Genesis and structure of Euro-indigenous frontier complexes. Rethinking the American margins from (and beyond) the work of Nathan Wachtel

Abstract

The current essay focuses in the main transformation known in historical anthropology research of frontier areas during the last decades. At the beginning we will present Los Vencidos, the pioneer work of Nathan Wachtel, French Historian and Anthropologist, in order to explain how this book turned out to be a milestone in the ethnohistoric literature of Latin Amarica. Then we will argue that the analysis proposed by the author, in terms of resistence/acculturation, tended to be progressively displaced by phenomena such as: ethnicity, mestizaje, ethnogenesis. We will show, thus, how ethnohistorical research regarding the New World and its frontiers has changed, above all in the ways to approach the cultural dynamic and the sociohistorical processes developed due to the arrival  of European people to America. Finally this will lead us to pose a tentative definition of a notion called frontier complex.