Materials
oral traditions
ICH Materials 132
Publications(Article)
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Awang BatilIntroduction\n\nIn Malaysia, there is a living traditional art where a storyteller develops the oral tradition, otherwise known as oral literature.\n\nOral tradition is the original source of Malay literature and translated into written literature. One of the practitioners of this oral tradition is known as 'Awang Batil'. Apart from specialised storytellers such as Awang Batil, there are other transmissions of oral literature throughout the country, especially in villages through folk stories or stories of elders that are collected, rewritten and made into collections for children to read.\n\n\nAwang Batil\n\nAwang Batil is a storyteller who provided entertainment and education to the people, especially to the villagers and local community. Awang Batil entertains and educates the community through many classic stories that he inherited. Through those stories, the community is entertained and educated.\n\nOnce upon a time, Awang Batil functioned as a story book, novel, radio, television, movie or video as it is now. He would travel from house to house, village to village, state to state including the state of Kedah, Penang and some areas in the Southern Region of Thailand, especially the Setol Region.\nYear2023NationMalaysia
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Memories and Traditions: ICH of Laos in the Twenty-First CenturyThe ICH of Laos is vibrant despite the instability experienced by the country’s populace throughout the twentieth century. Peace returned to the country in 1976 once the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR) was established on 2 December 1975. However, a large proportion of the population relocated to other countries, including many custodians and practitioners of ICH, not only those of the Lao ethnic group but also other ethnicities such as Hmong. The relocation of these masters or knowledgeable persons led to a break in the transmission of this wisdom to younger generations. Over time the restrictions mentioned above were lifted, allowing for the revival of various ICH elements. Memory served as a reservoir of knowledge for ICH traditions whose practice and transmission had ceased temporarily. The masters of some elements are no longer present in Laos to transmit the wisdom of techniques, symbolism, and use. Memory is thus crucial since this knowledge is not recorded in books, but rather is passed on via oral instruction.Year2021NationLao People's Democratic Republic
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Engaging the Community to Safeguard Singapore’s ICHIntangible cultural heritage (ICH) as defined by the 2003 UNESCO Convention encompasses the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, and skills, which communities recognize as part of their cultural heritage. In the case of Singapore, ICH is important as it represents the diverse practices, knowledge, and living traditions of Singapore’s multicultural society.\n\nIn recent years, the National Heritage Board of Singapore (NHB) has embarked on a concerted drive to document and safeguard Singapore’s ICH elements as well as to work with public and private sector partners to facilitate the transmission of ICH elements.\n\nPrior to these efforts, NHB studied the best ICH safeguarding practices in various countries, including Hong Kong, South Korea, France, Japan, and Malaysia (Penang). NHB noted that effective ICH safeguarding requires the community involvement and that ICH elements should be allowed to evolve or even disappear with time.\n\nNHB also noted that effective ICH safeguarding involves measures such as research and documentation efforts, recognition schemes for ICH practitioners, the creation of a national inventory, education, and outreach programs, as well as financial grants.\n\nIn November 2016, NHB launched its first nationwide ICH survey to identify key elements of Singapore’s ICH. The survey will be completed by the end of 2018. It will document more than a hundred ICH elements through oral history interviews, research, photography, and videography.\n\nMore recently, NHB announced the development of Our SG Heritage Plan, which is the first masterplan for Singapore’s heritage and museum sector. The masterplan outlines the broad strategies and initiatives for the sector over the next five years (2018 to 2022) and beyond.\n\nOne of the key strategic pillars for Our SG Heritage Plan focuses on ICH and presents the following recommendations:\n\nNHB will develop an ICH inventory to promote public awareness and facilitate public access to ICH information. The inventory will be updated with input from heritage experts and community groups.\nNHB will introduce a new scheme to recognize ICH practitioners who are dedicated to promoting and transmitting different aspects of Singapore’s ICH.\nNHB will step up efforts to research and document Singapore’s ICH and continue to promote research in ICH through research grants.\nNHB will leverage on museum exhibitions, festivals, and programs such as talks, workshops, and showcases to create greater public awareness and appreciation of Singapore’s ICH and ICH practitioners.\nNHB will work with the relevant agencies to ratify the 2003 UNESCO Convention in 2018 and explore possible ICH inscription onto the UNESCO Representative List.\nIn developing the ICH strategies and initiatives, NHB conducted eight engagement sessions involving close to 190 ICH practitioners between November 2016 and September 2017 to solicit views and seek feedback.\n\nAs part of NHB’s public engagement efforts for Our SG Heritage Plan,1. the institution is presently consulting the wider public about the ICH strategies and initiatives through a dedicated website (oursgheritage.sg) and traveling exhibitions.\n\nFrom December 2017 to February 2018, close to 20,000 people have visited the exhibition, and the website has received more than 14,000 visitors. In addition, more than 5,500 people have submitted their views through onsite and online polls.\n\nThrough its efforts to document, safeguard, and facilitate the transmission of Singapore’s ICH, NHB hopes to strengthen the Singaporean identity because it believes that ICH provides links to Singapore’s past, facilitates community involvement, and fosters cultural understanding within and across ethnic communities.\n\nPhoto : The NHB’s traveling exhibition on Our SG Heritage Plan © National Heritage Board of SingaporeYear2018NationSingapore
