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Thesis

Museums should return objects to the communities they came from, even when they were acquired legally at the time

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· 5 replies
JusticeAfrican & AfricanaLatin AmericanKwame Anthony Appiah#cultural-property#museums#repatriation#restitution
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Its coordinates: 6.4.1 Distributive Justice

Where it stands

Debates about returning museum objects usually turn on looting. When something was taken by force, as with the treasures removed from Maqdala in Ethiopia by a British expedition in 1868, most people now agree the case for return is strong.

Our motion is about the harder cases: objects bought, exchanged or exported with the permission of whoever had authority at the time.

Thesis: museums should return objects to the communities they came from, even when they were acquired legally at the time.

For: legality at the time often reflected deep imbalances of power. A sale by a colonial official, or by a chief under pressure, was legal but not free. And some objects are not art to their communities at all, but sacred or ancestral, and belong where they still have that meaning.

Against: "the community they came from" is hard to define after centuries of change. Modern states are not the same as the peoples who made the objects. And Kwame Anthony Appiah argues in Cosmopolitanism that the great works of every culture belong in an important sense to everyone who can value them, and that keeping them where many people can see them is itself a way of honouring their makers.

Please mark your side. Examples from your own country are especially welcome.

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5 replies

For the thesis 3

  1. Mateo Quispe

    For Fellow

    For. Peru knows the "legal at the time" case very well. The objects Hiram Bingham took from Machu Picchu between 1911 and 1915 left the country with Peruvian government permits, which Peru said were loans. Yale kept them for nearly a century. After years of dispute, an agreement was reached in 2010 and the pieces came back to Cusco in 2011 and 2012.

    Legality didn't settle anything, because the question was always what the permits meant. That's normal in these cases. "Acquired legally" is usually where the argument starts, not where it ends.

  2. Dawit Gebremedhin

    For Fellow

    For, and Maqdala shows why the "legal" cases matter too. Alongside the looted manuscripts, European libraries hold Ethiopian manuscripts bought later, quite legally, from churches and monasteries. But who could sell a church's book? In our tradition a manuscript given to a church belongs to the church, often with a curse written in it against anyone who removes it. A priest who sold one in hard times had no right to sell it, whatever the buyer's papers said.

    So "legal at the time" often means "legal by the buyer's law".

  3. Tomás Echeverría

    For Fellow

    For, with a lawyer's caution about Giulia's point. In Ecuador the question comes up with pieces from the Valdivia and Manteño cultures, many of which left the country through sales that were legal at the time or simply unregulated. Our law now treats archaeological heritage as belonging to the state.

    But I share the worry that "the community they came from" can quietly become "the state that now claims them". The Valdivia people left no heirs anyone can name. Returning a figurine to a national museum in Quito is not the same as returning a sacred object to the people who still use it.

    So I would vote for the motion where a living community can be identified and still uses or mourns the object. Where only a state remains, the case rests on something else: the right of a people to study its own past without buying a plane ticket to London.

Against the thesis 2

  1. Giulia Ferrante

    Against Fellow

    Against the motion as worded, though I'd like the Parthenon sculptures back in Athens tomorrow.

    My reason for Athens is not that a community owns them. It's that the building still stands, a few hundred metres from the museum built to receive them, and the sculptures are parts of it. That's an argument from the integrity of a work, and it would apply even if Greece did not exist as a state. Elgin's permission, which survives only in an Italian translation of an Ottoman document, is a separate quarrel.

    A general rule of "return to the community" would sweep in cases where the community is impossible to identify, and would miss the integrity argument entirely.

  2. Zainab Kadhim

    Against Contributor

    Against, from a bookseller in a city whose museum was looted in 2003. Some of what was taken came back; much did not. I know the pain of loss better than most here.

    But I also know what happens to objects in a place without security. I would rather a Sumerian tablet sat in a foreign museum, catalogued and studied, than in a private collection, or in the ground of a war zone. Return should depend on whether the object will be safe and seen, not only on where it came from. That is Appiah's point too, and it is not only a colonial excuse.