The Native Leisure Class
Consumption and Cultural Creativity in the AndesBy Rudi Colloredo-MansfeldThe University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 1999 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-226-11394-4 Contents
List of Illustrations.............................................................ixPreface...........................................................................xiPrologue: Andean Livelihoods in a Global Economy..................................11 Affluence, Consumption, and Cultural Improvisation..............................322 Outsider's Wealth: Race and Advancement, 1930–94..........................573 "Useless Things"" Subsistence Ethics and Native Identity........................874 Otavalo's Transnational Archipelago.............................................1205 The Artisan as Consumer: Commercial Faja-Weaving................................1636 The Native Leisure Class........................................................188Epilogue: Consumption and Cultural Concentration in the Andes.....................216References Cited..................................................................225Index.............................................................................247
Chapter One
Affluence, Consumption, and Cultural Improvisation
Beyond Enhancement and Dependence
Cash infusions and indigenous cultures mix in unpredictable ways. A relative rise in market resources sets some groups on paths to lively cultural expression and others to apparent dissolution. In India, for example, a tribal group known as the Muria Gonds was rich in forest lands in the last century (Gell 1986). As Hindus came into the area, the Muria sold them land which the Muria could no longer profitably cultivate. The sales generated earnings they spent to participate in village feasts. Buying finery for public ceremonies, villagers celebrated clan solidarity with distinctive assemblages of turbans, loincloths, short saris, and massive silver and brass bracelets — all of which were imported or patterned on objects from elsewhere.
In North America, the Osage escaped the poverty afflicting many Native American groups, in part, because their reservation in Oklahoma sits atop one of the largest concentrations of oil in North America (Thompson et al. 1984). Through leases and royalties, the tribe has earned more than $500 million since 1907. The money enables participation in both white and Indian culture. Osage have earned advanced degrees at Harvard, Oxford, and other universities. At the same time, Osage consistently travel from Colorado, California, and elsewhere in order to participate in the main tribal ritual, the Inlonshka. They have even found a way to preserve the central element of a warrior's funeral, the formal dedication of an enemy scalp. Instead of the traditional swatch of skin and hair, mourners buy the hair of white women as a symbolic replacement. Speaking of his tribe's commitment to its own traditions and rejection of either assimilation or Pan-Indianism, Chief Sylvester Tinker said in 1980" "The Osage got money. All them other Indians got is their ass and a hat" (Broad 1980" 35, cited in Thompson et al. 1984).
In the 1990s, the Kayapo of the Brazilian Amazon got money, too. Unlike the Osage case, though, wealth proved far more divisive. Beginning in the late 1970s, Kayapo chiefs granted mining and logging concessions to outsiders interested in the large quantities of gold and rich stands of mahogany and other hardwoods in Kayapo territory (Turner 1995). The younger chiefs who came into power in the 1980s exploited these contracts for personal gain, moving from forest villages into private town homes in Rendencao, where they kept cars, trucks, airplanes, and Brazilian servants. Eventually, young villagers and older chiefs revolted against their urbanized leaders and forced an end to the concessions. The Kayapo have subsequently built on village-based political organization to pursue a more sustainable, environmentally sound, and co-operative form of economic development.
While their histories and settings differ markedly, the Muria, Osage, and Kayapo confront a similar problem" adjusting to an influx of market wealth. The advent of relative affluence—the new opportunity to live without fear of poverty—raises fundamental questions about cultural survival, consumerism, and the agency of local groups in a global marketplace. Surveying scholarship on the subject, Richard Salisbury (1984)identifies two approaches to affluence. On the one hand, anthropologists describe how ethnic groups use new money to elaborate selected cultural forms, even as they neglect others, a process Salisbury (1984" 3)calls cultural enhancement. The Muria, whose investments in rituals and exotic goods reinforce local corporate identities, offer one example. The Sherpas of Nepal, who earn high wages in the tourist trade yet remain culturally rooted in the remote Khumbu region and devoted to Buddhist doctrine and ritual, offer another (Fisher 1990" 139-40). More generally, under newly wealthy circumstances, cultures with elaborate rituals of ceremonial feasting and exchange often intensify traditional symbols and stature associated with their leaders (Codere 1950; Strathern 1971).
On the other hand, ethnographers have recorded how a rise in earnings induces many people to forsake their culture for the products of industrial society. More than homogenization, such consumerism in nonindustrial society creates cultural dependence, a continuing need to earn money to buy the fashionable products of dominant metropoles (Salisbury 1984" 3-4). Keen to demonstrate modernity, groups such as the villagers of Erakor in Vanuatu tie "their identity to the ownership of object-signs that they can ill afford and that they are unable to produce ... asserting their cultural identity according to a code that they do not control" (Philibert 1984: 92). Along with losing local meanings, historically egalitarian groups stratify socially, thus producing conflicts between haves and have-nots.
