Trafficking Culture

Brown Bag Lecture - Please Bring a Lunch!

Trafficking Culture: Researching the Global Traffic in Looted Cultural Objects

Simon Mackenzie, Neil Brodie, & Donna Yates, University of Glasgow

This talk will introduce some of the work of a research project called Trafficking Culture, funded by the European Research Council. The project aims to produce an evidence-based picture of the contemporary global trade in looted cultural objects. It has five researchers active presently, and another five PhD projects. The lecture will focus on three studies within the overall project work. First, Neil Brodie will talk about the general issues involved in the study of looting and trafficking of cultural objects, and outline some preliminary findings of his quantitative work which uses public sales data to answer key questions about the market, such as what are the effects of particular regulatory interventions or other contextual factors which might influence market activity. Then we will move from the quantitative work of the project to two of the qualitative studies.

Donna Yates will report on her recent field research in Belize; an exploratory investigation into the extent and nature of looting there, the trafficking networks that the looters supply, and the rumoured links between those trafficking networks in cultural property and other illegal cross-border smuggling activities. Simon Mackenzie will then give an account of another regional field project, which used interview and archival methods to research the traffic of Khmer statues out of Cambodia and onwards to the international market. Several major statues have recently been returned to Phnom Penh from museums and collectors around the world, as evidence from a number of sources has emerged of the widespread plunder of temple sites during the years of conflict suffered by Cambodia from the early 1970s.

For more information about these studies, and the other work of the project, see http://traffickingculture.org/