Message-ID: <19991123170325.AAA25155@jubilee.ns.sympatico.ca@LOCALNAME> Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 13:03:34 -04 From: Kerry Miller <mailto:kerryo@ns.sympatico.ca> Subject: AAA: Culture and Agriculture To: mailto:DEVEL-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU
http://csbs3.utsa.edu/culture&agriculture/rhoads.htm
Rural Resistance to Globalization and Agricultural Change
Russell Rhoads (assistant professor of anthropology, Grand Valley State U., Michigan)
_Progress, Hunger and Envy: Commercial Agriculture, Marketing and Social Transformation in the Venezuelan Andes_, Monica Lindh de Montoya. Sweden: Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, 1996.
_The Force of Irony: Power in the Everyday Life of Mexican Tomato Workers_, Gabriel Torres. New York: Berg, 1997.
These two books represent recent contributions to a growing genre of literature on cultural representations that shape the identities of subjects under study. The cultural production approach is dedicated to the interaction between local peoples and other powerful groups.
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Based on the author’s dissertation, the [first] book draws from field work conducted in the late 1980s in which she relies primarily on participant- observation and open-ended interviews. Her main thesis is that the rapid expansion of commercial agriculture alters perceptions of self and community. “What interests me here is the social, rather than the material . . . how the skills and practices of capitalist agriculture are perceived, learned and incorporated into valley life. I am interested in what it feels like to live in Bailadores, and why. Market production has taken hold of local imagination, and my aim is to analyze how the market . . . shapes social life” (p. 10). What she finds is that modernity (commercial agriculture) is contrasted to a traditional existence characterized by hunger and deprivation.
This contrast of epochs is highlighted in chapter two, “Bailadores: History and Society,” in which the author embarks upon building a case that social life in the past was more integrated and cooperative than today. The reader will likely be disappointed withthe data detailing social and economic life before the advent of cash crop production. Rather than reporting the “Bailadores’ viewpoint” from detailed oral histories and thus constructing a local reality founded on empirical data, the author relies on secondary sources for the Andean region in general, resulting in a homogenous and familiar caricature of local life. No doubt, we are familiar with the normative ideal of the closed-community consisting of wealth in land, food crops, family integrity, labor exchange, and migration. Specifically, Lindh de Montoya replaces good historical ethnography with an enthusiastic embrace of Gudeman and Rivera (1990), in an effort to project an image of traditional rural life as an economically-marginal “domestic economy.” Although my own research in Bailadores (1990-1996) on the history of agricultural change confirms this historic condition (Rhoads 1992, 1994), Gudeman and Rivera is better used as a theoretical construct than as a description for the local economy with its diversity and changes over time.
Chapter three, “The Entry of the Cash Crop Economy,” continues the dichotomy of traditional and modern, examining the shift from the “domestic economy” to commercial farming. Overall, this chapter lacks a penetrating look into the diversity of farm types and farmer strategies that have accompanied the emergence of vegetable agriculture. This is perhaps due to the author’s primary interest in merchants, specifically in ajeros or merchants who trade in garlic, most of whom dwell in the town of Bailadores rather than in the countryside. Despite these weaknesses, the author uses greater ethnographic detail in painting a picture of how capitalization unfolded over a thirty-year period. Many farmers (but not all) relied on appropriating existing cultural organization, skills and labor practices as a means of integrating new elements such as the migrant workers from nearby Colombia.
The strength of the book rests in the main chapters on “Marketing Cash Crops” and “The Garlic Trade.” Here, the author demonstrates how emerging vegetable markets had allowed wholesalers to set production parameters, excluding farmers from marketing process. Intermediaries from the local community stepped in, reformulating local production and exchange practices, consequently introducing new social images and behavior. According to the author, garlic merchants manipulated traditional sharecropping and, according to their needs, sometimes appropriated and sometimes eliminated the “house” organization (the domestic economy). This thesis is supported theoretically with an actor-oriented approach taken from personal interviews. The use of prismatic vignettes effectively reveals the diversity of cultural symbolic meanings clarifying socioeconomic interaction.
