All people, whether they like it or not, are directed and guided in some way by something that can be as obvious as an instruction manual or as invisible and amorphous as a professor’s subtext. We lead, we follow. Everyone teaches, everyone is taught. The only question is—what?
The last time I visited my family in Peru, I was around six years old. I don’t remember much, but I can recall two important details from a day-trip we took to Machu Picchu: (1) we got there via what my family calls the “Hiram Bingham train” and (2) there were lots of rocks.
What I don’t remember seeing were any artifacts from the Inca Empire. That’s because they were all here at Yale, stolen about a century ago by former Yale professor Hiram Bingham and displayed in the Peabody Museum. Two years after my trip, Yale returned the materials, but not without a weird, laughably absurd reluctance. It still astounds me that a lesson we’re taught when we’re kids—don’t take stuff that’s not yours, and if you do, give it back—got so wrapped up in legal jargon that the entire ethical question of repatriation was missed.
Just the other day, I was sitting in my 9:25 class, casually talking with a friend when an older man with a minimalist leather jacket, light brown satchel, and expensive-looking loafers walked into the classroom. Like most Yale professors his age, his job seems to have made him into a caricature of his field: for a brief one or two seconds, I really thought I saw a resurrected Hiram Bingham. But no, it was Richard Burger, former director of the Peabody and microcelebrity in the anthropology world.
For what felt like thirty or forty consecutive minutes, he walked us through a detailed history of the dispute between Yale and Peru while paying particular attention to his own involvement in the whole thing. At one point, for example, Burger discussed the 2001 negotiations between former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo (the first Peruvian of indigenous descent to ever hold this title), his wife Eliane Karp, and Yale. He argued that the deal fell through because Toledo and Karp were trying to use the stolen materials to enhance their administration’s political popularity, and that Yale apparently had the intellectual foresight to see right through them. Nevermind that since the time of Bingham’s first expedition in 1911 the artifacts had assumed a central role in national identity among Peruvian scholars, the deal itself wasn’t even originally about repatriation, and that Toledo and Karp’s motivations were irrelevant to the question of whether the materials should be returned. The implications of Burger’s argument were clear enough: Peru was at fault for why the artifacts—which shouldn’t have even been moved in the first place—weren’t given back for another ten years.
Everything he said deflected attention away from Yale and toward Peru. At no point, for example, did Burger condemn any Yale Peruvian expeditions; in fact, he openly questioned why Peru would even want any of the stolen materials back after they found some artifacts of their own. Implicit in this statement lies a fundamental misunderstanding—Burger attributes value to the quantity of these items as opposed to their sanctity. At another point, he explained his shock at receiving letters from students in Hartford who asked for the return of the artifacts and criticized him personally. To defend himself, he pulled the ole “I’m married to a Peruvian! I can’t hate them!” card. Then, during the last few minutes of the talk, Burger made a joke about the quality of trucks that were sent to pick up the artifacts when they landed in Peru, playing a little too hard into stereotypes by saying the trucks looked like they should’ve been carrying potatoes. He concluded by describing an image of himself in which the people of Cusco praise him for returning the artifacts. Sound familiar?
The scary thing about all of this is that it happened about a week ago. We’re now thirteen years removed from the repatriation of the Peruvian materials, and to the average person who maybe read one or two headlines from online articles about Yale’s role in this—so uncritically positive that it makes my stomach hurt—the problem looks solved. But they aren’t in a classroom with Richard Burger listening to him actually influence how a dozen or so students think about the actual world. Repatriate all the Peruvian artifacts we can, but does it even matter when Yale’s language feels as colonial as Hiram Bingham’s expeditions?
Oscar Heller was the Opinion desk editor for the 2024-25 school year. He has also been a staff writer. Currently, he is one of the Editors-in-Chief for the 2025-26 school year.
