Anthropology and Cooperatives From the Community Paradigm to the Ephemeral Association in Chiapas,...

Anthropology and CooperativesFrom the Community Paradigm to theEphemeral Association in Chiapas, Mexico

Gabriela Vargas-CetinaUniversidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Mexico

Abstract ! This article, inspired by June Nash’s provocative vision of postmoderntimes in Chiapas, looks at how anthropologists have traced the changing natureof grassroots organizations to suggest that we need to see cooperatives and otherlocal organizations in a new way, as ephemeral associations. Through theexample of how the cooperative imaginary has informed different developmentprograms in Mexico’s recent history, from the early cooperative movement inthe 19th century to the 21st century, it explores the idea that the institutionalarrangements of the recent past have given way to a state of constant flux. A newvolatility is at the heart of both the organizations and their surrounding environ-ment, so that local organizations now have to re-invent themselves constantly, tokeep up with global and local changes. Through a case study of weavers’cooperatives in Chiapas, the article points at their internal flexibility and fragilityin the current climate of little support for the projects and activities of ruralproducers and the urban poor.Keywords ! anthropology ! Chiapas ! cooperatives ! grassroots organizations !

Mexico

The ideals of the cooperative movement, which emerged at the end of the19th century, still hold great appeal for members of grassroots organiz-ations around the world. The notion that an organization can be fully runby its members, with equal participation in investment, gains and losses, isat the center of the cooperative imaginary. Today, grassroots organizationsoften call themselves ‘cooperatives’, even when they are structured andoperate following very different principles from those supporting classicalcooperatives. While most rural producers who hold lands or other propertyunder collective arrangements or market their products through a collec-tively owned or collectively operated outlet have never heard of HenriSaint-Simon, Robert Owen or Charles Fourier, they nevertheless under-stand that cooperation transcends individual output and market possibili-ties. In any case, ‘cooperatives’, including those that see themselves as partof the international cooperative movement, have proven malleable enoughto adapt in shape and operation to local culture and the larger institutionalcontext. Cooperatives, in different forms, shapes and arrangements, havetaken hold of planners’ imagination, and also of the hopes and wishes of

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Vol 25(3) 229–251 [DOI:10.1177/0308275X05055210]Copyright 2005 © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CAand New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com

rural producers and the urban poor. Seen from this perspective, many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are but a recent offshoot of thecooperative imagination.

Professor Nash (2001) compels us to approach grassroots organizationsof all kinds from a new, multiple vantage point. National states and bureau-cracies, transnational markets, world media, solidarity movements, privatefoundations, foreign governments, multinational bodies and institutions(such as the United Nations, the International Labor Organization andtheir branches), human rights defense bodies and hundreds of volunteersand interested persons now play an important part in the development oflocal organizations everywhere. Furthermore, local issues can throw trans-national financial institutions off-balance, since ‘paradoxically, the processof integration in world markets gives power to those marginalized by theglobal economy’ (Nash, 2001: 11).

I believe that, along with this change of focus so as to see the local inthe global and the global in the local, we also need to look closely at thechanging structure of grassroots organizations, at least in Mexico, as inter-nally unstable and ephemeral. Ejidos, cooperatives and collectives used tohave clearer purposes and features when the Mexican governmentsupported and regulated them in many ways. Today, grassroots organiz-ations change rapidly in size, orientation, form, legal status and member-ship, responding to their changing economic, political, social and evenreligious contexts. Furthermore, as activists and NGOs increasingly takeover tasks that used to be associated with government programs, thepersonal attitudes and values of people in key positions as advisers make amark in the ways the organizations are structured and function.

In the past, the members of grassroots organizations controlled manydecisions, and often received funding, marketing advice and other formsof help from the Mexican government. This support included, even inthose cases where government bureaucrats never came close to the localorganizations, a legal structure which gave members rights and obligationsand made it possible for them to claim the benefits they were entitled to.Today, in-house or outside advisers and individual volunteers are import-ant in many local organizations, especially when these become associatedwith local and regional NGOs. These persons’ visions are often informedby issues transcending the local, such as a belief in social justice and thewill to help the poor. Since, under the climate of neoliberal policies thestate has largely withdrawn from many areas where it was once important,these individuals have become crucial. In the case of commercializationcooperatives, their time and trade horizons now coincide with the marketpotential of their products, which sharply rises or falls and is beyond localcontrol. In the case of other types of organizations, their shapes andpurposes are constantly changing according to their contexts.

