What’s Yours is Mine: Yale, Peru and the Ownership of Cultural Property
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Barlag, Phillip
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Barlag, Phillip. 2023. What’s Yours is Mine: Yale, Peru and the Ownership of Cultural Property. Master's thesis, Harvard University Division of Continuing Education.Abstract
Objects of material can be an invaluable source of information on the past, as well as a tool to help forge cultural identity. Such objects have value from aesthetic to academic, and from economic worth to political capital. There is often a lot at stake over their ownership. This is the case for many objects of pre-European Andean material. This thesis examines the dispute between Peru and Yale University over a collection of Incan material held by Yale.At times, this dispute was quite acrimonious, with protestors marching in the streets of Lima and Cuzco, lawsuits waging in U.S. Federal Courts, and accusations and defenses sprawling across the opinion pages of The New York Times. Just as it appeared to be at a deadlock, a series of innovative agreements resolved the century-long dispute with rapidity.
This thesis explores the contested ownership and eventual resolution of the dispute over these artifacts. The particular focus is on the decisions that several key Yale personnel made that led to the return of the objects to Peru. While this cultural property dispute was covered in the media, to date no analysis has been made of why Yale chose to follow its course of action. Despite frequent portrayals by Yale as “colonial” in the popular media, a closer examination reveals that key Yale professors and administrators were internationally collaborative, working with colleagues across borders to advance scholarship and dialogue, over several decades.
The examination of the Yale-Peru dispute offers a chance to examine the specifics of what it means to curate objects and study cultures and peoples. A university, especially a research university, must reckon with the realities of geopolitics and international legal frameworks. Given the pervasiveness of cultural property disputes, the Yale-Peru example offers a unique success story, by which all parties appear to have achieved their goals. This thesis thus concludes with an examination of ways in which this case can be applied to other cultural property disputes.
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