Constructing, Destroying, and Reconstructing Difference: The Mexican Nation and Cultural Difference

Abstract

Anthropological studies of Mexico in the twentieth century (like anthropology elsewhere) began with a heavy emphasis on fieldwork that usually lasted a year in a single community. By the late 1960s, under the influence especially of Eric Wolf in the US and Mexican anthropologists such as Guillermo Bonfil Batalla and Arturo Warman, anthropology's community studies had begun taking into account the larger national and international political economy as well as the historical context. Many of the community studies of the 1970s and early 1980s (such as those by June Nash, Guillermo de la Pena, and Frances Rothstein) looked also at what Wolf called extra-local relations and used a diachronic perspective. In the 1980s anthropology took a postmodern turn. Much that had been written before was strongly criticized for being static