Valorising whose Heritage? The Politics of Representation of Breton Culture at a French Non-Governmental Organisation
Résumés
Cet article examine comment Dastum (association loi 1901), qui a porté l’inscription du Fest-Noz sur la liste de patrimoine culturel immatériel (PCI) de l’Unesco en 2012, négocie la représentation autour de la culture bretonne. Nous soutenons que le modèle de représentation culturelle adopté par Dastum génère des tensions autour des définitions de l’authenticité traditionnelle au sein de la communauté culturelle bretonne. Cette représentation se manifeste à travers des invocations de la différence, ici désignées comme des processus de production d’échelle. Les membres de Dastum définissent le Fest-Noz comme authentiquement breton en l’opposant à d’autres formes de PCI, qui seraient de simples « représentations », car elles ne sont pas appropriées par la population. Dastum tire sa légitimité à parler au nom de la communauté bretonne en s’appuyant sur la notion de « terrain » et sur sa proximité relative avec celui-ci. Enfin, Dastum utilise l’Unesco pour légitimer son modèle de représentation culturelle, tandis que l’Unesco , en retour, désigne réciproquement le Fest-Noz comme un modèle de préservation du patrimoine. Ce faisant, les deux entités éludent des questions cruciales sur la manière dont les interlocuteurs négocient la représentation.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés :
patrimoine culturel immatériel, Dastum, Fest-Noz, représentation, Unesco, culture bretonnePlan
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- 1 “UNESCO - Fest-Noz, Festive Gathering Based on the Collective Practice of Traditional Dances of Bri (...)
1In December 2012, the music and dance form “Fest-Noz” (“night party”) from Brittany, France, was officially listed as intangible cultural heritage (ICH) on the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation’s (UNESCO) “Representative List of Immaterial Cultural Heritage of Humanity”. As defined by its UNESCO fact sheet, a Fest-Noz is a “festive gathering based on the collective practice of traditional Breton dances, accompanied by singing or instrumental music”.1 The nonprofit organisation (as defined by law 1901) behind the effort to inscribe Fest-Noz on the list, Dastum, plays a central role in the so-called Breton cultural milieu, a network of nonprofit organisations and public institutions promoting Breton culture. Dastum, based in Rennes, Brittany, holds a collection of 200,000 documents, including songs, music, tales, stories, photos and more, which constitute the “oral tradition of Brittany”.
2This article explores how ICH curators at Dastum attempt to reframe which enactments of traditional heritage deserve international recognition and what their assumptions about culture tell us about the politics of representation. We consider how employees at Dastum situate their appropriation and representation of Breton culture, as well as their ability to speak authoritatively on it. We draw from qualitative data from a year-long ethnographic research project conducted from mid-2023 to mid-2024 to consider how Dastum mediates Breton identity through its work with ICH. We contend that the inscription of Fest-Noz to the UNESCO Representative List serves as a theoretically productive lens through which to understand how actors within a nonprofit cultural organisation decide who properly represents culture and how.
Scale-making as analytical object
3Created in 1972 by a group of six Breton friends living in Paris with the aim of assembling existing collections of Breton ICH, Dastum was formed in a political context of regional identity assertion. Indeed, the co-founder of the organisation and its first director for nearly a quarter of a century, Patrick Malrieu, regularly compared the inhabitants of Brittany, Bretons, to other oppressed cultural groups around the world. Current members, however, attest that Dastum is not “as political” as it used to be, with some characterising its work as purely cultural and entirely apolitical. This dichotomy is simply one of many that interlocutors employ as they highlight certain axes of difference (hereafter referred to as scales) to the exclusion of others.
- 2 Pierre Bourdieu, “L’identité et la représentation. Éléments pour une réflexion critique sur l’idée (...)
4With studies of the country’s agrarian regions becoming increasingly popular in France through the 1960s and 70s, Pierre Bourdieu warned researchers not to take interlocutor’s representations of the identity of different regions at face value.2 Research subjects, he argued, selectively choose elements to highlight and to recognise at the expense of others and these choices implicitly host social and economic interests. Any notion of reality as distinct from a representation of reality, he suggested, is necessarily misguided since social reality is forged by the struggle between different actors to represent such reality. Thus, had Bourdieu analyzed Dastum’s first official slogan, “National Breton Sound Library” (Magnétothèque Nationale Bretonne), he would have likely highlighted how it (re)defines one particular region as a nation and thus divides it from others, thereby also delineating a desired legal status.
