“Intangible cultural heritage is alive and dynamic,” declared Assistant Professor Andrea Malaya Ragragio of the University of the Philippines (UP) Mindanao during the monthly Throwback Thursday of the Davao Historical Society (DHS) last May 28, 2026 at La Herencia Davao.
This declaration made me reflect on what it means for a heritage to be truly alive. When we say something is alive, we mean it exhibits certain properties — it grows, it responds to its environment, it reproduces (but not exactly), it ages, it adapts, it can get sick, and eventually it can die.
A heritage that is alive changes over time. A chant performed today is not identical to the chant performed 50 years ago, even if the same person performs it. Memory shifts, emphasis changes, the occasion differs, the audience responds differently. This is the inevitable result of being performed by living bodies in living moments.
A heritage that is alive responds to its environment. When a community faces a typhoon or a pandemic, their rituals and practices adjust. Offerings might change. Protocols might shorten. New prayers might be composed. The heritage is in dialogue with reality, not sealed off from it.
A heritage that is alive reproduces through transmission, but with variation. A master weaver teaches an apprentice. The apprentice will never replicate exactly because their body is different, their muscle memory unique, their aesthetic sense shaped by different influences. The tradition continues because of that variation, not despite it. Perfect replication would be a photocopy, not a living lineage.
A heritage that is alive can die. When the last speaker of a language passes away with no fluent learners, that language is dead. Not because the words are forgotten (they may be recorded), but because the capacity for spontaneous, novel utterance is gone. A dead language can be studied but a living language can tell a joke about last week’s Senate session. And the same applies to dances, rituals, crafts, and epics.
Listening to fashion designer and educator Emi Alexander Englis and visual artist and Datu Bago Awardee Lito Pepito talk about promoting Davao’s intangible cultural heritage in their works without being accused of cultural appropriation made me understand what makes heritage dynamic.
Because if being alive suggests an organic process, being dynamic suggests directed energy — movement, tension, force, response. Dynamic heritage has momentum. It pushes back. It changes direction in response to pressure.
Dynamic heritage has internal tensions. Friction between elders and youth; insiders and outsiders; secrecy and disclosure; preservation and adaptation. A static tradition has no arguments while a dynamic one is full of them.
“These tensions are proof that our heritage is alive,” affirmed Professor Ragrario.
Heritage adapts for a reason. Communities make conscious choices about what to keep, what to modify, what to abandon, and what to create anew. A ritual might be shortened not because people have become lazy but because they now have jobs and cannot afford a three-day ceremony. A weaving pattern might change not out of ignorance but because a new design tells a new story. This adaptation is strategic, not a sign of decay.
Heritage is also resilient. Because it can change, it can survive shocks. The COVID-19 pandemic forced many indigenous rituals to adapt to online gatherings, solo versions of group dances, postponed initiations. Communities that insisted on “exactly as before” simply canceled while communities that adapted kept the heritage alive. Dynamic systems bounce back while rigid systems break.
A living heritage looks forward as much as backward. It asks: What do we want our grandchildren to inherit? What will they need?
So if intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is alive and dynamic, why do so many policies still treat it as if it were a stone carving?
First, the institutional bias toward rigidity. Museums, UNESCO, national heritage commissions, and funding bodies are built on documentation, listing, and monitoring. They need stable categories: this dance, that chant, this craft. A living, changing practice does not fit neatly into application forms or five-year plans. The system rewards freezing, not flowing.
Second, the tourist and donor demand for “authenticity.” Visitors want to see “real” indigenous culture, which they imagine as unchanging, ancient, untainted by modernity. A weaver using a smartphone is “less authentic” to the outsider gaze. Funding follows that gaze. Communities are financially incentivized to perform a frozen version of themselves, even as they live dynamic lives offstage.
Third, a misunderstanding of what “safeguarding” means. Safeguarding is not about stopping change. It is about ensuring that the community retains the ability to manage change on its own terms. A language is not safeguarded by recording 10,000 words; it is safeguarded by ensuring children learn it and use it to talk about their world – which now includes words for “email,” “vaccine,” and “AI.” Safeguarding is about transmission, not mummification.
No culture is pure. Philippine ICH is full of borrowed elements — Spanish-influenced dances, American-introduced instruments, Islamic patterns in Mindanao textiles. These borrowings were once innovations. Today they are “tradition.”
Dynamic heritage continues to borrow — from K-pop, from anime, from global activist movements — and makes them indigenous. The strongest sign of a living heritage is that people make new things using its principles. A traditional epic inspiring a graphic novel. A weaving pattern appearing on a sneaker. A chant sample added in a protest anthem.
Healthy living heritage communities argue. They argue whether a new song is allowed, whether a new design is respectful, whether an old practice should be revived or retired. The arguing is the process of collective decision-making. Silence means either total consensus (rare) or total suppression (more common and more dangerous).
The tension between innovation and appropriation is not a line to be drawn once and for all. It is a conversation — ongoing, messy, context-dependent. And that conversation is the living heritage.
Innovation without appropriation is possible. It requires trust, power-sharing, and the courage to let go of the fantasy of purity. And in the Philippines, where every culture has been shaped by centuries of borrowing, resistance, and reinvention, we should know better than most. The line between theft and transformation is drawn by those who hold the power to define it. And that power must return to the communities themselves.
Heritage is not a noun we preserve, it is a verb we perform.
