The UNESCO literature on its intangible cultural heritage program is filled with language that

implies the potential for empowerment: "Community-based"; "grassroots level"; "capacity building." In
the discourse that surrounds the intangible cultural heritage paradigm, ICH safeguarding is portrayed as
a process that gives voice to communities and recognition to practices otherwise ignored, presenting it
as a tool that allows these communities to resist homogenizing globalization. Contrary to this discourse
of empowerment, intangible cultural heritage can do much the opposite. It has the potential to
disempower and silence some while inserting a new heritage "middle-management." This imbalance of
agency and influence results not necessarily from short-sightedness or incompetency on the part of
those implementing a heritage program, but rather from built-in aspects of the way intangible cultural
heritage is constructed and implemented, largely that it requires skills and levels of access that many of
those who actually practice the cultural heritage in question and become the objects of heritage
safeguarding programs do not possess.

Related to this point, in practice (if not always in rhetoric) the intangible cultural heritage
safeguarding approach treats heritage practices as something that its practitioners passively 'bear' and
"pass on" rather than shape and continuously re-create as part of their daily lives. I will discuss ways in
which these have real consequences for the people affected, and implication for the success of the
projects developed as part of intangible cultural heritage safeguarding programs.

Finally, power and heritage are by no means a simple issue: referencing the work of Nikolas
Rose and Valdemar Hafstein, I will very briefly discuss ways in which ICH safeguarding as practiced by
UNESCO and others does potentially empower, if perhaps not in ways directly touted by UNESCO.

2--->The Jemaa el Fnaa and the halqa

The assertions in this paper are based in large part on fieldwork conducted at the Jemaa el Fnaa,
a large public square in Marrakech that is home to hundreds of open-air performers, vendors, and
restaurants. . This site is the heart of the Marrakech tourist trade, and was declared a UNESCO
Masterpiece of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2001 – the latest in nearly a century of
heritage interventions undertaken at this site.
The Square is the performance space for a large population street performers in a wide variety
of genres, such as Berber and Arabic popular music, comedy, magic, snake charming, herb selling, and
acrobats. While there are a variety of performance/livelihood strategies that these performers use, the
most common and well-known is performances in the halqa, a performance space created by the circle
of audience members. While not all of the performers use the halqa as a performance strategy, they are
commonly collectively referred to as hlayqiya ("of the halqa", the singular of the term is halaqi). The
Jemaa el Fnaa has been home to hlayqiya for the last century and quite likely many more, and traveler's
accounts from as early as the 17th century describe performances there (Triki 2011; Hamid Triki in
Skounti, Tebbaa, and Nadim 2005). In current day, the hlayqiya are far more numerous (there are
between 350-400 who work there at least part of the year), and are the principal draw for the hordes of
visitors (both foreign and Moroccan) that visit the Square each day.
 Though not an aspect much discussed in either the heritage or tourist literature being a halaqi
is, among other things, a job. Part of the performance practice of most genres of halaqi involves some
sort of solicitation of baraka (lit., 'blessings', but in this case meaning donations) from the audience,
either during a break in the performance or after the audience member has taken a photograph. Almost
all hlayqiya are full-time performers, and many are the sole (or at least the principal) breadwinners in
their households (Beardslee 2014). In the past, the Jemaa el Fnaa was one stop in a much larger network
of performance sites, which includes markets, saints' festivals, and other public spaces. But since the
1980s, the hlayqiya of the Jemaa el Fnaa, previously much more nomadic, became far more sedentary as
the other stops in the circuit became less profitable (or disappeared entirely) and travel became more
expensive. Thus the Jemaa el Fnaa is the hlayqiya's principal worksite, and their livelihoods are
extremely sensitive to changes in its daily routine, yearly cycles, or physical layout.

