Heritage companionship in the Andean high valleys

A situated experience from Argentina to engage with postcolonial/decolonial/social archaeology frameworks

Bibliographic Data

ID2260175
AuthorsMaría Alejandra Korstanje (0000-0001-6150-3005, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume126
Issue2
Pages326-332
Publication date2024-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Anthropologist (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7294 • E-ISSN: 1548-1433
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/aman.13958
OpenAlexW4392185730
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited5

Social archaeology, established in the southern hemisphere in the 1970s as “Latin American social archaeology” aimed to use a theoretical Marxist framework to overcome the visible contradictions in Latin American archaeology at the time and was characterized by research practices with a distinctive neocolonial tone, despite the progressive views held by many scholars and practitioners (for a general overview, see Tantalean and Aguilar, 2012). While deeply engaged as praxis with communities’ problems and concerns, in those early days the emancipatory power of this revolutionary approach did not sufficiently challenge the maintenance of Western epistemological hierarchies and patriarchal practices. Many of the concerns and issues raised by social archaeology as developed in the Anglo-European world are closely connected with debates ignited through postcolonial critique and theory development, a worldwide and diverse position in the social sciences and humanities established in the 1980s (for a general overview, see Elam, 2019). This framework started questioning the Eurocentric perspective that had refused to validate non-Western traditions, and, with time, it spread to every situation suspected to be, behave, or be thought of as “colonial” as well as the main political phenomenon that names this tendency. Current mainstream critical archaeology and heritage literature is primarily based on this framework, with little consideration of practices, conversations, and debates developed and experienced outside the Anglo-European sphere. Decolonial thinking developed by many Latin American authors, some of them coming from sociology (Quijano, 2000) or literature (Mignolo, 2014), has had little direct impact on South American archaeology; however, diverse critical standpoints (e.g., Kusch, 1999; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010; Sousa Santos, 2009; Viveiros de Castro, 2011) have been more accepted, perhaps because they enable ways of understanding our realities and territories with theoretical tools more easily translatable into archaeological methodologies. Many authors, reworking these and other ideas, have proposed a different way of performing our profession (whether as service, skills, roles, or jobs), some even arguing for the end of archaeology (for an overview, see Haber, 2022). Since this is a long discussion and outside the range of this contribution, I will concentrate on the paths that we have found as a group, recognizing, of course, that since we are a collective, many of these ideas permeate our way of performing-thinking archaeology and beyond. This essay contributes to the discussion on heritage and decoloniality with a reflection on the ways we have collectively found to undertake academic/scientific and heritage practice in a framework that we call heritage companionship1, from 1991 until the present, in three high valleys in the Argentinean northwestern mountain area (Figure 1). “Companionship” is the English word we found closest to “acompañamiento,” the original and precise word in Spansh. The Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Collective of Catamarca's High Valleys (CIIVAC) is an interdisciplinary and intercultural team organized around archaeological, environmental, and wider sociocultural and artistic themes (Figure 2).2 We have been visiting and studying different areas of this region for over 30 years, articulating our knowledge with that of local societies in mutual respect. As a result, both parts promote—through the Museo Rural Comunitario (Community Rural Museum),3 a space for community preservation of memory, identity, and future projection—several activities and projects considering young people's visions about the future, but also rooted in the elders’ feelings and ideas about their own history. As researchers, we consciously try to avoid epistemological hierarchies. We constantly debate our presence and the impact our knowledge and experience have on local projects and initiatives, but we do so from a position of enjoyment of our work. We are unapologetic about loving our work and how it has enabled us to grow as a new community of valleys’ people and academics/science makers. I am writing as the coordinator of CIIVAC, as the storyteller of the history of our organization, since writing horizontally with 39 people is not easy. We reflect the trajectory of CIIVAC, enhancing with other members’ perspectives, our collective practice informer oral expositions (Korstanje and CIIVAC, 2020a, 2020b; Vega et al., 2021). including frustrations and successes in our noncolonial but not-naive perspective to behave, live, and enjoy our work. As a researcher, I respect exploratory sense-based approaches as much as rigorous scientific methods, paying attention to the ways in which those in the communities we engage with get to know their worlds (Korstanje, 2019b). This approach is, in essence, open to creation and co-creation, giving practical experience the same importance as preconceived notions or ideas. Heritage management accompaniment is, essentially, a similar exploratory and creative approach to the one we follow when researching (or indeed whenever “being respectfully and open in place” is required, even as visitors or tourists), and this short essay is about that. Decolonizing archaeology is urgent. Yet, we do not all agree on what it means. It does not necessarily imply avoiding our occidental theoretical categories—in fact, decolonization and heritage are, after all, two of these categories—but rather, and far more importantly, avoiding colonial practices. This is sometimes taken as trying