In Defense of Incremental Change

Abstract

We seem to live in an age of euphemism. A recent article in The Guardian titled “Iraqi discoveries help shed light on British Museum treasures” explains the lack of provenience of some antiquities as “owing to the circumstances of their discovery and retrieval during the buccaneering period of early archaeology.” Neither the word “circumstances” nor “buccaneering” do justice to the colonial legacy of the discipline and the complex and asymmetrical power relationships that led to the exhibition of such “discoveries” in Britain. Even in the well-documented case of the Benin Bronzes, a journalist for the New York Times prefers to put the word “looting” in quotation marks in the article’s title and speaks of the “so-called looted works of art” in the text, despite the fact that the curator who is interviewed in the same article refers to the same sculptures as “indisputably looted.”