In an era of globe-girdling resource flows, angry neo-nationalist movements, and increasing inequality between the powerful and the powerless, it's hardly a wonder that demands for the repatriation of cultural property by former colonial subjects from their former colonial overlords (and cultural institutions) have become a hotly debated ethical concern (Nilsson Stutz 2013).1 Greece's unanswered call for the return of the Parthenon (“Elgin”) Marbles from the British Museum (Fig. 1; Beresford 2015) is only the most famous of many; the longstanding demand of the Egyptian government for the repatriation of the famous bust of Nefertiti from Berlin's Neues Museum (Fig. 2; Ikram 2011); Cyprus's ultimately successful claims for the return of Byzantine frescoes looted from Lysi during the 1974 invasion, displayed until 2012 in the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, the Menil Collection, Houston (Fig. 3; Ogden 2015); and the endless wrangles over legal title to the Dead Sea Scrolls by Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians analyzed in depth by Kersel (2011) provide other vivid examples of highly politicized disputes in the Eastern Mediterranean region over exclusive ownership rights.On the one hand are the advocates of “cultural universalism,” as John Henry Merryman famously called it (1986)—aesthetes, collectors, auction houses, and spokesmen for the Great Museums—who wax eloquent about the transcendent value of cultural heritage to modern civilization—yet view its material manifestations as ownable, alienable property, legally transferable by sale or donation, whose ultimate index of value (for the purposes of acquisition, tax write-offs, and insurance) is its current market price (Wright and Eppink 2016). In their self-proclaimed status as universal cultural stewards, they defend their right—even duty—to protect the world's cultural heritage from destruction or decay. And they insist that the most precious examples of the cultural heritage of all the world's peoples can best be preserved for the future in established museums by private collector-custodians with access to the most advanced conservation and interpretation skills (Cuno 2014).Opposing them are those whom Merryman (1986) identified as adherents of “cultural nationalism,” who assert an a priori claim of a modern nation-state on cultural heritage found or uncovered within its territory. Positing an unalienable link between the modern state and all its ancient predecessors, the control of cultural heritage is seen as nothing less than a prerogative of sovereignty. Like petroleum, timber, bauxite, and other natural resources, heritage objects and sites are, in the first instance, the property of the nation that contains them. Its claim for the return of looted or illegally exported cultural property even before the establishment of the state is based on territorial and, often, presumed genealogical priority.And in recent years other contenders have arisen: sub-state actors—who are sometimes actively anti-state actors—including activists in indigenous communities, ethnic minorities, threatened language speakers, linguistic enclaves, class and gender movements, and diasporic groups (Graham and Howard 2008). In an age of identity politics, once-homogeneous national identities are in the process of continuing fragmentation, giving rise to countless global networks of political activism and cultural kinship that seek symbolically to challenge long-held inequalities of power and economic domination, by demanding their own cultural rights (Onciul 2015).Ironically, the most passionate advocates and staunchest opponents of cultural heritage repatriation share some identical assumptions: (1) that heritage objects rightfully “belong” to someone and (2) that every effort should be made to ensure that the rightful owners gain, retain, or at least regulate control of “their” ancient sites and historical artifacts. Yet because the goal in all repatriation disputes is exclusive possession, these disputes can also create dangerous tensions between “winners” and “losers” in what amounts to a zero-sum game.The repatriation of cultural property seems to be an eminently reasonable corrective that upholds the common sense principle that what has been stolen or otherwise unlawfully taken should be returned. But as I'll try to demonstrate in the next section, every element of that principle is subject to simultaneous, conflicting opinions about the criteria for “rightful ownership,” about what constitutes cultural expropriation, and the authorized body to accept the antiquities. Each faction has clear if different answers to all of these questions, and all assume that they occupy the highest moral ground. So like the children's game of “Rock Paper Scissors” one claim for possession can always be potentially trumped by another. As a result, the corrosive social effects of the zero-sum game of cultural repatriation debates will continue until we can figure out some