Community Creative Capital: UNESCO’s Intangible Heritage Politics Revisited at the Bulgarian Chitalishte

Why is it that cultural policy cuts are hardly ever mentioned in the discourses on the inadequacies of welfare and education under the neo-liberalist logic after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Why, indeed, when there are joint ministries of culture and education pointing to their common function of formation of civic values? This paper attempts to describe how this is partially due to a misunderstood concept of cultural policy as an elitist, "high arts" master narrative, and uses an observable phenomenon in Bulgaria that presents an alternative kind of cultural politics focused on local arts. The study examines the chitalishte, or the Bulgarian state-funded community cultural centers, connected in a network of close to 4000 chitalishtes, where locals (amateurs) engage in various forms of performance and visual arts productions. The chitalishte represents a unique public tool for creativity encouragement pre-dating communism, as it localizes cultural policy and, simultaneously, de-professionalizes cultural production by affirming the role of the amateur artist in the making of what the research names "community creative capital," i.e. a locus of intersection between social and cultural capital enhancing creative forms of civil society participation. The"grounding"and"de-professionalization"of cultural policy in the Bulgarian case is analyzed within the international context of the "immaterialization of cultural policy," evident in UNESCO s conventions on heritage and development, where policy-makers are starting to comprehend the social salience of the arts down to the community level, as well as of the living - not archiving - of cultural heritage in society.