These are simple things that may seem insignificant and probably won’t make anyone change their place of residence just based on their existence. But they are indicative of bigger societal differences in how people live their lives .

Commuter bikes

Biking is a popular pastime in the USA. But it’s an activity similar to jogging, power walking, or weight lifting. It’s a great way to exercise that also lets you enjoy spectacular views along scenic roads. People don’t use it to run errands, get themselves from A to B or anything practical. The result is that those who bike regularly are committed and good at it. But they are also very few. Biking is a financial investment and significant time commitment.

In Europe, people use bikes to get around in cities: run errands, take kids to kindergarten and go to work. Bikes are most commonly old, rusty and you can see them leaning onto walls or stands.  They are popular and widely used. There is no tradition of stealing them either as they are not meant to be high-performance sports wonders but loyal, reliable personal horses.

Line-drying laundry

Clotheslines are a picturesque, environmentally-friendly way to dry clothes. Not sure why they are forbidden in many US cities. I am hearing that things are changing, though, as more and more cities repel such existing laws. True, laundry that has been dried this way can catch dust and lose its shape. But there are few items I would be concerned about becoming dusty in the process of drying in each load.

News stands

Not sure how to evaluate the news stand as a social phenomenon. Maybe it’s not an efficient way to distribute news. Too much paper, too expensive? I love it though. I appreciate the possibility to glance over magazine covers to discover something I would like to hold in my hands and read. The familiar type and design of favorite newspapers. The opportunity to chat with the news stand owner and find out the latest gossip in town, which he would certainly know, since everybody is going there to get their newspaper and leave their own news behind, too.

Trains

I’ve never understood the reason why trains are not more popular in the USA. Is it the perceived lack of individual independence of movement? Yet anybody who has been stuck in traffic in an American highway knows that most people do commute in regular streams, anyway. Why not do it on a train instead of individually, sitting lonely in your car listening to traffic updates on the radio? The picture above, taken at one of the two Milan train stations is evidence that you can commute by train and be utterly fashionable at the same time.

Independent bookstores

E-book readers may have helped more people find time to read. They may be more energy-efficient, fast-access and tree-friendly. But they lack the intimacy of book-filled, book-smelling space created by tiny independent bookstores. The real (as opposed to virtual)  place where you go to find a reprieve of the everyday and a community of book lovers. I would prefer a non-acid-free-paper, yellowing book in my hand than the plastic-and-glass fragility of an e-reader.  Same is true of chain bookstores, although I would prefer having them than nothing at all. The picture above is of a bookstore founded more than a hundred years ago in a small town in Northern Italy. The town has one more independent bookstore + two chain bookstores.

Now that I am looking at these European habits I can see that they are all somehow related. They are all either tools for creating community or side effects thereof. This is ironic, as US culture consists of myriads of communities. Yet they are mobile and virtual more than spatial, physical spaces. And we need the sense of physical space community, too.

I didn’t mean this list to include only things that are regarded positively. There are lots of things common in Europe that I would rather not have. Like standing in line to pay a bill, for example. Any other ideas?

No, this is not related to Julia Child, whose culinary mystique I seem to have missed, being a transplant from a different culture on American soil. It’s about books on cooking in general, the writing of/on cooking and on the pleasure of food. Well, the concept of food is having a renaissance in the States, with cooking TV shows and even a Food Channel, cuisine stars such as Rachel Ray and Giada De Laurentis, and a proliferation of recipe books sold in bookstore that belie the trend of people actually not cooking at home.

But food is usually considered a mundane endeavor. Cooking is like cleaning – necessary for survival, but not spiritual or intellectual enough to deserve literati’s respect and popularity. Nobody reads poetry while timing the pasta and making the sauce. You have to be practical and expedient, not abstract and symbolic in that moment. I was not surprised by Lucas Green’s comment on packing books when he moved and “discovered that the cook books have been fornicating with the poetry books.” Yeah, these are usually not allowed to mix together, right?

Actually, there has been a growing and enthusiastic trend in mixing food with poetry. I am not talking just about Eat, Pray, Love, a poetic, spiritual and self-helpy book on discovering the transcendence of food. I am talking about books in the same artistic domain as films such as Babette’s Feast.

