Heritage cosmopolitics and the contemporary past of the southcentral Andes

The chapter discusses the results of a multi-sited archaeological ethnography in Tiwanaku (Bolivia) and the Calchaquí Valleys (Northwest Argentina) at the intersection of critical heritage studies and the archaeologies of the contemporary past in the southcentral Andes. Local memories of conflicts triggered by the deployment of state and transnational policies over cultural and natural resources reveal the persistence of modern-colonial legacies in the fragile consensus around Indigenous heritage. The articulation of cosmopolitical and decolonial thinking with archaeological and ethnographic sensibilities strengthens interdisciplinary efforts to decentralize heritage-making practices from anthropocentric and Western-based models and values. The research emphasizes the socio-material connections, multiple temporalities, and socionatural relatedness of Indigenous heritage beyond the authorized frameworks of modern (pluri)national states and transnational development agencies. By unpacking the archives of authorized discourses that facilitate extractive development models over natural and cultural resources, the two case studies highlight the cosmopolitics of heritage in the emergence of ecologically constituted collective subjects routed in anti-colonial struggles and care of the land as a more-than-human social participant.