In October 1968, demonstrators filled Mexico City's Plaza Tlatelolco to protest their government's disregard for the needs of Mexico's indigenous peoples, corruption, and complicity with capitalist interests. Less than two years later, five anthropologists sympathetic to the protest published a collection of essays attacking Mexico's anthropological establishment. The collection, titled De eso que llaman antropología mexicana, helped spur what came to be known as the ‘political breakdown’ (quiebra política) of Mexican anthropology. ‘Critical’ or ‘committed’ anthropologists rejected ‘culturalist’ analyses of family socialization and local communities that they associated with the imperialist, US anthropological currents. Global economic structures, not local cultures, generated the problems faced by indigenous peoples, the anthropologists said. These global structures would only be altered through a revolution that changed the Mexican economy and polity and Mexico's insertion in an exploitative capitalist world order.Footnote 1
Mexico's critical anthropologists were part of a worldwide critique of the discipline that drew force from the protest movements of the 1960s and from anti-imperialist nationalisms in the Third World. In the United States, Europe, and Latin America, young anthropologists accused their predecessors of serving colonialism. US anthropologists decried the complicity of their universities with military and intelligence agencies and US foreign policy. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) voted on a resolution condemning the US war in Vietnam. In England, Talal Asad's 1973 edited volume pointed out the historical links between the functionalist analyses of social anthropology and British colonial administration. From Tokyo to Kampala, anthropologists used notions such as ‘internal colonialism’ or ‘culture of poverty’ – both originally developed to explain Mexican social realities – to make connections between foreign and domestic struggles against economic exploitation on the one hand and racial, ethnic, and cultural discrimination on the other. Michael Hechter deployed the concept of internal colonialism to criticize English prejudice towards and exploitation of its ‘Celtic fringe’. US Black Power and Chicano activists borrowed the term to describe the economic and psychic effects of racism.Footnote 2
These critiques counterposed ‘reform’, associated with the United States and capitalism, with Third World Revolution. Insurgent anthropologists connected the former to a modernization theory that focused on the multiple economic, cultural, and psychological factors that might spur US-style capitalist economic growth and that sought to overcome the internal, national brakes on progress. They connected the latter with dependency theories that linked the ‘internal’ (national) to the ‘external’ (global) and privileged revolutionary changes that implied a radically changed relation to the global capitalist world system.
During a Cold War era in which knowledge became tightly linked to struggles regarding the socialist or capitalist nature of development, insurgent anthropology styled itself as a revolution on the intellectual terrain, a break with prevailing modernization paradigms. Yet, as this article argues, dependency and modernization theories emerged within a shared intellectual space in which scholars and ideas travelled from North to South and back. Even as many intellectuals rejected US models of economic development, they accepted the primacy accorded to economics and technology and the notion that science was a global enterprise aimed at generating universal knowledge. Dependency and modernization theorists shared assumptions about the nature of social scientific theories and their role in development.Footnote 3
This article charts trends in the United States and Mexico and links anthropological developments in each country to those in the other, to broader Americanist social science circuits, and to Third World currents of thought. It highlights the global intellectual and political contexts that shaped exchanges among and between Mexican and US scholars, including the totalizing social science frameworks that emerged at the close of the Second World War. By looking at anthropology, which focused on culture and the local, it extends a growing literature on modernization theory that has demonstrated how developing world actors responded to US-sponsored development initiatives.Footnote 4 That literature has portrayed modernization theory as the application of an evolutionary US model to the rest of the world and has shown how the theory shaped US foreign policy. Yet modernization theory, I suggest, should be conceptualized as a broad arena of debate in which some scholars accommodated cultural differences within a universalizing theory and some felt that to create a disinterested global social science they had to distance themselves from the applied knowledge that served US foreign policy. Anthropologists in particular belonged to a discipline that had long valued difference, and they generally spent extended periods abroad in working with their foreign counterparts. These experiences prompted US-based anthropologists to qualify and challenge elements of modernizing rhetoric. What US scholars learned from Latin Americans was not an afterthought: that knowledge helped constitute the social theories that emanated from metropolitan centres.Footnote 5
I also enrich the literature on Latin American dependency theories by showing how they emerged not just as a Latin American reaction to US theories modelled on the developed world but also out of Latin Americans’ experiences in global scholarly venues. Dependency theorists were as attuned to the global scholarly networks of which they were a part as to the subordinated social groups whose interests they purportedly defended.Footnote 6
World unity and knowledge in the age of US supremacy
At the close of the Second World War, intellectuals worldwide increasingly stressed the unity of humanity. UNESCO sought to encourage ‘a wider understanding of the scientific and cultural aspect of the history of mankind, the mutual interdependence of peoples and cultures and their contributions to the common heritage’.Footnote 7 Within the social sciences, universalizing approaches that sought to uncover laws that governed all societies took hold. Disciplines that focused on discerning universal patterns, such as sociology and economics, increasingly displaced disciplines such as anthropology that focused more on differences and the local. Anthropologists adapted. They engaged in dialogue with sociologists and economists, and recalibrated a discipline that, in its attention to evolution, had always probed what made humans human.Footnote 8
At the end of the war, scholars and non-scholars alike looked to science to predict the course of events and generate useful, applied knowledge. The social and natural sciences had been crucial to US success in the Second World War.Footnote 9 The United States would dominate the globe with its technological and scientific, as well as political and military, power. The challenge for US scholars, therefore, was to figure out how scientific neutrality could be reconciled with a US foreign policy widely perceived to be self-interested.
Purportedly neutral scientific knowledge became itself a sign of development. Proponents of modernization theory defined the fundamental characteristics of modern, economically developed societies: secularism, specialized roles, rational as opposed to magical thinking, consensus regarding values, and the attainment of social status rather than its adscription. Within this scheme, scientists saw themselves as the quintessential bearers of modernity: rational, tolerant, creative, part of a meritocracy.Footnote 10 Discussions of both modernization theory and the emerging dependency paradigm would focus on how countries might develop and on the knowledge necessary for that to happen.
