Indian Economic Life in Chiapas

Abstract

*T HE forms of economic organization, together with their geographic distribution, are obvious keys to differences in landscape, and set the limits within which particular geographic structures may develop. In many parts of the world, several distinct economies coexist in the same area, giving an opportunity for comparison of their respective geographic expressions. This is a description of one such area in which different economies occur side-by-side, the Rio Blanco valley of central Chiapas in Mexico. The Rio Blanco zone provides a fair sample of the large area of Tzeltal and Tsotsil Indian settlement in the Chiapas Highlands, still comparatively unintegrated with the modern commercial world. The system of Indian livelihood and the economic frameworks within which it operates stand quite apart from the slowly-advancing commercial order, and much of the land is still completely under the Indian's sway. What is of interest there is not the occurrence of a particular pattern of small villages, tiny patches of irrigated land, and spotty milpa clearings (all of which are familiar enough to anyone who has traveled in this part of the world) but the institutional mechanisms that regulate and distribute economic activity so as to produce such a landscape, and to set it off from other types nearby. Therefore, this article treats not so much geography, ill itself, as those mechanisms that control the scope and kind of geographic patterns that may be seen.