The concept of intangible cultural heritage (hereinafter "ICH") has been in circulation

since the 1970s and has spawned a number of measures, culminating in the 2003

UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Switzerland ratified this Convention on July 18th, 2008. The broadest aim of this multidisciplinary research

project is to to provide a scientific space for critically examining what it might mean, whom it might

benefit and what might be worth inventorying and preserving under its auspices. As

our title indicates, we also wish to call attention to the richness but also the paradoxes

and potentially undesirable consequences of the ICH paradigm. Thus the project explores the principal issues raised by ICH through a series of targeted empirical case studies.The project involves six research groups working in the fields of anthropology, folklore

and cultural studies, dialectology and museum studies, and associated with the

Universities of Basel (Seminar für Kulturwissenschaft und Europäische Ethnologie),

Lausanne (Institut d'anthropologie et de sociologie), Neuchâtel (Institut d'ethnologie;

Centre de dialectologie), the Museum of Ethnography of the City of Neuchâtel, the

CNRS (Laboratoire d'anthropologie et d'histoire de l'institution de la culture, Paris) and

the Haute Ecole-Arc (Institut horlogerie et creation, La Chaux-du-Fonds).

The Subproject of the Seminar für Kulturwissenschaft und europäische Ethnologie, University of Basel is called "Staging Culture" and consists of a post-doc study on Hip Hop in Basel and a PhD-Study on migrant theatre producations in Basel