Cook, Scott 2006

Commodity Cultures, Mesoamerica
and Mexicos Changing

Indigenous Economy
Scott Cook
University of Connecticut, Storrs
Abstract

A case is argued for the constitutive role of commodity value (use +
exchange + symbolic), and its shifting triangulations, in Mesoamerican and
Mexican indigenous culture. This role cross-cuts historical epochs but assumes
more pervasive inuence historically in proportion to the spread of integrative
markets and monetization. Given their commodity value matrix, indigenous
direct-producing subjects, yesterday and today, are assumed to economize,
regardless of the nature and destination of their labor or products or the par-
ticular social relations organizing the latters disposition. Particular forms of
commodity value triangulation require empirical determination at specic
spatial/temporal coordinates. Critical evaluations of work by Karl Marx,
Guillermo Bonl, Alejandro Marroqun, Manuel Gamio and Arturo Warman,
together with ethnographic material, are used to support the case for the
commodity value approach.
Keywords

acculturation
ethnic identity
globalization
labor value
petty
commodity production
At the present time, the sociocultural anthropology of Mexico is experi-
encing not only a crisis of representation (the question of voice and voices,
unitary subject vs. multiple subjects, etc.) but also one of focus (what is its
object identity or locality, community or region, nationality or transna-
tionality? etc.). One of the foci of the crisis has to do with the applicability
of the concept of Mesoamerica to the study of contemporary Mexico. This
concept has always been subversive in the sense of not recognizing politico-
territorial limits and not taking into account the nation-state (cf. Cook,
2003: 208; Monaghan, 2000). It supposes that culture (dened as group-
ings of cultural traits) can be mapped and is territorially delimitable, and
that Spanish contact/conquest constitutes a critical dividing line in repre-
senting/understanding Mesoamerica. The concept implies that there is, in
short, an ontological divide between pre-hispanic and post-contact/
conquest moments that requires epistemological compensation.
Another supposition is that, through time, the pre-hispanic territory of
Mesoamerica, thanks to acculturative processes that were not uniform, was
reshaped into sub-areas marked by different degrees of retention of key
cultural traits. Implied in terms like Mesoamerica today or modern
Article
Vol 26(2) 181208 [DOI:10.1177/0308275X06064978]
Copyright 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com
Mesoamerica is some degree of transformation in cultural content via
acculturative processes. In other words, Mesoamerica today is assumed to
be demonstrably different in specic cultural terms from Mesoamerica at
the time of Spanish contact. It is noteworthy that, in late 20th-century
anthropological discourse, energized by resurgent ethnic indigenism and
the anti-globalization movement, a current of thought emerged that resists
and downplays, if not rejects, the acculturation process and advocates the
possibility of anti-acculturative or re-enculturative projects regarding
Mesoamerican culture. Guillermo Bonls inuential book Mxico Profundo
(1990, 1996) epitomizes this current.
Elaborated by Paul Kirchhoff (1967, 1968) to integrate discourse
among archaeologists, ethnohistorians and ethnologists regarding a
particular culture area, the concept of Mesoamerica when transferred
from pre-history to modern history encompasses various nation-states
(Mexico, Guatemala and others of Central America) at the same time as it
compresses the past and present as, for example, in the phrase Meso-
america today (or modern Mesoamerica). This oxymoron is loaded with
the same ambiguities as Bonls (1990) concept of Mxico profundo (deep
Mexico). The same question that Stavenhagen (1992: 90) posed with
regard to Bonls concept can be posed with regard to Mesoamerica
today, namely, who are its authentic living carriers or representatives?
It is instructive that not even the anthropologists of the famous Viking
Fund seminar at the mid-point of the 20th century tried to answer such a
question, agreeing only that there is a kind of a two-class system with the
Indians subordinate in the whole area (Tax, 1968 [1952]: 298). Apart from
confusing class with caste in this statement, by not elaborating a clear
position or providing analytic guidelines regarding ethnic identity, the
seminar participants established a bad precedent; they virtually conceded
the problematic of Mesoamerica today with regard to the identity of its
subjects to the indigenist policy of forging the nation according to the
whims of each successive regime (sexenio).
Despite this concession, there was agreement among the seminar
participants that roughly two-thirds of the Mexican population in 1950 was
not Indian, and that anthropologists should begin to devote themselves to
studying the non-Indian majority of the Mexican population (Tax, 1968:
297). They arrived at this conclusion with the help of the Acculturation
Index (Tax, 1968: 26281) that classied 20 areas or localities in terms of
retention of pre-hispanic traits in four categories: language, technology,
social organization and religion. Points were assigned in this scheme a
total of 100 possible points in each category for complete retention. Only
the Lacandones scored 400 points, occupying the position of maximum
cultural retention; and the Tarascans scored a total of only 45 points, occu-
pying the position of minimum retention. It is interesting that, in the
discussion among seminar participants with respect to this index, Paul
Kirchhoff the intellectual father of the concept of Mesoamerica
182
Critique of Anthropology 26(2)
admitted that there was room for error in the method that resulted in his
assigning a score of 90 points (indicating low overall retention of ancient
Mesoamerican traits) for modern Mesoamericans, but he did not back
down from his judgement that basic structural features and the key aspects
of native life were lost (Tax, 1968: 266).
It can be argued that the concept of Mesoamerica is both a product of
and a support for the vision of general anthropology as an integrated disci-
pline with four sub-disciplines (archaeology, human biology, linguistics and
sociocultural studies). In this sense the concept seems to be less important
to a sociocultural anthropology oriented more around the other social
sciences than the other sub-disciplines of anthropology.
Still, for those who admire the anthropological vision because of its
comparative method and its dialectical relation between the universal and
the particular, the nomothetic possibilities of the concept of Mesoamerica
are attractive. Moreover, the diachronic method of anthropology that inter-
prets the present through the study of the past occupies an important place
in the sociocultural anthropology of Mexico/Mesoamerica. In fact, the
majority of anthropologists are uncomfortable with a non-comparative,
synchronic method, yet these same anthropologists often shy away from any
attempt to link the universal with the idiosyncratic in their work.
Among the Central Valleys Zapotec of Oaxaca, where acculturative
processes have fundamentally, if not uniformly, debilitated the Meso-
american cultural heritage, ethnographers working today in communities
that have opted for the usos y costumbres (traditional usages and customs)
identity realize that it is not possible to ignore the ties between this identity
and Mesoamerican culture. Indeed, these local populations motivation in
selecting this identity for electoral purposes is to ofcially permit them to
conduct elections for political ofces (or cargos) through community assem-
blies (Clarke, 2000: 168; Segura, 1980). The subjects who are bearers and
practitioners of usos y costumbres are, without doubt, peasant-artisans
who are different or distinctive precisely because of their ancestral ties to
Mesoamerican culture. That is, they belong to communities that have pre-
hispanic origins that were designated indigenous or Indian by the Spanish
after the conquest. In spite of the impact of the acculturative process in
such communities from the conquest to the present, it is clear that they
continue being distinctive in various dimensions of their daily lives. Never-
theless, I believe that, for them and for us, it is also necessary to recognize
that whereas their ancestors were Mesoamericans, they themselves are
Mexicans by identity and citizenship. It is for them to decide how, and to
what degree, their future revolves around strengthening the nexus between
their Mexican and their indigenous identities. Anthropological discourse
focused on the concept of Mesoamerica should promote a reasoned
consideration of this process of identity formation and designation.
