YEREVAN, OCTOBER 23, NOYAN TAPAN. Cultural globalization has called forth the necessity to bring out problems of preservation of national indentity, national culture, including keeping of non-material cultural heritage, and to find a new solutions to them. Karine Khodikian, the RA Deputy Minister of Culture, stated this at the October 23 third international three-day conference under the title "Knowledge and Symbol, Belief and Custom," dedicated to preservation of non-material cultural values. According to her, the whole non-material cultural heritage and system of values need legislative and institutional protection today in Armenia. At that, not only adoption of individual laws by the state, but also bringing them in line with international standards regulating the sphere is necessary. Garnik Guyumjian, the Head of the State Programs, Cultural Cooperation, Science and Education Unit of Cultural Policy Department of the RA Ministry of Culture, said in his speech that the Ministry has already worked out a bill On Non-material Cultural Heritage, which is at the interested Ministries. The law's adoption pursues a single purpose, to regulate legal interrelations in the sphere, to specify state governance bodies' authorities, to establish the directions, in which international cooperation should be carried out. G. Guyumjian said that Armenia joined the International Convention On Preservation of Non-material Values in 2005. G. Guyumjian said that the bill will have a special provision on preservation of non-material cultural heritage in the Diaspora. Ethnographer Levon Abrahamian's report on the subject "Indefinite Limits of Non-material Culture" rendered clear the borderline between material and non-material values. "Non-material culture is everything surrounding us, which is not tangible. In my opinion, we should start from what is lost or disappears from our life. For instance, a singer sings, his ability to sing is a non-material, not tangible value: the matter is how to preserve the ability to perform (a bad or good song or performance are not important)," the ethnographer said giving assurance that material values cannot be be created today unless we have non-material values.

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