Hi, guys.
Today I want to talk to you about ICH, intangible cultural heritage.
It's a very unfortunate term.
Intangible cultural heritage - what does that mean?
In French it translates as "immaterial heritage,"
but is it immaterial?
Well, yes, but no.
I prefer to call it living culture or dynamic traditions.
Now, my interest in ICH, I think came from my childhood.
I grew up in a bilingual home, so my mother would speak Irish to me,
but the rest of the family spoke English,
so as a child, I was aware of different cultures and traditions.
This was no help to me, though, in 1992,
when I met my future German mother-in-law.
She didn't speak English, and I didn't speak German.
Imagine not being on speaking terms with your mother-in-law.
I think most of you are too young for that,
but believe you me,
not being able to speak to your German mother-in-law
is an incredibly difficult experience.
And I soon realized that there is much more differences between us,
even though we're near neighbors, in European terms,
than simply language.
Later on, when I went to work in Germany,
I found even more problems.
Um, marking time is one issue.
If I make an appointment with you at 10:30,
that is the time I expect you to turn up.
However, in Germany,
if you make an appointment with someone for halb zehn,
they will actually turn up an hour earlier.
We mark time in terms of time that is gone past;
they mark time in terms of time that is to come.
My German husband and myself often disagree on colors.
I come from a land that is often described as having 40 shades of green,
and actually, in Irish Gaelic, we have two words for green:
we have "glas" and we have "uaine."
Now, glas is for a chilly morning, a gray horse, green grass,
but we would use uaine for a bus.
Now, you say to me,
"What's the difference between the green bus and the green grass?"
Well, actually, it's very hard to translate into English,
but I suppose the best I could say is grass grows, therefore grass is glas;
a bus does not grow, therefore the bus is uaine.
So,
many cultures have many different languages, expressions, traditions -
all part of intangible cultural heritage, or ICH.
Now, you may have seen in last week's newspapers
how it has been discovered with the new thesaurus
that there are 421 words in Scots for snow.
That actually surprises me a bit.
If you said to me it was 421 words for rain,
I would expect that.
But apparently, the Scots beat the Inuit for words for snow.
The Inuit are supposed to have 50 words for snow,
but actually that has since been described as a hoax.
Okay, so what is the value of that?
Well, I think the value of that is huge.
First of all, local languages reflect the local biodiversity.
They also create a sense of belonging and social cohesion,
but also there's a whole industry about Scots.
You can buy Gruffalo in Scots; you can buy loads of books in Scots.
You know yourselves, you can buy tea towels,
you can buy cups, you can buy baby T-shirts -
all expressing the words in Scots.
So there's a whole economic industry going on here as well.
Now, oral traditions and expressions are just one part of ICH,
but there are many others.
Performing arts is another,
and here I put up a picture
of what we would call one of our local folk stars, Gary West.
Now, Gary West is one of the many people
that have played in the Celtic Connection festivals,
which happens every January in Glasgow.
Now, the Celtic Connections festival started in 1994,
and since then, it has grown year after year after year,
and a study in 2007 found
that for every pound invested in this festival,
31 pounds came back,
so ICH has strong economic potential.
Performing arts is another example of ICH.
I don't know how many of you have enjoyed the Beltane Festival like I did,
but Beltane is one of the many rituals and social practices and festivals
that takes place in Scotland every year.
Now, rituals, social practices, and festivals
are another very important part of ICH.
And what are they good for?
They're good for the economy.
Think of all the tourists that come to see Beltane.
They're good for our mental health and well-being.
I mean, consider how good you feel at a fire festival.
Basically, Beltane is a fire festival.
They're also good for tourism and mixing with the locals
and marking the seasons, so they create a sense of environment.
I think one of the most underestimated contributions Scotland makes to ICH
is in terms of knowledge and practices concerning the universe.
And I just take as an example, John Muir.
Now, John Muir was born in Dunbar, but spent a lot of time in America,
and there he is known as the "Father of National Parks,"
because John Muir had a vision for nature,
a vision that we should all enjoy our leisure in nature,
that we should all feel good in nature,
and that nature should be available to everybody.
Well, it's not just about nature and mental health and well-being;
it's also about the economy.
So, we now have a new John Muir Way,
a 130-mile-long route which is bound to bring in the nature tourists.
Traditional skills is also a very important part of ICH,
and I would like to point to just one example.
In the photograph here, we have basket-making,
but the example I would like to point to
is a special example to me which is in government,
and it's called the GalGael Trust.
And the GalGael Trust was set up in the '90s
with a desire to give people who had been marginalized
or people who find life challenging,
a new aim in life.