1
183
Cook: Mexicos Indigenous Economy
Approaches to Mesoamerican commodity culture
Commodities and markets, whether as sources of continuity and disconti-
nuity in the Mexican/Mesoamerican civilizational process or of debates
about the nature and direction of the process itself, provide a link between
the two ontologies, and many epistemologies, of Mexico and of Mesoamer-
ica. Consideration of the 20th-century foundation and development of the
systematic study of rural Mexican (and Mesoamerican) economic life
reveals a scholarly fascination with complex interactions and relations
between indigenous and foreign modes of making and earning a living or,
alternatively, of producing, exchanging, distributing, consuming and/or
reinvesting commodity value. This scholarly legacy is epitomized by the
conceptual tandem of primitive merchants and penny capitalism associ-
ated with work in the western highlands of Guatemala by Robert Redeld
(1962 [1939]) and Sol Tax (1957a, 1957b, 1963 [1953], 1964) respectively.
It also found a Mexican counterpart in the storytelling of B. Traven (1956,
1966), and in the work by a series of anthropologists like George Foster
(1982 [1942], 1948), Miguel Othn de Mendizbal (1946), Bronislaw Mali-
nowski and Julio de la Fuente (1982 [1957]), Alejandro Marroqun (1957a,
1957b), Angel Palerm (1954) and Eric Wolf (1955, 1959).
2
By the 1970s, drawing on previous decades of scholarship and on new
analysis and theoretical renements, the Marxist current in Mexican/
Mesoamerican rural studies always focused primarily on capital/labour
relations emphasized that the indigenous subjects of contemporary
Mexicos regional economies were also immersed in petty commodity
production (e.g. Bartra, 1974: 729, 154, 1978: 7590; Coello, 1975; Contr-
eras, 1976; Cook, 1976, 1978; Daz Polanco, 1977; cf. Cook and Binford,
1990: ch. 1). Curiously, with a few exceptions (e.g. Cook, 1984a, 1984b),
scholarly contributors to this current have been reluctant to address head-
on the issue of petty capitalism and its seedbed in petty commodity produc-
tion. They have also been indifferent to the heuristic fruitfulness of the
realization that petty commodity producers in rural Mexico share aspects
of commodity culture with the capitalists who exploit them, and also with
their pre-Columbian and pre-capitalist ancestors whose participation in
commodity production was less market-driven that that of petty commod-
ity producers subsumed by capitalism. These connections, as well as their
contradictions, can be explored through a critique of the discourse
surrounding concepts like Mexico profundo or Mesoamerica today, that
seeks to expose its theoretical and philosophical bases.
3
As a starting point, it cannot be emphasized enough that Mesoamerica
was one of the independent centres of development of commodity cultures
in the evolution of human civilization. Therefore, commodity cultures are
as indigenous to Mesoamerica as Indians themselves. They are expressed
as constitutive forms of the specialized markets or markets subdivided
according to specialities and merchants who were also spies listed in
184
Kirchhoffs group I, that is, as elements exclusively or, at least, typically
Mesoamerican (1968: 245).
It is my contention that the origin of commodity cultures is even more
ancient than that of local markets and tianguis. It is logical to assume that
they have Stone Age origins, together with a numerous series of artifacts
and customs such as the cultivation of maguey for aguamiel, pulque and
paper; the grinding of corn softened with ashes or lime; the metate and the
mano; pyrite mirrors; weaving; the cutting and polishing of obsidian;
pottery; and so on. In other words, all the products of the Mesoamerican
social division of labour as well as the ideas and activities that result in
their fabrication, exchange and consumption constitute the areas
commodity cultures (see Cook, 2004: esp. 16574).
It needs to be reiterated that commodity cultures were well established
in Mesoamerica long before the arrival of the Spanish. The astonishment
of the Spanish conquerors upon seeing the great market of Tlatelolco for
the rst time, as reported in the chronicle of Bernal Daz del Castillo (1956:
215), reminds us of the intercontinental complexity of the civilizational
process. The Spanish had never seen so many people and so much
merchandise in a single marketplace. The social division of labour and the
sophisticated commodity cultures underlying what the Spanish conquerors
saw in Tlatelolco obviously did not drop fully developed from the sky. On
the contrary, the Tlatelolco market was a product of a long process of socio-
cultural evolution in which only Mesoamericans participated. In other
words, commodity cultures are as Mesoamerican as corn, metates, the
tianguis and as noted earlier the indigenous subjects, the Mesoameri-
cans, themselves.
Paul Kirchhoff, Ralph Beals, Sol Tax, Fernando Cmara and the other
anthropologists who participated in the Viking Fund seminar recognized
that exchanges occurring in the tianguis, and through a rotating system of
regional markets tied to an intercommunity division of labour and special-
ization, were constitutive traits of Mesoamerican culture. Several anthropol-
ogists of the last century documented the long trajectory of the production
and circulation of commodities in the Mesoamerican and Mexican econ-
omies. To mention some of the most prominent ones: Miguel Othn de
Mendizabal in his study of salt (1946, vol. 2) and of craft industries in the
Mezquital valley (1946, vol. 6: 15399); Alfonso Caso and his colleagues
(1954) in their detailed study of the pre-history, ethnohistory and ethnog-
raphy of Mexico; George Foster (1982) in his doctoral thesis on the Sierra
Popoluca economy in Veracruz; Friedrich Katz (1958) and Frances Berdan
(1985, 1989) on the Aztec economy; Alejandro Marroqun (1978) in his
monograph on the Tlaxiaco market; Bronislaw Malinowski and Julio de la
Fuente (1957), and later Ralph Beals (1975), on the market system of the
central valleys of Oaxaca.
In spite of these and many other studies of commodity cultures in
Mexico/Mesoamerica highlighting the profound impact of commodity
185
economy on indigenous culture from pre-hispanic times to the present,
there are still anthropologists of the Mexico Profundo school of thought who
interpret commodity cultures through the lens of economic self-sufciency
guided by the search for, in Guillermo Bonls own words, a basic security,
a wider margin for subsistence (1990: 57; cf. Nash, 2001, esp. ch. 1).
Bonl was very much aware of the importance of petty commodity
production in Mexicos regional indigenous economies, but his theoretical
orientation inclined him to submerge the market in the allegedly non-
market customs and idiosyncrasies of indigenous communities. According
to him, within indigenous communities, reciprocity, cooperation and
autonomy ordered and detoured mercantile activity away from utilitarian
rational calculation and the accumulation of value. Mercantile activity was
channelled toward subsistence consumption or compliance with ritual-
ceremonial obligations of kinship, ctive kinship or community. Moreover,
according to Bonl, the market in the indigenous economy functions
exclusively for products; it functions marginally for labour and not at all for
land. It is not clear in his account to what epoch Bonl is directing his
interpretation but, even with regard to the pre-hispanic epoch, it is debat-
able and, surely, is more debatable still regarding the colonial and post-
colonial epochs (e.g. Baskes, 1996, 2000).
