Rodrigo Liendo Stuardo
Rodrigo Liendo Stuardo
Title: “The political program of nation building and archaeology”
Abstract: Since its inception, archaeologists interested in Mexico’s past have been deeply interested in the characteristics of the societies in both evolutionary and descriptive ways that inhabited this geographic space. This concern was mainly centered around definition problems regarding the cultural and ethnic identities (linguistic, material) of the inhabitants of this vast territory; using, preferentially, the ethnographic and ethnohistoric sources of current indigenous groups in the hope of filling the information gaps inherent in archaeological research on past societies. Ethnicity and folklore lead the way in the construction of the Mexican nation at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century helping to create categories and concepts (such as: traditions, cultural heritage, local culture) to interpret social phenomena and processes, whose content and meaning were introduced in public discourse, until that became ideology, including attitudes and specific intentions recognized by a broader community. In Mexico, ethnography and archaeology played an important role in constructing the concept of the nation in the collective imagination, and in the modeling of identity for the consolidation of the Nation-State. Generating a collective identity was based on the shared recognition of a glorious and monumental indigenous past and on the benefits derived from the mixing of western and local traditions. However, in recent decades, this nationalist discourse based on the value of heritage as an educational element is slowly being replaced by a new vision of the past, this time as a “non-renewable” cultural “resource” and exploitable in the economic sense: mainly as a direct income generating mechanism through recreation and tourism. This transformation is not only evident in Mexico, but it corresponds to a global process characterized, according to some authors, by “technological development and the globalization of exchange that have substantially modified the articulation between capital, work and symbolic processes, having strong repercussions on cultural production”. In this presentation, I will try to show how this two “visions of the past” coexists in the current Mexican discourse about the meaning of cultural patrimonium and its implication for the future.
Bio: Dr. Rodrigo Liendo Stuardo is an archaeologist graduated from the National School of Anthropology and History with a Ph.D. in archaeology from the University of Pittsburgh, USA. He has worked in multiple archaeological sites in the Mayan area such as Sayil, Yaxchilan, Xcaret and has directed the Palenque Regional Project from 1996 to date. Since 2001 he joined the Institute of Anthropological Research of the UNAM, currently being a Principal Investigator B. Among his publications one may indicate the following books, articles and book chapters: “Los Antiguos Reinos Mayas del Usumacinta” coeditado con Concepción Obregón, COLMEX-FCE en 2016; “Mesoamérica: El estudio de sus procesos de Transformación Social Desde una Perspectiva de Larga Duración, coeditado con Kazuo Aoyama, “B´aakal: arqueología de la región de Palenque”, BAR, Arqueopress en 2011; “The Social Construction of Public Spaces at Palenque and Chinikihá, México” en Mesoamerican Plazas, 2014; “Mayas: Guía de Arquitectura prehispánica y paisaje mayas” UNAM en 2011; y “Representaciones y espacios públicos en el área maya” coeditado con Francisca Zalaquett, UNAM, 2011. He has been a member of the National System of Researchers, Level II since 2016. In these years and thanks to the support of Conacyt, UNAM and other national and foreign institutions, he m has managed to consolidate a solid and innovative line of research in the field of pre- Hispanic Maya archaeology (Pre-Hispanic Maya Political and Economic Organization). Within this line of research he directed a significant number of Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctorate theses; he has written a considerable number of articles, chapters in books and books published on topics that are the product of his particular research or on the Mayan culture in general.
Affiliation:
