“The sea-ruling Britannia snatched the last
spoils of Greece, that was in the throes of death.” – Lord Byron
“The
British say they have saved the Marbles. Well, thank you very much. Now give
them back.” – Melina Mercouri, Greek Minister for Culture, 1981-1989/ 1993-1994
"The
request for the restitution of the Parthenon Marbles is not made by the Greek
government in the name of the Greek nation or of Greek history. It is made in
the name of the cultural heritage of the world and with the voice of the
mutilated monument itself, that cries out for its marbles to be returned."
- Evangelos Venizelos, Greek Minister for Culture, 1996-1999/ 2000-2004
For over 150 years, the marbles of
Greece's Parthenon have been situated in the British Museum. Known as the
Parthenon or Elgin Marbles, they continue to be the focal point of an ongoing
debate about the ownership and display
of cultural artifacts, often acquired from the developing world by imperial
powers in the 18th and 19th centuries, and now displayed in Western museums.
The British Museum’s charter implies that the institution cannot legally return
items from its collection: “The Trustees of The British Museum hold its
collections in perpetuity by virtue of the power vested in them by The British
Museum Act (1963)”. Yet the debate rages: should cultural property such as the
Parthenon Marbles be returned to its country of origin? And, more broadly: who
has “rightful” ownership of cultural property? Is it “universal” cultural
institutions or nation states?
 |
A large sign which marks the ancient city of
Tyre in Lebanon as protected cultural property according to the 1954 Convention
for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.
|
The
debate, then, broadly positions an internationalist perspective on
the ownership of cultural property against a vision of cultural property
as national cultural patrimony. The concept of national cultural
patrimony views cultural objects produced, or first discovered, within a state
as belonging to that state based on special relationship between that state’s
people and their cultural artefacts (Thomason, 1990). All cultural
heritage found within the borders of a modern nation-state is defined as its
cultural patrimony. More importantly, cultural patrimony is understood to
comprise both the artifacts produced by a particular living culture, and those
produced by past cultures to which modern nation-states consider themselves
heirs. The debate surrounding universal museums is centered on this claim to
the products of antiquity. And cultural nationalism, in short, demands the
repatriation of cultural patrimony “wrongly” located in universal collections
(Bell III, 2010).
Critics of the nationalist approach,
on the other hand, see access to cultural property as a universal human right,
arguing that, in our “global age”, we cannot rely on outdated constructs like
the nation-state to dictate the rules of cultural property (Kimmelman,
2010). Major proponents of the internationalist argument are thus encyclopedic
or universal museums – like the Met, the Louvre and the British Museum – which
see themselves as truly
cosmopolitan institutions, promoting tolerance, understanding, and a shared
sense of history, while opening
visitors’ eyes and minds to the wide diversity of world culture and the
stunning art that –in their eyes - is our common heritage (Cuno, 2011).
With the
diversity of art in their collections, encyclopedic museums thus argue against a
narrow definition of culture (Cuno, 2011). Instead, they urge their visitors to
view cultural heritage as transcending political boundaries. Cultural property
— paintings, artifacts, music, or dance — transcends the cultures and people
that create them, intertwining the histories of different peoples. For example,
in relation to the Parthenon Marbles the British Museum writes:
“The sculptures from the Parthenon
have come to act as a focus for Western European culture and civilisation, and
have found a home in a museum that grew out of the eighteenth-century
'Enlightenment', with its emphasis on developing a shared common culture that
goes beyond national boundaries.” (The British Museum website)
Cultural
internationalism, thus, considers cultural heritage as belonging to all people,
but “owned” by no one person or nation. It is essentially shorthand for the proposition that everyone
has an interest in the preservation and enjoyment of cultural property,
wherever it is situated, from whatever cultural or geographic source it derives
(Merryman, 2005). This perspective, therefore, defends the continued right of universal
museums to acquire, hold, preserve and display the common cultural heritage of
mankind, in trust for all people of current and future generations. When art and culture are
strictly attached to a nation, universal museums argue, we lose the
cross-culture ties that
bind many different peoples together.
