The making of "cultural heritage": remembrance, knowledge and politics in today's Indigenous America. – FABRIQ‘AM

In order to understand the different forms of this patrimonialization process in the thirty or so Amerindian societies investigated in this project, three complementary research lines will be followed:
- temporality/ time-scale issues, historicity and knowledge.
- the “making” of heritage, its social construction and political uses.
- heritage logics and international or national heritage devices.
Led by experts on the societies under study, the analyses are mainly ethnological and ethnolinguistic. They aim at a deep understanding of the conceptions, processes and strategies at play at the local level. The research also requires special attention to, and fine knowledge of, the politics concerning cultural heritage, from the micro-regional level to the international one.

The project aims first at an inside understanding of the processes of change induced by the various increasing pressures towards patrimonialization in the Meso and South American societies. These changes are configured by and affect the conceptions of time and historicity, the construct of memory and the modes of transmission of cultural knowledge, the forms of esthetics and those of political action.
Although the intention of the project is mainly comparative, it is not about establishing a typology of similarities and differences between the various ways of placing emphasis on heritage. Its main ambition is rather to compare categorical representations, settings, relationships, and processes of constructing meaning and narratives.

Through the study of cultural patrimonialization, which reveals individual options, strategies of self-definition and political agendas, we hope to decipher, on the one hand, how Native Latin American peoples strive to fit into modern society and how they negotiate with different patterns of knowledge and historicity, stemming from patrimonialization. On the other hand, this study aims at highlighting the genesis and contemporary developments of the multicultural patterns, which define the Meso- and South American political arena.

In process

Patrimonialization (the various means by which cultural features –either material or immaterial– are turned into a people’s heritage) has recently become, for Amerindian groups, a major means to gain visibility and recognition in the new American social and political landscapes where multiculturalism plays an increasingly important role in the definition of governance.

Different forms of cultural patrimonialization have largely been studied elsewhere, especially in North America. Yet, they are far lesser known in Meso- and South America, especially among Amerindian peoples. Among them, the notions of what ought to be preserved or forgotten, the ways knowledge and assets are transmitted, and the modes of historicity often seem to go against the very grain of patrimonialization as defined according to Western views. Besides, due to outside mediation, teachings and influence, Amerindian peoples are now transforming some of their daily activities into items of identifiable, transmissible and retainable cultural heritage. Such schemes are usually associated with narratives working through the objectification, essencialization and ethnicization of native cultures.

The specific forms of remembrance among Amerindian minorities therefore display a twofold dimension. On the one hand, they are fostered within their very own localized cultural and social mold. On the other hand, they are now also, quite often, used within a globalised world as a means to reinforce collective identities, or even new forms of indigenousness. Analyzing the patrimonial patterns that can be found during fieldwork therefore requires solving how all this is forced upon and adopted by people, but also understanding how indigenous actors managed, in response, to reclaim the right to handle their own cultural narratives and establish them as a source for the statement of their very own identity.

In order to understand the different forms of this patrimonialization process in the thirty-odd Amerindian societies investigated in this project, three complementary axes will be followed:

• time-scale issues, historicity and knowledge.
• the “making” of heritage, its’ social construction and political uses.
• the institutional practices and the local forms of multicultural governance.

The twenty-odd anthropologists taking part in this project have longstanding fieldwork experience. They can therefore cover a vast sample of local situations and will be able to address the global process and varied responses associated with cultural patrimonialization.
This definitely comparative project is not about establishing a typology of similarities and differences between the various ways of placing emphasis on heritage. Its main ambition is rather to compare categorical representations, settings, relationships, and processes of constructing meaning and narratives through the study of cultural patrimonialization, which reveals individual options, strategies of self definition and political agendas. On the one hand, we hope to decipher how Native American peoples strive to fit into modern society and negotiate with different patterns of knowledge and historicity stemming from patrimonialization. On the other hand this study aims at highlighting the genesis and contemporary developments of the multicultural patterns, which define the Meso- and South American political arena.