Full Description
In 1923, Anglo-American anthropologists, in collusion with Mexican colleagues, Yucatec revolutionary leaders, and Maya workmen, began to peel back the tropical jungle of Yucaten to create the modern ruins of the ancient city of Chichen Itza. This convergence of opposing interests and agendas transformed Chichen into a factory of knowledge and laid the infra structural groundwork for tourism in the region by creating a museum of Maya culture. In this study, the author argues how notions of "impact", whether of tourism or of anthropology, are inadequate to comprehend the ways in which the Maya culture is known, represented, and experienced in the everyday worlds of tourism, anthropology and Maya society. Instead of "impact", he argues that the invention of the Maya culture derives from the historical complicities between heterogenous agents. Chichen Itza is viewed as both an artifact and the privileged site of contestations and mutual appropriations between Maya peoples, anthropological practices, tourist businesses, regional politics, nation building, New Age spiritualists, and international relations between Mexico and the United States.
Contents
Guide book to the archaeology of Chichen Itza. Part 1 The scriptual economy: inscriptions of travel in Yucatan - the progress that chose a village: measuring zero-degree culture and other scandals; measuring tourist impact on P'iz-te; "La Antesala de Chichen Itza, Patrimonio de la Humanidad"; Chichen Itza: the museum of Maya culture and civilization - on the museum's runes, the ruins of modernity: a genealogy; mysteries of the Maya and the marvellous sciences of survival: a "dark writing"; con/tour(s) of the museum: ventriloquilism, citing vision, and the temporality of tourist site, Vernal return and cosmos: that serpent and the balustrade and the New Age invasion. Part 2 War and its topography: an everyday guide to the orchestration of practices - the apparatus of the Piste/Chichen; panopticon as tianguis - tactics, language, strategy; departures from the museum - ethnographic espionage and the topography of culture.
