Cultural Property and Contested Ownership
Cultural Property and Contested Ownership

Author: Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-06-10

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1317281837

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Against the backdrop of international conventions and their implementation, Cultural Property and Contested Ownership explores how highly-valued cultural goods are traded and negotiated among diverging parties and their interests. Cultural artefacts, such as those kept and trafficked between art dealers, private collectors and museums, have become increasingly localized in a ‘Bermuda triangle’ of colonialism, looting and the black market, with their re-emergence resulting in disputes of ownership and claims for return. This interdisciplinary volume provides the first book-length investigation of the changing behaviours resulting from the effect of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. The collection considers the impact of the Convention on the way antiquity dealers, museums and auction houses, as well as nation states and local communities, address issues of provenance, contested ownership, and the trafficking of cultural property. The book contains a range of contributions from anthropologists, lawyers, historians and archaeologists. Individual cases are examined from a bottom-up perspective and assessed from the viewpoint of international law in the Epilogue. Each section is contextualised by an introductory chapter from the editors.

Blood on the Page
Blood on the Page

Author: Thomas Harding

Publisher: William Heinemann

Published: 2018-01-25

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9781785151057

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A groundbreaking examination of a terrifying murder and its aftermath by the bestselling author of Hanns and Rudolf and The House by the Lake. In June 2006, police were called to number 9 Downshire Hill in Hampstead to investigate reports of unusual card activity. The owner of the house, Allan Chappelow, was an award-winning photographer and biographer, an expert on George Bernard Shaw, and a notorious recluse, who had not been seen for several weeks. Inside they found piles of rubbish, trees growing through the floor, and, in what was once the living room, the body of Chappelow, battered to death, and buried under four-feet of page proofs. The man eventually convicted of his murder was a Chinese dissident named Wang Yam: the grandson of one of Mao's closest aides, and a key negotiator in the Tiananmen Square protests. His trial was the first in the UK to be held 'in camera': behind closed doors, and without access to the press or public. Yam has always protested his innocence - admitting to the card fraud, but claiming no knowledge of the murder. Thomas has spent the past three months investigating the case and has unearthed some revelatory material. It's a story that has been described in the press and by the leading detective (now retired) as the 'greatest whodunnit' of recent years: an extraordinary tale of isolation, deception, espionage and brutal violence, stretching from the quiet streets of north London to the Palace of Westminster and beyond.

Treasured Possessions
Treasured Possessions

Author: Haidy Geismar

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2013-06-04

Total Pages: 509

ISBN-13: 0822399709

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What happens when ritual practitioners from a small Pacific nation make an intellectual property claim to bungee jumping? When a German company successfully sues to defend its trademark of a Māori name? Or when UNESCO deems ephemeral sand drawings to be "intangible cultural heritage"? In Treasured Possessions, Haidy Geismar examines how global forms of cultural and intellectual property are being redefined by everyday people and policymakers in two markedly different Pacific nations. The New Hebrides, a small archipelago in Melanesia managed jointly by Britain and France until 1980, is now the independent nation-state of Vanuatu, with a population that is more than 95 percent indigenous. New Zealand, by contrast, is a settler state and former British colony that engages with its entangled Polynesian and British heritage through an ethos of "biculturalism" that is meant to involve an indigenous population of just 15 percent. Alternative notions of property, resources, and heritage—informed by distinct national histories—are emerging in both countries. These property claims are advanced in national and international settings, but they emanate from specific communities and cultural landscapes, and they are grounded in an awareness of ancestral power and inheritance. They reveal intellectual and cultural property to be not only legal constructs but also powerful ways of asserting indigenous identities and sovereignties.

Who Owns Antiquity?
Who Owns Antiquity?

Author: James Cuno

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2010-10-18

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1400839246

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Whether antiquities should be returned to the countries where they were found is one of the most urgent and controversial issues in the art world today, and it has pitted museums, private collectors, and dealers against source countries, archaeologists, and academics. Maintaining that the acquisition of undocumented antiquities by museums encourages the looting of archaeological sites, countries such as Italy, Greece, Egypt, Turkey, and China have claimed ancient artifacts as state property, called for their return from museums around the world, and passed laws against their future export. But in Who Owns Antiquity?, one of the world's leading museum directors vigorously challenges this nationalistic position, arguing that it is damaging and often disingenuous. "Antiquities," James Cuno argues, "are the cultural property of all humankind," "evidence of the world's ancient past and not that of a particular modern nation. They comprise antiquity, and antiquity knows no borders." Cuno argues that nationalistic retention and reclamation policies impede common access to this common heritage and encourage a dubious and dangerous politicization of antiquities--and of culture itself. Antiquities need to be protected from looting but also from nationalistic identity politics. To do this, Cuno calls for measures to broaden rather than restrict international access to antiquities. He advocates restoration of the system under which source countries would share newly discovered artifacts in exchange for archaeological help, and he argues that museums should again be allowed reasonable ways to acquire undocumented antiquities. Cuno explains how partage broadened access to our ancient heritage and helped create national museums in Cairo, Baghdad, and Kabul. The first extended defense of the side of museums in the struggle over antiquities, Who Owns Antiquity? is sure to be as important as it is controversial. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Whose Culture?
Whose Culture?

Author: James Cuno

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012-05-23

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1400833043

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The international controversy over who "owns" antiquities has pitted museums against archaeologists and source countries where ancient artifacts are found. In his book Who Owns Antiquity?, James Cuno argued that antiquities are the cultural property of humankind, not of the countries that lay exclusive claim to them. Now in Whose Culture?, Cuno assembles preeminent museum directors, curators, and scholars to explain for themselves what's at stake in this struggle--and why the museums' critics couldn't be more wrong. Source countries and archaeologists favor tough cultural property laws restricting the export of antiquities, have fought for the return of artifacts from museums worldwide, and claim the acquisition of undocumented antiquities encourages looting of archaeological sites. In Whose Culture?, leading figures from universities and museums in the United States and Britain argue that modern nation-states have at best a dubious connection with the ancient cultures they claim to represent, and that archaeology has been misused by nationalistic identity politics. They explain why exhibition is essential to responsible acquisitions, why our shared art heritage trumps nationalist agendas, why restrictive cultural property laws put antiquities at risk from unstable governments--and more. Defending the principles of art as the legacy of all humankind and museums as instruments of inquiry and tolerance, Whose Culture? brings reasoned argument to an issue that for too long has been distorted by politics and emotionalism. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Kwame Anthony Appiah, Sir John Boardman, Michael F. Brown, Derek Gillman, Neil MacGregor, John Henry Merryman, Philippe de Montebello, David I. Owen, and James C. Y. Watt.

Balinese Textiles
Balinese Textiles

Author: Brigitta Hauser-Schaublin

Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

Published: 2012-12-04

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1462907024

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In this beautifully illustrated book, three experts examine the history, production and uses of textiles in Balinese society. Many fine pieces are presented, their raw materials and methods of weaving and dyeing are described, and the complex symbolism and ritual functions of each are explained in detail.

The Politics of Private Property
The Politics of Private Property

Author: Simone Knewitz

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-04-21

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1793623767

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Located at the intersections of law and culture, The Politics of Private Propertyprovides a fresh perspective on the functions of private property within U.S. cultural discourse by establishing a long historical arch from the early nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The study challenges the assumption of an unquestioned cultural consensus in the United States on the subject of individual property rights, instead mobilizing property as an analytical category to examine how social and political debates generate competing and contested claims to ownership. The property narratives arising out of political conflicts, the book suggests, serve to naturalize the unequal social and economic structures and legitimize the hegemonic order, which however remains to be shifting and subject to challenges. Analyzing the property narratives at the heart of the U.S. American self-conception, The Politics of Private Property addresses the gap between the ideal of the U.S. as a universal middle-class society, characterized by a wide diffusion of property ownership, and the actual social reality which is defined by unequal dissemination of wealth and race-based structures of exclusion.

Contested Culture
Contested Culture

Author: Jane M. Gaines

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2000-11-09

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0807861642

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Jane M. Gaines examines the phenomenon of images as property, focusing on the legal staus of mechanically produced visual and audio images from popular culture. Bridging the fields of critical legal studies and cultural studies, she analyzes copyright, trademark, and intellectual property law, asking how the law constructs works of authorship and who owns the country's cultural heritage.

Contested Cultural Heritage
Contested Cultural Heritage

Author: Helaine Silverman

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2010-11-02

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1441973052

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Cultural heritage is material – tangible and intangible – that signifies a culture’s history or legacy. It has become a venue for contestation, ranging in scale from protesting to violently claimed and destroyed. But who defines what is to be preserved and what is to be erased? As cultural heritage becomes increasingly significant across the world, the number of issues for critical analysis and, hopefully, mediation, arise. The issue stems from various groups: religious, ethnic, national, political, and others come together to claim, appropriate, use, exclude, or erase markers and manifestations of their own and others’ cultural heritage as a means for asserting, defending, or denying critical claims to power, land, and legitimacy. Can cultural heritage be well managed and promoted while at the same time kept within parameters so as to diminish contestation? The cases herein rage from Greece, Spain, Egypt, the UK, Syria, Zimbabwe, Italy, the Balkans, Bénin, and Central America.