distribution

DISTRIBUTION AND REDISTRIBUTION

Thomas C. Patterson

Both anthropology and economics were constituted as disciplines in the context of a debate that began about 1750. This discourse is concerned, with the rise of modern capitalism and its impact on peoples in both the core and peripheral areas of its development. One explanation of the difference between the two fields asserts that economists have sought to account for these changes in terms of universally applicable models of human nature for instance, that human beings are naturally economizing, whereas anthropologists have stressed the importance of culture and its shaping effects on behaviour, both  individually and in the aggregate (Geertz 1984). As Joel Kahn (1990), Heath Pearson (2000) and others have shown, the inter-relationships of anthropology and economics are actually more complicated, and both contain In different ways elements of the dialogue among the diverse strands of liberal, romantic and Marxist social thought. Kahn further notes that concerns about cultural otherness manifested in both fields in the late nineteenth century occurred at a historical moment when traditional communities in both core and peripheral areas were being enmeshed increasingly in capitalist social relations and transformed differentially. One should add that new cultural identities were also forged in the process.

A concern with the inter-relations of production and distribution has been an important feature of this debate. From the eighteenth century onward, classical political economists, including Karl Marx, based their arguments on the labour theory of value, distinguishing between (1) the amount of goods required to sustain the members of a society and to ensure its reproduction and (2) surplus production above and beyond those subsistence needs. While Adam Smith and others argued that capitalist wages refracted subsistence needs and that surplus (profit) was 'the residual after wages have been paid'. Marx asserted that wages and profits were determined by historical conditions rather than subsistence needs (Calhoun 2002: 127). In his view, 'production creates the objects which correspond to given needs: distribution parcels them up according to social laws' (Marx 1973 [18587—58]: 89). Twentieth-century neoclassical economists, in contrast, have rejected the labour theory of value, claiming instead that distribution is based on the costs of goods and various production factors as these are determined by the interaction of supply and demand in the market.

Karl Polanyi (1957 [1944]: 47-55. 272; see Isaac chap, 1 -supra), building on the work of anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski (1922; see Strathern and Stewart chap, 14 infra), also related distribution to exchange (circulation). Unlike the neoclassical economists, Polanyi realized that market exchange and economies were historically contingent rather than universal, He argued that many societies had non-market economies; economic behaviour was rooted in the social organization of these groups and was based on principles of reciprocity (exchange between groups of kin), house-holding (production for use) and redistribution (collective pooling and reallocation of goods by a central authority). Beginning with EIman Service (1971 [1962]: 134), a number of anthropologists have viewed redistributive activities as virtually the exclusive basis of chiefly authority in stratified kin societies; they have argued that permanent, paramount chiefs coordinated large-scale production projects as well as the economic specialization of households or communities located in different ecological habitats, A few have continued to argue that the control chiefs exerted in the reallocation of goods was the basis of slate formation. Other anthropologists have focused less on redistributive activities of chiefly men and women than on the mutual rights and obligations of chiefly and non-chiefly peoples (estates) in stratified kin societies and on the tensions that exist between them, they have also urged examining the dialectics of class and stale formation instead of arguing that chiefdoms somehow automatically transform themselves into tributary slates (Gailey 1987; Sahlins 1963).

Many but certainly not all, anthropologists and economists have subscribed to the idea of progress: that is, the view that the processes underlying the development of society in general and of modern capitalist societies in particular are unidirectional, irreversible and inevitable. The uncritical adoption of this perspective buttresses the crasure of what we know or what we can infer with varying degrees of certainty about other societies, past and present, from archaeological, historical and ethnographic information. For example, there is evidence from different pans of the world of societies, past and present, in which economic rationality and market exchange are either non-existent or not very important, and in which there are few, if any, incentives to engage in the production of a surplus. There is also evidence of societies that lack exploitative social relations and of state-based societies, both ancient and modern, that either fell apart or seem to be in the process of doing so (Gailey 1987; Lee 2003; Patterson 1992; Szelenyi 1988, Szelenyi and Szelenyi 1991). in a phrase, primitive communism, what Erie Wolf (1982) called the kin-communal mode of production, has been and probably continues to be a reality, and class and state formation is probably still best viewed as a two-way street.

