Language and culture are key markers of any human being as an intellectual and transcendent species. They are prime carriers of shared values and usages but are also effective mediums for the construction and moulding of the characteristics and features of a people – identity. They are quintessentially the interface for the transmission and practice of a nation-state’s intangible heritage.
Malta provides, no doubt, a distinctive case study and testing ground.
Malta, a frontier nation-state in the basin of the ancient Mediterranean Sea, at the very crossroads of the three continents of Africa, Asia and Europe, boasts a colourful, opulent and dynamic civilisation founded and built up across centuries of cross-fertilisation. Malta’s eclectic character is most evident in its very unique idiom – Maltese – that has a Semitic base, a Romance adstratum and an English complement, and thus is lingusitically a veritable testament to an extremely rich and aegis-old story.
Malta occupies pride of place on the list of time-honoured, international achievements. It was, as an outpost, a prime municipium in the hub of Mare Nostrum under the Romans. Its population under varied suzerains in the course of the Late Middle Ages testified to acts of innate aspirations and self-determination wielded against the wider foreign surroundings, and beyond.
Malta’s spectacular harbours were the magnet for so many world powers and rendered it a centre of entrepôt trade that created and fostered innumerable ingenuities. Malta contributed from the beginning to academe by establishing a university of learning as early as 1592. It was, under the Order of Saint John (1530-1798), the home of one of the leading surgical hospitals and schools of botany and medicine.
Any item of the intangible heritage, just like any permanent monument and artefact of historical significance, once lost is sadly irreplaceable
Undeniably, Malta’s intangible heritage has played a fundamental and overarching role in the shaping and organisation of its society and collective memory.
In 2003, Parliament passed the Cultural Heritage Act that refers, by way of definition of “cultural heritage”, to “intangible heritage” as “intangible cultural assets comprising arts, traditions, customs and skills employed in the performing arts, in applied arts and in crafts, as well as other intangible assets which have a historical, artistic or ethnographic value”.
In April, Malta ratified the Unesco 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The government’s decision to do so is a highly appreciated action, given that it signals a very strong commitment to the conservation and nourishment of collective memory and national identity. Plaudits for the country’s administration in taking steps to bring the domestic statutory corpus juris au courant with the latest overseas undertakings and developments in the respective field.
The government’s finely chiselled and wealthy electoral programme, L-Aqwa Żmien, Manifest Elettorali 2017 has promised to further valorise intangible heritage through research, active collection incentives, investment in digital tools, creatingimage banks and adopting a citizen science approach to the relevant sectors.
The government’s unbounded vision and sacred mission to become the transparent and responsible keeper of all such ephe-meral patrimony is enthusiastically welcomed, considering any item of the intangible heritage, just like any permanent monument and artefact of historical significance, once lost is sadly irreplaceable.
The present generation has an absolute duty to ensure that the nation-state’s intangible heritage is wholly and properly bequeathed to its near-future children and distant descendants. How are dialects, crafts, skills, traditions, knowledge and other precious legacies not lost?
The safeguarding of intangible heritage also necessitates resorting to a proactive gathering and cultivation of recollections and emotions of living persons by virtue of oral albeit concrete testimonials. Such an initiative entails a concerted effort in the form of a strategy across the board involving public institutions, research bodies and the general public working together.
Who will decide what is, or is not, of importance for a community? Is an individual or group’s intangible heritage more meaningful than that of another? How are the checks and balances against devaluation to be brought to bear?
It may be prudent now, more than ever before, that the nation-state draws seriously on ad hoc vital legislation with efficacious mechanisms and commissions of enforcement that go over and above the passive and inapplicable National Archives Act of 2005 (Chapter 477 of the laws of Malta). It is futile to simply wring one’s hands while lamenting the loss of each master craftsperson or first-hand source who passes away without delivering his or her talents to posterity.
Raymond Mangion studied at the University of Malta and the University of Oxford, and is a graduate in literature, linguistics, communication studies, patrology, law and history.