Whang-od Oggay, a 102-year-old woman from a mountain tribe in the Philippines, is a living instrument in the continuity of pambabatok, an endangered ancient tattooing technique that chiefly constitutes hand-tapping to create figures on the skin. Believed to be the oldest tattoo artist and the last linkage of her tribe to pambabatok, Whang-od became famous in the internationally when she was featured by Dr. Lars Krutak, an American anthropologist who was the host of Discovery Channel’s Tattoo Hunter in 2009. Pambabatok is argued to be at least a thousand year old intangible cultural heritage (ICH) element.\n\nWhang-od is called a mambabatok, derived from the root word batok that means “to hit”. For her hand-tapping tools, she uses a lemon thorn needle or siit that is attached to the end of a small bamboo stick and another shorter stick for tapping the thorn into the skin. The ink she uses is a mixture of water and soot. Pambabatok, compared to other conventional tattooing techniques, is relatively painful. It is done by applying rhythmic and repetitive pricks on the skin using her traditional hand tools. During my personal visit in Buscalan in 2015 to see Whang-od, I noticed that she will begin tattooing the tourists in the first light of dawn and she will only finish at dusk. There would be days when almost fifty people lined up to get tattooed by her. Sometimes she could not eat because of the blood and flesh that she had been tapping all day.\n\nThe traditional designs of her tattoos come from the symbols of nature and geometric figures significant to the Butbut tribe, an indigenous community living in the village of Buscalan, nestled in the lush terraces of the Cordillera Mountains of Kalinga, a province in the northern part of the Philippines. In the olden days, the tribe was known for their headhunting culture. Warriors battled for land and honor to protect their tribe and village. They would cut off their enemies’ heads and as a reward they would be inked with magnificent tattoos that exude valiance when they return triumphantly to their village. The females also received tattoos as a rite of passage and symbol of beauty. Their tattoos transform girls into women; the women thereafter become eligible for marriage and bearing children. The more tattoos women had, the more attractive they were to the men in the village. Some elders believed that the tattoos could also cure infertility and various illnesses. The culture of headhunting and combat slowly disappeared due to modernization and religious influences. Consequently, protecting the vitality of their ritualistic and performance-based practices never occurred to be a social agenda.\n\nWhen a journalist named Grace, niece of Whang-od, realized that the tattooing heritage will be completely lost when her aunt dies, the transmission of pambabatok. Recently, the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) awarder her with the 2018 Dangal ng Haraya Award for Intangible Cultural Heritage to honor her contribution in raising awareness about the Butbut tribe and safeguarding an ICH element of the Philippines.\n\nPhoto : Whang-od Oggay © Royce Lyssah Malabonga

The Turkmenistan intangible cultural property comprises five domains that are summarised below:\n\n1. Oral expressions - oral folklore\n2. Traditions, customs and people’s beliefs\n3. Traditional performing arts\n4. Traditional craftsmanship\n5. Traditional knowledge\n\nEpics are included in the ‘oral traditions’ section. By now more than 10 elements have been identified in this field, including such epics as Gorogly, Shasenem and Garip, Zokhre and Takhir, Khuyrlukga and Khemra, Sayatly Khemra, Asly Kerem, Arzy-Gambar, hatamnama, Warka-Gulsha, Kasym oglan, Melike-Dilaram, Nejep oglan and Tulum Hoja. Gorogly occupies a special position among the abovementioned range of epics.

The Cultural Research Foundation (CRF) was founded in 2002. Led by folklorists and anthropologists, the work of CRF regarding intangible cultural heritage can be categorized as\n\n- Researching and documenting ICH,\n- Sharing and promoting ICH through publications and events, and\n- Creating cultural heritage awareness, especially for pre-school and youth.\n\nCRF, accredited under the UNESCO ICH Convention in 2012, carries out this work under the sections of Culinary Culture, Toy, Crafts and Rituals Research Programs. CRF is also a member of the Izmir ICH Commission.

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.

Kazakhstan is characterized by ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity. However, the nation has not always had such a multiethnic composition. In the 1920s, Kazakhstan was a republic of the USSR and was mainly monoethnic. The Stalinist leadership aimed at eradicating social classes. To reach this goal, terror and intimidation were employed, targeting mostly members of the clergy, opposition leaders, intellectuals, artists, and former tsarist-government officials. Starting in 1934, political repression was particularly strong. Millions of Soviet citizens were exiled to the Urals, Siberia, and Kazakhstan. Opponents to the Bolsheviks from all over the USSR were held prisoner in concentration camps located in Kazakhstan.

