Heritage discourses: from nation-building to nation-branding?

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel explores the transformation of discourses about material heritage in the twentieth and twenty-first century in Latin America. The literature has shown how, throughout the region, socio-political elites – helped by historians, archaeologists, museum experts, and other intellectuals – have made extensive use, since independence, of material (pre-Columbian, colonial, republican) heritage for nation-building purposes. If, as posited by Laurajane Smith, “heritage is about the promotion of a consensus version of history by state-sanctioned cultural institutions and elites to regulate cultural and social tension in the present”, what do heritage discourses in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries tell us about contemporary Latin American societies? Considering the performative function of heritage, this panel shies away from naturalized conceptions of material heritage as the remains of the “deep past” of the nation and explores the variety of discourses about heritage today. Among other topics, papers explore how official heritage discourses switch from nation-building purposes (for example, the promotion of mestizo nations) to nation-branding and economic development goals (by promoting tourism and investments towards domestic and international audiences). Other presenters focus on the re-articulation of the relations between centralized cultural institutions and local (particularly, Indigenous) actors, as the latter regains some agency and capacity to construct their own narrative about the material remains found on the territory of their communities. Together, these presentations analyze how contemporary heritage discourses reveal both continuity and ruptures in state-society relations.

Sub Track

• Art, Archaeology, and Architecture

Session Organizer

• Christopher J Parisano, The Graduate Center - City University of New York

Chair

• Pierre Losson, The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY)

Discussant

• María Luisa Rendón Puertas, Programa trAndeS, Freie Universität Berlin (FU), Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP)

Individual Presentations

• Recuperando lo nuestro: why have Latin American states sought the return of cultural heritage objects since the late 20th century? - Pierre Losson, The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY)

• Amarres and the magic of cultural heritage in Lima, Peru - Christopher J Parisano, The Graduate Center - City University of New York

• Tourist narratives and the shaping of national heritage in Mexico: The development and evolution of Morelos as a tourist destination in twentieth-century tourist guidebooks - Daniel Salinas Cordova, Leiden University

• Símbolo de identidad: el descubrimiento de Caral y los dilemas del Perú contemporáneo - Raúl Asensio, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos

• The material past as a political tool: Owning and restoring heritage in Quintana Roo, Mexico - Kasey Diserens Morgan