Deeply rooted in the present: Making heritage in Brazilian quilombos

Abstract

Heritage is often assumed to be the uncontested residue of static traditions. Yet, according to David Lowenthal, heritage ‘clarifies the past by infusing it with present purposes’ (1998: xv). In other words, as current social and political landscapes shift, so do the ways in which people think about themselves and their relationships with the past, what is considered authentic and valuable, and the means and justifications for its preservation. Thus, analysing heritage as a process in the present allows for a more dynamic understanding of cultural production. This reconfiguration of heritage is a key observation for the argument developed in this chapter, which posits heritage as an important tool for interpreting and practising a new legal and ethno-racial classification: remanescente de quilombo. Here, the importance of negotiating and, ultimately, controlling the meaning and value of heritage is directly related to control over territorial rights legislated by the 1988 Brazilian Federal Constitution, Article 68. As such, there is no fixed remanescente heritage. The content and practice of what it means to be a remanescente community, or descendent community of ex-slaves or fugitive slaves (quilombos), are heterogeneous and shift with location, political aspirations, and social and economic relations, where race, ancestry, memory, and place are differentially employed to construct, maintain, and communicate a specific sense of heritage. The form that remanescente heritage takes, what is protected, preserved, or showcased, is thus negotiated and influenced by a variety of actors, agencies, and ideas that expand beyond the community. These may include international and state agencies, NGOs, religious groups, politicians, academics, artists, and social movements, all of which mediate what is considered valuable and worth preserving, who it is preserved for, what is at risk of disappearing, and how it should be made available for future generations (Ortiz 1988: 164; Tamaso 2006). Therefore, notions of heritage, race, identity, and authenticity are not so understanding of the social and political construction – and ultimate plasticity – of remanescente heritage. Recent policies produced to address the rights of ‘minorities’ have con- tinued to shape the discourses, materials, and practices that remanescentes de quilombos use to communicate their relationships with the past. The notion of ‘rights’ and legal protection for Brazil’s ‘founding groups’ provides a different vision of social relations and access to resources, leading to new questions, and new ways of seeing oneself in relation to the past and future. By interpreting, remembering and commemorating, groups challenge and redefine authoritative heritage and their ‘place’ in the world. The construction and practice of heritage, then, is an inherently political act. To examine some of the complexities of heritage in quilombos, or maroon communities, I draw from field research carried out in Santa Luzia, in the northeastern state of Paraíba, where two communities were recently federally recognised as quilombo descendent communities: a rural community recognised in 2004, and an urban extension recognised in 2005. The rural community, formed in 1860, is located 26 kilometres up a mountain, and today consists of 120 people. Its urban extension is made up of family members who have migrated to the urban zone. Together they are engaged in stimulating cultural (identity work), political (collective territory rights), and economic production through heritage tourism.

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