Does a commodity economy enrich the few while ruining the masses? Differentiation among petty commodity producers in guatemala

Abstract

In this paper I discuss the way in which rural artisans in one municipio of Guatemala organize production and how this organization impedes the differentiation of the artisanal population into owners and workers. I show that categories of owners and workers exist in the municipio, but that these categories do not reproduce themselves as classes; instead, they reproduce each other through the life cycle. In order to explain this phenomenon, I look at internal relations of production, the external environment of large‐scale capital, and the role of migration and the stale in the creation of a permanent Guatemalan proletariat and in the creation of an undifferentiated artisanal economy.

Notes

1 would like to thank Jeff Boyer, Katherine Verdery and Robert Williams for helpful comments on this paper. I would also like to thank Sutti Ortiz and Alain de Janvry for inviting me to present some of this material to their seminars at the University of California, Berkeley, which helped me sharpen my arguments. The research reported here was supported by the National Science Foundation [Grant No. BNS 77–08179] and the period of analysis and writing was supported by both NSF and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. 1 would like to dedicate this article to the late Don Chus, master weaver of Totonicapan.

Department of Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27706, USA.