A wide range of festivals are held in Uzbekistan to generate public interest in intangible cultural heritage. This includes the recent International Bakhshi Art Festival, which was held for a week from 5 April in the ancient city of Termez. Bakhshi is a multi-genre art form that brings together singers, musicians, and performers of Doston, a Central Asian oral epic. Teams from seventy-five countries took part in this festival, which featured not only a wide range of performances but also an enlightening international conference.

Kyrgyzstan, a landlocked country the territory of which is more than 94 percent mountainous, is among the most attractive lands located at the heart of Asia on the ancient Silk Road trade routes. The cultural heritage of the Kyrgyz people has been greatly influenced by their nomadic history. Kyrgyz people occupy a unique cultural environment and have a rich ICH. The vitality of this cultural heritage is safeguarded and transmitted from generation to generation as collective memory, orally or through practice and expression.

Malaysia is a developing nation of Southeast Asia. A few of their famous slogans reflect the diversity of its present ethnic groups in terms of language, customs and traditions inherited from past generations, ‘One Malaysia‘ and ‘Malaysia Truly Asia‘. Malaysia’s cultural fusion is the result of immigration, trade and cultural exchanges over many centuries with Arab nations, China, and India, where the arrival of the first foreigners brought along with them their wealth as well as their cultural heritage and religion. Presently, these ethnic groups still maintain their cultural traditions, but managed to come together to develop Malaysia’s unique and contemporary diverse heritage.

While the circle is a quantifiable and concrete geometrical shape, the abstract idea of the circle has many different meanings, interpretations, and symbolic significance in Indian philosophical systems. These ideas have also culminated in varied manifestations of the concept into intangible cultural heritage. Garba is a ritual dance form where the knowledge and belief systems regarding the circle find choreographic expression. It is a social-community dance performed primarily by women in the Gujarat region in India. Performed during the nine-day Hindu festival of Navrātrī, the dance is primarily a celebration of feminine energy and an offering to the feminine divinity. It is also performed during the celebration of Sivaratri and weddings and in certain pregnancy rites.

If development is an aspiration, then culture is the historical sediment underlying this aspiration. Culture conveys humanity’s intersecting bonds and the kinds of rituals, practices, and representations that make up its ways of life. Development—conceived narrowly as income growth or broadly as ways in which people participate to achieve well-being—is heavily influenced by this sense of bonding and group-ness. Culture is literally the way humanity recognizes itself and reveals its aspirations.

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).

Tugging rituals and games survived in Ukraine from different epochs, keeping a deep ethnological sense and didactic use. Through decades and centuries, tugging traditions, which later formed the basis of different sport competitions and educational exercises related to tugging, have been modified, reflecting changed environments and social demands. As a rule, they constituted an important part of rural street (open-air) life and entertainment as well as public festivals associated with calendar or religious holidays, like Kolodiy, Masliana, and Stritennia (Pancake Week, Shrovetide, and Candlemas Day, respec-tively) and Midsummer Day, Christmas, Easter holidays. A lot of popular customs from pre-Christian (pagan) times passed to the Christian holidays and have continued until now. Obviously, as a recognized researcher of folk life, V. Skurativsky, wrote, the ethnographic term “street” to mean the ancient traditional form of youth entertain-ment that originated from the places of young people’s meetings.

According to newa, a Buddhist belief system, death is one of the ten major events in one’s lifetime. While death is the end of a life, it is also taken as a beginning of another life, a cycle that continues until the state of Nirvana is achieved. Hence, death rituals, apart from funerals and lamentations, include rituals carried out to prepare the deceased for the journey after death.

In many cultures, there is a concept of expected gendered roles where people perform certain functions, parts, or kinds of a cultural or social activity according to their gender. Men are expected to be strong and masculine, and employ the roles which are more related to hard labor, leadership, and literacy. Women, traditionally, assume feminine and maternal characteristics and roles in supporting men in their social events. Although these notions of gender qualities and roles differ from culture to culture, it is often found that the traditional customs which dictate who can and cannot participate in specific parts of the culture are often bounded by gender stereotypes and taboos.

The lion dance is a performance art known throughout East Asia, in which practitioners wear lion masks. It is thought that the lion dance was introduced in Japan as a religious play together with Buddhism in the seventh century. The dance tells the story of a lion with magical powers that played a role in expelling evil from the path on which the spirits travel. Today, it is a much-loved performance used to celebrate auspicious occasions, to bring peace, happiness, health, and long life. It is also commonly performed in New Year celebra\u0002tions and festivals. Several entertaining performance groups traveled around performing the lion dance during the Edo period, which gave momentum to the spread of the dance all over the country. The dance is light and has strong recre\u0002ational characteristics including acrobatic elements.

Masks and mask dance exist through which they try to realize equality and be free from judgement, allowing you to express yourself as an equal in society regardless of class. The mask dance festival starts on the last Friday of September and lasts for ten days, and over a million people visit domestically and internationally. It has garnered attention from world leaders. Queen Elizabeth II of the UK, George H. Bush and George W. Bush of the USA, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, and other influential leaders have attended. The festival is about mixing modernity with tradition coming together, creating a mosaic of different colors and cultural significance. They use the mask dance festival as a collaborative tool that can bring various cultures together. The mask dance festival also plays a large role in transmitting the heritage to younger generations through various associations that function as a network.

Bangladesh is a repository of hundreds of intangible cultural heritage elements that have been developed through various historical waves of different political and religious regimes over the last 5000 years.ICH education at the tertiary level has an important role to play in creating a pool of human resources for sustaining the value, meaning, and significance of these ICH elements. Until recent past, the importance of protection, promotion and safeguarding of various cultural heritage resources in Bangladesh has not received necessary attention from administration, academicians and researchers. Lack of policies and resources, and shortage of trained teaching staffs were the main reasons for not being able to introduce required courses at the tertiary level of education. Assessing the present status of heritage education at various tertiary institutions, this paper calls for immediate policy responses to strengthen the ICH education for developing a Sustainable Cultural Heritage Management Plan (SCHMP) through building capacities by mobilizing local resources in collaboration with various national and international organizations. Immediate and long-term heritage education policy-planning and interventions can encounter the challenges of protecting, promoting and safeguarding various ICH elements of the country. \n\nThus, the main objective of this paper is to examine the actual status of heritage studies at the tertiary level of education in Bangladesh through analyzing the contents of curriculums of some selected departments which are closely related to cultural heritage studies. As a supplement to this content analysis, a small number of randomly selected students and teachers have been interviewed to know their general understanding about the importance of ICH education in Bangladesh. \n