Cultural Heritage Ethics

Between Theory and Practice

CONSTANTINE SANDIS (ED.)

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Cultural Heritage Ethics
Between Theory and Practice

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Constantine Sandis
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 For Eleni Cubitt

Κι οι ποταμοί φουσκώναν μες στη λάσπη το αίμα

για ένα λινό κυμάτισμα για μια νεφέλη
μιας πεταλούδας τίναγμα το πούπουλο ενός κύκνου
για ένα πουκάμισο αδειανό, για μιαν Ελένη.

Γιώργος Σεφέρης
 Contents

Notes on Contributors ix
List of Illustrations xiii
Preface and Acknowledgments xix
Introduction 1
I. Meaning and Memory 9
1. Culture, Heritage, and Ethics 11
Constantine Sandis
2. Poppy Politics: Remembrance of Things Present 21
James Fox
3. The Meaning of the Public in an Age of Privatisation 31
Benjamin Ramm
II. History and Archaeology 41
4. History as Heritage: Producing the Present in Post-War Sri Lanka 43
Nira Wickramasinghe
5. Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to 57
Antiquity
William St Clair
6. South Asian Heritage and Archaeological Practices 103
Sudeshna Guha
7. The Ethics of Digging 117
Geoffrey Scarre
III. Ownership and Restitution 129
8. ‘National’ Heritage and Scholarship 131
Sir John Boardman
9. Fear of Cultural Objects 135
Tom Flynn
10. Restitution 149
Sir Mark Jones
viii Cultural Heritage Ethics

IV. Management and Protection 169

11. The Possibilities and Perils of Heritage Management 171
Michael F. Brown
12. Values in World Heritage Sites 181
Geoffrey Belcher
13. Safeguarding Heritage: From Legal Rights over Objects to Legal 197
Rights for Individuals and Communities?
Marie Cornu
Appendix: Links to Selected International Charters and 205
Conventions on Cultural Heritage
 Notes on Contributors

Geoffrey Belcher was formerly Coordinator for the UNESCO Maritime

Greenwich World Heritage Site. He is a member of the RTPI and a RIBA
Awarded Conservation Architect.

Sir John Boardman is Professor Emeritus of Classical Art and Archaeology

at Oxford. He has excavated in Turkey, Greece and Libya, and published
books on Greek art, classical gems and the Greeks in Asia. These include
The Greeks Overseas (1964; 4th ed. 1999), Excavations at Emporio, Chios (1964),
Archaic Greek Gems (1968), Greek Burial Customs (1971), Greek Gems and Finger
Rings (1970, new ed. 2001), Persia and the West (2000), The History of Greek
Vases (2001), The Archaeology of Nostalgia (2002), Greece and the Hellenistic
World (2002), The World of Ancient Art (2006), The Marlborough Gems (2009),
and The Relief Plaques of Central Asia and China (2010).

Michael F. Brown is President of the School for Advanced Research, Santa

Fe, New Mexico, USA, and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Williams
College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA. His books include Who
Owns Native Culture? (2003), and Upriver: The Turbulent Life and Times of an
Amazonian People (2014).

Marie Cornu is Research Director at the National Centre for Scientific

Research (CNRS) and director of the CECOJI (Research Centre on the
International Legal Cooperation). Her research interests focus on cultural
property law and art law. In cooperation with Prof. Jérôme Fromageau,
she co-leads an international research group that recently published a
comparative dictionary on cultural property law.
x Cultural Heritage Ethics

Tom Flynn is founder of The Sculpture Agency and a visiting lecturer at

Kingston University. He has written for The Art Newspaper, Art & Auction,
Art Review, Apollo, Art News, Museums Journal, The Spectator, and many
others. His books include The Body in Sculpture (1998), Colonialism and the
Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (1998, co-edited with T.
Barringer), The Paintings of Clive Head (2000), Jedd Novatt (2008), Sean Henry
(2009), Skate’s Art Investment Handbook, (2nd ed. 2010), and The Sculpture of
Terence Coventry (2012).

James Fox is a Research Fellow in Art History at Gonville and Caius

College, Cambridge. He has previously held research positions at Harvard,
Churchill College, Cambridge, and the Yale Center for British Art. He is
currently preparing a monograph on British art during the First World War.

Sudeshna Guha is Associate Researcher at the Faculty of Asian and

Middle Eastern Studies (FAMES), and the Centre of South Asian Studies,
Cambridge, UK. She researches the history of archaeology and South Asia
and has recently submitted for publication her first monograph, Artefacts of
History: Archaeology, Historiography and Indian Pasts.

Sir Mark Jones is currently Master of St Cross College, Oxford. He was

a curator in the British Museum for seventeen years before becoming
Director of the National Museums of Scotland and then of the Victoria and
Albert Museum.

Benjamin Ramm is a writer and broadcaster, and Research Fellow at

Gladstone’s Library, Wales. He is the former editor of The Liberal magazine,
and author of Citizens: A Manifesto.

Constantine Sandis is Professor of Philosophy at Oxford Brookes

University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is the author of The
Things We Do and Why We Do Them (2012) and has edited numerous books
on the philosophy of action and human nature.

Geoffrey Scarre is Professor of Philosophy at Durham University, UK

and founder and director of the Durham University Centre for the Ethics
of Cultural Heritage. His books include Death (2007), Mill’s ‘On Liberty’:
A Reader’s Guide (2007) and On Courage (2010); he has also edited (with
Chris Scarre) The Ethics of Archaeology (2006) and (with Robin Coningham)
Appropriating the Past (2013).
 Notes on Contributors xi

William St Clair is a Fellow of the British Academy and Senior Research

Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study,
University of London. His books include Lord Elgin and the Marbles (1967;
3rd rev. ed. 1998), That Greece Might Still Be Free (1972, 2nd rev. ed. 2008),
Trelawny, the Incurable Romancer (1977), The Godwins and the Shelleys (1989),
The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004), and The Grand Slave
Emporium (2006).

Nira Wickramasinghe is Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at

Leiden University and the author and editor of numerous books including
Dressing the Colonised Body: Politics, Clothing and Ethnic Politics in Colonial Sri
Lanka 1927-1947 (1995), Civil Society in Sri Lanka. New Circles of Power (2001),
History Writing: New Trends and Methodologies (2001), Identity in Colonial Sri
Lanka (2003), Sri Lanka in the Modern Age – A History of Contested Identities
(2006), and Metallic Modern – Everyday Machines in Colonial Sri Lanka (2014).
List of Illustrations

1.1 Blue glass sugar bowl inscribed in gilt ‘EAST INDIA SUGAR not 14
made by SLAVES’, Bristol, 1820-30. British Museum. Wikimedia
Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:East_India_
Sugar_not_made_by_Slaves_Glass_sugar_bowl_BM.jpg
1.2 Statue of Edward Colston by John Cassidy, erected in 1895 on 14
Colston Avenue, Bristol. Photograph by William Avery (2006).
Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
Edward_Colston_1895_statue.jpg (CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported license).
1.3 English Heritage blue plaque for Nancy Astor. Photograph by 15
Simon Harriyott (2010). Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nancy_Astor_(4313985760).jpg (CC BY 2.0
Generic license).
5.1 The Parthenon from the north-west. Author’s photograph, 6 October 69
2013.
5.2 The Parthenon from the north-west. Entrance ticket to the Acropolis, 69
issued on 6 October 2013.
5.3 The Parthenon from the north-west, c.1909, before the re-erection of 70
the colonnade in the 1920s. Postcard. Pharazes and Michalopoulos
of Athens, date of first publication unknown, but some time before
the postcard was posted from Athens on 6 April 1909. Author’s
collection.
5.4 The Parthenon from the north-west. Photographic print, ?1880s, 71
source uncertain. Author’s collection.
5.5 The Parthenon from the north-west, autumn 1839. Aquatint 71
engraving of a daguerreotype made on the spot by Joly de
Lotbinière. Author’s collection.
5.6 The Parthenon as it appeared in antiquity, as imagined in 1788. 72
Copper engraving. ‘Vue perspective du Parthénon’, engraved by
Ambroise Tardieu, plate 18 in the Atlas volume that accompanied
the edition of Anacharsis published in Paris by Ledoux in 1821.
xiv Cultural Heritage Ethics

5.7 The Parthenon from the north-west, c.1805. Aquatint from a 73

drawing by Edward Dodwell, in his Views in Greece from Drawings
(London: Rodwell and Martin, 1821). Wikimedia Commons: https://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dodwell_Parthenon_1.jpg
5.8 The Acropolis south slopes around 1858. Albumen print of a 74
photograph by Felix Bonfils. Author’s collection.
5.9 The ancient path on the north side under the caves. Photograph, 75
c.1910. Ernst Reisinger (ed.), Griechenland, Landschaften und Bauten,
Schilderungen Deutscher Reisender (Leipzig: Im Insel Verlag, 1916), 4.
5.10 The cave of Pan on the north slope, looking out. Author’s photograph, 76
2 October 2013.
5.11 Greece, invoking Homer and the ruins of ancient Hellas, calls on 80
Europe for help, 1821. Copper engraving. Σάλπισμα πολεμιστήριον
[‘A Trumpet Call to War’], a pamphlet by Adamantios Koraes that
purports to have been printed ‘In the Peloponnese from the Hellenic
Press of Atrometos of Marathon’, but was actually printed in Paris
by overseas Greeks, 1821.
5.12 Caryatid looking towards Philopappus, 1929. Photograph by 81
Walter Hege. Akropolis aufgenommen von Water Hege, beschrieben
von Gerhard Rodenwaldt (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1930).
5.13 North-west corner of the Parthenon, 1923. Photograph by Hans 82
Hold. Hans Hold and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Griechenland-
Baukunst, Landschaft, Volksleben (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1923).
5.14 Viewing the Acropolis, c.1898. Woodcut from an original work by A. 83
Kirscher. From an illustration in Das Buch fur Alle, a German journal,
c.1898.
5.15 The Acropolis as seen from the centre of Athens, by Edward 84
Dodwell, c.1805. Coloured aquatint, in Edward Dodwell, Views
in Greece from Drawings (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1821).
Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
Athens-dodwell.jpg
5.16 The Acropolis as seen from a distance by an arriving traveller, 85
c.1800. Aquatint by Louis Cassas, in [Cassas and Bence] Grandes
Vues Pittoresques des Principales Sites et Monumens de la Grèce, et de
la Sicile, et Des Sept Collines de Rome, Dessinées et Gravées a l’eau-forte,
au trait, par MM. Cassas et Bence; Accompagnés d’une Explication des
Monumens par M.C.P. Landon (Paris and Strasbourg: Treuttel and
Würtz, 1813). Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:Cassas_Louis-Francois_-_View_of_Athens_with_
Hadrians_Aqueduct_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
5.17 The Entrance to the Acropolis, Heinrich Hübsch, 1819. Aquatint 85
published in Denmark with description in Danish. Undated and
signed only with the name of the engraver ‘J.B. Peterson sculp.’
 List of Illustrations xv

5.18 The Muslim cemetery at the entrance to the Acropolis, c.1805. 86

Copper engraving. Simone Pomardi, Viaggio nella Grecia fatto da
Simone Pomardi negli anni 1804, 1805, e 1806 (Rome: Poggioli, 1820),
i, opposite 143.
5.19 Admission tickets to the Acropolis, mid-1830s. Author’s collection. 87
5.20 A low denomination bronze coin issued in Athens, Roman period, 88
probably first century AD. Copper engraving. Anacharsis, atlas
volume, engraved from a coin then in the French Royal collection.
Frequently reproduced, and other examples of the coin have been
found later, dispelling fears that it was a fake.
5.21 ‘A View of the Doric Portico at Athens in its present state’, c.1751. 89
Copper engraving. Published by R. Faulder, New Bond Street, July
1793 in [Bisani, Alessandro] A Picturesque Tour through Europe, Asia,
and Africa … with Plates after Designs by James Stuart, Written by an
Italian Gentleman (London: Faulder, 1793). The same plates were
used in an edition of Pausanias published by Faulder.
5.22 Volney’s Ruins. Title page and frontispiece of the English translation. 90
5.23 ‘Byron’s Dream’, 1819. Copper engraving, sold to be bound into 91
copies of his works. A New Series of Twenty-one Plates to Illustrate
Lord Byron’s Works. Engraved by Charles Heath, from Drawings by
R. Westall, R.A. With a Portrait, engraved by Armstrong, from the
original Picture, by T. Phillips, R.A. (1819).
5.24 ‘The Ruins of Athens’ Copper engraving. Composed by Konrad 92
Martin Metz, 1789, and frequently re-engraved in standard
geographical works over many decades. Metz never visited Athens.
5.25 The Parthenon as a symbol of the superiority of the northern white 93
races. Woodcut illustration in Robert Knox, The Races of Men, A
Fragment (London: Henshaw, 1850), 396.
5.26 The German flag flying over the Acropolis, 1941. Cover of the monthly 94
magazine Deutsches Wollen (‘The German Will’) for July 1941.
5.27 ‘Mars Hill, Athens’. Chromolithograph, no date, c.1840, from a steel 95
engraving by Clarkson Stanfield from a sketch made on the spot by
William Page, first published 1835.
5.28 The essence of the Athenian Acropolis exported to England. Copper 96
engraving by William Sharp, prepared from Stuart’s design for
Ralph Willett, A Description of the Library at Merly in the County of
Dorset (1785).
5.29 ‘Lord Elgin interrupts his meditations’. Lithograph. Frontispiece to 97
volume 1 of Mazier du Heaume, Hippolyte, Voyage d’un Jeune Grec
à Paris (Paris: Fr. Louis, 1824).
5.30 Confuting Hellenism. Mosaic on the church of Saint Philip facing 99
the Acropolis. Author’s photograph.
xvi Cultural Heritage Ethics

5.31 Mosaic of the Villa of Siminius Stephanus in the National 100

Archaeological Museum, Naples. Photograph by Matthias Kabel
(2012). Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Mosaic_MAN_Naples_Inv_124545.jpg (CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported
license).
9.1 Count Greven shoots the Buddhist priest. Frame from the film Fear 139
(Furcht, 1917), directed by Robert Wiene.
9.2 Count Greven encounters the ghostly face of the priest in his cellar. 140
Frame from Fear.
9.3 The spectral image of the Buddhist priest departs with the recovered 141
statuette. Frame from Fear.
9.4 Count Greven with the object of his desire. Frames from Fear. 145
11.1 The Coronation Chair of Edward I, 1296, with the Stone of 149
Destiny. Anonymous engraver, published in A History of England
(1855). Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/
wiki/File:Coronation_Chair_and_Stone_of_Scone._Anonymous_
Engraver._Published_in_A_History_of_England_%281855%29.jpg
11.2 King Edward’s Chair, Westminster Abbey, England. Photograph 150
by Kjetil Bjørnsrud (2002). Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SanktEdvardsstol_westminster.jpg (CC BY-
SA 3.0 Unported license).
11.3 The lectern at St Alban’s, Copnor (detail). Photograph by Basher 152
Eyre (2009). Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/
wiki/File:The_lectern_at_St_Alban%27s,_Copnor_-_geograph.org.
uk_-_1493823.jpg (CC BY-SA 2.0 Generic license).
11.4 Great Bed of Ware. Author unknown, Harper’s New Monthly 153
Magazine, December 1877, p. 23. Wikimedia Commons: http://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Great_Bed_of_Ware_1877.png
11.5 The opening of St Luke’s Gospel in the Lindisfarne Gospels 154
(715). Folio 139 recto. British Library Online Exhibit. Wikimedia
Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lindisfarne_
Gospels_folio_139r.jpg
11.6 Chess pieces from Uig, Lewis, now at the National Museum of 155
Scotland, Edinburgh. Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.
net, 2013). Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/
wiki/File:Lewis_chessmen,_National_Museum_of_Scotland_1.jpg
(CC BY-SA 4.0 International License).
11.7 The Axum Obelisk (also known as the Roman Stele) in Rome, where 160
it stood in front of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s
headquarters until 2005. Photograph by Bair175 (1960s). Wikimedia
Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ethiopian_obe
lisk_in_Rome_1960.jpg (CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported license).
 List of Illustrations xvii

11.8 The Axum Obelisk in Axum. Photograph by Ondřej Žváček (2009). 161
Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
Rome_Stele.jpg (CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported license).
11.9 Basalt stela with a relief of Antiochus I Epiphanes. © Trustees of the 162
British Museum.
11.10 Crown, Ethiopia, 1740. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 164
11.11 Carved marble head of a child, third century, excavated in 1882. 164
Taken by Sir C.W. Wilson from the so-called ‘Sidamara Sarcophagus’.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
11.12 View of the Acropolis from the interior of the New Acropolis 165
Museum. Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/
wiki/File:Acropolis_-_Museum_Interior.JPG
11.13 Chinese Imperial throne, carved lacquer on wood depicting five 166
clawed dragons, Qing dynasty, 1775-80. © Victoria and Albert
Museum, London.
 Preface and Acknowledgments

This is neither a textbook nor a manifesto for any particular approach to

heritage ethics. I invited the contributors to speak about issues they deeply
care about, using the volume as a platform from which to argue for their
own points of view. Their focus is sometimes general, and at other times
takes the form of case studies. Our collective aim was not to present an
overview of the field, but to showcase the value of promoting awareness of
difficult questions through debate which bridges the gap between theory
and practice. For ease of reference the Appendix to the volume contains
links to selected international charters and conventions on cultural heritage
mentioned in the essays.
It would be ungracious to not mention here three obvious predecessors
to this volume. One is Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush’s Claiming the
Stones/Naming the Bones: Cultural Property and the Negotiation of National
and Ethnic Identity (Getty Research Institute, 2002). This excellent volume
contains fourteen essays addressing a variety of controversies from across
numerous academic and vocational perspectives including anthropology,
archaeology, ethnobiology, law, and literary studies. Another, which
shares two contributors with this volume, is John Henry Merryman’s more
specialised volume, Imperialism, Art and Restitution (Cambridge University
Press, 2006). Finally, there is Astrid Swenson and Peter Mandler’s recent
book From Plunder to Preservation: Britain and the Heritage of Empire, c.1800-
1940 (Oxford University Press, 2013).
One of the issues surrounding cultural heritage is that of access and it
has been hugely important to me that everyone has free unrestricted access
to the essays in this book. I am extremely grateful to William St Clair for
proposing Open Book Publishers as a possibility, to Alessandra Tosi for all
her work, help, and advice from submission to production, and to Bianca
Gualandi for her invaluable assistance with the inclusion of images. Fellow
xx Cultural Heritage Ethics

philosopher Jonathan Webber came up with the suggestion of Banksy’s

Paint Pot Angel for the cover of this volume. I’m very grateful to Diane
Potter for permission to reuse her photograph of it.
I also wish to thank the anonymous referees for their incredibly
astute comments and constructive suggestions and, of course, all of the
contributors for their stellar work. A generous Visiting Fellowship at the
Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies has given me the time to put the
final version of the manuscript together in the most pleasant of academic
environments.
Over a decade ago Eleni Cubitt sparked my interest in cultural heritage
ethics and this volume was her idea. Like her namesake of Troy, Eleni
has launched a thousand ships in her time. But it is equally fitting that
she was named after St Helena, mother of Constantine and patron saint
of archaeologists. Though she will not necessarily agree with all the ideas
within this volume, I trust that she will find them thoroughly engaging. I
dedicate the book to her, with much love.

Constantine Sandis
Helsinki, May 2014
 Introduction
Constantine Sandis

Theory without practice is empty, practice without theory is blind, to

adapt a phrase from Immanuel Kant. Cultural heritage ethics has certainly
suffered from such a dichotomy. This book seeks to bridge the gap between
theory and practice through conversations which promote the awareness
and debate of difficult questions, collectively pointing to a just medium
between academic and vocational approaches.
The intra-disciplinary essays that follow have been written by
academics, consultants, journalists, lawyers, and museum practitioners. I
have divided them into four sections: (i) meaning and memory; (ii) history
and archaeology; (iii) ownership and restitution; and (iv) management
and protection. The book thus guides the reader from the abstract to the
concrete, and back again. What follows is a brief overview of the essays in
each section.

Part I: Meaning and Memory

In ‘Culture, Heritage, and Ethics’, I introduce a number of themes taken up
in more detail by the other contributors. Given the range of questions and
complexities surrounding heritage, I am sceptical about the possibility of a
unified account of it. Heritage, cultural or otherwise, is not always good. It
may be preserved in fundamentally different, indeed contradictory, ways.
Pari passu, the range of rights relating to it is not a straightforward one. My
essay has been written in the faith that ‘a repertoire might be more useful
than a conviction’, sketching out a very partial and rudimentary conceptual

© Constantine Sandis, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0047.14

2 Cultural Heritage Ethics

cartography of the area of cultural heritage ethics. In so doing, I hope to

have marked some of the numerous pitfalls which face the bolder theorist.
James Fox’s ‘Poppy Politics: Remembrance of Things Present’ takes as
its starting point the scandal ignited in November 2011, when FIFA (the
international football governing body) refused to allow the English football
team to wear remembrance poppies on their shirts during a match against
Spain. FIFA had long enforced a universal ban on the wearing of political
symbols during its games, but under intense pressure from both the
government and the Royal Family it finally relented. British lobbyists had
argued that the poppy was a ‘universal symbol of remembrance’, and had
no political, religious or commercial connotations. Fox’s essay explores the
origins and development of Britain’s rituals of remembrance, arguing that
the poppy is far less neutral than its supporters claim: Fox demonstrates
that in fact the poppy has deeply political associations which legitimise the
conflict that it ostensibly seems to condemn. His insights on the politics
of remembrance suggest that heritage in this case refers to the past rather
than to the present.
The first section concludes with Benjamin Ramm’s essay ‘The Meaning
of the Public in an Age of Privatisation’. Ramm takes on the New Right’s
characterisation of the private realm as the abode of meaning, investigating
how this attack on the value of shared culture has impoverished citizens by
robbing them of a vocabulary with which to make sense of the world. The
neoliberal concept of ‘private persons, public consumers’, he concludes,
has little time for public memory – a context in which heritage takes on
radical new meaning.

Part II. History and Archaeology

In ‘History as Heritage: Producing the Present in Post-War Sri Lanka’, Nira
Wickramasinghe explores the consolidation by a patriotic post-conflict
state of a notion of history reinvented as national heritage. The distinction
between history as an analysis of the past and heritage had rarely been
made explicit in the public discourse. After the war ended the distinction
disappeared almost entirely from the national discourse, with the exception
of a few voices in history departments. In Wickramasinghe’s view, heritage
as we understand it, is created, shaped and managed by, and in response
to, the demands of the present. It is, to follow David Lowenthal, not history
at all, but a special pleading. Wickramasinghe draws from an array of
 Introduction 3

sources and practices relating to post-war Sri Lanka to assess the feasibility
of devising alternative strategies in the production of historical knowledge.
Williams St Clair’s ‘Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times
to Antiquity’ does just what it says on the tin. St Clair guides the reader
through the history of ways of looking at the Acropolis – how and when
different perspectives emerged and how they were mediated. St Clair takes
this analysis even further, using the Acropolis as a case study to prove that
the meaning of cultural sites and artefacts is at least partly determined
by the viewer. St Clair argues that the wish to offer viewers a means of
understanding the relationship between the then present, the then past,
and the then future, was among the explicitly stated aims of those who built
the classical Acropolis, as well as by others in later times. By relocating the
site where meanings are made to the minds of viewers and by admitting
them as active participants in a complex dynamic system, we become able
to take into account factors that are not given sufficient attention in current
conventions.
In her essay ‘South Asian Heritage and Archaeological Practices’,
Sudeshna Guha demonstrates how archaeological practices have been
consistently deployed within South Asia for over two hundred years in
order to establish truths about the origins and legacy of that civilisation.
Guha focuses on histories of civilisational traditions that have been
unearthed in colonial and post-colonial India through seemingly disparate
archaeological practices, but which have historiographic crossings and
mutations. With reference to the nineteenth-century creation of a Buddhist
Banaras, as well as to recent interpretations regarding the cultural legacies
of the Indus Civilisation, Guha aims to sow seeds of caution towards all
forms of valorisation of civilisational ethos within disciplinary archaeology.
In so doing, she situates the importance of critiquing such constructs in an
academic milieu that shows an increasing concern towards archaeological
productions of tangible ‘heritage-industries’.
Geoffrey Scarre’s ‘The Ethics of Digging’ asks how archaeologists
should select their research material, and whether they make their choices
on the basis of academic considerations alone. Whose interests should
archaeological research be serving: those of the profession, of local ethnic
or indigenous groups, of the general public, or the good of mankind?
And how should these be prioritised? What permissions (and whose) do
archaeologists need to obtain if their digging is to be ethical? Is excavation
which permanently damages or changes a site ethically acceptable? Should
4 Cultural Heritage Ethics

archaeologists, in a Lockean vein, take care to leave ‘as much and as good’
material for later researchers, and avoid depleting archaeological resources?
What duties do archaeologists have following excavation in regard to
recording, publication, dissemination and display? Is archaeological
digging ethically consistent with the principle of stewardship to which
most archaeologists pay lip-service? Would stewardship, strictly construed,
imply a ‘hands-off’ approach to the archaeological resource, and permit
excavation only in the case of endangered sites? What special ethical
responsibilities do archaeological researchers have in regard to human
remains and grave-sites? These are the key questions which Scarre posits
and begins to answer.

Part III: Ownership and Restitution

John Boardman’s ‘“National” Heritage and Scholarship’ considers the
fifty-year old debate over the handling and publication of ancient artefacts
acquired through channels other than official excavation. Boardman
reminds us that while the UNESCO declaration has effectively increased
the value of objects known before 1970, it has done nothing to halt the
acquisition and marketing of ‘recovered’ objects. It is still not uncommon
to hear the term ‘national heritage’ being used and this can easily lead to a
more casual approach to some aspects of the problem. Better by far, claims
Boardman, to speak of ‘global heritage’, the ‘heritage of man’ or even just
‘heritage’. There are very few relevant countries whose modern population
has any serious genetic or cultural links with their distant past. Jealousy
seems a very strong motive in many cases, often abetted by extreme views
about what ‘copyright’ entails.
Moving from jealousy to ‘Fear of Cultural Objects’, Tom Flynn reads
some of the recent and current disputes over global cultural heritage
through the metaphor of fear. The essay opens with an analysis of the little-
known early German expressionist feature film Fear, the narrative of which
centres upon the illicit removal of a cultural object from a distant sacred
site and its subsequent re-location to a European private collection. The
subsequent ‘haunting’ of the collector, triggered by the illicit act of removal,
provokes our ethical reflections on heritage by suggesting that many of
today’s cultural heritage disputes are fuelled by different types of fear.
Western ‘universal’ museums fear losing their collections, which symbolise
their identity and power, to repatriation. This can be contrasted with the
 Introduction 5

fear felt by many in the formerly subaltern nations of the developing world
who interpret these mainly European and North American encyclopaedic
institutions as tyrannical symbols of imperial greed. Flynn explores the
roots of this mutual fear, asking how it can be assuaged in an increasingly
globalised world of contested cultural objects.
Further worries about ‘Restitution’ are investigated by Mark Jones
who considers the arguments for the return of cultural property and tests
them against some well-known contested objections. While recognising
the difficulty of reaching an agreement, Jones combines case studies with
sharp critical insights to suggest ways in which contested objects instead
of being divisive might on the contrary become catalysts for international
partnerships. Inaction in this case may be a better way of serving the public
interest.

Part IV: Management and Protection

The fourth and final section of the volume opens with Michael F. Brown’s
exploration of ‘The Possibilities and Perils of Heritage Management’.
Although the right of communities to practice their culture and defend it
from unwanted appropriation is widely regarded as a human right, the
precise means by which this right can be defended and administered remains
uncertain. Brown argues that the very notion of ‘managing’ a society’s
multiple forms of collective expression entails a degree of objectification
that poses a potential threat to culture’s inherent (and necessary) fluidity.
His essay considers the challenge of finding an appropriate balance
between ethical considerations and the law of unintended consequences
in the vexed arena of heritage protection. Using brief case studies, Brown
highlights the tendency of heritage protection strategies to gravitate to top-
down, ‘patrimonial’ models of control that treat culture as a commodity.
He concludes by making the ethical case for more informal and flexible
approaches to heritage protection.
Geoffrey Belcher begins his essay ‘Values in World Heritage Sites’ by
considering the variety of World Heritage sites, from the symbolic value
of Auschwitz and Hiroshima to the beauty of the Taj Mahal and the Great
Barrier Reef. All these sites are selected by the Conservation Committee at
UNESCO. Even though the management of the sites is formally undertaken
by the national state party (DCMS in the case of the United Kingdom),
in practice it falls to local organisations. Belcher argues that the chain of
6 Cultural Heritage Ethics

responsibility from international to local levels creates various tensions, the

concept of World Heritage being informed by the ten UNESCO criteria at
the universal level, and by national and local aspirations at the area level.
In order to rationalise this, statements of ‘outstanding universal values’
are produced for each site, identifying the special qualities and also their
‘authenticity’ and ‘integrity’. But without a precise system of rules at the
international level, local agencies have to rely on national and local systems
such as town-planning legislation for protection. At present this legislation
in the UK does not fully encompass the listing and management of World
Heritage Sites. The result is that the simple, popular concept of World
Heritage is being de facto challenged in its application and administration.
Belcher’s essay fleshes out some of the problematic areas and identifies
opportunities for creating clearer guidelines in the future.
Having begun with a series of conceptual questions, the volume ends
on the legalistic note of Marie Cornu’s essay ‘Safeguarding Heritage: From
Legal Rights over Objects to Legal Rights for Individuals and Communities?’
There are numerous ways of regulating the connection between memory,
history and heritage and, in this respect, diversity rules. Cornu discusses
the second wave of laws on heritage protection, which have taken on board
wider concerns about development and integration. Cornu outlines the
process by which other fields of the law (environmental but also economic
law) are now part of cultural heritage law, a field originally created as an
autonomous and distinct body of legislation. Whilst positive outcomes are
likely to result from the intersection of different legal fields, there is also a
risk that the level of protection of cultural heritage sites may decrease.
The thirteen essays collectively cover questions relating to access (essays
1-2, 4-5, 7-11); acquisition (3, 8-10); antiquities (5-6, 9-10); apartheid (1);
archaeological practice (6-7); barbarism and plunder (3, 10-13); capitalism
(1, 3); celebration (1-3, 6, 10-12); citizenship (3-5, 11); colonialism and
post-colonialism (1, 3-6, 9-10); curatorship (3, 9-10); education (3-5, 8, 12);
enlightenment (3, 5, 7, 9); ethnology (3-4, 9, 11, 13); fear (2,7,9-10); hegemony
(3-4); historiography (1, 4-6); history (1, 3-4, 6-7, 9-13); human remains (7,
10-11, 13); integrity (7-8, 12, 13); intellectual property (11); jealousy (8-9);
legislation (4, 8, 13, 10); management (3-5, 7, 8-13); memory (1-5, 13); myth
(4, 6-7); nationalism (2, 4-6, 8, 10-11); nostalgia (1, 4, 12); ownership (1, 5-6,
8-11); policy (1-2, 4-5, 10-11); prejudice (3, 10); preservation (1, 4, 5, 7-8,
10-11, 13); pride (1, 3, 5-7); protection (1, 5, 7, 10-13); public interest (2-3, 7,
10-13); privatisation (3, 9-10); relics (3-4); religion (1-2, 4-6, 9); respect (4, 6-7,
 Introduction 7

9-10, 12-13); responsibility (1, 4-5, 7-8, 12-13); restitution and repatriation
(5-11, 13); restoration (4, 6-7, 10); revolution and dissent (3-5, 9); rights
(1, 5, 11-13); scholarship (6, 8); shame (1, 5, 10); slavery (1); stewardship
(5, 7, 19); technology (1, 3-5, 6-7); tourism (1, 3-5, 7-8,10-12); trusteeship
(4, 10); understanding (3-4, 6-7, 9-10, 12); UNESCO (4-5, 7, 10-13); and
world heritage sites and conventions (8, 11-13). Of telling but unplanned
significance is the fact that all thirteen essays mention war.
It would have been impossible to cover all the relevant examples of
cultural heritage, but the range of examples included across the volume is
sufficiently geographically diverse to include references to Afghanistan (2),
Australia (2, 7, 11-12), Bangladesh (6, 13), Belgium (12), Bolivia (1, 11-12),
Brazil (2, 11), Canada (2, 10-11), Chile (11-12), China (6, 10-11), the Czech
Republic (1), Cuba (1, 11), Denmark (1, 5, 10), Ecuador (11), Egypt (1, 3, 5-6,
8-10, 12-13), England (1, 2, 5, 10), Estonia (11), Ethiopia (10), Finland (1),
France (2, 6, 10, 13), Greece (1, 5, 8, 10, 13), India (1, 3-6, 9--12), Ireland (2, 10,
12), Israel (1, 6), Italy (1, 8-9, 10, 13), Japan (12-13), Kenya (11), Korea (10-
11, 13), Madagascar (1), Mali (4, 7, 11), Mexico (11-12), New Zealand (2, 7),
Nigeria (10), Norway (1, 10), Pakistan (6), Peru (11), Poland (1, 12), Russia
(1), Scotland (5, 10, 12), Senegal (12), South Africa (1, 4-6, 10-11), Spain (2,
12-13), Sri Lanka (4), Sweden (1, 6), Switzerland (1), Tunisia (13), Turkey
(11), the United States (2, 4-5, 7,10-13), and Wales (12).
The subject is far from exhausted however, and there remains much
ground to be covered. I would like to have been able to showcase
contributions from across even more disciplines, to have covered wider
geographical ground, and to have been able to include essays on additional
topics such as those of the digital humanities (from online collections to
3D printing of souvenirs and archaeological artefacts), the heritage of
morally tainted gifts, pollution as the counterpart of sacralisation, and the
distinction between the ethics of returning artefacts for preservation vis-à-
vis those of returning human remains often for destruction. But if we have
learned one thing from the ethics of cultural heritage it is not to let greed
infect our aspirations.
 I
MEANING AND MEMORY
 1. Culture, Heritage, and Ethics
Constantine Sandis 1

1. Introduction
Heritage is that which has been or may be inherited, regardless of its value.
Unfortunately, the term ‘heritage’ (the thirteenth-century English word
is derived from the Latin haeres, meaning heir or heiress) is nowadays
frequently used for purposes best described as touristic, to sell everything
from beer and tomatoes to cars, gardens, and hotels. It is possible to think
of some of this heritage as non-cultural, or perhaps even anti-cultural.
An even more plausible contender for this last set would be hooliganism,
yet this is unlikely to feature in British magazines about heritage such as
Heritage, Discover Britain, or British Heritage Magazine. And yet such anti-
cultural behaviour may be as much a part of Britain’s culture as Big Ben,
the Monarchy, Stilton cheese, the National Health Service, and Top of
the Pops — the sort of things celebrated in Danny Boyle’s 2012 Olympic
Ceremony Opening.
Heritage magazines may choose to focus on castles, lakes, and gardens
(and do so for ostensibly sound commercial and aesthetic reasons), but it
would be wrong to think of these paradigm cases as being definitive. On
the contrary, we should be questioning whether they are even as common

1 This essay greatly benefited from discussions with Geoffrey Belcher, Eleni Cubitt, Max
de Gaynesford, Alon Lischinsky, and Erasmus Mayr. It was presented in near-final form
at the Ethics, Museums and Archaeology workshop, Ashmolean Museum (Oxford),
3-4 April 2014, after which I made some improvements thanks to feedback from Anna
Bergqvist, Ivan Gaskell, Erin Kavanagh, and Andreas Pantazatos. Finally, thanks to
Candida Lord for careful proofreading which saved me from several embarrassments.

© Constantine Sandis, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0047.01

12 Cultural Heritage Ethics

as contemporary popular opinion portrays them to be. To this conceptual

mix we might wish to add the spurious distinction between so-called ‘high’
and ‘low’ culture. It is a mistake to think that cultural heritage is reserved
for the former, that it privileges opera over football, Shakespeare over
EastEnders, though we may of course choose to use terms like ‘culture’ in
a more technical, narrower, sense.

2. Achievement and Atrocity

In distinguishing heritage from history, David Lowenthal has influentially
argued that the former is a ‘celebration’ of the past.2 But one need only
think of the heritage of slavery to note that we should not assume that one’s
cultural heritage is always, or even usually, celebrated. Even when it is, it
doesn’t follow that the celebration in question is of the past, as opposed to a
continuity that remains present. Nor need it be the case that the celebration
is a justified one.
French Law explicitly allows for the production of foie gras as part of
the country’s ‘cultural and gastronomic heritage’. By contrast, in July 2012
the state of California banned the production of foie gras, implementing a
$1000 per-day penalty for serving it. Production has already been banned
in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland,
Israel, Switzerland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The city of Chicago
banned its sale in 2006, only to have it overturned by then mayor Richard
M. Daley. More surprisingly, perhaps, Germany’s Nazi Government had
banned foie gras production in 1933, as part of a wider animal protection
law signed by Hitler which began with the statement that ‘it is forbidden
to unnecessarily torment or roughly mishandle an animal’. I do not intend
to voice my own views on the ethics of food production here, but only
to note that this much-bandied phrase ‘cultural heritage’ can include past,
present, and future practices that are arguably immoral, from the exploits
of Alexander the Great to fox-hunting and page three of The Sun.3 This is so

2 D. Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), p. x.
3 S. Peck, ‘Why does a Tory MP think that getting your tits out is a “National Institution”?’,
The Telegraph, 10 December 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/sex/10508530/
Boobs-on-Page-3-Why-does-a-Tory-MP-think-that-getting-your-tits-out-is-a-national-
institution.html (unless otherwise specified, all links cited in this volume were active on
23 June 2014).
 Culture, Heritage, and Ethics 13

even when the heritage in question is celebrated (I shall later look at cases of
heritage that is perceived as being tainted).
Though it may not be everybody’s cup of tea, Jennie Bristow is right to
claim that ‘page Three is as much a part of British culture as a cup of tea’.4
The positive judgment implied is, however, questionable. Pace Bristow,
being part of one’s culture does not magically bestow a thing with positive
value; it does not make it worthy of preservation. In the case in point, I
believe we should regret that The Sun (let alone its third page) is part of
our culture at all and take appropriate measures to change this state of
affairs. But whatever one makes of this specific case, the point I wish to
emphasise in this context is that even if anti-page-three campaigns were to
prove successful, the page would remain part of British cultural heritage.
Heritage matters, but removing something from one’s culture does not
eliminate it from one’s heritage. The acknowledgment of heritage forms
part of the ethics of remembering, and it is important to remember both the
good and the bad, atrocities as well as achievements. But at times we also
have a duty to forget such things, for example when this is the best way
of forging new relationships that avoid the perils of nostalgia. Lowenthal
quotes a native American complaining that ‘white people don’t know what
to remember and what to forget, what to let go of and what to preserve’.5
Arguably, there is a corresponding right to be forgotten which in some
countries allows for criminal records to be erased once convictions are
spent. The European Court of Justice has recently appealed to such a right
(convincing or otherwise) in relation to online privacy.6
The duty to remember something is a duty to preserve it in memory,
be it individual or collective (such duties are frequently non-teleological
in that they need not be driven by the prospect of some future good).
This obligation must not be conflated with a duty to preserve its actual
existence in the world. English Heritage’s Sites of Memory, for example,
mark the story of both the Atlantic slave trade and its abolition, including
controversial benefactors such as Edward Colston (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2).

4 J. Bristow, ‘Page three girls and porn-again feminists’, 22 November 2010, http://www.
spiked-online.com/newsite/article/9922
5 Lowenthal, 1998, p. 29.
6 ‘The European Court of Justice forces Google to remove links to some personal
information’, The Economist, 17 May 2014, http://www.economist.com/news/business/2160
2239-european-court-justice-forces-google-remove-links-some-personal-information-cut
14 Cultural Heritage Ethics

Fig. 1.1 Blue glass sugar bowl inscribed in gilt ‘EAST INDIA SUGAR not
made by SLAVES’, Bristol, 1820-30. British Museum.

Fig. 1.2 Statue of Edward Colston by John Cassidy,

erected in 1895 on Colston Avenue, Bristol.
 Culture, Heritage, and Ethics 15

We must not forget the legacies of those who accumulated vast wealth
from the trade any more than we must forget the human beings who were
traded and the anti-slavery campaigners. Each has left their own mark on
history, for better or worse.7
The distinction between what should be preserved and what is best
gone (but not forgotten) rests on the reasons why we ought to remember.
When Margaret Thatcher unveiled the English Heritage blue plaque for
Nancy Astor in 1987 (Figure 1.3), this was intended to honour Astor for
being the first woman to take a seat in Parliament. The plaque scheme
itself was introduced in 1866 by the (now Royal) Society of Arts with the
ambiguously-worded aim of increasing ‘the public estimation for places
which have been the abodes of men [sic] who have made England what it is’.
Strictly speaking, one may think that Astor’s home should be remembered
in this way without believing that she personally deserves any honour.

Fig. 1.3 English Heritage blue plaque for Nancy Astor.

It is impossible to codify the precise correct relation between past atrocities

and present duties. There are sound reasons for wishing to preserve
the Roman Colosseum, but not the practices related to it. These reasons
are largely aesthetic and historical, but are not primarily to do with
remembrance. Our duty to preserve Auschwitz, by contrast, has nothing to
do with any architectural merit. The line of taste, in matters that we might
term ‘atrocity heritage’, is easily crossed however. For example, while
we should be doing much more to commemorate victims of rape, Jerzy

7 
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/discover/people-and-places the-slave-trade-and-
abolition/sites-of-memory
16 Cultural Heritage Ethics

Bohdan Szumczyk’s life-sized sculpture Komm, Frau (‘Come, woman’)

– depicting a Russian soldier raping a heavily pregnant woman – is an
extremely inappropriate way of doing so, even if its creator did intend
it as a political statement condemning rape.8 Again, it is important to get
right the reasons why it is inappropriate. It is one thing to agree with the
Polish journalist Marek Gorlikowski that ‘this type of monument is far
from the way to commemorate the victims of rape’ and quite another to
agree with the Russian ambassador to Poland Alexander Alexeyev, when
he denounces the monument as having ‘defiled the memory of 600,000
Soviet servicemen who gave their lives in the fight for the freedom and
the independence of Poland’.9 This may seem obvious, but it did not stop
the Huffington post from claiming that Gorlikowski’s sentiments ‘echoed’
those of Alexeyev.10 There are no hard and fast rules about what counts as
appropriate commemoration any more than there are about what counts
as good art. But the fact that there is not one right way of commemorating
atrocities does not mean that all attempts are of equal merit.
Some years ago, the white South African philosopher Samantha
Vice caused a stir by claiming that she was ashamed of being white.11
Summarising her initial article, Vice writes that she ‘explored the moral
burden that whiteness places on us and was met by a similar outbreak
of self-righteous outrage’, suggesting that ‘white people should cultivate
humility and silence, given their morally compromised position in the
continuing racial and economic injustices of this country’. She continues:

[I]t is appropriate for whites to feel shame at their white identity, given its
destructive legacy and the way it continues to shape us. Of course, we did
not choose to be born white but that does not stop us benefiting from it
still – in ways that are far subtler than merely social and economic. We move
easily about a world made in our own image, validating our own values
and beliefs and sustaining our own comfort, unimpeded by the kinds of
structural and systemic challenges black people face daily. That is something
to feel ashamed about.

8 A photograph of the statue taken by the artist is available at http://www.openbook

publishers.com/isbn/9781783740673#resources
9  http://www.rusemb.pl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=729%3Ao-in
cydencie-w-gdasku&catid=1%3Aaktualnoci&Itemid=5&lang=ru
10 ‘Polish rape sculpture draws international backlash’, 18 October 2013, http://www.
huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/18/jerzy-bohdan-szumczyk_n_4123355.html
11 S. Vice, ‘Why my opinions on whiteness touched a nerve’, 2 September 2011, http://
mg.co.za/article/2011-09-02-why-my-opinions-on-whiteness-touched-a-nerve
 Culture, Heritage, and Ethics 17

Vice has been accused of being stupid, neurotic, self-hating, attention-

seeking, and blinded by ‘womanly political views’. But her point was that
we must sometimes move beyond what we might call the heritage ethics of
memory. She writes:

We forget the vast background of institutions, state support and opportunities

that made our success possible; we forget that we do not develop in a
vacuum or create ourselves ex nihilo. Apartheid’s dubious gift to whites was
the chance to live comfortably, securely and with opportunities for creative
development and worldly success. Apartheid cushioned whites at the
expense of making life very hard for others – and the effects of this injustice
are still present … So, however attached whites are to this country – and part
of my point is that, whether we admit it or not, we are fundamentally attached
to its sad history and legacy – and however much we care for its success, we
shouldn’t feel completely comfortable. The refusal to acknowledge one’s
luck is a manifestation of the careless complacence and arrogance that make
whites feel entitled to these advantages – and convinced that their own
efforts alone made their success possible.