My aim in this chapter is to examine how the relations of distribution differ from one form of society to another. As Marx (1981 [1894]: 927) noted many years ago, what distinguishes societies manifesting different modes of production is the specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour [or goods] is pumped out of the direct producers', What distinguishes direct producers in capitalist states from those in tributary and tribal (kin-organized) societies is that they have been separated from the means of production, whereas the latter retain possession or control over them as well as over portions of the goods they produce and their labour time. While the appropriation of surplus value during the production process is typical of capitalist production relations, it is not characteristic of either tributary states or the various kinds of tribal societies that were forced on the margins of states. In tribute-based societies as diverse as Han China, Byzantium or the Inca empire, surplus goods or labour were typically appropriated by political or extra-economic means from conquered or otherwise annexed subject peoples (Haldon 1993).

I shall discuss distribution and redistribution in terms of the tribal (kin-organized), tributary-state and peripheral capitalist societies traditionally examined by anthropologists. With regard to tribal societies, however, it is useful to keep two things in mind. First, not all of the tribal societies described, by anthropologists and historians are kin-organized. Some, for example Dahomey and Hawaii, are more accurately described as tributary states, and several anthropologists have recommended not using the term 'tribal' to refer to them. Second, tribes are simultaneously 'administrative units forced upon varied and politically autonomous groups in colonial contexts" and often hierarchically structured 'response[s] to the necessity of defense against imperialist efforts to dominate a given area" (Diamond 1991: 544). The conditions of state formation create resistance on a number of cultural and political fronts. The abilities of tribal societies to resist tribute exactions or becoming enmeshed in capitalist wage relations are varied and historically contingent.

Kin-organized societies and the communal mode of production

The most distinctive features of tribal societies manifesting the kin-communal mode of production are (1) collective ownership of the primary means of production and (2) the absence of social division of labour, in which the members of one group permanently appropriate the social product or labour of the direct producers. In other words, social relations are not exploitative in the sense that one group does not extort product or labour from the other throughout the entire developmental cycle. Eleanor Leacock (1982: 159) has argued that there is no exploitation in these societies because of the unity of the production process and the participation of all adults in the production, distribution, circulation and consumption of social product. This means that each individual is dependent on the community as a whole, it also means that there are no structural different; us between producers and non-producers. Such a distinction would exist only from the perspective of a given individual who is too young, too old or not a participant in a particular labour process; however, the distinction would disappear when the focus in extended beyond that of a, single individual or a single labour process. It becomes inverted from one labour process to another, as a direct producer in one instance becomes a consumer in the next.

Let us consider, as an example, how production, distribution and consumption are inter-related among the Dobe Ju/'hoansi, a foraging people who live in the Kalahari Desert and had only vague notions of the Botswana and South African states in the 1960s when anthropologist Richard Lee (2003: 46--58) first lived with them. The core living group of Ju/'hoansi society consists of siblings of both sexes, their spouses and children who live in a single camp and move together for at least part of the year. When the November rains come to the Dobe waterhole in northwestern Botswana, the camp may expand to include the spouses' siblings, their spouses and children as well as a steady stream of visitors. Plant foods collected by women are pooled within families and shared with other families. Men hunt, and a kill brings prestige to the successful hunter who in reality distributes the meat to his family, parents, parents-in-law and siblings However, the meal does not belong to the hunter but rather to the owner of the arrow he used to dispatch his prey. Both men and women lend and give arrows to men: thus, it is the arrow's owner, not the hunter, who is responsible for distributing die meat and for any glory or hostility that results from it. If the arrow's owner is present, the hunter shares the meat with him or her, if the arrow's owner is elsewhere, the hunter saves a portion of dried meat which be presents when they get together.

