…the fate of the Welsh slate workers (who whatever their plight were rarely literally thrown overboard)
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.
There were clearly differences in legal status and the notional ability to make choices, but I wouldn't be surprised if the life expectancy of an enslaved person on a plantation in Mississippi was higher than a slum dweller in Liverpool c1820.
The boundary between slavery and free person is grey. It is particularly grey in places where your housing depends on your employment. In many of those slate mines the owner provided the housing.
…the fate of the Welsh slate workers (who whatever their plight were rarely literally thrown overboard)
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.
There were clearly differences in legal status and the notional ability to make choices, but I wouldn't be surprised if the life expectancy of an enslaved person on a plantation in Mississippi was higher than a slum dweller in Liverpool c1820.
Average lifetime at birth for a slave born in the Deep South during that period was 22. Average working life of a slave landed in the Caribbean during the period we are talking about - which is earlier - is 7 years.
The boundary between slavery and free person is grey. It is particularly grey in places where your housing depends on your employment. In many of those slate mines the owner provided the housing.
There's the additional twist of spending your entire life as a possession of someone else, to dispose of as they pleased.
…the fate of the Welsh slate workers (who whatever their plight were rarely literally thrown overboard)
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.
There were clearly differences in legal status and the notional ability to make choices, but I wouldn't be surprised if the life expectancy of an enslaved person on a plantation in Mississippi was higher than a slum dweller in Liverpool c1820.
Average lifetime at birth for a slave born in the Deep South during that period was 22.
It was quoted as 19 in Liverpool when I was doing my GCSEs, though it looks now like the quality of data is somewhat questionable.
Does it matter if there are people in whose ancestors the cultures represented in Britain? I assume there are lots of people in Britain from West Africa. It seems to me a good thing that their heritage is shown to be capable of sophisticated artistic achievement beyond the stereotypes of tribal art.
That of course requires artifacts to be displayed as sophisticated achievements in the way that one would display the European artifacts to which one is comparing them.
I think it's a bit odd to talk as if the European colonial empires were the only empires in the history of the world to appropriate other cultural artifacts. (Of course, some empires just destroyed everything they got their hands on.)
If a culture has the sophistication to make artworks it's probably achieved that by conquering its neighbours. All three examples in the recent thread, Aztecs, Egyptians, and Benin were military empires. Taking the Benin bronzes as examples, among the Benin bronzes are depictions of soldiers with muskets. Those muskets would have been acquired from Europeans in exchange for people enslaved while Benin was expanding its territory and used to facilitate further expansion and enslavement.
It happens that the European powers and powers of European heritage were dominant when invading other countries stopped paying for itself because armies became too expensive and intact infrastructure became more economically important. One has to have some sort of statute of limitations.
I suppose it's easy to say that everything stays where it was when the wheel stopped when one's from the society that was dominant when the wheel stopped.
We were biggest and nastier in battle than they were therefore we are legitimately keeping the spoils of war hundreds of years ago in glass cabinets thousands of miles away?
This reminds me of a Professor I was talking to last year about the transatlantic slave trade and the contributions to it of British Christians who interrupted saying that the main people selling slaves out of Senegal were Muslim.
Also, whilst we are talking about slavery let's stop these bogus comparisons. Life was bad for British working people in the early part of the industrial revolution, but it wasn't anything close to being a slave caught up in the transatlantic slave trade.
Anybody else been on an Alice Proctor tour (https://www.theexhibitionist.org/) - I don't think she is doing them any more (Covid stopped them).
But she does have "Display it like you stole it" badges, and talks a lot about how the presentation in museums (and galleries - I did the National Portrait Gallery with her) give a message by what and how they display. And the pictures are themselves often an attempt at presenting people as they saw themselves, not as they were.
And, of course, historically, this has then been the perception of them taken by others. I mean, imagine, for example, if the only images of Trump were ones he had expressly commissioned. The only words were ones he had chosen to have permanently recorded. We would have a very different perspective on him.
(Obviously not the only one, just a prime example)
Working class children were bought from orphanages in Manchester by cotton mill owners during the eighteenth century and put to work in factories for 15 hours a day to earn their keep with no wages. Many of them died, either killed by the machinery or from communicable diseases caught in the dormitories. Accepting the fact that British working class people were exploited by the middle and upper classes does not mean denying other facts about the exploitation of Africans and the destruction caused by empire. Rich people have always exploited the poor, by whatever means possible.
