I want to insist that the terrible reductive conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like “America,” “The West” or “Islam” and invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse, cannot remain as potent as they are, and must be oppressed.
—Edward Said1
Born in Jerusalem, raised a proud Palestinian and a Christian; educated in English and American primary schools in Cairo (in the first case, with Armenian, Greek, Egyptian, Jewish, and Copt students; in the latter, with American students almost exclusively) and then in a U.S. prep school and U.S. universities; by profession, a literary scholar (Western literature); by love, a music critic (European piano music and opera); and by commitment, a social critic (mainly of matters in the Middle East and how they are represented in Western media), Edward Said was no one simple thing. No one is, he would insist. He closed his memoir, Out of Place, by reflecting on the nature of identity. “I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance.” In his published conversations with Daniel Barenboim, he spoke of identity as “a set of currents, flowing currents, rather than a fixed place or a stable set of objects.”2
Surely this is how we all see ourselves, if we think about it. We are never only one thing, even if when asked we try to simplify ourselves to a few things: a married, white, professional, middle-aged father with a university education. The currents that flow through us originate in our genes, experiences, and imagination, and are constantly coursing through one another, intermixing and overlapping. The metaphor is apt: currents are never static and can only be separated with effort imposed from the outside. Said described them as “always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of all kinds of strange combinations moving about, not necessarily forward, sometimes against each other, contrapuntally yet without one central theme.”
The journalist and novelist Amin Maalouf was born in Lebanon, raised speaking Arabic, lives in France, writes in French, and answers when asked whether he feels more French or Lebanese, “both!” And he means both at once. “You can’t divide it up into halves or thirds or any other separate segments. I haven’t got several identities: I’ve got just one, made up of many components in a mixture that is unique to me, just as other people’s identity is unique to them as individuals.” And yet social and political pressures assert themselves from time to time, we are “pressed to take sides or ordered to stay within [our] own tribe,” and forced to reach down deep inside to some original, irreducible, undeniable core identity, as if all the rest—in Amin’s words, “a person’s whole journey through time as a free agent; the beliefs he acquires in the course of that journey; his own individual tastes, sensibilities, and affinities; in short his life itself”—counts for nothing.3
What were we originally? The children of our parents, surely. Part of a somewhat larger family, probably. Likely raised among still others in a local community. Possibly initiated into a particular faith practice. A boy or girl, at least. At what point then are we aware that we have a nationality? When we come into contact with the state. When we go to school and have to register our place of birth and residence. When we leave our birth country for travel and have to have passports or identification cards. When we reach our maturity and get married and have children and have to register our status and their birth with state authorities. When, in many countries, we are obliged to do national service. When we pay taxes.
We are born with a nationality, that’s true. And likely we participate in national acts of observance—national holidays, recognition of the flag, oaths of allegiance—even before we come into direct contact with the state. But at the same time, even then we know that we don’t only have a nationality. We have other identities, too: family member, townsman, black boy, white girl, vegetarian, blonde, clarinetist, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist. Some even contradict the claims of nationality and call for allegiance to a higher authority or greater good. And all of these hold nationality in suspension. Until we come up against the state. The state demands commitment. It forces us to take sides. At some point we have to answer the question, what nationality are we? Turkish? Chinese? Kurdish? Uighur? And then can we agree on what this means, precisely? Just who and what really are any of these “nation”-alities?
All too often in the modern world, our nationality is our identity. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen argues that this is not to our advantage: “The prospects of peace in the contemporary world may well lie in the recognition of the plurality of our affiliations and in the use of reasoning as common inhabitants of a wide world, rather than making us into inmates rigidly incarcerated in little containers.”4 I said it at the outset of this book, but it bears repeating here. Encyclopedic art museums are a counter argument to the prevailing tendency to divide the world—and us—into such little containers. They are dedicated to preserving and exhibiting the diversity of the world’s common artistic legacy. They are repositories of things and knowledge, dedicated to the dissemination of learning and to serving as a force for understanding, tolerance, and the dissipation of ignorance and superstition about the world, where the artifacts of one time and one culture can be seen next to those of other times and other cultures without prejudice. They are based in the polymathic ideal of the Enlightenment museum: it is good for us, for our species, to experience the full diversity of human cultural industry in order to better understand our place in the world, as of but one culture and one time among many.5
Encyclopedic art museums introduce us to the larger world of which we are a part. They bear witness to the hybridity and interrelatedness of the world’s cultures. Nationalist retentionist cultural property laws force national identities onto works of art, even works of art that were made long before nations—certainly specific nations—existed. Encyclopedic art museums are based on the eighteenthcentury ideal of cosmopolitanism: “citizen of the cosmos,” of the world, the universe (as Diderot wrote in his letter to Hume, a citizen of “that great city, the world”). Nationalist retentionist cultural property laws are based on the nineteenth-century idea of nationalism: that we are first and most important a national, a member of a tribe determined by language, ethnicity, and place. Emphasis in nationalism is on separateness: one nation separate from other nations. Emphasis in cosmopolitanism is on commonality: we are all branches of a single family, to whom we are obliged equally. Nationalism narrows its vision of the world. Cosmopolitanism expands it.
