EN
This article discusses tradition versus heritage with example from Scandinavian (mainly Swedish) polska dance. The author also puts forward an idea how to understand a difference between the concepts tradition and heritage, and argues that it is the dancing that primarily must be taken into consideration, not the dances as such. Using heritage has a tendency to focus on the dances, while thinking of the concept of tradition more emphasizes dancing, the ongoing process of dance. This is an important distinction not least in the light of the UNESCO ideas about intangible cultural heritage. The consequence of intangible cultural heritage is that dance is seen more as objects, dances, instead of a process, dancing, since becoming certified heritage needs documentation. Documents are products, not processes, even if they are documents describing processes. The process of documentation creates artefacts put in archives that become heritage, dances, describing the process of dancing. The article does not want to define the concepts of heritage and tradition, but rather use the words to help us understand what happens when we create what is mostly called intangible cultural heritage.