Based on the accumulated experience over the course of fifteen years since the adoption of the 2003 Convention, Southeast Asia is well known for its diverse and abundant intangible heritage. Many states in this region have already initiated ICH safeguarding plans with active participation of communities.\nHowever, a number of Member States are still having difficulties employing community‐based safeguarding plan and programs. In implementing the 2003 Convention, much attention should be paid to build capacity to support and safeguard a wider range of ICH Stakeholders, including communities, group, and individuals.\nTherefore, this session will provide an opportunity to share experiences and discuss on the roles the community should exercise in safeguarding ICH. In this session, we will discuss the following questions: (1) Do ICH communities, groups, individuals, and practitioners fully recognise the spirit and significance of the 2003 Convention? (2) Are they subsequently assigned to embody appropriate roles?

Peganum harmala L. belongs to the plant family Zygophyllaceae and appears spontaneously in the wide arid and semiarid areas between Western China and the Middle East/North Africa region. It is also istributed in Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Caucasus. P. harmala is a perennial glabrous herb that reaches thirty to one hundred centimeters in height with a short creeping rooting system, white flowers, and three-chamber capsule-type fruits that can contain about fifty black seeds. The roots can reach a depth of five or six meters to adapt to drying soils. The plant tends not to suffer from grazing due to its bitter taste (alkaloid content).

Co-orgarnized by ICHCAP and Hue Monuments Conservation Centre (HMCC), this year’s Asia-Pacific ICH NGO Conference was held in Hue, Vietnam under the theme of ICH NGOs towards Sustainable Development of Communities.

Two frequently used proverbs in Korea are “like a rat caught in a jar” and “the sauce rather than the pot.” The first is used to describe someone caught in a difficult situation, like a rat that has fallen into a large onggi jar while the second means that the taste of the sauce contained within the pot is more important than what the pot looks like and is used to emphasize that content is more important than form.

The arc of cultural heritage is far broader than many realize. For many, the term calls to mind the physical remains of the past, often in the image of ancient buildings and ruins, or the history of a collective. If prompted to define what heritage encompasses in a personal sense, one might think of their own family’s lineage and ancestry. But in either sense, many of us understand heritage to be something outside of the self rather than something that we are a living part of. We are vehicles for living cultural heritage, not just ethnically, socially, or culturally, but physically. Tangible heritage might be best understood as very much alive, close to home, and applicable to each of us when we consider the body as a context for it.\n\nFrom the way we style our hair and the makeup we paint on our faces to the clothes we choose to wear and the adornments we dress up in, we all adopt insignias of culture and express our identities on the physical plain in modes that have been shaped by heritage. Tattooing is one of these mediums. Inking the skin as to permanently brand ourselves with a visual marker communicates something about who we are or what has touched our lives, to others as much as to ourselves. In this practice, the unseen intangible heritage and identity we know and feel is transformed into something tangible and corporeal.\n\nWe are hardly the first people to manipulate the body in such a way. Tattooing has a long history, a tradition adopted from ancient cultures from the Alps to Mongolia, from Greenland to China, from Egypt to Mexico, from Russia to the South Pacific. Whether marking the skin of a newly initiated member of a group, a tribe leader, a spiritual worshipper, a loyal warrior, or an outcast criminal, tattoos carried their potential to express diverse meanings into more recent history and the modern day. We’re all familiar with the sailor’s anchor, the Indian bride’s henna, the biker’s skull and crossbones, the adoption of the tribal tattoo or Chinese character in Western popular culture. But what stands out is not so much the range of meanings and contexts that tattoos might indicate, but rather the instinct to mark one’s skin in a permanent way, a tale as old as time.\n\nIt is striking to me that no matter where in the world these practices developed, so many diverse groups of indigenous ancestors were inclined to physically demarcate themselves and others, developing a technique of self-expression that would live on. I wonder why.\n\nMaybe they all recognized how powerful the skin can be as a medium for message-bearing. Upon this visible and undetachable bodily canvas, the way one is seen by others is manipulated from the first glance. As we dance through this ancient-turned-modern ritual today, whether the symbols we choose speak for themselves or inspire questions about who we are or where we’ve been, we consider ourselves branded for life.\n\nBut ‘for life’ and forever are not the same thing. In the past and at present, tattoos represent an attempt at permanence that is almost endearing in its falsehood. Though the ink on the skin itself may be unremovable, the skin and body itself is not eternal. The corpses discovered across Europe, Asia, the Americas and Oceania that attest to the long history of tattooing remind us that ‘undoable’ physical manipulations we make will last only as long as the body does. Whatever we regard as permanent is never really such, and after a time the tangible becomes intangible, whether we are referring to body or brick. Palpable proof becomes a fairy tale, man becomes myth. The physical is not perpetual, and tangible heritage does not last forever just because it takes material form.\n\nIt’s within this ongoing cycle of permanence and impermanence that cultural heritage is situated. Though we feel compelled to preserve the flesh of the past on personal and broader scales, matter is more delicate than we often accept, and the risk of disintegration is always looming. Tattooing is a poignant example of one of the most effective ways to retain the substance of the past as centuries go by: to keep it alive in practice, even if not in the exact form it once took, with the stories of where it came from accessible for inspiration.\n\nMore of Issabella’s work is available at museandwander.co.uk\n\nPhoto : Traditional Tattooing Tools

