The Penn Cultural Heritage Center:

"Transcending Place and Provenance? Cosmopolitanism, National Identity, and Cultural Property."

Speaker: Dr. Craig Calhoun, Social Science Research Council

Craig Calhoun will discuss his research on cultural heritage and cosmopolitanism, the role of the universal museum, social theory and politics, and on the social sciences themselves.

Debates over whether antiquities, art works, and other forms of cultural property should be "repatriated" have become a key arena in which claims made on behalf of nations and a cosmopolitan global elite contend.  Discussion turns sometimes on provenance and the roles of dealers, thieves, collectors, museum acquisitions departments and previous colonial governments and adventurers. Museums are asked to return works of dubious provenance; nations are understood to be the units of local "belonging" to which the restoration should made. National claims are sometimes given provisional recognition only to be rebutted on the grounds that national institutions are inadequate to care for cultural goods of cosmopolitan value. On each side of the discussion concepts are deployed as though neutral and obvious which on examination reveal numerous tensions and ambiguities. Are contemporary nations the "places" from which older cultural products come and therefore belong? Is the putative placeless universality of cosmopolitan claims only a mask over claims on behalf of other specific places? Are cosmopolitan standards ever free from entanglement in financial interests, unequal positions in the modern world-system, and class inequality? How do these debates relate to those over different strategies for collecting and presenting cultural goods: as decontextualized art works, in their ethnographic contexts, in a putative historical development, or in a global panopticon? In this talk Dr. Calhoun will approach these questions neither from the perspective of law nor that of museum management but rather to consider how this debate may is informed by, and may in turn inform, more general questions about cosmopolitanism and belonging, claims for the universal and for particular sites and social  relations.