Psychosocial Balance Sheets: Illicit Purchase Decisions in the Antiquities Market

The idea of a psychosocial criminology (Jefferson 2002) provides the point of departure for the argument in this article. It is also designed to contribute to the white-collar crime literature generally - including the white-collar crimes and unethical decisions which appear to play a central part in analyses in the emerging field of crimes "against the environment", alongside which the desecration of temples and gravesites may be considered - through charting the mechanism of the (sometimes criminal) decision-making processes of antiquities dealers. These decisions are psychological insofar as they involve the implementation of personal thought processes resulting in individual choice; they are social in that these thought processes are influenced by definitions and arguments provided by a group discourse; and they are environmental, cultural and historical in that they provide a demand for objects recovered by looters, and therefore an incentive for the continuing destruction of the world's precious reserves of cultural material. They are transnational, insofar as they often affect the preservation and retention of cultural heritage of and by nation states foreign to the buyer; and in addition to being psychosocial, environmental, cultural, historical and transnational, they are many other things too: not least economic.