Politically Mobilizing Collections of Material Culture: Three Nineteenth-Century French Expeditions to Tiwanaku, Bolivia

MARSH, ERIK J.

Los Angeles

Simposio; 40th Annual UCLA Art History Graduate Student Symposium; 2005

Department of Art History, University of California, Los Ángeles

In the nineteenth century, the French government sent three expeditions to Tiwanaku, Bolivia, following Alexander von Humboldt?s inspiring travels through South America. The first mission was led by Alcide d?Orbigny in the 1830s, the second by Léonce Angrand in 1848, and finally the ?scientific? mission of 1903, led by George Courty. This paper uses these expeditions as examples of France?s state-funded global collecting, which contrasts sharply with other European governments who spent little or no public money on such operations. The French government?s use of archaeological finds to reinterpret and politically mobilize the past drove the extensive funding of domestic and foreign excavations. The French expeditions to Tiwanaku had a significant and established precedent. The earlier large scale expedition to Mexico self-consciously modeled itself after Napoleon Bonaparte?s to Egypt, both amassing large collections and pioneering the intellectual undercurrents that justified this type of collection. Although science and the pursuit of knowledge informed these expeditions to varying degrees, the state-funded operations were inseparable from politics. Literally removing Tiwanaku artifacts from their context disrobed them of any local cultural significance, enabling reassessment and recontextualization in new museums in a European paradigm. There, the objects became scientific and political support for the chain of being, the European concept of linear and teleological cultural development. Domestic sites facilitated the political reinterpretation of French history, while foreign sites, like Tiwanaku, allowed the political reinterpretation of France?s role in global history. It reinforced a French self-image as cultural guardians, or ?universal arbiters of world culture? (Williams 1993:135). Under these influences and from this background, the French expeditions to Tiwanaku separated the local Aymará population from its material connection to the past and reappropriated the objects? cultural and physical contexts to where the French could politically redefine the objects? histories and significance.