Heritage wars
A historian points out the problems behind today’s claims of cultural ownership over historical artefacts.
by David Lowenthal, Spiked Online
Heritage is in demand. Ever more of the world’s heritage is looted, destroyed, mutilated, shorn of context, hidden from scrutiny, auctioned on eBay. Why? Partly because its virtuous stewards treat nations and tribes as enduring entities with sacred rights to time-honoured legacies.
Heritage is piously declared the legacy of all humanity. But the possessive jealousies of particular claimants pose huge obstacles to our global common inheritance. Confining possession to some while excluding others is the raison d’être of most heritage. Created to generate and protect group interests, it benefits us mainly if withheld from others (1).
Chauvinism underpins heritage rapine. The Rosetta Stone entered the British Museum ‘honourably acquired by the fortune of war’; Napoleon looted all Europe and North Africa to prove France the Roman Empire’s rightful heir; fin-de-siècle Americans threatened to buy up all England. Jingoist rivalry still foments plunder and inhibits global sharing. National and local self-esteem are sacred writ in international protocols. Equating heritage with identity justifies every group’s claim to the bones, the belongings, the riddles, and the refuse of every forebear back into the mists of time. All that stands in the way of everyone’s reunion with all their ancestral things is its utter impossibility.
It is impossible because it flies in the face of historical reality. There are no well-attested, long-enduring, pure, unchanged social or cultural entities. Every people are hybrid, every legacy multiple, every society heterogeneous, every tradition as much recent as ancient. All cultures are compages stemming from manifold antecedents. The farther back in time the more mixed is every ancestry. Multiple entitlements vitiate demands based on prior existence, occupance, use and discovery.
In Europe, each ethnic group ardently claims a realm defined by ancient settlements or kingdoms, no matter who lives there now. But this is willful fancy, as I argued in my book, Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History:
‘Congruence between early medieval and contemporary ‘peoples’ is a myth…. The history of European peoples…is not the story of a primordial moment but of a continuous process,…a history of constant change, of radical discontinuities…. Franks “born with the baptism of Clovis” are not the Franks of Charlemagne or those of the French people [of] Jean Le Pen. The Serbs…in the decaying remnants of the Avar Empire were not the people defeated at the battle of Kosovo in 1389, and neither were they the Serbs called to national aggrandizement by Slobodan Milosevic.’ (2)
Indigenes redefine themselves like European essentialists – we are the same people we have always been, our values unchanged since time immemorial.. Australian Aborigines assert continuity with prehistoric cave painters: ‘The same communities that made rock art are making the art we see today.’ (3) Modern Hopis and Navajos parade as hoary traditionalists, rightful stewards by ancestral occupance. Indeed, they feel forced to feign such links. ‘We have to learn to be Indian again. First, the whites came and stripped us. Then, they come again and “find” us. Now, we are paid to behave the way we did when they tried to get rid of us.’ (4) Conveniently forgotten are the European incursions, cultural innovations, sexual mixing, and tourist commerce that transformed Southwestern tribes.
Mainstream stewards promote this fiction. A South Dakota exhibit celebrates Sioux ‘generosity, fortitude, wisdom now, as ever,…a timeless culture.’ (5) Morally inalienable from the original owners, each discrete creation myth, custom, language, lifestyle, and artifact is an imperilled treasure. To be saved, it must be admired, but uncorrupted by modern admixture. ‘Museums have to persuade indigenous people to exhibit their culture without amalgamating it into the Western tradition.’ (6)
The chimera of timeless tribal purity harks back to the 1920s, when ‘authentic’ Hopi arts and crafts were ‘rescued’ by banning aniline dyes and ‘restoring’ prehistoric Anasazi and Mimbres pottery motifs. A Santa Fe Indian potter could not use a wheel without being chastised as inauthentic (7). The same mystique animated English folklorists to find and nurture ‘ancient and unchanging links with a lost rural past when the folk…responded simply and directly to the rhythms of nature’. Subsequent accretions were dismissed as degenerative. As late as 1968, Cecil Sharp devotees in England and Appalachia asserted that ‘folk society and folk art do not accept, reflect, or value change’ (8).
Long consigned to the scholarly dustbin, visions of changeless cohesive indigenes untouched by mainstream ways survive among tribalists themselves mainly as rhetorical legal ploys. Coca-Cola bottles on South Ryukus altars, Aboriginal and Maori post-modern pastiche, Pukapukan synthesis of tribal with biblical ceremony give the lie to the conceit that ‘we’ but not ‘they’ could adopt alien ways without social suicide (9). Yet this patronising view is now espoused by modern patrons of equity and global diversity. Despite caveats that tribal peoples ‘retain the right to “market” themselves if they want to’ (10), primitivist essentialism wreaks havoc in heritage affairs, especially restitution.