These people are my ancestors. Before the cotton mills they were exploited on the land; my great great great grandfather was transported to Australia to do hard labour for swearing an oath of secrecy (he formed a trade union of farm labourers because they were starving due to poor wages but that wasn’t illegal so the land owner found something else to prosecute him over).
Denying the historic exploitation of working class people is common among many middle class people. I am unsure if it is snobbery towards the uneducated (which I have experienced first hand) or guilt from the role their ancestors played in the exploitation.
Let me be brutally honest here. The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. We don't see what was destroyed. The forces of destruction are still in operation in the world example 1 and example 2. Museums are not saints, private collectors are not saints, there is conquers gaze in all this. However, when in situations of war and conquest is it right to intervene to preserve cultural artefacts and when is it right to return them? Or do we allow for the complete loss of the culture in conquest?
The conditions of working class people was terrible. The conditions of slaves was terrible. Slavery was worse.
That doesn't mean the stories of exploitation by the wealthy is an unworthy story. It just means that the latter story isn't somehow more worthy by equating and comparing their struggle with slavery.
After the Chartist movement was violently put down by the state, a handful of the leaders were sentenced to execution. In the end they were sent to Australia instead. The conditions were bad, they were badly treated.
However it wasn't slavery. They served their sentence, and afterwards Frost returned to England and Williams stayed in Australia and built a successful life.
Women generally suffered more in the Female Factories.
Let me be brutally honest here. The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. We don't see what was destroyed. The forces of destruction are still in operation in the world example 1 and example 2. Museums are not saints, private collectors are not saints, there is conquers gaze in all this. However, when in situations of war and conquest is it right to intervene to preserve cultural artefacts and when is it right to return them? Or do we allow for the complete loss of the culture in conquest?
"Our forebears conquered your forebears. You will never reclaim more than a remnant of the culture that was purposefully destroyed. Now be grateful our forebears saved some of your stuff. No, you can't have it. We stole it fair and square."
Let me be brutally honest here. The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. We don't see what was destroyed. The forces of destruction are still in operation in the world example 1 and example 2. Museums are not saints, private collectors are not saints, there is conquers gaze in all this. However, when in situations of war and conquest is it right to intervene to preserve cultural artefacts and when is it right to return them? Or do we allow for the complete loss of the culture in conquest?
"Our forebears conquered your forebears. You will never reclaim more than a remnant of the culture that was purposefully destroyed. Now be grateful our forebears saved some of your stuff. No, you can't have it. We stole it fair and square."
Reminds me of the Princess Bride's "You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen."
Let me be brutally honest here. The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. We don't see what was destroyed. The forces of destruction are still in operation in the world example 1 and example 2. Museums are not saints, private collectors are not saints, there is conquers gaze in all this. However, when in situations of war and conquest is it right to intervene to preserve cultural artefacts and when is it right to return them? Or do we allow for the complete loss of the culture in conquest?
I'd quietly suggest that if the items were stolen from victims of the Holocaust in your "brutally honest" assessment above, nobody would agree with you. The Nazis valued pretty things and many of them ended up in museums.
Collections in western museums are the opposite of "saints", whatever those words actually mean. The items have frequently been obtained by violence, threat of violence, extortion, cheating, piracy and so on.
Sorry I got sidetracked for a while there thinking about language and why we might describe organisations and inanimate objects as saintly.
Also it strikes me that there is a level of "revisionist history" occurring when a western person claims that the British Museum is the rightful place for a cultural item from thousands of miles away on the basis that it wouldn't have been preserved otherwise.
Cultures commonly preserve things that matter to them. Even when a culture disappears, non-westerners have been preserving artifacts for thousands of years.
I don't really accept that we can know how many items in Western museums would otherwise not have been preserved at all. I suspect it would only be everyday and essentially disposable items which would have been lost.
But those kinds of things are not typically valued in British museums.
Let me be brutally honest here. The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. We don't see what was destroyed. The forces of destruction are still in operation in the world example 1 and example 2. Museums are not saints, private collectors are not saints, there is conquers gaze in all this. However, when in situations of war and conquest is it right to intervene to preserve cultural artefacts and when is it right to return them? Or do we allow for the complete loss of the culture in conquest?
I agree with a lot of this. But I did argue earlier that we should return artifacts to their original cultures, and work with them to preserve and display them. And protect them.
I mean, given the far right attitude to culture, I don't see anything being safe in any countries where they have influence (US and UK included). I don't think we can claim to be protecting anything any more.
