Cultural Heritage on the Web: Applied Digital Visual Anthropology and Local Cultural Property Rights Discourse

Abstract

The 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage specifies that communities are to be full partners in efforts to safeguard their intangible cultural heritage. Yet the notion of safeguarding has been complicated by the politics and mechanisms of digital circulation. Based on fieldwork in British Columbia and Thailand, I show that community-based productions of multimedia aimed at documenting, transmitting, and revitalizing intangible heritage are productive spaces in which local cultural property rights discourses are initiated and articulated. I argue that digital heritage initiatives can support decision making about the circulation-or restriction-of digital cultural heritage while drawing attention to the complexities of safeguarding heritage in the digital age.

Embodied Interactions with a Sufi Dhikr Ritual: Negotiating Privacy and Transmission of Intangible Cultural Heritage in “Virtual Sama”

“…Digital recording technologies have been seen as helpful in this regard, creating documentary surrogates that can be shared and archived with the intention of facilitating learning and transmission in new forms (Hennessy 2012). However, when intangible cultural practices are endangered by unstable minority-state relationsin this case, such as those of Uyghur Sufi practitioners in China -digital documentation of these practices is no longer helpful and may place practitioners at risk.…”

Preservation of Intangible Cultural Heritage Using Advance Digital Technology: Issues and Challenges

“…According to Cruikshank (1992) although tangible and intangible heritage have been treated as separate fields of study, but both are related in the aspects of representing as well as denoting a strong cultural symbol and identities in their own context through things and also words. Tangible heritage such as artifacts and natural environment and intangibles heritage such as myths, folklores, ancestral line and cultural manifestations including their language, food, traditional dances plus everyday ritual and norms (Boamah et al, 2012;Hennessy, 2012;Sun, 2010;Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention, 2003;Cultural Property Convention, 1954).…”

“…Within the four categories that had been stated by the Operational Guidelines 2015 in their World Heritage List, cultural heritage has the most distinctive differences among the categories hence the difference being most appreciated between movable and immovable forms where the former are often referred as intangible cultural heritage meanwhile the latter as tangible cultural heritage (Hennessy 2012;Sun 2010;Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention, 2003).…”

Archive to repertoire: Motion capture & motion sensing data for digital intangible heritage (DIH)

“…Hence, the study would benefit both theorists and practitioners in the context of DIH by stimulating the intellectual encounters and cultural interchanges. Additionally, it will contribute to the UNESCO's stated ambition of safeguarding the cultural diversity and creativity of humanity through "the process of collective recreation" and "formal or non-formal education" [6]. …”