Genes and burkas: Predicaments of human rights and cultural property

Abstract

The validation of cultural property as a manifestation of group identity expanded through the 1980s and 1990s, but since then has encountered major challenges. If previously the control of images and cultural property was viewed as empowering, this has begun to change since the mid-1990s. This was largely due to the revolution in communication including the expansion of the internet and the development of the web. The same type of control - which was viewed as empowering marginal groups, anticolonial forces, and weaker states - has come to be viewed also as possible censorship and repression over individual members of the groups. A moral shift and the inclusion of multiple perspectives within all sides in the debate is at the core of these changing standards. Instead of a binary division between the haves and the have-nots, we encounter pluralistic perspectives at every fluid stage from the individual to the global. Not only can the center not hold, neither does the periphery. © 2007 Springer-Verlag New York.