Political Economy
William Roseberry
Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 17. (1988), pp. 161-185.
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Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 1988. 17:161-85
Copyright O 1988 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved
POLITICAL ECONOMY
William Roseberry
Department of Anthropology, Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research,
New York, New York 10003
INTRODUCTION
Evaluating Marxist approaches in anthropology at the beginning of the 1970s,
Firth (55) suggested a distinction between "gut Marxism" [he was later to call
it "visceral" (56)] and "cerebral Marxism." The cerebral Marxists were those
French anthropologists (66, 105, 176) who had "opened up problems of a
highly theoretical order" (55, p. 29); the gut Marxists were those American
anthropologists who "feel deeply about the world situation, hold that it
conforms broadly to Marx's theories of class conflict, base and superstructure,
etc, and espouse his interpretation of historical development with moral
fervour." Among the issues that concerned the guts were "problems created
by Western economic and political dominance of lesser developed societies,
of the significance of migratory labour for a colonial regime, of the genesis of
proletarian consciousness, of class identity and struggle, of the political role
of a peasantry" (55, p. 25).
Recent authors have accepted his distinction and some of his evaluations,
even as they have devised more academically acceptable and confining labels.
In her review of anthropological theory since the sixties, Ortner (131)outlines
two versions of Marxist anthropology, placing both in the 1970s-"structural
Marxism," essentially the cerebral Marxism of Firth with the addition of some
British and North American authors; and "political economy," Firth's gut
Marxism with the difference that it is given a more specific inspiration and
problematic. Its inspiration comes "primarily from world-systems and underdevelopment
theories in political sociology," and its problematic concerns
"the effects of capitalist penetration upon . . . communities" (131, p. 141).
Among the salutary aspects of political economy for Ortner are its openness to
symbolic analyses, its regional focus, and its historical attitude, each of which
also points to specific weaknesses. Political economy is "too economic, too
162 ROSEBERRY
strictly materialist," does not have enough to say about "real people doing real
things," and has too "capitalism-centered an approach to history (131, pp.
14244). Ortner offers this assessment as part of a call for practice theory;
others writing from different points of view (103, 175) offer slightly different
critiques, but many agree on two points: Political economy is world systems
theory, and it has little to offer anthropologists.
Between the two appraisals and critiques, between gut Marxism and political
economy, lies a history, or more properly, a set of histories. Basic to
recent critiques is a representation of anthropological political economy; and
we have recently been reminded (32) that representations are sensitive to the
political, social, scholarly and aesthetic concerns of the representers as well as
the activities of the represented. By offering an alternative account of the
history of anthropological political economy, this essay suggests a wider set
of concerns and problems and offers a different appraisal of its current status
and potential within the anthropological literature.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL
POLITICAL ECONOMY
Labels, Movements, Histories
Many anthropologists identify what they do as political economy; but the
label is also, at least in part, ascribed, and the ascription is offered as part of a
critique. With the move toward "political economy," authors imposed uniformity
or boundedness upon a heterogeneous set of scholarly and political
concerns. Part of the problem here concerns the place of "political economy"
within the history of economic thought, its identification with classical political
economy from Ferguson and the physiocrats through Smith, Ricardo,
Mill, and-by way of a critique that started with classical assumptions (e.g.
the labor theory of value) and took them to radical conclusions-Marx.
Political economy could in this sense be distinguished from neoclassical
economics, which represented a shift in concerns from the "wealth of nations"
to the price of beans, from value as determined by labor time to price as
determined in markets. Most anthropologists who appropriated political economy,
however, did not thereby appropriate all of classical political economy.
They appropriated Marx. Few, with notable exceptions (71,72), looked to the
physiocrats, the Ricardians, or the neo-Ricardians.
Of more immediate importance for this essay is the range of ideas, projects,
methods, and works that fit within an anthropological political economy.
What has come to be called political economy is the developing product of a
variety of intellectual and political movements, some Marxist and some not,
some Wallersteinian and some not, that have come together as a set of
srguments-with other anthropological "political economists," with other
POLITICAL ECONOMY 163
historically minded social scientists, with other styles of anthropological
work.
An essay of this length cannot fully explore each of these intellectual
currents (see 86, 95, 99, 121, 165, 185 for other treatments; for more
complete discussions of dependency and mode of production theories, see 25,
57, 68,78, 87, 89, 128, 135, 184, 192). We can appreciate some of the depth
and diversity of scholarship within anthropological political economy by
looking at the work of the four scholars mentioned by Marcus & Fischer as
practitioners from the 1960s (103, p. 84): Wolf, Mintz, Nash, and Leacock.
Unfortunately, this ignores older work (82, 137, 194) as well as contemporaneous
work done outside the United States (7, 19, 87, 206-208). It
will, however, allow us to appreciate a wider range of perspectives and move
beyond the simple identification of political economy with the 1960s and
1970s or with world systems theory.
Wolf, Mintz, Leacock, Nash
The proper place to begin with Wolf and Mintz is not in the 1960s but in the
1940s, in association with Steward's Puerto Rico project (113, 142, 170,
201). In the publication that resulted from that study, Wolf and Mintz
explicitly distanced themselves from Steward's cultural ecology and called
their approach "cultural history" (170, pp. 31-33). Superficially, their description
of such an approach appears to be an early statement of an interest in
"the effects of capitalist penetration upon communities," but their project
offered a more radical challenge. The contributors to The People of Puerto
Rico did not simply assume that their communities had their "own structure
and history," (131, p. 143) on which a later history of capitalist penetration
could be imposed (e.g. with the American occupation, or the investment of
some new form of capital a few years before fieldwork). As was clear from
their sketch of 400 years of Puerto Rican history, they were arguing that the
formation of their communities was intimately connected with a larger history
of colonialism, empire-building, international trade, and state formation.
