Crisis of the Heritage Order. Disputed Representations of the Jesuit Missions Past

WILDE, GUILLERMO

Washington

Simposio; ?The Missions as Heritage". Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium; 2020

Dumbarton Oaks - Harvard University

The Jesuit missions of Paraguay (1609-1768) have been the subject of contended representations that involved diverse actors from the seventeenth century to the present. The official heritage policy (in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia) has traditionally searched for a consensus about the Jesuit Missions past, enforcing its continuity with the national identity. However, these representations have experienced a crisis in the last decades, related to the emergence of new actors disputing the past and the use of heritage places. On the one hand, local communities acquire a more active participation in the heritage policy and re-appropriate historical sites redefining accepted notions of the past. On the other, classical historiographical conceptions of Jesuit missions move to a more critically oriented anthropological revision. The current shift of knowledge paradigm points to the complexity and historicity of heritage practices. This article provides a periodization of Jesuit missions heritage policy in the region, focusing on discontinuities and disputed representations of Jesuit Missions past over the long term.