In this context, questions about the geopolitics of scholarship emerged early. UNESCO built a new institutional infrastructure for the global exchange of ideas, and, beginning in the late 1940s, its Social Science Department encouraged the creation of international disciplinary associations such as the International Sociology Association. These associations in turn stimulated the creation of national and regional associations.Footnote 11 Mexico held its first anthropology round table in 1941 and its first sociology congress in 1950.Footnote 12 That same year the Latin American delegates to the World Congress of Sociology in Zurich planned the First Latin American Sociology Congress, which took place in Buenos Aires a year later and led to the creation of the Latin American Sociology Association.Footnote 13
Given the size and rapid development of US institutions of higher education, not to mention US economic and military power, US scholars played key roles in international networks. UNESCO inevitably legitimated ideas and disciplinary formations from the United States. But US and European scholars and officials knew that they could not produce the knowledge they needed without the cooperation of their Asian, African, and Latin American colleagues. Many truly wanted an exchange among equals and optimistically saw the conferences and associations they sponsored as microcosms of the world community they were working to create. In fact, UNESCO officials studied the conferences themselves to understand dialogue across cultures. The Second World Congress of Sociology sponsored a panel on ‘Professional activities and responsibilities of the sociologist’, alongside a panel on ‘Conflicts among groups, and their solution’. This was not simply the application to social science meetings of the navel-gazing therapeutic ethos that reigned in the United States. It was also a response to potential epistemic conflicts.Footnote 14
Percolating conflict was evident at the 1953 Second Latin American Congress of Sociology, held in Rio de Janeiro, where the Brazilian sociologist Alberto Guerreiro Ramos suggested the necessity of cutting ‘the umbilical cord which has transformed Latin American Sociology into an abortive by-product of European and American Sociological thought’. According to Ramos, scholars needed to adapt research methods developed to understand societies with greater material, technological, and cultural resources to local conditions.Footnote 15 A 1957 appraisal situated Ramos’ viewpoint squarely within the geo-racial and geo-cultural space of ‘Latin America’, the locus of ‘scholars of our Latin American people (those who were born in Latin America and study it) … our culturally and biologically mestizo sociologists (the indo-Latinos, melanolatinos), our criollo sociologists (Latin in origin, and American due to the telluric imprint our continent leaves on them)’. The review urged Latin American intellectuals to replace ‘servile attitudes’ not with isolation but with ‘diplomatic relations’ that would generate stronger but more equal ties. The Latin American student was no longer an uncritical first-grader but a university student who did ‘not systematically oppose his teacher’ but ‘remained vigilant in order to collaborate with the teacher by making his own critiques, his own assertions, presenting possible solutions’. He would become himself ‘a teacher, an active and acting member of the sociological community’.Footnote 16
As if to underscore the maturity of Latin American sociology, photographs of Mexican and Latin American congresses in the Revista Mexicana de Sociología showed serious, suited participants in well-appointed galleries (see Figures 1 to 3). Participants raised their hands. They spoke into microphones, showing themselves to be at ease with technology. Women were part of the proceedings, and the doctoras were pictured at the podium, providing evidence of advanced societies where women had voice. The sociologists no longer displayed to the world the objects of their studies: poor rural mestizos, urban proletarians, isolated indigenous peoples (see Figures 4 and 5). They displayed themselves, demonstrating their ability to be modern participants in a global scientific community.
Doctor Lucio Mendieta y Núñez during the reading of his study on ‘The organization of youth as a social education problem’. Source: ‘Crónica del Cuarto Congreso Nacional de Sociología’, Revista Mexicana de Sociología, 16, 1, 1954, n.p.
A view of one of the work sessions at the Third National Sociology Congress. The discussion is presided over and directed by Dr Mariano Ruiz Funes. Serving as secretary is licenciado Arnulfo Martínez Lavalle. Source: ‘Tercer Congreso Nacional de Sociología’, Revista Mexicana de Sociología, 15, 1, 1953, n.p.
Dr Victoria Kent highlights the merits of the paper presented by the licenciada Miss María Lavalle Urbina and asks that it be given an honourable mention. Source: ‘Tercer Congreso Nacional de Sociología’, Revista Mexicana de Sociología, 15, 1, 1953, n.p.
Cahita-type Yaqui girl wearing her particular dress for ordinary days. Behind her is her shack. Source: Luis A. González Bonilla, ‘Los yaquis’, Revista Mexicana de Sociología, 2, 1, 1940, p. 68.
Yaqui home – group of huts, Potam, Sonora. Source: Luis A. González Bonilla, ‘Los yaquis’, Revista Mexicana de Sociología, 2, 1, 1940, p. 80.
The Italian-born Argentine sociologist Gino Germani voiced concern about Latin America's ‘economic and cultural dependence’ at a 1960 UNESCO-sponsored conference on ‘Social implications of industrialization and technical change’ held at the University of Chicago. The conference proceedings, which included substantial chapters by North American scholars, included Germani's work only in a small-type appendix. There, the Argentine scrutinized the scholarly marginalization that the book itself rehearsed. But although dependence worried Germani, he also criticized nationalist scholars who jettisoned methodological advances or sought to exclude Latin America from healthy transnational dialogue. He propounded a truly neutral and global social science akin to ‘the supranational character of the natural science[s]’, which shielded them from the ‘problems’ of dependence and nationalism.Footnote 17
Although Germani believed that Latin American intellectuals’ ideological proclivities might generate misunderstandings between North and South, he concluded his essay with a sharp rebuke to ‘foreign experts’ … equally biased conceptions’. Foreigners, he wrote, should be ‘very sophisticated about the sociology of knowledge … capable of analysing the implications of their own theories, and … aware of the ways that the local social scientists and public may perceive these or interpret them. Completely assured scientific character and neutrality of concepts can often mask unexpected ideological implications.’ Germani believed in the scientific value of empirical research; his views on modernization were compatible with those of mainstream US authors; and he was wary of nationalism and the internal politics of Latin American countries, both of which stymied the development of a scientific social science. He nonetheless warned US scholars to be careful about the kind of generalizations they produced and how their research related to US foreign policies.Footnote 18
In Mexico, too, intellectuals sought ways to reconcile universalism with national differences. The conservative nationalism of Mexico's ruling party made left-wing intellectuals wary of nationalist gestures that sought to preserve a pure, untainted Mexican identity by drawing down a ‘cactus curtain’ (cortina de nopal).Footnote 19 In The labyrinth of solitude, Octavio Paz wrote that his philosophy would be
Mexican only in its accent or emphasis or style, not in its content. Mexicanism will become a mask which, when taken off, reveals at last the genuine human being it disguised. Under the present circumstances, then, our need to develop a Mexican philosophy becomes a need to think out for ourselves certain problems which are no longer exclusively ours but pertain to all men. That is, Mexican philosophy, to be truly that, must be philosophy plain and simple.Footnote 20
Mexico's cosmopolitan intellectuals saw Latin Americanism as modern and universal in its form, open to the world and to change, while still reflecting national values. Like Germani, they critiqued a US position that furthered national interests while parading itself as universal.
Modernization and US anthropology
Modernization theorists thought that the less developed parts of the world would travel the same trajectory as the United States, from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’. For them, the primary question was what stimuli would move countries toward modern ways of life. A small amount of outside investment or the diffusion of technology and modern entrepreneurial values might accelerate Latin America toward modernity. Entrepreneurial middle classes would blossom, displacing a reactionary landowning class that had refused to innovate or invest. Cities would grow as rural areas became mechanized. Industrialization would press forward, and mass communications would knit together societies by allowing citizens to share points of view. Modern Latin Americans would adopt not just industrial techniques and mechanisms for creating wealth but also congruent political, religious, familial, and sexual values and behaviours. Despite temporary cultural lags, all these facets of modernization were related. Bert Hoselitz theorized that the desire to save as well as the development of skilled labour and entrepreneurship were ‘in part, functions of the psychological make-up of a population’.Footnote 21
Theorists focused on bounded national societies that, if not similar, were at least comparable because they had similar functional needs – for example, for subsistence or social order – which could be met through more traditional or more modern means. The new field of comparative politics assumed that all societies used a combination of modern and traditional methods to meet those universal needs. Industrial nations tended to have more differentiated and institutionalized ways of solving basic problems, but even in these societies traditional practices persisted. They referred to this as dualism. For instance, modern political parties might exist alongside clientelism. By using matrices and statistical correlations, comparativists could track the relation between one modern characteristic and another, showing which combinations of characteristics were most probable. This allowed them to predict the most likely paths of political modernization.Footnote 22
Within this scheme, case studies from different societies became data points for theoretical models. As the political scientist Gabriel Almond put it, this implied
the obsolescence of the present-day division of the study of politics into American, European, Asiatic, Middle Eastern, African, and Latin American ‘area studies’. The political scientist who wishes to study political modernization in the non-Western areas will have to master the model of the modern, which in turn can only be derived from the most careful empirical and formal analysis of the functions of the modern Western polities.
