CULTURAL PROPERTY? RELATIONS OF OBJECTS, PERSONS, AND PLACE

All the authors in this volume provide criticisms of the concept of cultural property. They rely on carefully documented examinations of culturally specific understandings of objects and of the relationships between objects and persons. Contrary to everyday use, in which property refers to things and objects, legal scholars define property as the right to exclude others in respect to a thing; in other words, property refers to a relationship among people with regard to a thing. In this view property is a right in something (or to something) rather than the thing itself. In the case of private property, property rights are exclusive or discriminatory in that they exclude others from using or benefiting from the object in question. Conversely, in the case of common property, property rights are both exclusive (vis-à-vis persons without rights to the objects) and inclusive in that they guarantee that those persons with rights are not excluded from using or benefiting from the object in question.Footnote ⁷ Culturally specific examinations such as the ones provided here thus widen our understanding of the diverse ways in which the triadic relationship between persons in respect of an object may be conceptualized, a diversity suppressed by the encompassing notion of property.

Place and history emerge as critical issues in these discussions of the relational matrix of persons and objects. They arise both because of the straightforward point that objects exist in space and time, but also because of the intrinsic connections that some objects have with particular, historically significant places. Jade Baker and Huhana Smith describe the links that particular objects have with particular social and historical places and landscapes for New Zealand Māori. Joshua BellFootnote ⁸ shows the interconnections among ancestors, objects, and land for people living in the Purari Delta in Papua New Guinea. Anita HerleFootnote ⁹ focuses on the connections between objects, land, and indigenous identity for expatriate Pacific people who live in England and both create and interact with objects that originate in the Pacific but are held in British museums. From such culturally specific understandings of objects and their relationships with place, these authors ask wider questions about the placement of objects in museums.

In the first instance, their questions focus on how objects are in or at places; in other words the focus is on place as a context for objects. Baker, for example, formulates her critique of cultural property—and the assumptions about the easy mobility of objects across cultural and political contexts that are built into ideas of cultural property—by developing what she calls a “hapu perspective” on what Māori call taonga (“treasure” or “something prized”). She shows the importance of locating objects in specific cultural landscapes, and argues that there are proper places for things,Footnote ¹⁰ places where they have significance and power, or efficacy. What objects are, and what power they may exert over people, thus rests on their proper emplacement.

Second, place and history emerge not only as a context for objects but as intrinsic qualities of some objects: the place and history within objects. Thus, BakerFootnote ¹¹ recalls Hirini Moko Mead'sFootnote ¹² observation that the significance of Māori taonga rests on their connection to whakapapa (genealogy). She goes further, however, and states that “objects once associated with ancestors continue to exude properties of ancestral efficacy.”Footnote ¹³ In a similar vein, SmithFootnote ¹⁴ observes that a taonga is valued because of the associations it accumulated and that this true of movable objects as well as waterways and cultural landscapes in general.

In this view, taonga (including landscapes) are not passive, or more precisely should not be construed as passive. Rather, they have the potential to play an active part in human affairs. Prestations of objects (tuku taonga) play an important role in social relations because they socially reposition both givers and receivers—a point that anthropologists have been making at least since the publication of Marcel Mauss's Essai sur le don in 1925Footnote ¹⁵ and that Joan MetgeFootnote ¹⁶ has made in some detail for Māori in Northland. But the active potential of taonga is not simply a quaint ethnographic observation. BakerFootnote ¹⁷ argues persuasively that it has implications for ongoing postcolonial negotiations between Māori and the British Crown because “[t]he removal of taonga … into Crown ownership and therefore private property law” was also a separation of those taonga from their ancestral associations, genealogical information, and oral narratives. Together they constitute their efficacy: their ability to effect change and influence human affairs. Such a separation of taonga from people (which Baker describes as resulting in “taonga passivity”Footnote ¹⁸) can also be understood as a separation of people from their own history, a history in which physical locations, historical records, people, and taonga are “enmeshed” to such an extent that history is best explicated on the landscape in which ancestors' actions took place and in reference to the relevant taonga.Footnote ¹⁹

Joshua Bell makes strikingly similar points, albeit based on his research in the Purari Delta in Papua New Guinea. There too the interconnections among land, persons, ancestors and eve uku (heirloom objects) are prominent and at odds with prevailing international ideas about cultural property. In particular, BellFootnote ²⁰ argues that the discourse of cultural property solidifies and separates entities (land, persons, and objects) that people in the Purari Delta understand to be fluid and connected. In effect, then, the idea of cultural property masks these pivotal relations between land, persons, and objects. He argues that there is a general Melanesian understanding of objects as the materialization of the relations that brought them into existence, particularly those involved in the sourcing of materials.Footnote ²¹ He deploys the culturally salient metaphor of “the forest of relations by which artefacts, persons and the environment are intermeshed”Footnote ²² to describe the situation for people in the Purari Delta. Thus, eve uku are not simply objects but are literally the physical manifestations of social relations which have ongoing significance for people.Footnote ²³

