Anthropological Perspectives on Rural Mexico

Cynthia Hewitt de Alcántara

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351722704
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

In this title, first published in 1984, the author examines the social and political forces surrounding the practice of anthropology at different periods in the history of Mexico since 1917. She does this by analysing and tracing the development of competing anthropological perspectives, from ethnographic particularism and functionalism through indigenismo, cultural ecology, Marxism and the dependency paradigm, to the historical structuralism of the 1970s.

This book provides the basis for a systematic analysis of peasant studies in Mexico, and discusses in stimulating terms the theoretical and empirical difficulties of the profession of anthropology itself.

1Particularism, Marxism and functionalism in Mexican anthropology, 1920-50

At the turn of the twentieth century, as indeed in a number of preceding periods, the necessity to understand the nature of agrarian life loomed large on the agenda of Mexican intellectuals. The nation as a whole was caught up in a process of extremely rapid, and brutal, modernization promoted under the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz; and both the liberals who saw in rural ‘backwardness’ a basic impediment to progress, and the socialists who impugned contemporary depredations of capitalist agricultural entrepreneurs for causing unbearable suffering among rural people were determined to get to the heart of the ‘rural question.’ How should the countryside be organized in order to contribute to national development? What was there in the current arrangement which impeded a more rational and equitable use of the physical and human resources of rural areas?

These questions implied, for all observers of the period, an important preoccupation with culture, mistakenly conceived at the time in terms of race. Perhaps the single most visible characteristic of much of the rural population of Mexico was its ethnic differentiation, promoted and maintained over centuries of colonial domination through the artifice of a racially justified caste system in which ‘Indians’ were separated from mestizos or creoles. The legacy of prejudice left by such a system had not been eradicated, even among the most enlightened, at the turn of the century; and it was therefore virtually inevitable that intellectuals should be consistently concerned with ‘Indianness’ as they discussed what began to be seen as the ‘great national problems’ of Mexico.¹

Such a preoccupation was magnified immeasurably by the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, for agrarian unrest lay at the heart of the conflict. Rural people rebelled against the impositions of the Porfirian order and for a brief period experimented with their own locally devised forms of organization. Their opportunity to determine the parameters of local livelihood was, however, short-lived; by 1917, they were once again subject to the authority of a national state, now in the hands of a fragile coalition of revolutionaries of varied political persuasions. Intellectuals who had long debated the merits of new forms of rural community were placed in a position to advocate policy, and a period of noteworthy social experimentation began. There was, to be sure, little agreement at the time concerning the details of necessary land redistribution or rural development programs. But there was virtually unanimous agreement that the ‘Indian’ population of the countryside had to be integrated as quickly as possible into the wider national society, both as an instrument for promoting social justice and a bulwark for future national unity.

The newly created discipline of anthropology quite obviously had something of relevance to say concerning that issue. During the gradual formation of a separate area of anthropological concern within the social sciences of the late nineteenth century, anthropologists had begun to counterpose the concept of culture to that of race, and to challenge the prevailing supposition that some peoples or races were inherently inferior to others. Most particularly under the influence of Franz Boas, even the idea that there was likely to be a process of unilinear evolution from simpler to more advanced forms of cultural elaboration was questioned, and in its place was inserted a strong adherence to relativism. Each culture was to be considered on its own terms, its principal characteristics recorded and analysed. But there was to be no normative judgment of its value when compared with others, for Boas doubted that the social sciences, at their contemporary state of development, were capacitated to reach valid conclusions concerning the probable course of evolution of human society.

This was the point of view which underlay the kind of anthropology introduced in Mexico with the founding, under Boas's direction, of the Escuela de Arqueología y Etnografía Americana in 1909. Its denial of the validity of racial stereotyping was to provide an important counterweight to prevailing prejudices among intellectuals, and its dedication to the careful searching out and recording of even the most isolated human cultures was to contribute fundamentally to the post-revolutionary scientific reconnaissance of Mexican rural areas. But the decided relativism of Boasian ethnographic theory could make very little headway against the tide of liberal faith in progress which sustained the intellectual inheritors of the revolution. The latter had been fought, they were convinced, to sweep away the ‘backwardness’ of the past; and a significant part of that backwardness was to be found in ‘Indian’ communities. Therefore the ethnographic knowledge produced by early anthropologists, even when not specifically intended to serve the ends of national integration, was nevertheless to be inextricably interwoven with the practice of ‘applied’ development work. A science as close to the concerns of daily livelihood as anthropology could not be maintained outside the mainstream of debate on the future of indigenous peoples in postrevolutionary society, all pretensions of analytical detachment notwithstanding.

