Conas a aithníonn muid an oidhreacht?

Without realising it, people learn about heritage since childhood. We discover it as young children, and our first contact with intangible heritage is in:

• Family: through all folk stories, songs, legends and riddles told by our grandparents, through yearly folk festivities celebrated in our communities and attended by our parents and grandparents; through all objects and assets we find in our grandparents' houses, kept with the utmost care in their guest rooms and bedrooms; through learning the skills they used to practise, through learning their dialect and mother tongue, empirical knowledge of herbs.
• Village/community social life: by participating in community events celebrating the cycle of life (christenings, weddings, funerals), religious holidays, rural celebrations such as Harvest Day, carnivals, fairs, festivals, etc. 
• Church: introduces us to the spiritual world and brings us together with family and community to commemorate both life and death, celebrate religious holidays, learn Christian symbolism.
• School: it perpetuates the traditions and popular practices learned in the family, community and church through extracurricular activities such as visits to museums, memorial houses, fortresses, castles, archives in order to discover the diversity of the national heritage.
• Media and other means of heritage promotion.
• Tourism. 

But who are the actors of cultural heritage?

Bearing in mind that cultural heritage has been created over time through the collective participation of members of a community, we can consider the cultural heritage actors to be:

• Folk craftsmen specialised in various traditional activities that require specific skills and knowledge passed on by word of mouth from one generation to another.
• Members of local communities who practise and pass on elements of intangible heritage (gastronomy, agricultural practices, etc.).
• Heritage experts — these may be architects, landscape architects, researchers, ethnographers, musicians, choreographers, etc.

All these actors collaborate nowadays with the aim of preserving and saving heritage because 'What in the past had only use value today has testimony value' (CEMAT, Council of Europe, 2003). Although it is an expression of the heritage of the past, the intangible/intangible heritage through its elements must be integrated into the future requirements of society (Pătru-Stupariu, 2011). However, heritage research and identification has become a field of interdisciplinary interest that requires the application of very complex research methods and techniques.

A useful tool in the identification and inventorying of intangible heritage is the 'Guidelines for the evaluation of European rural heritage' presented and adopted at the 13th Session of CEMAT, Ljubljana – 2003.