The chapters “Local Politics” and “Conclusion: Progress and Material Life” describe how the ideal intersects with the material—how cultural meanings commingle with development. In the chapter on politics, the author brings together political activism with the new political power wielded by the successful cash-croppers and merchants, who effectively challenge the traditional political elites of the community. Unfortunately, the author waits until the concluding chapter to develop the theme of how the community employs “hunger” and “envy” to mitigate the power of the merchants. The chapter describes material progress and how the merchants invest new-found wealth into political power and objects of conspicuous consumption. Yet the power of progress and social stratification tear at the fabric of community, generating psychic conflicts. New cultural forms and conventions are struggled for by competing cultural groups: “the battle for development is fought out as much socially—in people’s heads—as it is economically” (p. 15).
According to the author, economic success stretches meanings and mores, redefines social institutions, and invents new models of behavior and being. And in the midst of prosperity for some, others experience envy and hunger, which they re-employ via language and metaphor against the nouveau riche as a means to deprive them from the deserved enjoyment of their gains. In sum, the framework adopted by Lindh de Montoya has a tendency to rely on binary conflicts between tradition and modernity, house (subsistence) and corporation (capitalism), farmer and merchant, and community and individual. These oppositions are then mediated in a form of “dialogue” based less on economics as objective structural forces of social transformation and more on the cultural concepts of hunger and envy. These latter take center stage as the pivotal cultural emotion driving social relations, and like a ball and chain, they weigh down modernization and mitigate the harsh stratifying effects of development. The author claims to fill the gap in how markets redefine everyday life; market behavior is less mechanistic and better viewed “as a time, a place, and an intersection between socially situated actors with different motivations and goals” and as “ways of developing alternative social identities” (p. 12). For the most part this book succeeds in these goals, and it will certainly help meet the needs of researchers interested in the growth of local commercial marketing systems and their effects on local social stratification. Readers, however, may be disappointed with the theoretical complexity.
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We leave the homegrown merchants of the Venezuelan Andes for Jalisco, Mexico and Gabriel Torres’ study of tomato workers. The agrarian question and peasant agriculture will not be settled with Torres, but he does make a significant contribution to an already massive body of research on rural Mexico. He covers new ground and fills an important gap in our understanding of agricultural and industrial worker studies in the context of agribusiness and globalization. A Mexican author, Torres’ research was directed by Norman Long and adopts Long’s actor-oriented approach. In this “ethnography of work,” Torres encourages a systematic inquiry into the life worlds of rural workers, whose “invisibility” he blames on the tendency of researchers to give theoretical primacy only to what they see as the subjugating force—the structural variables of globalization and capitalism. His point is well taken; worker's reality is often captured as a homogenous and residual artifact of structural variables.
In contrast, Torres sets out to rub shoulders with workers and listen to their stories, work place conversations, jokes and jibes . . . all on a serious mission of understanding how tomato workers cope with the internationalization of agriculture. According to Torres, as the influx of agribusiness changes relations of production, tomato workers must cope with a labor process that leaves them further disadvantaged and oppressed. He wonders how these workers have endured such conditions of poverty, and initially adopts a class analysis based on tomato workers in opposition to growers, expecting collective political consciousness to jump out at him. But to his surprise, Torres learns that this top-down approach masks the empirical nature of interaction between the two groups, which was revealed to him as heterogenous within groups and diverse across groups. The methodological magic he adopts is the “reflective ethnography” which allows him to discover cultural repertoires, meaning, identity, symbols, and irony in both language use and behavior.
This shift toward spotlighting the worker delivers an appreciation for the way workers employ irony in daily social interaction and how they are able to articulate their own power strategies in a systematic way, “delegitimizing the plans and policies of those apparently in power” (p. 1). The result is a melange of unexpected forms of historical consciousness as workers encounter growers, agribusiness companies, and even new groups of workers.
