Wampum

Last Saturday the Getty in Malibu re-opened. The day before Michael Brand left Malibu for Rome to meet with Rocco Buttiglione. Brand is the Director of the Getty. Buttiglione is the Minister of Culture of the Italian State. Marion True, who directed the Getty from 1986 to last October, is up on charges. Of the 104 objects the Getty considers as its chefs-d'oeuvre, 54 are on the suspected stolen list, and 42 of those were acquired "privately" in Italy.

When we talk about repatriation of cultural patrimony (or cultural matrimony for those of us from matrilocal, matrilinear traditions, which really distracts non-Indians who first have to get their heads around the non-domestication of women as a cultural organizational principle), we are limited in subject matter to human remains and grave goods, and to jurisdictional horizons. The scope of discourse about repatriation of European cultural patrimony, made more relevant by the systematic looting of collections in Iraq, does not have these limits.

The phenomena of collecting presents some issues, and not simply the collection of Maori facial tattoos, and the manufacture and trade in human heads which collection created to sustain the collection economy, one of the oddest "monetized objects" created by contact with Europeans, particularly the Victorian English. The "curio cabinets" and the relationship between the collector and the culture collected via its artifacts is fairly well understood. It a relationship of dominance.

Half a billion on some authentic, genuine rocks. Thats the high end for European Cultural Icons in the LA Basin. The value proposition for some authentic, genuine rocks, painstakingly disconnected from factual provenance (and the possibility of 5-10 in Turkish or Greek or Italian prisions, for each rock) and made a Pan-European Cultural Universal has to be better than reconstructions using local rocks, even local non-rocks, organized and presented as a teaching venue for material culture of the European antiquity, because the latter has never displaced the former in trans-Atlantic "memory" ritualisms. Fakes and Repros lead directly from Malibu and the Getty to Anaheim and Disneyland, but the Getty is simply a different kind of Disneyland, differing only in market demographics.

But the reasons are darker then just class distinctions in European society, or the need to objectify the collection of human heads and other curios. It is there in the text of Sophocles.

ISMENE On thee, 'tis said, their sovereignty depends.

OEDIPUS So, when I cease to be, my worth begins.

The nightlands of Anglo-America are storied by Steven King, but the ghosts that rise from the deadlands are those who died since Elizabeth sent Raleigh to Virginia. Devils when alive, but quaint ephemerals when dead, twenty thousand years of Indians have no weight, they press nought upon the minds of trans-Altantic transplants who've brought their ancestral rock, their great grandfather's knucklebones. From Poe to the present, no practitioner of the literary genere of horror has attempted to style the nameless dread as Abenaki Wolves or Mohawks, ravenous ghosts eating the living. The Aphrodite of Morgantina is a giant fire plug for the Exiles of Europe. It marks their territory. It is a substitute ossuary. One that fits in a single crate. It kills the necessity to go home and ritually taste familial dust.

The thefts concealed in Europe and Asia Minor serve to conceal thefts in the Americas. Whatever J. Paul Getty's obsession was, his thefts and his endowment have been repurposed. Le Monde editorializes on the theft of Patrimonie. Being Europeans, they fail to see the motive for the crime. A New World stolen. An Old World killed.