DOI: 10.3986/Traditio2021500103 TRADITIONES, 50/1, 2021, 29–41
In the article, the author starts from the different approaches 
between heritage studies on the one hand and disciplinary 
heritage approaches on the other hand to consider current 
and future developments in the field of intangible cultural 
heritage. In the play between critical studies and broader 
studies, there are risks of regression as well as opportunities for 
progress. To underpin his analysis, he refers to his experience 
of development processes in the field of cultural heritage 
and to some recent research in France on the institutional 
functioning of UNESCO in the field of intangible cultural 
heritage. He then focuses on the notions of “retrotopia” 
(Bauman, 2017) and “prospective” (Godet, 2004), which 
seem to him to be suitable for triggering a fundamental 
anthropological reflection on the future of cultural heritage 
research. At the end, he draws some conclusions about the 
possibilities of progress – or, conversely, regression – in 
intangible cultural heritage.
Keywords: heritage studies, tradition, UNESCO, retrotopia, 
prospective
Avtor z upoštevanjem trenutnega in prihodnjega položaja 
nesnovne kulturne dediščine, tematizira razlike med 
raziskavami dediščine in med disciplinarnimi pristopi k 
dediščini. V razmerju med kritičnimi in širšimi raziskavami 
dediščine opaža tveganje k regresiji, a tudi priložnosti za 
napredek. Pri podkrepitvi analize se opira na lastne izkušnje 
pri raziskovanju procesov razvoja kulturne dediščine in na 
nekatere nedavne raziskave institucionalnega delovanja 
Unesca na področju nesnovne kulturne dediščine v Franciji. 
V nadaljevanju tematizira pojma »retrotopija« (Bauman, 
2017) in »perspektivnost« (Godet, 2004), ki sta po njegovem 
mnenju primerna za temeljni antropološki premislek o 
prihodnosti študija dediščine. V sklepu povzema možnosti 
napredka – ali, nasprotno, regresije – nesnovne kulturne 
dediščine.
Ključne besede: raziskave dediščine, tradicija, UNESCO, 
retrotopija, perspektiva
CURRENT AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS IN 
HERITAGE STUDIES
FROM “RETROTOPIA” TO “PROSPECTIVE”
LAURENT SÉBASTIEN FOURNIER
In this article, I base my analysis on this difference in approaches between heritage stud-
ies on the one hand and disciplinary heritage approaches on the other to consider current 
and future developments in intangible cultural heritage. I show that, in the game between 
critical studies and more comprehensive studies, there are both risks of regression and 
possibilities for progress. To support my analysis, I refer to my experience in cultural 
heritage development processes and to some recent surveys carried out in France on the 
institutional functioning of UNESCO in intangible cultural heritage. I then focus on the 
notions of “retrotopia” (Bauman, 2017) and “prospective” (Godet, 2004), which seem to 
me likely to fuel a fundamental anthropological reflection on the future of heritage studies. 
I draw some conclusions about the possibilities of progress—or, conversely, regression—in 
intangible cultural heritage.
Since 2003, the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural 
Heritage has led to a new examination of a set of social and cultural practices tradition-
ally falling within the expertise of ethnology and anthropology. In France, as in other 
30
CURRENT AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS IN HERITAGE STUDIES
European countries, these practices—tales and oral forms of expression, rituals and festivals, 
traditional games, craftsmanship, knowledge related to nature and the universe, and so 
on—had been identified as early as the nineteenth century by folklorists (Belmont, 1995) 
and then incorporated into the field of “popular arts and traditions” (Rivière, 1989) before 
joining “national ethnologies” (Christophe et al., 2009). Thus, the content of intangible 
cultural heritage preceded its institutional consideration by UNESCO, which raises the 
following question: what are the consequences of the heritagization of social and cultural 
practices traditionally studied by ethnologists? These consequences are numerous; they 
concern ethnologists themselves, cultural institutions, and the communities to which the 
intangible cultural heritage elements belong.
