In discussing harms specific to Western institutions and individuals, all three participants emphasise the tension at play in addressing harmful behaviour in the West whilst attempting to maintain the institutional norms and goals that led to harm. These are most evident in two practices: first, publication of papers about cultural objects studied in the field with details on exact locations or specific identifying markers; and second, involvement with the market, both through authentication and recommendations for auction catalogues and in purchasing objects.
a. Effects of Publication
For this group, the controversy surrounding publication of catalogues and papers about cultural objects centres on how publication 1) makes objects vulnerable to theft from their original archaeological or cultural sites and 2) how publication increases the value of such works, thus encouraging theft and commodification. This stands in contrast to issues raised about publication that will be discussed in later chapters, in which publication of already looted works is criticised for its validation of harmful market practices.
Noah’s stance on publication is characteristically black and white: “Kenneth Murray always took the view that publication’s a bad thing because it would invite thieves. I took the opposite view. The publication was a good thing because it provided, it actually provided some
protection for things.” He describes instances in which this protection allowed him to trace objects he saw at auction in Paris back to the insider-knowledge of his colleagues and the publications in which they had appeared. “The point is that the thieves’ guide was also the
policeman’s guide. So I, as a kind of quote-unquote ‘policeman’, trying to see what exactly had gone on, I had the book too.” His use of quotes to describe himself as a policeman indicates self-awareness about the unofficial nature of his authority in this self-assigned role. Even after leaving his job in Nigeria, he continued on in this role to curb the trade through whatever furtive and unassuming ways he could. For him, this appears to have manifested most clearly in the importance of publishing, both for its function as a possible obstruction to wrongdoing and as a kind of moral sign posting of academic righteousness: “So, that’s always been my view, that one should publish what one knows and allow knowledge to develop. And I think that anybody of a similar set may feel the same way. We gain merit by publishing our stuff, after all.”
Jacob, however, adopts a more reserved position in acknowledging the difficulty of
participating in academic normative practice that benefits the academic whilst disadvantaging source communities. He describes the phenomena as “tricky”:
“You’re getting this very tricky situation where if you have a good scholar who puts on an exhibition and produces a catalogue about something or other, that immediately sends the price up and the desirability of these things because you’ve now got, if you like, documentary to support. So someone like Doran Ross at the University of California, who’s a great scholar of the Asante of Ghana and done big exhibitions with other people and on his own, and lo and behold, everyone starts collecting textiles and they’ve got the reference book.” The terms “tricky situation” and “good scholar” are key here in creating a scene that has conflict at its heart. He ultimately sees the scholars as being in a bind, where this particular activity may have an undesirable effect. However, he does not expand on this point, or share whether Ross himself is aware of the effects of his publications and exhibitions, whether academics in general are aware of it, or if it is trickier precisely because they are not aware of it.
Elijah takes a similarly sympathetic perspective, but goes even further in suggesting that scholars simply lack awareness of how their work affects the system as a whole. In answer to my question about the quandary of knowing an exhibition might create more demand for such
objects, he answers in a way that sidesteps the possibility of implicating wrongdoing.
“I think with archaeologists, you have this great thrill to find something which other people may not have found. And your first desire is to show that you’re the person that’s made this known to the world, as it were. So, there’s a sort of…a demand that you published, that you tell your community of colleagues what you’ve found, and how important it is. It’s the same as in science, when people find new fossils and things, they want to sort of publish them in
something like Nature as soon as possible. And that they don’t think about the long-term ramifications of what they’re doing.”
He doesn’t discount that there are harms associated with publication, but his emphasis of the innocence and good intentions behind scholars’ motivations for publishing suggests he doesn’t blame scholars’ for these effects or hold them accountable for “long-term ramifications”. Like Jacob’s perception of the situation as “tricky”, Elijah hones in on the “demand” faced by academics to make their findings accessible. All three are bound to publication as an
institutionalised norm. While they all acknowledge that certain harms are a by-product of this practice, none question the practice itself or investigate how it might be altered to avoid harm.
b. The Role of Market Involvement
The question of market involvement provoked the most discomfort, justifications, and contradictions amongst these participants. As museum and academic relationships with the market became strained and then looked down upon through the mid-century period,
academics and museum professionals were forced to grapple with the abandonment or defence of practices that had aided them professionally and personally. While I anticipated some defensiveness about maintaining involvement with auction houses or market actors, I did not expect participants to be entirely ignorant of changing attitudes to such relationships.
Noah does not exhibit any awareness that norms around market involvement have altered since the mid-century period. When asked about the now highly contested role of Western experts in authenticating objects in his field, he emphatically and repeatedly uses the word “we”:
“Well, we’ve always done that. I mean, Frank Willett, who was a colleague in Nigeria and then he was at Northwestern University and then he was in
Glasgow, would occasionally do this. Sometimes for a fee, sometimes not. And this would be true for pretty much anyone…. I think we’ve always done that. I mean, Roy Sieber, William Fagg, Robert Farris Thompson, you know, the senior people. We took our lead from them.”
His invocation of heavyweight names appears to be an attempt to emphasise the legitimacy of the act through the reputations of the individuals who partook of it. His casual, dismissive kind of repeating that “we’ve always done that” reinforces the level of normalisation of this
practice, and indicates his disconnect from the ways in which the field have changed. He appears unaware that this practice is now largely condemned by younger scholars.
He then goes on to claim, “I’ve never made any money out of doing this,” and immediately contradicts himself by stating, “I did write an article for a Sotheby’s catalogue a couple of years ago and they paid me very well for it. They paid me one euro a word or something. So I did rather well out of that.” Presumably, based on his belief that he’s never made any money out of this, this was perhaps the one time he was paid for his expertise. It’s more likely that he is claiming he has never made any substantial money from this; nothing more than
supplemental kind of pocket money. However, he fully appreciates the effects of this
involvement: “I’m very well aware of the fact that, you know, if Christie’s or Sotheby’s or a friend of mine who wants to sell something says, well do you want to know what this is, and I give my opinion, I’m very well aware of the fact that an extra nought will go onto the
estimated value of it.”
Refusal to share information based on this influence is, in his view, futile and irresponsible: “That’s the way the market works and I think on balance it would be dishonest to say, well, I’m not going to tell you what this thing is because I know perfectly well what it is and I don’t want you to earn any more money from it because if I don’t tell them somebody else will. I’m not the only person who knows about this stuff.”
responsibility for market harms through belief that his own actions are inconsequential. In addressing market involvement, he reluctantly admits, “I can see that you could say, yeah, but that will incite them to buy more. But I can’t control what’s happening in Nigeria or Mali or Ghana or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or wherever. I can’t control that. So
whatever I say, it doesn’t make no damn difference at all to what is happening in the country concerned.”
He holds a firm conviction that the knowledge production on his end is not related in a tangible way to the events occurring in African countries. He predominantly blames the profitability of the trade on the inability of West African countries to police the situation: “As long as countries like Nigeria and Mali and so forth can’t police what’s happening within their own territory, then there’s nothing I can do about it.” This helplessness does not just apply to him, but is applied to other colleagues. He cites the exhibition Central Nigeria Unmasked put on at the Fowler Museum at UCLA in 2011, through which curator Marla Berns discovered objects she had previously seen during fieldwork now in private collections. He complains, “She was able to show these things which she had got mentioned in the field which were not in this museum collection or that museum collection. And there’s not much she can do about it, so.” He projects the same sense of helplessness he has accrued in his own experience to Berns’s efforts to bring transparency to the histories of the objects in this exhibition.
Jacob similarly evades criticism of academic and museum involvement with the market, but through deflection rather than surrender. He does not deny that museums have been prone to wrongdoing, but he speaks broadly about museum wrongdoing in the United States, gesturing knowingly to certain scandals, and denies being able to think of any similar cases where British museums have been asked for objects to be returned. His criticism is reserved for foreign cases in which the harms of unscrupulous capitalistic market involvement are evident. “I can’t think of any in the UK where a museum has acquired stuff and then people have suddenly said, hey, you shouldn’t have that. Plenty of cases in the States. And largely because of the Greek and Italian smuggling and theft. I mean there may be cases in the UK, but I can’t bring any to mind.”
He assigns most blame to art dealers and the market overall. The question of museum
and the auction houses and the dealers. They are not controlled by museum staff.” In his view, museum work has evolved and most museums “now have a policy anyway saying that thou shalt not collect dodgy stuff.” The problem, as he sees it, occurs when museums are offered collections and the owners are reticent to provide export licenses for each object. He cites an example, in which the museum declined the offer:
“I knew a case of a private collection which was offered to a museum and it was possibly going to be funded by a grant from a public body. And when the owner of that collection was asked, where were the export licenses for all this? He said, oh I don’t have any, I just brought it out. At which point, it said, no, sorry, thank you very much but no. Which caused a certain amount of
unhappiness in various directions but…that I think is one of the few sanctions you have against private collectors.”
His description of this kind of rejection as a sanction against the market suggests he shares some of Noah’s helplessness in being able to police these issues. However, it must be noted that Jacob’s language surrounding museum responsibility is inherently contradictory. He is emphatic that museums know better now than to collect unprovenanced works, but when asked about the legacy of a former colleague with a reputation for collecting unprovenanced works, Jacob is keen to justify his actions.
“I think he acquired wonderful things, it was just that the provenance was cloudy… Oh he did a lot of very good things, but that’s different from saying, was he buying stuff that came properly documented? And he had a lot of contacts in trade and other museums and collectors around the world. He was a very kind man in many ways. Just bloody awful at doing the filing.”
Though his last remark is said facetiously, it remains that Jacob is largely dismissive of the same type of wrongdoing undertaken by his colleague as by the American curators he
implicated earlier on. He frames this colleague’s harmful practice as inherently separate from his transformative influence within the field, suggesting that for him, the issues are two separate things: whilst his colleague was a great scholar and figurehead in the field, he was also unfortunately inept at rigorously vetting the provenance of new acquisitions. Jacob fails to
consider that perhaps the one affected the quality of the other.
Elijah holds the market in similar disregard and exhibits a far less conflicted view of museum involvement. He attributes museum acquisition of questionable objects to a well-meaning desire to have a little bit of everything from everywhere, “we should have at least one bit of a Nok terra cotta, we should have have a bit of Djenne terra cotta, we should have a bit of a Koma terra cotta from Ghana,” with the museum acquiring from what they think is a licit market.
“Many people say, well we’re not going to try to get it from smugglers, we’re going to try to get it through the best means possible. Catalogues and reputable auction firms. And what one doesn’t quite realise is of course that when you see things for sale in auction catalogues, many things have been laundered, perhaps several times. And so, they’re wanting to in buying legal objects, you may be buying, unwittingly, illegal objects. So the people go back, just to recent
catalogues, and say, nothing there looks as if it’s looted. They say, these have been in collections for 10 years or 15 years, or whatever have you.”
He accuses objects of having “been laundered, perhaps several times over.” Such statements reveal two things: first, he is quite sympathetic toward museum acquisitions who, in his view, are trying to do things the right way without knowing that the right way is an illusion; and second, he does not trust the market, but does not accuse one particular part of it for being untrustworthy; rather, he paints a kind of vague picture where fear of laundering lurks behind every object.