Culture War: The Case Against Repatriating Museum Artifacts
Author(s): James Cuno
Source: Foreign Affairs , NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2014, Vol. 93, No. 6
(NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2014), pp. 119-124, 126-129
Published by: Council on Foreign Relations
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24483927
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Council on Foreign Relations is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Foreign Affairs
This content downloaded from
89.177.61.67 on Sun, 19 Nov 2023 18:34:01 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Culture War
The Case Against Repatriating Museum
Artifacts
James Cuno
In December 2007, the Italian government opened an exhibition in
Rome of 69 artifacts that four major U.S. museums had agreed
to return to Italy on the grounds that they had been illegally
excavated and exported from the country. Leading nearly 200 journal
ists through the exhibition, Francesco Rutelli, Italy's then cultural
minister, proclaimed, "The odyssey of these objects, which started
with their brutal removal from the bowels of the earth, didn't end
on the shelf of some American museum. With nostalgia, they have
returned. These beautiful pieces have reconquered their souls." Rutelli
was not just anthropomorphizing ancient artifacts by giving them
souls. By insisting that they were the property of Italy and important
to its national identity, he was also giving them citizenship.
Rutelli has hardly been the only government official to insist that
artifacts belong to the places from which they originally came. In 2011,
the German government agreed to return to Turkey a 3,000-year-old
sphinx that German archaeologists had excavated from central Anatolia
in the early twentieth century Afterward, the Turkish minister of
culture, Ertugrul Gunay, declared that "each and every antiquity in
any part of the world should eventually go back to its homeland."
Such claims on the national identity of antiquities are at the root of
many states' cultural property laws, which in the last few decades have
been used by governments to reclaim objects from museums and other
collections abroad. Despite unesco's declaration that "no culture is a
hermetically sealed entity," governments are increasingly making
claims of ownership of cultural property on the basis of self-proclaimed
JAMES CUNO is President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust. He is the author of Museums
Matter: In Praise of the Encyclopedic Museum and Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the
Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage.
November/December 2014 119
This content downloaded from
89.177.61.67 on Sun, 19 Nov 2023 18:34:01 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
James Cuno
and fixed state-based identities. Many use ancient cultural objects to
affirm continuity with a glorious and powerful past as a way of
burnishing their modern political image—Egypt with the Pharaonic era,
Iran with ancient Persia, Italy with the Roman Empire. These arguments
amount to protectionist claims on culture. Rather than acknowledge
that culture is in a state of constant flux, modern governments present
it as standing still, in order to use cultural objects to promote their
own states' national identities.
In the battle over cultural heritage, repatriation claims based
strictly on national origin are more than just denials of cultural exchange:
they are also arguments against the promise of encyclopedic museums—
a category that includes the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New
York; the British Museum, in London; and the Louvre, in Paris. By
presenting the artifacts of one time and one culture next to those of
other times and cultures, encyclopedic museums encourage curios
ity about the world and its many peoples. They also promote a
cosmopolitan worldview, as opposed to a nationalist concept of cul
tural identity. In an era of globalization that is nonetheless marked
by resurgent nationalism and sectarianism, antiquities and their
history should not be used to stoke such narrow identities. Instead,
they should express the guiding principles of the world's great
museums: pluralism, diversity, and the idea that culture shouldn't
stop at borders—and nor, for that matter, should the cosmopolitan
ideals represented by encyclopedic museums. Rather than acquiesce
to frivolous, if stubborn, calls for repatriation, often accompanied by
threats of cultural embargoes, encyclopedic museums should encour
age the development of mutually beneficial relationships with museums
everywhere in the world that share their cosmopolitan vision. Cultural
property should be recognized for what it is: the legacy of human
kind and not of the modern nation-state, subject to the political
agenda of its current ruling elite.
LESSONS FROM THE LOUVRE
I first visited an encyclopedic museum more than 40 years ago. Walk
through the Louvre as a young, traveling student, drawn to diffe
things that caught my eye, I came across an alabaster bust of a pray
figure from the ancient Near East. It was an armless torso with a he
a long, flowing beard, and one eye inlaid with shell and another just
empty hole. An inscription carved into the statue revealed that it
120 FOREIGN AFFAIRS
This content downloaded from
89.177.61.67 on Sun, 19 Nov 2023 18:34:01 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
dedicated to a goddess on behalf of a Mesopotamian king by his vassal
Eshpum more than 4,000 years ago.
The small figure was wholly foreign to me, yet I was captivated. I
imagined that I was looking at the statue as its original owner must
have done—and then, not just its original owner but everyone since
who had seen, admired, and protected it until it came into the museum
where it has been preserved for centuries for all to see. I sensed that I
was but one person in a long line of admirers attracted to the figure's
magic, all the way back to Eshpum.