!n kin-organized societies, men and women typically share the products of their labour with a range of kin: however, who constitutes kinfolk is often defined in several different ways and, thus; the category may be an ambiguous one. Let us consider for a moment how the Ju/'hoansi describe kin. Three distinct kinship systems operate simultaneously among them. The first involves the genealogical terms an individual uses to refer to his mother, father, son, daughter, older siblings and younger siblings: it distinguishes generations and relative age within a generation and lumps older and younger siblings of both sexes. In general, men and women joke with other members of their own generation and the generations of their grandparents and grandchildren: they show respect and reserve when dealing with members of their parents' and children's generations. The second kinship system is based on personal names; there are relatively few men's and women's names, and these are always gender linked. Thus, men and women share names with many other Ju/'hoansi. The possession of common names trumps genealogical ties; it also means, for instance. that an individual would cull anyone with his father's name 'father', and that he would be called by various term—depending on what his name meant to another person (similarly with someone having the same name as a woman's mother). The third kinship system is based on the principle that the older person determines the kin terms that will he used in a relation with another individual. The simultaneous operation of the three kinship systems makes kin out of virtually everyone in ju/’hoansi society, both those who are related biologically and those who are not. It tremendously expands the range of individuals with whom me products of labour are potentially shared (Lee 2003. 59 -76).

The Ju/'hoansi demand high levels of sharing and tolerate low levels of personal accumulation. Charges of stinginess and arrogance are the most serious accusations one individual can make about the behaviour of another. A woman who refuses to share foods she has collected is stingy, while the hunter who boasts iihoul his success is arrogant. While there are powerful leveling mechanisms among the Ju/'hoansi and other kin-organized societies, this does not mean that all kin-organized societies manifesting the kin-communal mode of production lack social differentiation or that interpersonal relations are not occasionally onerous or oppressive, or even that wealth differentials are absent. In some of these societies, especially those with stratified kin systems like the Tongan Islands in the early nineteenth century, individuals and groups occasionally do withdraw from direct labour and depend on the labour of others. However, their ability to appropriate labour depends not only on the positions of authority they occupy in the hierarchical kinship system but also on the continued goodwill of the community, rather than on force or control of the means of production. This authority is fragile. To threaten the community's customary standard of living with excessive demands invites resistance and denial of prestations. The appearance of a potential social division of labour within such societies creates tensions that make these hierarchies unstable, unless the kin antagonisms they generate are deflected by the mediating practices and Institutions of extraction and ruler-ship of the state.

Let us consider how production, distribution and consumption are interrelated in a kin-organized society with a stratified kinship system. Christine Gailey (1987) pointed out that, in early-nineteenth-century Tongan society, everyone was ranked relative to everyone else according to three potentially ambiguous and contradictory principles: (1) older was superior to younger; (2) maleness was superior to femaleness; (3) sisters were higher ranked than brothers. Moreover, people were also ranked collectively according to their genealogical proximity to a shared, founding ancestor and belonged to one or the other of two overarching hereditary estates; chiefly and non-chiefly peoples. Only the highest-ranking chiefly people were tilted. They attempted to support their claims to titles by reference to genealogical accounts that spanned more than a hundred generations and described the activities and deeds of named ancestors. However, these accounts winch were kept by chiefly women, contained another source of ambiguity: personal names in Tonga were not gender linked. As a result, while all relationships were potentially charged with inequality, the ambiguity which existed meant that there was also considerable room for maneuvering, especially in successional disputes and attempts by chiefly women lo consolidate their rank.

