Ruins in the landscape: Tourism and the archaeological heritage of Chinchero

Introduction

Over the last few years, the Inca ruins of Chinchero (Peru), a Quechua-speaking town located 30 km northwest of the tourist hub of Cuzco (see Figure 1), have been the scene of social tensions and struggles that underlie the reconversion of the country’s rich pre-Hispanic material past into archaeological sites. The sites are managed by the state under the official guidelines and philosophy of cultural conservation and heritage protection, and the reconversion has taken place within the Peruvian national context. This philosophy is at the heart of Peru’s current dynamics of nation-building and branding abroad (Cánepa, 2013; Silverman, 2002), and is closely associated with tourism development plans that the state is actively encouraging. However, the concept and nature of heritage, as well as the implementation of heritage preservation policies, have sometimes run contrary to local and indigenous understandings and practices related to the ancient material culture and its care (Gordillo, 2009, 2014; Lazzari, 2011; Sillar, 2013). The physical and conceptual reconfiguration of the ruins in Chinchero has had disenfranchising effects on the resident population, as in other places the world over (Smith and Akagawa, 2009).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

General view of Chinchero’s urban centre with the Inca ruins.

At the same time, other authors such as Sillar (2005), have underlined the different approaches towards heritage care and conservation found among indigenous groups. Critical Heritage Studies (Kirshemblatt-Giblett, 1998, 2004, 2006; Kuutma, 2013; Meskell, 2002; Sánchez-Carretero, 2012; Smith, 2004; Smith and Akagawa, 2009) have underscored the disjunctions and fractures inherent in a vision of ‘heritage’ as an hegemonic construct that states and institutions alike may use to impose their own agendas.

In Chinchero, heritage disjunctions are both spatial and temporal. In terms of space, archaeological heritage interventions have encouraged processes of de-territorialization that have had a severe impact on the historical landscape and have therefore substantially eroded the sense of place. In terms of time, new temporal regimes that have come along with the monumentalization of the ruins have arguably turned the site into an ‘other’ whose coevalness (Fabian, 1983) is denied. Moreover, the demarcation of an archaeological zone that encompasses Chinchero’s small urban core, under the supervision and control of the Ministry of Culture, has evoked an epistemological clash between different digging practices: on the one hand, those ‘scientific’ excavations carried out by professional archaeologists; and, on the other, those customarily performed by the villagers in routine maintenance work within their households, deemed destructive and disrespectful of the patrimony on account of the treatment given to the material remains found. This article explores all these different, but closely interrelated, dimensions of archaeological heritage in Chinchero as a field of contention whereby unorthodox conceptualizations and practices related to the material past collide with dominant ideologies, authorized discourses and official interventions that enforce a hegemonic order. At the same time, it introduces a critical review of how time is experienced within the community in relation to how the past is presented at the archaeological/heritage sites. In the final section, I consider how the proposed new Cuzco international airport in Chinchero will affect the landscape and the town’s (in)tangible cultural heritage.

When ruins become archaeological sites

The anniversary of Mamacha Natividad (Our Lady of the Nativity) on 8 September is the day when the main annual religious and civic festivity of Chinchero takes place with big altarpieces set up by different groups in the Inca plaza to serve as stations in the processions of the images taken out of the church. On this day in 2012 tensions mounted between the group composed of the varayuq (traditional authorities in Quechua) and the mayordomos (church stewards) on the one hand and the Ministry of Culture personnel on the other. The first group was ready to celebrate the festival according to their costumbre (custom), making use of the space of the archaeological site and of the Inca precincts contained within it; on their part, the Ministry of Culture workers had been instructed not to let the varayuq and the mayordomos develop their activities. These activities involved, among other things, eating and drinking as well as dancing and cooking within the ruins. In 2012, and for the first time in the history of the festival, access to the main precincts was fenced off and the workers, who on that day doubled in number, were monitoring and policing the site under the auspices of its preservation as a monument that brought tourists and money to the village and therefore had to be kept clean and tidy at all times. After the mass, and when the crowds coming from every corner of the district started to fill the main Inca plaza, frictions began when the varayuq and mayordomos from the different communities of Chinchero tried to jump over the fences and access the structures for feasting inside. As the Ministry of Culture staff tried to prevent them from doing so, tense verbal exchanges occurred between both groups. After negotiations, the comuneros (community members) were allowed amongst the Inca structures. Later on in the evening, the conflict picked up again and escalated when the varayuq tried to make fire in the plaza by using firewood for cooking and keeping the cold at bay throughout the night. The Ministry of Culture workers, who feared possible damage to the plaza’s pavement, made a dash towards the pile of logs and seized them. At that moment, the head of the varayuq rushed up to the workers and pulled the firewood out of their arms, while the rest of the traditional authorities shouted names at the employees, who had to retreat, taking their frustration and resentment with them.