Bonl segregates the market and commodity culture from other insti-
tutions and dimensions of indigenous life rather than recognizing that
commodities that circulate in the tianguis also circulate to their destination
in consumption through socioceremonial and reciprocity circuits, and that
commodity value is the integrative link between all of these circuits. Land
and labour power are also part of this integration when their use value is
realized by others than their possessors. Also, Bonl restricts the sense of
the term needs to exclude any form of accumulation, as opposed to
consumption, of commodity value. According to him, indgenas participate
in mercantile activities, especially those of the tianguis, apparently without
acting in accordance with their commodity cultures that include dening
guidelines for calculating value. It is as if indigenous marketers were cultur-
ally alienated from their own economic conduct. Bonl, in short, portrays
the indigenous community as being redistributive of commodity value and
relatively unaffected by social differentiation and antagonistic relations of
production.
Needless to say, this portrayal is similar to those by Eric Wolf and Arturo
Warman, which, in fact, reect the same theoretical sources as Bonl,
namely, the traditional concept of natural economy and Karl Polanyis
(1968) substantivism. This portrayal embraces static binary, oppositional
thinking and resists the thesis that oppositions in process interpenetrate
and interfuse.
Apart from the substantivist approach in Mesoamerican/Mexican
studies of indigenous economy, two other approaches provided frameworks
for analysing and interpreting the interior dynamics of local and regional
186
indigenous and mestizo economies during the second half of the 20th
century: the formalist and the Marxist. The formalist approach, inuenced
by conventional neoclassical economics, was rst exemplied in the work of
George Foster (1982) on the Sierra Popoluca economy of Veracruz and in
the canonical monograph of Sol Tax (1963), Penny Capitalism, on the
economy of Panajachel in Guatemala. The Marxist approach, inspired by
the economics of Karl Marx, was rst exemplied in the work of Alejandro
Marroqun (1957a, 1957b, 1978). Often overlooked is the shared orien-
tation of the formalist and Marxist approaches regarding three factors: (1)
the nature and composition of the economic process in sociocultural life;
(2) the fundamental importance of the commodity and of the subject/agent
in the process of producing, exchanging, consuming and distributing
economic value; and (3) the methodological necessity of approximating the
concrete and particular in contrast with the abstract and the universal.
It cannot be denied that relativistic tendencies exist in both of these
approaches. Both accept the fundamentally sociocultural nature of all
empirical economies, and that the concept of universal economy is simply
a heuristic abstraction. Nevertheless, these approaches reject the extreme
relativism of the substantivists, who advocate the thesis that each and every
society and culture must be understood exclusively in terms of itself. In
other words, formalism and Marxism accept the thesis that the particulari-
ties of historical and sociocultural context are indispensable to understand-
ing, but not to the exclusion of universal factors and prerequisities (e.g.
needs that are natural or necessary to material reproduction, prudently
rational subjects).
Marx, the labour theory of culture, and value
There is an epistemological explanation for the compatibility between the
formalist and Marxist approaches that reects their common origin in
classical political economic thought. Marx, in many senses, reinterpreted
and deepened the contributions of his predecessors in political economy
especially regarding the nature of capital and its relationship with labour.
Marx accepted the fundamental, if implicit, thesis in classical political
economy that the development of capitalism in Europe was nothing more
than a transformative moment in the development of humanitys economic
life. Moreover, because of this, the analysis of the elements and processes
within capitalism would necessarily illuminate fundamental elements and
processes of universal economy and, even more, of each and every particu-
lar concrete economy of record. After all, and despite cultural differences,
for Marx, humanity has many particular histories that belong to a common
universal history.
There is a conict in Marxs work, or, better said, a dislinkage between
his labour theory of value and his theory of socioeconomic evolution with
187
respect to the meaning and role of the commodity. There is good reason
to attribute this dislinkage to the lack of reliable archaeological and ethno-
graphic data, and the paucity of any such data, especially concerning the
lithic epochs, when Marx elaborated his theories during the second half of
the 19th century. Marx simply did not have empirical evidence of substan-
tial trade in the Upper Palaeolithic, which we now know was more than
sufcient to sustain and reect systematic commodity production. His
discussion of the evolutionary process of pre-capitalist forms in the Grun-
drisse (1965, 1973), which incorporates the archaeological and ethno-
graphic data available at that time, marginalizes the process of trade,
emphasizes the dominance of use value, and denies a systematic connec-
tion between labour and exchange value in the pre-capitalist period. Many
Marxists, for reasons of political ideology or analytical convenience, still
prefer to emphasize Marxs interpretation derived from obsolete anthro-
pology.
Ironically, this emphasis on discontinuity between the pre-capitalist and
capitalist records contradicts another interpretation derived from Marxs
labour theory of value that does not depend upon decient or obsolete
anthropology. Rather, it depends upon his logical exegesis of the commod-
ity in the rst chapter of volume one of Capital (1967) and of the method
of political economy in the introduction to the Grundrisse, both of which
support the thesis of a primitive, if not primordial, origin of the commod-
ity in humanitys economy. Based on a reading of these texts, it is possible
to make a case for the origin of commodity economy in barter or product
transfers that, at rst glance, appears to be similar to the naturalistic
scenario envisaged by Adam Smith (1937: 13). According to this reading,
which can be referred to as the labor theory of culture (Cook, 2004:
1359; Woolfson, 1982), the bartering/product-transferring subjects are
endowed with language and with various other capacities: social communi-
cation; self-identication as subjects and self-recognition as separate from
nature and from the products of their own labour; recognized and priori-
tized sets of needs; the ability to plan, decide and act in a way that co-
ordinates past, present and future. In short, these bartering/
product-transferring subjects are human beings capable of living culturally.
It is my contention that once humanity exists in the above sense alien-
ated labour also exists and, by extension, so do commodities and an
economy regulated by commodity value (exchange + use + sign/symbolic
value), if not exclusively or even predominantly by exchange value. Any
fabricated product or artifact that is not consumed by its fabricator (or by
some other member of his/her production-consumption unit), and whose
use value is realized by subjects outside that unit, is an alienated commodity
(or a product of alienated labour). If such a commodity is transferred by
barter then its exchange value is realized in the form of equivalency; on the
other hand, if it is transferred by reciprocity or as a gift, then its exchange
value remains unrealized until such time as there is a reciprocal
188
transaction. The important element here is not the time delay or the
interval between the initial and a subsequent counter-transfer but, rather,
that every product or artifact of human labour has the potential of being
converted into its putative equivalent, thus realizing its exchange value
(that actually is always embodied in any and every such product). This valu-
ation process is represented schematically in Figure 1.
4
It is important to reiterate that the concept of a pre-capitalist commod-
ity economy assumes that use value and symbolic value are more inuen-
tial in the overall circulation of commodities than exchange value.
Nevertheless, we know retrospectively that the historical transformation of
humanitys economy to the hegemony of the market gives priority to
exchange value in market-integrated economies. This is the profound
signicance of capitalist development and of the emergence of global capi-
talism.
