Revisiting De eso que llaman antropología

mexicana five decades later

Luis Vázquez León

Dialectical Anthropology
An Independent International Journal in
the Critical Tradition Committed to the
Transformation of our Society and the
Humane Union of Theory and Practice

ISSN 0304-4092
Volume 41
Number 4

Dialect Anthropol (2017) 41:331-335

DOI 10.1007/s10624-017-9456-7

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 Author's personal copy
Dialect Anthropol (2017) 41:331–335
DOI 10.1007/s10624-017-9456-7

Revisiting De eso que llaman antropología mexicana five

decades later

Luis Vázquez León 1

Published online: 2 August 2017

# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017

This controversial book written by Arturo Warman, Guillermo Bonfil, Margarita

Nolasco, Mercedes Olivera and Enrique Valencia—in that precise order of exposi-
tion—was a product of the authors’ epoch and circumstances. Saying so now sounds
very much like a truism, because in the almost five decades that have gone by since
then, there has not been any comparable rebellion. Therefore, a variety of internal and
external elements must be provided about the phenomenon in order to better under-
stand both its scope and its effective limitations. To start with, let’s talk about the
context. The book was published less than 2 years after the 1968 student massacre,
which was repeated in 1971. Our teachers were not uninvolved in what was happen-
ing. They were a group of professional ethnologists, made up of young professors
who had participated in protest marches and shared the anger of a generation
impatient for change, something more than understandable in a country with an
ossified political, social, economic, and cultural order. It is also understood that these
days there is a broad consensus to the effect that that social movement contributed to
advance the country’s democratization. Did this book have an equivalent effect on
Mexican anthropology or was it only an event that prefigured the later boom in
academic social anthropology?
With regard to that context, it is well known that the shakeup provoked in 1970 did
not spread to all contemporary anthropologists, since not all of them shared the
thinking of the group mentioned above. At that time, unitary anthropology still
prevailed (called the Bcommon core^ at the ENAH and INAH, the National School
of Anthropology and the National Institute of Anthropology and History, respectively)
and Banthropological sciences^ at the UNAM (the National Autonomous University of
Mexico) and not a few of the rest of such Bspecializations^ disapproved of their
ethnologist colleagues inclined toward change. In fact, they excluded them from their
unitary tradition, and even today, they disdain them because Bthey are not

* Luis Vázquez León

vazquezleonluis@gmail.com

1
CIESAS de Occidente, Av. Esoaña 1359, Col. Moderna, CP 44190 Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico
 Author's personal copy
332 L. V. Vázquez León

anthropologists.^ In an ensemble of events that occurred between 1970 and 1976, they
were celebrated by a group of Mesoamerican ethnologists as the Bpolitical bankruptcy
of social anthropology in Mexico.^ Note that they were not discussed as part of
BMexican anthropology^ (Medina and García Mora 1983; García Mora 1988).1 From
that point in time, it became inappropriate to speak of a single BMexican
anthropology,^ and it is not surprising that it was questioned in that book in order to
discredit it. The most unitary factor in it, without entering into Mexicanist gradations,
resided in the criticism by Mercedes Olivera of archeology at the INAH and by Enrique
Valencia of training at the ENAH.
Since then, there has been no common way of thinking in and about Bwhat they
call Mexican anthropology,^ because it is characteristic of the BMexican^ profession
to create divisions over the smallest differences, beginning with the respective fields
of socialization. It should also be pointed out that the center of the internal conflict in
BMexican anthropology^ cohered around Warman, when he was dismissed from his
post as professor at the National School of Anthropology and History, an abuse of
power that the rest rejected when in protest they resigned in mass. No one backed
them up, although there was no lack of sympathy among young students. It is no
coincidence that, soon after this, his essay BTodos santos y todos difuntos: Crítica
histórica de la antropología mexicana^ (All saints and all dead: Historical criticism of
Mexican anthropology) initiated the war. In that essay, Warman draws on a fierce,
ironic style that would not be repeated in any of his future writings, at the same time
as, rather than make reference to BMexican anthropology,^ he expresses judgments of
greater scope, such as saying that, given its foundations, anthropology is a step away
from negating itself. Or that BAnthropology defined in this way (by both its simul-
taneously universalist and particularist contradiction) has something of the cannibal
about it^ (Warman 1970, 9–10).2
Other criticisms, such as that of Mercedes Olivera, must have gotten Alfonso Caso
worked up from the first lines. For instance, when Warman talks about Gamio, he
brands him a generic BMexican anthropologist,^ a manipulator of people Bfor the
theoretical benefit of his own victims^ (31). But at the same time as Warman
criticizes BMexican bureaucratic anthropology,^ he introduces a reflection about the
changing representation of the Indian under Preterism, Exoticism, and Indigenism, on
a course quite removed from the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave used by
Bonfil, which retains its nationalist fidelity. Warman speaks bluntly about the creation
and recreation of the Indians according to the convenience of artists, archeologists,
and Bethnologists or folklorists^ (35). But while he confesses that he is a manichean
by conviction (seeing things in black-and-white), it would be the INAH’s founding
director who would refer to Warman and other critics as Bworms,^ although he
amended this immediately with Bexcuse me, I won’t call you worms again... I’m
going to call you ‘critical anthropologists’^ (Sodi 1983, 393). It is appropriate to add
that both occasions when there have been outbreaks of a critical anthropology in

