Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico
An Anthropology of Nationalism
An innovative examination of the interaction between culture and politics in Mexico.
In Mexico, as elsewhere, the national space, that network of places where the people interact with state institutions, is constantly changing. How it does so, how it develops, is a historical process-a process that Claudio Lomnitz exposes, explores, and theorizes in this book, which develops a distinct view of the cultural politics of nation building in Mexico. Lomnitz highlights the varied, evolving, and often conflicting efforts that have been made by Mexicans over the past two centuries to imagine, organize, represent, and know their country, its relations with the wider world, and its internal differences and inequalities.
A Mexican scholar now teaching in the United States, Lomnitz combines an intimate knowledge of how Mexican intellectual production works with a certain political and analytical distance from the process of production itself. A wide-ranging reflection on the role of time and space in forging Mexican discourses on the nation and the positioning of Mexican intellectuals in postrevolutionary political culture and in Mexico’s public sphere.
American Historical Review
In Mexico, as elsewhere, the national space, that network of places where the people interact with state institutions, is constantly changing. How it does so, how it develops, is a historical process-a process that Claudio Lomnitz exposes and investigates in this book, which develops a distinct view of the cultural politics of nation building in Mexico. Lomnitz highlights the varied, evolving, and often conflicting efforts that have been made by Mexicans over the past two centuries to imagine, organize, represent, and know their country, its relations with the wider world, and its internal differences and inequalities. Firmly based on particulars and committed to the specificity of such thinking, this book also has broad implications for how a theoretically informed history can and should be done.
An exploration of Mexican national space by way of an analysis of nationalism, the public sphere, and knowledge production, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico brings an original perspective to the dynamics of national cultural production on the periphery. Its blending of theoretical innovation, historical inquiry, and critical engagement provides a new model for the writing of history and anthropology in contemporary Mexico and beyond.
Public Worlds Series, volume 9
A Mexican scholar now teaching in the United States, Lomnitz combines an intimate knowledge of how Mexican intellectual production works with a certain political and analytical distance from the process of production itself. A wide-ranging reflection on the role of time and space in forging Mexican discourses on the nation and the positioning of Mexican intellectuals in postrevolutionary political culture and in Mexico’s public sphere.
American Historical Review
Related Publications
Cultural Residues
Chile in Transition
Reveals the cultural substrata of the transition from Chilean dictatorship
Dry Place
Landscapes of Belonging and Exclusion
Gathers tales from the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico to understand the relationship between people and place in a borderland
The Impure Imagination
Toward a Critical Hybridity in Latin American Writing
Challenges conventional thinking about the widely accepted concept of cultural hybridity