Heritage-as-Process: Indigenous Ontological Perspectives from Amazonia

Abstract

This presentation draws on the project Heritage and Territoriality: Past, Present and Future Perceptions among the Tacana, T’simane’, Mosetén and Waiwai to examine living heritage in Indigenous Amazonian contexts and to explore how collaborative research practices unsettle dominant heritage frameworks grounded in material permanence, conservation imperatives, and narratives of decay, loss, or depreciation. Based on long-term collaborative work in archaeology and anthropology with Indigenous communities in the Bolivian and Brazilian Amazon, I conceptualize heritage not as a bounded object or a fragile remnant of the past, but as a relational and ontological process embedded in lived territorialities, intergenerational memory, and multispecies relations. From this perspective, heritage is enacted through ongoing practices of landscape management, ritual engagement, material production, and storytelling, operating within ontologies that do not separate nature from culture, humans from non-humans, or past from present. I argue that processes often framed within heritage studies as “decline” or “deterioration” can instead be understood, from Indigenous ontological perspectives, as productive conditions of transformation, renewal, and becoming. By foregrounding Indigenous ontologies and collaborative modes of knowledge production, this contribution proposes a shift from heritage-as-preservation toward heritage-as-process, contributing to broader debates on living heritage, ontological pluralism, and alternative ways of imagining continuity and futures beyond dominant conservation paradigms.