What is RIDAP?

The INFORMATION AND DISCUSSION NETWORK ON ARCHEOLOGY AND HERITAGE is a critical analysis collective made up of researchers, activists, indigenous people, members of organizations and social movements and work groups interested in questioning the modern imaginaries that build the relationship heritage + culture + identity + memory + territories. The central focus of interest of the network is the critical study and denunciation of the production of heritage at the service of the colonial-patriarchal order of capital that operates as a structuring force of global reality.

 

WHY IS IT NECESSARY TO RETHINK THE RELATIONSHIPS OF HERITAGE + CULTURE + IDENTITY IN SOUTH AMERICA?

The extensive South American territory has been the object of interest of neocolonial policies and extractivist processes that use heritage discourse, due to its great biodiversity, but prescribe the understanding of its particular histories and memories. In this context, cultural heritage has been and is a very effective device to build, sustain, reproduce or transform the geopolitical logics of contemporary capitalism since it is a central object of agreements or disputes over the sovereignty of States at an international and intra-national level. -state. RIDAP aims to challenge the neutrality of disciplines that, such as archeology, anthropology, history, geography and the disciplines of heritage management, conservation and restoration, played a fundamental role in the creation of naturalized links between places and populations, from the production of “the archaeological” and “the heritage” in its double temporal/spatial and material/immaterial meaning.

However, this critical questioning of the archaeological discipline, which gives its name to the network, also promotes indiscipline in other linked fields of studies, strongly committed to heritage construction and reification.This criticism is necessarily undisciplined: it does not seek to act from the disciplines but against them. In the undisciplined view, archeology and heritage are just an excuse to facilitate dialogue and incite attendance. They are not solid places from which to speak, but rather suspended and contested positions. The critical positioning of the network is also a positioning against modern (onto)logic and its harmful effects. The activism of the members of the network translates into a political mobilization that seeks to contribute to the recomposition of the dominant order, decidedly violent, unequal and hierarchical. That is why the network not only links academics: it also links non-academic activists, indigenous people, organizations and social movements that are interested, although for other reasons, in what modernity calls “archaeology” and “heritage”.

RIDAP is also interested in working against the epistemic, conceptual and political operations with which other disciplines or thematic areas such as anthropology, memory studies, cultural management and the history of the present time, have adopted heritage rhetoric. In short, ours is not a view developed from modernity (which would seek more fair, democratic and inclusive versions of the archaeological and heritage), but from its margins. It seeks to show different worlds, not different versions of a single world. 

RIDAP | Red de información y discusión sobre arqueología y patrimonio