The (Legal) Culture of Cultural Property

Abstract

The paper contains the Summary Report presented by the author at the end of the Conference on "The Globalization of the Protection of Cultural Heritage. The 1970 Convention: New Challenges" held in Mexico City, on 21-23 March 2013. Unfolding a common thread among the many contributions to the conference, the Report examines how the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property has up to now dealt with the pluralism underlying both the notion and the law of cultural property. To this purpose, the Report emphasizes that the notion of cultural property is crisscrossed by the multiplicity of identities that its producers, users, and traders embody and convey into it. On a similar note, and consequently, the Report shows that cultural property law could be seen as a transnational, multilayered and multi-centric body of law, consisting of layers of rules with different origins and rationales. Against this framework, the Report examines how the UNESCO Convention has not only been able to influence the mainstream national and international legal and political debate over cultural property protection, but has also successfully penetrated the legal layers where official law usually does not have a say, providing a new narrative, model and vocabulary for the public and scholarly discourse about heritage protection.