Re-voicing Cultural Landscapes

Falmouth University is leading a consortium of the Universities of Latvia, Tartu (Estonia), and Groningen (The Netherlands) in a project that researches marginalised intangible cultural heritage.

The Re-voicing Cultural Landscapes project will use archival and desk research, primary data, and creative practice-based research compared across minority cultures in the UK (Cornwall), Netherlands (Fryslân), Latvia and Estonia (Livonian). The project aims to better understand the interplay between majority and minority narratives, perspectives, and performances of intangible cultural heritage, to make marginalised cultural landscapes more visible and resilient, and produce impactful insights to inform local communities to (inter)national policy-makers.

European nations are often thought of as culturally homogenous. Yet over 200 national minorities are recognised by the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. Clearly the picture is more complicated than meets the eye.

One way that minority cultures express their distinct identities is through intangible cultural heritage (ICH). ICH describes a culture's traditions rather than its monuments: from language to crafts, from dancing to food, it is the 'traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants' (UNESCO). Alongside these expressions of minority culture are narratives of how a minority culture is seen from the outside, across a nation's culture and beyond (such as in literature, television, or tourism marketing). The people who create and consume these narratives belong not necessarily either/or to the minority or majority, but a spectrum of more fluid identities.

Using inter-disciplinary and cross-national perspectives, the project will ask: How can a better understanding of the interplay between majority and minority narratives, perspectives, and performances of intangible cultural heritage enable us to make marginalised cultural landscapes more visible and resilient?

Using a variety of methods and contexts encompassing language; centre-periphery and demographic change; historical and contemporary creative practice and the arts; and socio-cultural networks and hierarchies: the project's approach is underpinned by the aim of better understanding, and potentially reconciling, majority and minority culture - whether that means greater synergy, or greater distinctiveness.