Often framed as a vanishing remnant of pre-modern rural life, transhumance has recently gained renewed visibility in heritage discourse, with states and international organizations promoting “traditional pastoralism” as a sustainable, socio-ecological practice and a form of intangible cultural heritage. This paper intervenes in these debates through the conceptualization of women’s pastoral work as heritage labour: the embodied, mundane practices generating heritage value through care, place-making, and skills transmission. Aligning with the conference theme of relationality, the analysis draws on ethnographic research in the Adjarian Mountains of southwestern Georgia to examine the dual role of transhumance in sustaining tradition while simultaneously reproducing gendered and social inequalities. By foregrounding women’s lived experience, the paper reflects on how such relational heritage might be recognized and sustained without obscuring the structural inequalities it relies upon.

In 2023, a series of commemorative activities began to be organized "out of the blue" by a group of local activists in the Czech-German border region in Western Bohemia. These activities commemorate regional heritage in a very bottom-up way, including, e.g. organization of a DIY street food festival. This heritage is both tangible and intangible, natural and cultural, but in most cases at least partially dissonant: death marches, expulsion of Germans after World War II, demolition of a number of villages, the construction of the Iron Curtain... Based on anthropological research, this paper attempts to answer questions about what these activities say about the current identity of the region (on both sides of the border), local memory and heritage-making actors, while also placing these processes in the broader context of the CEE, where the consequences of forced migration, nationalism, nazism and socialism, power inequalities, and regional marginalization are extremely significant.

This paper explores how the inscription of the Art of the Neapolitan Pizzaiuolo on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (2017) resonates within Slovenia’s contemporary pizza-scape, offering a distinct Central European perspective on a phenomenon perceived as Neapolitan, Italian, and increasingly global. Pizza, introduced to Slovenia in the 1970s, gradually shifted from an exoticised Western novelty in socialist Yugoslavia to a fully domesticated everyday meal by the 2000s. In parallel, Naples (and Italy more broadly) intensified efforts to protect, standardise, and promote Neapolitan pizza through EU quality schemes, trademarks, and UNESCO recognition. The paper examines how these glocal heritage processes have shaped pizzas, pizza-makers, and pizzerias in Slovenia.

Following long term connection with elder lacemakers in southern Cyprus, including recording their life stories, this paper considers ethnographic silences beyond their words. Lefkaritika is recognised as a social and artistic practice by UNESCO, in a state of rapid decline as only a handful of women still stitch. As Kawlra (2023) notes, ‘shifting attention to the question of where the women are in craft research is also a process of decolonizing one’s own scholarship’. Through reconnecting with the cloth, whose unique pattern consists of deliberately constructed holes, these silences were understood as presence rather than absence, especially as sites of silent resistance. Listening to the lacemakers therefore enabled a revised story, of ongoing colonial impact, where listening back becomes essential to moving forward.