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@prog-heritage-blog
Change Over Time has all it’s issues articles up as free downloads until the end of this month. You can also check out short articles on their website. It’s a journal on heritage conservation / built heritage studies and you might want to check out especially issue 5.1 on vandalism right now (it’s how I came across this in the forst place, looking for articles on grafitti on monuments)
Roman mosaic floor discovered under a vineyard in Negrar di Valpolicella, Veneto.
Link
“We want the museum to understand that the moai are our family, not just rocks. For us [the statue] is a brother; but for them it is a souvenir or an attraction,” said Anakena Manutomatoma, who serves on the island’s development commission. “Once eyes are added to the statues, an energy is breathed into the moai and they become the living embodiment of ancestors whose role is to protect us.”
isnt the point of a museum to preserve history though? id prefer something be in a controlled environment than outside in the elements.
The moai have been standing JUST fine in the open in the island for literal centuries. Believe it or not, the Rapa Nui are NOT stupid; they know their island, how to live in it, and what materials and treatment to those materials do or do not last in the island they’ve called their home for ages. The moai are MADE to be “outside in the elements”.
And preserved for whom? I’m sure my ancestors wouldn’t feel it’s preservation to have a LIVING piece of their culture stolen by colonizers and kept away from them all this fucking long when I assure you, no one asked for their permission to take it in the first place.
That’s not fucking “preserving”, that’s just fucking stealing, and a loss of culture for the Rapa Nui.
Well then my God, every museum in the world should give all their artifacts back to the entitled people who want them.
Damn right they should give back all their STOLEN artifacts. How the fuck are you this fucking stupid that you’d call the people who MADE and are the rightful owners of those artifacts “entitled” WHEN THE ARTIFACTS BELONG TO THEM AND MUSEUMS
S
T
O
L
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THEM.
If museums want to have things on display they should display the stuff their own country created through history instead of stealing from other peoples and nations. AND they should give back everything they stole from everyone else.
If they want to display art from other countries then they should afford everyone the same respect they do European artists between England, France, and a few select other countries by arranging special exhibitions with those museums in all countries and nations. (I’m going to admit I don’t know how special exhibits work-I’m working off of what I assume happens between museums; I tried looking it up on Google but I could not find something that explained it to me, probably because I don’t know what to Google in the first place to learn about this, so, I could be completely incorrect for this entire paragraph so if I am just ignore me, and if you have the time/energy send me things explaining how this all works).
-FemaleWarrior
Okay, so half the accounts that commented on this have deactivated (which really doesn’t bode well) so I have to reblog the shouty bit as well, sorry. Just quick response to @/venusmacabre: I think “preserved for whom?” is a very important question here, however preservation seems to be a goal (and problem as the stone is easy to carve as it is soft) on Rapa Nui and museums didn’t steal. In this case the Royal Navy stole, gave Hoa Hakananai’a to Queen Victoria who gifted it to the British Museum that has kept it ever since. The stealing was done by the Royal Navy, state approved and I don’t think the British Museum did exactly complain at the time.
Anyways, come along on a little trip down the rabbit hole into a tiny bit of the repatriation debate:
Preserving other people’s cultural objects while destroying their culture really is missing the point, in my opinion. And I say that as someone who works in the line of studying cultural artefacts in order to learn about the past (it’s great and part of my culture that we want to know about our ancestor’s lives).
You will be able to learn about the way the moai were constructed and consequently about the society that built them, by studying them in detail and for that you would want to preserve them in order to keep as much original evidence for future techniques that might be better equipped to figure stuff out.
All this has been done with Hoa Hakananai’a [x & wikipedia as of 28th April 2020] and the British Museum is keeping it in good shape. Only it cannot provide it’s original context which for many artefacts is a serious problem (most banal the backdrop of a volcanic island surrounded by a lot of pacific ocean sends an entirely different message than a clean exhibtion room). And even if it could, that is still beside the point when the problem is that this belongs to a specific culture that is codependent on it’s own cultural works. In this case research on the statues is done at the actual island by the Easter Island Statue Project [x]. They are moving forward that repatriation request, as I understand it, and are doing PR on the statues and their conservation problems. [a pbs clip on the environmental problems can be found here and a great radio interview here] Mostly they study and preserve the moai though, and highlight the problems the island is currently facing due to climate change and globalisation.
