Heritage and Its Missions
Contested Meanings and Constructive Appropriations
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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.
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
Cristóbal 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 Pará, 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
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 an MA in History from the Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul and a PhD 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.
Introduction | 1
Cristóbal 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 São 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
Cristóbal Gnecco
Part II : Local Appropriations of the Historical Meanings of the Missions
Uses and Meanings of the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay | 131
Maximiliano von Thüngen
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
Cristóbal Gnecco
Editors’ Acknowledgments | 233
List of Contributors | 235
Index | 239
