(Im)Proper Relations: Heritage Sustainability in Oaxaca

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse II, Current Research in Oaxaca Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper is a call to expand our definitions of sustainability, troubling what has become the bedrock of community archaeology and heritage projects. In Oaxaca, the question of sustainability is pursued alongside a fixed imagining of how an ideal heritage site operates. A “successful heritage project,” institutional actors assert, is not what they term a “ghost building”—a dead and empty space. Yet, the paradox of sustainable practice seems to do exactly this, often turning spaces into sterile museums or frozen repositories designed for touristic consumption. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted in Mitla, Oaxaca, and UNESCO, I think through the ways sustainability discourse is part of a moral project predicated on aligning communal and institutional relations to history. I query what is at stake in the ways heritage governance currently operates, and explore how the emphasis on such a narrow rendering of what is sustainable and ‘alive’ winds up positioning institutions as those whom regulate the distinction between life and nonlife, and, subsequently, both what proper relationality entails (Povinelli 2017) and what is worth preserving. In so doing, I hope to better sketch out the conceptual architecture of patrimonio, and open discussions into its ontological boundaries and cosmological significance.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Checking the Pulse II, Current Research in Oaxaca Part 1   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38629.0