As the Introduction to this volume makes clear, the category of cultural property has historically drawn together histories of thinking about property and cultural identity in the context of national sovereignty and an international community that is still scaled to the nation-state. As such, cultural property reflects both social and political theory and is also located historically within the very specific trajectories of the nation-state in global contexts of warfare, colonialism, and capitalism particularly as they have been instantiated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, in the present many of these relationships and communities are being challenged from a number of different directions. The tensions surrounding the remit and sovereignty of the nation-state, the efficacy of international law and policy and the scope of free markets emerge as a major theme for this volume.
The chapters in this section articulate some of the present-day tensions emerging from more than two hundred years of global capitalism. In a recent exhibition at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, Bruno Latour and his co-curators invited the visitor to “Reset Modernity” through a series of heavily orchestrated encounters with artworks that interrogate the place of human culture and society in the age of the Anthropocene. The exhibition draws on the trope of friction as established by Anna Tsing: the “awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (2004: 4) and brings this concept of friction into the often smooth conceptual move between the local and the global. The concept of friction allows us to see the places in which global capitalism is halted or jarred in its encounters with communities, with nature, with alternative scales, and understandings of scale. The first display of the exhibition unpacked the seminal film, book and image project produced by the office of Charles and Ray Eames, Powers of Ten (1977). Powers of Ten starts with an image of a family picnicking in a park in Chicago and moves both in and out of this image in powers of ten, shifting from the local to the planetary and the cosmic and then back to the local, moving through the human body into the microbial and atomic scale. Several of the artworks, and indeed the exhibition as a whole, intended to “interrupt this smooth glide through space” and in doing so make us aware of the work that goes into allowing us to conceptualize the global from the perspective of the local and vice versa (Latour et al. 2016). All of the chapters in this section effect a similar disruption, intervening in some of the understandings of the relation between the local and the global that are built into commonplace understandings of cultural property, and challenging the ways in which the nation-state is normalized as the reference point for the ordering of property relations, entitlement and sovereignty.
In many ways the smoothing out of scale and friction in the movements between the local and the global has created many of the ‘problems’ that cultural property both instantiates and emerges to resolve. How do we satisfy the claims of nations whilst creating a commitment to international community? How can we utilize culture as a local resource without it becoming valued only as a global commodity? How do we satisfy ideologies that underpin free markets with our ethical and cultural responsibilities towards historical polities that have not necessarily shared or benefited from these ideologies? How do we manage the relationship between state and market governance? At what scale does cultural identity become a form of sovereignty? Finally, and perhaps most chillingly, if the state is being eroded, what is emerging in its place? Each of the four chapters in this section demonstrates how cultural property is, in the present day, being rescaled to fit new kinds of collectivities, together with the intrinsic ways in which cultural property is implicated in identity politics and the constitution of sovereignty, again at different registers. This section, along with the following on new and emergent forms of cultural property, is a fitting end to the volume: to suggest what we perceive as the future of cultural property – a mechanism to undo, decolonize and transform the relations and borders between states and markets, between localities and global flows whilst also reworking the weave of the national and the international community, defining new forms of sovereignty and new conditions of ethically and responsibly circulating and sharing culture.
Stefan Groth and Regina Bendix explore the work that ‘culture’ plays in consolidating shared platforms of governance across the European Union. This chapter takes on a new salience in the wake of the referendum held in June 2016 in which the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, dubbed ‘Brexit’. The result of this referendum, which sent shock waves throughout Europe and beyond, and initiated an instant downturn in the UK economy, might be perceived as a failure in the cultural project of the Union. However, writing from the perspective of continental Europe, Groth and Bendix argue that culture has been a flexible concept allowing for both difference and uniformity to facilitate the construction of a sense of ‘European Community’ whilst maintaining national diversity. Groth and Bendix explore how the ‘culture concept’ has been put to many uses within the EU, whose governance structure and policy has been driven largely by economic interests. ‘Culture’ and the attempts at forging a new European identity have been used to leverage cultural identity, cultural difference and culturally framed values. Importantly however, Groth and Bendix are also concerned to show how (an imagined and performed unified European) culture has been used to gloss over conflicts and inequalities in EU policy and implementation. In the context of the significant refugee crisis that has overwhelmed Europe and was one of the catalysts for the UK referendum result, this chapter encourages a reflection upon the economic and political uses and abuses of the culture concept, paying particular attention to how they are used within EU policy and governance.
