The enactment of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990 represented the culmination of a long process of negotiation and ultimate compromise between representatives of Native American tribes and American museums. This paper focuses on the initial implementation stage of NAGPRA. That stage reveals that interaction between the two sides has entailed (and continues to entail) negotiations not only concerning the disposition of specific Native American cultural objects but also equally important concerning the professional identities of Native Americans and museum professionals, respectively. Viewed in this way, NAGPRA's post-enactment process is seen to illustrate the various functions of law (both symbolic and concrete) in maintaining the social and ideological dialectic of American society.

University-based anthropology museums are uniquely positioned to pursue nuanced decisions concerning the disposition of collections in their care, setting best practice for the field. The authors describe a three-staged approach to repatriations that they led during their concurrent service as head of cultural policy and repatriation (Jordan Jacobs) and director (Benjamin Porter) of the University of California, Berkeley’s Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology between 2015 and 2019. Examples involving human remains and cultural objects from Australia, Canada, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Japan, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Saipan, Senegal, Vanuatu, Venezuela, and South Carolina in the United States demonstrate the benefits of transparency, open communication, and rigorous investigation of provenance and provenience, which may or may not lead to transfer based on the criteria and priorities of potential recipients. This article also provides a history of the Hearst Museum’s Cultural Policy and Repatriation division, which was disbanded in 2021.

In October 2007, the mayor of the French city of Rouen agreed to return to New Zealand a preserved tattooed head of a Maori warrior (called toi moko by Maori) from that city's Museum of Natural History, whose collection the head had been part of since 1875. The decision to return the head was based on an initiative by the Museum of New Zealand (Te Papa Tongarewa), which has successfully secured the return of other such heads from museums in various European countries and the United States. Before the Rouen head could be handed over, however, the French Ministry of Culture intervened, arguing that its return was unauthorized under French law as being part of a French museum collection and thus inalienable.

Recent developments in U.S. case law have strengthened the power of private individuals to sue foreign sovereigns in U.S. courts over claims for artwork and cultural heritage property. Traditionally, however, the U.S. government granted a large amount of deference to foreign sovereigns regarding ownership rights in such property. Principles such as grace and comity with other nations, respect for cultural heritage property ownership, and increasing public access to art are reflected in U.S. legislation. For example, the adoption of the Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act (CPIA), the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA), and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) all demonstrate a strong position held by the United States to recognize and protect ownership rights in cultural heritage property.

This article documents the practices of pharmaceutical creativity in Ayurveda, focusing in particular on how practitioners appropriate multiple sources to innovate medical knowledge. Drawing on research in linguistic anthropology on the social circulation of discourse—a process called entextualization—I describe how the ways in which Ayurveda practitioners innovate medical knowledge confounds the dichotomous logic of intellectual property (IP) rights discourse, which opposes traditional collective knowledge and modern individual innovation. While it is clear that these categories do not comprehend the complex nature of creativity in Ayurveda, I also use the concept of entextualization to describe how recent historical shifts in the circulation of discourse have caused a partial entailment of this opposition between the individual and the collectivity. Ultimately, I argue that the method exemplified in this article of tracking the social circulation of medical discourse highlights both the empirical complexity of so-called traditional creativity, and the politics of imposing the categories of IP rights discourse upon that creativity, situated as it often is, at the margins of the global economy.

Most private international laws do not address cultural property specifically but, instead, apply the general lex rei sitae rule also to artifacts. Legal scholarship has revealed the flaws of the rigid application of the lex rei sitae principle to cultural goods and has proposed alternative connecting factors, such as the lex originis principle, to prevent forum and law shopping in this field. Reacting to the criticisms, some of the more recent private international law codifications have decided on the adoption of specific rules on stolen and illegally exported cultural goods that combine the lex rei sitae and the lex originis rules and provide room for the parties’ autonomy. This article draws the conclusion that these more recent legislative solutions do not necessarily promote legal certainty and predictability with regard to the governing law and are far from being a Holy Grail for the conflict of laws of cultural property, whether on a national level or within the European Union.

This article deals with the question of whether regional cultural competence centers foster the diversity of cultural expressions and how the objectives of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Convention on Cultural Diversity are implemented. By introducing the Convention on Cultural Diversity, the conditions of regional cultural policy governance, and the idea of regional cultural competence centers, a framework for evaluation is outlined. The evaluation of four regional cultural competence centers in the Swiss Central Region shows that fostering cultural diversity is complex and has many different approaches and effects. The final discussion concludes that principles such as “interculturality,” “freedom,” and “access for all” under the Convention on Cultural Diversity can promote a diversity of cultural expressions but that these criteria have to be set from outside—for example, by public funding institutions—so that regional actors implement them.

This set of articles is not intended to deal comprehensively with the totality of the relationship between heritage and hunting. Rather, it is designed to emphasize the connection and bring out aspects such as sustainability, ethics, respect, and civility. The role of hunting as a way of life is emphasized. This creates heritage even if its practitioners do not recognize it as such. The heritage so created can take many forms; but in particular hunting has produced an important intangible heritage expressed through art, music, poetry, and literature to name but a few of its aspects. Finally, the set of papers shows that mandated changes affecting hunting need careful consideration; there is much to be lost if the creating force for this heritage disappears.

The convergence of Yoruba nationals and the intensification of nationalism in southwestern Nigeria for self-assertion, political brokerage, and power relations in colonial and post-colonial eras were reinforced by the projection of Yoruba cultural heritage and patrimony expressed both in person and literary productions. Using textual analysis and observation, this paper examines some aspects of cultural heritage and Yoruba nationalism and how cultural heritage created patrimony, the sense of a nation, established civic virtue, and formed local (re)publics in southwestern Nigeria. The present discourse further examines how cultural patrimony is used to echo Yoruba sense of marginalization and political superiority in Nigeria. The paper further argues that most of this cultural heritage addresses a fairly well-defined audience, most especially those sympathetic to Yoruba nationalism and politics. Thus, cultural heritage and patrimony are active agents of nationalism and political identity in southwestern Nigeria.

The treatment of movable and immovable heritage is markedly different. While movable objects are highly valued and carefully protected, their immovable equivalents are often under a serious cloud of threat. This peril is the result of global mismanagement, failure of governments to provide adequate funds for their maintenance, and lack of recognition by the public that these disappearing resources are assets of major value. Conservators of immovables face special ethical and practical concerns in their efforts to preserve cultural heritage within its context - depicted in this article as case histories from the World Monuments Watch list of endangered sites. The legal and procedural mechanisms that support this task are ineffectual in the face of rapid change. The field needs new methodologies that harness public appreciation of a site's 'sense of place' to guarantee its future.

Whether from climate change, mass tourism, or decay of historical objects, cultural heritage researchers in Europe face many challenges. Common priorities became apparent at a conference about the EU project NET-HERITAGE on 24 March in Brussels. And among these and other important issues raised by the 170 participants were the economic and social value of cultural heritage for Europe.

This article discusses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement on the arts and cultural sector in the United States, placing the 2020 crises in the context of the United States’s historically decentralized approach to supporting the arts and culture. After providing an overview of the United States’s private, locally focused history of arts funding, we use this historical lens to analyze the combined effects of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement on a single metropolitan area – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We trace a timeline of key events in the national and local pandemic response and the reaction of the arts community to the Black Lives Matter movement, arguing that the nature of these intersecting responses, and their fallout for the arts and cultural sector, stem directly from weaknesses in the United States’s historical approach to administering the arts. We suggest that, in the context of widespread organizational vulnerability caused by the pandemic, the United States’s decentralized approach to funding culture also undermines cultural organizations’ abilities to respond to issues of public relevance and demonstrate their civic value, threatening these organizations’ legitimacy.

Modern warfare has prompted states to protect collections of cultural property by evacuating them to safe locations at times of war. Building on previously classified documents in archives, inquiries and other sources, this article investigates how planning for such evacuation was carried out in Sweden from 1939 to the 1990s. After the end of the Cold War, existing evacuation plans were finally scrapped. Due to the worsening security situation in the region, Swedish heritage institutions today need to build preparedness anew. It is shown that the evacuation of large volumes of property out of cities for practical reasons never was a realistic scenario, but probably should be restricted to a minimum of carefully selected objects, records and books. The process of selecting, transporting, finding safe locations to take the property to, and determining how to monitor it needs to be carefully planned during peaceful conditions in order to efficiently safeguard the collections in wartime. The relationship between Swedish planning and the 1954 Hague Convention, and how other states can learn from this study, is finally discussed.

The last decade or so has seen a fundamental shift in Aboriginal cultural heritage law in Australia. A number of subnational jurisdictions in Australia have undergone major reforms to their Aboriginal heritage legislation. Other subnational jurisdictions are currently in the reform process or have promised reform in coming years. We use the latest (and, at the time of writing, ongoing) process to reform Aboriginal heritage legislation in the state of New South Wales (NSW) to explore some of the legal issues and themes emanating from the Australian experience. The NSW example is a useful case study for thinking about how minority heritage regulation can not only serve broader social movements but also undercut some of its own possibilities. We argue that even law that is ostensibly in place to promote the control of communities over their own heritage can cause difficult balancing acts that may default to a dependency path and effectively detract from its own projected goals.