Heritage as Property

This chapter considers efforts to reconceptualize cultural heritage as a set of things and practices subject to principles of group ownership – in effect, as a form of property, although the identification of culture with property may be emphatically denied by proponents of such protection schemes. It explores some of the paradoxes of the expansive vision of heritage protection that seems to be gaining ground in international circles. Advocates for the protection of indigenous heritage today deploy the term “cultural property,” once applied to items of national patrimony plundered in wartime or looted from archaeological sites, to encompass all manifestations of an individual culture, both material and intangible. “Cultural property,“ Apache leaders declare, “includes all cultural items and all images, text, ceremonies, music, songs, stories, symbols, beliefs, customs, ideas, and other physical and spiritual objects and concepts inalienably linked to the history and culture of or more Apache tribes”.