Heritage, ideology and society: views from Bolivia and Potosí

Abstract

The authors start with a general reflection of the concept of heritage and its polemic uses to reach, in this article, the actual case of Potosi in Bolivia, and the social conflicts that have arisen from the contradiction between its industrial identity and its recent patrimonialization. Contrary to what the concept “ universalizer” suggests in the term “ Human Patrimony”, in fact, heritage only exists within private socio-historical appropriations and configurations. These are characterized by discrepancies that divide the population over where the authority for the heritage begins and ends. In this way, for the sociologist and the ethnologist, the patrimonial processes are striking revelations of social relations. Patrimony does more than crystallize preexisting identifications, solidarities and conflicts. The almost sacred dimension and authority it has acquired since the XIX century makes it a political instrument of the first rank. The use of heritage is evidently considered in the processes of unification of national identities in XIX century Europe, and more recently in the demands for restitutions – ancestral territories or museum collections – that accompany indigenous recoveries all over the world. 1) Transnational ideology and local enclaves: the contradictions of heritage Since approximately three decades, Bolivia is the scene of a recovery process, (re)construction and valorization of identity based on the patrimonalization of its past and focused on a proposal of sustainable tourism. As in many other cities in Latin America, the country seeks in the exuberant layers of its history, tools to improve its future by means of “ smokeless industry”. However, we can see how this process of identification, founded on raising the past, responds, like any historical construction, on a particular vision of the world, often hegemonic – which in the case of patrimony presents one “ politically correct” line of the globalization of ideological norms – and originates contradictions, occasionally negating the local identities it tries to strengthen.