How old brain functions constrain modern features of economies

– And how to see this

Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde
Institut Jean-Nicod

© 2012 Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
www.openanthcoop.net/press

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Abstract

Approaches by neuroscience to the production and handling of material artifacts has recently found support for a ‘cultural cortical recycling’ hypothesis (Stout et al. 2008). This hypothesis had already been robustly established for symbolic artifacts such as letters and numbers (Dehaene and Cohen 2007). In both cases, specific cortical maps dedicated to basic perceptual and/or motor functions appear to have been re-used at a relatively recent point in human history (on temporal scales too brief for any anatomical evolution of the brain to take place), allowing new cultural capacities to develop. Such functional recycling both facilitates and constrains the processing of these artifacts. It also presumably plays a role in their emergence and morphogenesis. I present theoretical arguments and preliminary behavioral and neurobiological findings in support of the speculation that the historical emergence and typical neural processing of coins – as both material and symbolic artifacts – might be explained by a similar hypothesis.

My goal here, however, is to provide the empirical and theoretical background to testing this hypothesis from the perspective of behavioral economic anthropology. This might lead to collaboration with anthropologists in designing and making operational future experiments that could be performed easily online or in the field.

Keywords: cultural cortical recycling; coins; money emergence; categorization tasks; response times; field experiments.

Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde is a philosopher and an experimental economist. He is interested in understanding the emergence of modern economic environments and artifacts. His main question is about the biological, and especially neurobiological, resources that have been put to use by humans to shape and adapt to their economic environments. He is running several experiments to try to understand these adaptive processes and the constraints on lay economic cognition and behaviour. He has published empirical, philosophical and formal work to make sense of some typical cognitive biases and behavioral anomalies within that perspective. He is currently professor of philosophy at Aix-Marseille University, a member of Aix-Marseille School of Economics and an associate researcher at the Institut Jean-Nicod, École Normale Supérieure.

1. Introduction

Neural plasticity probably allowed humanity to adapt and even to generate modern post-Neolithic cultural environments, but these changes could not be accompanied by genetic and anatomical modifications in so short a time. These modern environments were, however, enhanced by brain plasticity in that typically adaptive genetic and neurobiological features selected on a long-run evolutionary basis were not eliminated. On the contrary, these could well have been re-used, or recycled, in order to process emerging artifacts stimulated by cultural practice. I present an argument here for use in the field of economic anthropology similar to the hypothesis Dehaene and Cohen (2007) developed about reading and arithmetic in cognitive neuroscience.

There is only limited evidence in support of this hypothesis in economic anthropology and that is open to various interpretations. So far, studies in neuroeconomics have not been designed explicitly to test it. Neuroeconomics has been defined as the study of neurobiological mechanisms underpinning decision-making in situations involving – taken separately and together — uncertainty, variable temporal horizons and other-regarding strategies (Sanfey et al. 2006). I would add that neuroeconomics might use a new ‘archeological’ tool (based on the whole set of brain-imaging techniques) to unravel the older (from an evolutionary point of view) neural pathways that continue to underpin our decision processes. This would illuminate how the brain had to adapt to new social contexts by recycling these ancient neural pathways and putting them to novel use. As a result of these neural adaptive processes, for some recent cultural artifacts (like numbers and maybe monetary instruments) and situations (like exchanges in modern economic settings like markets for goods and labor), their ‘cortical niches’ might be constrained by genetic factors. Plasticity is realized within certain limits and new cultural acquisitions are made possible within those limits. The emergence of a given cultural artifact or behavioral pattern is then both facilitated and constrained by its alleged cortical niche.

2. The hypothesis of cultural cortical recycling

The hypothesis of cultural recycling of cortical maps was put forward to make sense of a seeming paradox in neurobiology. As Dehaene and Cohen (2007) put it: “Part of the human cortex is specialized for cultural domains such as reading and arithmetic, whose invention is too recent to have influenced the evolution of our species. (…) To explain this paradoxical cerebral invariance of cultural maps, we propose a neuronal recycling hypothesis, according to which cultural inventions invade evolutionarily older brain circuits and inherit many of their structural constraints”. In what does the recycling consist and what sort of inherited constraints may affect the neural processing of cultural inventions?

The concept of a cortical map is central to Dehaene and Cohen’s hypothesis. Maps are invariant brain structures which encode cultural items and supervene on basic neuronal layouts. Seen working at various scales, these cortical maps reflect the representational structure of a targeted cultural item in an isomorphic way. Structures of encoded items and corresponding cortical mappings may be of different topological types. With regard to reading, for example, we intuitively understand what this isomorphism amounts to in the case of letters. Strings of letters belong to a continuous two-dimensional metric space and their structure is reproduced on the surface of the cortex. Retinotopy, more generally, refers to the spatial organization of the cortex in response to visual stimuli, which has been observed to form a map of the visual field (Tanaka 2003). Here the topology is simple and the isomorphism may be implemented at different neuronal scales. The topology may also be more complex, but isomorphism may still be uncovered (Tanaka 2003, Dehaene 2005).

Neuronal layouts are shaped by evolution and are genetically constrained. Epigenetic factors in the early phase of an individual’s development will finalize the cortical structures, which then react to external stimuli in an invariant way. There occurs a compromise between genetic constraints, cortical relative plasticity and the frequency and tractable structure of encountered stimuli. Dehaene and Cohen (2007) list the potential constraints that might underlie the organization of visual cortical maps in reaction to orthographic stimuli. Those constraints determine the way a given stimulus is processed, as well as potential biases in processing the relevant information. The two determining components of cultural cortical recycling are the presence of a specific mapping process supervening on a pre-structured cortical map and observation of inherited constraints in the processing of a novel cultural item.

Evidence of recycling may be interpreted as the convergence of neural activations on specific patterns in a preexisting and functionally dedicated cortical map. Dehaene and Cohen (2007) report such evidence of converging neural responses in the acquisition of reading skills. At early stages of learning, the neural activities associated with reading are not scattered in an orderly fashion over the ventral visual system. They progressively find an optimal location in the so-called “visual word form area” after reading has become a routine skill. In the process, cells of that area are recycled in order to decode automatically the precise stimuli of a given writing system. Where a cultural cortical map fits both is determined by the structure of the stimuli to be treated and determines some features of that treatment. Biases in neural processing of novel cultural items, when they are attributable to the constraints of a cortical niche that already exists, may give reliable signs that some sort of cultural ‘exaptation’ of that cortical structure has actually taken place. In the case of reading, inherited biases point in two directions: constraints might be transposed into typical behavior (eye movements, limits to the simultaneous processing of several individual stimuli or anomalies like dyslexia etc.) and into a co-adaptive evolution of the stimuli, given their potentially optimal processing by the brain. In spite of cross-cultural variations, writing systems present a limited number of internal organizational forms — a high degree of sameness in terms of the invariant shape, position and size of letters – showing perhaps processing constraints and the forms of cultural stimuli have converged. This cultural cortical recycling hypothesis’ double provisional conclusion seems to be not only that the brain ‘exapted’ some of its evolutionary older neural pathways in order to process novel cultural items; but also that the latter might have evolved to be optimally apprehensible by the brain.

Cultural artifacts may have acquired typical shapes and other material features not only because those shapes and features were apt realizations of some general functions they were destined to fulfill, but because this material organization was optimally tractable by a plastic, but functionally constrained, cortical map. Moreover, we may speculate that the success of a few cultural items, seen through their dissemination and stabilization across places and cultures, as well as their durability, may have been fostered by the existence of such recycled cortical maps, which would be the general anthropological conclusion to draw. I will now be more specific and consider whether it is plausible to extend this hypothesis to the emergence
of money considered as a medium of exchange, referring at this juncture at our co-authored study on the neural basis of categorizing coins (Tallon-Baudry et al. 2011), which points towards a cultural cortical recycling hypothesis in the case of monetary artifacts.

3. Neural anchoring of material culture

Recent cultural neuroscience (Chiao and Ambady 2007) seeks to identify the neural structures that are shaped by cultural environments. It generally deals with only one aspect of the cultural cortical recycling hypothesis, namely the influence of repeated cultural exposure to typical stimuli on the early development of corresponding cortical maps (when these can be identified). In this respect, however, it is crucial to connect cultural environments – and especially their material or artificial aspects – with brain structures. Cultural neuroscience, understood in this way as how material and cultural contexts more generally shape the brain, differs from the opposite approach that would investigate how some cultural invariants might be identified and ultimately related to neuronal constraints. If such a reduction could be granted, it would put us in a position to use the methods and data of neuroscience to understand the emergence and history of human artifacts and cultural institutions. I do not aspire to such “ideal” mapping of human social creations onto brain structures. My contention is that some experimental facts, when adeptly acquired, shed light on how the brain’s functional architecture and its genetically limited plasticity have constrained structural aspects of artifacts and institutions. This approach has been advocated by Renfrew, Frith, and Malafouris (2008) when they state that the use of neuroscience techniques and results may improve archaeologists’ analysis of past material cultures. They adapt the concept of “extended cognition” to such an analysis, adding the notion that artificial environments are cognitive prostheses which individual brains jointly shape and wherein they fit.

The stabilization and success of a given material culture, undertaken by a close group of human brains perhaps over a few generations, may be strongly correlated to the same neurobiological processes (such as the convergence of cortical maps toward optimal recycling neuronal sites). Determining the speed and ease of cultural learning may then have archaeological consequences. The study of past material cultures from a neurobiological point of view may offer a more precise, direct and challenging way of uncovering possible correlations between archeological typologies (Gosden 2008). It could reveal slow changes in artifacts over many human generations and, in early developmental stages of the brain, the speed of convergence toward a relevant cortical area that will eventually be selected to deal with a given artifact. Think of lithic cultures and of coinage, the time and resistance it took to introduce alternative monetary means, coins still remaining the prototypical material form of money (Snelders et al. 1992). Is there a possible correlation between the pace and type of historical evolution of stone tools and the neurobiological mechanisms that could support a cultural recycling process in this case?

Stout et al. (2008) have shed some light on the neural and evolutionary foundations of human primitive tool-making skills. They carried out a PET study involving inexperienced subjects who were progressively trained in carving stone tools. Evidence that would point to a likely cultural recycling hypothesis in this case would consist of inter-individual convergence toward a neuronal “niche”. That neuronal niche would superimpose on a preexisting cortical map that it would make sense to “parasitize” when routinizing that task. Finally, inherited structural constraints in processing the intended artifact might be observed. These results, however, only partially support the cultural cortical recycling hypothesis in the case of tool-handling.
Having acquired the stone tool-making ability, subjects showed varied neural activities in several parieto-frontal perceptual-motor systems. Among these activities of the neural motor system, one was specific to humans and specialized in the perception and recognition of three-dimensional shapes in motion. As no other specific human neural activities associated with planning and strategy were observed, the authors concluded that low-level fine-tuned processes, rather than higher cognitive ones, would suffice for the neural processing of ‘affordance perception’ and tool-use. This low-level process, rather than more cognitively demanding processes of abstract conceptualization, could well be crucial for the launching of a cultural innovation. Even though the latter carries a lot of very abstract and conventional connotations in other respects, I expect that the very emergence and success of a cultural innovation depends on its fit with a preferentially low-level neural structure.

Another criterion of recent cortical recycling is that, particular proto-historic cultural innovations (such as reading, writing, numbers, money, modern tools and symbols, etc.) could not have influenced the anatomy of the brain in the short evolutionary time since their inception. They may simply be an upshot of specific brain extensions, in contrast with a former anthropological stage or by comparison with primate brains. But if invariant cortical maps and specific neurobiological niches are observed with respect to the processing of these novel cultural items, given that the latter cannot have influenced brain anatomy, this is likely to be explained by a cultural cortical recycling hypothesis. But in that case, they would in turn likely be morphologically constrained by the functional specificities of the re-used older brain circuits they are parasitic on. But this is where the hypothesis of specific cortical maps being recycled in connection with the processing of cultural items becomes tricky. Interpreting systematic observations that seemingly support such an hypothesis may be ambiguous; and one needs first to determine whether evidence points to specific human brain extensions or to the functional reshuffling of evolutionarily older neural pathways.

As an instance of such interpretive indeterminacy, Orban et al. (2006) reviewed comparative fMRI studies of the intra-parietal sulcus (IPS). They confirmed that the human IPS, which has its anatomical counterpart in monkeys, contains functional regions specific to humans. In particular, it includes a region uniquely sensitive to the perception of three-dimensional shapes in motion, as also noted by Stout and his colleagues (2008). At this stage, human brain extension is expected to be correlated with functional specification. Despite the link to monkeys, this may have developed in a specific way in humans: and then re-used or recycled in the context of cultural innovation. The first anatomical and functional extension made possible apprehension of moving objects which was the optimal cortical niche to parasite for a technological ‘affordance ability’ to emerge.

Figure 1: basic plausible functional shift in tool use; underlined in red: the intra-parietal sulcus

Technology is a dual system in the sense that it encompasses both low-level motor procedures – some of them requiring highly specific neutrally-wired functions – and more abstract, cognitively demanding aspects, such as planning, teleological thought and maybe symbolism. Crucially, tool-handling primarily taps into the low-level procedures and, to the extent that there is a pre-established optimally relevant cortical map locally available, a functional shift may be hypothesized with respect to tools. We might ask whether similar conditions may be hypothesized in relation to other cultural artifacts, in particular those relevant to economic environments in which I am primarily interested. Not, of course, that there were not any economic environments before the advent of money, but money defines what we could call a “modern economic environment”, in that it is one where omnipresent face-to-face bargaining relationships are mediated by inert symbolic proxies. In the same way as tools, money encompasses a very material level (if we consider, precisely, money’s materializations) and a highly abstract and conventional one (it is interesting to note that money presides over the increased abstraction of human relationships by means of a material artifact). An analogy with cultural cortical recycling in tool-processing would mean that low-level neural mechanisms are preferentially triggered when dealing with money, in contrast with the immediate involvement of neural circuits that would correspond to the treatment of its more abstract features, and that these low-level mechanisms are grafted onto optimally relevant older neural pathways. Even though there is little direct neurobiological evidence supporting cultural cortical recycling of money-processing, economic and anthropological models of the emergence of money, as well as behavioral anomalies with respect to money and their neural bases, may point towards such a hypothesis.

4. Issues in money emergence

Theoretical economics does not assign any role to an intrinsically useless object such as fiat money. For example, the general equilibrium economy of Arrow-Debreu is completely devoid of any medium of exchange. In real-world economies, however, money not only exists but expectations of inter-temporal variations in the value of money are an important part of monetary transmission mechanisms. Kiyotaki and Wright’s (1989) model (henceforth KW) provides an understanding of money’s role in an economy and incidentally of the mechanisms that may have presided over its emergence. In a KW economy, there is a mismatch between the goods an agent produces and those she wishes to consume. This discrepancy requires the agent to accept a mediator to acquire her own consumption goods (see Figure 2). If trade occurs, it yields a positive payoff, otherwise an agent has to wait and bear the storage costs of his produced good. Agents aim at inter-temporal maximization of the gains from trade and minimization of storage costs. To see how agents’ behavior evolves
in a KW economic environment, this model has been applied in a number of laboratory settings. These experiments show that the marketability of an object plays an important role in its acceptance as a medium of exchange; and in some situations agents could not discern these aspects and thus chose sub-optimally (Duffy and Ochs 1999, Duffy 2001). It has also been observed that an intrinsically worthless piece of fiat money may circulate as a medium of exchange as long as one of its feature is the lowest storage cost; if it is not the least costly to store goods, then its circulation as a medium of exchange less than that predicted by the theory (Duffy and Ochs 2002).

Some recent work in the psychology of money has distinguished between instrumental and hedonistic attitudes and behavior towards money (Lea & Webley 2006). It seems that money as a tool – taken essentially as a medium of exchange for purchasing desired goods – is conceptually primitive; hedonistic qualities of the purported good being derived from acquisition and consumption. But it has been noticed that money per se possesses hedonistic qualities that may sometimes outweigh an instrumental perspective (Vohs et al. 2006). An important question with regard to the study of money emergence is whether money was (and still is) primarily processed by brain structures that connect it to the value of what it is exchanged for, or whether it tends to be valued for itself independently of these intended items. If such an independent valuation phenomenon may be observed, we might wonder why and specifically whether money takes advantage of functionally relevant prewired circuits. If we adopt the purely instrumental view of money as being devoid of intrinsic value, the question becomes to understand how worthless tokens could be adopted as a universal means of exchange.

In the KW theoretical model of money emergence, perceptions of value are mediated by expectations concerning other agents’ behavior. The fact that a good of no intrinsic value is adopted indicates that it acquires value through rational expectations, i.e. through strategic considerations that presumably tap into the most evolved parts of the frontal lobes associated with planning and control, but also into brain areas associated with coordinating behavior, joint intention and action, and mental abilities (Coricelli & Nagel 2009). If, on the contrary, behavioral and neural data with respect to money may be understood as those high-level processes being short-circuited by lower processes, it would alter our view of money emergence in terms of the KW model, or at least lead to a closer focus on the respective contribution of value perception and strategic input to the emergence of a medium of exchange in an experimental environment.

A conceptual shift away from the determination of value by exchange to its derivation (even of an intrinsically worthless object) from the conventions governing monetary exchange is clearly a heterodox move in economics. It has been adopted by Aglietta and Orléan (2002) in a seminal work relying on several anthropological sources. Archaeological data may also provide hints to answering this question about the relationship between valuation and social coordination, especially since the material remnants of money use present features that are likely shaped and were shaped by the neural systems most systematically and primitively involved in money-use. In that respect, the case of electrum coinage is interesting, since its introduction generated a tension between value-perception and social convention (Wallace 1987). Coins in 600BC Lydia were exclusively minted from electrum, a natural alloy of a variable proportion of gold and silver. But given the inconsistent and indeterminable gold content of electrum coins, its intrinsic value for users was uncertain.

Electrum coinage may be viewed more precisely as showing that intrinsic value is not what grants money its market value, at least not since its inception as coinage. Electrum coins were of carefully standardized weight, implying that, regardless of its metallic content, each coin was assigned a particular value by monetary authorities warranting its redemption. Interestingly, coins were still made from an allegedly precious metal, perhaps not so much because their intrinsic value determined the use of these coins, but because it enhanced their perception as valuable items, as if the prevailing social convention could not guarantee it by itself. We may hypothesize, after this brief review of the heavily discussed topic of early coinage, that, on the one hand, the use of something bearing value may certainly take advantage of having the trappings of intrinsic value but the latter is not essential for its adoption as a valued means of exchange; on the other hand, its value, whether this is intrinsically or extrinsically grounded, is the most easily and perceptually processed feature of monetary artifacts.

5. Low-level money functional processing

If this hypothesis is correct, there should be observable conflicts between value-processing and conventional understandings of money, pointing towards the possible prevalence of low-level processing of monetary stimuli. Recent neural data on the money illusion may point into that direction. ‘The money illusion’ means that an increase in income is valued positively, even when prices go up by the same amount, leaving real purchasing power unchanged. The nominal value of money is not connected to its real value or, rather, there is a bias in the assessment of real economic transactions induced by an undue consideration of their nominal evaluation. This means that some features of the real economic structure in which an agent trades may remain unperceived by them in spite of their willingness to trade. This stands in contradiction, first, to the prediction of economic theory that an individual judges the value of money by its purchasing power rather than by its nominal value and, second, to the experimental economics norm of expecting behavioral anomalies to be eliminated through experience of market interactions.

Until recently, little was known about the mechanisms that make people tend to use a suboptimal heuristic and fall prey of the money illusion. Shafir, Tversky and Diamond (1997), in a behavioral study, tried to understand why individuals do indeed use nominal values as a heuristic to infer real values of transactions, thereby failing, in contexts where the real incentive structure has been modified in an inflationary or deflationary direction, to optimize their monetary utility. In the past few years, Weber et al. (2009) have used fMRI to investigate whether the brain shows this money illusion. Subjects were submitted to two distinct experiments that were identical in their real economic structure, but variable in nominal terms. Participants earned low or high amounts of money that could be used to buy items from two catalogues respectively offering low and high prices for identical items. In the absence of a money illusion, no region of the brain typically associated with the processing of value should be sensitive to this purely nominal variation. On the contrary, the experimenters found that a crucial area of the brain-reward circuitry (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, vmPFC) associated with the valuation and anticipation of goods, exhibited a money illusion. Its level of activity was significantly greater under high-price conditions as opposed to low prices, despite the unchanging real incentive structure. The following picture and graph show how the vmPFC was correlated with the degree of money illusion revealed by participants’ evaluation of simple economic transactions.

Figure 2

This study’s findings show that money was processed at the lower level of reward-related brain activity in the vmPFC. This suggests that the money illusion is deeply anchored at a biological infra-individual level and that its neural treatment favors hedonistic features of value rather than an instrumental and more abstract conventional approach to the use of money.

Although money seems to be primarily treated as a reward and secondarily as a tool, thereby indicating the prevalence of low-level neural processes, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the neural processes have taken advantage of old neural pathways that could optimally extend their functions to that specific processing end. Moreover, money is not just any reward; it is a reward – and is primarily treated as such – to the extent that it acquires some value through conventional institutions. We would need to figure out what behavioral and neural evidence could point to a neural mechanism reflecting this characteristically arbitrary feature of money, namely how the features of money are processed outside of contexts of conventional reward and trade.

In Tallon-Baudry, Meyniel, and Bourgeois-Gironde (2011), we demonstrate the existence of symbolic activities in the fusiform gyrus associated with visual categorization of particular monetary stimuli.

We were interested in how money is identified by the brain outside of contexts of reward. What kind of object is it? It is difficult to dissociate money from reward, as we saw, and its perception outside such contexts may well be strongly influenced by the use we usually make of it to obtain reward or in regarding money itself as the primary reward. In spite of this, we decided to investigate the way the brain identifies money in non-rewarding situations. Moreover, unlike physiological rewards, monetary stimuli are cultural artifacts, and our starting point was to ask how monetary stimuli are identified in the first place. We translated this question into another that makes it answerable through the use of magneto-encephalography (MEG) recordings of cortical activities: how and when does the brain identify a valid currency, rather than “where”, since we were not concerned at the outset with investigating localization.

By “valid currency” or “valid coin”, we meant, in our experiment, a coin that is (or was in 2010) endowed with current purchasing power. We took advantage of the formation of the Eurozone in 2002 to compare neural responses to valid coins (we used Euros and Australian $ for this) and invalid coins (French Francs and Finnish Marks, which were put out of circulation in 2002). The other factor built into this choice of types of stimuli is familiarity with these coins (minimally previous acquaintance) or lack of it. We made sure that the subjects were familiar with Euros and Francs (and were old enough in 2002 to have traded with the former French currency) and had never been in visual or economic contact with Australian $ and Finnish Marks. The experiment we invited our participants to perform was a one-back re-identification task. Namely, coins were successively presented on the computer screen and participants had to click on the mouse when they saw the same coin twice in a row. We did not directly test the factors we built in our choice of stimuli or the hypotheses we had in mind. The indirectness of our paradigm is an important methodological asset, in that if significant effects are shown with respect to our parameters and hypotheses, the conclusions we draw thereby escapes any criticism that we would have forced those effects on the participants.

Before running this experiment, we had expectations that are important to spell out briefly, given that they involve psychological and neural abilities lying at the core of observations and the associated methodology that we intend subsequently to transpose to other relevant contexts, where anthropological knowledge would be vital. We were aware that coins are both material and symbolic objects, endowed with economic properties by tacit, or most often explicit, social agreement. What we defined as coin-validity bears some analogy with the relation between a word and its meaning. Symbolic categories such as coins and words are therefore different from ecological categories, like faces, food, animals, which are based on visual similarities rather than being conventional carvings of reality. Given the partially symbolic properties of our monetary stimuli, we expected that these properties would be decoded by certain brain structures with a minimal 300ms delay. Categorizing a letter string as forming a valid lexical instance of one’s natural language takes at least this time. On the other hand, categorizing natural objects such as faces occurs in the human ventral visual pathway within about 150ms. We expected money to be categorized at a speed more like words than faces.

What we observed was dramatically different from what we expected. As we report in detail in Tallon-Baudry et al. (2011), both familiar and unfamiliar coins were readily recognized and differentiated in the ventral human pathway. This suggests that there preexists a neural representation of money in subjects sufficiently generic and abstract to accommodate new instances of this category. Our main result then was that familiarity with certain categorical instances of valid or invalid coins is not a requirement for money categorization along this abstract dimension. Our second, quite unexpected, result was that in our experiment stimuli are categorized as valid or invalid money within a time window located between 150-175ms. Such processing speed is usually found in the case of natural categories defined, as I said, by visual properties, not social agreement. This result suggest that the human ventral visual system is well able to deal with symbolic environments, or at least certain objects such as coins, on the basis of general knowledge rather than long reinforced experiential channels.

From a neural point of view, our findings may show that the ventral visual pathway, a system previously thought to analyze visual features such as shape or color and to be influenced by daily experience, was also able to use conceptual attributes such as monetary validity to categorize familiar as well as unfamiliar visual objects by tapping into the same neural mechanisms and just as automatically. The symbolic abilities of the posterior fusiform region could therefore constitute an efficient neural substrate to deal with culturally defined symbols, independently of experience, which probably fostered money’s cultural emergence and success in the first place. Natural candidates that come to mind are items such as faces, food or, again, tools. As with tools themselves, and the prior emergence of a motor module associated with three-dimensional moving affordances, we simply conclude that a special neural cortical map located in the ventral stream may have been selected through long-run evolution in order to detect whether faces or foods, or anything contributing to the individual’s survival in her environment, are of a “valid” or an “invalid” sort. This primitive cortical map may have been re-used in the processing of money-stimuli and supported their emergence and the shapes they historically initially took. This neural nesting of money would then help to explain behavioral anomalies that have been often recognized for this culturally central human artifact.

6. Conclusion

A series of experiments in various cultural contexts and using different coins would be needed to validate this interpretation of our findings. Our initial study, still speculatively pointing towards the plausibility of a cultural cortical recycling hypothesis in the case of monetary artifacts, must be extended in new directions. Among such questions I would mention the following:

• Is money the only conceptual category that can receive a fast, automatic, reinforcement-free treatment by the visual system? At least another conceptual (or semi-conceptual) category (alive/not alive) shows a neuronal organization independent of learning. It is most unlikely that the neural pattern we observed stems from a module functionally dedicated to money. It is a far too recent invention (about 3000 years) to have influenced brain evolution. If any cortical process has taken place in the case of money, it probably encompasses a more general or more variegated symbolic category than monetary validity only.

• More generally, our results suggest that, on a par with other cultural inventions, cultural capacities do not necessarily develop on the basis of higher-level, flexible, distributed neural mechanisms, but may consist in automatic routines taking place in dedicated neural territories originally associated with other more directly ecological goals. This point, yet to be confirmed, needs more systematic investigation (not necessarily involving brain-imaging) of the acquisition of behavioral measures in categorization patters and response times, referring to tasks in contrasting cultural vs. ecological contexts, more precisely, in contexts requiring anthropological expertise.

• Whichever primitive mechanism money processing is rooted in, the fact that an object conventionally defined as social is treated so automatically, fluidly and within circuits and mechanisms evolutionarily dedicated to ecological items such as faces or food, must have contributed to its cultural emergence and success. Of course, there is a gap between this preliminary result and the more general hypothesis that cultural success in human history (artifacts, institutions, abilities, behaviors?) must be rooted in similar neurobiological recycling processes.

[In order to start to address these open questions we plan to propose online and easy to perform on field experiments that could help to corroborate (or disconfirm), by means of acquisition of basic behavioral measures (items classification, categorization and response times in those tasks), the plausibility of a cultural cortical recycling hypothesis in the case of money as a medium of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account. It means that the three classical functions of money should be systematically explored, separately. Tasks, schematically, will involve pictures (if online) and maybe actual items (if in the field) of monetary artifacts (familiar or unfamiliar, valid or invalid), food, faces (familiar or exotic, friendly, edible, hostile, rotten, etc.) that we will ask the subject to categorize. We measure response times in those tasks by means of precise chronometric devices. The main prediction that short response times point toward automatic cognitive processes in categorization or associative (putting two objects together according to some criterion) tasks, which will be interested to observe whether they are the case in visual settings involving cultural vs. ecological artifacts.]

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Friendship, Anthropology

Liria de la Cruz and Paloma Gay y Blasco
University of St. Andrews

© 2011 Liria de la Cruz and Paloma Gay y Blasco

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
www.openanthcoop.net/press

Forum discussion in the OAC network.
Download as PDF, EPUB, MOBI.

Spanish translation: PDF.

The reflexive turn that made anthropologists protagonists of their texts did not alter the role of informants: they remain objects rather than creators of anthropological knowledge. Through their concepts, analytical frameworks, and debates, ethnographers talk to each other, not to their informants. As interlocutors, informants belong firmly in the field, not in the academy. It is as if informants were what happened to ethnographers before they started writing. And so, although ethnographies deal with the lives of informants, informants are kept out of the conversation of ethnography.

Here we collaborate, acknowledging that ethnographic knowledge is made by ethnographers and informants, and should be owned by both. We write together, an informant and an anthropologist, a Gitana (Spanish Gypsy) and a Paya (non-Gypsy), a street seller and an academic, two women born in the same city, in the same year, two mothers, two friends. We write about our worlds and about us: this text is ethnographic and biographical. We talk about being women, mothers, wives, lovers, and workers in a world shaped by inequalities to do with gender, class, ethnicity and wealth. And we talk about anthropology: not just as writing, although that too, but as a powerful presence in our lives.

By reflecting together on our lives and on how we have influenced each other through the years, we try to challenge divisions that have been fundamental to anthropology since its beginnings. These are the divisions between field and academia, between the ones who write and the ones who are written about, those who do the knowing and those who are known. We also consider other divisions: between men and women, Gitanos and Payos, people for whom everyday survival in twenty-first century Spain is easier and people for whom it is harder. These are the divisions that have moulded our lives and that underlie our friendship.

We first met in 1992, when Paloma was doing her fieldwork in a government-built Gitano ghetto in the south of Madrid where Liria had some close relatives. The two of us were twenty-three at the time, since we were born in Madrid towards the end of the Francoist dictatorship. Our lives, however, had developed in very different directions. Liria, a Gitana, had grown up in the expanding suburbs where the cheapest council housing mixed with shanty-towns. Until leaving to start university in Britain aged eighteen, Paloma, a middle-class Paya, had lived in a large apartment in an affluent district of the city. When we met, Liria was a young mother of two sharing a council flat with her husband and children near the ghetto, in an inner-city estate where Gitano families mixed with low-income working-class Payos. Paloma was working towards her anthropology PhD for Cambridge University in the UK, and was looking for a Gitano family with whom to stay. Liria and her husband, Ramón, offered their home. Quickly, we two became close friends.

Nineteen years later, Liria no longer lives with Ramón and their children. In 2008, she met a young Moroccan immigrant, Younes, fell in love, and had to lose her whole family in order to start a new life with him. She is shunned by other Gitanos and lives instead amongst North African and Latin American immigrants. Paloma is now an academic, a wife, and a mother of two working in Scotland. On the cusp of middle-age, we are still close friends. Until recently, we have remained fixed in our roles as informant and anthropologist. Now we have decided to challenge these roles: we have things to say, and we believe we can say them best together. In this project, Liria is not the provider of raw material, of ‘ethnographic data’ for Paloma to analyse and argue about. We each talk, about ourselves and about each other, from our own particular standpoints, with our histories, our own interests, fears and desires as a foundationincluding a deep involvement with anthropology. In these pages both of us speak, sometimes apart, sometimes together, sometimes with each other. The strength of what follows lies not only in the story we tell but also in the way we tell it. We mix voices and styles because we want to foreground our complicity and also the tensions, negotiations, agreements and disagreements involved in doing and writing anthropology.

How we work together

In order to write this article, we started by discussing what we wanted to write, and how we would do it. Since we were apart for the majority of the time, Liria in Madrid and Paloma in St Andrews, we talked on the phone and emailed each other with the kind assistance of Younes Bziz, Liria’s partner. Liria wrote in Spanish, by hand, the sections where she speaks in the first person, and Paloma typed them, added punctuation and translated them into English. On her laptop Paloma wrote in English the sections where she speaks in the first person and translated them into Spanish for Liria to read and suggest changes. Paloma also wrote in English first drafts of the sections were we speak together, using the plural ‘we’. She translated these drafts into Spanish, and Liria made changes and additions, sometimes very substantial, which were then incorporated into the English text. We had Paloma’s fieldnotes, and her letters from the field to her PhD supervisor in Cambridge, Stephen Hugh-Jones, but only Liria’s letters to Paloma since Liria had left Paloma’s letters behind when she eloped. We also had many hours of taped conversations in which we talked about our lives, past and present, and our friendship. Because Liria is unfamiliar with anthropological literature, we have not quoted other authors. We have only made a short explicit reference to anthropological debates in the introduction, and Paloma is responsible for this interpretation. We hope that readers will be able to make their own connections with other anthropological texts.