November/December 2014 121
This content downloaded from
89.177.61.67 on Sun, 19 Nov 2023 18:34:01 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
James Cuno
This is the power and promise of encyclopedic museums. By
preserving and presenting examples of the world's cultures, they
offer their visitors the world in all its rich diversity. And in doing
so, they protect and advance the idea of openness and integration
in a changing world. Over the last three decades, more people have
moved across or within national
Museums encourage ^orders than at Point in human
° history, straining the very contiguity
curiosity cifld promote CI anc[ definition of nation-states, which
Cosmopolitan worldview. are now less politically defined and
territorially circumscribed than ever
before. But all too often, as a result, governments seek fixed na
tional cultures to shore up their hold on their states' identities.
They focus on what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (citing
Sigmund Freud's "narcissism of small differences") called "new in
centives for cultural purification as more nations lose the illusion
of a national economic sovereignty or well being." This kind of
promotion of cultural purity, borne of uncertainty, can produce
dangerous, often violent xenophobia.
Appadurai was expanding on the ideas of the literary critic and
theorist Edward Said, who also examined the formation of national
cultural identities. In an essay published in 2000, Said concluded
that "the notion of an exclusionary civilization ... is an impossible
one." Instead, he insisted that the more important question is
whether "we want to work for civilizations that are separate or
whether we should be taking the more integrative, but perhaps
more difficult, path, which is to try to see them as making one vast
whole whose exact contours are impossible for one person to grasp,
but whose certain existence we can intuit and feel." This principle
is exactly what encyclopedic museums encourage: understanding
the intertwined nature of different cultures that are more similar
than they are different, the result of centuries of contact through
trade, pilgrimage, and conquest.
Yet this history allows critics to see encyclopedic museums as imperial
instruments and contemporary agents of historical imbalances of power
by which stronger nations continue to enrich themselves at the expense
of weaker ones. But such a view fails to account for the complexity of
empire. "Partly because of empire," Said wrote, "all cultures are involved
in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous,
122 FOREIGN AFFAIRS
This content downloaded from
89.177.61.67 on Sun, 19 Nov 2023 18:34:01 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Culture War
extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic." That applies not just
to European imperialism; it goes as far back as the Mongol and Mughal
empires and the empires of ancient Greece and Egypt. If one goes
looking for evidence of empire in the collections of encyclopedic
museums, one could find it everywhere. Empire is a fact of history,
and history is on display in encyclopedic collections.
RETURN TO SENDER?
If the small alabaster sculpture I first encountered in the Louvre years
ago were discovered today, it would almost certainly be claimed
by Iran as national property. A French archaeological delegation
excavated it in Susa, the modern Iranian city of Shush, at the turn
of the twentieth century. At that time, in an arrangement with the
Persian government, the French team had rights to all the objects it
excavated, provided that it compensated the government for any gold
or silver. The country's 1930 Conservation of Antiquities Act changed
those terms: if the state discovered excavated objects directly, it could
appropriate them all; if foreign excavators discovered them, the state
could choose up to ten objects of value and divide the rest equally
with the foreign excavating team.
In 1972, new legislation outlawed such divisions and gave the Iranian
Center for Archaeological Research authority over all excavations in
the country. In 1985, the government established the Iranian Cultural
Heritage Organization and charged it with surveying, registering,
and conserving all archaeological sites and artifacts in the country. In
1998, the government went even further, passing a law that gave the
organization the authority to take "necessary measures to identify and
restitute Iran's cultural properties, at national and international levels."
Egypt, Italy, Turkey, and many other states made similar legal
arrangements with archaeologists a century or more ago—instituting
the practice of partage, or the sharing of finds—and then experienced
similar evolutions in their cultural property laws. These modern laws
have often asserted living relationships between modern nation-states
and the ancient civilizations that long preceded them. In 1971, for
example, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran's last shah, held an opulent
celebration in the ancient city of Persepolis to commemorate the anni
versary of the founding, 2,500 years earlier, of the Persian monarchy
by Cyrus the Great, explicitly identifying his own decadent reign
with the glories of that ancient empire.
November/December 2014 123
This content downloaded from
89.177.61.67 on Sun, 19 Nov 2023 18:34:01 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
James Cuno
More than half of the 192 member nations of the UN have laws
that either grant the state ownership of ancient objects found within
their borders or restrict their export without state approval. Most
of these laws were passed after 1970, the year UNESCO adopted a
convention against the illicit trade of archaeological artifacts. Two
of the most contentious ongoing
Countries that claim repatriation claims involve objects
removed from Greece and Egypt,
historical objects are not respectively, long before 1970: the
protecting their cultural Parthenon Marbles (also known as
heritages t^le Marbles), a collection of
Greek sculptures and architectural
pieces that a British ambassador ac
quired and shipped to London between 1801 and 1812 and that now
reside in the British Museum, and the bust of Nefertiti, which was
brought to Berlin after it was discovered by German archaeologists
in 1912 and is now held by Berlin's Neues Museum.