For example, an important consequence of the emergence of the category of intangi-
ble cultural heritage and the proliferation of heritage objects has been the development of 
heritage studies, which in recent years has become a new independent field of study. From 
the perspective of heritage studies, various academic disciplines can be mobilized to better 
understand what characterizes contemporary heritage development processes. Cultural 
heritage is therefore at the center of an interdisciplinary approach. This type of approach 
complements more traditional disciplinary approaches, which use cultural heritage to 
feed their own fundamental reflections. Thus, historians working on cultural heritage 
use heritage to better understand contemporary representations of time, anthropologists 
interested in cultural heritage use it to better understand human relationships to cultural 
diversity, and sociologists studying cultural heritage are interested in this subject to better 
study social stratification or museum audiences.
In this article, I base my analysis on this difference in approaches between heritage 
studies on the one hand and disciplinary heritage approaches on the other to consider 
current and future developments in intangible cultural heritage. I show that, in the game 
between critical studies and more comprehensive studies, there are both risks of regression 
and possibilities for progress. To support my analysis, I refer to my experience in cultural 
heritage development processes and to some recent surveys carried out in France on the 
institutional functioning of UNESCO in intangible cultural heritage. I then focus on the 
notions of “retrotopia” (Bauman, 2017) and “prospective” (Godet, 2004), which seem to 
me likely to fuel a fundamental anthropological reflection on the future of heritage studies. 
I draw some conclusions about the possibilities of progress—or, conversely, regression—in 
intangible cultural heritage.
THE INVENTORY OF INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE:  
A VIEW FROM FRANCE
In ratifying the 2003 convention, France, like any state party to UNESCO, committed itself 
to carrying out a national inventory of intangible cultural heritage on its territory, which 
31
LAURENT SÉBASTIEN FOURNIER
was implemented by the Ministry of Culture’s Mission for Ethnology starting in 2008 in 
the form of a methodological seminar (Bortolotto, 2011), and then by the Department 
for the Steering of Research and Scientific Policy of the same ministry from 2010 onward 
with systematization of the collection of inventory sheets on the national territory. The 
activity of the national inventory, by creating numerous research partnerships between the 
Ministry of Culture and researchers, cultural institutions, and associations, has thus been 
carrying out an effective transfer of institutional conceptions of intangible cultural heritage 
to civil society for ten years. In Provence in southeastern France, where I have carried out 
my fieldwork since 2005, the work of the inventory was first concerned with methodology, 
with the goal of increasing the participation of what UNESCO identifies as communities 
and tradition-bearers. Several seminars held jointly by the Ministry of Culture and National 
Research Center (CNRS) in Aix-en-Provence made possible fruitful meetings between 
university researchers, cultural professionals, and actors in the field.
These seminars have always met with some success, without necessarily attracting many 
ethnologists and academic anthropologists, who are more involved in the anti-culturalist 
critique of the notion of cultural heritage. Between 2005 and 2015, several ethnologists 
thus insisted on methodological and epistemological problems being linked to the notion 
of intangible cultural heritage (Tauschek, 2010; Bromberger, 2014; Palumbo, 2020). They 
pointed out in particular the risks of instrumentalization, folklorization, and reinforcement 
of cultural stereotypes, as well as the problems inherent in the drafting of “files” and in 
the institutional promotion of cultural heritage. However, ministerial policy had to pursue 
its ambitions despite these theoretical criticisms in order to achieve the concrete agenda 
of the inventory.