In order to make our joint and separate voices clear to readers, we use three different fonts. We use Arial when we speak together, Cambria for Liria’s sections, and Calibri for Paloma’s.

Beginnings

I would like it if, with what I am going to write, people could understand how wonderful and important it was to meet my friend Paloma. No matter how much I write, it will never be enough to express so much gratitude towards just one friend. Because everything started with just a fieldtrip. We never thought this would reach so far into both our lives. We had barely started to live, we were both twenty, she was single and I was married with two children, Nena and Angel. We have had so much in common although we grew up in very different settings because I was Gitana and she Paya, and because we belonged to different ethnicities (etnias). That never pulled us apart, the very opposite. I even believe this was the interesting thing about our friendship, the desire to get to know new worlds and different people from what we were used to living with.

For this reason I remember very well the day I met Paloma. My elder sister Carmen had already talked to me about her. She had told me that she had met a Paya girl who came to the Villaverde church and who was doing a study about the Evengelical Gitanos and about all our surroundings and anything related to the Gitanos of the neighbourhood. Back then Paloma lived in Tío Basilio’s house, the most respected Gitano in the area of Madrid and some provinces. He was also my father’s uncle, although we have been brought up very differently in our two families, in particular we in my father’s house. And so when my sister told me that a young Paya girl was staying at Tío Basilio’s, I was surprised, not because they are bad people but because, as Gitanos, they still lived by rather old customs. When my sister introduced her to me, I thought she appeared ignorant and shy, but I recognise now that we were the ignorant ones, and she was also very brave to be in a neighbourhood full of Gitanos, most of them poor and with little schooling. For this reason I recognise that she was doing a very difficult job because she had started with the hardest part, and she still had a long way to go.

My first impression was that she was intelligent and a little serious. After introducing us my sister had told me that Paloma needed to live with a family in the neighbourhood but nobody was offering their house and all her studies hung on her living with a family. I hardly knew Paloma, only from seeing her in church, I had never talked to her, but my sister had said very good things about her and she told me that they couldn’t have her in their house because her husband was an Evangelical pastor. They could be given a church to lead at any time, and they would have to go outside Madrid, so they wouldn’t be able to pay the necessary attention to Paloma to help her do her work. But I also know they were influenced by gossip because they were a young couple, and people’s tongues and their enviousness are very bad. I too was advised not to take a Paya girl into my house because she would bring problems to my marriage. But my marriage could not go to waste more than it already had, even though back then he was not so bad with me. So I felt very sorry for this girl who had so much interest in our lives and our way of life, that we would not give her the chance to realise her project and her future. It was then that my parents supported my decision to have Paloma in my house. They have always been very liberal, in particular my mother, who had friends of all ethnicities (etnias), not minding about race, or colour, or circumstance. She put that in our hearts, and without a doubt this helped me a lot in my decision to open my house to Paloma and to show myself the way I was. And also I acknowledge that I too was interested in knowing more about her world, because the first friends I had as a girl were Payas who went to school with me and I liked very much their way of being, so simple. For Payos live more independently in their lives, without thinking about others’ opinions or gossip. And it has always bothered me, having to do things so that people will let you be and not be criticised for no matter what. For this reason I wanted to have a Payo friendship in my life, because since I married all my friends were Gitanas. I had a good group of friends, and got along with everybody, but I also wanted to make new friends, different from what I was used to.

And so, listening to my heart and my instinct, I said yes, she could come to my house to live with us and finish her research. Although in some ways I also researched her, because I was fascinated by her world and her way of life, even though I did not know what Paloma’s family thought about us, the Gitanos. I admit that I have never been bothered by what her family or my family think, although I have to say that my parents behaved rather well with Paloma, and they were never negative about her work and our friendship. The truth is that Paloma earned their trust through her behaviour. She adapted very well to the Gitano world, and she knew how to get in, through the elders and then through the church, and coming to live with me was the icing on the cake.

It was an experience for both of us. In our free time we used to go to the university behind Ramón’s back, because Gitanos, and in particular the men think that a woman goes to places like that because she wants to meet boys and do bad things. They do not think that two people can just be friends, without going any further. And in that they were wrong, because I met friends of Paloma, and nothing bad ever happened.

Paloma’s fieldnotes, March 1993

Liria and I talked today about what it has meant for her to have me in her house, and about what other people have been asking and telling her. She told me that people have been amazed that she has a young Paya in her house, in particular because her husband is very young. Young men are easily tempted, she said, and any tiny event would make people gossip: ‘you know what people’s tongues are like…’ For example, she said that if it was hot and Ramón took his shirt off, and I happened to be in the same room then, people would say ‘Ramón is having it off with the Paya’, and specially ‘how stupid Liria is, they are doing it in her own house’. Even people who have known me well for a full year were, according to Liria, shocked to learn that I was living in her house. The two pastor’s wives, Carmen and Emilia, who are always friendly and open with me, refused to take me in on the grounds that ‘people would talk, and it would damage very much out testimony, our standing’. Today I began to understand the implications that having me in her house has for Liria, since even those who seem to accept me best and talk freely with me would not have me. According to Liria, even these people ask her if I pay her money, and if I help her in the house, and she said she feels compelled to say that I do, because it is a kind of justification. I said to Liria that, in my opinion, for them it is a question of finding out who is fooling who, who is being tricked, and who is doing the tricking, a very Gitano thing: Gitanos won’t accept that ours could be a relationship on equal terms. So when her grandmother ‘innocently’ asked me where I was staying (she already knew) Liria told her, ‘poor wee Palomi, she is very good, poor thing, she helps me a lot in the house and with the children.’ Although I see that Liria could have done little else, I was rather offended at this, being made to look like a dimwit. But I didn’t say anything.

Informant and anthropologist

Our friendship started with her kindness, taking me into her house although she barely knew me and even though I was bad news. I was a Paya, young, unattached, not really managing to gain acceptance in a strongly marginalised community where the dominant Payos were distrusted and despised, and where Payas were considered uniformly immoral and sexually promiscuous. It was only because Liria looked beyond the stereotypes and the conventions that dominated interactions between Payos and Gitanos, because she questioned what most around her took for granted, that we became friends. Her generosity, her compassion, and her curiosity were the foundation of our friendship. From the first time we met and throughout twenty years, she has loved, helped and supported me.

We were fascinated by each other, perhaps because we were both dissatisfied with our lives and because we embodied for the other the deep unfulfilled desire to belong somewhere else. I had had an average childhood in an upper-middle class, conservative family. I had learnt languages and travelled abroad relatively often, but had also been immersed in a world of rigid conventions regarding such things as class, upbringing, occupation, dress and accent. I looked to anthropology as an escape into imagined, alternative worlds, but all I did was exchange the inward-looking, suffocating atmosphere of the Madrid middle-class for the inward-looking, suffocating atmosphere of a Cambridge college, and I felt at ease in neither. Among the Gitanos of Villaverde I was even more out of place: by the time I met Liria I had been doing fieldwork for nine months and was increasingly frustrated and convinced that I would never ‘get in’.

To start with, Liria seemed to me certain of her place and of her path in life. She was a well-respected young matron, a good street seller and money-maker, strict in her adherence to the highly elaborated Gitano code of conduct for women, always dressing modestly in long skirts, not smoking, drinking, or interacting with unrelated men. Her parents were well off by comparison with other Gitano families nearby, and they were very well liked, her father’s patrilineage was large and powerful and controlled much of Gitano life in the ghetto. At fifteen, her mother had arranged her betrothal to an older relative, Ramón, and she had married well, at a wedding ceremony where her virginity was tested and displayed, rather than much less prestigiously by elopement like some of her cousins and friends. She fitted in, and yet I soon learnt that she was discontented, with her marriage to a man she did not love and who could not love her, with the routine of wifely everyday life, and with the restrictions that being a ‘decent Gitana’ imposed on her. Above all, she was desperately curious to know what things were like among the Payos, the Others who surrounded her but were beyond her reach. She had a deep intuitive understanding of what anthropology was about and embraced the informant role with enthusiasm.

Liria wanted to learn, about the Payos and so about me and what she called ‘your world’. Together we took what seemed like huge risks, lying to Ramón and going for secret outings into Madrid so that she could see what my life was like. We dressed Payo-style, discarding our long skirts and putting on trousers, which the Gitanas never wore, and we visited museums, parks, middle-class restaurants, and the home where I grew up. Since she had opened up her house and her life to me, and she was so curious about mine, I felt I had to reciprocate and took Liria to my mother’s flat, where she met not only my family but the housekeepers who worked for us, and to the university where we had lunch with my childhood friends, well-off boys and girls who studied business, law or economics. Just like fieldwork amongst the Gitanos for me, these trips into middle-class Madrid were a great adventure for Liria. Having spent all her life on the periphery of the city, she literally discovered a new Madrid. And, at the university, she talked freely with unrelated men of her own age for the first time in her life.

Our outings were interludesfrom the strain of fieldwork for me, from the monotony of everyday life for herand they made us accomplices. Aged 22, we were excited, by life itself and by our friendship. We talked endlessly, while selling in the streets, cooking, taking care of the children, and at night while Ramón watched TV. We talked about men and about sex, about our pasts and futures, about being Gitana and Paya, and about anthropology. We argued about whether, as a Paya, I really had more freedom than her, and of what kinds. I read to Liria from San Román’s classic Gitano ethnography, and we discussed together the rights and wrongs of the anthropologist’s account of Gitano patrilineages. I also read to her from my fieldnotes, and we laughed about things we had said only days or weeks before. Liria’s friendship was a wonderful gift.

Looking back, I see that we were not preoccupied by the material inequalities between us, which now seem so blatantly important and which worry me so much. I was very aware of the large-scale hierarchies and inequalities that framed Gitano marginality, and of our relative positions within these, but in our everyday life in the ghetto I was out, wanting in. Yes, my parents were better off and I had reaped the benefits, having a comfortable life and going to study abroad. But Liria came from a Gitano family which was highly respected in Villaverde and she was secure in her role within the Gitano community, where the hierarchies and inequalities that mattered were among Gitanos, and where Payos were despised outsiders. In Villaverde Liria belonged and had status where I had none. Similarly, it did not occur to me that opening my life to Liria might be unethical. Later on, talking about our friendship to anthropological audiences in the UK, I have been criticised for not considering the impact that allowing Liria to meet my family might have on her, for not envisaging that it might make her dissatisfied with her lot as a poor Gitano woman. Back then, both of us knew that that I could not ask to be let into Liria’s life whilst keeping mine out of her reach.

Friends

Paloma and I, after spending so many moments together from when she came to my house to do fieldwork until now, we have lived so many experiences together that I would not have notebooks enough to tell all the good things and the bad ones. Today I can say with all my heart that between myself and Paloma there is a relationship as if we were sisters, because friends are not just for when things go well, but for when things go badly. And throughout many years I think that both of us have realised that our relationship as friends has been very firm and sincere. Even when we were separated by a large distance because she had to work in England, nothing prevented us from staying in contact, by letters or by phone, and whenever she came to see her mother in the holidays she kept some days exclusively to share with me. Nothing has stopped our union as great friends. Even though one was Gitana and the other Paya, and even though we had such different customs, we knew very well how to share our ideas and our tastes. My whole world revolved around the Gitano environment (entorno), and when Paloma was living with me just seeing her was an eye-opener. I saw that a woman is not just good for marrying and having children and cleaning, even though within the Gitano world I used to go out with my sisters, to the beach in the summer, and in winter to the malls and shopping. But with Paloma I did other things, like visiting museums, or going to the university, and many more things that I loved. And above all she made me see my qualities as a woman. She always used to tell me that I was intelligent and a very good person, but in my family I was always treated as a something of a moron, and I used to be taken for a ride. One of the people who helped me see my good qualities and my worth was Paloma. In particular with Ramón, he knew how to have me all mixed up, psychologically, with the idea that I wasn’t sufficiently clever, or pretty, and he told me so often that I came to believe it. Until one day a great friend turned up to tell me that this was not true, and through the years I have had other Paya friends, I had the pleasure of working with them when I was president of the parents’ association in my daughter’s school and they also encouraged me.

From the first time I met Paloma I opened my heart to her, as sincerely as possible, because as time went by I realised that I could tell her any secret since I knew she would keep it, and she knew she could also tell me anything, because with me it would be safe. The truth is that in this life you never know when you are going to need your friends. I think that in life, if you do good, the future can return it to you, although I never helped Paloma out of any kind of interest, and she knew it. Because when I helped Paloma I never thought that later on she would return the help to me with increase. When I decided to leave my Gitano environment (entorno) to find my happiness in a completely different world with a Moroccan partner (he was prepared to fight for our love against the Gitano people, Younes Bziz is his name), that is when I received all the support and the unconditional love, something never seen before, from my great friend Paloma. This is why we decided to write together. We both know we have many experiences to tell, together and apart, but our lives are always intertwined, the lives of two people, a Paya anthropologist with a great heart, and a sincere Gitana.

The middle years

Between 1993 and 2008 we wrote to each other, back and forth. We also talked on the telephone often and met whenever Paloma was in Madrid, at least once a year. As time went by, we continued to share our preoccupations — with pregnancies, children, schools, husbands, work, and our families. Liria and Ramón continued to earn their living by selling textiles at open air markets. They were resettled by the local government to a different flat, even closer to the ghetto where Paloma had carried out her fieldwork. Earning a livelihood became increasingly difficult as they became indebted and lost first one and then another permit to sell at weekly markets. Villaverde changed around them as immigration into Spain grew and more and more North Africans and Latin Americans came to the southern periphery of the city. Meanwhile, Paloma and her husband obtained tenured academic positions, moved to Scotland and bought a house. They settled into a typically British middle-class life.

All along Paloma wrote about Liria and her relatives and neighbours, a book and articles: we were friends, but we were also anthropologist and informant. Liria helped Paloma with her anthropology because she was a friend. She had a sense of what Paloma’s anthropological interests were but did not fully know what Paloma did with what she learnt, how she communicated her knowledge and to whom, and who benefitted or how. Paloma felt that she could only explain to Liria in very basic terms what her work was about, or how academic anthropology is produced. The jargon and theories through which Liria’s life could be made anthropologically meaningful seemed to Paloma almost impossible to convey to her. The fact that Paloma wrote in English meant that Liria could not even read what Paloma produced.

Throughout these years our friendship continued whilst our personal lives changed. Liria’s marriage deteriorated and she left Ramón several times. She took her children to her father’s house, but was always persuaded by her family to return. But as her difficulties inside the home increased, Liria found satisfying rewards outside it. In 2008 she became president of the parents’ association at her daughter’s school. She found herself at the helm at a time of serious crisis, when the local government decided to transfer the children (mostly Gitano) to a smaller building of poorer quality, to make way for the children of a neighbouring school (mostly Payo). Liria became a key player in the campaign against the plans, making several appearances on national radio and television. Although the fight was lost, Liria discovered in herself new capacities and needs, the desire to become something else than a Gitana wife and mother. In the meantime Paloma too found herself moving in new directions. She become a mother by birth and adoption in her thirties, engaged in political activism, and let her career take second or even third place in her life. For both of us our horizons opened up throughout the 2000s: for Paloma to the world beyond anthropology and academia, for Liria beyond her family and the Gitano Evangelical Church. And then Liria met Younes, by chance, and our lives were brought closer than ever before.

Lives transformed

One morning like so many the unexpected happened. There was a young man working with some friends of mine at a stall nearby, we were separated only by some fruit sellers. I don’t know how one morning I came to the stall of my friends to say hello, and to see the clothes they were selling, because often they had very pretty things and I liked to buy from them. The truth is that I had already seen that boy before, but shame and fear to fall in love, especially because he was younger than me, those things did not allow me to pay attention to him or to anybody else. But I don’t know how something made me look at him that morning, and his eyes were fixed deep into mine. I felt that he talked with me through his eyes. I had never felt like that before.

One morning like so many the unexpected happened. Liria’s sisters phoned me from Madrid. She had disappeared the day before, and they were desperate. They had found a small piece of paper with a man’s name and a telephone number in one of Liria’s handbags, and they suspected that she had eloped with him. I was to ring them immediately if she got in touch. I tried and tried Liria’s phone, and texted her, ‘Where are you? Everybody is worried. Is everything ok? Please get in touch, I’m dying of anguish here.’ That evening she rang. She had left with Younes, her sisters had realised she was having an affair and she felt she had no option but to elope, straight away. She had tried living with Ramón for twenty years, and Younes loved her. She hadn’t been able to take her young daughter along: according to Gitano customary law, which is often violently enforced, in cases of adultery children must remain with the blameless spouse. And so her family were looking for her, to bring her back and perhaps punish Liria, and Younes too. She was terrified. I was to pretend she had not been in touch, keep her secret, help her be safe.

I had no alternative but to return, because my sisters and their husbands found me, and my family threatened to kill Younes, and so I had no other option. Today I realise I allowed myself to be intimidated, and that my fear did not let me think straight. Now I see they could easily have harmed him before coming up to fetch me from the flat where I was hiding, because they were with him downstairs quite a while, but they did not. The thing is they convinced me, with threats and with kindness, they did all they could because they were desperate at that time. For me it was very painful, in two ways. First there was Younes, and being forced to leave him. I didn’t know how to explain to him that my family feared that he had tricked me, or pressured me somehow to be with him, because I had never done anything like this before. And then there were my children, and when I returned my heart broke to see how much they had missed me. ‘How am I going to recover my family, and my children?’, that is what I was thinking back then. But it was too late, nobody trusted me, they kept me under watch all the time. They tried to make me see I was deluded, that it was all an illusion because I had never had happiness with Ramón. And so they thought I was very confused, and a little bit mad.

She had no alternative but to return and, when three weeks later I went to Madrid, all her family wanted to make sure I understood why she had done wrong. ‘This is how we Gitanos do things, you know us, you understand us, you know how terrible this is for us, we are not like you Payos, this is beyond the pale, there is nothing worse than this.’ I had to talk to her, they said, convince her not to elope again, help to keep her in the house, under their control. Ramón, Carmen and Liria’s other sisters, her children, her daughter-in-law… they were the voice of Gitano reason. They knew how close Liria and I were, and were desperate for me to take sides. These were ‘the Gitanos’ of whom I had written for so many years, and what they said fitted all I had learnt about them: women’s virtue and subservience to men were central to how they saw their place in the world. And yet she asked for my help, and she was Liria, my friend, a woman whose fears and desires I knew, who had shared with me her wishes and disappointments, who loved me and whom I loved. So I did not say ‘leave’ or ‘stay’, but I helped her meet Younes clandestinely, taking our young children along as cover, knowing that the family would never think we would try something like that. When she decided she would leave for good, I helped again, sorting out plans, listening to Liria’s fears, anxieties, and hopes, and gving some of the money they needed to try to start again. After she and Younes went into hiding, I became the point of contact between Liria and her family, relaying her children’s heart-wrenching pleas, receiving and forwarding Ramón’s desperate letters.

My heart is broken in two.
Every day that passes I feel worse, for my daughter. Whenever I see girls of her age in the street I die inside, it is true.
Something is killing me inside.
I try not to tell Younes and I go into the bathroom to cry.
I tell myself, ‘Be happy’. How can I be happy knowing that my daughter needs me?
Then I say, ‘What if I return, and I die of longing for Younes?’
I can’t think of anything else, I only think about her.

Her heart is broken in two. Liria spent six months of living with Younes, in flats shared with African and Latin American immigrants, working as a domestic, hiding her Gitano identity from her middle-class employers, people very similar to my own family. We talked almost every day, and I visited her in Madrid every few weeks. I could see how much she and Younes loved each other, how much fun and freedom she had in her new life, but also how deeply cutting her pain was. I saw her cry with my daughter in her arms. I raged at Ramón and her sisters, who were unwavering: so long as she stayed away, she would not see her child. And if she took the child, they told me, they would kill both her and Younes. I understood well the cultural logic that underlay their actions, and knew I could not expect them to behave in a different way, yet I did. I began to ask myself about the force of compassion and of hatred too: could Ramón and Liria’s sisters not take pity on her, just because they were Gitanos? Were they so firm because they were Gitanos, or because they hurt? Liria asked for my help and from Scotland I rang women’s NGOs in Madrid, government agencies, social workers, solicitors, but nobody seemed to be able or willing to give any help. They were all puzzled by the complexities of the Gitano world, unable to understand why Liria would not simply apply for a divorce, request access to her child through the usual legal routes, why she was frightened, why there were threats. We could not see a way forward and so she went back once again.

When for the second time I had to return it was much worse. I thought that after so many conversations with my sisters and my children’s father, the situation was going to be better. But it was much worse. I could feel a tremendous hatred from Ramón. Earlier on, even when I was an honest and stupid woman our marriage did not go well, so imagine the situation after living six months away from home, with another man, and Ramón swallowing his pride of Gitano man, fooled by a woman who was inferior to him. So the last night I spent with my daughter I made her a promise, and I told her, ‘Darling, whatever happens I want you to know I love you very much’, and told her that if one day we had to be apart from each other for whatever reason, I would fight for her, until we could be together again. She looked into my eyes and said, ‘Mama, you are going to leave again’. And with pain in my soul, and so as not to worry her, I said no, but that if that happened I would go back to get her. And I looked at her straight and said, ‘You believe me, don’t you?’ So the first thing I did when I returned with Younes was find a solicitor to get custody of my child, and my divorce from Ramón. I got on with it, ready to face the world for the sake of my daughter.

When for the second time she had to return it was much worse. Ramón knew I had helped Liria with money and emotional support during her time away: although he allowed us to talk on his mobile phone, he was always nearby, listening closely to our conversations. Younes was heartbroken, thinking that she had left him for good, and would not sleep or eat. We talked often, but there was little I could do for him. Liria had managed to hide a mobile phone, and she would go into the bathroom at three of four in the morning, to ring Younes and me. In whispers, she told me about her life: she had no freedom, Ramón was in touch with a solicitor to get sole custody of her child, he wanted to have sex in spite of her reluctance, and she missed Younes desperately. When her sisters brought a Gitano Pentecostal priest to exorcise her, she thought it was the last straw, and decided to leave knowing that this time there would be no turning back.

Sharing our lives

When Liria left her home for the very first time, but also later, she and Younes were in dire need of money. Since they had to hide from Liria’s family, they also lost their livelihoods. Liria could no longer sell with Ramón and Younes could no longer work for Gitano street-market sellers loading and unloading stock. As the economic crisis deepened and Spain’s unemployment reached 20%, finding work became almost impossible. Without papers the only jobs Younes could find were sporadic and very badly paid. They could not afford to lose Liria’s small disability pension, so she worked without contracts for two or three euros per hour, cooking in bars, as an office cleaner or as a domestic servant.

Knowing it would be difficult to provide substantial economic help on a long-term basis, Paloma applied first to her Department and then for a small grant to pay Liria for writing down her life. What began as a way to find money became a project that came to fascinate us both. We started to tape long conversations, about Liria’s elopement, our earlier lives, and our families and friendship. Liria wrote, and Paloma wrote too. Liria went to
Scotland, visiting Paloma abroad for the first time ever. She talked to Paloma’s colleagues and students, and we gave a talk about our relationship. As Liria’s and Younes’ life unfolded, and as Paloma shared in it, we thought together about what it meant. Since Paloma was not just an observer, but a player in the story, it became clear that what we wrote had to include her too.

In March 2011, two years after she first eloped, Liria went to court to claim visiting rights to her child. She was the first Gitano woman to turn to the Payo courts to challenge Gitano traditional law and custom. Paloma went with her, and we came face to face with Liria’s sisters, their husbands, and Ramón. In spite of repeated requests, we had not managed to be allocated police protection, and we were frightened that Ramón or Liria’s brothers-in-law would manage to hurt one or both of us. All in Liria’s family thought Paloma had betrayed them and had shown her true nature as a Paya, helping Liria in her transgression. They were wrong in thinking that Paloma had encouraged Liria to leave, but right in identifying the strength of our bond.

Paloma’s Spanish family too have seen our friendship, and are disturbed by it. One of Paloma’s sisters suggested a solicitor and a social worker who might help. Another opened her home to Liria and Younes when they needed a place to stay for a couple of nights. But their middle class, comfortable lives have very little in common with Liria’s and Younes’s, and they are keen to keep their distance. They have a highly developed sense of class and ethnic distinctiveness, like many other well-off, culturally conservative Madrileños. They believe firmly in their economic and moral superiority. Paloma’s family see Gitanos like Liria and immigrants like Younes as unfortunate parts of Spanish society, to be blamed for their ‘situation’, victims of their inability to join in or ‘integrate’. They perceive Younes, like other Moroccan immigrants, as one of the lowest of the low, a member of an abject tide that threatens to engulf Spain. They call him, pejoratively, ‘el moro’ (‘the Moor’), and have been adamant that he must under no circumstance visit their homes, where Paloma stays during her visitsto Madrid. The majority of Paloma’s Spanish relatives are not unlike Liria’s Gitano family in the effort they make to keep themselves distinct, and in their conviction that they, and only they, live righteous and beautiful lives. But while Liria’s family were the amongst the first Gitanos to open their lives and their homes to Paloma, most of Paloma’s family want to have as little as possible to do with Liria or Younes. For them, Paloma’s friendship with Liria is a sign of her unfortunate eccentricity. The fact that Paloma spends more time with Liria than with her own sisters or her mother, demonstrates that Paloma has failed in her responsibilities to her family.

Writing together

I learnt what anthropology was when Paloma came to live in my house. I had a vague idea of what anthropology was, but it was living together day by day, seeing Paloma’s fieldwork, that I learnt its meaning. I think it is a very beautiful work that opens frontiers onto new worlds. Because it is not just writing about other people, but getting to know their lives, their customs, religions, and their ways of being. I find it fascinating, writing not only about my life, but about Paloma’s life. Because I have always been the informant, but now we are breaking the mould. We know that telling our lives, together and united, is going to be something never done before. Two women, a Paya and a Gitana, but very close from youth, breaking the barriers between two different levels and ways of life, although that distance never pulled us apart. Since I started writing about anthropology I have found it wonderful to have the opportunity to express my feelings towards other people, and to understand them. As I write about Paloma, I also learn to see things in a different way, especially because we two have been brought up so differently, in our customs. I know for sure that what I am doing right now is that I would like to do for the rest of my life, because getting to know people, their customs, their experiences,
their sadness and their joys, and especially having another person opening their heart to you, is wonderful.

I want people to know what the world of a Gitana is like, told by herself, and also how my life has changed so that through circumstances I find myself in the Payo world. I want to tell how I see everything, and also how my life changed, and also how things changed for Paloma and those who surround us, like Younes, and Paloma’s husband and her children… All of us have come much closer together. Being able to become united while you work, that is the beauty of anthropology. For me anthropology is about complicity and union, so that we all of us can build a better world, a world with more love.

I have learnt what anthropology is alongside Liria, and my understanding has changed as we have become older and our lives have been transformed. For many years after I first did fieldwork among the Gitanos I thought that my task was to extract information, make knowledge, weave patterns with words. I wrote and I looked away from those parts of experience I could not make sense of easily, from what did not fit into the moulds I had built. And so much of Liria’s life, and of the lives of her relatives and neighbours, was invisible to me. Over the last few years I have been drawn into Liria’s life much deeper than ever before, and she into mine. Sharing our happiness and our difficulties, I have had to confront the nitty-gritty of experience, as a person and as an anthropologist.

The bedrock of anthropology is fieldwork, because fieldwork is what brings us into deep contact with people, with their daily miseries and joys, their fears and their hopes. And it is during fieldwork that we anthropologists open ourselves up to others. But then those others, our informants, are left behind, they do not continue the journey with us. Imagine the possibilities if the deep mutual commitment that is so often seeded in fieldwork were allowed to grow, to spread into other areas of life. I do not know how successful our experiment has been. But I know that, if I want to learn and write about Liria, I have to let her learn and write about me. We share our lives, this is why we write together.

We meet in the spaces between worlds: between Gitanos and Payos, between immigrants and middle-class Spaniards, between informants and anthropologists. These worlds touch and interpenetrate, but they are also sealed away from each other, in many senses far apart. Anthropology is what has enabled us to come together, yet anthropology also erects barriers between us: until now Paloma has watched, investigated, looked for, written; Liria has been in a way in the dark. Our relation has been unequal, not because of Paloma’s greater wealth, but because Liria was a friend above all while Paloma was always a friend and an anthropologist. For anthropology to reach its potential to change the world, barriers like these need to be not just acknowledged, but undermined. By writing together, about our lives, our friendship, and our worlds, we hope to have contributed, in a small way, towards this project.

Landscapes of Wealth & Desire:
Histories of Value in Baja California Sur, Mexico

Ryan Anderson ¹
University of Kentucky

© 2011 Ryan Anderson

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
www.openanthcoop.net/press

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Summary

This paper explores the historical background to a proposed study of political disputes over the value of large-scale tourism development in Baja California Sur. The paper starts with a review of anthropological discussions of value — focusing on the work of Kluckhohn, Graeber, Elyachar and Appadurai. The aim is to use an anthropological approach to value to place current conflicts over land and resources arising from recent developments within a historical perspective.  The paper then investigates how actors in different time periods have contributed to collective and often contradictory constructions of the area as a place of subsistence, adventure, possibilities, salvation, investment, leisure and conflict.  It is not a report on the contemporary situation, but rather it examines some of the key moments and events that have in the past created, reshaped, and defined Baja California Sur as a place of value, meaning, and importance. These episodes start with the Spanish contact period and focus primarily on the southern portion of the peninsula. [Value, tourism, development, Baja California Sur, Mexico]

INTRODUCTION: A BACKWATER NO LONGER

On May 3, 1535, famed explorer Hernán Cortés landed on the shores of present-day La Paz in Baja California Sur (see Figure 1) with high hopes that he had finally found a legendary island full of gold (Leonard 1992; Alvarez, jr 1987; Crosby 1994). The following year, after spending vast amounts of capital and resources on the venture, the last remnants of Cortés’ expedition set sail for Acapulco on mainland Mexico, abandoning the settlement as a complete failure. While Cortés had hoped to find an island full of wealth, he only found a few pearls and a hot, dry, desolate landscape with few native inhabitants (Crosby 1994: 4). It was, by many accounts, a place of little worth, especially for a conquistador who had sacked the capital city of the Aztecs fifteen years prior.

Cortés was, of course, several centuries too early to cash in on the popularity of international tourism and development that turned the desert landscape of Baja California Sur into a high-end tourism destination that includes everything from ATV tours and Costco to exclusive hotels, expansive golf courses, and even a Hard Rock Café. For more than four centuries after 1536, the landscapes of Baja California Sur remained difficult, perplexing, and challenging places for explorers and entrepreneurs who hoped to extract some measure of value from its territories (whether gold or souls). From pearl diving and missionary work to silver mining, relatively few were able to achieve long-term economic or political success. Baja California Sur remained economically marginal—at least from the perspective of outsiders—until the late 20^th century. And then something changed.

So what happened? How did this supposed “backwater” of Mexico suddenly rise to such prominence and economic importance? As urban sociologists John Logan and Harvey Molotch argue in their landmark text Urban Fortunes, “A place is defined as much by its position in a particular organizational web—political, economic, and cultural—as by its physical makeup and topographical configuration” (43-44). The landscapes and territories of Baja California Sur, especially those located near the coast, clearly underwent a radical repositioning within a particular political and economic network. With the onset of mass travel in the 1960s, improvements in transportation technology, and specifically the rising popularity of international coastal tourism, the same arid, seemingly worthless environment of Baja California Sur became the locus for the creation of Mexico’s most prized tourism destination: Los Cabos² (Berger and Wood 2010).

The contemporary socio-economic importance of the coastal territories of Baja California Sur was only made possible by a shift in how various actors—from global tourists to Mexican State officials—re-imagined and re-shaped the formerly “desolate” environment into a desirable destination for travel, leisure, investment, and even permanent residence. From particular perspectives (e.g. the Mexican State, investors, and developers), increased tourism development, along with sharply rising land values, are clear indicators of considerable success and economic “progress”. Los Cabos is, in many ways, a powerful symbol of prosperity in Mexico. But this is only part of the story. To quote the late Vine Deloria, “Into each life, it is said, a little rain must fall” (1985: 78).

