In this book I question the efficacy and intentions of the current legal regime controlling the world’s access to our ancient heritage. Originally published in 2008, the book met with mixed reviews. Some reviewers liked it. Others hated it. Some thought it provocative. Some called it self-serving. Some were downright hostile to it.
One reviewer called me “the pit bull of the American mega-museum establishment.” Another called my book “an example of US cultural imperialism at its worst.” My favorite review concluded with these words: “I assume that many will hope, and some I know will pray, that this book represents the last death throes of a failed traditional world-view: the dominance of the many by the (very) few; the dominance of a Western scientific tradition over all others; the dominance of a closed view clinging, perhaps subconsciously, to what one can only describe as colonial oppression.” And then it closed with the funniest line yet written about the book: “Perhaps if a dinosaur could have written a book arguing against its extinction, it would have read like this.”1
All in all I’ve been pleased with the book’s reception. It struck a chord, which is why I wrote it. I wanted its readers to look again at the question of “Who Owns Antiquity,” and to ask “why” and “to what purpose.” And many have. This is not the place to respond to the book’s critics, although I will reflect briefly on the charges of “imperialism” and “colonialism” below. I want first to update factual details that have changed since the book was first published.
At the time of the book’s publication, the U.S. government had not yet responded to the People’s republic of China’s 2005 request for import restrictions on a broad range of objects made in China from the Paleolithic period to the Qing dynasty (1644 A.D.), or some two million years of human manufacture. (The request was made through the U.S. President’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee, as legislated by the 1983 Cultural Property Implementation Act [CPIA].) For the better part of four years, there was no action on the request. Then, on January 14, 2009, just days before the end of his presidency, and without public notice, George W. Bush accepted a modified Chinese request and agreed to prohibit the importation of monumental sculpture and wall art at least 250 years old and a broad range of categories of material dating from the Paleolithic period through the Tang dynasty (907 A.D.).
Just why President Bush responded as and when he did is not clear. It was the thirtieth anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries and the U.S.-Chinese relationship was (and of course still is) of the greatest importance to both nations. Diplomatic efforts were being made on multiple fronts: the United States was seeking China’s help in containing North Korea and arguing for China to revalue the renminbi (pegged to the value of the weak dollar, the renminbi keeps Chinese exports artificially cheap); the United States was suspicious of China’s reach into Africa, where China was trading aid and economic investments for political influence and access to much-needed raw materials; and the United States wanted China to join the American-led campaign to isolate Iran as a state supporter of terrorism with nuclear ambitions. (China imports crude oil from Iran to feed its booming economy and has large investments in Iran’s oil and gas sector and thus remains critical of isolating Iran.)
There were many reasons that the Bush administration might have wanted to reply to China’s request for import restrictions on what it claimed to be its cultural property. But almost certainly, protecting the archaeological record was not one of them. For governments do not make decisions on these terms. They do so for political reasons, because it is thought to be in their political advantage to make this or that decision. That was a principal argument of my book: governments define and police national cultural property for political reasons, not scientific ones. Retentionist cultural property laws are political instruments intent on restricting foreign access to what governments claim is their country’s national cultural property as a means of strengthening the identity of the nation as defined by government. And in this, the laws are nationalist political instruments propagating a false ideology of cultural essentialism and national cultural purity: Chinese culture—and in particular, Han Chinese culture—not the world’s.
The Chinese government’s pride in china’s long and distinguished history is sincere. Its sense of injustice done at the hands of the British and French during the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century, including the destruction of the Imperial Summer Palace, is equally sincere. So too are its feelings for the loss of much of its cultural property during the warlord years early in the twentieth century, when great quantities of ancient Chinese art were sold overseas. And of course the nationalists’ transfer of much of the Imperial collection to Taiwan is the greatest loss of all. These instances mark moments of an imbalance of power, when a weakened China suffered losses at the hands of stronger, foreign governments. And now a resurgent China is seeking to recover what it claims is its lost Cultural property through political and financial means and always with an emotional appeal to national pride.
The Chairman of the Poly Group, a Beijing-based industrial conglomerate with close ties to the Chinese military and a very handsome and important art museum, wrote in the preface to a catalogue of selected highlights of the museum’s ancient bronzes in 2001, “Most of these pieces, lost to overseas collections, have exchanged hands many times. . . . Their return not only makes us fondly recollect days of old, but is more importantly a source of great comfort.” And the “rescue of three bronze animal heads, formerly of the Summer Palace, particularly aroused the patriotic passions of Chinese sons and daughters. Regardless of the difference in their particular stands and religions, they all equally praised the rescue.”2
The chairman was referring in the second sentence to the museum’s purchase in 2000 of three bronze animal heads from the Zodiac Fountain of the Qinq dynasty Summer Palace (the heads were of the tiger, ox, and monkey figures). Designed by the French Jesuit Michel Benoist for the Qianlong emperor in the middle of the eighteenth century, the fountain once included twelve animals placed around a pool in two groups of six, each animal representing one of the twelve double-hours of the day and designed to spout water at its designated time during the day. A century later, in 1860, the Summer Palace was looted and destroyed by French and British troops. To date, seven of the animal heads have been located.