In the remainder of this article I trace the way in which anthropologyhas approached cooperatives and other types of local organizations, and

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then move on to a short history of how the cooperative ideal has informedthe promotion of cooperatives and grassroots organizations in Mexico. Ina third section, using examples of organizations in Chiapas that call them-selves cooperatives, I focus on why grassroots associations now have to beseen not only from multiple vantage points, as Professor Nash teaches us,but also as constantly changing according to the problems they face andthe available resources. I conclude with a short overview of the processesthat are turning Mexican and in particular Chiapan grassroots organiz-ations into ephemeral associations, pointing at the need for anthropologyto take these new circumstances into account.1

Anthropology and the study of grassroots organizations

With few exceptions, such as the Hawthorn studies of the 1920s (seeHamada, 1994; Wright, 1994), anthropologists took a long time to pay closeattention to ‘modern’ organizations, since they were more interested at thetime in exotic places than in their own societies and industrial culture. Inthe meantime, in the United States (under the New Deal programs), in theSoviet Union and other nations under Soviet influence, in new nations suchas Israel, in postcolonial India, in much of Africa and in Latin America,rural cooperatives emerged as an important development alternative in themodernization of the developing world (Eckstein, 1987 [1966]; Hyden,1980; Simpson, 1937; Worsley, 1971).

The general assumption then, in academia as in politics, was thatcooperatives were modern forms of organization that superseded or wereto supersede, in the long run, other, more ‘primary’ forms of associationbased on the family, age groups, kinship or tribe (see Rostow, 1960;Simpson, 1937). By the end of the 1950s, almost everywhere, rural societieshad registered important changes brought about by the new collectivisticpolicies. Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, cooperatives and other types oforganization inspired by them began to appear in rural areas of Africa, Asiaand Latin America, supported or even spurred by national governments(Attwood, 1992; Baviskar, 1980; Hyden, 1980; Nash et al., 1976; Russell,1995). These collectivization programs immediately caught the attention ofanthropologists working in those regions (see Montanari, 1971). Anthro-pologists were beginning to pay closer attention to the wider, internationalcontexts in which the groups they worked with now lived, and to study whatthey saw as the modern institutions that were transforming the countrysidein the so-called underdeveloped countries (Dore, 1971; Vincent, 1971).

In the 1960s the ethnographic study of rural cooperatives and collec-tives became an increasingly widespread practice, and a new field of anthro-pological enquiry was established. In 1969 Ronald Dore, Leonard Joy, P.S.Cohen and Peter Worsley organized a conference at the University ofSussex to bring together academics who were working in the field of rural

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Vargas-Cetina: Anthropology and Cooperatives

cooperation at the time. The volume resulting from that conference(Worsley, 1971) underlined some of the common ethnographic themes andideas surrounding the new wave of rural collectivization. The new cooper-ative organizations were considered an important innovation in productiveand distribution practices, and the ethnography registered the difficultiesinherent in transforming individualistic peasants or existing collective insti-tutions into efficient and successful cooperative organizations.

In 1972, June Nash and Jorge Dandler drew up a series of questions,all of which addressed the interface between local practices and the nation-state’s development projects, and sent out a call for papers for a symposiumat the ninth International Congress of Anthropological and EthnologicalSciences in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in 1973. The resulting volume, edited byNash, Dandler and Hopkins (1976), was thus prefaced by Sol Tax, who putthe accent on the shift of focus so clearly represented by the book:

For those who still think of anthropology as a discipline concerned primarilywith small traditional communities and exotic cultures, this book will be a waystation. Few if any of the worldwide group of active anthropologists in itsscenario would shy away from the problems of the industrialized and economi-cally interrelated world. The present volume, however, deals mainly with grass-roots people as they operate in the larger society. Cooperatives, as the editorspoint out in their masterful introduction, are communities of a special sortwhich show how people direct themselves to form, out of the same old humanmaterial, new institutions to cope with their changing world. (Tax, 1976: iv)

Grassroots organizations had become the center of a growing anthro-pological literature. In the 1970s and 1980s many anthropologists,informed mainly by political economy and by institutional economics,produced important work in the field of cooperative studies, keeping thefocus on rural organizations for the most part (see Attwood and Baviskar,1988; Attwood et al., 1987). What these studies showed was that state-spon-sored cooperation did not always turn out to be the best development tool;independent organizations were often able to achieve success on their own,without too much help from national governments. However, state supportcontinued to be necessary for small collective organizations. State interven-tion often led to corruption, but still represented an important source ofhelp for the survival and even for the success of many an organization.Hyden (1988) proposed that state intervention should provide a ‘green-house’ environment for cooperative organizations, giving them an import-ant degree of autonomy. Cooperatives, in the meantime, continued to beconceptualized as self-contained units that involved long-term associationof their members and required, if not a utopian understanding of theorganization as a community (Ayora-Diaz, 2003 analyses the reverseconcept of the community as a utopian blueprint for organizations), at leasta degree of harmony encompassing either the entire organization or self-contained factions within it (Attwood, 1989, 1992; see also Kasmir, 1996 andVargas-Cetina, 2000 for more recent examples of this same treatment).

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But the international schemes of structural adjustment enforced by theInternational Monetary Fund and the World Bank from the 1980s (Hewittde Alcántara, 1994) meant that state intervention and support were toshrink rapidly everywhere. The process was accompanied by the rise of anew rhetoric of entrepreneurship and of business opportunities onlywaiting to be discovered. In this new climate, small and micro-producers offoodstuffs, along with small and micro-artisans in the countryside and thecities, found themselves increasingly alone before the market. Neweconomic opportunities did open for some families and individuals, butmany small producers began to join forces through cooperative organiz-ations of different types, as their only way to economic viability. Middle-classvolunteers and NGOs began to help these new organizations and to supportthe older ones (Hirschman, 1984).

The rapid ascendancy of the discourse that elevated private propertyto an inherent superiority over other forms of property and resourcemanagement made many anthropologists uncomfortable. The rush tooutright privatization spurred the interest in the documentation andcareful ethnography of collective resource management systems thatactually work well and benefit their members. Some ethnographic workcentered on collective arrangements emerged from this new climate:ethnographies that took Hardin’s tragedy of the commons as their point ofdeparture and ethnographies that sought the reasons why in some casescooperatives worked well and in others did not (Acheson, 1988; Baviskar,1980; Netting, 1982; Wade, 1988; see also Mosse, 2003). Also, anthropolog-ical work reacting to the new climate of neoconservativism (which at thatpoint started to be called ‘neoliberalism’, especially in Latin America)centered on what happened to rural producers and artisans who foundthemselves, almost overnight, immersed in the logic of supply and demandwithout the old safety nets, although sometimes with a broader range ofeconomic opportunities. The research then being carried out soon resultedin publications addressing these issues (for example, Cook and Binford,1990; Stephen, 1992). It was also then that the NGO phenomenon beganto attract anthropological attention.

In this new intellectual climate, Professor June Nash organized in NewYork an exhibit and a conference on Middle America artisans, which thenled to an edited volume (Nash, 1993c). The book presented cases of organ-ized crafters, as well as of families who were relatively autonomous in themarket and crafters employed by transnational businesses. It put the accenton the new transnational connections between artisans and consumers,including tourists, local patrons, middlemen bulk-sellers and Bloomingdaleshoppers in the United States. The literature on the transnational linksbetween local people in developing countries and the internationalcommunity was already growing in the field of NGO-related literature, butethnography was only beginning to be informed by the theories aroundglobalization. In the 1990s NGOs became established as an important

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theme in anthropology (Bebbington and Perrault, 1999; Bebbington andRidell, 1997; Carroll, 1992; Fisher, 1993, 1997).

