When the Nashville Scene held its first annual “You Are So Nashville If” contest in 1989, the winning entry read, “You think our Parthenon is better because the other one fell apart.”
The winners of the news weekly’s long-running contest unfailingly distill the zeitgeist of the city, but I still think about this one every time I pass the Parthenon. It winks at the absurdity of finding an exact, full-size replica of an ancient Athenian temple in a Nashville city park while simultaneously acknowledging the breathtaking grandeur of the building.
By the mid-19th century, Nashville had come to be known as the Athens of the South, a reference to the city’s uncommonly high number of colleges and universities. The real Parthenon was built in the fifth century B.C. as a temple to Athena, the patron goddess of Athens. Our Parthenon was built in 1897 as a temporary exhibition space in connection with Tennessee’s centennial celebration.
It is now a museum and still stands in Centennial Park, surrounded by 132 acres of gardens and other public spaces. Like the original Parthenon, Nashville’s Parthenon tells the world something about how the city sees itself, how it hopes to be understood, the truths it values most.
In keeping with that tradition, officials at Nashville’s Parthenon have just announced that the museum will be returning its collection of pre-Columbian artifacts to Mexico. This decision by a tiny local museum offers an illustration of the practical, moral and ethical issues that much larger museums, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum and the British Museum in London, are wrestling with as they consider what to do about the works in their collections that were looted from other cultures.
The 248 pre-Columbian works came to the Parthenon by way of donations from two private collectors during the 1960s and ’70s. The artifacts include tools, musical instruments, ceramic pots, effigies and animal sculptures (including one very charming Mexican hairless dog).
A representative sampling has been on public display since April 18 in an exhibition titled “Repatriation and Its Impact.” After the show closes on July 14, the entire collection will be delivered to the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City.
I walked through the exhibition with Bonnie Seymour, an assistant curator who joined the museum staff two years ago. The necessity of addressing the ethical implications of this collection became clear on her very first day in the new job. She recalls pausing at the pre-Columbian antiquities while touring the museum’s art in storage and thinking, “Well, this is not where they should be.”
With artworks collected before the ethical standards followed by today’s collectors existed, the question of where antiquities belong is often charged. “Each case of repatriation is different,” Ms. Seymour takes care to point out.
When a work’s provenance isn’t clear, or when documentation of its legal purchase is missing, or when it is beloved by museum visitors, or when the decision is politically fraught, or when the work has cultural significance far beyond the place of origin, or when the museum has been prevented by local law from repatriating the work — all of these circumstances, and others, can make what might seem like a straightforward question far more complicated.
For quite a few of these reasons, the British Museum is grappling with the question of what to do about a group of friezes and life-size statues, long referred to as the Elgin Marbles, that were removed from the Athenian Parthenon in the late 18th and early 19th centuries at the behest of Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin. Athens was part of the Ottoman Empire at the time, and the earl served as Britain’s ambassador to it. By then, the ancient Parthenon had been severely damaged by wars.
As Rebecca Mead wrote in a detailed piece for The New Yorker, the ambassador helped himself to the Parthenon Sculptures, as they are now called, with the tacit permission of Turkish authorities. In 1816, he sold the sculptures to the British Museum. Soon after Greece gained its independence, it started asking for the Parthenon Sculptures to be returned. It’s been asking ever since.
The question of repatriating the pre-Columbian artifacts, by contrast, was much easier for officials at Nashville’s Parthenon to decide. Many of the antiquities were known to have been excavated without the permission of Mexican officials. They were unrelated to the museum’s actual mission. They were not on display and had no sentimental value to Nashvillians. The museum’s ethical obligation to these artworks made by the people of another culture, and to the people whose history they emerged from, was clear and uncomplicated…
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