Sometimes the sins of our parents should be inherited not only via
preservation in memory, but through shame and activism.

3. Heritage Rights from Feta to Burka

In the opening chapter of his classic 1961 study What Is History?, E.H. Carr
rightly noted that not all facts and events are historical. Pope John Paul II’s
1997 visit to Cuba is a historical fact, but my own visit in 2006, alas, is not.
We might similarly ask why an object or event forms part of some heritage,
be it the world’s, a specific nation’s, or that of some other specified set
of people. As with historical facts, such matters are not fixed across time.
There was a moment in time when it seemed to some that Oasis might
become as central a part of British popular culture as The Beatles, but that
moment is long gone (Lowenthal is right in his assertion that we cannot
simply equate heritage with history).
Even when we are confident in perceiving something as ‘cultural
heritage’, how are we to decide to whom this belongs to? The question
seems to imply that some people may have special (though typically not
exclusive) ownership rights to it over others. There is an obvious (albeit
trivial) sense in which ‘British Heritage’ belongs to the British, but what
does this actually translate to pragmatically? Do the British have some kind
of special right to eat pork pies and photograph Westminster Abbey? It
18 Cultural Heritage Ethics

is one thing to reserve the name ‘Champagne’ for products of a certain

geographical region and ‘Feta’ for those of another,12 but do the French have
a special right to champagne and the Eiffel Tower, the Greeks to Feta and
the Parthenon? And what about coffee, which we associate more with Italy
than the American and African countries which actually grow the beans?
Such questions are comic, in part because all heritage is universal in
the sense that we should all be free to access it if possible, if not always for
free. It is not always viable for everyone to access everything, or to do so
easily and at little or no cost: nobody thinks that the people of Greece have
a right to free Feta cheese; by contrast it takes a libertarian like the Nestlé
Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe to deny that there is a universal right
to free clean water.13 So this kind of rights-speech is really a misleading
way of talking about access priorities. The criteria here are a mix of the
practical and ideological: if only X amount of people can visit a monument
a year, should priority not be given to the local community? In some
countries locals pay a lower (or no) fare for entrance to sites than other
visitors do. These others, or ‘other others’, used to be called tourists, viz.
they who tour around. But the word has become pejorative and sites are
increasingly opting for the gentler – less discriminatory – term ‘visitors’.
But the policy of giving preferential rates to local residents is not always
limited to ‘visitor sites’. In Egypt, for example, this policy extends to
commodities like hotel rooms. And everywhere we have import taxes. In
the case of transportable physical objects the key access issue is that of
location, location, location. Unfortunately, questions about access priorities
are typically overshadowed by legal and ethical concerns about ownership,
as in the case of the Parthenon sculptures.
Cultural heritage rights – be they moral and/or legal – are rarely human
rights, but there are exceptions. So, while it is absurd to view the right to
have free or affordable access to French cinema as a human right, if there is
a right to wear a burka (be it for religious or cultural reasons), this will be
a human right. The issue is certainly not one of limited availability. Unlike

12 See, for example: ‘Greece wins exclusive rights to market Feta in Canada’, 18 October
2013, http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite2_1_18/10/2013_523829
13 Nestlé have since changed their official position, though it is difficult not to adopt a
cynical stance towards such revisionary ‘clarifications’: http://www.nestle.com/aboutus/
ask-nestle/answers/nestle-chairman-peter-brabeck-letmathe-believes-water-is-a-
human-right
 Culture, Heritage, and Ethics 19

some moral rights, all human rights ought to be legal rights. Cultural
heritage rights, then, do not necessarily deserve legislative support. This
will largely depend on their importance. We may wish to give certain
groups of people near-absolute legal rights to burkas, and priority access
to the pyramids, but no special right whatsoever to, say, caviar.
Where there are rights there are also duties, such as those of preservation,
in memory or actuality. These too will be constrained by resources such
as space, money, manpower, time, and so on. Mistakes of judgment, here
as elsewhere, are inevitable. A salient example is that of the BBC prior to
the Heritage Collection initiative. The Heritage Collection gathers radio and
television productions, artwork, props, and paraphernalia. These have
been largely compiled from personal collections, bequests by former staff,
and the BBC Archive Treasure Hunt (a public appeal to recover pre-1980s
productions that had been lost) as until then the BBC had a questionable
policy of wiping old videotapes for re-use, with no apparent realisation of
their historical significance.
Unfortunately, practical issues frequently end up bringing heritage
concerns too close for comfort to those of the tourist industry. Tristan Platt
has expressed this worry well:

… the funding of Bolivian Worlds by Lufthansa, and of Madagascar, Island

of the Ancestors by Air Madagascar (both airlines clearly interested in
boosting their tourist bookings to each country), … reminded me of the
uncomfortable continuum between ethnography and the travel-brochure …
Could I persuade myself that these artefacts were in fact to be perceived as
‘ambassadors’ of their peoples to the English capital of Britain?

This passage serves as a stark reminder of the multiple national and

commercial interests which lie behind claims to heritage. Separating these
from ethical concerns has become as difficult to manage in practice as it is easy
to do in theory. But some degrees of compromise are more acceptable than
others. When people like Brabeck-Letmathe make statements such as ‘access
to water is not a public right’14 and shorelines become increasingly open to
commercial development, we should consider carefully the increasingly
close connection between commerce and heritage. As the heritage industry
grows, there is a serious danger that it will purchase anything of value and
sell access to it at rates that only the privileged few can afford.

14 See note 13 above.

20 Cultural Heritage Ethics

4. Outro
Given the range of questions and complexities surrounding heritage, I am
sceptical about the possibility of a unified account of it.15 Heritage, cultural
or otherwise, is not always good. It may be preserved in fundamentally
different, indeed contradictory, ways. The range of rights relating to it is by
no means a straightforward one. This elucidatory essay has been written
with the faith that ‘a repertoire might be more useful than a conviction’.16
This is not to say that we do not even know what cultural heritage ethics is,
but only that exploring these concepts is an integral part of it. I have barely
sketched what even a partial conceptual cartography of the area might look
like. Nonetheless, I hope to have marked some of the numerous pitfalls
which face the bolder theorist.

15 Cf. L. Smith, The Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge, 2006), ch. 1.

16 Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. xvi.
 2. Poppy Politics: Remembrance
of Things Present
James Fox

In October 2011 the English football association requested permission

from FIFA (the International Football Federation) for its national team to
wear poppies on their shirts when they played Spain the following month.
Poppies had been worn across Britain every November for the best part of
a century, having been an integral part of the nation’s remembrance of its
war dead since 1921. FIFA, however, was unmoved by such traditions, and
immediately rejected the request. In an official statement the organisation
asserted that in line with its existing regulations, players’ equipment could
not ‘carry any political, religious or commercial messages’ for fear that they
would ‘jeopardise the neutrality of football’.1
The decision triggered an outcry. The British press published a series of
enraged editorials, and before long politicians took up the cause as well. On
Tuesday 8 November the government’s sports minister Hugh Robertson
told FIFA that the poppy was ‘not religious or political in any way’. Later
that day Prime Minister David Cameron declared that it was ‘absurd’ to
think that ‘wearing a poppy to remember those who have given their lives
for our freedom is a political act’. And only hours after that, Prince William
wrote directly to FIFA, stating that the poppy was a ‘universal symbol of
remembrance’ with ‘no political, religious or commercial connotations’.2

1 FIFA, ‘Regulation 54.1’, Equipment Regulations, 1 April 2010, http://www.fifa.com/

aboutfifa/officialdocuments/doclists/laws.html
2 ‘Prince William demands Fifa u-turn on poppy ban’, BBC News, 9 November 2011, http://
www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/15643295

© James Fox, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0047.02

22 Cultural Heritage Ethics

Under ever increasing pressure, FIFA – whose reputation had barely

recovered from a recent corruption scandal – quickly capitulated. On
Wednesday 9 November it gave permission for poppies to be worn,
with the proviso that they were attached to black armbands rather than
embroidered directly onto players’ shirts.3 Yet when the match was played
three days later, poppies were not just restricted to armbands: a poppy
wreath was placed on the pitch before kick-off; players wore poppy-
embroidered training tops and poppy-embossed anthem jackets; poppies
were attached to scoreboards and advertising hoardings; and poppy-sellers
were positioned in conspicuous locations around the stadium.4
The debacle is a highly revealing case study in cultural heritage for
two reasons. First, it showed that in less than a century, Remembrance
had established itself as such a powerful cultural force that any challenge
to it – however trivial it may have seemed – had the potential to cause a
national furore. Second, the incident indicated that most Britons considered
Remembrance to be a resolutely apolitical practice – little more than an
ethical duty to the dead. This chapter, however, will take issue with these
sentiments. By exploring the origins, development and current heritage
rhetoric surrounding the remembrance poppy, I will demonstrate that the
poppy has always been, and continues to be, a profoundly political symbol.

***

Most accounts of the remembrance poppy begin in the spring of 1915. The
first winter of the Great War was just winding to a close, and the battlefields
of the Western front were wastelands. Pastures had been turned to mud,
wildlife had all but been obliterated, and underneath the agitated earth
lay the bodies of countless dead servicemen. Nevertheless, as the weather
improved through April and May of that year, something unexpected
happened: red corn poppies began to bloom in huge numbers across the
fields. It is believed, somewhat ironically, that the season’s unusually
abundant crop had been germinated by the very bombardments that had
wreaked so much natural damage elsewhere.
Poppies, of course, had long possessed symbolic properties. Since
antiquity they had been associated with sleep, death and resurrection. So

3 FIFA, ‘Statement on England shirts and the use of the poppy’, 5 November 2011,
http://www.fifa.com/aboutfifa/organisation/media/news/newsid=1537881/index.html
4 ‘FA Statement: Remembrance Day’, 9 November 2011, http://englandfans.thefa.com/ef/
pages/news.aspx?id=207e49d4-327a-4d92-b4d3-47bbf126d54c
 Poppy Politics: Remembrance of Things Present 23

when one amateur poet saw the flower blossoming across Flanders, he set
about reconfiguring its ancient connotations for the new wartime context.
Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae was a Canadian medical officer serving
in Ypres. He first noticed the region’s poppies in May 1915 while burying a
friend who had been killed in action. Shortly afterwards, McCrae composed
a poem, which he called In Flanders Fields.5 The poem appeared later that
year in Punch magazine, and before long was widely known and admired.
Inspired by the funeral he had just attended, McCrae started the poem by
juxtaposing the death of men with the birth of the poppies:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark out place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

McCrae’s intention was clear. Like many poets before him, he was invoking
pastoral imagery as an antithesis to the war. It is in fact tempting to read
his poppies as pacifistic symbols: of nature defeating man, peace defeating
war, and life defeating death. This interpretation, however, is dramatically
disproved by reading on. In the second verse, McCrae establishes the poem
as the voice of the dead, and then, in the third and final verse, he recounts
the message they wish to communicate to the living:

Take up our quarrel with the foe;

To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high,
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

It is, by any reasoning, an abrupt shift in tone, for it is here that an

initially elegiac text is transformed into something altogether more
belligerent. McCrae’s interred soldiers are, after all, calling on the living
to avenge their deaths. For this reason, his poem does not condemn war
but legitimises it; does not demand the conflict to end but demands that

5 For the full and often disputed story behind the poem, see John F. Prescott, In Flanders
Fields: The Story of John McCrae (Erin, ON: Boston Mills Press, 1985).
24 Cultural Heritage Ethics

it continues; and though McCrae mourns the loss of life, he calls for yet
more sacrifice to come.
John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields is responsible for first establishing
the cultural connection between poppies and the Great War. However,
its author deployed the former as a smokescreen behind which he could
legitimise the latter. Written early in the war when hopes were still high,
volunteers were still needed, and the outcome of the conflict was far from
decided, his poem was little more than a propagandistic recruitment call.6
It is therefore hardly surprising that his words – and his poppy imagery
– were soon enlisted in North America and Great Britain to sell war bonds
and recruit volunteers. The poppy’s wartime origins were nowhere near as
peaceful as we often like to think.
If anyone was responsible for converting McCrae’s propagandistic
poppy into today’s remembrance poppy, it was the American academic
and humanitarian Moina Michael. Michael had read In Flanders Fields as
the allies were finalising their victory in November 1918, and she was
convinced that the conflict’s outcome had vindicated its author’s rallying
cry. She even went so far as to draft a poem in response to McCrae’s
interred soldiers, writing that the victors had ‘caught the torch’ that they
had thrown and ‘kept the faith’ when others had lost it. So while her
poem may well be a heartfelt salute to the dead, it is also a defence of their
sacrifice: Michael, in short, was implying that the war’s many casualties
were justified because they had been in the service of victory. And that is
why her poem, though now called We Shall Keep the Faith, was referred to
by contemporaries as The Victory Emblem.7
Shortly after composing The Victory Emblem, Michael purchased twenty-
five silk poppies at a New York department store and distributed them
in honour of the dead. Her memorial flowers soon caught on around the
world: from the United States in November 1918, they arrived in France in
October 1920, and Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain in
1921. Tellingly, all of these countries were victors. The poppy never found
its way into the cultural practices of the war’s defeated nations, and that
may be because the only men whose sacrifice was believed to deserve such
a symbol were those who had fought on the ‘right’ side. Poppies, in other

6 An example of this interpretation is found in Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern
Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 248-50.
7 See Moina Michael, The Miracle Flower: The Story of the Flanders Field Memorial Poppy
(Philadelphia, PA: Dorrance and Co., 1941).
 Poppy Politics: Remembrance of Things Present 25

words, had been converted into victory medals. And if doubts still linger
over the partisan politics of the memorial poppy, one only need name the
person who introduced it to Britain: Field Marshall Douglas Haig – a man
who had a vested interest in justifying the conflict to whose victory he had
so controversially contributed.
The first part of this chapter has proved that it is far from easy to claim
that the remembrance poppy was born out of a universal and apolitical
heritage moment. It was conceived when the war was still young and when
volunteers still had to be recruited; it was deployed during the following
three years to mobilise, raise morale, and legitimise the increasingly
unpopular conflict; and in the war’s aftermath it was reformulated as a
symbol that commemorated the Allied dead precisely as it celebrated
the Allied victory. And thus, for all of its pacifistic associations today, the
poppy was a thoroughly bellicose symbol from the start: a medal of honour
as well as a bleeding wound. But these associations did not expire with the
conflict. In the decades after the end of the Great War, the poppy acquired
yet more political significance, and yet more public prominence.
One way to demonstrate the poppy’s growing popularity through the
decades is to examine the statistics for the Royal British Legion’s annual
poppy appeal. They reveal that its campaign has raised ever-increasing
sums across the century of its existence, from £106,000 in 1921 to a
staggering £40 million in 2011. These figures suggest that despite receding
ever further into the past, the rituals of remembrance that originated with
the First World War are more relevant than ever. The question that remains
is why? Why, after so much else has happened, after so many other seminal
events have come and gone, do the British people remain so fixated on the
Flanders poppy? The answer, I think, lies less in the wars of the past than it
does in the wars of the present.
The British Legion’s statistics show that its poppy appeals have nearly
always been more successful when they have taken place during ongoing
conflicts. The pattern began with the Second World War. Through the 1920s
and most of the 1930s, the British Legion’s campaign income had grown
only modestly. In the war years, however, that figure almost doubled,
from £578,188 in 1938 to over £1 million in 1945. A comparable leap, of
almost twenty percent, was recorded between 1981 and 1982, during the
Falklands War; and there was another substantial increase between 1989
(£11.9 million) and 1991 (£13.1 million), the years that spanned the first
Gulf War. More recently, figures have followed the same trend. At the very
26 Cultural Heritage Ethics

beginning of the millennium, poppy appeal income remained relatively

static at between £20 million and £21 million each year; in the second half
of the decade, when major wars were being fought in both Afghanistan and
Iraq, that number virtually doubled, to £40 million.8
The Royal British Legion’s figures should not be surprising. After all,
its poppy appeal commemorates those who have died in all modern and
ongoing conflicts, and its funds support active servicemen and living
veterans. Moreover, in order to boost its public relevance and thus its
financial success, the organisation makes frequent and explicit connections
between the remembrance of past wars and the honouring of present ones.
In one official statement, it claimed the following:

We remember those who fought for our freedom during the two World Wars.
But we also mourn and honour those who have lost their lives in more recent
conflicts. Today, with troops on duty in Afghanistan and other trouble spots
around the world, Remembrance … [is] … as important as ever.9

The sentiment is doubtless honourable, and the British Legion’s fund-

raising figures confirm that it has also been highly effective. Nevertheless,
at the same time the passage suggests that the poppy has become a
problematic nexus in which past and present, poetry and policy, are
uneasily intertwined.
In recent years, the poppy’s linkage between past wars and present wars
has proved particularly controversial. With the outbreak of unpopular
conflicts like those in Afghanistan and Iraq, many Britons came to question
the political role that the poppy appeared to be playing. Some claimed that
by connecting the ‘justifiable’ world wars of the past to the ‘unjustifiable’
anti-terrorist wars of the present, the poppy enabled the former to legitimise
the latter. In November 2010 a group of six veterans, who had between
them served in Northern Ireland, Dhofar, the Falklands, Macedonia,
Afghanistan and Iraq, went so far as to write a letter to the British press:

The poppy appeal is once again subverting Armistice Day. A day that should
be about peace and remembrance is turned into a month-long drum roll of
support for current wars … The public are being urged to wear a poppy
in support of ‘our Heroes’ … There is nothing heroic about fighting in an
unnecessary conflict.10

8 These figures were given to me by the Royal British Legion.

9 The Royal British Legion, ‘The Nation Remembers’, http://www.britishlegion.org.uk/
remembrance/the-nation-remembers/
10 ‘Poppies and “Heroes”’, The Guardian, 5 November 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/
uk/2010/nov/05/poppies-and-heroes-remembrance-day
 Poppy Politics: Remembrance of Things Present 27

This view became so widespread that in the following November the

influential ‘Stop the War Coalition’ re-introduced white poppies as an
alternative to red poppies. While the red poppy marked only British
military casualties, the white poppy – with its traditionally pacifistic
connotations – commemorated all humans who had died as a result of all
conflicts, as an anti-war symbol.11
The anti-war criticisms of the poppy are not always entirely accurate.
The assertion that remembrance was initially about peace and was only
recently ‘subverted’ is contradicted by the poppy’s bellicose origins;
similarly, the claim that British politicians ‘hijacked’ the symbol to justify
their own wars remains difficult to prove.12 After all, the British Legion –
which administers the poppy appeal – remains steadfastly independent of
government. Nevertheless, the very fact that these debates have occurred
is proof that the poppy has acquired a raft of controversial political
associations. They also reflect the fact that, whether by design or not,
the poppy has indeed emboldened the warmongers’ cause: for how can
one honour the men and women who have died in war and not end up
endorsing the conflicts in which they have fought?
The poppy is now such a pregnant symbol of heritage that its ideological
reverberations have spread far beyond debates about the legitimacy of
individual conflicts; they have come to invade and influence the many fault-
lines elsewhere in British society. Immigrant groups, particularly Muslims,
have started to reject the poppy as a symbol of western imperialism. At one
demonstration in November 2010, the group ‘Muslims against Crusades’
even went to the lengths of burning a large model poppy as the rest of
the nation entered its annual two-minute silence.13 At the same time, right-
wing groups like the British National Party and the English Defence League
have appropriated the poppy as a symbol of militant nationalism. Indeed,
following FIFA’s refusal to permit English footballers to wear poppies in
2011, two members of the English Defence League climbed on to the roof of

11 ‘Stop the War bids to reclaim 11.11.11 Remembrance Day for peace’, 6 November 2011,
http://web.archive.org/web/20120312083217/http://stopwar.org.uk/index.php/united-
kingdom/920-reclaiming-111111-remembrance-day-for-peace-not-war
12 These arguments were made by the Master of the Queen’s Music, Sir Peter Maxwell
Davies. ‘Remembrance Sunday: Queen’s composer says he will boycott poppies’, The
Telegraph, 14 November 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8132185/
Remembrance-Sunday-Queens-composer-says-he-will-boycott-poppies.html
13 A. Bloxham, ‘Muslims clash with police after burning poppy in anti-Armistice protest’,
The Telegraph, 11 November 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-
order/8126357/Muslims-clash-with-police-after-burning-poppy-in-anti-Armistice-Day-
protest.html
28 Cultural Heritage Ethics

FIFA’s headquarters in Zurich and brandished a banner that read: ‘English

Defence League: How dare FIFA disrespect our war dead and wounded’.14
The poppy is surely most controversial in Northern Ireland. Here, the
British Army has been a divisive institution for decades, having played an
often violent role in policing clashes between Unionists and Nationalists
since 1969. For this reason, the high-profile commemoration of British
servicemen has only intensified the rancour between the two groups. Most
Nationalists consider the poppy to be deeply offensive because, as Revd
Tomas Walsh has claimed, many of the soldiers it honours had ‘colluded
with loyalist murder squads … and killed hundreds of innocent Irish
people’.15 In fact, Remembrance has been such an inflammatory symbol of
British power in Ireland that in 1987 the Irish Republican Army targeted
it specifically, detonating a bomb at the Enniskillen war memorial on
Remembrance Sunday and killing twelve people. Yet in Northern Ireland
the poppy means much more than simply an attitude to the British army;
it has become a powerful marker of identity in a region where identity
is so fiercely contested: Unionists embrace it as an emblem of Britishness,
Protestantism and Monarchism, while Nationalists reject it as an assertion
of their Irishness, Catholicism and Republicanism.
Poppies do not only mediate identity at the political extremes; they
are custodians of national heritage and identity in the mainstream as
well. The paper flower may well remind British people of the nation’s
darkest moments, but it also reminds them of the nation’s finest moments:
the hard-won victories of the First World War; the Battle of Britain; the
D-Day landings – all of which have become integral components of British
national identity. This is surely why, when politicians defended the poppy
following FIFA’s initial ruling, their phrases were soaked in such patriotism.
Immediately after claiming that the poppy was not political ‘in any way’,
the government’s sport minister Hugh Robertson declared that it was
nonetheless ‘a display of national pride, just like wearing your country’s
football shirt’.16 His argument was as perplexing as it was revealing, not least

14 ‘Poppy row: English Defence League climb onto roof of FIFA HQ’, The Mirror, 9
November 2011, http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/poppy-row-english-defence-
league-277327
15 Revd Tomas Walsh, ‘Lest we forget who they honour’, Irish Independent, 14 November 2007,
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/letters/lest-we-forget-who-they-honour-1218939.
html
16 ‘Prince William demands Fifa u-turn on poppy ban’, BBC News, 9 November 2011, http://
www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/15643295
 Poppy Politics: Remembrance of Things Present 29

because it is patently incorrect to think of ‘national pride’ as an apolitical

sentiment. Moreover, by likening poppies to football shirts Robertson was
implying that the former, like the latter, was the uniform of a patriotic and
competitive team that its supporters cheered on at the expense of others.
His words thus endorsed what they had intended to refute: that beneath a
thin façade of universal grief and quiet humility, the poppy remained the
red badge of a belligerent nationalism.
The FIFA scandal reveals one more political dimension of the poppy:
that much-pilloried bugbear of political correctness. In recent years
poppy-wearing has become an increasingly ubiquitous cultural practice.
In Britain, television presenters rarely appear on camera without them
in the month of November; politicians have started wearing them earlier
and earlier every year (and have at times been humiliated by doing so
before the official start of the British Legion’s appeal); and as the FIFA row
demonstrated, even sportsmen now seem unable to compete without them.
The last development is particularly recent: indeed, when the English
football team played Brazil at the same time in November two years earlier,
the poppies that in 2011 seemed so essential were neither requested nor
worn. It is, then, only in the last few years that poppies have fully tightened
their grip on British cultural life. While this ubiquity is undeniably good
news for the Royal British Legion, it does cast some doubt on the politics
of Remembrance. It is not only that in such a climate individuals might
wear poppies for performative rather than contemplative reasons; it is also
that the increasingly obligatory nature of poppy-wearing sits uneasily with
the ‘freedom’ for which the wars it commemorates were allegedly fought.
Indeed, one disgruntled British journalist famously described the pressure
to fall into line as nothing short of ‘poppy fascism’.17
This brief essay has shown that in spite of the many claims to the
contrary, the poppy is a potent political symbol. It was born out of a desire
to promote, prolong and propagandise the Great War, and in the conflict’s
aftermath it was reconfigured as a medal of triumph that celebrated the
Allied victory. As the First World War receded into the past, the poppy
acquired affiliations with the agendas of succeeding governments, and
in the new millennium it is believed to have helped legitimise unpopular

17 Paul Revoir, ‘I won’t surrender to “Poppy Fascism”: C4 News host Jon Snow refuses to
bow to viewer demand to wear the emblem’, Daily Mail, 3 November 2010, http://www.
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1326063/Jon-Snow-poppy-fascism-row-C4-News-host-
refuses-surrender.html
30 Cultural Heritage Ethics

conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet the poppy’s political connotations

have spread far beyond war. In an increasingly diverse Britain, it has
been violently appropriated and violently rejected as fringe groups define
themselves for and against mainstream British values. Conversely, in the
mainstream itself the poppy has become a focus for patriotic sentiments
that cannot easily be expressed in other ways. Finally, this essay has shown
that in recent years, Remembrance has strengthened its grip on the nation’s
cultural practices. In the process, poppy-wearing has become as much
about political correctness and public performance as it has been about the
remembrance of the dead. The poppy’s meanings have evidently changed
since John McCrae saw it blossoming in the fields of Flanders, but that little
red flower continues to feed off the carnage of a catastrophic century.
 3. The Meaning of the Public
in an Age of Privatisation
Benjamin Ramm

And we rebuild our cities, not dream of islands.

W.H. Auden, ‘Paysage Moralisé’

In an interview with The Sunday Times in 1981, Margaret Thatcher declared

her intention: ‘Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and
soul’. The culture of competition that drove the New Right’s revolution may
not have altered our souls, but it did change how we perceive ourselves, at
least in relation to our fellow citizens. This chapter will explore how aspects
of civic culture have taken on radical meaning in the age of neoliberalism,
and consider how we can rediscover the ‘civic soul’.
To diagnose the crisis of the public, it is necessary to understand why,
in recent decades, the private has become the dominant sphere of meaning.
The radical ideas harnessed by the New Right were incubated during the
social upheavals of the twentieth century, prompted by democracy and
catalysed by technology. As trust in elites declined, the civic notions
associated with Victorian society, such as duty and sacrifice, came to be
regarded as (self-) deceptions: at best naïveté – the ‘delusion’ of altruism – at
worst coercion, the reinforcing of existing social hierarchies. The notion of
a ‘public’ consensus was rejected as an imposition of elite order, inculcated
by an educational system based on deference. Instead of nurturing curiosity

© Benjamin Ramm, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0047.03

32 Cultural Heritage Ethics

and critical thinking, schools were accused of narrowing and disciplining;

of creating subjects – ‘another brick in the wall’ – rather than citizens.
Against this austere and conformist public culture, the ‘private’
represented a realm of sincerity and self-expression. Auden himself had
pined for an Age of Intimacy: ‘Private faces in public places / Are wiser
and nicer / Than public faces in private places’. Moreover, it was becoming
clear that bureaucracy – the promise of a rational public system, in Saint-
Simon’s words, ‘replacing the government of persons by the administration
of things’ – had failed: state socialism and state capitalism alike had proved
not to be a political science. Bureaucracy promised to liberate society from
the unpredictability of politics and the drudgery of a mechanised economy,
but its systems created their own unforeseen irrationalities, and a degree of
alienation and monotony as extreme as that produced by the unregulated
market. Against the ‘hegemony of the public’, embodied by an oppressive
state architecture, the private became the domain of the human: individual
and consensual.
The term ‘revolution’ is overused in the political context; rarely does
it signify ‘the world turned upside down’. Yet in relocating meaning
away from the public realm, the New Right overthrew the central tenet
of Enlightenment thought: that we find meaning in our interaction with,
and commitment to, the civic. The historical development of the ‘public’, a
sphere of free association and exchange, altered the perception of individual
identity and emphasised the social aspect of liberation: far from being a
solipsistic pursuit – the monastic cultivation of the soul for salvation – self-
realisation demanded civic emancipation. At the core of this vision was a
generational optimism, formulated by Hegel and celebrated by Trotsky:

Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will
become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more
musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average
human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And
above this ridge new peaks will rise.1

This renewed interest in the civic drew the theorists of the Enlightenment
back to the classical models from which citizenship derived. For the ancient
Greeks, declining to take part in public life was a mark of dishonour and

1 Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (1924), ed. William Keach, trans. Rose Strunsky
(Chicago, IL: Haymarket, 2005), p. 207.
 The Meaning of the Public in an Age of Privatisation 33

a sign of immaturity. The word ‘idiot’ is derived from the Greek διώτης
[idiōtēs], denoting ‘a private citizen’, one concerned primarily with his or
her own affairs. (Pericles, the great leader of democratic Athens, famously
castigated this self-centred attitude: ‘We do not say that a man who takes no
interest in politics minds his own business; we say that he has no business
here at all’). The public is itself a vehicle of maturation: to go ‘into society’
is to mark a coming of age, in which we learn to negotiate our desires, to
mediate our self in relation to other selves. As consumers, however, we
behave privately even in public, seeking to satisfy our particular taste. The
universality at the heart of the civic ideal does not appeal to the consumer,
for whom individuality (or at least the perception thereof) is preferable
to uniformity. The New Right succeeded in transforming this desire for
individuality into an ethic of individualism. By conflating ‘equality and
regimentation’, Thatcher was able to argue against the central tenet of
the Enlightenment – universality – by employing the rallying cry of the
Enlightenment: liberation. With the crisis of capitalism of the 1970s, both the
New Right and the statist Left set up a dichotomy – the state against the
individual – that elided the role of the civic:

They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such
thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are
families. And no government can do anything except through people, and
people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and
then, also to look after our neighbour.2

Ultimately, Thatcher’s radicalism was less about the privatisation of public

amenities than the suppression of the civic imagination. In 2009, Editorial
Intelligence – ‘an intelligent knowledge networking business which runs an
agenda-setting opinion former network’ – launched an annual ‘residential
experiential’ weekend event called ‘Names Not Numbers’. This ‘thought
leader symposium’ bills itself as ‘a private ideas festival’, the buzzword of
which is ‘individuality’. The notion of a ‘private idea’ would have disturbed
the Enlightenment mind, with its commitment to what Kant called ‘the
public use of one’s reason’. But for the organisers of this event, the general
public – those counted only as ‘Numbers’ – are insufficiently bespoke:
‘Names’ are a discerning elite. (Sponsors of the festival include Jaguar and

2 Interview with Margaret Thatcher, ‘Aids, education and the year 2000!’, Woman’s Own,
31 October 1987, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689
34 Cultural Heritage Ethics

The Groucho Club). So it is with audacity, and seemingly without irony,

that one strand at the 2013 festival was titled: ‘How Can Politics Reconnect
to People?’

***
the dark backward and abysm of time.
Shakespeare, The Tempest

Previous ages romanticised the old, whereas ours lusts after the new.
Planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence have accelerated our
ever-increasing appetite for technology, and transformed our attitude
towards production: that which is new is regarded – by the very nature of
its newness – as superior, as if new culture, like the technology it produces,
had incorporated all the wisdom of the old. In a culture in which knowledge
is reduced to the status of information – data, to be sorted according to its
utility – earlier civilisations are viewed as merely unplanned obsolescence,
whose extinction is a mark of their irrelevance. If capitalism has, in Marx’s
words, ‘accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman
aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals’, it has also ‘drowned the most heavenly
ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine
sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation’.3 The baggy,
messy civilisations of the past are co-opted into the market of things, but
fail to compete with modernism’s zeal for creative destruction:

Come on! set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the
museums!.. Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on
those waters, discoloured and shredded!4

The cultural violence of neoliberalism is not akin to the iconoclasm of

Futurism, or the coercive brutishness of Stalinism. Instead, it is realised in
the worlds it prevents from being born, in the monuments and artworks
to which it pre-emptively shrugs ‘What’s the use of this?’ Thatcher’s
Benthamite utilitarianism, with its governing triad of ‘Economy, Efficiency,
Effectiveness’, reduces all behaviour to ‘egotistical calculation’, thereby

3 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), ed. A.J.P. Taylor, trans.
Samuel Moore (London: Penguin, 1967), pp. 82-83.
4 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909), in Mary
Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001),
p. 188.
 The Meaning of the Public in an Age of Privatisation 35

failing to comprehend the nature of culture, which is a social life made

possible by the fulfilment of basic needs (‘Our basest beggars / Are in the
poorest thing superfluous: / Allow not nature more than nature needs, /
Man’s life is cheap as beast’s’).5 Civic culture is a challenge to utilitarian
assumptions because it knows that use is not the same as value: indeed,
culture has value in part because it comprehends a world beyond use,
where truths are uneconomic and inefficient. That which has little utility
may have great value: ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, wrote Auden, but it
is ‘a way of happening, a mouth’.
The term ‘Capitalist Realism’ has been coined to describe the triumph of
TINA – ‘There Is No Alternative’ – and the capture of the civic and political
imagination by consumer capitalism. In the ‘knowledge economy’, with
its division of ‘intelligent’ [useful] and unintelligent [useless] knowledge,
the non-capitalist world becomes a museum, and museums are regarded
as relics, curiosities. Yet it is precisely this ‘irrelevance’ – the assertion
of non-exchange value, outside the profit-motive – that transforms the
museum into a potential locus of radicalism. At its best, the museum offers
an imaginative alternative to the totalitarianism of ‘Capitalist Realism’,
which dismisses other ways of organising and valuing the world. The
museum is an epistemological affront to capitalism, as it validates the
‘useless’ and offers an encounter with objects that cannot be bought, that
lie outside the realm of economic aspiration, that have taken on a value –
incomprehensible to capitalist assumptions – beyond their rate of exchange.
The museum rekindles a civic aspiration for acculturation rather than
acquisition, against the New Right’s appropriation of ‘self-improvement’
as solely material advancement. It provides a rare public space in which
the individual behaves primarily as a citizen rather than a consumer, and
in which s/he recognises citizenship as a shared identity. It is for this reason
that entry charges ought to be resisted: museums contest the privatisation
of value, and should seek to minimise the degree to which citizen relations
are mediated by money. If, as Adorno argued, art imagines a totality that
the fragmented world cannot – a utopian possibility in formal perfection –
then the institutions of culture must offer a glimpse of a society unfractured
by inequality.
The dissolution of a civic ‘consensus’ is a key aspect of the culture of
postmodernity, and a primary cause of scepticism about curation. This
is understandable: curators, as gatekeepers and educators, have been

5 William Shakespeare, King Lear, II.ii.453-56, ed. R.A. Foakes (London: Arden, 1997), p. 255.
36 Cultural Heritage Ethics

responsible for telling a selective story of civilisation. But in an age of

consumer democracy, curators can be invaluable: we need their cura (‘care,
heed, attention’) in navigating the flood of knowledge from the digital world.
Consumer democracy purports to offer ‘choice’ but its market parameters
are often mandated by monopolistic corporations, which scupper diversity
and accentuate simplicity. ‘Choice’ remains the clarion call of the New
Right, whose populism conflates the notion of cultural elitism – ‘the best
which has been thought and said’ – with an elite. (A different elite, of course,
than the financial class created by the New Right’s reforms). The corporate
calculator assumes the lowest common denominator of Benthamism, which
can only comprehend value in terms of instant gratification:

The utility of all these arts and sciences – I speak both of those of amusement
and curiosity – the value which they possess, is exactly in proportion to
the pleasure they yield. Every other species of pre-eminence which may be
attempted to be established among them is altogether fanciful. Prejudice
apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of
music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more
valuable than either. Everybody can play at push-pin: poetry and music are
relished only by a few.6

In contrast, museums affirm the virtues of enrichment: a slower, more

arduous process, but one with the prospect of sweeter fruits. Yet museums
often seem reticent about asserting their cultural importance, wary of
making value judgments in a climate of relativism, and instead justify
themselves in terms of social utility. As Peter Jenkinson, the founding
director of Creative Partnerships, claimed: ‘Suddenly we are able to think
that museums and galleries are not sad, marginal locations of dust and
decay and heritage gloom, but alive and connected and critical to the
futures of communities the length and breadth of the United Kingdom’7.
This self-justification shifts the focus away from the exhibited items onto
the visitor, whose attention must be ‘targeted’. But this corporate emphasis
on personalisation does not allow room for the growth or discovery
inherent in the idea of Enlightenment, because it aims to capture consumer
preference at any particular point, and it makes individuals, with their
unique appetites, seem further away from each other than they are. The

6 Jeremy Bentham, The Rationale of Reward (London: John & H.L. Hunt, 1825), p. 206.
7 Peter Jenkinson, ‘Regeneration: Can Culture Carry the Can?’, RSA Journal, 5494, 2000, pp.
32-39.
 The Meaning of the Public in an Age of Privatisation 37

civic approach – universalist curation – adopts a ‘veil of ignorance’, which

is not prejudiced by the perception of (constructed and malleable) tastes.
‘Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic
association’, wrote Adorno, and for all the virtues of global museums,
their acquisitions are intimately bound up with the history of conquest.
How can these institutions offer an alternative vision to exploitation when
they are born of the original sin of colonialism? How can they counter
hegemony when they celebrate civilisations? For in the words of Walter
Benjamin, ‘There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same
time a document of barbarism’.8 How can these museums claim to be a
refuge from ‘getting and spending’ when they direct us, at almost every
opportunity, to the gift shop, and when major international exhibitions –
already burdened by diplomatic and ethical challenges – are sponsored by
the Bank of America? The corporate attempt to appropriate civic spaces for
consumerism at least acknowledges what capitalist logic had dismissed:
that citizens still value the ‘un-profitable’, and have an appetite for ‘useless’
knowledge. Perhaps a greater concern is the commodification of curation,
in which objects are evacuated of their history and ‘hollowed out’.9 In her
novel The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy describes this transformation
from ‘History House’ to ‘Heritage Hotel’. History is vital and contested –
a story of conflict, coercion, rebellion, failure and martyrdom – whereas
Heritage is a rarefied, sterilised ornamentation. Heritage offers gift shop
trinkets as tourist souvenirs – ‘remembrances’ in the French – but their
remembrance is also an act of forgetting, an eliding of History. This
‘reification’ (the hypnotising effect of commodity fetishism) represses the
memory of production: as Adorno wrote to Benjamin, ‘every reification is
a forgetting’10.
All Enlightenment ideologies dedicated to liberation are confronted
with the question of how to respond to their cultural inheritance. For Mao
Zedong, it was necessary to destroy the Four Olds – Old Culture, Old
Customs, Old Habits and Old Ideas – for the New to be born. The spectre
of civilisation could not be allowed to haunt the socialist imagination:
the Cultural Revolution would ‘Sweep Away All Monsters’. (Capitalism,

8 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), in Illuminations: Essays

and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 248.
9 Letter to Walter Benjamin, quoted in Eli Friedlander, Water Benjamin: A Philosophical
Portrait (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 156.
10 Quoted in Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1984), p. 229.
38 Cultural Heritage Ethics

Mao confidently asserted, would ‘soon be relegated to the museum’). For

Trotsky, by contrast, workers must ‘master all the culture of the past’, so
that it can be incorporated and transcended:

The art of past centuries has made man more complex and flexible, raising
his psyche to a higher level and enriching his mind in many ways. This
enrichment is an invaluable conquest of culture. Mastery of the old art is
therefore a necessary prerequisite not only for the creation of a new art, but
for the construction of a new society, because for communism, people are
needed with a highly developed psyche. Is the old art capable, however,
of enriching us with the artistic cognition of the world? Yes, it is. And it is
precisely for this reason that it is capable of nourishing our feelings and
cultivating them. If we were to indiscriminately renounce the old art, then
immediately we would become poorer in spirit.11

The curation of ‘civilisation’ compels us to reassess our understanding

of the relationship between power and culture. (‘Art never lies’, declared
Waldemar Januszczak in his BBC Four series The Dark Ages, but we can
deceive ourselves with it, often in ingenious ways). Intelligent curation is
able to reveal a hidden history of civilisation:

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?

In the books you will find the names of kings.
Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? …
Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?12

Curation can broaden as well as narrow; it can frame Alexander as a

leader among men, at once inspired and fallible, while at the same time
acknowledging the loss for civilisation of the library in the city that bears
his name. The Dark Ages that followed its destruction may not have been
an abysm – indeed, they may have been ‘the darkness of the womb’ – but
we are incalculably poorer for the loss of Alexandria’s treasures, even if
sealed with the names of kings.
In the permanent collection of the British Museum there is an Aztec
mirror of pure black obsidian – in composition it recalls the iconic monolith
in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The mirror is wondrous in its obscurity:
it purports to reflect, but shows us nothing of ourselves. What excites the

11 Leon Trotsky, Culture and Socialism (1927), trans. Brian Pearce (London: New Park
Publications, 1962), p. 12.
12 Bertolt Brecht, ‘A Worker Reads History’ (1935), in Selected Poems, trans. H.R. Hays (New
York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 108.
 The Meaning of the Public in an Age of Privatisation 39

viewer is its otherworldliness, its indifference to our narcissism. Perhaps

understandably, in an age vigilant of racism, we have become wary of the
concept of ‘strangeness’, and the awe and awkwardness that comes with
the encounter is regarded as the product of ignorance or parochialism. In
addition, globalisation has proved to be a force for cultural homogeneity,
creating an alphabet of shared (corporate) symbols and a political economy
that restricts civic experimentation. We have become a civilisation in love
with its own reflection, always demanding to know the ‘relevance’ of that
which it does not recognise. But museums must be careful about being
too familiar – they live by curiosity, and should seek to nurture it by
being suggestive, imaginative, challenging, humbling, inspiring. Against
consumer capitalism’s assault on memory, a museum offers evidence of
alternative ways of organising society, and in so doing plays a crucial role
in ‘the struggle of memory against forgetting’. Ultimately, it is the duty of
public institutions to challenge the complacency and introspection of the
private. Private domains and networks can limit our room for growth, as
they tend to reinforce habit and opinion: by encountering other individuals
and ideas – by participating in the public – we can evolve the ‘heart and soul’.

***
Engines bear them through the sky: they’re free
And isolated like the very rich
Auden, ‘In Time of War’

The island paradise is the dream vision of neoliberalism: the idyll of the
private, a haven from taxation and the burdens of society. Where ‘hell is
other people’, heaven is a luxurious retreat, a perpetual indulgence of the
self. It’s an uninspiring vision, largely because it doesn’t re-imagine our
social world, and denies our interdependence – that each of us is ‘a piece
of the continent, a part of the main’13. Unmoored from one another, we
have become privatised in temperament and habit, but the perspective of
the distance allows us to rediscover the radical promise of the civic. What
salvation for the lonely rower, lost in the sea of his desire? We must be
saved, from ourselves, by each other.

