“The problem is to understand and explain the articulation between three different series of sociocultural entities,” Quetzil Castañeda writes, “Maya culture(s), anthropology, and tourism” (p. 4). The intersection of these figures—Maya, anthropologist, and tourist—in the contemporary Yucatec Maya town of Pisté and the ruins/tourist complex of Chichén Itzá is the focal point of Castañeda’s “Guidebook to the Archaeology of Chichén Itzá” as he theorizes a set of three questions: What is the history of the political and economic processes that have constructed the landscape of Pisté/Chichén? How is “the Maya” invented as a culture in the daily operation of the tourist sight/site? What is the apparatus that orchestrates everyday touristic activities and constitutes the place of Pisté/Chichén as a site of struggle?
In attempting to answer these questions, Castañeda has written a historical ethnography that approaches them circuitously, as data, analysis, history, and ethnography intersect and mix in his study. He breaks down the artificial division between the present-day village of Pisté and the ruins of Chichén Itzá, seeing them as connected parts of a complex whole, and analyzes them as such, through discourse and text in part 1, and through practice in part 2. The first part examines the history of anthropological intervention in Yucatec Maya communities, dissects the results of tourism in Pisté, looks at the Carnegie Institution’s Chichén project and scrutinizes academic (and other) Mayanist discourse. The second part is an ethnography of power in Pisté/Chichén as spaces of tourism. Castañeda maps touristic practices, both spatially and through time. He then analyzes the sale of handicrafts, guiding, and his own fieldwork and the role of late-twentieth-century anthropologists in local power relations. Doing so, he clarifies the relationship between local politics, investigative ethics, and the appropriation of “Maya” culture.
By approaching the site of Chichén Itzá in conjunction with the community of Pisté and explicitly recognizing the short- and long-term complicity and responsibility of anthropology in constructing both the immediate environment for the consumption of “Maya culture” and the larger touristic discourse around that image of Maya culture, Castañeda moves far beyond the typical anthropological/archaeological literature. Rather than contemplating hieroglyphics or the Cenote of Sacrifice, Castañeda’s poststructuralist concentration on the “(re)invention of an Other, specifically, the ‘Maya,’ through the production of knowledge about this entity in (a range of) everyday practices within the tourist complex of Chichén Itzá and the dissemination of such knowledge” (p. 10) refocuses the academic gaze on the idea of “the Maya,” and the economic, social, and political implications of this idea on the people of Pisté.
The most effective section of Castañeda’s project is that which is based on the author’s ethnographic fieldwork in Pisté/Chichén, roughly chapters 5 to 9, particularly the analysis of guiding and the sale of handicrafts. The historical component of his study—particularly his discussion of the anthropologists Robert Redfield and Morris Steggarda and their work in the 1930s to 1950s—is a much-needed revisiting of anthropology’s past. Parts, though, are not as well developed as they should be. For example, the actual process of reconstructing the physical site of Chichén Itzá, the naming, building, and actual construction of the ruins—the environment where the studied activity is taking place—is far too brief.
This type of writing on tourism in Mexico is still fairly new. Castañeda’s study is far longer, more complex, and more sophisticated than, for example, Pierre Van den Berghe’s 1994 The Quest for the Other: Ethnic Tourism in San Cristóbal, Mexico. Van den Berghe’s work, though, attempts to get at the consumption of tourist site/sight through ethnography among the tourists—an element that is strangely absent from In The Museum of Maya Culture. In such an intricate analysis as Castañeda’s, the one-dimensionality of the tourist population is surprising.
The prose is often convoluted, even difficult to understand, but In the Museum of Maya Culture raises provocative questions about the process of ethnography, the creation of tourist sites, and the complicity of national and international anthropologists (and other academics) in local power relations. Castañeda’s thoughtful work is a “guidebook” that should be consulted by those who are interested in the politics of culture, anthropology, and tourism.