way to defuse and abandon the seductive magical materialism that animates repatriation claims.What do I mean by “magical materialism”? I am referring to the belief that certain inanimate objects—in this case, artifacts and cultural heritage sites—possess a miraculous, supernatural quality that links them with an eternal, timeless reality. Peter Brown has written definitively about how the Late Antique Christian cult of relics transformed splinters of bone, swatches of cloth, and even vials of water from the River Jordan and the Sea of Galilee into miraculous conduits of heaven-granted grace to all who would appropriately venerate them (Brown 2009). This cult was based on the simple conviction that the bodily remains of prophets and martyrs—even the objects that they touched and the ground upon which they tread—retained a continuing connection with the immortal souls of the saints even after they had ascended to heaven to sit in the presence of God. Like direct telephone lines to the source of grace-giving power, relics provided tangible, touchable access by mere mortals to the inexhaustible beneficence of the divine realm.2The cult of relics was dealt a severe blow in Europe with the Reformation, and was soon to be replaced by a new fascination with ancient material objects, collected and displayed in “cabinets of curiosities” (Zytaruk 2011). The sweeping expansion of the European empires, the exploration of remote lands and heretofore-unknown cultures, gave rise to a new cult of the specimen, with a new transcendent significance. In the Age of Reason, the world was imagined to be a complex mosaic of tradable resources, races, and natural phenomena that was only partially known. The quest of antiquarians, like other explorers, was to map new places and collect new objects, placing them in their proper chronological and hierarchical order—carefully separating nature from culture and then ranking human societies from primitive to civilized. Their collections—and their rankings—constituted the material metaphysics of the Age of Enlightenment.It was in this wave of European exploration and imperial expansion that the concept of the fetish was born. In the late sixteenth century, Portuguese explorers encountered indigenous communities along the West African coast who worshipped inanimate objects that they believed were inhabited by protective spirits (Pietz 1987). The Portuguese derisively called them feitiço (a term used in Portugal itself to refer to magical amulets and superstitious charms) and assumed that savage minds required some kind of tangible object to focus upon. Only the somewhat more advanced societies could rise to the level of fashioning idols of imagined gods, and only the most advanced of all could grasp the unifying spiritual abstraction of a monotheistic faith (Ellen 1988).So the term feitiço, eventually morphing into West African trade jargon as fetisso, was gradually disseminated into most European languages in various permutations of the word “fetish.” And, as Pietz has convincingly concluded (1985), it represented an entirely new—and judgmental—concept that had nothing specifically to do with the material culture of West Africa, but instead came to embody an object or artifact to which false or misleading values were assigned. Marx saw the flood of industrial capitalism's manufactured products as “commodity fetishes,” in which carefully cultivated consumer desire—rather than the actual cost of its raw material value and human labor—determined the market value of the thing (Ellen 1988: 216–17). Likewise, Freud later used the term to describe a physical object that evoked strong, often erotic, emotions for patients with suppressed childhood traumas that were subconsciously transferred to that particular material thing (Ellen 1988: 217–18). But my point here is neither to discuss whether cultural heritage, as a modern reification, is closer to Marx's or Freud's definition of the fetish, but to suggest that cultural artifacts at the center of repatriation disputes have become dangerously fetishized.If we examine the basic components of fetishism as articulated by Louise Kaplan (2006), I believe we can see how they map to the politico-emotional obsession that makes nations and indigenous communities sue for the repatriation of certain archaeological artifacts and that provokes Western governments and NGOs to express outrage at the destruction of inanimate ancient Near Eastern ruins and relics as loudly as (or even louder than?) many who campaign against the catastrophic destruction of human lives and massive movement of refugees from the war zone.Is the physical possession of certain ancient objects really so precious that it is worth politically framing it in an uncompromising claim against a former imperial power as defense of the nation or community's existential cultural identity? In some cases, unquestionably yes, especially when the repatriation would restore exhumed human remains to a place of dignified burial