Quest 217, March 2024, pp.

27-30

Intangible Cultural Heritage:

Pinning the Butterfly?
By Chris Wood

T he UK is at last ratifying the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the

Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage1 and a very small, under-
resourced team at the Department for Culture, Media & Sport is working
out how to implement it. By the time you read this, the first stage of
consultation, on how to develop an inventory of intangible cultural
heritage (ICH) in the UK, will have finished and work on the second stage,
consulting on how to safeguard ICH in the UK, is expected to be in
progress.2 It is an admirable endeavour, but will it actually help?
Heritage has tended to focus on the material, the tangible heritage, from
shards of pottery or flint-knapping detritus to landscape-scale monuments.
That focus prioritises the structure often to the exclusion of the animating
spirit, the human (and other-than-human) agency which made, used, lived
in, worshipped with, destroyed and/or discarded the material evidence. A
case which really brought home the heritage dissociation between physical
items and everything else was the excavation of the so-called Seahenge on
the Norfolk coast back in 1999. I hope to write more about where we have
got to over the last 25 years in a future edition of Quest,3 but suffice it here
to say that the Seahenge saga pitted the ‘preservation of artefacts at all
costs’ perspective against that of experiencing the transient wonder while
it lasts.

1 https://ich.unesco.org/en/convention, https://ich.unesco.org/en/what-is-intangible-heritage-
00003 .
2 https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/2003-unesco-convention-for-the-safeguarding-

of-the-intangible-cultural-heritage/consultation-on-the-2003-unesco-convention-for-safeguarding-
of-the-intangible-cultural-heritage .
3 Also, I have been asked to contribute a chapter on Pagan perspectives to a planned book,

Seahenge: Celebrating the Bronze Age Timber Circle, being edited by David Robertson and Clive
Jonathan Bond, to be published by Poppyland Publishing.
So, on the face of it, working out how to safeguard ICH appears to be a
positive move away from the focus on the concrete. But, what does
“safeguard” actually mean in this context and what is included and how?
There is little (at the time of writing) on the DCMS web-site to help people
understand what they are looking for, not helped by consulting on an
inventory (which is definitely “not an archive”) before it is clear in what
ways the “items” on that list can be safeguarded. DCMS is keen that the
inventory be community led, and it is up to people to nominate “their” ICH
to the inventory, with their community’s backing (yet at the same time
they also want to avoid “gatekeepers”). Those people are also then to be
responsible for keeping the listing up-to-date every two years. Several
participants in the on-line roundtable consultation workshops I have
attended have agreed that it seems unreasonable to expect volunteers in
dispersed “communities” of practice to keep up that momentum. Indeed,
the ICH in question may even be benefitting from the “safeguarding”, but
the original reporter may be unable to continue, whilst other people
involved do not realise the need to take on yet another piece of admin.
I have mentioned in these workshops that communities which have
experienced prejudice may be reluctant to add things to an ‘official list’
which could be used for reasons other than those the present team
envisages. Not least, the legacy of Victorian folklorists and ethnographers,
recording folk performances and practices as if they were unchanging and
thereby fossilising them, still sets alarm bells ringing. It is therefore
difficult for such communities to trust in a system without there being
clear benefits.
So far, the “safeguarding” suggested includes vague references to
resources to ensure that traditions can live and survive sustainably –
although it is stressed that there is, at this stage, no prospect of increased
funding being available. There is also no actual provision proposed for
genuinely protecting traditions from such things as appropriation by big
business (e.g. using intellectual property rights laws to patent or claim
copyright on a folk motif, preventing its traditional community ‘owners’
from using it) or commodification by the tourism industry as a twee folk
practice. One might think that being on the inventory could help avoid
unintended impacts of legislation, such as the way entertainment licensing
has affected folk music and performance, but even this is relegated to the
hope that awareness is raised.
When is the Intangible Not Intangible?
The DCMS team is keen to stress that ICH does not include physical
objects, even though a tool or costume (for instance) may not be
understandable without knowledge of the skill to use it or of the dance or
ritual in which it is worn. That is perhaps reasonable, but one particular
area of culture that is clearly intangible but which is specifically excluded
is religion. This is despite the fact that one of the inventory categories for
ICH contains the word “rituals” and another is devoted to “knowledge and
practices concerning nature and the universe”. Most of the examples
DCMS gives for the latter category are actually traditional skills and
crafts, like lambing, dry-stone walling and (interestingly) dowsing, yet
UNESCO writes that items in the nature and universe category are
“expressed through language, oral traditions, feelings of attachment
towards a place, memories, spirituality and worldview” and include:
“traditional ecological wisdom, indigenous knowledge, knowledge about
local fauna and flora, traditional healing systems, rituals, beliefs,
initiatory rites, cosmologies, shamanism, possession rites, social
organisations, festivals, languages and visual arts.” 4
In particular, it is stressed that safeguarding a community’s cosmology is
key. Many of these elements are generally bundled into systems of belief,
philosophy and cultural identity known as religions!
This issue brought it home to me that DCMS’s view of ICH, rather than
being heritage that is not tangible per se, is instead, in the first instance,
that it consists of activities that are traditional. It may be that this is simply
a confusion between ICH as a concept and the sort of items that could be
expected to go on an inventory. After all, these items probably wouldn’t
include religions as such and it’s not actually clear how beliefs and
worldviews could be safeguarded. The confusion is not helped by
consulting on the inventory process before establishing properly what
safeguards being on the list actually confers, but the focus on the specifics

4 https://ich.unesco.org/en/knowledge-concerning-nature-00056 .
rather than what lies behind the activities, practices, events and rituals is
likely to lead to much unproductive argument, to say the least. At worst, it
may suggest an agenda which is distinctly secularist, concentrating on the
more tangible aspects of the intangible!

Pandora’s Inventory
It is unlikely that many Pagan and Magical “items” will be put forward to
the inventory, for a variety of reasons, not least that the list is an exoteric
box that cannot hold the esoteric reality. However, there is an increasing
number of Pagan manifestations which are public and would fit the listing
criteria. Whether the Pagan communities concerned would trust the system
is another matter, of course. Equally, if something is emerging into the
public gaze in a positive way, then it, presumably, currently has sufficient
energy behind it to continue and doesn’t need safeguarding. On the other
hand, communities change, people change and life commitments change.
When the initiators of a public manifestation move on, will there be any
amongst the community which values it to continue it? If the energy is
there, then hopefully its continuity will be catered for, but could the ICH
“safeguarding” prove useful? I don’t know.
However, one potentially valuable point emerged, for me at any rate, from
the roundtable discussion of the “knowledge and practices concerning
nature and the universe” category. Whatever the pros and cons (and never-
ending debate) about who has the right to submit things to the list (and is
responsible for keeping them up to date), who the community is that owns
those things, and who the gatekeeper is,5 it is important that the knowledge
put forward is full, accurate, inclusive and well rounded. The way that is
achieved will necessarily vary between communities, tradition-bearers and
contexts, and it is to be hoped that the due diligence submission criteria are
not prescriptive about methodology. But, if one result of this whole ICH
process is that communities are encouraged (gently) to discuss amongst
themselves their traditions and practices, their evolution and development,
and thereby become more self-aware, then that surely is a good thing –
even if nothing is submitted to an inventory!

5Of course, a gatekeeper is not only responsible for controlling access in the sense of closing the
gate, they also show people where the gate is and make sure it can open for them.