Quelle carte pour quel territoire ? Impossibles et nécessaires : les inventaires du patrimoine alimentaire

Abstract

Our article focuses on the significant issues underlying the symposium “Compiling a food heritage inventory: existing knowledge, methods and perspectives” which was held in Tours in 2009. As a consequence of the generalized heritagisation process which has been gaining momentum for the last few decades, culinary knowledge and know-how are now widely accepted as a cultural asset worthy of preservation. This development has led to the establishing of important inventories carried out by researchers in the human and social sciences on all five continents; we propose here a brief overview of this work. It must, however, be underlined that such maps of the world food heritage find themselves faced with difficulties which are essentially coterminal with them: in fact, these inventories try to grasp something which is constantly eluding them. We find ourselves therefore in a position where we must now question the use of inventories and the reasoning behind them.