The Azerbaijani Carpet Makers Union (ACMU), founded in January 2010, is a voluntary self-governmental public association of citizens rallied to support Azerbaijani carpet weaving.The ACMU seeks to promote a revival of the powerful spiritual heritage of carpets, the national traditions of the Azerbaijani people, a consolidation of the creative potential of seen figures of society and culture, support for talented children and youth, and creative carpet dynasties. The purpose of the ACMU is also to convey objective information about the unique national culture, rich historical heritage, and diversity of the carpet art of Azerbaijan to the international community.

The food we eat is an important part of culture. It is also an expression of community identity. As American folklorist Millie Rahn writes, The kitchen, historically, is the place where families gather and where the everyday and the ceremonial meet and overlap. Here families interact and share private traditions, expressing identity through their food to each other and to the world. Creativity is alive in this space, from daily mealtimes to more elaborate feasts that mark rites of passage, religious and secular holidays, and other special events. This is where knowledge is passed on, from traditional ways of preparing and using various ingredients, implements, tools, and techniques to legends, stories, anecdotes, and cultural exchanges that have become part of familial and regional folklife. We all eat, and associate different layers of cultural meaning to the food we consume. Explorations of food, then, can be an easy conduit into the complex world of intangible cultural heritage. This article gives several examples from the safeguarding initiatives of the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador that have used foodways as a means to get people thinking about, and engaged with, concepts of cultural transmission and heritage conservation.

The biggest North Korean migrant community outside East Asia is located in a somewhat unlikely place, New Malden, UK, a suburb in southwest London (see Figure 1). Approximately 1,000 North Koreans live alongside the established community of over 12,000 South Koreans. In the foreign kitchen, what North Korean migrants do is recreate authentic traditional North Korean food that they have not had for such a long time. Decades of famine and national isolation have alienated people from basic meals and dishes that are part of the history and traditions of their country.

In December 2011, Rumah Angklung was founded by a group of young people who loved and cared about the Angklung (a traditional Indonesian musical instrument) and finally had the initiative to create a community. That community is now a serious foundation committed to preserving and developing Indonesian art and culture, especially related to angklung.

It had taken a few weeks for roads to be cleared of rockfalls and to be made safe enough for vehicles carrying essential goods and supplies in the wake of the June 2013 flash floods and landslides in the western Himalayan region, in particular the mountainous state of Uttarakhand. A small team from the specialist center that I was associated with, the Centre for Environment Education Himalaya, was traveling to a few of the villages that had been affected, which were also villages in which the center had been working for some years before the natural disaster. Those in the small group were anxious. There had been no way to contact people in the villages nor even local administrators in the sub-district offices. Phone lines had yet to be restored, and mobile phone towers were being slowly replaced. Had there been casualties amongst the groups the center had trained? Were homes and school buildings still standing? No-one would know until they reached.

Many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) concern themselves with biological conservation but fewer explore the need for conservation of intangible cultural heritage (ICH). Pacific Blue Foundation focuses both on biological and cultural conservation, primarily in Fiji, and recognizes fundamental linkages between the two. For example, traditional marine resource governance at the community level often created “tabu” (pronounced tamboo) on their reefs that restricted or prohibited fishing. Modern ecologists who propose marine protected areas (MPAs) recognize Fijian cultural tradition as knowledge the ancestors understood to be healthy for the ecosystem. Pacific Blue Foundation (PBF) has sought to learn the stories of ancestral tabu areas to assist creation of new MPAs. One of the most iconic elements of Fijian ICH is their more than 3,000 years of construction, and navigating double-hulled sailing canoes. Here we briefly explore the role these traditional sailing canoes had in the human migration into Oceania, and the effort PBF has made in the past 15 years to revitalize the construction of these canoes and to envision their role in providing sustainable livelihoods in the future.

