How very depressing. I remember when taking a course on "Greek & Roman Art & Architecture" nearly 40 years ago, we got to the bit where the early Christians started smashing the faces of pagan statues and it seemed such a shame to have this destruction but I didn't think I'd see such an attitude emerge again.
Seems to be a classic feature of revolutionary or epochal change - the Russian and French Revolutions did similar things, the Soviet attitudes to museums oscillated between outright destruction to repurposing for proletariat memorialisation.
It's always idiotically one directional. Nobody thinks the Jivaro should be handing their shrunken heads back to the people they made them from in the first place. For some reason that's different. I want to see a handover supervised by anthropologists - Jivaro hands over a shrunken head - "Sorry for cutting your grandad's head off. It was bad, this white guy says. Sorry. Here, I'm restoring it to you."
Of course not. Total fucking double standards. Gets my fucking goat.
It was with satisfaction that I read some black American lawyers are fighting to keep the Benin Bronzes in American museums - as restitution for the crimes committed *by the people who sold slaves to America*.
It is interesting to hear that. The thing with the Benin Bronzes is that I remember hearing from a former curator at the British Museum that some Nigerian diplomatic staff would sometimes off-the-record say that they would rather that the objects remained in the British Museum than being returned to Nigeria. This was because if they were returned to Nigeria they would be kept in the private collections of random princes rather than being accessible to the public. A lot of the calls for the repatriation of artefacts from foreign governments are little more than red meat for their local populace when there is some controversy at home. I believe that the last time there was major Greek agitation for the repatriation of the Parthenon marbles was at the height of the European debt crisis. It would be wonderful if museum staff just accepted this and ignored the cries for repatriation henceforth.
Modern academia is a priesthood devoted to the Christian heresy known as Social Justice, where Jesus the Suffering Servant is replaced by a constantly rotating cast of "minoritized" Others, who become sacred by the stigma they bear and are posited as the center of our moral universe and the locus of rites of atonement.
The foundational dogma and social glue of this faith is white guilt and white saviorism. Our Western liberal priesthood aka professoriate have the ultimate goal of undoing the European conquest of the globe, sort of an obverse or reversal of the Age of Exploration and Conquest. The entire modern world must be undone because it was created without consent and is deeply inegalitarian, which are the gravest of sins.
An interest in scholarship is secondary or even just a pretext, what this really is is a moral revolution, where "the last shall be first, and the first last" (Matthew 20:16) moves from Christian idea to secular commandment.
Very nicely put, but antithesis followowing thesis is as certain as Newton's Third Law. There is ample evidence that the young are turning against the currently dominant slave morality. They will rediscover Nietzsche soon enough, I think.
Thank you for this informative article. I have said it before, but this Substack is extremely valuable and I cherish it. It should probably be chiseled in stone for future generations to find after it all goes up in flames.
Very kind of you to say. I have always thought that the ephemerality of the internet will necessitate people printing and preserving content, hence why I try to publish many of the articles in book form.
There are many thoughts and feelings that this article has stirred inside of me. First of all, why do we tolerate some organisation calling for reparations to Africa?
Secondly, with regard to the display of human remains, one of the major issues is that many cultures have created objects from human remains. How can one justify removing from display the various bone flutes and skull cups from Tibet due to the petty racial resentment of sub-Saharan Africans? Similarly, human remains were displayed in large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. Various warlords in the Congo used to have skulls decorating their homesteads. There cannot be any logical justification for why that past behaviour was acceptable whilst the scientific display of human remains is forbidden other than racial resentment. All of this is nothing more than racial resentment by the objects of history. The narrative about rapacious colonialists is an absurdity that needs to be fought. Almost all colonial era artefacts in British museums would have been purchased from the non-white peoples. Their idiotic descendants are just petty thieves motivated by a bitter hatred of White people.
