{"id":1869,"date":"2009-09-14T16:54:42","date_gmt":"2009-09-14T20:54:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/?p=1869"},"modified":"2009-09-14T16:54:42","modified_gmt":"2009-09-14T20:54:42","slug":"london-museums-the-art-of-unapologetically-stealing-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/2009\/09\/london-museums-the-art-of-unapologetically-stealing-stuff\/","title":{"rendered":"London Museums: The Art of Unapologetically Stealing Stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"

After all of this time spent in museums in London, especially the British Museum, I find myself asking just one question: How are they still allowed to keep this kind of stuff? I mean, I can\u2019t exactly speak for the Greek government, but I imagine that they would want the sculptures taken from likely the most important structure in Ancient Greek history back. Oh wait,\u00a0Yes<\/a> I<\/a> Can<\/a>.\u00a0Despite the fact that England\u2019s age of Imperialism is most certainly gone and past, it is peculiar and almost funny to see that certain citizens of Britain are still holding to the imperialist mentality decades after their actual country gave it up.<\/p>\n

In 1801, the Earl of Elgin decided that in order to prevent pieces of the Parthenon from being burned to obtain lime, he was going to excavate pieces of the temple and its sculptures to put under his protection. The only problem is that in order to protect them, he took them out of the country and sold them to the British Museum. Masked under the cause of protecting cultural artifacts, it is apparent today that it was nothing more than a trophy to liberate from Greece and its people. In fact today the term elginism<\/em> means the practice of plundering artifacts from their original setting. So why is it that despite Greece\u2019s continuous calling for the return of these artifacts that are rightfully theirs, England seems reluctant to give them up?<\/p>\n

The answer seems to lie with everyone\u2019s favorite blog topic: identity. There are some opinions<\/a> that state that as a center of world heritage, Parthenon sculptures are better off in the British Museum that in the actual Parthenon. This probably would have been a valid argument at around the time that the marbles were actually stolen, but is laughable today. Playing the role of cultural center of the world, British supporters insinuate that Greece is in some sort of corner of the planet that doesn\u2019t see anyone other than its inhabitants. This is the 21st<\/sup> century. There are few people who live in Europe who cannot in a moment\u2019s notice hop on a plane and be in Greece within a 24 hour period. The truth behind the matter is that there are those in Britain (mostly likely A.N. Wilson is one of them) that yearn for the time that their country moved and shook the very foundations of the planet with its actions, enabling to go into countries and plunder what they pleased. Instead, they live in a country whose capital city is kept afloat by the tourist dollars of the very people that they ruled not a few hundred years ago. Whether legal at the time or not, it is long overdue for the marbles to be returned and for some individuals to live in the present, regardless of whether they work in museums.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After all of this time spent in museums in London, especially the British Museum, I find myself asking just one question: How are they still allowed to keep this kind of stuff? I mean, I can\u2019t exactly speak for the Greek government, but I imagine that they would want the sculptures taken from likely the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[749],"tags":[15237,1096,1390],"class_list":["post-1869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paul","tag-museums","tag-parthenon","tag-parthenon-marbles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1869\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}