Heritage Cosmopolitics: Archaeology, Indigeneity and Rights in Bolivia and Argentina

This dissertation tackles the contemporary consensus on rights-based approaches to heritage management, conservation, and research through a multi-sited archaeology ethnography of two iconic sites of the south-central Andean region: the UNESCO World Heritage site of Tiwanaku (Bolivia), and the Sacred City of Quilmes in the Calchaquí Valleys (Tucumán, Argentina). The investigation is at the crossroads of archaeology, anthropology, and political sciences and aims to improve interdisciplinary methodology within the field of Critical Heritage Studies by showing conflictive, entangled configurations of memories and aspirations beneath the definition and exploitation of indigenous heritage in the present as much as in the past. The analytical assessment of what ties the fields of cultural heritage and human rights together in both field locations – in spite of national and academic demarcations – provided effective conceptual and evidentiary tools of translation across world-making practices, which I describe in terms of heritage cosmopolitics in this thesis. These assemblages shake taken-for-granted meanings of heritage/rights, while tangibly crafting my own fieldwork and questioning the logic and police of neoliberal multiculturalism.