Cultural Heritage, Patrimony, and Repatriation
Title
Cultural Heritage, Patrimony, and Repatriation
Author
Handler, Richard
Research Area
Social Institutions
Topic
Arts and Cultural Institutions
Abstract
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 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 politics 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 provided 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.