The classical literature of Europe begins with a dispute over war spoils. This is no longer a sentiment anyone wishes to affirm. Of course, I find much to applaud in calls to look closely at procedures of acquisition. And I am certainly not here to take sides in these institutional struggles between the restitutionists and the retentionists in any particular case. But my professional inclination, as a philosopher, is to sort through the concepts through which these arguments are waged. Between “culture” and “property” lies a dangerous intersection, and the formal concept of “cultural property” has become entangled in competing stories about identity, origins, and ownership. “Cultural property” is now a movement as well as a category, and yet the idea turns out, on closer inspection, to contain buried contradictions that may be worth unearthing.