A number of features characterized this early cultural historical approach as
well as much of the later work of Wolf and Mintz:
1. It was historical, in the sense that it attempted to see local communities
as products of centuries of social, political, economic, and cultural processes,
and in the sense that it understood those processes in global terms.
2. Nonetheless, unlike later world-systems theories, the goal of historical
investigation was not to subsume local histories within global processes but to
understand the formation of anthropological subjects ("real people doing real
things") at the intersection of local interactions and relationships and the
larger processes of state and empire making. One object of their investigations
in these early years was to understand social and cultural difference in terms
164 ROSEBERRY
of a variety of such conjunctions, as in their essay on compadrazgo(116)or in
their typological essays of the 1950s (107, 195-198, 204).
Even as their objects of inquiry changed [e.g. the life history of a Puerto
Rican sugar worker (11l), marketing in Jamaica, nation formation in the
Caribbean (110) or in Mexico (199)], the interest in the formation of anthropological
subjects at the intersection of deeply rooted local and global
histories remained.
Like Wolf and Mintz, Leacock was educated at Columbia. She brought to
her anthropology an explicit Marxism that affected her early themes and
interests. Her early work on Montagnais-Naskapi was an attempt to show that
the demarcation of hunting territories was a product of the fur trade and that
the Montagnais-Naskapi case could not be used as an argument against
primitive communism or for primitive conceptions of property (91). In this
investigation were prefigured three themes that were to motivate her later
work (53, 92-94, 96): evolution; the origins of inequality, especially gender
inequality; and the effects of colonialism (and, later, of state formation).
These interests, too, are the concern of political economy, but they involve a
different focus from that of Wolf and Mintz. The central theme here is less the
understanding of local histories in global terms than the understanding of
evolutionary transformations and their effects upon particular classes and
groups of people.
Unlike the other three, Nash was not educated at Columbia and did not
receive her degree in the early 1950s. Coming out of the structural functionalist
tradition of Chicago in the 1950s, she was part of the large group of
scholars from Harvard and Chicago working in Chiapas and Guatemala. Her
monograph on her early work in Amatenango in Chiapas is much more
obviously "cultural" than any of the works by the others we have discussed,
but it also reflected the structural functionalism of her earlier training, stressing
the importance of responses to social and cultural stresses and strains
(119). Her contributions to political economy in anthropology began later
than those of the others. She has been engaged in two principal activities.
First is her work among tin miners in Bolivia, which began in 1969 and
resulted (in 1979) in a monograph that remains one of the most impressive
ethnographies written within a political economic framework (120). Second is
her organizational and ethnographic work in feminist anthropology, exploring
questions such as the division of labor within and among families, the
structure of multinational corporations, and the impact of recent international
economic trends on the participation of women in the work force in advanced
capitalist and underdeveloped countries. In addition to her own work on such
topics, she has played an important organizational role in encouraging and
collecting new anthropological work along these lines ( 121-1 23). Like
L,eacock, she has made feminist concerns central to political economy; unlike
POLITICAL ECONOMY 165
her, she has been less interested in evolutionary questions than in the impact
of recent developments in the capitalist world upon women and men. More
than the others discussed here, she has always taken a fundamentally
ethnographic approach to political economic problems.
Radical Critiques
The movements to which Firth directed his attention had their more immediate
roots in the late 1960s and early 1970s and involved a rich combination
of projects. As in other periods in the development of anthropology,
intellectual and political thought developed within a material, or institutional,
infrastructure. A full history of the institutional matrix would require an
account of the different university settings; departmental and interdepartmental
student cultures and reading groups; the teach-in movement,
in which anthropologists were active (200); the participation of anthropologists
in radical groups and parties; and the emergence in 1971 of
Anthropologists for Radical Political Action (ARPA), which published a
newsletter edited by "collectives" at various departments and began to
organize groups of symposia for annual meetings of the American Anthropological
Association. AAA meetings themselves became annual occasions
for lively discussions of proposals condemning the Vietnam War or
criticizing anthropologists for engaging in counterinsurgency research (95,
203).
It was this ferment and the intellectual movement associated with ARPA
symposia that Firth dubbed gut Marxism. Although some of its intellectual
products+ritiques of reigning anthropological concepts and practices, reflections
on the relationship between anthropology and colonialism, and
reinterpretations of cultural and political materials (1, 2, 18, 69, 82, 148)appeared
in established journals, many papers were informally circulated or
published in new, alternative journals that began to appear in the 1970s, some
of which went on to become established journals as well. It was in this period
that anthropologists began to use "political economy" to refer to their perspectives
(100, 101, 125, 150), generally (though not always) as a gloss for
Marxism. By the appearance of the 1978 special issue on political economy in
American Ethnologist, the subfield can be said to have achieved official
existence.
