “both a
symbol of the cultural identity of a self defined
group … and an essential element in the con-
struction of that group’s identity” (Blake 2000:
83). Having made the protection of “tangible”
heritage incumbent on nation-states in the
1950s (ibid.: 61), UNESCO adopted the World
Heritage Convention in the early 1970s. Bor-
rowing the notion of cultural diversity from the
paradigm of biological diversity, and consider-
ing heritage a “nonrenewable resource” (ibid.:
72), the World Heritage Program emphasizes a
common human heritage (UNESCO 2007).
Although the concept of heritage was origi-
nally limited to material culture, intangible her-
itage has recently emerged as an important object
of governance. Its codification in UNESCO’s
2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the
Intangible Heritage (ratified in 2006), signals a
broadening of heritage discourse to include the
“practices, representations, expressions, as well
as the knowledge and skills, that communities,
groups and, in some cases, individuals recog-
nise as part of their cultural heritage” (UNESCO
2008). While earlier efforts aimed at such prac-
tices on local, nation-state, and UNESCO levels
tended to address “folk art,”“folklore,” or “tradi-
tional culture,” the shift to the language of in-
tangible heritage was well underway with the
introduction of the Proclamation of Master-
pieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of
Humanity in 1997.4
In the 1990s, UNESCO working groups
made up of international delegates and consult-
ants convened to discuss the development of new
approaches to intangible heritage preservation.
Concerns were expressed about the manipula-
tion of cultural forms for political, religious,
or commercial purposes; the negative impact of
tourism was particularly noted (UNESCO
1993a: 10ff.). Fears of “folkorization,” seen as
the extraction of “culture products” from their
“original contexts,” and the conclusion that
“steps must be taken to safeguard the entire
socio-cultural structure to which the heritage
belongs” (UNESCO 1993b: 10) were key factors
in the development of new measures. The failure
of earlier projects in achieving the desired goals
was especially attributed to a lack of success at
revitalization (UNESCO 1993a: 5ff.). While be-
moaning far-reaching political and economic
changes and the negative impact of tourism,
participants envisioned an expanded role of in-
tangible heritage in development and a dynamic
role for cultural actors and creators in the na-
tional economy (ibid.: 10) largely through her-
itage tourism. A decision was made to focus
on “rural cultures dating from the preindustrial
era and associated with a particular territory”
(ibid.: 4).
Revitalization was thus a key concern of the
2003 Convention, which set up a plan for the
establishment of a Representative List of Intan-
gible Heritage of Humanity to promote visibil-
ity and awareness (and which would eventually
incorporate practices designated “Masterpieces”
since 1997), a list of those cultural practices in
need of “urgent safeguarding,” and a fund to
support programs, projects, and activities. The
Proclamation Program for the Safeguarding of
Cultural Heritage stresses that candidates should
be “a living cultural tradition,” act as a “means
of affirming the cultural identity of the commu-
nities concerned,” or “be at risk of destruction
or of disappearing” (UNESCO 2006). Candi-
dates are expected to produce “a sound action
plan for revitalisation, safeguarding and pro-
motion” (ibid.).
The Convention asserts that intangible heri-
tage provides practitioners “with a sense of identity
and continuity, thus promoting respect for cul-
tural diversity and human creativity” (UNESCO
2006). Elsewhere, it highlights the role of cul-
 Intangible heritage governance, cultural diversity, ethno-nationalism | 45
tural heritage as a “mainspring of cultural diver-
sity and a guarantee of sustainable development”
(ibid.). This association of intangible heritage
protection, sustainable development, and dem-
ocratic values such as the respect for diversity
appears to have become common sense on the
policy level and is often echoed by local actors.5
The term cultural diversity has been shown
to be flexible, however. While the Convention
connects cultural diversity with democratic val-
ues, the various uses of the term mask a tendency
to territorialize populations or fix boundaries
between those with long histories of cultural
exchange and mixing. UNESCO is not alone in
this; such uses of cultural diversity reflect a
broader tendency to base “the distinctiveness of
societies, nations and cultures … on a seem-
ingly unproblematic division of space, on the
fact that they occupy ‘naturally’ discontinuous
spaces” (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 2). Nadia Ki-
wan and Ulrike Meinhof (2006) show that the
term cultural diversity is used in three some-
what contradictory ways in EU documents. It
may be used to refer to national diversity within
the European context, particularly with regard
to cultural products and international competi-
tion; to represent regional diversity with regard
to the politics of regionalism, Indigenous groups,
and minority language protection; and finally,
to speak about anti-discrimination policy re-
garding ethnic minorities and migrants in the
workplace (Kiwan and Meinhof 2006: 67).
Echoing Eriksen’s (2001) claim about the
“archipelago approach to cultures,” Kiwan and
Meinhof note that the predominant view of
cultural diversity in EU documents points to a
“rather mosaic like imaginaire where difference
and bounded units of culture exist side by side
at times engaging in dialogue” (2006: 64). This
notion of diversity, they argue, incorporates “de-
territorialized migrants only with difficulty”
(ibid.: 61) and obscures the aspect of struggle in
processes of defining culture. The inability of
such understandings of diversity to deal with de-
territorialized groups or those without “nations”
may have broader implications in a Europe with
shifting borders and citizenship regimes. The
political implications of the reliance of heritage
governance on the connection between culture,
territory, and self-determination are acknowl-
edged quite openly when Indigenous rights are
involved (Sylvain 2005). They are much more
obscured in most discussion of the function of
heritage protection in Europe, where such ef-
forts are seen as cultivating a respect for diver-
sity. As I hope to illustrate below, the similarities
are worth considering and contextualizing. Con-
ditions of late capitalism may bring together
unlikely bed partners in defense of heritage, con-
tributing also to the reification of culture. Re-
garding culture as a commodity alone, however,
elides both the proliferation of new property
forms and processes of cultivation—both key to
understanding the uses of “local knowledges.”
