Corporations and Community in Highland Guatemala

Abstract

This article takes Eric Wolf's concept of the closed, corporate community as a starting point for exploring how senses of community take shape in highland Guatemala in relation to contemporary property and production models that are premised on the sovereignty of legal corporations (i.e., multinational firms). Findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork among indigenous Maya entrepreneurs who own small‐scale clothing manufacturing businesses and who routinely copy trademarked fashion brands. Their understandings and practices of community reveal a great deal about the unique dilemmas forged by global rights regimes and transnational capitalist production. Small‐scale manufacturers interpret their relationships to international intellectual property protections and maquiladoras [foreign‐owned, large‐scale factories] through a moral economy that privileges the sharing of knowledge and resources across kin and neighbors and in ways that reinforce senses of belonging to spatialized communities.