Dependency and World Systems Theories
One of the literatures first encountered by new groups of radical scholars was
dependency theory, especially with the popularity of Frank's work on Latin
America (60, 61). Published in the later 1960s, his two most influential books
drew on two traditions: (a)the "Monthly Review" tradition emerging from the
1950s, especially the work of Baran (8, 9); and (b) the development of
166 ROSEBERRY
dependency theories in Latin America, which were rooted in the work of the
Economic Commission on Latin America (ECLA) (26). By the 1960s, intellectual
centers in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and elsewhere had
become the foci for left-wing critiques of the ECLA economists, pushing their
theories toward more radical analyses of capitalism and the development
process itself.
Central to their work was the idea that the developed and underdeveloped
worlds were structurally, systemically linked, such that the process of development
in one region required a process of underdevelopment in another.
Beyond that, dependency theories were characterized by argument. Among
the various "schools" and points of view (29), two stand out. The first,
associated with Frank, was the more extreme of the two. It saw the structures
of development and underdevelopment forged by capitalism as rigid. Major
events within the developed or underdeveloped world--economic crises,
political independence, the development of new products, the emergence of
new types of political regimes and economic policies, and so on--could not
affect the basic structure of dependence and underdevelopment as long as the
capitalist system remained intact. The second, associated with F. H. Cardoso
(25-27), stressed movement and change within the structures of dependence.
It also paid attention to the forms of dependence in particular countries and
regions, and the different possibilities for "dependent development" or
structural transformation the various forms might enable. Throughout, the
emphasis was on the particularity of local situations, the "internalization of
the external" (27).
Unfortunately, neither the entire range of dependency theories nor the
argument among scholars reached the United States intact in the late 1960s
and early 1970s. The version of dependency theory that was first consumed
(25) in the United States was the more extreme version of Frank. While his
works were widely available in the late 1960s, Cardoso & Faletto's more
sophisticated survey, written at the same time as Frank's early works, was not
translated into English and published in the United States until 1979 (27).
In many ways, Wallerstein's world-systems theory (186-188), especially
in its earliest elaboration, was a North American version of Frank's dependency
theory, not only in his explicit association with Frank but in his
basic assumptions. The primary difference was that while dependency theorists
were interested in the underdeveloped world or periphery, Wallerstein
was most interested in the system as a system and in dynamics and processes
occurring in the developed core. Furthermore, Wallerstein's most important
innovation was a well-researched historical account of the origins of capitalism
(187, 188). Dependency theories had implied and called for a history;
Wallerstein wrote one.
Despite such differences and innovations, Wallerstein's world-systems
POLITICAL ECONOMY 167
theory shared certain assumptions and defects with Frank's dependency
theory. Both stressed structural stability. While both pointed to the deep
(16th-century) historical origins of the world capitalist system and wrote
historical analyses, the histories remained surprisingly static. All dynamism
was to be found in the developed core or metropole; developments in the
periphery or satellites were dependent upon initiatives taken in the core.
Furthermore, a variety of events and structures within the system were
explained in terms of the functions they served for the development of the
core or the maintenance of the system as a whole. In this, Wallerstein, Frank,
and their followers replicated the functionalist logic of a social science they
were otherwise subjecting to radical critique.
After the initial consumption of Frank's work, more dynamic and historically
sensitive versions of dependency theory emerged during the 1970s,
partly owing to the impact of Marxist criticisms and partly owing to the
growing awareness of the range of dependency arguments in Latin America.
Likewise, with the institutionalization of world-systems theories, they developed
a range of perspectives not easily subsumed within a neologism like
"Wallersteinian." Specific issues such as class formation, slavery, South
Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and the like engaged the work of anthropologists,
sociologists, and historians who could not be accused of the
functionalist logic associated with a caricatured version of world-systems
theory. Within this broader group of dependency and world-systems work,
many anthropological contributions to political economy can be located (34,
73, 149-151, 166, 167).
Modes of Production
Other anthropologists contributed to Marxist critiques of that literature,
however. Within the Marxist literature, the dominant interpretation for most
of the 1970s came from Althusser and his followers in France. Here Firth's
cerebral and gut Marxisms, or Ortner's structural Marxism and political
economy, are joined. Anthropologists interested in underdevelopment did not
necessarily embrace all of Althusserian Marxism, nor did they necessarily
read Althusser. Many came to the literature via Godelier (66, 67), Terray
(176), Meillassoux (105, 106), or Rey (139, 140), not all of whom were
Althusserian, despite their Marxism and their nationality (87).
Perhaps the most important contribution of Althusser to radical scholars
interested in underdevelopment was his interpretation of two concepts: mode
of production, and social formation. In their diffusion through journals and
the practice of fieldwork, such concepts often became unhinged from the
structuralist philosophy of Althusser himself and were applied to concrete
problems of historical and current development. In these more practical
applications, the mode of production concept offered the possibility of a more
168 ROSEBERRY
differentiated understanding of capitalism than did the extreme versions of
dependency and world-systems theory. This understanding was applied both
to the history of capitalism and to the current situation of underdeveloped
regions in the world economy. In historical surveys, rather than subsuming all
parts of the world within a global capitalism from the 16th century onwards
(as both Frank and Wallerstein had done), scholars working within a mode-ofproduction
perspective saw a more prolonged and uneven transition to capitalism.
The incorporation of regions within colonial or mercantile empires did
not necessarily impose upon those regions the laws of capitalist development.
Rather, scholars postulated a complex relationship, or "articulation," between
the dynamics of noncapitalist and capitalist modes. Likewise, work with
current populations would concentrate on groups who seemed to fall outside
of a strictly conceived capitalism because they did not fit within a capitall
wage-labor relationship. Here, too, a concept of the "articulation" between
noncapitalist and capitalist dynamics was important. In particular studies,
both approaches might be practiced, as authors tried to understand the history
of capitalism in their regions and to place those regions within late-20thcentury
capitalist development.
