Entangled Heritages

Postcolonial Perspectives on the Uses of the Past in Latin America

Olaf Kaltmeier, Mario Rufer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317142805
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Relying on the concept of a shared history, this book argues that we can speak of a shared heritage that is common in terms of the basic grammar of heritage and articulated histories, but divided alongside the basic difference between colonizers and colonized. This problematic is also evident in contemporary uses of the past. The last decades were crucial to the emergence of new debates: subcultures, new identities, hidden voices and multicultural discourse as a kind of new hegemonic platform also involving concepts of heritage and/or memory. Thereby we can observe a proliferation of heritage agents, especially beyond the scope of the nation state. This volume gets beyond a container vision of heritage that seeks to construct a diachronical continuity in a given territory. Instead, authors point out the relational character of heritage focusing on transnational and translocal flows and interchanges of ideas, concepts, and practices, as well as on the creation of contact zones where the meaning of heritage is negotiated and contested. Exploring the relevance of the politics of heritage and the uses of memory in the consolidation of these nation states, as well as in the current disputes over resistances, hidden memories, undermined pasts, or the politics of nostalgia, this book seeks to seize the local/global dimensions around heritage.

1 On the advantage and disadvantage of heritage for Latin America

Heritage politics and nostalgia between coloniality and indigeneity

Olaf Kaltmeier

DOI: 10.4324/9781315579849-2

Heritage is booming all over the world. Within the last years, we have witnessed an amazing qualitative and quantitative expansion of heritage policies. Not only have international heritage organizations like the famous UNESCO World Heritage Center expanded their scope dramatically, but the cultural industry also seems to be booming with a ‘heritage lifestyle’ marked by nostalgia, vintage, and a ‘retro’ look. Performance and narration of heritage are related to a globally established form, although its appropriation depends on local patterns. This is especially the case in Latin America, where the general heritage boom—which is also set according to a growing cultural industry—is intrinsically entangled with questions of coloniality and indigeneity.

While in Western European countries, heritage has often been transformed into a depoliticized lifestyle factor, in postcolonial contexts heritage has also become a battleground for the interpretation of history and its projection into the future. According to David Herwitz, this is the main reason why decolonizing societies enter the heritage game and make their own heritage, although heritage itself is a Western device.

To do so is a rehabilitating move, a way of self-assigning a future by taking over the ideology which allows them to ascribe origin and destiny to the past, accretion and transmissibility to their ‘values.’ And a central part of the postcolonial dialectic is re-conceptualizing the precolonial past as a heritage, finding a way to claim that past as the origin of one’s future.

(Herwitz 2012, 21)

This use of heritage has its pitfalls, since heritage is a discourse and a practice that is not rooted in indigenous policies of the past but introduced by the colonizers, which implies certain logics of representation, categorization, and exhibition. While heritage is based on these logics of representation, categorization, and exhibition, usually made by experts, it is articulated with the affective and emotional side of nostalgic feelings that, in the Americas, are related to the antagonist patterns of coloniality and indigeneity. Thereby, nostalgia is not a simple sighing for yesterday; instead, it serves as a means to confront a conflictive present and an uncertain future (Kaltmeier 2015b).

The decolonial engagement with heritage and nostalgia is particularly relevant for those Latin American countries that have a considerable indigenous population and where attempts are made at imagining the nation in relation to a precolonial heritage. The indigenous uprising in Ecuador in 1990 and the hemispheric indigenous protest movement of 1992 around the 500th anniversary of the European conquest of the Americas marked a turning point in the field of indigeneity and initiated a new politicization of the indigenous question in Latin America. This new visibility of the indigenous, the introduction of ethnic symbols and semantics into public spaces, and the reinvention of ethnic identities shape the political culture of the Latin American countries since the 1990s, and query the principles of vision and division of a social world based on coloniality. A fundamental aspect of these movements was their struggle for cultural-political recognition, including the matter of heritage.

Although Latin America’s policies have been multilayered and special emphasis has been placed by the public on the memory of South American military dictatorships, coloniality and indigeneity can be seen as fundamental temporal layers of the Americas. Following a discussion on the fundamental contemporary dynamics of heritage, this article focuses on its entanglements first with coloniality, and, second, with indigeneity. These two fundamental aspects of the colonial situation are re-actualized in many and different ways in the field of heritage. In this context, this article analyzes paradigmatic constellations spanning from Mexico to Chile where different actors—from social movements to cultural entrepreneurs, state agencies and NGOs—try to make use of heritage, and where they reinterpret history through heritage in several ways. In doing so, we explore to what extent is it possible to articulate difference or even resistance within the established idiom of heritage.

