What is a nations culture? Many Governments and institutions around the world are engaged in a continual effort to preserve our heritage by restoring or maintaining ancient monuments and historic buildings. And, UNESCO’s programme aiming at the preservation and dissemination of valuable cultural heritages has been successful over the years in identifying and putting together some of the world’s most valuable archive holdings and library collections.

However, a nation’s cultural heritage often goes deeper than its physical ‘tangible’ manifestations. Each culture has its own ‘intangible cultural heritage’. But what is that?

According to UNESCO and the 2003 “Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage”, the intangible cultural heritage – or living heritage – is the mainspring of our cultural diversity and its maintenance a guarantee for continuing creativity.

The Convention states that the ICH is manifested, among others, in the following ways:

• Oral traditions and expressions including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural heritage;
• Performing arts (such as traditional music, dance and theatre);
• Social practices, rituals and festive events;
• Knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe;
• Traditional craftsmanship.

Anthropologists and interculturalists alike will express the importance of story-telling in relation to the embodiment of a culture. It’s good to know that UNESCO aims to help us be more aware of the importance of our intangible assets.

Tags: 2003 convention for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage, anthropologist, cross-culture, intangible cultural heritage, intercultural, UNESCO

This entry was posted on Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 6:13 pm and is filed under about cross-culture, General . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.