Fragments for a not yet Written History of the Human Body in Physical Anthropology on the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia

Abstract

The text focuses its attention on a historical moment in the development of Physical Anthropology in the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH) that goes from the 1970’s to the present, when participants of the Research Seminar in Physical Anthropology rose the crisis of the discipline and proposed to redefine the object of study and its practice, based on recovering the analysis of social relations and the historical context in the disciplinary work. Hence the interest in building a bio-social perspective, which focuses its attention on the interaction of biological and social processes and their effects on human beings, in addition to being a discipline committed to society. A fact that, without a doubt, marked a before and after in the development of Physical Anthropology, especially in contemporary population studies, to the extent that its central category of analysis, the human body, is made explicit beyond its body morphology, to account for its living, feeling, thinking, expressing, suffering, and acting under a particular social and cultural context.