Legal Protection for China’s Traditional Religious Knowledge
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2016, Vol 7, Issue 9
Abstract
Traditional religious knowledge widely incorporates traditional religious expressions and other forms of traditional knowledge, such as ecological knowledge, medicinal knowledge, elements of languages, and so on. Traditional religious knowledge is a subset of cultural heritage, of which the inheritance and spread have attracted considerable attention from the global society. A series of international conventions have been reached to provide an international forum to negotiate the issues concerning the safeguard of traditional cultural knowledge. China has joined several important international conventions. Nowadays, the domestic laws that can be applied in safeguarding traditional religious knowledge include the intellectual property laws, the Law on Intangible Cultural Heritage, and other sui generis rules. Despite considerable achievements, the shortcomings of the existing rules make them insufficient to protect the interests and rights of traditional religious knowledge and prevent its misappropriation. Therefore, China should make further efforts to solve these challenges to optimize the environment for preserving and spreading traditional religious knowledge.
Authors and Affiliations
Wenqi Liu
Bare Rocks and Fallen Angels: Environmental Change, Climate Perceptions and Ritual Practice in the Peruvian Andes
One of the many dimensions of globalization is climate change that in recent years has caused much concern in the developed world. The aim of this article is to explore how people living on the margins of the global wo...
New Light on a Lost Cause: Atticus G. Haygood’s Universalizing Spirituality
The American tragedy of slavery and the Civil War provides the backdrop for the exemplary spirituality of Atticus Haygood (1839–1896). The son of a Georgia slaveholder, Haygood served as a chaplain in the Confederate a...
Responses by White Christians to Recent Latino Immigration in the Rural U.S. Midwest
Over the last twenty-five years, the rural U.S. Midwest has undergone dramatic demographic changes as the population of white people decreased in many areas and the number of Latinos surged. These shifts are especially...
Goal-Oriented Ethics: Framing the Goal-Setting Concretely
Joseph Selling, professor emeritus from KU Leuven, Belgium, recently made a significant contribution towards ethical methodology. It is in fact a continuation of the in-house conversations that have been in vogue about...
Reading Religiously across Religious Borders: A Method for Comparative Study
Oliver Freiberger has done us the great service of drawing our attention to how comparativists do their comparative work. Issues of method—the “methodical aspects”—of course matter greatly in the actual doing of compar...