INTERNATIONAL – When most people hear the name UNESCO, they think of ancient ruins, historic cities, or protected landscapes. Machu Picchu, the Acropolis, or Stonehenge often come to mind—physical places frozen in time and preserved behind velvet ropes. But alongside its better-known World Heritage Sites, UNESCO also maintains a far more dynamic and human-centered register: the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
This international list recognizes and helps safeguard living cultural traditions, practices, knowledge systems, and expressions that communities themselves identify as part of their cultural identity. Rather than stone and mortar, intangible cultural heritage includes oral storytelling, ritual and religious practices, festivals, traditional music and dance, craft skills, foodways, and ecological or agricultural knowledge. These are traditions not confined to museums, but enacted in kitchens, village squares, temples, streets, and family gatherings. They are “living heritage,” evolving across generations while remaining deeply rooted in history, memory, and collective meaning.
Flag of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) [Public Domain
Established under UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the list was designed to protect endangered cultural practices, promote respect for cultural diversity, raise awareness at local and global levels, and support communities in transmitting traditions to future generations. Today, it has become one of the United Nations’ most widely adopted cultural frameworks, with 185 countries participating. Each year, the list grows, encompassing traditions ranging from weaving patterns and wedding customs to dance forms and culinary rituals. Importantly, UNESCO has repeatedly emphasized that recognition is not meant to freeze traditions in time. As Ernesto Ottone, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Culture, has noted, the goal is to allow traditions to adapt, welcoming innovation from new generations rather than preserving culture as a relic.
The twenty-four-member Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, made up of representatives from UNESCO member states, evaluates nominations submitted by countries. The committee looks for evidence that traditions have community support, promote gender inclusion, and demonstrate environmental sustainability. Swim clubs, choirs, craftspeople, religious practitioners, and merchants often lend their voices to nominations, underscoring that intangible heritage is rooted in lived experience rather than elite institutions. The twentieth session of the committee will take place from December 8–13, 2025, in New Delhi, India, reflecting the global scope of the program.
While inscription can bring prestige and tourism dollars—guides, performances, food tours, and even collectible merchandise—the list’s stated aim is to bring communities together and celebrate their unique contributions to humanity. Still, the economic impact can be substantial. Following the inscription of the French baguette in 2022, scratch-and-sniff postage stamps appeared, while communities associated with endangered traditions, such as the Poncho Para’í de 60 List (added to the Urgent Safeguarding list in 2023), have received much-needed funding and international visibility.
Previous Recognitions
For many in Pagan, African-Diasporic, and Indigenous communities, the list can hold particular resonance because it has recognized religious and divinatory traditions often marginalized or misunderstood. One of the most significant examples is Ifá divination, which UNESCO inscribed in 2008. Central to Yorùbá culture in Nigeria and throughout the African diaspora, Ifá was recognized not as “fortune-telling,” but as a complex intellectual and spiritual system encompassing oral literature, ethics, cosmology, ritual practice, and social regulation. The inscription acknowledged the role of trained priests—babaláwo and iyánífá—and the sacred corpus of the odù Ifá, transmitted through years of disciplined study. For practitioners, UNESCO’s recognition affirmed Ifá as a living knowledge system with profound cultural legitimacy, strengthening efforts to preserve lineages, texts, and ceremonial practices across generations and continents.
Another divinatory tradition recognized by UNESCO is Xooy, a ceremonial practice of the Serer people of Senegal. Performed annually before the rainy season, Xooy is a dramatic, all-night gathering held in village squares, where master seers known as Saltigues step into a ritual circle to deliver predictions accompanied by drums, songs, riddles, and dance. Addressing issues such as rainfall, illness, and social harmony, the ceremony serves as both spiritual consultation and communal theater. The Saltigues act as intermediaries between humans, nature, ancestors, and the Supreme Being, drawing on esoteric knowledge and medicinal plant lore. UNESCO’s recognition underscores Xooy’s role not only as ritual, but as a system of environmental knowledge, social regulation, and intergenerational transmission deeply embedded in Serer cosmology.
Community as a Centerpiece
Most notably, this year’s honorees repeatedly return to themes of community and hospitality. Whether through shared meals, public gathering spaces, or ritual celebrations, many of the newly recognized traditions emphasize the social bonds created when people come together—sitting at the same table, moving in rhythm, or welcoming one another into shared spaces. In this way, the list reflects not only cultural diversity but the enduring human impulse toward connection.