We might begin with attempts to approach the articulation of noncapitalist
and capitalist modes historically, analyzing the development of commodity
markets, the imposition of colonial rule, the investment of different forms of
capital, and so on. Here one of the most influential theorists was Rey (22, 57,
140), who envisioned three stages in a transition to capitalism. Despite the
apparent uniformity of any stage scheme, he tried to fit his within a concern
for the variety of possible transitions to capitalism, each conditioned by the
local social relations at the time of contact and the forms and processes of the
imposition of capitalism itself. Rey stressed the importance of writing a
"double history," arguing that transitions should be viewed not solely in terms
of the structure and logic of capitalism but also in terms of the structure and
logic of the noncapitalist modes in which capitalism was taking root. His
approach retained a teleological character, however, as the "double history"
he called for had a single, capitalist, end.
Nonetheless, many scholars attempted to write a history of the regions or
communities in which they were working in terms of the imposition or
emergence of capitalism, conceiving that history as a changing articulation of
noncapitalist and capitalist modes of production (4,24, 134, 143, 158).Major
structural breaks or markers might be placed on that process, but they were
not necessarily conceived as stages in Rey's sense. Rather they might be tied
to different moments in the history of global capitalism, connecting with the
work of Amin, Mandel, or the later work of Frank and Wallerstein; or they
might be tied to major political or economic developments in the region or
country studied (political independence, the development of new commodity
POLITICAL ECONOMY 169
markets, revolutions, and so on). This group had affinities with the more
historically oriented dependency theorists, who also attempted to place regions
or populations within the history of capitalism in particular countries.
Although some of the historical writers followed Rey's lead in attempting
to write a variety of histories of transition, others turned to classic Marxist
texts on the development of capitalism in Europe for inspiration, especially
the section in Volume 1 of Capital (104) on primitive accumulation, and
Lenin's studies of the Russian peasantry in the early 20th century (98), but
also the transition debates among Marxist historians from the mid-20th century
(48, 81). In its approach to peasants and simple commodity producers,
the literature stressed social differentiation and explored the extent to which
classes were forming among them, producing rural bourgeois and proletarian
elements (10, 42, 45, 46, 68, 97, 141, 155). Others stressed the lack of
differentiation, or the failure of differentiation to lead to the dissolution of
peasant or artisan communities+ither because of the special conditions of
peripheral capitalism or as a result of conditions within the communities
themselves (5, 157).
With this literature we begin to move from historical approaches toward
those concerned with current populations. Here authors concentrated on
groups and types of activity that did not fit within a strictly conceived
capitallwage-labor relationship. Attempts to understand those groups and
activities in terms of mode of production would label them noncapitalist and
explore their internal coherence and logic as well as their relationship to the
dominant capitalist mode. Scholars were particularly active in research on
peasants and artisans (14, 15, 35, 40, 52, 68, 97, 105, 106, 141, 143, 155,
191, 205) and on women's work within households (12,44, 51, 76, 90). The
two literatures have separate histories, although recent attempts to integrate
them offer some of the most promising developments in political economy
(13,36,37,43,59,74,75, 146, 154).Linking the two throughout has been a
common set of assumptions concerning the importanceof "domestic" labor or
of "reproduction," the sphere of labor that was removed from the wage-labor
market and was not engaged in the production of value (e.g. peasant production
of subsistence crops, women's housework, etc).
Alternatives
One of the most important strengths of world-systems and mode-ofproduction
approaches was the placement of anthropological subjects within
larger historical, political, and economic movements, the attempt to understand
the impact of structures of power upon them-the slave trade, the
imposition of colonial regimes, the development of postcolonial states, the
cyclical boom and bust cycles of international markets, the development of
particular capitalist enterprises such as plantations, and so on. They gave
170 ROSEBERRY
greater theoretical and methodological weight to the criticism of community
studies that had begun with Julian Steward and his students (102, 169),
stimulating regional and more broadly comparative studies. And they contributed
to the resurgence of historical investigation in enthnographic inquiry.
Unfortunately, both dependency theorists' and mode-of-production theorists'
understanding of anthropological subjects in terms of capitalist processes
too often slipped into a kind of functionalist reasoning, explaining the existence
of traditional or noncapitalist features in terms of the functions they
served for capital accumulation (source of cheap labor power, source of cheap
goods, market for dumping excess goods, and so on). In a related way, the
emphasis on structural determination was often too strongly determinative,
leaving too little room for the consequent activity of anthropological subjects.
In addition, conceptions of history and of structural relationships were
often related in a highly abstract fashion. Even the more practical applications
of mode-of-production theory shared with Althusserian Marxism its more
theoretical proclivities: Rather than serving as a means to the analysis of
concrete social groups--communities, classes, ethnic groups, parties-modeof-production
analysis too often served as an end in itself. Although mode-ofproduction
theorists offered an advance in their refusal to reduce economic,
social, and political phenomena to capitalist requirements and dynamics, they
often encapsulated their understanding of contradictory phenomena within the
abstractly conceived laws of motion of noncapitalist systems. Thus social and
cultural processes were conceived in terms of the lawful relationships among
structures, seen as prior to and removed from human action.
