May 11th
Valdimar Hafstein
University of Island

“From Live Cultures to Cultural Heritage: The Heritage Branding of Skyr”

Skyr, a sour dairy product from Iceland and an everyday staple of the Icelandic diet, has recently attained heritage status. Its domestic and international marketing glides effortlessly from medieval literature to modern healthy living, promoting skyr as a unique, authentic, and wholesome product: heritage food and Iceland’s “secret to healthy living.” In this presentation, the focus is on how “heritage”, “tradition” and “heirloom cultures” are deployed as contemporary branding tools and how selective storytelling helps to move commodities.

Following the the dairy product from udder to cup, the lecture analyses “heritage branding“ efforts and advertising campaigns produced in the last two decades for various types of skyr from a number of different producers in Iceland, Europe, and the United States, and the ways in which they deploy the long history of skyr in Iceland. The messy relationships between the local and the global in such heritage efforts are fascinating for what they reveal about how global trends and markets influence people at local levels, impacting the way they think about and act on their own cultural forms, and how the local level, in turn, impacts global flows under the sign of heritage. 

The conference will be held in English with simultaneous translation

May 12th
Cristina Amescua
Regional Center of multidisciplinary research – Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

“The role of intangible heritage in building sustainable futures”

This presentation will show an overview of the complex assemblies between intangible cultural heritage (ICH) and development, critically analyzing the possibilities they offer for the construction of sustainable futures. The interactions between the ICH and the social and natural worlds will be reviewed, their role in generating income, and in the construction of conviviality at different scales.

The conference will be held in Spanish