Media coverage of UNESCO’s announcements has often focused on high-profile recognitions, and this year is no exception. Italian cuisine dominated headlines after being recognized as intangible cultural heritage, not for specific dishes, but for everyday food rituals. The nomination emphasized Sunday family lunches, nonnas teaching children to fold tortellini, and the cultural importance of eating together. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni hailed the decision as honoring national identity, calling cuisine “culture, tradition, work, and wealth.” Similarly, Iceland’s public swimming pools were recognized for their role as social meeting places, highlighting how communal bathing functions as an essential civic institution in Icelandic life.
While such recognitions draw global attention, UNESCO’s list is far broader, and arguably more powerful, when it shines light on Indigenous and minority cultural practices that rarely receive international platforms.
Diwali: The Festival of Light
Among the newly recognized traditions is Deepavali (Diwali), the festival of lights celebrated across India and by diasporic communities worldwide. Marking the end of the harvest and the triumph of light over darkness, Deepavali brings families and communities together through ritual cleaning, lamp-lighting, shared meals, music, and storytelling. Transmitted through family practice, temples, schools, and digital platforms, the festival strengthens social bonds and reinforces values of hope, generosity, and renewal.
Clay and Breath: The Boreendo of the Thari People
Among the traditions recognized by UNESCO are practices shaped directly by the materials of everyday life and the landscapes from which they emerge. The boreendo, also known as the bhorindo, is a traditional clay wind instrument rooted in the village culture of the Thari community. Made from locally sourced clay that is sun-dried and kiln-fired, the instrument’s hollow, rounded form produces sound through breath, with tone and pitch adjusted by subtle changes in angle and airflow. The boreendo is traditionally played by men during winter bonfires, weddings, and seasonal festivals, moments when music gathers people together in shared time and place.
Women play an equally important role in the life of the instrument, decorating the clay surface with painted designs that reflect local aesthetics and identity. Knowledge of how to make, tune, and play the boreendo has long been transmitted within families, though today it is also shared through village schools, cultural festivals, guest instruction, and digital platforms. Both musical and symbolic, the boreendo reflects a living relationship between creativity, environment, and communal continuity.
Fired Earth and Ancestral Hands: Ñai’ũpo Ceramic Craftsmanship
In Paraguay, UNESCO has recognized Ñai’ũpo, an ancestral ceramic tradition practiced in the communities of Itá, Tobatí, and Yaguarón. Ñai’ũpo refers to the handcrafting of blackened ceramic vessels used primarily for cooking and eating, created entirely from natural materials using techniques passed down over generations. The process begins with the careful gathering of wild clay from nearby swamps, requiring intimate knowledge of local terrain and seasonal conditions. Brick dust is kneaded into the clay to strengthen it before shaping begins.
Using the colombín method, potters stack and smooth coils of clay by hand with a traditional bamboo tool known as a tacuara. The vessels are polished, decorated with natural pigments, and fired in wood-burning ovens for several hours. The craft is led primarily by women, with elder artisans teaching daughters and apprentices through hands-on practice and oral instruction in the Guarani language. The passing of the tacuara from teacher to student symbolizes the continuity of knowledge, while the vessels themselves preserve culinary traditions and affirm the central role of women as cultural bearers.
Everyday Food as Cultural Memory: Koshary in Egypt
Foodways also feature prominently on UNESCO’s list, particularly where everyday meals carry deep social meaning. Koshary, Egypt’s iconic street dish made from lentils, rice, pasta, chickpeas, and spiced tomato sauce, was recognized as an element of intangible cultural heritage as part of broader efforts to highlight Egypt’s living traditions. Widely available from food stalls and small eateries, koshary is accessible, filling, and deeply familiar—shared across lines of class, religion, and region.
Prepared and eaten in ordinary settings rather than ceremonial contexts, koshary reflects how cultural heritage often lives in daily routines. Its recognition underscores UNESCO’s expanding view of heritage as something sustained not only through ritual, but through repetition, familiarity, and shared experience.
