UNESCO Podcast Project

The Heritage of War in Southeast Asia: Towards the intangible

Over the past two decades Asia has undergone a war memory boom, and as the gravity of power in the region shifts away from America and Japan, the legacy of World War II has become a source of acute political tension. This UNESCO Jakarta funded project speaks to those concerns and gives public attention to popular histories of war and conflict in the Southeast Asian region, using the framework of intangible cultural heritage.

Engaging with community-centered memories and histories, the project aims to initiate new debates about war and conflict heritage conservation and memory, and raise public awareness about the ways war and conflict led to new forms of cultural production, and how these intangible heritage assets are now being conserved to ensure cross-generational cultural transmission within the region.

This current project centres around the production of a podcast series and small format publication for distribution to museums and heritage organisations in Southeast Asia. The podcast series will include casual interviews and discussions with academics, local community members, curators and heritage linked NGO’s.

This podcast can also be accessed via Spotify, Spreaker or Apple Podcasts.

A podcast about war and culture. Our focus is Southeast Asia, join us for a series of discussions about the challenges and of safeguarding heritage in the aftermath of conflict and mass violence.

In this episode, Daniel Schumacher looks at the intangible side of commemorating and memorialising war and conflict in Singapore, Malaysia, and Cambodia to find out whether it can be seen as a form of intangible cultural heritage. Cultural geographer Hamzah Muzaini and museum archivist Song Pheaktra join him on this journey.

Mark R. Frost and Daniel Schumacher enter the world of spirits and ghosts in Vietnam and Cambodia. In conversation with anthropologist Christina Schwenkel and historian Charlotte Catchpole, they explore the cultural roles of “wandering souls” that war and conflict created and discuss their social, political, and economic significance.

We are grateful to Narrowcasters for contributing parts of their audio guide to memory sites in Phnom Penh.

In this follow up to episode 5, Mark R. Frost explores the relationship between modern conflict in Southeast Asia and forms of musical expression. In particular, he looks at the emergence of new and hybrid forms of rock and pop music, tracking their birth during the Vietnam War, and their development across the regions from the highlands of Northeastern Thailand to Singapore, Malaysia and Saigon. Can pop, rock and psychedelic sounds of the era be considered a valid example of intangible cultural heritage?

What lessons can we learn from post-war Cambodia and Afghanistan? How does history, culture and religion form part of reconstruction and revival? Tim Winter examines how things have changed for UNESCO, in conversation with Masanori Nagaoka.

In this first part of a two-part episode on the sounds and music cultures of war, Daniel Schumacher and Mark R. Frost first ask what kind of sounds might actually qualify as war heritage. By speaking to musicologists Odila Schröder and Lonán Ó Briain, they then explore sound regimes and sonic infrastructures from the Asia-Pacific War to the American War in Vietnam and look at the transmission and modification of the conflicts’ traveling musical repertoires.

Heritage by definition tends to be regarded as intrinsically positive and worthy of preservation. But is this always the case, especially when the heritage in question relates to past conflict? In this episode, Edward Vickers and guests discuss various 'difficult' aspects of intangible cultural heritage in Southeast Asia, from issues of gendered violence to the contested legacies of colonialism.

In this episode, Tim Winter considers the role of NGOs, tourism and what the shifting landscape of developmental aid might mean for ICH in Southeast Asia.

How does food become heritage? And what is its relationship with war and conflict? Daniel Schumacher explores these questions by talking to food experts Wantanee Suntikul and Nir Avieli to find out how wartime foods can connect communities through space and time and become an important marker of people’s identities.

Any consideration of intangible cultural heritage needs to take account of how stories, memories, traditions or rituals are transformed, reinterpreted or lost through the passage of time. This episode focuses on the importance of formal education and, in particular, of language to this process of intergenerational transmission. In conversation with Kirsty Sword Gusmao, Helen Ting and Mark Maca, Edward Vickers debates the role of language as a form of superordinate intangible cultural heritage.