In my judgement the Marxist version of the origin myth of the human
economy outlined above does not suffer from the tendency of classical
political economys Economic Man/Robinson Crusoe version to view
universal history through the lens of bourgeois history, and to assume that
such an ideal creature was instinctively inclined to trade, barter and
exchange. It does not do so because it assumes that the matrix process is
social and intersubjective, and that it is derived from the necessity of our
species to materially reproduce itself. Expressed differently, the Marxist
version of our economic origins recognizes that, in a constitutive sense, the
process of reproduction of humanity is social, not individual.
By means of the commodity value concept, my intention is to demon-
strate that, among other things, an approach to agent (or subject) activi-
ties or conduct intended to satisfy utilitarian needs within a context of
material possibilities and normative constraints is perfectly compatible
with a recognition of cultural distinctiveness. Although they belong to
social units or enterprises, the assumption is that agents/subjects are indi-
viduals or persons, and that the needs that they satisfy, or whose satis-
faction they seek, are material; that is, they are necessary to physical and
social reproduction. Obviously, it is not possible to specify the composi-
tion of material needs of direct producers in general, but only that of
direct producers representative of particular social contexts (see Heller,
1974). No such specification can occur in the absence of empirical investi-
gation.
189
Exchange
Alienation Value triangulation/realization Use
(barter or reciprocity)
Transfer
Symbolic
Figure 1 The general process of commodity valuation
Therefore, commodity value is central and indispensable to commod-
ity culture; it is the matrix through which economic subjects/agents in any
economy can determine the value of objects and of their own labour. It
consists of three dimensions or elements: use (utility), exchange, and
symbolic (sign). Value is always determined or assigned through a process
of triangulation that embraces all three elements of commodity value.
Depending on the context, exchange value varies according to its relation
with the other two value elements. It can be dominant, as it is in petty
commodity production and the capitalist economy; or subordinate, as it is
in many pre-capitalist economies where use value and symbolic value are
hegemonic. Still, in all economies, each and every commodity is a product
of or implies commodity culture and, for that reason, embodies commod-
ity value.
Metates and manos as exemplary commodities
Let us consider an example: the artifact set, metate and mano (Cook, 1982,
2004: 22934). Today, and for many centuries, the artisans known as
metateros have made metates and manos through the practice of a fund of
specialized knowledge that includes geology, quarrying, stoneworking and
also work organization, social demand and marketing or the circulation of
these commodities to their consumers. Metateros make metates and manos
because there are consumers who want to realize the use value of these
commodities. And also because, through the circulation of these commodi-
ties to intermediaries and consumers, metateros can convert the labour
embodied in their commodities into equivalents in money, and then into
other necessary commodities or services that they themselves do not
produce or cannot provide.
On the other hand, metates and manos have always embodied an
important symbolic element that revolves around the role of women in the
household division of labour and of womens identity in peasant-Indian
society and culture. In effect, metateros continue to make and sell metates
and manos in the opening years of the 21st century, even though corn-
grinding mills (molinos de nixtamal) and tortilla factories (tortilleras) pro-
liferate in regional towns and villages a proliferation whose impact has
been to drastically reduce the utilitarian demand for metates and manos
(since their primary use has been to grind nixtamal into masa for making
tortillas).
Obviously, the commodity value composition of metates (and manos)
has changed over the years. As pointed out above, their utilitarian value has
diminished. This leads to a plausible hypothesis that, other things remain-
ing equal, there should be a decline in metate (and mano) output.
Although recent time series data are lacking to test this hypothesis, casual
observation of marketplace inventories and conversations with metate
190
sellers in 2004 suggest that there is still signicant output and a correspond-
ing demand to support it. This in turn suggests that metateros still nd their
income sufcient to justify their work and that, given the decline in utili-
tarian demand, some other demand factor must explain the market viabil-
ity of metates.
The obvious explanation revolves around the symbolic/sign value of
metates which, in fact, appears to have translated into a continuing, and
possibly increasing, social demand for metates and, in turn, feeds back
upon and stimulates their exchange value. So-called gift metates do, in fact,
seem to predominate in recently observed marketplace inventories of
metate sellers. In short, the destiny of metates in the 21st-century indigen-
ous market appears to be less dependent upon utilitarian demand and
much more dependent upon socioceremonial/symbolic demand than it
was previously.
Marroquns pioneering contribution
Alejandro Marroqun (1957a, 1957b, 1978) not only deserves recognition
for his scientic research on themes popularized in the well-known short
story of B. Traven (1956) about peasant-Indian basketry in Oaxaca (Cook,
1995, 2004: 4164), but also for his explicit and systematic use of Marxs
labour theory of value in his analysis of the indigenous market economy.
According to Marroqun, long before the Spanish conquest the pre-
monetary economy of Mexico had developed to a level of organization that
required a standard to value products in circulation. In his words:
It is in this stage of intertribal exchange when the economic theory of the value
of things begins to be suggested by practical needs; at rst, the valuations are
eminently subjective and, therefore, subject to capricious variations; value is
simple use value of things, and since utility is relative to social and environ-
mental circumstances, a measuring rod for valuations is lacking; later, a
tendency toward objectication appears, upon the basis of appreciating
physical effort and the intensity of need really felt by the demander of the
valued object. (1978: 334)
By failing to update the obsolete anthropology of Marx, Marroqun
repeated the same error as Marx of empirically misunderstanding the
primitive origin of commodity economy, an origin that was logically
consistent with Marxs own labour theory of value. His dogmatism notwith-
standing, Marroqun outlined, for the rst time, one of the possible ways
by which labour was established as the regulator of the process of valuing
commodities in the Mesoamerican economy. His recognition of the
material and cultural origin of the need for things probably would make
him receptive to the following thesis: the study of socioeconomic phenom-
ena, as aggregate results of individuals acting on the basis of prudent inter-
ests with respect to material welfare (for subsistence or accumulation),
191
must correspond to a gamut of cultural values and not exclusively to
labour cost.
Marroqun searched for a way to conceptualize the Tlaxiaco (Mixteca
Alta) marketplace within its regional matrix and the national capitalist
economy. His effort was not completely successful. He did not succeed in
resolving contradictions between his concepts of process, system and struc-
ture. He captured the aggregate inequality of the exchange system well, but
passed over many of the complexities of interaction between different types
and scales of enterprises within the regional commodity economy. It was
not possible for him to reconcile an assumed coexistence of separate
economic systems in Mexico (underdeveloped capitalist, semi-feudal, and
indigenous or pre-capitalist) with his tripartite classication of the indigen-
ous market (semi-capitalist, intermediate, local traditionalist) (1978: 423)
and with his thesis of inexorable capitalist development.
Nevertheless, his analysis produced provocative conclusions like the
following:
. . . the market is nothing more than one of the parts of an economic system
. . . that . . . is profoundly immersed in the national economy, from which it
constantly receives, day by day and minute by minute, positive inuences that,
in the long run, will disintegrate the pre-capitalist economic system that still
prevails in indigenous communities, only to integrate it denitely and categor-
ically to the vaster and more developed national economic system. (1978: 40)
Marroquns commodity orientation helped him to understand better
than his predecessors the dynamic of equivalency calculations under
market conditions. According to him:
. . . it is not important that in such and such market barter is practiced in a
predominant way . . . it is not the same as that practiced in primitive markets,
but is a form of indigenous economy that tends to eliminate the use of money
as a general equivalent, but makes articles that are to be exchanged to rst be
valued in money terms; thus, for example, clay pots valued at 5 pesos are
exchanged for a quantity of peanuts also valued at 5 pesos. (1978: 46)
In short, Marroquns theoretical orientation enabled him to make a series
of astute observations regarding price formation in the indigenous market.
