Governing cultural meaning through heritage recognition: interpretive authority and Reog Ponorogo in Indonesia

Intangible cultural heritage policy recognises living practice through procedures that also shape who can define it. This study examines Reog Ponorogo, Indonesia, through a document-based case study covering 2017–2026. Forty publicly accessible records, including two administrative datasets, and ten published empirical studies trace UNESCO nomination, safeguarding, festival regulation, education, craft production and post-inscription valuation. The analysis compares institutional representations with published evidence of variation in performance, materials and participation. Recognition expanded visibility, participation and transmission, but also redistributed interpretive authority through dossiers, consent evidence, origin narratives, material specifications, festival criteria, curricula, registries and economic metrics. Research on obyokan, material adaptation, women performers and craftspeople shows that these formats do not exhaust the living practice. The study develops format governance as a mid-range explanation of how cultural policy makes cultural difference legible, teachable, comparable and countable. In dialogue with cultural citizenship and political theories of recognition, the analysis argues that recognition depends on practitioners’ capacity to scrutinise and revise the formats through which culture is represented and governed.