Tangible and intangible cultural materials – art, craft, artefacts and human remains – have been hot property since the earliest clash of civilizations. Whether captured as a prize in war or forcibly acquired in the name of scientific enquiry, cultural relics no longer residing at their point of origin boast pride of place in contemporary cultural debate.
The public face of this debate is almost certainly best represented by the ‘Elgin’, or Parthenon Marbles , famously ‘appropriated’ from their native Greece by Lord Elgin, the British Ambassador in Constantinople, in the early 19th century.
At the time, Lord Elgin obtained tacit permission from the occupying Turks to sketch, remove and export the marbles back to England at his personal expense. Eventually the artefacts were sold to the British Government, then ultimately acquired by the British Museum, where they currently rest. The Greek Government has long since sought the permanent return of their Parthenon Marbles, rejecting British arguments to retain them as hypocritical, and in extreme cases, even criminal. The Marbles case ongoing, resurfaced again during the Athens Olympics, when figures in both countries called for their homecoming as a gesture of cultural philanthropy, if nothing more.
Then there was the controversy surrounding Indigenous artefacts on temporary loan from the British Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew to Melbourne Museum in 2004. The items, a ceremonial headdress and two bark etchings, were due for return to Britain by September 30, but the Dja Dja Wurrung Native Title Group, who claim traditional ownership of the items, won a series of temporary cultural protection orders preventing their repossession. The move fueled applause from repatriation advocates and outrage from certain members of the Australian and UK museum fraternity.
Countless similar repatriation cases are currently in play, all the while the global community is neck-deep in discussions about their implications and the policy-makers are flocking to be part of this debate.
What then are the prevailing arguments?
Opponents of repatriation are often driven by economic or political ideologies, arguing that historical factors bear little relevance to where a cultural item is currently housed, provided it is adequately looked after. The more visible opponents to repatriation – large cultural institutions (such as the British Museum) – commonly argue that repatriation defeats the greater civic and cultural good, and acquiescence to any exclusive claim of ownership is tantamount to censorship .
What use is an artefact if it sits in a far corner of the globe, subject to the elements and without security or safeguard? Should it not be treated with kid-gloves, on display to the widest possible audience? Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, publicly argued this point in 2004, describing the role of flagship cultural institutions as ‘communities of interpretation’ that promote a greater understanding of humanity. Josie Appleton, author of the critical study Museums for ‘The People’? (a Conversation in Print by the Institute of Ideas), offers an aligned point: “The idea that things belong best in their place of origin undermines the nature of a museum. The act of collecting involves disjuncture and separation – it involves taking an object or parts of an object from the world, and preserving it in a separate sphere…When it belongs to a collection, an object can tell part of the story of history.”
But just as many leading organisations, academics and cultural professionals disagree. Using UNESCO’s 1970 Convention on the means of prohibiting and preventing the illicit import, export, and transfer of ownership of cultural property (which affirms cultural property as “one of the basic elements of civilization and national culture”, whose “true value can be appreciated only in relation to the fullest possible information regarding its origin, history, and traditional setting”), as a mortar, these experts hold that the rights of a community or people to access, experience, and distribute their cultural property as they see fit are both self evident and morally determinative; that they should not be subjugated by the populist gravitas of foreign curators, politicians and economists.
In his essay, Enlightenment museums: universal or merely global? , Head of Glasgow Museums Mark O’Neill refutes the ‘communities of interpretation’ position, citing this very clash of ways and means: “While displays in universal museums may have been updated, drawing on the best recent scholarship, none differs in its fundamental epistemology and mode of communication from those mounted 100 years ago. While they may have left evolutionism behind they still use categories derived from Victorian taxonomies of nature, art and materials, rather than from the cultures which produced the objects. They still aspire to be detached, academic, decontextualized and hierarchical, to be outside time, history and politics, and to privilege Western aesthetic over other non-rational meanings, be they cultural, emotional or spiritual.”
For native possessors – the primary instigators of patrimony claims on cultural relics – there exists insufficient vocabulary to articulate cultural objects outside their original context. Additionally, the persistent housing of artefacts in contemporary, ‘universal’ museums of the West is a painful reminder of the manner in which such objects were acquired – through theft and conquest as often as neutral investigation. Leong Yew, Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore, explains the dilemma thus : “A large number of the indigenous art and cultural artefacts adorning Western museums, stately mansions of the European upper class, or hidden away in the private stashes of businessmen, travelers, tomb raiders, and soldiers in contact with the colonial world have had a long and troubled history. Most of these have now come under scrutiny by a burgeoning postcolonial consciousness that their location in these places are inherently problematic… Much like the diasporic peoples around the world, indigenous art – once displaced – becomes caught in in-between hybrid spaces, never fully belonging to the countries that host them or to the places they originated.”
But for Andy Wilson, co-chair of the Haida Repatriation Committee (representing an aboriginal people in British Columbia), the argument is less academic. “This is about getting back what’s rightfully ours,” he told Canada’s Globe and Mail in 2003. “And for me, it’s also about healing the hurt inside from all the things that have happened to us in the past”. Countries or institutions who have addressed repatriation in their policies (such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act signed by the US in 1990), often describe their actions as a gesture of apology – a kind of retrograde conquest.
No matter the side taken, there is general concord that the process of repatriation is fraught with complexity. Beyond the question of ownership, there is inescapable matter of preservation (including the delicate transport of objects or remains). It’s here the advent and advance of digital technology comes into play, with its major impact on the warehousing of cultural materials worldwide – and in turn, the hotbutton issue of repatriation.
Californian nonprofit group, Cultural Heritage Imaging (CHI), is one of several organisations spearheading the use of technology in cataloging and preserving cultural property. Servicing communities, archeologists, cultural heritage institutions, and others interested in recording and preserving cultural objects and places, the CHI team suggest technology might well represent a white flag in the war of cultures past and present: “If the creation of rich digital documentation was included in the repatriation process, institutions returning cultural material would have the ability to continue displaying these objects digitally at both their home location through interactive displays, and around the world through the internet or the distribution of other digital media.” This is a view shared by many cultural operators, with sustained funding for technology related projects the key obstacle to a new era of access and audience for art and cultural property.
Amidst the post-colonial sparring, perhaps the only certainty is the value of the contested objects – all too fragile windows on history, yet again coveted by warring tribes.
