Malinowski in Oaxaca: Implications of an unfinished project in economic anthropology, Part II

Abstract

A careful reading of the preliminary report of Malinowski's unfinished Oaxaca project reveals an implicit template for future research that isolated production in constituent village units within the regional market system as keys to understanding flows of commodity value through markets to meet consumption needs throughout the system. Malinowski's field notebooks for 1941 show that follow-up research was conducted in several peasant-artisan communities focused on commodity production and division of labor. Two craft commodities with ancient origins, metates and pottery, and the major staple crop, maize were the focus of Malinowski's observations of work, supplemented by collection of quantitative data on costs of production, market pricing, and weights and measures. Mexico in 1940 had a capitalist economy, albeit one with uneven regional development, and Malinowski's project report and unpublished field notebooks provide evidence of his interest in capitalist activity in commodity production and marketing. But the main theme running throughout his ethnographic work in the Trobriands and in Oaxaca was the sociocultural entanglements of commodities as they circulate through activities of production, exchange, consumption, and distribution—that is, the economy.