Maps

Comparing the “World heritage” and the “Intangible cultural heritage” distribution

UNESCO.ORG (data until 2014)

The creation of a list of intangible cultural elements to preserve (ICH, UNESCO) should be understood as a kind of reaction to the vast World Heritage List (WHC, UNESCO), highly politicized “wonders of the world” directory. For many reasons, related to the preservation of ancient monuments, the Western-centric definition of the terms “cultural” or “heritage” or because we find many European countries actively involved in United Nations programs, Europe is over-represented in the World Heritage list.

WORLD HERITAGE SITES – Europe and North America host 48% of the listed items, while these territories account for only 16% of the world population, a rate of 40 items listed for 100M inhabitants. By comparison, the rate is 5/100M in Asia, 10/100M in Africa, 20/100M in the Arab States and 21/100M in Latin America.

INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE – Implicitly, the intangible cultural heritage directory aims to restore a form of balance, including a new element to list. As a result of a political choice to favor the marginalized elements, the number of intangible heritage elements in North America and Europe are less numerous (but still 33% of the new list). Asia, meanwhile, is better highlighted.

Music occupies a prominent place in the ICH list: of the 313 items recorded until 2014, there are 109 musical elements to which are added 74 elements including music.

Credit: Martin Grandjean, (CC-BY-SA), 2015

Curated by Lea Rekow for BifrostOnline

Related

What are the obligations of science and art to each other?

Philosopher Bruno Latour reflects on the difficulty of bringing artists and scientists together in collaborative work. Such collaborations always fail, he notes, unless the artists and scientists can come together to address challenges that lie, in effect, outside their areas of specialization and expertise. When specific difficult challenges require the collaborating parties to seek answers outside their usual repertoire of skills and methods (“when artists and scientists don’t know what they are doing and where they are going”) such collaborations can yield groundbreaking results, by steering specialists from both domains toward a creative fusion that does not proceed from habitual or conventional approaches but which may generate new ways of thinking or seeing.

CAIT Climate Data toolkit

An online platform designed to empower policymakers, researchers, media and other stakeholders with the climate data, visualizations and resources.

Where World Heritage sites are under threat

Percentage of sites where the conservation outlook is of significant or critical concern as of November 2017.

Third-ever global coral bleaching event 2015

Global coral bleaching 2014-2015