Weddings in Motion: The Zaffa Procession
Ritual processions marking life transitions appear throughout UNESCO’s listings, including the Zaffa, a wedding procession practiced in varied forms across parts of Africa and the Middle East. While the core structure—a public, music-filled escort of the couple—remains consistent, regional expressions reflect local customs and beliefs. In Djibouti, family members may break an egg on the groom’s head as a symbolic blessing for fertility and abundance. In Iraq, the Zaffa may take the form of a motorcade, with guests tossing flowers, sweets, and well-wishes as they travel together.
These processions transform private unions into communal events, reinforcing social bonds through sound, movement, and shared participation. The Zaffa illustrates how ritual adapts across cultures while maintaining its role as a bridge between individual milestones and collective life.
Music of the Plains and the People: Joropo in Venezuela
In Venezuela, Joropo has been recognized as a festive tradition shaped by the meeting of Indigenous, African, and European influences. Practiced across multiple regions—from the plains and the Andes to coastal areas—Joropo brings together music, poetry, singing, and dance. Instruments such as the harp, cuatro, maracas, violin, and accordion accompany songs that tell stories of love, humor, nature, and daily life.
Joropo dances involve coordinated steps and movements between partners, often beginning in a waltz-like position. Celebrations can last several days and draw in people of all ages, along with craftspeople, cooks, musicians, and dressmakers who support the gatherings. Knowledge of Joropo is passed down primarily through oral tradition and participation, with many children now learning through Joropo schools that emphasize not only technique, but cultural values and shared identity.
Rhythm, Resistance, and Belonging: Compas in Haiti
Compas, a music and dance genre from Haiti, is both a popular form of expression and a deeply rooted marker of cultural identity. Characterized by syncopated rhythms and melodic structures, Compas blends African, European, and Indigenous influences while addressing themes of love, freedom, peace, and resistance. The accompanying dance emphasizes connection between partners through coordinated steps and subtle, rhythmic movement.
Compas is present at festivals, rituals, family celebrations, and personal milestones, functioning as a shared cultural language across generations. Passed down through families, community workshops, schools, and professional artists, Compas serves as a living symbol of resilience, cohesion, and joy in the face of historical and ongoing challenges.
Flowers, Palms, and Sacred Time: Panchimalco’s Living Tradition
The Confraternity of Flowers and Palms in Panchimalco blends Indigenous beliefs with Catholic practices in a celebration tied to the onset of the rainy and harvest season. The event centers on a procession of palms decorated with wildflowers, accompanied by traditional dances, music, prayers, and the preparation of ritual foods made from rice, corn, cocoa, and herbs. Children participate wearing handwoven garments and carrying sacred images, reinforcing early transmission of the tradition.
Organized by community members with defined roles—such as the Teta, the elected Priostes, and supporting volunteers—the confraternity relies on collective responsibility and shared knowledge. Oral traditions, dance movements, handicraft skills, cooking techniques, and floral symbolism are transmitted informally through participation, making the celebration a living space for religious expression, cultural memory, and communal resilience.
Song, Dance, and Shared Memory: Cuban Son
Closing this section is Cuban Son, a music and dance tradition that blends African rhythms with European musical structures through singing, instrumentation, and movement. Cuban Son has had a profound and lasting influence beyond the island, helping shape the development of genres such as salsa, mambo, and cha-cha-cha across Latin America and the wider world. Performed in pairs or groups, Son balances improvisation with formal patterns, drawing lyrical inspiration from everyday life and oral storytelling. Instruments such as the tres, bass, and percussion guide both musicians and dancers, with the lead singer often improvising verses that shape the performance in real time. Son is transmitted through family gatherings, community celebrations, bands, and formal cultural institutions, ensuring its continuity across generations. As a cornerstone of Cuban musical identity, Son embodies creativity, communication, and shared cultural memory, an apt reminder that living traditions endure through participation, adaptation, and community.
Taken together, UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity offers a powerful counterpoint to narratives that privilege monuments over people. It affirms that culture lives in hands, voices, bodies, and relationships—and that safeguarding heritage means safeguarding communities themselves. For Pagan, Indigenous, and minority traditions, inclusion is not merely symbolic. It can strengthen cultural legitimacy, support intergenerational transmission, and offer a measure of protection in a world where living traditions are often dismissed, suppressed, or commodified.
The full and ever-expanding list is available through UNESCO’s official Intangible Cultural Heritage portal, offering a reminder that humanity’s greatest treasures are not only what we build, but what we practice, remember, and pass on.
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