Let me be brutally honest here. The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. We don't see what was destroyed. The forces of destruction are still in operation in the world example 1 and example 2. Museums are not saints, private collectors are not saints, there is conquers gaze in all this. However, when in situations of war and conquest is it right to intervene to preserve cultural artefacts and when is it right to return them? Or do we allow for the complete loss of the culture in conquest?
I'd quietly suggest that if the items were stolen from victims of the Holocaust in your "brutally honest" assessment above, nobody would agree with you. The Nazis valued pretty things and many of them ended up in museums.
Collections in western museums are the opposite of "saints", whatever those words actually mean. The items have frequently been obtained by violence, threat of violence, extortion, cheating, piracy and so on.
Sorry I got sidetracked for a while there thinking about language and why we might describe organisations and inanimate objects as saintly.
Since you bring up the Holocaust... There are all sorts of things, up to and including entire buildings/houses/factories, that were seized from victims of the Holocaust by the Nazis, appropriated by the postwar communist regimes, and have still not been returned. It's not all about the obviously stolen art that gets in the papers.
It's only in the last decade or so that many of the actual surviving owners of said property stopped being around to say 'er, that's mine, please give it back' (only to be commonly refused) - never mind the descendants.
We (the ‘West’ and the eastern bloc) seem to have been demonstrably unable to get it right when there were living deprived direct owners such as mid 20th century Jews*, it’s not a massive surprise it has been no better when ownership is operating at a cultural level further removed.
*the obstructionism of the former East went on long after the wall came down. But when it did there were, for example, exiled Czech Jews in their seventies who tentatively asked ‘can I have my house back?’ Only to be rebuffed by the Czech government.
We (the ‘West’ and the eastern bloc) seem to have been demonstrably unable to get it right when there were living deprived direct owners such as mid 20th century Jews*
As of the mid-century there were a number of peoples directly affected by imperial era dispossession and even genocide. I suspect there was a reluctance to draw a general principle and an impetus to keep it to one set of victims and belligerent(s) (often backed by arguing that colonial era governments were separate legal entities).
So it was largely seen as a German problem (and occasionally Austrian - it occurred to me earlier that I have a number of friends and family who had similar stories to @Baptist Trainfan and have as a result been eligible for Austrian citizenship).
We (the ‘West’ and the eastern bloc) seem to have been demonstrably unable to get it right when there were living deprived direct owners such as mid 20th century Jews*, it’s not a massive surprise it has been no better when ownership is operating at a cultural level further removed.
As a more general question, how do things like property rights interact with wars? A war is, from one point of view, what happens when one country decides to invade another country and take their stuff by force. Lots of stuff gets destroyed in wars, and perhaps your government will pay for the damage (up to a point) if your stuff gets blown up in a war. A bunch of other stuff gets stolen, either by individual invading soldiers, or by official action of the invading country.
Let me be brutally honest here. The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. We don't see what was destroyed. The forces of destruction are still in operation in the world example 1 and example 2. Museums are not saints, private collectors are not saints, there is conquers gaze in all this. However, when in situations of war and conquest is it right to intervene to preserve cultural artefacts and when is it right to return them? Or do we allow for the complete loss of the culture in conquest?
This part:
"The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. "
For us this is stealing and not better than owning stolen goods. Things that are our's are not your's. People think they are doing a good deed by preserving things. They are not. Things like medicine bundles, clothes, tools, hair are not your's and not your museums to keep. Original owners own things and they might want to destroy them for good reason that the stealers don't understand. A medicine bundle is a gift of the Creator and are signs from what we call the Holy Spirit. Some people pass them down, and some return them to the land and water at death of the keeper. It is not desecration to destroy. None of anyones business. Don't judge us.
"But the museum, in Exeter, Devon, is still refusing to hand them back and claim its proposed new home is not adequately equipped to look after them."
This is none of this Exeter, Devon's business. They are not the parents of these things. It is disgusting. It is expected of countries who think everything that is not breathing is dead and that they have nothing to learn. Starving people gave things to whites to get money for food. Forced. Maybe they also felt oppressed by the soldiers and guns and had to give it. This is not right.
Let me be brutally honest here. The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. We don't see what was destroyed. The forces of destruction are still in operation in the world example 1 and example 2. Museums are not saints, private collectors are not saints, there is conquers gaze in all this. However, when in situations of war and conquest is it right to intervene to preserve cultural artefacts and when is it right to return them? Or do we allow for the complete loss of the culture in conquest?
This part:
"The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. "
For us this is stealing and not better than owning stolen goods. Things that are our's are not your's.
