What am I reading in ScholarWorks? April 2024

Mucher tells the tale of Stephen’s archaeological exploits into Central America, Mexico, and the Yucatán. Not so subtly identifying Stephens as a man who “foreclosed the possibility of learning anything from the people who had guided him to the supposedly hidden city,” Mucher deftly highlights what the ramifications of a “logic of entitlement” entail. The commodification, and indeed, creation of a “culture” wrought on the conveniently ignored and abstracted people still inhabiting their lands formed the subsequent perceptions of those people by the mid-nineteenth-century western world, and beyond. Those perceptions fed the voracious and often vicious hunger for objects of “American antiquities,” while hardening careless, romantic tropes of exoticism. Infuriating, illuminating, and yet an eminently readable article.

To view this work in Smith ScholarWorks, visit: https://scholarworks.smith.edu/ams_facpubs/1/