In 2003, the National Treasures Fund of China, a quasi-governmental group, purchased from a reported American collector the head of the pig figure. The purchase was made with a $1 million donation from Stanley Ho, a real estate and casino billionaire from Macao. Four years later Ho purchased from Sotheby’s in hong Kong the head of the boar and gave it to the Poly Museum. A year later, Christie’s put up for auction two other bronze animal heads from the Summer Palace: the rat and the rabbit. They had belonged to the late French designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé. The sale was condemned by China’s State Administration of Cultural Heritage as having “damaged Chinese citizens’ cultural rights.” A spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said that the two bronzes should be returned to China because they had been taken by “invaders.” And a Beijing lawyer seeking to block the sale, Liu Yang, declared that “the Summer Palace, which was plundered and burned down by Anglo-French allied forces during the Second Opium War in 1860, is our nation’s unhealed scar, still bleeding and aching. That Christie’s and Pierre Bergé would put them up for auction and refuse to return them to China deeply hurts our nation’s feelings.”3
The sale went ahead, and the successful bidder (at $40 million)—Cai Mingchao, who described himself as a collection advisor to the National Treasure Funds of China, an entity established under the administration of the China Foundation for the Development of Social Culture and registered under the name of the Ministry of Culture for the purpose of repatriating what it describes as looted Chinese artifacts—refused to pay, saying that his bid was made “on behalf of all Chinese people” and that the sculptures should be returned. At a news conference in Beijing following the auction, Cai said he had submitted his bids on moral and patriotic grounds: “I think any Chinese person would have stood up at that moment.”4 (It should be noted that at the time, diplomatic relations between China and France, where the auction occurred, were strained. A year earlier, the Chinese government had been angered by pro-Tibet and anti-China protests during the Olympic torch relay in Paris, and Chinese officials cancelled a trip to Paris after French President Nicolas Sarkozy met with the Dalai Lama in december.)5 To date, the sculptures have not been returned.
Such statements as “on behalf of all the Chinese people” and “regardless of the difference in their political stands and religions, [all the Chinese sons and daughters] equally praised the rescue [of the Zodiac figures]” should give us pause. Who are the sons and daughters of China being spoken for? Certainly not the Uighur residents of China’s western-most Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, which came under Chinese control only under Qing Emperor Qianlong in the eighteenth century (the same emperor who built the Summer Palace). The Uighurs are Muslim and in number and cultural prominence historically dominated the region. But since the rise of the People’s republic of China in 1949, the percentage of Han Chinese in Xinjiang has risen from 5 to 40 percent (its capital city of Urumqi was 76 percent Han by 1998). The region is rich with crude oil and natural gas. Episodically fiercely independent, the region is considered a separatist threat. The Chinese government has denounced “three evil forces” in Xinjiang: separatist, terrorist, and religious extremism.
In chapter 4 of this book I noted reports of Human Rights Watch from the 1990s recounting Uighur uprisings and the Chinese government’s police responses. While the book was in press, and during the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, violence broke out in Xinjiang when Uighur separatists first attacked and killed Chinese security personnel in Kashgar and then days later attacked government buildings in Kuqa city. In all, 197 people died. The region of some 400,000 Uighurs was cordoned off and tightened security was enforced.