Nationalist retentionist cultural property laws segregate the world’s cultural property within the borders of modern nation-states. Most often, as I have discussed them in this book, such laws are focused on antiquities; that is, on works of art made long before there were nations. National and international laws, regulations, and agreements typically define antiquities as works of art made at least 150 years ago. They claim antiquities found (or thought to have been found) within their national borders as a nation’s patrimony, as important to that nation’s identity and esteem, and not to our understanding of the world. Quite explicitly, they claim them as a nation’s property, as bearing the imprint of a national identity.
Of course, this can not be true. As Kwame Anthony Appiah has written of Nok sculptures, which although made two thousand years ago are claimed by the modern state of Nigeria as part of its national patrimony: “We don’t know whether Nok sculptures were commissioned by kings or commoners; we don’t know whether the people who made them and the people who paid for them thought of them as belonging to the kingdom, to a man, to a lineage, to the gods. One thing we know for sure, however, is that they didn’t make them for Nigeria.”6 And of course, this is true of all antiquities. Whomever they were made for, they were certainly not made for the modern nations now occupying the land of the ancient governing entities that ruled their makers, be they ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Lydians, Persians, Athenians, Central Asian Turks of numerous kinds, or subjects of the Xia, Shang, or Han dynasties. If their makers made them with thoughts of their lasting, they were made “forever” and not for a particular unknown and unknowable modern nation-state.
Nationalist retentionist cultural property laws are based on false assumptions about art and culture: that the parameters of art and culture can be fixed—that the currents of influence can be stopped—and identified as national, as having national characteristics. Take the Italian government’s request to the U.S. government to impose import restrictions on antiquities. It claimed that it—by which in the context of the request it means explicitly antiquities—is “a source of identity and esteem for the modern Italian nation,” that it “constitute[s] the very essence of a society and convey[s] important information concerning a people’s origin, history, and traditional setting,” and that it is unique to a place: “these materials are of cultural significance because they derive from cultures that developed autonomously in the region of present day Italy.” These assertions form the basis of all nationalist retentionist cultural property laws. Cultural property and national identity are said to originate from the same place: the country identified with the nation; that is, the stretch of land with which a group of people—the nation—identify themselves and whose boundaries are coincident with the sovereign authority of the state. Both are declared unique to that place, as having developed autonomously there: what is Italian is Italy’s only and cannot be shared with any other nation; it is Italian by origin and identity.
In nationalist retentionist cultural property laws, sense of place is important. Cultural property originates from some place. It was made by people who once lived there (although of course their experience of the world was not limited to that place; no place is isolated from others for long). And that “some place” is now the territory of a modern nation (that the cultural property predates the modern nation is beside the point). As cultural property laws claim cultural property to be a source of national identity, that identity is located in that same place: in the country now occupied by the nation. But what if a national (a citizen or subject) is obviously not from that place? Say, Italians born in North Africa, who may be Jewish or Muslim. Are their origins explained by—is their identity founded upon—cultural property that was made centuries ago in the region that is in fact not from where they originate but only where they now live? By the terms of Italy’s request to the United States, North African–born Muslim or Jewish Italians can identify with Italian-ness only by adopting it as a foreign culture.
That is, they must come to their Italian identity (no small part of their individual identity, of course) by imagining a connection to some alleged pure other identity: from which only Italian identity comes—“from cultures that developed autonomously in the region of present day Italy.” But of course, nothing was developed “autonomously” anywhere, and perhaps still less so in the region of present-day Italy than most places. Like every other culture in the world, Italian culture is a rich mixture of the cultures with which the inhabitants of its land have come into contact over many centuries. In the case of its ancient inhabitants, this meant virtually every then-known culture in the world, from China to Africa to Britain. In fact, what makes the ancient cultures of the region of present-day Italy so important is not that they have a particular relationship to modern Italians, but that they bear witness to so many early encounters with the larger world. They were cosmopolitan cultures from the beginning. Ironically, what the North African–born Muslim or Jewish Italian is being asked to identify with—Italian-ness—was, if Italians want to claim descent from the cultures of their land’s ancient inhabitants, a polyglot, multiethnic world of overlapping cultures, which over the course of time included sustained encounters with the cultures from which the North African–born Italian has come, from which he originated.
Why then do national governments like Italy’s make these claims? Because they justify the purpose and reach of their nationalist and retentionist cultural property laws. These laws mean to retain cultural property within the territorial borders of the nation-state for the benefit of the nation and not to share it with the world for the benefit of the world. If the Italian government were only concerned with preserving “Italian” cultural property, it would preserve it wherever it now is. If it were concerned about preserving it because it is “a source of identity and esteem for the modern Italian nation,” it could still preserve it wherever it is. Aren’t there Italians living outside Italy who deserve access to Italian national cultural property because it “constitute[s] the very essence of a society and convey[s] important information concerning a people’s origin, history, and traditional setting” and not only so within Italy?
