Fundamental Disrespect
Doublethink
Admin, 8th Day Host
How the everliving fuck did anyone think it was in any way ok to auction the stolen remains and grave goods of the actual Buddha !
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce9299nln2ko
Why did Sotheby's ever even agree to do this !
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce9299nln2ko
Why did Sotheby's ever even agree to do this !
Comments
Not that that makes it any the less disrespectful, and it's no wonder that Buddhist communities worldwide are offended.
Buddhists and the Indian government have asked that they be considered as corporeal remains - perhaps because they were originally mixed with the Buddha’s cremated remains.
Ah - I see. Thanks for the clarification. A fair point, I think.
They certainly should not be knowingly complicit, of course.
The auction house should totally not have accepted this and so they are culpable. Like Ebay refuses to sell Nazi memorabilia. And they are not exactly the beacons of decency. And an old and respected house like Sotherbys should have known this. Yes, they have done this before - all of the major houses have dealt in looted artifacts at some time. Because they make money.
But the original seller should also be named. They are significantly culpable, and should have to explain how they acquired such items, and why they were not restored to the proper authorities immediately.
The whole trade in sacred antiquities is a disgrace, and I know the UK has played a major part in this. I can only imagine the uproar if, say, the mace from the House of Commons was to disappear and then be on sale in Africa. Where some of the material undoubtedly came from.
I am reminded of a Discovery Channel episode about Nazi Looted Art. It is so common it isn't seen as a problem. The show had a scene with an antiquities dealer in Europe whose shop had a prominent menorah displayed for sale.
There are several organisations, ranging from Jewish groups to commissions set up by museums, in most nations who are dedicated to locating art works and other items looted by Nazis or sold under unfavourable circumstances during the Nazi era (from 1933 a lot of Jews in Germany sold art works at below market value either because they were seeking cash to leave the country or later were being forced from home to ghettos and couldn't take the art with them), and to identify the heirs of the original owners so they can be returned. Any art that comes up for sale where there are questions about provenance during the Nazi period is immediately flagged by these organisations, and I can't see how such sales can happen without a lot of additional considerations.
Of course, once art has been restored to the heirs of the original owners there's no problem with them selling it on if they wish. With estimates of Nazi era looting affecting something like 20% of art works in Europe then items which have been restored to original owners or their heirs coming onto the market, with the provenance to show that it had been stolen and restored, would be very common.
Then there is the question of clients who come to dealers only to see their art claimed by someone else getting irate. It's bad for business.
I got the impression that this may be an ongoing process.
In 1976 a UK programme aired on NZ TV entitled The Black Expedition to the Heart of Britain. It made a huge impact on me.
There was a group of people from different countries in Africa sailing up the Thames, commenting on the strange and possibly backward ways of the local people. They met a member of the local Hippy Tribe, commented that the Morris dancing was quite complicated and advanced - so it must originate somewhere in Africa and have been brought to Britain, then they renamed Mt Snowden, Mt Kenyatta. At the time I thought "what right do they have to do that" then it dawned on me....
I saw the parallels to what had been done by explorers and early settlers in Aotearoa/NZ where Mt Taranaki had been renamed Mt Egmont and a track had been named after an enemy of the local people causing them considerable distress - (both of these have now been reversed), but not without a lot of work from the local Iwi.
If the news media treat it as a one-off then it becomes the center of attention. If it's a whole collection of things stolen over time, it doesn't have the shine.
One thing they've done is to really go to town on identifying stolen artworks. In most of the cases they have been stolen from Jews, of course. So the paintings have little annotations which say something like "we've looked into this and it probably wasn't stolen" or "we've looked into this and are not sure" or "we've looked into this and it is stolen for sure". A very small number of the artworks have been returned.
But perhaps more messed up even than the fact that they've done extensive hand-wringing to finally decide that there is bugger all they can do about it is how the museum was even established.
Most of the stuff in the main art museum came from things bought by an industrialist who made money selling arms in ww2. To both sides.
It truly made me feel sick
That us different to selling items for the highest price (i.e. probably into private collections - which are very heavily filled with stolen items, of course). And some of these people - historically - have given their collections to the state for the foundation of a museum.
I was at a museum in Holland that was showing ethnographic items. Of course, it is hard to return items to the Incas. But also, they were all being shown for education purposes, with respect for the origins and the spiritual role they played.
I remember going to Penrhyn Castle in 2020 and they'd rather gone overboard with this while virtually ignoring the terrible conditions of the Welsh slate workers who'd also greatly contributed to the family's fortunes. No doubt they've got a more balanced view on this now.
Paid â bod yn rhy sicr am hynny - don't be too sure about that.
Right, but the corrective is not that coverage of slavery should be reduced in order to cover the fate of the Welsh slate workers (who whatever their plight were rarely literally thrown overboard), but that they should cover both things where appropriate.
The Incas have living descendants: the Quechua people. Cusco, Peru, once the capital of the Inca Empire, still exists; the city center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
But also, I acknowledge it was in Holland which has been a conqueror across the world, and is still one of the centres of tax evasion schemes. So they are not blameless.
If I was of European Jewish heritage, it is highly likely that stuff that murderous bastards took from my relatives is now in a museum. If I was the descendent of someone caught up in this or other genocides, it is entirely possible that their remains are on display in a museum.
Would it make me feel better to know that the people who caused the genocide and who stole my cultural items are carefully preserving them in a museum in Oxford or London or Zurich or New York? That they were twiddling thumbs trying to decide whether I was worthy enough to receive the bones of my own murdered relatives whilst other people gawp at them behind glass?