The events of 8 September represented the culmination of a gradual process of encroachment and transformation that had taken place since the space of the ruins had been turned into an archaeological site and a monument under the control of the state and of the professionals who worked in the name of scientific knowledge, the protection of the nation’s past and, more recently, with the intention of developing local tourism. In other words, the site had become a ‘ruinscape’ (Silverman, 2016: 41), whereby the ruins had been privileged over a living population that simultaneously occupied that space. The events also epitomized the tensions inherent in this transmutation and highlighted the political nature of the apparently neutral operation underlying it. Lastly, they underscored the diverse and conflicting views and practices surrounding the material traces of the past and the notions of heritage attached to those material traces. The Ministry of Culture’s intervention made sense within a state-led programme of cultural revitalization intended to foster an Inca identity for the people of Chinchero that could be successfully marketed by the tourist industry. Similar operations of state-led cultural heritage revitalization can be found in other parts of the world, such as the one described by Denes (2012) in Thailand regarding the Khmer people being incorporated into the national Thai heritage.

Archaeological work in Chinchero began in the 1940s. In 1945, the Ministry of Culture (in those times known as the National Board of Culture, and later on the National Institute of Culture or INC) allocated a guardian to the monument, and in 2001 the site was officially declared an ‘Archaeological Park’. In 2004, a General Law of the National Cultural Patrimony was issued. Before the ruins became a ‘site’ they were mainly an agropastoral and ritual space fully integrated into the rest of the village. The Inca terraces and adjacent lands were cultivated by the peasants and the animals roamed freely. The chinkana rock and other natural shrines polarized ceremonial life and regular trading journeys between the nearby valley of the Urubamba River and the heights of Chinchero traversed the ruins to end in the village’s market. The reconversion into an archaeological monument took on a stark spatial significance and was achieved at the expense of land tenure. The Ministry of Culture (henceforth MC) expropriated chacras (plots of land) from residents in order to demarcate the perimeter of the site with its adjacent zona intangible or intangible area, with no compensation given after the demarcation. A 1984 INC report of archaeological works in Chinchero conducted by anthropologist Percy Bonnet confirms that by 1945 the cultivation of the terraces was forbidden because some comuneros did not have an interest in the conservation of the Inca terraces. And the report goes on: ‘Having been able to dislodge the peasants, the terraces were liberated ever since.’ In 1987, another report by Percy Bonnet recommended to the authority that

… you do not still allow to use [sic] the terraces for cultivation until the intervention has concluded and the monument has been puesto en valor (enhanced), and also because the peasants that use the adjacent terraces do not propend to maintain their optimal conservation.

Therefore, control and protection of the site have remained in the hands of the MC, a conglomerate of professionals directed by archaeologists and architects, but also inclusive of anthropologists and other specialists. The site has been appropriated, expunged from its former condition, enhanced and extolled as part of the national heritage and consecrated to archaeological research for the purpose of knowing the past. Regulations destined to ensure effective control of the space by the state and its representatives have been enforced, and these measures have altered the relationship between the residents and the ruins. The marking of the site’s boundaries combined with the expropriation of plots and the prohibition of traditional practices within it have physically segregated the space of the ruins from the broader local dynamics in which they were integrated. In the advent of the recent tourist boom, the restrictive measures have only become more strict and access to the site for animals has been barred with wooden fences to keep the area clean for the tourists. Additionally, regular maintenance and restoration work have been implemented as part of the heritage conservation programme.

Segregation is not only physical; it is also moral and symbolic. When the archaeologists took over the site, they established their authority in different ways. Apart from deciding who could work within the site and who could not, they also decided on the kind of work allowed in the area. Furthermore, they laid claim to the interpretation of the archaeological remains, displacing or disregarding folklore. Hegemonic scientific knowledge overthrew local knowledge, and, making use of Marisa Lazzari’s (2011: 181) words, ‘reworked a tamed space for the purpose of educating the nation about its past’. Similar processes of appropriation in other parts of the world have been described by other authors (Bender, 1993a; Gordillo, 2009; Lazzari, 2011; Sillar, 2005; Smith, 2004; Smith and Akagawa, 2009), where different groups claim rights and struggle over heritage sites or objects which are normally under the custody of state agencies or heritage organizations. For example, Bender (1993b: 246, 270), in her study of Stonehenge, has commented on the ways that, over the years, those with economic and political power and cultural capital have appropriated the past and the land of those engaging with it in different ways and have imposed a monopoly of knowledge in the name of scientific rigour. But scientific rigour, as Bender notes, has tended to eschew politics, severing the cultural and the aesthetic from the social (p. 270). This unfortunate insulation of archaeological–scientific practices from their present social context and demands has also been addressed by Silverman (2005) and Lazzari (2011). This knowledge is far from being simply objective or innocuous. Laurajane Smith (2004: 2) has disclosed the political nature of archaeological knowledge and discourse, making clear that, through cultural resource management policy makers exercise control over expressions of the social and cultural identity.

