Erfgoedfantasieën in de Ecuadoriaanse Andes: een etnografie van de betekenisgeving van erfgoed in Saraguro en Cuenca, Ecuador

Cultural heritage is a set of meanings that anchor people to a cultural landscape, projecting stereotypes and expectations of themselves and others. In recent years, interest in incorporating culture and cultural heritage dimensions into North-South development cooperation has increased. Therefore, it is relevant to continue exploring how heritage and development interact in local contexts and cultural matrices, considering historical power relations where Western thought has been the authority on the symbolic, ideological, economic, and bureaucratic apparatus to define cultural heritage. This doctoral research is framed within the project Innovative Governance Systems for Built Cultural Heritage, based on traditional Andean organisational principles in Ecuador (TEAM-Minga) and the study sites of El Vado in Cuenca and Chukidel in Saraguro. To better understand heritage as a social product embedded in local cultural matrices and historical backgrounds and, thus, to enhance approaches to understanding heritage in the terms and meaning systems of local actors (either inhabitants or researchers), this dissertation asks how the inhabitants of Chukidel and El Vado and the researchers group comprehend heritage as a notion and use it to depict and interact with each other within the context of the TEAM-Minga project. I address this question by building on Critical Heritage Studies, the Ontological Turn, and developing imaginaries as analytical lens for heritage studies. In doing so, I address a gap in the anthropology of heritage. Here, imaginaries are critical as meaning-making devices that navigate how people assume and signify heritage and how heritage displays images and preconceptions that shape identities of the self and the other. I conducted multi-sited ethnography as a researcher on the TEAM-Minga project and at the study sites from July 2019 to December 2023. I complemented the data with in-depth interviews, informal conversations, and digital ethnography. I analysed the data using open coding and established the analysis categories based on the results. I critically analyse heritage imaginaries in how people depict others and themselves within the frame of the TEAM-Minga project. I also analyse the imaginaries of heritage grounded in official notions, showing how people create meaning through a fabric of concepts and understandings, whereby one imaginary enables the existence of or gives meaning to another. Furthermore, I delve into alter-native imaginaries arising from the changing dynamics of people's daily lives and other ways of imagining heritage from Andean ontologies. Finally, I go through the learnings, changes, and challenges in heritage imaginaries of the TEAM-Minga, bringing together tensions and paradoxical encounters between Andean ontologies and the Western notion of heritage. By taking imaginaries as an analytical lens and mainly drawing on the alter-native imaginaries displayed in the practices and experiences of local actors, I attempt to decentre and situate heritage reflection in other ontologies. I argue that exploring heritage imaginaries can significantly contribute to articulating practical knowledge and care of heritage in terms of the inhabitants. In this line, imaginaries can be an input to build languages that articulate various disciplines and positions with different claims, motivations, and knowledge frames, improving cooperation projects and heritage