The division of labour in Tongan society refracted rank, age, gender, kin connections and skill (Gailey 1987: 84-105). Chiefly men holding the highest-ranking titles withdrew from direct production and delegated use-rights to lower-ranking district chiefs who provided labour as well as perishable and durable goods. The district chiefs oversaw the activities of non-chiefly peoples who were bound to the land but had hereditary use-rights to the means of production and to resources obtained through kin connections. While non-chiefly men farmed and fished, all women made woven mass and bark cloth (wealth objects or valuables) that were infused with their rank. The ranking systems refracting age and gender also functioned as rules of distribution. Thus, older siblings were able to claim labour and products from their younger siblings, and sisters by virtue of their higher rank had claims on the labour and products of their brothers as well as on those of their brothers' wives. These rules of distribution reflected both the diminished importance of households based on the nuclear family (the husband-wife pair) as well as the greater importance of the relationships that existed among siblings,

Members of the chiefly estate also had claims on the labour and products of the non-chiefly peoples. Gailey (1987: 93) writes that ‘the first results of any productive activity, the first fruits of any harvest – especially of yams – and unusual or high-quality products, fish, other foods, and so on were destined for the chiefs’. The claims of chiefs on commoners and on one another’s products by virtue of their relative rank were particularly apparent during the annual ‘first fruits’ ceremony that was held before the yam harvest. Non-chiefly men prepared an early-ripening variety of yam and baskets of fish, while the women made decorated bark cloth and mats. The men and women each presented their goods to the chiefs. The chiefs retained portions of the prepared foods for the gods, for their own use and for lower-ranking members of the chiefly estate; the rest was given back to the commoners to ensure that no one left the day-long festivities hungry or without food to take home. Chiefly women also made bark cloth and mats that they gave to other chiefly people, enhancing the status of the recipients in the process.

State formation and tribal societies

There was a crisis in Tongan society following European contact in the early nineteenth century that affected both production and distribution. Several interacting processes culminated in the imposition of state institutions and the crystallization of a social-class structure. First, the Wesleyan Methodist missionaries provided a patriarchal ideology that simultaneously ignored the traditional power of sisters and asserted the existence of an immutable hierarchy that contrasted with the ambiguous ranking system of traditional Tongan society. The paramount chief allied himself with the Methodists and seized on their worldview as a justification for marginalizing his sisters and for asserting his primacy over the other chiefs. Second, the Europeans also provided an endless stream of guns that were used to intensify successional disputes. Increased warfare underwrote the political unification of the archipelago, the replacement of the customary communal landholding practices with allotments to individual men over the age of 16 and the imposition of tax-rents. This provided the king with a steady source of revenue; it curbed the power of the local chiefs, who no longer had access to the labour of men who held individual allotments; and it provided incentives to those allotment holders to engage in the production of cash crops, like copra (dried coconut) or coffee, that could be sold or to sell their labour power to others. Third, a legal code enacted after 1850 redefined crime and morality and specified both monetary fines and periods of forced labour as penalties. It also banned women from wearing tapa cloth garments to church and thereby forced them to purchase imported cotton fabrics (Gailey 1987: 194–247). In some instances, states with omnipresent armies or police forces have distorted production relations as well as the rules governing distribution in kin-communal societies on their margins and succeeded, at least temporarily, in atomizing the community in ways that allowed the states to specify both the form and timing of tribute exactions. In societies like the Maasai of East Africa, production, consumption and taxation occur at the level of the individual household. However, the reproduction of Maasai society and culture in the context of the colonial state took place when the members of the various households participated in periodic ceremonies and when they lent cattle to kin and friends residing in other regions as a hedge against famine and drought (Rigby 1992: 35–97). In a phrase, the social reproduction of the Maasai continues to be based on pre-colonial forms of distribution, notably sharing, the use of common land and participation in regular community activities such as the periodic age-grade ceremonies.

In other instances, tribal societies have successfully defended communal control over use-rights, labour and the disposition of their members; however, in the process, the various dimensions of the division of labour – age, gender, life experience and kin role – were separated from one another, and a person’s status came to be defined in terms of one or two dimensions, typically age and gender, instead of an amalgam. As a result, higher-status individuals, usually older men, came to exert greater control over the labour and products of the community than women or younger men (Kahn 1981). The Guro of the Ivory Coast exemplify this social type. Emmanuel Terray (1972: 137) argues that Guro society manifests two modes of production: (1) a tribal-village system in which the means of production are owned collectively, authority is intermittent and temporary, and distribution is egalitarian; and (2) a lineage system in which the means of production, while owned collectively, are held by a single elder male whose authority is continuous and who appropriates foodstuffs and other goods produced by his dependent, younger kin. He then redistributes this surplus, ‘us[ing] it mainly to obtain wives for the same juniors … If he fails to honour this obligation, he will find that his dependents leave him and it will follow that he loses his position as an elder’ (Terray 1972: 172).

