Peu Pado-A New Direction: Arranging Indonesian Modern Identity and Reinventing the Foi Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Ngadha Region of Central Flores

Anation needs a cultural core to bind collective memories, to share animagined past, and to offer future dreams. 1 As Guntram Herb (1999: 17–24), Denis Byrne (2008: 154–7), and Rodney Harrison and colleagues (2008: 4–5) argue, in this process the nation with its power and authority invokes, invents and reinvents history by attaching meaning to cultural heritage: both tangible, such as sacred artefacts, monuments, sites and landscapes; and intangible, such as national history, religious celebrations, national commemoration days, and other triggers of collective memory. What has to be considered is that cultural heritage is somehow inherited, that it is passed down along a chain of owners and handed on to a specific individual, a group of closely related people, or a specific ethnic group. In the past, the act of looking after cultural resources was clearly shown in the form of the property that parents bequeathed to their children, as well as how a community passed on its landscape to the next generation. In this approach “the act of looking after” has been related to the local conti-nuity of the ancestral heritage (Davidson 2008: 31). However, people