The marbles were removed from the Parthenon and other buildings
in Athens' Acropolis complex with the permission of the reigning
Ottoman authorities and have been on display in the British Museum
since 1817. Greece didn't pass a law governing antiquities and ancient
objects until 1834. When it achieved its independence from the
Ottomans, in 1829, Greece made the Acropolis its national symbol,
then removed all non-Athenian additions to the citadel's buildings,
including remnants of a Byzantine church, an Orthodox and Roman
Catholic cathedral, and a mosque. (The German architect in charge
of the project pledged that "all the remains of barbarity will be
removed.") Still, the Greek government has persistently claimed that
the marbles' return would "restore the unity" of the Parthenon.
The bust of Nefertiti has been in Berlin since 1913, when Egypt,
although nominally a province of the Ottoman Empire, was effectively
ruled by the British. Egyptian governments have petitioned Germany
for the bust's return since the 1920s. Germany has always refused,
claiming that the bust was legally removed as part of a division of
finds between the German excavating team and Egyptian officials. In
December 2009, the director of Berlin's Egyptian Museum (the col
lection of which is part of the Neues Museum) presented historical
documents, including a protocol signed by the German excavator an
the Egyptian Antiquities Service, authorizing the bust's removal
124 FOREIGN AFFAIRS
This content downloaded from
89.177.61.67 on Sun, 19 Nov 2023 18:34:01 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
James Curio
Egyptian authorities alleged that the excavator misrepresented the
bust's importance in the protocol to deceive the Egyptian authorities
and get it out of Egypt—a charge the German government and museum
authorities have consistently denied.
In these and other disputes, the unesco convention of 1970 has
encouraged countries' calls for repatriation. But the convention does
not override national cultural heritage regulations that predate 1970,
nor is it itself a law. It is a binding agreement among its 115 signatory
countries to regulate the trade in antiquities and prevent their loot
ing and illicit trade. Adherence to the terms of the convention was
lax in its early years, as museums and individual collectors acquired
antiquities without careful consideration of their proper legal status
or provenance.
A major shift occurred in 2008, when the Association of Art
Museum Directors decided to bring its acquisition policies in line
with the unesco charter. Nearly 200 directors of leading museums
in the United States, Canada, and Mexico agreed that museums
"should not normally acquire archaeological materials and ancient
art without provenance demonstrating that the object was out of its
country of modern discovery prior to or legally exported therefrom
after November 17, 1970."
The decision was largely a response to scandals involving stolen antiq
uities, which provide a powerful argument for repatriation. In the late
1990s, Swiss and Italian police raided the Geneva warehouse of Giacomo
Medici, an Italian art dealer, and found photographs and documents
revealing his extensive involvement in the illegal sale of antiquities. A
number of U.S. museums that had acquired objects through Medici
were implicated. In fact, it was the Medici scandal that eventually led
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston,
the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Princeton University
Art Museum to send those 69 objects back to Rome in 2007.
CLAIM GAME
Although the unesco convention has helped crack down on the illega
trade in antiquities and led to the rightful repatriation of illicitly
acquired art, it has also inspired many governments to make combative
and sometimes dubious claims for restitution. As Zahi Hawass, Egypt
then long-serving antiquities minister, said in 2010, "We will make life
miserable for museums that refuse to repatriate."
126 FOREIGN AFFAIRS
This content downloaded from
89.177.61.67 on Sun, 19 Nov 2023 18:34:01 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Culture War
And states are not alone in these efforts. Unesco, despite what is
says about cultural fluidity, has joined with nation-states to assist in
the repatriation of cultural objects on the grounds that they represent
countries' exclusive national heritages. Its repatriation and restitution
committee has a broad mandate to facilitate bilateral negotiations for
the return of "any cultural property" that a state deems to have "fun
damental significance from the point of view of the spiritual values
and cultural heritage of [its] people." Claims can apply to any object
that was taken out of a country through "colonial or foreign occupation
or as a result of illicit appropriation." The International Council of
Museums, a nongovernmental organization with formal relations with
unesco and the un's Economic and Social Council, has a similarly
all-embracing directive. The council instructs any museum with an
object in its collection that is subject to a repatriation claim to "take
prompt and responsible steps to cooperate in its return."
But individual countries alone determine when something is part
of their cultural heritage: there is no international institution with the
authority to make that determination. A national government or state
backed entity can even declare a preceding state's or regime's self
proclaimed national cultural property idolatrous and destroy it, and
there is nothing any other country or any international agency can do
to stop it. In 2001, unesco tried in vain to prevent the Taliban from
demolishing the Bamiyan Buddhas, two monumental sixth-century
statues carved into a cliff in central Afghanistan. Not even a meeting
between un Secretary-General Kofi Annan and representatives of the
Taliban leader could spare the statues.