‘If our ancestors were good enough to make those objects, we are good enough to look after them,’ the Zimbabwean curator Raphael Chikukwa has argued. ‘You can’t steal my bicycle and say you’ll only return it when I have built a garage.’
It also jogged my memory about an episode that @betjemaniac's post brought up, but which I hadn't time to track down till now:
Of note is that part of the argument put in that case was that essentially that of a slippery slope (while hiding behind legalities):
Will Henderson, counsel for the attorney, said: "There are plainly other objects to which a moral claim might be made, of which the Elgin marbles may be the prime example."
He told the judge, Vice-Chancellor Sir Andrew Morritt, that the decision could affect other works, whether they were looted during the Holocaust or whether they were acquired in "unseemly circumstances at any other time".
"What if the moral claim were very different. If it was a cultural claim, rather than a proprietorial claim ... the door would be open," he said.
Let me be brutally honest here. The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. We don't see what was destroyed. The forces of destruction are still in operation in the world example 1 and example 2. Museums are not saints, private collectors are not saints, there is conquers gaze in all this. However, when in situations of war and conquest is it right to intervene to preserve cultural artefacts and when is it right to return them? Or do we allow for the complete loss of the culture in conquest?
This part:
"The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. "
For us this is stealing and not better than owning stolen goods. Things that are our's are not your's. People think they are doing a good deed by preserving things. They are not. Things like medicine bundles, clothes, tools, hair are not your's and not your museums to keep. Original owners own things and they might want to destroy them for good reason that the stealers don't understand. A medicine bundle is a gift of the Creator and are signs from what we call the Holy Spirit. Some people pass them down, and some return them to the land and water at death of the keeper. It is not desecration to destroy. None of anyones business. Don't judge us.
But that is not a fair analogy
If you take a bike from a burning bike store and mean it is still a working bike where otherwise it would have been destroyed, have you stolen it?
Let me be brutally honest here. The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. We don't see what was destroyed. The forces of destruction are still in operation in the world example 1 and example 2. Museums are not saints, private collectors are not saints, there is conquers gaze in all this. However, when in situations of war and conquest is it right to intervene to preserve cultural artefacts and when is it right to return them? Or do we allow for the complete loss of the culture in conquest?
This part:
"The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. "
For us this is stealing and not better than owning stolen goods. Things that are our's are not your's. People think they are doing a good deed by preserving things. They are not. Things like medicine bundles, clothes, tools, hair are not your's and not your museums to keep. Original owners own things and they might want to destroy them for good reason that the stealers don't understand. A medicine bundle is a gift of the Creator and are signs from what we call the Holy Spirit. Some people pass them down, and some return them to the land and water at death of the keeper. It is not desecration to destroy. None of anyones business. Don't judge us.
But that is not a fair analogy
If you take a bike from a burning bike store and mean it is still a working bike where otherwise it would have been destroyed, have you stolen it?
Let's change the analogy.
Your mother's ashes are in a vase on the mantlepiece. It's a prized possession, each time you pass you give it a polish and think of your mother.
Scenario 1: there's a terrible fire and the vase is lost along with your mother's ashes
Scenario 2: there's a terrible fire but unbeknown to you until decades later, there was a thief who broke in just before the fire and liked the vase so stole it. Decades later you stare in astonishment seeing it in a museum in another country.
According to your logic, I should be pleased that my mother's ashes have been preserved. And you seem a bit confused that anyone would prefer that the ashes and the vase were lost in the terrible fire.
I'm sorry if that sounds a bit disrespectful, but I don't think talking about stealing bicycles really covers the offense of taking culturally important items and sticking them in a foreign museum.
Let me be brutally honest here. The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. We don't see what was destroyed. The forces of destruction are still in operation in the world example 1 and example 2. Museums are not saints, private collectors are not saints, there is conquers gaze in all this. However, when in situations of war and conquest is it right to intervene to preserve cultural artefacts and when is it right to return them? Or do we allow for the complete loss of the culture in conquest?
This part:
"The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. "
For us this is stealing and not better than owning stolen goods. Things that are our's are not your's. People think they are doing a good deed by preserving things. They are not. Things like medicine bundles, clothes, tools, hair are not your's and not your museums to keep. Original owners own things and they might want to destroy them for good reason that the stealers don't understand. A medicine bundle is a gift of the Creator and are signs from what we call the Holy Spirit. Some people pass them down, and some return them to the land and water at death of the keeper. It is not desecration to destroy. None of anyones business. Don't judge us.
