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Topics in Preservation Series

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Recent Trends in Preservation of Intangible Cultural Heritage

Chandra Reedy
Director, Laboratory for Analysis of Cultural Materials
University of Delaware
May 20, 2008

Transcipt

The UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage dates back to only 2003. Yet, it’s already having a major impact, globally and within the preservation community of the United States, especially in stimulating increased conversations about what cultural heritage actually is, what makes things significant, how to identify and document all aspects of an object, and how to preserve the intangible realms that give fuller meaning to the material objects we’re also trying to preserve. This movement explicitly recognizes that material culture is intertwined with ideas, memories, knowledge, skills, creativity, spirituality, emotions, traditions, and other intangible qualities.

This afternoon I’ll review the 2003 Convention, discussing some of its major goals. We’ll then examine the context of this Convention within the overall preservation efforts of UNESCO, such as the World Heritage Convention and the Memory of the World program. We’ll also look at examples of current efforts and directions of the conservation and preservation communities, both globally and within the United States, that focus on issues related to the 2003 Convention and on intellectual frameworks for preserving intangible cultural heritage on its own and in association with material heritage.

The Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage was adopted by UNESCO (the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) on October 17, 2003. Intangible cultural heritage is defined as the set of practices, representations, expressions, knowledge and skills that communities, groups, or individuals perceive as being part of their cultural heritage.

The convention recognizes that intangible cultural heritage is transmitted from generation to generation. As a result, it provides a sense of identity and continuity to people. Yet, at the same time, this heritage is living, not static and dead; thus, it’s constantly recreated by communities and groups, in response to their interactions with nature, with each other, and with other groups. So the challenge goes beyond just preserving a set of traditions that were once important at some specific point in the past. We do want to preserve what’s most significant about those. But, at the same time, the challenge incorporates documenting and preserving traditions that are still living, while not interfering with change as needed or wanted by their communities.

UNESCO specifies that intangible cultural heritage that’s to be safeguarded by this convention is that which promotes respect for cultural diversity and human creativity; is compatible with international human rights; and which complies with mutual respect among communities, and of sustainable development. The people whose heritage it is are to have a major role in defining their own heritage and how it’s documented and preserved.

The convention emphasizes that intangible cultural heritage is both traditional and living at the same time. That’s one challenge regarding what should be preserved, and how that can best be done. The convention further emphasizes that intangible cultural heritage is often transmitted orally; and the primary depository of this heritage is the human mind, and collective groups, or the community, are central to the manifestation and sharing of this heritage. The importance of preservation efforts is seen in the fact that many elements of intangible cultural heritage are endangered due to the effects of globalization, poverty, and lack of appreciation for traditional ways and values.

There are five major domains into which the convention categorizes intangible heritage. One of these incorporates oral traditions and expressions including language as a vehicle of intangible cultural heritage. These transmit knowledge, values, and collective memory. UNESCO notes that the loss of a language leads to the loss of oral traditions and expressions, but it’s in those oral expressions themselves, with their social and cultural context, where a language is best safeguarded, as opposed to simply assembling dictionaries, grammars, and databases.

A cited example is from the Sakha Republic in the easternmost region of the Russian Federation; the Yakut heroic epic arts of the Olonkho. The Yakut language belongs to the Turkic family of languages. The Olonkho epic expresses beliefs, customs, and legends about the deeds of ancient warriors; it also includes legends about deities, spirits, and animals, and addresses contemporary events such as the disintegration of nomadic society. It includes a large number of poetic tales which can vary from 10 to 15,000 verses in length; these exist in many versions because each community traditionally had its own narrator. These narrators have to be proficient in acting, singing, and poetical improvisation. The tradition is considered to be endangered because there are currently a low number of practitioners remaining, most of them elderly. Preserving this tradition means preserving its social role in the practitioner’s lives, providing opportunities for recitation as well as for apprenticeships that enable the young to learn this art form. It may also mean creating new contexts such as storytelling festivals where traditional creativity can find new expressions. The 2003 Convention encourages safeguarding measures that focus on oral traditions and expressions as processes rather than just products. So, just recording a performance of the Olonkho, then watching it disappear from practice, would not be considered adequate preservation. Recording a traditional epic, then providing opportunities for the community to continue with a form of their epic traditions, perhaps in new ways, would be more in alignment with the spirit of the convention.

