From Shepherds to UNESCO: Collaboration, Living Heritage, and the Applied Humanities
Gábor Soós
Abstract
This essay explores collaboration as a mode of cultural, pedagogical, and institutional practice across living heritage, multilateral diplomacy, socially engaged art, and emerging human–AI relations. Drawing on autobiographical encounters, UNESCO negotiations, place-based fieldwork in Tihany, and the SOPHIA AI Ethics Manifesto, it traces a recurring “Bartókian” rhythm of source, encounter, reflection, recomposition, and return. The essay proposes that such movement between grassroots experience and institutional form can be understood as a kind of applied humanities: a practice in which literary, philosophical, artistic, and democratic sensibilities are translated into public action, policy, pedagogy, and collaborative design. Through the concepts of poiesis, praxis, social imagination, and stewardship, the essay argues that collaboration is not merely a means of producing outcomes, but a form of making and acting together that can reshape relations among communities, institutions, places, and technologies. Three cases illustrate this claim: the negotiation of community participation within UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage; the Bartók 4.0 methodology and Tihany Water Stories as place-based, participatory practice; and the SOPHIA manifesto as a hybrid ethical, literary, and collaborative form. The essay concludes by framing authorship as stewardship and by returning to culture as a source of dignity and resilience, asking how socially engaged practice can help sustain human judgment, participation, and meaning in increasingly mediated worlds.