Starting in 2017 in Provence, several inventory sheets were drawn up on various 
regional festive practices: cart festivals in the northwest part of the Bouches-du-Rhône 
district, Christmas traditions, the Nice carnival, the lemon festival in Menton, the green 
olive festival in the village of Mouriès, and the vine and wine festivals of the Rhône Valley 
have thus given rise to some field surveys by teams of researchers specializing in regional 
ethnology. These inventory sheets concerning festive practices were added to those that 
had already been carried out in 2012 on various traditional practices in the region. At the 
same time, other files have been produced in the associative milieu by activists trained in 
inventory methods. These supplementary files concern technical knowhow linked to boutis 
(Marseille embroidery) or to the art of navigation at sea , for example. A few additional 
files have also been produced by the Salagon Museum, a public museum specializing in 
ethnobotanics that has produced files on the cultivation and medicinal uses of certain 
plants and on the herbalism practices in Haute-Provence.1 Finally, in 2018, two elements 
concerning the territory of Provence were added to UNESCO’s Representative List of the 
Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. On the one hand, it is the knowhow related to 
1 See: http://www.musee-de-salagon.com/accueil.html (consulted on June 30, 2021).
32
CURRENT AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS IN HERITAGE STUDIES
perfume in Pays de Grasse in the Alpes-Maritimes district, and on the other hand the art 
of dry stone construction, a multinational file for which the French partners are based in 
Provence. Several other fact sheets are currently being drafted, which gives an idea of the 
intensity of the work related to the intangible cultural heritage inventory in southern France.
All these projects and initiatives for the recognition and enhancement of intangible 
cultural heritage have contributed to increasing the awareness of the cultural importance 
of practices that were previously mainly understood in terms of tradition or folklore in 
Provence, and in general in all the regions of Mediterranean France.2 Yet—and this is an 
issue that has rarely been questioned—the recognition of intangible cultural heritage has 
not necessarily been directly useful for ethnology and anthropology. Even if the inventories 
have largely mobilized the methods of these disciplines, and even if certain researchers in 
ethnology (of which I myself am a part) are involved in the production of the inventory files, 
many heritage actors have gone directly from the study of traditions to that of intangible 
cultural heritage without recognizing the role played by ethnology and anthropology in 
this paradigm shift. Thus, for the past ten years, associative activists or researchers from 
other disciplines have been able to become “experts” in intangible cultural heritage without 
training in ethnology, which contributes to strengthening the autonomous field of herit-
age studies but raises questions regarding the status of ethnology as a support discipline 
for these studies.
For the majority of the audience, to tell the truth, ethnology (like anthropology) is 
still synonymous today in France with exoticism and distant lands. It is not really perceived 
as relevant when it comes to investigating at home—that is to say, in Europe. Moreover, 
because the inventory is carried out by the Ministry of Culture, it is institutionally distinct 
from academic ethnology, which is practiced at the universities and in academic research 
units. In many cases, the intangible cultural heritage inventory is carried out in France by 
cultural professionals that work in the various regional ethnopôles, but who are not neces-
sarily trained in ethnology.3 Finally, because academic ethnologists are often critical or 
not very interested in cultural heritage, everything converges to empower the intangible 
cultural heritage sector and separate it from academic ethnology. An invisible “UNESCO 
effect” in the field has therefore been to gradually marginalize the ethnological heritage and 
2 Concerning Occitania (southwestern France), the CIRDOC (Centre Interrégional de Développement 
de l’Occitan) has been a privileged interlocutor of the Ministry of Culture, as have the Universities 
of Montpellier and Toulouse through the training that they have carried out for several years in 
Carcassonne at the ethnological research and documentation center founded by Daniel Fabre. In 
Aquitaine (the Atlantic part of southwestern France), the InOc (Institut Occitan Aquitaine) played an 
important role with the University of Pau and the Pays de l’Adour by developing the PCI Lab web-
site (https://www.pci-lab.fr/, consulted on June 30, 2021), which distributes the files of the French 
national inventory of intangible cultural heritage to the general public.
3 In France, the network of ethnopôles is made up of a dozen institutions labeled by the Ministry of 
Culture, which, in terms of research, information, and cultural activity, operate at both the local and 
national levels.