Recent critics of political economy have made similar points. What requires
stressing here is that these criticisms were offered from within political
economy in the 1970s and early 1980s, stimulating the development of new
approaches, reaching out to neglected Marxist traditions, and connecting with
earlier and concurrent anthropological work that could not easily be placed
within either dependency or mode-of-production frameworks. Disquiet about
the functionalist nature of much of this work was forcefully expressed in early
reviews of Meillassoux's study of capitalism and the domestic community
(129, 138). Individual scholars began to express reservations about our
understandings of ethnicity, peasantries, or history (25, 30, 31, 78, 83, 85,
87, 117, 143, 153). And publication collectives that had served as conduits
for the translation and publication of French Marxism began to express
serious reservations, most visibly in Critique of Anthropology's "French
Issue" in 1979.
This critical current was stimulated in part by the appearance of work by
other French scholars such as Bourdieu; but one of the more important
influences came from scholars outside the French tradition, the most visible of
which was Thompson (181). His criticism of Althusser addressed most firmly
POLITICAL ECONOMY 171
the problem of abstraction and of structural determination, calling for a more
concrete and open-ended approach to the activity of working people in the
history of capitalism. Thompson's was one of several critical appraisals that
placed a concern for "structure and agency" on the agenda; as he did so, he
also opened up for Marxist anthropologists a Marxist tradition that had been
dismissed by the Althusserians-the tradition of British Marxist historiography
as developed by Hobsbawm, Hill, Hilton, and Thompson. Some of their
work, especially that associated with the transition debates (81), had been
incorporated within the literature on modes of production. Other workespecially
Thompson's study of the early English working class, his studies of
18th-century political culture (177-180), or Hill's work on 17th-century
culture and politics (79, 80)-had been underrepresentedin the bibliographies
of anthropological political economists.
Given the growing dissatisfaction with mode-of-production arguments in
the late 1970s and early 1980s, this work and that of other British Marxists
such as Williams (193) became increasingly popular, opening up Marxist
studies of culture that drew upon Gramsci and Williams, showing more
explicit concern for class, culture, and politics. The new work was increasingly
prominent in anthropologicalpolitical economy. In it, we find case
studies of working-class or peasant experience and politics, community
formation, the creation of cultural traditions, hegemony, and resistance (11,
23, 38, 47, 50, 58, 118, 130, 145, 152, 156, 161, 168, 172, 173).
This work has its own strengths and weaknesses, which in many ways
complement those of the world-systems and mode-of-production literature.
Where the mode-of-production literature often paid too little attention to the
activity of human subjects, such activity is now placed at the center of
analysis. Where the mode-of-productionliterature was too abstract, new work
places concrete groups-and individual actors within them-at the center of
analysis. Where world-systems theory had too little to say about local situations,
many scholars now begin and end with the local.
In each of these ways it might be argued that some of the new work has
gone too far-too little contextualization of the activity of local groups and
individuals, too little theoretical reflection on the structures and systems
within which people act, too little attention to the structures of power that
shape and constrain resistance: too much agency, too little structure. In this,
some scholars have consumed British historical materialism one-sidedly.
They have read carefully Thompson's emphasis on the activity of the British
working class but have paid too little attention to his treatment of the
industrial revolution and of the changing British state in which that activity
took place. It is insufficient to assert that transformations are not structurally
determined but result from human agency. At this level, such statements are
true but trivial and quickly become a kind of theoretical slogan. What requires
172 ROSEBERRY
stressing is the unity of structure and agency, the activity of human subjects in
structured contexts that are themselves the products of past activity but, as
structured products, exert determinative pressures and set limits upon future
activity.
We can point to two related bodies of work that help us move beyond these
apparent difficulties. One is the lineal descendent of mode-of-production
theory as it has emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s. The internal criticisms of
the period pushed scholars beyond articulation. Many maintained their interest
in theoretical issues, but they stated that interest in terms of forms rather
than modes of production, invoking fewer assumptions concerning abstract
laws of motion. The most interesting work of this sort concerns simple
commodity production (6, 16, 17, 28, 3 9 4 2 , 62-65, 84, 157-160, 162,
163).
A related group has moved toward more ethnographic and historical studies
of particular regions or populations, concentrating on concrete problems and
issues such as ethnic formation and relations, labor migration and remittances,
household formation, food production and supply, and various structures
and processes of colonialism (21, 35, 36, 43, 70, 85, 126, 127, 132,
158). As they did so, they began to connect with the cultural history that
preceded world-systems and mode-of-production approaches, developed
alongside them in the 1970s, and offered new advances in the 1980s (34, 108,
109, 112-1 15, 124, 136, 149, 150, 202). In our earlier discussion of this
work, we stressed its concern for the formation of anthropological subjects at
the intersection of local and world history. In this it offered a much more
radical understanding of history than had either the mode-of-production theorists
or their more recent critics.
Although authors within the mode-of-production literature often constructed
their analyses in historical terms, the history of the noncapitalist
modes themselves was too often taken for granted. Basic concepts were
borrowed from European history and applied to apparently noncapitalist
groups along with assumptions about their basic social relationships and
dynamics. This was most true of those who used Chayanov uncritically,
imputing essentialist notions about use value and reproduction orientations to
populations for whom such notions were scarcely applicable. But the basic
conceptual problem plagued those who were more careful about the application
of "First World categories" to "Third World realities" (147). The problem
was too often stated as one of assessing the "impact" of capitalism on
noncapitalist modes, as if those noncapitalist modes had their own history,
structure, and logic that preceded the intervention of "capitalism" and could
be understood apart from its history, structure, and logic.
