So what happens in a liberal democracy when Australian Aborigines demand that museum curators forbid all female staff members from handling the indigenous sacred objects that are on display in Sydney, out of respect for the sexual division of the world in Aborigine society? Or when Native American Lakotas object to the desecration of a sacred site by mountain climbers and by New Age religious worshipers, and the sacred site just happens to be Devils Tower National Monument (made famous by the movie ”Close Encounters of the Third Kind”), which is located in a public park in Wyoming?
What code of cultural privacy makes sense when representatives of the Pueblo community complain that the sun symbol on the New Mexico state flag was stolen without permission from a design on a 19th-century ceramic pot made by an anonymous and unidentifiable American Indian potter? What about the disempowered forest-dwelling pygmies of Central Africa? Is there a meaningful modern sense in which they can be said to own their traditional flute music and distinctive form of yodeling, traces of which have diffused throughout the globe and can be detected in Herbie Hancock’s album ”Headhunters” and Madonna’s ”Bedtime Stories”? Should the pygmies be compensated? Why and how? What are our legal responsibilities under such circumstances? What are our moral responsibilities?
From a New York Times review in 2003 of Who Owns Native Culture? by Michael F. Brown (first mentioned by NewMexiKen two-years-ago today). Read a discussion of the Hopi-Voth controversy from the first chapter here.