January 24, 2020 • 14 mins
In today's casual Friday chat, Tracy and Holly discuss the Elgin marbles and the complex issues that museums face regarding the repatriation of artifacts.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, the production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, Welcome to
the podcast Happy Friday. I'm Chasey Vie Wilson Fry our episodes.
This week we're about Lord Elgin and the Parthenon Marbles
(00:21):
and the ongoing controversy about them and calls to return
them to Greece. I had an opinion about this before
I started working on it, just from the knowledge that
Britain has had these in the British Museum for two
ish years um and Greece has been like, can we
(00:42):
have those back for about that same amount of time,
And my basic opinion was maybe I'll should give that back. Uh.
And now, after having done all this research and having
like read all of this uncertainty about the firm in
and the fact that um Elgan's whole point was like
to put them in a shed on his personal property
(01:03):
and they got shipwrecked and damaged through over cleaning along
the way, I I have the same opinion as before,
but like ten times as vehement as I did before
I got into it. Right, do you consider any speculation
about what could have happened to them if he had
not removed them. I actually yes, So it's pretty clear
(01:28):
um from a lot of different angles that if he
had not removed them at all, they would have had
further damage. Like there's there's just been a lot of
documentation about like the ongoing vandalism, um, ongoing damage through
all of those monuments for the pieces that were that
remained there, basically from the nineteenth century when Elgin was
(01:51):
there doing that work into the early twentieth century. With
Greece becoming um an independent nation as it exists more
as it exists today, it was still all the structure
was a little different when it first became independent than
it than it has become. But I think that argument,
like that's there's a valid argument to be made there
that if if somebody had not removed a lot of
this artwork and protected it, then it would have been
(02:13):
damaged further. But at this point, like the nation of
Greece has done so much work to build the museum
and to clean up its air quality and all that
other stuff, uh and just persistently said can we please
have that back? It's like, okay, if we have this
argument of yes, these pieces in a lot of ways
were protected in some ways they weren't protected because they
(02:34):
wound up being shipwrecked and over cleaned and all this
sort of stuff, like, Okay, that the need to have
them protected in this way is over, maybe we can
return them to Greece now. I also feel like there
are some really complicated issues there involving sort of like
the paternalism of a lot of a lot of things
(02:57):
we've talked about and on some previous shows before. Um
when when somebody has said, oh, you know what I'm
gonna do is I'm going to make sure to preserve
these things because the local people don't seem to know
what they have here without really asking the local people
or finding out what they do actually know, or finding
out like what the meanings of these sites are. Uh,
and like it becomes kind of a complicated thing where
(03:18):
somebody kind of tramps in and says, I know it's
best in the situation, which is not necessarily true. A
lot of arguments against returning some of the things that
nations have said, can we please have that back? It's
an important part of our cultural heritage, and it was
like it was removed during a colonial period or during
a war, or we don't know how somebody took it
(03:39):
and we don't have it anymore. Like a lot of
the arguments that people make for not returning them, like
some of them kind of boiled down to the idea of, well,
we won't be able to see it in the museum
if we give it back to you, and like there
is an element of racism in that argument a lot
of the time, like like we need to make it
(04:00):
easier for the white people to see this art is
kind of the core argument of that sometimes, and that's
that's a little disturbing well, especially because I think that
that argument gets made in a way that is particularly nefarious,
which is like there is this veneer not always, but
sometimes of the white people need to see this art
(04:23):
because we're trying to understand you, Like it's almost like
we're so magnanimous, we're trying to appreciate other cultures and
you're not letting us. And it's like that is a
twisted way to look at this whole thing. That's where
my hackles get super up. I keep trying to think
about it in two ways that are conflicting. One is
(04:44):
like on a micro level of like have you ever
known someone in your personal life who had some treasure
that was perhaps in their family for a long time,
and they clearly are not taking care of it and
don't understand what it is. And there is that whole like,
I really wish you would just let me take this thing,
because it's going to be a wreck if I leave
(05:05):
it with you forever. And I understand that, but at
the same time, it's theirs. But then I also think
in the much bigger, bigger picture of like all of
these concepts of nationality and identity around it are to
some degree constructs that we have made up around lines
(05:27):
that are imaginary that we have drawn on maps, and
like that makes it a little trickier. I don't the
two work at odds. Like I said, it's not it's
not an eating thing, and I do understand. I mean,
I certainly know that I have been to museums and
stood there and looked at things that were from cultures
(05:47):
very far away from my own and loved them and
been very happy to see them. But I also can't
deny that, like, hey, it sure would be cool for
the people more connected to this to have access to it. Yeah, yeah,
you and I have. I mean, we've talked about our
love for museums on the show A lot like that.