Whang-od Oggay, a 102-year-old woman from a mountain tribe in the Philippines, is a living instrument in the continuity of pambabatok, an endangered ancient tattooing technique that chiefly constitutes hand-tapping to create figures on the skin. Believed to be the oldest tattoo artist and the last linkage of her tribe to pambabatok, Whang-od became famous in the internationally when she was featured by Dr. Lars Krutak, an American anthropologist who was the host of Discovery Channel’s Tattoo Hunter in 2009. Pambabatok is argued to be at least a thousand year old intangible cultural heritage (ICH) element.\n\nWhang-od is called a mambabatok, derived from the root word batok that means “to hit”. For her hand-tapping tools, she uses a lemon thorn needle or siit that is attached to the end of a small bamboo stick and another shorter stick for tapping the thorn into the skin. The ink she uses is a mixture of water and soot. Pambabatok, compared to other conventional tattooing techniques, is relatively painful. It is done by applying rhythmic and repetitive pricks on the skin using her traditional hand tools. During my personal visit in Buscalan in 2015 to see Whang-od, I noticed that she will begin tattooing the tourists in the first light of dawn and she will only finish at dusk. There would be days when almost fifty people lined up to get tattooed by her. Sometimes she could not eat because of the blood and flesh that she had been tapping all day.\n\nThe traditional designs of her tattoos come from the symbols of nature and geometric figures significant to the Butbut tribe, an indigenous community living in the village of Buscalan, nestled in the lush terraces of the Cordillera Mountains of Kalinga, a province in the northern part of the Philippines. In the olden days, the tribe was known for their headhunting culture. Warriors battled for land and honor to protect their tribe and village. They would cut off their enemies’ heads and as a reward they would be inked with magnificent tattoos that exude valiance when they return triumphantly to their village. The females also received tattoos as a rite of passage and symbol of beauty. Their tattoos transform girls into women; the women thereafter become eligible for marriage and bearing children. The more tattoos women had, the more attractive they were to the men in the village. Some elders believed that the tattoos could also cure infertility and various illnesses. The culture of headhunting and combat slowly disappeared due to modernization and religious influences. Consequently, protecting the vitality of their ritualistic and performance-based practices never occurred to be a social agenda.\n\nWhen a journalist named Grace, niece of Whang-od, realized that the tattooing heritage will be completely lost when her aunt dies, the transmission of pambabatok. Recently, the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) awarder her with the 2018 Dangal ng Haraya Award for Intangible Cultural Heritage to honor her contribution in raising awareness about the Butbut tribe and safeguarding an ICH element of the Philippines.\n\nPhoto : Whang-od Oggay © Royce Lyssah Malabonga