Dodgy fossils: international legislation and the meaning of 'cultural property'

Geological Curator Pub Date : 2018-12-01 DOI:10.55468/gc319
J. Martin
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

In our small world of palaeontology, it has ended friendships and ruined careers. Important fossils are lost to science, or are in limbo. In the wider world, people get shot or imprisoned. Through it, fortunes are made by rich people in the West, while peasant farmers in the South lose the fortunes they never had. 'It' is UNESCO 1970: The Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. This paper looks back at the ancestry of UNESCO 1970, to suggest that its ethically inspired progenitors probably would not have wanted it to turn out the way it did. The wrong turn seems to have been in the ambiguity (perhaps intentional, certainly not articulated) of the meaning of 'cultural property' in the 1970 Convention. Merryman (1986) reviewed 'cultural property'; he explained that it has two almostopposite meanings, whose complex bases, in semantics, nationalism and money, are explored in this paper. I ruminate on how differently the word 'culture' might be understood in the minds of legislators (and politicians) in the Signatory Countries to the 1970 Convention, and speculate about how their interpretations might, from one point of view, be inadvertently ('culturally', 'lost in translation') mistaken and how, from another point of view, they might coincide neatly with national interests. Maybe UNESCO 1970 itself did turn out the way its authors intended. The purpose of the Convention's Articles was to police international trade in national and personal property, arguably in support of the principles of capitalism, as variously applied in the signatory counties - and now, nearly 50 years on, globally. Finally, I question whether fossils should be in the Convention at all; I ask: except possibly for fossil hominins, whose 'cultural' property are they?
狡猾的化石:国际立法和“文化财产”的含义
在我们这个古生物学的小世界里,它终结了友谊,毁掉了事业。重要的化石要么被科学遗忘,要么被搁置。在更广阔的世界里,人们会被枪杀或监禁。通过它,西方的富人创造了财富,而南方的农民失去了他们从未有过的财富。“它”是教科文组织1970年:《关于禁止和防止非法进出口和非法转让文化财产所有权的方法的公约》。本文回顾了1970年联合国教科文组织(UNESCO)的前身,并提出,其受到道德启发的祖先可能不希望它变成现在这样。错误的转向似乎是在1970年公约中对“文化财产”含义的模糊(也许是故意的,当然不是明确的)。Merryman(1986)回顾了“文化财产”;他解释说,它有两个几乎相反的含义,其复杂的基础,在语义学,民族主义和金钱,本文探讨。我反复思考1970年《公约》签署国的立法者(和政治家)对“文化”一词的理解有多么不同,并推测他们的解释如何从一个角度无意中(“文化”,“在翻译中丢失”)被误解,以及从另一个角度来看,它们如何与国家利益完全一致。也许1970年联合国教科文组织本身确实按照其作者的意图发展了。《公约》条款的目的是监督国家和个人财产的国际贸易,可以说是为了支持资本主义原则,这些原则在签署国得到了不同的应用,现在,近50年过去了,在全球范围内得到了应用。最后,我质疑化石是否应该被纳入公约;我问:除了可能的古人类化石,它们是谁的“文化”财产?
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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