Heritage and Its Missions: Contested Meanings and Constructive Appropriations

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 make 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.

Cristóbal Gnecco (Edited By)
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.

Adriana Schmidt Dias (Edited By)
Adriana Schmidt Dias holds a M.A. in History from the Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul and a Ph.D. in Archeology from the University of São 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.