Of course, the Italian government argues that its cultural property laws are designed to prohibit the looting and destruction of archaeological sites within its borders. If one cannot own or export antiquities without the permission of the government, and if that permission is seldom ever granted, and if other nations, like the United States, agree not to import unprovenanced antiquities that might have come illegally from Italy, then looters will have no or at least a much-reduced market for their illicit trade, and archaeological sites will be preserved and the knowledge they contain made available to all interested parties through publication. But as I have already noted, such cultural property laws have not had the desired effect on the illicit trade in antiquities. Looting of archaeological sites continues at an ever-increasing rate, causing governments like Italy’s to seek ever stricter bilateral agreements with other governments. If cultural property laws were an effective means of protecting archaeological sites, we would see signs of their success surely by now: nearly 150 nation-states have such laws and many of them have had them for decades. But the looting continues and, as archaeologists will tell you, has in fact increased. Where then have the looted antiquities gone? We can only assume on to the black market to private collectors around the world and to museums in countries that do not respect other nations’ cultural property laws or international agreements. Cultural property laws have not reduced the market for illicitly traded antiquities. They have simply moved it around the world to ever newer markets, to wherever there is a buyer willing to take a chance on an antiquity with insufficient provenance and questionable export documents.
Italy’s cultural property laws are indisputably nationalist and retentionist. They are concerned with keeping for Italians what the Italian government claims is Italy’s national cultural property. And they are fighting to hold on to all of it. Yet, by any measure, Italy’s museums are engorged with antiquities and their storerooms have long been filled to capacity with antiquities waiting to be catalogued, studied, and published. The promise is always that they will be published and thereby shared with the world. But Italy’s record when it comes to publishing archaeological finds is poor (it is not alone in this respect). Finds languish in museum storerooms never to be published. And when those few are published, it is hardly done in a manner accessible to the general public. They almost always appear in reports prepared by specialists for specialists. Archaeological reports can never take the place of gallery presentations of antiquities. Only the object—the actual antiquity, the thing itself, there on view, ineluctably ancient, with the aura and facture of age—has the allure to attract the public’s curiosity. If the Italian government is concerned about preserving antiquities because they are “a source of identity and esteem for the modern Italian nation,” they can only have that effect if they are seen by Italian nationals. If they remain off view in storerooms for years or forever, they are mute and invisible and can hardly be said to exist for the purposes claimed by the Italian government.7
Let’s say that antiquities are a source of identity and esteem and convey important information about a people’s origin and history. Does each antiquity do this equally? Does one need every antiquity found within the borders of the modern Italian nation to remain within those borders, seen or unseen, in order to do these things? No, of course not. But that’s not the point of Italy’s cultural property laws. Other nations have laws that allow for restricting the trade in cultural property but permit the export of some things for the sake of sharing them with the world. Japan, for example, ranks its cultural property by quality and rarity and allows the export of much of it. (The rankings decline from National Treasures to Important Cultural Properties to Registered Tangible Cultural Properties; as of 2004, the nation’s Agency for Cultural Affairs had ranked nearly 20,000 cultural properties and designated only some 1,000 as National Treasures, which in most cases are ineligible for export, leaving 95 percent of the cultural properties available for export.)8 Britain can put a hold on the export of a property sold to an overseas buyer, giving a public museum a limited period of time to meet the property’s sale price or let it go abroad. Italy is different. Nominally it allows for the export of cultural property, including antiquities, but in practice that almost never occurs. Italy’s laws are retentionist for the sake of retaining its cultural property for itself and not for an international, global human history. They are also nationalist. They perpetuate the nationalist myth that Italy is a modern nation with a glorious and unbroken history stretching all the way back to ancient Rome and Etruria, when in the case of Ancient Rome “Italy” ruled much of the known world.
Let’s be clear about this. Italy has been a republic only since 1946. It was a kingdom for less than one hundred years before that (for twenty-one years during this period it was ruled by a Fascist dictator), and thus has been a unified nation for less than 150 years. It has been a “nation” only since the age of nationalism. Much has been written about nationalism recently, encouraged by the rise of new nation-states following the breakup of the former Soviet Union. Some writers have praised it, others have been highly critical. Some philosophers have even argued that the boundaries of nations are morally irrelevant, made as they are from accidents of history with no rightful claim on our conscience.9 Most writers agree that nationalism dates to the eighteenth century. The anthropologist Benedict Anderson locates its origins in the age of the Enlightenment and Revolution, when “the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm” was being destroyed.10 The historian Eric Hobsbawm dates it to the age of the European and American revolutions, 1789–1848, when it came to represent “the common good against privilege” and common interests—especially political and economic liberty—which were best served and preserved politically.11 And the political scientist Ernest Gellner dates it to the era of industrialization, when new technologies encouraged, even required, a more broadly educated population.12
It is also generally agreed that nationalism isn’t what it seems to be, or what nationalist ideology claims that it is, or what nationalists believe. It is neither natural nor inevitable. It is not compelled by ethnic or linguistic purity, and it does not derive from below but from above, from the ambitions of the socially and intellectually elite power-holders. In Gellner’s words:
[N]ationalist ideology suffers from pervasive false consciousness. Its myths invert reality: it claims to defend folk culture while in fact it is forging a high culture; it claims to protect an old folk society while in fact helping to build an anonymous mass society. . . . Nationalism tends to treat itself as a manifest and self-evident principle, accessible as such to all men, and violated only through some perverse blindness, when in fact it owes its plausibility and compelling nature only to a very special set of circumstances, which do indeed obtain now, but which were alien to most of humanity and history. It preaches and defends continuity, but owes everything to a decisive and unutterably profound break in human history. It preaches and defends cultural diversity, when in fact it imposes homogeneity both inside and, to a lesser degree, between political units. Its self-image and its true nature are inversely related, with an ironic neatness seldom equaled even by other successful ideologies.13
