“Seven Erroneous Theses about Latin America” and the Emergence of a New Mexican Anthropology

Critiques of Indigenismo and Mexican Anthropology’s Theoretical and Political Turn

Stavenhagen’s critique of indigenismo was linked to his training as a social anthropologist at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (National School of Anthropology and History) in the 1950s. At the time, research on sociocultural change among indigenous groups was led by Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Alfonso Villa Rojas, and Fernando Cámara Barbachano. Stavenhagen began fieldwork as part of a team created to relocate indigenous inhabitants displaced by the construction of the Miguel Alemán Dam in the Papaloapan River basin (Cámara, 1996). A few years later he joined the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Indigenist Institute—INI) and began research on indigenous groups in Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Veracruz. This provided him with firsthand testimony regarding the ambiguities and contradictions generated by indigenista policies, raising the question what “integration” meant if not the gradual disappearance of the cultural characteristics of the country’s various indigenous groups. What would indigenous peoples gain from political integration if, in the process, they lost their language, traditions, customs, myths and beliefs, social solidarity, and ethnic and cultural identity?

Driven by the apparent contradictions of indigenismo, as he recently explained (Stavenhagen, 2015), Stavenhagen began to rethink the issue of so-called indigenous underdevelopment in Mexico and the government actions in favor of “modernization” and “national progress” of the mid-twentieth century. His concerns regarding acculturation, uneven national development, and the resulting stratification gradually matured during his time as a teacher at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales (National School of Political and Social Sciences), then presided over by Pablo González Casanova. His doctoral thesis in sociology, defended in 1964 at the University of Paris under the direction of Georges Balandier, was entitled “Comparative Essay on Rural Social Classes and Social Stratification in Some Underdeveloped Countries” (Zapata, 2012: 330).

During 1950s and 1960s, Stavenhagen and González Casanova began a dialogue around the concept of “internal colonialism,” established by González Casanova in his pioneering work La democracia en México (1965). The concept entailed relationships of domination not just between nations but also within nations that were ethnically heterogeneous in which some ethnic groups were linked to the dominant classes and others to the dominated (González Casanova, 2006). In order to flesh out this concept, the two men began asking how a country’s native peoples could become objects of domination and cultural exploitation without this process’s being separate from social class. As a result, they questioned the idea that internal colonialism would be eliminated by “progress,” “development,” or “modernity.” Both eschewed the notion that this was a solely economic or cultural problem; they saw it as predominantly political and related to the nation-state. Stavenhagen specifically questioned the idea that Latin American countries were dual societies (the first thesis), the spread of development as a one-way flow from the center to the periphery and its use in national and regional progress (the second thesis), and the hegemonic mestizo identity that formed the basis of the national integration project (the sixth thesis). These issues would feed new and critical approaches in Mexican social anthropology, challenging the integrationist and “modernizing” policies being implemented in indigenous territories.at the time.

“Seven Erroneous Theses about Latin America” pushed researchers beyond local “community” studies and led them to address socioeconomic differences between rural and urban areas, indigenous and nonindigenous populations, and developed and underdeveloped regions within Latin American countries themselves. Stavenhagen rejected the concept of a “dual society” previously used to explain inequality, arguing that both poles of the spectrum (developed and underdeveloped) were the result of a single historical process. The issue was not the existence of two separate and unequal societies but the relationships between them—in other words, the fact that the development of one society was based on the use of cheap labor and raw materials provided by the other and that “backward” regions played the role of “internal colonies” within the national society rather than just being areas untouched by development.

These ideas challenged developmental functionalism and the concepts regarding the “spread of development” that had characterized the indigenista era (Medina, 1983): essentially, the progress of modern and industrial areas within a single country or region took place at the expense of its backward or traditional areas (Stavenhagen, 1973 [1965]). Stavenhagen’s work also offered a new perspective on indigenous issues during a decade characterized by authoritarian governments and dictatorships. Multicultural diversity within nations had become an “ethnic problem” to be resolved either via violence and the silencing of these groups or via integrationist policies that promoted miscegenation (Bonfil, 1981). According to Stavenhagen, miscegenation would not change the social structure of Latin American countries, let alone promote national integration; integration would in fact, remain a fallacy while relations of internal colonialism were maintained. Furthermore, the miscegenation thesis masked racist prejudice against indigenous peoples, seeking to reduce their ways of life and condemning them to a slow cultural agony under a false discourse of national integration.

