Cultural Heritage, Patrimony,

and Repatriation
RICHARD HANDLER

Abstract
In contemporary usage, the terms cultural heritage and cultural patrimony are syn-
onyms. Both are metaphors that depict the idea that the culture (material and imma-
terial) of a specific social group is its property, owned collectively and passed on from
one generation to the next. In the past 50 years, these terms have come to constitute
a discursive space in which academic disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology,
art history, and philosophy have interacted with professional disciplines such as law,
museology, and architecture; and these university-based fields have had to interface
with a much broader public, newly interested in what has come to be called the poli-
tics of culture. Repatriation is a term that signifies the return of cultural artifacts, from
metropolitan institutions that had “collected” them to local communities that can
claim to have created them. Repatriation has gained momentum since the Second
World War, as both decolonization and various international conventions have pro-
vided a platform for once colonized peoples to claim items of their cultural heritage
that had been taken from them. Repatriation is a directional process, from center to
periphery. It includes both the return of artifacts and a ceding of control over the
interpretation of such artifacts.

INTRODUCTION
In contemporary usage, the terms cultural heritage and cultural patrimony are
synonyms. Both are metaphors that depict the idea that the culture (material
and immaterial) of a specific social group is its property, owned collectively
and passed on from one generation to the next. In the past 50 years, these
terms have come to constitute a discursive space in which academic disci-
plines such as anthropology, archaeology, art history, and philosophy have
interacted with professional disciplines such as law, museology, and archi-
tecture; and these university-based fields have had to interface with a much
broader public, newly interested in what has come to be called the politics
of culture. Repatriation is a term that signifies the return of cultural artifacts,

Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1
2 EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

from metropolitan institutions that had “collected” them to local communi-

ties that can claim to have created them. Repatriation is a directional process,
from center to periphery. It includes both the return of artifacts and a ceding
of control over the interpretation of such artifacts.

FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH: CENTRAL CONCEPTS

CIVILIZATION AND CULTURE
The social-scientific study of culture and the institutionalization of programs
to preserve cultural patrimony stem from the same sources, those that led
to the rise of the nation-state, organized as a centralized bureaucracy, as the
dominant form of sociopolitical organization in the modern world (Poggi,
1978); and to an individuating historical consciousness, one of modernity’s
two approaches to the issue of historical temporality (Stocking, 1987; Traut-
mann, 1987). The two approaches to temporality are captured by the ongoing
relationship of the terms civilization and culture, terms which, in European
discourses over many centuries, have been defined and redefined but even-
tually came to represent, in their pairing, the tension between enlightenment
rationality and scientific universalism, on the one hand, and its rejection in
the historical particularism of romanticism, on the other hand (Elias, 1994,
pp. 3–43; Stocking, 1963).
By the end of the nineteenth century, civilization had come primarily to indi-
cate human progress as accumulated and displayed in the accomplishments
of industry, science, government, and the arts. Proponents of civilization sub-
scribed to a socioevolutionary understanding of human history, which was
seen to move in one direction, from the “primitive” to the “civilized” (Rist,
1997). Civilization itself was unitary, not diverse, and its advance since the
time of the “ancient” Greeks had come to be localized in Western Europe and
North America. Civilization was a product of human rationality, which was
at once universal (all human thinking would eventually arrive at the same
ultimate truths) and particular to the most advanced “race,” the “whites”
(Segal, 2000).
Proponents of culture celebrated human difference and validated the
worthiness of particular, historically and geographically distinct, human
traditions. The term culture could include the material products of human
ingenuity, and thus technological, scientific, and artistic achievements, but
in the twentieth century social sciences it came ultimately to refer to an
inner, mental, or spiritual organization that was thought to characterize, and
to be unique to, each society or people.
Cultures in this sense cannot be ranked: each life-way is a complete sys-
tem of human meaning and action that makes the world comprehensible to
 Cultural Heritage, Patrimony, and Repatriation 3

