This thesis focuses on the means by which the City Hall of Rio Janeiro implemented a policy for the preservation of local cultural heritage and used legal instruments available to the protection of intangible goods, notably from 2013, as of the creation of a new category: The Traditional and Notable Economic Activities s Book of Registry. The research is based on the debate about the conception of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) as an analytical category, in order to recognize that the ICH carries a challenging potential capable of supporting the struggles of historically subalternized groups and subjects, thus revealing the essentially political nature of this category. After conducting an analysis of the main national and international normative constructions on the subject, the thesis concentrates on the study of a selected case in order to investigate the repercussions of the use of Intangible Cultural Heritage in the city of Rio de Janeiro. To do so, two approaches are undertaken: one temporal and one territorial, corresponding respectively to the central region of the city of Rio de Janeiro and the administration of Mayor Eduardo Paes (2009-2016). The development of the research intends to demonstrate that Rio s intangible heritage was captured by the entrepreneurial thinking, which led to the neutralization of the challenging power of this category and permitted the beginning of the memory deletion process of those historically subalternized subjects and groups.