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Synopsis of the International Cultural Property Society Pocantico Conference
19-21 October, 2005
By Peter Turner, Princeton University

The field of cultural property or heritage, as it appears to an outsider, is bedeviled by different, perhaps contradictory fundamental values and structuring metaphors, on the one hand, and by large practical problems of enforcement and unintended consequence, on the other. The goal of the conference, as articulated primarily by Alexander Bauer and Daniel Shapiro, was to define the interests and problems of the field. A further object was to define the purpose and means of the society and its journal. Both tasks were conducted in the hopes that it would allow the society to advance the field by clarifying its ideas, goals, and courses of action.

Daniel Shapiro asked me to provide a synopsis of the conference. I attended as an outsider to the field, hired to transcribe the discussion. He hoped that I might be able to provide a different perspective on the conference precisely because I am not a practitioner in the field. I am taking Daniel at his word and have accepted that my lack of authority is, for the purposes of this report, authoritative. I will focus on the questions which seem important to me and suggest some answers that seem reasonable to me. I leave it in the hands of its readers to decide whether this exercise serves any purpose for them. As one control, however, against my having misunderstood the discussion, I am providing hyperlinks between remarks in my synopsis and their referents in the transcripts of the discussion. This document therefore contains my report and, on other web pages, the transcription of the conference by panel.

The conference was organized into six discussions – four panels and two concluding roundtables.

• Session 1: "Cultural Heritage" or "Cultural Property"?
• Session 2: "Tangible" and "Intangible" Heritage
• Session 3: Stewardship and Control over Heritage
• Session 4: Cultural Diversity and the Draft UNESCO Convention
• Roundtable 1: Recap and Clarification of Important Questions
• Roundtable 2: Future Agenda for Field and Journal

What is the field of cultural property/heritage good for?(f1) What does it hope to achieve? Various ends were suggested or implied: (1) preservation of cultural diversity, (2) knowledge of human behavior, (3) personal/cultural self-determination or autonomy, and (4) the positive right of prosperity. To these we may add a standard – (5) genuineness or authenticity of culture – the guarantee of which was sometimes treated as an end in itself. Are these goals compatible? If not, which should be prioritized? What are the real problems associated with achieving them and what are the false problems? These are among the most important questions to the society. Each possible end received a lot of attention individually, but there was little effort to address explicitly the question of prioritization and contradiction by juxtaposing the competing goals. This is a desideratum for future discussions of the society. I will take the question of ultimate end as the framing device for this report.

The logical conclusion of the discussion of ends, according to my understanding, is as follows. The goals can be grouped into two sets. Goals 1, 2, and 5 seek a certain quality, which can be evaluated without much reference to the human subjects from whose actions diversity, knowledge, or authenticity result. Knowledge, it is assumed, derives from the study of as many different patterns of human behavior as possible; diversity ensures an effective laboratory. Further, it is taken as a given that each of the diverse cultures must be genuinely itself and distinct from other cultures. Therefore, the ends of knowledge and authenticity are sometimes subsumed under the single rubric of cultural diversity. Goals 3 and 4 concern something akin to rights, where it is crucial to consider the subjectivity of the actors. As one participant said, “It’s about giving people maximum choice.”

We end up then with the two goals of cultural diversity and human rights. In many instances, these are compatible goals; in others, however, they may conflict. When the push for diversity comes to the shove for rights, which should prevail? Settling this question should clarify much of the society’s work. My impression is that diversity is a flawed goal. When conceived as the ultimate end of the heritage movement, it lacks theoretical coherence and, for this reason, gives rise to false problems. Moreover, acting to ensure diversity can create worse problems – for both diversity and rights – than it solves. The heritage movement would be best served by adopting rights as its ultimate end.

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The salient histories of heritage presented at the conference suggest rights are the paramount concern. The heritage movement originated in an approach to the spoils of war. It conceived of heritage in material terms – monuments or artifacts – as property to be transferred between owners (also here). The terminology that resulted was cultural property. “Property” has the consequence of emphasizing individual rights; it implies the possibility, therefore, of the object being alienated. Negotiation over such property was adversarial – claims and counterclaims formed the foundation for heritage law. As a result, many normative frameworks tend to rely on remedies of demand and response. Since then, the field has broadened beyond property rights and tangible heritage. To conceive of the field in those limited terms risks violating other, more valuable rights. There are two, linked developments. First, in some circles, cultural heritage has replaced cultural property as the term of choice. Heritage emphasizes group rights; it steers us away from a well-defined idea of control or possession and towards a sense of belonging, a domain rather harder to characterize. Which term is preferable? The argument in favor of heritage is that it does a better job in bringing out ideas implicit in the notion of culture – it implies a shared enterprise; access is stressed over exclusion; prohibitions against destruction of an object are more relevant than its possible alienation. Also, the conceptual history behind property is too thick and too rife with automatic entailments that are inappropriate to much cultural heritage; for example, the commodification implied by property makes it harder to protect heritage (f2). Finally, heritage allows us to recognize the value of intangible culture more easily than property. The second development, then, is that intangible culture has been included within the sphere of what is to be valued and protected. This change has benefited some cultural groups. It corrected for the fact that the distribution of tangible and, often, monumental heritage was unbalanced; heritage assistance went disproportionately towards countries with a history of monumentalization. This constitutes an unjustified prejudice in defining valuable culture; moreover, it meant that the poorest countries were denied resources (f3). The movement from property to heritage, then, has the potential to expand the domain of rights in question and, in so doing, empower individuals and groups currently disempowered. According to this narrative, the heritage movement began on the basis of property rights, and its recent history has unfolded in relation to concern for human rights.

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It makes sense to start looking forward with a framing question: which of two competing theories of Culture-with-a-capital-C should the movement adopt? The theoretical approaches to Culture effectively organize many of the important issues raised at the conference. The older, positivist understanding is essentialist and objectivist. It views Culture as a collection of cultural objects, somehow external to human agents. In other words, it makes culture out to be property-like and tends to prejudice us towards tangible heritage. The closed, positivist perspective on Culture – let’s call it “object-Culture” – presumes that the goal of the heritage movement is to preserve and protect discreet cultural objects, be they tangible monuments or intangible practices. Most academics would endorse a different approach, stressing that Culture is unbounded, that it can’t be owned, and that to act on it is to change it (but, in changing, it becomes no less “Culture” than it was before). This constructivist approach locates Culture in the thoughts and practices of a group; everything people do is Culture. As such, it provides support for the movement away from conceptions of culture as property and towards heritage. It also gives more credence to the value of intangible culture, because such living cultural practices are by definition dynamic. It is impossible, within the constructivist frame, to valorize one example of Culture qua Culture over another. Moreover, the idea that Culture is not essential but exists dynamically in the evolving actions and ideas of people has the effect of emphasizing the status of culture-holders as subjects. For both these reasons, it focuses us on human rights. Many of the participants endorsed the constructivist perspective but appear to suffer a kind of a conceptual hangover whereby the positivist perspective continues to influence their thinking, especially in the instinct to declare some pieces of Culture valuable as such. This led to some confusion, at least at the level of group discussion. Therefore, this question needs to be addressed explicitly.

These competing theories of Culture correspond to different justificatory analogies for their different understanding of the goals of the heritage movement (f4). The constructivist perspective corresponds, at least insofar as it emphasizes the status of culture-holders as subjects, to discourse on rights or, perhaps better, the freedom of expression. Culture is the means by which people articulate meaning. The only limits that ought to be placed on this expression is to ensure that one person or group’s expression does not do harm to others. It is fitting, then, that the heritage movement is linked historically to the international human rights movement. The constructivist view tends toward a neutrality on the content of cultural practices. What matters is the consequence of a cultural practice for the rights of others; we evaluate it in relational terms. A good example of this comes when populations employ the “object-culture” perspective in representing the value of their culture to outsiders – strategic essentialism. The term – meaningful as a cultural practice only from the constructivist perspective – recognizes that subordinated peoples may need to essentialize their own culture in order to act effectively in a domain ruled by powers beyond their control.