the people who live within it. Nor is culture cumulative across all human
history, as civilization could be said to be. In a famous essay on “Culture,
Genuine and Spurious,” Edward Sapir summarized the distinction between
civilization and culture in this way: “Civilization, as a whole, moves on; cul-
ture comes and goes” (1924, p. 413). Oswald Spengler used a more elaborate
metaphor that captures the opposition between enlightenment rationality
and romantic particularism: “Each culture has its own new possibilities of
self expression which arise, ripen, decay, and never return . . . . These cultures
… grow with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the field. They
belong … to the living nature of Goethe, and not to the dead nature of New-
ton” (1926, p. 21).
Culture came to be the particular disciplinary property, and central organiz-
ing concept, of anthropology as it developed in North America in the work of
Franz Boas and his students. Through Boas, the German romanticism of the
Humboldtian tradition of historical ethnography was transplanted to North
America (Bunzl, 1996). Boasian or American cultural anthropology became
institutionally dominant in the United States, the country that developed a
far larger university system than any other modern state and, consequently,
that produced the great majority of the world’s professional anthropologists
in the twentieth century (Stocking, 2001, p. 290).
As George Stocking has shown (2001, p. 308), anthropology itself, as an
academic discipline, emerged from different strands in European intellectual
history (natural history, philology, moral philosophy, and antiquarianism),
and its varying interests (in language, material culture, social organization,
and customs) came to be institutionalized in different ways within the
university systems of different countries. British anthropology, for example,
came to focus on social structure, not culture, and in Great Britain the study
of archaeology, which in the United States was one of the “four fields”
of anthropology, was institutionalized elsewhere than in anthropology
departments. Still, despite the differences among national anthropological
traditions, the intellectual project encapsulated by the favored US term,
culture, was central to all. And by the end of the twentieth century, the
culture concept had come to be similarly used not only in most national
anthropological traditions, but by the wider publics of modern societies.

PRESERVATION AND PROPERTY

Preservation—of historical buildings and monuments, and more generally
of past ways of life—emerged as a concern in modern Europe and North
America as one outcome of the great democratic revolutions. In its return
to classical antiquity, the emergent historical consciousness of the European
renaissance took profound note of historical difference, yet the preservation
4 EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of material artifacts (other than texts) was not part of this agenda. As David
Lowenthal notes, “admirers of antiquity were less apt to save ancient tem-
ples … than to mine them for their own creations: to extract marble from an
old ruin was cheaper than to import it from Carrara” (1985, p. 390). It was in
relation to the nineteenth- and twentieth century nationalisms that emerged
from, and led to, political revolutions and independence movements that
the preservation of the material artifacts of historically particular national
pasts became important. Indeed, the onslaught of modernity (civilization)
conveyed by dramatic political and socioeconomic changes lent urgency to
nationalists’ sense that their particular cultures, embodied in a physical pat-
rimony, were threatened and thus needed to be preserved.
The history of historic preservation in modern nation-states begins in the
early nineteenth century both in local institutions such as museums and his-
torical societies and in nation-wide regulation provided by laws (Hosmer,
1965, 1981; Nora, 1984; Wallace, 1996). By the middle of the twentieth century,
such work was being carried on in different countries by well-established pri-
vate and public institutions, while the establishment of the United Nations
provided an institutional site for international efforts. The emergence of an
anthropological conception of culture, encompassing all aspects of the life of
a society, coincided with the expansion of preservation efforts from a nar-
row focus on buildings and monuments to a potentially unlimited project
to preserve all aspects, material and immaterial, of a nationally or ethnically
defined past (Handler, 1988, pp. 109–158). Thus, the modern concept of a
world composed of distinct cultures and the nationalist desire to preserve
the national patrimony have come to fit together well.
This conceptual fit, between culture and preservation, must also be expli-
cated in terms of the idea of property (or heritage, or patrimony) that is
centrally important to both. In their remarkable compendium of definitions
of culture, A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn surveyed more than 150 dif-
ferent definitions, which they grouped in six different types. Of these types,
only one (which they term structural, to highlight the idea of a patterned orga-
nization or system) fails to incorporate an idea that is something similar to
the idea of heritage or patrimony. Their foundational definition comes from
the first page of E. B. Tylor’s 1871 Primitive Culture: “culture … is that com-
plex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and
any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”
(Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952, p. 43; Tylor, 1871, p. 1).
The participial phrase, “acquired by man as a member of society,” is crucial,
as it likens human socialization to the acquisition of property. Culture itself,
in Tylor’s definition, is a collection of products that are transmitted over the
generations, that is, heritage or patrimony. The underlying discourse is that
 Cultural Heritage, Patrimony, and Repatriation 5