to interpret and assume the other's interests and perspectives on heritage and the past, which can be quite patronizing. While it is essential to understand this and take it into account, this does not mean we could replace his/her own voice. On the other hand, if we keep speaking fast in hegemonic-country languages about decolonization to international audiences—where these are not mother languages for many attendees, if we keep subtly—or not so subtly, segregating women and other “minorities,” if we keep publishing just in central-country languages and journals, and so on, then colonial practices are perpetuated. Working not just for academia but also for/into/with local communities, as CIIVAC does, is one of the most profound ways of decolonizing archaeology, regardless of our theoretical background.4 This statement defines critical lines about heritage. We do not have a homogenous idea about everything that we do or should do, but we make agreements when we act as heritage companions. To follow the thread, I will recount what we have achieved as an intercultural and interdisciplinary group; how I think this contributes to general knowledge on heritage, decoloniality, and ways of living and producing knowledge from the South; and final reflections about how much I think archaeology and museology can contribute to a sort of peoples’ cultural liberation. Training as an agro-archaeologist, my interest was initially focused on labor organization in ancient rural landscapes, and this provided a thread for our team's early peasant-landscape archaeology analysis (Korstanje and Quesada, 2010). Focusing on pre-Hispanic Andean peasants as agents who inhabited different locations throughout different historical periods—from the first farmers to the Spanish colonial occupation—in what we insistently called the longue durée perspective,5 we were also looking into the early nation-building period all the way to current times. In this early Marxist-oriented point of view, pre-Hispanic Andean peasants were part of productive/reproductive social units using the land as a productive component, and agriculture and livestock as the means of production, where the benefit of the exploitation was achieved through the work/consumption balance. From this perspective, the minimum common denominator of peasant societies would be three fundamental factors: (1) a family-based agricultural economy; (2) the presence of villages or other residential bases where domestic farms operate and where social relations are developed; and, (3) links of reciprocity with families or communities living beyond these residential bases. While this approach provided a fertile ground for understanding the connecting threads between ancient and contemporary landscape practices in the region, its limitations for truly engaging with local communities’ lived realities were soon apparent. Following CIIVAC's continuous participation in dialogued ways of understanding this past/present relationship (cf. Taddei Salinas et al., in prep; ses also Brown et al., 2021; Vega et al., 2017), we have moved to a different ontological perspective, where the land (tierra or Pachamama, in local terms) is considered a living force with agency to raise other beings as well as to be raised. Nowadays our work involves looking at and trying to understand the territory where we practice archaeology. From our beginning, in the early 1990s, we knew that challenging the positivist premise that sees the past as long gone was an avenue for truly engaging with present people's points of view (Lazzari and Korstanje, 2013). Increased engagement with present-day lived realities and experiences in the area made us feel closer to, and empathize with, local communities’ realities, everyday needs, and political demands. In many ways, this could be considered the birth of our collective—when we left behind the model of researcher/informant and moved closer to a participatory, collaborative, and inclusive approach, built on the basis of strong, personal friendships. Our movement toward a closer relationship with local communities has benefitted from experience and feedback from other archaeological teams, some of them explicitly aligned with Latin American social archaeology (Delfino et al., 2016). Yet, in our case, I feel there was a distinctive emotional component generating a strong sense of empathy and solidarity with local people and their trials and tribulations before any theoretical or political consideration.6 As simple as that. Still, this theoretical cleavage allows us to understand the landscape as a social formation, transformed by the interaction of various social actors (human and not humans) who perform a territory (both material and immaterial in an indivisible unique category) relating to each other around the common ground offered by Pachamama. These relationships and interactions are interwoven configured and reconfigured peasant identities that leave marks on the landscape that might be observed by archaeologists.7 Nowadays, CIIVAC goes further than archaeology since, responding to local demands, we have grown into a broad intercultural and interdisciplinary group with different interests, wrapped as respectful dialogue facilitators around the hearth (both metaphorical and physical) of the Museo Rural Comunitario, and aiming to support the museum's mission in a relationship that prioritizes local community needs. To “demonstrate” who we are and what we do, let me show one of our latest presentations we did as a collective for the event “Make (Contemporary) Archaeology Big Again” (CIIVAC, 2020) (Figures 3 and 4). The group chose eight photos showing moments with the community or doing outreach activities, only two (h and i) that can be considered as “scientific.” Nevertheless, we consider ourselves a group that does research as a primary activity but that constantly reflects on the ways we communicate and ensure that our work is understood by local students, families, and dwellers, as the following design suggests (Figure 5). Working from these positions implies situated archaeology, where we and the people with whom we are gradually linking commit to the unattended local concerns that are, paradoxically, global social problems. Climate