Here is a short list of such artsy-food books for those who enjoy mixing food and letters.

The matriarch of them all, of course, is Laura Esquvel’s Like Water for Chocolate, where a love affair is expressed by cooking and consumed, collectively, through eating the prepared meals. The delicious concoctions of Tina, the youngest daughter of the family and the designated cook, cause people to fall in love, run away and generally drive the action in the novel.

A World of Pies by Karen Stoltz, on the other hand, uses exploration of new recipes as a way of integration into a community. Social change makes its way into cooking; in fact, it’s expressed through cooking and its social appreciation. Roxanne, the protagonist and a Texan, learns about life and how to live it through those recipes .

And then, She Flew the Coop (Michael Lee West) takes us to third food-centric territory, Louisiana. Preoccupation with food, again the driving force behind life’s events, is much darker, maybe because the author is a man. For example, see the possibility that what one consumes might be poisonous, which happens to one characters. Recipes are a way to explain one’s actions and motivations, a way to communicate and secure ties with the community, and to establish credibility.

And there are many more cooking and recipe novels… Feel free to add more.

In literary criticism, cooking and food are fashionable now, too. There is a myriad of articles interpreting the meaning of food in novels.  Medievalists take up medieval cooking practices and publish cookbook manuscripts with recipes that are probably impossible to make today. See, even I wrote a post on how recipe research is similar to textual criticism!

Stanley Fish’s column in the New York Times is probably the most prominent place where the world meets academia. After all, the world hardly reads The Chronicle of Higher Education and it’s sad these issues are otherwise largely ignored, beyond the annual college admission campaign. Getting into college seems to be extremely important, but the question of what college should actually be, now that is a conversation that that rarely happens. And it should.

Fish’s latest post is related to this existential topic, What Should College Teach? The answer to this lies in the inherent value we assign to higher education in general. It depends whether society expects it to produce independent minds  (liberal arts education) or provide practical skills (professional training).  With the trend going in the direction of practical skills and the growing popularity of majors such as accounting, it’s heartening to see that literature and foreign languages  are part of the obligatory mind-cultivation process that college is.

What kind of literature courses are the indispensable ones, though? Surveys covering an esteemed canon of  “Great Books”? Single authors, such as Shakespeare or Cervantes? Outside-of-the-cannon, but at least ones covering a specific chronology or diversity of genre? Topic-based courses?

Although he is flexible in this choice of core courses in literature, Fish seems to favors more specific courses at the expense of surveys. Writing, too. Actually, the poor teaching of writing itself is the crux of his post. But the inherent value of teaching literature is what interests me here. And what kind of teaching and learning (topics, approach, structure, etc) would help it fulfill the expectations of college education, such as acquiring critical thinking abilities and intellectual independence.

There are trends in teaching literature in college, too. Currently, the tide has gone from chronological and nation-specific surveys (say, medieval English literature) to specific trans-national topics (say, death and renewal in colonial culture) or non-canonical genres and authors (namely, Bob Dylan’s poetry or pamphlets and public rhetoric of the French Revolution).

These generational changes in interest and focus in the teaching of literature are understandable and welcome. And they have always taken place. They provide the necessary attention to neglected area of intellectual inquiry. And they also teach us new ways to see the world. But are they adequate in fulfilling their broader educational mission?

Some professors think that specific courses, say, those dedicated to a single author, give more time and chance to discuss details and understand texts and, as a consequence, develop multidimensional critical thinking on a subject matter. With their interest in non-canonical texts, they give the opportunity to think out of the box.

However, to shatter stereotypes you need to have them in the first place. Unfortunately, undergraduate students often don’t have  the canonical even if stereotypical basic knowledge college is supposed to build on, or shatter. Also, some professors who maintain that broad surveys may not afford the chance to delve into texts, but they help students develop a basic sense of orientation within intellectual history. They give an empowering overview of the broader context of culture. They are important in terms of the skills they can teach, not just the information they impart.

In an ideal world, I would require both kinds of courses.