of modern “possessive individualism” (Macpherson, 1962) and the accom-

panying ideas of the social-contract theorists (especially John Locke). In this
view, individuals in the “state of nature,” without any social prompting, act
to create private property; these pre-societal, yet fully formed, individuals
then choose, rationally, to create political or civil society in order to protect
their property.
From the perspective of a fully cultural anthropology, such a foundational
social theory is backwards: the desire for or understanding of private prop-
erty can only be a function of societal values, not their cause. Dorothy Lee
made a similar argument when she rejected the idea of culture as a response
to some set of universal “basic needs” of human beings. As she pointed out,
anthropologists and psychologists were constantly prompted to expand the
list of basic human needs, as new research brought to their attention previ-
ously unimaginable values. She concluded that values were basic and needs
derivative: “If, for example, physical survival was held as the ultimate goal
in some society, it would probably be found to give rise to those needs which
have been stated to be basic to physical survival; but I know of no culture
where human physical survival has been shown, rather than unquestion-
ingly assumed by social scientists, to be the ultimate goal” (Lee, 1948, p. 392).
Those unquestioning assumptions of social scientists, which are foun-
dational to modern thought, make it easy for us to imagine culture as a
system or machinery that generates products to satisfy our needs. In the
early modern discourse of the contract theorists, individual property owners
come together to form society—which can thus be seen as an institutional
response to a basic human need for the protection of private property
(Locke, 1960). In the nineteenth century discourses of both nationalism and
the emergent social sciences, societies are imagined as property-bearing
“collective individuals” (Dumont, 1977, pp. 47–60). The assumed need of
such collective individuals to preserve their property has led again and
again to heritage-preservation programs, which, as they have taken shape
in nation-states around the globe (Bendix, Eggert, & Peselmann, 2012), have
become prime sites for the generation of a kind of nationalistic, cultural
self-consciousness.

CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH: MATERIAL AND IMMATERIAL CULTURE

When we focus on culture as a system—usually, a system of ideas and
values—culture is understood to be “immaterial.” When we focus on culture
as the acting out of cultural values, then cultural products, or “material
culture” and its “accumulation” over time, come into view. The conceptual
distinction between material and immaterial culture is underpinned by
Western body–mind dualism.
6 EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Strictly speaking, there should be no need for the distinction: all human cre-
ations and activities are cultural, and they all have both physical (material)
and symbolic (immaterial) dimensions. A building is no more material than
an evanescent act of communication (which depends on symbols that have
a physical existence); and an act of communication is no more immaterial
than a building, both of which are imbued with meanings which are not in
the first instance physical. Yet, both modern anthropology (and its cognate
disciplines) and cultural heritage programs have institutionalized the dis-
tinction between material and immaterial culture—a distinction embodied
institutionally in the relationship of museums and universities.

MUSEUMS AND UNIVERSITIES

The disciplines most concerned with the kinds of collected objects that
would become (sooner or later) subject to repatriation claims were anthro-
pology, archaeology, art history, classics, and oriental studies. As noted
earlier, in different national traditions, these areas of study were configured
differently in relationship to one another within the institutions that housed
them. Whether closely or loosely affiliated, or even unallied, together they
were responsible for the collection, study, and preservation of the material
culture of various pasts. The pasts of primitive peoples fell to anthropol-
ogy and so-called prehistoric archaeology (Segal, 2000, pp. 774–775). The
pasts of prior civilizations—Greece, Rome, Egypt, the “Near East,” and
medieval Christendom—that could be seen as leading to civilization itself,
the unmarked category of modern Western civilization, fell to art history
and classical archaeology. And the pasts of what were considered to be
stalled, dead-end civilizations, such as India, Japan, and China, required
various kinds of oriental studies.
Throughout the nineteenth century, these disciplines became located in
two great modern institutions: the public museum and the research uni-
versity. Museums of various kinds formed a vast “exhibitionary complex”
(Bennett, 1995, pp. 59–88) meant to display the order of the universe, as
revealed by science, to the emergent publics of modern nation-states. Most
important for our purposes were museums of art, ethnology, and natural
history. Over time, various types of heritage objects traveled between such
museums; for example, primitive religious icons might be moved from an
initial home in an ethnology or natural history museum to an art museum
(Clifford, 1988, pp. 189–251). Still, by the turn of the twentieth century,
we find a vast portion of the collected, material world heritage gathered
together in a few dozen great metropolitan museums and scores of smaller,
regional museums (Penny, 2002), institutions that would continue to add to
their collections into the twenty-first.
 Cultural Heritage, Patrimony, and Repatriation 7

