Is World Heritage a Heritage of the Community?

Abstract

The Jesuit Mission of San Miguel Arcángel, founded in the eighteenth century, had its heritage values recognized in 1938—when it was classified by the National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN)—and in 1983, when it earned the World Heritage title. We believe that the museological presentation of the archaeological heritage is a strategy of socialization that is crucial to establish a connection between the local community and these assets. During the years 2008 and 2009, a project of socialization of archaeological assets based on some challenges grounded on the chaîne opératoire (operational sequence) was established in the ruins of San Miguel. The objective of this article is to present the project “San Miguel de las Misiones: museological presentation beyond the classified monument” (by Zanettini Arqueología), highlighting its conceptual principles and the system of evaluation of its actions and also to reflect about this project’s need for adjustments and updating.

Introduction

In the last 40 years, Brazil, a country with 15,719 km of terrestrial border and about 7,367 km of coastline, has been the setting for major enterprises of all kinds, such as hydroelectric and nuclear power stations or road and rail links of enormous length. This panorama was intensified with the implementation of a “Growth Acceleration Program” by the government of the former president Luís Inácio Lula da Silva. If the country’s fate is bound up on the one hand with progress, development, and modernity, it is also committed on the other to the preservation and enhancement of the Brazilian cultural heritage.¹

The challenge of balancing the force lines generated by the different interests and objectives of the various government ministries falls on the cultural heritage institution, understood in the light of historic institutionalism as a set of norms, conventions, laws, formal organizations, and different social segments (Saladino, 2010). The heritage institution in Brazil was given its initial framework in 1937 with the creation of a federal agency for the protection and management of public cultural heritage policies—the National Historic and Artistic Heritage Service (SPHAN)²—and the approval of a decree (number 25/37) which was to form the basis of public policies toward the cultural heritage. In time, other formal organizations were created within the country to consolidate its public cultural policies, such as the National Center for Folklore and Popular Culture (CNFCP) in 1946 and the Brazilian Institute of Museums (IBRAM) in 2009.

However, there is no disputing the centrality of the Institute for the National Historic and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN). This organization is responsible for overseeing and supervising all actions affecting properties recognized as belonging to the Brazilian cultural heritage.³ In other words, the IPHAN orients and authorizes any intervention affecting assets classified as part of the Brazilian Cultural Heritage.

In a country whose principal objective is growth in order to eradicate poverty, there is a very busy agenda of large-scale enterprises. The IPHAN is the agency in charge of allowing such interventions, since the archaeological heritage is under its protection. This type of cultural asset is governed by the legislation and regulations pertaining to the cultural heritage and also by environmental legislation. Another agency, the Brazilian Institute for the Environment (IBAMA), therefore plays a part in the proceedings too, since the environmental legislation requires archaeological prospecting to be carried out in zones affected by major developments (CONAMA Resolution no. 01/86).

One of IPHAN’s instruments for regulating the protection of the archaeological heritage is a specific decree (no. 230/02) designed to satisfy current demands for the consolidation of preventive archaeology in Brazil. According to this decree, development projects that are liable to have any impact on the archaeological heritage, whatever the scale of the enterprise, must implement a series of measures or phases, among them the creation of a “Heritage Education Program” with a view to the socialization of the archaeological heritage.

A decade after its promulgation, the potential and the inconsistencies of decree no. 230/02 have already been the subject of some debate. The decree guarantees society the right of access to the results of the archaeological research carried out and also assures it of the right to enjoy this category of cultural property. Nevertheless, defective institutional patterns and theoretical and methodological inconsistencies have compromised the quality of the “Heritage Education Programs” that archaeologists are under the obligation to undertake. According to the museologist and archaeologist Cristina Bruno, this leads to a peculiar situation marked by the dictatorship of prospecting, with lectures full of information but empty of meaning.

The purpose of this essay is to present a pedagogical action oriented toward appropriating and attaching value to the cultural heritage, the integrated educational project entitled “São Miguel das Missões: Musealization beyond the classified monument.” We shall also reflect on possibilities for adjusting, updating, and optimizing this instrument for the appropriation of the cultural heritage by the local community. The project presented here was selected by IPHAN, which had issued an edict for an archaeological survey of the Fonte Missioneira (“Mission Fountain”) area, on the immediate outskirts of the zone classified as a World Heritage Site, together with a number of lectures on the subject for local society. The team from Zanettini Arqueologia, however, went further than this and also devised a subsidiary project for musealization and integrated education. Even if this scheme was not directly related to an authorized project, we believe that an analysis of its form, development, and challenges might help to raise awareness of the importance of implementing even more robust measures of this type.