Like taonga then, eve uku are valued for what they represent (“accumulated associations” in the case of taongaFootnote ²⁴ and social relations that allowed their creation in the case of eve ukuFootnote ²⁵) and for what they come to be (efficacious objects, and things with agency and person-like status). In arguing that the agency and efficacy of objects matter, that objects are kinds of persons, and are valued because of the associations they have acquired through time, Smith, Baker, Herle, and Bell draw implicitly on recent anthropological theorizing about objects and persons by Alfred Gell and Marilyn Strathern, which suggests that objects are social persons. The fact that their debt to these theorists, and to those who have criticized and extended their work, is largely implicit speaks to the extent to which Gell's and Strathern's ideas have been taken up by contemporary anthropology.

If objects are persons, what kinds of persons are they? The answer, I think, is twofold: They are both extensions and composites. First, taonga, eve uku, and other culturally significant objects are what Gell called “distributed persons.” In Art and Agency, Gell argued that anthropology might profitably consider art objects as extensions of the agency of the persons who make and use them, and that social agency can in fact be exercised by things.Footnote ²⁶ Gell distinguished between what he termed “primary” agents who “initiate happenings through acts of will for which they are morally responsible”Footnote ²⁷ and “secondary” agents, which are objects “through which primary agents distribute their agency in the causal milieu, and thus render their agency efficacious.”Footnote ²⁸ Taken together, he argued, these two kinds of agents constitute a “distributed personhood,” a personhood not limited by the bodily boundaries of primary agents but instead extended in space and time through secondary agents. Gell argued that objects are a vital way in which “social agency manifests and realizes itself.”Footnote ²⁹

Smith's observation that a taonga is valued because of the associations that it accumulates and Bell's argument that eve uku are material manifestations of creative social relations are reminiscent of what Marilyn StrathernFootnote ³⁰ termed a “divisible person” or “dividual.” By using these terms, Strathern drew our attention to the ways in which persons in Melanesia are “constructed as the plural and composite site of the relationships that produced them … a social microcosm.”Footnote ³¹ The personhood of objects described in the articles in this special issue takes two forms: a distributed personhood and a divisible personhood. Objects are both part of how people exercise their social agency and composites of the social relations in which they have partaken.

This complexity of persons and objects does indeed suggest the difficulties inherent in thinking about social agents such as taonga or eve uku as property or as cultural property. But cultural property is an infelicitous phrase for another reason: its inherent commercial connotations. Anglo-American concepts of property, which increasingly dominate international treatments of property are, of course, closely related to and deeply embedded in concepts of markets, commodities, and private property. To use the language of property is to use the language of the market and to unquestioningly assume a person's right of alienation and right to profit through the transacting of property. But even Anglo-American law and sensibility recognizes and places limits on what can be considered a commodity and what can be transacted through market exchange; but the rapid and relentless expansion of commodification and property rights is one of the most striking characteristics of globalization in what has been called late capitalism. In other words, to use terms such as property or cultural property is to use the language of the market and to highlight certain kinds of relationships and rights (i.e., property rights) over other equally important relationships and rights (e.g., relations of kinship or common citizenship, and rights to political self determination or political sovereignty). In the case of culturally significant objects, what is needed is a new language—a language that does not immediately imply the market—as well as a careful rethinking of the morality of the free market transaction of such objects, especially in the context of growing disparities in wealth and economic and political power.

NEW FORMS OF CURATORIAL PRACTICE

Running parallel to the need to rethink and replace the metaphor of cultural property is a need to recast curatorial practices which are based on the conceptualization of museum objects as property. One way of doing this is to develop concepts and practices that take account of the distributed and composite personhood of objects. In this vein, HerleFootnote ³² suggests that we think about the nonproperty relationships some people have with objects (e.g., guardianship, access, use, and interpretation), and she notes that these suggest new, less proprietary forms of curatorship. The benefits of such alternative conceptualizations and practices include an improved moral position for museums; the forging of new connections between people and the objects held in museumsFootnote ³³; an enrichment of our knowledge and understanding of museum collections; and new, more egalitarian relationships between the public and museums as institutions. Traditional museum practices in the main have been concerned with control: physical control of collections and access to them, control of information, and control over the presentation of objects and the representation of other cultures. They have been based on what Baker calls “passive objects.” The curatorial practices described in the articles in this volume show the freedom and fluidity that come from sharing control and acknowledging the distributed and composite aspects of the personhood of objects.

