Paper short abstract:

We analyze political acts of the use of the past in rural Andean communities in response to dehistoricizing development policies. We understand them as processes of decolonial heritagization, an important part of transformation initiatives.

Paper long abstract:

Agroecological transformation initiatives, based on revaluations and reterritorializations of ancestral forms of Andean-Amazonian agriculture, which are supposed to be authentic, are one of the responses to pressures of agribusiness peasants face in their everyday life in rural Andean communities. Communities, groups of activists, networks and social movements pretend to return to tradition seeing it, paradoxically, as a way of promoting change.

Ethnographic fieldwork carried out in some rural Andean communities, in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, in 2020 and 2021 allowed us to observe such practices and narratives of transformation as: an overall return to traditional values, establishing local museums and banks of peasant memory, creation of seed conservation networks, as well as traditional medicine clinics and local libraries; agriculture on communal lands, eco-markets and fairs, among others.

These political acts transform people’s relations to the past, challenge the modern separation of humans from nature, as well as differences between social groups. For this reason, we consider them as processes of heritagization inspired by decolonial attitudes, through which communities resist conflicts of representation that underlie conflicts over the distribution of natural resources. We suggest that it is important to research the social use of authenticities, their social agents, narratives, intentions, and negotiations.