The “object-culture” perspective derives justification from a different analogy. The argument for the preservation of cultural diversity has often had reference to the recognized value of biological diversity. Thus the heritage movement is analogous to the environmental movement: the goal is to preserve as diverse a material ecology as possible because, as the argument goes, once a cultural object has become “extinct” we are deprived of options in deciding what to do with it. But this metaphor has problems both of descriptive accuracy and prescriptive force. First, even putting aside whether there are useful mechanistic parallels to reproductive fitness (cultural memes as genes was mentioned but not explored), one crucial difference is the ability of culture to form new combinations very rapidly, so that the creation of new culture moves at exactly the same pace as the destruction of old. This difference highlights the fundamental confusion in the analogy. When a species becomes extinct, the individuals who make it up die and future generations of individuals lose the chance to come into existence. When a culture disappears, the culture-holders have not died, only changed how they behave. Second, it is not even clear that the metaphor provides support for the goal of the preservation of particular cultures. Uses of the metaphor tend to emphasize extinction. But extinction is (often) the result of evolution; that is, it results from natural selection for reproductive fitness. It is inevitable that, as the cultural “environment” changes, certain ways of doing things will die out and be replaced by other ways of doing things. This happens with species; why should it not happen with cultures? Taking this metaphor to its logical conclusion actually lends support to some of the claims of the open, constructivist perspective, which values the transformative capacity of Culture. It was suggested – and I agree – that our instinct that we ought to preserve a culture has less to do with biological diversity and more to do with human rights and ideas of equity and fairness. The notion of cultural diversity is something we like to valorize on the basis of its being fair – humans have the right to remain as they want to be.

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Evaluating theories of Culture and their associated goals allows us to separate the real problems the heritage movement faces from the false. Indeed, certain issues, which present difficulties from the objectivist perspective, disappear when viewed through a constructivist lens. The problem of preservation asks, what is risked or lost in the attempt to preserve? It was often remarked at the conference that any attempt to preserve culture risks fossilizing it (examples 1, 2, and 3). If we are interested in preserving cultural diversity as a means to the end of learning from it about patterns of human behavior, this is not a serious problem. Essentializing a cultural practice in a museum display or by academic documentation does not prevent our deriving knowledge from it; indeed, this end may require some degree of essentialism. The concern about preservation for its own sake, however, results from a theoretical ambivalence. On the one hand, a recognition that much of the value of Culture lies in its being a vibrant part of lived experience and open to ongoing renegotiation tends toward the constructivist view. But the priority placed on preservation per se only really makes sense within an objectivist frame, where cultural practices of a specific kind have value as such. The constructivist perspective argues that culture is going on all around us; the destruction of national monuments is just as much an act of culture as the series of actions through which they came to exist and continue to have meaning. It asks why we should prefer one set of cultural actions over the other. If there is a point in preservation, it is to assist the aspirations of cultural actors. But at that point, we recognize that preservation is simply a cultural strategy; if cultural practices are fossilized in the process, that does not have to detract from the usefulness of the strategy (indeed, again, it may aid the strategists). This is strategic essentialism, as explained above.

Another potentially false problem is cultural homogeneity, sometimes a bugaboo in conversations about diversity. The fear is that the processes of globalization will result in a world where one place and people look much the same as another. As an argument for the active preservation of diversity, however, it runs into two problems. First, a theoretical confusion: on what level do we identify cultural diversity? India is notable for its linguistic diversity, even now, but linguistic nationalists, for example, have argued that the increasing prevalence of English poses a threat to this glorious variety. But the usage of Indian English is very different from the British or American versions, characterized by a remarkable species of code-switching between languages. So too the voice of the Indian author writing in English is distinctive; it has produced culturally unique styles and narratives. The Indian case exemplifies the process of cultural hybridization, and it indicates that globalization is unlikely to result in homogeneity (f5). Second, the quest to preserve diversity may lead to a practical contradiction, deriving from the fact that heritage value creates economic value. The World Heritage List might recognize one locale for, say, its ceramic production; in so defining the locale’s value, it will direct tourism and shoppers to this exemplary culture. As a result, neighboring villages will imitate the practices that have acquired a new economic value and abandon their own (equally culturally valuable) local practices. In other words, specifying examples of diversity can itself speed cultural extinction and homogenization. The question remains to ask: is there anything wrong with this? Rather than emphasize extinction, we might highlight processes of evolution, where fitness is understood to be the ability to achieve prosperity (f6).

The real problem of preservation practices lies in their potential to deny culture-holders autonomy or positive rights. A world of cultural diversity is attractive to those of us who inhabit dominant cultural modes; the material benefits we derive from our cultural power afford us the opportunity to derive aesthetic satisfaction from different cultures. The view from an endangered culture will be very different. A member of that culture may justly resent her lack of access to important resources and seek to change her cultural situation in such a way as to gain that access. A similar question asked – but not answered – at the conference raised the problem of limited resources: is it right to promote heritage when the funds might be better used to advance the well-being of the culture-holders by providing, say, education or health care? Recognizing that preservation for its own sake is a flawed goal should help the society address the conflict between the “rights of Culture” and the rights of people, when it exists.