Almond reduced the universal human experience to the West, and the adequacy of modernization theories was reduced to the adequacy of their sampling of Western societies, which was now termed a statistical ‘universe’, the limits of which were determined a priori. He wrote:
When we say that pressure groups in the United States perform certain functions in certain ways, we are saying in effect that there is a universe of pressure group actions … and that in this universe there is a given probability that these functions will be performed by pressure groups with certain frequencies and in certain ways … . If such a proposition implies a universe of events, then we must specify the limits and content of the universe. We can examine our evidence and ask of it, to what extent does it sample this universe?Footnote 23
This was a different universal than the one envisioned by Paz and his colleagues – though both sought to contain difference.
US anthropologists shared in central aspects of the modernization perspective, but not without misgivings. Their embrace of cultural relativism led them to suspect evolutionary views, and their inclination toward fieldwork focused them on particular places rather than general laws. Overall, anthropology tried to reconcile the need for universal laws with an interest in difference, replaying a longstanding tension within the discipline.Footnote 24 It also drew nearer to disciplines such as sociology and economics that focused, like comparative politics, on creating universal theories.
Anthropology broached new topics and methods to better address societies that its practitioners now saw as essentially modern, if lesser, varieties of Western civilization.Footnote 25 The Latin Americanist Julian Steward, an architect of the rebirth of evolutionary theory in anthropology, urged the study of
hundreds of thousands of other peoples, called ladinos or criollos or other local names, who are partly or predominantly Indian in blood, though they have adopted European culture and are regarded for all practical purposes as Whites. Although these peoples are generally thought to lie outside the scope of anthropology, they represent but the ultimate stage of a process of acculturation which began in pre-Columbian times and is even now at work on the ‘Indians’. What degree of assimilation takes Indians out of the anthropological field? It seems safe to predict that anthropological interest will some day extend from the acculturated to the assimilated Indians and from the latter to the similar rural White population, so that rural sociology, ‘folk lore’, and ethnology will become very similar.Footnote 26
By 1950, Steward had elaborated a fuller response to the challenges posed by modernizing political science and sociological perspectives. He noted that the obstacles to ‘universal social science’ were, first, cultural relativity and, second, the overly ambitious theories of
some economists, sociologists, and political scientists [who] have assumed that human beings are so fundamentally the same everywhere that rules of behavior which obtain in any one society – for example, our own, which has been the principal object of their investigations – will hold for all other societies so that a cross-cultural approach is scarcely necessary … . If the problem of developing a universal social science is adequately phrased, this seeming contradiction can be resolved. … Although the presuppositions about economic man that American economists have acquired through observations of our own culture may not hold for foreign areas, Chinese or Balinese may react in the same way under like circumstances. … The problem, then, is one of specifying the particular conditions under which similar behavior patterns may be produced.Footnote 27
Steward rejected the emphasis on singularity of cultural relativists who focused on cultural divergence and could explain convergence only as a result of diffusion – external influences. Instead, he analysed ‘parallels of form and function [that] develop in historically independent sequences or cultural traditions’ because of the ‘independent operation of identical causation’. While focusing on cross-cultural ‘regularities’, especially the movement toward greater complexity in the material, technical, and political organization, he believed that, because people had to adapt to different environments, they developed cultural differences. Evolution, even when its mechanisms could be predicted, was not unilinear but multilinear, plural.Footnote 28
Steward's approach pointed toward the need to break down the barriers between disciplines focused on domestic society, such as sociology and political science, and disciplines focused on others abroad, such as anthropology. A 1947 SSRC report on area studies similarly noted the ‘sterility’ of the ‘isolation between disciplines’, and promoted ‘cross-fertilization’. ‘A domestic area’, the author noted, could ‘suffice quite as well as a foreign one’.Footnote 29 Interdisciplinarity was here linked to work across national borders and universality, and both interdisciplinary and internationalism were linked to fecundity and the mixing of ideas from North and South – a mestizaje. The question was whether this academic mestizaje would be a form of whitening, in which the disciplines that studied domestic US society prevailed.
The 1951 presidential address to the AAA by the Latin Americanist Ralph Beals likewise advocated closer relations between anthropologists and sociologists as a way of bridging the study of domestic and foreign. Beals noted that, as anthropologists turned away from the study of unique ethnological histories, their work became more like the natural sciences, more oriented toward generalizations or what he called a ‘rebirth of theory in anthropology’. (Note that this is not a birth but a rebirth.) He suggested that the same problems motived ‘those interested in urban research, those interested in minority group research, and those interested in the acculturation of primitive and folk groups’. Scholars studying immigration and minority groups in Los Angeles could gain insight into the acculturation processes faced by American Indians. The content or intensity of the process might be different here and there, but it was the same process.Footnote 30
Yet Beals and other anthropologists also cautioned against mechanically applying US models. As a National Research Council committee of Latin American anthropologists noted in 1949, an emphasis on Western civilization or variants thereof could easily lead to evolutionary hierarchies. The committee, tasked with planning future research in Latin American anthropology, observed:
It is essential to bear in mind that any attempt to study the content and organization of a large modern culture-type such as the Criollo culture or the Modern North American culture or Modern Russian culture, and so on, requires the utmost in anthropological objectivity and to differentiate them and compare them with our own or other areas, there is always the possibility that uninstructed persons will see therein an implication of criticism. For this reason it must be understood that any tentative remarks concerning Criollo culture patterns … imply no invidious comparisons whatever.Footnote 31
Years of work in Latin America had alerted anthropologists to Latin Americans’ sensitivity toward universalizing rhetoric that ultimately confirmed hierarchies – the issue that both Germani and Mexico's cosmopolitan intellectuals had raised.