As both an ethnomusicologist and as a working performer who has made a living for much of my
life playing and teaching music, I became interested in the economic realities of the hlayqiya, as well as
ways that their designation as bearers of intangible cultural heritage may have affected their lives and
livelihoods. I spent a total of a year at the Square between 2010 and 2012, conducting both participant-
observation-interview research as well as doing a small quantitative livelihood survey. I wanted to know
the answers to a number of questions regarding the impact of the UNESCO declaration and previous
heritage interventions, the performers' concepts of themselves as heritage, and the sort of structures
that supported and detracted from the their abilities to make their livelihoods and participate in
decisions that affected them.
Although the 2001 Declaration was the first direct recognition of the cultural practices of the
Jemaa el Fnaa, it was by no means the first heritage-related intervention there. The Square was first set
aside as a protected space in 1921 by the French colonial administration under Maréchal Hubert
Lyautey, a self-described believer in the preservation of architectural and cultural heritage (Borghi 2005;
Abu-Lughod 1980). At the time, the Square had become not only an important center of trade, but the
hub of most intra-city transport, housing the bus station and located a few hundred meters from the
train station (Borghi 2005). The decree attached the formal 'Place Jemaa el Fnaa' appellation to the site,
defined the borders of the space, and prohibited building on the Square. It also specifically prohibited
the owning or renting of surrounding property to non-Moroccans, ostensibly to protect the Jemaa el
Fnaa's authentic character, but also in line with what Janet Abu-Lughod refers to as the 'urban
apartheid' policy of keeping local and colonial populations separate in Morocco and elsewhere in the
French colonies (Abu-Lughod 1980; Wakeman 2014).
Regarding UNESCO, the Square has seen two interventions: its declaration as a physical site (as
part of the old city of Marrakech) as World Heritage in 1985, and as a cultural space as an ICH
Masterpiece in the first round of such designation that UNESCO carried out in 2001. It was in many ways
the site of the genesis of the current phase of UNESCO's approach to ICH safeguarding: in 1996, Spanish
writer Juan Goytisolo, concerned both about the dwindling of the storytelling tradition at the Square
and the proposed construction of a glass-fronted hi-rise building and an underground car park nearby,
voiced his concerns to his publisher Hans Meinke, asking that he in turn speak with Federico Mayor,
then Director-General of UNESCO (Schmitt 2008). Through Meinke, Goytisolo inquired as to the
possibility of the Jemaa el Fnaa being placed under UNESCO’s protection as part of the ‘oral heritage of
humanity’, a concept for which a program did not yet exist. As Thomas Schmitt and Valdemar Hafstein
write, Goytisolo’s initiative to obtain UNESCO recognition and protection for the Squares’ oral traditions
was a key catalyst in mobilizing the movement towards a further formalization of the impulse towards
the protection of living practices that had been gaining momentum since the early 90s (Hafstein 2004;
Schmitt 2008). Arguably, the rest of the ICH Masterpiece designations grew out of the framework set up
for the recognition of the Square, which in turned served as a prototype for the 2003 Convention.

The dossier for the designation was prepared by Les Amis de la Place, an association which
included Goytisolo, as well as people like Ouidad Tebbaa (currently dean of literature at Cadi Ayyad
University) and Hamid Triki (a well known historian), as well as various local business owners. As part of
the UNESCO Declaration, an assortment of safeguarding activities were planned by Les Amis: Many of
the activities focused on the storytellers, who (to judge from both talks with those involved in the
project and from the storytellers' prominence in the literature generated by it) were deemed by those
who initiated the heritage project to be the most important and endangered aspect of the heritage at
Jemaa el-Fnaa. A youth awareness program brought them into a few schools, and many of their stories
were recorded for a website (currently defunct). A booklet in French and Arabic was printed up,
describing the heritage present at the Square (with special emphasis given to the storytellers), and was
also distributed to schools throughout Morocco. Various academic symposia and heritage concert
festivals have also taken place at the Square, organized by the local government and heritage
associations. In addition, changes to the physical site were made, including halting and/or demolishing
of some construction projects and changes to the automotive traffic on and around the Square.

4--->Heritage "middle-men"
Laurajane Smith, referring to the discourse around physical heritage sites, speaks of the
"authorized heritage discourse" – among other things, a top-down discourse molded by the voices of
accredited "experts" of which the public is merely a receiver and benefactor. UNESCO's vision of
intangible cultural heritage directly addresses these shortcomings, with its requirements of community
consent and involvement and its valorization of indigenous expertise. In terms of addressing the
problems Smith cites with the authorized heritage discourse, however, the ICH approach is problematic
at best. At worst it adds only a cosmetic veneer of democratic openness to a process of heritage-making
that is still very much dominated by "experts". To explain: one of the fundamental aspects of heritage –
and one that is surprisingly often overlooked in discussions about it – is the fact that it is itself a creation,
a "mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past." (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett,
1995) Heritage is a meta-cultural production, meaning it is a story told about a practice (or a place, or a
group of people) but is not the same thing as that practice. At least, not initially – the cultural and meta-
cultural are of course intertwined, they shape each other and the distinction between them blurs over
time. But when freshly created, intangible cultural heritage is a sort of schematic diagram of lived
practice, a depiction that exists in the form of descriptions, photographs, video, festivals, educational
programs, museum displays, and so on. As a creation, it is a set of choices: what aspects are part of a
practice and to whom the practice does or does not belong. All of this is an act of creation whose
product reflects the biases of the heritage-maker and shaped by their prejudices, nostalgias, and ways of
seeing the world.
The thing about this meta-cultural production is that it requires certain set of skills and access,
ones that are not necessarily common to those people who regularly engage in the cultural practices
concerned. The power to shape the heritage discourse depends on one possessing:

