Yearbook of Cultural Property Law 2006. Sherry Hutt and David Tarler, eds. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2006. 215 pp.Reviewed by Michael F. Brown
This
volume inaugurates a series sponsored by the Lawyers’ Committee for
Cultural Heritage Preservation, a group that in its own words “joined
together to promote the preservation and protection of cultural
heritage resources in the United States and internationally through
education and advocacy.” The aim of the series is to provide lawyers,
policy-makers, and museum professionals with timely information about
the changing face of cultural heritage law. Timeliness, however, is
often at war with elegant prose and thorough research. The editors
address this problem by supplementing just-the-facts reports on
important legal developments with individually authored essays that
explore facets of heritage protection from an interpretive angle. They
also manage to squeeze in an interview of a prominent practitioner, a
handful of reviews of recent books and articles on heritage protection
and cultural property, a brief report on the status of courses in
cultural property law in U.S. law schools, and obituaries of key
figures in the museum and heritage-protection world.
After a brief introduction, the
Yearbook
opens with an interview of Martin Sullivan, currently director of
Historic Maryland City and formerly director of the Heard Museum. With
a length of only two printed pages, however, the interview is so
compressed that it never gathers momentum.
The heart of the
book is a section called “Practice Areas,” which reviews legal
developments in various areas of heritage-protection practice,
including museums, land management, parks and monuments, and the art
market. The cases under consideration range from ongoing disputes over
the provenance of European antiquities held by major art museums to
refinements in the application of the National Historic Preservation
Act and the Sunken Military Craft Act. The editors move through this
material briskly and with a minimum of legal jargon. Here and there,
though, one encounters case reports that illustrate the perils of this
mile-wide/inch-deep approach. An example is a brief entry (p. 59),
apparently based on a local TV news story, declaring that New Mexico’s
Zia Pueblo now receives licensing royalties from Southwest Airlines for
the latter’s use of the Zia sun symbol on one of its aircraft. When I
interviewed the Zia tribal administrator about this issue in 2002, he
emphasized that the tribe was reluctant to use terms such as
“royalties” and “licensing” in connection with its sacred symbol,
preferring instead to treat the relationship with Southwest as an
instance of reciprocity based on mutual respect.
[1]
The distinction is subtle but expressive of indigenous peoples’ desire
to resist the idioms of Western intellectual property when pursuing
protection for their cultural productions. The entry on the sun symbol
issue also includes the oft-repeated canard that a ritually significant
pot on which the sun symbol is depicted had been “stolen” from Zia
prior to its recent repatriation, a claim unsupported by any evidence
of which I am aware. In fairness to the editors, the stated purpose of
the
Yearbook is to draw
attention to developments in the field, not to parse all their
complexities. By directing attention to low-profile cases that busy
professionals might otherwise miss, it offers a valuable service to the
museum community.
An essay by Tobias Halvarson, “Using Common
Law Principles to Recover Cultural Property in the United States,” is a
fascinating corrective to the widespread view that cultural-property
legislation is the only effective way to restore important objects to
their original owners. The advantage of common law, Halvarson says, it
that it “establishes a more or less universal standard throughout the
United States, independent of any statutory enactments, for how
property rights are allocated among competing interests” (p. 129).
Common-law definitions of abandoned, lost, mislaid, and
“treasure-trove” property may have legal implications for the
disposition of certain kinds of archaeological finds as well as
ethnographic collections.
Richard Waldbauer and Sherry Hutt
follow Halvarson’s chapter with a retrospective assessment of the
Antiquities Act, which passed the hundred-year mark in 2006. This
venerable law is inseparable from the rise of conservationism, a
movement influenced by the writer George Perkins Marsh and later by
public figures of great stature, including John Muir, Gifford Pinchot,
and Theodore Roosevelt. The essay makes a convincing case that the
Antiquities Act, despite its flaws, is foundational legislation that
helped to focus nascent public interest in the protection of the
nation’s natural and cultural resources.
The Yearbook concludes
with several short contributions: Michael Sherzer’s inventory of law
schools that offer courses on cultural-resources law, a selection of
short book and film reviews by the editors, and obituaries of Stephen
E. Weil and Vine Deloria, Jr., by Stephen K. Urice and Rosita Worl,
respectively. The obituaries are affectionate and informative, but
Urice’s remembrance of Weil is particularly skillful in the way that it
foregrounds Weil’s vivacity and sense of humor without shortchanging
his many achievements.
The Yearbook of Cultural Property Law
isn’t the kind of book you are likely to savor late at night while
nursing a tumbler of your favorite single malt. It is, however, a
reference work that provides a snapshot of important cultural-property
milestones and legal developments of the past year, leavened by more
theoretical chapters contributed by some of the field’s most
experienced practitioners. Anyone looking for a concise summary of how
law intersects with the expanding field of heritage protection will
want to consult this new series regularly.
Note1.
The relevant Southwest press release and a photo of the aircraft can be
accessed by pointing a web browser to
http://www.williams.edu/go/native/newmexicoone.htm. (accessed June 11,
2007).
Michael F. Brown is the Lambert Professor of Anthropology at Williams College. He is the author of many works, including Who Owns Native Culture?
(Harvard
University Press, 2003). In addition to his recent work on heritage and
cultural property policy, he remains interested in the ethnology of
lowland South America, the anthropology of religion, and human ecology.