As veias seguem abertas: tráfico de bens culturais e colonialidades

Abstract

Based on the multiple concepts and discourses on historical and cultural heritage, its social and political uses, and the various agents and institutions involved in it, this research seeks to inscribe culture and cultural heritage on the debates on colonialism, coloniality, and the anticolonial zeitgeist, arguing that the flow of commerce and trafficking in cultural property, the process of inscription of listed sites by UNESCO and social movements today follow the same structures created by the colonial domination. The research, inscribed in the field of Studies on Cultural Heritage and under the perspective of anti-colonial critics, derives from the investigation of various sources and an extensive bibliography, which makes it possible to propose that culture and art cannot escape the contradictions of the economic system in which we live in, and suffers the consequences of being treated as an object to be produced, reproduced, appropriated and consumed. It also allows us to perceive that the displacement of cultural properties follows the same path imposed by historical colonialism, when the looting of cultural heritage was legitimized by the force and political-military supremacy of the colonizer, and to point out that in the post-independence world there are other mechanisms of power: coloniality and imperialism. The aim is thus to demonstrate that the commerce of cultural and historical objects, whether legal or clandestine, the result of theft, looting or just unequal business acts, continues to bleed Latin America and enrich collectors and museums in the global north, all made possible by a relationship of dependence and still marked by colonial ideas. A scenario against which, it is important to point out, emerges a powerful anti-colonial epistemology, designed to build, along with social movements, an autonomous and plural thought, which includes the broad human and cultural diversity and which, without pretending to be universal, does not flinch from the fight for liberation and radical humanism.