Marroqun did not succeed in systematically analysing relations
between peasant-artisan labour, merchant capital, value, prices and
earnings within the Tlaxiaco regional economy. On the one hand he
emphasized the ethnoclass division and, on the other, the symbiotic
relation between indigenous labour in the villages and mestizo capital in
the district town. This contradiction is clearly expressed in his conclusion
that the economy of Tlaxiaco, without its own production base, is a para-
sitical economy that rests on the exploitation of indigenous labor (1957b:
241).
In summary, it must be recognized that Marroqun made good use of
previous studies by Othn de Mendizbal and by Malinowski and de la
192
Fuente to advance our understanding of the mechanisms that, in his words,
provoke the hypertrophy of small local economies or their maintenance
at a very accentuated backward level, in order to satisfy the parasitical
demands of the regions dominant center (1978: 43). In doing so, Marro-
qun anticipated future contributions by Aguirre-Beltrn (1967), Andre
Gunder Frank (1966) and Rodolfo Stavenhagen (1969: 193264). So, the
most lamentable aspect of Marroquns Tlaxiaco market project is that he
was never able to conduct a sequel to build and improve upon the original,
especially with regard to focusing more on the possibility of capital accumu-
lation within petty commodity production and, therefore, of the develop-
ment of small-scale capitalist enterprises.
Critique of Warmans historical structuralism
Continuing in a line of many indigenistas like Gamio, Mendizabal and
Aguirre Beltrn, with a career divided between governmental service and
the academy, Arturo Warman during the latter decades of the 20th century
distinguished himself as a contributor to the peasantist current of the
historical structuralist school inspired by the work of Eric Wolf (Hewitt,
1984). Criticized for his dualism, his lack of attention to indigenous culture
and to class formation within the peasantry (e.g. Cook, 1982; Cook and
Binford, 1990; Good, 2000), Warman, in a semi-revision of interpretations
in previous publications, recently conceded that money and industrial
goods profoundly rooted in the Indian economy were an essential part of
survival strategies (2003: 212). He also conceded that there is a process of
economic differentiation and wealth accumulation within indigenous
communities (2003: 215), processes that, paradoxically, he marginalized
analytically in his synthesis of the transformation of the Mexican indigen-
ous economy from the time of the Spanish conquest until the end of the
20th century.
According to Warman, three types or modes of exchange between ind-
genas and other components of Mexican society stand out: the tributary,
the ceremonial, and the mercantile or market (2003: 195245). He recog-
nizes that markets were common in prehispanic Mesoamerica and that
there were periodic markets or tianguis in each seorio o altepeme (2003:
197). But Warman qualies this recognition by insisting that the role of
markets in the pre-hispanic indigenous economy was limited and that
markets were indispensable but a small proportion of wealth circulated
through them (2003: 198).
Warman attempts to support this judgement by noting that the means
of payment or money were goods for consumption or daily use that were
difcult to conserve and store (2003: 198). I think that he exaggerates the
difculty of conserving and storing cocoa beans (granos de cacao) and strips
of cotton cloth (mantas de algodn), as well as other commodity-monies used
193
by the Mesoamericans. Surely these potential drawbacks are less signicant
than the overwhelming evidence of an evolutionary process of monetiza-
tion within the Aztec economy.
A fundamental opposition in Warmans discussion of the pre-hispanic
economy is between two modes of exchange: the tributary and the mercan-
tile or tribute and market. He emphasizes the weight of scholarly opinion
in favour of the thesis that Aztec society and economy at the time of Spanish
contact was organized as a despotic tributary mode of production and a
consensus regarding the importance of tribute in ancient Mexico (2003:
195). There is a great deal of ethnohistorical literature that supports
Warmans interpretation on this issue. However, a new generation of ethno-
historians is questioning the uniformly coercive nature of the political
economic relations between Spanish colonizers and indigenous direct-
producing subjects through detailed analyses of the repartimiento system.
These analyses suggest that remunerative economic activities . . . are not
evidence of coercion and that the repartimiento was merely a system of
credit designed to operate in a risky, institutionally underdeveloped,
colonial environment (Baskes, 1996: 26). Also, it bears mentioning that
previous theoretical discourse about despotic or tributary modes of produc-
tion was by no means dismissive of the role of private property, the market
and commodity circulation as sources of limitation on despotic absolutism
in the economy (e.g. Hindess and Hirst, 1975; Krader, 1975; Wittfogel,
1968).
It is not surprising that Warman, in order to strengthen his emphasis
on tribute, introduces early on the idea that basic units in pre-hispanic
society were self-sufcient in their basic consumption (2003: 194). He
avoids elaborating this proposition, one that I consider to be difcult to
support empirically. In any case, the logic of his interpretation privileges
tribute and downplays the market, and is very compatible with the concept
of self-sufciency. Warman emphasizes the circulation of equivalences that
produce[s] a redistributive economic effect and generate[s] social
cohesion in local family economies where the search for self-sufciency
that never succeeds provides a degree of autonomy, a space foreign to
exchange and submission (2003: 223).
At least Warman admits that self-sufciency is illusory but he implies
that, in some fundamental way, indigenous community economies are
outside the circuitry of the extra-community commodity economy. In other
words, he continues with the same dualism of his earlier writings, albeit with
an acknowledgement of the role of local markets. This dualism prevents
him from understanding that, in reality, local economies and regional
economies in Mesoamerica/Mexico are market-integrated. Local insti-
tutions of reciprocity and gifting are directly connected to commodity value
circuits of the wider economy.
Without a theory of commodity value that goes beyond unequal
exchange attributed to tributary and intermediary relations, Warman is
194
unable to defend his thesis that capital accumulation and market partici-
pation in the Mesoamerican economy are not systematically related. He
refuses to recognize that the logic of commodity economy requires that
possibilities to realize exchange value are recognized by economic
agents/subjects and realized through appropriate action when circum-
stances permit. Not even the concept of simple reproduction that privileges
use value and consumption logically excludes the possibility of the accumu-
lation of exchange value within the production-consumption units of
economic agents.
Let us examine Warmans arguments in more detail. There is an imbal-
ance in his approach that favours the appropriation of value from direct
producers and downplays the process of reproduction and the possibility
of accumulation within their production-consumption (i.e. household)
units. He also establishes a precedent for ambiguity with regard to the
concept of commodity value. He recognizes cryptically that the common-
ers . . . wove mantas that gave exchange value (tejian las mantas que daban
valor de cambio, 2003: 196). This implies that mantas are commodities in
the classical sense (i.e. exchange value + use value). Yet, a few paragraphs
later, Warman reveals that mantas, and cocoa beans, served as generalized
means of payment (2003: 1978). If it is true, as Warman contends, that
the surrender of a part or proportion of family production as tribute was
hardly a minor complement to the labor to make land productive and trans-
form the lords goods (2003: 196), then an obvious question arises: what
did the weavers do with the mantas (commodity-money) that were not
surrendered as tribute? Warman does not provide an answer to this
question; nor does he mention again the concept of exchange value. The
loose ends and paradoxes in Warmans discussion of value are exacerbated
by his persistent use of good (bien) for commodity (mercanca), and of a
neologism, satisfactor (satiser?), which he never denes (2003: 207).