At the heart of both
the internationalist argument and the debate over the Parthenon Marbles, lies
the idea of conservation or safeguarding from potential destruction and abuse. Many commentators
have pointed out that Elgin’s “purchase” of the marbles was indeed motivated by
the real risk to their survival. In fact, British journalist Richard Dorment
has argued in a 2009 piece for the Telegraph, that “Greeks should erect a statue of Lord Elgin near the
Parthenon to express their nation's gratitude to him for saving the Marbles”. According to Dorment, the Parthenon
wouldn’t have made it into the 21st century given its history of
plunder and exploitation. And indeed, over the past centuries the Parthenon has
been shaken by earthquakes, ravaged by fire, turned into a church and then a
mosque, bombarded and quarried for building materials (Jenkins, 2007). Yet
Greece has been an independent – and relatively peaceful – nation since 1829,
which means that this initial act of protection has been completed for the past
185 years.
 |
New Acropolis Museum, Athens
Credit: ©Peter Mauss/Esto |
Why then do
the Brits refuse to return the marbles? It is often argued that, unlike other
artifacts that have been successfully repatriated in the past, the marbles have
come to play a dominant role in Britain’s own cultural history. As Anthony
Snodgrass (2004) has pointed out, following their arrival in London, the
sculptures were heavily celebrated and imitated by British artists, critics and
poets. Over the next two centuries, they also became a subject of detailed
scholarly research by British art historians and archaeologists. For the
British Museum and especially for its Greek and Roman Department, this has
embedded them too deeply in the British scholarly and cultural consciousness
for them ever to be uprooted (ibid.). One may detect faint shades of Edward
Said's Orientalism (2003) here: the propriety of knowledge acts as a
legitimation for possession, in this case no longer territorial, but physical
all the same.
Nevertheless, as long
as the objects remain at the British Museum, they represent enduring symbols of
colonial injustice, as Elgin never obtained
permission to remove the marbles from Greece, but
rather the temporary occupational government at the time - the Ottoman Empire. Michelle Caswell’s (2011) powerful argument for the return of the
Iraqi Baath Party records to their “birthplace”, illustrates this point. As
Caswell (ibid.) points out, in this contemporary act of “cultural salvation”
which saw the aforementioned records seized during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq
and subsequently transferred to Stanford University, the power inequalities
inherent in their acquisition have been completely overlooked. In a similar manner the British government has been avoiding questions about unequal power distributions, opting rather to reinforce narratives about the unique educational value of
encyclopaedic collections.
|
|
'The British Museum: the Zoological Gallery, crowded', Wellcome Library, CC BY-NC
|
By
preserving and displaying objects whose origins lie across the world and in
different time periods, the argument goes, universal museums provide access to
the great diversity of the world’s artistic and cultural production. At last
year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, for example, a panel that
included the directors of the
British Museum, the Hermitage, the Metropolitan Museum of New York, and the
International Council of Museums argued that national governments that restrict trade in their self-defined
cultural heritage, were “denying their citizens to cultural objects from
different parts of the world, perpetuating dangerous stereotypes of foreign
peoples and foreign cultures, and working against the promise of encyclopedic
museums to promote the understanding of and respect for difference in the
world” (Cuno, 2013).
However, interest in
and ownership of cultural property is much less dictated by ideals about
connectedness and cross-cultural engagement, than it is by underlying economic
interests, as Caswell (2011) points out.
From that perspective, digital repatriation suggestions that are
becoming increasingly prominent in the aforementioned educational narrative
must be viewed with suspicion. As cultural institutions are reconfiguring their
identity in light of technological change, arguments in favor of digital
repatriation could be reversed to question the materiality of the museum space
and its collections. After all, if digital 3D copies of the Parthenon Marbles –
and digitized cultural property in general - really are viable alternatives to
the “real thing”, then why not use digital copies to promote museums’ educational
vision and mission while returning the actual physical artefacts to their place
of origin, where their absence is most deeply felt?
References
Bell III, M. (2010, November 2). Who’s Right? Repatriation of Cultural Property. IIP Digital. Available at <http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/publication/2010/10/20101022140412aidan0.7519953.html#axzz2zlUltTaq>
The British Museum (n.d.). The Parthenon sculptures: stewardship.
Available at < https://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/article_index/p/the_parthenon_stewardship.aspx>
Caswell, M. (2011). " Thank
You Very Much, Now Give Them Back": Cultural Property and the Fight over
the Iraqi Baath Party Records. American Archivist,74(1),
211-240.
Cuno, J. (2011). Museums
Matter: In Praise of the Encyclopedic Museum. University of Chicago Press.
Cuno, J. (2013, January 30). The Arts on the World Economic Stage—Notes
from Davos. The Getty Iris. Available
at
<http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/the-arts-on-the-world-economic-stage-notes-from-davos/>
Jenkins, I. D. (2007). The
Parthenon Sculptures. Harvard University Press.
Merryman, J. H. (2005).
Cultural property internationalism. International Journal of Cultural
Property, 12(01), 11-39.
Said, E. (2003). Orientalism:
Western conceptions of the Orient. Penguin Books Limited.
Thomason, D. N.
(1990). Rolling Back History: The United Nations General Assembly and the
Right to Cultural Property. Case Western Reserve Journal of International
Law, 22 (47).
