Anthropologist Backs LatAm Identity

By Mike Fuller

Havana, Jul 1 (Prensa Latina) Mexican anthropologist Mariano Baez Landa told dozens of Cubans at a cultural study center here that the science of diversity can be applied to overcome a conspiracy against Latin American identity.
"The time is ripe to build alternatives," said Dr. Baez Landa at the Juan Marinello Institute of Cuban Cultural Investigations, after a lengthy paper on Academia, Politics and Action.
Based on his original The Impossible Science, he traced the dilemma of anthropology that maintains and foments indigenous civilizations or that which improves their material conditions.
Practical anthropology did not have its first congress until 2005 in Mexico, where one out of every ten people is indigenous, and he listed several reasons why.
He traced the "deep epistemological divide" that opened last century when most of the academic writing on Guatemalan indigenous people was in English.
Baez Landa lamented a pervasive theoretical contempt for practical application, which he confessed can have some relation to funding.
He said scientific cultural study without application has had serious faults and cited the 50 years of anthropology carried out by major institutions like the US Smithsonian or Harvard Project, which failed to predict the 1994 uprising in Chiapas, Mexico.
But social investigation can be constructive, not only academic, he said, basing himself on seminal works like the 1952 Action Anthropology by Sol Tax.
He mentioned the importance of Marxism, critical anthropology and revolutionary capacity to counter neoliberal theories, and admitted some appearance of pluricultural discourse in state policy, with the opening of an indigenous coordination office in Chiapas.
He described resistance by regional power elites, a phenomenon to which Bolivia is no stranger in its attempt to integrate indigenous voices into the national decision making process.
Prensa Latina asked Baez Landa if he thought the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of the Americas (ALBA) could be the "new theory" which he said was necessary to balance globalized interests.
The US-sponsored Free Trade Agreement of the Americas was buried over two years ago at the America's Summit in Argentina, and ALBA was born at the parallel People's Summit, as an "anti-capitalist, revolutionary and endogenous alternative for integration."
Much of it has to do with indigenous principles of reciprocity with the community and nature, and Baez Landa said the time is ripe for a proposal like this and anthropology applied to make Latin American cultures visible.