Lourdes Arizpe

Lourdes Arizpe was born in Mexico City and grew up travelling with her family to all regions of Mexico, an itinerary that drew her attention to the rich diversity of indigenous cultures. Her home was also multicultural, as her Mexican father and Swiss mother, as well as her parents, were multilingual. While at grammar school at an American school in Mexico City, she plunged into literature, both in English and in French, which she studied with a French teacher who opened up her library to her. A few years later she received a First in English Studies at the British Council and the First Place Award in the final course on Advanced Studies in French language and history at the French Institute for Latin America. After taking the SAT examination, they placed her in the Honors English Class at the University of the Pacific in California and she made it to the Dean’s List during her stay there. She also studied to be an interpreter in Geneva University, Switzerland and received a Certificate in French Studies. Upon her return to Mexico, she studied history at the National University of Mexico, then an M.A. in ethnology from the National School of History and Anthropology in 1970 and a PhD. in social anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK in 1975.

This section presents Lourdes Arizpe's most relevant publications organised as Major Books, International Reports, and Selected Published Articles.

The world is one but the many have not yet found their place in it. Our own nature as human beings makes us forever look at the world from a specific place, a specific time. The horizon of our eyes has always been transformed into the boundary of ‘our world’. What happens when we can see beyond our known horizon, to the other side of the world? What we see are countless different cultures that are now part of ‘our world’.

To examine the issue of interdependence in a multipolar and globalised, yet dualistic world economy, we must start by clarifying the frame of reference in which it is to be analysed. This paper will stress that both the economic and the ecological challenges are interwoven to issues related to the social and cultural sustainability of world development.

Is it possible for the world to become one as the UN World Commission on Environment and Development suggests in the very first sentence of its report? As statesmen begin to declare that ‘our country is the planet’ and economic and political systems become metanational, a global perspective enters the agenda of the human race. Yet it is still not clear whether such a change will lead to a more balanced world or one fraught with environmental hazards and fragmented into islands of wealth in seas of poverty both between North and South and within nations. Will it be driven by conscious, collective action of humankind, or impelled by short term, destructive processes? The way in which it goes will depend, partly, on how quickly and accurately science is able to cope with the challenge of thinking and analysing phenomena from a global perspective.

This chapter describes the ethnography of their perceptions on recent changes in the natural environment, particularly the deforestation, of the Lacandona rain forest.

The massive labour migrations of modern history have consistently been associated with the geographical mobility of capital. The unequal distribution of capital investment around the world has generated pervasive unequal development between rural and urban areas, among regions within a country and among countries. Within this context, rural–urban migration in developing countries can be considered as the geographical counterpart of the generalized exchange of labour and resources between the peasant and the industrial sectors, an unequal exchange that has greatly benefited the urban centres where industry is located. In analysing this movement, much attention has been given to economic and social pressures driving peasants from their land, or attracting them to the cities, but few efforts have been made to understand the reactions of peasants to such pressures, that is, their strategies to overcome encroaching poverty and deprivation.

This chapter contends that, in order to explain female patterns of migration, women must be understood within the context of the dynamics of social structure in the sending areas. This context ultimately determines who is most likely to migrate among the women and men in the family and community. The chapter seeks to explain why certain women of a given age, marital status or social and economic background are the most prone to migrate out of specific rural communities in Latin America.

In recent years, the informal labour sector has increasingly represented a testing point for theories of development. The proliferation of informal jobs in developing countries has been considered alternately a stage in the process of development and a blind alley leading a country back into underdevelopment. But social scientists and policymakers have rarely recognized that the majority of those left out of the formal occupational structure are women. It is, however, very difficult to establish the heuristic boundaries of the informal labour sector, particularly with respect to women. Are we referring to the intermittent part-time activities of women outside the household both in cities and in rural areas? But men also engage in such activities, for example, as street peddlers. Is the unpaid work of the wife and young unmarried daughters in a family enterprise such as a store an informal job? If unpaid labour is to be included in the informal labour sector, then women’s voluntary community service and their unpaid domestic labour must also be taken into account. Moreover, since informal labour also comprises work not regulated through a contract, all low income, non-contractual jobs registered as formal occupations, such as paid domestic service, belong to this classification. Many low income and low productivity jobs included in the formal occupational structure and registered in national censuses, even when such a contract does exist, can be considered as a continuation of informal jobs as well and thus must be analysed within the informal labour sector. This paper assumes that the nature of the informal labour sector in a developing economy is a direct outgrowth of the type of industrialization a country is undergoing. Within this framework, this paper explores the degree of occupational choice that women have within the structural margins of employment.

An unease with the term ‘cultural change’ seems to be characteristic of research in rural areas in Latin America in the last few years. It stems, in my view, from two sources: first, from the confusion arising between the holistic term of culture as used in classical anthropology, and the reductionist version of it prevalent in other social disciplines and in policy-oriented studies, and, secondly, from the belief that the concept of cultural change cannot be dislodged from the North American culturalistic framework, and thus cannot be applied in studies taking a Marxist or dependency theory framework. This chapter attempts to give a comprehensive view of cultural change in the Mazahua region in central Mexico, since the beginning of this century, by focusing on the association between mainstream economic processes and shifts in ethnicity, in literacy, and in the perception of rural culture in the region. In so doing, it is hoped that both narrowing down the concept and separating it from the economic and power structure will be accented.

This piece is an extract of fieldwork notes that documents the First National Congress of Indians held in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, in Mexico in 1975.

Whether one considers classificatory schemes as arbitrary or as having a structural significance, they are, in any case cognitively neutral and can be analysed as such by anthropologists. Cognitive categories, though, once they have sprung from observation of reality or from the structures of the mind, can be used ideologically in a specific social context. By ideological I mean that certain traits of objective perception are overemphasized, while others are minimized, thus resulting in a distorted view of reality which can then be used socially for specific ends. In this way, one can say that cognitive categories get caught up in a game of impression management between social groups. This chapter addresses the discussion surrounding concepts of race in Latin America.

How do we stop the movement of society for an instant without interrupting it? This, at the heart of it, has always been the basic problem for an anthropologist. How do we capture, describe and analyze the life of a society and at the same time explain how it is changing? Change used to take place gradually and intermittently, easy to keep track of when traditional societies lived in isolation. Today, however, modern societies are increasingly fluid, permeated by and interwoven with Western capitalism. This is why it is more convenient for anthropologists to study a small community by itself, or better yet, an island, like one of the Trobriands: a closed, finite space, without the messiness of cultural limits that blur and bleed into the flow of another culture. Hence, too, the usefulness of a living, for one or two years, but in the end, a finite time, in an Indian community. Because in this slice of time, the life of that society is frozen in the researcher’s imagination, and years later she can continue to spin the skein of her interpretation. Cutting out blocks of time and space gives us the advantage of an uninterrupted observation of an encapsulated culture. How to study urban culture in a megalopolis? This chapter looks at Indian Culture in Mexico City.

Our main concern in this article is understanding the terminological kinship system of Zacatipan, a nahuat village in the south-eastern region of the Sierra de Puebla. The procedures carried out for this purpose were a componential analysis and a comparative study with other nahuat kinship terminologies.