Who Owns Museum Stuff?

I grew up in the Art Institute of Chicago and the Field Museum of Natural History, which means that I enjoyed and learned about the world looking at the fruits of loot inside these magnificent catch-all encyclopedic repositories. James Cuno in his book Who Owns Antiquity argues that encyclopedic museums, those catch-all of goodies from the world-over are good things.  He has been excoriated for this.  I stand with him; I agree that these museums are a good thing.

The British Museum is not going to give the Elgin Marbles to the government of Greece.  If each and every nation-state insists that whatever is in the ground belongs to them and only them, then whatever current national interests exist will be the only things served.  Thus in the face of increasing Sino-ization of Tibet, the Amharization of Ethiopia, the Russianization of the former Soviet border states, what contrary issues and ideas will survive.  Eleven and twelve centuries ago an entire tribe of Tartars converted to Judaism, their artifacts lie in the Trans-Caucasus between the Caspian and the Black Seas.  Russian archaeologists deny that those artifacts are Jewish. The Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan out of pure religious zealotry and spite with no regard or respect for their own antiquity or anyone else on the planet.

Der Spiegel ran a story today about the discomfort and downright political hostility experienced by Erika Steinbach, leader of a group that calls itself The Federation of Expellees in Germany that wants to document the sufferings of Germans expelled by the Polish government at the end of the Second World War.  The Polish government argues fearfully that such Germans should not be permitted to see themselves as victims of the Nazis.

I argue that they are victims of the insistence that the modern nation state defines nationhood and nationality on narrow bases of tribalism, race, religion, and language.  Cuno argues the same for archaeological artifacts.

Cuno posits that the argument over rightful ownership of antiquities is not whether they and the sites they come from should be preserved but how to preserve them and increase our knowledge of and increase public access to them.

We are all one tribe, we deserve to see all of our ancestors goodies and treasures; we do not want them besmirched in the name of narrow national interests.