An-aromantic-romantic - Tumblr Blog

Rogue's so relatable for this

god forbid 5000 year old girls do anything

I’m using ao3 the way god intended: via 36 open semi-abandoned tabs on my phone at 2 AM the night before work

the acolyte did stay true to star wars in the purest way possible by incorporating multiple powerpoint style transitions

confusing Odysseus and Orpheus is like confusing a liar and a lyre. send post

i have this disease called i will open your message and get distracted and forget to reply and then the notification will be gone so i will not have replied for ages and you will think i am ignoring you but. i am not. it’s incurable

honestly tho that scene in the incredibles where mr. incredible sees the names of all the old super heroes that used to be his friends / that he knew from Back in the Day and how every one of them has been killed by syndrome is such a chilling scene for so many reasons 

like for one, everyone he knew is dead at this point and has been killed on the same island he’s at now and two, its heartbreaking bc that means that almost every hero wanted to try out being a hero again despite the laws against it and wanted to try and help someone out and relive their glory days, only to be straight up murdered like fuck that scene is just so fuckin intense

Appreciation post with every single Taylor Room I've done so far! 💛💜❤️🩵🩷🩶🤎💙🤍

The Taylor Swift Room and the Reputation Room won't be done until we have their Taylor's Version re-release (it would only be fair!).

remember your life doesn't end at 20. dante alighieri got exiled from florence at 36! you still have time <3

Monet was so right to be obsessed with flowers

Sorrow

Source: †

I am looking neither respectfully nor disrespectfully. I gaze without recognition of your form, and without understanding.

Women want one thing and it's quite obvious, A large affordable interconnected North American Rail Network

Drew a tiny mouse today 🌿

I love you people going into "useless" fields I love you classics majors I love you cultural studies majors I love you comparative literature majors I love you film studies majors I love you near eastern religions majors I love you Greek, Latin, and Hebrew majors I love you ethnic studies I love you people going into any and all small field that isn't considered lucrative in our rotting capitalist society please never stop keeping the sacred flame of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and understanding humanity and not merely for the sake of money alive

“Nobody’s going to want to sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours to get from New York City to LA.”

Me. I will sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours. I’ll sit on it for days. I’ll write and read and nap and eat and then do it all over again. I’ll stare out the windows and see America from ground level and not have to drive. I’ll see the Rockies and the deserts and cornfields and the Mississippi River and your house and yours and yours too. I’ll make up stories in my head about the small towns I see as we go along. I’ll see the states I’ve yet to see because driving or flying there is a fucking slog and expensive to boot. I’ll enjoy the ride as much as the destination. And then I’ll do it all over again to come the fuck home.

Hey did you know I keep a google drive folder with linguistics and language books  that I try to update regularly 

knitting tutorial made by a twenty-something knitting influencer: 18 min long, 12 of those minutes being the intro and a sponsor plug, they show the first few steps of the tutorial at the slowest speed known to man, they show the most important steps at a neck-break speed, they stop every five seconds to talk about what they just did, 40,000 comments filled with questions ranging from insightful to “how do i knit”, filmed with a camera that costs more than a car, the tutorial is incorrect.

knitting tutorial made by a seventy-something grandmother: two min long, filmed 17 years ago, shows you what you want with the skilled patient hands of a beloved deity, made with the world’s shittiest camera, the best video on the fucking internet, four comments and 30 views, you lose the video and never find it again.

Out of curiousity, do you think most national museums are participating in the same kind of thing that the British Museum is, i.e. holding onto items that they stole in conquest / archaeological items that other nations are requesting back?

I always wonder if we should be looking at the bigger picture rather than just this one spotlighted issue (not that the spotlight isn't important in raising the issue originally).

oh goodie we're digging up stuff I wrote from 2 years ago...yay

Okay, for starters, let's look at how you've phrased your question. Currently, the heavy implication is that this is all the BM is (i.e. it only holds colonial loot and contested items), which is false. Yes, it does hold colonial loot from the British Empire. No one is disputing that. It also holds contested items such as the Parthenon Marbles and the Rosetta Stone. What it also holds are many items taken from digs where the country in question permitted them taking them, and then also gifts and other such non colonial requisitions.

Mostly, I need to stress, because as someone who's adjacent to museums this drives me insane: Framing all museum collections as Bad and only containing Bad Items from Bad Deeds doesn't give you the full picture and if you don't have the full picture you can't really address the issue of repatriation properly. It's the classic 'All or Nothing' mentality and I'm begging people to seek nuance on complex topics such as this. Also governments suck and so hearing repeated 'well museums suck because XYZ' means they're more than happy to simply defund them, which they already are doing and that's not helping stuff like repatriation either.

In short, if you're asking does any other museum have a law like BM63 (I wrote 68 in the post because...I'm bad at numbers)? Not as far as I'm aware, no. The BM is unique in that instance where the government literally created a law to prevent it from divesting of its collection.

Do other national museums hold colonial looted artefacts and contested items? Yes. Lots of them. All over the world.

Germany's Neues Museum holds the bust of Nefertiti, which is contested.

The Louvre in Paris has multiple Italian artworks that were stolen in the 1790s that Italy wants back.

The Horses of St Mark's (in Venice) were stolen from Greece by Constantine in the 1200s. (Not really all that contested but they were definitely stolen).

Yale University holds numerous items from Machu Picchu. The 1911 dig had permission from the Peruvian Government, but the items were supposed to be returned. I believe (don't quote me) that less than half were originally. They have subsequently been returned, but this is not an uncommon story.

There's a bunch of Nazi looted artworks that are in museums that need to be returned to their rightful owners.

The MET museum in the US and everything it got from Douglas Latchford (this is ongoing, with some repatriations having already happened)

The National Museum of Australia also got caught out by that guy.

To be fair, the MET Museum has a problem with looted artefacts in general from the 70s onwards as they tried to compete with the European collections and thus ended up gaining a lot of 'not properly provenanced artefacts'. There was a gold sarcophagus they returned only recently that was looted from Egypt post-2011.

The Bible Museum in the US has...stuff it shouldn't (there's a lot and I'm not listing it).

*voice dripping with derision* Whatever the Hobby Lobby is up to

I could go on!

Focusing solely on the BM is a result of a US-Centric mindset, and a pervasive anglophone bias in things people will read. (Or in other words: It's fun to shit on the Brits and most of you only read English anyway.)

This has the unfortunate effect of making it seem like the BM is only museum in the world doing this, and they're not. Not in the slightest. Many museums, national or not, will have colonial looted items if that country has, at any time in the past, waged expansionist wars against other nations, no matter how brief. If your local museum has artefacts from Not Your Country there's a good chance they were looted! Again, I stress that many many artefacts that left places like Egypt were part of agreements with the Egyptian government (called partition agreements) whereby the Egyptian government took first pick of artefacts from a dig and then the dig organisers could take the rest. This hasn't happened since UNESCO World Heritage Convention 1975, which prohibits new artefacts from leaving countries which is also why I will bonk on the head with a cardboard tube anyone who says Archaeologists/Museums are still stealing things.

So yeah, if you're looking at repatriation, you'll be much better looking at the bigger picture and understanding how all this came to be in the first place than you'll ever be making memes about the BM stealing things on the internet.