PIMA Press Release

13 October 2007

PIMA and Taiwan to co-host an international symposium on intangible cultural heritage in October 2007

Location: Taiwan

Dates: 18-25 October 2007

Background and Rationale for Symposium:

In October 2007 PIMA members will attend and present at a five-day symposium in Taiwan on the subject of Intangible Cultural Heritage

Museums in Taiwan and the Pacific both seek further advice on the purpose and implementation of UNESCO’s Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage and want to learn how they can use the Convention in their work serving communities.

By discussing these issues together there is great potential for professional information sharing and support, learning from each other and promoting cultural exchange and understanding between Taiwan and the Pacific Islands. The opportunity to meet at such a training event also affords the chance to explore our joint academic interest in the Lapita connections and shared heritage of Taiwan and the Pacific.

What is Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH)?

Museums across the world have in the past been preoccupied with the collecting, preserving, researching, exhibiting and exchanging of tangible objects (both natural and cultural) in their work to establish museums as places where the public may learn from, explore, interpret, remember and be inspired by the world around them.

In recent years, however, there has been a greater acknowledgement that culture manifests itself not only through tangible forms, but also as intangible elements such as language, music, dance, theatre and performance, folklore, oral history and storytelling, rituals and ceremonies, religions, beliefs, customs, manners, clothing, shelter, traditional skills, technologies and knowledge and so on.

The worldwide museum community now recognizes that it will have to pay significant attention to intangible cultural heritage as well as tangible resources and collections – in fact, the last ICOM General Conference in Seoul in 2004 was on the theme of safeguarding intangible cultural heritage.

This symposium encourages museum professionals from around the Asia-Pacific region to explore the topic of ICH and to share with each other the experiences, responses, challenges and successes that they have encountered in working with communities to safeguard and revitalise their living traditions.

The Pacific’s Experience of Intangible Cultural Heritage

With a total population of less than 10 million people, the Pacific Islands region has one-fifth of the world’s languages. The Pacific Islands region as a whole is made up of over 20 states and territories in an area covering over half of the world’s surface. This region has the highest rate of indigenous people within the national population of any region of the world, and also the highest rate of customary or traditional land ownership. 

In the majority of Pacific Islands states, a large proportion of the population continue to live in their cultural and kin-based communities on their ancestral land; satisfy most of their food and other requirements using traditional methods and forms of land and resource utilization, on their ancestral land; speak their indigenous language; be governed by traditional leaders; have their disputes resolved within communities through traditional mechanisms; and are involved to some extent in traditional customary rituals.

Pacific Islands’ cultures and cultural heritage, therefore, have two distinct characteristics:

1. they are “living cultures”, where the majority of people live and practice their culture on a daily basis;
2. they are by and large “intangible cultures” - because our cultures are not literate, and because almost all material forms of our cultural expression use organic biological materials (which quickly disappear in our tropical environment), our cultural heritage is made up of almost entirely of ‘intangible’ elements that are linked to places in the landscape.  (This is perhaps similar to the Aboriginal culture here, which is rich in “intangible” aspects but has no permanent material forms - such as written texts or buildings – apart from stones and sites).

Culture lies at the heart of sustainable development for the Pacific region. Pacific societies owe much of their continuing social, political, economic and environmental resilience to the central place that traditional cultural practices and institutions occupy in the social fabric. The vitality of Pacific island states’ tradition-based cultures, and the central role they play in the lives of most of the people, offers unique opportunities for demonstrating the role culture can play in sustainable development. From this perspective, in fact, it is not a matter of culture playing a role in or contributing to sustainable development, but rather that development can only be truly sustainable if it is based on and grows out of the culture of the majority of the people.

There is increasing awareness that the protection and promotion of cultural diversity is vital to universal human rights and fundamental freedoms along with securing ecological and genetic diversity. This standpoint is premised on the view that sustainable development is only achievable if there is harmony and alignment between the objectives of cultural diversity and that of social equity, environmental responsibility and economic viability.

Pacific Islands Museums and Cultural Centres, despite being hampered by a number of factors including a scarcity of financial and skilled human resources, a lack of political support, and buildings which do not fulfil the storage needs of collections or even staff themselves, are experienced in dealing with ICH and supporting and promoting “living cultures”. Many Pacific institutions have been developing and managing innovative and highly regarded programs and are passionate about their communities.

Technical equipment, training and the capability of IT infrastructure is a challenge faced by Pacific Islands Museums and Cultural Centres, and managing the diversity of the cultural information they collect is an area where they seek information and advice.

Collecting and keeping people’s stories, histories and oral genealogies is a very great responsibility, and they want to know how to continue to enhance documentation practice to cope with the new demands being placed on their museums. Museums are no longer simply places to store objects. They are now hubs for communication about, and the contextualisation of, the objects they hold, the people who created them and the people who have come to interact with them. Documentation needs to support this new, more socially aware role while continuing to maintain the highest standards of ethical and professional accuracy, and it is in this area that the Museums & Cultural Centres of the Pacific Islands seek the guidance and expertise of their Taiwanese colleagues.

Symposium Themes:

• ICH: definition, significance and conservation principles
• Identifying ICH and practitioners
• Exploring successful models of safeguarding ICH in the Asia-Pacific Region
• Communities: defining, engaging and working with communities
• Collecting, capturing, preserving and making tangible records of the intangible heritage
• ICH and ownership. Legal issues: intellectual property, copyright and patents
• Case studies of ICH practice in the Asia-Pacific Region

Lead Agencies

• Council for Cultural Affairs, Taiwan
• Pacific Islands Museums Association

Co-Facilitators/Discussion Leaders:

Pacific: Mr Ralph REGENVANU – Director, National Cultural Council of Vanuatu
Taiwan: Mr. HUANG Tsai-lang – Director of Department 1, Taiwan Council for Cultural Affairs

Outcomes and further collaboration:

This symposium provides a forum for scholarly dialogue concerning this crucially important topic as well as an opportunity for the practical sharing of information and collegiate support on how to implement policies and activities within daily museum operations and programming.

This symposium will foster cross-cultural understanding and friendship between Taiwanese and Pacific Islands museum and cultural professionals, and allows for the discussion of the following areas:

• collaborative research into cultural routes such as the Lapita Pacific migration,
• exhibition exchange and touring, and
• research into Pacific collections.

A tangible outcome could be the signing of a pre-prepared “MOU” by dignitaries representing PIMA and a Taiwanese cultural/museums agency.

Pacific Islands Presentations

• Vanuatu  - “The Field Worker Network and Sand Drawing Project”
• The Solomon Islands - "Promoting the Custom of Dolphin Calling, an Intangible Cultural Heritage and Eco-Tourism Project”
• New Caledonia - “The Field Worker Network and 2006 Toponymy Program (the collecting and transcribing of oral tradition, and reinstallation of Kanak names on road panels and maps)”
• Fiji - “Identifying Living human treasures through a national cultural mapping programme.”
• Palau - "The Challenges of Inventory and Implementing Intangible Cultural Heritage: The Case of Palau"
• Tonga - “Tongan Intangible Cultural Heritage Preserved: The Lakalaka Dance”
• Samoa - "Passing on Intangible Cultural Heritage to future generations of Samoa".
• Papua New Guinea – “The Annual Highlands Festival as an example of Living Cultural Heritage”