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

Bibliographic Data

ID12876313
AuthorsKarin Alejandra Rosemblatt (University of Maryland, College Park, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume9
Issue1
Pages94-121
Publication date2014-02-12
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Global History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1740-0228 • E-ISSN: 1740-0236
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s174002281300051x
OpenAlexW2112409229
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited44

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

Colonialism · Dependency (UML · Dependency theory (database theory · Latin Americans · Modernization theory · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Law · Social and Cultural Dynamics