Stavenhagen’s work managed to unveil the political charge of the indigenous issue in anthropology, stating that theories that have considered indigenous cultures backward, stagnant, and lacking vitality are, by default, political. The politicization of the country’s ethnic configuration was reinforced by the growth of indigenous movements during the mid-twentieth century, after the First Inter-American Indigenist Congress, held in Pátzcuaro in 1940, where indigenous people showed that they no longer needed mestizo spokespeople to defend them or address their problems. In fact, they organized that congress with the explicit purpose of challenging state policies that affected them (Stavenhagen, 1975: 410).

Overall, Stavenhagen questioned the “healthy distance,” “neutrality,” and “objectivity” that his mentors had instilled in him in his professional development; it was difficult to maintain a balance between his empathy for the indigenous population and his responsibility as an INI representative. Critical reflection on what was, at the time, known as “applied anthropology” led him to commit himself to so-called action anthropology (Stavenhagen, 2015), a concept that would reform Mexican anthropological practice during the second half of the twentieth century. This was reinforced by some international events that left their mark on Latin America, especially the emergence of guerrilla movements after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959.

In this context, accusations of complicity between “neutral” anthropological practices, counterinsurgencies, and espionage came swiftly. We have, for example, Johan Galtung’s 1964 denunciation of Hugo Nutini’s work on social change in Chile and Colombia, projects supported by the Office of Special Investigations of the American University in Washington and the U.S. Department of State. This led to the revelation of the Camelot and Simpático plans, intelligence programs based on social anthropological research that sought to use methodological instruments (surveys on values and psychological perceptions of national thought and conduct) to determine a population’s availability in an “internal war” and identify “degrees of confidence” in the government to develop counterinsurgency programs in regions with revolutionary potential (Gallini, 1975; Manno and Bednarcik, 1968).

In Mexico, indigenous policies and challenges to culturalist action anthropology were reinforced by the 1968 student protests, which questioned limited freedom of expression and lack of democracy as well as the conceptual bases that underpinned contemporary state policies. The “Seven Erroneous Theses” fit into what García and Medina (1983) called the political bankruptcy of Mexican social anthropology. From there on, anthropological practice began to adopt a critical stance with regard to the theoretical/political paradigms behind indigenista research, as well as state attitudes toward indigenous peoples (Warman et al., 1970). This diversified the anthropological field of study and its theoretical framework, doing away with any single theoretical dominant conception; the bases of thematic polarization ranged from Marxism, theory of marginality, and development critique to emerging sociological perspectives, including studies of sociocultural change, cultural studies, theories of social action, and interpretive approaches based on the analysis of symbolic processes. This opened up new fields of research focusing on gender studies, social movements, urban issues, popular culture, democracy, and political participation, among many others. A lot of this work was published by the journal Nueva Antropología. ³

Theoretical and Research Field Diversification

Theoretical reconfigurations and research polarization during the 1970s led to a rejection of so-called applied anthropology and its indigenista approach. Most challengers began to endorse the idea of action anthropology so as to engage with indigenous decolonization struggles across the Latin American political arena. Stavenhagen’s (1967) work on development and acculturation from the standpoint of internal colonialism played a crucial role in this regard. The colonial relationship that subjected the indigenous population well into the mid-twentieth century was the point of departure for Guillermo Bonfil’s (1972) deconstruction of the indio as a colonial supraethnic category that overlooked the specificities of the groups it included in favor of a particular relationship between them and other sectors of the global social system to which they belonged. For Bonfil, “indio” denoted the condition of the colonized and necessarily referenced the colonial relationship. Thus, indigenous groups were stigmatized as “different,” “lower,” or “backward,” justifying the state’s civilizing intent.

