Abstract

CONTRERAS ROMAN, Raúl H.. Lupita’s music. Drafts for an Anthropology of the Contemporary in a Rural Mexican Community. Revista Col. San Luis [online]. 2019, vol.9, n.20, pp.325-343.  Epub Mar 14, 2022. ISSN 2007-8846.  https://doi.org/10.21696/rcsl92020191003.

This paper seeks to outline an anthropology of the contemporary that underpins the approach of present time and the imagination of the past and future of a rural and indigenous community in central Mexico. Through an ethnographic approach presented in four scenes that have music as their argument, the dynamics of socio-temporal construction of contemporaneity are approached. With this, the paper makes a contribution to the scarce literature in Spanish on the anthropology of time, from a perspective that questions the concentration on the new -present in approaches such as the new rurality-, to try to capture the fine warps that articulate the shared time of a rural community. It is concluded that the contemporary is not the tie between the old and the new, but rather the disruption of time that makes it possible precisely to apprehend living time, that of the situation, that of elapsing that always has one step in the “no more” and another in the “not yet”. Hence it is concluded that the sociohistorical time of intelligibility, the common time, the shared present, is the one that grants viability to the ethnographic present and allows the historical imagination and that of the future in anthropological theory.

Keywords : contemporaneity; anthropology; ethnography; music; the new; past; present; future.