But that is not a fair analogy
If you take a bike from a burning bike store and mean it is still a working bike where otherwise it would have been destroyed, have you stolen it?
The other problem with this analogy is that it's not like the bike store suddenly caught fire autochthonously - the kind of societal chaos that might have led to the item being destroyed is frequently closely connected with encountering another society in imperial mode.
Let me be brutally honest here. The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. We don't see what was destroyed. The forces of destruction are still in operation in the world example 1 and example 2. Museums are not saints, private collectors are not saints, there is conquers gaze in all this. However, when in situations of war and conquest is it right to intervene to preserve cultural artefacts and when is it right to return them? Or do we allow for the complete loss of the culture in conquest?
This part:
"The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. "
For us this is stealing and not better than owning stolen goods. Things that are our's are not your's. People think they are doing a good deed by preserving things. They are not. Things like medicine bundles, clothes, tools, hair are not your's and not your museums to keep. Original owners own things and they might want to destroy them for good reason that the stealers don't understand. A medicine bundle is a gift of the Creator and are signs from what we call the Holy Spirit. Some people pass them down, and some return them to the land and water at death of the keeper. It is not desecration to destroy. None of anyones business. Don't judge us.
But that is not a fair analogy
If you take a bike from a burning bike store and mean it is still a working bike where otherwise it would have been destroyed, have you stolen it?
Let's change the analogy.
Your mother's ashes are in a vase on the mantlepiece. It's a prized possession, each time you pass you give it a polish and think of your mother.
Scenario 1: there's a terrible fire and the vase is lost along with your mother's ashes
Scenario 2: there's a terrible fire but unbeknown to you until decades later, there was a thief who broke in just before the fire and liked the vase so stole it. Decades later you stare in astonishment seeing it in a museum in another country.
According to your logic, I should be pleased that my mother's ashes have been preserved. And you seem a bit confused that anyone would prefer that the ashes and the vase were lost in the terrible fire.
You only have the opportunity to recover your mothers ashes because of the theft.
Think about it.
I am not saying what is done is good. I am just saying in a choice between dying of thirst or drinking mercury tainted water most prefer to drink mercury tainted water.
Let me be brutally honest here. The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. We don't see what was destroyed. The forces of destruction are still in operation in the world example 1 and example 2. Museums are not saints, private collectors are not saints, there is conquers gaze in all this. However, when in situations of war and conquest is it right to intervene to preserve cultural artefacts and when is it right to return them? Or do we allow for the complete loss of the culture in conquest?
This part:
"The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. "
For us this is stealing and not better than owning stolen goods. Things that are our's are not your's. People think they are doing a good deed by preserving things. They are not. Things like medicine bundles, clothes, tools, hair are not your's and not your museums to keep. Original owners own things and they might want to destroy them for good reason that the stealers don't understand. A medicine bundle is a gift of the Creator and are signs from what we call the Holy Spirit. Some people pass them down, and some return them to the land and water at death of the keeper. It is not desecration to destroy. None of anyones business. Don't judge us.
But that is not a fair analogy
If you take a bike from a burning bike store and mean it is still a working bike where otherwise it would have been destroyed, have you stolen it?
Let's change the analogy.
Your mother's ashes are in a vase on the mantlepiece. It's a prized possession, each time you pass you give it a polish and think of your mother.
Scenario 1: there's a terrible fire and the vase is lost along with your mother's ashes
Scenario 2: there's a terrible fire but unbeknown to you until decades later, there was a thief who broke in just before the fire and liked the vase so stole it. Decades later you stare in astonishment seeing it in a museum in another country.
According to your logic, I should be pleased that my mother's ashes have been preserved. And you seem a bit confused that anyone would prefer that the ashes and the vase were lost in the terrible fire.
You only have the opportunity to recover your mothers ashes because of the theft.
So having gone through the trauma of loss the first time, you are forced to revisit it (and in addition being confronted by some kind of bureaucracy which is *absolutely* going to try and prevent you from ever recovering your mother's ashes).
Let me be brutally honest here. The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. We don't see what was destroyed. The forces of destruction are still in operation in the world example 1 and example 2. Museums are not saints, private collectors are not saints, there is conquers gaze in all this. However, when in situations of war and conquest is it right to intervene to preserve cultural artefacts and when is it right to return them? Or do we allow for the complete loss of the culture in conquest?
