The food we eat is an important part of culture. It is also an expression of community identity. As American folklorist Millie Rahn writes, The kitchen, historically, is the place where families gather and where the everyday and the ceremonial meet and overlap. Here families interact and share private traditions, expressing identity through their food to each other and to the world. Creativity is alive in this space, from daily mealtimes to more elaborate feasts that mark rites of passage, religious and secular holidays, and other special events. This is where knowledge is passed on, from traditional ways of preparing and using various ingredients, implements, tools, and techniques to legends, stories, anecdotes, and cultural exchanges that have become part of familial and regional folklife. We all eat, and associate different layers of cultural meaning to the food we consume. Explorations of food, then, can be an easy conduit into the complex world of intangible cultural heritage. This article gives several examples from the safeguarding initiatives of the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador that have used foodways as a means to get people thinking about, and engaged with, concepts of cultural transmission and heritage conservation.

Intangible cultural heritage presents an important form of living cultural heritage. It covers fundamental, yet extremely vulnerable aspects of living culture and tradition embodied in the spiritual life, traditional knowledge, skills, and practices of communities. It presents one of the most vivid and colourful forms in which the world’s cultural diversity is expressed and preserved.

The information society built on the development of information and communication technology (ICT) is bringing about revolutionary change to humanity, such as the smooth dissemination of knowledge and information, promotion of communication, and an enhanced quality of living even if accompanied by other negative effects. Growing access to the internet is completely revising the very meaning of information services, thus creating a new environment. The possibilities of networking, mutual cooperation, and digitization created in this environment is effecting fundamental change in the functions of information acquisition, storage, and dissemination.\nSuch development in ICT presents new approaches in the field of cultural heritage as well. The appropriate utilization of ICT in the safeguarding and promotion of ICH is inspiring hope for a whole new ICH safeguarding system, going beyond traditional methods. Making ICH-related knowledge and information more accessible and usable to a larger public through ICT will contribute to ICH safeguarding and cultural diversity.

UNESCO’s Intangible Heritage Convention, which was adopted in 2003 and entered into force in April 2006, highlighted “Recognizing that com-munities, in particular indigenous communities, groups and, in some case, individuals, play an important role in the production, safeguarding, mainte-nance and re-creation of the intangible cultural heritage, thus helping to enrich cultural diversity and human creativity.” Articles 1 and 15 on purposes of the Convention make further references to issues relating to the participation of communities, groups, and individuals. By respecting and empowering practicing communities to define, desig-nate their intangible heritage, and engage in protecting ICH, many states have come to acknowledge community as one of the central goals of the convention. In fact, the interrelationship between community and heritage seems to be inseparable. Valdirmar Tr. Hasfstein pointed out that “At closer inspection, intangible cultural heritage is practically synonymous with community” and therefore “the purpose of the conven-tion is not only to safeguard traditional practice and expressions, but also, and just as importantly, to safeguard communities” (Valdirmar Tr. Hasfstein 2004, p.212)

Bongsan Talchum, or the Bongsan mask-dance drama, was originally transmitted in Giryang-ri, Dongseon-myeon, Bongsan-gun, Hwanghae Province in the northern part of Korean Peninsula. However, with the relocation of administrative bodies, including the district office to Sariwon in 1915, the mask-dance drama and its transmission activities were also transferred to the area. In South Korea, Bongsan Talchum had been transmitted since its restoration by performers who originated from the North, including Jin-ok Kim and Cheon-sik Min, and was designated as Important Intangible Cultural Property No. 17 in 1967. The office of the Bongsan Mask Dance-Drama Preservation Society is currently housed within the Training Center for Important Intangible Cultural Properties in Seoul.

Mehrgan is an autumn harvest festival celebrated during or after gathering a harvest. In ancient times, Mehrgan marked the autumn equinox, and according to an old Iranian calendar, celebrated on the mehr day of the mehr month, equal to 8 October. In the Republic of Tajikistan 15 October is the official day of Mehrgan.

The shamanism heritage is not a tangible cultural asset preserved in the halls of a museumor a recording that can be viewed repeatedly as a still or moving image. It is true that tangible assets as subjects of observation are also part of the shamanism heritage, the essence of shamanism is a complex and real cultural asset experienced through rituals performed in the real world occupied by people living in a specific time and space. In fact, the tangible and intangible is impossible to differentiate when in comes to cultural assets of shamanism. They are treated as separate entities for realistic, methodological or technological limitations, but in fact all traditional culture, not just shamanism, is a composite of tangible and intangible elements.