Reification and recognition:
Culture, territories, owners
In an article about Indonesian politics of indi-
geneity, Tania Murray Li writes “those who de-
mand that their rights be acknowledged must
fill the places of recognition that others provide,
using dominant languages and demanding a
voice in bureaucratic and other power-saturated
encounters, even as they seek to stretch, reshape,
or even invert the meanings implied” (2001: 653).
Discussing the intersection of rights-based in-
digenous activism, tourism, and recognition in
the politics of San Bushman identity, Renee Syl-
vain points out: “The proliferation of essential-
ist claims is owed to a globalizing idea of culture
that proves useful for generating income and
securing recognition, particularly for indigenous
peoples” (2005: 356ff.). She notes that this glob-
alized idea of culture, embodied in identity ex-
pectations originating in “the state,” NGOs, the
international donor community, or tourist pref-
erences, often converges with historical habits
of misrecognition intimately tied to dynamics
of dispossession.
In the case of Indigenous “places of recogni-
tion” there is an “overt link between cultural, or
‘national’ identity and a unique relationship with
‘the land’ ” (Sylvain 2005: 357; see also Li 2001).
Struggles over property and territory have been
46 | Mary N. Taylor
key to the emergence of Indigenous intangible
heritage governance. Having emerged in response
to dispossession at the hands of development
projects in the 1960s and 1970s, Indigenous
rights activism found allies in NGOs that facili-
tated claims made in the language of self-deter-
mination (ibid.: 356). To successfully make such
claims—that is, to be recognized—requires the
crafting and reproduction of a “unique locally
grounded but globally recognizable indigenous
identity” (ibid.). The recognition and preserva-
tion of intangible heritage for Indigenous groups
is aimed at (re)producing a recognizable iden-
tity for practices and peoples seen as endan-
gered, who are often associated with resources,
including territory considered essential to the
maintenance of that identity. Here the connec-
tion between heritage protection and self-deter-
mination appears unambiguous.
Heritage preservation projects have also
emerged from the incorporation of “local
knowledges” into development plans. Reflecting
the trajectory of development as well as dilem-
mas surrounding tourism in the UNESCO meet-
ings, local, place specific development projects
are seen as alternatives to those dispossessing de-
velopment projects considered allied with “glob-
alization” and colonial and neocolonial power
structures, as “alternatives to development” (see
Escobar 1991, 2000). The dominant notion of
development, however, tends to obscure inequal-
ities, based as it is on broad measures of growth,
and local knowledge-based heritage projects are
riddled with contradictions (Boswell 2009; Syl-
vain 2005). Notions such as the “sustainable de-
velopment of communities” may serve to mask
struggles over resources “within communities”
often obscured to outside observers, bureau-
crats, and experts (Kaneff and King 2004: 9; see
also Chanock 2000: 21).6
The heritage of groups that are not widely
identified as Indigenous is also “assumed to be
coterminous with bounded territorial groups,
so-called ‘communities,’ and with rural culture”
(Silverman forthcoming). Indeed, UNESCO’s
choice to focus on “rural cultures dating from
the preindustrial era and associated with a par-
ticular territory” (1993a: 4) assumes not simply
a relationship to territory but particular kinds
of land use, as with approaches to Indigeneity
(Sylvain 2005). In an article about land privati-
zation and ethnicity in rural Bulgaria, Deema
Kaneef (1998) reveals that people in this post-
socialist region, where long and short histories
of ethnic displacement are well remembered,
perceive the land they buy as territory.1 Why then
are the political and economic consequences of
heritage protection (with all of its associations)
imagined differently when we think about cul-
tural groups in Europe rather than Indigenous
groups?
Viewing reification, recognition, and heritage
governance through the lens of uneven devel-
opment prompts us to ask how heritage protec-
tion technologies refract under the conditions
of neoliberal globalization. Turning our gaze
away from the Third World to (parts of) Europe
(where, by the way, the discourse of colonial/
neoimperial oppression is used by nationalist
movements) can show us how technologies of
heritage protection and production frequently
deemed liberating for Indigenous groups here
play a part in the kinds of national boundary-
making reminiscent of romantic nationalism.
As Talal Asad suggests, “we should not sup-
pose that trouble spots such as East Timor, Is-
rael, Chechnya and Kosovo demonstrate how
elusive boundaries are” (2000: 13). They indi-
cate, rather, that the fixing, maintenance and al-
teration of boundaries “are the continuous facts
of contemporary political power” (ibid.). The
political boundaries drawn and redrawn in the
post-socialist era do not represent timeless nat-
ural boundaries but are the reflection of pro-
cesses of differentiation under particular and
historical conditions of neoliberal redistribu-
tion. The focus here on a formerly state social-
ist region of Europe should not suggest that
such processes are only active there. Neverthe-
less, shifts in territorial boundaries and prop-
erty regimes in this region during the past two
decades have brought political boundary-making
and the delineation of public goods from pri-
vate property to the surface, making this region
 Intangible heritage governance, cultural diversity, ethno-nationalism | 47
fertile for thinking through the broader impli-
cations of heritage boundary-making.
Making national cultures and the
territorial boundaries of nation-states
Janet Blake writes that the direct linking of
human rights and cultural heritage has “been
spurred on by recent conflict in former Yugo-
slavia, due to attempts by one party to the con-
flict to eradicate the cultural heritage of the other
in order to destroy their ethnic/cultural identity
as a weapon of war” (2000: 76). While main-
taining that the construction of cultural iden-
tity is what is at stake in the right of a people to
their cultural heritage, Blake fails to note that
the Yugoslav wars were fought under the sign of
the right to self-determination. They were based
on the relation of “peoples” to territory. In the
past two decades, seven “nation-states” have
emerged from what we once knew as Yugo-
slavia. The most recent example of this is the
2008 establishment of the sovereign state of
Kosovo, which declared independence despite
the questionable status of a Kosovar “people,” or
nation, yet the “obvious” difference (language
practices, for one) between ethnic Albanians and
their once co-citizens in Serbia.
