Guarani-Mbyá emergency in Jesuit missions: new actors in cultural heritage

Abstract

The article deals about the process of valorization of heritage and the intrinsic need to problematize established ideas, from an approach that incorporates new actors to the heritage issue. If the idea of cultural heritage has changed over the years, it is only recently that the inclusion of social actors who constituted their heritage in regions of the globe colonized by European powers since the 15th century, especially in the Americas. The “new social actors” are often groupings present since prehistory in territories with heritage, but which have not had their legacy recognized as cultural heritage, or only recently and, even so, in a subordinate and secondary way. In order to analyze the issue, the Guarani Jesuit Ruins, in São Miguel das Missões, in Rio Grande do Sul / Brazil are taken as case, a heritage officially recognized from almost a century, whose valorization of the Guarani culture, still precarious and incomplete, is embarrassingly recent. In particular, the process of recognizing the immaterial Guarani dimension of the “Tava, Place of Reference for the Guarani People”, declared a Brazilian cultural heritage in 2014, will be analyzed. The valorization of the Tava as heritage will be carried out from the comprehension that different narratives constitute the same cultural asset. The formulations presented here are based on ongoing research and are inserted in the criticism approach to colonial perspective of heritage.