Patachitra is a story telling tradition of the Medinipore region of West Bengal in Eastern India. In this unique art form, oral tradition meets the visual structures of a narrative. The bard presents the story with pictures and simultaneously narrates a song called “Pater Gaan”. The word pata is derived from the Sanskrit and Pali word patta, which means “cloth.” Chitra means “picture.” Patachitra means “picture painted on cloth.” The painter community is called Patua. All of them bear the last name Chitrakar, meaning painter.

Mataginifale Women’s Group (MWG) was established in Avatele in the 1980s. Originally named Avatele Women’s Group, its members decided to change its name in the 1990s to better reflect the unique status of women. Mataginifale was a female warrior from Avatele born around 700 CE and was a great weaver that created local tapa cloth called hiapo.

Language is a powerful aspect of intangible cultural heritage (ICH). Along with oral traditions and expressions, language is recognized as crucial vehicle for manifestation of ICH.1 It is the gateway to a people’s culture, value systems, and worldviews. Linguistic diversity is correlated with multifarious and unexhaustive dimensions of diversity, including biological, species and ecological diversity. Despite unrelenting colonial attempts at their annihilation, Indigenous Peoples occupy about 22 per cent of global land mass where they continue to exercise their rich traditions and stewardship of nature. With their global population of about 500 million, Indigenous Peoples constitute perhaps the greatest human demographic showcase of the world’s cultural diversity, unlike any other civilization. Indigenous Peoples have retained an untapped capacity to continue to contribute as inventors, re-inventors, speakers, and custodians of a significant portion of the world’s estimated 7000 languages. Revival of Indigenous languages is an acknowledged aspect of Indigenous resurgence.2 This contribution calls attention to the untapped potential of Indigenous languages and oral traditions as vital tools for mitigating current ecological crisis.

Traditional coastal communities possess marine knowledge that enable them to live with and live on resources in different eco-niches like intertidal strands, mangroves, mudflats, beach forest, and coral reefs. Chao Lay (which means Sea People in Thai language) or former sea nomads of Thailand are indigenous groups who used to make temporary settlement on islands and along the coastal areas. The sub-groups of Moken, Moklen and Urak Lawoi, total of 43 villages in southern Thailand, have intangible marine heritage that facilitate their wise uses of marine and forest areas for centuries. The Chao Lay are said to have the great ability in, “reading the water to remember the wind, and reading the sky to remember the star” (Kuain 2008). At present, marine knowledge and skills remain significant in some communities. The case in point is Rawai beach community in Phuket Province in southern Thailand, where two sub-groups of Chao Lay, the Urak Lawoi and the Moken have chosen this area as a settlement hundreds of years ago; not only because of the shallow water near the beach and the nearby coral reefs, but also because it is a bay that is sheltered from the winds from two directions. So the place is very suitable for both living and for foraging and fishing with abundant land and marine resources. The knowledge of settlement site selection is very crucial, and most of the Chao Lay villages on the islands and shore are located in the bay or beach protected from the wind and storm. Fresh water can be easily found nearby in the form of spring, stream, or pond.

A growing interest in cultural heritage by the corporate sector has offered new opportunities to safeguard, protect, and present both tangible and intangible heritage. Through strategic investments of capital, expertise, and technology into the cultural sector, corporations offer an opportunity to revitalize a sector beleaguered with precarious government funding and unpredictable public support. Nicholas Pozek stressed that the cultural sector must continue to approach the commoditization and commodification of cultural goods with skepticism.

Central Asia is a region that has served as the centre of social and economic, in particular cultural interrelations of East and West. The nations of this region have a rich cultural heritage and ancient traditions like any nation in the world. The nations of Central Asia - Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan – make up a unified cultural space, defined by great grassland steppes and famous mountains, nomadic culture and common history, relics and traditions. Throughout this region we find petroglyphs, keregsur, steles, ruins and other monuments attesting to the mingling of peoples in the Central Asian steppe since prehistory. The territory of our own nation, Mongolia, has indeed been the centre several nomadic empires at various stages in history, established by different peoples of Central Asia sharing a similar cultural origin – Hunnu, Khitan, Turks, Uighurs, Kyrgyz and Mongols.

From 1990 to 2010, as an ethnologist devoted to the process of heritagemaking, I investigated Alpine communities and their strategies in facing a changing world. In an historical perspective, my eldwork has been oriented to making memories and the ways they worked as strategies of resistance in facing the many uncertainties of the future (Certeau 1990).