Misplaced Objects examines the important and profoundly ironic exchanges between the Spanish colonial empire and Latin America, in particular, the exchange of ideas embodied in material objects that have come to live beyond the physical presence of actual governing structures. Ideas certainly have the capacity to outlast armies and bureaucracies—a central premise of Silvia Spitta's second singly authored book. The unique contribution of Misplaced Objects to Latin American postcolonial studies can be found in Spitta's use of material culture in constructing her main thesis, which is the very compelling argument that what Spain (and other European colonizers) plundered from indigenous cultures gradually wrought unanticipated and fundamental transformations to Europe's epistemology and worldview. Even more ironic, what Spain brought to the Americas in terms of icons and symbols—objects that re-present and project supposed Spanish superiority—were melded into hybrid or mestizaje “American” cultures and eventually taken up by independence movements that ended Spanish rule. The more recent phenomenon of latinidad, for example, bases its international cohesion on the Americanization of the “dark” Virgin of Guadalupe, initially imported by Cortes.Rich in illustrations and descriptions of the centuries of bidirectional transatlantic flow of artifacts, Misplaced Objects needs to be placed in the category of postcolonial projects that recovers silenced and suppressed histories of indigenous peoples, namely, projects of the Subaltern Studies Group. Spitta's use of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things as a theoretical springboard places this book in a poststructuralist framework: objects both constitute and are constituted in their relevant discursive matrixes, and the initial European endeavor to classify objects from the Americas revealed little about indigenous civilizations and much about the dominant, “master” narratives and paradigms of Europe that sought to dissect, categorize, and thereby apprehend and control their new imperial possessions, whether they were a genus of bird or a bipedal creature.Misplaced Objects takes The Order of Things further. “When things move, things change,” writes Spitta (3). Indeed, her book examines the “epistemological, cultural, and geographical shifts that had to take place of the myriad objects that migrated between Europe and the Americas to find their place within altogether alien contexts” (3). The author's interest is not simply in what Europe attempted to do to the objects that conquistadores, missionaries, colonial administrators, and collectors of all kinds took back to Europe; she is even more interested in what these objects “did” to European thought, that is, to the ideational structures that underpin cultural and social institutions. Once artifacts and, sometimes, human-as-specimens were misplaced in the European discursive context, they were both emptied of their original meaning, say, by collectors, such as P. T. Barnum, and reconstructed through essentially Eurocentric interpretative lenses. Mesoamerican objects were seen as examples of the primitive, the exotic, the irremediably barbaric, and the alien. Objects stood for the people that produced them; and in European minds, the indigenous peoples were inherently inferior, frozen in an ancient past, incapable of enlightenment and social progress. These bizarre objects, in other words, spoke of the other, stood as the material affirmation of the West as modernity. Vast amounts of artifacts were taken to Europe and were much sought after by royalty, by amateur and professional collectors (who sold tickets to the public that wanted to view strange things), and by pseudoscientists in a number of fledgling disciplines. Predictably, the Wunderkammern signaled European national might, cultural superiority, and aristocratic wealth and prestige.Yet the key point that Spitta makes in this book is that ideas flow in multiple directions and can exist in various temporal and spatial locations in ways that remark on each other, emerging as ghostly traces of the past in the present that change all points of a temporal continuum. In a sense, Misplaced Objects is a history book that undoes conventional views of historiography as a rational placement of events along a linear timeline. As such, Spitta's book argues that being is fluid, a process of syncretism, and is ground in an examination of the ways that “things” and “objects” change as we recast material culture in our likenesses, a move that is not always a conscious one. The first three chapters (comprising part 1, “The Object as Specimen”) analyze how the presence of these objects changed Europe in “seismic” terms. The collections, for instance, were significant in pushing European thinkers to come up with ever better systems of classification, albeit as attempts to bring “order” (to bring the other into the disciplinary regimes of the Eurocentric I/eye) to the presumed “disorder” that collectors in the classic colonial period perceived. These collections also formed the basis of modern museums, university libraries, circuses, zoos, and numerous academic disciplines, such as anatomy, medicine, botany, archaeology, paleontology, and other natural sciences as well as contributed to the development of Western art. Spitta's aim is to unearth “the crucial role the Americas played in the inception of modernity…. The global reach of Eurocentrism—indeed, the Hegelian notion of progress as the development of a world spirit culminating in Europe—becomes really comprehensible only when we consider how the cabinets of wonders positioned the European subject in a privileged vantage point with respect to the marvels of the world that lined their walls” (45).As Spitta points out, Misplaced Objects is a corrective to the Eurocentricism that marks The Order of Things. Indeed, Spain's “guns, germs, and steel” proved to be ineffective weapons against the resilience of indigenous beliefs and their emergence in, for instance, mestijaze identity, consciousness, and culture. Part 2 (“Migrating Icons and Sacred Geographies in the Americas”) contains an extended analysis of the discursive transformation of Spain's Virgin of Guadalupe into the center of a “centralizing cult” in the Americas that crosses national, class, and ethnic borders (97) and that informed the emergence of protonationalism in the seventeenth century. The irony of the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe begins soon after her arrival in New Spain. Spitta reminds readers that the Virgin became “the humble protectress of Indians during the early colonial period” (117). Then, in the eighteenth century, the Catholic icon was taken up as the patron saint of Mexico City and all of New Spain and then by Latin America in 1910. Pope John Paul II named her patron saint of the entire hemisphere in 1999. Spitta sees the Virgin of Guadalupe as exemplary of the process of hybridization, in which misplaced cultural symbols take on and combine with different values and meaning in new socio-ideological environments. The story of the Virgin is that of the formation of a mestizaje identity: “Her story is that of multiple appropriations, reappropriations, and migrations” (100); she is called different names in different parts of the Americas and has a “polysemous plasticity” (118) that enables her most recent transformation into the transgressive patron saint of migrants from Central and South America into the United States (123). The Virgin of Guadalupe has evolved into the “privileged icon of latinadad in the United States” (137).Appropriately, the last two chapters of Spitta's study (part 3, “Found Objects and Re-collecting Subjects”) examine the misplaced objects of the Spanish Empire as they have evolved and have been reconstituted in the United States and Cuba. The first chapter in this part takes up Sheila and Sandra Ortiz Taylor's exploration of their “Californios” identity in Imaginary Parents: A Family Autography, a construction that traces their roots to a pre-1848, Hispanic tradition and that refuses to be easily classified and confined by the stereotypes of Mexican America (165). With this and the next chapter on the work of Cuban artist Sandra Ramos, Spitta's analysis situates readers in a present unmistakably infused with the traces of misplaced European objects from the past, but these ghosts of a colonial past now know their proper place; they have become muted, reduced to the correct scale. Demystified.