For the British context, one of the major issues is not just curators but funding bodies. The National Lottery Heritage fund, a non-departmental public body not directly controlled by a minister, has a plan "Heritage 2033". It is a Woke ten-year plan that includes the usual gaff about the environment and inclusion. Similarly, the Esmee Fairburn Trust, one of the major funding bodies in the heritage sector, has this as one of their priorities:
"We want to contribute to a socially just and anti-racist society, where people have their rights protected, as well as the opportunity to speak and be heard, and the freedom to express their creativity."
All of this enables this sort of idiocy. The museum sector needs radical reorganisation and the funding bodies are a major part of the problem. They need to be abolished and brought under ministerial control with a strict policy of political neutrality and objectivity. All municipal and national museums need to be properly nationalised with a standardised entrance fee system across the UK. If woke curators suddenly find themselves cut off from funding from a reformed national government, they will fall into line.
I’ll admit, my first instinct was also to think “maybe human remains do belong in the religious & cultural sphere only,” but seeing the reasoning behind who gets these artifacts is quite damning. Very tragic what’s happening.
I do sympathise with the impulse to keep the human body sacred in some way, but since we neither want to destroy nor display them, and we can't just keep every burial plot as an eternal resting place, the end result is warehouses of human bones which could be better served for educational purposes.
Much of the arguments may be foolish, but they bring up some clear issues that archeology and academia do need to answer. At what point are bones and bodies fair game for study and use in science and/or display? At what point to property rights to tombs and other sites get extinguished? Easy to say maybe about remains 40k years old, but what about 100?
It depends on context. Places like graveyards in modern churches are obviously still used, but graves are often exhumed and remains moved to create space. Graveyards or burial pits which are uncovered during building and construction will often be preserved to avoid their total destruction, for example a medieval graveyard from 700 years ago might be cleared and the bones put in storage. Sometimes those bones will be used by students to learn about anatomy and archaeological markers of disease etc. Others such as victims of mass epidemics might be reburied with a memorial, or exhumed and placed into permanent storage. In the UK if a human body is discovered then the age and context will determine whether the police or archaeologists need to be involved, roughly 100 years is the standard but there are laws and procedures around disinterment - a license may be needed or a forensic specialist etc.
There is a real tension in North America about where archaeology legitimately begins and where the rights of living indigenous descendants end - do skeletal remains from 10,000 years ago 'belong' to Native tribes today? A hard question, since the scientific answer seems culturally at odds with how those groups see themselves and their pasts.
The underlying theme is more disturbing than simply restoration of objects, it's the erosion of rationality in favour of superstition. The philosophical change is very deep. At the same time as science provides more and better cutting edge research tools, more credence is given to the superstitions of primitives. The end point, I would have thought, would be excellent analytic techniques being deployed, but only ever on the artifacts of Westerners. Everything else gets put back into it's moldering grave.
Also, a return to nationalism. The interests of small nation trumps the international cooperative efforts of archaeologists, and the rights of the small nation take precedence over the collective right for large numbers of people to know their own history. Narratives of many people are intertwined, so if a small nation makes it's artifacts unavailable it's not just them that suffer.
"I also think that part of this squeamishness is the resentment academics have for anything particularly popular with the public. What the public enjoys is always up for suspicion, that they aren’t enjoying it ‘the right way’ or they are reinforcing their own popular Orientalist and Indiana Jones stereotypes." This is a brilliant point. I think it's also behind the neglect of philology, physical anthropology, and military history as disciplines in the Academy over the last 60 years or so.
I am Nigerian princess Adaobe, and if you send me your Benin Bronzes I can hold them for a friend and pass a fee on to you...
Really, though, why are the right-on lefty museums repatriating African fascist art to reactionary African aristocrats?
Come to that, why isn't reactionary Stone Age Herbalist celebrating the triumph of the nobility over the limp-wristed democracy that keeps these bronzes in the public domain.
Surely the return of the Bronzes is a victory for tradition over modernity - good right wing stuff?
Maybe this is all being framed incorrectly by the right as the decay inherent to liberalism, whereas in reality it's a return to tradition.
After all, one of the critiques of critical race theory is that on the surface it aims for equality and diversity but in reality restores traditional ethnic affiliations and animosities.
