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Abstract
This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the production of heritage in the Mexican state of Oaxaca between Indigenous Zapotec and Mixtec communities and institutional actors. It argues that heritage is a site of contestation in Oaxaca, and one that hinges on questions of who gets to define what heritage is, how it should operate, and to whom it belongs. Drawing on 17 months of ethnographic and archival research, the dissertation shows that heritage is a fraught and paradoxical formation shot through with a set of ever-evolving value-judgements that shape heritage into an inexorably moral, affective, and political project. There is no unified understanding of heritage here that might be shared between Indigenous and institutional stakeholders. Rather, by charting tensions over possession, dispossession, absence, and presence, the dissertation shows how “heritage” itself becomes an arena through which different theories of the past and relationality are set at odds with each other. The dissertation thus asserts that heritage, on both a conceptual and ideological level, must be viewed as a set of deeply entangled multiple cosmologies that serve to generate social and affective ties, given the ways its constitution is steeped in battles over meaning.
My ethnography centers heritage spaces as spatio-temporal projects that are both dialectical and dialogic, rearranging and reinforcing conceptions of space-time that structure or transform worlds and our orientations to those worlds and to each other. These acts of heritage-making – from efforts to preserve, destroy, or loot to restoration or reclamation – are inextricably bound to ritual. Each act serves to make heritage real in the world and reaffirm its significance on multiple levels. These “heritage cosmologies,” as I term them, provide scaffolding that simultaneously supports and undercuts institutional ideologies while also embodying local Indigenous ontologies. Heritage cosmologies offer an avenue into understanding why heritage generates endless frictions that manifest through negotiations and debates over possession, management, and meaning. Likewise, they elucidate why particular forms of heritage-making appear to unsettle or intensify relations between human and nonhuman subjects.
Tensions between possession and dispossession, and between absence and presence structure the dissertation, with the arc offering up instances of ‘ruin possession’ and heritage dispossession in the first half, followed by close-grained accounts of heritage re-possession in the latter half. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on themes of haunting, grief, and historical dispossession in the Indigenous Zapotec town of Mitla. Chapters 3 and 4 feature ethnographic investigations into local acts of re-possession within the heritage arena, beginning first with an account of ‘ghost buildings’ in the Mixtec town of Teposcolula and ending with an examination of street art. The dissertation ends with the contention that questions of permission, obligation and proper relationality to history are central to heritage in Oaxaca, suggesting that the power of heritage lies ultimately in how it centers the ways humans orient themselves to the past, and the ways in which these orientations are in turn shaped by moral obligations humans have between themselves as well as towards nonhuman beings.