Manuel Gamio and the liberal reinterpretation of ethnographic particularism: incorporation and indigenismo

There can be no better example of the peculiar mutation suffered by Boasian particularism under the impact of a liberal faith in progress, associated with revolution, than the work of Manuel Gamio, generally taken to represent the inauguration of the modern practice of anthropology in Mexico. During the last days of the Porfiriato, Gamio was a student of Franz Boas at Columbia University, and he was therefore thoroughly trained to study the culture of ‘primitive’ peoples in a static and nonhistorical framework. Human settlements isolated from any contact with surrounding modern society were the privileged setting of the Boasian paradigm, and the entire range of nonbiologically determined activity the legitimate object of observation. Ethnographers were to describe the complexities of livelihood as they saw them, neither questioning their past development nor speculating concerning their likely future course.

Such a theoretical prescription left the understanding of possible patterns of interaction between ‘primitives’ and ‘nonprimitives,’ as well as the probable nature of culture change, entirely undiscussed; and in a rural setting devastated by seven years of civil strife, this could only be a wholly untenable omission. Therefore when Gamio was placed at the head of the Direction of Anthropology of the Ministry of Agriculture of the first revolutionary government in 1917, he appended to his ethnographic training the prevailing liberal interpretation of human development, forming in the process a theoretical synthesis more akin to the unilinear evolutionism of pre-Boasian schools than to the tradition of his own generation at Columbia.

Put briefly, Gamio's theory was based on the assumption that the glory of Mexico's indigenous cultures lay entirely in the precolonial past. Contemporary differences in culture among the country's ‘small nations,’ as he liked to call them, were on the other hand simply stumbling blocks in the way of national unity. They represented a degeneration of preconquest customs, which if allowed to continue without fusion into the ‘progressive’ mainstream of mestizo culture would doom a large part of the inhabitants of Mexico to ever-declining levels of living and eventual extinction. The purpose of ethnographic field work was therefore less to preserve cultural idiosyncrasies than to understand them in order to hasten their disappearance.²

Gamio set as the first task of his Direction of Anthropology the systematic study of indigenous groups thought to be representative of seventeen regions into which the country was to be divided. In this respect, he was the precursor of work on delimiting ‘culture areas’ in Mexico which was to continue for a number of decades. So little was known at the time about the location and characteristics of various indigenous cultures that Gamio's department could base its regions only on state boundaries: each region contained one or more states, within which certain broad ethnic similarities were supposed to exist. In fact, however, during the eight years in which the Direction of Anthropology functioned, it proved possible to carry out a large study of only one area within one region: that of Teotihuacan, within the ‘Central Mesa’ states surrounding the Federal District.

Teotihuacan was chosen for reasons having to do at least as much with its preconquest past as with its miserable contemporary plight. It had once been the center of a flourishing Indian state, the physical remains of which included monumental buildings grouped around a complex of pyramids. But in 1917, its population was made up of both Indian and Spanish-speaking laborers, surviving at infrasubsistence levels on the proceeds of occasional work for seven large landowners, who dedicated 90 per cent of the agricultural land of the region to commercial crops entirely consumed in the Federal District. It was Gamio's plan to work simultaneously in archeology and ethnology, reconstructing the famous ruins of Teotihuacan while investigating the culture of its modern inhabitants, and at the same time beginning programs designed to better living conditions among families of workers employed on the archeological site. This integration of archeology, anthropology and community development was to appear again and again in the design of projects carried out by other institutions in the Mexican countryside in the decades following the 1920s. It deployed the academic and practical resources of anthropology in the widest possible way, and constituted a justly famous pioneering venture.³

Unfortunately, however, the quality of both the ethnographic study and the practical contributions made to improving the level of living of landless families was undermined by the way in which Gamio and his team drew the intellectual boundaries of their enquiry. Trained to study ‘folklore,’ and caught up in the heady ethnocentrism of a revolution which promised to sweep away all injustice through creating a ‘modern’ Mexico, they tended to fault ‘folkloric’ world views, and exclusion from the national socio-economic system, for the ‘backwardness’ of indigenous people. It was not that they did not see the injury caused by the hacienda system which dominated the valley; in fact, they repeatedly petitioned for agrarian reform as part of community development efforts. But the paradigm within which they worked did not allow them to relate the development of large landholdings, the course of socioeconomic change at the national level, and the culture of rural people within a single conceptual framework.

The picture of rural life painted in La Poblacion del Valle de Teotihuacan, published in 1922, is uniformly negative. The people wear ‘anti-esthetic and unhygienic’ clothing, live in ‘unhealthy’ huts, produce ‘degenerated’ pottery; they are malnourished and sickly. Their lack of access to basic livelihood resources had most obviously reduced them to the most exiguous levels of existence. For Gamio, however, the crux of their problem lay in the realm of culture, in their ‘archaic life which flows on in the midst of artifices and superstitions,’ and which must be altered through ‘incorporation into contemporary civilization’ in the future.⁴ The ‘folk culture’ which Redfield was at that moment preparing to immortalize as a viable adaptation of small, relatively self-sufficient groups to their environment (in the non-hacienda setting of Tepoztlan) appeared in a partially degenerated, ‘folkloric’ form to be completely unviable in Teotihuacan.

