This book is an insightful and thought-provoking ethnography exploring the effects of “heritage governance,” in Palenque, Colombia—an Afrodescendant community declared as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2005. The book persuasively explores heritage “exclusions” in four fields: epistemology; political economy, experiences of death and suffering and representations.
Escallón carefully underscores the “real-life effects of heritage policies on the ground” (14). She analyses how actors who are recognized as cultural heritage icons simultaneously experience structural exclusion, ethno-racial discrimination, marginalization, and the exacerbation of internal conflicts. One of the main strengths of this book lies in its deep and ethical engagement with the paradoxes and ironies of “being and becoming heritage.” Readers have the unique opportunity to listen to the contradictory voices of activists, leaders, bureaucrats, academics, and tourists and to learn about their everyday interests, desires, achievements, frustrations, and sufferings.
The book develops the concept of “heritage governance” which proves to be valuable for analyzing the multiple actors, practices, spaces, and products that are involved in the implementation of Palenque’s UNESCO heritage declaration. The author convincingly demonstrates the limits of heritage governance and neoliberal multicultural policies for addressing histories of slavery and racism and its connections with contemporary forms of inequality and discrimination affecting Afro-Colombian people. She reveals how after the heritage declaration, Palenqueros remained experiencing poverty, racial discrimination, and limited access to health, education and safety.
The first chapter examines the ambiguous role of academia and heritage “experts” in creating epistemological hierarchies while occluding or legitimizing particular ways of knowing. Conflicts and divisions are exacerbated among those who are legitimized as experts, entitled to manage heritage funds, and other local practitioners with less formal education, who lack political connections and bureaucratic technical expertise. These inequalities are identified by the author as technocratic capture: a process by which experts seek to control heritage projects, moving away from struggles against class and racial inequality.
Chapter two explores how the political economy in Palenque shifted after the declaration, as it was impacted by the tourist industry and the commercialization of cultural heritage. Tours and guesthouses emerged, and work linked to heritage safeguarding plans became available. Mistrust and enmities escalated among community actors and leaders, mainly over the allocation of heritage funds. Parallel social organizations (community councils) were created to compete for the control of resources, reinforcing existing hierarchies.
The third chapter draws attention to the subjective and emotional landscapes of local actors. Escallón shows how heritage knowledge produces an “analytical flattening” involving the objectification, carnivalization and dehumanization of human experiences. She argues that a cognitive dissociation with death is produced by academic discourses, that tend to see rituals (such as the lumbalú) as mere cultural artifacts, while the actual sufferings, debt, anxieties and vulnerabilities of Palenqueros are ignored. Moreover, the material causes of death, due to poverty, lack of health services, low income, and land displacements, are overshadowed and replaced with attention to cultural heritage.
The fourth chapter explores the experiences of Palenquera women street fruit vendors in Cartagena. The author examines the irony of how these women are on the one hand, cherished as marketable figures within the tourist, entertainment and heritage industries and yet at the same time experience racial harassment, economic precarity, police surveillance and legal marginalization. Escallón shows how these women feel unprotected, powerless and frustrated, since they have little control over their representations (photos, figurines, and dolls) and the profits derived from heritage plans. Palenqueras in Cartagena, she argues, are only protected and allowed to exist as “cultural relics” from another time and space, whilst they face significant economic precarity in the present.
The epilogue of the book addresses the novel role of digital technologies and social media in reshaping heritage governance. She shows how young leaders in Palenque are creating new alliances with global Black organizations and engaging in artistic practices involving the making of colorful murals with racial affirmation messages. American Black tourists are arriving at the community linking heritage recognition with anti-racist demands and larger global racial politics. Reflections on the connections between antiracism, tourism and heritage politics opens spaces to think about alternative spaces and strategies to move beyond the Eurocentric modern colonial logic of heritage regimes. Future re-editions of the book could engage in more detail with theories on decolonial heritage activism and Afrofuturist projects. How can Palenquerxs envision and build alternative heritage practices and future pathways that can account for “glocal” structural reparations, re-existence projects and memory justice interventions?
This book is highly recommended to scholars, activists, students, policy makers, bureaucrats, and consultants who aim to create critical, collaborative and constructive spaces for learning and reflecting about power and heritage—and their unexpected, everchanging and multiscale effects. This ethnography overall provides relevant, honest and insightful learnings on the overlooked intersections between heritage, racism, classism and inequality.