change, migration, social and economic inequality, minority marginalization and loose identity policies are local concerns that are set and imbricate in wider contemporary concerns (Lyons and David, 2019). It is in that close bond with societies that we will inevitably be immersed in the reality that we try to understand, which leads us to “excavate” in our own collective subjectivity, through a reflective, transformative, and affective process (Hamilakis, 2016).8 We do not claim to be coherent. “Eclectic” and “pragmatic” might be more appropriate words to describe our approach, but we are authentic to our circumstances. We do critical science, assist communities with their needs in museology, collaborative projects, environmental monitoring, oral history and traditional music recording, media archive building, communication infrastructure, and so on, but basically, we get together with local people in a horizontal relationship, humble in theoretical pretenses but consistent in senti-pensares (sense-thinking) and mutual accompaniment to navigate the enduring coloniality of northwestern Argentinian landscapes (Vega et al., 2021). In our word cloud (Figure 6), “share” is our main concept (and it is surrounded by many synonyms), while “dialogue” and “learning” are the upper and lower forces that explain and hold it as in an I Ching hexagram. Archaeology can be deconstructed through practice with local communities and by establishing trusting relationships and mutually sustainable initiatives in which heritage appears to connect to other basic needs and rights of Indigenous communities (such as education or health) in addition to community- lands recognition, which are all marginal points of governmental agendas.9 But archaeology may also be deconstructed if we release it from the rigid disciplinary framework included in its name (“science of the past”) that restricts, again and again, a rich and powerful craft that does not want to be disconnected from current reality. Changing the perspective, without changing all the statements; recognizing that the past and the present are not disconnected at all, allowed us to understand the present as the only time that exists and has a position to defend through a materiality that has something to say about the past. In our work, the issue of decoloniality has emerged organically because of our long-term archaeological work and active engagement with local communities (both rural and Indigenous). Our evolving capacity to identify and question the colonialist assumptions of the discipline does not stem only from increased theoretical and political reflexivity but also was primarily shaped by our hosts and friends in the communities we visit. Local people (some as co-CIIVAC researchers in current times) are constantly invited and have included us in their lives, made requests and demands, and challenged our objectives, our categories of analysis and thinking, and our modes of engagement with them, with ourselves, and with the landscape that brings us together. This is not a story about how scientific impact modified local communities and landscapes, but the opposite: it is about how practice, local societies, and landscapes impact and modify researchers. Decolonial work done in the field prompted the deconstruction of archaeological theory and practice, as well as the crafting of place-based heritage expressions that strengthen community decision-making and the ability to negotiate with state bodies and structures. It also helps to highlight how colonial interventions are still happening, often associated with state and corporate interests in tourism or extractive industries. While we participate in global discussions and extended debates about heritage management, we feel in a comfort zone at this point. We arrived where we are listening, sharing, and doing—rather than reading and copying models. Of course, we read others. Of course, nothing is truly original by itself. Of course, we have made mistakes, and we will continue making mistakes. But we claim to have a situated perspective. A situated perspective may be both conservative and respectful of local practices and bold in its envisioning of the future. We act as a team, but also as individuals who understand what the team proposes. And, above all, we have a perspective where the growth of local groups regarding heritage is both conservative and daring. We can say we all grow together in dialogue, assuming different respectful roles. If you ask me, the secret to 30 years of noncontroversial and affable relationship is that there is no “them” and “us.” We walk together and learn together as friends, but knowing local people are the leaders. Mariana's statement above shows this mutual respect. We are not naïve. We are not romantic. We are just studying and doing things in our own way, without a priori labels and essentialisms about what our respective views and approaches should be. We are not obsessed with following mainstream ideas or innovative proposals, but we are happy to learn from them. Finally, on a more personal note, I have been making the point recently in public speaking and conferences that archaeologists can overcome their former and current colonial guilt by following a new, emancipatory path that integrates the joy of discovery and exploration with accompanying peoples through heritage, land reclaiming, and resistance to global extractive processes (Korstanje, 2019a, 2020, 2022a, 2022b). My own position defending archaeology as praxis is not one unanimously shared within our collective, but it is one that can enrich, challenge, and generate further discussions and debates. The best is yet to come. Now we are really walking together.10 To Marisa, Francesco, and Peter for encouraging me to write about our collective work. To all CIIVAC members. To the Indigenous communities (Pueblos originarios) and rural people from Catamarca Province. To all the projects that financed our research and practices.

Archaeology · Geography · Interpersonal relationship · Situated · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Computer Science · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · History · Indigenous Cultures and History · Psychology · Social Psychology

Tools

Open DOI