ABSTRACT
The current social crisis in Latin America has greatly stimulated the urgent need to restructure the praxis of the individual and collective life around paradigms and theories that allow for the possibility of an organic response to the dilemmas that, notwithstanding the so-called death of ideologies and theories, threaten the physical and cultural survival of our societies. Latin American popularism, vernacular expression of a democratic socialism that split as a national political alternative from the mainstream of the Third Socialist International, created the ideological tools to maintain a no-commitment stance, essentially via the thesis of ‘intellectual and political neutrality’. However, it is only within the neo-liberal paradigm that the thesis that proclaims the starting point of social research as pragmatic, individual attitudes centred in the domain of the immediate world and the conceptualisation of the permanent as an expression of the transitory is fully developed. Within this thesis formulae are produced that permit the resolution of specific problems without changing the essence of the whole. As such, nothing is solved and the previous situation becomes fossilised. Within such a framework, positivist archaeology-with its popularist background-deems it necessary to solve the historical fundamentals of the questions of identity through the intensification of fieldwork and the accumulation of data that broaden empirical knowledge of the ancient American indigenous and colonial societies. Occasionally, practical policies are undertaken to preserve the physical integrity of material culture, but little interest is shown in generating explanatory theories of ancient history, or the causes of the destruction of archaeological sites. Such a situation is exemplified by the absence of state educational policies oriented towards the creation of an historical consciousness. As such, positivist archaeology is not concerned with the present living conditions of the Latin American population. In addition, it does not consider that there may be a continuity between the remote past and the present, or that archaeology can produce anything relevant for the social crisis of the present; it merely seeks to provide data pertinent only to current academic interests.