The academic disciplines that developed to study cultures, civilizations,

and their histories all had deep connections to both museums and universi-
ties. But over time, a split developed between the spiritual or theoretical side
of those disciplines and the side devoted to the study and care of the material
products or remains of past civilizations. For example, in the middle of the
nineteenth century, anthropology began to emerge as a discipline through
the activities of amateur ethnological societies, in Paris, New York, and Lon-
don. Much nineteenth-century anthropological work entailed the collection
of objects, whether cultural artifacts or the physical remains (skulls and skele-
tons) of human beings.
These collections must be seen as the signs and spoils of imperial conquest
(Fine-Dare, 2002, pp. 13–46). Even as the United States, Canada, Australia,
England, France, and other European nation-states colonized much of the
rest of the world (including “first nations” within the settler societies), in
a process that often included genocides, the front-line colonizers collected
what they considered to be the material remains of the societies that advanc-
ing civilization had either engulfed or destroyed. They shipped those objects
back to the metropolitan centers, to the newly established museums of
archaeology, ethnology, and natural history. There they could be displayed
to the public as proof of the superiority of their own civilization vis-à-vis
those who had been conquered, colonized, displaced, or destroyed
Such museums provided an institutional home for anthropologists, who
ventured out from them on collecting expeditions, and returned to them to
catalogue, study, display, and store their spoils. In the same era, universi-
ties were beginning to create positions and departments in anthropology. At
the turn of the twentieth century, Boas had positions at both Columbia Uni-
versity and the American Museum of Natural History. But museum work
entailed attention to mass public education that clashed with the ethos of
pure scientific work. Boas eventually abandoned the museum for the univer-
sity (Jacknis, 1985), and by the early twentieth century, museums had become
a professional “backwater” for anthropologists, the center of gravity of the
discipline having moved to “more behaviorally oriented” research (Stocking,
1985, p. 8).
Similarly, art history became institutionalized as an academic discipline
starting in the mid-nineteenth century. As early as the European renaissance,
wealthy collectors had employed knowledgeable agents to collect objects of
value. This split, between collecting objects and controlling the knowledge
that authorized their value, widened as academic art history developed as the
study of culture history in the German, romantic tradition. Art history came
to be more concerned with the “spirit” of art, or with various kinds of culture
theory that could explain it, than with the objects themselves, residing either
8 EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

in museums or the homes of wealthy collectors. The development of tech-

nologies for the “mechanical reproduction” of artworks (Benjamin, 1968),
principally photography, greatly abetted the process, as the teaching of art
history in universities came to rely on the projection of images (using various
kinds of “slides”) and their collection in mass-produced textbooks. As com-
pared to anthropology, for which museum collections, by the mid-twentieth
century, were not thought to hold the central data of the discipline, art his-
tory could never quite disavow the museum as a central repository of objects
of study. Still, by mid-century, it was clear that there were two art histories,
one residing in universities and the other in museums (Haxthausen, 2002).

AUTHENTICITY
A crucial aspect of the expert knowledge needed to collect and curate cultural
heritage concerns authenticity. For our purposes, authenticity refers to the
relationship between a heritage object and a social identity (Handler, 2001).
In everyday language, we ask of such an object, “is it real?” But because the
object in question exists in front of us, in an exhibition case or a museum stor-
age space, our question is not ontological. Rather, we are asking, “has this
object been produced by persons having such-and-such social identity”—in
other words, “is this doll a real Hopi katchina doll?” or “was this landscape
really painted by Vermeer?”
The answers to such questions turn out to be far more complicated than
we might expect, as a long literature on the concept of authenticity attests
(Bendix, 1997, Lindholm, 2008). It can be difficult to know with certainty
who, or which individual, was the creator of a particular heritage object,
even those produced within a recent Western tradition. For objects derived
from traditions where the attribution to particular artists was not important,
such questions are transmuted into questions about collective identity. Yet,
the ways in which peoples and cultures have been identified in imperial and
colonial writings—by travelers, traders, missionaries, administrators, and
ethnographers—do not necessarily correspond to the social understandings
of those people themselves (Cohen, 1978). Moreover, because Western
writers imported modern ideas about the purity of so-called pre-contact
cultural forms into their collecting practices, they tended to describe objects
produced after the moment of contact as debased or inauthentic.
Thus, metropolitan museums were filled with objects held to represent the
story of civilization and the cultures of simpler peoples, yet the identities of
those peoples were precipitated out of the same long-term historical process
that led to the collecting of their heritage. With respect to both peoples and
their heritage, authenticity became a matter to be decided by outside experts,
who were almost always museum and university professionals. Meanwhile,
 Cultural Heritage, Patrimony, and Repatriation 9

the expertise concerning cultural heritage of indigenous peoples around the

world could be dismissed on the grounds that such people were by definition
inauthentic, as they lived in the post-contact period. Museums owned the
“world’s” patrimony, and professional experts controlled the interpretation
of it. But this situation began to change with decolonization following World
War Two.