The second UNESCO domain of intangible heritage includes performing arts, widely defined. These can include things like music, dance, and theater performances. However, it’s not intended to be restricted to performances such as would occur on a stage. Many traditional practices are not carried out for an external audience, but may be part of a ritual, or accompany an everyday group activity such as agricultural work. The Convention includes in its definition of intangible heritage all of the instruments, objects, and cultural spaces that are associated with intangible expressions and practices; so for performing arts, that can include many things that must be understood in association with each other: musical instruments, masks, costumes, ornaments, scenery and props; and the performing spaces, built or natural.


One example cited by UNESCO is the tradition of Vedic chanting. The Vedas are an ancient corpus of poetry, philosophy, myths, and rituals that date back over 3,500 years, transmitted orally in the Vedic language, derived from classical Sanskrit. To ensure that the sound of each word would be retained unaltered, the practitioners, who are Brahmin priests, are taught from childhood a set of complex recitation techniques based on tonal accents. At one time there were over 1,000 Vedic recitation branches, but only 13 still survive.

The third domain of intangible cultural heritage is defined by UNESCO as including social practices, rituals, and festive events. These are habitual activities that structure the lives of groups and communities and are shared by a large part of the group, helping to reaffirm the identity of community members. Social practices can include greeting ceremonies, or practices of giving and receiving gifts; as well as traditional games, settlement patterns, culinary traditions, special clothing, gender-specific social practices, or traditional legal systems.

One example given by UNESCO is the royal ancestral ritual in the Jongmyo Shrine in Seoul, South Korea, a Confucian ritual dedicated to the ancestors of the Joseon dynasty of the 14th-19th century. It incorporates song, dance, music, and food and wine offerings, and is practiced once a year. It’s a unique example of Confucian ritual, no longer celebrated in China, but inspired by classical Chinese texts on the cult of ancestors and filial piety. Endangerment within this domain is centered on the fact that these types of activities depend on broad participation of a community. In modern societies, migration and the splintering of a society may lead to loss of heritage, economic changes may make them difficult to support, and the increasing participation of tourists in events may bring a reduction to short highlights instead of a full event.

The fourth domain is that of knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe. Included are skills, practices, representations, and knowledge developed and used by communities in interaction with their natural environment. These are cognitive systems expressed through language, oral traditions, attachment to a place, memories, spirituality, and world view, embedded in a complex system of values and beliefs and social organization. They may include cosmologies, traditional healing systems, ethnobotany and pharmacopeia, divininations, shamanism, possession rites, initiation rites, and others.

An example given by UNESCO is the Vanuatu sand drawings from the South Pacific, a unique and complex tradition of sand drawing that’s actually a multifunctional writing system going well beyond artistic expression. Drawing directly on the ground, in sand, volcanic ash, or clay, the practitioner uses one finger to trace a continuous meandering line on an imagined grid to produce geometric patterns that serve as a means of communication among members of about 80 different language groups inhabiting the islands of the archipelago. The drawings also function as mnemonic devices to record and transmit rituals, myths, and information about local histories, cosmologies, kinship systems, farming techniques, song cycles, architectural and craft design, and choreographic patterns. Most of the drawings have several functions and layers of meaning. The drawer, then, must not only have knowledge of a set of graphic patterns, but must also have deep understanding of their various levels of significance, and be able to interpret the drawings for spectators. Knowledge and practices within this domain become endangered as globalization replaces traditional knowledge and local belief systems may no longer be valued, while urbanization and population expansion may destroy environments and resources central to these practices.

The last UNESCO domain is defined as that of traditional craftsmanship. Although strongly related to tangible heritage, the intention is to focus not just on the craft products, but also on the skills and knowledge that are crucial for their ongoing production. Preserving and saving objects, then, is not enough; the skills and knowledge needed to make them, and the conditions that encourage artisans to continue, are critical.

