Rural Resistence to Globalization and Agricultural Change

Russell Rhoads

Russell Rhoads, assistant professor of anthropology, Grand Valley State University
 

Progress, Hunger and Envy: Commercial Agriculture, Marketing and Social Transformation in
the Venezuelan Andes, Monica Lindh de Montoya. Sweden: Stockholm Studies in Social
Anthropology, Stockholm University, 1996.

The Force of Irony: Power in the Everyday Life of Mexican Tomato Workers, Gabriel Torres.
New York: Berg, 1997.
 

    These two books represent recent contributions to a growing genre of literature on
cultural representations that shape the identities of subjects under study.  The cultural production
approach is dedicated to the interaction between local peoples and other powerful groups.
Variation within this approach stems from an authorâs decision about which groups have the
upper hand regarding the ãsymbol appropriationä used to manipulate the identities of others.  In
some cases, ethnic symbols may be combined by educated groups to legitimate new social
relations with the ethnic group within the nation-state, as in Wrightâs (1995) account of Garífuna
beauty queens.  On the other hand, following Michael Taussig, cultures may find a way to cope
with colonialism and globalization; people appropriate intrusive elements of development,
transforming them into metaphoric representations that empower the group against the onslaught
of capitalism.  One such example of this is Kaneâs The Phantom Gringo Boat: Shamanic
Discourse and Development in Panama, in which she describes how the Emberá use ãa
motorized archetype of desire,ä the gringo boat bringing development, as a way to reach forward
and backward in time and space, across conquest and development in order to bridge the gap
between the known and the shadowy landscape of the nation-state (1994:2).  Lindh de Montoya
and Torres both make contributions to the ãmiddle-groundä of  cultural production theory,
between Wright and Kane, but also test new territory by teaming up with actor-oriented human
agency as a mechanism for transforming the local social world.  Torres in particular builds on the
well-trodden theoretical paths blazed by post-colonial literature, James C. Scottâs ãeveryday acts
of resistence,ä and E. P. Thompsonâs approach to historical class consciousness.
 The significance of these books is to help move our focus of analysis away from the
primacy of powerful groups and elites, and how they appropriate ethnic representations.
Alternatively, the focus shifts to subordinate groups and how they ãturn the tablesä by claiming
cultural representations assigned negatively to them by more powerful groups, and then re-
deploying them as instruments of critique and social change.  Lindh de Montoya and Torres both
help the reader become aware of cultural repertoires employed through symbols, language,
metaphors, and irony as means to gain control of adverse social conditions and (re)create local
cultural forms.  Together both books demonstrate the flexibility of the cultural production
approach in two seemingly disparate cultural landscapes.

    Lindh de Montoya describes agricultural development in Venezuelan Andes and how
successful vegetable agriculture gave rise to a powerful merchant class with origins from within
the community itself.  She describes this rise in social stratification and the tensions that result as
people seek a ãleveling mechanismä to offset the free-handed economic clout of the merchant
class.  Lindh de Montoya describes how the community employs the local cultural metaphors of
ãhungerä and ãenvyä to shape the conduct of merchants and to circumscribe their control over
local farm families.  Although the strategy does little to arrest the growth of economic
stratification, it does undermine conscious class difference and proves an effective means of
making sure the welfare of the community overlaps significantly with the conduct of the
merchants.

    Based on the authorâs dissertation, the book draws from field work conducted in the late
1980s in which she relies primarily on participant-observation and open-ended interviews.  Her
main thesis is that the rapid expansion of commercial agriculture alters perceptions of self and
community.  ãWhat interests me here is the social, rather than the material . . . how the skills and
practices of capitalist agriculture are perceived, learned and incorporated into valley life.  I am
interested in what it feels like to live in Bailadores, and why.  Market production has taken hold of
local imagination, and my aim is to analyze how the market . . . shapes social lifeä (p. 10).  What
she finds is that modernity (commercial agriculture) is contrasted to a traditional existence
characterized by hunger and deprivation.

    This contrast of epochs is highlighted in chapter two, ãBailadores: History and Society,ä
in which the author embarks upon building a case that social life in the past was more integrated
and cooperative than today.  The reader will likely be disappointed with the data detailing social
and economic life before the advent of cash crop production.  Rather than reporting the
ãBailadoresâ viewpointä from detailed oral histories and thus constructing a local reality founded
on empirical data, the author relies on secondary sources for the Andean region in general,
resulting in a homogenous and familiar caricature of local life.  No doubt, we are familiar with the
normative ideal of the closed-community consisting of wealth in land, food crops, family integrity,
labor exchange, and migration.  Specifically, Lindh de Montoya replaces good historical
ethnography with an enthusiastic embrace of Gudeman and Rivera (1990), in an effort to project
an image of traditional rural life as an economically-marginal ãdomestic economy.ä   Although my
own research in Bailadores (1990-1996) on the history of agricultural change confirms this
historic condition (Rhoads 1992, 1994), Gudeman and Rivera is better used as a theoretical
construct than as a description for the local economy with its diversity and changes over time.

