The 2005 UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity is a landmark agreement in modern international law of culture. It reflects the diverse and pluralist understanding of culture, as well as its growing commercial dimension. Thirty diplomats, practitioners and academics explain and assess this important agreement in a commentary style. Article by article, the evolution, concepts, contents and implications of the Convention are analysed in depth and are complemented by valuable recommendations for implementation. In an unprecedented way, the book draws on the first-hand insights of negotiators and on the experience of practitioners in implementation, including international cooperation, and combines this with a good deal of critical academic reflection. It is a valuable guide for those who deal with the Convention and its implementation in governments, diplomacy, international organizations, cultural institutions and non-governmental organizations and will also serve as an important resource for academic work in such fields as international law and international relations.

"This volume of essays is the first to focus on the Colored Conventions movement, the nineteenth century's longest campaign for Black civil rights. Well before the founding of the NAACP and other twentieth-century pillars of the civil rights movement, tens of thousands of Black leaders organized state and national conventions across North America. Over seven decades, they advocated for social justice and against slavery, protesting state-sanctioned and mob violence while demanding voting, legal, labor, and educational rights. Collectively, these essays highlight the vital role of the Colored Conventions in the lives of thousands of early organizers, including many of the most famous writers, ministers, politicians, and entrepreneurs in the long history of Black activism"--

This book fills a gap in the literature on how the UNESCO Convention for the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions positions itself within the bigger field of public international law. Several studies have been undertaken regarding the relationship of this Convention with the trade regime. However, the drafting process of the Convention brought more than just trade issues to the forefront. It highlighted heritage law, human rights law, or development law issues as well. The book investigates to what extent the Convention has an impact on these various fields of law and thus clarifies the Convention's contribution to the fragmentation of public international law. (Series: International Law - Vol. 9)

The UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (CDCE) was adopted in 2005 and designed to allow States to protect and promote cultural policies. This book examines the effectiveness of the CDCE and offers ways by which its implementation may be improved to better attain its objectives. The book provides insight in how the normative character of the CDCE may be strengthened through implementation and increasingly recurrent practice based on its provisions. Hailing from various fields of international law, political and social sciences, the book’s contributors work to promote discussions on the practical and legal influence of the CDCE, and to identify opportunities and recommendations for a more effective application. Part One of the book assesses the effectiveness of the CDCE in influencing other areas of international law and the work conducted by other intergovernmental organizations through the recognition of the double nature (cultural and economic) of cultural goods and services. Part Two focuses on the practice of the CDCE beyond the recognition of the specificity of cultural goods and services in international law by addressing the CDCE’s call for greater international cooperation and stronger integration of cultural concerns in development strategies at the national and regional levels. The book will be of great use and interest to academics and practitioners in law, social and political sciences, agents of governmental and international organizations, and cultural sector stakeholders.

This book surveys several theoretical controversies in anthropology that revolve around reconciling the objective description of culture with the influence of inquirer interests and conceptions. It relates them to discussions by followers of W.V. Quine who see the problems of anthropological inquiry as indicative of conceptual problems in the basic assumptions operative in the discipline, and in the study of language in general. Feleppa offers a revised view of the nature and function of translation in anthropology that gives a plausible account of the problems that traditional semantics introduces into anthropology, while avoiding the severe methodological import Quine envisions.

This volume addresses the beauty of convention not in an attempt to recapitulate established values (as, luckily, in literature and culture, there are not absolute beauties that serve everyone and always), but as an aesthetic appreciation of form as a keeper of meaning and as an ethical post-cynical metadiscourse on human dependence on symbolic interaction and generic conventions. Looking into the artificial, invented, side of this concept, the book addresses such questions as: What is beauty by virtue of convention? How does convention generate beauty? How does it happen that a convention acquires a normative force? What is the nature and the “logic of situation” that leads to the arbitrary conventions? How are alternative conventions made? What is inertia, and what real joy or belief ensures the stability of convention? Is there a natural correctness that enables the stability of convention? How does convention determine linguistic meanings? Can interpretation avoid convention? Without imposing one definition onto the reader, this volume presents an understanding of the stability of convention and how it generates beauty by employing numerous contemporary reading strategies and diverse cultural, ethnic, gender, psychological, and textual perspectives. Primary focus is given to various literary texts ranging from early classics to modernism and contemporary writing, though there are also discussions on other forms of human expressions, such as music, dance and sculpture. This book will contribute to the on-going discussion about the ambiguities inherent in the concept of convention, and, thus, stimulate intellectual confrontation and circulation of ideas within the fields of literature and culture.

