Cultural Objects and Reparative Justice
Patty Gerstenblith
Abstract
Abstract This work provides a comprehensive legal and historical analysis of the issues surrounding the question of where tangible, movable cultural objects that were removed without consent should be located. The book traces the historical foundations of the current legal framework on both international and national scales and examines the four lenses through which cultural objects should be analysed: the international or universalistic, the national, the local or communal, and the contextual. As such, this book melds the fragmented debate of ownership utilizing an interdisciplinary approach based in law, history, art history, anthropology, and archaeology. In an innovative approach, the work analyses several examples of appropriation spanning the nineteenth century to consider the Parthenon Sculptures, the Yuanmingyuan Palace, the Benin objects, Indigenous human remains and cultural items, and artworks looted during the Holocaust. These types of cultural objects and different circumstances of their appropriation inform the work’s proposal of a paradigm for reparations. Acknowledging that the foundations of our modern laws and ethical guidelines with respect to cultural objects are built on a history of armed conflict, imperialism, and colonialism, this work advocates for a new structure based on reparation, restitution, repatriation, compensation, and market regulation in order to cease perpetuating past harms and to disincentivize new harms. Finally, it sets out a paradigm based on process and defined principles for the restitution of human remains and cultural objects that were removed from their communities and States as a result of colonialism, armed conflict, or imperialism.