Loot, legitimacy, and provenance: Intermediaries and the legitimation of looted cultural objects

• Provenance frameworks may enable trade of looted cultural heritage. • Conflicting understandings of “legitimate” provenance create a contested landscape. • Intermediaries in cultural institutions strategically use provenance to acquire loot. • The legitimacy of provenance is relationally constructed. The trade of cultural heritage operates at the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate spaces. While provenance is widely accepted as a barrier to the trade of loot, a growing body of work finds it may enable loot to enter legitimate institutions. This study builds on literature on legitimacy and grey markets to investigate how intermediaries in the antiquities market use provenance to legitimize looted cultural heritage. Drawing on interviews with curators, dealers, and auctioneers and scripting analysis of institutional records, the study identifies three "legitimizing provenance practices": an accumulative market setting that encourages collection at all costs; exclusionary professional networks that protect permissive practices; and everyday obfuscation techniques that mask looted origins. These practices operate within a polarized landscape of competing "pro-loot" and "anti-loot" applications of provenance. This reconceptualizes provenance as a relational social process shaped by competing value systems and unequal power relations. Interpreting legitimacy and provenance through the lens of “loot” demonstrates how such practices perpetuate colonial systems of dispossession in contemporary forms.