Bonfil’s text was widely discussed both academically and politically and memorably contributed to the Symposium on Interethnic Friction in South America held in Barbados in January 1971, culminating in the Barbados I and II statements (Bartolomé, 2006). This in turn led to the first group of critical anthropologists (including Ricardo Pozas, Enrique Valencia, Guillermo Bonfil, Mercedes Olivera, Margarita Nolasco, and Arturo Warman) who decried indigenismo as an integrationist policy whereby subsuming indigenous communities into the capitalist system meant their dissolution. In particular, they sought to highlight the “Western” world’s unfavorable effects on indigenous communities. Integration into the capitalist system was rejected and the right to indigenous identity validated. This theoretical/political approach was later termed “ethnicist” (Sánchez, 1987).

This critical anthropology emerged alongside another trend that questioned the relations of domination between the Mexican state and indigenous populations from a Marxist perspective. This group, led by Héctor Díaz-Polanco and Gilberto López y Rivas, maintained that so-called indigenous societies should not be conceived as “primitive,” “precapitalist,” or alien to capitalist development and the national society to which they belonged. They argued that modern ethnic groups did not precede or exist independent of capitalism—their sociocultural position was closely related to the global system that included them—and their social and cultural liberation and the elimination of oppression and discrimination therefore required an end to capitalist relations (Díaz-Polanco, 1985).

Stavenhagen’s view of internal colonialism was at the root of the heated debates between ethnicists and ethno-Marxists. These theoretical reworkings of miscegenation, acculturation, and national development contributed to the undermining of the ideological bases of continental indigenismo, turning indigenous autonomy into a fundamental part of the debates involving the state, the nation, and democracy (Díaz-Polanco, 1985). As stated by Burguete (2010), Stavenhagen’s critique of “internal colonialism” and development led to innovative conceptualizations of the ethnic and class issues that permeated all of Latin America, as well as the theoretical foundations of a new paradigm of autonomy as opposed to the old assimilationist one.

Stavenhagen’s seminal work also impacted indigenous struggles for autonomy and indigenous rights, opening the way for legal anthropology (Iturralde, 2006). Following the Barbados statements, a group of anthropologists including Stavenhagen, Bonfil, Díaz-Polanco, López y Rivas, and Alicia Castellanos worked with indigenous people to construct new legal arguments and provide a solid conceptual background for challenging hegemonic interpretations of international law. They claimed the restitution of indigenous self-determination as “native peoples,” possessors of ancestral rights to their territories, defying the nation-state model as well as the “one state, one people, one nation” principle of international law. Thus the emerging Latin American indigenous movement managed to put the issue of indigenous rights on the international agenda, regularly addressing the UN and reminding the world that millions of indigenous peoples around the globe were still subject to internal colonialism and had a right to decolonization (Burguete, 2010: 74).

Another offshoot of Stavenhagen’s work during the 1970s revolved around the meaning and relevance of the peasantry in Mexico, specifically in connection with the process of capitalist accumulation. This controversy led to the campesinista and descampesinista factions. As de la Peña (2008) points out, this controversy must be set within a wider context: that of the dependency theory elaborated by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean during the 1960s, which defied a unilinear scheme of social change that did not take into account conflicting and asymmetric relations. While “Seven Erroneous Theses” radically questioned dominant ideas on underdevelopment, Stavenhagen’s Las clases sociales en las sociedades agrarias (1969) avoided reductionist explanations and explored the complex relations between social organization and local cultures, markets, national policies, and international powers. Researchers were encouraged to address the political condition of peasant communities and their conservative, revolutionary, or potentially subversive tendencies. Descampesinistas claimed that the Mexican peasants had no control over their means of production and were therefore destined to become hired agricultural labor. Some viewed peasants as passive and lacking in revolutionary political initiative and saw their becoming proletarians as promising the eventual gestation of the necessary awareness for social transformation (R. Bartra, 1974). Campesinistas like Paré (1977) and Armando Bartra (1979) maintained that the exchange of products and goods between peasants and capitalists revealed strategies of adaptation and survival allowing the coexistence of precapitalist and capitalist modes of production that were complementary rather than contradictory.

