Closed Corporate Community Research Articles

Rearview mirrors: Harvard Land Rover interviews and the ethnographic drive in midcentury Chiapas

SummaryIn 1951, Mexico's Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) established a coordinating center for a pilot development project in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. INI administrators sought to draw Tzotzil‐ and Tzeltal‐speaking indigenous communities that radiated around San Cristóbal into identification with the Mexican state and its political mythology of racial‐cultural mixture, or mestizaje. To do so, the INI built roads. State investment in the transportation infrastructure of indigenous Chiapas enabled the geographical mobility of scores of U.S. anthropologists and students who used these roads to access “closed corporate communities” such as Zinacantán during the late‐1950s and 1960s. Working from archived correspondence and field notes, this essay examines Harvard Chiapas Project founder Evon Vogt's early project interviews conducted on these roads in a Land Rover. Reading the Land Rover as a space‐making technology of ethnographic rapport, I ask how such vehicles have structured ethnographic forms of intimacy and attachment and whether they render the interview space a site of capitalist capture. I ultimately refract a surfaced critique of the interview form's capitalist coloniality through a weak‐theoretical evocation of the Land Rover's social, technological, and symbolic indeterminacy.

Chinamit and Molab: Late Posclassic Highland Maya Precursors of Closed Corporate Community

This article explores the extent to which documentary evidence from the early Colonial period in Guatemala can be used to demonstrate the existance of closed corporate community as an organizing principle of basic Highland Maya socio-cultural units during the Late Postclassic period (ca. AD 1200-1524). Our ability to detect various aspects of closed corporate community among the ancient Highland Maya allows a more ethnographic characterization of Late Postclassic society, particularly at the non-elite level. The existance of closed corporate community as a principle of organization both during the Late Postclassic and today also raises questions of continuity and the extent of cultural change brought about as the results of the Spanish conquest and colonization.

Hospitality, Friendship, and the Outsider in Highland Sardinia

Abstract:Hospitality in central highland Sardinia is a key cultural idiom that structures community life and accompanies daily interactions among all social actors. Its meaning varies according to the relationship between the parties involved in the exchange, with social distance a primary variable. Based on field work conducted over a period of thirteen months in 2002 and 2003, this paper examines practices of hospitality in the village of Orgosolo in light of some characteristics that Eric Wolf (1957, 1986) attributes to the “closed corporate community.” A reworking of Wolf's classic formulation permits insight into how practices of hospitality maintain the exclusiveness of the moral community vis‐à‐vis the outside world, and incorporate outsiders into a special category which neutralizes the danger they initially present, thus exempting them from local standards of interaction that are driven by an egalitarian and competitive ethos.

Blurred Edges, Open Boundaries: The Long-Term Development of a Peasant Community in Rural Mexico

Wolf's dichotomy between open and closed corporate communities has become axiomatic for the study of social organization in rural communities in Mesoamerica. In this paper I argue that this dichotomy is of limited use for understanding the vital dynamics behind the evolution of social groups typically classified by anthropologists as peasants. To overcome the conceptual limitation of Wolf's original classification I propose a network model that focuses on social relations. This approach can more adequately capture the variability and complexity we observe in everyday practice in rural communities in past and contemporary times. The paper examines aspects of the social organization of Belén, a rural community in Tlaxcala, Mexico. Using data from parish registers and two ethnographic surveys, I demonstrate how the social networks of compadrazgo (ritual kinship) and marriage can be reconstructed back into the seventeenth century. Since the beginning of the eighteenth century Beléños have formed most of their compadrazgo relationships with people from outside, indicating that social boundaries had started to collapse long before industrialization led to new economic relationships. The driving force behind the change was a severe epidemic shock. These findings have substantial, theoretical implications for the model of peasant society commonly applied in Mesoamerica, especially for earlier historical periods.

A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (review)