An example illustrated by UNESCO is barkcloth making by the Baganda people in southern Uganda. Craftsmen of a particular clan, headed by the hereditary chief craftsman, have traditionally manufactured bark cloth. The inner bark of the Mutuba tree is harvested during the wet season, and, in a complex series of processes, is beaten with a succession of wooden mallet types to produce a soft, fine texture and even terracotta color. With the 19th-century introduction of cotton cloth, production greatly decreased; it’s now being encouraged and promoted again.

The challenges to preservation of traditional craftsmanship are found in the modern world of mass production which can often provide goods at a lower cost than hand production, with craftspeople often unable to compete with more efficient industrial factories. Natural resources needed for a craft may become difficult to acquire. Changing social conditions or cultural practices may eliminate the need or desire for some types of crafts. Long apprenticeship periods may no longer be practical for young people who need to go to school. Family trade secrets may disappear if there’s no one in the family to continue a craft and sharing the knowledge with outsiders violates tradition. Preserving intangible heritage in this domain, then, includes not just preserving relevant objects, and the associated knowledge, but also supporting the continuing transmission of knowledge and skills of traditional crafts, with adaptation and creativity, as a living heritage.

I’d like to briefly illustrate how all five of these domains are represented at a site where I recently conducted fieldwork, at a Tibetan Bonpo village. Bonpo is the ancient, pre-Buddhist spiritual tradition of Tibet. It’s deeply rooted in respect for the environment, for the plants, animals, rivers, and lakes on which survival depends. It heavily influenced the form that Buddhism developed in Tibet, and in turn became very influenced by Buddhism.

The village is located about 270 kilometers north of Chengdu and 75 kilometers southwest of Songpan, in Sichuan Province, China. This is part of the traditional eastern Tibetan region known as Amdo, where a dialect of Tibetan called Amdokhe is spoken. A small Bonpo monastery serves many surrounding villages. The village this discussion focuses on is one of the closer villages to the monastery, Lhayul. Lhayul has about 56 families. Terraces support fields for crops such as barley and beans. The surrounding mountains serve as pasture land for animals. Green vegetables and important medicinal and ritual herbs are also collected in the mountains.

There are many examples in the village where one can encounter oral traditions and expressions as a vehicle of intangible cultural heritage. One where knowledge, values, and collective memory are transmitted is the matri ceremony, dedicated to remembering and praying for ancestors, especially deceased parents. Each household in the village will try to periodically host this all-day event, and invite their neighbors. At least 12 people need to be present in order to create good rebirth circumstances for the dead.

The host serves meals and drinks to all; people bring liquid gifts for all to partake. A ritual food offering heaped in a large bowl is made to the deceased, and a set of chants and songs is directed towards the goal of blessing all of the dead parents. The values of the importance of family, the community, and caring for each other are transmitted in the songs. The songs have not been fully recorded yet, and hold their context in their recitation within the other aspects of the matri ceremony. Many of the young people have recently left the village for school or work opportunities. As a result, the ceremony I attended included almost exclusively older people. Few young people have learned the songs. It’s easy to see how the matri ceremony might not survive for another generation.

Lyrics emphasize the things ones parents did for us, for example: “The mother who carries me nine months in the stomach but for one night has too much pain. The mother who gives the children milk from her breast after birth. When the child wets the bed, the mother gives up her clean and dry side to give to the child.”

Next, the second domain of intangible heritage, performing arts widely defined. In the village we can see many of the types of performances not carried out for an external audience, but which are either part of a ritual or part of an everyday group activity. One example is found in the chang gathering, which each villager tries to host in their own home on occasion (chang is a traditional Tibetan homemade fermented barley beer prepared in a ceramic container).
Many of the women dress in their finest clothes and jewelry; all guests bring a gift, usually soda or alcoholic beverages, or food, to share. If there’s a guest of honor, they sit next to the chang. Long straws are inserted into the brew. The first event is a chang ritual song performed by the host, in front of the home altar.

