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.