Abstract
This chapter traces how cultural heritage rights are deployed in the Afro-descendant town of San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia. Since UNESCO declared the “cultural space” of Palenque as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (ICHH) in 2005, a small group of community members have disproportionately benefited from the declaration and gained privileged access to financial resources and political power. In this chapter, I reveal how local intellectual elites have used the language of heritage-based rights to justify their current status, resulting in entrenched social exclusion among Palenqueros. Heritage benefits are not distributed solely on the grounds of race, ethnicity, or descent, but are chiefly based on who worked towards the ICHH nomination. Perceiving themselves as self-made cultural entrepreneurs, elites feel exclusively entitled to benefit from Palenque’s heritage declaration. Although Colombian state bureaucrats consider heritage nominations as vehicles for integration and recognition of Afro-descendants as a whole, I show how the language of rightful entitlements to heritage limits the scope of their social inclusion. Ultimately, I argue that the entrenchment of elitism and rising inequity in Palenque are not altogether unexpected consequences of the heritage declaration. Rather, they demonstrate the difficulty of employing heritage to foster social inclusiveness and economic equality.
Keywords
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- 1.
In this chapter, I use the name Palenque as a shorter version of the town’s full name, San Basilio de Palenque. In Spanish, Palenque means maroon town. Historical research asserts that since the fifteenth century there have been dozens of maroon communities—Palenques—founded in what is today known as Colombia (McFarlane, 1991; Navarrete, 2003). Despite the historical proliferation of maroon settlements, San Basilio de Palenque is one of the most widely known and studied maroon towns in the region and commonly referred to as Palenque by Colombians. Inhabitants of this town call themselves Palenqueros and other Colombians know them by this name as well.
- 2.
The origin and meaning of this word are still debated. In town some explained that mochilas—a type of traditional handwoven shoulder bag with no internal pockets—are usually worn by social scientists, particularly anthropologists. Wearing a mochila is thus an indicator of being an anthropologist or a social scientist. Other Palenqueros explained that mochilero had a demeaning connotation as everything that is stored inside a mochila gets lost and is difficult to find.
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Acknowledgments
My deepest gratitude is to my host family and friends in Palenque who generously shared their knowledge and time during my fieldwork. I am grateful to Lynn Meskell, Lauren Yapp, Kory Russel, and Clara Seligman Lewis who read and commented on earlier versions of the manuscript. Thanks to the members of the Stanford Heritage Ethics Workshop and the participants of the Stanford Archaeology Center Workshop Series and the 2014 AAA session “Between the Global and the Local: Situating an Ethical Approach to Cultural Heritage and Human Rights” for providing helpful feedback. Funding for this research was provided by the Mellon Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC), Fulbright, and Colfuturo-Colombia. I am grateful to the Archaeology Center, the Department of Anthropology, the School of Humanities and Sciences, the Center for Latin American Studies, the VPGE, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University for their financial and logistical assistance. Finally, I am grateful to Helaine Silverman for her invitation to participate in this publication, her feedback, and support.
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Escallon, M.F. (2017). The Formation of Heritage Elites: Talking Rights and Practicing Privileges in an Afro-Colombian Community. In: Silverman, H., Waterton, E., Watson, S. (eds) Heritage in Action. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42870-3_5
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