James Cuno's Illogic

James Cuno's new book, Who Owns Antiquities?, continues to push the case he has been arguing for several years now in print against current international conventions designed to protect cultural heritage from looting. Such conventions, he has suggested, are in bad faith. "If only current international agreements were intended to preserve archaeological knowledge," Cuno has written elsewhere. "If only they were meant to make sure that we know where the world's archaeological objects were found and that its archaeological sites are preserved. But they are not. They are intended instead to preserve the integrity of one nation's cultural property at the expense of the world's interest in international exchange."

Bad faith, of course, could equally well be charged against those with an interest in international exchange -- the museums and collectors who benefit from current international agreements allowing them to purchase artifacts without having to show that the provenance of these objects is legitimate (or even having to register their purchase at all). If only such agreements were intended to preserve archaeological knowledge. If only they were meant to make sure that we know where the world's archaeological objects were found and that its archaeological sites are preserved. But they are not. They are intended instead to promote the interest, not of the world but of individual collectors and museums, at the expense of the integrity of one nation's cultural property.

If Cuno does not choose to complain about agreements that favor collectors and museums, it is because he believes that harm done to archaeological knowledge is always and only caused by retentionism. The source of all evil, retentionism not only prevents "the world" from benefiting from the chance to own antiquities -- it actually puts archaeological objects at greater risk. This is supposedly illustrated most dramatically by what happened in Afghanistan, where a retentionist policy meant that excavated artifacts were hoarded in the Kabul Museum, making it easy for them to be destroyed by the Taliban.

It is not difficult to see a problem with Cuno's logic here. Suppose the Taliban had inherited a museum built on internationalist principles rather than retentionist ones. Does Cuno really believe that they would then not have still considered whatever artifacts the museum held idols to be destroyed? The Taliban policy of iconoclasm would have been pursued regardless of whether the previous policy had been internationalist or retentionist. The only difference would have been that rather than destroying only Afghan artifacts the Taliban might also have destroyed items loaned or exchanged by other museums under an internationalist system.

There is no logical link between retentionism and iconoclasm, pace Cuno. Nor is there a logical link between retentionism and the looting of the Iraq National Museum, Cuno's other incendiary claim. Antiquities in Iraq, in fact, were among the safest in the world under the retentionist regime of Saddam Hussein (at least until the sanctions regime and the no-fly zone sapped his power). What put the Iraq National Museum's collection of antiquities at risk was not retentionism, but the failure of American forces to secure the Museum grounds after smashing Saddam's government to smithereens.

The lesson here is not that retentionism is a better policy than internationalism. It is, rather, that the fate of cultural heritage depends less on a country's legal framework -- retentionist or internationalist -- than on its power to enforce whatever laws it has, and its will to protect (or, in rare instances like the Taliban, its will to destroy) its cultural property. A police state in which the leader cares about cultural heritage is one in which law and order will be maintained, and cultural property secured and conserved. Conversely, a free country with an internationalist cultural heritage policy but inadequate resources for maintaining law and order (whether in general or with regard to cultural property in particular) will be susceptible to the ravages of looting. And, of course, the greater the demand from collectors individual and institutional, the more at risk heritage will be, whatever the legal regime in place.

If Cuno really is concerned about knowing where objects are found and about conserving archaeological sites, it would make far better sense for him to stop obsessing about retentionism and focus instead on what the museum and collecting community could do to direct resources towards policing efforts. Individual contributions by wealthy contributors would be wonderful, but an even stronger measure would be for collectors to call for a tax to be levied on all purchases of antiquities, with the revenues generated by the tax dedicated to anti-trafficking efforts.

Sphere: Related Content