 The ability to write the correct sort of prose, to make inventory descriptions, dossiers,
educational pamphlets, applications
 The right sort of credentials, which often include university degrees or other sorts of official
recognition
 Other competencies which go along with higher education, such as computer literacy and multi-
register and multi-lingual speaking and writing,
 Access to administration, whatever that may be - UNESCO, a national ministry of culture, a
directorate-general, and so on.

6---> Because it is those who possess these types of assets who shape the heritage discourse about a
particular practice, it is their own set of ideas – their aspirations, their nostalgia, their concepts of
authenticity – that will hold particular sway. None of the activities in the safeguarding project at the
Jemaa el Fnaa were directly planned, undertaken or overseen by the performers – a group positioned
squarely among those most directly affected by the activities, and those with the most to lose or gain.
Their exclusion from this process occurred because they lacked the necessary human and social capital.
The shaping of the heritage "version" of the Square contained in the materials produced and addressed
by the safeguarding measures that were implemented was undertaken by a relatively small number of
people, with little input from the performers that it concerned and whose lives it deeply affected. This
included Goytisolo and the Amis de la Place, as well as From what I was able to gather from interviews
with various participants in the process, relatively little input for the various aspects of the heritage-
making (the descriptions, educational materials, dossiers, and safeguarding plan) was taken from the
performers. The performers were consulted, of course, but were able to have a voice in the heritage-
making process only through intermediaries – such as Goytisolo, the Amis de la Place, and various
people either working for or with UNESCO - individuals and groups who did possess the necessary
capital.
The biases of the 'middle-men (and middle-women)' in the case of the Jemaa el Fnaa is evident
in a number aspects of the project. For example, a proposed building project adjacent to the Square was
one of the catalysts that put Juan Goytisolo's efforts to protect the Square's oral heritage into motion,
and his nostalgia and that of the others involved in the project for a particular 'authentic' appearance
and ambience found at the Square is evident in the emphasis within the written materials and
safeguarding plan. The particular value Goytisolo (a prizewinning author) and the others placed on the
practice of storytelling over the other sorts of activities found there, such as music, magic, and snake-
charming is also evident in both written materials and safeguarding actions.
Other proposed changes make very little sense from a preservation point of view (in terms of
either tangible or intangible heritage), but clearly show the influence of the tourism-focused Moroccan
urban planners who participated in the making of the safeguarding plan. The shutting-off of vehicle
traffic to the Square and the conversion of adjacent areas are difficult to justify from the point of view of
safeguarding, as the Jemaa had been a motor transport hub for most of the last century and a central
point of commercial traffic for an unknown period before that. Furthermore, these clearly tourist-
friendly changes are contradictory in light of the Declaration's stated concerns about "acculturation, also
caused by widespread tourism." (UNESCO 2011)
To be clear, the people involved in the intangible cultural heritage project at the Jemaa el Fnaa
were not bad people. Quite the opposite – Goytisolo, for example, is a well-liked figure who seems to
genuinely care for the people who live and perform at the Square. Ouidad Tebbaa, the other most
prominent figure in the Amis, is and someone who is still active in heritage events In terms of motivation
and caring, the same could be said of everyone else I met that was involved in the UNESCO project. But
benevolent action on one's behalf is not the same thing as genuine agency. As I will discuss a bit later,
the prevalence of the heritage-makers' notions of authenticity (in conjunction with the exigencies of the
tourist trade) had clear impacts on the lives of the hlayqiya, including (most ironically) on the lives and
livelihoods of the storytellers.