The violence came amidst increasing Beijing-directed cultural change in Xinjiang. The location education system was being standardized on the Beijing model: the language of instruction was changing from Uighur to Mandarin, and Han Chinese teachers were replacing Uighur ones. Authorities were organizing public burnings of Uighur books. And traditional Uighur customs such as religious weddings, burials, or pilgrimages to the tombs of local saints were being prohibited. Most visibly, the Chinese government was accelerating the razing of old Kashgar for what Beijing claims are safety reasons: the historic buildings are condemned as too dangerous in the region’s earthquake zone. The plan is to demolish 85 percent of old Kashgar and build in its place a mix of mid-rise apartments, plazas, avenues, and reproductions of ancient Islamic architecture “to preserve the Uighur culture,” the city’s han Chinese vice-mayor, Xu Jianrong, was quoted as saying. (The government also plans to keep a section of old Kashgar as a tourist site, with actors performing traditional Uighur cultural practices.) No archaeologists are monitoring the razings. The government already knows everything about old Kashgar, the vice-mayor said.6
I make the point throughout this book that national domestic and foreign policies influence cultural policy: after all, they are government policies. For example, I point out how in 1984, during the first Reagan administration, the United States withdrew from UNESCO because our government had determined that “it is no longer worthwhile for the U.S. to remain a member of the organization in which negative considerations so far outweigh the technical benefits provided”; i.e., being part of UNESCO was no longer in our self-interest. The United States remained outside UNESCO until the spring of 2003, when, two years after 9/11, our foreign policy was directed at perceived threats of global terror around the world and we were looking for allies in our mounting “global war on terror.” Suddenly we saw participation in UNESCO as vital to our national self-interest.
With the change in U.S. administrations in 2009, President Barack Obama appointed David Killion U.S. ambassador to UNESCO. Formerly a senior member of the professional staff of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Killion worked on the legislation that authorized our reentry into UNESCO in 2003. In his confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate Foreign relations committee, Killion testified that “UNESCO is engaged in promoting a culture of peace and intercultural dialogue. This is critical because we face a common, global challenge to educate young people to resist violent ideologies, and to offer them tolerant, peaceful and constructive alternatives.” He also emphasized that his agenda, and the Obama administration’s, for UNESCO would include gender equality, freedom of expression and the press, and the addition of U.S. monuments to the list of World Heritage sites (he mentioned specifically Mount Vernon, the Virginia home of the first U.S. president, George Washington).7 Is there any reason to think that this agenda indicates anything but that the appointment was political? Not if we take killion’s statement at face value: that his appointment ultimately advances the Obama administration’s agenda.8
When I wrote this book, much of the debate between art museums and archaeologists in the United States centered on the terms by which museums should and should not acquire unprovenanced antiquities (those with incomplete recent ownership histories). Simply put, for years museums argued for more permissive terms and archaeologists for stricter terms. In footnote 7 of my introduction, I recounted the history of the position on this matter taken by the Association of Art Museum Directors (the organization representing the largest museums in North America). I concluded with the 2006 AAMD report calling for all AAMD members to work in conformity with U.S. law and in accordance with the 1970 UNESCO Convention when acquiring antiquities. And I pointed out that the report allowed for the acquisition of unprovenanced antiquities in certain circumstances: “AAMD recognizes that archaeological material and works of art, for which provenance information is incomplete or unobtainable, may deserve to be publicly displayed, conserved, studied, and published because of their rarity, historical importance, and aesthetic merit.”
In 2008, AAMD adopted new guidelines advising member museums that they “normally should not acquire” an antiquity unless research substantiates that it was outside its country of probable modern discovery before 1970 or was legally exported after 1970.9 That date of 1970 was chosen to acknowledge the authority (such as it is) of the UNESCO Convention of that year and to bring AAMD into alignment with certain museums in Europe and archaeological organizations like the Archaeological Institute of America. But 1970 is only a symbolic date. It has no juridical authority. It does not legalize a museum’s acquisition of an object removed from its country of recent discovery after the establishment of laws restricting its ownership or export (whether those laws pre- or postdate 1970). It is meant to remove the financial incentive of looting: if the looter cannot sell the antiquity for forty or more years (and each year it will be one more year, for 1970 is a “bright line” date), he will not loot. But of course this applies only to museums, and only to museums that adhere to this principle.
It has become so difficult for museums to acquire antiquities that now they rarely do so. This is not to say that museums outside Europe and North America and private individuals anywhere are not acquiring unprovenanced antiquities, or that looting has been dramatically reduced. It is only to say that Western museums have almost stopped acquiring antiquities.
And this raises the issues of imperialism and colonialism. I argue in this book for the return of partage, the practice of sharing archaeological finds among foreign excavating institutions and local authorities. This is how the great archaeological research collections were built at Yale, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago, as well as the national museums in Cairo, baghdad, and kabul. But archaeologists tell me that partage will never return. It’s a relic of colonialism, they say, a reminder of historic imbalances of power that allowed Western nations to take advantage of weaker, what we would now call Third World, nations. And it all hinges on the question of ownership. Partage allowed for foreign institutions to own a part of another country’s past. And this should never— will never—happen again, they say.
