Heritage-making, landscapes, and experiences in tension in the Southern Andes mountains, Argentina

Abstract

This paper employs the concepts of heritage-making, communal identity formation, and landscape production to analyse the spaces that contribute to local, provincial, and national identities. Specifically, we examine how these spaces, now valued for their natural and historical significance, shape contemporary collective identity. Our study is located in the Andes mountain range, in an area called Manzano Histórico, in central- western Argentina, which is part of a larger nature reserve created to protect the headwaters of the basin and mountain areas from large-scale economic projects. This paper utilises a qualitative methodology that combines archaeological and historical studies with ethnographic techniques and a survey to describe and analyse the millennial occupation of the region. This continuous occupation has been shaped by multiple ways of inhabiting the world, some dominant and others marginalised or made invisible, resulting in ongoing present-day tensions. The heritage landscape proposed is a partial result of these tensions, a textured, fractured, and patched product of diverse, historically enabled practices. By analysing these spaces, we aim to acknowledge the various ways of being in the world that intersect within them, as well as the identity formations of alterity that hierarchise or invisibilise these practices.