This proliferation of nation-states in Europe
has occurred simultaneously with the transfor-
mation of the socialist welfare state and the re-
distribution of once public resources into private
hands. To illuminate the relationships among
minority/Indigenous rights protection, nation-
state making and property relations at stake in
heritage governance, I now hone in on national
boundary-making visible in a folk revival in
Hungary, referred to as the táncház (dancehouse)
movement. I focus on how the practices of this
movement that has popularized the practice of
rural folk dance/music as a regular social activ-
ity among urban Hungarians contribute to the
drawing of “national” territorial boundaries,
and of boundaries between owners of cultural
property/heritage through discourses of authen-
ticity. Examination of the dynamics of reifica-
tion, authenticity, and territory specific to the
Hungarian revival reveals shifting access to re-
sources under conditions of post-socialist border
disputes, property redistribution, and neolib-
eral dispossession.
The táncház movement’s success at revital-
ization has meant that it has achieved a main
goal of intangible heritage protection as defined
by the UNESCO Convention without being the
direct target of the programs prescribed by it.7
Some comparison with Croatian and Macedon-
ian candidatures for UNESCO’s Masterpieces of
the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity
will help relate the dynamics seen in the Hun-
garian revival to national and supranational
levels of recognition, and to illuminate tensions
between “global” visions and local realities.
For three decades Hungarian folk dance and
music revivalists have flocked (in increasing
hordes) to remote Transylvanian villages seek-
ing traditional settings in which folk music and
dance are performed, and “masters” to teach
them authentic styles. Since 1990 such activities
have become institutionalized in week-long
summer camps that feature daily lessons taught
by members of professional dance or music en-
sembles and local “masters.” “Traditional village
dance events,” dance houses, are held each
night.8 With the help of pedagogical methods
developed over three decades, thousands of ur-
ban Hungarians (and foreigners including my-
self) have learned to master “folk dance as
mother tongue”—to become “fluent” in folk
dances identified with particular regions or vil-
lages of the “Hungarian culture area” (most in
Transylvania). “Fluent” dancers are able to rec-
ognize the village/region of origin of any music
played by the accompanying band after a few
stanzas, allowing them to determine the dances,
motifs, and dance order appropriate for the
coming suite. Most suites begin with male solo
dances, followed by a series of couple dances
that are typically danced with the same partner.
The authenticity of the motifs and dances in
any suite is reinforced by twentieth-century
ethnographic films, instructors who have stud-
ied them, and the presence of “living masters.”
48 | Mary N. Taylor
However, regular dance events have become rare
in many villages in which dance events thrived
in the 1970s when the revival was in its nascent
stage. Indeed, even though some camps target
local youth, hoping to reproduce local practi-
tioners, staged dance events appear to be slowly
replacing those embedded in social customs.9
Thus, while camps derive authenticity from their
location in authentic villages, experts are most
often professional stage dancers and often come
from Hungary. Nevertheless, while authenticity
is derived from this triad of documents, experts,
and “masters,” the popularity of the camps can-
not be understood without recognizing their
location in remote agricultural villages in a re-
gion that was once part of Hungary. There, eth-
nic Hungarians speaking a regional variation of
Hungarian and practicing “archaic” dance and
music forms long “dead” in Hungary live under
the constant threat of assimilation (as well as
“modernization” and “globalization”). Here we
see that local knowledge is much more than sim-
ply folk music and dance. It includes the many
things that make up a collective memory of the
Hungarianness of this region and the people
who live there.
The táncház revival emerged in the 1970s as
the product of complex historical processes, in-
cluding the redrawing of borders at the end of
World War I, through which two-thirds of Hun-
garian political territory was allocated to neigh-
boring states. In the interwar period, a large
minority of ethnic Hungarians thus found them-
selves living in Romania. At the same time, the
agrarian population in Hungary found itself in
increasingly bitter poverty, making for a com-
plex definition of the “folk” (its conception as
the lowest strata of the agrarian population in
Hungary tending to meld with Hungarians in the
lost territories, especially in Transylvania; Tay-
lor 2008a, 2008b). Successive waves of folk (or
“populist”) revival beginning in this period, of
which táncház is the most recent and longest last-
ing, sought to preserve practices of the authen-
tic folk. Some activists also sought to popularize
them in order to fortify the Hungarianness of
all citizens, hoping this Hungarianness would
result in an empathy for the folk, and in turn be
reflected in the political sphere in policies of
land distribution (Borbándy 1989; Taylor 2008a,
2008b). Hungarian identity has been histori-
cally fluid, and successive folk revivals have ei-
ther sought or achieved to some degree the
fixing of the boundaries of Hungarianness and
the reproduction of “authentic Hungarians”
(Taylor 2008a).
Táncház preservation of intangible heri-
tage—the reproduction of Hungarianness
among ethnic Hungarian Romanians and Hun-
garian citizens—is subtly tied with conditions
of assimilation in neighboring states. Despite
the intentions of numerous participants and
managers who use “romantic liberal” language
seen in UNESCO documents and shun aggres-
sive nationalist expression, and despite frequent
reference to the “multicultural” folk culture of
the Carpathian Basin, the revival functions both
to define and codify authentic practices and to
attach them to authentic owners and territories.
It has produced, much as some interwar revival-
ists hoped, a broad stratum of Hungarians who
engage in folk dance/music regularly and em-
pathize with the folk, and it contributes to the
reproduction of territorialized authentic practi-
tioners in places associated with living tradition.
