Projects

The Fabric of Heritage: Memory, Knowledge, and Politics in Indigenous America Today

This project elaborates a comparative reflection on the avatars of the exogenous notion of “cultural heritage” in Amerindian societies, the ways in which these societies take possession of their “heritage”, and the resulting transformations (regimes of temporality, the transmission of knowledge, visibility, etc.).

In a Latin America where multiculturalism and the management of indigenous identities are a major political issue, to the point of changing local governance patterns, Amerindian populations are forced to put forward ethnic or cultural characteristics in order to position themselves on the national stage. These Amerindian processes of “heritage” follow their own logic and involve transformations that the thirty or so project researchers (all long-time specialists in the regions and populations studied) study and understand in terms of their historical depth, political and economic bases, and linguistic, cognitive, and socio-cultural dimensions. At the LESC, the research mainly focuses on systems of temporality, historicity, and knowledge, as well as on visibilisation and invisibilisation methods.