NGOs had begun to fill in the void left by the termination of manynational and international development and welfare programs, and hadbecome important in the eyes of development agencies. The role of NGOsand advocates, however, was not clearly registered yet by the literature onrural cooperatives, except at the technical level; that is, at the level of theliterature produced in the form of projects, reports and case studies result-ing from the interface between advocates and local cooperative organiz-ations. It was in the 1990s and the first years of the new century that thisliterature began to emerge. Nash (1993a, 1993b, 2001), for example, showshow cooperatives in Chiapas, including ejidos, artisan cooperatives andother collective organizations, were galvanized into the larger civil societymovements so that their own problems took on different shapes when seenas part of larger issues. The fight for ethnic identity, for indigenous rights,for greater opportunities against poverty and marginalization, is a strugglethat transcends the economic objectives of cooperatives and collectives andlends new meanings to these associations. Nash’s (2001) book bringstogether different strands of anthropological inquiry, including the long-standing interest in cooperative organizations, global markets, the politicsof identity, the importance of national and international advocacy, and theconflicts between locals and regional and national governments.

The current environment in which cooperatives operate is character-ized by the great uncertainty as to support funds. Funds are now channeledto development projects and organizations, including small and large co-operatives and collectives, through NGOs and through grants that comeand go with assorted government and private programs. Since at this pointrural producers can expect little help from the government in terms of agri-cultural support, and money has invaded most every corner of the localeconomies of developing countries, families find themselves diversifyingtheir activities and appealing to global movements such as the solidaritymarket and fair trade (see Grimes and Milgram, 2000). Mexico is not anexception to these new tendencies, as we will see in the following sections.

Mexico: cooperativism, corporativism and neoliberalism

Early students of grassroots and institutionalized cooperation (Gide, 1922[1904]; Holyoake, 1907) stressed the importance of the Rochdale EquitablePioneers Society as the main igniter of the cooperative movement that soonspread around the world. Following the success of this retail outlet, themovement spread rapidly to the cities of Europe and in the 1880s creditand work cooperatives became perceived as viable alternatives to employ-ment in private firms. In many cities, industrial workers united to createcredit unions and cut down their expenses through the joint ownership,

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supply and operation of cooperative general stores (Gide, 1922 [1904];Holyoake, 1907).

The cooperative movement was based on a reformist strand of social-ism (Worsley, 1971). This school of socialist thought saw both industrialistsand labor as producers of wealth, while bankers and middlemen wereconsidered parasitic. The movement, which had started as a mainly urbanphenomenon, soon reached mainland Europe, the Americas, Asia and thePacific both in urban centers and in the countryside (Reynolds, 2002; RojasCoria, 1984 [1952]; Sibal, 1996; Vargas-Cetina, 1993). As had been the casein Italy (Degl’Innocenti, 1981) and in Spain (Arrieta et al., 1998), inMexico the cooperative movement initially used the existing structures ofthe guilds and the rotating ceremonial and savings organizations institutedby the Catholic Church (Rojas Coria, 1984 [1952]). In the 1830s mutualsavings organizations began to gain independence from the Church andorganize outside religious contexts, and in 1839 the first popular bankopened in Orizaba, Veracruz (Enciclopedia de México, 1996: 7364; RojasCoria, 1984 [1952]: 111). The first Mexican cooperative organizationmodeled after the Rochdale Pioneers Society was founded in Mexico Cityin 1873. This organization and similar others were heavily influenced bythe example of the Pioneers Society’s ideals of self-help and workers’control of their own labor, and of retailing outlets and conditions of retail-ing (Enciclopedia de México, 1996: 7364; Rojas Coria, 1984 [1952]: 230–44).

