Intangible cultural heritage

The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, adopted in 2003, extended the logic of heritage protection from monuments and objects to practices: oral traditions, rituals, craftsmanship, and, explicitly, the performing arts. States that ratify it commit to identifying and safeguarding the living heritage on their territory, and the Convention names documentation among the safeguarding measures.

“Intangible” describes how this heritage lives — in people and their doing, rather than in stone — not a prohibition on recording it. A dance exists nowhere but in its dancers; documentation cannot replace transmission, but it safeguards the possibility of study, revival, and memory when transmission thins. The Convention’s position is deliberately both-and: keep the practice alive, and keep its record.

The policy consequence in Europe is concrete. Cultural funding bodies and public institutions increasingly treat documentation and deposit as conditions rather than virtues, and in law and policy a performance is heritage in the same sense that a cathedral is. What has not caught up is habit: institutions that would never de-catalogue a painting still close landmark productions without a preservation plan. The Convention settles whether live work deserves keeping; practice decides, production by production, whether it is kept.