We feel it important to end this presentation by emphasizing that the analysis presented here was performed on the basis of both an “insider’s” and an “outsider’s” point of view. In other words, it is the result of reflection by someone from the Zanettini Arqueologia team who took part in the execution of the project and also by a professional university researcher working on the challenges confronting the preservation and enhancement of the archaeological heritage. We believe that this has helped us to attain a more detached perspective and perhaps a richer and broader one.

São Miguel das Missões: A Brief Overview

São Miguel das Missões is one of the seven missions⁴ built by the Jesuits on the east bank of the Uruguay River with the purpose of evangelizing the indigenous people. Founded in the seventeenth century by Cristóbal de Mendoza, it was soon abandoned due to harassment by pioneering bandeirantes. In 1687, however, the people returned to the mission, and the project of building its church finally became a reality between 1735 and 1745 under the responsibility of the Italian architect Gian Battista Primoli, himself a Jesuit. It is worth mentioning that the project was never completed, since the church is missing the second tower, originally intended to house an astronomical observatory.

The missions were set up in frontier zones between Spanish and Portuguese territories. An atmosphere of tension was prevalent throughout the eighteenth century, and there was a great deal of violent conflict involving the Portuguese, the Spaniards, and the Guarani Indians after the signing of the Treaty of Madrid in 1750.⁵ The agreement to redraw the southern borders was not to the liking of the natives, who decided to remain on their lands. This led to the Guarani War, which ended in 1756 when Portuguese and Spanish troops launched an implacable frontal assault on the Guarani resistance.

After the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Iberian Peninsula (from Portugal in 1759 and from Spain in 1767), the Jesuit missions finally perished with the subjugation of the natives by the Spanish. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Portugal reconquered the region and connected it with the territory of what was then the province of Rio Grande do Sul.

Memories of the Jesuit missions linger on in the everyday life of the inhabitants of many of the towns which grew under their auspices. Customs, traditions, legends, and heroes also form part of the popular imagination, just as the ruins constitute the cultural landscape. For all these reasons, the historic and artistic value of the mission of San Miguel Arcángel (in Portuguese, São Miguel Arcanjo) was recognized by UNESCO in 1983, when it was granted World Heritage status along with the missions of San Ignacio Miní, Santa Ana, Nuestra Señora de Loreto, and Santa María Mayor, all now in Argentina.

Studies show that the population of the area in the eighteenth century was about 4,000. Today, São Miguel das Missões is a city on the southern tableland of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, in the south of Brazil. With an area of 1,229.80 km², the census of 2010 shows it to have a population of 7,421 inhabitants, of whom 48 % live in urban areas and the remaining 52 % in rural zones. According to the 2000 census, the predominantly young and male population has scant resources, with only 20.01 % of families bringing in a monthly income equivalent to 3 minimum salaries (the minimum salary in Brazil is about €200.00).

Where educational indicators are concerned, the 2000 census also shows that 96 % of the population of São Miguel das Missões has attended school at the primary level of the Brazilian educational system. The city’s principal economic sector, in the meantime, is farming.

“São Miguel das Missões: Musealization Beyond the Classified Monument”: Structure and Results of the Project

The project presented here was structured very simply in three phases: reconnaissance and identification of community and heritage assets, execution, and assessment.

Preparing the Ground

The object of this phase of the project was to perform a diagnosis of the local state of affairs and establish conventions for subsequent actions. It was especially important to embrace a concept that would generate material in support of these actions and to compile a list of heritage properties in the municipality of São Miguel das Missões from an emic perspective.

The premise of the project was the idea that the archaeological heritage must be inserted in a broader heritage panorama, with consideration also for heritage items pointed to by the community. The notion of the city as heritage was therefore chosen as a generating concept. In this respect, all the resources of the territory now identified as the municipality of São Miguel das Missões, whether associated with structures, individuals, knowledge, or material or immaterial assets, were regarded as of prime importance for the planning of educational strategies (de Varine-Bohan, 2002).

