Cultural patrimony certainly continues to be a passionate and often tendentious topic depending on whom you talk to. I’ve written about it earlier with respect to Greek and Roman antiquities — displayed for all to enjoy in Western museums. Recently, The New York Times Magazine (June 24, 2007) took up this topic with regard to artifacts from Machu Picchu in Peru: The Reconquest: Should Yale have to return its Machu Picchu artifacts? And who in Peru would actually benefit if it does? (By Arthur Lubow).
Conflict drives the news and controversy makes for a good story, so let’s present the contenders up front: Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven, CT, the Peruvian government, the National Geographic Society.
In 1912, explorer Hiram Bingham III and his team excavated 5,000 artifacts and shipped them back to Yale University for research and display. Most of these artifacts were bones, ceramics and so forth. “Unsurpassed as stonemasons, engineers and architects, the Incas though more prosaically when it came to ceramics.”
In many ways, the dispute between Yale and Peru is unlike the headline-making investigations that have impelled the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to repatriate ancient artifacts to their countries of origin. It does not revolve around criminal allegations of surreptitious tomb-raiding and black-market antiquities deals. But if the circumstances are unique, the background sentiments are not. Other countries as well as Peru are demanding the recovery of cultural treasures removed by more powerful nations many years ago. The Greeks want the Parthenon marbles returned to Athens from the British Museum; the Egyptians want the same museum to surrender the Rosetta Stone and, on top of that, seek to spirit away the bust of Nefertiti from the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. Where might it all end? One clue comes in a sweeping request from China. As a way of combating plunder of the present as well as the past, the Chinese government has asked the United States to ban the import of all Chinese art objects made before 1911. The State Department has been reviewing the Chinese request for more than two years.
The movement for the repatriation of “cultural patrimony” by nations whose ancient past is typically more glorious than their recent history provides the framework for the dispute between Peru and Yale. To the scholars and administrators of Yale, the bones, ceramics and metalwork are best conserved at the university, where ongoing research is gleaning new knowledge of the civilization at Machu Picchu under the Inca. Outside Yale, most everyone I talked to wants the collection to go back to Peru, but many of them are far from disinterested arbiters. In the end, if the case winds up in the United States courts, its disposition may be determined by narrowly legalistic interpretations of specific Peruvian laws and proclamations. Yet the passions that ignite it are part of a broad global phenomenon. “My opinion reflects the opinion of most Peruvians,” Hilda Vidal, a curator at the National Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History of Peru in Lima, told me. “In general, anything that is patrimony of the cultures of the world, whether in museums in Asia or Europe or the United States, came to be there during the times when our governments were weak and the laws were weak, or during the Roman conquest or our conquest by the Spanish. Now that the world is more civilized, these countries should reflect on this issue. It saddens us Peruvians to go to museums abroad and see a Paracas textile. I am hopeful that in the future all the cultural patrimony of the world will return to its country of origin.” Behind her words, I could imagine a gigantic sucking whoosh, as the display cases in the British Museum, the Smithsonian, the Louvre and the other great universal museums of the world were cleansed of their contents, leaving behind the clattering of a few Wedgwood bowls and Sèvres teacups.
Currently, Peruvian law requires that everything excavated in Peru to remain in Peru. Of course, Machu Picchu is “by far the most important tourist attraction” in the Peru. “Unlike most other great Inca settlements, Machu Picchu was overlooked and untouched by the Spanish.” Therefore, there are not only patriotic interests in Peru in favor of repatriation of Bingham’s 1912 artifacts but also financial ones as well. These artifacts may attract more tourists and a collection may entice tourists to stay longer in the area. In addition, these “patriotic interests” are not as pure as they may seem at first because they often take a political form as a touchstone for “indigenous rights”, Marxist ideologies, and political party gain.
The political conflict over Machu Picchu has as many dramatic episodes as a telenovela. In the 1990s, the Fujimori government caused an uproar when it proposed leasing the archeological parks, including Machu Picchu, to private concessions and building a cable car that would take visitors directly to the Machu Picchu site. Replacing the present bus ride or long, steep walk from the train station, the cable car could have doubled or tripled the number of visitors. Mould was among those outraged. “They were trying to use Machu Picchu as a place just for entertainment,” she told me. Hotel and train magnates, including [Lima-based travel company owner and conservationist José] Koechlin, supported the scheme, which was eventually defeated by a coalition of Cuzco [former Peruvian capitol city] students, international scholars, New Age believers in spiritual energy and the holders of the Aguas Calientes bus monopoly. “They were going to destroy the area with the number of people,” says David Ugarte, an anthropology professor at the University of Cuzco who led the student protests. “And the cable car was a cultural aggression, because Machu Picchu was built by Pachacuti as a place for religious purposes and resting. What the Western people call mountains were divinities for the Andean people. They were going to make holes in the divinities.”
Artifacts from Bingham’s third expedition in 1921 have already been repatriated according to Yale but contested by Peru.
The National Geographic Society is also in a bind on whom to side with:
…any dispute over the Bingham collection could only damage the position of the National Geographic Society in Peru — “a very rich country in terms of its natural and cultural resources" — and limit the society’s access to Peru’s cultural patrimony for future magazine articles, museum exhibits and television programs.
According to Yale, Peruvian law is an obstacle to research:
Under Peruvian law, antiquities cannot stay outside the country for more than two years before they must be returned. This statute, designed to protect the national patrimony, was to Yale’s thinking an obstacle to repatriating the collection. “Part of our concern with the materials we have here not the museum-quality objects but the study collection, the small sherds and pieces of things is that we are very concerned about scientific research and ongoing analysis,” Barbara Shailor, who is Yale’s deputy provost for the arts, told me [Arthur Lubow]. “If objects must be returned in two years, what does that mean in terms of scholarly research?”
…
“The museum-quality pieces are the ones that people will want to see,” Shailor, the deputy provost, told me. “I don’t think they will want to see the end of a little finger or five dog bones, but these are extraordinarily valuable from a research perspective.”
Along with Arthur Lubow, I tend to side with the historians who try to uncover Incan civilization but are overlooked — most often — amidst the passion and debate of cultural patrimony. The world should know accurately about Incan civilization.
Historic relics have pragmatic value: politically, for purposes of national pride and partisan advantage; economically, for display to tourists, museumgoers, magazine readers and TV-program watchers; scientifically, as research material for scholars pursuing academic careers; and, most nakedly, as merchandise for dealers in antiquities. In comparing the arguments and motivations of the different claimants to the Yale collection, I often identified with historians of the Inca trying to untangle those Spanish chronicles that were spun from the tales of native informants with their own purposes. The people at Yale say that they have preserved the collection as a legacy of a great civilization and they want to continue to study these artifacts to learn more about that culture. They are also paying tribute to one of the most colorful and glamorous figures in the university’s history. The Peruvians celebrate their own legendary ancestor when they describe the urgency of their case, but they also have very down-to-earth political and commercial uses for the collection. “Cultural patrimony” — the phrase sounds so otherworldly. Bingham and Pachacuti were both very practical men. They would not have been fooled for a minute.
The Reconquest or The Possessed is a pretty non-tendentious (balanced) article by Ludlow. He clearly illustrates the complexities of the Bingham controversy. Unfortunately, an easy solution may be difficult to reach. It is good that all sides continue to be in dialogue.
Photo: ©Bryan Busovicki; A view of Machu Picchu underneath heavy fog.
Tags: Arthur Lubow, Peru, Machu Picchu