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LAURENT SÉBASTIEN FOURNIER
ethnology of cultural heritage, in the sense of the scientific study of folklore and popular 
arts and traditions. Instead, heritage studies are promoted as a new interdisciplinary field 
of studies, which is much more concerned with the institutional processes of heritagization 
than with the concrete social and cultural practices encompassed by the notion of heritage.
THEORIES AND PRACTICES OF CULTURAL HERITAGE
The foregoing considerations encourage repositioning ethnology and anthropology within 
the study of the practices covered by the notion of cultural heritage because these disci-
plines remain essential to fully understand the symbolic constructions and interpretations 
that are currently associated with these practices. From an anthropological perspective, 
the heritagization processes are interesting to study in themselves because they open up to 
the analysis of representations of time and to that of the public administration of culture. 
However, they do not replace the ethnography of concrete practices observable in the field, 
which sometimes says something other than work focused on institutions and institutional 
processes. In this regard, I consider it important to revitalize the ethnology of heritage by 
relaunching field surveys focusing on practices rather than being concerned only with the 
processes of the institutionalization of heritage.
This proposal takes note of the fact that the notions of time and culture have entered 
into crisis since the end of the twentieth century, as evidenced by various theories developed 
by the human and social sciences. By introducing the notion of the regime of historicity, 
the French historian François Hartog (2003) insists that each society is characterized by 
a specific relationship to temporality. Traditional societies, according to this author, were 
guided by their past in the form of a historia magistra vitae, which made them attentive to 
glorious examples from ancestors. The past, from this perspective, set an example for the 
present, which strove to be worthy of it through “ancestor worship.” With modernity, the 
perspective changes radically and turns into futurism. Christian eschatology and Marxist 
eschatology have in common that they are oriented toward an ideal that is conjugated in 
the future, in the form of the last judgment for the former and the last revolution for the 
latter. For Hartog, contemporary societies have entered a new regime of historicity, which 
he calls “presentism” and which no longer trusts either the past or the future. This crisis 
of time, since the end of the twentieth century, has been marked by mistrust of a past that 
has become impossible to cope with since the mass killings of the two world wars, and by 
an equally great mistrust related to the risks of environmental destruction to come. Caught 
between a duty of memory and a principle of precaution, contemporary man would thus be 
drawn back to his own present, forced to adopt the latter as the point of view from which 
time shines, according to a new perspective that disarticulates both its fields of experience 
and its horizons of expectation. The notion of retrotopia, proposed by the German sociolo-
gist Zygmunt Bauman (2017), complements that of presentism by being characterized as 
34
CURRENT AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS IN HERITAGE STUDIES
the advent of a form of retrograde aspiration and as the desire to return to a past more or 
less mythologized by evading the most pressing questions of the present and the future, 
from a globally regressive perspective.
For its part, the notion of culture has been widely criticized by anthropologists that 
have rebelled against its supposed essentialism. Critics of the notion of culture are old. 
They have long aimed at reducing the stereotype defended by the culturalists of the culture 
and personality school from the beginning of the twentieth century and the drifts linked 
to collective psychology. At the end of the twentieth century, these criticisms intensified 
to condemn the political manipulations to which the notion of culture was the subject. 
According to the French political scientist Jean-François Bayart (1996), culturalism pos-
tulates an old and stabilized corpus of beliefs, closed in on themselves and corresponding 
to specific political communities. There is therefore a risk that cultures function as iso-
lates, entities that are separated from each other and refuse interactions with surrounding 
groups. The notion of culture would thus favor nationalisms and identity discourse; it 
would have no value from the point of view of anthropological analysis. For their part, 
contemporary specialists in folklore and cultural studies wish to keep the notion of culture 
as their analytical scope, but they join anthropologists in criticizing its instrumentalization. 
According to Dorothy Noyes (2016: 411–413), culture is what we feed people so that they 
avoid realizing their subordinate position and revolting in times of economic crisis. Like 
other slogan-concepts of modernity, such as folklore, nation, people, heritage, diversity, 
resilience, or sustainability, culture would have an ambiguous effect, both mobilizing and 
immobilizing. These concepts, while stimulating analysis and attracting activists, are also 
said to be means of controlling behavior and placing a fig leaf that distracts and at the 
same time attracts attention.
