Pablo Alonso Gonzalez - Böcker

This book upturns the conventional understanding of heritage, challenging widespread notions about how we relate to and why we preserve the past.Heritage research is often based on the assumption that heritage is something ‘given’ to us, that it is good and valuable in its own right. However, by looking at the historical and cultural roots of heritage and its development through the Enlightenment, modernity and capitalism, Pablo Alonso Gonzalez shows that it is in fact a system pervaded by fetishistic social relationships, embedded in capitalism, and not as benign as it appears.Focusing on a case study in the region of Maragatería, Spain, Alonso Gonzalez explores the ethnic and racial discrimination towards the local population in the context of Spanish nationalism, and how this formed the region’s heritage today. By challenging mainstream scholarship in the field, The Heritage Machine rethinks the relations between heritage, ideology and capitalism.

Cuban Cultural Heritage explores the role that cultural heritage and museums played in the construction of a national identity in postcolonial Cuba. Starting with independence from Spain in 1898 and moving through Cuban-American rapprochement in 2014, Pablo Alonso González illustrates how political and ideological shifts have influenced ideas about heritage and how, in turn, heritage has been used by different social actors to reiterate their status, spread new ideologies, and consolidate political regimes.Unveiling the connections between heritage, power, and ideology, Alonso González delves into the intricacies of Cuban history, covering key issues such as Cuba’s cultural and political relationships with Spain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and so-called Third World countries; the complexities of Cuba’s status as a postcolonial state; and the potential future paths of the Revolution in the years to come. This volume offers a detailed look at the function and place of cultural heritage under socialist states.

The role of cultural heritage and museums in constructing national identity in postcolonial CubaDuring Fidel Castro's rule, Cuban revolutionaries coopted and reinterpreted the previous bourgeois national narrative of Cuba, aligning it with revolutionary ideology through the use of heritage and public symbols. By changing uses of the past in the present, they were able to shift ideologies, power relations, epistemological conceptions, and economic contexts into the Cuba we know today.Cuban Cultural Heritage explores the role that cultural heritage and museums played in the construction of a national identity in postcolonial Cuba. Starting with independence from Spain in 1898 and moving through Cuban-American rapprochement in 2014, Pablo Alonso González illustrates how political and ideological shifts have influenced ideas about heritage and how, in turn, heritage has been used by different social actors to reiterate their status, spread new ideologies, and consolidate political regimes.Unveiling the connections between heritage, power, and ideology, Alonso González delves into the intricacies of Cuban history, covering key issues such as Cuba's cultural and political relationships with Spain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and so-called Third World countries; the complexities of Cuba's status as a postcolonial state; and the potential future paths of the Revolution in the years to come. This volume offers a detailed look at the function and place of cultural heritage under socialist states.A volume in the series Cultural Heritage Studies, edited by Paul A. ShackelPublication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This book explains how “natural wine” was made and not discovered by Spanish lawmakers, chemists, merchants, and theologians, showing how Spain consolidated a legal construct that normalised specific technical interventions while preserving the label natural.The book argues that wine labelled as “natural” was not the preservation of a traditional product, but the product of a legal fiction that allowed wines with additives to be normalized and protected under law. In doing so, the book explores the emergence and changing meanings of natural wine. Rather than providing a fixed definition, it analyzes how the boundaries of “natural” shifted from period to period. It shows how natural wine ended up being used in the historical-legal sense that crystallised in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spain and culminated in 1932. Through detailed archival research, the book explores debates around adulteration, chemistry, purity, and authenticity, using historical food studies and legal analysis as its framework. It introduces the Spanish case as a significant but overlooked moment in the broader European shift toward legally codified standards of food authenticity and quality. Drawing primarily on the work of Alessandro Stanziani and influenced by Bruno Latour’s perspective on scientific authority and socio-technical networks, the book bridges the fields of legal history, enology, and cultural politics. This historical analysis sheds light on contemporary controversies surrounding wine regulation, appellation systems, and the global natural wine movement.The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of food and wine studies, legal and economic history, anthropology, science and technology studies and European agrarian history.