In his provocative chapter, ‘Who Owns the Bible?’, Neil Silberman unpacks some of the assumptions built into cultural property from a global perspective, focusing on the ways in which evangelical Christianity rejects both regions and nations in their understanding of their global reach. His starting point is not the constitution of the Bible as cultural property, but rather the impossibility of thinking about the Bible within this register. Rather than critique the global from the perspective of the local, Silberman forces us to evaluate the ways in which we naturalize certain global positions. His piece provokes a rethink of the global categories of both cultural property and traditional knowledge and of how the ownership of culture may privilege certain constituencies. By wondering whether evangelical, reformist Christians should be considered as cultural property owners because of a claim to a unique form of ‘traditional knowledge’, Silberman challenges the global definitions of culture that are contained in both mainstream cultural property positions and in their critique. Silberman’s chapter asks us to look closely at the ways in which such positions as well as their critiques reference definitions of culture, which as Adam Kuper has observed, often reproduce conservative, romantic anthropological definitions of culture as belonging to bounded, territorially defined groups (2003). He points to the dangers that are embedded within the category of traditional knowledge that has been produced predominately within the UN agency of the World Intellectual Property Organization with very little input from the communities that it seeks to reference and mobilize. The chapter is a cautionary tale about the different ways in which cultural property may be deployed by parties with radically different agendas, networks of power and systems of political leverage.
Paul Tapsell’s very personal contribution re-theorizes the national, and criticizes the way in which ideas about Indigenous culture have emerged as a foil for the settler-colonial nation-state. As critics such as Elizabeth Povinelli (2002), Jessica Cattelino (2010) and Audra Simpson (2014) have argued, Indigenous identity exists in a complicated bind – both as conceptually outside the settler-colonial state, yet also over-determined and entangled within that very politics of recognition. Tapsell provides an argument for the ‘pre-Indigenous’: a category of being that connects to lineages and pasts that refute settler-colonial histories of disconnection and dispossession as they are reflected in the very politics of recognition. Tapsell’s formulation of the pre-Indigenous marks a different political point of departure. He rejects the emphasis on the Maori Iwi, glossed as a tribe, arguing that it has emerged as a neoliberal, and neocolonial, tool of state domination. Rather, he argues for a return to the marae – the political, spiritual and social centre of Maori communities, and by extension for a genuinely grass-roots perspective on cultural property.
Finally, Rosemary Coombe explores the ways in which cultural property has become a focal point in the global South, channelling new forms of neoliberal governance. Neoliberal collectives – corporately structured cultural polities – both work against the colonial legacy of certain nation-states and create new kinds of entanglements in global markets. On the one hand this might be read as an intensification of culture and cultural identity into new forms of capital accumulation. On the other it can be read as a new form of global resistance to market hegemonies, in which traditional knowledge economies are used to ‘assert particular forms of culturally based sovereignty which may exceed the calculus of market economies’. The paradoxes continue – neoliberal governance encourages community empowerment by devolving authority to the grass-roots, but also legitimates the withdrawal of state support for cultural heritage. The recognition of new rights holders has facilitated the emergence of transnational cultural and political movements (and Coombe focuses especially on new Indigenous social movements and economic formations), as well as new transnational markets.
Each of these contributions demonstrates the ways in which cultural property is providing ground for new forms of conceptualization of collective identity and the kinds of entitlement and property that it might produce. From ownership of the idiom, and therefore the authority, of global Christianity, through to the co-option of nature by new forms of neoliberal instrumentality, the state remit over cultural property, so painstakingly built up over the modern era is being both disrupted and eroded. It is here that we see cultural property, once a way to define the material culture most prominently associated with the state, becoming a way to articulate global flows, translations, and transformations that resist both the territorial borders of the state, and the abrogations of state sovereignty.
Cattelino, Jessica. 2010. “The Double-Bind of American Needs-Based Sovereignty.” Cultural Anthropology 25(2): 235–262.
Kuper, Adam. 2003. “The Return of the Native.” Current Anthropology 44(3): 389–395.
Latour, Bruno, ed. 2016. Reset Modernity! Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2004. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.