This part:
"The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. "
For us this is stealing and not better than owning stolen goods. Things that are our's are not your's. People think they are doing a good deed by preserving things. They are not. Things like medicine bundles, clothes, tools, hair are not your's and not your museums to keep. Original owners own things and they might want to destroy them for good reason that the stealers don't understand. A medicine bundle is a gift of the Creator and are signs from what we call the Holy Spirit. Some people pass them down, and some return them to the land and water at death of the keeper. It is not desecration to destroy. None of anyones business. Don't judge us.
But that is not a fair analogy
If you take a bike from a burning bike store and mean it is still a working bike where otherwise it would have been destroyed, have you stolen it?
Let's change the analogy.
Your mother's ashes are in a vase on the mantlepiece. It's a prized possession, each time you pass you give it a polish and think of your mother.
Scenario 1: there's a terrible fire and the vase is lost along with your mother's ashes
Scenario 2: there's a terrible fire but unbeknown to you until decades later, there was a thief who broke in just before the fire and liked the vase so stole it. Decades later you stare in astonishment seeing it in a museum in another country.
According to your logic, I should be pleased that my mother's ashes have been preserved. And you seem a bit confused that anyone would prefer that the ashes and the vase were lost in the terrible fire.
You only have the opportunity to recover your mothers ashes because of the theft.
Think about it.
I am not saying what is done is good. I am just saying in a choice between dying of thirst or drinking mercury tainted water most prefer to drink mercury tainted water.
Why do you think I haven't thought about it?
The question I thought you were asking was about the value of preservation in a museum versus being lost when it was in the hands of the original owner.
It's my mother's ashes. Of course I'd rather lose it than see it out of context in a museum. I want it on my mantlepiece or nowhere.
But your own chance for it to be back on the mantle piece is through the theft. Horrid yes, but true.
The thefts that we're actually talking about took place in contexts of colonization, conquest, and the Shoah. Various Europeans could have just stayed home and not gone pillaging in the first place.
But your own chance for it to be back on the mantle piece is through the theft. Horrid yes, but true.
This makes a bad assumption that the most important thing to the person is the preservation of their mother's ashes. In the case of almost anything personal, I think this is false. I have a number of things that are both personal and precious to me. If the price of preserving them for my future was having a bunch of strangers gawp at them, I would absolutely choose for them to burn up in the house fire.
You don't have to agree with me, and there's probably other stuff I have where I would be glad if you preserved it, and subsequently gave it back. It depends, I think, on how public or private the stuff was. But even if you don't agree with me, I think you'd have to agree that this position was a reasonable one, and that, given that it's my stuff that we're talking about, it's my opinion that is the one that matters.
This thread seems to be turning into a serious discussion. As such it should really go into Epiphanies.
If somebody would like to start a thread there please do.
Comments
There were clearly differences in legal status and the notional ability to make choices, but I wouldn't be surprised if the life expectancy of an enslaved person on a plantation in Mississippi was higher than a slum dweller in Liverpool c1820.
Average lifetime at birth for a slave born in the Deep South during that period was 22. Average working life of a slave landed in the Caribbean during the period we are talking about - which is earlier - is 7 years.
There's the additional twist of spending your entire life as a possession of someone else, to dispose of as they pleased.
It was quoted as 19 in Liverpool when I was doing my GCSEs, though it looks now like the quality of data is somewhat questionable.
That of course requires artifacts to be displayed as sophisticated achievements in the way that one would display the European artifacts to which one is comparing them.
I think it's a bit odd to talk as if the European colonial empires were the only empires in the history of the world to appropriate other cultural artifacts. (Of course, some empires just destroyed everything they got their hands on.)
If a culture has the sophistication to make artworks it's probably achieved that by conquering its neighbours. All three examples in the recent thread, Aztecs, Egyptians, and Benin were military empires. Taking the Benin bronzes as examples, among the Benin bronzes are depictions of soldiers with muskets. Those muskets would have been acquired from Europeans in exchange for people enslaved while Benin was expanding its territory and used to facilitate further expansion and enslavement.
It happens that the European powers and powers of European heritage were dominant when invading other countries stopped paying for itself because armies became too expensive and intact infrastructure became more economically important. One has to have some sort of statute of limitations.
I suppose it's easy to say that everything stays where it was when the wheel stopped when one's from the society that was dominant when the wheel stopped.
This reminds me of a Professor I was talking to last year about the transatlantic slave trade and the contributions to it of British Christians who interrupted saying that the main people selling slaves out of Senegal were Muslim.
