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Motivations and barriers to heritage engagement in Latin America: tangible and intangible dimensions

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Abstract

In this paper, we consider two ways of getting engaged with cultural heritage: visiting historic sites and monuments, and participating in community celebrations. We consider a sample that covers 18 Latin American countries and use data from the Latinobarómetro 2013 survey. We estimate zero-inflated ordered probit models to relate the intensity of the engagement to each dimension of cultural heritage and variables that characterize personal cultural capital, socioeconomic status, civic participation and community of residence. Our analysis finds three key dimensions to identify participation patterns: formal educational attainment, level of economic deprivation and degree of civic engagement. Higher educational attainment and better economic status are associated with greater probability of participating in both forms of heritage activities, tangible and intangible, and with a more intense participation in the tangible dimension. Individuals are also more likely to participate when they are also community-involved.

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Notes

  1. https://ich.unesco.org/en/intangible-heritage-domains-00052.

  2. https://ich.unesco.org/en/convention#art2.

  3. National surveys and how cultural participation is measured in Latin America can be tracked using UNESCO (2012), OEI (2014) and SIC (2017).

  4. See the country profiles in https://en.unesco.org/countries.

  5. The 18 countries that we study are: Argentina, Bolivia, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. More information about the Latinobarómetro survey can be found at http://www.latinobarometro.org.

  6. The Latinobarómetro Corporation publishes sample weights for analysis at the country level, but not at the Latin American level. Hence, we only consider weighting factors in country-by-country descriptive estimates.

  7. We conduct Chi-square tests on the independency of each of our variable and of our covariates (e.g., frequency of visits to heritage sites and gender), and for all of them, we reject the hypotheses of independency.

  8. We use the answer to this question: As well as Spanish/Portuguese, do you speak one or more of the languages of your country’s indigenous peoples? There are up to 58 such languages spoken by individuals in our sample and broad differences by country, For instance, 94% of respondents in Paraguay report that they speak other languages (46% Guaraní and 48% Jopara) and 25% of respondents in Guatemala report speaking one of the 16 languages recorded in that country. Conversely, the proportion of interviewees who speak indigenous languages in the samples from Brazil, Chile and Uruguay is below 1%.

  9. We follow Borooah (2002) to build our deprivation index. Respondents select whether they have each of the following goods: own home, drinking water, hot water, sewage system, at least one meal a day, a separate bedroom for the children, a refrigerator, a washing machine, fixed-line telephone service, mobile phone, a computer and a car. The material deprivation measure score is built by adding up No responses, weighted by the frequency of those who have each good.

  10. Our social participation variable takes a value of 1 when the interviewee had done at least one of the following in the last 3 years: Get together with others to raise an issue or sign a petition or contact a government official, a legislative representative, a political organization, a representative of an NGO, community leaders or other influential person because of personal, family or neighborhood problems, or problems with government officials and policies.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the organizers and participants of the 8th Spanish Workshop on Cultural Economics and Management (Sevilla, 2018), the II Gijon Conference on the Economics of Leisure, Culture and Sport (Gijón, 2018) and the Master in Cultural Economics University of Valladolid (Valladolid, 2018) for their useful comments during the presentations, as well as to the two referees that reviewed this manuscript.

Funding

Ateca-Amestoy and Gorostiaga received funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (ECO2015-64467-R) and the Basque Government (IT336-19).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Foundations of Economic Analysis II, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Avda. Lehendakari Aguirre 83, 48015, Bilbao, Spain

    Victoria Ateca-Amestoy & Arantza Gorostiaga

  2. Departamento de Economía, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de la República, Constituyente 1502, 11200, Montevideo, Uruguay

    Máximo Rossi

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  1. Victoria Ateca-Amestoy
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Correspondence to Victoria Ateca-Amestoy.

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Ateca-Amestoy, V., Gorostiaga, A. & Rossi, M. Motivations and barriers to heritage engagement in Latin America: tangible and intangible dimensions. J Cult Econ 44, 397–423 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-019-09366-z

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