Nationalism engenders nations, not the other way around. In Benedict Anderson’s formulation, nationalism imagines a community—a nation—precisely because none exists naturally. A nation “is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”14 Nationalism marks a change in the way people imagine their future, and imagine it for the better. But this does not apply to all of the people, of course. As a political principle, nationalism is the creation of the elite. It is not “the awakening of an old, latent, dormant force. . . . It is in reality the consequence of a new form of social organization, based on deeply internalized, education-dependent high cultures, each protected by its own state.”15
A common language is crucial. It creates a community of people who can understand and identify with one another. But it is not a kind of popular ur-language, which lies dormant until released by cultural circumstances. It is an acquired language made standard and imposed broadly on “the people” through political and economic circumstances, including “deeply internalized, education-dependent high cultures, each protected by its own state.”16 Related ethnicities have been historically important, too, but they do not naturally create nations. They are related to the power relations that themselves create and sustain nations politically. Nationalism “is a theory of political legitimacy,” Gellner tells us, “which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones, and in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state—a contingency already formally excluded by the principle in its general formulation—should not separate the power-holders from the rest.”17
During the Romantic era and then even more so through the second half of the nineteenth century, ethnicity and language became the central, decisive, or even the only criteria of potential nationhood. And in many cases this remains so today. Debates over the wearing of Islamic head coverings by public school teachers in Britain, legislators in the Netherlands, and public students in France are testament to the hold ethnicity has over nationalism still; and of course it plagues Turkey in its effort to join the otherwise “Christian” European Union. There was even the extraordinary moment recently when Mexican Americans and Mexicans in the United States took to singing the U.S. national anthem in Spanish, only to have their efforts roundly condemned by President Bush as separatist. To the president, the U.S. national anthem is not a set of ideas and beliefs, but a text that cannot be translated. It and the language it was written in—and officially is only sung in—are inviolate. Despite the hundreds of languages spoken in the United States today, there are still efforts to legislate English as the official national language. Ethnicity and language matter: they remain decisive in the formation of nations.18
This means of course that there are many more potential nations than there are possible viable states. And not all nationalisms can be satisfied, at least at the same time. As Gellner has noted, “The satisfaction of some spells the frustration of others.” This is made all the more complicated by the fact that many of the world’s potential nations live, or until recently have lived, not in compact territorial units but intermixed with other nations in complex patterns. It then follows that a territorial political unit can only become ethnically homogenous, in such cases, if it either “kills, or expels, or assimilates all non-nationals.”19 We witnessed violent incidents of such “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans and Rwanda during the 1990s, and of course see them now in Timor, the Sudan and Darfur, and in Iraq, where Sunnis and Shiites are locked in mortal, sectarian conflict.
I do recognize that nationalistic feelings have bred beautiful music, poetry, and works of visual art and have often been powerful forces for human liberation from political oppression. But all too often they have also hardened into ideologies with roots in fear and hatred of the Other, often with racist affinities. They then become dangerous as reprehensible means of oppressing others, sources of vicious, even barbaric sectarian violence, persuading colossal numbers of people to lay down their own lives in an effort to kill others. The idea of the ultimate sacrifice is inspired by nationalism (or its cultural or religious equivalent) and it must be held accountable for untold acts of brutality.
Nevertheless, strong claims are made for the beneficial consequences of national identities, even among skeptics. Anthony Smith, a professor of Ethnicity and Nationalism at the European Institute, London School of Economics, allows that national identity can provide
a powerful means of defining and locating individual selves in the world, through the prism of the collective personality and its distinctive culture. It is through a shared, unique culture that we are enabled to know “who we are” in the contemporary world. By rediscovering that culture we “rediscover” ourselves, the “authentic self”, or so it has appeared to many divided and disoriented individuals who have had to contend with the vast changes and uncertainties of the modern world.20
Why does nationalism retain a hold on us, he asks?
Perhaps the most important of its functions is to provide a satisfying answer to the problem of personal oblivion. Identification with the “nation” in a secular era is the surest way to surmount the finality of death and ensure a measure of personal immortality.21
And perhaps, too, because it offers extraordinary promises that make nationalism so seductive in our modern era:
Transcending oblivion through posterity; the restoration of collective dignity through an appeal to a golden age; the realization of fraternity through symbols, rites, and ceremonies, which bind the living to the dead and fallen of the community: these are the underlying functions of national identity and nationalism in the modern world, and the basic reasons why the latter have proved so durable, protean and resilient through all vicissitudes.22
Large claims indeed, but these are the kinds of claims made by many, and abused by many. Amartya Sen has acknowledged the double-edged sword of national identity (or for that matter all kinds of singular affiliations, national, religious, ethnic, linguistic, whatever) as also a source of richness and warmth as well as of violence and terror. But he points to the risks of limiting one’s identity to one or a few categories and argues that “the force of a bellicose identity can be challenged by the power of competing identities” by the broad commonality of our shared humanity, ways of classifying people that can restrain “the exploitation of a specifically aggressive use of one particular categorization.”23
Sen comes to these conclusions not only by analysis but by experience. In 1944, when he was eleven and living in Dhaka, the second city—after Calcutta—of Bengal, a man rushed into his family’s garden bleeding profusely. He was a Muslim and had been attacked by rioting Hindus (this was during the communal riots that marked the end of the British Raj; Sen and his family were Hindus). Sen shouted for his parents and his father rushed the man to the hospital, where he died. The man had come into the neighborhood looking for work because his family had nothing to eat. He was killed by people who didn’t know him but saw in him—his dress, his looks—something foreign and threatening.