In still other instances, tribal communities have from time to time removed themselves altogether from the influence of nearby states or rid themselves of kin who proclaimed themselves rulers. Pierre Clastres (1987 [1974]: 214–16) describes a series of events that occurred among the Tupi-Guarani of Brazil during the last decades of the fifteenth century, when fiery orators went from village to village warning them about the destructive effects of chiefly power and exhorting them to rise up against those who would be chiefs. Similarly, Richard Lee (2003: 178) relates that, by the mid-1980s, eight groups of Ju/’hoansi had already moved away from the strategic hamlets established a decade earlier by the South African Defense Force and resettled in remote areas of Botswana and Namibia. They are now reoccupying their traditional campsites. The implications in both cases is that the communities sought to reestablish traditional forms of distribution that contrasted with those imposed by the state.

Tributary states and the tributary mode of production

Anthropologists have also investigated a number of tributary states. Samir Amin (1976: 13–58) coined the terms ‘tributary’ or ‘tribute-paying’ to refer to a variety of pre-capitalist, state-based societies where, as in the early civilizations found in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, labour or goods were extracted through extra-economic (political) means from the direct producers by the state apparatus or the ruling class that controlled it. Tributary states have several distinctive features, the most important of which is that kin-organized communities continue to be the dominant units of production in the society, even though their survival is continually threatened by the claims and exactions of a state that is either unwilling or unable to reorganize production on a non-kin basis. While the state is able to intervene in the production and reproduction of these local communities, its survival depends on their continued existence. Production in tributary societies is organized for use rather than exchange; the goods kept by the producers as well as those appropriated by the state and the dominant class are used or consumed rather than exchanged. Tribute is not always extracted exclusively by means of force, since the direct producers might acquiesce or even agree to these exactions, particularly when they are threatened. Since exploitation is the most distinctive feature of any class-based society, resistance is equally symptomatic; as a result, class conflict is the fundamental relationship between the constituent classes of tributary states. As long as the kin or village communities retain control over their lands and labour, over their own subsistence production and social reproduction, they deprive the state and its ruling classes of some of the goods and labour their members wish to consume. As long as the state and its dominant classes are unable to exact tribute consistently from subject communities, their members often seek the goods and services they have lost or desire through expansionist policies that exploit or subjugate peoples on their periphery. Merchant classes are typically active on the margins of tributary states (Patterson 1992: 25).

Inca society was one of a number of small states, chieftainships, tribes and autonomous kin-communities that existed in the central Andes in the early fifteenth century. The dynastic traditions of Inca society suggest that it began as an estate-ordered chieftainship, much like the Tongan society described above. The chiefly and non-chiefly estates were divided into corporate landholding groups; each of the chiefly corporations had a founding patriarch and property to support his descendants. Civil unrest, political intrigues and assassinations, and invasions by neighbouring groups formed the backdrop against which imperial institutions and practices developed in the 1430s. The ruling class that emerged was composed of the leader who would be king, the members of his corporation and collateral kin who were war leaders, overseers of subject populations or priests at shrines that served the interests of this group. The Inca state expanded rapidly during the next 70 years and extended more than 3000 miles from northern Ecuador to central Chile and Argentina.

The Inca state extracted labour from subject populations; it provided the food, tools and lodging necessary, while the men and women drawn from diverse local communities provided their labour power for specified periods of time. Given the division of labour in traditional Andean society, subject men farmed on lands appropriated by the state and its ruler, participated in public works projects (road construction) or served in the army; subject women wove cloth and made beer. A portion of the foodstuffs and beer appropriated by the state was returned to the communities whose members produced them; woven cloth was also redistributed, some to the subject populations themselves and some to men deemed deserving by the state.

