October 8, 2020

Nikita Lalwani’s “State of the Art: How Cultural Property Became a National-Security Priority”

Recent Yale Law School graduate, Nikita Lalwani (JD), has published a thoughtful article, “State of the Art: How Cultural Property Became a National-Security Priority,” in the Yale Law Journal Forum (July 2020). Lalwani notes how little attention has been paid to her topic but, surprisingly, does not reference Erik Nemeth’s book Cultural Security (2014) which deals with it at length. She discusses how cultural artifacts increasingly play a role in U.S. foreign policy, and national security interests in particular. She suggests that the U.S. Government should more aggressively support cultural property repatriation efforts by burdening U.S. importers with the responsibility to establish that all cultural artifacts they attempt to import were exported legally, according to the source countries’ governments.

I agree that the protection and movement of cultural artifacts have become increasingly significant issues in U.S. foreign policy, but I suspect this solicitude may be grounded more in U.S. interests to maintain or establish positive economic and diplomatic relations with source countries rather than concern for preservation of these artifacts in their find spots/nations. Lalwani’s article does not address some of the potentially deleterious effects of the U.S.’s heightened scrutiny of imported antiquities. For instance, citizens of source countries might prefer to have a higher standard of living by benefitting from sales of cultural artifacts, rather than to have them used by high-level government officials as props for jingoist sentiment. Many source nations have untold numbers of unexcavated antiquities whose creators are no more culturally or ethnically related to those now inhabiting the land in which they lie than is the Native American who created an arrowhead to a current resident of a New England town who finds it. And it appears that a more aggressive U.S. policy has only encouraged officials like Matthew Bogdanos, in my opinion a publicity-seeking braggart who, in his capacity as an Assistant District Attorney in New York, has carried out legally questionable raids on museums and the homes of antiquities collectors like Michael Steinhardt.

Charles Cronin, 8 Oct. 2020

 

 

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