How can one see clearly through these criticisms? It seems that critically focusing 
attention on the institutional concepts and processes that make use of it carries a significant 
risk of being cut off from the ground. A viable alternative then consists in questioning the 
actors in the field about the very concepts that underpin the anthropological approach. 
How are notions of folklore, tradition (cf. Isnart, Testa, 2020), cultural identity, and her-
itage experienced in the field? The reflexive turn that has characterized anthropology in 
recent decades (Ghasarian, 2002) has no reason to exclude actors that are confronted in the 
field with the same notions, and therefore with the same questions, as anthropologists. Of 
course, regionalist activists and regional culture and cultural heritage professionals will not 
all have the same level of theoretical knowledge of these questions, and they will undoubt-
edly answer them unevenly. However, at least leaving them the possibility of expressing 
their thoughts about this seems to be a minimum condition for practicing anthropology 
in an ethical fashion, which considers informants to be persons fully responsible for their 
words and actions. Thus, the notions of presentism and retrotopy, which are often pre-
sented as explanations of certain contemporary tendencies to crisis or disorder, can also be 
considered as starting points for investigating vernacular representations of temporality 
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LAURENT SÉBASTIEN FOURNIER
today. The heritagization processes, by this account, are only a pretext; they invite one to 
an anthropology of the diversity of the representations of time, itself accessible by a precise 
ethnography of the social and cultural practices constituting what was called folklore in 
the nineteenth century and which is called intangible cultural heritage today.
CULTURAL HERITAGE AND PROSPECTIVE
This proposal, which consists of refocusing ethnographic fieldwork on the practices cov-
ered by the notion of cultural heritage, without necessarily excluding the anthropological 
analysis of the discourses that accompany the processes of heritagization, seems useful in 
order not to confuse the level of the objects studied and the plan for the study of these same 
objects. Part of the recent anthropological production concerning cultural heritage seems 
to have replaced the knowledge of practices initially qualified as “folk” by an entire series 
of abstract considerations that concern the study of these practices, taken in the second 
degree as the study of heritage institutions. This work can quite suitably be carried out by 
historians or sociologists of culture, even by economists or legal experts, who benefit from 
sufficient distance to interpret the progressive transformations of folklore into ethnological 
heritage, and then into intangible cultural heritage. However, such considerations belong 
to the field of institutional analysis, possibly to that of critical analysis, but not to that of 
empirical ethnography, which normally has its own set of accepted methods and prefers 
to proceed by induction.4
The fieldwork that I have carried out in southern France over the past twenty years 
tends rather to note the existence of multiple modalities of concrete existence of heritage 
objects, in perpetual transformation. In Provence, like elsewhere, civil society is led with 
each generation to grasp new concepts that appear, such as that of intangible cultural her-
itage after 2003. However, what the actors perceive are first of all concrete and localized 
practices that they associate with the idea of past time, even though their representations of 
temporality have changed. What I mean here is that the scientific views concerning local 
social practices do little to alter the general public’s ideas. Traditional tales, festivals and 
games, craftsmanship, and medical formulations based on local herbs constitute a relatively 
old corpus that is relatively unaffected by the transformations of a scholarly nomenclature 
that first identified them as folklore, then as elements of art and popular tradition, then 
as ethnological heritage, and finally as intangible cultural heritage. What has changed, no 
doubt, is the way of representing the time spent from the new points of view of presentism or 
retrotopy. Cultural heritage, on this account, introduces a dimension that tradition ignored: 
it postulates a break with the past rather than a continuity. Therefore, the representations 
4 There are, however, good counterexamples, proceeding by induction and proposing an “ethnography 
of heritage institutions” (Bortolotto, 2013; Hafstein, 2014).
