The Formation of Heritage Elites: Talking Rights and Practicing Privileges in an Afro-Colombian Community

Abstract

This chapter traces how cultural heritage rights are deployed in the Afro-descendant town of San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia. Since UNESCO declared the “cultural space” of Palenque as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (ICHH) in 2005, a small group of community members have disproportionately benefited from the declaration and gained privileged access to financial resources and political power. In this chapter, I reveal how local intellectual elites have used the language of heritage-based rights to justify their current status, resulting in entrenched social exclusion among Palenqueros. Heritage benefits are not distributed solely on the grounds of race, ethnicity, or descent, but are chiefly based on who worked towards the ICHH nomination. Perceiving themselves as self-made cultural entrepreneurs, elites feel exclusively entitled to benefit from Palenque’s heritage declaration. Although Colombian state bureaucrats consider heritage nominations as vehicles for integration and recognition of Afro-descendants as a whole, I show how the language of rightful entitlements to heritage limits the scope of their social inclusion. Ultimately, I argue that the entrenchment of elitism and rising inequity in Palenque are not altogether unexpected consequences of the heritage declaration. Rather, they demonstrate the difficulty of employing heritage to foster social inclusiveness and economic equality.