Speaking of fashion, I didn’t delve into the question whether style is really a personal expression of self identity or just a convention, a formula offered by society and used by an individual in one combination of elements or another. Is an individual ever free, after all, to use any piece of clothing in her or his own terms to express her or his own identity? If I think that a tea gown expresses my personality best of all, am I free to wear it for an evening out without any repercussions?

No. Fashion, if not a mandatory convention, is at least a vocabulary where clothing pieces are words with their own meaning which we can’t disregard in communication. I can’t use a certain kind of dress just because it corresponds to my internal inklings if I disregard its meaning to everyone else and expect those around me to interpret it in my way.

But still, there is a garment that is probably the most liberated and plastic, in terms of meaning and use. The T-shirt! I would call it probably the most democratic and individualistic fashion tool I know. Unless you point out another one that I may be neglecting.

First, a look at its history. It may have started as an undergarment for sailors named singlet in the early XIX century – think graphic white-and-blue stripes and sea-related romance.Bbut now it is predominantly an outer-garment, apparently because of Hollywood macho-image influences. It seems it first got its prints in the 40s, with a political campaign. Here is a brief history.

What is important is that this garment turned out to be so simple that it was possible to turn it into a blank canvass and from there, into a powerful tool for self-expression. Everyone can use this tool in a concretely individual way. And that use is not realized by a passive decision-making as of what shirt to buy among what is already available.  It is a tool that can be used actively to symbolically forge according to a personal taste: you can make the t-shirt yourself. But unlike clothes that you knit or sew yourself, a t-shirt in its physical form is already there and is not part of the identity-creation process.

This easiness and flexibility of using a t-shirt as an identity tool is possible because the most important part of a t-shirt is not just its fabric, although it helps if it is durable. Its shape is almost always a constant, so it is not a tool to create meaning itself either. But the letters, images and signs on it are. They are the meaning-creating tool that gives power to the t-shirt.

Think about the countless ways they can be used. They express allegiance to a rock band. Mark the members of a family-reunion party or a group of field-tripping schoolkids, for identification or pride-boosting purposes. Publicize a political opinion or a charitable cause.  Just go to a t-shirt printing website or visit a printing stand at a mall and you can start expressing yourself verbally in a unique way.

T-shirts are probably the most versatile token of globalization. They are popular in all cultures at this point, their spread facilitated by global tourism, low cost and pop-culture influences. They are worn by people of all ages, from babies to old folks and from hippies to commercial brand logo snobs. They are the most convenient tourist souvenir, both to buy from a specific city (like “My parents went to Chicago and all they brought me was this t-shirt”) and to give to local hosts.

The advantages of t-shirts compared to hand-held signs, tattoos or bumper stickers as identifiers? You can take it off at any time and so vary the image you are projecting to express a multifaceted persona. You can wear it, on your torso at that, thus symbolically associating your persona with the message on it. The identity it projects becomes a second skin which is much more difficult to be separated from the person wearing it.

The disadvantages? You can’t wear an old t-shirt you’ve grabbed from your dresser without considering the message it conveys and its appropriateness for what you’ll be doing. You can’t wear a political t-shirt when you teach. You can’t wear one of those dirty-joke t-shirts when you are visiting your grandmother in the hospital.

I love how the concept of the t-shirt fits Baudrillard’s ideas on simulacra. But… more on that some other time.

I love browsing through fashion advice books, but it’s always out of curiosity. I like to see a different interpretation of what women should look like – and how that changes through time . I never follow the advice contained in those books because I forget the specificities. And they are so different in every book.  I just enjoy the visual imagery and the interpretation  of the role of women in society expressed through that advice: do they have to make themselves attractive, do they have to learn to  be practical or conform to some rigit etiquette?

I never thought such a book would be liberating, feminist or useful for me, for what it is worth. After all, they all imply that women undeniably have to change something about themselves or to adhere to rules on how to conceal problems and boost merits. That’s hardly liberating. It is more a constriction than freedom, just as a sculptor friend of mine expressed it through her metal corset creations.

