Collecting and Repatriation of Culture - Admission/Application Essay Example

Therefore, in order to restore culture and a people’s past, there is need to repatriate all objects to their native land. The need to repatriate cultural objects is undoubtedly important. The cultural objects represent a crucial aspect of a community’s or nation’s past and history. Without these objects, it would be difficult for a community to understand its past and grasp the present. This is because “the present is intimately linked to the past through material conditions and cultural understandings” (Brumfiel p. 207). Furthermore, the past has a bearing on the quality of presently available resources.

Therefore, without the lost cultural objects, or those that are residing in museums in foreign lands, it would be difficult for a community to appreciate its present resources. Cultural artifacts also supplement historical records in several ways. To begin with, they provide crucial historical information that is not recorded in history books or transmitted orally. Secondly, they reflect the daily actions and interactions of people such actions and interactions include eating, working, migrating from one to another and sports.

Such activities are often taken for granted when constructing history books. Nevertheless, information on such activities is often imbedded in artifacts such as ancient tools. Therefore, repatriation of such items to their native land would help the natives to learn much about their past day-to-day lives. Historical texts and records often bear misconceptions and bias either deliberately or otherwise. Such bias may be in regard to ethnicity, gender or class. Archeological records can be used to challenge these misconceptions and correct them.

However, this is not possible without cultural artifacts. Therefore, a community needs to collect and restore its artifacts for it to be in a position to effectively address historical misconceptions as they appear in history texts. For instance, the archeologists of the 20th