The Notion of a Bearer of Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Polish Heritological Discourse

Abstract

The article opens a discussion about the reconstruction of a heritological definition of an intangible cultural heritage bearer in the Polish literature on the subject. The character of prolegomena is reflected in the article’s structure: first, selected lexicographic descriptions of the bearer lexeme’s semantics are presented, followed by fragments of the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage with related documents and Polish materials. On this basis, further 32 elements of a definition of the term “a bearer of intangible cultural heritage” are extracted. They can be expressed in four fields (aspects) of a bearer’s activity: social, axiological, safeguarding of heritage and cultural policy. In the conclusion, the author describes a 4-stage process of the bearer’s emergence, resulting from the subject-related approach inscribed into the UNESCO 2003 Convention: awareness of the need to safeguard one’s intangible heritage, act of will, declaration of will and action. It can be assumed that this is what the process of transforming any society into a community of intangible cultural heritage bearers would look like.