Paperback Edition of Sustaining Support for Intangible Cultural Heritage Now Available

Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) has recently grown as an analytical construct for documenting and interpreting culture, and as a canonical term to support official concepts of heritage. ICH, while compelling scholars to explore its multiple forms of expressive culture, has become codified through UNESCO, specifically within the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of ICH.

Sustaining Support for Intangible Cultural Heritage explores case studies from Gabon, India, Mozambique, Sri Lanka, and the USA to represent diverse positionalities and voices articulating the complexities, ambiguities and uncertainties within heritage discourses. The chapters illustrate how ICH, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, has become an analytical resource and a proscriptive device for safeguarding, presenting, and interpreting culture to a range of constituents, and will serve as a useful resource in the classroom for a range of fields, as well as for scholars and practitioners.

Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya, FRAS, is Visiting Professor at Ritsumeikan University, Japan, Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in the School of Advanced Study of the University of London. She is a member of ICOMOS Sri Lanka, and is the author of six books, including The Portuguese in the East: A Cultural History of a Maritime Trading Empire and The African Diaspora in Asian Trade Routes and Cultural Memories.

Mariana Pinto Leitão Pereira is a PhD Candidate at the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, researching how diaspora communities negotiate identity through cultural heritage. She worked as an archaeologist and heritage expert in Macau, and is a member of ICOMOS Portugal. Her publications include The Macanese Encontros: Remembrance in Diaspora ‘Homecomings’.

Gregory Hansen is Professor of Folklore and English at Arkansas State University, where he also teaches in the Heritage Studies Doctoral Program. He has also worked as a public folklorist for a range of organisations across the USA, and his scholarship focuses on applied cultural work and roots music. His publications include Florida Fiddler: The Life and Times of Richard Seaman.