CONCEPTUALIZATION OF "CULTURE" WITHIN HERITOLOGY AS A PARADIGM

Abstract

A few years back, UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage attracted great attention, but also provoked many debates in the sphere of academic and practical culture. In academic circles debates usually refer to the concept of culture in this Convention, and in the field of practice the concept of protection is questioned. One of the keystones in this Convention, and the way the concept of culture is described, is a distinction between tangible and intangible manifestations of culture. But, within the paradigm of conventional museology, theview of culture is in fact a view of material, tangible objects, so now we may pose a question of integral approach to culture, an approach that treatsculture as a sumof its material and non-material manifestations. In this work we first consider the conceptualization of culture in the Convention, and then we discuss the possibility of overcoming artificial separation into tangible and intangible culture. To present these views, in the end, we used an example of how a museum treats man’s perception of space and use of material and nonmaterial metonymic symbols originating from culture itself, so it can be understood and presented.