Such cultivation of “Hungarianness” is re-
flected in the political sphere today, not in land
reform favoring the agrarian folk in Hungary
proper, but, for example, in the obligation re-
vivalists expressed to me to vote “yes” to dual
citizenship for ethnic Hungarians in neighbor-
ing states in a 2004 referendum (Taylor 2008a,
2008b). As one revivalist stated, “after all, we
have been relying on the good will and patriot-
ism of Transylvanian villagers for 30 years.” In
the months before the referendum, a statement
authored by well-known figures in the revival
was circulated at táncház events beseeching par-
ticipants to vote “yes” for just this reason. Such
acts of empathy that seek to provide “over the
border Hungarians” access to resources limited to
Hungarian citizens intersect with movements for
regional autonomy and self-government, prop-
erty restitution, and language rights, in Transyl-
vania. The reproduction of such practices in
particular places is therefore related in a com-
 Intangible heritage governance, cultural diversity, ethno-nationalism | 49
plex manner to the reproduction of the nation
(and potentially, the territorial nation-state), for
it is also the reproduction of Hungarians who
engage in them—of “Hungarianness” itself.
While the gap between the number of people
professing to be Hungarian and who actually
speak the Hungarian language tends to be smaller
in Romania than in other countries hosting a
Hungarian minority, language and “identity”
assimilation—whether the consequence of in-
tentional programs or not—are quite real (see
Brubaker 2007: 298; Chen 2003). Hungarian
subjectivities are intimately related to the po-
tential success of autonomy movements in the
region, as well as access to the citizenship-like
status offered to Transylvanian Hungarians by
Hungary since 2001 (and in whose legislative
wake the unsuccessful 2004 referendum was
held).10 Further, being “recognizably” Hungar-
ian, rural, and folk plays an important part in
attracting tourists and various forms of spon-
sorship for camps and agro/ethnotourism de-
velopment (Taylor 2008b).11
Because the revival relies on ethnic Hungar-
ian villages and their inhabitants (in Transylva-
nia, especially) as authentic sources of dance
and music forms, it must also invest in repro-
ducing a local population that engages in these
practices and in an environment that meets the
expectations of revivalists and other tourists.
Established by coalitions of non-profit organi-
zations and entrepreneurs, and with the help of
funds from state (Hungarian, Romanian, and
EU) sources and the Transylvanian-Hungarian
political party RMDSZ, folk dance camps bring
tourists (mostly, but not exclusively Hungarian
revivalists) to Transylvanian villages for week-
long spectacles. Although unequally distributed
across villagers, resources brought by the camps
in the form of tourist expenditures for food,
alcohol, lodging, and folk artifacts, and as well
as temporary employment at camp facilities,
“breathe life into” “traditional” folk dance and
music and other forms of heritage (such as cos-
tume, built heritage, cuisine) needed to sustain
this agro/ethnotourism (Taylor 2008b). Camps
also reinforce a sense of the “Hungarianness” of
the region. I was not alone, for example, in slip-
ping up from time to time, and saying “here in
Hungary” when standing in a Transylvanian vil-
lage over 100 miles from the border.
Parallels between Hungary’s making of “na-
tional borders” with that of its neighbor Croa-
tia, which became an independent nation-state
in 1991, may seem less than obvious to readers.
Yet the fixing of Hungarian national borders and
accompanying population exchanges (and con-
comitant dispossessions) during and in the wakes
of both World Wars are first-hand memories for
living generations. Further, the two polities share
a longer regional history of imperial demo-
graphic politics. The “Hungarian culture area,”
roughly occupying areas that once fell within
the political borders of Hungary, is marked by
intercultural cooperation and exchange, due to
the highly mixed ethnic character of the popu-
lation, as well as a history of “internal coloniza-
tion” to fortify borders, populate regions
emptied by war, or deter or promote the ho-
mogenization associated with nation-states.
It is not a coincidence that the táncház re-
vival has focused mainly on the preservation of
the folk practices of the Hungarian minority in
neighboring states—it intersects with the mak-
ing of new national borders in the twentieth
century, and subsequent histories of irredentism
(northern Transylvania was briefly annexed by
Hungary during World War II), and state proj-
ects of ethnic assimilation. Although most re-
vivalists do not challenge national borders, they
speak openly of their concerns about assimila-
tion and the second-class citizenship with which
they perceive ethnic Hungarian Transylvanians
to be faced. Most revivalists I spoke with criti-
cized those Hungarian citizens who would not
vote to extend citizenship to “co-nationals” over
the borders (Taylor 2008a, 2008b).
The case of a Croatian application for UN-
ESCO’s second proclamation of Masterpieces of
the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity
in 2003 helps us visualize how processes of reifi-
cation and recognition are negotiated between
local revival movements and national and supra-
national heritage programs in complex ways.
Writing of the difficulties faced by a Croatian
application to have the “Istrian Ethnomusico-
50 | Mary N. Taylor
logical Microcosm” proclaimed a Masterpiece
of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Human-
ity by UNESCO in 2003, Lidija Nikocevic
(2004) asks “what is community and who de-
fines it” in polities where the state is unlikely to
support projects that do not reflect a single “na-
tional character.”12
Having described this musical microcosm as
being part of Croatian, Italian, Slovene, and
Montenegrin culture in the ethnically diverse
region of Istria, they received a response from
UNESCO that the proposal would need either
the endorsement of the “relevant countries” or
to represent “only the Croatian character of the
cultural expression” (Nikocevic 2004). Arguing
that the various mixing, interaction, and living
side by side represented in this “microcosm” of
cultural practices is an essential character of Is-
trian cultural life, Nikocevic stresses that these
practices do not exist outside of Croatian Istria.
They also go unrecognized by the “authorities
of the states involved” because they are not rep-
resentative of the “pure” expressions of these
“national cultures.”
Although seeking to promote cultural diver-
sity, the organizations’ “formalized narrow view
on minority cultures,” which categorizes cul-
tural practices at the level of “national culture”
or of specific minority groups, is unable to rec-
ognize cultural exchanges between groups in
places with a high degree of diversity and inter-
mixing (Nikocevic 2004). This attitude that sees
cultural exchange as an anomaly and excludes
certain groups from the nation to consolidate
the purity of the nation-state, Nikocevic notes, is
found at both the national and UNESCO levels.
