Scott Cook

Peasant economy, rural industry and capitalist development in the Oaxaca Valley, Mexico

This article examines the dynamics of rural industrial commodity production in capitalist development. Data from fieldwork in the Oaxaca Valley, Mexico, are presented and analysed around issues such as the relationship between agriculture and industry, factors influencing the incidence of rural industrial production (between households, communities and districts), the role of household demographics in rural industry, the difference between simple commodity and simple capitalist production, social differentiation and class formation as related to different rural industries, and the role of labour‐intensive rural industrialisation in developing capitalist economies. A general conclusion is that labour‐intensive industries in capitalism today may not be as uniformly retrograde as some have argued they were in earlier periods of capitalism.

‘Structural Substantivism’: A Critical Review of Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics

Stone Age Economics is the most important book in the field of economic anthropology produced by an American cultural anthropologist since M. J. Herskovits published The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples in 1940. Its theoretical and analytical superiority to that earlier book should cheer those of us who feel depressed because of the slow and tortuous course of progress in this sub-field of anthropological inquiry. While Sahlins’ book is original and provocative, however, it is not likely to revolutionize thinking in the field as much as the recent work by Godelier (1967). Even though it lacks the theoretical scope and scholarly judiciousness of the latter work, it should nevertheless become a minor classic in the literature dealing with ‘primitive’ (or tribal) economic life.

Value, price, and simple commodity production: The case of the Zapotec stoneworkers∗

The concepts of ‘commodity’ and of ‘simple commodity production’ in the work of Marx and his interpreters are examined as a necessary departure point for the analysis of value and price in a Mexican peasant‐artisan stoneworking industry. The labour theory of value, which posits a close relationship between market price and average embodied labour cost of commodities in a peasant‐artisan economy, is applied to the stone‐working industry and is shown to have explanatory power in both the qualitative and quantitative sense. This analysis leads to the conclusion that the labour theory is a necessary tool for discerning and approximating the fundamental role of the labour process, as well as the structure of production relations, in determining the nature and conduct of exchange activities in a peasant‐artisan commodity/market economy.

Commodity Cultures, Mesoamerica and Mexico's Changing Indigenous Economy

A case is argued for the constitutive role of commodity value (use + exchange + symbolic), and its shifting triangulations, in Mesoamerican and Mexican indigenous culture. This role cross-cuts historical epochs but assumes more pervasive influence historically in proportion to the spread of integrative markets and monetization. Given their commodity value matrix, indigenous direct-producing subjects, yesterday and today, are assumed to economize, regardless of the nature and destination of their labor or products or the particular social relations organizing the latters disposition. Particular forms of commodity value triangulation require empirical determination at specific spatial/temporal coordinates. Critical evaluations of work by Karl Marx, Guillermo Bonfil, Alejandro Marroquín, Manuel Gamio and Arturo Warman, together with ethnographic material, are used to support the case for the commodity value approach.

Rural Industry, Social Differentiation, and the Contradictions of Provincial Mexican Capitalism:

*Scott Cook teaches in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Fieldwork and archival research between 1977 and 1983 were funded by the Social Science Research Council, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the University of Given the well-known asymmetrical interdependence of the international capitalist system, it would be foolish to assert that a Latin American national economy such as Mexico’s is structurally and operationally independent of transnational capital. But our understanding of the evolution, structure, and functioning of Mexican capitalism will be deficient if we remain within the framework of a one-sided underdevelopment thesis that emphasizes only dependency and big capital. We should start by examining the large sector of small-scale, labor-intensive, noncapitalist industrial commodity-producing units that Mexican capitalism embraces. This sector is organized and operates at the household and community levels in several provincial areas as well as in major metropolitan areas (e.g., Lomnitz, 1975; Eckstein, 1977). This so-called informal or petty commodity

Malinowski in Oaxaca: Implications of an unfinished project in economic anthropology, part I

Malinowski’s unpublished and long unavailable field notebooks from 1940 are examined to show how his fieldwork influenced the organization and content of the co-authored preliminary report (with Julio de la Fuente) of his unfinished Oaxaca Valley, Mexico project. The personal and diplomatic background of Malinowski’s Oaxaca project is reviewed, together with the origins and development of his views on economics before, during, and after his fieldwork in Melanesia. The reasons for the fitful nature of the handling of Malinowski’s Oaxaca project materials following his death in 1942 are explored, and the themes and content of his work on Trobriand economics are systematically compared with those of his work in Oaxaca. Implications of his incomplete Oaxaca project, and of other late-career writings, for his place in the history of economic anthropology are considered.