Today we celebrate the 20th anniversary of theUNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. This convention was an important milestone in recognizingintangible cultural heritageor ICH — expressions of culture like performances, oral traditions, rituals and traditional knowledge — as an essential part of the world’s cultural heritage that deserves recognition and protection just like tangible heritage, such as sites and monuments. These cultural manifestations keep heritage alive, and safeguarding them takes more than documentation —transmissionfrom person to person and from generation to generation is key to their survival.
Over the last 20 years,hundreds of ICH elementshave been officially recognized by UNESCO, offering them greater visibility and celebrating the diverse ways in which communities express, recreate and transmit their cultural heritage. In theOpen Culture Programat Creative Commons, we believe thatbetter sharingof ICH — i.e. making it available for broad access and reuseethically, equitably, inclusively, respectfully, and responsibly — can be a catalyst for its safeguarding.
Throughbetter sharing, ICH can be revitalized and expressed through new narratives with new voices, renewed, brought into modern contexts, and can be a part of today’s cultural landscape, sustaining dynamic evolution and transmission, in accordance with their bearers’ rights, wishes, needs, and aspirations.Better sharinghelps to ensure that ICH manifestations can live beyond the database and continue to enrich the world’s diversity of cultural expressions. One example is theWiki Loves Living Heritageproject, supporting community work in documenting and sharing ICH around the world with the communities’ free, prior and informed consent. The initiative by Te Hiku Media to revitalize Te Reo Māori, the Māori language, as highlighted inPeter-Lucas Jones’s keynoteat the CC Global Summit 2023, is a prime example of the importance of language as a vehicle for ICH transmission and safeguarding.
Better sharing to support safeguardingis one of the reasons why we are now leading a community initiative called “Towards a Recommendation on Open Culture” (TAROC), building upon the2022 UNESCO Mondiacult Declaration’srecognition of culture as a global public good. This initiative aims to support the international community in developing a positive, affirmative, and influential international normative instrument (a “recommendation”) enshrining the values, objectives, and mechanisms for open culture to flourish. In the past few years, UNESCO adopted Recommendations for Open Educational Resources and Open Science, but there is currently no international instrument enshrining Open Culture. Such an instrument would recognize the importance ofbetter sharingof culture as a means to activate and buttress wider cultural and information policy ambitions, including the safeguarding of ICH.
Watch this space for more about TAROC andcontact us atinfo@creativecommons.orgto see how you can get involved in promoting open culture around the world.