The biggest North Korean migrant community outside East Asia is located in a somewhat unlikely place, New Malden, UK, a suburb in southwest London (see Figure 1). Approximately 1,000 North Koreans live alongside the established community of over 12,000 South Koreans. In the foreign kitchen, what North Korean migrants do is recreate authentic traditional North Korean food that they have not had for such a long time. Decades of famine and national isolation have alienated people from basic meals and dishes that are part of the history and traditions of their country.

The chapter is part of a UNESCO book about intangi- ble cultural heritage (ICH) in relation to the Sustain- able Development Goal 2 (SDG2): Zero Hunger. This chapter starts with an introduction to the Centre for Sustainable Rural Development (SRD), a Vietnamese organization that ran a project related to ICH and SDG2. The chapter continues with an introduction to the geographical and social context of the project, as well as three case studies describing the effect of the project activities on farmers’ lives. The chapter ends with two essays contextualizing the project in the larger issue of community resilience for climate change, and agrobiodiversity for food security.

The island of Madagascar is among the last, if not the last, large coastal region where openocean, sailing vessels remain the predominant crafts being used for both fishing and transport of goods and people. A rich diversity of sailing vessels and associated cultural heritage exists that are fundamental to the daily life of coastal communities. Awareness and knowledge of this heritage is largely unknown outside of the local communities and even here, it is not clear that it is highly appreciated. Development pressure to adopt “modern” boats and methods of propulsion are intense, but this would result in large dependencies and negative consequence for the sustainability and wellbeing of these communities. There is an urgent need for concerted efforts and programs to foster and safeguard this sailing heritage that will motivate preference for its continued utilization. This work needs to include a large element of local participation and involvement. Its focus needs to be on documenting the role and value of these vessels in terms of their economic and social importance as well as recording the skills involved in building, sailing, navigating and maintaining them. Such documentation should aim to foster a pride and appreciation in their vessels, skills and knowledge. This information needs to be distributed and presented widely within the coastal communities as well as those involved with management and development in Madagascar and beyond. Without such efforts, this highly valuable cultural heritage will likely be lost with devastating local consequences.

Johan Huizinga coined the term homo ludens to define humans as animals that play. The playful nature of Koreans as homo ludens is represented most definitively by the game, yutnori. It has been well loved by young and old and men and women alike throughout history. The game is especially important as a children’s game that helps develop strategic thinking skills while still being simple to learn.

Two frequently used proverbs in Korea are “like a rat caught in a jar” and “the sauce rather than the pot.” The first is used to describe someone caught in a difficult situation, like a rat that has fallen into a large onggi jar while the second means that the taste of the sauce contained within the pot is more important than what the pot looks like and is used to emphasize that content is more important than form.

Based on the accumulated experience over the course of fifteen years since the adoption of the 2003 Convention, Southeast Asia is well known for its diverse and abundant intangible heritage. Many states in this region have already initiated ICH safeguarding plans with active participation of communities.\nHowever, a number of Member States are still having difficulties employing community‐based safeguarding plan and programs. In implementing the 2003 Convention, much attention should be paid to build capacity to support and safeguard a wider range of ICH Stakeholders, including communities, group, and individuals.\nTherefore, this session will provide an opportunity to share experiences and discuss on the roles the community should exercise in safeguarding ICH. In this session, we will discuss the following questions: (1) Do ICH communities, groups, individuals, and practitioners fully recognise the spirit and significance of the 2003 Convention? (2) Are they subsequently assigned to embody appropriate roles?

"In this region of many “lands” surrounded by water, knowledge of the land and its harvests is tied closely to identity and heritage. This section’s themes thus offer a closer look at how the knowledge of caring for the land and harvests is a way of feeling for the Pacific islanders. This ICH, in addition to coloring people’s interactions on the land and carrying expressions of respect, is a means of ensuring sustainability and prosperity.\nPacific islanders depend largely on the land and their harvests from it for their survival, but these also hold deeper meaning for life. To the people of Vanuatu, for instance, laplap soso'ur is more than an edible delicacy: it is a feature of their cultural identity and a means to bring people together across societal levels. Similarly, in Palau, the mesei taro fields are valuable property, but they are also much more in that these pieces of land are deeply connected to the identity of the people, particularly women, and figure prominently in the colorful oral histories of the Palauans. Both of these cases, along with the other themes in this section, reflect the profound value of ICH related to the Pacific islands and their harvests."

