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ABSTRACT
This article examines how an expanding Mexican state sought the insights of ethnographic theory and practice between the 1940s and 1950s. Focusing on the Instituto Nacional Indigenista Coordinating Center in los Altos de Chiapas and its relationship with national and foreign researchers active in the same area, I show how ideas about gender affected the organization of health services, the hiring of indigenous promotores, and the differential treatment of women and men traditional medicine healers as well as anthropology graduate students and researchers. The article is organized around two conceptually distinct though, in reality, overlapping spaces: (1) the anthropologist’s fieldwork site and relations between informants, professors, and students and (2) the Mexican state's provision of health services. Even if gender was not an automatic category of exclusion or inclusion of the researcher into a local community, ethnographic insights were formed through fieldwork practices that were determined in part by gender difference and relations among researchers and their subjects. Ultimately, both anthropologists and the Mexican state indigenous agency grew to rely informally on gender as a category of expertise for gaining access to indigenous women in particular, even if the "gender intermediaries" who helped achieve this access were frequently unpaid and received little formal recognition or reward.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 ‘Indians: Witches and Brew’ in Newsweek (31 April Citation1959).
2 The NSF-funded ‘Man in Nature’ project also involved linguistic, historical, and environmental as part of its effort to understand culture in its totality.
3 From the very beginning of functionalist anthropological fieldwork in los Altos in the 1940s, gender shaped the dynamic of fieldwork. The ‘field’, as historian Lyn Schumaker proposed in Africanizing Anthropology, is not just a group of anthropologists and their polished monographs. Schumaker’s attention to the multi-sited nature of expertise and the ‘material infrastructure’ in postwar British anthropology in Africa was an attempt to go beyond one-dimensional understandings of anthropology as a ‘handmaiden to colonialism’. Schumaker (Citation2001).
4 The Harvard Chiapas Project lasted from 1957 to 1980 (active for twenty years), and for the period under consideration was led by anthropologist Evon Vogt. The first University of Chicago project in Chiapas named the Man in Nature Project was active between from 1956–1959 (primarily funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation). The second phase of the project run by the University of Chicago Anthropology Department lasted from 1960–1964 and was known as The Chiapas Project (also founded by the National Science Foundation).
5 As distinct from the nineteenth century. See Jaffary (Citation2016).
6 Thank you to one of the anonymous reviewers for helping me to reach this articulation.
7 There is also evidence to suggest that ladino status, because of exploitative ladino-indigenous, worker-employer relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was linked to increased sexual assault against indigenous women. See Mora (Citation2017).
8 On the use of ‘state medicine’ to describe medical systems, see Lei and Lei (Citation2014) .
9 ‘Chamula’, Salubridad, 1960, 2.009, AHCCTTC, CCDISC, San Cristóbal de las Casas, México.
10 ‘Chamula’, Salubridad, 1962, 2.0016, AHCCTTC, CCDISC, San Cristóbal de las Casas, México.
11 See Salubridad, 1956, 1.0002, AHCCTTC, CCDISC, San Cristóbal de las Casas, México.
12 Men did however get it from not speaking Spanish well. She refers this to indigenous and ladino tensions.
13 ‘Clínica de Chamula’, 1956, 1.0002, Salubridad Correspondencia, AHCCTTC, CCDISC, San Cristóbal de las Casas, México.
14 Vargas (Citation1956). The environment may have been made more favourable for the INI by the work of an SIL nurse in Oxchuc, Florence Gerdel. Thank you to an anonymous reviewer.
15 Yannakakis (Citation2008; Metcalf Citation2005). See also Rus (Citation1994).
16 ‘Informe mensuales clínicas septiembre’, 1956, 2.0300, Salubridad, AHCCTTC, CCDISC, San Cristóbal de las Casas, México.
17 See for example Informes mensuales abril, caso de Agustina Nochan de 25 años, Dirección, 2.0031, 1953, AHCCTTC, CCDISC, San Cristóbal de las Casas, México.