Asian Perspectives

The media regularly report news concerning the restitution of cultural treasures by museums, with current topics including the transfer in the near future of the Benin bronzes that are held in the British Museum to Nigeria and the return of art works of questionable provenance by the National Gallery of Australia to India. These relatively recent instances were preceded by high profile cases concerning the return by various countries, museums, and individuals of items looted by the Nazis; some of these restitutions occurred after the adoption of Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art at the Washington Conference of 1998. These principles were notable in recommending national processes for the implementation of restitutions, particularly in suggesting alternative dispute resolution mechanisms for resolving ownership issues.

It is such complex issues surrounding restitution, object histories, and questions of ownership, mainly in the context of western institutions seeking to decolonize their collections, that are discussed and documented by the various authors in the 2021 publication Returning Southeast Asia's Past: Objects, Museums, and Restitution, which is edited by Louise Tythacott and Panggah Ardiyansyah. This is the first book entirely devoted to object restitution to Southeast Asia. The contributors provide complementary perspectives as they are museum professionals and scholars from both Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia, as well as Europe, North America, and Australia.

While the book is organized into three parts, the issues of artifact ownership, colonial legacies as they figure in museum collections, and restitution in relation to cultural identities are interwoven throughout the individual essays. As many of the contributors point out, most of the heritage laws were adopted after many countries in Asia achieved independence, so the removal of cultural items during colonial rule was not technically unlawful. International conventions such as the Hague Convention of 1954, the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, and the Unidroit Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects (Rome, 1995) are rightly invoked as international instruments intended to facilitate the return of artifacts. However, the issue of restitution is never straightforward, since not all the countries involved are signatories to these conventions and the conventions cannot be applied retroactively. For example, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Britain have yet to sign the Unidroit Convention, and the United States of America only ratified the 1954 Hague Convention on 13 March 2009.

As part of the self-styled 'civilizing mission' imposed by colonial powers on their colonies as a way of justifying their exploitative and profit-seeking activities, the study of the history, culture, and archaeology of the colonies was approached from a western academic and scientific perspective. In most [End Page 368] cases, this approach was institutionalized by establishing organizations such as the Archeological Survey of India (1861), Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen [Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences] (1778), and L'École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO) (1900) and introducing the western concept of museums. The first museum in Asia was the Indian Museum in Kolkata, founded in 1814, followed by a museum in Batavia (Jakarta) in 1862. Various other museums were established in French Indochina during the early twentieth century.

While it is true that cultures (most of them ancient) were discovered and sites were unearthed, documented, and catalogued because of the activities of colonial authorities, the discoveries also resulted in the selective removal of objects from their original sites to designated spaces or locations within the colonies or, more significantly, to far-off destinations in the West for the noble purposes of education and research. Because they had been isolated from their cultural and architectural contexts, such objects were mainly appreciated for their artistic qualities. Previous to World War II, international exhibitions in particular displayed the culture and heritage of a nation's colonies, often including...