Likewise, those critics of mode-of-production theory who sought to recover
the agency of human subjects outside the bounds of structural determination
too often removed those subjects from the very historical processes in which
POLITICAL ECONOMY 173
they had acted. Ironically, the theorists who were least likely to search for
authentic human pasts removed from history were the dependency and worldsystems
theorists, but they too missed the radical possibilities of a cultural
historical vision. Where Wolf, Mintz, and others concentrated on theformation
of anthropological subjects at the intersections of global and local
histories, writers like Frank and Wallerstein saw a variety of institutions and
practices-peasant communities, ethnic divisions, household structures, and
gender relations (60, 77, 1 6 4 t a s the unambiguousproducts of capitalism.
In this sense, Wolf's most recent book (202) serves both as a culmination of
the cultural historical vision outlined in the early 1950sand as an enabling text
for a variety of political economic studies. It would be appropriate to read the
book either as an example of world-systems theory (103, 131) or as another
text in the mode-of-production literature, for it undermines both. In the first
case, aside from the fact that it offers explicit criticisms of Wallerstein and
Frank, it examines global processes without enclosing them within a system.
In the second, there is no attempt to conceptualize articulating modes of
production. Rather, mode of production becomes a tool for thinking about the
history of capitalism outside of Europe without imposing evolutionist labels
upon that history.
One may question whether evolutionism is entirely avoided (144) and
whether the concepts are adequate for getting at the intersectinghistories Wolf
takes as his subject (3). Nonetheless, in practice, Wolf avoids both the
unilateral imposition of capitalism upon anthropological subjects and the
illusory search for cultural authenticity (33). In his discussion of the reactions
of various North American groups to the fur trade, or the reformation of
African societies into slave-capturing and slave-providing centers, he provides
excellent case studies of the unity of structureand agency. He traces the
imprint of a series of intersections of world and local histories in the very
constitution of anthropological subjects, calling for a radical reformulation of
the way we think and talk about history. Critics who identify the book with
world-systems theory, or who counter that, "A society, even a village, has its
own structure and history, and this must be as much part of the analysis as its
relations with the larger context within which it operates," (131, p. 143) miss
this fundamental point. Admirable as attempts to keep the local and particular
in view may be, this particular statement of the attempt depends upon a
logical and historical separation of the "local" and the "larger context" that is
no longer tenable.
PROJECTS
The statement that anthropological subjects should be situated at the intersections
of local and global histories is a statementof a problem rather than
a conclusion. The problem imposes upon scholars who attempt to understand
174 ROSEBERRY
particular conjunctions a constant theoretical and methodological tension to
which oppositions like global/local, determinationlfreedom, structurelagency
give inadequate expression. They must avoid making capitalism too determinative,
and they must avoid romanticizing the cultural freedom of
anthropological subjects. The tension defines anthropological political economy,
its preoccupations, projects, and promise.
I conclude by discussing six recent works that deal with this tension in
different ways. I do not imply that they are the best books published in recent
years; others could easily have been selected (20, 38, 47, 49, 54, 58, 156,
182, 190). My aim here is to indicate the kinds of approaches that political
economic anthropologists take to the relationship between global and local
analyses (Stoler and Behar), to history (Vincent and Warman), and to culture
(Ong and Mintz).
Stoler and Behar
This pairing is the one most likely to surprise. Although Stoler's regional
study (171) seems to be a quintessential political economic monograph,
Behar's study (11)of a single village would seem to be beyond the bounds of
most anthropologists' definitions of political economy. Yet Behar's book
draws much of its inspirationfrom Thompson, especiallyhis richly suggestive
article on the web of use rights among European villagers in open fields
regions (179), and therefore holds an important place within a broadly
conceived anthropological political economy.
In her study, Stoler takes an entire region (the plantation zone of East
Sumatra) as her focus, although she also presents material from an ethnic
Javanesevillage in the region. Viewing that region as a concentrationof many
determinations-global, colonial, inter-island, Indonesian, regional, and local-she
adopts a multistrandedresearch strategy that includes work in Dutch
archives, interviews with retired Dutch administrators and foremen, research
in Indonesian archives, extensive travel through the estate region interviewing
actors at various levels, and a local village study. In this, and especiallyin her
use of materials and persons at the colonial center to illuminateher study of a
particular region, she has provided a methodological guide for others who
would attempt regional studies in terms of global processes. Yet she also
makes an important theoretical contribution to the problem of the relationship
between structure and agency. By concentrating on changing forms
of labor control over a 100-year period, she shows how estate managers'
plans for labor control were at least partly determined by their perception
(at times accurate and at times inaccurate) of danger from the laborers.
Attempts to resolve that problem (e.g. through the establishment of rural
households) would in turn create new problems for labor organization. On
the other hand, she also shows how the activities of laborers (e.g. in a
POLITICAL ECONOMY 175
squatter movement) could have unforeseen consequences for the organizational
capacities and incapacities of the laborers themselves. Thus the structure
of estate agriculture at various periods is shown to be the result of actions
and reactions by Dutch colonialists, Malay notables, Indonesian nationalists,
Javanese laborers, and Javanese squatters. But the structures seldom represented
the intended outcomes of action for any one of the groups, and they
carried with them consequences that none of the actors could foresee.