The administrative organization of the Inca state is typically described as pyramidal, with the ruler at the top, provincial governors drawn from his kin in the middle and non-Inca leaders overseeing the activities of their local communities. Census-takers and inspectors articulated the Inca and non-Inca layers of the imperial administration. They preserved the new internal order imposed on the local communities by the imperial state. The census-takers counted subjects and made tax assessments. The inspectors reported on the activities of provincial governors and local leaders to the emperor and his counselors.

Different rules of distribution existed in local communities, like Huarochirí in the central highlands of Peru. Here land and water rights were held by a series of bilateral kindreds whose members claimed descent either through male or female lines from a founding ancestor. In practice, plots of land located in different ecological zones were held and worked by the members of individual households affiliated with those kindred. While the households were the basic production and consumption units of the community, they also shared a portion of the foodstuffs and raw materials they produced with kin residing in other parts of their homeland. At one level, this ensured the selfsufficiency of the local community. At another level, a further portion of their product and labour power was appropriated by the community to support shrines, repair irrigation canals or to have festivals that underwrote the demographic and social reproduction of the community itself. Significant portions of the foodstuffs, beer and other goods appropriated at the community level were consumed in the process (Spalding 1984).

In his extended discussion of tributary states, John Haldon (1993) argued that tax and rent are two variants of the same form of surplus appropriation; both are based on the existence of a peasant producing class that retains control, but not ownership, of its means of production. In late Roman and Byzantine society, the state and landlords appropriated labour and goods through various forms of tax and rent. From the perspective of the state and the landlords who owned property, tax and rent appeared to be different. From the perspective of the peasants, they were similar. Haldon proceeded to point out that, while this basic form of surplus appropriation remained the same, what changed in Byzantine society as the power of the state weakened were the institutional forms in which surplus was distributed.

In the early years of the Byzantine society, the state appropriated surplus and distributed it through the state apparatus. By the eleventh century the peasants, who were increasingly subordinated, handed over surplus to tax collectors who passed it directly to the owners of private estates. In other words, as the power of the centralized state waned, control over direct producers in rural areas passed increasingly to private landlords. What changed was the identity of those who had the ability to extract goods and labour. Thus, Haldon (1993: 140–202) drew distinctions between states with bureaucracies that maintained control over the appropriation and distribution of surplus, from those with ruling families and their retinues and those in which power was effectively decentralized. In his view, the interplay of the forms of surplus extraction and the relations of surplus distribution imposed constraints on tributary states that refracted struggles within the ruling class and between that class and the state apparatus. In a phrase, conflicts over the distribution of resources in which the state loses tend to promote its disintegration or decentralization; however, when state officials win, the central authority is strengthened while that of the oppositional groups is weakened.

The dialectic between surplus appropriation and surplus distribution is evident in the changing organizational forms of the state in tributary societies as well as in changes in the composition of their ruling classes. For example, in the early years of the Inca imperial state, the ruling class was composed almost exclusively of the ruler and his close kin. As the empire grew, leaders from diverse local groups were incorporated into the lower echelons of the state apparatus, and their relations with the emperor were cemented through marriages between their daughters and the ruler. The male offspring of these unions were ethnically Inca and hence potential heirs to the throne. As sons of

the ruler, they had direct or indirect access to the labour of the imperial subjects. In theory at least, the sons also had an equal chance of ascending to the throne and, hence, were in competition with one another. Since each son maintained close ties with his mother’s kin, he was able to call upon them when successional disputes erupted. The loyalties and alliances each son established through their mother with maternal kin tipped the balance in several disputes over succession to the Inca throne in the fifteenth century. The Inca state ultimately began to disintegrate in the 1520s when it was no longer able to contain a successional dispute among rival claimants to the throne and the civil wars that typically erupted when successional disputes occurred. These also fuelled regionally-based secessions from the state as well as the development of new relations of distribution (Patterson 1985).

