Amerindian humanities in transformation: Ontologies, dynamism and contexts

© 2018, Asociacion de Antropologos Iberoamericanos en Red. All rights reserved. The text presents a journey through two of the great approaches that have crossed the history of Amerindianist anthropology in the last decades. First, it considers the study of the notion of humanity from an ethnographic ontological approach — lead by the structure and the synchrony — questioned as a-politic, essentialist and a-historic. Secondly, it goes throughout the dynamic approach, influenced by social history, interethnic relations, sociological and historical-political analysis, and diachrony. On many occasions, giving rise to two parallel agendas, all of them anthropological. The text presents the pertinence of both approaches in the understanding of indigenous peoples and particularly of anthropological notions such as humanity, whose transformations would not be intelligible without an approach both ontological, dynamic and contextual.