Protecting the intangible

Museums know how to look after a shirt. Looking after the knowledge of how to make one, or the practice of singing at a particular point in a wedding, is a different discipline with its own established methods.

What safeguarding actually means

Not preservation in the museum sense. A living practice changes, and a practice frozen at a chosen moment stops being living.

Safeguarding means supporting transmission: making sure there are practitioners, that there are people learning from them, and that the conditions allowing the practice to continue exist.

The inventory

Ukraine maintains a national inventory of intangible heritage elements, with entries at national and regional level. An entry describes the practice, identifies the community that holds it, records the current bearers and states the risks.

Identifying the bearers is the crucial step. An element without named practitioners is a description of something that has already stopped.

The international listing

Several Ukrainian elements are on the UNESCO lists — the Petrykivka painting tradition, the Cossack songs of the Dnipropetrovsk region, the Kosiv painted ceramics, ornamental tradition and others.

Listing brings visibility and funding, and it also brings a risk: an element that becomes a national symbol attracts pressure to be performed rather than practised.

The consent requirement

The community that holds a practice has to agree to its inscription. That is not a formality: it prevents heritage professionals from listing a practice on behalf of people who did not ask for it.

Who does the work

Regional centres of folk art, museums, university departments and, most importantly, the practitioners themselves. The last group is the one whose time is scarcest.

That a living practice cannot be put in a display case is the hardest part of safeguarding — and the consent requirement seemed to me the most sensible part of it: a community having the last word about its own tradition. The answer to who does the work sits in the same place, I think. Somebody from outside can fund it and document it; they cannot continue it.