At the time, Bengal was convulsed with sectarian hatred. A short while later it would be partitioned, with Dhaka the capital of what was then East Pakistan. Communal riots were replaced by Bengali patriotism, “with an intense celebration of Bengali language, literature, music, and culture” common to both the Muslims and Hindus of Bengal. But this was soon overshadowed by “the severe inequality of political power, linguistic status, and economic opportunities between the two halves of the imperfectly integrated Islamic state.” Eventually Pakistan was partitioned and East Pakistan became Bangladesh with Dhaka as its new capital, but this occurred only after more carnage during the painful process of separation: “With the Pakistani army’s frenzied attempt to suppress the Bengali rebellion, the identity divisions were along the lines of language and politics, not religion, with Muslim soldiers from West Pakistan brutalizing—and killing—mainly Muslim dissenters (or suspected dissenters) in East Pakistan.”24
Sen witnessed these violent challenges as a young boy in Dhaka, and then when as a university student in Cambridge, United Kingdom, he worried about the fate of his family back home (his father taught at Dhaka University). But it was the powerful experience of that day in 1944 when he encountered the Muslim man—Kader Mia—that left its indelible mark: “That Kader Mia would be seen as having only one identity—that of being a member of the ‘enemy’ community who ‘should’ be assaulted and if possible killed—seemed altogether incredible. For a bewildered child, the violence of identity was extraordinarily hard to grasp. It is not particularly easy even for a still bewildered elderly adult.”25
Mia was killed not only because he was a Muslim, of course, but also because he was poor. He had left the relative security of his home to look for work in an area swarming with Hindu thugs because his family was hungry. The poorest members of any community are the easiest to kill in sectarian riots: they have to go out unprotected in search of food. In the Hindu–Muslim riots in Dhaka, Hindus killed poor Muslims with ease, while Muslims “assassinated impoverished Hindu victims with equal abandon.” And even though “the community identities of the two groups of brutalized prey were quite different, their class identities (as poor laborers with little economic means) were much the same.” But no identity other than religious ethnicity was allowed to count. “The illusion of a uniquely confrontational reality had thoroughly reduced human beings and eclipsed the protagonists’ freedom to think.”26
The freedom to think and to choose our loyalties and priorities between different groups holds the promise to our overcoming such narrow, identity-based violence. But this presupposes that one can choose among identities, that there is not one identity that is undeniable because it is naturally, indelibly part of our origins, of who we are, really, “deep, down inside.” Sen acknowledges that there are constraints restricting such choice, but points out that choices are always made within the limits of what are seen as feasible. “The feasibilities in the case of identities will depend on individual characteristics and circumstances that determine the alternative possibilities open to us.” And even when we are clear about how we want to see ourselves, we may still have difficulty in persuading others to see us in just that way. The flowing currents of our ever-overlapping identities can only be separated with effort imposed from the outside, by others, often by the state: what nationality are you?
Still, the effort to insist on our ability to choose must be made. There is just too much at risk. “The point at issue is not whether any identity whatever can be chosen (that would be an absurd claim), but whether we do indeed have choices over alternative identities or combinations of identities, and perhaps more importantly, substantial freedom regarding what priority to give to the various identities we may simultaneously have.”27 And if this is true about human identities—and I am convinced it is—it is also true about cultural identities; that is, about the identities we give to works of art. Are they Italian because they derive from cultures said to have developed autonomously in the region of present-day Italy? Or have we simply chosen to identify them that way? They look like things we know to have been made by ancient peoples in the region of what is now, some nearly two thousand years later, Italy. Of course, they also look like things made in Greece, which in turn look like things made in Egypt, which themselves bear a resemblance to things made in the Ancient Near East. And then too, we see resemblances to things made more or less at the same time in Persia, the Steppes of Russia, and central Asia, not to mention across the Levant and northern Africa and up into Europe by way of the Balkans. And of course, too, each of these influences comprises currents of others, such that we can trace the “identity” of “Italian” works of art through a series of artistic and cultural encounters over much of the known world and over hundreds and hundreds of years. To claim that these things came from cultures said to have developed autonomously in the region of present-day Italy is to willfully ignore the hybridity of culture and its multiple identities. It is to reach into a bag and pull out a single identity and declare it not only primary but singular—the defining characteristic of a particular cultural expression—and then to attach a modern national identity to it, to pronounce that characteristic national, as characteristic of its Italian-ness or Bangladeshi-ness or American-ness, or whatever we are or want to claim as most important to who we think we are and what we want others to see us as being, our national identity.