The MC in Chinchero is largely perceived to be a foreign body, even if most of the employees hail from the District of Chinchero. But the heads are from elsewhere; they are Cuzqueñans or live in the city. In fact, the whole institution is strongly associated in the Cuzco region with urban Limeñan centralism on the grounds that most of the tourist revenues generated by Machu Picchu and Cuzco are transferred to Lima and administered from there. Originally from an urban background, they are considered ignorant and incompetent regarding countryside matters and ways. Apart from living in the city, they are qualified professionals and, as such, by virtue of their education and academic training, they are legitimated by the state to take decisions that affect all of the villagers (most of them uneducated or non-qualified workers) who live within the archaeological zone and the historic centre, which encompasses most of the Centro Poblado or urban core.

The relationships between the institutions and the villagers are consequently uneasy and often strained. From the residents’ perspective, the MC is to a large extent an institution that works against their interests. The MC prohibits them from work and grazing their animals in the ruins, as well as undertaking maintenance and refurbishment work in their households without previous archaeological exploration, under the premise that they are within the archaeological–historical zone and that all archaeological material is inalienable and belongs to the state, that is, to all Peruvians. In order to undertake badly needed improvement and construction work in their households and gardens, they have to request permits – permits that sometimes are not granted and, if they are, turn out to be costly and that take time in being processed. Money paid ‘under the table’ will certainly speed up the process, but not everybody can afford to do this.

These costs influence people’s preference for dismantling the Inca walls in their houses during the night rather than waiting or paying for permits. From the MC’s point of view, they have been entrusted with the important (and patriotic) mission of safeguarding the town’s rich Inca and colonial heritage and nobody is above the law that sanctions the protection of this legacy. Moreover, the MC has to fight against what they perceive as residents’ absence of identification with their heritage, clearly demonstrable to the MC by their tendency to become drunk in ceremonial spaces and urinate in them. The MC’s sphere of influence extends to almost all realms of life in Chinchero and every single public work or community project within the archaeological zone has to count on both approval and surveillance from the institution. In practice, this means that whilst the villagers are heading in one direction, the MC is systematically going in the opposite one. As an example, the artisans, traders and municipality had recently agreed that a new market was needed to replace the older one in the lower part of town. But, while they wanted a more modern structure that requires excavation, the MC has objected to the project, arguing instead in favour of a restructuration of the traditional market with rustic materials that do not clash with the typical image of old Inca/colonial Chinchero. As a result, and after being paralysed for a good while, the market has been remodelled according to criteria pleasing to the MC.

In addition to processes of reterritorialization and displacement, the segregation implied in the transformation from ruins to sites has carried with it a process of spatial sterilization and ideological domination already embedded in the language. When, during an interview with a couple of MC workers, I intentionally used the word ‘ruins’ (as is customary among the residents), they were quick to correct me: ‘Eh … excuse me; “ruins” is not the appropriate word. It suggests debris and mess. The proper term is “Archaeological Centre”. Only the dwellers talk about “ruins”. But we, professionals, say “Archaeological Centre”.’ Regarding this controversy, I prefer to use the term ‘ruins’ in the text because, as Gordillo (2014: 8) has noted in terms of the use of language, the concept of ‘archaeological site’ obscures a multiplicity of meanings and associations important to local sensibilities.

In the course of the conversation, the workers stressed what I had heard many times from other MC employees and their bosses to the effect that the uneducated locals are not prepared to appreciate the value of their heritage and do not care at all about it, unlike the tourists. This is the official discourse that emanates from the upper echelons of the institution: a discourse internalized and repeated by those who occupy the lower tiers in the hierarchy, regardless of their level of education or their position within the community. It is largely through the medium of language that prestige and authority are established by a particular social group to impose their project onto others and to legitimize an appropriation. The ideological manipulation of language for political purposes is not new in Chinchero. Fidel, the president of the Cúper Pueblo sector, recounted that in order to assert their symbolic dominion over the urban space and marginalize the Indian peasants, the colony had imposed Spanish names. Also, during the Republic and after the 1897 War of the Pacific between Peru and Chile, some streets were baptized with the names of the war heroes (Grau, Bolognesi). Ángel, a local ethnographer, recalled that, even later, one mayor had changed the Quechua names of the streets into Spanish ones. Those names had deep meanings and people still remembered them. In more recent times, the substitution of the native word ayllu (the basic social unit in the Andes) with ‘community’ and ‘sector’, according to Ángel, had brought about a process of dismembering. As for ‘ruins’ and ‘archaeological centre’, it is clear that the former has been tainted with negative connotations that did not originally exist for the residents, while the latter has been infused with the positive values of science, study, research, care and protection. Ultimately, through a process of altering the language, the past has been professionalized and alienated from the locals. Smith (2004: 50–51) has reminded us that archaeological discourse is inseparable from hegemonic structures and yet, in practice, discourse is separated from ideological dominance, leaving power issues unaddressed.