In order to access resources available through
UNESCO support, it may be expedient for such
a proposal to adopt a language that reifies cul-
ture—and in this case, its relationship with the
terriorialized nation-state—in order to fit into
homogenous “national” slots. The stakes of be-
ing recognized are high, however, in a context
rich with mobilizations for self-determination.
What might happen to the relationship of Istri-
ans who are not ethnic Croatian to a cultural
practice categorized thus as Croatian? Might it
become exclusively the heritage (property) of
“Croatians” defined not in a civic, but in an
ethno-national sense? Here we can see that the
boundaries of cultural property, territory, and
the nation may be difficult to distinguish.
Analysis of intangible heritage’s relation to
the proliferation of new property forms (and
related citizenship regimes) can be enhanced by
heeding Eric Wolf ’s (2001) insistence that dis-
tinctions of group identity can be strategic not
simply for securing work, but for securing or
accumulating various kinds of valued resources
under changing conditions of the mobilization
of social labor—incorporation. It is thus impor-
tant to consider the nature of property rights—
the kinds of control over and access to re-
sources—that frame the production of cultural
property under the political economic condi-
tions of late capitalism.
Late capitalism and culture talk
The rise of intangible heritage language and the
proliferation of supranational projects aimed at
its governance are in line with the historical
emergence of what Verena Stolcke (1995) identi-
fies as “cultural fundamentalism,” which proposes
that “humanity is composed of a multiplicity of
distinct cultures which are incommensurable,
the relations between their respective members
being inherently conflictive because it is in hu-
man nature to be xenophobic” (Stolcke 1995:
7). While Stolcke traces the rise of cultural fun-
damentalism to the end of postwar economic
growth, successive economic crises since the
1970s, and related rollback of the welfare state,
Mahmood Mamdani (2005) proposes that “cul-
ture talk” has become ubiquitous as a way of
talking (or not), about politics since the end of
the Cold War. Both cultural fundamentalism and
culture talk—which “assumes that every culture
has a tangible essence that defines it and … then
explains politics as a consequence of that
essence” (Mamdani 2005: 17)—can be seen as
symptomatic of a broader turn to culture that
arose in the wake of the 1970s oil crisis. At that
time, innovative processes contributed to the re-
constitution of “the social dimension of citizen-
 Intangible heritage governance, cultural diversity, ethno-nationalism | 51
ship along the lines of group needs, desires, and
imaginaries” (Yudice 2003: 165), shifting the
focus of political claims away from equality and
equitable (re)distribution of resources toward
one emphasizing the recognition of difference
(Fraser 1997).13
The heightened role of culture and the con-
comitant rise of intangible heritage governance
are therefore related to characteristics of late
capitalism associated with the “postmodern” and
neoliberal turns. These include the rollback of
the social state, financialization and the related
diminishment of political protections of na-
tional borders; and the rise of a service econ-
omy and associated forms of labor regimes and
subjectivities. Not only are goods produced at
ever higher rates of turnover (Harvey 1991: 63;
Jameson 1984: 56; Kaneff and King 2004: 4),
but the consumption of services has increased,
among them “spectacles” (Harvey 1990: 285),
represented by but not limited to the emergence
of tourism as a “strong growth industry” (Ka-
neef and King 2004: 7; see also Sylvain 2005).
Late capitalism is also said to be marked by an
“accelerated feeling of ephemerality and diver-
sification of values,” and the investment in forms
seen as traditional and threatened (Harvey 1991:
286, 292).14 All of this has been accompanied by
increased social inequality.
Although it is debated just how different the
structure and experience of “late socialism”
were in terms of the above characteristics of late
capitalism (see Bodnár 2001), the official “fall”
of East European socialism by the early 1990s
ushered in neoliberal agendas. In the post-
socialist period the region has experienced an
intensification of struggles over property and
membership in the nation, both related to re-
sources of citizenship, as formerly social goods
are privatized and national borders proliferate.
It is important not to regard “late capitalist”
cultural fundamentalism and culture talk as
solely the domain of those who seek to close
borders or justify wars and hate crimes. They
are reflected also in the broadened instrumen-
talization of culture as a panacea for myriad so-
cial problems including racism and genocide
(Yudice 2003), as seen in UNESCO’s approach
to heritage protection. The renewed salience of
culture as a conduit for access to economic, so-
cial, and political resources can be seen in the
shift from a legal emphasis opposing culture to
rights to one espousing “the right to culture,”
and the increase of attention to minority rights
by supranational organizations since the 1980s
(Cowan, Dembour, and Wilson 2001: 9; see also
Soysal 1997: 513). These intensified efforts
aimed at cultural rights and heritage protection
are closely tied with those aimed at economic
development, as has been shown in the above
discussion of UNESCO policies.
David Harvey argues that characteristics of
contemporary neoliberal globalization have con-
tributed to “desperate attempts to preserve and
assemble” monopoly privileges by new means
(2001: 397). As certain kinds of locational ad-
vantage have been overcome by developments
in communications and transportation that have
transformed the form and the scale of competi-
tion, uniqueness, and distinction, often framed
in terms of particular places and their unique
qualities, have become key to the assembly of
new monopolies (that is, control over resources).
The “idea of culture” has become “more and
more entangled” in attempts to secure new forms
of ownership, writes Harvey, “because claims to
uniqueness and authenticity can best be articu-
lated as distinctive and non-replicable cultural
claims” (2001: 399). The accumulation of capi-
tal through claims to cultural authenticity that
frame both the uniqueness of a cultural product
and its recognizable presentation, therefore,also
relies on processes that produce and reproduce
differentiation and diversity in the process of
uneven development.
