The Evolution of Cultural Heritage Ethics via Human Rights Norms
In Rosemary J. Coombe, Darren Wershler, and Martin Zeilinger, eds., Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Toronto: University Of Toronto Press, 2014), pp. 201-212.
12 Pages Posted: 19 Aug 2015
Date Written: 2014
Abstract
In light of the increased spread and availability of digital technology, issues of cultural appropriation have received new scrutiny. The tendency to treat all cultural forms in digital media ecology as mere “information” enables everyone to access and make use of cultural goods – assuming we overlook the “digital divide.” Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that when creativity involves a practice described as appropriation, an assertion is being made that a text has been moved or removed from its authorizing context, or that it has, in some other significant sense, been taken (Meurer and Coombe 2009). In some cases, this decontextualization may be deliberately and critically intended – to challenge the fields of meanings in which the object properly figures, to assert an alternative ownership over it, and/or to consider the importance of other realms of connotation in which it might signify. Other allegations of appropriation may occur when a cultural text is understood to have been improperly recontextualized to the harm of those who have serious attachments to its positioning in specific worlds of social meaning. In this chapter, we deal primarily with those forms of appropriation that effect injury to groups, primarily because of the power relations at work in digital environments that enable old inequities to be perpetuated in new ways.
Keywords: cultural heritage, human rights, intellectual property
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