Figure 1. Location of Baja California Sur.

In this case, the “rain” is the social and economic inequality that has been generated by Los Cabos. The urban colonias that ring the high-end tourism zone present a radically different picture of the “success” of tourism development in Los Cabos. Poverty, uneven development, unemployment, socio-economic segregation, and lack of access to critical resources such as water and land plague these settlements (Lopez et al 2006; Torres and Momsen 2005; Wilson 2008). This pattern of economic growth and consequent social inequality is a common theme for many tourism developments throughout Mexico, most notably Cancún (Hiernaux 1999, Castellanos 2010). The economic benefits of tourism development “successes” in Mexico are unevenly distributed, both spatially and socially. But this aspect of international and domestic tourism does not get that much attention.

The social, economic, and political restructuring of place in Los Cabos, and throughout the peninsula, is anything but uncontested, however. Sometimes it seems that powerful, larger discourses—such as those that originate with state systems or international media—define these places, spaces, and territories. The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO 2010), for example, claims that international tourism development is a “key driver” of socio-economic “progress” around the world. But what gets lost in such grand statements? According to this view, the Los Cabos tourism corridor, which has witnessed considerable tourism development, would stand as a major success and site of progress—and for some that is the case. But for others, this re-valuation, development, and transformation of place hasn’t resulted in prosperity. Despite the existence of prominent narratives and discourses that construct Baja California Sur as a place of successful, even “sustainable” development, there are other voices, other experiences, and other values that people attach to places, and they speak to some very different social and political realities.

These contested values and competing interpretations of place in Baja California Sur are by no means recent. By taking a historic look at how different people have engaged with Baja California Sur over time, this paper explores present conflicts over resources and ideas of place in light of the past. The current conflicts over the definition and control of the region are not new—they are just the latest acts of a long-running play. Here I investigate the various ways in which a multiplicity of actors—at various scales—have contributed to the collective and often contradictory construction of Baja California Sur as a place of subsistence, adventure, possibilities, salvation, investment, leisure, conflict—and ultimately value. These investigations are preliminary and suggestive, rather than definitive. Starting with the Spanish contact period, and focusing primarily on the southern tip of the peninsula (known as the cape region), the argument covers some of the key moments and events that have created, reshaped, and defined Baja California Sur over time as a place of value, meaning, and importance.

SOME NOTES ON VALUE

Before going any further, it makes sense to establish a few foundations. My analysis focuses on the concept of value as it relates to the construction of meaning and place in Baja California Sur. I draw from the work of anthropologists, urban sociologists, and geographers in exploring what is admittedly an unwieldy concept. Theoretical discussions about value—the attribution of import or meaning to ideas, ways of life, goods, and/or actions—have a deep history in the humanities and social sciences, including anthropology (see Kluckhohn 1958; Appadurai 1986; Eiss and Pedersen 2002; Graeber 2001, 2011; West 2005; Hart 2011; Elyachar 2005). The term “value” is tremendously loaded and complex. It sounds fairly simple to talk about the value of a place or an idea…but the more you dig into the concept the more difficult things become. That is because, as Graeber argues, while there are plenty of discussions about value, there is no clear theory of value per se. Part of the reason for this is that the term itself refers to a wide array of different—yet interrelated—understandings of what “value” is all about.

As Graeber (2001:1-2) explains, theories of value tend to fall into three overlapping categories: 1) values in the sociological sense (i.e. what is good or desirable for society); 2) the economic sense (how objects/goods are desired and measured according to a particular system of accounting, such as money); and 3) the linguistic sense (which Graeber glosses as “meaningful difference” within a larger structured system). Value in these various, interrelated senses is ultimately about how and why people rank, order, and organize their social worlds according to particular ideals, whether moral, cultural, or political. A truly exhaustive account of value should, as some argue, probably extend at least as far back as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and especially Karl Marx (Hart 2011), whose theories of value focused heavily on the critical importance of labor. Such a project, however, is beyond the scope of this paper. For the sake of conceptual clarity, I am going to limit my use of value to a few lines of thought derived mostly from relatively recent anthropological theories of value (although Marx does play a key role for many of these theorists). I draw primarily on Kluckhohn (1958), Graeber (2001), Elyachar (2005), and Appadurai (1986). Kluckhohn’s comparative project on value is a good place to start.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Clyde Kluckhohn launched an ambitious initiative aiming to make the scientific study of values the key concern of anthropology (Graeber 2001:2). Kluckhohn’s work focused mostly on a sociological sense of value, and attempted to analyze how and why different societies came to develop particular value orientations (Kluckhohn 1958). As Graeber explains, this early effort to analyze and cogently theorize value “ran most definitely aground” (2001:5). But it was not without merit. Foremost was Kluckhohn’s drive to find a way to push anthropology toward a study of social life that paid close attention to moral desires—or what individuals “ought to want” out of their lives (Kluckhohn 1958: 469; Graeber 2001:3). Kluckhohn advocated a study of values that sought to move beyond mechanistic assumptions about human choices and behavior:

We want to live in particular ways and toward selected ends. When the gap between actuality and aspiration is too great, individuals and indeed whole groups choose death rather than survival. For we human beings are not just pushed by our biological needs and psychological drives; we are also pulled by conceptions of the right, the good, the desirable (1958:469).

He argued that since there are patterned “habits of thinking which individuals consciously learn and unconsciously absorb in their daily social experience” (1958:469), an empirically grounded and systematic study of values was possible. He was in search of the “codes which unite individuals in adherence to shared goals that transcend immediate and egocentric interest” (1958:470). Values for Kluckhohn “are cultural and psychological facts of a certain type which can be described as objectively as other types of cultural and psychological facts” (1958: 472). The only problem was that Kluckhohn’s value project was never able to actually achieve these ambitious goals, despite much effort from Kluckhohn and his research team. The key issue, as Graeber (2001:4) points out, was the difficulty of finding a way to relate this comparative project to specific choices, behaviors, and actions within a coherent framework. What was ultimately missing was “an adequate theory of structure” (Graeber 2001:5).

Although Kluckhohn’s project hit a dead end, and has had no intellectual legacy, maybe something worthwhile may be salvaged from his efforts. As Graeber explains, Kluckhohn’s key idea was that cultures differ not simply in what they believe about the world, but also in “what they feel one can justifiably demand from it” (2001:5). This is at heart a moral project. Kluckhohn tried to move beyond studies of belief and perception toward a comparative analysis of morally-based ideals and desires. While most anthropologists may consider Kluckhohn’s project passé or irrelevant today, maybe he was onto something after all. In Graeber’s words: “However primitive the models Kluckhohn actually produced, he did at least open up the possibility of looking at cultures as not just different ways of perceiving the world, but as different ways of imagining what life ought to be like—as moral projects, one might say” (2001:22). This takes us further than many of the approaches to value that followed his.

Kluckhohn provides the first key component, then, of how I want to approach value. Value is not just about market forces, and it is not intrinsically embedded in commodities, places, or other material things. Kluckhohn’s value project went beyond questions of supply, demand, and taste to embrace what people feel is socially and morally just. As one foundation for thinking about value, this requires us to think about how such conceptions are linked to actions and to larger cultural contexts.

David Graeber’s book, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, offers perhaps the most thorough anthropological investigation of value to date. I want to highlight two key components from Graeber’s discussions of value here. The first is a focus on action. The second is an emphasis on how these actions translate into wider systems of meaning. Graeber seeks to construct a theory of value that moves away from Saussurean structuralism on the one hand and from what he calls “economism” on the other. The problem with the former is that value is reduced to little more than “meaningful difference” (2001:46). With the latter, value is framed as a factor of individual choice and little more. Both frameworks are also hopelessly static; Graeber, following the lead of Nancy Munn, moves toward an understanding of value that is dramatically more dynamic (2001:46).

Munn argues that value emerges in action or through the process of creation itself. Value is not just an intrinsic property of objects, goods, services, or places. It has to be produced—within the context of surrounding cultural systems. This argument, which emphasizes both process and action, comes full circle back to Marx’s theoretical discussions of value (which were, after all, very much about measuring value based upon human action—labor). Money, Graeber explains, is key to Marx’s theory of value: “What money measures and mediates…is ultimately the importance of certain forms of human action (Graeber 2001:66-67). Money, which is an abstract yet ubiquitous representation of value, comes to signify the meaning and importance of human labor or what Graeber sometimes calls “creative energies” (ibid). While Marxists tend to focus on a fairly restricted understanding of human labor, Graeber argues that it might be fruitful to broaden our thinking and consider some other possibilities when it comes to labor and human action.

He writes, “One invests one’s energies in those things one considers most important or most meaningful” (2001:45). Value, he argues, “is the way people represent the importance of their own actions to themselves” (2001:45). This takes certain socially recognizable forms, whether kula valuables, currency, or credit cards. The important point is that these forms are not the actual source of value—they are just the medium through which value is created and passed around. Human actions produce value….and these actions take on meaning when they are understood within larger social and cultural systems. This brings us to the second point: these human actions and creative energies attain meaning when they are placed within expanded symbolic and social systems.

Graeber argues that value may be understood as how “actions become meaningful” within a larger social system, “real or imagined” (2001:254; see also Elyachar 2006:8)³. In order to understand the importance or meaning of a particular action, there has to be some reference to a surrounding totality. There must be some sort of comparison going on: “Parts take on meaning in relation to each other, and that process always involved references to some sort of whole: whether it be a matter of words in a language, episodes in a story, or ‘goods and services’ on the market” (Graeber 2001:86-87). The “real or imagined” aspect of all this is also important here. Graeber says that the process of creating value requires comparison, which necessitates some kind of audience. This audience may be real (e.g. direct social relationships) or imagined. “Society” is basically an imagined, totalized audience that people use to assess tastes, choices, desires, and values. This is akin to the “imagined communities” that Benedict Anderson (2006) wrote about, which are connected through shared ideals, ideologies, and meanings.

So we have to take account of action in value creation, and we need to pay attention to how those actions are linked to surrounding social, cultural, and political systems of meaning. This is where politics and power come into the equation. Graeber writes, “In any real social situation, there are likely to be any number of such imaginary totalities at play, organized around different conceptions of value” (2001:88). There is not just one system of meaning that people engage with or contest—there are multiple interwoven, contested, overlapping systems. The confluence of these systems leads to what might be called a “politics of value” (Graeber 2001:88; Appadurai 1986). For Graeber, competing or conflicting claims about value are always inherently political in nature (2001:115). Terry Turner, according to him, claims that the struggle to define value is “the ultimate stakes of politics” (2001:88). It would be ideal if value (i.e. what matters, or what is important and how that importance is represented) were determined through democratic, fair, and just decision-making processes. But Graeber and others argue that this is not the case (see also Elyachar 2005). The playing field is not level. This leads to the question of power.

Julia Elyachar writes, “The anthropology of value, which has a strong focus on symbolic meaning, can have politics at its center as well” (2005:7). Elyachar’s monograph, Markets of Dispossession, is a deeply ethnographic work exploring the politics of value through an extended, detailed investigation of workshops in Cairo. She draws from both Munn and Graeber to analyze how workshop masters create what she calls “relational value,” which “expresses the positive value attached to the creation, production, and extension of relationships in communities of Cairo” (2005:7). The power struggles in this case consist of conflicts between these workshop masters, the Egyptian state, international organizations, and NGOs, among others.

Her ethnography outlines a conflict between the intrusion of neoliberal market reforms and ideologies, on the one hand, and the morally-grounded economies of the workshop masters in Cairo on the other. What is being “dispossessed,” she argues, is “the power to decide what matters or, in other words, what is value” (2005:8). Through a focus on neoliberal market reforms, Elyachar shows that “Markets are social and political worlds with their own cosmologies. Each is a cosmos of its own, an intricately functioning field of power” (2005:214). She challenges the utopian notion of neo-classical economists that markets are benign instruments which, if properly unleashed, will serve the interests of “society” at large⁴ (Elyachar 2005:214). Instead, Elyachar argues forcefully that markets are highly political projects that have real—and often dramatically disparate—material effects. What all of this means is that economic expansion and development is anything but a value-neutral or objective process…no matter what many economists and development experts assert. Elyachar makes a solid case for the need to pay close attention to power relations, and more specifically to how different forms of power work, interact, and clash, in the ongoing politics of value.

Arjun Appadurai has explored the politics of value as well, but in a very different way. His approach, which draws a lot on the work of Georg Simmel, is far more economic in its focus. While Graeber seeks to shift the emphasis from a focus on things to an emphasis on actions, Appadurai explores the question of value by paying close attention to the “lives” of commodities. This is because he sees exchange as they key issue in value creation. What matters, ultimately, is how much someone is willing to give up in order to obtain certain goods and services. For Appadurai, value is ultimately based on individual desire (this is a different conception of desire than Kluckhohn sought to address). His analysis of the politics of value focuses on the struggles to control “flows of commodities” themselves, which is a decidedly market-based approach. Appadurai seeks to trace these commodity flows as they pass through different “regimes of value in space and time” (1986:4). He writes, “We have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, and their trajectories” (1986:5). Although some aspects of Appadurai’s approach are problematic, I find the idea of “regimes of value in space and time” to be particularly intriguing and useful.

This framework, with commodities passing through different systems of meaning and their value related to this overall process, is yet another foundation for my current work on value creation in Baja California Sur. But it needs reworking a bit, mostly because the commodity in question is not a linen coat or a can of Coke—it’s a place. Land, as Polanyi once argued, is a commodity of a special kind. Logan and Molotch, following him, insist that land is 1) immobile, and 2) not originally produced for sale in a market (1987:23). This means that an analysis of how value is created in particular landscapes or places requires different considerations. Yes, there is an argument to be made that places such as Cabo San Lucas or La Paz are most definitely “produced,” but this is not the same as the production of traditional commodities like coats—or iPods for that matter. The “regimes of value” in this case are the ideas, beliefs, and predilections of people, past and present—and these work to shape and define the meaning and value of particular geographic places. These systems of meaning overlap, clash, coalesce, and break apart. In what follows, I seek to trace the historical trajectories of value embedded in specific places.

AMAZONS & PEARLS: 1533-1697

Before a single European even set foot on the territories of present day Baja California Sur, the imagined possibilities of the place had already been influenced by a powerful source: literature. In 1510, Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo first published Sergas de Esplandian (the exploits of Esplandian), a sequel to his previous successful series called Amadis de Gaula. All of these books were written in a genre that was widely popular in 16^th century Spain: the “romances of chivalry,” which were

usually long accounts of the impossible exploits of knightly heroes in strange and enchanted lands inhabited by monsters and extraordinary creatures, and they presented a highly imaginative, idealized concept of life in which strength, virtue, and passion were all of a transcendent and unnatural character (Leonard 1992: 13).

Throughout the century, upwards of ten editions of the Sergas were published (Leonard 1992: 17; Martinez 1960: 90). The main story of Sergas recounts the adventures of Esplandian, the son of Amadis, who eventually falls in love with Calafia, the formidable Queen of Amazon women who inhabit a rocky, gold-laden island named “California” (Leonard 1992: 38; Martinez 1960: 90; Alvarez jr. 1987: 12-13). One of the crucial aspects of this literature is that it often incorporated narrative components of contemporary historical accounts, leaving audiences convinced that such tales were literally true. Leonard argues that there was widespread belief in tales such as Sergas de Esplandian and that they influenced the ideas and actions of Spanish conquistadors, from Columbus to Cortés (Leonard 1992: 13-14). In fact, belief in the actual existence of Amazons was so pervasive that the “contractual agreements between conquistadors and their financial backers…frequently included clauses requiring a search for these mythical women” (Leonard 1992: 36).

The legend of an island full of warrior women dates to ancient Greece, and similar stories were passed around throughout the Middle Ages by famous travelers such as Marco Polo, Sir John Mandeville, and Pedro Tarfur (Leonard 1992: 37). These Amazon women have been reported everywhere from Asia Minor to West Africa, but the exact location of their island home always remained (conveniently) vague (ibid). While several explorers repeated similar narratives about these famed female warriors in their letters and publications, Leonard (1992: 38) argues that the popular myths of Sergas de Esplandian may have been the main source for the dramatic prevalence of these themes in the minds of 16^th century conquistadors. Leonard even suggests that the author, Montalvo, may have in heard of Columbus’ reports of seeing Amazon-like women in the Caribbean and added those details to his story about Espandian to capitalize on the popularity of the legend (Leonard 1992: 39). One passage of the Sergas about women who “dwelled in well-formed caves” echoes Columbus’s earlier report (ibid).

One key passage from Montalvo’s romantic novel may have played a critical role in the motivation to explore the lands that were later called California. In Chapter 157 we read:

Now I wish you to learn of one of the strangest matters that has ever been found in writing or in the memory of mankind…Know ye that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California, very close to the Earthly Paradise, and inhabited by black women without a single man among them, for they live almost in the manner of Amazons. They are robust in body with stout, passionate hearts and great strength. The island itself is the most rugged with craggy rocks in the world. Their weapons are all of gold as well as the trappings of wild beasts which they ride after taming, for there is no other metal on the whole island [in Leonard 1992: 39-40].

Editions of these books were widespread in key Spanish cities, including Toledo, Salamanca, Burgos, and Seville—the last being a primary place from which conquistadors embarked for the New World (Leonard 1992: 41). Editions of the Sergas were published in 1521, 1525, and 1526—all around the time that Cortés and his legions were conquering New Spain (ibid). In 1524, Cortés repeated rumors about this mystical island and its inhabitants in his reports to the Spanish emperor, Charles V (Miller 1974: 6; Leonard 1992: 41). He explicitly expressed his intent to “discover the truth” about the famed island (Miller 1974: 6).

By 1530, Cortés received authorization to explore the western ports of New Spain. This authorization also granted him the power to govern any new territories he discovered. In 1533 he sent two ships into the gulf, but they were separated, and one quickly returned to port in Acapulco. The other, the Concepción, headed west and anchored in the bay of what the crew thought was an island (Miller 1974: 7). This was, in fact, the bay of La Paz (see Figure 2). Its captain “received no welcome and from the outset the peninsula became known as inhospitable country” (ibid). The captain and most of his crew were killed by the inhabitants of the new land (most likely the Guaycara), but one survivor managed to get back to the mainland and informed Cortés about the discovery, which was supposedly an island laden with gold and pearls (ibid).

Figure 2. Map of key cities mentioned in the text. Note: Los Cabos includes the cities of San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas.

Cortés set sail late in the year of 1534 for what became “California,” in the hope of exploiting its resources (Crosby 1994: 4) and finding the legendary island of the Amazons. Ultimately, he found neither. The La Paz colony struggled from the start, and by 1536, Cortés returned to New Spain to “defend his rights of conquest and acquisition” (Alvarez Jr., 1987: 14). He never went back to the peninsula, which remained “unsettled” or, perhaps more accurately, unconquered, for the next century. Still, it held strategic importance for Spain, as one of the resting stops for Spanish ships traveling the Manila Galleon route (Ibid: 15). Cabo San Lucas, at the very tip of the peninsula, was a convenient waypoint for ships traveling in and out of New Spain.

For the remainder of the 16th century, the Spanish had little success with their attempts to establish settlements and harbors in Baja California. In the context of Spain’s overall colonial project on the mainland of New Spain, the peninsula held a marginal position (Alvarez, Jr., 1987: 16). The presence of English and Dutch pirates made the region even more inhospitable (ibid). Between 1533 and 1680, each attempt at settlement ended in failure. According to Alvarez, Jr., “Baja California provided no riches, no great cities, and no great populations to evangelize. Furthermore, colonists saw Baja as a barren wasteland in which the European could not live” (1987: 16). Some, however, did manage to find value on the peninsula.

Upon landing in La Paz in 1535, Cortés wrote to Cristobal de Oñate saying that he had discovered a land rich in pearls (Gerhard 1956: 239). While this news was certain to arouse interest, there are no records to indicate that any substantial attempts at pearl exploitation took place for the next fifty years. This may have been due in part to the perceived difficulty of such a venture after Cortés’ failure (Gerhard 1956: 240). The viceroy of New Spain granted three men the exclusive right to the pearl fisheries from the present-day state of Jalisco to the coasts of California. This virtual monopoly was broken in 1593 when Sebastian Vizcaino filed a legal suit and gained his own license to exploit the region’s pearls. From around 1600 onward, various licensed and unlicensed individuals took part in this resource extraction. According to Gerhard, “There is reason to believe that pearl hunting in Lower California became a well-established industry after about 1625, with frequent expeditions setting out from Chacala, Matanchel, Chametla, and other ports on the west coast of New Spain” (1956: 242). By 1685 profits from pearling were already dropping and, upon the arrival of missionaries in 1697, life became even more difficult for the pearlers. The coming of the missionaries meant the loss of a primary labor pool (the California Indians) and also increased government oversight (Gerhard 1956: 244-245). The pearling industry continued well into the missionary period, but “serious depletion” of the resources was already apparent by the early part of the 18^th century.

It is not difficult to accept that the discursive literary tales of writers such as Montalvo had significant effects on the imaginations of Spanish captains, generals, soldiers, sailors, investors, and others who engaged in the conquest and exploitation of the Americas. “There can be little doubt,” writes Leonard, “that a factor in creating the fantastic illusion of the Conquest in the minds of so many participants was the multitude of fables, myths, and legends that so completely possessed their imaginations” (Leonard 1992: 314). Much like TV and internet media of today, these popular discourses had their own material effects, even if they are, ultimately, difficult to measure directly.

Clearly, however, these legends and narratives helped to fill this western edge of the Spanish empire with intrigue—and ultimately high social and political value, at least for a while. The myths of Amazons and islands full of gold and pearls swept across the New World, always located just out of reach, on the horizon, were also undoubtedly spurred by inaccuracies and blunders born out of poor language translation and fevered expectations of wealth and success (Leonard 1992: 45). These discourses, mixed with political, economic, and strategic motivations from the sovereign down, encouraged people to traverse incredible distances and explore unknown places—all without any realistic idea of what to expect at the end of the journey. The search for value, then, is also about what Graeber calls “creative action”; the potential value of those territories depended on marshalling political and financial support from key individuals, as much as it was about literally sailing to the peninsula and attempting to extract resources or secure a territory. Baja California Sur was shaped, from the start, by a constellation of ideas and desires, which led to the interlinked fates of native populations and these Spanish argonauts. The actualities, once the boots hit the sand, were another matter. Regardless, the process continued, as previous discourses, ideas, stories, and narratives led to even more interest in the peninsula. One map always seems to lead to another. It is just a matter of time. For the early conquistadors, the Baja peninsula was desirable and valuable because of its potential material wealth. For a wave of new explorers who came more than a century later, value was measured in terms of human souls.

JESUITS: 1678-1767

In 1678 the Spanish made a second serious attempt at colonizing the peninsula of California. The Jesuit priest, Eusebio Francisco Kino, who became one of the driving forces behind the settlement of Baja, arrived in 1683 as part of a “government-backed effort to colonize the California peninsula” (Crosby 1994: 8). Kino was enlisted in the expedition as a geographer, mapmaker, and missionary (Crosby 1994: 8). They established a settlement at San Bruno, located about 20 km north of present day Loreto. The endeavor was a financial disaster, and Admiral Isidro de Atondo y Antillón, leader of the expedition, blamed the failure on the “sterility” of the new land. This “helped to create a perception of California that dealt a severe blow not only to the continuation of his own venture, but also to the prospects of anyone who might later try to raise money for an occupation of the peninsula” (Crosby 1994: 10). The project was abandoned, as was the colonization of the peninsula of California. Father Kino, however, was determined to establish a mission in California, and spent years working toward his goal. Contrary to conquistadors, pirates, pearlers, colonists, and common soldiers, Kino envisioned the wealth of California not in terms of economic resources, but souls. He remained steadfast in his desire to Christianize the native people of the distant peninsula that had repelled his earlier efforts (Martinez 1960: 118).

Kino, with fellow Jesuit Juan Maria Salvatierra, began working toward finding a way to implement his missionary plans. Both Kino and Salvatierra agreed that the primary reason for the failure of the first attempt at colonization was conflicting agendas between the parties involved. The missionaries, soldiers, and colonists all had different motives, expectations, and desires—and this was exactly what Kino and Salvatierra needed to control (Crosby 1994: 12-13). By 1696, Salvatierra and Kino were able to convince Spanish religious and political authorities to develop missions in California (Alvarez, Jr. 1987: 19). Due to an insurrection in Sonora, however, Kino was unable join the 1697 expedition to California. His religious superiors ordered him to remain in the tempestuous region where he held considerable influence; they felt he was far too valuable to be sent to some distant frontier (Crosby 1994: 23). Salvatierra continued on, with the help of the newly enlisted father Francisco Maria Piccolo. Along with Captain Luis de Torres y Tortolero, three mainland Indians, and five soldiers, Salvatierra set sail for the peninsula. They landed at the site of the present day city of Loreto, which is located on the lower third of the peninsula. Eventually, “This small group formed the basis for a successful settlement and for the establishment of a permanent mestizo/criollo populace in the Californias” (Alvarez Jr., 1987: 19). Within two years of landing, Salvatierra and his compatriots forged a settlement that included about seventy colonists.

Over the next three decades, four missions were built on the cape in the pueblos of La Paz (1720), Santiago (1724), Todos Santos (1733), and San Jose del Cabo (1730). Disease and social conflict, however, threatened these sites almost immediately. “Pestilences,” writes Crosby, “had ravaged every band of the cape’s people” (1994: 111). In addition, the missionaries zealously undermined the cultural and social ways of life of the native populations. One particular campaign against polygamy took place in 1733; this effort generated heavy resistance and enmity from the local Pericú people, and fueled aversion to life in the mission system (Crosby 1994: 111). The missionaries argued that the Pericú were the unwitting victims of devious leaders who immorally took multiple wives (ibid). Syphilis swept across the population, killing females disproportionately, and sending shockwaves through the Pericú social order. Polygamy was a common practice among Pericú leaders, and the missionaries struck at the heart of this custom by actively trying to recruit young women into the mission order (Crosby 1994: 111).

Political leaders and shamans fought back with a vengeance and resentment between the Spanish and native populations grew. At this point, half of the cape region’s population was already dead from epidemics. Rumors of insurrection spread throughout the three southern missions. By October of 1734, two Jesuit padres, two servants, and one guard were killed in the missions at San Jose del Cabo, La Paz, and Santiago (Crosby 1994: 115). All four of the missions were destroyed in the uprising, leaving the Jesuits in a precarious position on the cape. The Jesuits appealed to help from the rest of New Spain, and this brought about a radical shift in the power dynamic of the population. Kino and Salvatierra’s original plan for a mission system controlled by a predominantly theocratic agenda fell apart (Crosby 1994: 129). Ultimately, while the rebellion temporarily freed the native populations in the cape region from missionary control, their situation dramatically degraded shortly thereafter. Plagues continued to decimate the population. More importantly, the power of the Jesuits slowly began to crumble, opening up the region to external populations—many from the northern part of the peninsula—who sought new economic opportunities in the south.

Despite numerous conflicts, the decimation of native populations, and decades of adversity, by 1767 the Jesuits still managed to establish fourteen mission sites throughout Lower California. That was also the same year they were expelled from the New World, in part due to competition from other religious orders and the widespread perception that the Jesuits possessed too much political power. In 1772 the two Californias (which included the present day state of California in the U.S. and the two states of Mexico now known as Baja California and Baja California Sur) were divided into different administrative units due to conflicts between the Dominican and Franciscan orders, who took over control of the missions throughout the Californias. The Franciscans took control of the upper territory of California, leaving the lower part of California under Dominican jurisdiction. This division was formalized in 1804, when the territories were officially split into Alta and Baja California (Alvarez, Jr. 1987: 25). Spain concentrated its efforts on the exploitation of Alta California, while Baja served as a launching point for those efforts. Baja California was not, by any means, a focal point of colonial interest or exploitation for the Spanish (and this continued under the new Mexican state in the 19^th century). This relative lack of attention paved the way for the incursion of foreign interests in the 19th century.

Before moving on, however, we should take note of how the Jesuits inscribed value on the Baja peninsula. The place was clearly located outside the primary interests of the Spanish Empire, yet a few key individuals were driven by their desire to spread their ideologies to new lands, to save new people. In this way, these territories became valuable in a very different way: primarily because they were terra incognita, located outside the civilized, Christianized world. Kino and Salvatierra sought a kind of value that was bound within deep ideological and cultural systems of meaning…but the realization of those values also depended on the actions (as Graeber argues) and work (as Marx tells us) that were required to build the missionary structures and networks. Unlike the earlier Spanish colonists, the Jesuits were not interested primarily in economic or political gain—at least not explicitly. The value of Baja California, for them, rested on a worldview framed in terms of faith, fate, and a zealous sense of duty. It was yet another form of value that arose, coalesced for a short time, and then slowly crumbled—like Cortés’s dreams before—and gave way, eventually, to new values, desires, and hopes in the centuries to come.

THE OTHER CALIFORNIA

In the early 1800s, American, English, and Russian hunters and traders, attracted by the rich sea otter colonies in Baja California, began to establish trade networks along the peninsula. American traders made a base in the San Quintin area (in the northern part of the peninsula), and commerce increased in spite of Spanish efforts to quell the operations (Alvarez, Jr. 1987: 25). After the Mexican Revolution, the newly formed nation of Mexico revived interest in mining as one means of developing its economy and of creating much needed post-war capital. This included willingness to allow foreign investment in mining industries within Mexico (Alvarez, Jr. 1987: 25). Interest and investment in mining on the mainland—primarily by the British—waned by the 1840s. At the same time, however, the otter trade and whaling in Baja California was on the rise, drawing in both American and British whaling fleets. The Mexican-American War, which took place between 1846 and 1848, interrupted this period of increased foreign exploitation of Mexico’s—and Baja California’s—resources.

US President James Polk was intent on expanding the nation’s territorial bounds, and the western territories of California and New Mexico were among his prime targets (McPherson 1988: 49). Polk originally attempted to buy the territories from Mexico, but when the latter refused, he opted to use military force. What Polk and his compatriots really wanted was Upper California, which would not only expand the geographic territory of the US, but also assure control of critical coastal ports, such as San Diego, San Francisco, and Monterey. Lower California was a secondary interest. With the aid of internal insurrection and naval occupation of key ports, the conquest of Upper California was relatively swift. By the end of July 1845, in fact, Polk believed that he had undisputed control of the entirety of the Californias, despite the US military not having stepped foot on the lower peninsula (Chamberlain 1963: 50). The war did finally arrive in Baja California in 1846, when Commander S.F. Dupont sailed into the harbor at La Paz in order to blockade the west coast of Mexico (Chamberlain 1963: 50). There was no resistance from the population at La Paz, which was declared “neutral” by the territorial governor, Colonel Francisco Palacios de Miranda. Undoubtedly, the governor gambled on having picked the winning side (he was later reviled in the histories of Baja California as a cowardly traitor; see Martinez 1960). Dupont then continued on to Loreto, Mulege, and then San Jose del Cabo before heading back to the port of Monterey in Upper California. In 1846, Polk announced to the US congress that the conquest of the Californias was complete (Chamberlain 1963: 51).

The only problem was that US control of certain parts of California—especially Lower California—was tenuous at best. The US secretaries of War and the Navy, along with Commodore Robert F. Stockton, acknowledged this situation (Chamberlain 1963: 51). In February of 1846, Stockton ordered Commander John B. Montgomery to establish a more forceful US presence at the coastal towns of San Jose del Cabo, La Paz, and Cabo San Lucas (ibid). By April 14, all of these ports were “pacified,” along with the pueblo of Loreto. In each of these pueblos, there was little resistance to the US forces. The US flag replaced the Mexican flag in both Loreto and La Paz, and Montgomery granted “all peaceably inclined persons” the rights of US citizens (ibid). Having underestimated resistance, the US left many of these towns with little military protection. This incited repeated complaints from the citizens of San Jose del Cabo, for instance, who appealed for a garrison to protect them from “the rancheros and Mexican troops inland”⁵ (Chamberlain 1963: 51). Open fighting between the US and Mexico erupted with the Battle of Mulege in 1847. By the time of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February of 1848, the territorial conflict over Baja California between the US and Mexico was a draw, at best (Chamberlain 1963: 57). While the US repelled Mexican troops from La Paz, Mulege, and San Jose del Cabo, they held only superficial control of the peninsula, whose inhabitants put up fierce resistance (especially when compared to Upper California).

