The Looters Perspective
During her ethnographical investigation in the region of the Bolivian North Potosi, the author accompanied two young men to dig up pre-Colombian mummies. They intended to sell them to a university professor who dealt with them, they said, in the United States. To protect themselves of the possible wrath of the excavated mummies, they pointed out that you should not there « think/remember it » (yuyay, in Quechua). The author studies this exhumation and its contexts by focusing on the various strategies chosen in situ by both men to transform inalienable objects (the ancestors) into alienable objects (goods). She focuses on the processes of agency’s imputations and on reflexivity as well as on the conflictual relations between various social constraints suffered by both men. Finally, she explains how and why both believed afterward that they did not manage to neutralize the potential power of mummies.