But this book was a revelation. Instead of compiling a list of rules to follow in order to have style, it is a case study of 12 real women who are reinventing their style with the assistance of designer Mizrahi. Still, it’s a conceptual book. Mizrahi starts with the advice for women to define an ideology for themselves in terms of their self image, which they would want to present to the world. Because, instead of the trite notion that women should dress for themselves, he proposes the idea that they should dress, if not exactly for the world around them, then according to the message they would want to send to the community they live in through their cloting. That ideology, embodied in a self-image, will be then the guiding principle  in choosing their style and specific clothing.

For that reason, the book is inspirational. In fact, the first step in discovering one’s own style is the inspirational board, a space in which women display photos, mementos and images related to their cherished memories, moments of happiness, favorite objects (not necessarily related to fashion), inspiring paintings and visual art, words of wisdom and treasure-box ephemera. It is the self discovery necessary for defining one’s own image personality.

Based on that collection of images and inspirational ideas, Mizrahi then proceeds to offer women real-world looks, clothes and accessories that would be faithful to each one’s personality and “self-image ideology”. Instead of restricting women within some canned advice, he encourages them to experiment, to be bold and regard clothes as works of art, not as consumer goods.

But if women have to see themselves as art collectors, that does not imply that they have to buy expensive designer numbers; it actually implies that clothes are not regarded as one-season items to be constantly bought and discarded; it means that even old clothes deserve appreciation and care. There are no wrong clothes for any body type: if a woman feels something does not sit well on her, it’s because it sends a statement she does not believe in.

Ironically, How to Have Style is not a book everyone should keep on their dresser. It’s not a reference book to be consulted before going out. It’s an empowering insight. It’s about women paying attention to themselves and loving themselves while asserting their personae. It’s a reminder that they control the message they send through their clothing, which in reality is self expression outside of the convention and what we know as fashion.

As I stopped by Leo’s workplace the other day, I noticed that almost 30% of the cars in the parking lot bore vanity license plates. That struck me as unusual – I think that among the general car population, vanity plates don’t exceed 5%. Are those car owners identity-challenged or, on the contrary, have especially loud identities? Who would want their license plate number to be so easy to remember while they are driving around committing traffic violations? And so badly that they would pay an annual fee for that? Fort Worth Renaissance Lady Sonja Cassella made me think about this issue. I started a little qualitative research.

Of course, cars are not just a means of transportation, as we know all too well; they are a way to exhibit personality and construct an identity. There are macho cars, feminine cars and even lesbian cars. Ethnic, social and regional diversity, too: there are Chinese ladies minivans, Russian mafia sports cars and Texan farmer trucks.

But the identity-building does not stop there. After you get your blank canvass, the new car, you still have to personalize it further through decoration: you state political positions or boast wisdom through bumper stickers; display your religious status through steel emblems like fish or two-legged creatures; borrow some prestige through your school affiliation decal.

And after that, you are free to give your self-creation a title: the license plate. You either agree to the random number assigned to you by the local Department of Public Safety or exercise your right to self-determination. If you choose the first, you acquiesce to the faceless, anonymous combination of digits and letters Lady Luck has given you. If you are prone to self-analysis, you maybe try to to decipher her message to you through searching for symbolism in the sequence on the license plate. You agree to be just a number on the streets and highways of this land. But if you are too proud to let fate define you, you pay the fee for what is rather unjustly called a “vanity” plate. But since when is self-determination called vanity? Isn’t the right to identity guaranteed in the Constitution?

That may be true, but it depends whether you see your car as an extension of your self and, as a consequence, of your identity. If so, then you are right to claim your license plate independence. People like that “wear” their cars while they drive them; the car is the visible outer shell wrapping their bodies that presents them to the world. Those who don’t see themselves umbilically connected to their cars don’t delegate their personal identification to it while on the road. They see themselves as simply located within their cars and distinct from them, not clothed in them.

Let’s see the data I gathered through casual observation. People are more likely to have a vanity plate for their cars if they:

are male
also own a motorcycle
work for a machine manufacturer and are machine-savvy
car is exotic, expensive or flamboyant

These are all features indicating a strong human-vehicle bond, in which the car owner takes a loving care of the car and has chosen it for the emotions he (or she!) derives from it. This confirms my hypothesis that vanity license plates are an indication of a self-image in which the car plays a particularly strong role, rather than just being a label for the existing self-image.

