Sri Lanka has a diverse dancing culture where three main styles represent the classical dance tradition. These styles are known as Kandyan dances of the hill country (Uda Raṭa Nätum), the low country dances (Pahata Raṭa Nätum), and the mid-country (Sabaragamuva Näṭum). These three classical dancing styles are transmitted across generations with their ritualistic identities that are unique to movements, motions, costumes, and instruments. In the context of mask dancing, it is more relevant to the low country style, which is highly ceremonial and performed for ritualistic offerings to various devils. The dancers wear masks portraying many characters in different forms of spirits according to their characteristic features.

"The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (‘ICH Convention’ or ‘Convention’ hereafter) was adopted in 2003 and subsequently brought into force in 2006. The ICH Convention mandates signatories to use or mobilise various measures to safeguard intangible cultural heritage. \nEven though the Convention does not succinctly mention the elaborate legal measures for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage, the intellectual property rights to protect intangible cultural heritage and its holders are implied throughout provisions of the Convention. To implement the Convention’s spirit, the Operational Directives clarify legal form as safeguarding measures by stating that: State Parties shall endeavor to ensure, in particular through the application of intellectual property rights, privacy rights and any other appropriate form of legal protection, that the rights of the communities, groups, and individuals that create, bear and transmit their intangible cultural heritage are duly protected…."

My presentation is called ‘New Trends and Directions in the 2003 Convention’ although it is a bit hard to say which trends are new because this is really the first round of periodic reporting we are getting. So what I want to do is give you a summary of the information received by UNESCO following the start of the periodic reporting process. So they are obviously new directions because this is the first time. Some results are surprising and unanticipated, and others are to be expected.

"Culture and Development \nCulture is the source of our identity, continuity, and creativity. Therefore, culture is important in its own right. Besides this intrinsic value, culture has social and economic values. Recently, there has been growing attention to the economic contribution of culture to development mainly through cultural and creative industries, including cultural tourism. In October 2010, UN General Assembly adopted a resolution 65/166, which emphasises the important contribution of culture to sustainable development and the achievement of national development objectives and internationally agreed development goals, including Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).\nThis resolution invites all Member States, intergovernmental organisations, and UN agencies to ensure a more visible and effective integration and mainstreaming of culture in development policies and strategies. \nICH Convention and Information/Data \nThe UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH Convention) provides important principles and guidelines for cultural policy for ICH safeguarding. The most important goal of the ICH Convention is to ensure the safeguarding of ICH in need of urgent safeguarding. As the number of State Parties increases and the reach of the ICH Convention expands, the ICH Convention is expected to allow us to identify vulnerability and risks facing ICH elements in different parts of the world. It will then enable us to manage and mitigate risks of ICH elements being completely lost by drawing attention of national authorities and the international community base on knowledge base created by the ICH Convention. Different kinds of information and data will be generated by implementing the ICH Convention According to Article 12.1 of the ICH Convention, each State Party shall draw up, in a manner geared to its own situation, one or more inventories of ICH present in its territory and ensure that the inventory is updated. ICH inventories "

This paper is based on two phases of my work focusing on South Asian context:\n\n(i) my experience of designing an integrated heritage management programme and running it for the past five years, in which Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) has been a core concept; and\n(ii) my personal interest in rethinking the overall idea of education in general, and refining professional education for the heritage sector in particular.\n\nBoth of the above aspects have emerged from my engagement and exposure to the overall heritage scenario in South Asian contexts, hence this paper is a reflection on ICH pedagogy at least for the South Asian context. The paper explores the idea of ‘contextual learning’ as a feasible pedagogy that could be adopted in ICH education at two levels: first is to create professionals for safeguarding of ICH, and the second is to integrate ICH as resources both in early (child) education as well as professional education in general.

Moderator to Helena Norberg-Hodge: You have emphasized a new order and a way of life and the need to promote localization to escape from globalization and cultural uniformity. In my opinion, this localization can be carried out more easily in the post-CORONA era; what do you think? And this is the second question, in the post-CORONA era, is there a need to change the direction or strategy of the localization movement? If so, what would it be? People nowadays talk about new normal, so please also tell us about the post-CORONA era localization.

"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."

Waa’gey is a community-based organization that uses traditional skills to confront the social, economic, and environmental challenges faced by the people of Micronesia’s most remote outer islands in the Pacific. We pursue the preservation of native knowledge, technologies, and arts both to protect our distinctive outer islands’ identity and to solve specific problems relating to import dependency, urbanization, climate change, and unemployment.

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.

This article briefly presents a framework designed to gauge the level of vitality or endangerment of music traditions and suggests how the tool can be used to inform music safeguarding activities across contexts. The framework is the Music Vitality and Endangerment Framework (MVEF), developed and first presented in my book Music Endangerment: How Language Maintenance Can Help (Grant, 2014). The MVEF draws inspiration from various language vitality assessment tools, particularly UNESCO’s Language Vitality Framework (2003). In the absence of any such tool for gauging music vitality or endangerment across contexts, the MVEF was developed to fill this gap.

According to UNESCO’s Culture Urban Future: Global Report on Culture for Sustainable Development (Paris 2016), over half of the world’s population is now living in urban areas. Because of the heterogeneous background of these city populations, superdiversity has become a permanent feature not just of conurbations such as Singapore, Bangkok, and Mumbai. Also Europe is struggling with this challenge, which might create tensions and conflicts and the emergence of old and new cultural practices, reflecting new social identities and shared social spaces (Vertovec, 141). The Dutch city of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, harbors immigrants with at least 160 different ethnic backgrounds, everyone bringing along his or her own intangible cultural heritage. What is intangible heritage in such an ethnically divided society? There is evidence that in such a superdiverse context, ICH can contribute to community building and more generally to sustainable development.

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