The birth of a child is considered auspicious and sacred in every culture. India, being multicultural in its beliefs and customs, has diverse traditions of local cuisines at all occasions, be it childbirth, or even death. Although the recipes have grown in number as a result of shared practices in modern times, traditional food items and their variants are still popular and can be found in almost all mandatory rituals.

"BeezBistar Foundation (BBF), a community action-based non-governmental organization, was formed in 2009 by development workers and researchers. “BeezBistar” means prosperity in life and peaceful and joyful relations between human beings and all other life-forms. BBF works with local communities, especially farmers, weavers, fishers, adivashi, dalit, and other marginalized and socially vulnerable people for a prosperous and healthy life. Its guiding ethical principles are non-discrimination on the grounds of caste, race, class, and gender. BBF believes in people’s capacity to transform their existing situation of poverty and become pros- perous through a mediated process of interdependent, collective, and community support and actions. The notion of BEEZ is grounded in the local and indigenous culture of the peoples of Bangladesh, as well as advanced by science and life-affirming knowledge and technologies."

The rich folklore of the Kyrgyz people is an important historical and cultural phenomenon developing over many centuries and spiritually and artistically valuable. As an inexhaustible source of people’s wisdom, it reflects the history, life and social, political and spiritual ideals of the people. The oral folklore is the basis of our unique cultural heritage. Due to the harsh conditions of the nomadic life, endless clashes with enemies and invaders, and long distances of migration, the Kyrgyz people have not preserved their spiritual culture in the stone monuments of architecture, papyrus or clay writings but have preserved it in their memory for more than two thousand years of history. Memory proved to be good enough for keeping millions of lines of epic songs and works, which have been passed from generation to generation and reached the present day.

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.

Learning oral epic traditions means learning people’s lifestyle, traditions, customs and history, their present and future, their way of thinking and their spirit. Specifically, it means understanding the originality of a nation, its qualities, wishes, way of living and outlook or, in other words, learning the oral traditions of a nation means to study the nation itself. The process of modernising our present morals depends on how we have studied literary heritage, including the originality and degree of mythology in oral epic traditions. For this, initially we need to learn, investigate and research ancient mythological imaginations of our people and their oral narrative traditions, which are the base for art and literature. Oral epic works present the literary history of any nation.

During the first pilot project implementation on inventorying intangible cultural heritage in Uganda from 2014, Gulu Theatre Artists have been investigating a number of traditional foods within the Pageya Chiefdom to get an overview over the rich food tradition in this area.

Indonesia, made up of tens of thousands of island and several hundred distinct ethnic groups, is home to various forms of intangible cultural heritage (ICH). Nonetheless, in this age of rapid political, social, and economic change, cultural heritage is at risk of being lost forever. Considering this, there have been several projects geared toward safeguarding Indonesian ICH. In 1976, there was an ambitious project undertaken to compile a complete inventory of ICH throughout the many islands. However, this project and its many successors experienced several problems, making it impossible to conduct a comprehensive ICH inventory. The two main reasons for why these projects did not come to fruition were, firstly, the distinct lack of community and individual involvement and, secondly, the ambitious scope of the project exceeding the technological capacity of the times.

The art of tapa making is and has been practiced in a number of Pacific islands such as Hawaii, Samoa, and Niue to name a few. However, Fiji and Tonga are the main producers of this cloth to date. Tapa cloth or ngatu as it is called in Tonga, is made from the bark of the paper mulberry tree, hiapo. This article will examine the art of tapa making in Tonga, focusing on the stories behind some of the kupesi (stencils) embossed and then printed on the tapa cloth.

As of now, Bhutan is widely known in the world that stands out as a country in the world living traditions, rich traditions as well as daily unique practices by the people which evinces peculiarities of the Bhutanese culture. Thus, People of Bhutan not only take pride in its rich culture and traditional values which serves not only a national identity proving bondage within the people of the different communities in the country. Bhutanese culture gives identity that has protected and sustained independency between the two giant countries; Republic of China and India since time immemorial. Preservation of ICH has been one of the core objectives ever since the country had embraced the economic development plan in early 1960s.\n

Co-orgarnized by ICHCAP and Hue Monuments Conservation Centre (HMCC), this year’s Asia-Pacific ICH NGO Conference was held in Hue, Vietnam under the theme of ICH NGOs towards Sustainable Development of Communities.

I would like to thank Dr. Samuel Lee for inviting me to give this tour of the impacts of the 2003 Convention in the Asia-Pacific Region. I’d also like to thank Dr. Weiming for giving a talk that situated the work we do in a broader context and explained our work with intangible cultural heritage. I found it to be a very stimulating talk and a great way to start this day and a half. I am going to talk on a more basic level about what has been done as a result of countries coming together to ratify an international agreement that aims to safeguard intangible cultural heritage. It was a very ambitious program in the beginning. I was privileged to see a little bit of it working with Ms. Aikawa at the UNESCO headquarters during the time leading up to the Convention.

Since the organizers of this international academic conference sent the four essays to be featured in Session 1 in advance, I will present my opinions and questions regarding the said four essays and end by opening shared agendas for discussion based on the aim of this international academic conference, which was organized as a way to contribute to the transmission and growth of traditional maritime culture in the Asia-Pacific region.