Overview

Conflict, Heritage and World-Making in the Chaco documents and interprets the physical remains and afterlives of South America’s first “modern” armed conflict, the Chaco War (1932–35), and its effects on modern-day Paraguay. Esther Breithoff not only focuses on conventional archaeological remains but also takes an ontological approach to heterogeneous assemblages of objects, texts, practices, and landscapes shaped by industrial war. What she shows is that these assemblages are not simply dead memorials to a bloody war, but rather have been, and continue to be, active in making, unmaking, and remaking worlds—both for those who saw the war itself and for those who continue to live with its effects in the present.   Framing the study as an exploration of modern, industrialized warfare as a sort of “hyper object”, Breithoff shows how the material culture and heritage of modern conflict fuse together objects, people, and landscapes, connecting them physically and conceptually across vast, almost unimaginable distances and time periods. This book makes a major contribution to key debates in anthropology, archaeology, critical heritage, and material culture studies on the significance of conflict in understanding the Anthropocene, and the roles played by its persistent heritages in assembling worlds.  

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9781787358072

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Reviews

'Brings a previously understudied war to the forefront of scholarship in the archaeology and heritage of 20th century conflict, proving itself as a valuable source for researchers.' International Journal of Heritage Studies 'Well written, with a fine lens trained on the complexity of the war's materiality, this book constitutes an outstanding contribution not only to the study of the Chaco War and its aftermath, but also to the conflict and tension between different forms of world-making and its Anthropocenic connections.' Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI)

Author Information

Esther Breithoff is Lecturer in Contemporary Archaeology and Heritage in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London, and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow. She joined the department in 2019 after holding postdoctoral positions at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and the UCL Institute of Archaeology. Her research spans the fields of Contemporary Archaeology and Critical Heritage Studies and has ranged across a number of different topics, including war, natural and cultural heritage, nuclear and petroleum industries, dictatorships and biobanking, but traces a common set of interests in the relationships between conflicts, resources, recycling and rights across the human/non-human divide in the Anthropocene.

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