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A Watershed in Mexican Rural History: Some Thoughts on the Reconciliation of Conflicting Interpretations*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Peter Coy
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Extract

In the short history of anthropology as an academic discipline, polemics tinged with personal recrimination have been a constant feature. One might even be led to suspect that controversy has become a firm technique, in line with conflict theory, so that in the middle ground between opposing interpretations of social behaviour may be found a more acceptable aspect of the truth. ‘Penetrating analyses’, so the aphorism might run, ‘are tempered in the fire of animosity.’ Some protagonists had a positive genius for attracting thinly-veiled contumely and for polarizing opinion, even after they had ceased to be practising anthropologists. Perhaps the best example of this was Radcliffe-Brown, as a perusal of the journals Oceania in 1955 and the American Anthropologist from 1951 to 1956 will readily disclose. This method of advancing knowledge, if we may call it such, did not die with Radcliffe-Brown; it has been used many times since—and the discipline is the richer, one hastens to add.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , May 1971 , pp. 39 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971

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References

1 One example might be the outcome of the debate between Herskovits and Malinowski in the 1930s about the preservation of indigenous institutions.

2 The term ‘structural duration’ is borrowed from Professer Gluckman, M., ‘The Utility of the Equilibrium Model’, American Anthropologist, 70 (1968).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Ley de Desamortización, 25 June 1856, introduced by Lerdo de Tejada under the presidency of Comonfort.

4 Tannenbaum, Frank, Mexico, The Struggle for Peace and Bread (New York, 1954), p. 137Google Scholar; Núñez, Mendieta y, Efectos Sociales de la Reforma Agraria en tres comunidades ejidales (Mexico, UNAM, 1960), pp. 20–1.Google Scholar

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8 Redfield, R., The Little Community, and Peasant Society and Culture (Chicago, Phoenix Books, 1960), p. 135.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., p. 73.

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14 When this paper was in its final stages, my attention was drawn to Eric Wolf's interesting hypothesis which postulates the waxing and waning of the prestige and vigour of the Indian village in response to periods of the respectively weak and powerful influence of the metropolis. Paddock, J., ‘Oscar Lewis's Mexico’, Mesoamerican Notes, 6 (1965), 16–17Google Scholar. While my period of ‘structural duration’ for Tepoztlán is obviously different from Professor Wolf's, the general thesis that economic and demographic changes affect social behaviour still holds, in my opinion.

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Returning to the Tepoztlán pyramid, we may postulate, therefore, that the shortening of the female cohort of 20–24-year-olds G may partly be duc to migration in the direction of nearby Cuernavaca. This cohort may also have been affected by the typhoid epidemic in 1940, which is mentioned by Lewis, but it is curious that a similar indentation occurs in the pyramid around 20 years earlier H.

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26 The Agrarian Code is the administrative expression of Article 27 of Mexico's Constitution of 1917 which authorized the distribution of land to villages which needed it. Laws of land distribution pre-date the 1917 Constitution, the first being the Law of 6 January 1915. The first serious attempt at agrarian legislation, according to Núñez, Mendieta y, Efectos Sociales de la Reforma Agraria, p. 40Google Scholar, was by Bassols, Narciso, author of the ‘Law of endowment and restitution of land and (irrigation) water’ of 23 04 1927Google Scholar. The articles in the present paper refer to the Agrarian Code currently in force, which was signed by President Avila Camacho on 31 Dec. 1942, and appeared in the Diario Oficio of 27 April 1943.

27 In 1923, the decree of 2 August by President Alvaro Obregón had specified 18 years as the minimum age for the acquisition of ‘national or uncultivated’ land.

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32 Ibid., p. 125.

33 Coy, P. E. B., ‘Justice for the Indian in Eightecnth Century Mexico’, American Journal of Legal History, 12 (1968).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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35 Núñez, Mendieta y, Efectos Sociales de la Reforma Agraria, p. 42.Google Scholar

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37 Ibid., p. xix.

38 Ibid., pp. xxvi–xxvii.

39 Ibid., p. xxxiii.

40 Ibid., p. xlix.

41 Ibid., p. 1.

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43 Here, one should note that, in a much wider context and as part of a discussion of ‘Interpersonal Relations in Peasant Society’, Professer C. Jayawardene ascribes contrasting, but coincidental, behaviour patterns to the ‘distinct Systems of relations determining peasant social life—that of the local community and that of the total society’. ‘Ideology and Conflict in Lower Class Communities’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 10, No. 4 (1968), p. 441.

44 The presidencies of the period were those of Obregón, Alvaro, 1 12 1920 to 30 11 1924Google Scholar, and Calles, Plutarco Elías, from 1 12 1924 to 30 11 1929.Google Scholar

45 Fabila, , Los Ejidos, p. xxv.Google Scholar