ABSTRACT
In the case of anthropology, this challenge was posed particularly during a process of colonial expansion, which exposed European and American students of man to a vast new field of human experience. In the case of rural sociology, during a concomitant process of internal capitalist development, which increasingly distinguished urban industrial centers from surrounding rural areas within Europe and America, and thus created the objective possibility of concern with 'rurality'. This chapter presents a discussion of how paradigmatic boundaries have been drawn in post-revolutionary anthropological studies of the Mexican countryside. It deals with schools simultaneously under elaboration during the 1950s and 1960s. The chapter illustrates the cumulative, and dialectical, nature of the elaboration of anthropological theory. An effort has been made to place discussion of differing schools of thought along a continuum which runs from greatest concern with the ethnographic study of local culture, at one extreme, to greatest concern with the analysis of power at the other.
