The anthropologist and the Indians

pp. 177-180

in: Judith Friedlander, Being Indian in Hueyapan, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

I may have been the first anthropologist ever to live in Hueyapan for an extended period of time, but I was not the first in my discipline to do research in the village. Nor was I the first American. A few years before I arrived in the pueblo, anthropology students from the Escuela Nacional de Antropología did some preliminary fieldwork there, commuting back and forth from Mexico City. An anthropological linguist affiliated with Harvard had already visited Hueyapan as well, in the hope of finding a native speaker of Nahuatl who might be willing to spend a semester in Cambridge working with her and her students.¹ By the time I showed up, therefore, the villagers knew all about people like me. And anthropologists, they concluded, were basically the same as cultural extremists.