Orientalist "cultural chauvinism and blackmail"

There is nothing" Innocent" about Museums. There is no Innocence  about the  Objects in them, either.
 There never was.  Like Orhan Pamuk's book and his Museum in Istanbul, they are powerful fiction.

Museums were  largely colonial constructs imaging Imperialism at its peak. Imaging its imaginings of Power. They were about Plunder that imperial and colonial  power enabled. They were, and are, about cultural Power.  Power that the Plundered are now asserting by reclaiming what was stolen from them.
They are reclaiming the right to tell their own stories. Interpret their own images of  their past.

I find the tone of the German reaction  to the latest cultural war, fascinating . Accusations of "cultural chauvinism and blackmail" by Turkey are so   Orientalist.

 I am fascinated too, by the  slant of the  Guardian article itself.  There is a lot here to think about. The Right that the West and it's cultural institutions think they have over the heritage an the stories of Others , for example. The controlling of the telling creates loaded Histories

Turkey has been accused of cultural chauvinism and attempting to blackmail some of the world's most important museums in the wake of its demands for the return of thousands of archaeological treasures.

According to cultural chiefs in Berlin, Paris and New York, Turkey has threatened to bar foreign archaeologists from excavation sites in the country by not renewing their digging permits if governments refuse to return artefacts that Ankara says were unlawfully removed from Turkish soil. It has also threatened to halt the lending of its treasures to foreign museums, they say.

Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin, which among other collections oversees the city's Pergamon Museum, has accused Turkey of "playing a nasty game of politics" and of "threatening the future" of scientific work and other collaborations.

"The Turks are engaging in a rather aggressive style of politics," he said. "They are trying to blackmail us and others by pushing foreign archaeologists out.

Ankara says it only wants back what rightfully belongs to Turkey. Ertugrul Gunay, culture and tourism minister, said 4,067 artefacts were returned from 2002 to 2012. He said Ankara's demands coincided with a new-found pride in the country's cultural heritage.

"Our museum inventory is now on a par with that of European museums," he said recently.

"The times when we simply exhibited artefacts in cupboards is over. We have caught up … what we have taken back is only a very small part of what we will take back." He added that over the past five years, Turkey had "spent more on history" than any other European country.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/21/turkey-cultural-war-archaeological-treasure