From Indigenismo to Zapatismo: Theory and Practice in Mexican Anthropology

Human Organization, Summer 2004 by Gonzalez, Roberto J

Indigenismo and its Discontents, 1962-1974

Indigenista anthropologists faced challenges in the late 1950s and 1960s from colleagues influenced by Latin American dependency theory. The decolonization of Africa and Asia and the early success of the Cuban Revolution undoubtedly informed such work. But particularly in Mexico, the shortcomings of anthropological practice-embodied in failed indigenista policies-forced anthropologists to rethink theory. Structural functionalism had informed indigenista practice, but now the failures of the latter would inspire new theories based on Marxism and dependency theory.

An early critique was Guillermo Bonfil Batalla's Diagnostico sobre el hambre en Sudzal, Yucatan (Diagnosis of Hunger in Sudzal, Yucatan, 1962) a study funded by the government's Institute Nacional de Nutricion (National Institute of Nutrition). In it, Bonfil blasted conventional applied anthropologists for psychologizing poverty and blaming its victims, for recommending insignificant solutions to structural problems, and for pathologizing revolutionary change. Hunger in the henequen-producing village of Sudzal, he argued, was not a village problem or an Indian problem so much as a social one rooted in unequal economic relations between plantation owners and landless people. Bonfil noted that hunger, malnutrition, and poverty could not be solved by any single government agency; they were endemic structural problems requiring a more radical solution.

Other critiques incorporated internal colonialism theories, most often associated with the work of Rodolfo Stavenhagen (1965), who argued that ethnic identity could be effectively used by indigenous groups as protection against exploitative capitalist relations. This position differed radically from the indigenista position, which took for granted the need to homogenize cultural traits to minimize the economic exploitation of indigenous people (Aguirre Beltran 1955).

Critiques of indigenismo were probably influenced strongly by the historical context. In October 1968, several hundred students were gunned down by the Mexican army at Tlatelolco following weeks of demonstrations. The site was evacuated and the following morning, all evidence had been wiped away (Poniatowska 1971). More than any previous event, it indicated that elements within the PRT would stop at nothing to maintain a grip on power and signaled the beginning of a crisis of legitimacy that continued for the rest of the century.

It was in this atmosphere that De eso que llaman antropologia mexicana (Of That Which Is Called Mexican Anthropology [Warman 1970]) was published by a group of scholars sharply critical of the INI approach. The collection's opening essay, by Arturo Warman (1970), described anthropology's colonial roots, its use by nationalist ideologues, and its bureaucratic institutionalization in the guise of the INI. Bonfil's (1970) contribution described the indigenista position as unacceptably ethnocentric and proposed an alternative: indigenous autonomy and cultural pluralism in the form of a true multiethnic state.