From indigenous to peasants: anthropological views of a paradigmatic break

Abstract

This article seeks to expose and to discuss the paradigmatic changes that Mexican anthropology experienced in its approach to Indian peoples and their members, and specifically the transformations in the theoretical corpus and discourses of anthropologists in Mexico with regard to rural world subjects. We particularly focus on the great turn experienced during the decades 1970-1980, when Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán’s theoretical and practical corpus was replaced with the paradigms of marxism and of marginality and dependence theory, both in the academic space and in public policy. The anthropologic concept of Indian or aborigine was replaced by the economic - sociological one of rural inhabitant of depressed and isolated areas, reflecting powerfully the influence of paradigms from sociology, agricultural economics and public health that intervened in the design and application of welfare actions directed towards the indigenous people since the seventies. The Mexican Indians resigned in many cases to their ethnological condition of ethnically and culturally differentiated populations, or this condition was denied to them. They were led to assume the sociological condition of poor and isolated peasants, as a strategy of dialogue with the governmental and its welfare agencies, in order to try to recover their land or to reach benefits that were offered by the policies of social compensation. Only the zapatista rebellion, led by Mayan Indians in the Chiapas province, in the south-eastern Mexico, will manage to reposition the Mexican Indian peoples into their ethnic and cultural condition vis-à-vis the State and anthropology itself.