Intangible Heritage: A Shared Human Experience
It can be very easy to distinguish tangible forms of heritage: large-scale monuments, cultural sites, and even National Parks, however these physical representations of heritage do not always tell the personal cultural stories of societies the same way that intangible heritage aspects do.
UNESCO defines intangible heritage as
“ traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants, such as oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts.”
One element that separates intangible heritage from tangible heritage is that while many forms of these sites and monuments are unique in design and location, intangible heritage is universal.
Throughout every region of the world, societies share aspects of these intangible heritage traditions, with just a few distinct differences. The greater phenomena of theses social practices, rituals, festive events, etc. are rooted in shared universal elements of the human experience. While these are not elements that we can always physically see or have materialistic connections, these connections to our shared human experience are what make them such an important part of heritage.
We can relate to these intangible elements sometimes more easily than that of physical monuments or sites. We might not recognize a different culture’s specific site in reference to something within our own cultures, but this is where intangible heritage bridges these gaps. We can all recognize dance, story, and art, while we might not fully understand it, we can better appreciate its’ purpose based off of our own cultural versions. When trying to understand how important intangible heritage is, it is essential to consider that these forms of heritage are preserved through the transmission of knowledge passed from one generation to the next and in many examples representative of both traditional foundations infused with more modern elements. Their ability to act as traditional and contemporary at the same time is what helps to ensure the fluidity and continuation to our on going human experience.
On a recent trip to Mesa Verde National Park, I had one such experience that spoke to me in reference to the global connectivity of cultures from the past to our modern times. While exploring through the park, I had an opportunity to climb underground and sit in a restored traditional kiva, and listen to a descendant of Ancestral Puebloans people share a customary oral story with us, just as they would have done thousands of years ago.
I did not have to be direct descendant to feel the impact of this story in this place, but rather the notion of the relationship of the past to the present, through space and time, resonated through me as I sat and listened to the story. The tale had a relatable theme of the changing seasons that could have been told within a mindset of 1000 years previous, to 1000 years in the future. Unlike any prior experience, the notion of the connective forces that elements of intangible heritage encompass began to truly make sense to me. We are all connected to the past in some form, and intangible heritage is all around us, in stories, art, language, dance, and so on, but the real test to understanding these connections is to appreciate these forms as greater representations of ongoing shared experiences; historically and culturally shared human experiences.
