This article explores some key considerations around determining who should have the right to control access to, and benefit from, traditional knowledge and intangible cultural heritage. It highlights the complexities involved in these considerations by examining in detail the different claims to control by different segments of the population in regard to two case studies: Samoan tattooing and the Vanuatu land dive. It uses insights from this analysis to problematize the assumptions about the use of concepts such as “community” in legislation designed to protection traditional knowledge and expressions of culture, and it also reflects on what effect such legislative developments may have on the cultural industries initiative and the implementation of the Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage.

In the debate about indigenous cultural property, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of the United States has developed and implemented an unorthodox concept of “cultural affiliation.” The act entitles Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations to claim repatriation of their cultural property—comprising human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony—upon the establishment of a specific shared group identity and a cultural affiliation to an object. The concept of cultural affiliation in the act replaces proof of ownership, or proof that an object was stolen or illicitly removed. It thereby amends traditional standards saturated in notions of property and ownership that have perpetuated since Roman law and allows the evolution of a control regime over cultural property that takes into account the cultural aspects of the objects. On an international level, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) of 2007 stipulates a similar emancipation of indigenous peoples' cultural property claims from notions of property and ownership. This article explores NAGPRA's cultural affiliation concept as it stands between private property and human rights law and brings into focus the concept's elements that go beyond traditional property law. It ultimately looks at the potential and limits of the concept from an international perspective as a standard for other countries that consider implementation of UNDRIP's provisions on indigenous, tangible, movable cultural property.

While practitioners of the legal and art and culture industries have traditionally believed their businesses to be independent of the other, the escalating battle over the repatriation of cultural property teaches otherwise. The antiquities market has flourished despite the increase in litigation surrounding some works and the number of works repatriated in recent years, making interdisciplinary study of the market more relevant and necessary than ever. This study establishes that the number of antiquities sold with legally- significant provenance information is steadily increasing as a result of the legal environment. Also, these objects are less risky and therefore sell for higher prices than works with no recorded history of ownership. Finally, evidence indicates that the occurrence of a legal event causes a slight, short drop in the market, followed by a significant rise in prices for the objects with reliable provenance information. In the end, the auction market for Italian antiquities is inexorably linked to activities that have ramifications for the legality of collecting these works.

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.

In his article, “The Value and Valuation of Maritime Cultural Heritage”, Stefan Claesson discusses methods by which the relative or absolute value of submerged cultural sites like shipwrecks might be established, to provide rational bases for decisions about their management. He emphasizes systems used in ecosystem valuation, notably an average individual's projected “willingness to pay” (WTP) to preserve something and “willingness to accept” (WTA) its loss. He suggests that systems to apply such measurement devices be built into things like the procedures for addressing impacts on historic properties under Section 106 of the U.S. National Historic Preservation Act.

The International Journal of Cultural Property is a peer-reviewed journal which publishes papers and other materials representing a broad set of perspectives on problems relating to cultural property, cultural heritage, and related issues. Contributions are welcome from the wide variety of fields implicated in the debates—law, anthropology, public policy, archaeology, art history, preservation, museum-, tourism-, and heritage studies—and from a variety of perspectives and interests—indigenous, Western, and non-Western; academic, professional and amateur; consumers and producers—to promote meaningful discussion of the complexities, competing values, and other concerns that form the environment within which these disputes exist.