Question of heritage community: Actor-network or imagined community?
China ratified the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (hereinafter referred to as the Convention, and intangible cultural heritage as ICH) in 2004. Since the elaboration of this text, the Chinese government has maintained an intense involvement in domestic policies regarding ICH, in contrast with other countries where civil society plays a significant role (Song and He 2019). Whether at the governmental level or at the level of nongovernmental initiatives, the notion of community has become an essential keyword in studies and practices of ICH all over the world (Noyes 2006; Adell et al. 2015: 8-18; Jacobs 2018). It was already the case in the 2003 Convention and the following explanatory documents, where the notion of community was given preeminence. Nevertheless, in its Chinese utterances, this somehow ubiquitous notion has never led to a consensus. Close to the concepts of ...