Heritage Practices – Tangible and Intangible

Contesting Memorial Spaces in the Asia-Pacific

SPECIAL SESSION I: Heritage Practices – Tangible and Intangible

ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS

TOSHIYUKI KONO is President of ICOMOS (the International Council on Monuments and Sites), and Executive Vice-President of Kyushu University. He also serves on the Governing Board of the International Research Center of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region (C2 Center of UNESCO), and on the Committee for Global Cultural Heritage Governance of the International Law Association (ILA). Among his many other roles, he is a Director of the International Academy of Commercial and Consumer Law. In 2019, he was the recipient of the Reimar Lüst Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany). Since 1986, he has been an Associate, Full and Distinguished Professor at the Faculty of Law, Kyushu University.

LILA RAMOS SHAHANI is the former Secretary-General of the Philippine National Commission to UNESCO, during whose term the Philippines succeeded in obtaining four UNESCO designations for the country: in Intangible Cultural Heritage, Memory of the World and Creative Cities. Prior to her work with UNESCO, she served as Assistant Secretary and Head of Communications of the Poverty Cluster in the Philippine Cabinet, as Spokesperson for the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking, and as Assistant Secretary and Head of Communications of the National Anti-Poverty Commission. She has also been Deputy Director of the Museum of Philippine Humanities at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and has taught at the Asian Institute of Management, the Ateneo School of Government and the University of the Philippines.

This Roundtable offered a unique opportunity to reflect upon and discuss the practices of heritage and memory that exist within national and international organizations, as seen by those involved in their designation and implementation. The increasingly contested nature of heritage recognition and conservation appears to cut across the cosmopolitan values enshrined in the international bodies responsible for recognizing this ‘universal’ heritage. The Roundtable’s two distinguished speakers shared their thoughts on:
- What this contestation mean for claims regarding the universal value of specific examples of material heritage?
- Is it possible that heritage could help to reduce contestation, rather than providing yet another arena for national competition?
- And do notions of intangible heritage provide a more suitable, or less contentious, vehicle through which to celebrate humanity’s achievements?