Anthropologists’ ambivalence toward modernization paradigms extended to modernizing US government-sponsored technical assistance programmes. When President Harry Truman launched his Point IV Program, the Smithsonian Institution's Institute of Social Anthropology (ISA), which had been headed by Steward and had trained anthropologists in Mexico during the war, turned to working on it. The AAA, eager to show anthropology's relevance to US foreign policy, formed a committee to suggest possible roles for anthropologists in foreign aid, and the government commissioned the AAA to draft a training manual for Foreign Service employees, including those working on Point IV, to help them understand cultural differences.Footnote 32
Yet anthropologists also doubted Point IV: like political scientists who cautioned against the disruption that modernization might cause, they pointed out that technical changes might meet resistance. In Mexico, the ISA's Isabel Kelly prepared statements on public housing that, she said, ‘were written from the point of view of the native cultures involved, and they point[ed] up the conflicts and difficulties to be overcome in implanting our technical ideas on alien societies’. Overall, anthropologists argued that, without knowledge of specific cultures, policymakers could not gauge the impact abroad of the seemingly inevitable extension of industrialism or adapt to those reactions. The anthropologists did not suggest that the existence of difference invalidated modernizing development initiatives. Instead, they sought to adjust those initiatives to local conditions in order to speed the modernization process or make it less disruptive. Cultural relativism became less a celebration of distinct cultures and more a way of specifying the contours of supposed cultural universals.Footnote 33
Others US scholars were more critical. Robert Manners, a student of Steward's who worked with his advisor in Puerto Rico, argued that the ‘global potlatch’ of technical assistance came with ‘political and economic strings’ attached. Drawing perhaps on what he had learned in Puerto Rico, he suggested in a journal published in Mexico that ‘the role of the anthropological advisor’ might be like that of his ‘colonial office prototype’. Manners recognized that colonial ventures where economic exploitation was foremost were not the same as altruistic aid efforts. Yet he articulated one of the first critiques of the collusion of anthropologists with colonialism or, in the case of the United States, neo-colonialism. Anthropologists, he noted, rarely set the agenda. Others echoed Manners’ caution, arguing that anthropologists should provide disinterested scientific knowledge, not implement US foreign policy. ‘Basic research must continue’, Beals argued, ‘for it forms the necessary prerequisite to successful application’.Footnote 34
The retreat from policy and toward pure science had been sketched in 1947, when the Executive Committee of the AAA submitted its thoughts on the Human Rights declaration being prepared by the United Nations. The AAA document, drafted by Melville Herskovits, a scholar of Latin America and the African diaspora, drew on cultural relativism to question the wisdom of a universal declaration. It also drew attention to the culturally bound nature of the notion of human rights itself, placing it within the context of the West's colonial arrogance abroad and racial discrimination at home. The universal, he implied, was a guise for the particulars of the West, and it might overshadow specific, local values integral to the development of individuals.Footnote 35 Steward objected to Herskovits’ view but did not argue for a universal notion of human rights, suggesting instead that the question of what might constitute a universal right was a question of values that anthropology could not address scientifically. During the war, he said, professionals had used their expertise for the cause of the war, but they did so as ‘individual citizens’, without ‘a scientific justification for doing so’. ‘As a scientific organization’, he concluded, ‘the Association has no business dealing with the rights of man.’Footnote 36
Within the United States, then, there was a variety of positions regarding how to accommodate difference and universal laws. In some cases, cultural relativism was subordinated to US foreign policy goals that presumably furthered universal processes, using greater sensitivity to local conditions to make other parts of the globe more capitalist. Others sought a comparative approach that ignored differences and looked for functional equivalencies but that ultimately posited the United States as a model. Still other varieties of the comparative model stressed multiple causality leading to occasional parallels. Recognizing that universal knowledge was associated with rising US power, Steward, Beals, and others sought, like Germani, to create a ‘basic’ science divorced from value judgements. And some, like Herskovits, recognized the challenges of creating universal knowledge and rejected it in favour of ethnographic accounts and particular, often local, knowledge.
Small cracks in Mexico's anthropological edifice
Mexican intellectuals, a great many of whom worked directly for public institutions, had no compunction about their close affiliation with the state. They saw their efforts as carrying out the mandate of the Mexican revolution, and anthropologists in state agencies devoted to health, education, the arts, forestry, and agriculture sought to uplift Mexico's presumably degraded indigenous masses and to give them full rights as citizens. At the same time, they sought, like their pre-revolutionary predecessors, to knit together a nation of disparate languages, customs, and regions, and to establish Mexico as a worthy participant in the community of nations. The presumably backward economic conditions of Mexico's rural indigenous population constituted a potential brake on their ambitions for the nation. Building on ideas of the noble savage and trumpeting the advanced nature of ancient native civilizations, they sought to reconcile Mexico's indigenous heritage with development.
From the late 1930s forward, as the Mexican state swelled, its programmes aimed at attending to the needs of indigenous peoples multiplied. Anthropologists increasingly spent time in indigenous communities, studying what policies to apply and how. The state-sponsored applied science of indigenismo that emerged was, as a number of studies have shown, ambivalent. On the one hand, it promoted a modernity that was fundamentally Western and capitalist, serving as a homogenizing project of assimilation. On the other hand, indigenistas deemed certain aspects of native ways of life compatible with modernity. As long as native peoples could speak Spanish or read a newspaper, it did not matter what language they spoke at home. If native peoples participated in local and international markets, the native motifs in the rugs they sold did not matter. Moreover, native peoples themselves grasped hold of political patronage and the ruling party's discourse of rights to further, at least in part, their own goals. Non-native intellectuals who proposed solutions to the problems faced by native peoples were agents of a modernizing state, but revolution was still in many ways pluralist, articulating diversity into the nation. As Mexico became more prosperous, relatively few resources went to native communities. Politicians and businessmen profited disproportionately, and revolutionary nationalism, including indigenista policies supporting contemporary as well as ancient indigenous cultures, became a smokescreen for a corrupt and often anti-democratic state. Nevertheless, it was a state that at times effectively fulfilled the demands of its native as well as non-native clienteles.Footnote 37
By the late 1950s, the increasing corruption of the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and its pro-business policies made many Mexicans doubt the state and the intellectuals that served it. By that time, Professor Fernando Cámara Barbachano, who taught at Mexico's only graduate programme in anthropology, had started calling students in his course on social change ‘los chicos del cambio’ (‘the change guys’). However, neither the mainstream press nor the PRI saw discontent as evidence that Mexico's political leadership need to change course dramatically. The Mexican state continued to be able to co-opt opponents, and when students at Cámara Barbachano's Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH) struck in 1956, an official of the Secretaría de Educación Pública named Luis Echeverría (later President of Mexico, 1970–76) was called in to negotiate. Rodolfo Stavenhagen, who participated in the strike, recalled Echeverría saying: ‘Do you need more money for field research? Alright then, if you stop the strike, we will give you more money for field research.’ The students accepted the deal.Footnote 38 Yet the ability of the ruling party to accommodate rebels diminished as Cold War polarization escalated following the Cuban revolution. Students’ rejection of the Mexican state, US imperialism, and academic stances seen as supporting the US and Mexican governments’ modernization goals eventually led to the ‘breakdown’ of Mexican anthropology.
