TAHL · Temporalities of Andean Heritage Landscapes
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-05-01 → 2024-04-30
- EU contribution
- €178,203
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Temporalities of Andean Heritage Landscapes
This research project tackles the issue of Andean cultural heritage being regularly managed in ways that do not do justice to indigenous understandings and experiences of history and of the past. A main consequence is a widespread sense of dispossession and alienation resulting from mainstream archaeological conservation practice and policy in the Peruvian Andes. The project is relevant insofar as it may redress an imbalance in terms of how indigenous heritage has been managed so far by non-indigenous cultural managers unsensitive towards traditional systems of caring for the land and for the material past. The overall objectives are: 1) to formulate an archaeological heritage management proposal more respectful of and in tune with Andean ideas of time and uses of space; 2) To frame such proposal in current global debates and initiatives regarding the restitution/repatriation of indigenous cultural property. The main conclusions are: 1) Current (static and ahistoric) archaeological heritage conservation models in the Andes must and can be replaced by models that incorporate temporalities of rotation and circulation as found in local landscape practices; 2) This is a form of efficient protection that current conservation paradigms obscure and neglect.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
How can project/site managers consider local categories and ideas of time when conceptualizing, managing, and protecting indigenous archaeological sites in the Andes? At a time when politicians and scholars give increasing importance to local perspectives, few models exist for addressing the conflicting temporalities of Andean indigenous heritage. My project engages this problem by undertaking an ethnographic inquiry into the Quechua category of muyuy with reference to how time is understood through the material world and use of space in the community of Chinchero, in the Cuzco region of Peru. Muyuy is an Andean long-standing, key organising and dynamic principle of socio-political and ritual life that projects social relationships onto the landscape in different forms. Semantically, it is a concept charged with the temporalities of rotation, alternation, and circulation. As customary law and action, muyuy organises communal agricultural work and production by periodically rotating the plots allocated to families for their sustenance, ensuring rights to land. While muyuy has received some previous attention in the literature, my work will examine this idea in the most depth to date. My previous doctoral research on the topic has already laid the foundations for a more thorough and productive study. An emphasis on muyuy and other temporal categories is (relatively) new. By focusing on native temporalities my project intersects current anthropological debates on indigenous landscapes, as well as current indigenous efforts worldwide to regain control over their archaeological heritage.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union