Space, time, contact

Henri Lefebvre (1991[1974]: 11, 26) has postulated that hegemony does not leave space untouched and that social space is a social product. I have shown that the spatial hegemony of science, and particularly tourism, over the ‘archaeological site’ of Chinchero has been largely founded on the forced evacuation of the social life that predated it and on the arbitrary imposition of physical and symbolic boundaries where territorial continuities and cultural rationalities previously ruled. The new rationality of this space demands a qualitative transformation: visually, the ruins have been turned into an object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment for tourist consumption. They have become an icon. Visuality has been privileged and enhanced, a visuality constructed according to the rules of Western perspective, which has produced a luminous, coherent and objective space. The resulting ‘abstract’ space (in Lefebvre’s term) is physically clean and visually unobtrusive; but it is also deprived of mystery, is easily packaged and consumable and devoid of cultural and religious meaning (Herzfeld, 2006: 138; Lazzari, 2011; Lefebvre, 1991[1974]: 12). The extolling of a visual order has inhibited at the same time the participation of other senses and concealed the forces that have shaped that space. It is also a regulated space: movement is directed within it by newly created paths for the tourists, whilst the old local paths that crisscross it and that store the condensed traces of countless journeys (Ingold, 1993: 167) are falling into misuse. At the same time, the peasants are being pushed towards the margins of that territory. The resulting situation for them is one of loss of contact and control.

Loss of contact is a grave matter for a population whose sense of place is spatialized and embodied. Loss of contact to the site had begun much earlier. Fidel recounted how in older times the Catholic Church had separated the population from the idolatry of the ruins:

When we were kids we were forced to go the temple to pray and practise confession. Now the kids go to the school … but I used to play in the huacas (shrines) and climb onto the rocks before I learnt about the importance of heritage preservation through my studies. Catholic education has separated the people from their heritage. Now, it is being revalorized through tourism.

The space of the ruins is made of material traits that physically refer to the past and connect the people to that past largely by means of the senses. When contact is suppressed or restricted, continuities with the past, as well as knowledge of the present, are interrupted. Contact requires the ‘experiential order of materiality’ (Lazzari, 2011: 172) and operates intensely with the senses, particularly – though by no means solely – with or through the sense of touch. In addition, materiality and the senses, as well as historical processes, are closely related to the making of place. ‘Senses make place’, writes Feld (1996: 92). In Chinchero, the relationship between materiality and sense of place is an intimate one. People make sense of place through their continuous bodily engagements with materials in the multiple domains of daily life, such as in the making of adobe bricks, in the washing of their clothes, or in the varied physical tasks involved in agricultural work, for example. This engagement often takes place around places like the chacras or the ruins where the grandfathers had laboured and transformed the land themselves with their own hands in a process of permanent renovation of the landscape.

The landscape of Chinchero, where contact and sense of place occur (Feld, 1996: 92; Feld and Basso, 1996), is more than a random and static accumulation of physical and geographic features apprehended through the eye – vision, as a single sense, being criticized by a number of authors (Bender, 1993a; Frey, 2001; Gordillo, 2004, 2014; Hirsch and O’Hanlon, 1995; Ingold, 1993, 2000). It is a travelled landscape that is constantly changing through the reproductive practices that take place in it, such as farming, herding, logging, building, and so on. These travels and practices require a continuous corporeal engagement with the physical environment. Men, women and children walk, sometimes at a considerable distance from their houses, with their animals to their fields and pastures. Walking reiterates relationships with the landscape as well as with the powerful other-than-human forces that dwell in it, and mobilizes the memory in different ways, from the libations to the Pachamama (Mother Earth), or the blowing of the coca leaves to the Apus (mountain deities), to the remembering of the lands that their grandfathers had worked before. It is contact in motion, the anchoring of the individual to the land and the renewal of affective ties through the body. It is also an historicized and ‘humanized’ landscape (Weiner, 1991: 50), home to mythical ancestors that, according to local legends, shaped the landscape of Chinchero and prepared the world for humans. It is historicized because it is the locus of narrations about past struggles for the land and its ownership against abusive hacendados (landowners), narrations etched in the collective memory. It is ‘humanized’ because every single topographic feature, including the chacras, evokes a name and a story every time the landscape is travelled in journeys, honoured in rituals or worked in the fields, just as it would be in a storytelling session (Ingold, 2000: 219). This biographical, familiar and intimate character recalls the ‘other histories’ of agriculture, the ayllus, ritual, the land title and so on, which do not find a place in the official historiography of the town and that are as central to home-making as building, dwelling, naming and storytelling. These local histories and practices that matter to the people are gone once the transformation of the ruins into a site no longer involves more agriculture or herding, journeys, rituals or storytelling. This means that the names that have evoked the landscape and its reproductive forces since time immemorial on account of their performative power are not called out any more. In the absence of local history, what is left in the ruins is only the mythologized (Herzfeld, 2006) and de-politicized history of the Incas that mainstream tourist narratives glorify. My fellow local anthropologist, Carlos Quispe, recalled that before the MC was influential in town, people used the archaeological zone to cultivate their staple products and that they were respectful and fearful at the same time of the shrines contained within it. Carlos stressed the relevance of that contact that was lost later on:

With time, the space, through legal regulations, has become part of the Ministry of Culture. It was then that the state stepped in, but to restrict the use. The problem is that this intervention introduces a division. It is not any more a space of the villagers; rather, it is a more private space. Consequently, the bond with the population is gone, the bond with the Inca past, of that past that bonds them. Still some places are relevant for the dweller, but are now regarded from the outside.

And yet, it is also for the tourists that the ruins have become a largely disembodied space. Once the locals are gone, for the most part the only bodies that remain there are those of the tourists themselves and their guides. And this can be highly disappointing. As an annoyed Polish tourist told me once: ‘Tourists are not real … the real thing’, he said, ‘is the local people, and here there aren’t any!’ The isolation of the tourist experience is further bolstered by the expectation of not touching the stone and not stepping on walls and rocks. Whilst the intention of protecting the site from the effects of uncontrolled tourism is readily understandable, it is also true that by preventing closer physical contact between the tourist and the site, the tourist is deprived of a deeper layer of sensorial intimacy. It is in this sense that Edensor (1998: 51–52) has spoken of ‘deodorized’ and ‘unsensual’ tourist spaces. A Russian Orthodox priest whom I met in the ruins told me, while placing his hand carefully on an Inca wall, that when the stone is touched one feels the history, one feels closer to the people who made it and gets to know these people better. Additionally, in the case of Chinchero today, the scale of tourism, whilst already considerable and ever increasing, cannot be catalogued as ‘mass tourism’ and therefore, until now at least, extreme protection measures have not been required.

But the landscapes of Chinchero are also soundscapes. Sound indeed is another major feature of the Quechua landscape. I had soon noticed its extraordinary acoustic properties. While being in the fields or in the ruins, I had seen and heard the men working in their chacras communicating from far away, their voices being echoed and greatly amplified, even if they could sometimes not see each other. But their voices travelled lightly across the space and saturated it with their specific form of dwelling. In these instances, the landscape transformed itself into an intense sensory field of which I was but a small part (see also Howes, 2005; Howes and Classen, 2013, for discussions on the multisensoriality of the materiality embedded in the human existence).

Dislodging the people and the animals from the ruins has been just the first step in the sterilization of the space, an operation jointly required by science and by tourism. The process has demanded the removal of additional ‘polluting’ traces. Animal droppings appear every morning on the terraces after some of the farmers have sneaked in their animals (usually sheep, pigs or cows) at night to annoy the site’s managers, who believe that such display of organic matter will offend the tourists. In reality, the tourists I talked to did not mind these casual encounters. For the tourists, these incidents are the only sign of habitation and life around them, reminders of the local activity that they have come to see and that have been hidden from their eyes and their other senses. A group of Spanish tourists I interviewed in the ruins put it like this:

We enjoy the peace and quiet, the landscape, the fact that there are not too many tourists. Everything is very clean, but maybe just too clean. We would not mind at all seeing animal waste (but not garbage). What’s more, we miss the presence of sheep and other animals and of people doing their lives and their works around the site, like those women who are making chuño (dehydrated potato) at the plaza. We would all like to see that kind of living site.

The image of a humble piece of excrement encodes a great metaphor of contemporaneity and of its systematic denial in the site. The disposal of organic traces has been coupled with the removal of all moss and vegetation that cover the stones and walls. It turns out that some of the ‘weeds’ pulled out are medicinal plants that people collect to alleviate their ailments, signalling a further tension between past and present within the site. These interventions have been further complemented with the repositioning of fallen stones in collapsed walls. In other words, all signs of temporality have been erased through maintenance and restoration work, and this is ultimately where the sterilization of space has been leading to the suspension of time.