Baja California remained a part of Mexico, ultimately, because Polk never actually demanded the territory during the formal treaty process. He sent Nicholas Trist to Mexico City to negotiate with General Santa Anna’s government, with the explicit command to secure Upper California and New Mexico, but not Lower California (Chamberlain 1963). If Polk had made Baja California a part of the treaty, is it very likely that it would have become a part of US territory, despite the disputes on the ground. While Trist was in Mexico working on the final treaty terms, the Polk administration actually changed its demands and decided that they did in fact want the peninsula. After realizing the high costs of the war, Polk felt that the US deserved more territory than the original treaty demanded. By the time this change of heart reached Trist in Mexico, however, the original terms had already been agreed upon. While the Mexican government initially put off negotiations with Trist, once they received news of a possible change of terms, they probably did all they could to agree to the original terms (Chamberlain 1963). Thus, a measure of diplomatic blundering and carefully timed obfuscation on the part of the Mexican government probably saved the peninsula for Mexico.

With the onset of the California Gold Rush in 1849, Baja California received considerable domestic and international attention, as many new prospectors, migrants, and travelers arrived in the hope of cashing in on the mineral wealth of the Californias (Alvarez, Jr. 1987: 28). In 1857 president Benito Juarez enacted measures that once again loosened restrictions on foreign investment and development in an effort to stabilize the nation’s shaky economy (Meyer el al 2003: 385). The Porfiriato, which lasted from 1877 to 1911, resulted in an even stronger push toward development through foreign capital investment. The trend extended to Baja California as well, and foreign investment was dominated by businesses from the United States. Mining once again gained prominence throughout Mexico, spurred by technological advances (Alvarez, Jr. 1987:31). While mining operations in Baja California increased in number, the peninsula remained in a relatively marginalized position in the larger Mexican economy (Taylor 2001: 464). According to Alvarez, Jr., “As in the colonial and missionary periods, Baja’s main barrier to settlement and development continued to be physical geography” (1987: 32). This daunting geography continued to play a key role in shaping discourses and attitudes about the peninsula for decades to come. However, there were some early hints of a perceptual shift, foreshadowing a dramatic change in how people imagined and valued the landscapes of Baja California Sur. The very same rugged landscape that forestalled “development” and conquest for generations became the attraction for outsiders in search of new experiences in exotic, “natural” places.

UN PAISAJE DEL TURSIMO (A TOURISM LANDSCAPE)

In 1897, Swedish-born Gustav Eisen published a short paper about his explorations of the cape region of Baja California Sur. According to Jane Radcliffe, “Eisen’s interests were numerous and he has been described as a horticulturalist, a biologist, a zoologist, an artist and illustrator, an archaeologist, a viticulturalist, anologist, arborist, microbiologist, cartographer, explorer, and would be considered today to be a pioneer conservationist” (Radcliffe nd). His paper reads, in some senses, as a scientific account, since he describes the temperature, climate, rainfall patterns, watersheds, mountains, geology, and “botanical and zoological features” (Eisen 1897: 278) of the region. It also reads, however, as a tourist travelogue:

No one seemed to know that the southern part of the peninsula of Baja California, the country from La Paz southwards, possessed entirely different features from those of the country northward. And, indeed, when I first arrived there it was a surprise to see that, instead of landing on a barren waste, I had before me a tropical country, with luxuriant vegetation, and with many other attractions, at variance with what I had surmised from the few and scanty descriptions that had been published [Eisen 1897:271].

Eisen traveled to the cape region four times in all; three of those were “under the auspices of the California Academy of Sciences” to explore the landscape and collect faunal specimens (Eisen 1897: 272). He recounts tales of scaling unnamed peaks⁶, notes how suited the clear skies are for astronomical observation, and points out “the finest spring” he has ever seen in San Bartolo.

Eisen laments the lack of “taste for athletic exercise” in Mexico, noting that there is no sierra club, no mountaineering club, and “no desire to enjoy the sublime scenery of the high mountains” (Eisen 1897: 277). He goes on to explain that there was a dismal lack of record of ascents for the highest peaks in the region, and writes this off due to the fact that “the natives are satisfied to look at the mountains from below or to engage in deer-hunts in the more accessible places” (ibid). By the end of his article, the once foreboding natural environment of the southernmost part of Baja California Sur sounds like a paradisiacal natural wonderland. This seems to be an early salvo in a complete revaluation of these once feared and spurned landscapes. About a century later, the Mexican government, along with a cadre of hoteliers and developers, caught onto the economic potential of turning the landscape itself into a lucrative commodity.

In the late 1960s, inspired by the success of coastal tourism destinations such as Acapulco, a team of Mexican bankers, planners, economists, and developers crafted a plan to create five regional coastal tourism destinations. The chosen sites were Cancún, Loreto, Huatulco, Ixtapa, and San Jose del Cabo in the cape region of Baja California Sur (Clancy 2001: 50). These marginal places were suddenly seen as potential sources of tremendous value, precisely because of the shifts in the global economy that were taking place. Middle-class American tourists were the prime target market for this development plan; Mexico sought to create destinations that could compete with the popularity of Caribbean tourist sites (Clancy 2001: 53). San Jose del Cabo was likely chosen, in part, because it was already a favored destination for US expatriate sport fishermen, surfers, and other adventurous travelers who were willing to brave the long, dusty drive down the peninsula in Steinbeck-esque campers, trucks, and Jeeps. These populations, like Eisen before them, contributed to a reconstruction of the cape region as a desirable, valuable destination and romantic frontier for travel and leisure. By literally paving the way for future travelers, tourists, pleasure seekers, investors, and developers, these early migrants mapped new economic social values onto the cape region. This re-mapping or re-imagination of place had powerful economic and material consequences.

These histories lead back to my earlier discussion of the shifting nature of value. If value is, as Graeber argues, the way that society measures the importance of its actions, what do the histories of Baja California Sur tell us? The historical examples I have presented clearly illustrate how the same place may embody very different political, economic, and cultural values and meanings, depending on how it is situated within wider social networks. As the interlinked histories of the humans and landscapes of Baja California Sur show, there is no single way of a place to embody value, meaning, and importance. The social, political, economic, and even metaphysical meanings and values of the cape have all shifted dramatically over time—depending on the perceptions, desires, and expectations that various actors brought with them and the material effects of their actions once they arrived. Value, then, is not just the product of ideology or actions. It is instead a complex, dynamic combination of the two. As Marx suggests, value is the result of dialectical, not dichotomous processes that are ongoing. The importance or value of Baja California Sur has risen—and imploded—because of an ever-changing, unpredictable amalgamation of subjective understandings and very concrete actions.

Today, tourism and development media promote the landscapes and marine environments of Baja California Sur’s cape region as luxurious, high-end destinations for adventure, travel, romance, relaxation, and exploration. These discourses emphasize the natural environment, focusing on everything from the azure waters to isolated beaches and the austere beauty of the desert environment. But the value of these places for mass tourism was only made possible by a change in global travel from the 1960s, along with the rise of middle classes (many of them from the US) who had the time and resources to travel for pleasure (Gmelch 2004: 7). Combined with the earlier actions and experiences of expatriates who literally laid the groundwork for future development in places like Los Cabos, these re-imaginations and reconstructions of place coalesced with concrete actions to turn a once barren, isolated, seemingly treacherous territory into an appealing product, ready for consumption.

Yet, like the historical discourses and ever-shifting imaginaries of the cape region, these conceptualizations of place are not without conflict and contestation. The “progress” of tourism development is not shared by everyone, as the urban colonias just outside of the international airport in San Jose del Cabo so forcefully attest (Lopez et al 2006; Wilson 2008). While many international organizations, individuals, investors, and other stakeholders—including the Mexican government—continue to hedge their bets on this newest imaginary of the peninsula, it remains to be seen whether the benefits are truly “sustainable,” or if this is yet another elusive, romantic vision laden with false dreams and Quixotic values.

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Logan, John R. and Harvey L. Molotch. 1987. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Radcliffe, Jane. 2010. Biographic Sketch of Gustav Eisen (1847-1947). California Academy of Sciences,  researcharchive.calacademy.org/research/library/special/bios/Eisen.pdf, accessed December 6, 2010.

United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). 2010. Annual Report for the United Nations World Tourism Organization.

West, Paige. 2005. Translation, Value, and Space: Theorizing an Ethnographic and Engaged Environmental Anthropology. American Anthropologist 107(4): 632-642.

Wilson, Tamar Diana. 2008. “Economic and Social Impacts of Tourism in Mexico.” Latin American Perspectives. Issue 160, Vol. 35(3): 37-52.

NOTES

1 Ryan Anderson is a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Kentucky.  His research focuses on the politics of development and tourism in Baja California Sur, Mexico. He is the editor of a collaborative online project anthropologies and blogs at ethnografix, as well as being a contributor to the collective anthropology blog, Savage Minds (For examples related to this paper, see this link, and this one). Ryan first encountered Baja California Sur in 2005 and is currently seeking funds to carry out his doctoral research there.

2 This includes the present day cities and surrounding tourism zones of Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo.

3 Compare this with Logan and Molotch’s discussion about the definition of a place within particular political, economic, and cultural systems (1987:43-44).

4 Notice how the abstract notion of “society” plays a key role in the value system of neo-classical economic thought. It is, as Graeber argues, an imagined totality that serves a comparative purpose within a particular system of meaning and politics.

5 Considering the fact that the present day population of Los Cabos has many expatriate migrants from the United States, the allegiance of the town of San Jose del Cabo during the Mexican-American War is of particular interest.

6 These peaks, of course, had to be named: “With the right of every explorer, we have named some of the mountain peaks ascended by us, and which previously had no name. Thus in the El Taste region we named Mt. Troyer and Mt. Molera after members of the California Academy of Sciences” (Eisen 1897: 277).

APPENDIX: A Few Photographs & Notes from Baja California Sur, 2005-2010

Broken metate eroding out of the sand in the very southern portion of the peninsula. There are many archaeological sites throughout the region, which speak to the deep histories of these landscapes. 2009.

Landscape scene taken while driving down Highway One in Baja California Sur. This is the same landscape that repelled conquistadors, missionaries, and many others for centuries. This paved highway, which now runs the length of the peninsula, makes the journey quite a bit easier. 2006.

Guard tower and no trespassing sign, located in the far southern portion of the peninsula. With rising land values and ensuing conflicts over title and tenure, scenes like this have become more and more common. Property owners often hire private security guards to protect their lands against squatters and other possible intruders. 2009.

This is a coastal development site in the southern portion of the peninsula. The sign on the right provides some information about the development. Developers buy lots, and then seek investors by advertising the plans for the project. The most expensive properties on this site were listed at around 600,000 USD, just for the land. Similar properties sold for around 10,000 USD in the 1980s. 2009.

This is one of the main beaches in the Los Cabos tourism zone. Tourists, umbrellas, and hotels fill the landscape. Notice the ropes in front of the umbrellas, which are meant to help separate the tourists from local vendors who seek to sell their wares (hats, watches, jewelry, etc). The spatial segregation like this is very common in the tourism zone. 2009.

A long stretch of beach in a part of the peninsula that is relatively undeveloped at present. This is a perfect example of the type of desert landscape that was considered desolate and of little value by many outsiders for centuries. Today, such austere places attract the imaginations (and money) of a multitude of travelers. A few decades ago, the beaches of Los Cabos looked a little more like this. 2009.

This is a small coastal community at the tip of the peninsula. It is composed of citiziens from both the US and Mexico. Communities like this are increasingly common throughout the peninsula. This portion of the peninsula, which remains relatively undeveloped at present, has some of the most high demand real estate in the region.

This image shows some of the remnants of Baja California Sur’s mining past. This was taken in the inland pueblo of El Triunfo, where mining operations peaked in the late 19th century. 2009.

Fishing has a long history on the peninsula. Archaeological sites clearly illustrate the fac that early inhabitants depended heavily on marine resources. This continues up to the present day, but in some very different ways. Baja California Sur’s oceans host everything from large-scale commercial fishermen and international sport fishermen all the way to small fishing camps like this one, located on the Pacific coast. 2006.

As the traffic up and down the peninsular highway has increased over the years, so have the accidents—many of them fatal. The highway has many roadside shrines and grave markers. This particular shrine is located a short way south of the city of La Paz. 2009.

I mentioned in the main text that many travelers make their way down the peninsula in “Steinbeck-esque” vehicles (many of them from the US). There is a long history of tourists and other travelers making their way down the coast in campers, vans, and off-road trucks in search of everything from waves to marlin. There is, in fact, an interesting sub-culture that has developed around these trips to “Baja.” The above image is one recent example of a long-running phenomenon. 2010.

Malinowski had his tent, and I have mine. The bad part about working in a region that has an increasing amount of high-end tourism is that it is can be pretty expensive to find a place to stay. The good thing, however, is that it’s usually warm enough to set up a tent and camp. 2010.

Viktoryia Kalesnikava
University of Virginia

© 2011 Viktoryia Kalesnikava

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YBEMA, S., YANOW, D., WELS, H., & F. KAMSTEEG (Eds.). 2009. Organizational Ethnography: Studying the Complexities of Everyday Life. Sage Publications Ltd. vii + 287 pages.

Organizations appear bounded in so far as they are considered in terms of rigid structures, fixed hierarchies, and specifically designated spaces. Should they, however, be thought of anthropologically, the substance of everyday life—the contingency of human relations, creativity and failure, humor and irony, fear and desire, etc.—begin to manifest themselves inside organizations, forcing rigid divisions and bounded structures beyond convention, and away from such simple dichotomies as inside/outside, high/low, manager/worker, etc.

A venture by a group of scholars from Vrije University, Amsterdam, this edited volume on “organizational ethnography” lives up to what it says it is: an introduction to an alternative method of conducting organizational studies through the anthropological methodology, ethnography. The volume brings together a wide-ranging combination of contributors: hands-on professionals and managers, consultants, and academic scholars of anthropology, sociology, public policy, and business. Despite the differences in the authors’ backgrounds and styles of presentation, each of the twelve essays here appear to echo and resonate with one another in their central quest as to what an ethnography of organizations look like. Grouped into three thematic parts, the essays also touch upon adjacent issues relating to the writing and doing of ethnography. These thematic areas are the challenges and limitations of ethnographic method, power and representation, and ethics and responsibility.

In their introduction to the book, the editors give a brief overview of the field of organizational studies, and explain the role this volume might play as a “method text” that sets apart ethnography as “constructivist-interpretative perspective” (9) from other positivist approaches common to the organizational studies field. The introductory character of the book suggests a widely targeted audience and interdisciplinary scope. Indeed, the editors promise the book to those both new and experienced in the field, “ranging from advanced undergraduate and graduate students to organizational scholars, researchers, consultants, and analysts”(15). Whether due to its mostly dry prose, numerous typologies, or its “how to” style of representation, this volume, with the exception of a few of the essays, resembles a neatly assembled textbook where all divisions are settled and all gaps reconciled. With that in mind, for what textbooks are worth as introductory tools, I would definitely recommend it as a good classroom guide to ethnographic method. You will find a few challenging intellectual discussions, but you will come upon a variety of interesting ethnographic experiences from the field. And the latter is one of the worthwhile features of the volume. In addition, the volume might serve as an invaluable source of literature in the sphere of organizational ethnography, as it provides extensive references throughout, and concludes with a detailed annotated bibliography.

Whatever innovation this volume might offer to the field of organizational studies, this review specifically focuses on how the authors have adopted ethnography as a research method; what intellectual issues, gaps and anxieties they raise in its regard, including those around trust, truth, authenticity, representation, norms and standards, etc; and finally, how they attempt to reconcile them.

In what follows, I will briefly comment on each of the contributions (not in strict order of appearance in the volume).

Anthropologist Kees van der Waal starts off the first part of the book by depicting ethnography as but a “generic research approach” (24). The story of his own professional conversion from an ‘innocent’ South African ethnologist to a critical organizational ethnographer serves to situate his writing, which defends the importance of theory for the ethnographic method. In doing so, he proceeds to lay out a foundational scheme of steps and list of tentative questions – including issues of access and ethics – to arm oneself upon embarking on the ethnographic project. It is true that if one has never done or read ethnography of any kind (which is arguably difficult to avoid for an anthropologist), this inventory should prove to be useful.

Along the way, my experience of this text was that of reading a practical manual about how to write a grant, or better yet an IRB proposal, or do research: “make realistic goals,” “think of a back-up plan,” “what is your methodology?” “how are you going to store data?” and “how to attend to asymmetrical relations of power in the field?” Separate advice given, which might serve some well, include caution against tying oneself to “obligations to obtain approval of one’s work in order to publish it,” while still offering the “draft publication for comment” (28). One the whole, the ‘manual’ attempted to explain how to ward oneself off a strong feeling of anxiety, when in the field and prior. But in doing so, it failed to point out that however uncomfortable, this anxiety is not a curse against which one needs spells and safety cushions; anxiety is what constitutes the ethnographic moment (See Devereux 1967).

The essay jointly authored by Michael Humphreys, a Professor of Organizational Studies, and Tony Watson, Professor of Organizational Behavior, both from Nottingham University Business School, targets mostly issues related to post-field research, and focuses on the writing-up stage of the ethnographic enterprise. They make, what I find to be, a curious distinction between “writing-up ethnographic research” and “writing ethnography.” This seemed rather limiting and exclusive, but simultaneously a useful heuristic tool on ethnographic styles and various audiences. Unfortunately, rigid exclusions follow throughout, and the authors, among others in the volume, argue for a narrow definition of ethnography that includes “a huge range from doctoral theses converted into extended monographs to short stories, plays and poems” (41).

Putting these differentiations aside, Humphreys and Watson further focus on the topic of ethnographic genres, and create a four-fold typology of ethnographic writing distributed across a “spectrum of truth” (53). Here, truth or validity becomes the measuring rod for the division, which is staged in correlative terms to “what really happened.” As such, they start with what they assume to be straightforward, “plain ethnography,” proceeding to a “semi-fictionalized” description, and conclude with a “fully fictionalized account” (43). The article is more than worthwhile, due to the extensive ethnographic examples given to illustrate the “truth spectrum.” At the same time, fixation on truth as a measure of validity and success, painfully reflects utopian dimensions of holism, and complements Euro-American academic standards of a ‘good’ scientific research and expectations thereof.

The following article by two Political Science scholars, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow, resonates with Humphrey and Watson’s piece in its search for what it calls “trustworthy texts.” But if the latter concerns itself with the divisions between the writing and experience, the former focuses on the gap between writing a text and reader/reviewer expectations. In doing so, it sets up a six-tier evaluative criteria of trustworthiness comprised of “specific textual elements” based on the “standards and expectations” of the interpretative “Chicago School-style field research” (57). These, argue Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, aid ethnographers in their attempt to stage readers’ perception of the “overall trustworthiness of the research narrative” (58). As such, the authors claim that trustworthiness suggests a more “appropriate criterion than ‘validity’ […] and the like, as these are rooted firmly in a positivist scientific methodology that rests on the presumption of a real social work[...]” (62). Notably, the focus on trustworthiness in devising methodologies of research can be rendered as an indirect critique of Humphrey and Watson’s essay. This attempt to escape a correlation between the “truth” and representation is laudatory, but it too assumes the singularity of human experience and perception, and hence proceeds to devise strategies and create typologies for “proper” research design. The authors, however, do warn against taking their suggestions in a “checklist fashion,” but rather as a “starting point” of reflection about the “quality of a particular study” (63).

Likewise, Simon Down and Michael Hughes echo the concerns of the previous authors in relation to the authenticity of an account, and focus on the strategies of doing and writing organizational ethnography. Simon Down, a lecturer/researcher, and Michael Hughes, a worker/manager at a coke-making steel plant, jointly co-author an ethnographic account of an “experience of going through a corporate cultural change programme” (84). They do so by positing a concern about representation within the framework of power and ethics of speaking and writing, and attend to the issues of positionality, power, identity and reflexivity inherent to the question of representation á la Foucault and Spivak (1988). In doing so, they largely avoid the question of whether ethnographic subjects can speak for themselves. Accordingly, they frame ethnography in terms of autobiography, where both the researcher and the researched become the objects of study and reflection. In this piece, complexity of emotional engagement with human subjects – whether in the organizational, or research settings, or both – surfaces in the narrative. The authors contend that their co-produced story portrays “organizational life as it is lived.” As such, it does not make claims regarding authenticity of representation, but allows to “avoid the moral and emotional neutrality that social science so confidently claims, so often” (96).

The second and third sections of the book interrogate the classic schizophrenic division in anthropology between self and other, inside and outside, and familiarity and strangeness. They also gear towards questions that relate to ethics and perceived limitations, pertinent to doing ethnography at home.

In their essay, Sierk Ybema and Frans Kamsteeg make a case for a “disengaged engaged” approach to organizational ethnography. They argue that ‘going native’ is counterbalanced by the theoretical or intersubjective “distancing,” where the latter is seen as a necessary prerequisite for doing ethnography. If a researcher is already “native” and “at home,” they ask (103), “How do we step back?” Here, the authors argue for cultivating ethnomethodological strategies of surprise and play, and holding onto the mystery and irrationality – such as “breaching intimate relations” with the researched, or movement between scales of focus and research sites – all in order to break with “taken-for-granted understandings” (110). Or perhaps, suggest the authors, ethnographers should stop trying to take themselves so seriously and speak like experts (113). Instead, they argue they should adopt the role of an idiot, or “organizational fool” (Kets de Vries 1990).

Similarly, Davide Nicolini suggests that it is the strategy of improvisation and taking chances that allows for an ethnographic “processual ontology” approach. This type of ethnographic research stands out in the edited volume, as it focuses not on individuals, but rather takes as its main object of study their mundane practice and activity. Such a strategy of following social practice also “partially coincides with multi-sited ethnography,” as it implies shifts in time and space (120). Nicolini illustrates this research method with a four year-long ethnographic research project that he conducted on telemonitoring serious chronic heart failure patients at home. In the process, he studies things and people indirectly, from the side – focusing not on the objects and subjects as such, but rather on the “interactional order” between humans and non-humans (125), on bodies and artifacts and their trajectories, on learning curves of novices and accomplishments of apprentices, “texture of dependencies and references” (128), “following the intermediaries” resources and conditions necessary for practice (130), and “comparing sites of the same practice” (131). As such, the author claims to proceed “rhizomatically,” following connections between things extending in time and space. Notably, such a rhizomatic shifting argues ethnographically against an idea that there is some deeper knowledge underneath, and deep immersion into the field will eventually lead to it. In fact, “zooming in” does not warrant either a deeper understanding or better grasp of organizational practices. Instead, concludes Nicolini, it is attention to the “fragmented, distributed, and fast moving reality” of virtual and multi-layered organizations that yields increased understanding thereof (136).

Contrary to Nicolini, Brian Moeran, an anthropologist with a focus on Business Studies, argues for a complete immersion in the field. Furthermore, he advocates for the “observant participation” where the ethnographer puts participation ahead of observation. Drawing on his own experience in a Japanese advertising agency, he suggests a business model of ethnography that insists on taking advantage of strategic connections to gain access into an organization (141). In doing so, he advises how to properly “make a pitch,” and cautions against taking all what people say as truths. In his account, Moeran also distinguishes observant participation from “traditional” participant observation, critiquing the latter for its limiting focus on holism, inactive approach, and restrictions that it imposes on a researcher in terms of their ability to be fully “incorporated” as a community member (139). This, I argue, results from an overly narrow definition of participant observation and understanding of what it has to offer to the ethnography of organizations.

Chris Sykes and Lesley Treleaven largely echo already raised concerns in relation to organizational ethnography as a method. They suggest a hybrid method theoretically akin to Brian Moeran’s “participant observer” in focusing on “useful” action, also paralleling the co-authored account by Simon Down and Michael Hughes in co-construction of knowledge.

Likewise, Mats Alvesson in his own piece takes issue with both interview-based qualitative research and ethnography, arguing that both are “time consuming,” politically-sensitive, “uneconomical,” and focus too much attention on the “empirical material” at the cost of researcher’s reflexivity and theoretical analysis (159). Instead, he suggests a “new” method of “at-home ethnography,” which, according to Alvesson, is “a study and text in which the researcher-author describes a cultural setting to which s/he has a ‘natural access’ and in which s/he is an active participant” (159). In addition, he argues such an at-home ethnography will not be constrained by staged methodologies and procedures or a-priori chosen research questions, and would be quite convenient in terms of exercise and economical in expense (163). Alvesson’s concerns largely resonate with the earlier discussed account by Sierk Ybema and Frans Kamsteeg, who attempt to break away from the constraint of familiarity, by creating critical distance through irony and the cultivation of surprise as it lends itself to reflexivity and recursiveness.

The final piece of the volume, co-authored by Halleh Ghorashi and Harry Wels, resonates well with the concerns of reflexivity. As such it focuses on what seems to be an oxymoron, the “complicity of engaged research.” The authors contend that we, researchers and our informants, are always already embedded in disciplinary power and structures of violence, and hence without reflexivity and critical awareness easily slip into the normalized modes of moral and political legitimacy. The authors give a liberally utopian and vague answer: to take responsibility by engaging with “all players in the configuration of power” (231), regardless of prior divisions and allocated roles, thus “contributing to a more just world” (247).

Similarly, Gary Alan Fine and David Shulman concern themselves with ethical issues that inevitably accompany any human interaction, including that in organizations. More specifically, they claim that any organizational fieldworker is guilty of “lies” s/he inevitably tells before, in and after the field. These lies ordinarily are hidden behind numerous representational techniques and strategies. “Such antiseptic accounts,” argue the authors with an air of moral righteousness, “cost readers and practitioners, offering an incomplete account of the practical ethical dilemmas” (177). Their piece, however, suggests two virtuous contributions. One the one hand, the authors lay bare the constraints and limitations that most of the ethnographers face due to their conditions of research, the demands of academic standards, IRB requirements, and discursive norms (178), thus dispelling the myth of a liberally “virtuous” ethnographer. On the other hand, it also combats an illusion of giving neat and holistic ethnographic accounts. Instead, the authors argue, “each ethnography tells a tale of multiple sites – the field site and the sites of the interventions of colleagues, mentors, reviewers and publishers.” And of course ethnographers tell lies, conclude the authors, “but through lying we also present truths about organizations that escape those who are not so bold” (192).

Finally, Nic Beech, Paul Hibbert, Robert MacIntosh and Peter McInnes support the conclusions of Fine and Shulman, and address the question of friendship relations in field research and beyond. Illustrated with extensive ethnographic cases, the authors uphold the fact that ethical concerns always arise as researchers are embedded in a multiples locations and relations at once. However, these concerns are rather mundane in the course of social life, so why one needs to reify these in the context of a fieldwork. Friendships do get breached and compromised, but they are also sustained and cherished.

As a matter of conclusion, I wonder what the central preoccupations of the authors of the book – representation, truth, trustworthiness, authenticity, lying, reception, academic standards, and criteria of measurement – are symptomatic of? These issues are a concern for anthropologists as well, especially since the 1980s turn of “writing culture.” But in this case, I suspect, the anxiety has to do with the fact that organizational studies, a discipline with its own established methodologies and canons of legitimacy, has adopted a methodology foreign to it, especially the one that empirically interrogates the truth of received wisdom. Instead of attempting to suture them, they would do well to explore and exploit the gaps that the ethnographic method creates and makes visible in order to question received knowledge and truths, for this is very value and virtue of ethnography. Empiricism gives the researcher something to reflect upon. To be open to truth means questioning received ones. That is good scientific method.

In summary, the volume offers a fine introduction to interdisciplinary research, and makes a considerable effort to bridge anthropology and organizational studies, or rather enriching and extending the latter by borrowing the ethnographic method from the former. As such, it largely succeeds, and additionally gathers many useful references pertinent to both. At the same time, a general genre of the organizational ethnography situated largely in interpretative-constructivist approach that this book participates in, however innovative to the field of organizational studies is not to most anthropologists. Despite this, the book is of tremendous value precisely because of its reformulation of classic and perennial issues and problems of ethnography in a new setting, suggesting fertile ground for discussions in and outside the ivory tower. This is more than enough reason to assign the book for both undergraduate and graduate courses.

Mallika Shakya
University of Pretoria

© 2011 Mallika Shakya

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HART, K. LAVILLE, J-L and A.D. CATTANI (2010) The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide. Polity Press: Cambridge UK and Massachusetts, xvi + 370 pages.

Neoliberalism has been wounded, but it is not yet defeated,’ say Keith Hart and his co-authors. In calling for a human economy project, they assert that, unlike the dominant paradigm which views human beings as homo economicus operating under a mechanised framework of rational choice, economy is made and remade by people’s actions as social beings and the fine balance between an individual’s need for self-reliance and belonging to others must be brought back to contemporary economic thinking. This vision of human economy underscores a democratic political drive to overcome the unnecessary divide between ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism,’ both of which tell us only part of what is going on in an economy.

In what should essential reading for scholars who engage with the philosophy of economics, Hart et al highlight three facets of neoliberalism. First, an economic doctrine that evolved very much as an Anglophone phenomenon now openly claims universal application. This volume reflects a realisation that non-Anglophone economic thinking from France, Latin America and Scandinavia – often lost in translation in an increasingly anglicised world – needs to be brought back into the global mainstream. Second, the financial crisis made it clear for all to see that the ideology of ‘free market’ superiority is just so much hype. For millennia, economy was conceived of in domestic terms as ‘household management’ of personal incomes, expenses, servants, loans and repayments. Its overstretched usage to apply the principle to whole nations became untenable during the financial meltdown when the “financial ‘masters of the universe’ quickly brought out the begging bowl and in some cases had to suffer nationalisation,” and governments who once preached the free market gospel, desperately embraced Keynesian remedies with all the inflationary risks involved. Third, linked to the rise and fall of geographical and ideological hegemonies, the editors identify a need to build a global civil society, rising above the socialist-capitalist divide, and drawing on the work of anti-colonial intellectuals like Mohandas K. Gandhi, Frantz Fanon and C.L.R. James, who expressed an aspiration to make their own independent relationship to the colonialism of the twentieth century.

A new ‘new institutional economics’ is proposed, to be formed out of anthropology, sociology, political economy, economic philosophy and world history. This would be the product of an extended international collaboration that cuts not only across disciplines, but also geography and languages. The Human Economy traces its origin to the World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, and draws on earlier publications in Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian, all called Dictionary of the Other Economy. This version combines Jean-Louis Laville’s work on economie solidaire (1997) with Keith Hart’s seminal idea of the informal economy. On offer are thirty two chapters organised under five broad headers as: World Society, Economics with a Human Face, Moral Politics, Beyond Market and State and New Directions.

What is globalization? One aspect is the unprecedented rise of world-wide networks that heighten possibilities of collaboration in all walks of life. However, globalization has not necessarily worked for the poor, nor has it worked for the environment. In their chapter, Golub and Maréchal rightly attribute this to failure to identify and preserve global public goods which cannot be produced through capitalist markets. They call for a new architecture of global governance that respects democracy in both structure and spirit. Existing global institutions have shifted their focus from development to a neoliberal fixation on free capital flows, echoing the paradigm shift in the world order from the East-West conflict of the Cold War to a North-South divide, as is manifested most explicitly in the Washington Consensus (the chapter by Merrien and Mendy). The word ‘development’ itself has turned into a label for political relations between rich and poor countries after colonial empire. As the former shirk their responsibility for the latter’s economic improvement, development has become merely a means of legitimising the reproduction of inequality across the globe. One alternative proposed is what Pleyers calls ‘alter-globalisation,’ which critiques the neoliberal regime in three ways: through citizens’ and experts’ advocacy networks, renewed calls for local action and lending moral support to progressive regimes around the world.

The Human Economy’s call for action is also a call to revisit the theoretical foundations of economics. Who could argue against the aim to put our common affairs on a rational footing? For over a century now, however, economic gain has come to trump prudence in a trend that must lead to a critical debate over theory. Economic actions range between two poles of meaning: at one end an atomized rationality mobilizes scarce resources for unlimited needs, while at the other broader social considerations come into play. Neoclassical economics’ concern only with the former sense is conceptually erroneous and its political dominance runs the risk of undermining democracy and provoking extreme social reactions. This danger is apparent on several fronts: ecology, feminism, social entrepreneurship, fair trade, labour relations, microcredit and the informal economy. Effective answers require an economic pluralism expressed through many political and social forms.

The section on Moral Politics continues the line that economic thinking either needs redefinition or underplaying. For example, how are ideas of citizenship and welfare compatible with economic supremacy over politics? Is corporate social responsibility a neoliberal victory that blurs the distinction between states and corporations, thus placing one set of citizens above others on grounds of wealth? Caillé’s discussion of ‘gift’ again picks up the inadequacy of market principles to define the human economy. The point of Mauss’s seminal essay written just under a century ago on was that economic transactions have an inherent social logic behind them. Gifts are self-interested but they also carry reasons for alliance and disinterestedness. Here the anti-utilitarian paradigm may support the idea of economie solidaire which addresses plural interests over both the profit motive and universal class action (Jean-Louis Laville). Gift undermines the clear-cut opposition between pure charity and self-interest or between the market and associations. The gift paradigm also implies that dialectical continuities between the two sides may also be inverted. In this sense, a society is never complete as a construction; instead it evolves in a continuous process of making and remaking meaning.

