Latin America and the People without Capital
Keywords:
Capital, Anthropology, Latin America, Marxism, EpistemologyAbstract
In this essay, I propose the identification and analysis of one of the major expressions of Euro-American xenophobia and racism, the socio-anthropological refusal to encounter and/or project the existence of capital in non-Western populations. Starting from a critical reading of Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History, and following some of its lines of exploration, I question a nostalgic episteme in the creation of a world without capital in the Euro-American periphery, specifically in Latin America. Without delving into the logics of the religious discourses that advocated for the recovery of paradise on earth, nor of the construction of the American indigenous people as anti-economic or, at least, anti-economic subjects, for example, those of Franciscan catechization, I attempt to recall that socio-cultural anthropology formed an important part of the colonial enterprise. As such, genealogical, critical, and epistemological analyses must be used to discern how anthropology helped to establish Latin American populations as mere objects of Political Economy in the popular doxa.
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