Still, many questions remain and must be the topic of further research. Is vanity plate use related to extrovert personality or to insecurity and fear to be left out with no voice? One would think that boisterous, exuberant people are more prone to asserting their personality in multiple ways, including vanity plates. However, it could also be that they don’t feel their other social interactions helpful enough for their personality be noticed, hence the need to compensate for the insufficiency.

Here are two more vanity plates – they are interesting, but don’t conform to the conclusions of my study. I am not worried, though, because they belong to vanity show cars, not “real” ones  And here is a more complete list of license plate curiosities.

The Air France plane which disappeared over the Atlantic last month is horrible, but our collective anxiety over its fate made me thinking. And while everyone is puzzled by the disappearance, the plight of the relatives of those on board is especially difficult. They want, they need to know what happened to their loved ones, even though they know there is no hope for them to be still alive.

And in fact, this is a need shared by all. We need closure of the narrative of someone’s life. A father would grief even more if his soldier son’s body is not retrieved from the battlefield. The family of a child who vanished without trace would suffer more because of the uncertainty than if they knew for sure he is dead.

The same is valid for fictional stories we read. Closure is not just a mandatory element of a novel’s plot. It’s the feeling of finality that the conclusion gives to events, the answer to all questions and problems  posed by the story. It’s like Cinderella’s marriage to the prince as an answer to her suffering or Anna Karenina’s suicide as an answer to her impossible love. When we read a book, watch a movie or learn news, we give special weight to the last events a sequence and understand its meaning through them, for example, the career of a politician. Whatever events become prominent enough (or are publicized loud enough) to become the final part of the imaginary plot of his or her career, they will become the prism through which it will be judged.

Even though some stories have an open ended conclusion, it doesn’t bother us if it there is still an implied ending we can imagine. Or, rather, that implied closure is our hope and projection of how things should work in a certain set of circumstances. But if circumstances in a story belong to incompatible universes, our projections collide, as in a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. If it is a fairy tale, we know it’s not real, but we also know its internal laws and an unexpected end wouldn’t disturb us. But if real and impossible mix together, we are left to suffer just as after watching The Swimming Pool (2003) or The Moustache (2005).

And isn’t religion the ultimate means of providing closure to people’s lives and their meaning? Their stories won’t conclude inexpectedly or in a wrong way; they would continue with a transcendental conclusion.

I often ask my students, when teaching on the topic of culture, if, in their opinion, paella started originally as a dish of the poor or the rich. Having seen paella as one of the most expensive options on the menus of expensive restaurants, they usually say that paella must have been an invention for the table of the wealthy. After all, shrimp and clams, mandatory for paella, are deluxe ingredients.

But not when the dish was first created. Fish and seafood in general was cheap food, since it didn’t need land to be farmed. It grew free and plentiful, with just labor necessary to be harvested – and that was cheap. In fact, paella is based on the concept of “small pieces of different meats and veggies, combined with rice”, which in practice means “any kind of meat, mixed together in rice”:  the perfect way to use leftovers. In most cases, paella was the Spanish casserole in which leftovers from yesterday or from the master’s table were put together to make a hearty meal.

This is the concept of cucina povera, “cooking of the poor” or “peasant cooking”, which does not mean fast food, but rather a creative way to use seasonal, local, simple and available ingredients for a satisfying, versatile dish. Today, cucina povera is almost synonymous with chic cuisine, yet it is anything but chic. It is the opposite of opening a fancy cook book to select a recipe and then go buy the exotic ingredients. Those recipes are perhaps accurate, but not the idea and culture behind them: use (up) what you have in your everyday pantry and garden, including leftovers, and use it simply so that its subtle flavors may be appreciated without the need to be boosted with salt or grease.

How did we arrive at the phenomenon of expensive shrimp? Crustaceans, while cheap where they are common (the warm seas), have always been very expensive in colder climates. In those culture, they have been available to the wealthy only and have come to be associated with luxury. After societies in colder climates became relatively wealthier, they were able to follow the signs of prestige of their reference groups and the demand for shrimp rose. That lead to overharvesting and subsequent rise in prices.

