MCLC: Save the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (5)

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Save the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (5)
In response to Lily Lee's question about how China today has the capability to protect those fragments of its heritage that is now kept in foreign museums -- should not those things be sent back now? I'd like to make the following points:
1, Of course, yes, there is a museum boom in China now, and there are some that are very capable, and good, and interesting (I wrote about these trends here: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/mar/article/view/19150). So yes -- a qualified yes.
2, Just because something is on show in a museum does not mean it's been protected. There is also in China a huge boom in Chinese antiquities and art collecting, and auction houses where collectors gather. This fuels tremendous destruction, of the sites where the things come from. The graverobbers tear up the sites, break apart and trample the priceless setting, and carry only the saleable fragments off to market. Many objects you see in both Chinese private collections, and in Chinese museums, are surviving fragments of this kind. This is all illegal, of course, but as you can imagine in China today, money and corruption overrides that, and heritage officials and archaeologists are often powerless to do anything about it even though they hate this devastation, of course. They often come to places too late, after the thieves and the smugglers. I've written about this, too, once even in China Daily (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2010-06/23/content_10005909.htm).
Many Chinese do not understand this cause and effect (shopping = destruction), or choose not to understand (and many Westerners also don't). It is the same as when Chinese people and others keep buying and wearing and using ivory and rhino horn, without a care that they are now exterminating the elephant and the rhino off the face of the earth.
This is not an argument against repatriating cultural items, it is just to put things in perspective: In some ways the destruction of China's heritage is worse now, than in the past.
3, Also, in the global perspective, the countries of today are not the countries of yesterday, so there may not even be a "where it came from" any more, that you can send things to. I wrote about all that in my program piece "Chinese collections outside China: Problems and hopes" which I already mentioned. This means there can be no blanket answer but proposals to return things must be judged each by their own merit. For example, where would one send things that belong to places that no longer exist, since they were conquered and obliterated by the Chinese empire? That can't be done.
4, So every case must be discussed on its merit. One key point that will come up in every such assessment, is the difference between collectible objects like a painting scroll (which is meant to travel the world and to be collected), and object that do belong with a specific setting like a temple, a tomb, or some other set of things, or a place. For such fragments of wholes, yes, in the interest of our shared world heritage (more than for any nationalistic reason), I think they should be returned and reassembled as far as possible, regardless of the UNESCO conventions and their statutes of limitations. So the Parthenon sculptures in London should go back to the Parthenon in Greece, regardless. But for a Chinese painting in Stockholm, if it was legitimately bought and not stolen, I don't see any reason to send it back.
5, I also believe that collections and displays of other cultures in museums around the world can help people understand each other. So I could not agree that every cultural object must necessarily be packed up and sent back to where it came from, just because it came from there. This argument can be abused and misused, of course (see the books by James Cuno, for example), but it still remains that it's also possible for people around the world to peacefully give each other things for the sake of learning and understanding, such as happened in China's and Sweden's mutual 1925 agreement about the huge archaeological collections that founded the Museum of Far Eastern of Antiquities in Stockholm.
Finally with China there is an x factor: Many observers now are writing about the trends in China pointing towards yet another "Cultural Revolution" there. The Australia-based sinologist Simon Leys once wrote an essay (cf. "The Chinese Attitude towards the Past", in Simon Leys, _The Angel and the Octopus: Collected Essays 1983-1998_, Sydney: Duffy & Snelgrove, 1999, pp. 3-24), suggesting there is a cycle in China of repeatedly burning down everything from the past. Maybe there is such a cycle, and the next round of smashing things is coming up soon? What would that mean for this whole issue of repatriation?
Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42 at cornell.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on October 13, 2016
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