Bordering on anthropology the dialectics of a national tradition in Mexico

This paper explores knowledge production within the framework of a «national anthropology». Mexico developed one of the earliest, largest and most successful «national» anthropologies of the postcolonial world, yet it has been haunted by constant absorption of its leading practitioners into the state apparatus and by a sense of intellectual discontinuity and isolation. The author explores four aspects of Mexican anthropology in the historical contexts in which they emerged: the role of the discipline in shaping a national image (1850–1900); its strategies of intervention in the modernization and «incorporation» of the indigenous and «backward» population (1880–1930); its role in the regulation of a development orthodoxy (1940–1968); and its role in the reformulation of a national image in the face of massive urbanization (1968–1980s).