Alanna Cant | What is a Church for?

Alanna Cant is a lecturer in social anthropology in the Department of Archaeology, University of Reading. Her research focuses on the politics and aesthetics of material practices in the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, focusing on art markets, indigeneity, history, heritage, and religion. She completed her PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2012. Before joining Reading, she held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship at the University of Kent and a Research Fellowship at the University of Oslo. Her current research considers the transformations of material, political and religious relations as Roman Catholic spaces are brought into heritage regimes. Her monograph The Value of Aesthetics: Oaxacan woodcarvers in global economies of culture was published by the University of Texas Press in 2019. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Further Reading:

Achim, Miruna; Susan Deans-Smith and Sandra Rozental (eds.) 2021. Museum Matters: Making and Unmaking of Mexico’s National Collections. Tucson: University of Arizona Press

Baird, Melissa 2017. Critical Theory and the Anthropology of Heritage Landscapes. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Brumann, Christoph. 2014. Heritage Agnosticism: a third path for the study of cultural heritage. Social Anthropology 22(2): 173–188. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12068

Gruzinski, Serge 2001. Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner (1492–2019). Durham: Duke University Press.

Meskell, Lynn 2018. A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace.

Rozental, Sandra 2016. ‘In the Wake of Patrimonio: Material Ecologies in San Miguel Coatlinchan’. Anthropological Quarterly 89(1): 181-219.