Porfirio Diaz, who was President of Mexico between 1876 and 1910, wasunsympathetic to cooperative organizations. He saw them as subversive andhostile to his liberal capitalism regime (Krotz, 1988: 44; Rojas Coria, 1984[1952]: 252–363). Diaz, who had been trained in Latin, Philosophy andLaw, believed wholeheartedly in liberal economics and made privateproperty and foreign investment important parts of his economic agenda.He supported and promoted international and national investment incommunications. During his governments, Mexican and foreign privateinvestors created an extensive railroad system, connecting inland regionsto seaports. Steam boats, in turn, connected national ports among them-selves and with other ports abroad, in the Americas and Europe. Diaz alsofavored the concentration of land into a few hands and endorsed a systemof hacienda plantations, where indentured labor and debt-peonage werethe main sources of agricultural wealth (Eckstein, 1987 [1966]: 21–9; Enci-clopedia de México, 2001; Rojas Coria, 1984 [1952]: 335–363). Socialism,cooperativism and communism became dirty words during his presidency,since he perceived them as naming the enemies of liberal capitalism.

After the Mexican Revolution that brought Diaz’s regime to an end,successive governments saw the cooperatives as potential vehicles for socialand economic change. Through the first decades of post-revolutionaryMexico, between 1910 and 1950, the dream of a Mexican CooperativeRepublic was very present among urban intellectuals, industrial workersand Mexican legislators. In 1917 a group of law students gathered support

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from textile and railroad workers, teachers and students to form theNational Cooperative Political Party (Leon Portilla, 1995: 946–7; RojasCoria, 1984 [1952]: 378). This party was very successful in subsequentnational and state elections, so that by 1920 their candidates had beenelected Governors in five states and occupied 60 seats in the National Legis-lature (Rojas Coria, 1984 [1952]: 378–9). Charles Gide’s (1922 [1904])book on consumer cooperative societies had caught the Cooperative Partymembers’ imagination and in 1922 they began to propose the idea of aCooperative Republic (Rojas Coria, 1984 [1952]: 386–94). The Party’splatform was based on the ideas of Fourier, Owen and Gide, and relied onthe Rochdale Pioneers’ success as an important example of cooperativeendeavors and potential.

The influence of the cooperative movement in Mexican legislation isevident in the laws enacted by Congress during those years, and particu-larly in legislation concerning the program of agrarian reform that hadbeen announced in the 1917 Mexican Constitution. In October 1922 adocument of the Agrarian Bureau established the need to create coopera-tives throughout rural Mexico, including agricultural machine pools, creditsocieties, marketing organizations and irrigation societies (Eckstein, 1987[1966]). The Cooperative Party supported Adolfo de la Huerta, a presi-dential candidate who organized an armed rebellion in 1923 againstGeneral Alvaro Obregón, then President of Mexico. De la Huerta was soondefeated, and General Plutarco Elías Calles was elected President of Mexico(Eckstein, 1987 [1966]; Rojas Coria, 1984 [1952]). The dream of aCooperative Republic seemed to have been halted by the new turn inMexican politics.

In 1924 Plutarco Elías Calles, whom the Cooperative Party hadopposed, traveled to Europe and was very impressed by the Schultze-Delisch and the Raiffeisen savings and credit cooperatives. As soon as hereturned to Mexico he called on Luis Gorozpe, who had written acooperative manual, in order to draft a Cooperative Law applicable to allsectors of the economy (Rojas Coria, 1984 [1952]: 395). This law, finallyapproved by Congress in 1926 and published in 1927, established the legalbases of institutionalized cooperation in Mexico, with cooperatives asthe most important instruments for the modernization of the Mexicancountryside.

The first law for the creation of ejidos, the production units establishedby the agrarian reform program for the redistribution of land to thepeasants, dates from 1920 (Eckstein, 1987 [1966]: 48). Legislationpromoted by Calles in the sectors of education, irrigation, communications,land redistribution and credit firmly established new grounds for the ejidoland reform, supported by a system of credit and marketing societies basedon the Schultze-Delisch and Raiffeisen cooperative systems. PresidentLazaro Cardenas, who undertook the distribution of land to ejidos as themain program of his presidency (1936–40), promoted further legislation

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making it possible for ejidatarios to hold land collectively in those areaswhere private exploitation would not have been advisable. He alsopromoted the law that in 1936 created the legal framework for the opera-tion of fishing cooperatives, which continues to inform current legislationregarding Mexican fisheries to this day (Enciclopedia de México, 2001).Eckstein (1987 [1966]: 61) points out that even though the agrarian reformprogram was continuously accused of Bolshevism and Soviet influence ingeneral, in fact the ejidos, and particularly the collective ejidos (where landwas collectively owned and work was collectively organized), were conceivedof as agrarian cooperatives rather than as Kolhoz-style agricultural units(see also Reyes Osorio, 1979 [1974]).

