1. What is intangible cultural heritage?
Intangible cultural heritage is knowledge, skills, customs, cultural expressions, and related objects, artifacts, and spaces that are practiced and passed down through generations by communities, groups, and individuals and form their cultural identity, are constantly passed down, protected, recreated, created, and have historical, cultural, and scientific value. (Clause 1, Article 3 of the Law on Cultural heritage of Vietnam 2024)
2. Types of intangible cultural heritage
According to Article 10 of the Law on Cultural heritage of Vietnam 2024, intangible cultural heritage includes the following types:
– Oral expression and tradition include forms of information expression in language, speech, writing, characters and folk literature;
– Folk performing arts include music, dance, singing, traditional theater and other forms of folk performance;
– Social customs and beliefs include regular, stable practices that express the community’s concepts and beliefs, through rituals associated with traditional customs and practices that bear the cultural identity of the subject community;
– Traditional festivals include ritual practices and folk cultural activities of the community, performed cyclically in relevant cultural spaces;
– Folk knowledge includes knowledge about nature and the universe, human health and life, labor, production, disease prevention, treatment, cuisine, clothing and other folk knowledge;
– Traditional crafts include manual practices using knowledge, skills, techniques, know-how, art, together with tools, objects, artifacts, and natural materials, to create products bearing the cultural identity of the host community.
