CULTURE WAR
By James Cuno
[1] In December 2007, the Italian government opened an exhibition ∈Rome of 69 artifacts that four major U.S. museums had agreed to return to Italy on
the grounds [base legal] that they had been illegally excavated and exported from the country. Leading nearly 200 journalists 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
[entranhas] 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.
[2] 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 ∈ the early twentieth
century. Afterward, the Turkish minister of culture, Ertugrul Gunay, declared that “each and every antiquity ∈ any part of the world should eventually go
back to its homeland.”
[3] Such claims on the national identity of antiquities are at the root of many states’ cultural property laws, which ∈ 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 and fixed state-based identities.
Many use ancient cultural objects to affirm continuity with a glorious and powerful past as a way of burnishing [lustrar, polir] 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 ∈a state of constant flux, modern governments present it as standing still, ∈ order to use cultural objects to promote
their own states’ national identities.
[4] 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, ∈New York; the British Museum, ∈
London; and the Louvre, ∈Paris. By presenting the artifacts of one time and one culture next to those of other times and cultures, encyclopedic museums
encourage curiosity about the world and its many peoples. They also promote a cosmopolitan worldview, as opposed to a nationalist concept of cultural
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 [fortalecer] 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 encourage
the development of mutually beneficial relationships with museums everywhere ∈ the world that share their cosmopolitan vision. Cultural property should
be recognized for what it is: the legacy of humankind and not of the modern nation-state, subject to the political agenda of its current ruling elite.
Adapted from Foreign Affairs November/December 2014.
With respect to certain governments that demand the repatriation of ancient artifacts, the information ∈ the article supports all of the following except