Cultural identities—both of things and of people—are tricky things. Sen admits that our cultural background (and in my argument, this includes works of ancient art and the way we come to identify with them as part of our culture and use them to define our culture as unique, autonomous) can have a major influence on our behavior and thinking. But the skepticism he holds “is not about the recognition of the basic importance of culture in human perception and behavior. It is about the way culture is sometimes seen, rather arbitrarily, as the central, inexorable, and entirely independent determinant of social predicaments.” Our cultural identities can be important, “but they do no stand starkly alone and aloof from other influences on our understanding and priorities.”28 Class, race, gender, profession, and politics also matter. Culture is not a homogenous attribute, nor is it static. It perforce interacts with other determinants of social perception and action. Separating out any one determinant is a choice, a statement of one’s priorities in determining one’s own identity, and of course in determining the culture—and cultural limitations—of another’s.
This is the grave danger in our affiliating with only one cultural attribute: it encourages us to see others the same way, as only a particular nationality or religion or ethnicity or class. This leads to personal acts of discrimination against other individuals and to shallow generalizations made against other cultures. Sen refers to cultural explanations of economic development as an example of these dangers, and he uses a recent book by Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntington. In his introductory essay to the book Culture Matters—the essay is entitled “Cultures Count”—Huntington, who received heavy criticism for his earlier book, The Clash of Civilizations, cites South Korea and Ghana as evidence that cultural differences do matter in national development. In the early 1960s, both nations had similar economies. Thirty years later, South Korea had grown to the fourteenth largest economy in the world with a per capita income approximately that of Greece, while Ghana’s economy stayed flat, with a per capita income roughly one-fifteenth of South Korea’s. Huntington admits that undoubtedly many factors played a role in the difference in the development between two economies, “but it seemed to me that culture had to be a large part of the explanation. South Koreans valued thrift, investment, hard work, education, organization, and discipline. Ghanaians had different values. In short, cultures count.29 Sen responds by calling this causal story “extremely deceptive” and points out that there were many important differences between South Korea and Ghana in the 1960s, including class structures (with a much bigger role for the business classes in South Korea), politics, the close relationship between the Korean economy and Japan and the United States, and a much higher literacy rate and a much more expanded school system in Korea than in Ghana. And then he emphasizes: “This is not to suggest that cultural factors are irrelevant to the process of development. But they do not work in isolation from social, political, and economic influences. Nor are they immutable.”30
Culture matters. But cultural matters can be misunderstood or manipulated to use cultural differences as a way of limiting our understanding and regard for other peoples.
Kwame Anthony Appiah points to the conflation of the two primary uses of the word “culture” in the context of the cultural patrimony/property debate. “On the one hand, cultural patrimony refers to cultural artifacts: works of art, religious relics, manuscripts, crafts, musical instruments, and the like. . . . On the other hand, ‘cultural patrimony’ refers to the products of a culture: the group from whose conventions the objects derives its significance. Here the objects are understood to belong to a particular group, heirs to a transhistorical identity, whose patrimony they are.”31 This is precisely how the Italian government sees cultural patrimony/property, and how nationalist retentionist cultural property laws inscribe it: “cultural property” is at once individual works of art—antiquities, in our case—and the property of a culture, the distinct, autonomous, immutable, national culture claimed by the modern nation and enforced by its state apparatus (laws, ministries, border agents, police, and school curricula). The influential, multinational convention UNESCO 1970 reinforces this point. It pronounces that a state’s cultural heritage includes both work “created by the individual or collective genius of nationals of the State” and “cultural property found within the national territory.”32
Appiah is a professor of philosophy at Princeton University. He was raised in Kumasi, the capital of Ghana’s Asante region. On his father’s side he was related to the first wife of the Asante king, Premph II; on his mother’s side, to Sir Stafford Crips, Britain’s Labour chancellor of the exchequer from 1947 to 1950. Appiah likes to recall that his father—friend and then opponent of Kwame Nkrumah (first prime minister and then first president of the newly independent and unified Ghana)—dressed in dark European suits and carried the white wig of the British barrister. He was a proud Ghanaian, a pan-Africanist (he was with Nkrumakh and W.E.B. Du Bois at the Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England, in 1945), a delegate from Ghana to the United Nations, a Methodist, and much more.