They describe it as giving people a chisel with which to carve out the future.
And they particularly focus on boat-building.
Now, you may say,
"What's the value of traditional craftsmanship?"
But as you know, in this technological age,
there is a great desire for people
to purchase and engage with traditional crafts.
That's, of course, also good for the environment
because usually people like this don't exploit local resources,
but think about what they can hand on for the next generation.
Now, if all of that hasn't convinced you yet
that ICH is really important,
I'd like to take a few more examples.
You may say to me, "Yeah, that's all old-fashioned stuff.
It's all for old people; it's nothing to do with me."
But actually, it isn't.
Many of the tradition bearers of ICH are way ahead of us in technology.
Consider, for example, the Samis.
They, in the old days, would, with their reindeer husbandry,
would gather the reindeer on sleighs.
Do they do that now? No.
They use snow scooters.
Or here, I have an example of the Foxwoods Resort in Connecticut,
a huge enterprise with casinos, spas, golf courses -
a huge industry.
Now, that huge industry is owned by one of the Native American people,
who use the income from that for their tribal reservations.
So again, the economic dimension of ICH is extremely important.
Another example would be the Amazon Indians who use Google Earth.
Now, let me tell you how this happened.
It happened very simply.
One day, the local chief went into an internet café.
He saw Google Earth
and quickly realized the potential it would have for his people.
So he invited Google Earth in,
and they came,
and they trained the tribespeople
to make YouTubes of their elders recording their stories,
how to tag their stories, and put them up on the internet.
Later on, they came back,
and they trained these people how to use mobile phones
because one of the problems the Amazon Indians have
is illegal logging or illegal deforestation of their lands.
So now what they do is, if somebody's up to something,
they take photographs and put it up on Google Earth.
So that is a perfect example
of traditional wisdom with modern technology.
But of course, there's more.
ICH, intangible cultural heritage, is all about social inclusion,
and here I have an example.
I was with guests last Saturday night, and they were telling me
about this festival from Bengali which celebrates the goddess Durga,
and it's about gathering clay from the homes of prostitutes
to make the icon of this goddess every year.
All the activities around this festival
place a very strong emphasis on social inclusion.
Another example I would like to take is one called Art for India,
and this was an initiative which looked at traditional art forms
and discovered they were dying,
and they were dying - it was a bit of a catch-22 -
they were dying, there was no opportunities for artists to perform,
there was no income coming from it,
so they generated a whole new revival of these arts,
created opportunities for the artists to showcase their art,
and created networks.
So here we've another example of traditional crafts plus the economy -
everybody gains.
Now, if all that doesn't convince you that ICH is worth being passionate about,
I would like to turn finally to the notion of ICH being used
as a tool of reconciliation or conflict amelioration.
We're all familiar with examples from ISIS recently,
destroying heritage sites - tangible heritage - as acts of war.
Well, ICH can be harnessed to ameliorate those acts of war.
Um, here, um -
another example of intangible heritage that I should refer to first
is the Mostar Bridge,
which was really destroyed
to destroy the memory of peoples working together.
In this case, it was the Bosnians and the Croats.
So destroy the tangible heritage, destroy the memory.
And of course, ICH is all about memory,
and lots of wars are about memory and about the past.
The problem is that these wars
are not necessarily about the facts of the past;
they are about the interpretation of the past.
And very often war is caused
because different people interpret the past differently,
and they're often in conflict with one another.
And here's where ICH can come in,
because ICH can be used to sit down,
get people to talk about their understandings of the past,
and at least -
even if one doesn't agree with the other side -
at least come into dialogue with them.
A very good example of that happened in Northern Ireland,
where they called it "healing through remembering,"
and basically they set up conversation workshops
for people who had different and conflicting interpretations of the past
so that at least they could come to an understanding
of what the other side thought.
And so it was with great pleasure, actually,
that I attended Derry / Londonderry
celebrating its first UK City of Culture in 2013.
Hopefully you recognize the character of Nessie here.
This was a big pageant about the character Columba,
who in the past had divided communities known as Columba or Colmcille,
but with the UK City of Culture,
they sat down,
reconciled their memories, told a new story -
a new story which harnessed ICH,
or intangible cultural heritage,
to create a new common shared heritage for the city
with a view to economic benefit for all.
So hopefully by now I've convinced you
that ICH is something worth thinking about.
It's not just about the past; it's about the future.
It's about social inclusion.
It's about the economy.
It's about caring for our environment.
It's about me; it's about you;
it's about future generations.
Go raibh maith agat.
(Applause)