Heritage imaginaries and imaginaries of heritage: an analytical lens to rethink heritage from ‘alter-native’ ontologies

ABSTRACT

Imaginaries arerepresentational assemblages of the past, ways to understand and(re)create history and projections of the self and others that ground ever-changing identities. They are embedded in the cultural meaning-making systems of each society. However, researchers and practitioners within the heritage field have not directly analysed heritage as a product-producer of imaginaries or conceived heritage itself as an imaginary. This conceptual article proposes imaginaries as a useful analytical lens to critically study heritage. Imaginariesenable us to uncover how people assume and signify heritage from various positions and experiences. Furthermore, this article aims to shed light on how alternative imaginaries grounded in non-western ontologies enable us to rethink heritage meaning and practice in the encounters and conflicts between different systems of meaning in daily life. More concretely, we identify three significant contributions of using imaginaries as a lens for the study of heritage. To illustrate our theoretical propositions, we incorporate empirical examples from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Ecuadorian Andes.

KEYWORDS:

• Imaginaries
• ontologies
• critical heritage studies
• anthropology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Runa in Kichwa means a person, commonly indicative of people belonging to Kichwa or Indigenous Andean populations.

2. Independent music festival that takes place in the frame of the Inti Raymi celebration.

3. The Magical Town is a state program to designate tourist destiny based on the symbolic attributes, legends, history, and daily life mainly used for rural and Indigenous populations to promote tourism.

4. Multiculturalism promotes cultural diversity but ignores the needs and eliminating historical specificities, processes of Othering, asymmetries, and power relations (Gnecco 2015, 268)

5. Taita means parents or refers to the oldest person in Kichwa.

6. Collective work based on common objectives and their responsibility to the community.

7. Sumak in kichwa means fullness and beauty, and Kawsay means life. Sumak Kawsay comes from the Andean cosmovision that comprehends life is integral and relational.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the VLIRUOS .

Notes on contributors

Ana E. Astudillo

Ana Elisa Astudillo is a doctoral student in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, KU Leuven. She received a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of Cuenca, Ecuador, and a master’s degree in anthropology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), Spain. Currently, she is carrying out ethnographic research on heritage imaginaries in the Ecuadorian Andes. She is interested in heritage meaning-making processes, imaginaries of alterity, continuities, and discontinuities of identity, subaltern identities, decoloniality, and critical heritage studies. ORCiD 0000-0002-0093-9208.

Noel B. Salazar

Noel B. Salazar is professor in social and cultural anthropology, steering committee member of the Institute for Cultural Heritage (HERKUL), and founder of the Cultural Mobilities Research (CuMoRe) cluster at KU Leuven, Belgium. He is editor of the Worlds in Motion (Berghahn) book series and has published widely on heritage and imaginaries. Salazar is past secretary-general of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) and past president of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). In addition, he is an expert member of the ICOMOS International Cultural Tourism Committee and the UNESCO-UNITWIN Network ‘Culture, Tourism and Development’. ORCiD 0000-0002-8346-2977.