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CURRENT AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS IN HERITAGE STUDIES
associated with traditional or folk practices are reinterpreted from the point of view of 
the present, in a freer manner than with the notion of tradition. However, it takes quite 
a long time for these reinterpretations to take place. In almost twenty years, since 2003, 
I have observed that the penetration of the notion of intangible cultural heritage into the 
Provençal cultural landscape was far from being completed, even if it is starting to spread. 
The risk of criticism, by delaying the penetration of new ideas, is that the general public 
prefers the comfort of old ideas to them. Intangible cultural heritage therefore seems to be 
able to constitute an effective way of getting out of the folklorist or traditionalist discourse.
The foregoing elements lead to a preference for contemporary heritage building processes 
over the backwardness of traditions and identity exclusivity. Regarding intangible cultural 
heritage, Valdimar Hafstein (2014) clearly explained the fears of dispossession aroused by 
this new notion, accused of seeking to govern the vernacular. These fears, which concern 
the definition of the community and the issue of popular sovereignty, consider that, by 
giving a representative voice to the bearers of traditions, intangible cultural heritage risks 
eliminating local multi-vocality. It is therefore significant that these fears are shared by 
the most critical anthropologists and by the most populist actors in the field, who reject 
UNESCO’s stranglehold on their traditions. To escape from this polarization situation,5 
I believe it is necessary to reaffirm that heritage is not limited to what institutions make 
of it. Even UNESCO’s action, with all its good will, is limited by the fact that it ema-
nates from a cultural administration made up of states parties and not of communities 
or individuals. As an administration, it is much more interested in institutional and legal 
aspects than in the very content of the cultural practices it administers. As an organiza-
tion bringing countries together at an international level, it puts the national rights of its 
members ahead of minority rights and claims for cultural diversity within each country. So 
why seem surprised at its shortcomings? On the other hand, at the local level, the cultural 
policies promoted by UNESCO give rise to reinterpretations capable of re-semanticizing 
traditional and folkloric expressions. The heritagization processes then play an important 
role in territorial foresight by recalling the importance of the concrete practices contained in 
the notion of cultural heritage. Contrary to popular belief, these practices are not unilater-
ally associated with conservatism; many examples of creative transformations of folklore 
bear witness to the contrary.
THE FUTURE OF CULTURAL HERITAGE
By distinguishing between practices covered by the notion of cultural heritage and insti-
tutional cultural heritage development practices, it is possible to develop a prospective and 
synthetic approach to the heritage of a given territory. Here I give a quick overview of the 
5 I refer here to the Italian situation, which was analyzed very well by Lia Giancristofaro (2020).
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LAURENT SÉBASTIEN FOURNIER
usefulness of this type of approach, both because cultural heritage can take part in general 
territorial forecasting and because specialized foresight on cultural heritage can be of inter-
est for the anthropological study of a territory thus questioned. I therefore consider that 
a description of the future of cultural heritage over time, carried out at the regional level, 
remains a first-rate ethnographic tool for understanding the historical recompositions and 
reconfigurations of the relationship that a given society has with its own cultural practices.
