It had taken a few weeks for roads to be cleared of rockfalls and to be made safe enough for vehicles carrying essential goods and supplies in the wake of the June 2013 flash floods and landslides in the western Himalayan region, in particular the mountainous state of Uttarakhand. A small team from the specialist center that I was associated with, the Centre for Environment Education Himalaya, was traveling to a few of the villages that had been affected, which were also villages in which the center had been working for some years before the natural disaster. Those in the small group were anxious. There had been no way to contact people in the villages nor even local administrators in the sub-district offices. Phone lines had yet to be restored, and mobile phone towers were being slowly replaced. Had there been casualties amongst the groups the center had trained? Were homes and school buildings still standing? No-one would know until they reached.

Khamir was established on 2005 out of a joint initiative of Kutch Nav Nirmaan Abhiyan (KNNA) and Nehru Foundation for Development (NFD) to empower Kutch’s creative industry after a devastating earthquake in 2001. Khamir was originally developed to support craft industries where livelihoods were particularly affected. They also wanted to ensure the sustainability of the necessary resources for growth of handicraft industries. Today, it serves as a platform for promotion of traditional handicrafts and allied cultural practices, the processes involved in their creation, and preservation of culture, community and local environments.

Pakistani culture is a living tradition practiced by most of its people. It includes both tangible and intangible cultural heritage.

Cultural heritage is a synchronized relationship involving society (systems of interactions connecting people), norms, and values (ideas such as belief systems that attribute relative importance). Symbols, technologies, and objects are tangible evidence of underlying norms and values. Thus, they establish a symbiotic relationship between the tangible and intangible. Intangible heritage should be regarded as a larger framework in which tangible heritage takes on shape and significance within.

"As we all know, the importance of intangible cultural heritage has been greatly enhanced since the 2003 Convention though the forms we are talking about are old if not ancient in many cases, and the individuals who have worked in the arts with what was called ‘expressions of folklore’ were involved in efforts to preserve and transmit these traditions. However, the 2003 Convention, which has at its centre the aim of safeguarding, has helped bring these issues to the centre, resulting in debate and the need to define the ‘intangible’.\nI am discussing these issues not only as one who works in this area but as one providing perspective from India, from the standpoint of an archivist who is involved in the documentation, preservation, and dissemination of forms of intangible cultural heritage, including music, oral traditions, rituals, and other forms of performance.1 Though this is an attempt at providing an overview of the status of the Convention, my aim will be to deal with the spirit rather than the Though my experience is limited to India, this paper is based on input from Moe Chiba of the UNESCO New Delhi office for an overview of issues from Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, which fall under their aegis."

The Masters Degree Programme in Heritage Management at Ahmedabad University is open to students and practitioners from any discipline but with a demonstrated interest or experience, in any sector of heritage. Since its launch in 2015, the disciplinary backgrounds represented so far include arts, architecture, archaeology, commerce, conservation, engineering, geography, history, international relations, literature, museology, and planning. Such a diverse group of students spend two years in this journey together learning from peer group interaction and experiences, regular class room sessions, seminars, field visits, projects, immersion, practicum and research. The programme is designed to pursue heritage as an everyday concept, and heritage management as an opportunity of enhancing and enriching livelihood and ecosystem. This way, the canvas of heritage for us seems full of more intangibles than tangibles because heritage is essentially defined through values, knowledges and cultural practices. Hence, there are milestones in the programme that highlight these interconnections, and bring a holistic heritage idea to the forefront. It has to be noted that there is no explicit course for ICH convention but it does gets referred in multiple courses – sometimes explicitly and at length, sometimes as an integrated concept and a tool. \n\nIn fact, some of our discussions focus on critical reflections on the ICH convention too. This paper will discuss the concepts of the programme and how it integrates ICH across various aspects of heritage – not just the intangible and knowledges, but also tangibles and other standard fields of practices. Such an integrated approach is at the core of the programme, and the ICH discourse and various tools help us achieve our goals. In doing that, we believe the programme also contributes in safeguarding of ICH as demonstrated by various theses that has been done by the graduating students.

This paper provides an overview of the Intangible Cultural Heritage program developed by the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. It traces the early development of the program, and then provides an overview of two recent projects that explore, document, and encourage the continued safeguarding and sharing of ICH knowledge and skills: the Living Heritage Economy Case Study project, and the Oral History Roadshow. Background Newfoundland and Labrador is the easternmost province of Canada. Situated in the country's Atlantic region, it incorporates the island of Newfoundland and mainland Labrador to the northwest. It has a combined area of 405,212 square kilometres, with a population of just over 514,000. Most of the population is concentrated on the eastern portion of the island of Newfoundland.

The main contents of this publication are reports from thirty-two nations collected by ICHCAP from 2009 to 2015 as part of its annual projects to collect information on intangible cultural heritage safeguarding in the Asia-Pacific region. We have also compiled information from other reports and conference materials collected by ICHCAP to present key data, such as national inventories and information on related organizations, in an easily accessible format.

This Webinar Series begins with an assessment of the impacts of COVID-19 on intangible cultural heritage (ICH), considerably identifying the possible roles ICH might take in critical times. As the pandemic has been disrupting many forms of cultural practices, the effects of which worsen the vulnerability of the stewards of heritage, the first session intends to hold a discussion toward innovative solutions for ICH safeguarding and transmission during a time of global crisis and social unrest.

The location of Indonesia is at the junction of the Australian, Eurasian, and Pacific tectonic plates. and Positioned on the ‘ring of fire’ with many active volcanoes as well as its high annual rainfall, Indonesia susceptible to natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, flooding, landslides, and mudslides.

Countries in the Asia-Pacific region abound in a wealth of cultural expressions, but these expressions are not often recognized as skills that may be used to revitalize communities. ICH safeguarding needs to look beyond research and documentation, building databases on art forms, and creating awareness through one-off festivals or made-up landscapes where the artists and crafts persons are uprooted from their natural environment to engage in demonstration. The paper shares examples from an initiative in India that emphasizes the need for investing in communities to revitalize their traditional skills and promote community-based creative enterprises, including cultural tourism to safeguard ICH. The Art for Life (AFL) initiative of banglanatak dot com, a social enterprise headquartered at Kolkata, India, aims at fostering an alternative pathway for development using cultural heritage as concrete means for improving people’s livelihoods and empowering local communities. Around twelve languishing folk art forms have been revitalized. The initiative has led to improved income and quality of life for 5,000 traditional artists. Non-monetized outcomes include improved education of children, improved health, and better access to sanitation. Capacity\nbuilding of the ICH practitioners, documentation, and dissemination, heritage education and awareness building, and promotion of grassroots creative enterprise have been the critical components of the safeguarding process.

First, allow me to express my thanks and honour for being invited to make this keynote speech. This is the second time I have come to Korea at ICHCAP’s kind invitation. My contact with colleagues from this and other countries in the AsiaPacific Region has left me feeling more an ally than a mere sympathizer of their work. We live in an era of globalization, not only of the economy, information and communication, but also of solidarity towards building a better world for ourselves and for future generations. I hope this meeting will be a landmark in our joint efforts to make our contributions to the cultural communities with which we presently work and our role as advisors to the Intergovernmental Committee more effective, in terms of our joint mission of safeguarding intangible cultural heritage. Huge geographical distances and cultural differences separate our countries, a fact that is immediately evident in the linguistic diversity present in this room. Use of the English language facilitates our communication and, in addition, we can understand each other thanks to the efficient collaboration of the interpreters, even though we are so very much aware of how much subtlety is inevitably lost in translation. My thanks, therefore, to our backstage partners.