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The Mexican Aristocracy: An Expressive Ethnography (1910-2000). Hugo G. Nutini. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. 386 pp.
Several years ago Laura Nader said that it is important to have a good knowledge of elites in order to understand the class structure and mobility of society. This has not been the case of anthropologists who have been singularly disinterested in the study of elites. With the exception of Sugiyama Lebra's ( 1993) excellent study of the contemporary Japanese nobility, anthropologists, as far as I am aware, have not heeded Nader's suggestion. In the case of Mexico, for example, only two studies of plutocratic groups have been undertaken: one by anthropologists Adler Lomnitz and Pérez Lizaur (1987) and another by Hanono (2004). It is in this context that the book under review must be placed.
Hugo Nutini's book is the second of a series of three volumes on the aristocracy, and it is an outstanding study of this now-moribund social segment of Mexican society, whose origins go back to the Spanish Conquest. The study is a description and analysis of the Mexican aristocracy in the 20th century, as it evolved from the ruling and social class of the country to a virtually invisible sector of the upper echelons of the stratification system.
Nutini analyzes the structure, ideology, worldview, and the expressive mechanisms that have allowed the aristocracy to survive after...