The only circumstance where I might think that was acceptable was where I'd been part of the discussion about (for example) a memorial to a genocide, to the destruction of a culture, to the ravages of colonialism.
And even then I surely reserve the right to go to the Pitt-Rivers to look in one of their cabinets and say "that's my great-grandfather, he's been on display for 50 years and I want him back now to properly honour him in death".
(The Pitt-Rivers is a particularly ghastly ethnological museum near me in Oxford)
Indeed so. Both are vital to the history of the place, as the NT website tells us: "Richard Pennant (1737–1808), MP for Liverpool, and the first Baron Penrhyn, established Penrhyn Castle as the family seat. He campaigned against the abolition of slavery and invested the Jamaican profits in his Caernarfonshire agricultural estates and the Penrhyn Slate Quarry. He built Port Penrhyn, as well as roads, railways, schools, hotels, workers’ houses, churches and farms". In other words, the ignoble foundation of the slate quarries was slavery in Jamaica.
Please accept my apologies for polluting your mind with this thought on a Monday morning.
Each person of course can feel what they feel about these things. For me, I feel sick. And for me being in a museum on a quiet street in Zurich is something of a moral imperative. In the sense that we have to bear witness to the things our eyes see and our minds acknowledge.
Even when in the case of the UCL museum, the objects were collected as part of a disgusting and dehumanising philosophy of eugenics which overtook the intellectual life of that university for a while.
For me, these places need to be closed. Whilst they're still open, I'm going to go, witness and experience the feelings of disgust.
On a related topic, there are the Benin bronzes, some of which the Dutch now say they will return: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly8397e7gno.
Thank you for being kind.
I was in a museum once (I think it was in the UK but I'm not sure) where there was an A4 page on the wall about the Benin bronzes (which are a large looted collection of royal treasures, stolen by the British and split up and sent to museums around Europe).
Literally adjacent to the note was a cabinet containing some of the Benin bronzes.
So.. you are acknowledging that these things were looted and stolen but still proudly have them on display. That's disgusting.
There's that Aztec codex in the Liverpool museum. One of only four that remain anywhere in the world.
Not only has the culture been wiped out by white colonialsm, the artefacts are now in a museum far away from the context that the culture developed.
See also that ghost shirt from Native Americans (which I'm almost sure is in the Pitt-Rivers museum). The tribe was entirely wiped out.
I disagree. For one thing - it allows said rich white people to forget about their genocide - deny it ever happened, maintain that the ills of empire are exaggerated etc etc. Thereby making such behaviour more likely to be repeated. One narrative that enables colonisation and genocide is the belief that one’s own culture is essentially superior - preserving and presenting evidence of the art and achievement of lost cultures undermines that argument too.
There's very rarely space for context in a British museum. As others have said above, places like the Pitt-River and the UCL museum are rooms filled with random tat. Over there is a canoe, here's a colourful shirt, there's a totem pole, here's the bones of a witchdoctor, there's the house of a Polynesian family.
All of which mean next to nothing to the average Brit even though they're incredibly precious to the culture that lost them. And they're entitled to feel incredibly angry about it.
The treasures are contextualised by experts. They've spent a whole lot of money and effort in dealing with their past and still it feels uncomfortable and wrong.
But at least they're publicly sitting with the reality of being in the wrong and feeling uncomfortable about it.
I doubt being blown off the edge of a slate quarry by dodgy explosives or faulty fuses that you’re being made to use by bosses looking to save a quid or two is any less terrible an experience.
Yeah no, I don't think the life of a chattel slave was comparable to that of an early industrial worker.
If you know you shouldn't have things, why not give them to the people who should have them?
The Aztecs have living descendents. They still speak the language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nahuas
The Ghost Dance religion was founded and developed in the late 19th century, in the midst of the genocide of the Native American peoples. A number of tribes adopted it, and those tribes still exist, despite the manifold grievous losses they suffered. Some people still practice the ghost dance ceremonies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Dance
You keep saying "wiped out" as if absolutely no one remains who bears the historic pain of colonialism, and it's just not true.
Should the artifacts of previous cultures in the British isles which are now long gone be hidden away?
The long and involved negotiations are often caused by conflicting claims to ownership from distant descendents.
Where that's the case, the items shouldn't just be left in glass boxes for other people to gawp at whilst these are straightened out.
There are a lot of public exhibits in the UK which are objectively disgusting. For example in the Ossuary beneath a church in Hythe there's a massive pile of human bones which are some point were rearranged into more interesting shapes. There are medical museums which contain human body parts.
Of course this is all part of a history of death and memory which is (surprisingly, in some ways) incredibly un-squeamish about human bones.
For me, I think, there's something particularly disgusting about the public display of human bodies when the person who died and their families never expected them to be on display hundreds or thousands of years later. For me that's never acceptable.
It's on a whole other level when those body parts are from people in completely different parts of the world.
The ancient Egyptians had beliefs about death and preservation of bodies. They didn't expect that to include being stared at by sticky fingered children in South Kensington.
Squeamishness about body parts is your personal thing, not a universal feeling. Disgust is not objective. Plenty of people have no problem with the Paris catacombs - there are tours.
I think displays of the bodies of people from cultures where this is disrespectful are unethical. I personally don't care what happens to my body once I'm done with it. If my bones end up organized into a sculpture or displayed in a medical school or piled up willy-nilly in a dump, I really don't care.