ABSTRACT
Manuel Gamio was the first professional Mexican anthropologist to be educated at a US university. He was a student of the US anthropologist Franz Boas. Almost all activities of this kind were sponsored by the administrative agencies of the federal government. The program of Gamio’s anthropological science may be characterized as “nationalist-indigenist.” In general terms it corresponds to the effort of the positivist liberal world to identify, classify, incorporate, and predict the development of the social world: if certain conditions are created or given, then one can expect that in a reasonable amount of time the indigenous population will be able to form an important part of the civilization represented by the orchestrators of this model. The operation was carried out on the basis of three main distinctions: individual/society, tradition/modernity, and backwardness/progress. Under these conditions came into being what can be called a new political economy peculiar to the modern nation-state.
