Amulet Atlas

organizationsUNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage

also: the 2003 Convention · Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage · ICH

organizationEverywhere

The UNESCO programme run under the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. It lists practices, not objects. A charm cannot be inscribed; the craft of making it, the festival it is sold at or the rite it belongs to can be. States Parties nominate, and an intergovernmental committee meets annually and decides.

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When

Convention adopted 2003; inscriptions annual since still carried cited

Period2003 to now
How the date is knowntextual — a dated text describes it

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The story

Article 2 of the Convention defines intangible cultural heritage as traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants — oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe, and the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts. Those are the five domains.

Two statements in the Convention's own summary matter more than the lists. The first is that intangible cultural heritage is "traditional, contemporary and living at the same time" — it is not a survival, and an element does not have to be old. The second is that it is "community-based: intangible cultural heritage can only be heritage when it is recognized as such by the communities, groups or individuals that create, maintain and transmit it". A state cannot inscribe a practice over the heads of the people doing it.

There are three registers: the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding, and the Register of Good Safeguarding Practices. The committee meets annually to evaluate nominations proposed by States Parties and decide whether or not to inscribe them.

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Now

What inscription is not: a ranking, a mark of quality, a property title, a trademark, or a bar on anyone making or selling anything. UNESCO's own wording is that intangible cultural heritage "is not merely valued as a cultural good, on a comparative basis, for its exclusivity or its exceptional value". Inference — this atlas therefore counts an inscription as attention paid and never as a verdict, and it never reads an absence from the lists as evidence that a practice is less real. Most of the practices in these records have never been nominated by anybody.

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What this is near

traditionThai wichathe kind of living craft tradition the Convention's traditional-craftsmanship domain is written fortraditionEngimonoa shrine-linked making and selling practice of the sort the lists take intraditionTaonga Māoria tradition where the community-recognition clause does the work, not the listcontrastAustralian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studiesthe Australian institute often confused with this programme; its language collection sits on UNESCO's Memory of the World register insteadcontrastThe Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Actthe contrast in kind: a binding national statute about objects, against an international list about practicesstoryWho owns a charmthe long read on ownership, where inscription is the thing most often mistaken for a property claimstoryThe fake marketthe long read on authentication; an inscription settles nothing about whether a given object is what a seller says it is

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

orgBujeokthe body that listed the Jeju Yŏngdŭng gut in 2009, one of the rites these talismans are handed out at the end oforgEkekothe body Bolivia nominated Alasitas to in March 2011orgKeris pusakathe body that inscribed the Indonesian kris in 2005orgMartenitsathe body that inscribed it in 2017, on a file four countries submitted togetherorgIlla practicethe body Bolivia's Minister of Cultures nominated Alasitas to in March 2011; Peru declared the feast and its miniatures national heritage in 2016orgTaonga Māorithe international framework where the community-recognition clause, rather than a list, is the part that does the work hereorgThe red threadthe body whose Representative List carries the martenitsa and the mărțișorcontrastAustralian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studiesthe UNESCO instrument this institute is often assumed to work under; its language collection is on a different UNESCO registerorgFree to usethe register that raises the same question at state scale — who may list, and who may reuse, somebody else's practice

Where this came from

Elsewhere

Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.

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