During Dan-o, Daeboreum, and Chuseok, pre-modern Koreans used to hold celebrations composed of rituals to the communal deity, communal games, and various folk arts. Among the communal games, the tug-of-war was the most common. It was widely distributed around the central southern region of Korea and played simultaneously or in rotation with other communal games.

After the Angkor was inscribed on the World Cultural Heritage List, it was necessary to establish working mechanisms to promote national and international collaboration.

Based on a common geographical environment, the people of East Asia share a similar sense of the seasons and have been sharing the seasonal festival traditions for many years, which to a certain degree has brought commonality to their experience of heritage. The seasonal festival traditions in East Asia have a localized form of expression and common features.2) They all attach importance to seasonal nodes such as the Mid-Autumn Festival, Half of July, April Eight, and the Twenty-four Solar Terms. They value family ethics in the practice of festivals and share Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist cultural traditions, with emphasis on “red-hot sociality.” As they collectively enjoy seasonal festivities, they continue creating arts-related activities around these festivals and transmitting their heritage values to the younger generation. East Asia's practices of seasonal festival traditions are both a manifestation of cultural diversity and cultural sharing. This presentation will discuss the sharing, sustaining, and collaborative safeguarding f East Asian Seasonal Festivals as 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.

Telugu language is the mother tongue for carriers and transmitters in safeguarding the Intangible Heritage of the Telugu people. We have come up with an interdisciplinary and innovative educational programming that safeguards our intangible heritage of over 53.6 million people in Andhra Pradesh (AP). Our higher educational programming cuts across the five domains delineated in the 2003 ICH Convention of UNESCO. It is an integral part of a systematic safeguarding plan that is unique. I will introduce the framework that enables us to bring together the teaching of intangible heritage in a linguistic environment through six tertiary educational institutions for the Telugu speaking people. I am responsible for the curricula, pedagogy, employment of carriers and transmitters as teachers and performance education in all the six colleges. \n\nWe also address the interface between intangible heritage and language through higher education. Moreover, I will also reflect on my own engagement as a carrier and transmitter of theatre traditions of the Telugu people. My conclusion would advocate that we need to think in new and innovative ways for safeguarding the rich diversity of the intangible heritage of humanity. Our innovative tertiary education programming provides a feasible role model.

The title I was given in the first place was ‘Notion of Intangible Cultural Heritage Safeguarding from the Perspective of Sustainable Development’. But later, I found that the original idea of today’s conference was not simply sustainable development; it was sustainable human development. Adding ‘human’ between sustainable and development means that we have to be triply critical or critical in at least three stages or dimensions when we think about development.

The culture in the East Coast of Malay Peninsula are rich in visual and performing arts inherited over time immemorial. The art is also found to have similarities in three different states, despite their geographical gap. The similarities are shared in dialects, languages, presentations, builds, and past legacy artifacts. The Malay craftsmanship is also dominated by the Malay community in the East Coast and it is also produced in the form of art and fashion. Artifacts such as boats, houses, and furniture are still visible until now and they have high artistic value. This paper is aimed at displaying the various type of Malay traditional boats and symbols produced by the Malay community on the craft of the boat. There are several name of the boats produced by local craftsmen based on their function and usability. For example, a small line boat is used in river and coastal areas, the payang boat used by deep-sea fishermen, and the jokong boat is used to transport heavy goods. The art can be seen in the carvings and paintings produced on traditional Malay boats craftsmen in the East Coast. This art does not only serve as an ornament and for its aesthetics, but also has its own symbolism. The decorative art produced shows that the three main aspects necessary in Malay art are function, aesthetics, and ethics. The belief in the existence of supernatural powers – which preserve and safeguard their safety at sea and their ability to get income from marine products – underpins the craft of this decoration art.

Tug-of-war is a game that anyone can enjoy easily, in its simplest form requiring just a rope and some space to play, and it has been widely transmitted all over the world. In particular, in Asia, it has been widely practiced in combination with rituals for prosperity and peace within agricultural communities, and has played an important social role in fostering community cohesion and solidarity. Its significance was recognized by UNESCO in 2015, when ‘Tugging Rituals and Games’ was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity as a multinational heritage of Cambodia, the Philippines, the Republic of Korea and Vietnam.

India, one of the oldest civilizations in the world, is also one among the few countries named after a river system. The Indus River gave birth to the Indus Valley Civilization from where comes the word India. India is also the only country in the world with more than seven holy rivers, frequented by pilgrims even in the present day. Thus, water plays a central role in Indian society which is perhaps also because more than 60 percent of India’s geographical area is under agriculture. However, water availability in India has always been limited by the seasonal monsoon, and this has given rise to various traditional systems of water management in different parts of the country.

The term pastellessa represents an extraordinary combination of food, culture, music, and folklore, an expression of the people of Macerata Campania. It’s a term with a very rich history and tradition, relating to the celebration of a religious event: the Feast of Sant’Antuono (St. Anthony the Abbot).

I recall a documentary film entitled “Whose is this song” (by Adela Peeva, 2003) about a folk song sung by the local communities in the different countries of the Balkans that “has different faces and exists as a love song, a military march meant to scare the enemy off, a Muslim religious song, a revolutionary song, an anthem of the right nationalists, etc.”1) The impression after watching the film is unforgettable about the shared folk song as an ICH that has been claimed as an own original song in different countries in Europe and with not always the same meanings and functions for local communities. This reveals a good example of shared heritage across borders that can bring people together for mutual respect of international efforts on ICH safeguarding as stated in Article 19, “the States Parties recognize that the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage is of general interest to humanity, and to that end undertake to cooperate at the bilateral, sub-regional, regional and international levels.” The hundreds of such shared songs and other heritage domains such as the traditional festivals, folk rituals, music, craftsmanship, agricultural knowledge, forest protection, and so on have been common among peoples across borders and they shall be safeguarded internationally by the concerned communities. They are deserved of putting together in the multinational files by concerned States Parties for the UNESCO’s possible inscription in the sake of peace, dialogue and being together.\nThis presentation will overview the UNESCO’s multinational inscription of shared ICH and the challenge of the States Parties for building up these nominations.

There have been various cooperative activities for safe-guarding intangible cultural heritage (ICH) at the domestic, regional, and international level since the Convention for the Safeguarding of the ICH was adopted by UNESCO’s General Conference in 2003. ICHCAP, a UNESCO Category 2 Centre in the ICH field, has been working to share information, build networks, and raise visibility of ICH in the Asia-Pacific region, which shows the cultural iden-tities of relevant communities who can be a driving force of sustainable development of the societies. \nTug-of-war has also been an ICH theme ICHCAP has worked to safe-guard and raise awareness. Among a number of diverse ICH elements, tug-of-war is a cultural phenomenon found worldwide. In Asia, espe-cially, tug-of-war has been a custom deeply embedded in rice cultivation and is therefore found largely in agricultural societies. Tug-of-war was generally performed as a prayer for rain or to predict the bounty of the upcoming harvest. It has common features worldwide based on climate and environment. However, differences arise according to the distinct characteristic and the creativity of the region, which makes tug-of-war a worthwhile research subject as an Asian joint heritage.