    Chapter three, ãThe Entry of the Cash Crop Economy,ä continues the dichotomy of
traditional and modern, examining the shift from the ãdomestic economyä to commercial farming.
Overall, this chapter lacks a penetrating look into the diversity of farm types and farmer strategies
that have accompanied the emergence of vegetable agriculture.  This is perhaps due to the
authorâs primary interest in merchants, specifically in ajeros or merchants who trade in garlic,
most of whom dwell in the town of Bailadores rather than in the countryside.  Despite these
weaknesses, the author uses greater ethnographic detail in painting a picture of how capitalization
unfolded over a thirty-year period.  Many farmers (but not all) relied on appropriating existing
cultural organization, skills and labor practices as a means of integrating new elements such as the
migrant workers from nearby Colombia.

    The strength of the book rests in the main chapters on ãMarketing Cash Cropsä and ãThe
Garlic Trade.ä   Here, the author demonstrates how emerging vegetable markets had allowed
wholesalers to set production parameters, excluding farmers from marketing process.
Intermediaries from the local community stepped in, reformulating local production and exchange
practices, consequently introducing new social images and behavior.  According to the author,
garlic merchants manipulated traditional sharecropping and, according to their needs, sometimes
appropriated and sometimes eliminated the ãhouseä organization (the domestic economy).  This
thesis is supported theoretically with an actor-oriented approach taken from personal interviews.
The use of prismatic vignettes effectively reveals the diversity of cultural symbolic meanings
clarifying socioeconomic interaction.

    The chapters ãLocal Politicsä and ãConclusion: Progress and Material Lifeä describe how
the ideal intersects with the material÷how cultural meanings commingle with development.   In
the chapter on politics, the author brings together political activism with the new political power
wielded by the successful cash-croppers and merchants, who effectively challenge the traditional
political elites of the community.  Unfortunately, the author waits until the concluding chapter to
develop the theme of how the community employs ãhungerä and ãenvyä to mitigate the power of
the merchants.  The chapter describes material progress and how the merchants invest new-found
wealth into political power and objects of conspicuous consumption.  Yet the power of progress
and social stratification tear at the fabric of community, generating psychic conflicts.   New
cultural forms and conventions are struggled for by competing cultural groups: ãthe battle for
development is fought out as much socially÷in peopleâs heads÷as it is economicallyä (p. 15).
According to the author, economic success stretches meanings and mores, redefines social
institutions, and invents new models of behavior and being.  And in the midst of prosperity for
some, others experience envy and hunger, which they re-employ via language and metaphor
against the nouveau riche as a means to deprive them from the deserved enjoyment of their gains.
 In sum, the framework adopted by Lindh de Montoya has a tendency to rely on binary
conflicts between tradition and modernity, house (subsistence) and corporation (capitalism),
farmer and merchant, and community and individual.  These oppositions are then mediated in a
form of ãdialogueä based less on economics as objective structural forces of social transformation
and more on the cultural concepts of hunger and envy.  These latter take center stage as the
pivotal cultural emotion driving social relations, and like a ball and chain, they weigh down
modernization and mitigate the harsh stratifying effects of development.  The author claims to fill
the gap in how markets redefine everyday life; market behavior is less mechanistic and better
viewed ãas a time, a place, and an intersection between socially situated actors with different
motivations and goalsä and as ãways of developing alternative social identitiesä (p. 12).   For the
most part this book succeeds in these goals, and it will certainly help meet the needs of
researchers interested in the growth of local commercial marketing systems and their effects on
local social stratification.  Readers, however, may be disappointed with the theoretical complexity.

    We leave the homegrown merchants of the Venezuelan Andes for Jalisco, Mexico and
Gabriel Torresâ study of tomato workers.  The agrarian question and peasant agriculture will not
be settled with Torres, but he does make a significant contribution to an already massive body of
research on rural Mexico.  He covers new ground and fills an important gap in our understanding
of agricultural and industrial worker studies in the context of agribusiness and globalization.  A
Mexican author, Torresâ research was directed by Norman Long and adopts Longâs actor-
oriented approach.  In this ãethnography of work,ä Torres encourages a systematic inquiry into
the life worlds of rural workers, whose ãinvisibilityä he blames on the tendency of researchers to
give theoretical primacy only to what they see as the subjugating force÷the structural variables of
globalization and capitalism.  His point is well taken; worker's reality is often captured as a
homogenous and residual artifact of structural variables.

