Currents in Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Sol Tax 9783110809299, 9789027977588

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Currents in Anthropology

Sol Tax in Panajachel

Joan Eggan 1975

Currents in Anthropology Essays in Honor of Sol Tax

Edited by ROBERT HINSHAW

MOUTON PUBLISHERS · THE HAGUE · PARIS · NEW YORK

ISBN 90-279-7758-5 Phototypeset in V.I.P. Times by Western Printing Services Ltd, Bristol © 1979, Mouton Publishers, The Hague, The Netherlands Printed in Great Britain

To Sol Tax Teacher, Friend, Colleague

WILMINGTON COLLEGE

SOL T A X

The simple name of an anthropologist with an uncluttered view of human beings: we are distinguished culturally and individually by the choices we make. In his long career he has integrated goals and means in tidy fashion: to serve one's fellows, contribute as you can knowledge of the choices available to them; to learn about one's fellows, observe the choices they make. Have the respect not to decide for others what is in their best interests; assume you never will understand them that well. But do have the courage to protect wherever possible the freedom of others to make those decisions for themselves, and even to make mistakes. For oneself avoid premature choices and action. Assume there always is more knowledge to be brought to bear on any matter than is currently available. Incurably optimistic about humanity's ability to cope, and never despairing of our institutions, Sol Tax repeatedly has allied himself with the exploited and the disadvantaged. From Chicago's ghettos to the fragmented societies of Native Americans, he has served time and time again as catalyst in relating human needs to those in positions of power and authority. Sol Tax never has been hesitant in speaking truth to power. His technique is equally simple and straightforward: bring people together in dialogue. If a meeting or conference is not feasible, correspond. Using whatever medium deemed most appropriate, he is a master in bringing people into communication. Accordingly, the books he has written are few, but the dialogues he has orchestrated and edited are voluminous. From the urban renewal of Chicago to global population trends; from the move toward a voluntary draft to

SOL TAX

the assimilation policies of the Bureau of Indian Affairs; from adult education in downtown Chicago to education programs of the United Nations, Sol Tax has labored in our common interest, in the interest of the people. To no one is the truth of our common humanity more apparent. This conviction has led to ever expanding dialogues: from the presidency of the American Anthropological Association to editing the first truly international journal of anthropology; from directing the Smithsonian Institution's Center for the Study of Man to chairing the Ninth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. He is the recipient of the highest honor the world community of anthropologists can bestow upon colleagues: the coveted Viking Fund Medal. It is Wilmington College's pleasure to be the first to confer on Sol Tax the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. CITATION ACCOMPANYING THE HONORARY DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF LAWS CONFERRED ON NOVEMBER 8 ,

1974

Preface

Our hope for this book is that it will deepen understanding of the central concerns of Sol Tax among anthropologists and kindred souls who have not had him as a teacher or colleague. We are less interested in impressing the reader with the diversity of his own and his students' involvements in anthropology than in pursuing the problems inherent in the study of mankind that have occupied his attention as his career has unfolded. If there is a rationale acceptable to Tax for a Festschrift in his honor, it will be the advancement of ideas with which he also has struggled. Not that Tax needs interpreters; but his ideas do need testing and development by others. These ideas and convictions by and large are not difficult to understand, and often they are very appealing. Persuasive they just as often are not, however — at least not initially, and not to the majority of his colleagues in the profession. The proof, however, is in the eating, and the novel recipes Tax has proposed have produced palatable results often enough to insure him a steadily widening audience of respectful listeners and a dependable flow of committed students. Some of those students have remained marginal to the discipline of anthropology, but in no less continuing contact with the Taxes than those in the mainstream. The remarkable and, I suspect, unusual collegiality between the Taxes and this broad field of students is due in part to conscious decisions increasing Tax's own marginality with respect to the main theoretical discussions of the discipline. His Odyssey has been shared intimately by a number of students through whose research he has remained abreast of theoretical issues while at the same time strengthening the credibility of his convictions with respect to new applications of what he and they were learning. Working in contexts of persistent culture contact, where values, vested interests, and degrees of power vary markedly and where concerns with identity and self-determination produce factionalism and conflicting group interests, they were acquiring knowledge about communication,

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ROBERT HINSHAW

leadership, and strategies for achieving the consensus requisite for action. In particular, they were learning a great deal about the use and abuse of power and the wisdom of self-limitation by those in positions of authority. Initially, the research contexts were intratribal in North America (or intramunicipio in Mesoamerica), where factionalism often appears pervasive. This was a peripheral, rather than a central, interest of Tax's during his Mesoamerican research, but with his decision in the late 1940's to place the knowledge and influence of anthropological observers at the service of the observed he and his students became preoccupied with the challenges American Indians face in uniting on goals and in pursuing those goals through negotiation with non-Indians. From intratribal contexts, Tax moved to the arena of pan-Indianism, experimenting with administrative mechanisms acceptable to Indians for communicating and addressing those objectives on which agreement could be reached. Simultaneously, his ideas about effective action were brought to bear on other complex groups of diverse constituencies: the University of Chicago (where he served as Associate Dean of the Social Sciences from 1948 to 1953, department chairman from 1955 to 1958, and Dean of University Extension from 1963 to 1968); the volatile university neighborhood of Hyde Park and the city of Chicago (see Tax 1968); the American Anthropological Association (in which he served terms as president and as editor of its journal, the American Anthropologist); and the international community of anthropologists (for which he founded and edited Current Anthropology from 1958 through 1974 and organized the 9th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in 1973). In all these contexts Tax invited, indeed insisted upon, more grass-roots participation in deliberation and feedback in decision making and publication of findings than most would have deemed either logistically feasible or desirable in terms of effective action. And yet feasible and effective these undertakings indeed proved to be. His success in these ventures has encouraged him to explore the potential for revitalization of institutions and groups of many kinds (ideally orchestrated by administrative and political leadership committed to these ideals), most recently the family and neighborhood in the United States (Tax 1976a, b). As nontraditional as his own principal interests have become, there never has been any doubting Tax's identification with and commitment to anthropology as a scholarly discipline or his effectiveness in organizing and mobilizing the increasingly fragmented field. Time and time again, the discipline has turned to him for assistance in communicating the unifying foci of a rapidly growing community of scholars: in Heritage of Conquest (1952), An Appraisal of Anthropology Today (1952),

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Evolution after Darwin (1960), Horizons of Anthropology (1964), and the many volumes of the World Anthropology series resulting from the 9th International Congress, and, most recently, in the planning for a 25-year updating of the Wenner-Gren Foundation symposium which produced the above-mentioned Appraisal. In the light of these highly visible endeavors of the past 25 years, some among the latest generation of anthropologists may view Tax as an administrator, organizer, and man of action. This largely is a result of his having restricted to his early career the most readily recognized "pure" research. For Tax, however, the action activities also constitute a complex but necessary form of research. He is not alone in believing that the distinction between pure and applied research is of limited usefulness and that the knowledge the social sciences most need for the foreseeable future is of the way in which feedback from people's experience affects their perceptions, attitudes, and behavior. The observed must make more systematic use of the scientific observers, and in this process the object of study becomes the interaction. Epistemologically this is troublesome, and to my knowledge none of Tax's students has dealt adequately with its implications for the study of mankind as a "science." Troublesome or not, however, the process needed to be set in motion, and Tax concluded 30 years ago that integrity for him (if not for the discipline) would require the effort. Tax remained at the center of disciplinary concerns with method and theory in the study of tribal and peasant social organization long enough to establish an institutional home at the University of Chicago and to insure a continuing stream of students with those traditional interests. Some of the contributions to this Festschrift reflect Tax's early interests in social and economic organization: papers by Raymond DeMallie and June Collins prompted by Tax's doctoral research on kinship organization in native North America and papers by Manning Nash and Cyril Belshaw stimulated by his Guatemalan research. Fred Eggan, Tax's fellow student and colleague at the University of Chicago over the past 45 years, offered the following assessment of Tax's doctoral research in informal remarks prepared for a 1974 symposium in Tax's honor (see Stanley 1975): Sol wasn't content merely to write up the Fox social system, with its interesting variant of the Omaha kinship system patterns. He included a short history of the study of social organization, later published under the title "From Lafitau to Radcliffe-Brown" (1955a), which hasn't been surpassed; and he introduced his thesis with "Some Problems of Social Organization" (19556), whose originality has only gradually been appreciated. Here he takes off from Radcliffe-Brown, in part, but he also independently goes his own way. Of particular significance is the

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"set of rules" he develops. In a much later paper, Allan Coult (1967) shows that Tax has developed in a most explicit fashion the technique of transformational analysis, and that his technique is in point-for-point correspondence with Lounsbury's method,. . . published in 1964. He also notes that Tax's explanation of the Fox kinship system accounts more completely for the terms than does Lounsbury's analysis. This is equivalent to being told that you have been speaking prose all your life, and it is probably too late for Sol to learn to write with arrows and reduction formulae, but it is nice to have your achievements recognized while you still can enjoy the procedure.

Tax's pioneering experimentation with 100 percent ethnography in kinship analysis among the Fox (i.e., getting genealogical data from all the members of the Fox community, checking them against the earlier records of William Jones, and obtaining the kinship system from at least 20 individuals in order to uncover and explain discrepancies) were followed by comparably ambitious data-gathering in Panajachel, Guatemala. The results in the area of Panajachel economy (Tax 1953) are as well known among economists as among anthropologists and are here assessed in the light of subsequent developments in economic anthropology by Cyril Belshaw. The results on the diversity and patterning of Panajachelenos' beliefs are not yet published (although, like all Tax's Mesoamerican data, they are available on microfilm) and consequently have not been readily available except to Tax's students. My own doctoral research, in particular, benefited from Tax's pioneering insistence on probing the range of variation in several respondents' views of the world after having learned the bulk of what Panajachelenos could teach an outsider through close association with a principal informant. Also unpublished until now has been the life history of that principal informant, Santiago Yach, recorded by Tax in 1941 and selected to open this collection of essays. Because of space limitations, we have not included the already published paper by the Guatemalan Alfredo Mendez-Dominguez (1975), prepared for the 1974 symposium in Panajachel and addressing Tax's impact upon Guatemalan social anthropology. Of Tax's theoretical papers on Guatemala, perhaps his "World View and Social Relations" (1941) has evoked the most discussion, raising questions about the origin of impersonal, atomistic, and pragmatic social relations in urbanized, industrialized societies, given the existence of these among Mayan Indians in rural Guatemala. Manning Nash suggests in his paper that such social relations may be the result wherever "religious duties fall only on office holders . . . expecially when the major cultural axioms are consensual, uncodified, and not vested in a specific institutional locus." Tax's contribution to the development of Mexican social anthropology

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is reviewed by Mexican anthropologist Fernando Camara Barbachano. The municipios of Chiapas, Mexico, to which Tax introduced Camara Barbachano and fellow students, have in the intervening 30 years yielded the data on which June Nash draws for her controlled comparison of the changing functions of witchcraft. She notes that "whether witchcraft beliefs are assessed as positive or negative depends upon whether the analyst is concerned with a closed system viewed internally or with an adjustment to the wider society," the same point made by James Smith later in the volume with respect to the adaptive significance of factionalism on North American Indian reservations. Michael Salovesh acknowledges the contributions of municipio-centered data but points out their limitations for gaining an adequate understanding of regional and vertical networks of influence in Mexico. Most of the papers in this volume reflect the research and interests of the middle years of Tax's career, when issues of Indian acculturation, identity, and community development brought him and his students into contact with Native Americans throughout North America. Albert Wahrhaftig and Karen Blu focus on the persistence of tribal identity, Wahrhaftig proposing "that symbols central to Cherokee identity integrate a cybernetic mechanism which draws the attention of Cherokees to the meaning of their experience, causes them to monitor the quality of their life, and induces them to refashion their adaptation, the better to persist." Blu explores the symbolic importance of past Lumbee-White confrontations for maintaining Lumbee Indian identity and the way in which the kinds of historical documentation available affect Indian and White concepts of Lumbee identity. In yet other contexts of New World acculturation, William Douglass compares the differing histories of cultural persistence among Basque sheep ranchers who have immigrated to Argentina and to the American West. Leadership and factionalism in Indian communities are analyzed by James Smith and Nancy Lurie. Smith points out that "the often decried factionalism of the modern reservation may be viewed as a specific manifestation of a continuing system of polycephalic leadership adapted to the exigencies of reservation life." Lurie examines the causes of diminished effectiveness of traditional decision-making procedures in reservation settings and suggests steps which might enhance their viability. The decisions with which Indians frequently struggle concern modes of subsistence and dependency on outside assistance. Ernest Schusky reviews the past century of political constraints on the economic development of the Dakota reservations to document the powerlessness of Sioux governing bodies and explain the apathy which has greeted non-Indian efforts to expand the reservations' economic base.

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Less fully represented here are Tax's interests in the underlying cognitive orientations of Native Americans, which present a more fundamental challenge to a viable pluralistic society than simply the desire for religious freedom, political representation, and economic independence. The point is poignantly made by Bruce MacLachlan in his reconstruction of the legal impasse produced by differing White and Apache beliefs about conception and paternity. The scope of differences in epistemologies (i.e., ways of knowing), complicating communication within the scientific community as well as across cultural boundaries, is the subject of Magoroh Maruyama's paper. Maruyama's paper also serves as a transition to those papers sharing a focus on action anthropology; while not a student of Tax's, Maruyama has been attracted to the action anthropologists' interest in the cybernetic character of much human behavior and the limitations of the dominant paradigm in our sciences for understanding this behavior. Regrettably, neither Maruyama nor Tax has endeavored to translate his concepts into the idiom of the other, and they differ in the former's primary interest in describing epistemological differences and the latter's commitment to harnessing the potential for more effective action inherent in an expanded theory of knowledge. Frederick Gearing, in his paper, ventures deeper than has any action anthropologist to date in describing and analyzing the cybernetic character of human communication, drawing upon his research in face-to-face classroom interaction and relating this to his own and colleagues' efforts to understand the interaction of anthropologists and other non-Indians with the Fox. It was upon returning from Mesoamerican research and resuming study of the Fox Indians of Iowa that Tax seriously began to raise questions about anthropologists' responsibilities to the dominated, if not subjugated, peoples among whom they had up to that point been moving with relative freedom and political disengagement. He challenged the assumptions that an anthropological presence need not alter a group's expectations and behavior and that this presence needs no more justification than furthering understanding of behavior, regardless of the assistance which might be provided the people under observation. A philosophy of fieldwork emerged within the Fox project that explicitly acknowledged and built upon the resources of anthropological observers to promote both Indian decision making (and hence anthropological understanding of the Fox's hierarchy of values) and realization of the Fox's shared objectives. Steven Polgar reviews the lines of anthropological inquiry prompted by the Fox project and places the tenets of the philosophy of action within the broader context of contemporary applied, radical, and committed

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anthropology. Between them, Gearing and Polgar address several of the thorny issues raised in the C A treatment of Tax's two articles, "The Bow and the H o e " (1975a) and "Action Anthropology" (1975ft). An issue they do not address is the practicality of action research, admittedly difficult in many contexts. To this end, the final four papers suggest the diversity of contexts wherein the tenets of action anthropology have found application: from efforts by Tax to bring together representatives of all Indian groups in the 1961 Chicago American Indian Conference (paper by Joan Ablon) to continuing efforts by Sarah Anne Robinson to assist a band of Coast Salish Indians; from Leonard Borman's experiences with the Chicago American Indian Center, 1 Kalmuk immigrants in Philadelphia, and mental hospital patients to Philip Young's and Robert Hinshaw's experiences in college administration. The paper by David Blanchard, aptly titled "Beyond Empathy: The Emergence of an Action Anthropology in the Life and Career of Sol Tax," deserves special mention, for it provides a useful supplement to this introduction. Using unpublished papers and correspondence as well as the published documents, Blanchard traces the formative influences and principal junctures in Tax's career. In selecting papers for this Festschrift, we have emphasized work by Tax's students which relates closely to his own principal research foci. This argued against inviting contributions from associates of Tax whose involvement with him has resulted from his role in the international community of anthropologists since 1960. As a result, his concern during the latter third of his career with the integration and direction of the discipline itself is inadequately reflected; we are pleased that at least Cyril Belshaw, Tax's successor as editor of Current Anthropology, is among the contributors. Equally appropriate is the participation of Lisa Peattie, a student of Tax's but also the daughter of Robert Redfield, Tax's close friend and mentor throughout Tax's career until Redfield's death in 1958. The topic of her paper is economic anthropology, and accordingly it accompanies the paper by Belshaw. By contrast with his focus, however, hers is the recent shift by anthropologists to analysis of institutional economics in industrialized, urbanized societies — a trend she labels "anthropological economics." The contributions of two other daughters, the only children of Sol and Gertrude Tax, make this Festschrift unusual, if not unique. Susan Tax Freeman was introduced to anthropological fieldwork in a Chiapas municipio and in her paper examines the role of water resources in municipio identity in Spain. The contribution of Marianna Tax Choldin, a Slavic linguist and librarian, is her translation from the Russian of Aleksandr Voeikov's account of his journey through Yucatan in 1874. Choldin's papers falls at the midpoint of

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the volume, between the papers sharing Latin American topics and the papers dealing primarily with North American Indians and action anthropology. One other distinctive contribution rounds out the Festschrift: selected poems from a larger collection of Paul Friedrich's poetry for anthropologists. Those papers we could not include have been given to Tax. We endeavored to invite all of Tax's former students to consider submitting papers, not daring to anticipate where his influence had had greatest impact. Those who know Sol will recognize that he would have had it no other way. Some papers on action anthropology by persons who have not studied under Tax are being assembled by Leonard Borman for publication in a book which, like this Festschrift, is an outgrowth of the Panajachel symposium of 1974. Over the intervening three years Barbara Metzger, who was introduced to copy-editing as an assistant to Tax during his tenure as editor of Current Anthropology, has brought her skills and personal acquaintance with most of the authors to bear on the copy-editing of all papers. Given the limited market for Festschrifts, I express the deep gratitude of all contributors to Mouton Publishers for undertaking the publishing of the volume. Beloit, Wisconsin October, 1977

ROBERT H I N S H A W

NOTES 1. Any royalties from sale of this Festschrift will be donated to the Robert W. Rietz Scholarship Fund, administered by the Native American Committee, Inc.

REFERENCES CITED Lineage solidarity, transformational analysis, and the meaning of kinship terminologies. Man 2 : 2 6 - 4 7 . M i N D E Z - D o M f N G U E Z , ALFREDO. 1 9 7 5 . Big and little traditions in Guatemalan anthropology. Current Anthropology 1 6 : 5 4 1 - 5 2 . STANLEY, SAM. 1 9 7 5 . The Panajachel symposium. Current Anthropology

COULT, ALLAN. 1 9 6 7 .

16:518-24.

TAX, SOL. 1941. World view and social relations in Guatemala. American Anthropologist 4 3 : 2 7 - 4 2 . . Editor. 1952. Heritage of conquest. Glencoe: Free Press. . 1953. Penny capitalism: A Guatemalan Indian economy. Smithsonian Institution, Institute of Social Anthropology, publ. 16. . 1 9 5 5 A . "From Lafitau to Radcliffe-Brown: A short history of the study of

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social organization," in Social anthropology of North American tribes, enlarged edition. Edited by Fred Eggan, pp. 445-481. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1955ft. "Some problems of social organization," in Social anthropology of North American tribes, enlarged edition. Edited by Fred Eggan, pp. 3-32. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . Editor. 1960. Evolution after Darwin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . Editor. 1964. Horizons of anthropology. Chicago: Aldine. . Editor. 1968. The people vs. the system: A dialogue in urban conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1975a. The bow and the hoe: Reflections on hunters, villagers, and anthropologists. Current Anthropology 16:507-513. . 1975b. Action anthropology. Current Anthropology 16:514-517. . 1976a. Proposal for a new institution: The family as a corporate entity. Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions Report 9(l):6-7. . 1976b. Self-help groups: Thoughts on public policy. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 1 2 : 4 4 8 - 4 5 4 . TAX, SOL, et al. Editors. 1952. An appraisal of anthropology today. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Wilmington Honorary Degree Citation Preface by Robert Hinshaw Autobiography of Santiago Yach by Sol Tax

VI1

IX

1

The Data Base in Economic Anthropology by Cyril S. Belshaw

69

Economic Anthropology and Anthropological Economics by Lisa Peattie

85

World View and Social Relations: An Extension of Tax's Analysis by Manning Nash

95

The Influence of Sol Tax on Mexican Social Anthropology by Fernando Cdmara Barbachano

103

The Season for Witchhunts by June Nash

111

Looking Beyond the Municipio in Chiapas: Problems and Prospects in Studying Up by Michael Salovesh 141 The "Municipios" of Northern Spain: A View from the Fountain by Susan Tax Freeman

161

XX

CONTENTS

Aleksandr Voeikov's Travels in Yucatan, 1874 by Marianna Tax Choldin

195

Change in American Indian Kinship Systems: The Dakota by Raymond J. DeMallie

221

Multilineal Descent: A Coast Salish Strategy by June Μ. Collins

243

We Who Act Right: The Persistent Identity of Cherokee Indians by Albert Wahrhaftig

255

The Uses of History of Ethnic Identity: The Lumbee Case by Karen I. Blu

271

Basque Immigrants: Contrasting Patterns of Adaption in Argentina and the American West by William A. Douglass

287

Leadership Among the Indians of the Northern Woodlands by James G. E. Smith

305

The Will-o'-the-Wisp of Indian Unity by Nancy Ο estreich Lurie

325

Political Constraints on Economic Development: The Dakota Reservations by Ernest L. Schusky 337 The Case of the Protracted Pregnancy by Bruce B. MacLachlan

363

Transepistemological Understanding: Wisdom Beyond Theories by Μago roh Maruyama

371

Microanalysis and Action Anthropology by Frederick Gearing

391

Applied, Action, Radical, and Committed Anthropology by Steven Polgar

409

Contents

XXI

Beyond Empathy: The Emergence of an Action Anthropology in the Life and Career of Sol Tax by David Blanchard 419 The American Indian Chicago Conference by Joan Ablon

445

Memorandum to a Coast Salish Band on Politics and Policy Making by Sarah Anne Robinson

457

Action Anthropology and the Self-Help/Mutual-Aid movement by Leonard D. Borman

487

Action Anthropology in College Administration by Robert Hinshaw and Philip Young

513

Selected Poems by Paul Friedrich

547

Contributors

Joan Ablon

Susan Tax Freeman

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Cyril S. Belshaw

Paul Friedrich

UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

David

Blanchard

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Frederick Gearing

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Karen I. Blu

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

Robert Hinshaw

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Leonard D. Borman NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

Fernando Cämara

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

Barbachano

INSTITUTO NACIONAL DE

BELOIT COLLEGE

Nancy Oestreich Lurie UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN

Bruce B. MacLachlan SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY

ANTROPOLOGIA Y HISTORIA

Magoroh Marianna Tax Choldin

Maruyama

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

June Nash June M. Collins

CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

Manning Nash Raymond J. DeMallie

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

INDIANA UNIVERSITY

Lisa Peattie William A. Douglass UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

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CONTRIBUTORS

Steven Polgar* UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA

Sarah Anne

Robinson

SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS

Michael Salovesh NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY

Ernest L. Schusky SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY

*(1932-1978)

James G. E. Smith MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

Sol Tax UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Albert

Wahrhaftig

CALIFORNIA STATE COLLEGE

Philip Young WILMINGTON COLLEGE

SOL TAX

Autobiography of Santiago Yach

[Santiago Yach was asked to narrate his life story during the last of Sol Tax's several seasons of work in Panajachel. He had by 1941 become Tax's most capable and conscientious informant. Moreover, the Taxes had been compadres of the Yaches since becoming godparents of the latter's son Alejandro in 1937. In the course of seven sittings distributed over the final three months of fieldwork, Santiago dictated from memory his experiences in much the same order as presented here. Tax had expressed his interest in having such a record a week before the first session in order to give Santiago time to prepare mentally for the endeavor; in so doing he hoped to obtain the life story as Santiago himself structured it. In the initial session, however, it became apparent that he lacked the slightest notion of how to begin, and a few questions were needed at the outset and occasionally thereafter when he seemed at a loss to know how to proceed. At this point the record became, of course, no longer a "pure" autobiography, but throughout he was questioned as little as possible and, apart from requests for clarification, was not interrupted. Tax typed as he dictated, he being thoroughly accustomed to this procedure. Santiago dictated in Spanish; he was able to write and read some Spanish at the time, having relearned these skills after losing them soon after completion of his three years of early childhood schooling. With such knowledge he was not wholly typical of the adult Panajacheleno, but his literacy was not sufficient to give him an unrepresentative sophistication. He remained throughout Tax's acquaintance with him a respected and fully accepted member of the community, a community in which he had spent all his life and with whose members he identified completely. In one other respect he was a bit atypical; at the age of only 42 (when this account was dictated) he was already serving his term in the highest office in the hierarchy of community services. Santiago was killed 15 years later in a fall from the church roof he was

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helping construct. His three children were still living in 1963, when the youngest, Alejandro, served as one of Hinshaw's informants.] My father was Nicolas Yach, and he had only one sister and one brother that I can recall. The sister was Tomasa Yach, mother of Domingo Τοηόη, and the brother was Santos Yach, the father of Francisco Yach. Tomasa was the eldest and my father the middle child. Their father was Juan Yach, but he died before I was born; his wife, Maria Quiche, I recall, for she died at a ripe age when I was some 10 years old. Tomasa Yach died only six or seven years ago, but Santos died when I was a youth of 16 or 17. My mother was Rosaria Xingo, and she had only one brother, Lorenzo Xingo, who is still living. Lorenzo was the elder. Rosaria's father was Lucas Xingo, whom I never knew; her mother, Maria Lopez, also died before I was born. My parents were married in the church; that is why we children are called Yach. They were married some 50 years ago, when there was still a priest in the local church. Their first child was Jose Yach, who died at about the age of 20.1 was the second child, born July 25 almost 43 years ago, according to the records in the town hall. The third child was Agustina Yach, who outlived Jose by 7 or 8 years. The fourth was a boy child, whose name I do not know, who lived only three or four months. The fifth was another boy, Francisco Yach, who lived some 6 years. Then there was a stillbirth, of a little girl. I was born in a house with cane-and-mud walls on the site where I now live. Living there were my parents, my grandmother Maria Quiche, and my brother Jose, who was about three years my senior. My memories of childhood extend back to the age of a little more than four years, when my father gave me my first gabän and pants. In those days rodilleras were not worn, and the pants reached to the knees, unlike the short calzoncillos worn today. 1 The gabän, like those today, also reached to the knees; but since I was so small, of course my father did not sew sleeves into my garment. I remember the morning; it was during some fiesta. My father put my gabän on me, cautioning me not to soil it or tear it too soon, lest he not buy me another. He told me that any errand I was given by my mother I should do quickly, and any work assigned I should do well and quickly, without playing, so as to help him earn money to buy more clothes. He told me to help Jose and obey him in whatever he told me to do. My mother said nothing, for she had nothing to say about me since I would be working and traveling with my father. Then I was given some work to do — cleaning the edges of the irrigation ditch, gathering firewood, and sweeping out the patio. I still could not work hard, of course. If my father were working close by, I was

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always sent to call him when lunchtime came. Jose was now working alongside of my father. When Jose was younger, we no doubt played together, but from the time I recall we never did. At that time, Agustina was two or three years old; she still wore any kind of bought clothes, but with a little skirt like Mother's (which is exactly the same as those worn today). It was another job that fell to me to take Agustina out in the shade while Mother was busy in the kitchen; I carried her in a cloth on my back just as Mother did. We played together with little clay pots and tin cans, and we used to pile up earth and mix it with water and make little dishes and things with the mud. We also played hide-and-seek, and we used to fix up sticks to look like saints and carry them on litters we made, adorning them with flowers and so on. We played other games, too, but I cannot remember them. Among my first memories is that of my godmother, Candelaria Parajon, who was a eurer. Her husband was dead, and she died when I was seven or eight. When I was a child, my mother took me to visit her every fiesta. My father never went along. I recall a visit to her house even before I was given my first gabän; I think it was one Holy Week, about nine o'clock in the morning on Thursday. I knew that at my godmother's house they always gave me something good to eat, so I went very happily with my mother that morning. She lived way uptown, and I walked holding my mother's hand. My mother carried a cloth-covered basket with things for my godmother, and when we arrived she delivered this. We went inside and sat down, and my godmother began to play with me, saying, "Here has come my husband; I suppose you have brought me money? Why didn't you send me firewood yesterday? Now, even though it is a fiesta, you will have to go and bring me a load of firewood." Then she asked my mother if I weren't ill, saying that she hoped to God I was all right. Then she gave us bread with honey and a little white fish; we ate a little and took the rest home. My mother gave her a great basketful of bread, chocolate, sugar, honey, tortillas, tamales, white fish, and cooked eggs, and my godmother had to give her an equal amount of the same things. She had to have a lot of things ready for all her compadres and patients, who would come with gifts that would have to be reciprocated. Of course, she could give the gifts brought by one person to the next visitor, losing only what the visitors ate in the house. Six or seven months before putting on my first gabän, I remember that I took sick with the evil eye. Only my mother knew who it was that had done it to me; I never knew. I remember feeling bad for days, with fever and a burning at the heart. I neither ate nor slept well; I was very cranky, and had diarrhea. Fever and diarrhea are the real symptoms of evil eye. Then my mother went to notify my godmother that I was sick. She came

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back and said we would have to wait until Monday to give me the remedy. Only on Mondays and Fridays can medicines for evil eye be given, because only on the bad days is the evil in the heart; on other days it hides and cannot be treated. My mother must have gone to get the medicine while I was still asleep early Monday morning, for when I woke up she was gone and had told my father not to let me go anywhere or eat anything. My mother brought a coffee-colored liquid; I cried when she made me drink it, for I knew that it would bite. I took two whiskey-glasses full. Not until 10 or 11 o'clock in the morning did I get anything to eat. I was sick in bed, and not until the next day did I get up feeling perfectly well. That was the last time I was treated for evil eye, for then I grew too old to get the sickness. Of course, my godmother died presently and there was nobody to treat me. My grandmother stayed around the house all the time; being nearly blind, she never went uptown or anywhere else. When my mother had a lot of work, weeding onions or something, she left early and Grandmother did all the work in the kitchen. Or if my mother was weaving, Grandmother would make the lunch. But if my mother was in the kitchen, my grandmother didn't do any of the work. She knew how to braid garlic; or if it were time to prepare coffee, she would pick it over; or if my mother were going to sell onions in the market, she would pull them out early and Grandmother would clean and prepare them. What my grandmother did most was talk to us children. She scolded us when we didn't do as she ordered: "Naughty children! You run away from me because I can't see well. I can't hit you, but when your father comes, I'll tell him, and he'll hit you!" But when we were good, she would be good to us; then she would give us our lunch early if my father were late. When we were bad, she would chase us out of the kitchen, and then we would go out and find limes and oranges to eat. When we were good, we used to sit in the kitchen watching her work, and she would say, " T o o bad that I am old and can't see well, and can no longer work fast to get your lunch quickly." And she would say, " I shall soon die, but you will grow up and you must help your father; that is why we give you good food, so you will grow strong and be able to help." She also told us to respect God and the saints, for if we didn't, then when sickness came, we would die. She also told us that when we saw corn on the floor, we should pick it up, because she herself could not see well enough to do it. I do not recall that she ever told us stories; if she did, I just cannot remember. She never told us about the sun or the moon or the hill, for we were still very young. On the whole, I have pleasant memories of my grandmother. She was good to us, and only scolded when we were at fault. When I used to care for and play with Agustina in the patio at home,

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there were no neighbor houses close by where I went to play. Sometimes the mother of Lucia Sahon, who was the same age as Agustina, left her at our house while she went to her work. Then the three of us would play together. Also, Bonifacio Can, who was my age, and his brother Jose sometimes came to our house to play with us. Their father and mother used to drink a lot, both going to the tavern, and there was nobody at home to feed them. So they would come by themselves to our house, where my grandmother would give them something to eat; she was probably some relative of the Can family. Then they would stay and play with us. We never went to the Sahon or Can houses. Indeed, I never entered a house other than my own until I was 10 or 12 years old, when I visited the house of Lorenzo Xingo to do a few days of work there. Grownups occasionally came to the house when they were drinking with my father; Bonifacio Can's father and mother used to come once in a while when they were drinking. Lucia Sahon's widowed mother also came to visit occasionally, perhaps every four or five days. If she came at lunchtime, my parents would give her a cup of coffee, and if she saw that there was work, she would help a little. Neither my uncles nor aunts ever came to our house, except Lorenzo Xingo after I was fairly grown. The first trip to a market that I can recall was to the local market when I was about six years old. One Sunday morning my mother had to take many onions to sell and couldn't carry them all. My father said to me, "You had better take 200 onions to the market with your mother." I put the onions in a little bag and walked behind my mother. My father had said that I could go only if I was able to carry the onions. I was able to carry them, and was very happy. I stayed with my mother in the marketplace, for of course I could not go home alone. My brother Jose only liked to work; he was ashamed to go to the local market with my mother, for he was then almost ten years old. Two or three Sundays after that I again went to market with my mother, and then one fiesta day I was taken for the first time to Solola. This was during the week of Palm Sunday, when the market is so large in Solola. Because she was blind, my grandmother could not care well for Agustina, so Jose had to stay. They took me along so that I could see the fiesta. I walked all the way up to Solola that morning, starting when it was still dark at about four o'clock. We arrived at six or six-thirty. In those days everybody went very early, for there were wholesale buyers of onions and green beans that came from San Francisco El Alto with lime. They made up their loads quickly and were gone by seven or eight o'clock, so we had to arrive even earlier. (Today it is prohibited in Solola to sell out wholesale, and one can be taken to jail and fined a quetzal for doing so. They say this is because there is nothing left for the ladinos of

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Sololä if everything is sold wholesale. The only way to sell wholesale is to make the deal early but not deliver the goods until about noon, meanwhile setting such a high price that nobody will buy.) When we had sold our goods, we all went together to make purchases of fish, mats, and other things that my father wanted. My father consulted with my mother, but he carried the money and made the bargains. That time my little brother Francisco was an infant, and my mother carried him on her back. We had tortillas with us, and my mother asked my father for money and bought other things, like cracklings, for us to eat and coffee for us to drink. In those days, of course, the coffee was bought in little clay jugs; there were no cups. Then there was only one Indian from Sololä who made coffee for sale, whereas now there are many; the market was bigger then than now, but most people drank only atol. Quezaltecos sold atol and pinol, but only during the fiesta, not on ordinary Fridays. After lunch, at about one o'clock, we started back home. We started to walk, but I was too tired and began to cry. My father meanwhile began to drink, for there were many marimbas in Sololä. My father drank with a friend from here and became drunk, and finally it was the friend who carried me home to Panajachel. He had his bag full of purchases, and I sat on top of the bag on his back, my arms around his chest. I remember how my mother scolded my father, saying, "Why did you begin to drink? Now who will carry the child?" But my father said, "Don't worry, my friend will carry him." My mother then said only that they shouldn't drink any more, lest both should become worse. I was crying rather hard by then because there was nobody to carry me. The friend, when he carried me, was also pretty drunk and weaving down the road; I was pretty frightened all the way, for if he had fallen, I would have fallen, too. A little above San Jorge, my father fell down. His friend let me down and said, "We'll rest awhile while your father is there." He sat down to rest, but then he was not able to rise again. My father had bought a half-bottle of liquor in Sololä, and my mother was carrying it. Father said, "Give me another drink, and I'll go." Mother answered, "How can I give you more liquor? You'll never be able to get up." My father insisted, and since he was rather angry my mother was afraid to refuse him and gave him and the friend a drink apiece. Then the two men got up and continued the way down, but now holding onto each other. I had to continue the journey afoot, holding my mother's hand and going behind the men. Every little while they asked for more liquor, and my mother gave it to them little by little. It was about seven o'clock that evening when we arrived home. That was the first time that I remember that my father was drunk. I was frightened, thinking that he might fall into the ravine and that he might hit

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my mother. (Now when I get drunk and come home, Alejandro goes off with Juliana into the coffee trees and won't come home until I am asleep. They think I will hit them, but I never would, no matter how drunk.) The second time I went to the local market, the schoolboys saw me, and they were always complaining to the teacher about other boys who were ready for school. They assumed I was Jose and told the teacher that Jose had gone to the market and that he should be in school. So the teacher put him on a list of boys ready for school and took it to the town officials. At home the family talked over the danger. Father asked Jose, "What shall we do if they call you to go to school?" Jose said, "I won't go. Santiago can go. It was his fault that this happened, for he went to the marketplace." So Father said, "All right, then, we'll send him, for you can help with the work; he still can't work well." The mayores2 called my father to the town hall, since my brother was on the list. The boys had erroneously reported Jose's name to be Gaspar, and that is how the name appeared on the list. In the town hall, then, Father told them that he indeed had a son, but he was still very small. The alcalde (a ladino) said finally, "The one called Gaspar is the one you will send to school." My father and Jose were angry with me, for it was my fault that this had happened. (The first time I went to market, my father had sent me, but the time I was reported to the teacher I had volunteered to go so that we could take a bigger load.) My father then entered me in school, under the name of Gaspar, a name I kept for five or six years. Little by little, then, my father told people that was not my name — that I was called that only in school - and so gradually people began to know my real name. Three years I was in school. The first day I went, crying, with my mother. My father had scolded her a lot for having taken me to the market that time, and my mother was crying too. The school was where it is today, in the town hall. There was only one teacher, and there were about 30 students, mostly boys, both Indians and ladinos. We were separated into groups according to how much we knew, and those who knew more taught the younger children. Bonifacio Cululen had been in school four or five years when I came; he already knew something, so he and others took turns teaching me. But the teacher gave me my first lessons. There were 10 or 12 youngsters of my age and perhaps a dozen Indian boys all told. I remember that in school, Domingo Τοηόη, who was older, one day told me that we were relatives. I went home and asked my father if that were true. Domingo hadn't known either, but the first day of school he walked home with me, saying, "Don't worry, I'll watch you." When Domingo came home he told his father that a son of Nicolas Yach had started in school. Then his father told him to care for me a little, since we

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were like brothers. After that, Domingo called me wachalal3 and told me we were relatives. Before that, I knew some of my relatives. I knew that Lorenzo Xingo was my uncle and his sons my cousins. To reach our land we had to go by Lorenzo's house and lands, and my mother pointed him out and told me he was my uncle. In the same way I knew Jose and Antonio Xingo, my mother's uncles, because they had lands near ours. Santos Yach and his wife, Manuela Quiche, also had a little land back of our house and used to come to work there; my father pointed them out to me and told me they were my uncle and aunt. Once having entered school, for three years I never went again to Sololä or anywhere else. However, since I had to go uptown anyway, I was given my mother's loads to carry to the market here every Sunday. Now that I was in school, I was the errand boy of the house; when somebody had to go to the store for sugar or other things, I went. My brother Jose during this period was going to Sololä and to Tecpän with my father; he also went to Tecpän alone, under the care of some older man from here who happened to be going. He was only nine or ten when I started in school, but he was already very strong. He would go on journeys while my father stayed and worked. Now, of course, Agustina was big enough to take care of herself around the house. When I was taken out of school, I was very happy. If I had gone a year or two longer, perhaps I would have learned to like it; as it was, it was just a nuisance. Before school I had to do chores around the house, and then I would be late to school and the teacher would beat me severely with his staff. Then, on the way home to lunch, I would play with the older boys and arrive late, and be scolded at home and given work to do; then I would return late again to school and get another beating. So I didn't like it much. Of course, when in school, I played with the other boys. Domingo Τοηόη and Quirino Quiche found a pole about four inches thick and five feet long, and they would carry it on their shoulders with me seated on it. But then after awhile they began to find ways to throw me to the ground while carrying me; when this had happened two or three times, that game ended! We also played "Buying a Mule": About eight boys would take each other's hands in the form of a whip, and we would all run forward fast. One boy, "the buyer," would run behind us and try to tackle one of us. The game was to keep him away with our feet, for when he caught one of us it would be with a hard fall. The boy who was caught then stood to one side, watching while the others formed the whip again and the buyer tried to catch another. He continued until all were caught. There was another game, "Coyote and Sheep," that was played with more boys

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during recess at school. The ladinos all knew this game, and we played together (the other game was too rough for the ladinos, and usually only the Indians played it). Some 12 or 15 boys joined hands as in the other game and made a circle; the "sheep" was in the middle and the "coyote" outside the ring. When the coyote wanted to enter, they all lowered their arms to keep him out. With carelessness the coyote would find a way to sneak in, but the sheep was watchful and would be allowed to dash out if the coyote came in. Then, when the coyote went out to chase him, the sheep would quickly be allowed to enter again. Finally, of course, the coyote would catch the sheep and throw him to the ground. Another game was "Pulling Up Vegetables." One boy was "buyer," another "seller," and two or three small, quick boys were "dogs." The seller was the head of the game, and he looked for 10 or 15 boys to play. The seller sat with arms around a tree, and the other boys sat behind him, each holding onto the boy in front by his sash. Each boy had a name, such as Onion, Cabbage, etc. The last was always Coriander. Near Coriander sat the dogs. A strong boy who could take a lot was the buyer. He would come up to the seller and say, "Good morning. My boss has sent me to see if you can sell me some vegetables." "Sure, I can sell you any kind of vegetables you want, but unfortunately they are not watered and it is hard to pull them out." "Well," said the buyer, "if you will sell them to me, I shall see about pulling them out; I'll try it." "Ah, but I had better warn you about the dogs that I have guarding the field." "All right," said the buyer, "if you have dogs there, I had better buy a couple of rolls to give them." Then the buyer would come to Coriander to pull him up, and when the dogs began to bark he would give them a little piece of bread. The dogs wouldn't eat the bread, and while the buyer tried by sheer force to pull up Coriander, the dogs would scratch and tickle him all over the legs and ribs to keep him from succeeding. If the buyer didn't succeed in getting Coriander, he would go to the seller to complain that the dogs wouldn't let him pull it up. The seller would ask, "How many rolls did you give each dog?" He would reply, "Only a small piece each." The seller would say, "You have to give them plenty; if they get filled up, they will go to sleep in the shade and won't bother you; try again, with plenty of bread." So the buyer would try again to lead the dogs away with more bread, or the pretense of bread, until he finally managed to pull up Coriander. Coriander would then go to one side. Then the buyer would say, "I have pulled up the Coriander; now will you sell me a bunch of onions?" "With pleasure, if the dogs will let you." Then he would repeat everything with Onion, and after pulling up Onion would ask for Garlic, Cabbage, Beet, Carrot, etc. In the end the buyer also had to pull up the seller, always bothered by the dogs. I used to like this game, and had two

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sashes torn in it. My mother, on her way to the marketplace, would see us playing, so she knew how they got torn. She would scold and tell me I'd have to find some other way to tie up my pants and rodillera. All the talking in the games was in the Indian language, and when ladinos joined us those of us who spoke a little Spanish would explain the games to them. There were many more games like this among the Indians, in some of which ladinos would join when we got started. Ladinos never entered the rough games, however; clothes would get torn, and they didn't want to join in. Rough games took strength, and ladinos, always weaker than Indians, couldn't take them. Another game in which both ladinos and Indians joined was called "Chain." All would stand in a line holding outstretched hands. The leader would pass under the arms of the last two, followed by all the rest, leaving the last man facing in a direction opposite all the rest. Then the leader and the rest would go under the next to the last pair of arms, and so on, until all were twisted with the right hand under the left armpit holding the left hand of the next boy. This was the only game the 12 or 15 Indian girls ever played in school. We never played together, of course. Since we got out of school so many years ago, these games have not been played. Nowadays the children play only ladino games, such as ball. We never even saw balls in those days. But the schoolboys still shout on the way to school the way we did. I recall that the older boys in school started it, telling us all that we had to shout on the way to school so that those who had not yet started would hear and come out quickly. Thus we would all get to school together and nobody would be late (unless we all were) to be beaten by the teacher. When I left school, I left behind all games. I have never played a game since, except for the second time that I served as alguacil. Once, about three or four months after becoming alguacil, eight or ten of us played the game of "Pulling Up Vegetables." It happened that all of us had been in school and so knew the game. One alguacil began to talk about it, and we all told the mayores how it was played. So the mayores said, "Let's try it to see if we understand it." We chose the two smallest alguaciles to be the dogs, and the mayores were in the middle of the line because they didn't know the game. We did this at night, by torchlight, but never repeated it. In school, Bonifacio Cululen and Domingo Τοηόη were my closest friends. Bonifacio was the oldest, and knew a lot; he left the school at the same time I did. He wanted me to stay in school and become better educated, but my brother Jose advised my father against this, saying that I might not learn to work if I stayed in school longer. My father had a ladino employer, Secundino Chavez, and asked him to approach the authorities about letting me drop out of school. Secundino told them that my father

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owed a lot and there was nobody to help him work off the debt, and they let me out of school. Then for about four months I lived with the Chavez family. He was a butcher and had brought four or five head of cattle from the coast. I had to cut and bring feed for them, and I had to water his crops when there were no cattle to feed. Those four months I wasn't paid at all; nor did my father get credit on his debt, for this work was to repay the favor of getting me out of school. However, I was fed at the Chavez house, and there I slept. Only the few nights when I came home to bathe in the sweatbath did I stay home. In the Chavez house I was happy; the father of Bonifacio Can worked there, as did my father, Vicente Locon, and others I do not remember. I was the only one who lived in the house. The lady of the house was named Arcadia; she did all her own grinding and cooking. There were three children, six, four, and two years old; I had to care for the youngest one a little. I slept alone in a little house back of their house and ate alone in the kitchen, where they left me food. I ate everything they did — meat, beans, rice; it was not hard to learn to like their kind of food. Indeed, when I left there, it was rather hard to like the food at home again. I had not learned to speak Spanish in school, and in this house I learned nothing either. Both Secundino and Arcadia always spoke to me in my language. I recall that my employer had a second wife who lived in Tzanjuyu with two children. She was a widow, and the children were by her former husband. Her name was Clementa, a ladina. When Secundino would butcher an animal, he would send me to Tzanjuyü to give her three or four pounds of the best meat, cautioning me to say nothing to Arcadia. Then when I returned, Secundino would give me about a pound of meat to take home to my parents. I would take it home and tell my mother that today a steer had been killed and so my employer had given me a ration. But she didn't know how it was I had earned my meat! Finally, Arcadia discovered that I was taking meat to the other woman. One day when Secundino gave me meat for Clementa, other women were in the butcher shop and saw it. Later they passed the tavern where Arcadia was working and said to her, "Well, you must be cooking meat now, for we just saw your husband send it to you." Arcadia of course denied that she had meat, and when I returned at noon she asked me where I had taken meat. I said I hadn't gone out anywhere. She said, "Oh, yes, you did. Where were you at seven this morning?" I said I had been in the butcher shop. She asked me no more, but after that she was always angry with me. Sometimes she didn't give me very good meals after that. I told my employer that perhaps I wouldn't finish my time there because his wife knew that I was taking meat to Clementa and now didn't give me proper meals. Secundino then told me that if lunch was short, I should

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come to him and he would make it up with bread. But I was ashamed to do this, and I came home to tell my father that I wasn't getting enough food. My father told me I should go and make new arrangements with Secundino, that perhaps I had better come home for lunch. However, I didn't do anything even then, and I stood it another month, which was the last of the four months I had to serve. I r e m e m b e r when my brother Francisco was born; it was about the time that I was given my first gabän. I do not r e m e m b e r anything about it except when the infant was taken into the sweatbath (it must have been the ninth day) with my m o t h e r and Agustina carrying the child. Agustina carried the baby on her back, in a cloth, in the usual way. She was very small, but she had to do it, for it is the custom that the next eldest child carry the newborn into the sweatbath for the first time. (Thus, I am told, I carried Agustina in. If the next eldest is only a year or so old and cannot possibly do the job, then the midwife carries the infant in.) I r e m e m b e r asking my father, " W h o is t h a t ? " and he told me it was my little brother. I had known that my m o t h e r was sick in bed, but I did not know the reason. I did not, of course, know that babies are born of their mothers, and my father had told me she had a headache. A n d now he told me the infant had been bought. " W h e r e ? " I wanted to know. " I n G u a t e m a l a , " my father replied, adding that there they sell plenty of babies. I argued that he had not gone anywhere, and asked who had brought the baby. H e replied that I had still been asleep early that morning when a merchant had come to the house to offer the baby. " W h y are they putting it in the s w e a t b a t h ? " I then asked, and he said, "Just because they like t o . " I didn't ask how much the child had cost, and since there was work to do the conversation ended. I do not r e m e m b e r how the last child was born. W h e n Francisco was about four years old, my parents sent him with me to our cornfield to cut a little chipilin4 for lunch. I had trouble with him on the way; he didn't want to walk, but finally I got him up to the field. A f t e r I had cut the chipilin, he didn't want to start back and began to cry. I hit him with my palm at the back of the head and dragged him when he cried harder and didn't want to come. We didn't get home until late, and my mother scolded me because he immediately complained that I had hit him and dragged him. The next day Francisco awoke with fever, and didn't get better, and after about three weeks he died. My parents scolded me and blamed me, but I defended myself. They had sent Francisco with me, and he hadn't wanted to walk, and what could I have done? I think now that it was my fault all right, because I gave him such a blow that he fell to the ground and got a great fright, and of course it was of fright that he died. W h e n the child was sick, no eurer was called. My father just went to the

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pharmacy and told them that the child had fever; they gave him a remedy, which he gave to the child. Four or five times he went to the drugstore for remedies, but in the end the child died anyway. I have no memory of his death or of the funeral or anything; I remember only how sad my parents were, and that my father drank for about a week. They said no more to me, for they knew that I might get sick and die myself if they scolded me any more. It was useless, anyway, for the child was dead and couldn't be brought back to life. My brother Jose was more angry with me than my parents were, and said, "Why did you hit him and cause him to die? That was very bad, for he was a boy and a helper to our father." Sometimes when I am working on my land, I recall this and say to myself, "Here is where I hit my brother, and he sickened and died." And I feel sad. When Francisco died, Jose decided that, whether I was strong enough or not, I would have to go on a journey. Father was drinking a lot, from sadness, and Jose told me that since I had killed my brother, I would have to help more, and go with him in Father's place. Of course, I was anxious to go anyway, for I had never been anywhere except to Solola, and I wanted to go to Tecpan and Patzun. My father used to go to Patalul and the coast, to Tecpan and Patzun, to Antigua and the capital, to Totonicapän, and to other distant markets with his produce. In those days my father took to drinking a lot on the road. Sometimes he would go to Tecpan to sell on Thursday and not return until Saturday, and then without any money. When he went with Jose, his drinking was worse than when he was alone, because then he had somebody to look after the cargo. So Jose it was who told Father that he had better stay home, for he went only to drink, and that I would go with him on the road. Father agreed that it would be better so. It was during the dry season that I made this first trip to Tecpan. In the rainy season, of course, children cannot go there, because there are two rivers to cross. We arose early; my father went alone to pull up the onions, and everybody helped prepare the cargo for Jose. I carried no load, only the food and the utensils. Since it was my first journey, my mother found good food to send along, so I would go happily; there was a dish prepared of little fish and tortillas, coffee, and brown sugar. We started out at about ten o'clock on a Wednesday morning, taking the road to San Andres, which I saw for the first time. We stopped there a little while and drank a bottle of soft drink which Jose bought at the roadside. Then we took the road to San Antonio Las Flores, stopping for lunch at Xechicojay, where there is water and a good place to build a fire. This was at about three o'clock. We arrived at Las Flores an hour later, and, after resting a little, went down the ravine to Pawarabal, where there live some Tecpanecos who sell atol. We found a spreading tree and made our beds under it for

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the night. In the dry season nobody sought lodging in houses; people just slept under the trees. I recall that in San Andres we met Miguel Cosme, Agustin Lopez, and Francisco Chuc, all older men from Panajachel. Jose spoke to them first: "You are early." "Yes," they replied. "Can we go with you a little?" asked Jose. They agreed, and we followed them. When lunchtime came, we all lunched together. Miguel set down his lunch, and we all ate of it; then when it was finished, Agustin set out his. When we had finished that, we had all had enough and so continued the journey. Then, for supper in the evening, first Francisco set down his food, and then Jose put down our lunch for all to share. In the morning, we made a fire for breakfast. Each of us took out our second package of lunch (for each carried two), and Jose and I ate apart, as did each of the others. (So it always is, because if we should all eat of one man's lunch, perhaps at noon in the marketplace we would not eat together and that person would have none.) It was about five-thirty when we resumed our journey, arriving at about nine-thirty in the morning in Tecpän. I was very happy then, for I had nothing to carry, most of our food having been used up; Jose did not ask me to help him with his load. Jose, of course, knew the place where he was supposed to sell, each merchant having his spot. He undid his load, and we began to tie up the bunches of onions, separating the big ones from the little ones. The smallest onions sold for 2 reales a bunch, the larger ones for 4 reales, and some for a peso; the very largest sometimes sold for 12 reales. One earned 150 to 200 pesos in those days with only a small load. We sold pretty well; at least Jose said, "Business was good today." We finished selling at about noon, and then we lunched there, buying coffee. Earlier, Jose had sent me to buy two cups of coffee and some bread to hold our appetites until we should finish selling. So we bought coffee twice. Then Jose began to buy things: salt, chile, the bread made in Patzun, and a half-pound of meat to eat on the road. Jose and I left at about three; some Panajachelenos had gone before, and now (virtually without cargo) we almost ran to catch them. I don't remember now who they were. We ate and slept that night where we had lunched the day before; we made a fire and made a rice soup with the meat and onions in it. We didn't eat communally, for each had brought his meat and each made his own soup in his pot. Tastes differ, and maybe one wouldn't like the other's soup. At three o'clock we got up and arrived home at about six for breakfast. My parents immediately asked how I had taken the journey; they were happy that I had gone to earn money. First we divided the bread, and we all ate it with coffee; then, after breakfast, Jose delivered his accounts to Father. He turned over all the money, and Father said, "When you feel

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like going to work in the fields now, all right; if you want to rest, that's all right, too." I was tired, so I rested, but Jose, who was accustomed to this work, went to the fields. My father told me not to sit down or to sleep, for that would make me more tired; he said I should walk around, visit the crops, do anything but sit down. (If one sleeps, it is even worse than if one sits down, for on waking one cannot stand up; one's feet become cold.) I stood it until evening and then went to bed. Thereafter, we went to Tecpän or Patzün every two or three weeks, or several weeks in a row when there was a lot to sell. When I was about four years old, even before I had my first gabän, I remember when my father was sent to the coast on a mandamiento.5 I remember that the alcalde and his regidores came to recruit him, bringing money. My father said he didn't want to go, since he had just recently come back, and he refused the money. But the alcalde left it on the ground in the patio and told him he had to do it. My parents were very angry, but they did not cry. The next day my father went to San Andres to buy corn for the journey, and the day after that my mother began to make totoposte.6 For three or four days my mother ground corn while my father gathered firewood. Fifty pounds of corn had to be made into totoposte for the journey. If it was too much, and some was left over, this could be added to for the next time one had to go away; but one could not take less than this. In about ten days, the alcalde returned to tell my father that in a few days he would start with the others. Then he went to buy more corn to make tortillas and large tamales for the road. I recall that early one morning my father went to Tzanjuyu, where he and the others took the launch to Atitlän to start their trip to the coast. My mother cried because the money that had been given was not enough for all the corn and the expenses at home; where would the money come from? Also, she was worried that my father might get sick on the coast. While Father was away, my mother pulled up onions to sell, bought corn, and so on; she knew what to do. I do not remember how long Father was gone then, but a good worker could usually return in about three weeks. I do remember that he returned rather soon, very contented that he had finished so quickly. He first asked my mother if we had all been well, if nothing had happened to us. Then my mother asked if nothing had happened to him. My father said that all had gone well. My mother had ready some cash from the sale of my father's crops, and since he felt like a drink, she sent Jose to buy one. The next day he picked up his work where he had left off. Of course, he brought no money, having just paid off his debt. Every few weeks he would have to go. At first I remember that he was sent for 15 or 20 tareas1 at a time, but during the time I was in school they

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began to demand 30 or 35 tareas at a time. By then my father was taking Jose along with him, but Jose was too small to help much and they were often gone a month or so at a time. Then nobody was left at home to help my mother, and little work was done. My mother watered the gardens herself, and weeded and transplanted when necessary. Sometimes I did a little before school in the morning or stayed out of school a day. We never hired men to help. Then when Father returned he worked hard to make tablones and tablones, so that if he should be called away again soon Mother could do the planting and so on. When I was some seven or eight years old, my father received the cofradia8 of Sacramento. This was the first service of his that I can remember. Pedro Parajon (now an old man) was the first mayordomo; Nicolas Quiche was the second mayordomo. I do not remember when they must have come to our house for the first time, for the fiesta of Holy Thursday; but I recall very well when the year was received and the mayordomos were pointed out to me by my mother. In the morning the bread was counted out in the cofradia by the mayordomos and my father; I sat with them and they gave me a roll. At noon, when the turkey and rooster were cooked and carved up into little pieces by the mayordomos, I was again there with them in the cofradia, and they gave me a piece of turkey. Jose came in and found me there and scolded me; he was angry because I was there while he was out working in the field. "What are you doing here? Come along and look at the crops. You're just here because they gave you a roll this morning." And he took me to help water the crops. (My father had asked the school to excuse me that day because of the fiesta in the house.) Jose scolded me and said I should go to school tomorrow; better that than that Father should have to pay a fine for me. But I didn't go to school the next day; when my father and the others went to town for the procession, I went along. Jose remained at home. I also recall the rituals of the night before. When all the officials came, they brought in the saints and drank rum and chicha made from plums. I remember how the food was served and that the mayordomos went to take the leftover food to the houses of the officials. I do not remember any of the officials, only the mayordomos who were around all year. I do remember something of what the wives of the mayordomos and the texel did when the year was received. They came when the saints were brought to the house; each woman, except for the wife of the texel, had two helpers, and one of these carried a bundle of saints' clothes about a meter high. They all went into the kitchen, where they were given a lot of liquor by my mother and the new mayordomos. I remember this well because I was with my mother; Jose wasn't there because he was ashamed to enter there with the women. They drank about two bottles of liquor,

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and then they were given their food. The order of service was: the wife of the retiring cofrade, of the incoming cofrade, of the retiring first mayordomo, of the incoming first mayordomo, and so on. They all got drunk, the new texel the worst because my mother, not wishing to get drunk, gave much of her share to him. At about seven o'clock in the evening the retiring officials left, pretty drunk. I also remember the fiesta when the "Jews" were received, 9 for then a steer was butchered right at our house. I think it was Manuel Quiche who killed it; the texel, Nicolas Choguaj, helped him. Manuel Quiche was better at butchering than Agustin Lopez, who was the other butcher in town for cofradia rituals. Manuel was also chief of the Jews. Since it was up to him as butcher to divide the portions for the Jews, the people used to complain a lot that he made them too big. It was the custom for people to come and ask for meat in exchange for alms of five pesos or so; with this money the assistants bought liquor to drink. But with me there, they couldn't do this. I recall how the food was dispatched from the kitchen to be sent to all the guests. The alcalde, regidores, and sacristans did not come to the fiesta, but shares of the food were dispatched to their houses first. Then food was sent to the houses of the Jews and Apostles. The butcher himself supervised the dispatching, leaving his place in the cofradia every once in a while to do so. This was at night, but all of the food was not delivered until the next morning, it took so long. I didn't go to bed that night, but dozed a little around three o'clock. Every person to whom food was delivered had to give the bearer from two to five pesos. This money was used to buy more liquor, candles, and incense when the supply bought beforehand was gone. When all the food had been dispatched, the leftover meat was divided between my father and his officials. I remember that my father and his mayordomos got a half-basketful apiece. And the liquor that was left over was drunk in the cofradia by the butcher, his assistants, the officials, their wives, and the kitchen helpers who had done the grinding and made the ruwiyä. (Ruwiyä is ground cacao in water; a cup of this beverage was sent with the food to each guest. The woman who knew how to make this was to the women what the butcher was to the men, and she had two assistants. The woman's name I do not remember; the wife of Pedro Parajon is the only one now who knows how to make ruwiyä.) I was thinking most of the time, "My father, my father! How much he has spent!" My brother Jose wasn't around. Since he was now a grown man, he was in the fields working. Both he and my father advised me to stay home and watch the men so they would not sell any of the meat. He said he himself earned money to pay for all this, and he wanted something

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left. What was left over was what I earned for being there three days and staying up all night! The next day I went to school, and the teacher hit me because I had been granted only one day's permission. They did not fine my father. That same year, I believe, Jose entered as an alguacil. I remember that the mayores came to speak to my father and that because my father had the cofradia he didn't want Jose to serve. The mayores went to complain, and the alcalde said it didn't matter that my father had the cofradia, Jose would have to comply. They came for Jose in the evening. Then we had a year of rest, and then Jose became an alguacil again for another year; that was when I was with Secundino Chavez. Then after another year of rest my father entered as second fiscal. I remember when he received his year as fiscal. The mayordomos came the night before to decorate the house with pine needles and "rooster's foot"; 10 my father gave them a bottle and a half of liquor, which one of the mayordomos dispensed. This was the adobe house that used to serve as the cofradia; it is gone now, and I have crops where it stood. The next night the two outgoing fiscales came to get my father, and he served them another bottle; then they all went to the house of the new first fiscal to get him. The fiscales then carried long smooth white poles of anona wood. The old fiscales had to find new poles for their successors. When my father returned home, he had his long pole, and with this pole he went to the houses to ask for vegetables and other food for the priest; he also had to find women to grind for the priest. As my father was finishing his year as fiscal, they wanted to make Jose serve as alguacil again immediately; he didn't want to, however, and my father sent me instead. I must have been about 12 years old. Juan Ralon, a ladino, was alcalde when I was alguacil. Because I was still too small to carry correspondence to Sololä and other towns, I was made semanero11 at the house of the alcalde. I soon became bored with that, so when my week would start I would go to the town hall and say, "Find somebody else to do that." But Ralon was accustomed to having me at his house and didn't want to change. Thus I was the semanero all year, working alternate fortnights. During my fortnight, I had my meals at the alcalde's house. They gave me what they had left over, and it was good. But I came home to sleep. The alcalde kept sending me to Atitlan to buy pigs, for he was a pig butcher. The first time, he went with me, and although we bought only three or four, I remembered where all the fat ones were in the various houses. The second time, I went alone, with money. Ralon had relatives in Atitlan, and I stayed there several days, going around buying pigs from the women. That was my job during my service; every working fortnight I

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went to Atitlän once or twice. When working here for the alcalde, I had to sweep the patio and street and carry water from the river. When the other alguaciles went to the hills to get flowers for fiestas, I did not go along. I was too small. My father said that they might give me liquor and I would die, because I was still so small. Also, since as a semanero I didn't earn anything as the others did, it was not fair for me to have to contribute for liquor and other expenses. So I neither spent money nor earned a drink. All year I had nothing to do with the rituals or anything; thus I finished my first service. It was during this time that Jose was married. In those days, a young man had nothing to do with looking for or choosing a wife. One day at lunch when we were all together, my father spoke to Jose (having already arranged with my mother, in private, the course of action): "Jose, we must find you a wife now. When we are sent on the mandamiento there is nobody to help your mother prepare the food to take along and nobody to help her with the work." Jose replied, "No, it is better not, for if I marry they will send me on mandamientos also." My father replied, "Well, if they send me, you come along; and if they send you, I shall go with you." Then Jose said, "But there is no money on which to get married." Father replied, "I shall get an advance-for-work from Secundino." Jose said, "No, it is too hard to pay off the debt; better I should plant more and so get the money." "Good, you plant more and begin to save money for the expenses later; and meanwhile, I have a little to buy the liquor to ask the girl's father." Jose then agreed. Then my father asked Jose, "What girl do you want?" Jose replied, "I don't know; you are the ones to say who the best girl is for me." Then my father said, "I think the daughter of Juan Can is a good girl; let us ask for her." "But," replied Jose, "we do not know if they will give her to us or not." My father said, "But I am on good terms with that man; we have never fought at all." And so it was arranged. Jose said nothing of the girl personally; nor did anybody else. Then Jose said, "It were well for me to make some trips soon." And he went to Tecpän and Patzün, making some four journeys during the next month. Thus, with the money he earned and what Father had, they had more than 500 pesos. One day, in the presence of all of us, they both counted all the money that they had. When the money was laid out, they took out enough for 12 bottles of liquor, 100 pesos for the bread, about 25 pesos for the chocolate and sugar, and 300 pesos for the gift to the girl's parents. We saw that there was enough money for all this, but there wasn't a peso left over for the ceremony, if the woman should come soon, or for the expenses of the house. So my father said, "Now you see that I have to get money from my employer." Jose did not want this, and said, "Better I

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should make another journey." My father then said, "That means we have to wait another month so you can make two or three trips, and that is bad, for if I begin to drink, all this money we have saved will go." So then Jose agreed that he should borrow from the employer. (Jose could not have said, "Well, I'll take all this money and hide it, so you can't drink it up"; since Father was his father, he couldn't take the money from him.) So my father went to Secundino and got money — I don't remember how much. He explained to Secundino what the money was for and promised that perhaps Jose would come to help work off the debt. Secundino was happy with the prospect of another hand; labor was scarce, for people had to go on mandamientos whether they worked for ladinos or not. Father returned home with the money, and further arrangements were made when we were all at home. He said, "Now I have this money; the other will serve for the marriage, and this will be for the expenses of the house." Then Father said, "Let us now look for a spokesman." Since Lorenzo Xingo was my uncle and an elder, he said, "I shall ask Xingo to go with me, for alone I wouldn't have the courage." Three or four nights later, therefore, Father and Jose went to Xingo's house. Xingo was very happy, since he thought it was good that my brother should get married and approved of the girl. Xingo advised Jose to work hard on his land to get money and not to drink; when he had a wife he would need a lot of money for her food and her clothes, and it would be necessary to have money in the house in case somebody should get sick. Jose said he would do these things, if only Xingo would do him the favor. Then he knelt and kissed Xingo's hand. They arranged to go the next night to ask for the girl. It was decided that the next morning Father and Jose would go to Sololä to buy the liquor. The next day they went, returning at noon. They then decided how many bottles they would take that night. My father suggested five because he didn't know if they would give the girl. But Jose said it would be better to take it all, so he wouldn't have to return for more if the suit was accepted. (The liquor came in arrobas, earthenware pots with small mouths. The liquor had to be poured into bottles, which we had at home, and they planned to take one bottle filled and when needed refill it at the girl's house.) Jose's suggestion was taken; they took the whole arroba, but first took out a bottle to take to Xingo. At about eight o'clock that evening they went to Xingo's house, where they gave him and his wife a drink. Then Father, Jose, and Xingo returned to our house and drank a half-bottle here with my mother. Xingo asked if everything was ready. Then he advised Jose that if his prospective father-in-law should say that he would give his daughter only if Jose would provide her food

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and clothes and do all his services, he should surely answer that he would comply with everything. Then they left — my father and mother, Jose, and Xingo — and later told me what had happened. They arrived at Juan Can's house at about ten o'clock and awakened the Cans. Juan Can opened the door and, being rich, asked if they wanted money, or corn, or something. He did not ask them in. Xingo replied, "If you will favor us, let us enter for a minute." "What do you want — money, corn?" asked Can. "Please let us in; then we shall tell you what we have come for," replied Xingo. Then they all entered and sat down. (The whole family was sleeping in the room.) Then Xingo began to talk: "Pardon us for coming to you; this is a bother for you. We come with no quarrel or anything like that; we only wish to know if your daughter will marry Jose." Can said, "Oh, for that you came to bother us." My brother Jose meanwhile had poured out a cup of liquor to give to Can, and now he knelt before him saying, "Pardon me, will you receive this drink?" Can paid no attention, and addressed Xingo: "Why did you come with these poor people? I do not like poor people. I want a son-in-law, but a rich one." Xingo replied, "A poor man is much better than a rich one." Can said, "No, I won't give her." He didn't accept the drink all this time. "I'm not drinking this liquor; I have liquor here if you would like a drink," and he went quickly and brought less than a half-bottle that he had. "It is useless for you to have come; better take these people out, for I am not going to give them my daughter. I want a rich man, not a poor one." So Xingo said, "Well, think about it; perhaps tomorrow we shall come once again." And then they left and came home. Now they were all nervous and finished the bottle of liquor they had taken from the arroba. They arranged to go again early the next evening. Jose took Xingo home. They all thought that perhaps Can would think it over and change his mind; anyway, having decided this was the girl they wanted, they decided to put up a struggle for her. But the next day Juan began to talk to others, saying, "The poor people came to me last night, wanting to ask for my daughter to marry Jose. Poor things, if they come again I shall be after them with a machete; even if I pay a fine for it, I shall machete one of them." Somebody told my father this, and when Xingo came in the evening, they decided not to return to the Can house. Xingo asked, "Well, what other woman do you want? If you want to find another, all right, I shall find you another, for the one you found apparently isn't good." My father said, "All right. Whom do you know?" And Xingo said, "Let us go to my compadre Ventura Yach; he has a daughter who is still a young girl." Xingo turned to Jose and asked him if he would like her; and Jose replied, "If they will give her to me, all right."

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And they decided to go to the Yach house. They then took another bottle of liquor from the arroba and drank a little before starting out for the compadre's house. Arriving there, Jose hid the rest of the liquor outside, taking in only a bottleful. The compadre was still up, and all were in the house. "Good evening," said Xingo, and when Yach saw who it was, he was happy and said, "What are you doing out in the dark?" Xingo asked permission to come in, saying he had brought some companions. "Since you are my compadre, I cannot say no; come in." The four entered and sat down. Xingo then began to explain the purpose of the visit. Yach knew that they had gone to the Can house the night before, and he replied, "What do you mean by looking for two wives? Last night you went to Juan Can's house, and now you come here!" So Xingo told him what Can had said and done, and Yach replied, "Yes, that's how those rich people are; I heard that they were going to beat you if you came again." Meanwhile Jose was struggling to give him a drink; and Ventura Yach, without talking much more, took it. Then he said to his wife, "Let's give her; this is his godchild he is asking for." And she replied, "Very well." To the girl, Torivia, nothing was said, for she was still very young — 14 or 15, only a little older than I was myself. She was there to hear it all, but said nothing. Then Ventura said to Xingo, "Because you are my compadre, I am going to give you the girl. We are poor and we shouldn't try to mix with the rich; because they have money, they want to kill one." After several more drinks, he said, "I am grateful to you, compadre, that you have come to leave me a son-in-law here; that is good. It is well, for both are still children and can begin their services early." Then they all began to drink. All night they drank, finishing six bottles. Jose himself only had a cup or two; he was the dispenser, and of course he was happy. At dawn, they were all stretched out in the Yach house. The children of the house certainly didn't sleep all night. Jose accompanied my parents and Xingo to our house and served my parents and Xingo liquor until they were drunk. Then he returned to his in-laws to care for them. Ventura was awake; he called his daughter Torivia and asked for water or coffee, but Jose said, "No, better you should drink more liquor." Ventura replied, "You are very bad, coming to steal my daughter; why did you come here? Why didn't you finish with Can?" Jose replied, "Now, we can't talk about that; take another drink and be done!" And he gave him a drink. Ventura asked Jose, "And have they given you something to eat?" Jose didn't answer, ashamed to say that they had not. Ventura called Torivia and said, "Now you will give this man something to eat, because I have drunk so much liquor I can't afford to give back what I have drunk." Then Jose said, "If you will eat some, I shall drink with you." Ventura said, "No,

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when I drink, I want only liquor and don't want food; but if you have another drink for me, I shall take it." So Jose gave him another drink, and Torivia gave Jose his breakfast. Jose said to her, "Now let us drink coffee together." She said, "What a shame that is! After one day you already want me to drink coffee with you!" She gave Jose his coffee and some tortillas and went outside. Ventura got drunk again, and just then his wife, Maria Macun, got up from her stupor. She was sober again and didn't want to drink. She called Torivia, who was outside, and asked if she had given Jose something to eat. "Here are eggs here; why didn't you make him something so he could breakfast well?" Jose, still breakfasting, rose quickly to give Maria another drink, but she refused, and added, "Perhaps your father-in-law didn't remember to give you a drink?" Jose said, "No, I didn't have any, so now let us drink a few cups together." So each had a drink. Then Maria said, "You might try and see if your wife would like some. Try half a cup." Jose asked her please to call Torivia and offer her the liquor, since she might not take it from him. Maria then told him to fill a cup full of liquor, and before her he would drink half and Torivia half. Then she called Torivia, and she came in. Jose drank half the liquor and offered the rest to her. She objected that it would burn and maybe with that half-cup she would get drunk, but finally she drank it. Jose gave another to Maria, and Maria told Torivia to hurry and begin lunch. She had money in a kerchief and sent Torivia for two pounds of meat. Then Maria and Torivia made lunch and the three of them ate together. My parents meanwhile woke up at about 11 o'clock in the morning and asked for the rest of the bottle of liquor left there. They drank a little from the bottle and then took the rest to Xingo's house. They asked Xingo if Jose had been there for lunch, and Xingo replied in the negative. Xingo then said, "Let us get ready this afternoon; we must go and order the bread, and we have to ask Jose if there is still some liquor left." I went to ask Jose if he still had liquor. He said he did. He asked me if Father had perhaps taken out money to get more liquor, and I reassured him. He told me to tell our parents that only Ventura was still drinking and that they should await him to go get the bread ordered. I reported to my father, and in a short time Jose came and got out the money and both parents and Jose went uptown to order the bread from the ladino baker. Then Jose went back to his in-laws for dinner. He slept there in their house, but he did not of course yet sleep with his wife. In the morning, Jose took his new in-laws a load of firewood that he had ready at home. He breakfasted there and then came to work in the fields near our house. Jose went to his in-laws for lunch and then was at our house most of the afternoon working and helping to arrange the next visit.

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Then in the evening Xingo, my parents, and Jose went together to the in-laws with a large basket containing the gifts of bread, tamales, chocolate, sugar, and the money in large, new bills. (It would not be nice to take coins.) Jose carried the bottle of liquor. When they arrived, Xingo talked, and they all were admitted into the house. Jose served liquor to Ventura and Maria and then to the others. When the bottle was finished, Maria uncovered the basket and saw the money. Maria said to Ventura, "Here they have put some money." Ventura said to Xingo, "Why did you send me money?" Xingo replied that it is the custom always to do so. Ventura then said, "It was useless to send this little money; this won't be enough for the clothing and all that is needed." Xingo replied, "It is not necessary that you make clothes, for there they will give the girl her clothes." Ventura replied, "It is a shame not to give her anything; she shall go with at least one outfit." "Why should we fight about the money?" rejoined Xingo. "What you wish to give her, good; and what is lacking, we shall make up there." Ventura took a little of the money from the basket and sent Jose to buy a bottle of liquor. When it came Jose again served it until they had drunk up the bottle. Ventura then said, "Now you will wait a few days until we have gotten the girl's clothes ready, and then she will come to you." Xingo replied, "Very well, we shall wait." Then Xingo, my parents, and Jose came home, where they arranged to buy the turkeys and roosters for the ceremony. Jose said he was ashamed to be eating and sleeping at the Yach house all the time without working there at all, so it was decided to have the marriage ceremony as soon as possible. Wednesday, Jose went to Tecpän to sell, and there he bought a turkey to bring home. Then, returning early Friday, he went at once to Sololä to buy two roosters. He continued to live at the Yaches', but every three days he took them a load of firewood. Then the next Wednesday he went again to Tecpän, and on Friday again to Sololä, where he bought another turkey and two more roosters. Then the next Thursday he went to Tecpän to buy 100 pounds of corn, to which my parents added 50 pounds more. The next night my mother, who had found eight women to help her, put the nixtamal12 on to cook. Early Saturday morning they washed the nixtamal and began to grind. At noon Santos Yach, Pablo Sahon, and my father and Jose began to kill the fowl. They were hung by the feet from a pole and their necks wrung. By the time the fowl were killed, a huge pot of boiling water was ready, and one by one the fowl were submerged in the water and plucked. The previous Tuesday the women had toasted 50 pounds of maize and had ground it into flour. The women now boiled the fowls, and when all

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were cooked the flour was put into the broth. This mixture was constantly stirred by one of the women until it was a very thick pinol. Meanwhile, others were fixing the fowl, others grinding, and so on. Then at about 11 o'clock the women began to cook the tamales. By midnight, all that remained was the cutting up of roosters to be given to the women helpers. Then, about 4 o'clock in the morning, my parents, Xingo, and Jose (who had warned his in-laws not to go away in the morning), together with several assistants, took food over to the Yaches'. One assistant took a huge new jug of the pinol, another carried a whole turkey and four large pieces of the other turkey in a basket, and one man carried a basket of tamales weighing about 100 pounds. Jose carried two bottles of rum. At five o'clock that morning they arrived at the Yach house; the family was asleep but, on being awakened, got up quickly. Jose entered quickly to light the room with a candle, for the man carrying the tamales could hardly wait long with the tamales so hot. Maria quickly made a fire in the house, and Xingo began to speak to Ventura: "Now we have come to complete the ceremony; it is a shame if we do not finish it soon. There is no hurry about the clothes; you can send them later." Meanwhile Jose was serving liquor to everyone, and when the two bottles were gone my parents, Jose, and the others came home again. At home there were another two bottles of liquor. My father said to Xingo, "Many thanks for the favor you have done us; we narrowly missed being beaten at the first house, and luckily because you were their compadre the Yaches gave up this woman." Xingo replied, "I shall always be glad to do you a favor while I am alive. Only for you do I do such a favor." "Thank you very much for the favor you have done," said my father as he knelt and kissed Xingo's hand. My mother followed, and then Jose, who remained kneeling. Xingo began to cry, "How lucky that I am alive, for now I can leave you all set with your wife." And he began to counsel Jose: "Do not beat your wife, and do not scold her. You must show her what work she has to do. You have seen now that she has cost you some money, and if you beat or scold her she might return to her house and you will have lost this money." Jose replied, "No, I cannot afford to lose money; I shall take good care of her." Then Xingo said, "If there is ever a quarrel, you should call me. It would be better not to fight, however, for if you do I might be called in, and I do not like to fight with my compadre." Then Xingo left. Jose said to my father, "We should now send our gift to Xingo." And they sent my mother with a basket of meat, pinol, tamales, and other foods to Xingo's house. The next day Jose stayed at our house; he was tired after the sleepless night, but for about two hours in the morning he and I harvested four

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tablones of corn (it must therefore have been in December or thereabouts) so that corn would not be lacking when his wife came. Meanwhile, no doubt, Torivia put in the day taking food to all of her neighbors and relatives. She did not take any to her godfather, Xingo, of course, but to all the other compadres and relatives of the family she took a little pinol, meat, and tamales so that they would know she was married. The following morning Ventura and Maria brought Torivia to our house. Ventura brought a bottle of liquor; the others carried nothing. We were still asleep, not having slept the night before, but we got up quickly to go call Xingo and light the fire. Ventura asked my father, "You didn't drink yesterday?" "No, we didn't have any more money, so we didn't continue." And Ventura also remarked that they had waited for Jose to come last night. "Oh, he was very sleepy, and he lay down and never awakened." "Oh, then it's all right that he didn't come," said Ventura. Jose soon returned with Xingo, saying to Ventura, "How quickly you have come to bring my wife!" "Oh," replied Ventura, "I thought we had better bring her quickly, for there is nobody to make her lunch." So they joked a little. Then Ventura said to Xingo, "Pardon me, compadre. Now that you have finished observing all of the customs, it would be a shame for me to keep my daughter a few days longer. Better I should leave her now, for if I should keep her there, you might become angry." Torivia was outside all this time, and now Ventura called to her to come in. She came in and, kneeling, kissed first Xingo's hand and then my father's and my mother's. Then Xingo said to her, "Here is your place now, where you will sit," and she sat down by the fire where the women always sit to make tortillas. There was a new mat ready for her, and on it she sat down. She began to cry, and when Ventura saw this he began to cry too. Maria didn't cry; she managed to hold out. Maria then took the bottle of liquor out of her cloth and called Jose to serve it. He served Xingo first, then Ventura and Maria, and then my father and mother. Then Ventura began to counsel his daughter; "Now, you will rise rather early and not sleep late. You should put a pitcher of water on the fire, and when your father-in-law and husband get up, you should give them hot water with which to wash their hands, and you should always say 'Good morning' to your parents-in-law. If Jose should ask for water, or a little coffee, you should give it to him right away. Don't go giving him his lunch very late, and whatever work he teaches you, you should learn." Then Ventura called Jose to him: "Very well, then, my son-in-law, you should get up rather early, also. Your wife shouldn't remain long in the house, but should do the grinding quickly to get out to the fields. You must give her work to do, and not leave her in the house. If she won't obey you, you must come and tell me. And be careful that you don't drink; if

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you go on a journey, you should not drink on the way. Don't mix with the men who are accustomed to drink on the roads, for it won't do for you to lose all your money and not have anything for the week's expenses. And whatever service they give you, you will accept. If you don't have the money for it, I shall help you; otherwise it is a shame for us all." Jose replied, "All right; I shall not drink. It is true, as you say, that it is a shame for us all if I don't fulfill my services." Since I went away then for more liquor, I know no more of what went on. When I left Torivia was still crying, having said nothing at all. My parents were quietly listening to all the advice. When I returned, Ventura was addressing Torivia: "If there is a sickness, here it is that you will die; for where a woman is born is never where she dies. Isn't that so, compadre?" And Xingo agreed, adding that even with men it is often true, since a man sometimes goes to live at his wife's house. Then they all continued drinking. It was about eight o'clock in the morning when they got up to go, and Ventura said to Xingo, "Now we must be going. We have come to leave your woman; she is for you, and if there is any trouble, I shall call you." Xingo replied, "All right; that's what I'm here for." Then Ventura and Maria left, saying nothing to Torivia. When they had gone, Torivia stopped crying. Then Xingo began to counsel my father, thus: "Now, don't you scold this girl much; you have to tell her about her work slowly. It was only on account of me that they gave you the woman quickly, for they wouldn't have given her to you alone." My father replied, "Very well." Then Xingo said to Torivia, "If your husband hits you, you must come to me to complain, and I shall come and scold him." Torivia kissed his hand and Xingo left. We had not yet had our breakfast and were hungry, for we young ones hadn't been drinking. There were some tamales left from yesterday, and now my mother gave them to Torivia and asked her to do the favor of warming them up. This was her first work. Then mother brought the pottery dishes and showed them to Torivia. "This is your father-in-law's, this mine, that your husband's, this Santiago's, and this one will be yours." Then Torivia served the coffee and tamales. My mother and father were a little drunk, so they didn't breakfast; instead they asked Jose for some money and went over to Xingo's house to drink the rest of the day. So Jose and Torivia, Agustina and I were left alone in the house. Jose said to Torivia that it was up to her to make lunch, since Mother had gone away to drink. Torivia said, "I don't know what to give you for lunch." Jose said, "Well, look and see if there was any meat left over to make some chirmol13 with. Santiago and I have to go water my crops, for I have not yet done so, and Agustina will stay here with you." So we went away

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and left them alone. We returned for lunch, but Torivia herself did not eat anything (any more than she had eaten tamales for breakfast), for she was too ashamed. I don't remember what happened after that; I think that night I entered my week of service as alguacil. Two or three years before, Jose and my father had built a small house next to the old house. That is where he had been sleeping, and now of course his wife moved there to sleep. We had two beds: one for Father and Mother, the other for Agustina and me. Earlier, of course, I had slept with Jose, and Agustina had been with my parents. Now that Jose was married, we began to make another house for him, below the big house. Within about a year, Jose and his wife moved there; Jose still didn't have lands of his own, so what he kept in his house belonged to all of us. When Jose moved into the new house, I moved into the little house, and Agustina, who was about nine or ten years old, slept alone in her bed. In October of the year after his marriage, Jose received the service of texel in the cofradia of San Francisco. It was rather difficult, because Juan Can, who had refused him his daughter, was the cofrade of San Francisco, under whom he served. Jose didn't mind, for the incident hadn't been his fault, but Juan Can must have been ashamed because he had refused his daughter. The girl had now a husband, too — Jose Martin, who was a hired man of Juan Can. Martin and the girl had started an affair on their own, since Martin was living at their house. So Martin finally asked Juan Can for her. Thus Juan, who had wanted a rich son-in-law, got only a hired man! (Martin eventually earned enough money at the Cans' to buy a piece of land,) When Jose came to the Can house to be texel, Martin was living with the girl. Can was rather ashamed, since he had refused the girl to Jose and had then come off worse. Jose was happy because he had been married and had begun his services so soon. Whatever money Can asked for a ritual, Jose gave right away. Once when Can got drunk, he asked Jose, "Why didn't you come the next night?" Jose answered that it was because he had said they were too poor, that Jose wouldn't be able to do the services. "But it turned out all right, for now you have a very rich son-in-law." Can admitted that it had been his fault, and Jose said, "Yes, you sure were at fault! Why did you tell people you were going to kill us with your machete?" Can denied this, and Jose explained that Xingo had thought better of coming again because he thought Can was going to kill him. Can then said, "But finally you have entered my house, and as a son, for you have come as a texel." And so they made up. The newlyweds returned to Ventura's house to visit every fiesta, taking bread, chocolate, and sugar. Also, for the first two or three months Torivia went to visit her mother every week or two. Thereafter she went

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less frequently, for Jose didn't allow it when there was a lot of work to do. When he became texel, she stopped the visits altogether. Her mother rarely came to visit us, but Ventura came every once in a while when he was drunk to ask Jose for money to continue drinking. About two years after they were married, Jose and Torivia had their first child, a daughter. He was finished with his year of service when the baby was born. My father had advised Jose to ask his father-in-law which midwife to call, and he got the one they wanted. The baby was born at four or five in the morning. As soon as the child was born, Jose went to his in-laws' house, and they scolded him for not having let them know earlier. They came right away. The midwife was still at our house, and they asked her if the girl was all right, if nothing bad had happened. Ventura also scolded my father for not having sent Jose to notify them of the impending birth. Then they went home again. During the next year my father, Jose, and I went together on mandamientos about three or four times. It was also during that year that I made a trip to Patalul with Jose to buy corn. This was probably in September, when corn was scarce hereabouts. One Saturday at dawn we began our journey, by land. From San Antonio we went to Pampojilä and slept in San Julian. We knew the road, having gone that way on mandamientos. In San Julian we bought 100 pounds of corn, but since we needed a load for me, too, we left that there and went on to Patalul. All we bought there was 50 pounds for me to carry, plus some fruit for the house. Leaving Patalul, we were almost killed. On the road there were three men, and they grabbed Jose and asked him if he hadn't seen a dead man on the road. Jose said no, and that they should let him go because we were employees and our boss was just behind. They became frightened at this and ran away. It was true that there had been a dead man on the road; we had seen the body in the morning, but not on returning, since it had been removed. These bandits were drunk, had probably killed that man, and would have killed Jose had he not frightened them off. That was about mid-afternoon, and we were so frightened we hurried on to San Julian that same evening. We had bought the corn in San Julian from a plantation employer (an acquaintance, formerly of Panajachel), and since this was illegal we left immediately and went to San Lucas to take the launch home. If we had been caught, the corn would have been confiscated and we would have been sent to prison in Patalul. We had been going to leave this corn at home and return to the coast immediately, but we didn't go because we were so frightened. It was a very bad trip — and we never went again. It was during the year he was fourth mayor that Jose died. I must have