Capitalist societies and the capitalist mode of production

In the division of labour that developed in the social sciences from the end of the nineteenth century, the objects of anthropological inquiry were typically societies on the peripheries of industrial or colonial states, whereas their sociological colleagues concerned themselves with the connections among immigration, the proletarianization of peasant communities and industrialization. The societies of concern to anthropologists either were struggling to retain important aspects of their traditional way of life or were in the process of being enmeshed in capitalist wage relations. Consequently, the economic relations that existed in those communities often appeared different from those that prevailed in societies dominated by industrial capitalism and the capitalist mode of production.

Moreover, the economic relations that developed on the periphery of the capitalist world were diverse and continue to be so. In some peripheral societies, like that of the northern Yangzi delta of China early in the twentieth century, the direct producers were sub-proletarians who were unable to subsist and reproduce themselves and their kin exclusively on the basis of wages; they supplemented their wages with traditional subsistence activities that yielded foodstuffs and durable goods and with petty commodity production (Walker 1999). In others, like Pisté on the Yucatán Peninsula, peasants and rural proletarians became town-folk increasingly engaged in artisanal production (Castañeda 1995). In still others, individuals who trucked with outsiders became ‘big-men’ or ‘men of renown’ in their own communities (Sahlins 1963). In a phrase, the object of anthropological inquiry has been societies that manifest articulations of capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production. As a result, the forms of distribution and redistribution that have emerged in those societies are as diverse as the production relations described above. Let us examine a couple of examples in more detail.

James Greenberg (1981) unravels the political–economic and symbolic aspects of the seemingly wasteful expenditures of resources by the civil–religious organizations that sponsor saints’ fiestas in the Indian communities in southern Mexico and northern Central America. In Yaitepec, Oaxaca, the community members hold their lands in common; that is, the means of production are parceled out to member families and fields cannot be sold by those who possess them. While the community produces many of the foodstuffs and goods required for the social reproduction of labour, its members also purchase needed manufactured goods in stores and markets that are monopolized by an elite whose members reside in Oaxaca city. Consequently, the community members are forced to grow cash crops and sell labour power in order to buy those goods and to pay taxes. After the men in the community marry, usually in their early twenties, they undertake their first religious cargo, which entails caring for a particular saint and sponsoring its annual fiesta; by the time men are in their sixties, they have typically undertaken four or five such cargos. As a result, they require steadily increasing amounts of cash to fulfill these obligations.

Greenberg reveals a number of important facts about the cargo system in Yaitepec and, by extension, other corporate Indian communities in the region. First, more than half of the often substantial cash expenditures on saints’ fiestas involve the purchase of food which is either consumed during the ceremony or taken home by the members of the community. Second, the majority of the rituals in Yaitepec occur immediately before the harvests in October, when the availability of food grows steadily scarcer with each passing day and the signs of malnutrition increase. Third, the amount of food redistributed during the fiestas of this part of the year is sufficient to provide every man, woman and child in the community with food for 41 days. Thus, in Yaitepec, at least, ‘the fiesta system reduces the risks of “starvation” (Greenberg 1981: 152). Fourth, the redistribution of wealth resulting from service in the fiesta system is a leveling mechanism, buttressed by ideologies of egalitarianism and reciprocity that reduces differences within the community. Fifth, as community members have been differentially drawn into the production of coffee and wealth differentials have increased, ‘the leveling mechanisms and traditional obligations which function to minimize the cleavages in the community become less and less effective at resolving the actual inequalities that do exist. This process inevitably brings “individualism” into conflict with “egalitarian” ideology and creates frequent, spasmodic, and sometimes violent interpersonal quarrels’ (Greenberg 1981: 198). Finally, there is considerable variation in the fiesta system from one community to another; it appears that the production of cash crops, like coffee, on the communal lands held by particular families combined with the ideology of individualism and the alienation it entails diminishes the amount of wealth that is ultimately redistributed.