Then from time to time throughout the evening, someone will approach the container, invite the guest or host to take a sip, and will then take a sip as well. Frequently during the night there’s singing, often with separate male and female choruses. Occasionally someone will stand up and compose an impromptu song in honor of the guest, the host, or a recent event. Others may add songs in response.

A variety of traditional circle dances, food and tea, and lots of conversation and joking complete the evening. Not just the initial song in front of the home altar, but most of these traditional village song and dance forms exist primarily within the context of such social events.

The third domain, social practices that constitute habitual activities that structure the lives of a community and are shared by most members, are as important here as are larger rituals, ceremonies, or events. For example, Lhayul operates on a barter economy, so exchanges are very important. Exchanges of gifts constantly reinforce and cement family and social relationships. They also help to maintain the welfare of the group as a whole. For example, no one in the community goes hungry. However, the subsistence economics of the village and of some of its inhabitants does mean that the variety of food types available to one person or family may be very limited at times. However, if one person has a special fruit or vegetable supply – from gathering it in the mountains, buying it from a town, or receiving a gift from a family member living outside the village, the social practice is to share it, as small gifts given to many others in the village. Another time, those people will then give you small food gifts. While reinforcing family and social ties, this practice also means that everyone has the advantage of greater variety in their diet than any one household could obtain on their own.

The fourth domain, that of knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe; are of course reflected in many of the rituals here. But also very important to a Bonpo community are the skills, practices, and knowledge relating to the plants that they gather in the nearby mountains. Their plant lore is rich with history, function, symbolism, and healing powers.

For example, they collect and process a plant they call “drimo” to make a red dye to mix with melted yak butter. This red colorant marks barley dough images of gods that represent certain human emotions or states of being, and distinguishes them from images representing other emotions or states of being.

And, a red dye called rTa tshu, probably a local variety of madder, is traditionally prepared and used to provide an additional color for weaving, which uses black yak wool and white sheep’s wool. This technology is beginning to fade, however, because a variety of dye colors and dyed threads can now be purchased in the nearest large town, Songpan.

Finally, with the domain of traditional craftsmanship, we can find many cases. Keeping in mind the UNESCO focus on not just craft products, themselves, but on the skills and knowledge that are crucial for their ongoing production, the case of traditional iron working comes to mind. In the past, most villages in this region had one part-time village smith, as Lhayul still does. That person made all of the tools used in the village (such as knives, hoes, plow, cutting tools, and loom parts). The smith works fields most of the time, but when someone needs an item, they commission it, for barter. Today, many of the village iron smiths have disappeared, and tools are instead purchased from a larger town like Songpan.

The other category of traditional craftsmanship that’s very important in Lhayul is that of ephemeral ritual objects, where what is important is the making and using of the objects, and they’re intended to be destroyed after use. One example is that of tormas, offering sculptures usually made out of dough with a barley flour base. These ones were made during a two-day ritual called Sokha, intended to bring good fortune and blessings to the sponsoring household; then, the blessings are sent out to all animals and to all people of the village and of the world.

Each aspect of the ingredients, fabrication, and blessing rituals for tormas have multiple layers of symbolism. For example, the roasted barley flour itself represents all sustenance, that the participants are praying will be abundant in the next life. Yak butter dots represent flowers, and thus the beauty we want to fill our next life. The eating torma has special ingredients thought to carry healing powers, and a small piece is eaten by each participant.

Family members participate in various purification steps and in processes intended to create the conditions for good harvests. Absent family members are represented and blessed by a pile of their belongings towards which offerings like rice grains and pieces of the eating torma are tossed throughout the ritual. Leaving tormas on the roof at the close of the ceremony creates good karma because it’s an expression of kindness and generosity towards the birds that swoop down to eat them.

Most of this knowledge is imparted orally, with only some of it written down, The skills and meaning of torma making and the Sokha ritual they’re part of are learned over time by young monks assisting the older ones. Fortunately, this apprenticeship tradition is continuing at the moment, although on a smaller scale than it once was. However, most of the household participants are now elderly, and fewer young people are living at home and experiencing them. And, since the monastery and villages are living near the edge of poverty, a short-term disaster could disrupt the Bonpo religious system at any time. It’s thus important to document the full range of intangible aspects of craft production in this traditional Bonpo society, while it’s still possible to do so. There’s much richer and more complex cultural knowledge associated with craft products than is possible to deduce from a study of objects and texts alone. Fortunately, although located a little over 100 kilometers from the epicenter of last week’s 7.9 earthquake, they came through unscathed and uninjured. Sadly, many other villages in the region did not.