The community development program which grew out of Gamio's work in Teotihuacan was, not surprisingly, heavily oriented toward changing the local culture through education. Primary schools were introduced for the purpose of teaching Mexican and world history, as well as to reinforce the use of the Spanish language; local curers were confronted with competition from modern medical personnel; and the consumption of traditional alcoholic beverages was tenaciously combated. At the same time, an effort was made to widen the productive base of a virtually landless population through the introduction of beekeeping and the importation of the Talavera pottery technique from Puebla. Always guided by the premise that better living conditions depended upon reorganization directed by enlightened outsiders, this program could have little real impact upon livelihood until local people themselves were able to join together to break the monopoly of the hacienda system over vital productive resources. It did serve, however, as the opening experiment in an official program of induced culture change which was to figure prominently in public policy toward indigenous areas for a number of decades to come.

‘Indigenismo,’ as this policy came to be called, rested on the conviction that the indigenous groups of Mexico were culturally distinct from the rest of the nation and therefore required special study before particular ways of attacking their livelihood problems could be worked out and put into effect. Whether the end result of ‘indigenismo’ was to be the complete incorporation of these separate cultures into the dominant mestizo culture, or the preservation of some elements of indigenous culture felt to be particularly valuable, was to become an element of debate (in which, clearly, Gamio was at this stage of his intellectual development to be found near the pole of complete incorporation). All indigenistas stood together, however, in their insistence that general programs of rural modernization could not be applied to the countryside indiscriminately, without adaptation to the reality of a number of specific indigenous cultures.

Such a point of view was challenged by groups of intellectuals equally as interested as the indigenistas in bettering the livelihood conditions of rural Mexicans, but inclined to feel that treating indigenous groups separately would only increase their low status in national society. For men like José Vasconcelos, who became Minister of Education in 1921, it seemed indispensable to provide all rural families in the nation with certain basic elements of national culture (or perhaps it would be better to say of Western culture); whether these families spoke indigenous languages or practiced peculiar religions made no difference in the program. They were Mexicans, and furthermore they were citizens of the world.⁵ Under a banner of this kind Gamio's Department of Anthropology was dismantled in 1925, as was the Department of Indian Culture within the Ministry of Education. For a decade thereafter, a wide-ranging program of rural education and modernization was carried out in mestizo and Indian regions alike, without benefit of the organized participation of anthropologists in policy-making.

Moisés Sáenz: a precursor of anti-incorporationist indigenismo

One of the principal architects of the remarkable effort made to utilize education as a tool of community development during the 1920s and early 1930s was Moisés Sáenz, like Gamio a graduate of Columbia University. Sáenz was not an anthropologist by training; he received a doctorate in philosophy for his work in the field of education. Yet his contact with Boas and, to a much more significant degree, with John Dewey (who held a chair at Columbia during the early part of the century) predisposed him to look at the culture of rural Mexicans with a critical eye. After writing his thesis on the application of the principles of Dewey's ‘action school’ to the livelihood problems of the Mexican countryside, he returned to his country to assume the post of Director of Education in the state of Guanajuato, roughly at the same time Gamio was promoting the establishment of his Direction of Anthropology in the Ministry of Agriculture.⁶

By 1925, Sáenz had become Vice Minister of Public Education, charged precisely with the integrated program of rural community development which had made Gamio's separate anthropological effort temporarily irrelevant. Rural schools in all communities were to become laboratories for experimentation in socioeconomic change, and rural teachers were to serve the interests of the whole population, rather than limiting their contribution to the traditional field of formal instruction. They were assisted in this task by mobile Cultural Missions, containing teams of specialists in fields deemed useful for community development: doctors, nurses, veterinarians, home economists, carpenters, musicians and others. The purpose of the program, carried out with a dedication which encouraged numerous observers to qualify it as the best product of the Mexican revolution,⁷ was to raise levels of living in the countryside and to incorporate rural people into the mainstream of national culture and society. It was assumed, as Gamio had assumed, that physical and sociocultural isolation were the reasons for rural ‘backwardness,’ and that educatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Particularism, Marxism and functionalism in Mexican anthropology, 1920-50
• 2 A dialogue on ethnic conflict: indigenismo and functionalism, 1950-70
• 3 Cultural ecology, Marxism and the development of a theory of the peasantry, 1950-70
• 4 Anthropology and the dependency paradigm in Mexico, 1960-75
• 5 Historical structuralism and the fate of the peasantry, 1970-80
• 6 Conclusions
• Notes
• Index