Commodifying Everything

Relationships of the Market

Susan Strasser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136706929
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

Commodification refers most explicitly to the activities of turning things into commodities and of commercializing that which is not commercial in essence. The mass marketing of pets, the rise of the coffin industry, the conversion of preacher into salesmen, and the globalization of Taleggio cheese are some of the exciting but surprising topics in this volume that show how friendship, death, spirituality, and artisanship all have a price after being commodified. This unique collection of essays is a fascinating take on creating consumer products and consumer identities when what's for sale goes well beyond the thing itself. It will be a course-in-a-box for instructors who want to teach their students about commodification.

V

Village and Nation: Community, Identity, and the Market

9

Marketing Community

State Reform of Indian Village Property and Expenditure in Colonial Mexico, 1775–1810*

Andrew B. Fisher

IN 1841 THE WIFE OF A SPANISH DIPLOMAT, Frances Calderón de la Barca, witnessed a religious celebration in the Indian village of Uruapan in western Mexico. She recalled:

Yesterday, being the festival of San Andres [sic], the Indians were all in full costume and procession, and we went into the old church to see them. They were carrying the saint in very fine robes, the women bearing coloured flags and lighted tapers, and the men playing on violins, flutes, and drums. All had garlands of flowers to hang on the altars; and for these lights and ornaments, and silk and tinsel robes, they save up all their money.¹

Calderón’s brief account concerns a pervasive component of rural Mexican life, the patron saint holiday. A melding of pre-Hispanic and Catholic religious sensibilities, these celebrations (fiestas) had served as symbols of indigenous identity and resistance to exploitation since the Spanish colonial era (1521–1821). Often noisy, sometimes violent, and almost always carnivalesque, fiestas were occasions for peasant communities to reaffirm social bonds and ethnic boundaries in a racially stratified society that placed indigenous people at the bottom rungs of the social pyramid. To celebrate the birth or martyrdom of a saint, a manifestation of the Virgin Mary, or significant events in the Catholic calendar, villagers shared food and alcohol while enjoying the pageantry of fireworks and candles, bullfighting, costumed processions, dance, and music. As Calderón notes, holidays could be exceedingly expensive, and were a luxury for otherwise poor peasant communities. Indians traditionally raised income for village fiestas through the selective commodification of communal property they considered the domain of the saints themselves. Agricultural produce and livestock raised on the saints’ lands were sold, while many of these same goods (e.g., corn and cattle) circulated through reciprocal networks of exchange (and consumption) that reaffirmed community affinity.²

Far from pristine relics from a distant past, Indian fiestas and their sponsorship evolved in response to punctuated periods of crisis characterized by “particularly heavy pressure from external political and religious authorities.”³ One of the most crucial of these turning points occurred during the late eighteenth century when the Spanish Bourbon monarchs, influenced by Enlightenment philosophy concerning the “rational” organization of society and “proper” expressions of religious piety, launched an ambitious project to alter how indigenous villages interacted with the market. As part of a larger imperial effort historians call the Bourbon Reforms, government officials oversaw the forced acceleration of the commodification of communal resources (especially land) to augment village treasuries that could then be extracted by the state.⁴ Municipal savings were further promoted by curtailing village sponsorship of the ritual calendar. In place of communal property funding fiestas and other expressions of village solidarity, the state attempted to impose a conception of community conceived in terms of market value and cost. The saints’ properties, in other words, were no longer to be considered the means of replicating community ethos, but rather were to be treated strictly as commodities to be bought and sold at will.

This paper examines how Indian peasants living in one region of western Mexico—the tierra caliente, or “hot lands,” of the mid-Balsas River Depression in the modern-day state of Guerrero—responded to these pressures. These villagers resisted the commodification of collective resources by legal and extralegal means whenever possible, but also sought to revamp the sponsorship of fiestas rather than witness their ruin. In this respect, Indians reaffirmed the importance of traditional expressions of community solidarity, and refused to alter how they viewed the village assets that underwrote the fiestas. The result was a dual system of municipal finance: village coffers funded through coerced commodification for the benefit of the state coexisted with a modification of the older system that combined market and nonmarket circulation of goods to sponsor traditional needs.

Recent scholarship has underscored the complex ways by which things become marketable goods, and has suggested that commodification can be considered neither a complete nor an irreversible process.⁵ More problematic is the concurrent tendency to downplay the distinction between goods exchanged in a market economy and those circulating through gift or barter networks. According to this approach, what is important is whether the item in question is exchanged rather than whether it was produced for a commercial market or, say, some form of a precapitalist moral economy.⁶ Reaction in the tierra caliente to the Bourbon state’s commodification of village resources belies this position. The viewpoint of the Indian peasantry—with their mixed economy of market and reciprocity exchanges—reinforces Michael Taussig’s assertion that capitalist commodities, “although they may in fact be the same articles, socially and conceptually … are very different” from their precapitalist counterparts.⁷ Most significantly for this chapter, the marketing of village land transformed the foundation of a communal system of reciprocity into a vehicle of colonial exploitation. Resistance to this development was widespread, and contributed to a nascent sense of pan-Indian identity emerging in the region on the eve of independence. “Indianness,” in other words, began to be linked to popular hostility toward the commodification of communal life.

