Micro And Macro Levels Of Analysis In Anthropology by Pertti J Pelto

Author:Pertti J Pelto [Pelto, Pertti J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Anthropology
ISBN: 9780429729522
Google: bgScDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 49587079
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

a total of eighteen percent of males ever employed on plantations. These figures were much lower than I had expected from my earlier survey (1969-1970),26 in which thirty to forty percent of adult males worked seasonally on plantations and more than fifty percent were also employed in local peasant agriculture.

The difference between the core and peripheral zones remained marked, with only 1.3 percent of the core males dedicated primarily to plantation work (less than five percent working on plantations at all during the year) and only 18.5 percent primarily engaged in any form of agriculture, while 14.2 percent of peripheral males made most of their income from plantation work (twenty-four percent working on plantations at some point in the year) and nearly thirty-eight percent were primarily engaged in some form of agriculture.

The more recent survey year, 1977-1978, can be considered a "good" year for peasants. Reconstruction after the major 1976 earthquake provided more local employment than was normally available. But the difference between a good year and a bad one would, according to local estimates, affect only about ten percent of the population. Both individuals and communities generally reported a touch lower dependence on plantation income than was formerly the case. Communities that in the 1960s had exported upwards of sixty percent of their adult male population to work on plantations were now sending as few as ten to fifteen percent.

What were the new income sources for these peasants? They were derivative of the new kind of commercial distribution system in the peasant highlands, described earlier. This system emerged during the early years of independence, it expanded alongside the plantation economy in order to keep it supplied, and it boomed throughout the period under discussion here, fueled by modern transportation, urbanization, and the increased cash incomes of peasants and workers in the region. By the beginning of the free wage era in the mid-1940s, the new commercial distribution system had eroded all the Ladino commercial monopolies to the point that rural market centers rather than Ladino-controlled urban centers accounted for most of the commerce. The initial impetus for this development came from the plantation economy, but by the end of the period under discussion, a fair amount of the peasant production was intended for urban as well as rural demand. The fastest-growing cottage industry was tailoring, the market for which was not only peasant Guatemala but also the working and middle classes of Guatemala City.

Because peasants had developed a variety of ways to cope with the increasing penetration of market relations into their communities, there can be no single characterization of their stratagems. One can argue, however, that certain expectations for this period were not realized: there was no general trend toward increasing dependence on plantation wages, no general impoverishment, relatively little internal class polarization, and much less destruction of indigenous community organization than would be expected from the usual accounts of the period. The closed corporate community no longer existed, but in any event it had expired much earlier.

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