5Dastum’s mission has not changed since its founding even though the political context has. The organisation’s mission, which is officially “to collect, preserve and promote” the intangible heritage of Brittany, has nonetheless been reframed. It is no longer simply sound that interests Dastum but the “oral heritage of Brittany”, its current slogan. The project is no longer couched in terms evoking an independent nation but instead simply names the current administrative region, Brittany. Though subtly, this slogan represents a new claim: one based not on a politics of regional nationalism but rather on a certain notion of culture. It is a claim to identity that manifests as a claim about the nature of culture. The relevant qualities of the scale invoked have changed but the political nature of the claim hasn’t since it involves representation of others in a cultural community. The double meaning of the word claim, as in to stake an interest and to argue a position, underlines the fact that interlocutors’ invocations often implicitly situate who is most suitably positioned to speak on behalf of others. These invocations also concern what is real because they attempt to delineate what is claimable.
- 3 Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine, Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life, 1st ed., (...)
- 4 Guillaume Samson, “Le maloya au patrimoine mondial de l’humanité. Enjeux culturels, politiques et é (...)
6Researchers have proposed considering how interlocutors make meaning and construct power through analysis of scale-making claims.3 Such frameworks account for the dynamic nature of social interaction because they are sensitive to how people posit difference, underline the relative salience of qualities and position actors along intersecting scales. A traditional song sung at a Fest-Noz, for example, is thus more or less traditional based on the degree of some criterion assigned to it, such as its lack of literariness or written trace. Likewise, Dastum’s authority when speaking on behalf of so-called tradition bearers (porteurs de tradition), depends on Dastum members’ relative proximity to them. The contingency of Dastum’s role as institution mediating between actual Breton communities and UNESCO echoes similar dynamics in other French contexts.4 More generally, an attentive analysis of interlocutors’ attempts to appropriate and contest others’ claims to Breton culture requires following how people use language to (re)position actors and (re)frame events. In such an approach, the veracity of claims matters less than the contingent nature of meaning.
- 5 Elsa Broclain, Benoît Haug, et Pénélope Patrix, “Introduction. Music: Intangible Heritage?”, Transp (...)
- 6 Simon Coleman and University of Durham, Tourism: Between Place and Performance, Paperback repr. in (...)
7Along with scale, the metaphor of circulation is also important since interlocutors’ work concerns the transmission of ICH to future generations and its circulation (or not) amidst populations. What are the conditions of possibility for the creation and contestation of channels of information and resources related to ICH in Brittany? What do moments of friction along these channels tell us about how classifications of social practices as ICH impact cultural identities and vice versa?5 The broader rise of transnational tourism is likewise pertinent in this analysis since questions of the politics of representation are highly salient within tourist markets. The ways in which place is represented, by whom and who decides, remain high-stakes questions for interlocutors, for whom livelihoods are sometimes built around tourism.6
A culture of regional cultures
- 7 “Le Fest-noz breton inscrit au patrimoine de l’Unesco”, Franceinfo, 6 décembre 2016. Online: https: (...)
8Fest-Noz’s addition to the UNESCO list, an important milestone for interlocutors involved in the collection, preservation and promotion of ICH in Western France, is a part of a broader trend by which Breton culture is reified through institutional recognition. Charles Quimbert, ex-director of Dastum, current director of the nonprofit Brittany Culture Diversity, and member of the team that submitted the Fest-Noz dossier to UNESCO, proclaimed in 2013 that the decision to list Fest-Noz represents an “international recognition [of Breton culture] that, beyond the Fest-Noz dance, will change how people see the entirety of Breton culture”.7 In Quimbert’s words, we see that the politics of representation—that is, interactional decision-making processes regarding who is afforded the ability to make claims about Breton culture—is positioned as mattering not just for regional or national publics but international ones as well.
- 8 UNESCO, Text of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, s. d. Onli (...)
9ICH is defined by a 2003 UNESCO convention agreement that builds from a 1989 UNESCO Recommendation as “a phenomenon that is transmitted from generation to generation and constitutes an important aspect of a community’s identity”.8 Protection of and funding for cultural practices (ICH) that are under serious threat of disappearance are, according to the convention, to be coordinated with the corresponding “state party”. This arrangement poses the troubling question of how the safeguarding process unfolds if it is principally the state party that is responsible for the practice’s disappearance (via, for example, displacement or discrimination), as has been alleged with regards to Breton ICH in Brittany, including at Dastum. Actors within the Breton cultural milieu cast the state as both a necessary player and, historically, a threat to Breton language and culture because of its largely successful historical efforts to replace Breton with French language and culture. The degree of autonomy of municipalities and non-governmental structures in decision-making over the preservation and promotion of regional culture, especially so-called traditional culture, remains centrally important to interlocutors who define it against centralised power situated in Paris which, actors posit, creates and diffuses dominant culture.
- 9 Saurabh Dube, Enchantments of Modernity, London/New Delhi/New York, Routledge, 2012.
