After a trip abroad I have been more interested lately in who owns pieces of cultural heritage/patrimony etc. Why do the Greeks demand return of the Elgin Marbles or Egyptians the Rosetta Stone? I had been familiar mainly with the side that demanded return of antiquities, but I had become more sympathetic in recent years with a more cosmopolitan view. I listened to a British Museum podcast and that probably made me like them more. In this book, Cuno is clearly on the side of the British Museum and the like, describing a political battle between museums, dealers, and private collectors on one side and most archaeologists, academics, and all national governments of "source" countries on the other. Thanks to emerging national identities creating nation-states, those nation states now want to ensure their legitimacy by returning cultural artifacts. It is a major "win" if the current government of Greece can connect itself to Sparta and Athens rather than just the 19th century revolution. The same goes for any national government seeking to trace its legitimacy as far back in time as possible. And there is a strong moral argument for it. Many of the disputed antiquities were taken either illegally or in a manner that was legal at the time, but would be considered unacceptable today due to colonialism. But Cuno is on the other side. He prefers the old system of partage, in which museums funded excavations in source countries and then divided what was found between the foreign museum and the source country. This type of system encourages more excavations and archaeology to get done, and is the basis of collections at the University of Chicago, Harvard, and the British Museum, among others. But today's system of establishing ownership is based on the laws of the states where the antiquities are found, usually apportioning the entirety of the find to the state. Cuno believes that this twentieth century system of ownership nationalizes cultural property while failing to protect it, and leads to a lesser understanding and appreciation of the world's many diverse cultures.
Critically, the "national" criteria of determining where an antiquity should go is extremely confused. Cuno gives an example of a supposed tooth of John the Baptist, which is in Venice as a result of the Venetians taking Greek Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), where is probably arrived from Fatimid (Muslim) Egypt. Where should something like that be repatriated to? And when people advocate return of antiquities as a means of "evening things up" since most of the countries that have taken antiquities did so through colonialism, they ignore that there are rich countries that are source countries too who would be gaining a windfall, like China and Italy. But perhaps even more relevant is that the modern states that claim to represent the nations who have some form of cultural ownership are poor proxies for owners. Can China really claim to own Tibetan and Mongolian artifacts, or can Turkey claim the Greek marbles found in Ephesus? In reality, the modern states simply cannot reflect the ancient peoples and the nations only vaguely correspond. There is little principle behind these arguments. Cuno is highly critical of nations in general, arguing that nations are not born, they are made, and that culture is personal, not national.
A major dispute is over unprovenanced antiquities, meaning objects with modern gaps in ownership. Archaeologists usually argue that unprovenanced antiquities are almost always looted, but it is also in their interest to argue that since they want there to be more of a market for what they find, which is provenanced. It is made more complicated by the fact that provenance is an ownership concept, not one of archaeological status. And since many countries allow an internal market for antiquities, those antiquities have no provenance, but that certainly does not mean they were looted. China, for example, allows for the legal import and ownership of unprovenanced antiquities and even those that are suspected of being looted, but does not allow any exports. When it comes to actually looted objects, Cuno takes a less defensible position, which is that if the looting has already happened, it is better that a museum bring it into the public domain. I can see why there should be some kind of process to redeem looted objects, but anything that would encourage further looting needs to be strenuously avoided.
There are some interesting legal arguments about antiquities. The most interesting paradigm is that of John Henry Merryman, who proposed the "triad of regulatory imperatives." They are preservation, knowledge, and access. When determining what institution should hold an object, we should first consider how we can best protect the object from becoming impaired. Second is knowledge, in which we ask how we can best advance the search for valid information about the human past, and learn the most from what the object can provide. And third is access, meaning who can make the object "optimally accessible to scholars for study and to the public for education and enjoyment?" The idea is to shift the focus from ownership to stewardship. Cuno says the idea should be for maximum dispersal of antiquities, allowing for encyclopedic museums that can exhibit, for example, coins from all over the world, instead of just national museums tracing their people's chronology. There are also benefits in risk management, so that if something happens to one museum or site, not everything is lost.
Some major international conventions have been established since 1954, which have usually favored nation-state control over antiquities. The first was the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, and it was more cosmopolitan, but very weak and without enforcement options. More significant was the 1970 passage of the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. This treaty was much more nationalist in perspective, and enacted in the United States in 1983. As of the publication of Who Owns Antiquity?, 118 states have signed. The US enabling legislation for the UNESCO treaty was called the Cultural Property Implementation Act, and dealt with local jurisdiction by creating a review process managed by the Cultural Property Advisory Committee (CPAC). CPAC receives requests from foreign governments for the US to place import restrictions on whole categories of cultural property. It holds public hearings with summaries of requests made public, deliberates in private, and makes a recommendation to the State Department, which then advises the president. Problematically for museum directors, these requests are always considered in light of US foreign policy, which makes them very likely to be approved to meet some foreign policy goal. Officially, CPAC makes four determinations.
First, that the cultural patrimony of the requesting country is in jeopardy from pillage of archaeological or ethnological materials; second, that the requesting country has taken measures consistent with UNESCO 1970 for the protection of its cultural patrimony; third, that import controls by the United States with respect to designated objects [...] would be of substantial benefit in deterring such pillage; and fourth, that the establishment of such import controls in the particular circumstances is consistent with the general interest of the international community in the interchange of cultural property among nations for scientific, cultural, and education purposes.
The result of these deliberations and recommendations is that the president has approved every single request for import controls and every request but one (from Canada) for extensions of import controls. Cuno uses examples from Italy and China to show his point, and points out that in the bilateral agreement reached with Italy, it staters that the destruction of the archaeological record in modern-day Italy would be bad not because of losing vital information about humanity, but because it would make it harder to reach a full understanding of Italy's cultural history. So the assumption that history and culture are national has become fundamental. And as a result, the US has agreed not to import fifteen centuries of Italian history and two millennia of Chinese history. Cuno says this is contrary to the 1983 enabling act's intent.
Tracing the passage of different international conventions on cultural heritage, Cuno assesses that the scope of the conventions has broadened from protecting cultural property in Hague 1954 to preventing illicit transfers in UNESCO 1970 to returning cultural property in UNIDROIT 1995. It seems like if these conventions continue to grant more rights to nation-states over cultural artifacts found in their borders, Cuno believes they should come with obligations as well, but those have not been established. One of them might be the obligations of states to nations without states. Cuno mentions the Kurds, who have cultural artifacts in Iran, Turkey, and Iraq, but no rights to those artifacts since they have no state. Instead, national archeological museums are used as a means of enforcing control over identity to accomplish nation-building. So Turkey puts "approved" cultural history in its national museums, but omits the history of Jews, Christians, and Kurds, among others.
Cuno argues that no culture of any significance has ever occurred in isolation or has been free of distant influences. National culture is always a political construction to exclude contact with "foreign" people. He labels the laws he criticizes as "nationalist retentionist cultural property laws," focusing not just on their nationalism, but on their emphasis on keeping artifacts inside national borders. He says this is part of a nineteenth-century ideal of nationalism, but that it would be better to return to a 17th century cosmopolitanism.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- One precedent recently established and discussed by Cuno is that under the National Stolen Property Act, in which some Egyptian antiquities were considered stolen by an American based on an Egyptian law even where it would not have been "stolen" under American law (I think, but I need to learn more about this).
- Cuno frequently states that bans on trading of unprovenanced antiquities are meant to prevent the illicit trade, but fail to do so. However, Cuno fails to ever cite any data supporting his claim.
No comments:
Post a Comment