http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CAFCC.htm
16
March 2006
A historian points out the problems behind todays claims of
cultural ownership over historical artefacts.
by
David Lowenthal
Heritage is in demand. Ever more of the world's heritage is looted,
destroyed, mutilated, shorn of context, hidden from scrutiny, auctioned
on eBay. Why? Partly because its virtuous stewards treat nations
and tribes as enduring entities with sacred rights to time-honoured
legacies.
Heritage is piously declared the legacy of all humanity. But the
possessive jealousies of particular claimants pose huge obstacles
to our global common inheritance. Confining possession to some while
excluding others is the raison d'être of most heritage. Created
to generate and protect group interests, it benefits us mainly if
withheld from others (1).
Chauvinism underpins heritage rapine. The Rosetta Stone entered
the British Museum 'honourably acquired by the fortune of war';
Napoleon looted all Europe and North Africa to prove France the
Roman Empire's rightful heir; fin-de-siècle Americans threatened
to buy up all England. Jingoist rivalry still foments plunder and
inhibits global sharing. National and local self-esteem are sacred
writ in international protocols. Equating heritage with identity
justifies every group's claim to the bones, the belongings, the
riddles, and the refuse of every forebear back into the mists of
time. All that stands in the way of everyone's reunion with all
their ancestral things is its utter impossibility.
It is impossible because it flies in the face of historical reality.
There are no well-attested, long-enduring, pure, unchanged social
or cultural entities. Every people are hybrid, every legacy multiple,
every society heterogeneous, every tradition as much recent as ancient.
All cultures are compages stemming from manifold antecedents. The
farther back in time the more mixed is every ancestry. Multiple
entitlements vitiate demands based on prior existence, occupance,
use and discovery.
In Europe, each ethnic group ardently claims a realm defined by
ancient settlements or kingdoms, no matter who lives there now.
But this is willful fancy, as I argued in my book, Heritage Crusade
and the Spoils of History:
'Congruence between early medieval and contemporary 'peoples' is
a myth...... The history of European peoples
is not the story
of a primordial moment but of a continuous process,
a history
of constant change, of radical discontinuities...... Franks "born
with the baptism of Clovis" are not the Franks of Charlemagne
or those of the French people [of] Jean Le Pen. The Serbs
in
the decaying remnants of the Avar Empire were not the people defeated
at the battle of Kosovo in 1389, and neither were they the Serbs
called to national aggrandizement by Slobodan Milosevic.' (2)
Indigenes redefine themselves like European essentialists - we are
the same people we have always been, our values unchanged since
time immemorial... Australian Aborigines assert continuity with
prehistoric cave painters: 'The same communities that made rock
art are making the art we see today.' (3) Modern Hopis and Navajos
parade as hoary traditionalists, rightful stewards by ancestral
occupance. Indeed, they feel forced to feign such links. 'We have
to learn to be Indian again. First, the whites came and stripped
us. Then, they come again and "find" us. Now, we are paid
to behave the way we did when they tried to get rid of us.' (4)
Conveniently forgotten are the European incursions, cultural innovations,
sexual mixing, and tourist commerce that transformed Southwestern
tribes.
Mainstream stewards promote this fiction. A South Dakota exhibit
celebrates Sioux 'generosity, fortitude, wisdom now, as ever,
a
timeless culture.' (5) Morally inalienable from the original owners,
each discrete creation myth, custom, language, lifestyle, and artifact
is an imperilled treasure. To be saved, it must be admired, but
uncorrupted by modern admixture. 'Museums have to persuade indigenous
people to exhibit their culture without amalgamating it into the
Western tradition.' (6)
The chimera of timeless tribal purity harks back to the 1920s, when
'authentic' Hopi arts and crafts were 'rescued' by banning aniline
dyes and 'restoring' prehistoric Anasazi and Mimbres pottery motifs.
A Santa Fe Indian potter could not use a wheel without being chastised
as inauthentic (7). The same mystique animated English folklorists
to find and nurture 'ancient and unchanging links with a lost rural
past when the folk....responded simply and directly to the rhythms
of nature'. Subsequent accretions were dismissed as degenerative.
As late as 1968, Cecil Sharp devotees in England and Appalachia
asserted that 'folk society and folk art do not accept, reflect,
or value change' (8).
