Documenting Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) in Scotland
Cultural heritage is not only expressed through buildings and artefacts - it is also communicated through language, music, dance, storytelling, festivals and rituals. These cultural forms are known as Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), or living culture.
Through its Scotland Committee, the UK National Commission for UNESCO (UKNC) is working to help preserve the richness and diversity of Scotland’s intangible heritage. In 2008, the UKNC Scotland Committee, in partnership with Museums Galleries Scotland and the Scottish Arts Council, commissioned a report by Edinburgh Napier University on Intangible Cultural Heritage in Scotland.
The report outlines a how a scoping and mapping project to record intangible heritage in Scotland might be taken forward. The report reached these key recommendations on next steps:
A fully funded national inventory is a cost-effective and efficient repository of knowledge of Intangible Cultural Heritage practices in Scotland. This should take the form of a wiki.
For the purpose of the inventory, intangible heritage in Scotland should be considered to include as wide a range of practices as possible that fall within the scope of UNESCO definition. Thus practices that may not have originated in Scotland, but are now practiced there and those which are practiced in languages other than those indigenous to Scotland will be equally considered to belong in the inventory.
The national inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage becomes a key tool for safeguarding through identification of fragility and an important component of education and community development.
Following the publication of the report, Edinburgh Napier University was awarded a Knowledge Transfer Fellowship grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to bring the report’s recommendations to fruition. The project will utilise the knowledge and expertise of partner organisations across Scotland to establish an online inventory of Scotland’s Intangible Cultural Heritage. This inventory will both record the living aspects of Scotland’s culture and, where applicable, inform decisions concerning its possible safeguarding.
The inventory's two main aims are:
- To provide a dynamic record of Scotland’s Intangible Cultural Heritage practices and thereby promote general awareness of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
- To enable the easy identification of the fragility of practices and thus enable safeguarding to take place, where this is deemed appropriate
The inventory will take the form of a customised Wiki database.
Visit the Intangible Cultural Heritage in Scotland Wiki here.
To read more about the Convention on Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, click below
Pages in this section
- Convention on Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003)
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- This Convention seeks to safeguard and ensure respect for Intangible Cultural Heritage – the practices, representations, expressions and knowledge which are transmitted from generation to generation
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Up Helly Aa festival, Shetland
© Anne Burgess