The Pasifika Styles exhibition at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, with its associated workshops, conference, and visiting artist program, is an example of a less proprietary form of curatorship. The exhibition juxtaposed objects in innovative ways that collapsed the distinction between historical and contemporary objects. It could be seen as an attempt to take seriously the distributive personhood of the objects in the exhibition. This demonstrates an explicit reflexivity about the objects as secondary agent for the museum and its curators as well as an acknowledgement that the objects in the exhibition were, and continue to be, secondary agents for others: makers and visitors, and particularly visitors who have already existing relationships with the makers and their places of origin.

Bell and Baker discuss different aspects of curatorial practices: research in what museum professionals often call source communities. Baker writes about her investigations of the meaning of taonga among people with historical connections to them, and Bell describes the use of historical photographs and photographs of museum artifacts as elicitation prompts in field research. Bell argues that the use of photographs destabilizes the objects held in museum collections by forcing us to pay attention to the social relations inherent in museum objects (i.e., their composite personhood) and realize the potentials of such social relations. This point was driven home for me in my own research among Boazi-speaking peoples in the Lake Murray-Middle Fly area of Papua New Guinea in the 1980s. When I showed people photographs taken in that area by the Australian photographer and adventurer Frank Hurley in the early 1920s, people were mainly concerned about figuring out their kinship relations to the people in the photographs. However, photographs of objects evoked the observation that one can always see the face of the person who made an object in the object itself, which I interpret as an assertion of the inalienability of objects from the people who made and used them. What interested people in the Lake Murray-Middle Fly area about objects were the relationships and persons they materialized and brought to mind.

All the articles in this special issue indicate the need to recast the idea of provenance (a critical concept for museum curators) in terms that more adequately recognize the distributed and composite nature of museum objects' personhood. Instead of focusing on an object's history of ownership,Footnote ³⁴ an understanding of objects as composite persons (i.e., as composites of the social relations that produced them) reminds us of their sheer physicality and draws us back to the specific places where they were made. It also foregrounds the materialsFootnote ³⁵ that constitute an object and the social relations that allowed those materials to come together. In Gell'sFootnote ³⁶ terms, it urges the consideration of art as a component of technology.

The critiques of cultural property and the alternative curatorial practices described in the articles in this issue initiate how the social relations within which museum work has traditionally taken place can be rethought and changed. It requires a loosening and sharing of curatorial control with other people who have interests in the objects in museum collections as well as a view of museum artifacts that goes beyond the conceptualization of them as property, a view that might profitably include the distributed and composite personhood of objects. I was repeatedly reminded of these issues and conflicting perspectives during the nine years that I worked at the Papua New Guinea National Museum.Footnote ³⁷ The Papuan New Guineans with whom I worked often stated two principles about a museum as vital: The objects in the museum's collections were powerful in that they could cause people to do things, and the museum should be about people as much as about objects. They often stated that the National Museum should be filled with people's voices, not in the postmodern sense of multivocality (although many of them would have been open to that as well) but in the actual auditory sense of people talking or, where appropriate, of people making music. In our discussions, a saying emerged as a consensus for these views: “Museums and the things in them should be alive.”

As I noted at the beginning of this article, ideas about the importance of social relationships have also been critical in the New Museology. New Museology argued for an expansion in the kinds of communitiesFootnote ³⁸ with which museums interact and maintain relationships as well as a change in the substance of those relationships, in particular a movement toward a greater balance in the power relations between museums and their constituencies. All the articles in this issue focus in various ways on changing social relationships in and around the work done in museums—relations between or among persons; and relations between persons and objects.

More than political appeals to change policy, however, the articles in this issue all demonstrate the potential benefits and positive effects that flow from the increasingly egalitarian relationships that some museums have sought with what are sometimes called source communities. In the long term, the reshaping of museums and curatorial practice suggested in these articles has the potential to benefit all concerned, because they indicate ways of forging different kinds of relationship between museums and the wider societies in which they exist. In this regard, we need a label that more adequately reflects the fact that such communities are more than their function as source and instead reflects them as partners with ongoing relationships with those objects that are traced to them and with the museum as an institution.

COSMOPOLITANISM

One theoretical context for critiques of cultural property and associated museum practices is cosmopolitanism, a prominent and powerful statement of which has recently been provided by Kwame Anthony Appiah.Footnote ³⁹ Appiah admitted his ambivalence about the term cosmopolitanism, acknowledging that it can suggest a distasteful stance of superiority on the part of urban sophisticates toward rural provincials.Footnote ⁴⁰ But he attempts to “rescue” it by using cosmopolitanism to refer to the idea “that no local loyalty can ever justify forgetting that each human being has responsibilities to every other.”Footnote ⁴¹ AppiahFootnote ⁴² identified two distinct strands in this positive cosmopolitanism: the idea that we have obligations to others beyond those to whom we are immediately related and a serious interest in the beliefs and practices that give human lives meaning. He called these strands “universal concern” and “respect for legitimate difference,” and noted that these ideals sometimes clash.

