Kwame Anthony Appiah: evaluation

Transcript context

…But more Dogon artworks in Mali would be a good start, right? There could be a museum with 200 of them. Maybe they wouldn’t be taken care of as well, but isn’t that up to people in Mali, to decide what’s the risk-return tradeoff, and they simply ought to be sent back? They were probably purchased under duress, in some cases taken? I don’t agree with you that it’s up to them. It’s not up to them. These things matter to all of us. Their care and concern should be a concern for everybody. It should be part of the job of the global community to think together about how to manage these things. Now, obviously, from time to time, particular objects are in the trust of various public and private institutions in particular countries, and those countries should make sure that they perform the duties that come with having such a trust. But no, I don’t think it’s just up to them. Just to take the case of the Dogon material, the Dogon material — much of it is religious material from a religion that hardly anybody practices anymore because Mali is way more Muslim than it was in the French colonial period as a result of interesting processes which we could discuss. It’s a bit like the situation that there was in Afghanistan under the Taliban. They were, as possessors of the Afghan state, trustees of a whole bunch of stuff that they thought of as idols, and some of what they did was destroy stuff because they thought it was idols. Fortunately, as a result of the good sense of a lot of curators in Afghanistan, who hid stuff from the Taliban, they didn’t succeed in destroying as much as they could have. But the thought that the Taliban is in charge of whether we should look after Buddhist material that happens to be in Afghanistan, I think, is a mistake. In other words, I really do think of these things, as it were, belonging to all of us, humanity. This is the cosmopolitan attitude to these things, and that of course states — as with all cosmopolitan obligations — states play a central role in ensuring that they’re met. And so each state has responsibility for the stuff in its territory, but it doesn’t have special rights to determine what happens to things just because they happen to be in its territory, any more than the Italians have any special right to decide that Etruscan stuff is bad, and therefore we’re going to not care for it. That would be wrong. Of course, they haven’t decided that, but if they were to, it wouldn’t be sensible to say, “Well, because it’s in Italy, the Italians are entitled to do what they like with it.” They’re not. Now, in the middle of all these dialogues, we have a segment called overrated versus underrated. I toss out a few names or ideas, and you tell me if you think they’re overrated or underrated. But these will be easy. Are you ready?…

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