10Ethnographers have long observed that the voicing of selves and of culture—their mediation—often passes through essences. The essence of a culture, scholars note, is constructed as separate from and prior to the social process of the mediation of that essence.9 It is precisely these processes of intersubjective double-mediation than must constitute our analysis in order to fully account for claims about differences between cultures, whether they manifest, for example, as claims arising from geographical difference between Parisian and Breton cultures or temporal difference between traditional and modern ones. Organisations like Dastum offer up intangible heritage as a basis upon which regional identity and cultural essence can be moulded. Indeed, identity and culture rooted in certain representations and practices of tradition have gained traction across France, especially since the 1970s, as exemplified by the development of the Federation of Actors of Traditional Music and Dance (FAMDT). The FAMDT is a nonprofit organisation that, since its creation in 1985, regroups and promotes the work of over 200 structures engaged in preserving and diffusing ICH in France.
- 10 Catherine Bertho-Lavenir, “L’invention de la Bretagne”, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales (...)
11Dastum, along with the FAMDT, continues to reinforce the notion that Breton culture, especially traditional Breton culture, exists and is identifiable. However, the idea that Brittany might have its own unique culture is a rather recent one, according to historians.10 The first accounts of Breton culture were produced by the elite of the 19th century: the administrators of the new Republic and scholars. These knowledge productions served political purposes such as governance and control of populations. The discovery of Brittany nourished the scholarly curiosity of 19th century folklorists such as Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué. Through authorial, then institutional practice, knowledge of Brittany became scientific fact and folklorists its guardians. Now Dastum regularly reanimates the work of these folklorists and ethnologists, such as Donatien Laurent, whose scholarly work was invested in demonstrating the bounded nature and coherent existence of Breton culture. The social and economic stakes of reifying Breton culture are high for the nonprofit; there is political saliency in claiming regional identity, not to mention the consequences for tourism and a sense of belonging based on this identity.
Mapping the cultural practice of Fest-Noz
- 11 Centre de recherches historiques de l’Ouest.
12Social science researchers, from sociologists to ethnomusicologists, have studied the many dimensions of different ICH in Brittany, including Fest-Noz and its evolution over the years. Doctoral and master’s students have studied Breton ICH and even Dastum as an organisation. But the first set of extensive data on the actual prevalence and evolution of the practice of Fest-Noz comes from a collaboration between two nonprofit organisations, Tamm Kreiz and Brittany Culture Diversity, and a research laboratory at the University of Rennes 2, CERHIO.11 This 2012 project sought to answer basic questions about Fest-Noz and to map the phenomenon, ultimately publishing its findings in 2015. Tamm Kreiz was well positioned to coordinate this research project since the nonprofit hosts a webpage tracking all upcoming and past Fest-Noz and manages ticket sales for some of them.
13The researchers found that there were 1,300 Fest-Noz events organized in 2015 (Ill. 1) and the group has published its data each year since (in 2024, there were 1,850 Fest-Noz and Fest-Deiz, a daytime Fest-Noz). As we can surmise from Ill. 1, the practice is fairly evenly spread across the geographical territory of Brittany.
Ill. 1. The location of the roughly 1300 Fest-Noz events that took place in “historical Brittany”, France, in 2015, with each dot representing one event.
Credit: Tamm Kreiz, 2015.
- 12 Jean-Laurent Bras, “Quatre ans après l’Unesco, un état des lieux du fest-noz”, Ouest-France.fr, 8 d (...)
14Among those selected to speak at a 2016 presentation of the report’s findings were Dastum members, a fact which further demonstrates the organisation’s public association with the dance form. Explaining the results, Dastum’s president explained that the Fest-Noz dance has experienced a “banalisation” and, as such, has lost “its slightly activist and subversive flavour”.12 He also faulted a demographic movement of the population, from the centre of the region to the eastern capital, Rennes, and to the coastline, for the slight overall decrease in the number of Fest-Noz and of attendees in the years prior. Even though 60% of Fest-Noz require an entrance fee, Dastum’s president suspects that fewer Fest-Noz are profitable than before. A logic of quantification and translation is at play in the creation and presentation of maps like the one in Ill. 1, rendering a cultural practice intelligible to supra-state organisations like UNESCO. Measurement of a cultural practice, the logic goes, allows a determination of its vulnerability. Knowing the practice’s relative importance for people, one can assign it value. Next, we see how some Dastum members assess the relative value of Fest-Noz by defining it against other cultural practices in the Breton cultural milieu.
Defining Fest-Noz against Celtic Circle dances
15When we interviewed the president and vice president of the board of directors of Dastum in early 2024, a two-hour long discussion of their involvement in the traditional music scene in Brittany became a history lesson about Fest-Noz. To help us understand the origins of the dance form, the president compared it with dances hosted by organisations called Celtic Circles, of which some Dastum employees are members:
President: There were two main trends after the war in the 1950s. The rural society began to collapse but two major movements developed in a rather parallel manner. One was the continuation of Trévidic, Albert Trévidic, and the other [of] Loeiz Ropars. Fest-Noz was intended for everyone, and everyone embraced it and lived it. The show was as much on the stage as in the audience, if not more in the audience. In fact, there were no spectators; people were both actors and spectators. It grew at the same time as the Celtic Circles, which preserved the costumes and also the dance, even though people at Fest-Noz also preserved it, without saying, without knowing, and simply by keeping it alive. The others were putting on a show.
