Heritage: Chain, Hierarchies and Conflicts - An Ethnography of the Tierradentro Archaeological Park and Nasa Indigenous Territory, Colombia (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cultural Heritage Management and Indigenous People in the North of Colombia
Cultural Heritage Management and Indigenous People in the North of Colombia, 2021
Cultural Heritage Management and Indigenous People in the North of Colombia explores indigenous people’s struggle for territorial autonomy in an aggressive political environment and the tensions between heritage tourism and Indigenous rights. South American cases where local communities, especially Indigenous groups, are opposed to infrastructure projects, are little known. This book lays out the results of more than a decade of research in which the resettlement of a pre-Columbian village has been documented. It highlights the difficulty of establishing the link between archaeological sites and objects, and Indigenous people due to legal restrictions. From a decolonial framework, the archaeology of Pueblito Chairama (Teykú) is explored, and the village stands as a model to understand the broader picture of the relationship between Indigenous people and political and economic forces in South America. The book will be of interest to researchers in Archaeology, Anthropology, Heritage and Indigenous Studies who wish to understand the particularities of South American repatriation cases and Indigenous archaeology in the region. Wilhelm Londoño Díaz is Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology, University of Magdalena, Colombia.
Between INAH and UNESCO: Questions of Heritage Governance in Oaxaca, Mexico
Do remnants of a colonial epistemic order undergird the type of international law that characterizes UNESCO? If so, how might this play out on the ground surrounding discourses of heritage in southern Mexico? This paper explores what kinds of power UNESCO wields in Oaxaca, Mexico, by examining the relationship between this particular organ of the United Nations and the national and local governing bodies of heritage, such as INAH (the National Institute of Anthropology and History). It asks how some rulings might mirror historical forms of colonial law and authority. As an extension of the United Nations, how visible is UNESCO's imperial hand in Oaxaca, and does UNESCO or INAH have ultimate jurisdiction over cultural policy, patrimony, and preservation? In asking these questions, the paper addresses two major World Heritage sites and the discourses that surround them: the Centro Historico and Monte Albán; it also addresses the question of what is meant by "authenticity" and examines how a rhetoric of authenticity and the demands placed on Oaxaca from external institutions may effectively resurrect ghosts from a colonial past.
Indigenous Heritage and Ontological Conflicts in the Southcentral Andes
Future Anterior, 2022
Taking inspiration from the epistemological potential of the Aymara concept of taypi this contribution aims to show the persistence of Indigenous peoples' self-determination and community governance in contemporary heritage politics. A multisited archaeological ethnography across Tiwanaku (Bolivia) and the Calchaquí valleys (Tucumán, Argentina) brings to light the long memories of anti-colonial resistance in the southcentral Andes and visualizes heritage-making practices in their ecological dimension, bridging multiple temporalities and territorial relatedness. The resulting picture figures a deep-seated tension between regulatory policies that adjust indigenous heritage to universal classifications and values embedded in the modern nation-state imaginaries, and emancipatory politics in which heritage claims are entangled with the social reproduction of community life and with the reparation of historical injustices. This twofold political dimension materializes in the legal artefact of the free, prior, informed consultation (FPIC), whose long memory of ambiguity is traced down to the early day of colonization. The article argues that consent-seeking mechanisms create an intermediate space where universal and place-based worldmaking designs converge. Locating these grey areas in time and space is crucial for addressing intercultural histories and future-oriented practices of heritage rights.
2018
In the central highlands of Peru today, people share space with a relatively plentiful amount and variety of physical remains of past human societies. Among the most conspicuous examples are colorful ceramic sherds and standing stone or brick architecture. In the more rural areas of the highlands, this ancient material culture is incorporated within a wider cultural landscape held together by Indigenous Andean belief systems, ritual practices, and offerings to animistic mountain gods. Shared meanings and values between local community members are thus imprinted upon a large territory that structures, and is structured by, seasonal agropastoral lifeways. The persistence of cultural continuity testifies to an enduring relationship between people of the present and places of the pre-Hispanic past. But ancient Peruvian cosmographic understandings and spiritual places are rarely, if ever, declared national heritage.