Mexican critiques drew on European, US, and Latin American scholarship. Initially, they too were mild. In October 1959, sixty scholars from twenty countries gathered in Rio de Janeiro for an International Seminar on Resistances to Social Development held at the UNESCO-funded Centro Latino-Americano de Pesquisas em Ciências Sociais (CENTRO), founded in 1957. Participants – including Germani and the Mexican Pablo González Casanova, both on CENTRO's board of directors – questioned European colonialism and US imperialism. Yet they did not mount a frontal challenge to modernization approaches. In a presentation that González Casanova found persuasive, the French geographer François Lambert drew on widespread theories of dualism to characterize Brazil as a society divided into underdeveloped rural areas and industrial cities.Footnote 39 The US sociologist C. Wright Mills made one of the conference presentations most critical of Western models. Reiterating what economists from the Economic Commission on Latin America (ECLA) had been saying – that, though both North and South might both pursue industrialization, the paths would be different – he told his Latin American audience: ‘You are really on your own …. The answer for you is not available in historical Europe or in contemporary North America or in Soviet Russia …. My own hope is that you would liberate your cultural imaginations from all these other models, especially that of North America, and think freely upon what you really want.’Footnote 40
González Casanova took note of what Mills said that day, and Ricardo Pozas, who worked with González Casanova and developed one of the first published Mexican critiques of US anthropology, probably saw a note written by González Casanova that summarized the conference.Footnote 41 In early 1960, Mills visited Mexico and delivered a series of lectures on Marxism.Footnote 42 Pozas may have heard Mills or had access to the papers from the 1959 meeting, published in 1960. Certainly, Guillermo Bonfil Batalla – one of the authors of De eso que llaman and Pozas’ student – read the 1961 Spanish-language version of Mills' The sociological imagination, a book that included an extended critique of both Talcott Parsons' structural functionalism and the empiricism reigning in US social science. The sociological imagination critiqued the presumed value neutrality of social science and the reformism implicit in comparative analyses of specific cases. It argued that US sociologists had tended to
scatter their attention …. They have insisted that for any social phenomenon there surely must be a very great number of minute causes. Such ‘pluralistic causation’ as it is called, is quite serviceable to a liberal politics of ‘piecemeal’ reform. In fact, the idea that the causes of social events are necessarily numerous, scattered and minute, readily falls into the perspective of what may be called liberal practicality.Footnote 43
Mills questioned the cultural pluralism that anthropologists and others were trying to reconcile with universalism. He did not question the universalist pretensions of modernization theories.
Nor did Pozas. In a published review of the Spanish translation of Oscar Lewis' Five families, a book of first-person narratives of five Mexican families, four of them poor, living in the ‘culture of poverty’, the Mexican anthropologist harshly criticized Lewis’ empiricism, which he contrasted to Mills' critical, engaged sociology. (Pozas may have had personal motivations. His wife, Isabel Horcasitas, had been expelled from the ENAH following a dispute with Lewis, who supervised her during fieldwork in Tepoztlán.Footnote 44) Pozas claimed that Lewis’ work served US imperialism and he accused Lewis of being a spy. He declared that Lewis’ work was merely a descriptive amalgam of empirical cases; it was not theoretical; it could not explain the causes of poverty; and it was therefore unscientific. ‘Anthropologists should not be satisfied with simple description’, Pozas wrote. Their job was ‘to formulate syntheses in order to test them and to explain and unmask social realities, aiming research toward what is essential and transcendent in human relations, for practical purposes’.
Pozas also disputed Lewis’ assertion that the culture of poverty existed in multiple locations, seeing this assertion as a wrongheaded ‘comparison’ based on superficial similarities. Poverty, he asserted, had ‘different historical precedents and was linked to different forms of social organization’. Yet he did not believe that poverty should be analysed simply in relation to the conditions of specific contexts. Poverty in Mexico and Latin America was qualitatively different from poverty in developed countries. In England, poverty was caused by internal factors such as the poor distribution of resources; in China, by ‘droughts and other natural calamities outside of man's control’. But ‘in Mexico, the same as in Puerto Rico and all of Latin America (except Cuba), the principal cause of poverty lies in the fact that we are considered “underdeveloped” peoples and treated like “primitive” people because we are exploited by the capitalists inside in alliance with those outside’. The poor in Mexico and other Latin American countries were ‘subordinated colonial groups’ exploited by external powers. Those powers blocked the efforts of underdeveloped countries to improve their technology, and this allowed colonial powers to extract raw materials and sell expensive manufactured goods. Pozas thus asserted the ‘colonial’ difference of Latin America: its problems were ‘external’, even when the national bourgeoisie was implicated. But he also embraced the goal of technological and economic progress as defined in the United States. And he advocated the kind of totalizing social science that modernization theorists touted.Footnote 45
In a more restrained critique, published in 1962, Bonfil also drew on Mills but armed himself as well with the academic prestige of Manuel Gamio, a founding father of Mexican anthropology. According to Bonfil, Gamio had embraced ‘scientific advances originating abroad’ but had also ‘harshly criticized “the deadly foreignistic orientation that has prevailed in Mexico, our attachment to so-called classical canons, and our servile loyalty to academic opinions” ’.Footnote 46 Citing Mills, Bonfil rejected ideas of multiple causality that denied ‘patterns of historical development’, precluded value judgements, and justified piecemeal remedies. A decolonized anthropology, he said, should generate science: generalizing, useful, and predictive knowledge. Bonfil trumpeted an evolutionary materialist Marxism: ‘the ascendant evolution of humanity due at bottom to the dialectical development of the material conditions of life and change in the mode of production’. Recognizing that the emphases on the ‘external’ mirrored modernization theory's belief that change was diffused from the outside, Bonfil called for more attention to the agencies internal to societies. The task for critical intellectuals was ‘above all to stimulate the emergence of internal conditions that allow the normal evolution of backward peoples’.Footnote 47
In 1967, Bonfil and González Casanova delivered papers at a meeting convened by the Mexican government to discuss national planning. Bonfil underscored his arguments against ‘sterile empiricism’, stating that, in the ‘more advanced countries’, anthropology had progressed by generating basic generalizable knowledge. To catch up, Mexico should do the same. González Casanova, by contrast, called into question the usefulness of general knowledge, noting that the specific knowledge needed for economic development did not always generate general knowledge that advanced science and achieved international recognition. The latter, González Casanova believed, required theoretical work. However, because it needed to speak to an overly broad set of circumstances, it did not lead to useful applied knowledge. Bonfil saw the task of the anthropologist as applying general laws to specific instances to generate particular laws.Footnote 48
Thus in Mexico, as in the United States, there were a variety of positions regarding whether and how to account for differences within and across national borders. But even as scholars such as Herskovits and González Casanova insisted on the value of particular and applied knowledge, others increasingly subsumed difference. The universalism that resulted supported a bipolar global geopolitics, with many scholars portraying internal differences within nations as mere projections of differences between developed/underdeveloped (or modern/traditional, metropolitan/peripheral) that were products of a global capitalist system.
Internal colonialism
Despite González Casanova's scepticism regarding the usefulness of generalizations, he developed one of his own: the concept of internal colonialism. At the 1959 conference in Rio, Mills had suggested that ‘Given unequal development of the sort which, Professor Lambert has made so clear to us, they, the developed sections inside the underdeveloped world – in the capital and on the coast – are a curious sort of imperialist power, having internal colonies, as it were’.Footnote 49 González Casanova extended Lambert's insight, in the process drawing on ECLA's analysis of the unequal terms of trade between the metropolitan core and its periphery; the concept of ‘dependency’ which began to emerge from the analyses of ECLA; and analyses of the ‘Third World’, which took shape in Paris, where González Casanova and Celso Furtado of ECLA had studied.
