Protection originates in this source: gender and cultural heritage: gender and cultural heritage

Abstract

The article proposes a debate on the absence of social markers of gender in policies for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage (PCI), highlighting some derived problems. Through a brief history of the gender focus in Brazil's Cultural Heritage policies, and considering UNESCO's “Operative Lines for the Application of the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage”, we debate the need to expand strategies for the production of knowledge on gender conditions, to improve the effectiveness of actions to safeguard Brazilian intangible heritage, respecting the collective notions of power of the groups and social segments that hold them, thus avoiding Western ethnocentrism, while also seeking to combat the reproduction of processes where violence and exclusion are structured. The gender issue is treated in a very incipient way by the policies of intangible heritage, although a large part of patrimonialized assets, mainly in the category of knowledge, relates to women as central actors in the processes of cultural production and reproduction. We bring, as study cases, the experiences of safeguarding Brazilian intangible heritage, the Oficio de Baiana de Acarajé and the Conocimiento y Maneras de hacer Muñecas Ritxoko, to think about how the presence of social markers and diagnoses based on this genre can contribute to improving the management of this public policy. In this way, we hope to summarize reflections to improve the implementation of integrated identification, reconnaissance and safeguard actions, considering the gender specificities of the segments and social groups producing the PCI.