Singapore launched its Street Corner Heritage Galleries scheme for traditional trades on 7 March 2020. The new scheme will involve the National Heritage Board of Singapore (NHB) collaborating with qualifying local traditional trades and businesses with significant history in selected precincts to co-curate “street corner heritage galleries” that will showcase the history of their respective shops, trades, and products as well as other intangible cultural heritage (ICH) elements through displays of historical documents, photographs, and artefacts.\n\nUnder the scheme, NHB will also provide training to owners of these traditional trades and businesses in the areas such as the development and delivery of heritage programs. NHB will also provide funding support to these street corner heritage galleries to encourage them to develop heritage programs and to participate in NHB’s signature events such as Singapore Heritage Festival, CultureFests, etc. as showcases of Singapore’s living heritage.\n\nAccording to Mr. Alvin Tan, Deputy Chief Executive (Policy & Community) of NHB: “Through the scheme, we hope to identify existing heritage resources and perform ‘urban acupuncture’ by introducing small-scale interventions to showcase these resources and in the process, revitalize the precinct through street-level heritage.”\n\nThe scheme is aligned with NHB’s five-year masterplan, Our SG Heritage Plan, which seeks to showcase heritage in everyday places to encourage greater public awareness and appreciation of heritage in our midst. NHB will be piloting the scheme with the traditional trades and businesses within the Balestier precinct, and they include a traditional pastry shop, a traditional bakery, a traditional coffee powder shop and more.\n\nFollowing its launch, NHB will be identifying other traditional trades and businesses and partnering with the relevant community stakeholders to roll out the scheme on a precinct-by-precinct basis starting with Balestier and Kampong Gelam in 2020 followed by Little India and Chinatown in 2021, and finally Geylang Serai in 2022. Overall, NHB hopes to co-create a total of twenty-five street corner heritage galleries with traditional trades and businesses across the different precincts.\n\nThrough the Street Corner Heritage Galleries scheme, NHB hopes to facilitate stronger stakeholder participation and ownership of different aspects of Singapore’s heritage; equip traditional trades and businesses with the necessary basic competencies in the areas of heritage documentation, promotion, and conservation; activate public spaces through a stakeholder-centric and participatory approach; and create a network of community-championed “mini heritage galleries” in different parts of Singapore.\n\nPhoto 1 : The owners and staff of Loong Fatt, the oldest surviving traditional coffee shop in Balestier known for its signature traditional flaky pastry filled with green bean paste, standing around the shop’s street corner heritage gallery © National Heritage Board, Singapore\nPhoto 2 : The owners of Loy Kee, a shop selling traditional Hainanese chicken rice in the Balestier area since 1953, standing next to their street corner heritage gallery © National Heritage Board, Singapore

In the traditional society, on New Year’s Eve, the day before January 1st of the lunar calendar, the civilians and the royal court held a Narye ceremony to welcome the new year. Narye is an event to drive out the evil spirits of last year and pray for peace. In the private sector, green bamboos with nodes were burnt to make explosive sounds in order to frighten the evil spirits way from the house. Even in the royal court of the Joseon Dynasty, they wore a naryero mask and walked around the palace playing jegeum(Korean cymbals) and drums. This ceremony is the Cheoyongmu (meaning Dance of Cheoyong), a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.\n\nCheoyongmu is based on the Cheoyong tale. Records related to Cheoyong can be found in Samguk Yusa, the historical book. According to records, Cheoyong was a person during the reign of King Heongang of Unified Silla. Cheoyong discovers that while he was away from home, the spirit of plague comes and secretly slept with his wife. However, Cheoyong sang and danced and withdrew, and the spirit who repented of his mistake by Cheoyong’s attitude vowed not to appear before him again. Afterwards, in private houses, the image of Cheoyong was attached to the gate to ward off the bad spirits, and Cheoyong took on the meaning of driving out evil spirits and welcoming auspicious events.\n\nBecause of this story, Cheoyongmu was an indispensable dance in the royal court narye. The current Cheoyongmu was prepared during the Joseon Dynasty and is performed by five male dancers. The dancers wear blue, white, red, black, and yellow robes and a Cheoyong mask decorated with tin earrings, peonies, and peach fruits on red skin. All of these decorative elements of the masks symbolize as the amulets of warding off the bad spirit and welcoming the auspicious events. Cheoyongmu has its origins in the aforementioned period of King Heongang of Unified Silla, and has been transmitted to this day. As the historical origin is long, it has rich artistry and value, and in recognition of this, it was registered as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009.\n\nCheoyongmu has freely crossed between the civilian and the royal courts, spreading through in various forms such as dance, writing, and oral tradition, resulting in many changes and developments. Today, Cheoyong is recreated and enjoyed as a “living heritage” with various popular cultural contents such as creative dance, animation, and drama, and Cheoyong’s long vitality and symbolism are noteworthy. The reason is that court dance which had strict content and form and was an art for the few, is passively reproduced and slowly approaching the public as opposed to folk dances combined with various media and styles in modern society.\n\nIn the past, before the development of science and medicine, in traditional societies that were vulnerable to natural disasters and diseases, amuletic events such as Cheoyongmu were held to prevent diseases and bad luck in the New Year. In modern society, amuletic rites are no longer held at the national and private level, but people today are living with the rites of passage for the new year, such as eating red bean porridge or ringing of the Bosingak bell. The new year is a time when hope and anxiety for the future intersect. Even if the way of living in the past and the present changes and the form and method of spending the old year and welcoming the new year are different, wishing for good luck will be the wind that runs through the century. I conclude this article with a speculation that these winds may be bringing life to the 21st century Cheoyong.\n\nphoto : Cheoyongmu © Taewook Kim

