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Modernization, dependency, and the global in Mexican critiques of anthropology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2014

Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt
Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt*
Affiliation:
Department of History, 2115 Francis Scott Key Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD 20742, USA E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This articles examines the links between Mexican anthropologists who – as part of a 1960s-era revolt, rejected prior anthropological approaches, which they labelled imperialist – and social science currents in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. They also took inspiration from anti-colonial movements. They spurned modernization theories that focused on the multiple economic, cultural, and psychological factors that might spur US-style capitalist economic growth and that sought to overcome the internal, national brakes on progress. Instead, they embraced dependency theories that linked the ‘internal’ (national) to the ‘external’ (global) and privileged revolutionary changes that implied a radically changed relation to the global capitalist world system. Yet dependency and modernization theories emerged within a shared intellectual space. Even as many intellectuals rejected US models of economic development, they accepted the primacy accorded to economics and technology and the notion that science was a global enterprise aimed at generating universal knowledge.

Keywords

anthropologyCold Wardependency theoryinternal colonialismmodernization theory
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 94 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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