The Articulated Peasant

Household Economies In The Andes

Enrique Mayer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429976452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

Based on Enrique Mayer's 30 years of research in Peru, this collection of new and revised essays presents in one accessible volume Mayer's most significant statements on Andean peasant economies from pre-colonial times to the present. The Articulated Peasant is therefore noteworthy as a sustained examination of household economies through changing historical circumstances, while considering also the relationship of the environment to systems of land use, agricultural production, and economic exchange among ecological zones. Though the volume stresses the Andean context, its relevancy is wider. It will resonate with those who are struggling with issues of survival and development in Latin America or elsewhere where units of production and consumption are largely household based. This book is well suited for courses in Andean studies, economic anthropology, human ecology, peasants, and development.

1
The Household in Perspective

This chapter focuses on the household as an economic unit and makes the argument that although the household is the foundation of the economic system, it does not stand alone and unaided. The theoretical review herein relates the home, family, gender, and age with the circulation of goods and services in order to clarify the inner workings of the home and the ways in which it links up with wider spheres. Toward this end, four theoretical models are presented along with descriptions taken from ethnographic works on the Andes.

House, Field, and Money

It is difficult to penetrate the privacy of people’s homes, to understand the economic processes that occur within it, or even to apprehend the magical transformations that take place among family members in the intimacy that surrounds their hearth, much less the events that bring them either fortune or penury. In economic anthropology, the concept of “household” turns out to be an elusive one. Although this concept appeals to common sense, the working definition—which specifies the functions of a household as the basic unit that organizes production, distribution, and consumption and ensures its own reproduction—is not a good place to start. Instead, I single out three elements—house, field, and money—to provide a picture of its dynamics. The house is the place for shelter, storage, individual growth, identity, and autonomy. The field, also part of the household, is the place where seed turns into crop. And money comprises the tokens that members of the household incessantly struggle to obtain and love to spend on consumer goods as well as drink, music, and fancy costumes. Field and house integrate nicely, but money is the disturbing element.

There is a sense of dealing with the concrete and tangible when one starts looking at houses, their layouts, and the activity patterns that take place within them. This fact was vividly brought home to me in Tangor in 1979 when I participated in a private ceremony connected with the process of providing a new construction with a thatched roof. Members of the family whose house was being built had gathered after supper in the new house and made themselves comfortable among the piles of straw. They spent most of the night chewing coca, conversing, and drinking. The atmosphere was solemn; participants were there to divine whether the new residents of this house would be happy and successful. Late in the night, the wife’s brother-in-law appeared for the terrado yupay (the counting of the rafters). He was to crawl and jump from one ceiling joist to another, counting them as he touched them with his feet and hands. The more rafters, the bigger the house—and the greater the ostentation.

Later, the brother-in-law took some straw, braided it into a thin rope that he wound around the necks of the owners of the house, and, candle in hand, guided them around as if they were unseeing. He pointed to the places where they should sleep, where ears of corn should be hung, and where the woman should suspend her balls of spun wool. He took them to the attic to show them where they should store their potatoes. He populated the house with future guinea pigs, and he placed imaginary tools in their correct places. To inaugurate the dwelling, he took the candle to the attic to blacken the rafters with candle smoke. (When a house is actually inhabited, its rafters become black from the rising smoke of the kitchen fire.) Aptly, this little ceremony is called wasi pichuy; a phrase that, in Quechua, means “the where-at ceremony,” for it converts inanimate adobes, wood, and straw into a living thing—a house that creaks, groans, and may even become haunted.

I also found out that it was easier to peer into the private lives of people when I visited them in their fields—partly because we were free from prying ears out there, but also because, in their own fields, farmers were involved in a project they were eager to share. A field in the Andes is a chacra, a powerful object and symbol that conveys states of being and feeling. Julio Valladolid (1998: 51), a Peruvian agronomist, says that words are a difficult medium in which to convey the nurturing feeling that a chacra evokes. How can words express, he asks, “the profound feeling of affection and respect that the peasant feels for the Mother Earth, or the joy and gratitude towards the mountain protectors the peasant experiences on the birth of an alpaca that is treated like a new daughter?” He goes on to say: “The nurturing of the chacra is the heart of Andean culture which, if not the only activity carried out by the peasants, is the one around which all aspects of life revolve.” Julio Valladolid belongs to a group of professionals who, as members of an organization called Proyecto Andino de Tecnologías Campesinas (PRATEC), strongly argue for the regeneration of Andean life through a “back to the earth” movement, on the one hand, and a rejection of Western values, particularly development programs, on the other. To make chacra, PRATEC members affirm, is to cultivate Andean cultural values.