Post-revolutionary governments considered cooperatives a goodalternative to socialism and to capitalism alike, but during the governmentof Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–45) cooperatives lost their place of privi-lege in Mexican government projects. In the years that followed, the ejidosystem, other types of rural and urban cooperatives, and the system ofcooperative pools and banks were rapidly transformed into marginalproduction units and inefficient bureaucratic institutions. It was, however,from the 1960s and on that anthropologists turned their attention to theejido as such and to rural cooperation, including fishing cooperatives –when, although these institutions were only a shadow of what the reform-ers had intended, they were already thoroughly assimilated by the rural,often indigenous, peasants of Mexico.

Three major strands of social thought were important for the creationof post-revolutionary Mexico: liberalism, cooperativism and socialism.Successive governments took it upon themselves to harness these ideolo-gies to the interests and purposes of the Mexican state. While cooperativismgave shape to the policies and programs for the rural areas of the country,socialism, in its peculiar Mexican form of trade unionism, gave shape to therelationship between the state and urban labor. In the meantime, liberal-ism and the promotion of what in Mexico was called ‘private initiative’shaped the relations between the state and capitalist entrepreneurs(Carmona et al., 1983 [1970]).

Between 1940 and 1970 the Mexican state consolidated a corporativistpolitical system whereby the dominant political party (Partido de la Revolu-ción Institucional, or PRI) was supported by the three main corporate‘social sectors’ of the country: the National Confederation of Peasants(Confederación Nacional Campesina, or CNC), the Confederation ofMexican Workers (Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos, or CTM)and the Confederation of Popular Organizations (Confederación Nacionalde Organizaciones Populares, or CNOP). CNOP was the most hetero-geneous of these three corporate organizations, since it included urbanmiddle classes, professionals, intellectuals, employees, fishermen, teachers,shop owners and rural small producers (Carmona et al., 1983 [1970]:185–8; Hardy, 1984: 31). This way, much of Mexican society from both the

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left and the right end of the political spectrum was brought into the differ-ent sections of the PRI’s organizations.

In the 1970s President Luis Echeverría tried to revive the witheredcooperative movement. His efforts included the revitalization of the collec-tive ejido, through state-directed vertical integration of agro-industries.Echeverría’s government tried to turn ejidos into subjects of credit again,so that they could not only supply food for peasant families’ needs but alsofor the urban markets. He turned the old Department of Agriculture andColonization into a Secretariat of Agrarian Reform, which, along with thenewly instituted Bank of Rural Credit, was to ensure a continuous flow ofraw materials to state-controlled industrial processing plants. Echeverríaalso continued the existing policy of import substitution, which shutnational borders to many foreign goods, and maintained a policy of paritycontrol between Mexico’s currency and the US dollar. Under Echeverría’sgovernment peasants enjoyed a comprehensive policy of crop price supportand the extension of socialized health care to all agricultural producers andtheir families (Enciclopedia de México, 2001).

Subsequent governments, however, returned to the old liberal ideas offree market, opening the national borders to foreign imports and dimin-ishing the subsidies to peasants and the poor. In 1979 Margaret Thatcherhad become prime minister of Britain. She carried out important reformsthat undermined the power-base of British trade unions, reduced taxes andput national industries in the hands of private investors. She was a strongpromoter of free trade. Thatcher, along with Ronald Reagan, who came topower in 1980 in the United States of America, created a new style ofgovernment based on neoconservative liberalism. They also undertook anaggressive foreign policy aimed at establishing an international climatefavoring free trade and transnational corporations. As a result of theirpolicies, governments around the world began to turn to liberal economicsonce more, and away from many of the welfare provisions then in place.

