Deborah Poole – A Companion to Latin American Anthropology

Автор: Deborah Poole
Название книги: A Companion to Latin American Anthropology
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Прочая историческая литература
Страницы: 554
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Comprised of 24 newly commissioned chapters, this defining reference volume on Latin America introduces English-language readers to the debates, traditions, and sensibilities that have shaped the study of this diverse region.
Contributors include some of the most prominent figures in Latin American and Latin Americanist anthropology
Offers previously unpublished work from Latin America scholars that has been translated into English explicitly for this volume
Includes overviews of national anthropologies in Mexico, Cuba, Peru, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, and Brazil, and is also topically focused on new research
Draws on original ethnographic and archival research
Highlights national and regional debates
Provides a vivid sense of how anthropologists often combine intellectual and political work to address the pressing social and cultural issues of Latin America

In 1968, an article entitled “Anthropology and Imperialism” in the US journal
Monthly Review challenged anthropologists to confront the worrying gap that seemed
to separate their academic discipline from the political passions and complexities of a
modernizing, capitalist, and militarized world. Arguing that “anthropology is a child
of Western imperialism,” the article’s author, Kathleen Gough, charged that anthropologists
had ignored this reality to act, either implicitly or explicitly, as defenders of
their nations’ colonial and imperial projects. Although some anthropologists had
begun to study processes of urban migration, proletarianization, and social change,
Gough argued that the hardening of imperial and revolutionary currents would now
oblige them to expand their reach even further to include revolutionary movements,
nationalist identities, and the political aspirations of the marginal or subject peoples
with whom anthropologies had always worked.
In subsequent years, as anthropologists and their subjects have together moved
through the antiwar and decolonization movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the
postcolonial critique of the 1980s, and the rise in the 1990s of identity based, sectarian,
and antisystemic politics, Gough’s charge has lost its radical edge to assume
instead the implicit force of a received truth. Anthropology today is invested in a wide
range of ethical, political and humanitarian debates and most anthropologists readily
accept the argument that their discipline should both be politically engaged and
embrace distinctive, even discrepant political voices. As it has moved through crisis
and recovery, the discipline has been significantly expanded. Anthropologists now
study pretty much everything, from laboratory scientists and development workers, to
financial markets, genomes and transnational political movements. Thus, if anthropology
can still be somewhat broadly defined as “the study of other cultures and
societies,” the location of that “other” has been left up for grabs: The other is both
out there in the world and inside the very methodologies, theoretical claims, and
epistemologies that define the work of anthropology. However, although anthropology
may well have lost its original claim to have a distinctive subject matter – the “non-
Western” or “primitive” cultures of the world – its recovery has brought a new claim
to disciplinary distinction grounded in methodologies of encounter and acknowledgment.
Anthropology has thus grown, somewhat unevenly, into the social science discipline
that is best positioned to acknowledge the philosophical and ethical priority of
alterity as the necessary grounds for articulating responsible (and, in Gough’s terms,
nonimperialistic) claims to political and scientific knowledge. This move is, perhaps,
best observed in anthropologists’ growing commitment to redefine the political and
ethical force of their discipline through a critical engagement with such traditional
anthropological methodologies and concepts as ethnography, comparison, locality,
culture, tradition, and indigeneity.
The Latin American anthropologies surveyed in this Companion offer a privileged
perspective on the relevance, force and passion of anthropology as a discipline
that studies and embraces both alterity and activism. Indeed, the very idea that
anthropology could be anything but engaged is one that does not resonate easily
with the experience of anthropologists working in Latin America. Since its emergence
as a field of scientific study in the 19th century, the discipline took its cues
from new liberal states whose national and cultural identities were formed in a complex
dialogue with their Spanish and Portuguese colonizers. Throughout their history,
Latin American anthropologists have also had to contend with the cultural and
academic imperialism of their powerful neighbor to the north. Many have had to
carry out their research in the shadow of repressive governments and dictatorships
who were benefactors of US economic and military support. More recently still,
Latin American anthropologists have been challenged by the demands of their own
research “subjects” for the expanded participation of indigenous and other subaltern
anthropologists.
The chapters collected in this Companion offer an entry into these experiences,
histories and debates that comprise Latin American anthropology. They tell the story
of anthropologies that developed in tandem with the liberal nation-state, and of
anthropologists who often played critical roles in defining both the ideological contours
of national cultures and the administrative and governmental policies through
which culturally and ethnically diverse populations were governed and, at times, subdued.
They also, however, tell stories of anthropologists who defended indigenous
and economically marginalized populations from state abuses, who have struggled
with the need to incorporate indigenous voices into their discipline and research, and
who have crafted a regionally specific disciplinary agenda around issues of social justice
and activism. Together these stories suggest that Latin American anthropologies
were like European and US anthropologies to the extent that their theoretical priorities
and applications were often shaped by the needs of conservative states and by the
policies of internal colonialism through which states attempted to subjugate indigenous
peoples. At the same time, they clearly point toward important regional differences
in that – with very few exceptions – the “native” subjects of Latin American
anthropologists did not live in far-off lands, but rather formed part of the same nationstate
as the anthropologist