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.

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.

This article presents a more human, dynamic, and holistic perspective of cultural heritage, closely referring to the currently observed changes in its conceptual development. It argues that the conceptual focus of cultural heritage has shifted alongside three interrelated and complementary directions: 1) from monuments to people; 2) from objects to functions; and thus 3) from preservation per se to purposeful preservation, sustainable use, and development. The reappearing and alive functional heritage is discussed as opposed to the objectified, glass-covered, and frozen heritage of the past by referring to both practical and theoretical heritage domains. Conclusions are drawn in favor of an adequate reexamination and readaptation of the conceptual framework of cultural heritage, based on accepting its new functional socioeconomic dimension and integrating multiple perspectives from a variety of academic fields.ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: I would like to thank Alexander Bauer and an anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments on this article.

The illicit antiquities trade is composed of a diverse population of participants that gives the appearance of complexity; however, using the network paradigm, a simple underlying structure is revealed based on specific geographical, economic, political, and cultural rules. This article uses a wide range of source material to chart interactions from source to market using a criminal network approach. Interchangeable participants are connected through single interactions to form loosely based networks. These flexible network structures explain the variability observed within the trade, as well as provide the basis behind ongoing debates about the roles of organized crime, terrorism, and the Internet in antiquities trafficking. Finally, a network understanding of trade's organization allows for anticipation, though not necessarily prediction, of antiquities trafficking and offers the opportunity to develop new strategies for combating the trade.

In December 2000, a World Indigenous Peoples Forum was held in conjunction with the 24th session of UNESCO's World Heritage Committee in Cairns, Australia. Representatives from Australia, Canada, and New Zealand harnessed the momentum of these events and their location to propose the formation of a new committee, the World Heritage Indigenous Peoples Council of Experts (WHIPCOE). The initiative was taken in response to concerns voiced by indigenous peoples to their lack of involvement in the development and implementation of laws, policies, and plans for the protection of their knowledge, traditions, and cultural values, which apply to their ancestral lands, within or comprising sites now designated as World Heritage properties. This article traces the fate of that proposal and underlines the intransigence of sovereign states during those short-lived discussions. It goes on to suggest alternate routes for indigenous representation and recognition within the World Heritage system.

The author portrays the indigenous populations who engage in subsistence digging of sites in Latin America both as a means of supporting themselves economically and as a way of connecting themselves to their past and their ancestors who left the buried remains as a type of gift to their descendants. The article is also critical of the mainstream archaeologists, who, according to the author, hide behind the veil of scientific objectivity. Finally, the author juxtaposes the varying competing interests, particularly against the backdrop of denial of basic human and economic rights in these regions, and poses the question, to whom should these cultural remains belong?

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.

The World Heritage Convention, revolutionary in its conception thirty years ago, has today become the most widely accepted international legal instrument for the protection of cultural and natural heritage. Now, however, it requires adjustments if its successful implementation is to continue. These changes must not modify the Convention but must achieve an equivalent level of implementation. This article focuses on three issues, which are currently the subject of ongoing discussions: the representivity of the World Heritage List, equitable representation in the World Heritage Committee, and revision of the Operational Guidelines. The author not only describes the procedures for reform and the results achieved so far, but he also compares the legal provisions of this Convention to the other international legal instruments for the protection of cultural heritage.

This article comes as the conflict in Syria has entered its fifth year, bringing with it loss of life and the displacement of the Syrian people as well as extensive damage to, and destruction of, the country’s cultural heritage. This article will first provide an overview and explanation of the national and international legal framework for protecting cultural property in conflict as it applies to the Syrian State and the non-State actors involved, using examples from the whole conflict, including the recent actions of Da’esh. Second, we demonstrate that the destruction of all types of cultural property, regardless of its importance, can be considered a prosecutable violation of these laws, and we examine the possibilities for prosecution. Following from this discussion, we question whether the existing framework can be considered effective and consider the role the international heritage community can play.

The practice of yoga outside India and for commercial exchange (transnational commercial yoga) is a multibillion-dollar industry that has been the site of increasing formal regulation. The primary questions these regulations are meant to resolve include the following: (1) What is yoga? (2) What is its proprietary nature? and (3) Who has the right to manage its expression? Two recent U.S. federal district court cases involving the Bikram Yoga College of India, a yoga franchise based in Los Angeles, have drawn international attention to the debate on whether yogic knowledge or practice resides in the public or private domain. This article asks, if given the monetary value at stake, did the global market for transnational commercial yoga set the stage for claims to individual IPRs? Furthermore, this article analyzes how yoga, due to its unique characteristics as an embodied practice and intangible form, serves as a platform for experimentation from which new meanings of open source, IPRs, and information management strategies emerge.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I would like to thank the Department of Anthropology, the School of Social Sciences, and the Center for Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine, for their funding support.

The progress that has been made by 'indigenous peoples' in international forums has been aided by the political perception that this category of claimants is limited and in some respects unique, and that such claims can properly and safely be treated as a special case. Although the imprecision of the category and the expanding array of groups involved in the 'indigenous peoples movement' could eventually threaten this perception and provoke more sustained demands for precision, such a transformation has not yet occurred.