The reason for this choice was that the Zanettini Arqueologia team frequently found that the people of São Miguel das Missões referred in conversation to the Jesuit reduction as a cultural property separate from the community, in that it belonged to the State, to “Humanity,” and to tourists, but not to them. They thus spoke of it as a tedious obstacle to the community’s ambitions for development (Tavares, 2004), even though a museum had been created at the heritage site.⁶ A strategy of incorporating other heritage assets into dialogues with the community was therefore implemented with the objective of stimulating appropriation of the city as heritage.

On the basis of this idea of the city as heritage, Zanettini Arqueologia made use of its team’s cohabitation with the local people⁷ to compile a tentative list of heritage properties and assets in the municipality. The inventory named 26 places that have yielded archaeological evidence,⁸ eight sites recognized as historic and cultural edifices, seven edifices with a religious function, and six public facilities. These specifications were used to draw up a ludic map that was used throughout the course of the project. The map was included as an insert in an educational activity book for children and young people entitled “Friends of the Heritage: Investigating São Miguel das Missões.” Among other things, the book encouraged children and youngsters to investigate their own city through their family histories and by “rediscovering” São Miguel das Missões. In a didactic and also ludic manner, it thus introduced the concepts of environmental, archaeological, immaterial, historic, and architectural heritage while drawing specific attention to the Fonte Missioneira, the object of the research project presented here. Furthermore, the activity book invited all its users to become “Friends of the Heritage” and so to view the heritage that makes São Miguel das Missões such a unique city as something dynamic and relevant rather than static and remote.

Implementing the Actions

The project for musealization and integrated educational action was implemented concomitantly with the excavations at the Fonte Missioneira park, as mentioned above. The fountain located in this zone provided the main water supply for the Jesuit mission. The objective of the excavations was to furnish data for judging proposals that the zone be transformed into a public park in accordance with community wishes. It is important to point out that such a purpose indicates a change of mentality in IPHAN, since in its seven decades of existence as an institution for the protection, control, and supervision of interventions on historic monuments, the agency had built up an image for itself as a highly centralized and sometimes even authoritarian body. Besides this, its attempts to spread awareness of the challenges facing it, and to implant strategies of heightened social awareness and cooperation, have all been very recent and remain asystematic.

The actions were implemented through lectures designed to heighten local sensitivity, Heritage Education workshops, and guided visits for children and young people. The goal of the workshops was the construction of a channel of communication between the researchers, the community, and IPHAN, with each interlocutor taken as a multiplying agent of the ideas discussed. The concept of a multiplying agent rests on the conviction that any educational process presupposes continuity and that the achievement of even a minimum degree of continuity requires the formation of agents who will continue the process of multiplying knowledge. Five Heritage Education workshops were held for different sectors of the public (two with teachers and educators, two with members of the staff of the IPHAN Technical Office,⁹ and one with tourist guides). The object of diversifying the public was to multiply knowledge on various fronts.

Every workshop was organized in four parts: (1) conceptualization of cultural heritage, (2) archaeology and archaeological heritage, (3) the investigations in the area of Fonte Missioneira and the Archaeological Heritage of São Miguel das Missões, and (4) ways of multiplying knowledge. Each part involved dynamic activities stimulating an exchange of ideas among the interlocutors and the joint construction of knowledge. Sets of questions sought to tap the various relations and tensions existing between institutional practices and the preservation of the city’s heritage. For instance, the third part began with the following questions:

• Can you recall any team of archaeologists working at San Miguel? How long ago?

• Have you already seen the work that the Zanettini Arqueologia team is doing at the Fonte Missioneira park?

• What image of archaeology have you been given by contacts like these?

• Could such research lead to positive changes in the city? Why?

• What suggestions do you have for helping this work to insert itself more fully into the city’s everyday life? Write one down on a piece of paper and fold it up. We will then exchange them by drawing lots. Everyone will have to read out a companion’s suggestion.

What was sought in this way was an understanding of the relationship between the archaeological researchers and the community in the conviction that greater proximity could still be fostered. During one of the workshops, a female participant said that when São Miguel das Missões was classified as a World Heritage Site, the “Center of Nativist Traditions,”¹⁰ which had operated in one portion of the classified zone, was moved away by IPHAN to another area some distance from the town. The participant concluded by saying this had a negative effect on the Center, which lost both its functional impetus and its representative nature. Also etched on the social memory are various stories about the machines which deliberately entered the area of the cemetery of the old Jesuit mission, even though it was still used by the community. The cultural heritage of the community, in other words, was “erased” in favor of the heritage selected by the State. Such actions clearly interfered with the way in which the townspeople went on to regard and perceive their World Heritage Site.