Critical race theory paves the way for white identitarianism, so maybe repatriation will do the same.
Why should the sacred objects of the white people be on display for all the world to ogle with their unworthy eyeballs, rather than restored to their true context? Have we become so profane?
"Its not hard to see how this argument moves from ‘the dead didn’t consent to being displayed’ to ‘the dead didn’t consent to being dug up/analysed/DNA tested’. "
What about Jesus? I don't recall the bit in the bible where he says everyone should gawp, slack jawed, at his burial shroud, and bits of his toenail, and bits of his cross, and all the rest of it.
That criticism has been made multiple times in the past, most notably by Calvin in his Treatise on Relics:
„Now, the origin and root of this evil has been, that, instead of discerning Jesus Christ in his Word, his Sacraments, and his Spiritual Graces, the world has, according to its custom, amused itself with his 218 clothes, shirts, and sheets, leaving thus the principal to follow the accessory.”
Well I guess the Christian relic tradition is where Christianity overlaps with other folk religions that use objects as vectors for the spirits of the deceased. Hard habit to break? Bit presumptious of Calvin to claim that an actual piece of Jesus has less spiritual power than his words. Whether they are actual pieces is a similar question as whether those were his actual words. For Calvin proof would be a sense of transcendence associated with the words as reported in the bible but, then again, similar proof could be furnished via a relic. I don't recall Jesus mentioning relics either way in the bible. Maybe one day a scroll will be found that clears it all up. Something like The Toenail Gospel, in which Jesus says "as I am in the word, so am I in the body, and so you will find me through my toenail", a bit like "this is my body, this is my blood" :-)
And in that case those contacting him through relics, without even the Roman Bible to rely on, will be of superior faith to Calvin.
How very depressing. I remember when taking a course on "Greek & Roman Art & Architecture" nearly 40 years ago, we got to the bit where the early Christians started smashing the faces of pagan statues and it seemed such a shame to have this destruction but I didn't think I'd see such an attitude emerge again.
Seems to be a classic feature of revolutionary or epochal change - the Russian and French Revolutions did similar things, the Soviet attitudes to museums oscillated between outright destruction to repurposing for proletariat memorialisation.
It's always idiotically one directional. Nobody thinks the Jivaro should be handing their shrunken heads back to the people they made them from in the first place. For some reason that's different. I want to see a handover supervised by anthropologists - Jivaro hands over a shrunken head - "Sorry for cutting your grandad's head off. It was bad, this white guy says. Sorry. Here, I'm restoring it to you."
Of course not. Total fucking double standards. Gets my fucking goat.
It was with satisfaction that I read some black American lawyers are fighting to keep the Benin Bronzes in American museums - as restitution for the crimes committed *by the people who sold slaves to America*.
https://theblackwallsttimes.com/2022/11/16/dc-lawyer-sues-to-keep-benin-bronzes-in-america-not-benin/
It is interesting to hear that. The thing with the Benin Bronzes is that I remember hearing from a former curator at the British Museum that some Nigerian diplomatic staff would sometimes off-the-record say that they would rather that the objects remained in the British Museum than being returned to Nigeria. This was because if they were returned to Nigeria they would be kept in the private collections of random princes rather than being accessible to the public. A lot of the calls for the repatriation of artefacts from foreign governments are little more than red meat for their local populace when there is some controversy at home. I believe that the last time there was major Greek agitation for the repatriation of the Parthenon marbles was at the height of the European debt crisis. It would be wonderful if museum staff just accepted this and ignored the cries for repatriation henceforth.
Then they end up in the private collections of rich Arabs....
Modern academia is a priesthood devoted to the Christian heresy known as Social Justice, where Jesus the Suffering Servant is replaced by a constantly rotating cast of "minoritized" Others, who become sacred by the stigma they bear and are posited as the center of our moral universe and the locus of rites of atonement.
The foundational dogma and social glue of this faith is white guilt and white saviorism. Our Western liberal priesthood aka professoriate have the ultimate goal of undoing the European conquest of the globe, sort of an obverse or reversal of the Age of Exploration and Conquest. The entire modern world must be undone because it was created without consent and is deeply inegalitarian, which are the gravest of sins.
