on the use of cacao in ceremonial contexts.

Simon Martin’s contribution plus that of

Terrence Kaufman and John Justeson

(chapter 6) reveal how important the de-

cipherment of ancient texts has become in

understanding the ancient Maya and their

neighbors. David Stuart’s excellent ‘‘The

Language of Chocolate: References to Ca-

cao on Classic Maya Drinking Vessels,’’

puts the history of decipherment into his-

torical context while demonstrating what

it has done to help decode cultural behav-

iors from the archaeological evidence. Also

important in Stuart’s paper is the infor-

mation on regional differences in the ways

that writing are used in the Maya area, and

what it reveals about varieties of use for

Theobroma.

The standard of editorial work in this

volume is quite high, but not all papers are

equally well written. A few elements, such as

the ‘‘Note on Orthography’’ (27), might

have been better handled and located more

strategically. In a few cases, such as in Stuart’s

paper, the excellent illustrations need further

clarification for the nonlinguist. Stuart’s

brief listing of labels found on Maya ceram-

ics (p. 193: table 9.1) would benefit from the

addition of a column noting where these in-

dividual items are found. Perhaps a more

complete listing is forthcoming, but no ref-

erence is provided to any planned manu-

script. In short, this reviewer wants to know

more about this topic, as well as almost every

other area covered in this collection that is

not covered in excruciatingly fine detail else-

where. Almost unavoidable in a 21-paper

collection focusing on a single subject is the

repetition of some basic information

from paper to paper. Certainly, the average

reader will appreciate having each paper

placed in context. And readers will no doubt

savor each entry in this compendium, with or

without a cup of the eponymous beverage.

Readers also will note that a paperback edi-

tion of Allen M. Young’s 1994 The Chocolate

Tree: A Natural History of Chocolate has just

been issued (2007), also by The University

Press of Florida. This joins Basil D. G. Bart-

ley’s (2005) The Genetic Diversity of Cacao

and Its Utilization. A second edition of The

True History of Chocolate (S. D. and M. D.

Coe, 1996) has just emerged (2007). While

The True History offers a long and enjoyable

‘‘drink’’ of my favorite beverage, the wonder-

ful collection of papers in McNeil’s extraor-

dinary volume reminds me of the classic

14th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

McNeil’s Chocolate provides satisfyingly

all-inclusive texts written by the foremost

scholars in the field. She has generated a

comprehensive overview with chapters that

will stand as the last word far into the future.

This volume’s integrative elegance makes it

required reading for anyone interested in any

aspect of Mesoamerica, and a must for every

scholar’s library and every college and uni-

versity collection.

Monumental Ambivalence: The Politics

of Heritage. Lisa Breglia. Austin: Univer-

sity of Texas Press, 2006. 242 pp.

Peter Benson

Washington University in St. Louis

Monumental Ambivalence is an insightful,

well-crafted ethnography of the politics

of heritage and cultural patrimony in

contemporary Mexico. Its readerly prose

and engagement with power and history

makes it of interest to scholars working

on cultural property, indigenous identity,

and historical preservation in other parts

of the world. The book is appropriate

4 5 4 J O U R N A L O F L A T I N A M E R I C A N A N D C A R I B B E A N A N T H R O P O L O G Y

for classes of all levels in anthropology, ar-

chaeology, and Latin American studies.

But given its rich analysis of the manage-

ment, construction, and marketization

of national pasts, this work will also be in-

dispensable to advanced scholars working

on heritage preservation, nationalism, and

neoliberalism.

The setting is the Yucatan Peninsula,

and more specifically, the well-known ar-

chaeological site of Chichen Itza, the les-

ser-known site of Chunchucmil, and the

communities surrounding each. Such

places are usually approached as objects

of scientific inquiry, properties of nation-

states, or tourist stomping grounds. Yet

Breglia is interested in how archaeological

sites and scientific or historical knowledge

unearthed through excavation and/or

preservation are saturated with power re-

lations and linked to nationalist ideolo-

gies. Drawing on multisited ethnography

and a careful analysis of how heritage

is constructed and contested on various

levels, Breglia tracks interactions among

international organizations, national

agencies in Mexico, academic and profes-

sional researchers (e.g., archaeologists),

and populations residing within the land-

scape of ruins.

Breglia came to realize during field-

work that ‘‘workaday definitions of ‘heri-

tage’ or ‘patrimony’ simply cannot

account for the variety and contradiction

evident in how local residents, state offi-

cials, archaeologists, and others used (and

abused) heritage on the ground’’ (8). She

thus documents how ‘‘ambivalence’’ about

heritage’s meanings and values is evident

in competing claims about who the land

belongs to and what ought to be done with

ruins. Breglia examines the micropolitics

of site workers’ and community residents’

engagements with tourism, science, and

the state. These local people are often

ambivalent as to whether ruins represent

national patrimony or communities’ us-

ufruct-based land inheritance. This illus-

trates how tourism development meets

with mixed responses. Yet Breglia compli-

cates the notion that communities simply

reject univocal state ideologies of heritage.