Hann offers ethnographic evidence for this: he juxtaposes Malinowski’s account of Trobriand Islanders to Thompson’s idea of moral economy among English workers. Both accounts contradict Adam Smith’s opposition of self-interest to morality as well as the Marxist utopia of class solidarity. Further, how are we to make sense of the Indian caste system which evidently places merchants below kings and priests? This complex division of labour is prescribed and maintained on the basis of ritual purity even though India has historically been a fiercely competitive society. It is true that this ancient hierarchy has undergone substantial changes today, but caste ideology continues to exercise a hegemony that does not necessarily conflict with the profit motive for Indians.

While this book collectively identifies major obstacles to humanising economics, straightforward answers to go about this task are not readily available from the varied chapters, except for the assertion that substantive interests must be given play over formal considerations in economies that are essentially local and self-reliant. This resembles an approach to development by the bootstraps where societies must have inductive freedom to find their own balance between self-interest and morality in developing an economic framework of their own. Such a process must emancipate the theory of economics from an atomic rational assumption of what human beings are, and release them from existing methodological, geographic and linguistic hegemonies. Thus, the book suitably ends by charting out new directions for engagement.

Banking Nature?
The financialisation of environmental conservation¹

Sian Sullivan²
Birkbeck College, London

© 2011 Sian Sullivan

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In addressing the challenge of achieving global sustainability, we must apply the basic principles of business. This means running “Earth Incorporated” with a depreciation, amortization and maintenance account.

Statement by Maurice Strong, Secretary General at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm and the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, and first Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), in a 1996 lecture to the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy, Seoul.³ Currently reproduced on the website for EKO Asset Management Partners (www.ekoamp.com), a ‘merchant bank’ for environmental markets.⁴

A recent special issue of the journal Antipode on capitalism and conservation,⁵ introduced and edited by Daniel Brockington and Rosaleen Duffy, traces how what they call a capitalist ‘conservationist mode of production’ is emerging through consolidated alliances between business and environmental conservation. Alongside other key texts,⁶ they emphasise the sustained effort on the part of conservation organisations to recruit business to the environmental cause. Coupled with this is a systemic revisioning of environmental sustainability as a new frontier for capital expansion and revenue growth,⁷ and of markets as the realm through which environmental damage can best be mediated, mitigated and governed. As such, the current combination of environmental and financial meltdowns are being constructed explicitly as creating business and investment opportunities in ‘sustainability’.

Brockington and Duffy assert additionally, however, that ‘[c]onservation has hardly been involved in the production of value through financialisation’.⁸ Financialisation is the process whereby finance comes to dominate other activities in the economy. In post-manufacturing economies, financialisation has come to be the primary engine of economic growth and expansion, generating accumulation through financialisation, even as other economic areas are stagnating.⁹

My perception differs from Brockington and Duffy in that I think the contexts briefly described above actually are ushering in an intense financialisation of environmental governance for conservation, combined in part with the financialisation of environmental risk.¹⁰ And interestingly, in recent months several academic opportunities have appeared seeking to research precisely this.¹¹

I think of the financialisation of environmental conservation as taking two key forms. First, is the turning of banks and financiers to environmental parameters as a locus for expansion and investment. Second, is the modelling of both conservation practice and understandings of non-human natures in terms of banking and financial concepts. These are taking place in the context of two paradoxes. First, while it would seem that recent financial crisis should signal that finance markets had reached some sort of expansionary limit, subsequent bailouts with public money suggest instead that finance has been substantially reinforced, both in resources and in the power to command legitimising strategies by national governments¹² Second, while apparent environmental crisis might be interpreted as signalling a developmental crisis of capitalism – aka James O’Connor’s ‘second contradiction of capitalism’ whereby capitalism putatively undermines its own possibilities for accumulation by depleting its required material and metabolic base¹³ – it is instead becoming an accumulation frontier for capitalism, precisely through relationships with finance and capital investment. Both financial and environmental crises thus are entwined in ways that strengthen, rather than reduce, the power of finance capital.

As Jason Moore writes, the consequent emerging ‘financialisation’ of environmental crisis and protection extends ‘the penetration of finance into everyday life, and above all into the reproduction of extra-human nature’ as a key feature of capitalism in its current guise as neoliberalism.¹⁴ As such, financialisation has critical structuring effects in all realms of life, composing new and resistant socionatures¹⁵ It is thus ripe for anthropological study. New layers of financialisation pose challenges for the sustenance of local ecological knowledges and ‘biocultural diversities’. They rationalise human and non-human natures to conform with a particular economic system that privileges price over other values, and profit-oriented market exchanges over the distributive and sustainable logics of other economic systems.¹⁶ And by assuming people to be individual utility-maximisers and private property to be the norm, they are simplifying cultural diversity and arguably are contributing to critical transformations of biological, linguistic, cultural and epistemological diversities globally.¹⁷

This paper is an attempt to both delineate and theorise some of these effects in the arena of environmental conservation. It is structured into four remaining sections. First, I draw attention to the ways that environmental crisis and conservation are being created as a spectacular frontier for capital investment. I follow Anna Tsing¹⁸ who observes that ‘the self-conscious making of a spectacle is a necessary aid to gathering investment funds’ and ‘a regular feature of the search for finance capital’, and I detail several ways that finance capital, in collaboration with conservation agendas, is constructing such a spectacular frontier in environmental conservation. In the next section I offer a brief survey of the emerging financialisation of environmental conservation. I focus on four aspects of this process: the production of nature finance, nature work, nature banking and nature derivatives. My third section constitutes a theorisation of these entwined phenomena. I apply current thinking regarding the continuous nature of primitive accumulation as delineated by Marx, to explain the impetus towards investment in the new frontier of environmental conservation and to consider its likely effects. I follow this with a Foucaultian framing of the current financialisation of environmental conservation as extending the technical and biopolitical entraining of environmental governance to the controlling tenets of neoliberal capitalism. I close with a brief conclusion.

Creating the spectacular new frontier of environmental conservation

Source: http://ecosystemmarketplace.com/documents/cms_documents/2008_StateofVoluntaryCarbonMarket.4.pdf

For finance to ‘operationalise’ the accumulation opportunity of environmental crisis and conservation, products and commodities connecting these domains need to be created that permit new investment, trade and speculation. As Martin O’Connor writes in the 1990s, nature needs to be ‘capitalised’ and ‘capital ecologized’ in new ways.¹⁹

Or, to paraphrase Morgan Robertson’s recent work²⁰ capital needs to create new natures that it can see. This requires that the earth-in-crisis is rethought and reworded such that it is brought further into alignment, conceptually, semiotically, and materially, with capital.

The attraction of financial investment to the creation of both new products and new markets for the profitable exchange of these products, requires the spectacular creation of an investment frontier. Tsing notes that new investment frontiers are made through the productive use of spectacle, requiring combinations of dramatic performance, as well as of conjuring tricks in the opening up of unforeseen possibilities. As she states, ‘the more spectacular the conjuring, the more possible an investment frenzy’.²¹ Speculators conjure potential to create commodity bubbles attractive to investors, which although often based on multiple layers of product abstraction can have significant social and material effects. The spectacular frontier of environmental conservation is no different and I want to highlight three mutually reinforcing mechanisms of its creation.

First, are the repetitive utterances of the spectacular financial returns deemed possible through the exchange of new environmental conservation products. Since ecological economist Robert Costanza and colleagues famously estimated the annual ‘value’ globally of ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘natural capital’ to be $16-54 trillion, affirmations of nature’s dollar value have proliferated.²² Costanza et al. were attempting to draw attention to ways that exclusion of environmental factors as externalities in conventional economic analyses misrepresented the cost of environmental impacts of development activities. This has been rapidly transformed, however, into an optimistic embrace of the returns that might be captured if this ‘value’ of environmental externalities can be priced and traded. Statements now abound of the spectacular promise of new markets in products intending to signify environmental degradation and conservation, in terms of returns to both investors/traders and to ‘the environment’. The environmental consultancy firm Advanced Conservation Strategies states on its website, for example, that ‘[b]y 2030, Carbon will be the largest commodity market in the world: $1.6-2.4 trillion, about the same as the current oil market’,²³ and it is easy to find many such assertions of the potential dollar value of emerging commodities that are based on some appeal to environmental conservation.

The promise of this new equation of nature with money is marked by the proliferation of powerful images conveying nature as money. As shown below, for example, a 2007-8 UNEP and IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) document on payments for ecosystem services (PES) features an image of verdant green foliage amongst which various currency notes appear as ‘leaves’.²⁴ This is echoed in the 2009 logo of the United Nation’s Environment Programme’s (UNEP) current New Green Deal initiative, which depicts a delicate young green plant, shooting up from a pile of Euro coins.²⁵ Bombardment by text and images displaying a unitary discourse that nature’s value can be captured adequately through application of money’s signs, is a powerfully manipulative means of marketing, and thereby composing, this ‘reality’.

Sources: http://www.unep.ch/etb/areas/ pdf/IPES_IUCNbrochure.pdf; http://www.unep.org/greeneconomy

This constitutes the opening of a new investment frontier. For this fledgeling frontier to grow, i.e. to attract more interest and investment, it needs to become pregnant with promise. In the financialised world of environmental conservation, this second aspect of frontier creation is constituted by the conjuring of a spectacularly proliferating range of new products and trading possibilities. These are based on unforeseen abstractions of non-human nature and the consequent opening up of new niches for investment. Key to this is the infinite substitutability posited by the notion of a global environment as a sort of abstract ‘global ledger’ that can be essentialised into new definable and exchangeable parts, permitting offsetting trades in newly commoditised measures of environmental health and degradation.

This is made possible through two key interconnected routes. First, is the creation of increasingly derived tradable products through the addition of layers of abstraction to commoditised signifiers of nature health and degradation. Second, is the constructing of tradable equivalence between previously non-exchangeable entities and distant localities. This conceptual mechanism releases any brakes on the creation of environmental conservation commodities that can be traded between localities.

Until recently, for example, the possibility of an emerging global trade in carbon emissions, would have seemed strange and surreal. This is now entrenched and familiar. The market trade in carbon manifests in various ways, significant ones being: 1. trade in the ‘free gift’²⁶ to industrial emitters of government allocated emissions quotas (i.e. ‘carbon credits’) (e.g. under the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (UE ETS)); and 2. purchase of standing biomass (normally in the global south), which, under expansionary carbon accounting practices such as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, www.un-redd.org), increasingly is becoming conceived as carbon ‘sinks’ for the voluntary ‘offsetting’, or dumping, of carbon emitted elsewhere.²⁷

Within the international policy frame that opens the possibility of this trade (the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)), work to create and stake claims to carbon has been conducted by ‘[b]rokers, consultants, carbon procurement funds, hedge fund managers and other buyers’, who have ‘scoured the globe for opportunities to buy credits associated with projects that reduce emissions in developing countries’.²⁸ Conservation and Policy²⁹ and current heat over REDD, is indicative of policy and business excitement over the potentially lucrative linkage of carbon offsets with the carbon stored in standing biomass. An accompanying array of derivative products increases possibilities for greater financial returns on this trade, extending its reach into the complex and intractable realm of ‘mad money’³⁰ associated with derivatives trading, hedge funds and futures markets. Stock exchanges existing only to service trade in carbon products now exist in London (www.ecx.eu) and Chicago (www.chicagoclimatex.com), and are emerging in Montreal (www.mcex.ca), China (www.chinatcx.com.cn), and Australia (www.envex.com.au). The organisation running these exchanges, Climate Exchange Plc (www.climateexchangeplc.com), is itself a company whose shares are listed and traded on the London Stock Exchange, recently purchased for US$ 395 million by the US-based energy and futures trader InterContinental Exchange (ICE).³¹

This proliferating trade in carbon products naturalises an idea critical for enhancing investment and trading possibilities at the conservation frontier. This is of the equivalence and substitutability of very different ‘things’ and ‘environments’, via essentialising reductions to a defined environmental measure, in this case the element of carbon. The carbon offset trade conceptually enables carbon production as one thing (e.g. industrial emissions) in one location, to be ‘offset’ against its storage in another qualitatively different thing (e.g. tropical forests) in another location. Through this the earth becomes conjured as a carbon matrix in which all production and activity is reduced to the concentration and exchange of the element of carbon. This innovation permits unintuitive conflations, as well as having profound implications for local socio-ecologies.

The possibility of using market exchanges to offset environmental damage in one location through investment in some measure of environmental conservation or restoration in another location, now is a feature of global environmental governance. Equivalent and accompanying offset trades are emerging in additional measures of biodiversity and habitat health. These are being pursued in collaborations between corporations, major environmental organisations and government regulators, to facilitate emergence of an array of new environmental offset commodities and exchanges (outlined further below). The mining conglomerate Rio Tinto, for example, is working with Environmental NGOs (ENGOs) in Madagascar to create biodiversity offset schemes whereby the impacts of mining in one location will be ‘paid for’ by investing in biodiversity conservation in a different location.³² As such, biodiversity offsets bring what has been termed ‘the ultimate anti-commodity’, i.e. biodiversity, into the mitigation banking market³³ such that ‘clearing of native vegetation may be allowed if offsets are established elsewhere in the landscape’.³⁴

Ecologically then, these are designed to enable habitat loss through extractive industry. Geographically, they constitute a radical discounting of cultural and biophysical place-based specificities. What they do permit is a bringing forth of proliferating layers of possible finance accumulation through the bundling together of different environmental products that, as they are distinguished and capitalised, can begin to be banked, offset and traded in combination with each other. Bekessy and Wintle³⁵ make plain this opportunity in suggesting that carbon offsetters (i.e. investors in carbon sequestration landscapes), also might accrue biodiversity credits ‘when the biodiversity benefits of a carbon-sequestration project can be demonstrated’.

Accompaniment by spectacularly dramatic performances and mediated presentations of environmental crisis, of the nature treasures that require conservation, and of conservation performance constitutes a third impetus in creating the frontier of environmental conservation investment. These combine to compose an environmental and conservation spectacle that both sets the scene for investment in environmental conservation, and acts to engender particular human and non-human natures as well as relationships between them.³⁶ The lucrative and proliferating investment frontier of trade in environmental conservation products thus is set against, and justified through, spectacular marketing of nature loss and value, and of conservation endeavour and conservationists.³⁷

The recently released film Hotspots, made by the mega-ENGO Conservation International under the direction of celebrity conservation biologist Russell Mittermeir, brilliantly illustrates this production of conservation as spectacle.³⁸ The trailer spectacularly dramatises conservation work, using tropes of treasure, rarity and the exotic in signifying global localities of high biodiversity, and of crisis and threat in specifying the urgency of conservation work. This sets the scene for entrance of the story’s leading actors: the heroic, predominantly white and male, conservation biologists, whose work is a military-style operation featuring long lensed cameras, helicopters, camouflage fatigues, a racy soundtrack and machismo. The cinematic experience thereby generated is similar to that of Hollywood portrayals of contemporary US military engagement in ‘Third World’ frontiers, echoing, for example, Apocalypse now (Vietnam) and Black hawk down (Somalia). The trailer closes with a deep male voice-over describing the protection of hotspots as ‘the mother of all wars’. But alongside fighting to protect nature’s treasures, CI is systematising its productive collaborations with corporate and financial worlds. It is run by a board of directors consisting largely of CEOs and other representatives from businesses such as Wal-Mart and Starbucks.³⁹ It works with business and finance⁴⁰ to seek offsetting solutions for industrial impacts in particular locations, as well as to realise conservation capital through monetising lands owned or purchased by corporations that exhibit newly priced ‘ecosystems services’.⁴¹ The dramatisation of natural history, environmental crisis and capitalist conservation endeavour, is further performed and orchestrated through spectacular events such as at the four-yearly IUCN World Conservation Congress⁴² and the biannual Wildscreen natural history film festival in the UK.⁴³ At these meetings, corporate-conservation networks and empowered understandings of conservation issues and interventions are produced and reinforced.

As with any frontier of capital expansion, this created frontier of environmental conservation is making possible the penetration of finance into the ensuing new spaces for investment. It accompanies and is accompanied by a modelling and conceptualisation of nature using banking categories to produce a proliferating range of new nature products that can be easily aligned with finance. I outline these entwined components of nature’s financialisation in the following section, focusing on the categories of nature finance, nature work, nature banking and nature derivatives.

Banking nature

Nature Finance

The movement of financial investment into the world of environmental conservation and governance is the most direct means of conservation financialisation. Several tendencies are indicative of this movement and I outline a few of these here.

First, is a notable presence of new investment funds offering products and services linked with discourses and indices of environmental conservation and sustainability. The investment fund EKO Asset Management Partners, for example, is

… a specialized investment firm focused on discovering and monetizing unrealized or unrecognized environmental assets… in short, a “merchant bank” for the world of environmental markets.⁴⁴

EKO’s investors hail from the world of haute finance and include James Wolfensohn, 9th president of the World Bank Group, as well as Lord Jacob Rothschild and Alexander and Ben Goldsmith of the Rothschild and Goldsmiths banking dynasties.⁴⁵ Elsewhere on their website they state that EKO’s approach is to:

stimulate the development of environmental markets’ through aligning ‘smart capital with people, projects, and companies that are poised to profit from emerging markets for ecosystem services, whether they be markets for carbon, for water quality, or for biodiversity.⁴⁶

Investments are oriented towards, for example, towards:

land with undeveloped or unrecognized environmental assets with a view to developing these assets and profiting from their sale in emerging environmental markets’.⁴⁷

Source: http://www.ekoamp.com/

The investment fund ‘Inflection Point Capital Management’, has a slightly different focus but environmental sustainability is emphasised as key for investment choices. The fund’s website describes it as ‘the world’s first multi-strategy asset management boutique offering exclusively sustainability-enhanced investment products across a broad range of asset classes’.⁴⁸ The fund-managers identify ‘recent market meltdown as a multi-trillion dollar “advertorial” for sustainability-enhanced approaches’,⁴⁹ and aim to increase the ‘sustainability alpha premium’⁵⁰ of company performance through incorporating proxy measures of ‘sustainability performance’ into investment practices, based on the proprietary database developed by associated company Innovest.

Source: http://www.inflectionpointcm.com/

This fund is headed by Matthew Kiernan, acclaimed author of Investing in a Sustainable World: Why Green is the New Colour of Money on Wall Street⁵¹ former President of the World Business Council of Sustainable Development (WBCSD), and regular speaker at the annual Davos World Economic Forum. The cover of Kiernan’s book displays a blue-green earth, half of which is subsumed by gleaming American quarter-dollar coins; an image echoing painted representations of the globe used in the 1500s and 1600s to depict the new commodity trades then bolstering an emerging European mercantile class.

Through work for JPMorgan via his previous company Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, Kiernan has been associated with the creation of index-linked corporate bonds, ‘designed to enable credit investors to make return-driven investment decisions that systematically take into account the risks and opportunities created by global warming’.⁵² Thus, ‘[u]sing Innovest’s proprietary database and applying an exacting methodology, [the] JENI [carbon-beta index] overweights the securities of issuers judged to have relatively lower risk due to climate change, and underweights issuers with relatively higher risks’.⁵³ Risk here is related to a firm’s ‘carbon intensity’ (its vulnerability in the context of climate change and carbon regulation), with the index intending to signal firms preferable for investment in relation to carbon reductions, as well as those vulnerable to climate-change associated risks.

It is being proposed that index-linked carbon bonds might also be issued by governments, such that ‘interest payments [from government to investors] are linked to the actual greenhouse gas emissions of the issuing country against published targets’.⁵⁴ This would enable investors to hedge against the risk of a government not meeting its carbon commitments, such that investors would receive ‘an excess return if the issuing country’s emissions are above the government’s published target’, and vice versa.⁵⁵ The rationale is that the issuing government then has an additional incentive to make sure national emissions targets are met, because this will enable them to pay lower interest rates to bonds issued to investors. Investors in turn would provide governments with cheaper debt as long as governments meet their emissions targets. The important point is the implication that private sector ‘green financiers’ would then be governing, or at least disciplining, governments on their carbon/climate policies, via the incentives built into the bond structure. This structurally shifts the locus of responsibility for global environmental outcomes into the incentivising domain of investment finance, and further entangles possibilities for emissions reductions with other competing domains of investment.⁵⁶

Conventional banks also are turning their investment practices towards substantially integrating environmental ‘assets’ into lending. The Forest Carbon Partnership Facility of the World Bank is supporting forest-rich countries of the global south to enter the global offsetting trade in carbon.⁵⁷ The European Investment Bank is working with the University of Stirling’s Management School to ‘design markets for ecosystem service delivery’ (or ‘eco-delivery’ as they call it).⁵⁸ Multilateral development banks, themselves increasingly making private sector investments that go towards financial intermediaries and private equity funds,⁵⁹ are being encouraged to ‘partner countries to sustain their natural capital’, through integrating mapped and monetised ‘ecosystem services’ in all bank ‘strategic direction-setting, investment, and advisory services’.⁶⁰ An interpretation of these moves, consistent with the thesis that financialisation currently is driving accumulation, is that large bank lenders are financialising their own investment practices (through lending to private sector finance), at the same time as encouraging the increasing financialisation of environmental management and conservation.

This moves us into the next layer I want to draw attention to, which is the creation of nature as a ‘service-provider’ and the production of billable ‘nature work’.

Nature Work

Source: http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/home04.html

A significant conceptual move enabling the financialisation of conserved non-human nature, is the construction of nature as a ‘service-provider’. Conservation biologists have been using the language of ecosystem services since the 1970s.⁶¹ The 2005 publication of the influential United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA), which highlights human-generated change of the biosphere, overwhelmingly uses this language in speaking of the non-human world.⁶² More recently, the Deputy Head of the Species Programme of the IUCN has stated that ‘[i]t’s time to recognize that nature is the largest company on Earth working for the benefit of 100 percent of humankind – and it’s doing it for free’.⁶³

In combination, this language creates non-human nature as a company that needs to be acknowledged for the service work that it does. Of course, any ensuing payments do not actually go to nature, but to the people who are able to capture them. What becomes significant then are questions of what nature work is able to become billable, and of who, via enforceable property rights signalling ownership, becomes able to capture the revenue arising from payments for this billable work.

The growing discourse on payments for ecosystem services (PES) both creates, and attempts to resolve, precisely these questions. The key idea here is that those wanting and/or requiring the ‘service’ of environmental health should pay those dwelling in the landscapes in which these ‘services’ are located. These flows and ‘cascades’ of services and payments⁶⁴ can be seen most clearly in the case of downstream water users paying upstream users to maintain water flow and/or quality.⁶⁵

Given both the location of valued ecosystems in the ‘global south’, accompanied by need for their services in the industrialised ‘global north’, payments from north to south for service maintenance by the south for the north increasingly are being posited as a means of producing win-win sustainability (i.e. conservation and economic development) scenarios.⁶⁶ The result has been an urgent requirement to measure, assess, standardise and disaggregate nature into new ‘goods and service categories’, combined with measures of their health and/or degradation and the assigning of monetary prices to these measures⁶⁷

This is being done via rapid ecological assessment and economic valuation techniques. The latter rely heavily on contingent valuation or estimates of ‘willingness to pay’, the validity of which has received intense criticism within economics.⁶⁸ Ecosystem service valuation projected from unit values (dollar estimates of economic value on a per-unit basis) derived from particular use and non-use values measured at specific sites, also is often arrived at via the practice of ‘benefit transfer’. This parallels the conceptual convenience, as noted above, of the substitutability or correspondence between different locations, by permitting the transfer of ‘economic value estimates from one location to a similar site in another location’, an assumption and practice that again can produce a number of transfer errors.⁶⁹

Through investment combined with regulatory and legislative support, these valuation techniques are permitting creation of an array of new markets in the environmental service products represented by the measurements they generate. They are ushering in an enormous systematic and competitive effort to measure, catalogue, dissect and ‘value’, i.e. price, nature’s ‘goods and services’, via an emerging ‘ecoinformatics’ that entrains mapping, measuring and monetisation techniques to produce combined ecosystems services catalogues, applicable from local to global scales. The table below provides examples of four such current and massive ecosystem services valuation initiatives.

Details of four current major global ‘eco-informatics’ initiatives to map and price ecosystem services.

All this effort constitutes a systematic ushering in of a new large-scale economic-environmental science so as to bring into focus a world of measured and ‘valued’ ecosystem services or ‘nature work’. The collaborative (and competitive) investment in complex ‘ecoinformatics’ approaches is connecting and entraining ecological and economics data so as to create ‘value’ at various ecosystem scales. It parallels capital investment in bioinformatics at the scale of molecular biology, or ‘accumulation by molecularisation’ as Nally puts it.⁷⁴ In combination these moves into both large and small scales of nature are working to permit consolidation of claims to domains (and inventions) of life, and as such to ‘expand the scale and scope of capital accumulation via so-called “extra-economic” means’.⁷⁵

PES thus capitalises landscapes such that they can be brought into global markets in various new ways. The creation of billable nature work also is radically reframing inhabitants of service-producing landscapes as service-maintainers for consumers elsewhere in the global ledger of environmental services. The implications for those dwelling in landscapes newly priced for their ecosystem service functions are profound. This can be seen in proposals that local people might mortgage the environmental values newly associated with local landscapes so as to provide income for local development. The suggestion here is that communities in low income nations finance poverty alleviation and economic development through offering newly monetised ‘environmental assets’ as collateral for ‘environmental mortgages’. These would be loans offered by international environmental investors that are linked to measures of the state of an ‘environmental asset’.⁷⁶ They would contribute ‘debt-based investment’, i.e. that ‘capitalizes environmental assets locally and makes that capital available to local communities through collateralized lending, microfinance approaches, and access to affordable financial services’, thereby ‘providing access to affordable financial services in exchange for environmental stewardship’.⁷⁷ In these proposals, then, sustained ecosystem services as newly priced nature values are to be used as collateral for loans so that people of the ‘south’ – or the ‘fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’ as the business community likes to frame them⁷⁸ – can be brought further into the global monetary economy. Complex questions arise of who then possesses or has governing powers over the collateral (particularly in the case of default), and of how the pricing of local ecologies intersects with other socially embedded culture:nature values.

Nature Banking

Accompanying creation of nature as billable service-provider, is an increasingly hegemonic conceptualisation of the health and degradation of nature’s services as dependent on the underlying stock of nature as ‘natural capital’. Nature itself is becoming conceived as a bank account, as noted in the statement opening this paper, that ‘Earth Incorporated’ will only be sustainable if run as ‘a depreciation, amortization and maintenance account’.⁷⁹ This has been taken seriously by the UN/EU project on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), headed by Pavan Sukdhev – a career banker from Deutsche Bank. The latest TEEB initiative is establishment of a website called The Bank of Natural Capital. This represents environmental issues in a rather standard current bank account format with pages for ‘Current Account’, ‘Natural Capital’, ‘Ecosystem Services’, ‘Stocks and Investment’, and ‘Advice and Guidance’.

Source: http://bankofnaturalcapital.com/ Accessed 5 March 2011.

Unsurprisingly then, ‘nature banks’, managed by nature bankers, are emerging as key management structures in environmental governance for conservation.⁸⁰ By creating the nature that capital can see,⁸¹ in part through capitalising the service work that it is deemed to do, and in tandem with formalised property rights, landowners (private or collective) can thereby become nature entrepreneurs: they can capitalise on the new nature prices attaching to the ‘nature assets’ associated with the monetised and thus billable service work accruing to defined land areas. Forms of ‘nature banking’ now are prominent in the US and Australia, and this approach is gaining traction elsewhere. An array of ‘wetland mitigation banks’, for example, exists in the US. These enable landowners to realise ‘value’ through maintaining wetland ecosystems by entering into financial exchanges with developers intending to degrade wetlands elsewhere, and accompanied by permitting and regulating legislation.⁸² ‘Species banking’ has proliferated in recent years, particularly in the US (e.g. see www.speciesbanking.com),⁸³ allowing trade in species credits to mitigate development impacts on protected species. Biodiversity banking (or ‘biobanking’) now is advocated such that ‘[a]ccrued investment [by landowners in biodiversity] could be sold to a party wishing to liquidate an equivalent amount and quality of vegetation elsewhere in the landscape’.⁸⁴ And the UK now is entering the environmental mitigation banking arena, with recent announcement of its first conservation credit scheme to be facilitated by The Environment Bank Ltd. (www.environmentbank.com)⁸⁵ within a conservative policy discourse that considers a future biobanking industry to be worth billions.⁸⁶ The nature banking and offset market approach has been advocated particularly strongly by the Katoomba Group, ‘an international network of individuals working to promote, and improve capacity related to, markets and payments for ecosystem services (PES)’,⁸⁷ and whose online ‘Ecosystem Marketplace’ (www.ecosystemmarketplace.com) provides market information to facilitate transactions.

Private investment is promoted as the source of funds to facilitate the creation and structuring of nature banks and the ensuing mitigation banking market. The Ecosystem Marketplace’s former Director and co-founder in fact is now a partner and co-founder of EKO Asset Management Partners, the merchant bank mentioned above established precisely to invest in – i.e. to capitalise – new markets in new environmental products.⁸⁸ The consequent attaching of prices to nature’s ‘services’ permits the banking of these new nature values by those who own land and whose ownership is protected by property law. The mission of the US Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets thus is to ‘focus on scientifically rigorous and economically sound methods for quantifying carbon, air and water quality, wetlands, and endangered species benefits in an effort to facilitate the participation of farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners in emerging ecosystem markets’.⁸⁹ In combination, then, the process serves to add and bank more monetary value to that which already is able to enter a market exchange; i.e. to that which already is formally owned (discussed further below).

Nature Derivatives

I have noted above the proliferation of increasingly derived carbon products as a constitutive aspect of the expanding frontier of conservation commodity markets. The creation of similarly derived environmental-financial products, or ‘nature derivatives’, in additional environmental domains is a burgeoning feature of financialisation of environmental conservation for lucrative management of environmental risk and scarcity.

A recent paper in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, for example, proposes the creation of ‘biodiversity derivatives’.⁹⁰ A derivative contract ‘is a bet as to whether the value of the underlying security, which might be a stock, bond, or financial index, will increase or decrease by a specified date’.⁹¹ These contracts permit businesses to ‘hedge against the occurrence of unpredictable adverse events’.⁹² As such, they are associated with the construction of risk as a tradable commodity,⁹³ at the same time as also permitting speculative returns based on the chances of the derivatives contract itself.⁹⁴ In recent years, derivative creation has extended into the turbulent realms associated with unpredictable atmospheric, oceanic and biospheric dynamics, permitting the direct hedging and trading of environmental contingencies in capital markets, as superbly described and theorised by Melinda Cooper.⁹⁵ For biodiversity derivatives, the suggestion is that the market be used to reduce the costs of conservation, by applying derivatives to the risk of species extinction. The proposal is that ‘governments issue modified derivatives contracts to sell species’ extinction risk to market investors and stakeholders’, as a means of providing incentive structures that take ‘full advantage of the market to reduce costs in conservation’.⁹⁶ This, it is argued, will align the interests of conservationists, governments and landowners, by making species presence more valuable to landowners than modifying habitat through development. Contracts would be priced on current interest rates and the probability of a payout or default due to species decline below an agreed threshold. If triggered through species decline, the principal paid by investors would be made available for remediation and recovery of the species in advance of being placed on an endangered species list.⁹⁷ Biodiversity derivatives based on risk of species extinction would be akin to insurance derivatives, ‘issued with modifications to allow responsible action to decrease the likelihood of the insured event’ (i.e. extinction of a species) so as to encourage ‘social change that is incentivized through market forces’.⁹⁸

This transferring of derivatives logic to the domain of species survival seems strange. Futures exchanges might help stabilise prices for storable commodities by balancing sellers’ hopes for rising prices with buyers’ desire for the opposite. But it seems perverse to transform the value of species survival into prices whose rise or fall is entangled with bets on the likelihood of their being susceptible to their irreversible loss, underscored by a situation whereby species value rises with rarity, i.e. with greater risk of extinction. Susan Strange notes that gambling on prices creates ‘heightened volatility’. Is this what is wanted for species presence?⁹⁹ Mandel et al. argue, however, that through issuing a derivative whose value is based on species decline, and ‘[i]f the trading of species derivatives were responsibly permitted’, then ‘those who do not currently incorporate a conservation ethic into their economic decisions would stand to profit from a change in behaviour towards environmental stewardship’.¹⁰⁰ This, of course, is a classic neoliberal suggestion to design, invest in, and legislate for market-based incentives to manipulate behaviours through appealing to the economic self-interest of those with protected land tenure.