It should be mentioned that there was a hiatus between the destruction of the mission in the eighteenth century and the occupation of the area by families who arrived from different parts of the southern region in the late nineteenth century. This contributed to a lack of any strong sense of identity between the ruins of the old mission and the community. The Guarani indigenous groups, the heirs to this history, still live in the region, but they are usually excluded from public policy and matters regarding heritage. In view of the complexity of the situation, the Zanettini Arqueologia team chose not to work directly with this social segment, since they considered that more time was needed to implement actions with them. Nevertheless, the project sought to use its work based on the territory of São Miguel das Missões to construct a critical vision of the processes in question and so stimulate the missing sense of identity.

It is worth pointing out that the workshops also included a visit to the excavations at the Fonte Missioneira park and to the Archaeology Laboratory of the IPHAN Technical Laboratory in São Miguel das Missões. 81 multiplying agents took part in the workshops.

The Visitor Circuit can be regarded as a “walk of discovery” in the sense employed by de Varine-Bohan (2002). A trip around different areas of the city materializes the concept that the territory has a diversity of heritage assets. The concept of cultural heritage was thus extended to natural spaces, landscapes, and cultural references, as well as to the meaning constructed for heritage assets by each individual. The purpose of this was to demonstrate that the territory now covered by the city has a variety of heritage segments, among them the ruins of the classified monument—that is, the World Heritage Site of the ruins of São Miguel das Missões. While the project was under way, 513 pupils from state schools took part in these Circuits.

The Circuits were previously agreed upon with the state schools in the municipality, and the pupils taking part were always accompanied by their teachers. The Circuit had a duration of 2–3 h, depending on the age of the pupils, the size of the group, and the complexity of the questions raised during the activity. It was organized as a bus outing with three stops to explore some of the areas shown on the ludic map. Whenever they reached one of these areas, the Zanettini Arqueologia team members would ask the pupils: “Where are we? Are there any heritage assets near here? What else would you choose to put on our map?”

All the groups were taken to (1) the Fonte Missioneira park, (2) the zone classified as a World Heritage Site and the Museu das Missões, and (3) the Archaeology Laboratory at the IPHAN Technical Office in São Miguel das Missões. When they reached the Fonte Missioneira park, the party was divided into two smaller groups, each accompanied by a monitor, since better results are achieved with smaller numbers. During this stop, the team of archaeologists responsible for the excavations next to the fountain gave explanations and answered questions. Observing the excavation always turned out to be a productive way of engaging everyone’s interest.

The next stop was the classified zone and the Museu das Missões, where the participants were taken to see the church of San Miguel Arcángel and observe the spatial organization of the mission. A dialogue was established regarding the importance of the museum and the objects of sacred art exhibited there. With the youngest pupils, a game was played in the classified zone with the aim of provoking reflection on teamwork. During this phase, we saw that it was possible to advance a different way of perceiving the heritage, which often went unnoticed by those living in the town. The game was very positive in this respect, since children are generally kept away from the place by the local people’s image of it as formal and boring.

The third phase of the Circuit was a visit to the Archaeology Laboratory, generally awaited by the children with some eagerness. It was not a place that could be visited every day, and this made it a special moment that was used for further demonstration of the archaeologist’s work and reflection upon it. The explanations were given by the Zanettini Arqueologia team working in the laboratory.

Another important aspect of the last stop on the Circuit was that it emphasized the care necessary for the preservation of the collected objects and the importance of having a stable context to relate them to. The goal was to emphasize that besides the preservation of the ruins, objects and information about them and the surrounding area also have to be carefully preserved. The cleaning, marking, and photographing of the pieces were all followed with enthusiasm by the youngsters, who also enjoyed looking through the digital catalog of the contents.

The Circuit ended with a request to the teachers in charge of the group to have their pupils produce a small piece of work in class time, which could be a drawing, a text, or a combination of the two, showing what they had found most interesting about the activity. The Zanettini Arqueologia team also agreed with the teachers on a date when this material would be collected from the school. It was then used as one of the bases for assessing the results, as described below.