TRAVELING CULTURES
Culture has always “traveled” (Clifford, 1997, pp. 17–46; Urban, 2001).
Throughout the millennia of human history, people have carried, traded,
borrowed, or stolen merchandise, relics, rituals, incantations, tools, weapons,
arts, crafts, music, and dances across any and all social boundaries and
natural barriers. And people themselves have moved away from home,
assimilated into new social groups, and returned to prior homes, migration
being another means by which culture and cultural objects have traveled. In
some cases, people have resisted what we would call cultural borrowing,
in others they have welcomed it, but it is only in the modern era that such
movements have been conceptualized in terms of individuated national and
ethnic groups defined in part by the culture they possess—their heritage
or patrimony. And as the idea of culture as a heritage to be owned and
controlled by the groups who created it became widely accepted, the
collecting practices that had filled museums and that continue to flourish in
the worldwide antiquities market came to be seen in a new light, as theft.
Hence, the current worldwide trend in favor of cultural repatriation—the
return of heritage objects to their rightful collective owners.

REPATRIATION
Cultural heritage repatriation is today a prominent issue, but it is well to
remember the many famous cases in which people sought the return of
looted objects immediately, well before the emergence of heritage-protection
laws. The Elgin or Parthenon Marbles present the paradigmatic case of
cultural removal leading to ongoing demands for cultural repatriation.
Almost immediately after Lord Elgin had pieces of the frieze sawn off
and shipped to England in 1801, Greeks protested; such protest over this
stolen patrimony has been an important theme in Greek nationalism ever
since (Hitchens, 2008). Throughout the nineteenth century, North American
Indians mourned the victims of genocides and protested the robbing of their
graves and the confiscation of their ritual paraphernalia. As early as 1899,
the Onondaga Nation brought suit against a private collector for the return
of wampum belts (Fine-Dare, 2002, p. 92).
10 EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Over long, bleak decades, indigenous peoples within settler societies

struggled to maintain their way of life, and as in the history of the US civil
rights movement, their efforts gained new momentum after Second World
War. The global geopolitical landscape was transformed by decolonization,
and settler societies began to be transformed by what would come to be
called multiculturalism—a social movement in which indigenous peoples
(among other “minorities”) gained access to higher education (including,
importantly, legal training) and fought for the return of their ancestral lands
as well as other kinds of political, civil, and human rights.
Meanwhile, since the late nineteenth century, nation-states have been con-
structing a system of international regulations for the protection of cultural
property. Scholars generally cite the Hague Convention respecting the Laws
and Customs of War on Land (1899, revised 1907) and the Hague Convention
concerning Bombardment by Naval Forces in Time of War (1907) as the first
international agreements outlawing “the destruction, pillage, looting or con-
fiscation of works of art and other items of public or private cultural property
in the course of armed conflicts” (Frigo, 2004, p. 367). Although it did not con-
cern cultural property, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was
an important milestone, as proponents of repatriation subsequently began to
frame their cases in terms of the “human right” of a group to undisturbed
possession of its cultural heritage (Robbins and Stamatopoulou, 2004). Con-
ventions, treaties, and laws to regulate the sale or transfer of cultural prop-
erty, and to prohibit looting, have proliferated since the 1950s, at the inter-
national, national, and subnational level (as in the laws of various US states
to prohibit the looting of Indian graves; Fine-Dare, 2002, pp. 97–107). In the
United States, NAGPRA (the Native American Graves Protection and Repa-
triation Act of 1990) has been profoundly influential, requiring museums and
federal agencies in possession of Native American remains and cultural items
to make inventories of such items available to tribes, and giving tribes the
right to repatriate those items which they can legitimately claim.
Questions about the legitimacy of a repatriation claim can be difficult to
resolve, because within the framework of Western legal norms, claimants
may not be able to prove they have a direct link (cultural or biological) to
the people from whom the objects in dispute were obtained. Clifford (1988,
pp. 277–346) describes a paradigmatic land-claim case from the 1970s in
which the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Council of Cape Cod, Massachusetts
was unable to convince a court of law of its continuous existence as an
authentic Indian tribe, and hence of its right to the lands in question.
Another paradigmatic case is that of Kennewick Man, 9000-year-old skeletal
remains found in 1996 in Kennewick, Washington (Thomas, 2000). Several
area Indian tribes claimed the remains for reburial, but were opposed by
scientists who argued there was no way to connect the skeletal materials
 Cultural Heritage, Patrimony, and Repatriation 11