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been about 16, and I was resting from services after having served a second time as alguacil. It was in June that Jose took sick; there was a lot of fever in town, in fact, an epidemic. He was sick in bed for about two weeks. We were all sick in bed at the same time, except for Torivia. I got better first, and was fairly well when Jose died; my father and mother and Agustina were still quite ill. Jose died at eight o'clock one morning, and Torivia immediately went and called her parents. They asked me, "What shall we do?" We didn't tell my father or mother what had happened, for they were very sick. I asked Ventura to do us the favor of ordering the coffin. Since I had no money, I asked him to see if he could get it on credit. He did as I asked and then went to notify the town officials, who told him to bury Jose quickly. He asked permission to wait until the coffin was ready, but they wanted to bury Jose without a coffin, so afraid were they of the sickness. They sent a commission with Ventura to watch the coffin being built, and when they got there it was finished. He brought five alguaciles with him to get the burying done quickly in case men should not be found. Ventura and another friend dressed the body in clothes Torivia had borrowed. The alguaciles put it in the coffin and at six-thirty we went to the cemetery with it. I was still so sick that it was difficult. They took tools to the cemetery and dug the grave. It had been raining all day. Ventura had bought several bottles of liquor, and he advised me to take a drink lest I die going out in the cold. We didn't have time to think of drinking at home, but at the cemetery Ventura served liquor to the alguaciles and of course drank himself. We forgot to sprinkle liquor in the grave. I sent a friend to town to buy on credit four more bottles of liquor, telling him to leave two at my house and to bring the other two to the cemetery. When Ventura's liquor was finished, therefore, I had some ready. The people had brought a big armful of candles to the house, and only a few had been lighted around the body. Now these candles furnished us light by which to bury Jose. It was ten o'clock that night by the time Jose was buried. The alguaciles went uptown, and we went home. Torivia had not gone to the cemetery because she had to look after the sick. Back at the house, Maria cried a lot, and it was not long before my parents understood that something had happened: "Why are you up? What are you doing? Why are you crying?" Ventura then told them. My father and mother cried and asked for a drink. Ventura and Maria stayed with us all night, finishing the two bottles of liquor. Maria cried all night, a little drunk. When Jose first died, I cried hard; he was the one who had shown me my work and traveled with me. After that I was too busy thinking about what I had to do. I did not cry at the cemetery because I was sick and afraid if I cried I would get worse and

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die. At home I cried a little more, but they wouldn't let me for fear I would get sick. They gave me liquor in hot coffee. At dawn Ventura and Maria left. Pretty soon the ladino uptown sent to ask for money for the coffin and the liquor. Jose had left two sheep, so I went at once to Juan Ralon, the pig butcher, and sold them to him very cheap. I wanted 300 pesos for the two, but he gave me only 200. He gave me 100 pesos down, and I gave them to my creditor, Jose Maria Armas, who claimed he needed the money to pay for the lumber. This took most of the day, for I was so sick I could hardly walk. After four or five days my parents were a little better, and they asked me to sell the sheep to buy food. I had to tell them I had already sold them and spent the money to bury Jose. Then they began to cry more, for where would we get money to buy food? But Jose had left about a cuerda14 of onions when he died, and I began to pull them up to sell. In this way Torivia could buy food for the sick ones, and gradually they got better. It wasn't until a week after Jose died that Agustina was well enough even to know of his death. It was a long time before I could go on trips. For six months my father wasn't well, and my mother never really got better. We had become poor from the sickness and the death; the sheep were gone, and we had to sell coffee from door to door. The house was pretty sad, and Jose's house remained empty. Torivia remained with us about two months after she was widowed. Her child was about a year old. A month after Jose died, another man named Santos Yach began to talk with her; on the road uptown they talked on her trips alone to the marketplace. Pretty soon she wasn't working well at home, and the first time my mother went to market they told her that Torivia had been coming to market all right, but had been meeting this man in the late afternoons. When Mother returned she told my father, and we discussed what we should do. I said we should dismiss her from the house. When my father asked her if she had another man, she said no. But since my mother knew otherwise, there was fighting in the house for four or five days until she left. One afternoon in August she went home with her child and her clothes, her new mat and blanket, but no utensils. Neither Ventura nor Maria ever came, and after a few months she went to live with Santos Yach. She died 10 or 15 years ago, still with Santos. I always called her sister-in-law, and she and my parents always treated each other properly. After the little fight everything was all right, since she was widowed and of course had a right to find another husband. But she married again in six or seven months, and it would have been better to wait a year. It was the next February or March that the town officials sent me with about 15 others to the coast to work 30 days on the railroad. We crossed

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to Atitlän, then went to Najualate, where we took the train to beyond Retalaleu. We had to haul earth and do other things. We all lived in a big hut out in the open. It was very hot, and hard work, but what could one do? I think that later that year I went with my father on a mandamiento; otherwise, I just worked here and went on selling trips. In January, my father was named cofrade of Santa Cruz, and of course the saint came to us on May 3. My father still wasn't well, and I had to help a lot, getting the money and so on. My father's mayordomos were Encarnacion Yach and Jose Martin; there was no texel. There was nothing special in the rituals that happened during the year. The saint was put in the big house where our kitchen was. (The house Jose had used had collapsed because it hadn't been made with good lumber, and we had put up another little house in its place for our kitchen and my parents' sleeping quarters.) About October 15, however, my father died. During the fiesta of San Francisco of course he had begun to drink; he drank again on the Octavo. We were thinking at this time of finding me a wife, and when the Octavo had passed he asked me if I had some money. I said I had a little. (I had about 500 pesos; I had been working and selling and, because he was employed, I hadn't been sent on mandamientos.) Then out of a clear sky he suggested that we ought to find a wife for me. I told him I did not have enough, but he said we could get more later. He said we should make the arrangements quickly; perhaps he knew he was going to die. I said, "I don't know what woman to bring." He suggested that I look around and talk to some girls on the road to see which I liked. Two or three days later I did speak to a girl. I had seen her before, and we had exchanged greetings in passing, but that was all. She was Petrona Quiche, daughter of Santos Parajon. I knew her father from working together on mandamientos. Her brother Francisco, Jose's age, I knew only slightly. I knew her mother, Maria Quiche, but I had never talked to her. I had never been to their house, below here on this side of the river. As a boy I had never thought of girls, and, unlike the young people now, in those days we did not go out in the street. I was a virgin when I married. When my father asked me to look for a girl for my wife, I looked for a good one. Petrona was neither fat nor thin, more or less average. I knew she knew how to work, for her father had lands that she worked on. With the other alguaciles we never talked about girls much. The older boys would talk some, but only among themselves. We occasionally talked about the girls that we saw a lot in the street, but never about Petrona that I recall, because she was one that didn't go out into the streets. When my father asked me to look for a girl, two came to my mind; it was well that I decided upon Petrona, because the other died soon. Yes,

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there were lots of other girls, but the blood or the heart didn't like them. Who knows why? One afternoon about three o'clock I saw Petrona alone; I had been thinking of her and watching, and when I saw her pass near the house, I caught up with her at the riverbank. After greeting her and learning that she was on her way to the marketplace, I asked her when she would be returning. She replied, "Not for quite a while," and I said, "Then I'll be waiting for you, just to say a few words to you." She didn't answer, but became angry and went on. She returned at about six-thirty, and I met her on the other side of the river. I said, "Now you see that I have come to meet you." She said, "Why did you come to meet me?" I was young and didn't know how to talk much, so I said, "Would you like to live with me?" She didn't want to believe me. "How can you want to marry? Maybe you don't have money!" I replied that I had money, and she said, "A marriage requires rather a lot of money." I replied that even if I did not have enough now, I would get it tomorrow or the day after. She said, "I know nothing about this; if you wish, talk to my father and mother.' I walked with her almost to her house; we went quickly, and nobody saw us. I went home and told my father: "I just now talked to a girl." "Whose daughter?" "Santos Parajon's," I replied. He said, "That's good, and what did she say?" "She told me that she knows nothing about this, that I should talk to her father and mother." "Is that true?" asked my father, and I said, "Yes, it is." "Well, then," said my father, "now we can go there." And I said, "Yes, but we must find a spokesman." My father said we should go to Lorenzo Xingo, and next day we went to his house early in the morning. My father told him what had happened. Lorenzo asked me, "Is this true?" I said it was, and Lorenzo said, "This requires quite a lot of money; how much do you have?" I told him 500 pesos, and admitted that wasn't enough for all the ceremonies. "Where will you get more money, then?" he asked. And I replied that perhaps I would get more later. So Lorenzo said it was all right. My father then told him that he wished to arrange things right away. Lorenzo then told us to buy only eight bottles of liquor, for he saw that my father was pretty sick and shouldn't drink much. "If you want this over right away," he said, "Santiago should go right away to buy the liquor." The next day, therefore, I went to Sololä to buy the eight bottles. On returning I went immediately to notify Lorenzo that I had the liquor. Lorenzo told me, "Perhaps your father is going to die and for that reason he wants to arrange this soon; perhaps we should go this very night." So it was. I went to get Lorenzo at about seven o'clock. Lorenzo, at our house, said, "Let's go see if they will give us the girl, but let's wait a little until

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they are asleep; if they're awake they might go and hide." At about ten o'clock, therefore, we went to the Parajon house. Lorenzo refused to have even one drink at our house because my father was sick. The Parajons were asleep. Lorenzo said, "Good evening." Santos answered from inside, "Who's there?" " I t is I, Lorenzo Xingo. I have lost my way; I wanted to go to a friend's house, but I find myself here. Will you please open the door?" " W h y ? " asked Santos. "Because I would like to borrow a cup just to drink a little water." "Oh, then, you come with a hangover." " Y e s . " "Then come in," and he opened the door and Lorenzo went in alone. Santos gave him a cup and asked, " D o you want it with water, or just the empty cup?" "Just the cup," replied Lorenzo, and he added, "and you know how it is with a hangover, one always likes to drink with somebody. Excuse me for having awakened you just to borrow a dish. Wouldn't you like a drink?" and he proffered a drink in the big cup. (Santos was quite a drinker.) Santos then drank and asked Lorenzo to drink to cure his hangover. Lorenzo just drank a little bit and then gave another to Santos. By this time Maria was out of bed and making a fire and lighting a light. Maria said to Santos, " Y o u had better not drink much, for perhaps he has come for some other reason." " I think not," said Santos, "for this is an old friend." We outside now knew that Santos had drunk twice and was going to drink a third time. Then Lorenzo inside gave a drink to Maria; when I heard her accept, I said to my father, "Now both of them have drunk and we can go in." So my father went in, saying, "I've been looking for you, Lorenzo," and we quickly followed him in. Seeing all of us, Maria got angry: " S e e , " she said, "what I just told you is true; Lorenzo didn't come alone!" She said to Lorenzo, "Why didn't you say right off that you had companions?" " O h , " lied Lorenzo, "you see when I came they were still in their house." Then Lorenzo began to talk: "Pardon us for having come, but the boy has already talked to your daughter and she said that he should come to you to make the arrangements." So they woke up Petrona and asked her when she had met me. She replied, "When I went to the marketplace, he caught up with me and asked me when I would return. I told him, because I had no idea what he wanted to ask me, and when I returned there he was. He asked me if I didn't want to marry him. I thought it was a lie, so I told him to come to you." Then Santos said, "Well, if they have already arranged it, why should I mix in?" Then Maria scolded Santos, "Just because you want to drink more, you let your daughter go!" So Lorenzo said, " I do not come to fight; I come to ask you a favor." Meanwhile, I was kneeling before the quarreling couple, offering them liquor. Santos didn't hesitate long to take it, since he liked to drink and had already started, and Maria said no

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more. Petrona was sitting by the fire. Only Santos and Maria drank a lot and got drunk. At about two o'clock I took my father and mother home, and Lorenzo went home alone. Then I stayed home and slept a little. At about five o'clock I went to the Parajon house again. Santos and Maria were stretched out on their bed, dead drunk, so I woke them up and gave them each a drink or two. They said, "We didn't know why you had come; we had understood that Domingo Τοηόη was going to come to ask for Petrona." And they would have preferred Domingo to me, but Petrona liked me better than Domingo. They got drunk again, and I went home to breakfast. Then I went to see Lorenzo to ask him what day he would come with us to order the bread. He said I should go and order it for that very afternoon, and I did. That evening I paid 50 pesos for the bread and 10 pesos for chocolate and sugar; there was still some liquor left, since nobody had drunk very much. I was very ashamed to go to my in-laws to sleep that night, but I knew it was the custom. Santos was still drunk, but Maria was not. I spoke only to Maria: "I have finally come," I said. "Why so late?" she asked. And I explained what I had had to do, saying nothing of course about the bread and so on. She then gave me something to eat, but I was too ashamed to eat and besides had eaten something at home. Petrona was at the fire with Maria, and to eat I went off a little to one side. Maria then told me to lie down; I had brought my mat and blanket, and I fixed my bed. I lay down, but was too ashamed to sleep. I was just thinking all night of what I would have to do — the arrangements tomorrow, how I would get money, and so on. I arose early and went home without the others' getting up. At six o'clock Lorenzo, Father, Mother, and I returned to deliver the gifts. We put 200 pesos in cash on top of the bread. Lorenzo spoke, and I served a bottle of liquor. They received everything all right and drank up a bottle. Then we returned home, where Lorenzo, my father, and my mother got drunk. When I returned to my in-laws that night, all were asleep except for Petrona, who was sitting by the fire. She told me, "I have stayed up to wait for you to give you your dinner." I said, "It is very well that you have waited for me, but now let us eat together." She said, "I have already eaten." I replied, "Then I shall not eat." She said, "Oh, then, you are turning out to be stubborn." I denied this and said, "All right, I'll eat then." I ate a little, having eaten at home. While I was eating, Petrona began to tell me that Jesüs (her ten-month-old brother, the only other child living at home) had taken ill. While I was eating, Jesüs awoke and began to vomit again. This went on for more than an hour. Maria said, "If we stay here, the child will die before morning. You, Santos, had better

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leave your hangover here and come with me to take him to the eurer." So they left. We sat by the fire to await their return. Petrona said, "If the child dies, I'm not going with you. How can I go with you contentedly and leave my parents here in sadness? If you want to stay here, all right; otherwise, we won't be able to go through with this." I became angry and said it wasn't my fault. "Oh, yes," she said, "why did you come to give liquor to my father and mother?" "But," I replied, "it wasn't I who gave the sickness to the child." She continued to blame me, however. "You made my mother sad and the sadness affected the baby." "All right," I said, "maybe the child won't die, and if in the morning the child is well I'm going to take you with me!" She laughed, "God grant that the child come back well!" But she only laughed at my other statement. So we talked all night, waiting for my in-laws to come; Petrona said they might come soon, and we should wait up. At four o'clock in the morning she began to make coffee and warm tortillas. At about six she went to the curer's house with food. I swept the patio. Petrona returned alone, saying the child was pretty well and probably would not die. I said, "See? What did I tell you?" She wanted me to have some breakfast, but something told me to go to see how my father was. I told Petrona I would return shortly and left. I ran home, and Agustina told me father was sick with a hangover. I told her to go quickly for two pesos of liquor. When she returned I gave a drink to Father. I saw then that he was very sick. I asked how his heart was, and he said it was burning a lot. I asked if he wanted the liquor hot or cold, and he said better hot. So I gave him his drink warm, and he fell asleep. I was very sleepy, and lay down. In a half-hour I awoke, and my father was dead! I awakened Mother, who was asleep with a hangover, to tell her what had happened. We tried to give Father water, but he could no longer drink. I ran quickly to Lorenzo Xingo's house. He scolded me, saying I was to blame because I had wanted a wife and so my father had had to drink. I denied this, saying that I hadn't wanted a wife and that Father had insisted. "Now what will you do for money?" asked Lorenzo. "This will take a lot." I said we'd have to find it. Lorenzo told me to go get it and come back to him. So I went to Jose Maria Armas to ask for a coffin and some liquor on credit and to borrow 100 pesos. He sent at once to Sololä for a demijohn of liquor, lent me 100 pesos, and agreed to make the coffin. Then I went to ask Jose Anleu for 300 pesos as an advance on labor to be done. It was now almost noon, and I hadn't had a thing to eat. I went to Lorenzo Xingo's and told him what I had done."Very well," he said, "now I am content that we have something to go to the town hall with." He went with me to report to the officials and to buy candles and new

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clothes for the body. By this time the liquor from Sololä had come, and we returned with it to the house. The church bells having rung, there were many people at home. The body had been washed (probably by Santiago Quiche and Valentin Can) and placed on a table. We immediately took out two bottles of liquor, and Lorenzo began to serve it. Men began to dress the body. When the two bottles were finished, we got out more. At about noon I looked out and saw that Petrona was in one of the other houses, talking to Agustina. I went out and said, "I guess you won. Why did you tell me last night that you wouldn't come here if the child died?" She said, "You're drunk!" I said I hadn't drunk anything. "Why are you scolding me?" she asked. I asked how the child was and what her mother had said. She replied that her mother was angry because the marriage hadn't been finished, that Father had died first. I said, "So be it; neither you nor we are to blame." Then she asked if I didn't want some atol, of which she had brought a huge pitcher, and she scolded me for not having come to notify her right away. I told her I couldn't think of that under the circumstances. She was contented when I had had the atol, and she went home saying she would come again. But before she left she gave a drink of atol to all of us of the family and some others too. She cautioned me not to drink too much liquor, and I told her I didn't yet know how to drink liquor. She told me that I should drink some, however, or I would become sick with sadness. Then she left. It was early afternoon by then, and I sent several of the men present to get the coffin. When the coffin came, I helped put the body in. Lorenzo meanwhile appointed several others to dig the grave. Those who went to the cemetery took a bottle of liquor with them. When they returned at about four o'clock we started for the cemetery. On leaving the house, one bottle was drunk; then another at the corner of our road; a third at the turn onto the road that goes down to the Yaches'; a fourth at the corner at Felipe Yach's house; a fifth at the entrance to Miguel Yach's house; a sixth at the crossing of the cemetery road; and a seventh at the entrance to the cemetery. Santiago Quiche recited the catechism at the grave and poured in a little liquor. Then they lowered the coffin and began to fill the grave, with everyone drinking. No earth was left over, and everyone knew it was his time to die. My mother was sick and hadn't even gone to the cemetery, but Petrona went with Agustina and me and cried with us. Everyone came home with us, and the demijohn wasn't enough, so I had to send for four bottles more. Night fell. Some six or eight people stayed all night, some drunk and others caring for Mother. Petrona went home soon after we returned from the cemetery. Her parents hadn't come because of the sick child. I slept well all night, having had three or four drinks.

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In the morning Santos, Maria, and Petrona came with atol and bread, and I went for another bottle of liquor. I sent Agustina to call Lorenzo to come over quickly, for here were my in-laws bringing things, and what should I do? Lorenzo wouldn't come, for fear that everyone would drink more if he came and there would be more expense. This way, he said, I could give a drink to Santos and it would end there. So it turned out: I gave a drink to Santos and Maria, and one to Petrona, Agustina, Mother, and me; we finished the bottle but no more. Petrona then left with her parents. Petrona came at noon, bringing lunch for all of us and lunching with us. We were rather happy. She said, "If you wish, I shall come to sleep with you, because you cannot leave your mother alone." I said that would be well. She returned that night with Santos and Maria. Santos said, "We have come here to sleep a little, because your poor mother is sick. We couldn't send Petrona alone." I had to go for another half-bottle of liquor. My parents had a room in which Mother slept, and I had a little house of my own. I slept alone in my house, and the others all slept in Mother's room. In the morning we gave them their coffee, and Petrona and her parents left after we had all breakfasted together. Now we were accustomed to each other and were not ashamed. It was two weeks after my father died that we finished the marriage. It was all done, with the help of the Xingos', just as for Jose's marriage. The next morning Petrona came to live with us. "My father sent me here," she said. I said, "It is well, come in." She came in and sat down with Agustina, who was fixing coffee. Petrona had no new clothes or anything else. She asked after my mother's health; I told her she was very ill. She said, "My father said yesterday that perhaps you were not treating her, so I should come early this morning." I told her that I was treating her, that she shouldn't say I wasn't. She said I should look for a eurer, and I replied that I already had and that the eurer had said Mother would die. Why should we go to more expense if she was going to die? We could just give her medicines, and perhaps she would live a little longer. She agreed and said, "Perhaps tomorrow morning I shall go to my father; perhaps he knows how to cure your mother." The next morning she did go to her house for a remedy. For four or five days after that my mother felt better, and Petrona said that if she continued to improve with this remedy, she would go get more from her father. Petrona once said to me, when I went back to work after giving the remedy, that perhaps I wasn't thinking of my mother — only of my work. I said, "But what can I do? If she dies, I'll need money, and where will I get it?" Petrona said, "Why did you arrange the marriage so quickly if you had no money?" I said it would have been a

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shame not to finish it. But she replied, "No, it would have been better had I come just like this, without the expensive ceremony." Petrona quickly became accustomed to eating with us and soon was no longer ashamed. It wasn't until four or five days after she came to the house that I took her to work with me weeding onions. She said, "Now I shall see your crops, to see if it is true that you have something." We used to have another cuerda and a half that the river has since taken, and there we went. I showed her all the land and the crops. Petrona said, "I don't feel like working. My mother said that if your mother is sick I shouldn't leave the house, but should stay and care for her." "But," I said, "better you should work here a little; for it she dies, we'll need money." So she worked until noon and then went home, I staying another hour. In the afternoon she didn't want to go to work; she said it was a pity to leave my mother. For about eight or ten days everything was all right between Agustina and Petrona. Then they began to fight. Agustina went to the market every two or three days, but Petrona didn't want to go, being too ashamed. Finally Agustina asked me, "When are you going to take your wife out? When is she going to the market?" I told her that she had nothing to say about what we did; if I wanted to send her, I would. "Then why did you find a wife?" she asked me, and continued, "One finds a wife so that she will go to the market and do a few errands, not just to have her stay at home." I said to her then, "If you wish, I'll give you nothing more to sell; I'll give all the produce to Petrona." "Very well," she said, angrily. And I added, "And I won't give you work here, either; you can go find work in other places." Then Agustina went and fought with Petrona, saying that I didn't want to take her out. Petrona said, "Why are you bothering me? I'm not doing anything to you. Perhaps you're angry because your brother married me. I'm going to the market — don't worry; but my mother told me to come to care for the patient and not go out. If you continue to scold me like this, I'll go back home." They continued fighting. Petrona began to cry. They fought for about four hours. I became so angry that I finally hit Agustina with the broad side of a machete, and then she stopped. I scolded her for bothering my wife, who was new in our family, and told her that if Petrona returned to her house I would lose all we had spent. My mother also became angry at Agustina, scolding her for bothering Petrona and telling her that there was good reason for not sending a new wife to town too soon, lest people give her advice and she decide to go back to her own house. My mother told Agustina that if this happened she would have to replace the money spent. Agustina argued that a man looks for a wife so she will earn money, not just sit around home. My mother answered that

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Petrona had been working hard at home, while she (Agustina) just sat around when she went to work. Agustina cried, but said no more after that. She was about 14 or 15 years old then. By evening Petrona and Agustina were friends again and slept together as usual. The next morning Petrona said to me, "Better I should go to market today." I said that was good, that perhaps Agustina wasn't turning in all she received in the market, since she never seemed to sell well. So I sent Agustina to work in the fields early, and Petrona went to the market. Petrona got up very early that morning, at four o'clock, to do the grinding and leave lunch all ready. She was more than willing to go to the marketplace, saying that Agustina had certainly been keeping out some of the earnings. After three or four days the two went together to market, and after that they went to work together and to market together. They got along well, arranging together when to go to market and when to the fields. My mother remained sick. We didn't continue to get her the remedy from Petrona's father, or any other. She died on Christmas Eve. Lorenzo had gone to Antigua, so it was very bad for us, having to bury her alone. I went with Petrona first to her house to call her parents. They cried, saying the woman had died too soon, before having been able to teach Petrona any work. I said, "She doesn't need any more instruction; Petrona knows how to work now." Santos said, "Why did you look for a wife, when you knew your parents were going to die so soon?" I said I was not to blame, that my father had told me to find a wife. Then they asked where I would get more money to bury my mother. Petrona scolded her father, saying, "Why are you scolding him? He knows where he'll get money to bury his mother." I explained that we had a little money, and perhaps it would be enough. Petrona then said, "Let's count our money now," and so we immediately began to do this. She had been giving all of her earnings to me, and now we counted 400 pesos all told. Petrona said, "This will be enough; we won't buy more liquor." I agreed that perhaps it would be enough. "Yes," said Petrona, "but now we had better take care of your mother." Petrona cautioned that we should not tell Agustina how much money we had, lest she claim she had earned it all. Maria went to find an old woman to wash the body, while I went uptown to buy two large candles and a bottle of liquor. We already had clothes ready, so the women dressed the body. Only Santos and Maria and Lorenzo's wife were with us, and we stayed up all night. Early in the morning I went for Santiago Quiche, explaining that Lorenzo was not around and I had nobody to go with me to the town hall. We ordered the coffin from Jose Maria Armas, went to the town hall, arranged to have the church bells rung, and then bought four bottles of liquor.

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When I arrived home there were many people. I began to serve liquor and then picked out the men to dig the grave. There were many women but only a few men, so the same men went to bring the coffin. By the time the funeral started, we were out of liquor, and I went to buy four bottles more. I still had some money. At about three o'clock we took the usual road to the cemetery, making the usual stops. We left two bottles of liquor at home and took two along. Santiago Quiche prayed at the grave, and we finished the liquor. Very little earth was left over; it was her time. We all returned to the house, and I sent for another bottle of liquor and we drank up two. Miguel Sahon, the father of Domingo Sahon, and Santos and Maria slept with us that night. In the morning we drank the last bottle of liquor, and when the others had all left I was left with my sister and my wife. It was pretty hard, for my father had left the cofradia with us, and on Christmas night there were rituals. When we returned from the cemetery, there were the mayordomos fixing the things for the fiesta. Agustina was helping the mayordomas and didn't even go to the cemetery. The women were grinding and the men fixing up the house. The drum and flute players had been at the house when the funeral started, and when we returned I had to join the mayordomos in arranging things. I didn't stay with them during the actual ceremony, but stayed with the mourning visitors. The rituals took until three o'clock the following morning, and we couldn't sleep much. Every little while the mayordomos called me for liquor, which I gave to my father-in-law. At dawn, there were two separate parties with a hangover, we of the funeral and they of the cofradia ceremonies. So the next day was spent in curing hangovers. I did not continue drinking, however, since I didn't yet know how to drink. Agustina was angry because she had not been able to go to the funeral. I had buried Mother while she had taken care of the cofradia. She said, "Why didn't you order Petrona to remain with the mayordomos?" I said, "No, Petrona had to go with me to bury Mother." But after that Agustina was never happy with us. I didn't know it, but she was having an affair with a man. It must have been the third or fourth night after the funeral that Petrona slept with me for the first time. Since Agustina was fighting with Petrona, I said to her, "Better come to sleep with me, now that we know that Agustina has a man. I do not have a father or mother now, and now you shouldn't be ashamed." She replied, "But here is Agustina, and I am ashamed before her." I said, "When do you want that we should join?" "When I wish we'll sleep together; you can't order me." I said, "Yes, I do order you, for I am your husband." "But," replied Petrona, "poor Agustina will be left to sleep alone; now I am used to sleeping with her."

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"But now you will leave her; when will you become used to sleeping with me?" We spoke thus at bedtime, in the presence of Agustina. Agustina said it was all right, she would go to sleep in my little house. Then Petrona said, "All right, but I shall put out the lights and then fix Agustina's bed." I said, "Better fix the bed first and then put out the light," and she agreed. She went with Agustina to fix her bed, and then returned and put out the light. She was trembling, and I said, "You can go to bed first if you are ashamed." She climbed into bed with all her clothes on. I undressed as usual and followed. She had her own blanket that she had brought from her house, and I of course had my own. Since she had her blanket wrapped around her, I waited until she was asleep, and then pulled up the corner of her blanket and covered us both with it. Feeling this, she woke up, and said, "What a bad man you are! Why did you pull up my blanket?" "Because I was cold," I replied. "And when you sleep alone, aren't you cold?" she asked. "No, of course not," I replied. "How is it that only when you sleep with me you feel cold?" she asked. I said, "That's the way it is; when one has a companion, one feels cold." "Oh, then you're afraid," she said. "That's why you're cold." "No, why should I be afraid?" "Then you took my blanket just to tease, not because you were cold!" she said. I only laughed, because of course this was true. We went to sleep then. She was ashamed and rose at about four o'clock; she wanted to be up before Agustina. She was grinding when Agustina came in, and neither said anything. The next night it went the same. Agustina left first, the lights were put out, and Petrona got into bed. Then I followed, and while she was still awake I took her blanket. She said, "What is this? Now you're getting the habit! What can I do?" I replied, "Pretty soon the cold is coming." She said, "How is it that the men aren't ashamed to grab women's blankets!" I said we would get accustomed to sleeping together little by little. "But this isn't little by little! You take my blanket all at once!" Then we j ust went to sleep again. Four or five nights this went on. By this time she said nothing about the blankets, and was used to it. Then for two or three weeks we slept together, still innocently. I had never seen or done the sex act, but the older boys had joked about it when I was alguacil, so I knew something about it. One night I began to talk about such things, rather ashamed. I said only a few words and she became angry: "Where did you learn such things? I won't sleep with you if that's what you're thinking of!" I said, "But I was only joking." "But perhaps you are going to continue saying such bad things," she replied. "No," I said, "I won't continue." The next night she was already asleep when I brought up the subject again. "Why

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didn't you say something like that before, and I would have left the bed? Now I have been sleeping," she said. Then I told her rather clearly what I wanted. She said, "Oh, then you have had another woman." I said this was not so. "Now let's try, and you will see by how I do it that I have not had another woman." She said that she would think about it. I argued that we had already been married for two months without trying anything. " B u t , " she said, "not until I want to. Nobody orders me." " I can order you, for I am your husband," I replied. So we argued awhile, and finally nothing came of it and we fell asleep. On awakening I asked how she had spent the night, but she was still angry and replied, " A l l you think of is such things; it would be better if you thought of your work." " I have to think of other things besides work," I replied. Then she began to laugh, and was no longer angry. I don't know what happened, but all day she was very pleasant and happy. That night we went to bed as usual; I immediately began to bother her, and not only with words. She began to cry, saying she didn't know anything. I told her not to cry, that everyone had to do this. " A l l right," she said, and everything went well. I had while sleeping with her these weeks had wet dreams twice, and now I just did as I had in my dreams. The next day she was very sad. I asked her, "Why are you sad?" She said she was in pain and was afraid she would get sick. I told her not to worry, she would not get sick. She asked me how I would cure her, and I replied that she needed no cure, all she needed was to use the sweatbath in the afternoon. I didn't know, of course, but just thought the sweatbath might help. That afternoon we entered the sweatbath together. Petrona complained that her whole body hurt as if she had been beaten. I told her she would become accustomed to the business little by little. "Oh, then," she said, "you want to repeat that again?" I just kept quiet so she wouldn't become angry. I didn't give her any more work that day, and the next morning she awoke well and happy. It wasn't until about two weeks later that we had sexual relations again. She said nothing then, and woke up well; nor was she angry. After that, we continued every three weeks or so, as is the custom here. Young people like that have to become accustomed to such things gradually. Petrona had been going to see her mother every week or two, but of course had never said anything about this. We both noted that she was getting fat, but she made nothing of it. I understood that she was pregnant, but she didn't. I kept hinting that she should go see her mother, but when she saw her mother, her mother just said she must be eating well. Perhaps her mother understood but was ashamed to say anything. It was one afternoon that the labor pains began. She said to me, " M y stomach hurts. I wonder what's wrong?" I didn't know either, but when

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the pains increased I went to a widow neighbor and asked her please to come and see what was wrong. The woman came and told me that perhaps she was going to give birth. "You know she is pregnant, don't you?" she asked me. I said that I did, but that Petrona didn't know and thought it was just a stomachache. The woman advised me to go for a midwife, and I went quickly to one called Siona. I knew nothing about such matters, so didn't even take money with me. I woke her up and asked her please to come and see my wife, since she had pains in her stomach. We were coming into the patio when the newborn baby cried out. It had come all by itself, although the neighbor had stayed to help. The midwife became frightened and ran in; she grabbed Petrona and scolded her for not having told me to call her earlier. The midwife stayed all night. I had to heat water and do what I could to help, for by this time Agustina was gone and Petrona and I were living alone. At daybreak I went to Lorenzo's house to borrow 100 pesos; I had no money ready for the event, since it all came so suddenly. Then I bought bread and a half-bottle of liquor for the midwife. I sent a boy to tell Maria what had happened. They became frightened, and hurriedly came over and scolded me, asking why I hadn't gone to them first. I told them I had had nobody to send during the night. Then they were content, for it was a little baby boy, and Petrona was alive. They soon left, and made food for Petrona and me. Then I went to the town hall after first going to a ladino friend to ask him the favor of looking in the almanac for the names for that day. There was only one name for a boy, and since there was no choice I named him Victor. That was the name I reported at the town hall, and that was the name we always used. Petrona never scolded me when she had the baby; now she was happy. We baptized the child in about a month. Before saying anything to Petrona, I went to talk to her parents. I told them we ought to baptize the child, and they agreed. "Who will you look for to baptize him?" they asked. I told them of a friend, Adrian Väsquez, who might do me the favor. They said this was all right, and then I reported to Petrona, who also agreed. When I went to Adrian's house, I took nothing; I didn't know whether he would do the favor or not, so why should I take a gift? Adrian and his wife Mercedes thanked me and said it would be well. Then the next day I took them ten pesos of bread and some sugar and chocolate. There was no priest here, and we had to wait until the next fiesta day, about two weeks later, when the priest came from Sololä. After the ceremony we had the usual party with the godparents. It was after Mother died that trouble with Agustina arose. She was

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going alone to the market every day, and I didn't know it, but she was meeting a man, Eulogio Salpor, on the road. She said nothing to me, but one afternoon went to talk to Lorenzo Xingo to notify him that one of these nights the Salpors would come to ask for her. It was very bad that she went to him rather than to me. Lorenzo became angry with her. "Why did you come to me? Why didn't you go first to your brother?" he scolded, and he also told her that our father and mother wouldn't want her to go with a man to his house. If she wanted to marry, the man should come to our house, so I would not be left alone. When Agustina returned form Lorenzo's, she said there was a man who was talking to her and wanted to marry her, and she told me of her talk with Lorenzo. "How can I think about this when I know nothing about it, all of a sudden like this?" I asked. Agustina then said, "I shall go with the man; you can't order me." I said that I knew nothing about it and that I didn't want another man to come to the house with me. I said that Eulogio was lazy and drank a lot. She said, "It's true that he drinks a lot, but he can help you in your work." I said, "No. If you wish, go with the man, but I don't want him here." So it was. For two months Agustina stayed with us, and nothing was said; I thought perhaps she and Eulogio had broken up. Since I was to become texel at Corpus, I began to make preparations, getting corn ready and so on. In those days there were women semaneras whose service it was to work in ladino homes for pay for a week at a time. They came to draft Agustina one day, giving her her pay in advance. This was bad, because that day I had to shell corn and the next day the nixtamal would have to be cooked. I told her it was all right, but pretty hard on me; she agreed, and said if I wished she would go to the alcalde and return the money. I told her that would be good. As it turned out, she went to get Eulogio to return the money for her. Eulogio told me later that he had told them in the town hall that they could not draft Agustina because she was his wife, they having been married some time. This was on Sunday. The next day Agustina helped me grind corn. She told me nothing about how the money had been returned. Tuesday I went with my cofrade to bring liquor, and when I returned in the afternoon I found Eulogio there in the house. He said, "Good afternoon, where were you?" I told him. He then said, "Now, don't be angry with me that I'm here in the house." Agustina quickly helped out, explaining that this was the man she was going to marry. "I know nothing about this," I said. "It is useless for you to come here, because you must go to Lorenzo about this matter." Agustina replied, "No, we're not going. Lorenzo doesn't order me; he doesn't feed me." "But," I replied, "since he is in charge of us, it is necessary that you go there." Then Eulogio said, "We have it all arranged

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now; you can't do anything, and if the woman will go with me now, I shall take her." I said, "You can go, then." Agustina then said, "We won't go now, not until you receive your year." Eulogio had ready a bottle of liquor; he remained seated, but offered me a drink. I didn't take it. I was angry and said nothing, and went out to join my cofrade. Later I learned that when I went out, the two of them began to drink. They offered Petrona a drink, but she refused, saying, "If my husband wouldn't accept it, how could I?" She was angry too. I returned at about seven o'clock, when half the bottle was gone and the two were fairly drunk. They wanted me to take a drink, but I refused. Then Eulogio went home to get his bundle; when he came back they slept in the big house that had been the cofradia. I imagine that they had been together before in the woods. Petrona and I had to go to the cofradia next day, and we left Agustina and Eulogio at home. When the fiesta was over, they said I should give them a little house to live in. I agreed that I would, but I told Eulogio I had no work to give him. (He had very little land himself, having been selling it.) I told him I did not like a drinker and a lazy man. He said, "All right, I'll find work elsewhere." They lived in the little house, entirely on their own, for two months. Agustina no longer worked in my fields or took my produce to market; she and Eulogio found work elsewhere, and the money they earned went half for living and half for drinking. They were named mayordomo of San Nicolas, and it was then that they began to sell more of their land. He sold a piece of land that was not his; it belonged to his grandparents, but he stole the document and went to pawn the land in San Andres for 2,000 pesos. They bought a little corn and beans to receive their year, but they mostly drank up the money. When I learned they had pawned the land in San Andres, I sent them away. I told Agustina that they would have to leave — that I couldn't have them around just drinking. She said she would ask her husband to find a place to stay, but they didn't leave until I had scolded them on the matter three or four times. Agustina said, "Very well, you can chase us out, but do you have any more right than I to stay on our parents' house-site?" I pointed out that I did — that I had buried Father and Mother, Jose, and a younger brother and that I had finished out my father's year as cofrade. I had spent a lot, and she nothing. She left then, saying, "All right, I'm going, but we shall see later how things turn out." They went to live with his sister, Luisa Salpor. That was in September, and nothing more happened until the end of January. After I had ended my year as texel in June, we had no service until January, when I was made mayor. In the next June or July, Petrona took sick. All rainy season she was sick, with swelling. I called in Francisco

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Quiche, her grandfather, who was a eurer. He told me that Petrona would die, and that it was her fault: when my father had died, she had said she would not come with me; and when she fought with Agustina, she had asked for death, saying, "Better I were dead than go on like this with Agustina." That is why the sickness entered her and she could not withstand it. We performed some rituals for her, and so she lived a while longer. But as she got worse, the eurer told me she could withstand her sickness no more than a year, and so it was. Because I was in the town hall and there was nobody to care for her, we moved to the house of Petrona's parents, leaving our house closed up. It was my mother-in-law who had to help me with the ceremony when I ended my year as mayor. In mid-January I was sent to the coast on a mandamiento. My father-in-law Santos went with me, to help me. I worked for about three weeks and had almost finished my work when I received a telegram telling me that Petrona was very bad and that I should come quickly. That was on Sunday. On Tuesday we finished my work, pretty sure that she must have died. On the way home we met people from here going on mandamientos. They told me that my wife had died on Friday. It was in Pachuta that we heard this, and we went to the tavern and had a drink with those whom we had met. Santos and I cried and got drunk. The next afternoon we got home. Only Maria and Jesus were there, of course, and we stayed in the house for two or three days crying and sad. I didn't eat or drink. I wouldn't even drink liquor. Even Santos didn't feel like drinking, but he ate a little. Lorenzo Xingo had helped Maria bury Petrona, spending about 100 pesos of his own. Victor was about three years old and no longer nursing. Of course, Maria was caring for him. I didn't return to my house, but stayed with Maria and Santos. About ten or twelve days after this, a neighbor, Margarita Sabuyuc, asked me one morning if I knew that Agustina was going to court against me. I asked on what grounds, and Margarita told me she was going to take away half of all my land. Agustina had told Margarita the day before (expecting that she would pass the word along to me, for we had not spoken since she left the house). I began to think about what I should do; I didn't see how she could get away with it, since I had gone through so much and there was so little land. I arose early to irrigate my tablones, and I was just finishing when I saw Agustina entering the house of another neighbor, Nicolas Quiche, who had land bordering mine there. She stayed quite a while, and I waited. I thought she was offering to pawn our land bordering his in order to make her case in court. This turned out to be true. She came out, and I called her and asked her what she had done there; she said she had gone to buy a

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half-bottle of milk. When she went home Nicolas called me in and asked me if Agustina and I had arranged about the land. I said we had not done anything. "But," he said, "Agustina came here to ask for money to pay the witnesses, since a commission is coming to divide the land." I told him he shouldn't give her money, because she would probably never be able to get the land. Nicolas, however, opined that she would win. So I said, "All right, if you have money to lose, take the chance!" I went home to lunch at my in-laws' house. I was sad that my wife had died, and wasn't thinking of land; Agustina was taking advantage of me. Early the next morning Agustina went to the town hall, and the alguaciles came for me as if I were a murderer or a thief. I was working on a tablon of beans when they came. All morning I was under arrest on the porch of the town hall, waiting. At about one o'clock the case was heard. Juan Vickers was the first alcalde, but Jose Anleu was the regidor who had arrested me, being in charge that day. Agustina had promised him that she would sell him the land if he could get it away from me. The brief said: that my father had left me a lot of land and a lot of corn; that I had used up all the corn and given her nothing; that I had sold much of the land (a barefaced lie, of course). I began to protest, but the alcalde wouldn't let me speak. Lorenzo Xingo happened to be second alcalde (first among Indians), and I told Anleu that he was my witness. But Xingo had not yet come to the office. I told Anleu that I had been left a little land, but that I had in effect bought it because of the expense I had been put to. I added that Agustina had not helped at all, and that if she had, I would give her some land. The judge pounded on the table and said it was all a lie. I said I would take the matter to Sololä. "All right," said the judge, "go there, but you'll go as a prisoner." I agreed, and was told to wait on the porch for something to be written. I noted that an Indian regidor left, and when he returned with a measuring rod I said to myself, "Then it's a lie that they are going to send me to Sololä; they aren't writing anything, but are preparing to measure the land!" A ladino regidor was placed in charge, and the alcalde came out and told me I was to go with the commission to measure the land. I said, "Sir, you said you were sending me to Sololä! I am awaiting the note to take to Sololä." "You can't order me," replied the judge. "You will go with the commission!" Agustina went ahead with the commission to show them the land, and I followed. I had no money to fight. The land I had inherited consisted of a piece above Lorenzo's house, eight cuerdas at the foot of the hill, and a cuerda and a half of tablones; none of this did the commission take. In addition, there was the house-site with two cuerdas and a piece by the river. First they measured the cuerda and a half near the river; and then they measured off half of the

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house-site. Agustina wanted to go to the land up farther to get some of it, but I said, "If you wish to go, go, but I'm not going." The commission then refused to go if I wouldn't, and they said to Agustina: "You are a woman; now he has given you something; if you were a man, perhaps you could get half, but not this way." Agustina said, "Oh, but there's much more; there's a big piece up there!" But they refused. Lorenzo by then had come to the town hall; the mayores told him what had happened, and he went quickly to my land near his place to see that nobody took any. He said that if Agustina tried to get the land there, he would grab her and take her to Sololä, and if I didn't have money, he would supply it. But we didn't go there. Agustina went with the commission back to town, and I remained at home, very sad. I just thought about what I could do. Meanwhile, they told Agustina in the town hall that they would make up the documents tomorrow. Then she went to ask Nicolas Quiche for money. She got 400 pesos, and with this money she and Eulogio began to drink. They didn't think even to go to the town hall to make up the documents. When they had drunk up the 400 pesos, they went to Patricio Choguaj and got another 250. In both cases she sold land to get the money: the first time the land up-river (for 600 pesos all told) and the second the house-site land (for 350 pesos). They drank up all the money, and Anleu not only got no land but wasn't even paid for the claim he wrote up. The money was gone, and the buyers of the land didn't even have papers to show. Anleu sent alguaciles to find the couple, but they hid out and couldn't be found for about two weeks. Then they left for the coast, but half of those two pieces of my land was gone. One piece the river now has; this land lasted only six or seven years after Agustina sold it, and then the river took it after Quiche had planted coffee on it. That made me contented! But the widow of Choguaj still has half my house-site. She has no document for it; perhaps I should try to get it back. Juan Rosales says that actually the land is only pawned, and could be redeemed for 350 pesos. When Agustina first started causing me trouble, I suggested that my in-laws come to my house to live. They agreed, and we all moved over. The economics were arranged thus: I would buy corn for a few days, and then they would buy it for a while; or, if there was nothing for lunch, I would give money to Maria to buy meat, eggs, and so on. She might ask me for money, or I might ask her if she needed some to buy food for lunch or supper. Any money that wasn't needed I could put aside for myself. When I worked on Santos's land, he did not pay me, for he gave me my food when I was in my week in the town hall. In about May, Santos took sick with swelling, and after three or four

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months he died. Maria did not want me to call a eurer, for Santos was rather old and she didn't want to spend money uselessly. We bought some medicines in the pharmacy; that was all. During that time, I had to do all the work of the fields alone. And when he died, of course, I had the expense of burying him. After a month longer in my house, we moved again to Maria's house. Maria did not want to stay in my house, for Santos had died there. There were just Maria and me, plus Jesüs (six years old) and Victor (about three). I came to my house to sleep every night and only had meals with the family. I had to come home to sleep because someone had stolen a hoe and a machete and broken two huge pots. The rest of the family didn't sleep in their house either; they were afraid to be alone, so they slept at a neighbor's every night. This arrangement went on for four or five months. In January I was made auxiliar in the town hall, and in April I spoke to my second (and present) wife, Andrea. Agustin Quiche was her father's name, and he had died while I was mayor two years before. Her mother had long been dead, and Andrea lived alone in the house, except for an Andresana who had taken temporary lodging with her. They had separate fires and lived separately. It was to this house that Maria and the two children went to sleep nights. Andrea must have been about 22 years old. She had never been married. She had a little land, but no one to work it, so her brother Esteban worked her land (paying her nothing) and she earned her living by working for others by the day. Esteban was single, too, and lived in another house in the same patio. But Andrea didn't like to live with him because he was always cross, and soon after Maria and the children started spending nights with her she decided to move to her sister's house. Then Maria came back with the children to live at my house. Andrea went to live with her sister in about August, and the next April the two sisters fought. Andrea was sent from the house and found temporary lodging at the home of my neighbor Margarita. It was on Sunday of Lazarus that she came there, and that afternoon when I was planting onions in the patio, Margarita came to me. I had told Margarita that if she should meet Andrea on the road, and have the chance, she should ask her if she didn't want to marry me. Now that Andrea had come crying to her house, saying she had been chased out and that she had no place to go, Margarita quickly came and told me what had happened. I told her I would be over. Margarita asked if I had money for a little liquor; she would send for it and give Andrea a drink. I gave her five pesos, and she sent a son to buy the liquor. Maria knew nothing of all this, for she was in the house. When I arrived, Andrea was drinking with Margarita. "I've come in

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good time," I said. " Y o u have a fiesta, and so you're drinking!" Margarita replied, "It's from sadness we're drinking." "Oh, has somebody died?" I said. She replied, " Y o u don't know how things are with us." I didn't reply, and Margarita said, "If you will drink, we shall give you a cupful." I said, "Certainly, if you have enough, I shall drink with pleasure." So she gave me a drink, but before I drank, I said they should drink with me. Margarita agreed, and they each drank two cupsful (having also drunk one before I came). I had only one, and then I left, saying, "Now that you have given me a drink, I'm thirsty; I'm going to get more, and I'll be back." Andrea said, "Don't come back, or your mother-in-law might scold you." I paid no attention and left. By this time, since they weren't accustomed to drink, the two women were a little drunk. While I was gone, Margarita began to say to Andrea, " L o o k , this poor man can't find a wife. What will you do if he comes again and asks you to marry him?" Andrea replied, "That is a shame, for he has had a wife, and I have never had a husband." Margarita said I was still young. " B u t he already has a child!" said Andrea. Margarita told her to think about it, because I might come again. Then Andrea said, "Well, then, this looks bad — as if I came here only to find a husband! I think perhaps you sent for him to come." Margarita denied this, saying, " H e heard us talking, and that is why he came. Better think fast, because maybe tonight they will come to arrange things." I went home, and Maria asked me where I had been, since I had left my work. I said I had gone to see about the irrigation ditch to water my onions. I said I was going out again for a little while. " W h y ? " she asked. "Only to take a little walk," I said, keeping my distance so she wouldn't smell my breath. I took about ten pesos with me and bought a half-bottle of liquor. I arrived at Margarita's house and said to her and Andrea that the drink they had given me had given me a headache. I sat down inside the doorway so nobody could leave and asked Margarita for a cup. First I gave her a drink, telling her it was a soft drink. Margarita drank, and said nothing. I filled the cup and gave it to her to give to Andrea. Andrea drank it up, and said to me, "Why are you giving me liquor?" "Just for fun, that's all," I replied, "and because you gave me one a while ago and I am ashamed not to return it. The three of us are in the same poor state; neither of you has a husband, and I have no wife!" The two then invited me to drink myself, if I still had some. I took a big one, so I wouldn't be afraid to talk. Then I said, " L o o k , will you do me a big service, Margarita? I wonder if Andrea wouldn't like to marry m e ? " The two of them burst out laughing, and Margarita said, " A h , well, just because the poor thing came to ask lodging here, you want to grab her!" " S u r e , " I said, "she is poor and so

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am I; perhaps it would be good to get married." Andrea said, "Ah, perhaps that is bad; you already have a child and you have done some of your services." I replied, "But those were not hard services." "Yes," she replied, "but you have done some. Have you spoken to your mother-in-law? Perhaps she will look for a good woman for you." I said, "She has nothing to say about it; I can have anyone who pleases me." She said, "Go and bring your mother-in-law!" I said, "No, I want to speak with you alone." "But," said Andrea, "with you alone we cannot arrange anything." Then Margarita put in, "But yes, I am the witness, and this man is alone without family." I gave Andrea another drink, and she received it, saying, "Perhaps you will leave the house a while, so I can think about it. With you here we can't arrange anything." So I went home, but only to return the first thing next morning. Andrea greeted me and said, "Margarita has advised me well, and I'm willing to do it; but I wonder if you will treat me well? Did you bring something for our hangover?" "Yes, I brought what was left from last night." "And do you mean to say you didn't drink that up?" she asked. "No, how would I drink that all alone!" Then Andrea said, "Not for me, but for Margarita." And indeed, only Margarita would drink. Andrea refused. Margarita then told me that everything had been taken care of, that they had reached the decision last night. I thanked her, and asked lodging for a few days so I could stay with Andrea. This arranged, I ran home quickly. I brought 15 pesos and gave them to Andrea, saying, "Now that it is all arranged, it is up to me to pay your expenses." "Well," she replied, "but you must come to lunch with me." I agreed, and said she should just send a child to call me in time. "But," she said, "these 15 pesos are more than enough for today," and asked my permission to take 5 pesos of the money to send for liquor for Margarita, since she had given her good advice the night before and now had a hangover. Then I went home. Maria of course knew that I had left early and had probably seen me going to the neighbor's. Now she asked, "Where were you?" and I answered that I had gone on an errand. "No," she replied, "perhaps you went to look for a wife." I admitted this. She then said, "Very well, bring your wife here, and I shall go back to my house." I said, "No, I don't know yet how it will be; I have just now asked her." "Why didn't you speak to me?" asked Maria. I explained that I hadn't known, that I had gone to talk to the neighbor all of a sudden. She asked me what I was going to give the woman, and I lied and said I would give her nothing, that she could get along for the time being without money. Then Maria said, "If you have a wife now, take Victor and leave him with her." I said, "No, how can I take him?" and with that I left for work.

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I heard later that she immediately looked over into the neighbor's patio to see what woman was there. At lunchtime I didn't go home, but to Margarita's. Margarita had small children, and I sent one to call Victor over. Victor didn't come directly, but sort of hid out and came slowly. I said to Andrea, "Please do me the favor of giving my boy lunch." "Very well," she replied, "but why didn't you tell Maria that you were coming here? This morning she came over and looked, but didn't come in, and I think she is angry with me." I didn't answer, but just asked for my lunch and suggested we eat together. She asked if I didn't want a drink before lunch, since Margarita had had only one and the rest was still there. I said I would only if she would, but she said only I should drink. I drank alone then, and we gave one to Margarita. We all lunched together, and then I went back to work. After lunch, Victor went back to Maria, who scolded him for having left without telling her: "Why did you come back here? Why didn't you stay with your mother over there? This afternoon I'm going back to my house; your father will probably bring this woman tonight or in the morning." Then Victor returned to Margarita's, for Maria didn't want to care for him. So it was that Andrea came to see me where I was working and told me I had better go and arrange these things with Maria. So I returned to see if what Victor had reported was true. Maria said it was all true, that she was going to her house that afternoon, and she told me to bring my wife home immediately. I agreed that I would do this, since this was my house. "Very well," said Maria, "but Victor cannot stay with me now. He must go to the other woman." We were fighting, and I said angrily, "If you want to go to your house right now, it will be all right too." "Yes, I'm going," she retorted, "but I must take all my belongings." I told her that most of the things she had in my house were mine and she couldn't take them. She replied, "Well, perhaps your new wife is rich, and will bring with her all the things she needs." "It's none of your business," I replied, "whether she's rich or poor, and if she doesn't have what she needs, I'll buy it for her. If you're going to take all the things in the house, then I'll keep all the crops; I won't give you even one tablon." "Then I am your servant!" she replied. "I worked in the fields, and now everything is yours." I finally told her that if she wished to stay a few days, all right ; if not, she could go. Then I went to tell Andrea that I was fighting with Maria and that she should get ready to come with me. Andrea replied, "All right, but if she says something to me I won't finish with you." I said, "If she says something to you, pay no attention, because I want you to come to live in my house now." So she agreed that if I wished she would come early in the morning. I argued that she would have to come now to put on the nixtamal for tomorrow's lunch, but she insisted on waiting for morning.

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Finally Maria stayed at my house the night, and I went to Andrea for dinner and breakfast. After breakfast, I took Andrea and Victor to the fields with me. When we got there, we didn't work, for we decided something else. "I'll tell you what," I said, "Let's go to the house and tell Maria that we want to go to Sololä tomorrow, and ask her if she wants to help us cut some green beans and pull up some onions to fix up to take along. You see, she is my mother-in-law, and for two years she has ground for me; I can't chase her out of the house. Better we should try to get along." Andrea agreed, but said, "We had better go to talk to her to see what she says." So we went to my house. Maria wasn't there, having gone to her fields to water her beans. We decided that Andrea should clean the house, make the fire, and get lunch ready, so that when Maria returned things would be in order. "But now don't you go away," said Andrea, "She might come and scold me." I agreed, saying I had work at home anyway, and I told her to go bring her things from Margarita's so she could make lunch. She went and brought her nixtamal and other things and began to grind. I was sweeping the patio when Maria arrived, and when I saw her I said jokingly, "Oh, now you have a helper to do the grinding," to which she replied rather sarcastically, "How old is the girl — ten or twelve?" I answered that she was going on eight, and then told her that they mustn't fight, and that I was tired of being alone. I told her, "Better that the three of us should be content together and not fight, because I would like you to stay a while with us. And don't worry, for we'll give you what you need. You'll be with us like a helper, and we'll feed you, and you needn't worry. If you wish, I'll make tablones for you." "All right, then," she agreed, "I'll stay with you a little longer. I thought you were going to send me away." Then I said, "Now, will you help us to cut beans to take to Sololä?" She agreed, and it was decided to do this after lunch. Then Maria said, "Now I must go do the grinding." But since Andrea and I had decided that we would give her lunch without making her work for it, Andrea now said, "I will gladly do the grinding, if you will but please take this money and buy some meat." Then Maria said to Andrea, "And what am I going to eat for lunch if I do not do my grinding?" And Andrea answered, "The grinding I am doing is for all of us." So Maria went for the meat, and when she returned she fixed the meat herself. Then Maria asked Andrea where she had gotten the money to buy the corn, and Andrea replied that I had given her money yesterday to buy it. "Oh," said Maria, "now I understand why he didn't give me money for corn yesterday, and I had to buy it myself." Then she asked if it were true that we were going to Sololä tomorrow, and Andrea told her what we had decided in the morning.

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While we were lunching together that noon, Maria asked me about going to Sololä, and when I said we were going, she said she wanted to go also. I said, "All right, but you'll go with us, because Andrea will be ashamed to go with me alone." "That isn't my fault," said Maria. "What more do you want?" I asked her. "I'll give you a basket of green beans, and if you want to buy something in Sololä, you can use the money you receive." She said she had thought of cutting a basket of her own beans, but I said that I would give her one. This made her contented, and right after lunch the three of us went to cut beans. This done, we all pulled up onions, and while we were cleaning them at home, Margarita came. After telling about the plans to go to Sololä, Maria said to Margarita, "You are very bad. Why didn't you come and tell me that Santiago had a wife at your house?" Margarita replied, "Why, I didn't know it myself. I was away at work, and when I returned there were the two of them in my house. Santiago only asked me to give her a little lodging, and I gave him permission because he is my neighbor. Besides, I was happy to do it, because poor Santiago was tired of being alone." Maria replied, "I became angry because Santiago didn't tell me." "Oh, one must have patience," said Margarita. "Santiago didn't spend much. For you it's all right, for now you won't have to grind or do much other work." "But I was ashamed," said Maria, "fearing that the woman would come to the house suddenly without anybody's telling me in advance." Then Margarita said, "It was well, though, that Santiago came alone to ask for his wife, that you didn't come with him; now if there is any trouble between them, you cannot be called to the town hall as a witness. I'll have to be the witness because the arrangements were made before me." So Maria thanked Margarita for helping arrange this marriage. Then Maria turned to me and asked what I had done for Margarita in return for the favor; I said I had given her nothing. Then, right there, Maria asked me if I had three pesos; I gave the money to her, and she told Andrea to go make a little coffee while she ran quickly to buy three pesos of bread. Margarita meanwhile had started to help us fix up the onions. She asked if we had fought in the morning. " A little," I admitted. Then she advised Andrea: "If she scolds you a little, you should take it, because if she wants to go to her house, she will." Maria returned and went into the house and brought out a cup of coffee and a plate of the bread and gave them to Margarita, saying, "Ay, Margarita, excuse Santiago for not thinking to thank you; you did us the favor, and he gave you nothing." Margarita replied she had done no favor, that she had only given a little lodging. Then she went home. The children stayed with Margarita while we went to Sololä. When we had sold everything, Maria asked me, "And now what are you going to do

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for me?" "What do you want?" I asked. "Well, I think it is a pity that you were able to drink with your wife at your marriage, while I haven't had a thing!" I told her I hadn't drunk much either. It was a healthy marriage, I told her; we had bought only five pesos of liquor. "All right," said Maria, "I don't want to ask more; just give me one cupful and be done with it." I consulted then with Andrea, and she said, "But if she gets drunk, who will carry her home? Better not buy her liquor; just give her five pesos and she can do what she wishes." I did this, but Maria got drunk anyway, and we had to drag her home in bad shape. We didn't drink a thing and came home contentedly. "It was good you drank nothing," said Andrea to me, "and if Maria asks for liquor to cure her hangover in the morning, don't give her anything; she only wanted it because she thinks we drank a lot when we married." We got home about seven-thirty and had supper. Maria slept alone and the children slept with us. Andrea arose early. Maria asked her how she had been on the way from Sololä, and Andrea told her; Maria asked if I had drunk too, and Andrea told her I hadn't had even one drink. "Then it was a shame what I did," said Maria, "for I drank alone." She asked then if I were angry, and Andrea said I was. Andrea then told her that we were going to water the fields and cut more beans to take to Sololä the next day. Maria asked for no liquor, and I gave her none, but at noon I got her a soft drink from town. We did go to Sololä the next day, and Maria stayed home. Even though we had not notified Lorenzo Xingo or any of Andrea's relatives in any way, everyone now knew of our marriage and Andrea was not ashamed to be seen about with me. Once when I fought with Andrea, later, she threw up to me the fact that I hadn't spent anything to get her: "If I want to go, I'll go," she said, "for you didn't spend anything to get me." I just said, "Go then, if you're not ashamed; we have already done services together, but go if you wish." Of course, the quarrel blew over. We had been married about eight years then. Maria stayed with us only through Holy Week and then went to her house with Jesus. I had planted her fields, and she used these crops to live on. I never once went to visit her, but I called her mother-in-law on the street. She died two or three years later; I was on the coast at the time, and a brother-in-law of hers buried her and took Jesus. After about four months, Victor sickened with swelling. I called his great-grandfather, Francisco Quiche, and he divined that Maria had done wrong by Victor — that she had lighted candles before the saints so Victor would die. I thought it was a lie; why should Maria do that? I went to another eurer, a Catarineco, but he told me exactly the same thing. He added that it would be useless to perform rites, for he thought Victor

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would live only a week. This was true, for in a week Victor died. I was very angry with Maria, of course, and had I gone to see her I would have struck her. When Victor died I asked Lorenzo to go with me to notify the town officials, buy the coffin, and so on. When we returned, Maria was at the house. She asked what I had done to try to cure him, and I told her what the two curers had told me."Lies!" she said. "Why would I do that?" She wanted to know the names of the curers in order to go to the town hall to complain against them, but I didn't tell her. She went home angry. Neighbors helped us bury the child. A little earth was left over, and it was no doubt true what the curers had said. Lorenzo returned home with us, rather drunk. There was no liquor left over from the funeral, so all the neighbors left us alone. Lorenzo asked, "Are you going to sleep here?" We said yes. "How can that be," asked Lorenzo, "when the body was taken from here?" "But we can't leave our house! Where would we go?" we replied. "No," said Lorenzo, "you will come with me." And right away he took us to his house. He had a half-bottle of liquor at his house, and he gave us each a drink. In the morning he said, "Don't leave; stay here a few days. If you return to your house, you or your wife might die; it would be better to leave your house a while." I said I had better go home, for how could we arrange our expenses here? He said then that he would give me money if I needed it, and I could work two or three days for him. Andrea could help in the kitchen. We agreed then to stay a few days; Andrea said she wouldn't like it there for longer. So he gave me an advance of 50 pesos, and I stayed there to work off this money. During that year I was auxiliar, so after a few days at Lorenzo's it was my week in the town hall. Lorenzo said, "Your wife can't go home to be alone there; she can stay here, and when you finish your week, you can go to your house." So it was arranged, and since Lorenzo was good to us Andrea didn't mind. We had a house apart and an independent kitchen. Lorenzo said if I wanted money he would give it to me and I could work it off. So I took another 100 pesos when I received my week, and I hadn't yet worked off all of the previous 50. When I finished my week, Lorenzo said, "Now you had better stay here until you pay off your debt; then you can go to your house." I objected, but couldn't do much. Andrea needed clothes, and I began to buy them with the produce from my fields. I couldn't plant a new crop, however, because I had to work for Lorenzo. Every week when I was on duty in the town hall, I needed money for the week's expenses and had to borrow from Lorenzo. I could never pay off my debt, it seemed, but he said, "When you finish your year as auxiliar, you'll quickly pay off the debt." When I finished my year, however, I

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owed him 500 pesos, and Lorenzo wouldn't give me even a day's leave to work in my own fields. "Finish paying your debt," he said, "and when you need money, I'll give you more." Of course, I had to ask for more to live on. The debt rose rather than diminished, for I couldn't plant my lands at all. When the year was over I owed about 600 pesos, and then they called me to be mayordomo of Sacramento! I told Lorenzo I had no money to accept this service, but he said I would have to do it. "But you know I have neither money nor crops!" I protested. "I shall help you with the money," Lorenzo said. "Yes," I agreed, "you will no doubt do me the favor of helping with the money, but I won't be able to repay it." "Oh, you'll be able to pay it off later," he replied. So I accepted the service on his advice and with his help. When I finished my year as mayordomo I owed Lorenzo more than 1,000 pesos. I determined to work this off, but I just wasn't able to. Lorenzo never gave me a day to work in my fields, and I could never plant them. When my year of rest ended, I owed 900 pesos; and then they named me mayordomo of San Francisco. Lorenzo again lent me money, and when I finished that service, I owed 2,400 pesos; the expenses were very great, 300 or 400 pesos each ceremony! When we went over the accounts then, I said to myself, "This debt I'll never be able to pay." We decided that Andrea would hire out for work in the fields and grind for Lorenzo early in the morning at three pesos a day. Lorenzo now said he would give me no more money, and I replied that I would continue working for him only when I didn't have work in my own fields. He agreed, saying he would lower my pay. Then I began to work my land and slowly began to pay off the debt. When I finished my year as mayordomo of San Francisco, I had two years of rest, and in those two years I worked off 1,400 pesos. But we still lived at Lorenzo's house. He wouldn't let us go, for he didn't want Andrea to work anywhere else. Then they made me regidor, and that year I couldn't pay off anything. Andrea had to go against Lorenzo's wishes to work in other houses, earning ten pesos for weeding a tablon of onions. We needed this money so that we wouldn't have to borrow from Lorenzo. I still worked a day or two a week for Lorenzo, during my weeks off, and we still lived there. He paid me cash, letting the debt rest. When I finished my year as regidor, I owed him 900 pesos. The first of January, then, we fought with Lorenzo. He was cofrade of Sacramento then, and he became drunk and when I was away spoke very ill to Andrea. When I returned she was crying and saying that she couldn't stay there any longer. I was relieved then, and said, "Good, we'll leave now; since he has fought with us, we can go and find some other house." My own house was of course in ruins by this time, after 12 years with Lorenzo. She said, "Think well; should we really

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leave?" I said yes. I called on Jose Mucün, Andrea's brother-in-law, to ask lodging for us, and he agreed to let us stay there. I said it would be only for a couple of months. I immediately went for Andrea, and that morning we were in our new home. Lorenzo was there too drunk to understand, and he thought we were going out for a half-day or so and would come back. I had been waiting for this opportunity, ready to seize the first scolding as any excuse to go. I had some lumber and thatch bought for my house, but of course Lorenzo didn't suspect this. In three or four days I began, alone, to build my house. We had two plum trees, and Andrea went every day to the market to sell the fruit in addition to the weekly trips to Sololä. So the plum tree gave us the money for building the house and for living. I didn't work at anything else, but I did have to borrow 200 pesos from Domingo Τοηόη. In three weeks I had finished the house. When it was finished I called Jose Mucün to do me the favor of testing whether there wasn't something in the house-site that would cause trouble later, bringing sickness or bad fortune. Jose was a eurer, but because he was my brother-in-law he didn't charge me anything. He scolded me for not having called him before the house was built, but after divining he said finally that it would be all right; I would get sick every little while in the house, but I wouldn't die. And so it has turned out. For a month I never went to work for Lorenzo. He sent to inquire when I would begin working for him again, and I replied not until I had paid off the drinking debts occasioned by finishing my year of service. It was February when I began to work for Lorenzo again, but it took me ten years to pay off 500 pesos. When debts were canceled in 1936,15 1 still owed Lorenzo 400 pesos, which, of course, I have not had to pay. My first wife, Petrona, had brought me no land, but Andrea brought me two cuerdas — one in tablones and the other planted in coffee. The coffee cuerda was, at the time, pawned to Patricio Choguaj for 300 pesos; the other her brother Esteban was using without paying rent or anything. When we came back to our house from Lorenzo's, I knew nothing about this land. Andrea had never told me it was hers. I don't know why she never said anything. Then one day, when I was at work, Esteban came to the house and quarreled with Andrea. At noon when I came home she told me that Esteban had been there to scold her out of spite. Then she told me that the land Esteban was using was hers. "How is that?" I asked, and she said it was her inheritance. She said that she had had the document, but perhaps it was lost, because for many years she had left it entrusted to Luis Andrade. I told her we should first look up the document. She didn't have much hope, but she finally went to ask. Luis was there, and she asked him please to give her the document she had left

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with him so long ago. Luis had it and delivered it with pleasure, saying, "Why, I couldn't lose that document; you asked me please to keep it for you, and here it is. Take it and get the land for yourself, for your brother has no right to it." I had thought that the cuerda planted in coffee had been sold to Choguaj, and now that I understood it had only been pawned I was sad at the prospect of having to pay to redeem it. We decided to go to Miguel Yach to see if he wanted to buy a piece of the land so we could pay back Choguaj. We both went to Miguel, showing him the document and asking him if he didn't care to buy a piece of the land. He wanted us to sell him the whole two cuerdas, but we didn't want this, and he finally agreed to buy the cuerda of coffee for 1,000 pesos. Miguel said that he would have the money for us in a week, but we should go first to Choguaj to see if he would receive the 600 pesos. Therefore we went right to Choguaj's house, and he agreed to take the money and turn over the land. In a week, Miguel sent for us and gave us the 1,000 pesos. Then we went quickly to Choguaj and returned the 600 pesos. Now, Esteban said he had paid his father 200 pesos on the other cuerda of land, giving Esteban the right to use it all these years. So now we went to see Esteban to return the 200 pesos. Andrea spoke angrily, saying that she doubted the truth of his statement that he had given 200 pesos to their father. So they fought a little, but we gave him the money and let it go at that. Then we had the cuerda of land, and I began to work it. It was about a year and a half after we married that Andrea and I had our first child. As in the case of Petrona, Andrea didn't know until the child was born that she was pregnant. I knew after five or six months, but I didn't tell her why she was getting fat, lest it frighten her. It was in April, just before Holy Week, that about 20 of us were sent to work in Guatemala City because of the earthquake that had destroyed the city. We lived at the plantation La Palma west of the city. When we went, nobody said we were going to work. We were told only that we were delivering cargo; we took lumber, thatch, and other such materials. Then, when we arrived, they told us we had to stay to work. We had very little money and no totoposte for a long stay. They fed us tamales, but old ones that had been gathered in other towns. With what we had brought for our return trip, we could eat a little more, but we had to endure our hunger. Ten days we worked there, without being paid a cent. They didn't want us to leave. There were 100 Atitecos and 50 from Santa Lucia; they had taken their labor contractors with them, and these contractors prepared a letter complaining that we had not been told we would have to work. They then let us go. On Holy Thursday we left the city, each with ten pesos for the trip.

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When I arrived home, Andrea had given birth to a little girl. This had happened on Monday, and Andrea was well. Lorenzo had registered and named the child, but I don't remember the name. Andrea told me she had had to call Lorenzo at night and he had gone for a midwife; he had to pay all the expenses and also help the midwife by holding Andrea during the birth. When I arrived, Lorenzo was rather drunk, and he scolded me for not having looked for a midwife earlier. I told him I hadn't thought the time was so near. "And you didn't leave any money," he complained, "and I had to supply it." I agreed to repay the debt of 100 pesos with work. When the child was a year old, she died of fever after having been sick for a month. We were very sad, but Lorenzo was content because Andrea was able to work for him again. He wasn't responsible for the child's illness, however. We didn't call a eurer because the child died so quickly, but we did get some remedies at the pharmacy. The burial cost me about 100 pesos, and Lorenzo supplied that, too. We had baptized the child in Sololä, asking a ladina named Rosaria to be godmother. When we meet I still call her comadre. A year after the first child died, our second child was born. We asked Juana Parajon, the same midwife Lorenzo had found for the first child. Andrea always gives birth at night, and this time was no exception. I helped, of course, and then gave the midwife a drink and some bread. This was a little girl. I went to a ladino who had an almanac, and since it was the day of Santa Juana, I named her Juana. The morning after the birth, the midwife said, "Ah, this child you will give me to baptize." I was glad, thinking I wouldn't have to seek a godmother, and anyway, I couldn't refuse her lest she become angry. In about two months we went to Sololä and baptized the child. When we returned, Lorenzo asked who the godparent was; when I told him, he said, "Ah, that is bad; perhaps the child soon will die." This turned out to be true, for when Juana was about eight months old she sickened and died. I had been hired by a ladina here to take a load to Quezaltenango. I went uptown for the load one afternoon and brought it home. Andrea reported that Juana had had an attack, with convulsions and eyes rolling upward. She said it had lasted only a minute, and she had given the child water and she was better now. During the night it happened again, but at six the next morning I had to leave for Quezaltenango. That day the baby had convulsions once again, and didn't nurse at all. By the next morning, the child was dead. I was in Quezaltenango when it happened, and when I returned to the ladina's I knew nothing. She knew about it, however, and when I came in she asked me to take a drink of liquor and accept five extra pesos. This was very

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unusual, of course, but I didn't ask any questions and only wondered. I found Lorenzo drunk, and he told me, "Finally you have come. Your child died." I became angry, for I had no money and here was yet another expense. "Don't worry," said Lorenzo, "I buried her." I said, "All right, but I can't work off that money, for it is too hard and all I do is work off debts." He said I could pay it off little by little, and then he gave me a drink. Then he reminded me that he had told me this might happen because the midwife was my comadre. "It wasn't my fault," I replied. "I didn't ask her." "Then it was her fault," said Lorenzo, "and you shouldn't call her in again if your wife has another baby." Of course I agreed to this. Our Lucia was born about a year and a half later. This was in December, during the fiesta of Santa Lucia. Now, of course, Andrea knew all about such things, and sent me in good time for the midwife. In spite of what Lorenzo had said, I went for the same midwife; after all, she might become angry if I didn't. When I asked her, she said nothing about Juana and agreed to do us the favor. When the night of the birth came, I went for her, and everything went well. For Lucia I found a Concepcionero eurer for a godfather. He had come to Lorenzo's house to perform rites when Lorenzo's child was sick. Once when he was there, I thought, "Since he is a eurer, I shall ask him the favor." I thought that if Lucia should get sick, he could cure her. He thanked me and agreed. When Lucia was four months old, we went to Sololä, on a day chosen by the godfather. He and his wife came here to go up with us. After the baptism I gave him and his wife a drink, and bought bread, chocolate, and sugar for them to take home to Concepcion. He, of course, paid the priest. We also took home some bread, sugar, and chocolate to give to Lorenzo; he had done me many favors, the child was living, and we felt like giving him something. He said, "Thank you, and did you go to the baptism contentedly?" I said we had. "This was well," he said. And so it has turned out, for Lucia still lives. Lucia never took sick because her godfather always performed rites for her so nothing should happen. Whenever I would see him in Sololä or in the market uptown, I would invite him to come to the house. When there were fiestas in Concepcion, he invited us to come there, and for three or four years we went to each other's fiestas. Then once he didn't come when I invited him, and after that we never asked each other. The reason was that although previously he had not been a drinker, he became one and became poor and so didn't have money for the fiestas. I see him frequently in the market and in Sololä, and we are on very good terms. I never send him things because he lives so far away. Two years after Lucia, another girl was born. I asked Maria Ordonez to favor us, since the other midwife had since died. The girl was born on the

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day of Santa Maria, so we called her Maria. I thought perhaps the Concepcionero wouldn't want to baptize her, and since Delfino Armas was always friendly with me, I asked the favor of him. He thanked me and agreed. This turned out all right, for Maria lasted about eight years before she died. She died of swelling, after six months of sickness. First I went to the pharmacy, and when the remedies did no good, I called Hilario Churunel. We were then in our own house again. He came, bringing his things, and he divined that she would not get well. He didn't perform any rites then, for what was the use? What he divined was true, of course, and she died. I had the cofradia of Santa Cruz at that time and had borrowed a house of Domingo Sahon's for the purpose; it was there that we were living when Maria died. Domingo went uptown with me to make the usual funeral preparations. I notified Delfino Armas that his goddaughter had died, but he didn't come. It cost me 60 pesos to bury Maria, and I pawned a piece of land to Miguel Yach to raise the money. A year and a half after Maria was born, our Juliana was born. Maria Ordonez was the midwife again, and Delfino baptized her. Two years later, a boy was born; his name was Mariano, with the same midwife and godparents. Mariano died when not yet three, and I had to pawn land to Miguel Yach for those expenses also. Mariano was sick about three weeks, with evil eye; we never knew who gave it to him. Maria Ordonez tried to cure him, but it didn't help, and the child died one afternoon. I immediately went to Miguel, and he said at first that he had no money and would have to borrow it. Within an hour he sent me the money, however, so of course he had had the money at home and just didn't want to admit it. The next morning Domingo Sahon went uptown with me to make the preparations. We did not spend more than about 40 pesos. I had 20 left, but in the afternoon I was pretty drunk and lost half the remaining money when I went to get another bottle of liquor. The next morning I realized the loss when I went to buy liquor to cure my hangover. About a year after Mariano's death Alejandro was born. This was February 11,1937, on the day of San Alejandro. Maria Ordonez was the midwife, and the Taxes were the godparents. It was the following month that I was surprised by being named to the post of second regidor, or alcalde of the Indians. Before Sunday, the elders had chosen a slate of Santos Yach, Jose Cumes, and Fermin Salpor, all of whom had twice had cofradias. I felt safe because I had been cofrade only once. The list was sent to the governor in Sololä; he said that Santos Yach was not eligible because he was in the Sanitary Commission and that Jose Cumes was not acceptable because he didn't know how to sign his name. Only Fermin Salpor could serve. Juan Raxtun, the first regidor, probably told the intendente that Fermin

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is a great drinker and wouldn't be very good; so the intendente told the sindico, Delfino Armas, that under the circumstances it would be better to have Miguel Yach serve as alcalde. At our elders' meeting that morning, Miguel was told that the intendente had said he should take the job. Miguel said, "Why should I take it? I have had it many times years ago, as well as all the other services. Anyway, why look for another? Fermin is willing to take it; he knows how to write, and he has asked for the job many times, saying, 'When will you make me alcalde? I'll do a good job.' " So Delfino said no more, and it was decided that Fermin would be made alcalde. At 11 o'clock we were all called to the town hall to vote. We all voted for Fermin. But there were lots of young men who went into the town hall to vote, and there Juan Raxtun talked to them, advising them not to vote for Fermin but to vote for me instead. These boys didn't know, not having been at the meeting, and as one would finish voting and another would come up, he would ask, "For whom did you vote?" On hearing it was for me, the other then did likewise, thinking I was the one who had been named by the elders. All of us stayed around until about noon, and I heard that some were voting for me. I couldn't say anything, because it wouldn't have been right for me to advise the boys. In the afternoon all the ladinos voted, and the secretary advised that I was better for the job than Fermin. So the ladinos all voted for me also. In the end I had 66 and Fermin only 40 votes. I came home sad to tell my wife. There was nothing to do; I had talked to Juan Rosales uptown, and he had told me that I could resign, but not until later. For now he could think of no way to get out of it. My wife couldn't blame me, nor I her. She said we should think well before deciding to resign, for the money spent in receiving the year would be wasted, and who knew how much it would cost for the documents to resign. Then we had to think about where the money would come from, and decided to ask Sol Tax. For the money that might be needed in June, we would go to ask Miguel Yach. The purchases began immediately: on Friday in Sololä I bought a quart of liquor to give to the alguaciles the following Thursday night. Sunday Andrea bought 20 pounds of corn in the market, and on Wednesday we shelled 30 pounds of our own corn. Wednesday night, my wife and I went to Esteban Sahon's house to borrow two large pots and six hearthstones and a bench and table; before that, in the morning, Andrea went to Miguel Yach's to borrow six bowls, four plates, two liquor glasses, four baskets, and four small pots. That night we emptied out our sleeping room. Thursday morning we went to Lorenzo Xingo's house to borrow a large

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pot, and then I harvested onions to take the next day to Sololä. The wife of Jose Martin came to help Andrea get the nixtamal on, and 55 pounds of corn were cooked up by six o'clock, all in one big pot. Meanwhile, I was cleaning the onions, and now we began to bunch them while waiting for the retiring alguaciles. At about nine o'clock about 20 alguaciles came with the big drum and the drum and flute played by Tomas Raxtün and Benito Pozul of Santa Catarina. Two mayores were with them, and the first mayor, Maleno, did the talking: "Sir, here we are to help you; the old alcalde said that you have been named the new alcalde." "I don't know about that," I said. "I understand that it is Fermin Salpor who has the office." "Oh, no," Maleno replied, "the alcalde told us that you had been elected." I said, "All right, then; come in." They all then entered the room and began to decorate the house with pine needles and "rooster's foot," while others stayed outside sweeping out the patio. When they had finished, Maleno said, "Now we are finished, and we'll be going," but I told them to wait a little. I went and brought the quart of liquor and gave it to Maleno there in the patio; then some went inside and sat on the bench while others remained in the patio. Maleno invited me to drink with them, but I said, "No, the custom is for you to drink the liquor alone." When they dispensed the liquor, however, they brought me the first cup; I drank one, Maleno bringing it, and later I drank a second that Juan brought me. That was all. All of the alguaciles and mayores drank. Then they gave me the empty bottle, and they thanked me, the mayores kissing my hand. The next morning I went to Sololä. I sold the onions and began buying food for the ceremonial meal; I bought four quarts of liquor, twenty pounds of meat-with-bones, two candles, two pounds of salt, a half-pound of chile, and five cents' worth of achiote. My daughter went with me and carried the meat in her basket. I also bought myself a new hat and a rodillera. When I returned in the afternoon, I had to go to Lorenzo's house for the pot. He cried when I came, out of sympathy for the "ill that the town has left you by making you alcalde." I asked, "Why are you crying?" and he replied, "Because they have left you this, and now you are going to receive." I said, "Don't cry for me, because I must comply." He said, "Yes, but the expense. Where did you get the money?" I told him, and he asked where I would get the money to repay the loan; I said that by selling coffee when the next crop comes, I might get the money. He then said, "See, I told you you could plant coffee in places where you cannot plant corn." He was in bed, and very sick. I told him not to think of me, lest he become worse. "I'm thinking of you because when I was alcalde I had to

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find men to go on mandamientos and so on; the people became angry with me, and that's why I'm sick now." I said, "But now it's not so bad; now we are only working on the roads, and not sending people elsewhere." As I left, he said he hoped I would have time to come to see him a little Sunday morning. Then I had to carry to the house the grinding stones of the several neighbor women who had been asked to grind corn that night. The women came at about seven o'clock and began to work right away. Meanwhile, Andrea had boiled the meat, taken it out of the pot, and put into the soup salt, chile, achiote, and ground corn. When the women finished grinding around one o'clock, my wife had one of them serve a half-quart of liquor; then some of them slept a while and others helped my wife. She cut the meat into small pieces and began to divide it for distribution to the helpers, regidores, alguaciles, and the lenders of utensils. The tamales were put on the fire around midnight and were all finished by four o'clock, when those helping were given their shares of food to take home. By six o'clock all was quiet at home, so I went to the fields to look at my crops. After breakfasting we awaited the cofrades and the others. At nine-thirty the retiring alcalde arrived with the cofrades and mayordomos of the four cofradias. They were accompanied by the mayores and alguaciles and were preceded by the drum and flute. They went inside, and I asked a mayordomo to dispense the liquor. Then soon the retiring regidores arrived with their successors; there was hardly enough liquor, and these last had only a few glasses apiece. Then, the liquor gone, we all went in procession uptown. The order of those in the procession was: musicians; first mayordomos of Santa Cruz, Sacramento, San Francisco, and San Nicolas; the retiring alcalde and me; the retiring and new third regidores; the retiring and new fourth regidores; the cofrades of the four cofradias, and all the remaining mayordomos, mayores, and alguaciles. We entered the main room of the town hall, where benches were all ready. Only the secretary, sindico, new mayores, and new alguaciles were there. The retiring mayor and alguaciles didn't enter; they had to deliver their things to their successors. We sat down, in order; soon the intendente entered, and I rose and exchanged greetings with him. He said, "You are the regidor who is receiving his year?" I said yes, and he said, "Very well. You agree to receive the staff of office?" I said yes. "You will obey the orders of the governor?" Yes. "You can sign your name?" Yes. So he gave me the staff and said I could be seated. Then he called Humberto Tobar, a ladino and fourth regidor, and repeated the process with him. The first and third regidores were not starting a new

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year, so of course were not called. Then he called up the six auxiliares, the three Iadinos first and then the three Indians. The secretary then said that he would write up a record of the proceedings, but no one should leave because drinks were to be served. Delfino Armas, as sindico, passed around the liquor. I asked permission of the intendente to take with me all the new officials, and he gave it, saying we could perform whatever ceremonies we wished. No work would need to be done in the town hall for the rest of that day. The Iadinos then left for lunch, except for Humberto Tobar and Delfino Armas, who accompanied all the new Indian officials to my house. The first and third regidores came after escorting the retiring alcalde to his house. When we arrived home, everyone entered the house except the alguaciles and mayores, and everyone sat down except the auxiliares. I produced a half-quart of liquor, and the second auxiliar dispensed it in the order observed in the procession. The Iadinos were offered liquor first, of course, but didn't want to take precedence, saying, "This is your ceremony; we only come to watch." Once the liquor had been served, tamalitos, beef, and coffee were served; I invited them all to eat right there, and they did. The alguaciles and mayores ate outside. My wife herself prepared the portions in the kitchen, and the auxiliares served. After drinking another half-quart of liquor, they all left, except the two Iadinos, who were dead drunk and stayed an hour longer. I stayed home until about five o'clock that afternoon and then went uptown and met the other two regidores in the town hall. We contributed eight cents apiece for liquor and went to Mundo's store to drink and smoke cigarettes. When the two regidores accompanied me home, I asked my wife if there hadn't been some liquor left over. She said yes, and we finished half of it. Then I ate a little, but I was pretty drunk and soon went to sleep. I had a hangover in the morning and took a drink. At about eight o'clock the other regidores arrived, and we finished the liquor and went to the town hall. The others in the town hall had not cured their hangovers either, so a quart was purchased on credit and with this we all got drunk again. Then we all went home separately. Monday morning I still had a hangover, so I sent for liquor to cure it. Then I breakfasted and went to the town hall. It was not my week, but I went uptown anyway because Juan Raxtün wanted everyone to learn his duties. Anyway, I had to cure my hangover. I returned home soon and lay down. The following morning the intendente called me at about nine o'clock and said I had to go bury a body. Supervising burials was to be my duty, whether in my week or not. I went home, and in the afternoon they came to get me and I lost most of the afternoon. The next morning when I

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went to the town hall to leave my staff, they told me there had been another death; so again all afternoon I was busy. With each funeral I was given more liquor, so I continued pretty sick. They wanted us to report daily to the town hall, but I asked for two days' rest because of my condition, and they granted it. Then Saturday I was called to decorate the lake shore for the fiesta, and there I was all day Sunday too. Then the next day my week of service began, and there I was all week. Just when my week was over, it was Palm Sunday, so there I was for another week. Of course, the next week was my week again. And so it is when one is alcalde.

NOTES 1. Αgabän is a knee-length woolen cloak; a rodillera is a woolen blanket wrapped around the waist and extending to the knees over a man's trousers; calzoncillos are long white drawers approaching trousers in appearance. 2. The civil offices referred to in the account are alguacil (lowest), mayor, auxiliar, regidor, and alcalde (highest). These offices usually were filled by Indians during the era of Santiago Yach's service. Other civil posts, falling usually to Ladinos, were intendente (highest authority of a municipio, appointed by the President of the Republic), slndico (treasurer), and secretary. For Indians service to the community alternated between the civil and religious offices (see note 8) of the hierarchy, a year in each with rest periods of varying length in between. Upon having finished the "ladder," one became a principal, or elder, exempt from further service. 3. Kin term meaning "distant relative," used in addressing cousins and other relatives whose relationship to ego is not close enough or important enough to specify. 4. A wild herb used in cooking. 5. Literally, an order or command; an institution of forced labor requiring communities to supply quotas of laborers for plantation harvests. 6. A large tortilla, used only for journeys. 7. The amount of work expected of a laborer in one day. 8. Confraternity; a group of men, consisting of a cofrade, two or three mayordomos, and a texel (in descending order of importance), who have the stewardship of a saint for a year; also, the house of the cofrade where the saint is kept. Other religious offices mentioned in the account are fiscal and sacristän. 9. The "Jews" are Indians or ladinos recruited to accompany Judas and the Roman centurions during the Holy Friday reenactment of Christ's betrayal. 10. "Rooster's foot" is an orchid. 11. Semanero is axialguacil (see note 2) ;alguaciles (semaneros) serve for alternate weeks, two youths filling one position. 12. Ground corn mixed with water. 13. Chirmol is a soup, or stew. 14. Land measure; in Panajachel usually 32 varas square (0.178 acre). 15. Legislation enacted in 1936 terminated debts and the conscription of debtors for forced labor on coastal plantations.

