Argentina: Contagious Marginalities. Debates in Argentine Ethnology and Social Anthropology

CLAUDIA BRIONES Y ROSANA GUBER

A Companion to Latin American Anthropology

Blackwell

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2008; p. 11 - 31

This chapter explores the development of anthropology in Argentina in relation to both ideas and practices of politics and the political (politicity), and the official common-sense understandings of cultural diversity.   As Ana María Alonso (1994) has warned us, anthropologists need to exercise caution when working with analytical categories such as ethnicity, nation and state, in that they also form part of our common knowledge as citizens. The Argentine experience suggests that problems related to the use of analytical categories which are also part of our common knowledge as citizens (i.e., ethnicity, nation, state), result from the exchange between scientific theories and wider social theories nurturing people’s interpretive frameworks. Although anthropological constructs were at times backed by the Argentine State in its most authoritarian and intrusive phases, here we argue that there are no automatic alignments between the constructs of diversity endorsed by ethnology, folklore and social anthropology and the “officially” sponsored ones. We also show that anthropological constructs of otherness produced by ethnologists, folklorists and social anthropologists have differed from the hegemonic constructs of otherness sponsored by the state. Such differentiation depended upon the political and institutional positions held by each sub-discipline, as well as on the ways in which each one forged its objects of knowledge.