Jolon: I see.
President: [Events held by Celtic Circles] were meant for spectators, but Fest-Noz was not meant for spectators. So, both developed somewhat in parallel in the 1970s. Plus, Fest-Noz became much more significant than the Celtic Circles. I know that, for me, the Celtic Circles were—I said this at the founding meeting of Kenleur and it sent a chill through the room—I said that when I was a teenager, the Celtic Circles were people who dressed up as Bretons to entertain tourists in the summer.
Vice-president: Which isn’t entirely false.
President: It’s not entirely false [laughs], even if we see now that things are evolving. Not everyone goes to Fest-Noz; it’s one leisure activity among many, even though it remains a fundamental phenomenon. It no longer has the same societal impact in Brittany as it once did. And the circles... it’s a very lively environment, with people of all generations, lots of young people, which was somewhat the goal when they were founded. The founders often said, ‘We’ll have a sort of breeding ground for Breton culture.’ They would marry among themselves, creating people who are connected to Breton culture.
16The president here lays out several distinguishing elements between Fest-Noz and Celtic Circle events, each of which would seem to reinforce the next and add to the overall comparison. The following table highlights the contrast he makes:
Table. 1. Schematic summary of the Dastum president’s distinction between Fest-Noz and Celtic Circle practices.
| Fest-Noz | Celtic Circles |
| Loeiz Ropars (1921 - 2007) | Albert Trévidic (1921 - 2012) |
| Intended for everyone | Intended for spectators (tourists) |
| Enlivens tradition (audience is both performer and spectator) | Creates a representation of a tradition (audience is spectating) |
| Socially cohesive leisure activity | Linked to a social project |
Credit: author.
17Fest-Noz, according to Dastum’s president, doesn’t attempt to represent anything: it is pure tradition. By the president’s telling, there is no political or social project behind Fest-Noz. The events held by Celtic Circles, on the other hand, are representations of something and therefore are not authentic tradition. It is supposedly the very ignorance of Fest-Noz goers—the fact that they don’t know that they are perpetuating tradition—that tells us apparently that Fest-Noz is authentic and events by Celtic Circles are not.
- 13 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York, Basic Books, 1973.
- 14 Michelle Z. Rosaldo, “The Things We Do with Words: Ilongot Speech Acts and Speech Act Theory in Phi (...)
18This notion of the ignorance of research subjects echoes 20th century theories by social scientists that argued that only academic researchers are appropriately equipped to access the deeper symbolic meaning of cultural practices. Social scientists later complexified understandings of outsider interpretation of cultural practice by proposing that researchers “read” the text of a culture by peering over the population’s metaphorical shoulders.13 This so-called interpretive approach would attempt to understand a cultural practice like Fest-Noz by looking closely at the symbolic meaning of different signs (phenomena) rendered meaningful by participants. Other social scientists have shown us, however, that conceiving of a cultural practice as a text is simply not adequate for grasping the symbolic meaning of an event.14 Indeed, we may recognize that actors are in fact aware of the larger symbolic meaning of their actions and yet we might still miss the fact that meaning for participants is constructed in extremely complex ways, often being reframed and contested in real-time interaction. This analytical lens helps us situate tradition bearers as themselves agentive in their engagement with Dastum’s ICH “collectors”.
- 15 Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine, Signs of Difference, op. cit.
19Dastum’s president emphasises the participatory aspect of Fest-Noz as the quality that demonstrates its authenticity in contrast to that of the Celtic Circles. Anthropologists Susan Gal and Judith Irvine’s notion of “rhematisation” help us understand his characterisation.15 The perceptible contrast of a quality of an indexical sign, they argue—in this case the president’s words drawing our attention to participation in each expression of tradition—pushes this opposition to depict a contrast in the conditions under which each type of participation in cultural practice is produced. The contrasting qualities are then “found” or projected onto the contrasting phenomena; in this case, onto the two expressions of ICH. The implication is profound: what someone points out as apparently inherent to one expression of tradition or another is in fact subtly constructed by the person asserting the difference. The found contrast is moreover granted an aura of truth as traces of its construction are discursively erased.
20The contrast between the different ICH that Dastum’s president highlights is, of course, caricatural. His comparison points to the idea that an authentic culture is one that emerges organically. Importantly, we found the president’s comparison refracted repeatedly in different contexts by employees and others associated with Dastum. For instance, another employee would later emphasise that Dastum was special because the organisation never had to promote its work or put out a call for volunteers since people would come naturally to Dastum, passionate about archiving and passing down traditional heritage. This employee further emphasised that time volunteered at Dastum is time not volunteered at other nonprofit organisations.
