THE FINAL JOURNEY: THE BENNETT MONOLITH AS SYMBOL OF RESTITUTION

The Bennett monolith was transported back to Tiwanaku in March of 2002. Representatives from the Aymara peoples in both the city of La Paz and the town of Tiwanaku undertook the organization of a series of ceremonies and rituals to mark several stages of this journey. The night before its transfer the mayor of La Paz, surrounded by a group of government and diplomatic authorities, wished the monolith a safe trip back to its original home. The

Mayor’s speech was laced with Aymara words as he named the monolith the city’s older brother and urged it not to forget them. He then participated in a cleansing and blessing ritual performed by an Aymara ritual specialist or shaman who burned incense and other aromatic herbs while conducting a reading of coca leaves. The shaman concluded their libations and announced that the Pachamama or Mother Earth gave her willing consent for “her child to return home” (Rivera 2002).

The monolith was carried prone on the back of a specially built platform atop a trailer truck. People ran next to the truck waving flags and cheering, as it slowly made its way through the city and then across the altiplano. A couple of stops were made, first in the recently inaugurated Aymara university in the city of El Alto (above La Paz), where speeches were given and an escort of university students on bicycles joined the procession, and at the towns of Laja and Tambillo where the local Aymara communities received it with a feast and speeches. At the town of Tiwanaku, the entire village turned out to welcome the monolith with music and dances, and another ritual was performed by the Aymara shaman, asking the Pachamama to bless the new home of the statue. The monolith was then raised within a specially built enclosed space, that now forms part of a new archaeological museum and tourist center at the Tiwanaku ruins (Figure 55.1). The monolith is now the centerpiece of a museum targeted at foreigners as well as locals; the Tiwanaku community view foreign visitors favorably, as the villagers expect to benefit directly from tourist revenues (see Hastorf 2006).

The monolith’s return journey to Tiwanaku was purposefully laced with symbols by the Aymara people to create, by virtue of association, a strong bond with the statue and invest it as the representation of cultural restitution. One of the symbolic discourses deliberately deployed at the time was the re-telling by Aymara political leaders of a myth when the press interviewed them about their thoughts on the monolith’s return. These leaders told the story of Tupac Katari who led a well-known indigenous uprising against the Spaniards in the eighteenth century and who is believed to have said “I will die, but I will return turned into thousands to liberate our people” (Rivera Cusicanqui 1982). The Aymara leaders stated that the “sleeping giant” that was Tupac Katari had been reincarnated in the monolith. Various agents had used this messianic myth, many times before, to urge the Aymara people into political and actual battle. It was most recently appropriated at the 2006 inauguration of Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, where Tupac Katari’s return was said to be Morales’ victory at the polls.

The Tiwanaku archaeological site also has played a prominent part in the symbolic positioning of indigenous nationalism. It was the site of Morales’ recent presidential inauguration (La Razon 2006), and in 1982 it was the location where the manifesto was signed that resulted in the independence of the Bolivian peasant unions (Rivera Cusicanqui 1982). As has happened before, the Bennett Monolith has come to symbolize current social ideology and events at a time when politics in Bolivia have become “popularized” and the participation of indigenous leaders is becoming more prominent. Indeed, Bolivia’s populist political party that is now in power is based on a strong indigenous nationalistic ideology espoused by a loosely knit network of grassroots social movements (Jackson and Warren 2005: 558).