A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. DIANE NL NELSON. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999; 428 pp. A straight-forward summary of Diane Nelson's book would describe it as being about Maya and Maya cultural rights activism, bodies and body politics, la mujer maya, a gringa anthropologist, and discourses of ethnicity, race, gender, and nation in Quincentennial Guatemala. All this would be at least a partially accurate representation of what Nelson calls her -partial' ethnography and what could also be described as life (and love-sexuality and erotics are also [un]covered) in the time of colera, this last term used in the sense of an intense emotional response to a hurt, such as a finger in a wound. However, since her early days of solidarity work in Guatemala, Nelson has come to understand the fluid nature of issues, labels, borders, and bodies and thus writes of a methodology of fluidarity: a practice and analytics that combine solidarity-being partial to, as in on the side of, the people I work with-with an acknowledgement of how partial, how incomplete, my knowledge and politics have to be (p. 31). What this means is that a mere list of topics covered hardly scratches the surface of what Nelson accomplishes in this serious and playful, wideranging and masterfully argued body of work. Rather, Nelson states that identity is formed through (p. 41) and points to Maya activists' notion of formacion, with the sense of being made by practices of (p. 349). Her own articulation of the issues helps form her subjects in new, sophisticated ways and inform her audience in the process. No matter how much it might seem like a closed corporate community, the state is hardly a traditional anthropological fieldsite. However, Nelson's years of experience working in a variety of locales and with a wide range of people have enabled her to make contact with many of the natives. As a recent college graduate in 1985 she engaged in solidarity work that introduced her to government elites and other professionals in the capital, refugees of the violence in Mexico, and people whose power and positions were in between those extremes. She went on to conduct research in the Development Poles, translate for Rigoberta Menchu, and otherwise expand her circle of contacts, all of which has provided her with a multitude of candid voices speaking articulately and complexly on subjects that are often painful even when they are funny. Within the frame of her work on Maya in/and the state, she devotes significant attention to four topical complexes: gender (including Rigoberta Menchu jokes, with their sick/funny humor, and la mujer maya-the Maya woman-understood as prosthetic for Maya/Guatemalan culture); state-level institutions (for example, the Ministry of Culture and Sports and the Guatemalan Mayan Language Academy, with their politics of culture); the nexus of the Maya/local, the nationstate/national, and the world-system/international (for example, the struggle for ratification of the United Nation's ILO Convention 169 and technotraditional Maya-hackers); and the body (whether the wounded body of the gringa suspected of baby snatching, the unwound body of the Rigoberta Menchu in jokes, or the bodywork that goes into mestizaje). These themes are interpenetrated and interwoven with theoretical considerations (and in effect do not exist without their theoretical frames) having to do with the construction of power and identities, the nature of labels and attitudes, the inter-relatedness of productivity and repression, and the struggle to make sense of it all. This semiotic struggle lies at the heart of Nelson's project and is the site where her theoretical/ethnographic concerns are most powerfully pronounced with her writing. Nelson's fluidary analysis pushes beyond the solid, certain takes on the world and the binary oppositions so breezily offered up as descriptions of social reality into a territory where contradictions necessarily coexist and understanding is always partial because it is endlessly coming-into-being. …

Flexible Production, Households, and Fieldwork: Multisited Zapotec Weavers in the Era of Late Capitalism

Like other crafters catering to tourists and international ethnic art markets, Zapotec weavers have become closely tied to international capital and to increasingly flexible and dispersed schemes of production. Some Zapotec families have responded to such flexibility and now maintain several households in the Southwestern United States, U.S./Mexico border towns, and Oaxaca. The study of household petty commodity production thus requires a multisited field methodology for what are today dispersed Zapotec households enmeshed in the transnational production of Zapotec textiles. (Mexico, Zapotec, Chimayo, New Mexico, textiles, flexible production, multisited ethnography) In a provocative essay, George Marcus (1995:95) outlined the contours of an emerging ethnographic strategy that responded to what he referred to as more complex objects of study ... such as the capitalist world He described a developing set of ethnographic practices appropriate to the increasingly nonlocalized nature of the lives of those whom anthropologists study that at the same time captured and helped to configure the limits of their ill-defined social geographies. What Marcus called multi-sited ethnography delineated new understandings of particular social worlds that became increasingly dispersed in the later half of the twentieth century. Multisited ethnography, Marcus (1995:96) maintained, embodies a research design best suited to examining the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space. The ethnographic practices he outlined would follow people, things, metaphors, plots, stories or allegories, lives, and conflicts for new and better understanding. Resulting changes in the fieldwork habits of anthropologists would include a shift from prolonged field stays in a single location to shorter forays to multiple locations. Definitions of what constitute the field and fieldwork would in consequence be reworked to the extent that anthropology departments, professional organizations, libraries, museums, and institutions that fund social science research, as well as electronic spaces such as Web sites, listservs, and chat rooms frequented by anthropologists would become field sites in and of themselves. Many who study household petty commodity production in Mesoamerica do so through intense periods of residence and participant observation in a single location; usually a single community but sometimes a single household. Especially in the case of petty household commodities produced for touristic consumption, a great deal of recent research in Latin America, for example, has described how international capital has inserted itself into and reconfigured relations of production that were once internal to individual households. Complicated systems of subcontracting and the extraction of surplus value by intermediaries (whose economic and cultural capital is subsequently both enabled and recreated) are well described (e.g., Nash 1993; Ehlers 1993; Stephen 1993; and Stromberg-Pellizzi 1993). These studies, however, frame productive strategies unproblematically in terms of local connections to a generally conceived global system. Latin American ethnographers working in Mesoamerica, for example, having worked through legacies such as the closed corporate community and having long recognized the limitations of constructing rural communities as social universes unto themselves, reinvigorate the very divisions they attempt to overcome. Local/global distinctions treat the global and the local as entities that exist a priori even though researchers embraced a world-systems perspective; precisely in response to criticisms that they had either assumed or created ethnographic locales disconnected from their wider social and historical universes. Instead, a conceptual framework is needed in which these kinds of distinctions are blurred, where the local is seen to be riddled with the global and the latter is seen as the product of multiple locales. …