Identifying Some Results

The analysis of results is an essential part of any educational action, even if it is rarely carried out in heritage education programs in Brazil. In the specific field of educational actions related to the archaeological heritage, there are in fact no more than a handful of examples. While Bruno (1984) presents an assessment of the museological communication program at the Instituto de Prehistória over a period of 5 years, Cury (2005) offers an analysis of the perception of an exhibition by visitors to the Museu de Arqueologia de Ouroeste. In the meantime, Almeida (2002) carries out a detailed analysis of the reception and perception of a public archaeology project at a school in Rio de Janeiro.

For Almeida (2006), the main goal of an assessment is to produce quality information for decision-taking, whether at museums or other cultural and educational institutions. We concur with this affirmation. We believe that the educational action described here could provide inspiration for a program on a larger scale within the municipality of São Miguel das Missões, and our assessment therefore sought to articulate areas of reflection that might help to ripen decisions.

Of the 81 participants in the workshops, 43 were teachers, 23 were staff members at the IPHAN Technical Office, and 15 were tourist guides. Where the group of teachers is concerned, it is worth drawing attention to the fact that 36.5 % of the municipality’s educational personnel took part in the project.¹¹

At the end of the activity, a workshop feedback form was handed round to be filled out on the spot. Various points for discussion emerge from an analysis of the responses. The teachers’ principal demand was to be able to participate in activities of a longer duration dealing specifically with archaeological practice. Nearly 30 years after the recognition of the ruins of San Miguel as a World Heritage Site, there is still no ongoing teacher training in heritage work, although there have been some isolated actions. Among the members of the IPHAN team, one fundamental point that emerged was a call for information to be divulged among the entire staff, since a large number of the participants had had no previous access to certain basic information on the patrimony, and many of them expressed pleasure and interest at “being informed” about the activities of the IPHAN Technical Office itself. It should be pointed out that most of these staff members are involved in security activities and in many cases turn into “informants” for the tourists who visit the ruins. Moreover, attending courses and lectures helps to raise the self-esteem of these professionals, who are crucial for cultural heritage conservation. The group of tourist guides also turned out to need more access to information, since many of them displayed a negative image of IPHAN as an institution, largely because they were unaware of the many different activities under way. In this case, there is also an information lag related to the division of authority for taking public policy decisions on tourism among IPHAN, the municipal authorities, and the national government.

The Visitor Circuit with the younger public yielded 416 responses, representing 81 % of all the pupils involved in the action. The qualitative analysis of this material soon became a challenge.

Observing a scarcity of bibliography on the subject, the model employed, as mentioned above, was the one presented in a project by the Museums, Archives, and Libraries Council of Great Britain entitled the Learning Impact Research Project.¹² According to this model, “learning is a process of active compromise with experience (…) Effective learning leads to change, development, and the wish to learn more” (Almeida, 2006). This tool seeks a broad evaluation of learning beyond mere “contents,” suggesting for the purpose an approach known as Generic Learning Outcomes (GLO), which gives five results for learning processes in museums, archives, and libraries: (1) knowledge and comprehension; (2) skills; (3) attitudes and values; (4) pleasure, inspiration, and creativity; and (5) action, behavior, and process (Melo, 2007).

The compositions produced by the pupils were categorized into visual language, written language, or visual and written language. They were also divided into three groups corresponding to different phases in the educational system: (1) infant school, first, and second years; (2) third, fourth, and fifth years; and (3) sixth year upward. After analyzing the compositions, the themes appearing in them were classified as follows: Ruins of the church of San Miguel; Fonte Missioneira; Museu das Missões; Mission Cross; Reconstitution of the Jesuit Mission; Archaeologists (male and female); Archaeology: Excavation; Archaeology: Laboratory and archaeological objects; Heritage and preservation; City, history, and tourism; Indigenous peoples; Legend; Free creation; Characters; and Bus.¹³

The most frequently repeated themes were the ruins of the church of San Miguel and Fonte Missioneira, followed by the laboratory and the archaeological objects. When the themes were analyzed in relation to the pupils’ age groups, however, some interesting differences were noted.

The ruins, the fountain, and free creation were most recurrent in the lower grades (Groups 1 and 2) and can therefore generally be associated with the younger pupils. Such a result may be related to the fact that pleasure, inspiration, creativity, and skills are the most frequent learning results in this group. Clearly, the themes were more closely related to these GLOs.