What is prospective? As a “science of man to come,” it is a foresight. It is not a technique 
of divination, but a rational approach of possible or impossible scenarios concerning the 
future of a given system, starting from the determination of major trends and promising facts 
(Godet, 2004). This approach, by identifying variables and proposing extrapolations from 
the analysis of data available at a given point in time, is often applied as a strategic decision 
aid, but it can also be used for other purposes of more fundamental knowledge. By relying 
on more or less long-term horizons, foresight has an ambition similar to that of anthropology 
in that it supposes a global approach of the existing, which is interested in a multiplicity 
of themes without deciding a priori which theme is more important than others.6 In the 
scenario method, which is central in prospective approaches, each variable of the system 
studied is associated with indicators of motor skills or dependence that attempt to predict 
the importance of the variable in the system. Prospective, as an approach to predicting the 
future of systems, has been applied in fields as diverse as demography, energy production, 
sociological analysis, and town planning. As a reasoned approach of the future, it has taken 
on new importance in the context of the rise of the concept of sustainable development, 
and it is applied at the territorial level from the perspective of biodiversity management.7
Although the prospective approach is well known to economists and managers, and 
even to sociologists, it is not one of the tools and methods commonly deployed by ethnolo-
gists and anthropologists. However, in terms of heritage and heritage-making processes, 
there is every reason to believe that it could be of some use to them. Indeed, like the notion 
of prospective, that of heritage concerns representations of temporality. More precisely, 
heritagizations are a way for contemporary societies to project into the future representa-
tions from a past from that they feel cut off from (Davallon, 2000). Thus, heritage gives 
rise to cultural enhancement projects that are turned toward the future, unlike traditions, 
which only concern the relationship of societies to their past. From an empirical point of 
view, anthropological questioning concerning heritage therefore lends itself particularly 
well to a prospective approach, in the sense that it involves analyzing the development of 
territorial actions concerning heritage—in other words, studying the concrete methods of 
implantation of heritage projects.
6 This conforms to the classic definition of “total social fact,” through which “all kinds of institutions 
are expressed simultaneously and all of a sudden” (Mauss, 1950: 147) without knowing which one 
commands the others.
7 This is the meaning of the Agenda 21 action plan adopted following the Earth Summit in Rio de 
Janeiro (1992).
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CURRENT AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS IN HERITAGE STUDIES
In southern France, ethnographic surveys concerning the practices covered by the 
notion of heritage have led to observation of various valuation methods among heritage-
bearers. Although some actors remain focused on the old notions of folklore and tradition, 
in recent years others have been embracing the new notion of intangible cultural heritage. 
Surveys also show that civil society—the community in UNESCO’s terminology—is today 
more sensitive to the notion of heritage than to that of ethnology. It therefore seems that 
the progression of intangible cultural heritage is accompanied by a regression of ethnologi-
cal sensitivity, which should be able to be compensated for by devoting more ethnological 
research to this situation. Thus, the rise of the notion of intangible cultural heritage, far 
from justifying the withdrawal of critical anthropology, requires instead that critical anthro-
pology increase its activity. In the absence of field surveys and anthropological analyses 
concerning the practices covered by the notion of heritage and the processes that lead to 
their heritagization or their recognition as folklore or traditions, there is a risk that the 
actors of civil society will follow the easiest path, which consists of reproducing identically 
the backward-looking interpretations that they are most familiar with. In forward-looking 
terms, therefore, the success of intangible cultural heritage can be interpreted as a cultural-
ist regression by critical anthropologists, but at the same time it constitutes an important 
progression compared to classical traditionalism.
More specifically, the prospective approach refocuses debates on the future of cultural 
heritage and on content for which the names have changed over time but which, on the 
whole, remains constant. Of course, field surveys show that, despite the claims of continu-
ity asserted by their organizers, local Provençal festivals have changed considerably since 
the first descriptions were made at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning 
of the nineteenth century. However, they constitute a regional common fund, known to 
historians, and which will undoubtedly continue (Gasnault et al., 2010). Although some 
evolutions will be inevitable, the basis of the different evolutionary scenarios is the same 
because it is anchored in the past. In terms of cultural heritage, the prospective approach 
therefore consists above all in finding a horizon of interpretation that goes beyond the 
critical point of view of anthropology. The aim is then to spark creativity in the field, 
and to practice anthropological criticism in a constructive way. Rather than condemning 
traditional festivals or traditional knowhow a priori for their backwardness, anthropology 
should warn those working in the field against traditionalist backward trends and work to 
open up the field of cultural heritage to more creative initiatives. The exercise then consists 
of adapting existing means to the ends pursued; that is, using cultural heritage policies to 
advance anthropology, rather than constantly accusing them of being a regressive force.
