Suchergebnisse

Cultural heritage is material - tangible and intangible - that signifies a culture's history or legacy. It has become a venue for contestation, ranging in scale from protesting to violently claimed and destroyed. But who defines what is to be preserved and what is to be erased? As cultural heritage becomes increasingly significant across the world, the number of issues for critical analysis and, hopefully, mediation, arise. The issue stems from various groups: religious, ethnic, national, political, and others come together to claim, appropriate, use, exclude, or erase markers and manifestations of their own and others' cultural heritage as a means for asserting, defending, or denying critical claims to power, land, and legitimacy. Can cultural heritage be well managed and promoted while at the same time kept within parameters so as to diminish contestation? The cases herein rage from Greece, Spain, Egypt, the UK, Syria, Zimbabwe, Italy, the Balkans, Bénin, and Central America.

Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift. Gail Anderson, ed. Marburg an der Lahn: Basilisken Press, 2004. 401 pp.

My temporary exhibition in Krannert Art Museum, The Social Context of Violence in Ancient Peruvian Art (March 27–May 23, 2004), is transgressive and self‐critical. While presenting a small number of objects in the university art museum's collection that depict ancient violence (battles, human sacrifice, and trophy head taking), the exhibition simultaneously argues that the objects themselves are the result of violence, specifically to the archaeological record through the act of looting. The exhibition further suggests that the looters are themselves the victims of a failed national economic system that does not enable them to earn a living wage as farmers and of an exploitative international art market that similarly pays them little for objects that become immensely valuable (financially and culturally) once out of the country. Museums, and especially university museums, may be enabling venues for the interrogation of their own hegemonic practices.

Peru offers important perspectives for understanding the presence of the past, particularly as expressed on various landscapes of national and local identity, social and political power, and economic development. As Peru's archaeological past is converted into a vast tourist project, contradictory, negotiated, and contested relationships are played out in a constantly changing drama, with ruins, indigenous people, ordinary city residents, foreign tourists, the Peruvian government, and the private sector as the actors. Concerned with how representations of the past are created and received differently by various groups in Peru, particularly in Cusco and Nazca, I show the importance of concentrating attention on the local context in which the pragmatics and poetics of archaeological tourism are orchestrated, demonstrating the insufficiency of studies focused exclusively on the role of nationalism/nationalist discourse in contemporary constructions of the past. [Keywords: Peru, tourism, authenticity, archaeological heritage, identity]

Helaine Silverman muestra en este artículo las complejas implicancias que tiene para la perspectiva arqueológica las relaciones entre las construcciones monumentales y la organización político-social. Tal temática la desarrolla para el caso de la cultura Nasca y en especial, el sitio monumental de Cahuachi.

Helaine Silverman shows in this article the complex implications for the archaeological perspective of the relationships between monumental buildings and political-social organization. This theme is developed in the case of the Nasca culture and especially, the monumental site of Cahuachi. ; Helaine Silverman muestra en este artículo las complejas implicancias que tiene para la perspectiva arqueológica las relaciones entre las construcciones monumentales y la organización político-social. Tal temática la desarrolla para el caso de la cultura Nasca y en especial, el sitio monumental de Cahuachi.