Last year, in volume 13 of this journal, Lyndel Prott published a Case Note entitled, “The Dja Dja Warrung Bark Etchings Case.”Prott, “The Dja Dja Warrung Bark Etchings Case.” In it she set out the background to a court case in Melbourne in 2004 to 2005 under the federal Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act 1977. The case related to three nineteenth-century bark items made by Aboriginal people in northern Victoria, items now held in the collections of two London museums. The items had been borrowed by Museum Victoria and brought to Australia for an exhibition in the Melbourne Museum. During the exhibition, an inspector under the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 had imposed a series of successive emergency declarations. The effect of these declarations had been to prevent Museum Victoria from fulfilling its contracts to return the three items to the overseas museums who had lent them for exhibition. The case went to court after several months of unsuccessful negotiations when Museum Victoria successfully challenged the legality of continuous emergency declarations. The inspector then failed in a request to the Victorian Minister for Aboriginal Affairs to make a permanent declaration to keep the objects in Australia, or to acquire the items compulsorily under the Heritage Protection Act. The objects were then returned to Britain.

I was the curator of the exhibition, Etched on Bark 1854: Kulin barks from Northern Victoria, which was held within the Aboriginal Gallery of Melbourne Museum between March and June 2004. This paper is a discussion of some of the issues raised by the exhibition and its aftermath, and it is written from the perspective of a curator and a historian.

The first part of the paper sets out the historical provenance of the three items, and discusses how the items came to be collected and sent overseas in the 1850s. I then describe how the debates at the time of the emergency declarations largely ignored this historical background, suggest some reasons why this occurred, and draw out some implications for the future. Last, I consider issues arising from the claims of ‘ownership’ that were made before and during the court case.This paper builds on two conference papers, one presented to the Museums Australia Conference in Brisbane in May 2006 and the second given to the Conference of the Australian Registrar's Committee in Hobart in November 2006. An expanded version of the first paper, “History, Strong Stories and New Traditions” appears in History Australia, June 2007.

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.

When a thief steals a work of art and resells it to a bona fide purchaser, most commentators favor protecting the buyer's title against a claim by the original owner. American law on this issue has been in flux, and today most American States resolve these disputes by balancing the buyer's blameworthiness against the owner's delay and fault. Such ad hoc statutes of limitations are misguided because they encourage art theft, reward morally culpable buyers, and leave the law unclear and unpredictable. Instead, the law should award title automatically to theft victims who immediately report their losses to the police and an international computerized database of art thefts. Doing so would create clear incentives for owners to report thefts and for buyers and art merchants to check the database, thus drying up the market for stolen art.

This article explores the possibility that dance is a field of expert knowledge that can be studied from the perspective of documents created by dancers and choreographers whose anticipated viewers/readers are mainly other practitioners. These documents include written texts and annotated video recordings created with the aim of sharing processes, techniques and ideas. These documents seek, in a variety of ways, to partially transform experiential knowledge from the tacit/ implicit to the explicit. As such, they suggest a form of trade literature that circulates dance knowledge within its professional network, but with the potential to generate productive exchanges with others outside of this network. By drawing on a number of examples of this trade literature and discussing their methods of circulating dance knowledge, this article makes a link to the theme of this special issue which is dance as a vehicle to discuss and debate ownership and cultural property.

This article seeks to relate hunting practices, of which some good examples have been given in this volume, to the way such practices are dealt with in the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage 2003. The extraordinary ubiquity of hunting behavior, ritual, and representation creates an enormous field of study, which can only be touched lightly by such an international legal instrument.

In recent decades, cultural protocols have emerged as a non-judicial alternative to the inadequate legal protection of Indigenous cultural heritage. They are meant to protect Indigenous peoples from the misappropriation of their heritage by outsiders and enhance Indigenous peoples’ control over their own domain. This article examines the functioning of Indigenous cultural protocols within Australia’s contemporary art world. As we will demonstrate, cultural protocols have clear practical utility. They can raise awareness, instigate changes in behaviour, and operate as a conduit for correcting the unauthorized use of Indigenous cultural materials. Yet, a disjunction exists between codified ideals and a messy reality. Our analysis of two protocol transgressions shows that protocols do not automatically protect Indigenous individuals equally. Furthermore, although discussions about compliance are infused with rhetoric about the authority of “the Indigenous community,” Indigenous people with cultural connections to contested heritage objects do not always have a clear voice in decisions made about their use.

