The Azerbaijani Carpet Makers Union (ACMU), founded in January 2010, is a voluntary self-governmental public association of citizens rallied to support Azerbaijani carpet weaving.The ACMU seeks to promote a revival of the powerful spiritual heritage of carpets, the national traditions of the Azerbaijani people, a consolidation of the creative potential of seen figures of society and culture, support for talented children and youth, and creative carpet dynasties. The purpose of the ACMU is also to convey objective information about the unique national culture, rich historical heritage, and diversity of the carpet art of Azerbaijan to the international community.

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.

Based on a common geographical environment, the people of East Asia share a similar sense of the seasons and have been sharing the seasonal festival traditions for many years, which to a certain degree has brought commonality to their experience of heritage. The seasonal festival traditions in East Asia have a localized form of expression and common features.2) They all attach importance to seasonal nodes such as the Mid-Autumn Festival, Half of July, April Eight, and the Twenty-four Solar Terms. They value family ethics in the practice of festivals and share Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist cultural traditions, with emphasis on “red-hot sociality.” As they collectively enjoy seasonal festivities, they continue creating arts-related activities around these festivals and transmitting their heritage values to the younger generation. East Asia's practices of seasonal festival traditions are both a manifestation of cultural diversity and cultural sharing. This presentation will discuss the sharing, sustaining, and collaborative safeguarding f East Asian Seasonal Festivals as ICH.

Efforts for the sustainable development of human cultures, which is defined by UNESCO as its most important goal, have already affected our lives in many ways. Among others, the inheritance and development of ICH are considered unique to humanity and the quintessence of human life. Education plays a vital role in the process of cultural inheritance and development. In particular, the experiences and education we receive during elementary school as young members of a future generation have a critical and meaningful influence on our lives. The significance of ICH education for the sustainable development of humanity is evidently underlined in UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and its Operational Directives.

With recent recognition of the value of intangible cultural heritage (‘ICH’ hereafter) elements of a specific society, movements have emerged to signify them as common cultural heritage of humanity. These movements are related with UNESCO's activities, and they are spreading across the world as cultural movements to newly evaluate disappearing traditional culture and safeguard them. As part of these movements, UNESCO stresses that, by announcing the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2003, protection and management of ICH are the way of preserving traditional culture of each country as well as that of safeguarding cultural resources of humanity. \n

Discourse about intangible cultural heritage is anchored on the question of memory, which has become a topic of great interest today not only within academia but also in popular culture. America’s newfound taste for cupcakes and macaroni and cheese, for instance, is not so much about society’s gastronomic craving for these foods, as it is about society’s craving for history and the comfort of things past. In essence, it is about restorative nostalgia and the memories that these foods evoke and make possible through the imaginary. Our preoccupation with memory and remembering, in large part, is driven by our recognition of the fragility of memory, a fragility that is underscored by this age of mass displacement in which we live. As the Iranian American writer Roya Hakakian notes in her recent memoir, “When you have been a refugee, abandoned all your loves and belongings, your memories become your belongings.” In a world where over 80 million people are currently forcibly displaced, amounting to one person being forcibly dislodged from his or her home and lifeways approximately every two seconds, dislocation, uprooting, and rupture are as much a facet of our lived experience as are connectivity and interdependence. Exilic condition is an unfortunate but undeniable feature of modernity.\nEven within living memory, Asia has had her share of tumultuous histories. Colonization, conflict, war, and other calamities have engendered mass dispersal. Over 2 million Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians fled their homelands in the aftermath of war, revolution and genocide, and many more Southeast Asians continue to be displaced in varied contexts and conditions as we speak. The genocide in Cambodia left deep wounds and ravaging effects on the cultural memories of the nation that is now bifurcated between Asia and the diaspora. Even without the trauma of war and mass atrocities, globalization, modernization, and urbanization have progressively divested traditional knowledge of its merits, and peripheralized certain memories into oblivion.

The Azerbaijani Carpet Makers Union (ACMU), founded in January 2010, is a voluntary self-governmental public association of citizens rallied to support Azerbaijani carpet weaving. The ACMU seeks to promote a revival of the powerful spiritual heritage of carpets, the national traditions of the Azerbaijani people, a consolidation of the creative potential of seen figures of society and culture, support for talented children and youth, and creative carpet dynasties. The purpose of the ACMU is also to convey objective information about the unique national culture, rich historical heritage, and diversity of the carpet art of Azerbaijan to the international community.

UNESCO has ten subcategories of human communities and networks, but there are two patterns of human civilizations—sedentary and nomadic communities. Difficulty with archaeologists and historians to explore and discover civilizational heritage information. Nomadic communities served as an ancient networking system, bridging sedentary communities with cultural and technological information. There is a necessity of a network approach on the discovery, excavation, preservation, and public opening of Silk Roads intangible cultural heritages through a singular project hub—namely through ICHCAP. Examples of existing projects include the Caravanserai projects by UNESCO and National Geographic, which focus on tangible heritage along the Silk Roads without considering cultural interconnections and influences. A Korean case is the KBS six-episode documentary series on the origin, spreading and localization of noodle cuisine in Eurasian communities. Another networking case currently under way is the development of series on Silk Roads martial arts, dance, and play through Korea, Japan, China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Iran.

Bread making is more than a culinary tradition: it is an integral part of the Austrian Lesach Valley’s cultural heritage, which carries aesthetic, symbolic, and religious value for the community of the valley. Rituals, customs, and personal stories constitute the nature of the element and illustrate the high significance of the practice for the region.

The Central Asian region is a unique area where centuries-old civilisations, religions, and cultures have intersected. The region’s ICH provides the basis for historical self-identification of the people that inhabit the region, and this ICH has influence on their future spiritual development. The ancestral heritage is intertwined in a vast cultural material, which reveals itself in folklore, legends, festivals, and games; in the rules and norms of social behaviour; in music, songs, and dances; and in national costumes as well as in decorative and applied arts and crafts.

Cultural heritage consists of any tangible or intangible object, group, or natural resource which has been inherited or created by a generation and is safeguarded to be transferred, in excellent condition, to future\ngenerations (after UNESCO, 2019). Tangible cultural heritage refers to monuments, groups of buildings or sites of outstanding universal value, whereas intangible cultural heritage is a practice, representation, expression, knowledge, or skill, as well as instruments, objects, artifacts, and cultural spaces that communities, groups, or even individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, 2019., UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2019). The 1972 World Heritage Convention of UNESCO defines the criteria of the natural or cultural sites to be considered for inscription on the World Heritage List (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, 1972). The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage was drafted in 2003 for the protection and promotion of the aforementioned intangible cultural heritage elements, and such elements may be inscribed on the appropriate Intangible Cultural Heritage List (UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2003). The two types of cultural heritage, tangible and intangible, are not to be treated separately but in combination, since either one is influenced by and complementary to the other.

Venerated from a time before antiquity as life-giver, water has been held in the highest esteem in all cultures and eras. Water-related mythologies show as much the divine character associated with it, as its qualities that lie beyond the material. In our time, the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) and traditional knowledge that surround water still give us an entryway to a fuller understanding of the great life-giver.