To write about Indigeneity means already being deeply enmeshed in identity politics. The much researched rural south of Mexico City is a case in point. Anthropologists have described the Nahuatl speakers of Milpa Alta as “heirs of the Aztecs,” and knowledge of Nahuatl and folklore has become key to maintaining municipal land rights in the context of current multiculturalist politics. Thus, Nahuatl has become a politicized marker of prestige. This has led to various tensions, including acrimonious competition over what constitutes the “correct” way of speaking Nahuatl and frictions with newly arrived speakers of other Indigenous languages. To avoid exacerbating these tensions, I suggest that anthropologists should commit to decolonizing their work by politically and epistemologically situating it and by adopting participatory approaches, as well as an iterative, adaptive approach to research ethics. This means continuously reevaluating and tailoring one's ethics to concrete situations as they emerge—and never truly leaving “the field.” [Identity politics, decolonization, Nahuatl language]

中文翻译：

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阿兹台克人不是土著：人类学和土著政治

写关于土著性的文章意味着已经深深地陷入了身份政治。墨西哥城以南经过大量研究的农村就是一个很好的例子。人类学家将米尔帕·阿尔塔的纳瓦特人说成是“阿兹台克人的继承人”，在当前的多元文化主义政治背景下，对纳瓦特尔和民间文学艺术的了解已成为维护市政土地权的关键。因此，纳瓦特尔已成为声望政治化的标志。这导致了各种紧张局势，包括在构成“纳瓦特尔”的“正确”说话方式上进行激烈的竞争，并与新来的其他土著语言使用者产生摩擦。为了避免加剧这些紧张关系，我建议人类学家应致力于通过政治和认识论上的立场并采用参与性方法来使其工作非殖民化，以及一种迭代的，适应性强的研究伦理学方法。这意味着要不断地对道德规范进行重新评估和调整，以适应具体情况的出现，而永远不会真正离开“领域”。[身份政治，非殖民化，纳瓦特尔语]