In this section we present a global perspective on cultural property by illuminating its very local histories. As described in the Introduction, discourses and legal framings of cultural property emerged in Europe and were exported around the world through colonial empires. Law was not just a vital form of colonial governance, it was also a form of cultural colonization, defining and privileging colonial values, using key legal categories (like property for instance) as a way of shaping colonial subjectivities, erasing local values and political systems and even suppressing local languages. However, despite the totalizing aim of the colonial project, it was impossible to entirely eradicate cultural and political systems of meaning and governance (Deloria 1969; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997; Chatergee 1994; Mamdani 1996; Merry 2000; Dirks 2001; Stoler 1995, 2003). In turn, a Eurocentric focus on this colonial period obscures both local histories in the negotiation of colonial logics and power as well as processes of empire building in other parts of the world (Mignolo 2011; Byrd 2011; Geismar 2013). The four chapters here are presented to provincialize the dominant narrative of cultural property that comes largely from European contexts and draws our attention to the need for alternative accounts of cultural property that have their origin in other parts of the world (Anzuldúa 1987; Chakrabarty 2000).
As we argued in the Introduction, although cultural property has its antecedents in early Renaissance and Enlightenment histories in Europe, its current usage and politics is a product of modernity, specifically from the 1870s onwards, with particular international engagement and consensus building in the mid- to late twentieth century. As a distinctly modern figure then, cultural property is made and remade through the politics, economics, global designs and relationships of state and non-state parties during this period. But not all of these move in the same direction or with the same influence. Here we want to redirect and refocus by considering alternative non-European state engagements with cultural property.
In his work unravelling the persistent forms of colonialism woven into our globalized present, Walter Mignolo argues that there are three types of critiques of modernity. The first, postmodernity, is internal to the history of Europe and as such functions as a Eurocentric critique even though its reach is global. The other two types (dewesternization and decoloniality) emerged from “non-European histories entangled with western modernity” (2011: xii), and whilst they now also reach into multiple sites, they derive from very particular experiences of modernity. In pointing to the differentiated standpoints for current critiques of modernity, Mignolo is pointing to the significance of locality in shaping forms of knowledge production. In conversation with theorists like Jean and John Comaroff, Arturo Escobar and Jodi Byrd, Mignolo helps us reframe the question to ask: how might the geopolitics of knowing cultural property shift if we change the direction of the gaze (Escobar 2008; Mignolo 2000, 2011; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012; Byrd 2011)?
In her chapter, Sandra Rozental considers the interface between international discourses of cultural property and the hybrid conception of ‘patrimonio’, which emerged in Mexico as a particular synthesis of Spanish colonialism and an indigenously inflected Mexican nationalism. She teases apart the language of ‘patrimonio’ and how this has been strategically mobilized by the Mexican state in the production of a national identity that incorporates a pre-Hispanic past. In demonstrating this point, Rozental looks at both the language and logic of Mexican cultural property legislation alongside a very specific example of the taking of a pre-Hispanic artifact from the town of Coatlinchan for public display in the National Museum. This cooption of the Indigenous by the nation, to generate a state identity that is Indigenous, not necessarily in solidarity with the politics of local communities, but in terms of the meta-Indigenous category produced for the international community, is a common story – reflected in contributions in this volume from Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Rozental illustrates why it is important to look to the ways in which cultural property discourse is translated into local idioms and to understand the history and resonance of terms like ‘patrimonio’. Local histories of cultural property signify the multivalence and hybridity that is built into the category from the beginning. This becomes more evident if we look carefully at the way it is adopted, reframed and re-positioned within non European nation-states in the present day.
Shu-li Wang and Michael Rowlands’ chapter considers the shifts in the politics of cultural property from a Chinese perspective. The heritage boom in China over the past 25 years has led to a significant increase in the number of museums built and heritage sites established, as well as a surge of new collecting and arts markets. Initiated through changing ideologies around private property, Wang and Rowlands argue that this expansion of the heritage and museum industry has been encouraged by the state as part of a pursuit of the production of collective memory and as efforts towards very specific patriotic education in an era of rapid globalizing change. Cultural property here is being used as a tool to secure a sense of internal collectivity that reaches back into a long dynastic history of meaning-making about what it is to be Chinese. Consequently there are very specific cultural references and points of departure, but in the present it is also being successfully merged with dominant UNESCO categories and definitions. With this translation from a Chinese context into the international bureaucratic framing, there is a transformation in the meaning of cultural property that is occurring for the Chinese art market and also for the future shape of Chinese collective memory.
Morag Kersel’s chapter asks whether artifacts are the common heritage of humankind or whether specific communities or nations have proprietary rights to this material. By presenting an overview of her research in the Middle East, Kersel juxtaposes the dynamic of the movement of objects across the region, with the more statist and static language of UNESCO. Kersel rightly identifies the tensions that exist in local understandings of exchange and that version which is embodied in UNESCO conventions. Kersel’s own project tracks sets of pots and basalt bowls distributed globally through an innovative exchange from the Bab adh Dhra’ tomb in Jordon, and exposes the unruliness of object movements across state borders through the market, as well as through archaeological and museum exchanges. Kersel cautions us to read UNESCO and other cultural property legislation as a policy of movement as much as restriction, which both advocates for a regulated but important flow of objects, and limits that flow within the boundaries of states. In this way, the capacity of objects to truly be ‘cultural ambassadors and messengers’ has limits.
Boatema Boateng also takes up the question of the capacity for state adaptation and adoption of international policy frameworks, in particular by considering the colonial histories of intellectual property law and copyright. Boateng is interested in exposing the cultural entanglements of intellectual property law and the powerful transformation of African ideas of culture, creativity, individual ownership, authorship and possession that came through the colonial importation of this body of law. Intellectual property law is intimately bound up with histories of empire and colonization, and Boateng’s work is a welcome addition to the increasing attention to colonial copyright and the different experiences of its implementation, co-development and appropriation in non-European contexts (see Bently 2007; Anderson 2009). Boateng argues that the European conceptions of history and time, which placed Africans outside both, continue to affect how this European body of law operates. Illustrating this point in the context of Ghana, Boateng makes the poignant point that even through the experiences of decolonization and independence, this colonial legal structure, as incompatible and inadequate as it was and remains, has been very difficult to shift and change. This has had significant consequences for how an independent Ghana conceptualizes its ideas of culture, its properties and its ownership.
In all these chapters, UNESCO and its conventions and bureaucracy function as a certain ‘centre’ that is increasingly being destabilized. Localizing cultural property does not necessarily mean taking UNESCO out of the frame. Instead UNESCO is being dislodged as the primary locus of knowledge production. How cultural property has been made in non-European contexts and the various efforts to decolonize that concept (which is also a feature of other chapters in this volume) remains a critical project for the future of cultural property. What these chapters illustrate and also grapple with, is how, even in the local histories, a globalized category of cultural property continues to maintain considerable power to effect and produce new forms of global nationalism which depend upon very specific ideas of culture.
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