Political Authority and the Creation of Wilderness: American National Parks and Mexican Eco-Archaeological Parks

Summary

Over the last several decades, scholars have reexamined the importance of spatiality to human life and argued that space is social, relational, and that it produces and is produced by social relationships. This reconceptualization of space has highlighted the ways in which the production of landscapes is integral to the creation, maintenance, and negation of social inequality and political authority. Recent archaeological approaches to studying inequality through landscape have taken a variety of forms, including analyses of political architectonics, panoptic spaces, and pre-existing places. An equally important practice includes transforming, or claiming to transform, wilderness into a built environment. Such claims affirm rulers’ abilities to impose order on chaos and to control the natural, or seemingly natural, world by destroying it. This presentation argues that political leaders bolster their authority not only by proclaiming their ability to turn wildernesses into built environments, but also by emphasizing their ability to turn built environments into wildernesses. Put differently, political regimes not only claim to conquer nature; they also claim to create it. To examine this argument, the presentation will compare the creation and development of American National Parks and Mexican eco-archaeological parks, focusing on the relationships between governmental authorities and indigenous peoples.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22114