Mark Rice's excellent Making Machu Picchu shows how strange this Inca estate's rise has been: a national site 350 years older than the nation-state, first promoted by an American historian named Hiram Bingham, that has become an uninhabited and state-managed engine of commerce and identity—the “synthesis of all things Peruvian,” President Alan García told the nation in 2011. Bingham or Machu Picchu's Inca history has little to do with it, Rice argues. The key is tourism and the transnational contact zone—per Mary Louise Pratt—of the nearby city of Cuzco.

That tourism is integral to Machu Picchu's “Marca Perú”—the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism's brand since 2012—might seem self-evident. Making Machu Picchu points out how unlikely it would have sounded in the late nineteenth century, when elite nationalism was flatly anti-indigenous, even anti-Inca, or in the mid-1910s, when the site was infamous because of rumors that Bingham's Yale expeditions smuggled...

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