Our May heritage cafe will focus on our Intangible Cultural Heritage following the news that the UK has finally sign the UNESCO treaty to protect vulnerable global Intangible Cultural Heritage.
The May Argyll & Bute Museums & Heritage Forum online Heritage cafe is focused on beginning to explore how to recognise, collect, collate our Intangible Cultural Heritage particularly throughout Argyll and Bute. All welcome, especially those from around Argyll whose voices are less often heard. 
Johnnie Anderson of HES, Peter Hewitt of MGS and Jess Smith, travellers community author, will be joining us.

We all easily recognise the Tangible heritage around us - castles, prehistoric cairns, churches, the objects of our history.

But the intangible needs care and recognition too : oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts.
Intangible cultural heritage does not only represent inherited traditions from the past but also contemporary rural and urban practices involving diverse cultural groups throughout our communities.

If you have access to our ABMHF facebook page there will be more ICH resources being added there this week - and in the future this will be added to our new website.

The UK recently ratified the UNESCO 2003 treaty for safeguarding our vulnerable ICH, and the UK Gov will be looking for contributions to assess the breadth of our ICH and what is most vulnerable.

We all have a long journey ahead to collect, collate, and celebrate our Argyll ICH, we look forward to learning together.

There are so many resources to bring together to help us all : individuals,  groups, organisations across our community.

Museums may seem more focused on the Tangible, but will play a vital role, as well as our greater ICH understanding bringing new opportunities for them. 

The forum will be including our growing understanding of ICH in our website development as well as sharing resources like the UNESCO Treaty details, from countries around the world, examples of our ICH past and present on our Facebook page 

Please feel free to invite friends and colleagues who may be interested.