Cultural heritage


Cultural heritage is the tangible and intangible legacy of a group or society that is inherited from past generations. Not all legacies of past generations are "heritage"; rather, heritage is a product of selection by society.
Cultural heritage includes tangible culture, intangible culture, and natural heritage. The term is often used in connection with issues related to the protection of Indigenous intellectual property.
The deliberate action of keeping cultural heritage from the present for the future is known as preservation or conservation, which cultural and historical ethnic museums and cultural centers promote, though these terms may have more specific or technical meanings in the same contexts in the other dialect. Preserved heritage has become an anchor of the global tourism industry, a major contributor of economic value to local communities.
Legal protection of cultural property comprises a number of international agreements and national laws.
United Nations, UNESCO and Blue Shield International deal with the protection of cultural heritage. This also applies to the integration of United Nations peacekeeping.

Types of heritage

Cultural property

includes the physical, or "tangible" cultural heritage, such as artworks. These are generally split into two groups of movable and immovable heritage. Immovable heritage includes buildings, large industrial installations, residential projects, or other historic places and monuments. Moveable heritage includes books, documents, moveable artworks, machines, clothing, and other artifacts, that are considered worthy of preservation for the future. These include objects significant to the archaeology, architecture, science, or technology of a specified culture.
Aspects and disciplines of the preservation and conservation of tangible culture include:
"Intangible cultural heritage" consists of non-physical aspects of a particular culture, more often maintained by social customs during a specific period in history. The concept includes the ways and means of behavior in a society and the often formal rules for operating in a particular cultural climate. These include social values and traditions, customs and practices, aesthetic and spiritual beliefs, artistic expression, language and other aspects of human activity. The significance of physical artifacts can be interpreted as an act against the backdrop of socioeconomic, political, ethnic, religious, and philosophical values of a particular group of people. Naturally, intangible cultural heritage is more difficult to preserve than physical objects.
Aspects of the preservation and conservation of cultural intangibles include:
"Natural heritage" is also an important part of a society's heritage, encompassing the countryside and natural environment, including flora and fauna, scientifically known as biodiversity, as well as geological elements, scientifically known as geodiversity. These kinds of heritage sites often serve as an important component in a country's tourist industry, attracting many visitors from abroad as well as locally. Heritage can also include cultural landscapes.
Aspects of the preservation and conservation of natural heritage include:
Digital heritage is made up of computer-based materials such as texts, databases, images, sounds and software being retained for future generations. Digital heritage includes physical objects such as documents which have been digitized for retention and artifacts which are "born digital", i.e. originally created digitally and having no physical form.
Digital heritage also encompasses visual identity records, including the preservation of brand trademarks and logo evolution. These elements contribute to cultural memory by documenting how visual symbols change over time and how they reflect social, commercial and technological development. Such archives help illustrate historical continuity in branding, providing reference points for researchers and design historians.

Protection of cultural heritage

History

There have been examples of respect for the cultural assets of enemies since ancient times. The roots of today's legal situation for the precise protection of cultural heritage also lie in some of the regulations of Austria's ruler Maria Theresa and the demands of the Congress of Vienna not to remove works of art from their place of origin in the war. The 1863 Lieber code, a military legal code governing the wartime conduct of the Union Army also set rules for the protection of cultural heritage. The process continued at the end of the 19th century when, in 1874, at least a draft international agreement on the laws and customs of war was agreed. 25 years later, in 1899, an international peace conference was held in the Netherlands on the initiative of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, with the aim of revising the declaration and adopting a convention. The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 also significantly advanced international law and laid down the principle of the immunity of cultural property. Three decades later, in 1935, the preamble to the Treaty on the Protection of Artistic and Scientific Institutions was formulated. On the initiative of UNESCO, the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict was signed in 1954.
Protection of cultural heritage or protection of cultural goods refers to all measures aimed at protecting cultural property against damage, destruction, theft, embezzlement, or other loss. The term "monument protection" is also used for immovable cultural property. Protection of cultural heritage relates in particular to the prevention of robbery digs at archaeological sites, the looting or destruction of cultural sites and the theft of works of art from churches and museums all over the world and basically measures regarding the conservation and general access to our common cultural heritage. Legal protection of cultural heritage comprises a number of international agreements and national laws.
There is a close partnership between the UN, United Nations peacekeeping, UNESCO, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Blue Shield International.
File:Blue Shield Fact Finding Mission Libyen.jpg|thumb|Karl von Habsburg, on a Blue Shield International fact-finding mission in Libya
The protection of cultural heritage should also preserve the particularly sensitive cultural memory, the growing cultural diversity, and the economic basis of a state, a municipality, or a region. Whereby there is also a connection between cultural user disruption or cultural heritage and the cause of flight. But only through fundamental cooperation, including the military units and the planning staff, with the locals can the protection of world heritage sites, archaeological finds, exhibits, and archaeological sites from destruction, looting, and robbery be implemented sustainably. The founding president of Blue Shield International Karl von Habsburg summed it up with the words: "Without the local community and without the local participants, that would be completely impossible".

Ethics and rationale

Objects are a part of the study of human history because they provide a concrete basis for ideas, and can validate them. Their preservation demonstrates a recognition of the necessity of the past and of the things that tell its story. In The Past is a Foreign Country, David Lowenthal observes that preserved objects also validate memories. While digital acquisition techniques can provide a technological solution that is able to acquire the shape and the appearance of artifacts with unprecedented precision in human history, the actuality of the object, as opposed to a reproduction, draws people in and gives them a literal way of touching the past. This poses a danger as places and things are damaged by the hands of tourists, the light required to display them, and other risks of making an object known and available. The reality of this risk reinforces the fact that all artifacts are in a constant state of chemical transformation so that what is considered to be preserved is actually changing – it is never as it once was. Similarly changing is the value each generation may place on the past and on the artifacts that link it to the past. Cultural heritage is addressed not only through preservation and conservation practices, but also through policy, governance, and Cultural Planning frameworks at the municipal and regional level.
The equality or inseparability of cultural preservation and the protection of human life has been argued by several agencies and writers, for example, former French president François Hollande stated in 2016
File:Responsible development.webm|thumb|Kautilya Society in Varanasi - When heritage protection becomes a fight for legality and participation →
Classical civilizations, especially Indian, have attributed supreme importance to the preservation of tradition. Its central idea was that social institutions, scientific knowledge, and technological applications need to use a "heritage" as a "resource". Using contemporary language, we could say that ancient Indians considered, as social resources, both economic assets and factors promoting social integration. Ethics considered that what had been inherited should not be consumed, but should be handed over, possibly enriched, to successive generations. This was a moral imperative for all, except in the final life stage of sannyasa.
What one generation considers "cultural heritage" may be rejected by the next generation, only to be revived by a subsequent generation.