ABSTRACT
There can be no better example of the peculiar mutation suffered by Boasian particularism under the impact of a liberal faith in progress, associated with revolution, than the work of Manuel Gamio, generally taken to represent the inauguration of the modern practice of anthropology in Mexico. When Gamio was placed at the head of the Direction of Anthropology of the Ministry of Agriculture of the first revolutionary government in 1917, he appended to his ethnographic training the prevailing liberal interpretation of human development, forming in the process a theoretical synthesis akin to the unilinear evolutionism of pre-Boasian schools. The community development program which grew out of Gamio's work in Teotihuacan was heavily oriented toward changing the local culture through education. This chapter draws upon Marxism to analyse the structural elements of misery in indigenous communities and to demand the kind of agrarian reform program in fact undertaken by the Cardenas government. It discusses the beginning of structural-functionalism.
