Living Ruins
Résumé
All across Meso- and South America, majestic ruins and archaeological sites fascinate visitors who see them as tokens of the past splendor of native cultures. But what do these and other vestiges represent for the Amerindian peoples who live in their vicinity? How do their conceptions of time, space and historical continuity (or lack thereof) contrast, and often even clash with those that we tend to take for granted when discussing notions of « sacred spaces » and « cultural heritage »?
The chapters in this volume engage with recently debated issues such as regimes of historicity and regimes of knowledge, cultural landscapes, conceptions of personhood and ancestrality, artifacts and materiality... They also add to the lively body of work on the invention of tradition, neo-Indianism, and what we might call “retrospective ethnogenesis” in a world where tourism, NGOs, and Western essentialism are changing indigenous attitudes and representations regarding vestiges. Based on specific case studies analyzed by anthropologists with extensive first-hand experience of ten fieldwork sites in Mexico, Peru, Bolivia and Brazil, the essays in this collection analyze such changes as envisioned from native perspectives rather than from those mediated by UNESCO, Hollywood or Travel Agents.
This book is a must-read for anyone interested in Cultural Heritage Studies, Amerindian spirituality, and native engagement with archaeological sites in Latin America. It shows how ruins and remnants of the past can be seen as endowed with life, rather than as mere relics handed down from previous generations. They are Living Vestiges.