González Casanova first formulated the concept of internal colonialism at a moment of relatively open dialogue. The 1963 essay in which the concept first appeared cited Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi, as well as Hoselitz, the French economist François Perroux, Gunnar Myrdal (a Swedish practitioner of geographical economic approaches), and Karl Marx's essay on ‘The British in India’.Footnote 50 An article that González Casanova had published the year before opened with a reference to Lambert.Footnote 51 Drawing from modernization theorists’ and Lambert's spatial understanding of heterogeneity (dualism), he argued that, whereas industrial societies were homogenous, heterogeneity characterized rural preindustrial countries. But he questioned the ‘abstract’ approach of theorists who assumed political and/or economic changes would necessarily and always lead to development. His experience in Mexico led him to ask whether countries such as Mexico that had achieved a degree of political and economic independence and initiated their ‘take-off’ would necessarily see a decline in their marginal population and increasing homogenization. Mexico might not conform to abstract laws. Theories of modernization had to be adapted.Footnote 52
As anti-colonial struggles made European colonialism and US imperialism increasingly visible, González Casanova and others became more pessimistic about US-style modernity and gradually left behind the diffusionism of modernization. By 1968, González Casanova was insisting that Mexico was no longer feudal, but it was not capitalist either. It remained mired in a semi-capitalist state:
The increase of productive forces, industrialization, urbanization, the growth of communications and the means of transportation which are promoted by semicapitalist dynamics, are not sufficient to break completely through the internal and external structure of the old colonial and semicolonial society, which at a later stage becomes the principal obstacle to the expansion of national and international markets, to the formation of the nation-state, and to the full expansion of capitalism itself.Footnote 53
Marxism and the anti-colonialism that González Casanova had experienced first-hand in Paris had clearly made their way into his thinking.
So, too, had an attention to race that perhaps drew force implicitly from US civil right movements.Footnote 54 In asserting that underdeveloped countries had ‘dual or plural structures’, González Casanova equated the geographical and economic concept of dual societies characterized by advanced industrial and backward rural sectors with the concept of ethnically stratified, plural societies. Colonies that were not settler colonies – González Casanova differentiated Mexico from the United States – contained ‘the “evolved European” and the “archaic Indian” (or archaic Negro) in the same region’.Footnote 55 The colonial and therefore racial nature of differences in Mexico – the existence of poor rural people who were indigenous – impeded the development of class relations and therefore development seen as a universal process of class formation. The concept of ‘colonialism’ underscored the relation of racial differences to underdevelopment and helped to explain the recalcitrant nature of poverty in countries such as Mexico. As André Gunder Frank would later note, this analysis failed to explain continuing racial inequality in the United States.
In relating internal, national conditions to their global context, González Casanova asserted continuities between analyses of domestic and international relations. The 1963 essay in which he introduced the notion of ‘internal colonialism’ opened by noting that political borders had influenced the formulation and use of sociological categories. Intellectuals applied concepts such as ‘civilization’ and ‘colonialism’ to international or universal phenomena, but they used ‘dual or plural society’, ‘class’, and ‘social status’ when analysing processes internal to nations. These divisions obscured continuities. Although formal colonialism might give way to political independence, countries such as Mexico continued to have a ‘colonial structure’ that reproduced forms of inequality, including ethnic inequality, that had characterized the unequal economic exchange of colonialism. In making this argument, González Casanova broached the issue of whether development was internal or external by arguing that the external was mirrored in the internal and that there was no sharp break between developed and developing worlds. He nonetheless suggested that settler colonies might more easily overcome racialized internal divisions that retarded development.Footnote 56
Polarization and the genesis of dependency theory
González Casanova's argument was taken up by Stavenhagen in a set of ‘Seven erroneous theses on Latin America’ published in 1965 in the Mexican daily El Día. Like González Casanova and Furtado, Stavenhagen had studied in Paris and was probably familiar with discussions of colonialism and dependency circulating among Parisian intellectuals. François Perroux, who demonstrated how markets reproduced inequality, had influenced both Furtado and ECLA. Stavenhagen studied with Georges Balandier, an Africanist who in 1951 coined the term ‘situation coloniale’, later popularized by Franz Fanon. In 1956, Balandier was perhaps the first to speak of economic ‘dependence’. Believing that economic inequities had roots in global rather than national dynamics, he criticized approaches that ‘viewed backward countries more in terms of their internal characteristics than in terms of the types of relations they have with the exterior. This is to fail to recognize what people in revolt insist on most: the “domination effect” they are subject to, the feeling of economic dependence that can render illusory the political liberties they have recovered.’ Balandier also argued for greater relativism in studies of underdeveloped countries and rejected approaches based on ‘our experience, our past and our preferences’. Equally importantly, Balandier drew on the work of the sociologists Louis Wirth of the University of Chicago and Raymond Kennedy of Yale University, as well as E. O. Walcker, to analyse race within the colonial situation, characterizing colonies as ‘plural societies’.Footnote 57
In ‘Seven erroneous theses’, Stavenhagen argued that ‘archaic’ areas were in no way separate from or subject to a distinct logic of development. Areas were made backward as they were incorporated into a mercantile capitalist economy. Modernization would not be diffused from urban Western society to underdeveloped rural areas. Writing pessimistically about struggles to break historical patterns, he noted that ‘diffusion’ had been going on in Latin America for over four hundred years without producing development. This led him to his most novel argument, one that he seemingly developed in concert with Gunder Frank, whom he had met while working at CENTRO in Rio de Janeiro in 1962–64: that development in the metropolis in fact produced underdevelopment in the periphery. The same process was replicated within each nation.Footnote 58 This is the insight that, building from ECLA, led to the development of dependency theory.
Stavenhagen insisted that the exploitation of the periphery by the metropole was both commercial and rooted in locally specific forms of labour relations.Footnote 59 By contrast, Frank, who simplified the thinking of his Latin American colleagues for an English-speaking audience, focused on commerce. This led him to characterize Latin America as part of a worldwide mercantile capitalist system that began with the Spanish conquest and consequently to reject the widespread view that Latin America was, even in part, ‘feudal’. In rejecting the feudalism thesis, which had been the doctrine of the Latin American communist parties, Frank also rejected the strategy of creating a pro-industrialization alliance between the working class and the progressive national bourgeoisie. Instead, he allied himself with the revolutionary Left. In an early essay in which he had labelled Mexico's agricultural sector ‘feudal’, Frank had given serious consideration to González Casanova's endorsement of ex-President Cárdenas’ reformist proclamation: ‘Support the institution and organize the people’. Yet he subsequently rejected that strategy, writing that ‘while the Mexican people “organize”, other Latin Americans will inevitably make revolutions far more radical than that of Mexico. As the Cuban Revolution has already done, these revolutions abroad will just as inevitably sharpen the antagonisms between Left and Right in Mexico itself.’Footnote 60
Stavenhagen, who placed the word ‘feudal’ in quotation marks when referring to rural Indian–Ladino relations in a 1963 essay, noted in ‘Seven theses’ that the national bourgeoisie would not break the ‘feudal’ latifundia. Development had and would come about through ‘popular movements’. Frank went further and argued that development could not occur until a given country exited the capitalist world system.Footnote 61 He believed that his Brazilian Marxist friends wrongly focused, like Stavenhagen, on production. They therefore saw change as coming from internal, national sources. Frank criticized the Marxist Brazilian scholar Nelson Werneck Sodré, saying that Sodré did not
understand what the hell went on in Brazil. He is a victim of his marxist categories …. Marxist friends here support their view of the matter by arguing that inside relations are really ultimately determinant – ergo, the feudal relations on the farm are and the market relations ‘outside’ the farm can't. The trouble is they can't tell inside from outside.
Presumably the outside context mattered most.Footnote 62
In a seminar on González Casanova's Democracia en México, Frank critiqued González Casanova for his dualism. Although González Casanova only haltingly advocated intensification of capitalist reform, Frank's criticism centred on the evolutionary, diffusionist optimism implicit in a strategy that viewed contemporary Mexico as only partially capitalist and the settler colonies as able to transcend internal divisions. He made reference to the United States, where racial inequality persisted, to make his point:
To insist that Mexico is pre-capitalist and it will not become capitalist as long as there is internal colonialism and until Mexico fails to become more or less equal to the United States of America is theoretically absurd and it contradicts the sad empirical reality of a country whose economic internal colonialism fills the press around the world with the slogan ‘Freedom, now’ a hundred years after the emancipation of the black population, which constitutes ten per cent of the US population (like the ten per cent of Mexico's population that is Indian)….Footnote 63
Frank thus borrowed from González Casanova the notion that relations internal to the nation, as well as those between colonial or imperial centres and their peripheries, contributed to inequality within the nation. But he believed pessimistically that capitalism would not bring development. Optimism lay only in Cuba. The notion that national elites were complicit in underdevelopment was implicit in the internal colonialism formulation. Frank extended it, while perpetuating a view of exploitation as embedded in space. At the same time, he stressed the role of economics and the international system, and he created a totalizing formulation that negated González Casanova's and Stavenhagen's incipient efforts to integrate more detailed evaluations of local conditions into an analysis of global capitalism. He shared a good deal with some of the cruder versions of modernization theory.
The polarization of Mexican anthropology
Frank lived briefly in Mexico in 1965. By that time, the Cold War and Cold War anti-imperialism had escalated following the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1964 and the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Social mobilization intensified in Mexico, and with it the tenor of the debates among anthropologists. In this context, the ENAH professor Daniel Cazes articulated a more radical position that came to be called ‘committed’ anthropology, in contrast to the ‘critical’ anthropology of Stavenhagen, Bonfil, and González Casanova. Cazes suggested that Mexican anthropologists who had tried to solve the social problems of native peoples had become bureaucrats who implemented piecemeal reforms that headed off protest and substantive change. In the end, mainstream developmentalist indigenismo served Mexican capitalism by integrating Indians as proletarian workers and consumers into the national economy. Cazes believed that the work of Stavenhagen and González Casanova held ‘the kernel of a new ideology that tries to ground itself in Marxism’, but he saw their views as ‘conciliatory’ and as diverting attention from ‘class struggle’.Footnote 64
Cazes criticized official definitions of who was ‘indigenous’ because they emphasized culture, language, and belonging to a local community, while presumably ignoring economic conditions or reducing them to issues of technology and forest management. He called the Mexican anthropologists too ‘superstructural’ and not ‘materialist’ enough. But beyond suggesting that indigenous identity was linked to global processes that isolated native peoples in ‘regions of refuge’ – again projecting difference onto space – he could only define native populations as ‘particular strata of the social class of the exploited, which have subsisted as such because of that isolation’. Rather than advocating autonomy for native peoples, Cazes suggested that they join the struggle of the ‘enemies of the bourgeoisie’. ‘Are there differences in the [material] base’, he asked, ‘that would allow us to situate the indigenous community very differently than the rural community in general? … Aren't there rural “mestizo” communities that are just as isolated as the indigenous communities, with just as many non-European cultural traits, with clearly American somatic types …?’ Given essential similarities between the native and non-native poor and their eventual incorporation into the proletariat, Cazes believed that anthropologists should become ‘scholars who consciously place themselves at the side of a science that will serve the class that most closely represents the interests of humanity’.Footnote 65 Members of the ENAH's Committee of Revolutionary Students spoke similarly of themselves as the champions of ‘the masses’ and ‘exploited majorities’. Students were filling in as a ‘provisional vanguard’ that would fold their demands into those of the proletariat.Footnote 66
Within the ENAH, students increasingly studied the literature of world revolution. The school's student committee for political struggle recommended the writings of Régis Debray, Mao Tse Tung, and Frank. It mimeographed and distributed books on the Cultural Revolution in China and the Black Panther Party, works by dependency theorists, including Frank's ‘On the indigenous question’ (‘Sobre el problema indígena’), essays by Stavenhagen, and a publication by the Soviet ethnographer S. A. Tokarev. Beyond Stavenhagen's work, which was primarily theoretical, the only publication that dealt with Mexico or was written by someone resident in Mexico was Alejandro Marroquín's ‘Introducción al mercado indígena’ (‘Introduction to the indigenous market’).Footnote 67
At the same time, radical students doubted the value of fieldwork. In 1952, while still a student, Stavenhagen had carried out fieldwork in Papaloapan, where the Mexican government was preparing to displace indigenous communities to build a massive dam. Mexican planners had brought in anthropologists to help the Otomí villagers adapt to their new homes and soften the negative impact of capitalist modernization. Based on his experiences, Stavenhagen later repudiated this type of project. His contact with the Otomí gave him the emotional and intellectual, as well as political, connection to native peoples that sustained a professional career devoted to championing the rights of native peoples. In 2001, he became the first UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous People.Footnote 68 Subsequent generations of ENAH students were less likely to have that type of experience: a document drafted by an ENAH student committee in 1970 noted that fieldwork experiences vital to students’ ‘scientific training and link with the workers’ had fallen by the wayside. ‘Right now’, the students declared, ‘we lack clarity regarding the academic and political importance of fieldwork’. As students moved toward Marxism, they argued for more instruction in theory and emphasized the importance of theory in shaping research questions. This happened as the Mexican state devoted more and more resources to development in indigenous communities.Footnote 69
Meanwhile, the ENAH had been severely shaken by the repression following the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. As a reprisal for his participation in the revolts of that year, Mexico's Finance Ministry had suspended the salary of Bonfil, then an ENAH professor. In November, the PRI president, Alfonso Martínez Domínguez, declared that there were too many schools of anthropology in Mexico, a statement that students took as a threat to shut down the ENAH. Even more serious, the agreement between the ENAH and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), whereby the UNAM granted master's degrees to ENAH students, was being rescinded as the UNAM prepared to open its own school of anthropology. ENAH students believed that the creation of a new school of anthropology was aimed at creating a more quiescent student body. To protest, they and the ENAH faculty staged a month-long strike. Eight of the ENAH ethnography professors threatened to resign, including Stavenhagen, Bonfil, and Cazes. This group of professors came to be called ‘the magnificent seven [sic]’, in reference to the 1960 film in which seven gunmen from the United States taught Mexican villagers to protect themselves from bandits. It was an apt metaphor. In the film, the villagers hand the seven over to the attacking bandits after a dispute. The ENAH's students likewise denounced their professors, labelling them reformist. Because Bonfil had resigned, the students said, he had ended the protest before it had achieved its goals. The students also denounced the critical anthropology of Professors Angel Palerm and Bonfil because it was presumably aimed at convincing ‘the bourgeoisie that they “also have something valuable to offer” ’. They declared that the professor suggested bureaucratic solutions to the problems faced by the ENAH and failed to face head-on the broad issues at play.Footnote 70
Conclusion