The Remaking of Indian Society, 1521–1700

The origins of the fiesta system rest largely with Indian adaptations of Hispanic institutions that were introduced in the early colonial period. After the tierra caliente fell under Spanish control in the early 1520s, preexisting indigenous structures and established circuits of exchange helped meet colonial demands for precious metals, various tribute goods, and labor services.⁸ This arrangement unraveled during the second half of the century, however, due to the precipitous decline of the region’s Indian population from Old World diseases and dislocations caused by exploitation. Decline occurred throughout Mexico, but in areas such as the tierra caliente, with its relatively sparse precontact population, indigenous polities nearly vanished. In the aftermath of the population crisis, the economy collapsed and Spanish interest declined appreciably in this otherwise poor and inhospitable region. The economic downturn allowed the remnants of the remaining settlements to recuperate in relative isolation for much of the seventeenth century.

As the sixteenth-century crisis deepened, the state implemented measures intended to transform indigenous society and to expedite the extraction of resources from the peasantry. Authorities resettled the dwindling population into select communities, called pueblos de indios, modeled architecturally and conceptually after Hispanic notions of civic life, including a central plaza with a church and municipal buildings. Annually elected officials who served on the Spanish-introduced town council (cabildo) replaced the hereditary elite and were supervised by a Spanish magistrate.⁹ These sites of concentrated population facilitated Christian conversion and Hispanic acculturation, and enabled a handful of Spaniards to maintain order far from the urban centers of colonial power.¹⁰ Furthermore, wealth could more easily be collected from a population no longer dispersed throughout the countryside. Indian officials were responsible for raising tribute and collecting other fees from pueblo members to underwrite both village expenses and the parish church. These fees were deposited in a community chest (caja de comunidad).¹¹

Indigenous reaction to these reforms varied in the tierra caliente. Although municipal officers (governor, alderman, etc.) played an important role in villages throughout the colonial period, the cajas that underwrote their salaries were soon abandoned, only to be reintroduced by the Bourbon Reforms of the late eighteenth century.¹² Indians instead adapted another facet of Hispanic culture, the Catholic lay brotherhood (cofradía), to serve as the principal institution of the newly organized pueblos. The Spanish intended this institution to support the Indians’ devotion to a particular heavenly intercessor or holy day, but more importantly for villagers it served as a crucial element for a reconstructed indigenous collective identity.¹³ Indeed, these lay organizations were so prevalent and central to community life by the mid-seventeenth century that it was nearly impossible for outside observers to discern easily the boundary between cofradía and community membership or resources. Most of these brotherhoods were not officially sanctioned by either the colonial state or the Church hierarchy and thus remained almost entirely under Indian management. Much as they adapted Spanish Catholicism, Indians used cofradías to fulfill the needs and values of their communities.

To that end, cofradías supplanted some of the roles falling under the jurisdiction of the cabildo. Funding for religious celebrations and other community expenses, for instance, was collected on behalf of brotherhoods rather than for the cajas de comunidad. Cofradías also became the chief beneficiaries of land left vacant after the demographic collapse. During a century of low population density, many area villages included enormous tracts that were not needed for subsistence agriculture, and much of it was turned over to lay brotherhoods. These lands often became the patrimony of the patron saints, rather than property belonging to the town council or individual villagers.¹⁴ Donated, semi-feral livestock roamed freely over the saints’ land, tended to by members of the community.¹⁵ Men planted corn and cotton for the divine benefactor, while women spun the cotton and wove cloth, a local religious obligation that predated the conquest.¹⁶

Most mundane village expenses could be covered from the commodities this collective labor produced.¹⁷ The sale of the saints’ cloth, corn, and cattle (either on the hoof, or as salted meat and leather byproducts) were important sources of revenue. But along with the limited circulation of these village assets into the local economy, cattle and corn were distributed in nonmarket transactions that symbolically reinforced community identity. The celebration of both secular and religious holidays (New Year’s, the annual inauguration of village officials, rodeo and branding days, patron saints’ days, etc.) afforded an opportunity for ritual feasts in which all villagers participated.¹⁸ The communal consumption of the saints’ cattle and corn, made possible only through the labor of the entire community, served as a powerful reminder of bonds of reciprocity and responsibility in the new colonial villages. Other important exchange networks of cattle and corn involved supplemental rations allotted to those placed in charge of the pueblo’s livestock and the disposition of alms to the most needy of the village.

Thus, by 1700, Indian society in the tierra caliente had survived its near-fatal demographic collapse and had reemerged in a new form; Catholicism was intertwined with and informed by pre-Hispanic culture. Of primary import were lay religious brotherhoods, which sponsored the celebrations that served as the locus of collective identity. Villages sold communal goods to raise funds for these fiestas, while also distributing the saints’ bounty to community members in times of celebration and need. By 1750 the local economy had rebounded from its malaise, attracting unprecedented numbers of non-Indian migrants who began usurping land and other village resources. The more significant threat to villages, however, emerged soon after, with government efforts to modify how Indians managed municipal property. This reform program stressed the fiscal impetus behind the state’s previous reorganization of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• I Boundaries of the Market
• II Love and Money: Intimate Relationships and the Market
• III Goods and Services: Expanding Market Relationships
• IV God and Mammon: Selling and the Sacred
• V Village and Nation: Community, Identity, and the Market
• Contributors
• Index