Mexico

Mexico ranks among the world's most important locations of anthropologists and anthropological research. It was a center of crop domestication and village settlement and one of the few sites of primary state formation. It witnessed a rich and varied history of complex societies, including writing, urbanization, and class hierarchies. Study of the Spanish conquest and colonial transformations has provided crucial understandings of how apparently “local” peasant communities and other social formations form part of world capitalism. Much anthropological work on power and inequality has taken place about and within Mexico. Finally, Mexico has provided the setting for key studies of cities and migration, and its contemporary politics contributes significantly to our understanding of indigenous peoples and social movements under the conditions of globalization.

Mexico includes most of the cultural region called Mesoamerica. Mesoamerica extends into the northern [Page 1588]half of Central America. On the other hand, the arid north of Mexico falls outside of Mesoamerica proper, being a transitional cultural region with affinities to both the southwestern United States and Mesoamerica. These cultural boundaries, however, are not to be taken as hermetically sealed; during the pre-Columbian era, there was considerable interaction between Mesoamerica and Central America and even South America and North America. Within Mesoamerica, the Maya region in the south and the central Mexican highlands constitute strong foci, but there are other regional cultures due to the rugged and complex topography, so internal differences and interactions are also significant.

Mesoamerica during the post-Columbian period had involvements of even a wider scale, so that it must be viewed in terms of combined and uneven relationships with Europe (via Spain) and the United States. Indeed, emerging from colonial New Spain and then explicitly with Mexican nationhood in 1821, our unit of analysis shifts from a culture region approach (Mesoamerica) to one of a political entity with cultural consequences (Mexico). One cannot speak of the Mexican nation and its people as culturally uniform—indeed, Mexico's linguistic, cultural, and regional variations are enormous—but recent work has addressed precisely the consolidation of the Mexican state as a cultural framework for more specific local and regional phenomena.

There is a long history of written records from Mesoamerica, but deliberate collection and analysis of knowledge about culture (anthropology, we might say) may be said to have begun after the Spanish conquest among literate indigenous Mexicans and European priests looking back on pre-Columbian societies and their practices. A notable instance was the project supervised by Father Bernardino de Sahagun, in which Nahua (central Mexican or “Mexica”)elites provided to the priest a vast body of information about the Aztec empire and its constituent city-states. Contemporary scholars carefully reread these documents, identifying the Mexica and European elements and noting the agreements, conflicts, and reinterpretations involved in this early anthropological collaboration.

Later colonial accounts are less notable. By the 19th century, much knowledge was hidden in dusty archives and overgrown ruins. Early explorations in Mexico started to recognize an important point, namely that the civilizations of the New World resembled key Old World civilizations in many ways but did not follow exactly the same sequences or have identical traits. This sparked the vital field of Mesoamerican archaeology, which continues to the present. Among its highlights is the study of the domestication of corn, which not only is an important crop but also presents unusual challenges in its reconstruction. The field includes seminal studies of sedentism and the formation of village societies in Tehuacan and Oaxaca and then the emergence of stratified societies in the Olmec and later central Mexican and Maya areas. Long-term longitudinal studies of changing settlement patterns have been particularly influential in Mesoamerican archaeology, addressing fundamental questions such as the relationship between irrigation and the centralization of power. Recent breakthroughs in reading pre-Columbian Maya writing has resulted in a much richer understanding of political dynamics in Maya city-states, and this in turn has provided a more processual approach to the cultural evolution of power that previously had been dominated by stage approaches. Finally, important intellectual linkages between cultural anthropology and archaeology developed in Mexico, notably a shared interest in agrarian class societies and relations among peasants and elites as well as among countryside and cities.

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