Legitimizing Culinary Heritage: A Comparative Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of Five UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Nominations
Abstract
This study examines how culturally distinct culinary practices are constructed and legitimized as intangible cultural heritage (ICH) in UNESCO's nomination discourse. The study employed comparative corpus-assisted discourse analysis on five official UNESCO nomination files: Gastronomic Meal of the French, Mediterranean Diet, Turkish Coffee Culture and Tradition, Kimjang, Making and Sharing Kimchi, and Washoku. After removing UNESCO prompts, boilerplate, administrative metadata, and non-comparable sections, the small specialized corpus analyzed consisted of 19,262 words from functionally comparable State Party responses. The analysis was conducted through frequency, normalized frequency, document dispersion, recurrent multi-word patterns, collocation, cross-case lexical comparison, and concordance inspection. The corpus-led patterns were then analyzed using van Leeuwen's discursive legitimation framework. The results show that all five nominations use a shared lexical-semantic repertoire centered on community, tradition, transmission, knowledge, family, sharing, identity, nature, and related heritage values, but this repertoire is configured differently in each case. Three legitimation strategies are robustly found across all nominations: authorization, moral evaluation, and rationalization, while mythopoesis is not strongly identified as an independent strategy. These findings indicate a pattern of institutional convergence without discursive uniformity: culturally distinct foodways use shared institutional resources but organize them into different legitimation configurations.
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