Paradigm Shifts in Global Heritage Discourse
Journal of Space and Communication, 2015
This essay narrates the evolution of the UNESCO doctrine on cultural heritage, its Eurocentric underpinnings, the concerns of its doctrinal authority, and the course of its decolonization. Three principal themes in current heritage doctrine-universality, significance, and material originality of heritage-clearly represent the occidental thought that primarily frames contemporary conception of heritage. Based on literature review, the essay examines these themes showing (a) their European patrimony and the problems they pose in managing heritage of a diverse geo-cultural context; and (b) how debates within and beyond UNESCO challenged this persistent representation of heritage sites as original, static, and frozen in time and the resultant changes that redefined the discourse and attempted to address the geo-cultural imbalance in the World Heritage List. The essay argues that achieving geo-cultural balance in the World Heritage List does not necessarily promote further paradigm shifts in the heritage discourse. Yet, the List becomes a powerful catalyst to evoke the debate of decolonization globally and, most importantly, locally, by bringing the coloniality of heritage thinking, governance, and practice at the regional, national and local levels of the Global South into focus.
Heritage drives along a path that goes from nowadays toward the past, when somebody starts to recognize it and thus come back to the past looking for references that legitimize interests of the present. Then, heritage constitutes a speech, a narrative that joins values, interests, and ideologies as from concrete elements or goods gain sense. At present, an avoidable topic in those heritage activation processes is tourism. The explosive development of this activity hardly pushed and particularly based these kinds of processes from heritage. The increase in tourism promoted the interest for the voyages looking for the consumption of cultural goods. We present here four examples of archaeological/historical sites from Tierra del Fuego (Argentina), where tourism is one of the main industries. Scientific community, indigenous communities, Government actors, and tourism are presented as the best-involved social agents in heritage enhancements. From these cases, we analyze the limits and difficulties to go ahead with the heritage activation and its feasibility.
Aspects of Management Planning for Cultural World Heritage Sites, 2018
This chapter discusses the relationship between World Heritage Sites and management approaches found within internal contexts-the nation state-and external contexts-the international organizations. The focus of analysis is two examples, which are long enshrined within Brazil's rich architectural heritage and that also form part of the UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL): the city of Ouro Preto in the state of Minas Gerais and the ruins of the Jesuit mission of the Guaraní of São Miguel das Missões in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. The chapter is composed of three interconnected sections. Firstly, it seeks to bring a contemporary view of the concept of cultural heritage, expanding this concept to include recent considerations regarding the idea of World Heritage, and also examining the classificatory mechanisms utilized in international heritage directives and regulations. Secondly, the chapter seeks to examine and understand the process of declaration as cultural heritage of the two sites in question, keeping in mind the importance of local and national identity politics in the preservation of the sites. Thirdly and finally, the chapter seeks to take into account contemporary conflicts that have emerged from the consolidation of architectural heritage, revealing new protagonists in the use and resignification of the sites in question.
Heritage cosmopolitics: Archaeology, Indigeneity, and Rights
Heritage Cosmopolitics: Archaeology, Indigeneity and Rights in Bolivia and Argentina, 2021
[ http://hdl.handle.net/10871/129335 ]This dissertation tackles the contemporary consensus on rights-based approaches to heritage management, conservation, and research through a multi-sited archaeology ethnography of two iconic sites of the south-central Andean region: the UNESCO World Heritage site of Tiwanaku (Bolivia), and the Sacred City of Quilmes in the Calchaquí Valleys (Tucumán, Argentina). The investigation is at the crossroads of archaeology, anthropology, and political sciences and aims to improve interdisciplinary methodology within the field of Critical Heritage Studies by showing conflictive, entangled configurations of memories and aspirations beneath the definition and exploitation of indigenous heritage in the present as much as in the past. The analytical assessment of what ties the fields of cultural heritage and human rights together in both field locations – in spite of national and academic demarcations – provided effective conceptual and evidentiary tools of translation across world-making practices, which I describe in terms of heritage cosmopolitics in this thesis. These assemblages shake taken-for-granted meanings of heritage/rights, while tangibly crafting my own fieldwork and questioning the logic and police of neoliberal multiculturalism.