Mexican Anthropology and Inter-American Knowledge

This essay contributes to a fuller understanding of the history and future of area studies by tracing Latin American studies back to the early twentieth century, when it took form within academic disciplines that sought to contribute to state policy-making. The essay focuses on a set of intellectual exchanges between the United States and Mexico around Native American affairs. In an era in which new inter-American scientific venues and the Good Neighbor policy attenuated the inevitable and ever present intellectual hierarchies that divided the United States from Mexico and the rest of Latin America, some scholars found resemblances and parallels between North and South America. These scholars envisioned a cosmopolitan Americanist intellectual sphere based on horizontal forms of sharing, and they looked for novel ways of reconciling the avowed need for generalization with the particulars that they confronted at home and abroad. They found themselves unable to fully escape epistemological binds that positioned the North as a model of modern nationhood and a locus of universal knowledge, and that relegated non-Western nations like Mexico to the category of the particular. They could not overcome the difficulties spawned by hierarchies among nations and, concomitantly, among their own scholarly communities. Este ensayo nos ayuda a entender la historia de los estudios latinoamericanos, y su futuro, trazando sus raíces en los comienzos del siglo veinte, cuando tomó forma dentro de disciplinas académicas dedicadas a fortalecer las políticas públicas. Se enfocan un conjunto de intercambios intelectuales entre Estado Unidos y México alrededor del indigenismo durante la época del Buen Vecino. En un momento en que se atenuaban las inevitables y omnipresentes jerarquías intelectuales entre Estados Unidos y Latinoamérica, algunos expertos encontraron similitudes y paralelos entre el Norte y el Sur. Estos intelectuales intentaron forjar un ámbito intelectual Americanista que era cosmopolita y se basaba en relaciones más horizontales. Buscaron, además, nuevas formas de reconciliar las generalizaciones, siempre necesarias, con las particularidades que encontraron en sus países y en el extranjero. Sin embargo, no pudieron escapar las amarras epistemológicas creadas por un ideal liberal de modernidad que posicionaba al Norte como modelo y relegaba a los países no-Occidentales como México al dominio de lo particular. Por lo tanto, no pudieron superar las dificultades generadas por las jerarquías entre las naciones y, asimismo, entre sus comunidades académicas

The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910-1950

Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I Science and Nation in an Age of Evolution and Eugenics, 1910-1934 -- 1 Mexican Indigenismo and the International Fraternity of Science -- 2 Migration, U.S. Race Thinking, and Pan-American Anthropology -- Part II Science and Nation in an Age of Modernization and Antiracist Populism, 1930-1950 -- 3 From Cultural Pluralism to a Global Science of Acculturation in the United States -- 4 Cultural and Economic Evolution, Pluralism, and Categorization in Mexico -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- IndexDescription based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, YYYY. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries