Studia Ethnologica Pragensia (Jun 2022)
The concept of cultural heritage to defend a territory from extractivism. Petroglyphs in Támesis, Antioquia (Colombia).
Abstract
A study case in a village in Colombia illustrates the contemporary tension between local lifestyle and global/transnational models. Hundreds of petroglyphs, probably made in prehispanic times, started to be widely valued by the local community when large-scale mining companies were attempting to enter into their lands. These petroglyphs have been resignified since then as Cultural heritage, a term coined officially by UNESCO, and adopted and enriched by the local community in order to strengthen their own fight defending their territory against the large-scale mining and other economic activities such as monoculture farming. The process of local resistance is an ongoing process. The community have been working together since then and they have gained relevant achievements in terms of political participation and self-determination for governance linking the cultural, historical, social and environmental issues. In other terms, thanks to the risks they have had to face they have been developing their own economic and social alternatives for living as a way of social resistance. This case, even if it is a sign of people’s agency concerning their sovereignty and autonomy as a political group, it is also an expression of the geopolitics of colonialism that still operates even in the so-called postcolonial times, being the extractivist economy one of its main mechanisms.