But she does have "Display it like you stole it" badges, and talks a lot about how the presentation in museums (and galleries - I did the National Portrait Gallery with her) give a message by what and how they display. And the pictures are themselves often an attempt at presenting people as they saw themselves, not as they were.
And, of course, historically, this has then been the perception of them taken by others. I mean, imagine, for example, if the only images of Trump were ones he had expressly commissioned. The only words were ones he had chosen to have permanently recorded. We would have a very different perspective on him.
(Obviously not the only one, just a prime example)
These people are my ancestors. Before the cotton mills they were exploited on the land; my great great great grandfather was transported to Australia to do hard labour for swearing an oath of secrecy (he formed a trade union of farm labourers because they were starving due to poor wages but that wasn’t illegal so the land owner found something else to prosecute him over).
Denying the historic exploitation of working class people is common among many middle class people. I am unsure if it is snobbery towards the uneducated (which I have experienced first hand) or guilt from the role their ancestors played in the exploitation.
The conditions of working class people was terrible. The conditions of slaves was terrible. Slavery was worse.
That doesn't mean the stories of exploitation by the wealthy is an unworthy story. It just means that the latter story isn't somehow more worthy by equating and comparing their struggle with slavery.
After the Chartist movement was violently put down by the state, a handful of the leaders were sentenced to execution. In the end they were sent to Australia instead. The conditions were bad, they were badly treated.
However it wasn't slavery. They served their sentence, and afterwards Frost returned to England and Williams stayed in Australia and built a successful life.
Women generally suffered more in the Female Factories.
Deportation was indeed a terrible thing.
"Our forebears conquered your forebears. You will never reclaim more than a remnant of the culture that was purposefully destroyed. Now be grateful our forebears saved some of your stuff. No, you can't have it. We stole it fair and square."
Reminds me of the Princess Bride's "You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen."
I'd quietly suggest that if the items were stolen from victims of the Holocaust in your "brutally honest" assessment above, nobody would agree with you. The Nazis valued pretty things and many of them ended up in museums.
Collections in western museums are the opposite of "saints", whatever those words actually mean. The items have frequently been obtained by violence, threat of violence, extortion, cheating, piracy and so on.
Sorry I got sidetracked for a while there thinking about language and why we might describe organisations and inanimate objects as saintly.
Cultures commonly preserve things that matter to them. Even when a culture disappears, non-westerners have been preserving artifacts for thousands of years.
I don't really accept that we can know how many items in Western museums would otherwise not have been preserved at all. I suspect it would only be everyday and essentially disposable items which would have been lost.
But those kinds of things are not typically valued in British museums.
I agree with a lot of this. But I did argue earlier that we should return artifacts to their original cultures, and work with them to preserve and display them. And protect them.
I mean, given the far right attitude to culture, I don't see anything being safe in any countries where they have influence (US and UK included). I don't think we can claim to be protecting anything any more.
Since you bring up the Holocaust... There are all sorts of things, up to and including entire buildings/houses/factories, that were seized from victims of the Holocaust by the Nazis, appropriated by the postwar communist regimes, and have still not been returned. It's not all about the obviously stolen art that gets in the papers.
It's only in the last decade or so that many of the actual surviving owners of said property stopped being around to say 'er, that's mine, please give it back' (only to be commonly refused) - never mind the descendants.
*the obstructionism of the former East went on long after the wall came down. But when it did there were, for example, exiled Czech Jews in their seventies who tentatively asked ‘can I have my house back?’ Only to be rebuffed by the Czech government.
As of the mid-century there were a number of peoples directly affected by imperial era dispossession and even genocide. I suspect there was a reluctance to draw a general principle and an impetus to keep it to one set of victims and belligerent(s) (often backed by arguing that colonial era governments were separate legal entities).
So it was largely seen as a German problem (and occasionally Austrian - it occurred to me earlier that I have a number of friends and family who had similar stories to @Baptist Trainfan and have as a result been eligible for Austrian citizenship).
And Israeli too presumably?
AIUI* I think Germany is anyone of European Jewish descent (regardless of actual connections to Germany)? And Israel is one Jewish grandparent.
*it doesn’t have a bearing on me, but does my children and wife.
As a more general question, how do things like property rights interact with wars? A war is, from one point of view, what happens when one country decides to invade another country and take their stuff by force. Lots of stuff gets destroyed in wars, and perhaps your government will pay for the damage (up to a point) if your stuff gets blown up in a war. A bunch of other stuff gets stolen, either by individual invading soldiers, or by official action of the invading country.
