Beyond Alterity: Destabilizing the Indigenous Other in Mexico

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The concept of “indigenous” has been entwined with notions of exoticism and alterity throughout Mexico’s history. In Beyond Alterity, authors from across disciplines question the persistent association between indigenous people and radical difference, and demonstrate that alterity is often the product of specific political contexts.

Although previous studies have usually focused on the most visible ­aspects of differences—cosmovision, language, customs, resistance—the contributors to this volume show that emphasizing difference prevents researchers from seeing all the social phenomena where alterity is not obvious. Those phenomena are equally or even more constitutive of social life and include property relations (especially individual or private ones), participation in national projects, and the use of national languages.

The category of “indigenous” has commonly been used as if it were an objective term referring to an already given social subject. Beyond Alterity shows how this usage overlooks the fact that the social markers of differentiation (language, race or ethnic group, phenotype) are historical and therefore unstable. In opposition to any reification of geographical, cultural, or social boundaries, this volume shows that people who (self-)identify as indigenous share a multitude of practices with the rest of society and that the association between indigenous identification and alterity is the product of a specific political history.

Beyond Alterity is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding indigenous identity, race, and Mexican history and politics.

Contributors

Ariadna Acevedo-Rodrigo
Laura Cházaro
Michael T. Ducey
Paul K. Eiss
José Luis Escalona-Victoria
Vivette García Deister
Peter Guardino
Emilio Kourí
Paula López Caballero
Elsie Rockwell
Diana Lynn Schwartz
Gabriela Torres-Mazuera

Author(s): Paula López Caballero, Ariadna Acevedo-Rodrigo
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Year: 2018

Language: English
City: Tucson

Cover
Half Title, Title Page, Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Why Beyond Alterity? / Paula López Caballero with Ariadna Acevedo-Rodrigo
1. The Practices of Communal Landholding: Indian Pueblo Property Relations in Colonial Mexico
2. Connected Communities: Villagers and Wider Social Systems in the Late Colonial and Early National Periods
3. Indigenous Communities, Political Transformations, and Mexico’s War of Independence in the Gulf Coast Region
4. Happy Together? “Indians,” Liberalism, and Schools in the Oaxaca and Puebla Sierras, 1876–1911
5. Todos tenemos la crisma de dios: Engaging Spanish Literacy in a Tlaxcalan Pueblo
6. Communal and Indigenous Landholding in Contemporary Yucatan: Tracing the Changing Property Relations in the Postrevolutionary Ejido
7. From Anatomical Collection to National Museum, circa 1895: How Skulls and Female Pelvises Began to Speak the Language of Mexican National History
8. Anthropological Debates Around the Indigenous Subject and Alterity, 1940–1948
9. Displacement, Development, and the Creation of a Modern Indígena in the Papaloapan, 1940s–1970s
10. Encapsulated History: Evon Vogt and the Anthropological Making of the Maya
11. In Sickness and in Myth: Genetic Avatars of Indigenous Alterity and the Mexican Nation
Epilogue. Beyond Alterity, Beyond Occidentalism: “Indigenous Other” and “Western Self ” in Mexico
Contributors
Index