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Cardiff 27th April 2017 Breaking Boundaries Postgraduate Conference

Introducing archaeological ethnography and the ethics of cultural heritages

Francesco Orlandi Barbano


University of Exeter Department of Archaeology

In my master dissertation, I combined the historical development of international cultural heritage

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

approach to cultural heritage promoted by international organizations, namely the UN Council of

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

different sensibilities and responsibilities, which materialise in the multi-scalar relationships

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

of the emergent Plurinational Republic of Bolivia, Tiwanaku is a place of intertwined senses: it is

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

together with local/indigenous interpretations. Notwithstanding, such endeavor was aimed at

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

have to be disciplined by the state and academic discourses.

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

make Tiwanaku an outstanding Heritage of Humankind.

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-

oriented, and, at the end of day, colonial representation of cultural heritage.

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.

Then, I thought that an interdisciplinary approach in which ethnographic and archaeological

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

conversations based on the translation of self-determined ontologies.

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

representative of backwardness, consequently moved in a peripheral segment of the collective

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

used to segregate and deny the right of the others.

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

performing heritage is deployed. Considering the ontological complexity of heritage/rights system


means grasping the conflictual aspirations embedded in its relationships. This would design heritage

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

Agnastopolous 2009; Meskell 2005,2010,2012). Another working-concept emerges from that:

Indigeneity is intended to be a space of enunciation that connects memories of the past and

aspirations for the future, opening up alternative possibilities for conversations.

Lynn Meskell (2010:446) puts it very clear when she says that archaeological ethnography is a

holistic anthropology that is improvisational and context dependent, and it is aimed at

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

preconceived temporality and conception of communitarian identity. Visualising and materialising

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

patriotic sentiments and toward vernacular solidarities.

In conclusion, keeping these theoretical-methodological developments in mind, in my doctoral

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

or global recognition of cultural diversity and communities self-identification converge in order to

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.

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