This article considers the constant tension facing several national panels in their consideration of Nazi spoliation claims concerning cultural objects. It will argue that this tension results from a shift in paradigms in dealing with Nazi-related injustices—from a strictly legal paradigm to a new victim groups-oriented paradigm, where addressing and recognizing the suffering caused by the nature of past crimes is central. While these national panels originate from this new paradigm and embody the new venues found for dealing with Nazi-looted art claims, this paradigm change at the same time presents these panels with a predicament. It seems impossible to abandon the legalist paradigm completely when remedying historical injustices in the specific category of cultural objects. Through a comparison between the Dutch and United Kingdom (UK) systems, this article will illustrate from both an institutional and substantive perspective that these panels seem to oscillate between policy-based, morality-driven proceedings (new paradigm) and a legal emphasis on individual ownership issues and restitution in kind (old paradigm). This article addresses this tension in order to provide insights on how we could conceptually approach and understand current restitution cases concerning Nazi-looted art in the Netherlands and the UK.

This article analyzes drafts put forth by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to examine the gaps that are created when institutions attempt to assign authorship of traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions to individuals and communities and how these gaps impact the use of folkloric dance in cultural institutions. The analysis produced via anthropological mappings of policy is underpinned with an examination of terminologies that circulate between fields of discourse, spiraling their way into public policies concerning marginalized peoples’ rights, economies of art, and intellectual property. This is followed by ethnographic accounts of Afro-Cuban folkloric dance classes, for it is in the dancing bodies that gaps between policies of authorship and the reality of unstable streams of transmission and reception materialize. By reproducing and circulating these unstable streams, combined with various legal doctrines put forth by WIPO, cultural institutions appropriate Afro-Cuban folkloric dance to commodify individuals and communities.

Following Nepal’s 2015 earthquake, there was speculation that sacred art would be looted from the ruins of severely damaged temples due to a breakdown in formal security. Although pillage did not immediately occur, the months following the earthquake have seen the theft of sacred heritage items. As Nepali sacred art remains under threat of theft, we explore the processes by which government intervention can be destructive of the community dynamic that maintains local crime prevention on an informal and unofficial level. Based on fieldwork conducted in Nepal shortly before and after the earthquake, we ask: can situational crime prevention measures, when imposed in a top-down fashion upon communities by state actors, be corrosive of collective efficacy and, therefore, ultimately self-defeating in crime prevention terms? The case of post-quake Nepal seems to suggest that the answer to this question is, in some circumstances, yes.

The phenomenon of antiquities smuggling is a complicated issue. The lack of official data makes it difficult to do an integrated analysis of the problem. The aim of this article is to present an accurate view of antiquities smuggling in the recent past. After gaining official permission from the Greek police, we examined 246 official arrests made by the Greek Department against Antiquities Smuggling (Athens Office) that occurred between 1999 and 2009. First and foremost, our results revealed that many arrests showed instances of fake antiquities. Moreover, it seems that there is a connection between organized crime and antiquities forgery. In addition, people with higher status are more often involved in antiquities forgery. With respect to the stolen objects, coins were by far the most preferred objects when it comes to forgery, and forgers are also using mostly bronze when it comes to these forgeries. Antiquity looting seems to have many hidden aspects, and the varied natured of antiquities smuggling requires the cooperation of a range of competent authorities and an in-depth investigation of the data, which should be based on the principles of the scientific method.