The Heritage Machine
Anthropology, Culture and Society Series Editors:
Jamie Cross, University of Edinburgh,
Christina Garsten, Stockholm University
and
Joshua O. Reno, Binghamton University
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The Heritage Machine
Fetishism and Domination in Maragatera, Spain
Pablo Alonso Gonzlez
First published in 2017 as El antipatrimonio: fetichismo y dominacin en Magaratera by Editorial CSIC
First published 2019 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Pablo Alonso Gonzlez 2019
The right of Pablo Alonso Gonzlez to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3807 1 Hardback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0300 9 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0302 3 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0301 6 EPUB eBook
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Contents
List of figures
Series Preface
As people around the world confront the inequality and injustice of new forms of oppression, as well as the impacts of human life on planetary ecosystems, this book series asks what anthropology can contribute to the crises and challenges of the twenty-first century. Our goal is to establish a distinctive anthropological contribution to debates and discussions that are often dominated by politics and economics. What is sorely lacking, and what anthropological methods can provide, is an appreciation of the human condition.
We publish works that draw inspiration from traditions of ethnographic research and anthropological analysis to address power and social change while keeping the struggles and stories of human beings centre stage. We welcome books that set out to make anthropology matter, bringing classic anthropological concerns with exchange, difference, belief, kinship and the material world into engagement with contemporary environmental change, capitalist economy and forms of inequality. We publish work from all traditions of anthropology, combining theoretical debate with empirical evidence to demonstrate the unique contribution anthropology can make to understanding the contemporary world.
Jamie Cross, Christina Garsten and Joshua O. Reno
1
Introduction
This book is at once an essay that allows us to think differently about heritage, a set of stories about a region and its people, and the reflection of my personal career as a researcher. In it, I explore a territory where official heritage initiatives and public institutions have had little impact. However, the absence of institutions can be as pernicious as their dominating presence, if we observe how they undermine territories and societies. Heritagisation is understood as the dynamic through which objects, performances and places are turned into heritage. In Maragatera, these processes are difficult to predict and develop, according to parameters far removed from what is known as the authorised heritage discourse (Smith 2006). Elements that could be considered heritage from the point of view of global hierarchies of value are destroyed, abandoned or simply there. Other features have been exaggeratedly constructed as heritage, particularly Maragato identity and tradition. Due to rapid changes in the Spanish economy and a socioeconomic destructuring of the country, different subjects and social groups cohabit and interrelate uneasily in Maragatera. This is reflected in their values, spacetime perceptions and ways of relating to one other. It also affects what heritage can mean in their ways of life. In Maragatera, social actors do not have differing or opposing views on heritage, rather they inhabit partially divergent frameworks of meaning, life-paths and worldviews.
In charting Maragatera, this book describes changes in the dominant patterns of relations between people, and between people and things, through the framework of heritage. This is not learning about heritage or defining it as if it were an essence. Instead, this book is about learning together with the actors and understanding how they came to be alongside the notion of heritage and the network of relationships in which they live. The goal in learning about these relationships is to understand heritage construction in the framework of capitalist systems of domination and to examine how heritage contributes to their reproduction. In this process, the working careers, capacities for action and powers of various actors in the territory are reorganised. This rearranges their competing tendencies towards egalitarian self-organisation and immanence, or towards the creation of hierarchies and abstract social relations through specific power relations. The interdisciplinary approach of this study is broad, as is typical in the field of heritage, but the view is at root anthropological, both for its solid grounding in ethnographic data and its main theoretical apparatus.
