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:
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.
