“Well… if the professor told you so… who am I to disagree?”. The impact of academia on community knowledge and a strategy from the archive

Abstract

The impact of academia on cultural heritage is yet to be scrutinised. The intangible cultural heritage (ICH) constitutes a particularly fragile domain because it is so open to the influence of researchers and bodies of reputation, such as the experts hired for the production of a diplomatic file such as the UNESCO candidacy. In the beginning of the article I offer the institutional overview of ICH and its Portuguese subsidiary. In the second part of the article I detail the Eu?ropean project HeritaMus and its underlying conceptual framework, which was designed to document ICH and tangible cultural assets, creating a simple tool for cooperative curation involving members of the fado community.