Intangible Heritage as a Non-Relocatable Asset

Alongside institutional heritage stands another kind of asset, harder to pin down because it appears in no registry and no statute, yet it weighs heavily on what sets the canton apart: the whole body of knowledge, gestures, festivals, spoken languages, food customs and stories now gathered under the somewhat bureaucratic label of intangible cultural heritage.

The term arrived late in the vocabulary of public policy — UNESCO formalized it in 2003¹⁹ — but the thing itself existed long before, and so did the awareness of it. What international formalization changed is that it forced us to treat as heritage in its own right what had until then passed for mere custom: the way a vine is pruned, an alphorn made to sing, rye bread dough kneaded, an alpine legend told, a Corpus Christi procession walked, a particular spot on a trail passed in silence. None of this is written down. All of it is passed on through gesture and voice, over the long span of an apprenticeship. And all of it, in a sense this chapter means to spell out, becomes strategic in the age of generative AI.

What digital modernity makes scarce

To grasp what is at stake, start with what digital modernity has made commonplace. It has made image production commonplace: a model generates an endless supply of convincing alpine landscapes in a few seconds. It has made text production commonplace: another writes dozens of warm, factually plausible tourist descriptions in a few minutes, indistinguishable at first glance from what an experienced guide would have produced. Videos, music, translations, speeches, narratives have followed the same path. The great shift of this decade has nothing to do with machines that think; it has to do with mid-level cultural production becoming infinitely reproducible, at a cost tending toward zero.

This shift carries a direct economic consequence. Reproducible cultural goods see their unit value collapse mechanically. A generic ski-resort description, a stock photo of the Matterhorn, a story of alpine tradition patched together from internet sources are worth almost nothing, since anyone can produce them at will. Competition for attention turns fierce, margins compress, and territories that had bet on the mass distribution of generic content to compete in global markets find that the strategy no longer works.

Symmetrically, whatever cannot be reproduced sees its relative value rise. Whatever requires a body physically present, an embodied memory, a long chain of transmission, a specific place, becomes scarce by contrast. A patron saint's festival organized for centuries in a given village, a craft learned by following a master for ten years, an alphorn heard resounding on a particular alp at sunset: no model can generate these. Imitate them, yes — an AI video can produce a plausible alphorn. But imitation does not replace experience, and the difference is felt. Tomorrow's cultural market, once AI matures, will likely be far more polarized than today's: a collapse in the value of reproducible content, a growing premium on whatever stays rooted in a place and a body.

It is precisely this polarization that turns Valais's intangible heritage, paradoxically, into an asset whose value rises at the very moment generic cultural production is losing its own.

Valais on the UNESCO lists

The canton now appears on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity through several entries that concern it directly. Traditional irrigation, of which the bisses of Valais — small gravity-fed channels once carved along mountainsides to bring water from glaciers and streams to fields and orchards — form a central element, was inscribed in December 2023 as part of a multinational nomination²⁰. The alpine season, inscribed the same year, covers the ascent and descent of herds to and from summer pasture, cheesemaking in a shared cauldron, cow-fighting contests, and the whole calendar of customs tied to the estive²¹; Valais is one of its principal living homes. To these are added mountaineering, inscribed in 2019 through a joint French-Italian-Swiss nomination centered on the Matterhorn, and yodeling, inscribed in December 2025 on a purely Swiss nomination²², for which Upper Valais remains one of the living grounds of practice. The Fête des Vignerons of Vevey, a Vaud inscription from 2016, extends the picture through wine-growing kinship.

This density of inscriptions places the canton among the richest regions in Europe for recognized intangible heritage. It also reflects the quality of the inventory work carried out over the past twenty years by cantonal and federal agencies, which have identified and documented roughly a hundred living practices: from the alphorn to the making of cowbells, from mountain rye cultivation to cow-fighting, from stories tied to the mayens — the mid-altitude hamlets used for spring and autumn grazing — to the game of hornuss. Each of these, to varying degrees, is alive: it has its present-day practitioners, its places of practice, its occasions for public display, its transmission through family or association.

This inventory is an asset on three counts. First, it documents: an inventoried practice is one whose existence is recorded, whose details are set down, whose bearers are identified. Documentation does not keep a practice alive — only its practitioners do that — but it protects it from being forgotten and eases its transmission. Second, it opens access to public support programs, federal and cantonal, that partly fund the associations carrying these practices forward. Third, it forms a repository of authentic, rooted, verifiable references from which the canton can draw to build a territorial narrative that is neither generic nor reconstructed.

Living custom, folkloric custom

One distinction is missing from the debate, though, and it strikes me as central. A cultural practice can be living or folkloric, and the two states are not distinguished by age: a centuries-old custom can be folkloric, a recent practice can be living. What distinguishes them is something simpler. A living custom produces social bonds among its participants; a folkloric custom produces spectacle for onlookers.

A patron saint's festival is alive when it brings together villagers who prepare it as a group, recognize themselves in it, bring out their costumes because those costumes are theirs, and sing because they have known the songs since childhood. The same festival turns folkloric when it is staged for an outside audience, when the costumes are rented, when the songs are learned by heart the night before the performance. The line is not a clean one, and the same ceremony can slide from one state to the other depending on how its participants hold themselves. But the line exists, and everyone in the canton senses it, even without always being able to name it.

