This dissertation explores issues of identification, relatedness, and belonging on a global scale, through an ethnographic study of Portugal's urban Marranos (descendants of fifteenth-century forced converts to Catholicism) and foreign Jews who travel from abroad to meet them. Although not Jewish according to Jewish law, given centuries of intermarriage, Marranos are nonetheless widely considered to be part of "the Jewish family," "lost brethren" who should be welcomed back to the Jewish people. Many Jews view them within the metanarrative of Jewish destruction and survival, the "eternal spark" that remains despite the Inquisition's attempted elimination of Judaism from the Portuguese landscape. However, for numerous local reasons the present-day Marranos are not welcomed by Portugal's tiny normative Jewish community. As a result, the urban Marranos, who feel strongly that they are Jews by descent, turn to foreign Jewish travelers as sources of educational, spiritual, and material assistance in their bid to join the Jewish world and attain recognition as Jews in the present.

Based on two years of fieldwork in Marrano organizations in Lisbon and Porto and traveling alongside Jewish tourists and outreach workers, the dissertation undertakes a processual analysis of the constitution of ancestral Jewish identity and of the role of transnational, cross-cultural affective ties in affording a sense of global Jewish belonging. The primary questions driving this work are, first, how and why do far-flung people come to feel that they are related to one another, and what terms do they use to characterize and think through that feeling of relatedness? Second, to what extent are their perceptions of essential connection disrupted or transformed by face-to-face contact? By interrogating the cultural logics of kinship writ large--the language and conceptual frameworks people use to articulate and make sense of their feelings of relatedness to one another--and then examining how those logics play out "on the ground," this study provides a fine-grained ethnographic analysis of the mechanisms through which global and ancestral imaginings become concretized in social interaction. Ultimately, I argue, physical proximity remains the productive sphere for identification and belonging, even as global interconnection provides new opportunities for encounter.

The overall theme of this dissertation is to understand, through the heritage cityscape of Trinidad, aspects of the processes of the reconfiguration of political economy in today's Cuba. In late socialist Cuba, tourism is a key sector sustaining the revolution, and heritage cityscape constitutes one of the main tourist attractions. In this regard, the city of Trinidad provides a vantage point to analyze heritage practices and the tourism economy. I argue that the heritage cityscape of Trinidad manifests a tension between neoliberal and socialist rationalities, as the preservation office is converted into a cultural agency that depends on its own entrepreneurship.

In 1988, the historic urban center of Trinidad and the material remains of the sugar industry in the surrounding Sugar Mill Valley were declared a World Cultural Heritage site. The local agency in charge of its preservation is the Office of Conservation, the main site of this project. These local agencies and preservation professionals around the world produce and are produced by the global regime of heritage exemplified by UNESCO's World Heritage program. Although economic management is not the explicit end of heritage practices, to the extent that these agents are held morally accountable for the material conditions of the heritage sites, and that their insufficient performance is construed as unsuccessful entrepreneurship, the global regime of heritage operates by a neoliberal rationality. Maintaining a good cityscape signals good governance, and consequently success as a subject of the regime.

In Trinidad, where tourism is the single most important industry, the city's future depends exclusively on heritage commodification; maintaining and restoring the past urban form. I call this looking forward through looking backward "heritage modern." While the actual heritage cityscape is not materialized in the way that the Office imagines it to be the "good cityscape," signaling the precarious state of the Office as the subject in the global regime, the Office maintains a firm grip on the discursive landscape over Trinidad's heritage. Thus within the tension between neoliberal and socialist rationalities, the Office claims to be the appropriate guardian of the local specificity of heritage within the global regime.