They evoke Alfredo López Austin, the wise man, the teacher and the dissident

Everything that we propose, which has passed through a rigid strainer, we know that it is never polished enough to be considered a truth. In other words, science ceases to be a producer of truths and becomes a producer of proposals, but each of the proposals is simply provisional. That is to say, there is no scientific certainty, we could say, not even in the formal sciences”.

Alfredo López Austin (1936-2021) (taken from a tribute video)

Alfredo López Austin the memorious, the accessible, the dissident and owner of a stupendous sense of humor and limitless generosity; the ethnologist on his merits, the one who took mythology seriously and opened the discussion to possibilities that often reframed the rigid understanding of our past.

This is how the Mexican historian and academic was honored, one year after his death (October 15), in the Jaime Torres Bodet Auditorium of the National Museum of Anthropology, within the framework of the International Anthropology and History Book Fair (FILAH).

Friends and students of the academician were invited to these evocations, among them, the archaeologist and researcher emeritus of the INAH, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma; the ethnologist Andrés Medina Hernández and the Nahua poet and activist Mardonio Carballo, moderated by Patricia Ledesma Bouchan, director of the Museo del Templo Mayor.

“Alfredo was very reluctant to receive tributes,” Matos Moctezuma declared about his friend, noting: “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 his own era, 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 is alive and so fundamental that the absence seems dissolve.

“Alfredo is a provocateur 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 his 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”.

López Austin was a sower of doubts at all times, declared the poet and activist Mardonio Carballo during his 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”.

Carballo acknowledged that “his consistent voice was dissident when it had to be. And one of the great things about Alfredo López Austin was precisely there, in his generosities that could also become the most absolute dissidence.”

The moved pupils

Two of the students that the scholar sheltered at UNAM also took part in this tribute. It was impossible for them to keep from crying as they offered their testimony.

The historian Norma Sánchez Merino, who in recent years, even in a pandemic, was an assistant professor of the honoree, expressed that “her main teaching is that the Mesoamerican peoples are not the past; to understand them, we have to approach our present context.”

For his part, 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.”

Some fundamental works of the historian:

“Omens and abuses” (1969)Alfredo López Austin (introduction, version, notes and comments)UNAM

“Man-God. Religion and politics in the Nahuatl world” (1973) Alfredo López AustinUNAM

“Human Body and Ideology” (1980)Alfredo López AustinUNAM

“The myths of the opossum. Paths of Mesoamerican mythology” (1990)Alfredo López AustinUNAM

ricardo.quiroga@eleconomista.mx