Warman relies heavily on the concept of surplus but never bothers to
dene it or indicate how it is measured (see esp. 2003: chs 7, 9). Likewise,
he fails to introduce critical concepts like the value of labour power or
socially necessary labour time into his analysis of peasant-Indian household
reproduction, which means that the relationship between necessary labour
and surplus labour within tributary units in Warmans scheme remains a
mystery. In all antagonistic modes of production, including the despotic
tributary mode objectied by Warman, exploitation cannot function to the
extreme of systematically interfering with the reproduction of labour
power. That is to say, there are absolute (physical survival) and relative (to
the system of land tenure and relations of rent/tribute) limits to the appro-
priation of labour or its products from direct producers by the appropriat-
ing class fractions. Warman has a tendency to exaggerate the efciency of
the tributary apparatus as well as the amounts of tribute, giving the
impression that, in colonial Mexico, there were no limits to surplus extrac-
tion threatening the socially necessary product of the direct producers.
195
I doubt that the tributary system of the Aztecs or of their Spanish succes-
sors was as unlimited or efcient regarding the appropriation of commod-
ity value from indigenous direct producers as Warmans discussion implies.
One thing is certain: there is a paucity of empirical data to demonstrate the
contrary.
Perhaps the Achilles heel of Warmans ambitious historical synthesis
of the labour/value nexus is his failure to operationalize it in terms of the
Marxist labour theory of value. Absent from his synthesis is an analytically
precise concept of commodity value that takes into account its subjective
and objective dimensions together with the interplay between and among
its three components: use, exchange and symbolic/sign. Commodity value,
as I have argued above, is always determined through a process of triangu-
lation or interplay of these three elements.
Interestingly enough, once the labour/value nexus is operationalized
in terms of the labour theory, Warmans emphasis on the tributary nature
of the pre-hispanic (and colonial) Mexican economy harmonizes with my
emphasis on labour alienation, and the production and transmission of
commodity culture by indigenous subjects, which occur within the struc-
tured economic transformation that fascinates Warman. There is no incom-
patibility between tributary relations and the importance of commodity
value and culture from the perspective of direct producers. Compelling
logic and the ethnographic record suggest that direct producers under-
stand the value of what they surrender as tribute and do what they can to
resist or reduce their losses. It is precisely to accomplish this that they
participate in reciprocity and gifting locally, and tianguis both locally and
regionally.
Commodity cultures responsive to the interaction of three interrelated
value elements use, exchange, symbolic can be understood functionally
in the context of relations between the three modes of exchange posited
by Warman, that is, the tributary, the ceremonial and the mercantile/
market. The key point here is that commodity cultures are not reducible
to the market; they encompass tributary and ceremonial domains as well.
In other words, the fact that Warman concedes much importance to trib-
utary processes (or tributary relations) as exemplied by the colonial
reparto de mercancas (2003: 2036), and to processes/relations of redistri-
bution and reciprocity (2003: 21416, 22245), does not mean that
commodity culture(s) and commodity value are not involved in the trans-
formation of the indigenous economy in a given period. Arguably, they
were so involved precisely because the nexus between labour and values
that Warman posits reduces to a triangulation of elements use, exchange
and symbol/sign. In the last analysis, tributary and ceremonial institutions
are complementary to the market, not exclusive of it. Commodity cultures
and the triangulation of value develop and diversify under economic struc-
tures dominated by tribute, religion or markets. Consequently, under
mercantile structural conditions (that is, those integrated and dominated
196
by the market institution), exchange value is privileged over use and
symbolic value in the triangulation process within commodity culture.
Warmans analysis of tribute and its evolution from the 16th to the 18th
centuries focuses particularly on the repartimiento de mercancas, the avio
and other forms of mercantile intermediation and credit. Nevertheless, a
plausible argument can be made for its compatibility with my commodity
cultures approach. It is probable that popular resistance throughout
Mesoamerica to tributary practices and institutions was stimulated by
resentment derived from notions of commodity value and of labour alien-
ation on the part of direct-producing indigenous subjects/agents who were
motivated to avoid simple reproduction squeezes. Warman makes an effort
to free his analysis of utopian concepts like self-sufciency and of romantic
interpretations of reciprocity (2003: 241). He admits that Indgenas do not
live immersed in human solidarity nor in equity among themselves (2003:
240) but, in the last analysis, he distances them from commodity culture
and economy and class differentiation; he insists that indigenous peasants
depend only on the certainty of reciprocity and that they live in poverty
without surpluses and without the possibility of saving (2003: 241). For
Warman, in sum, it is relations of reciprocity, not class relations, that
distinguish indigenous peasant communities. The ills of commodity/
market economy exist only outside these communities, not within them.
Perhaps his views do not represent a romantic vision but they certainly
represent a vision not inclined to recognize commodity economy within
indigenous cultures.
Gamio as a pioneer of migrant commodity studies
What is the relevance of a commodity cultures approach to understanding
Mexico today rather than Mesoamerica yesterday? Contemplating the
future from todays perspective, the economic anthropology of Mexico
must give more importance to commodity value than it has in the past. This
declaration reects a recognition of the wide, multifaceted transformation
of Mexican economy, society and culture during the 20th century, a process
represented by the participation of the country, as a third partner, in a
project of establishing a North American common market. This neoliberal
project, of which the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is
a rst step, seeks to integrate the continent according to the logic of
comparative advantage and strategic participation in competitive global
markets.
The Mexican turn away from a model of independent national
development to one of national development through a structure of asym-
metrical interdependency is controversial. In my opinion, it is best under-
stood as a realistic policy formulated in response to the recognition of
hegemonic fractions of the Mexican ruling class that the nationalist and
197
protectionist project of the institutionalized revolution had reached the
limits of its capacity to satisfy the material needs and expectations of the
growing national population. Year after year since 1982, increasing
numbers of Mexicans from all regions of the country and representing all
sectors and levels of the national class structure anticipated this policy turn.
In other words, the citizens of Mexico themselves made the policy about-
face of their government a fait accompli through their migration to search
for dollars in the US labour market, or through their trips to the emporia
north of the USMexico border to make consumer purchases, or through
their investments in US and other foreign money markets. The common
denominator of this popular activity consists in the calculated decisions by
this cross-section of Mexicans migrant workers, consumers and investors
regarding the acquisition, use and accumulation of monetized commod-
ity value. From the early 1980s this market behaviour has occurred under
pervasive conditions of subsistence and accumulation crisis.
There is no doubt that labour market participation through migration
to the United States is key to explaining and understanding the transform-
ations of rural Mexico during the 20th century and into the 21st. Despite
a plethora of recent contributions to the study of this topic from many disci-
plinary perspectives, illustrated in anthropology by the work of Michael
Kearney (2002) on Mixtec migration to California, it is worth reconsider-
ing the contribution of Manuel Gamio (1971 [1930]), who was the real
pioneer of the study of Mexican migration/immigration to the United
States.