As for the third element, money, I refer to my conversations with my compadre Don Victor in Tangor in 1970. Money certainly has mysterious sources and more uses than just exchange. The two of us reminisced about how people go treasure hunting on the 24th of June because buried treasure on that night emits a strong bluish flame revealing its whereabouts—a flame, known as antimonio, wielding so strong a force that it can knock over a man who gets too near it. Don Victor supposed that gringos like me were immune. We commented on the elaborate costumes required for the dance of the “Ancestor Old Man” and his “Inca princess,” whose handbag shimmers with polished antique silver coins sewn on the outside. Qolque is the Quechua term for both “silver” and “money,” as is the Spanish word plata. Don Victor’s musings found their way into my dissertation (Mayer 1974a: 310):

My grandmother told me when I was small. She said that the time will come when everyone will be rich, even the most insignificant man will know money in thousands, in millions. Now even a nobody handles a thousand, two thousand soles. But all that money is no good, things have become expensive. For example, in those times five soles for a sack of maize, potatoes were two fifty, really cheap, really cheap. Now it is more, one hundred up to two hundred. When I was small, I earned five centavos, later, they paid me ten cents, and when I was bigger I went to the sugar cane hacienda and they paid me thirty cents. My grandmother said that when everybody would have lots of money, then the end of the world will come, and when the world ends then we shall all die, there will be nobody.

Anyone traveling in the Andes today cannot fail to notice the importance of markets, fairs, peddlers, traders, and shops in the livelihoods of Andean peoples. Most migrants have experience as street vendors in the informal sector in cities. There is even a popular god that ensures luck in trading. Known as the ekeko, it is a small plaster figurine depicting a rounded jolly man loaded down with merchandise. People keep the ekeko in a niche in their house where they also place miniatures of the consumer goods they most ardently desire: perfect small models of houses, trucks, tools for carpentry or mechanical trades, and canned or bottled supermarket goods; tiny university degrees suggesting the status of doctor, lawyer, or architect; minute passports, airline tickets, and credit cards. These items are available at special fairs called alasitas (the word is derived from the Aymara language and means “buy from me”), which have become very popular in Bolivia and Southern Peru. During alasitas, people engage in a playful game of acquiring tokens of their most coveted wishes. Stalls are set up where the miniatures are exhibited and sold. Young and old alike move from stall to stall, choosing among the perfect reproductions of diminutive cans of Carnation milk, boxes of soda crackers, bottles of rum, and bags of flour and sugar—all those things that fulfill their ardent desires (wanlla in Quechua). The ekeko has an open mouth so he can smoke cigarettes given to him by the family members. It is believed that if he is properly propitiated, during the year, the simulacra on his altar will bring in the real things. To be effective, however, one’s ekeko figurine has to have been stolen or given as a gift. A bought one is useless, and the good fortune it is capable of bringing is likely to abandon a person as easily as it came (Arnillas 1996: 133).

Most conspicuous during alasitas is the presence of play money. Perfect imitations of bills in various denominations of national currency are tied to the ekeko’s belt. People use the play money to simulate buying and selling urban and rural properties, obtaining miniature land titles, and paying fees to lawyers and notaries. The only item not miniaturized is the one hundred dollar bill—an enlarged version of the American bill, but with the image of the Bolivian Virgin of Urcupiña printed in the middle. Even more gross is the fetishized, poster-sized “one thousand dollar” bill, which features the ekeko image in the center, loaded down with flour, sugar, car, chalet, television, guitar, and Sony-brand sound equipment.

The Household in the Andes

In a publication on kinship and marriage in the Andes (Mayer 1977b: 64), I stated:

In Tangor, the basic units of production, distribution, and consumption are households. Each household produces enough food from agriculture to feed itself but not much more. Most agricultural labor inputs come directly from the household. Surplus labor available to the household is dedicated to cash pursuits which, except for a few cattle breeding families, implies migration out of the village. Insofar as it is possible, each family divides itself into two sections, one staying in the village to take care of the agricultural front, the other migrating to obtain cash.

While still basically true, this statement needs to be updated in the light of recent research on households in general and in the Andes specifically. In a volume on the household economy (see Wilk 1980), Peggy Barlett (1987: 4) discusses households in terms of four basic categories: (1) personnel and household composition, (2) production activities and the division of labor, (3) consumption activities and inter- and intra-household exchange, and (4) patterns of power and authority. In addition to providing an overview of these categories, I intertwine my description of Andean households with a discussion of four models of the household as an economic unit.

The first model posits the household as a “black box” within a larger system. Decisions that are made inside the box have observable effects in terms of what flows in and out of the house. The black box approach asks us to focus on the inflows and outflows and to be less concerned with what happens inside, but it also stresses the overall internal unity of the household and lays great emphasis on its boundaries. The second model focuses on personnel and patterns of authority within the household, reducing economics to kinship in order to explain decisions and outcomes in terms of kinship norms and gender relations. I call this the “kinship model.” The third model focuses on the production process, rather than on people, in order to pinpoint the ecological and economic processes that take place within the household. Following Stephen Gudeman and Alberto Rivera (1990), this model will be called the “house model,” although the house I am thinking of is the smallholder/householder family farm (Netting 1993). The fourth model is called the “rational choice model,” for it bypasses the household as a unit in order to focus directly on the individuals within it—individuals who make cost-benefit choices, within the context of the household’s means and needs, between rewards and punishments and between investments and payoffs. The household in this model is a miniature marketplace where rational actors trade in everything—food, affection, authority, leisure, pleasure—and compete with each other.