genetically to living people. The Indian claimants did not prevail and the
bones remain at a court-appointed neutral site, in a museum, but not on
display.
There have, however, been many successful repatriation projects prompted
by NAGPRA and similar laws in other countries. These laws have led to
often difficult discussions between representatives of indigenous peoples
and museums around the world, some of which have been more willing than
others to part with their treasures (Brown, 2003; Clifford, 2013). Repatriation
involves not merely a return to a status quo ante, it is a process that requires
dialogue and cultural exchange. For example, Canadian museums agreed
to return confiscated potlatch objects to the Kwagiulth communities of
Vancouver Island that claimed them, but on condition that the Indians build
museums to house the treasures (Clifford, 1997, p. 125). Some museums and
scholars have steadfastly fought repatriation efforts, on various grounds:
that particular cultural treasures “belong” to all humankind (e.g., in the case
of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum); or that no living group can
prove a claim to them; or that they were acquired legally. Still, cooperative
repatriation processes are ongoing, as, for example, between Cambridge
University, where some 450 ethnographic photographs, taken by John
Layard in the New Hebrides in 1915, were stored but then made available
to the descendants of the people photographed—becoming in the process
important artifacts for the “re-invigoration” of local culture (Geismar and
Herle, 2010, p. 41).

KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH:

REPATRIATIONS OF THE FUTURE
In the relentless development of modern capitalism, “all that is solid melts
into air,” Marx wrote famously in the Communist Manifesto. But the converse
is also true: under capitalism, all aspects of human activity, whether material
or immaterial, can be commodified, or turned into objects to be measured,
valued, and sold. We may think that the paradigmatic example of cultural
heritage is an object in a museum, but more and more, people’s lifeways,
knowledge, and spiritual values are being treated as heritage to be protected,
copyrighted, and licensed (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2009). At the same time,
capitalist objectification works on the natural world in new ways that affect
human social groups, through the process of “discovering” and then attempt-
ing to patent useful properties of localized flora and fauna, including species
crucial to particular groups’ subsistence (Hayden, 2003). It remains to be seen
who will control and profit from these new kinds of heritage objects, and
what kinds of repatriation struggles may ensue.
12 EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

It also remains to be seen how the brave new worlds emergent from
digital technologies will affect the politics of repatriation. Already in the
nineteenth century, various forms of mechanical reproduction made it
possible to reproduce unique objects and make them accessible to the
masses. Museums today are experimenting with digital technology to share
objects, or views of objects, with remote audiences and to make available
views of objects that cannot be accessed in the museum itself—for example,
the back or underneath of an object on display, a cross-section, or a rotating
three-dimensional view. In many cases, museums and the communities
that own heritage objects are agreeing to let the museums continue to hold
the physical objects while their community owners gain some measure
of control over their interpretation. In such situations, the new kinds of
access afforded by digital media can create new grounds for cooperative
relationships between the nineteenth century institutions that have collected
and hoarded culture for many decades, even centuries, and the resurgent
twenty-first century communities that now have the means to repatriate the
heritage or patrimony they can prove to be theirs.

