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]〉.

Between 1976 and 1991, central Beirut, repository of centuries of historic structures, was substantially destroyed by civil war. In 1994, a private company known by its French acronym Solidère was created by government decree and given the task of reconstructing the center of Beirut. Despite political problems, the Solidère project brought the hope of social recovery through economic renewal; yet progress should not come at the cost of memory.

How can Beirut, destroyed, be a site of both recovery and erasure? Even though traditional legal and political discourses acknowledge that cultural heritage holds a powerful position in reconstruction, there are few tools for capturing its functions. Using heuristics originally employed in archeology and art history, this article addresses psychological aspects of reconstruction by discussing contemporary Lebanese art. If culture is defined not only as what people do but how they make sense of what they have done, the enormity of the political problems of post–civil war reconstruction become clear. National governments hoping to consolidate authority would do well to consider how best to approach public places resonant with emotionally charged memories.

Policymakers should consider the complex benefits of negative heritage in drafting laws that will enable its protection. Legal reform carried out with the goal of balanced heritage policies that accommodate negative heritage is key for postconflict urban spaces. By acknowledging the weight of the past, such policies would also bolster confidence in the emergent government and the political process.

Cultural property goes back a long way. It is probably fair to say that it originated with the beginnings of human creation, the earliest material and intellectual expressions of mankind. And as soon as there was cultural property, there likely was dispute, although in a most primitive form. The destruction, supplanting, and taking of another group's cultural creations may not unreasonably be thought of as the earliest form of cultural property debate.

The twenty-first century has ushered in new debates and social movements that aim to structure how culture is produced, owned, and distributed. At one side, open-knowledge advocates seek greater freedom for finding, distributing, using, and reusing information. On the other hand, traditional-knowledge rights advocates seek to protect certain forms of knowledge from appropriation and exploitation and seek recognition for communal and culturally situated notions of heritage and intellectual property. Understanding and bridging the tension between these movements represents a vital and significant challenge. This paper explores possible areas of where these seemingly divergent goals may converge, centered on the Creative Commons concept of some rights reserved. We argue that this concept can be extended into areas where scientific disciplines intersect with traditional knowledge. This model can help build a voluntary framework for negotiating more equitable and open communication between field researchers and diverse stakeholding communities.

Recently the commons has become a predominant metaphor for the types of social relationships between people, ideas, and new digital technologies. In IP debates, the commons signifies openness, the exclusion of intermediaries, and remix culture that is creative, innovative, and politically disobedient. This article examines the material and social implications of these debates (and the legal copyright regimes they interact with) in the translation and remix of Warumungu culture onto a set of locally produced DVDs. Although DVD technology can account for concerns such as monitoring access, preserving cultural knowledge, and reinforcing existing kinship networks, it also brings with it the possibility of multiple reproductions, knowledge sampling, and unintended mobilizations. Tracking the shifting mandates and emergent protocols in this digital interface redirects the lines of the debate to include multiple structures of accountability, ongoing systems of inequity, and overlapping access regimes involved in the always tense processes of cultural innovation.

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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.

This article responds to John Merryman's article on cultural property internationalism in the last issue of the International Journal of Cultural Property (IJCP). It considers the increasing, although still limited, role that art historians working out of universities play in the debates around the ownership of cultural property. Although there are a number of principles embedded in cultural internationalism that are still widely supported, art historians seem to be moving away from cultural property internationalism. One reason for the increasing critique of cultural property internationalism is the rise of scholarship that questions traditional art history and its relationship to colonialism.

The Federal Assembly of the Swiss Confederation, Pursuant to Articles 69, para. 2 and 95, para. 1, of the Swiss Federal Constitution, in execution of the UNESCO Convention from November 14, 1970 on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property (UNESCO Convention 1970), after having examined the Message of the Federal Council dated November 21, 2001, decides.

The challenge of how to stop the unauthorized use of Indigenous knowledge has been firmly constituted as a problem to be solved by and managed through the legal domain. In this paper, my questions are directed to the way Indigenous knowledge has been made into a category of intellectual property law and consequently how law has sought to define and manage the boundaries of Indigenous knowledge.

Responding to J. H. Merryman's discussion of cultural property internationalism in the preceding IJCP issue, this article examines the currency of the internationalist perspective within the museum community. Perhaps surprisingly, there is little evidence of adherence to an internationalist perspective, at least among the official policies and publications of museums and museum organizations. The article proposes that the current dissociation with cultural internationalism in the acquisitions arena signals an important shift, and bears significant long-term consequences for many museums.

Cultural property internationalism is shorthand for the proposition that everyone has an interest in the preservation and enjoyment of cultural property, wherever it is situated, from whatever cultural or geographic source it derives. This article describes its historical development and its expression in the international law of war, in the work of UNESCO, and in the international trade in cultural objects and assesses the ways in which cultural-property world actors support or resist the implications of cultural property internationalism.

A major factor driving contemporary concerns about the fate of intangible cultural property is the rise of the Information Society, which has proven adept at stripping information from the cultural contexts that give it meaning. Efforts to preserve intangible heritage have tended to follow Information Society models by proposing that heritage be inventoried, then removed from the public domain and returned to the exclusive control of its putative creators. This essay reviews recent scholarly work and policy initiatives related to intangible cultural property, with an eye toward identifying their merits and flaws. It argues for a more ecological perspective, one that takes account of the unpredictable quality of information flows as well as the costs of attempting to manage them. Also explored are some of the difficult, unanswered questions about whether all intangible cultural heritage is equally worthy of protection.