An interest in scholarship is secondary or even just a pretext, what this really is is a moral revolution, where "the last shall be first, and the first last" (Matthew 20:16) moves from Christian idea to secular commandment.
Very nicely put, but antithesis followowing thesis is as certain as Newton's Third Law. There is ample evidence that the young are turning against the currently dominant slave morality. They will rediscover Nietzsche soon enough, I think.
Thank you for this informative article. I have said it before, but this Substack is extremely valuable and I cherish it. It should probably be chiseled in stone for future generations to find after it all goes up in flames.
Very kind of you to say. I have always thought that the ephemerality of the internet will necessitate people printing and preserving content, hence why I try to publish many of the articles in book form.
There are many thoughts and feelings that this article has stirred inside of me. First of all, why do we tolerate some organisation calling for reparations to Africa?
Secondly, with regard to the display of human remains, one of the major issues is that many cultures have created objects from human remains. How can one justify removing from display the various bone flutes and skull cups from Tibet due to the petty racial resentment of sub-Saharan Africans? Similarly, human remains were displayed in large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. Various warlords in the Congo used to have skulls decorating their homesteads. There cannot be any logical justification for why that past behaviour was acceptable whilst the scientific display of human remains is forbidden other than racial resentment. All of this is nothing more than racial resentment by the objects of history. The narrative about rapacious colonialists is an absurdity that needs to be fought. Almost all colonial era artefacts in British museums would have been purchased from the non-white peoples. Their idiotic descendants are just petty thieves motivated by a bitter hatred of White people.
For the British context, one of the major issues is not just curators but funding bodies. The National Lottery Heritage fund, a non-departmental public body not directly controlled by a minister, has a plan "Heritage 2033". It is a Woke ten-year plan that includes the usual gaff about the environment and inclusion. Similarly, the Esmee Fairburn Trust, one of the major funding bodies in the heritage sector, has this as one of their priorities:
"We want to contribute to a socially just and anti-racist society, where people have their rights protected, as well as the opportunity to speak and be heard, and the freedom to express their creativity."
All of this enables this sort of idiocy. The museum sector needs radical reorganisation and the funding bodies are a major part of the problem. They need to be abolished and brought under ministerial control with a strict policy of political neutrality and objectivity. All municipal and national museums need to be properly nationalised with a standardised entrance fee system across the UK. If woke curators suddenly find themselves cut off from funding from a reformed national government, they will fall into line.
I’ll admit, my first instinct was also to think “maybe human remains do belong in the religious & cultural sphere only,” but seeing the reasoning behind who gets these artifacts is quite damning. Very tragic what’s happening.
I do sympathise with the impulse to keep the human body sacred in some way, but since we neither want to destroy nor display them, and we can't just keep every burial plot as an eternal resting place, the end result is warehouses of human bones which could be better served for educational purposes.
Much of the arguments may be foolish, but they bring up some clear issues that archeology and academia do need to answer. At what point are bones and bodies fair game for study and use in science and/or display? At what point to property rights to tombs and other sites get extinguished? Easy to say maybe about remains 40k years old, but what about 100?
It depends on context. Places like graveyards in modern churches are obviously still used, but graves are often exhumed and remains moved to create space. Graveyards or burial pits which are uncovered during building and construction will often be preserved to avoid their total destruction, for example a medieval graveyard from 700 years ago might be cleared and the bones put in storage. Sometimes those bones will be used by students to learn about anatomy and archaeological markers of disease etc. Others such as victims of mass epidemics might be reburied with a memorial, or exhumed and placed into permanent storage. In the UK if a human body is discovered then the age and context will determine whether the police or archaeologists need to be involved, roughly 100 years is the standard but there are laws and procedures around disinterment - a license may be needed or a forensic specialist etc.
This helps to explain why so many artifacts had been removed from the American Indian section of the art museum I went to last week.
The mummy was still on display in the Egypt section though (and frightened my daughter and captivated my son).
