ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides a critical examination of intangible heritage on both conceptual and practical levels. It explores intangible heritage not only in the international sphere of cultural diplomacy, but also, via a more grounded approach, in the complexities of twenty-first-century heritage and museum practice. The book explains examination of cultural preservation: the effort to protect, conserve, or safeguard the traces of past for the future, which constitutes a key narrative of modernity. It explores the idea of the twenty-first-century museum as an institution that grapples with multiple constituencies and engages with calls for a reinvented museology. The book examines intangible heritage on the global and local as well as the intellectual and operational levels. It makes a further call for a multidimensional examination of intangible heritage as something that is bound up in the interrelations of tradition, modernity, cultural change, and authenticity.
