Cultural Mapping: Documenting Community Heritage

Cultural Mapping: Bridging Past and Future Through Memory

• Cultural mapping and resource profiling systematically identifies, records, and classifies existing cultural properties or resources of a community.
• It serves to document, describe, visualize, and understand these resources through an ongoing process of database generation/updating.

Objectives of a Cultural Mapping Project

• Aims to understand the basic frameworks on culture and heritage following R.A. No. 10066, along with other pertinent laws and mandates.
• Intends to appreciate the cultural resources within local communities.
• Applying tools and methods for gathering, classifying, and analyzing local data through cultural mapping is a key objective.
• Consolidation of local culture profiles and generating key baseline data for cultural statistics.
• Seeks to integrate profiles and baseline statistics into LGU development plans, programs, and activities.

Purpose and Community-Based Research

• Cultural mapping plays an important role for Local Government Units (LGUs) in protection and promotion of community heritage.
• It provides a way for LGUs to recognize the vastness of cultural properties within their jurisdictions and enrich resources for cultural, social, economic, and political development.
• Mapping is community-based and participatory research.
• It seeks to rewrite history by telling local stories.
• Cultural mapping incorporates worldviews, indigenous knowledge systems, and practices.
• It employs community-sensitive research methods.
• Focuses on language recovery.
• It values alternative ways of knowing, theoriazing, and doing.

Goals and Programs

• Aids in legislation.
• Enlists tangible and intangible cultural heritage for documentation, conservation, and funding.
• Data is used as primary and secondary sources for researchers and historians.
• Serves as a potential educational resource.
• Involves creation of museums and galleries.

Quantitative and Qualitative Methods of Cultural Mapping

• Quantitative methods involve measuring area covered by natural heritage, heritage houses, and volume of archival records.
• They also assess the number of practitioners of a traditional craft and budget allocation for culture/the arts.
• Qualitative methods include ethnography, interviews, historiography, and participant observation.

Phases of Cultural Mapping

• Scoping and Negotiation Phase: Familiarizes the LGU with the project.
• Social Preparation Phase: Orients local stakeholders.
• Training of the Local Team Phase: Trains local mappers using committee-developed modules.
• Data Gathering Phase: It involves data gathering for about 3-6 months.
• Data Validation: Data is presented to internal/external experts to confirm and corroborate the validity of mapped entries.
• Finalized Local Culture Profile: It involves the production of the Finalized Local Culture Profile after data validation.

Assessment of Significance

• It serves as basis for heritage decisions, clarifying the importance of heritage items.
• Significance assessment requires a holistic understanding of an item’s background, setting, and comparative data, with potential need for research to gain sufficient insight.
• Significance assessment requires knowledge of the item, its provenance, context and comparative examples
• This can apply to many heritage places and is subject to change.
• Assessment includes provenance, representativeness, integrity, and rarity.

Nature of Significance: Criteria

• Historical significance relates an object to a particular person, group, event, or activity to understand a period, place, or event.
• Scientific significance is determined by researcher interest and the potential for object study to uncover future research data.
• Aesthetic significance evaluates the design and craftsmanship, innovative quality, and beauty according to common standards.
• Social significance determines an object's value to a cultural or ethnic community by consulting with them.

Toponymy, Cultural Identity, and Authenticity

• The Catálogo alfabético de apellidos, issued from November 21, 1849, responded to the lack of a standard naming convention.
• It led Filipinos to use the new last names.
• The Philippines continues to be influenced today by legacy in the Spanish naming conventions.
• Hokkien Chinese influence is seen in Filipino family terms.
• Toponymy studies geographic place names, their origins, meanings, use and linguistic evolution.
• Place names provide testimony to the religious, social, economic, and political aspects of inhabitants.
• There 4 Spanish Cities of the Philippines including Cebu (Sugbu, 1565), Iloilo (Irong-Irong, 1566), Manila/Intramuros (Maynila, 1571), Nueva Cáceres (Naga, 1575), Nueva Segovia (Lal-lo, 1595).
• Name changes have often been in tribute and memorialization of local cultural values.
• Authentic values have been tied to local cultural values for generations.

Heritage Documentation and Assessment

• The first step is diagnosis involving value assessment, rescue, and first aid.
• Reversibility and minimal intervention is a core concept to avoid overrestoration.
• Temporarily list damages.
• Then, plan out the treatment, using expert advice.
• Memory mapping documentation should be assessed using Surveys, Interviews, Focused group discussions, Immersion, Secondary sources, and Archival work
• Examples of intangible heritage include:
  • Agricultural and fisheries
  • Food Culture
  • Crafts and building techniques
  • Performances, games
  • Folklores and myths
• Listed from collection to significance.
• Then documents using template.
• Store/Treat objects and preserve them.
• The objects are cleaned then either stored, treated or displayed based on conservation values.