I argue in this book against the premise that modern nation-states own the cultural remains of antiquity that lie within their borders simply because they are found there. I point out that those claims are motivated by nationalist politics intent on strengthening government claims of political legitimacy by appealing to racial, ethnic, and cultural pride. I argue instead that ownership is only a means of stewardship, a way of investing in the preservation of our common ancient heritage and encouraging broader access to it. But I am told that our ancient heritage is not common, but rather the heritage of particular peoples (peoples often confused with nation-states, which define and police cultural property on behalf of the people, often, as we have seen with the example of China, a particular subset of people, the ethnic and political elite of the nation). To claim common identity with the world’s ancient past is, I am told, an act of imperialism or colonial oppression. And when I affirm the importance of encyclopedic museums as institutions dedicated to the dissipation of ignorance and superstition about the world and the promotion of inquiry and tolerance of difference itself, I am told that such museums are instruments of empire, evidence of colonial oppression, and the means of perpetuating Western hegemonic control over the world. (This is the “failed world-view” one critic accused me of clinging to.)
I disagree. In my view, encyclopedic museums are the result of the Enlightenment, not empire, evidence of curiosity about the world. It is true, of course, that in the intervening years since the first encyclopedic museum (the British Museum) opened its doors more than two hundred years ago, specific museum collections have grown due to imbalances of wealth and power. But this is not to say, as some critics do, that their collections were “stolen” from weaker countries. Overwhelmingly, their collections were acquired legally on the terms that applied at the time; that is, when former sovereign entities (e.g., the Ottoman Emprire) granted permission for their removal, or when a transfer of power occurred as a result of war (e.g., from the French to the British), which was not illegal or uncommon. And their collections are still being built legally. Some critics argue that that may be true, but the moral thing to do is to return at least some key objects to the nations that are requesting them: the Parthenon Marbles to Greece, the Rosetta Stone and Bust of nefertiti to Egypt, and the Ishtar Gate to Iraq. And why? Because it is said that they belong there, where they were made and with the people who are said, by virtue of living there now, to have the only legitimate claim of identification with them.
I argue against using museum collections to redress historical imbalances of power. But more importantly, I argue that the Enlightenment principles that formed—and still inform—the work of encyclopedic museums offer the greatest promise for better understanding the truth about culture: that it has never known political boundaries and has always been mongrel and hybrid, evidence of contact between peoples and their intertwined history. For encyclopedic museums aspire to the condition of cosmopolitanism as articulated by Diogenes (“When anyone asked him where he came from, he said, ‘I am a citizen of the world’”); the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who famously urged his readers not to forget “the closeness of man’s brotherhood with his kind; a brotherhood not of blood or human seed, but of a common intelligence”; and, during the Enlightenment, David Hume, who saw the cosmopolite as “a creature, whose thoughts are not limited by any narrow bounds, either of place or time.”10
But to raise the ideal of cosmopolitanism is to tempt criticism from those who think cosmopolitanism itself is an imposition of Western values on others, values that allow Western dominance to slip in under the cloak of openness and curiosity about others. Certain postcolonial theorists are offering alternatives to the Enlightenment framing of cosmopolitanism, calling for a new cosmopolitanism in a context of “minoritarian modernity,” which “is visible in the new forms of trandisciplinary knowledges. . . . Transdiciplinary knowledge, in the cosmopolitan cause, is more readily a translational process of culture’s inbetweenness than a transcendent knowledge of what lies beyond difference, in some common pursuit of the universality of the human experience.”11 This is not the place to go into a larger investigation of the possibilities of a cosmopolitan view of the world today. But I would argue that encyclopedic museums are just the kind of institution where one can see evidence of cultural “inbetweenness” in the way objects bear witness to cultural influences and hybridity.
I believe as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum does, that fundamental to a cosmopolitan view of the world is compassion for the other. “Compassion begins with the local,” she writes. “But if our moral natures and emotional natures are to live in any sort of harmony we must find devices through which to extend our strong emotions and our ability to imagine the situation of others to the world of human life as a whole.”12 And, like Nussbaum, I believe that a cosmopolitan view can be taught—“[s]ince compassion contains thought, it can be educated”—and that through cosmopolitan education (just the kind of education one can gain from the experience of encyclopedic museums), we learn more about ourselves:
One of the greatest barriers to rational deliberation in politics is the unexamined feeling that one’s own preferences and ways are neutral and natural. An education that takes national boundaries as morally salient too often reinforces this kind of irrationality, by lending to what is an accident of history a false air of moral weight and glory. By looking at ourselves through the lens of the other, we come to see what in our practices is local and nonessential, what is more broadly or deeply shared.13
In this respect, I argue that encyclopedic museums should be preserved where they exist and encouraged where they do not yet exist. (Some will respond, “Easier said than done. How will it be possible for poorer countries to compete in the marketplace for collections with richer countries?” But this presumes that ownership is the only way to build collections. Loans and exchanges of collections are the future of encyclopedic museums—and not loans of a limited duration, but loans for many years, so that visitors to such museums will be able to return again and again to explore the many nuances of a rich and diverse encyclopedic collection experience. But first there has to be curiosity about the world, a commitment to looking through the lens of the other to explore what is more broadly or deeply shared among us.)
