Introduction: dialogues between international and national laws relating to intangible cultural heritage

Managed by Anita Vaivade (Latvian Academy of Culture) and Marie Cornu (ISP-CNRS), the Franco-Latvian programme Osmose aimed at studying through a comparative approach the different national legal experiences in relation to intangible cultural heritage. The goal of the research programme was to understand how the law apprehends the notion of intangible cultural heritage and the influence exerted by the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage on law at the national and local level. This chapter explains how this research project was designed and how it unfolded. Attention is paid to methodological choices and to tools used by the researchers.