Heritage Fever: Law and Cultural Politics in a Decolonizing State

The early twenty-first century ushered in a period of change in Bolivia. The country welcomed its first Indigenous president, a new constitution, and a profusion of laws that recognized individual music and dance expressions as intangible cultural heritage. Using cultural heritage lawmaking as a window through which to view the de-centered workings of the Indigenous-focused Plurinational Bolivian State, Heritage Fever unpacks the myriad motivations for heritage making in this this politically transformative moment. Heritage Fever reorients UNESCO-driven heritage debates towards a different set of questions--a pivot the authors call ＂heritage otherwise.＂

These inquiries focus on how citizens use law to frame expressive culture and engage their new state. Through grounded case studies, Bigenho and Stobart reveal how competing claims over cultural expressions stimulate aficionado research and produce an abundance of cultural activities. Managing these productive conflicts often involves strategic uses of scale within the country’s new political autonomies, even as old-style nationalisms lurk beneath a plurinational sheen. One case study highlights imagined Indigenous autonomy as bolstered by decolonizing historiography that predates the Plurinational State by several decades.

Privileging the stories told by those who championed or who were bureaucratically involved in the respective heritage-making campaigns, Heritage Fever’s research draws from the authors’ combined fieldwork in Bolivia over the last 30 years, recent multi-sited fieldwork conducted as a team, and ethnographic interviews conducted with Bolivians involved in heritage-making projects. Contributing to legal anthropology, critical heritage studies, ethnomusicology, and anthropology of the state, Heritage Fever looks beyond intellectual property frames, opens new perspectives on archival thinking, reflects on decolonizing practices in expertise and knowledge production, and uncovers the agency of mid-level citizens in a decolonizing state.

Michelle Bigenho is Charles A. Dana Professor of Anthropology and Africana & Latin American Studies at Colgate University. She is the author of Intimate Distance: Bolivian Music in Japan and Sounding Indigenous: Authenticity in Bolivian Music Performance.

Henry Stobart is Professor of Music and Ethnomusicology at Royal Holloway University of London. He is the author of Music and the Poetics of Production in the Bolivian Andes and the editor of The New (Ethno)musicologies.