CYRIL S. BELSHAW

The Data Base in Economic Anthropology

My acquaintance with economic anthropology goes back to the 1930's when, as a New Zealand schoolboy, I read Raymond Firth's (1929) Primitive Economics of the New Zealand Maori. The success of that work was dependent upon the author's skill in assembling, interpreting, and reanalyzing information which was essentially non-quantitative. The invention of fieldwork methods in the style of Malinowski, Boas, or Firth resulted in an enormous increase in the veracity, sensitivity, and range of information recording. Much of this had to remain buried in notebooks until the date of publication of the resulting studies, a tradition which carries into the present despite the availability of economical storage and retrieval systems which could serve to make field data readily accessible to all scholars. By the '40's a few anthropologists began to relate their observations to statistical material gathered by governmental agencies, usually to provide background for field studies and generally limited to agricultural, commerical, migration, or population data. It had, however, become evident that you could not convincingly answer questions involving levels of consumption or production, income or wealth, without providing data which could carry conviction among readers, especially the non-anthropological readers concerned with policy, welfare, or development. Further, the basic theoretical propositions of economic anthropology, seeking to establish the nature of systems, relied upon judgments of linkage and quantity which required figures. A handful of field anthropologists, realizing that official statistics could not possibly do the job, moved resolutely in this direction and deliberately tested their capacities to quantify. Firth's Malay Fishermen: Their Peasant Economy (1966) and Rosemary Firth's Housekeeping Among Malay Peasants (1943) were so successful in this objective that, by comparison with other field reports of the day, they are hardly

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recognizable as anthropology. Only rarely have they been equaled since, and not once have they been surpassed. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, and at approximately the same time, a few American anthropologists aimed at similar results. Allowing for differences in society and field conditions, Sol Tax's work in Guatemala, begun in the mid-'30's, showed the same pioneering ingenuity in obtaining figures and using them to discover relationships and back up propositions. While some of the Tax Guatemalan material was ready and appeared much earlier, the primary economic study, Penny Capitalism: A Guatemalan Indian Economy, was not published until 1953. (The delay in publication could be attributed to the intervention of World War II.) Still, enough was known of the Firth and Tax achievements to prompt debate in the graduate seminars of the late'40's and '50's which were influencing the focus and methodology of on-coming younger anthropologists. That debate was not by any means always favorable to the trend which Tax and Firth, with others, were pioneering. I well recall a not unusual remark: "Who are economic anthropologists? They are people who count the number of coconuts on coconut trees. There's nothing in it." The implication was clear: counting was dull and intellectually derisive. It resulted in delayed publication because of all those tables which had to be wrestled with, and, in field conditions, it was nearly always impossible to do (despite the Tax/Firth demonstration to the contrary). A few of the mature figures, for example, Audrey Richards and George Foster, took no notice of these objections and in their own contemporaneous work provided materials which, again, from this point of view, could be taken as models. Some of the fresh generation also were sufficiently deaf to persist in an attempt at quantification. In the subsequent years, the relevance of quantification and formalized methods of analysis has expanded, particularly in anthropological linguistics, kinship analysis, and archaeology. In economic anthropology, however, the advances beyond the techniques of Penny Capitalism have been episodic. Apart from the appearance of the essays in The Craft of Social Anthropology (Epstein 1967), which is in part a handbook of quantitative field method, there has been little replication of techniques shown to be workable. Even courses in economic anthropology pay little attention to this aspect of the subject, and in a distressing number of studies the most elementary data omissions are shrugged off. In common with much of anthropology, economic anthropology has addressed itself far too little to the problem of cumulation in knowledge, and the approach of many of its practitioners has been to dabble in data-gathering techniques with little attempt to build upon or learn from past successes and failures.

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What was done in Penny Capitalism? In the first place, it should be mentioned that Tax initially suffered from the common North American condition of spending short rather than long periods in the field. This will not do in economic anthropology, because of the absolute necessity of correcting quantities for seasonal adjustments. Further, Tax did not have the benefit of a tradition of earlier studies which would have given him guidance. Thus a considerable part of his first field experience can be regarded as exploration. During subsequent visits of longer duration, spread over many years, the questions that he saw he had to answer became sharpened and organized, and what was originally a disadvantage became an advantage. He was able to obtain additional data and amend his technique over time. Further, and this is most important, he obtained the cooperation of a schoolteacher, Juan Rosales, who later became an anthropologist in his own right. This extended the fieldwork team to two, permitted data gathering between Tax's visits, and made possible more or less continued interaction with the field. There are two prime obstacles to obtaining quantitative data by field methods. The first is manpower. One person can only do so much, no matter how much time he spends. To take the observations or ask the systematic questions which are necessary is extremely time-consuming One must always be taking the measure of opportunity costs and deciding when more value will be obtained by inquiries aimed in other directions. The critics are right to this extent; a field study limited entirely to systematic figures would be very dull reading, unless it were handled with considerable theoretical ingenuity. The second obstacle is the boredom and irritation which can be engendered by the routine questioning, the continual repetition of observation, and the persistence which must characterize the gathering of significant material. We have here the social-science equivalent of the tediously repeated experiments of the natural sciences, which turn to gold only when large numbers are accumulated or when controlled action leads to an unexpected observation. In our case, however, we are not dealing with inanimate matter, and the irritation and boredom can come to be shared by our informants. At that point, the information gathering becomes not merely a normal cost of fieldwork, but a hazard, interfering with the supply and validity of the information. The anthropologist must stop this line of inquiry, or take measures to avoid or minimize the problem. The pioneering studies did not address these questions directly, but they nevertheless were successful in dealing with them. Both the Firth and Tax studies assembled data from two fieldworkers. Both made use of official statistics as background material. Both seized the opportunity

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when it occurred to make regular quantitative observations. Thus Firth made an incredibly onerous daily six-month record of the catch of 20 lift-nets on a half-mile length of beach, sampled rice production on 222 contiguous plots, made a census of 331 households, and recorded the budgets o f t e n households for periods of from one to five months. Tax was able to check the acreage devoted to specified crops on the first day of each of twelve months for a total of 1,638 acres. He assembled a complete survey of land ownership, with summary wealth data for 132 families, and a more detailed study of ten households chosen to represent economic differences. Marketing data included the observation of produce carried to market by vendors at stated hours during each day of eight separated weeks. He obtained a detailed, ex post facto, annual budget for four families, linked in his calculations to the detailed checking of the actual consumption of six families for a seven-day period. The material gathered by these processes was still insufficient in itself; huge gaps in data of significance to the general analysis emerged. These had to be filled by calculation or estimation. Clearly, such deductions are reliable only to the extent that the initial samples are adequate and the logic of calculation is suitable. Firth makes the point that the mere counting of the physical catch landed on the beach was insufficiently reliable, since sometimes the boats transferred the catch to other carriers or agents at sea; the direct observation had to be supplemented by pointed questions. If such problems have been controlled, however, it is, for example, possible and legitimate to calculate fishing income from one's knowledge of quantities landed and transported to market, corrected by a factor to allow for non-sale, domestic consumption, nonmarket exchange, and spoilage (each based upon some observational data). These quantities can then be multiplied by a market price figure, which in turn is based upon detailed observation, questioning, and the analysis of the nature of market pricing and variation. While this is complicated, each observational step may be more practical, reliable, and acceptable than the direct questioning of fishermen as to their cash income. Furthermore, such a procedure has a chance of revealing the processes which lie behind the results. Tax leaned on calculations of this sort very heavily in Penny Capitalism; indeed, looking back on that study I feel that one of its most significant contributions was the demonstration of the possibilities of ingenuity in calculation. While most of the data assembled are based upon inference and calculation rather than direct observation, and while occasionally Tax is not always explicit about the calculation method, I doubt that there are more than three or four studies in the literature which approximate the richness of his final data. In general, he achieves

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this result by using normal anthropological inquiry and observation to obtain as precise a description as possible of relevant roles and categories of action. In addition, he is systematic and thorough in his coverage of the range of relevant behavior. Thus, for example, he works through every conceivable occupational role in the community and builds a careful analysis of the conditions of that role and the requirements which affect such matters as the distribution of time. He uses the information obtained to calculate the distribution of work, to examine age and sex differences, and to arrive at a macro account of labor distribution for the community as a whole. The method of indirect calculation is exemplified by his account of the way in which he built up a table summarizing time devoted to marketing. The table, he says (p. 132), comes from two surveys, with different Indians, and several years apart, plus the innumerable observations of years. The Indians talk about markets, and prices, more than anything else, and merchandising activities are well known. However, the primary data are not all as detailed as table 49 would indicate. Questioning was done in terms of households and general custom. For example, an informant's statement that a certain "whole family" went regularly to Solola, was true even though part of the family went one week and part another. Thus while it is true that 102 men, 112 women, and 60 children regularly went to Solola, the number that went on any one Thursday or Friday is a question. Without a count of Indians on the road for a sample period of time, or some other spot check, the figures in the column "Times per year" are based partly on general observations such as that the 82 households regularly patronizing the Solola market are regularly represented there 50 times annually (some occasionally going twice weekly), but that the total days are reduced because inclement weather, sickness, and fiesta days keep all of the families away some days, and in cases of compound families, all of the members do not usually go to the market at once. . . . The figures for "Hours each time," based on reliable statements and observation, are highly accurate. The totals calculated for "regular" visits are probably accurate to within 10 percent. Those for "irregular" visits on the contrary could be off as much as 30 or 40 percent.

A detailed account of the manner in which consumption data were arrived at (p. 164) has very similar implications: meticulous observation and calculation constrained by the physical limitations of observation, the combination of various sources of data to provide a chain in the link of calculation and to reinforce conclusions, and the indication that such calculations contain the potentiality of error. The frankness about margins of error is not usual in other fields of anthropology. Perhaps this is the reason that subsequent searches for more accurate methods have not been particularly sustained or enterprising. Although Firth added a short methodological postscript to his work,

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neither the Firths nor Tax presented their studies as consciously arrived-at advances in technique. Nor have many later writers. One is tempted to say that this is partly because later writers, with very few exceptions, did not advance the techniques; indeed, a high proportion of subsequent work fails to reach the same standards. This in turn is perhaps because the significance of an adequate methodological base, although it should be obvious, has not been made the subject of sufficient discussion (with the exception of accounts in Epstein [1967]) or a criterion for grant support. Yet at the same time the range of theoretical questions which could be addressed has expanded considerably since the Tax and Firth studies. The advent of the computer means that a vast quantity of data can be handled; there is no danger now of gathering too much, as long as it can be of significance. We can use simulation techniques and give meaning to "pieces" of data, even if we lack the whole picture, enabling us to work with the principle that scientific advance consists in replacing one approximation with another that is somewhat less approximate. Furthermore, the chances are that students and the present generation of research workers are much more knowledgeable about calculation techniques and statistics than Tax, Firth, or the students they dealt with in the late '40's and early '50's. This is not the place to attempt a full statement of the new theoretical issues, but a few can be mentioned which have a sharp implication for data gathering. One of these has been the focus of interest on choice and decision making, for which intensive and detailed information of limited kinds about a few individuals can be theoretically revealing, as can linear programming and laboratory experiment (cf. Davenport 1960, Prattis 1973, McFeat 1974). Perhaps the most satisfactory linkage between data arid analysis has been in market studies, for example, the work of Davis (1973) and Beals (1975). Here the best practitioners either take the greatest pains to ensure that the data samples are representative or frankly use qualitative judgment in the standard anthropological way. Unfortunately, the best studies are supplemented by other work which falls into most of the methodological traps without recognition that they are there (see, for example, essays in the collection edited by Brookfield [1969]). One field in which there has been some cumulative advance has been the examination of presentation and exchange that have a non-market base (though often linking with market forces). This advance has proceeded slowly, however, usually through comparative analysis of existing field materials. The number of persons who have made new contributions through using new techniques is small (Schneider [1970],

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Salisbury [1962], and Cancian [1965, 1972] are among the exceptions). The insights gained are of course important when the work is well done. They are also, however, a little dangerous, particularly since they establish a model for graduate students, who may feel they must use their field opportunity to establish yet another ethnography which will meet the standards if some little original guess or new philosophical twist can be incorporated. One of the results is a tiresome series of studies of, for example, Melanesia or New Guinea, or Latin American peasant communities, which tell us nothing that was not fully known by the mid'50's. At the same time, very few are addressing themselves to the important issues: What are the exchange networks? How can decisions within them be interpreted? What are the communication flows? Where are the power and influence links? It is now agreed that such questions can no longer be raised adequately by internal village studies and that some sense of socio-geographic perspective is mandatory. This fact alone places a tremendous burden upon the investigator. It also seems to be agreed, though often by lip service rather than by practice, that dynamic rather than static models provide the best perspective and that they must incorporate external as well as internal influences. History (with ethnohistory) is still the dominant source of information here, and much can be achieved creatively (Salisbury's [1969] Vunamami and Burridge's [1960] Mambu should be required reading). The time-scale involved, however, is often too long to provide the dynamic models which can be of utility in interpreting the here and now and the microsocial. At the same time, the link between the microsocial and the macrosocial demands that at least the models we already have be filled out by data. These are but a few of the issues, and I have not attempted to deal with the extension of anthropological analysis into such uncharted territories as the interpretation of contemporary corporate behavior or international politico-economic transactions and organization (cf. Belshaw 1975) or the analysis of socioeconomic achievement (cf. Belshaw 1970). It is true that there seems to be a gap between grand theoretical demands, issues of public policy, and the minutiae of field investigation. Yet our discussion of such matters will continue to be speculative to the extent that we do not root the arguments in some samples of empirical inquiry. Let us come back to the minutiae again and see what the problems are. The basic data problem throughout anthropology is to obtain samples which have some analytic meaning. On the whole, most anthropology records a range of uniquely observed events which are then analyzed in terms of a discovered logic in their relationships. The representative

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nature of the events is inferred or assumed, and the problem of sampling is seldom addressed consciously. The single statement of a myth is an event; it occurred, it is recorded, it is therefore a datum to be analyzed. A single wedding ceremony is observed in all its complexity. Since the population studied is that of a small village, the investigator counts himself fortunate in having been there at the time, and although it is physically impossible for him personally to follow the whole event, he can combine observation and information to reconstruct a description. Perhaps he is lucky enough to note several births, and of course he can find aggregative data for more static or frequently occurring material, such as that involved in kin relations or a household census. For matters of production, consumption, and exchange, to say the least, more formal approaches to sampling are essential. For somewhat different reasons, the same is true for ceremony, which is, after all, a special form of exchange. The problem also bedevils other areas of anthropology, particularly those concerned with the regularities and variations of social relations. Obviously, one event in these fields cannot strictly be taken as representative of a general condition, either for the individual or, still less, for any group. What we generally do is to obtain a great deal of surrounding information, for example, idealized accounts, or the observation of subsidiary events, or partial observations of greater numbers. If the detailed observation is consistent with the surrounding information, we are tempted to consider the detail to have some sort of representative or typological value. Furthermore, it can be used to illustrate the operation of processes, for example, of exchange and decision, as individuals make their choices when confronted by particular concrete circumstances. Such analysis, if properly carried out, can be of great merit and constitutes one of the strengths of anthropological inquiry, but it is also a source of vulnerability. Critics can question whether our individual, our event, even our village, is representative, and we have little by way of persuasive answer except our own faith. Furthermore, even under the best of circumstances, evidence of single events is weak when our interest is in dynamics rather than statics. I am confident that this is the reason for the traditional static bias of much of anthropology, which, in turn, has limited the growth of formal theory, since the propositions of formal theory can only be tested adequately in a context of dynamics. Yet, at the opposite extreme, the collection of vast amounts of quantitative material through statistically valid sampling can only be achieved for limited kinds of information under special field circumstances. Statistical validity is a goal which must be in the mind of every anthropologist, but his skill in the field will be demonstrated as he

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uses ingenuity to increase reliability when he is denied full statistical validity. I assume that, except for limited special fields, the anthropologist must rest content with smaller than desirable samples, and yet he will not be content with episodic isolated instances. The real problems, for which anthropology has bit by bit worked out a few answers, lie in this intermediary area. I will now set forth what I think we have learned. Observation, limited to one observer, often is unable to encompass the complexity of the interactions which together constitute one institutional event. Ceremonial (particularly of marriage, death, and the more complex religious occurrences) provides an appropriate illustration. In my own work in Fiji (Belshaw [1964]) I found it fairly straightforward to obtain general accounts of the institutionalized steps involved in these matters and to use them to organize information with respect to particular ceremonies. My task was also simplified to some extent by the broad geographical coverage of the study, since I had earlier determined that it was unrealistic for my purposes to confine observations to one village, or even to one structurally united group of villages. As a result, I knew about a sizable number of appropriate events, whereas from a single village base I would only have been drawn into one or two, except insofar as the villagers themselves were caught up in "external" activity. Even had I been able to be present for all ceremonies in all villages, I would have lacked an adequate sample for statistical validation. The basic constraint was that as a single fieldworker I simply could not gather the quantitative data for all the numerous institutionalized exchanges linked to any of the major ceremonial events. Therefore, why should I bother about quantification? Why not rest on the laurels of qualitative and ethnographic description? The reason was that for Fijian society, as for so many others, there existed an ethno-social-science myth, which permeated all levels of government and public opinion, to the effect that "ceremony" involved "wasteful" and disruptive expenditures inconsistent with economic growth and development. It was of fundamental importance to test the validity of this myth. A qualitative ethnographic interpretation could have been misleading, and it would not have carried conviction if it asserted principles contrary to the prevailing theory. Hard data were necessary to provide me with my own basis for interpretation and evaluation, to give a clear indication of the flow of goods and services, and to provide material for discussion and argument. How could they be obtained? In the outcome, I was aided to a great extent by the custom of Fijians nowadays to keep records of who gives what. Where such records existed, they could be used. In many instances, however, they were imperfect or needed a great deal of interpretation through inquiry after the event, and

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even these accounts had to be double-checked. The end result was that my account of ceremony consisted deliberately of combining elements, closely observed, from a series of different events, to build, as it were, a composite picture. This method did at least enable me to assess the flow of goods and services and to challenge with hard data the prevailing view. (I did not succeed in destroying the prevailing view, which has abysmal results for policy, but at least I have the satisfaction of knowing that, up to now, my opponents have not been able to put together equivalent information.) This method did not, however, achieve another possible objective. Too often we are presented with accounts of ceremonial which indicate that this or that must be done if traditional culture is to be observed. What we do not often obtain is an account of variation, not merely over time but in a given period, as individuals manipulate custom for specific purposes, or as differences in power, social position, income, scheduling, occupation, residence, and similar factors bear upon decisions. These issues I could only deal with by inference, with some quantitative back-up drawn from a totally different source — a house-to-house census which included questions about ceremonial involvement. (The study which has attempted to grapple with this problem most successfully, though not with all the factors mentioned, is Cancian's [1965] Economics and Prestige in a Maya Community.) Nevertheless, because I was drawn into or observed what seemed to be an infinite number of yaqona drinking ceremonies, I do have in my notes, waiting for analysis, material which ought to provide a base for the analysis of variation and manipulation for that ceremonial institution. It can be done. The census and the questionnaire are of course instruments of ever increasing importance in anthropology. Unless deliberate steps are taken, however, they tend to be static instruments, and it is most important, wherever possible, to check the results over time. For example, in 19501 spent very short periods in some selected communities in southeastern New Guinea. As part of this expedition I spent two months on the island of Ware, not nearly long enough to provide the intuitive and qualitative judgments which would alert me to the falsity of initial impressions. Naturally, I administered a household census, which told me among other things who was living in which houses. By a stroke of good fortune I administered a shorter version six weeks later; it told me that, out of a total population of 233, 35 of the children and the unmarried had changed their residences in that short period. While I might have been aware of one or two movements, I would certainly not have seen the phenomenon in that light (Belshaw 1955). How often, one wonders, do such matters go unobserved?

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The census and the questionnaire do have severe limitations. Anthropologists are correct to treat them with great suspicion. In our kind of work, they should never be used in isolation; indeed, it is possible that our vision of our own society is becoming seriously distorted by the tendency to use questionnaires without correcting factors derived from more qualitative sources. They are particularly open to challenge when they attempt to elicit opinions rather than a statement of events or a description of things; when they pose hypothetical questions; or when they place a considerable burden on memory. Many anthropologists, including myself, have incorporated questions such as "How many weddings did you attend this year?" "What did you provide for those weddings?" "What income did you receive during the year from garden activity?" The accuracy of responses to such questions is open to very serious challenge. Nevertheless, aggregated data of this kind can sometimes be useful, to compare, for example, the situation of coastal and inland communities, or one occupation against another. Such questioning has the advantage that you can reach a fairly large sample, even if you are the only fieldworker, by devoting considerable time to the questioning. Its defects, however, are such that it is always desirable to supplement the broad questionnaire with small-sample intensive inquiry over short periods. Such investigation is usually applied to areas of concern such as income and expenditure accounting, domestic consumption, exchange relations, and the like. In this manner an impression of quantities can be built, often taking into account time changes, adjustments in response to pressure, and comparison between social categories. In theory the method should provide almost infinite data, but the practical constraints dictate otherwise. Ideally, for the households or individuals involved, the data should be obtained for every day for the whole year, if they are to be used to detect and interpret variation. The most important reason for this, and the inescapable one, is seasonal variation, however small, and attending rhythms in the work pattern. In addition, one must be able to allow for the impact of ceremonial involvement. It is simply not practical, however, for a fieldworker to impose his presence day after day on the same households or individuals. He will soon be shown the door, confronted by bored respondents, fed misleading answers, or told to mind his own business. Further, the only time available for such questioning is, almost by definition, time during which the respondents are not engaged in other activities. Such times often are the same for all respondents (i.e., very short periods of the day or evening, perhaps at mealtime), so that even in the most favorable circumstances the lone fieldworker can perhaps cover only five to eight

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households in a day. O n e response to this situation, distressingly frequent, is to produce tables on the above matters which, typically, read " R e a l and Cash Income for Five Household Heads Obtained over Three W e e k s . " Such a table, despite the labor that went into it, is hardly worth publishing. One must do better than that. A possibility is to visit the households or individuals, not daily, but periodically. This has the merit of extending the time coverage, but it must be balanced against loss of accuracy. In some communities it is quite feasible, and may even be helped along by persuading cooperative householders to keep notes. Similar principles apply to market situations, in which it is necessary to collect information from individual vendors, stall-holders, or established buyers. Where there is a great deal of mobility in the market, it may be desirable to concentrate on a single corner of it, even though the personnel who move through that corner change each market day. The control points become fairly obvious when one is in the field, but their use is not always practicable. I was fortunate in Ware Island because all external trade had to be sea-borne, and the movement of vessels had to take place from the village beach. A t Wagawaga on the mainland, such certainty of observation was impossible because the coastline was longer, and the numerous trails in and out of the extended village provided several channels of movement. In some inland Fijian villages a single horse trail gives the route of trade, and toward the coast I was able to obtain information about the market produce of a dozen villages because they all had to converge their activities onto a single road and then move their produce by bus or lorry in one direction. A l l the above situations require conscious decisions about the structure of the sampling, which cannot be taken adequately until some broad outline of the socioeconomic situation is available. Census taking, with the conversations and observations that accompany it, and language acquisition provide the initial opportunity to gain appropriate insights. A s a result, the first one or two months in the field are too early to start to apply systematic sampled inquiry, unless one is prepared to jettison or amend the sample. Clearly, one must endeavor to draw into the sample individuals who seem to be representative of socioeconomic variation: lineage differences, since these may imply differences in landholding and in the size and importance of kinship connections; occupational interest; capital and prestige; sex and age; family or household size. If there is only one fieldworker, the result of all this activity may well be only one example of each category. T o aggregate such data to provide a total for the community is clearly dangerous and potentially misleading. T o put the categories into one table labeled " D a t a from Six Households" is also at least indeterminate. It is probably rather better to keep the

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information separated and to use it as indicative, not necessarily representative, of the conditions which apply within the specific categories. This comes close to using the information as part of individual case histories, which, if properly analyzed, can be most useful and revealing of conditions and processes. It is not necessary, however, to remain limited to this level. Provided one does not claim statistical reliability, but is merely endeavoring to search for further information and to provide some rough basis for comparison, then it is worthwhile to go further. One technique I devised in Hanuabada (Belshaw 1952,1957), for example, where I was aiming at covering the lineages in inquiries devoted to such matters as household transactions and consumption, was as follows: I selected three lineages with six or eight households in each and administered a daily inquiry for one week in Lineage A , another week in Lineage B, and a third week in Lineage C, with a break from the inquiry in the fourth week. I repeated this sequence for two to three months, then abandoned the process for one or two months, then started again. Such a recipe reduces the chances of irritation among household members, since they are only being visited for a week at a time. It extends the sample in two directions — temporally, to cover such variations as seasons, and socially, across lineages. By keeping the records identifiable, one can aggregate them in ways which will emphasize comparison across lineages or through time. Further, it is not difficult to extend the sample in other ways. In the conditions of communities such as Hanuabada it is possible to capture memory reasonably accurately over two days. Thus it would have been possible to use eight-day units instead of one-week units, and cover twice as many households by calling on them on alternate days only. Most of the above remarks are predicated on a single fieldworker, but Tax and the Firths achieved what they did in part because they were not alone. In my opinion, current standards, and the need to break through to new levels of data gathering, require even more than this. In Hanuabada in the early '50's I was most fortunate in obtaining the goodwill of government departments; three of them each made available to me a member of their staff for on-the-job training (Belshaw 1951). Not only did they work regularly and hard to extend my sample, but they perused such anthropology texts as I had in the field with me. (Moral: anthropologists should consider taking relevant books into the field; they can be eagerly consulted.) In Fiji the climate had already changed. The bureaucracy could not see its way to helping out. But after all, the records that are necessary do not require a high standard of literacy or even a sophisticated education. It is obviously better to seek helpers who can

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have a career or professional interest in what they are doing, for the work contributes, if only modestly, to the extension of their awareness and their skills. In Fiji I could not do this. Nevertheless, by squeezing a little money from my funding (at the expense of my family), I could provide a reward for a number of assistants who proved adept at census taking, checking market movements, and the like. The process of increasing the team's manpower has perhaps gone farthest in the case of Cancian's work ( 1 9 6 5 , 1 9 7 2 ) ; he, like other American anthropologists working in Middle America, acknowledges assistance from a number of students and local people. Similarly, Beals's latest marketing study (1975) acknowledges help from a very large team including American students and educated local residents. There is no doubt in my mind that serious work in economic anthropology, if it is to produce quantitative material for the new demands, must be based upon teamwork, and that the team composition will vary according to the general field situation and that of the country where the work is taking place. Yet, at the same time, numerous cautions must be entered. I do not believe that the Middle American solution is the ultimate, or even that in the conditions of those countries and of the modern world it is ultimately wise. If economic anthropology is to be pursued by scholars who are not a part of the academic structure of the country where the research is taking place, they are by and large confronted with one of two situations. Either there is an academic establishment with personnel resources in place, or else the academic establishment is absent or overloaded. In the first instance, it now seems obvious that the extension of the team must be designed in partnership with national academic personnel, and not used as a training ground for the foreign student. This is difficult to achieve, because many national funding agencies have not yet accustomed themselves to providing the money for students or personnel who are not nationals of the funding country. I for one am now making it a practice to point this out to funding agencies and to recommend refusal of grants which are built on the premise that the faculty member takes a team of eager students with him, rather than exploring cooperative links with the country of his research. By the same token, students who are applying for support for thesis research frequently do not apply for the necessary funds to enable them to hire junior students of the country where they will be working as research assistants, or to pay local people to keep records for them. I do not know of anyone, for example, who has yet succeeded in establishing a network of "observation posts" in New Guinea villages held together through prestatory exchange, or in tracing the exchange movements between the highlands and the coast, although there have been

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innumerable studies, particularly theses, which touch upon such topics. In many instances, the funding agencies, while perhaps sympathetic to the idea of paying "informants" (in my opinion a barbarous practice in all but a few special circumstances), do not recognize the need in their rules. The paradoxical result is that we often allow graduate students to go to the field unaware of the demands upon their technique, and where they are aware of these we cannot provide them with the necessary funding. The result is that students must learn anew in the field, almost as if no one had learned it before, that data-gathering assistance will be virtually mandatory. Unless they are very fortunate or ingenious, they cannot put into practice the true basis of their craft until they can apply for funds as faculty members. No wonder that economic anthropology, despite its manpower needs, is grossly understaffed. There is yet another phenomenon which I feel requires more fundamental explanation, and which perhaps it is particularly appropriate to raise in the context of a Festschrift for Sol Tax in view of his continuing and deep concern for matters international. The craft of economic anthropology, as traditionally defined, is even more highly concentrated in a few countries than is the remainder of anthropology. The United States, France, Britain, and Canada are the main sources of studies in which extensive quantified data are available. The Netherlands, India, and Latin America are making analytic contributions to economic anthropology, often in the latter case under the rubric of the analysis of peasant society. In Africa and Asia, most anthropologists seem to prefer to tackle other questions. Yet surely, eventually, it is from outside Europe and North America that the new insights, carefully founded in controlled data, will emerge. Standards for a data base in economic anthropology were created by Sol Tax and the Firths and reinforced by their colleagues in the '50's. Since that time there have been not more than a dozen studies which, by the exercise of ingenuity and the extension of manpower, have added to the repertoire of techniques, and only somewhat more which have been roughly equivalent to Penny Capitalism in their data base. The great majority of studies have not come up to these requirements. This is patchy cumulation at best, and we owe it to Tax and Firth, who were the pioneers, to see to it that future work builds on their foundation. Is the younger generation heeding? Or is it being forced to learn from scratch all over again because those of us who teach the subject have not adequately drawn attention to the issues?

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REFERENCES CITED The peasant marketing system of Oaxaca, Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press. BELSHAW, CYRIL S. 1951. Using Papuans in social survey work. South Pacific 5. . 1952. Port Moresby canoe traders. Oceania 23. . 1955. In search of wealth. American Anthropological Association Memoir BEALS, RALPH L . 1 9 7 5 .

80.

. . . .

1957. 1964. 1970. 1975.

The great village. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Under the Ivi tree. Berkeley: University of California Press. The conditions of social performance. London: Routledge. The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Elmsford: Pergamon. BROOKFIELD, HAROLD C. Editor. 1 9 6 9 . Pacific market-places. Canberra: Australian National University Press. BURRIDGE, KENELM Ο. L. 1960. Mambu. London: Methuen. CANCLAN, FRANK. 1965. Economics and prestige in a Maya community. Stanford: Stanford University Press. . 1972. Change and uncertainty in a peasant economy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. DAVENPORT, WILLIAM H. 1960. Jamaican fishing: A game-theory analysis. New Haven: Yale University Press. DAVIS, WILLIAM G. 1973. Social relations in a Philippine market. Berkeley: University of California Press. EPSTEIN, ARNOLD L. Editor. 1967. The craft of social anthropology. London: Tavistock. FIRTH, RAYMOND. 1929. Primitive economics of the New Zealand Maori. New York: Dutton. . 1966. Malay fishermen: Their peasant economy. London: Routledge. FIRTH, ROSEMARY. 1 9 4 3 . Housekeeping among Malay peasants. (Monographs in Social Anthropology 7.) London: Lund, Humphries. MCFEAT, TOM. 1 9 7 4 . Small group cultures. New York: Pergamon. PRATHS, J. I. 1973. Strategising man. Man, n.s., 8(l):46-58. SALISBURY, RICHARD F . 1 9 6 2 . From stone to steel. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. . 1969. Vunamami. Berkeley: University of California Press. SCHNEIDER, HAROLD K. 1970. The Wahi Wanyaturu. Chicago: Aldine. TAX, SOL. 1953. Penny capitalism: A Guatemalan Indian economy. Smithsonian Institution, Institute of Social Anthropology, publ. 16.

LISA PEATTIE

Economic Anthropology and Anthropological Economics

Sol Tax's Penny Capitalism is one answer to the question anthropologists have asked over and over: What does it mean to do economic anthropology? Does the "economic" refer to the subject matter or to the method? Which of the concepts and techniques developed by economists in highly monetized societies of the industrialized world are transferable to the kinds of societies studied by anthropologists? This is a good, solid question or set of questions. We do not yet have definitive answers — and indeed it is foolish to think of a "definitive answer" when the kind of "economic anthropology" will vary with the anthropologist and with the society. Surely the "penny capitalism" of the Panajachelefios in part urged upon Tax the kind of precisely cost-accounted analysis he made of their activities. The theme of this paper, however, will be another question, the obverse of the traditional one. Instead of asking what we can take from economics for our purposes, I propose that we ask, what can economics get from our way of working? If we, working in the tradition of anthropology, now turn our attention to the kinds of urbanized, monetized societies in which economists usually work, and perhaps focus on the problems with which they deal, can we not create a more realistic kind of economic analysis? This question is grounded for me in recent, very sketchy and exploratory research in Bogota. I will talk about the economic issues to which this research seems to relate and the sorts of anthropological exploration of economic issues which it suggests might be done. In this, it is perhaps incorrect to claim a role in the evolving history of economic anthropology. In fact, what I find myself doing may more properly be described as a kind of anthropological economics, an anthropologist's version of that tradition in economics generally referred to as "institutional economics." Economic anthropology has in large part revolved around the issue of

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whether and to what degree the conceptual categories and analytic techniques of academic economics — developed in an effort to understand the market economies of Britain, Europe, and the United States — could be applied to primitive and peasant societies. Polanyi's (1957) distinction between "formal" and "substantive" economics was, of course, linked in his thinking to a distinction between two very broad categories of society; "formal" economics, economics in the sense in which the term is generally understood in economics departments, was appropriate, he thought, only to the market economies. Around this theme of applying economic analysis to primitive and peasant societies have pivoted a number of versions of the proper approach. Tax (1953) showed that monetization and market rationality of a classicism hard to find nowadays in the New Industrial State could exist in societies otherwise displaying characteristics of the societies my father, Robert Redfield, was calling "folk." Firth's monumental studies showed that even non-monetized societies, in which "social elements interpenetrate and overlay the economic organization" (1930:352), could be analyzed according to the major categories of economics and could follow basic principles of maximization. Geertz's (1965) sophisticated multilevel analysis showed how the relatively nonmonetized part of a complex society could be shown to form part of a single economic system with the commercial export sector. Blau (1964) and Belshaw (1965) have tried to subject all the transactions of social life, not merely those in the "material sphere," to a type of analysis clearly derived from formal economics. But the relation between economics and anthropology raises problems other than those deriving from the kind of society with which each discipline has traditionally dealt and the degree to which methods developed for one sort of society can be transferred to quite different ones. In a furious full-dress review of Herskovits's Economic Anthropology, Knight (1940) raised the issue squarely; it isn't that economics does not describe the way people behave in non-monetized societies; it is that economics does not, except in a very specialized sense, describe the way people act in any society, and is not meant to: Economics, in the usual meaning, as a science of principles, is not, primarily, a descriptive science in the empirical sense at all. It "describes" economic behavior and uses the concept to explain the working of our modern economic organization and also to criticize and suggest changes. . . . [Economics] is the one social science which effectively uses inference from clear and statable abstract principles and especially intuitive knowledge as a method. In contrast with it, all other social sciences are empirical, including those which use the word "economics" (or "economic") in their designation — though it should go without saying that no

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science can be at once social in any proper sense and empirical in at all the sense of the physical sciences. This relationship between observation, induction from observations, and inference from "a priori" principles forms the very pivot of the problem of collaboration between the social sciences, and specifically of collaboration between economic theory and the "quasiempirical" sciences of history, sociology, and anthropology, including institutional — one might say anthropological — economics. An essential feature of the situation is that all these sciences are distinguished primarily not by differences in the subject matter, in a designative sense, with which they deal, but rather by centering upon different features or aspects of the same phenomena. The principles of economy are known intuitively; it is not possible to discriminate the economic character of behavior by sense observation; and the anthropologist, sociologist, or historian seeking to discover or validate economic laws by inductive investigation has embarked on a "wild goose chase." Economic principles cannot even be approximately verified — as those of mathematics can be, by counting and measuring.

I believe that this is a fair characterization of the main tradition of microeconomics. Macroeconomics, the study of the functioning of the total economy, however, tends to be rather more inductive and statistical and has been in effect forced by the demands of policy making to take account of institutions. It thus seems to lie somewhere between formal microeconomics and that minority tradition which, as Knight mentions in the passage just quoted, has long existed in economics: the tradition of institutional economics or "political economy." This tradition, generally associated with radical social criticism because of its focus on manmaintained institutions rather than on "general principles" in Knight's sense, is as Knight says quite "anthropological" in character. It describes how institutions — which can be thought of as both social, economic, and political — function to organize work, to socialize and discipline persons into positions in the economic order, and to distribute claims on consumption. The two systems of thought of course interact, and since both represent ways of describing and understanding reality, albeit along quite different lines, both may be appealed to when it comes to trying to understand a particular social issue. For example, the justice or equity of the wage structure may become such a social issue. Economic theory works with certain principles, in particular the notion that wages tend to equal workers' marginal productivity and that they must cover "investment in human capital" or education. This way of looking at the subject of wages tends to suggest that in a market economy, allowing for some market imperfections, the wages of persons will tend to equal their "actual" economic contribution. The social critics and institutionalists regard this as casuistry and treat wages as determined by social and political institutions and the notion of "human capital" as in large part a

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rationalization for monopolies of educational privilege (Görden 1972). The two approaches cannot be neatly brought together or tested in terms of each other. Marginal productivity theory is derived from the logical exploitation of other elements of economic principles and, as one economist puts it, "contains elements which defy empirical verification" (Pierson 1957). Yet it may reasonably describe aspects of the functioning of a system from the institutionalist's point of view, just as a physicist's equations describing free fall in a vacuum may be useful in understanding motion in a world where there are no vacuums. The economists' abstractions can be for us a way of focusing our investigations of a complex reality, at the same time that the phenomena we find in reality force the development of a theory which does better in dealing with the real and often bitter issues of human life. Although Knight correctly describes the tradition of institutional economics as "anthropological" in character, the old tendency to divide up the turf so as to leave anthropologists specializing in primitive and peasant societies has led anthropologists to separate what are not at all unrelated: the institutional determination of wages and the structure of economic dependency from work. However, with a growing interest in "urban anthropology" and with the anthropologists' interest in urbanization and social change clearly overlapping with the economists' interest in the political economy of development and underdevelopment, it is natural for the two professional streams to join. Indeed, the politically radical anthropologists are beginning to join them. This is encouraging, for it suggests that anthropologists are moving into some very basic areas of social policy, areas in which judgment as to the appropriate "economic model" has to do with judgments as to the choices which peoples can make as they try to shape their future in a given society. One of the issues which seems to be a natural, so to speak, for anthropological contribution is that of policy toward the part of the urban economy which has been variously called the "informal sector," the "traditional sector," the "lower circuit," and even (in frank confession of ignorance) the "unenumerated sector" — a kind of residual generally very much larger than the more easily identified "modern sector" to which it is contrasted. Coexisting with the bureaucratically organized, generally capital-intensive enterprises which governments have characteristically regarded as the spearheads of progress and favored with protective tariffs and capital subsidies there are in all the developing countries a vast number of small, often one-person or family enterprises using relatively little capital in relation to labor and comprising non-capital-intensive manufacturing, services, and trading. These are

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recognizable to anthropologists as the sorts of occupations in which the people they usually study in cities are engaged when not playing a part as unskilled workers in the modern sector. Until recently, development economists have taken rather little interest in this sector (a view of course congruent with the usual position of governments); they have regarded its participants as a sort of generalized labor pool unhappily waiting for "progress" in the form of growth of the modern sector to catch them up in its forward sweep. The classic growth model was that of Lewis (1954), in which a large pool of surplus labor waiting conveniently in the countryside keeps wages down in the modern sector and thus permits high profits in that sector which, if reinvested, will in time permit labor-absorbing growth. It only remained to suppose (Todaro 1969) that some of the rural surplus laborers, lured by the bright lights and the lottery-like possibility of one of the modernsector jobs, move to the city and engage in various types of makeshift economic activity (often referred to as "subemployment" or "disguised unemployment") to have a thumbnail description of the urban informal sector which simultaneously accounted for its presence, described its current role as of minimal economic importance, and counseled for a policy of benign neglect which would in time produce a happy solution to the poverty with which it was associated. Those who noted that much of the modern sector was foreigndominated and inclined to repatriate profits saw some problems with the reinvestment part of this scheme. It also became clear that even a pool of surplus labor was not enough to keep wages very low in a modern sector where advanced notions of labor organization had taken root and where capital-intensivity made the wages bill in any case a somewhat secondary consideration for management. However, I believe the real factor which has made this model substantially less attractive than it appeared a few years ago is the political pressure to deal with poverty now rather than in some indefinite future. It was a Pakistani economist of that not-very-radical organization, the World Bank, who said, in an often-quoted article written after the explosive break-up of Pakistan over the issue of inequality, that "a high growth rate has been, and is, no guarantee against worsening poverty and political explosions. . . . We have a number of cases by now which show how illusory it was to hope that the fruits of growth could be redistributed without reorganizing the pattern of investment and production first. . . . The distribution policies must be built into the very pattern and organization of production" (ul Haq 1971). This current focus has yet to generate a growth model of the compelling simplicity of Lewis's, but two recent reports by the International Labour

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Office suggest the general character such a model might take. The report on Colombia (ILO 1970) focuses not on the problem of capital investment, but on the problem of demand. It makes an argument for changing the pattern of commodity demand away from goods which take a relatively high ratio of capital to labor, like cars and refrigerators, toward those which are relatively labor-intensive, like clothing and foodstuffs, thus setting in motion a more progressive distribution of earnings in the economy. The report on Kenya (ILO 1972) focuses directly on supporting the informal sector — enterprises it describes as characterized by (a) ease of entry, (b) reliance on indigenous resources, (c) family ownership, (d) small scale of operation, (e) labor-intensive and adapted technology, (f) skills acquired outside the formal school system, and (g) unregulated and competitive markets. It proposes measures to transform a "lop-sided economy" into one which is both more egalitarian and more productive through making better use of resources in a society where labor is plentiful and capital in scarce supply. All this no doubt finds stimulation also in the example of China's strategy of "walking on two legs." At this point, the activities in this part of the urban economy come to be of very much more than sociological — or anthropological — interest. They are no longer a sort of residual category, but central to development planning. And here the limited experience of economists becomes a distinct handicap. Bienefeld (n.d.) points out that, in the absence of specific knowledge of the nature of urban activities, thinking about the kind of issue dealt with in the ILO reports has had to proceed on the basis of crude generalizations which dichotomized the urban economy into a modern and traditional sector, into a progressive and a stagnant sector, into a formal and an informal sector. In different ways these were all synonyms for " g o o d " and " b a d , " or at least "productive" and "unproductive." In practice these concepts were rarely further defined except to assert that this modern or progressive sector was more or less approximated by the "unenumerated" sector of the economy, even though enumeration coverage varied considerably and was frequently based on quite unrelated problems of collection or definition. If it achieved little else, this procedure ensured that discussion of the informal sector should proceed in almost total darkness, since by definition the unenumerated sector was that sector of the economy for which there were virtually no reliable statistics. Speculation about developments in this sector was thus virtually unencumbered by detailed information concerning its composition.

McGee ( 1 9 7 3 : 1 4 1 ) lists some issues he thinks might be investigated by anthropologists with respect to this part of the urban population (which he calls, perhaps not entirely helpfully, the "protoproletariat"):

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Does membership in the protoproletariat ease the process of assimilation for rural migrants? Do more migrants move into this sector than into proletariat employment? Does the protoproletariat sector offer a training ground for urban skills? What are the relationships between the protoproletariat and the peasantry? Are the protoproletariat "conventional nontractable members of society" as Mangin would have us believe?

There are other questions, too, some of which are even more directly related to the issue of how these activities should be treated in development planning. How are these occupations structured institutionally? To what extent is the sector in fact open and freely competitive and to what extent structured in a semimonopolistic manner? What determines earnings in the sector as a whole and its various subcomponents? What functions do these activities serve in the urban economy? What kinds of government policies affect these activities, and how? What potential do they have for growth? Or are they simply activities of economic transition? What consequences do these activities have for income distribution? Are they, as the ILO appears to believe, a way of channeling more income to those at the bottom? Or are they, as some Marxists claim, a way of distributing goods produced in the modern sector and contributing to urban infrastructure (like housing) at very low labor cost in such a way as to make those in charge of the modern sector relatively richer in the long run? I think that we will be some time in getting satisfactory answers to äll these questions, but we are beginning to get material which tells us something about the issues, and if we take this sort of research agenda seriously we can move ahead on them. Even a few weeks of very sketchy exploratory research in Bogota last spring was enough for me to see some very interesting things and to develop much more interesting questions than those with which I had begun. It appeared to me, for example, that the "economic potential" issue would have to be treated quite particularly, commodity by commodity, with respect to manufactures. The small-scale unmechanized brickyards can compete with the mechanized brick factory only by supplying a cheaper product in small lots suitable for the low-income market. By contrast, even a small shoe factory can produce a quite competitive product; indeed, the little exporting of shoes which goes on from Colombia is done by the smaller firms. My brief study also elucidated a number of the threshold problems of expansion — space, location, capitalization, formality of organization — with which small industries have to deal if they try to expand and with which public policy must deal if it is to support them. It suggested the importance for these activities of some aspects of government action not

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usually thought of by development planners as particularly relevant. It is not merely tariff policy and the differential availability of credit; it is also the nature of the urban transportation system, the accessibility of the wholesale market to small sellers who must do their buying every day or two, the presence of a housing stock which is not too bureaucratized to permit its use for industrial and commercial purposes, and the degree of residential segregation by economic class. I found that the small commercial interests of the streets — indeed, the very newspaper vendors and lottery ticket sellers so frequently cited by economists as examples of "the sort of thing I mean" — are by no means the unorganized world of free competition which the I L O and many others seem to suppose. These activities, in which the commodity to be distributed is limited in amount and its flow therefore capable of being controlled, are organized to a very high degree. I saw how other monopolistic elements are introduced into the world of small commerce by public policy which establishes and allocates legal locations for selling, in markets or on the street, and thus makes a salable scarce resource out of that most valuable of commercial assets, a good location. Seeing this, I could understand the survey findings and the bits of reporting from Colombia and elsewhere which show earnings in urban small commerce as very widely dispersed, not as bunching together around some low average (Sabot 1974, Berry 1973). I could also understand the findings, again from both Colombia and elsewhere, that new migrants to the city are not very strongly represented in commerce (Berry 1973, Bienefeld n.d.). My observations made me want to insist — as the institutional economists had done before me with respect to wages — that the pattern of earnings to be seen cannot possibly be attributed casually to "natural market forces," but must be seen as the outcome of a set of social institutions, man-made and for man to reevaluate. Questions were raised that I could not deal with around the issue of the economic contribution of these tiny enterprises. A great deal of this activity, and in Bogota it would appear the most thriving part of it, is not in the small-workshop manufacturing about which the I L O report speaks so affectionately, but in commerce. And it is certainly not true that the bulge in services and commerce — t h e "terciarization of the economy" — is well explained by the crowding into it of "subemployed" migrants. Migrants are not especially well represented, and average earnings in commerce turn out to be not particularly low. It is doing something and people are paying for it, but when one looks to economics for a clearer understanding one finds that the whole body of economic theory with respect to commerce and services has a somewhat hazy and problematic

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character. Here, I think, thoughtful research can give us leads on moit adequate theory. Theory in economics is, after all, not wholly abstract. It responds to issues of policy, and although its structure is deductive, the basic framework represents conceptions about the essential elements of reality. I thus find myself arguing that some anthropologists might find it more interesting to ask not what economics can do for us, but what we can do for economics — in the sense of both economic policies and economic theory. The connection with policy in the kind of urban fieldwork I am suggesting is obvious. "The economist, confronted with choice-ofobjectives questions, is exposed to (1) the tendency to make decisions that are justified mainly because they are supported by numbers, . . . and (2) the temptation to ignore the intangibles and the complexities of the real world, to exclude important insights and to oversimplify complicated realities . . ." (Heyman 1965). We are good at counterbalancing this kind of tendency. We can help generate better decisions. I suspect, however, that if we go on in this area we will also want to look at concepts and theory and that it will be useful if we do. Deductive theory cannot be empirically disproved, but it can be replaced by theory which is more useful in describing the phenomena. There is a world of phenomena in the cities of developing countries which anthropologists can help to explicate, and it would be surprising and disappointing if the process were not to affect the theory with which economists are trying to explain such phenomena. REFERENCES CITED S. 1965. Traditional exchange and modern markets. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. BERRY, R . ALBERT. 1 9 7 3 . Urban labour surplus and the commerce sector: Colombia. MS. Economic Growth Center, Yale University. BIENEFELD, Μ. A. n.d. The self employed of urban Tanzania. MS. Institute of Development Studies Working Paper 17. BLAU, PETER. 1 9 6 4 . Exchange and power in social life. New York: Wiley. FIRTH, RAYMOND. 1 9 3 9 . Primitive Polynesian economy. London: Routledge. GEERTZ, CLIFFORD. 1 9 6 5 . The social history of an Indonesian town. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. GÖRDEN, DAVID M . 1 9 7 2 . Theories of poverty and underemployment: Orthodox radical and dual labor market perspectives. Lexington, Mass.: Heath. HEYMAN, H A N S , JR. 1 9 6 5 . "The objectives of transportation," in Transportation investment and economic development. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution. INTERNATONAL LABOUR OFFICE. 1 9 7 0 . Towards full employment: A programme for Colombia. Geneva: International Labour Office. BELSHAW, CYRIL

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Employment incomes and equality: A strategy for increasing productive employment in Kenya. Geneva: International Labour Office. KNIGHT, FRANK. 1 9 4 0 . Anthropology and economics. Journal of Political Economy 4 9 : 2 4 7 - 2 6 8 . LEWIS, W . A . 1 9 5 4 . Economic development with unlimited supplies of labour. The Manchester School, May 22. MCGEE, T . G . 1 9 7 3 . Peasants in the cities: A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox. Human Organization 3 2 : 1 3 5 - 1 4 2 . PIERSON, FRANK C. 1957. "An evaluation of wage theory," in New concepts in wage determination. Edited by George W. Taylor and Frank C. Pierson. New York: McGraw-Hill. POLANYI, KARL. 1 9 5 7 . Trade and market in the early empires. New York: Free Press. SABOT, R. H. 1974. The meaning and measurement of urban surplus labour in an African context. MS. TAX, SOL. 1953. Penny capitalism: A Guatemalan Indian economy. Smithsonian Institution, Institute of Social Anthropology, publ. 16. TODARO, M. P. 1969. A model of labour migration and urban unemployment in less developed countries. American Economic Review 59 (1): 138-143. UL HAQ, MAHBUB. 1971. Employment and income distribution in the 1970's: A new perspective. Development Digest 9 (4):3-8. INTERNATIONAL LABOUR OFFICE. 1 9 7 2 .

MANNING NASH

World View and Social Relations: An Extension of Tax's Analysis1

In a seminal paper, Sol Tax made an analytical distinction between a kind of world view and a set of social relations. In his words (1941:38-39): The world view general among Guatemalan Indians is, as I have said, of the primitive type. Like classical "primitives" their minds are clouded with animism: sun and earth, river and hill, are anthropomorphized; animals talk; plants have emotions; it is possible for a hoe to work alone; such things as fire and maize are capable of direct punitive action. But while this complex of beliefs forming a basis of action constitutes a world view of the type we have come to expect in isolated preliterate tribes, the type of social relations of the Guatemalan Indians, as I have indicated, is of a different character. . . . In their social, economic, political, and even religious interrelations these people are in significant degree practical, matter-of-fact, mundane and secular-minded.

My own field experience in the western highlands of Guatemala and the reports of numerous other fieldworkers convince me of the accuracy and penetration of this formulation of mundane social relations coexisting with a world view suffused with animism, supernature, omens, and all the usual symbols associated with non-literate apprehensions of reality. There are, however, some interesting processual questions associated with the Tax formulation. First, how did this seeming incongruity come into being, and second, what are the social and cultural processes by which it is maintained? To the question of historical emergence of the dichotomy, only speculative answers are possible. Neither the large corpus of pre-Conquest and post-Conquest documents (Cline 1972) nor the vast archaeological record is empirically adequate to the solution of so subtle a problem as the quality of the world view and the tenor of social relations. Hence, it is to the second question — How is a folk world view maintained in a set of modern-like social relations? — that I shall address this paper. The social structures of the municipios of the western highlands of

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Guatemala are dominated by what Mesoamericanists have come to call the civil-religious hierarchy. In its most general form, this hierarchy can be described as follows (Nash 1958:66): Typically, Indians organize local communal life around a series of ranked offices. These offices form two ladders, o n e a ladder of religious posts and the other of civil posts. The two ladders, however, are tied together by common symbols, and in virtue of the fact that men in office alternate between posts in each of the ladders. The difference between the two ladders is conceptual. Indians tend to think of them as one system. A n d the term civil-religious hierarchy recognizes the fact of interrelation. From the point of view of the Indian in local society, the hierarchy represents fixed tasks of communal service to which he must devote a number of years from his adult life. Each man who serves in an office is really, above the very lowest rungs, a representative of a family. A n d it is family units, rather than individuals which pass through the cycle of public service. A male enters service at about 16 or 17 years of age, at one of the lower posts in the hierarchy. After a year of service, there is a rest period, running from three or four years between posts. He then assumes a post on the opposite ladder, one rung higher. The crossing from religious to civil office back and forth up the hierarchy is usual, but a fixed order with regular alternation is not essential.

Most writers on the civil-religious hierarachy have concentrated on the social, political, and economic consequences of the ordinary operation of the hierarchy, and we have in the literature (Wolf 1955, Cancian 1965, Nash 1958, Adams 1965, to cite but a random few) a series of fairly well-documented empirical generalizations. It is clear that the hierarchy brings all families into a single social structure; age-grades the population; acts as a wealth-scrambling device; insulates the community from the environing ladinos; is a mechanism of prestige allocation; and defines the limits and membership of the local community. The literature even contains good descriptions of how the hierarchy is changed over time by either exogenous events or internal ones like demographic growth and occupational shifts. What is lacking in large measure is an equally empirical and detailed grasp of the cultural meaning of the civil-religious hierarchy — what it means for the world view of the Indians; how it relates to religious conceptions; and how it helps define time, space, and life and death. I shall explicate some of these dimensions and in so doing attempt to account for the seeming anomaly of the folk world view coexisting with modern social relations. I draw on my field experience in Cantel, Guatemala, with speakers of Quiche and in Amatenango, Chiapas, with Tzeltal-speakers. The hypothesis offered needs a comparative check with the large literature on these regions, but this paper is not the vehicle for such comparisons. While the content and details of religious belief and practice vary from

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municipio to municipio (as do such other aspects of culture as dialect, costume, economics, use of the indigenous calendar, etc.), there is a broad general pattern. Amatenango has more emphasis on witches than Cantel, but Cantel has more concern with the day lords of the Tzolkin, for example; and Amatenango has an annual world-renewal rite on the installation of its officials, whereas Cantel puts on a full dramatic week during Holy Week (see Nash 1958 and Nash 1970 for detailed descriptions). Here I concentrate on the general pattern, its symbolic conveyances, and its publicly shared meanings (which is what I mean by culture). The idea of a separate domain called "religion" or "sacred belief' in these Indian municipios is alien to most Indians. Those who can talk of "religion" or the "holy" are either converts to Protestantism or heavily influenced by the Action Catolica movement sponsored by the clergy to "purge" Indian communities of what the priests consider heterodox belief and practice. The closest approximation to our usage of religion is the notion of costumbre, the time-honored, respected practices that are unreflectively taken as the conduct of "well-built members" of a given municipio. Costumbre, however, is not limited to what an anthropologist might put into the realm of religion. It includes many things, practices, and beliefs which, under any definition, belong to the mundane and profane. The points to be underscored about the religious (used here and throughout this paper to refer to the culturally central core of costumbre) aspect of highland Indian culture are three: (1) it is not a matter of individual adherence or practice, but society-wide, obligatory, and largely unreflective; (2) being public and shared, it sets up bundles of expectations the violation of which brings anything from the diffuse sanctions of gossip and ridicule to the ultimate sanction of execution; (3) the beliefs we ethnocentrically assign to the rubric of religion are held in the same way as the other items and patterns in costumbre; there is no set of beliefs (socially transmitted, validated, or acted on) that can be considered specifically religious. In short, for the Indians of the western highlands and Chiapas, social reality is constructed on the basis of common, unquestioned cultural axioms that give rise to a plausibility structure subscribed to by most members of the society. It is not that these Indians are unempirical; in fact, the reverse is true. It is merely that their empiricism rests on a different constellation of cultural propositions about the world and reality. To illustrate this, the nagual belief system is a good vehicle. There is widespread belief that men have animal counterparts called naguales. These animal counterparts have a life coexistent with their human others;

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if either one dies, so does the other. Some men are believed (in Amatenango, at least) to be able, at night, to change into their animal counterparts and do harm to other people. When a male baby is born, a fire is burned all night and the ashes smoothed over. In the morning, if there are animal tracks in the ashes, then the newborn has as its nagual whatever animal left the tracks. If there are no tracks, that newborn male does not have a nagual. This is straightforward, empirical, coherent, and logical, given the preexistent cultural postulate of the existence of naguales. The plausibility structure is also validated by the culturally generated reading of experience. All the hills and caves in a municipio have owners. These owners are the holders of large treasures. An Indian can enter into a bargain with a given owner and be rewarded with some of the treasure, or he can try to steal it, at the risk of being enslaved by the owner and put to work inside the mountain. Some Indians have tried to enter caves at night to steal treasure, and some of them have never returned. The missing are not accounted for by positing some accident or mishap; their fates are understandable in terms of capture and enslavement by the irate owner of the hill. Another support for the body of costumbre is the indigenous therapy that stills doubt at the rare times it arises. The whole intricate system of curing - exploration or sounding (pulsando), sucking of foreign objects from the body, massage and bath, charms and amulets — is oriented to bringing deviants back into conformity with social expectations and restoring desired kinds of social relations. Hardly anyone gets sick as an individual. His illness comes from frictions in his social relations or the violation of custom. Illness is always a social and cultural fact, not merely an individual biological happening. The classic example of the cultural nature of illness is the sickness called susto, which anthropologists have parochially called "magical fright" because it does not exist in the lexicon of Western medicine. If Indian culture stipulates that the soul can leave the body in instances of sudden fright and shock, and people in fact do fall into comas or fits of trembling under shock, then susto is, to Indians, a fact of nature. Many more beliefs, such as the saint cults, the Judas cult (Mendelson 1959), and the role of ancestors, could be explored to underwrite the assertion that highland Indian religion is not a separate domain of culture supported and validated by ideas and actions differing from the plausibility structure of everyday life. Further compelling evidence that the culture of highland Indians is not bisected into domains of sacred and profane or religious and mundane comes from the way ordinary space is culturally categorized and these

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categories used in social life and the definition of reality. The four cardinal directions are recognized and given colors and symbolic associations. East is red and associated with birth; West is black and associated with death; North is white and is male, while South is blue or green and associated with female. The diurnal path of the sun is a cycle of birth and rebirth, and it takes place, in Amatenango, only because at the installation of the new hierarchy a drama of world renewal is enacted to propitiate the sun, moon, and earth. These bodies are placed in a kinship relationship — sun as father, earth as mother, and moon as grandmother. The setting of the sun is likened to copulation, resulting in next day's newborn sun, while the r >ing moon keeps watch over the coupling during the night. Furthermore, Amatenango is laid out in barrios, a dual division of the town on territorial lines, and the cemetery is a mirror image of the barrio division in the placing of the dead according to residence in life. In Cantel, a house cannot be occupied after it is built or transferred to a new owner without the performance of the house-sacrifice ritual. A sheep or goat is slaughtered and one of its paws buried in each of the corners of the house to propitiate the cardinal directions; the head is buried in the center as an offering to Mother Earth for being allowed to occupy this space. The body of costumbre, of course, is not static. The dynamic for change comes from competing plausibility structures — those of Protestant missionaries or modern Catholic priests, or new political ideologies — confronting what was unreflective and raising it more or less to the consciousness of choice. The Indian cultural system is not swept away in these confrontations among plausibility structures, except possibly in the most thoroughgoing conversions to a Protestant denomination. Rather, the familiar processes of reinterpretation, reintegration, novel synthesis, and deletion come into play. From the first Spanish attempts to missionize down to today, these processes have operated, and they account for the content and structure of highland Indian belief systems. The trinity, the saints, the cross, heaven, and hell nowhere have the meanings assigned in the catechism alone, but are reworked so that some syncretic meaning supersedes orthodoxy. The historical sources of the content of belief are not nearly as theoretically interesting as the modes of readjusting the belief system so that paradox, conflict, incoherence, and contradiction are removed or minimized. This is largely accomplished in two ways. First, the belief system is never available as a whole for inspection. It has never been codified, written down, or vested in an authority. This is a consensual, crescive cultural formation. Second, the belief system is not held as a philosophical stance, but is occasion-relevant. An Indian does not think of a theory of illness, but he knows what to do when certain symptoms or

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pains plague him. Thus the body of costumbre is open and flexible as long as the Indians are allowed to choose from competing plausibility structures and make heir own adjustment in their world view. When they are forced to modify costumbre, resistance and violence are often consequences. There are individual religious experts, like the chiman of Cantel or the curers of Amatenango, but they are not repositories of authority or definers of the legitimate. Rather they are embodiments of extraordinary power or of superior, detailed versions of common belief and knowledge. The social organization of religious life is not differentiated in an institutional locus; it is a reflex of municipal organization. The chief means of keeping the world in order are vested in the civil-religious hierarchy. The religious offices in this hierarchy are responsible for the upkeep of the cult of the saints, the plaza church, and the sacred places, the organization of fiestas, and the enactment of the drama of Holy Week. A mayordomo and one or several assistants are devoted to each saint, depending upon his/her importance. The patron saint is, of course, the most important and his/her fiesta the most gala. The image of the saint is housed either in the house of the mayordomo for his year of tenure or in a special house of its own. The mayores (assistants to the mayordomo) light candles for the saint in front of his image daily. They recite the proper prayers at the proper times and keep the saint supplied with flowers or other items he is believed to need. (For example, St. Anthony needs keys, since he is the patron of lost things.) The incumbents of offices in the religious wing of the hierarchy are charged with carrying out all the costumbre activities for the entire community. Since the religious aspect is in the hands of men who do little else, everyone else is free to carry on his ordinary activities, secure in the knowledge that proper costumbre is being performed in his behalf. One reason that daily social relations have the segmental, impersonal, and agonistic character familiar to urban Westerners is that the religious aspects of daily life are compartmentalized and delegated to the civil-religious hierarchy. The world view, peopled as it is with animistic symbols, does not intrude on the daily task orientation except in very minor and economically insignificant ways (e.g., cutting wood only in certain moon phases). The compartmentalization of the maintenance aspects of costumbre frees the non-incumbent Indian from deep personal concern with religion and religious activity and allows him to concentrate on his own affairs without noticeable religious prescription or proscription. A general statement of the situation might be the following: In a social structure where religious duties fall only on office holders, social relations

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tend to be impersonal, segmented, and pragmatic, especially when the major cultural axioms are consensual, uncodified, and not vested in a specific institutional locus. Although this arises from Highland Maya material, it could be tested against other bodies of data. My cursory reading of how the Egyptian peasant behaved under the Pharaonic cults lends some support to the proposition. Conversely, the individual Burmese Buddhist is responsible for his own fate, his everyday life is suffused with religiously significant behavior, and his social relations are a mix of strong kin and neighbor relations with pragmatic components. The hypothesis is interesting because most social science has viewed the modern type of social relations as either the residue of more intimate affective and whole-person relations or a consequence of recent emergence of individual freedom and rationality in social organization. The Guatemalan case raises the possibility that such social relations may be the inadvertent consequences of the ordinary operation of a sort of social structure and cultural pattern. It is a testimony, again, that culture and social structure are not isomorphic and that modes of integration in these analytically separate domains may be different. On the two or three occasions when daily life and religious life are fully merged, as in the installation of a new hierarchy or the fiesta of the patron saint, social relations are of neither the urban nor the folk type — they are dissolved in alcohol.

NOTE 1. I have skimped on ethnographic documentation, first because I do not have fresh food to add to the extensive literature on the area and second because the ethnography is so readily available and well summarized (see Nash 1968, Vogt 1969).

REFERENCES CITED N. Editor. 1965. Political changes in Guatemalan Indian communities: A symposium. New Orleans: Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University. CANCIAN, FRANK. 1 9 6 5 . Economics and prestige in a Maya community. Stanford: Stanford University Press. CLINE, HOWARD F . 1 9 7 2 . "Guide to ethnohistorical sources," in Handbook of Middle American Indians, Vol. 12. Edited by Robert Wauchope. Austin: University of Texas Press. MENDELSON, Ε. M. 1959. Maximon: An iconographical introduction. Man 59:57-60. NASH, JUNE. 1 9 7 0 . In the eyes of the ancestors. New Haven: Yale University Press. ADAMS, RICHARD

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NASH, MANNING. 1958. Political relations in Guatemala. Social and Economic Forces 7(l):65-75. . Editor. 1968. Handbook of Middle American Indians. Vol. 6. Austin: University of Texas Press. TAX, SOL. 1941. World view and social relations in Guatemala. American Anthropologist

43:27-42.

VOGT, Ε. Z. Editor. 1969. Handbook of Middle American Indians. Vol. 7. Austin: University of Texas Press. WOLF, ERIC R. 1955. Types of Latin American peasantry: A preliminary discussion. American Anthropologist 57:452-471.

FERNANDO CAMARA BARBACHANO

The Influence of Sol Tax on Mexican Social Anthropology

Sol Tax was introduced to Mesoamerica in 1934 as a member of the Carnegie Institution team directed by Robert Redfield. Tax's assignment was to extend to Guatemala the ethnographic survey of contemporary Mayan Indians which Redfield and associates had begun in Yucatan. Beginning with Chichicastenango, municipios in the midwestern highlands were surveyed, revealing more visible municipio cultural boundaries, a more extensive division of labor among communities, and more reliance on markets for exchanging goods and services than in Yucatan (Tax 1937). These findings suggested that in some contrasts with Yucatan the Guatemalan Indian societies were "mobile, with relationships impersonal, with formal institutions dictating the acts of individuals, and with familial organization weak, with life secularized, and with individuals acting more from economic or other personal advantage than from any deep conviction or thought of the social good" (Tax 1939:467). Moreover, this patterning of social relations along lines not unfamiliar to North Americans comfortably coexisted with a world view as animistic as that encountered in Yucatan (Tax 1941). Intrigued by these regional differences, Redfield joined Tax in intensive research in Indian and ladino communities bordering Lake Atitlän. Tax focused his attention for several years on Panajachel, completing an exhaustive study of the economy (1953) and initiating an equally exhaustive collection of world-view data. With Redfield he explored, for perhaps the first time within anthropology, the degree to which beliefs held by chief informants are representative of the community and region (Redfield, Tax, and Villa Rojas 1941:307). Beyond the intensive work in the lake towns of Panajachel, San Antonio Palopo, Agua Escondida, and San Pedro la Laguna, questionnaire schedules were designed for comparisons on a much wider canvas: surveys were conducted in eastern and northwestern Guatemala,

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with an eye to tackling eventually the one remaining major area of Maya population, the Chiapas highlands of Mexico. Mexico had had a long tradition of historical and anthropological studies conducted by national and foreign scholars. John L. Stephens had "discovered" the Maya in 1841; Orozco y Berra, Garcia Cubas, and Pefiafiel had compiled extensive historical and geographical data; Brasseur de Bourbourg and Lord Kingsborough had traveled widely and written pieces of scholarly work about the ancient civilizations; Bandelier and Seler had analyzed Aztec systems of land ownership and inheritance; Brinton had written about the Maya chronicles; and Starr and Tozzer had done ethnographic research on southeastern Mexico and the Lacandones respectively. The short-lived International School of American Archaeology and Ethnography was in existence; Mexico had hosted three meetings (1895, 1910, and 1939) of the International Congress of Americanists; the Carnegie Institution had conducted archaeological, historical, and social anthropological research in selected regions; and Mexican anthropologists, working for the government through the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, were publishing historical and ethnographic material in the Anales and special monographs (Cämara B. 1967:252-255). Against this background, Redfield and Tax suggested that much might be learned about Indian communities in Mexico from careful examination of municipal records (Redfield 1942:273). They were soon to be proven correct indeed, and the curtain was about to rise on a new chapter of Mexican anthropology. The stage was to be the Chiapas highlands. My association with Sol Tax began in 1942, when he accepted an invitation to teach a course in social anthropology at the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia and introduce some Mexican students to ethnological fieldwork. This was part of the Rockefeller Foundation's program to bring together in Mexico anthropologists from the United States, Mexico, and Central America. Since Tax's experience in the preceding six years had been among the Indians of Guatemala, he was an obvious choice to lead the INAH in reviewing the knowledge of Maya ethnography gathered to date and planning future research. The task assigned to him and his students was to answer the three questions (Tax 1947:Appendix 1): (1) What is known of the contemporary Maya? (2) What more should be investigated? and (3) How should social anthropologists go about this research? From August to November of 1942, 15 students participated in classroom study preliminary to going to the field. The seminar was our introduction to social anthropology as a discipline. How to select useful

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problems and what constitutes relevant data were hotly debated issues. The principal lesson that Tax sought to teach us we learned well: different problems or questions require different methods of study. Functional analysis and historical reconstruction both have their place. During those initial four months, nine students worked assiduously enough on the diverse materials of Mayan ethnography to earn the privilege of accompanying Tax to the field in December. Emanuel Palacios, Ricardo Pozas, and I were to work together analyzing Chiapas census data. Pedro Carrasco and Barbro Dahlgren were given the task of preparing abstracts in Spanish of some works in German by Stoll, Sapper, Lehmann, Schultze-Jena, and Termer. Calixta Guiteras Holmes was assigned the review and synthesis of the published and unpublished monographs on the contemporary Maya. Miguel Acosta, Anne Chapman, and Gregorio Rosas (the latter remembered for his intense interest in applied issues) had other responsibilities. Acosta is now a well-known Venezuelan anthropologist. Pozas, who subsequently developed a reputation as an extraordinary fieldworker, serves currently as Director of Community Development Programs at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, while I am employed as Assistant Director of the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia. Guiteras is a member of the Cuban Academy of Sciences and teaches anthropology at the Universidad de la Habana. Carrasco, following more than 15 years at the University of California, Los Angeles, is now Associate Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Dahlgren is Associate Researcher at IN AH in Mexico City. Chapman recently served as Adviser for the 42d International Congress of Americanists in Paris. For our field research, Tax selected Zinacantan, a small Tzotzil municipio in the Chiapas highlands. One reason for the choice was Zinacantan's proximity to Tzeltal communities that Alfonso Villa Rojas was investigating, facilitating comparison between Tzeltal- and Tzotzilspeaking communities. The 1940 census of Zinacantan had been studied, and by the time we left for the field we already knew a great deal about the people we were going to study (Tax 1944). The Governor of Chiapas was notified in due time, and he promised full cooperation and support. An Indian boarding school, under the sponsorship of the Mexican Department of Indian Affairs, was made available to us; our stay coincided with the school's winter vacation. The school provided us beds and cooking equipment. A cook was hired from San Cristobal, but the stinginess of Anne Chapman, our bookkeeper, and the difficulties of securing other than locally available foods resulted in a steady diet of beans, eggs, and tortillas. Lighting also was a problem; the gasoline lamps borrowed and rented were little more reliable than the

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decrepit electrical plant. I suffered the most from the unpredictability of adequate light, since to me had fallen responsibility for the cataloging and filing of our field notes. The working day consisted of approximately eight hours of interviewing and two or three hours of typing notes. Establishing good rapport with members of the community was the first order of business, and initially we spent considerable time walking around the town drawing charts and maps. After a week we knew the layout of the community and the leading families. The town hall (cabildo) was a useful place for meeting Indians, and one or more of us would spend several hours there each day. In this way we learned of land disputes, family conflicts, accusations of theft, and the debates surrounding fulfillment of cargos within the cofradia and political structure. We relied on bilingual Zinacantecos for translation, since all complaints were discussed in Tzotzil. In fact most of our association was necessarily with bilingual Indians, for none of us spoke Tzotzil. It was necessary for us to take considerable initiative in making contacts, since the school where we resided was some distance from Indian homes. This isolation was advantageous in some ways but handicapped us in participating in community life. We took advantage of invitations to visit and share meals in Indian homes whenever possible, and in turn invited informants to visit and eat at our headquarters. In fact, the day before Christmas we invited all the cabildo personnel to dine with us at the school. Tax taught us much about relationships with informants, above all that nothing takes the place of openness and sincerity. The informant's feelings about appropriate timing and procedures for interviewing should be honored, and the informant deserves to know as much as is feasible to share about the uses to which the information will be put. Informants deserve to benefit from the relationship, if not materially at least in terms of friendship fully reciprocated. One member of our group gathered significant ethnographic material through the dispensing of medical aid. Whether or not to pay informants was a controversial issue. Tax advised that payment might be made for an informant's time, rather than for his information. In fact we paid only two or three bilingual informants when their help was needed for many hours at a stretch. Drinking was another dilemma, some deciding to abstain completely and others drinking in ceremonial contexts out of courtesy. In general, rapport was easily established, and several of the group became such good friends with both Indians and ladinos that they spent virtually all their available time with them. The writing and ordering of field notes involved a number of valuable

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techniques taught us by Tax. He insisted on daily entries in our diaries and the typing of each day's field notes before details were forgotten. Being as numerous as we were, we found that the identification of each person's data and the compilation of data relevant to specific topics posed problems. The latter problem was solved by following Murdock's Outline of Cultural Materials, in which two, three, or four digits classify topics and subtopics. The Zinacantan data at the end of our 50th day amounted to nearly 1,500 pages. In the subsequent analysis of these data, Tax suggested that we each assume responsibility for one or more topics. I was assigned the religious and political organization, while others selected technology, labor, housing, food, dress and adornment, ethnic and family relationships, etc. Even at that early stage in my development as a researcher, I was able to construct a model and some hypotheses concerning the social control functions of the cargo system. After our return to Mexico City, Tax remained for a month to review our notes and advise those of us who planned to return to the field. Only Guiteras, Pozas, and I were in a position to pursue further work in Chiapas immediately, and by the end of the year the three of us were back in Chiapas preparing to launch research in the municipios of Cancuc (Guiteras — social organization), Chamula (Pozas — economy), and Tenejapa (Camara — religious and political organization). Both Redfield and Tax participated in this planning and followed closely our subsequent seven months of research. Villa continued 4 his work in Oxchuc, only six hours away from Tenejapa (1946). We remained in touch with him and with each other, sending copies of all notes to Tax, who by then had returned to the University of Chicago. Our data from this fieldwork subsequently were added to the Microfilm Collection of Manuscripts on Middle American Cultural Anthropology, another of Tax's undertakings which has contributed significantly to Mexican and Mesoamerican social anthropology (Camara B. 1946, Guiteras Holmes 1946, Pozas A. 1947). The following year I went to South America, with a Rockefeller fellowship, and on my return to Mexico in 1946 the continuing influence of Tax on Mexican anthropology was readily apparent. In 1945 his article "Anthropology and Administration" had appeared in Amirica Indigena, the same journal which would later print one of the earliest formulations of the tenets of action anthropology (1952ft). In 1946 the campaign on behalf of Mexican Indian education was at its height, and several of us were hired as anthropologists to cooperate with linguists in preparing teaching materials for the instruction of Indians. Unfortunately, the humanistic stance of scholarly pursuits, so fundamental to action

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anthropology, was not widely adopted in Mexican academia, despite the efforts of persons like Alfredo Barrera Vazquez, Alfonso Villa, Julio de la Fuente, Calixta Guiteras Holmes, Ricardo Pozas, and myself, who combined teaching with application of anthropology in a variety of contexts. It was during research in the Papaloapan River basin in southern Veracruz, under Villa's direction in 1948, that I received a letter from Tax which would alter the course of my life. He informed me that the Mexican office of the Institute of International Education had awarded me a scholarship to complete my M.A. at the University of Chicago, tuition-free. No news could have been more welcome. The next two years (1948-50) at the University of Chicago culminated for me in a seminar organized by Tax on Middle American ethnology, the proceedings of which appeared as Heritage of Conquest (Tax 1952a). This seminar, to the best of my knowledge, was the first of its kind and became the model for many subsequent seminars organized by Tax as well as the model utilized in the international journal he initiated, Current Anthropology. Papers were prepared and, along with field notes, duplicated for distribution among seminar participants in advance of the seminar. Under the sponsorship of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, some 30 participants gathered in New York the week preceding the 29th International Congress of Americanists. The subsequent publication of the papers included the debate generated by each paper, an idea which evolved into the concept of "CA treatment" in Current Anthropology several years later. To my, and Tax's, regret, a Spanish edition of Heritage of Conquest never appeared. Now, 25 years later, the time is ripe to organize another review of our knowledge of Mesoamerica, this time to appear simultaneously in Spanish and English. After the publication of Heritage of Conquest, Tax's attention turned increasingly toward the international community of anthropologists and action anthropology. His interest in Mesoamerica has persisted, however, and his students at the University of Chicago have continued to pursue research in Mexico and Guatemala. One final contribution of his to the vitality and visibility of Mexican anthropology bears mention. As president of the American Anthropological Association, he was instrumental in bringing the 58th annual meeting of the Association to Mexico City, the first time the Association had held its meetings in a non-English-speaking country. Familiarity of North American anthropologists with Latin American anthropologists and with the state of anthropology in Mexico was considerably enhanced by this undertaking.

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REFERENCES CITED B., FERNANDO. 1946. Monografia sobre los Tzeltales de Tenejapa. Microfilm Collection of Manuscripts on Middle American Cultural Anthropology 5. Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries. . 1967. "Anthropology," in Social science in Latin America. Edited by Manuel Diegues Junior and Bryce Wood, pp. 241-287. New York: Columbia University Press. GUITERAS HOLMES, CAUXTA. 1 9 4 6 . Informe sobre Cancuc. Microfilm Collection of Manuscripts on Middle American Cultural Anthropology 8. Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries. POZAS Α., RICARDO. 1947. Monografia de Chamula. Microfilm Collection of Manuscripts on Middle American Cultural Anthropology 15. Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries. REDFIELD, ROBERT, SOL TAX, and ALFONSO VILLA ROJAS. 1 9 4 1 . Social anthropology and linguistics. Carnegie Institution of Washington Year Book CÄMARA

40:289-309. REDFIELD, ROBERT.

1942. Social anthropology and linguistics. Carnegie Institution of Washington Year Book 41:273-275. TAX, SOL. 1937. The municipios of the midwestern highlands of Guatemala. American Anthropologist 39:423-444. . 1939. Culture and civilization in Guatemalan societies. Scientific Monthly 48:464-467. . 1941. World view and social relations in Guatemala. American Anthropologist 4 3 : 2 7 - 4 2 . . 1944. Information about the municipio of Zinacantan, Chiapas, Mexico. Revista Mexicana de Estudios Antropolögicos 6:181-95. . 1945. Anthropology and administration. America Indigena 5:21-33. . 1947. Notas sobre Zinacantan, Chiapas. Microfilm Collection of Manuscripts on Middle American Cultural Anthropology 20. Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries. . Editor. 1952a. Heritage of conquest. New York: Macmillan. . 19526. Action anthropology. American Indigena 12:103-106. . 1953. Penny capitalism: A Guatemalan Indian economy. Smithsonian Institution, Institute of Social Anthropology, publ. 16. VILLA R., A. 1946. Notas sobre la etnografia de los Indios Tzetales de Oxchuc. Microfilm Collection of Manuscripts on Middle American Cultural Anthropology 7. Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries.

JUNE NASH

The Season for Witchhunts

Witchcraft beliefs and practices are statements of power over evil forces. They give shape to the real and imaginary fears that plague mankind and assert that at least some people can control them. In small-scale societies lacking special legal and policing agents, social control is maintained by the kinship group, while shamans, diviners, and sorcerers are the intermediaries dealing with supernatural forces. In these societies, belief in supernatural power has enough force to make most people follow the rules for living in the group. Witchcraft revealed in disease and death is the negative sanction in a belief system that offers the positive reward of security in fulfilling social norms. Anthropologists ever since Malinowski have emphasized the conservative effect of witchcraft beliefs and practices in maintaining social norms. Evans-Pritchard's (1937) classic study of Azande witchcraft showed the wide ramifications of such beliefs as a theory of causation and as a system of morality. Kluckhohn (1944) and Whiting (1950) have shown parallel instances of witchcraft functioning as social control in North American Indian tribes. Recent studies of social change and belief in witchcraft have demonstrated the adjustment mechanisms brought about by witchcraft accusations in cases of conflict (Douglas 1963, Marwick 1965). Most of these anthropologists have stressed the positive function of witchcraft in maintaining the social organism intact. Nadel (1952) and Wilson (1951) have shown the negative aspects of such beliefs. Whether witchcraft beliefs are assessed as positive or negative depends upon whether the analyst is concerned with a closed system viewed internally or with an adjustment to the wider society. Kennedy (1967:219) has attacked some of the British anthropologists, who view the African societies they have studied as "closed mystical systems," for their failure to see the "transitional nature of society subjected to powerful forces of social and cultural change." The Azande, who provide the classic model

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for a witchcraft-dominated belief system, had been compelled to leave their indigenous settlements just prior to Evans-Pritchard's arrival. Gluckman (1968:28) has pointed to this dislocation as an explanation of the unusual pattern of witchcraft accusations whereby neighbors as well as kinsmen are accused. Disruption of the indigenous machinery of oracles and divinations capable of dealing with suspicions and accusations aggravated the anxiety and fear of the Azande in their new location, a point Kennedy emphasizes (1967:220). Kennedy's criticism of Evans-Pritchard and the British structuralists concentrates on their failure to apply sociological or psychological theory to their analyses. The real lack is a historical framework in which to place their structural analysis. Gluckman recognizes the need for this in linking witchcraft beliefs as a positive philosophy with certain "techno-economic levels" (1968:28). A review of the cases in which social breakdown occurs suggests that the crucial factor in the shift from positive to negative impact in witchcraft is the degree of intrusion of the dominant colonial or neocolonial society into the economic and social system of the indigenous society. Economic deprivations and dissatisfaction with the distribution of rewards may give impetus to witchcraft movements, but, as Parkin (1968) points out for the Bemba, the main impulse comes from the fear and anxiety resulting from the undermining of old ideological solutions. The witchcraft movements are not merely cyclical, but sometimes, as he effectively demonstrates (1968:428), involve a fundamental restructuring of society and provide a means of advertising new power holders. 1 The thesis I shall maintain is that witchcraft beliefs and practices, which sustain a system of security in societies maintaining internal governing mechanisms, become a source of disruption as the old belief systems are undermined and as restrictions are imposed on the supernatural intermediaries. Fear and its psychological precipitate of anxiety rise as the witchhunts lead to violence and homicide. In societies dominated by alien governments, such witchhunts are the negative reaction to the undermining of morale and confidence in traditional leaders that has a more positive counterpart in nativistic movements. Hostility is turned inward as economic frustration and the sense of loss of control over one's fate increase. In some cases, especially in Africa, nativistic movements parallel the rise of witchhunts and are directed against both the White society and the witchcraft practitioners (Douglas 1963; Lanternari 1963:24). Like nativistic religious movements, witchhunts are the desperate attempts of oppressed people to find solutions to the problems they face in a world they never made. With comparative data from five Middle American communities, I shall test a model of the kind of social conditions in which witchcraft,

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operating as social control in the colonial period, becomes its opposite in the witchhunt. The model includes the following features: 1. There is a coherent set of beliefs concerning supernatural causation of illnesses linked to a set of rituals and practices by which these can be cured. 2. There is a hierarchy of practitioners dealing with witchcraft cases that controls entry and instructs initiates during an apprenticeship period in the techniques and the rules governing the profession. 3. The right to practice is validated by others in positions of power in the society. 4. Divinations are predicated on conventional understandings about where conflict occurs. 5. In the operation of legal or quasi-legal settlement of cases involving witchcraft, the society is autonomous or feels itself to be relatively free of external governing bodies. 6. The witch and his victim are members of the same kinship or territorially defined subgroup of the society. 7. The victims of witchcraft are considered to have violated the norms and provoked witchcraft. Typically, these violations are aggressive words or acts, in societies which suppress any show of hostility, or a display of wealth which excites envy. As the society becomes increasingly involved in national and regional institutions, this belief system is undermined. This may be accomplished by legal systems' outlawing the very practices which serve to control witchcraft or by missionary churches' discouraging these practices through moral persuasion to the same effect. The following cycle of change takes place within the society: 1. Practitioners dealing with witchcraft go underground; as a result, hierarchy and control over entry break down. There is, as a consequence, an increase in the number of practitioners. 2. Competition among practitioners develops as those who had enjoyed privileged positions in the old hierarchy are threatened by the entry of new practitioners no longer under their control. 3. People lose their faith in the protective and curative powers of practitioners as they witness competitive discord. The loss of faith is accelerated by breakdown in traditional beliefs other than in curing and divining. Usually there is retention of belief in evil powers, since misfortunes continue to be blamed on supernatural intervention. 4. The witch is isolated as a target of attack, and his victim is considered innocent. The witchhunt is on when the whole society turns against the supernatural intermediaries.

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The loss of belief in the protective powers of the practitioners is crucial and may happen to individuals within the society at any stage. It is a correlate of the penetration of alternative modes of explanation in the society. It sets off the season of witchhunts, the effects of which are cumulative and accelerating. The final phase of the cycle would be acceptance of natural explanations for misfortunes and disbelief in both good and evil powers of practitioners. Of the five Chiapas Indian communities I shall compare, the most conservative was the Tzeltal-speaking community of Oxchuk when it was studied by Villa Rojas (1946) from 1942 to 1946. Conversion to Protestantism of nearly half of the population of 4,000 after 1950 provided alternatives that have since undermined the old social norms. San Andres Larrainzar, the Tzotzil-speaking community studied by Holland (1961) in 1957, retained curing ceremonies similar to those observed by Nunez de la Vega (1702) in the 17th century. San Pedro Chenalho, a Tzotzil-speaking community studied by Guiteras (1961) in the '50's, had lost some of the social control features once associated with patrilineages, but still retained belief in the destructive forces they could exercise. Tzo'ontahal, a Tzeltal-speaking community, had, within the time of my study from 1957 to 1967, lost many features of government by elders and of the ritual veneration of the ancestors, but curing practices were an important means of keeping alive beliefs in the guardianship of the ancestors (Nash 1970). A system of social control similar to that of Tzo^ontahal was kept alive in supernatural form among the Tzeltalspeaking Indians of the ladino-dominated township of Pinola studied by Hermitte (1964) in 1958. All of these towns had a system of security and social control maintained by a gerontocracy supported by curers and diviners. Within each community, the authority of these leaders was sustained by belief in the force of witchcraft manifested in sickness and death. The Spanish colonial form of government in each township provided a form within which local independence could persist (Wolf 1955). The core of resistance to change has been the quasi-official shamans and diviners, who operate both within and outside of official hierarchies. Their power stems from two sources — control over life and death and the ability to predict and divine the future on the basis of calendrical knowledge. Bishop Nunez de la Vega (1702:132) called those who practiced curing or sorcery sabios (wise men) and applied the term nahualistas to those who divined the future. The curers were initiated into their office by masters who taught them all the prayers and treatments. Three were taught together, in order "that it will be difficult to discover the author of the witchcraft, to execute him," and after they were initiated into the

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profession, none of them could do anything without giving notice to the others and to the master. The curers were ultimately under the authority of the diviners who confirmed their appointment. The diviners taught each child what his animal spirit was and set the times for communal ceremonies. The work of these practitioners was accepted within a system of belief in the guardianship of Canamlum, the fourth son of Cham, and his descendants (p. 9). The Bishop expressed amazement (p. 19) that these beliefs persisted almost 200 years after "the light of Evangelism had dawned" throughout New Spain and Guatemala. The "evil arts" he described and the belief system in which they were embedded can still be found in contemporary Maya Indian communities of Chiapas. Because of the political and social autonomy of these communities, the strength of these beliefs and the extent of curing and divining practices vary.