Bangladesh is rich in intangible cultural heritage in all the five domains outlined in the 2003 ICH Convention namely oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, and festive events, knowledge about nature and the universe and traditional craftmanship.Four elements are inscribed in the UNESCO representative list and two applications are submitted in 2019. The Ministry of Cultural Affairs has a list with literature of 54 elementsunder the 5 ICH domains, while researchers identified 123 elements. Comprehensive inventorying of living heritages is under process with the Government. Bangladesh, by ratifying 2003 Convention, assumes its obligation of safeguarding these elements of ICH. Among the elements, some are sustainable for the economic output of the objects associated with the elements. Others remain vulnerable for change in lifestyle, knowledge pattern, social and economic advancement, science and technology. Require safeguardfor sustainable development that includes transmission of the ICH elements for generations.

Culture is chiefly perceived as a driving force for sustainable development in the UN’s action plan for people, planet, and prosperity entitled “Transforming Our World: 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’. In this context, there is a foreseeable strength in ICH to generate means for sustainable development. The following issues are considered as starting points of discussion: (1) the methods of aligning commercial activities with ICH safeguarding activities, (2) the possible risks to ICH viability and the ways in which they can be mitigated, and (3) the prospect of moving toward and maintaining a mutual relationship between ICH Safeguarding and development policies.\nKeeping the grassroots level highly pertinent in Session 3, we intend to put various NGOs activities at the center of the discussion, particularly in light of our pursuit to assess their presence in sustainable tourism development and eco‐tourism, looking into the possibility of expanding the role of NGOs in areas such as cultural mapping and gender equality. To end, a plenary discussion will be held. The outcome document will be circulated to share the discussion points of and lessons learned from the meeting.

Traditional navigators are trained to recognize physical signals in, “sea, skies, and stars, memory signals from knowledge of star, swell, and wind compasses… and cultural knowledge recorded in chants, dances, and stories”.

Mataginifale Women’s Group (MWG) was established in Avatele in the 1980s. Originally named Avatele Women’s Group, its members decided to change its name in the 1990s to better reflect the unique status of women. Mataginifale was a female warrior from Avatele born around 700 CE and was a great weaver that created local tapa cloth called hiapo.

Historically, Malaysia (the Malay Peninsula) was known as the Golden Chersonese, and in the past, Malay populations lived in riverine and coastal settlements, which were some of the most important trading hubs in Southeast Asia. The Malay maritime empire was once a large kingdom, stretching from the coast of Vietnam and Cambodia to Southern Thailand, the Malay Peninsula, Singapore, Borneo, Sumatra, Riau, Sulawesi, and Southern Philippines. Across the Malay-speaking world, fabrics embellished with gold were for the rich and powerful, such as the ruler of the kingdom. Besides the golden fabric, songket, Malay embroideries were mostly used by nobility and royals. In the fifteenth century, the Melaka Sultanate instituted sumptuary laws governing the types of ornaments and colors for interior and soft furnishings, such as curtain fringes, bolster ends, cushions, prayer mats and other items. Across the Malay world, the numbers of dais, bolsters, and layers of siting mats, were associated with a certain hierarchy, varying across the regions.

Human has made great progress beyond the speed of biological evolution by using tools. First, human used stones and wood as tools for hunting and gathering, and then invented earth-baked earthenware such as bowls for food, appropriate to farming life. The defects of woodenware and earthenware, however, were obvious. It was not able to contain liquid due to their moisture absorbency, and easily damaged. Earthenware has evolved into glazed ceramic but it required a high-tech kiln with high temperature, accompanied by a technology for metal refining as a key prerequisite. In East Asia, moisture proof and insect proof techniques to coat objects were invented much earlier. That is lacquer technique.\nProduction process of lacquer is delicate and complicated such as handling lacquer sap at the risk of skin disease, creating hot and humid environment for hardening process, etc. Nevertheless, in East Asia, people have used lacquer technique in many regions from the Neolithic Age, knowing its merits earlier on. Lacquer was used for adhesive and surface protection of leather, earthenware, ceramics and metalware. In particular, it has been inextricably linked to wooden objects. Whereas in West Asia and Europe various varnishes mixed with dry oil and resin has been used, in East Asia lacquer was used as a basic varnish in common. That shows that lacquer is great material and technique to represent the commonality of Asian culture.1) This article aims to briefly look into the origin of lacquer technique in Northeast Asia and share the information on it and its current status of transmission.