Proposals such as this act to enhance the ways in which environmental change, itself indelibly and inequitably entwined with human activity, can become ‘a speculative opportunity like any other in a market hungry for critical events’.¹⁰¹ They are rationalising nature dynamics to fit the dynamics of human constructed financial markets, permitting the assigning of tradable prices to the unstorable commodities of essentially unknowable futures.¹⁰² So whilst the production of nature work and nature banking, as described above, is rendering nature into a new ‘mass of standardized, qualitatively indifferent exchange values’,¹⁰³ financialisation here is extending possibilities for nature’s speculative release into the realm of circulating money in its new universal form of derivatives. This derivative realm ‘challenge[s] the idea that the circulation of money must be anchored in some fundamental, underlying value’,¹⁰⁴ whilst at the same time binding nature’s dynamics, and associated wealth-making possibilities, to the influence of financial investment in other commodities. The innovative conceptual alignment of nature change with derivative finance products acts to materially enhance the fortunes of investors and their associated impacts, whilst shifting the locus of decision-making power regarding environmental governance to the realm of finance and the speculative expectations governing futures markets. It is capturing a nature of unpredictable flows and dynamism such that these are able to circulate as money – as a nature ‘on the move’ as Bram Büscher calls it¹⁰⁵ – the power and material effects of which are concealed through the abstract and seemingly virtual milieu of its movement.

The environmentality of ‘earth incorporated’? Theoretical gestures

The above documents the transformation of conserved nature into discrete ‘billable hours’ and bankable assets, whose release onto markets in varied forms and at different scales is constituting an expanding investment frontier. The novel and frequently opaque ecology of associated and intersecting terms and concepts on which this frontier feeds, constitute an emergent and systemic wave of semiotic¹⁰⁶ and material enclosure of ‘the global environment’. It is creating a new ‘product range’ of complex, virtual and mobile nature products, to produce a ‘derivative nature’¹⁰⁷, which while increasingly abstract nonetheless has significant material effects. In what remains I theorise these phenomena through two key and complementary theoretical lenses: that of Marxian primitive accumulation, and of the consolidation of Foucaultian bio-political governmentality in the realm of socio-environmental management.

On contemporary primitive accumulation

Primitive accumulation is the drive of capital and its protagonists to both create and capture the forms of capitalist value that underscore all subsequent relations of production and exchange. For Marx, the two critical enclosures are of land as property, and human activity as labour, the creation of which required the historical separation of each from the other, or the disembedding of people from land-entwined social relations, as Polanyi puts it.¹⁰⁸ Other scholars have highlighted additional historical primitive accumulations as integral to capitalist strategy, together with the ideational changes required and effected in bending nature in situ, as well as human life and bodies, into the commodity form.¹⁰⁹

The accumulations of productive forces that are not a priori manufactured for sale, all require, and are mirrored by, significant and frequently radical, i.e. onto-epistemologically unintuitive, conceptual transformations. New commodity fictions need to be imagined for them to manifest; and the commodity fantasies that become discursively and materially prominent are those privileged by empowered socio-political structures, which in modernity are associated with imperial and patriarchal adventure. In relation to non-human natures, the radical application of a notion of absolute private property to land areas, and a rejection of prior values, access or use rights by those dwelling there, underscores all subsequent commodity creation. Land itself becomes capital that can be owned absolutely: the monetary value of which can rise and fall in relation to other commodities, and the exchange of which can occur at a distance with money as symbolic medium and measure of value. In combination, land and human activity are transformed from subject to object, thereby permitting their reification as tradable commodities.¹¹⁰ Viewed through the onto-epistemological lens of non-capitalist cultures, whether historic or contemporary, such conceptualisations can be a nonsense. Instead it might make more common sense to think that land ‘owns’ people,¹¹¹ or at least is animated by myriad other practices of relationship, value and ethical requirements.¹¹²

Marx states additionally that ‘[a]s soon as capitalist production is on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation [of labour from the means of capitalist production], but reproduces it on a continually extending scale‘.¹¹³ Massimo de Angelis refers to this as the ontological, as opposed to historical, condition of capitalist production, to describe the continuous creation, capture and enforced possession of new commodities that permit capital’s recursive accumulation.¹¹⁴ Many other authors have stressed this continuous nature of so-called ‘primitive accumulation’, from Rosa Luxemburg writing in 1913, to David Harvey writing in 2010. Recent analyses of primitive accumulation that see its historical shape as present in contemporary circumstances globally, thus frame the process as ‘continuous’,¹¹⁶ ‘permanent’,¹¹⁷ and ‘contemporary’.¹¹⁸ As Silvia Federici, maintains, ‘primitive accumulation has been a universal process in every phase of capitalist development’, re-launching ‘similar strategies in the face of every major capitalist crisis’.¹¹⁹

Historically and today, rises in capital ‘values’ for land increase the possibility for enhanced money rents, and strengthen desires by land-owners to expropriate land-dwellers, thus ‘releasing’ their availability as labour.¹²⁰ The current proliferation of new nature values and tradable commodities for environmental conservation, as outlined above, can be understood as a similar and significant wave of primitive accumulation in these terms. They are structuring nature into the reified and exchangeable commodity form in previously unthought ways,¹²¹ at the same time as creating additional ways of bringing diverse peoples into the global market in service to these new commodity forms. As such, they are consistent with maintaining a political economic (and cultural) system in which ‘only production-for-market… [is] defined as a value-creating activity’,¹²² a movement which seems likely to discount and displace other value practices and and diversities.¹²³

The environmentality of ‘Earth Incorporated’

Whilst not discounting the hybrid ‘uses’ and manifestations of neoliberal policies in environmental domains,¹²⁴ the myriad policies and practices described above arguably become clearer given their consistency with the globally hegemonic governmentality, or even ‘culture complex’,¹²⁵ of neoliberalism. Here I draw inspiration from Foucault in two ways: to highlight the practices delineating and thereby composing the natures that can be managed and traded as ‘Earth Incorporated’; and to emphasise the ‘bootstrapping’ biopolitical gestalt of the empowered ‘truth regime’ of the market, in both shaping and being reinforced by these natures.

Foucault emphasised that new regimes of governance are structured and bolstered by new social sciences, which iteratively also enable new techniques of management and administration that concord with the episteme of modernity. At the time of the rise of the bourgeois class and the Age of Reason in Europe, for example, he makes much of the accompanying presence of a novel bourgeois spirit that partitions, makes distinctions, classifies, codifies and calculates.¹²⁶ He is talking here about the body; and about the new social sciences that helped to construct, subject, manage and accumulate the body as a utility-maximising ‘body-machine’, as well as to rationalise and administrate bodies as populations.

In the contemporary arena of primitive accumulation in association with neoliberal environmental governance, my suggestion is that we are bearing witness to an intense extension of these tendencies into socio-ecological domains. Through ecosystem service science, nature, like the body, is being made conceptually docile. It is becoming ‘caught in a [new] system of subjection’, whereby its productive characteristics are further ‘calculated, organized, technically thought’ and ‘invested with power relations’.¹²⁷ As with the new sciences of demography, nutrition etc. that make possible the administrations of the modern era and which involved the application of accounting to social relations, currently we are witnessing the similar and apparently depoliticised application of accounting to socio-environmental relations. Like the human body, and the body-politic of populations, nature as service-provider and store of capital is ‘entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it’, thus bending and releasing its immanent forces towards economic utility.¹²⁸ In these new ecological accounting practices for environmental conservation, the very necessity of conceptualising ecosystems in terms that lend themselves to the disaggregation of measures amenable to monetisation contracts ecological understanding and may hamper conservation outcomes.¹²⁹ In further transforming and accumulating ‘Nature’s’ exceeding immanence into ‘work powers’, the animated, embodied and sentient world that may be experienced by non-capitalist rationalities is of necessity erased.¹³⁰ Nature’s operations are made ‘intelligible and controllable’, ‘void of any intrinsic teleology’¹³¹ or agency.¹³² As such, human nature is rendered deaf but in apparent authority over a mirroring mute and intractably distinct non-human nature.

Alvehus and Spicer¹³³ note that an increasing experience of work as financialised ‘billable hours’ is a classic strategy of workplace control. Similarly, the ‘micro-physics of power’ operating in the multiplicitous moments and institutional apparatuses of ecosystem service science is strategically training socio-environment relations into those of Earth Incorporated,¹³⁴ creating nature as both usefully productive and utterly subdued in the process. Disaggregation of environmental turbulence into financial products that capture environmental unpredictability into the circulating and derivative commodity form, similarly flattens nature’s life and dynamism through ‘writing’ these as finance.¹³⁵

Foucault’s more recently published work, particularly his lectures of 1978-79 on biopolitics, published in English in 2008, is critically illuminating in this respect.¹³⁶ In this, he draws to the fore the socio-political fact of the ‘truth regime’ of the market under liberalism; and the corresponding necessity of working to create the governing incentivising and regulatory structures that allow for the ‘free market’s’ need for ‘frugal government’. As Martin O’Connor has also noted, ‘[t]he logic of the marketplace states plainly that all capitals will realize their “full value” only by insertion within the sphere of exchange value. Under the doctrine of utility maximisation, their best use will be signaled by price: they should always go to the highest bidder’.¹³⁷ Muradian, Corbera, Pascual, Kosoy and May describe how this naturalisation of capitalist ‘free markets’ also is rationalised by a Coasean institutional economics that assumes the emergence of social and environmental optima through the incentivised bargaining of those with private property allocations.¹³⁸

These conspire to produce a ‘governmentality’ that ironically requires intense government and public engagement to facilitate the construction and regulation of the incentive structures that discipline individual and corporate behaviour, to conform with the logic of the ‘free market’. This, as Noel Castree notes, is ‘the paradoxical need for “free” markets to be managed’.¹³⁹ In understanding neoliberalism to take hold as governmentality, i.e. to be both reinforced and hybridised through multiplicitous yet patterned acts and practices of governance, participation and resistance, it becomes possible to notice how similar practices are unfolding as the ‘truths’ of contemporary environmental governance. Robert Fletcher, in a recent article in Conservation and Society, thus extends the notion of governmentality to highlight the governing incentive structures associated with environmental governance for environmental conservation under neoliberal logics, as well as the different environmentalities associated with other governing logics.¹⁴⁰ In embracing the truth regime of the market, the art of government in relation to ‘environmental conservation’ of necessity will be the environmentality of Earth Incorporated: the accepted participation of all environmental concerns in the logic the market, such that they become framed, traded, banked and circulated as capital.

The nature of the beast?

Current rationalisations and monetisations of nature in terms of the disaggregated, commodified and banked services that ‘it’ provides, constitute a new mechanisation of nature management to satisfy discourses of efficiency in the realm of environmental conservation;¹⁴¹ whilst maintaining accumulation as ‘the engine which powers growth under the capitalist [conservationist] mode of production’.¹⁴² The enhanced separation of human from non-human worlds that this permits makes possible further transformations of nature from subject into object, constituting a significant new layer in the reification of nature as an object consisting of many objects. Nature’s agency is foundationally discounted,¹⁴³ and human:non-human relationships become further disciplined into master-slave or doctor-patient configurations.¹⁴⁴ Nature is reconstituted as ‘service-provider’ for humanity, and people dwelling in landscapes now valued for their ecosystem services are transformed into the labour needed to maintain these services (or are displaced). To paraphrase Sassen, vast regions of the world are being repositioned and territorialised as sites for capitalised global ecosystem services conservation and supply.¹⁴⁵

All these market-based innovations are being effected to accord with the desirable objective of promoting nature’s conservation. But surely there is a fallacy at the heart of these conceptual and technical strategies to incentivise environmentally ethical behaviour via the design of commodity markets and associated financialised trading activity? This is that ‘the market’ does not in and of itself embody or produce virtuous behaviour. The market does not care. And given a political economic system based on the ‘permanently revolutionary force’ of capital accumulation,¹⁴⁶ it seems problematic to assume that it is only the correct design of markets, e.g. through pricing mechanisms, that will prevent the manifestation of nature losses. What is being promoted here is a valuing of nature as money, not of nature’s immanence or sentience, or as a communicative community of which we as humans are one of many companions. And since the ‘free-market’ is an emergent property of the competitive dance of multiple commodity prices, exchanges and other asymmetries and influencing factors, there is nothing intrinsic to this system to uphold the prices of environmental health relative to unpredictably shifting prices of other commodities.

It is pertinent to remember Polanyi’s description of the transformation of land into the commodity form as ‘perhaps the wierdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors’.¹⁴⁷ Currently we are in the midst of an equivalently revolutionary shift in empowered ideas regarding a global geography of non-human natures and associated cultural diversities. While these build on extant understandings of land as commodity and of private property, they extend these in radical ways to release new nature ‘values’ that can be traded, invested in and speculated on via conversion into the commodity form. To paraphrase Marx,¹⁴⁸ once again, a ‘new social soul’ is popping into the body of nature; as the non-human world becomes enclosed, conceptually, economically and legally, into new nature products, and as human and non-natures become reoriented around the emerging environmentality of Earth Incorporated. It seems to me that perhaps the composing of humane, healthy, equitable and diverse socio-ecological relationships instead requires moving in an entirely different direction: towards conceptualising and embodying socio-environmental realities that connect human and non-human ecologies without the always mediating and structuring sign of money. Opening up such possibilities is a task that anthropologist are particularly well-placed to embrace.

NOTES

Ritual Murder?

Jean La Fontaine
London School of Economics

© 2011 Jean La Fontaine

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
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Ritual murder is a phrase used by many people but what does it actually mean, or imply? To remind you – ritual is a religious performance and embodies authority; its aim is public, the personnel that perform it and, ideally, their actions, are specified and cannot be varied without weakening its efficacy.¹ Its aim benefits those for whom it is performed. Ritual concerns the sacred and it is a truism of anthropology that it also invokes the highest cultural legitimacy, activating spiritual powers, whether they be of gods, spirits, or ancestors, in order to achieve a beneficent result.

Murder is, by contrast, immoral and illegal; it is an act carried out in secret that attracts a severe penalty. In all societies killing human beings is subject to some form of regulation that define what is illegitimate killing, that is to say murder.² Murder commonly pollutes the murderer who must be ritually cleansed; the victim’s kin incur the duty to seek vengeance or compensation. In Western i.e. Christian doctrine all killing is wrong: thou shalt not kill; in other societies there may be exceptions to a general rule. These exceptions generally designate categories of person who are virtually rendered non-human by their exclusion. Killing them is not murder. In Bugisu, where I first worked, sorcerers and homosexuals were excluded in this way; killing them was not murder and entailed no blood guilt. Murder then is the opposite of a religious act; it is the prototype of illegitimate action. Murder performed as part of a ritual implies the existence of religious acts which are not legitimate and which are, like murder, illicit and morally wrong. Ritual murder is thus an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms and for any anthropologist this requires investigation.

Several forms of killing may also be referred to as ritual murder. There is also a common synonym, human sacrifice, which is used in much the same sense. What the killings seem to have in common is a link to the realm of spiritual power. One of the aims of this paper is to compare these concepts and show that whereas human sacrifice involved real killings, ritual murder is a much more shadowy concept, invoked often enough to describe grisly events or denigrate particular communities, but never pinned down by reliable evidence. In fact, as I shall argue, the idea of ritual murder is just that, an idea that in Britain represents the epitome of evil and which denotes the alien nature of other people outside what may be known as “the civilised world” or, worse still, the horror of the evil within. In this respect it resembles witchcraft. I shall come back to this.

While it is sometimes said that academics are too prone to spend their time arguing about definitions and distinctions I would argue that such discussions frequently lead to clarification of ideas and this is my aim here. In my approach though, I follow the French historian Muchembled who wrote of the risk carried by an analysis of ideas without taking into account their social context; this is the risk that “the investigator will describe his own mental processes rather than the subject of his research” (Muchembled 1960:141). That he wrote this in an article about witchcraft makes his remarks even more relevant. To avoid this risk I shall consider try to give at least some of the social context of the relevant ethnography.

The impetus to write this paper was given by the reactions evoked by a film in the television series, Dispatches, which some of you may have seen. It concerned a series of murders in Uganda that were referred to both as ritual murder and as human sacrifice, although I would argue that they were neither. This set various anthropologists, myself included, against the film-makers who can be said to represent the general (British) public, although I am aware that journalists are usually believed to be more sceptical than most people.

Professor Pat Caplan wrote an article about this controversy for Anthropology Today (26 (2) 4-7) which provides a useful summary of what happened. The cause of this major disagreement between film-makers and anthropologists was the alleged existence of a rapid increase of killings, particularly of children, who were murdered and then mutilated. It was this that was referred to as “child sacrifice” or ritual murder. In support of their view the film-makers relied heavily on a man who confessed to having killed 70 individuals but to have reformed. He claimed to be mounting a campaign against child sacrifice. Most of the anthropologists did not believe him, recognising the type of Christian leader whose conversion gains added lustre from the contrast with the blackness of former sin, and considering what people say as weak evidence without reliable information on what they do or have done. While the film-makers reported that they had been told by reliable witnesses of multiple killings and mutilations, a Ugandan anthropologist from Makerere referred to the situation as “hysteria” and linked it to the popularity of Nigerian (Nollywood) films in which such killings feature. A series of fairly heated emails were exchanged most of which found their way to Adam Kuper’s London Review of Books blog.

Caplan’s aim was not to decide either way but to discuss the two main topics she thought had been raised by the controversy: the first concerned “the interpretation of witchcraft and other forms of alleged ritual killings in contemporary Africa …” while the second, which I shall not consider, had to do with the media and what she calls ‘public anthropology’. She argued that anthropologists are inclined to interpret allegations of witchcraft as ideas and moral values in the classical tradition, implying that this leads them to deny the reality of such beliefs. She does not spell out whether she means that they deny that people actually are witches or that what they do works. She points out that, in an alternative view of ‘occult phenomena’: “some anthropologists working in Africa have accepted that there has indeed been an increase in allegations of witchcraft, but also in its material manifestations, including killing and the removal of body parts….” Here killing for body parts is identified with witchcraft; the other material manifestations are not specified. So, not only is there a dispute between anthropologists and the journalists about what is going on in Africa but there are opposed views among anthropologists. I shall try and show that this situation is in part a confusion of terminology.

I turn now to what we know about killings that are linked with beliefs in occult phenomena and I start with human sacrifice.

Human sacrifice

The killing of a living creature as a ritual offering to a god or spirit used to be termed a blood sacrifice, an old-fashioned term that focuses attention on the spilling of blood. The blood may be important, less in itself, than as a manifestation of the dispatch of a victim’s life as offering to the spiritual being or beings to whom the ritual is addressed. Usually a return is expected in the form of good fortune, whether generalised or as the granting of a particular prayer. Blood sacrifice might also be used to cleanse sufferers from sin, prevent misfortune or failure and avert evil. In some cases the blood spilled was human.

However, not all sacrifices entail the spilling of blood; victims were killed in other ways and in some societies, and on some occasions, it was actually important not to spill the victim’s blood. The reference to blood has been dropped now and we consider sacrifice in general. This is a part of rituals in many parts of the world, though usually the offering takes the form of an animal or even a bird. Most anthropologists in the field in Africa have seen at least one of these sacrifices, usually involving a chicken or a goat. The more valued the creature sacrificed, the greater the honour done the recipient of the offering.³

The most valuable of all life is that of a human being and human sacrifice, where it occurred, was the greatest possible ritual gift. Human sacrifice has been recorded in many parts of the world although, as historians have pointed out, executions and other killings of human beings have sometimes been wrongly interpreted as human sacrifice (Wilks cited in Law 1985). The most famous example is perhaps that of the Aztecs, whose human sacrifice allegedly consisted of a heart taken from a living victim.

There is evidence that human sacrifice took place in antiquity in societies, including some in what is now Britain, bordering the Roman and Greek Empires, whose members sacrificed only animals and birds. Rituals including it have been described by outside observers. In Central America the practice of human sacrifice among the Aztecs and Incas was recorded by the invading Spaniards in early modern times and in parts of Africa by the Europeans who came first as traders and then as colonisers. There is most information on human sacrifice in Africa where it has been described in relatively recent times by travellers, missionaries and by officials of the colonising powers, so I will draw largely on that material as summarised in a useful article by the historian Robin Law.⁴ There is no doubt that this killing took place as part of public rituals and was considered legitimate.

In Africa, human sacrifice was a practice largely confined to some kingdoms of West Africa, such as Asante, Benin, Dahomey, Calabar and the riverine Ibo, although disregard of human life was much more widespread.⁵ Human beings were sacrificed as offerings to gods and to the dead, particularly dead kings and other elite forbears. In the West African kingdom of Dahomey, a regular ritual of remembrance offered to dead kings, known as the Annual Customs, required the sacrifice of human victims to strengthen the dead rulers’ spiritual powers and by showing the filial piety, engage them on behalf of his successor. It also demonstrated the mundane power of the ruler and the legitimacy of his position (Law 1985), the former function being explicitly recognised by one such ruler, King Kpengla of Dahomey, who explained succinctly the need for human sacrifice to a European enquirer in the 1780s as follows: “You have seen me kill many men at the Customs. This gives a grandeur to my Customs, far beyond the display of fine things which I buy. This makes my enemies fear me and gives me a name in the bush.”⁶

In West Africa, as in ancient China and elsewhere, funerals might entail the killing of human beings to accompany the dead. A great ruler might be buried with his wives and/or members of his entourage to provide him with a suitable retinue in the afterlife. The individuals who were killed were not, strictly speaking, sacrificed, since they were not killed as offerings either to the gods or the spirit of the dead king or ruler. Moreover it is alleged in some cases that the close associates of the dead man volunteered to die, much as Indian widows were traditionally expected to commit suicide on the funeral pyre of their dead husband⁷. Nevertheless, the term human sacrifice may be used to refer to these practices, since the additional deaths were an integral part of the funeral ritual. In parts of West Africa, individuals might also be killed as messengers to the dead in addition to the normal human sacrifices. Fear of the approaching colonial powers resulted in many human sacrifices to avert military disaster.

Killings as offerings to the dead may not seem to Westerners to be sacrifices, in that they are not offerings to gods. However in many African religions, ancestors are holy beings, with spiritual powers to reward or punish their descendants. There may be some recognition of a vaguely conceptualised creator god but as a remote deity, uninterested in human affairs; the ancestors are usually the spirits to whom one appeals for help in trouble. Thus in Dahomey when human sacrifices were made “to water the graves of the ancestors” they were as much part of their religion as other religious festivals. Hence we may call these sacrifices and where the victim was human they were human sacrifices.

Two patterns among the selection of victims can be seen. The victim for sacrifice may be chosen either as a particularly pure or valuable human being: a child, a virgin or a young warrior; alternatively the opposite choice is made; the victim is an outsider: captive, representative of a defeated enemy, or a slave. Slaves might also be bought to be sacrificed, thus avoiding the need to kill a member of the community. However, where the tally of captives and slaves was inadequate, victims might be taken by force from among them.

The Greeks and Romans offered blood sacrifices to their gods but they were never human sacrifices, although both they and the Greeks kept slaves whom they might have sacrificed. In fact the Romans characterised some societies on the margins of their empires as barbarians because they did perform human sacrifices. The failure to draw a distinction between human beings and animals which the existence of human sacrifice implied, was to both Greeks and Romans clear evidence of the lack of civilisation of those people who practised it. Those they conquered, such as the tribes in what is now Britain, were strongly discouraged from the practice. In the early centuries of the Christian Era from which this information comes there were increasing number of Christians within the Roman Empire who believed that the death of Jesus was “a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world”⁸ and it rendered any sacrifice, not merely unnecessary, but a failure of faith. Pagans who offered sacrifices to their gods were barbarians. Thus sacrifice and in particular, what was sacrificed, was a powerful symbol for both communities, dividing them and justifying to each the inferiority of the other.

Human sacrifice is no longer practised, even in those societies where it used to be part of the traditional religious rites. Apart from the disapproval of the Romans, the spread of Christianity in territories taken as colonies by European powers, starting with Spain and Portugal in southern America in early modern times, have rendered it immoral and illegal in many areas where it used to be practised. Islam, spreading southwards from North Africa into Africa south of the Sahara, put an end to the practice in the north of many West African states and further colonisation by the European powers in the nineteenth century has forcibly ended the practice in the southern areas⁹. There may be talk of its revival in independent West African states where it has only been a century or so since the practice was stopped, but the stories are, so far, only unconfirmed rumours. There has been no public revival of the practice. But people persist in associating Africa with human sacrifice. Since the practice is abhorred in Britain it is also seen as ritual murder.

There are also practices that are sometimes confused with human sacrifice or considered to be necessarily linked to it. Cannibalism is not an inevitable consequence of human sacrifice nor are the victims dismembered for use in some other way, although the Aztecs were reputed to eat the hearts of human sacrifices. Some peoples, in many different parts of the world – the Ijo of West Africa are an example – ate parts of their dead enemies as a means of magically taking over their strength. Marshall Sahlins describes with some gusto similar practices in Fiji (Anthropology Today 19 (3) 3-5). Such practices have been referred to as ritual cannibalism, since they have magical and spiritual connotations to the participants. However, in Africa, although animal sacrifices were normally eaten at the end of a ritual, in a feast whose participants were carefully selected for their relation to the spirit (usually an ancestor) in whose honour the sacrifice had been offered, human sacrifices were not eaten. Speaking generally, cannibalism, even as a ritual, was always much less frequent than human sacrifice.

The rationale for eating human sacrificial victims or enemies who had been killed in battle, was that power was thought to be inherent in parts of the human body, even after death. The same belief lies behind the use of body parts in ‘medicines’¹⁰ records of which in Africa go back as far as the 17th century. These ‘medicines’ are magical concoctions but their purposes are purely secular; they are put together by specialists, who charge for their services and they purport to ensure success, wealth and the confounding of enemies. The magicians often referred to as witchdoctors may employ killers to obtain what they need or may kill themselves. The use of human body parts is said to give the ‘muti’ very great power. This is a form of magic or sorcery, concocted in secrecy for the benefit of the sorcerer’s client and of course to increase the renown and wealth of the magician. Universally stigmatised as ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ the practice has nevertheless been reported widely in Africa.

The early records of this ‘medicine’ came from West Africa but it probably occurred elsewhere as well. In modern times, from the end of the twentieth century to the present, murders for the purpose of making medicine (the South African term muti may be used) have been reported in large numbers from South Africa and from much of East Africa. The murders of albino Tanzanians for ‘muti’ were widely publicised in the international press. The acquisition of body parts does not always require killing. Some unfortunate victims have been left alive after limbs have been severed.

The “child sacrifices” in Uganda were killings for such magical purposes. The police reported that some corpses lacked limbs or organs. (Killing was not always necessary; in Kenya recently two men have been arrested for dealing in body parts obtained from a crematorium). But murders for body parts are not offerings to any god or spirit but killings for gain: both the client who orders and the magician/ sorcerer who prepares the ‘medicine’ profit by the death. While the belief in the power of human body parts may be called magical thinking, as can the idea that albino body parts have greater power than normal African ones, the killing is not part of any ritual. Children and young people may be chosen as victims more often because of their purity and the potential for growth in their bodies, but their selection may be simply the more mundane one of greater ease of capture. We do not know, as everything about these ‘medicine’ killings is secret until the mutilated body is found. Whereas human sacrifice was performed openly and as part of rituals that were believed to benefit the community, these murders are furtive and hidden, fuelled by individual ambitions and the lust for wealth and power. They are manifestations of continuing belief in the power of magic (or sorcery if you prefer) but not of witchcraft which has never rested on material proof except the misfortunes that are, with hindsight, attributed to it. Killings for ‘muti’ are openly condemned by members of the communities where they take place but they are not human sacrifices or even ritual murders.

Ritual murder

If ritual murder is not human sacrifice or killing to obtain ingredients for powerful magic, what is it? The term implies a killing to obtain spiritual powers that are not recognised as morally right, but are evil and dangerous. So far from being the same as human sacrifice it is its antithesis.

It is in Western Europe that one finds this idea of ritual murder and it has a long history. In the second century AD, Christians may have despised the religion of their pagan neighbours for the blood spilt in their rituals, but much worse allegations were made against these small dissident groups within the Roman body (Rives 1995). Christians were said to worship their god in secret, performing rites in which there were sexual orgies, often incestuous and cannibal feasts. The central act of the ritual was the killing and eating of a child or baby, perhaps stolen for the purpose. Since the early Christians were forced to conceal their gatherings, meeting in secret, the conviction that they were engaged in shameful acts seemed plausible. In AD 177 in Lyons, a number of Christians were publicly tortured and killed by the Roman authorities and these allegations played a large part in their condemnation. Some of those who died cried out denials of the accusations, proof of the role they had had in these horrible deaths.

When Christianity became the dominant religion in Europe, the idea of secret groups practising ritual murder did not disappear; Christian authorities took over the myth that had earlier been used to justify their own persecution. Like their Roman predecessors they used the accusation of ritual murder to denigrate and persecute opponents. In this case it was those divergent religious communities such as the Waldensians or the Cathars who were designated heretics and accused of it. Centuries later, in a more elaborate development of the story, ritual murder was believed to be carried out by covens of witches, gathering to worship the devil and feast on the flesh of human sacrifice.

They represented the opposite of all that was considered good and their pleasure was to do evil and ultimately to destroy society. The rituals they performed were the opposite of Christian services: they took place at night, not in the daytime and in secret locations, not in public buildings that were known and open to all; most sinister of all, the rites included practices that represented all that was believed to be against human nature: cannibalistic feasts, incest and other perversions. It was these ideas that triggered the infamous witchhunts of early modern Europe.

The picture that I have drawn was built up gradually during the centuries. The people who were accused of ritual murder, or suspected if they were not accused, were people seen as non-believers, outsiders, whose very existence threatened the fabric of society. Belief in hidden conspiracies, secret societies whose members aimed to rule the world, were rife from the eighteenth century onwards. Subsequently Jews, Freemasons, and, in twentieth century America, conspiracies of communists, were seen in a similar light, as people of evil intent, whose aim was to destroy society as it then existed. It is important to recognise the historical depth of our beliefs in a secret and conspiratorial group, the epitome of evil characterised by the ritual killing they are believed to indulge in. The depraved actions of these hidden beings are very similar to those of witches the world over: they commit incest, kill and eat human beings and commit the most lurid crimes. This is part of a cultural definition of evil, just as beliefs in witchcraft as a manifestation of evil, are part of the world view of most Africans (see Pocock, Parkin et al The Anthropology of Evil.¹¹

The colonisation of Africa may have suppressed human sacrifice but it allowed for the development in Europe of the myth of ritual murder in another direction. The former existence of human sacrifice in West Africa encouraged the most sinister beliefs about African culture. Events in Africa seemed to confirm these as realistic portrayals. From the end of the nineteenth century onwards there were outcrops of serial killings in different parts of Africa that local people claimed were the work of human beings who had transformed themselves into animals, usually leopards or lions. Given the belief that occurs in many parts of Africa that witches can transform themselves into wild animals for the purpose of killing and ‘eating’ other human beings, an anthropologist would expect that both the killing and the eating were spiritual rather than actual. However the deaths were real and the death blows appeared to have been dealt by an animal, showing wounds apparently inflicted by teeth and claws, although sceptics claimed that these mutilations might be inflicted by special weapons designed to conceal the fact that the killer was another human being. Given the existence in Sierra Leone, where the first such cases emerged, of secret societies of witches associated with leopards it was thought that these societies might be to blame and that the killings were offerings to their secret shrines. Some witnesses claimed to have seen leopards attacking the victims, others claimed that the murderers were human beings disguised as leopards. The European colonial servants who were responsible for the areas in which these murders occurred and who shared to a greater or lesser extent existing fantasies about Africa were unable to decide whether the killings were ritual murder or not. But reports of the deaths contributed to a whole genre of literature that embedded the notion of ritual murder ever more deeply into the European imagination.¹²

Ritual murder is still murder and hence a crime. If we treat it as such, we have to consider what the evidence for it is. Over the course of history, many people have been accused of ritual murder and many have been executed for it, but the evidence for their guilt has been unsatisfactory from a modern point of view. Two kinds of evidence have been accepted as ‘proof’ of participation in ritual murder: first accusations by people who claimed to have suffered the evil attacks and/or to have seen the secret meetings or secondly confessions from the accused, in former times often extracted by torture. Checks as to whether personal malice or pre-existing quarrels were the cause of accusations seem not to have been made although the accused have often claimed that the allegations were the result of malice. Independent evidence or material evidence such as would be demanded in a prosecution today has never existed. Yet the idea persists because it represents in a dramatic form what is the ultimate in inhuman evil and by contrast emphasises what it is to be human.

