Anthropological attention to landscapes has revealed them to be more than where people subsist: landscapes are inherently social entities. People create landscapes in their interactions with the environment and each other. People conceptualize, or imbue the landscape with meaning such that given places serve to impart cultural knowledge, identity, and social order. The link between people and their landscape thus underscores the importance of a landscape focus in the attempt to understand people. Furthermore, as a product of cultural behavior, the landscape constitutes a form of material culture that may be marked in ways that are consistent with how it is conceptualized. The material dimension of people's relationship with their landscape renders it a fruitful focus of archaeological inquiry. The main goal of this study is to identify how the Wixárika of Jalisco, Mexico, conceptualize the landscape, and to assess its relevance to understanding the ancient past. As adherents of a Mesoamerican tradition, the Wixárika offer a distinctive perspective on the landscape, and one with potential to elucidate the ancient past.

Given that a major share of a society's culturally significant cognitive features is expressed most productively by means of language, in this study I rely on aspects of language to ascertain Wixárika landscape conceptualization and materialization. Through the linguistic analysis of placenames and place-talk, I determine the meanings with which the Wixárika landscape is imbued. Through the analysis of the utterance of placenames, I provide examples of how the landscape is instilled with meaning. Utilizing native terminology, I characterize the content of the Wixárika landscape, and describe the process, in terms of movements, whereby the landscape is actualized.

Results indicate that the Wixárika conceptualize their landscape in diverse ways, including as a dwelling, a repository of memories, and a source of identity. The process and manifestation of Wixárika landscape conceptualization yield insights pertinent to understanding ancient landscapes, especially with regard to content and scope. This study is significant in that it represents the landscape from an indigenous perspective. It also sheds light on the construction of a living landscape, and thus is a useful framework for contemplating the past.

Museums are gaining increasing attention throughout the world for their ability to foster social inclusion, intercultural dialogue, and collaboration in practices of heritage management, exhibition, and interpretation. This dissertation aims to contribute a critical perspective on museums as agents of social change through an exploration of new museological practices in contemporary China. Through an ethnography of the ecomuseum, I unravel the assumptions and expectations of implementing a Western concept based on notions of community participation, empowerment, and the democratization of heritage in the context of a transforming China.

In my ethnographic account of the multifaceted politics faced by ecomuseums, I question how power and authority are mediated through these civic institutions and how central aspects of museum and heritage practices are being redressed in Chinese society. This study exposes how ecomuseums in China are a result of global processes and positioned as part of a heritage protection movement and museum development boom to promote cultural nationalism, a "civilized" China, and state edicts of rural development in impoverished ethnic minority regions. Detailing the implications of government-led ecomuseum development in ethnic villages in southwest China, and the specific case of Huaili ecomuseum, in Guangxi, I interrogate the institutionalization of heritage and cultural landscapes through processes of exhibition, museumification, and the revaluing of culture. I explore the ecomuseum as a social space of cross-cultural encounter and friction through which local actors grapple with conditions of cultural governance and the entanglements cultural difference and a national heritage discourse. In my critical analysis of collected ethnographic narratives over 15 months of fieldwork from state-directed interest groups, Chinese technocrats, and villager informants involved in the institutionalization of heritage, I present the complex arrangements and interactions that take place through the ecomuseum context and how subject positionalities shift and claims to heritage, identity, and voice are negotiated, regulated, and contested. This study contributes to the anthropology of China and museum and heritage studies, and aims to push new directions in the study of community heritage and museums, in offering a critical perspective of the political nature of ecomuseums in non-Western contexts, such as China.