Monumental Ambivalence: The Politics of Heritage (review)

Lisa Breglia's Monumental Ambivalence: The Politics of Heritage (2006) is an original multi-sited and comparative examination of the construction of meaning in monuments—what she calls "heritage-as-practice." As a tributary of Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), and Henry LeFebre's Production of Space (1991), the book offers a key contribution to students and professionals engaged in Critical Heritage Studies. Additionally, its implicit consideration of the sources of politicization around heritage as a symbolic territory deserves consideration in light of mounting international tensions over it.¹

Her research gets to these overarching aims by first circumambulating around two archeological/monumental sites found in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico—one a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Chitchén Itzá, and the other, Chucumil, a heritage site-to-be. Each site is discursively excavated for a genealogy of its symbolically laden and territorialized meanings. As the title suggests, the meanings are not always certain, nor uncontested. Instead they are produced—through practice. And, the most evident mixed-use practices she documents as having taken place around the sites are mostly the result of a historically discursive cloisonné of science, neoliberalism, and international and national policy—all allegedly ambivalent or unconcerned. Thus, certain referential frames, such as "tangible heritage," monument of "ancient civilization," national/cultural patrimony, and/or, site of touristic development, construct Chitchén Itzá and Chucucmil both as monumental-heritage places that are conceptually outside of the contemporary land, labor, or culture claims that any specific de facto, local heir may have over them. That there may be de facto local practices and interests not recognized de jure is a feature common to modern States' with historical minority and ethnic groups.

After Breglia shows that it is through the allegedly ambivalent modern legal, bureaucratic, and scientific interests in the historical or national value of the sites, it becomes clear how certain other connections are systematically undervalued, even as they are decidedly non-ambivalent. Such non-ambivalent stakes that some local Yucatec Maya and even other foreign social actors have tried to have in the heritage sites are secure jobs, entrepreneurial opportunities, land, tourism, and contemporary folk beliefs. Thus, Breglia also anticipates where politicization is likely. Maya with secure jobs and opportunity at Chitchén Itzá had already been protesting the Mexican government's declaration to turn the monument over to private hands. And at Chucumil, some Maya with patrifruct rights² to the land inside the archeological zone perceive the actual land beneath and around the ruins as a landscape of de facto intangible heritage. But Breglia notes that these heirs are becoming "docile" heirs-made-"illegitimate." Would this be happening if someone had been contesting Chucumil through de jure International precedents such as UNESCO's "intangible heritage"—which includes the indigenous knowledge, folklore, and cultural expressions based in territorial natural resources? Chapter Four, "By Blood or By Sweat, Shaping Rights to World Heritage" implies that the invisible and contemporary labor practices going into the production of monument meanings are also worthy of intangible heritage notice.

However, such an explicit recommendation on behalf of any one social actor is not found in Monumental Ambivalence. This is even though the ledger of histories, archived titles and policy, offer numerous grounds for different and competing claims to the resources around the sites. Even the end of Chapter Six—Archeology, Ejidos, and Space-Claiming Techniques, offers evidence to argue that Maya with ejido land grants in the Chuchucmil archeological zone—expropriated by Mexican State as eminent domain—deserve compensation for the loss of agrarian products.

But this is not Breglia's overarching point. And even though her Chuchucmil data was derived from an applied anthropology job, her book has more implicit lessons for the agent of the Modern State, archeology, or International Heritage and Monuments policy. Thus, her overall caveat rests in anecdotes about the misapprehended Maya figures of the exotic past and/or present.

But the thought that actual consideration of local Maya should disturb an...