The ger, a traditional dwelling created by nomadic Mongolians, is specifically designed to fit their way of life. Its semi- sphere shape helps the ger endure storms and tempests. It has solutions for heat control and ventilation. It is flexible in terms of size and design, and it is portable and lightweight. At the same time, it is also comfortable to live in and easy to build and dismantle. Moreover, the ger is used as a measure for time and directions.

The culture of the Central Asian steppes expresses itself vividly in the lifestyle of traditional nomadic practices. Mongolian culture has been in practice in the nomadic life and the traditions surrounding the nomad’s home (ger). And it is present in religious celebrations, national festivals, art and crafts, music and dance, language and literature, which form the backbone of Mongolian intangible cultural heritage of Mongolia. Mongolia is filled with valuable cultural properties and intangible cultural heritage of humanity that have been kept or practiced for thousands of years.\n\nGer, Mongolian Traditional Dwelling\nThe traditional architecture of the Mongols differed strongly from that of the settled peoples of Asia and other continents. Centuries ago, there the ger, also known as a yurt, appeared. It still offers shelter to nomads in particular places in Central Asia. Its development and fundamental principles are determined by the specific features of the way of life of Mongol tribes, which made it necessary to evolve a light and collapsible structure to be used as a dwelling or for public functions.\n\nMongolian Language and Literature\nMongolian is the language of most of the Mongolian population and inner Mongolia. By origin, Mongolian is one of the Altaic family of languages, and the history of the Mongolian language is long and complicated. Significant literary work of early Mongolia includes The Secret History of the Mongols, which was published in 1228).\n\nMongolian Religion and Beliefs\nThe Mongols have practiced several religions, of which Shamanism and Buddhism were the most common. The faith in Mongolia is Buddhism, though the state and religion were separated during the socialist period, but with the transition to the parliamentary republic in the 1990s, there has been a general revival of faiths across the country\n\nMongolian Art and Crafts\nMongolian arts and crafts have been passed down across generations from the Paleolithic times to today, leaving behind deep impressions on all facets of life and conscious, aesthetic, and philosophical thinking. Highly developed Mongolian arts and crafts come from the second millennium BCE. The works included sculptured heads of wild animals with exaggerated features. Other items include knives, daggers, and other items of practical and religious use.\n\nMongolian Music and Dance\nMusic is an integral part of Mongolian culture. Among Mongolia’s unique contributions to the world’s musical culture are the long songs, overtone singing, and morin khuur (the horse-headed fiddle). The music of Mongolia is also rich with varieties related to the various ethnic groups of the country. Among the most popular forms of modern music in Mongolia are Western pop and rock genres and the mass songs written by contemporary authors in the form of folk songs.\n\nHorse Culture of Mongolia\nIt is famously known that horses play a large role in the Mongols’ daily and national lives. Common sayings are, “A Mongol without a horse is like a bird without wings,” and “Mongols are born on horseback” these are arguably true words. Even today, horse-based culture is still practiced by nomadic Mongolians.\n\nVisit https://www.toursmongolia.com/tours for additional information about Mongolian culture.\n\nPhoto 1 : Prairie meadow grass inner Mongolia traditional clothing © Batzaya Choijiljav\nPhoto 2~7 : © Batzaya Choijiljav