By the end of the 1960s, the likes of Victoria Novelo, Lourdes Arizpe, Larissa Lomnitz, Jorge Alonso, and Néstor García Canclini began to question the exclusive study of indigenous populations as Mexican anthropology’s central problem. Interest in issues like the agrarian problem, labor struggles, the working class, factory workers, urbanization, popular culture, cultural consumption, and urban popular movements diversified the fields of study across social anthropology (Portal and Ramírez, 2010). Urbanization intensified during this period of developmental policies, leading anthropologists to ponder migration, urban poverty, and popular urban movements among those struggling for housing (Arizpe, 1975; Lomnitz, 1975). This kind of research was largely approached through the theory of marginality and Marxism. The labor movements of the 1970s led to research on industrialization and the Mexican working class, focusing on the sociocultural specificity of this group, its clashes with the state and capital, and forms and mechanisms of resistance (Alonso, 1980). The anthropology of labor documented social relations in various sectors of industry and their relationship with the domestic sphere and family labor (Novelo, 1979). Popular culture and cultural consumption became important topics (García Canclini, 1982). The broader context, in this regard, was the relationship between tradition and modernity in Latin America, along with assessments of the notion of culture as a symbolic process (Portal and Ramírez, 2010). All these reconfigurations show how progress in empirical research on new topics of study, along with the incorporation of new theoretical perspectives, gave this discipline a boost toward the end of the twentieth century.

The Anthropological Legacy of “Seven Erroneous Theses about Latin America”

Mexican anthropology since 1968 has expanded enormously, extending to the regional and global processes that have affected Mexican groups and communities while incorporating new theoretical and working approaches—rural and urban studies, cultural analysis, research on political practices, and more—all of which went well beyond studies focused on indigenous cultural elements to promote national integration. What this means is not that research on indigenous peoples is no longer conducted but that now it adopts a variety of approaches, including autonomist and ethnicist stances that employ internal colonialism as a theoretical/political core concept.

Stavenhagen’s contributions are also methodological: the situation of the researcher doing fieldwork and the need to rethink anthropological practice by taking a stance with regard to the groups or problems being studied. He was one of the first Mexican anthropologists to question the idea that a field researcher could be “neutral” and should undertake work in the most “objective” way possible. We can perhaps include him as a practitioner of what would later be known as “reflexive anthropology,” based on recognizing the biases generated by intersubjectivity and the position occupied by the researcher, which necessarily affects the context studied and its interpretation. Through action anthropology, Stavenhagen found a dialogic solution to the dilemmas posited by the oppressive interventions associated with applied anthropology. He assumed that any anthropologist (or social researcher) represented the interests of the society to which he or she belonged and could appear in other cultural contexts through an exercise of political power in which “neutrality” and “objectivity” had no place.

Finally, we are invited to think critically about the role played by Mexican anthropology in the twenty-first century, especially in the face of current national and global problems. This question opens up several possibilities. On the one hand, we must urgently analyze the relations between Mexican anthropology and the Mexican state so that this discipline can once again play an active role in guiding government action. Pressing problems include human rights, inequality (cultural, social, and political), environmental imbalance, violence, racism, territorial dispossession, increased poverty, sociocultural changes, and, of course, deficient democracy. On the other hand, we must address the ways in which new global environments affect our “traditional” way of doing anthropology, methodologically as well as in terms of issues and topics. While this scenario poses new challenges, it does not prevent us from reviewing our now classic approaches to anthropology. The work of some of our major writers, as is the case with Stavenhagen, can undoubtedly shed some light on how to approach the new shapes taken by those old problems that have historically characterized our social structure both in Mexico and across Latin America.