The compulsive construction of heritage : material culture and identity at the dawn of the 21st Century in northwestern Argentina"
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation is a study of the different social and cultural processes experienced in Quebrada de Humahuaca, northwestern Argentina. Drawing on a combination of archaeological and ethnographical methods, this study follows different practices and experiences in which people and material culture have engaged through discourses of heritage and the uses of the past, resulting from the region's inclusion as part of the World Heritage sites list. By introducing the concept of compulsion, this dissertation explores heritage as a pathological disorder that becomes manifested in people's everyday interaction with material culture producing a myriad of contexts in which notions of the past, modernity, and identity intersect. Heritage, therefore, is identified as one the main factors in the production of material culture and social practices through processes of commodification, reproduction/replication, preservation and sublimation. Understood as a compulsion, heritage is observed as the result of an irresistible impulse in the production and representation of different settings in which heritage is performatively expressed. By discussing heritage as compulsion, this dissertation highlights the tensions between structure and practice, global and local, authentic and inauthentic, and provides an alternative perspective based on an analysis that focuses on the dynamic and mutually constitutive relation involved in the production of material culture and identity. Working in the intersection of archaeology and ethnography, this research focuses on the documentation of the changes expressed in the material culture of Quebrada de Humahuaca, the elaborated production and staging of heritage, and the nuanced notions of ethnicity and subjectivity that are now reconfiguring the character of Argentina as a modern nation. As part of this reconfiguration, the processes of re-centering a previously historically marginal region constitutes itself as a fundamental axis upon which the image of a modern, multicultural and democratic nation is built through a hectic and obsessive production and consumption of cultural difference.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2010 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Angelo Zelada, Dante Alejandro |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Anthropology. |
| Primary advisor | Hodder, Ian |
| Thesis advisor | Hodder, Ian |
| Thesis advisor | Curtoni, Rafael Pedro |
| Thesis advisor | Meskell, Lynn |
| Thesis advisor | Wilcox, Michael V. (Michael Vincent), 1967- |
| Advisor | Curtoni, Rafael Pedro |
| Advisor | Meskell, Lynn |
| Advisor | Wilcox, Michael V. (Michael Vincent), 1967- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Dante A. Angelo. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Anthropology. |
| Thesis | Ph.D. Stanford University 2010 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2010 by Dante Alejandro Angelo Zelada
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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