2023-11-27 07:00:28
On November 20, 2023, Switzerland returned to Bolivia three pre-Columbian mummies held in the collection of the Geneva Museum of Ethnography (MEG).
During a ceremony attended by the press, the mummies were officially handed over to the Minister of Cultures, Decolonization and Depatriarchalization of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Sabina Orellana.
MEG’s ethical commitment
The director of the MEG, Carine Ayélé Durand, underlined that the city of Geneva was making “a strong gesture in terms of ethics by returning human remains to their beneficiaries, as it had already done in 2014 at the request of the Maori people of New Zealand. It is also in the name of ethics that the three mummies, two adults and a child, were not exhibited during the ceremony.
This act is part of a growing movement of Western institutions returning objects acquired under questionable circumstances in past centuries. In recent years, the MEG has committed to questioning the management of its sensitive cultural assets in order to restore a human dimension to its collections.
On this subject, the director of the MEG expressed herself as follows: “Human remains preserved in museums are legally assimilated to objects while communities demand that an active process of rehumanization be initiated. »
Proactive ethical repair
As part of its ethical reparation project, the MEG created a documentary file on the provenance of the mummies and informed the Bolivian authorities of their presence in its inventory. In December 2022, the MEG received an official restitution request from the Bolivian authorities.
These mummies, called the chullpas in Aymara, come from the province of Pacajes, in the department of La Paz. In 1893, Gustave Ferrière, Swiss engineer and German consul in La Paz, sent the mummified bodies as well as their plant fiber sheaths to the Geographical Society of Geneva. In 1895, the the chullpas were donated to the Archaeological Museum of Geneva and in 1901 they became part of the recently formed Museum of Ethnography collections.
No documents were found relating to official border crossing authorizations or records from Bolivia to Switzerland.
The Bolivian minister explained that the mummies are 900 years old and that they draw their origin from the ancestral culture of Paka Jaqis, of Aymara ancestry, which was established between 1100 and 1400, before the domination of the Inca culture throughout the Bolivian Altiplano region.
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