Entangled Heritages: Postcolonial Perspectives on the Uses of the Past in Latin America by Olaf Kaltmeier & Mario Rufer

Author:Olaf Kaltmeier & Mario Rufer [Kaltmeier, Olaf & Rufer, Mario]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Caribbean & Latin American, Political Science, World, General
ISBN: 9781317142812
Google: QS6TDAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 30852703
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusive remarks

Through the case of the Inca—Kings of the Andes exhibition, I aimed to inquire about the constraints and institutional frameworks governing the management of cultural heritage under the neoliberal regime, at a local and transnational level. I also intended to discuss the transformation that such regime allows regarding the colonial relationship between European ethnological museums, and the museums and cultural legacies of the countries from which their collections originate.

Key principles that govern this new order respond to the imperatives of efficacy and efficiency, and are aimed at ensuring the competitiveness of the museum for the sake of its economic viability. For this, it is necessary to conduct a distinctive performance of cultural possession that, in the same logic of building a brand, can result in the distinguishing feature of the museum. On the other hand, within such order, it is required to implement collaborative strategies that facilitate interaction and mobility between people, objects, and knowledge that operate in favor of the sustainability of the museum. The imperatives of effectiveness and efficiency are, moreover, subject to results-based evaluations that require quantifiable criteria, such as media exposure, number of visitors, as well as minimizing costs. Thus not only the imperative of efficiency but also the imperative of efficacy is subject to an economic rationality.

What is at stake within this emerging order, which I have considered to be constitutive of a neoliberal governmentality, is the establishment of a new regime of knowledge and legitimacy within which cultural heritage is managed, compromising the very nature of the ethnological museum in the contemporary world. This regime of cultural management, which I understand as constitutive of a neoliberal governmentality, creates a set of tensions. The present case study allows me to highlight two of them. A first tension operates at the intersection of knowledge and consumption, in other words, between the validity of the museum as an institution of knowledge and its economic viability. In this new regime, the modern ethnological museum as an institution dedicated to critical thinking and the search for new knowledge is thus challenged by the need to offer services that have to be competitive in the market. Achieving the latter implies emphasizing aesthetic and sensory aspects of museum objects and their display at the expense of contextualization and analysis. On the risk of de-contextualization and de-historization through processes of aestheticization has been written critically (Kleinman and Kleinman 1996). On the other hand, within the sensory turn in anthropology, it has been argued that sensorial experiences also offer the possibility of critical exploration and reflexive apprehension of the world (Pink 2006). However, the second option requires work that needs to be properly based on the theories and methodologies of anthropology of art and of anthropology of the senses, especially if one’s aim is to break with an aesthetic language that naturalizes and reproduces common-sense knowledge and the prejudices that go with it. This has certainly not been the case of the Inca exhibition.

The second tension I observed is between two different forms of performing cultural possession.

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