“Nuestras Reliquías Históricas” and the Rhetorical Work of Objects at Machu Picchu

Abstract

This essay elaborates a trio of object lessons that aim to complicate, reorient, and upend how rhetoricians encounter the rhetorical work of objects. The object lessons follow the history and politics of a set of archeological objects taken from the site now known as Machu Picchu in the early twentieth century and returned to Peru after much debate in the early 21st century. Over one hundred years, their nature, purpose, and proper location became subjects of intense debate and, eventually, the debate itself became fused to the objects: they became either national treasures or scientific objects; either evidence of heritage or specimens for research. Tracking that history and the multitude of worlds that emerge from it, this article demonstrates that rhetoricians need to account for the “things” that colonialism has produced and the ways those things act in public life to overdetermine settler colonial perspectives. It draws attention to the worlds precluded by a debate premised on Peruvian national identity and U.S. scientific imperialism as twin poles, and it turns, instead, to Andean theories of the pluriverse and broader Indigenous relational theories to illustrate how rhetoric’s ontological turn has, often, also been a colonial return. Working against that turn, this article aims to unsettle rhetorical studies’ objects, places, and theories.