But, if the Bonpo monasteries and villages do not survive into the next century, we will have lost the core living traditions and social practices in which Bonpo village heritage exists. If the communities themselves can survive, even if they change, as we all do and want to do, in response to the modern world, then they may develop new layers of intangible cultural heritage.

Leaving the Bonpo village now, we’ve seen how sacred and ritual objects are easily seen as being connected to intangible cultural heritage, and also traditional crafts and technologies and the knowledge and skills they require. Let’s look for a moment at how the concept of intangible heritage fits into some of the other UNESCO cultural heritage programs.

For example, the 1972 World Heritage Convention. A cornerstone of this convention is the World Heritage List, which has the mandate of identifying, protecting, and preserving both cultural and natural heritage around the world that’s deemed as having “outstanding value to humanity” and considered to be “irreplaceable sources of life and inspiration.’ Some have argued that the Convention for Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage was a response to the privileging of buildings, monuments, and sites that occurs with the World Heritage List. And, perhaps, a relatively small list that has been identified by UNESCO as Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity under the Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention might be seen as following that idea of coming up with a list.

However, many of the efforts that have occurred under the new Safeguarding Convention differ from the idea of listing, and, in fact, I see this new convention as a way of expanding on existing UNESCO programs and creating more depth and sophistication to our research and preservation efforts. Most World Heritage Sites are dripping with Intangible Cultural Heritage, and we have only to focus more closely on those aspects in order to better understand a site, its significance, and how to more fully preserve what’s important about it. For the Potala, some intangibles are easy to visualize.

We can see that it was deliberately built on the highest spot in Lhasa, typical protective placement for Tibetan palace sites; we know that it served as the residence of Dalai Lamas, and contained a monastery, temples, shrines, many works of religious art, and administrative offices for the Dalai Lama’s regent. We can imagine some aspects of the religious atmosphere, or even experience what of that is left today, by joining in with the many Tibetans who circumambulate around the base of the Potala while continuously repeating mantras and prayers. But, if we imagine ourselves in the shoes of some who have written and talked about what it was like in the past, we can get even more sense of how the building functioned in daily life. The idea of the building floating up into the clouds is a constant theme. The turrets on the sides are called the “wings of the Potala.”

The wide, steep stairways at the entrance are intended to give the effect of the palace being built on a sheer rock wall. The progressive narrowing of the structure towards the top gives the building the appearance of moving skywards. Inside, as one climbs up to and enters the rooms where the Dalai Lama greeted visitors, with a view down over the city of Lhasa and the entire Lhasa Valley, one felt as if they were climbing up into the heavenly realm of the bodhisattva of compassion, whose current incarnation many Tibetans believe is the Dalai Lama. Now, of course, it also represents a modern political situation with new memories.

We could look to intangible aspects of any structure to give us a better sense of how people arranged and used their spaces, where visitors to the home were greeted, what visitors saw first when they entered, and what was blocked from their view until or unless they attained a more intimate invitation. For example, we can look at the various activities that took place in a 19th-century Rural Gothic Revival mansion and garden, searching for what the design says about the roles of the individuals who moved through the landscape and structure, their status, what they wanted their surroundings to communicate to others. Here at Rockwood Mansion in northern Delaware, gardenesque landscaping was used, a style with long vistas, curving paths, and trees and shrubs bordering the lawn.

A visitor would travel back and forth along the curved paths, catching occasional glimpses of the home beyond through gaps in the trees, getting a sense of the importance of the isolated estate, and of the status of its owner. Suddenly, they’ve arrived, and are faced with an imposing home. They approach the front door. As they enter and are greeted, they look forward through a series of grand, arched and decorated doorways and see the back windows that look out:onto the all-important back garden.