Indeed, time has been evacuated from the ruins and this operation owes much to cultural or heritage tourism. This process is paradoxical because, in essence, and especially since the late 18th century in Europe (Lowenthal, 1985), ruins embodied the passage of time and time’s destructive power through its decaying condition. Ruins were testimony to older historical times and to the fugitive condition of all human endeavours, while at the same time being part of the quotidian landscapes of human groups. And now it turns out that, through the dynamics of heritage conservation and the promises of difference heralded by cultural tourism, ruins have to be made to last (Gordillo, 2014: 8–9). By insulating and restoring them, by polishing them and concealing the blemish of time from them, they have been turned into an atemporal monument; they have been fashioned into a classic ‘other’ in the same way that Greco-Roman ancient monuments stand for the ideal of eternity.

Michael Herzfeld (2006: 129), reflecting on the topic of time in monumental spaces, has written that the built environment reflects the ideologies that endorse it. The ideology behind monumentality is one of eternity, permanence and of disappearance of temporality except in a mythological sense. Also, his study of a small heritage town in Crete is particularly relevant for Chinchero as he shows the residents contesting an imposed de-temporalized past as well as a de-socialized present imposed by the heritage bureaucratic–administrative apparatus (Herzfeld, 1991: 9–10). Monumental space, according to Herzfeld, is coupled by a monumental time that stands in opposition to social time (p. 6). This author defines social time in terms of formal relations and daily interaction, ‘the grid of everyday experience’, whose unpredictability gives events their reality. By contrast, monumental time is reductive and generic, predictable, with a singular focus on the past and conceives of events in terms of the realization of a supreme destiny. The awareness of social time, Herzfeld argues, dwindles as people begin talking about history in monumental terms (p. 10). Monumental time, I should add, is also tourist time, which is itself suspended in a sort of bubble that originates with the temporary and circumscribed rupture of the tourists with their everyday world. The resulting asynchrony and disjunction has been underwritten by Urry (2002: 166) when pointing out that tourists’ time may not be the same as the time of the locals because it tends to slow down.

Yet, paradoxically, freezing the flow of time in the site has amounted to an extreme form of temporalization because, by separating the ruins from the local history and turning them over to the tourists, by ignoring the passage of time and the contemporaneity of the ruins, these same ruins have been made into a distant ‘other’, unavailable to their descendants precisely on account of their maximized condition of eternal ‘Inca-ness’. Ironically, as Herzfeld (1991: 251) has argued when observing the incoherence of historical conservation as it helps to destroy what it seeks to preserve, nothing is more permanent than the temporary and, conversely, nothing is potentially more temporary than a building designated as a permanent monument to the past under the conditions of historic conservation. Incidentally, Silverman (2006: 183) has put forward a similar argument in Cuzco’s historic district, where residents with insufficient resources prefer to demolish old walls or let them decay into self-destruction rather than undertake the MC approved renovations. Monumental history amounts to the mastery of time, claims Herzfeld (1991: 9, drawing from De Certeau’s work). This point is reinforced by Meskell (2002: 566–567), who, when commenting on tourism’s ability to turn ‘negative’ heritage sites like Nazi buildings in Munich into toured objects, concludes that tourism may represent the ultimate past mastering.

Academic versus local archaeology

Time suspension in ruins and conservation/restoration imperatives run contrary to historical practices maintained by peoples in different parts of the world in various time periods (Bermejo, 2006; Gordillo, 2009, 2014; Lowenthal, 1985: 389–390). For these peoples, ancient materials have a value in terms of use and their reutilization or disposal is consuetudinary, with no sense of loss attached. Similarly in Chinchero, a massive reutilization of stones from the Inca terraces and collapsed walls took place in past times. Also, the Inca town was heavily redesigned under the colony (Nair, 2015). People still remember the old custom of rumichakuy (literally, ‘the hunting of the stone’, in Quechua), a faena or collective work undertaken by the comuneros to transport Inca construction material from the ruins to their new construction sites.

Rumichakuy obviously is no longer practised and is both legally banned and socially disapproved. But still, within the confines of the households and hidden from the surveillance of the MC, it is customary to undo the Inca walls found within their boundaries. This material, as well as other objects or remains buried in their gardens, is excavated in the course of construction work or recycled in different ways or simply discarded. This practice is strictly forbidden by the MC, whose employees accuse the residents of lacking any historical and artistic consciousness, and of ignoring the value of their heritage.

