Dance disappears the moment it becomes visible, the complexity of its ontology matching that of its production and of its intellectual property status. Its creative process is both collaborative and hierarchical, involving the transmission of knowledge from one body to another, remembering steps, recognizing moves, mimicking, and improvising gestures as well as coordinating the roles of dancers, choreographers, and studios. Matthias Sperling’s Riff (2007) directly addresses many of these issues, which inform the specific content of the piece as well as its conceptualization, development, and the copyright licenses that underpin it. Sperling’s performance is clearly conceived as a rite of passage, a dance through which a dancer becomes a choreographer, going from “riffing off” other choreographers’ work to developing dance movements and phrases that, while tied to those of his predecessors, he can claim as his own. As such, Riff makes explicit and rearticulates the rearrangement of professional relations and roles, the difference between reperforming and innovating, between learning from bodies or from media, as well as how the property status of the work intersects with community norms and expectations of attribution.

The aim of this special issue is the investigation and contextualization of specific arts practices for what they can show us about the transmission and ownership of knowledge. Our authors make explicit the modes of sharing that are part of the creative process in contemporary dance and in Irish traditional music and examine the principles of transmission and social mores that allow ideas to move between practitioners. This introduction sets out some context for the issue and our approach, which is to work alongside practitioners to understand and reveal the social principles and expectations of ownership that are part of the process of producing these art forms.

In this article, we aim to focus on how the Iberian past (sixth century to the first century BC) has been used both to shape identities and to produce values in the marketplace and how the triad of the past, authenticity, and tradition is key in the commodification of the Iberian world. To do so, we will examine developments in the village of Moixent (Valencia, Spain). In this town, the Iberians and their archaeological remains are presented as the protagonists of the area, accompanied by several “heritage stratifications.” Through case studies of family-run wineries, we analyze the process of symbolic appropriation of the Iberians in the local wine sector and its confluence with cultural tourism as well as how it has led to the development of territorial branding based on the past.

As European nations address their legacy of colonialism, many museums in France, Germany, Great Britain, and elsewhere in Western Europe are examining the provenance of objects in their collections that were removed during periods of colonial occupation and, in some cases, have developed plans for their restitution. As of 2022, few museums in the United States have announced similar objectives. This article offers specific suggestions for American art museums to proceed proactively and transparently with colonial-era provenance research projects. I propose that museums identify objects in their collections that were displaced in one of two ways: either looted during a post-Napoleonic military conflict or stolen or traded by force under a period of colonial occupation. These works of art should be prioritized for provenance research and listed or otherwise made discoverable online. By listing these objects on their websites, museums will acknowledge the contentious histories of works of art in their collections and signal an openness to engaging with source communities, whether about the return of an object, loans, storage, display, educational initiatives, or other matters of care.

The revitalization of fermentation projects during COVID-19 raises questions about the preservation of the pandemic’s material and ephemeral effects – a topic that heritage policy is well equipped to engage. These activities also emphasize the necessity of engaging with heritage practices as a kind of care, encompassing both methods of safekeeping and practices of empathy. In addition, heritage ferments prove “good to think” around themes of loss and preservation, the interpretation of novel viruses through traditional food practices, and the coupling of heritage to microbes. Connecting microbes with heritage allows us to consider points of overlap: as bearers of patrimony with cultural and material lineages, as central to heritage tastes, and as open to geographical indications or other protections to further a kind of microbial resource management. Despite the pandemic’s devastating impact, consideration of heritage ferments points to both emancipatory and constraining outcomes for our post-pandemic future.

It is notoriously difficult to design and attach suitable legal rights to intangible cultural heritage (ICH), due to its nature as an evolving, living heritage. This article investigates the effects of government intervention relating to Scottish tartan in order to trace the relationship between formal proprietary rights, commodification, and cultural branding. The article proceeds in three steps: from (1) the historical context of the Jacobite rebellion and the subsequent Victorian assignment of the tartan to clans; to (2) the formation and function of the subsequent self-regulating community tartan registers; and (3) the 2009 governmental intervention with the establishment of a governmental tartan register, subsuming the community groups’ role in self-regulating tartan. While past ICH protection efforts have focused primarily on developing countries, the example of tartan raises wider concerns about the social and economic impact of the subtle erosion or, conversely, the ossification of living heritages. Finally, some alternatives are considered within the IP regime, such as sui generis protection, while highlighting the challenges of reconciling the domestic regulation of diverse ICH.

Religion has inspired the creation of art throughout human history. Most religious works of art are not considered to be sacred objects. Instead, these works serve to express religious ideas, values or feelings. Some works of art are, however, considered sacred objects. While art museums are secular institutions, the acquisition, handling, treatment, and interpretation of works of art deemed to be sacred objects may warrant special consideration since these works possess multiple purposes as works of art and sacred objects.

Even now in 2006, sixty years after the end of World War II, the subject of cultural assets seized under Nazi persecution (“looted art”) and displaced during the war (“trophy art”), continues to be of interest to politicians, historians, legal experts, and many others. Thus, at a meeting in January 2005, Germany's Advisory Commission for the return of cultural assets seized as a result of Nazi persecution, particularly those cultural assets removed from Jewish ownership, recommended the return of four paintings presently in the possession of the Federal Republic of Germany to the community of heirs of Julius Freund. Also in January 2005, Germany's government, all federal states and central organizations of municipalities called on German public bodies not to slow down in their search for cultural assets seized as a result of Nazi persecution and to report any items found to the Koordinierungsstelle für Kulturgutverluste (Coordination Office for Lost Cultural Assets) for display as part of its Internet database www.lostart.de. Furthermore, in February 2005, Franz von Lenbach's painting “Prinzessin zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn” which had been seized by the Nazis was identified through www.lostart.de and returned to the heirs of Bernhard Altmann. The painting was part of the Remaining Stock CCP (“Linzer Liste”) within www.lostart.de enlisting cultural objects with provenance gaps in the administration of Germany's Bundesamt zur Regelung offener Vermögensfragen (Federal Office for the settlement of ownership issues). The object was on loan from the Bundesamt and in possession of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Köln (Germany).

Displaced and nationalized cultural property remains hidden in the vast holdings of museums, libraries, and archives around the world. Some governments holding these “trophies” of war and conquest refuse to return such cultural treasures to their rightful owners even when their provenance has been identified. They assert that the collections were obtained through expropriation and nationalization, and that divestiture of a museum, library, or archive would jeopardize the existence of these institutions and cause societal discord.

This article discusses the struggle of an orthodox Jewish organization to recover from the Russian Federation a collection of sacred, irreplaceable books and manuscripts seized in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution and during World War II. The story of Agudas Chasidei Chabad's efforts to recover these core religious texts of its spiritual leaders has involved appeals by U.S. presidents, congress, and the U.S. Helsinki Commission, as well as lawsuits in the Soviet Union/Russia and United States.

After prolonged litigation in the United States, a federal court of appeals in Washington DC ruled in 2008 that American courts have jurisdiction over Chabad's suit against the Russian Federation to recover its religious texts. This ruling may pave the way for the resolution of this dispute and also lead to the filing of other suits in American courts seeking to recover looted cultural property, even if that property is located outside U.S. borders.

In the last decade of the twentieth century three UNESCO/ICOM regional workshops were held in Africa (Arusha, Tanzania in 1993, Bamako, Mali in 1994 and Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo in 1996) on the fight against illicit trafficking of cultural property. In the first decade of this century already two UNESCO regional workshops have been held in Africa on the same theme. The first was held in Abuja, Nigeria in 2003, and the second, which is the focus of this report, in Cape Town, South Africa in September 2004.

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.