In the late nineteenth century, while advocates garnered support for a law protecting America's archaeological resources, the U.S. government was seeking to dispossess Native Americans of traditional lands and eradicate native languages and cultural practices. That the government should safeguard Indian heritage in one way while simultaneously enacting policies of cultural obliteration deserves close scrutiny and provides insight into the ways in which archaeology is drawn into complex sociopolitical developments. Focusing on the American Southwest, this article argues that the Antiquities Act was fundamentally linked to the process of incorporating Native Americans into the web of national politics and markets. Whereas government programs such as boarding schools and missions sought to integrate living indigenous communities, the Antiquities Act served to place the Native American past under the explicit control of the American government and its agents of science. This story of archaeology is vital, because it helps explain the contemporary environment in which debates continue about the ownership and management of heritage.

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The view that “cultural property internationalism” (Merryman) is represented by the Hague Convention 1954 and that it has been departed from in later UNESCO instruments can be challenged. Words which carry particular connotations can distort the argument—property is one of them, so cultural property is already a loaded term. The historical sources used to buttress the modern argument for more liberal trade in cultural objects bear other interpretations. Similarly, UNESCO's mandate has been narrowed in a way not justified by its constitution. UNESCO's later instruments, such as the 1970 Convention, do not represent an aversion to the art market, as is witnessed by its development on an international Code for Dealers. However, the art trade at present is based on the secrecy of transactions, and this has led to a number of scandals. Neither assessment of the interests at stake nor treaties on human rights or trade require tolerance of these practices.

Increasingly those concerned with cultural property favor an approach that focuses on protection and shared access over unequivocal demands for return to places of origin or insistence on retention by museums and other institutions. This article starts by describing the International Law Association and discussing its role, along with that of other nongovernmental organizations, in connection with the development of cultural heritage principles and instruments. It then outlines the intent behind “Draft Principles for Cooperation in the Mutual Protection and Transfer of Cultural Material” presently being developed by the Committee on Cultural Heritage Law of the International Law Association. The Committee favors a nonadversarial and collaborative approach to issues surrounding the return of cultural material to its place or people of origin. This article describes and discusses the draft principles being developed by the Committee. Its hope is that a set of principles could be developed that would form the basis for expediting the resolution of a variety of cultural property disputes. These principles are at an early stage in their development and the Committee welcomes suggestions for changes and additions to the draft principles as they now stand.

The closing years of the twentieth century and the early years of twenty-first century witnessed remarkable developments in the international attempts to protect the world's cultural heritage. For instance, in 1999 the Second Protocol to the Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict was adopted. In 2001, the Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage was adopted whilst 2003 witnessed the adoption of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. The United Nations declared 2002, as the UN Year for Cultural Heritage and appointed UNESCO as its Cultural Agent. There is no gainsaying that the UNESCO was faithfully committed to this mandate and discharged its responsibilities satisfactorily. However, the acknowledgment of the fact that lack of information and inadequate appreciation of the UNESCO Conventions on the protection of cultural property remained a formidable obstacle to the realisation of the aspiration of the UN and UNESCO informed the 2003 Abuja Workshop convened primarily to promote the UNESCO Conventions protecting Cultural Property. What follows is report on the 2003 Abuja Workshop.

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.

Heritage piety departs ever farther from reality. High-minded admonitions broaden the gulf between what happens to cultural property and what virtuous stewards feel should happen. Ever more of our patrimony gets looted, destroyed, mutilated, shorn of context, hidden from scrutiny, inadequately stored, poorly conserved, eBayed. Merryman cites three causes: the animus of UNESCO and archaeology against marketing cultural property, the sanguine view that trafficking abuse can be quashed by state fiat and moral suasion, and excessive constraint against heritage export by blanket diktats from source nations (and tribes and ethnic groups). These evils endure because heritage stewards commonly subscribe to four underlying sacrosanct fictions. (1) The heritage of all humanity deserves to be preserved in toto. (2) Cultural heritage matters above all for the information it can yield. (3) Collecting is reprehensible; it must be circumscribed if not outlawed. (4) Nations and tribes are enduring entities with sacred rights to time-honored legacies. I show why these views are mistaken yet remain embedded in heritage philosophy and protocol. In particular, although heritage is piously declared the legacy of all mankind, chauvinist sentiment continues to impede internationalism, partly because it buttresses the credentials of those in charge, who are forced into moral postures that promise unachievable stewardship. National and local self-esteem are holy writ for UNESCO and other cultural property agencies. Equating heritage with identity justifies every group's claim to the bones, the belongings, the riddles, and the refuse of every forebear back into the mists of time. All that stands in the way of everyone's reunion with all their ancestors and ancestral things is its utter impossibility. Heritage professionals once seen as selfless are now targets of suspicion, often thought backward looking, deluded, self-seeking, or hypocritical. Small wonder that militant reformers who seek to suppress illicit cultural property dealings by treaties, court decisions, government fiats, and the moral artillery of shame and guilt are viewed with an increasingly cynical eye.