That's come up a lot of times. And I do
love museums, and I think museums can serve a really
(06:08):
valuable role. And I think a lot of museums are
really struggling right now as they sort of realized that, Like, yeah,
I mean I live I live in Massachusetts. The Boston
Museum of Fine Arts has had a series of incidents
where like they planned an event that was supposed to
be something positive without really taking into account the people
(06:31):
they were actually representing, Like uh, and and you know it.
It reflects the fact that in a lot of museums,
the curators are mostly white, the board is mostly white,
and and not necessarily I'm not saying that white people
can't do this job, but not really having the viewpoints
of the people whose artwork they're they're curating and representing,
(06:53):
and like that shine shines through sometimes. So it's like
I can see how museums can be really problematic and
in that kind of programming. And then also at the
same time, I often will be at a museum looking
at a piece in front of me and my thought is, like,
where did you get this? And how like that's the
thing that I am thinking about a lot of the
times when I when I'm looking at a museum. Also,
(07:15):
it's not entirely within the scope of the episode that
we just talked about, but this idea that if Britain
returns the Parthenon Marbles, a whole lot of other museums
are gonna like it's gonna start this landslide of museums
having to return stuff. Like I think people have sort
of this imaginary situation where Britain returns the Parthenon Marbles
and then the people show up with the pitchforks and
(07:36):
the torches demanding all of the art back, and the
walls are going to be totally empty. Like there's this
weird fear like that's going to be the next step,
which I don't think is really what would happen, UM.
But that kind of fear has led to a couple
of just really appalling crimes that I know about. UM.
(07:56):
One of them is here in the United States, after
the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act,
a guy named Thomas Munson, who was acting as the
park superintendent at at Effigy Mounds National Monument, which has
its own whole series of controversies in its history. He
stole the bones of like forty one different people that
(08:19):
had been housed in their collection. The reason that he
stole it is that so those remains wouldn't be repatriated
to the people that they belonged to, and in doing so,
he basically destroyed the context of all of those pieces
like that, that's like, okay, now, how do we figure
out who all these bones belong to and who they
should be repatriated to? Like that was just a really
(08:40):
horrifying crime that was motivated by racism and by this
fear of like returning things to the cultures that they
came from. Yeah, I also wonder if there is another
fear that is not really been introduced. And this is
(09:00):
purely speculations, so please don't museum people come after me.
But I really wonder if there is a subtler fear
that starting to do something like this repatriating these marbles
will open up a Pandora's box where people really start
looking a lot more closely in general, at the providence
of art pieces that are often in museums, and it
(09:22):
will reveal that are there are a lot of dirty
hands along the way like, there are a lot of
pieces of art that have been you know, passed around
through various private collectors that probably never should have been
in the hand a lot of the hands that they
were in, and that opens up a whole other moral
discussion similarly of like should a museum buy a piece
(09:44):
of art from a private collector where maybe they don't
know how that person got it and it may not
be an entirely above board providence lineage in terms of
when it was created to when this person has their
hands in it, they're theoretically taking it out of the
into somebody that shouldn't have it and putting it on
a wall, but they are also indirectly perpetuating the problem, right.
(10:06):
I worried that that too, is probably part of the
discussion either not happening but being thought about, or happening
but being happening in a much quieter way, because it
does open, like I said, a Pandora's box of how
art has moved through the world for centuries. Yeah, yeah,
(10:28):
for sure, for sure, I think that's probably likely an
element in it. Also, Yeah, it's such a whole, huge, complicated,
important issue because like I've definitely been inspired to learn
more about things by things I saw and saw in museums,
And I've learned a lot from museums. And there are
so many like indigenous people, people of color saying like, hey,
(10:53):
that that's actually ours, like it's it's not yours. And
I think there's a really incredibly important important voices to
listen to and elevate in all of this, and in
a lot of cases, um, when museums have started working
more directly with the people whose artifacts are in their collections,
like that's really made the museum's experience a whole lot
(11:16):
richer in terms of what information they've been able to share,
how they've been able to curate their own collections. I
am hopeful that like the world of museums will just
continue to get more diverse and richer in that way,
and and like we'll sort of arrive at a place
at some point in the future, maybe not in my lifetime,
(11:39):
where where it feels like museums really are curating things
in a way that is always respectful and thoughtful of
the people whose um whose artifacts are in the collection.