In the opening chapter, “New Ways for Understanding Farm Workers,” the author introduces some unconventional, though worthwhile, wisdom. His thesis about worker existence is twofold: (1) social networks, cultural identities, and organizational patterns are diverse yet difficult to observe because (2) worker power is “hidden” from the ethnocentric gaze of the researcher who devalues worker reality as either backward or as a function of capitalism. The task of unearthing hidden power, Torres explains, is complicated by the limitations of field empiricism and ethnography. But the worker struggle can be revealed, however imperfectly, through “practices of irony,” knowledge and practice about a set of conditions beyond the worker’s control (p. 17-19):
. . . irony allows workers to entertain the idea that even though apparently nothing changes, there is room for free action, joy, resistence or at least fugitive behavior . . . Despite these limits, emergent worker arrangements point to new forms of consensus, labor organization, compliance, and ways of dealing with the unintended consequences of actions. These emergent forms are not fantasies, but implicit assumptions and concepts in a social process that includes field work itself. [p. 20]
Thus, Torres questions assumptions that legitimize the dichotomous image of development and underdevelopment, implicitly reified as totalizing categories that swallow the capacity for workers to exert agency and micro-diversity (cf. Kearney 1996).
Chapter 2, “Plunging into the Garlic,” highlights the local character of the research process, and advances Torres’ thesis of the link between worker “invisibility” and research “assumptions that workers lack a counter-hegemonic discourse” (p. 35). A local colloquialism plunging in the garlic is borrowed by the author by analogy to signify a long-term commitment between researcher and farm worker, and like “plunging into the deep end of a pool,” it is a way for researchers to close the distance that separates them from the farm worker.
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“The Force of Irony and the Irony of Power,” chapter six, examines work place collective behavior: how subordinated people accumulate, exercise and concede power. Again, Torres reminds the reader that this power is concealed under representations of subordination. He also returns to key concepts for further theoretical development: ironic practices and contingent utopias. Irony helps the workers recover dignity against the stereotypes and prejudices perpetrated against them by company personnel; and contingent utopias help workers articulate systematically their power strategies. These two concepts, Torres argues, help explain the initial question of how workers endure oppressive work and life conditions. Supported by several more vignettes, Torres describes profiles of collective behavior, such as the use of jokes and irony in conversation. Farm worker life projects are also viewed as contingent upon the imposition of a dominant structure, but these conditions, Torres states, are tolerated as temporary until a better motivation allows workers to see the undesirability of the situation.
In Torres’ words, “I employ the term contingent utopia to characterize the association of actors and events and the paradox of seeking opportunities over a long time without being sure of the outcomes. The concept emphasizes the active and creative self-determination of workers” (p. 184) As a result, farm workers can and do transform the organization of production and their life conditions. Workers use the power of their subordination to ready themselves and to force change.
The Epilogue, “Who Are They?,” presents a final theoretical reflection on the “ethnography of work.” Torres begins with a question directed rhetorically at those we study: How do I know that my concept represents you and your real existence? Restating his thesis and raising issues on actor-oriented human agency and its transforming capacities, Torres resolves that the ethnography of work “demonstrates the indeterminacy of macro-structural variables” in favor of the limited, but more accurate, contingent utopia “as motivating farmworker’s spontaneous, creative, ironic acts, which should therefore be seen as part of a subtle but active strategy of resistence” (p. 219). By the end of the book, the reader is left with an honest, convincing proposal, both well-documented and well-constructed. I especially appreciated the way he clarifies biases in “theory” that purport to explain micro-macro processes of globalization and capitalization, as well as his descriptions of the dynamic and diverse cultural forms of tomato workers.
In sum, Torres’ claim that the subject (worker), in a conscious manner, grasps the system of objective relations governing the social world advances beyond Bourdieu. We owe a debt to Torres for bringing to us the historical consciousness of the tomato workers, both in groups and as individuals, which bestows dignity on people who time and again take the brunt of capitalism.
The Force of Irony affords the workers voice and visibility they deserve, advances ethnographic theory in the critical, reflexive tradition, and offers a believable account of the link between globalization and local social worlds. In addition, Torres makes clear that concepts of domination and subordination are indeed problematic realities. Finally, both of the reviewed books bring two disparate groups– agricultural workers and merchants—to Kearney’s (1996) reformulation of the peasant concept, reinforcing the trend of rethinking anthropological biases concerning appropriate subjects of analysis. Although researchers wedded to the positivist tradition will likely balk at the Torres world view, anthropologists, rural sociologists and those development specialists with field experience should recognize outright the contributions that this book makes to micro-theory, the ethnography enterprise, and to agricultural workers everywhere.
-------- References Cited
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-- from Culture & Agriculture, Vol 21:1, Spring 1999 A Publication of the Culture and Agriculture Section Copyright by the American Anthropological Association, 1999