Many of our ebooks are available through library electronic resources including these platforms:. Whether antiquities should be returned to the countries where they were found is one of the most urgent and controversial issues in the art world today, and it has pitted museums, private collectors, and dealers against source countries, archaeologists, and academics.
Maintaining that the acquisition of undocumented antiquities by museums encourages the looting of archaeological sites, countries such as Italy, Greece, Egypt, Turkey, and China have claimed ancient artifacts as state property, called for their return from museums around the world, and passed laws against their future export.
But in Who Owns Antiquity? They comprise antiquity, and antiquity knows no borders. Antiquities need to be protected from looting but also from nationalistic identity politics. To do this, Cuno calls for measures to broaden rather than restrict international access to antiquities. He advocates restoration of the system under which source countries would share newly discovered artifacts in exchange for archaeological help, and he argues that museums should again be allowed reasonable ways to acquire undocumented antiquities.
Cuno explains how partage broadened access to our ancient heritage and helped create national museums in Cairo, Baghdad, and Kabul. The first extended defense of the side of museums in the struggle over antiquities, Who Owns Antiquity? By this he means not only collecting and showing art from every place and era, but also, and more crucially, the promotion of an essential kind of cultural pluralism.
Whatever one makes of Cuno's thesis, it brings into focus some urgent questions—for museums and for archaeology—that have yet to be given much attention. The crux of his argument is that modern nation-states have at best a tenuous connection with the ancient cultures in question, and their interests are political rather than scientific Cuno advocates instead a universal, humanistic approach to the world's shared cultural treasures Cuno's pleas for a more expansive approach to cultural artifacts must be taken seriously.
Trade in antiquities should be dictated not by politics, but by the demands of conservation, knowledge, and access. The argument presented here is thought-provoking. Additional Information. Table of Contents. Cover Download Save contents. Title Page, Copyright, Dedication pp. Contents pp. Preface pp. Introduction: The Crux of the Matter pp. One: Political Matters pp. Two: More Political Matters pp. Three: The Turkish Question pp.
Four: The Chinese Question pp. Five: Identity Matters pp. But not in terms of an identity with those ancient people. It is not on the basis that they are the modern heirs to the achievements of these ancient peoples, that they descend from them in any kind of continuous or natural way and that the modern culture is akin to the ancient culture.
I nearly fell off my chair when I read that. Rarely do we see today such blatent cultural superiority except from my friend Frank, a Canadian who seriously thinks the remaining Amazonian tribes would be served best if they were moved wholesale into apartment buildings in Sao Paolo or Lima. My position as a professional archaeologist no longer practicing has long been that human remains and artifacts should be returned to the nations wherin they reside.
I see, for example, no reason for the Elgin marbles to remain in London. They belong in Greece. In that process, however, there must be some careful consideration because we have to find a way to avoid some of the problems brought on by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act NAGPRA wherein remains have been returned to tribes who have no relation to those remains or where valuable scientific study has been stopped by a tribe that has no relation to the remains found on or near their current land.
We also need to recognize that, as Cuno correctly points out, culture is a process not a thing and that culture developed and continues to develop through interaction between cultures and over trade routes. It is a very fine line to walk. I do agree with Cuno that many of the national laws protecting cultural resources are based on an idea of static, nationally distinct cultures.
However, preaching some sort of cultural superiority and entitlement adds nothing healthy to the debate. I should add that it bothers the hell out of me, for example, that China, with its very tight controls on antiquities leaving China has no problems with ancient Chinese items being bought and sold within China with no thought to where these items came from nor what they could tell researchers.
This is a tired century-old canard that claims an ethnic group has only a tenuous tie to their ancestors. Is language not enough for him? Return to the Elgin marbles, for instance. Cuno worries that cultural artifacts may be destroyed if located in a singular place. Yet Lord Elgin destroyed the marbles themselves in removing them, lost many in the Mediterranean, and the British Museum allowed patrons to dump wine on them during wild fundraisers.
Or amputating the torch arm on the Statue of Liberty, and passing it to Sierra Leon ooof…bad joke there, I know. And all the names on Vietnam War Memorial? Should we share them out with Vietnam? The Parthenon still exists.
The marbles are the frieze of the Parthenon. And have you taken a look at the new Acropolis Musuem? Well, what does that make Cuno and his ilk? Worse than nationalists, me thinks. Attempting to parse cultural descendency is violently political. It seems safest to eliminate that nationalisim infused scholarly hassle of who gets the goodies and let the countries where the artifacts lie take jurisdiction.
Plymouth Rock? The French get Montreal. Spain gets the Southwest missions? Nor does he seem to understand why they may want to prevent current and future theft. While the statements that these items may be better preserved in rich, stable countries with abundant resources seems noble, I found no offer to help build satisfactory preservation systems in the nations of origin. One has to wonder if Cuno and Princeton!! Nov 26, MJ rated it did not like it Shelves: read-for-school.