I feel like we have inadvertently stumbled into like a
really good television show, Pitch Please don't anyone do this
um where we have the main hero is a person
(12:03):
who steals from museums Allah Robin Hood to repatriat them
to the places they belong. It could be like her
food were they're a traveler and we we see them
each week doing good in the world. Yeah, I'm thinking
reverse Indiana Jones and kind of like I'm gonna take
(12:23):
this back to the people that belongs to you. Well,
although Indiana Jones at least wanted them in museums first, yes,
versus the people that wanted to do other things with them.
But yeah, I uh, yeah, this is gonna be a
great show. We're gonna pitch it, We're gonna uh it's
gonna be imitable, which is going to be unfortunate. There
will be subsequent lawsuits. I think we found out how
(12:45):
we meet our ruin and it's going to be a
great ride. Yeah. Uh. Also, I know that all this
stuff that we've just talked about for the last I
guess ten or twelve minutes, a lot of people have
really passionate opinions about this, and we will probably hear
from people in our listener mail um of people who
agree or disagree of all the various things that we
(13:05):
have said to spend that in the most positive way
I can. It's because art means that much. It does. Like.
That's to me part of like the case to be
made for art when people are like art. Uh, it
means a lot to people culturally and historically as well
as just it evokes a lot of emotion because it
(13:27):
is art. Um. That's my positive spin on that. Uh.
It is good that that folks care about this. Um.
Like I said, I really I would like those marbles
to be back in Athens one day. It's also would
be a nice excuse for a trip to Athens to
(13:50):
go see them. Yeah, I means crossed trips, the lots
of places. So um. If you would like to write
to us about this or our other podcasts or history
podcast at i heart media dot com and all over
social media at miss in History, and you can subscribe
to our show on Apple Podcasts or the I Heart
(14:10):
Radio Apple or anywhere else you like to get podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, the production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, Welcome to
the podcast Happy Friday. I'm Chasey Vie Wilson Fry our episodes.
This week we're about Lord Elgin and the Parthenon Marbles
(00:21):
and the ongoing controversy about them and calls to return
them to Greece. I had an opinion about this before
I started working on it, just from the knowledge that
Britain has had these in the British Museum for two
ish years um and Greece has been like, can we
(00:42):
have those back for about that same amount of time,
And my basic opinion was maybe I'll should give that back. Uh.
And now, after having done all this research and having
like read all of this uncertainty about the firm in
and the fact that um Elgan's whole point was like
to put them in a shed on his personal property
(01:03):
and they got shipwrecked and damaged through over cleaning along
the way, I I have the same opinion as before,
but like ten times as vehement as I did before
I got into it. Right, do you consider any speculation
about what could have happened to them if he had
not removed them. I actually yes, So it's pretty clear
(01:28):
um from a lot of different angles that if he
had not removed them at all, they would have had
further damage. Like there's there's just been a lot of
documentation about like the ongoing vandalism, um, ongoing damage through
all of those monuments for the pieces that were that
remained there, basically from the nineteenth century when Elgin was
(01:51):
there doing that work into the early twentieth century. With
Greece becoming um an independent nation as it exists more
as it exists today, it was still all the structure
was a little different when it first became independent than
it than it has become. But I think that argument,
like that's there's a valid argument to be made there
that if if somebody had not removed a lot of
this artwork and protected it, then it would have been
(02:13):
damaged further. But at this point, like the nation of
Greece has done so much work to build the museum
and to clean up its air quality and all that
other stuff, uh and just persistently said can we please
have that back? It's like, okay, if we have this
argument of yes, these pieces in a lot of ways
were protected in some ways they weren't protected because they
(02:34):
wound up being shipwrecked and over cleaned and all this
sort of stuff, like, Okay, that the need to have
them protected in this way is over, maybe we can
return them to Greece now. I also feel like there
are some really complicated issues there involving sort of like
the paternalism of a lot of a lot of things
(02:57):
we've talked about and on some previous shows before. Um
when when somebody has said, oh, you know what I'm
