Indian Cultures in Mexico City

Abstract

AbstractHow do we stop the movement of society for an instant without interrupting it? This, at the heart of it, has always been the basic problem for an anthropologist. How do we capture, describe and analyze the life of a society and at the same time explain how it is changing? Change used to take place gradually and intermittently, easy to keep track of when traditional societies lived in isolation. Today, however, modern societies are increasingly fluid, permeated by and interwoven with Western capitalism. This is why it is more convenient for anthropologists to study a small community by itself, or better yet, an island, like one of the Trobriands: a closed, finite space, without the messiness of cultural limits that blur and bleed into the flow of another culture. Hence, too, the usefulness of a living, for one or two years, but in the end, a finite time, in an Indian community. Because in this slice of time, the life of that society is frozen in the researcher’s imagination, and years later she can continue to spin the skein of her interpretation. Cutting out blocks of time and space gives us the advantage of an uninterrupted observation of an encapsulated culture. How to study urban culture in a megalopolis? This chapter looks at Indian Culture in Mexico City.KeywordsMexico CityIndian CultureIndigenous CultureLost CityGolden JewelleryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.