Encyclopedic museums and their collections are not instruments of empire but witnesses to the legacy of empire, a fact of history dating back thousands of years and including the Babylonians, egyptians, Chinese, Greek, Persians, Romans, Mongolians, Ottomans, Russians, British, Spanish, and Americans. Such museums hold, preserve, and present evidence of the intertwining of cultures, of the imperializer and the imperialized, for all time and for all to see. The history of empire didn’t start with the British. It is a phenomenon as old as history itself, and culture bears its imprint. Culture has never been immune to—and in fact has thrived on—the imbalance of political power, just as it has thrived on the fruits of economic and cultural exchange. One sees evidence of this everywhere in the collections of the British Museum. Whatever has brought people into contact with one other has furthered the development of culture.
The legacy of empire is complex and needs to be considered carefully. Edward Said, to whom I referred in chapter 5 of this book, dedicated his professional life to examining the intentions and effects of empire through its representations in literature and the popular media. In numerous essays and books, he criticized our tendency to simplify the history of empire and reduce the complex and intertwined hybridity of culture and intellectual production to simplistic and reductive binary relationships.
Said was a professor of comparative literature, an academic field whose origin and purpose, like those of encyclopedic museums, he noted, “is to move beyond insularity and provincialism and to see cultures and literatures together, contrapuntally,” a field in which “there is an already considerable investment in precisely this kind of antidote to reductive nationalism and uncritical dogma: after all, the constitution and early aims of comparative literature were to get a perspective beyond one’s own nation, to see some sort of whole instead of the defensive little patch offered by one’s own culture, literature, and history.”14 Ironically, as he noted, the study of comparative literature “originated in the period of high European imperialism and is irrecusably linked to it” (a fact that compromises its ideals no more than a similar history does those of the encyclopedic museum). Said then went on to trace the history of comparative literature and concluded by stating that “[i]f I have insisted on integration and connections between the past and the present, between imperializer and imperialized, between culture and imperialism, I have done so not to level or reduce differences, but rather to convey a more urgent sense of the interdependence between things.”15
Seeing history as one-sided—as the richer, more powerful nations only exploiting the poorer, less powerful ones, taking from them their cultural treasures and imposing upon them a false culture, as if culture were something so distinct and pure as “ours” and “theirs” that the one can impose upon the other—is false and dangerous. As Said wrote of the legacy of empire, it is “so vast and yet so detailed . . . as an experience with crucial cultural dimensions, that we must speak of overlapping territories, intertwined histories common to men and women, whites and non-whites, dwellers in the metropolis and on the peripheries, past as well as present and future; these territories and histories can only be seen from the perspective of the whole of secular human history.”16
And our task as servants of encyclopedic museums, just as it is the task of professors of comparative literature, is, as Said wrote of his lifelong intellectual project shortly before he died, “to complicate and/or dismantle the reductive formulae and abstract but potent kind of thought that leads the mind away from concrete human history and experience and into the realms of ideological fiction, metaphysical confrontation and collective passion.”17
We must find ways to work together as nations and museums to encourage a greater curiosity about the world and a broader access to the world’s cultural legacy through the development of encyclopedic museums: museums dedicated to the presentation of the world’s many cultures without prejudice. This can come about only through a softening of the legal regime that restricts such access and perpetuates a false view of culture as pure and fixed, one nation’s and not another’s, to be policed, defended, and in the end, if necessary, fought over. In this respect, we need to remember the words of the Indian economic journalist Sanjay Subrahmanyam, who has written that “a national culture that does not have the confidence to declare that, like all other national cultures, it too is a hybrid, a crossroads, a mixture of elements derived from chance encounters and unforeseen consequences, can only take the path to xenophobia and cultural paranoia.”18
We live in dangerous times. And the more we understand that we all have a stake in the preservation of the world’s cultures as our common culture, that any and all forms of cultural expression produced at any time in any part of the world are all of ours to identify with and be inspired by, by dint of inheritance, of our being humans, individuals capable of surmounting the limitations of our national affiliations, the better off we will be and the greater will be the prospects for a safer world.
This is the argument of my book. And the argument I stand by.