Long consigned to the scholarly dustbin, visions of changeless cohesive
indigenes untouched by mainstream ways survive among tribalists
themselves mainly as rhetorical legal ploys. Coca-Cola bottles on
South Ryukus altars, Aboriginal and Maori post-modern pastiche,
Pukapukan synthesis of tribal with biblical ceremony give the lie
to the conceit that 'we' but not 'they' could adopt alien ways without
social suicide (9). Yet this patronising view is now espoused by
modern patrons of equity and global diversity. Despite caveats that
tribal peoples 'retain the right to "market" themselves
if they want to' (10), primitivist essentialism wreaks havoc in
heritage affairs, especially restitution.
Failing assured and undivided ancestry, repatriation gets as dodgy
as the supermarket melon labelled 'product of more than one country'.
Four nations claim Priam's golden hoard - the Trojan treasure Schliemann
smuggled out of Turkey, kept in Greece, and gave to Berlin, where
Soviet forces seized it. Who are the rightful heirs of Babylon or
the Ottoman Empire? To which descendants ought Oetzi or Kennewick
Man be consigned? Should Britain's Koh-i-Noor diamond go back to
India, Pakistan, Iran, or Afghanistan? No UNESCO or NAGPRA (the
US Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990)
diktat can tell. Not natural justice but arbitrary fiat decide conflicts
grounded in identity and descent.
'First People' claims are ambiguous and hindsighted. Indians, Inuits
and Aborigines asserted Ur-continentality only when the continents
ceased to be theirs. In any case, all ancestral roots are of equal
age, harking back to our primordial ancestor, Lucy. What entitles
stay-at-homes more than others? Why has Melbourne, the third-largest
Greek city, no original classical legacy? Should Ghanaians have
more say than African-Americans over the Gold Coast dungeons whence
slaves were shipped to the New World? Diaspora are heritage hungry;
'the more people are on the move, the more they will grasp at tangible
memorials of their collective past.' (11) Emigrant millions crave
legacies. So do wannabe Maoris, Aborigines and Native Americans,
attracted by the spirituality, ecological nous, exotic chic, or
lucrative spin-offs of minority status. Such is the urge to become
Native Americans that tribes reinstate blood-quantum criteria, rebuffing
appeal from 'reincarnated' Indians.
However dispersed or diluted the group, presumed solidarity shores
up essentialist claims. Assumed to speak with one voice, minorities
and tribes assert the right to enforce heritage traditions for all
members. NAGPRA returns 'legitimate cultural authority' to Native
American groups. The United Nations explicitly vests authority in
anointed chiefs, elders, and censors (12). Oligarchic control is
mandated on the premise that cohesion is crucial. But such strictures
pertain only to traditional indigenes and minorities; these are
deemed to speak with one voice, while others do not.
Hence the disparate standards adopted for managing heritage. For
the pluralistic West, universal access to heritage is an individual
right. For tribalists, sanctions on heritage use and display that
exclude others (outsiders, women, non-initiates) are sacrosanct.
Collective tribal values assume an identity between the original
makers of ritual objects and those who are now using them, and the
concurrence of present-day folk with ancestral rules and hierarchies.
'Those who are not privy to the inside knowledge must accept the
authority of those persons who are privy, and the wisdom of the
restrictions.' (13)
That 'groups have rights similar to those traditionally reserved
for individuals' is lauded by indigenous advocates as 'neo-Enlightenment
morality' (14). But when groups are sanctified as fossil entities,
the moral outcome is dubious. By what right should women today have
to submit to the will of male elders? How many and which tribal
members need to subscribe to the traditional view for it to remain
authoritative? (15) What of individuals' rights to dispose of things
personally created or lawfully acquired? Have persons less claim
than groups? Western inheritance laws safeguard family, not group
desires; we aim to leave cultural property to particular heirs,
not to a generic state. We may deplore the miserly greed or anal
retentiveness of collectors who squirrel Old Master paintings out
of sight, or, as bibliophiles have done, buy up simply to destroy
any incunabula whose existence detracts from the pricelessness of
their otherwise unique copy. But have we any right to p! revent
them from doing so?
Essentialism is a persistent delusion. Each group claims its 'own'
history and heritage, insisting that only a Native American can
know what it was like to have been Indian, only an African American
to have been black, only a Jew an ancient Israelite. Ancestral mystique
determines how legacies are divided, whose legends are heard, how
and to whom heritage is displayed. This is politically correct,
but practically wrong - wrong because we are all multiply mixed,
wrong because ancestral pasts cannot be possessed anyway. To say
'my ancestors, the Gauls', or 'my forebears, the Athenians', or
'my people, the Africans', makes a statement not about them but
about us; these Gauls, Athenians, Africans are not actual progenitors
but presentist emblems of ancestry. 'Claims that "we have always
been a people" actually are appeals to become a people, appeals
not grounded in history but rather, attempts to create history.'
