Cultural Artifacts Their Return

The Return of Cultural Treasures:

Should They Be Restored to Their Places of Origin?

There is finally a new sense of cultural sensitivity to the violated rights of cultures which were pillaged in the past in the supposed pursuit of knowledge. As Jenette Greenfield notes in her book The Return of Cultural Treasures, this debate has been especially contentious regarding the Australian aborigines. Here, the controversy does not merely revolve around ancient structures and artifacts, but actual ancestral bones that were taken away from their original context.

The conflict has its roots in history, a history in which European civilizations often attempted to appropriate and judge non-European civilizations as inferior societies which existed solely to educate European ones about a more primitive past. Today, museum curators and academics often fame such a conflict in terms of science versus faith, as the dominant players are research-based universities versus aboriginal cultural centers. A recent example of this is that of Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre’s demand for the skull of a chief from the University of Edinburgh (Greenfield 301). Such claims for physical relics seem poignant considering the plight of Tasmanian aboriginals, as theirs was an indigenous society rendered extinct because of its conflict and oppression by colonial powers.

Within Australia itself, aboriginals have characterized such remains as religious relics. English institutions have used legal language and claims in opposition to tribal moral claims (Greenfield 302). This is perhaps unsurprising given the considerable number of relics from societies all over the world housed in the British Museum and elsewhere within the UK as a legacy of the widespread nature of the British Empire. The fact aboriginal skulls were once used to contrast primitive versus modern societies highlights how the extraction of such artifacts was not done intending to benefit the community from which they came.

Although some museums and societies gradually have returned their collections of ancient aboriginal human remains, others have not, citing concerns that the scientific discoveries derived from the bones, as well as the value of the completeness of their collections, would be disturbed. They claim the knowledge for present day humanity that can be gained via scientific study outweighs the value the relics offer if treated solely as personal, sacred relics. Again, however, this has uncomfortable echoes of the past, whereby the artifacts of aboriginal people viewed as rightfully belonging to European people who could study and judge them scientifically from a Western perspective.

Today, entities such as the British Museum have argued that the living ancestral owners of ancient bones are no longer living, and for “the betterment of mankind” the relics should remain where they are (Greenfield 307). Tribes have argued a foreign country is not an appropriate repository for a tribe whose roots are far away, and firstly and foremost the rights and betterment of those with a closer geographical and ancestral connection to the relics should hold sway. The idea of bettering mankind in the abstract ultimately assumes and privileges a universality of the European experience over those of other peoples.

While it may be true that museums do have a beneficial educational function for humankind and visitors from all over the world, this does not erase the often-uncomfortable history such structures have had in presenting non-Western societies and what would be regarded as personal possessions and remains as artifacts for a judgmental Western gaze. Perhaps the best solution is the creation of museums which are staffed and managed by representatives of the cultures they are purporting to celebrate and honor. The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C. is an example of ways to move forward into a more respectful and considered curatorship. Also, allowing tribes to repossess bones that were rightfully theirs, yet offer more respectful studies of such tribes in the contexts of museums may be an effective and more equitable compromise between the tension of religion and science, the study of history and ancestral rights, in the long term.