FOLKMARKS
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.