Reframing voicings and value
21Interlocutors, social scientists have noted, link themselves and others to larger social categories, via the embodiment of different typologized voices, in order to accomplish meaningful action in the world. In reframing and repositioning actors and actions, people in fact create the social worlds they appear simply to be describing. Untangling the specific relationships between signs employed helps understand how context-dependent visions of the world can manifest as action on it. Dastum’s president’s comments do this work of reframing and therefore constitute attempted action. The terms through which authentic ICH is defined, therefore, have real consequences for people entangled in those social worlds.
22The president’s description of the Celtic Circles also matters because his position as president of the board of Dastum grants his words a certain weight. As a contender for national, regional and local grant money, Dastum is in direct competition for different kinds of capital with the groups the president is describing. Indeed, the stakes for establishing the relative authenticity of Fest-Noz are not just symbolic. The symbolic value of these dance forms—or at least the narratives describing them—could be said to be reflected in the allocations of public money that go to nonprofit organisations like Dastum and the various Celtic Circle chapters. In fact, fluxes of grant money provided to Dastum, though not specifically linked to Fest-Noz, were a common topic of conversation among employees.
- 16 Sharon Jeannette Macdonald, The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture, Transferred to digi (...)
23Dastum’s president’s words echo similar claims across the European continent regarding the authenticity of certain practices and identities (see, for example, Macdonald16). And indeed, these debates around cultural heritage and the politics of representation reverberate beyond Dastum within the Breton cultural milieu. Certain publics erupted in discontent, for example, when the regional museum of Brittany in Rennes called into question the use of the adjective Celtic to describe the region’s historical character in a 2022 museum exhibition on the subject. The controversy led to Celtic harpist Alan Stivell withdrawing his financial support of the exhibition, again demonstrating the financial stakes involved in claims about identity. We turn now to considering how exactly claims around identity come to carry weight at Dastum, that is, how members of Dastum position themselves as uniquely capable of speaking about ICH in Brittany.
The field: the temporal-geographical location of authenticity
24For a cultural practice to be listed as intangible cultural heritage, an entity (typically a nonprofit organisation) must demonstrate that the practice meets the set of criteria laid out by a group of experts from UNESCO member states. An element proposed for inscription on the Representative List of Humanity, for example, must be, among other requirements, “rooted in the community”, “recognised by the community” and provide the community with “a sense of identity and continuity”. Crucial in these criteria is the assumption that a community, or group of individuals, can (and perhaps must) constitute a coherent and bounded whole. Given UNESCO criteria for the inclusion of Fest-Noz on its ICH representative list, who claims to speak for a community and exactly how a cultural practice relates to that community’s identity represent real stakes for individuals participating in these debates.
25How, then, does one know that Dastum is truly connected to the real Breton culture? We demonstrate that interlocutors assert their own ability to legitimately speak for a projected Breton culture by claiming their proximity to the vaguely defined concept of the field (le terrain). That is, presence in or proximity to the field would appear to grant authority to speak for and take action on behalf of those imagined to occupy this community. The field is a mutable and contingent concept that is nonetheless mobilized to indicate a specific geographical and temporal location. The field is often defined in its negative; it is that which is not the cosmopolitan urban elite. Indeed, members of Dastum position people, institutions and cultural practices along a scale of closeness to the field.
26During a presentation of Dastum’s work by the organisation’s “curator-organizer of the Upper-Brittany network” and one of its administrators to some thirty participants at a three-day “International Ballad Conference”, the curator-organizer explained that:
In 1972, the nonprofit Dastum was created period […]. There are a lot of people who are part of this cultural dynamic and who are aware that there are still tradition bearers in the field, in the countryside, people who still know songs from the oral tradition.
27In this citation, the curator-organizer links the field to the countryside, that space where the tradition bearers still exist, literally those who carry oral tradition with them. The term positions tradition as necessarily something possessed by some and not by others. The space in which we are most likely to find a tradition bearer, the field, is a space where people still know songs from oral tradition, that is, songs thought to have been passed through the generations via oral transmission. These types of songs are likely—though not exclusively—to be found at a Fest-Noz event. Members opposed oral tradition to a literary one; oral tradition is defined by its lack of written trace (though concessions are made for oral tradition that has been fixed onto leaflets and, currently, onto cassettes and CDs published by Dastum). Dastum members also associate the field with those spaces where there are still people who speak Breton and Gallo, Brittany’s two regional languages, which make many appearances in Dastum’s archives. Language also serves as a focal point around which the authenticity of one’s Breton identity can be based. It is perhaps no surprise that most of the employees at Dastum speak either Breton or Gallo and that the politics of language there were linked to the notion of the field, that space where regional languages are spoken and passed down through generations.
