Significant documents of record recently produced and dealing with cultural property, heritage and related issues will be printed annually in the final issue (No. 4) of each numbered volume. Documents considered for publication may be national, regional, or international instruments and codes. Inquiries or suggestions regarding documentary materials may be addressed to the Chronicles Editor, Kurt Siehr, at 〈[email protected]〉 or the Editor, Alexander Bauer, at 〈[email protected]〉.

This essay explores a number of issues concerning the relationship between works of art and cultural property. From the perspective of a museum director, it posits an ontological distinction between the idea of a work of art and the concept of cultural property. The essay concludes by arguing that to the extent that nations place restrictions on the export of their art, they inevitably affect the way their culture is understood and perceived abroad and so alter the larger metanarrative of culture.

The article contrasts long-suppressed details of German art seizures during the Second World War from Ukrainian state museums and Western Jewish dealers, ordered to Königsberg by Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia and Reich Commissar of Ukraine. While most of the art from Kyiv was destroyed by retreating Germans when the Red Army arrived (February 1945), here we investigate “survivors.” Initial provenance findings about the collection Koch evacuated to Weimar in February 1945 reveal some paintings from Kyiv. More, however, were seized from Dutch and French Holocaust victims by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and his cohorts, including Jewish dealers Jacques Goudstikker (Amsterdam) and Georges Wildenstein (Paris). Many paintings deposited in Weimar disappeared west; others seized by Soviet authorities were transported to the Hermitage. These initial findings draw attention to hitherto overlooked contrasting examples of patterns of Nazi art looting and destruction in the East and West, and the pan-European dispersal of important works of art.

This article considers the intersection of gender, traditional cultural expressions, collaborative innovation, and intellectual property in the Tonga Indigenous community of Zambia. Based on a study of the Tonga rural women basket makers who are organized around craft clubs, the study investigated the collaborative environment that fosters the preservation of the cultural tradition of basket weaving, the impact it has had on empowering the women, and the legal protection options available for the Tonga baskets. The study found that Zambia’s 2016 Protection of Traditional Knowledge, Genetic Resources and Expressions of Folklore Act no. 16 (Traditional Knowledge Act) gives automatic protection to traditional cultural expressions and the option for the protection of traditional cultural expressions under the existing intellectual property laws. Though intellectual property protection may not be practical for the Tonga baskets, the Traditional Knowledge Act is a significant step in recognizing the customary values and governance principles in protecting traditional cultural expressions. Registration, in terms of the Traditional Knowledge Act, could enhance the recognition of the baskets, preserve and promote the cultural heritage, and empower the Tonga women.

The 16th Session of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to Its Countries of Origin or Its Restitution in Case of Illicit Appropriation was held in Paris at the UNESCO headquarters, 21–23 September 2010.

A divide has emerged between traditional allies as environmental protections increasingly constrict efforts to support the preservation of cultural heritage. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service addressed this debate by hosting an open forum on the current policies for the hunting of migratory birds. Proposed changes could end the granting of exemptions to Native American tribes, who use golden eagles and feathers in religious ceremonies, and would destroy the cultural and religious significance of the birds for the tribes. Such stringent environmental legislation not only threatens to undermine the importance of cultural preservation but also neglects an opportunity to strengthen the broader conservation movement by increasing involvement through the valuing of both the physical existence of a species and also its broader cultural significance. A study of the Hopi tribe of Arizona demonstrates the importance of flexibility and exemptions.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I would like to thank Alexander Bauer for his guidance and support throughout the process of researching and writing this article.

Pandemics creep up on us slowly, and without our suspecting, while we are distracted. Likewise, human experience shows that they recede gradually and without our noticing. For those in the eye of its storm—those that experience their devastating impact firsthand without the hope of an end in sight—they touch and shape their daily lives and their societies, in big and small ways. History shows, that across millennia, pandemics throw a harsh light on existing cleavages in societies and shortcomings in their organization; fuel deliberation, agitation, and the search for new ideas; and accelerate or bring about change. There is no reason to believe the effect of the pandemic that is presently affecting every continent will not follow a similar path.

This article discusses the implications of recording and digitizing a variety of cultural and contemporary dance performance practices, core to a European project known as WhoLoDancE, which focused on issues of reuse, ownership, property, and responsibility. The recordings and subsequent processing of dance material into digital data raised questions about the responsibilities to the dancers who have contributed their material to the project, particularly when it is transformed into data visualizations that can be accessed and reused by others. The article not only focuses on how value accrues in these kinds of resources and sometimes in unexpected ways but also draws attention to how dance remains bound to the communities in which it is performed and tends to resist its abstraction from the body to be commodified as a form of cultural property. This then points to how dance, as intangible cultural heritage, is self-regulating in terms of principles of ownership and attribution.

The May 2004 decision of the London High Court in the matter of Thomson v. Christie's captured the interest of the salacious British press for its glamorous players: the Canadian heiress, the English aristocrat, and the international auction house. Taylor Thomson, the daughter of billionaire newspaper baron, Lord Thomson of Fleet, sued both the Marquess of Cholmondeley, a bachelor filmmaker with a fortune valued at over £100 million, and Christie's Auction House, for misrepresenting a pair of gilt and porphyry urns she purchased from Cholmondeley at a Christie's sale in London in 1994 for just under £2 million.

