This lecture will explore the significant connection between three categories of otherness: indigenous peoples, peasants, and immigrants. It will also analyze the impact of these categories on how national and international institutions treat the members of these groups and their cultures, as well as on their respective legislations. This, as can be assumed, has a very direct effect on the concepts, terms, and approaches that affect the idea of what is considered intangible cultural heritage and its management, since UNESCO established the declaration for its safeguarding in 2003. This is because these categories point to or single out groups and populations that are placed a priori in a disadvantaged situation that could be summarized as follows: they would be people without history, names, or rights. However, this is an “invention” that historically refers to various previous denominations, such as barbarians, pagans, and savages.

The name “pagans” comes from the name given in the ancient world to those who, in the countryside, or more specifically in the mountains and forests, worshipped and paid homage to their gods. And it is for this reason that when Europeans arrived in the New World, preachers and chroniclers tended to equate the ancient idolaters with the new ones. The subsequent “ethnographic invention” was served. Why were indigenous people and peasants not seen as “us” and should they be re-educated until they resembled us as closely as possible? For a number of reasons that make them hypothetical “savages from here and there”: they usually live in the countryside, far from the “civilized world,” which is ‘ours’; because of their closeness to nature and the “wild,” they are suspected of remaining outside the religion and laws of “civilized people”; they live off agriculture and herding, as our ancestors did; they tend to preserve beliefs, practices, and rituals from other times; they sometimes insist on continuing to live in this way without joining in with supposed technological and industrial progress. Therefore, if there is no way to “recover” them for the progress of “today’s society,” they would be, from the perspective of various powers, unnecessary and expendable.

However, the Western view of the “savages over there” was not always—and in all respects—so unbearably ethnocentric. As Graeber and Wengrow have explained, there were Europeans, mainly belonging to certain religious orders, who discovered in the peoples of the New World the persistence of customs and social organizations that they considered desirable: a kind of utopia come true that could be perfected without having to resort to transforming the members of those societies into Europeans. These priests and friars had discovered and described certain peoples who, while not absolutely ideal in their behavior, were based on the organization of communities that were more egalitarian and respectful of their members than European societies. And they had a decisive influence, through their works, on Western thinkers of the so-called Age of Enlightenment to embrace, among other objectives, “equality” as a goal, which until then had not been a principle governing European societies, built on a clear structure or order of lords and serfs.

For all these reasons, we present this proposal for reflection and debate on the idea of cultural heritage, based on the reconceptualization and defense of human rights from an anthropological, historical, and legal perspective. Because it is also a reality that, even though the “ethnographic invention” mentioned above was a strategy to occupy territories, dominate peoples, and convert “the others” into something more like ‘us’ or deny them their humanity, it is no less true that peasants, indigenous peoples, and immigrants can today become “the same”; and, as “others” who are constructed as such, they may be stigmatized or dispossessed of their cultures and the rights inherent to their human condition. Hence, it depends on the application and use given to a construct such as Intangible Cultural Heritage whether it functions as yet another expropriation of the knowledge of “others” or as a true recognition of their cultures and a vehicle for resistance.