OXCHUK The settlement pattern of Oxchuk is that of dispersed parajes, or rural hamlets, in which clusters of agnatic kin live surrounded by their cornfields. As Villa Rojas (1946) and Sivert (1960) have described the community, these parajes were linked to a ceremonial and civil center in which lived a few ladino government officials and storekeepers as well as Indians who were fulfilling their terms of office. Preferred patrilocal residence and endogamy within the paraje preserved a strong sense of identity in the patrilineal group. Two named calpules organized lineages for ceremonial functions. The term calpul was introduced by the Toltecs prior to the Spanish conquest (Calnek 1960) and may have been applied to indigenous groups. Membership in a calpul depended on patrilineal inheritance. Formerly the calpul may have had greater territorial definition, but migration had mixed the calpules by the time of Villa Rojas's stay. A street passing in front of the church divided the town center into little (chin) and big (mukul) calpules. Officials who came to live there during their terms of office resided in the calpul to which they belonged. Each calpul was represented by a hierarchy of religious officials. The highest office was that of katinab, held alternately by a member of each calpul. Formerly an important post was that oidzunubil, an intermediary between the community and the gods, but no one had been recruited to this post since the last incumbent prior to Villa Rojas's stay had died. Below him were four chuycales, who directed the activities of the mayordomos, of which there were eight in each calpul. The ceremonial function of the officials of the calpul was to pray to the gods and the saints

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in order to prevent famine, sickness, and other misfortunes. Their animal spirit, called nahwal in Toltec and lab2 in Tzeltal, gave them the power to overcome evil (Villa Rojas 1947). The katinab was responsible for punishing anyone charged with witchcraft. After Oxchuk was declared an independent township in 1936, the Indians were free to elect a president and regidor in the civil hierarchy. A ladino chief of police, secretary, and judge continued to dominate secular affairs. The tendency was toward restricting to ceremonial affairs the power of the cabildos de justicia, men within each calpul who had passed through civil and religious office. The president was assuming many of the functions formerly performed by the alcaldes (judges) of the calpules. The only functions they retained were care of the "sacred book" of old Spanish documents and prayer making every Friday and when rain was needed. Social control was exercised by authorities within each of the structurally defined groups. First recourse was to the tatab, an elder of the lineage who had held communal office. He was believed to be able to exercise judgment because of his powerful nahual. If the claimant was dissatisfied with his judgment, or if he felt that he would have a better chance of winning his suit under national law rather than traditional custom, he took his case to the president of the school committee in his paraje or to the civil authorities in the center of the town or the departmental capital. Some even turned to the anthropologist or to prestigeful ladino figures. This was particularly common in cases of dispute over land when a widow wished to make claims on land purchased during her marriage and over which she had no rights under patrilineal inheritance (Villa Rojas 1946:500). The growing confusion as to who should adjudicate raised the issue of establishing an agency for settling local cases. Local Indians hesitated to serve in a post outside of the traditional hierarchy (where their power was validated by seniority and previous holding of office) for fear of witchcraft, and no one wanted a ladino in such a post (Villa Rojas 1946:341). A similar confusion was found in the boundaries within which witchcraft operated as a sanction. People said that witchcraft could be used only against people of the same lineage (p. 261), but Villa Rojas found many contradictions to this. Neighbors were common targets for witchcraft and accusations of being witches. When confronted with these contradictions, informants said that illness caused by witchcraft exercised by someone of the same name-group was much harder to cure than that caused by anyone else (p. 272). The outer limits of effective witchcraft were the boundaries of the township. Witchcraft belief was extensive and constituted the most important

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explanation for sickness, accident, and death of persons or animals (p. 241). Witchcraft accusations originated in schisms between neighbors, "being egotistic," theft, raising one's level of living above norms, failing to fulfill neighborly obligations, mistreating in-laws, etc. In short, anyone whose conduct was contrary to norms was liable to become the victim of witchcraft or to be accused of exercising witchcraft (p. 242). Only men could be witches, and only they could counter witchcraft. Most of the men accused of witchcraft were over 40 years old, because only they were considered to have an animal spirit powerful enough to cause harm. The curing ceremony was the setting for dramatizing witchcraft accusations. When someone got sick, the most powerful curers (pik k'abal) of the lineage were called in. As many as eight might be invited for a consultation. They divined the source of evil by feeling the pulse of the patient. The basic assumption was that the patient's illness was caused by some act of aggression on his part or some failure to fulfill obligations toward someone, who then provoked the illness. A child's illness was attributed to his parent's guilt. The diviners extracted a complete confession from the patient or his parents as liquor was served. Implicit in the questions framed by the diviners were the most common social violations and the most frequent role conflicts. Villa Rojas summarizes the conventional questions (p. 244), which I paraphrase here: Do you get on well with your husband (or wife)? Have you had any quarrels with your parents-in-law? Have you had any illicit sexual relations? Have you spread any intimate facts about your home in the neighborhood? Have you fulfilled your social obligations? Have you invited to family ceremonies all those whom you should by custom? Have you insulted or struck any friends? While irregular sexual relations were said to be the major cause of conflict (p. 98), other sources of conflict were related to the failure to fulfill norms of reciprocal gift giving. The marriage of a daughter involved repeated gifts of liquor, for as long as 30 years, to the son-in-law in exchange for the food and other offerings he had presented during bride service. Although the exact time of delivery was not specified, there was a generally accepted periodicity of from five to eight years. Failure to meet the obligation led one man to blame his father-in-law for the death of his children (p. 278). A great deal of friction occurred during the year of bride service. During this period, the son-in-law had to bring food to his parents-in-law on three occasions. At the end of the year he was expected to bring liquor, tortillas, eggs, and other gifts for a ceremony called mukul ha (the big drink). If the son-in-law let too much time elapse, it was believed that whatever children he had could be killed by the shamans of the girl's lineage (p. 202).

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Failure to present gifts on other occasions less standardized than these could also result in accusations of witchcraft. In one such case, a husband blamed the death of his wife in childbirth on witchcraft caused by his wife's brother. He felt that his brother-in-law was angered when he failed to give him the usual gift of five liters of liquor when he returned from the plantation where he had been working. Men who earned money on the plantations were usually careful to avoid the envy that motivates witchcraft by presenting gifts to a wide number of relatives and affines with whom they would come in contact on their return. Weddings and funerals were occasions for demonstrating the solidarity of the kinship network and for publicly denying violations of customary obligations. Parents of a couple getting married were careful to invite all of the powerful curers in both clans in order to avoid any ill feeling that might lead to witchcraft. After a death, relatives were eager to demonstrate their goodwill toward the dead man in order to avoid accusations of witchcraft. Recognizing this, the kin often suspected those who volunteered to dig the grave of having harbored ill will toward the dead man which contributed to his death (p. 451). The ultimate source of witchcraft was envy. People were careful not to show greater prosperity by a higher standard of living or even by a display of industriousness. Villa Rojas noted that, in addition to the cornfield sown with the help of the usual cooperative labor group of brothers or compadres, many people planted a small plot alone. He learned that they did this to avoid the witchcraft they might suffer if they sowed more than the 50-60 mazorcas (cobs of corn for seed) customarily planted, storing the corn from the additional plot in a place apart from their house to avoid prying eyes (p. 53). Also, people kept only the number of chickens they could raise without provoking witchcraft. The goods of a man who died without children had to be sold and the proceeds totally consumed in liquor served at his funeral; otherwise the benefactors would be subject to witchcraft. Failure to undertake community responsibilities made one vulnerable, since theprincipales were expected to use witchcraft against a man who refused to accept a public post. The rules for avoiding witchcraft were so standard that, if a person violated them, he was not given much sympathy. These rules can be inferred from Villa Rojas's excellent case materials, in which failure to observe them has resulted in conflict and sickness attributed to witchcraft: 1. Avoid occasioning envy. 2. Fulfill all obligations in reciprocal gift giving. 3. Invite all relatives to wedding and curing ceremonies. 4. Avoid contact with relatives with whom conflict is likely, such as parents-in-law, or limit contact to formal relationships.

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When it was felt that ill feelings had been aroused, people could avoid witchcraft by recourse to the ceremonial drinking session called pas be yo?tan (literally "to make the heart"). These sessions, motivated by fear, a desire to show respect, or general caution (p. 137), were a tactic to lessen the effects of witchcraft. Important diviners were often called upon to attend. The oldest diviner of the lineage prayed to the sun (chultatik) and earth (me^tik lum) to prevent conflict, accidents, and attack by nahuales who brought witchcraft. The Oxchukeflo was brought up to live defensively. The domination by elders in group relations was broken by two major avenues of escape. The first was to go to the fincas, both to escape the threat of witchcraft and to earn money. When a man returned from the fincas, he was expected, as I have said, to overcome envy by gifts of liquor. Even so, he was a target of criticism for violating the norms. Villa Rojas quotes one elder as criticizing a man in his lineage because "he was lacking in respect to his elders and careless of the norms of the group as a consequence of his long stay in the coffee fincas" (p. 347). The second alternative was conversion to Protestantism. Marianna Slocum, the first Protestant missionary, arrived in 1948 to live among the Indians and translate the Bible. She has summarized some of the repercussions of conversion on the rest of the social system (1956): 1. The prohibition of drinking, which had been indispensable in the payment of all obligations, reduced alcoholism and its "attendant evils." 2. Treatment of illness by modern medicines introduced by the missionaries reduced the control of the "shamans." 3. Power shifted to young Protestant leaders, who had prospered from the conversion. These men were able to spend the money they no longer spent on liquor in increasing their stocks of cattle and chickens without fear of witchcraft. I have spoken with some of the converts, now elders, who said that even before the advent of missionaries they had lost faith in the diagnosis and control of the diviners and were glad to be free of the old "superstitions" which bound them. Although the alternative of Protestantism came from outside, people embraced it because the old system failed to allow them to take advantage of new educational and economic opportunities. The prior breakdown of the solidarity of the lineage and the authority of the elders caused by movements within the township and to the plantations paved the way for conversion and modernization.

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SAN PEDRO C H E N A L H 0 Guiteras's (1961) study of the nearby community of San Pedro Chenalho reveals a similar weakening of the authority of the elders, accomplished in this case without the intervention of Protestantism. Like Oxchuk, San Pedro Chenalho is a free township with a settlement pattern of scattered parajes related to a ceremonial center. Groups called calpules were present as in Oxchuk, but the term was ambiguously applied to territorial groups, lineages defined by Indian surnames, and clans defined by Spanish surnames linking several Indian name-groups (p. 65). Guiteras states that the "official" use of the term was applied to the territorial groups, of which there were three — the Central, Southern, and Northern sections of the town. Marriage was preferentially within the calpul considered as a territorial unit and prescriptively outside of the Indian and Spanish surname group. Members of the calpul, called calpulal, held some communal land. Each calpul had sacred waterholes and crosses and was identified with one of the sacred mountains. The calpules were represented by principales, men who had served in the civil and religious hierarchy of the township. These men, of whom there were six in the Central and Southern calpules and five in the Northern, were called upon by members of the calpul to say prayers and to settle disputes. They were also responsible for organizing officials to carry out religious ceremonies. The ranked hierarchy of officials serving the township included a president, sindico, governor, two judges or alcaldes, two regidores, and five policemen. Men started their public career in civil office and alternated service in the religious hierarchy as mayordomos. They were charged with responsibility for the welfare of the people within the boundaries of the community and for relations with the outside world and with cosmic forces. They were expected to control the powers of nature ensuring the regular succession of days and seasons, the fertility of the soil, and the productivity of the harvest. They were also expected to protect the people against evil powers in the world and in their fellow men, warding off violence, envy, and illness (p. 78). The power of office holders came from their possession of a wayhel (animal spirit). The souls of both the office holder and his wife were believed to be heated (panwil), and this gave them the power to defend themselves and their fellow men from harm. The understanding that heat offered protective power was related to the heat of the sun and to the thunderbolt used by Anhel, the Mountain Owner, to destroy evil (pp. 217,235). The protective functions of the officials were dramatized in the rituals of entering and leaving office. Following their induction into office, they went to the hills near the villages in search of a laurel tree.

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Holding three twigs broken from the tree, each office holder prayed for success in carrying out his duties. The governor, president, and sindico prayed for the welfare of the town, while the judges prayed that no crime be committed. The regidores prayed for protection and for continuity of life so that all might continue as it was since the "beginning of the world" (p. 85). When they left office, a ritual of separation was performed to release them from the burden of responsibility they had assumed. The power they acquired in office was, however, cumulative, and their rise in the hierarchy was marked by a corresponding rise in their position and power in the community. Public office was both feared and desired. The fear stemmed from belief that the office holders' lives were endangered because they shielded all of the people from evil. Any slight mishap occurring to members of their families or to their animals was attributed to witchcraft. The desire to hold office stemmed from the high value placed on experience gained in office. Knowledge of the working of good and evil derived from serving in office was expressed in the phrase that those who have held office "see the world in a clearer light." Office holders were believed to be substitutes for the gods. The responsibility for the welfare of the people was expressed in prayers made by religious officials. There were three formal occasions when "masses for the cave" or for the Owner of the Mountain were held. The first occurred shortly after the new office holders entered service. The prayer makers called upon the sun, the Holy Earth, the Owners of the Mountains, and the patron saint to preserve and multiply life. At the second, held around the time for planting, they asked for care of the corn and for the health of the community and of their animals. The final one was held after harvest, when their work was considered done. Special prayer sessions were held when danger threatened the community. The sense of protection provided by the past and present officials was so strong that any misfortune was attributed to their failure to defend the people. In seeking arbitration of conflict, people appealed first to the parents of both parties, then to those past officials of the paraje who were elder kinsmen, and finally to the judges in the town center. Resort to departmental authorities outside of the community was made only when a ladino was involved. Arbitration was motivated by fear of illness resulting from ill feeling, and the local authorities made an effort to settle the basic grievance causing the dispute in addition to assigning damages. Ultimately, the society relied upon the individual's sense of protecting his own soul by observing social norms (p. 119). This was instilled by a process of socialization in which the individual was taught to fear the

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world about him. Guiteras's principal informant, Manuel, expressed this as follows (p. 87): "I was brought up in fright. A long time ago there was much danger; many evil creatures were about that didn't allow the babies to thrive. Children had to be reared as little chicks. If they went out to play, there was a bird like a great hawk that would carry them away." Sickness and death were taken as evidence of evil. Diseases, categorized according to their causes, were attributed to sorcery (cortar hora, "cut the hour"), object intrusion, loss of soul from fright, anger, and envy. When the sorcerer (tPbal, "devourer") set out to do harm, he could succeed only with the permission of his enemy's protector — his guardian saint or totilme7il (p. 135). A child suffered illness from his parents' sins. The eurer (?ilol) had to struggle against powerful forces to rescue the patient from the soul devourer, just as the totilme?il fought with evil forces in the mythological past. The curer's diagnosis, obtained by feeling the pulse, identified the man causing the illness. Although his anger might have been justified, he was called to the sick man's house to ask forgiveness of the Holy Earth. The term totilme'il was applied to all who guard others. Formerly it was public knowledge who these persons were, but at the time of Guiteras's stay, this endangered them and it was kept secret. In the old days, the totilme?il were invited to all celebrations and were accorded special honor (p. 263). Some Pedranos, such as Guiteras's informant Manuel, believed that the totilme?il had left the world after the War of the Castes in 1868 (p. 179). The totilme?il were a powerful calpul who encouraged the people to fight the ladinos and promised them that the Earth would come to their help. When it was "proved that they lied," they were discredited and lost their power in the community (p. 317). Although Manuel had been a eurer, he turned from this and called the curers mischief makers (p. 198). He preferred, he said, to protect himself with "fasting, prayer, and hard work" (p. 236). He tried to convince other Pedranos to free themselves from the curers and from the fears they invoked, but many still sought their care. The alternative to the old belief system and the practitioners who supported it in Chenalho was the introduction of Catholic practices by missionary priests in the '50's. Their efforts to overcome pre-Conquest beliefs, Manuel says, freed the people from fear. It is hard to judge from Guiteras's monograph how far the authority of the curers and officials had broken down. People relied on both the curing practices and the protection of the officials without having complete faith in the guardianship of the totilme?il. Without a strong alternative, people continued to seek aid from the old guardians even when they had lost faith.

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TZCPONTAHAL The settlement pattern of Tzo'ontahal contrasts withthat of Oxchuk in that the indigenous population is concentrated in the civil and religious center. The rural settlements (colonias) are settled by "foreign" Indians who were workers in the plantations expropriated by the Land Reform Act as well as by migrants from the town center. The town is situated just a few yards from the Pan-American Highway and only three miles from the ladino community of Teopisca. Despite this proximity to the currents of change, Tzo?ontahal residents maintain a strong insulation from external influences, particularly in the area of social control. Tzo'ontahal center, when I studied it from 1957 to 1967, was divided into two endogamous barrios, or wards, called Upper (Ahk'olnantik) and Lower (Alannantik). The term calpul was not used in reference to them, but some of the features of leadership found in Oxchuk applied to them. There was a balance of officials from each of the divisions in the civil and religious hierarchies, with the single post of president ideally alternating between representatives of one or the other. Two principales, men who had filled five offices in the civil hierarchy and six in the religious, represented each of the two barrios. These men had lost the authority they once exercised. Their official duties in the town hall were ceremonial and consisted in symbolic acts stressing the continuity of authority, such as passing on the staffs of office in the New Year's ceremony marking the change of yearly posts and blessing the liquor served in the ceremonies held in the town hall. The civil hierarchy was linked to the religious hierarchy by the alternation of officials between these posts. Up until 1967, four alfereces, or captains in charge of the major religious fiestas for the four patron saints, served as ceremonial intermediaries, bearing the sacred banners representing the saints from the church to the town hall and back to the church. Because of the expense (an outlay of 3,000 pesos) and because of the fear of witchcraft directed against the incumbents, men refused this office and had to be coerced by the senior officials. In 1966, the last year that alfereces served, all four were recruited from one side of the dual division, in which there was an expanding population. This created an imbalance in the representation of the dual divisions and hastened the demise of the institution in the following year. The loss will probably undermine the tradition of prayer making, since it was in that post that men learned the greetings and prayers before passing to the higher posts of regidor and alcalde. The civil and religious officials were believed to act out, as they said in prayer, "that which our fathers did and our mothers did here before the

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eyes of our ancestors." Ancestors were called me^tiktatik. They were believed to live in a cave on a hill from which they could look out over the town and guard it against the entry of evil, brought by the swayohel (animal spirit) of the ak'camel (witch, literally "giver of sickness"). Their direct intermediaries were the curers, whose animal spirits watched over the village at night. A s curers, these men were referred to as u?ul (seer), but as guardians of their side of the dual division they were called me^iltatil. The prefixes m e ' and tat reveal their relationship to the ancestors and other guardian figures. The principales and the alcaldes, who were also referred to as me'iltatil, were charged with watching over the curers to see that their power was not used for evil. The system was one of checks and balances operating to protect the community against the powers of evil. The term me'iltatil was also applied to the bilaterally extended group of relatives who gathered together for house ceremonials connected with baptism, marriage, and death. Like the other groups so designated, this one functioned as guardian, but in this case it was the individual person who was the focus. The composition of the group differed for each individual and for each life cycle ceremonial through which he passed, although there was a common core of members. Thus he might acquire different godparents for his marriage from those he had acquired at baptism, but the core of elders in his mother's and father's families would remain the same. The me?iltatil of baptism were expected to attend his funeral, and those who had assembled for his marriage were called together if there were a crisis of separation between him and his wife. This system of security operated at three levels: the principales and judges guarding the community, the curers guarding the side of the dual division in which they lived and worked, and the core of bilateral relatives guarding the individual. Overlooking the guardians were the ancestors on their hilltop. When their guardianship failed and evil entered in the form of sickness, the curers dealt directly with it by divining who had caused it. The theory was that blood of the patient "speaks" (ya sk'oplal) to the blood of the eurer, who can " h e a r " or " f e e l " (both yah s^awai) the message. The eurer held the pulse of the patient at the wrist, temple, or bend of the elbow or knee with his thumb so that his soul entered into communication with the patient's soul. While holding the pulse, he questioned the patient about any recent conflicts he had had. The pulse jumped when the patient mentioned the name of the person guilty of the witchcraft. Local curers never mentioned the name of the suspected witch in public, but they could be plied with liquor to reveal it. The assumptions underlying divination in Tzo'ontahal differed from those in Oxchuk. It was not the patient himself who was considered guilty,

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but rather some member of the household or neighborhood group. The outer limits of effective witchcraft were said to be the boundaries of the dual division rather than the consanguineal kinship group, and I never knew anyone outside of the dual division to be accused of witchcraft. The curers were supposed to be chosen from the same side of the dual division as the patient. Only the eldest leading eurer and the single female eurer always remained on their own side, however. Sometimes the family would consult with out-of-town curers, either to confirm the diagnosis by the local eurer or to discover who was doing the witchcraft if he refused to name anyone. After every burial, the male relatives of the deceased gathered near the grave to discuss who had caused the illness. Liquor was passed around and the evidence reviewed concerning the conflicts the deceased had had with kin or neighbors. Consultations with the diviners were discussed, both to demonstrate that the deceased's family had done everything possible to overcome the witchcraft and to weigh contradictions. During my stay, these sessions were a kind of trial leading to the execution of the suspected witch. When a man was killed as a witch, everyone listened to the reaction of his widow to see if she supported the verdict. At midnight, during his wake, she sang of his life over his body. If she was convinced of his innocence, she would broadcast her case, trying to stir up vengeance. The breakdown of a supernaturally sanctioned system of security controlled by authorities who were validated by the community can be traced in a series of events occurring in the last 30 years. These events caused a significant reformulation of attitudes about local officials and the roles they played within the community and with national and regional government agencies. The trend undermined the old beliefs and the officials who acted in terms of them. The first break came when "foreign" Indians began to get the revolutionary gains of land under the Reform Act — and the power that went with it. In 1935, a Huixtecan Indian who had worked on a finca within the township organized a group of Indians to demand ejido grants. On the basis of his success, he was elected president. In the first year of his term, the principales were in accord with him, but in the following year he "tried to control the people of the town," according to local informants. The residents of the town center particularly objected when he tried to get house lots in the center of town for families from the rural barrio in which he lived. The principales and the judges went with the police to seize him and the arms he and his supporters held. He was forced to repay money they said he had extorted from local residents for ejido land, and then he was exiled from town. The incident was a victory for the traditional authority, but the process of politicization had begun. Indians

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had become aware of the gains to be made in civil offices and from the national government. The second crisis occurred when a leading eurer was elected president in 1942. During his term of office, he shot a man who had accused him of being a witch. The judges ordered him put in prison. On the third day after his arrest, the assembled civil officials "took his heart," or questioned him, and then sent him to the departmental capital. The people did not trust the ability of the first regidor, who had been made president, to overcome the destructive power of the eurer, acting through his colleagues who remained in the town. All of the curers were called to the town hall, and in a drinking session with the civil officials it was decided to imprison three men suspected of being agents of the imprisoned eurer. The effect of this event was to upset a balance of power and thus undermine the position of the curers. The principales and alcaldes proved unable to command respect in the very kind of dispute for which their age and experience should have qualified them. Even more disturbing to them than this, however, was the fact that the curers could not control one of their own. A third event was the entry of political parties into the community. Up until 1950, the township ran a single candidate for president in an uncontested election. Literacy and the alternation of the post between the two sides were the only conditions imposed on candidates for the presidency. In the first contested election, the candidate who had acquired the backing of the Partido Accion Nacional (PAN), the opposition party nationwide, was opposed by a man from the other side who had secured the backing of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the government party. The contest was cast in terms of the traditional opposition between the two sides of the dual division. Later, in 1964, backing of the political parties was sought in a contest between competing economic factions based on ownership of trucking cooperatives. This time support was no longer split along the lines of the dual division, but followed membership in cooperatives, and this cut across the old lines of cleavage. These events mark the shift from a traditional rule by elders, whose position was validated by age and experience, to rule by young literate men interested in the economic advantages to be gained by entering into the regional economy and the national polity. Conflict was still related to local rather than national issues, but the idiom in which it was expressed had changed. Power was held by younger literate men, and the principales had only ceremonial functions. Their diminishing importance meant that no one could act as watchdogs over the curers to see that they acted in the interest of the people rather than causing harm.

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In the same period, control within the curing hierarchy was breaking down. Just as in the case of the civil authority, the curing hierarchy had been structured along lines of the dual division. Each side had a leading eurer, who was the oldest and most respected member of the profession. Other curers were ranked on the basis of age, with two major levels, itz'inil (junior eurer) and bankilal ^u^ul (senior eurer). Entry into the profession was controlled by the group as a whole, which was able to see who had an animal soul. The elder curers would call the novice to a meeting in the town hall on the occasion of a consultation about a widespread contagious disease. In order to be accepted, he was expected to contribute the soul of one of his children or that of a sibling. (Whether he ever performed the witchcraft required for this I do not know; it is more likely that he would claim as a sacrifice some recent death in his extended family.) The group of curers exerted control over any member who abused his power. A change in the kind of person recruited into the hierarchy came with the incident just described in which a eurer became president. In the following decades, the curers lost the position of respect they had enjoyed in the town. The marked change in attitude toward the curers during the period can be seen in changes in the treatment for contagious diseases between my two visits to the town in 1957 and 1967. Curers were considered responsible for keeping out the devil (Pukuh), who brought the "heat" (k'ahk') which caused death in the case of contagious diseases. In the old days, the leading curers from each side of the dual division would consult together in private and then advise the civil officials that they had taken care of the illness. The disease would abate and the fears along with it. During my stay in 1957, all the curers were called before the assembled civil officials. They would drink agarrafon (18 liters) of liquor while they consulted as to who had brought in the heat and where it was buried. They would then go with the civil officials and dig it up. In all three cases I recorded, they found a charcoal burner with candles. One of the curers would carry it to the Cave of the Star and dump it. Suspicion was directed against the curers themselves. In two cases, one of the curers was found dead the following day. The assumption was that the neighbors of the victim had killed him on the advice of the leading eurer. In the last session that I recorded in April 1967, the eldest eurer stayed in the town hall after the others had left. The civil officials plied him with more and more liquor until he yielded the names of three members of the profession in disrepute. (There were only eight remaining of the twelve who had been active when I first went to the town in 1957.) Nothing was done immediately, because there was some doubt about the verdict, but in subsequent drinking sessions neighbors of the three named would press

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them to tell what they had done. The youngest of these boasted that he knew who the next victims would be and named the streets where there would be deaths in the next few weeks. He was soon killed, and the other two fled, one to hot country and the other to the neighboring town, where he has continued to practice. Once he was beyond the borders of the community, he was no longer a threat to the members and they no longer pursued him. The lessening of respect for curers displayed here coincided with a loss in belief that the ancestors still lived in the cave overlooking the town. In 1956, during the celebration at the cave of the ancestors on the Day of the Cross, a youth challenged the curers' assertion that they spoke to the ancestors when they entered the cave. He went in with them, and saw no one. The curers told him, "Now you know the truth. Don't tell the people when you go outside." He did, however, and his account was often repeated as evidence of the chicanery of the old curers. This was but one of a series of occurrences discrediting the curers. The relationship between the civil authorities and the curers had been shifting from one of a balance of power between equals to one in which the civil authorities were actively working to restrict the power of the curers. In 1950 the civil authority took the first positive move against a eurer. The judges, president, and regidores heard the evidence presented that this eurer had used witchcraft to cause the death of a child, and they concluded that he was guilty. They locked him in the local jail. That evening the policemen released him and told him they were taking him to the jail in the departmental capital. As they walked on the road, the accuser met them and asked them all to have a drink. When the eurer was drunk, his accuser killed him and chopped up his body into 122 pieces, which he put in a cave. The following day, the curer's widow asked the president where he was, and the president replied that he must have escaped to hot country. My informant commented that, from that time on, the town began to improve because people were no longer afraid of the curers. As communication increased with nearby ladino communities following the construction of the Pan-American Highway, law-enforcing agents came into the town more frequently. Civil officials tended to reject the responsibility for sponsoring executions of witches in this manner. Individuals who felt themselves or their families to be victims of witchcraft once again felt forced to defend themselves against the witches. Sometimes this meant killing them. When this was the intent, the killer first tried to stir up consensus by spreading stories about the accused witch. Then, usually with the help of three or four men, he would attack the victim when he was drunk or alone and unprepared. In an analysis of

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37 of 63 homicides occurring between 1935 and 1965,1 found that eight of the victims had been curers. None of the slayers in all these cases was ever brought to justice. Curers were sometimes beaten, and about five have fled in the past ten years in fear of being killed. The monopoly of the curers had been broken, and along with it their control over each other's behavior. When respect and prestige were lost, the curers tried to reassert their control by inspiring fear. One eurer boasted that he and his colleagues ate the souls of the patients they were called upon to cure — that they fried the souls and in a common meal consumed them when they were "well-cooked." Such reports showed a change in the image of the curers held by the people as well as the curers' changing self-conception. Their aggressive show of bravado masked a paranoic fear of everyone and everything in their environment. I noticed this in the soliloquy of a young eurer whom I interviewed. He never answered questions, but preferred to speak directly to the tape recorder. An excerpt is as follows: And when I arrive at Pahalton (curing spring), I set aside my hat and blanket so that it does not get burned. If a dog should come and chew my sandals o r if I should leave them outside the house where I am curing and a house rat chews them, then it will cost me 80 pesos to buy a new pair. When I come late at night, a cat spirit sometimes appears on the road and I throw a stone at it so it will not carry off my spirit, or a dog comes and I must beat him with my hand because I have no machete with me, or I must throw a broken bottle at the devil. When I get home, I take off my jacket and hat and go to sleep. My woman must tie up the sandals with a string on the rafter so that the rats will not get them. Then it is the woman's fault if the devil dog gets them. Late at night the spirits of the curers come to play and go at cock's crow. A n d at 2 o'clock the spirit of a sheep comes out with the devil and these spirits do not go to sleep in their house until dawn. A n d if they [the curers] arrive in bed drunk and take off their sandals and bother their wife, she will put them in prison and then they have to pay a fine of two liters of the " g i f t " [liquor] and one handful of cigarettes. If their woman leaves the curers and they come out of prison, then if they do the same thing again, they send them back to Santo Domingo [the prison]. In prison they make net bags and if they have a wife, she goes and gives them tortillas and coffee. If their wife or father and mother help and give money, then they can pay for a lawyer and get out. O r if they have a daughter, then they receive the gift of a suitor and eat the bread. Later there will come the chicken and sweet liquor and trago, and then she will marry.

His soliloquy was a fantasy of defeat which was realized two years later when he was killed as a witch after boasting of his powers as recounted above. His outlook contrasts with that of the one remaining leading eurer, who is sure that his power comes from God and that his invocations of the saints, the Holy Earth, and the Lord can control the evil he exorcises from his patients. In the contrast between the self-image of these two

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generations of curers is reflected the 20 years of growing disillusionment of the people with traditional authority.

SAN A N D R E S L A R R A I N Z A R The settlement pattern of San Andres Larrainzar, a Tzotzil-speaking aldea of the township of Chamula bordering Chenalho, is one of scattered parajes. Each paraje tended to be settled by lineages organized into exogamous patrisibs, but the correlation between kinship and territory was breaking down at the time of Holland's study (1963:52) because of parcelization of plots held by the patrisibs (p. 103). Spirits of each of the patrisibs, called totilme^il, were believed to live in a sacred mountain associated with each of the parajes (p. 110). The Indians of the neighboring Tzotzil-speaking town of Chamula were strongest in their resistance to external social control. This seems related to their leading position in the intermittent Caste Wars from 1847 to 1901. In 1867, two Chamultecos made an idol that was reputed to be able to talk. The idol's Indian interpreter, Pedro Diaz Cuzcat, a leading eurer of Chamula, interpreted his words to mean that the ladinos would be expelled from the town and that the Indians should no longer venerate their strange idols. In a literal interpretation of the lesson of the Scriptures learned from their Christian oppressors, the Indians decided that they could succeed only if they had an Indian savior. They selected a boy 18 years of age, Domingo Gomez Checheb, to become the Indian successor to Christ, and on G o o d Friday of 1868 they crucified him. In the following year, a priest and his companions were killed by a thousand Indians, who proceeded to kill all the whites in the area. Guerrilla warfare continued until 1870 and was not totally suppressed until the turn of the century. During Holland's study, the top ranks of civil and religious office holders included curers. The world of spirits and their intermediaries formed a rigid hierarchy conforming to the hierarchy of the cosmos. Heaven was believed to be divided into 13 levels. San Andres, the patron saint, was at the pinnacle. He determined the length of life of each individual, animal, plant and acted as a protector when danger threatened. Following him in order of importance were the gods of heaven, the gods of the world and of the four cardinal points, the gods of the earth, the gods of the lower world, and the gods of the lineage and ancestors. Appeals were made to the gods in order of their importance, and punishment was meted out from higher to lower. The association between a man and his animal spirit (waiyijel) was

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strong. Principales, curers, and high authorities had as animal spirits the jaguar, puma, and coyote. More important men, among them lineage elders, had more than one spirit. The principales might have up to 13 (a figure corresponding to the 13 levels of heaven). The animal spirits of the curers and principales were calledpetometik (embracers) and kuchometik (bearers), suggesting their role as guardians. As a group they were called the totilme^iletik (fathers and mothers), showing their link with the ancestors. The animal spirits formed a hierarchy conforming to that of the elite they represented in the community. The gods of the lineage and the ancestral gods had collective responsibility for social control within the group. The lineage gods reported to the deities of their hierarchy the sins committed by the group. If the sin was grave, the deities consulted important figures up to and including Jesus Christ, who was equated with the sun god. They chose an adequate penalty, and the order to carry it out descended in the line of divine command until it arrived at the gods of the lineage, who were expected to carry it out. They called upon the animal spirits of the offenders to receive their punishment. Holland writes (p. 132): "The system of government of the world of the spirits reinforces that of the Tzotzil societies; many Indians live in constant fear of punishment of magical origin in their conduct. Evil conduct which can escape the attention of human societies can be met more severely in the world of the spirits." Sickness, attributed to bad conduct, was the constant reminder of the power of these spiritual guardians. When there was an epidemic, the most powerful principales went to the highest points of the sacred mountains, where their animal spirits would wrestle with the spirits that were causing harm. The curers (?ilol) received notice of their calling in a dream sent by the ancestral gods, who revealed their animal spirits and taught them the curing rites and prayers. The curers occupied a temporal hierarchy paralleling that of the spiritual hierarchy of their animal spirits. This rank order was believed to occupy ascending niches in the sacred mountains of the ancestors. These mountains had 13 levels, corresponding to those of the heavens. At the peak of this hierarchy were the me^santo, the direct intermediaries with the gods. These were full-time curers who received gifts for their curing and divining. Below them was a group of senior curers (bankilal ?ilol) who shared respect and prestige with the me^santo and the principales. Those who knew less — who could cure fewer illnesses, practiced fewer magical rituals, and dedicated less time to their profession — were junior curers its'inal tzabak). The civil-religious hierarchy of ranked posts paralleled the curing hierarchy. Men could rise simultaneously in both hierarchies with the power gained in either.

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The power to destroy was equated with the power to cure. This had important consequences for the position of the eurer, who was often accused of witchcraft. In order to use this power legitimately, the curers had to call upon the gods of the heavens, the gods of the lineage, and the gods of the earth. Invoking these deities justified the acts of sorcery used by the elders as social control. When the power to do evil originated in the devil, the sorcery was not justified, and the sorcerer was liable to be killed. Such evildoers were said to be the offspring of women seduced by the devil. In the curing ceremony, the curers dramatized the conflict that brought about the illness and reestablished the social equilibrium. Their questions to the patient were aimed at determining the etiology of the disease, from which flowed the cure. Some of these, along with the diagnosis, are paraphrased from Holland's text: Have you fallen? (soul loss because of fright suspected); Have you "talked with" someone? ("talked with" being a euphemism for sexual relations, witchcraft resulting from envy suspected); Do you have any enemies? (sorcery, the most severe form of witchcraft, suspected). In the questioning sessions, the patient was encouraged to confess his sins so that the source of the illness could be discovered and the cure effected. The important thing was to eliminate the cause. The power of the eurer was measured by the ability of his animal spirit to wrestle with the animal spirit of whoever was causing harm. One technique to liberate the soul of the patient was to pass a chicken over his body in the form of a cross, calling upon the gods of the underworld to accept the soul of the chicken in exchange for that of the patient. In all the cases mentioned in Holland's monograph, those who occupied positions of power were curers. Sometimes, when accused of sorcery, curers performed a curing ceremony, calling upon the gods to protect their animal spirits and bring harm to those of the enemy. The struggle was not completely confined to the spiritual level, however. Men suspected of causing more than one death by sorcery were killed, and in the cases recorded by Holland (pp. 144-146) they were curers. What appears to have been happening here, as elsewhere in the Chiapas highlands, is a breakdown of the authority of the curing hierarchy and an attack on their use of sorcery for social control. Competition between powerful elders was endemic and was continuously being worked out in spiritual combat of their animal spirits to establish primacy. Holland concludes (p. 247), "The cult of the ancestors and the concepts about sickness that are engendered, function to maintain the social and cultural integration of the traditional Tzotzil life." This conclusion obscures the growing conflicts within the traditional society of which the witchhunt is

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the overt expression. The syncretism Holland notes between modern and traditional medicine masks a developing conflict. So long as the etiology of disease is based on indigenous diagnostic principles, curers may retain their power; but that appears to be rather frequently challenged. Of patients interviewed by Kennedy at the Chamula clinic, 49 percent had come directly to the clinics without previous consultation with a eurer. As the prestige of the curers is threatened, they are not likely to accept it passively.

PINOLA In all of the communities so far described, Indians have been a majority controlling local government. In Pinola, they are a minority, living on the margins of the community in rural hamlets. Ladinos have always dominated civil positions, and over 30 years ago the Indians gave up their religious hierarchy. Lacking a governing body of their own, they developed a system of social control operating entirely at the conceptual level. In her fascinating and insightful thesis, Hermitte (1964) describes a belief system in which disease, attributed to the agency of powerful old men acting as intermediaries with the spiritual ancestors, sustained the traditional system of social control. The Tzeltal-speaking Pinoltecos referred to the ancestor guardians as the me^iltatil. The world of spirits and of humans was divided in halves, each section of which was subdivided into vaguely bounded quarters. Both the supernatural and the residential communities were defined spatially. Witchcraft was limited to the side of the dual division rather than.the lineage. Human guardians, whose identity was often disputed, reported transgressions to the spiritual government of me?iltatil, who made decisions as to what form of illness the punishment should take. These intermediaries did not form a council; their concerted action took place exclusively at a supernatural level. Hermitte (1964:198) describes the operation of this spiritual world as follows: Indian formal authorities whose responsibility might have been the application of sanctions have disappeared, i.e., the religious hierarchy; or they are, at present, completely subordinated to Ladino municipal officials, i.e., the civil hierarchy. The Indians are not granted the right to govern themselves, nor do they form a moral community with the Ladino village. . . . These factors have produced an interacting phenomenon, that of "moving up" the council of elders to a metaphysical level but with structure and functions similar to those of the traditional Indian bodies of officials. This supernatural government — which has no correspondence with any group at an earthly level — consists of a President, a Secretary, a Judge and several policemen. But nobody knows who they are.

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This supernatural hierarchy was geared to the operations of the human ladino hierarchy. The dates of election and assumption of office coincided with those for the municipality. Those who were believed to be guardians, or human representatives of the me'iltatil, while not a clearly defined group, reinforced the image by recounting dreams of flying high, making threats to evildoers, or chewing live coals—exploits which are the criteria of the power of the me'iltatil. Disease was the only form of social sanction operating to maintain the Indian system of norms and values. The presence of disease confirmed the persistence of ancestral control so long as the belief in the roots of sickness in witchcraft persisted. The curers, who were the intermediaries between the supernatural and human worlds, kept this belief alive. They were considered to be members of the supernatural government, which they joined through their animal spirits. The status of a eurer depended on his age and his reputation as a protector and eurer and on the number and power of his animal spirits. As the eurer gained power, others in his residential area were believed to gain protection. The eurer received his (or her, since women could become curers) calling in a dream in which the Virgin, the saints, or the ancestral spirits announced it. In subsequent dreams they were told what kinds of medicines to use and how to prognosticate a patient's fate. While all people were believed to have animal spirits, the animal spirits of the guardian curers differed in kind. The most powerful spirits were those of high-flying birds. The most powerful curers had 13 animal spirits. Additional power was believed to be derived from eating the soul of a child, but only those reputed to be witches acquired power in this way. The highest-flying spiritual guardians were believed able to see farther and know more. They recruited the future generations of guardians for the Indian community. The eurer had to secure the permission of the supernatural government of me?iltatil to treat a patient. If the me'iltatil had given permission to the witch to cause the illness initially, they would not grant the curers the permission to cure. The curers' questions to their patients revealed the basic assumptions concerning the etiology of illness: Have you offended someone? Have you quarreled? Have you refused help to anyone? While asking these questions, the curers felt the patient's pulse as an aid to diagnosis, since they could discern, by the response of the pulse, the areas of emotionally charged issues and personalities. Since the eurer had to plead the case with the me?iltatil before he undertook the cure, his relation to the patient was more that of advocate than that of physician. The list of reasons given for the onset of illness is a sensitive index of the behavior considered to be morally reprehensible: economic success, 13 cases; failure to fulfill reciprocal obligations, 8 cases; imitation of ladinos,

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5 cases; lack of respect for elders, 5 cases; refusal to marry, 4 cases; stealing good spirits, 4 cases; attempt to get back wife, 2 cases; sanctions against eurer, 2 cases; violation of rules of residence, trespassing of supernatural sections, envy, 1 case each. The etiology of illness here is related to more direct infringement of social conventions than in the other communities analyzed. Since the Indians in Pinola had no courthouse in which to try cases according to indigenous custom, the disease and curing syndrome carried the major responsibility for social control. Having determined the cause of the illness and communicated with the me?iltatil to get permission to cure, the eurer then had to convince the witch to withdraw the illness. The eurer was given instructions on how to handle the case through his dreams. The use of witchcraft to punish someone who violated the norms was also legitimized by the permission of the me'iltatil. They themselves bewitched anyone who did not obey the elders or who was too close to the customs of the ladinos. In 53 cases of witchcraft reviewed by Hermitte (1964:92) the following categories were accused: me ? iltatil, 11; affinals, 9; neighbors, 3; brother, compadre, husband, wife, foreigner, 1 each; situational, 1; unknown, 17. As indicated by the frequencies of human antagonists, the tensions seem to be concentrated among affinals rather than consanguineals. The absence of extended-family networks in lineages or patrisibs reduced the number of obligations in consanguineal lines and hence the antagonisms resulting from failure to fulfill them. Witch killing was on the increase during Hermitte's stay (p. 97). In the old days, the curers used to make public the name of the witch. If he denied his guilt, he was beaten until he confessed. At the time of Hermitte's stay, the names were not revealed. Lacking a public hearing and punishment, individuals sought their own means of taking vengeance on a witch. Homicide was considered a justifiable execution when the victim of the witchcraft had not violated the moral code of the Indian community. Those accused of witchcraft were most often people who boasted of their power. Wealth did not seem to be an important criterion as it was in Larrainzar, where the poor were said to be more likely to cause witchcraft out of envy. This reinforces Hermitte's thesis that witchcraft was a means of preserving the Indian community intact against ladino encroachment and acculturation, a conclusion further supported by the fact that imitating ladinos was a crime punishable by witchcraft performed by the ancestors. This supernatural world of authority and social control was unknown to the ladinos. Hermitte points out that "By 'moving up' it [the supernatural hierarchy] has succeeded in 'going underground'" (p. 238). It was a more extreme variation of the subversive forms of indigenous government of

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the other communities described. In these other communities, control by a supernatural authority was retained in human agents whose identity was concealed from extracommunal authorities by the facade of officers following a colonial model. It is possible that the Pinola system, by its adaptive response to ladino domination within the community of "going up" — constructing a fantasy supernatural — will have a better chance of surviving than that of the other Indian communities, where the hierarchy was open to insiders. It was an ingenious adaptation for cultural survival in a world where the Indians had no temporal power.

CONCLUSION Witchcraft beliefs served to maintain an equilibrium based on the authority of elders controlling supernatural powers in corporate Indian communities during the colonial period and up until recent decades. In the old system, institutionalized envy expressed in witchcraft accusations prevented the formation of classes (Wolf 1957). The apparent democracy of elected officials serving an annual cycle concealed the polarization of power acquired by age and passage through the civil and religious posts that validated the position of the elders. The conflict that has erupted in the witchhunt reveals the structural opposition between aged leaders relying on internal control systems and young ones orienting to regional and national institutions. Traces of the old system of a witchcraftdominated society conforming to the model given in the introduction are still found in these communities. In all of them, however, there is discontent with the rule by elders who prevent individuals from taking advantage of new opportunities offered by outside institutions. The developmental cycle in witchcraft beliefs from social control to a focus for internal conflicts has local variations. Oxchukefios escaped the fear of opposing the elders by converting to the alternative belief system offered by Protestantism, and the old practitioners of curing and divination were ignored as people flocked to the new faith. In San Pedro Chenalho, the people had lost faith in the guardianship of the elders, but continued to turn to them to fight the evil powers they still feared. In Tzo ? ontahal, witchcraft beliefs were turned against the intermediaries themselves when the hierarchy of curers controlling their practices was destroyed. The witchhunt came about as the loss of elder-based leadership in the civil hierarchy threatened the balance of power between civil authorities and curers. This coincided with the increasing gains to be made in relating to the national government as land reform and other programs became a reality. Defensive attitudes against the central

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government were increasingly overcome as the nation responded to community interests. Town leaders reached out to political allies, rather than, as in Oxchuk, to religious sects, for an alternative to what was increasingly felt to be a repressive system. In San Andres Larrainzar, curers retained their control over people because of the persistent belief in the witchcraft basis for disease, but they were increasingly challenged. Many townspeople preferred the modern clinical cures dispensed by the Instituto Nacional Indigenista, and curers increasingly became the target of accusations of causing witchcraft rather than curing it. In Pinola, the conflict was continued within the colonial paradigm of ladino/Indian hostility, and the supernatural hierarchy of Indian civil authorities was a defense against the dominant group. Significantly, it was only in Pinola that the sin of imitating ladinos was explicitly mentioned as a basis for witchcraft. In all the Chiapas communities reviewed, we see the same elements of a witchcraft-based social control model changing in kaleidoscope fashion under the pressure of national and regional changes. The very power attributed to the curers for curing witchcraft caused by others made them the target of witchcraft charges as their authority to practice was brought into question. In those communities which had kinship-ordered parajes as the basis for institutionalizing witchcraft and its control, such as Oxchuk, Chenalho, and San Andres Larrainzar, the breakdown in kinship control over land hastened the loss of security in the elders who acted as curers. In Tzo'ontahal, the shift from a kin group to a dual division in which authority and control by the curers was confined and controlled had already been achieved, but this basis for authority was also threatened as the principle of alternating authority in the dual division was upset in the civil authority. In Pinola, the territorial base for the supernatural hierarchy was an effective base for defining protection and control. The internal restructuring of these communities reveals the efforts made by the Indian populations to adapt to the changes brought about by increasing involvement in the life of the nation. The confrontation between traditional and modern that has absorbed the interest of social scientists has often ignored the contradictions developing within the traditional society even when it is not in direct contact with modernizing sectors. It is, however, on these internal confrontations that change depends. The insights and advances gained by the group in working through an internal conflict such as I have described reveal the potential for change initiated by people themselves. This is often ignored by the agents and analysts of development, who attribute the initiative for change to the dominant group.

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What seems to have been happening in these societies is a struggle for power between those who perceive some of the personal and social advantages to be gained in the wider society and an existing power structure dominated by elders who control others through their claims to supernatural power. An indigenous form of social sanction, the witchhunt, is the overt form this has taken in most of the villages studied, except that the former control agents in the witchcraft are now the targets. Conversion to Protestantism or entry into a political party is not the cause of the break, but merely the means by which the people advertise their rejection of the old control hierarchy. The change required not a single event, but a series of events interpreted in such a way as to promote a restructuring of the local society. So long as a society has some control over its own destiny, these self-generated adaptive changes are possible.

NOTES 1. See Marwick's review of recent historical and anthropological contributions to the study of witchcraft (1972), which points out that contemporary historical analysis puts greater emphasis on the potential for bringing about change than do the anthropologists. 2. Lab is a classification of night-prowling animals. Since the nahwal roams at night, it is considered to be part of this classification.

REFERENCES CITED 1 9 6 2 . Highland Chiapas before the Spanish conquest. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, Chicago, 111. DOUGLAS, MARY. 1963. The Lele of the Kasai. London: For the International African Institute. EVANS-PRITCHARD, Ε . E . 1 9 3 7 . Witchcraft and magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press. GLUCKMAN, M A X . 1 9 6 8 . Psychological, sociological, and anthropological explanations of witchcraft and gossip: A clarification. Man 3 : 1 9 - 3 4 . GUITERAS HOLMES, CALIXTA. 1 9 6 1 . Perils of the soul: The world view of a Tzotzil Indian. Glencoe: Free Press. HERMITTE, ESTHER M. 1964. Supernatural power and social control in a modern Maya village. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, Chicago, 111. H O L L A N D , WILLIAM R . 1 9 6 3 . Medicina maya en los altos de Chiapas: Un estudio del cambio socio-cultural. Mexico: Instituto Nacional Indigenista. KENNEDY, JOHN G. 1967. Psychological and social explanations of witchcraft. Man 2 : 2 1 6 - 2 2 5 . KLUCKHOHN, CLYDE. 1944. Navaho witchcraft. Boston: Beacon Press. CALNEK, E D W A R D E .

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The religions of the oppressed: A study of modern messianic cults. London: MacGibbon and Kee. MARWICK, Μ . 1 9 6 5 . Sorcery in its social setting: A study of the Northern Rhodesian Cewa. Manchester: Manchester University Press. . 1972. Anthropologists' declining productivity in the sociology of witchcraft. American Anthropologist 74:379-385. N A D E L , S . F . 1 9 5 2 . Witchcraft in four African societies: An essay in comparison. American Anthropologist 54:18-29. N A S H , J U N E . 1 9 7 0 . In the eyes of the ancestors: Belief and behavior in a Maya community. New Haven: Yale University Press. N U N E Z DE LA VEGA, FRANCISCO. 1 7 0 2 . Constituciones diocesanas del obispado de Chiapas. Rome: Imprenta de Caretano. PARKIN, DAVID. 1 9 6 8 . Medicines and men of influence. Man 3 : 4 2 4 - 4 3 9 . SIVERTS, H E N N I N G . 1 9 6 0 . "Political organization in a Tzeltal community in Chiapas, Mexico," in The social anthropology of Middle America. Edited by C. M. Leslie. Alpha Kappa Deltan 3 0 : 1 4 - 2 8 . SLOCUM, MARIANNA. 1956. "Cultural changes among the Oxchuc Tzeltals," in Estudios antropolögicos publicados en homenaje al Doctor Manuel Gamio. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. VILLA ROJAS, ALFONSO. 1946. Field notes, Oxchuk. Microfilm Collection of Manuscripts on Middle American Cultural Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries. . 1947. Kinship and nagualism in a Tzeltal community. American Anthropologist 49:578-587. WHITING, BEATRICE B . 1 9 5 0 . Paiute sorcery. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology 15. W I L S O N , MONICA. 1 9 5 1 . Witch beliefs and social structure. American Journal of Sociology 5 6 : 3 0 7 - 3 1 3 . W O L F , ERIC. 1 9 5 7 . Closed corporate peasant communities in Meso-America and central Java. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 13:11-15. LANTERNARI, VITTORIO. 1 9 6 3 .

MICHAEL SALOVESH

Looking Beyond the Municipio in Chiapas: Problems and Prospects in Studying Up 1

MUNICIPIOS, STUDYING DOWN, AND STUDYING UP IN CHIAPAS Sol Tax's 1937 article "The Municipios of the Midwestern Highlands of Guatemala" is one of the most-cited works in Mesoamerican anthropology. It has strongly influenced research in linguistics and archaeology, as well as all branches of social and cultural anthropology, in the area. The fundamental point of the article (Tax 1937:425, italics mine) is that it is possible to isolate — quickly and certainly — groups of people who do represent, without question, social and cultural units; and it is possible to name and define their type of organization and to describe their respective cultures. The people of Guatemala live in municipios which are territorial administrative divisions commonly recognized in all governmental matters, but which are also as it happens — the basic ethnic divisions and cultural groups into which the country is divided. . . . Studies in the ethnology of Guatemala must begin with studies of the cultures of individual municipios.

What Tax summarized for Guatemala is equally significant for many parts of Mexico. Indian municipios in Guatemala have their direct counterparts in highland Chiapas, central Oaxaca, and many other Mexican areas. I will confine my remarks to the ethnography of highland Chiapas, the site of my own fieldwork, but I am convinced that what I say applies with equal force to nearly all of Indian Mesoamerica today. Tax pointed the way in 1937; a few years later, he used census schedules as the base for a provocative study of the Chiapas municipio of Zinacantan (Tax 1944). Since then, virtually all ethnographic work in Chiapas has concentrated on the municipio as the basic unit of analysis. My first objective in this paper is to demonstrate just how pervasive our concentration on municipios has been. Tax, it should be remembered,

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suggested that we begin with studies of individual municipios: he never suggested that we stop there. (Even his pioneering study of 1937 goes beyond the limits of municipios as cultural isolates. He also considers relations between and among municipios and how individual Indians and whole municipios articulate with wider forms of institutional interaction; further, he at least hints at how Indian municipios function as parts of Guatemalan national economic and political systems.) Simply to note that we who have worked on the ethnography of Chiapas have not yet transcended the limits of municipio boundaries is to acknowledge a fact. Facts, however, do not speak for themselves; it is only when they are set in an explanatory framework that they have any use at all. I believe there are strong reasons why we have not looked beyond the municipio to understand Chiapas ethnography, and my second objective here is to point out what these are. I will argue that our approach to Chiapas studies has been strongly shaped by the ease with which we have been able to "study down" — that is, to study people less powerful than ourselves. Let there be no misunderstanding of what I am saying here. I do not believe that there is anything wrong with studying down. My own fieldwork in Chiapas, over some 15 years, was conducted within a single municipio, and it is only in the last three or four years that I have even begun to look beyond the municipio. The work of other anthropologists in nearby municipios has been much better than my own. Ethnographic work within Chiapas municipios has advanced to the point where it can stand as a commendable model for research elsewhere. Furthermore, the work of many anthropologists in Chiapas has helped improve the life chances of the Indians with whom we have worked. The benefits of anthropological study within a municipio for the people of that municipio are so clearly recognized by the people themselves that leaders of municipios not yet studied have approached me, and several other anthropologists, with requests that we turn our attention to their communities. Studying down is not, in itself, an error to be concealed. Chiapas municipios, however, are not islands surrounded by unpopulated ocean, nor are they completely autonomous in their internal affairs. I will demonstrate how much of what goes on within a municipio is decided by the policies and personages of ladinos whose bases of power lie outside the municipio. As long as we continue to focus exclusively on the municipio as a cultural isolate, we will continue to misunderstand even that which happens within the municipio. My argument, then, is that "studying up" — studying individuals and groups whose power transcends the bounds of local communities and who both individually and collectively have more power than any visiting

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anthropologist — is, at very least, an essential complement to studying down. I will suggest, by passing reference to my own most recent fieldwork, that studying up is possible in Chiapas. I hope to show that it is essential for some of us to begin studying up so that we can make larger sense out of what we have already learned by studying down.

COMMUNITY-BASED STUDIES IN CHIAPAS In Chiapas, as in Guatemala, boundaries between Indian communities are clear, relatively permanent, and readily visible. Chiapas Indian communities frequently resemble their Guatemalan counterparts in that they are coterminous with governmental units called municipios, but this is not always the case. For example, the Tzeltal-speaking community of Aguacatenango occupies only a corner of the municipio of Venustiano Carranza. The largest town of that municipio contains a separate, Tzotzil-speaking community called San Bartolome de los Llanos, and there are several other towns in the municipio (such as Soyatitän, Flores Magon, and Pujiltic) that are not Indian, but ladino. This kind of mixture, repeated in several other Chiapas municipios, does not seem to occur in Guatemala as Tax describes it. For our purposes, it will be convenient to regard any Indian community occupying a clearly bounded territory including a town-center as functionally equivalent to a municipio, regardless of its technical, politico-legal status. Anthropological studies in Chiapas began with studies of Indian municipios nearly 40 years ago (see, e.g., Redfield and Villa Rojas 1939). Echoes of Tax's summary of Guatemalan municipios are typical of these early studies. Villa Rojas (1947:579), for example, reports: Today [the Tzeltal] live in communities, each with several thousand inhabitants. Within the political structure of the state of Chiapas these communities are known as municipios. Each of them has a peculiar way of life or, better said, a local variant of a common cultural pattern found in the whole region and including the Tzotzil-speaking communities. . . . Each community can be considered a tribe, differing from all others.

Studies by Villa Rojas in Oxchuc were roughly contemporaneous with Tax's work in Zinacantan (1942-44), Guiteras Holmes's in Cancuc (1946, 1947), Pozas's in Chamula (1959), and Cämara's in Tenejapa (n.d.). (For annotated bibliographies of parallel work in other parts of Mesoamerica, see Cline 1952 and Ewald 1956.) Most of these workers were friends, as well as colleagues, of both Sol Tax and Robert Redfield. It was largely through the personal and professional influence of Tax and

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Redfield that the municipio and submunicipio became the focus of nearly all the fieldwork of the time. The mid-1950's initiated a period of great efflorescence in Chiapas studies, more or less coinciding with the opening of the Pan-American Highway as far as San Cristobal de Las Casas. Major projects connected with the University of Chicago, Harvard, and Stanford initiated an inundation of the Tzotzil-Tzeltal highlands by United States-based anthropologists. Community studies were conducted in, among others, the municipios or submunicipios of San Pedro Chenalho (Guiteras Holmes 1961), Pinola (Hermitte 1970), San Andres Larrainzar (Holland 1961), Aguacatenango (Metzger 1960), Amatenango (Nash 1970), Tenejapa (Metzger and Williams 1966), Oxchuc (Siverts 1969), and Venustiano Carranza (Salovesh 1965). In addition to these and other published works, Chiapas fieldwork has led to dozens of doctoral dissertations and scores of master's theses at Chicago, Stanford, Berkeley, Tulane, Columbia, Harvard, and elsewhere. The Harvard Chiapas Project, which began in 1957 and is still evolving, deserves special mention. This project has already led to the publication of three books written or edited by its director, Evon Z. Vogt (1966, 1969,1970). Other members of the Harvard Project have also produced many books (e.g., Cancian 1965, 1972; Collier 1973; Blaffer 1972), innumerable articles in published form and many more in private circulation, and massive collections of data. The work of the Harvard Project is particularly remarkable in that it has been focused on the single municipio of Zinacantan. As a result, we now have more detailed anthropological knowledge of Zinacantan than has been produced for any community of comparable size anywhere in the world. The citations given here — and they are only a limited selection of the vast anthropological literature on Chiapas — make it clear that a great deal of work has been done in the Tzotzil-Tzeltal highlands. How densely concentrated that work has been becomes apparent when it is noted that a circle of less than 40 miles' radius drawn on a map of Chiapas would include all of the communities named here and virtually all of the area in which Tzotzil and Tzeltal are spoken. We may not yet have reached the mythical state of the Navajo, whose kinship system is said to include both a term and a regular status for the family's anthropologist, but there certainly have been more than enough anthropologists at work in Chiapas to provide annual recruits for a special status in each local civil-religious hierarchy. Given all the work that has been done in Chiapas, it would be tedious to demonstrate that nearly all of us have taken the viewpoint that Chiapas Indian municipios are cultural isolates. A few illustrative citations will

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have to stand for the whole. To play fair, I will begin with some of my own work (Salovesh 1971:74-76): In V. Carranza, there exists a bounded corporate group which I shall call the community of San Bartolome. . . . As we shall see, politics in V. Carranza, Chiapas, and Mexico can have direct consequences in the behavior of those who belong to the community of San Bartolome. . . . In this analysis, however, politics in such larger groups will be regarded as essentially external to the political system under examination.... To maintain strict comparability [with studies in other communities], then, the relevant unit of analysis clearly must be politics within the [individual] Indian community]. Cancian is not quite as explicit, but the thrust of his work is clear from the following (1965:2, italics mine): [My] purposes in writing this book [are]: (1) to make an ethnographic record of the cargo system in Zinacantan; [and] (2) to analyze the community-wide social structure οfZinacantan as it can be seen in the cargo system. . . . The [se] purposes are rather straightforward and need no further discussion here. Other works written in connection with the Harvard Chiapas Project take viewpoints so similiar that to cite them would be to belabor the point. If further demonstration is needed, I offer the very titles of two of Vogt's works: Los Zinacantecos: Un Pueblo Tzotzil de los Altos de Chiapas (1966) and Zinacantan: A Maya Community in the Highlands of Chiapas (1969). Other workers in other towns have taken the same view. Guiteras Holmes clearly would have liked to have found the municipio of San Pedro Chenalho coterminous with a single community. She almost sounds annoyed when she notes (1961:7) that contrary to the general pattern of the correspondence of the political entity of the municipio with the ethnic group, Chenalho includes in its territory to the southwest the two Tzotzil groups of Santa Marta and Magdalena. Statistical data available are invariably provided for the entire political entity without distinguishing such ethnic differences. It is therefore impossible, without a house-to-house study, to separate those pertaining to the Pedrano proper. Hermitte's work in Pinola is even more revealing. Pinola is not an Indian community; the town contains a substantial number of ladino inhabitants in addition to its many Tzeltal-speakers. 2 Nonetheless, Hermitte concentrates exclusively on the Indian segment (1970:1, translation mine): 3 Our focus on problems of social control [will be] limited exclusively to those

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supernatural sanctions imposed on the Tzeltal Indians of Pinola when they transgress the local moral code. . . . In this bicultural community, supernatural sanctions are not the only ones in operation. There are also those of the Mexican legal code, under the jurisdiction of ladino functionaries and under social and economic pressures exercised by ladinos.

A quotation from Holland (1963:11-12, translation mine), 4 whose work takes in several communities, will serve as my final illustration of a bias toward regarding the Indian community as an autonomous unit: A municipio is a territory whose inhabitants are united through religious, political, economic, and kinship ties that distinguish it from other territorial units. . . . Despite 440 years of contact with the exterior, their economic, political, and religious ties with the ladino world are still quite weak; the municipios have maintained cultural traditions that are very different from those of the rest of Mexico and have continued as native communities that are relatively autonomous.

Where Holland compares, he still views each community as if it were isolated from other communities and tries to separate the local traditions of each community from what he seems to regard as intrusions from the outside. Why have we narrowed our field of view to the individual community as the unit of investigation and analysis? Some of this bias is, of course, directly attributable to the intellectual history of anthropology (see, e.g., Stein 1960: esp. chap. 10). Another strong impetus toward community-based studies comes from the fact that the boundaries of Indian communities, particularly in Chiapas and Guatemala, seem at first glance to be so clear-cut. Just as Tax pointed out in 1937, Indians of a single community or municipio are almost always completely demarcated from those of neighboring communities by many boundary-maintaining mechanisms. These include strong rules of community endogamy; a distinctive local dialect (or, in many cases, even a totally different language, not shared with the community's immediate neighbors); highly visible distinctions of dress, with local costumes always confined to a single municipio or submunicipio; localized economic specializations that cannot be explained by the natural distribution of resources; and, of course, the local civil-religious hierarchy, with its restrictive rules of membership and participation that all but define the limits of the community (see Carrasco 1961). These factors make the municipio seem to be a natural unit of analysis for ethnographic work.

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STUDYING DOWN AS AN EXPLANATION OF COMMUNITY-BASED STUDIES Despite the surface visibility of boundary markers that set each Chiapas Indian municipio or submunicipio off from all of its neighbors, and despite the understandable preoccupation of villagers with community differences, a case can be made that these units are not all that distinctive. Granting that the largest fiesta in Venustiano Carranza is that of San Bartolome, while the day of San Pedro is the big fiesta in Chenalho, the major outlines of fiesta celebration and the organization of individuals and resources entailed in such a celebration are just about the same in all Chiapas municipios. Even the linguistic separation between Tzeltal and Tzotzil fails to conceal the fact that, in either language, what people talk about, the stories they tell, and the world view embedded in their talking is essentially the same throughout central Chiapas. It is not just the differences among communities and the natives' interest in these differences that lead us to focus on single communities as our units of analysis; it is also the fact that each of us works in a single community. After we have made the professional, financial, and emotional commitment entailed in doing fieldwork in one place, it is entirely understandable that our reports are partly shaped by a desire to make it seem that "our" people are truly distinctive. Historical tradition and the empirical visibility of community boundaries are, therefore, conditioning factors but cannot be the full explanation of our communitarian biases in Chiapas studies. Other explanations that have been offered turn out, on examination, to be even less helpful. Some fieldworkers have justified their own concentrations on single municipios through simple geographic difficulty of access — but this will hardly explain why others have treated municipios along the Pan-American Highway as if they, too, were geographically and culturally isolated. Some have argued that concentration on Indian community identity and isolation is warranted because of the exploitative conditions nationally and internationally which have forced this defensive insulation (e.g., Frank 1967, Greenberg n.d.). Such a global explanation may suit some ideological purpose, but it does not explain anything in particular because it attempts to explain everything in general. It cannot explain, for example, how or why such Chiapas towns as Soyatitän became "open" and "non-Indian." Some have suggested that the focus on Indian communities as worlds unto themselves results from the anthropologists' preoccupation with the underdog, but this obscures the fact that some anthropologists have studied non-Indian

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towns when there are many Indian communities available in the immediate neighborhood. The answer lies, I think, in certain characteristics of Chiapas fieldwork (not to mention anthropological fieldwork anywhere in the world) that make it easy to study Indian communities as cultural isolates but provide no particular help to the anthropologist who wants to encompass a wider field of view. These characteristics derive from a simple imbalance of power in favor of the anthropologist. The ethical anthropologist begins planning for fieldwork in Chiapas only after consultation with colleagues and institutions in Mexico — which is to say, Mexico City. Permission for the conduct of research must be obtained from the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia, under Mexican law; the wise anthropologist not only obtains such permission, but also carries documentary evidence that permission has been granted as insurance against difficulties with local authorities. It is at this point that the anthropologist begins to acquire an aura of power. The Instituto is, after all, national, with direct access to the corridors of power in Mexico City. Those who are sensitive to professional courtesy, and who wish to learn as much as possible from experts who have devoted years to Chiapas studies, also call on colleagues in the Instituto Nacional Indigenista, the Museo Nacional de Antropologia, the Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, and other institutions. As fellow members of an international professional fraternity, these colleagues frequently help the visiting anthropologist by providing introductions to other experts resident in Chiapas or to officialdom in general. Once the visitor arrives in Chiapas, the professional network expands naturally. We all like to talk shop anywhere, but we are particularly prone to seek out fellow anthropologists while in the field (perhaps as a defense against or an escape from culture shock). A number of anthropologists occupy administrative posts in government agencies in Chiapas: the state Department of Indian Affairs, the Department of Agrarian Affairs, the Program for Socioeconomic Development of Chiapas (PRODESCH), and so c i . Other anthropologists we come to know professionally and socially a . frequent consultants in such matters as Indian education, the establishment of a special showplace for the marketing of Indian handicrafts, or even labor policy. When anthropologists work in Indian communities, our power by association is immediately obvious. Reasonable entry into a community involves presentation of credentials to the local authorities. Our initial credentials carry the stamp of very high officialdom indeed. The communities where we usually choose to work come into contact with outside officials in many ways, and where the non-local organization

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employs anthropologists we have collegial relationships while the members of the community have the role of suppliants. We may see ourselves as unimportant — especially if, as is usual, we are still degree candidates or in the early stages of establishing our positions within the profession. We may even perceive ourselves as relatively impoverished and politically impotent. When we do our fieldwork in an Indian community, however, this is not the image perceived by others. In the field setting, we are seen as comfortably rich and extremely powerful. Local authorities accede to our tentative requests as if they were demands. We are allowed to intrude where others are excluded by reason of age, sex, or station. Women anthropologists are granted the nonce status of local men; the anthropologist who is a man participates in women's gossip circles; despite our ages we are admitted to the deliberations of the elders, and despite our lack of eligibility we are allowed to witness and even participate in the most esoteric and sacred of rites. Our inclusion where every rule of normal behavior would forbid our presence is a direct reflection of the power that comes with studying down. Our very presence in a community which our own literature characterizes as "closed" is testimony to our ability to impose. Our relative power is seductive: entry is easy, access to what we want to know is comparatively open, and our frequent gaffes are tolerated. When we work beyond the confines of a local Indian community, our relative status is much less clear. The manager of the sugar plantation at Pujiltic regularly travels to Europe as a consultant in the purchase of machinery for the mill and is used to calling on the services of, say, the Mexican commercial attache in Paris as a matter of right. The federal district judge has direct consultative access to the Procurador General de Justicia in Mexico City. Members of a regional elite may maintain full household staffs in the state capital, Mexico City, and resorts such as Acapulco or Cozumel. The Governor of the state has direct access to the President of the Republic; state department heads of national institutions operate as peers among the high powers in Mexico City; and even those on the middle levels of regional and state officialdom hold great political power in their own hands. The study of interactions between a local community and regional, state, and national institutions necessarily involves working with such powerful people. Those who hold power beyond the municipio are not easily impressed by letters of introduction addressed "to whom it may concern." Their perception of sumptuary distinctions is not limited to the observation that the anthropologist regularly wears a wristwatch: some of them wear chronometers, and all are capable of making exceedingly fine distinctions about the status of the wearer through observation of the things worn.

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The anthropologist's propensity for travel is no match for the travel experience of, say, members of the Governor's staff who have accompanied him on trips to China or Albania. It is clear that when we study Chiapas elites, we are studying up with a vengeance. As our investigations lead us to look beyond the local community, we can expect to suffer all the disadvantages of studying up. Those who control the affairs of a region and have a strong voice in the conduct of a state also have the power to keep an outside observer on the outside. It is much easier to confine oneself forever to investigations of the internal dynamics of a single community. Even if that community is Zinacantan, already so well studied by so many, there is still so much to be learned that any individual anthropologist can easily find full justification for studying that community alone. Our bias toward studying local communities as cultural isolates makes very good practical sense when access to the local community is made easy, and access to larger arenas is made difficult, by the power differential between anthropologist and informant.

THE LOCAL COMMUNITY IN A L A R G E R WORLD One of Sol Tax's favorite classroom anecdotes provides a kind of charter for shifting our focus. His story is about a benighted soul searching for a lost ring under a streetlight. A passing policeman is dragooned into the search and finally asks, "Are you sure this is where you lost it?" "Of course not, silly, or we would have found it already." "Then why are we looking here?" "Well, over there, where I lost it, it's so dark you can't see a thing. At least the light's good over here" (cf. Tax 1968:11). We are better off, in some ways, than Tax's ringseekers. Our search where the light is, in the Indian municipio, has turned up not one, but many treasures. There is every reason to believe that more are there to be found. My argument is that, working in the light, we have been blind to the importance of people and events outside the boundaries of the local unit. Out there, in the darkness, is where I think we will make the really important discoveries for the future of Mesoamerican anthropology. Even if I am wrong, it will still be true that those who want only to understand what's going on within a municipio must look beyond its boundaries. A brief examination of how municipios function in relation to the larger world will help show why this is so. A municipio, in state and federal law, is regarded as a sovereign constituent unit of the state. No administrative subdivision is supposed to intervene between the municipio and the state government. The municipio is supposed to be governed by local officials chosen by direct

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popular election. Municipio officials have the power to levy and collect taxes and to maintain and expend public funds; they are charged with providing for and supervising a multitude of local services ranging from garbage collection to road maintenance, schools to utilities, public health to public order (see "Constitution" n.d.: arts. 65, 66; "Ley" n.d.: arts. 3, 19-25,65-67). The legal charter of a municipio thus seems to give it both independence and great responsibility. In the case of Chiapas municipios, the surface pattern of legal provisions is extremely deceptive. Full independence in the kinds of activities envisioned in the law presupposes that the municipio have the resources to carry out its assigned duties, but very few local units enjoy such resources. (Tax collections in some Indian municipios amount to less than the equivalent of U.S. $2,000 per year). Limited tax revenues mean that municipios simply cannot accomplish what the law says they are supposed to without massive outside assistance. Furthermore, non-local laws set so many constraints on the local unit that the freedom, sovereignty, and independence the law attributes to the municipio clearly are legal fictions. The operating power of a municipio consists of its ability to ask, or not to ask, that somebody from outside come in to do things to and for the municipio. Even that power is subject to the limitation that outside agencies may very well decide to intervene without local request and sometimes over local opposition. Administratively, the first level of outside intervention and assistance in municipal affairs is the state of Chiapas. The State Education Commission erects schools and pays teachers; roads are built and maintained by the State Highway Commission or one of its subsidiaries, a Local Roads Federation (Junta Local de Caminos); drinking water may be provided through the State Potable Water Commission; local medical services may be provided in part through the state's Office of Public Health; and so on. These agencies of state government do not provide such services automatically. Pressure to provide them at all frequently must come from the municipios themselves. Agencies of the national government also work directly within the municipios of Chiapas. Communications (mail, telegraph, telephone, and highways) come under the purview of the national Secretariat of Communications and Public Works (SCOP). Utilities may be provided by the Secretariat of Hydraulic Resources, the Federal Electricity Commission, and other agencies. Although municipios are technically charged with maintaining a structure of criminal and civil courts, the actual assignment of judges and the payment of their salaries is ultimately a function of the federal judiciary system.5 A national system of consumer stores (CONASUPO) sells articles of popular consumption at

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lower-than-normal prices under governmental subsidy; many municipios have CONASUPO outlets. National agencies also provide the equivalent of crop price supports through the purchase and storage of major agricultural products at guaranteed prices; the agencies have set up local warehousing facilities in many municipios. On occasion, federal troops may supplement or entirely replace local police forces on the way. At least one road-building project undertaken by an alliance of municipio governments and another begun by a governmental agency ostensibly not free to indulge in such projects were specifically intended by their planners to shame state and national officials into providing more and better roads in the area. This pattern of overlap and competition about roads is repeated by other agencies, in school construction, other major public works, and utilities, among other services. With so many outside agencies having the potential to provide services in and for local municipios, it is not surprising that agencies have come into being to channel and coordinate requests for those services. Other agencies, not formally charged with such functions, still perform them in the interests of their own special clienteles. Examples of the former kind of group are INI's Centro Coordinador and PRODESCH; examples of the latter are the national Department of Colonization and Agrarian Affairs and the National Confederation of Campesinos. Even when these coordinating groups do not themselves have the power to provide services for the municipios, or even to influence those who do have such power, it is to their advantage to claim credit for services provided by other agencies, and they frequently do so. For a study confined to the internal dynamics of a Chiapas municipio, all these regional, state, and national institutions are dark corners, indeed. We know even less about how non-institutional alliances of individuals and informal groups work through and around such institutions to achieve their own objectives and those of their municipios. I believe that it is our ignorance of events beyond the municipio that has led some to speculate as to whether (or, as the more convinced would have it, how) anthropology functions as an extension of colonialist oppression. (Nash [1975] provides a summary of many articles taking this position). For those who take this view, Chiapas municipios and their analogues elsewhere are the victims of internal colonialization within their own nations, as well as external imperialism. I would argue that such a conclusion could only be sustained if it were true that members of the local community are unable to exercise power over either local resources or those brought in from outside. Of course, the outside agencies I have mentioned have formidable power to shape events in the municipio. There are, however, many interactions between the municipio and

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external agencies in which municipio residents have a strong interest in obtaining desired results while outside officials are indifferent to particular outcomes. In such cases, the municipio gets its way more often than not — and the methods that gain success in those cases are also used, often successfully, when locally desired results are opposed by some external authorities. The dynamics of such interaction can only be understood by studying up. In this context, "studying up" does not mean ignoring what we have learned by searching where the light is. It means, instead, using knowledge gained within a municipio as a point of entry to wider studies.

STUDYING UP FROM A MUNICIPIO BASE Anthropologists have little experience in studying complex bureaucracies and the distribution of power at the level of nation-states. (Happily, there are some exceptions; see, e.g., Adams 1970.) We need not, however, begin with the largest possible societal whole. I do not propose that we study the commodities market in Chicago, even though that helps determine the world price of corn and is therefore, somehow, relevant to the income potential of a Chiapas farmer. I do not propose that we become minor-league political scientists, regional historians, or penny economists. Instead, I suggest that we begin modestly to broaden our view of what is significant for the understanding of local-level affairs (cf. Swartz 1968: esp. 6-18). We can, for example, follow major public-works decisons out of the municipio to the regional and state levels without even having to do anything we are not accustomed to doing when we work entirely within a municipio.6 There are many kinds of broadly based organizations whose operations reach down into Chiapas municipios. Each holds public meetings, disseminates publications, maintains offices, and has officials available for interview. Going beyond all that, there are two special times when the activities and influences of governmental units beyond the municipio are at their most visible for an outside observer: just before the promulgation of annual programmatic budgets and just before the announcement of electoral platforms. These are the times when we should be most active in studying up if we are to understand how municipios interact with higher-level units. I will describe one case in detail, and suggest some questions about another, to make clear what there is to be learned and how anthropologists can begin to learn it. Once a year, the Governor of Chiapas (like the President of Mexico and the Governors of all other states) is charged with making a report to

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the legislature and to the people he governs. This report presents a detailed summary of the accomplishments of the past year and proposes a detailed program of activities for the coming one. It is, at the same time, a review of the previous year's budget and a proposal for the next. In it, the Governor does all the talking; the program for the coming year appears to be paternalistically or autocratically imposed from above. The Governor's report, however, is only the formalization of a planning process that begins much earlier. As part of this process, the Governor calls many semipublic meetings with groups of Presidentes Municipales (chief executive officers of each of the municipios). Many of these meetings take place in the state capital, Tuxtla Gutierrez; others are held in regional centers, such as San Cristobal Las Casas, Comitän, or Ococingo. The Governor brings representatives of each major state agency to the meetings. Presidentes, for their part, are often accompanied by members of their municipal councils, advisors, observers, servants, and guards. Holders of other elective or appointive offices may attend ex officio; newspaper reporters and members of the general public wander in and out freely. Times and places of the meetings are widely announced in advance, in newspapers and on the radio. So is their general subject matter. We may regard such meetings, then, as easily open to the anthropologist's participant observation. 7 At these budget and program meetings, high officials of each state department explain to the Presidentes the jurisdiction and possible programs of their departments. They seem to be completely open to questions from the floor; at meetings I attended, when departmental spokesmen were unable to answer questions directly, they sent for subordinates who produced some kind of an answer before the end of the day's meeting. At the same time, the departmental representatives ask searching questions: "How does mail reach such-and-such a community in your municipio?" "How many public baths are available in Barrio X?" Each Presidente is then asked to present to each relevant state agency a priority list of public services and possible public works needed in his municipio, together with a detailed list of those already available in each place of settlement in the municipio. Submission of these lists is accompanied by written reports of the municipio's income and expenditures and of its efforts (and those of non-state agencies) to provide services to its inhabitants. This is a stage of public input in the state-level planning and budgetary process that is much more than symbolically important in the delivery of goods and services to the municipios. A municipio whose representatives do not specifically mention a particular project, no matter how small, at one of these meetings will not get support for that project from the state in the coming

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budget year. Of course, this is not to say that any municipio will ever receive everything it asks for, but each municipio will get something, usually something that is pretty high on its priority list as submitted to at least one major state agency. The granting of such a request will make it possible for the Governor, in his annual report, to mention the municipio and its project specifically. It is believed that this kind of specific mention of local projects is a major means of guaranteeing local support for the state administration. Projects named in such a report range from the grandiose to the most minor: from completion of a 30-mile stretch of all-weather road to provision of ten minutes of additional weekly time for radio communication with an isolated rancheria. The kind of planning meeting I have just described is typical of many that are held by all kinds of governmental agencies at all levels above the municipio. Most frequent of all are those held by such coordinating agencies as PRODESCH and the INI Centro Coordinador, ostensibly to help municipios formulate requests to other governmental agencies. These formal meetings involve representatives of several municipios at a time; in addition, municipios often send separate delegations to higher governmental offices with requests for intervention and assistance. Anthropologists are free to accompany such unofficial delegations to learn where they go, whom they see, and what they are told. Most of us, however, have usually chosen to ask our informants what happened when they return from such a trip. The pictures we get may well be useful in revealing the perceptions of members of the municipio, but they have no necessary correspondence to what actually happened. Neither can they tell us what those who are not of the municipio think happened. Only direct observation can fill these gaps. The very least we can do about public meetings taking place outside the municipio is to observe a fair sample of those attended by representatives of the municipio. I have suggested that, in addition to the period of budget planning, the period in which electoral platforms are formulated can be especially revealing of the ways municipios interact with higher-level units. This is not the place to provide a complete description of electoral platforms and the formal political processes of the state of Chiapas. Instead, I will point out a few salient features of Chiapas electioneering — not necessarily the most important, or even the most obvious, ones — as a framework for asking some questions that indicate what we should learn about relations between the municipio and other kinds of political and governmental units. What I have here called an "electoral platform" is a public proposal of the major outlines of what a candidate for major political office will try to do when elected. It is also a list of candidates for subordinate political

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offices. Control of the electoral scene by a single political party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), means that the platform of the PRI candidate will be the policy of the incoming administration and the subordinate candidates will be the incoming officers of that administration. The internal machinations of PRI at the state level are not open to public examination. It is well known, however, that PRI's candidate for Governor selects his own slate of candidates for Presidente Municipal for the state's 110 municipios. Each candidate for Presidente Municipal, in turn, names his own slate of municipal officers and members of the municipal council and has consultative power in the nomination of candidates for members of the state legislature for his district. The relationship between a PRI candidate for Governor and PRI candidates for Presidente Municipal would thus seem to be a key one. We can more or less safely assume that candidates for Presidente in the more urban municipios will come from a statewide elite in which the incoming Governor has been operating for a long time. The majority of the state's municipios are rural, however, and their inhabitants are not usually part of the social scene of the state capital. The Presidente of an Indian municipio cannot be chosen from among the members of the San Cristobal Lions Club or the Tuxtla Chamber of Commerce. How, then, does a gubernatorial candidate find his full slate of candidates for Presidente? This apparently simple question is not a naive one; its answer may be the crux of understanding how a municipio articulates with the state. 8 Unlike the list of candidates for subordinate offices, the program proposals that are part of an electoral platform are not a finished package at the start of an election campaign. The gubernatorial candidate will make an appearance in every municipio during the campaign and usually will visit nearly all municipios several times. Similarly, the candidate for Presidente Municipal will visit every outlying settlement in his municipio before the campaign is over. Proposals as to what the incoming state administration will try to accomplish for each municipio are modified as the campaign develops; the candidate for Presidente will also repeatedly modify proposals at the municipal level, only partly to articulate the municipio's programs with those of the state. Published descriptions of Chiapas municipios do not tell us what levels of interaction are involved in the program modifications that take place during an election campaign. Whose demands are taken to be non-negotiable, and why? Who determines who is going to get what, once a candidate has been chosen? Why do some parts of a municipio get assistance from the state during a single Governor's incumbency while others get nothing? Once more,

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answers to these questions are not to be found within the municipio alone, but without such answers we cannot say we understand the municipio.

SUMMARY I have shown that those of us who have studied the municipios of Chiapas (and, by extension, local communities elsewhere in Mesoamerica) have been biased toward looking inward, within the municipio itself. Second, I have pointed to some of the more important ways in which a concentration on the internal affairs of the local community has led us to ignore much of what happens there. I have argued that until we study the affairs of larger units and the ways that local communities articulate with those units, we will never fully understand how local communities in Mesoamerica work. Finally, I have tried to show that studying up is not only desirable, but possible. I hope that more and more of us will do so.

NOTES 1. Portions of this article, in considerably different form, were presented as a paper, "Studying Up in Chiapas: Problems and Prospects in Studying Regional Power Elites," at the 55th Annual Meeting of the Central States Anthropological Society, April 3, 1975. Fieldwork in the summer of 1974 was supported, in part, by a grant from the Deans' Fund of Northern Illinois University. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Fernando Cämara B., of the Institute Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, and to Doctor Jesus Dominguez H., Presidente Municipal of V. Carranza, Chiapas, for their illuminating discussions of some of the problems considered here. 2. Pinola is one of a handful of towns in central Chiapas in which a corporate Indian community occupies the same town-center as a substantial number of ladinos and others. Venustiano Carranza, Chiapilla, and Teopisca are additional examples. The corporate Indian communities within these towns range from 25 percent to 75 percent or more of the total town populations. 3. "Nuestro enfoque del problema del control social estä exclusivamente reducido a aquellas sanciones sobrenaturales impuestas a los indios tzeltales de Pinola cuando transgreden el codigo moral local. . . . En esta comunidad bicultural no solo operan las sanciones sobrenaturales, sino que ademäs las del codigo legal mexicano bajo la jurisdicciön de funcionarios ladinos y bajo las presiones sociales y economicas que ejercen los ladinos." 4. "Un municipio es un territorio en el que los habitantes estän unidos por lazos religiosos, politicos, econömicos y familiares, a diferencia de otras unidades territoriales.... A pesar de los 440 aftos de contacto con el exterior, sus lazos econömicos, politicos y religiosos con el medio ladino son todavia bastante debiles; los municipios han conservado tradiciones culturales muy diferentes de las del resto de Mexico y han permanecido como comunidades indigenas relativamente autonomes." 5. Judicial structure is considerably more complicated than this brief statement might be taken to imply. No short description can do justice to the structure that includes locally named Jueces Municipales and Jueces Rurales and the state-appointed Jueces de Primera Instancia and also assigns quasi-judicial functions to other officials. I am

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prepared, however, to defend my conclusion that legal judicial power is essentially a national function. 6. In earlier versions of this paper, I placed much more emphasis on the study of networks of elite communication upward from and downward to the municipio. I still believe that such studies are not only extremely important, but an essential minimum. Unfortunately, recent events have made it impossible for me to reveal any details of my own fieldwork along these lines. There is a very real danger that my informants would suffer if I were to disclose their views. It is for this reason that I have chosen to restrict my suggestions here to the study of public and institutional interactions. 7. However, members of the Governor's staff and other participants in one such meeting in 1974 told me that as far as they knew I was the first anthropologist to attend. (They did not have to point out the obvious exception of those anthropologists employed by governmental agencies who were required to attend as part of their official duties.) Those who spoke to me about it also expressed some surprise, not at my presence, but at the fact that anthropologists were not in evidence at every meeting of this sort. 8. The importance of my question is underscored by the fact that a Governor must name a full slate of Presidentes not once, but twice, during his candidacy and incumbency: Governors serve for six years, Presidentes for only three. No one who has served as Presidente can serve in that office again.

REFERENCES CITED Crucifixion by power: Essays on Guatemalan national social structure, 1944-1966. Austin: University of Texas Press. BLAFFER, SARAH C . 1 9 7 2 . The black-man of Zinacantan: A Central American legend. Austin: University of Texas Press. CÄMARA BARBACHANO, FERNANDO, n.d. Notas sobre Tenejapa. M S . CANCIAN, FRANK. 1 9 6 5 . Economics and prestige in a Maya community: The religious cargo system in Zinacantan. Stanford: Stanford University Press. . 1972. Change and uncertainty in a peasant economy: The Maya corn farmers of Zinacantan. Stanford: Stanford University Press. CARRASCO, PEDRO. 1 9 6 1 . The civil-religious hierarchy in Mesoamerican communities: Pre-Spanish background and colonial development. American Anthropologist 63:483^197. CLINE, HOWARD C . 1 9 5 2 . Mexican community studies. Hispanic American Historical Review 3 2 : 2 1 2 - 2 4 2 . COLLIER, JANE FISHBURNE. 1 9 7 3 . Law and social change in Zinacantan. Stanford: Stanford University Press. "Constitution politica del Estado de Chiapas." n.d. Leyes del Estado de Chiapas, vol. 1, pp. 9 - 8 5 . Mexico, D . F.: Gräficos Galeza. E W A L D , ROBERT Η . 1 9 5 6 . Bibliografla comentada sobre antropologia social guatemalteca, 1900-1955. Guatemala: Seminario de Integration Social Guatemalteca. FRANK, A N D R £ G U N D E R . 1 9 6 7 . Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical studies of Chile and Brazil. New York: Monthly Review Press. GREENBERG, JAMES BRIAN, n.d. Closed corporate communities/de facto reservations: A study of internal colonialism in Chiapas. MS. GUITERAS HOLMES, CALIXTA. 1 9 4 6 . Informe sobre Cancuc. Microfilm Collection A D A M S , RICHARD NEWBOLD. 1 9 7 0 .

