To study the reasons that drive public support for high-brow culture, we exploit the case of the 1994 referendum on the public funding of the Zurich Opera. Based on Bourdieu's theory of fields we study the prevalence of autonomous and heteronomous arguments in public discourse. The analysis is based on a quantitative content analysis of media articles in the lead-up to the referendum. We found that heteronomous arguments mentioning the prestige of the Opera Zurich, its performance in attracting visitors, and the federalist necessity to share the burdens of public subsidies to the opera in a fair way were clearly dominant in the discourse. Pitted against these heteronomous criteria were autonomous values of high art und providing inclusive access to the arts. Mainly actors from the art field itself and left-wing politicians put forward autonomous values. The heteronomous arguments were more strongly put forward by governmental actors, right-wing politicians and journalists.
Cultural heritage governance in Norway, as in many countries, is organised through a sectoral split: built heritage and cultural landscapes are managed by environmental authorities, while museums and other cultural policy instruments fall under the Ministry of Culture. This conceptual article asks whether that split matters for lay experiences of heritage and for the perceived relevance and legitimacy of governance, and how cultural policy can respond without major institutional restructuring. Drawing on Critical Heritage Studies and cultural policy research, the article develops a framework of three governance logics - authorised protection, project/event programming and care/stewardship - tied to distinct evidence regimes, temporalities and budgetary logics. Using Norwegian vignettes, it shows how these arrangements shape visibility and recognition, access to protection and resources, participation and legitimacy, and the effectiveness of heritage measures over time. The article proposes four design principles - interface coherence, evidentiary parity, recognition proportionality and a care horizon - to align cultural heritage governance with lived heritage while preserving arm's length arrangements.
This article introduces the concept of object diplomacy to analyse how cultural restitution can be mobilised as political currency in global politics. Moving beyond accounts that treat restitution primarily as historical redress, it argues that transfers of colonially acquired objects can accompany, or be staged alongside, less reconciliatory negotiations over geopolitics and influence. Drawing on documentary sources and fieldwork in Senegal, the article analyses France's 2019 ceremonial handover of the sabre attributed to El Hadj Omar Tall, tracing how it intersected with security cooperation and was shaped by museum infrastructure and legal discretion. Rather than adjudicating the moral status of cultural restitution, the framework shows how, when such transfers are not legally required and objects carry high symbolic weight, governments can stage and sequence them in ways that generate reputational credit while aligning symbolic gestures with material interests. The article concludes that such performances may reproduce, or at least leave intact, the hierarchies they claim to dismantle.
This paper explores how liberal ideals enabled and legitimized imperial practices by U.S. archaeologists in 19th-century Iraq. They sought to dissociate local Iraqis from their own heritage while interpreting ancient artifacts as part of a universal legacy requiring Western stewardship. Such logic justified extraction and exclusion, overriding local opposition in the name of protecting humanity's past, however defined. Historical actors thus denied locals full humanity-and with it, legal or moral claims to cultural property. These tenets echo today's debates on restitution and global heritage. Contemporary actors in liberal democracies often invoke universal visions of humanity while imposing conditions on restitution or sidelining local voices. Rather than distancing ourselves from a problematic past, this paper urges a critical reckoning with the illiberal foundations of liberalism: liberal ideals mask exclusionary practices under claims of global good. Without confronting this legacy, restitution risks becoming meaningless at best and neo-colonial at worst.
For many observers and activists alike, the incidents of iconoclasm that occurred in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd were perceived as genuinely political acts - even if, or specifically because they exhibited a disturbing feature: the use of physical violence against statues as if they were living human beings. From a theoretical perspective, the combination of toppling statues with exerting and enacting violence on them can in fact be considered political - if Carl Schmitt's concept of the political is interwoven with Horst Bredekamp`s idea of the image act. Iconoclasm, then, not only serves as an example of the performativity of objects and of a prevalent friend-enemy-dichotomy. Above all, it indicates the unresolved conflicts and fears within us, in other words, the uncomfortable questions that we come to ask ourselves and the way we respond to them. Modern-day iconoclasts in liberal democracies consider vandalism to be a legitimate political expression. The framework proposed here, however, allows us to reject violence enacted on objects not for reasons of morality and civility, but on the grounds of political theory.
This paper introduces cultural heritage supranationalism as a framework for analyzing how Western states, museums, and international organizations continue to regulate the retention and restitution of looted cultural artifacts. It argues that restitution, often presented as a neutral or ethical process, remains structured by postcolonial power asymmetries that constrain the sovereignty of origin nations and communities. Drawing on decolonial theory, critiques of international law, and debates in museum studies, the paper shows how restitution negotiations privilege Eurocentric legal, diplomatic, and museological norms, requiring source nations to navigate external conditions in order to reclaim their heritage. Through three case studies-the German restitution of the Benin Bronzes and its resistance to the authority of the Oba of Benin, Glasgow's effort to tie return to democratic reform in Nigeria, and the epistemic claims of the universal museum-the paper identifies three major threats posed by cultural heritage supranationalism: the disruption of internal governance, the imposition of political conditionality, and the preservation of Western interpretive authority. It concludes by calling for a decolonial model of restitution grounded in plural sovereignty, cultural autonomy, and community-centered stewardship.
