Nominal Ruptures in Archaeological Heritage Governance? Heritage Ethics vs. Embedded Politics in the Participatory Paradigm of Peru’s Qhapaq Ñan Project

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Arqueología colaborativa en los Andes: Casos de estudios y reflexiones" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This presentation discusses the permeability of the Qhapaq Ñan Project’s participatory paradigm with historically rooted politics in archaeological heritage governance in Peru. In the early 2000s, the transnational nomination of the Qhapaq Ñan to the UNESCO World Heritage List harnessed a participatory approach for archaeological heritage management in the Andean region. Intergovernmental organizations advocating heritage conservation promoted this approach through recommendations, standards, and policies that emphasized community engagement, social inclusion, and sustainability. In the Peruvian context, specialists and managers of the Qhapaq Ñan's technical secretary (Lima) articulated strategies to build participatory practices out of a highly vertical and conservative heritage regime. Based on a qualitative methodology and archaeological ethnography, this study analyzes the processes, practices, and knowledge that underscore the Qhapaq Ñan’s aim for a renewed heritage policy with a socially-sensitive ethos. It follows the concept of governmentality, to examine how the Peruvian state's technologies of power metabolized participatory and collaborative archaeology practices. The policy-making demonstrated tensions and resistances between emerging critical archaeological ethics and conventional forms of governing archaeological heritage. Therefore, it questions whether a state-led heritage participatory paradigm constitutes a nominal rupture that still favors the prevalence of the status quo.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Arqueología colaborativa en los Andes: Casos de estudios y reflexiones   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39321.0