Culture is an integral part of who we are. It shapes our worldview, fosters pride and strengthens ties within communities.
Cultural heritage can include physical artifacts like monuments, towns and archaeological sites. It also includes intangible attributes like traditions and oral history.
The intentional destruction of tangible cultural heritage by nonstate armed groups, militias and despotic governments is a form of cultural genocide. Efforts to protect and conserve cultural heritage must address this fact.
What is Cultural Heritage?
Cultural heritage is a part of the shared identity of a community. It encompasses traditions, language, arts, and rituals that reflect a culture’s unique experiences and worldview. These elements bind a community together, creating a sense of belonging and unity. Preserving cultural heritage is an important goal for many communities, and many have laws and organizations dedicated to its protection. These efforts often focus on preserving tangible artifacts, such as monuments and art, and on intangible cultural heritage, like folklore and traditional crafts. While globalization poses challenges to cultural heritage preservation, it also offers opportunities for cross-cultural exchanges that can enrich a local culture.
UNESCO defines cultural heritage as “the practices, representations, expressions and knowledge including the instruments, objects, artifacts and cultural spaces that a community, group or individual recognizes as its cultural heritage, provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, and promotes respect for diversity” (2003 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage). Intangible cultural heritage includes non-physical intellectual wealth, such as customs and traditions, folklore, beliefs, languages, cuisines, musical styles, and more.
It is important to note that what may be considered part of a culture’s cultural heritage at one time might not be considered part of it at another time, or by different individuals or institutions. Cultural heritage is fluid and constantly evolving, and what constitutes it changes as a result of transitions in governments, social values, wars and conflict, marginalization, and more.
A large portion of intangible cultural heritage is comprised of performing arts, particularly dance. Conserving, documenting, and analyzing this type of cultural heritage requires extensive research in fields like image analysis, pattern recognition, and machine intelligence. Current technical breakthroughs have opened incredible possibilities for recording, documenting, archiving, and visually interpreting choreographic patterns of dance-related intangible cultural heritage. This will allow dance-related intangible cultural heritage to be digitized and preserved for future generations to enjoy and learn from.
Tangible Cultural Heritage
The tangible cultural heritage is the physical artifacts produced, maintained and transmitted intergenerationally in a culture that are recognized as important and significant. It includes buildings, sites, monuments and museums that have a variety of values including symbolic, historic, artistic, aesthetic, ethnological or anthropological, scientific and social significance. It also encompasses cultural landscapes, cultural districts and cultural neighborhoods.
Tangible cultural heritage is not a new concept as it has long been an aspect of heritage conservation. It is an interdisciplinary field that combines the study of history, archeology, cultural sciences, arts and architecture. It is also concerned with the economic and legal issues arising from the preservation, protection and valorization of cultural heritage.
Heritage is the legacy left by a generation for future generations, something that reflects the value systems, beliefs and traditions of a society. It can be both tangible and intangible, although the former represents a more material and visible aspect of culture.
Intangible cultural heritage, on the other hand, is less a physical object and more an idea. It includes the social customs and traditions that characterize a culture, such as rites, rituals, ceremonies and indigenous knowledge of natural resources. It also covers the arts, music, language and the political and ideological beliefs that influence a culture.
An example of this is the way that cicadas and crickets are celebrated in China as harbingers of spring and autumn, respectively. Although the insects themselves are tangible natural heritage, their cultural reflection as a song is considered intangible cultural heritage. This type of cultural heritage, in particular, is often regarded as more difficult to protect than the more obvious and easily accessible tangible aspects of heritage. However, UNESCO is developing policies that are more community-based and focus on the sensitivity of intangible cultural heritage practices to changes in society and the environment. In the case of deteriorating heritage, they are designed to encourage community stewardship rather than depend on expert determinations of its importance.