ABSTRACT
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) shares the widespread contemporary popular and academic concern about globalisation and responds by making the protection of ‘cultural diversity’ the pivot of its overall cultural policy. In particular, the ‘threat of globalisation’ is assumed to be especially dangerous for the most recent UNESCO heritage domain, Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage refers to the issue of globalisation in the preamble, recognising that:
the processes of globalisation and social transformation, alongside the conditions they create for renewed dialogue among communities, also give rise, as does the phenomenon of intolerance, to grave threats of deterioration, disappearance and destruction of the intangible cultural heritage, in particular owing to a lack of resources for safeguarding such heritage.
