Online workshop for sharing a toolkit with experts and NGOs working with ICH communities.
Currently, the ICH communities all over the world face many challenges like over-commercialization, the violation of the intellectual property rights of traditional artists, misappropriation of ICH etc. However, there is lack of practical guidance on how to address these issues, think about the relationship between ICH and the market, and what practical steps communities and other stakeholders can take to encourage heritage-sensitive commercialization that supports heritage safeguarding. The HIPAMS toolkit is developed as an attempt to address those gaps.
An online workshop was held on 8th September, 2020 for sharing the toolkit with the ICH experts and the organizations working with the ICH communities for sustainable development and safeguarding of ICH and for getting their feedback.
The workshop was attended by the project team members from Contact Base and Coventry University. Apart from the team members there were 17 ICH (Intangible Cultural Heritage) stakeholders from India, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Kyrgyzstan and five folk artists who participated in the workshop. The ICH stakeholders were from different sectors like publishing, art gallery, filmmaking, festival organizer. The artists who participated were from the Chau dance, Chau mask, Patachitra and Baul-Fakiri communities of West Bengal.
The integral and complex relationship of ICH commercialization, community participation, marketing, artists’ rights and risks that constitute the core of HIPAMS project were explained in the workshop. The different types of commercialization of heritage were presented along with case studies. How the toolkit helps to fill a longtime gap by interconnecting areas like heritage, marketing and IPR and include those in current conversation of heritage management was shown. Heritage tools, marketing tools and IP tools were explained through diagrams and examples from target communities of HIPAMS project. The implementation of different tools with the communities, responses from the communities and the context were also shared. Different tools like codes of practice, innovative packaging, digital storytelling, social media promotion were discussed to confront challenges like violation of rights, lack of online presence etc. Important questions like enforcement of IP rights of the ICH communities, social linkages or social contracts and context were raised and debated by the participants. Watch the video recording of the online toolkit workshop here.
This research project, Heritage Sensitive Intellectual Property and Marketing strategies: India (HIPAMS - INDIA), is funded by the British Academy's Sustainable Development Programme, supported under the UK Government's Global Challenges Research Fund 2018-2021.
