Spanish and Portuguese

The Maya archaeological site of Xcaret, formerly known as P’ole’, was once an important port community of the Caribbean littoral, serving as a mainland gateway to the religious shrine of Ixchel and the ports on the island of Cozumel during the Late Postclassic Period (1250 – 1519 CE). Over the past two decades, this ancient port has been transformed into the most publicized archaeo/eco-tourist theme park in the Maya world, a modern, multisensory gateway to a series of cultural narratives of identity built around, in part, the ancient ruins that provide a physical/historical backdrop and performance space. In this paper we critically examine the multiple narratives presented to the public at the archaeological site/theme park that stem from historicized places, people, material culture, and texts--what we refer to as archaeonarratives. At Xcaret, an “ancient Maya past” provides the contextual backdrop for audiovisual representations of a national Mexican imaginary directed toward an elite national and international tourist public. Ironically, this heritage centering takes place in a peripheral location that has been historically and culturally disconnected from the larger Mexican national identity discourse. Our research, which integrates approaches from cultural studies, ethnography, and archaeology, suggests that archaeotourism at Xcaret and the Mexican Caribbean has provided a gateway for a “Maya past” to be incorporated into the palimpsest of modern heritage discourse in Mexico in unprecedented ways that problematize the relationship between local and regional identities and the nation-state.

This paper starts from Dipesh Chakrabarty's argument that in the newly named era of the Anthropocene—when human beings have become such a destructive force to the environment that they have acquired the status of geological agents, capable of interfering with the most basic processes of the Earth—, the history of culture can no longer be separated from the history of the species and of nature itself. I then develop the insight that the Anthropocene renews the relevance of Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's Ameridian perspectivism, a theory based on the widespread Amerindian postulate of an originary state of indifferentiation between humans and animals, and that the original condition common to humans and animals is not animality, as in Western thought, but humanity itself. The abundance of Amerindian narratives in which animals, plants, and spirits see themselves as humans is analyzed as an Anthropomorphic impulse that paradoxically contains an anti-anthropocentric potential, as “in a world where everything is human, being human is not that special.” The contrast between Amerindian anthropomorphism and Western anthropocentrism is further developed in the context of the recent Ecuadorian and Bolivian constitutions, which for the first time confer on animals, plants, and bodies of water the condition of juridical subjects endowed with rights. The conclusion points toward the notion of non-human rights as a necessary and urgent task in the era of the Anthropocene.