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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...
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…
Works Cited
Greenfield, Jenette. The Return of Cultural Treasures (3rd ed.) New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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