Tihar is one of the most popular festivals of Nepal. This five-day festival has something that relates to almost every community dwelling in the country. It is both a religious and a cultural festival that reminds us about the importance of human relations and that with nature and its various components.\n\nIn Teria, the southern region of Nepal, it is celebrated as Dipawali. Houses are decorated with oil lamps to welcome Lord Rama, who is returning with his wife, Sita, to his kingdom after 14 years of exile and defeat of the demon king, Ravana. In the hilly region, it is celebrated as Tihar with the honoring of the goddess Lakshmi, and sisters bestowing blessings upon their brothers. In the Kathmandu Valley, it is known as Swanti among the Newar community and is celebrated with much fanfare. Tihar also holds special significance within the farming community. It marks the end of the harvest season and thus the filling of the granaries and store houses or rooms with ample produce to last for a year.\n\nThe five-day festival, also referred to as Panchak, honors Yama, the lord of death, and is mainly dominated with the worship of the goddess Lakshmi, the giver of wealth according to Hinduism, as well as appreciating animals that are connected closely to humans. Houses are cleaned and decorated with oil lamps and marigold garlands, in preparation for the festival. In modern times, colorful strings of flashing electric lights have begun to replace traditional oil lamps.\n\nThe festival commences with the kaag puja or tihar, which is the worship of the crow. According to the Hindu epic Ramayana, the crow was cursed as well as blessed by Lord Rama during his exiled years. The curse was that it could use only one eye at a time and the blessing was that it could see what other eyes cannot see—spirits and departed souls. In this regard the crow is seen as the connection between the living and the dead, thus it is appeased with offerings of good food placed in an open area outside the house.\n\nThe second day honors the dog, called the kukur tihar. For thousands of years, humans and dogs have shared a very special bond and the dog has often been referred to universally as “man’s best friend.” Dogs are specially venerated on this day as an appreciation for their loyalty and for guarding our homes. Red tika is applied to their forehead and a pretty garland placed around their neck. Special treats are fed to the dogs, and the best part is that, besides domestic pets, street dogs are also treated with equal reverence.\n\nThe third day begins with the worship of the cow in the morning and the goddess Lakshmi in the evening in the hope she will bless and bring fortune to the worshiper. Posters of the deity are purchased beforehand and, for the ritual, pasted in safes, lockers, or where monetary transactions take place. The ritual is then performed in the evenings, beginning with the lighting of oil lamps, chanting of mantras, and making of offerings to appease the goddess of wealth.\n\nThe fourth day celebrates the ox, the Govardhan Puja, another faithful and very useful animal in Nepali culture. Being an agrarian state, depending heavily on agriculture for sustenance, the ox has played a major role in plowing the fields and pulling carts in the absence of modern technology. This day has another very important significance to the Newar, or locally community of the Kathmandu Valley. It is the “Mha Puja,” or the day to cleanse and worship oneself. The elaborate ritual starts in the evening with the making of a mandala and lighting an oil lamp on it. All family members are seated in front of their own mandala, cleansing themselves of the sins of the past year and enriching themselves both physically and spiritually with energies for the coming year. Coincidentally, the Newari New year (Nepal Smavat) is also celebrated the same day with much fanfare, bike rallies, and traditional music.\n\nThe fifth day is the Bhai tika, a much-awaited day for both brothers and sisters. Although different communities all over Nepal celebrate it in their own way, the meaning of the ritual is for sisters to ask God for long life, good health, and prosperity for their brothers. The sister applies the tika to her brother’s forehead, and decorates him with garlands of flowers. Traditionally, she prepared a whole array of edible goodies for her brother, although today this has been replaced with attractively packaged imported treats. In return, the brother blesses his sister and gifts her cash and sometimes various other tokens. They then sit and make merry, exchanging sibling love and respect with good food and drinks. For those who do not have a sibling to celebrate with, there is a tradition of going to specific temples.\n\nIn sum, Tihar is a celebration of humans and their relations with each other. It also celebrates the relations between humans and animals, thus emphasizing the importance of a harmonious ecology for a better spiritual and social life, a tradition that we should persevere to continue and hand down to newer generations. This year, the festival falls between October 26 and 29.\n\nPhoto : Tihar Festivalⓒ Swosti Kayastha

The Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador’s Intangible Cultural Strategy has four broad goals: documentation, that work of inventorying ICH; celebration, where we honor our tradition-bearers; transmission, where we ensure that skills are passed from person to person and community to community; and finally cultural industry, where we can build sustainable communities using Intangible Cultural Heritage as a tool.

Documentation of heritage is one of the important tools for both tangible and intangible heritage, not only for recovery in case of loss but also for transmission of knowledge. In the case of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), documentation has been stressed as the starting point of safeguarding. Article 12 of the 2003 Convention clearly mentions that each state party should maintain the inventories of the Intangible Cultural present within the territory. Also, while sending the application for nominating ICH elements to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, or to the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding, the application file should also contain the inventories of each nominated element. From this, therefore, we can understand the significance of documentation in ICH.

Discourse about intangible cultural heritage is anchored on the question of memory, which has become a topic of great interest today not only within academia but also in popular culture. America’s newfound taste for cupcakes and macaroni and cheese, for instance, is not so much about society’s gastronomic craving for these foods, as it is about society’s craving for history and the comfort of things past. In essence, it is about restorative nostalgia and the memories that these foods evoke and make possible through the imaginary. Our preoccupation with memory and remembering, in large part, is driven by our recognition of the fragility of memory, a fragility that is underscored by this age of mass displacement in which we live. As the Iranian American writer Roya Hakakian notes in her recent memoir, “When you have been a refugee, abandoned all your loves and belongings, your memories become your belongings.” In a world where over 80 million people are currently forcibly displaced, amounting to one person being forcibly dislodged from his or her home and lifeways approximately every two seconds, dislocation, uprooting, and rupture are as much a facet of our lived experience as are connectivity and interdependence. Exilic condition is an unfortunate but undeniable feature of modernity.\nEven within living memory, Asia has had her share of tumultuous histories. Colonization, conflict, war, and other calamities have engendered mass dispersal. Over 2 million Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians fled their homelands in the aftermath of war, revolution and genocide, and many more Southeast Asians continue to be displaced in varied contexts and conditions as we speak. The genocide in Cambodia left deep wounds and ravaging effects on the cultural memories of the nation that is now bifurcated between Asia and the diaspora. Even without the trauma of war and mass atrocities, globalization, modernization, and urbanization have progressively divested traditional knowledge of its merits, and peripheralized certain memories into oblivion.

Co-orgarnized by ICHCAP and Hue Monuments Conservation Centre (HMCC), this year’s Asia-Pacific ICH NGO Conference was held in Hue, Vietnam under the theme of ICH NGOs towards Sustainable Development of Communities.

Capoeira , a Brazilian martial art (MA) expression, was in 2014 inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) of Humanity for its fundamental values and characteristics, transmitted from one generation to another (Vianna, 2016; UNESCO, 2020). The is a circle formed by capoeiristas, musicians, and the audience, in the center of which capoeira matches take place.

ICCN, Interurban Cooperation Network for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, is an international organization of local governments and cultural institutions which includes 31 states, 29 cities and 34 associations. Its main objective is the protection of the intangible cultural heritage around the world and the promotion of sustainable local development. Moreover, it also seeks to achieve cultural peace through mutual understanding and intercultural dialogue between the different populations that are part of it. Julio Nacher shared some good examples of cultural events that successfully held in pandemic situation.