Models in economics, says Gudeman in Economics As Culture (1986: 38), are “… a way of searching, coping, adjusting and making sense of things…. [T]hey represent an exercise in human control and a form of public communication.” Because models draw attention to certain features while ignoring other possibilities, they are partial constructions that nevertheless represent a totality. Models often employ primal or axiomatic metaphors that warrant validation because they are based on personal experience. Each of the four models mentioned above highlights some important features about the household while suppressing others. Therefore, these models must be judged in terms of what they contribute to our understanding; but we also need to realize that this understanding often depends on the angle of approach.

The Black Box

No scholar really wants to subscribe to a “black box” model, as this approach has been widely criticized.¹ Yet, there are defensible appeals to such a label, the least of which is the lure to peer into the black box in an attempt to unravel its mysteries. The aim of such a model is to stress that what goes on inside the box is different from what goes on outside the box, and what goes into or comes out of the box is transformed into something else in the process. For example, noodles and sugar may be bought in the market as commodities, but once they enter the household they become food. Labor within the household is domestic but becomes something else once it crosses the boundary. Another benefit of the black box approach is that it conveys a sense that the inside constitutes a unit that is more than the sum of its parts. As a unit, it must have boundaries, and where there are boundaries, there are gateways, mechanisms that control inflow and outflow, customs agents and smugglers. Thus the black box model helps us to emphasize efforts at boundary maintenance, along with such interesting features as privacy, autonomy, identity, and the uniqueness that is magically generated within the sanctity of a home.

A moment’s thought about how words such as family, womens work, privacy of the home, and private property have become politicized reveals that even so neutral a term as black box, if it is to be useful at all, underscores the fact that the features that create this concept are cultural constructs and sustained by ideologies. In the social sciences, black boxes are associated with systems theory. They are derived from the way electrical circuits are drawn on paper to represent the interrelatedness of parts to a larger grid; indeed, this is a useful image to keep in mind, because grids represent electrical flows that are dynamic. Unlike circuits, however, social science systems are capable of transforming themselves. Finally, by substituting the term black box for others commonly used in the literature such as home, family, and even household itself, we can use the black box construct to avoid the tendency to “naturalize” the household, as if it were universal, irreducible, and constant throughout human societies and incapable of changing historical content (Harris 1981)—which it decidedly is not.

The word householding, coined by of Karl Polanyi (1997: 41), can be associated with an interesting formulation of one version of a black box theory associated with the household: “In ancient Greek as well as in Germanic, householding is the term used to denote catering for one’s own group. Oikonomia in Greek is the etymon of the word economy; Haushaltung in German corresponds strictly to this. The principle of ‘provisioning one’s self’ remains the same whether the ‘self’ thus catered for is a family, a city or a manor.” In householding the flow of material goods and services is circular and circumscribed, the boundaries are important to contain the flow within it, and the mode of integration (provisioning, pooling, and sharing) is different within the household from other forms that Polanyi identified—namely, reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange.² In Marxism, natural economy has similar connotations. Barbara Bradby (1975: 127) cites Rosa Luxemburg’s definition of the term as based on the “production for personal needs,” and William Roseberry (1989: 205) states that “economic organization is essentially in response to internal demand.” This latter definition, however, goes beyond the household to include the economy that contains it.”³

Insofar as my main research interest in Tangor focused on inter-household exchanges, as described in Chapters 2, 5, 6, and 7, my treatment of households in this book focuses on what goes on outside or across the boundaries of the household, and I thus find some of the features of the black box approach useful because it helps me stress differences between inter- and intra-household activities. A comparison between sixteenth-century Tangor households and those of Tangor in 1969 shows that household composition did not differ substantially between such separate times.⁴ The predominant household composition in Tangor during my census (Mayer 1972, 1974a) was the nuclear family (61 percent). Nonnuclear families were of two kinds: Incomplete households were due either to the death or separation of one of the spouses (6 percent) or to the temporary absence of a migrating member (14 percent). All incomplete households were managed by women, a fact that is related to the division of labor whereby men are in charge of productive tasks while women administer the resources. In Tangor terms, a man cannot live alone because he has no one to cook for him, whereas a lone woman can obtain male help for productive tasks. Extended families (18 percent) included portions of either spouse’s parental family or incomplete children’s families (i.e., with a spouse missing).

In terms of the development cycle of households (Goody 1966), the tendency to establish nuclear families when children marry implied that the household’s corporate agricultural enterprise did not persist over time. Rather, households were established at marriage with resources contributed by both spouses and grew as the family developed and children began to contribute, until they, in turn, married. Then the resources of the group began to be split up among the newly constituted families. For this reason it is better to consider transmission of landholdings through partition rather than inheritance. By the time the parents died, fields had usually been turned over to the children, and those not actually turned over were designated among them. The child who stayed with aged parents inherited the house and movable possessions. Billie Jean Isbell (1978) and Jane Collins (1986: 658) report parallel transmission of lands, men from men and women from women, which, though pooled during the household’s existence, were maintained as separate legacies.

Households were “independent” in the sense that eac...