A Sociocultural Study on Cultural Heritage Conservation: Communicative Performances in a Heritage Community

Abstract

This research was premised within the socio-cultural tradition of communication theory which subscribed to the contention that communication is the manner by which a community expresses itself by sharing the symbolic values or meanings attached to activities or artifacts which are articulated between individuals and among community members, which to them is reality. Further, that the process of reproducing this reality is determined by its communicative performance which are found in the practices or artifacts themselves. Thus, the research question – what are the communicative performances for cultural heritage conservation in a community. The main object was to explain cultural heritage conservation using the socio-cultural tradition of communication theory. Specifically, it aimed to capture how the heritage community views cultural heritage conservation; to identify and document cultural practices for cultural heritage conservation, and to surface existing communicative performances for cultural heritage conservation in a community.

Qualitative research using the ethnographic method was employed to discover what communicative performances were used for cultural heritage conservation in one of the municipalities in the cordilleras of the Philippines. This researcher is part of the heritage community and used the Focus Group Discussion heritage community, representatives. The study used open coding to present the data which were mostly descriptive. Close coding was used in the conclusion. A letter of request to conduct the FGD and letter of consent of participant were accomplished.

The views of the HCRs on cultural heritage conservation reflected their desires to preserve and share cultural knowledge, customs, and traditions, and practices to the conservation in the community spontaneously birthed the emergence of three (3) cultural practices namely: the “Gotad”, the Open-Air Museum (OAM), and the Ifugao Indigenous Peoples Education Center and Heritage Galleries (IPEDC-HG) which focused on the preservation of the tangible and intangible aspects of the Ifugao culture. The communicative performances surfaced in the process of sharing cultural conservation practices used indigenous and exogenous forms of communication to reproduce the Ifugao culture. These ranged from the use of folk media, intentional/deliberate instruction, keeping written records, unstructured channels like a discussion at home and other, to the use of the internet and social media. True to the socio-cultural tradition of communication theory, the communicative performances identified in this study reproduced the reality of Ifugao culture within the ambit of a community that was obviously in the stage of diminishing cultural customs, traditions and practices. Such communicative performances were local innovations that created an ingenious and novel way of sharing and experiencing cultural heritage.