Commitment and Subjectivity in the Experience of a Mexican Anthropologist

Abstract

The present article is an exercise of introspection: from a biographical perspective, the author analyzes the developments of Mexican anthropology over the past fifty years. Trained as an anthropologist in the classic techniques of social research by authors such as Weitlaner and Juan Comas, and later on having worked with Alfonso Caso, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran and Angel Palerm, he discovers —after years of fieldwork among a number of indigenous peoples in the country— that postmodern anthropology considers what he sees as a personal and social commitment with the disfranchised as no more than a form of narrative. He thus proceeds to review a complex line of research, involved in controversy over the uses and abuses of an anthropology put to the service of a project of national construction. At the end, a look at the current state of the world leads him to vindicate the relevance of the knowledge gained by both ethnography and anthropology for the social change of the indigenous peoples of the world. Because of this conviction, he calls for a social anthropology committed to the analysis of those conditions that make the continuation of injustice possible. Ignoring the politized context of the history of the discipline in order to concern oneself alone with dilettante academic digressions will turn social anthropology into an instrument of the prevailing political system, run by the dominators.