Le flamenco et son récit scalaire : construction d’un patrimoine institutionnel

In this paper, I put the inscription of flamenco on the Unesco Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage (2010) into perspective with the history of the cultural policies instituted by the Junta de Andalucía (government of the Autonomous Region of Andalusia) since the approval of its Statute of Autonomy in 1981. Looking at the emergence of these cultural policies diachronically enables me to consider them as vectors of flamenco heritagization. I highlight the construction of a ‘scalar narrative’ with regard to flamenco in the official discourse of the cultural institutions of the Junta de Andalucía. I then show that the different rhetorics that make up this institutional ‘scalar narrative’ are reconstructed as a consequence of the emergence of these cultural policies. Finally, I emphasize that this ‘scalar narrative’ is constructed by the mobilization of different semantic fields, which form a geographical imaginary of flamenco. This imaginary serves to legitimize the implementation of political measures concerning flamenco, such as the development of economic strategies within the Autonomous Region of Andalusia.