13 John Donne, ‘Meditation XVII’, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), http://www.
luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/meditation17.php
 II
HISTORY AND
ARCHAEOLOGY
 4. History as Heritage:
Producing the Present
in Post-War Sri Lanka
Nira Wickramasinghe 1

The state – actually a shifting complex of peoples and roles …2

Introduction
Walter Benjamin warned against the ‘appreciation of heritage’, describing
it as a greater ‘catastrophe’ than indifference or disregard.3 Indeed,
heritage can be considered an essentially cultural practice centred in the
present, and an instrument of cultural power. Cultural heritage is as much
a construction of the present as it is an interpretation of the past.
The changing fortunes and popularity of historical sites indicate that no
specific place is inherently valuable as heritage. There is therefore no
heritage per se and all heritage, as Laurajane Smith argues, is ultimately
intangible.4 What make sites valuable are the contemporary cultural

1 I thank Marina Carter, Anup Grewal, Sanayi Marcelline, Nilu Abeyratne and Sasanka
Perera for their thoughtful reading of the original draft of this essay which enabled me to
sharpen many of the arguments made here. A much longer version has been published
as ‘Producing the Present: History as Heritage in Post-War Patriotic Sri Lanka’, Economic
and Political Weekly, 48(43), 2013, pp. 91-100
2 M. Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation State (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 5.
3 S. Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 2007), p. 168.
4 L. Smith, The Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 3.

© Nira Wickramasinghe, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0047.04

44 Cultural Heritage Ethics

interpretations and activities that are undertaken around them. It is

through the practice of cultural appropriation that artefacts and places
acquire meaning and value. In this chapter we will investigate an example
of hegemonic discourse on heritage ‘which acts to constitute the way
we think, talk and write about heritage’5 by exploring the situation in
post-civil war Sri Lanka, a country where political ideals, contemporary
cultural and social values, debates and aspirations directly translate into
a partisan interpretation of selected heritage sites.6

Return to Heritage
After the decimation of the Tamil Tigers in 2009 brought Sri Lanka’s
long civil war to an end, President Rajapaksa promised there would no
longer be minorities, in spite of the fact that the idea of a multicultural
society was endorsed in the Thirteenth Amendment to the 1987
Constitution. In the new ‘civic nation’ fleshed out in the President’s
speech, citizen-patriots would be ethnically undifferentiated, although
at the same time all religions and ethnic identities would supposedly be
respected. However, the President’s vision of a nation at one with the
state is based on patriotic feelings stemming from a particular reading
of the history and foundation myth of the Sinhala people. In this context
all other groups – those formally known as minorities – are relegated
to a secondary role with no room in the country’s common political
culture. At the same time there has been, in the last few years, a singular
but clearly identifiable phenomenon in the public sphere which I would
describe as a ‘return to heritage’.

Economic Development and Heritage

Since the 1930s – when a measure of self-government was granted to
the crown colony under the Donoughmore constitution – Sri-Lankan
society has experienced an underlying nostalgia for a bygone age when
the peasantry was proud, prosperous, and embodied the moral values
destroyed in modern times. As a consequence the post-colonial state
invested heavily in restoring ancient irrigation tanks in the north-central

5 Ibid, p. 11.
6 Ibid.
 History as Heritage: Producing the Present in Post-War Sri Lanka 45

province areas, constructing new dams in the south-east (Gal oya and
Welawe ganga), and finally, from 1968, undertaking the large-scale project
of developing the area around the Mahaweli river and its affluent. The
purpose of the latter project was not purely economic. Developmental
goals were intertwined with nationalist underpinnings centred on the
Sinhala peasant, represented in popular ideology as a ‘sublime object’. In
the state ideology of the United National Party (UNP) government, which
introduced a new economic policy based on economic liberalisation and an
export-led economy, development through irrigated agriculture achieved
a prominent place and was presented as a reincarnation of the ancient,
indigenous and Buddhist culture of Sri Lanka’s golden age. The Minister of
Mahaweli Development in the UNP regime, Gamini Dissanayake, declared
quite candidly in 1983 that ‘the soul of the new Mahaweli society will be
cherished values of the ancient society, which were inspired and nourished
by the Tank, the Temple and the Paddy Field’.7
The link between economic policy and state ideology has been
demonstrated by Hennayake who has shown the involvement of the agro-
technology and insurance sectors in the process of connecting development
to the concept of an ideal past. She cites the text from the advertisement of
a fertiliser company from the post-1977 period:

Agriculture is a part of Sri Lankan heritage, its culture and tradition. Our
ancient kings were inspired agriculturists. Our people here, from the time
immemorial, combined an affinity for the earth with a talent for innovative
technology. Anglo-Fert and Anglo-Chem are two companies who share a
corporate commitment to the growth of agriculture in this country.8

Another aspect of the appropriation of cultural heritage by the post-1977

liberalised state is testified by the government’s policy of invoking the
past and displaying its commitment to nurture the nation’s heritage in
order to push through its development agenda. The UNP government
was responsible for requesting the United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to provide guidance and assistance
in managing the archaeological sites in the regions containing the three
ancient capitals of Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and Kandy in 1978.
Two years later, the director general of UNESCO, when appealing

7 Cited in N.S.M. Tennekoon, ‘Rituals of Development: The Accelerated Mahaväli

Development Program of Sri Lanka’, American Ethnologist, 15(2), 1988, p. 297.
8 N. Hennayake, Culture, Politics and Development in Postcolonial Sri Lanka (Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2006), p. 123.
46 Cultural Heritage Ethics

internationally for the funds necessary to safeguard the Cultural Triangle,

reminded his interlocutors that it ‘must be preserved for the sake of the
world at large because it forms an integral part of man’s heritage’.9 As these
examples show, from the late 1970s the state’s intention was to display
its commitment to the deepest values of the nation. While the opening
up of the economy was radically transforming other aspects of society,
sometimes brutally bringing a peasant society into a modern world of
consumption, the dominant discourse was more and more imbued with a
sense of the pastoral care of the material past. Caring for the heritage of the
nation would give the government the self-assigned right to radically alter
the present. As Michael Herzfeld points out:

The static image of an unspoiled and irrecoverable past often plays an

important part in present actions. It legitimizes deeds of the moment by
investing them with the moral authority of eternal truth and by representing
the vagaries of circumstance as realization of a larger universe of system and
balance.10

In the early twentieth century proponents of a nation that was modern

yet unsullied by western influence defined their ancient past as heritage
in order to create pride in the nation in the making, whereas the liberal
state of the late 1970s, focusing on economic development, used heritage to
strengthen their claim to moral authority to transform an agrarian society
into a market-oriented export processing zone. The twenty-first-century
government, however, uses heritage for purely political purposes. In the
years since the end of the civil war in 2009, the concept of national heritage
has been used to depoliticise citizens and to mute any possible dissent.
A number of institutions, groups and personalities are involved in the
construction of the present discourse around national heritage.

The Construction of the Present Hegemonic Discourse

Local and international bodies, governmental and non-governmental
organisations and individuals all play a role in the creation of a specific
understanding of ‘heritage’ that has gradually merged with what is
generally known as history. This new interpretation of national heritage is

9 Cited in R. Silva, ‘The Cultural Triangle of Sri Lanka’, in Henry Cleere (ed.), Archeological
Heritage Management in the Modern World (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 222.
10 Herzfeld, 1997, p. 206.
 History as Heritage: Producing the Present in Post-War Sri Lanka 47

shaped in a number of ways: through acts and practices that define heritage,
through legislation and policy decisions about specific heritage sites,
through the allocation of state funding, and, finally, through conservation
practices that transform heritage sites.

Education and Heritage

As Bourdieu has argued, educational structures aim to produce social
agents worthy and capable of receiving the heritage of the group and
adept at transmitting it in turn to a larger group.11 Education in Sri Lanka is
free at primary, secondary and tertiary levels. In 2010 there were 3,932,722
students enrolled in primary and secondary education.12 A principal
manner in which ideas about heritage are conveyed to a large public is
through teaching in schools, universities and Daham Pasala (Buddhist
Sunday schools), and through textbooks. Indeed, textbooks provide a fairly
accurate reflection of the way history as critical assessment of the past has
been superseded by a version of history that conveys a simplified account
of the past.13 This process is not a recent one, but it did gain momentum
after the war against the secessionist movement in the north and east
entered its last and bloodiest phase.
Issues pertaining to heritage are introduced in both history textbooks
and Buddhism textbooks. History is now a compulsory subject in primary
and secondary schools and a cursory look at the texts produced by the
National Institute of Education reveals an emphasis on monumental
histories associated with royal lineages. History as a subject that interprets
the past, rather than glorifying it, is unrecognisable in these textbooks,
which offer children a narrative of the glorious days before invaders from
India and colonial powers shattered the equilibrium of Sri Lankan society
by ushering in modernity.14

11 P. Bourdieu, ‘Strategies de reproduction et modes de domination’, Actes de la recherche en

science sociale, 105, 1994, p. 6.
12 Data Management Branch, Ministry of Education, 2010, http://www.moe.gov.lk/web/
images/stories/statistic/std_2010.pdf
13 R. Siriwardena, S. Bastian, K. Indrapala and S. Kottegoda, School Textbooks and Communal
Relations in Sri Lanka, Part I (Colombo: Council for Communal Harmony through the
Media, 1980); N. Wickramasinghe and S. Perera, ‘Assessment of Ethno-Cultural and
Religious Bias in Social Studies and History Texts of Years 7, 8, 10 and 11’ (Colombo:
World Bank, 1999).
14 In 2005 I was Consultant to the Ministry of Education on curriculum revision for schools
(chairperson of the History syllabus committee).
48 Cultural Heritage Ethics

Alongside grade-school history books, the syllabi and texts used for
teaching Buddhism in Daham Pasala should be looked at as one of the main
vehicles for transmission of ideas about heritage to a younger and often
more naïve generation. Even a quick examination of the present Daham
Pasala texts that contain sections on Sri Lankan history reveals certain
trends. Just as in school histories, the history of Buddhism appears as
one peppered with glorious deeds and exceptional individuals (shresta
minissu). It is a history full of omissions and chosen emphases, one which
resembles the heritage/mythic mode of recounting the past rather than
modern historiography. If heritage is about the meanings placed upon
artefacts or other traces and the interpretations that are created from them,
what is dispensed in Daham Pasala is a ‘heritagised’ version of history in
which interpretations are presented as evidence that cannot be contested
or questioned.

Institutions
At the University of Colombo, where I taught for nearly 20 years, student
Buddhist monks often chose to study history expecting to be taught
a national culture set in stone, able to provide certainties in a world in
constant flux. They were, of course, disappointed to find that the courses
we offered did not deal with history as heritage but rather questioned their
received ideas about monastic history conveyed by the Chronicles. History,
as we taught it, was conceived as precisely the opposite of heritage studies.
But this is not always the case in those fields of study where notions of the
past are being fashioned – departments of history, archaeology, heritage
studies, Pali and Buddhist studies.
Outside academia there are a number of ministries and government
departments directly involved in the definition, production and preservation
of heritage: the Ministries of Buddha Sasana and Religious Affairs, of Culture
and the Arts, of National Heritage; the Archaeological Department, and those
of the National Archives, National Museum, Buddhist Affairs, Christian
Affairs, Hindu Religious and Cultural Affairs, Muslim Religious and Cultural
Affairs, and Cultural Affairs and Educational Publications. These institutions
earn their power and credibility by making themselves visible before the
public eye, in particular through print and audio-visual media.
In addition to government ministries, a number of statutory bodies and
non-governmental organisations are concerned with particular aspects of
 History as Heritage: Producing the Present in Post-War Sri Lanka 49

heritage, either through teaching, research or funding conservation. These

include the Central Cultural Fund (CCF), the Galle Heritage Foundation
(GHF), the National Art Council (also covering non-tangible heritage), the
National Crafts Council (NCC), the National Performing Art Centre, and
the UNESCO National Commission. These institutions earn power and
credibility in various ways as they target different audiences through a
variety of projects. Many experts sit on a number of these commissions,
thus creating a message on heritage that consolidates its own foundations
rather than questioning them.
Finally, non-governmental organisations play a considerable role
in generating interest in heritage issues, among them the Royal Asiatic
Society of Sri Lanka (RASSL), The National Heritage Trust, The Dutch
Burgher Union (DBU), The Archaeologists Association, local branches of
the International Commission on Museums (ICOM), and the local section
of the International Commission on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS).

Vying for Popular Appeal: Merging History and Heritage

in Popular Culture
The realm of popular culture has always been filled with accounts of
Sri Lankan history drawn from the Chronicles, myths, and Jataka tales
which portray heroes and gods as the agents of history. Social forces or
class conflict have no place in these accounts. The gap between histories
written in English by professional academics and popular histories in the
vernacular is not new, but widened with the opening up of the economy
in the late 1970s, when a cosmopolitan class chose to consume western
modernity with a vengeance after a decade of austerity. They consciously
detached themselves from a past that was linked to myths and legends. The
vernacular domain of culture was, however, recently re-energised under
the influence of an entertainment industry that pandered to many people’s
need for reassurance at a moment when the nation was threatened by
secessionist anti-systemic groups. The trend became especially pronounced
in 2008, when the state began its full-scale patriotic war to overthrow the
Tamil rebels in the north and east of the country.
This patriotic war had a direct impact on the film industry. In August
2008 the historical movie Aba was released in 38 cinemas across Sri Lanka.
Aba was produced by EAP Edirisinghe, a group of companies that owned
a popular TV channel called Swarnavahini. The film, directed by Jackson
50 Cultural Heritage Ethics

Anthony, a well-known film actor and TV personality, depicted the life of

King Pandukabhaya. Pandukabhaya was the first king of Anuradhapura
who, according to the Chronicles, ruled for 70 years some 2,400 years
ago. Cinema-goers watching the movie reached the impressive figure of
2,105,000, about 10 percent of the total population of the island.
This and other contemporary works revolve around common tropes,
such as the hydraulic civilisation and the aesthetic of the gargantuesque.
What is portrayed is not the past but Sri Lanka’s fame, which is related to its
past ability, for instance, to build stupas15 deemed exceptional for being the
largest brick structures known to the pre-modern world. Monumentality
is a central value in the production of heritage by the state, businesses,
journalists and consultants in Sri Lanka. The connection between the
exceptional architectural prowess of the past and the present is implicit.
Today’s patriotic state needs the ‘signatures of the visible’ to construct a
national imagination.16 Creative works, monuments and archaeology thus
create a heritage able to consolidate national identity and to strengthen the
public profile of political figures.
Fictionalised versions of the past consumed by adults and children are
also vehicles for a heritage discourse that naturalises certain narratives
as well as cultural forms and social experiences that are often linked to
ideas of nation and nationhood. Historical novels, for instance, are in great
vogue. A case in point is Jayantha Chandrasiri’s novel – soon to be made
into a film – The Great Dutugemunu (Maha Dutugemunu), which relates the
glories of a third century BC Sinhala hero who slayed the Tamil King Elara
and recaptured the kingdom of Anuradhapura.
Today, it is clear that the public idea of what constitutes the past is
fashioned in a vibrant commercial environment. Publishers, authors, film
and teledrama makers use print media as well as visual technologies and
the internet to reproduce a monumental, often exclusive, personality-
oriented vision of the past as heritage, a vision that the state apparatus is
also conveying through educational institutions. This vision is, however,
contested on occasion by dissenting views, as well as by members of
communities that are excluded from the official discourse.

15 A stupa is a hemispherical structure containing Buddhist relics, typically the ashes of

Buddhist monks, used by Buddhists as a place of meditation.
16 A. Appadurai, ‘The Globalization of Archaeology and Heritage: A Discussion with
Arjun Appadurai’, Journal of Social Archaeology, 35(1), 2001, p. 44
 History as Heritage: Producing the Present in Post-War Sri Lanka 51

Heritage in Practice: Disputes and Dissent

The transformation of history into heritage must also be understood as
a transformation from a selective and individualistic practice performed
by professional historians into a public performance. Heritage practice
involves visiting, interpreting and especially managing and conserving.
One initiative in this direction is the Ramayana Trail, which takes people
to 52 sites related to the great Hindu epic of the same name, including
the garden where the abducted Sita, wife of Prince Rama, was imprisoned
by Ravana, king of Lanka. The National Tourism Development Authority
(SLTDA)17 started this initiative in 2007 with the aim of attracting Indian
tourists in search of an authentic historical experience. In 2009, after the
civil war ended, 4,000 Indian tourists arrived and numbers have been
growing since.
The Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka (RASSL), especially its director,
Susantha Goonetilleke, were vehemently opposed to what they saw as
the resurrection of a fictional trail based on no historical evidence and for
purely commercial reasons. Historians, including those of a nationalist
leaning, criticised the creation of an historical site that was not supported
by ‘proper scientific knowledge’. The Ramayana Trail controversy shows
how in Sri Lanka promoters of the patriotic nation state select myths useful
for propaganda purposes and to neutralise historical interpretations that
do not conform to the dominant ideology.

Disputes over Sites

Heritage can be used by official cultural institutions and social elites as
a tool to promote a version of history which tones down cultural and
social tensions in the present time. It can also, however, be used by
marginalised groups in a progressive way, to rethink the past and express
social identities excluded by the official discourse.18 Historical sites are a
particularly powerful form of heritage as they are visual and material – and
memory requires a display, an articulation via objects or representation
to give it meaning. Moreover materiality makes these locations appear
neutral as mere traces of history rather than political and social constructs,
whilst in fact sites and landscapes are the terrain where conflicting claims

17 Formerly the Tourist Board of Sri Lanka.

18 Smith, 2006, p. 4.
52 Cultural Heritage Ethics

over heritage clash. Post-conflict Sri Lanka is a case in point of cultural

appropriation of national heritage by a state determined to present a
glorified notion of the nation’s history.
A recent example is provided by Kandarodai in the Jaffna Peninsula,
where a collection of circular structures on a megalithic site possibly dating
from the early part of the second millennium was discovered in the early
twentieth century. After the end of the civil war pilgrims began to visit the
place again and its name was subsequently Sinhalised as Kandurugoda,
while the structures were refashioned as stupas. This connection with the
Buddhist past of the country’s north was meant to counter the entire Tamil
nationalist historical narrative. Today, this interpretation of the site could
fuel tension between communities as they battle over the cultural meaning
of the place. Unlike the case of the Ramayana Trail, the stupas appear to
offer concrete evidence of a Buddhist past, further strengthened by an
inscription naming the place Kandurugoda. This serves Sinhalese claims
that Buddhism encompassed the entire island, the stupas being dated to
the ninth century AD, a period which bears similarities to Borobudur in
Indonesia.19 Tamil scholars have acknowledged the Buddhist remains in
Jaffna, described as ‘burial monuments of monks, a buddhicised version
of megalithicism’, as proof of the existence of Tamil Buddhists in ancient
times.20 Sinhalese nationalist Ven. Ellawalla Medhananda is championing
the renovation of all Buddhist sites in areas ‘desecrated’ by decades of civil
war.21 In the post-conflict period Tamils felt the state was investing too
much in renovating traces of Buddhist heritage in the north and east as well
as building new temples, while their Hindu heritage was being neglected:

Buddha statues have been found in places like Kandarodai, and this shows
that Tamils have followed Buddhism and that Tamil Buddhism was practiced
in Eelam, in a lesser extent, but the Sinhalese show these as Buddhist
antiques and claim parts of the Tamil motherland as Sinhala areas.22

19 D.G.B. de Silva, ‘Kantarodai Buddhist remains: A Sri Lankan Boro-budur lost for ever?’,
The Island, 14 August 2002, http://www.island.lk/2002/08/14/midwee01.html
20 N. Parameswara, Early Tamils of Lanka (Ilankai: KL Malaysia, 1999), pp. 123-24.
21 V.E. Medhananda, Sinhala Bauddha Urumaya (Sinhala Buddhist Heritage), 4th edition,
(Colombo: Dayawansa Jayakodi and Company, 2008) describes sites in Anuradhapura,
Vavuniya and Mullaitivu districts.
22 Navraj Parthiban, ‘Hindu temples of Vanni and the lands of the Tamils are in danger’,
Global Tamil News, 29 September 2011, http://www.globaltamilnews.net/MobileArticle/
tabid/81/language/enUS/Default.aspx?pn=articles&aid=53410
 History as Heritage: Producing the Present in Post-War Sri Lanka 53

Tamils are countering with similarly grandiose claims of a ‘Great Stone

Age’ in Kandarodai, using new media to disseminate their ideas.23
Monuments and sites are thus being invested with new meanings, a
phenomenon that existed in the past but that has been infused with a
new urgency in a post-conflict situation where power relations between
communities are being redefined. Each group is trying to test the limits of
toleration of the others under the watchful eye of the patriotic state.

The Conflict over the Nature of Restoration

Protecting built heritage and restoring it according to certain agreed
criteria is an idea that was born in Europe in the nineteenth century and
travelled to Sri Lanka with antiquarianism and colonial archaeology under
H.C.P. Bell. In the post-colonial period, these principles were enshrined in
a number of international treaties, among which the Venice Charter of 1964
is the most influential. The preamble of this seminal document indicates
the underlying ideas about the past that prevailed in the 1960s:

People are becoming more and more conscious of the unity of human
values and regard ancient monuments as a common heritage. The common
responsibility to safeguard them for future generations is recognized. It is
our duty to hand them on in the full richness of their authenticity.24

It is on this crucial issue of ‘authenticity’ and the need to respect this

principle when restoring monuments and sites that differences in
interpretation arise between international organisations upholding these
values and other parties who feel they have trusteeship of a monument.
The Temple of the Tooth (Dalada Maligawa) in Kandy is believed by the
Buddhist community to house the Buddha’s Tooth relic. The temple was
constructed by King Wimaladharmasuriya (1593-1603) and is today under
the control of two chief monks of the Malwatta and Asgiriya temples and
a lay custodian (diyavadana nilame). The restoration of the Temple of the
Tooth after part of it was destroyed by a Tamil Tigers bomb in 1998 offers a
telling example of the local understanding of restoration as making anew.
New tiles were laid, new sandakadapahana (moonstone) and new carvings

23 ‘People of the Great Stone Age Civilization had lived in Kandarodai’, Global Tamil
News, 24 June 2011, http://www.globaltamilnews.net/GTMNEditorial/tabid/71/article
Type/ArticleView/articleId/63096/language/en-US/People-of-the-Great-Stone-Age-
Civilization-had-Lived-in-Kandarodai.aspx
24 See http://www.international.icomos.org/charters/venice_e.pdf
54 Cultural Heritage Ethics

were added, totally in contravention of the Venice Charter.25 The clash is

here between an historical temple as a living heritage where people come
to practice their rituals, and the World Heritage view of historical places
as unalterable entities fixed in time. The vision of the bhikkhus, as far as
stupas and other Buddhist sites are concerned, is that heritage is a living
thing that can be modified. Hence the restoration of the Dalada Maligawa
to look exactly as it looked before, even if this meant using present day
materials, or the painting of ancient stupas in white, which is a common
occurrence in Sri Lanka and serves to make them similar to all other modern
stupas in the country.

Conclusion
In Sri Lanka, as in most states which are signatories of international
conventions, ‘heritage’, in its multifarious guises, is endorsed simultaneously
by UNESCO, an international bureaucratic organisation, by a global tourist
industry and by the country’s government.26 UNESCO’s rhetoric appears
to be progressive in that it purports to protect world cultures by means of
protocols, declarations and inventories. But world heritage projects belong
to a world system and world economy which are in no way at odds with
the way nation states exhibit and promote a populist interpretation of the
past. In that sense international organisations such as UNESCO facilitate
the marginalisation of certain histories and the dominance of ideological
and cultural appropriation by centres of political and economic power.27
The state uses the framework of World Heritage Sites for its own agenda
of cultural hegemony. The contradictions between Sri Lanka’s nation
state ideology, morphed into what I have elsewhere qualified as ‘new
patriotism’ in the post-conflict years, and the lofty goals of UNESCO are
rarely acknowledged by local representatives of UNESCO or members of
ICOMOS.28 There are few voices left to dissent.

25 See Article 6 of the Venice Charter, http://www.international.icomos.org/charters/

venice_e.pdf
26 M. Askew, ‘The Magic List of Global Status: UNESCO, World Heritage and the Agendas
of States’, in S. Labadi and C. Long (eds.), Heritage and Globalisation (Abingdon: Routledge,
2010), p. 19.
27 Ibid, p. 22.
28 Nira Wickramasinghe, ‘After the War: A New Patriotism in Sri Lanka’, Journal of Asian
Studies, 68(4), 2009, pp. 1945-54.
 History as Heritage: Producing the Present in Post-War Sri Lanka 55

At a time when Western thinkers have lost their legitimacy among the
people of Sri Lanka, it might be strategic to re-introduce them to the thought
of Rabindranath Tagore. Indeed, Tagore advocates that when a country is
seen as morally transgressing, it forfeits its claim to the loyalty of its citizens.
His contemporary, Leo Tolstoy, made the same point when he stated that
one could be a critic while at the same time being a patriot. What both
thinkers discredited was an extreme patriotism that entailed a belief in the
superiority of one’s country and an exclusive concern for one’s country.29
Tagore’s low-key nationalism is certainly at odds with the type of state
patriotism promoted by the Sri Lankan government during the final phase
of the civil war and the eventual victory over the Tamil Tigers. I have
argued elsewhere that if the Rajapaksa regime takes patriotism seriously
and expects non-Sinhalese communities to identify with a national identity
that transcends their attachment to a specific group, it will need to avoid
expressions of ‘banal nationalism’ that can easily alienate cultural minorities.
Continuing to flag Sinhala-Buddhist traditions as the basis of the nation’s
patriotism, a practice that started in the mid-1950s, is certainly not a way to
win over the hearts of members of racial and religious minorities.

29 Leo Tolstoy, ‘On Patriotism’ (1894) and ‘Patriotism or Peace’ (1896), in Writings on Civil
Disobedience and Non-Violence (New York: New American Library 1968).
 5. Looking at the Acropolis
of Athens from Modern
Times to Antiquity
William St Clair 1

The Acropolis of Athens is one of the most famous places on earth, visited
by over a million people every year, and instantly recognisable by millions
more who know it only from pictures. With posters and postcards
displayed in every street kiosk and hotel lobby in Athens, and countless
images encountered in books, films, television, brochures, advertising, and
social media in countries round the world, it must now be impossible for
any visitor, whether a Greek child on a first educational visit or a stranger
from a distant land, to look at the Acropolis without feeling that, in some
sense, they have already seen it. Nor is the sense of immediate familiarity
a recent or an incidental result of the rapid spread of modern information
technology. Already by the end of the eighteenth century, the number of
people who knew the Acropolis from pictures was greater than the number,
whether local people or visitors, who saw it with their own eyes, and the
gap continued to widen.
Partly as a result, thoughtful visitors have long been worried about loss
of independence. Colonel J.P. Barry, a medical man, for example, visiting

1 Versions of this essay were given as the Runciman lecture, King’s College, London, 2012,
the Gaisford lecture, University of Oxford, 2012, the Duncan Sandys lecture, Europa
Nostra UK, 2013, and at academic seminars at home and abroad. I am deeply grateful to
the many friends and colleagues who have contributed to the development of the ideas.
A book length study that sets out the full history is expected in 2015, but it seemed useful,
at the risk of unbalancing the present essay, to offer the theoretical and methodological
discussion as a contribution to the general debates in this volume.

© William St Clair, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0047.05

58 Cultural Heritage Ethics

the Acropolis from India in 1905, hoped to experience ‘impressions not

derived from reading’, claiming that: ‘The most valuable impressions for
the traveller are those he makes his own not those made for him’.2 Joseph
Pennell, an artist from the United States, who in 1913 wanted to experience
Greece without preconceptions, declared that before his visit he avoided
reading any classical author even in translation, and deliberately refused
to take any interest in architecture or proportion.3 They and many others
before and since have understood that, whether they chose to submit,
to resist, or to negotiate, and whether in the event they were confirmed
or ‘agreeably disappointed’ in their expectations, the seeing agenda had
already been set.4
In many of the issues that have arisen in the development of modern
notions of cultural property, including law, legitimacy, identity, history
versus heritage, stewardship and trusteeship, appropriation and
restitution, the Acropolis of Athens and its buildings (including the parts
of the buildings removed by Lord Elgin) have provided a framework for
understanding the changing issues. Continuing in that tradition, and as
a potential contribution to the wider aims of the volume, I offer in this
essay a summary history of ways of looking at the Acropolis and how and
when they were constituted, from which some of the contemporary ethical
questions emerge. There can be no other monument in the world in which
the potential long view is so long, the ways of seeing so different across
time, the claims made so varied, and the evidence available for developing
answers so complete.
Two general observations underpin everything that follows. First,
without viewers, the Acropolis is a culturally inert accumulation of animal,
vegetable, and mineral – and even these are categories invented and
imputed by human observers. It is the man, woman, or child who looks
at the Acropolis who confers the value and makes the meanings, not the
Acropolis as such. And, secondly, the transformation in the mind from the
physiological act of seeing to the psychological act of interpretation cannot
occur unless the experience has been mediated. Any act of looking at the

2 Lieut-Col. J.P. Barry, A.B. M.B., At the Gates of the East: A Book of Travel among Historic
Wonderlands (London: Longman, 1906), pp. vii and 17.
3 Catalogue of an Exhibition of Lithographs and Etchings of Grecian Temples by Joseph Pennell
(New York: Frederick Keppell, 1913), Preface.
4 The phrase is from Murray’s A Handbook for travellers in the Ionian Islands, Greece, Turkey,
Asia Minor, and Constantinople … with maxims and hints for travellers in the East (London:
Murray, 1840), p. 55.
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 59

Acropolis, I take as established, has required decisions on the part of the

viewer, not normally consciously or explicitly taken, about the organising
categories within which the seeing experience is to be understood.5 The
situation today, when all on-the-spot seeing has been prefigured, is only
one example of a cognitive process that, we can be confident, has occurred
at all times in the past, including during the centuries when there were no
pictures and hardly any written words. Even those viewers about whom
we know least, such as women and girls forcibly brought from distant
alien cultures and immured in the Acropolis as slaves, brought their own
interpretative categories, even if it may now be impossible to recover what
they were. And, at the other end of the spectrum, I could give long lists of
men and women whose sincere accounts of their experience of looking at
the Acropolis conform so closely to the conventions of their cultural group
that it is impossible to tell from their words alone whether they ever really
saw what they describe.
Discussing the relationship of words with images, Socrates is reported
by Plato to have remarked:

Writings, Phaedrus, have a strange quality in which they resemble portraits.

They stand before you like living things, but if you ask them a question, they
preserve a solemn silence. And it is the same with written words. They seem
to talk to you as if they had minds, but if you ask them about what they say,
from a wish to understand them more fully, they go on telling you the same
thing for ever.6

The Acropolis, our generation can readily agree, does not converse, but,
with all respect to Socrates, we also know that it does not speak, let alone
that it goes on telling the same story forever. The aspiration to ‘let the
mute stones speak’, a proverbial phrase since ancient times, ignores the
inescapable fact that no meanings exist in stones, nor indeed in any of the
other material remains of the past, until they have been imputed by live
human beings applying their own categories. The belief, associated with
western romanticism, that great art can transcend its cultural circumstances
and material conditions and offer timeless truths direct to the minds of
viewers, is itself a mediating category, as historically contingent as the
others. The eye, except possibly in newly born babies, is never innocent.

5 The general insight by Bloch and others is discussed with reference to the ancient Greek
myths by Richard Buxton, Imaginary Greece: The Contexts of Mythology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 80 ff.
6 Phaedrus, 275, author’s free translation.
60 Cultural Heritage Ethics

Contemporary neuroscience discusses the operation of visual cognitive

processes in terms of ‘saccades’, the eye movements that occur several times
every second, and ‘salience’, the value that the mind attaches to the visual
stimuli received, and the reward it hopes to receive by targeting its gaze.
The assumption, mainstream until recently and still commonly held, that
the act of viewing is a passive receiving of information, has been replaced
by an understanding that viewing implies choice. Other assumptions about
the ways in which the external world is understood, often categorised as
‘natural’, ‘god-given’, or otherwise essentialist or unchanging, that have in
past epochs underpinned both the visual production and the consumption
of the Acropolis no longer deserve our assent. For centuries, for example, it
was generally believed, officially taught, and acted upon, that the human
eye sends out light rays to touch the object of vision and returns, bearing the
essence of that object. During the centuries of the iconoclasm controversies
among competing Christian groupings in the Byzantine period, Athens
and its acropolis were part of a society in which theories of anatomy, optics,
the nature of light, and what happens to the mind in the act of looking, that
have long since been proved to be fallacious, led to many violent deaths.7
Or, to give a more modern example, when William Hugh Williams, a
landscape artist who saw and drew the Acropolis in 1817, and who became
known in his day as ‘Grecian’ Williams, wrote of the ‘electrifying truths,
which flash upon the mind in studying her [‘Nature’] not only as she is, but
as seen through the medium of works of genius’, he was repeating a cliché
of his time that few can now accept. Nor is his assumption that the natural
world is designed and benevolent one that can now be accepted.8
Our generation can also bring to a history of looking at the Acropolis
a modern appreciation of the difficulty of separating mental and bodily
states. Emotions engaged by seeing experiences, it is now established, can
lead to changes in and beyond the mind/brain, such as a sense of enhanced
intensity, which may be mistaken for a confirmation of the validity of
some opinion that the viewer already holds, whether of admiration or
abhorrence. Dreams too have often been categorised as ‘epiphanies’ or
‘prophecies’, messages from supernatural beings or forces, that encourage
the wakening dreamer to think and act in certain ways. Viewers of the

7 In the words of Liz James: ‘Byzantium is the only major world power to have undergone
political upheaval on a vast scale as a result of an argument about art’. Liz. James (ed.),
Art and Text in Byzantine Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 1.
8 Hugh William Williams, Travels in Italy, Greece, and the Ionian Islands (Edinburgh:
Constable, 1820), ii, p. 338. Among the predecessors whom he mentions are Poussin and
Claude whose paintings he had gone to Italy to study.
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 61

Acropolis, acting on such beliefs, have in modern as well as in ancient

times sometimes deliberately put themselves into a semi-conscious state
in order to experience responses that they believed arrived from outside,
and have frequently been encouraged to do so by those who have wished
to influence them.
Memories, we can, I suggest, now accept as having been established
by the work of Halbwachs and his successors, exist in relationship to a
social group, situated in the mental and material spaces provided by, and
often invented and maintained by, that group in order to enable them to
be organised and conserved.9 Besides functioning as a theatre of social
memory, the Acropolis has itself been a technology of memory both for
attempts to invent and control new memory by building and rebuilding,
and for policies aimed at destroying and superseding the previously
existing memory by knocking down, replacing, and what we may call
monument cleansing. To those living in modern and in ancient times, but to
a much lesser extent during the long millennium in between, the Acropolis
has served as a store of cultural capital.10
When UNESCO, the organisation that was established in 1945 in the
ruins of the world war, to promote peace ‘on the basis of humanity’s moral
and intellectual solidarity’, took the Parthenon as its symbol, it was picking
up and reinforcing a tradition of regarding the building as more than an
extraordinary survival from an ancient civilisation or as a fine work of
architecture. Unlike, say the Pyramids of Egypt, the Acropolis of Athens
has in recent centuries been presented, within the western political and
artistic traditions, as an inspiration to the modern world, part of a precious
identity shared with classical Hellas. And the imputations are themselves
part of the history. As a material embodiment of immaterial values that
many since the European Renaissance have wished to claim as their own,
the Acropolis has provided a focal point for many of the intellectual – and
occasionally of the physical – struggles from which the modern world has
emerged. If there is a shared western identity, the Acropolis of Athens has
participated in the debates and crises that have helped to shape it. Indeed,
with its hold over the mental worlds of memory, myth, and fantasy, the

9  Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire (1925) and La Mémoire Collective (1950). Discussed also by
Eleni Bastéa, The Creation of Modern Athens: Planning the Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), pp. 2-6.
10 As far as ancient Athens is concerned, discussed by Bernd Steinbock, Social Memory in
Athenian Public Discourse: Uses and Meanings of the Past (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 2012).
62 Cultural Heritage Ethics

Acropolis of the imagination has sometimes played as decisive a role in the

course of events as the Acropolis of the stones.
A history of looking at the Acropolis that aims to address the implications
of the two starting observations within a framework of established modern
knowledge must therefore, I suggest, do more than add new information
to the existing histories of the Acropolis as a monument, modifying the
accounts and explanations as necessary, although it must try to do that. Nor
can it be content with finding examples of people who saw the Acropolis
at different times, and summarising what they are reported as saying
or thinking or feeling, although it should build up this kind of historical
data too. A history that pursues the implications of the two observations
within a framework of established modern knowledge must, I suggest, also
investigate the means by which the experiences of cultural constituencies
were turned into categories, and how, by whom, and on whose authority,
these processes of inscription, repetition, and ritualisation helped to
establish and mediate ways of seeing, and how, when, and why changes
occurred. Although seeing is individual and dynamic, the mediations
that condition expectations, and the choices about salience, are social and
often stable for long periods of time. And since the mediating, both the
immaterial, such as cultural norms, and the material objects, such as the
books and the pictures by which norms were constituted, could only have
influenced those who already knew their languages, conventions, and
genres, it follows too that questions about the nature and extent of the
materiality of mediation, including the political economy of how they came
into existence in the form that they did, who had access to them and when,
and who assented to them or resisted, must also be part of the inquiry.
Until recently, the historic, as distinct from the implied, viewer has been
largely absent from art history as practised, or has been conceived of as ‘a
passive reader or consumer of images’.11 However, when we try to build a
provisional model for conducting an inquiry into the history of the Acropolis
as a dynamic cultural system – that is, as a series of transactions rather than as
a changing text – we quickly find that the determining role of the mediations
cannot simply be attached to the current conventions, leaving them
otherwise unchanged. No historic viewer of the Acropolis, has, for example,
ever followed the conventions that present the Acropolis as a chronological
parade. A history arranged as a series of moments of first production is unable

11 The phrase used by Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science
(New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 46.
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 63

to accommodate the fact that the monuments of the Acropolis were designed
and built so as to be seen into the future as it was then foreseeable, and that
they often did continue to be looked at for centuries. It has become common,
by those aware of the difficulties implicit in periodisation, to describe the
continued existence of public monuments after the time when they were first
built as their ‘afterlife’ from the German nachleben. But the word itself draws
attention to its own lack of historicity. Except possibly (and to a limited
extent) in the case, for example, of the first viewers personally present at the
unveiling of a public monument, when the producers and the consumers
were members of the same closely defined cultural group, we cannot assume
that even broadly contemporaneous viewers categorised, interpreted, or
responded in the same way. Since all monuments are attempts to influence
viewing experiences beyond the moment when they were first made, their
‘afterlife’ begins the moment they are born, or in many cases even earlier.
Nor have viewers of the Acropolis always, or even normally, privileged the
immediately contemporary over the old, nor regarded the no-longer-new as
being culturally no longer alive. Most visitors today look more closely at the
Parthenon than at the ticket office.
What we can say with confidence is that the producers of the material
Acropolis – walls, buildings, public and private dedications and inscriptions,
sculptures, pictures, and symbols – have always wanted it to carry visual
signs to live viewers, actual and potential, with the hope, intention, and
expectation that meanings made by these viewers would be accepted,
internalised, and acted upon. Indeed a wish to offer viewers a means of
understanding the relationship between the then present, the then past,
and the then future, was among the explicitly stated aims of those who
built the classical Acropolis and by others later. And there has never been
a time from the present back to classical times and earlier, when viewers
did not see ruined as well as functioning buildings, and attempt to draw
lessons from the experience. A study that faces the implications of the two
observations is therefore, I suggest, certain to be different from a history
(or an art history, or an archaeological history) of the stones, and cannot
be derived solely from such histories. The theories and mediations, that
coexisted and competed, form complex time patterns of their own that do not
coincide with one another, let alone with the conventions of a chronological
parade. When, however, we relocate the site where meanings are made to
the minds of viewers, and admit them as active participants in a complex
dynamic system, we may begin to undertake the more ambitious task of
64 Cultural Heritage Ethics

tracing the effects of cultural production through to cultural consumption,

to the resultant construction of group mentalities, and on to real world
consequences in at least some cases.
The fact that there are mismatches between current and past ways of
seeing is, of course, well understood, as is the difficulty of the imaginative
leap needed to emancipate even the recent past from modern assumptions.
The Past is a Foreign Country was the title of one of David Lowenthal’s
pioneering studies of the notion of heritage published in 1985.12 For more
than a generation, scholars have rightly emphasised the need to recover
and historicise past discursive practices, including ways of seeing, that
were based on assumptions that have since been rendered untenable.
My approach may meet the comment, associated with post-colonial
theory, that I am imposing modern western European scientific and
Enlightenment categories on societies whose world views were different
and who valued different kinds of knowledge. In recent times, for example,
some have re-conceptualised the notion of myth as ‘meaningful history’, an
attempt to soften the distinction between a search for reliable knowledge
of what actually happened in the past from a search for understandings
of how the mediated past impinged on the minds of the people alive at
any particular time.13 However, although assessing the past within its
own discursive terms may appear to protect the modern historian from
the charge of condescension, it risks turning history into a mere collecting
and chronicling of past stories that we now know to be untrue, an
antiquarianism condemned to perpetual imprisonment within its own
artificial conventions.
Preferable, I suggest, is to find a way that neither ignores the otherness
of the past, nor adopts the reactionary fallacy that modern scientific
and Enlightenment knowledge is just another passing discourse whose
claims are no stronger than those of its many predecessors and modern
competitors. Nor need such an approach accept a relativist position that all
the pasts of the Acropolis are, or should be regarded as, of equal interest to
the present day, what Werner Jaeger, the champion of the unique value of
Hellenism, despairingly called ‘a night in which all cats are grey’.14 Rather,
while accepting that my approach is inescapably a product of my time, as

12 ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’, the opening lines of the novel,
The Go-Between, by L.P. Hartley (1953), was made popular by the film of the same name.
13 Quoted by Steinbock, 2012, p. 8. Other terms he notes are ‘usable past’, ‘imagined and
remembered history’, ‘cultural memory’, ‘believed history’, and ‘intentional history’.
14 Werner Jaeger, Paideia, The Ideals of Greek Culture, trans. Gilbert Highet, 2nd edition, 3rd
printing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. xxv.
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 65

well as an attempt to escape from it, I would say that recovering a critical
understanding of the succession of pasts and how those who inhabited
them understood their own pasts and possible futures, can both lessen the
risks to our intellectual independence and improve our understanding of
our present situation.
***

So how could such a history of looking best be attempted? How can we write
a history of transactions rather than of texts, of minds as well as of things?
History, in the sense of the past as it occurred, has proceeded chronologically,
but historiography is inescapably counter-chronological, a looking back in
time from a here and now. And, as was remarked by Karl Marx:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please;
they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under
circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.
The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a mountain on the brain
of the living.15

In the approach that I adopt, broadly counter-chronological with detours,

I propose to excavate the conceptual and organising categories that were
applied in various pasts, in the hope of discovering how they came into
being, were circulated, modified, subsequently overlaid, and sometimes
acted upon. In re-imagining the past, it may be safer to move in steps from
one layer back to its immediate predecessor, thus developing an incremental
understanding of how the imagined past has come down to us, than to risk
making a single large leap from the here and now. Indeed the history of
modern attempts to understand ancient Hellas is so replete with examples
of cultural constituencies projecting back their own ideologies that it
would be possible to read it as a set of reminders of the risks. Although
concentrated on one specific object, this essay can therefore be taken as a
response to Michel Foucault’s call for an ‘archaeology’ or a ‘genealogy’ of
knowledge, remembering that Foucault was not a theorist qua theorist, nor
an ideologue, but a thinker whose ideas were founded upon his historical,
critical, and Enlightenment-inspired attempt to understand the otherness
of the past, including ancient Hellas.
For such a study, the Acropolis of Athens offers some unique advantages.
Indeed it is probably only the presence of these unique advantages that
makes a project with so many factors and feedbacks potentially feasible.