28Dastum’s archives, another employee asserted, represent the expression of the Breton population itself. This is because of the size of the collection (the overall number of interlocutors and documents), but also because of the proximity of collectors to that which they are trying to save, the traditional cultural practices, including Fest-Noz. This employee explains:
This is also the source of a great strength, an opportunity in fact: the fact that the oral heritage is taken care of by the population itself, or at least by a base that is broad enough to be representative, and socially close enough to the informants to establish a genuine transmission link. The strength lies in the fact that these collectors are multi-skilled, and are also, if not above all, involved in practice and transmission.
- 17 Paul Kockelman, The Chicken and the Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guate (...)
29A statistical logic of representability is mobilized in this quote. It is the number of collectors—large—and their proximity to the field—close—that enables this employee to say that the Breton population expresses itself in Dastum’s archives. But the real semiotic work of differentiation of this citation lies in the use of a single word: “enough” (suffisamment). We locate the work of voicing, or the embodiment of a position, in the use of this word, which implies a graded difference; that is, semiotically relevant degrees of a quality or quantity.17 We also encounter a very simple idea in this quote: people who play music and dance in Fest-Noz will themselves be able to collect and transmit their collection presumably better compared to those who do not themselves play or dance the ICH. Proximity to the field, apparently, matters.
30Dastum’s proximity to the sources of ICH it collects, according to the curator-organizer, is necessary to carry out its core work: gathering and securing the region’s history and memory. He explains, “from the outset, Dastum’s work has been aligned with one of the fundamental features of the UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage: the empowerment of communities to take charge of their heritage and define it.” Dastum “take[s] charge” of UNESCO’s mission by appropriating and transmitting this ICH to new audiences, especially through its website and events. This conception of tradition, however, ignores the fact that any appropriation of intangible heritage is always first a claim to that heritage and a claim about its salient aspects.
- 18 Jessica Roda, “Le patrimoine à la lumière de l’ethnomusicologie. Collaboration, implication et réfl (...)
31The activism of previous generations, Dastum members explained to us, was not just youthful irreverence but was culturally meaningful and deeply logical. The objective was to take back the knowability of the region. In response to questions about who owns and represents the knowledge of tradition in Brittany and who decides on its access, Dastum points to itself and its founding members. The nonprofit, navigating copyright laws around diffusion of non-commercial songs, makes an explicit effort to render virtual copies of ICH items available to anyone with access to a computer. Members compared this feature of the organisation’s work to the practice of the French state. As one Dastum employee put it, the French state, having funded ethnographic efforts to study the country’s regions, did not ultimately make the data accessible to anyone beyond academics. Since public access was virtually impossible, the findings did not serve the regions’ populations but rather an erudite elite. Involved in a volunteer capacity in Dastum’s work, we ourselves had to navigate a balance between collaborating with employees on the organisation’s projects and maintaining a critical reflexivity, a tension that is highly relevant for ethnomusicologists playing roles in heritage projects.18
- 19 Akhil Gupta et James Ferguson, Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science(...)
32Drawing from social science researchers’ theorisations of the concept of the field, we argue that claims about the field reveal just as much about the social typologies a given interlocutor attempts to enact as they do about the true nature of the spaces imagined.19 It appears that the notion of the field carries weight for Dastum employees in part because of the organisation’s proximity to academia. Indeed, Dastum remains connected to academia by collaborating with university presses on publications and inviting university classes to its offices. Nonetheless, Dastum employees’ use of the concept of the field reinforces problematic hierarchies between researchers and subjects. This is exemplified by ex-director Quimbert’s assertion that tradition bearers “don’t know that they know”, a statement that underpins Dastum’s fundamental assumption about rural countryfolk unconsciously propagating oral tradition. Such characterisations likely diverge from these individuals’ self-perception. When confronted with ethnologists and recording equipment, these tradition bearers likely recognise they possess knowledge desired by the organisation. Dastum employees’ use of the concept of the field would appear to serve the organisation’s claim to authority rather than serve as an entry to deeper reflection surrounding fundamental assumptions at play in the organisation’s work.
Celebrating Fest-Noz as exemplary ICH
- 20 Jessica Roda, “Des Judéo-espagnols à la machine unesquienne. Enjeux et défis de la patrimonialisati (...)
- 21 Michael Silverstein, “Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description”, in Id. Meaning in (...)
33Dastum also establishes its expertise by pointing in the opposite direction from the field: international supra-structures like UNESCO. Indeed, we argue that Dastum uses UNESCO to claim legitimate cultural representation and that UNESCO in turn points to Fest-Noz as a model of intangible heritage preservation. This heritage recognition process, the contours and stakes of which have been studied by ethnomusicologists,20 played out during a filmed celebration of the 20th anniversary of the 2003 UNESCO Convention that took place in Paris in December 2023. A video of the event published by the French Ministry of Culture shows various musical groups playing in a large hall with the Eiffel Tower looming in the background. Scenes of musical performances are interspersed among footage of a circle of people holding hands and dancing around two singers: a demonstration of Fest-Noz. The video cuts to short interviews with the participants. Fest-Noz “is the wealth of our territories”, says Pascal Liévaux, head of the department for research, promotion and ICH at the French Ministry of Culture. Here, the shifter21 our reformulates the speaker, and quite possibly the viewer too, as French, rather than Breton. The speaker’s political assumptions can be heard in his choice of words.