The false problem of authenticity or quality evinces another confusion between the objectivist and constructivist perspectives, this time in the notion of value. It was noted that one consequence of the “re-balancing,” which placed intangible heritage alongside tangible, is inflation in the concept of heritage. When only monuments, artifacts, and objets d’art are valued, there is more or less a fixed set of cultural property. The notion that everything is Culture – the constructivist view – encourages us to value cultural practices as such but also makes it difficult to assign differential value to examples of Culture. The resulting increase in officially acknowledged heritage on, say, the UNESCO World Heritage List, risks cheapening the concept of heritage: if everywhere is a historic site, there is no meaning, no historical value (f7). But the concept of inflation is only possible from the objectivist perspective; when you consider the value of a cultural practice or object separately from the culture-holders who produce it, you are able to assign differential value to such practices or objects. The very debate about authenticity – what is “real” heritage – is created by the forces of transnational capitalism, whereby notions of authenticity, via the law of supply and demand, construct a scarcity that has value in the marketplace (f8). The “inflation in heritage,” therefore, is no metaphor: what is perceived to have cultural value has, by virtue of the designation, economic value. It is important to consider, however, the reason for the increasing number of applications to the Heritage List. There is a sense that, if one is to exist in the community of nations, one needs a place on the List. The reasons for claims to valuable heritage have little to do with value as such or with the particular pasts they valorize. Claiming value in the past is all about claiming prestige in the present – strategic essentialism once again. Indeed, it is unclear that “inflation” matters to anyone outside the narrow group of professionals – academics and dealers – who have their own strategic interest in preserving value and authenticity as the basis for their prestige and profit. Culture-holders who get on the World Heritage List likely will simply feel proud to be recognized. Such ideological value or cultural prestige is not subject to the laws of supply and demand. If we are worried about economic consequences rather than what this means for Culture, however, we should commit ourselves fully to this concern. Considering the situation in explicitly economic terms makes clear the importance to local populations of having their cultural objects officially designated as valuable heritage. Heritage often means tourism for countries that need the income (also here), and creative industries related to heritage are increasingly being viewed as a growth sector in the economy (f9). Worrying about inflation in the concept of heritage seems to miss the rather more important issues at stake.

There is room, however, to argue that physical objects have an intrinsic historical or aesthetic value (f10). Tangible culture, therefore – monuments, museum pieces – raises its own, distinct problems. Preservation for the end of knowledge or beauty does not lead to the same internal contradiction risked by preservation for its own sake. The intriguing suggestion was made that objects might be considered stake-holders in their own right. I take this to be another way of saying that humanity in general has a stake in health of such objects and the dissemination of knowledge derived from them. Experts are in the best position to serve humanity’s claim, by virtue of the codification of professional practices of excavation, preservation, and interpretation. This is a powerful argument; all else being equal, these are stakes worth protecting. But all else is rarely equal: the initial way of articulating this ideal makes nicely explicit the potential conflict between the “rights” of objects and the rights of those populations for whom the objects possess a particular cultural significance (and who, therefore, may indeed have different notions entirely about the “rights” of the objects in question) (f11). Stewardship was introduced as a concept which might mitigate this conflict. In its Judeo-Christian origins, it was conceived in broad ethical terms as making choices that allow the most good for the most stake-holders most of the time; it was defined at the conference as caring for something or as a concern with the future, over and against the present. The goals of stewardship encompass both diversity-type ends such as knowledge and rights-type ends, like giving voice to the disempowered. Can stewardship resolve disagreement over the possession, treatment, and use of special objects? If so, its usefulness will be founded, again, on a consideration of rights (f12). It was suggested that stewardship consists of a different bundle of rights than property ownership. For instance, a museum, playing the role of a steward of an object, would ensure the well-being of the object while a culture with a countervailing claim could control the method of its display or set limits on what technical procedures it might be subject to. Stewardship may be able to subsume values that, when framed in terms of ownership, appear to compete with one another.