Universal concern and respect for difference are ideals with which I agree, but an examination of Appiah's cosmopolitan view of art and culture shows that his position depends heavily on the primacy and universality that he accords to individuals (as opposed to collectivities),Footnote ⁴³ private property and the wisdom of the marketplace, and his sidestepping of issues of political and economic inequality.

Appiah conceded that the “connection to art by identity” (i.e., the connections people feel to objects that are “symbolically theirs” because they were produced in “a world of meaning created by their ancestors”) is powerful and should be acknowledged.Footnote ⁴⁴ But he argued that equally important is the connection “despite difference,” the link that people can feel to art from cultural traditions other than their own. It is this connection that allows all people to have what he called “a cosmopolitan aesthetic experience.”Footnote ⁴⁵ I agree with Appiah that people's capacity to be moved by art (or any object or expressive form for that matter) from societies other than those of their ancestry is a critical aspect of what it means to be human. In my view, however, this is mere confirmation that the agency of art objects has the potential to transcend culture and origins.

I can also agree with Appiah's observation that “we can fully respond to ‘our’ art only if we move beyond thinking of it as ours and start responding to it as art.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In this context, Appiah dissociates art from ownership, whereas in many other contexts he argues for art as private property and leaves no doubt about his faith in the ability of the market to distribute art objects equitably.Footnote ⁴⁷ For example, he stated that “There is no good reason … to think that public ownership is the ideal fate of every important art object.”Footnote ⁴⁸ His reasoning here is that art objects should be a daily presence in people's lives. I would guess that the people of Ngāti Hikakino in New Zealand would agree with this sentiment; the taonga about which Baker writes are no longer a daily presence in their lives. There is a critical difference between Appiah's and Baker's positions, nevertheless: Appiah's primary concern is with what he sees as the rights of art consumers rather than the rights of owners,Footnote ⁴⁹ especially when those owners are the peoples, such as Ngāti Hikakino, who press claims for repatriation. The critical questions resulting from Appiah's innocuous statement, which he does not address satisfactorily, are in whose (and possibly in how many people's) lives can and should objects be a daily presence, and how could this presence be achieved?

Appiah's analysis of those who seek the restitution of cultural heritage reflects a particular view of history:

In this statement, much turns on Appiah's characterization that objects in museum or private collections in metropolitan centers are there because people gave things away. Taking this position fails to confront the actualities of some museum acquisitions: the cultural differences involved in the transacting of objects and the actual historical circumstances of colonialism (and neocolonialism) during which many acquisitions were made. It is an acceptance of the legality of colonial political arrangements at face value.

Appiah's unease with claims for the restitution of cultural heritage stems from his faith in the political neutrality of private property and the market, exemplified by his assertion that “property is an institution, created largely by laws which are best designed by thinking about how they can serve the human interests of those whose behaviour they govern.”Footnote ⁵¹ This may be how laws are best designed, but it is an unrealistic statement of how laws (including international laws) are designed, because it ignores power differentials and interests, such as class interests, around which laws are fashioned. On the level of nation states, Appiah argued that countries should not be able to restrict the export of objects across their borders (although they should be able to tax such movements) and that national museums should pay market prices for objects they want to acquire.Footnote ⁵² If realized as policy, this would result in countries footing the bill for regulating and taxing a market in which they cannot reasonably compete. It would also allow only the wealthiest individuals to enjoy valuable objects on a daily basis and only a privileged public in public institutions. In non-first-world countries such as Papua New Guinea in any case, it would deny the general public access to their heritage and specific members of the public access to objects of significance to their contemporary lives. Denying the relevance of claims by those who originated museum objects and their descendants, on the basis that these objects should be dissociated from their places and relations of origin in favor of a politically neutral space of art, is in fact the privileging of one particular kind of place: the place of the metropolitan elites.

What is missing from Appiah's argument is a serious engagement with the political and economic inequalities of the contemporary world. Simply stating that art should be a daily presence in people's lives or that people should think of themselves as citizens of the world ignores the fact that vast numbers of people do not live with art, that not all citizens of the world are equal, and that there are critical differences in wealth and power between metropolitan centers (where art is most available for consumption) and the rest. What is needed is not a faith in property and market as politically neutral ways of adjudicating the distribution of art objects, but rather a critique of the straightforward application of ideas of property to cultural heritage. The articles in this volume contribute to this endeavor.