Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
law with anthropological perspectives on indigenous identities and communities imagination. The
aim of that work was to identify some gaps in the current evolution toward a human right-based
Human Rights and the UNESCO. By looking at cases of heritagization - that is the material-
discursive processes around the making-sense of a place as local, national or world heritage - I
wondered what could be the way to conceive of heritage/rights as a complex system encompassing
between communitarian identification, national interests, and global aspirations. In other words,
while the current discourse around the human right to cultural heritage stems from the logic of
recognition of cultural diversity, is it possible to think about a more symmetrical approach to this
relationship?
The present paper draws on some reflections derived from a fieldwork in the Bolivian
archaeological site of Tiwanaku during September 2016. Just after having submitted my MA
dissertation, I got in contact with Dr. Patrizia Di Cosimo, an Italian archaeologist based in Bolivia
who was recently appointed by the Direction of Tiwanaku as the director of the multidisciplinary
team deputed to extend the communitarian participation in the management of the archaeological
site. She thought that some of the ideas that I had exposed in my dissertation could be useful for her
work there. Having received a research grant by the School of Political Science of the University of
Bologna, I flew to Bolivia with the purpose to spend two weeks in Tiwanaku. I carried out an
ethnographic work that consisted in interviewing people, which have some kind of relation with the
site. The objective was to understand to what extent the activities promoted by the new community-
led management of Tiwanaku had been received by those people directly interested by those
policies.
Tiwanaku seems to be the perfect case-study for exploring heritage/rights imbrications insofar as
the long established conservation policy is nowadays managed by the local indigenous
communities. This was just one of the outcomes of the massive socio-political uprising and
indigenous affirmation since the last two decades of the twentieth century, which eventually brought
Evo Morales to be elected president for three consecutive times from 2005 till now, with the strong
support of indigenous organizations and rural workers unions. In the contemporary circumstances
the major tourist attraction of the country, a place where to display the invented traditions that
legitimise indigenous participation in the new State, but also a place where new dynamics of power
can be visualised.
Yet the materiality of the site is not new to be depicted and inserted in the changing time of the
history of this territory. Archaeological evidence put the flourishing period of Tiwanaku between the
fifth and the the tenth centuries, then its ruins served as a source of power for the Inka sovereigns,
as it has been attested in the myths recorded in early Spaniards Chronicles. In particular Juan de
Betanzos Suma y Narracin de los Incas (1551), Cieza de Len s Crnicas del Per (1553),
Sarmiento de Gamboas Historia de los Incas (1572) provided the earliest descriptions of the ruins
including the past of the Others into the biblical time of the Colonial regime. To be thinkable these
ruins had to be put into a known history, and the vernacular conceptions extirpated.
The situation did not change so much with the enlightening secularization, and the independence of
Latin American countries. Explorers visited the ruins, they gazed at and depicted the site in several
ways, trying to solving the mystery inscribed in those stones. However, two centuries of
explorations enable to appreciate a meaningful evolution: while the early romantic explorers were
fascinated by the present landscape of the ruins, that is their connection with the local dwellers, the
gaze gradually become more clinical, aseptic, and the ruins were separated from their surrounding,
put into a map, and eventually virtually reconstructed. This has been the evolution of the
archaeological thought during the last nineteenth and the early twentieth century: the past no longer
lives within the present, it must be sanitised, and, as four centuries before, it has to be put at the
service of a self-claimed universal history; then the vernacular relationship with these materials
This tension is still part of the dynamics around the site. Moreover, nowadays it assumes a
paradoxical form insofar as, from one side, the Plurinational Constitution establishes that the 36
indigenous nationalities have the right to seek an autonomous self-determination, from the other, the
site is the stage where the centralization of power is more evidently performed, at the national and
international scales. The intertwining of national and global aspirations materialise in the expansion
of the buffer zone for the appropriate conservation of the values of authenticity and integrity that
So, I wonder, is the plurinational project really alternative to the state-centred production of
heritage? Does it really overcome the national imagination for the benefit of communities self-
determination? What appears to me was that, despite the global and governmental attempts to
promote a communitarian management, the self-determined memories on and of the site were not
actually considered. Notwithstanding the good intentions, the dynamics of power around the
representation of the nature of this heritage are still silenced for the benefit of a fictional, tourist-
To face the history of the site means to deal with the memories inscribed in its stones. How are
these memories being translated and articulated in the circumstances of the present? And by whom?
Understanding that is an archaeological work, for it deals with remote events and their material
consequences, but it has also a broader anthropological dimension stemming from contemporary
encounters with alterity, and with materiality itself. To investigate into the politics of heritage is less
about the how a thing called heritage deems to be preserved than to ask what is this heritage we
are talking about. By moving from an epistemological to an ontological dimension, the relationship
between human rights and cultural heritages shifts towards the understanding of heritage/rights
system.
sensibilities are mixed was the best situated for grasping the encounters, the networks, and the
dynamics surrounding what I like to call heritage/rights systems. Thus, I found that two recent
developments in archaeological theory and methodology were particularly useful for the design of
my doctoral investigation. One the one side, since the last decade several scholars have begun to
draw on the so-called ontological turn to reorient the social dimension of archaeology (Alberti
2016; Alberti et al. 2011; Alberti and Bray 2009; Olsen 2010; Shanks 2007; Webmore 2007;
Witmore 2006,2013). Following theorists such as Bruno Latour (1993,2005) and Eduardo Viveiros
de Castro (2004,2014), this scholarship emphasises the complex hybridism surrounding the crucial
elements of the archaeological thought, namely the entanglement between human, things, and time.
