'Sustaining Support for Intangible Cultural Heritage' Book Talk Set for Dec. 9

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Arkansas Folk and Traditional Arts will host a book talk with Sustaining Support for Intangible Cultural Heritage editors Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya, Mariana Pinto Leitão Pereira and Gregory Hansen from 9:30-11 a.m. Friday, Dec. 9. This webinar is free and open to the public. Registration is required. 

Sustaining Support for Intangible Cultural Heritage from Cambridge Scholars Press features scholarly examples of analyses of intangible cultural heritage from across the globe, and one chapter focuses on Bluegrass Monday at the Collins Theatre in downtown Paragould, Arkansas. 

Lauren Willette of AFTA notes, "Students, professors and practitioners of folklore, anthropology and culture will find this presentation interesting and useful. Many of the chapters of this book touch on important aspects of intangible cultural heritage." Willette added, "This book is especially relevant, as it focuses on events and themes that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond."  

This volume explores case studies from Gabon, India, Mozambique, Sri Lanka and the U.S. to represent diverse positionalities and voices articulating the complexities, ambiguities and uncertainties within heritage discourses. The chapters illustrate how intangible cultural heritage, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, has become an analytical resource and a proscriptive device for safeguarding, presenting and interpreting culture to a range of constituents, and will serve as a useful resource in the classroom for a range of fields, as well as for scholars and practitioners. 

Hansen is a professor of folklore and English at Arkansas State University, where he also teaches in the Heritage Studies doctoral program. He has worked as a public folklorist for a range of organizations across the U.S., and his scholarship focuses on applied cultural work and roots music. His publications include Florida Fiddler: The Life and Times of Richard Seaman. Hansen has been a supporter of Arkansas Folk and Traditional Arts in many capacities since the program began in 2019.  

Jayasuriya, Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, is a visiting professor at Ritsumeikan University in Japan, a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge and a senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in the School of Advanced Study of the University of London. She is a member of the International Council on Monuments and Sites in Sri Lanka and is the author of six books, including The Portuguese in the East: A Cultural History of a Maritime Trading Empire and The African Diaspora in Asian Trade Routes and Cultural Memories. 

Pereira is a doctoral candidate at the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, researching how diaspora communities negotiate identity through cultural heritage. She worked as an archaeologist and heritage expert in Macau and is a member of the International Council on Monuments and Sites in Portugal. Her publications include The Macanese Encontros: Remembrance in Diaspora 'Homecomings.' 

Questions about this online presentation may be directed to Lauren Willette at willette@uark.edu. Arkansas Folk and Traditional Arts is a statewide program of the University of Arkansas Libraries dedicated to building cross-cultural understanding by documenting, presenting and sustaining Arkansas' living traditional arts and cultural heritage.