TRAMES 1/2, 3, 1999
Toomas Gross. From Theory to Fact in Anthropology: The Case of Mexican
Ethnography
University of Cambridge
It is useless going into the field blind. Evans-Pritchard (1976:242)
Abstract
The present article looks upon the relationship between theory and method
in the the discipline of anthropology in general, and in the case of Mexican
ethnography in particular. After a brief discussion of these issues in
anthropology in general, a short overview of the development of Mexican
anthropology into an applied social science is presented and various examples
from the history of Mexican ethnography are used to illustrate that anthropologists
in their placement into the field and in their methodological preferences
have often been influenced by the theoretical schools to which they belonged,
as well as their very personal intersts and backgrounds.
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