This week it was reported that a 2500-year-old a brooch originally belonging to King Croesus will be returned to its homeland of Turkey. The brooch, a golden winged seahorse, is one of several items in a collection known as the Lydian Hoard, looted from Turkey in 1965. After circulating in the art market and finding itself exhibited in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1980s, the collection was repatriated to Turkey in 1993. Yet, in 2006, it was discovered that the repatriated brooch was a fake.
Recently, the original was found and returned to Turkey.
The Guardian article describing this series of events also reports that the brooch's return to Turkey is one example of a larger trend within the country. The author, Constanze Letsch, states that Turkey has "launched what some call 'an art war' to repatriate antiquities from museums around the world that it says were stolen and smuggled out of the country illegally. According to official numbers, 885 artefacts were returned in 2011 alone."
As Letsch highlights, certainly there are economic benefits to owning cultural treasures. They will attract tourists and art historians to a particular place, as the article explains. However, there is also a potential for this repatriation, which is, in a sense, a performative act of recognition, to initiate healing and solidify cultural history, presence and belonging.
Scholarship in critical museology explores the relationship between politics, power, and material culture. This work is particularly relevant for understanding the stakes involved in the repatriation of items that have ended up in museum collections, private collections, or the art market. Whether a call for ownership is physical in nature -- a desire for an object being returned to its source community, or epistemological -- a community claiming authority over the meaning, treatment, or interpretation of their material culture, it is, as James Clifford (2004: 9) has stated, a "powerful political act." It is a way for people "long marginalized or made to disappear, physically or ideologically" to say "We exist."
Sources:
Constanze Letsch, "King Croesus's golden brooch to be returned to Turkey" http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/25/king-croesus-treasure-returning-turkey
Clifford, James. "Looking Several Ways: Anthropology and Native Heritage in Alaska." Current Anthropology 45(1) (February 2004): 5-30.
No comments:
Post a Comment