Organ craftsmanship and music are inextricably linked with each other. In Germany, a particularly rich symbiosis between craftspeople, composers, and performing artists has evolved over the centuries. In recognizing the transmission of this intangible cultural know-how from generation to generation, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) inscribed organ craftsmanship and music together in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2017. This article elucidates how this inscription influences the perception and self-concept of organ craftsmanship and music, both in theoretic-intellectual and in virtual terms. Complementing the qualitative content analysis of literature and documents, narrative first-hand accounts/expert interviews with organ craftspeople/organ builders have been conducted and interpreted. Taking into account a dual nexus of cultural sustainability and intangible cultural heritage, sustainable value creation, substantial claims, multi-perspective visibility, and facilitative reassurance were analyzed and assessed vis-à-vis organ craftsmanship and music. Including organ craftsmanship and music in UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity demonstrates an appreciation for sustainable value creation related to the quadruple bottom-line of sustainability – that is, addressing economic, environmental, and societal aspects, including culture as a fully integrated dimension; claims substantial rights for safeguarding and invoking/activating heritage; enhances visibility of performing organists, assigned organ builders, frequent practitioners, and nominated organ experts; and enables reassurance of passion and self-positioning with organ craftsmanship and music.

The publication of a book in 2020 that argues against repatriation, on the grounds that it is incompatible with the necessary objectivity required for the production of scientific knowledge, raises issues that most scholars consider long settled. Rather than engage in a detailed review, this commentary revisits the reasons why claims of contributing to universal knowledge are insufficient to justify exploitation of the physical remains, and cultural property, of people who object to specific lines of research and reminds readers that academic freedom is a mitigated freedom that is rooted in responsibilities and norms agreed on within disciplines, all of which today accept repatriation as part of the necessary redress of legacies of exploitation.

To promote public trust and accountability for U.S. museums, AAM offers the following standards to guide the operations of museums that own or acquire archaeological material and ancient art originating outside the United States.

This article concerns the case of a stolen 1,000-year-old Buddhist mummy, known as the statue of Zhanggong-zushi, which caught the attention of the international community. The statue of Zhanggong-zushi is the embodiment of God in the eyes of the locals, and the treatment of human remains is controversial and sensitive. This case opens a discussion as to how Western courts should consider religious interests in the disputes of stolen cultural property. It is very important for the art world to understand how locals feel about the loss of their culture or religion.

Built heritage conservation is not easily achievable through the market, as it involves use of urban space and thus opportunity cost. The problem is more serious if there is no government support. This is the case in Hong Kong, where both the market and the state are not favorable to built heritage conservation. However, in 2005, through a local voluntary organization, a built heritage of Hong Kong—the Tung Wah Coffin Home—was conserved, and the project won one local and one regional conservation award. While conservation of built heritage by the voluntary sector has been common among developed countries, it is new in Hong Kong. This article first situates the issue in a general political-economy perspective and then analyzes the case of the Tung Wah Coffin Home, in particular, in the context of Hong Kong. The purpose is to examine what this case tells us about the role of the voluntary sector and its relationship with the government in providing built heritage conservation.

The process adopted by the local government to protect the interior of an old building in Victoria, British Columbia, culminated in a significant compensation award in favor of the building's owner and highlights the shortcomings of a coercive regulatory approach to heritage conservation. This study focuses on the relationship between cooperative resolution of conflicts between the rights of the public to protect heritage buildings and the rights of private property owners to the use of their property without interference, on the one hand, and the long-term utility and conservation of historic buildings and the sustainability of local government heritage programs, on the other. Analysis includes discussion on (a) key issues arising out of an involuntary heritage designation, (b) flexible alternative conservation mechanisms and incentives available to local governments, (c) approaches to conservation of heritage buildings in other jurisdictions, and (d) opportunities for improvement in the local government heritage conservation program.