The Catholic Church and the Closed Corporate Community During the Guatemalan Revolution, 1944-1954

Scholars have debated the effects of the Guatemalan Revolution (1944-1954), i.e. the political and social changes carried out during the decade, on the closed corporate community. Many scholars, including the anthropologists Carol Smith and Ralph Beals, have looked at the political pressures and changes during the Revolution in attempts to explain the decline of the traditional community during the decade. Meanwhile, the historian Jim Handy has challenged the common political explanations for the downfall of the community and questioned the degree to which the communities are “closed” and “corporate.” Most scholars agree, however, that the revolutionary period witnessed a breakdown in the traditional village structures.

Agrarian Unrest from an Anthropological Perspective: The Case of Vietnam

Twentieth-century peasants have played a central role in the making of the modem world. This is undoubtedly the case in the Vietnamese revolution, which has attracted considerable attention from a number of specialists on agrarian politics.' This paper critically examines the fundamental premises in three recent important works in sociology and political science on the Vietnamese revolution in particular and agrarian unrest in general: Jeffery Paige's Agrarian Revolution, James C. Scott's The Moral Economy of the Peasant, and Samuel Popkin's The Rational Peasant. These premises will be analyzed in relation to the peasant-based movement of 1930-1931 in Nghe-An and Ha-Tinh, two provinces in North-Central Vietnam (see map). As the most serious pre-1945 challenge to French colonialism, the Nghe-Tinh movement epitomizes, in certain major aspects, the dynamics of the Vietnamese revolution at large. In the following analysis of the theoretical literature and the Nghe-Tinh movement, I will argue that when utilitarian logic is applied to a particular case without a systematic consideration of the environmental and normative parameters of individual action (Popkin and, in a broad sense, Paige), this application amounts to an abuse of utilitarian logic. Both rewards and political strategies are intrinsically mediated by sociocultural rules-rules within which agrarian relations are inextricably embedded, inconsistent as these normative elements may be. The costs and benefits of human action are always informed by the complex structural principles of a specific sociocultural system. However, if agrarian unrest is examined exclusively in terms of the structural opposition between peasants and the lords and state (Scott), such an analysis can only partially enhance our understanding of their behavioral choices. In the closed corporate communities of precolonial and colonial northern Vietnam, agrarian relations encompassed both an intricate hierarchical order and a radical egalitarian principle. They involved both utmost solidarity and intense competition. I will argue that without an in-depth analysis of the ambiguities and contradictions in structural principles and ecological parameters, neither the Nghe-Tinh movement, nor the Vietnamese revolution, nor agrarian unrest in general can be fully understood.

Closed Corporate and Open Peasant Communities: Reopening a Hastily Shut Case

In a provocatively entitled article, “Chinese Peasants and the Closed Community: An Open and Shut Case,” Professor G. William Skinner has raised a number of important issues regarding the closed corporate and open peasant community types first formulated by Eric Wolf (1955, 1957). Skinner questions Wolfs assumption (1957: 8) that closed corporate communities developed in areas where society became dualized “…into a dominant entrepreneurial sector and a dominated sector of native peasants,” whereas open peasant communities arose in the new, market-production oriented settlements budded off from Europe “ …in response to the rising demand for cash crops which accompanied the development of capitalism in Europe” (Wolf, 1955: 462).

What alpine peasants have in common: Observations on communal tenure in a Swiss village

An ecological approach to the persistence of communal tenure in a Swiss village suggests that such rights are neither historical anachronisms nor aspects of the closed corporate community. The adaptive value of group holdings in alpine pasture, forest, water, and access routes is compared to that of individual rights in arable land, meadows, and buildings within the same community. The nature and exploitation of resources are related to communal acquisition, conservation, and distribution.

Defensive Structuring and Environmental Stress

This essay explores a kind of adaptation, referred to as defensive structuring, that recurs with great regularity among groups that perceive themselves as exposed to environmental stress of long duration with which they cannot cope directly and aggressively. Adaptive elements include: authoritarian control over members, exercised by a small specially knowledgeable elite; a high rate o endogamy; cultivation of cultural identity symbols; and early socialization for impulse control. A defensive adaptation emerges from specifiable kinds both of prior structural characteristics and environmental changes in interaction. Examples are provided from cases examined in some depth. The response syndrome is discussed in relation to social and revitalization movements and closed corporate communities.