- 22 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After M (...)
34Other interviewees attempt to link Fest-Noz to different voices and roles. Marie-Barbara Le Gonidec, a member of the Dastum Board of Directors, explains, “I feel that I’m Breton through dancing”. In her testimony, she creates an iconic link between dance and Breton identity. Dancing this particular dance becomes an emblem of Bretonicity: she embodies the Breton identity through dance. Another interviewee, the Brittany region vice-president of culture, cultural rights and artistic and cultural education, Béatrice Macé, situates the importance of Fest-Noz within a humanist vision: this tradition belongs to “our human family”, she explains. “Human” here is situated within a de-historicized Western humanist framework, ignoring what the term “human” has previously meant to Western colonial powers.22
- 23 Charles-Dominique Luc, “La patrimonialisation des formes musicales et artistiques : anthropologie d (...)
35Fest-Noz’s central appearance at the 20th anniversary gathering demonstrates how UNESCO sees the practice as a representative archetype of the sort of cultural practice UNESCO seeks to protect. The video presents ICH generally as something coherent and stable rather than something complex, historical and conflict-ridden. This image of ICH reinforces findings by ethnomusicologist Luc Charles-Dominique who points out that the heritagisation of cultural practices in France risks reifying otherwise protean cultural forms.23 What the celebratory video doesn’t show are the tensions surrounding the representation of Breton culture. For example, though Fest-Noz is presented as representative of the entirety of the Breton community, this image has been punctured by recent debates about gender disparity of musicians on Fest-Noz stages. By way of another example, we observed one employee at Dastum making light of gender and environmental conditions for public grant money, mockingly saying he would fake his gender and put on a dress if it meant Dastum could continue to receive regional and departmental resources.
⁂
36During a 2024 conference entitled “No.s Archives, No.s Futurs” that took place in Rennes and was co-hosted by Dastum and FAMDT, panelists questioned how cultural communities can productively engage and appropriate forms of ICH for identity formation going forward. This thread was captured in the conference’s title, which means both “our archives, our futures” and “no archive, no future” and invites further questions about who exactly “our” is and who decides. Participants posed questions about how cultural organisations like Dastum appropriate and represent the past. Indeed, the conference’s brochure suggests that we might look to ICH to “reinvent our cultural identities.” Given the different visions of authentic ICH expressed at Dastum, we might ask: if Fest-Noz is living cultural heritage, are Celtic Circle events zombie heritage, resurrected to look alive but not in fact living? Panelists pointed to the 2005 Faro Convention on “the value of cultural heritage for society”, organized by the Council of Europe, as a guide for action. Crucially, the Faro convention underlines the importance of “communities” in defining their own cultural heritage. This fact notwithstanding—or perhaps because of it—France has neither signed nor ratified the convention.
- 24 Yarimar Bonilla, Greg Beckett and Mayanthi L. Fernando (eds.), “The Presence in the Past”, in Miche (...)
37The conference and Faro Convention’s framing would appear to implicitly accept anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s notion of history as double. As he explains, “historical authenticity resides not on the fidelity to an alleged past but in an honesty vis-à-vis the present as it re-presents that past”.24 Any representation of Breton culture, then, tells us as much about how meaning is made around it in the present as it does about the veracity of its claim regarding the past. That is, the meaning forged by actors in the present through their telling of history matters just as much as the story told itself. In the same way, in this article we’ve seen how Dastum members forge the social worlds within which the institution operates. Dastum invokes scales to negotiate a politics of representation, that is, a model for establishing who speaks for whom. Through this process, Dastum contrasts certain ICH against other ICH and anchors its authority in specific vocabulary such as the field.
38We have also briefly examined how Dastum and UNESCO point to each other to define representation. The representative list’s ultimate conceit is that culture and cultural practice is something that can be bounded, measured and identified. If we do not, however, assume that UNESCO determines universal truths about cultures and cultural practices, then we are obliged to understand UNESCO’s recognition of Fest-Noz instead as the viewpoint of a Western—rather than a universal—institution. The theoretical consequences for an eventual provincialisation of notions of culture and modernity could reverberate back to the organisations and cultural practices UNESCO points to as exemplary stewards and models of ICH.
Notes
1 “UNESCO - Fest-Noz, Festive Gathering Based on the Collective Practice of Traditional Dances of Brittany”. Online: https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/fest-noz-festive-gathering-based-on-the-collective-practice-of-traditional-dances-of-brittany-00707. Consulted 21 October 2024.
