Page 130 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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Museum in New York, the Berlin State Museum, the British Museum and the
Louvre, which described their museums as ‘universal’ institutions, may be read
as a resort to universalist claims in the face of demands for repatriation.
According to Geoffrey Lewis, the Chair of the International Council of
Museums’ (ICOM) Ethics Committee, the ‘real purpose’ of the Declaration
was to aid these institutions in resisting claims for repatriation (Lewis cited in
O’Neill, 2004: 191). In particular, the Declaration is seen as motivated by the
British Museum’s desire to head off the well-publicized repatriation claims
relating to the Benin Bronzes and the Elgin Marbles.
In other cases, museums and legislators do consider repatriation claims, but
in a case-by-case way. Claims for human remains are assessed according to
whether an ancestral line links the remains to the people claiming them. Those
people’s particular cultural rituals and practices relating to death and to ances-
tors are also taken into account. Against such claims, the scientific arguments
emphasize their universal basis: the ability of these remains to contribute to the
sum of human knowledge, and the idea that the remains should be available for
future generations, not just the present one (Steel 2004: 22–5). Thus the argu-
ments for and against the return of remains is cast as a conflict between particu-
lar and local interests, and global, universal ones. Both the intransigent position
and the case-by-case approach assume the universal validity of museum con-
cepts and practices. The signatories of the Declaration base this claim in the
size and diversity of the museum’s audience. For instance, the director of the
Metropolitan Museum asserted that ‘in these large museums the audiences
are . . . the whole world’. As the head of Glasgow Museums, Mark O’Neill
has argued, this ignores populations for whom museums are, for economic,
geographic, or cultural reasons, irrelevant – including some of the populations
demanding the return of objects (O’Neill, 2004: 196).
Those museums taking an intransigent position see in the conflicts over
specific artefacts a larger political struggle and take a ‘tip of the iceberg’
approach to relatively small claims. For instance, in 2004 the British Museum
and Kew Gardens in London lent two etched barks to the Melbourne Museum.
These barks originated in Australia and only three are known to exist. Just
before the Melbourne Museum’s exhibit closed, its parent institution Museum
Victoria received ‘an emergency declaration’ which claimed ownership of the
barks on behalf of the Dja Dja Warrung and Jupagalk people. While this placed
the Melbourne Museum in a very difficult ethical and legal situation, the British
Museum responded with warnings that it may be unprepared to lend artefacts
in future. An article in the museum’s journal reported that other European
museums would be watching the dispute over the barks carefully, and that an
outcome in favour of the Dja Dja Warrung and Jupagalk people may lead
to museums refusing to lend to countries with substantial First Nations