(16)
Creating history is a fraught enterprise. 'Who has the right to
frame and interpret the past of others?' (17) The implication is
that no one has such a right. But we all have a stake in each other's
history. No 'past of others' is truly distinct from our own. All
pasts are those of others and ourselves. Nobody 'owns' a past whose
interpretation is their exclusive privilege. The real question is
'not which past should count as ours but why any past should count
as ours', since most past events and actions did not happen to and
were not done by us. 'The history we study is never our own; it
is always the history of people who were in some respects like us
and in others different.' (18)
But this insight is anathema to nationalists and tribalists. For
them the beat of 'their own' history is that of their own hearts.
And they coerce the compliant mainstream. The UK's Museum Association
code of ethics endorses removing from public view ceremonial and
religious items whose 'unrestricted access may cause offence to
actual or cultural descendants' (19). To use Apache blood samples,
geneticists studying disease resistance had to agree to refrain
from any research 'that might contradict traditional views of the
tribe's history' (20). Upholding a textbook's fictitious account
of heroic Japan's war record, a Tokyo professor declared that 'all
nations have a right to interpret their history in their own way......
That is a part of sovereignty' (21).
Such claims are flawed in logic, untenable in fact, divisive in
practice. Yet they continue to shape every aspect of heritage -
how it is identified, interpreted, stewarded, altered, purloined,
and scuttled. They endure because embedded in long-standing notions
of cultural property -even of natural and intangible legacies. The
aurora borealis (northern lights) has been contested by Sweden,
Norway, Russia, even by France, contending that its very absence
from their skies made the French most acute observers (22). And
national, tribal, and local retention and restitution claims grow
more assertive when global agencies and scholarly bodies lend them
moral standing.
Free trade even in images and ideas is increasingly curtailed. To
prevent a Japanese 'living treasure' emigrating to Korea, or a dwindling
Canadian First Nations band from joining a thriving Minnesota tribe
(23), would seem as absurd as if Greece deterred neoclassical architects
from 'borrowing' Corinthian designs or demanded demolishing that
Greek temple, the British Museum. Yet Canada cordons off its music
and media from the US juggernaut, Britons protect 'native' landscapes
against 'alien' flora and fauna, peoples the world over secure everything,
from deities to drumbeats and dance steps, against export. Foreign
tattooists' use of Maori designs is censured as 'pillaging the spirit
of a tribal people to sate the culturally malnourished appetites
of the decadent West.'. Prince Harry of Britain committed 'cultural
theft' in exhibiting paintings with Aboriginal motifs (24). An Aboriginal
tribe sued the US National Aquarium in Baltimore for replicating
its sacred waterfall! for an Australian exhibit (25).
Local constraints encumber even potential heritage resources. All
references to tribal culture by outsiders are subject to tribal
control in United Nations declarations empowering indigenous peoples'
'right to maintain, protect, and develop the past, present, and
future manifestations of their cultures'. Their 'collective, permanent,
and inalienable' heritage includes 'objects, knowledge and literary
or artistic works which may be created in the future' (26). Viewing
cultures as the discrete possessions spurs demands to protect their
'legitimacy and richness', as Oakland's school board did for Ebonics,
the inner-city African-American lingo of fancied West African-cum-slave-ship
origins (27). A UNESCO imprimatur confers on 'Masterpieces of the
Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity' the fatal kiss of eternal
life. Things fluid by their very nature are ossified into factitious
perpetuity. Thus we 'reinforce the notion that heritage is a kind
of fortress requiring constant! protection, [and that] every breach
in its walls is one more irreversible step in losing one's culture'
(28).
Designation promotes loss: the very act of cataloguing 'encourage[s]
outsiders to think that the heritage of indigenous peoples can be
sold' (29). Heritage chauvinism also buttresses the credentials
of those in charge. Rulers pose as stalwart guardians against foreign
robbers. Blanket export prohibition laws mask actual inability to
stem the drain of cultural property. Heritage-rich nations and tribal
groups alike sound bellicose in defence of heritage whose attrition
they are impotent to prevent. Looters in Belize outnumber and are
better funded than the country's entire military (30). Italy's army
and police force combined cannot secure its relic-laden soil from
tombaroli, its tens of thousands of museums and churches from theft,
nor its porous borders from illicit export (31).
