到底是誰的國家寶藏？

為了教學需要，我一直都保持著閱讀紐約時報的習慣，希望能從中找到一些不太難的文章可以帶著學生讀。
不過為了讀紐約時報而買聯合報其實還挺划不來的，於是我常改而閱讀網路版。只是，報紙嘛，還是紙本比較習慣，
剛好學生家中有訂閱聯合報，因此我便拜託他們把每週二的紐約時報留給我（反正他們家裡也沒人看這個）。
今天在我拿到的這一份裡，我看到了一篇文章，標題叫做"Who Draws the Borders of Culture?"
雖然有些不著邊際，不過卻吸引我一直讀下去。沒想到，這居然是一篇非常「帝國主義」的文章。


這篇文章的作者是Michael Kimmelman，討論的主題是古文物的所有權到底屬於誰，
說白了，就是在談「希臘、埃及等各文明古國到底有沒有權利討回他們以前被這些強國所搶走的古文物？」
全文可以免費在紐約時報網站中看到，在此僅引用一小部分，有興趣的人請自行前往觀看。
    

Siding with the imperialists drives good people bonkers, I know. It's akin to Yankees worship, with the Greeks playing the underdog role of the old Red Sox. That said, patrimony claims too often serve merely nationalist ends these days, no less often than they do decent ones, never mind that the archaeological and legal arguments by the Greeks, while elaborately reasoned and passionately felt, don't finally trump the British ones.

Mostly, though, the issue comes down to the fact that culture, while it can have deeply rooted, special meanings to specific people, doesn't belong to anyone in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't stand still. When Walter Benjamin wrote in the last century about the original or authentic work of art losing its aura, he was in part suggesting that the past is not something we can just return to whenever we like — it's not something fixed and always available. It's something forever beyond our grasp, which we must reinvent to make present.

Today's Acropolis is itself a kind of fiction. Over the centuries and through succeeding empires and regimes, it became Christian and Turkish, and briefly Venetian, after it had been Roman. The Parthenon was a pagan temple, a church, a mosque, an arms depot (disastrously, under the Turks) and even a place from which the Nazis hung a big swastika flag whose removal by Greek patriots helped spur a resistance movement. Modernity has mostly stripped the site of all those layers of history to recover a Periclean-era past that represents, because it has come to mean the most to us, its supposed true self — a process of archeological excavation, based on another modern kind of fiction about historical and scientific objectivity that inevitably adds its own layer of history.

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But the general question, looting and tourist dollars aside, is why should any objects necessarily reside in the modern nation-state controlling the plot of land where, at one time, perhaps thousands of years earlier, they came from? The question goes to the heart of how culture operates in a global age.

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Italy recently celebrated the return of a national treasure after the Metropolitan Museum gave back a sixth-century B.C. Greek krater by the painter Euphronius that tomb robbers dug up outside Rome during the 1970s. Stolen property is stolen property. But how curious that an ancient Greek vase, which centuries after it was made came into the possession of an Etruscan collector (a kind of ancient Elgin) living on what is now the outskirts of Rome, and then ended up buried for thousands of years below what became modern Italy, is today Italian cultural patrimony. By that definition, Elgin's loot is arguably British patrimony.

It’s not coincidental that conflicts over patrimony have accelerated in recent decades thanks to globalizing trends: the increasing circulation of information along with objects and money — consequences of the Web, jet travel and mass tourism — and the evolution of institutions like the British Museum from sleepy, scholarly repositories of artifacts into entertainment palaces and virtual town squares. Authorities in countries like Greece, having seen the escalating economic and symbolic value of works like the marbles, have naturally sought to take advantage.

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But as the Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has cautioned about the whole patrimony question: “We should remind ourselves of other connections. One connection — the one neglected in talk of cultural patrimony — is the connection not through identity but despite difference.”

What he means is that people make connections across cultures through objects like the marbles. These objects can become handmaidens for ideologues, instruments for social division and tools of the economy, or cicerones through history and oracles to a more perfect union of nations. Art is something made in a particular place by particular people, and may serve a particular function at one time but obtain different meanings at other times. It summons distinct feelings to those for whom it’s local, but ultimately belongs to everyone and to no one.

We’re all custodians of global culture for posterity.

Neither today’s Greeks nor Britons own the Parthenon marbles, really.

文章太長，在此我不打算翻譯。我看了後其實挺訝異的，我從來沒看過紐時刊登這麼立場強烈且具爭議性的文章。
此文在紐約時報的網站上引起了不少迴響，許多人長篇大論地進行攻防，不少人都反對這個作者的想法，
我也是站在反對的一方，原因很簡單，以英國的例子來說，英國不像羅馬帝國般真正統治希臘、埃及諸國，
因此英國文化幾乎在這些國家中沒有實際的份量，怎麼可以因為以前拳頭比人家大就可以理所當然地分一杯羹？
最後那一句「Neither today’s Greeks nor Britons own the Parthenon marbles」更是虛偽，
就算巴特農神廟不該獨屬於今日的希臘所有，那為什麼就該放在英國？因為希臘比較落後，比較不會保存嗎？
那已經是過去的事情了（雖然最近有金融危機...），今日的希臘應該已經有能力保存這些古文物。
就算退一萬步來說，因為這些不是希臘獨有的，所以「暫時」留在英國，那如果有一天聯合國成立一個中立的博物館，
請問英國會把包括巴特農神廟這些古文物交給聯合國嗎？我才不相信！這不過是既得利益者的好聽話而已。

雖然我覺得這記者的立場偏頗，但其實他也點出了一些有趣的議題，例如「當A國侵入B國後，
要多久以後或到怎樣的程度，我們會覺得A國可以說B國的文物也是自己的東西？（反之亦然）」
舉個例子，蒙古和中國今日已經分家，但蒙古帝國的文物卻有許多在中國手上，那蒙古是否可以追討？
我想大部分人都會認為不可以，因為兩者的關係實在太深，所以大家會偏向服從既定的現實。
但我認為這其中的模糊空間極大，而且有趣的是，就像作者說的，這幾百年世界的交流驟然頻繁起來，
因此越是文明古國在這方面就會越吃虧，因為世局的變化不僅導致這些國家被侵略，而且也被改變，
義大利雖然似乎是羅馬帝國的傳人，但是要說羅馬帝國的東西都該給義大利卻很奇怪，
古埃及跟今日的埃及也根本就已經走在完全不同的道路上，我們只是因為「血統」就該認同這所有權嗎？
更重要的問題是，到底博物館的本質是什麼？是展示自己的文化財？是展示「任何」文化寶藏？是見證歷史？
隨著不同的答案，這些文物的去留也會有完全不同的解答，而這卻是我很少看人家討論過的。