Intangible Heritage, Place and Community: Écomusée d’Alsace

Abstract

At first glance there seem to be more differences than similarities between the Écomusée d’Alsace and 19 Princelet Street: one is all about rural community, agriculture and a style of life that is rooted in the landscape, the other is about migrants taking their chances in initially strange and unfamiliar urban environments; one focuses on how different people shape a place, the other on how people are shaped by a place, its landscape, its geological and geopolitical features. The Écomusée is the largest open-air museum in France and a major tourist attraction;¹ 19 Princelet Street is confined to one house, fights for funding and is not permanently open to the public. What connects the museum at 19 Princelet Street to the concept of the ecomuseum, which appeared on the French museological scene in the 1970s, is their approach: they both aim to relate the connections between tangible (objects, architecture) and intangible heritage (customs, beliefs, skills) in order to ‘preserve and deepen a sense of place’ (Davis 2004: 368) and a collective identity that is based on a people’s relationship to a place. Both projects deal with difficult histories but also evoke nostalgia for these times of struggle. They are keenly aware of questions of ownership of heritage and are based on the idea of public participation and the involvement of the local community in the project.