From bellicose words ensue bellicose acts. 'As tools of cultural
identity and proof of ancestral claims to the land, heritage sites
have acquired new attributes important and perverse enough to merit
their obliteration and fuel war.' Chauvinism everywhere, as in Europe,
'has turned our understanding of the past into a toxic waste dump,
filled with the poison of ethnic nationalism,
seeped deep into
popular consciousness.' (32)
Heritage stewards foster chauvinism by making autonomy holy writ
and trusting each sovereign people to mount effective controls.
'Collectors will develop the moral sense to stop purchasing unprovenanced
artefacts', in the militant view, 'only when they have been humiliated
into submission by public opprobrium'. But 'do Western collectors
really stimulate looting, or does the cause lie more with corrupt
source governments and impoverished social conditions?' (33) Or,
perhaps, with cultural-property knights in shining armour?
A generation ago, heritage professionals were seen as selfless.
No more (34). Defence of heritage is now denigrated as backward
looking, deluded, or self-seeking. Claims of disinterested inquiry
elicit cynical responses. 'Artefacts represent money and power to
archaeologists and art historians', say tomb-robbers. 'That is how
they make their upper-class living.' In much of the world, illegal
digging is not only a crucial adjunct to subsistence but 'an institutionalized
part of community life.' (35) Rural villagers join curators and
collectors in upbraiding 'archaeologists [who] argue that every
shard is a buried treasure and ought to remain in the ground as
a nonrenewable resource until it is discovered - but only by them.'
(36) Museum staff suffer similar opprobrium; the very term 'keeper'
suggests a curmudgeon clinging to other people's stuff, much of
it out of sight (37).
Militant reformers would suppress antiquities looting by international
treaty, court order, state fiat, and the moral artillery of shame
and guilt. 'No wonder the trade feels so besieged: their opponents
act like a combined Pope, Minister of Culture and nagging parent,
all the while claiming that they are the victims', yet coping with
a 'system where unaccountable bureaucrats pass down prohibitive
edicts based on moral posturing' (38).
High motives - justice, equality, global sharing - actuate many
who would ban trafficking and enjoin repatriation. But visionary
reforms dis-serve their cause. The vast majority of prized portable
property, and ever more of what used to be immovable, is no longer
in lands of origin. And the vast majority of heritage attachments
are now commingled among countless shifting clienteles. 'No efforts
of romantics, politicians, or social scientists', warns an historian,
'can preserve once and for all some essential soul of a people or
a nation' (39). Both the solitary stakeholder and the unalloyed
tribe are dying breeds. We sanction their heritage claims at our
personal and collective peril.
David Lowenthal is professor emeritus at the Department of Geography,
University College London. This is an edited except from his article
'Why sanctions seldom work: reflections on cultural property internationalism',
International Journal of Cultural Property 12 (2005).
(1) On heritage aims, see my Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of
History (Cambridge UP, 1998), chs. 6, 7, 10
(2) Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of
Europe (Princeton UP, 2002), 37, 156-57, 174
(3) Aboriginal & Torres Straits Islander curator quoted by Tony
Clifton, International Herald Tribune, 26 Apr. 2003
(4) M. Estellie Smith, 'The process of sociocultural continuity.'
Current Anthropology 23 (1982): 132
(5) Claudia J. Nicholson, 'Advisors to partners: bridging the cultural
gap.' History News 50:4 (1995): 11
(6) Elazar Barkan, 'Amending historical injustices: the restitution
of cultural property,' in his and Ronald Bush, eds., Claiming the
Stones/Naming the Bones: Cultural Property and the Negotiation of
National and Ethnic Identity (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute,
2002), 32, 39
(7) Edwin L. Wade, 'The ethnic art market in the American Southwest,
1880-1980.' in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material
Culture, ed G W Stocking Jr. (Madison: U of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
167-91; Deirdre Evans-Pritchard. 'The Portal case: authenticity,
tourism, traditions, and the law.' Journal of American Folklore
100 (1987): 287-92
(8) Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and
the English Folk Revival (Manchester UP, 1993), 96-99, 133-41;.Roger
