How do you preserve the intangible

I had some comments that wanted to make yesterday during the exercise but we were a little pressed for time. I thought the exercise brought up an interesting point about how you go about preserving intangible culture, when a key property of it is that it changes over time. When one of the groups mentioned that some fishermen were no longer fishing due to the danger to their lives and that they had turned to the tourist industry instead, I immediately through of situations in Central America and the Pacific Islands were certain cultural practices had lead to social collapse. I through that it was very important that the community adapt to the present and the future. This did get me thinking about situations in past, like during military conflicts, were physical heritage has been destroyed to save lives. Therefore, I considered that if continuing these practices was leading to death in the community then the community most definitely has the right to give up this practice.

From this I considered how to go about preserving intangible heritage when it is so dynamic, and justifiably so. I therefore considered the work of the historian Herodotus who sort to preserve the intangible heritage of all known cultures of the time in his book ‘Historia’. This leads into the question of why intangible culture should be preserved. Herodotus believed that it is only through understanding the customs of people and how they came to be formed that you can understand their attitudes and decisions. From this he believed that peace and cooperation could be achieved through mutual understanding and respect.

To me it seems that some of these intangible cultural traits cannot be preserved by the community as living history due to ever changing environmental pressures which make them unsustainable. Furthermore, this heritage needs to be preserved to promote understanding and mutual respect. Therefore, the museum can become the mode by which this information is preserved. The museum may shift from collecting material objects to collecting the intangible through video recordings, photographs, audio interviews and written notes.