At the end of the twentieth century people across the world asserted their belief in rituals that included the sacrifice of children as offerings to the devil. In the United States, Britain, Europe, Australia and New Zealand accusations were made. The rituals were said to include a modern sin, that of the sexual abuse of children, but in other respects they resembled the accusations made across early modern Europe and included allegations of human sacrifice and cannibalism. But when investigated, the evidence for the conviction that ritual murder was being perpetrated was very like that of early modern Europe: allegations, often from children, and the ‘confessions’ of adults who claimed to have been participants. There was no forensic evidence. As one journalist put it, despite modern sophisticated techniques of investigation, police found: “no bodies, no bones, no blood, nothing”.

Yet seven years after the ritual abuse panic died down, when a little boy’s mutilated body was found floating in the Thames, some of the same people who had publicised their belief in Satanism claimed it as justifying their beliefs. The Catholic Herald proclaimed: “Boy’s torso prompts new ‘Satanic abuse’ fears (March 2002). Was this the proof of ritual murder that had not been available before? It was presented as such in the media. Amazing detective work by the Metropolitan Police traced the child, referred to as Adam, first by the police and later from its use in the media, by everyone in general. Medical science showed the mutilations had been performed after death. The origin of the only garment he was wearing, shorts, were traced by their label. Forensic science indicated from the contents of his stomach where he had originally come from, Nigeria, from a village in the south-east of the country. This is all material evidence on which conclusions may be based and it can only be challenged by similar but contrary evidence.

Yet, despite the good work of the police, they could not show why Adam was killed and then mutilated or who did it. Nevertheless his death continues to be cited as evidence for the existence of ritual murder. It was the fact that ‘Adam’ was found to be African turned attention to the possibility of ritual murder. According to one BBC report, (BBC News July 9th 2002 accessed April 13 2010) police were investigating whether Adam’s death “was a West African voodoo killing involving human sacrifice.” The use of the term voodoo is an example of how ignorance about a non-Christian religion can support this myth of ritual murder. Vodun is a religion that developed in the Caribbean among West African slaves, from a mixture of Catholic Christianity and the traditional beliefs preserved in memories of their homeland. Its rituals do not include human sacrifice, but the whites in the Caribbean, for reasons that were partly political, claimed it was devil worship and that evil reputation has clung to it ever since. Voodoo became a term denoting evil magic and ritual practices, even in Africa.¹³

When it was discovered that the child Adam was probably brought to London from Africa, which has for centuries been subject to myths about ‘The Dark Continent’, certain people hastened to claim that it ‘proved’ the truth of satanic ritual abuse and of human sacrifice continuing to occur among the ‘uncivilised’. The general attitude has been described very nicely by David Pratten who wrote: “…Africa represented a blank space in Europe’s collective imagination and could therefore be populated by all manner of invented creatures, sometimes noble, sometimes monstrous, that were the visual and visceral products of European fears and desires” (Pratten 2007:9) Over simplistic ideas about ‘leopard societies’ and secret organisations that kill for pleasure, have influenced Christian missionaries in Nigeria and kept the idea of ritual murder alive.

While Sanders (2001) has done a good job of pointing out how the continued emphasis on the African provenance of ‘ritual murder’ has deepened existing prejudices about Africa and Africans, he stuffs all the evidence of British cultural concepts into that vast portmanteau labelled The Other. Unfortunately this neither illuminates nor analyses the ethnographic material that is thus bundled together. What I have tried to do here is to show how British concepts of evil – particularly the ideas of ritual murder and human sacrifice – emerge in the way they think about the African killings. ‘Ritual murder’ is a European representation of great evil; its historical origin has been demonstrated by historians who have demonstrated its role in generating the Christian pursuit of witches in early modern Europe. It is hardly surprising then that the present rash of accusations of witchcraft against children (which I have no had time to deal with) owes as much to Christian fundamentalist missions as to ‘traditional’ African ideas of witchcraft. In today’s Africa the Pentecostal belief in Satan’s demonic servants as the source of the power of witchcraft links the two concepts firmly together into a single contemporary image of the grossest evil.

Beliefs in ritual murder and in witchcraft are similar cultural traditions and both are worthy of anthropological study and of comparison, since if it is to be anything anthropology must be comparative. While I have not attempted this yet, a brief indication of the differences and similarities between the concepts might be a fitting end to this article.

Both the idea of ritual murder and the concept of witchcraft concern activities and persons who do not, as far as we know, exist. While real people may be accused, the evidence supporting the accusations is not rationally founded or supported by hard evidence So we are talking about ideas, not behaviour, but ideas that motivate strong reactions. The actions and the people who perform them represent evil in its most extreme forms. The actions of witches and in ritual murder include the same acts of evil: incest, sexual perversion, infanticide and cannibalism; the cannibalism fills a lust for human flesh, rather than any ritual or symbolic requirement which may surround cannibalism in societies that do undertake it This may be what makes it so evil. In effect, these persons are inhuman and their lack of humanity may be further emphasised by attributing to them nonsensical reversals of behaviour. By opposition then, both concepts define not merely inhuman but human nature, not merely evil but the bounds of what is permissible in human society.

Both concepts also are linked to the distribution of unfortunate events although the power raised by ritual murder is not directed by individuals against their personal enemies. But neither allows for the random event, drawing everything into a framework of human (or near human) causative power. Moreover both concepts embody the possibility of social destruction whether of social life or of interpersonal relations and relate this to the power of evil, whether generated by organised groups or seen in individual malice. Evil can and may destroy the world.

Of course there are differences. In Western society evil is characterised by a group whose individual members act in concert to worship the fount of all evil, their demonic master. Witchcraft is essentially a matter of individuals, although Western witches undertook a collective worship of Satan. While African witches may attend communal feasts, the emphasis usually lies on the debts created by the provision of the flesh, the substance of the feast that create indebtedness between provider and receiver. Hence perhaps the elaboration of differences in behaviour and appearance of witches, the unnatural human beings, that does not appear to characterise participants in ritual murder. Indeed ritual murder does not depend on the people who enact the killing being inhuman, merely evil. Ritual murder, then, brings destructive evil within the range of human possibilities.

REFERENCES

Carrasco, David. 2000. City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization, Moughton Mifflin.

Clendinnen, Inga. 1995. Aztecs: An Interpretation, Cambridge University Press.

Coggins Clemency and Orrin C. Shane III. 1984. Cenote of Sacrifices, The university of Texas Press.

Girard, René. 1979. Violence and the Sacred, translated by P. Gregory, Johns Hopkins University Press.

Girard, René. 2001. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, translated by James G. Williams, Orbis Books.

Green, Miranda. 2001. Dying for the Gods, Trafalgar Square.

Heinsohn, Gunnar. 1992. The Rise of Blood Sacrifice and Priest Kingship in Mesopotamia: A Cosmic Decree? Religion, 22 (2) 109-134.

Hughes, Dennis. 1991. Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece, Routledge.

Hughes, Derek. 2007. Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera, Cambridge University Press.

Hutton, Ronald. 1991. The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy. Oxford: Blackwell.

Kahaner, Larry. 1994. Cults That Kill, Warner Books.

Law, Robin. 1985. Human Sacrifice in Pre-Colonial West Africa, African Affairs, 84 (334) 53–87.

Muchembled, Robert. 1990. Satanic myths and cultural reality. In B. Ankarloo and G. Henningsen (eds), Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, Clarendon Press.

Pratten, David. 2007. The Man-Leopard Murders, Edinburgh University Press.

Rives, James, 1995. Human Sacrifice among Pagans and Christians, The Journal of Roman Studies, (85) 65–85.

Sales, R. H. 195.7. Human Sacrifice in Biblical Thought, Journal of Bible and Religion, 25 (2) 112–117.

Sanders, Todd. 2001. Save Our Skins: Structural Adjustment, Morality and the Occult in Tanzania. In Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (eds) Moore, HL and T. Sanders, Routledge.

Sheehan, Jonathan. 2006. The Altars of the Idols: Religion, Sacrifice, and the Early Modern Polity, Journal of the History of Ideas, 67 (4) 649-674.

Smith, Brian, 2000. Capital Punishment and Human Sacrifice, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68 (1) 3-26.

Smith, Brian and Wendy Doniger. 1989. Sacrifice and Substitution: Ritual Mystification and Mythical Demystification, Numen, 36, Fasc. 2. (Dec.) 189-224.

Valerio Valeri. 1985. Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii, University of Chicago Press.

Van Baaren, Th. P. 1964. Theoretical Speculations on Sacrifice, 11, Fasc. 1. (Jan.) 1-12.

Willems, Harco. 1990. Crime, Cult and Capital Punishment (Mo’alla Inscription 8), The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 76, 27-54.

Williams, Clifford. 1988. Asante: Human Sacrifice or Capital Punishment? An Assessment of the Period 1807-1874, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 21, (3) 433-441.

Winkelman, Michael 1998. Aztec Human Sacrifice: Cross-Cultural Assessments of the Ecological Hypothesis, Ethnology, 37 (3) 285-298.

NOTES

Where the Wild Things Are

Philip Swift

© 2011 Philip Swift

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HENARE, AMIRA, MARTIN HOLBRAAD and SARI WASTELL (Eds). Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge, 2007, x + 233 pp. Paperback £22.99.

Can one think without things? Perhaps we would like to think so. We might even suppose that things get in the way of contemplation that the ideal conditions for thought would be to think in the absence of things altogether. After all, consider that iconic image of cogitation, Rodin’s The Thinker: his head bowed, and his body bound up in the activity of silent and solitary meditation, the closed circuitry of introspection. No things impinge on thinking here – not even the unwelcome impediment of clothing! But perhaps even Rodin’s figure is still too heavily sensuous. If only we could take the next step, and slip free of our skins, abandoning our bodies to ascend to the pure plane of frictionless cognition, unmediated by things…

And yet, matters are obviously more complicated than that, because ‘things’ can neither be solely, nor straightforwardly, associated with mere matter. Cartesian philosophy, for example, offers a particularly powerful version of the thing/thought dichotomy – or, more accurately, the metaphysical division between matter and mind – but both matter and mind are designated as ‘things’ (res) so that the mind is described as a ‘thing that thinks’ (res cogitans). So what, then, is a ‘thing’? This book, Thinking Through Things (henceforth, TTT), does not tell us, but that is quite deliberate, for its aim is not to provide a general definition or a global theory. The argument is, instead, that the ‘things’ which anthropologists encounter in the field should be allowed to generate their own theories particular to them. Hence, what counts as a ‘thing’ may be more or less anything, as the various contributions to the book demonstrate: divinatory powder used in Cuba, Mäori claims over ‘cultural property’, cigarettes in a Papua New Guinean prison, received law in Swaziland, Darhad shamanic apparel, and so forth. The term ‘thing’, therefore, operates as a kind of empty concept that awaits its activation in the empirical encounters that constitute ethnography. From a conceptual perspective, the configuration of ‘things’ in TTT calls to mind an older and well-known metaphysical account of ‘the thing’. Not the essay by Heidegger, but the horror film by John Carpenter. For, similar to the alien entity that features in Carpenter’s The Thing, the notion of a ‘thing’ in TTT lacks any prior shape or definition, and is therefore capable of assuming multiple forms – with less horrible consequences, of course!

It is this analytical openness that, I think, distinguishes the project of TTT from some of the other object-oriented approaches that are currently so prominent in the social sciences. Thus, while on the face of it, a volume such as Lorraine Daston’s excellent edited collection, Things That Talk (2004), seems almost identical – looking like TTT to a T, as it were – the difference is that the ‘things’ in Daston’s book are understood in the more straightforward sense as ‘objects’ (even if these are anything but elementary). Likewise, the methodological programme outlined in the introduction to TTT sounds rather like Bruno Latour in places, but, as the editors themselves point out (p.7), Latourian theory has global pretensions. If Latour’s elevated aspiration is for a ‘parliament of things’, then the editors of TTT intentionally aim for something much lower; something more like a mini-cab office of things perhaps, in so far as you never know what kind of thing will come through the door, but when it does, you will have to take it wherever it wants to go, for it is the thing that gives directions on the journey to be taken.

While on the subject of the differences between TTT and other seemingly similar enterprises, I feel it worthwhile to draw attention to a comparable research programme currently underway in Japan: namely, the monogaku series of studies, headed up by Kamata Tôji of Kyoto University. Loosely translated, mono in Japanese means ‘thing’, and so monogaku – the term newly coined by the group to describe their endeavours – means ‘thing studies’, or mono-logy. But, although the word ‘thing’ is useful precisely to the extent that its range of reference is so open, the meaning of mono is perhaps even more elastic still, since it also comprises a spiritual dimension (as is evident in such terms as tsukimono (spirit possession), bakemono (ghost, monster), etc.) in a way that ‘thing’ does not. As such, by drawing out these animistic aspects of the term, the contributors to the monogaku project are able to make a virtue of what Martin Holbraad – in a recent reflection on the tenor of TTT – has suggested is a possible shortcoming of the volume, which is the attention paid to the overly magical character of the things (shamanic jackets, powerful powder, and so on) that featured in it.

But, these considerations aside, let us briefly introduce the method as presented in TTT, since it is methodology, and not theory, which the book claims to promote. The methodological argument at the heart of TTT takes off from the last line of a lecture series given by the Brazilian anthropologist, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, at Cambridge in 1998, when the editors – Holbraad, Amiria Salmond (formerly Henare) and Sari Wastell – were graduate students there. In his concluding remarks, Viveiros de Castro observed that, ‘All I know is that we need richer ontologies, and it is high time to put epistemological questions to rest’ (‘Cosmological perspectivism in Amazonia and elsewhere’, p.94). Hence, the method advocated in TTT is a turn away from epistemology, towards the ontological. As the editors argue in their introduction, one of the problems with epistemology is that, when applied to problems of ethnography, it tends to assimilate them into the order of representation. Accordingly (to take as an example the ethnographic conundrum which is the particular concern of Holbraad’s chapter) when Cuban diviners say, of the aché powder which they employ in their practices, that it is an instantiation of the ‘power’ that makes their divinations possible, the epistemological reflex would be to assume that, since the claim that ‘powder’ equals ‘power’ cannot be literally true, the powder must somehow index, or represent, or otherwise symbolize, an ‘idea’ of power. A further instance of this kind of thinking would be Ernest Gellner’s argument (expertly deconstructed by Talal Asad in his Genealogies of Religion, 1993) that Moroccan Berber ‘saints’ (igurramen) cannot be chosen by God, as claimed by his informants, but must in fact (‘in reality’, says Gellner) be chosen by the people. As in the case of the epistemological switchover that occurs in the ‘powder’ = ‘power’ problem, ‘God’, in Gellner’s solution, is assumed to represent, or do duty for, something else intelligible (read ‘real’), such as societal interests.

The ontological move advanced in TTT is, by contrast, to take the ‘is’ of such native claims as ‘powder is power’ completely seriously, and to explore the conceptual consequences that would follow. Thus, the various contributors to TTT attempt to investigate what certain things are in terms of what they do in particular places, so that, to summarize some of the chapters all too crudely, cigarettes are generative of sociality in a prison in Port Moresby (according to Adam Reed), or that specific objects on display in domestic settings in Mongolia are a means of making present relations to otherwise absent relatives (in Rebecca Empson’s chapter), or that a 19^th century British colonial treaty signed by Mäori chiefs was charged with chiefly mana so that, for Mäori now, it just is (rather than merely represents) the efficacy of the ancestors (or so goes, in part, the argument of Amiria Salmond).

The ontological approach on display in TTT is both inventive and refreshing, but it does, I think, give rise to a certain ambiguity, which is the question of the relation between ontology and culture. That is to say, to what extent – if at all – are they consonant? Certainly, Holbraad, for one, has subsequently, and quite forcibly, argued that ontology and culture are not in any way synonymous (see Holbraad, in Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 30 (2) 2010). And yet, in the introduction to TTT, while the editors (of which Holbraad is one) express doubts about the culture-ontology equation (p.10), on the previous page – in a favourable précis of an argument of Viveiros de Castro’s – they speak of ‘the ontology of modern Euro-Americans’, which, even if it isn’t exactly an endorsement of the ontology equals culture thesis, sounds rather close to one. But I mean this as less of a criticism than as an observation of possible differences in viewpoint, since there is no reason to suppose that the other editors (or contributors, for that matter) need necessarily share Holbraad’s view of the matter. (Although, Wastell, for one, does distance her own account of the ‘thing-like’ nature of received law in Swaziland from what she implies would be Marshall Sahlins-like cultural-ontological identifications.)

If there is a fault with the book, it is, I think, that the argument of the introduction partially succumbs to what Bruce Kapferer once diagnosed as that tendency of anthropologists to overemphasize the radicalism of their arguments at the expense of earlier approaches. This is not to say that the argument as presented is neither novel nor important – it is both – but simply that the ‘revolution’ (albeit a ‘quiet’ one) it claims to usher in is, I suggest, an attempt to realise the incipient potential that anthropology already possessed from its professional inception. For one thing, the important claim that the project of anthropology should be less a matter of comprehending how natives think than it ought to be one of ‘how we must think in order to conceive a world the way they do’ (p.15, original emphasis) seems to me to be pretty much what Talal Asad was calling for, when he argued strongly in favour of a foreignising type of translation that would scandalise ‘our’ language of analysis (see his ‘Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology’, Genealogies of Religion, 1993). But equally, we might remind ourselves that anthropologists have been thinking rather radically through things for quite a long time. A classic example of which would be Lévi-Strauss’ La Pensée Sauvage (1962) – a pun categorically lost in the dreadful English rendition of the book’s title, ‘The Savage Mind’, but one which, in French, means both ‘wild pansy’ and ‘wild thinking’, and was intended to be emblematic of things thought through, in the sensuous ‘logic of the concrete’. And, to recall a further example of ancestral radicalism in terms of thing-thinking, did not Evans-Pritchard say that it took the Nuer to make him ‘cattle-minded’?

These gripes aside, if TTT doesn’t exactly constitute a revolution, it is, in my view, still a significant redrafting of current anthropological priorities. As I understand the matter, epistemology (as conceived by TTT’s editors) is opposed to ontology as sameness is to difference. As a mode of making sense, epistemology discloses a tendency to function as recognition, or the recapitulation of what we know already; the promise of ontology is that it draws on a completely different paradigm of understanding altogether. Or, as Gilles Deleuze (who seems to be something of a subterranean influence on the editors of TTT) has proposed: ‘the new – in other words, difference – calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other model, from an unrecognised and unrecognisable terra incognita’ (Difference and Repetition, 1994, p.136). It seems to me that TTT goes some way towards realising this other model, a model that emerges from the territory of alterity.

Pratik
Haitian Personal Economic Relationships

Sidney W. Mintz
John Hopkins University

© 2011 Sidney W. Mintz

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This paper was first given at the American Ethnological Society meetings, then prepared for publication as Mintz (1961) “Pratik: Haitian personal economic relationships,” Proceedings of the Annual Spring Meetings, American Ethnological Society: 54-63. It may be of historical interest. The phenomenon it describes was observed during 1958-59, while I was working in Haiti. I am grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation and to the Social Science Research Council for grants, which made the research for this paper possible. Several field workers there now (2010) tell me that the same custom, and others that I have described elsewhere, are alive and well in that suffering country. I have made some small changes in this text – e.g., I continue to use the present tense – but the substance of the paper is unmodified. Readers may be struck by the manifest changes in Haiti since 1958, such as the sharp rise in the percentage of urban population, and so on. In what follows, Creole words are transcribed in the Laubach orthography, on which see Hall (1953). January, 2011

THE MOST VISIBLE features of Haiti’s internal exchange economy are its market places.¹ In 1954 there were 294 officially recognized and controlled market places in the Republic (Moral 1959: 74). These are the intersection points in the trade network by which the bulk of Haiti’s marketed agricultural product and its imports reach their consumers. Retail stores are much less important than the market places, even in the large towns; in the countryside such stores are of little significance in economic life. In the capital, Port-au-Prince, and in large provincial centers such as Cap Haïtien and Les Cayes, storage depots and import houses are tied in with market place trade; but retail stores have limited importance outside the capital.

Trade is carried on by thousands of intermediaries, most of them women. In a population believed to total 3,400,000, Moral’s estimates (1959: 84) suggest somewhat more than 50,000 female and 15,000 male traders. These figures are probably too low; omitted are the large numbers of children under fourteen years engaged in petty trade, and the numerous part-time unlicensed intermediaries who slip in and out of trade.

Through the market places, producers and consumers are united in exchange, but few transactions involve only producer and consumer, since intermediaries successfully interpose themselves. Such intermediaries render many different services, including bulking, transport, minor processing and packing, storage, breaking bulk, money-lending, and the provision of short-term credit. They hold their places in the distributive process by offering these services at prices their customers are willing to pay; were they redundant, their customers would circumvent them.²

The competition for the privilege of serving as an intermediary is stern, since the Haitian economy has a large supply of labor in all sectors. Accordingly, each market woman seeks to protect her stake within the arena of exchange by various means. A paramount feature of the struggle to secure and to profit from the right to render service is the institutionalized personal economic relationship referred to in Haiti as pratik.³ It is toward an examination of this relationship that the present paper is directed.

Moral writes:

L ‘attrait de l ‘argent est si fort dans les compagnes et la circulation monétaire si reduite que le “capitaliste” influent du bourg rural mène la spéculation pratiquement a sa guise grâce à une “clientèle” étendue dont la fidélité est maintenue soit par le jeu compliqué des avances, des engagements et des dettes, soit par le respect qu’impose la réussite, soit encore par la tradition de la “pratique.”

And he continues:

C’est le mot-clé du petit commerce rural. Il désigne a la fois le vendeur et l’acheteur. Il traduit surtout la confiance réciproque et la force de l’engagement oral dans une société où le document écrit est une rareté (1959, p. 70).

That pratik means both buyer and seller emphasizes the reciprocal nature of the relationships. Metraux (1951, p. 121) points out that in Haiti “The women who buy and sell are on friendly terms, calling each other bel me (stepmother), ma kome (gossip) [i.e. "godsib" or ritual coparent] and matelot (concubine of the same man).” In the pratik relationship, the participants are equals for purposes of trade.

A comparable terminology occurs in Jamaica, according to Katzin:

The term “customer” is used by Jamaicans as a generic term applied to anyone with whom one has regular business dealings. Higglers call both those who sell to them and those who buy from them “my customers.” One town higgler said: “The house buyers who buy from us are our customers, but country people call us customer and we call them customer. We are really the customer because we do the buying, but I don’t know what we would call them, so we still call them ‘customer’ (1959, p. 19).”

In Haiti, one has pratik (ge pratik) and makes pratik (fe pratik). The degree of intimacy and mutual benefit varies, but since the relationships are intended to stabilize and maintain one’s role in distributive activity, they are always built up over time and have economic value for the participants. As such, pratik ties add to the regularity and patterning of internal marketing activity.

In an economy typified by smallholder farming, limited technology, inadequate processing and preservation methods, inferior transport and communications facilities, feeble and dispersed demand, and numerous small-scale producers and intermediaries, each with limited means, distribution is likely to have a markedly irregular character. This unevenness is magnified when seasonal variation in the supply of various goods and in income, is often sharp. All of these conditions are characteristic of the Haitian economy. There is, further, some movement of individuals in and out of the distributive system with changes in season, status, and fortune. Under such circumstances, pratik relationships stabilize sequences of dyadic economic transactions. Taken together, these arrangements afford greater order to the distributive system as a whole.

The personal element in economic activity is of course not limited to economies of the Haitian sort. But certain features of such economies affect the ways that the relationships are worked out. Haiti is famous for its relatively plentiful supply of labor, its relatively scarce supply of capital, its agrarian nonindustrial character, and its relatively low productivity. On all of these counts it is the poorest economy in the Caribbean area, with the lowest per capita income, and probably the lowest standard of living for the whole of Latin America.

Haiti is rural as well as agrarian. Moral demonstrates that the calculation that 12.6 per cent of the Haitian population is urban is arbitrary in the extreme; at most only approximately 8 per cent of the people live under even remotely “urban” conditions (1959,pp. 29-30). Country towns are above all political administrative centers. To some extent they also serve as regional entrepots for agricultural produce moving out of the surrounding region, and for finished goods moving into it (Mintz, 1960). Contact between the regional administrative centers and their countrysides, and between the various regions and the capital, rests to a considerable degree upon the distributive mechanisms of the internal market system. The sorts of information carried by market women and truckers in the course of their work include marketing intelligence, affecting the rate at which produce flows toward demand areas and probably helping to stabilize prices to some extent. The communication of a remote unsatisfied demand may even affect tendencies in production. In this sense intermediaries help to bring distant areas into firmer contact with the cities and with other regions by their activities. The distances covered in search of profit are staggering; to walk thirty miles in a day to acquire or dispose of stock is not unusual, and some women walk nearly twice that to attend particular market places. Such trips open regions and may increase the likelihood that roads, trucks, and development activity will follow.

The nature of rural production in Haiti is such that relatively little agricultural land is held in large properties. Instead there are long-standing patterns of divided and subdivided small plots, worked by their owners, sharecropped, mortgaged, leased, rented, and held by customary tenure or by squatting. Agricultural production rests on a heterogeneous tenure situation, and is pursued on holdings that are prevailingly small. Farming itself is marked by crop diversification, even on tiny plots, by intercropping, and by successive harvests, up to four in a single year for some crops.

The rationale for maintaining highly diversified farms need not be considered here, but its relation to the distributive pattern is of interest. Rapid and efficient bulking of agricultural products for resale in cities or in other regions occurs readily only where production is quite specialized, or where many individual cultivators in a single sub-region have very similar farm situations. Grapefruit from the north plain, onions from St. Raphael, millet from Fond des-Negres, and rice from the Artibonite illustrate this sort of bulking to some extent. But even in these instances, the intermediaries may buy in relatively small quantities, limited by their available capital and media of transport, and their calculations of demand. Normally, the acquisition of stock by intermediaries for resale is a long, time-consuming procedure, involving personal dealings with a large number of individual producers or with other intermediaries.

Consumption both of finished goods and of agricultural produce exhibits certain parallels to production. The peasants customarily sell much of what they produce, and buy much of what they consume, but both sales and purchases are on a small scale. Whether it be millet, rice, cornmeal, root crops, greens, salt, spices, cloth, kerosene, cooking oils, soap, matches, or anything else, small sums are expended for small quantities. Such buying habits are analogous to the practice of selling off produce irregularly and in small quantities. These transactional habits are a function of the seasonal nature of the agriculture, its diversified character, the chronic shortages of cash, and the lack of adequate means of storage. They may also be conditioned by a cultural preference for small-scale and irregular expenditure of cash assets for consumption. Expectably, the distributive mechanisms tying production and consumption together reflect their character.

Intermediaries are the living links between these two aspects of the economy. On the one hand they bulk produce when buying it up. On the other, they break bulk in resale. They render additional and incidental services at the same time. The presence of an oversupply of individuals always ready to provide such services sharpens the competition between intermediaries, and keeps the costs of these services to the economy as a whole at a minimum. The constant search by large numbers of distributors both for supplies to be bought up for resale, and for loci of demand, helps to keep supply and demand in a more balanced relationship – as reflected in price changes – than would be the case were the number of distributors reduced arbitrarily (Bauer, 1954; Mintz, 1957). It also serves to enhance the importance of the pratik relationship, my major concern here.

A pratik may be either one who sells to a distributive intermediary or one who buys from a distributive intermediary. Since some products pass through the hands of more than a single intermediary, pratik relationships may tie together producer and middleman, or middleman and middleman, or middleman and consumer. For products, which are bulked by an intermediary near the source of supply, and broken in bulk for resale by a retailer, the bulking intermediary may have pratik relationships with numerous small-scale producers on the one hand, and with several retailers on the other. Moreover, just as the producers may have pratik relationships with more than one bulking intermediary, so the retailers may have pratik relationships with numbers of consumers. Hence these ties form webs or networks of economic association.

The rationale behind the establishment of pratik is clearly economic in nature. This is confirmed by the results of scores of interviews with Haitian professional market women. Every such woman interviewed stated that she had pratik; and all of them made clear that the purpose of forming pratik ties is to secure and solidify the channels of trade. In general, the means for creating and maintaining pratik is by the granting of economic concessions. But obviously such concessions cannot be granted unilaterally, or they serve no economic purpose for one of the participants. Concessions (in the form of price, quantity, credit, or otherwise) are made by intermediaries both to producers and to consumers, and to yet other intermediaries. The reciprocal reward for these concessions takes the form of more assured pathways to supply and demand. In effect, the intermediary will be seen to be trading some portion of her potential profit in a theoretically random market situation, in return for some measure of assurance that she will be able both to acquire stock and then to dispose of it.

This point deserves some stress if only to clarify the wholly rational economic motives which lie behind pratik relationships. These ties are by no means uneconomic, non-economic, or economically irrational. On the contrary, in fact, their existence demonstrates the Haitian market woman’s clear recognition of the general character of the economy. Except in the instances of granting credit and lending money, and often, even then, the guarantees that a pratik relationship will persist and continue to be mutually beneficial are personal and customary, not legal and contractual. But dishonesty on the part of a pratik will end the tie, and women who behave unethically in such relationships soon threaten their own stakes in the distributive process.

No market woman interviewed denied having pratik relationships with those who “buy from her hand”; some, however, fail to have these ties with those from whom they buy, if those others are producers. Intermediaries who buy from producers do not uniformly make pratik of them. Retailers-intermediaries who sell to consumers-are like intermediaries, between intermediaries, having bilateral relationships. But on the consumer side, the nature of the pratik arrangement will differ.

Commonly the pratik is defined as a “good customer.” When an intermediary has pratik among producers from whom she buys, she may theoretically buy at a higher price, accept a smaller quantity for the same price, or advance a loan against a future crop. No one indicated that she bought less of a given product for the same price. The intermediary as buyer is acquiring stock, and wishes to do so to the limit of her capital. She may pay a little more in order to improve her access to more stock in the future. But she will not buy less from a single seller than her capital makes possible at one time, if this means having to seek out another seller of the same produce.

At the other end of the chain, the retailer who has pratik with her consumer customers is readier to make small concessions in price — giving a little more for the same amount of money — than to give the same amount of stock for less money. Where perishable goods are concerned, the retailer when bargaining will increase quantity rather than lower price as a matter of practice, even when not dealing with pratik who buy from her.

Perishability and like considerations such as fragility, short harvests, and high unit costs enter into shaping pratik relationships in other ways. The intermediary buying from her producer pratik is unlikely to offer to buy at higher than the going price if the product rots easily, as in the case of onions or tomatoes. The producer-seller is going to sell off to the first buyer who comes along and offers the going price. He cannot hold stock of this sort, even for short periods, given his lack of storage and refrigeration facilities. Correspondingly, the buying intermediary wins no future assurance of supply by offering more than the going price precisely because the producer-seller is unable to hold stock for her.

But in the case of relatively more durable stock – unhusked millet or dried corn for instance – the producer-seller may be in a position to retain his supply in anticipation of a price rise. With relatively imperishable stock, particularly rice, this is even more the case. In such instances, and where the buyer-intermediary regularly acquires stock from the producer, she may be willing to pay slightly more per unit of purchase when she buys. Her concessions increase her chances of acquiring stock when goods are scarce and resale profits potentially high.

Generally speaking, relationships with producers based on price concessions develop when such producers have relatively large stocks of less perishable goods. Peasants in this situation are able to “hold back” on two counts: better storage facilities, and more capital available for necessities. Less well-fixed producers, even of imperishable stocks, are more likely to have to sell off to any buyer, much as if their produce were subject to rapid spoilage.

In the case of items that spoil readily, the most common basis for pratik with the producer is by loans against a future crop. Such loans are made to either large-scale or small-scale producers of less perishable stock (with large-scale producers also winning concessions in price); but loans, to the exclusion of price concessions, predominate in transactions with producers of perishables.

Loans to producers are made in several ways. In the Saint Raphael region of the north, loans are made to producers of onions, which are subject to rather rapid spoilage, and to producers of rice and tobacco, both less perishable. These loans are paid off in kind rather than in cash. Creditors are entitled to claim their stock at the very start of the harvest, at which time market prices are high. It appears to be the usual practice to estimate the price-to-be of the product and to lend money on these terms. Though some intermediaries claim that they have lost money on crop loans, the opening market prices for rice in the fall and onions in the spring make this unlikely. In the case of tobacco, however, marketing difficulties and the complaints some informants made indicate that they did lose money. Some said they would advance no more money for tobacco crops, and this will probably affect the next year’s tobacco crop.