The risk Valais runs, then — and it has partly already happened — is not the loss of its traditions. It is their gradual slide into folklore. A descent from the alps staged mainly for visitors. An alphorn played to open a conference. A raclette served in costume to guests who have come to photograph it. None of these situations is condemnable in itself; folklore can be practiced with dignity, and the income it generates supports families. But if the balance tips, if folklore becomes the dominant mode in which Valais traditions exist, the canton will have lost exactly what gave its intangible heritage its value. It will have become a display case of itself.

What AI can do, and what it cannot

In this landscape, generative artificial intelligence plays an ambivalent role, one that has to be taken seriously in both directions.

On one side, it speeds up the production of mid-quality folkloric content. A generated video of a herd descent, a description of alpine tradition drafted in two minutes, a fake alphorn produced by an audio model: all of this already exists, already circulates, and helps dilute, within a generic stream, elements whose value lay precisely in their authenticity. For a canton that fails to position itself, the risk is becoming an indistinguishable signal within a mass of generated content. The more automatic production of "alpine tradition" grows, the harder real alpine tradition becomes to perceive.

On the other side — and this strikes me as the decisive point — AI can be put to work for intangible heritage rather than against it. It can document practices with a precision never achieved before: capturing and transcribing hours of interviews with elderly tradition-bearers, indexing sound archives that remained inaccessible for lack of staff, laying out in a structured database the regional variants of a song, a ritual, a recipe. It can support transmission across generations by opening to trainees historical recordings that no one would otherwise have had time to go through. It can even help reconstruct what has been partly forgotten, without falsifying it, provided its use is governed by the communities concerned rather than by outside providers.

This second path demands discipline: documenting and generating must not be confused. Documenting a tradition with AI and generating content about that tradition with AI are opposite gestures. The first is archival and networking work that serves the communities carrying the tradition; the second is a form of counterfeiting that competes with them. The distinction is clear in principle, blurrier in practice, and it will depend on the technical, contractual and political choices made by public and private actors in the years ahead. Valais has a card to play here that owes nothing to chance or to folklore: to become a place where, at the scale of an entire territory, people learn to put AI at the service of intangible heritage. It has the material. It has the institutions to carry it. It has the historical legitimacy, with the Törbel pact once again serving as an anchor point.

The economics of authenticity

One practical question remains: what does all of this produce in economic value?

The answer is not an accounting one. The bisses and the alphorn do not finance a canton, and intangible heritage cannot be monetized directly; attempts in that direction — admission tickets to ceremonies, festivals staged for paying visitors — almost always produce folklore instead. But intangible heritage, as long as it stays alive, feeds everything that sells around it. It gives a Valais wine a story no communications agency could reconstruct. It gives an alpine cheese a provenance that can be verified through the genealogy of the alp and the lineage of its cheesemakers. It gives a long stay a rootedness that standardized destinations cannot offer. More broadly, it gives the whole territory a recognizable signature.

In an age when everything defaults to the generic, that signature is worth a great deal. It is worth all the more because immediate neighbors — the Tyrol, Haute-Savoie, the Aosta Valley, Trentino — hold comparable heritage and know how to make the most of it too. The competition turns on the quality of living transmission. It is won through depth of rootedness in the territory, through the sincerity of the practices, through the ability to weave tradition into an economy that needs it without unraveling it. It is lost through generalized folklore, through a disconnect between residents and their own traditions, through placing under glass cultural objects that are no longer kept alive.

A shared responsibility

Keeping intangible heritage alive cannot be legislated into existence. It depends first on the practitioners themselves: those who play the alphorn out of love rather than under contract, those who make their cheese following gestures learned by watching their father, those who know the liturgical hymns of their parish because they have sung them since childhood. Without them, no public policy can achieve anything.

It also depends on the economic and institutional conditions that make these practices sustainable. A mountain economy that no longer supports its residents year-round removes the conditions for transmission. An approach to integrating newcomers that fails to bring them into local practices breaks the chain. A public culture that reduces intangible heritage to decorative folklore slowly kills what it claims to protect. Conversely, a canton that retains a skilled resident workforce creates the conditions for traditions to keep being practiced by people who understand them, renew them, and pass them on. Preserving tradition and economic attractiveness are not opposed; they feed each other, because a canton that keeps its skilled workers also keeps practitioners, transmitters, heirs, and because a canton whose practices stay alive keeps hold of part of what makes it livable.

Finally, it depends on political choices that may look far removed from heritage and that lie ahead in the coming years: the regulation of generative AI and its cultural uses; policies for welcoming and integrating new residents; decisions on urban planning, housing and transport that make villages sustainable or unsustainable; school curricula, caught between cantonal culture and federal standardization; the status of bilingualism, which the next chapter takes up. Taken separately, these are technical matters. Taken together, they sketch out the possibility, or the impossibility, of a Valais that remains a bearer of its intangible heritage without freezing it in place or selling it off cheap.

The task, then, is not to protect intangible heritage from modernity. It is to build a modernity in which it remains an active mode of collective life. That undertaking is far more demanding than inscription on UNESCO lists. It calls for decisions, mechanisms, and above all people who have the means to keep living in the canton — in every language spoken there.