Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Signals.

To return to the question of ‘indigenous’ religious artefacts in museums, it should surely be pointed out that a great bone of contention is that a great many, if not most, of such artefacts were looted in the course of colonial wars, etc., and it is hardly surprising that the descendants of those peoples should not be happy about it, and the lack of respect shown to them then and now, a lack of respect that – forgive me for saying this – appears in at least one of the comments here.

There was the Younghusband invasion of Tibet in 1903, in which monasteries were sacked and plundered, and the man, Lawrence Waddell, mostly responsible for (as he said) ‘procuring from that closed land those manuscripts and books so greatly required by Western scholars’, even as he described Tibetan Buddhism as ‘a parasitic disease’ and Tibetans as ‘sunk in the lowest depths of savagery’, and as being ‘more like hideous gnomes than human beings’. There was the looting and burning of the Summer Palace in Peking in 1868. More than 10,000 Indigenous Australian & Torres Island artefacts have been identified in institutions around the world, a third of them in the British Museum. The ‘British Expedition to Abyssinia’ of 1868, in which… But I shan’t go on, except to say that you may find all this information, and more, in Sathnam Sanghera’s excellent and fair-minded book, Empireland.

I have confined the above to Britain, but I rather doubt that the objects in question in science museums in the USA were all happily handed over by happy ‘natives’ (‘Oh, great, you are going to put them in museums along with those skulls you need for your physiognomical research into IQ, etc.! Thank you so much’!). And I am not surprised at all that indigenous peoples are still unhappy about the situation.

I don’t think one should be worried about accusations of ‘virtue-signalling’, which come for the most part from people whose attitudes, even though they may proclaim themselves as atheists, seem uncomfortably close to those of nineteenth-century imperialists, colonisers, colonists, and Christian missionaries.