    In contrast, Torres sets out to rub shoulders with workers and listen to their stories, work
place conversations, jokes and jibes . . . all on a serious mission of understanding how tomato
workers cope with the internationalization of agriculture.  According to Torres, as the influx of
agribusiness changes relations of production, tomato workers must cope with a labor process that
leaves them further disadvantaged and oppressed.  He wonders how these workers have endured
such conditions of poverty, and initially adopts a class analysis based on tomato workers in
opposition to growers, expecting collective political consciousness to jump out at him.  But to his
surprise, Torres learns that this top-down approach masks the empirical nature of interaction
between the two groups, which was revealed to him as heterogenous within groups and diverse
across groups.  The methodological magic he adopts is the ãreflective ethnographyä which allows
him to discover cultural repertoires, meaning, identity, symbols, and irony in both language use
and behavior.

    This shift toward spotlighting the worker delivers an appreciation for the way workers
employ irony in daily social interaction and how they are able to articulate their own power
strategies in a systematic way, ãdelegitimizing the plans and policies of those apparently in powerä
(p. 1).  The result is a melange of unexpected forms of historical consciousness as workers
encounter growers, agribusiness companies, and even new groups of workers.

    In the opening chapter, ãNew Ways for Understanding Farm Workers,ä the author
introduces some unconventional, though worthwhile, wisdom.  His thesis about worker existence
is twofold: (1) social networks, cultural identities, and organizational patterns are diverse yet
difficult to observe because (2) worker power is ãhiddenä from the ethnocentric gaze of the
researcher who devalues worker reality as either backward or as a function of capitalism.  The
task of unearthing hidden power, Torres explains, is complicated by the limitations of field
empiricism and ethnography.  But the worker struggle can be revealed, however imperfectly,
through ãpractices of irony,ä knowledge and practice about a set of conditions beyond the
workerâs control (p. 17-19):

      . . . irony allows workers to entertain the idea that even though apparently nothing
     changes, there is room for free action, joy, resistence or at least fugitive behavior .
     . . Despite these limits, emergent worker arrangements point to new forms of
     consensus, labor organization, compliance, and ways of dealing with the
     unintended consequences of actions.  These emergent forms are not fantasies, but
     implicit assumptions and concepts in a social process that includes field work itself. [p. 20]

Thus, Torres questions assumptions that legitimize the dichotomous image of development and
underdevelopment, implicitly reified as totalizing categories that swallow the capacity for workers
to exert agency and micro-diversity (cf. Kearney 1996).

    Chapter 2, ãPlunging into the Garlic,ä highlights the local character of the research
process, and advances Torresâ thesis of the link between worker ãinvisibilityä and research
ãassumptions that workers lack a counter-hegemonic discourseä (p. 35).  A local colloquialism
plunging in the garlic is borrowed by the author by analogy to signify a long-term commitment
between researcher and farm worker, and like ãplunging into the deep end of a pool,ä it is a way
for researchers to close the distance that separates them from the farm worker.

    Some readers (ready to plunge into the data) might find this chapter a distraction, better
served as an appendix justifying Torresâ ethnography of work.  But it is here where thoughtful
onlookers will find the theoretical and methodological kernel underlying the remainder of Torresâ
book.  In reading these introductory chapters, we are better positioned to see how theory impacts
the phenomena we allow through the doors of the apparently reasonable and valid.
 In the following chapter on ãTomato Work,ä Torres takes the reader on a lengthy journey
through ethnographic detail of the labor process, including the work day, the tomato season, the
diversity of company institutional styles, and worker heterogeneity.  Torres constructs the
dynamics of ãmicro-universesä or ãmicrolocalitiesä and shows how globalization and
ãrelocalizationä make an impression on the labor process at the local level.  The impression is
surprising, unexpected, and nondeterministic:

     In the paradoxical process of relocalization, the locality disintegrates owing to
     alienation by new forms of technological development, but human beings
     eventually come back to reassert the significance of locality within the discourse on
     global trends affecting the agricultural labour process.  Such a view admits that
     workerâs conditions of existence and reproduction are locally and regionally
     embedded . . . .  Thus locality again becomes relevant, if not critical, for
     understanding agricultural labour processes. [pp. 57-58]

    Chapter 4, ãThe Politics of Tomato Work in Autlán History,ä broadens in scope
connecting microlocalities to regional historical contexts.  According to Torres (p. 104), ãThe
goal is to distinguish the universal and that which originates in actorâs everyday lives, by analyzing
power mechanisms and the relationships linking organizational schemes with other locations and
times.  Thus, belonging to a local community means being simultaneously inside and outside.ä  In
other words, externalized and internalized influences impinge upon the construction of worker
identity.  Readers will find this section wielding a forceful argument with particulars on the way a
companyâs externality becomes internalized (appropriated) within local traditions of carrying out
agricultural tasks and organizing rural life.  As Torres concludes, Autlán has not one history, but
several associated with distinct groups that claim ties to the locality over time.  These histories are
brought to life in the following chapter, ãOn Workersâ Power and Skills,ä which recounts a series
of vignettes.  Torres uses this anecdotal tactic because ã[f]ollowing workers through a series of
interactions exposes the fragility of the status quo, the inconsistencies of the official truth, the
provisionality of company hierarchies, and the rupture of ideological and historical trends despite
their continued prevalenceä (p. 165).

