Cultural heritage, cultural rights and care ethics

Abstract

The perception that cultural rights are lesser forms of rights persists. Countering this, the UN Human Rights Council created in 2009 the position of Special Rapporteur to clarify their meaning and content. This chapter first summarizes the notion of cultural rights and then briefly surveys how technology promotes cultural rights vis-à-vis its care for tangible and intangible cultural heritage. The key insights of the chapter, however, pertain to two deeper ethical implications of the technology - rights - heritage nexus: the dislocation of place, and the displacement of meaning. By emancipating heritage from its specific geographic location, technology has the capacity to generate new opportunities for intercultural understanding and respect for cultural rights, which subsequently supports the UNESCO project of reading heritage as representative of human ingenuity and experience. These implications, in turn, underscore the expressive, creative, social and socially rooted subjects at the heart of human rights.