reportage
Colonial plundering and illicit trafficking of cultural goods Two phases of the same problem?
D
ecolonization movements are, fortunately, in full swing. Their goal is to make visible and deconstruct the reminiscences of colonialism in our mentality, behavior, societal organization such as our standards of beauty, which tend to prefer blond and blue eyed to black and curly haired; and our social structures, which render our institutions more violent towards people with the latter traits than with the former. These traces didn't vanish when the colonial formal administrations ended after the Second World War, and they are the underlying cause of some issues we currently have. It is an everyday fight and at the same time a long term process to identify these pastpresent relations, deconstructs these paradigms and builds bit by bit a better world. In this context, and with more and more movements of countries to claim back their heritage stolen in colonial times, and also of these former colonizer countries to restitute them, one question one might ask is... What is the
24 - VOICES
connection between the colonial plundering of cultural objects in the past and the current huge problem of illicit trafficking of cultural goods? There are several points of contact between present and past reality, but this connection is not direct, of cause and consequence, nor simple, of automatic emulation today of yesterday's dynamics. The major point is that most of the source countries (from where cultural goods are taken) are countries of the global south, once colonized - Central American, African, Southeast Asian countries. And most of the market countries (to which they go) are of the global north, once colonizers - such as Europe. The source countries have a rich historical past but not a prosperous economic condition today. They are poor or developing countries, or countries at war, where before an attachment to their own history, there is a need among people to find sources of income to eat today, or to get more weapons