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of Manuscripts of Middle American Cultural Anthropology 8. Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries. . 1947. Clanes y sistema de parentesco de Cancuc. Acta Americana 5:1-17. . 1961. Perils of the soul: The world-view of a Tzotzil Indian. Glencoe: Free Press. ΗΕΚΜΠΤΕ, M . ESTHER. 1 9 7 0 . Poder sobrenatural y control social en un pueblo maya contempomneo. Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, Ediciones Especiales 57. HOLLAND, WILLIAM. 1961. Tonalismo y nagualismo entre los Indios tzotziles de Larrainzar, Mexico. Estudios de Cultura Maya 1:167-181. . 1963. Medicina maya en los altos de Chiapas: Un estudio del cambio socio-cultural. (Coleccion Antropologia Social 2.) Mexico, D. F.: Instituto Nacional Indigenista. "Ley del municipio libre." n.d. Leyes del Estado de Chiapas, vol. 1, pp. 151-207. Mexico, D. F.: Gräficos Galeza. METZGER, DUANE. 1 9 6 0 . Conflict in Chulsanto, a village in Chiapas. Alpha Kappa Deltan 3 0 : 3 5 - 4 8 . METZGER, DUANE, and GERALD E . WILLIAMS. 1 9 6 6 . Some procedures and results in the study of native categories: Tzeltal "firewood." American Anthropologist 6 8 : 3 8 9 - 4 0 7 . NASH, JUNE. 1 9 7 0 . In the eyes of the ancestors: Belief and behavior in a Mayan community. New Haven: Yale University Press. . 1975. Nationalism and fieldwork. Annual Review of Anthropology 4:225-246. POZAS Α . , RICARDO. 1 9 5 9 . Chamula: Un pueblo indio de los altos de Chiapas. Memorias del Instituto Nacional Indigenista (Mexico) 8. REDFIELD, ROBERT, and ALFONSO VILLA ROJAS .1939. Notes on the ethnography of Tzeltal communities of Chiapas. Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication 509, Contribution 28. SALOVESH, MICHAEL. 1 9 6 5 . Pautas de residencia y estratificacion entre los Mayas. Estudios de Cultura Maya 5 : 3 1 7 - 3 3 8 . . 1971. The political system of a highland Maya community. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, Chicago. 111. SIVERTS, HENNING. 1 9 6 9 . Oxchuc: Una tribu maya de Mexico. Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, Ediciones Especiales 52. STEIN, MAURICE R . 1 9 6 0 . The eclipse of community: An interpretation of American studies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. SWARTZ, MARC J. 1968. "Introduction," in Local-level politics: Social and cultural perspectives. Edited by Marc J. Swartz, pp. Chicago: Aldine. TAX, SOL. 1937. The municipios of the midwestern highlands of Guatemala. American Anthropologist 3 9 : 4 2 3 - 4 4 . . 1944. Information about the municipio of Zinacantan, Chiapas. Revista Mexicana de Estudios Antropolögicos 6:181-195. . 1968. "Anthropologists: Are they modern medicine men?" in Anthropological backgrounds of adult education. Edited by Clifford L. Winters, pp. 3-16. Brookline: Center for the Study of Liberal Education of Adults, Boston University. VILLA ROJAS, ALFONSO. 1 9 4 7 . Kinship and nagualism in a Tzeltal community. American Anthropologist 4 9 : 5 7 8 - 5 8 7 . VOGT, Ε VON Z . 1 9 6 6 . Los Zinacantecos: Un pueblo tzotzil de los altos de Chiapas.

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(Coleccion Antropologia Social 7.) Mexico, D. F.: Instituto Nacional Indigenista. VOGT, EVON Z . 1 9 6 9 . Zinacantan: A Maya community in the highlands of Chiapas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. . 1970. The Zinacantecos of Mexico: A modern Maya way of life. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

SUSAN TAX FREEMAN

The "Municipios" of Northern Spain: A View from the Fountain1

The municipios of the midwestern highlands of Guatemala were described by Tax (1937:444) as "the primary (and possibly final) ethnic units" of the region's social organization. Beginning with the fact that municipio identity far outweighs that attaching to the larger linguistic categories sometimes designated as "tribal" groupings, he went on to cite the variety of respects in which municipios are distinct from one another — even from others of the same linguistic affiliation and/or close physical neighbors. In addition to the geographic and environmental differences between them and the fact that they display settlement patterns of contrasting types, municipios conceive of themselves as separate by blood and tradition, and marriage outside each unique unit is disapproved. Municipios are also distinguished at least by differences of dialect, if not by deeper language differences; by sharp differences in agricultural, commercial, and industrial specialization; by the existence of separate civil-religious hierarchies; and by distinct symbols of membership — different costumes, different patron saints and fiesta cycles, and, of course, different names, by which members are collectively identified by the members of other municipios. This is "las Indias," Spanish America. In Spain, too, the territorially defined entity most often called the termino municipal (municipal tract), or simply tärmino, is the unit of primary importance (beside the single household) in the social organization. The inhabitants of a termino are collectively referred to as a pueblo ·, the same term is applied to the physical nucleus of the termino's population, its group of houses and barns. 2 The pueblo is usually the maximal unit of cooperation, of common festivals, and of social identity in most contexts. Relations between different pueblos or municipalities, on the other hand, are in most contexts competitive. Social anthropological views of Spain owe much to models developed in Spanish America by such scholars as Robert Redfield, George Foster, 3

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and Eric Wolf and to the work of Julian Pitt-Rivers, whose field researches in both Spain and Spanish America continue to enrich both fields.4 In regard to the question at hand — the nature of municipalities and their place in social organization — Tax's 1937 work on the Guatemalan municipios antedates by years any comparable ones for Spain,5 even though Spanish scholars themselves had more than a half-century earlier produced the compendia of data which still stand among the most important sources for the understanding of traditional municipal organization in rural Spain. 6 While the ethnology of Spanish America has contributed so importantly to that of Spain, some of what scholars observe in the New World is the product of the Spanish presence there. To what extent this is true is often in question, but Foster (1960) and others have assumed the task of making the Spanish tradition more relevant and accessible to Americanists. This paper is written in a similar spirit of exchange, with the knowledge that the Hispanicist can learn much from the comparisons and contrasts with Spanish America and with the hope that a close view of certain Spanish municipal traditions is of more than parochial interest. I shall first make some brief general comments on the comparison of Spanish municipalities with Guatemalan ones. Then I shall turn to one part of Spain where municipal identity and corporacy are both very strong. For this region, whose general characteristics are already described in the literature, I shall analyze one central aspect of municipal life which has not been systematically treated: water — the ways in which water use reflects collective concerns, and strengthens municipal life, and in which water itself is a symbol of municipal identity. I have chosen for general comparison upland northern Spain — the region north of the River Tajo, excluding the Atlantic coastal strip. Settlement pattern in the coastal areas tends to be more dispersed, and municipal organization is often correspondingly looser. It is not my intention to draw sharp lines or to split hairs, but rather to offer comments on regions on which our data are good and where comparison with the Guatemalan model seems for the moment most fruitful. If my comments pertain to the rest of Spain as well, as some of them indeed do, so much the better. In general, northern Spain was not an area of heavy Muslim settlement, though it was at various times a refuge area for both Christians and Muslims from farther south. This was the zone — first in its northeastern (Pyrenean) corner and in the Cantabrian mountains, and later more extensively — from which the Christian reconquest and repopulation of Spain radiated. Most of the villages and towns here date from the 8th to

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11th centuries A.D. at the latest — some of course have much longer histories — and have not suffered total population upheavals in the period since then. Their foundation or resettlement during the repopulation was by more local elements than was that of towns farther south: repopulation assumed a different character south of the Tajo, and the North in general can be said to have enjoyed more tranquillity in terms of population movement and in several respects greater continuity of tradition. 7 The North is the Spain of the minifundio — of small holders working their own land and participating with their neighbors in the administration of the municipal resources to which they have rights by virtue of their ownership and working of the land within the termino municipal. This type is by no means absent on the Atlantic coast, where the minifundio also dominates, but it is simply more attenuated and less elaborately corporate in nature. Nor is it entirely absent from southern Spain, but it is not the dominant type there; even though a good argument can be made that common organizational themes run through all Spanish communities (Freeman 1968«), other things being equal, size is a crucial factor, and larger centers predominate south of the Tajo. 8 So, in comparing the content of Guatemalan municipal identity with that in Spain, I shall refer to the North and, at least indirectly, to the works on it mentioned earlier (Costa 1898, 1 9 0 2 a , b ; Ateneo 1901), to a variety of more recent works by social anthropologists and by Spanish scholars in several fields, to the census of Spain (Instituto Nacional de Estadistica 1 9 6 0 , 1 9 7 0 , etc.), and to some impressions gained from archival research and from Spanish historians and folklorists. Contrasts with Guatemalan municipios abound. In the first place, most Spanish rural municipalities are smaller in territory and often also in population. The Spanish rural tradition does not seem to support a common municipal identity among large numbers of people over wide spaces; the tendency is, rather, toward subdivision and the formation of separate foci of identity. Probably for this very reason, the agro-towns of southern Spain display less of the tight municipal culture than small towns do. Large populations have more elaborate divisions by neighborhood, they are more highly stratified, voluntary associations such as confraternities are more common, and the proliferation of secondary loyalties seems to sap the force of the primary ones. Where the Guatemalan municipios ranged from about 300 persons to near 30,000 at the time Tax wrote, 9 it is my impression that the critical maximum for strong municipal organization in Spain is 2 , 0 0 0 - 3 , 0 0 0 . A population of 2 5 , 0 0 0 - 3 0 , 0 0 0 , like that of Chichicastenango in the 1930's, would in northern Spain be a city, living from something other than the land, its population internally diverse and partaking of essentially the same

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qualities of urban life as Madrid: such centers exhibit only shadow forms of the characteristics of the rural municipality which alone is comparable to the Guatemalan ones. Southern agro-towns, on the other hand, have greater occupational homogeneity and rural character and a size to match the larger Guatemalan examples. While they usually display impressive senses of solidarity, they do not have the very strongly developed municipal unity on the corporate level to compare to Guatemala: this is to be found largely in the smaller populations of the North. The presence of an elaborate corporate infrastructure in the unit of sentimental attachment is important in differentiating the North from the South, at least generally, and its significance will become evident in the final stages of this analysis. In many parts of the North — and certainly in the parts I know best — the natural features which bound different municipalities are not barriers to communication. Municipal territories are generally smaller than those cited for Guatemala, 10 and populations are heavily nucleated: variations in settlement pattern do not equal those found in Guatemala. Thus, even where towns lie within an easy 45-minute stroll of one another, their nuclei house all of their inhabitants and no one on either side lives near the border. In Spain there is no linguistic diversity to match that of the Guatemalan highlands, and this is not usually a factor in municipal identity except in one sense: minute differences in vocabulary or pronunciation are occasionally attributed by some towns to others, and some aspects of language style may be among the items selected for characterization or criticism of one town by others. However, it is also true for some zones — such as the Sierra de Cadiz — that stylistic differences in speech may identify the speaker's place of origin (Pitt-Rivers, personal communication), though this is not true in northern areas with which I am familiar. One of the most obvious contrasts — and methodologically an important one — is the lack in the modern Spanish setting of distinctive costumes for different municipalities. In the Maya highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala, it is above all costume, with its high visibility, which announces municipio membership and invites the anthropologist to examine what is symbolized thereby. Local differences in costume have, for the most part, disappeared from Spain. Today, folklorists, students of costume, and rural Spaniards themselves tend to regard the traditional costumes as pertaining to regions larger than single pueblos. Some few villages or small groups of villages maintain costumes, largely for festival and commercial (touristic) occasions. Foster (1960:97) mentions the persistence of the traditional dress in Lagartera (Toledo), a town famous

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for its weaving and embroidery, but I do not know whether its dress is local to that village only or whether the traditional dress of the region simply survives in Lagartera alone. Ortiz Echagüe's classic Esparia: Tipos y trajes (1971), first published in the 1930's, shows relatively few traditional costumes identified with single pueblos rather than with larger zones, sometimes whole provinces or more. The single pueblos mentioned, furthermore, are located mostly in the Northwest, which in various respects both Foster (1960) and I (1968a, b) have considered something of a climax zone. The collections of the Museo del Pueblo Espafiol, currently in storage, bear out these impressions, as do other works on traditional dress.11 Otherwise, we are hard put today to identify costume traits typical of single pueblos, and so are the villagers themselves. In addition, it is my impression that in many instances local variations in Spanish costume are often (but not always) less marked than are those in parts of the highland Maya country: I think particularly of the major variations in men's trouser styles between neighboring municipios in highland Chiapas. 12 By contrast, in the Santander town of Vega de Pas, where each of the town's barrios (neighborhoods) is an entire mountain valley, my informants profess to remember vaguely that at least one barrio formerly distinguished itself in daily dress, but only in the width of the men's trousers at the ankle. Similarly, Bogatyrev (1971) points out for Moravian Slovakia that major costume differences exist at the regional level, lesser differences at the district or parish level being recognizable to natives only and important only for them. Returning to Santander, in aspects of costume other than the width of trousers at the ankle, the entire mountain zone containing three Pasiego pueblos was characterized by a single festival costume — the one pictured by Ortiz Echagüe — and this did not differ so strikingly from those of neighboring zones as might those of two Mayan municipios.13 In parts of Europe, at some periods, the small locality was the largest unit of shared dress style. In contrast with the Moravian case, for example, Danish ethnographers cite a relationship between parish endogamy and the difficulty of changing dress created by marriage across parish lines in West Zealand (Michelsen and Rasmussen 1955:51). Where and when local costumes may have differed to this extent in Spain is perhaps impossible to know. In Spain, unlike Guatemala, the major economic pursuits of neighboring pueblos are not sharply different. For the most part, the entire zone to which I refer is characterized by subsistence-oriented mixed farming and herding. Differing conditions may favor local emphases in some pueblos or zones on the herding of different animals or on the cultivation of different grains, or may encourage different ratios of grain farming to truck gardening or orchard cultivation, but the

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relationship between pueblos is not characterized by the need for continual exchange of subsistence goods. Similarly, certain forms of production (such as wool-working through the spinning stage) tend to replicate one another from one municipality to the next, though the inhabitants of different pueblos all look to specific local centers for some essential services (such as weaving). A few towns do have local monopolies on some industries (such as pottery) or services (such as milling), and this often has to do with the different availability of critical resources. Exchange relationships between towns and their constituent households are not as intensive or far-flung as in Guatemala, however, nor does much exchange encroach on the sphere of the foodstuffs consumed daily. The market is much more quiescent and a much less important part of daily living than it is in Guatemala; nonetheless, Spanish rural culture is permeated in most spheres by market values (Freeman 1965), as is that of the Guatemalan highlands (Tax 1953). Today, with reference to the typology offered by Wolf (1957), we would call the Guatemalan municipios closed corporate communities. The presence in each of its own civil-religious hierarchy — its system of cargos, its sacred and administrative infrastructure — is one of the principal defining features of the closed corporate community, and each municipio's uniqueness is symbolized by its name and that of its patron saint as well as by its costume. Spanish municipalities share with Guatemalan ones this complex of characteristics. Even though, in the spheres of civil and religious administration, Spanish towns are part of overarching national structures, they also have intertwined internal political and religious structures which often outweigh the national ones in significance and comprise the chief forces governing local life (Freeman 19686). Perhaps it is in the very nature of the closed corporate community to disapprove, in one way or another, marriage across its boundaries. The high rate of Guatemalan municipio endogamy is not everywhere equaled in Spain, but it is approximated wherever population size permits. The Sierra Ministra, which I shall discuss at length below, is composed of very small populations — ranging from 50 to 200 persons. The larger rural pueblos of northern Spain may be more than ten times as large as this. Even within the Sierra Ministra, the proportion of endogamous households increases directly with population size, and I have recorded censuses showing that in towns of 35-40 households (175-200 persons) more than 75 percent of these are headed by couples in which both spouses are pueblo natives. The proportion in the smallest villages is, of course, very low. Regardless of village size, however, the entire North (and indeed all of rural Spain) is permeated by an ideology which

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discourages, on a symbolic level,14 marriage between people of different pueblos. Village lore is filled with notions of local superiority, and these include notions that the population of a municipality is (in Tax's words) "a unique group by blood and tradition." The equation of village with local breed manages to survive in Spain even in small villages with high rates of outside marriage. This is even to some extent accompanied by differing traditions of origin for different pueblos: where available, pueblos have lifted out of local history and protohistory bits of knowledge about their past which set them off from their neighbors. What costume cannot tell us about the significant boundaries and interrelations of Spanish populations we can learn from popular verses (cantares) and population nicknames (apodos) and from the refrains (refranes), proverbs (dichos), and counsels (consejas) which form part of the oral tradition of Spanish culture. Though less visible than costume, they parallel its role and give the anthropologist his best clues as to which structures stand in mutual opposition. Caro Baroja's (1957) essay on sociocentrism draws on some of the classic collections of refrains and verses15 and on some contemporary ones 16 and for the first time deals analytically with the patterns of mutual opposition of Spanish territorial entities. Caro properly points out that sociocentrism begins at the neighborhood level and that village lore contains expressions of opposition at this level. Nonetheless, the bulk of that lore reflects opposition not so much at the neighborhood level as at the level of entire pueblos — population nuclei which are distinctly separated in space, contain their own political infrastructures, and have separate religious identities. Larger units ( Λ« Ο ο β Ο 2 η Η

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MAGOROH MARUYAMA

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them, the homogenistic epistemology and the independent-event epistemology, will be fairly familiar to Western readers because they are two sides of the same coin, mistakenly called "Western logic." The homeostatic and morphogenetic epistemologies may seem exotic, but they correspond to biological and social processes of equilibrium, increase of differentiation, growth of patterns and structures, heterogenization, symbiotization, and evolution. In a sense, the table serves as an epistemological Rorschach test. Those who adopt the homogenistic epistemology invariably ask whether the categories are universally valid, exhaustive, and mutually exclusive, find fault with the table in terms of these criteria, and attempt to construct universally valid, exhaustive, and mutually exclusive categories. Those who adopt independent-event epistemology are relatively uninterested in the table. Those with homeostatic and morphogenetic epistemologies proceed on the assumption that the construction and interpretation of tables depend on the situation, and consequently they do not worry as to whether the categories are universally valid, exhaustive, or mutually exclusive. In fact, they consider these criteria irrelevant and useless. The difference between those who adopt the homeostatic epistemology and those who adopt the morphogenetic epistemology is that the former will seek equilibrium between differing tabulations and interpretations by different persons, while the latter will expect change over time. For example, my epistemology happens to be morphogenetic: in the first place, I need no neat categorization in my head, and in fact it is unnatural for me to categorize; furthermore, if I make categorizations for the convenience of others, they come out different each time. This is a comment on how people with different epistemologies look at the table differently and is therefore a metacomment, which, incidentally, agrees with the table. The contents of the table are to a great extent self-explanatory, with the exception of reciprocal causality, which requires some additional discussion because of its recent history and ramifications. Within Western thinking, reciprocal causality was scientifically recognized only in the 1940's, when mathematical sophistication developed with the study of various feedback systems such as radar-controlled anti-aircraft artillery and servomechanisms. Until then Western logic had prohibited the formal formulation of causal loops, and non-reciprocal causal models had, with occasional exceptions, dominated Western thinking for almost 2,500 years (Maruyama 1963a, 1978). Since 1940, reciprocal causal models have undergone a series of developments. In its first phase, during the 1940's, and 1950's, efforts were concentrated on deviationcounteracting, stabilizing reciprocal causal processes such as homeo-

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stasis, morphostasis, and servomechanism. In its second phase, from around 1960 to the present, differentiation-amplifying reciprocal causal processes began to draw scientists' attention. In the course of the first phase, there was increasing realization that Shannon's information theory (Shannon and Weaver 1949) w^s inadequate. This theory per se had nothing to do with reciprocal causality. In fact, it was based on the independent-event epistemology, in the sense that it assumed the basic state of the universe to be homogeneity and considered heterogeneous structures as unusual occurrences which tended to decay into homogeneity under the influence of random noise. In Shannon's formulation, nothing could grow. It was gradually recognized that what increases structures, differentiation, and heterogeneity in such processes as evolution is another type of reciprocal causal process. An example of this kind of process is the case of a particular species of moth and the particular species of bird that feeds on it. Camouflaged mutants of the moth survive better, and the mutants of the bird that are more capable of finding the camouflaged moths survive better. Therefore, the moth gets more and more camouflaged generation after generation, and the bird gets more and more capable of finding the camouflaged moth. This type of reciprocal causal process has been called "deviation-amplifying," "morphogenesis," "positive feedback system," etc. (Maruyama 1963a, 1968). Ulam (1960) mathematically demonstrated that simple rules of interaction can generate complex patterns and that it takes more "information" to describe the finished patterns than to describe the generating rules. In other words, the amount of information, as defined by Shannon's formula, can grow. Just as reciprocal causal processes can increase the amount of Shannonian information, they can also systematically increase the unevenness of distribution of temperature in the biological and social world. This is impossible under the assumption that the basic state of the universe is random distribution of independent events. To clarify this notion, we must examine two misconceptions, one regarding the relationship between thermodynamic entropy and information and the other regarding the relationship between thermodynamic entropy and energy. Thermodynamic entropy is a measure of thermal homogeneity and is defined in such a way that it is greater when temperature is more evenly distributed. The fact that it increases with thermal homogeneity, while the amount of Shannonian information decreases with structural homogeneity, is purely definitional. Shannon could have defined the measure of the amount of information to increase with structural homogeneity in order to parallel the definition of thermodynamic entropy. Alternatively, thermodynamic entropy could be redefined to

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decrease with thermal homogeneity in order to parallel Shannon's definition of amount of information. In any case, there are no grounds for maintaining any mystical notion regarding the fact that the Shannonian measure of information has a polarity opposite to that of thermodynamic entropy. Furthermore, since thermodynamic entropy is a measure of thermal homogeneity, while the Shannonian measure of information deals with structural homogeneity, they are not directly related; nor are they convertible to or from each other. The misconception regarding the relationship between entropy and energy is of a different nature. This misconception usually occurs in one or both of two forms: (a) as if entropy and energy were convertible to and from each other and (b) as if they added up to a fixed sum, i.e., as if what is gained in one were lost in the other. The first law of thermodynamics is the law of conservation of energy. The second law is the law of increase of entropy, in other words, the law of thermal homogenization. These laws are logically and physically independent. Furthermore, there is no law of conservation of entropy. If entropy increases somewhere, it does not have to decrease somewhere else. In fact, one form of the second law of thermodynamics says that, in an isolated system, entropy has a high probability of increasing. It is important to note that entropy increases within the system without decrease of entropy elsewhere; that there is neither energy input nor energy output during this process of increase of entropy; and that total energy remains constant within the system even though entropy changes. Entropy and energy can change independently. There is no direct conversion between entropy and energy. Furthermore, the second law of thermodynamics applies only to temporal stochastic, causally nonreciprocal processes, not to reciprocal causal (both deterministic and probabilistic) processes. Therefore it is not logically contradictory for entropy to decrease within an isolated system if there are reciprocal causal processes going on in that system. As we have seen, the misconception regarding the relationship between entropy and information is mainly due to insufficient understanding of the definitional nature of these terms. On the other hand, the misconception regarding the relationship between entropy and energy is aggravated by an epistemology based on the notion of substance, which tends to treat entropy and information as substances or quantities which persist. Energy is a quantity which persists in various forms and which is even convertible to and from matter. Entropy and information, in contrast, are forms and structure which do not persist, and they are not convertible, even one to the other. Reciprocal causal models so far have succeeded in explaining growth of

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patterns, heterogeneity, and information. The next problem to be studied is the process of symbiotization once heterogeneity has been generated. This is particularly important in planning. In recent years we have seen an increase in diversity and the demand for diversity in our society, but we have not worked out methods for producing symbiotic combinations of heterogeneous elements which are not yet interacting. If Individual A has three ways, a i, a2, and a3, to implement his goal and Individual Β has two ways, bi,b 2 , to implement his, there are 3 x 2 = 6 different alternative combinations between the two individuals. Some of these combinations may be symbiotic, others not. For a greater number of individuals, the number of combinations becomes enormous. There may be individuals who cannot be part of the same network because no symbiotic combinations between them can be found. The selection of symbiotic combinations and the selection of networks for each individual require methods we do not yet have. The next phase in the study of reciprocal causal models will be the development of such methods. Through the development of reciprocal causal models, it has become clear that the basic principle of biological, social, and even some physical processes is increase of heterogeneity and symbiotization. Westerners have traditionally regarded homogeneity as the basis of peace and heterogeneity as a source of conflict. In biological processes, however, it is often homogeneity that causes conflict while heterogeneity confers benefits. For example, animals convert oxygen into carbon dioxide, and plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. In doing exactly opposite things, they do not conflict; on the contrary, they help each other. The richness of life in the tropical rain forest or on the coral reef is possible because of the heterogeneity of the species living there. If all animals were to eat the same food, there would be food shortage. If not all animals were eaten, there would be waste. Heterogeneity also assures richer and faster evolution and a higher probability of survival in the case of ecological and environmental change. The Mandenka of West Africa say: "If you force people to be similar, the only way left for them to be different is to get on top of one another. This creates conflicts" (Camara 1978). Traditionally, Westerners have had to choose between the two sides of the same coin (occasionally with various degrees of mixture): the homogenistic epistemology and the independent-event epistemology. Examples of this limited choice are the medieval controversy between universalism and nominalism, with an intermediate position taken by conceptualism, and the 19th- and 20th-century contrast between idealists such as Kant and Hegel and existentialists such as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre. The same limitation is found in many of the conflicts in the social sciences today. In sociology, the quantitative school reflects the

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homogenistic and the phenomenological school the independent-event epistemology, although symbolic interactionism has moved toward the morphogenetic epistemology. In anthropology, the universalists' arguments belong to the homogenistic and most of the relativists' arguments to the independent-event epistemology. (Some of the latter, being quantitative, reflect the homogenistic.) It is incorrect, however, to identify the homogenistic and independent-event epistemologies as "Western," because they are predominant in many non-Western cultures as well. Islam is more hierarchical and categorical than Christianity. The Hindu philosophy is also hierarchical and homogenistic. On the other hand, Mandenka epistemology is morphogenetic, and Chinese philosophy is homeostatic. Japanese philosophy has at least three underlying currents: the Jomon current, which originated around 7000 B.C., is morphogenetic; the Yayoi current, which began about 300 B.C., is homeostatic; and the Yamato current, which came later via Korea from horse-riding hunters of northern Asia, is hierarchical. The Jomon current accounts for the Japanese's view that nothing remains the same and hence their readiness to change. (This contrasts with the traditional Chinese philosophy of oscillation, in which there is a return to the same state.) The Yayoi current is responsible for the Japanese's apparent rigidity, formality, and perfectionism, and the Yamato current is seen in their hierarchy-consciousness. To add to the heterogeneity within the Japanese culture, the three currents have been distributed differently in different social classes. Up to and including the feudal period, the small ruling class was hierarchical and homeostatic, while the grass-roots culture of farmers was egalitarian and reciprocally interactive. After the Meiji reform, the Yayoi and Yamato epistemologies spread into the growing middle class, although the Jomon current remained in all social classes. Each person in the Japanese culture incorporates all three currents. In contrast, the Western individual chooses to belong to one religion, one ideology, or one political party. The interaction between the Jomon and the Yayoi currents is also expressed in various forms of traditional and modern Japanese architecture (Tange and Kawazoe 1965, Tange 1972). Furthermore, Japanese and Mandenka philosophies are heterogenistic, while Chinese philosophy is dualistic. In this respect Chinese philosophy resembles Greek logic on the surface, and it is this superficial resemblance which has caused Europeans to interpret Chinese philosophy as having a "logical" structure, even though this interpretation contains some distortions. Similarly, Europeans have recognized the Islamic and Hindu philosophies as "great philosophical systems" because they are hierarchical and homogenistic. One difference between the

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Christian philosophy and the Islamic philosophy, however, is that the former has the dualistic structure of good and evil, while the latter is more unitary. In summary, the Islamic, Hindu, and Chinese philosophies, which Westerners consider "typically Eastern," have affinities to Greek philosophy. Jomon, Mandenka, and to some extent Navajo and Eskimo philosophies form a different cluster and have not been recognized as "philosophical systems" by Western philosophers.

DIMENSION R E D U C T I O N Mutual understanding between persons with different epistemologies is often illusory. Quite often a person believes that (s)he "understands" other persons, while in fact (s)he is only reducing their thinking to her/his own epistemology. I shall call this process dimension reduction. The conversion of one epistemology to another may or may not produce an internally consistent "explanation." When it does, the person is likely to be convinced that the explanation is the right one even if it is incorrect. I shall illustrate this with two metaphors. For the sake of simplicity, these metaphors are at the level of theories rather than at the level of epistemologies. The first metaphor is the two-dimensional, parabolic movement of a ball thrown into the air (ignoring the resistance of the air and the rotation of the earth). The situation is illustrated in figure 2, where the .Y-axis represents the horizontal direction in which the ball is thrown and the Y-axis represents the vertical direction. We can make a dimension reduction of this movement in several ways. One way is to project this movement onto the A'-axis in the manner of the shadow of the ball on the ground when the sun is at the zenith. This dimension reduction produces the interpretation that the movement is a one-dimensional movement of a body at a constant speed. This interpretation does not violate the laws of physics and is internally consistent. Therefore the person who makes it may be convinced that it is the correct one. Another way is to project the movement onto the Y-axis as it would appear if it were sunset time, the ball were thrown in the direction of the sunset, and we were watching the shadow of the ball on a wall behind the man who threw it. We would see a movement of an object upward with a constant deceleration until it eventually stopped and began accelerating downward. We could interpret this as a one-dimensional movement under the influence of a constant gravitational force. This interpretation

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does not violate the laws of physics and is internally consistent. Therefore the person who makes it may be convinced that it is the correct one. In this instance, the two methods of dimension reduction produce internally consistent descriptions that may induce a delusion of correctness in the interpreter. In the next metaphor, some methods produce internally inconsistent descriptions. Figure 3 represents the movements of two balls on a billiard table. The .Y-axis represents the east-west direction and the Y-axis the north-south direction. One ball comes from the east and the other from the west; both are of the same size and weight and have the same speed; they collide in such a way as to bounce off in north-south directions. Again, there are several ways to produce a dimension reduction. If we project this event onto the line alpha, which runs southwest to northeast, we see two objects move toward each other, collide, and bounce back and move apart, all in one-dimensional movements. This description does not violate the laws of physics and is internally consistent. If, however, we project this event onto the A'-axis, it appears that two objects fly toward each other, collide, and get stuck, with some decrease in their total size. In this description the kinetic energy gets lost. If we want to preserve the law of conservation of energy, we have to invent some explanation. We can, for example, say that the kinetic energy was converted into potential energy required to hold the two objects together

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γ

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with a reduced size. This is, of course, a rationalization which produces an internally consistent but incorrect explanation. We cannot exclude the possibility that much of our "science" consists of such rationalizations. If we project the event onto the Y-axis, one object apparently splits into two pieces that fly away, and the sum of the sizes of the two pieces is greater than the original object. Again, we can rationalize this by saying that an explosion took place and that some potential energy was converted into kinetic energy. If we project it onto line beta, which runs northwest to southeast, we have a more difficult problem: Two objects collide, pass through each other, and fly away. Here we may finally realize that this event is very difficult to explain as one-dimensional, and the second dimension must be added. Similarly, when a person reduces another person's epistemology to the dimensions available in her/his own, the resulting interpretation may or may not be internally consistent. When the interpretation is internally consistent, (s)he most likely deludes her/himself that (s)he has understood the other person. "I understand you perfectly, but you keep saying that I don't understand you" is a typical statement made in such situations. When the dimension reduction produces an internally inconsistent interpretation, the person doing the dimension reduction tends to think that the fault is in the other person and to consider the latter illogical, unintelligent, insincere, or deceptive.

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SELF-CONSISTENCY, AUTODOX, AND EXOPARADOX The theory that there is only one logic, or that there is a superlogic to encompass all other logics, is tautological rather than logical. Like solipsism, such a theory is internally self-consistent and therefore self-proving, but not necessarily correct in the sense of correspondence with what it tries to describe as "reality." Mathematical logicians know that the self-consistency of a theory is no proof of its universality. In fact, mathematical logicians can produce many self-consistent theories which disagree with one another, for example, Euclidean geometry and some of the non-Euclidean geometries. More important, mathematical logicians know that there is nothing "objective" about mathematics or mathematical logics; these do not need to correspond to any "reality." Mathematical theories and mathematical logics are mental constructs. If there is anything "objective" about them, it is not in their contents, but in the fact that once you agree to adopt certain axioms and certain rules of deduction, you can arrive at the same conclusions (called theorems). Anthropology as science, on the other hand, aims at producing theories which correspond to "reality." Too frequently, however, the internal consistency of a theory leads to a delusion as to its correctness in the theorist. The self-consistency of a theory may lead to a tendency unintentionally to distort and reduce other theories to that theory in such a way as to reinforce it. This is exactly the opposite of Russell's paradoxes, which contain self-contradictions.1 The tendency I am talking about converts any counterargument into proof of its own theory. For lack of a better term, I shall call this tendency autodox. A self-consistent theory may also provide its opponents with the argument that autodox is predictable in terms of their opposing theories; i.e., it may provide opponents with proof that they are right. I shall call this process exoparadox. A few examples will illustrate these processes. Α universalist I met at an international congress maintained that all humans had the same basic structure of reasoning regardless of culture. He asked me how I would say "I see a tree" in Japanese. I made a Japanese translation ofthat sentence and said "kio miru." He asked me what the grammatical structure of the Japanese sentence was. I told him that "ki" is a noun, "tree", "o" is a suffix indicating accusative case, and "miru" is a verb, "see." Thereupon he said that his theory was proved. Upon close examination, many theories are based on this type of rationale. For example, a sociologist who believes in a hierarchy theory of social organization goes to a non-hierarchical culture, constructs a "measure" or "scale" of leadership (such as the frequency with which one person talks with other persons), collects "data," and writes a monograph

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on the hierarchical structure of the culture. Similarly, the use of the Q-sort technique, in which a person is made to rank-order a number of adjectives, assumes that adjectives, or for that matter everything, can be rank-ordered, or that all persons in all cultures live in a rank-orderable universe. A less technical but more commonly used method is " v a l u e " analysis, in which persons in different cultures are asked to rate certain words, sentences, or situations. From the ratings, the researcher deduces the rank-order of "values." The assumption is again that all persons in all cultures live in a universe consisting of ratable events and rankable values, or that all persons in all cultures have a hierarchical epistemology. The fallacy common to all these examples is that the theorist or the researcher is seeking data from the point of view of her/his own theory, logic, or epistemology, forcing her/his epistemological structure upon data and filtering and distorting the data without realizing that (s)he is doing so. (S)he is free of distortion on the level of measurement, but not on the level of epistemology. Autodox is the result of such epistemological distortion. The theorist examines the counterarguments, reinterprets and epistemologically distorts them into her/his own epistemology, logic, or theory, and finds confirmation in them. A l l (s)he accomplishes is to convince her/himself that (s)he is right. A t the same time, (s)he provides others proof that they are right and (s)he is wrong. This is what I have called exoparadox. The universalist is convinced that everybody has the same thought structure and therefore her/his thought structure is universal. This provides non-universalists proof that the universalist is limited in her/his ethnocentric (non-universal) thinking and therefore even the universalist is non-universal. Autodox and exoparadox create a trap which confines the theorist in a delusion of the correctness of her/his theory and the incorrectness of others' theories. There is another set of considerations at the epistemological level which contributes to the inability of theories to capture much of the wisdom which exists in different cultures and disciplines: exotication, the unsuspected hole, and self-confinement.

EXOTICATION, THE UNSUSPECTED HOLE, A N D SELF-CONFINEMENT What is self-evident in one epistemology may be incomprehensible in another. For example, in Mandenka wisdom, it is self-evident that heterogeneity and change are sources of harmony and symbiosis while homogeneity is a source of conflict. This is incomprehensible in the homogenistic epistemology, which advocates unity by similarity and con-

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siders differences as sources of conflict. Even though such wisdom may be applicable and useful in any culture, those whose epistemology cannot accommodate it may fail to see its applicability and usefulness and consider it exotic, something belonging to somebody else. This tendency may be called exotication. Another example is the concept of reciprocal causality. Even though the concept was understood and used in certain disciplines, such as biology, ecology, and electrical engineering, in many others it remained until recently something exotic and even illogical. Many whose epistemology could not accommodate reciprocal causality attempted to "understand" it by breaking it down into a series of non-reciprocal causal chains in alternating directions, without realizing that this procedure alters the mathematical characteristics of the description and therefore results in incorrect analysis. Furthermore, those who considered reciprocal causality exotic regarded it as something that applied only to special cases and failed to see its more general applicability and its full significance. Still another example involves culturally conditioned sex differences in thought patterns in the United States. For a number of years I taught courses on misunderstandings. I required the students to present case studies of misunderstandings with analysis at different logical levels of communication. Women produced complex cases with sophisticated analysis. When I praised them, the women thought that they did not deserve it because these cases were common everyday occurrences. On the other hand, the men thought that these cases must be fictitious and complained that the women were getting good grades by inventing stories (Maruyama 1963b). Here the women's wisdom was exoticated by the men. Persons in a discipline or a culture may be unaware that others lack the concepts they consider basic. This problem may be called the unsuspected hole. For example, ecologists, for whom the concepts of heterogeneity and symbiosis are basic, may be unaware that many political scientists and even some sociologists lack these concepts. Similarly, people in cultures with heterogenistic epistemologies may be unaware that Westerners tend to be unable to think of peace in terms other than "unity by similarity." As long as a person remains unaware that others lack a concept basic to her/him, it does not occur to her/him to explain it to them, and the concept does not get formulated as a theory. Persons in a given field may be unaware that a conceptual or epistemological innovation in their field is related to (a part of, resulting from, or affecting) an overall conceptual or epistemological change which includes other fields. This is a failure to see the significance of the

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innovation in the larger context of intellectual evolution. It is provincialism of a sort, and I term it self-confinement. Sometimes the persons involved are unaware that the innovation is epistemological rather than theoretical or technical, especially if they have been brought up in one epistemology and are unaware of others. In such cases they may be unable to explore the full potential of the innovation and may be trapped in their old epistemology within the innovation. For example, the invention of positive feedback loops in radio engineering occurred about 1910 (Milsum 1968). Even though positive feedback loops are abundant in biological processes and are the basis of differentiation, growth of structure, and evolution, at the time of its invention, the positive feedback circuit was regarded as a local innovation within the field of radio engineering. Furthermore, they were considered a technical rather than an epistemological innovation. They were exoticated by those in other fields. It is almost ironic that the concept of reciprocal causality gained its visibility through the application of negative feedback loops in the 1940's (Maruyama 1963a), while positive feedback loops were not given much attention until the 1960's. Perhaps, on the other hand, this was because the concept of negative feedback was more compatible with the epistemology of Western science than that of positive feedback. Reciprocal causal processes of both types were alien to Western thinking. Negative feedback systems, however, with their equilibrium-maintaining characteristics, were much more compatible with Western epistemology, based on the concepts of substance and permanence, than positive feedback systems, whose basic characteristic is change. Therefore, it may be understandable that negative feedback loops found wide recognition in 1950's while positive feedback loops continued to be exoticated. For example, Waddington's (1968-72) pioneering work in theoretical biology still leaned more toward morphostasis than toward the rise of new patterns. Immediately after the publication of my article "The Second Cybernetics: Deviation-amplifying Mutual Causal Processes" (Maruyama 1963α), I received some 70 reprint requests, mostly from geneticists, embryologists, and cancer-research pathologists in Europe and North America. This indicated the disciplinary localization of the concept and self-confinement. In 1968 the article was reprinted in a book for behavioral scientists (Buckley 1968). Another article, "Paradigmatology and Its Application" (1974), drew reprint requests from twelve fields of biological science, eight fields of medical science, four fields of psychological science, three fields of physical sciences, and two fields of social science, indicating a further decrease of localization. In 1975 Prigogine, a leading non-equilibrium thermodynamist, showed interest in my concep-

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tualization, and in 1976 Jantsch and Waddington combined in a book, among others, an article by Prigogine on non-equilibrium thermodynamics, one by me on symbiotization of heterogeneity, one by Holling on resilient systems, and one by Abraham on macrons, a remarkable crossdisciplinary association. Thus self-confinement is gradually breaking down, with increasing numbers of people realizing that what they had thought to be a local phenomenon has wider implications. In 1963,1 wrote to the Editor of American Scientist that the concept of deviation-amplifying reciprocal causality would be taken up by social scientists in about five years and by philosophers and general scientists in ten to fifteen years. My "prediction" turned out to be true. I was able to foresee this because I was familiar with the climate of opinion in various disciplines and therefore could estimate the time it would take them to change. The concept of reciprocal causality is the first major conceptual innovation in "Western logic" in 2,500 years. It will be increasingly appreciated during the coming decades as the cosmological, biological, and anthropological implications of differentiation-amplifying reciprocal causal processes are studied further.

WISDOM BEYOND THEORIES Theories are limited in several ways. They are limited because they must take a certain logical form in a certain epistemology and because they establish themselves by dimension reduction, self-consistency, and autodox. They are artificial. Much of wisdom cannot be captured by theories. There are two types of wisdom. The first is the wisdom which exists in specific cultures or in specific disciplines, for example, the Mandenka wisdom. This type of wisdom is often taken for granted within the culture or discipline, and little or no explanation or theorization is needed for insiders. Insiders consider it trivial, and outsiders either are unaware of it or, if aware, consider it exotic — irrelevant and inapplicable to themselves. Therefore, this type of wisdom is reduced to trivialities if attempts at theorization are made, either by insiders or by outsiders. In this sense it is beyond theories. It gives birth to non-trivial theories only under certain circumstances. Mandenka wisdom probably will become theoretically non-trivial because the time is ripe for it: the Western world is looking for an alternative logic, and Mandenka wisdom can meet the need. Fortunately, Mandenka wisdom has been written down articulately by Sory Camara because he, as a Mandenka, realized that his French colleagues did not understand it. My articles (1963a and 1978) were written under similar circumstances. The wisdom contained in them has existed for

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centuries in several cultures and in several scientific disciplines. It is trivial in these cultures and disciplines. The need for its articulation arose when I realized that most Westerners could not easily understand what was trivial to me. The time was somewhat ripe in some disciplines, though it will be riper in a wider range of disciplines in a decade or two. The other type of wisdom is gained in transepistemological understanding. It concerns the limits of applicability of theories, logics, epistemologies, and culture-specific or discipline-specific wisdom. It is a metawisdom, so to speak. The concept of reciprocal causality is wisdom of the first type; my 1963 "prediction" about the rate of acceptance of this specific wisdom is wisdom of the second type. We have seen that both types of wisdom are beyond theories. What we need in our world, now and in the future, is wisdom rather than theories. We must improve our transepistemological understanding and avoid entrapment in theories, autodox, and exoparadox. Anthropologists can be experts at the attainment of wisdom, if we do not remain trapped in our own theories.

NOTES 1. An example of Russell's paradoxes is the statement "Everything written on this page is false." If the statement is true, it must be false; if the statement is false, it must be true.

REFERENCES CITED Editor. 1968. Modern systems research for the behavioral scientist. Chicago: Aldine. CAMARA, SORY. 1 9 7 8 . "The concept of heterogeneity and change among the Mandenka," Cultures of the fiiture. Edited by M. Maruyama and Arthur Hawkins. World Anthropology. Mouton: The Hague. JANTSCH, ERICH, and C . H . WADDINGTON. Editors. 1 9 7 6 . Evolution and consciousness Reading: Addison-Wesley. MARUYAMA, MAGOROH. 1963a. The second cybernetics: Deviation-amplifying mutual causal processes. American Scientist 51:164-179, 250-256. . \963b. Basic elements in misunderstandings. Dialectica 17:78-92, 99-110. . 1968. "Mutual causality in general systems," in Positive feedback. Edited by J. Milsum. Oxford: Pergamon. . 1978. "Psychotopology and its applications," in Perspectives on ethnicity. Edited by R. E. Holloman and S. Arutivnor. World Anthropology. Mouton: The Hague. MILSUM, JOHN. Editor. 1968. Positive feedback. Oxford: Pergamon. BUCKLEY, WALTER.

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and W. WEAVER. 1949. The mathämatical theory of communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. TANGE, KENZO. 1972. Katsura. New Haven: Yale University Press. TANGE, KENZO, and N. KAWAZOE. 1965. Ise. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. ULAM, STANISLAW. 1960. Lecture given at Stanford University. WADDINGTON, CONRAD H. Editor. 1968-72. Towards a theoretical biology. 4 vols. Chicago: Aldine. SHANNON, CLAUDE,

FREDERICK GEARING

Microanalysis and Action Anthropology

Infrequently, once in a decade perhaps, from somewhere in the social science community, an unusually powerful fact is discovered which seems to reach out in all directions and transform the many other facts and ideas it touches. A pair of facts of this kind has of late emerged, and one of the ideas touched is action anthropology. Beginning in the early 1950's a few social scientists — linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, perhaps 10 or 12 in all — found each other (see, for example, Bateson et al. 1971). Before, from their variety of background and to an equal variety of purpose, all had been interested in fine-grained analysis of filmed records of human conversation and other interaction. Having found each other, they began to pool their efforts; a few others joined them, and by the early 1970's the pair of facts of interest here had been established and its wider implications were becoming evident. 1 The two facts are these: First, whenever humans meet face-to-face and talk, dancelike behaviors unfold between speaker and listener, the behaviors of each synchronized with split-second precision with the behaviors of the other. The dance follows the beat established by the voice of the speaker of the moment and is made up of, on the one hand, his speech and his gestures, gaze directions, and bodily movements generally and, on the other hand, the analogous body movements of his listeners and their verbal interjections and over-talk (see, among others, Kendon 1970, 1972). For example, in some well-established and smooth-running casual conversation now under way among five or six persons, the speaker of the moment would not have begun the utterance he or she is making and probably will not finish it except that all the listeners, through their synchronized body movement and verbal accompaniment, have been participating and continue to participate, moment to moment, in the creation of that utterance. Second, sets of such synchronized behaviors form strong patterns, and

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these patterns make up a multiplicity of simultaneous and largely tacit messages passing between each party and every other (see, among others, Kendon and Ferber 1973, Kendon 1975). In the example just given, as the speaker is speaking he and the listeners are jointly negotiating, through these dancelike acts, how long he will speak and who will speak next; through other such dancelike behaviors they are simultaneously negotiating or maintaining some array of mutally acceptable degrees of distance. Further, they are negotiating and maintaining the many additional de facto agreements whereby the event is a casual conversation and not some other kind of face-to-face talk and whereby the participants assume contrasting roles in the conversation and make the conversation group a social organization. In short, whenever humans talk face-to-face, the negotiated results of multiple messages create limits as to the content of the talk and other enactments — establish that some utterances and acts can appropriately occur and some cannot. Control is brought to bear through the synchronies in speaker-listener behaviors — through the power each listener thereby has over any speaker. This power frequently is sufficient to permit any listener to stop any speaker in mid-sentence, with or without consciously intending to do so, mainly by falling out of synchrony with him and the rest of the group. Put otherwise, when people talk together, it takes joint work by all the parties to define and create the event and to sustain it. Further, under many conditions any one party can momentarily stop the talk; and, if that occurs, it again takes all the parties acting jointly to recreate the event, or to reconstitute it as an event of another kind, or, indeed, comfortably to dissolve it. All these dancelike communicative behaviors are tacit in very large measure. The participants in face-to-face talk are aware in a general way of the influences they exert on each other and are to that degree aware of the multiplicity of messages and of their powers of control, but only in the sense that they can later report with some accuracy on instances of such influences they have exerted or felt. They are not at all aware, in that same sense, of the specific behaviors — the synchronies and patternings — themselves. The presumption is strong that synchronies and patternings of this general kind are culturally universal, but of course the behaviors and the messages in their particulars vary between cultural groups. Many implications of this pair of facts are becoming evident. One implication of interest is methodological. In the context of the study of face-to-face communication, once an action has been observed, deemed a datum, and noted, with what other such datum is it, for analysis, to be juxtaposed? With what other set of data is that set to be juxtaposed? and

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so on. The evident answer singles out the relationship in time between one datum and another, and between one set of data and another: face-to-face talk is best described where the temporal relationship principally held in analytic focus is not before-and-after, but while. That is, actions are principally to be juxtaposed with other actions which occur simultaneously: while the speaker is talking and acting, moment to moment, what is this listener simultaneously doing? and these other listeners? While this message unfolds, what other message simultaneously unfolds? and what third and fourth messages? That implication is easily recognized but may prove hard to follow. We who are social scientists are forever engaged in face-to-face talk. All participants in face-to-face talk through engrained habit selectively focus their conscious attention on the speaker, on his words and on other signals directly connected such as facial expressions and standardized gestures; all else is taken care of, as it were, through subliminal awareness. Such selective attention quite adequately gets one through the day, of course. We have, however, carried this over, in rather large measure, into our scholarly work, and that has made mischief. In face-to-face talk, one person (by and large) talks at a time; thus we have tended to observe face-to-face talk much as spectators watch a tennis match, following the ball. This, in turn, has helped create and raise to prominence analytic tools which are sequential in form, as cause and effect, stimulus and response, act and reinforcement. These very familiar analytic terms seem comfortable, even self-evidently and objectively "true." Tennis matches can be described in that familiar mode, and sports writers do so describe them, but presumably no (winning) coach would. To recommend, not before-and-after, but while, runs against deep habit. Difficult or not, this reorienting of analysis is revealed by this pair of new facts as imperative. When we describe face-to-face talk in the better-established, sequential manner, we may note an action by A and juxtapose this with an ensuing action by B; but data now revealed as crucial — actions having controlling power — have by that familiar mode already fallen by the way. While A was saying and doing what he said and did, what was Β doing? Statistical regularities (cause and effect, or whatever) have been found, often enough, following that familiar mode, but in the light of these new facts it seems evident why: when such regularities are found, there must exist unobserved regularities in those controlling, simultaneously occurring actions. Sets of such paired, synchronized actions between speaker and listeners unfold, as sets, in some sequence, and thereby they form patterns. Now, the analytic juxtaposition of one set of data with another set is appropriately before-and-after, but even here in a most qualified

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sense. The redundancies in such messaging are so massive as often to permit participants (or observers) to "see" the whole message in the earliest-occurring bit of it, though the message may continue unfolding over some while. For example, the tacit negotiation as to how long the speaker of the moment is to speak and who will speak next may unfold through a pattern of making and breaking eye-contact between the speaker and some one listener and through other such behaviors which (standing in qualitative contrast to analogous patterns enacted with other listeners) constitute tacit agreement among members of the group. It may further unfold through a pattern of ebb and flow in those eye contacts and those other behaviors by which the exact timing of the switch in speakers is executed. All that is a message, we empirically know, first, because the participants can later report (at a level) with some accuracy and, second, because there follows a regular outcome: the switch in speaker does in fact normally occur. This now large set of data, this unfolding pattern, is, however, but one message. The rule reads: while this message unfolds, what other message simultaneously unfolds? and what other? and so on. The analytic juxtaposition has, of course, fully shifted back to "while." As the saying goes, it takes two to tango, and those two must act in synchrony and jointly weave their pattern. It, as obviously, takes two to talk. This first implication of the new facts seems now to point toward an endless and thankless task, the mapping and listing of very many simultaneously unfolding messages. Such messages, I earlier said, constitute an agreement which makes an event a casual conversation, not some other kind of face-to-face talk. Given that, a goodly number of additional messages make the conversation group a social organization. And so on and on. All this can, however, be put into a larger context and rephrased, and, so rephrased, the task seems do-able and invites the doing. This rephrasing points up a second implication of that pair of new facts, the implication of principal interest here: these new facts make the idea of "constraint" empirically graspable. Face-to-face talk is made up of actions unfolding within limits, some of them preexisting and others established in the course of the encounter. People who come together are limited, first, to the kinds of face-to-face talk which can in their community sanely unfold; they are more drastically limited to the kinds which can plausibly occur in the particular place, at the particular time of day, and among the kinds of people they are (that is, the mix of age, sex, prior acquaintanceship, and so on, among them). Usually options remain, to join in talk or not to and, if so, to engage in some one kind of talk out of the few or many kinds that are, within the above limits, possible. Choice among these options requires negotiation, and, of course, any given choice can in principle be renegotiated within the preexisting limits, as

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where a conversation becomes an argument (but not, without going outside, a fight). Once established, the kind of talk creates a new set of limits as to the kinds of topics which can be dealt with; options remain within those limits, and these must be negotiated and will normally be frequently renegotiated, as with topic shifts. Once a topic is established, this creates new limits, and so on. A moment's reflection suggests that all the above must go on simultaneously. The preexisting limits are real because and only because they are usually honored and because when they are violated visible consequences follow; so in any particular face-to-face talk, whatever else is going on, those preexisting limits are being enacted. While that enactment continues, negotiation is under way as to which particular kind of talk is to be established. That determined, its enactment continues while . . . and so on. The number of simultaneous messages is great indeed, but one does not compile a mere list, because by this rephrasing it is evident that the messages are organized: limits nesting within limits nesting within limits. Throughout, all these limits are made real by the powers inherent in those synchronized, dancelike behaviors by which a listener often can, without conscious design, stop the speaker in midsentence; tangibly, the limits are operating constraints. This second and principal implication of the pair of new facts is evident and broad: face-to-face talk is best described as a system of constraints, a cybernetic system. More accurately: that much of human life which finds expression in face-to-face talk is best so described. And how much of life is that? All of it. By offering it an empirical grounding, the pair of new facts provides new encouragement to take up yet again the task which Bateson (1936) anticipated and which has ever since been most tempting and yet most elusive: the application of the notion of cybernetics to the description of the behavior of humankind in groups. To this I will return. That pair of new facts, as now broadened, touches the set of seminal ideas and related practice called action anthropology. Tax (1952) first put the ideas to paper. He wrote that an anthropologist while at work in a community should embrace two coequal purposes: to discover new knowledge and to be useful to the community in which he works. Tax also laid down some guidelines as to how an anthropologist who pursued those two purposes might behave effectively in the field. Among those guidelines, one was pivotal: that the action anthropologist carefully avoid any exercise of power. His involvement should instead be limited to suggesting to the community new, alternative courses of action among which members can choose. This directive is central, Tax argued, because by following it the anthropologist can hope to keep the purposes of

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learning and helping in balance. T o the degree that an anthropologist comes to know the community scientifically as a system of some kind, realistic options will present themselves to his mind, along with words and acts which will make those options intelligible to members of the community. Conversely, when such options are presented to the members of the community their reactions will often modify and extend that scientific knowledge. Finally, the choices so made will in the main be good choices, will affect community life in non-trivial ways that the people think good. This final point was the critical one. The first two, taken alone, would in fact justify the use of power in the usual mariner of applied anthropology (that is, the applied anthropologist would go to work at the invitation of persons in seats of power, he would study and make recommendations to those who hired him, and if these were implemented he could stand by and be instructed by the ensuing developments). The idea that choices made by the community without duress lead to better outcomes no doubt involved some political ideology and some wishful thinking, but it contained the gernt, at least, of an empirical claim about the nature of social change which invited development and testing against facts. A s is generally known, the idea of action anthropology grew out of efforts then already under way in American Indian communities. In this context, the thinking of action anthropologists about social change soon took on a surprisingly uneven emphasis: there was only infrequent and typically almost casual talk about change, and there was frequent observation and quite searching thought and discussion about cultural persistence arid the absence of change. The anthropologists saw that the Fox Indians, for example, had been saying no to the proposals of a string of government officials over the years, and they found them frequently saying no to the current suggestions of the anthropologists. Tax argued that the course of social change would be happier if members of the community themselves made the choices. A s discussion about social change took early form, this argument was given additional content: they will frequently choose not to change, and not changing is an important, little-understood dimension of that happier course. This was the seed, perhaps, of a theory. It would be pleasing to report that, as the number of action anthropologists modestly grew and as they took up residence in a number of communities and did their work and shared their results, that seed grew into a great tree. It did not. One reason, in hindsight, is clear. The action anthropologists brought with them to their work, not surprisingly, the conceptual tools which prevailed in the social science community at the time; more particularly, they brought a largely

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unexamined imagery which underlay those concepts. By that imagery, the world of human behavior had two principal features. First, it had a prevailing state of inertia, motion in a fixed direction, which was called habit, or character trait, or custom, or culture. Second, intermittently impinging on that inertia were cultural contacts and other impacts which changed the direction; these impacts were called stimuli or causes or independent variables, and the altered inertia states were responses or effects or dependent variables. Of course, the inertia states came first in temporal sequence, then the impacts, then the consequences. The early action anthropologists were made vaguely uncomfortable by inertia and impacts; they tried to escape that imagery but only halfsucceeded. Perhaps they came closest in a series of social organization studies which culminated in the idea Robert Rietz termed structural paralysis (Gearing 1970: chap. 7). A more revealing episode in the struggle occurred as they tried to think about change and persistence in a people's values. Most anthropologists had thought of values as inertia: a people could be said to "have" this value or that. Normally, it was therefore said, values did not change; where a value did change, that was interesting and merited explanation. The impacts which changed values could be slow (in respect to Indians, the pressures of White approval and disapproval) or sudden (war, or allocating Indian land in severalty), but in either event they came typically from outside. Values, it was said, formed a hierarchy, and, generally, the higher a value in the hierarchy, the more impact was necessary to change it. The early action anthropologists said, in effect, that people did not "have values"; rather, people made choices. A value, in their view, was an observed regularity in such choosing. They argued that, a priori, such regularities were remarkably tenuous; values normally changed, often virtually capriciously, and therefore a value which did not change was interesting and merited explanation. There were, it was said, core values and peripheral values, and generally core values did not change. Cast about as the action anthropologists did, however, no forces seemed evident which might stop a core value from changing; they could only say that the people had earlier chosen to act in this or that way and that they chose that course still. By default, inertia had crept back in, by the back door. Missing, of course, was the notion of constraint in the empirically visible form to be offered 20 years later by the pair of new facts I have been talking about. I draw now from a small excursion into the use of the notion of constraint

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in describing human community life (Gearing n.d.). Later I will trace how the notion, so extended, seems to impinge on the idea of action anthropology, specifically on the matter of core values and their persistence. I use the notion of constraint, and the notion of cybernetics more generally, as heuristics, because to use them as an epistemology is beyond my competence. The excursion will seem grandly phrased, and the comments will be highly compressed. They are offered with the modesty obviously due. First, an introduction to cybernetics as applied to other than human communities: The notion, together with other ideas historically related, takes all the impacts ever imagined and rolls them into one initial great bang which created the islands of order we know as the brute matter around us. O r d e r is some persisting arrangement of parts; it is in the nature of such arrangements to degenerate into randomness. As brute matter degenerates, order is lost, but often some order is recaptured in new forms; along the way come the forms of order we call life. Life is best defined as a struggle against that degeneration into randomness; it is a losing battle, but the processes of mutation (in the service of randomization) and natural selection (in the service of capturing order) make the struggle interesting. Any species is a temporary success story: order, a persisting arrangement of parts, has been captured. A species, given its ecological slot, has certain jobs it must do to survive, so for any surviving species variation is held within limits: function constrains order. This applies to the species as a whole, to its members as individual organisms, and to the organs and other parts which make up an organism. Constraint is not a mere state of limitation; it is the operations of a self-correcting feedback system through which information flows. Information is news about three classes of difference: too much, too little, and just right (or, more precisely, within limits of tolerance). Constraints always operate indirectly with life forms. With some species, for example, a respiratory system involving lungs has the job of getting oxygen from the air into the blood. Since the information "too little" would also be too late, the system monitors instead the intake of carbon dioxide, which is itself innocuous but chemically linked to oxygen. For life forms, function constrains order indirectly. On the uses of the notions of constraint and cybernetics in studying human group behavior, one must pick and choose (see, among others, Bateson 1958) and improvise: Man is a biological species, subject to all the above. The jobs this species must do are done through an arrangement of parts we recognize as a community. Since humankind constitutes today a single worldwide community, to select some part of it to deal

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with is an act of some arbitrariness. We do so often, however, and shortly I will do so here. A cybernetic description of a community is oriented by the two principles just named. First, function constrains order. The behavioral variation in any human community is held within certain ultimate limits: species requisites (food, shelter, etc.) must be met. Since all surviving communities, with all their contrasts, do this, the variation for any particular community is evidently severely restricted. Any community is so complex an array of interconnected parts that almost any behavioral variation beyond established limits would adversely affect its tenuous balance. For such reasons, it can be assumed that a community is constrained by the jobs it does in the ways it usually does them. Cultural persistence is the issue; not whether culture persists, but how it persists. Second, function constrains order indirectly. This means that the community is seen to include among other things a job-doing system, which normally is kept unchanging through constraints operating through some second system or set of systems not directly connected with the doing of those jobs. A community, once (arbitrarily) selected and described, is a social system. Describing the community means identifying some actions as data, analytically arranging various juxtapositionings of those data, and so on. From the buzz of persons, places, acts, and objects "out there," only regularity can capture the eye and ear; the kind of regularity which pivotally must form the raw material of a cybernetic description of a community is those routinized interactions (routines) which unfold in recurring face-to-face gatherings (events). Description of a community, that is, will be made up pivotally of certain features of the routines which unfold in an adequate qualitative sample of events. Not less than 99 percent of observable phenomena has already been left behind. To describe the whole, each selected event and all the sample of events together must be described and then redescribed as some set of subsystems. I believe the necessary number of such subsystem descriptions is three: the work system, the education system, and the system of ritual and play. Variation in how members behave, I have said, is constrained by the jobs the community does in the ways it does them. Since the community operates in nature and in an environment of other human communities, those jobs are the community's ways of handling those externals. The limits of variation are revealed by description of the work system. Anthropologists have dealt well with the interplay between this system and the natural environs, for example, in studies of cultural ecology (following Julian Steward). They have also dealt, though less extensively, with the analogous interplay with other communities.

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This work system is not a thing: it is the total community selectively described. This selective description includes description of three aspects of the system: a directly visible surface structure which varies within limits, an infrastructure which normally does not vary, and a monitoring process which constrains the variation of the first in terms of the second. These three aspects are all familiar to anthropologists, though they appear never to have been treated as conjoint aspects of a single system. The surface structure of a work system is usually called (following Firth) the social organization, the de facto ways a community at some moment is getting its tasks done. This surface structure is at any moment some pragmatic compromise between a set of norms as to how a task should get done and the particular contingencies affecting the doing; it therefore varies, but within limits. The infrastructure is that set of norms, and it establishes the limits of variation in the sense that large departures from it are more difficult to manage than smaller ones. This infrastructure has two dimensions, only one of which is a well-established field of inquiry. This one is known (again following Firth and British social anthropology generally) as social structure; it is a set of norms as to how the community's pool of human resources is to be sorted and deployed as personnel (which sorting permits the community's know-how to be put to use). The second dimension has been sporadically treated; it is a set of norms as to how the community's pool of know-how is to be selectively distributed among the members of the community (which distribution permits, reciprocally, the community's pool of human resources to be put to use). Of course, both of the two dimensions come explicitly into view, as two sides of the same coin, when division of labor is under discussion. These two dimensions interpenetrate totally, however, as is made evident by a little-noted but virtually self-evident fact: most of the know-how in everyday use in a community is property-like, in the sense that the display of almost any bit of it is appropriate for some persons (defined by the community according to age, sex, kinship, and so on), not for others, and in the presence of some persons, not others. In other words, virtually all displays of know-how are role behaviors. I will refer to this infrastructure as the community's template for work. The third aspect of the description of a community as a work system, the monitoring process, is familiar to anthropologists (following Barth) as transaction, the on-the-job process of role adjustment and role elaboration. It is through this process that variations are generated and — critically — kept within preordained limits. Surface structure, infrastructure, and monitoring process operate as a single system. The stable infrastructure of the work system is the encapsulated long-term experience of the community as to how, through

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sorting persons and allocating to them know-how (including authority, rewards and penalties, and the like), the community can get its work done. It is, however, an averaged-out experience, in effect a precipitate of many persons' doing many different jobs many times; it is general, thus abstract. There follows a near-paradox: without this preserved experience, men would hardly be able to begin any coordinated action, but it would provide insufficient guidance for doing almost any particular job under the specific conditions that would prevail at any particular time. Thus humans at work transact. They severally imagine that they are receiving three classes of information about their fellows — too little, too much, and just right — in respect to displays of know-how, that is, exertions of effort, exercises of authority, sharing of rewards, and so on. Thereby they monitor, more by actions than by words; and through that they negotiate adjustments and in general fine-tune their roles to the specific tasks at hand. The two new facts earlier sketched indicate the nature of this transaction process: persons are caused by recalcitrant particular circumstance to renegotiate through dancelike behaviors some preexisting constraint (some feature of the template for work) but are, at the same time, constrained by those same dancelike behaviors to do so as modestly as possible. Many groups of persons transacting in many such contexts together generate the visible surface structure of the work system, the social organization of the community in its momentary form. A description of the work system would surely raise questions: Why are transacted role elaborations not simply absorbed into the template? Why don't communities change in this way, cumulatively? Perpetually to recreate the template unchanged is the principal work of a second system, the education system most broadly conceived (Gearing n.d.), which is a redescription of the community in the process of distributing and redistributing know-how to personnel, the right items to the right persons at the right times through their lifetimes, specifically through the duration of those interludes wherein inept newcomers to any event become old hands in that event. The work system, as I said earlier, is constrained by the jobs the community does in the ways it does them, but it is constrained indirectly. The behavioral variations which are the social organization would, in the nature of the case, enter that "encapsulated experience" which is the template for work and simply change it but for one set of facts: the fact that in human communities there necessarily occurs a succession of generations; the fact that at certain critical junctures across life careers the community's educational tasks are put into the hands of persons who are "out o f ' the community's work (teachers, old men, wardens, priests, psychiatrists, professors, etc.); the probable fact that these persons take

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as their "reality" and variously enact the infrastructure (not the vacillating surface structure) of the work system; and the fact that these enactments, in interchanges with students/clients/inmates/whatever, constitute a typically inadvertent hidden curriculum (recall, again, the multiplicity of messaging revealed by the pair of new facts treated above). Thus the template for work is exactly replicated through the succession of generations. Through the operations of such indirect constraints, the work system will continue basically unchanged in the absence of massive disruptions or long-lasting shifts of circumstance in the community or its environs. Perhaps the best-demonstrated form of the latter is Marx's, and probably the key reason shifts in relationship to the means of production have the systemic effects they have is that they systematically alter who comes together with whom in the educational encounters in which the template for work is perpetually recreated. The third and final subsystem is the system of ritual and play. I merely name it and note that it "re-recreates" the template for work: it serves any community as a kind of back-up system in this regard. In summary, the notions of constraint and, more generally, cybernetics, as heuristics, invoke the image of a chain of systems of constraint, each system constraining or being constrained by another, whereby the social system as a whole perpetually recreates itself and behavioral variation among members of the community normally is kept within narrow limits. It bears repeating: all this would be, in my judgment, idle except for that pair of new facts which transforms constraint from a way-of-speaking into a visible, empirically investigatable form. One can not only see that variation in behaviors is constrained, but also observe, in those dancelike behaviors, the constraining. Transaction and analogous monitoring processes are not things one knows have happened from their evident results; one can see them happening. I turn again, and finally, to action anthropology and, as a case in point, the Fox Indians of Iowa as of the 1950's. All the ethnographic information to be alluded to has been reported (Gearing, Netting, and Peattie 1960, Gearing 1970), so the comments can be brief. The identification of the boundaries of a social system is, I have said, somewhat arbitrary, subject only to standards of pragmatic truth. In contrast with earlier phrasings, I now identify the community of interest as consisting of all resident Fox (as of the early 1950's), plus the neighbors of the Fox then resident in three surrounding towns, plus staffs of certain government offices in Des Moines and Minneapolis who were then directly affecting the Fox; later I will include the action anthropologists. Tax had said: If they choose, it is better. I select one familiar situation: the government officials, joined by the neighbors, propose; the Indians

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say no; the officials and the neighbors have the power to proceed, and they do so. "Thinking constraint" as far as is possible, how does all this unfold? An adequate sample of events, we must now suppose, had in the 1950's been observed; these, when well described, would be the social system of the identified community. The first description describes the community as a work system. This, in its first surface aspect as social organization, has, in reasonably complete form, been done. One part of the related infrastructure, that dimension of it familiar as social structure, has also been described. This much highlights two facts. First, the three populations — Indians, neighbors, officials — form three markedly disarticulated sectors of this work system. Second, the Indians are down, the other two sectors up, in terms of access to concentrations of economic and political power; the officials and the neighbors usually have the power to act unilaterally in ways affecting the Indians, if they so choose. The infrastructure in its second aspect, the community's pool of distributed know-how, admits of description now, very selectively according to the purposes at hand and insofar as available ethnographic information permits. This means mapping who displays what know-how to whom. It is in general clear that among the Indians many bits of know-how are displayed selectively, according to who is in the presence of whom in terms of age, sex, kinship, etc. This is generally clear as well among the neighbors of the Indians, and similarly within and between the government offices. Across these disarticulated sectors of the work system, however, displays are severely selective, in the first instance because members of any sector meet relatively rarely with members of any other. There would be interest in selecting some sample of bits of know-how and mapping, as far as data permit, who displays what items to whom throughout this wider community. Each item would need to be considered in terms of its substantive content, for example, pragmatic knowledge about seed corn or fertilizer, which is fairly generally displayed among and between the Indians and the neighbors (among men), in contrast to knowledge about sacred packs on the Indian side or infighting in local politics on the side of the neighbors, both of which are very selectively displayed. To the current purpose, I move past a mapping in such terms and sketch the outlines of another mapping. Displays of any bits of know-how can be sorted relative to one another and arrayed on a two-dimensional field. It appears to be in the nature of language that one can verbally display know-how solely in terms of categories (e.g., of things, of actions, of events, plus categories of logical or other relationship), since most words are labels for such categories. Categories may be digital or typological (Heider n.d.): a digital category

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is a set of attributes, and an item is a member if all attributes are present; a typological category has a prototype, and an item is more or less a member as it approximates the prototype. If a continuum with digital on the left and typological on the right formed the horizontal dimension of the field, a display that entailed mostly digital categories would be located to the left of one that entailed more typological categories. Similarly, displays may range along a continuum from logically simpler to more complex; roughly, a display is simple to the degree that it is terse and can stand alone ("2 + 2 = 4" can stand alone in most talk, without accompanying displays about the ideas set and number, but "two giraffes and two apples are four" cannot). If this continuum formed the vertical dimension of the field, with simple displays located toward the top, more complex toward the bottom, then "This kind of soup costs 20 cents a can" would be located toward the upper left, "Fishing is good now" probably toward the upper right, "With the price of beef down and corn up, I'm planting 20 acres more" toward the lower left, and "The book was tight and polished, the way the Bolshoi does 'Swan Lake'" toward the lower right. A mapping of displays in these terms reveals, I believe, four facts: First, the displays of Indians in their talks with each other are located up and down the field from simple to very complex but tend to cluster toward the right, toward the typological pole. Second, displays of the neighbors, in their talks with each other, are located in all sectors of the field, according to situation, and so are those of the government officials. Third, when Indians talk to the neighbors or to the government officials or either talk to the Indians, most displays are located toward the upper left. The fourth fact involves a kind of display of very special interest. In the farther reaches of the lower right one places displays of a kind long familiar to anthropologists as unspoken premises, or implicit meanings, or themes. These are rarely or never verbally formulated by members of the community: they are enacted, and they are enacted regularly, in many, perhaps all, contexts. When the action anthropologists spoke of Fox core values, they always used as examples displays of this kind. The Fox live by "a principle of harmony," it was said; specifically, by that principle, man is alongside of and implicated with (not over) nature, and any man is alongside of and implicated with (not over or under) another man. These were verbal formulations by the anthropologists, not the Fox; it was said that the Fox acted as if they might say and believe those things. Of course, the analogous core values of the neighbors and the officials, it was imagined with less inspection, were the opposites. These core values as formulated are statements of relationship: "alongside of and implicated with" as against "over or under." The pervasiveness of enactments of core values in face-to-face talk is

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therefore not mysterious: one can hardly talk about anything without talking about people acting in relationship to other people or in relationship to some part of nature. More saliently still, face-to-face talk cannot even occur without the group so gathered having organized itself, different persons differently participating in the talk itself. This organization of the talking group, as I have said, is a matter of many simultaneous messages; and all this messaging is necessarily about relationships — about parties aligning themselves "alongside o f ' or "over or under" one another — for the talk itself. So the fourth fact is this: such core values are the most widely distributed of all property-like know-how, in interchanges among the Indians, or separately in interchanges among the neighbors or the officials. Because they normally are not verbalized, however, they are the most severely restricted of all property-like know-how in interchanges between Indians and the neighbors or between Indians and the government officials; here messages are tacitly sent but not received, the parties always strongly sensing a "wave-length problem" of some kind that they cannot identify. One key inference from this fact is grossly evident and could through further research be confirmed and made precisely evident: face-to-face talk among Indians typically moves forward smoothly, as does such talk among the neighbors and officials, but face-to-face talk between Indians and neighbors or officials is repeatedly stopped. Our analytic focus has now shifted from the infrastructure to the related monitoring process, specifically to that pair of new facts which shows that constraint — not only the fact of limited variation, but the constraining itself — can be made empirically visible to observation. Specifically: in talk among Indians (and analogously among neighbors and officials), their core values/nuif be displayed, or there is no talk at all. The persistence of these core values would seem much less a matter of opaque inertia than a matter of the operation in this context of empirically visible constraints. In talk between the Fox and neighbors or officials, on the other hand, principally because of the contrasts in their respective core values and the powers in those dancelike behaviors, it seems virtually certain that talk would be found to be stopped with almost every utterance. If any of the parties could leave, probably they would; but often they cannot. In such an event, the officials or the neighbors keep talking because they must, but in order to do so, they must willfully close their minds, as it were, to the very presence of the Indians. In other words, the neighbors and the officials talk to each other, and the Indians sit there, silent. To relieve the discomfort, all may interject interludes of small-talk which would locate toward the upper left corner of the field earlier

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described. (We see the same syndrome in many places: where very poor urban Black children sit in school with middle-class teachers, White or Black, and in general where power differentials and ethnic contrasts coincide and people are trapped in encounters they cannot avoid. The persistence of contrasting core values in contexts of such intensive cross-cultural contact seems, again, less a matter of opaque inertia than one of visible constraints.) All these monitoring processes are empirically knowable, but only through fine-grained analysis of filmed specimens of the interactions involved. Such analyses would have seemed bizarre to the action anthropologist in the 1950's. They seem to me now utterly necessary in situations of that kind. I have suggested the outline of the work system of the selected community, in terms of surface structure, infrastructure, and monitoring process. Now, to trace the chain of events of interest — the officials and neighbors propose, the Indians say no, the officials and neighbors proceed — it is necessary to suppose only that talk across the groups as just outlined has occurred and has been about such a proposal. One would hardly need inquire what, in substance, the proposal was; one would be able to see the monitoring process unfolding and anticipate the result. The officials' going ahead, almost irrespective of the proposal, is a matter of turning spigots: where money or some other valuable once flowed to one outlet, it is made to flow to some other. Some of the Indians scramble as best they can to the new outlet. One does not need science in general or cybernetics in particular to describe turning spigots, and perhaps one need not closely attend to the scrambling. In this and other Indian communities, however, those Indians who succeed in getting near the new outlet were earlier near the old and will probably get near other outlets yet to appear. These become over time a "progressive" faction; over more time and under appropriate circumstances they may become indistinguishable from the neighbors. Meanwhile, those who do not scramble or do not succeed in it become the necessary counterpart, the "conservative" faction, and for them, to all effects, the proposals and their consequences do not happen. Much of this process merits description in the terms discussed. The progressives turn two corners: first, when they discover that they can enact the core values of the neighbors and officials in one encounter and the core values of the Indians in another, according to circumstance; and second, when they can no longer enact the Indian core values. These turning points could be identified and precisely described. Overall, in terms of the community as it was and as it would become, following such a career, not much would have happened. We started with a work system with three disarticulated

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sectors, and we end with the same; some of the members of one sector have switched places. From such analyses, a partial explanation would be in hand as to why core values do not change for most of the individual parties and for the community itself. This is a "partial" explanation in the critical sense that it must assume that the template for work (in its contrasting forms for the disarticulated sectors) persists unchanged; the task remains to describe the process by which that template is perpetually recreated unchanged, i.e., to describe the community again, as education system. I skip past that task with only the mention that it would be necessary to describe in appropriate terms what has been described well elsewhere for a closely parallel community (Wax, Wax, and Dumont 1964), those nonconversations similar to those we have just alluded to which regularly unfold in encounters between Indians and non-Indians in such critical "out-of-it" institutions as schools, hospitals, jails, etc. Of course, one would also have to describe analogous encounters within the Indian sector, as at ceremonials. One special feature of this education system must, however, receive brief special note. The action anthropologist, at work in the community, has not been evident. I think now of him or her, an inept newcomer ideally becoming in time an old hand in some array of the events which make up life in the community in question. I think of what it means, in these terms, to be in the community in the first place, and what would probably happen if, following Tax, this anthropologist during the transition from newcomer to old hand frequently proposed options, then backed off and let the Indians decide. Solely by being newly arrived, the action anthropologist is inept, and, if he or she comes from the cultural tradition of the neighbors and the officials, will most easily become an old hand by taking up their relationship of disarticulation with the Indians. Ethnography helps avoid that, and ethnography informed by the heuristic notion of constraint would appear to help more. It is evident, however, that fine-grained analysis of filmed or videotaped specimens of behavior will be necessary, not only to describe monitoring processes as part of the ethnography in general, but critically to describe those processes as they involve the action anthropologist, particularly at that juncture where, following Tax, a proposal of some options is laid before the community. Merely in getting the proposal "on the table" in face-to-face talk with the Indians, the action anthropologist will have many times stopped the talk in mid-course. Backing off means backing off then as well, and rejoining when the Indians restart the talk, if they do. It is evident that both the substantive content of the proposal and the organization of the talk group

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itself are at issue, that both are under tacit negotiation, and that by the time the proposal is out, both the proposal and the anthropologist's role in the talk will necessarily have been substantially transformed already, congruent with those Fox core values. That is, both the proposal and the talk group will have b e c o m e shaped by "alongside o f ' relations rather than "over and under" relations. Until all this has occurred, the action anthropologist's first sentence, as it were, cannot be finished.

NOTES 1. The c o m m e n t s which follow in this section and the third section of this paper are drawn with only minor change from an effort to d e v e l o p a "cultural theory of education" (Gearing n.d.).

REFERENCES CITED G. 1936. Naven. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 1958. "Epilogue 1958," in Naven, 2d edition. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

BATESON,

BATESON, G . , R . L . BIRDWHISTELL, H . W . BROSIN, C . F . HOCKETT , a n d N . A . M C Q U O W N . 1 9 7 1 . Microfilm Collection of Manuscripts on Cultural Anthropology series 1 5 , nos. 9 5 - 9 8 . Chicago: University of Chicago

Libraries. The face of the Fox. Chicago: Aldine. . n.d. "Introduction" and "Part III," in Toward a cultural theory of education and schooling. Edited by F. Gearing and L. Sangree. The Hague: Mouton. In press. GEARING, F . , R . McC. NETTING, and L . R . PEATTIE. Editors. 1 9 6 0 . Documentary history of the Fox project. Chicago: University of Chicago Department of Anthropology. HEIDER, Ε. P. n.d. Universale and cultural specifics in human categorization. Presentation at East-West Center, Honolulu, 1973. KENDON, A. 1970. Movement coordination in social interaction: Some examples described. Acta Psychologica 32:100-125. . 1972. "Some relationships between body motion and speech: An analysis of an example," in Studies in dyadic communication. Edited by A. Siegman and B. Pope. New York: Pergamon Press. . 1975. Some functions of the face in a kissing round. Semiotica 15:299-334. KENDON, Α . , and A. FERBER. 1 9 7 3 . " A description of some human greetings," in Comparative ecology and behavior of primates. London: Academic Press. TAX, SOL. 1 9 5 2 . Action anthropology. America Indigena 1 2 : 1 0 3 - 1 0 6 . W A X , M., R . W A X , and R . V . DUMONT, J R . 1 9 6 4 . Formal education in an American Indian community. Society for the Study of Social Problems Monograph 1. GEARING, F . 1 9 7 0 .

STEVEN POLGAR

Applied, Action, Radical, and Committed Anthropology

At the core of applied anthropology lies a set of skills, at the core of action anthropology a system of values, and at the core of radical anthropology a theory of society. I think we might develop yet another kind of endeavor, committed anthropology, that would be dedicated to furthering the interests of all of humanity, present and future. Since my ideas about it are still rather vague, I will only sketch its general outlines here, in the context of a discussion of the practice and products of the other three forms. Action anthropology emerged 26 years ago, when the group of students who went from Chicago to Tama, Iowa, came to question the premises of both academic and applied anthropology and Sol Tax reacted positively to their concerns and began to develop a new philosophy (Gearing, Netting, and Peattie 1960:25-39). In this philosophy, responsibility to the members of the community studied and to the furtherance of knowledge were to be pursued at the same time. Not only was the unrealistic traditional working premise that the presence of the anthropologist would not significantly influence the community explicitly abandoned, but this influence was to be deliberately channeled so as to benefit the community. Also abandoned was the usual position of the applied anthropologist of trying to see how a set of goals, defined by some agency or group holding power and employing the anthropologist, could be carried out with a minimum of harm to the community or other "target" population. The dominant reference group of the action anthropologist was to be other social scientists who sympathized with this dual set of responsibilities. Somewhat similar philosophies were developed in the same period by the Instituto Indigenista Interamericänö and the Cornell Vicos project. A new set of anthropologists is now emerging in the United States — among them Jacobs (1974), Maruyama (1974), Peterson (1974), Schensul (1974), Schlesier (1974), and Talbert (1974) — who have developed a set of values similar to those of Tax and his direct followers. They have

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forged these values out of their own experiences, often with programs that derived from the "War on Poverty." This reinvention of action anthropology is most welcome, since the original cohort of Tax's students has scattered and by 1965 no real network of practicing action anthropologists, regularly consulting one another, survived. Another significant event in the last ten years or so in the United States has been the development of radical anthropology as a self-conscious movement. Tax has moved on to build new means of international scientific collaboration, including Current Anthropology and the 9th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences; he has pointed the way for a committed anthropology that could work to diminish the influence of nation-states and help to build a radical, humanitywide community.

P O W E R A N D INFLUENCE To do their work, all types of field anthropologists need to have at least a little influence; they need to make their bargains with those who hold power. Even those who say they only seek knowledge must find a way to remain in the community, to get people to talk to them. In the first four decades of this century, almost all anthropologists were White, and their "field" was located in external or internal colonies. Currently, also, one has to befriend the authorities, or at least make sure that they see no harm in one's being in the community asking a lot of questions. In the usual way anthropological fieldwork is done, informants receive small gifts, favors, medicines, intercession on their behalf with local officials, or at least the prestige of being befriended by a presumed representative of the outside elite. Publications are often written without concern about their possible use by those in power for promoting their own ends. Academic anthropologists seldom recognize their relationships to power structures and think of their work as neutral or indirectly beneficial to the people they study. They certainly mean well. In applied anthropology, one is almost inevitably hired by, or at least works closely with, "management" — be this the government, factory owners, school authorities, or senior physicians in a health organization (cf. Roth 1962). To be sure, with some notable exceptions, applied anthropologists work for the presumed benefit of the community. One may even be charged to find out if members of the community have a "felt need" for this or that type of available program. Anthropologists writing from a sociology-of-knowledge perspective (e.g., Manners 1956, Maquet 1964) have noted that such good intentions can pale into insignificance when the larger, national and international

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context of many "development" efforts is taken into account. Will the small improvements in the lives of those affected merely allow elites in the long run to consolidate their power, or will they assist those presumably being helped to launch and strengthen their attack on the fundamental conditions of oppression? Will the project lead to new stratification within communities, where a few of the people on the bottom are promoted to positions of minor privilege while the majority sink into deeper deprivation (cf. Gross and Underwood 1971), or will it increase the solidarity of the oppressed? Our influence in the action anthropology project at Tama, Iowa, was derived from our status as university people and our ability to use this status vis-ä-vis power holders in the local White community and state and federal officialdom. We could influence other universities to provide scholarships for Indians; we could write articles that local papers would print; we could help to sell the products of a small crafts cooperative. We were not hired by any outside group; our support came from a small foundation. Within the Mesquakie community we tried to avoid allying ourselves with any faction, but the mere fact that we acted as spokesmen for the Indians and tried to support traditional behavior patterns as one legitimate alternative earned us considerable hostility from some of the more acculturation-oriented leaders, who were often the spokesmen for the community in its relationships with White institutions. As distinct from academic, applied, and action anthropologists, radical anthropologists seek to ally themselves entirely with the oppressed. Most of this kind of influence — unless one were to become an organizer or active revolutionary — has been exercised through attempts at intellectual persuasion. Many radicals, of course, use the prestige of their positions in seeking to be heard. Since, however, the power allowed to intellectuals in modern Western societies is negligible, radicalism among academics may often look like merely a parlor game.

THEORY Applied anthropology, in my view, has made few contributions to social science theory. In principle, there should be wide opportunity to test general propositions under conditions of "planned" intervention, as opposed to the more usual "spontaneous" processes of culture contact and change. Very few applied anthropologists, however, have conducted comparative studies on change in different communities. Generalizations have been made about "innovations": who is most willing to accept them, how they come about on a cognitive level, and what consequences flow

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from them. The little theory that has come from applied anthropology has therefore been mostly psychological (e.g., Barnett, Chappie, Erasmus, Goodenough). Consequently, applied anthropologists have been particularly useful in the "targeting" process: which group might be selected for a program, with what kind of culture-change "payload," and in what cost-effective manner. Action anthropology has led to the elucidation of political processes both among the Mesquakie and elsewhere. Miller's (1955) distinction between the superordinate-subordinate relationships in European cultures and the gingerly way in which authority was treated among Central Algonkian Indians helped to explain why some long-established collective enterprises at Tama functioned well and many externally stimulated attempts had failed. Fallers, another participant in the 1948 summer field party at Tama, went on to study the dilemmas of bureaucrat-chiefs in East Africa (1955) with a perspective enriched by his association with action anthropology. Gearing's (1970:95-108) concept of structural paralysis, drawing on the work of Robert Rietz and Walter Miller, clarified how the preemption of major decisions by a superordinate authority undermines the ability of groups like the Mesquakie to arrive efficiently at positive large-scale decisions. Another theoretical area which interested several of us was socialization. Miller (1955) examined the way in which Mesquakie child-rearing practices and mythology encouraged a change from parental-dependency to self-dependency. My own work (Polgar 1960) concerned the biculturation of teenagers more or less concurrently into Mesquakie and White patterns. Miller went on to become a specialist on juvenile delinquents; my own interest in helping teenage kids find interesting things to do — and in understanding them — was more transient, as I turned to community development and then public health. Other examples could be cited of topical areas in which those associated with Tax in action anthropology have introduced new concepts and helped to build middle-level theory, but, in my view, the most important theoretical contribution of action anthropology has been in epistemology. Peattie (Gearing, Netting, and Peattie 1960:300-304) has pointed out that rejecting the mode of operation where ends are defined first and then means found to accomplish them, and substituting for it a "continuous process of discovery and action and valuing," is by no means new to action anthropology, but has a respectable status in philosophy through the writings of John Dewey. Nevertheless, few anthropologists have adopted this philosophical stance — perhaps because we have failed to explain it well enough, on the one hand, and because it is difficult to put into practice, on the other.

