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 different 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.
Cristobal Gnecco (Edited By) Cristobal 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. Adriana Schmidt Dias (Edited By) Adriana Schmidt Dias holds an MA in History from the Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul and a PhD in Archeology from the University of Sao Paulo. She is professor in the Department and in the Graduate Program in History at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and professor in the Graduate Program in Social and Cultural Anthropology and Archeology at the Federal University of Pelotas. She has carried out research and published on Brazilian precolonial archaeology; theory and method in archaeology; Indigenous history; and cultural heritage.
Introduction 1 Cristobal Gnecco and Adriana Schmidt Dias Part I: Alternative Readings of Heritage: Subjects, Alterization, and the Different Meanings of the Past Crisis of the "Heritage Order": Disputed Representations of the Jesuit Missions' Past 23 Guillermo Wilde Semiotic Policies in Conflict at Sao Miguel Arcanjo Mission (Brazil) 48 Adriana Schmidt Dias Teaching Missions, Training Citizens: The California Missions as Curriculum 65 Elizabeth Kryder-Reid Native Heritage and the California Missions: A Collaborative Approach at Mission Santa Clara 88 Lee M. Panich and Charlene Nijmeh Heritage at Stake: The Contemporary Guarani and the Missions 112 Cristobal Gnecco Part II : Local Appropriations of the Historical Meanings of the Missions Uses and Meanings of the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay 131 Maximiliano von Thuengen Claiming the Missions as Indigenous Spaces 153 Lisbeth Haas Reclaiming Cha'alayash through Applied Decolonization: Intervening and Indigenizing the Narrative in, around, and about California'sSites of Conscience 169 Deana Dartt Violence, Destruction, and Patrimonialization of the Missionary Past: The Tohono O'odham Memory, the Silenced Voice of the Magical Town Magdalena de Kino 192 Edith Llamas Conclusion: The Missions as Heritage 221 Cristobal Gnecco Editors' Acknowledgments 233 List of Contributors 235 Index 239
Cristobal Gnecco and Adriana Dias have gathered a distinguished group of international scholars, providing innovative, sensitive, and provocative insights about the Spanish and Portuguese Catholic Missions in the Americas. Through a critical heritage approach, the volume reveals the plethora of meanings that constitute these memorial landscapes, and shows that their persistent physicality has a vivid agency in the present. The book presents a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective and is of interest to a wide range of fields.---Marcia Bezerra, Professor of Archaeology at the Universidade Federal do Para, Brazil. This is a wonderful collection of essays that takes its place in the exciting, growing field of Critical Heritage Studies. It manages to be both specific in focus and broad in its conceptual range and ambition, powerfully establishing the manner in which heritage acts as a site of contestation negotiated at the point of intersection of multiple claimants and interests. This collection is a 'must read' for scholars and students in a range of fields: Heritage Studies, but also Archaeology, Anthropology, History, Indigenous Studies, and others.---Nick Shepherd, author of Rethinking Heritage in Precarious Times: Coloniality, Climate Change, and Covid-19 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 Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico
