Preservation
Prior to the UNESCO Convention, efforts had already been made by a number of states to safeguard their intangible heritage. Japan, with its 1950 Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, was the first to introduce legislation to preserve and promote intangible as well as tangible culture: Important Intangible Cultural Properties are designated and "holders" recognized of these craft and performance traditions, known informally as Living National Treasures. Other countries, including South Korea (Important Intangible Cultural Properties of Korea), the Philippines, the United States, Thailand, France, Romania, the Czech Republic, and Poland, have since created similar programs.
In 2003 UNESCO adopted the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. This went into effect on April 20, 2006. The Convention recommends that countries and scholars develop inventories of ICH in their territory, as well as work with the groups who maintain these ICH to ensure their continued existences; it also provides for funds to be voluntarily collected among UNESCO members and then disbursed to support the maintenance of recognized ICH. UNESCO has also created other intangible culture programs, such as a list called Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. This list began in 2001 with 19 items and a further 28 were listed in 2003 and another 43 in 2005. In part, the original list was seen as a way to correct the imbalance in the World Heritage List, since it excluded many Southern Hemisphere cultures which did not produce monuments or other physical cultural manifestations. It was superseded in 2008 by the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists.
Read more about this topic: Intangible Cultural Heritage
Famous quotes containing the word preservation:
“The reason why men enter into society, is the preservation of their property; and the end why they choose and authorize a legislative, is, that there may be laws made, and rules set, as guards and fences to the properties of all the members of the society: to limit the power, and moderate the dominion, of every part and member of the society.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)
“Men are not therefore put to death, or punished for that their theft proceedeth from election; but because it was noxious and contrary to men’s preservation, and the punishment conducing to the preservation of the rest, inasmuch as to punish those that do voluntary hurt, and none else, frameth and maketh men’s wills such as men would have them.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“It is my hope to be able to prove that television is the greatest step forward we have yet made in the preservation of humanity. It will make of this Earth the paradise we have all envisioned, but have never seen.”
—Joseph O’Donnell. Clifford Sanforth. Professor James Houghland, Murder by Television, just before he demonstrates his new television device (1935)