The topic of intangible natural heritage is new, recently emerging as an important subject of inquiry. It describes the untouchable elements of the environment that combine to create natural objects, and help define our relationship to them. These elements can be sensory, like auditory landscapes, or processes like natural selection. As a concept, intangible natural heritage is growing in prominence, as museums are increasingly charged safeguarding and interpreting the milieux from which their objects originate. This book is a significant advance on the subject of intangible natural heritage; no book on the topic has yet been written and current scholarship is confined to a few isolated papers. As such, there exists a wide variety of perspectives on the topic. Intangible Natural Heritage presents a spectrum of opinion, making the first attempt at a unifying concept on which future work can be based. Authors from Europe, Asia, Australasia, Britain, and North America, address topics on scales from minute insects to sweeping landscapes. The common thread in these explorations is the importance of human relationships with nature that is passed down from generation to generation. In a world that is becoming increasingly fragile, recognizing and fostering these relationships has never been more vital.

The topic of intangible natural heritage is new, recently emerging as an important subject of inquiry. It describes the untouchable elements of the environment that combine to create natural objects, and help define our relationship to them. These elements can be sensory, like auditory landscapes, or processes like natural selection. As a concept, intangible natural heritage is growing in prominence, as museums are increasingly charged safeguarding and interpreting the milieux from which their objects originate. This book is a significant advance on the subject of intangible natural heritage; no book on the topic has yet been written and current scholarship is confined to a few isolated papers. As such, there exists a wide variety of perspectives on the topic. Intangible Natural Heritage presents a spectrum of opinion, making the first attempt at a unifying concept on which future work can be based. Authors from Europe, Asia, Australasia, Britain, and North America, address topics on scales from minute insects to sweeping landscapes. The common thread in these explorations is the importance of human relationships with nature that is passed down from generation to generation. In a world that is becoming increasingly fragile, recognizing and fostering these relationships has never been more vital.

Since the adoption of the World Heritage Convention in 1972, the notion that cultural and natural heritage need to be protected and properly utilized has gained popularity. Over time, however, such utilization concepts were less focused on ideas of sustainability and became increasingly influenced by commercial interests. For the first time, this publication attempts to elaborate the development of the World Heritage Convention, the Convention itself in its different facets and how it evolved into one of the most important UNESCO instruments for the protection of cultural and natural heritage. It will be shown that the protection and utilization of heritage is a highly complex political, participatory and interdisciplinary process. This publication discusses these developments and suggests potential solutions in order to deal with such unintended trends.

This book explores the international legal framework developed by UNESCO to identify and protect world heritage and its implementation at the national level. Drawing on close policy analysis of UNESCO's major documents, extensive professional experience at UNESCO, as well as in-depth analyses of case studies from Asia, Europe, and Latin America, Sophia Labadi offers a nuanced discussion of the constitutive role of national understandings of a universalist framework. The discussion departs from considerations of the World Heritage Convention as Eurocentric and offers a more complex analysis of how official narratives relating to non-European and non-traditional heritage mark a subversion of a dominant and canonical European representation of heritage. It engages simultaneously with a diversity of discourses across the humanities and social sciences and with related theories pertaining not only to tangible and intangible heritage, conservation, and archaeology but also political science, social theory, tourism and development studies, economics, cultural, and gender studies. In doing so, it provides a critical review of many key concepts, including tourism, development, sustainability, intangible heritage, and authenticity.

Almost fifty years have passed since the adoption of the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (the UNESCO World Heritage Convention). With its 194 States Parties, it is the most widely ratified convention within the family of UNESCO treaties on the protection of cultural heritage. The success of this Convention and its almost universal acceptance by the international community of states is due to the great appeal that recognising certain properties as "world heritage" has for national governments. Since the publication of the first Commentary, new problems have arisen in the management of world heritage sites. It has become increasingly difficult to properly monitor the conservation of the ever-growing mass of sites inscribed in the World Heritage List, and to resolve disputes over the formal designation of contested world heritage properties - a problem that has led to the withdrawal of the United States and Israel from UNESCO. New frontiers are now being explored for the expansion of the world heritage idea over marine areas beyond national jurisdiction, and the monopoly of the State in the identification, delineation, and presentation of world heritage properties is being increasingly challenged in the name of indigenous peoples' rights and by local communities claiming ownership over contested cultural sites. At the same time, the regime of world heritage protection has infiltrated other areas of international law, especially international economic law, investment arbitration, and the area of international criminal law. This second edition critically examines the World Heritage Convention against this dynamic evolution of international heritage law to help academics, lawyers, diplomats, and officials interpret and apply the norms of the Convention after half a century of uninterrupted implementing practice by State Parties and Treaty Bodies.

Papers on the experiences and perspectives of the museum communities and the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology.

"Situated at the intersection of scholarship and practice, Heritage Keywords positions cultural heritage as a transformative tool for social change. This volume unlocks the persuasive power of cultural heritage—as it shapes experiences of change and crafts present and future possibilities from historic conditions—by offering new ways forward for cultivating positive change and social justice in contemporary social debates and struggles. It draws inspiration from deliberative democratic practice, with its focus on rhetoric and redescription, to complement participatory turns in recent heritage work.Through attention to the rhetorical edge of cultural heritage, contributors to this volume offer innovative reworkings of critical heritage categories. Each of the fifteen chapters examines a key term from the field of heritage practice—authenticity, civil society, cultural property, cultural diversity, democratization, difficult heritage, discourse, equity, intangible heritage, memory, natural heritage, place, risk, rights, and sustainability—to showcase the creative potential of cultural heritage as it becomes mobilized within a wide array of social, political, economic, and moral contexts.This highly readable collection will be of interest to students, scholars, and professionals in heritage studies, cultural resource management, public archaeology, historic preservation, and related cultural policy fields."