Fragmented Methodologies: indigeneity, relationality and intangible heritage management

Abstract (English)

Relationality, in Lauren Tynan’s Indigenous perspective (2021), is a lived principle of kin-based connection among human and more-than-human beings, places, and stories—enacted through practice rather than grounded in Western ideas of comparison or classification. In the Andes and broader Latin America, this principle is often sustained through cycles of celebration and reciprocity, known as fiestas, which not only preserve memory and kinship but also enact cultural continuity and future-making. Oral traditions and performance are central to these practices, functioning as “vital acts of transfer” (Taylor 2003, 2) that transmit social memory, identity, and knowledge in ways written archives often cannot. Scholars such as Ángel Rama (1996) and Diana Taylor (2003) have shown how colonial regimes in Latin America privileged written culture—what Rama called la ciudad letrada—to dominate and marginalize Indigenous oral and performative traditions, reinforcing Eurocentric knowledge systems.
Building on this scholarship, the paper uses ethnographic and secondary analysis to examine how Indigenous struggles for cultural self-determination persist in contemporary heritage management. It focuses on the treatment of intangible cultural expressions such as dance festivals and parades, using Bolivia’s largest fiesta, the Oruro Carnival—inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008—as a case study. Although the 2003 UNESCO Convention states its goal to safeguard and promote understanding of intangible cultural heritage as living traditions shaped and maintained by communities, its operational logic remains grounded in state-centric legal and archival frameworks that neglect Indigenous epistemologies and needs (Alves, 2025). By emphasising documentation and institutional safeguarding, it overlooks relational understandings of heritage—as ongoing, contextual and transmissive relationships rather than fixed, extractable cultural assets. These frameworks often impose bureaucratic, state-led filters that constrain community agency and limit the evolution of cultural meaning, marginalising those outside the ciudad letrada and restricting their capacity to shape cultural futures.