"The Hooker Papers"

The Collectors’ rights lobby have obviously taken previous criticisms of the intellectual bankruptcy of their arguments to heart, so it would appear that now they are searching around for new ones. The latest installment in this entertaining spectacle is the publication on the ACCG website of what promises to be a new series of pieces called “Cultural Property: The Hooker papers”. Some of us have been following the unfolding spectacle of the conspiracy theories by former ACCG president Peter Tompa about the mechanisms of a Rogue Administration in the US conspiring with foreign governments against the interests of US citizens. These readers might therefore view the title with some misgivings, expecting that it might contain spicy revelations about State Department officials and Washington ladies of easy virtue.

Fortunately it turns out to be a bland bolstering of collectors' self-esteem written by Canadian coin collector John Hooker under the heading of: “A series of white papers by John Hooker dealing with the philosophical aspects of cultural heritage, cultural property and the concept of stewardship". John Hooker used to write some interesting stuff, so I read both with interest, though mounting disappointment.

The first of this series published by the ACCG is called Deconstructing Cultural Heritage as it applies to property and quickly turns out to be a rather superficial piece. Surely anything which claims to be “deconstructing” a somewhat complex concept like "cultural heritage" requires an examination and presentation of the literature regarding that concept which goes beyond a citation of a single convention, and one from 1970 (and about cultural property) to boot. It is like discussing Canada’s energy policy on the basis of a single treaty of 1970 concerning coal imports. Furthermore, I suspect the author has skipped the preamble of the Convention and (typically for this milieu) misinterpreted its title and remit. I wonder if the author really has grasped the meaning of the concept of "deconstruction". The text also contains a suspicious number of references to the heritage of Nazi Germany which is customary in this milieu.

On page [3] the author attempts to philosophise about the 'nature of history', but apparently does not know enough about this and its literature to penetrate the problem very deeply, but this does not seem bother him, the whole point of it is to lead to the statement "if the objects of the past belong to the people[,] then should any of them not belong to any person?". Predictably, Mr Hooker's answer to the question he poses himself is a foregone conclusion. He reckons there are two "aspects to culture" (just two? Hmm), and the second, an 'individual' one, is impossible to define exactly. Well, again it is a shame that Hooker betrays no inkling of the vast literature in a number of the human sciences (including historiography) connected with identity (and indeed the role of memory in that) which do precisely that. Instead of referring to any of that, however, he found a paper in the Internet about something called "cultural frames" by a Spanish author. This relates to concepts that have bneen around since at least the 1970s, but in the spin put on it by Hooker is nothing more or less than another name for an aspect of the identity of collectors I have previously discussed on this blog a number of times (such as here). The value of this online paper for Hooker is that "the wonderful thing about the cultural frames approach as discussed by Marti is that it frees us from having to agree, in principle, with nationalistic hype".

Wonderful. The problem is that the UNESCO convention which Hooker's paper critiques is about the means of prohibiting the illicit transfer of ownership of cultural property. Hooker in this paper is attacking the basis of the right of (any) groups to be able to define an activity involving cultural property (or is that "heritage"?) as in any way illicit. This is not "philosophy", it is anarchy in the strict sense of the word. Is Hooker saying that Marti's "cultural frames" gives the culture criminal a carte blanche? It seems so. So, what about the cultural frames of those in the source countries that do not want to see their heritage(dug out of their local archaeological sites and ripped off the monuments), their marbles, bronzes, artworks taken off by Canadian collectors to store in their dens as part of their own acquisitive "cultural frames"? Is Mr Hooker's own cultural frame ("student of the global past") superior to that of a Greek, Nigerian or Cambodian whom looters and smugglers are depriving of their ability to appreciate these items? Why? Presumably Mr Hooker would want to tell them that they are all in the "wrong cultural frame", but then are they not free to choose? To choose between their own archaeology (done by people of the same nationality and reported in their language) and public collections, and having their heritage illicitly carted off to foreign and inaccessible to them markets? It's a shame that Hooker does not expand his "frame" more fully to look at the culture of indigenous communities in Canada and the US in the context of collecting and looting of sites which they regard as their ancestral sites for collectables for outsiders to acquire. This seems to me a deliberate omission.

The "property" of the second part of the title of this paper does not figure much in the text, I presume it means the collector's "property" - which in the case of no-questions-asked collecting could well be stolen property, though of course the whole point of Hookers home-grown philosophising is to "prove" why we should not regard this type of stolen property stolen at all, because its all - he says - about "cultural frames" of individuals. Once again we see the discussion diverted away from conservation issues under the pretence that they are only about the rights of individuals to do their own thing no matter what.

The second “White Paper” promises to be about: Ancient Coin Collecting: Organization, Praxis and Epistemology. Despite the title, it actually contains nothing about the epistemology of “ancient coin collecting” (or how that differs from any other kind of coin collecting, or indeed collecting of anything else). It also contains little on the praxis, surely the basis of any decent collection is documentation? There is no mention of that in Hooker’s account so the praxis is just heaping them up loose on a table in Calgary or somewhere I guess. Surely a paper intended to inform readers of the "praxis and epitemology" of coin collecting would have been helped by a few references to textbooks on the methodology of collecting and numismatics. The text is instead a loose farrago of chatty and personal reflections consisting (despite its title) mainly of numerous references to what “archaeologists” write say and think (and “fail to realize") about something-or-other. The unspoken assumption is that coins (just the "ancient" ones maybe) are in some way different from other types of addressed and non-addressed sources used by the archaeologist (page [7-8], though nowhere is the reasoning behind this discussed. The text is lamentably short on references to where such statements attributed to "some" or "many" archaeologists are made in order to indicate that such statements come from a proper study of the archaeological literature from the English-speaking world (as well as the “source countries”) rather than the author plucking them from thin air. In a few places archaeologists (Hodder, Wylie) are however cited out of context when they support Hooker’s line of thinking. Throughout the "paper", archaeologists are for some reason routinely labelled “nationalist” without any coherent explanation why. Are the police who raided the “Crack House” down the road from Hooker (pp [13-4]) to reduce access to damaging drugs by Canadian citizens “nationalist policemen”? Is the Canadian Council on Animal Care a “nationalist” organization too? More to the point, is Britain's Portable Antiquities Scheme a "nationalist" organization? What nonsense. Am I supposed to be a "nationalist archaeologist"? More revealingly, conservation of the archaeological resource is apparently “a crackpot idea”. (page [6], no references here either). The “way forward” is apparently to leave “collectors who buy from [Canadian?] shops” alone. Hooker is illogical when he contrasts “collectors” with museums, without recognizing (page [3]) that the latter too are collections.

Page 4 contains the most telling flaw. Apparently, according to the Canadian coin-collecting "independent scholar": “archaeologists stress the importance of recording of provenance for three reasons…” but then among those he lists, Hooker totally ignores the most important of them, which is the context of deposition. This is of course the most fundamental of them all, and is behind the central issue that the digging up of archaeological sites and assemblages for collectables irreversibly destroys those sites and assemblages, for ever making impossible their use in gaining a fuller knowledge of the past than can be gained by the "study of objects themselves [...] within the context of similar objects regardless of their site context" (p. [10]). This is an issue which of course Hooker’s paper somehow completely avoids discussing…

In my opinion, most of this text is rather naive and superficial, though I am sure coin collectors will treat it very seriously. This is after all an official ACCG “White Paper”.