Greenberg has suggested that the fiesta system is undermined by increased production for the market, as men are increasingly reluctant to accept cargos and the responsibilities they entail. As a result, cargos will not be filled; fiestas will not be held; ever-decreasing amounts of wealth will be redistributed within the community. This potentially opens the community to even further capitalist penetration and exploitation. While not necessarily disagreeing with Greenberg’s prediction, there has been a steadily increasing number of accounts describing individuals who, after migrating to the United States for work, maintain and renew ties with their kin and neighbours in Indian communities throughout Latin America (for example, Hulshof 1991). A number agree to run as candidates for civic office in local elections or accept cargos in the fiesta system. While it is hard to document this number, many Latin American immigrants maintain their ties through remittances, which grew from US$4 billion in 1990 to an estimated US$23–26 billion in 2002 (Rechard and Dickerson 2002).

Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez, Guillermina Nuñez and Dominique Rissolo (2002) discuss other aspects of transnational communities. They focus on the rural settlements, or colonias, which have developed since the early 1980s in agricultural areas north of the US–Mexico border from Texas to California. The 2000 or so colonias currently have a combined population of a million or more people, mostly of Mexican origin. Since neither the state or federal governments nor the capitalist farmers provide housing or services to these settlements, their residents effectively subsidise the agricultural industry north of the border. Nearly 70 per cent of the men and women in El Recuerdo, the colonia they investigated, work for local farmers engaged in commercial agriculture; another 10 per cent are labour contractors; a few own small businesses: a garage, grocery store and restaurant-bar; the remainder participate in various facets of the informal and underground economies. A family of six in El Recuerdo has a mean yearly income of about US$22,500, more than 60 per cent of which is spent on food, payments on cars or trucks, gasoline and automotive repairs. A family of six also spends about US$26,000

a year, which is nearly US$4000 more than its members earn.

As Vélez-Ibáñez and his associates note, the households of El Recuerdo continually attempt to balance income with over expenditure and struggle to keep the negative income ratios to less than 20 per cent. They do so through pooling resources, rotating credit associations and, when all else fails, participation in the informal and underground economy, which may yield significant returns but carries large risks, for example arrest, incarceration, seizure of property and deportation. Typically, the members of a household pool their income, wages and future earnings in order to make down payments on land, trailers or automobiles. For example, a married couple wishing to buy a lot or a trailer will call upon parents and siblings for assistance; in practice, this means that many of the households in El Recuerdo are multi-generational, composed of multiple siblings, their parents, their spouses and their children. New cycles of debt are incurred when younger siblings marry, and cash is consequently pooled again to purchase new housing or make a down payment on it.

Household members also rely on informal, rotating credit associations that will advance about US$1000 to US$1200 for periods of six months. These loans are used to defray the costs of everyday needs, to reduce debt or to purchase gifts that will be redistributed at various rituals. These associations are mostly in the hands of women. Failing to repay a debt to a relative, a neighbour or a friend, thereby breaking a mutual trust or confidence, is, as Vélez-Ibáñez and his colleagues observe, almost unthinkable and has potentially disastrous consequences given the precarious financial circumstances of the households and the ever-present threat posed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The men in the colonia typically seek money in other ways. For instance, they will borrow from local moneylenders at high rates for short periods. Here, the threat of physical violence, rather than the stigma of a broken trust and promise, provides the incentive to repay the debt.

These are not the only ways in which wealth is transferred in capitalist societies. Other forms of distribution and redistribution flourish as well. At one level, as Stephen Gudeman (2001: 63–4) observes, ‘goods are transferred within communities and across generations at bridal showers, weddings, baby showers, birthdays, confirmations, graduations, and other celebrations’. At another level, individuals make gifts of time, services or money to charities and foundations. At still another level, the kind of food sharing that occurs at potluck dinners or picnics cements and reaffirms both interpersonal and social relationships. It is important to note, as Gudeman does, that such forms of redistribution are not carried out in the market nor are they easily taxed by the state.

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