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Radical anthropology is linked to Marxism and has concentrated on criticism and theory building. Moving radical theory into praxis obviously leads to activities that have not been conventionally considered as "doing anthropology." Critiques of academic and applied anthropology from a radical perspective have enlarged upon the propositions arising from the sociology of knowledge. Both earlier and contemporary writings on evolution, "race," cultural relativism, functionalism, and particularistic ethnography have come under fire from historical materialists. Radicals have been very important in the widespread reaction against "management-oriented" applied studies (e.g., Bonfil Batalla 1966), of which those related to counterinsurgency are the most extreme example. Lastly, the institutional bases of American anthropology have also been scrutinized for the ways they serve elite interests. As in sociology, where those of a more leftist orientation have been among the most active in developing conflict theories (in opposition to consensus theories), radical anthropologists have increasingly turned to studies on peasant uprisings, ethnic revitalization movements, the political and economic roles of women, and similar topics. Very relevant to the concerns of action anthropologists is the recommendation (in line with C. Wright Mills's work) that the study of the cultures of superordinate groups and institutions be given at least as much priority as that of the lifeways of disenfranchised peoples (cf. Nader 1969). Generalizations such as "the culture of poverty" and "the image of limited good" have been attacked on the basis that they are extremely useful to elites and elite-serving bureaucrats in justifying and perpetuating repressive policies. Wolfe's (1963) analysis of the acephalous network of power holders in the African mineral industry nevertheless remains a rather lonely example in print of an anthropological effort to study "upward."

VALUES There are still many anthropologists who earnestly believe that the "search for knowledge" they are engaged in is value-free. I just want to note again here that even if the approach used in collecting information is kept as free of bias as possible (as indeed it should be), the selection of one's topic and the ways in which the results are analyzed and disseminated are — consciously or unwittingly — influenced by political and moral considerations. The decision to work deliberately for the benefit of some people (other than oneself, or scientists in general, who think of themselves as the guardians of science) underlies applied, action, and radical anthropology.

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A common justification for applied anthropologists is that drastic changes are being visited upon nonindustrial and minority groups whether anthropologists interfere or not, but with our help these changes can be made less harmful and more beneficial. Early in my career this was an argument I also used for what I hoped to do. As a number of writers (e.g., Manners 1956) have pointed out, however, under conditions of administrative or economic colonialism the basic policies underlying guided culture change will inevitably be aimed at furthering the interests of the metropolitan elites. Some exceptions to this can be found, such as the conscientization movement launched by Paulo Freire, but, not surprisingly, these efforts have been repeatedly suppressed. Under revolutionary regimes, of course, an applied anthropologist may be able to work for the benefit of the "masses," but even in these situations the general welfare may be defined by functionaries from a dominant ethnic group without sufficient regard for important cultural differences. Another dilemma for the applied anthropologist is the conflict between the requirements for carrying programs forward in the short run and for pursuing the advancement of scientific knowledge. Tax's prescription in the face of this dilemma has been to define action anthropology as "an activity in which an anthropologist has two coordinate goals, to neither one of which will he delegate an inferior position. He wants to help a group of people to solve a problem, and he wants to learn something in the process" (Tax 1952:103). In the situations in which I worked subsequent to the Tama project, I found this principle to be difficult to put into practice. To a large extent the difficulties have arisen out of the conditions of my employment. Most applied anthropologists tend to work on practical tasks and scientific tasks seriatim, in separate settings, rather than simultaneously. Value conflicts for radical anthropologists are no less severe. If one takes radicalism at all seriously, one must recognize that it is not sufficient to write and speak about one's theoretical positions. As already mentioned, however, if one moves into the sphere of action, what one does will usually not be considered anthropology. Value conflicts for radicals, furthermore, differ considerably according to their ethnic and class affiliation. Middle-class White male anthropologists in the metropolitan countries, belonging to the stratum responsible for much of the oppression around the globe, have to turn against their own and fight on behalf of someone else. Most radical anthropologists in the United States do in fact belong to this group, and it is not easy to decide whether to behave as an advocate, a servant, a spy, a consultant, a commentator, a technician, or what. Anthropologists from a minority group or a Third World nation also experience grave difficulties. Having succeeded in becoming profes-

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sional academics — a success for which they have had to meet standards set by the culture of Western academia (which, after all, is an aspect of the dominant imperialist society) — they too may not really be part any more of the oppressed segment of humanity. Does their teaching and research really serve the interests of their "brothers and sisters"? This is a particularly hard question because they must often work under conditions of severe political repression and may differ greatly in living style from the majority of the population.

EMPLOYMENT CONDITIONS Teaching anthropology in a university is a well-established tradition in Western society, although it may be less prestigious than practicing medicine and financially less rewarding than running a car-wash business. Research aimed purely at "increasing the fund of knowledge" is also well accepted by the profession (but is less well appreciated by those who decide on the budgets of universities). The current squeeze on academic employment, however, has made "alternative" careers a serious topic of discussion even among those who have long looked down their noses at applied and action anthropology as " m e r e l y " something like social work. Applied anthropology has been defined here in terms of the employment of its practitioners by institutions and groups who pursue rather specific and non-academic goals. Applied anthropologists are hired for their skills in understanding cultural phenomena — it being agreed that culture is in some way influencing program performance. Trained in academic settings as applied anthropologists usually are, they often become unhappy when they remain technicians and cannot set their own goals as they would (at least in a limited sense) in academic research. The choice then is between turning administrator and seeking to gain power in setting program goals, returning to the traditional university role, or looking for something new like action anthropology. Action anthropology, however, seems to be possible only if one is a relatively free agent — preferably with the help of a grant and working under the auspices of a university. In my own career, employment as a non-official staff person in a government community-development department, as a research director in a voluntary health agency, and as a principal investigator of a U.S. government contract to do "institution building" with African universities has not allowed me to perform as an action anthropologist. Most radical anthropologists I know are teaching in universities in the United States. Given the constraints of this type of employment, one can

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carry out radical precepts only in writing and in a private capacity (and even that only in very restricted ways, unless one is willing to risk losing one's university position). Radicalizing the university itself has been a goal that some have tried to pursue, but to my knowledge not with any noticeable success. Some radicals, furthermore, seem to be quite conservative in defining what anthropology is and how it should be taught.

COMMITTED ANTHROPOLOGY International cooperation among anthropologists on scholarly matters, as promoted by Sol Tax, could well be a pathbreaking prelude to a more active commitment to furthering the interests of all of humanity. Tax has often emphasized that what unites us as anthropologists is our concern with all societies and cultures. This concern has manifested itself in such activities as those of the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs in bringing to public notice instances of genocide and ethnocide, passing resolutions protesting such outrages, and requesting material help for isolated populations faced with epidemics and national disasters. Intellectual forays into cultural futuristics, which have been supported by Tax, presage another potential aspect of committed anthropology. The recognition of dangers to our descendants (in both industrialized and non-industrial countries) from war, wasteful practices of modern society, overpopulation, cultural homogenization, totalitarian methods of governance, and the like unites us also on the consequent necessity of planning on a worldwide scale. The most important values that would be relevant to committed anthropology are shared by all members of our profession: the regard for all of humanity, for the past as well as the present, for the inherent legitimacy of all cultures no matter how different from one's own. Added to these, we need the willingness to planfully interfere in the course of events, a willingness that is shared (as I have noted) by applied, action, and radical anthropology. The power of anthropologists is very small indeed. To be consequential, then, committed anthropologists will have to make alliances with other groups with similar values. Influence will depend on expertise, skill, and theoretical contributions. My thought is that social evolution would be the main theoretical base for committed anthropology, particularly a theory of evolution that would extend into the future. With the emergence of feudalism (in the broad sense of that word) some 5,000-6,000 years ago, social evolution, in my view, took an unfortunate turn (Polgar 1971). While the inception

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of redistributive networks on top of reciprocal ones helped in times of local food shortages, the long-run developments predicated on redistribution include social stratification, exaggerated male dominance, the nation-state, and large-scale killing. Committed anthropologists, recognizing the short time span and unusual character of these institutions from an evolutionary perspective, can project (and work for) the reemergence of the local community as the most important political unit and the substitution of worldwide economic coordination for nationalistic and multinational-corporation-determined exchange relationships. Employment would be no problem for sympathizers with committed anthropology; they would go on with teaching, research, or applied work. Inasmuch as I see committed anthropology working very hard to bring about the demise of the nation-state as the dominant political institution of our time, however, some who would devote themselves completely to this movement might have difficulty in getting or holding ordinary jobs. Committed anthropology may be a dream, but then who, 20 years ago, would have believed that the international network of anthropologists represented by Current Anthropology would be the reality it is in the 1970's?

REFERENCES CITED G. 1966. Conservative thought in applied anthropology. Human Organization 25:89-92. FALLERS, L. 1955. The predicament of the modern African chief: An instance from Uganda. American Anthropologist 57:290-305. GEARING, F. 1970. The face of the Fox. Chicago: Aldine. GEARING, F . , R . McC. NETTING, and L . ΡΕΑΤΠΕ. Editors. 1 9 6 0 . Documentary history of the Fox project. Chicago: University of Chicago Department of Anthropology. GROSS, D . R . , and B. A . UNDERWOOD. 1 9 7 1 . Technological change and caloric cost: Sisal agriculture in northeastern Brazil. American Anthropologist

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71:725-740. JACOBS, SUE-ELLEN. 1 9 7 4 . tion 3 3 : 2 0 9 - 2 1 5 .

Action and advocacy anthropology. Human

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MANNERS, R. A. 1956. Functionalism, Realpolitik, and anthropology in underdeveloped areas. America Indigena 16:7-33. MAQUET, J. 1 9 6 4 . Objectivity in anthropology. Current Anthropology 15:4755.

1974. Endogenous research vs. delusions of relevance among exogenous academics. Human Organization

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and expertise 33:318-321.

MILLER, W . B . 1 9 5 5 . 57:271-289.

Two concepts of authority. American

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NADER, L. 1969. "Up the anthropologist: Perspectives gained from studying up,"

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in Reinventing anthropology. Edited by Dell Hymes, pp. 284-311. New York: Random House. PETERSON, JOHN H . , JR. 1 9 7 4 . The anthropologist as advocate. Human Organization 3 3 : 3 1 1 - 3 1 7 . POLGAR, S. 1960. Biculturation of Mesquakie teenage boys. American Anthropologist 62:217-235. . 1971. "The possible and the desirable: Population and environmental problems," in Human futuristics. Edited by M. Maruyama and J. Dator, pp. 123-129. Honolulu: Social Science Institute, University of Hawaii. ROTH, J . 1962. Management bias in medical sociology. Human Organization 21:47-50. SCHENSUL, S. 1974. Skills needed in action anthropology: Lessons from El Centro de la Causa. Human Organization 33:203-208. SCHLESIER, Κ. H. 1974. Action anthropology and the Southern Cheyenne. Current Anthropology 15:277-283. TALBERT, CAROL. 1974. Experiences at Wounded Knee. Human Organization 33:215-217. TAX, S. 1 9 5 2 . Action anthropology. America Indigena 1 2 : 1 0 3 - 1 0 6 . WOLFE, A. W. 1963. The African mineral industry: Evolution of a supranational level of integration. Social Problems 11:153-164.

DAVID BLANCHARD

Beyond Empathy: The Emergence of an Action Anthropology in the Life and Career of Sol Tax

If, as Levi-Strauss has suggested, anthropology is the final stage of imperialism, 1 then anthropology's survival in the postimperial era certainly should be called into question. As imperialism succumbs to "Third World" nationalism and nationalism makes concessions to "Fourth World" tribalism, anthropologists are turning away from prospective fields of foreign study in increasing numbers. Thus it appears that, at least insofar as anthropology is identified with fieldwork, its demise may be imminent. This is surely the case unless, as Hymes (1972) has urged, anthropology can "reinvent" itself and, in so doing, change its allegiances and ultimately its methodology. Sol Tax has proposed a reinvented anthropology in the mode of action research. Tax's career, and particularly his fieldwork experience, can serve as a model to anthropologists attempting to facilitate the transformation of their discipline that will assure its survival in a changing world. Herein I shall undertake a review and analysis of this experience in order to extract from it a model of the action anthropology field strategy. Hegel (1953:3) writes that there are three methods of writing history: original history, reflective history, and philosophical history. This essay attempts to incorporate all three methods into a single perspective. First of all, I have assembled materials from Tax's personal correspondence, unpublished and published papers, and conversations to document his history as a record of intentions. This I see as the first job of the historian: to compile the sources that demand reflection. Clearly, however, history is not simply a record of intentions; it is as much the record of consequences. I therefore also compare the documented record of intention with the record of accomplishment and reflect on the gap — however wide or narrow — that separates the two. Finally, accepting Gadamer's interpretation that the "reason" in history sought by Hegel's philosophical method is that purpose which comes into being within the individual actor, I believe that the documents presented here adequately charac-

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terize the geist of the discipline of anthropology as Tax has lived it. Since childhood Tax has had a profound commitment to social betterment and social justice, a commitment which married action with learning from the outset of his scholarly career. Sol's parents, Kate and Morris Tax, were Russian Jews who had immigrated in their teens. Sol was born in Chicago in 1907, but soon thereafter his parents moved to Milwaukee. Milwaukee was in many respects an ideal climate for young Utopians to grow up in. Many of its German-American citizens were descendants of exiles of the 1848 revolution. Socialism was strong in Milwaukee during Tax's formative years, and both of his parents supported the Socialist ticket. In fact, the internationalist flavor of American socialism became very important to Tax's thought and is reflected in his later work to help establish a world community of anthropologists. Tax recalls that, as a high-school student, he took an after-school job delivering telegrams in downtown Milwaukee: I carried three or four, or more, telegrams in my hat, and recall coming back to the office with an empty hat and signed receipts without being conscious of delivering anything. I was a Walter Mitty, and had constant dreams of glory ; and these were almost all associated with somehow or other saving the troubled world. Later I think that social science and anthropology only came to mediate the process.

Tax shared these dreams with his younger brother, Ervin, whom he describes as a kind of "self-didact who always combined his intellectual interests with planning for social r e f o r m . " As youngsters, the brothers would spend hours planning how they would bring reason to the world and institute global reforms in the interest of peace and world brotherhood. At the age of 12, Tax had his first encounter with community organization when he became involved in the "Newsboys' Republic," an indirectrule organization of newspaper carriers encouraged by the Milwaukee School Board to enforce the Wisconsin Street Trades Law among their peers. Tax first learned of the "Republic" when he was arrested for selling newspapers without a permit. Before his trial came up, he joined the organization and secured the necessary authorization to sell on the street. H e eventually became editor of the organization's magazine and chief justice of its supreme court. Upon graduating from high school, Tax worked in Florida as assistant circulation manager for the Miami Daily News and then had a spring quarter at Chicago before entering the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 1926. He had a rather shaky start at the university, allowing his organizational and political interests to stand in the way of his studies.

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While a sophomore he helped reorganize the Hillel Foundation; later he became editor of its bulletin and finally its president. On the political side, Tax helped found the University of Wisconsin Liberal Club. This society in turn supported the internationally based pacifist organization The Percentage Peace Plan. In what he later called a "lesson in tactics," Tax saw the Liberal Club taken over and eventually destroyed by the campus Communist organization. During his first year at Wisconsin, Tax studied political science and economics, aiming toward a career in law and eventually politics. In the summer of 1927 he read Marett's Anthropology, and it interested him enough to take Linton's anthropology course when it was first offered the following autumn. In a 1963 letter to Nancy Banks (a student who had written asking him about his career), Tax recalls his decision to major in anthropology: After a lecture or two [of Linton's The Study of Man] I decided I liked anthropology and forgot about other careers. Linton was encouraging, and that was that. Having made this decision, I simply ordered my life in terms of it. . . . Of course I took every anthropology course taught — Linton and Charlotte Gower were the two anthropologists on the staff.

In 1930 Tax accompanied the Beloit College Logan Museum's expedition to North Africa, an expedition which he came to regard as his formal passage into the profession. This expedition resulted in his first published anthropology article, a personal account of the celebration of Passover with two Algerian families (Tax 1931) that reveals his self-consciousness as an anthropologist and fieldworker. In it he writes (p. 565) "My feeling of kin grew upon me with the hours and, before I finally left, I actually felt closer to these Jews, far off in Algeria, living an eastern culture, than I did to those gentile friends of mine in our archeological camp brought up with me in my own country." In the thesis he wrote as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Tax (1931a) examined his reasons for taking up anthropology: [The first reason] might be labelled an interest in pure science; we want to know these things simply for the sake of knowing them. Kroeber refers to such an interest as an extension of play; Marett and other anthropologists consider that there should be no other purpose in anthropology. The other possible interest in the study of culture is therapeutic. . . . It would seem that that effort [the therapeutic] might at least have the best knowledge of its subject that it possibly can: and the pure science anthropology must furnish that knowledge.

Although he distinguished between " p u r e " and "therapeutic" science,

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Tax saw the two as closely related. He went on to admit that "it was through an interest in therapeutic measures" that he came to study culture. He noted that in his search for "facts about culture processes" he began "to see the incompleteness of anthropology as a pure science." He concluded, "Anthropology has failed; it is through an interest in particular problems that we see just where it has failed, and it is not asking too much to expect science to give us the data which we need to solve our problems." It is important to clarify just how Tax saw the therapeutic paradigm of science at this time in his career. Science needed to be "pure," but it must not be play. In a sense he viewed scientific activity as a dialectic: Practical men posed practical problems to the research scientist. The research scientist then freely pursued "truth," yet always kept the original problems in the front of his mind. When solutions were secured, their application was turned over to the social worker, who then remedied the problem. Two difficulties with this therapeutic paradigm were to haunt Tax for the next 20 years. First, nowhere in the synthesis to this dialectic is the "patient" considered. Good therapy required good diagnosis, and that necessarily involves the active participation of the patient. Secondly, the scheme leaves all moral responsibility to the social worker. Later, Tax was to decide that the scientist could not afford to surrender this moral right to another. Following his graduation from the University of Wisconsin, Tax was accepted for graduate study at the University of Chicago. Before leaving for Chicago, he spent the summer of 1931 as a member of the Laboratory of Anthropology's field party, directed by Ruth Benedict, to the Mescalero Apache. In his letters from the field to his family and fiancee, we see Tax struggling with his therapeutic paradigm. He was not convinced of its soundness, and his experiences with the Mescalero seemed to weaken his confidence in it. Tax spent part of the summer in the company of an Apache sheepherder deep within the reservation. That experience underscored for him the radical difference between formal interviewing and participant observation. He was able to evaluate the two and to draw out their advantages and disadvantages. Although "living the life" provided a certain depth to one's study, Tax learned that it also demanded a commitment of time that one might be unwilling or unable to make. He further noted that while living with one's informants there was little time available for asking and answering questions. Understanding had to come through sharing their experience and then analyzing this experience through introspection. The informant-interview method, though shal-

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lower than the experience of intensive fieldwork, proved more expedient. Tax (1931ft) reports a conversation with the sheepherder before his departure for Chicago that foreshadowed the kind of fieldwork he was to institute 17 years later among the Fox: I found Solon, my hope, sitting in his car. I spent almost two hours talking with him, and I'd hate for any official around here to know what I said. I'd get bounced off the reservation. I let him air his grievances of the reserve, and I helped him along. Then, to get his reactions, I gave him a constructive plan of action for the Indians, to defy the government and the Indian trader and get all set.

Tax then outlined an elaborate plan for cooperative farming, herding, and marketing which would benefit the Apache community and satisfy their needs — the seed of an action program. These thoughts for Mescalero development were set aside, however, as Tax went on to Chicago full of commitment to the "pure" science of anthropology. At the close of his first term at the university, Radcliffe-Brown raised with him the possibility of studying the Fox Indians' Omaha-type kinship system. Funds were secured through the Department of Anthropology, and Tax spent the summer doing fieldwork which eventually was to contribute to his Master's thesis and doctoral dissertation. The Master's thesis (1932) contains an abundance of information on his field experience at Tama. The introduction, entitled "The Ethnographic Procedure," begins with an apology: Since my stay among the Fox was limited to some eleven weeks, it was neither possible nor practical under the circumstances to attempt to learn the language, and it therefore was impossible to "get into the life of the people". . . . I soon discovered that the ideal method of ethnography, as Malinowski, for example, portrays it, is not quite ideal in an Indian community such as the Fox. I started out to live in a camp of my own in the midst of the native camps; but this soon appeared silly. In the first place, nothing much happened at night, and there was no need to sleep under the stars; in the second, the Indians themselves spent their evenings in town as much as on the reservation; more importantly, they thought I was silly to stay out there and cook for myself like a squaw when I could get to town in five minutes (as they themselves did).

Accordingly, Tax packed up his tent (although not the ideals it symbolized) and bought a Model Τ Ford for commuting back and forth from Tama to the reservation. The following summer Sol and Gertrude were married, and their honeymoon was spent collecting comparative social-organization data from Algonkian tribes in Manitoulin Island, northern Michigan, and Wisconsin. It was a relatively frustrating and unsuccessful field season for

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a number of reasons. In a July 13, 1933, letter to Robert Redfield, Tax notes his frustration: "The natives are mixed Ottawa and Ojibway with some Pottawotamie thrown in. The language is apparently mixed, and when you ask if kinship terms are one or the other, the Indians answer that they are both." Work became satisfying only the last month, when they settled in with the Menominee. Tax returned to the Fox for a month in the summer of 1934 before writing his doctoral dissertation. A few days after his oral defense, he was on his way to Central America, where he would spend the next ten years doing research for the Carnegie Institution and Rockefeller Foundation under Redfield's supervision. When the Taxes arrived in Guatemala, they had carte blanche with respect to where, how, and what to study. They were fortunate to meet the Guatemalan, Antonio Goubaud, an unusual tourist guide with scholarly interests, who facilitated their transition to Guatemalan life. Tax helped train Goubaud in ethnology, and Goubaud eventually received an M.A. from the University of Chicago, worked on a nutrition project directed by Tax, founded the Guatemalan Indianist Institute, and later became ambassador to the United States. After taking the Taxes on a brief excursion to Chinautla, a town near Guatemala City, Goubaud left them in Chichicastenango to establish their first field base. After a few weeks, the town was disrupted by a Hollywood movie crew that had moved in to film scenes for Tarzan and the Green Goddess. Having had advance notice of this disruption, the Taxes left there and surveyed a large part of western Guatemala while filming was in progress. It was at this time that they first visited Atitlän and Panajachel. Unlike Chichicastenango, Panajachel was small enough for 100 percent ethnography. Together, Panajachel and Chichicastenango became the focus of Tax's Guatemalan fieldwork until 1941. Soon after they had settled in at Chichicastenango, the Taxes were joined by Manuel Andrade, a University of Chicago linguist who had become attached to the Carnegie project. Andrade discouraged Tax from attempting to learn the Quiche language. Reluctantly, Tax acquiesced, but not until after expressing his disappointment to Redfield in an October 1935 letter: "I hope that one of these years I can stay in a place long enough to learn the language as well as Malinowski, for example, knew the language of the Trobriands." The need to learn Cakchiquel was minimized in part by the assistance in data collection rendered by Juan de Dios Rosales, a Panajachel native who subsequently studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, earned an M.A. in Mexico, and likewise assisted the Hinshaws when they renewed study of Panajachel in the 1960s.

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In 1940 Tax took a position as research associate in the Department of Anthropology of the University of Chicago while continuing his research for Carnegie. In July 1942 he moved for the first time into the Mexican field, assuming a nine-month appointment as visiting professor at the National School of Anthropology, a branch of the Institute of Anthropology and History. This appointment provided him the opportunity to write up the results of his Guatemalan fieldwork. Perhaps more important, his participation in the training of Mexican anthropologists was considered alternative service to military duty. While at the National School, Tax taught a graduate seminar in anthropology (the subject of Fernando Camara Barbachano's paper in this volume). The course ended with a five-week field training session in Zinacantan, Chiapas, anticipating the later Harvard projects. Although the research importance of this field school was overshadowed by its success in training a cadre of Mexican social anthropologists, it came to figure prominently in Tax's later reevaluation of anthropological field methods. Tax reports two incidents that reveal his then naive rationalism and his growing dissatisfaction with the therapeutic paradigm of scientific inquiry. Tax (1945a: 197) notes, in an essay entitled "Democracy in Middle America," how he tried to organize the field party along egalitarian and democratic lines. "The only distinction of teacher and student," Tax writes, "would be based on the fact that I happened to know some things that they were anxious, or at least willing, to learn." He goes on to say that "the students kept agreeing to run themselves, but never did a thing about it." Tax's students expected to be directed. For one whose earlier image of a world at peace was the image of a world self-directing and communicating, this reluctance was hard to take. Tax tells how his students took one opportunity to show initiative (p. 198): "One day, the students held a secret meeting in the Church and drew up a polite list of demands that they later presented to me." He notes that these demands "were very reasonable — about things I had expected them to decide for themselves." Yet one of these demands required Tax's approval, and that was not forthcoming (Tax 19456: 21): The Indians appeared to them [Tax's students], poor, diseased, and exploited, and the emotions of these youthful anthropologists were aroused. How, they wanted to know, could I see what they were seeing and not do anything about it? [My] reply hardly satisfied, and doubtless my attitude was attributed to heartlessness, perhaps a reactionary bias, and a lack of social consciousness.

Tax's reply consisted of three caveats, and they are important here

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because they were to become the focus of the Chicago action anthropology seminar four years later. First of all, he warned that any program of action based upon insufficient knowledge would probably do more harm than no program at all. The scientist's task, he argued, is to collect data and formulate scientific generalizations. When these generalizations become sophisticated enough, they are applied to problem areas by administrators. Thus the scientist's contribution to social justice is both essential and indirect. Furthermore, identifying problems, ascertaining the knowledge needed to solve them, and defining the value boundaries within which solutions may be sought are all outside the domain of scientific inquiry. They too belong to the administrator. "The point is," Tax writes (1945b:23), "that science does not set ends, that the results of scientific investigation can only be 'used,' and can be used only by policy makers, in terms of goals and values that are set outside of science." Finally, Tax revised his therapeutic model of scientific inquiry. According to that model, as we have seen, the administrator poses specific problems to the scientist, the scientist considers general solutions, and the administrator applies these solutions to the problem. In the undergraduate thesis presenting this model, Tax had concluded that anthropology had failed because it had not produced the data needed to solve social problems. Now, in contrast, he contended (p. 25) that "scientific theory gives rise to scientific problems, in light of which the social facts of a particular situation are interpreted and make possible a broadening of scientific theory." Here, social problems are not even considered by the scientist. The weakness of this position was already apparent to Tax; in the closing paragraphs of the essay he notes that the scientist is also a citizen and as such shares in the responsibility of decision making. He does not, however, go on to resolve any of the difficulties raised by this observation. In 1946 Tax accepted an appointment as associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, and became involved in the development of the integrated core program that would greet the influx of postwar students. In addition to his participation in the core-course lectures, Tax prepared a set of lecture notes on "Science and Values" in which he considered the question of anthropology's relationship to problems of social justice and the ethical responsibilities of the fieldworker. This idea(l) of "justice" became particularly important to Tax's thought during the postwar years. He had spoken of it earlier, of course, but its meaning and implications had largely been assumed. Tax had had a sense of membership in a world community since childhood. He considered this membership a privilege which carried certain responsibilities.

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It was the responsibility of all world citizens to work for the improvement of the total world community. Science, for Tax, was one route to realizing this responsibility. Man's very existence, therefore, demanded the active participation of the world citizenry in a rational scheme of progress. Earlier, Tax had considered that this participation, realized through science, would show immediate results. Later, at least by 1945, he had decided that scientific activity was good in and of itself and, if allowed to progress, would eventually lead to a bettering of the human condition. His membership in the human community was justified for Tax through his participation in scientific activity. The years 1 9 4 6 ^ 8 were years "tinged with the weariness of amazement" for Tax. They were years of personal soul-searching — of reconsideration of his commitment to anthropology, which was, in effect, an existential commitment. One can only speculate as to the reasons for this personal crisis. Most likely it was part of the general intellectual crisis that dominated the American academic scene of the time. The recently disclosed figures of the full extent of the World War II holocaust — the destruction of six million European Jews, the annihilation of cities, and the terrible destructive power of the atom — all of these empirically verifiable, historically documented facts had made a strong impression on Tax. The once clear issue of right vs. wrong, of democracy vs. totalitarianism, had become obfuscated by the results of scientific warfare. The war had been an all-out effort, and science had played a central role. Science had become Tax's faith, and that faith was badly shaken by the inglorious aftermath of its application. Could the atomic scientists working on the University of Chicago's Manhattan Project really disclaim all responsibility for the terrible destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? For Tax, the postwar disclosures raised the question whether the scientist could continue to compromise his humanity by surrendering his right and obligation to make judgments of value. It was during these years of questioning, in the winter of 1948, that Tax was asked by the Department of Anthropology to investigate the possibility of starting a summer field training program on the Fox reservation. Should this prove feasible, he was to direct the school and supervise the research and training of six students. Tax had, of course, done his own fieldwork among the Fox. He was also well suited to direct such a program, having attended two similar sessions while himself a student and having recently directed the program in Chiapas. What is more, there were problems at Tama that Tax wanted investigated. His own fieldwork had not been able to deal adequately with them, and he had closed his chapter on "The Field Trip to the Fox Indians" (1932) with a suggestion for further study:

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It seems possible that the Fox Indians may someday furnish a classic study of acculturation. Ten years from now conditions will have changed; and if another investigator, armed with the material now at hand — specific material dealing with names and dates — will return to the scene to see what has happened in the interim, and the apparent reason for it, conclusions of great value might be drawn.

In May Tax wrote to John Provinse, who had been his fellow studeiit at Chicago and was now Assistant Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, to discuss the project. He promised to encourage his students to investigate problems of interest to the Bureau in "establishing policy for the reservation." These problems he briefly enumerated (Gearing, Netting, and Peattie 1960:27): "The general problem of relations to neighboring whites, of acculturation, of the present mechanisms of social control and their effectiveness, and the factions of the reservation need to be particularly studied." Tax even went so far as to offer a premature solution to the problem of factionalism at Tama: "Get into positions of greatest influence and power those individuals (the majority, incidently) who are not committed strongly to either orie or the other faction." Tax's correspondence with Provinse clearly shows a return to his therapeutic model of science. He was concerned with social problems at Tama, after all, and intended to produce sufficient data to solve them. Yet the Tax-Provinse correspondence also betrays the weakness of the therapeutic approach, for nowhere in it does Tax refer to any conversations with the Fox. The only persons whose cooperation he needed to secure were the principal of the government school and the Bureau of Indian Affairs officer. The six students arrived at Tama on June 24,1948, each with a specific problem to investigate. The following month Tax visited Tama and in the course of discussion posed the question, "What will be the future of the Fox?" This was apparently a harmless question, but the answer that seemed most obvious disturbed the six students, and its consideration by them and Tax eventually led to the development of action anthropology. The plight of the Fox community in 1948 was a sorry one. Indians returning to the reservation after the war were no longer satisfied with the life they had known. There was pressure to preserve the old ways to a certain extent, but there was also pressure to change. Aware of these pressures, Tax had asked his students to consider the Fox's future, and doing so was to put pressure on the anthropologists to change as well. On July 28 the field party sponsored a celebration for the Fox community. The party was an effective spirit-builder for all concerned and was viewed by the anthropologists as a great boon to the community. In a sense, the students shared Tax's commitment to rationalism and progress through communication. Like Tax, they were dismayed by the factional-

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ism at Tama, and they saw the attendance of both factions at the celebration as a step toward better communication b e t w e e n parties. Lisa Peattie suggested to Tax by phone the night of the party that they sponsor more such affairs and thereby contribute to the well-being of the community. What she was proposing was not an elaborate means of paying back informants, but a carefully planned and monitored program to maximize the students' interference for the benefit of the Fox and the advancement of their research effort. Tax rejected the idea. H e reminded Peattie that she and the others were at Tama to learn scientific methods; while he certainly sympathized with their concerns, and in fact shared them, he could not support such a request. But an old ghost had c o m e back to haunt him, and the following w e e k he wrote to the field party reversing his decision and approving a program of action (Gearing, Netting, and Peattie 1 9 6 0 : 3 2 - 3 3 ) : I have been thinking considerably along the lines of the direction that the research enterprise that you people have begun might take in the future. As you (Lisa, at least) know, my ideas about the relations of research and social action have been a little up in the air in the last couple of years, but have been coming down to earth gradually, and whether they're right or wrong, at least I now have some convictions. Among these convictions is that one cannot study a social situation without explicit recognition and utilization of a set of values. I don't believe that you can do "pure research" among the Fox except if you also do what has sometimes been called "action research." What I say applies not to all problems — I think you could do a study of the kinship system in the usual manner — but it certainly applies to the problems of the kind that you are interested in. Looked at another way, I think that the "participant-observer" method might very well be taken to mean "interferer-observer" method because in any situation comparable to the one you are in, at least, you are bound to be interfering with what you are observing. Instead of considering this an unfortunate situation, I would now say, let's think of it as fortunate and take the fullest advantage of it. Let us simply recognize that we want to do something for our society and get ourselves into positions of relative power, on a smaller or larger scale, depending upon who we are and where we are, and start doing it, observing what happens as we do it, and thus learning about the society in a way that is comparable to a controlled experiment.. . . We, however, are social scientists, and it's up to us to try to figure out what are the possibilities and what are the probabilities if (a), nothing is done, or (b) if x, y, or ζ is done. Then it's up to us to educate the Fox to the probabilities, to determine with them what would be the best end product and then to figure out ways and means and work with them for getting it. Now, in all this process, we are definitely participating, as well as interfering, in Fox society. We might get into trouble and we might get kicked out of the place, but that's the chance we have to take. . . . By doing this sort of thing, in the long run I think we are apt to learn more about the social structure of the Fox, because we will be running into it all the time, and trying to do something with the Fox, and learn more about their culture and personality and almost everything else that we're interested in knowing than any

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other way that I can think of. In other words, we are not, in fact, sacrificing our ends as "scientists" by performing these operations, provided always that we remember that we are scientists. When you come back here, during the next year we will be interested in getting your impressions of what (if anything) we should do in subsequent years about giving students training in connection with the Fox; and in thinking about the Fox research program, I suggest that we consider the possibility of expanding the vistas of what we normally think of as a research program to include the types of conscious and calculated, and of course well-meaning, interference that I have suggested.

In this letter Tax amended his therapeutic model to include the patient — in this case, the Fox Indians. He recognized that any solution to the problems at Tama would necessarily involve the active participation and eventual approval of the Fox. He described the role of the anthropologist as an educator, facilitating communication in a community torn by factional strife. The rationalist bias is still evident, but tempered by experience. The field party was scheduled to remain at Tama only for another month. They discussed possibilities and problems among themselves and with members of the Fox community. When they returned to Chicago, they prepared seminar papers which were presented and discussed in a year-long symposium on the Fox field school. Most of the discussion of that 1948-49 seminar centered about a specific problem with which the field party had been concerned: Should they, as social scientists, encourage the Fox to assimilate, or should they support the efforts of some tribal members to preserve the old ways? For his part, Tax hesitated to make a decision, citing the scientist's commitment to truth as just cause. What if the anthropologists supported assimilation and this proved to be counter to the wishes and best interests of the Fox? Then the canons of science would have been violated by the anthropologist's imposing his values on the native community. Yet both Tax and his students felt that action of some sort was necessary. The problem of assimilation vs. conservatism was dubbed "logically insoluble" when the 1949 field party left for Tama in June of that year. The members of the field party intended to spend this second summer exploring the possibilities of action research from all perspectives. They were equally concerned with how a program of interference might prove beneficial to the Fox, what methodological lessons could be learned for anthropology, and how an action research program might contribute to social scientific knowledge. More immediately, they were concerned with the question of whether to support assimilation or conservatism at Tama. In a seminar paper, "Fox Impressions" (Gearing et al. 1960:87-92),

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Charles Leslie objected to phrasing the issue in this way. Why, after all, must one assume that the only alternative to conservatism is assimilation? Tax agreed, and noted that although on the surface the Fox had "lost" many of their old ways, the new ways which had come to replace them were appreciably different from the ways of the surrounding Whites. Change was inevitable, yes; but assimilation was not the only course open to the Fox. Moreover, the question of assimilation vs. conservatism was not one which the anthropologists had the obligation or the right to decide. Their responsibility ended with their willingness to help, but it was up to the Fox to decide from among the alternatives available to them. In a way, this decision had been foreshadowed in Tax's letter to Peattie, in which he had limited the role of the anthropologist to that of educator or facilitator of action. In this capacity, the anthropologist needed to gain the trust and respect of the native people he was dealing with, and this necessarily meant cutting himself off from the outside sources of power. This problem of conflicting group interests was commented upon by Raymond Firth, who sat in on a session of the action anthropology seminar. Firth noted that many of the Fox problems resulted from contact with Whites. The anthropologists had sided with the Fox, but what about the Whites? What does the anthropologist do when confronted with conflicting group interests or values? It was a question that Firth was to face later in his own fieldwork on Tikopia. For Tax the problem was addressed in the Fort Berthold community study, the first attempt to apply the lessons learned at Tama to a defined problem area. In the fall of 1949, Tax was contacted by Galen Weaver of the Race Relations Department of the Congregational Church's Board of Home Missions. Weaver's organization was involved in the controversial relocation of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, brought on by the construction of the Garrison Dam. The decision to go ahead with the dam's construction had already been made, and when Weaver approached Tax he was seeking advice on how his organization, which supported a mission church at Fort Berthold, could best help facilitate the transition for the Indian community. The Fort Berthold relocation was recognized by all parties involved as posing particularly difficult problems. For one thing, the Fort Berthold reservation consisted of not one but three tribal groups. The Mandan, Gros Ventre, and Arikara tribes had all opposed relocation and were now to be affected by it. Despite this common predicament, the tribes had no single organ of communication, although all were represented on the Fort Berthold Council. All news came from the Bureau of Indian Affairs office, which was hardly an unbiased party with respect to the relocation.

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Tax met with Weaver, and agreement was reached that an anthropologist, under Tax's supervision, would go to Fort Berthold to help the Indians and agency personnel develop a plan for resettlement. The anthropologist selected was Robert Merrill, a participant in the 1949 seminar on action anthropology. Later, Robert Rietz, an early participant in the Fox field school, joined Merrill. Rietz's involvement at Fort Berthold was at Merrill's urging; he felt that the relocation would be best accomplished if a permanent anthropologist were on hand to anticipate problems between the Bureau and the Three Affiliated Tribes and help resolve differences. Tax agreed with this recommendation and managed to secure a Bureau-funded position for Rietz through the intervention of John Provinse. Merrill did not view Rietz's Bureau affiliation as posing any particular problems to Rietz and glossed over the difference between his and Rietz's roles in terms of an "accident" of funding sources. Tax disagreed and in a September 2, 1950, letter to Merrill posed (in a different form) the question that Firth had asked earlier: What if Rietz were confronted with a choice between two courses of action presented to him, one by the Bureau and the other by the Council? Fortunately, Rietz was prepared to defend his own position as an anthropologist. Rietz agreed with Tax that he was not an administrator and that, while he was on the government payroll, he had been hired as a scientist. It was his commitment to science, Rietz argued, that prevented him from choosing either government or Indians. For Rietz, the community he was serving was made up of both Indians and government workers, and both of these parties had needs to be met. In an outline of his duties at Fort Berthold, Rietz (1952) listed his duties as twofold: Research, in that an ongoing community analysis is made to discover and understand Indian social organization, beliefs, practices and major life goals and concerns. Action, in that this understanding is put to use in achieving mutual understanding and participation in the various tribal enterprises cooperatively carried out by the Bureau and the Tribes.

Tax was satisfied with Rietz's response, but while the issue of the anthropologist's relationship to the government officials and to the Indians had been temporarily resolved, it was to crop up repeatedly in the future. For example, the Bureau had attempted to close the higher grades of school on the Fox settlement, and the Indians had solicited Tax's support to help keep them open. The summer field parties found themselves becoming farther and farther removed from the controlling Bureau officials in

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Minneapolis and continually siding with the Indians in confrontations with White authorities. In April 1955, Rietz returned to Tama to serve as field director of the Fox project. Before he left in 1958 to become the director of the Chicago Indian Center, the project had given rise to a scholarship program for Fox youth, a native craft industry (TamaCraft), and a community center. In terms of actions, or "helping," the project accomplished a great deal; yet the amount of theoretical work that took place at Tama was necessarily limited because of the nature of the project's financing. In the early 1950's Tax had sought the help of the Ford Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for support of the Fox project, and both had declined. Finally, he had turned to the Schwarzhaupt Foundation, and in his proposal he cited two aims: "to help bring about a 'widening of the area of responsibility of the Indian community for its own affairs' and to help create 'more and better participation by the Indians in choosing and realizing their aspirations as individuals and as a group.'" These two aims were certainly both in the interest of the Fox community, yet they differed markedly from the dual aims of action research set out initially by Tax. He had always maintained that action anthropology was a theoretical science brought into the experimental stage. It also happened to be an approach to science which responded to problems as they were encountered in the experimental setting, namely the field. In his proposal to the Foundation, Tax ignored the theoretical side of action anthropology and emphasized the practical. As a philanthropic trust dedicated to encouraging citizenship and the active participation of minorities in the democratic process, the Foundation was not concerned with sponsoring scientific research, and Tax's proposal was addressed to its interests. This decision set a pattern which could not have been anticipated in 1954. Time and time again, as Tax and his students were forced to seek the support of philanthropy, the potential methodological and theoretical contributions of action research to anthropology were largely ignored. By the close of the Fox project, Tax and his students had worked out most of the major philosophical and practical problems of action research (Gearing, Netting, and Peattie 1960). Similar projects were under way elsewhere, the most notable being Cornell University's Vicos project in Peru. Tax had used numerous opportunities to speak on action anthropology, inviting the criticism and creative input of the discipline, but had evoked little response. The 1950's were a time of growth for American science, but action research was not one of the ways in which anthropology had chosen to expand. The Fort Berthold and Fox projects, while directed by Tax, were actually

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in the hands of his most capable students, and this freed him to pursue other possibilities for action research. In 1950 Tax accepted a position teaching anthropology during the summer session at the University of California at Berkeley. He used the drive to California as an opportunity to visit a number of reservations across the northern Plains and Rocky Mountains and the return trip as a chance to visit the tribes in the Southwest. These trips provided Tax with his first pan-Indian experience, and he was surprised to learn how much the various, dispersed tribes had in common. He was particularly struck by some of the effects of the Eisenhower administration's termination policy, which found many Indian tribes once again pitted against the government in an effort to preserve their tribal integrity. Six years later, Tax was again in communication with Galen Weaver. Weaver's missionary society provided higher-education financial support to a number of Indian students across the country. These students experienced the same problems of identity that Tax had encountered among the Fox in postwar Tama. They had asked Weaver if he could help arrange for Indian college students to come together and discuss their mutual problems. In addition to problems of identity, the students expressed their general feeling of helplessness with respect to immediate issues that affected their tribes. This problem, as they saw it, was one of education and communication. How could they educate themselves about government policy and then transmit what they learned to other Indians who were to be affected by that policy? In response to this expressed need, Tax helped Weaver to secure funding for a summer workshop on Indian affairs for Indian students. The purpose of the workshop was explicit (Tax 1956): "We propose to make possible an experience which will supplement the normal higher education experience of young Indians. The aim is to increase the real freedom of choice of these students by helping them become knowledgeable in matters which seem to them especially crucial because they are Indians." The preworkshop research committee at the University of Chicago compiled an annotated list of all Indian-related legislation before the 83d and 84th Congresses. The huge quantities of data gathered formed the basis for a number of generalizations about Indian policy. These generalizations proved useful to the Indian students and constituted a valuable contribution to the history of Indian-White relations in the United States. What is more, they helped workshop participants to see how they might influence federal policy formation. For Tax, the workshop provided firsthand experience with the emerging pan-Indianism, a force that was to influence Indian policy throughout the 1960's and up to the present. The success of the 1956 session warranted its continuation the following

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summer, and it eventually became institutionalized at Colorado State University at Colorado Springs. In April 1960, Tax learned from Carl Tjerendsen of the Schwarzhaupt Foundation that the Foundation had money available for a conference if Tax would consider directing a study of Indian problems and developing recommendations for policy makers and foundations. Tax had attended the Canadian Indians' Kingston Conference a month earlier and had noted the need for such a gathering in the United States. Through his experience with the Indian-affairs workshops, he had come to recognize the legitimacy of Native North America as a "field" that warranted action anthropological fieldwork. He further recognized that, in line with the action anthropologist's commitment, any policy recommendations that a conference might make would have to be formulated by the Indians themselves. The anthropologist could serve as a facilitator, educator, and resource coordinator, but could not assume a position of power. Tax communicated these feelings to Tjerendsen in a November 10, 1960, letter, and this led six months later to the American Indian Chicago Conference (reviewed by Joan Ablon in this volume). The Chicago Conference deepened the grass-roots commitment to pan-Indianism, clearly demonstrating that Indians throughout North America shared a sense of community stemming from a common response to shared political, economic, and social pressures from the wider society. The pan-Indian community posed the action anthropologist a peculiar set of problems. He had to intuit, apprehend, and empathetically recognize a great variety of values and then regulate his action to accommodate them all. Accordingly, Tax's rationalist commitment to communication was tempered by pragmatism at the Conference. In keeping with this commitment, the regional and national planning meetings were open to all Indians. The regional groups were kept in touch with each other through periodic newsletters, progress reports, and visits by Tax. When the delegates met in Chicago in June 1961, it was evident that the careful planning and sensitivity to Indian values had paid off. The Conference was not, however, free of problems. There were objections from some quarters to the name of the conference, which had to be changed even after the stationery had been printed. Further, careful as Tax was to play down his leadership, his prominence produced some questioning of his motives; he was accused by some of being manipulative and a self-styled leader of the Indian people. In a sense, this criticism was inevitable. Vine Deloria has noted that initiative is fatal in the contemporary Indian movement because of the bitter lesson that history has taught the Indian people: the leaders who move first are most likely to be the ones who are selling out their own people. Nonetheless, the 1961

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Chicago Indian Conference was a success, and a Declaration of Indian Purpose was drafted and presented to President Kennedy. The beginnings of Tax's action research on the international community of anthropologists are difficult to date, and an assessment of this ongoing endeavor would be premature. A brief sketch of it would perhaps depart from the international symposium organized by Paul Fejos, Director of Research of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, in 1951, with the aim of assessing the accomplishments of the discipline. Alfred Kroeber acted as president of the symposium and editor of its papers, published as Anthropology Today (Kroeber 1953). Tax and others edited the record of two weeks of discussion of these papers by scholars from 21 countries SLS An Appraisal of Anthropology Today (Tax et al. 1952). The first effort to update world anthropological knowledge was followed by what was planned to be a biennial Yearbook of Anthropology, the first (and last) issue edited by William Thomas at the Foundation (Thomas 1955). Finding the publication of books by Foundation staff too great a drain on its facilities and human resources, Fejos approached Tax with the proposal that he take over the project (see Tax 1965: pi. 1). Tax accepted on the condition that he first have the opportunity to ascertain what the anthropologists of the world wanted it to be, and in April 1957 Fejos agreed. At this same time, Tax was heavily committed to (1) action anthropology and (2) facilitating communication among American Indian tribes. In the manner in which Tax set out to establish Current Anthropology, the influence of both of these activities is evident. One of the first tasks he set for himself was to confer with anthropologists around the world to elicit their opinions as to what form Current Anthropology should take. Conferences were first organized in the United States. Then, in July-August 1958, Tax traveled throughout Europe to meet with colleagues in England, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Austria. Finally, in late August, representatives of all of these regional conferences met at Burg Wartenstein to discuss the results to date. At Burg Wartenstein the ground rules for Current Anthropology were laid down. The European and American participants suggested that Current Anthropology be published as a journal, in English, "addressed to the world audience of those who professionally pursue the anthropological sciences . . . and all their subsidiary and related sciences by whatever names" (Tax 1965:244). These early Associates also agreed that the journal would publish two classes of materials; first, major reviews of subjects "of interest to a broad segment of anthropologists" and "either new considerations of traditional subjects or preferably subjects of new, current, and growing interest" and, secondly, current news

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and reference materials relating to the anthropological sciences. Finally, the Burg Wartenstein conference spoke of "Associates" in Current Anthropology, who would contribute both to the scholarly content and to the developing form of the journal. Tax then embarked on another world journey to discuss the results of the Burg Wartenstein conference with anthropologists in Moscow, Delhi, Calcutta, Bangkok, Manila, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Honolulu, and Palo Alto. In April-May 1959, Tax was off again, this time visiting Mexico, Guatemala, Bogota, Lima, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Säo Paulo, and Caracas. The fourth and last of these journeys took him to Stockholm, Warsaw, Prague, Ankara, Cairo, Addis Ababa, Kampala, Khartoum, Ibadan, Accra, Dakar, and London. While we cannot directly assess the knowledge that Tax accumulated about the international community of anthropologists, his success in establishing Current Anthropology at the height of the Cold War stands as a testimonial to his skill as a fieldworker in this arena. Tax edited Current Anthropology from 1959 through 1974. In 1963, in response to the above-mentioned letter from Nancy Banks, he discussed his role: By means of the printed word, one develops communities of literate people. Current Anthropology is such a community of scholars, without organization or locus; I hope that it will be a pattern for a new type of influential world community. All of my editorial ventures (from high school days onward) have been experiments going in this direction, though of course I was not aware of this; perhaps the printed word has always been the mortar I have used to help people find their community. Even the American Indian Conference two years ago was mostly an affair of encouraging written communication among them, and this continues. Implied in this is that I do not conceive of editing (as most do) as a process of selection and tough choices, and setting standards, which view implies that I know better than the members being brought together what is good for them. [Rather] mine is a very relativistic and permissive view of the good and the beautiful in human life.

When Tax decided to step down as editor, what was important to him and to Associates in the choice of a successor was the ideals of the international community. In offering his resignation to Associates, Tax (1974:366) announced that with the appointment of Cyril Belshaw as his successor "a strong hand will be withheld from the tiller while its automatic pilot carries CA safely through virgin territory toward unknown destinations." In the remainder of this essay I shall try to draw from Tax's fieldwork a

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model of action research and to offer some thoughts on the incorporation of this model into the existing epistemological structure of contemporary American anthropology. Action anthropology is, after all, a field method. So considered, it does not preclude the use of other methods; it simply arranges these methods in a specific processual sequence and completes the total fieldwork experience through action. In short, action anthropology brings the fieldworker beyond empathy to the point where he is able to treat the subjective data of his own empathetic experience with objective certainty. Yet, as Tax pointed out as early as 1952, action anthropology is not simply a strategy for pursuing field research. It has in fact two "coordinate goals, to neither of which [the anthropologist] will delegate an inferior position. He wants to help a group of people to solve a problem, and he wants to learn something in the process" (Gearing, Netting, andPeattie 1960:168). Thus the action anthropologist's concern for contributing immediately to the betterment of the lives of his informants, or host community, becomes a part of his overall research scheme. Finally, it is in responding to this concern that the action anthropologist severs his traditional anthropological allegiances and brings the methods of anthropological fieldwork into line with 20th-century realities. The action model of fieldwork, as I see it, has four distinct stages. These stages are outlined in table 1. Obviously, the anthropologist's relationship to the native community before beginning action research will influence the execution of this field strategy. For example, if the community has initiated the action project and contacted the anthropologist to aid in its execution, the anthropologist is assured of amity and all he need do is express his own commitment before beginning action research. Such cases are becoming more and more familiar to anthropology as men and women are drawn to the discipline after an informal encounter with a community has caused them to want to increase both their understanding of and their usefulness to that community. Anthropologists will continue to find themselves drawn to particular communities for academic reasons, however, and here again they will be confronted with the problems of action research. Yet, as Tax has warned, an action program cannot be initiated unless the anthropologist also experiences an "emotional conversion" to action; and, finally, unless this conversion is shared by the community, an action project will not be possible. Like most fieldwork strategies, the action approach encourages study from afar as a prelude to the actual field experience. Tax has argued that "virtually any knowledge of the kind obtained by other modern anthropologists is grist for our mill." He is particularly committed to the study of

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Action anthropology fieldwork strategy

Pre-action phase: Study from afar A. Review of literature B. Theoretical formulations

II.

Pre-action phase: Study through interference on the periphery A. Interview B. Observation C. Participation

III.

Options for dealing with interference mediated by chance and commitment A]. Conditions of chance favorable to an action program 1. Amity between anthropologist and community and expressed commitment of anthropologist Bi. Corresponding options for dealing with interference 1. Maximize effects of interference through action

IV.

Action phase A. Formal presentation of self to community B.Creative and critical role C. Avoidance of mistakes through introspection

V.

A2. Conditions of chance not favorable to an action program 1. Enmity between anthropologist and community and/or lack of commitment B2- Corresponding options for dealing with interference 1. Take cognizance of interference in study 2. Ignore interference IV. Presentation of results of study to academic community

Presentation of results of study to academic and native community

history and linguistics as preparation for the field. In 1953 he advised his students that (Gearing, Netting, and Peattie 1960:289): the more we know about the cultures and societies in contact, and what goes on in people's minds, the more effective we are. For example, the Fox language. The more we work, the more we see that we have to control the language. This would be useful for practical problems. More important, we need to deal with problems of thought patterns we think distinguish the Indians from neighboring whites, and we can't do it without language.

The action anthropologist also formulates theoretical propositions before encountering the field, but his strategy relegates these formulations to a position secondary to actual experience. The commitment to action

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necessitates this relegation, because the action anthropologist eventually arrives at the point where he has to choose a course of action. He alone must accept the responsibility for this choice, and so he must rely upon experience, of which he can be sure, to be his guide. After familiarizing himself with the written literature on the people with whom he hopes to do fieldwork, the action anthropologist initiates study from the periphery. Study from the periphery involves interview, observation, and participation in the culture of concern. In the process, the anthropologist interferes in the routine life of his informants. In 1955 Tax noted that (Gearing, Netting, and Peattie 1960): when any anthropologist enters a community and begins to elicit kinship terminology, he has already interfered . . . and the only way not to interfere is to stay home. But assuming that anthropologists are not going to stay home, there still remains a choice. Either they can attempt to know about such effects (and, one would hope, take cognizance of them in their analyses) but minimize them; or they can hope to maximize the goodness of the effects. Action anthropology does the latter.

Study from the periphery enables the anthropologist to become acquainted with individuals within the community and, more important, to become familiar with his own reactions to a foreign culture. He makes contact with informants and interviews them; he achieves some measure of mobility and, assuming the role of observer, reaches out to a wider range of individuals within the culture. He then establishes friendships which are viewed as meaningful in and of themselves. Finally, he participates with his native friends in their various cultural activities. Empathy is essential to the action project. If, for reasons of his own or reasons that the culture presents to him, the anthropologist is unable to establish a relationship of trust and friendship with the native community, then an action project will not be possible. In a sense, the anthropologist must cease being an anthropologist for a time, and simply participate. Establishing relationships which are mutually satisfying to anthropologist and native does not mean pretending to have done this; the sincerity, or lack of sincerity, of the anthropologist becomes most evident in this phase of the action project, and all else will come to depend upon it. If the anthropologist is accepted by the native community and has expressed a commitment to them, then the third phase of fieldwork, action, may commence. In this phase the action anthropologist presents himself to the community for its critical review. He expresses his willingness to work with members of the community in solving what he has come to regard as mutual problems. He makes his case as a fellow human being

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and friend, but does not avoid presenting his interests as a scientist to the community as well. This formal presentation of self to the native community involves a great deal of personal insight on the part of the anthropologist. He must make both his skills and limitations equally clear to the community; and, what is more, he must recognize his willingness to work within its value system. In all of the steps leading up to this one, the anthropologist has been in charge, and his effort has been essentially under his own control. A s he now offers to turn his energies to the community's assistance, and to be guided by its direction, he abdicates a certain amount of control over his study. This abdication does not violate scientific truth; it simply recognizes the ultimate reality of the fieldwork situation: the natives are in control of information to which the anthropologist requires access. Action anthropology has come to be equated with practical anthropology and has suffered from the scientist's disregard for the practical. It involves much more, however, than simply doing practical things. The decision to act puts the anthropologist in the position of playing both creative and critical roles within the culture. His creativity and criticism are in turn scrutinized by the community and, often, found wanting. The freedom to make mistakes is his, however, as long as he turns the mistakes into creative learning experiences. Gradually, the action anthropologist refines his empathetic understanding of the culture through action. Action research thus involves more than participation. It requires the anthropologist to recognize and share native categories of experience and expectation; to test his intuitions through action; and to become better equipped, through introspection, to move about in a foreign culture. In so doing, action research transforms anthropology into an experimental science in which the subject is the anthropologist himself and not the community of his concern. When the action anthropologist leaves the field and returns to his institutional base, his responsibility to the native community does not end. In fact, he enters the fourth and final stage of fieldwork, the formulation and presentation of results. In preparing the results of his study for presentation, the action anthropologist must still consider his twofold commitment to science and to justice. His intimate experience of a foreign culture allows for a complete study, which in turn contributes to refined scientific generalizations. Science also benefits from the action project in that it can now treat the empathetic data of the fieldworker's experience with more assurance. Because of his commitment to justice, and to serving the community, the action anthropologist's presentation of results must be subject to the same conditions faced in doing fieldwork. If the mode of presentation is

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not comprehensible to the community or is considered offensive, he must consider alternate means of presentation. This is so because the final test of action research is an evaluation of its usefulness to the community. If the results are cloaked in anthropological jargon, such an evaluation will not be possible. Anthropology is a discipline which, for better or for worse, depends upon the intensive fieldwork experience to keep abreast of a rapidly changing world. In the model set forth here, action is presented as the sine qua non of the fieldwork of the future. It would be an understatement to say that anthropology has not wholeheartedly accepted this judgment. As a result, it now finds itself facing a crisis. In 1948 Tax faced a crisis of his own, brought on by a personal sense of failure to live up to his commitments. The crisis that anthropology faces today is similar to his in that we cannot expect to go on as anthropologists in the manner to which we have grown accustomed. It is different, however, in that what prompts us to change is less a commitment to fundamental values than a concern for the discipline's survival. There is subtle irony in the fact that at the time Tax was making his bid for action research, his department at the University of Chicago was committing itself to the study of the "new nations." It now becomes evident that what will eventually force action research on anthropology is the determination of these new nations to achieve some immediate product from the fieldwork of the many anthropologists who yearly migrate to their shores.

NOTES 1. "If anthropology is typically Western it is to a great extent on account of a very special relationship which our civilization has towards these people. Here, there is nothing for us to be proud of. After all, it is because we have killed them, exploited them, for centuries that it was possible for us to look at them as mere things. We can study them as objects because we have treated them as objects. There is no doubt that anthropology is the daughter of an era of violence" (Steiner and Levi-Strauss 1966).

R E F E R E N C E S CITED GEARING, FRED, ROBERT M c C . NETTING, and LISA PEATTIE. 1 9 6 0 .

Documentary history of the Fox project. University of Chicago D e p a r t m e n t of A n t h r o pology. HEGEL, G . W . F. 1 9 5 3 . Reason in history. N e w York: Bobbs-Merrill. HYMES, DELL. Editor. 1 9 7 2 . Reinventing anthropology. N e w York: P a n t h e o n Books.

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A. R. Editor. 1953. Anthropology today. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. LESLIE, CHARLES. 1 9 6 0 . "Fox impressions," in Documentary history of the Fox project. Edited by Fred Gearing et al., pp. 8 7 - 9 2 . University of Chicago Department of Anthropology. RIETZ, ROBERT. 1952. Robert Rietz Fort Berthold community study field notes. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Fort Berthold Community Study file. STEINER, GEORGE, and CLAUDE Livi-STRAUSS. 1 9 6 6 . An interview with Claude Levi-Strauss. Encounter 26:4. TAX, SOL. 1931. An Algerian Passover. American Hebrew, April 3, pp. 548 et seq. . 1931«. The interpretation of culture. Unpublished undergraduate thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis. . 19316. Field notes: Mescalero field school. MS. . 1932. The social organization of the Fox. Unpublished Master's thesis, University of Chicago, Chicago, 111. . 1945a. Democracy in Middle America. Amirica Indigena 5:4. . 1945ft. Anthropology and administration. America Indigena 5:21-33. . 1956. "Introduction," in Workshop in American Indian affairs. Colorado Springs. . 1965. The history and philosophy of Current Anthropology. Current Anthropology 6:238, 242-269. . 1974. Editor's report. Current Anthropology 15:365-366. TAX, SOL, et al. Editors. 1952. An appraisal of anthropology today. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. THOMAS, WILLIAM L., JR. Editor. 1955. Yearbook of anthropology. New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. KROEBER,

JOAN ABLON

The American Indian Chicago Conference1

The American Indian Chicago Conference, held in 1961, constituted a landmark event in the history of Indian affairs. More than 500 Indians representing 90 tribes assembled at the University of Chicago to draw up a formal statement of their determination to continue to exist as Indian people and to document specific problems they shared and offer constructive recommendations to solve these problems. The Conference was a unique gathering which stimulated great interest, concern, and hope among the thousands of Indian people touched by it in varying ways. In 1961, relatively few non-Indians were effectively concerned about American Indians. The disenfranchisement of Indians of the benefits of the larger society and their severe economic, health, and educational problems had not been well publicized. Obviously, the solutions proposed by governmental agencies were historical and ongoing failures. Sol Tax had given considerable thought to ways that political and economic opportunities could be structured so as to enable American Indians to organize and devise ways to pull themselves out of the bureaucratic morass. The year 1960, with its upcoming national election, seemed an auspicious time for action. Tax began thinking about a conference on Indian policy, and he approached the University of Chicago about the possibility of funds for such a conference and received a positive response. His thinking was further stimulated by his attendance at the Kingston conference of the Indian-Eskimo Association of Canada in June of that year. He then began seriously to explore the various areas of interest in such a conference. In the early fall of 1960, Tax was approached by the Emil Schwarzhaupt Foundation to draw up a report on the current Indian situation that would give direction to other foundations. In response to this request, he suggested his idea of drawing Indian people together for a policy conference and began to pursue the possibility of the University of Chicago's receiving a grant for such a conference. When the Schwarzhaupt Foundation expressed a definite interest, he

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presented the idea in late fall to the National Congress of American Indians and later to the American Anthropological Association. Both groups were interested and promised endorsement. The Schwarzhaupt Foundation, the University of Chicago, and later the Wenner-Gren Foundation agreed to provide the major financial support. He asked Nancy Lurie, an anthropologist then at the University of Michigan who had long-standing concerns about American Indian problems, to assist him as Assistant Coordinator, and Robert Rietz, Director of the Chicago Indian Center, to be Associate Coordinator. He later asked Albert Wahrhaftig and Joan Ablon, graduate students at the University of Chicago, to serve as assistants to the coordinators. Tax and his staff very clearly organized this meeting on the operational model of action anthropology which he and a group of his students had developed through their work with the Fox Indians. The action approach is based on the premise that a group of people, if properly informed of the alternatives, is able to choose what is best for it more wisely than outside "expert advisors" or well-meaning planners. The action approach entails a stage-by-stage evaluation of the community's problems as presented by its members and a feedback of these developing ideas to the community-client group together with a clarification of alternative paths of action among which the community could choose. Self-determination in the setting of short-term and long-term goals must be the essence of any action program. The actionists stress their equal responsibility to the people whom they wish to help and to the scientific community, of which they must remain members and to which they must continue to contribute data. The Conference was conceived and carried out in terms of this approach. In retrospect it was apparent to the coordinators that the Conference could not have succeeded had it been planned or carried out in any other manner. Lurie, in her detailed account of the Conference (1961:481-482), commented specifically on the action approach: There are several important principles which must be observed in such undertakings. First, there is the need for fundamental faith coupled with much patience that the people involved are better able to solve their own problems, given the opportunity, than anyone else. This faith is at least as tenable as the faith of those who believe that experts are better able to solve a group's problems and go so far as to decide what the problems are in the first place. The approach of Action Anthropology does not exclude the use of experts. In fact the reason that it is Action Anthropology and not just spontaneous community effort is that the situation is such that the group is unable to get the process of problem solving started itself although it wants to do so. Outside help may also be needed to keep the process running smoothly and supply information and services which the group cannot provide for itself. In the case of the American Indian Chicago

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Conference (AICC) the major problem was the matter of communication between the widely scattered groups of Indians who appeared to form a real community of opinion, at least in many common grievances, and who had no opportunity to express their views widely or learn what other Indians were thinking. Suggestions for a process of communication and the use of experts as a source of help and information must, however, have relevance to the group and not be foisted on them. Tax was fully aware of all the criticisms and prophecies of doom which would be dredged up from the murky waters of Indian administration once a plan such as he envisioned was widely known among non-Indians. Indians are factional. Indians are suspicious. Indians are apathetic. Indians are unable to handle their own affairs. Indians are too varied culturally from tribe to tribe to hold any views in common. Indians are at the mercy of the few political Indians who railroad through only measures that they want. And, as everyone familiar with Indian affairs knows, Indians cannot be worked with in this way because this is not the way Indians are worked with! The above, like all truisms, are valid if surrounding factors are held constant. Tax proposed to change the surrounding factors to see what would happen.

HISTORY AND LOGISTICS Preparations for the event began with Tax's proposal to the annual meeting of the National Council of American Indians in November 1960 to draw up the kind of document that could be produced by the projected conference as a statement of Indian opinion on present problems and Indian desires for their future. NCAI did produce such a model document, and this was subsequently revised for use as a working paper during the Conference. In an attempt to reach as many Indians as possible, a mailing list was compiled from names given by the NCAI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and various Indian and scholarly organizations and from tribal council officer lists. By June 1961 this mailing list was to grow to about 5,000 names, some 4,000 those of Indians. This list constituted a unique and historic communication device; this was the first time any attempt had been made to form a mailing community of American Indians across the country to be used for positive action. On December 27, 1960, the first pieces of literature were mailed out. These explained the idea of the American Indian Charter Convention (as it was then called) and included the "model charter" drawn up by a committee from the NCAI and such reference materials as selections from the Meriam Report of 1928, the first "comprehensive" report on Indian affairs; a map of American Indian populations in 1950 compiled by several of Tax's students; and other pertinent materials on Indian problems. Other reference

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materials, letters from the coordinators, and progress reports with letters from individual Indians and reports of preparatory local and regional meetings were sent out from the Conference headquarters during the next five months. Aside from the stream of materials sent through the mails, a variety of planning meetings were held across the country. Local and regional meetings were held in New York, Washington, Chicago, Seattle, Reno, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Tempe (Arizona), Lincoln (Nebraska), Norman (Oklahoma), Great Falls (Montana), and Pembroke (North Carolina). These meetings, usually held in scholarly institutions, were open to Indians and interested non-Indians and explained the purpose of the Conference, defining and clarifying the issues to be discussed. A steering committee of Indians across the country was organized and came to Chicago for meetings in February and April. At the first meeting of the Steering Committee it became apparent that "American Indian Charter Convention" would not be a suitable name because the words "charter" and "convention" had implications other than those intended for the meeting. "Charter" seemed to imply to many a dogmatic statement or contract and was reminiscent of too many tried and failed governmentsponsored programs. "Convention" suggested a regular meeting of an organization, and there was to be only one conference; it was not formed to be a new organization. The Steering Committee suggested the name American Indian Chicago Conference which was more general and made use of the already widely publicized initials. A subtitle, "The Voice of the American Indian," was added. More than 250 community, tribal, and intertribal meetings were held over the country to discuss Conference materials as they arrived. Tax also called meetings of a broad spectrum of non-Indians who could contribute their resources or knowledge in various ways—anthropologists, scholars in other fields, lawyers, service personnel in government agencies, and representatives of religious denominations and other organizations concerned with Indian rights and welfare. Press, radio, and television were kept apprised of the developing conferences and gave very full coverage throughout the planning and during the Conference itself. Through all phases of publicity for the Conference, the coordinators stressed three main points. First, they emphasized that they were not trying to "run" the Conference in the sense of influencing what would be decided or produced at the Conference or the document that would be its result. Aside from arranging the mechanics and facilities of the Conference, such as dormitories and meeting rooms, the duty of the coordinators was simply to assure fair and open communication so that all

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persons would have the opportunity to be heard. Second, the coordinators stressed that they were neutral scholars interested only in seeing that Indian people had an opportunity to speak and plan for their future in their own way. The coordinators represented no particular interest groups. The meeting was sponsored by the University of Chicago, an independent scholarly institution, and was not to be influenced by the government, NCAI, or any other specific body, although many organizations endorsed the Conference and were very helpful in promoting it. Third, the Conference was to be held for the Indian people, and only Indians would have the right to speak. Interested non-Indians could attend as observers, but they could not speak out in sessions unless, as, special resource people, they were asked for advice by Indian participants. As interest developed, it became apparent that the Conference would take on much greater proportions than Tax had originally planned. The coordinators faced many problems. One of the most urgent was finances. How could Indian people, with their common handicap of insufficient financial resources, come from all over the country to Chicago and stay there a full week? A distance subsidy was worked out so that, according to a seven-zone scale, those Indian registrants who came from the greatest distances would pay less for their week's room and board in the dormitories than those from points nearer to Chicago. Local persons, in Zone 1, would pay the maximum fee of $45, while those who came from the West Coast, scaled as Zone 7, would pay only $15 for the week's room and board. Non-Indian registrants would pay a higher standard fee to help subsidize Indians.

THE CONFERENCE The Conference was formally held from Tuesday, June 13, through Tuesday, June 20. The Steering Committee arrived several days early and set up rules of procedure. About 500 Indians attended the Conference, many sent as official delegates from their tribes which either partially or fully paid their way. More than half of the Indian registrants came as independent persons. As individuals they represented more than 90 tribes from almost every state including Alaska, as well as a few Canadian bands. Also, 145 non-Indian observers registered, most of them scholars, members of religious organizations, and officials of local, state, and federal governmental agencies. Representatives of the Department of the Interior's Task Force on Indian Affairs, which had recently completed a tour of hearings around the country, attended.

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The Conference began with an opening Calumet Ceremony and Welcome Feast. At the first night's session, Tax gave a brief history of the Conference and then turned the Conference over to Indians. Edward Dozier, a Santa Clara Pueblo Indian from New Mexico and anthropologist at the University of Arizona, gave the keynote address, and Earl Welch, an Oklahoma Cherokee and a Justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court, was the chairman of the evening. The business of the evening was the acceptance of the Steering Committee's rules of procedure. The three days which followed were the core working period of the Conference. Each registrant spent most of his time in one of the nine round-table discussion sections of about 40 persons, exchanging information and working over a preliminary statement that the Steering Committee had drafted in April as a working model to be revised or rejected as the conferees saw fit. The entire body met in large plenary sessions briefly in the mornings and for several hours each night to discuss progress made in the smaller and less formal round-table sections. The Steering Committee was dissolved for the period of the Conference, and the business of operation was conducted by the Rules, Credentials, and Drafting Committees, which had been elected by the whole group in session. Most of the non-Indian observers attended an Indian Institute three afternoons of the week and exchanged information, opinions, and philosophies of service. The days and evenings composed a more than full schedule of activities, but at the close of the evening sessions a great many of the Indian registrants would drift over to the registration hall and there, accompanied by drums and singing, would dance far into the night. Saturday and Sunday originally had been planned to be free of Conference work. Local trips and powwows had been scheduled to give registrants a chance to relax from the busy first four days. Nevertheless, a work session was also called for the Drafting Committee's presentation of the first draft of the projected final document as taken from the nightly reports of the discussion groups' results. Sunday morning church services were conducted by Indian clergymen of various faiths. The afternoon and evening were given to a powwow and dance contest. At this time the formal dress and serious manner of the discussions gave way to gaily colored costumes, hours of singing and dancing, and to an afternoon picnic. The final Monday and Tuesday were tense and serious days taken up by a section-by-section consideration of the Drafting Committee's revised document. Any Indian had the right to suggest additions or deletions, and many did. The question of differential voting strength to be given to persons formally sent as tribal delegates from federally recognized tribes, as opposed to persons coming independently, was the largest issue of

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contention at the Conference. This had been anticipated as a potential difficulty in the Steering Committee's preliminary meetings. It was feared by some that the Indians living in urban areas or in communities not recognized by the federal government would vote against reservation interests, and that the reservation delegates would begrudge their city brothers' appropriations. It was finally decided that the vote of the tribal delegates would count as a block vote of 60% and that of the individuals 40%. In actuality, the matter of the block vote was never carried out, and when voting occurred in the last several days, the vote was in every instance taken by individual voice or standing vote. There was a high degree of unity on major issues involving what the Indian people wanted. Differences of opinion occurred most frequently on what were the best ways to express their feelings and about the best procedures to achieve their aims. The majority wanted the language of the document to be outspoken and direct in stating the wish to retain their Indian identity and in listing what types of government programs they wanted. A small group shied away from strong language and preferred to be more diplomatic and reserved, both in words and demands for government action. Some conservative or "traditionalist" groups were so suspicious of the Conference and any possible government sponsorship that they did not come. Others sent delegates who voiced opinions quite different from those of the majority. Some, for example, urged rejection of the Citizenship Act of 1924, which, they saw as forcing citizenship with its obligations as well as privileges, on tribes that preferred to be independent nations in treaty relationships with the United States and Canada. Although this was a minority view, it should be noted that the majority was strong in insisting on their right to maintain their Indian identity in the face of impinging 'White' culture and on the right to choose what aspects of this alien culture to adopt. Many of the young Indian people were especially insistent on the expression of this right of selective acculturation. The 49-page document that resulted from the Conference was called "Declaration of Indian Purpose." In eloquent language, it set forth the position taken by this representative group on many of the important and shared issues which confronted American Indians. The document, along with various appendices, was printed and sent out to persons on the mailing list and registrants after the Conference. Accompanying the Declaration was a summary of the Meriam Report of 1928 and a review of the progress in Indian Affairs since that year, along with information on the termination policy and reports on a variety of subjects which had been submitted by individuals and groups at the Conference.

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EVALUATION In evaluating the Conference, the coordinators recognized certain limitations. The shortage of money and time limited communication to only a small proportion of the total American Indian population. More regional and local meetings would have been desirable. Still, the great number of tribes contacted, the hundreds of letters received from Indians who could not come, and the readily apparent fact that during the Conference Indians of all statuses gave thought to each other's problems made the consensus that developed in Chicago more representative than the registration numbers alone would indicate. It was recognized also that, through the selective factors of literacy, financial ability, and cultural and personal patterns allowing aggressive action, more progressives and middle-of-the roaders were represented than "traditionalists." Yet, the strong feeling for the retention of Indian identity reflected a continuing desire to protect "Indianness" and Indian rights among all Indian people throughout the country. The coordinators considered the Conference to have been successful in a number of differing areas. The preliminary reference materials and progress reports mailed out provided much needed information to Indian people around the country as well as promoting a feeling of assurance that with effort it would be possible to improve their situation. These ends were accomplished for those who could not attend the Conference and would have been accomplished even if the Conference itself had not been held. Moreover, the Conference was extremely well publicized across the country (and in some areas abroad) in newspapers and magazines and on radio and television. This provided what may be regarded as the greatest amount of concentrated publicity presented to the American public at one time about American Indians and their problems in many years. The immediate result of the Conference itself was that persons representing a variety of tribes, cultural and educational backgrounds, legal statuses, and geographical areas came together and productively exchanged experiences and opinions. Men and women, young and old, persons from federally recognized tribes and from others, reservation people and relocated urbanites, all worked in unison. Reservation people and rural and urban dwellers alike were able to see the whole range of problems of their Indian brothers, and it appeared that each Indian voted in the interests of all Indians. As one Indian woman expressed it, "When I came here, I thought only of my people and our problems, and now I think of all the Indian people and all their problems." Indian participants were for the most part very enthusiastic about the Conference. They expressed appreciation to Tax through gifts of a peace pipe and a war bonnet.

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The Conference provided a unique learning experience for the anthropologists. They were able to observe pan-Indian social and political organization and attitudes develop, the compatibility of voting on resolutions (a custom absent from pre-Columbian America) and singing traditional Indian songs, the strength of traditionalist ideas and the system of communication among the holders of these ideas, and various other areas of contemporary Indian life.

THE LONG VIEW Indian history since the Conference has been dynamic and chaotic, yet in its basic character frustratingly static. While a long-view assessment of the effects of the Conference is a very difficult task, a number of specific happenings furnish directions to follow in tracing changes related to it. These suggest that the long-range significance of the Conference for Indian life has been its stimulation of indigenous political action rather than its direct influence on federal policy. The fruition of the Conference was shown in such subsequent events as the Alcatraz "invasion" and the demonstrations of the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee and Ship Rock, in the writings and speeches of young Indian activists, as well as in many quietly constructive achievements that have received little attention. All of these have brought serious attention of the American public and government to Indian problems. Indians had heretofore been the least "squeaky wheel" of American minority groups, even though their problems were the most severe. Many of the events of the past 14 years may in fact owe their origin in part to the multifaceted stimulation, communication, and hope engendered by the Conference. President Kennedy formally received the Declaration of Indian Purpose from an Indian delegation which brought it to Washington in 1962. There is no doubt that the holding of the Conference affected early policy in the new administration. The antitermination sentiments of Indians were clearly voiced in the Declaration; in this Bureau officials and Congressmen had firsthand documentation of their Indian constituencies' antagonism toward this policy. The members of the Department of the Interior Task Force who attended the Conference absorbed the message, and two months after the Conference the Task Force Chairman, Philleo Nash, an anthropologist, was named Commissioner of Indian Affairs. The milieu created at the Conference by a strong consciousness of Indian identity was of particular importance to a number of groups. Representatives of the Menominee Indians, terminated from federal relationship only a few weeks before, were very disturbed by their situa-

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tion and pointed out dramatically what problems they might be facing. (As it happened, the consequences were even worse than they had anticipated for their tribal funds, lands, and forests.) The Conference provided an arena for the Menominee's dire warnings to other tribes. How much these warnings helped others in their own struggles against termination is difficult to measure. A new federal awareness that Indians can organize and that their grievances must be taken seriously and repaired led, for example, to the repeal of the Menominee Termination Act and abandonment of the termination policy generally. Doubtless, Indians were ready to move toward self-determination in reaction to the unpopular federal Indian policy of the 1950's, but the Chicago Conference offered a massive educational experience and model for action, mustering Indian sentiment and effort at a crucial moment and thus perhaps bringing their goals closer together. Representatives of the Wisconsin Winnebago were inspired to conduct a survey of their own situation, patterned in part after the Conference, as a means of building tribal unity. They were the first tribe to seek funding for such a purpose and carry out the work entirely on their own initiative. They had never organized under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, but saw it as a means of dealing with their problems as revealed in their survey. By 1962 they had incorporated. One might wonder if the Winnebago, if they had not been stimulated by the Conference, would have ever chosen to resurrect that Act, then more than 25 years old. Members of other Wisconsin tribes later organized the Great Lakes Intertribal Council, an effective consortium-type effort to seek funding and act as a clearing-house of information for Indians in the state (Lurie 1973:11-15). The "radical-traditionalist" minority views regarding treaty status which had been expressed at the Conference, although not included in the final Declaration, had nevertheless been heard and began to gain greater currency among Indian people over the country in succeeding years. A variety of turnarounds on the Indian political scene had their birth at the Conference, conceived through the unique opportunities for mingling and communication among leaders and groups. Following the Conference, there was a change in the leadership of the NCAI, long stable in its orientation and personnel. Likewise, a significant group at the Conference was composed of many of the alumni of past sessions of the Summer Workshop on Indian Affairs as well as the members of the new class of 1961. This Summer Workshop had become a training ground for young Indian leaders, some of these later forming the National Indian Youth Council, the early prototypic organization for aggressive political action on the part of Indian youth. The ferment of these young people provided

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basic philosophy and courage for the dramatic demonstrations of the 1960's and 1970's. There is little doubt that the attendance of parents and older relatives of today's Indian political activists contributed to the motivations of these new younger Indian spokesmen. Ironically, the best indication of the Conference as successful action anthropology is the fact that many younger Indian people are unaware that it was a catalyst for aggressive Indian activities and for the ready communication with Indians across the country which they now take for granted. Many young Indians resent the suggestion that anthropologists can be useful in political action. A major offshoot of the Conference was another project in action anthropology. A few months following the Conference, Tax approached the Carnegie Corporation and obtained funding for a major crosscultural education project. One component of this project was the development of the first national newspaper, Indian Voices, edited by Robert K. Thomas and Clyde Warrior, President of the National Indian Youth Council. This paper utilized the original Conference mailing list and added several thousand more Indian names to it. A second aspect of this education program was a field project in Oklahoma carried out during the following years by Robert K. Thomas, Albert Wahrhaftig, and others. In overview, the Conference constituted a unique arena for (1) social stimulation—the mingling of persons of Indian heritage, who brought with them a host of differing rural and urban experiences; (2) educational enlightenment provided by the abundance of readable educational materials distributed on Indian historical, legal, and economic issues; and (3) political opportunity to exchange short-and long-term problem solving strategies. All of these resulted in a climate of excitement and hope for a better life for the participants and their people as Indians. In sum, the Conference served as a novel experiment in social-science planning. It proved that a people long deprived of the power of self-determination can draw up an articulate and forceful statement of belief and action when they are provided with information and an opportunity to make intelligent choices without the imposition of "expert," ready-made solutions by outsiders.

NOTES 1.

This description is a brief overview of a very complex happening. For more detail, see Lurie (1961).

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REFERENCES 1962. The American Indian Chicago Conference. Journal of American Education 1:17-23. LURIE, NANCY OESTREICH. 1961. The voice of the American Indian: Report on the American Indian Chicago Conference. Current Anthropology 11:478-500. . 1973. "Action anthropology and the American Indian," in Anthropology and the American Indian, pp. 4-15. San Francisco: Indian Historical Press.

ABLON, JOAN.

SARAH ANNE ROBINSON

Memorandum to a Coast Salish Band on Politics and Policy Making

PREFACE This article is an act of action anthropology. It is a revision of a memorandum first presented to the chief and council of a Coast Salish Band November 1968. 1 The original version has been copied and passed on to others by Indians across the continent. In subsequent versions I have kept what I think is of general interest and have broadened and updated the manuscript for publication. I took the revised manuscript with me when I visited the band in February 1976 and gave copies to people who had been directly involved in events discussed. Then I talked with as many band members as opportunity would allow and made some corrections and a number of additions. The third version was also circulated for comment before a final draft was prepared. I have spelled out the related concepts of anomie and anomia not only for readers who may not have access to references but also for readers with a background in social science. The two concepts need to be clarified and related anthropologically to a complex cultural situation. A precise understanding of the phenomena is essential to make sense of this case study and to understand how the conclusions drawn from it can be used by action anthropologists as a formula applicable to many similar cases.

MEMORANDUM TO A COAST SALISH BAND I am addressing this memorandum to you for three reasons. First, it may help you in dealing with present problems and in planning a course for the future. Second, it may be useful to you in explaining your needs to other Indians and to non-Indians. Third, it may help you to understand one possible role of the social scientist and what can be done with the information he gathers.

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In 1957, when I first came to work among you, I found your community demoralized and poverty-stricken. In a hundred years of White contact your political and economic systems had been all but destroyed and your ethical and religious beliefs had become muddled by conflict. The setting in which you lived was one typical of rural poverty. You could be characterized by Oscar Lewis's (1966) description of the "culture of poverty." Wherever chronic poverty is found, basic conditions are similar. There is also an apparent similarity in the way the people living under these conditions think and feel and behave. However, each group has its particular cultural background that determines certain forms its plight will take. This background may also offer a route to recovery. Poverty certainly contributed toward your disorientation and despair; but in the past 20 years it has gradually given way before expanding job opportunities, rising salaries, better education and training, and a liberalized Federal grant policy for band development. Now few of you are poor. Yet even those of you whose incomes would put you in the category of "middle class" still show behavior patterns and attitudes characteristic of the "poverty class" (see Caplovitz 1963 and Valentine 1968). This means we must look to causes other than lack of economic resources or even poor living conditions to explain why you are having such difficulty in developing a satisfactory community life and an effective political organization. I think the related concepts of anomie and anomia can be usefully applied to your community to give you guidelines for adaptive change useful long after my comments here are dated. What you have shown me and I, in turn, shall try to show you is how anomie and anomia occur, how they are interrelated, and how they can be mitigated.

ANOMIE The term anomie means literally "without norms." It was first used by Dürkheim (1951) in 1897 to describe the condition of a type of individual prone to suicide. The concept has been much debated in sociology and the term variously applied (see Clinard 1964). I use it to designate a set of conditions which evoke a dilemma that the individual cannot rationalize. If the order of interpersonal, belief, or behavior relationships is broken, confused, or made unacceptable, it produces a ripple effect that ultimately calls for a resorting of the individual's perceived world and his place in it. If the breaches cannot be closed or bridged and confusion remains, this can be personally upsetting and can affect the individual's self-perception and behavior.

