More on Bangladesh and the Mus ée Guimet

[mkapstei at UCHICAGO.EDU]

Tony's remarks in response to my post are illuminating.
The Bangladeshi perspective has been almost entirely
absent from the information that I have been able to 
access here in Paris.

A few random thoughts:
While there is perhaps a certain absurdity in the
notion that an institution like the Musée Guimet
might copy borrowed works and then return the copies
to the owner, keeping the originals, the plausibility 
of such fears surely stems in no small part from the
real-life shenanigans afflicting the current art market.
The recent profile, in the New Yorker magazine, of the
Getty's former curator Marion True, provides a disconcerting
vision of the dystopic realm of Western classical 
antiquities, and, as we know, the current pillage of
art is even worse elsewhere. This past autumn my wife and
I travelled in Sichuan, China, where we had last visited
in 2004, and were appalled to learn of the pace at
which sculpted Tang-period Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and Taoist 
immortals are being decapitated, to fulfil an apparently
insatiable craving, in China and elsewhere, for a pretty
piece of stone for the mantlepiece.

China, however, clearly recognizes the value of its
antiquities in relation to cultural diplomacy, so that
despite the on-going looting of artifacts, the Chinese
have nevertheless seen fit to collaborate with Western
institutions in order to bring some of their treasures
to world attention. South Asia generally, and perhaps
Bangladesh in particular, seems not yet to have worked
out as clear a sense of the value of their heritage in terms 
of their profile in the world.

Matthew T. Kapstein
Numata Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies
The University of Chicago Divinity School

Directeur d'études
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris