ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an investigation of the concept of community in the cultural heritage/property context. Heritage invokes the concept of community as the site of this constitutive social process. The problem that law has in recognizing community might be understood as part and parcel of the important questions around the legitimacy and politics of community. Private property rights like copyright are not a route to building a community of cultural and creative values. The temporal dimensions are both horizontal and vertical: horizontal because comradeship and solidarity carry with them some notion of a shared temporal space; vertical because if memory is critical to the imagined community, then this implies a shared concept of the community’s history and its temporal progression. Community is the relation that makes its members “no longer individual subjects”; it is lack, debt and obligation.