Much of this story is told at the regional level, and action is recorded as the
action of organized groups (e.g. unions) or through the commentary of
sympathetic and unsympathetic observers. This results from one of her
methodological decisions-to use the silences and preoccupations in elite
commentaries to indicate areas of disquiet, to signal disorder within apparent
colonial order. Had she been able to supplement these sources with more of
the voices of those from below, either through a fuller integration of the
village of Simpang Lima into the historical account or through life histories,
her impressive study would have been even richer.
Behar's elegant portrait of the Leonese village of Santa Maria del Monte is
especially interesting because the village was able to maintain its open fields
until the early 1980s, after her main period of fieldwork. Rather than presenting
an account of the impact of the Franco regime on the village, or of the
integration of the village into a wider economy through labor migration, or of
the transformation of village life with the enclosing of the open fields and the
recent suburbanization of the town, she attempts to recapture the economy
and culture of an open field village in a region that has practiced strictly
partible inheritance. In the process she provides a detailed account of noncapitalist
peasant life and livelihood. Her account centers around the concept of
use, beginning with the "archaeology" of a village house, which leads directly
into a description of inheritance practices and strategies and the ideology of
equality, and, most importantly, the web of use rights in village agriculture
and herding. The result is an ethnography of the commons, one that enriches
our understanding of historical instancesof open field agricultureelsewhere in
Europe. She also shows that the concern for use rights does not necessarily
imply an exclusive concern for use value. The economy of use rights in Santa
Maria does not preclude commodity production and exchange, and the villagers
show themselves to be quite acute and calculating in matters of inheritance,
in which everything is expressed in monetary values.
In her emphasis on economic and cultural continuity, she draws upon
events that have occurred over the past 300 years. Partly because they are not
drawn into a chronological narrative, crucial movements such as the 19thcentury
liberal reforms and the impact of the Franco regime are often mentioned
but are not fully explored. Continuity is stressed, but the differentiating
effects of, for example, the move toward hiring herders in the late 19th
176 ROSEBERRY
century are not emphasized. Had some of the processes of change within a
continuous system of open field agriculture been more fully integrated into
her account, the extraordinarily rapid changes that came with enclosure might
have seemed less abrupt.
Vincent and Warman
With Vincent and Warman, we explore two historical strategies. Vincent
(183) concentrates on a relatively short period (37 years) during which
capitalism was introduced and took root in the Teso district of Uganda.
Warman (189) concentrates on the experience of peasants in eastern Morelos
since the Mexican Revolution, but he also recounts changes that had occurred
during the previous 300 years.
Vincent's book provides an account of the conquest and colonization of the
area that was to become the Teso District; the creation of an administrative
hierarchy, first through Baganda agents and later through Iteso chiefs; the
competition between Catholic and Protestant missions and their role in the
creation of colonized subjects; the introduction of poll taxes and compulsory
labor drafts; and the introduction of compulsory cotton cultivation. Her
concentration on a few decades, marked at the beginning by the advent of
conquest and at the end by the British removal of a number of Teso chiefs, is
strategic. To make sense of her period, she must look backward to forms of
trade and settlement, dimensions of social and political organization, and
forward to the social and political consequences of the changes introduced in
the first three decades of the 20th century. But the period remains crucial
because it represented a fundamental break with preexisting forms and because
it established certain basic social and political relationships that were to
have lasting consequences.
Of these social and political relationships, one of the most important was
the establishment of a nascent peasantry and proletariat. Vincent's description
of these processes is especially good: When a colonial regime creates a
peasantry through the imposition of a poll tax, the transformation of property
relations, and the introduction of cotton cultivation, or when it creates a
supply of laborers who are escaping tax obligations and labor drafts by
working on estates, it seems bizarre to accuse the person who studies such
processes of imposing European class labels on non-European folk (165).
Nonetheless, given the period with which Vincent is working, the question
with which she concludes-why did Teso workers not acquire class consciousness?-is
surprising. Situations of genuinely cohesive working-class
consciousness are rare enough and would not be likely in Teso of the early
20th century, characterized as it was by growing regional disparities, ethnic
conflicts, religious conflicts, cotton booms and busts, and administrative
transformations. The fundamental characteristic of this period, and of the
social groups that resulted from it, can be surmised from Vincent's reference
POLITICALECONOMY 177
to "nascent" class: A differentiated peasantry and a segmented proletariat
were being created in the context of uneven development and regional differ-
entiation.
Among the books that have placed Latin American peasantries within
regional, national, and international structures of power, Warman's study of
eastern Morelos (first published in Spanish in 1976) remains one of the most
impressive. Like Vincent's study of Teso, it is historical, but Warman's use
of history differs in two important respects. First, Warman is most interested
in delineating the characteristics of the present. The work is based on a
large-scale cooperative project of ethnography and oral history in several
villages in the region, and most of his data concern the villagers' present
situations and their memories of the revolution and its aftermath. Nonetheless,
his interpretation of the present depends upon an historical sketch.
Unlike Vincent's Ugandan example, the introduction of capitalism in Morelos
cannot be concentrated in a relatively brief period. Warman therefore presents
several moments in the formation of eastern Morelos: the colonial period, in
which he discusses the formation of sugar estates, the remaking of indigenous
communities and the settlement of workers on the estates; the late 19th
century, in which the entire region was controlled by a single estate; the
revolution; and the post-revolutionary years, in which the estate was dismantled,
ejidos instituted, and new social groups and state institutions entered
into the lives of rural cultivators. In each period, Warman pays careful
attention to the social relations of a differentiated peasantry, outlining the
different kinds of rural cultivators (those on estates, those off; those with land,
those without, etc), and sketching the different kinds of domestic group that
emerged in particular periods and situations.