In my earliest, groggiest memories, I can recall waking up to the ticking burner of a gas stove, the gurgle of a Bialetti cafetière beginning to boil, the grinding gears of a coffee machine crushing each bean to a fine powder, magic dust that became the first sip of the morning. To those who grew up in Italian households, rackety espresso mornings (and afternoons and evenings) echo memories of childhood, grandparents’ houses, or the kitchens of countless cousins. As a result of memories like this of an upbringing deeply infused with Italian culture, I feel Italian right down to my bones. I have Calabrian blood, brown eyes, Sicilian skin, an Italian passport; but I was born and raised far from the Mediterranean.\n\nMy grandparents moved to Canada in a wave of immigration of young people from all over post-war Italy to North America. In the decades that followed, European and Asian immigrants blew like dandelion fluffs across the vast Canadian landscape, rooting themselves into the fabric of a now very multicultural nation. Those seeds planted so many communities like my own, homegrown by expatriates in the image of the cultures and lifestyles they carried with them across the sea. There are so many people like me, the sons and daughters and grandchildren of that first generation, who still speak and act and cook and live under their influence.\n\nMy associations with morning coffee are a simple example of a wider tendency within us all: each person senses and conceptualizes the world according to their unique cocktail of intimate personal experiences. Comfortingly, our senses are pre-programed, predisposed towards the semblance of where we come from, what we grew up doing. But our origins stretch far beyond the place in which we grew up and the family that reared us, especially when many of our generation, born during waves of migration and globalization, grew up between countries and continents, or at least with distant homelands close at heart. We became who we are in a multitude of places.\n\nThese are the circumstances under which the process of self-identification becomes even more difficult than it already is. For those with scorched origins, those who understand dialects spoken but never written, those christened with names that the next-door neighbors of displaced homes couldn’t pronounce, unpacking one’s cultural identity is no easy feat. We are left to grapple with the conflicting inferences of how we look, what passports we hold, what language it feels most natural to curse in.\n\nHow can we possibly know who we are when there’s no singular trace of where exactly we come from? What is it that makes a person associate with a culture and consider their own? What permits them to wear that badge of identity rightfully? Is it a matter of language or lifestyle or geography or genealogy or gastronomy? Need it be justified and by whom?\n\nI would argue that following a distinct checklist of prerequisites in the interest of culturally profiling ourselves and others is surely one of the reasons so many of us feel so mixed up about who we are. Humans are messy beings and we live messy, sprawling lives. And the ongoing identity crisis within us all, especially those who can’t exactly pinpoint where we come from, simply won’t be solved by the validation by any number of other people.\n\nThe only broad response I can put forward is something like the cliché usually used in reference to relationships: when you know, you know. Each of us just knows what makes us feel at home, connected to who we are. We can feel, sense, hear, see and smell it all around us. We sweep our eyes across a room and a slideshow of recollected images play behind our eyes. Certain words bowl off of our tongues more easily than others in second and third languages because they are quotations of a linguistic background unique to each of us, selected from the dialogues of our entire lives. We might find ourselves at home with the landscapes and humidity levels and smells that resemble the setting of our grandparents’ stories rather than our own memories. Wherever we end up, wherever they might be, we are all painfully, inevitably connected to our origins. Our tie to them is a cord that can’t be cut, one that stretches with our efforts to pull away and always offers enough give to coax us back to the source.\n\nRead more from Issabella on cultural heritage and thoughtful travel at www.museandwander.co.uk.\n\nPhoto : Word cloud © Shutterstock / Tupungato