The anthropological militancy on display in Mexico was not limited to that country. In the United States, the Marxist anthropologist Charles Valentine rejected prior analyses of Afro-American inequality and stressed the explanatory primacy of external, economic forces, writing: ‘Both material resources and human events from external sources are ultimately prior to, and therefore separate from, the culture of any human collectivity.’ In England, critics of post-war Africanist anthropology, including the so-called Manchester School, disparaged prior studies that had looked at isolated communities and tribes and called for more analysis of the relation between presumably modern and traditional sectors. Kathleen Gough, a British Marxist working in the United States, took up this critique in a forum on the social responsibility of anthropologists in which she declared anthropology to be the ‘child of Western imperialism’ and asked why anthropology had studied isolated communities but not imperialism itself. Gough drew inspiration from the Manchester School and the Latin Americanists Steward and Eric Wolf, as well as from an edited volume by Immanuel Wallerstein that included Balandier's analysis of the colonial situation.Footnote 71
Anti-imperialist scholars such as Gough also championed activist anthropology and decried pretensions of scientific neutrality. In Colombia, Orlando Fals Borda cited Guerreiro Ramos to argue for the futility of a neutral science and the need for engaged, applied science. In the wake of the discovery of Project Camelot and CIA-sponsored research supporting the Vietnam War, anthropologists used their professional authority to condemn the US role in the war. But they also denounced reformist colleagues who countered US government uses of social science by retreating to the ivory tower. Gerald Berreman's contribution to the forum on social responsibility suggested that ‘the notion that contemporary world events are irrelevant to the professional concerns of anthropologists’ was a ‘sterile professionalism and fear of commitment’. He and others suggested that scientists were responsible not only for what they wrote but also for how it was applied.Footnote 72
These scholars, like intellectuals in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, took inspiration from Cuba and socialist models of revolution, and they increasingly believed that wholesale structural change would come about through class struggle and the overthrow of capitalism. In advocating sweeping change, many scholars saw only ‘universal’ social classes – as opposed to local, specific communities – as legitimate agents of change. In the process, they distanced themselves from empirical research regarding how communities and groups participated in local, regional, national, and global markets for labour and goods. The concept of internal colonialism promised to knit together the different levels of analysis and to combine attention to economics with attention to race and ethnicity. But Latin American radicals brushed aside the analysis of internal colonialism because its focus on internal and cultural factors was presumably reformist, piecemeal. By contrast, in the United States, where anthropology had focused primarily on ‘the other’ abroad, scholars and activists mobilized the concept of internal colonialism to criticize inequalities internal to the United States. Unlike their Mexican colleagues’, US anthropologists’ critiques were compatible with the trumpeting of previously marginalized forms of racial and ethnic solidarity, in contrast to the more radical forms of dependency analyses articulated in Latin America and Africa, which focused dogmatically on universal social classes.
One of the goals of certain dependency approaches was to account for heterogeneity within capitalism, and Marxism could help pinpoint the relation of local events to global economic systems. Stavenhagen focused on how labour was organized at the local level and in tandem with external events. González Casanova insisted on applied knowledge, adapted to local realities. Even some critical anthropologists who rejected the studies of the past for their localism embraced the empirical findings of these studies and argued that they should be used for subsequent structural analysis.Footnote 73 Yet by the late 1960s scholars increasingly applied Marxist theory mechanically. Revolution, they believed, was the inevitable outcome of global, universal, structural economic laws. The numerical certainty and presumed universality of economic models, whether socialist or capitalist, as well as a fetishized faith in technological progress, promoted decontextualized analyses. In the end, analyses grounded in dependency approaches echoed modernization theory and the broader post-Second World War intellectual climate even as they increasingly saw Latin America as having a different history, one that would generate distinct historical laws.
In projecting economic relations spatially onto a global grid of capitalism, Latin America's leftist intellectuals tended to ignore what was specific to particular times and places, carving the globe into imperial and anti-imperial blocs. Their analysis helped a Latin American Left differentiate itself from a more inward-looking and more nationally oriented but also more reformist Old Left. In Mexico, where nationalism had been so fully appropriated by the ruling party, a universalist rhetoric that bypassed nationalism was particularly appealing. Mexico's ‘committed’ intellectuals associated empirical research and applied anthropology with an imperialist US social science based on plural causality and focused on culture. In making this claim, the anthropological rebels subsumed a culture seen as local and particular to economics viewed as global and universal. In this context, Mexico's rebel anthropologists could not find a way to talk about what, if anything, made native peoples different from the poor in general.
In characterizing ‘imperialist’, piecemeal anthropology as cultural, Mexico's rebel anthropologists glossed over the ways in which anthropologists had tried to reconcile economic modernization, broadly understood, and cultural difference. Melville Herskovits had rejected the imperialist implications of universal laws derived from the experiences of the West. Comparative political scientists, even when they posited the United States as a norm, used empirical knowledge as presumably comparable data points to be correlated statistically, and they recognized the need for specific, often local, knowledge. Steward adopted a materialist and evolutionary viewpoint, but remained attuned to the multiple paths that might lead to a similar endpoint. His formulations shared a great deal with an emerging dependency theory that accepted prevailing ideas about what constituted economic and technological progress but insisted that Latin America's path would be different. Mexico's new generation of anthropologists labelled these approaches ‘imperialist’.
The rebels of the late 1960s attacked earlier critical intellectuals for their reformism too. But the later rebels also built on an epistemological critique that first emerged in the 1950s, as intellectuals from around the world met in new venues. By 1960 – more than a decade before the appearance in English in the United States of volumes decrying the ‘colonial’ nature of anthropology – Germani, Ramos, and others were already questioning the neutrality of the social sciences developed in the United States. But in contrast to later insurgents, earlier critics embraced the possibility of a neutral science that was neither stridently nationalist nor anti-imperialist. Paz and other Mexican intellectuals argued for a locally inflected cosmopolitanism. That vision lost sway after 1965, as the ways in which the United States and the Soviet Union used science as a Cold War weapon made the possibility of truly disinterested knowledge seem unlikely. Nevertheless, scholars such as Bonfil and González Casanova continued to struggle with the question of how to combine particular knowledge with theory.
Today, scholars of global and transnational history still struggle with how to attend to the particular while generating knowledge that transcends the local. We, too, characterize power in spatial terms and argue, like the anthropologists of the 1960s, about the scale at which to study it. We are now more sceptical of the ability of our scholarship to be value-free and more attuned to difference. Recent analyses that draw on the internal colonialism formulation are starting to help us see culture and race as global, along with capitalism. But we have not yet found a way to generate global knowledge while attending to multiplicity or to avoid seeing internal-national and external-global as counterposed. Nor have we found a consistent vocabulary that allows us to talk about contexts that may be small (and nonetheless critically important) or large (and not important at all) or not amenable to a spatial representation of any kind. We need better arguments to justify our historically grounded analyses of specific contexts, and we need frameworks to describe better the varying spatial dimensions of economy or culture and how they are intertwined. Perhaps most importantly, we must still learn more about how our own geospatial and geopolitical awareness, and the contexts that mould it, shape our understanding of the past.
Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt teaches Latin American History at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is author of Gendered compromises: political cultures and the state in Chile, 1920–1950 and co-edited Race and nation in modern Latin America. She is writing a book that tracks how scholarship on development, race, and poverty travelled between Mexico and the United States from 1920 to 1970.