The truth is that the MC is not alone in its claims against the lack of appreciation of the legacy of the past. Educated residents and MC ex-employees have endorsed a similar but much more nuanced discourse, one that exhibits an understanding of the gap between the MC as a state institution and local views, needs and practices. Their position, whilst being critical of some of their neighbours, reinforces the premise that the MC is going too far with their restrictive policies and calls for a closer collaboration between the institution and the residents. In addition, the alleged disregard for the value of the archaeological site is contested by many villagers. They blame the MC for neglecting the patrimony that they exhort others to protect. For one of the community leaders, ‘It is precisely our fellow MC people the very same people who do not value the Inca. What they do and say is just because of their job. If they didn’t work there they would not care at all.’ In actuality, it is not rare to see in the upper streets of the Centro Poblado collapsed Inca walls that have been abandoned. Residents expect the MC to collaborate with them in the restoration of their houses, whilst the institution does not allow them to handle those ‘archaeological’ remains, raising the issue of the nebulous and conflicting boundaries between the public and the private in a so-defined archaeological area that overlaps with current domestic habitation. Luis, a comunero from the sector of Cúper Pueblo, illustrated the situation like this: ‘If I try to fix the wall myself the MC will fine me; but if I don’t do anything, neither will they.’ The discrepancy about the ownership of historical material found within the household is a bitter one. Luz Marina, the owner of one of the weaving workshops in town, recounted her argument with one MC official in regard to the ownership of Inca material in her property:

This episode exemplifies the ambiguity regarding the property of heritage and the overall feeling of disenfranchisement amongst the villagers. On the table is the question of the institutionalization of heritage and of its ownership. ‘When culture becomes the heritage of the humanity the presumption is open access’, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2006) has usefully written. She has also highlighted the contradiction between the specificity of sites and the universality of their designation as World Heritage (pp. 1–2, 185).

While walking down the unpaved streets of the upper section of the Centro Poblado, I would often come across ceramic sherds with Inca or pre-Inca designs lying on the ground, semi-buried but still visible. While I was always tempted to pick them up, no one in the neighbourhood seemed particularly interested in them, even though I learnt that many villagers kept Inca mortars found in their gardens for use. Gastón Gordillo (2009: 31) asks: what view of the past lies behind a casual attitude towards the spatial debris of history? He has written eloquently about native practices of reutilization and abandonment of old materials found in ruins deemed ‘destructive’ or cast as ‘looting’ by archaeologists working in the Argentinian Chaco region. His work on ruins describes how people who have been living with ruins for generations relate to them in ways that are different from those promoted by the professionals and held by the tourists. The meanings attached to them are not the same. Aesthetic and historic appreciation – Gordillo argues – is for the most part an academic, middle-class concern. The professionals have the time and the money (plus the academic bias) to dedicate to the study and preservation of ruins. As for the tourists, they do not interact with the ruins on a daily basis. This distance enables the production of symbolic meaning. But in impoverished areas people are understandably more concerned with jobs and economic opportunities than with heritage conservation. Practical logics of use, recycling or selling of materials (or obtaining economic benefit) make sense under these conditions. Gordillo concludes that ruins are important to the locals, but an importance to remember that is mandated through traces intact in the space does not necessarily mean a straightforward relationship between ruins, memory and a distant or disconnected past for the locals. Moreover, some ruins are preserved as places of sociality incorporated into local practices (pp. 44–46), and this is precisely what happens in Chinchero with the Inca precincts.

In effect, Chincherinos still recycle old materials recovered from their yards and gardens and will dismantle Inca and colonial walls, if necessary, in order to undertake construction work in their houses. Although I first found this practice to be disturbing, mainly due to my cultural background and academic training, with time and consideration I started to think of it in a different manner. I entertained the notion that what the villagers were doing was not necessarily an attack on the patrimony, as the MC interpreted these actions. It could rather be seen as a local version, grounded in historical roots, of a digging practice that proceeded with different logics and aims in mind than those predicated by an academic archaeology.

When digging in their gardens, the villagers bring to the surface objects that have been buried for a very long time. Whilst the objects recovered in scientific excavations are removed from circulation and destined to go to labs for analysis, or to storerooms for study and classification, or to museums for exhibition and contemplation, objects that have been recovered by villagers in refurbishment and construction works (mainly stones) are often put back into circulation and assigned other uses. Some of them are dismissed and reburied. Whilst in the first case, the objects are cut off from any social life, in the second they acquire a new one. One of these objects is the muhu papa rumi (the potato-seed stone, in Quechua), a small, dark and finely polished stone with a distinctive potato shape that Augusta, my landlady, found one day in her garden while doing some digging. Augusta assured me that thanks to this stone she had plenty of potatoes in her chacras and kept it hidden in a basket wrapped in a cloth with a religious motif. The example of the muhu papa rumi found by Augusta in her garden is illustrative. Had it been found in a prescriptive excavation it would have most likely ended up in a museum or storeroom. Having been found by Augusta, it rested in an altarpiece in her room along with other ritual objects and images of Christ, the Virgin and the Saints, and exercised a newly recovered agency by helping ensure a bountiful potato harvest.

