Heritage research is often based on the assumption that heritage is something “given” to us in what is being handed down from the past, and that it is good and valuable in its own right. However, by looking at the historical and cultural roots of heritage and its development through the Enlightenment, modernity, and capitalism, Pablo Alonso Gonzalez shows that it is in fact a system deeply embedded in capitalist logic and pervaded by fetishistic social relationships.
            Focusing on a case study in the region of Maragatería, Spain, Gonzalez explores the ethnic and racial discrimination faced by the local population in the context of Spanish nationalism and shows how this hostile dynamic shaped what we recognize as the region’s heritage today. Challenging widespread notions about how and why we preserve traditional cultures, The Heritage Machine rethinks the relations between heritage studies and converging disciplines, from anthropology to cultural and memory studies.
 

Pablo Alonso Gonzalez is tenure track researcher in cultural anthropology at the Higher Research Council of Spain.

— Dante Angelo, Universidad de Tarapacá, Chile

— Michael Herzfeld, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University

“An engaging and theoretically grounded analysis of ‘heritage’ as a form of relation in fetishist societies. Alonso offers an insightful ethnographic exploration while deconstructing the Maragato myth, one of the ‘damned peoples’ of Spain.”
  — Cristina Sánchez-Carretero, Spanish National Research Council