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In an anomic society, systems that channel rights and duties are disarticulated. They are, in effect, pulled apart so that they cannot work together. Some duplicate each other, presenting alternatives. Others are incomplete or indefinite. There are gaps between certain systems which make it difficult to coordinate the activities of each with the other. In an anomic society institutions fail because the members cannot agree and cooperate or because the available means do not work or are unacceptable. Formal relationships disappear; so does the sense of belonging to an organized whole greater in scope and complexity than the individual. The fabric of society unravels. Individual members of an anomic society find it confusing and frustrating. One may set out to achieve something and find that his way is blocked, that the means he has been told will get him what he wants do not work, or that the people he must cooperate with to achieve his ends are preoccupied with another course of action. Alternatively, he may not know through which institution he should work, what means he should employ, or even what goals he should strive for. The machinery of his society works for him inefficiently, inconsistently, and too often ineffectively. This means he must play out his life by means of his senses, judging on the basis of what he knows about each individual he comes in contact with just what to expect under what circumstances. The person affected by anomie feels most secure in small groups of people he is personally familiar with or in routine situations where people and activities run to a type he knows how to handle. The uncertainty and confusion created by an anomic situation can have a devastating effect on a person's sense of values and on his perception of himself in relation to the world about him (see Toffler 1970). Confusion over whom to believe about what, over terms in which to think, and over cause-and-effect relationships leads to a state of mind sometimes referred to as anomia (see Maclver 1950, Riesman, Glazer, and Denny 1956, Srole 1956). This is essentially a state of disorientation. To the extent that the individual in an anomic society experiences inconsistent consequences of his actions and is exposed to competing authorities, he tends to ignore the regulations that do exist. Sanctions become ineffective. To the extent that he ignores the rules and plays the game as he pleases, when he pleases, he contributes toward making conditions anomic for others. Thus the state of anomie can be perpetuated in a society generation after generation until something happens to break the cycle. Somehow, the members of the society must reorient themselves or the social structure must be repaired. Ultimately both must occur in order to reverse the process creating anomie. Not all persons in an anomic society experience the same conditions,

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nor do people with different personalities respond in exactly the same way to similar conditions. Not everyone in an anomic society is anomic — that is, exhibits the behavioral symptoms of anomia. This is important to realize because it helps to explain why anomic societies do not collapse in utter chaos. It also helps to explain why people find different ways of handling their problems. The trend toward anomie in your band/community is not hard to trace. It follows much the same course as that on other reserves. White settlement of the area occurred in the mid-19th century. Soon the aboriginal system was rivaled by values and beliefs propounded by the Indian Affairs Branch, the churches, schools, and other groups in the non-Indian society. The result was confusion reflecting fundamental conflicts of interest. The individual found himself in a dilemma, but he could afford to gamble. Social punishments and rewards would not necessarily be triggered if either the White or the Indian community-wide backing necessary to carry them out was lacking. Furthermore, jobs and a money economy made the Indian less subject to coercion within his own society because they broke down interdependence and provided both means and incentive for the Indian to leave his band community for greater or lesser periods of time. Today, a person has somewhat less trouble than his father and grandfather did because there is not such great divergence between Indian and non-Indian standards as once there was. But a person is still confronted with differing codes and conflicting interests. The aboriginal village consisted of a cluster of large households each containing a number of couples with their children plus a few single people, young as well as old. Although not every member of a household was related to every other member, each was related to at least one other. An extended family formed a nucleus. The family owned the house and dominated its affairs. A village was simply a collection of houses owned by people who were related to each other. Kinship ties were traced through both the male and female lines and reached beyond the village to form a network that spread over a wide area of the coast. Families were central to the whole political organization. Each family had its own interest to be served and each was a cooperative unit. Leadership was exercised by a variety of people within the family, depending on occasion, ability, and the acknowledgment of followers. As Whites began to move into the region, Indian settlements were consolidated and assigned a relatively limited amount of land on which to live. In your case, one community was created from five separate settlements — that is, five family-oriented political units, each with its own headman. The Canadian government called this new, arbitrarily created

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community a "band." The band was henceforth treated by the government as though it were a single political unit. Families have continued to dominate the political machinery of the community in order to serve the needs of their members. They have been especially interested in controlling whatever benefits are to be got from affiliation with powerful people and institutions and with the Indian Affairs Branch. While there has been an increase in the types of benefits and even in dollars available overall, their amount has rarely been enough for everyone to share. Family-centered political factions have been weakened by individual special interests. The mutual dependence and the hierarchy of power within families were affected by the availability of jobs and money. Old skills and the ownership of natural resources and supernatural power were no longer necessary in order to amass wealth for spending at feasts and potlatches. The old headmen were gradually replaced by councillors elected at large. Finally, the government established a formula basing representation on band population size. New interest groups have come into being and some of these now appear to be developing into political factions that rival and may soon overpower the old family factions. Age groups are becoming cohesive at the expense of family ties. Class distinctions based on sophistication and style of living crosscut both age and family lines. New interest groupings are reflected in the composition of the council. There is a countertrend to community fragmentation. You say that the men first began to work as a team, literally, when some of them started to play lacrosse and soccer professionally 30 years ago. There had been professional sports teams and individual players before then, but the nucleus of this team was also working together in an Indian-owned contract logging business, making good money, and feeling selfconfident. Canoe racing became popular in the late 1950's. The support of the 11 -man racing canoes involved a number of people besides the crew members and their families. More or less as a direct outgrowth of these activities, a club was formed to support not only sports, but other social activities as well. This club went through several transformations before disappearing altogether. Under the leadership of G.W. and his committee, many of the original members plus some new ones became involved in putting on a highly successful annual sports day. This venture brought them into full participation with the adjacent non-Indian community. These activities and some purely social ones growing out of new friendships involved a wide variety of people, both Indian and nonIndian. Not everyone on the reserve has participated by any means, but a surprisingly large number have been involved at one time or another. The

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result has been a new pride and sense of community as well as a new sophistication. Through these activities you have also experienced social organization that is purposeful and effective. From the beginning, non-Indians have found it frustrating to deal with Indians through their own political organization, especially when an interpreter was needed. The Indian interpreter was called upon whenever possible to act as spokesman. The government sought to legitimate the position of spokesman and interpreter by superimposing an office of chief on the old family-centered political organization. Before the Indian Act of 1951, the chief was appointed by the government to act as a constable, maintaining law and order within the reserve, and also to channel information, services, and actions between the band/community and the Indian Affairs Branch. His role as a spokesman for the band was inconsistent with the old political organization, but it was not in conflict with family-centered control so long as he represented all families equally. He came in conflict with rival families whenever he favored his own over others in dispensing goods and services obtained from the government. He also stepped out of line when he represented his own opinions as the consensus of the community if in fact there was disagreement. Individuals, whether they were representative of their families or not, could bypass the chief and deal with the agent. The agent was the one-man representative for the Indian Affairs Branch and ultimately the whole Canadian government. Structurally, he and the chief were the contact points between the two societies. In practice, the agent could rarely be bypassed, but the chief frequently could be. The chief also found it best not to carry his role as constable into the households of others except when invited to do so. Policing of family affairs was left mostly to the families themselves. Even today it is not politically wise to interfere in family matters. The resentment of uninvited intervention is not simply a matter of custom; it is also the consequence of the reservated band's being a small, essentially closed community where everyone knows everyone else and must deal with each other frequently. Fear of interference divides authority into separate orbits and hampers the coordination of community-wide programs and activities. The Indian Act of 1951 prescribed greater autonomy for bands through their official government. For various reasons, self-determination was not promoted by either the band or the local representatives of the Indian Affairs Branch until the 1960's. Then the Branch began to experiment with leadership training programs and increased services in the areas of health, education, welfare, economic development, and job placement and training. The chief and council were given the responsibility of administering the band's own budgeted funds.

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Although band revenue has remained limited, the amount of money available for selected projects has increased through a system of grants. The band, however, has not been prepared for the project approach to problem solving, so the debate over priorities continues. The restructuring of band government and the shift of administrative responsibility to the band has not changed the basic relationship between the band and the Indian Affairs Branch. The band is still almost totally dependent on the Branch for working capital, and an increasing number of band members are dependent on federally funded jobs on the reserve where earned income is not taxed and housing is subsidized. The Branch has made several attempts to restructure band government in order to channel new development programs through it. The first experiment was with committees appointed by the chief and council to carry out health, education, and welfare projects. A more recent experiment has been with a paid staff, usually hired within the band. The staff are trained through workshops and special courses to administer programs formerly operated by the federal or provincial government and to execute the business affairs of the band. These constructs are useful but flawed in that they assign duties to offices without regard for the way the resulting roles will fit into the existing political organization. Band members have been assigned to do things they should not because they are inadequately trained, or they would be violating the taboo against interference, or learning more about a neighbor than he would wish, or flying in the face of values held by certain groups, or creating a political power base at the expense of elected officials. Some program administrators are also band councillors, thus creating the possibility of vested interests. Job training usually has been given to younger band members, thus encouraging class division coincident with age. Adding or subtracting offices and shuffling the existing responsibilities will not help. The people of the band have not yet learned to delegate responsibility to elected officials, much less to appointed ones. Therefore, tinkering with the organization to make it a better mechanism for dealing with the world exterior to the band/community is not going to help matters, especially if the band develops a bureaucracy based on impersonal relationships instead of turning the intimacy of the small community into an advantage by stressing neighborliness. The band administration must become more responsive to individual needs than the Branch has been, but all the demands and training from the government press the band administration into the bureaucratic mold. Most of the administrators are young, and the dependency fostered by the old paternalism disgusts them. Therefore, they willingly adopt the less personal

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approach and do not realize the Branch still calls the tune. It is possible, however, to adapt the present administrative organization by changing the style of operation within the band so that administrators can deal effectively with community members as well as with Branch personnel. Before we examine what can be done, we need to look into what makes the people react politically as they do. It is my thesis that anomia is a factor which cannot be ignored. It arises out of anomie, then acts to sustain it. The persistence of anomia helps explain the persistence of anomie generation after generation. The effect anomia has on anomie implies that your political reform should begin, not simply with reorganization, but with some sort of effort to change the attitudes of participants in the political process.

ANOMIA The anomie person tends to think of things primarily in relation to himself. He does not usually act altruistically, nor does he expect altruism of others. In fact, he suspects those who act on his behalf unless he can find some way they stand to gain from it or he can otherwise explain their behavior. For the anomie person, the present is the main consideration — not the past, because it may not be a reliable guide, and not the future, because it is too uncertain. He feels powerless to control the conditions of his life and may therefore feel inadequate. Feelings of inadequacy can turn to rage against other people or things perceived to have some measure of control. One type of anomie person may give in to his sense of futility and lack of self-assurance by becoming apathetic and cautiously conservative. Another type may defy his sense of powerlessness by insisting on freedom to act impulsively; by doing so he tries to prove to himself that he is in control of his life after all. Most people who are anomie act one way at one time, then another way at another. All anomie people are characterized by a sense of futility and a fear of the unfamiliar. They are reluctant to break away from an accustomed way of living in order to try for new long-range goals. Given the circumstances in which these people live, theirs is not an unrealistic view of the world. As long as boundaries can be drawn around a set of institutions adequate to carry out day-to-day activities and to fulfill day-to-day needs, people can take refuge and avoid anomie conflict with the greater society. They can stay together as a group, working out their problems in relation to each other. This is what people on an Indian reserve have done for generations. There is another way a refuge can be established which runs contrary to

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the development of reserves as long established, socially and culturally integrated communities with predetermined membership. A refuge for the anomic can develop where institutional arrangements, attitudes, and practices remain relatively constant while membership in the group changes. This is what happens in migrant camps and labor crews and skid roads. People can move individually or as families from one place or group to another and immediately feel at home — that is, feel that they are in a familiar situation where they know just how to relate to others around them. A migrant camp may not have the same population two days running, but it nevertheless operates as a community. It is as isolated, or rather insulated, from the rest of society as the traditional Indian reserve. The increasing number of Indians who have left their own reserve and are no longer regular participants in the social and political life of their community need the more generalized type of refuge. They want the differences between Indian communities minimized and the common elements maximized in order to produce a sense of familiarity and commonality — a sense of "Indianness." Not all persons living in an anomic society are affected in the same way or to the same degree. Each lives under slightly different circumstances and each has had different experiences. Furthermore, not all have exactly the same personality structure. Anomic conditions can aggravate neuroses in those with psychological problems and can affect the form and direction that their neurotic behavior will take. This is not to say that every anomic person should see a psychiatrist. Insofar as his state of mind is caused by very real circumstances external to himself, a psychiatrist cannot be of much help. If the anomic person is to change his state of mind, he must be made aware of the inconsistencies of his value system and of the fact that it is possible to resolve them (Rokeach 1968:167-168). By becoming aware and taking control of himself in terms of his problems, the anomic person is, in fact, reorienting himself. As Merton (1938) first pointed out, he may not reach his goals by means considered legitimate by others in the society, but presumably this does not bother him as much as being torn by conflicting values. Perhaps the means are not available. As long as he is not uncertain about what he values and the validity of what he believes, he is not anomic, he is simply frustrated. The process of "curing" anomia is one in which changes in action and awareness are inseparably interlocked so that one precipitates and then is reinforced by the other. Self-awareness is the foundation of motivation but motivation must be translated into behavior. Conversely, the anomic person does not undergo a simple behavioral learning experience; it is a process of self-evaluation as well.

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It helps to have someone standing by to give encouragement and perhaps to show the way, but this is not essential. You well know a case in which success virtually took one of your members by surprise. The initial success caused him to try to take command of himself and to repeat the experience. He succeeded again. Step by step, each a little more ambitious than the last, over a period of years D.B. literally remodeled himself. His case shows clearly, as he himself perceived in later years, that it is necessary to experience a repetition of successes in order to reinforce self-confidence. If the change in a person's life is too radical there is a risk of incurring the kind of personal anomie that results from being thrown into a different position in society from that to which one is accustomed (Dürkheim 1951). Too much success can be as disorienting in its way as too little. What is also of vital significance in this case is that D.B. developed a clear image of the person he wished to become. He understood the role of the aboriginal headman and, with an anthropologist's precision, distinguished between acts in character with the role and acts which, out of their aboriginal context, created a caricature. He was able to adapt his behavior to deal with modern times and at the same time to manifest the idealized personality of the aboriginal "big man." He deliberately thought through his goals and the means he would use to obtain them. He did not perceive them all at once. Instead, it was for D.B. an ongoing process over a period of time that kept pace with his record of success. It took continuous courage for him to force himself into unfamiliar and uncomfortable situations. Slowly he evolved from the stereotypic, hard-drinking, drifting Indian into a spirit dancer and respected member of the contemporary potlatch system. He adapted aboriginal economic activities to the present day. He entered the summer commercial fishing industry and worked to obtain better boat after better boat on lease from the company, becoming more and more trustworthy in the eyes of the cannery managers. Ultimately, he became your chief. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened had D.B. lived more than nine months after his election. He applied the same analytic ability to the problems of the band that he had used to set his own goals and to chart his own course. D.B. urged the remodeling of you all, but he was impatient. You were beginning to balk when suddenly he died. Who would have won in the end? All I know is that when I came back to visit your community three months after his death you were still in a state of shock. There are signs that, like poverty, anomia is a less pervasive problem in the band than it has been in the past. For one thing, there is less conflict between Indian and White culture simply because so much of the one has

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given way to the other. Second, Indian ways that are carefully kept serve to establish identity and to preserve a sense of social integration and common interest. Third, individual Indians are more involved with the non-Indian world than ever before. This means they are more sophisticated about the ways of that world and less afraid of it. Sophistication varies widely. There are still many who, though living relatively well in terms of income and material goods, are not very sophisticated about White society. Therefore, they have a problem in making decisions requiring knowledge of the world beyond their present restricted one. For the unsophisticated, their world of relationships is more like that of their parents and grandparents than like that of more outgoing community members. A class split has begun to develop along lines of sophistication, and a gulf is developing between those who are purposeful and those who are still disoriented. How "hard core" the disoriented become depends on how bridgeable the gap may be. That, in turn, depends on how isolated and perceptibly "different" the anomic become within the band/community. Because of the nature of anomia, the "hard core" are not especially enterprising, and, therefore, are likely to be low achievers in a system that demands individual initiative and commitment. An isolated, residual, poorly coping group is not a desirable component of any society on practical or on humanitarian grounds. What creates problems is not simply a difference in world view or the fact that some Indians are venturing boldly beyond the limits of their own society. It is also that outside influence has become diffuse. The Indian Affairs Branch and the churches are no longer the dominant outside influences on the reserve. Non-Indians of various backgrounds and persuasions, plus Indians who are not band members, singly or in organized groups are becoming involved in the organization of the reserve community. When, as now, families are divided, with members moving off the reserve, one can expect a breakdown in community feeling and a lessening sense of protective isolation. The reserve is for many an emotional refuge, but it is no longer a social refuge even for the most conservative. The community can agree most of the time on what its problems are, but it is fragmented into opinion groups over the solutions to these problems. These opinion groups are based in large part on self-interest, but they are also much influenced by the knowledge their members have of practicable alternatives, of the way non-Indian society operates, of where to get certain types of information, of causes and consequences, of people, places, things, skills and techniques. These are the kinds of knowledge that make for sophistication and equip a person to avoid anomia.

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The different interest groups all want sufficient control of band affairs to be sure that their interests are served. There is fear and distrust of those who would lead the people off onto new and unfamiliar paths. At the same time, there is anger and frustration on the part of those who see new ways opening up and think other people are blind. No one wishes to place his fate entirely in the hands of someone else, and so there is a power struggle not only between family factions and rival officials, but also between those who would control band affairs and those who stand to be controlled. The demand is for rule by consensus, according to old customs, but there is great difficulty in reaching consensus. Special knowledge can be a source of power in any society insofar as it creates dependency on the part of others. In your society, knowledge has always been considered private property and linked with prestige. It is not easy to change this cultural pattern now and induce people to share their knowledge. Nevertheless, this must be done. The ordinary band members are not completely informed about the services now available to them and on how to manage these for themselves. Therefore, they continue to be dependent on the more sophisticated for guidance and favors. Anomia gives an emotional charge to this dependency relationship. Lack of selfconfidence in dealing with what is outside normal routine can create dependency on someone else for moral support even when one knows what should be done. In your band/community political power is basically a dependence relationship and leadership tends to be paternalistic. The Indian Affairs Branch was the ultimate source of well-being, the agent the ultimate paternalistic power. The chief and the administrators are now lesser versions of the same type, whether the roles are played accordingly or not. Dependency has been the basis for other types of leadership. Certain of you have developed friendly relationships with non-Indians deemed able to perform useful services or to have special influence. Modern reform leaders, as a rule, have no goods and services to dispense, but people are dependent on them, nevertheless, for information and guidance. Knowledge affects beliefs and attitudes. The band member who has not served recently as a chief or councillor or band administrator has a poor understanding of what the jobs now entail or of the problems these officials must solve. Beliefs and attitudes based on differential knowledge are not always shared between the band and the officials who represent them. Often "leaders" and "followers" work at cross-purposes. Band officials do not expect the people to be interested in many aspects of band business. In fact, band members resist being called upon to master the complexities of new issues and opportunities. They are used to

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being told by the agent or their chief and council what to do and how to do it. They usually wait to be sure what the consequences will be before making a move. Then they act to preserve a relationship on which they are dependent, even if this requires giving up something they would prefer. It is symptomatic of anomia that people are afraid that their actions will misfire and bring retaliation down upon their heads. Condemnation acts as a safety valve for pent-up frustrations as well as a means of pressuring people to act in some desired fashion. Therefore, it is important for accusers to be able to pinpoint responsibility for what goes wrong. This is a reason interference is avoided. People prefer to let others go ahead and do wrong without someone else's intervening and confusing the issue. Even in pre-contact times, people gained superiority by means of others' shaming themselves. The same purpose is served today for people with low self-esteem. The more one is set above others and the more one's actions can affect the lives of others, the more vulnerable one is to attack. If it would be too disruptive to blame someone within the family or the community, a scapegoat can usually be found. Blame is also focused on a scapegoat when the lines of responsibility are not clear and when the causes of something unacceptable are complex and confusing. The Indian Affairs Branch should be held responsible for what it has not done as well as for what it has done wrong, but some of the deep bitterness felt by Indians can be attributed to the projection of blame for general circumstances. Band officials are caught between the expectations of the Indian Affairs Branch and the resistance of their fellow band members. They are damned if they take direct action and damned if they do not. The method still used by some leaders to get around the problem is a kind of political sleight-of-hand. Decisions are made, but not openly and publicly where they can be argued with and blame can be attached. The initiator of a new action takes a roundabout route to assure that his name will not be attached to the proposal. Blocking other people's proposals can be done more openly, but a direct "no" delivered face-to-face is avoided if possible. In other words, the lines of responsibility are obscured in order to make it difficult to pinpoint blame. If some unpopular action cannot be avoided, someone else is found to do it and to become the scapegoat. No one has much power this way except to obstruct others. The band still has no clear sense of direction or purpose for its development. Anomia is reflected by the way people deal with problems in the community and with each other politically. Divergence over management of internal and external affairs poses problems for leaders and followers alike and discourages band members from exercising leadership.

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THE POLITICS O F LESSENING ANOMIE AND ΑΝΟΜΙΑ As we have seen, anomic people who withdraw together from a larger society into a world of their own may share a system of beliefs, attitudes, and values about their world and about the world they choose to avoid. To the extent that they do, they are not disoriented, and they can achieve organization. To the extent that their system of values, attitudes, and beliefs is inconsistent and unrealistic, they can be judged disoriented. The anomic person may work out a compromise that allows him to take some sort of action, but the choices he makes may not be based on a realistic view of the world and an understanding of the full range of possibilities for getting what he wants. Therefore, building a common system of attitudes, values, and beliefs is not enough to assure the reversal of anomia or anomie. The anomic person must learn about alternatives and relationships between means and ends so that he can judge the value of the means as well as the ends. This is a process of learning. When this learning takes place collectively, it must be described as a political process. It is in the political arena that collective awareness can develop, change can be introduced, and success can be achieved by the group as a whole. The staff you have now to administer a variety of projects in the community can also be used for more general purposes of information transmittal and discussion. However, care should be taken that staff do not interfere with emergent leadership. This means opening up opportunities for training and initiating activities and organizations not necessarily sanctioned by band officialdom. A pyramidal structure for administration may be necessary in dealing with the world external to the Indian society, but this was not the aboriginal model. As D.B. considered how to adapt the model of the old "headman" to modern times, you might consider how to adapt the old organizational model to meet some of your present needs. The old was flexible and fluid and allowed ability and wisdom to emerge. Followers joined those with the best record of success. Leadership was proven before full support was given. To a certain extent, leaders were continually on trial. They were first among equals, not "chiefs" whose authority was derived from the office they held (see Miller 1955). You have recently used this model for several sports-related enterprises. It is adaptable for other types of tasks and for the development of broad community interrelationships. In order to adapt the model, an intimate knowledge of all those involved in the enterprise is needed; the model cannot be made to operate effectively in an impersonal setting. Nevertheless, formalized

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procedures and structural arrangements are also needed to give the sense of order and stability necessary to counteract anomia. Beyond the band/ community level the model is workable only if formalized procedures for positioning and setting up working relationships are devised. The traditional potlatch system was dedicated to the cultivation and maintenance of interstatus relationships in an ordered society. People moved about within the structure and manipulated it to serve their individual and family interests. At the same time, they were incorporated into the workings of their society as a whole. Even today, the remnant potlatch system is potent. As a network of people held together by shared values and repeated transactions, it is a force for conservatism. Those who participate have prestige in the eyes of many band members. For this reason especially, the new pan-Indian organizations must come to terms with the old system and its participants. The new organizations are dedicated to fight for Indians' rights. It is vital to gain the support of all Indians possibly affected by the outcome of the struggle. This means recruiting and organizing Indians of different cultural and experiential backgrounds. Pan-Indian political organizations tend to emphasize the commonality of all Indians, not only smoothing out certain cultural details, but also providing a system of contacts, jobs, attitudes, and rewards which can be dealt with separately from those of the individual's own reserve. It can be tempting to split one's commitment, alternating between one's own community and the heterogeneous, non-community-based organization. Then one need not burn any emotional bridges and one can turn from one group to the other for reaffirmation when cause and self are under attack. There is a need to coordinate the two kinds of power structures so that they do not work at cross-purposes. There is also a need to broaden the network of working relationships in any interband political organization. To date, the history of each Indian rights organization shows a progressive reduction in the number and strength of such relationships. This is because there are no formal means of extending relatively far-flung, occasional relationships and maintaining them in functioning order. Face-to-face relationships are relied upon. The result is reduction of effective organization to a clique. Some adaptation or substitute for the potlatch system must be devised in order to form an Indian society. Survival as Indians depends on putting together more than a common but incomplete culture for a segment of the Canadian population. Ethnicity in the name of "culture" is meaningless without a structured social organization — without a functioning "society." What is only now beginning to be perceived is the political potential the

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Indian Affairs Branch offers to bands — a direct line to Parliament, a structural arrangement for an organized minority group with special interests in a pluralistic society, Whether the system operates with the colonial attitude of condescension or whether it becomes a means of linking two autonomous sectors of Canadian society depends largely on how well-organized the Indians of Canada become and how thoroughly their organization incorporates the members of each band. Grass-roots participation and support depend in large part on finding ways to forge a sense of community. In order to become a political force in Canadian politics, Indians must organize to act under certain conditions as a single political bloc. A rallying point is needed for mobilizing a scattered people who lack a common purpose, whether they are anomic or not. Projecting blame outside the group and generating hatred and bitterness toward a target that is generally accepted as having done wrong may be the only way to mobilize individuals on a national scale, where people and their personal interests are far apart, but this approach carries with it hazards of which I am sure you are all aware. Hatred breeds an obsession to destroy the hated object. The people may all become oriented toward the same overriding goal, but their view of the world is distorted by bitterness. They are not truly free to determine their own destiny because they always have to turn back to give the whipping boy one more lash. They cannot cut free of the past to move on. Self-determination is impossible because the self is still seen only as a reflection in the eye of the adversary. The reflected image may change, but it is nevertheless a reflection from the same mirror. An additional danger is that for the average person there will be no reform, only a change of masters. If no attention is paid to helping the ordinary man to handle his own life so that he can make decisions confidently and realistically, he will be no better off than before. True, people can be unified to work toward a single goal. In doing this, they build a common organization of beliefs, attitudes, and values, but these are all organized in relation to a handful of issues. The issues are like the stones in an arch: remove one and the whole structure collapses, unless another is quickly found to put in its place. You say you want self-determination, but when you cry out to be allowed to make your own mistakes, are you asking for the right to plan and experiment, or are you really saying "don't touch me; don't tell me; leave me alone"? "Self-determination" can become a battle cry whether or not the people have the organization and planning needed to reach the goals they may set. A coherent, future-oriented plan is difficult for anomic people to accept and almost impossible for them to anticipate.

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Therefore, self-determination may mean only a demand for immediate gratification of immediate desires. As a group goal it is simply the collective equivalent of the anomic individual's choice of impulsive freedom over circumscribed routine. In short, none of the basic problems of anomia are corrected; only their outward appearances are changed. Agreement on a goal is not enough to lessen anomia among a people if the means of achieving that goal are not clearly understood. Awareness of problems and even of their solutions are not enough either. To alleviate anomia and set about the business of reversing anomie, several things must be done. It is necessary to expand knowledge and to change the behavior of the people toward their leaders — and vice versa. In order to do this, new sources of information as well as new knowledge must be accepted, not only by the leaders, but by all. Furthermore, experience in the process of making decisions for the community must be broadened, for it is through this kind of political process that the members of the community will develop a new collective image and become able to reorder their lives in accord with the function of the whole. Reversing anomie ultimately depends on the people's motivation and on the success their efforts bring. Motivation and success are inseparable. A dream or a coincidence can start the process of change, but success must occur to reinforce learning. Ridding a people of anomia is a learning process. Learning can come out of one's own experience or be gained through the acceptance of what one is told by another. The anomic society is in special need of fresh ideas, yet anomic people grant authoritativeness grudgingly to those among them who propound new notions and new ways. Therefore, non-members of the band/community can be useful to supply information, to introduce suggestions, and to launch new activities. The role of the outsider as catalyst, supporter, and guide can be played by a member of the Branch staff, by a consultant hired by the band or by the government, by a member of an Indian rights organization, or simply by a friend with time and skills to offer. The role of community developer is best played by someone who is thought trustworthy and knowledgeable rather than by someone who can pull strings or hand out benefits. Someone interested in promoting community development must be a leader in the sense of showing the way and breaking a path. Sol Tax (1958:18) explained the ideal approach to a people who are anomic. He said: All we want in our action programs is to provide, if we can, genuine alternatives from which the people involved can freely choose — and to be ourselves as little restrictive as is humanly possible. It follows, however, that we must try to remove restrictions imposed by others on the alternatives open to Indians and on their

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freedom to choose among them. We avoid imposing our values upon the Indians, but we do not mean to leave a vacuum for other outsiders to fill. Our program is positive, not negative; it is a program of action, not inaction; but it is also a program of probing, listening, learning, giving in.

Less a developer, more an advisor, the White-friend-to-the-Indians traditionally acts as a sounding board and go-between — explaining, contacting, phrasing, approving, and defending on the basis of a real or assumed understanding of both cultures. There has always been ambivalence about this role and many now reject it entirely. Even though it was born of the old dependency, a contemporary adaptation could be useful to gain expertise. Until recently the band has had no money to pay for professional advice, and Branch specialists seldom have come to the reserve. When consultant sessions occurred, they were usually short and problem oriented. Afterward, the Branch personnel disappeared again into the bureaucratic woodwork. The problems of getting technical advice and other expertise to the band remain. One problem is supply. To fill the need, the Branch is giving bands the money to hire their own special advisors. This helps to ease the distrust felt by band members toward advice proffered by Branch personnel. It also keeps the supply of specialists more clearly in line with demand for their services. Demand for specialists is the second problem. The bands must learn to determine what information and skills they need and where to get them. Traditionally, helping band members to see their needs and develop working relationships with consultants has been the role of the agent. Now the band staff are expected by the government to fulfill the role. Neither Branch nor band personnel have played the role well because they have, as a rule, not been very sophisticated about political and professional developments. It cannot be assumed that someone like your friend M.C. will always be available; therefore, if you see the need, you should institutionalize a new role of professional band advisor and hire a consultant to meet with you regularly. Another solution is to develop a study and planning program through an Indian rights organization or an organization of bands in the area. The third problem is that band members really do not know how to deal impersonally with leadership; and a consultant, no matter how briefly employed, is a leader. It is his job to show the way in solving some particular problem. The effective consultant is something of a salesman. The trouble is that a sales technique that is effective in other cultural settings may not be effective on an Indian reserve. A non-Indian consul-

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tant must be willing as well as able to learn how to deal effectively with his Indian clients. What evidently is needed is not so much a person of long and intimate acquaintance as someone who has the patience to work with you in an involved process of decision making. Committees can be an effective contact point between the band and the outside expert. Here the ordinary band member can learn that the consultant is a person and can satisfy himself through direct questioning. No matter who introduces new information or how it is introduced, it must be circulated and discussed if knowledge and experience are to be broadened within the band. Band meetings are an obvious place to exchange information. They are not effective if attendance is poor and if people who do attend are ill-prepared to deal with the matters at hand. A news sheet is one obvious way to give people vital background material for discussion and to publicize the meeting agenda. You have used this means and have found that often the news goes unread. D.B. used to go from house to house talking with people, telling them what was going to happen, inviting them to come to the next meeting, calling on them again if they did not attend, and reporting any new developments that they should know. This was effective, especially when he found people with problems with which he could help. It is difficult for some people to speak out publicly on an issue because they are shy or because they are uncomfortable before a relative who is an accustomed spokesman. Most people will not come to the band office or the chief's house to chat about band affairs, but they will talk freely in their own homes. It is possible to visit every household on the reserve in a matter of a few days. Someone who could adjust his work schedule accordingly could easily do it once a month. The question is, who? Politically speaking, it should be the chief. In terms of available time, it may have to be a band employee. To be effective, it must be someone with genuine concern for community development and for the concerns of every community member as an individual. One of the best ways to develop an informed public and to train prospective leaders is through committee work. Committees that are small, undifferentiated, and organized around the performance of specific tasks tend to pressure all members into activity. In the early 1960's, the Indian Affairs Branch began to urge all bands to organize committees. Welfare, health, and education committees were appointed by the band council to initiate a variety of projects and to improve conditions on the reserve. These committees worked best when they were not headed by paid or elected officials. This made them freer to use initiative and imagination without worry over reputation or reelec-

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tion. Even when a paid or elected official heads a committee and directs its operation, members can gain organizational experience, although such an arrangement runs contrary to accepted patterns of organization among you, and makes it more difficult to stimulate open discussion and general involvement. Perhaps the greatest value of the earlier committees lay in their being able to stir up controversy and disrupt old routines, but some of the early committees, or rather some of their members, became a political liability because part of their suggested duties involved "meddling" in the home situations of their neighbors. This is the hazard for activist band members whether they are hired or not. In response to the development of band committees, an Indian rights group experimented in supraband political organization by forming committees with volunteer representatives from each band in a federation of local bands. The purpose of the committees was to facilitate communication between bands on matters calling for their joint action. The idea was that they would not only serve as a clearinghouse for information for Indians and non-Indians, but also act as a spur to chiefs and councils to take action where action was needed. They were to apply pressure from outside the band/community while avoiding some of the resistance to interference evoked by "outsiders," especially Whites. The scheme did not work well because band representatives had inadequate communication within the poorly organized bands. A slight modification of the scheme might prove more effective. If an umbrella committee composed of representatives from council-appointed committees of a certain type from each of the member bands were formed, the participants would be plugged into an organization in their own band capable of reaching all band members for an exchange of information. By making all members of a band committee members of the umbrella committee, involvement, trust, and discussion would be further spread within each community. Some of the unproductive games now played between leaders and followers might be avoided. In the early 1960's, at the same time that the Branch began to urge the formation of committees, it instituted a program of bringing together Indian leaders and Branch personnel to discuss their mutual problems. In effect, the conferences brought together the experts on problems and the experts on solutions. Formal leadership training sessions were held, and in the informal discussions that ensued the Indians behaved as equals toward the Branch staff members who, in turn, took seriously the examples and suggestions offered. In that era this was an unusual experience. The weekend conferences were held in relatively glamorous settings which, by comparison with the drab surroundings of the reserve, heightened the sense of breakthrough. Many Indians experienced for the

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first time a new self-image and sense of self-importance. Individuals who would never have ventured out alone were given initial confidence by the fact that they were a group who shared the new excitement and bolstered each other in the face of strange people, strange surroundings, and strange customs. The Branch, I think, wrongly assessed the impact of these conferences. Attendance was irregular. Some Indians pocketed their per diem and headed home before the weekend began. Others skipped certain sessions. Nevertheless, those who did participate learned and carried some of that learning back to their reserve. The sessions were particularly helpful when Indian participants included official and non-official members of several bands with similar problems and agency ties, and when the Branch participants included not only regional staff but agency administrators as well. The sessions served to establish long-lasting working relationships between some Indians and some administrators. The conferences at this level lasted only a short time. They were succeeded by larger, prolonged, sensitivity-type sessions held at a special center in Ontario. Indians whom Branch staff recommended as having leadership potential were brought together from all over Canada for several weeks of intensive training. Local superintendents chose well. Most of the participants did indeed have leadership potential. The direct and almost immediate result of these training sessions was a wellorganized Indian rights movement that sprang up across Canada. Since that time the beleaguered Indian Affairs Branch has abandoned the local conferences. I hope that the Branch will resume them. They can be used to reach all band members. The conference offers a way to link band committees both on and off the reserve into larger networks. It also offers a chance for the "new" Indians who have been pruned of their social roots to talk out their differences and reach some understanding with members of the interband society that predates the new political organizations. There is some feeling among you that the potlatch system is an anachronism and that it is acceptable to practice a streamlined version — one that does not place so much emphasis on who gives what to whom. Some of you have tried to stay out of the system entirely. For this you have incurred much disapproval from those in other bands. It is thought by them that your breaks with tradition are the cause of your being unable to unite and plan and attain your goals as a community. Perhaps there is some truth in this analysis. If there is it points to the basis for political authority within the band. E.W. showed extraordinary ability and accomplished many things during the 1940's and 1950's. Regionally, he was an acknowledged

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leader in Indian affairs; locally, he was ahead of his time. He did not participate regularly in the areal interband society and could not derive sanctions from it when the band was uncooperative. B.S. had no program for band development but he was considered "strong" in the aboriginal sense and therefore was elected whenever the band was troubled by mounting pressures for change. After you elected D.B. you suddenly realized how strong his relationships were with Indians from other reserves in the area. Had he lived, those relationships probably would have sustained him as a person; they also might have sustained him politically because they were based on values you still espouse. You would have found it difficult to repudiate him publicly as a leader. No one can gain the prestige necessary to sanction authority unless the qualities he shows are valued. You must establish such values. Simply as good business practice you should decide upon a written job description for each official and staff position in your band. That is not as easy as it sounds. You should first describe in detail each elective and administrative job in the band and compare these for overlapping responsibilities as well as for gaps where no responsibility has been assigned. When you know what duties each job entails, you can then decide what qualifications a person should have to perform them. To do a job right, a person might need to be skilled or to have a special reputation. If no one is available who meets the requirements, you should encourage people with potential to work toward attaining the needed training and experience. Meanwhile, you can learn to work with consultants to get what you need done. They will by example help you establish some standards of performance. Leadership is a quality which does not come automatically with holding office, but it can be nurtured through practice — in or out of office. By expanding the opportunities to exercise leadership you may find that you have increased the number of people willing and able to play leadership roles. Followers need much the same training as leaders. For one thing, they may some day be leaders. For another, they need to understand and evaluate the work of their elected officials and band employees. It is commonly thought that the responsibility for making certain kinds of decisions on behalf of the group must be delegated. The argument runs that if a representative of the band is not given the authority to make at least limited commitments on behalf of the band without a referendum, the operation of affairs in relation to non-Indian organizations will be impossibly unwieldy. But, as we have seen, band members are troubled about delegating the right to make commitments for the band. If a person is to act accountably as an authorized representative of his group, then a certain amount of unanimity among those being represented is required.

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When there is none, a power struggle results. The only way to bring about a consensus is through discussion and an honest look at fears and problems. The federation of local bands formed in the mid-1960's serves as a model for an organization that can develop consensus leading to decisive action. The leaders did not consider themselves as delegates of their bands. Present band officials should note that they acted as staff workers planning, coordinating, and implementing certain projects. They constantly referred — or tried to refer — to the people on the reserves for discussion and for a referendum vote on proposed actions. Federation leaders did not act on behalf of the bands without getting a consensus of the band members. They did act as spokesmen to the Indian Affairs Branch, to the press, and to other Indian and non-Indian groups, but they tried to make clear when they were speaking as representatives and when they were speaking for themselves. This federation gave way to another interband organization organized around band chiefs. It is a modern adaptation of the aboriginal political structure, but it has shown stress comparable to that sometimes occurring between elected officials and paid staff within the band. Without the potlatch and a commonly accepted set of criteria for granting authority, it is hard for an organization of chiefs to win popular support and to marshal concerted action. Now still another interband alliance has been formed to attempt political unity in your immediate area. The earlier federation of bands probably held the greatest potential for developing a genuine grass-roots movement. It served as a study group on new proposals and Indian Affairs Branch programs. People from many different bands came to meetings to express their own opinions and hear a variety of opinions from others. Meetings were supposed to be open to anyone who wished to come, but not all knew this — or chose to acknowledge it. The apathetic and suspicious stayed away and complained, just as they stay away from band meetings and then complain. Nevertheless, the approach made progress in producing interband unity on certain issues and in gaining adherents. The enthusiasm of the workers was contagious. Their camaraderie was attractive. The group was almost exclusively Indian. Among the member bands anyone could become involved — everyone was invited. Most important, the people active in their own band were joined by activists from other bands. The outsiders were a stimulant. They so frequently visited the various reserves that they very nearly assumed the full role of community developers. The drawback to this type of organization was the time and energy it took from the leaders. Even the most dedicated found the pace too much to sustain over a long period of time. They were traveling for long

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distances from reserve to reserve holding meetings at each place several times a month. It was especially tiring if they had other duties to perform. The difficulties were further compounded if their jobs entailed shift work at odd hours as many logging, milling, longshoring, and other industrial jobs do. If band governments were to model political communications along the lines of this organization, band officials would at least be spared long distances of travel, and they would have a paid staff to do much of the time-consuming preparations. Time can be a problem if discussion becomes too involved or a quick decision is required to handle a particular matter, but it is well worth taking the time to try to find unity of purpose and mutual understanding. The more you work together, the more you will develop informed procedures to facilitate decision making. Feelings of inequality can keep people from participating in the decision-making process. Jane Mansbridge (1973:367) says that: . . . even in the long run, inequalities in expertise, attractiveness, verbal facility, length of time spent in the organization, access to information, interest, and effort are not likely to disappear. Worse, all the trump cards will often be held by the same people in a group. That is, those who have a lot of experience in the organization will often be those with networks of friends in the organization, who informally bring them important information. They will be more interested, will have acquired irreplaceable knowledge and skill, will thus be self-confident, likely to speak in meetings, and fun to be around. All these qualities will not always be found in a single person, but they do tend to come together, as do loneliness, shyness, isolation, and inexperience in a new member. Because of this cumulative tendency, inequalities become even harder to handle. But most groups that have built up some mutual trust, understanding, and care can do it.

Mansbridge (p. 358) points out that "face-to-face relations are much more rewarding than impersonal relations but they are also more emotionally threatening." Left unchecked, pressures increase to make decisions on the basis of feelings rather than on grounds of "rational" criteria. Mansbridge also points out that personality and life-style factors are important. The person who is admirable may win over someone who has a better proposal but who personally is unattractive to the group. "Because it more frequently involves the emotions, participatory, face-to-face decision making will be particularly hard on those who have trouble facing and handling emotional issues" (p. 359). Many of you have such trouble, and that, I am sure, influences attendance at meetings. Many of you have dropped leadership roles rather than take punishment in the beer parlors. Somehow, you must devise some way other than withdrawal for handling personal confrontations. It is clear that a revitalization of some sort was beginning to take place

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during the mid-1960's. It seemed spontaneous, but only because there was no single leader or grand cause to point to as the instigator. A combination of factors was involved, among them (1) the new committee system; (2) the regional weekend conferences between Branch personnel and band members, many of whom held no official position within their band; (3) the dedicated efforts of the regional Indian rights federation, which gave some of you vital outlets for your abilities, also providing many moments of success; and, finally, (4) some of the less controversial results of collaboration between the chief andcouncil and a White friend, M.C., who acted as their advisor and resource broker. Secondary factors were (1) your experience of successful organization through canoe racing and the social and athletic club in the late 1950's; (2) the self-esteem that acceptance by non-Indians gave you; (3) the increased clarity of your Indian identity; (4) the high expectations for your performance held by D.B. and E.W., who were chiefs in the recent past; and (5) the air of purposefulness shown by D.W. and his council in office during the period of revitalization. There were many other causal factors, including an expanding job market and rising incomes. By 1965 it was evident that a peculiar combination of circumstances had produced a yeasty effect. While the revitalization had no discernible beginning, the end was evident in a change of leadership style as well as in the leaders themselves. In part this was a reaction. Significantly, no counterreaction followed. M.C. left town. No real successor in the role of activist advisor developed. It was difficult for band leaders to find a way of doing the aggressive problem solving that had taken place, except through one of the succeeding Indian rights organizations. Meanwhile, the people who had been learning leadership at the Branch-sponsored conferences, through committee work, and by participating in the grass-roots Indian rights organization found themselves cut off from those opportunities before they could quite consolidate their ideas and accept their new self-confidence. The development of new leaders was stunted until the new bureaucracy was trained and a shift in the demographic balance took place, producing a fresh young political majority. What can start another revitalization? A chance combination of stimuli could happen again. There is certainly the possibility that a leader may emerge who will guide you to a new future. There is also the possibility that necessity will drive you to take charge of yourselves and set about finding new cohesion and more satisfying ways of managing your affairs. In the foreseeable future there is one pressure which may precipitate another revitalization. Your reserve lands are in demand for development by the non-Indian community. The lure of land leasing is increased by the fact that individual landowners on the reserve want to get all they

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can for any development that takes place on their property. They are not eager to pool the returns for overall development of the reserve or for starting a cooperative enterprise unless they stand to make immediate gains. Decisions about land development will be difficult enough to make without factional disputes. Knowledge of alternatives is essential. Will you actively seek such knowledge? Will you come together to work out plans to minimize the ill effects and maximize the benefits for all the various members of the band? If not, you may end up an "ethnic group" without economic assets or even land to live on. Perhaps another issue will arise that will signal an effort to reestablish the ties of interdependence that once existed in the Indian community. The poverty that once held you together and gave your community cohesion is now diminishing, but to a significant extent the anomie remains. If you are to survive as a community, you must address yourselves to the problems of anomie.

CONCLUSIONS Evidently it is not enough to establish a system of common beliefs, practices, and values geared primarily to concerns stemming from the world beyond the community. Nor is agreement on a goal enough to lessen anomia among a people if means of achieving that goal are not clearly understood. The adoption of the most suitable organizational design is not in and of itself sufficient to bring order to those living under conditions of anomie. Why? Because vital customs, realistic attitudes and beliefs, step-by-step goals and objectives, orderly structures, and smoothly operating organizations are all end products in the process of reducing anomie and anomia. It is further evident that the reduction of anomia is essential to the reduction of anomie. Anomia is the effect of anomie on the individual; but your history indicates that anomia, once established, can persist even when the conditions that produced it are altered and opportunities for reorganization exist. In other words, once anomia develops in the individual members of a group, simply changing the conditions under which they live will not automatically solve their problems. Disorientation will persist, though a figurative compass be pressed into the hands of those involved. People who are anomie will operate the most perfectly tuned organizational machinery in such a way as to cause it to buck and jam. Clearly, to reduce anomie, the people who are anomie must be enabled to reorient themselves and to work out the development of an organization in which they can operate comfortably and effectively.

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Where the social context is too large or the turnover of personal contacts is too great to allow intimate knowledge of individual behavior patterns, people in an anomic state of society tend to depersonalize relationships and deal with persons as stereotypes. Whenever possible, they tend to cleave to groups small enough to permit a great deal of face-to-face contact and, therefore, of personal knowledge about the group members' behavior. To reach the imagination of the anomic individual and give him the support necessary to make changes in his thinking and in his way of living, you must approach him on a person-to-person basis. The more depersonalized an individual's relationships have become, the harder it is to reach him with proposals or requirements for change. Fortunately, you still have a community that all band members can call home and in which many of you still live. It is as a community of individual people that you should approach the task of reducing anomia and hence anomie. The route to the reduction of group anomia runs parallel to that for the reduction of anomie in the group's living conditions. The starting point is face-to-face relationships, which can be developed into working relationships by giving people opportunities to work together to accomplish something specific and immediate. Simply by fostering this development, you can enable people to experience social organization even before their society is set in order. I believe that this experience must take place before the anomic can operate effectively in any organization. Working together entails discussion with the consequent sharing of knowledge, experiences, and points of view. This sharing gives the individual new ideas and new capabilities. At the same time it can lead to the development of procedures for transmitting information and for reaching decisions. Carried further, it leads to the formation of a sense of community. Social outsiders should not be excluded from the process, because they have knowledge and a variety of viewpoints to offer. Fresh ideas and new possibilities are needed to stimulate the development of processes for transmitting information and arriving at decisions. The presence of outsiders is not necessarily detrimental to the development of a strong sense of community. Outsiders who are too forceful or too numerous may pose a threat to those affected by anomia, but the information outsiders bring is needed and so is the experience of working with them. In the differentiation of "insiders" from "outsiders," the limits of the community are defined. Through continuous and varying two-way interactive processes that cross these boundaries, the community is placed in context and given character. Discussion is essential for the analysis of problems and the search for solutions which all involved can agree upon. In turn, such agreement is

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essential to the reordering not only of people's values and priorities but also of their institutions and other types of organization. Wallace (1962) used a graphic term which applies here: a new "mazeway" must be formed in order for revitalization to take place. Finally, a new self-image must be adopted by the individual members of the anomic group and the group as a whole must routinize new structures and procedures. Learning must be reinforced. The repetition of success is essential to the assimilation of change in both the individual and the community. The remaining questions to be answered are who will lead and how. Wallace (1962) outlined a process of revitalization which can be interpreted here as one for the reduction of anomie and anomia. He discussed the process in terms of a prophet and disciples. As your history shows, a dominant leader is not necessary to the process. With courage and determination, a few can capitalize on opportunities and goad the public into developing its own revitalization. You should not worry about demagoguery as long as no one person or clique makes decisions on behalf of the people at large. Whether one or several leaders develop among you, both leaders and followers must work together in studying alternatives and making decisions about your band affairs and the future of your community.

NOTES 1. According to prior agreement with the band chief and council, the specific community where I have lived at intervals for a generation has not been identified.

REFERENCES CITED The poor pay more. Glencoe: Free Press. Editor. 1 9 6 4 . Anomie and deviant behavior. New York:

CAPLOVITZ, D A V I D . 1 9 6 3 . CLINARD, MARSHALL B .

Free Press. Suicide. Glencoe: Free Press. La vida. New York: Random House. MACIVER, ROBERT M . 1 9 5 0 . The ramparts we guard. New York: Macmillan. MANSBRIDGE, JANE J . 1 9 7 3 . Time, emotion, and inequality: Three problems of participatory groups. Journal of Applied Behavior 9 : 3 5 1 - 3 6 8 . MERTON, ROBERT K . 1 9 3 8 . Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review 3 : 6 7 2 - 6 8 2 . MILLER, WALTER B . 1 9 5 5 . Two concepts of authority. American Anthropologist DÜRKHEIM, EMILE. 1 9 5 1 . LEWIS, OSCAR. 1 9 6 6 .

57:271-289. RIESMAN, D A V I D , N A T H A N GLAZER,

New York: Doubleday.

and R E U E L

DENNEY.

1956. The lonely crowd.

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Beließ, attitudes, and values: A theory of organization and change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. SROLE, L E O . 1 9 5 6 . Social integration and certain corollaries: An exploratory study. American Sociological Review 2 5 : 7 0 9 - 7 1 6 . TAX, SOL. 1 9 5 8 . The Fox project. Human Organization 1 7 : 1 7 - 1 9 . TOFFLER, ALVIN. 1970. Future shock. New York: Bantam Books. VALENTINE, CHARLES A. 1968. Culture and poverty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. WALLACE, ANTHONY F. C. 1962. Culture and personality. New York: Random House. ROKEACH, MILTON. 1 9 6 8 .

LEONARD D. BORMAN

Action Anthropology and the Self-Help/Mutual-Aid Movement

INTRODUCTION: THE SELF-HELP/MUTUAL-AID MOVEMENT A recent review of the literature on self-help/mutual-aid organizations indicates that, in spite of the unfashionable nature of such studies, a body of material has been accumulating (Killilia 1976). One current collection of papers designed to encourage collaboration between self-help groups and social science (Lieberman and Borman 1976) concentrates on theoretical, empirical, and policy issues involved in the developing selfhelp/mutual-aid movement. The focus of this collection is mainly on ad hoc groups formed to provide special advice as well as psychological and social support to their members. These include groups organized around common addictions, chronic illnesses, or disabilities, groups faced with major life-cycle changes, and groups socially stigmatized or traumatized by social, cultural, or natural events. The ad hoc groups may be distinguished, as Tax (1976:448) suggests, from traditional groups such as families, hunting parties, religious congregations, etc., which are probably the original self-help groups. Any such focus must make explicit issues of criteria for identification and classification. What are the differences between groups formed around a common affliction, such as alcoholism, or a common experience, such as being an ex-offender? How do these compare with groups formed around common family, kinship, neighborhood, ethnic, or tribal background? How shall we compare these groups with "consciousnessraising groups," such as those formed by women and the elderly; with consumer groups, such as food clubs and cooperatives; or, indeed, with labor unions? Can even broader cross-cultural comparisons be made with Russian, Chinese, and Israeli collectives or the village cooperatives of Pakistan? All have been identified, among others, in the growing literature referred to.

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Classification and comparison should lead, naturally, to detailed examination of the formation processes — the characteristics of different kinds of groups and the ways in which people become members. Identifying their similarities and differences in history, social structure, culture, leadership, ideology, recruitment patterns, size, articulation with outsiders, longevity, etc., is a major research undertaking that is beginning to draw considerable attention. Another important series of issues in the study of self-help/mutual-aid groups concerns their various courses of emergence. These groups (especially in the United States) appear to be widespread, include a great spectrum of conditions, are growing in number, and, from most indications, seem to meet important needs of their members (Back and Taylor 1976, Levy 1976, Tracy and Gussow 1976, Tyler 1976, Durman 1976). Three kinds of explanations for them have been put forth. One suggests that they form to fill gaps in the services provided by professionals, bureaucracies, or nation-states. Such established sources of support are seen as technically deficient — lacking in knowledge and skill — especially in their human-service delivery systems. Alcoholics, gamblers, drug addicts, child abusers, even widows and the chronically ill seem to fall between the cracks. Accordingly, this explanation sees self-help groups as forming, when they do, around those who face similar afflictions or conditions and turn to each other for help. A second explanation sees groups as forming because of barriers to established forms of help. Expertise may exist, but it is effectively denied those who might benefit. Such barriers as lack of money (or insurance coverage), geography, red tape, waiting time, limited resources, etc., make help inaccessible and precipitate the formation of groups among people who feel excluded and alienated. A third explanation looks less to the deficiency or inaccessibility of olltside services and organizations and more to the needs of individuals to be helped, strengthened, and supported in community-type groups. Many self-help/mutual-aid groups resemble traditional family and kinship organizations. Networks are formed, members are accessible, groups are named and seem to endure, and help is provided reciprocally on the basis of affection and mutual obligation rather than fees for services or any professional skills or expertise. Since the basic mode of human organization for all of mankind, through most of our history, has been the small kin group, why should it not persist in new forms? The issues raised by self-help/mutual-aid groups are of considerable interest to social scientists as well as human-service professionals. Moreover, clearer awareness of these phenomena is of even greater concern to the large and diverse segments of society that may benefit

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from participation in such groups. Our recent review of the relationship between social research and self-help groups, which points to the technical and conceptual problems in assessing the benefits of such groups, calls for new efforts at collaboration between professional practitioners, selfhelp groups, and researchers, including action anthropologists. As we asserted in that review (Lieberman and Borman 1976:460-463): In contrast to the relative precision characteristic of the best outcome research in psychotherapy, it seems clear that research on the effectiveness of self-help groups will require the involvement of the researcher in a much broader context. . . . General assessment strategies rather than semi-experimental models are probably more appropriate. In the real world, individuals who utilize self-help groups are likely to be involved in other help-providing systems. Meaningful assessments will require that the researcher be aware of this reality and examine the various contributions to the well-being of the individual in light of this. Accordingly, research on the effectiveness of self-help groups may have more intellectual affinity with investigations concerned with analysis of helping systems at the societal level than with psychotherapy research. Another dilemma facing the researcher interested in assessment is that the usual "pre-post" design is not applicable for many self-help groups. Individuals enter self-help groups subsequent to some crisis — particularly those self-help systems that are organized around common medical afflictions. . . . Adequate assessments, particularly from a social policy perspective, of the effectiveness of self-help groups require comparative analysis of individuals with the same conditions — alcoholism, drug abuse, or a particular transition state or ailment — who are exposed to different helping strategies. In the hurly-burly real world of which self-help groups are a part, traditional research models employing control groups or contrasting "treatment conditions" are difficult, if not impossible, to apply. . . . . . . The difficulty of access to self-help groups is another impediment to quality evaluative research. Unlike the psychotherapy researcher, who frequently owns the turf he is studying or has helped to create the setting to be studied, neither is usually true for the investigator of self-help groups. With a few exceptions, self-help groups owe little to the professional. . . . At times, their ideology actively precludes such individuals from entering their systems; for some, their anonymous nature is a major stumbling block to meaningful research. . . . As social scientists, we have too frequently been naive about the potentials for collaboration, and it seems that few have really explored the possibilities of collaborative inquiry. We believe that models of meaningful collaboration can be developed and executed, but that they will involve the researcher in activities that do not entirely fit with an archetypal view of what research is and how one conducts it. The kind of research findings that emerge and the way in which they are learned, we believe, will be the product of a genuine partnership between the researcher and members of the self-help group. Realistic collaborative arrangements that involve important pay offs to the groups, as well as to science, are essential. . . . . . . We see the need for special involvement of skilled and sympathetic professionals . . . the work of pioneers such as Silverman, Mowrer, and others deserves close attention as exemplifying important models of research and collaboration to be emulated by others. The efforts that were spearheaded by Sol Tax in "action

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anthropology" may also be mentioned here. Such "helping-learning" models of social research may spawn the needed technical and conceptual apparatus currently lacking for evaluation of self-help groups [and] . . . may, at the same time, provide mutual access of professionals [to the self-help groups] and vice versa. The experience of action anthropologists may prove especially instructive since this has occurred with non-middle class populations, apparently not well represented in current studies of the self-help movement. An examination of their activities may allow us to follow Durman's lead in suggesting the support of sympathetic professionals who will encourage organizations among currently neglected populations.

With this introduction, I will now discuss some of my experiences as an action anthropologist with three populations that are like ad hoc self-help groups in many ways. I will first describe some of my interests, roles, and values and characterize the conditions and auspices under which I was able to operate. Then I will try to describe some of the common features of these three populations, and self-help groups like them, and suggest some explanations for the emergence of these features. By presenting my experiences in this way, especially noting some similarities in the modes of organization of these groups with self-help groups, perhaps I can help encourage anthropologists (and other social scientists), action-oriented and otherwise, to consider their own findings, theories, and methods in the light of developing scholarly and practical interest in the selfhelp/mutual-aid movement. Increased and meaningful collaboration might result across disciplines, as well as with diverse populations.

ACTION ANTHROPOLOGY: INTERESTS, ROLES, VALUES Since 1951, when I participated in an eight-week work camp sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee with the Penobscot Indians of Maine, I have maintained a more or less continuous relationship with members of Indian tribes throughout the country, and especially with Indians who have come to Chicago. Over the years, my roles and relationships with Indians have ranged from membership on the Board of Directors and Grand Council of the Chicago American Indian Center to grant-making responsibilities with a charitable foundation to volunteer consulting activities with a number of Indian urban and other groups. From 1952 to 1956,1 worked with a community of 600 Kalmuk Mongols who had come to the United States as displaced persons; for the first two years I was supported by foundation grants and for the last two through my position on the staff of the settlement house (Friends Neighborhood Guild) in the Philadelphia neighborhood in which Kalmuks were settled.

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From 1958 to 1965, as Chief of the Anthropology Service of one of the largest Veterans Administration mental hospitals in the country, I participated in a number of projects centering upon the organization of patient self-help councils in the back wards (euphemistically known as the "continued treatment service") of the hospital. I have been impressed by the similarity in the conditions faced by these three populations. Basically, these are people or communities in trouble — facing crisis or even catastrophe. They lack traditional forms of support or guidance from family, kin, neighbors, etc. Or where these resources exist, they are unprepared to help in the situations involved. They are often ignored or neglected by agencies and professionals, and the help provided them is inadequate or misdirected. For example, while many American Indians received some financial assistance in coming to Chicago, most help was for short-term entry needs; there was little provision for the longer-term employment, economic, psychological, and social problems they encountered. Unlike the European immigrants to America, Indians had little urban experience, few urban tribal cohorts, and limited motivation in taking up life anew in the city. Their homes were with their people on reservations and in settlements throughout the continent — where they were no longer able to make a living. Urban life seemed to them a necessary evil to be endured rather than a golden opportunity to move up the ladder of success. The Kalmuk Mongols arrived in the United States as displaced persons after they had been uprooted first from their homelands in Russia and then from Yugoslavia, where many had lived between the two World Wars. Along with many other modern peoples of the world uprooted by war, they were admitted to the United States under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. They constituted a racially, culturally, and linguistically distinct minority group. They had few compatriots in the United States, and existing community and social agencies were ill-prepared to provide adequate assistance. Their U.S. sponsors, Church World Service and the Tolstoy Foundation, were hopelessly divided on resettlement plans for the Kalmuks, including the use of special funds appropriated by the International Refugee Organization of the United Nations. Consequently, the Kalmuks were forced to rely heavily on themselves. The mental patients on the back wards of the Veterans Administration Hospital were provided custodial care and little else. They had not responded favorably to conventional treatments. Many had undergone electroshock, some were lobotomized, all had gone through the full range of physical medicine and rehabilitation programs and were still under heavy medication of one kind or another. Few of the staff, the relatives of

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the patients, or, for that matter, the patients themselves anticipated their return "as veterans to a full and useful life in the outside community" (the hospital's mission). These three groups — as with the many ad hoc self-help/mutual aid groups — were immersed in desperate situations in which they were struggling to maintain their families, their culture, their health, their sanity, and life itself. They were not populations primarily occupied with the typical activities and concerns of everyday life. The essential challenge an action anthropologist faces is to observe and learn while helping people cope with the problems that confront them (Gearing, Netting, and Peattie 1960, Piddington 1970, Current Anthropology 1975). In the classic paper where he defines and outlines this activity for the first time, Tax views action anthropology as (1952: 103-105) an activity in which an anthropologist has two coordinate goals, to neither one of which he will delegate an inferior position. He wants to help a group of people solve a problem, and he wants to learn something in the process. He refuses ever to think or to say that the people involved are for him a means of advancing his knowledge; and he refuses to think or to say that he is simply applying science to the solution of those people's problems. . . . If applied anthropology presupposes a body of scientific knowledge — compendent empirical propositions — developed by theoretical anthropologists and awaiting application to particular situations when we are asked to do so by management, government, administrator, or organization, then action anthropology is far different. . . . The action anthropologist realizes that his problem is less the application of general propositions than the development and clarification of goals and the compromising of conflicting ends or values. In fact, the action anthropologist finds that the proportion of new knowledge which must be developed in the situation is very great in comparison to old knowledge which he can apply. He is and must be a theoretical anthropologist, not only in background but in practice. . . . The action anthropologist eschews "pure science." For one thing his work requires that he not use people for an end not related to their own welfare: people are not rats and ought not to be treated like them. Not only should we not hurt people; we should not use them for our own ends. Community research is thus justifiable only to the degree that the results are imminently useful to the community and easily outweigh the disturbance to it. When the theoretical anthropologist publishes his report of a literate community, he changes the name and disguises it as well as he can — and perhaps keeps away from the place. . . . The action anthropologist on the other hand characteristically would not only not publish anonymously but his report is likely to be part of the program itself, participated in by the community. In any case, he has moral justification for expecting the community which gains from his scholarship to help the development of new knowledge that may be used to help others. One may characterize action anthropology by saying that the communtiy in which it works is not only its subject of study but also its object.

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The action anthropologist disclaims pure science also because his method is what I call clinical, perhaps experimental, in the sense that a physician continually improves his diagnosis with tentative remedies. Theory in the field of sociocultural dynamics requires that we understand not simply the "culture" and its personality characteristics, and the functional interrelations of institutions, but also the perceptions by people of the alternatives which face them in changing situations. Such perceptions critically influence the ultimate reaction of the society and culture to a change. The best if not only way to test a hypothesis concerning a group's perception of a situation is to change the situation in terms of the hypothesis. Indeed, one may say that description of the culture itself (in such terms) requires a program of action in the same way that diagnosis of a sickness often requires treatment. The interplay between understanding of the situation and doing something about it and understanding it better is so intimate in theory concerning the dynamics of acculturation that simple observation is a wholly inadequate tool. Moreover, I must emphasize that in this work current theory is never enough. The basic problem that the action anthropologist deals with is community organization, and his chief tool is education. If a teacher in a simple classroom situation must add art and experience to science, and must forever try and change and try again, how much more so must this be true of the action anthropologist who is intent on affecting a total situation that includes perhaps a dependent people, itself split into factions; a bureaucracy which represents power; and surrounding communities of different culture; each with its personalities and its history, its expectations and its views of the others? In such a complex situation his ever increasing storehouse of proved knowledge is useful but never sufficient. He must guess and improvise, and in some degree always play by feel. In order to learn, he must therefore teach; and thus deny himself the simple role of observer, or even participant observer. He becomes in a sense a more responsible scientist, playing "for keeps" in the development of his theory; with the consequences of error a burden heavy upon his own work, his future, and his conscience. Lost then is the comfortable familiarity of objectivity, and the mantle of science as it is usually understood. Thus my focus involved a "split vision." In part I was looking for issues, concepts, and problems that would contribute to anthropological theory and method; in part I was seeking ways to maintain some continuing constructive relations with these varied populations. My posture was not that of an applied anthropologist as this has been generally understood. Even the most learned members of the so-called helping professions had difficulty in "applying" helpful principles to these cases. In the hospital situation, moreover, many staff were themselves involved in what I saw as a "revitalization m o v e m e n t " (Borman 1966). They had not completely resigned themselves to the routine performance of ritual-like tasks (often called therapies) that resulted in little improvement for back ward patients. A s in other social movements, these often-disillusioned professionals were involved in some creative stirrings that took many forms: modifying hospital bureaucracy; qualifying prevailing medical and

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psychiatric practice; and discovering alternatives to fragmented technical-professional roles. I was frequently aligned closely with these movements for change. It seemed that one way to help was to learn, and in this sense I operated more in the tradition of the theoretical field anthropologist than in that of the applied. Additional dimensions in my repertoire of operations resembled clinical or experimental methods, community organization, group therapy, communication through the media in addition to conventional and informal education. I assumed, of course, that understanding how a community overcomes threats to its survival, especially when faced with enormous pressures to change, is a basic interest in anthropology. Social and cultural change, acculturation, and interfaces between political, bureaucratic, and community groups were some of the anthropological concerns that would be informed by my activities. Moreover, detailed, systematic findings on leadership, decision making, and small-group and large-group dynamics at a micro level would result. If I could learn how a group survives a desperate situation, would this not be good for anthropological theory and knowledge? Reciprocally, would not this knowledge be helpful to other populations confronted with like circumstances? In the tradition of anthropological fieldwork, the boundaries within which I learned and acted were generally vague. I was interested in getting a sense of the larger picture, the forest rather than the trees, but at the same time I needed to get to know many particular persons. I did not move in with clear-cut blueprints or professional techniques. This was a kind of "opportunity fieldwork" in which I moved in directions that were not always predictable, that were guided by a desire to maximize my helpfulness and learn as I went along. I felt that I needed to see the troubled community or population in its larger community or institutional context. I kept extensive field notes and "hung loose," as the saying goes. My aim was to help find ways for the community or population to fulfill its goals or aspirations, perhaps even to discover them. Each of the three groups differed from the larger society (or the particular agencies they dealt with) in values and practices, and these differences were often critical. Learning about these frequently led to an attempt on my part at clarifying, even opening up, lines of communication between the troubled group and outside agencies and professionals. Communicating with the public, often through free-lance writers, became important (see Roche 1954). Needless to say, this often involved very sensitive and delicate collaboration with professionals and agencies that had reached the limits of their helpfulness, to say nothing of their patience, and sometimes were locked into hopeless stereotypes of the populations involved.

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All of my activities were guided by the basic tenet of action anthropology that people know better than the expert or specialist what is good for them. This does not mean that others in authority or with special knowledge should refrain from suggesting what they think should be done, but that, in the final analysis, the people should be allowed to be self-determining and perhaps even to make mistakes (Tax 1956). Often, we are dealing with a pyramid-like bureaucracy in which authority is delegated, position descriptions are well-defined, and self-regulation by the people concerned is stymied. Program development and decision making in such a bureacracy rarely come from the bottom up. At one extreme, this pattern takes the form of colonialism; at the other, it emerges as institutional regulation and supervision. "We become numbers who give until it hurts rather than persons who give because it feels good. There is a system outside of us which we cannot understand and for which we have no love" (Tax 1968a:78). My work involved helping the people I worked with to break out of this pattern. Finally, a word about the conditions and auspices under which, as an action anthropologist, I needed to operate. I found that they rarely came ready-made and well-defined; I had to create and define helpful settings as situations developed. Flexibility was essential. It was also important for me to translate my interests and findings into terms that the host organizations would understand. Frequently this involved interpreting their own policies to their agency practitioners. In all cases, key members of the agencies involved recognized the limits of existing knowledge or practice. With Kalmuks and Indians in urban areas, conventional social agencies and settlement houses were hard put to know how to respond to the many needs these groups presented. In the mental hospital, professionals had exhausted their skills and techniques for helping the patients now relegated to the back wards. Their major attention was usually focused on acute patients who had limited hospital stays. I was not hired by agency or administration to implement a fully developed program or policy. On the contrary, effective policies and programs were to be discovered and developed. The part-time teaching appointments I held at various universities and medical schools (mostly not in anthropology) while engaged in these fieldwork activities helped me discover both bodies of useful knowledge and professional collaborators. My contact with Sol Tax and others associated with action anthropology never ceased. I was part of an informal action "support system" network, which extended beyond anthropology to include some psychologists, social workers, and others (Pratt and Tooley 1967; Katz and Spaner 1964; Katz n.d.). Perhaps this was my own self-help/mutual-aid group. In summary, then, as an action anthropologist I was engaged in an

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extension of more traditional anthropological research aimed at contributing both to scientific knowledge and to the improved welfare of the community of my concern. In order to learn how a people survived disaster and pressure to change, I needed intimate access to communities in such situations. Furthermore, knowledge of perceptions and values, as revealed in people's choices, was essential. And I learned these through active involvement and participation. Collaborating with existing agencies and human-service professionals often provided an important base, especially if support funds and a sympathetic audience were available through this means. If agencies were not friendly, I gained further insight into the problem of interface. Since these agencies often failed to address adequately the needs of these special populations (whether or not willing to acknowledge these failures), I was free to explore new ways for outsiders to be helpful. My task as an action anthropologist was to seek the views of the people themselves, even those regarded as insane. Self-determination, whether for the culturally distinct, the urban migrant, or the institutionalized mental patient, was a key value that guided much of what I did. Obviously such values contributed to my credibility and acceptance among those involved in forming self-help/mutual-aid groups. I thus became a liaison between such groups, the scientific community, and professional helpers. As a scientist, I valued truth, careful scholarship, and the importance of sharing observations and findings with scientific colleagues. I often opened the door in these situations for advanced students and colleagues to develop and test hypotheses that could not otherwise have been addressed.

SELF-HELP G R O U P PROFILE I have outlined my interests, roles, and values as an action anthropologist because it was largely from this vantage point that I was able to learn about and work with these populations to the extent that I did. I would like now to present a profile drawn in part from these three experiences that illustrates some characteristics and tendencies that are shared with many self-help/mutual-aid groups. The initial formulation of some of these characteristics, which I see as still very tentative, was further stimulated by my foundation experience in working with a number of self-help groups and especially in convening a workshop that included more than 30 of them. Some characteristics I identified in the course of these contacts are as follows (Borman 1975:vi-vii): Their membership consists of those who share a common condition, situation,

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heritage, symptom, or experience. They are largely self-governing and selfregulating, emphasizing peer solidarity rather than hierarchical governance. As such they prefer controls emanating from consensus rather than coercion — including majority rule. They tend to disregard in their own organization the usual institutional distinctions between consumer, professional, and boards of directors, combining and exchanging such functions among each other. They advocate self-reliance and require equally intense commitment and responsibility to other members, actual or potential. They often provide an identifiable code of precepts, beliefs, and practices that includes rules for conducting group meetings, entrance requirements for new members, and techniques for dealing with backsliders. They minimize referrals to professionals or agencies since, in most cases, no appropriate help exists. Where it does, they tend to cooperate with professionals. They generally offer a face-to-face or phone-to-phone fellowship network that is usually available and accessible without charge. Groups tend to be selfsupporting, occur outside the aegis of institutions or agencies, and thrive largely on donations from members and friends rather than from government or foundation grants or fees from the public.

I will elaborate on each of these characteristics. Membership: Mutual Recognition Recognition of common membership seems to be crucial. Whether we are dealing with culturally distinct groups or the hospitalized mentally ill, members tend to reject the abstract labels or diagnoses placed on them by outside professionals or agencies. The Kalmuks came to the United States as displaced persons (a designation, incidentally, they rarely used in referring to themselves) and their American sponsors conducted a resettlement program that essentially dispersed these families on ranches and farms throughout the southwestern United States. One objective underlying this resettlement plan was to provide jobs for Kalmuks that were consistent with their farming and herding experience. Another objective, less overt, was to discourage the "clannish tendencies" that had been exhibited by other Russian immigrants in the eastern part of the United States. In less than a year practically all the Kalmuks sent to the southwest (over 100) had returned to Philadelphia and New Jersey to take up life closer to their fellows, who were working in assorted industries, and to other Russian immigrants. The Kalmuks viewed the Southwest as Siberia, as the wasteland where the atom bomb was tested, and felt that they had been sent there in an effort to disperse and destroy their "nation." They did not identify with the pioneering, life-is-a-struggle values of the Southwestern sponsors, whose ancestors had endured considerable hardships in their own early settlements. , American Indians coming to urban areas had a much different history,

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but some of the conflicts with United States society are similar. From early efforts at obliteration to more recent efforts at forced urbanization, American Indians have resisted programs and policies designed to separate them from their families, their tribes, their cultures, and their land. They resist pressures to "Americanize" them. They want to maintain their tribal names, their affiliations, their language, and much of their culture. They resist even the general classification of "Indian," which was Columbus's error, and see themselves as members of hundreds of distinct tribes (Borman 1976c). There seems to be a tendency on the part of many officials and professionals to disavow or disrupt groupings based on commonly recognized and perceived characteristics of those who affiliate. I have pointed out this tendency earlier with regard to the Kalmuks and the American Indians (Borman 1971). For example, an obstacle to the establishment of the American Indian Center was a policy of the local Welfare Council that all social agencies receiving Council support should be open to everyone. Homogeneous centers or agencies were seen as discriminatory. (This policy has since changed, especially since the "Black Power" movement of the late 1960's.) At the same time, officials from the Bureau of Indian Affairs initially discouraged their urban relocatees from going to the Indian Center. They felt that such participation for Indians would diminish their urban adjustment and assimilation. Similarly, with the mentally ill, volunteer patient self-help councils were initially discouraged by many hospital administrators and professionals. A typical objection was, " D o you expect 'crazy' people to have the capacity for planning, making decisions, and governing — even to a limited extent — their own activities?" In spite of such official discouragement, the groups I describe, as with other self-help/mutual-aid groups, identify themselves to each other around conditions or characteristics they share. As with groups of the mentally ill, such as Recovery, Emotional Health Anonymous, and Schizophrenics Anonymous, other health groups can be found in almost all of the World Health Organization's disease categories. Hurvitz (1974) has termed many of these groups as "peer self-help psychotherapy groups," since they rarely utilize psychotherapists and differ greatly in their structure, procedures, and approach from conventional psychotherapy.

Governance:

Self-regulation

Self-regulation, involving functional leadership and organizational con-

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trol from their own ranks, was a basic premise underlying the Kalmuk and Indian communities. Domination, control, even influence from "outsiders" was often suspect. The American Indian Center broke its early ties with the Chicago office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and sought to develop independently. Some years later, in an effort to protect itself from its non-Indian "friends," the Center altered its by-laws so that anyone could join the Center, but only Indians could vote. While Robert Rietz, a non-Indian anthropologist, served as director of the Center for 13 years, he always viewed himself as a "hired hand," playing down his direction of anything and building up Indian problem-solving mechanisms. The Kalmuks, too, rejected domination from "outsiders," and early in their American resettlement years formed mutual-aid corporations that, among other purposes, served to distance their members from their American sponsoring organizations. Once the initial sponsoring functions were complete, including legal obligations for entry jobs, housing, and welfare, the Kalmuks preferred to sever any on-going dependency ties. At the same time, they continued to utilize assistance from outsiders around a myriad of problems that arose in their resettlement. All of this is not to suggest that self-governance was smooth and uncomplicated. Far from it. Many issues occurred around differentiation among "insiders." But with both Kalmuks and Indians preference was clearly that essential initiatives in action and problem-solving rest with members of the group, and not others. For the back ward hospitalized mental patients, who existed under tiers of outside professionals, para-professionals, and other hospital functionaries (e.g., ward housekeepers would frequently order patients about), self-regulation and self-management were trivialized as ward organization or therapeutic principles. The formation of patient councils did, however, move self-regulation into a more valued and vital direction. We found that the conventional diagnostic labels applied to patients tended to communicate a mood of hopelessness that served to enfeeble efforts at self-regulation. Ward aides and practical nurses would frequently adopt the professional prognoses that little could be done for long-term patients, and acted to confirm this expectation. Focusing on patients' self-perceptions and even limited aspirations, as we did in the self-help councils, helped patients to identify goals and action possibilities that were dimly perceived, even denied, by the professional staff. Since these council activities were more in the realm of enhancing patient quality of life, rather than finding cures for ailments, they may have been neglected by the professionals who were more bent on seeking cures. This emphasis on living fully in spite of disabilities seems crucial to many

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self-help health groups. "Make Today Count" (Kelly 1975), for example, has been formed for persons with life-threatening illnesses. The founder is himself a person with a cancerous tumor, who has spearheaded the organization of over a hundred chapters in the United States made up of others in similar straits. These groups, as with the councils formed in the hospital, provide opportunities for self-expression, mutual support, and self-governance. They serve at the same time, at least in the hospital situation, to open new options for hospital staff in dealing with patients that may be highly disabled (see Borman 1965, 1966, 1970; Rosenberg 1962, n.d.; Costonis 1963).

Merging of Board, Staff, Member

Functions

The organization of the three populations that I report here contrasts sharply with the bureaucratic mode of organization common to agencies and institutions in our society. The familiar distinctions found among professionals, board members or policy makers, and patients, consumers, or other objects of the agency's intention are absent. As in most selfhelp/mutual-aid groups, the tasks performed by these three functional segments are performed by the members of the group. One is an "expert" or "leader" largely because of one's experiences with the focal concern of the group. Outsiders, including the action anthropologist, can be helpful and supportive, but they are not seen as leaders or decision makers. The educational process in such groups has been described by Tax (1968ft: 465) as "using people in the group to teach others and creating a cultural continuum in which those that know more teach the others, and older members of the group teach newcomers. This institutionalization of the process of cultural diffusion does not seem to involve hierarchical structures or patterns of authority." This educational process, which sets critical limits on outside help, focuses special responsibility on members with different experiences, and resists pyramid-type hierarchies, seems to be a common pattern in most self-help groups. Riessman (1965) termed part of this process the "helper-therapy principle." The Chicago Indian Center offers a good example of the process. Since it required outside financial support, it needed to incorporate under Illinois law as a not-for-profit organization, and this in itself required a considerable degree of formal hierarchy. Incorporators were required, a board of directors was formed, minutes kept, reports filed, books audited, by-laws and resolutions adopted, Center directors and staff hired, etc. Yet Robert Rietz, who was the action-anthropologist director of the Center for 13 years, pointed out, "nothing got done unless an Indian did

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it." Most agencies that received support from the Community Fund of Chicago were composed of an outside board of directors drawn from affluent and influential circles, a professional staff trained in social service, management, and other skills, and a client population that was the recipient of the agencies' service. The Indian Center, on the other hand, attempted as much as possible to draw these three distinct functional groups from the Indian population. When non-Indians were asked to serve on the staff or board, very special responsibilities were entailed. Rietz (1959) claimed that the most serious organizational problem that the Center faced was the relationship between the Indian board of directors and himself: The Center differs profoundly from the rather authoritarian structure of the ordinary social agency which is set up and operated by people other than those it serves. This is so because the Center proposes that its goals be accomplished through the democratic process by those who make up its membership, since it is in this fashion that Indian people can be assisted in developing that citizenship participation that represents true membership in the Chicago community. . . . The executive must never insist that his will be followed because of special knowledge that he thinks he has as an expert. Unless this knowledge is usable by the Indian board in terms in which they understand a proposition, either the director has not been very expert in communicating to the board, or he does not understand the board view of the proposition. The Indians must have a chance to be responsible for whatever happens, for without this there is no chance that the purposes of the Center can be served.

The Indian Center, then, would share in the characteristics of self-help groups as described by Steinman and Traunstein (1976:350): It seems reasonable to suggest that the anomaly which the self-help movement represents — its "irregularity, or major deviation from the common order" — is the evolution of an alternative to the bureaucratic and professional model of the human services. It is an alternative to abstract principles and objective criteria, to specificity of function and expert authority, to affective neutrality and impersonal detachment, to technical qualifications and to the hierarchical control structure.

Self-Reliance and Group

Affiliation

The emphasis on self-reliance, on taking responsibility for one's own actions, appears to be an important common thread of self-help/mutualaid groups. The motto of Integrity Groups captures the principle: "You alone can do it, but you cannot do it alone." One is not a helpless pawn, caught up in desperate situations bound by outside forces and fates. Self-help groups require member commitment to utilize own strengths

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and resources. Recovery, Inc., in focusing on ex-mental hospital patients, emphasizes the importance of "will training" and plays down the role of unconscious drives in human experience. The many self-help groups for drug addicts, following the Synanon model, require that their members take responsibility for their own actions. They do not see the usefulness of viewing drug addiction as an illness, or as psychologically determined. If you "shoot dope," you are stupid, and you cannot blame anyone else, they assert. In the cases cited above — Integrity, Recovery, and Synanon — affiliation with group meetings, other members, and group-organized activities, including their literature, provides important mechanisms to bolster personal responsibility and self-reliance. One is kept from "backsliding," if that is the problem, by strengthened personal resolve that is encouraged by a variety of such group processes. With Indians, Kalmuks, and mental patients, enormous pressures existed for group, individual, and culture change. In the mental hospital, such pressures took many forms, from medication to behavioral modification — even to the way in which wards and buildings were utilized. The "disturbed building," for example, was used as a detention center for patients who did not comply with the numerous rules, regulations, management or therapeutic procedures, etc., that prevailed on the wards and buildings in which they were originally housed. Patients were unable to undertake many actions on their own behalf. They existed in what might be considered a "dependency culture" where literally anyone from the hospital manager to the housekeeper could tell them what to do (see Goffman 1961). Moreover, most of the patients had been legally committed, which meant that they had lost their usual civil rights. Developing patient self-help councils in such a setting was a challenge, but one that was managed successfully. The groups organized on various wards were allowed to send representatives to hospital-wide advisory councils, which in turn strengthened the group and the individual member at the local ward level. In this way, self-imposed affiliations were developed even in a total institution (see Wulbert 1963 for discussion of this feature among hospitalized mental patients). The idea of persisting group solidarity seems to permeate self-help groups, whose members are voluntarily united in a kind of enduring union that transcends the particular needs of any individual. One of the early findings of the initial action anthropology project with the Mesquakies (Fox) in Iowa was that almost any change was possible if Indian values were not disrupted. Identities and preferences could shift, but these were tied very closely to individual and group choices made by the people themselves, and not imposed from without. Whether patient,

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Indian, or Kalmuk, the idea of personal self-reliance and self-imposed affiliation, although eschewed by many professionals, seemed critical to the groups considered here.

Hostility or Indifference to Professional Help The relationship of self-help/mutual-aid groups to professionals has been described by many as generally hostile. Back and Taylor (1976:301-302) indicate that "one of the most striking characteristics of self-help adherents is distrust of professionals. In fact, the easiest way of being accepted as one of the ingroup is to make a few slurring remarks about physicians, social workers, or the whole academic establishment. The agitation, the uneasiness out of which the movement grew, may be, in general, reduced to a mistrust of professional help and even more — a general distrust of pure rationality." In the cases I have presented, if there is a distrust of professionals, it probably arises from the fact that most experts have not been very helpful. As with the back ward patients in the veterans' hospital, many self-help groups formed among other populations are quite open in discussing incidents in which clergy, psychiatrists, social workers, and even family and friends were unable to be helpful, even unable to grasp the nature of their problems. Madsen (1974) points out that we are often dealing with people (in his case alcoholics) who have through their addiction gone bankrupt, abandoned their vocational or professional careers, destroyed their marriages and disrupted their families, incurrred criminal records, become hospitalized with various conditions, and become ineligible for credit or loans. For many problems faced by those who form self-help groups, there is no technical expertise that can be helpful. Again, if you are Kalmuk or Indian, to what professional do you go to retrieve your culture, your language, your cherished values, or even to renegotiate these traditions in the light of current experiences and reality? With these groups it is not so much that they are antiprofessional; it is more that most professionals are irrelevant. This diminished relevance of outside professional or expert help means that in most situations one must discover, rather than assume, what the proper role of an expert might be in relationship to the problems the group faces. With the mental hospital experience, it became clear to me that the professional diagnostic culture that presumed to classify patients in pathological terms helped to maintain a stalemate between the professional staff and many patients. I attempted to bridge this gap in part by neither buying into the diagnostic culture (although the pressures to do so were constant) nor presuming to know what was best for the patients.

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Others with special training have also attempted to be helpful to self-help groups, and in many cases have played important roles behind the scenes (Borman 1976ft). The American Indian Center had a number of professional friends in universities, with the Welfare Council, with the American Friends Service Committee, and elsewhere, who worked, as with Rietz, to strengthen Indian efforts to participate in their own problemsolving. This was true with a number of professional friends of the Kalmuks as well. At the same time many professionals who'attempted to help these and other self-help/mutual aid groups in their own terms, that is, focusing on the aspirations of the groups themselves, would have to "bootleg" their time, working weekends and evenings, without the sanction and support of their agencies or their colleagues. These kinds of professionals are always eagerly sought after by self-help groups.

Distinctive

Belief Systems and

Ideologies

It should be apparent that, as self-help groups form and come to respect their own values and perceptions, they develop their own distinctive precepts, beliefs, and practices. For example, one of my functions with the patient self-help councils was to tape-record and subsequently transcribe the verbatim minutes of their meetings, which often ran to 40 pages. I was impressed with how inventive patients were in utilizing these minutes: from helping so-called mute patients recite to convincing relatives and staff that they were not so out of touch with reality. The very process of having their voices recorded, transcribed, and disseminated seemed to alter their usual way of experiencing themselves and others. Antze (1976) analyzes three self-help groups (Recovery, Synanon, and Alcoholics Anonymous) in terms of the distinctive belief system or ideology each group (the mentally ill, drug addicts, and alcoholics) has developed. He is convinced that the greatest therapeutic value these groups provide rests in their teachings. These are usually neglected, even by advocates of peer psychotherapy, who emphasize instead (p. 323) "a relatively simple cluster of social-psychological processes, most notably confession, catharsis, mutual identification, and the removal of stigmatized feelings." Antze goes on (pp. 324-325), My objection to this approach is not that it is mistaken but that it is seriously incomplete. Social psychologists have surely been right in seeing peer therapy groups as arrangements for mutual support and the removal of stigma. They may well be right in holding that such activities have therapeutic value. But in neglecting ideology they have missed another, equally crucial, function of these groups, a persuasive function. Whether by accident or unconscious design, most peer

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therapy groups also share an array of traits that make them highly effective in impressing their teaching on members. The result is that with time active participants tend to absorb group ideas not just as a creed or set of beliefs but as a living reality that is reconfirmed in each day's experience. No understanding of how these groups help their members can be complete without examining this persuasive process. Rietz made an analogous point — in a lecture to our hospital staff (n.d.: 4 - 5 ) — when he described what he had learned through his own interference in trying to be helpful to American Indians: Now if we imagine a definition of man's place in the universe radically and profoundly different from our own, and realize that it is not a system of beliefs, but the terms upon which people exist — the order of nature — then the problem of cross-cultural communication assumes a new dimension of difficulty. For example, for over a hundred years now, we have been exhorting, cajoling, advising, encouraging, and teaching Indians to become as we are. And in the main we have been tolerant and have tried to be understanding. We have had tremendous faith in simply supplying information which Indians should be able to use without a strain on their intelligence or their ability, to take advantage of what we have to offer for their self-improvement. With every good intention of dedicated people we have presented Indians with program after program, for well over a hundred years in some cases. And in many, many cases there has been no visible good effect. The problem of communication that occurs is not a simple one that could be understood as a difference in beliefs. Rather, it comes about for a much more basic reason. It involves the full universe of culture and diverse ways of being — behaviors which have implications that go far beyond any immediate program. And unless we understand something of this whole context of what it means to be an Indian, we are not fully aware of the consequences of the things we do. And this holds whether we are concerned with Indian culture and ways of being, or. . . with patient culture and ways of being.

Self-Support:

Separation

of Outside

Help from Policy

Making

The way in which outside support is provided, either as financial aid or technical assistance, as well as the amount, seems to have a critical bearing on the function and direction of the self-help group. Tracy and Gussow ( 1 9 7 6 : 3 8 2 ) see a major shift occurring in self-help groups when they become foundation-oriented, emphasizing research, fund-raising, public education, and legislative and lobbying activities. They often tend to depart from their mutual-aid concerns of providing direct help to members in the form of education, peer support, coping skills, and other forms of assistance. Professional staff may be hired, more formalized structures of organization are developed, and accountability to outside sources of support begins to take precedence. In the three cases con-

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sidered here, some procedures were designed so as to minimize undue controlling and policy influence from the outside. Even though the patient council members had their basic needs provided by the hospital, weekly refreshments and special events (such as a party for student nurses) were supported from the personal funds of the patients, accumulated from veterans' benefits. This was not always easy, given the fact that most of the patients had been committed and the approval of hospital authorities was needed for patient fund withdrawals. Events that were personally supported seemed to arouse more active participation than similar events occurring under the auspices of the hospital. While these were token efforts at self-support, they symbolized that such activities were feasible and caused both patients and sympathetic staff to scan the range of other possibilities in the hospital milieu (e.g., use of private lockers, clothing selection, activity scheduling, recreational preferences, etc.). As indicated earlier, one way in which the Indian Center managed to keep control of programs and policies, while at the same time soliciting support from outsiders, was to require that only Indians could elect the policy-making Board of Directors. While non-Indians might serve on the Board, they were elected or appointed (for unexpired terms) by the Indians. This was specified in the by-laws, which permitted anyone to join the Center but only Indians to vote. The Grand Council of the Center, consisting of non-Indian citizens, was formed primarily for fund-raising purposes and deliberately exercised no role in program or policy development. With the Kalmuks, the funds appropriated by the International Refugee Organization that remained after resettlement expenses were turned over to the three Kalmuk mutual-aid societies that had been formed. While the sponsors had encouraged the formation of one such organization, eventually the Kalmuks formed three, and each received support proportional to the number of its members. Each in turn proceeded to develop a center for its activities, acquiring land, property, and equipment for religious, cultural, and social activities.

