How Our Heritage is Looted”
Legal Meaning-Making, Cultural Property, and Customs Enforcement in Nigeria, 1938–79
Dados Bibliográficos
| ID | 8976527 |
|---|---|
| Autores | Colin Bos (0009-0001-0187-9681, Princeton University, autor correspondente) |
| Ano | 2024 |
| Volume | 65 |
| Fascículo | 3 |
| Páginas | 295-309 |
| Data de publicação | 2024-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Sim |
| Open Access | Sim |
| Tipo | ARTICLE |
| Periódico | The Journal of African History (JOURNAL) |
| Identificadores do periódico | ISSN: 0021-8537 • E-ISSN: 1469-5138 |
| Editora | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0021853724000422 |
| OpenAlex | W4404331472 |
| Idioma | EN |
| Citações recebidas | 1 |
| Referências citadas | 34 |
This article sets out to explain why Nigeria was unable to prevent the loss of heritage objects in the 1960s and 1970s. Obvious answers to this question would include the limited enforcement capacity of the African state and the complacency of European and North American art dealers. “How Our Heritage Is Looted” argues, however, that a colonial legal category, namely “antiquity,” played a key role in creating an ineffective enforcement regime for cultural property theft. The mismatch between the ordinary meaning of the term “antiquity,” denoting a remnant of an ancient civilization, and the kinds of modern crafts that the state wanted to protect ultimately resulted in the inability of Nigeria’s colonial preservation statute to convey clear rules to customs officers and museum curators about what exporters could take out of the country. Nigeria’s heritage law thus constituted a project of legal meaning-making whose failure facilitated illicit commerce
Cultural heritage · Cultural property · Enforcement · Epistemology · Meaning (existential · Political science · Property (philosophy · African history and culture studies · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Philosophy
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Colonial Histories of Heritage
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Reinventing Africa
Colonial Legacy in African Museology
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| Obras citantes distintas | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citações por ano | 1 |
| Intervalo de citações | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Velocidade de citação | recent |
| Altamente citado | Não |