The power of heritage

Probably, every human society engages in practices of memory in order to build identity and belonging. However, the notion of heritage that alludes to practices and discourses made by scientific experts emerged around the second half of the nineteenth century in the context of nation-building. The nation’s attempt at a diachronic and harmonious narrative is at odds with the dynamics of industrial revolution, internal migration, and massive processes of urbanization disrupting the processes of identity formation. In Europe, the emergence of the discourse of heritage was linked to romanticism and to ideas such as ‘arcadia,’ ‘origin,’ and ‘authenticity.’ Therefore, the discourse of heritage is offered as a way to heal the flaws of modernity. It promises continuity and stability, continuing an invented origin that was lost in the processes of modernization (Herwitz 2012, 18; Smith 2006, 17). Especially in postcolonial conditions, however, the use of heritage for nation-building is somehow ambiguous. Due to the colonial situation, the past is not only a positive reference with which to narrate a story of progress; rather, it is marked by trauma and colonial shame.

In Latin America, the idea of heritage emerged as homologous and interchangeable with European notions, but unlike them, it was marked by the colonial situation. Thus, the indigenous as well as the colonial are seen as a resource in different junctures, but also as a hindrance and an obstacle for the construction of identities. Since the 1860s, colonial architecture and urbanism were seen by Latin American elites mostly as an obstacle to modern urban development as established by the Paris model. By the liberal republics, the Hispanic heritage was seen as an obstacle for modernization and civilization, while conservative sectors relied on hispanism to forge the nation. For the criollo elites, the treatment of indigenous peoples within national history was equally a problem. Without the indigenous origin, it became difficult to form a national narrative as deep as that shown by European discourses. Therefore, indigenous peoples were—in many countries—petrified and exhibited as an artifact of the past, while contemporary indigenous populations were forced into assimilation processes.

From the national perspective, the image of heritage rises as a mosaic, fragmented according to national borders. This national segmental rationale is increasingly intertwined with a transnational field of heritage. Especially after World War II and through international and supranational organizations such as UNESCO, the Organization for World Heritage Cities, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the International Centre for the Study and Preservation of Cultural Property (ICCROM), and regional associations such as the Latin American and Caribbean Organization of Historic Centers, a trans national field of heritage emerged where architects, archeologists, urbanists, sociologists, economists, ecologists, and other experts participate in an interdisciplinary manner and from their own specific discourses.

Heritage is thus established, after World War II, as a technocratic discourse produced by experts. With its universalizing scope construed in terms of ‘world heritage,’ the strong nineteenth-century link between heritage and nation is loosened and heritage becomes depoliticized. If, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, we had to define de nomos of the heritage field, we could claim that it is the decision on which tangible or intangible goods are to be preserved and which are not. It is in this sense that Jesús Martín-Barbero (2010a, 5) points out:

The craft of memory [as that of heritage, O.K] is therefore that of not mere accumulation but that of sieving, which is to say selection and redressing. Values are also included here, since memory also exercises its craft on them by re-valuing as well as de-valuing.

Making this decision is not in the least a democratic exercise; it depends on the control over economic, social, and cultural capital (García Canclini 1999). It is based on a fairly simplistic attitude before the contradictions and complexities of history, which led Eduardo Kingman and Ana María Goetschel (2005), drawing on their experience in Quito’s historic city center, to understand it in Foucauldian terms as a disciplinary device that trivializes memory. Heritage is in this sense intrinsically linked to power. Laurajane Smith coined the concept ‘authorized heritage discourse,’ which ‘focuses attention on aesthetically pleasing material objects, sites, places, and/or landscapes that current generations ‘must’ care for, protect and reserve’ (2006, 29) in order to create identity. The decision to preserve is informed by the geopolitics of mainstream knowledge, which is currently related to the historical emergence of the West throughout the long sixteenth century and its Eurocentric production of knowledge. On the level of discourse, it can be conceived as an iteration of national Western discourse on a global scale, thus universalizing the European forms and concepts of heritage. In spite of its global character, it is ultimately nation-states that are responsible for proposing and managing world heritage sites.

Recently, however, there are several tendencies in the proliferation of heritage. Within UNESCO definitions, the concept of heritage has been increasingly widened. It was first centered on monuments; by the mid-seventies, it came to include urban settings, which, as it happened with the historic center of Quito on 1978, can be declared to be world heritage, as it was also the case for cultural landscapes after 1992. It is especially with the emergence of intangible heritage, which was adopted by UNESCO in 2003, that a proliferation of heritage was directed also to local and regional communities and was no longer limited to state agencies. Nearly every single community, municipality, or region is identifying its specific heritage. Thus, heritage came to be considered as a fait social total. As a social fact in Durkheimian terms, heritage consists of representations and actions, and thus exerts a coercive power over the individual. Thereby it encompasses legal, economic, religious, aesthetic, morphological, and other aspects of social life (Mauss 2009). Within the context of contemporary identity policies in the Americas, George Yudice (2003) has argued that there is a performative imperative to reveal identity. In the same way, we can identify a heritage imperative of showing historically bound identity and belonging.

