The critical legacy of Ángel Palerm and regional studies in Mexico

Abstract

This essay reviews the two figures of Ángel Palerm: the eponymous one, from the institutionalization of the social and ethnohistorical anthropology work in Mexico, one side, and the critical one, from the Marxist anthropology with a historic ethnography focus, on the other. Part of the discussion is that the eponymous figure of Palerm has dominated in Mexican anthropology, from his early death during a period when critics and questionings in the twentieth-century seventies had begun a period of important progress in regional studies, exemplifying in the works of Palerm students or his closest colleagues.