Intangible cultural heritage: safeguarding embodied Creole cultures

In principle, the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage aims to 'ensure the visibility of the intangible cultural heritage and awareness of its significance, and to encourage dialogue which respects cultural diversity' (UNESCO, Text of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Retrieved May 8, 2022, from https://ich.unesco.org/en/convention, 2003). In practice, however, intangible cultural heritage is vulnerable to value judgements made by national institutions, which may be limited in their capacity to certify the significance of cultural practices or to support them in ways that enable them to thrive. Nevertheless, the Convention provides welcome recognition of the role of the non-artefactual aspect of cultural heritage and importantly, by adopting the notion of 'safeguarding' rather than 'preserving' acknowledges the living nature of cultural practices. This is found to be particularly valuable in relation to examples of Creole cultural practices which sustain Creole identities that may be vulnerable in a global, post-colonial context. However, the designation of cultural practices as 'intangible' may work against full consideration of the interrelationships between embodied practices, the materials utilised and the physical and social contexts within which they take place. In contrast, it is argued that in developing approaches to safeguard cultural heritage, more attention should be directed towards facilitating the embodied interactions between people, things and place through which some forms of culture are constantly being re-created.