What ?

You are looking at a parody. Specifically, you are looking at a satiric rendering of the UNESCO website for Intangible Cultural Heritage or “ICH”, and more specifically still, at the kind of webpage on which UNESCO presents an item of ICH to a presumably confused and identity-hungry world. Recognizing items of ICH is thought to provide virtual emergency food supplies to the inhabitants of this world; in the words of a great princess: “if the peasants have no bread, let them eat heritage.”

Items of ICH are featured on one of two Lists for which UNESCO is responsible by virtue of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. They tend to look like this, or this, or this. For our parody, we have reproduced the essential features of these webpages: a brief description (including necessary bureaucratalia – nomination form, consent of communities), a slideshow, and a short video in standardized preservationist format.

In order to give our parody a home and to welcome other items like it, we have created an alternative organization, UN-ESQUE, whose task it is to compile lists of Intangible Satiric Heritage (ISH). We have nominated Swiss banking secrecy as its first entry. Why?