However, anyone with a substantial restaurant experience in any industrialized country has noticed that shrimp has become more accessible in more restaurants these days. It could be found on the menu of dining places of mid and low caliber. And not just shrimp, but also other foods considered expensive or deluxe until recently, including meat in general. How come?

It has to do with how luxury works. It is a term associated with high quality, which may be true even if its subjectivity is taken into account. However, luxury is closer to the notion of prestige, status symbol and excess. Luxury is not a necessity, but an extra value. If you have more money, you won’t start buying more shampoo, for example.  You may buy a more expensive brand of shampoo, but the difference won’t be comparatively significant. You may start buying more (expensive) clothes, shoes, jewelry and similar.

When the mechanism of luxury is applied to food, it creates some interesting phenomena. On one hand, some food items are expensive for different reasons – costly or difficult production, distance, scarcity. While most of them have their own legitimate value as food, their high cost oftentimes contributes to their status of prestige and luxury and hence higher desirability.  When this is the case, food producers can bet that if they find a way to produce those items at a lower cost and sell them cheaper, they will be more likely to sell in higher quantities rather than food items normally considered a necessity.

This is what happens with shrimp – relatively higher wealth in society, coupled with industrialized (though environmentally destructive)  farming techniques and more nimble global transportation has led to the lower cost and  ubiquitous presence of shrimp in restaurants, as well as to the general overconsumption of meat and sweets and larger meal portions.

Luxurification of food works in other ways, too. While luxury food in the past may have been just food that was difficult to produce or find, or something intrinsically distinctive or symbolic, today, in a society where most food is increasingly accessible and available, efforts are in the other direction: necessity and even everyday food is made to be luxury. The result is a hamburger for $5000 (made of Kobe beef and truffles), world’s most expensive coffee and bagel.

I would call this secondary luxurification, or nouveau riche luxurification, in which people are not acquiring new habits and taking on new products, but rather elevating certain items of their own milieu to a new status of luxury. I am not sure how this kind of luxury will work as a means of distinction. While for example escargot is immediately recognizable as a status symbol for those consuming it, a luxury hamburger needs further specification if it needs to be recognized as such for the benefit of its wealthy consumers.

Maybe this is the democratization of luxury James B. Twitchell is talking about.

Speaking of museums, here is the new Night at the Museum story. I was curious to see it. First, a movie about history coming alive – or actually being alive – is a great idea. It’s stimulating for the young minds and it deserves support just for that. Second, I was also interested in it as a postmodern application of the concept that the past is constantly rethought and reworked in people’s minds. It’s also a fantastic example of what I said in my previous post: that museum artifacts are important in themselves as symbolic carriers of traditions, but what ultimately counts is what we make out of them and how they play out in our public consciousness.

However, if you want to find some special insight on history, or even something fun about it, this is definitely not the movie to see. Artifacts do come alive in this night at the Smithsonian, but they behave as their most stereotypical and one-dimension selves. Napoleon is only worried that others might think he is short. Tiny mass-produced Einsteins in the museum store are bouncing their heads in relativistic yes-no indecision. Worst of all – and most offensive – Amelia Earhart is a flirty red-head whose fixation is mainly to get the protagonist night guard to pay any sort of romantic attention to her.

At least, a discerning adult audience might want to enjoy a play-out of a potential rearrangement of history. Even if characters are stereotypical, one might be curious to see how a stereotypical Ivan the Terrible would possibly interact with Napoleon and what outcome would that potentially produce. Would catastrophes be avoided in different settings and circumstances? Would terrible figures act differently? What new would we learn from that interaction and reconsideration?

Turns out, nothing. And unfortunately, it’s not just nothing creative or new; it’s nothing at all. In its creative rearrangement of historical material, the film is not even a useful illustration of historical events for the benefit of kids studying them in school. I would give it the benefit of doubt if at least it gave us back something relevant. But conflicts are symbolically resolved through the usual fights. Their creative lack of sense is aptly represented by the mindless face slaps inflicted by all indiscriminately, even among friends: protagonist to his capuchin monkey pals and vice versa, and then even by his romantic interest, Amelia.