7--->Practitioners as anonymous "bearers" of heritage

As both cause and effect of this diminishing of voice among many of those who actually do a
practice about which heritage is made is their treatment as anonymous "bearers", who carry and pass
on a practice. The heritage practice becomes the focus of concern; the people who actually engage in
that practice become of secondary importance: interchangeable "vessels" whose life circumstances or
personal wishes are important to the discussion only inasmuch as they affect the continuation of the
heritage practice.
As an illustrative anecdote, I recall a conversation I had with my friend Radouane, a Gnawa
musician (a type of syncretic Moroccan music that contains both North and sub-Saharan elements). We
were looking through a recently-purchased copy of Ouidad Tebbaa and Mohammed Faiz's book Place
Jemaa el Fnaa, a book of photographs and essays (many produced as part of the UNESCO safeguarding
plan) celebrating the heritage of the Square. While he himself never worked at the Square, Radouane
knew many of the performers in the photographs, but there was one Gnawa whose name he was
unsure about.
"Him- I don't know him, but I know his face. Does it say his name?" I looked underneath the
photo, on the opposing page – no name. I then looked through rest of the book – no names anywhere.
The essayists, including Tebba, Faiz, Goytisolo, and Elias Canetti were all labeled clearly, as were the
photographers – but the people in the photos remained picturesque but anonymous. With a couple of
exceptions (a few Storytellers are named) this same anonymity of practitioners is found in the UNESCO
booklet on the Jemaa el Fnaa as well. This is, of course not atypical of heritage materials (including just
about everything UNESCO publishes), and it illustrates on which side the agency lies in heritage-making
– in the documenting, describing, and creation of safeguarding projects – but not in the practicing of
heritage.
 This view of the unimportance of individual identity that is often displayed in the heritage
materials differs significantly from that of the performers, who by and large see themselves as part of
the heritage, in addition to practitioners of it. As Belʻaid Farouz, the amin (treasurer) of the snake
charmers’ association told me when I asked if he considered his practices as turaath (heritage),

Of course! I am folklore (maʻlum ana folkluur)! I am folklore, my father he was there, he

was folklore. My grandfather here (shows me a very old postcard with a snake-charmer
on it), he was folklore. (Farouz 2011).

This disjuncture between the views of the heritage-makers and the performers is also felt in the
still ongoing mistrust between the two groups over the issue of resources– the declaration was
accompanied by funds-in-trust from the Japanese government to assist with the implementation of the
safeguarding plan. The hlayqiya, seeing themselves personally as the locus of the Square's heritage,
expected the money (or at least some of it) to come to them, while the Amis de la Place (and UNESCO)
intended – and has since used – the money in support of the project.
The objectification of heritage practitioners has effects and echoes in other aspects of heritage-
making, particularly in terms of a lack of attention to the actual lives of the practitioners. In the heritage
descriptions of the Jemaa el Fnaa produced by this group (that served in turn as the basis for the
safeguarding plan proposed), perhaps the most significant thing is what was not included: the fact that
these performers do these performances in order to earn a livelihood. The economic realities of the
performer's lives, the conditions to which they adapted their performances or which might have made
performing possible or impossible – these are left out.

Purifying the Square8--->Consequences

EXPAND THIS, WITH MATERIAL FROM BERLIN PAPER – TIME AND PACE. ADD BITS ABOUT
CHANGES OVERALL DUE TO PURIFICATION, MOST PARTICULARLY IN REGARDS TO TRANSPORT. In the
case of the Jemaa el Fnaa, the practical consequences of these inherent power imbalances largely
resulted from these borders drawn in the heritage-making process , the lines drawn between "what
was" and "what was not" the heritage of the Jemaa el Fnaa.

These storytellers, even more so than musicians, magicians, or acrobats, depend on pedestrian traffic,
specifically on audience members with a bit of time to kill. In addition, they depend on a Moroccan-
Arabic-speaking audience. Up to the 1980s, the Jemaa el Fnaa had large amounts of people who were
potential audience members, due not only to its place as the central hub of pedestrian traffic in the city
but also to its role as a transportation hub: it was home to not only the city's main coach station, but
also to the city buses and shared taxi ranks. The presence of these transportation centers meant that
the storytellers had a fairly regular supply of audience. But following the Marrakech medina (the old
city) designation as world heritage in 1985, the bus station was moved to a point just outside the city
walls. Following the UNESCO designation of the Square as intangible cultural heritage in 2001, the taxi
rank was moved away from the Square. These changes – ironically ones made with the express purpose
of protecting the existing physical and intangible cultural heritage - exacerbated the loss of audience the
storytellers were already facing due to the increased availability of home televisions and satellite
receivers.

