Posted on February 14, 2011
The Intangible Heritage Convention was adopted by UNESCO in 2003 and entered into force in 2006. It now has 134 States Parties, excluding South Africa but including most other African states. As I mentioned in a previous blog about this Convention, it is an attempt to broaden the definition of heritage beyond the iconic cathedral or waterfall that claim 'outstanding universal value' under the 1972 World Heritage Convention, to include cultural practices and knowledge systems, performing arts and ritual of value to the communities that practise them. It has been embraced and supported by many developing countries, who see it as a way of addressing geographical imbalances in the World Heritage Convention. The Intangible Heritage Convention has even been referred to as 'Africa's Convention', because of the emphasis placed on intangible heritage (ICH) within the African context.
The Intangible Heritage Convention established two international lists, called the Representative List of the ICH of Humanity, and the List of ICH in need of Urgent Safeguarding. One of the problems faced in establishing this new Convention is that large numbers of nominations to the Representative List have been received from States Parties in the first few rounds, mainly from those in Asia who are now over-represented. States in Africa and the Middle East have not been submitting many nominations. Also, the nominations received have been of variable quality. The nomination form for the Lists of the Convention is deceptively shorter and simpler than the form for the World Heritage Convention, but filling it in appropriately requires careful thought and considerable preparation including a strong community participation process. More broadly, and perhaps even more crucially, States Parties have asked for guidance on how to create inventories of the ICH in their territory and how to implement the Convention nationally.
Challenges around implementation of such a new Convention, and the scale and quality of nominations, are not unexpected. The solution devised has been, in part, to commission the development of training materials around ratification of the Convention, nominations to its Lists, implementation of the Convention and inventorying of ICH at the national level. During the last year, I have been contracted by the UNESCO Intangible Heritage Section as part of this project, working with Rieks Smeets and others, including South African pedagogical expert Veronica McKay, to develop training materials for some of these workshops.
The workshop about developing nominations to the Urgent Safeguarding List was given its first trial run in Windhoek in November 2010, facilitated by myself and Silverse Anami from Kenya. Some of the participants, from Lesotho, Namibia, Botswana, Malawi, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe, had already participated in a series of capacity-building workshops around community-based inventorying in Lesotho, Botswana, and Malawi. One of the interesting features of the nominations workshop is the use of what we have called 'sample nominations', which are inspired by real, good nominations, but are rewritten and anonymized to create first a very poor version (for critical analysis by participants) and then a version compliant with the criteria for inscription on the Lists. Analyzing the sample nominations (especially the poor version!) helped participants to understand the requirements for a successful nomination.
The materials for all four workshops were then introduced to trainers in the Asia-Pacific region in Beijing, and to about 18 more trainers in Africa at two workshops in Harare and Libreville in January 2011. Another three workshops are planned for Sofia, Abu Dhabi and Havana. The 'training of trainers' workshops have already raised important issues in heritage management, both tangible and intangible, including the relationship between 'communities', 'experts' and the state, and the role of heritage in development.
The idea has been to create generic materials about the Convention and its Operational Directives that can be adapted by these regional trainers to their different circumstances. Trainers will share their updates with other trainers in their region and more generally, so improvements can be incorporated into the materials.
Harriet Deacon, consultant correspondent to the Archival Platform, is temporarily based in the UK where she has been involved in writing these training materials for UNESCO. She was lead author of The Subtle Power of Intangible Heritage, was on the expert panel developing the South African draft ICH Policy in 2007-2009 and was an examiner at the IGC meeting in Abu Dhabi.
