Limiting the list : human rights and intangible cultural heritage

UNESCO's Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage came into force in April 2006, signalling a major expansion of the global system of heritage protection from the tangible to the intangible. It is an expansion that some heritage professionals see as opening up a Pandora's box of confusions and complexities. The conservation of inanimate objects tangible sites and monuments and artefacts - is difficult enough; but the protection of heritage embodied in people raises new sets of ethical and practical issues. The paper canvasses these concerns and focuses on how the notion of human rights must be used as a way of limiting and shaping the Intangible List. In particular it outlines the ways in which the protection and preservation of cultural heritage is linked to 'cultural rights' as a form of human rights. This linkage is not clearly recognised by cultural heritage practitioners in many countries, who view their work merely as technical, or even by human rights workers, despite the abundance of opportunities around the world to witness people struggling to assert their cultural rights in order to protect their heritage and identity.

Garden & landscape heritage:a crisis of tangible & intangible comprehension and curatorship

The cultural landscape of George Town, Penang, Malaysia, embraces the historic enclave of George Town as well as a range of other significant colonial vestiges adjacent to the entrépôt. Many of these landscapes cannot be isolated from the énclave as they are integral to and part of its cultural mosaic and character. Perhaps the most important are the Penang Hill hill-station landscape and the 'Waterfall‘ Botanic Gardens. The latter is an under-valued 'garden of the empire‘—a garden that significantly underpinned the development and historical and botanical stature of the Singapore Botanic Gardens.This paper reviews the cultural significance of colonial botanic gardens as they were established around the world during the scientific explosion of the late 1800s. It addresses their position within World Heritage listings, and considers the role, significance and importance of the 'Waterfall‘ Botanic Gardens within this context, within the concept of 'cultural landscapes‘, and critiques its absence from the recent World Heritage Listing of the colonial enclaves of Georgetown and Meleka in Malaysia.

Unbearable pressures on paradise? : Tourism and heritage management in Luang Prabang, a world heritage site

This article critically appraises and evaluates tourism strategies and heritage management in Luang Prabang, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, a Unesco-designated ‘world heritage’ city. Luang Prabang is widely regarded as one of the most significant heritage cities in Southeast Asia. The city is renowned for its Buddhist and royal culture and also its historic vernacular Lao, French, and Lao-French architecture. The city earned world heritage status in 1995, but since that time the boom in in-bound Asian tourism has put pressures on Luang Prabang’s authenticity and, for some, called into question the validity of its world heritage status. This article examines these substantial and wide-ranging pressures and argues that the growth in tourism and the treatment of Luang Prabang’s heritage are symptoms of broader regional processes of political and economic change, including the expansion of Chinese and Korean investments and the growth of intra-regional tourism. The authors argue that it is unreasonable to expect traditional heritage management mechanisims, including the world heritage listing, to be able to cope with the pressures on sites like Luang Prabang. The very least that is required, the authors contend, is an expanded understanding of the context in which heritage places sit, and the authors make a case that the cultural landscapes approach, combined with explicit concerns for intangible heritage and poverty alleviation, must be at the core of any strategy for long-term protection of the city’s cultural values.

Value relevance of information in hi-tech industries in Australia : accounting information and intangible asset disclosures

The main objective of this study is to test the value relevance of financial and non-financial information in high-tech industries in Australia. Ninety-one companies were selected from the sectors of Pharmaceuticals, Biotechnology and Life Sciences; Technology, Hardware and Equipment; and Telecommunication Services of ASX for the analysis. Both financial and non-financial sections of annual reports were scrutinized in order to obtain data for the analysis. The unaudited sections of annual reports were particularly analysed using NVivo to obtain the word-count of intangible assets. Ohlson’s (1995) Equity Valuation Model (modified for the intangible assets disclosures) was explicitly applied to examine the value relevance of financial and non-financial information. The overall results provide evidence that book value is the most significant factor and earnings are the least significant factor in deciding share prices in high-tech industries in Australia. This finding supports the previous studies that showed value relevance declined in earnings but increased in book value. This research proved that voluntary disclosures of intangible assets are value relevant, providing support for the previous US and Australian studies and the conclusion that investors probably increasingly rely upon alternative information sources.

Photosharing on Flickr: intangible heritage and emergent publics

This paper argues that Flickr, a popular ‘photosharing’ website, is facilitating new public engagements with world heritage sites like the Sydney Opera House. Australian heritage institutions (namely libraries and museums) have recently begun to employ Flickr as a site through which to engage communities with their photographic archives and collections. Yet Flickr is more than an ‘online photo album’: it is a social and cultural network generated around personal photographic practices. Members can form ‘groups’: self‐organised communities defined by shared interests in places, photographic genres, or the appraisal of photographs. These groups are public spaces for both visual and textual conversations – complex social negotiations involving personal expression and collective identity. For one group, the common interest is the Sydney Opera House, and their shared visual and textual expressions – representations of this building. This paper argues that such socio‐visual practices themselves constitute an intangible heritage. By drawing on the work of scholars Jose Van Dijck and Nancy Van House, Dawson Munjeri and Michael Warner, the paper proposes that this enactment of intangible heritage is implicated in the broader cultural value of the Sydney Opera House

World within no more

The tiny Kelabit community of the central highlands of Borneo was isolated and unconnected with the world outside of the highlands until the middle of the 20th Century. Their response to contact has been to embrace education and seek to understand the language and ways of outsiders. They have achieved high rates of tertiary qualifications and Kelabits now hold major professional, business and government positions in Sarawak and Malaysia disproportionately to the size of their population. The consequence has been a loss of cultural practices and langauge and now they are concerned that they are losing their distinct Kelabit identity.

This film was made as part of the development of a museum proposal and to identify the significant intangible cultural heritage through which the Kelabits wish to preserve and express their identity.