The past as a lived space: Heritage places, re-emergent aesthetics, and hopeful practices in NW Argentina

Abstract

This article explores the past as a lived, inhabited reality through a series of examples of indigenous heritage practices in NW Argentina (NWA), a region that in recent decades has seen increasing indigenous demands for autonomy as well as for land and cultural rights. This article seeks to understand the locations where heritage struggles emerge, as well as the artefacts around which they emerge, as social, semantic, and physical spaces of ontological multiplicity. Understanding how such places and artefacts are constituted as lived-in-the-flesh realities today requires examination of the multiple present connections that make them possible, as well as inquiry into how the sedimentation of previous lived experiences contributes to present understandings. This article examines ancient places that become gravity points, fuelling both indigenous politics and an academic practice with its own aesthetic code. To varying degrees, the cases explored reflect our involvement --as archaeological researchers, professional advisors, and museum visitors --with reemergent indigenous heritage practices in the region.

Introduction ‐ The heritage and decoloniality nexus: Global exchanges and unresolved questions in sedimented landscapes of injustice

“…The wealth of experience of people deeply involved in contested territories over decades showcased in this section highlights the seemingly incommensurable challenges posed by the dual nature of heritage as tangible "things" as much as intangible "process," revealing networks of attachments (to objects, places, memories, people, other species, and beings) that create unique configurations and trajectories. In our own engagements with Indigenous peoples, descendant communities and minorities (Larsen, 2015(Larsen, , 2018(Larsen, , 2022Lazzari, 2008Lazzari, , 2011Lazzari and Korstanje, 2013;Orlandi, 2022), we have witnessed how the tropes of heritage rights and conservation have been repurposed and reshaped to curate pasts that matter for imagined futures. The bricolage of distinct place-based fluid dynamics with often long-established anticolonial taxonomies emerges as pathways toward "re-existing" and "de-linking" from Western/metropolitan aesthetics and modes of classification (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018, 7).…”

Oriental Marco Polo Plaza Encounter: Choreographing Place and Placelessness from a Phenomenological Perspective

“…In this way, the place is no longer a sealed box; visitors are immersed in it, entangled with the material and immaterial here. It has diverse processes of production and succession due to the engagement of tourists who bring their own memories and perceptions [71,72]. Ideas, memories, and practices flow and merge, creating new place meanings.…”

An Introduction to Relational Personhood and Other-than-Human Agency in Archaeology

“…As anthropology can never be entirely extricated from its colonial roots and fully escape its Western modes of inquiry, the hypocrisy and paradox of this field remains a problem that may never be resolved, particularly for indigenous scholars (Alberti and Marshall 2009;Hereniko 2000;Nicholas 2010). In truth, it is debatable whether destabilizing Western intellectual traditions in any way directly benefits indigenous communities (but see Lazzari and Korstanje 2013). However, most scholars, including the contributors to this volume, would probably agree that listening to the indigenous communities and considering their ontological and epistemological frameworks has strengthened their interpretations and benefits anthropology.…”