Feeble-Minded Ramblings on "Cultural Justice"

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Not everybody professing to be "interested in preserving the past" is happy about the Italians offering the benefit of their experience in museum design and management of the cultural resource to the Iraqis. Veteran antiquity dealer and moaner Wayne Sayles uses the announcement to ask "Where is Cultural Justice?". He chides that - in his opinion - the Italians are "unable to do the most basic forms of preservation in their own country — where it seems that everything is disintegrating". This seems an unjust criticism from somebody in a country where the Washington Monument in the centre of the capital is now closed because - like Pompeii - it has cracks in the walls. I think every country in the world (including my own) has problems finding the resources (financial and human) enough to conserve and protect everything that needs conserving and protecting - which applies equally to archaeological remains. To say that Italy, one of the world leaders in cultural property conservation is "unable" to conduct "basic conservation" is simply an unjust insult and expression of ignorance.

Conveniently forgetting that the agreement was for the Islamic gallery as well as the Assyrian one, Sayles postulates:

These efforts are reported as Italian assistance to Iraq's national heritage, ironically the present national government in Iraq has no cultural connection whatever with the Assyrian artifacts that are being preserved. Any heritage from that ancient civilization is diffused in the bloodlines of millions of people who inhabit virtually every corner of the earth today. If anything, the Assyrian heritage is global today, just as most cultural heritage is.

As indeed is the Islamic culture in the other gallery, an equal underpinning of the European renaissance as the 'Classical' civilization Sayles and his coiney mates adulate. "Bloodlines" Mr Sayles? One wonders what "Ahnenerbe" this writer understands by the notion "cultural connections". Have I as a fair-haired blue-eyed Brit no "cultural connections" with the Roman remains of my country or the legends of king Arthur because my "bloodline" (as the White supremacists of sites like "Stormfront" would have it) is most likely Teutonic? Am I from the wrong "bloodline" to feel Stonehenge is part of the landscape of the common past of my nation/people? What kind of talk is that? Where's "power of place", "heimat", "local homelands", "places of memory" in any of this antiquitist-fetish nonsense of the collectors?

Iraq has a duty to protect and exploit wisely the archaeological heritage that is buried or curated in and on its territory. Just the same as Mr Sayles' has towards the archaeological remains of the communities of Red Men (and women) that inhabited the land long before the White Man came and tried to exterminate them all. And the place for that is NOT natural history museums along with the stuffed birds, geological curiosities, pinned butterflies and shells. Its part of the world heritage, yes, but also part of the heritage of the land on which the modern state exists. One to be cherished and sustainably managed for common benefit and not squandered for extempore reasons or individual profit. That includes antiquity dealers like Mr Sayles.

Sayles reckons:

The UNESCO construct that led to its 1970 convention and resolution was already antiquated when it was adopted and becomes more and more irrational with each passing day and with each new birth in a world where cultures are homogenized. Yet, emerging governments try desperately to attach themselves, like parasites, to a distant and more stable past. This "nationalist" view is, of course, a feeble attempt to solidify their manifest destiny to rule and history is replete with failed examples.

Wow. the guy actually seems to think that "cultural homogenization' is a good thing. I suppose if you live in a country that presents itself as a cultural "melting pot", stubbornly ignoring the deep (and perhaps deepening) divisions which persist beneath the veneer within that society on racial and ethnic grounds (including between the native population and the immigrants with outside roots). Frankly from a European perspective the prospect is appalling. What creates a culture and national identity is the individual aspects of the past of the territory on which the state now exists as part of the cultural mosaic which is the heritage of humanity. That may be difficult for somebody to comprehend if they come from a society which sees its past as going back to some piece of paper signed by some rebellious gents in funny wigs in July 1776 defining it as not-a-colony.

The enshrined Holy Relic of a New Nation

It is against that background that I find laughable the phrasing about "emerging governments" who "try desperately to attach themselves, like parasites, to a distant and more stable past". Is that not precisely what US collectors of antiquities taken from the soil of the old world are trying to do? Is the attempt to claim the cultural heritage of foreign soil as their "own" by collectors of dugup Classical antiquities nothing more than a "feeble attempt to solidify" their identity as separate from the ancient heritage of the land which they now inhabit?

I'd be interested to know how many collectors of Greek, Roman and other ancient coins, Egyptian scarabs, Mesopotamian seals, chinese arrowheads and all the other stuff of the eBay antiquities market in the United States also collect arrowheads picked up on private land in the fields and creeks of the US itself?

Coming back to the theme of "cultural justice", it would seem from what he writes Missouri antiquities dealer Sayles thinks that it would be if the Italians would refrain from helping other nations look after antiquities in their museums or manage the archaeological resource better. It seems his idea of "cultural justice' would be to allow the stuff to come onto the open market where US collectors can claim the antiquities that take their fancy as bits of "their heritage" to be bought and sold no-questions-asked like potatoes.

The United States government will do everything within its power to make sure that the nationalist interests of both these countries are protected. The rights and interests of our own citizens are irrelevant. We will impose controls on the transfer of anything that might be imagined as "cultural property" under the ridiculous guidelines of UNESCO 1970 and we will disenfranchise natural descendants of a vanished cultural group just because they happen to live in the USA. This, we do in favor of the political ambitions and aspirations of an unrelated nationalist successor state. Where is the cultural justice in that?

Where is the cultural injustice in asking US dealers and collectors to respect the existence of laws governing the manner in which material like this circulates on the international market? Who is doing whom the injustice in the no-questions-asked, could-not-care-less global market in which US dealers and collectors all too willingly participate?