    ãThe Force of Irony and the Irony of Power,ä chapter six, examines work place collective
behavior: how subordinated people accumulate, exercise and concede power.  Again, Torres
reminds the reader that this power is concealed under representations of subordination.  He also
returns to key concepts for further theoretical development: ironic practices and contingent
utopias.  Irony helps the workers recover dignity against the stereotypes and prejudices
perpetrated against them by company personnel; and contingent utopias help workers articulate
systematically their power strategies.  These two concepts, Torres argues, help explain the initial
question of how workers endure oppressive work and life conditions.  Supported by several more
vignettes, Torres describes profiles of collective behavior, such as the use of jokes and irony in
conversation.  Farm worker life projects are also viewed as contingent upon the imposition of a
dominant structure, but these conditions, Torres states, are tolerated as temporary until a better
motivation allows workers to see the undesirability of the situation.  In Torresâ words, ãI employ
the term contingent utopia to characterize the association of actors and events and the paradox of
seeking opportunities over a long time without being sure of the outcomes.  The concept
emphasizes the active and creative self-determination of workersä (p. 184)  As a result, farm
workers can and do transform the organization of production and their life conditions.  Workers
use the power of their subordination to ready themselves and to force change.

    The Epilogue, ãWho Are They?,ä presents a final theoretical reflection on the ãethnography of work.ä
Torres begins with a question directed rhetorically at those we study: How do I know that my concept
represents you and your real existence?  Restating his thesis and raising issues on actor-oriented human
agency and its transforming capacities, Torres resolves that the ethnography of work ãdemonstrates the
indeterminacy of macro-structural variablesä in favor of the limited, but more accurate, contingent utopia
ãas motivating farmworkerâs spontaneous, creative, ironic acts, which should therefore be seen as part
of a subtle but active strategy of resistenceä (p. 219).  By the end of the book, the reader is left with an
honest, convincing proposal, both well-documented and well-constructed.  I especially appreciated the
way he clarifies biases in ãtheoryä that purport to explain micro-macro processes of globalization and
capitalization, as well as his descriptions of the dynamic and diverse cultural forms of tomato workers.

    In sum, Torresâ claim that the subject (worker), in a conscious manner, grasps the system
of objective relations governing the social world advances beyond Bourdieu.  We owe a debt to
Torres for bringing to us the historical consciousness of the tomato workers, both in groups and
as individuals, which bestows dignity on people who time and again take the brunt of capitalism.
The Force of Irony affords the workers voice and visibility they deserve, advances ethnographic
theory in the critical, reflexive tradition, and offers a believable account of the link between
globalization and local social worlds.  In addition, Torres makes clear that concepts of domination
and subordination are indeed problematic realities.  Finally, both of the reviewed books bring two
disparate groupsö agricultural workers and merchants÷to Kearneyâs (1996) reformulation of the
peasant concept, reinforcing the trend of rethinking anthropological biases concerning appropriate
subjects of analysis.  Although researchers wedded to the positivist tradition will likely balk at the
Torres world view, anthropologists, rural sociologists and those development specialists with field
experience should recognize outright the contributions that this book makes to micro-theory, the
ethnography enterprise, and to agricultural workers everywhere.

References Cited

Gudeman, Stephen and Alberto Rivera
               1990 Conversations in Colombia: The Domestic Economy in Life and Context. New
                        York: Cambridge University Press.

Kane, Stephanie C.
               1994 The Phantom Gringo Boat: Shamanic Discourse and Development in Panama.
                        Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Kearney, Michael
               1996 Reconceptualizing the Peasantry.  Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Rhoads, Russell
               1992 The Intergenerational Transfer of a New Rurality: The Family Farm and
                        Commercial Production in the Venezuelan Andes.  Urban Anthropology and
                        Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 21(4):311-351.

               1994 Farm, Family, and the New Rurality among Vegetable Farmers of the Venezuelan
                        Andes.  Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Kentucky.

Wright, Pamela
               1995 The Timely Significance of Supernatural Mothers or Exemplary Daughters: the
                        Metonymy of Identity in History.  In Articulating Hidden Histories: Exploring the
                        Influence of Eric R. Wolf.  Jane Schneider and Rayna Rapp, eds. Pp. 243-261.
                        Berkeley: University of California Press.