A Case-Study on the Coloniality of Gender in Heritage-as-Development: Lenca Craftswomen in Honduras

Abstract (English)

Across Latin America development-with-identity schemes have been widely promoted in the last twenty-five years; schemes based on the commercialization of heritage, which increasingly focus on impoverished ethnic minorities. As part of this trend, the Honduran state’s discourse on cultural diversity reinforces the heritage-making (patrimonialización) of cultural minorities, their identities, and livelihoods—particularly indigenous women, under the auspices of multiculturalism and the cultural industries framework. In this context, cultural heritage is not only a development asset but has also become a political resource that is shaping and is shaped by ideas of governance and nationhood. As a result, indigenous communities who have been chronically underrepresented by the Honduran state, are experiencing greater exposure to the states’ ideological and economic objectives.

In this paper I will concentrate on the role of crafts-cooperatives and the Lenca ceramic tradition, which serves as a cultural commodity, and as a container and conduit of the social relations and economic dynamics taking place through heritage-as-development. Lenca craftswomen’s livelihoods and culture seem to be at the heart of a global context that increasingly concentrates on human rights and heritage governance rooted in UNESCO’s ‘Living Human Treasures’ approach, while aiming at poverty alleviation and gender mainstreaming in the current 2030 development agenda.

This context appears to “foster the idea that indigenous women will enter the world of production and entrepreneurship as individuals to ‘free themselves’ [and] only when engaged in such work will theirs be considered meaningful lives that need to be secured” (Gutiérrez-Zamora, 2021: 144). Wherein, presumably, indigenous women will acquire "a modernized indigeneity that permits intercultural economic integration” (Burke, 2010: 17). However, as Lenca craftswomen become the symbolic and material embodiment of their communities—making them coveted beneficiaries in local development initiatives and legitimate entrepreneurs in global economies of culture—they are participating in a selective “cooptation of both gender and cultural rights through neoliberal governance...utilized by the state as [part of] a discourse of governmentality to regulate indigenous subjects” (Blackwell, 2012: 703).

I contend that heritage-as-development reproduces Colonial/Modern capitalist forms of feminized and racialized modes of production. Lenca craftswomen's involvement in development-with-identity, as part and parcel of heritage-as-development, produces a paradox: the creation of democratic spaces for public-civic engagement, fomenting the possibility to see and acknowledge the indigenous feminine 'Other,' simultaneously organizing indigenous women’s livelihood and labor for their ready cooptation, whilst distracting us from the surplus extracted from these craftswomen’s value-added differentiated cultural products.