15 Translated from the opening paragraph of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).
66 Cultural Heritage Ethics

Firstly, the record is unusually full and long. From the time when the
Homeric poems were composed and recited (eighth or ninth century BC),
and probably long before that, there have been many people living far from
Athens who knew enough about the Acropolis to recognise allusions in both
epics. And there have been few times since then when some knowledge of
the Acropolis has not been passed far from Athens across time and distance
by word of mouth, by oral literature, by writings carried in manuscript
and print, and by other media. And besides the direct reports of those who
actually visited Athens, we also have many writings that were composed
and promulgated in an attempt to influence ways of viewing. Admonitory
writings, provided we read them as indications of recommended ways of
seeing, stories that attempt to make the mute stones speak, rather than as
examples of records of actual individual experiences, are a major resource,
especially for the long periods of time when we have few others. Indeed
for the task of recovering mainstream ways of seeing, the clichéd, the
humdrum, the derivative, and even the fake, are particularly useful, and
fortunately they are abundant.
Since the sources, although plentiful, are at all epochs heavily weighted
towards those produced by males from the richer socio-economic groups,
we are put on our methodological guard against arguing from the anecdotal
to the general. Paradoxically, among the constituencies who have been
largely lost from the record are the people who spent much of their lives
within the Acropolis precincts, such as the men and women who looked
after the buildings and serviced the rituals, the soldiers of the garrisons,
and their women and slaves.
A second huge and specific advantage is that, as an object of study, the
Acropolis constitutes its own visual and interpretative frame. Some of the
locations in and around Athens from which viewers have chosen to look at
the Acropolis, and from which artists have presented their pictures, the –
using a term adopted by Adam Smith – ‘viewing stations’ were consistent
for centuries, and we can be confident that it was to influence the seeing
experience of viewers standing on these stations that the built Acropolis
was designed during some epochs at least.16 The Acropolis matches the
classic definitions of landscape pioneered by J.B. Jackson and W.G. Hoskins
as ‘a portion of the earth’s surface that can be comprehended at a glance’,
but also as a text that is open to be read, and as a dynamic cultural process
by which, by selective emphasis and exaggeration, human identities are

16 Adam Smith, ‘Of the Nature of that Imitation which takes place in what are called the
Imitative Arts’, in Essays on Philosophical Subjects (London, 1795), pp. 131-84.
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 67

constituted.17 Like a literary text in a book, or a painting hung in a picture

gallery, that is as an object of view already boundaried, the Acropolis can
therefore be read, both historically, within past contexts, and critically in
accordance with whatever modern criteria we may choose to apply.
A third specific advantage is that, throughout its long history, the
Acropolis has always been an officially controlled site. The legal as well
as de facto ownership of the Acropolis, recognised against the legal norms
of each epoch, including right of conquest and treaty of surrender, can
be traced back, through a succession of suzerainties, to ancient times
more or less continuously from 10th of April 1833 – the day when it was
handed over to the government of the recently established Greek nation
state, and its modern history began. Apart from occasional catastrophes
of earthquake, fire, sacking or bombardment, every substantial change –
whether the first flattening of the summit, the clearance of caves or the
vegetation, the building of temporary barriers and walls, the digging of
pits, the design and the placement of fortifications, buildings, statues, and
inscriptions, as well as their later removal – has required the approval
of the authorities then in control, including those whose occupation was
short-lived. Removals from the site, of which there have been many, have
also required approval. In considering how changes to the appearance of
the Acropolis came about, the study need not therefore be thrown back on,
or restricted to, notions of cultural emergence or emanation, that equate the
minds of viewers with those of artists as expressed in their production, and
is liable to fall into circularity and romanticism. It is legitimate to discuss
the whole history of the Acropolis, including the classical Acropolis, in
terms of the aims, intentions, and hopes of the successive producers of its
appearance, including the theories of cognition and of art and iconicity
that influenced their decisions, without of course assuming that they were
always successful in their aims. Because the sources are so rich we are also
able to recover the political regulatory and the economic processes that
brought about the material Acropolis in various forms at various epochs. In
addition to the cultural agendas we can recover the formal administrative
processes by which approvals were given and projects financed (including
by slave or forced labour) and then executed and accepted.
Introducing the political economy component brings out the extent to
which the determining decisions about the appearance of the Acropolis,

17 See the Introduction to I. Robertson and P. Richards (eds.), Studying Cultural Landscapes
(London: Arnold, 2003) and W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1994).
68 Cultural Heritage Ethics

and often also how it should be mediated in words and pictures, were
taken not locally in Athens, but in ancient Rome, in Byzantine Nicaea
and Constantinople, in Ottoman Istanbul, and in the capitals and other
cities of modern western countries. Moreover decisions were often made
or influenced by governments and international authorities and agencies,
whose agendas did not necessarily coincide with the wishes of the local
people of Athens, insofar as they are knowable. With the exception of the
classical period, almost all the written and visual works on which we are
reliant for a history of looking were not produced locally in Athens, and even
in the classical period many of the most famous writers, such as Aristotle,
came from elsewhere. The thought, still heard occasionally, that you have
to be Athenian to understand the Acropolis, that implies an essentialism of
nationalism, is especially out of place for a monument that has, for most of
its history, been culturally constructed far from Athens, and that, even in
the classical period, counted a wish to influence non-Athenians among its
explicit aims.
Among the producers of the Acropolis, I therefore include the proposers
and the instigators, the political and other institutions who voted the
funds, the designers, engineers, architects, artists, skilled and other
workers, whether forced or voluntary, both those who built and those
who destroyed, replaced, adapted or altered. Among the producers I also
include the intermediaries who composed, made accessible, and published
visual representations, and those who attempted to regulate or influence
the viewing experiences of others, such as political (including religious)
leaders, authors and educators. Among the consumers, I include both
those who saw the Acropolis directly with their own eyes and those who
encountered it from a distance in images and words.

***

So let me begin the dig by offering a photograph of the Parthenon today,

probably the most valued view of the Acropolis in recent times. Figure 5.1
shows a view of the Parthenon that at the time of writing opens up to the
visitor arriving on the summit and following the tourist path. The pictures
I show are mediations of mediations, and this offers advantages as well
as potential losses. The once clear air of Athens, that was uniquely well
captured by the technology of coloured aquatint, is now made even clearer
when seen with the computer light behind in the online version. And we
can use zooms to improve our appreciation of how visual technologies
achieved their effects.
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 69

Fig. 5.1 The Parthenon from the north-west.

This is the temporary, constantly changing, Parthenon that visitors encounter

and have encountered during the recent decades of conservation. It coexists
with images of the timeless Parthenon, shown without scaffolding or people,
that appears on the entrance tickets given to visitors, as shown in Figure 5.2.

Fig. 5.2 The Parthenon from the north-west.

70 Cultural Heritage Ethics

It is, almost without exception, the timeless Parthenon that is reproduced

in the postcards, on the covers of guidebooks, and in the windows and
frontages of the shops and kiosks that surround the Acropolis, and elsewhere.
A periphery of iconicity, we can say, pre-sets the Acropolis viewing
experience before visitors reach the site. And although there are occasional
grumbles that the conservation works are taking too long, contemporary
viewers appear to have no difficulty in cognitively negotiating both images
simultaneously, eliding the scaffolds as easily as they elide the other
apparently temporary, but in reality permanent, modern fixtures that they
see on the Acropolis, such as the lamps for floodlighting. And just as the
principles of the Venice Charter on the conservation of monuments, with
which the recent Acropolis programme conforms, requires that viewers of
the Acropolis buildings are able to distinguish the ancient marble from the
new used in repairs, that is, to operate simultaneously in two temporalities,
they also operate simultaneously at different levels of cognition, seeing the
actual stones, imagining what has been lost, and often also according the
experience some wider signification and meaning.18 In Figures 5.3, 5.4, and
5.5, I trace the view back through the era of photography.

Fig. 5.3 The Parthenon from the north-west, c.1909 before the re-erection of
the colonnade in the 1920s.

18 See http://www.international.icomos.org/charters/venice_e.pdf.
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 71

Fig. 5.4 The Parthenon from the north-west.

Fig. 5.5 The Parthenon from the north-west, autumn 1839.

72 Cultural Heritage Ethics

Figure 5.5 reproduces the first picture of the Parthenon made directly by
the technology of light on a chemical plate without artistic intervention,
although since the daguerreotype camera produced only one copy it had to
be copied by an engraver. It shows how the lens of the camera made central
the little building that the salience of the selecting eye of a human viewer
elided or ignored. The building was physically removed soon after.
The image reproduced as Figure 5.6, frequently re-engraved for half a
century, accompanied The Travels of the Younger Anacharsis in Greece, the
book on ancient Greece that was most often encountered in all the main
languages across western Europe and elsewhere from 1788 until into the
age of photography and beyond.

Fig. 5.6 The Parthenon as it appeared in antiquity, as imagined in 1788.

Since the 1830s, the actual Acropolis has gradually come to match the
engravings of the eighteenth century whose artists imagined how the
Parthenon appeared in antiquity. It derives from the explicitly stated aim
of those who, in 1834, decided that the four principal ancient buildings
should be visible from all sides.19 They regarded the buildings primarily as

19 Costas Tsarouchas [publisher], ‘Akropolis von Athen.’ Facsimiles, with translations, and
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 73

free-standing works of architecture – rather than as a complex of stories in

stone in which the official memory and values of the ancient polis had been
visually presented and around which they had been ritually performed.
And it was not only the Parthenon as a building that was iconised but an
interpretative frame that excluded just as it included. We also see that
the net effect of the successive conservation interventions till now has
been, step by step, to make the real Parthenon resemble the Parthenon as
imagined in the eighteenth century. The most recent interventions, such
as the introduction, for conservation and tourist-management purposes, of
the roped-off concrete path shown in Figure 5.1, have helped to entrench
that way of seeing the monument even further.
Figure 5.7 reproduces a view of how the Acropolis summit looked
when there was still a town on the summit, the Acropolis, taken from an
imagined viewing station that was not available, except to birds.

Fig. 5.7 The Parthenon from the north-west, c.1805.

The modern view of the Parthenon only became available when the town
was removed in the nineteenth century. In this clearance the unsculpted
marble, stones, and tiles, almost everything that could be recycled as

comments on, a selection of twenty documents from the official papers in a file of the
Bavarian Regency Government, 1834 to 1842 (Athens: Alethea, 2012), p. 29, translated
from the German. The decision was explicitly noted by Charles Lévèque, ‘Les Etudes
archéologiques en Grèce’, Revue des Deux Mondes, August 1851, p. 646.
74 Cultural Heritage Ethics

building materials, was sold and are now spread through modern Athens.
Enormous quantities of earth, and the remains of eight thousand years of
human and animal occupation, several metres deep, were dumped over
the walls on three sides as shown in Figure 5.8.

Fig. 5.8 The Acropolis south slopes around 1858.

The present Acropolis summit, we can say, is a triumph of science and

archaeology, but it is also the result of a quite narrow way of viewing that
looks at ancient architecture, and even at ancient architectural sculpture,
as discreet ‘works of art’, with insufficient regard to cityscape, context, or
function.
One point about the recent conservation programme has, in my view,
not been sufficiently appreciated. Without fanfare, the ancient path that
circles the Acropolis on its slopes, long cordoned off with fences and
barbed wire, has recently been reopened. Visitors can now visit more
sites, both natural and man-made, look at more vistas, and experience
more ways of seeing both directly and in their historical imagination,
than have been possible for half a century or more. The old photograph
reproduced in Figure 5.9, taken when the Acropolis vegetation had been
temporarily scrubbed out, records a view of part of the ancient path that
is no longer so clearly available.
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 75

Fig. 5.9 The ancient path on the north side under the caves.

To the viewer looking up from the old town, as well as from distances far
beyond to the north, the row of column drums built conspicuously into
the defensive summit walls, still catches the attention. They are among the
remains of the pre-classical buildings that were destroyed by the Persian
invaders in 480 BC. The Athenians of the classical age and later looking up
from the centre of town, the agora where much of the daily life occurred,
encountered every day this permanent reminder of the foreign invasion that
had once destroyed their material city, but not the real city, the people.20 It
was the remains of the older, destroyed, Parthenon that they mostly saw in
their daily lives, not its classical replacement that lies outside the sightlines
from the town on this side.
The path round the slopes was not an informal track beaten through
the vegetation made by generations of trespassing feet, although there are

20 That the drums had been deliberately placed on the walls so as to be a visual reminder
to the town below, suggested by Ludwig Ross in the 1830s and probably by others
earlier, is discussed by Manolis Korres in ‘A Conversation with Manolis Korres, Athena’s
Worship and the Semiology of the Monuments of the Acropolis’, in M. Korres et al.
(eds.), Dialogues on the Acropolis. Scholars and Experts Talk on the History, Restoration and
the Acropolis Museum (Athens: Skai Books, 2010), p. 144.
76 Cultural Heritage Ethics

some of these too. Cut into the rock the path was a designed and engineered
feature of the Acropolis and of the cityscape that, we can be confident, must
have been officially approved and financed by the city’s authorities at some
moment in the remote past. Visually, as was noted by Aelios Aristides in
his panegyric of 155 AD, the road that circled the acropolis of a Hellenic city
was like a jewelled necklace, that unified as well as adorned.21 Inside, until
the nineteenth century, many caves were brightly coloured and lit. The
acropolis of Smyrna, a colony of Athens that followed many of its customs,
was according to Aristides, laid out like an embroidered gown, another
comparison that reminds us that women were included in the metaphors,
as well as in much of the iconography, of the ancient city.
Also visible from the town, and now visitable, is the Cave of Pan. Figure
5.10 shows the present view looking out over the ancient agora, with the
Hephaisteion in the distance.

Fig. 5.10 The cave of Pan on the north slope, looking out.

21 P. Aelius Aristides, ‘A Monody for Smyrna’, in The Complete Works, vol. II: Orationes XVII-
LIII, ed. and trans. Charles A. Behr (Leiden: Brill, 1986), p. 7. Aristides imagines a viewer
looking down from above, but the metaphor works well looking from ground level.
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 77

It was here, as the story was retold by Euripides, that Creusa was raped by
Apollo and to here that she secretly returned to give birth.22 Pan was given
the Cave by the Athenians as a reward for spreading ‘panic’ among the
enemy at the battle of Marathon, but as we know from the satirist Lucian,
he did not much like it. It was noisy and cramped as I can confirm. The
Athenians occasionally killed a goat in his honour, inappropriate, Pan
thought, for he was half goat himself. No wonder, as Lucian tells us, Pan
hated paying the tax as a non-domiciled resident, a non-dom.23
On the ancient path, visitors can now stand on the exact spot where in
classical Athens the young male Athenian citizens under military training
took their oath to defend the city and what it held sacred, and to increase
its power.24 They can share the vistas across to the surrounding mountains
and seas that visually enclose the territory within its natural amphitheatre,
confident that most of the famous men of classical Athens, whether poets,
playwrights, philosophers, historians, or politicians, once stood on this exact
spot, regarding themselves at that moment as citizen-soldiers. Standing in
ranks with the steep Acropolis crags at their backs, the young men were
obliged by the steepness of the Acropolis slope to look forward and outward,
and to hold their ranks without jostling, as they might soon have to stand in
a real battle. Many rituals began on the slopes where the view was outward
and unlimited to the horizon, before moving to the summit where the view
is inward and confined. In ancient drama too, comedy as well as tragedy, the
Acropolis slopes and the horizons of mountains and sea were always in sight,
with many of the best known ancient stories, such as those surrounding the
families of Orestes and Oedipus, firmly anchored to the visible landscape,
both close up, and to the mountains and seas on the horizons.
The Acropolis summit, especially now, is a place of imposed order, a
clean, bare, enclosed, controlled environment of straight lines, built by
human hands, where the natural world is unwelcome – every sprouting
plant is immediately weeded out. In ancient Athens, the paths and the caves
of the slopes were also integral to the ceremonial, ritual, and formal life of
the whole city, important to the cults favoured by non-citizens and slaves
of both sexes as much as to those of citizens and their official wives and

22 In the Ion.

23 Lucian, Double Indictment, 9.
24 The words of the oath are quoted by Lycurgus, Against Leocrates, i, 77. The wording
may have changed over the centuries but its essence remained unchanged and familiar,
as was shown by P. Siewert, ‘The Ephebic Oath in Fifth-Century Athens’, Journal of
Hellenic Studies, 97, 1977, pp. 102-11.
78 Cultural Heritage Ethics

daughters.25 The peripatos too, a word that brings out the role of the path as
a place for peripatetics, performed social functions beyond its usefulness as
a road along which to move from A to B. As an unsupervised meeting place,
it allowed, for example, political conspirators and transgressing lovers to
escape inquiring eyes. As Lucian reports, Pan used to say that he had a
thing or two he could tell about what he saw from his cave after nightfall.26
A modern psychologist might look on the Acropolis as a layer of conscious
human rationality resting on an unconscious swirl of dreams, desires, and
fears.
Today I think it is fair to say that the dominant way of looking at the
Acropolis is as an archaeological and art-historical site. But it is also often
invested with modern political messages. That the Acropolis celebrates
ancient Athenian democracy is often presented as a fact — Athens as the
birthplace, or the cradle, of democracy, the political ancestor of modern
democratic nation states.27 When we dig down through the layers, however,
we find that this imputation is seldom made before the mid-nineteenth
century.28 From the epigraphic evidence of over forty cities it now appears
that, in the classical period, Athens was not unique in having a democratic
form of government, nor was Athens the first.29 And although the
Parthenon was commissioned during the century when classical Athens
was governed by a democracy, albeit one confined to male citizens, there
is little or nothing democratic in the iconography of the buildings, that, as
throughout the Hellenic world, present traditional scenes from local and
pan-Hellenic myths as was the convention long before the democracy
began and continued after it had gone.

25 The numerous peri-acropolitan cults are discussed by, for example, Robert Parker,
Polytheism and Society at Athens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 52. For the
sanctuaries and cults on the slopes, and some recent photographs, see the conversation
with Constantinos Tsakos in Korres et al., 2010, pp. 166-87.
26 Double Indictment, 11.
27 For example ‘The Athenian Democracy pervades all in the classical Acropolis’, Korres et
al., 2010, p. 7.
28 A moment of transition may be Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Athens: Its Rise and Fall, With
Views of the Literature, Philosophy, and Social Life of the Athenian People, first published in
1837 in which, as the full title indicates, the cultural achievement is brought into the
political and moral history, although only as a supplement. The grand narrative histories
of the eighteenth century, including Mitford and Ferguson, mostly favoured Sparta over
Athens, and presented ‘democracy’ as a political system to be feared (summarised by
Oswyn Murray in his introduction to the bicentenary edition). In 1873, the historian
Edward A Freeman, in an essay ‘The Athenian Democracy’, Historical Essays, Second
Series (London: Macmillan, 1873) suggested that ‘the pre-eminence of Athens in literature,
philosophy and art’ was the result, not the cause, of its democracy.
29 Eric W. Robinson, Democracy beyond Athens: Popular Government in the Greek Classical Age
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 79

Another political way of looking at the Acropolis is to see it as a monument

to the continuity of modern Greece back to ancient Hellas. In the recent
book prepared by the experts who managed the Acropolis conservation
programme, the point was put in the form of a question: ‘Why is it that
Greeks regard these monuments as being theirs, regardless of whether or
not they visit them regularly or whether they really know them? Why do
they regard them as their very own, their “home”, the trademark of Greece
through the ages and of the present day?’30 This way of looking appears to
be no longer much emphasised in Greece itself, being for example, largely
absent from the official educational programmes for Greek children
visiting the Acropolis.31 One of the clearest statements can be found in the
speech of Melina Mercouri of 12 June 1986, when as the Minister of Culture,
speaking in English, she addressed the students of the Oxford Union in
England: ‘You must understand what the Parthenon Marbles mean to us.
They are our pride. They are our sacrifices. They are our noblest symbol of
excellence. They are a tribute to the democratic philosophy. They are our
aspirations and our name. They are the essence of Greekness’.32
Like many nation states, in the nineteenth century Greece produced a
series of long, often learned, and apparently authoritative, histories that, by
mixing historical fact, myth, ideology, and some self-congratulation, gave a
unified narrative to the imagined community of ‘the nation’ as a metaphysical
entity continuing in its essentials unchanged across time and situation. The
historian Constantinos Paparrigopoulos, for example, in his six volume
work, first published between 1860 and 1877, commented on the long period
between modern and ancient Hellas: ‘The city of Athens still preserved its
ancient traditions, its love of beauty and reverence for the masterpieces of
art … These descendants of the Athenians of the age of Pericles had indeed
forgotten how to cultivate literature and the arts, but they had preserved the
nobility of their race, and although they had lost its intellectual force, they
retained its reverence for all that stirred the enthusiasm of their ancestors’.33
Despite much searching in recent decades, however, no-one has found any
evidence for the local Christian Orthodox community before the Greek
Revolution associating their own identity with the ancient ruins before

30 Blurb to Korres et al., 2010.

31 The current official education programmes are described by Cornelia Hatziaslani in
Korres et al., 2010, pp. 426-43.
32 Available on the website of the Melina Mercouri Foundation: http://www.melina
mercourifoundation.org.gr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=73&Item
id=49&lang=en
33 Quoted in translation by Demetrios Sicilianos, Old and New Athens (London: Putnam,
1960), pp. 20-21.
80 Cultural Heritage Ethics

the 1790s, and that was under influences from expatriates.34 Nor is this
surprising as the last thing a theocracy wants is democracy, especially when
it is associated – as it was in ancient Athens – with open intellectual debate.
An example of the transplanting of philhellenism into Greece, where it has
since become native, is shown as Figure 5.11.

Fig. 5.11 Greece, invoking Homer and the ruins of ancient Hellas,
calls on Europe for help, 1821.

Without implying that they are invalid just because they are historically
contingent, we can note that all the main contemporary ways of looking at
the Acropolis, the archaeological, the art historical, the romantic aesthetic,
and the political, were invented and introduced during the last two centuries.

***

Within a few years of the advent of photography, more images of the Acropolis
had been produced and distributed than in all previous millennia put together.

34 A process discussed by, among others, Yannis Hamilakis, The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity,
Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 81

The photographers, while purporting to offer images that are direct analogues
of reality (‘the camera cannot lie’), that the photo-chemical technology appears
to guarantee, soon adopted the techniques of fashion, advertising, opera and
cinema, to produce imagined but unseeable images, using long ladders and
special cameras to shoot from viewing stations that never existed in modern
or ancient times. Figures 5.12 and 5.13 are examples of these images, icons
of icons, a vision of an Eternal Greece produced for a global viewership.35 In
‘Eternal Greece’, there are usually no people, nor any clues to when the images
were made. By eliminating contingency, they eliminate time. Some, such as
the example in Figure 5.13, are deliberately archaised.

Fig. 5.12 Caryatid looking towards Philopappus, 1929.

35 The main pioneers and practitioners of the style from the arrival of photography to
the mid-twentieth century include, in rough chronological order, Robertson, Stillman,
Bonfils, Gkinakou, Margaritis, Constantine, Boissonas, Sebah of Constantinople,
Antoine Bon, ‘Nelly’, Alnari, Ponten, Boudot LaMotte, Sirén, Hoyningen-Huene, Hege,
Hürlimann, Herbert List, Lukas, and – for moving images – Riefenstahl.
82 Cultural Heritage Ethics

Fig. 5.13 North-west corner of the Parthenon, 1923.

The makers of the modern Acropolis were not only the archaeologists and
engineers, but the photographers, publishers, and postcard makers who
presented an incorporeal Acropolis, hovering between realism and iconicity.
Pan, incidentally, Lucian tells us, complained that, as a plain country god
from the Peloponnese, he could not understand words like ‘incorporeal’
that he often overheard in his cave wafting up from the philosophical
academies.36 It was a word that the satirist knew would always raise a laugh
at the expense of the philosophers. In Timon, for example, Lucian has the
plain-speaking Zeus complain about the philosophers that: ‘One must sit
with one’s ears plugged, if one does not want the drums of them cracked;
such long vociferous rigmaroles about Incorporeal Things’.37 In the eleventh
century a small Byzantine Christian church, dedicated to ‘the Incorporeals’,
was built alongside the grand Roman ruin of Hadrian’s Library, in which the
ancient philosophers had stored their books and conducted their classes in
specially designed rooms. The word may have been a Christian attempt to
appropriate an ancient word still associated with the locality.
Modern coexisting ways of seeing are caught by the image at Figure 5.14.

36 Double Indictment, 11. ἀκούω γε αὐτῶν ἀεὶ κεκραγότων καὶ ἀρετήν τινα καὶ ἰδέας καὶ
φύσιν καὶ ἀσώματα διεξιόντων, ἄγνωστα ἐμοὶ καὶ ξένα ὀνόματα.
37 Lucian, Timon, 9.
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 83

Fig. 5.14 Viewing the Acropolis, c.1898.

This image, that itself has the clarity of a photograph, is probably copied
from a photograph of a painting which had itself been composed from
photographs rather than from a personal visit by the artist, and there is no
viewing station from where the scene could have been seen. A product of
illusory realism, the image picks out some of the main ways of viewing since
the clearances. We see a western officer, such as Colonel Barry with whom
I began, with his ladies, taking charge with his pointing arm. The elderly
Greek, one of the former soldiers employed as guards, is lost in his own,
possibly philhellenic, thoughts. We see an artist, and a man reading – maybe
an ancient author or an archaeological guide-book. And in the background
we glimpse another man looking up, who may be internalising Eternal
Greece. The lady who rebelliously breaks away represents the viewers who
throughout the ages have resisted the mainstream conventions.
84 Cultural Heritage Ethics

Working down to the eighteenth-century layers before the Greek

Revolution below we find ways of viewing that were very different. Figure
5.15 is a view of the Acropolis as seen from the town.

Fig. 5.15 The Acropolis as seen from the centre of Athens,

by Edward Dodwell, c.1805.

Although Athens was then a town of only about six to ten thousand
inhabitants, it contained forty churches, over eighty chapels, and
eleven mosques. By its religious buildings, Athens visually presented
its political and social organisation into religious communities, the
majority Orthodox Christians and about a quarter Muslim. There were
also a few hundred Africans. A visitor to Piraeus in 1809 saw only two
ships in the harbour, one exporting antiquities for Lord Elgin, the other
importing slaves from Africa.38
To the surprise of western architects, the classical buildings on the
Acropolis mostly lay outside the sightlines from the town. It was only
from a distance that the Acropolis appeared as a statue to be wondered at
from all sides, in its unique light, as it had been celebrated in antiquity, as
some of the eighteenth-century artists tried to capture.

38 John Galt, Letters from the Levant (London: Cadell and Davies, 1813), p. 127; Voyages and
Travels, in the Years 1809, 1810, and 1811 (London: Cadell and Davies, 1812), p. 185.
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 85

Fig. 5.16 The Acropolis as seen from a distance

by an arriving traveller, c.1800.

Figure 5.17 shows how the entrance to the Acropolis appeared during
the hundred years or so after an Ottoman refortification programme was
completed sometime in the early eighteenth century until the changes
brought about during the Revolution that began in 1821.

Fig. 5.17 The Entrance to the Acropolis, Heinrich Hübsch, 1819.

86 Cultural Heritage Ethics

What was unignorable was the huge Muslim cemetery with its mosque
that proclaimed to every viewer that Athens was part of the Ottoman
dominions and had been inhabited by Muslims for four centuries – for as
long as Europeans had been settled in North America. In the eighteenth
century the Muslim population spoke Greek as their first language.39

Fig. 5.18 The Muslim cemetery at the entrance to the Acropolis.

In my explorations in the area I have come across a few paving stones

apparently made from Muslim tombs, but as part of the Hellenising agenda
the cemetery was cleansed from sight, and from memory.
In the long eighteenth century, unlike today, the Acropolis visually
presented the continuity of its long past back to mythic times. But here I
note two large differences between the experience of local viewers and that
of visitors. For hundreds of years, hardly any of the Orthodox Christian
community of Athens ever saw inside the Acropolis as it had been a closed
military facility since at least the thirteenth century. By contrast, for visitors

39 The Turkish language ‘in Greece where it is little understood, even by the Musulmans
themselves, and where its use is confined to the large cities, and some districts in Macedonia’,
William Martin Leake, Researches in Greece (London: John Booth, 1814), p. iv. According to
Sicilianos, 1960, p. 20, ‘The Turks who lived in Athens spoke a mixed language, mostly
composed of Greek, and had forgotten their own language to such as extent that they could
not converse with members of their own race who came from abroad’.
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 87

from western Europe, the desire to see the buildings on the summit was
their main reason for being in Athens, and they could afford to pay to
gain entrance to the site. The second big difference is the availability of
expectation-setting mediating images. In 1835 shortly after the Acropolis
was handed over to the newly independent Greek state, the authorities
began to issue admission tickets, made by lithography. One was a map, the
other a picturesque view.

Fig. 5.19 Admission tickets to the Acropolis, mid 1830s.

88 Cultural Heritage Ethics

The map, that only notes the ancient buildings on the Acropolis, looks
forward to the time when the town would be removed. The view, by
including in its frame both a church and a camel train, keeps continuity.
Figure 5.20 is an engraving of a bronze coin made in Athens during the
Roman imperial period.

Fig. 5.20 A low denomination bronze coin issued in Athens,

Roman period, probably first century AD.

That coin, catching the viewing experience of the ancient observer, picks out
the ancient way up to the Acropolis, past the Cave of Pan, up the steps, and
it shows the bronze statue of Athena Promachos, and a classical building –
probably the Propylaia not the Parthenon, or maybe just a generic temple.
For nearly two thousand years, from the time that this coin was struck until
the tickets of 1835, I do not know of a single visual representation of the
Acropolis produced locally. And by local I include the whole Byzantine
and Ottoman territories.
This absence, we can be certain, was not due to lack of technological or
artistic skill. The government that built Haghia Sophia in Constantinople,
then the largest building in the world, had plenty of skills, and could import
any that it did not have. What we see here – or rather do not see – is the
continuing result of the decisions by the early church councils to forbid all
but Orthodox Christian art. And in this regard, as in many others, the law
of Byzantium did not end with the fall of Constantinople but continued to
be applied in Athens until the Revolution of 1821. By contrast, visitors from
the west had not only read descriptions of Athens by ancient and modern
writers but had been prepared for the experience. And they found that
much was indeed as they had been educated to expect. As Byron wrote:

Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild;

Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,
Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled,
And still his honied wealth Hymettus yields.
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 89

Athena’s owls still fluttered round the Acropolis. Every spring and autumn,
almost to the day, the storks mysteriously came and went, building their
nests on the monuments as shown in Figure 5.21.

Fig. 5.21 ‘A View of the Doric Portico at Athens in its present state’, c.1751.

In ancient times an enclosed area of the Acropolis slopes had been called
‘the place of the storks’ (‘to pelargikon’) a verbal slide from ‘to pelasgikon’
(the place enclosed by the Pelasgians). It was a ‘storkade’, as one clever
translator has put it, and we cannot fully understand ancient literature
without reinserting the storks. For Enlightenment viewers, their acts
of viewing, their makings of meanings, were attempts to use their
imaginations to fill the gap between Nature, which they perceived as fixed,
and the works of Man which were always changing. So the philosopher
of history started with the storks. When wheeling high in formation in
the sky, the storks had the panoptic view that the human viewer longed
to share. The storks had stable government. The older storks looked after
the younger ones, who, it was believed, cared for their parents. And in
the eighteenth century any storks unable to fly to Africa spent the winter
90 Cultural Heritage Ethics

in the Ottoman governor’s garden which offered social care, free at

point of delivery. Secure in their own little acropolises, generations of
Athenian storks had observed the ups and downs of human history with
indifference and condescension.
But what were the laws of human history that were so different from
the laws of Nature as practised by the storks? And how could they be
discovered? The book that most helped to spread and entrench the
philosophical way of seeing was The Ruins by Count Volney, his meditations
on the ruins of empires, first published in French in 1788 on the eve of the
French Revolution that he claimed to have predicted when looking at the
ruins of Palmyra. As he wrote of his investigative method: ‘I will dwell
in solitude amidst the ruins of cities: I will inquire of the monuments of
antiquity what was the wisdom of former ages’.40

Fig. 5.22 Volney’s Ruins.

40 Quoted on title page of most editions and translations from chapter iv.
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 91

In the eighteenth century the Athenian Acropolis was uniquely well suited
to the search for unifying theories. More even than Rome, it visually
presented a continuous story. Far into the nineteenth century, despite
the findings of science and scholarship, many histories start with ‘the
Creation of the World’, as calculated from the biblical texts. They assume
a providentialism that takes as given that the course of history is under
a divine guidance that punishes as much as it saves. Many books play
variations on Athens its Rise and Fall, Athens, Elevation and Decline, Athens,
Grandeur and Decay. To individuals and to societies, the Acropolis visually
presented lessons that were universal, exportable, and relevant to current
public policy questions.
Besides perambulating the Acropolis with eyes open, the philosopher
therefore spent time reflecting on the totality of his or her experience,
following the arguments, weighing the evidence, and fixing the lessons in
his memory. The philosopher viewed the Acropolis with his eyes closed.

Fig. 5.23 ‘Byron’s Dream’, 1819.

92 Cultural Heritage Ethics

But what were these lessons? To account for the achievement of Athens, many
applied the theory developed by Hume, Montesquieu, de Staël, and some
of the ancients, that the character of a people is an outcome of the natural
environment. The Thebans were stupid, the ancients had said, because Boeotia
was damp. Byron, picking up that tradition, noted that Lord Elgin came from
Scotland, ‘a land of meanness, sophistry, and mist; /each breeze from foggy
mount and marshy plain / Dilutes with drivel every drizzling brain’.
But the climate of Athens is not always balmy, and its soil is rocky. It
was Sparta, which has a more pleasant climate and a more productive soil,
that had produced militarism. If the explanation for the achievement did not
lie in Nature, it must lie in Man? So was it the institutions of the ancient
Athenians that had led to their achievement, was their system of government,
their commercial spirit, their democracy resting on a slave economy? But
then what about the long decline? For help in meditating on that question,
the philosophical viewer was visually assisted by the artistic conventions
of the capriccio and the picturesque, and I show just one example of the
images that were most frequently encountered at the time, rather than those
commonly reproduced today.

Fig. 5.24 ‘The Ruins of Athens’.

 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 93

Textbooks for artists, including a few that advise on how to present Greek
ruins, emphasised that accuracy was not important: the depiction of ruins
must always have a moral aim. Viewers looking at these images were
invited to ask themselves questions such as: why had Athens come to this?
Had Athens been punished for its sins by divine providence? Like Sodom
and Gomorrah, Nineveh and Tyre, Pompeii, and other ancient cities? And,
if so, why had Athens been damned? Maybe too much luxury or free-
thinking? And if Athens had it coming, then others had better look out too,
as many warned. The explanation that carried most conviction to viewers
from the west is that the failure must lie in the essential character of the
people. The main early theorist of racism, Robert Knox, drew heavily upon
the Acropolis, as shown in his book.

Fig. 5.25 The Parthenon as a symbol of the superiority

of the northern white races.

With the invocation ‘wonderful and most mysterious race! divinest chapter
in human history! unparalleled, unequalled, whence came ye? Whither have
ye gone, fading away into the mists of the past?’ Knox, a medical anatomist,
who assumed that ancient men and women looked like the ancient statues
from the Parthenon that he had studied in the British Museum, uncritically
reversing from icon to actual, declared that the Ancient Hellenes were a
94 Cultural Heritage Ethics

blue-eyed race directly akin to the modern Germans and Scandinavians.

And across the Europeanised world the old idea that the genius of the
ancient Hellenes was due to the natural environment merged with the
new idea of essential racial differences. For example the Right Rev. J.A.
McClymont, who provided what he probably assumed were uncontentious
mainstream words to accompany the first popular book to employ colour
in prints, remarked: ‘The inhabitants belonged to a good stock, the Indo-
Germanic, while their geographical position and surroundings were well
fitted to develop a high type of manhood’.41 And the line goes to Nazism,
the German occupation of the Acropolis in 1941, and the systematic killing
of those regarded as racially inferior.

Fig. 5.26 The German flag flying over the Acropolis, 1941.

Nazi racial theories had many roots, of which the Acropolis was not the
most important. But it is striking that while during the occupation, the
Germans inflicted unspeakable suffering on the people, including mass
executions, genocides of the Greek-Jewish community, enslavement, and
the burning down of churches and monasteries, they made scarcely a
scratch on the Hellenic monuments.42 Ernst Buschor, a famous professor,

41 John Fulleylove, Greece Painted by John Fulleylove. Described by Right Rev. J.A. McClymont
(London: Black, 1906), p. 3, and in the editions of the 1920s.
42 The contradictions between the philhellenic admiration for ancient Athens and the
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 95

in a book published in Germany during the war, repeated the myth that
the ancient Greeks were a Nordic people who had come from the north.
In a little book, War in the age of the Parthenon that was given out to soldiers
and students, he links their struggles to those between Hellenes and
centaurs represented in the metopes of the Parthenon, that are indeed,
in modern terms an aestheticisation of interracial violence. In a preface,
Buschor makes explicit the German claim to be the new Hellenes by
dedicating his book to the soldiers ‘who have died for the Great Hellenic
heritage on the borders of the west’.43
Meanwhile, some viewers preferred to turn away from the Acropolis
and look instead at the hill of the Areopagos nearby where, according to
the author of The Acts of the Apostles, Paul had presented his ideas in a
seminar of two of the Athenian philosophic schools. In this way of looking,
the Areopagos was offered as an alternative – a superior – acropolis,
and one which the early Christians had provided with its own mythic
associations centred round Dionysius the Areopagite who is only known
from one sentence in the Acts of the Apostles – but who was given a full
biography, an iconic visage, and a large body of pseudonymous writings.
The Areopagus is bare. The church and episcopal palace that had formerly
stood there, had been destroyed at least once by earthquakes and rock
falls, divine providence in this case punishing the Orthodox Christians.
Instead, the Areopagus was reimagined as triumphing.

Fig. 5.27 ‘Mars Hill, Athens’.

German treatment of the Greeks whom they regarded as Slavic, with enslavement and
mass killings are described by Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of
Occupation, 1941-44 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
43 ‘die auf griechischem Boden und an anderen Rändern des Abendlandes für das Grosse
Griechische Erbe fielen’, Ernst Buschor, Das Kriegertum der Parthenonzeit (Munich, 1943).
96 Cultural Heritage Ethics

There is a large body of texts of nineteenth-century, mainly western, Christian

groups who compare the Acropolis unfavourably with the Areopagus, that
is ancient Hellenism with Christianity. Some are fanatical, violent and
triumphalist, others forgiving or trying to have it both ways. The counter-
Acropolitans, as we can call them, were however united by their hostility
to what the classical Acropolis represented, that they described, typically,
as ‘the very citadel of Grecian paganism’ ‘all rank idolatry’.44 Their largely
forgotten texts give us, I suggest, an insight into the range of reactions at
the end of antiquity, a time when the contest between the values of ancient
Hellenism was gradually being won by the incoming Christians, for which
the surviving record is heavily weighted towards the point of view of the
victorious theocrats.
But before turning to Byzantium I want instead to return to another
way of seeing invented in the eighteenth century, the aesthetic. Could it be,
some asked, that the buildings of the Acropolis preserved some essence of
Hellenism that was independent of their associations? The aesthetic way
of viewing, unlike the philosophical, does not need active viewers. On the
contrary, it claims to be an autonomous domain of meaning. The aesthetic,
being immaterial, is exportable. By the end of the eighteenth century, Europe
was already filled with new buildings modelled on the ancient buildings of
Athens and North America followed. I show a picture by the architect James
‘Athenian’ Stuart, who did more than anyone to export aesthetic Hellenism.

Fig. 5.28 The essence of the Athenian Acropolis exported to England.

44 The quotations are from James W. Hott, D.D., Journeyings in The Old World (Dayton, OH:
United Brethren Publishing House, 1884), p. 221, and Photograms of an Eastern Tour. … By
Σ. With original illustrations (London: [Bungay printed], 1859), p. 126.
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 97

Stuart imagines the ancient architect Mnesikles showing his plans for the
Propylaia to Pericles and the other famous men of the time. The Cave of
Pan and the stairs up to the Acropolis – and the usual non-existent view of
the Parthenon. The building on the right is a gentleman’s library. England,
such buildings proclaim, has imported the essence of the classical Acropolis.
Britain is the new Athens. And the style in which the ancient values were
expressed could be copied. And it was a small step from exporting the
incorporeal aesthetic to exporting the actual stones. It is this way of seeing,
an attempt to separate the aesthetic from the historical and geographical
context, that encourages the collecting of ‘unprovenanced’ antiquities,
that continues to damage our ability, and that of future generations, to
recover knowledge of the ancient world. Figure 5.29 reproduces a French
lithograph showing Elgin that I only found a few years ago.

Fig. 5.29 ‘Lord Elgin interrupts his meditations’.

98 Cultural Heritage Ethics

This illustration nicely captures a transition from the philosophical mode

of viewing where the viewer’s experience is central, to the aesthetic notion
that meaning can inhere in stones.

***
Digging down deeper to the seventeenth century, we see that when the
modern scientific on-the-spot study of the Acropolis began in the 1670s,
much was immediately re-discovered about the ancient sites and buildings.
Scholars from the west, unlike the local people of that time, had access to
the printed works of the Leiden scholar, Johannes Van Meurs, known as
Meursius, who, half a century before, had patiently collected and published
all the references in the surviving works of the ancient authors that had
been recovered and printed at the rime of the European Renaissance – a
corpus not much enlarged since. And when we dig through to the local
layers below the 1670s, we find a curious pattern. During the entirety of the
period between the Christian takeover of the eastern empire at the end of
antiquity and the encounter that began in the 1670s, not only are there no
pictures of the Acropolis made locally in the whole Byzantine and Ottoman
territories, but, in the vast surviving literature of Byzantium, mentions of
Athens can be counted on the fingers of two hands.45
The three that can have any claim to represent local ways of seeing
during the long millennium share some characteristics. The authors, or as we
should perhaps call them, the story-tellers, know the names of some ancient
Hellenic authors, but have no understanding of who they were or of what
they wrote. They are all ‘philosophers’.46 Secondly, it is extremely difficult
to date the time of composition from internal evidence, with some scholars
putting the longest of the three texts as early as the ninth century and others
as late as the seventeenth. The problem arises because they make little
distinction between what still existed to be seen and what they say had once
been there. In this running together of the see-able and the only imaginable,
the stories are akin to the ‘meaningful history’ narratives now classified as
post-colonial, that put first the perceived needs of their present. Like the
nineteenth-century western Christian viewers of the Areopagus, they are

45 Most of those that refer to Athens as a place are noted by Filippomaria Pontani,
‘EKΛEΛEIMMENΛ EPEIΠIA. I Bizantini e le rovine antiche’, Annali della Scuola Normale
Superiore di Pisa, Classe di lettere e filosofia. Quaderni, 4th series, 14, 2002, p. 45. I shall
publish another that I have recently discovered in the forthcoming book.
46 In this regard the accounts resemble that of the seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller Celebi,
who although highly privileged and by the standards of his cultural group well educated,
respects the ancient ‘philosophers’ but knows little about them beyond their names.
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 99

secure in their triumphalism, and it is the places they associate with defeated
ideas, notably the outdoor sites where the ancient philosophers held their
meetings that they pay most attention to, not quite dancing on their graves,
but picking out as ‘theatres and schools’, meaning, in the Greek, ‘things to
be looked at and learned from’. Over a thousand years, a Christian theocracy
monopolising education and art, had imposed a set of Christian myths on the
ancient cityscape, on its buildings, and on its rituals. The long Akathist [‘not
seated’] Hymn, that is still chanted in Orthodox Churches, composed long
before it was adopted into ritual in 626, shows traces of the deep hatred of
Hellenic Athens by the early Christians. In one passage, verse 17, not always
now sung, the congregation collectively rejoice that their goddess, Mary, has
triumphed over the ensnaring logic of the philosophers.47 And there are other
traces of this way of seeing. For example, the church of Saint Philip facing the
Acropolis displays a modern image of the mythic visit of one of the disciples
of Jesus to Athens where he was said to have confuted the arguments of the
philosophers, as shown in Figure 5.30.

Fig. 5.30 Confuting Hellenism. Mosaic on the church

of Saint Philip facing the Acropolis.

47 ‘Orators most eloquent do we behold mute as fish before you, O Theotokos; for they
are at a loss to explain how you could remain a virgin and yet give birth. But as for
us, marvelling at this mystery, we cry with faith: Rejoice, Vessel of the Wisdom of God.
Rejoice, Treasury of His providence. Rejoice, you who proves the philosophers fools.
Rejoice, you who proves the logicians illogical. Rejoice, for the subtle debaters are
confounded. Rejoice, for the inventors of myths are faded away. Rejoice, you who breaks
the webs of the Athenians. Rejoice, you who fills the nets of the Fishermen’. Translation
into English made by Vincent McNabb in 1934: http://www.orthodoxchristian.info/
pages/Akathist.htm.
100 Cultural Heritage Ethics

There is space for only a few remarks about how the Acropolis may
have been viewed in antiquity – a long period of time but since viewing
conventions were long-lived, some general points can, I suggest, be made.
First, the ancient perception of the landscape and the cityscape was highly
poetic, and so is the art in which landscape and cityscape were presented.
Figure 5.31 shows a mosaic of which there are two versions both probably
derived from a famous picture.

