1 Autonomy and Alterity The Dilemmas of Mexican Anthropology

‘Poor Mexico, so far from God, and so near to the United States’, remarked Porfirio Díaz, the dictator overthrown by the political revolution that inaugurated two decades of social upheaval in Mexico in 1910. This famous aphorism could also express one of the central dilemmas of Mexican anthropology, and one that it shares with other ‘anthropologies of the South ’ (Krotz, 1997). While Mexico was initially the child of Spanish rather than North American colonialism (and the first ‘ethnographers ’ of the colony were Spanish friars), its ‘indigenous ’ modern anthropological schools developed in an uncomfortable relationship with North American research teams and foundation funding. The relationship between Mexican anthropology and Northern centres of academic power remains sensitive today, even if it was substantially reconfigured by the post-revolutionary nation-building project and subsequent developments that I will discuss in the course of this article. The tensions are not restricted to the role of researchers from the United States, since France and other European countries also have a substantial financial and institutional stake in anthropologica