As alternative models, cultural dependence and cultural enhancement underscore the diverse outcomes made possible by affluence. Yet taken together, they reflect the same premise. Both assume that people will invest new resources in pre-existing cultural models, either embellishing past practices or imitating the lifestyles of urban or foreign elites. Such an assumption, however, falters on two accounts. First, rather than enhance shared cultural values, new money may bring latent rivalries into conflict and elevate the position of once-marginal groups within a culture. Thus, for example, in Chiapas, Mexico, gender relations have become more contentious as Maya women in some communities capitalize on the international demand for ethnic arts. In Amatenango del Valle, wealthy female potters "are becoming caught up in the contest of envy and competitive personal advancement that was restricted to men" (Nash 1993b" 141). In so doing, they place themselves in mortal danger. Two successful potters have been murdered as a consequence of trying to achieve the public legitimacy and stature long enjoyed by men. Any cultural group, even apparently "traditional, native" ones like the Maya or the Otavalefios, contain a diversity of interests and values. Gendered, generational, occupational, and individual variations in worldviews may be more forcefully expressed in the midst of affluence and have the potential to rupture institutions trying to cope with new points of view.
Second, a rise in earnings rarely results in a systematic transformation toward any single model of living. The hallmark of Latin American modernity, in fact, is the way that it hybridizes the modern and traditional (Starn 1994). As Néstor Garcia-Canclini (1995a: 46) writes"
Latin American countries are currently the result of the sedimentation juxtaposition and interweaving of indigenous traditions (above all in the Mesoamerican and Andean areas), of Catholic colonial hispanism, and of modern political, educational, and communicational actions. Despite attempts to give elite culture a modern profile, isolating the indigenous and the colonial in the popular sectors, an interclass mixing has generated hybrid formations in all social strata.
In Otavalo, people commit themselves simultaneously and partially to multiple cultures, from Andean to an international consumerist culture. Like the Osage, Otavaleños travel great distances to participate in community rituals and will return from abroad to attend baptisms and weddings. Yet, like the people of Erakor, they sometimes seem to celebrate these events with "a code they do not control." My wife Chesca and I participated in one wedding in which the hosts continually came up to us for instruction on how to write the invitations to favored relatives, release the corks on the ersatz champagne, cut the three-level wedding cake, and cope with other accoutrements of their wedding. The event was simultaneously (and awkwardly) Andean and "Americanized." Such an occasion offers a specific, concrete example of Arjun Appadurai's (1990" 5) broader contention that the "central problem of today's global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization."
This tension calls for a more dynamic model of affluence-driven change. Rather than focus on a narrow set of outcomes, such as enhancement or dependence, we need to develop a model that emphasizes the complexities of "regularizing" social processes (cf. Moore 1975 ). That is, we need to consider how people establish the conventions and meanings that structure a community's relationships during an era of economic change and rising resources. Such an analysis would link two key concepts, organization and improvisation. By organization, I mean not the fixing of static, formal institutional structures. Rather, I refer more simply to creating consistency in interactions among individuals, a consistency that not only gives rise to certain distributions of material rewards but also to "mutual recognition of intent and significance" (Watanabe 1992" 13). Like John Watanabe, I consider such organization to be a fundamentally moral act, dependent on shared standards of conduct, beyond personal volition, for its success. Willful misuse or disregard of established conventions invites not only sanctions but unintelligibility as the meanings of new or utterly transformed conventions are no longer sensible to others (Watanabe 1992: 14).
Despite these moral and communicative constraints on individuals, people take charge. The cultural ordering that accompanies an expanding economy creates opportunities for exerting power and influence. Such initiative, though, operates less through overt coercion than through construction of new contexts of action. As Eric Wolf (1990" 586; cf. Wolf 1994)puts it, organizational power works "through the settings in which people show forth their potentialities and interact with others." It is a matter of tactics and allocation that concentrates the means of cultural participation in specific enterprises, rituals, and places, thereby accruing social and political benefits to those with access to such means. Indeed, for its connotations of consolidating power, "cultural concentration" may be a more apt term to describe the organizational process linked to rising incomes than "enhancement" (Salisbury 1984) or "intensification" (Fisher 1990). These other terms give a sense of the cultural growth taking place but not of the unequal participation that often accompanies it.