Fig. 5.31 Mosaic of the Villa of Siminius Stephanus.

It shows seven men, probably the Seven Sages, with their human scientific
and artistic instruments. In the corner what appears to be a green-walled
sanctuary, possibly Delphi or the Acropolis of Athens, is represented as it
was encountered by the viewer, as a forest of marble dedications. The border
of the mosaic, with gorgons and masks, is a common poetic representation
of a physical natural border, like the Acropolis slopes.
 Looking at the Acropolis of Athens from Modern Times to Antiquity 101

In ancient times, to judge from the authors, it was the Acropolis that
provided the main interpretative frame, rather than any of the buildings
such as the Parthenon. From Julian back to Homer, it is the Acropolis that
is appealed to, whether to warn, to shame, to educate or to celebrate. And
it is the whole visible Acropolis rock, slopes and summit, myth and history,
the natural as much as the man-made. Memory slips away, but memory
instantiated in marble, or in literature and ritual, has a better chance. To the
ancient Athenians the aspiration was to create not an Eternal Greece, but
an Eternal ‘Athenianness’, a history but especially also an expression of the
values of the society, the famous notion of ‘paideia’. And as is made explicit
by Aristides, this aspiration was achieved ‘by viewing and remembering’.48
As the site where the official memory and official values were preserved
and displayed, the ancient Acropolis tolerated a good deal of alternative,
even of contradiction, provided that it was filtered through the shared
system of signs constituted by myth. We see none of that fear of art, and
the urge to destroy it, to allow it to be used only for approved purposes,
to keep it indoors, to allow two dimensions but not three, and to control
both the production and consumption, that is such a feature of the long
millennium of theocracy that followed.

***

So what, if any, more general conclusions emerge from this brief summary
of the long history of ways of looking at the Acropolis of Athens? As an
embodiment of numerous, mostly incommensurate, imagined pasts
and ideologies over thousands of years, it offers a uniquely full case
for investigating the processes by which the past has been understood,
misunderstood, misrepresented, claimed, mythologised, and presented
and packaged for the current purposes within different societies. And
how it can be drawn into an explanatory, but also often into an allegedly
legitimating, relationship with the present and the future. In the richness
of its retrievable historical experience, the Acropolis of Athens is an
inheritance as precious as the marble.
The read-across questions for those responsible for ancient and historic
monuments round the world therefore come tumbling out. Which pasts
deserve to be preserved? How should any current generation regard its

48 Aristides, Panathenaic oration, 154.

102 Cultural Heritage Ethics

responsibilities to its predecessors and its successors? Is it possible, or

desirable, to recover the historically typical and not just the unusual? Should
preference be given to what is now regarded as valuable, remembering
that such judgments change, as the thousand years of hostility, indifference
and neglect of the Acropolis vividly demonstrates? How far can those with
responsibility offset the modern consumerism that treats the past as a
resource to be exploited, for tourism, or for building a sense of community,
such as nation or religion, and thus instilling a false view of the past
driven by present day ideological objectives? Is there a legitimate place
for ‘epistemic cooperation’, a phrase invented recently to describe an
administrative process that ensures that archaeologists, lawyers, ‘heritage
professionals’ and others have a right to be heard in the decision taking.49
Pragmatic solutions of this kind, however, that sidestep the competition
between the truth claims, risk both slipping into relativism and enabling
the loudest and politically most powerful voices to force their way.
The dead have no rights nor do I suggest that they should be given any.
Indeed much of our knowledge of ancient Hellas comes from excavating
graves, setting aside the wishes of those who mourned and commemorated.
However, I suggest, we owe it to ourselves and to our children to be as
truthful as we can about the past. The Venice Charter was a commendable
attempt to devise an inter-generational ethics aimed at saving the
materiality of ancient buildings, based on notions of stewardship and
respect for the autonomy of the past and of the future. In the modern west
we have well-tried protocols for assessing the validity of research into the
past, including into myth-making, of which evidence, openness, and free
debate are amongst the most important. Perhaps, given the present threats,
the time has come to build into that tradition a code of ethics for those who
claim to make the mute stones speak?

49 The phrase ‘epistemic cooperation’ is used by Geoffrey Scarre and Robin Coningham,
Appropriating the Past: Philosophical Perspectives on the Practice of Archaeology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 6.
 6. South Asian Heritage and
Archaeological Practices
Sudeshna Guha

Studies of the histories of heritage inevitably lead us to disciplinary

introspection. As with the scholarship of heritage studies elsewhere,
research into South Asian heritage has developed from considerations of
tangible heritage, and through a focus on the social biographies of historical
monuments, built environments and landscape. Academic projects are fed
by the non-academic ‘heritage industry’ in which civilisational histories are
routinely invented and used as commercial capital for the global market
through the creation, circulation and display of ‘historically seminal
monuments’. An apt example is the replication of the second-century BC
Buddhist stupa at Sanchi (Madhya Pradesh, India) as the India Pavilion at
the Shanghai Expo in March 2010. This architectural adaptation, which left
a ‘deep impression’ upon one of its more important visitors, the Chinese
Premier, was aimed at conveying the ‘universalistic values of peace, and the
message of healing the harm we bring upon nature’.1 Such acts of rewriting
the forms and meanings of historical topography facilitate the bringing
home of ‘venerable’ heritage from foreign lands, as we see in the case of
the recent building of the Taj Mahal at Sonargaon (Bangladesh), and the
construction of a version of the Sanchi stupa at Louyang (China) between

1 ‘China PM visits India pavilion at Shanghai Expo’, The Times of India, 31 October 2010,
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/China-PM-visits-India-pavilion-at-Shanghai-
Expo/articleshow/6845554.cms

© Sudeshna Guha, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0047.06

104 Cultural Heritage Ethics

2008 and 2010. Although each instance of re-evaluation, adaptation and

replication of tangible and intangible heritage pursues different aims,
all demonstrate the importance of engaging with the history of the
reproduction of monuments as the ‘performative spaces’ within which new
meanings of the ‘actual objects’ are created.2
Inevitably, the rewriting of heritage as global capital drives academic
study of the ‘careers’ and ‘travels’ of objects and monuments. Within the
context of South Asia, this scholarship has created an important analytical
corpus regarding the ways in which the reproduction of historical
monuments shape ‘popular imaginaries of the disciplines of archaeology
and anthropology’ and serve ‘as grounds on which professional
knowledge came to be configured within new public domains of display
and scholarship’. However, the pioneering scholarship focuses exclusively
upon the colonial and post-colonial histories of heritage-making, and in
historicising the relationship between archaeological practices and the
heritage industry, reinforces the theory – unproblematically presented in
all histories of Indian archaeology – that the antiquarian study of South
Asia through the region’s historical monuments, sites and objects was
a ‘western cognitive entity’.3 The long pre-colonial histories of heritage-
making within the Indian subcontinent not only demonstrate the errors of
this thinking, but also throw into sharp relief the fact that British orientalist
historiography conspicuously celebrated the ‘coming of antiquarianism
into India’ for denying native historical consciousness.
The orientalist historiography, which was established in the eighteenth
century, no doubt inspired the pioneering British archaeologist of India,
Alexander Cunningham (1814-93), to establish the history of antiquarian
scholarship of India through the statement that ‘the study of Indian
antiquities received its first impulse from Sir William Jones, who in 1784
founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal’.4 However, when we reflect upon the
amassing of old manuscripts, paintings, curiosities and objects of art within

2 B. Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, ‘The Museum as a Catalyst’, Keynote address, Museums

2000: Confirmation or Challenge, organised by ICOM Sweden, the Swedish Museum
Association and the Swedish Travelling Exhibition/Riksutställningar in Vadstena, 29
September 2000, https://www.nyu.edu/classes/bkg/web/vadstena.pdf
3 T. Guha-Thakurta, ‘Careers of the Copy: Traveling Replicas in Colonial and Postcolonial
India’, Firth Lecture, Bristol University, 8 April 2009, http://www.theasa.org/
publications/firth/firth09.pdf and Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in
Colonial and Postcolonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 3.
4 A. Cunningham, ‘Preface’, Archaeological Survey of India: Four Reports Made During the
Years 1862-65 (Simla: Government of India Publications, 1871), p. i.
 South Asian Heritage and Archaeological Practices 105

the Mughal Empire, it is apparent that, like the antiquarian scholarship of

the British in India, such acts pointed to scholarship of the past, and to
the extra-scholarly value of connoisseurship within the politics of imperial
self-fashioning. Furthermore, despite the different intellectual genealogies
of viewing, collecting, copying and connoisseurship in the seventeenth-
century Mughal domain and Britain and Europe, the descriptions of
monuments and artefacts from the former were rather similar in nature to
the descriptions that were considered essential by the growing breed of self-
styled British and European antiquaries to document the incorruptibility
of material sources. An example is Emperor Jahangir’s description of the
Jami Masjid in Ahmedabad, which he saw in his eleventh regnal year, on 6
January 1617/18, and recorded in his Jahangirnama as follows:

This mosque is a monument left by Sultan Ahmad, the founder of the city of
Ahmedabad. It has three gates, and on every side a market. Opposite the gate
facing the east is Sultan Ahmad’s tomb. Under the dome lie Sultan Ahmad,
his son Muhammad, and his grandson Qutbuddin. The length of the mosque
courtyard exclusive of the maqsura is 103 cubits; the width is 89 cubits. Around
the perimeter of the courtyard is an arcade with arches four and three-quarters
cubits wide. The courtyard is paved in cut brick, and the pillars of the arcade
are of red stone. The maqsura contains 354 columns, and above the column is
a dome. The length of the maqsura is 75 cubits, and the width is 37 cubits. The
maqsura paving, the mihrab, and the pulpit are of marble.5

Jahangir’s description undermines the assertion of Cunningham’s latest

biographer that the ‘earliest notices and descriptions of Indian monuments,
architecture and sculpture are to be found in the writings of sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century European travellers’.6 It also exemplifies Alain
Schnapp’s contention, based on his research into histories of historical
enquiries, that ‘in widely differing circumstances, and given similar
assemblages, antiquaries may produce similar statements’.7 The British
pioneered archaeological practices within the Indian subcontinent
during the nineteenth century, and historians of South Asian archaeology
continue to follow Cunningham in tracing archaeology’s genealogy

5 The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India, ed. and trans. W. Thackston (New
York and Oxford: Smithsonian Institute in association with Oxford University Press,
1999) pp. 244-45.
6 U. Singh, The Discovery of Ancient India: Early Archaeologists and the Beginnings of
Archaeology (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), p. 6.
7 A. Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past: The Origins of Archaeology (originally in French,
1993), (London: The British Museum Press, 1996) p. 319.
106 Cultural Heritage Ethics

through European views of South Asia’s past. Yet identifying antiquarian

scholarship in South Asia as a European quest also perpetuates the
traditions of colonial historiography, which were developed by the British
administrative scholars of the East India Company, and which declared the
natives of Hindustan to be historically unconscious because they did not
undertake historical enquiries. In this respect, the post-colonial histories
of South Asian archaeology, which emphasise the need to research
the agency of ‘native’ scholarship, pose a paradox, as they enshrine the
dictates of the colonialist and orientalist historiography, namely that there
was little consciousness of historical scholarship within pre-colonial India.
The histories asserting a western origin for antiquarianism in the Indian
subcontinent have, moreover, been uncritically used to write the grand
histories of world archaeology, and as a result the latter wrongly promote
the idea that ‘systematic antiquarianism did not develop in India prior to
the colonial period. Despite impressive intellectual achievements in other
fields, Indian scholarship did not devote much attention to political history,
perhaps because the Hindu religion and division of socio-regulatory forces
between high priests and warriors directed efforts to understanding the
meaning of life and of historical events more towards cosmology’.8
Beyond the South Asian sphere, most twentieth-century archaeologists,
unlike Schnapp, have viewed antiquarian scholarship as a project of
modernity within the Enlightened European world. In determining
periodisation, they have made a distinction between acts of valorisation
of the past in ancient and pre-modern times, and a conscious approach
towards historical enquiry through antiquities from the late-sixteenth
and early-seventeenth centuries onwards. This periodisation has been
widely accepted within the growing twenty-first-century archaeological
scholarship of heritage studies, in which the origins of a heritage-conscious
society are traced back to the emergence of an educated public sphere
in Europe during the seventeenth century, that responded to the milieu
of rising national consciousness with efforts to seek out and control the
past through laws and objective field explorations.9 The understanding of
rational enquiries and ‘proper’ histories and history writing as products

8 B. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2006), p. 77.
9 E.g. M.L.S.S. Sørensen and J. Carman, ‘Introduction: Making the Means Transparent:
Reasons and Reflections’, in M.L.S.S. Sørensen and J. Carman (eds.), Heritage Studies:
Methods and Approaches (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 3-10.
 South Asian Heritage and Archaeological Practices 107

of the modern western world, which the above periodisation fosters,

clearly echoes British colonial histories of antiquarian scholarship in India.
However, heritage archaeologists, who rightly promote the intellectual
need to interrogate the dominance of ‘western’ historiographical traditions,
have overlooked the glaring borrowings from a historiography they
explicitly reject in their own histories of the origins of heritage practices.
In thinking through the histories of heritage-making within South
Asia, we become aware that the acts of replicating historical monuments,
such as the building of a Taj Mahal and Sanchi stupa at Sonargaon and
Louyang respectively, may have extended well beyond the widely-known
twelfth-century AD example of the Buddhist temple at Bodh Gaya, which
was reproduced at Pagan on the orders of the ruler Kayanzittha so that
his subjects could worship at their venerable shrine. The repeated reuse
of the rock and pillar edicts of the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka (268-31 BC)
from the first century, by Mahakshatrapa Rudradaman (c.150 AD), until at
least the seventeenth century, by the Mughal Emperor Jehangir (r.1605-27
AD), indicate the disparate histories of conscious acts of memorialisation,
and encourage us to look beyond the ‘western’ historiography of the
origins of heritage practices. Furthermore, we also note that the restoration
of tombs and mosques, of which there are numerous examples from the
Delhi Sultanate (specifically between c.1369 and 1503 AD) and the Mughal
dynasties (especially from Aurangzeb’s rule 1658-1707 AD), echo many
aspects of the nascent nineteenth-century archaeological restoration
projects, in that they were political acts aimed at redefining the way sacral
and historical spaces were experienced. Also worthy of note, therefore, are
the popular perceptions within India regarding archaeological practices
during the early twentieth century, when archaeological undertakings
and scholarship were both becoming increasingly visible through the
conservation work and excavations of the colonial Archaeological Survey.
The following remark with which the members of the Delhi Municipal
Committee feted the departing Viceroy George Nathaniel Curzon (1899-
1905) is representative:

‘It would not be too much to say that your Excellency has bridged over the
500 years since the time of the Emperor Feroz Shah Tughlak, who was what
would be called in modern parlance as Delhi’s first great archaeologist’.10

10 13 November 1905; Lord Curzon’s farewell to India: being speeches delivered as viceroy &
governor-general of India, during Sept.-Nov. 1905 (Bombay: Thacker and Co., 1907).
108 Cultural Heritage Ethics

Curzon remains the principal architect of the archaeological restorations

of historical India, which he facilitated through the restitution of the
Archaeological Survey of India in 1902. Yet it is only by looking beyond
the connected histories of archaeological practices and heritage that we
are able to establish more precise cultural histories of history-making and
heritage practices within South Asia.

II

In reviewing the archaeological scholarship of heritage we are shown the

ways in which inferences are often transformed into material evidence. The
British scholarship of Indian archaeology began from the nineteenth century
and was initiated with the aim of uncovering ancient India’s supposedly
pristine ‘Buddhist’ cultural legacy. Among the early excavations that were
undertaken were those by Alexander Cunningham at the Dhamek Stupa
in Sarnath near Banaras between 1834-36. Through them Cunningham
initiated his ‘Buddhist archaeology’ of India, which gathered further
momentum after the Great War of 1857, largely because of his leadership
of the Archaeological Survey of India between 1861-65 and 1871-85. In 1863
Matthew Sherring of the London Missionary Society excavated at Banaras
with the aim of demonstrating the presence of Buddhism in the city’s
foundational history. It is clear from the focus of both Cunningham’s and
Sherring’s excavations at Sarnath and Banaras respectively, that the British
launched their ‘archaeology of India’ to establish a counter-narrative to the
prevalent ‘Hindu’ civilisational history of the natives, which they dismissed
as mere Brahmanic propaganda. By establishing archaeological, and hence
tangible, evidence of a physically absent religion, the excavators sought to
demonstrate that just as Buddhism had disappeared from India despite
being the national religion for more than 500 years, so too could Hinduism.
As well as calling into question the place of Hinduism in India’s
civilisational history, the archaeological finds of Buddhist sites and
monuments supposedly ruined and destroyed by the ascendant Muslim
rulers from the twelfth century onwards provided visual evidence to support
the new Raj’s depiction of the Muslims as destroyers of all that was glorious
in India’s ancient heritage, while also illustrating the relative benevolence
of the British towards their heathen subjects. This archaeological history
thus demonstrates how historical landscapes are continuously refashioned
‘to instantiate particular histories and historicities’, and so exemplifies the
 South Asian Heritage and Archaeological Practices 109

manner in which archaeological scholarship of ancient civilisations can

contribute towards the construction of intangible heritage. 11
The material evidence of civilisational origins and legacies, and of
past perceptions of cultural geographies, identities and traditions, which
the archaeological scholarship of ‘prehistoric’ and archaic civilisations
routinely produces, undermines the assumption that heritage is inherently
knowable. However, perhaps because of the palpable materiality of
archaeological data, the archaeological literature of the history of heritage
practices often misleadingly conveys the assumption that heritage
can be discovered, recorded, and mapped, despite the fact that many
archaeologists now increasingly search for innovative, discipline-specific
methodologies to help clarify the ways in which ‘interpretations may be
constructed from data’.12 As the theories discussed below regarding the
Indus (or Harappan) Civilisation illustrate, the archaeological constructs
of civilisational heritage force us to revisit some old-fashioned disciplinary
concerns, such as explanations for cultural continuity and change, schema
of classifications and periodisation, and the kinds of data that are selected
as evidence of cultural boundaries. Critical reviews of the archaeological
constructs would show the shifts and transformations over time in
notions of valid evidence, and encourage us to reconsider the existing
methodologies by which material traits are translated into cultural forms.
In this they also remind us of the need to consider the ethical aspects of
heritage-making and its scholarship.13

III

The object of sustained archaeological study since 1924, the Indus Civilisation
physically straddled the border between India and Pakistan, two countries

11 N. Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self Fashioning in
Israeli Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 13. On the nineteenth-
century archaeological explorations of Banaras see S. Guha, ‘Material Truths and
Religious Identities: The Archaeological and Photographic Making of Banaras’, in
M.S. Dodson (ed.), Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories (London and New York:
Routledge, 2012), pp. 42-76.
12 Sørensen and Carman, 2009, p. 4, see also p. 24.
13 The scholarship of heritage ethics is growing. It has provided a critical stance to the
practices of archaeology, and concerns with many different issues. For two different
approaches to considerations of ethics see L. Meskell, ‘Human Rights and Heritage
Ethics’, Anthropological Quarterly, 83(4), 2010, pp. 839-60, and L. Smith and E. Waterton,
Heritage, Communities and Archaeology (London: Duckworth, 2009).
110 Cultural Heritage Ethics

whose shared cultural histories were officially divided by the partition

of 1947. As a result of the partition, the post-colonial scholarship of the
Indus Civilisation in Pakistan has been facilitated to a large extent by ‘non-
native’ archaeologists. Therefore, embedded within the historiography of
this Bronze Age phenomenon of the third millennium BC, are competitions
and contestations regarding the authorship of knowledge and ‘important’
discoveries, unequal intellectual encounters, disparate claims to ‘cultural
legacies’, and conflicts and tensions regarding the granting of permission
to ‘foreigners’ to dig the ‘native soil’ of others. The ninety-year-long
archaeological scholarship of the Indus Civilisation therefore provides
us with a seminal archive of creations, representations and contestations
around the ownership of evidence of heritage.
The history of Indus scholarship also highlights the waning influence
of British scholarship upon Indian archaeology after the Raj, and the
concomitant spread of North American theories and methods within South
Asian archaeology. This epistemological shift has left a rich collection
of official correspondence, which offers an insight into the spectacular
conflicts between the British old guard, some of whom, such as Mortimer
Wheeler (1890-1976), continued to serve as diplomats of Indian archaeology,
and the young American entrants into the field, such as Walter Fairservis
Jr. (1921-94).14 The numerous examples of professional clashes between
the British and American camps demonstrate the fallacy of reducing the
power politics of post-colonial archaeological scholarship in South Asia to
a simple dichotomy of foreign versus native.
The history of the Indus Civilisation encompasses a remarkable
geographical shift around the year 2200 BC, when cities within the Indus
valley, including the type-sites of Harappa and Mohenjodaro, declined
and new cities, such as Rakhigarhi, Kalibangan and Dholavira, emerged
in regions to the east and south-east. This geographical change creates
the need to consider the manner in which past perceptions of territoriality
have been sourced through the archaeological scholarship, and provokes
an enquiry into the way in which archaeologists have established material
evidence of the indigenous. The understanding of the Indus Civilisation as
‘sub-continental’ in its ‘roots’ and ‘style’ is a specifically North American
contribution to the historiography, and was formally suggested in 1967

14 Details in ‘Wheeler Papers’, Box 459, archives of the British Academy, London.
 South Asian Heritage and Archaeological Practices 111

by Fairservis, who endowed the Civilisation with ‘Indian’ features by

historicising its ‘ethos’ as village-orientated.15 Fairservis subsequently
stated that ‘the story of prehistoric India, which stretches back to a time so
remote that it conforms to a Hindu Kalpa of untold generations reaching
to a primordial world, nonetheless repeats again and again the pattern
which was not to change until the East India Company ships moved up
the Hooghly’.16 Fariservis’s view of a uniquely Indian civilisation whose
characteristic features – a Hindu society with a village- and caste-based
culture – had remained essentially unchanged since time immemorial,
followed the trends of contemporary orientalist historiography. However,
this view also prevails today within the functionalist and systemic
modelling of an overarching construct of ‘Cultural Tradition’, whereby the
Indus Civilisation is now regarded as demonstrating the continuity of an
exclusively indigenous cultural history of South Asia.

IV

The archaeological construct of ‘Cultural Tradition’ was initially

developed in the context of studies of the settlement patterns of prehistoric
Mesoamerica in order to record cultural change and continuity and
measure the processes of cultural integration.17 It was widely adopted by
the processualist school of New Archaeology during the 1960s, and was
introduced into South Asian archaeology a decade later by Jim Shaffer
through his research on prehistoric Baluchistan. Since the early 1990s,
Shaffer and his co-author Dianne Lichtenstein have gradually extended
the scope of the model. They now propose an overarching ‘Indo-Gangetic
Cultural Tradition’, encompassing the long-term cultural developments
in northern South Asia which link ‘social entities over a time period from
the development of food production in the seventh millennium BC to the
present’.18 In an earlier model of this theory, which was published in 1995,
the authors conceived the continuity as being economically and culturally

15 W.A. Fairservis Jr., ‘The Origin, Character, and Decline of an Early Civilization’, American
Museum Novitates, 2302, 20 October 1967, p. 19.
16 W.A. Fairservis Jr., The Roots of Ancient India (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971) p. 381.
17 See G.R. Willey and P. Phillips, Method and Theory in American Archaeology (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1958).
18 J.G. Shaffer and D.A. Lichtenstein, ‘South Asian Archaeology and the Myth of Indo-
Aryan Invasion’, in E.F. Bryant and L.L. Patton (eds.), The Indo-Aryan Controversy:
Evidence and Inference in Indian History (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 93.
112 Cultural Heritage Ethics

focused upon cattle. Now, with due regard for the danger of slipping
into orientalist historiography, they insist that by charting an unbroken
indigenous cultural continuity for northern South Asia they nonetheless
recognise ‘significant indigenous discontinuity’, and do not ‘propose social
isolation nor deny any outside cultural influence’.19 However, despite
all these qualifications and careful nuances, Shaffer and Lichtenstein’s
‘Indo Gangetic Cultural Tradition’ still evokes orientalist and colonialist
historiography in the basic assumption that this tradition can be recognised
because its core features have remained unchanged over millennia.
Following Shaffer’s work, an archaeological narrative of northern South
Asia has been established on the basis of constructions of cultural traditions
that historicise the indigenous and the foreign as being respectively internal
and external to this vast region. Yet such distinctions lead to misleading
histories of ‘others’ and ‘otherness’, reminding us of the observation of
the noted historian B.D. Chattopadhyaya that even the region’s Muslim
communities were not regarded as ‘others’ by the Hindus until the twelfth
century because ‘the notion of territorial outsider in a political sense [was] not
compatible with the early cosmological/geographical concept’.20 We should
not forget that the Indus Civilisation was historicised as indigenous by all
early excavators, notably John Marshall, who described the authors as being
‘born of the soil’, and Mortimer Wheeler, who stated that ‘the population
would appear to have remained more or less stable from Harappan times to
the present day. Invasions of these regions, however important culturally,
must have been on too small a scale to bring about marked changes in
physical characteristics’.21 Although Marshall and Wheeler established the
indigenous nature of the Civilisation with reference to its inhabitants, they
explained many of its socio-cultural features as elements of ‘borrowing’
from the bronze-age cultures of west Asia. They studied the Civilisation
at a time when the ‘Aryan invasion’ of northern India in the second
millennium BC was considered an undisputable historical fact, and were
hesitant to historicise a sophisticated city-type civilisation, which predated
the ‘Vedic Civilisation’ of the ‘Aryans’ by more than a thousand years, as
an indigenous product of South Asia. The intellectual understanding of

19 Ibid.
20 B.D. Chattopadhyaya, Representing the Other? Sanskrit Sources and the Muslims (Delhi:
Manohar, 1998), p. 90.
21 J.H. Marshall, Mohenjodaro and the Indus Civilization (London: Arthur Probsthain, 1931),
p. 109; R.E.M Wheeler, The Indus Civilization, 3rd edition, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1968), p. 72.
 South Asian Heritage and Archaeological Practices 113

the Indus Civilisation as indigenous in the twenty-first century arises from

the convincing evidence against any ‘invasion’ of the Indo-Aryan speaking
people, which has effectively removed all ‘foreign hands’ from the cultural
make-up of South Asia’s ancient past. However, the on-going academic
debate regarding the exact physical location of the first perceptible ‘roots’ of
the Indus Civilisation points to the need for greater sensitivity towards the
manner in which the archaeological search for evidence of an indigenous
civilisation contributes to issues of cultural ownership.
Thus, although the Indus Civilisation is now celebrated as a pure-bred
product of South Asian soil, the question of its precise origins remains a
contentious topic. In particular, Indian nationalist archaeologists reject
the ‘Baluchi story’ of their North American colleagues who excavate the
‘Harappan’ sites of Pakistan, according to which the roots of the Civilisation’s
incipient technologies can largely be traced through the evidence of
domestication at Mehrgarh in the Kacchi Plain. Instead, they put forward an
alternative origin story focused upon evidence gathered within India, which
highlights the origins of rice and millet domestication in the ‘Indus-Hakra-
Ghaggar alluvium’ and the innovations in metal technologies in the ‘Aravalli
hills during the fourth to mid-third millennium BC’.22 These assertions
have provoked the surprising counter-claim that possible evidence for
the indigenous growth of Taxila, Charsada and Peshawar (Pakistan)
into important commercial cities by c.600 BC calls into question the ‘time
honoured models’ describing the derivation of ‘Indian culture’ from ‘a
Gangetic homeland’.23 A surprising claim because although the region of
Magadha in the Gangetic valley was the heartland of the classical kingdoms
of ancient India, it has never been regarded as the ‘homeland’ of ‘Indian
culture’. In all models since the nineteenth century the ‘homeland’ has
remained the Sapta Sindhu, believed to be in and around the area of Punjab
which is in Pakistan today, where the early Vedic hymns were supposedly
composed. The nationalist and counter-nationalist claims may seem childish,
but they clearly demonstrate the performative uses to which evidence of the
indigenous is put within the scholarship of South Asian archaeology.

22 D.K. Chakrabarti, The Oxford Companion to Indian Archaeology: The Archaeological

Foundations of Ancient India, Stone Age to AD 13 Century (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2006), p. 134
23 J.M. Kenoyer, ‘New Perspectives on the Mauryan and Kushana Periods’, in P. Olivelle
(ed.), Between the Empires: Society in India 300 BCE to 400 CE (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2006), p. 46.
114 Cultural Heritage Ethics

Functionalist, adaptive and processualist approaches to culture and

cultural change have given rise to numerous inferences about the presence
of an incipient caste-based, multi-ethnic population within the Indus
Civilisation. However, since archaeologists now also strive to ensure that
their scholarship is anthropologically informed, we cannot overlook the
fact that their representations of the Civilisation’s social structures and
ethnicities, which are mainly inferred from specialist craft production
technologies and stylistic similarities in artefact types and their decorations,
go against the caution of social anthropologists that people ‘can’t be put
into a box anymore’. Moreover, India and Africa are now identified by
anthropologists as ‘obvious examples’ of places that include societies of
long-standing superdiversity.24 The historical fact of this superdiversity –
understood as the ‘diversification of diversity’ – in South Asia leads us to
question the way in which archaeological inferences about social identities
are forged from artefacts, and to dismiss the assertion, often made by
archaeologists, that past markers of identity can simply be uncovered and
understood through archaeological fieldwork.
In order to identify continuities between the Indus Civilisation and the
subsequent cultural histories of early India, archaeologists of the twenty-
first century have also shown a renewed interest in sourcing Sanskrit and
Pali texts, many of which are vastly disparate in terms of both chronology
and intent, from which to glean the ‘idea of an ancient Indian/South Asian
Civilisation’. On the basis of comparisons and juxtapositions of patently
mismatched textual and archaeological ‘sources’, we are told that ‘the
very fact that authorities both in the Harappan and Ganges civilisation
expressed their ethos in similar material symbols – various forms of
fortification, circumvallation – indicates that the forms of authorities
in these two civilisations may have been similar as well’, and that the
‘deep structure’ of the South Asian Civilisation, which developed from
the Neolithic period onwards, can be defined by ‘five traits; namely,
agricultural economy, an orally transmitted code of conduct, an orally
transmitted sacred knowledge, an idiosyncratic sociocultural system, and
a set of ritual and sacrificial practices’.25 This new archaeological literature

24 J.N. Jørgensen and K. Juffermans, ‘Superdiversity’, November 2011, http://hdl.handle.

net/10993/6656
25 P.A. Eltsov, From Harappa to Hastinapura: A Study of the Earliest South Asian City and
Civilization (Boston, MA and Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 165, 185.
 South Asian Heritage and Archaeological Practices 115

seeks to be politically correct in terms of its intellectual framework, and

constitutes the grand civilisational tradition of South Asia since the distant
past as one which was multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and religiously diverse.
Nonetheless, even this new literature overlooks the blatant essentialism
embedded in the idea of a unique South Asian civilisational ethos. After
all, few academic archaeologists would care to propose the archaeological
history of a unique, age-old civilisational ethos for western Europe, North
America, Britain, France, the United States, or any other regional or national
domain of the ‘western’ world.
Processualist archaeology was developed by the New Archaeologists
of the 1960s, but had fallen out of favour by the late 1980s, when
archaeologists came to recognise that the inherent positivism of the
processualist approach encouraged an abject disregard for human agency,
and hence also for the basic responsibilities of archaeological scholarship.
Although the processualist school of thought has long been out of fashion
in theoretical archaeology, its tropes have continued to guide studies of the
Indus Civilisation, especially in North American scholarship on the subject
since the late 1980s. This outmoded approach, which is most obviously
apparent in the schemes of periodisation that are developed on the basis of
the functionalist constructs of traditions, eras and phases, takes no notice
of the theoretical slippage that occurs in establishing evidence of social
identities through evidence of a society’s production technologies. Thus,
inferences regarding the existence of specialist craftsmen within the Indus
Civilisation are routinely drawn upon to show the presence of kin and
caste groups, and evidence of the spatial demarcation of the different crafts
and manufacturing processes within the cities is presented as evidence of
social segregation, and of the possible existence of a caste system.26 Given
that western archaeologists often criticise their non-western counterparts
for failing to adopt new theoretical approaches, the continued dominance
of the processualist school of thought in the archaeology of the Indus
Civilisation is somewhat surprising, and demonstrates the theoretical
poverty of even ‘western’ studies of South Asian archaeology. In this respect,
the archaeological construct of a ‘Great South Asian Tradition’ through the
modern scholarship of the Indus Civilisation forces us to interrogate the
intellectual and moral obligations of today’s ‘post-colonial’ archaeology.

26 For an early example see K.K. Bhan, M. Vidale and J.M. Kenoyer, ‘Harappan Technology:
Theoretical and Methodological Issues’, Man and Environment, 19, 1994, pp. 141-57.
 7. The Ethics of Digging
Geoffrey Scarre

[W]hile the Workmen made several Ditches, they fell upon divers Urnes, but earnestly, and
carelessly digging, they broke all they met with, and finding nothing but Ashes, or burnt
Cinders, they scattered what they found.1
Sir Thomas Browne

Sir Thomas Browne’s account of the chance discovery and thoughtless

destruction of Roman sepulchral urns near Brampton in Norfolk is the
stuff of archaeologists’ nightmares. Fortunately, this particular story had
a happy ending: following the antiquarian knight’s arrival on the scene
several more urns were unearthed, which Browne carefully described in
what amounts to an early example of an archaeological report. We can only
speculate how much of the English archaeological record disappeared in
similar incidents over the centuries but vast quantities of ancient material
must have been destroyed by the ignorant or the uninterested. The rise of
antiquarianism in the eighteenth century and its gradual transmutation into
a professional and scientific archaeology were of inestimable importance
in stemming this loss of objects and the information to be obtained from
them. And scholarly excavators not only preserved the archaeological
riches but became increasingly adept at reading the messages they
conveyed. By the mid-twentieth century, university-trained archaeologists
had understandably come to see themselves as the primary stewards of the
archaeological heritage. For they, more than others, had the knowledge and

1 Sir Thomas Browne, ‘Concerning some Urnes Found in Brampton-Field, in Norfolk, Anno:
1667’, in Religio Medici and Other Writings (London: Everyman’s Library, 1969), p. 142.

© Geoffrey Scarre, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0047.07

118 Cultural Heritage Ethics

skills to extract maximum information from an often partial and imperfect

record. Archaeology, which had formerly been a pastime for amateurs, had
evolved into a business of experts.
Yet professionalism in archaeology, as in some other scholarly fields
once dominated by laymen, is not an unmixed blessing. If the past and
the things of the past are our common heritage (as the familiar mantra
runs), then the privileging of the expert over the amateur in the practice
of archaeology raises certain questions about equity. Where professionals
rush in, amateurs may fear – or more often be forbidden – to tread. At worst,
professional archaeologists may look on untrained amateurs as interfering
nuisances, to be kept at a distance; at best, amateurs on excavation sites
are treated as unpaid assistants to the experts, useful pairs of hands to
carry out the dirty work. If all of us are equally heirs to the past, then it
seems that some heirs are more equal than others. But if the relegation of
amateurs to subsidiary roles is to some extent an inevitable effect of the
ever-increasing dependence of archaeological research on sophisticated
technology and analytical techniques (even in the world of supposedly
post-processual archaeology, with its greater tolerance of alternative
narratives), there are other exclusionary effects of professionalisation that
may be more avoidable. Archaeologists who claim to be stewards of the
archaeological heritage on behalf of everyone doubtless speak sincerely.
But not everyone accepts that archaeologists are the best people to manage
that heritage or to construe its meaning. Thus, many indigenous people
in North America, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere protest at the
disturbance by archaeologists of the sites at which their ancestors lived
and died, which they see as disrespectful and intrusive; or they are highly
sceptical about the truth, or the relevance to themselves, of the accounts of
the past that archaeologists deliver.
In the latest edition of their textbook Archaeology: Theory, Methods and
Practice, Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn assert that ‘the fundamental purpose
of archaeology must be to provide people with a better understanding of the
human past’.2 This statement appears in a chapter on archaeological ethics
bearing the significant title ‘Whose Past?’ At one level, this is a question
about who has the right to decide what is removed from the ground, how
it should be handled, whether it should be retained or reburied, and who
should ultimately have control of it. At another level, it raises subtler issues

2 C. Renfrew and P. Bahn, Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice, 6th edition (London:
Thames and Hudson, 2012), p. 540.
 The Ethics of Digging 119

about identity, allegiances and social continuity: about who is entitled

to speak about the past of a community whose sense of itself is founded
in certain beliefs (which may be true or false) about its own origins. Few
of us enjoy having our identity defined for us by others, and we may be
still more resentful when outsiders tell us that our own favoured stories
about our roots are wrong. Nevertheless, archaeologists cannot and should
not be expected to compromise their professional standards of evidence
when conducting excavations or interpreting their finds. Archaeology is
a scholarly discipline, not a spinner of myth, a servant of ideologies, or a
rubber stamp for popular opinions. Archaeologists need to be rigorously
scientific in their methods while avoiding the academic bullishness that so
naturally offends others. This is not an easy ethical nut to crack.
In the survey that follows I look briefly at some of the moral
responsibilities that professional archaeologists, and particularly those
engaged in the excavation and interpretation of sites, must bear on
their shoulders. Knowing how to behave as a virtuous archaeologist is
difficult when the responsibilities in question pull in divergent directions,
as they often do. For convenience’s sake, I shall divide the discussion
somewhat arbitrarily into three sections: 1) Responsibilities to People; 2)
Responsibilities to Things; 3) Responsibilities to the Profession. (These
labels do not, of course, identify entirely disparate categories of issues.)

1. Responsibilities to People
In recent years there has been increasing recognition of the variety of
‘stakeholders’ in the archaeological enterprise – that is, the different
sets of people whose interests are actually or potentially affected by the
activities of archaeologists. A short-list of those who have been considered
stakeholders includes (in no order of precedence, and allowing for overlap):
a) archaeologists; b) the general public; c) local (including indigenous)
communities; d) genetic and/or cultural descendants of the subjects under
investigation; e) tribal associations; f) religious affiliates, or claimants to
that status; g) national or local governments; h) owners of land or property
on which excavation is carried out; i) planners and developers; j) the
dead (if, as some philosophers believe, some kind of ‘moral estate’ can be
ascribed to people after their death). In addition to present people who are
affected by the activities of archaeologists, there are also potential effects
on future ones to be considered. So (to state the obvious) a site which is
120 Cultural Heritage Ethics

excavated today will not be available as a virgin site for later generations of
archaeologists and their public.
Satisfying the particular, and sometimes sharply conflicting, interests
of such a variety of groups can produce hard dilemmas for archaeologists.
Larry Zimmerman emphasises that while archaeologists claim to act as
stewards on behalf of the public, that public is far from homogeneous
and may contain members who ‘have a substantially different view of
stewardship of the past than archaeologists’.3 Given the diversity of
interests and viewpoints, even archaeologists who acknowledge their
accountability to the public might sometimes be stumped to answer the
question ‘What public?’ In the notorious controversy over the disposal of
Kennewick Man in the north-west USA, members of the Umatilla tribe
argued that the only respectful mode of caring for the extremely ancient
remains in question was to rebury them, a mode of ‘stewardship’ which
archaeologists who wished to preserve them for further research rejected
with horror. There may also be people whose paramount interest is not
in stewardship of any kind, sometimes for perfectly legitimate reasons. A
town council or construction company which wants to build a school or
social housing on an archaeologically sensitive site may reasonably argue
that the land cannot be frozen forever in the past, and that present needs
must sometimes trump the case for preservation. (Fortunately, in many
such cases some compromise is possible, whereby a portion of the site is
preserved or a ‘rescue dig’ by archaeologists is commissioned before the
developers move in.)
The interests that need to be considered when archaeological excavation
is in prospect vary considerably from place to place. Generally speaking,
the investigation of the site of a deserted medieval village in the British
countryside is less ethically sensitive than a project to excavate the dwelling
site of an indigenous community in North America or Australia. Digging a
settlement in rural Yorkshire or Oxfordshire to learn more about the former
inhabitants is likely to be welcomed by the local residents as a way of making
connections with their forbears, bringing the past to life and fostering a
sense of trans-temporal community. (However, not all contemporary
Britons feel ethically relaxed about the practice of archaeology. In the last
few years the Society for Honouring the Ancient Dead (HAD) has argued
for the adoption in Britain of a default procedure of reburial of human

3 L.J. Zimmerman, ‘When Data Become People: Archaeological Ethics, Reburial, and the
Past as Public Heritage’, International Journal of Cultural Property, 7, 1998, p. 70.
 The Ethics of Digging 121

remains discovered in the course of research – a proposal that has been

met with resistance by much of the archaeological community.) By contrast,
the excavation of a former tribal occupation site on the American Great
Plains by archaeologists trained in western techniques of scientific analysis
grounded on Enlightenment epistemology, may be seen by a present-day
Indigenous community as an act of intellectual and moral arrogance that
treats people – their people – as mere data for research.
In the USA, the passing of the Native Graves Protection and Repatriation
Act in 1990, which mandates that tribes be consulted before human physical
remains or associated funerary objects are removed from tribal or federal
land, and establishes the right to demand the return of those that have
previously been removed, has set the framework for generally improved
relations between archaeologists and indigenous groups. But even before the
enactment of NAGPRA, changing conceptions of their role by archaeologists,
including a wider and more generous recognition of their responsibilities
to other stakeholders, were producing a less imperious mode of conducting
research, in which purely academic considerations no longer alone ruled the
roost. What Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson have called an ‘ethic of
collaboration’, that emphasises a cooperative role for native communities
in deciding research questions, selecting sites for analysis, managing
excavations, and publishing and publicising results, is fast becoming a
standard component of cultural resource management in the USA.4
While it would be hard to deny that cooperation and consultation
among stakeholders is highly desirable on both moral and on practical
grounds, it would obviously be too sanguine to suppose that consensus
will invariably be the outcome of such practice. It is not always possible
to reconcile the different interests, still less the underlying ideals that may
be at issue; it can also be hard to decide just who the relevant stakeholders
are, or who is entitled to speak for them. The fifth principle of the World
Archaeological Congress’s First Code of Ethics calls on archaeologists ‘[t]‌o
acknowledge that the indigenous cultural heritage rightfully belongs to
the indigenous descendants of that heritage’.5 Yet the prima facie justice
of this principle ought not to obscure the fact that an unwillingness to

4 C. Colwell-Chanthaphonh and T.J. Ferguson, ‘Virtue Ethics and the Practice of History:
Native Americans and Archaeologists along the San Pedro Valley of Arizona’, Journal of
Social Archaeology, 4, 2004, p. 23.
5 World Archaeological Congress, First Code of Ethics, 1990, http://www.world
archaeologicalcongress.org/site/about_ethi.php
122 Cultural Heritage Ethics

share one’s cultural heritage is not always defensible on the ground that
such sharing would be a threat to that culture’s integrity. Moreover, if the
principle implies that indigenous owners have the ultimate say over what
happens to their cultural heritage, then it may inadvertently warrant even
such acts of wilful destruction as the Afghan Taleban’s dynamiting of the
Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 or the current spate of destruction of cultural
heritage by Islamic fundamentalists in Mali. Such cases evince a total, but
surely disputable, rejection of the idea that there may be other people with
a legitimate interest in the heritage in question. (It is also worth noting in
this connection that conventional legal notions of property, which mostly
accord owners the right to do what they like with whatever belongs to
them, are inadequate tools for thinking about the ethical responsibilities of
the finders, managers or controllers of sites or objects of cultural interest)6
In the contemporary global village, people increasingly care about sites of
cultural interest wherever in the world they are. As Atle Omland writes,
‘The [UNESCO] World Heritage concept rests fundamentally on the idea
that cultural heritage can be held in common’.7 But while this view has
evident attractions, determining the relative weight of different stakeholder
interests and finding modes of conflict-resolution that are acceptable to all
parties are not always simple.

2. Responsibilities to Things
When archaeologists speak about the ‘archaeological record’, they are
sometimes referring to the material sites and objects located within them,
and sometimes to the knowledge obtainable from that material by the
application of appropriate investigative techniques. This ambiguity is
not entirely harmless. For archaeologists may persuade themselves that
they are ‘preserving the archaeological record’ when they write up their
excavation reports, where their investigations have actually damaged or
degraded the material record. Brian Fagan sounds a salutary warning note:

[I]n an era when the archaeological record [in the material sense] is under
threat everywhere, the first concern of any research project should be

6 T. Allen, ‘Legal Principles, Political Processes and Cultural Property’, in G. Scarre and
R. Coningham (eds.), Appropriating the Past: Philosophical Perspectives on the Practice of
Archaeology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 239-56.
7 A. Omland, ‘The Ethics of the World Heritage Concept’, in C. Scarre and G. Scarre
(eds.), The Ethics of Archaeology: Philosophical Perspectives on the Practice of Archaeology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 243.
 The Ethics of Digging 123

the maintenance of the site and the stakes of all those concerned with its
conservation – be they archaeologists, local land-owners, tourist officials, or
indigenous peoples.8

Fagan’s proposal may seem the merest common sense. Yet the only way
of wholly conserving a site is to leave it completely alone. Even light-
touch investigation which creates minimal disturbance causes permanent
changes to a site. Attempts to restore it to its previous condition at the
close of a dig often consist in little more than a cosmetic replacement of
its previous covering of earth. Although the visual status quo ante may
be restored in this way, signs of previous activity will still be apparent
to later investigators who reopen the excavation. Objects of significance
found at the site will have been removed, reducing the informational
basis available to subsequent researchers. In some cases, exposure by
archaeologists to the light and air of what has been long buried actually
serves a sentence of destruction. (One of the most tragic examples is the
fading away of hundreds of painted frescoes and inscriptions at Pompeii
since they were first uncovered by diggers in the nineteenth century.)
Clearly, archaeologists must be willing to put up with some loss of the
material record in the creation of the knowledge-record; yet there can seem
something oddly conflicted about a science that is willing to destroy the
very thing it loves.
Still, without digging there would be no data, and most archaeologists
consider that some amount of dislocation and destruction is an acceptable,
if regrettable, price to pay for making the material record speak. But
justifying the pretension to stewardship requires that a maxim of
‘excavational economy’ is adopted whereby a site is disturbed no more
than is necessary to realise the basic research objectives. Collecting items
that are surplus to requirements, and that will be left to gather dust in
the storerooms of museums or archaeology departments, is academically
pointless and morally irresponsible. Investigators need also to ensure that
maximum benefit accrues to stakeholders from the work that has been
carried out, by publishing and disseminating their analyses, facilitating
public access to the site where practicable, and exhibiting the finds. (An
exception to this publicity condition may be made where revealing
the details of an archaeological site is liable to attract the attention of
professional or amateur looters.) Last but not least, archaeologists must

8 B. Fagan, ‘Foreword’, in V. Cassman, N. Odegard and J. Powell (eds.), Human Remains:
Guide for Museums and Academic Institutions (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2007), p. xvii.
124 Cultural Heritage Ethics

interest themselves in the proper curation of objects that are removed in

the course of excavations. Michael Trimble and Eugene Marino complain
that many archaeologists continue to be negligent concerning the future
of the objects collected once their own research questions have been
answered. In their view, ‘These collections should be valued, curated, and
studied, not just by archaeologists, but by everyone with a professional
interest and the results of those studies should be made widely available’.9
If a particular institution lacks the facilities to look after objects properly,
either it should not have acquired them in the first place or it should
now transfer them to another location where they can be better studied,
enjoyed and protected.
To speak about archaeologists’ responsibilities to things is a way of
acknowledging the value they have as objects created by and associated
with our ancestors. This, of course, is quite different from their financial
value in the commercial market; the earthenware funerary urns that so
excited Sir Thomas Browne would have been of no interest to treasure-
hunters on the trail of gold and silver. Nor is it identical with beauty or
artistic value, as many objects without these (including human remains)
can provide important information to the specialist. But the value that old
objects possess for us is not entirely a function of what they can tell us
about past lives. Much of the thrill of gazing on an ancient coin or pottery
vessel or textile fragment derives from the very fact of its association with
people who were once as real and vital as we are. In A Treatise of Human
Nature, David Hume speculates that the ‘esteem and admiration’ we feel
for very old objects stems from the sense of awe aroused in us when we
contemplate vast passages of time.10 But while Hume may be right that
objects can fascinate by virtue of age alone, we are less likely to be deeply
moved by ancient things that lack the human connection. The oldest
stone tools or earthenware pots are vastly younger, for instance, than the
fossilised tree-ferns that we blithely burn on our fires in the form of coal,
yet only the former evoke our ‘esteem and admiration’. Human remains,
which have an even more intimate relationship with our forebears than
the things they made or used, are naturally the most intriguing and
evocative objects of all.

9 M.K. Trimble and E.A. Marino, ‘Archaeological Curation: An Ethical Imperative for
the Twenty-First Century’, in L. Zimmerman, K. Vitelli and J. Hollowell-Zimmer (eds.),
Ethical Issues in Archaeology (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003), p. 99.
10 D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1888), pp. 432, 433.
 The Ethics of Digging 125

3. Responsibilities to the Profession

Archaeology is unusual among the sciences in that it can easily become
a victim of its own success. Too much archaeology, or too many
archaeologists, and the future of the subject is endangered by the
sheer depletion of its source material. There are only so many ancient
cities, sites and landscapes awaiting the archaeologist’s spade, and the
understandable desire of researchers to engage with the more before the
less interesting means that the richest plums will tend to be selected first.
When the richer sites are exhausted, archaeologists turn their attention to
those of more marginal interest until they, too, are worked to the point
of exhaustion. According to Fagan, ‘Today there are hundreds, if not
thousands, of researchers who are mining sites, often without reference
to all the potential stakeholders involved, to answer purely academic –
and often very insignificant – questions’.11 It might be countered that such
sites provide useful training-grounds for young archaeologists in places
where they can do relatively little harm; also, that even minor academic
questions may be worth answering in order to add small pieces to the
larger jigsaw of the past. (But the questions really must be answered, and
the answers published in appropriate places and within a reasonably short
period of time, otherwise the disturbance of a site is indistinguishable
from vandalism.) However, John Locke’s principle that a resource may
be appropriated only on condition that there is ‘enough, and as good left
in common for others’ is difficult to apply in archaeology.12 It looks as
though future archaeologists will be forced to make do with the leavings
from the current archaeologists’ table.
Some archaeologists judge this picture to be needlessly alarmist. So long
as human societies exist there will always be something new to excavate,
as fresh generations go the way of their ancestors, leaving behind their
own material traces. Larry Zimmerman pertinently asks: ‘Archaeologists
promote the idea that archaeological sites are non-renewable resources,
but aren’t humans creating new archaeological sites all the time?’13 If
archaeology aims ‘to develop general principles about human behaviour’,
then sites of recent creation should be equally productive of information

11 Fagan, 2007, p. xvi.

12 J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett (New York: New American Library,
1963), p. 329.
13 Zimmerman, 1998, p. 78.
126 Cultural Heritage Ethics

as older ones.14 As one obvious example, in Britain and other early

industrialising centres there is now a lively ‘industrial archaeology’
whose raw material is frequently less than a century or two old. In a
few generations’ time, archaeologists may be enthusiastically excavating
the remains of our own civic centres and shopping malls. According to
Zimmerman, there could in principle be a fruitful ‘archaeology of five
minutes ago’.15 But while this is so, archaeologists who are fascinated by
more ancient things – those who wish to study the origins of man, or the
migrations of long-gone peoples, or the development of early technologies,
or the rise of early civilisations – will eventually face a much more
straitened choice of unexcavated locations. Do present archaeologists
treat their successors unjustly by removing the opportunities for research
that they themselves enjoy?
Depriving future archaeologists of similar opportunities to those
enjoyed by present ones to excavate sites of prime importance may
not seem a particularly grave evil in the greater scale of things. And if
professional courtesy (to rank the moral obligation no higher) of current
archaeologists to future ones dictates that they should reserve for them
some potentially significant sites, there are other stakeholders in the
archaeological enterprise whose interests may be less well served by
such a self-denying ordinance. A rural community wanting to learn more
about the history of their village, a people who wish to know who their
ancestors were and where they came from, or members of the public who
value the feeling of closeness to the past that archaeological discoveries
can provide, may think it a poor reason for waiting to have their curiosity
satisfied that future archaeologists will need to have something to do.
Resolving this particular tension is challenging, but once again much
may be achieved by mutually respectful and tolerant consultation among
the various stakeholders concerned, and by a willingness to give and
take. By encouraging the idea of an ‘archaeology for all’, professional
archaeologists not only show themselves sensitive to the interests of those
outside the profession, but benefit their own and later generations of
archaeologists as well. By getting the public on their side, archaeologists
are better placed to secure for their discipline the popular, political and

14 Ibid.
15 L.J. Zimmerman, ‘Social Problems and Creating an Archaeology of “Now”, Not Just
“Back Then”’, Address to World Archaeological Congress, WAC-6, University College,
Dublin, 29 June – 4 July 2008.
 The Ethics of Digging 127

financial support that is necessary to ensure its long-term prosperity. In

the long run, the self-interest of the profession and the interests of other
stakeholders may be less divergent than they may first have appeared.
And if that is true, it is good news for everyone.
 III
OWNERSHIP
AND RESTITUTION
 8. ‘National’ Heritage
and Scholarship
John Boardman

The debate over the handling and publication of ancient artefacts acquired
through channels other than official excavation has raged for over fifty
years. The 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and
Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural
Property1 has effectively increased the value of objects known before 1970
but done nothing to halt the acquisition and marketing of objects ‘recovered’
since that date, although there are a few inhibitions about the way they
are marketed. Robbing graves probably ranks alongside other ‘oldest
professions’ of the world, although nowadays it is often accidental, and
since ‘recycling’ is generally perceived as being a civilised activity, it could
readily be defended. More general recognition of national responsibility
for the preservation of the evidence of ancient cultures in or on its soil is
now in place and selectively acted upon, except where issues of greater
political or economic force prevail. We can probably not expect more. But
it is still not uncommon to hear the term ‘national heritage’ being used,
and this can easily lead to a more casual approach to some aspects of the
problem. Better by far to speak of ‘global heritage’, the ‘heritage of man’
or even just ‘heritage’, and whether it has to be ‘cultural’ or not may be a
moot point.
The use of the word ‘national’ carries with it implications of moral or legal
claims by any country on artefacts found on or in its soil. The implication is

1 See http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13039&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_
SECTION=201.html

© John Boardman, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0047.08

132 Cultural Heritage Ethics

that the modern nation has a responsibility, which is not contested, but that
is based on some positive link between the modern and ancient cultures
that the land sustained. Where this is clearly lacking, problems arise. It is
easy to see where ‘national’ interests have been counter-productive, even in
recent years – the destruction of Buddhist monuments by an Islamic state,
the destruction of Islamic monuments by a Christian state, the destruction
of anything that gets in the way of any sort of ‘development’ that is deemed
more important.
Sometimes the argument for possession is more subtle or complicated.
A fine Athenian vase made in about 500 BC was immediately exported
to Italy where it was soon put into an Etruscan (non-Greek) grave and in
modern times recovered ‘unofficially’ and taken to display in an American
museum. It is a Greek product, its use was as an Etruscan grave offering,
and its major period of display for admiration and study has been in a
New World museum. It has been returned to Italy because it was found
there, not because it was made there or because it might be a better
demonstration of the quality of Greek art there. Objects of scholarly rather
than aesthetic (i.e. for a modern public) importance are more easily judged
and accommodated where they are best understood and appreciated,
which is not always where they were found.
The restitution of ‘works of art’ to their country of origin might be held
to depend on whether it is thought that they are in fact best appreciated
there. We could hardly wish for the dispersal of collections of diverse post-
antique world art, and should treasure all the more those galleries of ancient
art composed from widely different sources – the British Museum, the
Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, countless smaller galleries
worldwide – which give the public the opportunity to judge and compare.
In all this, ‘nationalism’ need and should play no part. Genetic and/
or cultural continuity in populations is often too easily assumed and the
markers for it (language, script) sometimes overvalued. Sometimes the
differences are obvious – as in the Americas with their native and immigrant
populations. Britain’s genetic past is so variegated that it poses no serious
problems of this type. For Greece the alphabet provides the strongest link
with the past since even the ancient physical type – tall, fair-haired, blue
eyed – is at some variance with the modern Balkan (Christian) aspect,
much adjusted by contacts east and west. The fact that, whatever is alleged,
there are very few countries whose modern populations have any serious
genetic or cultural links with their distant past, should not be ignored – a
 ‘National’ Heritage and Scholarship 133

problem which is (understandably but nonetheless mistakenly) not much

favoured in modern political and historical scholarship.
The classical world is one in which the problem of restitution of
monuments to their former physical position (not just environment) is at
stake. Yet no one would put the Elgin marbles back on the rebuilt Parthenon
where they would be barely visible, over forty-feet up. The marbles, which
have been on display in the British Museum in London for nearly two
centuries, have already proved their worth in the shaping of classicising
arts as well as in general education for visitors from all over the world,
through their juxtaposition with prime works from Egypt and the Near
East. There must surely sometimes be a case to be made for not letting the
past get in the way of the future.
While many ‘source’ countries take their responsibilities seriously,
there are many shortcomings. To understand the past we need access to all
the evidence, in corpore or in publication, yet, for the classical world, both
Greece and Italy have very poor records indeed in the matter of publishing
their own excavations, and in providing scholars with access to the evidence
gathered in the process. Not that they are alone, there are still western
museums which choose to be selective of whom they allow to study their
material, on nationalistic grounds. This is not simply a matter of laziness
or indifference. The remark that ‘they want to steal our material’ can still
be heard, as well as manifest examples of scholars ‘sitting on’ what they
perceive as ‘their’ material indefinitely, indifferent to whatever regulations
there may be about the period for which they might claim priority. Jealousy
seems a very strong motive in many cases, often abetted by extreme views
about what ‘copyright’ entails.
For learned journals to restrict or ban publication of ‘doubtful’ objects
is simply a censorship of scholarship indefensible on any grounds. Our
attitude to the past, including that of scholars for whom it is a subject of
intense interest and also often a living, can even verge on the superstitious.
The worst example of this is the feeling that unprovenanced objects
should not be studied by scholars, should not be published, should not
be conserved, should perhaps even be destroyed – an approach which
would not make the slightest difference to the discovery of objects, to a
‘trade’ and interest in collecting and display that is immemorial, and which
reveals at the same time an indifference to the integrity of evidence and
scholarly freedom, an attitude which is frankly itself unscholarly. That
the American Institute of Archaeology takes some such views impugns its
scholarly status. The German Institute is wary since the freedom of action
134 Cultural Heritage Ethics

by its foreign institutes might be jeopardised. Some scholarly journals are

also wary, and they also thus betray their scholarly responsibilities.
‘Ownership’ of the past does no doubt need closer definition, not least
of the responsibilities which it carries with it – to display, educate and
publish. Alongside this we need recognition that scholarship devoted to
the past should be one human activity that should on no account or for
whatever reason be subject to censorship or suppression.
 9. Fear of Cultural Objects
Tom Flynn

The terrible Buddha priests want their revenge! They seek me and they
will also find me! There is no escape from their secret power!1

This paper seeks to read some of the current disputes about the collecting
of cultural heritage through an analysis of Furcht (Fear). This little-known
silent film of 1917 by the German director Robert Wiene (1873-1938),
who went on to make The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), is regarded as
one of the most influential examples of German expressionist cinema. In
Fear, a wealthy German Count returns home from India with a statuette
he has stolen from a temple and thereafter gradually descends into a
state of guilt-ridden paranoia over his acquisition.
The fear to which the title refers is ostensibly generated by the
repercussions flowing from the Count’s illicit acquisition of the statue
and the fear of his own imminent death, foretold by a phantom Buddhist
priest who visits his home. The relationship between the collector and
the mysterious representative of the source community from which the
object was removed echoes the encounter between powerful European
nations and the peoples and communities they subordinated during the
colonial era. The film also works on a psychological level, expressing
the ‘deep and fearful concern with the foundations of the self’ that
has been identified as a core preoccupation of early twentieth-century

1 Bruno Decarli as Count Greven, Furcht, directed by Robert Wiene, 1917.

© Tom Flynn, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0047.09

136 Cultural Heritage Ethics

German cinema.2 As Siegfried Kracauer has suggested, the political

circumstances of the period immediately after the First World War
prompted the contemporaneous imagination towards the ancient
concept of Fate – ‘Doom, decreed by an inexorable Fate was not mere
accident but a majestic event that stirred metaphysical shudders in
sufferers and witnesses alike’.3
Released in 1917, just prior to the German Revolution and the
establishment of the Weimar Republic, Wiene’s narrative, played out
in the film through the experiences of the wealthy collector, might also
be interpreted as prefiguring Germany’s surrendering of its colonies
that became a condition of the Treaty of Versailles. Fear, I suggest, can
thus be read as a symbolic enactment within the cultural sphere of the
castration anxiety articulated almost contemporaneously by Freud. It
might also stand as an early example of what Anton Kaes has described
as ‘shell shock cinema’ – films that ‘evoke fear of invasion and injury,
and exude a sense of paranoia and panic’.4 Wiene’s own Dr Caligari
remains one of the pivotal examples of this sub-genre, and while Fear
may not partake of the ‘fragmented story lines, distorted perspectives
… abrupt editing and sharp lighting’ that Kaes identifies as the defining
characteristics of shell shock cinema between 1918 and 1933, the film
does rehearse another of that category’s core preoccupations. The
soldier’s return from the front in a psychologically altered state from
that in which he left – ‘he has come home, but the war has come with
him’5– is a theme mirrored in the plight of Fear’s Count Greven who
returns from his travels psychologically disturbed, or as the intertitle
has it: ‘Two years ago a happy cheerful man went abroad – and what
sort of man came home?’
While these aspects of film history and film criticism are fruitful
routes into an appreciative understanding of Fear, I want instead to
focus here on the film’s frame story about the acquisition and collection
of cultural objects. Wiene’s ambiguous treatment of fear also provides

2 S. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974 [1947]), p. 30.
3 Ibid., p. 88.
4 A. Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 3.
5 Kaes, 2009, p. 2.
 Fear of Cultural Objects 137

a lens through which to read the ideologically loaded discourses that

cluster around cultural heritage issues today. It is an unusual theme
for a film of that period and in a sense we might see it as the venerable
initiator of a cinematic ‘cultural heritage’ category that embraces
everything from Chadi Abdel Salam’s thoughtful Al Mummia (The Night
of Counting the Days) of 1969, and Jules Dassin’s heist caper Topkapi
(1964), to the popular Indiana Jones and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider franchises.
Vestiges of the anxiety dramatised in Fear can still be detected
today in attitudes expressed towards the ‘encyclopaedic’ museums
of Europe and North America by source nations seeking to recover
objects appropriated during the era of colonial conquest. Conversely,
the combative positions adopted by some museum directors in their
attempts to ward off repatriation requests appear to express another
kind of anxiety – a fear of ‘the floodgates’ opening6 – leading to the
wholesale denuding of museums and the loss of the reassuring material
plenitude that is a legacy of Enlightenment-era collecting.
Wiene’s film hinges on the overpowering sense of foreboding felt by a
wealthy aristocrat whose acquisitive impulse has driven him to commit
a cultural crime. Whether the emotions he manifests on arriving home
with the statue are intended to signify tremors of colonial guilt, Wiene
leaves the viewer to decide. Is the fear experienced by his protagonist
a response to some genuine objective danger, or the delusions of a
deranged mind – a real fear or a neurotic fear, to use Freud’s typology?7
Wiene’s father is said to have suffered from mental illness towards
the end of his life,8 which has been considered a possible source of the
psychological themes explored in his later Dr Caligari. Released in 1917,
Fear provides an even earlier point of reference for those concerns.

***

The film opens with the return to his ancestral home of the wealthy
Count Greven (Bruno Decarli) from a ‘foreign journey of several years’.

6 T.-L. Williams, ‘Cultural Perpetuation: Repatriation of First Nations Cultural Heritage’,

University of British Columbia Law Review, 29, 1995, pp. 183-201.
7 S. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), in Art and Literature (London: Penguin, 1990).
8 U. Jung and W. Schatzberg (eds.), Beyond Caligari: The Films of Robert Wiene (New York
and Oxford: Berghahn, 1999), p. 66.
138 Cultural Heritage Ethics

As his carriage pulls up outside the castle, numerous manservants are on

hand to attend to his luggage. Once inside, the Count, visibly distraught,
instructs his servants to lock all the doors and bolt all the gates to the
estate, announcing: ‘I never want to see a strange face again!’ He makes
his way upstairs to his private quarters, passing through rooms full of
Chinese porcelain, Old Master paintings and antique furniture. Some
moments later his servants enter, carrying a large rectangular wooden
trunk he has brought back from his travels. After dismissing them,
the Count furtively unlocks the trunk and removes a metal statue of
a Buddhist deity, which he begins passionately to embrace, before
returning it to the box and locking it. When night falls, the Count returns
to the box, removes the statue and carries it to another room where he
installs it on a pedestal in a specially designed niche behind a glass door
concealed by a curtain.
In the days that follow, the Count becomes increasingly agitated,
skulking around his castle at night with a lighted candle, constantly
looking over his shoulder, peering nervously out of the windows and
into darkened recesses. Aware of his master’s mounting anxiety, the
Count’s butler seeks help from the village minister, who offers to visit
(we later learn he is the Count’s former teacher and mentor). The Count
confides in the minister, telling him, ‘You know that I am driven by
an unhappy passion for collecting rare works of art, which drove me
into the world to see the most beautiful art objects’. He then reveals
how, ‘one day, deep in the heart of India, I heard about the holy Buddha
image in the Temple at Djaba, whose beauty made the sick well and the
sad happy … I had to see it’.
The film then cuts to a flashback in which the Count, dressed in
full colonial regalia of pith helmet and white three-piece suit, is shown
creeping stealthily into a temple interior where he eavesdrops on a ritual
conducted by a Buddhist high priest (Conrad Veidt) involving a small
statue. After the priest and his acolytes have left, the Count approaches
the statue and swoons in front of it, before snatching it from its niche
and departing. The priests return to the temple and are enraged to find
their sacred object missing.
Back in his castle, the Count tells the minister, ‘Since that day I have
had no peace. The terrible Buddha priests want their revenge! They seek
me and they will also find me! There is no escape from their secret power!’
 Fear of Cultural Objects 139

Fig. 9.1 Count Greven shoots the Buddhist priest.

That night, an exterior shot of the castle gardens reveals the Buddhist priest
standing statue-like on the lawn, staring up at the Count’s window. Lying
in bed, but suddenly aware of the proximity of a sinister presence, the
Count rises and takes a pistol from under his pillow. From his window he
sees the figure of the priest and in an agitated state proceeds out into the
garden to confront him. Without entering into a dialogue with the man, the
Count fires three shots. The priest remains standing, evidently unharmed,
at which point the Count collapses before him and pleads to be put out of
his misery: ‘Take my life! Death will be a release for me!’ The priest calmly
shakes his head and replies:

Then I would take something of no value to you! Instead you must live and
learn to love life. Then today seven years hence you will die at the hand of
one who is dearest to you.

Stricken with fear, the Count returns upstairs to the cabinet in which he has
placed the statue and is unsettled to find pinned to the plinth a handwritten
note confirming the curse – ‘Do not forget … today seven years hence!’
Seemingly reconciled to his fate, the Count decides to live life to the full,
hosting elaborate soirées, gambling, drinking and dancing through the
night with his friends. One evening, still troubled by his approaching
death, he abruptly calls a halt to the partying. He banishes the revellers and
thereafter embarks upon a series of scientific experiments in his basement
laboratory. Yet even after discovering a means to convert nitrogen into
140 Cultural Heritage Ethics

protein – ‘which could do away with hunger in the world forever’ – the
Count smashes his scientific equipment and decides to divert his energies
towards something new. This time it is love that preoccupies him. A
romantic interlude ensues in which he woos a young woman (Mechtildis
Thein), escorting her around the castle ramparts, frolicking with her beside
the lake, enfolding her in passionate embraces. And yet, despite the ‘days
full of sunshine and happiness’, the Count knows time is running out and
soon plunges back into a state of near delirium. Convinced the statue is
the source of his torment, he takes it to the lake and casts it into the water.
On returning to the castle he is suddenly overcome by a dark intuition and
approaches the cabinet, only to discover to his horror that the statue has
mysteriously reappeared – ‘The suffering!’

Fig. 9.2 Count Greven encounters the ghostly face of the priest in his cellar.

Fearing imminent death, the Count begins to perceive danger everywhere

and even accuses his butler of poisoning his tea. He then enters his study to
find his lover idly fondling a dagger. This reminds him of the curse – ‘The
hand of the one who is dearest to you’. He promptly takes out his pistol and
fires at her, but misses. ‘I hate the world!’ he declares. ‘I hate life! There is no
hand that is dearest to me!’
The camera now reveals the Buddhist priest has returned to the garden
and is seated on the lawn in the lotus position, hands clasped over his breast,
head bowed. Inside the castle, the Count descends to the cellar, gun in hand,
where he begins to lurch about in suicidal panic. Finally, when the ghostly
face of the Buddhist priest appears in the air before him, he slowly turns the
gun towards his own heart and fires.
In the closing sequence, a series of double-exposure shots convey the
spectral image of the priest rising from the lawn and entering the castle.
 Fear of Cultural Objects 141

He climbs the stairs to the cabinet room, retrieves the statue and solemnly
carries it away.

***

Rarely has the restitution of cultural property been so melodramatically

enacted. While the film could be read as a symbol of the neurotic
Weltanschauung of the German nation at the end of the war, it also comments
on the psychology of colonial collecting. A closer examination of the film’s
symbolism and narrative arc reinforces the relevance of both interpretations.
The Weimar Republic, established a year after Fear was released, ushered
in a cultural environment of what the historian Peter Gay has described
as ‘exuberant creativity and experimentation’, and yet one tempered by
‘anxiety, fear and a rising sense of doom’.9 Wiene’s film mirrors these
apparent cultural contradictions as Count Greven veers between irrational
dread and the rational impulse towards scientific research (the village
minister who comes to counsel him concludes: ‘You don’t need a priest,
you need a doctor’.) Wiene had dealt with the idea of threatened rationality
in a number of his films of this period.10 Fear might thus be seen as an
example of what the cultural historian Richard Brantlinger has described
as ‘Imperial Gothic’, a literary topos that ‘combines the seemingly scientific,
progressive, often Darwinian ideology of imperialism with an antithetical
interest in the occult’.11

Fig. 9.3 The spectral image of the Buddhist priest departs

with the recovered statuette.

9 P. Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (London: Norton, 2001 [1968]), p. xiv.
10 Jung and Schatzberg, 1999.
11 P. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 227.
142 Cultural Heritage Ethics

The ‘haunting’ of Count Greven provides a useful metaphor through

which to explore more recent developments in the ‘culture wars’ between
source nations and western collectors (be they so-called encyclopaedic
museums or private individuals). Underpinning many of these disputes
are various strains of fear. On the one hand, it is clear that some European
and North American museum directors fear that the increasingly vocal
and determined calls for repatriation of objects acquired during earlier
eras – indeed still being acquired in 1917 at the time Robert Wiene directed
Fear – could lead to a serious stripping-out of western museums.12 This was
most clearly articulated in the ‘Declaration on the Importance and Value
of Universal Museums’ issued by the Bizot Group of museum directors
in 2002, which proved divisive and controversial within and beyond the
international museum community.
The emotional response to rising demands for restitution of objects can
be contrasted with the fear felt by some developing nations who interpret
European and North American museums as tyrannical symbols of imperial
greed. As Kavita Singh has noted, the knowledge that significant amounts
of other nations’ cultural patrimony is languishing in the basements of
these museums, much of it uncatalogued and neglected, has engendered
a view of encyclopaedic museums as ‘terrifying places with insatiable
appetites for works of art’.13
Count Greven’s castle, with its grand salons brimming with Dutch
Golden Age portraits, Imari vases, Indian sculptures and heavy antique
furniture, might be seen as a symbol of the western museum complex. The
Count, having admitted to an unquenchable desire to seek out the world’s
most beautiful works of art, struggles to reconcile his acquisitive impulse
with a nagging awareness of the unethical nature of his collecting. Returning
home with the Buddhist statue looted from the Indian temple at Djaba,
the Count places it on a stand in a glazed cabinet concealed behind heavy
curtains. The object is thus immediately ‘museified’, ‘pedestalised’ – that
is, decontextualised, marked out. Its symbolic power as a synecdoche of a

12 See, for example, J. Cuno, Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); J. Cuno, Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and
the Battle over our Ancient Heritage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); J.
Cuno, Museums Matter: In Praise of the Encyclopaedic Museum (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2011); J. Cuno, Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate over
Antiquities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
13 K. Singh, ‘Do we really want the freer circulation of cultural goods?’, The Art
Newspaper, 192, June 2008, http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Do-we-really-
want-the-freer-circulation-of-cultural-goods?/8581
 Fear of Cultural Objects 143

mysterious and unknowable Orient becomes apparent from the moment

the Count arrives home, telling his servants, ‘Lock the doors, bolt the gates!
I never want to see a strange face again!’ The reference to the temple at
Djaba is clearly a fictional confection, although in Hindu traditions djaba
refers to a particular social group and means literally ‘outside’.14
Credited as the film’s writer as well as director, Wiene may have
drawn on his own collecting interests in creating his original script for
Fear. Wiene was himself a collector of Benin sculpture, a significant amount
of which was dispersed through the international art market following
the sacking of the Benin kingdom of west Africa by the British Punitive
Expedition of 1897. This was a classic instance of pith-helmet subjugation,
the British ransacking the Benin Kingdom in retaliation for the killing of
some of their soldiers during an earlier mission undertaken ostensibly to
form a trade agreement with the Benin people.15 The Punitive Expedition
sent the Oba of Benin into exile and looted the kingdom of its cultural
heritage, including carved ivory leopards and the extraordinary ancient
brass sculptures that had for centuries adorned the Oba’s royal residence.
The Benin objects almost immediately became enveloped by controversy,
chiefly on account of the circumstances of their acquisition. Many of the
brasses found their way into the British Museum, others entered museums
in Chicago, Boston, Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden and elsewhere, while still
others were bought at auction by European private collectors or through
dealers who acquired them on the secondary market. Wiene, it seems, was
one such collector, although exactly when and how he took possession of
his own examples is unclear. Dr Hans Feld, former editor of the influential
German film magazine Film Kurier, who knew Wiene during the director’s
time in London in the mid-1930s, recalled of his frequent visits to Wiene’s
flat in Maida Vale:

Wiene and his wife offered a home away from home. He took personal
interest in the daily lives of his guests and with his smiling scepticism he
created some balance. His art collection – mainly Benin sculptures – was a
reminder of a world which most of us had forgotten.16

14 K.P.H. Koentjaraningrat (ed.), Villages in Indonesia (Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta: Equinox

Press, 2007 [1967]), pp. 221-24.
15 R. Bacon, Benin: City of Blood (Memphis, TN: General Books, 2009 [1897]).
16 Jung and Schatzberg, 1999, p. 19.
144 Cultural Heritage Ethics

Forgotten, perhaps – certainly largely overlooked by a museum-going

public who at that time would still have seen them as ‘primitive‘ or ‘tribal’17
– the Benin sculptures have subsequently come to figure among the most
contested objects in the uncompromising stand-offs between source nations
and encyclopaedic museums. They are now widely recognised as evidence
of the worst excesses of colonial aggression and thus symbols of the imperial
underpinnings of the ‘universal’, or encyclopaedic, museum. Was Wiene
motivated to write Fear as a result of his own experience of owning a sculpture
that had been illicitly removed from a weaker nation? That question may
never be settled, but how prescient his film now seems in the light of later
developments in the fractious politics of cultural heritage collecting.
The encyclopaedic museum has its roots in the princely collections of
Renaissance Europe which held that the ordered arrangement of objects
could amount to a legible representation of the wider universe. That
tradition was developed during the era of the European Enlightenment
when the museum emerged as an expression of the rational impulse to
order and classify, to contain the whole universe beneath one roof. More
recent analyses, however, have come to view the museum’s universalising
strategies as fundamentally irrational and illegible, not to say unsustainable.
As Eugenio Donato has observed:

The set of objects the Museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that
they somehow constitute a coherent representational universe … Such a
fiction is the result of an uncritical belief in the notion that ordering and
classifying, that is to say, the spatial juxtaposition of fragments, can produce
a representational understanding of the world.18

Count Greven’s collecting is presented as an irrational, obsessive activity

as opposed to the rational, reflective pursuit of knowledge through
classification.19 His private, almost fetishistic relationship with the statue is
signalled from the moment he removes it from its box. Jealously guarding
it from the eyes of others, he embraces it, fondles it, clutches it to his breast
with an amorous passion.

17 J. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
18 E. Donato, ‘The Museum’s Furnace: Notes towards a Contextual Reading of Bouvard
and Pécuchet’, in J. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structural Criticism
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 223.
19 Clifford, 1988, p. 219.
 Fear of Cultural Objects 145

Fig. 9.4 Count Greven with the object of his desire.

The phallic connotations are apparent in almost every frame in which

the statue is shown: the Count holds it before him like an erect penis,
his scopophilic fixation coexisting with the dread that it will be taken
away from him. The psychoanalytic roots of this kind of anxiety are
well documented in Freud’s work, but there are fictional precedents too.
French author Maurice Leblanc’s popular Arsène Lupin mysteries, almost
contemporaneous with Fear, echo the torment experienced by Wiene’s
obsessive collector. In Arsène Lupin in Prison (1907), Leblanc writes:

Baron Satan leads a life of fear. He is afraid, not for himself, but for the
treasures which he has accumulated with so tenacious a passion and with
the perspicacity of a collector whom not even the most cunning of dealers
can boast of ever having taken in. He loves his curiosities with all the greed
of a miser, with all the jealousy of a lover.20

From the opening frames of the film, the life of fear led by Wiene’s Count
Greven is marked out in relation to the statue and seems to be generated
by a consciousness of his guilt in having stolen it. In a key moment in
the film, the Count fires his gun at the figure of the priest who remains
unharmed – the first suggestion that he may be merely a figment of the
Count’s imagination. The Count falls at the priest’s feet and begs to be put
out of his guilt-ridden misery. ‘I want to die’, he cries, as if the ultimate
punishment at the hands of this ‘terrible Buddha priest’ is the only way to
end his torment.
The theft or unauthorised extraction of cultural heritage, even in its most
fragmentary form – and the guilt such acts can engender in the perpetrator
– is also a theme in twenty-first-century art practice. British artist Andy
Holden’s Pyramid Piece (2010), fashioned out of panels of knitted yarn and
upholstery foam over a steel armature, takes the form of a huge lump of rock.
It represents an enlargement of a tiny piece taken from the Great Pyramid

20 M. Leblanc, Arsène Lupin in Prison (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Press, 2012 [1907]).
146 Cultural Heritage Ethics

of Giza by Holden while visiting Egypt with his family as a young boy. ‘It
became for me, at the age of ten, this kind of strange guilt object’, Holden
has said of the piece he stole. ‘I couldn’t really understand why I wanted
to take something authentic rather than buy a replica’.21 Fifteen years later
he returned to Egypt to try and locate the exact place on the pyramid from
which he had taken the fragment. The knitted sculpture, then, is merely a
pretext for the articulation of an inexplicable desire to possess the object
and the experience of its removal and eventual return.22
The unexpected effect an illicitly acquired object or fragment can have
on its possessor is an abiding theme in literature and film. Wilkie Collins’
The Moonstone of 1868 set a benchmark for mystery narratives centred
around disputed cultural heritage. Like the Buddhist statue in Fear, the
moonstone has been taken from its rightful home by a European traveller
(a British army officer) and, as in Fear, it becomes the focus of a quest for
repatriation by Indian priests. It is eventually returned to the statue from
which it was originally removed.
Guilt – or the anxiety induced by illicit ownership – seems also to
have motivated the return of a fragment of the Colosseum removed by an
American couple while on holiday in Italy in the 1980s. Regretting what she
eventually came to see as a thoughtless and selfish act, Mrs Janice Johnson
of North Carolina posted the fragment to Rome’s archaeological office with
a covering letter in which she confessed: ‘I have been bothered by the fact
that we took something that did not belong to us and am now returning it.
I have felt badly about it whenever I would see this rock sitting on our shelf
among our other artefacts from trips taken over the years of our lives’.23
The not uncommon tendency to assign some metaphysical quality to
inanimate objects in cultural heritage cases was illustrated by the Johnsons’
closing request to the Roman authorities that the fragment be returned to
the Colosseum ‘so it may again be at rest back where it belongs’.24
The guilt experienced by individuals like the Johnsons can be contrasted
with the attitudes of stubborn indifference adopted by encyclopaedic

21 Andy Holden, Tate Shot: Art Now: Return of the Pyramid Piece, 10 April 2010, http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=mr5WCSziG28
22 Described by Holden in the associated video work, Return of the Pyramid Piece, https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr5WCSziG28
23 ‘US tourists return Roman artifact 25 years later’, The Guardian, 7 May 2009, http://www.
guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/8495017
24 ‘US couple return ancient artifact to Rome after 25 years’, The Telegraph, 8 May 2008,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5293725/US-couple-
return-ancient-artifact-to-Rome-after-25-years.html
 Fear of Cultural Objects 147

museums seeking to deflect calls for return. Expressions of remorse or regret

– accompanied by an official apology – have occasionally been articulated by
governments or heads of state on behalf of nations seeking to heal historical
wrongs, often inflicted during the imperial age. In the case of the Parthenon
Marbles in the British Museum – the appropriation of which by Lord Elgin is
also widely viewed as an act of cultural desecration, the Ottoman permission
to remove them notwithstanding – opinion polls consistently show a majority
of the public in favour of return.25 In this respect, the British Museum and
many of today’s larger museums who face similar cases, are failing to act
in accordance with the wishes and sensibilities of the people they purport
to represent. Might it be the case that they have come to see the prospect of
mass returns as a form of punishment for the acquisitive activities of earlier
generations. Fear of punishment was not what drove Mrs. Johnson to return
the fragment of the Colosseum, she merely felt it was the ethical thing to
do. But guilt seems to have been a motivating factor, as it was in the case
of Andy Holden’s returned pyramid piece. In Fear, Count Greven’s attempt
to banish his sense of guilt lead him to try and dispose of the stolen statue
by throwing it in the lake. The theme echoes Picasso’s attempt a few years
earlier to dispose of an ancient Iberian sculpture in his collection, which had
been sold to him by an associate of his friend Apollinaire, a Belgian named
Géry Pieret, who had stolen it from the Louvre in 1911.26 Under suspicion for
the theft, Picasso and Apollinaire considered throwing the sculpture in the
Seine to deflect suspicion away from themselves and, presumably, thereby
to remove the burden of fear and guilt.
Freud saw guilt as the most important problem in the evolution of culture,
maintaining that ‘the price of progress in civilisation is paid in forfeiting
happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt’.27 Moreover, in his
clinical studies Freud found that ‘the sense of guilt expresses itself in an
unconscious seeking for punishment’.28 Throughout Fear, Wiene provides
plentiful hints that what we are witnessing are the phantasms of a psychotic
mind – the ghostly apparition in the garden; the magical reappearance
of the statue in its cabinet after the Count has thrown it in the lake; the

25 The issue of ‘restitution’ is discussed by Sir Mark Jones in Chapter 10 in this volume.
26 S. Loreti, ‘The Affair of the Statuettes Reexamined: Picasso and Apollinaire’s Role in the
Famed Louvre Theft’, in N. Charney (ed.), Art and Crime: Exploring the Dark Side of the Art
World (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger/ABC-CLIO, 2009), pp. 52-63.
27 S. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2010 [1929]),
p. 123.
28 Freud, 2010/1929, p. 125.
148 Cultural Heritage Ethics

presence of the handwritten note decreeing the seven-year curse; and the
substitution of the priest for the carriage driver as the Count is preparing to
flee the castle (foreshadowing the demonic coach driver who crops up just
a few years later in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu). All these combine to deliver
an aura of the uncanny, the Unheimlich, that characterised so much German
expressionist cinema of this period.29
The fear that a wronged people – often configured as the dead or half-
dead – will somehow return to wreak ghastly vengeance on the living is
an enduring trope of the Gothic genre (the Buddhist priest who cannot be
killed also prefigures the zombies beloved of later Hollywood horror). To
suggest that the vengeful Other of the imperial age has now returned to
haunt the encyclopaedic museum might be to stretch the metaphor. What
is undeniable, however, is that the increasingly clamorous demands by
source nations for return of their cultural property is beginning to present
an existential challenge to these institutions.
Tellingly, at the end of Wiene’s film, although Count Greven has killed
himself, the image of the ‘terrible Buddhist priest’ – previously presented as
a probable symptom of the Count’s psychotic state – survives in film time
to reclaim his temple statue. Wiene thereby genuflects towards that strand
of counter-Enlightenment metaphysics upon which the cinematic art has
always thrived. Thus, while ostensibly a psychodrama about an obsessive
collector, Fear is also a disquisition on film itself and our fascination with
the threshold between fantasy and reality and the monsters lurking beyond
the boundaries of the rational mind. Meanwhile, the increasingly persistent
calls on European and North American museums for the return of cultural
objects are not issuing from some spectral being. They are a reality. If, like
Count Greven, we feel fear, it is entirely of our own making.

29 Freud, 1990/1919; S.S. Prawer, Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror (Cambridge,
MA: Da Capo, 1980).
 10. Restitution
Mark Jones 1

In considering the thorny questions of restitution it may be helpful to

begin with some recent examples of restitution in action, to see if the
practice and principles enunciated to support, or implicit in, these cases
have a bearing on the yet more controversial areas in which claims for
restitution remain contentious.
On St Andrews Day 1996, a rectangular block of sandstone, ‘The Stone
of Destiny’, was formally installed in Edinburgh Castle.

Fig. 11.1 The Coronation Chair of Edward I, 1296,

with the Stone of Destiny.

1 A version of this essay appeared in The Art Newspaper, 250, October 2013, pp. 67-70.

© Mark Jones, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0047.10

150 Cultural Heritage Ethics

This act of restitution was intended symbolically and really to undo

the actions of Edward I of England ‘Hammer of the Scots’ who, seven
hundred years earlier in 1296, had instructed that the Stone of Destiny, the
coronation stone of the Kings of Scots, should be taken from Scone Abbey
and carried south to Westminster Abbey. There it was placed in the King of
England’s coronation chair, ‘King Edward’s Chair’, in Westminster Abbey,
thus symbolically asserting and reinforcing England’s claim to sovereignty
over Scotland.

Fig. 11.2 King Edward’s Chair, Westminster Abbey, England.