That being said, conservation and research are approaches to handle objects or the environment, that the people of the culture those belong to should be able to take on their own accord. Thus if they’re not interested in that or of the pieces in question play an active role in their culture which goes beyond pure existence (like say, the difference between a vase and a urn for your ancestor’s ashes) it’s up to them to decide how to handle the things in question.
In case of Rapa Nui / the Easter Islands the Guardian article linked above by @/tariqah states:
When the island became part of Chile in 1888, the state assumed sovereign rights over the territory as well as the moai that dot the island’s windswept grassland. Under Chilean law, the moai are not considered objects but an integral part of the land.
So talking about these statues as objects is already kind of a problem, which I’ll put aside for simplicity’s sake, but just so you know how difficult intercultural exchange can be.
Now what about objects that were taken in a time when nobody cared about who stuff belonged to as long as the person didn’t have a bank account? Why should contemporary Europeans feel guilty about the stuff people stole 100+ years ago?
Well, I don’t see why they should feel guilty about that. They cannot change what has happened. It’s the not returning it to the people it belonged to, especially when they actually ask for returns, that I am unhappy about. (For some cultures artefacts become worthless once they leave their original context, so they don’t even ask for a return of their cultural works.)
The quoted article even mentions the constructive approach of the Rapa Nui people:
“The Rapa Nui people want to explain to the museum’s administrators that the moai is the living soul of the island. Hoa Hakananai’a acts as their ambassador and we want that to remain the case – but we want to exchange him for a moai that will be sculpted by craftsmen on the island so that the representative is there voluntarily. This is very important,” said Ward.
So a replacement to exhibit as a plastic example for visitors at the British Museum seems to be provided for, which is very important as well, as museums like this are integral for intercultural understanding, I believe. At least I learned to appreciate Middle-Eastern cultures a lot more by visiting the National Museums in Berlin (and don’t get me started on their repatriation problem) and the British Museum is as far as I know one of the most important museums world wide. Partly thanks to how much the British Empire stole, partly thanks to how much wealth they consequently had to accommodate these goods and partly to a lot of people actually being interested in the goods.
Yet, Hoa Hakananai’a still seems to remain in the British Museum [x as of 27th May 2020] and I cannot find any more recent info on this debate than this guardian article, that also mentions that the British Museum is very much willing to talk about options of repatriation.
So, if anyone has more info on this particular case I’d welcome it and I’ll be now off further down the repatriation rabbit hole.[x]
[I originally wrote this on April 27th, then chickened out, then decided to built a whole new blog just for posts on heritage issues. I’m still hoping for better news in this, but all I got so far is that The British Museum now put a lot of their exhibits online as fotos, including Hoa Hakananai’a, as a bit of a poster boy.]
About
Hello,
I’m Anas, former architecture student (with a Bachelor’s and everything) turned to a Master’s in heritage conservation.
As architects love pretty pictures and hate reading, I’ve got some writing practice to catch up on. Which is why I decided on starting a little blog, writing about (built) heritage conservation history and theory and hopefully shining some light on the contemporary challenges cultural heritage management is up against. This means that my posts are not the writings of a professional in this field but of someone who aspires to work full-time with built heritage someday. What I post will reflect my interest but also my lack of experience. Since this is a micro blogging website I’ll also just reblog things that are interesting without adding commentary to it besides tags. I hope you can enjoy it nevertheless and encourage you to ask for more detail or better sources where things seem unclear. Questions like that will most likely help me improve my research and writing skills :) Furthermore I live and study in Germany, so this shapes my perspective and experience. Please keep that in mind, as culural heritage management differs as much as cultural heritage, thus methods that are best practice in Germany might be highly controversial in other parts of the world. Starting as close as France, Italy and Poland.
Finally a short list of my interests so you know what you’re in for:
- the problem of the authorized heritage discourse - approriation vs misappropriation - communication - digital heritage and digital documentation and communication methods - social history (over military history any day) - subaltern heritage - time periods of special interest are: the 20th century and it’s reform movements and the renaissance (to keep that period as broad as possible - yet, mostly florentine Renaissance)
Projects I’m currently involved in (however losely):
- research on a church building project of the 1950ies (my thesis) - a digitalisation project on a late medieval church (my work) - research and upkeep of an anarcho-syndicalistic hiking lodge from the 1920ies (my hobby I guess? anyway to level out all the church stuff) - a puzzle game in an art noveau villa from 1902 (more hobby stuff)
My spoken languages are:
German, English, and some Italian and I understand easy Spanish and French (with dictionary help) but don't expect me to write in these