REFERENCES

Bendix, R. (1997). In search of authenticity: The formation of folklore studies. Madison,

WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Bendix, R., Eggert, A., & Peselmann, A. (Eds.) (2012). Heritage regimes and the state.
Göttingen, Germany: Universitätsverlag Göttingen.
Benjamin, W. (1968). Illuminations. New York, NY: Schocken Books.
Bennett, T. (1995). The birth of the museum. New York, NY: Routledge.
Brown, M. (2003). Who owns native culture? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Bunzl, M. (1996). Franz Boas and the Humboldtian tradition: From Volksgeist and
Nationalcharakter to an anthropological concept of culture. In G. Stocking (Ed.),
Volksgeist as method and ethic: Essays on Boasian ethnography and the German anthro-
pological tradition (pp. 17–78). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Clifford, J. (1988). The predicament of culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Clifford, J. (1997). Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Clifford, J. (2013). Returns: Becoming indigenous in the twenty-first century. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Cohen, R. (1978). Ethnicity: Problem and focus in anthropology. Annual Review of
Anthropology, 7, 379–403.
Comaroff, J., & Comaroff, J. (2009). Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Dumont, L. (1977). From Mandeville to Marx: The genesis and triumph of economic ideol-
ogy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
 Cultural Heritage, Patrimony, and Repatriation 13

Elias, N. (1994). The civilizing process Trans. E. Jephcott. (Ed.) Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Fine-Dare, K. (2002). Grave injustice: The American Indian repatriation movement and
NAGPRA. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Frigo, M. (2004). Cultural property v. cultural heritage: A “Battle of Concepts” in
international law? International Review of the Red Cross Number, 854, 367–377.
Geismar, H., & Herle, A. (2010). Moving images: John Layard, fieldwork and photography
on Malakula since 1914. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press.
Handler, R. (1988). Nationalism and the politics of culture in Quebec. Madison, WI: Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press.
Handler, R. (2001). Authenticity, anthropology of. In N. J. Smelser & P. B. Baltes
(Eds.), International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences (pp. 963–967).
Oxford, England: Pergamon.
Haxthausen, C. (Ed.) (2002). The two art histories: The museum and the university.
Williamstown, MA: Clark Art Institute.
Hayden, C. (2003). When nature goes public: The making and unmaking of bioprospecting
in Mexico. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hitchens, C. (2008). The parthenon marbles: The case for reunification. London, England:
Verso.
Hosmer, C. B. (1965). Presence of the past: A history of the preservation movement in the
United States before Williamsburg. New York, NY: Putnam.
Hosmer, C. B. (1981). Preservation comes of age: From Williamsburg to the national trust,
1926–1949. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia.
Jacknis, I. (1985). Franz Boas and exhibits: On the limitations of the museum method
in anthropology. In G. Stocking (Ed.), Objects and others: Essays on museums and
material culture (pp. 75–111). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Kroeber, A. L. & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and
Definitions. Vol. 47, No. 1, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archae-
ology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
Lee, D. (1948). Are basic needs ultimate? Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 43,
391–395.
Lindholm, C. (2008). Culture and authenticity. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Locke, J. (1960). Two treatises of government (Reprint). Cambridge, England: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Lowenthal, D. (1985). The past is a foreign country. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press.
Macpherson, C. B. (1962). The political theory of possessive individualism: Hobbes to locke.
Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Nora, P. (1984). Les Lieux de mémoire. Paris, France: Gallimard.
Penny, H. G. (2002). Objects of culture: Ethnology and ethnographic museums in imperial
Germany. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Poggi, G. (1978). The development of the modern state: A sociological introduction. Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Rist, G. (1997). The history of development: From western origins to global faith. Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Zed Books.
14 EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Robbins, B., & Stamatopoulou, E. (2004). Reflections on culture and cultural rights.
South Atlantic Quarterly, 103, 419–434.
Sapir, E. (1924). Culture, genuine and spurious. American Journal of Sociology, 29,
401–429.
Segal, D. (2000). ‘Western Civ’ and the staging of history in American higher educa-
tion. American Historical Review, 105, 770–805.
Spengler, O. (1926). The decline of the west. New York, NY: Knopf.
Stocking, G. W. (1963). Matthew Arnold, E. B. Tylor, and the uses of invention. Amer-
ican Anthropologist, 65, 783–799.
Stocking, G. W. (1985). Essays on museums and material culture. In G. Stocking (Ed.),
Objects and others: Essays on museums and material culture (pp. 3–14). Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press.
Stocking, G. W. (1987). Victorian anthropology. New York, NY: Free Press.
Stocking, G. W. (2001). Delimiting anthropology: Occasional essays and reflections. Madi-
son, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Thomas, D. H. (2000). Skull wars: Kennewick man, archaeology, and the battle for identity.
New York, NY: Basic Books.
Trautmann, T. (1987). Lewis Henry Morgan and the invention of kinship. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Tylor, E. B. (1871). Primitive culture. London, England: J. Murray.
Urban, G. (2001). Meta-culture: How culture moves through the world. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Wallace, M. (1996). Mickey mouse history and other essays on american memory. Philadel-
phia, PA: Temple University Press.

