Comment by panglott | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panglott | Hacker News Reader

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It can be grease for the wheels of appropriation, sure. And that kind of universalization can be a further cultural attack on minority peoples—saying that not even the language shared between mother and child is the legitimate domain of the people.

But archaeological remains aren't really necessarily an artifact of the culture that lives there now. Sometimes there is a continuous cultural tradition that claims them, and sometimes not. The Mississippian mounds of the midwestern US aren't an artifact of the U.S. of A., for example—they were in danger of being looted by Americans more than anything, in the 19th century certainly.

And much as an international militia for the defense of archaeological remains is a bad idea, I think the OP was talking more about ISIS blowing up the Temple of Baalshamin in Palmyra or the Taliban blowing up Buddhist statues in Afghanistan. The locals are likely descended from the people who built those structures, but we do all lose something. These religious structures were not shibboleths, but public structures into which people poured their creativity, their personality, their values, their traditions to communicate them within and beyond their community. I am not a Christian, but I am moved by the Sistine Chapel—this was Michaelangelo's goal. I am moved by the Hagia Sophia, by the Ishtar Gate.

If the Romans decide to blow up the Vatican, or the Canadians invade Missouri and carry off the artifacts of Cahokia, it's a loss to more than the residents of Rome and St. Louis. Even if (as with Palmyra &c.) it's locals who object most strongly and are the most injured.

"We" as outsiders only lose the potential of having that culture shared with us. If your co-worker wrecks his car, you haven't lost the ability to drive it. You never had it. He might have chosen to let you drive it, or he might have chosen to let you ride in it, but you haven't lost anything just because the car might have been useful to you.

Sympathy is the appropriate response. Being ready to help people defend their culture in a conflict is fine, being ready to help people preserve culture before a conflict is fine, being available to help people recover what they can after a conflict is fine, but undermining people to preserve your expectation of value (like by hiring mercenaries to secure archives in a conflict zone) is not. That is an important difference.

Culture is a consensus. It just so happens that the region of culture nearest to me values the practice of sifting through obscure, niche, or distant sub-cultures for stuff that may be temporarily adopted in isolation, yielding social status points for the discoverer and early adopters.

The destruction of cultural artifacts previously unknown by the local mainstream is thus deplored, not because it had any real intrinsic value, but because it is no longer available for someone to show off and say, "look at this cool old thing that I found, that none of you culturally ignorant heathens have ever seen before."

As N-thousand-years-old artifacts are a scarce resource, whenever some hairy barbarian burns a book that no one cares about, he deprives some hipster of a critical opportunity to gain prestige in front of their friends for about 20 minutes.

Now, some people may become upset that elements of what they perceive as their own culture are essentially being used as toys and amusements for someone else's culture, but it is an essential element of culture that it cannot be controlled in such a way that such uses could be prevented. Culture is broadcast. You put something out there, and it is either adopted and rebroadcast, or it fades into obscurity. Once it is part of the culture, it isn't fully yours any more.

There is no protection for culture. If the consensus changes the meaning of something you liked to something you don't, you just have to move on to liking something else. If someone manages to make rompers for grown men fashionable, you just suck it up and wait patiently for the fad to die. You don't have to wear one, unless you want to participate in that part of the culture. And you don't have to rescue one from a thrift shop as a cultural artifact after it goes away. If you did, it would just be some thing to stick in a museum, so future visitors could see it and giggle, say "hmmmm", or vow "never again".

Not all cultural artifacts are worthy of "saving". For all we know, those unique manuscripts that might be put to the torch when the invaders march in are someone else's cultural equivalent of a Hitler Pepe meme or a man-romper silkscreened with Kim Jong-Il's face at 500% actual size.

Just because you don't care about some old book doesn't mean that it has value to noone. One of the books found in the monastery was a thousand-year-old document written in Caucasian Albanian, for which there is no other documentation than short stone inscriptions. The Udi people speak a descendent of this language, but their language community is under severe threat. Something like this would probably be very important to a community trying to save its cultural traditions! Not to mention the historians and humanists who can often glean some amazing insights from the scanty evidence left to us by history. The last printed-out Hitler Pepe meme might be very revealing to a far-future historian trying to understand our times.

Cultural traditions are exactly those things that generation after generation of a community has seen the value of preserving.

The point is that I can't decide what other people should value culturally. And I certainly shouldn't send in mercenaries to "secure cultural artifacts".

It would be acceptable to offer to buy the ones you intend to preserve, or to donate to a museum to preserve the ones they see as important. Archaeology at gunpoint isn't good for the artifacts, isn't good for the people who had them, and isn't good for the people that take them. The best you could do in that vein would be to create a new cultural artifact featuring an adventurer-archaeologist that pilfers the important artifact you would like to preserve as the main plot MacGuffin. And to not make it about stupid crystal-skulled aliens.

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