Constructing, Destroying, And Reconstructing Difference: The Mexican Nation and Cultural Difference (R. Aida Hernandez Castillo, Histories and Stories from Chiapas: Border Identities in Southern Mexico; Claudio Lomnitz, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism; June C. Nash, Mayan Visions: The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization) (Book Review‪)‬

Anthropological studies of Mexico in the twentieth century (like anthropology elsewhere) began with a heavy emphasis on fieldwork that usually lasted a year in a single community. By the late 1960s, under the influence especially of Eric Wolf in the US and Mexican anthropologists such as Guillermo Bonfil Batalla and Arturo Warman, anthropology's community studies had begun taking into account the larger national and international political economy as well as the historical context. Many of the community studies of the 1970s and early 1980s (such as those by June Nash, Guillermo de la Pena, and Frances Rothstein) looked also at what Wolf called "extra-local relations" and used a diachronic perspective. In the 1980s anthropology took a postmodern turn. Much that had been written before was strongly criticized for being static descriptions of supposedly self-contained communities. While the 1980s postmodernists often ignored earlier critiques of colonialism and dependent development and exaggerated the extent to which anthropologists had treated communities as isolated in space and fixed in time, they brought attention to the limitations of earlier approaches. Especially as the communities anthropologists usually studied continued to change, the postmodernist highlighting of difference and power in a broader context was important.