A Bibliographical Study on The Scientific Studies on Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in Turkey

Culture is an accumulation of a society’s way of life; the traditions, customs and values it inherited, in other words everything that society produced. A society needs to be aware of its cultural values in order for it to survive and pass its culture unto the next generations by preserving it. Globalization, which began to be effective in the whole world since the end of the twentieth century has been leading societies away from their national culture into uniformity. The 32nd General Conference of UNESCO aimed at drawing attention to this issue by adopting the Convention to Safeguard Intangible Cultural Heritage on 17 October 2003. Through this convention, along with language, which is the vehicle of transferring intangible cultural heritage, oral traditions, narrations, performance arts, communal activities, rituals and festivals, activities concerning nature and the universe and handicrafts have been deemed intangible cultural heritages. By announcing a universal concern of the loss of intangible cultural heritage, the convention aims at getting the interested countries to contribute to the safeguarding of this heritage in order to raise awareness and to inform the younger generations. Turkey became an interested country in 2006. This study presents a bibliography of the studies on intangible cultural heritage in the education field up to date. In this study, of the qualitative research methods the document scanning method was used. 3 theses, 22 articles and 7 oral presentations matched with the scans. When these studies were analysed, the common conclusion of almost all of them was that the national awareness in terms of intangible cultural heritage must be raised and that this can be achieved through a systematic and well-planned intangible cultural heritage education in the curriculum