Revisiting "De eso que llaman antropología mexicana" five decades later

This controversial book written by Arturo Warman, Guillermo Bonfil, Margarita Nolasco, Mercedes Olivera and Enrique Valencia—in that precise order of exposition—was a product of the authors’ epoch and circumstances. Saying so now sounds very much like a truism, because in the almost five decades that have gone by since then, there has not been any comparable rebellion. Therefore, a variety of internal and external elements must be provided about the phenomenon in order to better understand both its scope and its effective limitations. To start with, let’s talk about the context. The book was published less than 2 years after the 1968 student massacre, which was repeated in 1971. Our teachers were not uninvolved in what was happening. They were a group of professional ethnologists, made up of young professors who had participated in protest marches and shared the anger of a generation impatient for change, something more than understandable in a country with an ossified political, social, economic, and cultural order. It is also understood that these days there is a broad consensus to the effect that that social movement contributed to advance the country’s democratization. Did this book have an equivalent effect on Mexican anthropology or was it only an event that prefigured the later boom in academic social anthropology?