What is Heritage?
Heritage typically refers to something inherited from the past, such as traditions, values, cultural practices, or physical objects that are passed down through generations. It encompasses both tangible and intangible aspects of a culture or community, including language, beliefs, customs, and historical sites. Heritage often plays a significant role in shaping identities and providing a sense of continuity and belonging within a group or society. It can be preserved, celebrated, and transmitted to future generations as a way of maintaining cultural diversity and understanding our collective history.
What are the different types of Heritage?
Heritage can be categorized into various types based on its nature and characteristics. Here are some common types of heritage:
- Cultural Heritage: This includes tangible cultural heritage (such as monuments, artifacts, and historic sites) and intangible cultural heritage (such as traditions, rituals, music, dance, language, and oral histories).
- Natural Heritage: This refers to natural features or areas with cultural significance, such as landscapes, biodiversity, geological formations, and ecosystems that are valued for their aesthetic, scientific, cultural, or recreational qualities.
- Historical Heritage: This encompasses historical buildings, structures, documents, and artifacts that are significant due to their association with historical events, periods, or people.
- Architectural Heritage: This includes buildings, structures, and urban areas valued for their architectural and historical significance, craftsmanship, design, and cultural importance.
- Industrial Heritage: This refers to sites, buildings, and artifacts associated with industrial processes, technologies, and achievements that have historical, technological, or social significance.
- Intangible Heritage: This includes traditions, knowledge, skills, and practices that communities, groups, and individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage, such as oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, and craftsmanship.
- Digital Heritage: This includes digital artifacts, collections, and resources that are created, preserved, and shared for their cultural, historical, or educational value in the digital realm.
- Heritage of Knowledge: This refers to knowledge systems, techniques, and practices that are transmitted through generations and contribute to the cultural identity and heritage of communities, such as traditional ecological knowledge or traditional medicine.
These types of heritage are interconnected and often overlap, contributing to the richness and diversity of cultural and natural heritage worldwide.
Heritage and its value in today’s world
One’s heritage is their identity and tells them where they have come from, what morals, values or traditions they had, how they used to conduct daily life, and also highlights the mistakes that they made that led them to their demise.
Sindh’s heritage shines through in the beautiful heritage buildings that are studded across Sindh. Buildings and monuments, made to astonish their beholder, constructed many decades ago, are now listed and recognized as heritage buildings. These buildings contain magnificent architecture, with natural allowance for ventilation, brilliant woodworks, chandeliers, brickworks, tiles, and many more things that one can’t find craftsmen to make today.
The heritage of Sindh lies in a state of despair throughout the province, and due to few mischievous ones, it continues to disappear brick by brick. Mother Sindh calls on all of us to help its heritage be restored to its original grandeur.
A people without the knowledge of their past, origin & culture is like a tree without roots
Campaign for listing the heritage of Sindh
The Endowment Fund Trust for Preservation of the Heritage of Sindh, a trust formed for the preservation of Sindh’s heritage, is organizing a campaign whereby you can tell us of heritage buildings in your locale. Buildings that fall under this category are buildings that have been constructed over 75 years ago. We have launched a map feature on our website where you can tag the heritage sites that you know of, along with a description, coordinates (if possible) and pictures of the building, so that we may build an all-inclusive database of heritage sites all over Sindh. It is as simple as tagging the sites you know on maps on our website, just like you would on Google Maps, and we will credit that entry to you.