The Scots were not alone in believing that objects had the power to confer
and confirm legitimacy in the exercise of power. St Stephen’s Crown, for
example, not only conferred legitimacy on the kings of Hungary, but
ruled in their place during the regency that followed the First World War.
Similarly, the royal treasures held at the Abbey of St Dennis had a crucial
part in the inauguration of the Kings of France and the London Stone had
a similar function for those who ruled London. For many cultures across
the globe (e.g. Maori taonga in New Zealand), objects can acquire sacred
or symbolic power which makes them much more significant to people’s
sense of themselves and their history than their often unimpressive physical
appearance might suggest. It is the symbolic significance of possession and
relinquishment, their close association with perceptions of power and status,
that makes restitution and return so difficult and emotionally charged.
The return of the Stone of Destiny was initiated by a desperately
unpopular Conservative Secretary of State for Scotland, Michael Forsyth
 Restitution 151

(now Baron Forsyth of Drumlean), who presumably hoped that its return
would persuade Scottish voters that Scotland’s nationhood would remain
proud and intact under Conservative administration, without devolution
(the re-creation of a Scottish parliament) and within the United Kingdom.
It was not a success: the Conservatives lost all their Scottish seats in the
following elections.
Surprisingly few questions about this act of restitution were raised at
the time. But the Irish and the English have, if we can derive a theory of
restitution from the generality of current cases, a better claim to the Stone
than the Scots. It is often maintained that objects should be returned to
their place of origin: this is one of the bases of Italian, Greek, Turkish and
Egyptian claims for the return of antiquities. Yet the ‘origin’ of the authentic
Stone of Destiny is, according to legend, not Edinburgh or Scone but Tara in
Ireland. It is sometimes also claimed that it is the length of association with
a particular place or culture that is important. But the Stone of Destiny has
been in Westminster Abbey for longer than it was at Scone Abbey.
To complicate matters further the Stone’s authenticity is questionable.
Alex Salmond (First Minister of Scotland and Leader of the Scottish National
Party) is one of many who have publicly doubted it.2 It can hardly be true
that the stone is, as legend would have it, the coronation stone of the Kings of
Tara in Ireland, brought by King Fergus to Scotland in the late fifth century.
Geologists have identified the stone from which it is made as coming from
the vicinity not of Tara but of Scone in Scotland. Nor does it look like the seat
on which John Balliol was crowned in 1292. Walter de Hemingford, who
attended Balliol’s coronation, described this as ‘hollowed and made in the
form of a round chair’.3 Perhaps the Abbot of Scone gave Edward’s men
something else altogether and hid the authentic chair. But if so, why was
the authentic stone not used for the coronation of Robert the Bruce? And
why did the Scots want it back badly enough to make its return one of their
objectives in negotiating the Treaty of Edinburgh/Northampton in 1327-28
(Edward III issued a royal writ requiring its return, but it was never carried
out). In 1950 four young nationalists stole the stone from Westminster Abbey.
It was broken in the process and Alex Salmond is not alone in suggesting that
the stone returned in 1951 could have been one of the copies made by Bertie
Gray, the Glasgow stonemason to whom the stone was taken for repair. But

2 Auslan Cramb, ‘Stone of Destiny is fake, claims Alex Salmond’, The Telegraph, 16 June
2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/2136221/Stone-of-Destiny-is-
fake-claims-Alex-Salmond.html
3 This suggests that it was similar to St Winifred’s seventh-century throne, the ‘Frith Stool’,
in Hexham Abbey, which is made in exactly this way.
152 Cultural Heritage Ethics

would Scots therefore regard an English claim for the permanent return of
the Stone to Westminster with indifference? Almost certainly not; at least
until a more convincing and better preserved version turns up.
It begins, I hope, to be apparent that discussion of restitution within the
United Kingdom raises many of the key issues in a context which, precisely
because it is domestic – and therefore somewhat less fraught than restitution
claims involving disputes between states as well as nations – helps us to
understand that these issues are universal.
There are many other examples of restitution debates within the UK. In
May 1999 the leading Scottish Nationalist Winnie Ewing was quoted in the
Glasgow Herald: ‘Not only have we seen the return of the Stone of Destiny
to Scotland, but another part of our history is returning’.4 She was referring
to the Dunkeld Lectern which is said to have been made in Italy in 1498 and
given by Pope Alexander VI to George Crichton when he became Bishop of
Dunkeld in 1526 (rather confusingly since Alexander VI died in 1503).

Fig. 11.3 The lectern at St Alban’s, Copnor.

William Galloway, a Scottish antiquarian writing in 1879, suggested that

the lectern, which bears George Crichton’s name and arms, and which had
been found in St Stephen’s Church, in the English town St Albans, when
the Montagu family tomb was opened in 1748, might have been given to

4 Raymond Duncan, ‘A lost Scots treasure emerges from hiding Dunkeld Lectern makes
capital return’, The Herald, 3 May 1999, http://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/spl/
aberdeen/a-lost-scots-treasure-emerges-from-hiding-dunkeld-lectern-makes-capital-
return-1.293750
 Restitution 153

the church by Sir Richard Lee.5 It is known that Lee looted a brass font from
Holyrood Abbey during a punitive expedition launched against the Scots
by Henry VIII in 1544, which he gave to the Abbey Church (now cathedral)
in St Albans and which was melted down during the English Civil War,
so Galloway suggested that the lectern might also have been looted and
demanded its return to Scotland.
The lectern’s loan to the exhibition ‘Angels, Nobles and Unicorns’ in 1982
aroused strong nationalist feelings in Scotland and it was stolen from St
Stephen’s church in 1984. Happily it reappeared, after extended negotiations
between the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, during my time
as director of the National Museums of Scotland in the 1990s, and eventually
went on display in the Museum of Scotland as an icon of Scottish History.
But again, on the basis of the accepted story, the lectern originated not in
Scotland but in Italy and has been associated with St Stephen’s Church, St
Albans for more than 400 years (from roughly 1544 to 1984) – much longer
than with Dunkeld (less than 20 years). To add to the confusion, a census of
eagle lecterns of this type demonstrates that they are overwhelmingly found
in churches north of London, in East Anglia and central England, and it
seems probable that they were made in England or the Low Countries. So it
must be the historic wrong, Sir Richard Lee’s putative pillage, that motivated
the Church and others to work for, or accept, its return to Scotland, rather
than anything particularly Scottish about the object.
Other contested British objects recently in the news include the Lewis
chess pieces, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Great Bed of Ware.

Fig. 11.4 Great Bed of Ware.

5 William Galloway, ‘Notice of an ancient Scottish Lectern of Brass, now in the Parish
Church of St Stephen’s, St Albans, Hertfordshire’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries
of Scotland, 13, 1878-79, pp. 278-301.
154 Cultural Heritage Ethics

The Great Bed of Ware was made around 1590 to attract custom to the
White Hart Inn in Ware. Subsequently in other inns in Ware, it was sold
in 1870 to the owner of Rye House, Hoddesdon, before being bought by
the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1931. Some argue that the Great Bed
‘belongs’ in Ware, although there is nothing obviously contestable about
the chain of ownership. Its return to the town for a year from April 2012 to
April 2013 has been generally welcomed, though even with the publicity
generated by this historic event only about 25,000 people saw it during its
year there, perhaps a tenth as many as would have seen it in the V&A over
the same period. The experiment has perhaps dampened the sometimes
excessive expectations about the consequences of a ‘return’ while at the
same time reinforcing understanding that there can be multiple legitimate
interests or stakeholders in a historically resonant object, particularly when
that object is in a public collection and therefore in some sense owned by
‘the people’ as well as by a particular institution.

Fig. 11.5 The opening of St Luke’s Gospel in the Lindisfarne Gospels.

 Restitution 155

The Lindisfarne Gospels, made by Eadfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne (699-

721), has been in the British Museum/British Library since its foundation in
1753, given by the heirs of Sir Robert Cotton (1570-1631) who acquired it in
the early seventeenth century, after its removal from Durham under Henry
VIII in the 1530s.
Its return to the north-east of England has been vigorously campaigned
for, a campaign that is supported by the former Bishop of Durham, now
Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. He was quoted in the Northern
Echo: ‘I think something that comes from here should be part of the life
of the region’.6 John Danby of the Northumbrian Association took a less
nuanced view: ‘They should be restored to their rightful home’.7 It remains
to be seen to what extent the loan of the Lindisfarne Gospels to Durham
from July-September 2013 satisfied local opinion.
The Lewis chess pieces bring us back to Scotland, but in this case the
issues surrounding them are as much intra as inter-national.

Fig. 11.6 Chess pieces from Uig, Lewis, now at the

National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh.

These walrus ivory and whale tooth chess and gaming pieces, made in
the late twelfth century, were found in a kist, or container, in the dunes

6 Mark Tallentyre, ‘Church’s new leader calls for Lindisfarne Gospels’ return’, Northern Echo, 12
November 2012, http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/local/northdurham/10040266.
Church_s_new_leader_calls_for_Lindisfarne_Gospels__return/?ref=arc
7 ‘Petition demands return of Lindisfarne Gospels’, The Journal, 16 March 2006,
http://www.thejournal.co.uk/news/north-east-news/petition-demands-return-
lindisfarne-gospels-4581288
156 Cultural Heritage Ethics

at Uig on Lewis in 1831. Eighty-two are now in the British Museum and
eleven in the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh.8 When I was
director of the National Museums of Scotland in the 1990s there were
strongly stated demands for their return to Lewis – whether to Stornoway
or Uig was a matter of debate. There seemed to be a real risk that the
pieces could be ‘kidnapped’ if returned to Lewis, but regular loans to the
Museum of the Western Isles, initially from the British Museum and the
National Museums of Scotland, and in subsequent years from the NMS
alone, created a reasonably harmonious partnership which then extended
to other exchanges.
In 2007-8 there was a new campaign for their return. Linda Fabiani,
Scottish Minister for Europe, External Affairs and Culture said ‘it is
unacceptable that only 11 Lewis Chessmen rest at the National Museum
of Scotland while the other 82 remain in the British Museum in London’,
thus appearing to suggest that ‘return’ should be to Edinburgh rather
than Lewis. Margaret Hodge, then Minister for the Arts in Westminster
responded ‘It’s a lot of nonsense isn’t it?’,9 while Bonnie Greer, deputy
chairman of the British Museum ‘absolutely’ believed that they should stay
in London. A renewed loan to an exhibition that toured Scotland in 2009-
11, and an agreement that six chess pieces from the British Museum will
go on long-term loan to the new museum in Lews Castle in 201510 seemed
to restore a degree of harmony. No claim to the chess pieces has yet been
lodged by Norway, although the balance of scholarly opinion is that they
were probably made in Trondheim.
What can be learnt from the five examples cited here? First, that there
is a strong tendency for well-known objects associated with a place to be
claimed for that place. Sometimes the claim is that a historic wrong should
be put right: Henry VIII’s despoliation of the monasteries or English looting
of a Scottish church. Sometimes there is a sense that objects are significant
to the culture, history or society of the place, region or nation in question.
Their absence leaves something important incomplete: repossession will
restore the community’s identity and make it whole. There are economic
arguments too: tourism would be generated and the local economy
boosted by possession of the contested objects. In no case is the argument
for ‘return’ – and I put return in inverted commas because this is the term

8 Given by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1888.

9  Sunday Herald, 3 February 2008.
10 Frank Urquhart, ‘Lews Castle to house Western Isles museum’, Scotsman, 27 November
2013, http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/arts/news/lews-castle-to-house-western-isles-
museum-1-3210848
 Restitution 157

most widely used even though strictly four out of five cases do not involve
return to the putative place of origin – based on what would generally be
regarded as a coherent set of generally agreed principles. And yet in every
case the argument is deeply felt, often widely supported and, in terms of
public reception and results, quite effective.
Indeed, if we look solely at the effects of the restitution claims cited here,
it could be argued that they are on balance positive. The Lewis chess pieces
are much better known, have been more thoroughly studied and seen and
enjoyed by many more people than would have been the case if they had
remained uncontroversial. The same is true of the Lindisfarne Gospels
which, though on display in the British Museum for many years when I
worked there, attracted very little public attention. The return of the Stone
of Destiny meant a lot to many Scots, but there has been no comparable and
offsetting sense of loss in England. Active and valuable partnerships have
been created around several of these objects, partnerships which would
not have come into being without the stimulus of controversy. Although
there are unattractive, dog-in-the-mangerish aspects of all these claims,
the overall outcome has, so far, been beneficial for all concerned. So might
restitution claims be a good thing, to be encouraged rather than feared?
Certainly the climate of opinion has changed significantly over the last
fifty years. When I first worked in the British Museum in the 1970s, it was
regular practice to take in and study coin hoards which had been illegally
excavated and exported. The argument was that there would be a significant
loss to our knowledge of the past if these hoards went unrecorded. This
was true of course, but when it became obvious that the countries from
which these hoards came regarded this as unethical and unacceptable, and
a boycott of offending museums was threatened, policy changed. Since
then the British Museum has taken the view that museums must not give
encouragement or legitimacy to illegal excavation and trade by acquiring,
exhibiting or researching objects which do not have a legitimate history
going back to the date of signature of the UNESCO Convention on the
Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer
of Ownership of Cultural Property 1970,11 and has encouraged others to
follow suit.
I took part in the debates on this issue in the Bizot Group of directors of
the big international art museums in the mid-2000s. Philippe de Montebello,
then Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and James

11 For the text of this convention see http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13039&

URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
158 Cultural Heritage Ethics

Cuno, then Director of the Art Institute of Chicago, were among those who
argued that the acquisition of unprovenanced works could be a moral duty.
If great works of art, however discovered, were not acquired by reputable
museums, they would be lost to scholarship and the edification and
appreciation of the public. Against that it was argued that by apparently
legitimising the collection of unprovenanced works, museums would give
out the message that private collection of such pieces would, eventually, be
approved not deprecated. Collectors would know that, after the passage
of a suitable number of years, they could proudly show their collection in
public and perhaps end up by acquiring the prestige accrued from the gift
of important and valuable works to great public museums. This tended
to sustain the illegal trade which does so much damage to archaeological
sites and the artefacts found there, and deprives us all of the invaluable
information that only proper excavation can provide. Now all major
museums agree on this: indeed, having been actively pursued through the
courts by the Italian government, the Getty and the Metropolitan Museums
have returned illegally traded objects to Italy. As a result, the value of
unprovenanced material has reduced in comparison with provenanced
material and restitution is now regarded as right and proper where it can
be shown that objects have been illegally excavated or traded. Interestingly
though, few museums are undertaking active, systematic provenance
research to see if their collections do in fact contain such objects.
This chimes with other areas in which ethical questions about the process
of acquisition or the propriety of retention have been raised. Holdings of
human remains, which remained uncontroversial until the 1980s, became
the focus of increased anxiety and distaste in the 1990s and were the subject
of UK government legislation to enable their return in 2004. The Department
for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) ‘Guidance for the Care of Human
Remains in Museums’ issued in October 2005, with the explicit support of
the National Museum Directors’ Conference and the Museums Association
recognised that ‘some [human remains] were acquired between 100 and
200 years ago from Indigenous peoples in colonial circumstances, where
there was a very uneven divide of power’, and recommended meticulous
provenance research with open public access to the resulting information.12
It also provided a step by step guide to dealing with claims for return.

12 h ttp://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.culture.gov.uk/images/
publications/GuidanceHumanRemains11Oct.pdf, p. 8.
 Restitution 159

In the USA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation

Act, which was signed into law by President George Bush in November
1990, requires federal agencies13 and institutions that receive federal
funding to return Native American ‘cultural items’ to lineal descendants
and culturally affiliated Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organisations.
At the same time, the American Art Museum Directors (AAMD) have in
their own words ‘taken a leadership role in restitution of art and other
property stolen by the Nazis’. Accepting that the historic wrongs done
during the period of Nazi rule in Germany (1933-45) should be undone
wherever possible, they published guidelines in June 1998 which became
the basis of the Washington Principles agreed later that year. These
committed museums to careful and detailed analysis of the provenance of
all objects that changed ownership in Europe during the period in question.
The importance the AAMD attaches to this is evident from its website
which states:

The AAMD promulgates fundamental standards by which art museums

should be governed and managed. … the AAMD’s commitment to these
core values and the success of its members in the identification, recovery
and restitution of works seized by the Nazis have ensured that America’s
art museums are among the most trusted and respected public institutions
in the world.14

British museums, led by Sir Nicholas Serota, followed suit and in both
countries meticulous provenance research has been undertaken and a number
of claims for restitution have been successful: settled by return of objects
to earlier owners or their heirs or by the payment of agreed compensation.
Interestingly, many of them have turned out to be cases in which the works
were not in fact stolen or seized, as envisaged by the AAMD, but sold under
pressure. The Stuttgart Staatsgallerie’s recent ‘return’ to Canada of a Virgin
and Child, formerly attributed to the Master of Flémalle, righted the wrong
done when the picture dealer Max Stern had to sell the painting in order
to raise the money needed to buy an exit visa from Nazi Germany for his
mother.15 Where compensation has been agreed, it is based on the value of

13 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_agencies
14 ‘Art museums and the identification and restitution of works stolen by the Nazis’,
Statement on standards and practices issued by the Association of Art Museum Directors, May
2007, https://aamd.org/sites/default/files/document/Nazi-looted%20art_clean_06_2007.
pdf
15 David D’Arcy, ‘Canada under pressure over potential Nazi loot’, The Art Newspaper, 3
April 2013, p. 3.
160 Cultural Heritage Ethics

the work now, not on an estimate of the difference between the price actually
obtained and the true value then. So this is a generous and comprehensive
approach, but it so far applies only to the Nazi period in Europe. Attempts
to extend it to victims of the Armenian genocide (1915-18 and 1920-23) have
made some progress in California, but it remains to be seen whether the
case brought against the J. Paul Getty Museum by the Armenian Apostolic
Church for the return of seven manuscript pages from the Zeyt’un Gospels
will succeed. The case has already had some impact though: the Getty has
begun discussions with the Matenadaran, the Armenian museum that hold
the rest of the Zeyt’un Gospels.16
While a member of the Bizot Group, I had the slightly surreal
experience in 2003 of seeing a chorus of nodded agreement from my
international museum colleagues to the proposal by Italian museum
directors that the Group should take a public stand against the return of
the Axum Obelisk to Ethiopia.

Fig. 11.7 The Axum Obelisk (also known as the Roman Stele) in Rome,
where it stood in front of the UN Food and Agriculture
Organization’s headquarters until 2005.

Fortunately, assent evaporated when it was explained not only that

Mussolini had taken the obelisk as war booty in 1937 and erected it in

16 Laura Gilbert, ‘Restitution to get harder in California?’, The Art Newspaper, 4 April 2013, p. 4.
 Restitution 161

Rome as a sign of imperial conquest, but also that at the conclusion of the
Second World War Italy had formally agreed its return in 1947. The Bizot
Group risked being seen to apply one standard to those of European origin
who had suffered loss in the period 1933-45 and quite another to Ethiopia.
The obelisk was in fact returned in 2005 and re-erected in 2008.

Fig. 11.8 The Axum Obelisk in Axum.

Two other relevant examples of return both concern manuscripts. The

manuscripts of Icelandic sagas were systematically sought out and
collected by antiquarians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and
taken to Denmark for preservation and study. Danish recognition of the
central importance of these manuscripts to Icelandic culture was ratified by
legislation passed in 1961, which led to a gradual transfer back to Iceland
of a significant proportion of the manuscripts over the period 1971-97.
Initially contentious this became a focus of scholarly collaboration between
the Árni Magnússon Institute in Reykjavik and the Arnamagnean Institute
in Copenhagen (which retains a significant collection of saga manuscripts)
and a warm point in Danish-Icelandic relations. The consensus built around
this return contrasts with the bitter feelings engendered by France’s return
of manuscripts looted by a French punitive expedition which raided Korea
in 1866 after the execution of a number of French Catholic missionaries.
162 Cultural Heritage Ethics

Return was first agreed by President Mitterrand during a visit to Seoul in 1993
and was widely believed to be connected with the award of a very large contract
to build a high-speed rail link to the French bidder. Mitterrand, overriding
the protests of the then director of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Emmanuel
Le Roy Ladaurie and the relevant curators, took one manuscript with him:
returned according to the Koreans, lent according to the French. Despite a
strong campaign, led by curators in the Bibliothèque Nationale, who pointed
out that alienation of objects in French public collections is illegal, President
Sarkozy decided to honour the agreement. A formal agreement was made
between President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea and President Sarkozy of
France that the remaining 297 volumes should be returned on the basis of a
five year renewable loan. The manuscripts went back to Korea in 2011 and
nobody expects that they will return to France, except as occasional reciprocal
loans. The National Museum of Korea held an exhibition in the autumn of that
year which in the words of their website ‘celebrated the homecoming of uigwe,
which were looted from their rightful place … in 1866’.17

Fig. 11.9 Basalt stela with a relief of Antiochus I Epiphanes.

The issues raised here are of particular importance to museums in Britain

since they, like American and French public collections, are responsible

17 h ttp://www.museum.go.kr/program/show/showDetailEng.jsp?menuID=002002002
&searchSelect=A.SHOWKOR&pageSize=10&showID=4620
 Restitution 163

for significant numbers of contested objects. Turkey has recently claimed

the return of a number of objects from museums around the world, most
publicly the Stele of Antiochus I from the British Museum.
The British Museum has responded by pointing out that the stele was
acquired by Leonard Wooley in 1924 with permission from the French
authorities in Syria, where the artefact was then stored. It has expressed
willingness to discuss a loan for temporary exhibition but concluded its
April 2012 press release by stating that ‘The Trustees of the British Museum
cannot consent to the transfer of ownership of the stele and firmly believe
that it should remain part of the British Museum’s collection where it can be
seen in a world context by a global audience’. A consequence of this dispute
has been that Turkey now refuses to lend to the British Museum which also
has problematic relations with Greece over the Parthenon Marbles, and with
Egypt. This is an uncomfortable and potentially damaging situation for one
of the world’s greatest museums of the ancient Mediterranean. The problems
faced by the British Museum are far from unique.
The Victoria and Albert Museum, like all museums with significant
international collections, faces similar dilemmas. To start with a little
known example, it emerged in the early 2000s that a Spanish monstrance
in the V&A’s collection might have been stolen from a monastery in Spain
in 1885. Careful research demonstrated that the stolen object and the one
in the V&A really were one and the same. The museum faced a problem.
Legally the V&A could retain the artefact as the monstrance had been left
to the museum by someone who had good title to it under English law.
The National Heritage Act 1983, governing the V&A, does not allow it to
dispose of objects unless they are duplicate or useless. The monstrance was
neither. So it was agreed by the V&A trustees in 2003 that the object should
be returned, subject to certain assurances about its care. With the help of the
then British ambassador to Spain, an agreement satisfactory to both sides
was reached and the monstrance was returned to Spain, to the treasury of
Zamora Cathedral, in 2005.18
Another case that arose during my time at the V&A concerned the
Ethiopian treasures taken from the Emperor Theodore after his defeat at the
Battle of Magdala in 1868.
W.E. Gladstone, who was Prime Minister at the time, told the House
of Commons that ‘he deeply lamented, for the sake of the country, and
for the sake of all those concerned, that those articles, to us insignificant,
though probably to the Abyssinians sacred and imposing symbols, or at

18 Minutes of the Board of Trustees, 17 April 2003 – 23 June 2005.

164 Cultural Heritage Ethics

least hallowed by association, were thought fit to be brought away by a

British Army’. He went on to say that ‘with that just and kindly spirit which
belonged to him, Lord Napier said these articles, whatever the claim of the
Army, ought not to be placed among the national treasures, and said they
ought to be held in deposit till they could be returned to Abyssinia’.19 The
V&A received a letter from the then President of Ethiopia asking for their
return. But a reasonably positive response which asked among other things
for information about the gold crown returned in the 1930s received no
reply. One complication is that as a result of the 1983 Act, the ownership of
these objects – which had originally been a government loan – was vested
to the V&A into the property of the Trustees.20

Fig. 11.10 Crown, Ethiopia, 1740.

Towards the end of my time at the V&A, two other issues arose. One
concerned a small marble head of a child taken by the archaeologist Sir
Charles Wilson from the Sidamara Sarcophagus, a third-century Roman
tomb which he excavated in 1882 and which is now in the Archaeological
Museum in Istanbul.

Fig. 11.11 Carved marble head of a child, third century, excavated in 1882.

19 30 June 1871.

20 Trustees minutes, 20 October 2005.
 Restitution 165

The head was subsequently left to the V&A by his daughter. It seemed
evident to me, my colleagues and the trustees who I consulted that it should
be returned. Actually, this had been agreed in principle by the V&A in the
1930s, but never executed. The head does not fit with the collections of the
V&A, which has no classical antiquities, and serves no useful purpose there.
But it clearly does belong with the sarcophagus from which it was taken.
I hope that its return will not be long delayed. It would be particularly
unfortunate if it were argued that return would set a dangerous precedent.
To suggest that the rectification of an obvious anomaly of this kind would
prejudice the case for the retention of the Parthenon marbles or other
antiquities would be to accept that there are parallels where there are really
none – and so weaken not strengthen the case for retention.
I well remember the claim made for the return of what were then known
as the Elgin Marbles in the early 1980s, the then director David Wilson’s
sturdy assertion that they legally and legitimately belonged to the British
Museum, and his mixture of pleasure and annoyance at the visit of the then
Minster for Culture of Greece, the charismatic Melina Mercouri. Following
that episode, there was a period when the Greek government was willing,
even eager, to discuss recognition of the British Museum’s legal ownership
of the marbles on the condition that the Greek stake in them was also
recognised and they were in practice shared between London and Athens. It
seems a shame that that offer was not taken up and that it was subsequently
withdrawn, just as it is a shame that the risk that any sculpture lent might
not be returned was not properly weighed against the risk that a failure to
create partnership around the Marbles might eventually make the British
Museum’s tenure of them unsustainable.

Fig. 11.12 View of the Acropolis from

the interior of the New Acropolis Museum.
166 Cultural Heritage Ethics

The last case I had to deal with was that of the objects looted from the
Summer Palace (and elsewhere) during the European invasions of China
in 1860 and 1900.

Fig. 11.13 Chinese Imperial throne, carved lacquer on wood

depicting five clawed dragons, Qing dynasty, 1775-80.

On a visit to China in 2010 with Neil MacGregor, Director of the British

Museum, I suggested that we propose a programme of serious and sustained
joint provenance research with our colleagues in the Palace and National
Museums of China, so as to ascertain, as far as possible, the history of the
objects in the two museums’ collections. I was very pleased when, at a joint
press conference in Beijing the following day, Neil MacGregor put forward
this suggestion on behalf of the British Museum and the V&A. It seemed
to me that this would be a good way to begin the process of deciding the
long-term future of the looted objects. François-Henri Pinault’s recent
decision to return the rat and rabbit bronze heads from the Summer Palace
with the statement that ‘the family … strongly believe they belong in their
rightful home’, which reflects both the importance of the Chinese market to
a luxury goods group like Pinault-Printemps-Redoute and the significance
of this gesture to Franco-Chinese relations, confirms that the issue needs to
be addressed urgently.21 A report on their return to the National Museum
of China quotes a worker surnamed Zhao: ‘As a Chinese I hope all those
other antiques scattered throughout the world will be returned to China
too, but it will depend on how powerful China becomes’.22

21 Scheherazade Daneshkhu, ‘Symbols of amity’, Financial Times, 27/28 April 2013, p. 4.

22 Kathrin Hille, ‘Pinault gives bronze rat and rabbit back to China’, Financial Times, 29 June
2013.
 Restitution 167

What has emerged, I hope, is that we now have abundant examples

of practice, good and not-so-good, in the field of restitution. Museums in
America and Europe have publicly committed themselves to the principle that
restitution, or return, can and should be used to right past wrongs. We can see
from the numerous examples available to us that engaging with the problems
posed by contested objects has had beneficial consequences. Even the Getty
Museum, having lived through the trauma of the Italian trial of its former
curator of classical antiquities Marion True, has established better relations
with the Italian authorities than it had before – although it might have done
still better had it responded positively when the issue was first raised.23
The same standards must apply universally. We cannot have one rule
for Scotland or Spain and another for Turkey or Nigeria. We cannot rectify
wrongs wrought in Europe and ignore those committed elsewhere. We
cannot proclaim that objects belong in the British Museum ‘where they can
be seen in a world context by a global audience’ without recognising that
Istanbul (like Beijing and Shanghai or Delhi and Mumbai) can also claim to
be a ‘world city’ with a ‘global audience’.
There are real risks in action, not least to the preservation of the objects,
as the return of some of the Benin bronzes in the 1950s and the Ethiopian
Crown in the 1930s demonstrate. But these risks are not as great as some
imagine. The number of genuinely contested objects is small in number
and tiny as a proportion of total museum collection. Inaction is riskier
still: time is not on the side of those responsible for contested objects. A
price, in terms of the unrealised benefits of collaboration, is already being
paid. More serious are the risks of future confrontation over objects which
could and should be productive of partnership and good feeling. China
has not yet asked for the return of looted objects. Mitterrand and Sarkozy’s
negotiations with South Korea give us an idea of what might happen if it
does. And it will of course, it is just a question of when.
Proponents of an active approach to the resolution of disagreement
around artefacts are often accused by those in the museum profession of
naiveté, of not fully understanding the situation. My own conclusion, after
a lifetime working in some of the museums most affected by these claims,
is that the risks of action are overestimated and the risks of inaction are
underestimated. But most important for me is that we owe it to our proud
tradition of museums serving the public interest to see where something is
wrong and take steps to set it right.

23 Hugh Eakin, ‘The great giveback’, New York Times, 26 January 2013, http://www.nytimes.
com/2013/01/27/sunday-review/the-great-giveback.html
 IV
MANAGEMENT
AND PROTECTION
 11. The Possibilities and Perils
of Heritage Management
Michael F. Brown

After two decades of spirited debate about the fate of cultural heritage in
a shrinking, commodifying world, a few things seem settled. One is that
the unsanctioned appropriation of cultural assets by outsiders is unjust
and unethical, especially when undertaken by a more powerful group. It
perpetrates an economic injustice because the stewards of an ancient song,
art form, or useful element of traditional knowledge are denied whatever
profits those cultural resources may accrue in the marketplace. Worse still,
the act of tearing cultural elements from their original context may change
their meaning, even to those who created them. When the source community
is an embattled minority, the resulting distortion is especially damaging.
Many critics of cultural appropriation hoped that the framework of
intellectual property (IP) law could be modified to curb such injustices.
IP law’s attraction was that it was already in place as a global system
with well-established precedents. The prospect of co-opting international
copyright and patent laws, often portrayed as engines of cultural theft,
had a transgressive appeal to those who campaign for robust heritage-
protection policies. Yet aside from a few modest improvements here and
there, IP has proven to be a fickle ally. Patents and copyrights are time-
limited forms of protection. Eventually their term expires, and they revert
to the public domain, where they are available to anyone. This time-limited
quality is objectionable to source communities that wish to shield their
intellectual and cultural property forever. IP’s transformation of sacred

© Michael F. Brown, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0047.11

172 Cultural Heritage Ethics

forms of human expression into the language of property often offends the
people it is ostensibly trying to help.
The multiple deficiencies of an IP-based model have led the heritage-
protection movement to cast about for more promising frameworks. This
has fuelled growing interest in so-called ‘geographical indications’ as a way
to defend local traditions. Closely related to this is the emergence of formal
certifications of virtue. These consist of administrative structures that
designate something – a building, an art style, a craft, a genre of traditional
music, a ritual – as meriting protected status because of its transcendent
cultural importance. An obvious example of the latter is UNESCO’s system
for identifying and certifying World Heritage Sites.1
Legal experiments in heritage management that have been implemented
to date tend to follow a similar script. They inevitably give expression to
what can be called the ‘administrative mind’. The greatest student of the
administrative mind was Max Weber (1864-1920), the German sociologist
whose analysis of bureaucratic logic remains a touchstone for subsequent
work in the field. In the highly rationalised world of bureaucratic
administrators, Weber observed, problems are dealt with by carefully
defining their properties, establishing fixed rules for dealing with them,
subdividing authority among trained experts, and doing everything
possible to squeeze awkward exceptions into existing procedural categories.
Systems of this sort have become nearly universal because they manage
complex systems predictably and, often enough, efficiently. What works
well when manufacturing widgets in a factory, however, swerves toward
absurdity when applied to more subjective dimensions of human life. A
familiar example is the current enthusiasm for auditing the performance
of university professors. Asked to judge teaching ability or scholarly merit
in a precise way, administrators resort to dubious metrics of success in the
name of objectivity. Even more vexing problems arise when attempting to
manage something as elusive as culture in the name of protection.
Consider the following case which, although hypothetical, closely
tracks emerging strategies to protect traditional crafts in many parts of
the world. Let us say that a nation such as India or Ecuador or Kenya
has a distinctive, localised, artisanal textile industry of some renown.
The national government wants to protect this industry from imitators,

1 On certificates of virtue, see Michael F. Brown, ‘A Tale of Three Buildings: Certifying
Virtue in the New Moral Economy’, American Ethnologist, 37(4), 2010, pp. 741-52.
 The Possibilities and Perils of Heritage Management 173

especially industrial firms that can easily appropriate traditional designs.

To accomplish this, the government creates a geographical indication
unique to that tradition, such that no outsider can claim to make ‘X fabric’
or even ‘X-style fabric’ without violating national law. So far, so good.
For this law to have teeth, the government must define several things
with great precision. First, what is X fabric? In other words, what are the
boundaries of its design palette, raw materials, thread count, and the like?
Next, what are the boundaries of the production zone protected by the new
geographical indication? Within that formally defined area, who will be
recognised as a certified artisan? Who will do the certifying? How much
of the cost of administering the certification system will be passed along to
the producers themselves?
One can readily imagine various unintended consequences of this scheme
despite its apparent simplicity. The smallest producers may lack the financial
resources or literacy skills to file the relevant forms and pay the inevitable
fees, thus forcing them to merge with larger, better-established producers
who have already achieved certification. Innovative artisans pushing the
boundaries of an official style may find their legitimacy questioned by
more conservative producers, risking loss of certification. Over time, such
rigidity could turn a lively tradition into an inert museum-piece. As Winston
Churchill once said of art, ‘without innovation, it is a corpse’.
A growing roster of news stories and case studies shows that
my hypothetical example only begins to inventory the unintended
consequences that may arise from the application of the administrative
mind to the challenge of protecting heritage. In 2009, for example, a noisy
dispute broke out between Bolivia and Peru over a costume worn by
Miss Peru in the Miss Universe Pageant. In the portion of the competition
devoted to each nation’s folklore, Miss Peru crossed the stage dressed in a
costume linked to La Diablada (‘Dance of the Devils’), which is performed
in the Andean altiplano region shared by Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. It
happens, however, that Bolivia’s version of the dance – specifically, the
version performed in the town of Oruro – has been certified by UNESCO
as a ‘Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity’. For
reasons known only to UNESCO, the same dance as performed in Peru and
Chile lacks such certification. Thus Bolivia, which sees the designation as
an important draw for international tourism, protested that by wearing the
costume of La Diablada, Miss Peru had pilfered its national patrimony. The
colourful scrimmage between Andean nations echoes an earlier dispute
174 Cultural Heritage Ethics

between China and South Korea over stewardship of the Duanwu Festival,
celebrated in the fifth lunar month in both countries.2
Another example is provided by the American Indian Arts and Crafts
Act (1990), a US law with the straightforward goal of protecting consumers
from false claims that a given piece of artwork has been created by a
Native American. The law says that for a work to be legally portrayed
as Indian-made, the artist must be an enrolled member of a federally- or
state-recognised tribe or Alaska Native community. The doctrine of tribal
sovereignty that applies in the United States, however, gives tribes great
latitude in their enrolment practices. Some are expansive in their standards,
others quite restrictive. The result is that certain artists widely regarded
as Native American by fellow Native Americans cannot advertise their
work as Indian-made, whereas others with more tenuous links to Native
American society are free to do so. Admittedly, these problems arise around
the edges of an otherwise effective law, but they illustrate the difficulties
that arise when cultural definitions – in this case, of tribal membership –
become concretised in formal bureaucratic practice.3 More troubling still,
the law is virtually powerless in the face of products that imitate Native
American art but make no explicit claim of Native origin. A morally
complex instance of this would be the inexpensive ‘Southwestern-style’
rugs made by indigenous Zapotec weavers in Mexico, which turn up with
great frequency in Native American arts shops in the United States, where
they compete with more expensive rugs made by Navajo weavers.
In the arena of traditional music, the ethnomusicologist Javier León has
documented the effects of formal certification on Peruvian musicians of
African descent. In 2001, Peru’s National Institute of Culture declared an
instrument called the cajón to be the ‘Cultural Patrimony of the Nation’.
As the name implies, the cajón is a wooden box that has long been used
as a percussion instrument by Afroperuvian musicians. Whether the cajón
is unique to Peru is disputed, although exposure to Peru’s version of the
instrument has unquestionably led to its recent adoption by performing
artists in Spain, Cuba, and Mexico. Peru’s claim on the instrument has
various motivations: national pride, the possible benefits to cultural

2 Matt Moffet and Robert Kozak, ‘In this spat between Bolivia and Peru, the details
are in the devils’, Wall Street Journal, 21 August 2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB125081309502848049.html. On Duanwu, see ‘Paying more attention to cultural
heritage’, Financial Times, 18 May 2004.
3 William J. Hapiuk Jr., ‘Of Kitsch and Kachinas: A Critical Analysis of the Indian Arts and
Crafts Act of 1990’, Stanford Law Review, 53, 2001, pp. 1009-75.
 The Possibilities and Perils of Heritage Management 175

tourism, and, according to León, the attraction of ‘reaping any revenue

that such ownership might yield’.4 One comes away from his study with
the sense that declaring the instrument to be an item of national patrimony
has produced as much divisiveness as pride among musicians by fostering
disputes over whose use of the cajón is more authentic. In a similar analysis
of policies designed to protect the musical heritage of the Seto minority
group in Estonia, Kristin Kuutma concludes that the ‘discursive impact of
the concept and perspective of intangible heritage paves a battleground
of celebration and contestation among those entangled in the process of
heritage production’.5
The administrative mind is not the only source of trouble when heritage
is redefined as a resource amenable to bureaucratic supervision. Equally
vexing is the role of the state. With few exceptions, nation states consider
themselves the proper stewards of heritage resources found within their
borders, a premise that the charters of organisations such as UNESCO are
obliged to honour. Yet the state’s interests and those of internal cultural
communities often diverge. In the interest of national unity, the state may
choose to emphasise some aspects of heritage and suppress others. States
may wish to promote certain traditions and heritage sites because they
attract tourists, whereas local communities may value a way of life that
residents see as irreconcilable with an ever-increasing number of visitors.
More often than not, state institutions such as national museums and
archives exercise control over heritage resources in ways that are deeply
resented by source communities – in recent years prompting calls for the
‘liberation’ of culture from the iron grip of distant bureaucrats.
More subtle but no less profound implications of state insertion into
local heritage practices have been documented by Lorraine Aragon and
James Leach in their research on Indonesia’s efforts to implement laws that
shield traditional arts from exploitation by outsiders. Among their findings
is that ‘bureaucrats’ best-intentioned legal plans do not easily encompass
artists’ complex aims for art production processes and transgenerational
reciprocity’.6 In other words by reframing local heritage in international

4 Javier F. León, ‘National Patrimony and Cultural Policy: The Case of the Afroperuvian
Cajón’, in A.N. Weintraub and B. Yung (eds.), Music and Cultural Rights (Chicago, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 2009), p. 129.
5 Kristin Kuutma, ‘Who Owns Our Songs? Authority of Heritage and Resources for
Restitution’, Ethnologia Europaea, 39(2), 2009, p. 36.
6 Lorraine V. Aragon and James Leach, ‘Arts and Owners: Intellectual Property Law and
the Politics of Scale in Indonesian Arts’, American Ethnologist, 35(4), 2008, p. 608.
176 Cultural Heritage Ethics

legal terms, the state is changing local cultures in ways that the alleged
beneficiaries find unsettling and even destructive.
Ethnographic fieldwork in certified heritage sites likewise offers
a picture of local dissatisfaction simmering under the surface of an
upbeat, culture-affirming label. Consider, for instance, the Pelourinho
neighbourhood of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, which was declared a World
Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1985. The anthropologist John Collins has
assessed the process by which this former red-light district and its primarily
Afrobrazilian residents were converted into national patrimony. In order to
conform to the state’s idea of acceptable heritage, those inhabitants have
been subjected to coercive government reform efforts. Collins finds that
‘the Bahian state arbitrates “correct” markers of ethnic identity and national
history that qualify bearers for political rights while residents who exhibit
incorrect behaviours face exile on Salvador’s periphery’.7
Different concerns are voiced by residents of another World Heritage Site,
the mud-brick city of Djenné in Mali. The rigorous preservation protocol
developed by UNESCO prevents the people of Djenné from altering the
structure or appearance of their houses in any way. Those who wish to
increase the size of rooms or renovate them to accommodate plumbing
and modern appliances are prohibited from doing so. The inevitable
frustrations seem to be turning citizens against the tourism-promoting
authenticity from which only a few derive direct benefits.8
I could continue piling up examples of what Lisa Breglia, in a study of
local attitudes toward Mayan archaeological sites in Mexico, memorably
calls ‘monumental ambivalence’, but the contours of the problem should
now be readily apparent.9 Even thoughtfully designed heritage-protection
laws and policies tend to be flawed affairs. Their imperfections arise from
two sources. First, most are creations of the nation state, whose interests
are likely to diverge from those of subcultural communities struggling to
maintain a degree of distinctiveness. Even when the state is not aggressively
trying to redefine local cultures and heritage sites to suit a nationalist
narrative, a predilection for centralised control is likely to put too much

7 John Collins, ‘“But What if I Should Need to Defecate in Your Neighborhood, Madame?”:
Empire, Redemption, and the “Tradition of the Oppressed” in a Brazilian World
Heritage Site’, Cultural Anthropology, 23(2), 2008, p. 312.
8 Neil MacFarquhar, ‘Mali City rankled by rules for life in spotlight’, New York Times, 9
January 2011, A4, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/world/africa/09mali.html
9 Lisa Breglia, Monumental Ambivalence: The Politics of Heritage (Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press, 2006).
 The Possibilities and Perils of Heritage Management 177

power in the hands of credentialed experts far removed from the everyday
interactions that keep heritage alive.
Equally problematic is the transformative power of law itself. As
various legal scholars have noted, by its nature law imposes uniformity. In
contrast, cultural heritage embodies flexibility and highly contingent ways
of doing things, both of which are anathema to law’s search for procedural
regularity. Indeed, a great irony of the heritage-protection movement is
that it advances globally uniform approaches to the defence of heritage
said to be threatened by globalisation. Law not only encodes meanings, it
retools them in ways that change social practice.
An example that comes readily to mind is the impact of the concept of
‘repatriation’ encoded in a celebrated US law called the Native American
Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, better known by the
acronym NAGPRA. NAGPRA provides for the return of human remains
and objects of religious patrimony to Native American communities from
which they were taken, subject to specific conditions. Ethnographic studies
of the repatriation process have shown that the law has in some cases
transformed Native American notions of cultural ownership: tribes now
regard themselves as the proper owners of objects that once belonged to
individuals, families, or sub-tribal units. This is not necessarily a bad thing
– surely it is preferable to having sacred objects of doubtful provenance
remain in the hands of museums – but it should not be mistaken for the
preservation of tradition. It has changed that tradition in innumerable
ways. Moreover, NAGPRA’s success in rectifying historic wrongs has
inspired supporters of indigenous rights to demand the ‘repatriation’ of
intangible heritage – recordings of songs, photographs of rituals, digital
images of indigenous art – to source communities. In a digital age,
however, intangible heritage does not answer to the logic of the material
objects covered by the terms of NAGPRA. Digitised heritage may reside in
thousands of places simultaneously. It can be diced into partial elements
and distributed instantly around the world. Recovery, reassembly, and
sequestration of these scattered shards is an unlikely prospect, however
much we might wish it. Leakage of the legal concept of repatriation into
a domain where it doesn’t readily apply has sometimes made it harder to
find effective solutions to the circulation of elements of cultural heritage
over which source communities have long sought control.10

10 On the complex interaction between law and culture, see especially Naomi Mezey, ‘Law
as Culture’, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 13, 2001, pp. 35-67.
178 Cultural Heritage Ethics

Twenty years of watching the world struggle with questions of heritage

and its preservation have drawn me to the tragic view of human ambition
embraced by the literary critic Terry Eagleton. As Eagleton puts it, ‘Tragic
protagonists … acknowledge that flawedness is part of the texture of things,
and that roughness and imprecision are what make human life work’.11
However noble our desires, however much we strive to advance the cause
of justice, the outcome of this human effort will be marked by imperfection.
Such a perspective need not produce ethical paralysis, but it does call for
humility and a willingness to change course when evidence warrants. A
willingness to laugh at human folly helps, too.
Cultural heritage, whether embodied in places or stories, is a shape-
shifting, protean thing whose contours may be contested even by those
who create it. For centuries the powerful have tried to define its shape and
the uses to which it is put. Now that it has become a commodity, the stakes
have risen further. The cultural heritage of formerly isolated communities
has gained value in markets hungry for novelty. This coincides with a
democratic opening that in many parts of the world has empowered
minority communities to reassert their cultural distinctiveness. The
resulting convergence of economic interests and identity politics – to say
nothing of the spiritual idioms in which heritage-protection demands are
often couched – makes for an ethical landscape of great complexity. So
what is to be done?
One useful step would be to revisit the broader context that gave rise to
the current passion for protecting heritage. The expansion and tightening
of global IP rules that began in the 1990s sparked a moral panic about
cultural theft. The response has been an effort to defend heritage with
new laws that sometimes outstrip copyright and patent law in the degree
to which they commodify culture and downsize the public domain. Is
emulating the worst features of IP the best way to hold it at bay? Perhaps it
is time to re-energise public efforts to roll back expansive IP laws. After all,
if corporations find it harder to privatise public knowledge, they will focus
their acquisitive attention elsewhere. A promising tactic to undermine
predatory IP law has been employed in India, where the creation of a
publicly accessible Traditional Knowledge Digital Library has made it
more difficult for bioprospectors to secure patents on products derived
from Ayurvedic medicine. IP law says that patents may only be issued for

11 Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 186.
 The Possibilities and Perils of Heritage Management 179

products that demonstrate novelty. By putting ancient medicines in the

public domain, India pre-emptively refutes claims that pharmaceutical
products based on Indian tradition qualify as ‘new’.
Operating on the fringe of the heritage-protection movement are
scrappy outsiders whose creativity gives me hope for the future. Among
the best is Mukurtu (www.mukurtu.org), a not-for-profit group of
anthropologists, programmers, and indigenous thinkers who have created
archival software that allows communities to preserve, study, and use their
own digital heritage. The program’s architecture can be customised to
serve a community’s changing needs and preferences. Mukurtu isn’t a total
solution, nor does it aspire to be; this is one of its strengths. Diversity sustains
diversity; uniformity stifles it. The steadily growing list of independent
museums and cultural centres in the United States, Canada, Australia, and
elsewhere is a hopeful sign of local resistance to the imposition of a single
set of global solutions. This isn’t to say that international treaties such
as the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage,
approved by UNESCO in 2003, cannot serve a useful purpose.12 They focus
attention on heritage and, one hopes, help to mobilise public enthusiasm
for its preservation. But to the extent that international agreements provide
justification for top-down policies and centralised management, they may
do more harm than good.
An unavoidable lesson of recent experience is that cultural heritage
is most likely to thrive when shielded from the administrative mind’s
managerial impulse and the suffocating embrace of formal law. When
controls are warranted, they should be developed by source communities
rather than state bureaucrats. The state’s remit should be limited to providing
advice, financial support, and appropriate enforcement mechanisms for
locally created controls. Such an approach honours culture’s dual identity
as a verb as well as a noun. For cultural heritage to survive, it must be
cultured by its proper stewards.

12 For the text of the 2003 Convention see http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=17

716&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
 12. Values in World Heritage Sites
Geoffrey Belcher

1. Introduction
It is helpful to begin with an explanation of the concept and evolution
of ‘World Heritage’ as adopted by UNESCO, the United Nations
Environmental, Social and Cultural Organisation which is ‘building peace
in the minds of men and women’.
In the late 1950s, after the building of the Aswan Dam flooded the Nile
Valley, destroying many ancient sites, international concern about places
of world significance focused on Egypt. Among the country’s countless
historic sites, the most famous was the temple of Abu Simbel, with its four
giant statues of the great pharaoh Rameses II. As a result of the concerns
raised by the flood, international aid was gathered to fund an ambitious
scheme to cut the temple’s stonework and relocate it to higher ground
away from the rising waters. The archaeological and aesthetic legitimacy
of this action may have been questioned in subsequent years, but the event
did ignite a process that eventually led, via an initiative in the United States,
to the establishment in 1972 of the UNESCO Convention Concerning the
Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage.1
The World Heritage list was readily drawn up in these early years to
include the most obvious places of world interest such as the Taj Mahal in
India, the Mesa Verde National Park in the USA, and the Galapagos Islands

1 See http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13055&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_
SECTION=201.html

© Geoffrey Belcher, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0047.12

182 Cultural Heritage Ethics

in Ecuador. As the idea of the list has evolved, a greater variety of Sites has
been added, whilst the process of inscription and management of these
World Heritage Sites has become much more rigorous.
Today, a Site can only be inscribed on the list if the World Heritage
Committee agrees that it meets one or more of the ten criteria listed in the
World Heritage Convention Operational Guidelines (2005),2 which can be
paraphrased as follows:

(i) To represent a masterpiece of human creative genius.

(ii) To exhibit an important interchange of human values.
(iii) To bear a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition.
(iv) To be an outstanding example of a type of building.
(v) To be an outstanding example of traditional human settlement.
(vi) To be directly or tangibly associated with events or living traditions.
(vii) To contain superlative natural phenomena.
(viii) To be outstanding examples representing major stages of Earth’s history.
(ix) T
 o be outstanding examples representing significant on-going ecological
and biological processes.
(x) To contain the most important and significant natural habitats.

The first six of these criteria may be considered to apply to cultural Sites, and
the remainder to natural Sites, although some Sites are in the dual category
of ‘cultural landscape’. As we will see, UNESCO have broadened their
approach to inscription over the last few years, and as a consequence the
World Heritage list now includes ‘properties’ of hugely varying character,
from places of great architectural beauty such as the Taj Mahal to places
linked with significant historical events, including Auschwitz-Birkenau
in Poland and Hiroshima in Japan. Natural Sites, meanwhile, include
places ranging from the Great Barrier Reef and Shark Bay in Australia to
Yellowstone National Park in the USA.
Participating nation states (State Parties) may put forward one cultural
and one natural Site for World Heritage status annually, but the UNESCO
Conservation Committee’s selection process is by no means straightforward.
The United Kingdom has had to withdraw nominations for Charles
Darwin’s Cultural Landscape in Kent, and Wearmouth and Jarrow in the
county of Tyne and Wear (associated with the Venerable Bede) in the last
few years because the cases, which relied strongly on association with an

2 See http://whc.unesco.org/archive/opguide05-en.pdf
 Values in World Heritage Sites 183

important historical figure, were not considered robust enough. At present

the number of UK locations listed as World Heritage Sites remains at 28.
The individual characteristics of each Site mean that their management
varies and may involve a wide range of issues. At present UNESCO World
Heritage Sites have little status in national heritage-protection legislation,
and as a result management plans, which are a UNESCO requirement for
the protection of the Sites, have only a limited statutory basis. Moreover,
many Sites contain private land and enterprises, and so must include
elements of a business plan. These issues will be discussed further below.

2. The Wider Value of Heritage

The modern appreciation of the value of historic sites can be traced back to
the Renaissance, when architects began to adapt classical ruins in order to
develop new architectural styles. Subsequently, in the eighteenth century,
the Grand Tour of Italian and Greek archaeological sites became de rigueur
for young aristocrats. Unfortunately, plundering of artefacts by these
eighteenth-century tourists was rife, but their experiences also encouraged
the use of classical elements in the ‘Palladian’ style, which produced
buildings of great elegance. The nineteenth century, meanwhile, saw the
introduction of a more formal concern with the protection of the historical
legacy, and the founding of the Society for the Protection of Ancient
Buildings represents a milestone in this regard. Throughout the heritage
world, a more rational approach was increasingly taken to the recording
of historic sites and objects both above and below the ground. In the case
of field archaeology, this meant the establishment in the early twentieth
century of highly rigorous excavation procedures designed to prevent the
cavalier treasure hunting and consequent destruction of the historic context
of such ‘finds’ that had been widespread since the eighteenth century.
In Britain, the value of historic buildings was further recognised with
a number of studies, such as the on-going ‘Survey of London’ (founded in
the 1890s), which documented buildings of historic interest, often shortly
before they were destroyed to make way for development. By the twentieth
century, historic towns had become an accepted part of the British national
culture, although without any specific designation. Ironically their
recognition at an international level in the Baedeker guides (founded in
1827) led to some of them (Bath, Norwich, Exeter) being targeted by the
Luftwaffe in the early bombing raids of World War II. It appears that these
184 Cultural Heritage Ethics

initial raids were aimed at places of cultural rather than military significance,
indicating the Nazis’ assumption that heritage occupied a special place in
the British psyche.
In the wake of the Second World War, innovations in town planning
in the UK were driven by a generation sick of the restrictions of war, fed
on the 1930s dream of a ‘modern’ life of convenience and leisure. Their
approach to town planning was shaped by the ‘Brave New World’ visions
of Le Corbusier’s designs for new cities, including Paris, as well as the
more prosaic example of the ‘Arts and Crafts’ Garden Cities of Welwyn and
Letchworth. The establishment of the Town Planning Act in 1948 introduced
the idea of ‘development plans’, which aimed at holistic redevelopment
to celebrate the post-war age. Unfortunately, the first development
plans were disappointingly dull, being based on the narrow concerns of
road widening and other service considerations, rather than any more
general vision for an improved way of life. As a result, many of the ‘new
environments’ created in the 1950s and 1960s were a failure – the tower
blocks of the period, for example, are now recognised to be unsuitable for
everyday life in the UK, while the destruction of familiar town centres had
a negative impact on quality of life. These failures gave rise to a growing
popular interest in the wider historic environment, and there was a
widespread reaction against the unwanted changes. Groups of enthusiasts
saved rashly-closed railway branch lines, canals and the like, and in the
late 1960s the growing concern for the country’s historic environment was
acknowledged by central government with the introduction of the 1967
Civic Amenities Act, which brought in the concept of ‘Conservation Areas’.
The first such areas were based on historic town centres and consisted of
tight groups of historic buildings. However, the success of this new concept
led to its being extended to cover wider areas after 1973 when the idea of
‘the familiar and cherished local scene’ – that is areas not just made up of
historic buildings – was accepted as a basis for designation.3 Just as the
late 1940s ushered in a new optimism about a ‘Brave New World’ of town
planning, the 1970s, despite being ‘the decade that taste forgot’, produced
a raft of Conservation Areas which safeguarded many town centres against
the rampant redevelopment that had decimated traditional places even
more extensively than the Blitz.
This was in keeping with the general re-evaluation of many aspects of
everyday life that took place in the 1970s. The popular television programme

3 Department of the Environment Planning Circular 46/73.

 Values in World Heritage Sites 185

‘The Good Life’ represented a new-found appreciation for traditionally-

grown food. The Arts and Crafts movement resurfaced with a revival of
hand-made goods and the beginnings of what we would now call ‘localism’,
something also apparent in the resurgence of markets, full of local and
specialist produce. Disillusionment with bland, industrial products not only
contributed to the emergence of interest in ‘classic cars’, but also led the Ford
Motor Company to produce ‘customisable’ Cortinas which offered so many
permutations that it was almost as if no two cars were the same – although
they all rusted in the same way. It all seemed to represent the pursuit of
stability and lasting values in a rapidly changing world.
In the 1980s, the increasingly widespread Conservation Areas became
very fashionable, with estate agents in particular promoting them as
desirable places to live. Local Conservation Area Advisory Committees
were set up to give the local community a say in their management,
although most members seem to have been primarily concerned with
protecting their enhanced property values, rather than with championing
aesthetic and historic considerations.
The decade also saw a revival of ‘cultural tourism’. Package holidays in
the Spanish sun were no longer enough for many, and instead travellers
increasingly sought out destinations that were of historical interest. It is
unclear whether tourists were particularly attracted to World Heritage
Sites at this stage, but many Sites have certainly been branded as tourist
destinations in recent years.
With such a swell of public concern and interest in heritage it was
inevitable that some form of categorisation and stability would eventually
become necessary. This process is illustrated by the case of the market for
‘classic cars’ (only defined as such in the 1970s), in which prices reached
dizzy heights in the 1990s, before crashing. Cars with a historical association,
such as those that had won the Le Mans race, had a special value, but given
the probability that such a machine would have gone through several body
and engine changes over the course of time, the meaning of this association
was open to question, and court cases were even fought over the right to
display a chassis plate with the ‘historic’ numbers of a revered car. It was
time to rationalise the position, and this ushered in a more widespread
concern for authenticity and integrity, as illustrated by the rise of the
so-called ‘oily-rag’ approach to classic car maintenance.
With the rise of interest in classic cars from the 1970s, concours d’elegance
meetings rapidly generated a breed of restoration that owed more to gloss
than originality. Restoration became more ‘re-creation’ at the expense of a
186 Cultural Heritage Ethics

vehicle’s patina of age. The issues are fascinating. If a vehicle is to be made

roadworthy it must have appropriate tyres, and inevitably these will be
modern since tyres produced thirty years ago or more will have decayed
(indeed, there have been tragic cases where fastidious owners suffered
fatal accidents caused by blow-outs of their ancient rubber tyres). Brake
systems have similar problems: whilst the risks of using an out-dated
braking system may be acceptable in the case of a veteran car doing at
best 30 miles per hour, they cannot be accepted in the case of an E-type
Jaguar which can reach 150 miles per hour. Modern traffic is much faster
and much busier than in the classic cars’ heyday, and so it also makes sense
to carry out upgrades on suspension, cooling systems and so-on, to create
a vehicle happy with the modern environment. With all the underpinnings
upgraded, why not make use of modern paints to improve the finish? A
clean engine bay is nice, but why not chromium-plate the air filters to add
a touch of sparkle? It is easy to see how the glossy look-a-likes at the Pebble
Beach concours in California were conceived, but a backlash against this
modernising approach was inevitable.
This backlash has taken the form of a strong drive in the last few years
to recognise the qualities of unrestored cars which display a patina of time.
As outlined above, there will always be compromises, including the use of
modern fuels and oils, but the use of an oily rag to give cover to rusty metal
and keep parts lubricated can keep a vehicle on the road with a minimum
of ‘restoration’. This ‘oily-rag’ treatment of classic cars is now increasingly
popular, ensuring that the originality (admittedly still a difficult concept)
of the machine is accepted and its completeness is such that a simple clean
will enable it to function as it was designed to. After all, in some cases any
intervention into the historic fabric of a vehicle would destroy not only its
patina of age, but an essential connection to the car’s history. The Austin-
Healey that was involved in the tragic accident at the 1955 Le Mans race
which killed more than eighty people was recently sold for an enormous
sum, despite being in poor condition. (Although in this case the car had,
in fact, been repaired immediately after the accident, so its ‘historic’ fabric
associated with the race had already been modified.) A Frazer-Nash which
had spent seventy years resting on the bottom of a Swiss lake also attracted
an enormous bid, despite being little more than a rusty fragment.
These sales point to perhaps the most interesting aspect of the historic
vehicle world – its active marketplace and the way considerations of
originality and historical association affect a car’s market value. Whilst
 Values in World Heritage Sites 187

a thorough restoration of a classic car including upgrades to achieve

modern driving standards still attracts a premium, prices for unrestored
vehicles capable of ‘oily-rag’ treatment are increasingly approaching
such premiums. Evidently ‘historical association’ carries considerable
importance in the valuation of classic cars, whereas this aspect appears to
be much less significant in the evaluation of potential Sites in the World
Heritage context.

3. Values in World Heritage Sites

This process of rationalisation and identification of values has also found
its way into the arena of World Heritage. All proposals for new World
Heritage Sites must now be accompanied by a ‘Statement of Outstanding
Universal Value’ (SoOUV). Such statements are also being prepared for
Sites already inscribed.
This recognition of ‘outstanding universal value’ means that Sites are
seen as part of the world heritage of mankind as a whole, and as such
deserve to be protected and transmitted to future generations. The concept
of OUV now underpins the whole World Heritage Convention and all
activities associated with inscribed properties. The 1998 Global Strategy
meeting in Amsterdam proposed a definition of OUV as ‘an outstanding
response to issues of universal nature common to or addressed by all
cultures’.4 OUV means cultural and/or natural significance which is so
exceptional as to transcend national boundaries and to be of common
importance for present and future generations of all humanity. At the 2005
UNESCO Special Expert Meeting in Kazan on the concept of OUV it was
put forward that ‘definition and application of OUV are made by people
and will be subject to evolution over time’, thereby recognising that the
process of nomination for World Heritage is taking place in the context of
a continually broadening definition of cultural heritage. The idea of fixed
reference points over time is not necessarily possible nor even desirable. A
reshaping of cultural heritage is taking place in every country and is linked
directly or indirectly to the application of the World Heritage Convention.
This means that over the years since the first inscriptions, new types of
cultural heritage have been recognised, nominated for inscription and

4 Report of the World Heritage Global Strategy Natural and Cultural Heritage Expert
Meeting, 25-29 March 1998, Amsterdam, p. 18, http://whc.unesco.org/archive/amsterdam
98.pdf
188 Cultural Heritage Ethics

in many cases inscribed on the list. What remains fixed are the criteria
accepted by the World Heritage Committee as justification of OUV at the
time of inscription. Retrospective preparation of a SoOUV must therefore
be undertaken according to those past criteria, and so the work involves a
certain element of ‘going back in time’.
In sum, the SoOUV sets out not individual qualities, but the totality of
qualities that together give a property OUV. The SoOUV thus overarches
the whole management and conservation of a property, since management
of each Site must be focused on sustaining the OUV for which it was
inscribed. The SoOUV is also the essential reference point for:

Monitoring
Periodic reporting
Potential reactive monitoring
Possible danger listing (in 2012 Liverpool and the Tower of
London were placed on the Danger List by UNESCO)
Deletion (Dresden was removed from the World Heritage list
by UNESCO in 2005)

The Statement of Outstanding Universal Value is therefore of great

benefit to the relevant State Party and to all stakeholders involved in the
management of a World Heritage property. It not only facilitates a clear
understanding of what has been inscribed on the list and why it has OUV,
but also gives direction to management of the Site by indicating which of
the property’s attributes need to be maintained in order to sustain its OUV.

4. The Content of the Statement of Outstanding Value

The SoOUV should contain the following:

A brief synthesis including a summary description and summary of values and

attributes:
(i) Criteria (the UNESCO criteria according to which the Site is inscribed,
see above).
(ii) The Authenticity of the Site.
(iii) The Integrity of the Site.
(iv) Management demanded to sustain the OUV through an overall
framework and long-term expectations.
 Values in World Heritage Sites 189

(i) Criteria
The criteria listed earlier in this paper are the current versions. The use
of the criteria has only been mandatory since 2002, and in the case of
some early Sites (43%), nominations were made by State Parties without
reference to any criteria. Moreover, it is important to recognise that these
criteria have changed and evolved over time and, as mentioned previously,
retrospective statements of OUV must be made against those criteria in
operation at the time of inscription.
UNESCO have subtly modified the cultural criteria several times since
1977.5 For example, in 1977 criterion i was stated as ‘represents a unique
artistic or aesthetic achievement, a masterpiece of creative genius’. By 1983
the ‘or aesthetic’ had been removed. Maritime Greenwich is an example of
inscription under criterion i (inscribed 1997).
The evolution of criterion ii was more significant. In 1977 it read ‘have
exerted considerable influence over a span of time or within a cultural area
of the world on subsequent developments in architecture, monumental
sculpture, garden design and landscape design, related arts or human
settlements’. By 1996 this had been changed to ‘exhibit an important
interchange of human values over a span of time or within a cultural area
of the world, on developments in architecture or technology, monumental
arts, town planning or landscape design’. This effectively expanded
the criterion and opened the door to World Heritage Sites based on
technological advances. Examples of inscription under criterion ii include
the Ruins of the Buddhist Vihara at Paharpur, Bangladesh (1985), and later
the Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works in Chile (2005) and the
Blaenavon Industrial Landscape of south Wales (2003), both of which were
inscribed under the revised version of the criterion.
Criterion iii was also expanded. In 1977 it referred to Sites being
‘unique, extremely rare, or of great antiquity’, but by 1996 this had become
‘bear a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or
to a civilisation which is living or which has disappeared’. Messa Verde
National Park was inscribed under the earlier criterion but the enlarged
wording covering cultural landscapes, a testimony to evolving traditions,
saw the Stone Circles of Senegambia and Senegal inscribed in 2006.

5 
The criteria are listed in full in the UNESCO Operational Guidelines for the
Implementation of the World Heritage Convention. For full details of the various
versions of the guidelines cited in this section see http://whc.unesco.org/en/guidelines/
190 Cultural Heritage Ethics

In 1977 criterion iv required that Sites ‘be among the most characteristic
examples of a type of structure, the type representing an important cultural,
social, artistic, scientific, technological or industrial development’. This
was tightened in 1996 to ‘be an outstanding example of a type of building
or architectural or technological ensemble or landscape which illustrates
a significant stage in human history’. Examples of the changing Sites
inscribed under criterion iv include the Silver Mines of Potosi, Bolivia
(1987) and the Town Houses of Victor Horta, Belgium (2000).
Criterion v stated in 1977 that a Site should ‘be a characteristic example
of a significant traditional style of architecture, method of construction, or
human settlement that is fragile by nature or has become vulnerable under
the impact of irreversible socio-cultural or economic change’. By 2005 this
had been limited to ‘be an outstanding example of a traditional human
settlement, land use, or sea-use which is representative of a culture or
human interaction with the environment especially when it has become
vulnerable under the impact of irreversible change’. The historic city of
Kairouan in Tunisia (1988) was inscribed under the earlier criterion, while
the Agave Landscape and Ancient Industrial Facilities of Tequila, Mexico
(2006) were inscribed under the modified version.
Criterion vi stated in 1980 that Sites should ‘be directly or tangibly
associated with events or with ideas or beliefs of outstanding universal
significance’, altered in 2005 to ‘be directly or tangibly associated with
events or living traditions, with ideas, or with beliefs, with artistic and
literary works of outstanding universal significance’ – yet another opening
up of a criterion.

(ii) Authenticity
There is sometimes confusion between the concepts of authenticity and
integrity. Authenticity is the link between attributes and outstanding
universal value. This link must be truthfully and credibly expressed on the
basis of verifiable sources of information.
Before 2005 the test of authenticity referred to four attributes: design,
material, workmanship and setting. That is, only tangible aspects of
heritage were included. Since 2005, however, intangible heritage has been
included in assessments of authenticity, so that the test now includes
form and setting, materials and substance, use and function, traditions,
techniques and management systems, location and setting, language, spirit
 Values in World Heritage Sites 191

and feeling. Thus a much broader range of attributes that might carry OUV
can be identified. This is a very significant shift away from the tangible.
As an example, the OUV of an urban area might be carried by the following
attributes: structures, spatial plans, traditions and living communities, a
socio-economic whole working collaboratively. Authenticity relates to how
well these attributes reflect OUV, and can be compromised if the attributes
are weak – if communities cease to thrive, buildings collapse or traditions
disappear. A statement of authenticity should therefore say whether the
relevant attributes are thriving, and convey their message credibly and
truthfully.

(iii) Integrity
The concept of integrity can be applied to both natural and cultural
properties, although since 2005 it has only been applied to cultural
properties. Integrity is the completeness/intactness of the attributes that
carry OUV, a measure of the wholeness of the property. Are all the elements
necessary to express the property’s OUV included within its boundaries?
Is the property of adequate size to ensure the complete representation
of the features and processes which convey the property’s significance?
Does the property suffer adverse effects from development or neglect? A
statement of integrity needs to answer these questions, stating whether
the collection of attributes that carry OUV are all contained within the
property’s boundaries, that no parts have lost these attributes, and that the
attributes are not under threat.

(iv) Protection and Management

The attributes that convey OUV need to be maintained, conserved, managed
and protected in order to sustain a property’s OUV. Statements need to be
set out demonstrating how this is to be achieved in both the long and the
short term.

5. The Practice of Managing a World Heritage Site

The evolution of definitions, along with the widening of the criteria, has
produced a much more rational inscription process. However, while the
concept of OUV may appear straightforward, in practice the definitions
192 Cultural Heritage Ethics

of concomitant values can prove difficult. For example, in the case of the
Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site, the historic tea clipper the Cutty
Sark, located at the heart of the Site, would seem to be highly significant and
deserving of Attribute of OUV status. This is especially the case given that
the ship is cherished locally, is recognised at a national level with its Grade
1 listing, and is even known internationally as the last surviving clipper.
However, despite the ship being an historic building on the statutory list,
because it is movable, English Heritage, interpreting the UNESCO criteria,
refuse to support it as an Attribute of OUV.

6. Management of World Heritage Sites

While UNESCO, an international agency, is responsible for inscribing
World Heritage Sites, responsibility for their management and protection
lies with the nation states of the participating countries. In the United
Kingdom this role is undertaken by the central government’s Department
of Culture Media and Sport (DCMS). DCMS is advised by the UK branch
of the International Council for Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), English
Heritage and its equivalents in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
A prerequisite for inscription is the preparation and adoption of a World
Heritage Site management plan. In most cases this is prepared locally by a
steering group consisting of local organisations and interests, with the help
of national advisory bodies. Management plans have to be approved by the
UNESCO Conservation Committee but this body’s infrequent meetings
(once every 6 months) and its consequent bulky agendas mean that full
discussion of the plans for each Site is rare. However, UNESCO has also
put in place a system of ‘Periodic Reporting’ which demands that each Site
be the subject of an assessment every 5 years. This assessment considers the
state of the Site and the management of its attributes in order to identify
issues of concern. Where problems become significant in advance of this
process, UNESCO acts swiftly by sending a delegation of inspectors to
assess the situation. This can lead to a Site being placed on the ‘World
Heritage Sites in Danger List’, as is currently the case with Liverpool in the
UK. In extreme cases, where threats have been identified and no remedial
action has been taken, UNESCO will remove a property from the World
Heritage List, as recently happened with Dresden in Germany.
The preparation of a World Heritage Site management plan is a costly
and specialist exercise (assessed by DCMS at £20,000 in 2008). There is no
funding available from either UNESCO or DCMS, so the task and its costs
 Values in World Heritage Sites 193

fall to the local steering group. Most UK Sites have a locally based, locally
funded coordinator who prepares and updates the plan.

7. Political and Other Tensions

As a central government department, DCMS is subject to political oversight,
and this can have a major impact upon the department’s work in the heritage
sector. During the 1980s the Tory administration under Margaret Thatcher
severed relations with UNESCO, and the relationship was only reinstated
in 1997 when a Labour administration came to power. At a more local
level, meanwhile, World Heritage Site steering groups are often chaired by
local government councillors, and where central and local government are
represented by different parties this can introduce a fundamental political
rift. The situation becomes even more complex in those cities where
there is also an elected mayor: in London there are four World Heritage
Sites within the city, and the Mayor of London includes concern for their
wellbeing in the London Plan. Thus there can be three different levels of
political influence, and these are perhaps most strongly felt where there
are issues of funding involved. Heritage of international standing may be
perceived locally as irrelevant, and even regarded with hostility. The use
of scarce local resources for its safeguarding may therefore be considered
unimportant or even immoral compared with meeting the needs of local
public services. Fortunately there are sources of funding external to local
budgets which recognise such heritage. English Heritage and the other
national heritage organisations are in a position to offer grant aid, while
the Heritage Lottery Fund has proved very supportive of the UK World
Heritage Sites, giving grants for a number of restoration projects.
The position of World Heritage Site coordinator is also an important
consideration. Within the twenty-eight UK Sites there are a variety of
arrangements, depending on the nature of the Site in question. Blenheim
Palace, for example, is privately owned and so its management is undertaken
through its own organisation, while the management of Hadrian’s Wall has
been taken to a sophisticated level by the establishment of a trust, funded
by the fourteen Local Authorities and others which lie along its length.
In many cases, however, the coordinator is based within the Site’s Local
Authority, often as part of the town planning department. While this may
provide some influence when dealing with planning applications, it also
has the disadvantage of tying the role to a professional service, possibly to
the detriment of a wider view.
194 Cultural Heritage Ethics

8. Legislation and Administration

The only power UNESCO can exercise over World Heritage Sites is to
remove them from the World Heritage List; their protection depends on
legislation adopted by the nation state. In the UK there is no system of
protection for World Heritage Sites operated at the central government
level. Instead, most measures dealing with the wider historic environment
have effectively been delegated to the local level.
The UK has an established and sophisticated town planning administra-
tion that controls development through the granting of planning permission.
Historic buildings are protected by their inclusion on a ‘list’ of buildings
of special architectural or historic merit. ‘Listed Building Consent’ must be
obtained for changes that affect the fabric of such buildings. Some build-
ings and structures can also be scheduled as ‘ancient monuments’ which
require additional consent for any changes. In the case of historic areas,
meanwhile, Conservation Areas can be designated within which consent
must be sought for any demolition work. Further protection is afforded
on some individual issues such as the control of advertisements, and
highways issues, which can be of particular importance, are also mainly a
responsibility of the Local Authority.
Recently there were moves in the UK to introduce the concept of a
‘historic asset’ throughout building and conservation legislation, in order
to identify the key elements of a building or environment that might come
under threat from, for example, a development proposal. However, the Bill
that would have established this was abandoned in 2009, and instead the
status quo remains. This means that the location of a development proposal
within a World Heritage Site can be regarded as a ‘material consideration’
when a planning application is being decided. To assist in the protection of
the UK’s World Heritage Sites, Local Development Frameworks (previously
Local Plans) prepared by the Local Planning Authority can contain policies
specifically directed at their protection and enhancement.

9. Some Conclusions
‘Heritage’ as a concept has become mainstream since the Second World
War, representing many values ranging from nostalgia to reminders of the
darker side of human nature. It can be a romantic notion and a blueprint
for regeneration. ‘Heritage’ has evolved over the last 40 years to cover the
 Values in World Heritage Sites 195

most prized works of human genius as well as the most beautiful natural
places. It has also come to mean an appreciation of the lowly places that
represent a familiar and cherished local scene. ‘Heritage’ is now seen as
going beyond the tangible to include places of intangible heritage where
significant living traditions survive.
A hierarchy of assessments of heritage has evolved from the international
through national to local levels. Each level has its own values, with some
values being shared and some not. Systems to define and then protect those
values vary in strength. International values have to be protected by the
application of national systems of law. Thanks to the Town Planning Acts,
national and local systems for the protection of heritage are well developed
in the United Kingdom, although an all-encompassing piece of legislation
to define heritage assets and rank them for protection has yet to make the
statute books.
At the top of the ‘heritage hierarchy’, World Heritage Sites are
inscribed by UNESCO and respected by those nation states supporting
the organisation. National legislation, however, makes scant reference
to the concept of World Heritage and this causes confusion at the local
level, where politicians who ‘know what they like’ may not grasp the
significance of an international attribute.
Generally speaking, the rise of information technology has enhanced
appreciation of both special places and the values of the people who cherish
them. The rise of ‘cultural tourism’ has also helped, and the blurring of the
line between ‘holiday makers’ and ‘learners’ points the way to a better-
shared future. Where once a summer holiday meant a beach in Spain, it
may now mean a trip to Auschwitz or Hiroshima where international
values have to be absorbed in order to achieve any kind of understanding.
The recent destruction of World Heritage Sites in the Middle East and
elsewhere as a result of political and religious conflict has emphasised
the need to safeguard such international treasures through awareness,
education and physical protection. An appreciation of local values through
the consumption of local goods, including food, could be built upon to
further this understanding of others’ values. In spite of the rise of religious
extremism and the threats of climate change and global conflict, I remain
optimistic that heritage values at all levels will endure and consolidate.
 13. Safeguarding Heritage:
From Legal Rights over Objects to
Legal Rights for Individuals and
Communities?

Marie Cornu 1

Heritage protection for the twenty-first century is clearly an issue that

raises a number of questions – regarding the very concept of cultural
heritage, and how the law embraces that concept and sets its boundaries;
regarding the fundamental purpose – to preserve and pass on – implied
by the word ‘heritage’; regarding the multiple legal environments at the
regional, national and international levels in which heritage law stands.
Legally, there are many different ways to organise the connection between
memory, history and heritage and, in this respect, diversity rules.
Cultural heritage law is a large body of legislation which was developed
relatively recently. National legislation was generally introduced during
the nineteenth century, while international law on cultural heritage was
developed at the end of the nineteenth century and in the second part of
the twentieth century. The first important convention was enacted in 1954;2

1 This chapter is based on a presentation given at the Oxford University colloquium on

‘The Future of the Past: Memory, History and Cultural Heritage in the Twenty-First
Century’, organised by the Faculty of Classics of the University of Oxford in cooperation
with the Maison Française d’Oxford (CNRS). This contribution has been translated by
Marie Trape (CECOJI-CNRS) and revised by Catherine Heygate.
2 The 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed
Conflict, http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13637&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&
URL_SECTION=201.html

© Marie Cornu, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0047.13

198 Cultural Heritage Ethics

a protection plan designed for war-time, it was the starting point in the
construction of international law relating to the conservation of cultural
heritage. Other major legal instruments would follow, such as the 1970
UNESCO Convention on illicit trafficking of cultural property3 and the 1972
Convention concerning the protection of world cultural heritage.4 While I
do not intend to explore this complex legal architecture in detail in this brief
essay, I will highlight a few particular aspects of it that, in my view, reflect
a change in our thinking about the protection of cultural heritage over the
past two decades. These aspects concern the issue of defining heritage, and
the process by which heritage is legally identified.
Regarding the concept of cultural heritage in its relation to memory and
history, I will start with the example of French law, bearing in mind that other
countries have a similar history, particularly in Europe where legal models
evidently circulated across borders. Initially, when heritage protection was
in its early days, the founding concept was that of the historic monument
and not, in fact, the more inclusive term ‘heritage’, which came later (in the
1970s in France). This notion of a historic monument referred equally to
buildings (such as castles or cathedrals) and to objects, the primary concern
being for artistic and historic interest, concepts which can be found in most
legislation on heritage.
Building upon this concern for artistic and historic interest, the first
legislative texts – especially France’s law of 31 December 1913 – developed
an elitist approach. In France, this founding legislation introduced a public
easement, a technique never previously used in the heritage field, whereby
the owner of any building classified as a historical monument was placed
under supervision and was forbidden from making any changes that
might alter the physical integrity of the property without the permission
of the ministry of culture. This approach to protection was founded on
the exceptionality of the historical monuments in terms of their artistic
or historic value. The buildings identified as historical monuments were
artistic masterpieces. They were, according to Théodore Reinach, one of the
architects of the 1913 law, stone books in which the memory of the nation
had settled, and as such they could contribute to the construction of that

3 The 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit
Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, http://portal.unesco.
org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13039&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
4 The 1972 UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and
Natural Heritage, http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13055&URL_DO=DO_
TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
 Safeguarding Heritage 199

memory.5 This protection scheme, a venture of national interest, thus only

took into consideration exceptional things.
In the course of the twentieth century, however, the heritage field
underwent a double extension, at once typological and chronological,
according to Françoise Choay’s analysis in L’allégorie du patrimoine.6 The
extension was typological in that new items, which had not previously fallen
within the purview of the legislation, began to be protected. This extension
arose from the development of a more inclusive concept of heritage, which
not only designates exceptional or rare items, but can also be applied to
a trace or a memory. On this basis, modest, ordinary objects can become
heritage because they carry the memory of various human activities, such as
farming, industry, and technology. As a result, tools, habitats, workplaces
and machines are now being protected. This ethnological approach began
to be adopted in the field of heritage in the 1970s, at precisely the moment
when the concept of cultural heritage was coming to the fore. The term
‘cultural heritage’ was not chosen by chance, and is indicative of the more
global and inclusive vision that was then emerging.
The extension of the heritage field was also chronological. As Choay
has pointed out, in the 1960s the chronological framework of heritage
protection hardly went beyond the early nineteenth century, even though
no such temporal limit was imposed by the legislation.7 Since the 1960s,
however, ever more recent elements have been brought within the heritage
framework, to the extent that twentieth-century heritage has now made its
way into the categories of public policies on cultural heritage.
Thus the boundary of what constitutes heritage has evolved. Indeed,
the concept of heritage turns out to be a highly malleable framework which
is constantly changing and developing. By contrast, the legal formulation
of heritage, and hence the legal instruments of heritage protection, are still
quite close to the earliest formulations of the concept. Heritage law defines
the status of physical things; it identifies material wealth. Of course, the
intangible dimension is not entirely absent, indeed it is at the heart of the
idea of artistic and historic interest. However, when legislators develop a
protection scheme, they design it to protect physical items, regardless of
whether those items have an intrinsic value arising from their exceptionality
or rareness, or whether they function as traces or memories. Inevitably,

5 A. Auduc, Quand les monuments historiques construisaient la nation (Paris: La documentation
française: Comité d’histoire du ministère de la culture, 2008).
6 F. Choay, L’Allégorie du patrimoine, coll. La couleur des idées (Paris: Seuil, 1992).
7 Ibid.
200 Cultural Heritage Ethics

this physically-oriented approach to heritage shapes decision-making in

relation to protection schemes and, therefore, their legal formulation.
France’s 1913 law established a procedure for classifying properties
whose conservation ‘presents a public interest from an artistic or a
historical point of view’. As a result, the ensuing easement focused upon
conservation, and the idea of conservation remains paramount in legislative
texts, whether in terms of physical conservation (i.e. respect for a property’s
physical integrity) or legal conservation, expressed in such provisions
as the rules of indefeasibility and inalienability, or measures to prevent
heritage objects leaving the country. I refer specifically to French law here,
but this approach is common to a number of states, including Italy, Spain,
Germany, Greece and Egypt, and it prevails in important international
conventions. The 1972 World Heritage Convention, for example, protects
physical heritage in the form of sites and monuments, and the objective of
conservation is still at the centre of its protection mechanism.8
This approach, whereby heritage protection law is organised on the
basis of material realities, has changed dramatically in the past two decades.
The new perspective, which is apparent in the way cultural heritage is
legally identified and defined, has introduced a profound change in the
very nature of heritage law. This evolution in the legal concept of heritage
is reflected in two instruments, the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the
Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage,9 and the 2005 Council of
Europe Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for
Society (the Faro Convention).10
The UNESCO Convention introduces the concept of intangible heritage
into international law for the first time. Strictly speaking, the concept of
intangible heritage used here was not an ex nihilo creation, since some
states, notably Japan and Korea, had already established protection for
their intangible heritage before 2003. However, the concept is completely
new in the field of international law, and at present it is not recognised in
the legislation of most states. What does this concept refer to? According
to the UNESCO Convention, intangible cultural heritage means ‘the
practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the

8 For the text of the 1972 Convention see http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13

055&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
9 h ttp://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=17716&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_
SECTION=201.html
10 http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/EN/Treaties/Html/199.htm
 Safeguarding Heritage 201

instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith –

that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognise as part
of their cultural heritage’.
The most obvious innovation lies in the object of the Convention’s
protection – it deals with intangible heritage, with practices and expressions
of skills that were not previously in the legislator’s field of vision. Beyond
the intangible character of the elements to be protected, however, there is
a more fundamental change in the way heritage is designated. Intangible
heritage consists of elements that communities, groups and individuals
recognise as part of their heritage. As a result, heritage is defined by its
relationship with a group, whereas in the standard protection system, this
relationship and the associated identification of rights holders is more
distant and diffuse, even though the idea of community does exist. The
change embodied in the UNESCO Convention does not, therefore, only
affect the substance of heritage and the distinction between the physical
and the intangible. After all, the Convention also protects the ‘instruments,
objects, artefacts and cultural spaces’ associated with intangible cultural
heritage. The more profound evolution lies in the identification of support
communities and the recognition of their power to designate an element
of cultural heritage. It is this sense of belonging which produces cultural
heritage. With this understanding, we are moving away from the usual
systems of protection.
A very similar approach was adopted with the Faro Convention, which
was enacted shortly after, in 2005, and which states that ‘for the purposes
of this Convention, cultural heritage is a group of resources inherited
from the past which people identify, independently of ownership, as
a reflection and expression of their constantly evolving values, beliefs,
knowledge and traditions. It includes all aspects of the environment
resulting from the interaction between people and places through time’
(Art. 2). The text also provides a definition of a heritage community, which
has the capacity to define heritage as follows: ‘a heritage community
consists of people who value specific aspects of cultural heritage which
they wish, within the framework of public action, to sustain and transmit
to future generations’ (Art. 2b).
The clear similarities in the processes by which cultural heritage
is defined in these two conventions reveal a change in both the legal
construction of heritage protection, and in the very nature of that law. With
the evocation of communities and groups, with the idea that heritage reveals
202 Cultural Heritage Ethics

itself in a sense of belonging, it seems that we are moving away from a

property law founded on a public interest in protection, and towards a law
granting individuals a right on this property. Under this new approach, the
individual or the group is at the centre of the definition of cultural heritage,
and so they are also at the centre of the protection system more generally.
It is clear that human rights law has influenced these legislative texts (as is
the case in most fields of law): the safeguarding of heritage is articulated
in terms of the protection of the fundamental rights of communities and
groups. This is particularly apparent in the Faro Convention, which, in
its preamble, recognises ‘the need to put people and human values at the
centre of an enlarged and cross-disciplinary concept of cultural heritage’,
and in its first article defining the aims of the Convention, states that:

‘The Parties to this Convention agree to:

(a) Recognise that rights relating to cultural heritage are inherent in the
right to participate in cultural life, as defined in the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights;
(b) Recognise individual and collective responsibility towards cultural
heritage;
(c) Emphasise that the conservation of cultural heritage and its sustainable
use have human development and quality of life as their goal;
(d) Take the necessary steps to apply the provisions of this Convention
concerning:
– The role of cultural heritage in the construction of a peaceful and
democratic society, and in the processes of sustainable development
and the promotion of cultural diversity;
– Greater synergy of competencies among all the public, institutional
and private actors concerned’.
‘Emphasising the value and potential of cultural heritage wisely used as
a resource for sustainable development and quality of life in a constantly
evolving society; Recognising that every person has a right to engage with the
cultural heritage of their choice, while respecting the rights and freedoms of
others, as an aspect of the right freely to participate in cultural life enshrined
in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and
guaranteed by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights (1966)’.

This concern for heritage had already been defined in these terms in various
legal texts relating to the protection of fundamental rights, especially in
those texts dealing with the rights of minorities or indigenous communities.
With the UNESCO and Faro Conventions, however, the same concern
 Safeguarding Heritage 203

was extended to the instruments for the protection of cultural property.

Worldwide, this understanding of heritage in terms of fundamental human
rights is now beginning to have some bearing on the issue of international
restitutions, for example in relation to objects possessing considerable
symbolic meaning, or to human remains held in museums.11
Another evolution in the field of heritage law, which is again apparent
in the UNESCO and Faro Conventions, concerns the fact that heritage
protection now includes the concepts of sustainable development and
integration. The concept of sustainable development is particularly
prominent, and is changing the very definition of heritage. Initially,
heritage was defined as something to be preserved and passed on to future
generations. Nowadays, it also has social, environmental and economic
aims. In the light of this, heritage law, which had originally developed as
an autonomous branch of law, is clearly being influenced by other legal
disciplines such as environmental law and economic law. It is still too soon
to say what will come from this. Certainly the outcome can be positive, but
there is also a risk that the strength of heritage protection may decrease.

11 On this tendency, see: M. Cornu and M.-A. Renold, ‘Le renouveau des restitutions
de biens culturels: les modes alternatifs de règlement des litiges’, Journal du Droit
International (Clunet), 2, 2009, pp. 493-533. This article was also published in English: M.
Cornu and M.-A. Renold, ‘New Developments in the Restitution of Cultural Property:
Alternative Means of Dispute Resolution’, International Journal of Cultural Property, 17,
2010, pp. 1-31.
 Appendix: Links to Selected International
Charters and Conventions
on Cultural Heritage

The 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event
of Armed Conflict
http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13637&URL_DO=DO_
TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
The 1964 Venice International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of
Monuments and Sites
http://www.international.icomos.org/charters/venice_e.pdf

The 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the
Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property
http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13039&URL_DO=DO_
TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
The 1972 UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural
and Natural Heritage
http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13055&URL_DO=DO_
TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
The 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural
Heritage
http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=17716&URL_DO=DO_
TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
The 2005 Council of Europe Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural
Heritage for Society
http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/EN/Treaties/Html/199.htm

The Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the UNESCO World

Heritage Convention
http://whc.unesco.org/en/guidelines/

List of UNESCO World Heritage Sites

http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/
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