On its surface, Bonnichsen v. United States is an administrative law case, reviewing a decision by the Secretary of the Interior regarding the appropriate reach of a specific set of legislative and regulatory rules. As such, Judge Gould, writing for a panel of the Ninth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals (Ninth Circuit) decided that the secretary's office had overstepped its bounds; in short, its interpretation of the rules in question was not reasonable. But underneath the legal categories, Bonnichsen is a much more complicated and politically charged case. It is about competing conceptions of history and spirituality. It is about sovereignty (although that word is not uttered once in the decision, aside from reciting a definition of Native Hawaiians) and the clash of cultures. It is less about the standards for decision making and more about who the appropriate decision makers are. It is a case about a man who lived 9,000 years ago and about how today we should understand his cultural identity.

This article examines Indigenous peoples’ experiences with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage Convention against the backdrop of their rights as recognized in the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and reviews the efforts of Indigenous peoples and human rights mechanisms to ensure respect for Indigenous peoples’ rights, cultures, and values in World Heritage sites. Although the Convention’s governing bodies have adopted policy and operational guidelines “encouraging” states parties to respect Indigenous peoples’ rights, many nomination, management, and protection processes of World Heritage sites continue to be marked by an exclusion of Indigenous peoples from decision making, a lack of respect for their relationship to the land, and disregard for their traditional livelihoods and cultural heritage. Human rights violations against Indigenous peoples continue to occur unabated in many sites and are in many ways enabled, and sometimes even driven, by decision making under the Convention. This article argues that there is an unacceptable disconnect between this Convention and the UN human rights system, with significant implications for the Convention’s and UNESCO’s credibility, and that a concerted effort should be made to align this UN Convention with the UNDRIP and the human rights purposes of the UN Charter and the UNESCO Constitution.

The essay narrates the biography of a single art object—acclaimed in recent history as a “masterpiece” of ancient Indian sculpture—to invoke the larger spectrum of practices and discourses that came to constitute the field of art history in modern India. It explores the shifting locations and aesthetic trajectories that marked the transformation of this artifact from a curious archaeological “antiquity” into a national “art-treasure” and icon of Indian femininity, and later even into “a travelling emissary of ancient Indian art and culture.” On the one hand, the spectrum of travels of this object provides an ideal instance for mapping over the twentieth century the changing colonial, national and international stature of Indian art. On the other hand, its career also pointedly reveals the clash of contending claims and the politics of “return” and “restitution” that have attended the nationalization and artistic consecration of many such objects.

The term “cultural heritage” contains an inherent tension. On the one hand, “culture” suggests something dynamic: it represents the diverse values and practices of different social groups, which continually evolve as they interact with others and their membership changes. On the other hand, “heritage” (and likewise “property”) implies something more clearly defined and static: it refers to a specific object or tradition passed on from generation to generation with little to no significant change. The difficulty in resolving these opposing forces—change versus stability—underlies why protecting, controlling, and possessing cultural heritage is so difficult to regulate in law, policy, and practice.

Heritage 2010 was a state-of-the-art event regarding the relationship between forms of heritage and the conceptual framework for sustainable development. The four dimensions of sustainable development—environment, economics, society, and culture—were brought together in order to define a particular approach on how to deal with and go beyond the traditional aspects of heritage preservation and safeguarding. As heritage is no longer just a memory or a cultural reference, or even a place or an object, some deeper conceptualization is needed in order to place heritage in its present context. The concept of heritage is moving toward broader and wider scenarios, where it often becomes the driving force for commerce, business, leisure, and educational politics. Heritage is currently seen, or referred to, only through its cultural definition. However, sustainable development brings heritage concepts to another dimension, as it establishes profound relationships with economics, environment, and social aspects. Consequently, heritage preservation and safeguarding is facing new and complex problems. Degradation of heritage sites is not any more just a result of materials ageing or environmental actions. Factors such as global and local pollution, climate change, poverty, religion, tourism, commerce, ideologies, and war are now on the cutting edge for the emerging of new approaches, concerns, and visions on heritage. Thus, the “Heritage 2010: Heritage and Sustainable Development” conference was conceived to embrace a global view on how heritage is being contextualized with the four dimensions of sustainable development. Furthermore, heritage, governance, and education were brought into discussion as the key factors for enlightenment of future global strategies for heritage preservation and safeguarding.

This article addresses the current international debate on the protection of cultural goods. Whereas some groups (such as indigenous peoples) are arguing for the creation of cultural property rights analogous to classic intellectual property rights such as patent and copyright, most industrialized countries advocate to keep cultural goods within the public domain. In this article, we develop an economic perspective based on identity and clarify the question of which cultural goods should be protected, regulated, or left in the public domain. We conclude that protection based on the concept of identity is required for a very limited scope of cultural goods.