Cultural property protection policy as implemented in Syria since 2011 is structured around standards and practices enshrined within the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (including its First and Second Protocols) and the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. Policy emphasis is on the in situ protection of cultural sites and the recovery and return of stolen or looted cultural objects. But policy initiatives have very obviously failed to stop the plunder and illegal trade of cultural objects in Syria, as they have failed before for neighboring countries. This paper describes why policy initiatives aimed at site protection and object recovery have failed and how policy might be improved by a market reduction approach aimed at subduing demand.

This article builds on recent discussions on intangible heritage following the adoption of the relevant convention by UNESCO in 2003. The emergence of intangible heritage in the international heritage scene is tied up with fears of cultural homogenization and the need to protect the world's diversity. For a number of critics, however, UNESCO's normative framework raises questions around the institutionalization of culture as a set of endangered and disappearing ways of life. The article reviews these institutional approaches to cultural preservation in relation to the politics of erasure, the creative interplay of heritage destruction and renewal. This is then further examined against the backdrop of indigenous identity politics played out in two contested public arenas: the National Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington and the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.

The following short articles were presented at a special session of the Pacific Arts Association, held at the College Arts Association annual meeting in New York in February 2007. Entitled “Cultural Properties—Reconnecting Pacific Arts,” the panel brought together curators and anthropologists working in the Pacific, and with Pacific collections elsewhere, with the intention of presenting a series of case studies evoking the discourse around cultural property that has emerged within this institutional, social, and material framework. The panel was conceived in direct response to the ways that cultural property, specifically in relation to museum collections, has been discussed recently in major metropolitan art museums such as the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met). This prevailing cultural property discourse tends to use antiquities—that most ancient, valuable, and malleable of material culture, defined categorically by the very distancing of time that in turn becomes a primary justification for their circulation on the market or the covetous evocation of national identity—as a baseline for discussion of broader issues around national patrimony and ownership.

Alternative methods of dispute resolution are an important resource in matters of cultural heritage in addressing the return, restitution, and repatriation of cultural property. The purpose of this article is to analyze the situations in which such methods might be preferred to the classical judicial means and to examine the problems that might arise.

The article is in two parts. The first part describes the actors as well as the current methods used for the restitution and return of cultural property. The second part explores the types of property that lend themselves to alternative dispute resolution techniques and lists the—often original—substantive solutions that have been used in practice.

Alternative methods of dispute resolution enable consideration of nonlegal factors, which might be emotional considerations or a sense of “moral obligation,” and this can help the parties find a path to consensus.

This article questions and contextualizes the emergence of a discourse of intellectual property rights in Māori society. It is argued that Māori claims regarding intellectual property function primarily to demarcate ethnic boundaries between Māori and non-Māori. Māori consider the reinforcement of ethnic boundaries necessary since they experience their society and distinctive way of life as endangered both by the foreign consumption or misappropriation of aspects of their authentic cultural forms and by the intrusion of foreign cultural elements. Following Simon Harrison (1999) it is argued that the first threat is often represented as an undesired form of cultural appropriation, piracy or theft, while the second threat is viewed as a form of cultural pollution. This argument is elaborated with a case-study of each so-called danger, namely a claim regarding native flora and fauna submitted to the Waitangi Tribunal, which is considered as an example of resistance against cultural appropriation, and the increasing hostility of Māori to foreign interest and research in Māori culture and society, which is analysed as an example of opposition to putative pollution.

In recent years an increasing number of state-based heritage protection schemes have asserted ownership over traditional medical knowledge (TMK) through various forms of cultural documentation such as archives, databases, texts, and inventories. Drawing on a close reading of cultural disputes over a single system of TMK—the classical South Asian medical tradition of Ayurveda—the paper traces some of the problems, ambiguities, and paradoxes of making heritage legible. The focus is on three recent state practices by the Indian government to protect Ayurvedic knowledge, each revolving around the production of a different cultural object: the translation of a seventeenth-century Dutch botanical text; the creation of an electronic database known as the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL); and the discovery of an Ayurvedic drug as part of a bioprospecting benefit-sharing scheme. Examined together, they demonstrate that neither TMK, nor Ayurveda, nor even the process of cultural documentation can be treated as monoliths in heritage practice. They also reveal some complexities of heritage protection on the ground and the unintended consequences that policy imperatives and legibility set into motion. As the paper shows, state-based heritage protection schemes inspire surprising counterresponses by indigenous groups that challenge important assumptions about the ownership of TMK, such as locality, community, commensurability, and representation.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: My grateful thanks first to Vijayendra Rao and Gayatri Reddy for invaluable discussion and intellectual support; Debra Diamond, Jane Anderson, Lalitha Gopalan, Michael Sappol, Alexander Bauer, and two anonymous referees for extremely useful interdisciplinary insights; and to the Rockefeller Foundation and the Smithsonian's Center of Folklife and Cultural Heritage, particularly Richard Kurin, Carla Borden, James Early, and Peter Seitel, for the ideal fellowship and venue to get this paper written.

First, the good news: Carpenter, Katyal, and Riley make a compelling case that the venerable concept of property—long defined primarily by such principles as transferability and rights of exclusion and control—should be broadened to encompass a robust ideal of stewardship. In doing so, “In Defense of Property” (henceforth, IDP) renders property more compatible with the indigenous view of things. This significant contribution to ongoing global debates about the protection of indigenous heritage will be of great interest to readers of the IJCP.