1
The books of Medina and García (1983) and García Mora (1988) do not include social anthropology. In the
former volume, only social anthropological subjects of study are mentioned (regional studies, economic
anthropology, indigenism, etc.) that could no longer be ignored by 1987–1988.
2
At that time, Warman was already the director of the School of Social Anthropology of the UIA [Ibero-
American University] founded by Felipe Pardinas and Luis González.
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Revisiting De eso que llaman antropología mexicana five decades later 333

Mexico occurred when Alfonso Caso was a high-ranking official, first as the director
of the INAH (1939–1944) and then the INI (1949–1970).3 It is also strange that an
institution that employed social anthropologists—ethnologists willing to work as
technicians of indigenist policy—was directed by an archeologist from outside the
discipline, even if this was still reduced to sub-professional Btechnique.^ As Warman
wrote shrewdly: BThe lack of criticism is partially explained by the fact that when it
arises, repression makes an appearance.^ His words have not lost their validity.
The fact that punishment was the tacit rule rather than the exception for dealing with
dissidence does not prevent us from appreciating that there were not (and there are not, even
today) any mechanisms for guaranteeing freedom of speech. The problem, as Warman warned,
was Mexican anthropology itself, dependent on Bindigenist nationalism^ with functional
institutions and membership. This self-critical issue that borders on falsification takes on a
very different aspect with the following essay (in the book) by Guillermo Bonfil: BDel
indigenismo de la revolución a la antropología crítica^ (From the indigenism of the revolution
to critical anthropology). It’s a much more conventional piece in comparison, but it has the
merit of anticipating much of the thinking that would reappear in Bonfil’s later texts, even in
his most influential essay, México profundo: Una civilización negada (1987) (translated by
Philip A. Dennis as Mexico profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization). However, what stands out
here is his insistence in developing critical anthropology as an exclusive field of social
anthropology, a proposal with which he closes his essay, because it is his central argument.
Such a critical anthropology is to contribute to the ethnic restoration of indigenous cultures, the
new pluricultural utopia, but putting its own society and its own culture on trial, which serve as
the master in the cultural dialectic.
Several questions can be deduced from these ideas. Unlike Warman, Bonfil is not entirely
adverse to indigenous nationalism. The national culture, reified as monad, can and must admit
the indigenous cultures, although these, in their required authenticity and autonomy, may draw
a line of demarcation with the Boverall society,^ which is none other than the national one.
That tension remains in his later thought and limits and contains his criticism. Only such
indigenism as seeks to Bextirpate the ethnic personality of the Indian^ should be reformed if it
accepts a liberating criticism. The same idea was clarified at another time, when he warned that
academic social anthropology was about to divorce itself from governmental tasks, at the same
time that nationalism was breaking down inside the state apparatus (Bonfil 1990). He later
affirmed that the book De eso que llaman Antropología Mexicana did not propose an
alternative to governmental anthropology but rather a change in the government project. So
it can be understood that around 1970 he maintained that the only reproach that should be
made of the indigenists is that of having abandoned the exercise of criticism. After an
interregnum, that criticism arose again in 1987, now inverted, because it warned that the
academicism of social anthropology may turn out to be counterproductive.
As would be seen more clearly in the essays of Nolasco, Olivera, and Valencia, their
respective criticisms announce a sort of anthropology of anthropology much more exact in its
appreciations regarding the cage of indigenism, anthropology and professional education. It is
noteworthy that the three experienced a more academic trajectory, even Olivera, who after

3
The first moment of critical Mexican anthropology dates from 1909 with Andrés Molina Enríquez; the second
moment came in 1951 with Pedro Armillas and Ángel Palerm, two Spanish exiles who dissented from Caso; and
the third moment occurred in 1970. Arqueological thought was only involved in the second moment (Vázquez
León 1998).
 Author's personal copy
334 L. V. Vázquez León

