First International Interdisciplinary Congress on Cultural Heritage: Memory, Orality and History Sources for Cultural Heritage
The first International Interdisciplinary Congress was held at the University of San Sebastian, in Concepción, Chile, from 16 to 18 August 2016. A university city, Concepción was chosen over Santiago, the capital, to break with the centralisation of knowledge production that prevails in Chile.
Co-organised by APC affiliate Maria Esperanza Rock Nuñez, the conference largely hosted scholars from the Latin American world. APC post-doctoral fellow Duane Jethro and APC fellow Susana Molins Lliteras attended the conference. As delegates from South Africa working on questions of heritage, identity and archive in South and West Africa, they hoped to hear from and engage with scholars working on similar questions in South America.
Concepción is a bustling, lively, youthful city of students who attend the numerous public and private universities in this southern Chilean city.
Walking around the campus of the University of Concepción, which is the biggest public university in the city, we were struck by the signs of student protests, which, appearing to address neoliberal spending cuts and policies as well as sexual harassment, not only resonated with student issues in South Africa, but also bore a striking resemblance in terms of aesthetics. We felt in familiar territory, and looked forward to the discussion the conference would bring about this robust atmosphere of student activism.
The conference commenced with an opening address by Dr Enrique Aliste about memorialisation at the Cemeterio General in Santiago Chile. It was followed by a cultural performance by a youth theatre group that performed traditional song and dance portraying a folk history of rural life and labour in Chile. Delegates then branched off to the first parallel sessions which looked at Symbolic Archives of Memory and the Prevalence of Territorial Memory.
The collection of papers presented in the session on Symbolic Archives of Memory largely addressed architecture and the preservation of built material heritage. This included Andres Torres’ presentation about the preservation of a Chilean Castle and the revival of a traditional brick making process; Paulo Alarcón Carreño’s presentation on agricultural built structures in rural Chile; and Aurelio Sánchez Suárez’s fascinating paper on ‘knowledge of construction’ among the Maya people of Mexico. Foregrounding distinct and unusual examples from the global south, these papers raised provocative questions about the usefulness of a strict distinction between tangible and intangible heritage stressed by dominant scholarly and institutional discourses.
Identity and the idea of Territorial Planning, and Heritage Conservation and the Social Use of Industrial Heritage were the scheduled afternoon panel sessions. Maria Esperanza Rock Nuñez, however, arranged a special roundtable session to explore possibilities for comparison and collaboration in the global south. The session comprised participating scholars from South America and APC fellows Duane Jethro and Susana Molins Lliteras. Scholars introduced themselves and their work, and then discussed the possible intellectual crossovers that could be APC affiliates Maria Esperanza Rock Nuñez, left, and Susana Molins Lliteras at the Congress in Concepción explored going forward. Boundary crossing—of language, since Latin American scholars write and engage mainly in Spanish, distance between regions and funding—formed the central challenge to on-going intellectual collaboration. The session concluded with a commitment to form and promote a southern heritage online collective to share work and connect scholars from South America and South Africa. It proved an exciting start for ongoing exchange and engagement amongst scholars in the global south.
Day 2’s morning sessions were split into two panels, one dealing with the Destruction of Heritage, and the other Memory, Orality and Testimonies. The session on Memory and Orality was particularly interesting. The panel hosted scholars from different parts of Chile who worked with oral archives, and who explained the kinds of challenges they addressed in collecting and managing such collections. Many of these archives were related to the period of dictatorship and the repressions. So, for example, Eric Fuentes delivered a presentation on the oral histories of Chilean rail workers and how they mobilised to support each other but also keep the memories of their important work after the privatisation of the rail network during the Pinochet dictatorship. Claudio Ogass spoke about the oral testimonies of former student activists, going into detail about the Western history of oral history archives, and the kinds of challenges he and his compatriots face in collecting and managing this archive. Daniela Fuentealba Rubio gave a presentation on the oral testimonies of survivors of human rights violations. An investigator working for the Museum of Memory and Human Rights violations in Santiago Chile, she explained how they would go about collecting oral testimonies, how these were used in investigations, and how the material, from testimonies to drawings donated by the survivors, were used to make books about their investigations and circulated in schools, or used in museum displays.
What was fascinating about the panel was not so much the deep reflection on archives and oral testimony by panellists, but rather the robust discussion that ensued among audience members during question time about how archives were mobilised to prosecute and vilify former perpetrators. This followed when a member of the audience raised the provocative proposition that human rights had been unfairly apportioned in contemporary Chile. Today, the audience member suggested, former perpetrators and their relatives were being victimised, and essentially dehumanised, at the hands of survivors and former victims. The room split in debate about the truth or falsehood of this claim, which suggested that the memory of the dictatorship is still fresh and raw in some parts of contemporary Chile.
In the afternoon, the panel entitled “Symbolic archives of memory: contexts, culture and identity as sources of cultural heritage” from the first day’s session continued with presentations by the APC-affiliated Jethro, Molins Lliteras and Rock Nuñez. Jethro’s paper entitled “Of Ruins and Revival: Heritage formation and Khoisan indigenous identity in post- apartheid South Africa,” was very well received and elicited a lively discussion. His discussion of the multiple relationships between destruction, mobilization and revival of Khoisan heritage seemed to resonate with an audience drawing parallels with Chilean experiences of indigenous marginalities and strategies of heritage recovery. Molins Lliteras’s presentation on the manuscript collections of Timbuktu as “iconic archive” in discourses on cultural heritage in the continent, raised questions of the access to such collections and the relationships between the oral and the written heritage of the region. Finally, Rock Nuñez’s presentation offered an attempt to theorise the multiple sources of cultural heritage and their relationships, emphasising the need for an interdisciplinary approach to research on such topics.
On the third day, Noelia Carrasco, an anthropologist from the University of Concepción, delivered the opening public lecture, which seemed to be aimed at students. She focused on the “processes of heritage-making” as she termed it, stressing the importance of asking the questions “who, why and how” about the formation of cultural heritage, and problematizing the still-current association of cultural heritage with development. The two parallel sessions that followed included an interesting one on Folklore as a Source for Cultural Heritage. In this session, Roberto Contreras, a professor of Musical Folklore and his former students – all secondary school music teachers and local folklore researchers—presented their work on the recovery of the musical heritage of the working-class coal-region close to Concepción. Contreras gave a short poignant presentation of the marginalisation of folklore as a discipline in favour of the more in-vogue notion of “heritage,” and asking questions of how the process unfolded. The other researchers presented the more practical side of their research, describing in detail the methodology they employ to recover some of this musical heritage and the work they are undertaking in developing pedagogy and related materials to teach this musical heritage at local schools. The conference was formally closed with a book launch on the local heritage of wine-making in the region and a musical performance by the University’s own “Tuna” or student-music group who displayed an uncanny illustration of the themes of the conference by their choice of music to perform.
After this full morning session and extended lunch break, the students of the degree “Pedagogy in History”—who had served as our kind and capable hosts, ushers and facilitators these past three days—took a select group of foreign researchers on a heritage route of Concepción. The approximately three-hour-long walking tour was developed exclusively by the students, who choose the relevant monuments, sites and spaces to visit and who have detailed historical/heritage explanations of each. Together we explored the mount-turned-park that marked space of the first battle of independence for Chile, the cinematurned-market exemplifying the change of the city from the ‘50s to the present, and of course the central square, or Plaza de Armas, where the monuments of colonial history coexist with and are juxtaposed to those of Independence, Indigenous history and the Catholic Church. Poignantly, one of the recurrent themes of the tour was the constant presence/mark of earthquakes—Chile is the most seismic country on earth—on the city, forging its heritage and identity one ruin and reconstruction at a time.