Professional archaeology entails a different circulation of materials within another past–present system: it spatially proceeds from bottom to top, the top being the present that removes the objects from circulation for the purpose of knowing the past. Local archaeology, by contrast, proceeds from bottom to top and then back from top to bottom because the materials excavated are first reinserted into contemporary structures and then subject to being again reburied after being reused for a while or simply after being discarded. These material traces are continually weaving their way out of the past and into the present and vice versa, in a sort of meandering movement across time horizons in which the past is not there so much ‘to be known’ from a distant and objective present, but rather to be engaged with in productive ways. The journey of these objects denotes, as Lazzari (2011: 175) remarks, that past and present are never fully separated, even if each one has its own internal logics.

So, the movement implied in professional archaeology is linear and unidirectional and, by treating past and present as two separate entities, prevents the mutual and fertile trespassing of boundaries. The archaeological procedures therefore remain within the framework of lineal time. On the contrary, the circularity and dynamics of ‘local archaeology’ seem more consistent with the broader circularity of the muyuy and its cyclical recurrences. Muyuy is the key Quechua concept that embodies the rotational patterns that impregnate and govern not only the agropastoral tasks, but many other aspects of sociopolitical life in Chinchero. In Jorge Lira’s (1941) dictionary, muyuy is translated as ‘to spin, move in circles, rotate, turn around, go in circles around an axis’. Muyuy envelops a world already immersed in other cosmic motions, generating a multiplicity of rhythms that emphasize a strong sense of alternation and circularity. The circulation/recycling/rotation of materials mirrors the rotation of people in the social organization under this principle of the muyuy. In the same way that the social order is regenerated by virtue of muyuy, the material world from which the locals are not drastically separated is also regenerated and reinvigorated. Reinvigorating the objects amounts to reinvigorating the lives, if we accept the proposition that that which is not circulated becomes stagnant and that motion is inherent to life just as the cessation of it may be the preamble of death. Rather than being a destructive practice, it can be a creative one in the sense described, and this practice is moreover in tune with an ancient Andean tradition of burial, rebuilding and reusing of ritual–civic spaces and buildings that apparently were not made to last.

The proposed airport

In January 2013, the community of Yanacona, one of the three historical ayllus of Chinchero, agreed to sell part of its land (actually the best agricultural land located in the pampa or flat space) to the Regional Government for the construction of the new Cuzco international airport. This was an old and cherished project promoted by Cuzqueñan elites and the tourist industry, who had spread the perception that the project would greatly fuel the economic development of the region and of Chinchero by exponentially increasing the number of visitors. Yanacona members bought into this idea and, after a fraudulent negotiation process that neutralized all resistance and inhibited debate on the social and environmental costs of the project, the land sale was materialized. Since that moment, a number of important changes have altered ancient patterns of land tenure. With the sale and the expectations of business raised by the airport, many Chincherinos have seen an opportunity to make money out of their plots and have started a shift from communal to individual property so that the land can be commercialized once released from the inalienability prescribed by communal law. As a consequence, a conspicuous process of land speculation has been initiated, along with the reconversion of several smaller communities into producer associations unbound by the legal status of the peasant community and its obligations.

The land sale has also had a noticeable impact on the landscape already. Traditional adobe house are being more and more replaced by concrete buildings (see Figure 2) and urbanization that disrupt the unity of style of the historic centre. In addition, the proposed airport – construction work is expected to start once a recent controversy over the nature of the contract signed between the state and the private company in charge of its construction (Kuntur Wasi) is cleared – will have a negative impact on social practices that nurture the bonds between the people and the landscape. These bonds are epitomized by the ritual of Linderaje (or the marking of boundaries), in which comuneros walk around their territory naming, honouring and renewing the milestones that they identify with the ancestors. Linderaje is at the same time a matter of territoriality and a celebration of kinship ties with the land. The airport’s perimeter will partly overlap with the traditional itinerary followed in Yanacona every year, disrupting a festival that is an essential component of the town’s intangible heritage. Other anticipated effects on the landscape will be the partition of Yanacona into two disconnected halves, thus altering spatial relationships and dwelling as well as mobility patterns that bind people from different sectors of the community together through daily journeys across the pampa.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

New building blocks in the perimeter of the proposed airport.

The future of Chinchero is linked to the construction of the airport. Chincherinos hold legitimate expectations about jobs being created by the project. However, so far it looks like this is going to be yet one more example of how ‘heritage’, which is locally understood as the cultural identity represented by the people, may be endangered by a touristic development, which in theory should contribute to valorize it and protect it.