Conservação, salvaguarda, criação e culturas orais: uma aproximação conceptual

Abstract

Conservation, preservation, creation in oral cultures: a conceptual approach

While in the old regime of change the old had to be naturally replaced by the new and was indeed, at a slow path and without the innovation inducing any destructuration of the overall (material, technical, symbolic) pattern, the new appears in contemporary times, due to the very speed at which change occurs, as being submitted to a rapid obsolescence, a vortex into which the old sinks, leaving behind it no reference points that might grant some permanence to what is, swallowed as it is by the turmoil of change. From these processes emerged a new culture characterized by a new relation to time. Our societies thus face the disruption of the systems that assured the transmission between generations, disruption whose principal cause is undoubtedly the speed rate of change. The concern about conservation of cultural elements inherited from the past stems out of the consciousness of the dramatic effects of that disruption.

It’s widely admitted nowadays that conservation and preservation differ essentially according to the type of objects on which they concentrate. The attempt to extend theories and concepts that were build to take care of architectural objects to other objects with very different structures, such as landscapes, rises questions of a very different order. When it comes to taking account of the specific character of symbolic objects, we cannot avoid building a new analytic framework that may support the attempt to deal in a proper way with the issues of definition, description and conservation.

We propose some conceptual tools to deal with the identification and definition of the symbolic objects that integrate what has been called “immaterial heritage”. “Cultural form” is the most inclusive of those concepts. We will define it as a virtual reference schema used by the members of a given society to regulate the production and reproduction of the performances in a locally recognized genre.

“Cultural form” always implies the existence of a conceptual structure (schemata, scripts) that defines the performance’s intension, a (normative) system of regulation and a community of bearers of the cultural form. The practical confrontation of the first two elements results in the establishment of the cultural form’s formal frontiers. But it is certainly the existence of the communities who bear the cultural form (those who created it or other ones who may have adopted it) that counts as the essential prerequisite for its effective, dynamic operation.

The concept of cultural form is aimed at constructing a theoretically grounded definition of the symbolic object, when it comes to answer to the question “preserving what?” And if “to preserve” means keeping a cultural object alive, the concept of “cultural form” should help in determining what is to be preserved – defining the living practice – and how that goal could be obtained. In this direction, we propose to explore four complementary paths: transmission, exploration, experimentation, creation.