ABSTRACT
A persisting problem for the critical study of cultural property is how to conceptualize differences in the ways in which national and indigenous claims are shaped and legitimated. The coupling of identity and indigeneity with ownership and rights mobilized in claims have been read analytically as identity politics, nation building, resistance, postcolonial mimesis, alternative modernities, forms of ethno-commodification, and as a "provincializing move that destabilizes our certainty about what is local and what is global". This chapter presents a sustained argument, which reframes the debate about how to read claims. The argument is based on contrasts between property and heritage and between distinct technologies of governmentality, which are associated with these terms. Specific technologies of governmentality produce distinct set of claims. The chapter discusses how these technologies of governmentality can co-exist in single case trajectories.
