ABSTRACT
The partial historical structuralist challenge to functionalism crafted by Mexican indigenistas in the early postwar period, and consequently reflected in the changing world view of foreign-trained functionalists conducting research in indigenista 'refuge regions', developed at the same time that a second challenge to functionalism was being elaborated in the United States within the emerging paradigm of cultural ecology. Such a model differed from administrative domain only in the fact that the asiatic mode of production permitted the continued existence of peasant communities, nominally in control of their own land. It was through personal contact between peasants and non-peasants that class conflict took form within rural society. This chapter looks at how the new paradigm began, before discussing the way in which it was utilized by Eric Wolf as a starting point for elaboration of a comprehensive theory of the peasantry, which incorporated the insights of the European Marxist tradition into the prevailing anthropological understanding of the Mexican countryside.
