Material Innovations

UNESCO defines intangible heritage as: All forms of traditional and popular or folk culture, so basically, collective works originating in a given community and based on tradition. We can look at it as the preservation of highly crafted systems of living.

Style or dress is a matter of craft that gets passed on through visual example. Portland style hearkens back to our logging roots, which are manifest in plaid, beards, and our addiction to all things Pendleton. Culturally crafted style is a big part of cultural identity.

Food customs and culinary traditions are essential to every culture. The explosion of the foodcarts is one example of how new cultural customs are continually being made. Although street food is an old idea, it is just taking root as a big part of Portland’s personality. As for community gardens, farmer’s markets, and growing one’s own food, these are consistently staple values of the city.

Intangible heritage is a series of learned processes along with the knowledge, skills and creativity that inform and are developed by them, so even culturally accepted and encouraged modes of transportation can be a form of heritage. Bike culture is largely an observed and learned custom within this community. Most people don’t move here being fixed-gear bike aficionados—rather, it is an intangible part of Portland’s core culture.

Music is an exemplar of the facet of intangible heritage that strives to protect human creativity. Portland’s music scene is a particularly thriving entity and the reason it is able to be so is that the culture here supports, feeds into, and safeguards the music industry. People here love music, and so it continues to remain an honored and valuable part of our cultural character.

The cultivation of safe places to come together within the community is largely a craft in and of itself, and Portland has excelled at this through the careful crafting of things like beer and coffee. The continuity of intangible heritage applies not merely to artefacts, but above all to persons, and to their entire habitat, which largely includes their social world. The social world of Portland involves a lot of time with finely-crafted beverages, representing a very laid-back society in general.  These independent brew and coffee houses also reflect a staunch tradition of staying local and supporting our local economy.

Moving on to Suriname, because of its incredible cultural diversity, there is a wealth of oral traditions, customs, languages, music, dance, rituals, festivities, traditional medicine, culinary arts and all kinds of special skills connected with the material aspects of culture, that can be understood as symbols of intangible heritage.

Suriname has a rich multi-ethnic heritage, including the Boeroes (or the Dutch), Amerindian, Hindoestanen, Javanese, Chinese, Creoles, Brazilians, and a group of runaway slaves that reinvented their own thriving culture in the rain forest, called the Maroons.

The architecture of Suriname, and particularly Paramaribo, reflects the diversity of influences that have had a hand in shaping this capital city and the surrounding country.  There are old-world styles of building seen here, but also a specifically Surinamese mish-mash of different architecture styles, that makes it a unique tradition in and of itself.

Because of the wide range of cultures represented here, there is much religious diversity. This picture shows the rather rare phenomenon of a synagogue being located right next door to a mosque. This represents a kind of living community that cannot be preserved in any tangible fashion, particularly if one of these buildings were to be destroyed.

Another facet of sustaining heritage is the products that a community creates and the resources, spaces and other aspects of social and natural context necessary to their sustainability.  These processes provide living communities with a sense of continuity with previous generations and are important to cultural identity, as well as to the safeguarding of cultural diversity and creativity of humanity. These images reflect various ways of making a living in Suriname, whether in the markets, or fishing, or growing and exporting goods. Some of the main exports include Bauxite, gold, oil, iron ore, fish and shrimp rice, bananas, timber, and citrus fruits.

Here you see a wide variety of more traditional types of dress, which may seem trivial, but we are thinking about intangible heritage as a totality, rather than as an inventory of individual characteristics. This system of preservation calculates the intangible value of a living system, be it natural or cultural.

The main focus of intangible heritage is sometimes referred to as folklore, which always exists in a community context. Folklore by definition is not the unique creation of an individual; it exists in versions and variants rather than in a single, original, and authoritative form, it is generally created in performance and transmitted orally, by custom or example, rather than in tangible form (writing, notating, drawing, photographs, recordings).

“While persistence in old life ways may not be economically viable and may well be inconsistent with economic development, the valorization of those life ways as heritage (and integration of heritage into economies of cultural tourism) is economically viable, consistent with economic development theory, and can be brought into line with national values of cultural uniqueness and modernity.”

In essence, intangible heritage is the preservation of a metaculture—the entire way of life for a group of people. “There is no community without embodied knowledge that is transmitted orally, gesturally, or by example,”  and it is this knowledge that we hope to pass on for many generations to come.