Loans are usually advanced on the basis of acreage, or rather on the estimated yield of a given acreage. The intermediary advances cash against the expected number of barrels of rice, or bags of onions, or bundles of tobacco to be harvested. She will either have some knowledge of the subject herself or depend on her husband or some trusted male friend in making such judgments. These estimates, though, are only a means for putting a reasonable ceiling on the loan, and do not affect the terms. Often the intermediary “buys” the total crop by making a flat cash payment before harvest, and claiming the entire harvest as it ripens.

Since it is likely that the producer who borrows from an intermediary will be turning over his product at harvest at a selling price below what he could get in the open market, it is relevant to explore why peasants make such arrangements. The need for cash in the planting season is sometimes severe, while cash loans or credit are difficult to secure by other means. Loans made by intermediaries, though generally sealed by an informal contract, are generally small. The peasant does not normally put up his land or other real property as collateral, which he would be expected to do if he borrowed from a townsman or from a wealthy farmer. The intermediary who lends him money is probably resident in his community, and though she may handle more cash than he, their class position is not likely to be different. The pratik relationship itself is the basis for the loan even though the loan is contractual, and it is a relationship requiring some mutual trust and regard. The lending intermediary in these cases takes two risks: one of crop failure and the other of a market glut. Surely she does her best to protect herself in lending her capital to producers.

At the other end of the chain of intermediaries – that is, as between retailer and consumer – the character of pratik is different, both in kind and in scale. A retailer of vegetable produce in Port-au-Prince, for instance, whether an itinerant house-to-house seller or stall keeper in the large city markets, tries to acquire a group of steady customers. These customers are made and held by price and quantity concessions, but particularly by concessions in quantity. The “extra” – dégi or tiyô in Creole – is part of many transactions.⁴ All grains and legumes, for instance, are sold in units of tin cans of various sizes (Mintz 1961) normally heaped to spilling; the “extra” given in these instances is in excess of the heaped tin. In food measured by the lot or pile, the giving of an extra portion is sometimes more subtle. The Haitian squash (Creole: militô), the avocado, sweet potatoes, and many other perishable foods and some other items are sold in small piles. One will see a few such piles spread at the feet of a seller, and the differences between these piles are slight indeed, and difficult to measure. If the item in question varies much in size or quality, each pile will contain an assortment, and the piles are carefully prepared so that this will be so. “Extra” to pratik is then given by selecting the better items to make a pile, or by adding one or two additional units for the same price.

On a given day at a particular time in any market, the going price for unit stock of this sort rapidly comes to be relatively uniform. The same is true for dried legumes such as rice, millet, corn and cornmeal, red and black beans, pigeon peas, and so on. Unless there is considerable variation in quality or condition, this uniformity of price will prevail. Prices for particular items take shape in a fashion surprisingly reminiscent of the textbook examples. The seller knows at what price a particular item sold on the previous market day; she also knows at what price she has risked buying. She sets her opening price in line with her expectations. If demand is steady and uncomplaining, she will raise her price but she rarely has to do this, since the asking price usually adjusts downward by small concessions until it becomes stabilized. If demand is slack (and customers voluble in their disdain), and other sellers are doing business at a lower price, she will reluctantly but quickly come down. What is worth remarking is the speed with which these adjustments are made, not over time or uniformly in different market settings, but for a given and particular situation. If there are a dozen sellers of cornmeal or red beans in a given market at ten o’clock in the morning – by which time the market has been in progress and prices have been finding their levels for several hours – it will be difficult to find a single seller whose price varies as much as a penny a unit for the stock in question. Exceptions occur, however, if the stock is very scanty and the demand high; if there are big variations in quality; or if sellers with very small stocks have the need to sell off very rapidly.

The implications of price uniformity for the pratik phenomenon are interesting. Each of the retailers of a certain product in the market may be expected to have pratik; they make these pratik and hold them essentially by giving more for less. But they remain in constant competition with other sellers of the same product, in terms of their asking price. Market women do not advertise their pratik. The pratik buyer comes to his or her pratik seller and inquires after the price of a certain good. The price quoted does not vary from that quoted to any other prospective buyer. When the sale is consummated, however, the pratik buyer gets the product at a lower price – or else, and more typically, gets a greater quantity for the same price. Since this occurs only with pratik, it should not be thought that the intermediary is lowering the going price of her stock on the open market. The going price rises and falls in relation to supply and demand (Mintz, 1959: 24); price concessions of the sort described here are additional to general supply-demand based changes, or they may be thought of as occurring within the field of these wider changes.

The upshot of this is that two sorts of competition, very different from each other, occur in the same setting. The first sort, and more important, is the competition of the open market, revealed by the emerging uniformity of the asking price at anyone time for a given product in a single market. The second sort is the competition for pratik, proceeding behind the screen of apparent price uniformity. Not all buying pratik are granted the same measure of concession, nor even necessarily the same kind of concession. Intermediaries admit both to having buying pratik and to concealing the details of their pratik relationships from their competitors; these relationships are pervasive at the same time that they are partly hidden.

It remains to discuss pratik relationships between intermediaries. These are various in nature, but only one category will be treated, namely, relationships between wholesalers and retailers of agricultural products. Many agricultural items, such as dried grains, legumes, and fresh fruits and vegetables, are bulked by intermediaries who buy from numerous small producers and wholesale to retailers who break bulk in selling to consumers. Such a series includes a minimum of four participants: producer, bulker, retailer, and consumer. It is to the center of this series that attention is now directed.

Credit extension and concessions in quantity are the major means of tying retailer pratik to the wholesaler. Price reductions are also employed. Retailer pratik are to be found mainly in the capital, in and around the big markets, and in the provincial cities. Since the bulking intermediaries carry relatively large stocks, they will make pratik with numbers of retailers. Though the quantities of anyone item carried by a bulking intermediary and those purchased by any single retailer vary enormously, the relative scale can be suggested. An onion bulker from the north will usually carry from about seven to about twenty sacks of onions to the capital to wholesale. These sacks hold approximately fifteen to sixteen No. 10 cansful of onions when filled to bursting. A Port-au-Prince retailer may purchase one sack, or two, or even six, for resale by the pound or canful. The bulking intermediary will buy onions from the producer at, say, U.S. $7.00 the sack, and resell at U. S. $9.00, if the market is very brisk. For her trade at large, she will reduce the quantity of onions in each sack by one or two cansful, and thus put together enough onions for an extra sack. When reselling her onions at the U.S. $9.00 rate, she may provide her pratik with one of two kinds of advantage: reduce the price per sack, or refill the sacks to their original overflowing. She may also be willing to sell to some of her established pratik on credit, giving them a week or ten days to sell off and repay her in the form of cash. Sometimes these credit arrangements include a carrying charge or interest. A bulking intermediary with many retailer pratik may be able to dispose of half or more of her stock through her pratik. Since onions are speculative, yielding good profits sometimes but glutting the markets at others, pratik with retailers is decidedly advantageous to the bulking intermediary.

Pratik relationships seem to have a characteristic way of taking shape. A bulking intermediary will call over a would-be buyer unfamiliar to her and invite her to buy. After some talk, if the seller likes the buyer’s manner, she will make a very reasonable selling offer. As the sale is consummated, she will ask the buyer if she buys regularly on that day and at that place. If the answer is a friendly affirmative, she will say meaningfully: ‘Wait for me. I always come on this day. I come from such-and-such a town. I come here with the truck called so-and-so. I keep my stock here, at the depot of Madame X.” With more talk, an understanding begins to emerge. Each woman will carefully watch the other’s behavior on subsequent occasions, until there is genuine mutual trust. When vaunting the solidarity of a pratik, an intermediary will say: When I go to Port-au Prince, my pratik never lets me sleep in the depot — I sleep in her house.” Or: “When X promises to buy eggs for me, she hides them from the other women, and will not consider their offers.” A buying pratik who knows her selling pratik is coming will wait at the proper place and time, refusing to buy stock from others that she is sure her pratik is carrying.⁵

To the extent that her stock is committed in such arrangements, a selling pratik will refuse to sell to others until she has met her pratik buyer. One may be led to believe that the selling behavior of intermediaries is random or whimsical, and that they may refuse to make certain sales because of some irrational streak.⁶ It should be clear, however, that personalized economic relationships, while they modify somewhat the nature of the distributive process, arise precisely because intermediaries understand the basic character of the Haitian economy so well.

A final point may be considered here. In the brief discussion of Haitian agriculture undertaken earlier, nothing was said of the economic and social arrangements by which work is done. Considerable emphasis is put on cooperative work groups by those writing on Haitian rural economy (Metraux, 1951). But I think that in the Haitian countryside there is great economic individualism in agriculture, and in fact relatively little institutionalized cooperation. If this is true in agriculture, it appears to be even truer of marketing. Combines of intermediaries do not exist, and intermediaries do not at present form such combinations in order to bulk produce on a larger scale, reduce overhead, purchase trucks, fix prices, or otherwise act collectively in their own group interest. Intermediary activity has a highly fragmented individualistic character. But the pratik custom plays an integrating role. It is built up out of series or chains of dyadic relationships, which persist through time, and are founded on mutual trust for mutual advantage. It may be that some observers of Haitian rural society have not noticed the variety of integrating social forms serving various ends. Ties of the pratik kind may be most common in those societies in which more extended formal social devices have never existed or have fallen into disuse. The kôbit and kové work societies of old have nearly disappeared from Haitian agriculture, to be replaced by day labor in most cases. But overmuch notice is still taken of these disappearing work groups since they have somehow caught the imagination of observers and visiting planners. Pratik relationships, partly because they occur mainly within the distributive system rather than wholly within production, partly because they seem socially narrow, fragile, and trivial alongside the work societies, have received little or no attention. It is at least worth considering whether cooperative economic activity in a country such as Haiti might not be strengthened more by careful prior analysis of dyadic relationships, than by the marshaling of nostalgic suppositions about an institution now nearly vanished from the scene.

REFERENCES

Bauer, Peter T. 1954. West African Trade. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Hall, Robert A., Jr. 1953. Haitian creole grammar, texts, vocabulary (American Anthropological Association, Memoir 74), Washington , D.C.

Herskovits, Melville J. 1937. Life in a Haitian Valley. New York, Knopf.

James, Preston E. 1942. Latin America. New York, Odyssey Press.

Katzin, Margaret F. 1959. Higglers of Jamaica. Ph. D. Thesis, Northwestern University.

Metraux, Alfred, et al. 1951. Making a Living in the Marbial Valley (Haiti). Paris, UNESCO Educational Clearing House, Occasional Papers in Education, No. 10.

Mintz, Sidney W. 1957. Aspects of the Internal Distribution System in a Caribbean Peasant Economy. Human Organization, XV, No.2, 18-23.

——–. 1959. Internal Market Systems as Mechanisms of Social Articulation, in Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society edited by Verne F. Ray. Seattle, University of Washington Press.

——–. 1960. A Tentative Typology of Eight Haitian Market Places, Revista de Ciencias Sociales, TV, No.2, 15-57.

——–. 1961. Standards of Value and Units of Measure in the Fond-des-Negres Market Place,Haiti, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 91 (1): 23-38.

Moral, Paul. 1959. l’Economie haitienne. Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Imprimerie de l’Etat.

NOTES

1In what follows, Creole words are transcribed in the Laubach orthography, on which see Hall (1953). Creole words are italicized, and distinguished from French words by their orthography. The accent aigu over “e” is as in French. Over “0,” the accent grave forms the equivalent of the French open “0.” The “ou” is as in French, the “ch” as in English “sh, ” and the “j” as in French “z.” The circumflex indicates nasalization.

2Bauer (1954) has made the point eloquently for West Africa. Whether the intermediary’s rate of profit is “unreasonable” does not appear to be a moral question but an economic one.

3From Fr. “pratique.” A typical definition of pratik is the following. “It means that you are selling. I come to buy from you each day. I need credit; you sell to me (on credit); the money is ‘content’ that you sell to me. I always buy from your hand; I pay you well. That’s what pratik is.”

4The same procedure is reported from Jamaica. Katzin writes (1959, p. 87): “Some sellers favor their regular customers in other ways. To give ‘brawta’ or ‘make-up’ is the practice, all along the line from rural producer to retail buyer. This is identical with the British and American practice of giving something additional in a transaction.”

5In this instance, as in several described by Katzin for Jamaica, the economic rationality of such behavior is clearly demonstrated. Such examples make clear that the old woman on her way to market who refuses to sell her stock to a passing stranger at a very favorable price is not in fact behaving irrationally; quite the contrary. Nor does her unwillingness to sell demonstrate that her real purpose in going to market is merely to gossip with her neighbors, a charge which even local city people are fond of leveling at every opportunity. Careful examination of the Haitian situation throws light on James’ claim (1942, p. 771) that “The markets which are held throughout rural Haiti, many of them in the open country, are attended primarily for social pleasure, not for buying and selling.”

6This is often misunderstood to be a lack of commercial sophistication. James writes (1942, p. 771): “The average rural Haitian is not a person of great ambition, nor one who takes naturally to the complexities of commercial life.”

Devouring Objects of Study
Food and Fieldwork

Sidney W. Mintz
John Hopkins University

© 2011 Sidney W. Mintz

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This paper was first delivered as the David Skomp Distinguished Lecture on April 30, 2003, for the Department of Anthropology, Indiana University. It was then published separately, the same year and with the same title, by the Department. I have made a few small changes in the text for this online edition. It is posted here by permission of the Department of Anthropology, Indiana University.¹ Janurary 2011.

Back in 1978, when thinking about food seriously was becoming a crotchet among scholars, Joseph Epstein wrote a column for The American Scholar about the subject:

Judging from the space given to it in the media, the great number of cookbooks and restaurant guides published annually, the conversations of friends — it is very nearly topic number one. Restaurants today are talked about with the kind of excitement that ten years ago was expended on movies. Kitchen technology-blenders, grinders, vegetable steamers, microwave ovens, and the rest-arouses something akin to the interest once reserved for cars…. The time may be exactly right to hit the best-seller lists with a killer who disposes of his victims in a Cuisinart (Aristides 1978:157-8).

If Professor Epstein was so in awe more than thirty years ago, he must now ponder with added bewilderment — as should we all — what has happened since. One keeps expecting the fascination with food to fade away but it has not – anyway, not yet. The anthropological study of food-related behavior has also changed and expanded radically during the last three decades, though no one is ready to explain its momentum. Some years back, Christine Du Bois and the author (Mintz and Du Bois 2003) sought to document briefly in text, and with bibliographical underpinning, some of the major problem areas this interest has entailed, to enable us to highlight a few changes. One such problem area has to do with studies of single plants or animals, food substances, or ingredients — buckwheat or quinoa, shrimp or muskrats, collagen or lecithin, vinegars or oils. It is with that problem area in particular, in relation to anthropology, that the following remarks are concerned.

Redcliffe N. Salaman’s remarkable History and Social Influence of the Potato appeared in 1949, yet the number of kindred studies that followed it during the subsequent three decades or so was small. I wrote a book on sugar (sucrose), published now twenty-five years ago (Mintz 1985*). Since then, similar works have multiplied. We have seen books on maize (Warman 2003*), saffron (Willard 1999), rhubarb (Foust 1992). potatoes (Zuckerman 2000), pasta (Sirventi and Sabban 2000*), bananas (Jenkins 2000), eels (Schweid 2002), codfish (Kurlansky 1997), wedding cakes (Charsley 1992), Coca Cola (Pendergrast 1993, Foster 2008), two on guinea pigs (Morales 1995*, Archetti 1997*), at least two on salt (Kurlansky 2002. Laszlo 2001 [1993]), at least three on rice (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993*, Hess 1992, Carney 2001), at least two on milk (Wiley 2010, Valenze 2011 [forthcoming]), at least three more on capsicums (Long-Solis 1986*, Naj 1992, Schweid 1999 [1987]), and even a quintet, by a prolific popular food writer, on peanuts, popcorn, ketchup, and two on tomatoes in America (Smith 1994, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2002). The supplementary list of volumes since 2003 and now forthcoming or in progress is, if anything, even more intimidating. Only some of these works are by anthropologists (I have starred them above). But anthropological books on food now float amid a veritable sea of food studies. The anthropological interest in food came about by a distinctive route. If we go back to two of the founding food-centered studies by American anthropologists – Frank Cushing’s essay on Zuñi breadstuffs (1920) and Franz Boas’s work on salmon among the Kwakiutl (1921) – we can see why. Though each focused on a single food, one plant and one animal, their aim was to describe that food in cultural context. Otherwise said, each dealt with a subsistence mainstay that was food for all, inside what was conceived of as a small, specific, geographically distinct society; and both works were based on fieldwork. Most important, production, distribution and consumption are treated in each as integral — as coherent within a single social and economic system. Trade was certainly known to the Zuñi and was important to the Kwakiutl, yet food-linked economic activity appeared to be mostly endogenous.

Of course social and economic boundaries between them and their neighbors were crossed. But such boundary crossing was noteworthy. Food-related activity took place almost entirely within the society itself; and it was, and was considered, absolutely critical to survival. In both societies the issue of adequate food figured, ceremonially and ideologically, in the lives of the people. For anthropologists at that time, at least, the reasons for studying food systems were crystal clear: how could you know how the society worked, if you did not know how it got and used its food? If one looks, for example, at Clark Wissler’s The American Indian (1917), in its time a bible for beginning students of the indigenous peoples of North America, one discovers that Wissler’s culture areas are above all food areas, built on Otis T. Mason’s earlier work on “ethnic environments” (Mason 1895).

How better to begin to sort out the complexity of indigenous hemispheric life than to look at which people ate salmon, which acorns, and which maize? While some groups, such as those of the Northwest Pacific, lived rather high on the hog (so to speak), most had it much harder; none, especially to judge by their folklore, had it easy. For all New World peoples food was, both literally and figuratively, part of the central challenge of life. Turning back to works on the aboriginal peoples whose cultures most interested the anthropologists of a century ago, we remember that those societies produced most of what they consumed, and consumed most of what they produced. Yet such societies were not isolates. Alexander Lesser (1961) pointed this out in a brilliant paper, as had others before him. Still, most of the economic activities remained within definable borders. When anthropology moved away from societies that were largely self-sufficient (or that the ethnographers took to be largely self-sufficient), our task changed. Our ability to treat production, distribution and consumption as a coherent system ended, once that real (or in some cases spurious) self-sufficiency disappeared. One simply couldn’t write a monograph about Muncie, Indiana that made it look like Malinowski’s Coral Gardens and Their Magic, or Firth’s A Primitive Polynesian Economy, no matter what sorts of blinders the ethnographer wore.

The enlargement of anthropological focus beyond the so-called “primitive” came slowly, even painfully; and a full recognition that the job requirements for anthropologists had become different arrived yet more uncertainly. I ask your forbearance, in commenting briefly on that shift, by referring to my own experience. More than half a century ago, when such fieldwork by anthropologists was still rare, I worked in a rural proletarian community on the south coast of Puerto Rico. Nearly everyone there worked in the sugarcane. Indeed, one could argue defensibly that the community was defined by the activities of a foreign sugar corporation, which employed nearly every inhabitant. To have tried to picture that community as some sort of isolate, self-contained, definable in terms of itself, would have been as convincing as imagining it to be on the moon.

But understanding what had happened does not end there. I discovered that much of the social fabric of that community would remind me more of what I had been reading about in Malinowski and Firth than of Muncie, Indiana, in spite of the industrial ambience. I would come to conclude that this seeming contradictoriness was real. Learning about sugarcane and sugar production was essential to making sense of people’s lives there. Understanding something about the Boston corporation that managed its production and sale clarified other things about Puerto Rican life. Yet I knew I was making a community study, even while realizing that the local economy was utterly dependent upon forces external to it. Its people were not tribespersons or peasants; they were rural proletarians (Mintz 1951). They had no means of production beyond their labor; they were nearly as stripped of such means as any dishwasher in a New York City restaurant. They sold their labor power to a North American corporation. They produced hardly anything that they ate, ate nothing they produced. That is an exaggeration, but only a slight one. Economically speaking, their lives would have been empty without sugar.

Yet their lives as a community were real enough. Indeed, in the tenor of daily life, they seemed to me in my short life much more like a living community than anywhere else I had lived up to that time. I saw sugar as an element in the shaping of their lives, not as the subject of my research. It was not until thirty-five years later, when I decided to write a book on the history of sugar, that I first began to think of myself as a serious student of a single substance. It was lecturing on that book that made me a student of food. In the question period following a lecture on sugar history, I might be asked what I had to say about salt — about which I knew nothing; or about honey, of which I knew too little; or about Equal, or HFCS, or maple syrup – or why people everywhere seemed to like sweet foods, anyway. It was in response to my listeners’ questions that I became serious about the study of food. I recount this only to indicate to the reader how accidentally one can – or anyway, I did – wander into something like the anthropology of food.

The truth is, of course, that Sweetness and Power is not really about food — it is about the rise of capitalism. Sugar (sucrose) was simply an illustrative instance of that process, a long thread in the social and economic fabric of Western history – and the histories of peoples then buried by western historiography..

While I think that sugar is interesting in its own right, in Sweetness and Power my interest in sugar was only incidental. I was trying to uncover how holders of power in the West were establishing themselves at an early time in the world outside Europe on the one hand, and relating themselves in new ways to their own laboring classes on the other. I realized that one of the ways they were discovering how to do so was by manipulating the material universe. The one concrete substance that I knew about personally was sugar.

As the governing classes learned to take the measure of their own people and of subjected peoples elsewhere, we are able to see how the fates of different lands and their inhabitants as producers and as consumers became linked in various ways to the fates of particular substances. In effect, the ruling classes of the societies of the West, who had long seen themselves as entitled to enjoy both substances and experiences not available to others, must have been beginning to think more consciously about what ordinary people might want – and then, more importantly, under what conditions it might benefit them, the rulers, to see that ordinary people got some of what they wanted. This is a highly original line of thought if it turns up in societies where inequalities were inherited — to control others and to benefit from their existence, not by beating them with a stick, but by offering them some carrots. In practice this doesn’t work so well with donkeys, about whom it is commonly said; but some persons thought maybe it would work with humans. It did; and it does. Gradually a social and economic system was born, within which people could fashion their identities as much from what they consumed as from what they could learn, work at, or create.

Of course such a line of thought is highly speculative, even though it may sound persuasive. But what we knew about how capitalism as a system of consumption had taken shape, from writers such as Marx, Sombart and Veblen; and what I knew already about the history of sugar, made it seem worth my while to look harder. Even without the inner story of sugar, some uncovering of its nature in relation to human desires – and of the human capacity to braid together desire and habit – the larger, outer story of power might be narrated. But if I did only that, we would not have an example of what I intended to uncover. I hoped to show how, by looking at one revealing niche of activity, an ever-larger economic system could be discerned, operating pretty smoothly, though not entirely visible.

To achieve my aim, there had to be – at least for me – a definable and concrete object of study. Of course there were and are alternative ways to study sugar or any other such product. Perhaps it would have been more useful to do a discursive analysis of books on power and the tropics; or to study the history of capitalism on a larger canvas, such as the general nature of human food, the ubiquitous power of capitalism, the generalized hegemony of its leaders. I even wondered about writing about the works of whoever wrote about sugar. I had been studying those, and a lot of people, some of them interesting, had indeed written about it.

But I would not have been able to do that work well. Being of my generation, with a strong liking for the concrete, I went ahead with my own plan. That involved – though I did not anticipate it as such at the time – putting my ideas and what I learned within a framework of the sort sometimes now referred to, not very respectfully, as a “master narrative.” I suppose the truth is that I am a sucker for master narratives. Back when I was living on the edge of a sugar plantation in Puerto Rico in 1948, it surely seemed to me that sugar fitted within a larger chronicle of the rise of capitalism, of the use of forced labor outside the capitalist heartland, of fin de siècle U.S. imperialism, and of the long-term success of linking a safe site of production and a guaranteed market for consumption: at home and in the colonies, and preferably without others quite noticing it.

This looked to me like a lengthy chronicle, going back as it did for nearly five centuries, involving Europe, Africa and the tropical New World, using forced labor in many guises, and perfecting a characteristic form of industrial organization, one that blended field and factory into one efficient, productive and vicious enterprise. I did not see any of those features in sugar’s history as inevitable. Indeed, I came to take positions on the relationship of slavery to capitalism, and on the geographical locus of the first centers of industrial production, that put me in positions that no orthodox Marxist or economic determinist would want to find herself. And I surely did not believe that my version was by any means the only such narrative of the past. In fact, in a much earlier book, I had put together unawares much of the same story, taken from the mouth of a single narrator (Mintz 1960).

In chronicling sugar, I wanted to be as objective as I could. At times I wondered whether there might be some way to get enough distance from my subject to attain the objectivity that apparently comes with successfully situating oneself outside of, or above, the capitalistic system. I admit that some anthropological scholars had apparently succeeded at doing that, and at first I wanted to do it, too. But when I thought about where my university salary came from; who pays for the fellowships that my school supplies its graduate students; the light that proper attention to politics still sheds upon plantation owners in the right places, even today; and other such truths (not opinions) in today’s world – I could not elude my feeling that I, at least, was living within capitalism, not floating invulnerably above it. I decided to write my study of sugar in an old fashioned way: as if I lived in a capitalist society myself, and so I did.

As Redcliffe Salaman’s remarkable study of the potato eloquently demonstrated, the idea of studying a single plant, animal, food, or food ingredient is by no means new; and work such as Boas’s and Cushing’s in an earlier era makes plain that anthropologists had thought of it long ago. But it is worth noting afresh, because when we look at Malinowski’s work with the Trobrianders, or Firth’s with the Tikopia, we see much of the same, because they could define social groups that produced what they consumed, and consumed what they produced. In such analytical works production and consumption were not amputated from each other; the near-obsession with consumption that we have seen in food studies in recent years was absent. Put simply, in those societies the relation between supply and demand was much less influenced by market forces than is true for most of the modern world. Missing from those monographs is concern with the economic relationships among producers, and their influence over consumers. In those societies producers did not aim at enlarging, changing, or cornering a part of the market. They were not competing for buyers, nor were the consumers searching for alternate for sellers. Each economic act in those societies was also a social act. A diminishing supply did not automatically result in price rises. When such indicators, having to do with the nature of capital, of the market, and of the market value of factors of production such as labor, are not present, their absence signals that a fully developed capitalism is still wanting. But I believe that it is near impossible to study food production or consumption almost anywhere in the world today without taking such forces into account.

In the modern world, the extent to which economic factors become deeply interwoven with the role of government in the economy makes the picture additionally complex. For example, where does profit stop and the FDA begin? Should ephedra be taken off the market, rather than being sold with warnings to the consumers? Should we regulate the so-called nutraceuticals at all? To what extent should General Foods lobbyists or sugar lobbyists — or for that matter, congressmen underwritten by lobbyists — determine how the food triangle is depicted graphically, and what pictures and words go in it?

Now the interpenetration of government and the private sector poses almost daily challenges to our conceptions of individual freedom and the definition of general welfare. If one contemplates the facts about food-borne diseases and what consumers can do to protect our children from the “modern” system of food production, we have a wordless but eloquent demonstration of our near total helplessness.

But these are questions with which our anthropological ancestors did not have to deal when they studied food. They concentrated on other food-related matters, such as coral gardens and their magic, or salmon recipes on the Northwest coast. In very large measure, the doing of the anthropology of that earlier era is gone, even if — one hopes — not forgotten. But we can still study the way human beings behave, and the rules and patterns of their behavior, as did our forbears; we can still learn about different value systems, and their internal logics. We can, in short, still profitably do fieldwork, which is what we are supposed to be good at.

I was reminded of our distinctive methodological gift a few years back, when I asked two colleagues if I might read their unpublished manuscript. Professors Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz had based what became their book (2002) on the New Guinea fieldwork they had carried out over two decades and on their recent Morgan Lectures. I asked to read the manuscript because it is about sugar. In it they describe events leading up to the creation of a plantation and the construction of a modern sugar mill in Papua New Guinea. Since the history of the industrial production of sugar goes back at least to the 17th century in the Caribbean region, I tend to associate it with slavery and the destruction of cultural origins, both Native American and African. But in Papua New Guinea, making a sugar industry was intimately associated with creating a nation – not so much with destroying local cultures, as with aiming at the conception of a national culture.

The early planning discussions there, Errington and Gewertz report, had to do with whether the Papua New Guinea sugar industry would supply only the national population, or undertake to export sugar besides. Much discussion concerned the quality of sugar to be produced, as well as the quantity. People wanted PNG to have a modern industry, so the country would look modern to the outside world. So both quality – in this case, to produce fully-refined white, or the less “modern” brown – and quantity were argued over. Once decided, the next issue became that of location and employment. On grounds of fair play, and to avoid localism, the labor force for the new industry was to be drawn from peoples across the nation – a deliberate attempt was made to avoid provincialism or “wantokism” (“one-language-ism”); and by aiming to treat individuals as equals, the hope was to contribute to the building of a national identity. With the work force recruited from every part of the country, both to prevent kin, village or language-group cliques from forming, and to impose equality of treatment on all, the sugar industry became a bulwark for fostering national feelings, as against local loyalties. To at least some extent, the plan succeeded (or at least at that time the authors thought it had.). Errington and Gewertz had to learn about the sugar industry, as have many other anthropological field workers before them in other places; but what they learned shows the way that the world is changing, and the power of anthropological fieldwork to document in detail the changes taking shape. When one reads what was done with the labor force for the PNG sugar complex — organized by the Booker-Tate Corporation, one of the great capitalistic enterprises that lay behind the development of Caribbean sugar — one is stunned to see to what extent the efforts made to create a genuine landless wage-earning proletariat in Papua New Guinea paralleled those that marked the coming of U.S. power to the Puerto Rican south coast, a century before.

Even more remarkable, those efforts also reveal provocative similarities to what happened sociologically with the enslaved Africans brought in to work on Caribbean plantations centuries earlier. What I mean here is that a nation was being deliberately constructed; in Caribbean history, pre–existing cultural patterns were being deliberately broken down.

What I read about in Errington and Gewertz’s book was the imposition of a time-conscious industrial process upon people in a newly-emergent nation – people whose vision had been, and in large measure still is, conditioned by kin group, village and linguistic group that provide the circles of meaning by which the people identified themselves, as individuals and as group members. The sugar industry there reveals that they are now being circumscribed by a still larger circle – one we social scientists have variously labeled with terms such as secularization, industrialization, urbanization, acculturation or some other, but which also end up meaning at some point “modernity” within global capitalism.

I do not mean to suggest by this description that there is some single interpretive or explanatory high road to the study of food – any food – or toward our richest understanding of human behavior and its past. If we look at the work of other “sugar scholars,” after this brief glance at Errington and Gewertz, we see how rich and varied are the approaches that serious scholars have taken. Monographs by historians and anthropologists about sugar, no two of them alike – Ortiz in Cuban Counterpoint, Moreno Fraginals in El Ingenio, Attwood in Raising Cane, Scheper-Hughes in Death Without Weeping, Mazumdar in Sugar and Society in China, and many others – have advanced our understanding of the relationship among substance, society and behavior; and though sugar figures importantly in all of their work, it would be mistaken to claim that they wrote “books about sugar.” My intention in this paper was to keep the notion of concrete objects of study – in this instance, foods and food substances, and one in particular – front and center. Yet none of these books is only about sugar, even though each of them is very much about sugar. Their authors’ eyes were firmly fixed on the substance through which their protagonists, and the social forces of which they were part, interacted. Of this list of monographs, all of them excellent, two – Death Without Weeping and Raising Cane – were written by anthropologists, and both display handsomely how the study of the material world and the methods of anthropology can meet fruitfully in fieldwork. The purpose of these remarks was to reflect upon fieldwork and the study of foods or food-related substances. But permit me to conclude by making a final point.

My aim was to suggest that there are still many different ways to do anthropology, and within the subfield of food studies that is still true. We food anthropologists need to do careful fieldwork and lots of it. But we want it to help us to understand, if possible, something larger than itself. That is not always possible; and the fieldwork can still be well worth doing. But if we aim to reach a larger readership than our colleagues; and if we want what we have found out and think to serve some useful purpose beyond self-education, we should aim at exploring the larger messages our data offer us.

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NOTES

1Requests for copies of the original lecture may be addressed to the Department of Anthropology, Indiana University, 701 E. Kirkwood Avenue, SB 130, Bloomington IN 47405.