The Musée du Quay Branly held an international symposium, “From Anatomic Collections to Objects of Worship: Conservation and Exhibition of Human Remains in Museums,” in Paris on February 22–23, 2008, at the museum's Théatre Claude Levy Strauss. The main purpose of the 2-day conference—opened by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication's Christine Albanel—was to stimulate an international debate on a multidisciplinary basis concerning the roles and responsibilities of museums in the exhibition and repatriation of human remains. The subject turned out to be topical, originating from the case of the toi moko, the Maori tattooed head belonging to the collection of the Natural History Museum in Rouen, France, since 1875. The restitution of the toi moko to the Papa Museum in Wellington, New Zealand, deliberated by the city of Rouen, was recently banned by the Administrative Tribunal of Rouen, on request of the Ministry of Culture at the end of 2007. The head actually belonged to a municipal museum, which was in fact part of the Musées de France, and therefore it was considered part of a public collection. Accordingly, the 2002 French statute providing for the inalienability of state properties was applicable.

Perhaps surprisingly, a number of Canadian jurisdictions have been at the cutting edge of legal exemptions from seizure or attachment processes for artworks on loan. Starting with the curious case of Hermitage treasures displayed in Winnipeg in the mid-1970s and using other intriguing examples, this article traces the historical origins of Canadian legislation with particular regard to the international context. The current state of the law in Canada is summarized and compared to that of other international jurisdictions.

This article provides brief coverage of the Russian-German dialogue since 1991 and the search for solutions about looted art of German ownership seized at the end of the Second World War and still held in Russia. So far, while Russia and Germany regard themselves as partners and friends in political and economic realms, they have been unable to find agreement about the looted art. Germany seems no longer to retain Russian cultural goods plundered during the war, whereas Russia still possesses a significant amount of German cultural assets. On the basis of existing treaties and international law, Germany demands its restitution. Russia, on the other hand, has nationalized the confiscated goods in 1998 as compensation for its own war losses. Nevertheless, not a few citizens of both countries have been returning artworks and books privately, in some cases supported by the governments. A convincing solution for the general problem can only be found if the treasures, which in the past have been understood as trophies, could be transformed into cultural ambassadors, while dialogue and the search for new ways continue within the framework of a policy of reconciliation. This approach also includes further research and analysis of the Russian cultural losses resulting from the war, a project undertaken in the 1990s at the Forschungsstelle Osteuropa (Research Center for Eastern Europe) of the University of Bremen, as briefly described in an appendix to the article.

There are apparently two legal systems of “rights ownership” in Ghana, which are (1) the individuals' rights—a system that overemphasizes the exclusive protection of the individual musicians' rights to ownership, and (2) the communal or governmental rights—a system that provides an exclusive protection of the government's (or community's) rights to ownership. Thus, for while the first are the inalienable rights that empower the autonomous musician universally, and are seen as a “private property” of mutually independent individuals; the second are the inalienable rights that empower the collective rights of the community/government, which are seen as a “public property” for a group, with cultural, communal or linguistic rights; systems that are contrary to the Akan systems of right ownership. My aim in this essay contest is to discuss the Akan “individual-communal” dual-relationship with respect to ownership that embraces these two seemingly unrelated concepts of “rights-ownership.”

Since the second half of the last century, public international law has been developing rules regulating the restitution of cultural objects removed from occupied territories during armed conflict. Today it is generally recognized that customary international law forbids pillage. The Protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict further mandates that artifacts removed from an occupied territory must be returned to the competent authorities of that territory at the close of hostilities. The Arab-Israeli case highlights the problematic side of this solution. Following the Six Day War in 1967, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the Gaza strip and the territory known as the “West Bank” came under Israeli control. Israeli archaeologists carried out numerous excavations, and discovered artifacts of special importance to Jewish cultural heritage. It is regrettable that, as a result of the peace treaty with Egypt, these artifacts can no longer be exhibited and appreciated at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, but had to be delivered to Egypt, where they now face an uncertain future. A similar fate may befall the artifacts excavated in the Golan Heights. The Palestinian claim for restitution cannot be based on the Protocol. The Problem is nevertheless the same in all cases; if the artifacts are to be preserved, properly appreciated and made available for purposes of study and research, it may be more appropriate to distribute them among the states by way of compromise and agreement, that will seek to enhance their cultural significance, rather than use the arbitrary sole criterion of the place of discovery.