Abstract

ARRIAGA-ORNELAS, José Luis. Ethnography, epistemology and reflexivity. The experience of accompanying a community in resistance in Mexico. univ.humanist. [online]. 2018, n.86, pp.27-53. ISSN 0120-4807.  https://doi.org/10.11144/javeriana.uh86.eere.

This is an epistemological text that aims to make a second-order observation. It is a reflective work on the position of those doing anthropology “from the south”, who have accompanied the people of Xochicuautla, municipality of Lerma, State of Mexico, in their resistance to a highway megaproject that would split in half their ancestral lands and community. The argument developed in this article refers, at first, to anyone who intends to do ethnographic work as an observer; in a second moment, it focuses on the observed object and the development of its capacity to think about itself, to delimit itself from an environment and to self-organize. The main results offered here are: the existence of a type of ethnographic work that contributes to the recovery of the historical being of the subject of study, with both a critical and an ethical sense distinct from the nomological-descriptive framework of Eurocentric anthropology; and a proposal for an epistemological rupture with modern Western thought and its aesthetics of representation.

Keywords : ethnography; reflexivity; second-order observation; resistance; San Francisco Xochicuautla.

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