SOME PUBLIC POLICY IMPLICATIONS The general profile outlined above, which discerns some regularities between traditional and ad hoc self-help groups and, at the same time, contrasts these to professionally organized agencies, suggests implications for public policy. Self-help/mutual-aid groups, and their precursors in families, tribes, and other indigenous groups, represent modes of

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organization that obviously serve important psychological and social needs of their members. Moreover, they seem to have an important part to play as support and mediating structures between their members and the rest of society, including formal agencies and professional institutions. As such, these groups become a critical locus of responsibility from a societal viewpoint in helping to achieve some overall objectives regarded as desirable by the nation that are neglected by other agencies. They focus around values, character development, and discipline and provide some constructive elements of response to crisis and catastrophe. They also seem to arouse a level of participation and involvement that, as Tyler points out (1976:444), is an essential element in all effective human services, be they health, education, or rehabilitation. The widespread occurrence of these diverse groups, and the forms they take, suggests the need for a reassessment of those institutions that are nominally assigned responsibility to deal with these areas of human concern. The National Institute of Mental Health provides an example of one federal agency that has expressed considerable interest in the articulation of selfhelp/mutual-aid groups with current resources expended on mental health efforts. These include mental health centers, the training and allocation of manpower, and the development of new strategies for understanding and helping those special populations benefiting from self-help groups. One project along this line, in which I am currently collaborating with Morton A. Lieberman and Gary R. Bond, is the examination of self-help groups in urban areas as alternative systems of help. At a time when national health priorities require a focus on community based programs, with an emphasis on de-institutionalization, the special resources presented by self-help groups loom in importance. Tax has suggested that one way to recognize the critical locus of responsibility assumed by self-help groups is to provide legal recognition to them along with three-generation extended families (Tax 19766:452; also see Tax 1976a). Once there is legal recognition of a voluntary family type, non-profit institution, benefits available to other non-profit corporations can come to it; and benefits can be asked in special legislation (federal, state, local) or in legislation already in existence which is designed, for example, for medical institutions. Thus, medicare and medical insurance programs might permit funds to go to the self-help group as they go to physicians and clinics for services performed. At the least, members might get receipts for and be able to include expenses incurred in self-help groups in their own income tax returns. Thus also, grants might immediately be available for research and education and the development of new approaches and of new groups.

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Durman (1976) has indicated the important part self-help groups can play in helping to sort out some basic dimensions of the professional service provision task. They may be especially useful in assessing current priorities of public programs. They may help, for example, in identifying the special characteristics of populations that are not benefited by existing helping programs; they may help to indicate the kinds of needs — notably support and advocacy — inadequately served by public programs; and they have serious implications for the nature of direct service provided by agencies: notably in their reliance on non-professional peer support from those who share in the common experience. The methods of action anthropology may be instrumental not only in advancing fundamental research around the self-help/mutual-aid movement, but in contributing to the practical work of the professional helpgiver and the public policy-maker. As an activity that pursues the ends both of science and of human service, action anthropology may provide one meaningful model of collaboration to advance these often separated ends.

CONCLUSIONS In reviewing some aspects of my involvement with the Chicago American Indian Center, the Kalmuk Buddhist Mongols who resettled in the United States, and the councils formed among hospitalized mental patients, I have suggested that there are some apparent regularities in the organizational features of these groups and that they share these with members of the self-help/mutual-aid movement. Surely these regularities need to be qualified and refined. Comparative analysis, both historical and cross-cultural, may be one contribution anthropology could make toward the understanding of this movement. Ideally anthropologists can collaborate more closely with members of other disciplines in joint undertakings. The self-help group profile I have sketched should be seen as tentative, since these forms characterize people and groups in the throes of change, buffeted by many forces. Some common elements in the situations faced by these three groups, as with self-help groups, need further analysis. I see them all encysted in threatening situations, where survival is often at stake. Whether the threat looms in pressure for acculturation or personal adaptation to a lifethreatening illness, the modes of group and community organization seem to be similar. Our understanding of these many groups, the situations they face, and their responses needs the concerted attention of scholars, scientists, practitioners, and ordinary citizens drawn from a

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plurality of traditions. Hyphenating scientific with practical ends as I do reveals that the problems addressed are larger than academic, requiring diverse capabilities for their solution. The method of action anthropology has already become the basis for encouraging some of this needed attention. As I begin to suggest in this brief paper, much that is learned in method and fact is transferable. Anthropologists need not confine their activities to communities of culture alien to our own. Action anthropology can lead to systematic and detailed understanding at a microlevel; we are frequently dealing with particulars — people, events, situations, etc. At the same time, our understanding and action move to macro levels, and we acquire more general insight on matters both academic and practical. In many instances this has occurred through the initiative taken by action anthropologists to convene workshops and conferences. The Self-help Exploratory Workshop conducted in 1974 brought together self-help groups and professionals and provided the impetus for a series of scholarly and practical activities that has ensued. The development of a Self-help Institute at Northwestern University has also resulted (Borman 1976a, b). This workshop was modeled after earlier conferences convened by action anthropologists together with other populations. The American Indian Chicago Conference of 1960 (Ablon this volume) was an early effort on the part of action anthropologists working closely with American Indians from throughout the country to provide an important forum for the expression of Indian viewpoints on matters of serious concern to the tribes. The landmark "Declaration of Indian Purpose" was one of the results. The Community Services Workshop of 1966 is another example of action anthropologists working closely with community organizations and minorities primarily in the city of Chicago that focused on maximizing participation of community groups in a variety of human service delivery programs (Tax 19686). Indeed, the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, convened in Chicago in 1973 under the presidency of Tax, followed an action anthropology model established earlier by Tax in his editorship of Current Anthropology. One of the intellectual results has been the publication of the series World Anthropology. The special mode of participation of the action anthropologist, then, in working with both traditional and ad hoc self-help groups, may be highly productive in advancing both knowledge and human well-being at the same time.

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REFERENCES CITED 1976. "The role of ideologies in peer psychotherapy organizations: Some theoretical considerations and three case studies," in Self-help groups. Edited by Morton A. Lieberman and Leonard D. Borman, pp. 323-346. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 12(3). BACK, KURT W „ and REBECCA C . TAYLOR. 1976. "Self-help groups: Tool or symbol?" in Self-help groups. Edited by Morton A. Lieberman and Leonard D. Borman, pp. 295-309. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 12(3). BORMAN, LEONARD D. 1965. Patient council innovations in a mental hospital. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, Chicago, 111. . 1966. A revitalization movement in the mental health professions. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 36:111-118. . 1970. The marginal route of a mental hospital innovation. Human Organization 29:63-69. . 1971. Melting pots, vanishing Americans, and other myths. Library Trends 20:210-222. . Editor. 1975. Explorations in self-help and mutual aid. Evanston: Center for Urban Affairs, Northwestern University. . 1976a. Barn-raising revisited: The upsurge in self-help groups. Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions Report 9 ( 3 ) : 1 6 - 1 7 . . 1976b. Self-help and the professional. Social Policy 7(2):46-47. . 1976c. "American Indian tribal support systems and economic development," in The diverse society: Implications for social policy. Edited by Pastora San Juan Cafferty and Leon Chestang, pp. 150-162. New York: National Association of Social Workers. COSTONIS, ANTHONY. 1963. Response to innovation in a mental hospital. Unpublished Master's research paper, University of Chicago, Chicago, 111. Current Anthropology. 1975. In honour of Sol Tax. 16:507-540. DURMAN, EUGENE C. 1 9 7 6 . "The role of self-help in service provision," in Self-help groups. Edited by Morton A. Lieberman and Leonard D. Borman, pp. 4 3 3 - 4 4 3 . Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 1 2 ( 3 ) . GEARING, FRED, ROBERT McC. NETTING, and LISA R . PEATTIE. 1 9 6 0 . Documentary history of the Fox project: 1948-1959. University of Chicago Department of Anthropology. GOFFMAN, ERVING. 1961 .Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor. HURVITZ, NATHAN. 1974. "Peer self-help psychotherapy groups: Psychotherapy without psychotherapists," in The sociology of psychotherapy. Edited by Paul Roman and Harrison M. Trice, pp. 84-138. New York: Jason Aronson. KATZ, GEORGE G . n.d. Action psychology: Its significance for the field of mental health. MS. KATZ, GEORGE G . , and FRED E . SPANER. 1 9 6 4 . The action social scientist: A paradigm for hospital psychology. Paper read at the American Psychological Association meeting, Los Angeles, Calif. KELLY, ORVILLE E. 1975. Make today count. New York: Delacorte Press. KILLILEA, MARIE. 1976. "Mutual help organizations: Interpretations in the literature," in Support systems and mutual help: Multidisciplinary explorations. Edited by Gerald Caplan and Marie Killilea, pp. 37-93. New York: Grune and Stratton. ANTZE, PAUL.

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1976. "Self-help groups: Types and psychological processes," in Self-help groups. Edited by Morton A. Lieberman and Leonard D. Borman, pp. 310-322. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 12(3). LIEBERMAN, MORTON Α., and LEONARD D. BORMAN. 1976a. "Self-help groups and social research," in Self-help groups. Edited by Morton A. Lieberman and Leonard D. Borman, pp. 455-463. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 12(3). . Editors. \916b. Self-help groups. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 12(3). MADSEN, WILLIAM. 1 9 7 4 . The American alcoholic. Springfield: Thomas. PIDDINGTON, RALPH. 1 9 7 0 . "Action anthropology," in Applied anthropology: Readings in the uses of the science of man. Edited by James A. Clifton, pp. 1 2 7 - 1 4 3 . Boston: Houghton Mifflin. PRATT, STEVE, and JAY TOOLEY. 1 9 6 7 . Action psychology .Journal of Psychological Studies 1 5 ( 3 ) : 1 3 7 - 2 3 1 . RIESSMAN, FRANK. 1 9 6 5 . The "helper-therapy" principle. Social Work 1 0 : 2 7 - 3 2 . RIETZ, ROBERT, n.d. Culture, identity, and the self. MS. . 1959. Report to the Schwarzhaupt Foundation: For the American Indian Center. MS. ROCHE, MARY. 1 9 5 4 . Philadelphia's lost tribe. Harper's, August, pp. 5 3 - 5 9 . ROSENBERG, LARRY. 1 9 6 2 . Social status and participation among a group of chronic schizophrenics. Human Relations 1 5 : 3 6 5 - 3 7 7 . . n.d. The anthropologist as patient council advisor. MS. STEINMAN, RICHARD, and DONALD M. TRAUNSTEIN. 1976. "Redefining deviance: The self-help challenge to the human services," in Self-help groups. Edited by Morton A. Lieberman and Leonard D. Borman, pp. 347-361. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 12(3). TAX, SOL. 1952. Action anthropology. Amärica Indigena 12:103-106. . 1956. The freedom to make mistakes. America Indigena 16:171-177. . 1968a. Society, the individual, and national service. Current History, August, pp. 78-83, 109. . Editor. 1968&. The people vs. the system. Chicago: Acme Press. . 1976a. Proposal for a new institution: The family as a corporate entity. Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions Report 9(l):6-7. . 1976b. "Self-help groups: Thoughts on public policy," in Self-help groups. Edited by Morton A. Lieberman and Leonard D . Borman, pp. 4 4 8 - 4 5 4 . Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 1 2 ( 3 ) . TRACY, GEORGE S., and ZACHARY Gussow. 1 9 7 6 . "Self-help groups: A grass-roots response to a need for services," in Self-help groups. Edited by Morton A. Lieberman and Leonard D . Borman, pp. 3 8 1 - 3 9 6 . Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 1 2 ( 3 ) . TYLER, RALPH W . 1 9 7 6 . "Social policy and self-help groups," in Self-help groups. Edited by Morton A. Lieberman and Leonard D . Borman, pp. 4 4 4 - 4 4 8 . Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 1 2 ( 3 ) . WULBERT, ROLAND. 1 9 6 3 . Inmate pride, collective disturbances, and riots. Unpublished Master's thesis, University of Chicago, Chicago, 111. LEVY, LEON H .

ROBERT HINSHAW and PHILIP YOUNG

Action Anthropology in College Administration1

INTRODUCTION Each author has devoted five years to Wilmington College (Ohio) in administrative roles.2 Hinshaw served as president (1970-75); Young served first as campus ombudsman (1971-73), and then as coordinator of individualized educational planning (1973-75) and is currently director of a Wilmington-sponsored Associate of Arts degree program at a nearby correctional institution. Our involvement in Wilmington's administration, during a period of marked and rapid change in mission and governance, was an unusual opportunity. On the basis of what we have learned about change processes appropriate to this college, we are persuaded that similar participant observation by anthropologists on other college and university campuses is in order. That anthropologists have shied away from academic administration is not surprising, given the biases of our discipline with regard to administration in general and the biases of faculties with regard to academic administration in particular. Colleges and universities, however, are in trouble, their ability to support anthropologists on their faculties depends on their getting out of trouble, and action anthropology provides a useful strategy for learning about the change dynamics of campus communities while serving in administrative roles. The trouble in which colleges find themselves results largely from poor planning for the steady state, demographically and economically, that we are experiencing this decade and anticipate for the foreseeable future. During the 20 years prior to 1970, higher education in the United States expanded at such a rapid rate and enjoyed such a favored position among the national priorities that the adaptability of educational institutions in the present steady state is poor. In the absence of any felt need for orderly, directed change over several decades, the organizational structures and governance procedures for handling change atrophied to a

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surprising degree on many campuses. Faced suddenly with the necessity of rethinking institutional mission, curriculum, and faculty and student roles in governance, many campus communities are drifting toward their demise for lack of any common, acceptable change strategies. The need for change may be generally accepted, but the constraints protecting the status quo are sufficiently informal and idiosyncratic in any given campus subculture to confound observers of higher education seeking facile solutions (e.g., abolishing tenure, increasing productivity, ungluing departmental boxes, etc.). Reference to college campuses as subcultures stretches current definitions of subculture but serves to emphasize how insulated, myth-sharing, and informally patterned and integrated the average small college has become. This is where anthropologists can be of service. Needed are observers accustomed to looking beyond formal organization to the informal, sometimes covert patterning of social relations, decision making, and political influence. Neither of us was hired as an anthropologist, although we came to Wilmington from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kansas (where Hinshaw was teaching social anthropology and Young was completing an M. A. in ethnolinguistics) and regarded the sojourn at Wilmington as an integral part of our anthropological careers. We joined the Wilmington staff primarily to be of assistance to the institution. 3 In the process, however, we learned some things about small-college functioning and change. In our administrative roles we functioned as catalysts in the making and reviewing of decisions, thereby generating opportunities to learn about the institution. It was fortuitous that the opportunity to participate in college administration placed us in a college which would, for reasons unforeseen in 1970, experience over the next five years changes as radical as few small colleges in the country would experience. Briefly, the more far-reaching of these changes were (1) organization of lower-level curricula around interdisciplinary rather than departmental foci, (2) extension of this principle to the individualization of degree requirements in terms of a problem or career interest of the student, and (3) negotiation of a contract with a neighboring public community college to provide community-college students the instruction leading to an Associate of Arts degree alongside Wilmington College students in Wilmington's classrooms. Each of these changes involved shifts of increasing complexity and magnitude in institutional mission, curriculum, departmental autonomy, and faculty role. In our respective roles we were necessarily and acceptably involved in precipitating, making, implementing, and evaluating many decisions. As a Quaker college, Wilmington expected a president to lead in non-

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directive ways, inviting broad participation and relying heavily on consensus in decision making. Authoritarian administration would have been as unacceptable to the community as it would have been repugnant to action anthropologists. Yet, any college president, however nonauthoritarian, influences the content of some decisions. Our interest in governance and process possibly led Hinshaw to precipitate more decision making than expected or at least required of the president ; if changing too rapidly is the Scylla of academic leadership, shying away from decision and change is the Charybdis. The limits of acceptable presidential intervention in precipitating and influencing decisions were ascertainable only through experimenting with a range of leadership stances. We endeavored to monitor these varying degrees of participant intervention, although objectivity undoubtedly diminished as our involvement increased. Because of the complexity and institutionwide character of the curricular changes undertaken in the late 1960's and early '70's, Wilmington was invited in 1971 to join a nationwide consortium of colleges and universities monitoring change processes. The consortium title, Strategies for Change and Knowledge Utilization in Higher Education, reflected this focus on process, as distinct from output, goals. Institutional-functioning instruments were administered over a threeyear period to measure responses to the changes Wilmington was undergoing, and consortium staff gathered extensive interview data. These attitudinal data and recorded observations by trained observers external to the campus community became increasingly helpful in monitoring our own roles as we gradually deepened our participant intervention. We turn next to more detailed discussion of the methodological and ethical issues raised by our efforts to examine the modes of decision making characteristic of small colleges in general and of Quaker institutions in particular. This discussion will lead to formulation of a model of leadership stances, or roles, which we find useful in analyzing a number of decisions with which we were associated at Wilmington. A case history will demonstrate the application of this model to our experience. Finally, each of us will offer some concluding observations.

METHODOLOGICAL AND ETHICAL ISSUES Sol Tax and his colleagues did not embark on the Fox project with the intention of helping the Fox solve problems. Learning about the Fox was their motive, and it was in part to enhance the learning possibilities that they experimented with what Tax initially termed "participant interference" and later labeled action anthropology. While learning and helping

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are regarded as coequal goals in action anthropology, the ethical issues raised are primarily those of helping when the desire to learn has brought trained observers into contexts in which their assistance as outsiders is invited or at least accepted. Acceptable help includes clarifying options, exploring the implications of courses of action, and using one's influence and knowledge to facilitate implementation of the decisions reached. Unacceptable is advocacy of a particular course of action or any attempt to judge what is in the best interests of the group. In the words of Piddington (1960:205): This adumbrates the most significant distinction between action anthropology and applied anthropology as ordinarily conceived. It emphasizes the right of Fox self-determination or, as Sol Tax bluntly puts it, the freedom to make mistakes. The Fox are faced with the need of making decisions relevant to their future. The function of the anthropologist is not to impose his own decisions, much less those of administrators. . . . His function is to act as a catalyst, to help clarify issues for the Fox and to make available to them possibilities of choice which may not have occurred to them, or which might not have been available to them apart from the programme of action anthropology.

The strength and weakness of action in contexts of outsiders helping insiders is the observer's lack of responsibility for the specific decisions reached by the group under observation. The anthropologist's insistence on neutrality in intragroup politics, coupled with his advocacy of group self-determination in the wider political arena, heightens his credibility and the utility of his inputs in intragroup deliberations. At the same time, however, it frees him from any responsibility for the decisions reached or for the inability to reach decisions and its consequences. He feels under no obligation to surmount intragroup factionalism, even though it may play into the hands of superordinate or external interests threatening the group's autonomy or welfare. The reasons for non-interference are not only ethical but also pragmatic: what the group does under any given set of circumstances is what the observer is out to learn. The differences between the participant interference deemed legitimate by action anthropologists in contexts of indigenous peoples' selfdetermination and the participant interference in which we were involved in college administration are obvious. The anthropological observer, as an outsider, may have considerable power, if not authority, but of course he can disavow it in the interests of objectivity and "pure" research. A college president cannot disavow responsibility for the content of decisions in some areas, and a major expectation of his role is the use of influence in surmounting differences among the college's constituencies (students, faculty, administration, alumni, church, and trustees) in vested

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interests and expectations to insure that indecision and factionalism do not immobilize the institution. Yet the similarities impress us more than the differences. A college president is in many respects an outsider, both in terms of (usually) being "brought in" from another institution and in terms of being "above" constituency allegiances. Moreover, it is acceptable — especially in Quaker institutions — for him to use the authority of the role to promote power decentralization and a policy of community self-determination. To repeat: the critical difference lies in the anthropologist's not being held accountable for community mobilization for problem-solving or needsatisfying action. The president must grapple accountably with the likelihood that intraconstituency consensus on output and process goals may not lead to interconstituency consensus without considerable intervention on his part. The president can be just as concerned as the action anthropologist not to impose his values or solutions; this is not the issue. The issue for the president is helping each constituency or faction realize its expectations from the community as fully as other constituencies will permit. This necessarily is a political process, and the president's utility and credibility in his role stem from the same non-alignment and objectivity which give utility and credibility to the inputs of the anthropological observer. While alignment and political action are legitimate options for the president to a degree that they are not for the action anthropologist, the president can lose as much credibility as can the anthropological observer by letting his interests and agenda lead to second-guessing of constituency insiders' best interests. Our understanding of this is greater now than it was on joining the Wilmington staff, and yet even then we gave considerable thought to how a president's neutrality and credibility might be enhanced in order to facilitate effective leadership. We also understood that the resolution of the dilemma of "leading" an institution while not imposing an outsider's agenda lay in diversity of insiders' agendas (i.e., differences among constituencies in needs and objectives). The wider the range of articulated agendas, the greater the likelihood that any direction the president comes to feel appropriate for the college will have been espoused initially by insiders. Early in 1971 Hinshaw prepared a proposal in the search for funds to assist Young in his role as ombudsman, one facet of which would be the monitoring of the president's role performance. Excerpts from that proposal will serve to illustrate the attention given at the outset to the issues of credibility and effectiveness in leadership: Successful institutional experimentation with alternative ends and means of education depends less on the innovative policies (which abound and gain implemen-

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tation rather easily by administrative fiat, student threat of disorganization, etc.) than on preserving procedures for interpreting change to the several constituencies with vested interests in the college in terms they find generally acceptable. . . . Institutional flexibility thus depends only in part on openness to change among an institution's several constituencies; it also depends on the ability of institutional leadership to orchestrate the interconstituency communication. . . . The proposed research focuses on variables affecting such flexibility: constituency dissonance; channels of communication; and the role of president in such communication. O f these variables, the president's role is the most difficult to research, and where the president plays a broker's role the anatomy of institutional change is virtually impossible for an observer to research. The president has to be intimately involved in the analysis. . . . The solution to this dilemma lies in basing the research in the office of ombudsman, a role new to college communities (and new to Wilmington) which lends itself remarkably well to the proposed research. . . . The ombudsman is hired by the president, reports directly to and only to the president and performs a low-visibility, "unofficial" broker's role between president and chiefly students. He is an "observer" by definition, functioning outside the visible decision-making structure. His overt function is clarifying for all concerned existing procedures and policies, including procedures for reviewing and changing policies. He identifies individual discontent and institutional stress points. A less visible function is the constant reading of constituency attitudes and expectations. Maintenance of the broker's role by the president depends on presidential credibility to all constituencies. T o safeguard this there must be mechanisms for obtaining feedback on how constituencies interpret the decisions made, as well as unofficial single-constituency communication with the president whenever multi-constituency communication is more ambiguous than a constituency (usually students) is comfortable with. The ombudsman can provide this feedback and requisite candor in his unofficial, observer role, while preserving the credibility of president as broker. It bears clarification that o u r thinking about the utility of the o m b u d s m a n role in enhancing a president's effectiveness evolved after the decision had b e e n m a d e t o e x p e r i m e n t with an o m b u d s m a n and also after, by coincidence, an anthropologist had been selected for the role. T h e hiring o f Y o u n g culminated a f o u r - m o n t h s e a r c h for an o m b u d s m a n - c o u n s e l o r , during which a n u m b e r o f candidates w e r e brought t o the c a m p u s for interviewing. Counseling training was s h a r e d by m o s t candidates, and n o n e apart from Y o u n g had a b a c k g r o u n d in anthropology. O n c e the decision to hire Y o u n g had b e e n m a d e , however, o u r c o m m o n b a c k ground in a n t h r o p o l o g y and e x p e r i e n c e with participant observation (Hinshaw in G u a t e m a l a and Y o u n g a m o n g rural peasants in T u r k e y and Indians o f the A m e r i c a n N o r t h w e s t ) led easily t o consideration o f the learning possibilities inherent in o u r roles. T h e relevance o f action anthropology for a c a d e m i c administration w a s suggested m o r e by the o m b u d s m a n role than by the presidency. P a r e n thetically we might add that persons e x p o s e d t o a n t h r o p o l o g y who have

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an action inclination are particularly well prepared for serving in the ombudsman offices which are appearing in so many institutional and community contexts in the United States. While in the role at Wilmington, Young was in contact with ombudspersons on several other Ohio campuses as well as in such varied environments as hospitals, prisons, radio stations, and mayors' offices. Scott (1975:54-55), an observer of governance on college and university campuses, has proposed experimentation with an Office of Technical Assistance in Constituent Lobbying (TACL) which conforms even more closely to the model of action anthropology: A TACL office differs from an ombudsperson in that the ombudsperson actually represents the interests of the individual to the institution. A TACL office would act more as community organizer, training a constituent group in how to identify what it wants, what can be done, and who can grant it; in how the group can rally allies, develop a lobbying strategy and tactics to approach the decision-makers, find handles to convince them, and decide what to hold out for and what to agree upon.

In either case, the assistance rendered is increased knowledge of the available options and of the implications of any given action, provided by a perceptive observer divested of authority or power to decide for community members what is in their best interests. During the two years Young served as ombudsman, his credibility in an action role enhanced the credibility and effectiveness of Hinshaw in interconstituency relations as well. During those initial years we both assiduously avoided participant interference which might be interpreted as partisan. Later, there was a shift in our stances, prompted by our determination to precipitate a decision on whether to carry to logical conclusion the trend toward individualization of program planning and degree requirements. By the time the decision had been made, students and faculty viewed us as partisan. The subsequent change in Young's role, from ombudsman to coordinator of individualized educational planning under the provost, was a highly visible administrative shift, accompanying less effective brokering thereafter by Hinshaw as well. Had Hinshaw as president more consciously adopted, conscientiously adhered to, and publicly clarified the tenets of action anthropology to which we were both basically committed, our credibility as facilitators probably could have been considerably extended. The pros and cons of a strict actionist philosophy in a college presidency have been debated and contemplated more extensively in connection with the writing of this paper than they were during those initial years. At the heart of action anthropology is a clinical approach to learning:

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observing how a group utilizes inputs and makes and responds to decisions those inputs may precipitate. In the contexts of traditional anthropological investigation, the observer's inputs (usually in the form of information) are prompted altogether by the community's agenda; his observer status insures this. By contrast, the chief executive officer or the ombudsman of a campus community influences the community's agenda, if only unconsciously, simply by choosing to address one community need or problem ahead of another. For example, Hinshaw was by conviction and anthropological training drawn to the college's commitment to respond to needs of minority students and accordingly gave this high priority in his first years on campus. Another president undoubtedly would have had different priorities. Just as the community learned much about us by observing the choices we made in response to perceived needs and challenges, so we learned about the constituencies and community of Wilmington by observing how they made use of us and responded to our administrative roles. We made no conscious effort to use our positions to select problems or structure governance procedures simply to enhance learning opportunities. Since we were nevertheless in a position to do this, we could be suspected of unacceptable interference to the extent that our interest in systematically monitoring governance was public knowledge. Accordingly, we shared with only a few administrative and teaching colleagues the proposal quoted from above, in which we discussed hypotheses concerning the kinds of leadership stances or roles available to a president and the dynamics of interconstituency relations affecting the appropriateness and utility of those stances. Had the proposal been funded, our interest in monitoring governance would necessarily have become more visible and our objectives and procedures more carefully thought through. As it was, our procedure was one of noting after the fact how different problems and different degrees of interconstituency involvement in a decision altered leadership needs and possibilities. The appropriateness of leadership given was then assessed in terms of how efficiently action was agreed upon and how acceptable to those concerned the procedures and leadership appeared to be. As mentioned earlier, the involvement of the Strategies for Change team in documenting the four-year history of decision making in the academic area and in monitoring constituency attitudes enabled us to be more rigorous in our study than otherwise we could have been. The most important ethical issue raised by our research is whether in some roles the researching of role performance is incompatible with the proper performance of the role. When the role is surrounded by the aura of a service "calling," such as the ministry, for example, there may well be a degree of incompatibility. The college presidency (especially in small,

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private, church-related institutions) would be so classified by some people; by others it is considered as much a science as an art or calling, in need of as much empirical study as we can muster. Whether our efforts to learn while helping have been justified will depend in part on what we have learned and succeed in communicating to persons in positions to benefit from and apply this experience.

SMALL-COLLEGE GOVERNANCE IN A QUAKER CONTEXT The governing boards of many small private colleges differ from those of other institutions of postsecondary education in permitting their presidents considerable latitude in structuring their own as well as other administrative offices and roles. When presidents served customarily for one to three decades, this presidential prerogative produced considerable variation among campus communities in governance and degree of centralized decision making. Yet the former heavy handedness of presidents in small-college governance probably was less burdensome to the campus constituencies than has been the more recent experimentation with egalitarian governance, coupled with more frequent shifts in top administrators and governance philosophies (Cole 1976: 71-78). Hinshaw's predecessor at Wilmington had acceptably acted unilaterally in adding a dean-of-faculty position, and two yfears later Hinshaw, just as acceptably in the eyes of trustees, faculty, and students, merged the deanship and the vice-presidency for academic affairs in a new office of provost. In similar fashion he dissolved a dean-of-students position (preferring initially to stay closer to student affairs than had his predecessor) and unilaterally decided to experiment with an ombudsman. These changes were prompted by the conviction that for at least an interim period the state of Wilmington campus morale necessitated a president's mediation among its constituencies' needs and interests and that this required increased access to constituencies and feedback on their satisfaction with policies and procedures. The point is that Hinshaw was free to make these decisions about administrative organization and the president's role virtually unilaterally. Such latitude resulted not only from the tradition of presidential prerogative just mentioned, but also from the frustrations of securing and holding college presidents during the late 1960's, when campus unrest was at its height, and from the perceptions of Wilmington constituencies that the changes were motivated by Hinshaw's interest in decentralizing decision making and facilitating constituency and community self-determination. Hinshaw came to Wilmington with very little in the way of a personal agenda with regard to institutional

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mission or output goals, and his agenda with regard to process goals appeared to be well received. It was not that Wilmington had been characterized by authoritarian presidencies. The previous two presidents (1947-69) had sought consensus on major policy decisions. The problem that Hinshaw's immediate predecessor had encountered, and that Hinshaw increasingly encountered as well, was the distrust engendered by the informality of governance characteristic of Quaker educational communities. Quaker educational communities are archetypical of educational communities in general in one basic respect: they pretend to be much less political or politicized than they are, in the interest of perpetuating an image of consensual collegiality. Scott (1976:50) observes: To say, as I have heard it said, that "politics has no place in the university" or that "our system is collegial, not political," is naive at best, dishonest at worst that a political process is not overt and explicit does not mean that it does not exist; it simply means that it is covert, underground, informal, hidden, called by some other name. . . . In my experience the political processes of decision making in Academe are largely covert.

This is a harsh assessment, perhaps, and yet it will serve to accentuate the problems Quaker educational institutions face. The tendencies which produce the informality typical of colleges in general are encouraged at Wilmington by Quaker tenets of egalitarianism and decision making by consensus. These tenets result in heavy reliance on individual responsibility to the group (with a consequent deemphasis on management and leadership skills) and high value on each individual's growth or improvement potential (with a consequent reluctance to evaluate role performance or to let negative evaluation lead to termination of services). The price the community pays for these tenets is diffuseness in job descriptions, lack of accountability, and an informality in relationships and decision making which risks making them considerably more covert than the community would like to believe. The distinctions between formal and informal are between defined and undefined, explicit and implicit, routinized and ad hoc and in degrees of accessibility, openness, and accountability. In making these distinctions, we should make clear that it is only when informality is used to reduce access to the decision-making process that informal procedures should be regarded as covert. It is possible for an informal system to be quite overt and accessible; indeed, Quakers frequently opt for informal procedures because of the greater responsiveness and flexibility the informality can engender. 4 Herein lies the crux of the problem, however.

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A Quaker college community differs from a Quaker meeting community in a number of significant respects. A Quaker meeting does not have constituencies, and the membership usually is homogeneous enough in values and attitudes to permit high degrees of consensus on most decisions reached. The leader, or "clerk," is expected only to elicit the "sense of the meeting," and any overt attempt by the clerk to influence or impose a decision is unacceptable. The sense of the meeting differs from consensus in claiming to be the right or best decision possible. Consensus, as we define it, is simply sufficient agreement to insure implementation without dissension. The sense of the meeting is therefore consensus-based, but not all consensus-based decisions claim to be, or need to be, rooted in truth to permit effective action.5 As institutionalized in Quaker meetings for business, the procedures for decision making are highly formalized and overt, with universal access to the process insured. Because of the constraints of time and representation, the formal process is supplemented in many situations by informal substitutes. Because access in the formal system is insured, it is taken for granted in the informal procedures as well. It is within these contexts that the clerk role permits particularly effective leadership. To the extent that such leadership is unsanctioned, it must be exercised subtly and in nondirective ways, but within Quaker meeting communities an able clerk can acceptably move back and forth along the continuum of formal-informal procedures, molding consensus and interpreting differing opinions to mobilize for effective action. In a campus community, with many constituencies differing in needs and interests, this tendency to rely on informal procedures produces more suspicion and likelihood of covertness than a Quaker meeting community experiences. The fact that Quaker college campuses are unusually pluralistic culturally further aggravates the situation. At worst, community members with no orientation to Quaker tenets may perceive the informality as purposely designed to permit covert procedures to flourish. Given the vested interests of campus constituencies, the high levels of consensus characteristic of Quaker meetings are seldom attempted and rarely achieved. Lower levels of consensus are often achieved, however. More frequently, decisions conveniently regarded and labeled as consensus-based are simply majority decisions or negotiated decisions. The administrative challenge is to assess the level of consensus necessary for effective implementation of a given decision and then to achieve that level of consensus (or, at minimum, the appearance of it). In seeking consensus, the president of a college is seldom permitted the role characteristic of the Quaker meeting clerk. Instead, the available roles are brokering and mediating or, at worst, arbitrating. Herzog

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(1972:9) has drawn some useful distinctions among these roles as performed by fieldworkers in community development: In brokering, the fieldworker attempts to articulate, explain, and develop, to each other, the goals, life styles, and concerns of all groups within and affecting the community; and with the groups, to synthesize mutually satisfactory goal statements and programs of action. This task is not arbitration (because the fieldworker has no power to impose his solutions), nor mediation (because the fieldworker often goes beyond the encouragement of bargaining to himself suggesting combinations of goals and programs that have not occurred to other participants).

The two axes of comparison among the four roles (clerking, brokering, mediating, and arbitrating) of interest to us are the level of congruence among community members' expectations and needs, on the one hand, and the level of credibility or trust the administrator enjoys, on the other (see table 1). The more dissonance within the community, the more necessary and useful the brokering role becomes. Ability to broker, however, depends, on the several constituencies' identifying sufficiently with the administrator to permit him to interpret the interests and needs of one in terms of the values and expectations of another. If the administrator's credibility is low, the options are limited to mediating or, at worst, arbitrating confrontation. Table 1.

Roles available to the college administrator Interconstituency congruence Low

Leadership credibility

High . . Brokering Low . . Arbitrating

High Clerking Mediating

It is less common now than during the late 1960's and early 1970's for college administrators to be reduced to arbitration. More commonly, the available roles are brokering and mediating. These latter roles perhaps differ most significantly in the levels of consensus deemed possible and requisite for action and hence the degree of influence the leader can exercise: comparatively little when mediating and considerably more when brokering. One hypothesis is that the flexibility permitting rapid decision making and fundamental (radical) change is greatest when conditions require brokering leadership. Successful brokering should, in turn, increase congruence; the edges of constituency disagreement gradually blur as the brokering shifts emphasis away from divisive differences toward the shared interests

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which unite. Brokering is basically a screening process, and in a campus community it is justifiable only as long as constituencies want disagreement played down in order to unite on shared objectives and concerns. Constituencies thus brought into closer cooperation can reach the point where bonds can withstand open confrontation of differences or differences are in fact reduced. In this case, brokering becomes less appropriate or acceptable, and clerking or mediation becomes necessary in seeking the higher levels of consensus now possible and necessary for effective action. A s leadership needs shift, it becomes problematic whether the same person who has been heavily involved in brokering can serve satisfactorily in the clerking role. Brokering can easily be perceived as "wheeling and dealing," especially in retrospect, after congruence has appreciably increased. If, structurally, the same person is expected to continue providing leadership, the consequence is likely to be mediation rather than clerking. Whether mediation is effective in reaching and implementing decisions then depends on how high the level of consensus must be. If unrealistically high, then impatience and frustration are apt to reduce congruence again to the point where brokering or arbitration becomes necessary. In a college community, the role of trustees is particularly important when mediation is called for. Because of their authority, trustees can give leaders the backing needed to permit effective action when the level of consensus would otherwise be too low for making or implementing decisions. Trustees can also slow the erosion of administrative credibility by supporting movement by leaders along the brokering-clerking axis. Possibly the key to protecting this flexibility lies in a division of labor among institutional leaders which does not require any one person (e.g., the president) to shoulder responsibility for all brokering. Further, if conditions call for considerable arbitration and brokering, the person leading in these capacities should not be expected to lead when dissonance has lessened. If a president is expected to provide the appropriate leadership in any and all contexts of college community life, the result is likely to be erosion of credibility and institutional paralysis. The dilemma which Quaker educational communities face is not unlike that which comparably egalitarian American Indian groups faced in having to shift from peace keeping to war making (i.e., from maintenance of the status quo in good times to coping with threats to survival in bad times). They institutionalized two kinds of leadership and did not require persons who served as peace chiefs also to serve as war chiefs.

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A CASE HISTORY We find this model of interrelated leadership roles useful in charting a number of decisions reached at Wilmington from 1971 through 1975. Through observation of the informal and formal procedures utilized in reaching these decisions, we have learned much about the effectiveness of these procedures. What we have learned will be best conveyed through a case history of decision making and response. Morale on campus was low when Hinshaw assumed the presidency, partly because the college had been without a president for almost two years. Interim conditions had accentuated the informality and selective access of students and faculty to decision making which had characterized the latter years of the previous administration. A number of major decisions — on expansion of the physical plant, experimentation with off-campus work and study, interdisciplinary curricula, and servicerelated schooling by contract with the Peace Corps — had been made virtually unilaterally by the administration. Students felt sufficiently disenfranchised to seek input through organized lobbying and demonstration. Tensions were apparent along racial lines, along departmental lines, and along lines of student life-style preferences. These tensions had alienated alumni and the wider community to the point that, when a controversial yearbook was issued several weeks before Hinshaw's arrival on campus, the alumni council, elders of the city of Wimington, and leaders of the parent religious body felt it necessary publicly to disavow the college. Town-gown relationships could hardly have been more strained. Hinshaw's attention turned immediately to learning and identifying with the different constituencies' perceptions and expectations of the college. His pronouncements on accessibility and decentralization of decision making were well received. With empowerment as a platform, it was only a matter of time before the depth of institutional and presidential commitment to this concept would be tested. The Black students chose the occasion of Hinshaw's inauguration to take over the administration building; what better opportunity for them to make the point that Wilmington had a long way to go in becoming the responsive, viable multicultural community to which the college claimed to be committed? Fortunately, Sol Tax and Fred Gearing were guests on campus that week and helped turn the inauguration into a deeply moving and instructive community "happening." During the initial months, Hinshaw was restricted much of the time to an arbitrating role. Tension and dissonance were remarkably high for a small campus community, in part because of the diversity of people

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attracted to Wilmington and in part because several interest groups regarded it as necessary and appropriate to accentuate those differences through confrontation. The administrative changes mentioned earlier and his leadership in arbitration gradually strengthened Hinshaw's credibility among the several constituencies, particularly among students, who viewed the decision to experiment with an ombudsman as especially advantageous to them. With Young's assistance the following fall a number of campus needs were identified and solutions sought to the satisfaction of the principal constituencies. In the area of health services and parietal rules, for example, college policies were brought into line with student needs in the areas of sex counseling, assistance in cases of drug abuse, and consumption of beer on campus. The decision to permit beer consumption in residence halls within the restrictions of state law will illustrate the brokering role which characterized our offices during that period of comparatively rapid and effective decision making. Students for several years had been lobbying for a change in the regulation prohibiting beer consumption on campus. The parent religious body had opposed drinking on principle; trustees and administration were primarily concerned with the hypocrisy of unenforceable rules; faculty basically were neutral on the issue; and alumni and local community sentiment was that nothing should be conceded to students employing the pressure tactics of recent years. Our first step was to interpret to student leadership the importance of reducing the visibility of student pressure. A student referendum revealing 85 percent student support for liberalizing college policy accordingly was not publicized by student government or by the campus newspaper, permitting Hinshaw the necessary time to judge the extent to which the rules could be liberalized without arousing undue negative public sentiment among principally off-campus constituencies. At the appropriate time, the trustees received, and accepted, a recommendation to permit drinking in dormitory rooms, a recommendation which had been in the making for several weeks by the College Council (composed equally of students, faculty, and administrative staff). No announcement of a change in policy was issued to the local press, but on the basis of some evidence from another Quaker college that campus beer consumption in fact lessened after prohibition was rescinded, Hinshaw corresponded with the clerks of all Quaker meetings in the area explaining administration and trustees' hope to remove the source of friction with students and possibly even reduce the amount of beer consumption on campus by permitting consumption in dormitory rooms. In the absence of any visible student pressure precipitating the decision, none of the off-campus constituencies chose to make an issue of the decision. Brokering accompanied negotiation and discussion with committees

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and was particularly useful (as in the case of the change in beer policy) in communication between groups where values and expectations of the college most varied (cultural and racial minorities, conservative and elderly sectors of the alumni and sponsoring church body) and where insistence upon face-to-face deliberation would have raised the visibility of such differences to a point where consensus probably would have been unattainable. Effective brokering depended on constituencies' confidence in the brokers' understanding of their points of view and awareness and acceptance of considerable diversity in constituencies' values and vested interests. With our (and others') visible commitment to cultural pluralism in general and to a culturally heterogeneous campus community in particular, the foundation grew gradually for acceptance of at least the unavoidability of pluralism in factional and constituency expectations. The more idealistic members championed this diversity. The challenge of Quakerism always has been the reconciliation of differences through their understanding and acceptance, something akin to "agreeing to disagree." It is the joining of a commitment to respect deeply felt differences with a conviction that what is shared should bind more than differences are permitted to divide. Obviously, in a campus community members will differ greatly in understanding and acceptance of these tenets, and throughout the first two years in our administrative offices the line between arbitration and brokering remained a fine one. In 1973 the lobbying by a minority of students and faculty for more radical change in student-faculty roles in the learning endeavor convinced us, the provost, and faculty leadership that first Hinshaw's and eventually Young's influence would be appropriately exerted in precipitating a faculty decision on whether to individualize student degree programs and do away with the traditional distribution requirements for the B.S. and B.A. degrees. Although our sympathies were with the lobbying students and faculty, we made clear that the decision had to reside with the full faculty, given the implications of the change for faculty role and departmental autonomy. We accordingly used our influence to discourage student pressuring of faculty in the subsequent debate, extending over many weeks. Our open support of faculty prerogative in reviewing faculty role eroded key students' confidence in us as brokers, even though the role change under consideration was prompted by our perception of student interests and needs. The history of this decision and the shift in our roles warrants more detailed description and analysis. We are assisted in the documentation of the making, implementation, and community assessment of this decision by the study of Wilmington curricular changes from 1968 through 1975 undertaken by Arthur Chickering and colleagues under the auspices of the Strategies for Change consortium.

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Experimentation with problem-focused (rather than disciplinefocused) interdisciplinary courses at the freshman level had begun on a pilot basis in 1968 under the leadership of the provost (then dean of faculty) and led to receipt of National Endowment for the Humanities funding for 1971-74 for extension of problem-focused study through faculty additions and faculty on-campus training. A logical outgrowth of this trend was the option of student-designed "cluster" majors, blending the offerings of several departments with off-campus study in a unique course of study leading to the B.S. or B.A. degree. Simultaneously, Wilmington joined with several other colleges in developing (in large part from Sol Tax's initiative) a social sciences M.A. at the University of Chicago which permitted students to design a B.A.-related interdisciplinary M.A. in conjunction with or following study at the undergraduate level. Spurred in part by these new institutional affiliations, several faculty proposals for contract learning and replacement of departmental with divisional requirements surfaced in the Educational Policies Committee early in 1972. These deliberations produced committee proposals to the full faculty in April, prompting debate throughout the spring and summer in workshops funded by NEH and affiliated with Strategies for Change. The principal issues were student flexibility in program planning versus breadth and rigor of study and the procedures for reaching satisfactory resolution of differences. These issues continued to dominate the faculty retreat early in the fall of that year, when again Strategies resource personnel shared with the provost the major leadership. Two sets of factors led to Hinshaw's increased involvement in this dialogue through the fall term. First, attitudinal data gathered under Strategies auspices over the preceding nine months revealed considerably more unity, institutional vitality, and readiness for innovation than the deadlocked faculty deliberations suggested. Second, the stalemate appeared to result in part from disaffection with the faculty and administrative leadership (i.e., the Educational Policies Committee) and the existing procedures for seeking consensus among the faculty. Specifically, the Institutional Functioning Inventory (IFI), an Educational Testing Service instrument which had been administered the previous winter, showed Wilmington well over the 75th percentile (compared with national norms) in academic freedom, in human diversity, in concerr for undergraduate learning, in democratic governance, in concern for innovation, and in institutional esprit. Beyond these data, Strategies staff interviews during the spring of 1972 had focused in part on Wilmington's Quaker-influenced style of governance. Most respondents agreed that the push for a consensus, or "sense of

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the m e e t i n g " which all could live with, was a g o o d idea in the abstract but of questionable utility in practice. It was unduly time-consuming, a c c o r d ing to some, and it stifled dissent, according t o others. T h e following are representative q u o t e s f r o m s o m e faculty interviews (Lindquist 1 9 7 7 : 2 8 ) : The sense o f the meeting is not always the sense o f the meeting. It is very important who is determining the sense of the meeting as to what decisions get made. You must be really opposed to something to stop it. Y o u feel terrible if you stop something. It's an appeal to you to be a good sport. Genteel ramming through, sometimes. We're using it, but we haven't been educated to it. There are dreadful delays. These cause impatience. . . . It was all incomprehensible to me at first that things could go on this way. But the more I got used to it, the more I felt it was a pretty effective way to get things accomplished. Basically, the faculty reservations about decision-making

procedures

c e n t e r e d o n their a d e q u a c y given the heterogeneity o f Wilmington faculty and students. A g a i n , some representative faculty observations (Lindquist 1 9 7 7 : 3 0 ) : I'm not sure at all you can have in a small community a great variety of cultures coming in conflict with each other and still survive. Common agreement and values hold us together, but I'm not sure what that whole something is. The whole package is so diverse that you can't get a handle on it. The increase in Blacks has pointed out some problems that we're not ready for. . . . We're not geared either in our curriculum or financially for the kind of student coming from different kinds of backgrounds. I'm skeptical. We will find ourselves with a diversity we want, but not the ability to take advantage of it. A n d the opinion o f a student: Diversity is very hard to deal with. Y o u must sit down [together], you must think, you must tolerate. People don't like to do that. Faculty and administration can meet [students] intellectually for several minutes a day, times three, and go home to their own culture. I can't. I go to a multicultural dorm. Either tolerate it or bite the dust. I must deal with it practically. [For faculty] it's a different problem; they can philosophize about it. Whose consensus speaks the loudest? It's exciting but it's depressing at t i m e s . . . . I expected peace and tranquility to study for four years. C o n c e r n with unwieldiness in decision making led that fall to facultyinitiated modification o f faculty decision making, permitting voting and t h r e e - q u a r t e r s ' majority rule for m a t t e r s j u d g e d o f m i n o r i m p o r t a n c e by an a g e n d a c o m m i t t e e , but still requiring a " s e n s e of the m e e t i n g " in m o r e important matters.

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The leadership stance Hinshaw was led to assume under these conditions took the form first of a high-visibility position paper ("Where we are headed and how we get there") and thereafter of a less visible brokering role. In retrospect, the judgment that the community had not yet coalesced sufficiently to dispense with brokering possibly was premature. In any case, the brokering (which led eventually to the provost's ability to "clerk" a sense-of-the-meeting decision by faculty to individualize degree requirements) was the last significant brokering permitted us among the on-campus constituencies. The brokering process involved meeting with faculty by academic divisions to discuss academic mission; experimenting with an ad hoc planning committee to mobilize faculty leadership more effectively than existing committees appeared able to do; involving Young through his visit to another college where faculty ownership of decisions similar to those under consideration at Wilmington had been effectively established; and, as an outgrowth of this latter visit, encouraging a series of five off-campus retreats to strengthen a sense of faculty ownership of the decisions to be made at Wilmington. A related endeavor was arranging for that year's annual Strategies workshop, held at Wilmington (bringing resource personnel and teams from other member institutions of the consortium to the campus). From this workshop emerged a Strategies recommendation that Wilmington administer the ETS Institutional Goals Inventory (IGI), in anticipation that the results would indicate more unity in objectives within and between constituencies than the skeptical were inclined to believe (just as the Institutional Functioning Inventory had revealed higher esprit and confidence in institutional functioning than we had been led to assume, given our indulgence in self-criticism). The IGI asks each constituency (students, faculty, administration, and trustees) to rank ten general goals (comprising a series of more specific objectives), such as individual personal development, graduate professional training, vocational training, public service, etc., in terms of both perceived current attention received and desired future emphasis. The instrument permits an assessment of intraconstituency and interconstituency congruence with regard to emphases and priorities. In general, agreement on top-ranked goals among the four constituencies was higher than agreement within the major constituencies of faculty and students. Pertinent to the issue of increased student prerogative and program planning, all constituencies united in advocating "individual personal development," although there was substantial disagreement about the attention this objective was then receiving. Predictably, faculty (and trustees) perceived more current emphasis on the goal than did students

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and administrators. Our impatience with faculty progress in implementing more flexibility for students reflected our awareness of and possibly greater sensitivity to student interest in this area, an awareness enhanced by the ombudsman's ear to student opinion. In general, administrators felt desirable goals were receiving less current emphasis than did the other constituencies; hence the stronger administrative push toward change. Of particular interest was the concern expressed by all constituencies that more attention be paid to "maintaining a climate in which communication throughout the organizational structure is open and candid" and "maintaining a climate of mutual trust and respect among students, faculty, and administrators." This concern was strong despite the fact that, in the assessment by all constituencies of current valuing of community, freedom, and democratic governance goals, Wilmington ranked higher than the ETS norms. It seems fair to conclude that Wilmington expects considerably more of itself in these respects than does the average liberal-arts college. Along other axes of comparison, faculty were more concerned to strengthen professional training than were the other constituencies and less concerned to promote vocational preparation. In general, students evidenced less interest in strengthening intellectual development than did faculty, the latter placing this at the top of their list of priorities while students placed it fifth. Faculty felt too much attention was being given to foreign study, work-study programs, and similar off-campus experiential learning endeavors, while students wanted more such opportunities and credit by examination for more independent learning. These differences, however, disguise the wide range of opinion on objectives within the faculty. Emphasis on research (standard deviation 1.13), traditional religiousness (1.08), graduate professional training (1.07), social egalitarianism (1.03), off-campus learning (1.02), meeting local needs (.99), accountability efficiency (.93), and individual personal development (.90) all showed considerable faculty disagreement. Strategies staff members were centrally involved in interpreting the data to the community, and their report noted the following (Lindquist 1977:54); Because goals stressing individual development, both intellectual and personal, were highly emphasized, the exercise may have served to solidify support for the individualized program planning. Then again, the only moderate faculty interest and considerable difference of opinion about locally oriented, vocational, and off-campus programs suggests that what Wilmington faculty desired was individualizing the on-campus program, not the kind of outreach described in the President's earlier memo and in descriptions of the likely content of future

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individual programs. One might predict from those data a campus-bound implementation of Individualized Program Planning.

It was a Strategies staff suggestion that Wilmington benefit from the experiences of Ottawa University (Kansas) in balancing administrative support with faculty initiative and ownership of curricular decisions comparable to those with which the Wilmington community was wrestling. Young was selected by Hinshaw to visit Ottawa, and an ad hoc committee of Educational Policies Committee and Long-Range Planning Team members was pulled together to hear Young's report and to decide on next appropriate steps. Strategies and Ottawa personnel had emphasized the utility of small-group discussion across departmental lines as an alternative to meetings of the full faculty. They further advocated retreats away from campus to permit sustained interaction. Accordingly, Young and the ad hoc committee recommended a series of retreats, to be held on five consecutive evenings over supper at a nearby farm. Faculty members were assigned to each to insure a cross-section of departmental and philosophical allegiances in each group, the groups consisting of twelve faculty members, a trustee, Young, Hinshaw, and the provost. As ombudsman, Young exercised a highly visible leadership role in these discussions, encouraged in this by president, provost, and the ad hoc committee in acknowledgment of the leadership vacuum which had gradually evolved and the comparative neutrality which Young had maintained in earlier faculty debates. Out of these retreats came a mandate for the ad hoc committee, with Young's leadership, to put together a proposal for a new program of individualized educational planning. The central component of the proposal was a learning contract "which begins with the student's personal, intellectual and career goals and which enables him to maximize his options in planning and commencing a life-long learning process." Programs were to be put together by the student and a committee of three faculty advisors. Collegewide distribution requirements would be dropped; faculty roles would place increased emphasis on advising and coordinating independent study. Faculty development workshops, training leaves, and growth contracts would be introduced, replacing the sabbatical leave system. Career orientation would be enhanced by engaging local practitioners in advising. Although the retreats had prompted some open and good-humored jesting about a strategy of "dividing to conquer," the faculty response to the steps taken to build consensus and confidence was generally positive. At the subsequent faculty meeting, called to determine just what level of consensus had developed, the ad hoc committee presented its proposal.

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Of the 70 persons with faculty status present, 60 approved the proposal. After subsequent discussion in which the 10 dissenting persons were encouraged to express their concerns, it was agreed a high enough level of consensus had been demonstrated to warrant proceeding with individualization of program planning. The procedure followed, and the unusually high consensus achieved was closer to a "clerked" sense of the meeting than any we experienced at Wilmington (in the context of full-faculty deliberation on a major decision). While the student body had been represented at the faculty meeting (as had the trustees), it rapidly became apparent that student leaders felt unjustifiably excluded from a decision which, admittedly, affected students a great deal. Some faculty had advocated inclusion of student representatives in the off-campus retreats, but the more frequently voiced concern (which we supported) was to limit the participation to faculty. Too late we realized that we had not communicated adequately to student leadership the importance of increased faculty ownership of the decision under consideration. Paradoxically, in an effort to respond to the expressed needs of students we had incurred considerable student suspicion. Our open support of faculty prerogative in reviewing faculty role had eroded students' confidence in us as brokers. Students accused us of manipulating the faculty and played on a few faculty members' lingering uneasiness with respect either to the desirability of individualization or to the faculty's ability to make the shifts which individualization would require. The latter ability was the chief concern of the vocal students, and their taunts (largely through the student newspaper) drove a wedge between those in the community who wanted to believe the faculty could deliver on the commitments the decision implied and those who doubted whether it should or could. In general, faculty resented the student claims of an administration-imposed decision, and the student skepticism served to meld faculty determination to implement the decision. This response of the faculty, coupled with the inclusion of students in the summer planning, blunted the wedge. Some of the most alienated students, and one of the faculty members most opposed to individualization, opted to leave, and by fall the die was clearly cast for individualization. Receipt of Lilly Endowment funding later that year to assist in the transition over the next two years increased community confidence in the institution's ability to implement the decision. The die also had been cast for shifts in our respective roles: from ombudsman to coordinator of the transition to individualized program planning for Young (under the provost's direction) and from brokering to mediation for Hinshaw. An alienated student newspaper editor used his final issue of the paper to review the decision to permit beer in the

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dormitory rooms. His intent was clear: to carry to alumni and Quakers in the community the message that they should not permit the president to represent them in a brokering role. To be confined to the mediating role was in effect to be limited to the formal organization of community governance. By the fall of 1973 it was clear that any major decision affecting all constituencies would require the reaching of consensus through formal procedures. The adequacy of this system was to be put to stringent tests which in time would lead to a systematic review of formal governance by an ad hoc committee of the Board of Trustees. Cooperation with a new public community college located on the outskirts of Wilmington was an issue which precipitated a number of difficult decisions with exceedingly far-reaching implications. The previous year the possibility had surfaced of establishing a public technical college in facilities located near Wilmington on what formerly had been an Air Force base. The decision to endorse a citizens' application for such a college had been quickly and easily made by trustee and administrative action; given the special characteristics of a technical college, no competition with Wilmington College was anticipated. A series of delays ensued, and in late 1973 the Ohio State Board of Regents decided not to charter any more technical colleges in the state. The options presented local citizens were no public postsecondary institution in the region or a community college which would offer Associate degrees in liberal arts as well as technical skills. The latter option entailed merging a branch campus of the University of Cincinnati (30 miles south of Wilmington) with the Wilmington Air Base facility in a community college serving five counties. The president's role in the subsequent negotiations was clear and acceptable to all of the college's constituencies: to protect the autonomy and viability of Wilmington as a private four-year Quaker college. The threat to Wilmington College lay in losing our local southwestern Ohio students to a publicly subsidized institution charging one-fifth the Wilmington tuition. Five years previously, when more than half of Wilmington's students had come from out of state, the loss would have been less critical, but with a growing dependency on a steady increase of in-state and especially southwestern Ohio students since 1971, Wilmington might well be unable to survive competition with a public institution. Our options as first perceived were to take a conciliatory stance, in the hope of cooperating maximally with the new institution, or to oppose the chartering of a new institution and risk alienation of some local community support as well as officials of the new college in the event the Regents decided to proceed over our protest (as we had reason to believe they eventually would do). On-campus constituencies generally were inclined

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toward this latter option, while a nucleus of trustees, faculty, and administrators were intrigued with the potential for pioneering cooperation with the state along lines of private-public college cooperation already under way in Illinois. Clearly, none of the college's constituencies could be left out of the debate, and the formal structure of committees and councils was involved wherever interest warranted. The challenge in these deliberations was to communicate candidly with on-campus groups while not letting the heat of the on-campus debate compromise off-campus exploration of options involving interinstitutional cooperation. The solution to this dilemma was heavy reliance on the Long-Range Planning Team. Deliberations within this team, within which all constituencies were represented, were fully candid, while access to information disseminated within that group was more restricted than in previous years. This arrangement, coupled with periodic reports to the full campus community, permitted reasonably effective planning. As negotiations with the Regents, proponents of the new college, and University of Cincinnati officials proceeded, it became clear that the Regents were determined to charter the new two-campus institution despite University of Cincinnati's and Wilmington's cautious opposition. The University of Cincinnati accordingly decided to use the anticipated loss of a branch campus to bargain for other considerations from the Regents, and Wilmington was left with only one course: to offer endorsement of and cooperation with the new institution in return for as many guarantees of mutually beneficial relationships as possible. Continued opposition to the chartering of the new college would, at best, produce a Regents' resolution to limit the new college to technical education initially, postponing for a few years the inevitable growth of competing liberal-arts programs. Guarantees restricting such competition in the initial charter were essential, and obtaining these guarantees depended on a cooperative stance and endorsement of the Regents' proposal. The fact that all of the various options (from adamant opposition to the Regents' proposal to more cooperation than the Regents envisioned or even desired) had their adherents on the Long-Range Planning Team enabled Hinshaw simply to mediate until a consensus began to build favoring cooperation. Administrative leadership was exercised principally in exploring more rapidly than the team as a whole could do the ways in which individualized educational planning, financial status, community relations, and statewide educational planning could benefit from a highly visible cooperative enterprise. Throughout, the objective was to keep campus esprit as high as possible in a situation in which growing financial exigency was assumed by some off-campus observers to be motivating Wilmington College's exploration of state assistance

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(erroneous) and assumed by almost everyone on campus to make either opposition to or cooperation with the state a major financial risk. Making the most of our deteriorating bargaining position with the state, we opted to strive for strengthened esprit by championing publicly the educational advantages to students of southwestern Ohio, and to struggling private institutions in Ohio, of imaginative cooperation with the state. The nature of our proposals on this cooperation evolved slowly, influenced by experimentation under way in other states (some examples of which faculty delegations examined) and by negotiations in progress between another private (but non-church-related) Ohio college and the Regents to replace the private school's first two years with a community college Associate of Arts program. That radical a change was not advocated by any sector of the Wilmington College community, but proposals to provide most or all of the liberal-arts instruction for the community college students on the Wilmington College campus were carefully considered, and such a proposal eventually was submitted by Wilmington trustees to the Regents. Before that decision was reached, however, months of deliberation within the Long-Range Planning Team and among campus constituencies virtually exhausted the energies of all concerned and produced insufficient consensus to permit a campus recommendation to the trustees. The Long-Range Planning Team, by spring, had reached considerable agreement, but the many unanswered (and unanswerable) questions prevented campuswide consensus on any proposal, given the need to present the conditions of Wilmington's endorsement of the proposed public college to the Regents by year's end (June 1974). The trustees accordingly took an increasingly active role in the deliberations of the team. While this degree of trustee involvement was greater than either trustees or other constituencies welcomed, given the magnitude of the issues involved it was not challenged. While there was no concerted faculty or student opposition to the resultant proposal to the Regents (i.e., to offer, under contract, to open Wilmington classes to community college students, in return for guarantees that a parallel set of competing offerings will not be instituted on the new campus), the lack of any visible consensus encouraged continued debate and debilitating opposition by faculty and students. Had the proposal benefited from the consensus established for initiating individualized program planning, continued opposition by faculty would have been regarded as unjustified. Student opposition to the trustees' proposal focused on the proposal itself, not on the procedures followed in reaching the decision. By contrast, student opposition to the earlier decision to individualize program planning had been directed primarily at

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the process. The important difference in responses to the two decisions lay in the painstaking adherence to the formal committee system of governance and mediation by administrative leadership in reaching the decision to propose cooperation with the community college. Disguised by the magnitude of the decision to be reached was the dependence of the formal system and mediation on trustee intervention for getting a decision made. Neither the trustees nor the other constituencies would have felt comfortable with the trustees' intervening to decide the issues of individualization of degree requirements. Convinced that the formal system's adequacy would remain linked to a level of trustee involvement deemed inappropriate by the community, and yet equally convinced of the community's commitment to relying on the formal system for the immediate future, Hinshaw raised the question of trustee role in governance in various contexts after the decision to cooperate with the new community college had been reached. The first context was administrative organization and functioning. Here Hinshaw requested that the trustees appoint an ad hoc trustee committee to review the formal system. The committee was promptly appointed. The dependence upon informal procedures in the past and the lack of formal provision for evaluation and accountability quickly surfaced, and the committee's request for clearer job descriptions of officers and committees was not contested. The second context was curricular organization, involving reallocations of personnel and financial resources to accommodate the influx of community-college students in the freshman and sophomore classes. Reduced resources for instruction in junior and senior years necessitated sharper focusing of resources than previously deemed appropriate or necessary. Neither the propriety not the necessity of trustee intervention in decisions of this nature had been accepted by trustees or faculty by the time Hinshaw left Wilmington's presidency to return to teaching. It remains to be seen whether the formal system, strengthened as it has been by trustee review, can meet the challenges it faces. We anticipate that its ability to do so will continue to depend on heavy trustee involvement in making and supporting decisions which carry the comparatively low levels of consensus that mediation usually produces. If this vacuum is not filled acceptably by trustees, we anticipate a gradual increase in dissonance and reliance on informal alternatives, including an administrative brokering role.

HINSHAW'S CONCLUSIONS We endeavored to use key administrative positions within Wilmington

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College to help the campus community identify needs, reconcile differences, and realize the objectives of its diverse constituencies. In the process we brought our anthropological training to bear on learning about effective governance in such an institutional setting. A formal system of committees and mediation in leadership provide the most visible and acceptable modification of Quaker governance for community deliberation and decision making. Comparatively high levels of consensus, established through constituencywide or campuswide meetings, are required for effective implementation of the decisions reached. The limitations, in terms of efficiency, of this formal system produce varying degrees of reliance on informal alternatives, and the monitoring of shifts in reliance on one or the other of these systems in reaching several decisions has clarified some of the strengths and weaknesses of each. The more fully the formal system is adhered to, the more visible the constituency differences in opinions, values, and vested interests become. Hence, paradoxically, the more difficult it becomes to achieve the levels of consensus requisite for effective action. Given the difficulties inherent in relying on the formal system, the community has depended heavily during recent tumultuous years on informal procedures for achieving the consensus necessary for responding to constituencies' needs. Brokering roles have been central to this informal system during a period of considerable diversity in values and interests among the college's constituencies. As brokering has given way to mediating, with the president attempting to provide the leadership in both roles, the articulation of informal and formal systems has weakened, focusing attention on an authority vacuum which only trustees can acceptably fill. A more acceptable long-range solution would appear to be an institutionalized division of labor between administrative officers to provide for mediating and clerking leadership, when community integration permits, by someone who is spared the responsibility for arbitration and brokering when these roles are required. The peace chief should not undertake to be the war chief as well. The credibility of leadership requisite for effective brokering and clerking in a Quaker institution is remarkably difficult to sustain. The fundamental problem Wilmington faces is acceptance, without regret or apology, of governance which produces less than full consensus and leadership which falls short of the clerking ideal. The heterogeneity of a campus community such as Wilmington and the financial pressures on all campuses in the 1970's produce changing levels of unity on goals and procedures. The leadership needs of the community change accordingly. While the tenets of Quakerism permit action in contexts of high tension and diversity of viewpoints, Quaker governance is designed for and most

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effective in contexts of considerable mutual trust and unity in expectations with regard to goals and procedures. The solution to this dilemma in Quaker institutions, characterized by unusual heterogeneity in clientele, has been considerable informality in governance. When we joined the Wilmington community it was not clear to anyone what the limits of departure from formal procedures and clerking in decision making might be. These limits were ascertainable only by acting and observing the community's reactions. There is no one "best" mode of governance for colleges in general or Quaker institutions in particular. Under ideal circumstances, a range of leadership roles and governance procedures will be required in any college community. What we can try to achieve is more general awareness on any given campus of the structural characteristics of colleges which complicate governance and clarification of the limits within which leadership can effectively and acceptably be given. Action anthropology is an administrative orientation useful for furthering this awareness and clarification.

YOUNG'S CONCLUSIONS Questions of success or failure are always difficult and painful. For the action anthropologist, who has more than one principal role involvement with the subject, both the difficulty and the pain of this assessment increase exponentially. In addition to the criteria of each of the various audiences, there is one's own less generous scrutiny of how well these several commitments have been balanced. In performing both as administrators and as anthropologists, we opened ourselves to evaluations by the standards of both of these communities. By setting our own expectations of success in our dual roles, we raised the marks, perhaps unrealistically but nonetheless really. Administratively, our actions may have supported the critical balance of survival for Wilmington College during a threatening period: preventing further deterioration of interconstituency relations, securing financial backing and opening new avenues for admissions recruiting through major revision of the academic program, and negotiating a compatible relationship with a new neighboring postsecondary institution were all essential contributions toward the school's continuing existence. While the decision-making structures utilized for these movements achieved the community involvement and ownership necessary for each to succeed, however, they did not engender the ongoing communication and awareness of constituency interdependency which we sought. While our observations as anthropologists are useful in explaining what

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was happening at the time, they provide, at best, an "as i f ' understanding. They lack the precision requisite for prediction or for providing a good administrative tool for bringing full participation and agreement into community decision making. In concluding this description of our fouryear experience, however, we can share useful insight into inherent weaknesses of our approach. Our research includes a set of basic assumptions, a set of objectives, and a structural model. The assumptions are founded in the disciplinary matrix of action anthropology, the exemplar for which is the experience of the Fox project. The implicit assumptions of that experiment with selective researcher intervention, translated to fit the particulars of our backgrounds and roles and of Wilmington College, became the following: 1 a. Anthropology provides insight into the situations, issues, and problems of various subcultural groups. lb. This insight can facilitate understanding and communication across subcultural boundaries. 1 c. Improving intergroup communication and understanding by lessening threat and perceptual noise can increase the effectiveness of multigroup decision making. 2a. Wilmington College and its constituencies may be viewed as a multicultural community. 2b. Administrators (i.e., president and ombudsman) can act as action anthropologists in not imposing personal values or solutions. 2c. Effective community decision making can be facilitated by "action anthropologist" administrators through involving all constituencies as fully as possible in decisions. 3. Heterogeneous community wide participation in decision making maximizes the satisfaction of intraconstituency identity and goals without detracting from community ownership of and participation in decisions. 4. Modes of decision making must change with fluctuations in interconstituency congruence and in level of credibility of administrators. An integrating image for this set of assumptions is a state of metastable equilibrium, maintaining a stable composition and stable relationships only in the absence of a catalyst. The community is the sum of its parts, not including the administrator, and the job of the administrator is to increase effective communication and cooperation within this community as decisions become necessary without disturbing the composition itself. The objectives of our involvement can be more simply stated. Administratively, we hoped to increase the effectiveness of decision making without further disenfranchising any constituency of the Wilmington

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College community. In long-range perspective, we hoped to increase satisfying participation by all constituencies in the many decisions necessary for a small community facing rapid and threatening change. Our anthropological objective was to develop a structural model with suitable precision to use to effect responsive community decisions without affecting the decisions made. Our structural model was that judging the degree of presence of interconstituency congruence and administration credibility allows selection of the most appropriate mode of decision making and anticipation of the resulting degree of constituency and community involvement and ownership. Ostensibly, what was being tested was the model. Both the assumptions and the objectives were central elements in the appointment of Hinshaw as president and later of Young as ombudsman. They were also conscious and much discussed between us prior to our arriving at Wilmington. Both the assumptions and the objectives took into account the realities of Wilmington's situation as perceived by its various members: the interconstituency dissonance, the urgency of crucial decisions, and the importance of acceptance and ownership of the decisions by all of the various constituencies. We believe our experience confirms the validity and the utility of the model for understanding the community decision-making history described by our research, at least in an "as i f ' sense. It does not replicate the internal awarenesses of the various constituencies, nor does it purport to do so. With additional testing and refinement, we believe it holds promise for anticipating appropriate modes of decision making in heterogeneous communities and particularly in Quaker educational institutions. O f more significance, however, is that, while we were busy testing the model, it was the assumptions which were being put to the test, and this prevents confirmation of the model by our research. Flaws in the assumptions are numerous. That anthropology provides its practitioners special insight is attested to by its continuing existence as a discipline, by its academic legitimacy, and by its swelling ranks, to mention only a few of the possible indicators. That understanding leads to successful communication, however, can be readily challenged by any classroom teacher of anthropology, and classroom teaching remains the single most significant tradition of imparting our knowledge and procedures. Unlike economics, political science, and even sociology, our discipline does not provide us with visible and tangible tools of the trade with which we could identify to the Wilmington community our efforts to objectify our roles and the "learning-while-helping" stance we adopted. Whether a small college campus with a formal raison d'etre replete with motto and school song,

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yet a highly transitory body of subscribers/members, may be viewed as a "community" in anthropological convention is arguable. In the eyes of its members, is a community merely the sum of its parts, or does it exist in a vital mythology which incorporates all but resembles none of its participants? If not the former, then it is unlikely that a community will long permit its leader simply to arrange cooperation. Attempts to share an awareness of the anthropological perspective with the community were met with bewilderment, and even the most benevolent of our colleagues found our approach frustrating. We saw the various changes in our roles as conscious and orderly, with likely outcomes and implications. Other members of the community tended to see them as false starts along a path of choices increasingly constrained by financial exigency and community resistance. This increasing resistance, reducing administrative effectiveness, is the single most important outcome of our research. From our strength came our failure, and from this failure comes the usefulness of our research. What we did not adequately understand was the need of the community and its various constituencies to understand us, and to understand us in some framework conventional to them. In our rush to maintain our "outsiderness," not to inject ourselves and our solutions and value judgments into the community, we denied the community any point of reference or even of departure from its perceptions of past administrations. Certainly this was no ordinary sort of presidency — and who could even pronounce "ombudsman"? Regardless of our motives, in emphasizing role at the expense of personal involvement we became non-persons. In selecting modes of decision making and leadership roles to fit indicators we saw in various situations and issues, we in effect denied the community any semblance of pattern in decision making. We came to embody the only thing we seemed to embrace — the state and quality of community decisions. Having elevated the obvious to the esoteric, we can now bring it back again to the obvious. An anthropological perspective can provide the sensitivity to people which underlies good judgment. The growing Weltanschauung of action-anthropology experience is the cutting edge of the ethical deliberations faced by anthropologists entering non-traditional roles. The practical lesson which comes out of experiences like ours is that non-traditional roles for anthropologists are not non-traditional to the people we serve. If we are to seek roles not traditionally sought by anthropologists, we must be willing to adopt the trappings of those roles and the expectations and criteria for evaluation inherent in them. The sensitivity and ethical standards with which our discipline has endowed us must be delivered through the credentials and the vernacular acknowledged by those with whom we work.

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This will mean getting our hands dirty and facing decisions not experienced in our ethnographic reading and more exotic fieldwork. It will mean little recognition among those with whom we work of those aspects of our thoughts and actions which we value most highly. It will permit fewer scholarly papers and clear models from us and will call upon our discipline to adjust the media for exchange of ideas. It will allow us to prize more highly the opportunities for meeting with our anthropological compatriots.

NOTES 1. The draft of this paper written for the Panajachel symposium was revised for presentation at the 34th annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology in Amsterdam, March 1975. A second revision occupied Hinshaw during the summer of 1976, and Young has added to this in 1977. It is fitting that the concluding observations be presented independently by the two authors, since Young throughout has maintained more objectivity than could Hinshaw. 2. Publication of the analysis of one's efforts to manage a college is a delicate undertaking, subject to many misunderstandings. Some readers may question the propriety of identifying the institution. We have decided that to disguise its identity would be a betrayal of Wilmington's fundamental Quaker commitment to accountability and disclosure in seeking to integrate as perfectly as possible the means and ends of institutional functioning. 3. Several possible false impressions need to be forestalled. The role of a college president is multifaceted, involving a considerably broader range of responsibilities than the domain of institutional governance on which this paper focuses. Spread so thinly, a president must depend on the dedicated efforts of a team of administrators. This is obvious, especially to those administrative colleagues, and yet this dependency will not be readily apparent in this paper. To facilitate the reader's task of assimilating considerable descriptive detail and to move from those particulars to structural regularities as quickly as possible, we have reluctantly omitted and deemphasized the names and participation of colleagues, other than Young. Several of the trustees, administrators, and faculty have read preliminary drafts of this paper, and the analysis benefits from their insights. On only our shoulders lies the responsibility for endeavoring to wear our two professional hats simultaneously, however, and to share this experience with a wider audience. Young was invited to share in the writing of the paper simply because he, more fully than any other colleague, shared in the thinking about "learning while helping." That decision made, the analysis understandably focused on those problems and issues where on-campus communication was our mutual responsibility and concern. The several decisions alluded to above may give the erroneous impression that an involvement with governance and our efforts to look objectively at the president's role were more central priorities than in fact they were. 4. While this article focuses on the difficulties and limitations of informality in Quaker governance, the other side of the coin warrants mention. Quaker decision making and governance are sufficiently adaptable and have demonstrated their effectiveness in such a wide range of institutional contexts that they persist as the most basic common denominator of the Quaker experience around the world. Forms of worship, tenets of theology, and testimonies vary considerably among Friends, but the reputation of Friends in mediating differences and mobilizing for effective action attest to the strength of Quaker procedures and organization.

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5. A detailed analysis of consensus building in Q u a k e r decision making is available in a recent dissertation by Drake (1973).

REFERENCES CITED COLE, CHARLES C . 1 9 7 6 . The 57(2):71-78. DRAKE, MATTHIAS C. 1 9 7 3 . Quaker

reeling presidency. Educational

Record

consensus: Helping learners understand and participate in the Quaker way of reaching group decisions. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. HERZOG, JOHN. 1 9 7 2 . The anthropologist as broker in community education. Council on Anthropology and Education Newsletter 3(3):9—14. LINDQUIST, JACK. 1 9 7 7 . Strategies for change: Collegiate innovation as adaptive innovation. San Diego: Pacific Sounding Press. PIDDINGTON, RALPH. 1 9 6 0 . Action anthropology. Journal of the Polynesian Society 6 9 : 1 9 9 - 2 1 3 . SCOTT, ANN. 1 9 7 5 . "Management

as a political process: Overt vs. covert," in Formulating policy in postsecondary education: The search for alternatives. Edited by John F. Hughes and Olive Mills. Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education.

PAUL FRIEDRICH

Selected Poems

INTRODUCTION These poems are part of a larger symbiosis that is growing today. An increasing fraction of younger anthropologists also write poetry and they have precedents in Eiseley, Sapir, and others. Younger poets are also drawing on anthropological texts and experiences in a trail blazed, for example, by Gary Snyder. "A Russian Asymmetry" (the fourth poem below) requires background. In the larger household of the Russian peasants and Cossacks of the last century the bride was chosen for her work value after negotiations through a (usually female) matchmaker. During the engagement and before the wedding it was vital that she take the scheduled steambaths (typically in the great stove that occupied so much floorspace). At the wedding the groom would lightly lash his bride with a horsewhip while she removed his boots. But the underlying transaction was between the groom's father (or house chief), who paid the bride-price to be used for the sumptuous wedding, and the bride, who contributed two to five years of earnings as her dowry together with whatever she inherited from her mother. Some husbands were younger than their wives and many were absent much of the time as migrant laborers, soldiers, transient workers, and so forth. These and other factors contributed to the common if informal liaisons between the patriarchal father-in-law and his daughterin-law (often on her initiative). The pattern, called snokhächestvo, was incestuous in law and Orthodox canon. It was not infrequently referred to in conversation and folklore. Some of the poems below have appeared or are scheduled to appear in the following poetry journals, anthologies, and collections: The Creative Woman, Neighboring Leaves Ride This Wind, Bastard Moons, and The Other Side of the Shouting. Some of the materials in the Thorpe poem come from the excellent biography by Jack Newcombe, The Best of the Athletic

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(The White Man's Impact

on Jim Thorpe,

Doubleday.

"the cry of the fox" let it center in your

longing

listen into your lifetime not to the loons nor the phoenix' screech like a geyser within the tunnel of its upsoaring don't settle for less when you lie under the ash trees its tawny bush and back and the V-shaped face like a French philosopher will split the witch grass

1975). New Y o r k :

Selected Poems

ODE TO JIM THORPE for Al Ortiz One does not sing an ode of victory to a "magnificent athlete" these days but I will do that for you, Jim Thorpe because as Everest is high and ironwood the hardest tree of all and gold the most brilliant metal so were you (as the King of Sweden put it) "Sir, the greatest athlete in the world" and you, the rebel: "Thanks, King!" You knew your myth of Sauk-Fox warriors in beaded leggings the hair in a roach, rooster-like, who raided for captives to adopt and alone among the Algonkians rose up against all odds under chief Black Hawk of the Thunder Clan (the same as yours). of your grandmothers Sauk-Fox, Kikapoo and Potawatomi one, Wind Woman, and an Irish blacksmith bred Hiram G. father by five women of (approximately) 21 Thorpes. "Half-breed" you were Indian enough to run in dawn's mute thunder along the North Canadian River with Charley your twin to you the closest "the gentle one" and rage against police, the White Man's school and Irish beatings from Hiram G. when you ran home even that time after Charley died.

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It would be too much to "sing of punt returns shifting and glittering like Pindar's allusions through the Ivy Leaguers' shattered lines" ("Thorpe 32, Brown 17," headlined the Herald), or of varsity letters in ten sports, so be it only your double gold in the Olympic Games Stockholm 1912. It seems just yesterday and my kid brother's words: "He could do everything, but everything, drop-kick field goals from the fifty first in one direction, then the other he won the decathlon and the pentathlon and he was an Indian too, full-blooded Sauk-Fox."

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THRENODY FOR MY CATHOLIC ADOLESCENCE LOST IN A MEXICAN MAELSTROM for Octavio Paz 1 I was a Catholic of the pageants and the great cathedrals that glow, dappling the fluted columns with stained glass gasping at the frost prickles under my shirt I raced through Christmas streets, a prurient buck to bear the cross amid the candles of my church and returned once from a Russian mass at Easter to feel her lips' membrane three times against my cheek and she with the years to be my mother — her only kisses ever did I lose her somewhere amid those fiesta maelstroms? did I lose my tinkling faith amid their belch and lurch? 2

bring on the jackass beneath the long-stemmed sierra grasses! sow the cemetery with seed of sacred wheat! and while "Moors" on nags in silken, blue masks canter on Assumption Day in August heat, revere! sing! Our Virgin of the Rosary with our sweet "Tiger Tunes!" "The Little Old Men" will bark as we feast All Souls with guts of beef (in chili broth) and jig with Indian women in streets dark festooned until, for red-caped, raucous Carnival on cobblestones like fishscales, I, the impresario will hire two bands

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to toot and strum for the Apaches whooping on your tombs before an icon in its box stained with Christ's juice

Selected Poems

A RUSSIAN ASYMMETRY the lily, the poppy and the red, red rose wax, like this girl within the softness of their stems she gathers mushrooms of amber and fills dark forests with her beams of song filaments of flax she cards and spins in wind-swept winter to amass with her artistry a milk-white web in its oaken chest the clothes of her dowry, and rubles red a balalaika in sun-soaked harvests is her dancing as the chorus uplifts her she sways with each courtship, springs into first liaisons with the fall of night will it be her lad divined in water? or a matchmaker, to test her speech and tweak her thighs with wrinkled fingers and sow-like eyes? the women know, the women grow . . . into the sauna go mothers with daughters to steam together in streams of sweat and she must too with her braids on her breast into the world of the earthenware stove the peasant sauna go the bride and the groom for the "red princess" must plunge in the snow through cold reborn and her young man's doom skyblue eyes and flaxen hair but whose? who plucks her hence? whose horsewhip lashes lightly when she bends to unlace and jerk at his boot?

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the wedding whirlpool sucks the girl to a yard and its hut for his mother and sisters to sneer at the "unknown one" who rakes and cards: the impure but at high noon hayseed and sweat make wild honey and, drunk with the taste of it "daughter" and "father" by a wedding rite will thirst in their thighs and thrust, and thrust under grasstips hid of the Cossack steppe

Selected Poems

555

SCHWEINEREI (a) Sausages bacon and chops — pork, but pigs also get minced to ore-colored slush that's pushed around in a tub a wheeled bathtub and shovelled into a cast-iron vat massive, high-pressurized to ejaculate a sloppy jet out of a nozzle (or faucet) then caught in a sheath or (if it's liverwurst) a sack of gut which fills — squish! it's taut as finger and thumb squeeze it closed a horizontal bologna or Polish hard over the greyish juices of the work table's steel flipped, twisted, tied shut with two wrap-arounds of twine between the head and wrinkled skin a square knot yanked tight and away it slithers to hang in the smokehouse (b) Pig Doom Iowa black dirt Bohunks Krauts hired men giggle cackle tackle hogs trailer trucks stink bring pigs gangplank slaughterhouse (Sperry and Barnes, Inc., Conn.) weeds wasteland inside insane stampede circling mob crazed Iowa hogs their hocks jerked up fat hogs upside down cheeks drop jowls flop squeal peel echoing slaughter hall conveyor reel yank yank yank butchers Krauts sweat biceps pig-stickers slit all day necks spurt butcher knives gloom dressing room pig doom

556

PAUL FRIEDRICH

(c) compare: The Tarascan Indian grins. Castrating is fun. Early morning. Hold down the young hog, Excise. Rub in salt. Haunches jerk. His squeal fills the mountains. Echoes. You'd think somebody'd cut his throat.

Selected Poems

557

CITIES the mind is a far traveller into its cities with their lovers, sunbrowned and quick as lions, in Nice who stare into the harbor waters without depth below their raft and on into its idioms and half-forgotten women the mind drifts to dreamscapes of Teheran: a hotel, stucco, ice-cubes in vichyssoise and the diplomat's wife from Seville, her brats, her anxious intercourse or is it the Soviet official on the plane home with her unfeeling Spanish about museums in Moscow, or my own lost recall of the languages of Mexican cities in the frosted dust around their quadratic plazas which you cross at dawn for some gruel of fresh field maize and anis dished out by great-breasted matrons who whisper in mellifluous Nähuatl or Tarascan with their silver tongues caressing, flickering like Hindu sunsets over a temple pool and over carved, knee-crooking gods and goddesses in their thousand cubicles near the railway station in Madurai — "could we meet there for one hour? I had wanted so to talk with you alone, it's been so hard without you" and this despite the red betel juice in streams, the sirens, the horns of cities that do not constrain the haunted geometries of the mind flowing through their dung in the streets and crystalline eddies questing, sifting on and beyond the forms of Homer and Frangois Villon Whitman and Mandelshtam and all the lost poets of our mental metropoles down to seven veils below syntax and lexicon to the church of the Madaleine where a flaxen-haired girl junkie-troubador sings, "I never meant to be unkind" among the cobbled grids, and rows of horse chestnut trees, the curve of malls to a final bouillabaisse on Bourbon Street and the Dixieland of Preservation Hall that drifts through our shutters like a mist of song

558

PAUL FRIEDRICH

THE POEM OF LIFE for Gonzalo Aguilar thrust of a green needle through soil and by morning tips without number breathe a soft wave a viridescent gauze like the vague pallor of first snow flakes fallen in an autumn field young stalks twist sunwards topped by tissues of lime green the leaves' tonguelets that half conceal the lust for growth: beneath the maiden's gown her body's torque greens of the husks darken like evening their wombs hold points pale, soft hardening to rows of kernels, purple, gold erect each on its necklet with molar top a congealing of the sun: embryo, embryo your bones!

Selected Poems

crisp at last saturated with pure dust the tassel and silk like down above the parted lips of a lad or a senile man surmount, in fall the golden teeth ranked in each cob the parabolas that arch from their fluted stalk: the whole

559

560

PAUL FRIEDRICH

THE EQUATION For twenty years I sought an equation to heal the wounding of my boyhood LET US MAKE THIS CHILD FROM OUR MOULDING

ITS SKULL

TOGETHERNESS

WITH OUR ACTS OF

LOVE

by a metamorphosis in a pool, chill as stalactites on its raw mountainside that eyed the monstrous sun LET US REJOICE BREATHING

IN THE BURSTING

TOGETHER

OF THE BAG OF

HUSHED LIKE RABBITS

WATERS

IN HIDING

because my sister drowned, disappearing into her blue-grey cheeks spreadeagled then her corpse on a porch over the hay fields LET US LABOR

IN UNISON TO BRING

THIS NEWEST CREATION

OUT

THAT WE HOPED

FOR

where our family, emaciated by grief, hovered like bent, blasted elms who encircle a swamp LET US DILATE

AS MAN AND WOMAN

ONE

FOR THIS CHILD ON THE DAWN OF ITS DAY

in a convocation of ancestors and the still unborn of those standing there alone and those absent AND NOW IN THE FINAL HOURS OF THE THE SLENDER

MIDWIFE

HANDS OF A HINDU FEMALE

DOCTOR

we will heal at last my mother wailing by a wall the blinding blue of my father howling in his eyes WE, OVER THIS SMALL A SLOPING

SPACE

WITH ITS POINTED

FIELD THAT TAPERS BETWEEN

HAIR

BOULDERS

over the ashen cheeks remembered, the half-open life OVER THE HEAD A FULL MOON

IT LEAPS

FORTH

SUDDENLY

THERE

THE STRIKE OF A OUT OF

TROUT

TREETOPS

Selected

561

Poems

LIKE A GUSH OF MOUNTAIN INTO RECIPIENT

WATER

FINGERS

AND KING DAVID LEAPS AND DANCES IN ECSTASY

FOR THE

AMID CRIES OF A WOMAN: MOTHER SISTER DAUGHTER HER NUCLEAR

WORDS SHRILLING

LORD

LOVER

IN A MIGHTY STORM OF

THUNDER: "It's a girl! it's Katherine!

oh! look at her! let me hold

her!"