Visually imposing sites often catch the imagination of the public. But there is often more than the monumental that informs local’s and visitor’s experiences. Few realize the importance of local civic spaces that demonstrate community benefits from safeguarding heritage in all its manifestations. Engagement with the local primary stakeholders and their spaces reveals deep knowledge for pilgrimage, tourism, education, and recreation. Safeguarding intangible cultural heritage (ICH) requires benefit analysis and integrated local area planning through a bottom up praxis for sustainability.\n\nA promising development in Amaravathi Heritage Town, Andhra Pradesh, birthplace of Mahayana Buddhism, is a major program for safeguarding its tangible and intangible heritage. Known to the outside world for its famous Amaravathi School of Buddhist Art, recent systematic cultural mapping revealed 2,900-year layers of history and a rich inventory of intangible heritage. Significant is the first Government Order for safeguarding the Balusulamma Thalli Gudi or temple. Its archaeological and historical importance is amplified through the collective memories and living heritage of Balusulamma as the village patron goddess of the ancient Dharanikota.\n\nTwo hundred years ago, local king Raja Vasi Reddy Venkatadri Naidu used to dismount his elephant on returning home from other villages and make offerings to Balusulamma. Last month, his direct descendants on an annual pilgrimage visited the place during the harvest festival and conducted vermillion or Kumkuma Puja for Balusulamma. They are now sponsoring an onsite educational room built strictly according to traditional architecture and in partnership with the Amaravathi Heritage Centre and Museum.\n\nThe priest or pujari, potter Sambayya, is reviving famous Dharanikota pottery traditions. Scaled drawings of the cultural space were prepared by the School of Planning and Architecture, Vijayawada. Local farmers are assisting with documentation and the use of the cultural space for revitalizing the diversity of intangible heritage. The landscape has been carefully fenced. Five solar lamps, a water tank, and boring pump have been installed. A gateway has been constructed and landscaping is preventing soil erosion.\n\nThe rachhabanda or traditional meeting place under the large 200-year-old Banyan tree has been renovated with smooth granite. It is being used by the local village administration, school groups, and families. Everyone loves the ambience of the place, irrespective of caste, faith, age, and other cultural affiliation. The access road to the temple, along with drainage, has been completed. Festivities that have revived the intangible heritage of the place are once again bringing back people from the surrounding twenty-three villages. The Village Vathavaranam or village ambience is revitalized. It is a concept that is rarely addressed in critical heritage discourse.\n\nBalusulamma Thalli Gudi is an illustration of locating culture in development in safeguarding intangible heritage through integrated local area planning. There are about 14,000 villages in the state and an estimated 100,000 shrines to a high number of village goddesses across its thirteen districts—perhaps a million of heritage-rich sites in India. They are the bedrock of Andhra and Telugu culture and Indian heritage. They provide the essence of what it is to experience village atmosphere in the face of rapid urbanization and globalization.\n\nBalusulamma signifies culture as an essential component of human development as it is a source of identity, innovation, and creativity for the village life in India. UNESCO emphasizes that many people, especially the poor, depend directly on ecosystems for their livelihood, and, in effect, their economic, social, and physical well-being, including nonetheless their cultural heritage. Balusulamma Gudi is also a good representative example of the UNESCO 2011 Recommendation on Historic Cultural Landscapes and the 2003 Convention on Safeguarding Intangible Heritage. The value and role of community cultural reclamation and responsible tourism through safeguarding and promotion of heritage landscapes is better understood in Amaravathi Heritage Town.\n\nPhoto : Local folk theater revitalized © Amareswar Galla

Traditional builders from Samoa are in Japan on a very special mission: to build a faletele, a traditional Samoan house that is circular with one or more central posts. Master Builder Lesā Laufale, who started learning his craft some 30 years ago, leads the crew.\n\nThe Little World Museum of Man, where the faletele will be built, is near the city of Inuyama in Aichi prefecture, southwest of Tokyo. It is an open-air museum celebrating cultures and architecture, with 32 traditional houses from 23 countries and regions represented. Founded in 1983, the museum arranged for 12 builders from the village of Sa’anapu, where the current crew also comes from, to build four Samoan houses over 30 years ago.\n\nThe faletele will be built using traditional techniques and materials. This means using ’afa, a versatile and strong coconut fiber sennit used for lashing the structure together. Over 14,000 meters of the handmade cord is needed, work taking many months to complete. The making of sennit during village council meetings is now rarely practiced. Aiming to rekindle interest in the declining craft and with support from the U.S. government, project manager Galumalemana Steven Percival produced a documentary film and museum exhibit on Samoan sennit in 2013. A stone-floored and sennit-lashed faletele was also built at the Tiapapata Art Centre.\n\nHouse construction is replete with esoteric knowledge, but Lesā explains that there are no schools in Samoa where one can learn the required skills. He studied under Mulitalo Kirifi, a well-known builder from his village.\n\n“I observed Mulitalo working and whenever he asked me to do something and I made a mistake, he would tell me to start over.”\n\nThe passing down of knowledge from a master builder, matua o faiva, to an apprentice is common across cultures but when particular techniques are no longer used or are modified, esthetics can be compromised. Not only is the structure less appealing, but the language is also diminished. The natural environment is also affected by the decline. Building materials come from the forest: various palms and trees and a long coconut known as niu’afa, a species believed to yield the longest coconut in the world.\n\nIn traditional society, the natural environment was protected by tapu, a set of laws forbidding actions that would adversely impact the sustainable supply of resources. Ask a sennit maker about the elongated coconut and he will tell you about the tapu: one is not allowed to burn leaves or other parts that fall to the ground; these must be buried or thrown in the sea. Ignoring tapu, it is believed, leads to a gradual shortening of the husk. A plant that seems to have disappeared completely from the environment is the wild sugarcane known as tolofualau, named after its broad and supple leaf that was preferred for thatching.\n\nLesā remembers seeing beautiful houses thickly thatched with the leaf. “We now use the courser leaf of the sago palm niu o Rotuma because when we stopped protecting the wild sugarcane, pigs had a feast,” he says. But the environmental story is not all bad. There are invasive species now used in house construction such as the togo vao, a type of mangrove tree that grows no thicker than a finger but is tough and flexible, a perfect combination for the many hundreds of aso (listels) used to tie thatching. \n\nThe Japan faletele provides a unique opportunity for the crew to deepen and apply their knowledge. It is a place of learning for an important piece of intangible cultural heritage that will help assure a future for traditional house building in Samoa.\n\nPhoto 1 : The roof structure of the faletele at the Tiapapata Art Centre. No nails have been used in this construction ⓒ Galumalemana Steven Percival\nPhoto 2 : In Japan, Master Builder Lesā Laufale (front right), stands next to Little World Museum of Man Curator Takao Miyazato. ⓒ Galumalemana Steven Percival

