Heritage of display: interculturality and cultural diplomacy in the 2010 UNESCO falconry file

In 2010, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) led 11 countries to inscribe falconry onto the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Representative List. The aim of this article is to examine one of UNESCO’s leading principles, interculturality, through the analysis of the processes that led to the first multinational inscription of falconry. It seeks to delineate, through the study of a multinational file, how the principles of interculturality were understood and implemented both by the countries and communities involved, and how falconry came to fit into them. Using the concept of cultural diplomacy, it tries to measure the scope of interculturality in the evaluation of the relations between communities, the national States, and the UAE as the leader of the candidacy.