Group 3 meanwhile showed a predilection for themes associated with the archaeological objects accessed in the laboratory and also for Fonte Missioneira. Archaeology as a specific science recurred often in this group, but so too did themes related to the preservation of the heritage, the history of the city, and tourism.

Toward an Analysis and Assessment of the Project

For an understanding of the theoretical and methodological choices involved in the activity presented here, and to be able to carry out an assessment of it, it is first necessary to state the underlying premises. These are:

• 1. The archaeological heritage must be inserted within the heritage of the community as a whole, involving other segments of its patrimony (Zanettini, 2008).

  This is taken as a basic premise because, as the historian Ulpiano Bezerra de Meneses notes, the preservation of the archaeological heritage as a contribution to the formulation or reinforcement of a cultural identity has no autonomy or nature of its own, since it flows together with general questions like the concepts of identity or memory (de Meneses, 1987).

• 2. Museological theory and methodology have been adopted for the implementation of actions, with a dialogue established also with the concepts and methods of Heritage Education (Zanettini, 2008).

  The consequence of adopting this premise was a consideration of the concept of Museological Pedagogy and of the educational ideas of Paulo Freire and the New Museology.

  Museological Pedagogy, it should be emphasized, is oriented toward the education of the memory on the basis of heritage influences, seeking on the one hand to support museological procedures from a technical point of view and on the other to broaden the prospect of accessibility and problematize notions of belonging (Bruno, 2006). The concept is moreover linked to the idea that Museology studies the relationship between man and his reality (de Moraes Wichers, 2011).

  Where Freirean pedagogy and the New Museology are concerned, one point worth stressing here is that the idea of education as a political act, one of Paulo Freire’s key notions, is a starting point for an updated Museology whose documentary framework would be the 1972 Charter of Santiago de Chile, along with certain premises such as the idea of opening the museum up to society, the decentralization of museological actions, and the broadening of the concept of heritage and its use as a factor of integrated development (de Moraes Wichers, 2011).

• 3. The preservation of the cultural heritage is associated with the qualified use of heritage assets and references and should therefore promote sustainable local development.

• 4. According to Hughes de Varine-Bohan (2002), such development must be based on the active and creative participation of local communities, since without such participation, the only thing that is verified is the implementation of technocratic programs whose efficacy is founded on an ephemeral juncture of political determination and availability of financial and human resources (Zanettini, 2008).

As mentioned previously, the project presented and analyzed here was not conceived as a typical Heritage Education action, but neither did it stray too far from that methodology.¹⁴ The project structured the means of personal interpretation¹⁵ around the idea that Heritage Education is a bridge (Merillas, 2003a, p. 115), since the receivers were to adopt an active position vis-à-vis the object of learning, and a two-way link was to be established between society and cultural heritage, adding new senses to the latter. Heritage Education was also understood as educational diffusion (Merillas, 2003a, p. 123), since one of the project’s strategic objectives was to contribute to the training of teachers, tour guides, and the staff of the IPHAN Institute (Zanettini, 2008). Finally, Heritage Education was viewed as a form of management (Merillas, 2003a, p. 123) of a nonrenewable resource, in this case the cultural heritage.

When the project was implemented, the Museu das Missões¹⁶ was going through great difficulties, such as a lack of human and structural resources. It therefore collaborated very little beyond receiving the team from Zanettini Arqueologia who were to execute the activity. In the meantime, the IPHAN Technical Office also proved unable to assist in the implantation of the integrated education project at São Miguel das Missões, since the function of IPHAN was solely to issue the edict. In our judgment, one measure that might increase the effectiveness of educational actions and consolidate public policies for the preservation of the cultural heritage is some form of interinstitutional articulation between IPHAN and IBRAM.¹⁷

It is important to point out that before the implementation of the project presented here, others had already been carried out in the area. However, they produced no records or analyses or assessments of results that could be consulted. Moreover, when the professionals arrived in São Miguel das Missões, as mentioned earlier, they quickly perceived the distance between local society and the World Heritage Site. We believe that much of the responsibility for this picture lies with the way IPHAN, the official agency for the preservation of the cultural heritage, has gone about things.

