[URBANTH-L]CFP For AAA Panel: The New Borders of Mexican Anthropology

[Gilberto Rosas]

The Shifting Borders of Mexican Anthropology: Beyond Exclusions,  
Inclusions, and Collaborations

As the country that reputedly inspired by E.B. Tylor’s science, the  
discipline of anthropology in Mexico would seem to be inextricably  
coupled to imperialism and globalization. Indeed, several histories  
and anthropologies map the centrality of the discipline in the  
formation of the state and its asymmetrical positioning in the global  
economy and relations of empire. They also chart the discipline's  
centrality in the formation of a cohesive, modern, national mestizo  
community, a common citizenship that indigenizes modernity and  
modernizes the indigenous. Many anthropologists have documented  
historically specific techniques of inclusion and exclusion, based on  
race, class, gender, and ethnicity, cognizant of the discipline's  
close association with genealogies of state formation and extra- 
territorial forms of power-knowledge. Others have sought to document  
and analyze both everyday struggles and widespread mobilizations.   
Many have sought to disrupt theses aforedescribed power-knowledge  
relations through innovative exercises of social theory,  
representational practices, and new methodologies. Such critical  
scholarships emerge from specific critiques of the discipline both  
from within Mexico and beyond.

The scholars on this panel---both Mexican and non-Mexican---revisit  
the tensions of anthropological knowledge production in Mexico.  We  
seek a wide-range of innovative papers exploring the shifting politics  
of anthropological knowledge production in this country from the  
revolutionary moment through the Calderon government and across  
disciplinary and international borders. What new subjects of analysis  
and locations become unveiled under distinct if simultaneous regimes  
of power-knowledge relations? How do migrant and other post- 
territorial subjects complicate the politics of knowledge production?  
How do new ethnographies of Mexico speak to the new configurations of  
power? What do activist inspired ethnographies tell us about the  
shifting nature of power and knowledge?

Dr. Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo of the Centro De Investigaciones y  
Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) has graciously  
agreed to be the discussant.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words by March 20 to



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Gilberto Rosas
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
and Latina/o Studies Program
University of Illinois
109 Davenport Hall
607 South Mathews Avenue
Urbana, IL 61801
(217) 244-4117
grosas2 at uiuc.edu
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