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This sort of collaborative process is responsive to the question of rights. Many of the claims that stewardship attempts to address stem from historical injustices – theft, combat, or imperialism – that, in the past, have caused parties to seek remedy in an adversarial mode. General public recognition of this historical context has enabled a new moral order that is more sensitive to the claims of past victims. Multiple examples of successful collaboration were given, in which the cooperating parties each derive benefit from the relationship. Another concept of a shift from an adversarial to collaborative relationship comes from the Cultural Heritage Committee of the ILA. The Committee has proposed a new framework of “caring (protection) and sharing (cooperation).” Those lawyers working on a so-called sui generis regime of traditional knowledge, designed to avoid problems inherent both in intellectual property and in relying on indigenous concepts, are moving in a similar direction (f13). So collaboration can work well; the question is, how often will it? There is no mechanism of enforcement to ensure that purported stewards behave in accordance with the ideal. This has been a problem in the past even for museums. But even beyond this, some of stewardship’s promise to dispense with the entailments of ownership may be illusory (f14). The nature of the owner cannot help but determine the nature of the stewardship; national governments that own cultural property, for example, are less likely than museums to be effective stewards. The question finally comes down to this: is “stewardship” more than just a new word for old practices? Will the popularization of the concept result in changes in the way people do things? The answer lies ultimately in the perceived self-interest and the guiding culture of institutions of stewardship. The innovative practices reported at the conference do suggest that a new normativity is developing with regards to stewardship, in which heritage advocates can find some reason for optimism.

It may be productive to pay more attention to the norm of collaboration and to the phenomenon of normativity itself in working our way through yet more complicated situations where rights are threatened or where rights contradict. UNESCO’s role in promoting world heritage gets us quickly into the middle of this problem (f15). Discussion included the World Heritage List, the 2003 Convention on intangible heritage, and this year’s Convention on cultural diversity. There are problems of both definition and enforcement.

The problems of definition (also here) betray a more fundamental failing with the conceptualization of the UNESCO conventions: they nowhere deal with the conflictual nature of cultural diversity. We can identify this conflict on two levels. First, under the conventions, member states are responsible for determining the kinds of policies that promote heritage. This state of affairs reflects the fact that the structure and administration of heritage derives from the structure of the nation-state. Also, as each state emerged, it developed a narrative around the historical remains contained within its bounds. The narratives assert ancient, sometimes quasi-autochthonous origins and a teleology that sees the nation as the natural outcome of the history of its place. There is a basic contradiction, however, between the interests the nation-state has in its asserted homogeneity and diversity – specifically, the mission of protecting the culture of national or indigenous minorities. Does one trust the French government to act responsibly in promoting Moroccan culture? This is connected to a different problem. The fact of diasporic populations poses a direct challenge to a central assumption of much heritage work, that its subject is a bounded culture tied to stability and continuity in a certain place. Heritage supports the dissemination of the central narrative throughout the nation, even (or especially) to national minorities, be they indigenous or diasporic. This results in a kind of injustice. These narratives make little or no room for minority heritage, such as that of Jews, Muslims, or Gypsies in European countries. Second, the conventions fail to resolve, in themselves, potential conflict between the rights to cultural expression and other human rights. While the conventions state that they cannot be used for anything that constitutes an infringement of human rights, it remains unclear whether this allows specific cultural practices that might violate human rights to be protected. This is essentially the problem of unattractive heritage (f16). An example is a tribal dispute-settlement procedure practiced in Ethiopia that is only open to men. Does such gender-specificity offend against international human rights?

The practical problems of enforcement are also worrying. There are no real mechanisms for enforcement at all; they suffer significantly in comparison with the WTO. UNESCO conventions, moreover, may well conflict with the WTO: what one country perceives as an issue of cultural protection, another will understand to be economic protectionism. In such instances, the economic argument will likely trump the cultural one. A pressing question is whether the upcoming WTO meeting in Hong Kong will craft a broader cultural industry exception to give international legal legitimacy to those countries arguing that cultural diversity can warrant the closing of markets. Heritage advocates, however, should not be reliant on the good graces of experts in trade law to promote cultural goods. In general, enforcement will only follow successfully on the development of a reciprocity, acknowledging that claims of cultural protectionists and economic free-traders are both legitimate. The issue at hand, then, is what a compromise, which sees certain kinds of cultural protection as deserving a place in international agreements and others not, will look like. The UNESCO conventions fail to clarify this picture.