On 28 February 2019, Baden-W & uuml;rttemberg returned two heirlooms associated with anticolonial leader Hendrik Witbooi - a Nama-language (Khoekhoegowab) New Testament, known as the 'Witbooi Bible', and a whip - at a high-profile ceremony in Gibeon, southern Namibia. Officially framed as a gesture of reconciliation and historical redress, the return also cast restitution as a governance problem: who may receive, interpret, and steward heritage where state authority and traditional leadership intersect. Drawing on fieldwork, documentary materials, and recent scholarship, this article reconstructs the objects' symbolic significance and historical context and analyses how their return shaped competing claims to authority across German and Namibian institutions. It argues that state-led restitution can operate simultaneously as a gesture of moral repair and as a site of contested political negotiation. The article concludes that post-ceremony afterlives may raise longer-term questions of custody and sustained public engagement, reframing restitution as a process of governance over time rather than a single diplomatic moment.
This article makes an argument for rehumanisation as a methodology of restitution, one whose meanings have significant potential, especially in understanding restitution as distinct from repatriation and R & uuml;ckgabe. While repatriation and R & uuml;ckgabe refer to projects of giving back, restitution signals an anticolonial politics of reclamation, restoration and return. The work of restitution belongs to a politics of anti-colonial claims-making, while repatriation and R & uuml;ckgabe seek to conduct returns on the terms of the returners. Restitution should also proceed alongside a critique of European museum classificatory systems, and histories of collecting that turned belongings in to ethnologised objects and that objectified the bodies of ancestors as 'human remains', using a category of museum objectification. It argues that restitution should be understood as a politics of disciplinary critique as well as a new practice of museology. This article examines the work of claimants, activists and museum professionals in advancing the work of restitution.
This article examines the historical trajectory of cultural policies in Brazil, analyzing the relationship between state intervention, cultural movements, and market forces. Drawing on Albino Rubim's concept of three persistent 'sad traditions' (authoritarianism, instability, and absence) and N & eacute;stor Garc & iacute;a Canclini's paradigmatic framework of cultural policy models, the analysis identifies a central paradox: systematic cultural policy emerged predominantly under authoritarian regimes (Vargas Era, Military Dictatorship), while democratic periods often saw fragmentation and state withdrawal. Brazil's colonial heritage - marked by obscurantism and exclusion - created enduring obstacles to democratic cultural policy. The study highlights key moments, from M & aacute;rio de Andrade's pioneering S & atilde;o Paulo Department of Culture to the participatory experiments of the Lula-Dilma governments and the recent erosion under Bolsonaro. It concludes that contemporary challenges involve reconciling participatory democracy with cultural democratization amid profound inequality and that the Aldir Blanc National Policy represents both a potential turning point and a test for the future.
Migrant cultures have played a significant role in Australian society, yet meaningful representation of culturally diverse groups remains a challenge for many Australian heritage and memory institutions. This article details informal heritage practices being carried out by Ukrainian, Iranian, and Sri Lankan migrant communities in Queensland, in light of comparatively limited holdings of culturally diverse heritage materials held in official repositories. Ethnographic research revealed these case study communities regularly engage in cultural heritage via three main activities: cultural maintenance, public representation, and informal archival practices, which are aligned through the activation of intangible creative practice and knowledges. These activities are positioned as 'living' methods of heritage preservation which are enacted through the 'performance' of heritage in the everyday life of diaspora communities. This article explores the implications of maintaining migrant heritage both in community and industry settings, foregrounding the significance of considering the future of Australian heritage collections.
This paper examines Turkey's efforts to establish itself as a legitimate actor of the international order through an analysis of visits to Turkey by the heads of state of Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Transjordan in the Republic's first decade. It argues that these diplomatic encounters functioned as tools of status seeking, through which early Republican elites sought to stage, affirm and legitimize Turkey's position within a hierarchical international order structured by distinctions between Western and non-Western modernities. Drawing on archival documents and newspaper coverage, the article analyzes how these visits were instrumentalized as tools of public diplomacy, conceptualizing them as choreographed spectacles deploying spatial transformation, institutional transformation and socio-cultural transformation to communicate Turkey's desired civilizational alignment with Western modernity. By foregrounding the symbolic and performative dimensions of diplomatic practice, the article contributes to debates on public diplomacy and status, demonstrating how modern identity was staged during periods of state transformation.
