MORNING

If buying looted antiquities is a form of white-collar crime, and if understanding white-collar crime is in some measure about identifying ways that people use narrative to ‘explain away’ offending, then questions of narrative seem to provide a useful bridge across the three themes of this workshop: crime, networks (including object biographies) and contested histories.

Narrative can be simple post-hoc justification of white-collar crime, but it can also be constitutive: in other words, the stories we tell ourselves about what is happening shape what we choose to believe, and consequently what we choose to do. Those stories are part of wider narrative fabrics in society, and the antiquities market has such an identifiable narrative fabric, which we will explore. Often the stories we are concerned with manifest as fiction about the provenance histories of particular artefacts, but I will argue that we can discern such evidential lies as frequently tied to wider and more generic market narratives.

We will look at some of the things that dealers and collectors say, as a method for thinking about those market narratives. Through these stories we can identify the social construction of a particular type of market reality: capitalist, colonial, competitive and consumeristic, but also on some views philanthropic, educative, cultured and heroic. We will think about how particular narrative devices support wrongdoing, and how they fit with other classic perspectives in the study of white-collar crime like the normalisation of deviance; the manipulation of moral accounts; the ethically-neutralising effects of rationalisations, justifications, and excuses; and the sociology of denial. These theoretical frameworks help us to see that the overall problem of looted antiquities and provenance is comprised of features that are common in white-collar crime: power, profit, exploitation, vested interests, and entrenched routine.

In conclusion we can ask: if narrative is part of the problem of how the market engages with provenance, can it perhaps also be part of the solution?