The symptom of this state of affairs, as noted by the members of the Zanettini Arqueologia team, was that the citizens of São Miguel das Missões did not regard the ruins of São Miguel das Missões as their heritage. The concept of cultural heritage therefore needs to be elaborated on the basis of a broader context. In other words, in order for the chain of procedures know—understand—respect—value—cherish—enjoy—transmit (Merillas, 2003b, p. 75) to function properly, it is essential to explore the emotional implications of an understanding of the heritage from a pedagogical point of view.¹⁸ This meant it was necessary to arrive at the more universal heritage through the more individual heritage of the subject, as recommended by Merillas (Merillas, 2003b, p. 74). Such was the case with the reflections on the heritage value of places not classified as historic heritage sites, yet of great importance and significance all the same,¹⁹ during the workshops and the visits to the classified sites. It is important to emphasize that the excavations outside the classified area—that is, at Fonte Missioneira, an archaeological zone which clearly demonstrated that the cultural heritage spread further than the area designated as a World Heritage Site—helped to provide material support for the arguments used. The material collected during this activity legitimized the notion that the heritage is not restricted to classified monuments. Working on the basis of the signification and appropriation of cultural assets, whether classified or not, was thus the strategy employed to bring the people of São Miguel das Missões closer to their World Heritage ruins.

All the actions were structured around a tone of provocation, in the sense that the individuals needed to form new concepts about the heritage and its possible uses. The experiments carried out and assessed in 2008 and 2009 were never capitalized on, since the results obtained and the suggestions made in the subsequent report were never taken up as guidelines for a new relationship between the IPHAN Technical Office and the community. On the other hand, although the Museu das Missões made little active contribution to the project during its execution, its staff afterward appropriated part of the material devised for the project in order to develop their own educational activities.²⁰

We believe in the success of the strategy of broadening the concept of cultural heritage, although for various reasons, such as a lack of human resources, materials, and time, no specific actions were developed during this phase of the integrated education project in São Miguel das Missões for an extremely important segment of society that stands in direct relation to the World Heritage of the Missions: the Guarani Indians. There is much still to be done, but the concept underlying the project presented here enabled a new vision of cultural assets and made the World Heritage Site of São Miguel das Missões more accessible and full of significance.

Conclusion

This attempt to reflect from both an outsider’s and an insider’s perspective on a project carried out nearly 3 years ago ends here with the identification of certain needs for adjustment and revision, as well as certain conclusions on processes of heritage listing. We are well aware how important it is that the IPHAN Technical Office and the Museu das Missões should appropriate the contents of the project presented here and plan a project of articulated action to resume and extend the work begun in 2008. This seems to us to be fundamental to prevent the results obtained by the project from being lost, and to allow the multiplying agents to act effectively as multiplying agents, since the work of valuing and appropriating the cultural heritage has to be continuous. We are also very conscious of the importance of extending the project to the indigenous community under the perspective of Public Archaeology and Sociomuseology.

The project assessment report has already indicated a pressing need for the creation of spaces for continuous dialogue with different segments of the community, and especially teachers and tourist guides, multiplying agents par excellence. It also pointed out the lack of internal communication in the IPHAN Technical Office, whose staff knew little about the activities of the agency itself. Considering the limitations of resources and time during the implementation of the project described here, the action was regarded as no more than a first step along a very long road. Nevertheless, we believe that IPHAN has made very little further headway. On the contrary, the staff at its Technical Office in the city has been drastically reduced, and today it has no professional archaeologist. On the other hand, we feel that the Museu das Missões is going through a moment of synergy, permitting its transformation into a cultural institution of importance for the community of São Miguel das Missões and the surrounding area.

This analysis helps us perceive the complexity surrounding the processes of classifying monuments. This is because the recognition and appropriation of the cultural heritage lies beyond the scope of the State, and the interventions of agencies affect the way society appropriates it. Classification is not a certain guarantee that monuments will be valued as such. Finally, looking back on this project has shown us the need to create strategies to avoid distancing society from its heritage. For our part, we believe that the adoption of the idea of the city as heritage, along with the creation of our ludic map, resulted in an effective strategy for reapproximating the citizens of São Miguel das Missões to their heritage, coincidentally a World Heritage Site since 1983 (Fig. 5.1).

Fig. 5.1

San Miguel de Misiones, 2008. Source: Zanettini Arqueologia