The preservation of intangible heritage, tied
up in processes of development (and particu-
larly the organizational patterning Harvey iden-
tifies as “urban entrepreneurialism”) brings
together coalitions of state powers, civil society
actors, and private interests, who may have vastly
different intentions. As Harvey writes, “the most
avid globalizers will support local developments
that have a potential to yield monopoly rents
(even if the effect of such support is to produce
a political climate antagonistic to such global-
52 | Mary N. Taylor
ization!)” (2001: 402). As we have seen above, the
reproduction of intangible heritage—of “living
culture”—is not simply the production of com-
modities. It is also the reproduction of cultured
individuals; the cultivation of practitioners
whose subjectivities are formed at the nexus of
reifying processes and whose access to resources
(membership in a nation, access to (various
forms of) citizenship, and possibilities for em-
ployment) is dependent on their recognition.
National boundary-making without
territory: The case of Roma
The making of national boundaries appears
tied to the making of territorial boundaries—
the nation-state, autonomous regions, or vil-
lages. Yet, as we have seen, such boundaries that
draw distinctions between rightful owners of
authentic practices—that delineate those indi-
viduals or groups that are properly cultivated
(or “cultured” in the possessive sense)—may be
drawn on other planes as well. In the “cleans-
ing” of Roma musicians from their central roles
as accompanying musicians, we can see a dia-
lectical relationship between the protection and
codification of Hungarian music and dance her-
itage and the dispossession of Hungarian speak-
ing Roma who have filled this important niche
in traditional cultural production for over a cen-
tury, and who face limited alternative sources of
income. Rarely considered co-nationals, and
without a “national territory,” Roma face particu-
lar consequences of national boundary-making.
When the táncház emerged in the 1970s, ru-
ral Roma musicians made up the bulk of the ac-
companying bands for the (Transylvanian)
village dance events adopted as models for the
revival. Revivalists flocked to Roma “masters” to
learn traditional playing styles and repertoires
necessary to revive such dance forms on a broad
scale in Hungary. The key role Roma played and
the fictive kinship relations revivalist musicians
established with them is one basis of the oft-
heard claim that the revival “is not national-
ist”—that, unlike Hungarian society in general,
it is “open to Gypsies.”15
Judit Frigyesi (1996) points out that the move-
ment helped destroy a long held myth that folk
music could only be played by Roma, while cre-
ating new (or recreating old) narratives about
the authority of Roma musicians.16 In this re-
vival, Roma, often seen as contaminators of the
nation, were placed in the esteemed role of
treasurers of the national heritage—folk music.
Revivalist musicians established their own au-
thority by learning repertoires and playing styles
personally from Roma greats, as apprentices of
sorts. Romantic images of revival events in-
evitably feature Roma musicians, and their
presence (especially of elderly fiddlers) tends to
draw crowds. Revivalists often noted to me that
unlike the “half- assimilated” urban Roma who
they encounter (or avoid) in Budapest, these
Gypsies are different; “they are traditional.”
In the 2000s, however, the majority of per-
forming (and accompanying) ensembles are
made up of ethnic Hungarian revivalists. Elderly
Roma do still provide authenticity as masters or
first fiddlers, their names enthusiastically billed
along with those of ensembles when on tour
and at camps, yet long time táncház partici-
pants complained to me that the camps had be-
come boring. “There are no gypsies anymore,”
one told me. When I asked why, he answered
that with less demand for (“authentic”) folk
music in the villages, there are fewer who know
how to play it. Rural Roma musicians serve mul-
tiple ethnic communities with various needs
and attachments to “tradition.” The assumption
here is that as demand for Hungarian folk dance
music decreases in the villages, younger musi-
cians become less and less familiar with this
particular repertoire.
I often heard the sentiment expressed that, as
the older generation of Roma musicians dies out,
it is revivalists rather than village Roma who play
more authentically (see also Hooker 2005: 56).
While deriving authenticity from the elderly gen-
eration of Roma musicians who also served
broad swath of communities, the revival has set
standards that exclude new generations. This is
connected to the fact that what has been most
important for villagers is whether they are able
to dance their local dances and sing songs to the
 Intangible heritage governance, cultural diversity, ethno-nationalism | 53
music, while for revivalists, the authenticity of the
form vis-a-vis a documented past is paramount
(see Frigyesi 1996). This dispossession—the re-
distribution of the authenticity needed for one’s
cultural practices to bring resources—from the
hands of Roma into those of ethnic Hungarians
represents another drawing of the boundaries of
the nation, and with it, of cultural property and
its owners, through the authority of authenticity.
The not necessarily intentional “cleansing”
of younger Roma from the central role of ac-
companying musicians for traditional dance
unfolds in a context in which the conditions of
Roma in the region are becoming more acute.
In Hungary, discrimination and hate crime
against Roma has increased in the post-socialist
era (Barany 1994; Stewart 1997). The criminal-
ization of Roma and the drive to make social
assistance to Roma dependent on public works
service have wide political support (Tamás
2009). The election of three representatives of a
new Hungarian extreme right political party
(Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom) to the Eu-
ropean Parliament in 2009 suggests support for
its hard-line attitude toward Roma, whom they
define as outside the Hungarian nation.
The intersection of revival movements and
supranational heritage governance in the rein-
forcement of boundaries between the ethnic na-
tion and Roma “citizens” is illustrated in Carol
Silverman’s forthcoming book Romani routes:
Cultural politics and Balkan music in diaspora.
Discussing the 2002 application of Macedonia
(independent since 1991) to have the wedding
from the village of Galičnik declared a Master-
piece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Hu-
manity, she shows how UNESCO policies might
unwittingly support such processes. Silverman
notes that despite UNESCO’s claims to be inter-
ested in “the preservation of cultural diversity”
and “the tolerance and harmonious interaction
between cultures,” Roma cultural practitioners
integral to the wedding performance became
nearly invisible in the process of application”
(Silverman forthcoming).