gonna do is I'm going to make sure to preserve
these things because the local people don't seem to know
what they have here without really asking the local people
or finding out what they do actually know, or finding
out like what the meanings of these sites are. Uh,
and like it becomes kind of a complicated thing where
(03:18):
somebody kind of tramps in and says, I know it's
best in the situation, which is not necessarily true. A
lot of arguments against returning some of the things that
nations have said, can we please have that back? It's
an important part of our cultural heritage, and it was
like it was removed during a colonial period or during
a war, or we don't know how somebody took it
(03:39):
and we don't have it anymore. Like a lot of
the arguments that people make for not returning them, like
some of them kind of boiled down to the idea of, well,
we won't be able to see it in the museum
if we give it back to you, and like there
is an element of racism in that argument a lot
of the time, like like we need to make it
(04:00):
easier for the white people to see this art is
kind of the core argument of that sometimes, and that's
that's a little disturbing well, especially because I think that
that argument gets made in a way that is particularly nefarious,
which is like there is this veneer not always, but
sometimes of the white people need to see this art
(04:23):
because we're trying to understand you, Like it's almost like
we're so magnanimous, we're trying to appreciate other cultures and
you're not letting us. And it's like that is a
twisted way to look at this whole thing. That's where
my hackles get super up. I keep trying to think
about it in two ways that are conflicting. One is
(04:44):
like on a micro level of like have you ever
known someone in your personal life who had some treasure
that was perhaps in their family for a long time,
and they clearly are not taking care of it and
don't understand what it is. And there is that whole like,
I really wish you would just let me take this thing,
because it's going to be a wreck if I leave
(05:05):
it with you forever. And I understand that, but at
the same time, it's theirs. But then I also think
in the much bigger, bigger picture of like all of
these concepts of nationality and identity around it are to
some degree constructs that we have made up around lines
(05:27):
that are imaginary that we have drawn on maps, and
like that makes it a little trickier. I don't the
two work at odds. Like I said, it's not it's
not an eating thing, and I do understand. I mean,
I certainly know that I have been to museums and
stood there and looked at things that were from cultures
(05:47):
very far away from my own and loved them and
been very happy to see them. But I also can't
deny that, like, hey, it sure would be cool for
the people more connected to this to have access to it. Yeah, yeah,
you and I have. I mean, we've talked about our
love for museums on the show A lot like that.
That's come up a lot of times. And I do
love museums, and I think museums can serve a really
(06:08):
valuable role. And I think a lot of museums are
really struggling right now as they sort of realized that, Like, yeah,
I mean I live I live in Massachusetts. The Boston
Museum of Fine Arts has had a series of incidents
where like they planned an event that was supposed to
be something positive without really taking into account the people
(06:31):
they were actually representing, Like uh, and and you know it.
It reflects the fact that in a lot of museums,
the curators are mostly white, the board is mostly white,
and and not necessarily I'm not saying that white people
can't do this job, but not really having the viewpoints
of the people whose artwork they're they're curating and representing,
(06:53):
and like that shine shines through sometimes. So it's like
I can see how museums can be really problematic and
in that kind of programming. And then also at the
same time, I often will be at a museum looking
at a piece in front of me and my thought is, like,
where did you get this? And how like that's the
thing that I am thinking about a lot of the
times when I when I'm looking at a museum. Also,
(07:15):
it's not entirely within the scope of the episode that
we just talked about, but this idea that if Britain
returns the Parthenon Marbles, a whole lot of other museums
are gonna like it's gonna start this landslide of museums
having to return stuff. Like I think people have sort
of this imaginary situation where Britain returns the Parthenon Marbles
and then the people show up with the pitchforks and
(07:36):
the torches demanding all of the art back, and the
walls are going to be totally empty. Like there's this
weird fear like that's going to be the next step,
which I don't think is really what would happen, UM.
But that kind of fear has led to a couple
of just really appalling crimes that I know about. UM.