serving as director of the ENAH became radicalized, siding with the guerrillas in Guatemala,
the EZLN and Bindigenous feminism.^ Nolasco, for her part, stuck to the demand of finding
new subjects of study for social anthropology, an idea that is present in her essay BLa
antropología aplicada en México y su destino final: el indigenismo^ (Applied anthropology
in Mexico and its final destination: indigenism^) (1970, 66–93). At that time an Bindigenism of
liberation^ was already arising—studying the class structures, stratification and power in
indigenous regions—but also developing urban, agricultural, educational, health, conflict
(including the events of 1968), and even war themes, an entirely premonitory subject at that
time. She was the first, I think, to speak of the Bneo-indigenous^ in the valley of Puebla,
Xochimilco, and Milpa Alta, as well as a Mesoamericanist indigenism, a significant marginal
observation. Whatever the case, the diversification that occurred in academic social anthro-
pology would be based on her ideas, even though the most discomforting ones turned out to be
ignored.
Olivera took a different path, which is only comprehensible under the unitarian tradition. In
effect, Olivera takes up the Banthropological sciences^ more comprehensively, which explains
her affirmation that Banthropological research in Mexico is deformed, inflexible, and decrepit^
(1970, 98). From her tower office in the Department of Anthropological Investigations of the
INAH, she could not avoid seeing that ethnology and social anthropology were dispersed,
unconnected, and ensconced in the individualism of personal prestige and that archeological
research was depressed, lacked theorization, and was flatly anti-evolutionist, a stagnation not
unrelated to the forced separation of Pedro Armillas and of Pedro Carrasco. In his essay,
Warman demands a critical review of Mexican social thought. For Olivera, on the other hand,
an Banthropological analysis of anthropology^ (117, italics in the original) must be undertak-
en, from a critical perspective of course.
Finally, there is what Enrique Valencia covers, oriented toward BLa formación de nuevos
antropólogos^ (The training of new anthropologists) (1970, 119–53). With a line of argumen-
tation very similar to Olivera and Nolasco, he focuses on the education of anthropologists at
the ENAH, particularly ethnologists and archeologists. Since he is concerned with the way
these scientific disciplines are communicated, he expresses profound doubts—without a doubt
one of the most serious in the book—from the time when, inspired by The Mirror of Man by
Clyde Kluckhohn (1944), he suggests that we see ourselves in the mirror of culture, for it is
there where we also reflect our underdevelopment and marginalization. Part of that sad view is
to identify indigenism and BMesoamerican nationalism^ as causes of stagnation. But he
doesn’t overlook internal factors either, such as the dependence of the ENAH on the INAH
(on the Mexican State) and their traditional and particularist nature. Along the way, he asks
himself about the services required by society from these professionals, demonstrating their
increasing devaluation and lack of productivity. His methodical doubt is implacable and he
ends up inquiring Bif it is good for the country and its educational system to keep training
professionals in a branch of knowledge that has been demonstrated to be unproductive^
(Valencia 1970, 153).
This last question has resonance today that would have been unthinkable in previous years,
given the growth of the Banthropological sciences^ with respect to schools, universities,
professionals, journals, books, privileges, etc. But 50 years later, members of the Mexican
Academy of Anthropological Sciences are making the same reflection, from the standpoint of
both governmental and academic anthropology. Worse still, the continued training of anthro-
pologists is being questioned in the heart of both government and society. The divorce has not
been concluded, it’s just that now they don’t want to pay us alimony. Of course, for a long
 Author's personal copy
Revisiting De eso que llaman antropología mexicana five decades later 335

time—the days of ontological security based on the squandering of oil income—the critics of
critical anthropology emphasized Warman and Bonfil’s participation in the government. The
former they condemned so bitterly that it became an insult to call another colleague a Bson of
Warman.^ They held Bonfil in an ambiguous status because his ideas have been reconsidered
by theoreticians and followers of decolonialism, but a preoccupation with globalism led them
to underestimate his nationalism.
The anthropology of anthropology followed less radical paths, as was to be expected under the
(oil) subsidized boom. Valencia’s methodical doubt gave way to the triumphal and self-satisfied
spirit of official histories of a network of institutions whose members would talk only about
problems that affected them from the outside. And instead of looking at themselves in a self-
critical mirror, they preferred to look at the students and their individual subjectivities through the
lens of an actor-centered ethnography (Kroz and de Teresa 2012; Peña and Urteaga 2014). Once
the institutional future and jobs are assured, the degree to which Mexican anthropology may have
Bsocial uses^ is a consideration that may be downplayed, since at most it is taken up as a matter of
the labor market for the students. That’s why the new generations are called upon to imagine how
they might Bsell themselves^ in an adverse world if they want to survive Social Darwinism. It is
clear that professors and researchers are positioned at the margin of a critical anthropology that
seeks, as Nolasco would say, solutions beyond the existing social system.
For some profound reason, a group of ENAH students published the second edition of De
eso que llaman Antropología Mexicana (Warman et al. 2002). Doing so is not the only homage
that they can pay today to such an outstanding group of anthropologists. The other would be to
reinvent critical anthropology.

References

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García Mora, Carlos, ed. 1988. La antropología en México. Panorama histórico. 5. Las disciplinas
antropológicas y la mexicanística extranjera. Mexico: INAH.
Kluckhohn, Clyde. Mirror for Man. 1944. New York: Fawcett.
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mexicana. México: Comité de Publicaciones de los Alumnos de la ENAH.