The family quarters are hidden up the stairway to the side, beyond their view. Certainly, there are some who see increased discussion of preservation of intangible cultural heritage as a way of responding to, and augmenting, the past emphasis on what can be documented in the material world, not just with the World Heritage List, but also with the National Register of Historic Buildings and Landscapes. The World Heritage Convention itself has gone far beyond the original listing of major buildings and monuments. Many of its new programs fit well into agendas aiming towards better documenting and preserving intangibles. For example, some of the categories for sites that can now be proposed include cultural landscapes, cultural routes, and industrial heritage. So, I forsee that in the future we can expect more efforts to incorporate documentation and preservation of both tangible and intangible cultural heritage together, perhaps in new ways.

Another UNESCO program that I see as very closely related to the issues raised by the Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention is the Memory of the World program. That program is focused on the preservation and dissemination of archive and library collections of the world. The underlying rationale is that documentary heritage reflects the world’s diversity of languages and cultures, and thus serves as a mirror of the world and its memory. Yet, many of these collections are fragile, disappearing, and irreplaceable. In line with the World Heritage List, and with the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, there’s a register of holdings by country (including manuscripts, photographs, and other records) of documentary heritage identified by an international advisory committee.

However, as with the Intangible Masterpieces list, this is not yet very extensive; for example, only two things are listed for the United States: the Wizard of Oz film and a map here in the Library of Congress (the 1507 printed world map by Martin Waldseemüller. However, the Memory of the World program also supports a diversity of projects and activities (international, regional, national, or local); and, as with other programs, these may ultimately have a higher impact than a list. As with other types of objects, those in library and archive collections are the bearers of a far-ranging intangible history and heritage. UNESCO also has an E-Heritage program, and a Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage, concerned with the preservation especially of born-digital heritage (such as web pages, electronic journals, and on-line databases). Since documentary evidence and e-heritage have many similar issues regarding identifying, documenting, and preserving the full depth of information, experiences, functions, memories, and ideas associated with their intangible aspects as do objects, buildings, and landscapes, they present some of the same challenges. And, many repositories of intangible heritage are now partially or wholly digital.

The American Memory program of the Library of Congress, while not part of either of these last two UNESCO programs, cuts across the goals of both, and is in many ways connected to the idea of preservation of intangible cultural heritage. American Memory provides access to an enormous wealth of digitized written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document American experiences, with millions of items assembled online into thematic collections. Many of the collections yoke together a variety of materials that, taken together, help the person accessing the collection to gain a deeper sense of the heritage represented, including intangible values.

For example, the motion pictures and sound recordings of the Edison companies are available, with a brief biography of Thomas Edison, the prolific inventor of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to reading about Edison and his work and inventions, viewing photographs, and reading print interviews of him published during his lifetime, via this digital resource anyone can also listen to representative sound recordings made by his companies in the early 20th century, including recordings of Edison himself speaking; and one can view his experimental talking film, or a documentary film made in the early 20th century following some of his working processes at his incandescent light bulb factory.

Rather than simply providing information and describing the past, this collection is able to impart a range of intangibles – the shiver one feels hearing Edison himself speaking in 1919, and, as one listens to his speech praising America’s allies of World War I, our attention is momentarily drawn away from studying the details of his inventions and manufacturing and marketing efforts, as a flood of remembered histories enter the listener, perhaps stories or a remembered photograph album from a grandfather who was among those whom Edison is referring to as fighting in France and Belgium, or perhaps from remembered history lessons of years ago, to remind us of the times in which Edison lived and worked. Collections such as these preserve the intangibles of our history yoked together with the tangible, so that they’re more than the sum of their parts – they offer the public a way to more fully enter into the lives and times of people of the past.