There were once three traditional house- construction styles in Fiji. The first, rausina, was common in the hinterland tribes of mainland Vitilevu. Its prominent feature was its single-ridge pole that gave the roof a conical shape. The second, kubulolo, was common in the outer islands of the Lau group. Its prominent feature was its oval shape, which is a typical feature in Polynesian Tonga and Samoa, two islands renowned for their trade with the Lau islands. The third, which is the focus of this article, is called the vasemasema style, and it was known for its two main ridge posts and was commonly found around coast tribes and villages on the main islands of Vitilevu and Vanualevu.

Every year for the past thirty-nine years, Bali hosts the Bali Arts Festival (Pesta Kesenian Bali), a traditional performing arts celebration featuring artists from all over Indonesia. Starting from 10 June with a magnificent parade where all Balinese regencies are represented, the festival continues until 9 July with several daily performances, all open and free for the public. Held in Taman Budaya in Denpasar, the festival venue represents a beautiful ensemble of traditional architecture pavilions.\n\nMost participating performing groups come from Bali to demonstrate rare art forms from the distant parts of the island or compete in mostly popular genres, which include barong, legong, kecak, and various mask dances. Safeguarding these arts being the main objective of the festival, it has contemporary music, dance, and theatrical styles that reflect the motifs and patterns of traditional culture. Along with performing arts that are indisputably central to the festival, traditional Balinese foods and crafts, and even ways of conducting religious ceremonies are also showcased.\n\nThe Bali Arts Festival started in 1979 as a provincial initiative of Ida Bagus Mantra in response to rapid expansion of the tourism industry, attempting to prevent the extinction of traditional Balinese arts. It proved to be successful; and a series of various district and regency contests helped galvanize cultural life while dance and art schools were opened with government support. The festival remains mostly a local communal event allowing performers, artists, and craftsmen from different regencies to meet and occasionally compete with the support of the spectators from their own villages. Amidst the overwhelming growth of tourism industry in Bali, a condition that brings compounding threats to sustaining traditional cultural production, the presence of foreign tourists in the festival remains rather insignificant.\n\nPhoto : Traditional Balinese dancers preparing themselves for performance © Eva Rapoport

Dungarpur is in the southwestern part of Rajasthan, India. The region is also known as Vagad, where inhabitants are mostly tribal communities. Along with great cultural diversity, Vagad is also known for its natural beauty and traditional craftsmanship like stone sculpture, wooden dolls, and toy making. Communities like Sompura and Tirgar from Dungarpur and nearby areas have learned craftsmanship from their ancestors. Stone sculpture and wooden crafts by Sompura and Tirgar artists, respectively, are perceived as intangible cultural heritage of the region. Old palaces and heritage buildings like Badal Mahal Museum (BMM) are living relics of traditional stone architecture and sculptures.\n\nThe Municipal Corporation of Dungarpur has transformed the BMM building into a unique cultural display to preserve and promote tribal and rural lifestyle, history, and crafts. The museum has been designed by heritage expert Monish Paliwal and intangible cultural heritage researchers Lokesh Paliwal and Dinesh Kothari.\n\nAn open stone sculpture gallery including Mother Nature Park showcases a Sompura stone sculpture and features traditional and modern subjects. The scenes of rural and tribal kitchens and shrines explore the simple lifestyle of rural communities. BMM has set up a royal lifestyle on the top floor of the building, which includes a collection of weaponry, vessels, turbans, and other articles.\n\nAveraging a thousand visitors per month, BMM is helping to promote cultural heritage and ecotourism while providing exposure and a market for local arts and crafts, a significant contribution in a time when traditional heritage needs a larger role in public life.\n\nPhoto : Badal Mahal Museum exhibit © Lokesh Paliwal