Gamios contribution is fundamental in two senses. First, in the after-
math of the Revolution he played a key role in formulating Mexicos
poltica indigenista (policy vis-a-vis indigenous peoples), which was influ-
enced by Boasian culturalism and was intended to find adequate forms
of combating situations of poverty, ignorance and unhealthiness, in
which ethnic specificity appeared as a problem and to which the incor-
poration of the Indian to Mexican nationality was applied as a solution
(Medina, 1996: 57). Second, thanks to a commission of the Social Science
Research Council in collaboration with the Mexican government, Gamio
was the first scientific researcher of 20th-century Mexican immigration to
the United States. In his time, Gamio was alone in recognizing the
importance of this topic and was the first to study it in accordance with
the best available methodology (cf. Burma, 1971: v). Not only did Gamio
establish a paradigm for researching the migratory process, but he also
influenced binational policy regarding it. Indeed, not the least of his
influences was the so-called Bracero Program through which Mexican
workers were contracted, under government supervision, to work in the
United States.
A careful reading of his pioneering study, published in English in 1930,
makes it clear that many of his ndings and interpretations about the rst
20th-century wave of Mexican immigration to the United States remain
198
pertinent today. The list is impressive. First, Gamio insisted that Mexican
immigration into the United States was, fundamentally, an economic
phenomenon (1971: 301); that it was, at the same time, a phenomenon
stimulated by a demand in the United States for Mexican labour and by
conditions in Mexico that obliged Mexicans in Mexico to leave their
country in increasingly large numbers in search of better wages and
conditions (1971: 11). He recognized that the migratory process was
necessarily engaged with the eternal war between capital and labor by
beneting certain industries in certain regions and being opposed by
organized labour in the United States (1971: 33, 50). Moreover, he realized
that the migratory process had serious repercussions for inter-ethnic
relations, including those between successive generations of Mexican immi-
grants. Also, Gamio emphasized the importance of migrant remittances for
the Mexican economy, and conducted an imaginative and rigorous quanti-
tiative analysis of them.
Gamio astutely compared the impact of different wage levels in Mexico
and the United States, employing an index of the minimal wage of
comfort that he formulated. With a focus on what is of urgent necessity
to life for a working family of ve members, Gamio calculated an average
monthly salary for Mexico of 288 pesos or US $124. Based on average actual
monthly wage earnings of 36 pesos or US $18 in Mexico at that time, Gamio
concluded that the mean wage of a Mexican worker would have to increase
approximately eight times in order that he might meet the cost of the
normal necessities of life (1971: 37). To this day, the irresistible material
incentive behind the circulation of Mexican labour power in the United
States labour markets, and the capitalist rationale for establishing
maquiladoras in the border industrial zone, depend upon the disparity in
wage levels rst analysed by Gamio.
Unfortunately, Gamios contribution was awed by his indigenista
orientation and his nation-building fervour. As Medina observes:
[Gamios] consideration of constructing a homogeneous nation implied in
different ways the disappearance of the Indian, with an ingenuous pretension
of the scientic possibility of separating the positive aspects, in order to retain
them, from the negative aspects, in order to eliminate them, like a kind of
model that can be assembled and disassembled. (1996: 39)
Gamio misrepresented the cultural background of the majority of Mexican
migrant workers as an environment of personal attitudes based on
tradition, convention, and supernatural beliefs (1971: 73), placing
emphasis on its pre-modern, primitive and folkloric nature (1971: 745).
He considered the indigenous peasants of rural Mexico of that time to be
encapsulated in a lower stage of civilizational development, and to have an
idiosyncratic and anachronistic mentality in a modern, urbanized environ-
ment (1971: 74). This is the source of paradox in Gamios contribution:
199
Mexican migrants to the United States were wage earners with a folkloris-
tic culture (1971: 76 passim).
In view of his perspective, it was impossible for Gamio to reconcile the
alleged backward folkloric mentality and cultural background of Mexican
migrants with their success in negotiating and beneting materially from
their participation in the United States labour markets. He never under-
stood that the cultural background of the migrants included elements that
provided them with the means to take advantage of their involvement in
the labyrinth of US capitalism. In short, Gamio like many anthropologists
of later generations simply failed to appreciate the long and profound
history of indigenous peoples of Mexico in commodity cultures or, put
differently, their collective historical experience in making and earning a
living on the basis of producing, exchanging and consuming commodities,
with and without money and markets.
Thus Gamio established a precedent among anthropologists of failing
to understand that within the Mexican economy itself were the cultural and
human means necessary to transform Mexico into a great industrial and
agricultural country like the United States (1971: 49). The potential for
capitalist development was always present in the commodity economy of
Mesoamerica, a fact that is lost in the approach that is accustomed to under-
stand capital or capitalism as foreign or external to the local, regional and
national economies of Mexico. Gamio was steadfast in his belief that the
experiences of Mexican migrant workers in the United States were necess-
ary to qualify them as potential contributors to the development of a
modern, capitalistic Mexico. Such a belief is symptomatic of a profound
dualism that divides the economic world: the urban, industrial, capitalist
economy on one side, and the rural, peasant and non-capitalist economy
on the other. Gamios dualism was a harbinger of the substantivist approach
that conates commodity economy with capitalism.
Apparently, Gamios desire to forge the nation by eliminating folk-
loric attitudes from the indigenous peasantry either reected (or inclined
him toward) a variety of racism that was expressed in his early support for
the eugenics movement that eventually culminated in experiments to
genetically improve allegedly degenerate races in Nazi Germany. This
unsavoury aspect of Gamios career is examined in the work of Alexandra
Stern (1999), who categorizes him as mestizophilic, and of Claudio
Lomnitz (2001: 2523, 312 n. 39), who calls our attention to the fact that
Gamio was named vice-president of the Second International Eugenics
Conference held in Washington DC in 1920. Warman does not address this
connection but reminds us that a concern with la raza indgena (indigen-
ous race) overlapped with Gamios views about Mexican identity, a relation-
ship to which Warman devotes an entire chapter in his recent book (2003:
6387). Warman is by no means alone in recognizing that, under Gamios
inuence, Mexican indigenist policy began to give more emphasis to
cultural and socioeconomic factors, instead of race, in the process of
200
nation-building. In addressing themes like mestizoization, mestizo and
indigenous identity, and Mexicanness (Mexicanidad) it is difcult to avoid
the controversial terrain of the interaction of culture, biology and power.
Los indgenas and the anthropology of globalization
It is a sign of progress in anthropological thought that the Viking Fund
seminars Acculturation Index, which depends on a simplistic procedure
for scoring cultural retention among contemporary Mesoamerican
peoples, is viewed simply as an historical curiosity. A focus on the retention
of cultural traits obviously distorts the process of understanding cultural
change and converts the retaining subjects into objects of living museums.
Yet the problem of explaining and understanding two ontologies of
Mesoamerica and of present-day Mexico is still before us. It is plausible
to argue that, upon abandoning the acculturation paradigm, anthropolo-
gists have either opted for local and regional history, or simply afliated
themselves with one or other current of politica indigenista under the
banner of pluri-ethnic identity. In its own way, each of these alternatives
seeks to produce knowledge about relationships or interactions between
the two ontologies.
