Neither “primitive” nor Mediterranean: A critique of uninformed assumptions in twentieth-century kinship and family studies in Mesoamerica

Abstract (English)

Mesoamerica was one of the first non-“primitive” culture areas in which sociocultural anthropologists carried out field work. Despite their forming part of state societies for millennia, kinship and family in Mesoamerican peasant societies were dealt with under the same assumptions and with the same conceptual tools deal that had been developed for tribal, non-state societies. As the number of field studies grew, it was decided that, with few exceptions, acculturation had rendered kinship and the family basically bilateral and fundamentally European, with much in common with the Mediterranean. This uninformed conclusion was derived in part from unquestioned assumptions regarding the key role of kinship in pre-state societies and its supposed demise in the evolutionary process. This paper examines anthropology’s early field encounters with Mesoamerican kinship and family and how it favored exotic concepts of otherness and ignored field data that could have led to more useful constructs. It concludes with a discussion of some of the embedded assumptions regarding the other in several long-standing characterizations of key institutions in Mesoamerican rural society.