The term "organization," then, covers durable dimensions of change — regularity, morality, and power. In contrast, "improvisation" calls attention to the immediacy of this process (Jackson 1995). Cultural structuring occurs in and through the ongoing actions of people interacting in concrete situations, as Pierre Bourdieu (1977), Anthony Giddens (1979), and other advocates of "practice" theory have exhaustively argued. In explaining the role of social practice in historical transformations, Marshall Sahlins (1981) and Sherry Ortner (1984, 1989) emphasize how cultural schemas guide action in the present as people work to reproduce their culture under new circumstances. In the course of such practice, past symbols are revalued "because the 'objective' world to which they are applied has its own refractory characteristics" that disrupt expected systems of meanings (Sahlins 1981" 70). My approach similarly acknowledges the disruption of meanings and intentions due to "objective" circumstances.
In contrast to other perspectives, however, I argue that such disruptions do not signal either an unraveling culture or the missteps of shortsighted actors but, rather, moments of real agency. At times, Sahlins and Ortner describe a world in which people have shared knowledge of cultural schemas, yet partial understanding of the material, social, and political realities in which they operate. Often, though, historical circumstances are the reverse: people have a partial, situated understanding of cultural meanings and a pretty good grasp of the possibilities of and limitations for their actions. An Otavaleño teenager growing up in Bogotá may or may not share the same sense for the capricious powers of Tayta Imbabura that her cousin in Ariasucu has. Yet, each will be versed in the practical implications—tourist fascination, ethnic discrimination, indigenous solidarity, and rivalry—of exhibiting a native Andean identity linked to Tayta Imbabura's homeland. Otavaleño culture comes from the ways these cousins, their families, and others act on these implications and assert their particular meanings as general models for the wider group.
Improvisation, thus, does not mean salvaging traditional cultural schema within new circumstances. It is not about enacting a culture, but acting it (Roseberry 1994" 10). Certainly, "acting culture" entails drawing on learned schemas, but it also means learning from new experiences, working in the moment, making do with the resources at hand, playing off the people who are present and, ultimately, devising something new. The terms "acting" or "improvising" conjure up the creativity immanent in a social world like that of Otavalo in the 1990s.
In his analysis of Maya society, Watanabe (1992) argues that the conjunction of people, place, and premise—"existential sovereignties" he calls them—guide the creation of culture as both locally rooted and part of the modern world. Otavaleño culture reflects such a "localized engagement with the world," yet its production is more open-ended than what he describes for the Maya. Migration and money undermine the sovereignties of place. The trappings of transnational artisan entrepreneurship casually intermingle with the conventions and artifacts of a subsistence economy. Long-distance phone service, VCRs, and other novelties join uchurumnis (chili-pepper grindstones), anakus (straight, wrap-around skirts), and looms to the influence of other societies and challenge the cultural primacy of any single locale. As the economy diversifies and Otavaleños disperse to growing expatriate communities, this eclectic material culture has become a primary means through which people work out their relationships with others and the ideals they hold in common.
Consumption as Symbolic Action
The study of material culture in general and consumption in particular has flourished recently within anthropology (Miller 1995a). This current interest in the cultural and social significance of the material world owes much to the work of Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood (1979) and Pierre Bourdieu (1984) who illustrate the ways consumer goods serve as signs in the production of cultural categories and social dispositions. Following their lead, anthropologists have demonstrated how the traffic in objects becomes a process of signification, substantiating kinship, religion, status, class, and the other traditional categories of anthropological analysis. Thus, tiny, Japanese-made ceramic plates sold in Cairo yield clues about a changing Muslim faith (Starrett 1995). Or the Papua New Guinean television show Pepsi Fizz provides evidence of new concepts of personhood and national identity (Errington and Gewertz 1996). The creativity of this scholarship has put to rest older anthropological biases. Drinking Pepsi or buying mass-produced religious souvenirs can no longer be dismissed as the loss of authenticity or the tragic mystification of workers by commodity producers. Rather, these and other acts of consumption have been shown to be "the main arena in which and through which people have to struggle towards control over the definition of themselves and their values" (Miller 1995b: 277).
Consumption studies, however, have promised something more than symbolic explorations of identity. Scholars examine the distribution and consumption of commodities to understand problems of power and poverty. Daniel Miller (1995c: 21) puts the case succinctly: "The acknowledgement of consumption need not detract from the critique of inequality and exploitation, but this critique is foundering precisely because the enormous consequences and attractions of consumption are left out of the analysis." Sidney Mintz's (1985)historical work on sugar and global capitalism, Mary Weismantel's {1988) ethnographic analysis of bread and barley in a peasant economy, and Catherine Costin's and Timothy Earle's (1989)archaeological examination of consumption changes in the wake of Inca conquest all demonstrate the centrality of consumption in the constitution of political and economic privilege.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Native Leisure Classby Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld Copyright © 1999 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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