Our Living Heritages
The Intangible Cultural Heritage Inventory and the National We
Abstract
The process of inventorying intangible cultural heritage in Finland reflects the transnational and European heritage politics, but it operated at the national level. The article discusses the processes through which the Finnish Heritage Agency identifies, produces and ‘safeguards’ intangible heritage. It concentrates especially on the Wiki-Inventory for Living Heritage, which is an open access participatory inventory platform. Its’ material contains submissions by several well-known Finnish community sector organizations. Concentrating on the submissions by the organizations and the inventory framework provided by the Finnish Heritage Agency, the article analyses how the commonplace discourses on ‘Finnishness’ are (re)produced in the heritagization processes. These discourses are identified through examining deictic expressions that include the personal pronoun ‘we’ or pronominal
possessions. In these discourses, the ‘national we’ is understood as a fairly exclusive ideal category that is regarded as having an inherent relationship with the ‘homeland’. This relationship is manifested for example in expressions in which Finnishness is described as being ‘part of nature’.