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A Tale of Two Curries: Culinary Tradition as a Form of Cultural Heritage'Like this,’ the old woman says, raking her fingers through red lentils clouding a stream of bottled water. We’re crowded together in the kitchen of the guesthouse I am staying in—consisting of not much more than a single gas burner, a rice cooker, a table, and a shelf full of an array of spices—in a village on the outskirts of Kandy, Sri Lanka. While my hostess demonstrates how she makes the dahl, she feeds hungry travelers, and her daughter marinates chicken for a second curry. The way the pair dance through their routine tells me they’ve done this many times before, I imagine both in the presence of foreign guests as well as in the comfortable silence of private company.\n\nThe cooking lesson my hostess gave me years ago has evidently stuck with me in memory, and in practice, as I try my hand at the recipes, I was taught. The preparation of food, after all, is not just a duty performed by people out of necessity but also a ritual cherished across cultures. It can unite the members of a household, each individual playing a role in the making of a meal, from sourcing ingredients to cooking the dishes to laying the table. Though their responsibilities might differ from culture to culture, the collaborative element of preparing to eat together is one that can bind the women and the men, the young and the old, the past and the present.\n\nRecipes themselves are more often passed between generations hand to hand rather than neatly written on recipe cards, as grandmothers and grandfathers teach their young ones to simmer and season a dish to perfection. It’s a part oral tradition and, part ritual, and in this manner, tradition can be maintained, not just the combinations of ingredients that come together in proper proportions, but the act of making something together, whether as a family, community, or patchwork group of temporary visitors.\n\nThat tradition can then become characteristic of an entire region or country, as can any cultural craft. But culinary customs have exceptional quality, as the tradition can be intimately experienced by family members and foreigners alike. Anyone who participates in local cuisine is invited to taste the past and present of a people in a single bite. As traditional meals feed the bellies and satiate the souls of entire nations and their visitors, tradition is kept alive not only in the art of making the meal but in those it substantiates in both body and spirit. This is how heritage is kept alive; when it continues to nourish people.\n\nHeritage is also invited to take a seat at modern tables when the keepers of local traditions share the customs they’ve inherited. When foreigners, for instance, take the initiative to learn the ingredients, recipes, etiquette, and conversation that circulate the kitchen in a culture that is not their own and they are permitted to do so, they are offered a glimpse at so much more than just local cuisine. They are personally introduced to a custom that has preceded even grandmothers’ generations, one that remains alive thanks to the conscious dedication to tradition and its maintenance. In this process, which we may be privileged to take part in as we travel, intangible elements of cultural heritage are shared, rehearsed, and solidified. A magical merger can happen between local and foreign, and between ancestors and today is made possible.\n\nSo it’s no wonder that something more potent than curry spice lingers at the table in Sri Lanka after we have prepared dinner and sat together to eat. The simple act of cooking and sharing a meal carries far more weight than I then realized, although I could feel it; a sense of being tied together with not only the people in the room but with those who built this tradition so long ago. This invisible connection remains uncompromised by the limited language and experiences people of different walks of life are expected to have in common. And it’s a sentiment I encourage travelers to seek to experience anywhere they go, no matter how different and far-flung those corners of the globe might be. When we explore culinary traditions and local teachings, we approach the vast and various nuances that characterize culture and ultimately participating in the preservation of tradition.\n\nMore of Issabella’s work is available at museandwander.co.uk\n\nPhoto : Split Red Lentil Seeds Ready for Curry CC BY-SA 4.0 Sanjay AcharyaYear2020NationSri Lanka
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Schools of Living Traditions in the PhilippinesThe School of Living Traditions (SLT) is a flagship program by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), which is the overall policy-making, coordinating and grants-giving agency for the preservation, development and promotion of Philippine culture and arts. Historically, the SLTs were created through the initiatives of community representatives in the NCCA’s Subcommission on Cultural Communities and Traditional Arts to preserve and integrate traditional culture and its various creative expressions as a dynamic part of the national cultural mainstream. It should be noted that the SLT program was instituted in 1995, eight years prior to the Philippines’ ratification of the 2003 Convention on the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Thus, the SLT program is geared towards revitalizing and safeguarding traditional culture and practices through the transfer of indigenous knowledge and skills from the cultural masters to the young learners in the community. The SLT is not part of the formal Philippine educational system. It operates as a community-based non-formal center of learning involving masters and apprentices. The SLT’s mode of teaching is usually oral, and is grounded in “learning by doing” philosophy.Year2019NationPhilippines
