As the human rights movement has brought awareness to the needs of the individual throughout the world, the cultural rights movement has provoked attention to protect the rights of groups of people, or culture. Cultural rights focus on groups such as religious and ethnic minorities and indigenous societies that are in danger of disappearing. Cultural rights include a group’s ability to preserve its way of life, such as child rearing, continuation of language, and security of its economic base in the nation, which it is located. The related notion of indigenous intellectual property rights (IPR) has arisen in attempt to conserve each society’s culture base and essentially prevent ethnocide. Look up Culture in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Wikinews has news related to this article: Culture and entertainment Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Cultural Development in Antiquity Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Culture and Civilization in Modern Times Classificatory system for cultures and civilizations, by Dr. Sam Vaknin... Ethnocide is a concept related to genocide; unlike genocide, which has entered into international law, ethnocide remains primarily the province of sociologists, who have not yet settled on a single cohesive meaning for the term. ...

The cultural rights movement is important because much traditional cultural knowledge has commercial value, like ethnomedicine, cosmetics, cultivated plants, foods, folklore, arts, crafts, songs, dances, costumes, and rituals. Studying ancient or obsolete cultures may reveal evidence about the history of the human race and shed more light on our origin and successive cultural development

The notion of cultural rights is closely related to cultural relativism. Anthropologists that study a culture should not make judgments on whether the culture is correct or not, but rather present accurate accounts and explanations of cultural phenomena. The anthropologist does not have to approve of cannibalism, torture, or infanticide to record their existence and make objective observations. Relativism is the view that the meaning and value of human beliefs and behaviors have no absolute reference. ...

Phillip, Conrad. (2005). Window on Humanity. New York: McGraw-Hill