FURTHER READING

In press – (edited). Vehicles: Car, canoes and planes as metaphors of the moral imagination
(co-edited with David Lipset). Berghahn Books.
Lipset, D., & Handler, R. (Eds.) (In press). Cars, persons, and streets: Erving Goffman
and the analysis of traffic rules. In In Vehicles: Car, canoes and planes as metaphors of
the moral imagination. Berghahn Books.
(2013) Disciplinary adaptation and undergraduate desire: Anthropology and global
development studies in the liberal arts curriculum. Cultural Anthropology, 28(2),
181–203.
(2012) What’s Up, Doctor Goffman? Tell us where the action is. Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Society, 18, 179–190.
(2006 (edited)) Central sites, peripheral visions: Cultural and institutional crossings in
the history of anthropology (history of anthropology (Vol. 11). University of Wisconsin
Press.
(2005) Critics against culture: Anthropological observers of mass society. University of
Wisconsin Press.
(2004 (edited)) Significant others: Interpersonal and professional commitments in anthro-
pology (history of anthropology (Vol. 10). University of Wisconsin Press.
 Cultural Heritage, Patrimony, and Repatriation 15

(2000 (edited)) Excluded ancestors, inventible traditions: Essays toward a more inclusive
history of anthropology (history of anthropology (Vol. 9). University of Wisconsin Press.
(1997 (with Eric Gable)) The new history in an old museum: Creating the past at Colonial
Williamsburg. Duke University Press.
(1995) Schneider on Schneider: The Conversion of the Jews and Other Anthropological Sto-
ries. Interviews with David M. Schneider, transcribed, edited and with an introduction by
Richard Handler. Duke University Press.
(1990 (with Daniel Segal)) The fiction of culture: Jane Austen and the narration of social
realities. University of Arizona Press.
(1988) Nationalism and the politics of culture in Quebec. University of Wisconsin Press.

RICHARD HANDLER SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Richard Handler I am a cultural anthropologist who studies modern West-
ern societies. My initial fieldwork was in Quebec (1976–1984) where I studied
the Québécois nationalist movement. This has led to an enduring interest in
nationalism, ethnicity, and the politics of culture. Upon coming to the Uni-
versity of Virginia in 1986, I pursued the latter topic by looking at history
museums. Beginning in 1990, I worked with Eric Gable (PhD Virginia 1990)
and Anna Lawson (PhD Virginia 1995) on an ethnographic study of Colonial
Williamsburg, which is both an outdoor museum and a mid-sized nonprofit
corporation. In addition to examining the invention of history and tradition,
our study focuses on corporate culture, class, race, and gender.
A different interest is the intersection of anthropology and literature. I have
written on Jane Austen’s novels, on the literary bent of such noted anthropol-
ogists as Ruth Benedict and Edward Sapir, and on the difficulties of writing
the ethnography of nationalist movements. Finally, I have had an ongoing
interest in the history of American anthropology—in particular, in anthro-
pologists as critics of modernity, and the relationship of our discipline’s crit-
ical discourse to other intellectual trends. Most recently, I have been writing
about the American sociologist Erving Goffman.
Between 2000 and 2010, I served as dean of the undergraduate College of
Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. From 2009 on, I have been
Director of the Program in Global Development Studies, an interdisciplinary
social science major in the College of Arts and Sciences at U.Va.

RELATED ESSAYS
History and Epistemology of Anthropology (Anthropology), Arjun
Appadurai
Authenticity: Attribution, Value, and Meaning (Sociology), Glenn R. Carroll
Culture and Cognition (Sociology), Karen A. Cerulo
16 EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Empathy Gaps between Helpers and Help-Seekers: Implications for Coop-

eration (Psychology), Vanessa K. Bohns and Francis J. Flynn
Museum Anthropology (Anthropology), Candace S. Greene
States and Nationalism (Anthropology), Michael Herzfeld
Social Aspects of Memory (Psychology), William Hirst and Charles B. Stone
Funerary Practices, Funerary Contexts, and Death in Archaeology (Archaeol-
ogy), Kirsi O. Lorentz
Cultural Conflict (Sociology), Ian Mullins
Culture and Globalization (Sociology), Frederick F. Wherry