She finds residents and workers fashioning

patrimonial claims based on ideas already

present within what is, in fact, a multiva-

lent sphere of heritage objects, practices,

and procedures. Various actors, from

bureaucrats to site custodians to Maya

farmers, register claims to suit particular

purposes. Such ambivalence does not ad-

here in ruins themselves ‘‘but rather in the

historical interplay between the territorial

assertions of the nation over its patrimo-

nial resources and the interventions of pri-

vate interests seeking to benefit from those

same resources’’ (7). Importantly, this

work challenges a romantic idea that

Mayas identify with the past in a facile

way. It portrays instead agentive commu-

nities interacting in sophisticated ways

with science and state projects.

This book adds to a growing literature

on the webs of power in which archaeo-

logical institutions and practices are

imbricated, as well as the ways popular

education and entertainment may be

informed by archeological science (e.g.,

Nadia Abu el-Haj’s Facts on the Ground:

Archeological Practice and Territorial

Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society and

especially, given the overlapping ethno-

graphic focus, Quetzil Castaneda’s In the

Museum of Maya Culture: Touring Chichen

Itza). These push anthropological knowl-

edge farther than Breglia’s effort on a num-

ber of fronts, including more rigorous

Book Reviews 455

theorizations of archaeology’s epistemo-

logical and practical complicities with na-

tionalism, racialization, and modernity’s

master tropes. But what sets Breglia’s book

apart and defines its contribution is its fo-

cus on political–economic aspects of her-

itage, namely the question of how

neoliberal privatization affects cultural

properties.

Breglia focuses on a 1999 privatization

proposal for the reallocation of responsi-

bility for the custodianship of Mexico’s

cultural properties via the fomentation of

nongovernmental participation in their

preservation and promotion. Corpora-

tions, NGOs, and indigenous communi-

ties have increasingly entered the business

of excavation, conservation, and develop-

ment. States have decided they can no

longer afford to maintain sites. Breglia ar-

gues that patrimony’s privatization in

Mexico is symptomatic of ambivalence at

the heart of modern nationalism. In fol-

lowing a global trend to privatize cultural

properties, Breglia writes, ‘‘Mexico dem-

onstrates ambivalence toward its own mo-

dernity’’ in that the state seems to want to

maintain an older, liberal form of exclusive

possession over its resources while em-

bracing a market-logic and courting pri-

vate corporate interests (10).

One of Breglia’s important claims is

that privatization in the realm of cultural

property is not new, at least in the Yu-

catan. She traces centuries of scientific,

including anthropological, interventions

and dynamic relationships between scien-

tific research, colonial and postcolonial

states, and systems of agricultural produc-

tion. She documents multiple kinds of

privatizationFthe recent push to estab-

lish private economic enterprises and

tourism development, but also changing

patterns of property ownership and land

use evident in the historical archive. ‘‘All

these forms that privatization takes,’’ she

argues, ‘‘illustrate the competing interests

in archeological zones and at the same time

speak to the competing meanings pro-

duced by different social actors regarding

archaeological heritage’’ (15). This work

thus historicizes neoliberalism and pro-

vides a useful counterpoint to scholarship

that portrays privatization as an entirely

novel and unidirectional phenomenon.

This ambitious book charts a course

for studying contemporary transforma-

tions in the political economy of heritage

preservation. Its theoretical interventions

might have focused more specifically on

the broadscale dimensions of neoliberal-

ism rather than on the micropolitics of

labor and land use in and around archae-

ological sites. Breglia’s emphasis on dis-

cursive and strategic dimensions of the

‘‘heritage assemblage’’ often comes at

the expense of a thorough consideration

of the economic value of ancient ruins to

the Mexican government and corpora-

tions, whereas her focus on the usufruct-

based claims of local communities might

have been complimented by a fuller ac-

count of cultural meanings of heritage and

place for local populations. Nevertheless,

these are minor shortcomings, and

Breglia at times does examine the serious

social and elegiac value of ruins in local

communities. Monumental Ambivalence

is thus an excellent ethnographic investi-

gation of how ‘‘culture’’ is unearthed

and excavated by archaeologists, packaged

and sold to tourists, and secured as a

kind of private property by the state and

communities.

4 5 6 J O U R N A L O F L A T I N A M E R I C A N A N D C A R I B B E A N A N T H R O P O L O G Y