Although we agree with the aforementioned critique of heritage as a Eurocentric realm of power, we also think there are ways of counter-conduct or even resistance. In regard to his discussion on governance, Foucault stated: ‘Where there is power, there is resistance.’ In his lecture from March 1, 1978, at the Collège de France, Foucault discussed the possibility of resistance against the new pastoral power. He discussed both passive and active forms of resistance. But his main interest was directed towards those practices of counter-conduct emerging within the new power regime. In concert with this Foucauldian approach, we are also mainly interested in the practices of counter-conduct within the field of heritage that have the productive function of challenging orthodox forms and creating new knowledge.

This is particularly the case in postcolonial contexts where heritage is simultaneously adopted and altered. In this context, Herwitz proposes the following understanding of the use of heritage: ‘Heritage practice was a ‘gift’ in the double edged sense of offering and poison’ (2012, 8). On the one hand, it enables postcolonial nations in a mixture of mimicry and assimilation to construe themselves as nations and insert themselves within global history. On the other hand, it defines a discursive frame to express these demands and its forms of representation, such as museums, history books, archaeological sites, and so on.

Beyond the analysis of heritage as discourse, I want to emphasize its material dimension, which is especially expressed by the category of tangible heritage. Here, the way coloniality has shaped the heritage landscape is rendered evident. As Bertolt Brecht (1964, 261) wrote: ‘Always the victor writes the history of the vanquished. He who beats distorts the faces of the beaten. The weaker departs from this world and the lies remains.’ Similarly, Eric Wolf (1982) has argued that many colonized peoples have been subjected to the state of ‘peoples without history.’ If this is so for historiographical discourse, it is even more relevant for the case of appropriated and transformed space as it is shown by monuments, cities, and cultural landscapes. The exclusion of the subaltern from the material text of space is even deeper there than in written and told history. Access to capital is of paramount importance for the construction of material goods that are considered by experts in the field of heritage. Besides, lack of capital limits the selection of construction materials, so artifacts made by the subaltern usually have less durability. The monuments remain and the barracks of the workers disappear.

To perform such an appropriation and transformation of the environment, economic, cultural, and social capital are needed. In pervasive colonial contexts, this capital is mostly generated through appropriation and exploitation of a social class constructed in racial terms by a white mestizo elite. It is therefore worth emphasizing along with Walter Benjamin, that ‘there is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ (1974, 253). These considerations are still absent from the discourse of heritage agencies that praise many monuments in the Americas for their colonial character.

Nostalgia and heritage nowadays

After World War II and the subsequent wave of decolonization, we can observe a depoliticization of heritage that was followed in the 1990s by an increasing dynamic of commodification of heritage in the postmodern condition. The end of the bipolar world brought about by the fall of the Soviet Union inspired neo-Hegelian philosopher Francis Fukuyama to declare the ‘end of history’ at an age of global capitalism. This dynamic goes along with a remarkable return of nostalgic attitudes and feelings. Linda Hutcheon (1998) even argues that nostalgia is the main cultural force in the 1990s: ‘Perhaps nostalgia is given surplus meaning and value at certain moments—millennial moments, like our own. Nostalgia, the media tell us, has become an obsession of both mass culture and high art.’

We are witnessing a certain crisis of the future that relates to the end of great narratives of development and progress. However, this does not mean history has come to an end. On the contrary, the omnipresence of cultural heritage projects, policies of memory, nostalgia, ‘retro’ and vintage fashion trends, as well...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: the uses of heritage and the postcolonial condition in Latin America
• 1 On the advantage and disadvantage of heritage for Latin America: heritage politics and nostalgia between coloniality and indigeneity
• 2 Mexicanos al grito de guerra! How the himno nacional became part of Mexico’s heritage
• 3 Making heritage – the materialization of the state and the expediency of music: the case of the cuarteto característico in Córdoba, Argentina
• 4 Is Spanish our language? Alfonso Reyes and the policies of language in postrevolutionary Mexico
• 5 Cultural management and neoliberal governmentality: the participation of Perú in the Exhibition Inca—Kings of the Andes
• 6 Commemorate, consecrate, demolish: thoughts about the Mexican Museum of Anthropology and its history
• 7 Going back to the past or coming back from the past? Governmental policies and uses of the past in a Ranquel community in San Luis, Argentina
• 8 Unearthing patrimonio: treasure and collectivity in San Miguel Coatlinchán
• 9 Processes of heritagization of indigenous cultural manifestations: lines of debate, analytic axes, and methodological approaches
• 10 The ambivalence of tradition: heritage, time, and violence in postcolonial contexts
• Index