Para uma crítica do patrimônio: apontamentos a partir das comunidades apanhadoras de flores sempre-vivas e do Centro Histórico de Diamantina/MG

Abstract

This study addresses the relationship between traditional peoples and communities in Brazil and the field of cultural heritage, taking as a case study the sempre-vivas flower pickers – agricultural heritage recognized worldwide who were expelled from their territories by those who claimed to protect the heritage. – and the Historic Center of Diamantina/MG – cultural heritage of humanity also recognized worldwide. The construction of this research was carried out based on the method of Marxian writings, which guided the fieldwork and the conversation with members of the Commission for the Defense of Extractivist Peoples (CODECEX). Starting from the investigation about the possibilities presented by heritage in the fight for the rights of traditional communities, an issue raised together with representatives of the communities, the reflections were built in three mo(ve)ments: (1) a movement of empirical approximation of the proposed object; (2) a historical rescue of the formation of the mobilized categories; and, finally, (3) a movement of abstraction from what was observed at an empirical and historical level, at which point we present a critique of the object. From the perception that the forms under which heritage appears are close, in the discourse, but in reality, they could not be and be more distant, we present how Diamantina, where these two cases are situated, represents some of the most emblematic contradictions of the sciences humanities: between the material and the immaterial, between the countryside and the city and between culture and nature. Based on these observations, we see how the relationships between traditional communities and heritage in Diamantina emerged and on what foundations – taking into account that both are inscribed within the modern Western society that produces commodities. With these notes, it was possible to carry out a movement of abstraction over the concrete reality, in an attempt to disarrange the assumptions imposed by the social organization based on the commodity, namely: time, history, nation and territory - notions strengthened with the instruments that emerge from them. fundamentals, such as equity. The possibility of building a different future for society, a possible 'ancestral future', involves the need to reflect on new ways of (re)elaborating the past in ways that go beyond the notion of heritage.