In Kumasi, young Kwame Anthony would wander down the main commercial street past Baboo’s Bazaar, a food store run by an Indian (Mr. Baboo), get rice from the Irani Brothers, visit Lebanese and Syrian families, Muslims and Maronites, British and continental Europeans, and hear stories of his English grandparents and Assante stories and folktales told by his father and others and fondly collected, retold, and published by his mother (he would also later publish with her a collection of Assante proverbs). His youth in Ghana was rich with national and multinational associations. It was a large world he lived in, in the town of Kumasi. And some fifteen years ago, not long after his father died, he wrote a book recalling what he had learned from his father about identity, about Africa, and about culture. He called it In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, purposely referencing the Bible—“in my father’s house, there are many mansions”—not only because the phrase would have come easily to his father and mother but also because it is a formulation appropriate to his view of culture and identity which he gathered from his rich life experiences:
If my sisters and I were “children of two worlds,” no one bothered to tell us this; we lived in one world, in two “extended” families divided by several thousand miles and an allegedly insuperable cultural distance that never, so far as I can recall, puzzled or perplexed us much. As I grew older, and went to an English boarding school, I learned that not everybody had family in Africa and in Europe; not everyone had a Lebanese uncle, American and French and Kenyan and Thai cousins. And by now, now that my sisters have married a Norwegian and a Nigerian and a Ghanaian, now that I live in America, I am used to seeing the world as a network of points of affinity.33
We all have similar stories. As Amin Maalouf says: “Isn’t it characteristic of the age we live in that it has made everyone in a way a migrant and a member of a minority?” Isn’t that the point, really?34
The British Museum is the inspiration of all encyclopedic art museums.35 A former director of the museum described its origins in the Enlightenment in England as a time that “can be characterized by a spread of the spirit of curiosity amongst newly developing classes of society, release from attitudinal constraints of the past, and a creative desire for knowledge which was satisfied in a variety of ways: by experimentation, by exploration, by books and by forms of public spectacle.”36 It was the age of the encyclopedia. Diderot’s and Le Rond’s Encyclopédie appeared in 1751, two years before the founding of the museum, and the English Cyclopaedia of Ephraim Chambers twenty-three years before that.37 Both works sought to survey the state of knowledge, classify it, and provide informed public access to it. They were, as the British Museum would be, public archives intent on doing public good by sparking curiosity about and inquiries into the known world. This is why we call the British Museum, and all similar museums, encyclopedic museums: they comprise collections meant to represent the world’s diversity, and they organize and classify that diversity for ready, public access. As a former director of the museum put it, “the Museum acted as though it were an encyclopaedia, or a dictionary based on historical principles, with sequences of rooms, their layout, and the juxtaposition of objects within them providing a means of understanding relationships within the threedimensional world of objects and specimens.”38
This was an Enlightenment ambition. Critics since have criticized this as an effort to control and dominate nature and humankind. Others more recently have argued to the contrary, that the Enlightenment was an age—and its legacy is still—of broad-minded tolerance and focused curiosity about the full richness of the world, “when these ways of thinking and behaving permeated all aspects of life—the interlacing pattern of history, arts, science, philosophy, politics and religion all reacting upon each other and in turn affecting people’s attitudes to them.”39 We may acknowledge the limitations of our efforts, and the false pressures of classification. But the Enlightenment’s ambition for universality—for discovering the underlying principles of all things and all knowledge—and its emphasis on unprejudiced and open inquiry about the world and its people should inspire us still. It is an argument against prejudice and specialization and for ideals that we can or should attempt to grasp and appreciate the whole of human knowledge in all of its untidy and glorious strangeness. And its museum—the British Museum and all encyclopedic museums since—should strive to be “a repository of the achievements of the human endeavour, and there is no culture, past or present, that is not represented within its walls. It is truly the memory of mankind.”40
This is not a nationalist argument. It is an argument against narrow, proprietary notions of nationalist claims on the world’s common artistic legacy. I have been arguing that nationalist retentionist cultural property laws are just such narrow, proprietary claims, and that they discourage our learning more about the diverse cultures of the world. They also perpetuate the falsehood that living cultures necessarily derive from ancient cultures. The latter, as I have argued, is a nationalist perspective. It does not allow for the building of encyclopedic collections. It segregates cultures and their artistic artifacts by a false, nationalist system of classification. In his recent book The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe, the historian Patrick Geary explores the role the academic discipline of history has played in defining nations and substantiating their nationalist claims:
Modern history was born in the nineteenth century, conceived and developed as an instrument of European nationalism. As a tool of nationalist ideology, the history of Europe’s nations was a great success, but it has turned our understanding of the past into a toxic waste dump, filled with the poison of ethnic nationalism, and the poison has seeped deep into popular consciousness. Clearing up this waste is the most daunting challenge facing historians today.41
And facing encyclopedic museums too, I would argue.
Works of art are made from encounters with new and startling things, and they encourage us to see further associations and to explore their implications. That is the nature of culture. And this is what encyclopedic museums can offer that no other kind of institution can: they reveal the truth about our nature as curious, sentient beings alive to the world of differences and similarities. Ours is a contaminated world of mongrel races. Appiah draws attention to Salman Rushdie, who described his novel Satanic Verses, which occasioned the fatwa against him, as celebrating “hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it.”42 Or, as Appiah has put it, “Cultural purity is an oxymoron.”