D. Abrahams and George Foss. Anglo-American Folksong Style (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 11
(9) Signe Howell, 'Whose knowledge and whose power? a new perspective
on cultural diffusion,' in Counterworks: Managing the Diversity
of Knowledge, ed. Richard Fardon (London: Routledge, 1995), 164-81
(10) J. Anthony Paredes, 'Preface,' in Intellectual Property Rights
for Indigenous Peoples, ed. Tom Greaves (Oklahoma City: Society
for Applied Anthropology, 1994), vii
(11) Simon Jenkins, 'Dead and dismembered on the Nile,' The Times,
9 Jan. 1993: 12
(12) 'Introduction,' in Barkan and Bush, Claiming the Stones/Naming
the Bones, 5; UN 'Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of
the Heritage of Indigenous Peoples' (1997), App .B, art.15, in Cultural
Rights and Wrongs (Paris: UNESCO/Institute of Art and Law, 1998),
99
(13) Diane Bell, Ngarrindigeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was,
and Will Be (N. Melbourne: Spinefex, 1998), 537; on this issue,
John Henry Merryman, 'Cultural property internationalism.' and Lyndel
Prott, 'The international movement of cultural objects.' International
Journal of Cultural Property 12 (2005): 1-29 and 226-48
(14) Barkan, 'Amending historical injustices,' 16
(15) Michael F. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard UP, 2003), 184
(16) Geary, Myth of Nations, 37
(17) Barkan and Bush, 'Introduction,' and Claire Lyons, 'Objects
and identities: claiming and reclaiming the past.' in Claiming the
Stones/Naming the Bones, 2 and 127
(18) Walter Benn Michaels, 'Race into culture.' Critical Inquiry
18 (1992): 655-85 at 682
(19) Tiffany Jenkins, 'The censoring of our museums,' New Statesman,
11 July 2005
(20) Phil Cohen, 'Totems and taboos,' New Scientist, 29 Aug. 1998:
5
(21) Professor Fujioka, quoted in Doug Struck, 'To critic's ire,
revisionists insist Tokyo's war record is twisted,' International
Herald Tribune, 19 Apr. 2001: 5
(22) Patricia Fara. 'Northern possession: laying claim to the Aurora
Borealis.' History Workshop Journal 42 (1996): 37-57
(23) Merryman, 'Cultural property internationalism,' 16
(24) Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, 'More than skin deep: Ta Moko today,'
in Barkan and Bush, Claiming the Stones/Naming the Bones, 248, 253;
Rodney Dillon quoted in The Times, 21 Aug. 2003: B2
(25) Executive director David Pittinger, personal communication,
19 Oct. 2005
(26) UN 1994 App., art.12, and 1997 App...B, arts. 3 and 11, in
Cultural Rights and Wrongs, 193, 198
(27) Louis Menand, 'Johnny be good.' New Yorker, 13 Jan. 1997: 4-5
(28) Sidney Littlefield Kasfir and Labiyi Babalola Joseph Yai, 'Authenticity
and diaspora,' in 'Views and Visions of the Intangible,' Museum
International 56:1-2 (May 2004): 190-97 at 197
(29) Erica-Irene Daes, Protection of the Heritage of Indigenous
Peoples (UN, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 1997),
quoted in Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 210
(30) David M. Pendergast and Elizabeth Graham. 'The battle for the
Maya past: the effects of international looting and collecting in
Belize,' in The Ethics of Collecting Cultural Property: Whose Culture?
Whose Property? ed. Phyllis Mauch Messenger (Albuquerque: New Mexico
UP, 1989). 51-60
(31) Italy, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, An Evaluation of Cultural
Policies in Italy (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1995), 131-32,
142-49. 182-95; David Gordon, National Cultural Policy in Italy
(Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1995), 13, 66, 74
(32) Gustavo Araos, 'Heritage as Conscience,' US/ICOMOS Newsletter
No. 3 (May-June 2000), 7; Geary, Myth of Nations, 15
(33) Steven Vincent, in ''The Good Collector': fabulous beast or
endangered species?' Forum, Public Archaeology 1 (2000): 80-81
(34) Lawrence J. Zimmerman, 'When data become people: archaeological
ethics, reburial, and the past as public heritage.' International
Journal of Cultural Property 7 (1998): 69-86
(35) Diura Thoden van Velzen, 'The world of Tuscan tomb robbers:
living with the local community and the ancestors.' International
Journal of Cultural Property 5 (1996): 111-26 at 112, 125
(36) Peter Marks, 'The ethics of art dealing.' and David Matsuda,
'The ethics of archaeology, subsistence digging, and artifact looting
in Latin America.' International Journal of Cultural Property 7
(1998): 116-27 and 87-98
(37) David Lowenthal, White Elephants and Ivory Towers: Embattled
Museums? (London: British Museum, 1999)
(38) Steven Vincent, 'Good Collector,' 80-81
(39) Geary, Myth of Nations, 174
Regards,
Paul Kekai Manansala
http://sambali.blogspot.com/
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