In the end, kids who don’t know anything about Napoleon or Octavius would never understand why they are fighting and, in fact, why Octavius or General Custer happen to be on the side of the goodies and Napoleon or Ivan the Terrible on the side of the baddies. Neither would adults. They would just have to take the film for what it is – a plain action movie in which the most fun is brought to you by the joy of just, well, fighting. That’s history to you and it’s supposed to make going to the museum and learning something there enjoyable. Famous women live for a kiss and scientists, mass-produced plaything, don’t count in the fight but are the first ones to give out the secret to help the enemy.

If you pay attention to the info notes at an archeology museum, you’d notice most items were acquired before 1970s. After the UNESCO Convention on Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import and Export of  Cultural Property of 1970, ancient treasures have rarely crossed borders to become part of the permanent collections of world museums.

It seems like a great thing. After all, isn’t it disturbing that the most important museums in the world are venerable institutions founded around the time their countries were significant colonial powers. Their roles, beyond geopolitical conquering, was to rescue ancient treasures of civilizations past from their ancestral lands, where they weren’t appreciated enough, to the metropolis of the current cultural dominant.

The concept of museums was invented in the Enlightenment and developed during the Romanticism. While previously just erudites collected ancient artifacts privately, now collections were public. There was a specific ideology behind museums. They played a role in colonialism’s conscious drive to take on the baton from ancient civilizations. Conquering a land included also the intellectual conquest of its discovery for humankind.

On the other hand, museums also played a role in the consolidation of the nation-state, where the ancient roots of each country fortified the arguments for national liberation and independence.

This created tension. Do treasures have to go to world museum centers, where they would be properly catalogued and studied, or stay in the very land they were discovered, because they were part of the heritage of the local people who had a right to them? Was the scientific argument also an argument for plundering the dignity of dependent nations, just as their natural resources were under threat?

Well, the UNESCO Convention sought to prevent plundering of cultural heritage. But recent cases of disputes over ownership and custody of artifacts serve as reminder of the old tension. Two years ago, Yale agreed to return objects taken from Machu Picchu over a hundred years ago. Egypt recently demanded the return of the famous bust of Nefertiti, taken to Germany in 1912.

It turns out, though, that this bust contention is a perfect example of the role of museums in globalization of cultural heritage. Yes, it was taken to Germany when Egypt was part of the waning Ottoman Empire, with hardly a voice in the decision regarding what would soon become one of its cultural symbols. Apparently, however, this bust was a fake. It was created on commission by Ludwig Borchardt, the archaeologist who was conducting the digs, to test ancient pigments on a statue. But as a Prussian prince admired the work as an original ancient work, he “couldn’t sum up the courage to ridicule” his guest. So the image went on to become one of the most famous examples of Ancient Egypt and its civilization worldwide.

It is ironic and highly significant that the return of that very bust was demanded at the same time the truth behind its origin was revealed. Yes, scholars from colonial powers have taken countless artifacts to universities and museums to study them and to display them, distancing them from the very people among whom they were found. But the attention toward the precious objects also brought respect toward the ancient cultures that produced them. In more recent days, that also brought tourism and cultural interest in those countries and in the people who perhaps inherited the ancient traditions. Nefertiti’s bust was a fake, and it has been in Germany for the last hundred years, but it served as a fascinating symbol of a powerful empire, thus creating a world interest in Egypt during that time.

The UNESCO Convention was an instrument of fairness at a dynamic moment of anti-colonial movement worldwide. But it is not necessarily a clear-cut instrument contributing to awareness of less-known cultures, access to cultural heritage for those people who have the ancestral right to it or even preservation of that heritage. Even if artifacts found in contemporary Peruvian lands go back from Yale to Peru, they probably will stay in the capital city instead of going to the Andes. They will be less accessible to the public and admired just by a fraction of the crowds who can see them now. And how do we know who are the rightful owners of ancient traditions of peoples long disappeared? What if those peoples and their lands don’t conform to today’s national boundaries? Do we separate the collection between Peru and Bolivia? How? Who has the property rights of them, actually?

Except when they have been victims of the illegal digs of treasure-hunters, the UNESCO Convention is not the right way to preserve ancient treasures. It just perpetuates the nationalism of cultural heritage.