There is a great deal of varied terminology used to refer to cultural heritage, and this chapter explores how definitions of these terms translate into practice the importance of cultural heritage to communities that care about it. At times the UK’s system of law and non-law instruments can lead to a fragmented approach to caring for cultural heritage. In addition, there is a body of jurisprudence where a cultural heritage object, place or practice is at the centre of the dispute, but where general legal principles (rather than specialist cultural heritage laws) are applicable; it is the way in which the judges in these cases construct notions of cultural heritage which present an opportunity to fully appreciate the way in which the UK, as a community, imagines cultural heritage. Concepts such as value, significance, interest, importance, uniqueness and value all demonstrate the recognition of the varied ways in which communities in the UK care about cultural heritage. Although the importance of cultural heritage to a community’s identity is frequently cited, this concept is rarely, if ever, translated into legal or non-legal instruments in the UK. This chapter explores how the relationships between different communities and cultural heritage have been translated into the various nested practices of care.

Given the centrality of communities to the care of cultural heritage, this chapter explores how the UK legal and non-legal instruments recognise the concept of the UK, as a community and as a network of communities. This chapter identifies and analyses the varied communities of care that directly and indirectly care for cultural heritage. These include international, national and local communities, but also institutional communities and those involved in law-making and policy. It also considers the smaller-scale communities that form to challenge the status quo and who seek justice, or wish to assume responsibility for the care of cultural heritage. What becomes apparent is the interrelationship between communities of care and the shared responsibilities at times for the care of cultural heritage, which is all too evident in the context of World Heritage sites in the UK.

This chapter focuses on the everyday. It considers how responsibility for the everyday, quotidian care of cultural heritage is assumed or allocated and the form that this takes. It analyses how care is translated into access, preservation and care of collections and places and how risk is managed when access has the potential to harm the long-term future of cultural heritage. This chapter analyses the ways in which access and preservation are supported, through financial support as well as in statutory provisions; it analyses the duties of care placed on custodians of cultural heritage and the role played by standard-setting.

The book concludes on a note of hope. The UK’s legal and non-legal landscape is often fragmented, but nevertheless facilities the efforts of communities of care, who care about cultural heritage, to care for it. This chapter sets the book in the context of being the start of a conversation about care of cultural heritage with a hope to expand the concept more widely in the future.

The focus of this introductory chapter is on identifying the importance of cultural heritage; the chapter thus addresses the fundamental questions about why communities care about cultural heritage.To this end, the chapter examines the search for the elusive definition of what cultural heritage is. By treating cultural heritage as an intangible concept one can focus on the value of cultural heritage to different people, rather than on its physicality as the subject of property; the human dimension and common features of cultural heritage of all types are therefore explored. There are clearly different ways in which groups value cultural heritage and this can change over time. The chapter identifies the areas of contestation and challenge regarding cultural heritage which lead to difficult questions that law and non-law initiatives need to address. The participation of communities as well as experts in decision-making is key to addressing some of these difficult questions. The chapter also addresses matters of terminology and methodology.

This chapter begins by exploring the causes of the uneasy relationship between cultural heritage and law and the relationship that has developed between law and other non-law initiatives to care for cultural heritage in the UK. In developing an integrated approach to the care of cultural heritage, by considering both legal and non-legal instruments, the terminology of ‘nested practices of care’ (drawn from the work of Joan Tronto) is adopted. These different practices of care form the corpus of study for this book and demonstrate the varied way in which care is provided in the UK. In addition to cultural heritage frameworks consisting of multiple nested practices, other sources of law and non-law dealing with general principles provide care and are therefore treated as nested practices of care. The analysis adopted in this book does not lose sight of the hierarchy of norms and enforceability of the different legal and non-legal instruments, but nevertheless does treat these different elements as contributing to the communities of care across the UK.

A key element of the notion of caring is the impetus to protect from harm. Harm is taken to include not only physical harm but also harm to the intangible elements to cultural heritage, including the association that might exist between an object, place or person. This chapter analyses how the UK law and non-law initiatives translate the concept of caring for heritage into duties on communities to protect cultural heritage from harm, or to respond to the risk of harm. This includes precautionary care, where policies and procedures are put in case, just in case they are needed in the event of war or conflict. Preventative care involves being alert to future potential risks and seeking to guard against these by prohibiting certain harmful activities (or at least subjecting them to scrutiny). The chapter also considers reactive care, where efforts are made in response to an actual or imminent risk of harm. It is recognised that often harm cannot be entirely averted and so the terminology of navigating harm is used. For that reason, where harm is inevitable, measures need to be in place to mitigate the effects of harm and these are considered.

This chapter explores the potential loss of cultural heritage objects to overseas purchasers and the apparent loss of public access to these objects. This is in the context of deferring the granting of licences for the export of ‘national treasures’ to permit time for public institutions to raise money to purchase the objects and prevent them from being exported abroad. The way in which the concept of ‘nation’ is constructed is analysed as well as how far other nations which may also have a connection with the object are considered. Does the ‘nation’ have a voice or is reliance placed on the expert advisor and the panel of independent experts who advice the Secretary of State at the exclusion of the views of communities or ‘the public’? The chapter explores what exactly the cultural heritage object is being saved from; frequently the trope of the American collector or the ‘Los Angeles museum’ is deployed when seeking to keep objects within the UK’s borders. The chapter considers how far such a system, which focuses primarily on the national community of care, represents appropriate care of cultural heritage.

This chapter analyses how communities of care challenge the status quo of who possesses cultural heritage; it focuses on the way in which the notion of caring for extends across the generations to claims made by the descendants of past owners, communities of origin or states and the multivocality in decision-making. Frequently the question has been asked: who owns cultural heritage? But it is more helpful to consider whether there is a reason to challenge the status quo and to analyse how decisions are made about the appropriate course of action to take. Many UK national museums have prohibitive governing statutes preventing them from acceding to repatriation requests (although these have been eased in the context of Nazi Era spoliation and some human remains). In some cases, a defensive stance is taken to challenges which represents paternalistic care.Some individual museums which have faced repatriation claims in the past for human remains or other cultural heritage objects have developed their own policies and processes in response to this which represents dialogic care.

This chapter defines care in the context of cultural heritage, drawing on the work of Joan Tronto, who treats care as both a disposition and a process. Central to this is the notion that care represents how people care about cultural heritage, but also the action of caring for it. Given the multitude of communities that care about, and care for, cultural heritage, it is clear that care is relational in nature. Building on the work of other academics who have analysed the nature of care, this chapter applies these to the context of cultural heritage and identifies the central elements of care as (a) developing and sustaining relationships; (b) acknowledging and assuming responsibilities; and (c) identifying and maintaining the appropriate care in the circumstances and revisiting this regularly. The need for caution with the concept of care is addressed, in particular to ensure that care is not paternalistic. Any system of care needs to build in space for revisiting the current allocation of care to determine whether it remains appropriate.