Edward Said died in 2003. A few months earlier he had completed a new Preface to Orientalism, his classic study of Western representations of the Middle East, which was first published twenty-five years earlier. Said had spent decades interpreting the way writers and orators in literature and the media used knowledge to gain and wield power over others, often explicitly over the Other. Knowing he would likely die soon, Said was precise about his concerns. He reflected on the state of what he called the humanist critique:
I have called what I try to do “humanism,” a word I continue to use stubbornly despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated post-modern critics. By humanism I mean first of all attempting to dissolve Blake’s mind-forg’d manacles so as to be able to use one’s mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding and genuine disclosure. Moreover, humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking, therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist.43
He challenges us “to complicate and/or dismantle the reductive formulae and the 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.”44
We who work in or care about the future of encyclopedic art museums should take up Said’s challenge. We should argue against nationalist retentionist cultural property laws and international agreements and conventions that perpetuate nationalist orthodoxies and ahistorical explanations of culture and its origins and development in the world. We should present our collections in ways that draw attention to the basic hybridity of culture and the interrelatedness of cultures. We should encourage our visitors to work against the conventional classification system by which we show our collections—sometimes by chronology (Ancient, Medieval, Modern, Contemporary), sometimes by geography (Asia, Africa, America, Europe), and sometimes by media (Prints and Drawings, Photography, Decorative Arts)—and to trace the currents of influence that course through the works in our collections. And, like Edward Said, we should always encourage a rigorous application of the humanist critique—by ourselves and among our visitors—“to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so imprison us in labels and antagonistic debate whose goal is a belligerent collective identity rather than understanding and intellectual exchange.”45
Much is at stake. Much of the world is at war. We live in an age of resurgent nationalism. And where the violence is not nationalist, it is sectarian. Identity matters proliferate, and identities matter more and more. We cannot be partners to ahistorical claims on the past and the cultural property laws that sustain them. We must always question them, challenge them, hold them up to humanist critique. And then “Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations,” as Said wrote in the final paragraphs of his final Preface, “we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow. But for that kind of wider perception,” he cautions us, “we need time and patient and skeptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction.”46
This is the challenge to encyclopedic art museums in the first years of the twenty-first century: Continue to build collections representative of the world’s artistic legacy and argue against nationalist laws and international agreements that discourage this noble ambition. Some critics argue that this is a self-interested charge justifying the transfer of cultural property from the Third World to the First. After all, they argue, encyclopedic museums are only in the developed world and mainly in the West. Although it is true that encyclopedic museums are primarily in the West, does that discredit the principle of their existence? If it is a good idea to have representative examples of all the world’s cultures under one roof for curious people to see, to think about, to better understand and appreciate, to become more sensitive to the cultures of others, to the Other, to the expansive, rich, fecund diversity of the world’s many cultures that over millennia have overlapped and influenced each other such that each has a claim on the other, then it is a good idea, period.
I wrote in the Preface of this book about what we might learn from considering just six objects in neighboring galleries within the Art Institute. This is important not just in itself, of course, as I have argued, but it is also important because of the role the Art Institute plays in its host city, Chicago.
The Art Institute is Chicago’s window on the world. It is where our citizens are introduced to, and are encouraged to engage with, cultures distant from their own in time and space. Increasingly, given the rapidly changing demographics of our city—already famously a city of immigrants—these distant cultures are coming home and moving next door. They are no longer only foreign. They are becoming local. Twenty-six different ethnic groups with at least 25,000 members each now live in our city; more Mexicans than any other U.S. city except Los Angeles, and more Asians than Honolulu. Africans are coming in great numbers too; from Nigeria especially, but also from Ethiopia, Somalia, and Tanzania. And of course there are hundreds of thousands of Irish, Germans, and Poles (more Poles than in Warsaw, it is often said). The more our citizens know about the world and the glories of its diverse artistic production and its distinguished history, the more likely they will develop respect and understanding for the different cultures of their neighbors in an ever-changing, increasingly multiethnic city. This is the promise of encyclopedic art museums: they serve as a force for understanding, tolerance, and the dissolution of ignorance and superstition about the world. And they remind us of the connections that course through history and manifest themselves in the objects we prize for their beauty, eloquence, and fresh strangeness. The encyclopedic museum reminds us that culture is always living culture, always changing the way we see the world, and always transforming us, ourselves, into the bargain.
Encyclopedic museums gather the art of the world for the world at home and everywhere. They tell a cosmopolitanist story and should be encouraged. Individual governments and international organizations expend enormous amounts of time, effort, and money to enforce laws claiming that antiquities are a modern nation’s cultural property and a source of identity and esteem for the citizens of that modern nation, and that such antiquities constitute the very essence of a society and convey important information concerning a people’s origin, history, and traditional setting, and derive from cultures that developed autonomously in the region of a present-day nation. If all of that were spent instead to promote the understanding that antiquities are part of the world’s common ancient heritage and a source of identity and esteem for all of us, and that they constitute the essence of our very humanity, and derive from cultures that have always influenced each other, that are hybrids and mongrels—cosmopolitan—we would all be much better off. We would be more likely to regard the cultural expressions of our neighbors and distant cousins as worthy of our respect and admiration, and the cultural expressions of ancient people not as patrimony of particular modern peoples but of all of us, as our common ancient heritage in which we all have a stake, and which we should preserve and make accessible to everyone.
The cultural property laws of Italy, Turkey, and China—just to name three nations—argue against these possibilities and claim antiquities to be not only the property and patrimony of particular nations but the manifestation of the “collective genius of nationals of the State.” And therein lies the real danger: citizens of the state claimed by the state to be bound together by some collective genius that distinguishes them from everyone else in the world; and antiquities as bearing the imprint of some modern people’s national genius, indelibly.