There is a real tension in North America about where archaeology legitimately begins and where the rights of living indigenous descendants end - do skeletal remains from 10,000 years ago 'belong' to Native tribes today? A hard question, since the scientific answer seems culturally at odds with how those groups see themselves and their pasts.
The underlying theme is more disturbing than simply restoration of objects, it's the erosion of rationality in favour of superstition. The philosophical change is very deep. At the same time as science provides more and better cutting edge research tools, more credence is given to the superstitions of primitives. The end point, I would have thought, would be excellent analytic techniques being deployed, but only ever on the artifacts of Westerners. Everything else gets put back into it's moldering grave.
Also, a return to nationalism. The interests of small nation trumps the international cooperative efforts of archaeologists, and the rights of the small nation take precedence over the collective right for large numbers of people to know their own history. Narratives of many people are intertwined, so if a small nation makes it's artifacts unavailable it's not just them that suffer.
"I also think that part of this squeamishness is the resentment academics have for anything particularly popular with the public. What the public enjoys is always up for suspicion, that they aren’t enjoying it ‘the right way’ or they are reinforcing their own popular Orientalist and Indiana Jones stereotypes." This is a brilliant point. I think it's also behind the neglect of philology, physical anthropology, and military history as disciplines in the Academy over the last 60 years or so.
Got two paragraphs into the Bechiche article when it became apparent that they are the words of a dickhead and not worth finishing.
I am Nigerian princess Adaobe, and if you send me your Benin Bronzes I can hold them for a friend and pass a fee on to you...
Really, though, why are the right-on lefty museums repatriating African fascist art to reactionary African aristocrats?
Come to that, why isn't reactionary Stone Age Herbalist celebrating the triumph of the nobility over the limp-wristed democracy that keeps these bronzes in the public domain.
Surely the return of the Bronzes is a victory for tradition over modernity - good right wing stuff?
Maybe this is all being framed incorrectly by the right as the decay inherent to liberalism, whereas in reality it's a return to tradition.
After all, one of the critiques of critical race theory is that on the surface it aims for equality and diversity but in reality restores traditional ethnic affiliations and animosities.
Critical race theory paves the way for white identitarianism, so maybe repatriation will do the same.
Why should the sacred objects of the white people be on display for all the world to ogle with their unworthy eyeballs, rather than restored to their true context? Have we become so profane?
People who hold such concerns should also not be allowed in to European cultural institutions.
Why would any proudly and righteously decolonised person want to set foot in a museum anyway?
Stay out, museums are not for you, they are for Europeans.
Let's just segregate.
"Its not hard to see how this argument moves from ‘the dead didn’t consent to being displayed’ to ‘the dead didn’t consent to being dug up/analysed/DNA tested’. "
What about Jesus? I don't recall the bit in the bible where he says everyone should gawp, slack jawed, at his burial shroud, and bits of his toenail, and bits of his cross, and all the rest of it.
That criticism has been made multiple times in the past, most notably by Calvin in his Treatise on Relics:
„Now, the origin and root of this evil has been, that, instead of discerning Jesus Christ in his Word, his Sacraments, and his Spiritual Graces, the world has, according to its custom, amused itself with his 218 clothes, shirts, and sheets, leaving thus the principal to follow the accessory.”
Well I guess the Christian relic tradition is where Christianity overlaps with other folk religions that use objects as vectors for the spirits of the deceased. Hard habit to break? Bit presumptious of Calvin to claim that an actual piece of Jesus has less spiritual power than his words. Whether they are actual pieces is a similar question as whether those were his actual words. For Calvin proof would be a sense of transcendence associated with the words as reported in the bible but, then again, similar proof could be furnished via a relic. I don't recall Jesus mentioning relics either way in the bible. Maybe one day a scroll will be found that clears it all up. Something like The Toenail Gospel, in which Jesus says "as I am in the word, so am I in the body, and so you will find me through my toenail", a bit like "this is my body, this is my blood" :-)
And in that case those contacting him through relics, without even the Roman Bible to rely on, will be of superior faith to Calvin.