The oral tradition of the Kyrgyz people is the basis of a unique intangible cultural heritage that reflects Kyrgyz cultural identity. Oral heritage, developed over centuries, depicts the history and culture of the Kyrgyz people. Their creativity has been proven to survive exclusively in an oral form for many generations. This oral tradition represents a unique layer of traditional knowledge, making it a valuable source of cultural and traditional values and evidence of the development of the sociopolitical history of the Kyrgyz people. Kyrgyz oral heritage takes a wide variety of forms, including songs, fairy tales, proverbs, and riddles. These can all be different in terms of content and structure. Depending on the genre, oral tradition can reflect history, legends, fairy tales, or lore, which can be important in educating younger generations about the value of peace, attitudes toward nature and people, and love for the motherland. Many traditional oral works portray the main characters as defenders of their native land, arousing a sense of pride, and also depict the rich nature of the Kyrgyz land, nourishing love for their home. Some elements of oral tradition such as songs and folktales tell the stories or the specificities and peculiarities of the everyday life of Kyrgyz people. Folktales also reflect the esthetic views of the Kyrgyz people and teach us to recognize beauty, rhythm, and skillful use of language.\n

Recalling the excerpt from the 2003 Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) Convention, "intangible cultural heritage ...is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history..." ICH is about people's values, particularly people's harmonious relations with nature. When our body is not in balance in the Philippines, healers or doctors take our pulse or pulso. \n

Key matters on modern significance of intangible heritage and its safeguarding Intangible heritage is living cultural heritage which can express human’s wisdom and sensibility intactly by this time. Even though some of them already disappeared, are about to disappear and would disappear not before long, there still remain many of them in our thoughts and experiences. Such heritage is the infinite future resources and traces of the past that human can enjoy in this digital era. The traditional cultures can play a more important role for us in feeling human’s emotions and humanity in the digital era because they contain old human’s memories, and can be an economic means as well. These intangible heritages, in essence, may have the same function even though their forms are different. In particular, we can see that certain cultures spread to neighboring regions, which led to the creation of a new form of culture in a community that accepted them. This process is important as an asset for sharing humanity and at the same time becomes a meaningful source for each community to have its cultural identity as an expression of diversity of human thought.\nTherefore, how to preserve the shared or coexisting intangible heritage among cultural communities is a key topic in the international society today. Meantime, there have been some cases in which even though they are the same kind of heritage, certain heritages in some areas were inscribed on the list of World Heritage but others were pushed aside, in spite of their equally excellent values. In today’s fast-changing society, if culture is neglected even a little bit, it will disappear. Then, if it disappears, total amount of culture in that society will eventually shrink, which means that the future values will be lost. What is called culture inevitably comes to vanish without those who use it, no matter how creative it is. In order to preserve traditional heritage that may disappear at any time, it is an essential process to persuade the society, develop modern utility and seek for strategic methods, deeply thinking of its future value of such heritage.

Intangible heritage is living cultural heritage which can express human’s wisdom and sensibility intactly by this time. Even though some of them already disappeared, are about to disappear and would disappear not before long, there still remain many of them in our thoughts and experiences. \n\nSuch heritage is the infinite future resources and traces of the past that human can enjoy in this digital era. The traditional cultures can play a more important role for us in feeling human’s emotions and humanity in the digital era because they contain old human’s memories, and can be an economic means as well. These intangible heritages, in essence, may have the same function even though their forms are different. In particular, we can see that certain cultures spread to neighboring regions, which led to the creation of a new form of culture in a community that accepted them. This process is important as an asset for sharing humanity and at the same time becomes a meaningful source for each community to have its cultural identity as an expression of diversity of human thought. \n\nTherefore, how to preserve the shared or coexisting intangible heritage among cultural communities is a key topic in the international society today. Meantime, there have been some cases in which even though they are the same kind of heritage, certain heritages in some areas were inscribed on the list of World Heritage but others were pushed aside, in spite of their equally excellent values. In today’s fast-changing society, if culture is neglected even a little bit, it will disappear. Then, if it disappears, total amount of culture in that society will eventually shrink, which means that the future values will be lost. What is called culture inevitably comes to vanish without those who use it, no matter how creative it is. In order to preserve traditional heritage that may disappear at any time, it is an essential process to persuade the society, develop modern utility and seek for strategic methods, deeply thinking of its future value of\nsuch heritage. To preserve the intangible heritage, it is necessary to build the favorable environment in which communities with such technological culture can keep working on new creative works. For this, each society has to make continuous efforts in cooperation with communities not to wither this\nheritage away. These efforts are important not only in terms of the transmission of tradition but also as cultural resource to form sustainability for a society in the digital era. Here, we should pay keen attentions to preventing such intangible heritage from being fossilized, remaining fixed cultural system and eventually being eliminated. Intangible heritage should exist as one culture, but its way of expression should adapt to the senses and demands of a new generation by constantly making creative transformation. By doing so, the original form can be also preserved as a part of diversity. In other words, the practical benefit based on tradition is a prerequisite for the transmission through generations.

The intangible cultural heritage of any nation and ethnic group depends upon a locality, environment, business way of life, language, and condition of cultural history that is very diverse and unique. Thus, the intangible cultural heritage of any nation symbolizes their identities and constitutes an integral part of the world culture. The Mongolian nation and its ethnic groups are an inseparable part of the global population. The Mongols and their ancestors have lived and moved from place to place on the vast territory from the Altai Mountain ranges to the Khyangan Mountains, from Lake Baikal to the Chinese Great Wall. This area is a part of the vast and grassy Eurasian plain that stretches for several thousand kilometers from the Danube River to the Korean peninsula, and on which animal husbandry–based nomadic cultures and agricultural farming–based sedentary civilizations long co-existed.