Research on Community Institutions in Contemporary Latin American Studies

Abstract

Research on community institutions has long been an important area of anthropology. A great deal of literature is devoted, inter alia, to Latin American communities, both rural, including traditional indigenous communities, and those emerging in urbanized and semi-urbanized areas. The article provides a brief overview of the development of Latin American community studies, from their origins in the 1920s and 1930s to the present day. I characterize the current state of the study of community institutions in the region in international anthropology, highlighting several trends within Latin American community studies. In domestic Latin American studies, the topic of community institutions occupies a peripheral place. Soviet scholarship had certain achievements in developing it, but methodologically it was limited by a dogmatic version of Marxism. Over the past decade, Latin American community research in Russia has gained some momentum.