Recognizing Heritage: The Politics of Multiculturalism in New Mexico

5. Anthropology, Heritage, and Multicultural Justice

CHAPTER FIVE Anthropology, Heritage, and Multicultural Justice Anthropology and the heritage industry are closely related, especially in the American Southwest. The Southwest has been a preeminent “laboratory” for both archaeological and ethnographic research since the nineteenth century (Fowler 2000). This research was tied to tourism development, as the early history of the Museum of New Mexico illustrates. Archaeologists lobbied for the establishment of national parks around important Ancestral Puebloan ruins, and these parks became key sites for the public interpretation of both past and present Indian cultures (Fine 1988; Keller and Turek 1998, 30–42, 185–215; Rothman 1992, 56–83; Snead 2001). The Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway worked together to market the Southwest to tourists and played a central role in its invention as an exotic American region. They hired anthropologists to develop ethnographic collections and publish brochures, catalogs, and books (Francaviglia 1994; Neumann 1999; Weigle and Babcock 1996). Anthropologists and the railroad collaborated on living ethnographic exhibitions at world’s fairs, in Albuquerque’s Indian Building, at the Grand Canyon , and elsewhere. Around 1915 anthropologist John P. Harrington commended the railroad for making “possible the exploiting and scientific study of the quaint peoples through whose ancient lands it runs. The rescuing of the customs of these Indians from oblivion will be an asset to the Santa Fe railroad as long as time lasts.” These salvage efforts, he reasoned, would benefit tourists and scientists alike (Weigle and Babcock 1996, 68). Tour- Multicultural Justice 219 ism advertisements continue to employ anthropological language in Santa Fe, “a city where one is confronted with a striking degree of popular enthusiasm for ideas and sensibilities historically associated with anthropology and anthropologists” (Mullin 2001, 1). The overlap between anthropology and the heritage industry should come as no surprise, since heritage itself is a quasi-anthropological category. Richard Handler (1987, 137) encourages anthropologists to consider how the heritage industry’s appropriation of the culture concept illustrates “some of the uses to which their own concepts and data have been or will be put.” The liberal conception of heritage that is ascendant worldwide (everybody has heritage and everybody’s heritage deserves recognition) owes much to the relativization and pluralization of culture in earlytwentieth -century anthropology. American anthropologists challenged the Eurocentric equation of Culture with Civilization and described a world made up of many (equal) cultures. The recognition of heritage also relies on anthropological processes such as the investigation, documentation, interpretation, and representation of social life. Heritage area development requires cultivating an ethnographic gaze and recognizing “ethnographic landscapes” (Guthrie 2005, 62–82). Despite this overlap between heritage development and anthropology , the heritage industry largely relies upon outdated anthropological concepts.1 Edward Bruner (2005, 4, 7, 195) notes that “tourism is co-opting ethnography” but that it “performs outmoded anthropology” and chases “anthropology’s discarded discourse, presenting cultures as functionally integrated homogenous entities outside of time, space, and history.” Essentialist conceptions of race, culture, and identity in heritage productions not only produce inaccurate views of social life but also have dangerous political consequences. I have argued that heritage interpretation and preservation in New Mexico perpetuate colonial hierarchies in three ways: by rendering subordinate groups more visible than dominant ones, by promoting an impossible standard of authenticity that binds Native Americans and Nuevomexicanos to the past, and by de- 220 Multicultural Justice politicizing culture, identity, and the past. All of these tendencies have parallels in anthropology, but since the 1980s anthropologists have critiqued and moved away from them. Westerners were almost entirely absent from anthropological accounts through much of the twentieth century. Anthropologists even removed themselves from their ethnographies, assuming the role of invisible scientific observers. Recently, anthropologists have become more interested in Western societies and have recognized the importance of disclosing their own situated position as researchers and writers. Anthropologists have not only reproduced but also policed the notion of authenticity. Yet many anthropologists no longer consider authenticity a useful analytical concept. Finally, modernist anthropologists ignored colonial politics and advanced an apolitical conception of culture. In the past few decades, however , anthropologists have more explicitly addressed the politics of their field sites and their scholarship. In this concluding chapter I propose integrating these more recent anthropological approaches into heritage interpretation and preservation. I begin with a discussion of objectification, a process common to both anthropology and heritage development. The objecti fication of heritage often raises concerns about authenticity...