Alfredo Lopez Austin the memorious, the approachable, the dissident owner of a stupendous sense of humor and boundless generosity; the ethnologist on his merits, the one who took mythology seriously and opened the discussion to possibilities that often overflowed the rigid understanding of our past.
This is how the Mexican historian, academic, translator and popularizer was reminded during a tribute paid this Sunday afternoon, practically a year after his death (October 15), in the Jaime Torres Bodet Auditorium of the Anthropology National Museumunder the editing 33 of the International Anthropology and History Book Fair (PHILAH).
For these evocations to the historian, friends and students were invited: the archaeologist and researcher emeritus of the INAH, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma; the historian Norma Sanchez Merinothe anthropologist Leopoldo Trejo Barrientosthe ethnologist Andres Medina Hernandez and the Nahua poet and activist Mardonio Carballomoderated by Patricia Ledesma Bouchandirector of the Museo del Templo Mayor.
“Alfredo was very reluctant to receive tributes,” Matos Moctezuma declared to evoke that tribute to Alfredo López Austin, whom in 2013 he managed to convince to be the object of a tribute with a book, an exhibition and a colloquium.
Later, he pointed out: “playing with time is only given to those characters who have the privilege of transposing time itself and reaching the times that were without leaving their own time, Alfredo is one of them.”
Alfred, present
For his part, at all times, the ethnologist Andrés Medina Hernández, who maintained a 20-year friendship with the honoree, spoke of him in the present tense, as is usually spoken of those people whose intellectual legacy lives on and it is so fundamental that the absence seems to dissolve.
“Alfredo is a provocateur and he is in the sense that he makes proposals that elicit constructive responses, that open up the field. I believe that the ethnography of Mexico has expanded its fields of contribution as a response to Alfredo’s proposals. I say that he is an ethnologist because he incorporates aspects of anthropology, linguistics and archaeology. And that is ethnology, the conjunction that he does brilliantly, although he always said that he was a historian”.
He advocated for living peoples
López Austin was a sower of doubts all the time, declared the poet and activist Mardonio Carballo during your participation. “He could have been the wisest man, he could have been a great teacher, but, above all things, Alfredo was a good person. That always has to be celebrated, especially in the areas where he moved, in the academy, full of disagreements and enmities that, of course, are generated with arguments.
He acknowledged that “his consistent voice was dissenting when it had to be. One of Alfredo’s greatnesses was precisely there, in his generosities that could also become the most absolute dissidence”.
The pupils cried
Two of the hundreds of students that Alfredo López Austin supported at UNAM also took part in this tribute. Neither of them could avoid crying when offering their testimony about the famous historian.
The historian Norma Sánchez Merino, who in recent years was assistant professor of the honoree, expressed that “his main teaching is that the Mesoamerican peoples are not past; to understand them, we have to approach our present context.”
The ethnologist Leopoldo Trejo Barrios evoked: “Alfredo considered that, more than isolated individuals, we are social individuals, nodes of a great knowledge-producing network whose vitality rests on dialogue.”
We know that everything we propose, which has passed through a rigid strainer, is never polished enough to be considered a truth, that is, science ceases to be a producer of truths and becomes a producer of proposals, but each one of proposals is simply provisional. In other words, there is no scientific certainty, we could say, not even in the formal sciences”.
Alfredo López Austin (1936-2021) (taken from a tribute video)
Some fundamental works of the honoree:
“Omens and Abuses” (1969)
Alfredo López Austin (introduction, version, notes and comments)
UNAM
“Man-God. Religion and politics in the Nahuatl world” (1973)
Alfredo Lopez Austin
UNAM
“Human Body and Ideology” (1980)
Alfredo Lopez Austin
UNAM
“The myths of the opossum. Paths of Mesoamerican mythology” (1990)
Alfredo Lopez Austin
UNAM
ricardo.quiroga@eleconomista.mx
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