Although they do not live in the village of
Galičnik, Muslim Roma musicians “signal every
important ritual moment with appropriate mu-
sic” at this week-long event (Silverman forth-
coming). Silverman illustrates the historically
given nature of Roma participation in this event
and their intimacy with the Slavic wedding rit-
uals and dance repertoire with a proverb: “no
wedding will take place in Galičnik unless the
Majovtsi family plays” (ibid.). Despite this, the
UNESCO application “hardly mentions Roma
at all and nowhere mentions them in relation to
the goals of affirming cultural identity and pre-
serving traditions” (ibid.). With Roma appear-
ing only in a few sentences simply as musicians,
“the great potential in this project for recogniz-
ing and promoting cultural exchange between
Roma and Macedonians is ignored” (ibid.).
Most significant for our analysis, Roma are
not mentioned at all in plans for training future
generations. In these revitalization plans, cen-
tral to UNESCO intangible heritage policies,
ethnic Macedonian members of revivalist en-
sembles are envisioned in the role of wedding
musicians. Silverman writes: “Ironically, while
Romani living traditions are excluded or mini-
mized by the state, the folklore of the majority
Slavs is coded as authentic even though it is
staged.” Although such heritage awards are
thought to target “authentic living traditions,”
here Slavic revivalists are slated to play a more
central part in the future than those Roma for
whom these practices can be said to be part of
everyday life.
As with the Hungarian example, this partic-
ular form of intangible heritage threatens to be-
come the property of ethnic Macedonians alone.
Such boundary-making, here conceived as a dis-
possession, cannot be overlooked in a context
in which Roma face difficulties certifying citi-
zenship, and even when they succeed, tend to
be subjected to second class citizenship. Projects
of intangible heritage protection, then, do not
simply reproduce practices, they produce and
reproduce boundaries between practitioners.
They delineate authentic owners while obscur-
ing exchange between populations and strug-
gles over resources such as membership in the
ethnic and civic nations.
54 | Mary N. Taylor
Property rights, territory, peopleness:
Toward a conclusion
Deborah Yashar (1998) connects the growing
politicization of Indigenous identities and the
demand for Indigenous rights in Latin Ameri-
can countries to (neoliberal) state reforms and
political liberalization. These processes have, on
the one hand, led to increased possibilities for
organizing, and on the other hand, diminished
the utility of the “peasant” identity encouraged
by earlier agrarian reforms. Identity, authentic-
ity, and property are thus intimately tied
through historical processes of state formation
(see Brown 2004: 52).
State formation is not a process that can be
easily generalized across spaces and societies.
Nevertheless, a distinctive characteristic of late
capitalism is the foregrounding of cultural rights
as the languages of equality (Fraser 1997: 2) and
of the social (Holmes 2000) have lost promi-
nence. George Yudice argues that this “cultural
ethos” generated in “the transition of the wel-
fare state to the neoliberal state” is at odds with
conventional notions of citizenship as some-
thing to be accessed equally by all members of
the nation(-state) (2003: 165, 22). This “renewed
impetus … of the rhetoric of culture” (Cowan
et al. 2001: 9) in the last four decades can be at-
tributed in part to the proliferation of “founda-
tions and third sector institutions specializing
in welfare services” (Yudice 2003: 165) and to
supranational organizations aiming, among
other things, to protect intellectual and cultural
property. The process of recoding rights once
thought of as social rights in a cultural vein
closely parallels the shift toward the “recogni-
tion of difference” associated with the rise of
identity politics since the 1970s (Cowan et al.;
see also Fraser 1997).
Anthropologists have written in support of
discourses and practices of difference as a means
to counter the hegemony of development and
to “be used as a basis for alternative social and
economic projects” (Escobar 2000: 202). Such
goals are “inextricably linked to conceptions of
locality, place, and place-based consciousness”
(ibid.: 203). Conceiving place and local culture
as “the others” of globalization, Arturo Escobar
argues that it is possible to “distinguish those
forms of globalization of the local that become
effective political forces in defense of place and
place-based identities” (ibid.: 205). Such a place-
based politics derives from histories of colonial-
ism and imperialism, which Escobar (1991) so
eloquently described in his critique of devel-
opment.
I have hoped to show here that the recogni-
tion of resistance or place-based difference does
not preclude the forces of capital. The broader
range of utility for “culture” suggests new rela-
tionships between NGOs and “local” actors in a
civil society framework designed to ensure sta-
bility under conditions of neoliberal capitalism
(Yudice 2003: 95). Culture is now considered “a
crucial sphere for investment” (ibid.: 13) when
a dominant paradigm of “development” is of-
fered as the answer to economic stagnation and
social cutbacks not simply in the “third world”
(see Escobar 1991, 2000), but as a general model
for growth (Peck and Tickell 2002). UNESCO
policy documents tie the idea of sustainable de-
velopment to heritage protection, particularly
with regard to tourism ventures, touted by supra-
national organizations such as UNESCO or the
IMF as viable ways to bring income to impover-
ished or marginalized populations.
Such uses of culture require its reification—
its identification with particular, mutually ex-
clusive groups. Resources are tied to “places of
recognition” into which myriad projects may
slot themselves. When populations who have
engaged in cultural exchange over long stretches
of time are codified as members of distinct and
mutually exclusive groups, the traditions that
they share may be cemented as the tradition of
one or the other. If such cultural identity is con-
nected to claims to property or territory, we
must be careful to examine the accumulation
and dispossession taking place through these
processes.
Relying on the reification of culture, invest-
ments in cultural heritage may facilitate the es-
tablishment of relationships that can be mobil-
ized toward political claims (for example, the
formation of new nation-states) and the assem-
 Intangible heritage governance, cultural diversity, ethno-nationalism | 55
bly of new monopoly powers (whether for cap-
italists or by dispossessed groups). We may rec-
ognize this as liberating in the cases of partic-
ular oppressed groups. Yet it is wise to consider
whether those cases of ethno-nationalist mobi-
lization deemed the opposite of “civil society”
are not also intimately connected to these diver-
sity promoting and boundary-making tech-
nologies under conditions of late capitalism.
