Description:
Explores how heritage discourses and local publics interact at Catholic mission sites in the southwestern United States, northern Mexico, and the Southern Cone
Interdisciplinary in scope and classed under the name "critical heritage studies," Heritage and Its Missions makes extensive use of ethnographic perspectives to examine heritage not as a collection of inert things upon which a general historical interest is centered, but as a series of active meanings that have consequences in the social, political, and economic arenas. This approach considers the places of interaction between heritage discourses and local publics as constructed spaces where the very materiality of the social and the political unfolds. Heritage and Its Missions brings together researchers from several countries interested in the pre-republican Catholic missions in the Americas as heritage. Each essay discusses the past and current heritage meanings applied to a specific mission by national and multicultural states, local Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, international heritage institutions, and scholars. They then address how heritage actors produce knowledge from their positioned perspectives; how dif-ferent actors, collectives, communities, and publics relate to them; how heritage representations are deployed and contested as social facts; and how different conceptions of "heritage" collide, collaborate, and intersperse to produce the meanings around which heritage struggles unfold.Brief description: Cristóbal Gnecco is professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Universidad del Cauca and chair of its Anthropology Program, where he works on the political economy of archaeology, geopolitics of knowledge, discourses on alterity, and ethnographies of heritage.
Review Quotes: How can we currently grasp the remains of impressive colonial projects such as the missions? What do the contemporary uses of the missions say about the colonial myths of grandeur and domination, about the relationship between mission, sovereignty and indigenous worlds, or about the structural relationship between education, nation, capital and heritage? In this book the editors have brought together outstanding contributions to address these questions and open up others. Heritage and its Missions will be a crucial reference at the intersection of heritage studies, cultural studies, indigenous knowledge and decolonial thought.---Mario Rufer, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, México