One of the other main consequences of the imbalance of power within the Jemaa el Fnaa
heritage project was its loss of momentum and eventual dissolution, with relatively few benefits felt by
the performers themselves. While the more "meta-cultural" aspects of the safeguarding projects did
come about in some fashion – a large commemorative plaque, some in-school performances, some
academic conferences, a booklet and photography – the more ambitious portions (such as the
establishment of funds-in-trust for aging performers) never came about. Eventually, the people in
charge of the project, such as Dr. Tebba, Juan Goytisolo, and other members of the Amis de la Place
were unable to continue their commitments to it or see the other parts of the project through, and the
safeguarding project ended. EXPAND – HLAYQIYA AS PASSIVE BEARERS: This is a result, I feel, of the
aforementioned built-in placement of power in the hands of intermediaries: if one has no deep personal
stake in a project (not merely an emotional one, but a stake connected to your livelihood and daily well-
being) one is less likely to see it through.

9---> THE JLF AS A PROTOTYPE OR BETA VERSION – TO SPEAK ABOUT FAIRLY, ONE MUST POINT OUT
THINGS HAVE CHANGED SINCE THEN (ISSUE OF JLF AS A CULTURAL 'SPACE', COMMUNITY APPROVAL,
FOR EXAMPLE. ALSO, IDEA OF CHASING A 'VANISHING POINT' WHERE EVERYONE IS EMPOWERED TO
SHAPE ICH DISCOURSE) To be fair, there have also been developments with more positive implications
for the empowerment of the performers. According to my talks with performers who had worked there
for several decades, previous to UNESCO's involvement this population of artists did not see themselves
as a community with shared goals. Following the Declaration in 2001 however, this seemed to change: a
number of associations were formed among the performers, including both pan-genre associations as
well as more genre-specific ones. While (aside from the snake-charmers association) most of these
remain only loosely functional at best, they represent a potential for mutual aid, consolidation of
individual power and for collective bargaining with authority in order to achieve shared goals.
This new group feeling and imagining as a community makes sense in light of what Valdemar
Hafstein (building on the work of Nikolas Rose and, of course, Michel Foucault) describes as heritage's
role as a tool of governmentality – i.e. in this case, a way for individuals to be rendered more governable
by incorporating their practices into administrative structures and encouraging individuals to imagine
themselves as part of recognized group. While this may initially sound like I am describing heritage as
merely another means of control, official recognition of a group (in this case, the recognition of the
performers as people who bore important Moroccan heritage)can lend that group a measure of power
to make demands of those officials. In the case of the performers of the Jemaa el Fnaa, this recognition
seemed to be encouraging the performers to ask questions like "what are our shared needs and
challenges," and, importantly, "If we are so important, why aren't you responding to our needs?" At one
point during my research, there were in fact notions of a general strike among the performers, although
they have yet to come to fruition.
10-->Conclusions
In conclusion, the purpose of this discussion is not to say that the people who are promoting or
working within the intangible cultural heritage paradigm have an underlying oppressive agenda. Quite
the contrary – in my research on the Jemaa el Fnaa, I never met a single person who did not seem to
hold both a genuine love of the Jemaa el Fnaa and its people and a sincere desire to do the right thing.
And as I just pointed out, intangible cultural heritage does have the potential to encourage collective
action, the power to help people imagine themselves as part of a community that can work together to
achieve desired goals.

11-->But there are risks inherent in the application of the idea of intangible cultural
heritage, risks built into the very concept itself –

 Gross power imbalances between those who do and do not possess the savoir faire,
accreditation, and access to authority necessary in order to shape the heritage discourse about
a given practice
 The objectification or 'un-naming' of heritage practitioners and their depiction in the discourse
as passive "bearers" and "passers-on" of traditions
 Negative consequences for these heritage bearers, (or for anyone else affected by but unable to
shape the discourse) in terms of livelihood, freedoms, and agency. At very least, the bulk of the
power being placed in the hands of those without a direct, urgent stake in the outcome of any
projects has poor implications for potential successes or benefits.

12-->EXPAND!! As an instrument of public policy, as an academic discourse, and –

to be pragmatic – a potential source of funding and employment for those of us in this room, intangible
cultural heritage is not going away any time soon. But what I hope to encourage is a more critical
approach to its application, and the asking of serious questions about what it supposed to do, whom it is
supposed to help, and whether or not it is the best tool for a particular problem. We live in a world with
vast economic and social inequalities, with power imbalances that enrage us and spur us to action. It
would be wise to be careful that in our attempts to address existing unequal situations we do not
unwittingly create new ones.