Department of English

Christa J. Olson “Nuestras Reliquías Históricas” and the Rhetorical Work of Ancestors at Machu Picchu”

Between 1911 and 1915, Yale University Professor Hiram Bingham III and his Yale Peruvian Expedition illegally carried thousands of objects out of Peru, adding them to the collections of the Yale Peabody Museum. Analyses of the Yale Peruvian Expedition’s work and the international arbitration that finally established Peru’s claim to the objects in 2011 has tended to frame the conflict in terms of U.S. neo-colonial scientific imperialism and Peruvian national history. Either the objects ought to be understood as scientific evidence of a past culture—in which case they have universal import—or as historical relics—in which case they tell a particular story about Peruvian national identity. Interesting as those debates are, however, they are limited.  They obscure the processes by which the objects because national patrimony or scientific evidence in the first place. In this talk, therefore, I focus on the object-making processes that make the same “things” into evidence, patrimony, or—a point that has often been absent from the debate—the sacred bodies of ancestors. Taking up work on repatriation, Indigenous sovereignty, and rhetorical studies, this talk explores the different objects that conflicting arguments produce. These objects, I argue, remind us that the task of decolonizing knowledge requires attending not only to Indigenous and de-colonial epistemologies but also to the differing material worlds they bring into being. It is not merely that different perspectives lead to different interpretations of “our historical relics” but that meaningful relics which belong to one group or another are made by some epistemologies and not others. It matters, immensely, which sorts of matter come into being.

Christa Olson is a rhetorical historian focusing on trans-American visual cultures. In her research, she returns repeatedly to the rhetorical sources and consequences of nationalism. She is the author of Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador and has published articles on visual culture, historiography, Américan rhetoric in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, and Literacy in Composition Studies. Olson’s current research examines the visual history of U.S.-Latin American relations in order to understand how U.S. publics came to see themselves as particularly American among Americans. She is a regular contributor to Reading the Pictures, an online venue dedicated to public-facing analysis of photojournalism.