39
LAURENT SÉBASTIEN FOURNIER
CONCLUSION
In this article I wanted to show that the recent development of the notion of intangible 
cultural heritage implied the coexistence of different logics: the emerging thematic logic, 
specific to heritage studies, is thus added to the specific logics of the various academic 
disciplines interested in cultural heritage. In addition, the complex notions of heritage 
and intangible cultural heritage have connotations and refer to specific conceptions of 
temporality, themselves in touch with more general tendencies indicated by the theoretical 
concepts of presentism or retrotopia. In the current context, and despite all the work of 
ethnologists and anthropologists, the notion of heritage remains very external to the field 
because it postulates a break with the past and a desire to project oneself toward the future. 
These characteristics are difficult to understand by those working in the field, who often 
remain prisoners of a conservative and backward-looking logic associated with the notion 
of tradition. Therefore, I suggest that it is important today to develop a forward-looking 
and constructive approach to cultural heritage, to better take into account the specificities 
of this notion. Entering into this dynamic is an increasingly imperative need to neutralize 
critical polarizations, avoid regression toward conservatism, and really put cultural heritage 
at the service of the development of territories with a prospective aim.
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SODOBNI IN PRIHODNJI RAZVOJI V RAZISKAVAH DEDIŠČINE
OD »RETROTOPIJE« DO »PERSPEKTIVE«
V članku je avtorjeva analiza zasnovana na razločkih med pristopi v raziskavah dediščine in 
disciplinarnimi pristopi k dediščini, da bi pokazal na sedanji in prihodnji razvoj nesnovne kulturne 
dediščine. To pokaže z medigro kritičnih raziskav in širših raziskav nesnovne kulturne dediščine, 
ki oboje tvegajo regresijo in imajo možnosti za napredek. Podpora analizi so avtorjeve izkušnje 
s procesi razvoja kulturne dediščine in nekatere nedavne raziskave institucionalnega delovanja 
Unesca na področju nesnovne kulturne dediščine v Franciji. V nadaljevanju tematizira pojma 
»retrotopija« (Bauman 2017) in »perspektivnost« (Godet 2004), ki sta po njegovem mnenju 
usmerila temeljni antropološki premislek o prihodnosti raziskav dediščine. V sklepu povzema 
možnosti napredka – ali, nasprotno, regresije – nesnovne kulturne dediščine.
Članek želi razgrniti, da nedavni razvoj pojma nesnovna kulturna dediščina implicira 
sožitje različnih logik: najprej nastajajoče tematske logike, značilne za raziskave dediščine, nato 
pa še specifičnih logik različnih akademskih disciplin, ki jih zanima kulturna dediščina. Poleg 
tega imajo kompleksni pojmi dediščina in nesnovna kulturna dediščina različne konotacije in 
se nanašajo na specifične koncepte časovnosti, ki so sami v stiku s splošnimi težnjami, kakor jih 
kažejo teoretični koncepti prezentizma ali retrotopije. V sedanjem kontekstu in kljub obsežnemu 
in intenzivnemu delu etnologov in antropologov pa pojem dediščina praviloma ostaja zunaj tega 
41
LAURENT SÉBASTIEN FOURNIER
področja, saj predpostavlja prelom s preteklostjo in željo po projekciji v prihodnost. Te značilnosti 
težko razumejo tisti, ki delajo na tem področju in ki pogosto ostajajo ujetniki konservativne 
in v preteklost zagledane logike, povezane s pojmom tradicije. Po avtorjevem mnenju je danes 
pomembno razviti v prihodnost usmerjen in konstruktiven pristop do kulturne dediščine. Za 
vstop v to dinamiko pa so vse bolj nujni potreba po nevtralizaciji kritične polarizacije, izogibanje 
nazadovanju h konservativnosti in resnična postavitev kulturne dediščine v korist razvoja 
območja s perspektivnimi cilji.
Prof. Dr. Laurent Sébastien Fournier, Aix-Marseille University, laurent.fournier@univ-amu.fr