or return sacred artifacts to their original ritual functions. Yet I would argue that the characteristic archaeological remains of chronologically distant cultures do not always automatically belong to governmental authorities or community leaders of the place in which they are found. Protection, yes. Responsible research, yes. But asserting that ancient cultural resources are an unalienable embodiment of “national identity” is a textbook example of the fetishization process.Moreover, the deep longing for a “homecoming” of the repatriated artifacts—or, alternatively, the insistence of the artifacts' greater chances of physical survival in their adopted institutional home—further demonstrates classic qualities of a fetish: “concretisation, animation or anthropomorphisation, conflation of signifier with signified, and an ambiguous relationship of control between person and object” (Ellen 1988: 213). In the post-colonial conflict between global powers and developing nations, heritage claims have become a form of competitive fetishism, enabling political elites in metropolitan centers like those in long marginalized communities to battle for contemporary political legitimation through the struggle for possession of touchable, exhibitable things.A repatriation dispute can become a powerful political issue, yet because it relies on the magical materialism of exclusive possession, its ultimate outcome can only be either “win” or “lose.” And here is the paradox that makes repatriation, to my mind at least, a potentially destructive enterprise in our era of reactionary identity politics. Whether the artifact is obtained by persuasion, public pressure, or legal fiat from a former colonial power, museum, university, the claim of “exclusive possession” can also—may inevitably—be challenged from within. The fetishism strategy does not end with the act of possession, but only begins a new phase. For not only does it endow sculpture, pottery, and metalwork with distinctive local qualities of “authenticity,” “continuity,” and “identity,” it ties them so completely to the ontological vision of the present governing elites, that it “transforms ambiguity and uncertainty into something knowable and certain and in doing so snuffs out any sparks of creativity that might ignite the fires of rebellion” in the public historical imaginary (Kaplan 2006: 6).The Authorized Heritage Narrative (Smith 2006) and the dominant, officialized heritage landscape (Simone 2016) can be brakes on cultural creativity, attempting to impose political cohesion and civic allegiance on a population, but rarely encouraging its dynamic cultural vitality, contesting its inherent multiculturality, or acknowledging collective identities to change over time (Macdonald 2012). This is why I fear that repatriation is not only a rather useless effort; it can also be a poison pill of politicized mythohistory that is unknowingly ingested by the leaders of any ethnic group or political entity that makes a successful repatriation claim (Echo-Hawk 2010; Kuper 2003). Repatriation does not overturn the essentializing, authoritarian reliance on the power of a single story; it merely changes the identity of the teller of the authorized tale.The legal scholar Mahdavi Sunder makes an important point in disputing that “cultural survival” is an appropriate justification for the protection and ultimately appropriate grounds for the repatriation of indigenous and marginalized peoples' cultural property rights (Sunder 2001). “Current law, stuck in a nineteenth-century conception of culture,” she writes (2001: 566), not only fails to recognize the claims of sub-groups or individuals to be able to express differentiated identities, “but actively impedes individuals' ability to create more autonomous cultural lives. Unreflectively deferring to a culture's leaders about the group's nomos and about what challenges threaten to dilute its nomos, law may become complicit in the backlash efforts of traditional cultural leaders to silence internal dissent.”Even if we were able to establish clear and unambiguous rules for the repatriation of cultural property, repatriation would still exploit iconic artifacts as fetishes for static collective identity, ignoring the decisive turn toward dynamic social networks, virtual environments, diasporic cyberspace, 3d digital imaging, and “history read against the grain” (Silberman and Purser 2012) We must learn to abandon repatriation's magical thinking that confuses exclusive physical possession with the right to determine significance. As a cultural strategy, repatriation does not challenge the danger of a single story; it merely changes the identity of the teller of the authorized tale. In that sense, it almost guarantees that repatriation disputes will deepen in the coming years as new claims and bitter counterclaims are made by a growing number of marginalized sub-state groups, desperate to legitimize their own identity, who will arise to make new repatriation claims.