Between Anthropology and History: Manuel Gamio and Mexican Anthropological Modernity (1916-1935)

My essay is located in the context of the profound changes at work in our disciplines today. This change of paradigm—to use the well-known Kuhnian expression—is part of the reflection on and revision of the canon of social and historical science inherited from the nineteenth century. This reflection, which became even more intense in the second half of the twentieth century, involves factors both internal and external to science, ones as diverse as the two Great Wars and their consequences for the processes of decolonization of many erstwhile European colonies.

A number of intellectual critics are associated with this process of reflection, among them the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. For our purposes we will focus on his work on the relation between time and narration. I refer, in particular, to the passage from Le temps raconté dealing with “the renunciation of Hegel” (Ricoeur 1996 [1985], 918–38).

Hegel, as we all know, is a sort of icon of European modernity's philosophical heritage. We identify him with the effort to philosophically found our age, on the one hand, and as an emblem of closed systems of thought, on the other. Paul Ricoeur ranks among the subtlest critics of absolutist modern reason.

I allude to Ricoeur because I believe the distance he takes from Hegel presupposes his recognition of him. Ricoeur urges us to “give up” Hegel, making a little extra effort. It is not enough to accuse Hegel of idolizing the state [“estalótatra”] or of being a totalitarian state's founding philosopher; something more is required if we are to free ourselves from the intellectual weight he represents, and that “something more” consists in recognizing his presence. Indeed, a major epistemological problem that confronts any historian is how to apprehend an intellectual event—the fall into discredit of Hegelian philosophy, for instance—when one has not taken part in it, or know its implications. We do not know, for example, if this decline represents “a catastrophe that continues to harm us,” or, rather, “a liberation we dare not boast of” (Ricoeur 1996, 931).

Ricoeur's critical program then, consists of the assertion that we must acknowledge Hegel's presence before dismissing him. My reflections on Manuel Gamio—an icon of the Mexican Revolution and an enthusiastic preserver of the historical and anthropological knowledge of the indigenous world—are governed by the same intellectual spirit.

My purpose is not to deny Gamio's relevance or his contribution to the development of modern anthropology in Mexico. Nor do I intend to judge him in a way that divides the world into two opposing camps. Rather, my effort is to understand the rise and the social functioning of a particular kind of anthropology from the standpoint of the present, allowing us to view the construction of modern knowledges as contingent. It is a way of facing the alterity represented by the modern notion of “the indigenous.”

I will develop my arguments around two basic themes: (1) relationships between the intellectual and the state, or the regime of science and politics, and (2) indigenismo. We owe a great deal to both traditions, even if we have not created them. Hence, the focus of this essay is not the identification but the recognition of this inheritance as a condition for transcending it. Undoubtedly, this intellectual exercise is something of a propitiatory ritual, the retelling of a story more or less known in order to forget it, thereby opening oneself up to new ways of understanding it.

Notwithstanding the recurrent criticism of Gamio's works (Bonfil Batalla 1987; Medina and García Mora 1986),¹ is there any guarantee that our writings on the indigenous past and our perception of the “indigenous” are not still marked by the guidelines established by the “father of modern anthropology”? To what extent can we claim...