Electronic collections also create new intangible, living culture as more people are exposed to, and have the opportunity to interact with, such collections (as opposed to the old mode where only those who lived near a collection or could travel to one, and who had the time, interest, and money to enter into a museum, could encounter collections such as this). Millions more now interact with resources such as these, and their interactions produce new feelings, reactions, thoughts and ideas, even new actions, social processes, and relationships. Witness the astounding experience of the Library of Congress Flickr project. Not only can the photos be viewed online, but anyone may add comments or tags and read all the comments of others. Millions of people viewed, favorited, and commented on items within a very short time of their being made available. As this widespread conversation increases about what specific photographic images of the American past mean to millions of people from all over the world, the past becomes part of our present living culture.

Modern material culture studies resonate with these ideas. An underlying theme is that people use material culture to make sense of life, of the context of their community within the larger world and the universe, and of their role in that community. Material culture scholars work on the assumption that material culture embodies layers of memories and then evokes them to those who have a connection to those memories. Some who study material culture even use poetry to help them interpret material objects, because poetry is a good vehicle for expressing the intangible. A quilt may be far more than a textile, a set of design elements, or a style to the person for whom it was made. She sees scraps of cloth remembered from her home, evenings watching her mother make it while chatting about how some of the design elements came from a long line of family relationships and shared histories; and memories of the special event, perhaps a wedding or birth of a child, when she received the gift from her mother.

Yet, as John Jameson from the National Park Service has noted, the goal of preservation and interpretation is usually not just to provide information, but to provide access to meanings. He argues that intangible meanings exist on a continuum, from the particular to the broader and more universal. He defines universal concepts as intangible meanings that are comprehensible and relevant to many people in a given audience, even if they don’t all view them the same way. He suggests trying to recognize the universal concepts associated with a resource, because the resource will then become more meaningful to a wider audience who will gain a deeper appreciation for that resource.

In March, at an international conference in Belgium on “Re-thinking the Role of Intangible Heritage,” participants grappled with a variety of methodological issues:

What about historic or even archaeological materials – to what extent can we hope to recover intangible data, and what are the best approaches for that? Methodologies that were presented were wide ranging – from the anthropological (such as participant observation, interviews, and documentation by film, photographs, and field notes); to the sociological (analyzing how individuals and groups develop and participate in social and cultural relationships, and mapping relationships that occur simultaneously between people, things, technologies, and ideas), from historic preservation (such as measured drawings and architectural design analysis), to community development work, and even to performance (such as traditional puppetry).

Looking to concrete ways in which conservators can participate in preservation of intangible cultural heritage, one clear and explicit discussion is found in Barbara Appelbaum’s recent 2007 book on conservation treatment methodology. She presents a systematic methodology for conservation treatments, incorporating goals for both preservation and interpretation, that promotes gathering and analyzing of non-material as well as material information. She believes preservation and interpretation cannot and should not be unlinked, because efforts to preserve and treat objects can affect and enhance the meaning of those objects.

She further notes that non-material aspects are linked to preservation because both the physical state of an object and its cultural meaning shift constantly. She therefore devotes a chapter of her book to a discussion of sources for non-material information; questions to ask about an object that relate to history, meanings, and different types of values; working with an object’s custodian and identifying additional stakeholders; the relevance of values to conservation treatments; and how to interweave all information obtained into a conservation treatment and preservation approach.

But finding strategies to identify and preserve the intangible is not easy. Certainly, here in Washington D.C., the National Museum of the American Indian has been a leader in how this can be done, as well as in finding ways to support healthy continuation of living traditions. O. Young Lee, former Minister of Culture for the government of Korea, said at an International Council of Museums conference on museums and intangible heritage held in Seoul in 2004, that he believes that museums “should strive to be a permanent vessel that contains our lives.”

Yet finding ways of containing memories, relationships, social practices, ideas, skills, knowledge, shared histories, and the like, is challenging. A recording of the Bonpo matri songs, with documentation of their social context, is better than letting it disappear from the world scene forever, lost and unknown a few years hence. However, how do we capture the close sense of community and belonging in which they are sung, and the feelings of love for the deceased parents that motivate the ritual? If there are no more Bonpo villages in the world, have recordings really preserved what’s significant about the matri ceremony? The methodology for identifying, documenting, and preserving intangible cultural heritage is still in its infancy, and it may require institutions and researchers to work in new ways, but I believe it’s important that we ask these questions and consider these issues.