(07:56):
One of them is here in the United States, after
the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act,
a guy named Thomas Munson, who was acting as the
park superintendent at at Effigy Mounds National Monument, which has
its own whole series of controversies in its history. He
stole the bones of like forty one different people that
(08:19):
had been housed in their collection. The reason that he
stole it is that so those remains wouldn't be repatriated
to the people that they belonged to, and in doing so,
he basically destroyed the context of all of those pieces
like that, that's like, okay, now, how do we figure
out who all these bones belong to and who they
should be repatriated to? Like that was just a really
(08:40):
horrifying crime that was motivated by racism and by this
fear of like returning things to the cultures that they
came from. Yeah, I also wonder if there is another
fear that is not really been introduced. And this is
(09:00):
purely speculations, so please don't museum people come after me.
But I really wonder if there is a subtler fear
that starting to do something like this repatriating these marbles
will open up a Pandora's box where people really start
looking a lot more closely in general, at the providence
of art pieces that are often in museums, and it
(09:22):
will reveal that are there are a lot of dirty
hands along the way like, there are a lot of
pieces of art that have been you know, passed around
through various private collectors that probably never should have been
in the hand a lot of the hands that they
were in, and that opens up a whole other moral
discussion similarly of like should a museum buy a piece
(09:44):
of art from a private collector where maybe they don't
know how that person got it and it may not
be an entirely above board providence lineage in terms of
when it was created to when this person has their
hands in it, they're theoretically taking it out of the
into somebody that shouldn't have it and putting it on
a wall, but they are also indirectly perpetuating the problem, right.
(10:06):
I worried that that too, is probably part of the
discussion either not happening but being thought about, or happening
but being happening in a much quieter way, because it
does open, like I said, a Pandora's box of how
art has moved through the world for centuries. Yeah, yeah,
(10:28):
for sure, for sure, I think that's probably likely an
element in it. Also, Yeah, it's such a whole, huge, complicated,
important issue because like I've definitely been inspired to learn
more about things by things I saw and saw in museums,
And I've learned a lot from museums. And there are
so many like indigenous people, people of color saying like, hey,
(10:53):
that that's actually ours, like it's it's not yours. And
I think there's a really incredibly important important voices to
listen to and elevate in all of this, and in
a lot of cases, um, when museums have started working
more directly with the people whose artifacts are in their collections,
like that's really made the museum's experience a whole lot
(11:16):
richer in terms of what information they've been able to share,
how they've been able to curate their own collections. I
am hopeful that like the world of museums will just
continue to get more diverse and richer in that way,
and and like we'll sort of arrive at a place
at some point in the future, maybe not in my lifetime,
(11:39):
where where it feels like museums really are curating things
in a way that is always respectful and thoughtful of
the people whose um whose artifacts are in the collection.
I feel like we have inadvertently stumbled into like a
really good television show, Pitch Please don't anyone do this
um where we have the main hero is a person
(12:03):
who steals from museums Allah Robin Hood to repatriat them
to the places they belong. It could be like her
food were they're a traveler and we we see them
each week doing good in the world. Yeah, I'm thinking
reverse Indiana Jones and kind of like I'm gonna take
(12:23):
this back to the people that belongs to you. Well,
although Indiana Jones at least wanted them in museums first, yes,
versus the people that wanted to do other things with them.
But yeah, I uh, yeah, this is gonna be a
great show. We're gonna pitch it, We're gonna uh it's
gonna be imitable, which is going to be unfortunate. There
will be subsequent lawsuits. I think we found out how
(12:45):
we meet our ruin and it's going to be a
great ride. Yeah. Uh. Also, I know that all this
stuff that we've just talked about for the last I
guess ten or twelve minutes, a lot of people have
really passionate opinions about this, and we will probably hear
from people in our listener mail um of people who
agree or disagree of all the various things that we
(13:05):
have said to spend that in the most positive way
I can. It's because art means that much. It does. Like.
That's to me part of like the case to be
made for art when people are like art. Uh, it
means a lot to people culturally and historically as well
as just it evokes a lot of emotion because it
(13:27):
is art. Um. That's my positive spin on that. Uh.
It is good that that folks care about this. Um.
Like I said, I really I would like those marbles
to be back in Athens one day. It's also would
be a nice excuse for a trip to Athens to
(13:50):
go see them. Yeah, I means crossed trips, the lots
of places. So um. If you would like to write
to us about this or our other podcasts or history
podcast at i heart media dot com and all over
social media at miss in History, and you can subscribe
to our show on Apple Podcasts or the I Heart
(14:10):
Radio Apple or anywhere else you like to get podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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