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FIELDWORKER NETWORK PROGRAM OF THE VANUATU CULTURAL CENTREThe principal role of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre since its establishment in the early 1960s has been to document and record the culture and cultural history of Vanuatu. This has been done by the Centre’s staff and a network of over one hundred volunteer fieldworkers. The documentation efforts focus on details of remembered histories and traditions; details of ritual practices, classification systems, and languages; details of cultural landscapes and particularly sites of cultural significance; and records of contemporary events of historical and cultural significance. The latter, which is essentially a history-in-the-making, is recorded on video as examples of material culture collected for museological display, but almost everything else is documented on audiotape. This is because our indigenous cultures are primarily oral, and therefore, all our cultural knowledge is retained and transmitted orally. This documented knowledge is held by the Centre and has been used as source material for the revival of certain traditional cultural practices no longer being practiced.Year2013NationSouth Korea
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4. The Story of Kamaicha - Identity of a CommunityA treasure trove of both natural and cultural diversity, India is home to innumerable rural and indigenous communities dotting its varied geographical landscape. One such community—the Manganiyars—is a clan of hereditary professional musicians residing in the villages of the Thar desert in western Rajasthan. Their oral legends say that these communities settled in different villages of Barmer and Jaisalmer around a thousand years ago. \n\nThe Manganiyars hold a vast repertoire of folk songs integral to their ways of life and significant to their social systems. For centuries, their music has been supported by their traditional patrons, called Jajmans, who usually live in the same or nearby villages and engage the Manganiyars to sing at various life events and celebrations of their families in exchange for money, land, and gifts. A distinctive feature of this patron-server relationship is the Manganiyars’ exclusive and vital role as genealogists of their patrons’ families that can go back to fourteen or eighteen generations, such record keeping being entirely oral. The Manganiyars belong to the Mirasi (entertainers) community. They are Muslims but sing for both Hindu and Muslim patrons, performing songs of Hindu gods and goddesses as well as Muslim Pirs and \nFakirs (Sufi saints or spiritual guides). The melodic structure of their music resembles classical traditions, but in reality, is very different in terms of the raagas (combination of notes) and associated time theory. The Manganiyars believe that their children are born with an inherent sense of music that is naturally transmitted to subsequent generations through some magical non-formal framework that is undefined and innate. Unlike many other indigenous communities, they themselves have kept their tradition alive, believing that music is fundamental to their ‘being.’Year2021NationIndia
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People Who Love Their Land: Methods of Protecting the Environment of Konduk VillageKonduk is a remote mountain village in Kyrgyzstan, located in the Alai-Kuu valley, not far from Kulun-Ata Nature Reserve in Osh Province. The reserve has a high level of biodiversity, being home to rare species of plants and animals. The population of the village is about 1,500. Several male villagers work in the reserve, and are well aware of the natural diversity of the reserve; they have generational practices, oral stories, and traditions to preserve the land they live. In 2020–21, an Aigine Cultural Research Center team investigated the traditional ecological knowledge of this community.Year2022NationKyrgyzstan
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Safeguarding ICH in Central Asia: Overview and PerspectivesCentral Asia stands at the crossroads of ancient civilisations. Its territory, crossed by the northern part of the great Silk Road, constitutes an ensemble of cultural heritage sites and monuments that express common historical experiences as well as reflect an extraordinary cultural diversity dating from prehistoric times to the Islamic period and beyond. For centuries, the phenomenon of intangible cultural heritage was a key factor for the transmission of indigenous cultural traditions for future generations as well as a matching point for intercultural dialogue in Central Asia—a region with unique oral and music traditions.Year2011NationSouth Korea
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EPIC STORIES THAT BRIDGE ANCIENT AND PRESENT WORLDS IN TAJIKISTANEpos forms a considerable part of Tajik cultural heritage. The process of developing oral epic traditions in Tajik culture originates in antiquity, going back to the mythology of ancient Iranian nations.Year2014NationSouth Korea
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Epic Stories that Bridge the Ancient and Present Worlds in TajikistanEpics form a considerable part of the cultural heritage of the Tajik. The oral epic traditions in the Tajik culture appeared and formed in the most ancient period of its history, originating from the mythology of ancient Iranian peoples.Year2015NationSouth Korea
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The Task of Inventory, Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage Experience from VietnamIn Vietnam, activities aimed at the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage date from a much more recent period than the protection of tangible cultural heritage. This delay of over half a century in the development of preservation policies for intangible cultural heritage has been a big loss, which in some cases cannot be redressed. Because of the limited awareness of the full value of intangible cultural\nheritage, many ordinary people and culture owners have ceased practicing and transmitting their traditions. This has meant that there have been no inheritors to many traditions. Many oral heritage elements have disappeared forever, even from popular memory. The rapid change of socio-economic conditions has led to many changes in the spiritual and cultural life of communities. In the past, some intangible cultural heritage elements were considered backward or superstitious or belonging to the culture of the feudal class. As a result, culture bearers disavowed their heritage or were compelled to renounce their traditions. There are some social customs, forms of folk knowledge and technical skill that have become altogether extinct without any possibility of restoration or revival.Year2013NationSouth Korea