2 Pierre Bourdieu, “L’identité et la représentation. Éléments pour une réflexion critique sur l’idée de région”, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, vol. 35, no 1, 1980, p. 63‑72. Online: www.persee.fr/doc/arss_0335-5322_1980_num_35_1_2100.
3 Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine, Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life, 1st ed., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019.
4 Guillaume Samson, “Le maloya au patrimoine mondial de l’humanité. Enjeux culturels, politiques et éthiques d’une labellisation”, Cahiers d’ethnomusicologie, no 24, 2011, p. 157-171. Online: https://journals.openedition.org/ethnomusicologie/1755.
5 Elsa Broclain, Benoît Haug, et Pénélope Patrix, “Introduction. Music: Intangible Heritage?”, Transposition, no 8, 2019. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.4201.
6 Simon Coleman and University of Durham, Tourism: Between Place and Performance, Paperback repr. in 2008, New York, Berghahn, 2008.
7 “Le Fest-noz breton inscrit au patrimoine de l’Unesco”, Franceinfo, 6 décembre 2016. Online: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/culture/spectacles/danse/le-fest-noz-breton-inscrit-au-patrimoine-de-l-039-unesco_3372117.html.
8 UNESCO, Text of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, s. d. Online: https://ich.unesco.org/en/convention.
9 Saurabh Dube, Enchantments of Modernity, London/New Delhi/New York, Routledge, 2012.
10 Catherine Bertho-Lavenir, “L’invention de la Bretagne”, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales vol. 35, no 1, 1980, p. 45‑62. DOI: 10.3406/arss.1980.2099.
11 Centre de recherches historiques de l’Ouest.
12 Jean-Laurent Bras, “Quatre ans après l’Unesco, un état des lieux du fest-noz”, Ouest-France.fr, 8 décembre 2016. Online: https://www.ouest-france.fr/bretagne/quatre-ans-apres-l-unesco-un-etat-des-lieux-du-fest-noz-4668298.
13 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York, Basic Books, 1973.
14 Michelle Z. Rosaldo, “The Things We Do with Words: Ilongot Speech Acts and Speech Act Theory in Philosophy”, Language in Society, vol. 11, no 2, 1982, p. 203‑237. Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4167311.
15 Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine, Signs of Difference, op. cit.
16 Sharon Jeannette Macdonald, The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture, Transferred to digital print., [Repr.], The Heritage Care-Preservation-Management, London, Routledge, 2006.
17 Paul Kockelman, The Chicken and the Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala’s Cloud Forest, Durham, Duke University Press, 2016.
18 Jessica Roda, “Le patrimoine à la lumière de l’ethnomusicologie. Collaboration, implication et réflexivité”, Cahiers d’ethnomusicologie, no 29, 2016, p. 19-35. Online: https://journals.openedition.org/ethnomusicologie/2583.
19 Akhil Gupta et James Ferguson, Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997.
20 Jessica Roda, “Des Judéo-espagnols à la machine unesquienne. Enjeux et défis de la patrimonialisation musicale”, Cahiers d’ethnomusicologie, 24, 2011, p. 123-141. Online: https://journals.openedition.org/ethnomusicologie/1752.
21 Michael Silverstein, “Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description”, in Id. Meaning in anthropology, 1976, p. 11‑55. Online: https://web.stanford.edu/~eckert/Courses/ParisPapers/Silverstein1976.pdf.
22 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument”, CR: The New Centennial Review vol. 3, no 3, 2003, p. 257‑337. DOI: 10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.
23 Charles-Dominique Luc, “La patrimonialisation des formes musicales et artistiques : anthropologie d’une notion problématique”, Ethnologies, vol. 35, no 1, 2013, p. 75‑101, 10.7202/1026452ar.
24 Yarimar Bonilla, Greg Beckett and Mayanthi L. Fernando (eds.), “The Presence in the Past”, in Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Trouillot Remixed, Durham, Duke University Press, 2021, p. 374‑385. DOI: 10.1215/9781478021537-018.
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|---|---|
| Titre | Ill. 1. The location of the roughly 1300 Fest-Noz events that took place in “historical Brittany”, France, in 2015, with each dot representing one event. |
| Crédits | Credit: Tamm Kreiz, 2015. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/socrep/docannexe/image/1217/img-1.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 610k |
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Jolon Timms, « Valorising whose Heritage? The Politics of Representation of Breton Culture at a French Non-Governmental Organisation », Sociétés & représentations, 60 | -0001, 119-135.
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Jolon Timms, « Valorising whose Heritage? The Politics of Representation of Breton Culture at a French Non-Governmental Organisation », Sociétés & représentations [En ligne], 60 | 2025, mis en ligne le 17 décembre 2025, consulté le 14 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/socrep/1217 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15dhb
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