In the 1980s, when neoconservative economic thinking was alreadyfashionable again, the governments of Mexico and other developingcountries defaulted on the payment of their foreign debts. Many develop-ing countries had supported their agricultural subsidies and extensionprograms with money they had borrowed from international financial insti-tutions. The international debt crisis of the developing world that finallyexploded in 1982 brought about important changes in the configurationof international relations. In particular, the World Bank and the Inter-national Monetary Fund began to make financial help to indebtedcountries conditional, through what came to be known as the programs ofstructural adjustment (Hewitt de Alcántara, 1994). Structural adjustment,which is still an important part of the World Bank’s and IMF’s developmentpolicies, is predicated upon the neoconservative ideas of unhindered freetrade and the withdrawal of the government from most sectors of theeconomy. This amounts to a reduction (and eventual ending) of subsidies

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to food, agricultural inputs, and health and retirement programs. Alongwith these changes, national governments are forced to implement policiesthat favor investors while they undermine trade unions.

The privatization of national industries and the dismantling of tradebarriers to foreign goods and capital are also important tenets of structuraladjustment programs (Hewitt de Alcántara, 1994). The nationalist wavethat characterized most agricultural collectivization systems had run itscourse, and developing countries began to drop the protectionist policiesthey had implemented so as to shield national industry from outsidecompetition. Post-industrial nations, however, maintained many of theirsubsidy programs and are taking longer to dismantle their national welfaresystems (Mingione, 1990).

As of 1982 rural producers and the urban poor in developing nationsbegan to experience a level of hardship that was almost unthinkable in the1970s. In Mexico the pressure exerted by international development insti-tutions brought to an end much of the support for agriculture. For ruraland urban cooperative organizations in Mexico, it has meant the end of theprotection of collectively owned property in favor of private capital, thewaning or complete disappearance of previous subsidies for farmingsupplies and basic foodstuffs, and the extinction of guaranteed prices foragricultural goods and specialty crafts (Mata García, 1992). Cooperativesfound that they had to compete in the international markets with very littleor no help from the national government. In the cities and the country-side, individuals, families and collectives felt the effects of the neweconomic policies in the form of a rapid pauperization (Calderón, 1990).

Mexican cooperatives are now in the same situation as others in thedeveloping world. The connection between rural and urban organizations(including cooperatives) and the market is now handled, under the ambiva-lent gaze of the national government, mostly by non-governmental organiz-ations, small entrepreneurs, private foundations and individual volunteerswho take it upon themselves to support indigenous peoples, rural produc-ers and poverty-stricken people everywhere (see Ayora-Diaz, 2002; CantoChac, 1998; La Piedra Barrón, 1992; Nigh Nielsen, 2002; Vargas-Cetina,2002; Zapata Martello et al., 2003). In the next section, through a case studyfrom Chiapas, I show the way the new wave of liberalization reforms haveaffected grassroots organizations and have transformed many Mexicangrassroots organizations into ephemeral associations.

The cooperative imaginary and the ephemeral association inChiapas

Since the 1970s, but increasingly so in the 1980s and 1990s, concernedactivists and groups of young professionals have provided guidance andsupport to grassroots associations in the Mexican state of Chiapas.

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Individual advisers and civil organizations dedicated to different politicaland economic goals have sprung up in most of Mexico. A good part of thoseorganizations, which can be characterized, after the related literature, asgrassroots support organizations (GSOs) (Carroll, 1992; Fisher, 1993,1997), work to connect local producers’ organizations with national andinternational markets, government programs and private foundations’funds. These organizations are usually staffed by highly idealistic volun-teers, who want to help people help themselves, following their own dreamsof empowering rural dwellers or the urban poor.

