Reflections on Museum Week 2018 and Restitution-Juniper Publishers
Archaeology & Anthropology- Juniper Publishers
Opinion
Discussions on restitution have been acquiring
momentum. Museum Week in 2018 has been marked in the press by a series
of articles which support this direction. It started with an email from
an Indian colleague who was at the ARCA conference last year where I was
talking about the history of collecting of European museums and the
gathering of antiquities during the late 18th and early 19th century.
This is an argument about which I have been very passionate and that has
been at the core of my research interests, teaching and public
engagement, since my postgraduate days.
On the Queen’s birthday, Anuraag Saxena had written a
provocative and passionate article Your Majesty: Thou shalt not steal
on the need to return Indian artefacts to India, calling for a ‘reverse
[of] the colonial-era plunder, especially symbols of our culture - our
heritage’. With the India Pride Project, Anuraag is an active proponent
of the repatriation of looted Indian artefacts, and his argument gained
strength and momentum with the declaration by the French President,
Emmanuel Macron, of the intention to return African artefacts. This was
not just an announcement in the way politicians do them, because Macron
has already given the task to Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, and a
deadline, to see the job to completion.
Macron has stated that “African heritage cannot be a
prisoner of European museums.” Most importantly, he made his
announcement in a joint appearance with the president of Benin Patrice
Talon. Benin has been campaigning for a return of its cultural heritage,
not only from France, for several years. In fact, it was the British
who took their most treasured possessions and put them on the market in
retaliation for an uprising in 1897. On the 6 March 2016 the Guardian published an article
giving voice to a student protest in Cambridge which demanded that a
Benin cockerel held at the entrance of Jesus College should be returned
to its rightful owners.
The British Museum celebrated museum week with the
Europe and the World, a Symphony of Cultures project promoted by the new
director Hartwig Fischer. I took myself to hear the beautiful Ottoman
and Versailles court music in room 6 on the Sunday afternoon. In the
presentation page of the website, Fisher had declared that: ‘’The world
collections of the British Museum provide extraordinary opportunities
for musical performance. Here the material inheritance of the world’s
cultures is stored and deciphered, and we are invited to interpret the
ways that regions and peoples assert their identities - an endless and
urgent task.”
Fisher shared in this thought the ideas of Macron,
stating himself that we need to recognise that culture, and artefacts,
pair with “identity” and that there is an “urgent task” that needs
attention. Yet the approach is indeed different, if on one side the
French government has officially undertaken the task to reunite colonial
countries with their artefacts, recognizing that it is time to reverse
actions that have been done in the past, in Britain this call has
remained unanswered. Here Fisher has put an emphasis on how cultures can
mutually play and strengthen themselves reciprocally. Yet I find this
approach hypocritical and another way to dominate them culturally yet
again.
Although fascinated by the beautiful music, I could
not quite make the connection myself of how music played in the British
Museum in London would help middle eastern people to reassert their
identity at home. During the same week, the Guardian published the news
that the V&A had hinted to the return of Ethiopian artefacts on a
long-term loan basis. After the French news, this move was perhaps
inevitable, yet a step in the right direction, and a demonstration that
Tristram Hunt had sensibly bent to the call of the Benin ambassador on
the eve of the exhibition opening. Whether this was a conscious
decision, or the surprised response to a highly sensitive issue after
the outspoken speech by the ambassador, this represented a positive and
unprecedented step forward in the current debate
on restitution in England, especially when considering that in a
Guardian interview Fisher had said only two weeks before that
“the [British]museum will bring a much greater sense of selfscrutiny
to its displays”, hinting that restitution issues are not on
the agenda. It is from the same article that I learn that Fisher has
married the Cuno idea of “a museum of the world for the world”,
a way to say that the artefacts are staying put.
Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised to read the next day
about the fuss my former student Alice Procter was causing
with her museum tours designed after she attended my course
Collecting for the Nation at UCL which explains to students how
the history of collecting for European museums is fundamental
for the understanding of the wider issue of ownership,
repatriation, and current legislation and the development of the
art market. Alice elaborated the concepts studied by designing
provocative museum tours that show the history of the pieces
and present the institutions in a different light. This caused an
outcry in some papers, enough to let the Guardian give her a
voice to explain her reasoning behind the tours: ‘I make “Display
It Like You Stole It” badges for people to wear on the tours. It’s
a slogan designed to push museums and visitors to rethink the
politics of presentation in galleries. On most text panels there’s
little or no mention of how objects came to be there. Euphemistic
language of “acquisition” obscures the truth. I don’t believe
most visitors to the British Museum’s Benin and South Pacific
collections, for example, or the V&A’s Indian collections, come
away understanding that these are largely the spoils of war.’ Alice concluded her article by saying that her tours will
continue until ‘museums engage fully with their imperial
legacies without needing to be prompted. I don’t know when
that will happen, but it must.’
Museums have disassociated themselves from her tours, yet,
these have the scope to provoke people to think that the narrative
presented by museums themselves leaves out the knowledge of
how they got their collections, a history that is becoming ever
more fundamental if museums want to establish a position of
transparency going forward. Notwithstanding the amazing work that museums, and
especially the British Museum Middle East and Egyptian
Departments are doing to reconnect and empower people in
countries at war, coming up with a position of transparency
on the history of the pieces they hold would create a novel and
ethical position. Facing the past would allow to discuss the
future.
I have written in a previous article that “Approaches that
were possible and legal through the eighteenth and most of the
nineteenth centuries are now both unthinkable and illegal”, this
means that if the acquisition of antiquities was not illegal yet
poses several moral issues in modern times.
On 15th of April Marc Masurovsky, co-founder of the Holocaust
Art Restitution Project, had published his presentation for
the annual conference of the Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural
Heritage Preservation (LCCHP), which took place in Washington,
DC a couple of days earlier. There, he had remarked that he has
“always viewed restitution, as part of an overall healing process,
a salve on a trans-generational traumatic scar”.
But restitution is a complex issue, all sorts of complications
and ethics come into play, as well as the politics and historical
imbalances that have created those positions of privilege that
have allowed the removals. An exact understanding of the
circumstances that have caused the artefacts to change location
is therefore essential to establish a position of competence.
Another passage of his talk is worth quoting as it coincides
with my thoughts again: “From an ethical and moral standpoint,
the repatriation of looted objects to autocratic and dictatorial
nations can be viewed as problematic. But what is the alternative?
Prevent those objects from returning to their source? Under
what pretense? That we are morally and culturally superior? If
we follow those arguments, we are no better than 19th century
colonial adventurers who viewed the “others” as inferiors and
whose assets should best be handled by the Western world. We
cannot allow ourselves to think that we are morally superior to
anyone.”
Although he was talking about contemporary looted objects
and holocaust restitution, the concept applies to some historical
acquisitions. So many times, the argument that Western
European museums provide a safe haven for artefacts that
would have otherwise been damaged, destroyed or forgotten,
has been used to discard claims of restitution. But who says that
one population has righter than another to hold an object?
“Art objects are an integral part of our individual and
collective memory of the past and the present. They are an
extension of who and what we are. For those reasons, it is as
important to transcribe faithfully and truthfully the story of these
objects as it is to recover them. Every cultural object, regardless
of origin, deserves a thoroughly fleshed out provenance before
it is displayed or traded. Ignorance, arrogance and greed are
the enemy. One way to forestall future acts of State-sanctioned
plunder is to ensure that the history of these objects and their
owners is written, published, disseminated and taught to as
wide a public as possible.” I have been doing exactly that. By teaching my history of
collecting course and researching the way antiquities have
arrived to museums, I have been trying to sensibilise the public
to the necessity to come to terms with this history. In particular,
I believe that the best way forward for encyclopaedic museums
is for them to open up their archives to the public, providing
absolute transparency about the history of their collections. This
clarity of position will allow a constructive conversation about
their future.
Masurovsky therefore, concludes where I started, with the
conviction that the history of collecting, the study of the archival
documentation of museums and public records that allow us to
recover the full undisclosed story of those acquisitions, is the
essential passage to open a future of collaboration and peaceful,
unresentful exploration of the future. Teaching that history, is
just as essential. So, the week finished decisively in a positive
note, with the announcement that the German government is
pouring money into doing exactly that. I wonder how long it will take for the British government
to start focusing its attention on these issues. The foundation of
the Schools of Archaeology in Athens was financed first by the
French in 1846 with Germany following suit in 1876. The British
School of Archaeology was eventually established ten years later
at the invitation of the Greek government and the donation of
land to build on.
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