Why museums are returning cultural treasures | Chip Colwell

TED Talks Daily

TED

Creativity, Business, Design, Inspiration, Society & Culture, Science, Technology, Education, Tech Demo, Ted Talks, Ted, Entertainment, Tedtalks

4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 September 2018

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Archaeologist and curator Chip Colwell collects artifacts for his museum, but he also returns them to where they came from. In a thought-provoking talk, he shares how some museums are confronting their legacies of stealing spiritual objects and pillaging ancient graves -- and how they're bridging divides with communities who are demanding the return of their cultural treasures.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This TED Talk features anthropologist Chip Caldwell recorded live at TEDx Mile High 2017.
0:09.0	A confession. I am an archaeologist and a museum curator, but a paradoxical one. For my museum, I collect things, but I also return things back to where they came from.
0:23.9	I love museums because they're social and educational,
0:28.6	but I'm most drawn to them because of the magic of objects.
0:33.2	A one million-year-old hand axe, a totem pole,
0:37.3	an impressionist painting,
0:38.7	all take us beyond our own imaginations.
0:42.6	In museums, we pause to muse,
0:45.5	to gaze upon our human empire of things in meditation and wonder.
0:52.7	I understand why US museums alone host more than 850 million visits each year.
1:00.4	Yet in recent years, museums have become a battleground.
1:05.0	Communities around the world don't want to see their culture in distant institutions
1:09.5	which they have no control over. They want to see
1:12.9	their cultural treasures repatriated, returned to their places of origin. Greece seeks the return of
1:20.8	the Parthenon marbles, a collection of classical sculptures held by the British Museum. Egypt demands antiquities from Germany.
1:30.3	New Zealand's Maori want to see returned
1:33.3	ancestral tattooed heads from museums everywhere.
1:38.3	Yet these claims pale in comparison to those made by Native Americans.
1:43.3	Already, U.S. museums have returned more
1:46.4	than one million artifacts and 50,000 sets of Native American skeletons. To illustrate what's at
1:55.3	stake, let's start with the war gods. This is a wood carving made by members of the Zuni tribe
2:02.8	in New Mexico.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from TED, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of TED and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.