In light of the recent return of stolen cultural artifacts to Nepal by several major U.S. museums, and the discovery of many others still in collections around the world, a panel at Harvard Law School agreed it’s past time to make amends, through firmer policies that ease sending such objects back.
Panelist Erin Thompson, a professor of art crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City University of New York who studies the looting, theft, and deliberate destruction of cultural artifacts, began by saying it was exciting that after thousands of years of objects being taken, it was no longer true that the people who lost them would probably never be able to figure out where they went.
“What has changed over the last few decades,” she said, “with increasing globalization, and increasing transparency for museum collections, and increasing habits of private collectors … not realizing what they’re revealing online, has been that people have figured out, oh, that’s where my stuff is. That’s where my gods are.”
Laws to stop this traffic and increase repatriation have been around for about 50 years, Thompson said at the Nov. 20 panel. But the claims kicked into high gear much more recently.
They have been particularly strong from Nepal because of its history. Nepal only opened its borders to the world in 1951, after the fall of the Rana dynasty. In 1956, the country passed a law banning exports of cultural property. However, collecting Nepali antiquities started to take off in the ’60s and ’70s. Many of the nation’s cultural heritage scholars say that it should be assumed that Nepali artifacts outside the country without evident permission were smuggled out.
For this reason, Nepal has been particularly active in making claims seeking the return of objects. Nepali activists and attorneys such as Sanjay Adhikari, who participated in the Harvard panel from Kathmandu, the capital, via Zoom, play an essential role in that process.
A public interest litigator on issues pertaining to natural and cultural heritage across Nepal, Adhikari has argued key conservation cases before the Nepali Supreme Court. He is also secretary of the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign, a volunteer-based organization that has played a role in returning more than two dozen stolen artifacts to Nepal and helped locate many more, according to its co-founder Alisha Sijapati, as reported by New York Times.
Adhikari told the Harvard audience that when Nepalis think about their cultural heritage, they don’t just see physical artifacts or works of great beauty but living entities that are deeply embedded in daily life. The gods and goddesses stolen from Nepal are part of a vibrant, continuous culture, he said. “To some, they may just seem like stone, but for people here they are living entities. They actually are the protectors of the country.”
When a statue is stolen, the sense of loss to the ritual life of the community is immense. Repatriation is about bringing the all-important gods and goddesses back to their people.
“To some, [the stolen gods and goddesses] may just seem like stone, but for people here they are living entities. They actually are the protectors of the country.”
Sanjay Adhikari
Panel moderator Grace Shrestha ’27, a Harvard Law student who leads the Harvard Law School Advocates for Human Rights project “Protecting Nepalese Cultural Heritage as a Human Right,” asked Thompson how Nepal’s experience with cultural loss connects to the recent destruction of cultural sites in Ukraine and Palestine.
Thompson responded that there are a lot of ways to answer that question, but one that she thinks about a lot has to do with why cultural expression is a human right. She said for her it’s because human existence is deeply based in how we come together as communities.
“If you look at the destruction of cultural heritage as a technique of war, it is a very profitable one,” she said. “I think, for example, of what ISIS did in the conflicts in Syria and Iraq. They would come into towns and the first thing they would destroy would be the local shrine, the church, the place that gave people their connection to that location, where they had their rituals and their ceremonies. And then people would flee. And it would be a whole lot easier to take over.”
Thompson said it is impressive to go to Nepal and see the many empty spaces where work has been taken and yet the vibrancy of the living heritage that still fills those spaces and how resistance to accepting that loss has played out. “I think Nepal has a lot to offer as an example of resistance to the violence of destruction as a technique of cultural genocide.”
The pivotal role these objects play in the context of community was echoed by Sneha Shrestha, a Nepal-born artist based in Boston and Kathmandu, who created an exhibit at the Rubin Museum in New York on the authentic use of ritual objects, “When these objects are put out of context, it’s not just the object out of context. It’s a whole country’s culture out of context,” said Shrestha (no relation to Grace Shrestha, the panel moderator).
“I come from a perspective of an artist, “she said, “and also someone who was born and raised in Nepal. My family still lives in Kathmandu, so these rituals are part of their everyday lives. I grew up going to the local temple. My dad grew up around all these temples that are still there, and it’s part of our everyday architecture, everyday rituals, and it’s what holds our lives together in this way.”
She said that the idea for the exhibit started with the memory of looking at similar objects in museums. At first, she had “a naive sense of excitement, my first time going to an American museum and seeing an oil lamp and immediately recognizing it, and knowing exactly what it is, how we use it.” But then “there was this sinking feeling of despair when you realize that there’s something wrong with the objects, the fact that I’ve never seen an oil lamp so sterile and shiny and clean. This strips the object of its spiritual life.”
“When these objects are put out of context, it’s not just the object out of context. It’s a whole country’s culture out of context.”
Sneha Shrestha
She believes these objects need to be repatriated but acknowledges that it’s not a simple task, even when an institution is willing to do so. “It’s not just: I give this back to you. Put it where it belongs,” she said. “There are institutions that are involved. There are funders that are involved in the institution. And then there’s maybe the Nepali consulate, and then a question of funding in terms of how we ship it back. And then, once it is in the community, how do we share the knowledge that this object has been repatriated?”
She gave as an example the Rubin Museum, which recently repatriated several objects to Nepal, including an apsara, or spirit, that belonged above the entrance of a temple, and was returned to the community of Itumbaha, a monastery in Kathmandu. The community had been wanting to create a local museum for other objects it had, she said, so in returning the apsara the Rubin agreed to provide part of the funding for that museum.
“It seems like a great partnership where all those community stakeholders came together, but the picture is still larger than that,” she said. There was a lot of misinformation spread in the community, she added, and some there feared that the Rubin was now going to take more objects because of the new museum. “That was far from the truth, but there should have been a lot more work done in terms of sharing the news.”
The panel also addressed gaps in existing legal protections. “Everyone thinks there is some overarching law, and there are international conventions,” Thompson said, citing the 1970 UNESCO Convention covering the protection of cultural property from looting. But if a nation signs on to the convention, it has to enact laws on its own. That leads to a range of different laws, doing different things, with different levels of efficacy.
In recent years, she said, “I have turned away from that sort of mishmash of purpose-driven laws, which are often heavily crafted with input by collectors and dealers in market countries, and looked more at what the Manhattan D.A’.s Office is doing in its Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which is to say, ‘This is stolen property.’ And in the U.S., if it’s stolen, it’s stolen. And they will seize and return things, not because it’s a deity, but because it’s something that doesn’t belong to the owner under the National Stolen Property Act.” Thompson said she thinks that gaps in U.S. enforcement are convincing other prosecutors to make this a priority and devote resources to researching other cases here.
When the panelists were asked what members of the Harvard community could do to make a difference, Adhikari said he hoped that they would speak out and help to “decolonize the law.”
“We are the victims,” he said, “but we are asked, ‘What proof do you have that your gods were looted?’” Sneha Shrestha told the audience, “When you go to a museum and see these artifacts that are super exciting and interesting, be a little curious about where they came from.”
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