Chair’s Scope
Heritage
Heritage refers to the rich and diverse legacy of cultural, historical, and natural elements passed down from previous generations, shaping the identity and values of a community or society.
Intangible heritage encompasses traditions, knowledge, rituals, performing arts, and oral expressions that are not physically tangible but hold immense cultural significance and are transmitted from one generation to another.
Living heritage refers to the dynamic and ever-evolving aspects of intangible heritage, as it is actively practiced and embraced by contemporary communities, keeping the traditions alive and relevant in the present.
Through preserving and promoting their intangible heritage, communities can foster a sense of pride, belonging, and continuity, strengthening their cultural identity.
Festivals, traditional dances, indigenous storytelling, craftsmanship, and culinary practices are examples of living heritage that continue to be practiced and cherished by communities worldwide.
UNESCO plays a crucial role in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage, encouraging nations to identify, protect, and promote their unique living traditions.
The transmission of living heritage often occurs through informal education and mentorship, as knowledge and skills are passed down from elders to the younger generation.
Living heritage not only reinforces social cohesion and cultural diversity but also fosters intergenerational communication and understanding.
As modernization and globalization bring new challenges to traditional practices, safeguarding living heritage becomes essential to maintain the unique identities of diverse communities.
The active involvement of communities in safeguarding their living heritage ensures its sustainability and relevance in a rapidly changing world, ensuring that these treasured traditions endure for generations to come.
The Chair will take active part in the ongoing dialogue about music, culture and tradition, by (a) exploring systematically and analyzing critically the existing major trends in the social sciences and humanities that coincide with UNESCO’s priorities (“Africa” and “Gender Equality”) and (b) repositioning itself against the established views of music as intangible cultural heritage.
In an effort to blend creatively anthropological knowledge with artistic expertise, the Chair’s program will contribute to such discussions and debates through planning and implementing new objectives for research, teaching, academic conferences, as well as musical performances based on heritage knowledge.
Great emphasis will be given to the act and results of representing music as heritage by tracking down the politics and the ethics of representation as evidenced in the trans-local discourses of the various structures and agencies involved in the research, safeguarding and promotion of local, regional, national or international projects.
The Ethnomusicology and Cultural Anthropology Laboratory of NKUA and the Chair’s partners (universities, organizations and other relevant networks) will carry out joint research regarding the structural and cultural impediments to sharing and preserving traditional music.
Undergraduate studies in traditional music, as well as graduate and post-graduate programs in the anthropology of music at the NKUA will serve as the institutional framework for organizing seminars, symposia and conferences on musical heritage with a special focus on Europe and the Arab world.
By cultivating research contributions and collaboration across fields, the main focus of collaboration with all the stakeholders will be on understanding how structures and systems of representing and repositioning intangible cultural heritage work across domains to produce exclusion and inequality, and inclusion and equality.
Moreover, by building relationships among diverse groups and across disciplines, we purport to align our research efforts with the needs of community organizers, policymakers, and other stakeholders in the domain of music as living cultural heritage.
Community-centered collaborations will help inform our research while our scholarship will help community partners and policymakers with strategies and policy, which may increase our mutual effectiveness at many levels. This type of relationship building may move beyond just coalitions toward deeper synergy, and will be strengthened by time and interaction, and ultimately yield a greater capacity to effect change regarding intangible cultural heritage.