Edible Heritage on Display: Exploring Food Festivals and the Articulation of Territory, Food, and Heritage in Portugal

Abstract (English)

This paper focuses on a specific category of festive events: food festivals. More precisely, it examines the type of food festival defined by Timothy and Pena (2016) as those “focused on local specialty produce or iconic foodstuff.” In this case, the focus is on convent sweets, a category of culinary products widely found in Portugal, though not without some definitional controversy. Throughout the year, various municipalities across the country promote social events centered around these products. This paper is based on an ongoing PhD research project and explores the role of food festivals in the symbolic construction of this category. It approaches these events as discursive spaces that construct and convey notions of territorial cultural identity through food, with particular attention to the ways in which heritage discourse is mobilized.

As in many other parts of the world, the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003) has played a pivotal role in Portugal by encouraging the development of a legal framework that facilitates the heritagization of a broader range of cultural expressions under the category of intangible heritage. Over the past decade, we have witnessed, at the international level, the increasing incorporation of food-related practices and knowledge into the institutional field of intangible heritage, as well as the diffusion of the concept of intangible heritage into everyday discourse. In Portugal, however, this trend has not resulted in a significant number of food-related elements being included in the National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage—despite the prominence of the "Social practices, rituals and festive events" and "Traditional craftsmanship" domains, both of which are particularly well-suited to encompassing food heritage.

Nevertheless, the relative scarcity of formal recognition does not imply that the language of heritage is absent from the food festivals promoted by local authorities. This paper therefore seeks to explore the underexamined relationship between intangible heritage and food festivals from an anthropological perspective, drawing on ethnographic research conducted at food festivals in Portuguese cities.