Acknowledgments
Research for this paper was conducted with the
help of grants from the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York and a Fulbright Fel-
lowship. A version of this article was presented
at the conference of the European Association
of Social Anthropologists (EASA) in Ljubljana
in August 2008. I am grateful to participants
and co-conveners of the EASA panel for sup-
port and comments, and thank Katharina Bo-
dirsky, Banu Karaca, Levent Soysal, Verena Stolke,
Michael Blim, and Focaal anonymous reviewers
for helpful comments on drafts of this article.
Mary N. Taylor, PhD, teaches anthropology at
Hunter College and the Cooper Union. Her
2008 dissertation, “The Politics of Culture: Folk
Critique and Transformation of the State in
Hungary,” centered on the politics of civic cul-
tivation at the intersection of state cultural
management and social movements. She co-
organized the annual interdisciplinary confer-
ence “Toward a Comparative Discussion on
Rightist Movements” at the Graduate Center in
2008 and 2009.
Mailing address: 98 Noble Street, Brooklyn,
New York 11222, USA.
E-mail: loditaylor@mindspring.com.
Notes
1. In Hungary the socialist government re-
warded “authentic” folk art with the Master
of Folk Art award beginning in 1953. Similar
awards were adopted in Romania and other
socialist countries and by Japan in the 1950s,
South Korea in the 1960s, the Philippines in
the 1970s, Thailand in the 1980s, and France
in the 1990s. They have been unified under
the term Living Human Treasures connected
to the 1989 UNESCO recommendations for
the protection of traditional cultures and folk-
lore (Gombos 2001; see also Taylor 2008b).
2. Hagyományok literally means traditions, but
the Institute’s translation of its title is Heritage
House.
3. The Institute’s history is telling. Founded by
populists in the late 1940s, it was closed and
then reopened by the socialist government in
1951 with a different name. It was central to
the emergence of the táncház revival. See Tay-
lor 2008b.
4. Among these were the 1989 Recommenda-
tion on the Safeguarding of Traditional Cul-
ture and Folklore, the Living Human
Treasures program, promoted to member
states since 1993, and the Proclamation of
Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Her-
itage of Humanity (Western Europe), intro-
duced in 1997.
5. We can find a similar formulation in the mis-
sion statement of the Directorate on Cul-
ture, Cultural and Natural Heritage of the
Council of Europe: “We encourage the dem-
ocratic governance of culture and heritage as
a key factor in attaining the sustainable devel-
opment of communities, offering also an
important means of promoting tolerance,
understanding and mutual respect. We put a
continuing focus on cultural co-operation
within and across borders as it promotes dia-
logue between different individuals and
groups, and helps prevent conflicts at all lev-
els of our societies” (Council of Europe
2008).
6. This raises questions about the role of re-
vivals in heritage governance. In all revivals,
some aspects of source practices are fore-
grounded as important for authenticity, while
others are neglected or obscured, and even
changed through the revivalist practices. See
Livingston 1999 and Taylor 2008b.
7. The revival does have links with the organiza-
tion, however. One example is the European
Folklore Institute “a regional centre for the
safeguarding, revitalization and diffusion of
traditional culture and folklore in Europe”—
56 | Mary N. Taylor
(European Folklore Institute 2007) founded
in 1994 by Hungarian ethnographers with
the sponsorship of the Ministry of National
Heritage and UNESCO. Its publication, “fea-
tures original articles on folk literature, folk
music, and folk dance (with special focus on
the Hungarian táncház movement)” and pro-
vides information on events (Hungarian
Heritage 2000: front flap). The editorial board
includes key players in the revival, some of
whom are central actors in Heritage House,
or prominent ethnographers.
8. Táncház literally translates as dance house,
and means both the dance event and the place
where it takes place.
9. Village ritual events in the past were tied to
agricultural cycles and recruitment practices.
10. See Kovács 2005 and Taylor 2008b on the sta-
tus law and referendum.
11. See Taylor 2008b for explication of the fee
scales at camps based on ethnic membership
and citizenship.
12. Here the sense that more than one “national-
ity” may occupy a state harks back to an ear-
lier epoch of nation-state making in this region
in which the right to an independent state
was tied with claims to “historic nationhood.”
In this region, those minorities who identify
with or are identified with populations of na-
tion-states are referred to as “nationalities,”
rather than as minorities (as are Roma, who
have no nation-state).
13. Fraser (1997) sums this up as the “postsocial-
ist condition,” allowing us to connect the de-
mise of socialism as a viable alternative to the
dominance of neoliberal state formation. In
this article I have employed the term post-
socialist to refer to the conditions in those
polities in “post-socialist Eastern Europe”
formerly with state socialist governments. I
use the term postsocialist (as in postsocialist
neoliberalization) to refer to the global con-
ditions since the “fall of Communism,” as in
the “postsocialist condition” which has fol-
lowed its elimination as a viable alternative to
Capitalism (Fraser 1997). While I use these
terms according to a conventional chronol-
ogy that marks a break between political-
economic systems, my use of the late socialist
is meant to point to the many “liberaliza-
tions” that occurred during the state socialist
period.
14. My choice to employ late capitalism as a
broader term than neoliberalism stems from
my concerns about the ubiquitous use of the
latter. Placing neoliberalization within the
context of late capitalism allows us to remain
in dialogue with the earlier debates over
“postmodernity” and also to slot late social-
ism into late capitalism before the “moment”
of “postsocialist neoliberalization.”
15. Because many local terms for Roma are con-
sidered epithets, I use the term Roma here.
When representing the opinions of or citing
revivalists and Roma involved in the revival,
however, I use the term Gypsy (Cigány), as
neither group uses the term Roma.
16. Composer/ethnomusicologist Béla Bartók is
one oft-cited source of an older version of
this narrative. He expressed that peasant mu-
sic should be produced by peasants, and that
professional gypsy musicians inevitably in-
troduced elements of their broader repertoire
into peasant styles.
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