This part:
"The items in museums and private collections probably only still exist because they are in museums and private collections. The options were not between leave unsullied with the original culture or descrate and put in a museum BUT between descrate and put in a museum or descrate and destroy. In other words what survives, often survives because of the process that got it into a museum. "
For us this is stealing and not better than owning stolen goods. Things that are our's are not your's. People think they are doing a good deed by preserving things. They are not. Things like medicine bundles, clothes, tools, hair are not your's and not your museums to keep. Original owners own things and they might want to destroy them for good reason that the stealers don't understand. A medicine bundle is a gift of the Creator and are signs from what we call the Holy Spirit. Some people pass them down, and some return them to the land and water at death of the keeper. It is not desecration to destroy. None of anyones business. Don't judge us.
Here's example:
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/entertainment/arts/fury-as-british-museum-refuses-to-give-back-sacred-artifacts-to-indigenous-canadians-176410/
"But the museum, in Exeter, Devon, is still refusing to hand them back and claim its proposed new home is not adequately equipped to look after them."
This is none of this Exeter, Devon's business. They are not the parents of these things. It is disgusting. It is expected of countries who think everything that is not breathing is dead and that they have nothing to learn. Starving people gave things to whites to get money for food. Forced. Maybe they also felt oppressed by the soldiers and guns and had to give it. This is not right.
As it happens there was a long article in the latest edition of the LRB that covered these issues (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n10/jeremy-harding/paths-to-restitution ), and the preceding part of the post that you responded to was reminiscent of this:
‘If our ancestors were good enough to make those objects, we are good enough to look after them,’ the Zimbabwean curator Raphael Chikukwa has argued. ‘You can’t steal my bicycle and say you’ll only return it when I have built a garage.’
It also jogged my memory about an episode that @betjemaniac's post brought up, but which I hadn't time to track down till now:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/may/25/artsandhumanities.arts
Of note is that part of the argument put in that case was that essentially that of a slippery slope (while hiding behind legalities):
Yes, heaven forfend.
But that is not a fair analogy
If you take a bike from a burning bike store and mean it is still a working bike where otherwise it would have been destroyed, have you stolen it?
Let's change the analogy.
Your mother's ashes are in a vase on the mantlepiece. It's a prized possession, each time you pass you give it a polish and think of your mother.
Scenario 1: there's a terrible fire and the vase is lost along with your mother's ashes
Scenario 2: there's a terrible fire but unbeknown to you until decades later, there was a thief who broke in just before the fire and liked the vase so stole it. Decades later you stare in astonishment seeing it in a museum in another country.
According to your logic, I should be pleased that my mother's ashes have been preserved. And you seem a bit confused that anyone would prefer that the ashes and the vase were lost in the terrible fire.
The other problem with this analogy is that it's not like the bike store suddenly caught fire autochthonously - the kind of societal chaos that might have led to the item being destroyed is frequently closely connected with encountering another society in imperial mode.
If you intentionally took possession of it, knowing it didn't belong to you, how is that not stealing?
You only have the opportunity to recover your mothers ashes because of the theft.
Think about it.
I am not saying what is done is good. I am just saying in a choice between dying of thirst or drinking mercury tainted water most prefer to drink mercury tainted water.
So having gone through the trauma of loss the first time, you are forced to revisit it (and in addition being confronted by some kind of bureaucracy which is *absolutely* going to try and prevent you from ever recovering your mother's ashes).
Why do you think I haven't thought about it?
The question I thought you were asking was about the value of preservation in a museum versus being lost when it was in the hands of the original owner.
It's my mother's ashes. Of course I'd rather lose it than see it out of context in a museum. I want it on my mantlepiece or nowhere.
It's mine, not anyone else's.
The thefts that we're actually talking about took place in contexts of colonization, conquest, and the Shoah. Various Europeans could have just stayed home and not gone pillaging in the first place.
This makes a bad assumption that the most important thing to the person is the preservation of their mother's ashes. In the case of almost anything personal, I think this is false. I have a number of things that are both personal and precious to me. If the price of preserving them for my future was having a bunch of strangers gawp at them, I would absolutely choose for them to burn up in the house fire.
You don't have to agree with me, and there's probably other stuff I have where I would be glad if you preserved it, and subsequently gave it back. It depends, I think, on how public or private the stuff was. But even if you don't agree with me, I think you'd have to agree that this position was a reasonable one, and that, given that it's my stuff that we're talking about, it's my opinion that is the one that matters.
If somebody would like to start a thread there please do.
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