The fundamental purpose of the 2003 Convention is to contribute to peacebuilding, mutual understanding, respect, dialogue among different people and communities and to empower and enrich the cultural diversity of humanity. The concept and nature of ICH are linked with the expression of valuable knowledge and skills transmitted among ethnic communities and groups, in a word, with the spiritual memory of the people and societies, which transcend geographical spaces and political borders. As ICH is often shared by communities on the territories of more than one state, the multinational inscriptions of such a shared heritage on the UNESCO List of ICH constitute an important mechanism for promoting international cooperation. \n\nThe Committee, therefore, decided (7.COM 14) to establish an online platform through which State Parties can announce their intentions to nominate elements and other State Parties may learn new opportunities for cooperation in establishing multinational nominations. Mongolia holds the multinational nomination with China on the ‘Urtiin duu, Mongolian traditional folk long song’ (2008) and with 18 States Parties on the ‘Falconry, a living human heritage’ which are inscribed on the Representative List of the ICH of Humanity

Cultural heritage, as defined by UNESCO, includes both diverse tangible and intan- gible cultural heritage (ICH).1 In the maritime realm—that is, connected to human activity at sea—tangible heritage includes physical material such as shipwrecks, artifacts, and submerged archaeological sites found under water and in the tidal zone. A term more commonly used is underwater cultural heritage (UCH), as defined in the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage. Intangible heritage encompasses five domains where heritage is expressed and maintained through contemporary practices (“living heritage”), as defined in the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Water, as we all know, makes life possible on Earth. Thus, the accessibility and availability of water sources have historically decided the rise and fall of civilizations around the world. \nScientific research has shown that the Kathmandu Valley once contained a great lake, and it only became habitable once the lake was drained. Buddhist narratives place the agency behind the draining with Manjushri, while later Hindu accounts place it with Krishna (Slusser, 1982). The fertile alluvial soil present in the valley adds to the argument of the valley once being a lake. In addition, there are many water sources in the valley, including rivers, small lakes, ponds, wetlands, wells, springs, and stone waterspouts.

Hoi An is a small city located in the central region of Viet Nam, covering an area of 60 km2. It has two World Heritage Sites recognized by UNESCO: Hoi An Ancient Town (“an exceptionally well-preserved example of a South-East Asian trading port dating from the 15th to the 19th century”; UNESCO, 2018) and Cham Islands Biosphere Reserve. \n\nIn its day, Hoi An was the most prosperous trading port in Dang Trong, southern Viet Nam, and famous throughout Southeast Asia. Not only traders from all over the country but also a large number of foreign merchants from China, Macao, Japan, Manila, Malacca, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, as well as Western countries such as France, Portugal, and Italy traveled across the sea to Hoi An to conduct business. Here, merchants could easily sell and purchase goods per their requirements, especially ceramic products.

As a good safeguarding practice, ‘Ponte… Nas Ondas! (abbreviated PNO)’ of Spain and Portugal was registered on the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage list in 2022. The PNO initiative is an institution that was developed to safeguard and spread intangible cultural heritage on the Portuguese-Galician border and It’s also an educational project for the transmission of common cultural heritage to the young generation.\n\nPonte nas Ondas originated from World Radio Day in 1995, which merged schools in both countries with the opening of the bridge for the river Miño between the region ‘Salvaterra de Miño’ in Spain and the region ‘Monção’ in Portugal. As 16 schools began communicating via radio waves, Radio broadcasting studios were created in each area. At the beginning of the program, It was broadcast only in Galician and Portuguese. But later, Spanish was also included with spreading to other educational institutions in Argentina, Cuba, Chile and Colombia.\n\nPNO initiative now does various projects like making lists of intangible cultural heritage in Galicia-Portugal, presenting the Galician-Portuguese oral tradition, and holding some traditional game meetings. And it also organizes some programs for young generations to induce active participation and offers classes at all levels from basic to higher education. Furthermore, through ‘Escolas nas Ondas’ which is a project for radio and video broadcasting, PNO teaches students at the schools in Galicia-Portugal to produce programs for radio broadcasting under the theme of oral tradition and broadcasts radio and video programs on their website. It has worth as a representative model for traditional culture transmission education.