There is a third, broader, problem in using international norms and procedures at all to promote particular local heritages. To do so may create a tendency towards uniformity that threatens the goals of preserving diversity: the language and norms in which international law requires people to frame their claims may, in the process, do violence to the full range of human aspirations. For example, using intellectual property – with its time limits – as a framework may contradict indigenous desires to assert that their culture is eternal. As for solutions, there may be ways to rig the system in favor of local language and decision-making (also here). Recognizing that diversity per se is not a fundamental goal may also take some of the sting out of whatever standardization of culture results from globalizing promotion of heritage. But the difficulty remains that, if autonomy of expression is a fundamental goal, the very modes used to protect that goal may, because of their particular cultural articulation, contradict it. Unfortunately, empowering expression on that level may turn out to be impossible. That’s a fact; is it a problem?

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If a people need help in protecting heritage in the first place, it is because they have joined the international community in one way or another (including simply having become subject to international forces). This “community,” however, possesses its own particular culture. It developed out of, and now reproduces the norms of, a culture of internationalism. Internationalism is a special sort of culture – a meta-culture, as it were, whose practices and ideology developed in response to the need to allow distinct national and cultural communities to interact productively. Its salient features are a commitment to fundamental rights and to consensual procedures for mediating disagreements. Recognizing the fact and value of this culture is fully in line with the constructivist school of thought on Culture. That same perspective tells us that the culture of internationalism “belongs” equally to whoever participates in it. Is it too much to ask local cultures that participate in this international culture to respect it? Is it okay if norms are, in fact, normative?

The salient features of internationalism characterize much of the institutional apparatus discussed at the conference for promoting heritage. These features suggest a promising direction for the heritage movement. It appears that both the problems of the conflictual nature of diversity and of enforcement can be addressed (more and less) productively by substantive and procedural international norms. Let us take those problems in turn.

Does the gender-specificity of the Ethiopian tribal dispute-settlement procedure offend against international human rights? Perhaps, but rather than attempting to answer that question in advance, let the nomination of the procedure to a list of valuable heritage be a forum for Ethiopian women to object to it. Any controversial nomination would provide a new and powerful platform for the oppressed to register their complaints. This would result in a net benefit for those whose rights were being violated. The nomination process is sufficiently political that a practice which did violate local rights would have a hard time finding a place on the heritage list. If it did, however, that would likely either be the result of a compromise or of the final judgment that human rights were best served by approving the nomination. The broader framework of normative political processes also will likely make it harder for nation-states to oppress indigenous groups or national minorities. UNESCO heritage administration does put states in charge, but the treaty also obligates them morally to respect cultural diversity. It is true that, within the terms of the UNESCO conventions, there is no mechanism to enforce rights or claims. It is also true that one’s rights are only as good as one’s ability to defend them. But neither is one’s ability limited to what the UNESCO conventions contain. The complaint about enforcement may view the stage of action too narrowly. The question is not simply what are the conventions capable of doing but also, what will be the consequences of the conventions? UNESCO conventions can be used as a tool by which to place pressure on those who would infringe against its principles. The convention on cultural diversity contains assertions that would not have been possible to make in chauvinistic countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, where the political repression of national minorities begins with the demonizing of their culture. Many countries which signed the convention will now be accountable to its logic, opening new room for the political affirmation of democracy. The convention may not spell out that internal culture can conflict with national culture, but neither does it preclude that reading. The history of similar assertions, like the Helsinki declaration on rights, shows that they may likely empower opposition to repression. Equally important, civil-society arguments may impact the way corporations decide to pursue their interests. Viewing the stage of action more broadly might also mitigate concern over the failure of UNESCO conventions to provide enforcement mechanisms. It was suggested that the diversity convention is best viewed as a negotiating tactic – an argument that values and norms have changed and that the WTO, for example, should respect the change. Alternatively, it might be used as a lever in influencing the ICJ.

Soft instruments sometimes prefigure hard ones. In cases both of state oppression and enforcement, if UNESCO norms are not legally enforceable, they are still norms and they represent incremental progress towards a world in which disrespect and disruption are less acceptable and, ultimately, less imaginable. The concept of stewardship and more explicit deployment of international norms underscore an idea that seems entirely appropriate to the work of a society dedicated to cultural protection: that serving culture and its peoples depends on the development of a culture that does so.

