CULTURE: Defending ‘Intangible Heritage’ in the South

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 26 2002 (IPS) - The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) is focusing on protecting humanity’s intangible cultural heritage as a means of correcting imbalances in the granting of world heritage status, which has up to now favoured the industrialised North.

The World Heritage Convention, in effect since 1972 and signed by 167 countries, has played a decisive role in the preservation of cultural and natural heritage sites on all continents, while fomenting tourism and investment in the designated sites.

However, the granting of world heritage status has been based on a monument-oriented vision, admitted UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura on a visit to Brazil this week.

World heritage status has been granted up to now only to works and sites of historic, aesthetic or anthropological value, without a focus on intangible heritage of vital cultural importance, said Matsuura, who was in Brazil Monday through Thursday.

The great majority of the 721 monuments and sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List – including 554 cultural landscapes, 144 natural sites and 23 mixed sites – are located in the industrialised North, especially Europe.

Spain, France and Italy alone contain 99 of the world heritage sites, and are the countries that draw the largest flows of foreign tourists, even prior to approval of the Convention.

Spain, France, Italy, Germany and Britain together account for a full 148 of the world heritage sites, more than one-fifth of the total, while the rest are distributed among 119 countries.

Intangible heritage, comprised of oral traditions, customs, languages, music, dance, rituals, festivities, traditional medicine and pharmacopoeia, the culinary arts and all kinds of special skills connected with the material aspects of culture, such as tools and the habitat, are sources of community identity and cohesion which have so far been neglected, said Matsuura.

For several years, UNESCO has been leading the effort to correct that distortion. In May 2001, the UN agency proclaimed 19 masterpieces of the oral and intangible heritage, including the the Oruro Carnival in Bolivia, the Kunqu Opera in China and the cultural space of Djamaa el-Fna Square in Marrakesh, Morocco.

The distribution of the masterpieces was inverted, with most of them located in developing countries, and only one in Japan and five in Europe.

Furthermore, three of the European masterpieces are in eastern Europe, the poorest part of the continent: polyphonic singing in Georgia, cross crafting and its symbolism in Lithuania, and the cultural space and oral culture of the Semeiskie, in the Russian Federation.

Five of the masterpieces are in the rest of Asia, four are in Latin America and four in Africa, as indicated on the UNESCO website: http://www.unesco.org. New masterpieces of intangible heritage will be declared in May 2003.

UNESCO is drafting a new international standard-setting instrument aimed at protecting intangible heritage, which is hard to define and to preserve because it does not consist of physical entities but of “collective creations that are transmitted orally or by gesture, and are modified over a period of time through a process of collective recreation.”

The new instrument, to complement the 1972 World Heritage Convention, was discussed by 25 delegates of a number of countries in the International Meeting of Experts on Intangible Heritage, held Tuesday through Thursday in Rio de Janeiro.

The experts reached agreement on proposals to be submitted to a panel that is to hammer out the new standards-setting instrument, Jurema Machado, an architect and UNESCO coordinator of culture in Brazil, told IPS.

The question will be discussed again at a September meeting of culture ministers in Istanbul, said Matsuura, who pointed out that the United Nations had designated 2002 the Year of Cultural Heritage.

This week’s meeting of experts was held in Rio de Janeiro not only due to Brazil’s great diversity and dynamic culture, but because this country has a pioneer National Programme on Intangible Heritage, based on laws in effect since August 2000.

Brazil has created a Registry of Intangible Cultural Assets – an inventory of knowledge, festivities, forms of expression and important cultural spaces.

Brazil’s new legislation, an outgrowth of the 1988 constitution, which stipulates that intangible cultural heritage must be preserved, was praised by the foreign experts for its “modern and broad conceptions, which do not limit their focus to folklore and rare forms of expression,” said Machado, who organised the meeting.

Brazil’s experience serves as a model for drafting the new standards-setting instrument, said Aziza Benani, a Moroccan diplomat and chair of the UNESCO executive committee.

Intangible heritage, like physical cultural assets, is of enormous economic importance, said UNESCO representative in Brazil, Jorge Werthein.

Protecting and promoting intangible heritage not only attracts tourists, but can also transform that heritage into export products, as occurred, for example, with tango, a musical genre from the Rio de la Plata region (Argentina and Uruguay), said Werthein.

Taking greater advantage of Rio de Janeiro’s cultural wealth could lead to a 50 percent rise in tourism, he added.