Elis Meza

O passado permanece, tanto nas narrativas quanto nas materialidades ressignificadas, atravessando várias memórias. Nas cidades com herança escrava, o passado que persiste nos convida a refletir sobre suas consequências no mundo contemporâneo. No Sul do Brasil, na cidade de Pelotas, um dos enclaves dos quais podemos discutir essas interações multitemporais é “La Gruta”, ruínas de uma caverna artificial localizada no jardim do Museu da Baronesa. Esse espaço provoca uma discussão pública sobre as dimensões das consequências coloniais no campo patrimonial local, principalmente nas representações das memórias da escravidão.

The Mapoyo are one of the indigenous groups of Venezuela with better relationship strategies with national society, achieved through their entailment with several state stances. The building of a Communitarian Museum served as visibility mechanism of the “cultural revitalization” led by them but mainly it was fundamental to this objective their nomination to the UNESCO ́s Urgent Safeguarding List. The postulation emphasize two elements of the Mapoyo Oral Tradition: a collective suicide and the participation they had at the Independence War against the Spanish Empire at XIX century and by which Simón Bolívar, the greatest national hero and icon of the “Bolivarian Revolution”, gave them the ownership of the lands they occupied. Nevertheless, it is that last memory that have been showed up in the media as well as in the institutional context entailed with the Mapoyo. It is in that frame of disputes regarding ethnicity recognition where exaltation of certain collective memory becomes elemental, and at the same time it is remarkable the political functions in the construction of narratives of the past chosen for the constitution of Tradition.

The maroon archaeology is part of an ongoing interest of archaeology for socially relevant research issues. In Brazil, it has been associated with the democratization process and with the fight against inequalities, in such a way that its contributions may be seen as political statements. Through the example of Palmares Maroon and its various interpretations, we discuss the outlook of maroon archaeology in Brazil, in relation to its social and disciplinary context. The collaboration with social movements and also international archaeologists has enabled the construction of new approaches, widely significant to historical archaeology and anthropology.

The dynamics reigning on cultural heritage’s activation processes are strongly imbued in the specificities of national contexts. In the case of Venezuela, where has been handled by Bolivarian discourse in the past two decades, it is remarkable the use, as a political resource, of a sword that the "country's founding father”, Simon Bolivar, would have delivered to Mapoyo as a reward for their participation in the War of Independence in the early nineteenth century. We argue that the symbolic capital associated with the commemoration of this event, with the materiality of the sword showing its authenticity, has influenced the cultural heritage recognition of Mapoyo, and the granting of his territorial ownership. We emphasize both the agency established by the sword, as the performance of Mapoyo to use of this "scarce resource” to advance their interests in the context of the government's inclusion in legitimating account of his ideological project.