About the Author:
Peter Turner is a doctoral student in Classics at Princeton University. His dissertation, “The political sociology of conflict in archaic Greece,” seeks to describe and explain the cultural causes of intra-community conflict in the archaic Greek polis.

FOOTNOTES

1. The first panel, which asked whether “cultural property” or “cultural heritage” was the better term, seems to have been designed to frustrate the writing of any report on the conference. I will use the term “heritage” for simplicity’s sake without implying any prejudgment on the question. [Return to main text]

2. Heritage, however, may be too open a term – to the point that it becomes either meaningless or entirely contentious – precisely because it lacks the permanent quality implied by property. Indeed, in the last 15 years, the term has become noticeably more politicized. It was also observed that English terminology for denoting the field suffered in comparison with the broader continental possibilities. In this respect, heritage seemed preferable, communicating both the retrospective quality of German Kulturgut and the ambiguity of Latin use of patrimonio (“property” but also linked to the state). Patrimony splits the difference to an extent, but it is important to allow that there is important heritage not claimed by any fatherland, such as the material remains of the Holocaust. The difficulties and importance attendant on translation in an international field were perhaps not pursued to a sufficient extent. [Return to main text]

3. Even where property does allow us to discuss intangibles, such as in the case of intellectual property, it favors the claims of Western economic powers. [Return to main text]

4. It was suggested that some of the work of the journal concentrate on the uses and misuses of analogy and metaphor. [Return to main text]

5. It could be argued that hybridization results in a lesser kind of diversity than that provided by a number of coherent, culturally isolated communities. In that case, however, one would like to know more about how to define and evaluate diversity as such. This question was not broached at the conference. The 1995 World Culture Report did argue that cultural diversity of a significant degree – on the level produced by the isolation of whole populations – was valuable as a safety-net against the possibility that contemporary technological civilization will collapse. If it does, we will need to have preserved alternative models for achieving subsistence, such as the strategies of hunters and gatherers. This appears to be the strongest use of the biological metaphor. If we imagine that strategies of resource production and distribution are genes, then indeed it does appear that we have a shrinking cultural gene pool, which makes our species more vulnerable to rapid and dramatic environmental changes. But this is, at the bottom, an economic argument that treats cultural diversity of a specific kind as a means to an end. It is disingenuous to use this as an argument for cultural diversity as such and writ large. [Return to main text]

6. If the argument is starting to smack of Social Darwinism, perhaps that means we should abandon the argument from biological diversity entirely and rely instead on arguments about rights. [Return to main text]

7. Note the conflation here of the value of “Culture” and the value of knowledge. We may avoid this confusion by treating knowledge and cultural diversity as separate goals, rather than assuming that knowledge is a by-product of diversity. [Return to main text]

8. This fact is demonstrated in comic extremism by the commercial consequences of Japan’s “living treasures” category – a select list of artisans designated by the state for their value in exemplifying Japanese cultural heritage. Their products acquire economic value as a result of the designation. In one instance, a knock-off artist produced imitations that were so successful that they were sold as “heritage products.” The Japanese government, unable to otherwise restrain the imitations, resorted instead to including the knock-off artist on the list of living treasures, thus ensuring the integrity of the living treasures market (as opposed to the living treasures designation system). [Return to main text]

9. On the other hand, there is concern that the real money-makers are heritage consultants and state officials; that the actual producers of valuable culture, who need wealth the most, see little of the economic value they produce. If so, this is, again, a question about economics and administration, not Culture. [Return to main text]

10. An anecdote about spirits in Native American artifacts illustrates this indirectly quite well, as pointed out here. [Return to main text]

11. One question, capable of mitigating arguments based on “humanity’s claim,” is, how effectively do experts serve such claims? It was pointed out, for example, that archaeologists have no real power over historical remains – control belongs to institutions within sovereign governments that make policy – and, in any case, are often derelict when they do have power – witness the spotty and inefficient record of publication from excavations. [Return to main text]

12. For example, one reason for stewards to refuse repatriation of an object might be because doing so would serve only to benefit corrupt local elites and further their repression of parts of a national population. [Return to main text]

13. The concept of a sui generis regime of knowledge remained unclear to many of the participants. [Return to main text]

14. On the difficulty of moving away from a concept on ownership based on property rights, cf. this section of the discussion. [Return to main text]