CULTURAL HERITAGE AND SOCIETY: TENSIONS AND DIALOGUES BETWEEN TRADITION AND INNOVATION
Cultural heritage, as an element of meanings collectively constructed and related to referentiality and identity, is a field of dispute in which its legitimizing function becomes evident across the most diverse dimensions of society: economic, social, political, environmental, human, institutional, cultural. This field is not immune to the various relations of power, whether hegemonic or insurgent, which directly impacts decision-making power over present uses of cultural assets: who decides what remains, what is forgotten or replaced, and how and when such present uses will be implemented. In this context, institutions (formal and non-formal) play an important role in the exercise of rights and the realization of citizenship. States, for example, can serve as a counterpoint between individual actions and the interests of the collectives involved in the territory, with their cultural assets and the insurgent practices that seek, through their heritage, human dignity and social justice for communities. But the very rules and standards established in each territory can also affect how each person and citizen establishes social bonds with their surroundings. We start from the premise that tradition and innovation are not opposite poles, but dimensions that intertwine in the various processes of heritagization, in which communities, economic sectors, new technologies — in short, uses of the past in the present — interact, producing meanings around memory, identity and belonging. In this temporal and territorial relationship, we perceive the existence of power relations and tensions over what is maintained in everyday practices and what ends up being forgotten and replaced by new practices. What remains, and why does it remain? What meanings are at play in this decision-making process? And, above all, who holds the decision-making power over what remains and what is “forgotten”? Such tensions have repercussions in the legal, social and economic fields. What new uses of cultural assets (tangible or intangible) allow for the maintenance of the referentiality proper to cultural heritage? And what uses might disconnect the social bonds that cultural practices foster in the territory?
The diversity found in the Americas is one of its main identity traits, evident, for example, in the various cultures and languages found throughout the territory. The result of complex relations of colonization, migration, existence and resistance, it is a territory that establishes diverse relationships with its heritages, marked by migrations from the most varied origins. Within this diversity are present complex and varied processes of confrontation, preservation, highlighting, erasure and even cultural reinvention. This context of struggle over narratives about cultural heritage also reveals the relationships that societies in the Americas establish with their assets and with one another, including the international congress of Americanists itself. Existing in the territory also involves material and subjective struggles over which standards are legitimate to exist and remain in force in the present.
In this context, the present symposium is proposed with the aim of reflecting on and problematizing the tensions and dialogues concerning present uses of and relationships with cultural heritage as a symbolic resource based on identities and identifications, particularly in the context of the Americas.