This turn aims to uncover the constructiveness of the great modern divides upon which this
thought has been built, such as subject/object, culture/nature, present/past. The ontological turn
suggests to break the boundaries of the modern constitution, which is accountable for blocking out
the inherent hybridism of historical events, and for denying Others ontologies. The purpose of this
exercise would be inserting a difference where it is supposed to be the sameness, thus enabling a
relational attitude toward alterity beyond representation, which might foster symmetrical
However, how does it work in the field? Considering for example that in Tiwanaku I was told
several times that the great monoliths act during the night, they speak, move, and even cry, but they
cannot go out because of the fences that were installed to protect, conserve, and enhance the site for
the purposes of science and tourism. I may interpret this stories as believes, that is a cultural
relativistic approach to the same thing that we are looking at. Yet, by saying so I would assume that
my interpretation is the real one while the others are just superstition or folklore. As in the story of
the Bennett Monolith, I would discover and name those believes after my own standard of
interpretation, then translating them into a public space where they would be judged as
understanding, and eventually claimed back as a local property. Although the claim for heritage is
made to promote a cultural citizenship, it is working through the same logic that was previously
Conversely, an ontological gaze on that situation would rather focus on the misunderstanding
between what I consider heritage in relation to others accounts. In other words, we are not
actually looking at the same thing: because of our bodies, our eyes, our sensibilities and experiences
towards that place are radically different. In my conversations I learnt that an heritage otherwise is
not only thinkable, and material, but above all it concerns the life of many people whose memories
and practices are entangled with this site through sensory experiences. What I might see as
harmless, although politically embedded, remains of the past from an educated western
archaeological perspective, for local people these are not only objects of historical value, but also
subjects participating in a continuous flow of sociability and reciprocity. That is, making heritage
otherwise is to think in the relations. What is considered heritage only due its scientific and
historical outstanding values makes the monoliths crying as the result of the disciplining violence
suffered by their relational subjects. So long as heritage policies separate the inherent sociability of
the historical and contemporary assemblage of humans, things, and time, they will reduce this
vernacular sociability to a mock ritual to be performed for the benefit of capitalistic, nationalist, and
academic agendas.
That point leads me to the second element I wish bring to the fore: a collaborative approach that
takes ontological differences into account should be achieved through archaeological ethnography.
This emerging field provides the possibility to conceive of the relationship between human groups
and material culture as inserted into the socio-political context in which every practice of
policies within an ethical dimension where alternative values are not crystallised in academic or
ethnic tropes, rather they are tackled in their creativity and capacity of being in relation (Alberti et
al. 2011).
The strength of this approach lays in the capability to explore relevant ethical issues in
archaeological and cultural heritage community-based approaches in the terms of the limits of
unilaterally conceived spaces of recognition (Castaeda 2009; Hamilakis 2007,2011; Hamilakis and
Indigeneity is intended to be a space of enunciation that connects memories of the past and
Lynn Meskell (2010:446) puts it very clear when she says that archaeological ethnography is a
identifying competing conceptions of the common goods, and the practices by which new and
emergent realities come into being (Meskell 2012:140). Archaeological Ethnography provides a
way to think about the sensorial, relational, and, therefore, dialectical, assemblages between living
communities memories, the durable memory embodied in objects, and multi-scalar identifications.
This enables to analyse how modern/colonial discourses about monolithic concepts of past and
communities are still a powerful source for state legitimisation within its boundaries and in the
international arena.
This kind of friction (Tsing 2005) of the past into the present by means of material engagements
(Domanshka 2006; Gonzalez Ruibal 2008, 2016) is what should be traced, despite any
what lays outside the normative discourses of heritage and rights (Buchli and Lucas 2001; Field,
Gnecco and Watkins 2016; Smith 2006) should be part of a counter-modern, undisciplined (Haber
2012; Hamilakis 2013) project aimed at exploring future possibilities of social justice and
intercultural encounters grounded on peoples rights, and on mutual responsibilities, beyond
project I will focus on a crucial feature of the heritage/rights system, which I have identified in the
process of achieving an agreement to collaborate through the legal instrument of the free, prior, and
informed consultation. This procedure both ritualises and materialises the moment in which national
agree about what heritage is, and how it is deemed to be protected. In these terms, looking at the
free, prior, and informed consultation means to be looking at heritage/rights system as an ongoing
negotiation about the nature of cultural heritages. This is a creative process where local values
should be able to articulate themselves with global discourses. Yet the consent achieved in these
terms will be always partial, and the acknowledgement of this enduring partiality is what should be
conceived of as the vernacular right to participate in the cultural life of the community.