Festivals for apple-based PGI products in Norway: a case of cultural adaptation work in food heritagization

Despite the growing use of heritagization in describing how food and food-related practices become cultural heritage, important questions remain regarding what characterizes heritagization and its internal dynamics. This article advances studies on heritagization by applying cultural adaptation work (CAW) to apple festivals. Whereas CAW has been conceptualized within Norway’s regime of geographical indications (GIs) as a rule-bound regulatory institution, we revise and extend that conceptualization by (i) relocating CAW to a hybrid institutional arena where protected GIs (PGIs) and festivals meet; (ii) specifying how CAW’s adaptive practices – translation, reorganization, and transformation – operate as mechanisms that generate recognition, legitimization, and valorization; and (iii) foregrounding festival publics, pedagogy, and experimentation as drivers of adaptation. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Norway at three apple-based PGI festivals and, for comparison, one non-PGI apple festival, we show how bottom-up festivalization recalibrates the top-down governance of GIs and yields both intended outcomes and unintended frictions. By shifting analysis from stage models to patterned work on living heritage, the CAW-in-GI-festivals approach makes adaptation practices visible and comparable across cases. In turn, it clarifies food heritagization’s internal dynamics and offers a lens on agri-food domains where de jure certification regimes intersect with de facto experiential publics.