A fleeting hold

The “preservation of immaterial cultural heritage” has risen to become a ubiquitous call today. The concept itself, however, not only refers to the documentation of language, knowledge or practices, but it also includes the increased value of immaterial cultural heritage and its handing down as “living culture”. We are interested in the relation between regional and cultural history museums and immaterial cultural heritage and how those responsible for these institutions act in light of the fact that the social role of these museums can no longer consist in caring for and maintaining the traditional, but rather that their strengths lie in analysing and contextualising cultural phenomena in the broadest sense. Also, in terms of potential prospects for regional history collections, we will deal in the workshop with the possibilities, forms and processes of documenting and communicating immaterial heritage and explore what the ephemeral and processual have to say about previous world views, stocks of knowledge and values, or current images of nature/region/homeland. We will discuss how it may or may not promote understanding and the exchange of ideas or be a source of creative design and what tomorrow's immaterial cultural heritage might be.