Cherishing the Historical Environment: Good or Bad?

well, I was wondering how long it would be before a feature about "abroad" in last week's New York Times (Michael Kimmelman "When Ancient Artifacts Become Political Pawns") would find its way over to the blogs of the "culture club" throwbacks. It just has:

While bloggers steeped in an "archaeology over all" perspective claim that only "looting matters," those cultural property observers with a broader perspective recognize the importance of the political and nationalistic dimensions to the debate about restitution, import restrictions and the like.

writes Mr Tompa. But of course if we are of the conviction that "Looting really does Matter", then repatriation, import restrictions are side issues in the wider one. Why does the antiquities trade and all those who support it not address the core issue rather than fiddling about with the side issues all the time? Because it is easier there to pass the buck and say it's somebody else who is at fault?

Now what exactly is the "importance" of the political and nationalistic dimensions of the debate, features which anyone engaged in actual debate, and anyone at all familiar with the copious academic literature, knows has been accepted as part of the pictures since at least the 1980s? Yes "heritage" is indeed connected to specific groups of people who claim various types of it as their own. That is in its essence. Collectors of ancient dugup coins do the same, they claim them as some part of their own personal ('global') heritage.

Mr Tompa calls it "nationalism" that local people take an interest in the material remains (but also related intangible values) of millennia past of the region in which they live. He seems to see it as an entirely negative phenomenon when it stops collectors getting their hands of assorted "pieces of the past" with which to create a pretend "place on the past" of their own. Mr Kimmelman the author of the article which so tickled Mr Tompa sees nothing incongruous in using decontextualised bits of Roman heritage to create a "new public space" in New York surrounded by faux-Roman architecture on the edge of Central Park.

The same Mr Kimmelman who wrote:

Italy is not like America. Art isn’t reduced here to a litany of obscene auction prices or lamentations over the bursting bubble of shameless excess. It’s a matter of daily life, linking home and history. [...] “Without the culture that connects us to our territory, we lose our identity,” he said. “There may not be many famous artists or famous monuments here, but before anything, Italians feel proud of the culture that comes from their own towns, their own regions.

So this art which gives a region its identity is a good thing or a bad thing for Mr Kimmelman when he is in Italy?

Or what about when he's in Poland ("Poland Searches Its Own Soul")?

To the surprise even of the researchers, many residents said the Jewish history of their district was crucial to their own sense of pride and home. The study found that the monuments, museums and other cultural reminders of the past were essential to sustaining the neighborhood’s collective memory. “History is being rewritten here every day,” as Mr. Bilewicz put it.

The power of place, good or bad? It seems to me Kimmelman is writing approvingly here when he's in Poland. So what changes when the stuff is hoiked away into a western big-green-dollar museum where it can no longer be used to speak of the past to generations lving in the area where these items were made, used and deposited many years ago? Why is it mere "nationalisssm" to say this should not be happening? Why is it "nationalism" that the people of Athens say they'd like the bits of their Parthenon back please?

It seems to me that cherishing and attempting to protect the historic environment in a world of change and erosion of landscape values by commercial interests can only be seen as a positive thing. Not, it seems if you are a collector of portable antiquities or lobbyist on their behalf. They seem hell-bent on trying to misrepresent such concerns as negative phenomena, in total disregard of the public debate that has been going on for the last three decades at least.

Update:
For a far more thoughtful reaction to the Kimmelman NYT piece than Tompa's, see Derek Fincham:
"It's about emotion, not airtight logic and consistent policy."

Also for a piece on archaeology and identity in the united Kingdom, see Madeleine Bunting's comment mentioning the weekend's cringeworthy BNP's Nick Griffin "Questions Time" appearance ("Original thinking: The booming interest in archaeology suggests a new quest for identity in a time of rapid change"). She argues that proper archaeology is a tool to fight the woolly views of the past favoured by real nationalists like Nick Griffin (who does NOT get a link here).