Avaliação: PUEBLOS INDÍGENAS Y POLÍTICAS CULTURALES. Repensando el patrimonio – ‘A punta de barro’: Lenca Craftswomen, Honduras’ Identity Politics, and Global Economies of Culture.

Across Latin America ‘development with identity’ schemes are currently widely promoted by multilateral and aid organizations, which increasingly focus on impoverished ethnic minorities and the commercialization of their heritage. In turn, Latinamerican states’ policies and discourses of multicultural nationalism and citizenship have expanded in tandem. In this context, cultural heritage is not only a development asset, but has also become a political resource that is shaping and is being shaped by ideas of governance and nationhood. 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 indígena women. However, the on-the-ground reality for indigenous communities, specifically Lenca women, participating in such initiatives, remains with some of the highest indices of poverty and vulnerability in the country. Hence, the conditions under which ‘development with identity’ benefits local communities, and indigenous women’s response to such state-sponsored engagement, are unclear.

This paper ethnographically examines the semantic spaces simultaneously created by Honduran public policy, heritage commercialization, and the development industry, through which intercultural engagements take place with the indigenous feminine ‘other’, and the consequent welfare outcomes, and its effects on the identity discourses and political subjectivities put forth by Lenca women. It will address: What are the implications and limitations of the state’s recognition of indigenous women as rights-bearing subjects, as development beneficiaries and as heritage entrepreneurs? What are the factors that contribute to or impede indigenous women’s negotiation with and control over the terms of their recognition, representations, and what it means to be indigenous within the Honduran state’s development agenda and the cultural industries market?

• Development with Identity
• Lenca Craftswomen
• Cultural Industries
• Heritage-Making (Patrimonialización)
• Identity Politics