Jul 03, John David rated it really liked it Shelves: anthropology , art-and-art-history , politics. James Cuno manages to cover all these bases in this book whose major question is: Do modern states have the right to demand the return of objects that may be deemed to have cultural, aesthetic, or national value?
And if they do, what reasons validate this demand? Instead, he sees the rise of these cultural reappropriation laws as a way of shoring up nationalist pretentions. His argument seems strong. In other words, at least on the level of political propaganda, the purpose of these new laws was not to maintain and preserve ancient artifacts, but rather a proxy for a relatively new country to build a sense of cultural and national identity. Much the same thing happened to the young Turkey while trying to survive the birth pangs of early Ataturkism and subsequent westernization.
The claim to national identity is also a common one, and one that Cuno rejects with equal fervor. We are so used to the argument that this object or that belongs here or there because of the important part it plays in making a people who they are.
However, these objects are often so removed in historical time that the number of things these artists shared with the supporters of cultural appropriation shared is vanishingly small. Look at contemporary Egyptians. They share neither a common language, a body of customs, a religion, or law with ancient Egyptians, yet we are still urged to believe that one is an integral part of the identity of the other — presumably because of geographical proximity.
That dynamic thing we call culture has worked over dozens of centuries to produce these widely divergent changes. The claims of contemporary Egyptians on the cultural artifacts of ancient Egypt seem tenuous at best. One of the only other alternatives would be to potentially let these objects onto the black market, where they would certainly lack the curatorial and historical expertise they would be afforded in a museum.
While Cuno effectively cottons on to an important lesson of the last few centuries — that the modern nation-state will stop at nothing to traduce any obstacle that gets in the way of imparting its influence - he does go out of his way to paint many of these states as heterogeneous and uniform in their power, which is misleading at best.
Not all nascent nations practiced nationalism, either on an ideological or pragmatic level, with equal vim and vigor. Whatever your opinion on the issues, provided you had one prior to exposure to this book, it will make you re-think how art, identity, cultural appropriation, and museum-building are all intimately connected. It does a wonderful job at raising intelligent questions about how these concepts are linked. I never want to see or hear about this book ever again thanks.
View 1 comment. Jan 23, Chris rated it it was amazing Shelves: museum-theory , art-crime-cultural-heritage , lis , policy. I'm not clear why so many people seem to have found it difficult to read I found it straightforward, if a tad repetitive at times and highly recommend it as an introduction to the subject.
Jan 02, Bohdana rated it liked it Shelves: museology , nonfiction , history , art-history. The book discusses the topic of retentionist cultural property policies and why they are a bad idea because of nationalism, instead the book argues for partage.
I don't entirely agree on some of the point though. The book discusses politics, history, law, and sociology. The book examined the case of Turkey and China to explain this point further. The book emphasizes exchanges between cultures throughout history.
Some critiques and comments: The argument seems to hinge on encyclopedia museums' abi The book discusses the topic of retentionist cultural property policies and why they are a bad idea because of nationalism, instead the book argues for partage. Some critiques and comments: The argument seems to hinge on encyclopedia museums' ability to teach.
The one thing the book didn't mention in that aspect was why the original and not a reproduction is required. I know the answer is because it's more useful for research purposes- Tiffany Jenkins mentioned it in Keeping Their Marbles: How the Treasures of the Past Ended Up in Museums - And Why They Should Stay There , but Cuno didn't discuss it, though it seemed like it was mildly implied, so I'm not going to argue against something he didn't write as an argument.
He discussed how he became interested in cultural artifacts but the issue is, why does it matter if it's a real or fake artifact? The outcome would be the same: awe and a spark of interest.
Also, he mentioned transportation but at the same time he didn't really discuss the issues that arise when transporting fragile artifacts.
Compared to Jenkins' book , I think she provides a more up-to-date look on the same view of the topic than this book from Still, he provides good points on understanding how it looks from a legal and political POV. I just disagree on what that means though. Partage sounds like a compromise but the issue comes when thinking about what that means locally. Yes, it can increase nationalism, but they are the ones who would more immediate community that are the inheritors think: 'next of kin' when someone dies.
Sure, tell the world they are dead, but maybe let the next of kin know first. Politics is involved either way, those countries that hold the artifacts still benefit from them whether it be one country or another.
In cases of war, that may require alternative accommodations for the artifacts. The book also discussed imaged communities and discusses nationalism as a more recent development. He also discussed how artifacts were intended to last "'forever' but not for a particular unknown and unknowable modern nation-state" p.
I'm not sure if he's arguing from the original intention or something Jenkins also tried this argument in how the people expected that upon victory artifacts will be looted.
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