overview

collecting

spoliation

artifacts

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destruction

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related
Guides:

Intellectual
Property

Censorship






related
Profile:

Human Rights

Flagburning

Blasphemy

Collectibles

Indigenous
Marks

     collecting and commodification

This page provides an overview of questions about the identification, collection, destruction, theft and repatriation of cultural heritage.

     orientations

The following pages of this note highlight academic and other studies of particular value for understanding legal frameworks, the trade in movable cultural heritage, repatriation of human remains and spoliation.

The literature on particular aspects is large but often very uneven and sometimes polemical. The following items offer points of entry.

For legal perspectives and some practicalities see Who Owns The Past? Cultural Policy, Cultural Property, and the Law (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni Press 2005) edited by Kate Fitz Gibbon.

The outstanding work on repatriation remains Jeanette Greenfield's The Return of Cultural Treasures (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1996). It might be supplemented by Elazar Barkan's The Guilt of Nations: Restitution & Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: Norton 2000), John Torpey's Making Whole What Has been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 2006), David Lowenthal's Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1998), Robert Bevan's The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion 2005) and Claiming the Stones/Naming the Bones: Cultural Property & the Negotiation of National and Ethnic Identity (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute 2003) by Elazar Barkan & Ronald Bush. For some ethical questions see Phyllis Messenger's The Ethics of Collecting Cultural Property (Albuquerque: Uni of New Mexico Press 1999), The Imaginary Museum (London: Secker & Warburg 1967) by André Malraux and the feisty Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton 2004) by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

The psychology of collecting is explored in The Cultures of Collecting (Melbourne: Melbourne Uni Press 1994) edited by John Elsner & Roger Cardinal. Works on curation and collection include Making Representations: Museums in the Post-Colonial Era (London: Routledge 2001) by Moira Simpson. For perspective on the markets see Peter Watson's cogent From Monet To Manhattan: The Rise of the Modern Art Market (New York: Random House 1992), Karl Meyer's The Plundered Past (New York: Atheneum 1973), Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers, and the Looting of the Ancient World (New York: St Martins 2004) by Roger Atwood and Lynn Nicholas' sobering The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York: Vintage 1995). Other works are highlighted in discussion of the collectibles market and issues such as art fraud, indigenous origin marks and droit de suite.

Works on human rights are noted here.

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