Since the dawn of time people have tried
to codify their relationship with their families,
friends and community,and place themselves and their species in the context of the
planets and stars. The rules to guide human relationships begin with myths and legends
that exemplify the importance of tradition. The words folk and lore as understood in
everyday language denote, respectively, common people and a particular body of
tradition handed down from generation to generation.
Folkmarks are ideas that define the behavioural
rules holding a particular society
together. They have their roots in the distant past when they were put together as
stories in order to define what is expected, and allowed, in human relationships and the
beliefs that define the place of particular groups in the cosmos.
Folklore can be defined as the common
orally transmitted traditions, myths, festivals,
songs, beliefs and superstitions, arts and crafts and stories of the people and has
historical, ethnological and sociological components. These are recreated in each
generation and cannot be traced back to particular author or date, and the mode of
transmitting is basically oral. Though folklore is characteristic of geography, culture and
history etc, it has universal character in its messages for maintaining social harmony.
Religions are also based on stories.
These stories explain ideas about how everything
came to be. These creation stories have formed the basis of every belief system, each
of which treasures its own account about how and why the world and everything that
lives in it began. Some talk about a god, or gods. Other's do not. Some people believe
that these stories are really words to paint a picture. Some believe that they are
accounts of how things really happened. Others believe that they are word pictures
which try to help us to understand not just how we came to be, but why, and how we
should behave.
There is one folkmark where folklore and
religion are intertwined. This is the biblical
book of wisdom in the Old Testament, known as Ecclesiastes ('the philosopher') .
Through the devices of parable and allegory the reader is pricked into thought about the
ends for which men live. Ecclesiastes perhaps rings more bells in our day than any
other book of the Bible. Its author seems to hover between faith and doubt, between
enjoyment of life and puzzlement about life's meaning. 'All human actions are in vain
and utterly meaningless!', he says. The author has tried all the normal routes to find
satisfaction and meaning to life–pleasure, money, philosophy, hard work, power over
others. But there is always a craving for more. And sooner or later death puts a full stop
to everyone's life. What meaning is left then? Yet at the same time he feels that life is a
gift of God, and that to obey God's commandments is 'the whole duty of mankind'.
Like many people today this writer stumbles
between these two reactions. He feels that
the meaning of life is always out of his reach, and that death mocks so much of human
achievement, and yet that it is right to enjoy the good things of life.
Perhaps there is no real answer to his
questions, unless death itself can be conquered.
Yet there is a drift of scientific thought to endow humanity with a Godless goal that
believes the purpose in human life is to gain knowledge about the the physico chemical
process of life, the galaxies and the origins of the universe. For example, the zoologist
Richard Dawkins says:
"We humans have purpose on the brain. We find it hard to look at anything without
wondering what
it is "for," what the motive for it is, or the purpose behind it. When the obsession with
purpose
becomes pathological it is called paranoia-reading malevolent purpose into what is actually random
bad luck. But this is just an exaggerated form of a nearly universal delusion. Show us almost any
object or process, and it is hard for us to resist the "Why" question-the "What is it
for?" question".
Dawkins believes that this inquisitiveness,
which, in a minute span of evolutionary time,
took us to the Moon, is the purpose of human life that was incorporated by evolution into
the evolving brains of the first hominids. In Unweaving The Rainbow he argues that now
we have escaped from the forces of Darwinian selection in the wild, our purpose through
social evolution lies in discovering why and how we are here. Appreciating the amazing
intricacies of the natural world should give us all enough purpose to our lives. It is a
rebuttal against his critics who claim that his biochemical view of the world is a
depressing one which leaves no room for human creativity or beauty.
This view was rebutted as an unsatisfactory
purpose of life over two millennia ago by the
author of Ecclesiastes who as a princely scholar knew something of the biological
imperative we have to communicate with a being greater than ourselves. This is
probably hard-wired into our genes:
Said I to myself, "Now here have I gained far more wisdom than any before me
in Jerusalem, my
mind has such experience of wisdom and knowledge; I have applied myself to wisdom and
knowledge as well as to mad folly, and I find it futile. The more you know, the more you suffer: the
more you understand, the more you ache."
The intangible cultural
heritage, as defined in the Convention that was adopted by
the 32nd Session of the General Conference of UNESCO, means in the first place
the practices, representations, and expressions, as well as the associated
knowledge and the necessary skills, that communities, groups and, in some cases,
individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage.
The intangible cultural heritage, which is
sometimes called living cultural heritage, is
manifested, inter alia, in the following domains:
- oral traditions, expressions and
language;
- the performing arts;
- social practices, rituals, and festive
events;
- knowledge and practices about nature
and the universe;
- traditional craftsmanship.
The intangible cultural heritage, while
being transmitted from generation to
generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their
environment, their interaction with nature, and their historical conditions of
existence; the intangible cultural heritage provides people and groups of people
with a sense of identity and continuity. The safeguarding of the intangible cultural
heritage promotes, sustains, and develops cultural diversity and human creativity.