There is little doubt that the great majority of Mexicans at the begin-
ning of the 21st century have internalized elements of a mestizo identity
that they associate with a distinctive national citizenship, and also have
internalized elements of regional and local identities. However, a minority
residing in the various regions of contemporary Mexico that belonged to
the so-called key areas of the Mesoamerican civilizational process (Palerm
and Wolf, 1957) also still retain or have chosen to internalize elements of
various subnational identities based on a specic indigenous ethnicity that
usually places their residential localities in the political-administrative
category of usos y costumbres (usages and customs). So, in states like
Oaxaca, the population can be assumed to be united in terms of citizen-
ship, as well as state and national identity, but separate and distinct in terms
of locality, usages and customs (including indigenous language) and a
corresponding ethnic identity.
An implication of the above perspective is that the indigenous problem
can no longer serve as the reason for being of Mexican anthropology. It has
been superseded by the problems of capitalism and class that revolve around
commodity value (its production, distribution, consumption and accumu-
lation), by a series of political and constitutional problems dealing with
human rights and citizens rights and, perhaps most signicantly, by the
implementation of NAFTA and the related process of continental economic
integration in a competitive global economy. It turns out that the most funda-
mental identity in this context was recognized and named years ago by Jorge
Bustamente as that of commodity-migrant (1978).
201
With regard to NAFTA, anthropologists, like everyone else, must be
aware of certain factors. First, economic relations between Mexico and the
United States embrace much more than the contents of this agreement and
are largely a creature of the fundamental asymmetry between these two
national economies. Second, although NAFTA may be the most important
treaty between the United States and Mexico of the 20th century because
it proposes the institutional means to achieve a common market (Wein-
traub, 1997: 83), it does not reect or address many processes that are
occurring at the level of the global economy and division of labour (e.g.
industrial relocation, inter-industrial specialization, labour migration) or
domestically within the two national economies (e.g. ination, unemploy-
ment, underemployment). That is to say, these and many other processes
are essentially independent of NAFTA. Third, NAFTA is not irresistible,
irreversible or inevitable. Its implementation is subject to a political
process, although, admittedly, with greater responsiveness to the needs and
interests of business than to those of workers, consumers and the public
interest.
Last, NAFTA, proportionally speaking, has a much greater impact on
Mexico than on the United States. This is owing to the difference in scale
between the two economies as illustrated by the fact that the US gross
domestic product is 23 times larger than Mexicos, and its export market is
much more diverse. More than 90 percent of Mexicos exports ow into US
markets, and more than 63 percent of its imports come from the United States
(Weintraub, 1997: 834). Inevitably, then, the costs and benets of NAFTA
weigh more heavily in Mexican affairs than they do in those of the US.
Conclusion
Once the idea of Mesoamerican commodity cultures is accepted, and so
long as it is not identied exclusively with market institutions or the tianguis
but simply with the prudent exercise of reason in the pursuit of material
interest dened in commodity value (i.e. use + exchange + symbolic) terms,
I believe that the door is opened toward new understanding, not only of
the Mesoamerican economy but also of the regional economies of contem-
porary Mexico and of Mexican participation in the North American
economy under construction. If Mexican rural communities and their
subjects today are understood to be active participants in commodity valu-
ational and market processes, just like their counterparts in prior gener-
ations going back to the pre-capitalist epoch, then we will be less inclined
to underestimate their capacity to defend their material interests under
conditions of capitalist-driven change and to despair about the fate of their
idiosyncratic ethnocultural identities. Even though such conditions reect
capitalist agendas and are beyond the control of local communities, their
families and individual subjects, they do not result ipso facto in structures
202
devoid of opportunities for culturally informed individual and community
manoeuvre with regard to the production, exchange and consumption of
commodity value.
In short, this approach suggests a direct connection between Robert
Redelds primitive merchants (1962), Sol Taxs penny capitalists (1963)
and Michael Kearneys polybians (1996). The suggested connection is
subjects/agents prudently rational participation in the rich and diversify-
ing fund of Mesoamerican commodity culture in the pursuit of material
interest within a complex, multi-sectored economy. Individual choice and
manoeuvre within complex economies may have relatively little cumulative
impact on value distribution patterns between classes, sectors or locations
within the total system. Moreover, in long-term evolutionary perspective,
there is no doubt that the scale and volatility of economic activities and
consequences at all levels of the Mexican economy have been magnied
and intensied by the ascendancy of capitalist relations and market inte-
gration. Despite periodic crises of subsistence and accumulation generated
by dominant and determinant relations of capital since at least since the
Porriate (18761911) (see Hart, 2002), the reproduction of families and
communities in rural Mexico sometimes in stubbornly idiosyncratic ways
continues to rest upon prudently rational and culturally informed partici-
pation in the circuits of commodity economy, even under the impact of the
seemingly irresistible forces of 21st-century global economic change.
Notes
This article is the authors translation and revision of a public lecture entitled
Cultura, mercancas, y la economa indigena de Mesoamerica/Mxico, presented
on 25 June 2004 at the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales of the Universidad
Autnoma Benito Jurez de Oaxaca in Oaxaca, Mexico.
1 Good discussions of the usos y costumbres matter are found in Clarke (2000:
16870) and Hernndez-Daz (2001a, 2001b: 3741, 32544).
2 This scholarly legacy is examined extensively in Cook (2004: esp. chs 13, 6).
3 The concept of commodity cultures is dened and discussed at length in Cook
(2004).
4 There is debate, especially among Asianists and Oceanianists, regarding the
proper conceptualization and analysis of valuable things as gifts, commodities,
goods, valuables and so on (e.g. Appadurai, 1986; Gell, 1992; Gregory, 1997;
Parry, 1989). My approach to value negates the conceptual opposition between
gifts and commodities by essentially subsuming the former to the latter. Accord-
ingly, I choose to conceptualize humanly produced valuable things as
commodities, and to conceive of commodities as embodying three discrete
forms of value: use, exchange and symbolic. Theoretically, when commodities
are physically transferred between two parties, any or all of these value forms
may be realized depending upon the situational context and social relations
engaged in the transfer. In any particular time and place situation, this is
entirely a matter of empirical determination. If, for example, a commodity is
203
transferred from donor A to recipient B, it may be gifted in the sense of meeting
past, present or future reciprocity expectations. In any event, this single donor-
to-recipient transfer will minimally involve the realization of symbolic value
(intersubjectively Schutz, 1967) and, possibly, exchange value (if, in fact, it
was given in reciprocation of a prior donation from B to A). The use value of
this hypothetically gifted commodity will be realized when and if it is consumed
by B. In short, in my approach the opposition commodity vs. gift dissolves into
a distinction between a gifted vs. a non-gifted commodity.
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Scott Cook is Professor Emeritus of anthropology at the University of Connecti-

cut, Storrs. He has numerous publications on topics in economic anthropology and
Mexican studies, many of them based on extensive eldwork in the state of Oaxaca
and, more recently, in the state of Tamaulipas on the TexasMexico border. He lives
in San Marcos, Texas. [email: hscook@grandecom.net]
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