In the debates of the 70s among Mexican social scientists concerning the
positions, roles, and fates of peasants, Warman was often characterized as a
populist or peasantist. To the extent that he draws inspiration from Chayanov,
or to the extent that he pays special attention to peasants as historical actors,
such a characterization is accurate enough. Warman does not draw his
inspiration solely from Chayanov, however, and his treatment of peasants is
far from romantic. In rejecting those Leninist understandings of peasants that
would make them disappear into other class categories, he may underestimate
the extent of class formation within peasant villages. But his treatment of the
historical formation of a local peasantry and the character of its connections
with other classes and the state is one of the most satisfying available-both
for the detail with which it analyzes the peasantry itself and the sophistication
with which it treats structures of power.
Ong and Mintz
I conclude with two recent political economic attempts to understand cultural
phenomena. Ong's (130) is an ethnographic analysis of spirit possession
178 ROSEBERRY
among young Malay women working in electronic assembly plants; Mintz's
(114)is an historical examination of the changing place and meaning of sugar
in the diet of the English working class.
Ong's title and the question with which she begins her Preface ("Why are
Malay women workers periodically seized by spirit possession on the shop
floor of modern factories?") (130, p. xiii) connect her work with other
attempts to view cultural phenomena such as spirit possession and devil
contracts as responses to the introduction of capitalist relations. Unlike Taussig's
earlier work (174), however, Ong does not reduce her understanding to a
simple opposition between precapitalist use value relations and capitalist
exchange value relations. Rather, she begins with an examination of the
colonial creation of a "Malay" peasantry, its early experience of commodity
production, and explores the changing character of village life within the
modem Malaysian state. By studying differentiation and class formation in
villages as well as changing domestic relations, she outlines the emergence of
a group of young women who, because of their class positions in the villages
and their alienated positions within households, are pushed toward wage work
outside the home. That work simultaneously offers the possibility of increased
independence and the experience of stigmatization within the household and
village.
When Ong follows these women to the shop floor, then, she has located
them as historical subjects in terms of particular experiences of class, gender,
village, and household life. When she writes, "I wish to discover, in the
vocabulary of spirit possession, the unconscious beginnings of an idiom of
protest against labor discipline and male control in the modem industrial
situation" (130), p. 207), her analysis remains largely suggestive. She recognizes
that the phenomena of spirit possession are too complex to be viewed
simply as a response to or commentary on capitalism. Words like "unconscious"
and "beginnings" call for a multistranded analysis that is not fully
attempted here. Ong's careful placement of the young women within a
complex set of contradictory experiences makes such an analysis possible and
should carry discussion of such phenomena to a new level.
Mintz's book could be seen as a commentary on each of the dimensions of
political economic work considered in this section. It takes a novel approach
to the relationship between the local and global by turning insights gained
from decades of study in the Caribbean toward a study of transformations in
England. Its approach to history is one that attempts to encompass some 250
years from the 17th to 19th centuries, a period that covers the establishment of
capitalism and the creation of a proletariat in England. We concentrate here,
however, on his analysis of cultural change, specifically the transformation of
diet and the growing predominance of sugar in English life. His approach to
this change is intimately connected with his choice of unit of analysis and of
historical periodization and method. He begins with an outline of the place of
POLITICAL ECONOMY 179
sugar in the creation of a world economy, the creation of plantation economies
in the Caribbean, and the increasingly powerful position of England in
the sugar trade and in the colonization of the islands. Though his study is
explicitly placed in this context, the focus is on the changing structure of
consumption. Here he traces changing uses of sugar from late medieval to
industrial contexts, from differentiated uses as medicine, spice, decorative
substance, sweetener, and preserver to more widespread and less differentiated
use as a sweetener. He also examines the transition from exclusively
upper-class use to more general, population-wide use.
The change in diet, and of the place of sugar in diet, are explicitly
connected with the change in class structure-the proletarianization of working
people and consequent changes in domestic groups, work and eating
habits, and forms of sociality within and between households. Although the
data on diet are not presented in terms of regional and social differentiation,
Mintz makes a powerful case for understanding cultural change in terms of
changing circumstances of class, work, and power. He therefore offers an
important criticism of those who would divorce their understanding of culture
from relations of class and power, and he shows that we can approach such
complex connections through historical reflection upon apparently simple
objects like a bowl of sugar.
CONCLUSION
Although most of these studies place their subjects within the formation of a
world economy and the development of capitalism, none of them is simply
asserting that there is a wider world, and none is overly concerned with the
articulation of modes of production. Each places the social and cultural
phenomena it investigates within an examination of circumstances associated
with getting a living and the structures of power that shape and constrain
activity. Taken as a group, they give evidence of the range, vitality, and
promise of studies pursued within anthropological political economy, and
they offer an effective response to those who would proclaim too quickly and
eagerly its demise. More importantly, they demonstrate that anthropologists
can creatively deal with the theoretical and methodological tensions imposed
by the attempt to place anthropological subjects at the intersections of local
and global histories. In the process, they offer a fundamental challenge to
those who discuss culture, history, and practice without sufficient consideration
of class, capitalism, and power.
I thank Julie Hunter and Elena Arengo for bibliographic help and Nicole
Polier and Rayna Rapp for their criticisms of early drafts of this review.
180 ROSEBERRY
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