Reorienting Indigenous heritage for socio-environmental justice: cosmopolitics, resistance and ruination in the Andes

This contribution presents a study of the archaeological ruins of Tiwanaku and Quilmes in the south-central Andes as spaces of equivocation at the intersection of diverging human-nature and past-present ontologies. Drawing on multi-sited archaeological ethnography, the research reveals the underlying struggles for Indigenous heritage rights and self-determination through discursive-material juxtapositions, frictional materialities, and multiple temporalities. Three lines of inquiry are examined: a) the modern-colonial origins of dominant configurations of heritage rights in the Andes; b) the failures of development projects aimed at the “rehabilitation” of native technologies and knowledge; and c) the pluriversal becoming of Indigenous heritage from the ruins of multicultural development. The findings offer a critical counterpoint to rights-based narratives and consent-seeking approaches that objectify heritage and communities within hegemonic conservation and development regimes. Alternative forms of political subjectivity and socionatural configurations enable an assessment of the entangled environmental and decolonial dimensions of heritage, indigeneity, and rights.