This third session of the ICH Webinar Series attempts to have a deeper engagement with ideas of building cooperation and networking among higher education institutions for ICH safeguarding. Primarily, this session aims to examine the state of networking activities in different regions around the world, how networks were formed, and how they became functional associations for the study of ICH. Furthermore, the session looks into what it means to be in such kind of network, their significance to teachers, students, non-teaching professionals in higher education settings, research, community service, and intellectual exchange, amongst others. Finally, the session intends to address questions of expandability of networks, with emphasis on the possibility of inter-regional cooperation.

In Palau, important lessons about life and how to conduct oneself may be captured in a particular oral tradition. Stories are told a retold from generation to generation to impart significant principles and values about being Palauan. There are stories explaining the origins of life on Palau, settlement patterns, and migration between places. These oral traditions may be transmitted through stories, chants, performances, and architecture. Significant cultural sites are also a medium of conveying important oral histories of migrations and events that supports close lineage among families and villages. Other oral stories show the importance of certain plant and animal species in Palauan culture.

Best practices (BP) and guidelines represent a fundamental topic, especially when a given technology matures enough that many users, not totally familiar with it, decide to approach that technology to make it mainstream. This is, for example, the case with 3D modelling methodologies; many users, also non-experts, have tried to approach them, especially after the emergence and diffusion on the market of high quality, non-metric, and relatively cheap digital cameras, together with many software solutions for 3D image-based modelling. If several technical standards have already been adopted for the traditional surveying and dimensional contact metrology fields, it is only in the last few years that BP-related projects and information have appeared in the field of 3D Cultural Heritage (CH). A best practice is a process or method that, when executed effectively, leads to enhanced project performance (Cheok et al., 2008) and ensures, or at least increases, the chance of performing quality data acquisition and subsequent use in a given field (Beraldin et al., 2011). Since documenting is part of a measurement process, the basic principles and practical issues that affect the making of measurements should be considered when dealing with CH documentation. A Good Practice Guide was created by Goldsmith (2010), where six guiding principles to perform good measurements are stated, i.e.:

I would like to thank Dr. Samuel Lee for inviting me to give this tour of the impacts of the 2003 Convention in the Asia-Pacific Region. I’d also like to thank Dr. Weiming for giving a talk that situated the work we do in a broader context and explained our work with intangible cultural heritage. I found it to be a very stimulating talk and a great way to start this day and a half. I am going to talk on a more basic level about what has been done as a result of countries coming together to ratify an international agreement that aims to safeguard intangible cultural heritage. It was a very ambitious program in the beginning. I was privileged to see a little bit of it working with Ms. Aikawa at the UNESCO headquarters during the time leading up to the Convention.

Cultural heritage consists of any tangible or intangible object, group, or natural resource which has been inherited or created by a generation and is safeguarded to be transferred, in excellent condition, to future\ngenerations (after UNESCO, 2019). Tangible cultural heritage refers to monuments, groups of buildings or sites of outstanding universal value, whereas intangible cultural heritage is a practice, representation, expression, knowledge, or skill, as well as instruments, objects, artifacts, and cultural spaces that communities, groups, or even individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, 2019., UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2019). The 1972 World Heritage Convention of UNESCO defines the criteria of the natural or cultural sites to be considered for inscription on the World Heritage List (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, 1972). The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage was drafted in 2003 for the protection and promotion of the aforementioned intangible cultural heritage elements, and such elements may be inscribed on the appropriate Intangible Cultural Heritage List (UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2003). The two types of cultural heritage, tangible and intangible, are not to be treated separately but in combination, since either one is influenced by and complementary to the other.