This book explores the international legal framework developed by UNESCO to identify and protect world heritage and its implementation at the national level. Drawing on close policy analysis of UNESCO's major documents, extensive professional experience at UNESCO, as well as in-depth analyses of case studies from Asia, Europe, and Latin America, Sophia Labadi offers a nuanced discussion of the constitutive role of national understandings of a universalist framework. The discussion departs from considerations of the World Heritage Convention as Eurocentric and offers a more complex analysis of how official narratives relating to non-European and non-traditional heritage mark a subversion of a dominant and canonical European representation of heritage. It engages simultaneously with a diversity of discourses across the humanities and social sciences and with related theories pertaining not only to tangible and intangible heritage, conservation, and archaeology but also political science, social theory, tourism and development studies, economics, cultural, and gender studies. In doing so, it provides a critical review of many key concepts, including tourism, development, sustainability, intangible heritage, and authenticity.

Playing Culture represents one of the corner stones in the model of the Theatrical Event, as developed by the Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). In this volume, thirteen scholars contribute to illuminate the significance and possibilities of playing within the framework of theatrical events. Playing is understood as an essential part of theatrical communication, from acting on stage to events far from theatre buildings. The playfulness characterizing academic traditions sets the tone in the introduction, illustrating the four sections of the book: Theories, Expansions, Politics and Conventions. The theoretical chapters depart from the classical Homo Ludens and offer a number of new perspectives on what play and playing implies in today’s mediatized culture. The contributions to the second section on extensions, deal with playing in non-theatrical circumstances such as market places, passports and stock holders’ meetings. The third section on the politics of playing focuses on wood-chopping women, saints and youngsters in South African townships – all demonstrating their social and political ambitions and purposes. The last section returns to the stage on which performers intend to represent, respectively, themselves, Bunraku puppets or the audience. Playing appears in many forms and in many places and constitutes a basic principle of theatre and performance. This book touches upon important theoretical implications of playing and offers a wide range of historical and contemporary examples. Playing Culture – Conventions and Extensions of Performance is the third book of the IFTR Working Group on The Theatrical Event. The first volume, entitled Theatrical Events – Borders Dynamics Frames was published in 2004, followed by Festivalising! Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture in 2007. The present volume continues to expand the vision of the Theatrical Event as a theory and model for the study of playing, theatre, performance and mediated events.

This book critiques the dominant physical and biological interpretation of the Genocide Convention and argues that the idea of "culture" is central to properly understanding the crime of genocide. Using Raphael Lemkin’s personal papers, archival materials from the State Department and the UN, as well as the mid-century secondary literature, it situates the convention in the longstanding debate between Enlightenment notions of universality and individualism, and Romantic notions of particularism and holism. The author conducts a thorough review of the treaty and its preparatory work to show that the drafters brought strong culturalist ideas to the debate and that Lemkin’s ideas were held widely in the immediate postwar period. Reconstructing the mid-century conversation on genocide and situating it in the much broader mid-century discourse on justice and society he demonstrates that culture is not a distraction to be read out of the Genocide Convention; it is the very reason it exists. This volume poses a forceful challenge to the materialist interpretation and calls into question decades of international case law. It will be of interest to scholars of genocide, human rights, international law, the history of international law and human rights, and treaty interpretation.

This book critically analyses the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, UNESCO's latest and ground-breaking treaty in the area of cultural heritage protection. Intangible cultural heritage is broadly understood as the social processes that inform our living cultures, and our social cohesion and identity as communities and peoples. On the basis of this conception, the Treaty proposes to turn our understanding of how, for whom, and why heritage is safeguarded on its head, by putting communities, groups and individuals at the centre of the safeguarding process. The commentary, written by leading experts in the field from all continents and multiple disciplines, provides an authoritative guide to interpreting and implementing not only this Treaty, but also its ripple effects on how we think about cultural heritage and our experience with it as a part of our living cultures. This book is of interest to lawyers, policy-makers, anthropologists, cultural diplomacy specialists, archaeologists, cultural heritage studies experts, and, foremost, the people who practice and enact this heritage.