Since that notorious attack, threats to the world's cultural heritage
have only become more common. Unesco lists sites where what it
calls "emergency actions" to protect cultural heritage are needed; the
list currently includes places in Egypt, Haiti, Iraq, Libya, Mali, and
Syria where cultural property is threatened by either armed conflict
or, in the case of Haiti, natural disaster. These actions, led by unesco,
assess and document the extent and severity of the damage to, for
example, the Roman-era ruins of the ancient desert city of Palmyra,
in Syria, and Aleppo's Old City, both designated as unesco World
Heritage sites and both damaged in 2012 in fighting between the
Syrian army and rebels in the ongoing Syrian civil war, and Egypt's
Museum of Islamic Art, in Cairo, which was damaged in a bombing
claimed by Islamist militants in January.
November/December 2014 127
This content downloaded from
89.177.61.67 on Sun, 19 Nov 2023 18:34:01 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
James Cuno
SPREAD THE WEALTH
Contrary to their stated intent, countries that make political c
on historical objects are not helping protect their cultural heri
Since the rise in cultural property laws, many such objects
become concentrated in a few places. Insurance companies k
this is a bad idea. Political instability and natural disasters
threaten cultural property anywhere—whether it's the more
4,000 medieval manuscripts destroyed by Islamist militants in M
2013 or the galleries and art collections in New York City dam
by flooding during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Allowing the wo
museums to share cultural property through loans or acquisit
would reduce some of these risks.
Governments and international agencies that value the protec
tion of cultural property and the principle of cultural diversity
should speak out in favor of a robust program of exchange among
museums around the world. They should also discourage frivolous
restitution claims from individual governments and promote the
responsible sharing of collections from encyclopedic museums with
museums in places that themselves have no encyclopedic museums.
Given the political sensitivities of many governments, this is most
likely to happen through loans of cultural objects rather than through
their acquisition.
Unfortunately, not every museum sees the value in lending. There
are risks with it, to be sure: the possibility of damage during transpor
tation or from changes in environmental conditions, not to mention
political instability. But over the long term, these risks can be mitigated
through measures to increase the ability of smaller museums to properly
care for objects of great value.
For encyclopedic museums to fulfill their promise of cultural ex
change, they should be established everywhere in the world where
they do not now exist. And existing encyclopedic museums should
aid in their development. Already, there are laudable examples of
how great museums in wealthy countries can foster a more compre
hensive kind of cosmopolitanism. The British Museum established a
program in 2008 to promote partnerships with institutions in Africa,
Asia, and the Middle East. In addition to loaning collections and
exhibitions from British museums, it focused on training: in conser
vation, curating, and archiving. In all, some 29 countries were involved.
The program was supported by the British government's Department
128 FOREIGN AFFAIRS
This content downloaded from
89.177.61.67 on Sun, 19 Nov 2023 18:34:01 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Culture War
for Culture, Media, and Sport. But after three years, the British
government cut the program's funding. The partnerships continue
on a smaller scale supported by grant funding, including from the
Getty Foundation.
This process of exchange and cooperation should build trust among
museums and national authorities. It will be a long, slow process, but
if successful, it would lay the foundation for a greater understanding
of the values represented by the encyclopedic museum: openness,
tolerance, and inquiry about the world, along with the recognition
that culture exists independent of nationalism. These ideas can flourish
everywhere, not only in the United States and Europe but wherever
there is a spirit of inquiry about the world's rich and diverse history—
and venerable or new museums to foster that interest—from Marrakech
to Nairobi, Abu Dhabi to Mumbai, Shanghai to Mexico City. Examples
of how such collaboration has worked include two recent exhibitions
at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, in Mumbai:
The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia: A New Beginning, organized
by the British Museum, and Flemish Masterpieces From Antwerp,
organized in collaboration with the Royal Museum of Fine Arts
Antwerp. Potential future collaboration could involve, perhaps,
Chinese or Kenyan curators arranging an exhibition drawn entirely
from the diverse collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art or
the J. Paul Getty Museum, to be shown, respectively, at the Palace
Museum, in Beijing, or at the Nairobi Gallery, in Nairobi.
But this more open future mostly depends on individual govern
ments' setting aside their nationalist claims and encouraging among
their citizens a cosmopolitan view of the world's many different cultures.
Then, perhaps, more young students will have the experience I had
in the Louvre some 40 years ago: a powerful and ancient object will
enlarge their world, forever provoking curiosity about another time
and place.©
November/December 2014 129
This content downloaded from
89.177.61.67 on Sun, 19 Nov 2023 18:34:01 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms