Full 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 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.
Contents
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
