Page 171 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

162 Shea Esterling

conventional sources in the cultural property argument that: ―Decades of legal
scholarship, cases and debates carried out in the press seem to have weighed
heavily on scholarly analysis creating a substantial inventory of readymade
arguments supporting just about any position in a cultural property dispute. As
a result discussion surrounding the protection or restitution of cultural property
has come to rely on a dizzying self-referential and self-justifying series of
legal theories and counter-theories deploying and combining any number of
arguments…. Viewed as a whole, these legal arguments predictably have
tended to cancel each other out, muddying the field enough to entrench a status
quo in which restitution is studied, analyzed, and bitterly debated, while
Western museums are rarely, if ever, compelled to question their vast holdings
or contemplate their return.‖ [Audi, 2007, p. 131-2].

LIMITATION OF MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS

Although the text of the Indiana Jones trilogy provides a number of signs
ripe for semiotic analysis, the trilogy also lacks some representations relevant
to the research and realities of the illicit trafficking and repatriation of cultural
objects. These omissions in and of themselves prove significant. First, the
trilogy lacks any texts related to exploring the complex issues that arise in
relation to this research. For instance, it ignores key issues of legal and moral
enquiry such as who owns the past, what ownership means and if ownership
even matters. Apart from the issue of ownership, it ignores whether the objects
should or should not remain with market states or source states and/or peoples,
the relationship between the objects and markets states and source states
and/or peoples and the broader human rights issues pervasive in all of these
enquiries, to name just a few. These enquiries consume much of the
conventional research into the illicit trafficking and repatriation of cultural
objects. This does not always prove the case for the trilogy‘s omissions. These
films also pay scant attention to representations and so the reality of the plight
of one of the most important actors in the illicit trafficking of these objects: the
tombaroli, huaqueros, or tomb robbers [Lattanzi] [Slayman] [Ruiz].
These robbers serve as the starting point in the long journey that cultural
objects take in trafficking. They plunder tombs of both sites that they discover
and official archaeological sites and then pass the discovered items onto