In the past, many government development projects did not reachChiapas in their original form. Chiapas was seen as bound by atavisticrelations; a ‘backward’ region of the country, only suitable for paternalisticprojects aimed at transforming indigenous people into Mexican citizens(Ayora-Diaz, 2002; Köhler, 1975 [1969]). The government tried to imple-ment different types of development scheme, including rural cooperativesrunning through subsidized funds, but did not envision self-sufficient localassociations successfully competing in the world market. Ejido land reformdid take place in the 1930s and 1940s; peasants gained ownership of theirlands and control over their own agricultural practices, but the federalgovernment never managed to break the stronghold a few families had onthe politics and social life of the state (Benjamin, 1995 [1989]). With a fewexceptions (see Ayora-Diaz, 2002), cooperatives formed under the auspicesof the National Indigenous Institute (INI) tended to be subsidized for awhile until they disappeared without having fostered any real interestamong agriculturists or craft producers.

It was because of concerned priests, private citizens and social activiststhat local producers’ organizations and other grassroots associations finallyflourished and prospered in Chiapas. The Indigenous Congress of 1974brought together people from different ethnic groups and spurred a waveof rural organizations in the Chiapas countryside. The most common formof grassroots organization in Chiapas became that of a group of peoplecoordinated by an outside adviser or by a team of advisers. These media-tors were in charge of making contacts with government agencies, privateand public foundations, donors and niche market gatekeepers. Hirschmanpointed out in 1984, regarding the general development of the grassrootsmovement in Latin America, that young urban intellectuals teamed up withpeasants in order to help these enter international markets and trans-national social movements, turning disadvantages into strengths. This wasthe case in Chiapas too. The Mexican and state governments, in turn, triedto submit the new organizations to the general rules of operation obtain-ing for ‘social capital societies’ (that is, organizations that are not expectedto bring in major profits but only to help their members get by).

Most grassroots organizations in Chiapas registered their chartersunder some form of ‘social capital’ legal status. With few exceptions, thatsituation persists to date. Through this acceptance of a set of legal

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definitions generated by the state, the multiplicity of grassroots organiz-ations in Chiapas became subsumed into a few categories, which conditiontheir membership modalities and forms of operation. For example, underMexican civil law, the social solidarity society is a form of organization thathas to have a rural base and cannot have openly gainful objectives. Nationallegislation was not amenable to non-agricultural cooperatives (althoughthe Cruz Azul complex of cement cooperatives and the Cooperative Bankof Orizaba are two success stories in spite of the difficulties posed by suchlegislation). Small producers’ associations were treated almost as marketstock-based private businesses, and thus not many grassroots organizationsin rural Chiapas took this legal form (see Nigh Nielsen, 2002; Vargas-Cetina, 2002).

Between 1995 and 1999 I was able to work with four different organiz-ations of women weavers in Highland Chiapas. Three of them were in factnetworks of smaller organizations. For the sake of brevity I will only presenthere the case of the House of Weavings (La Casa del Tejido), which is theoldest, most successful and internationally best known of these organiz-ations. It is important to point out that at the time of my fieldwork, mostproject drafting and the management of these organizations were in thehands of non-indigenous advisers. Two exceptions to this were the Houseof Weavings, in San Cristobal de las Casas, and a small, very independentcooperative in downtown Tenejapa (see Mosquera Aguilar, 1995; Vargas-Cetina, 2002).

The House of Weavings was the felicitous result of the concerted effortsof many people. In 1974 the Mexican institute for the promotion of folkart (FONART) opened a store in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. Theobjective was to buy handmade crafts from the artisans of the Highlandsand commercialize them at a national level, along with the crafts of otherparts of Mexico. Some of the people who purchased crafts on behalf of thestore had already been actively collecting textiles and studying their struc-ture and possible meanings. The subsidies to run the store dried up in1977. The artisans, still impelled by the ideas generated during the 1974Indigenous Congress, created a weekly crafts bazaar in San Cristobal de lasCasas, with help from the former employees of the FONART store. Thismarketplace soon proved difficult to sustain and protect, as one nightsomeone broke into the warehouse where the goods were kept during theweek and stole most of them. With help from anthropologists and Mexicanofficials who were interested in the preservation and promotion of indigen-ous crafts, the advisers were able to collect enough money to pay theartisans for their work, and created the House of Weavings Civil Society.One of these advisers was an American student of anthropology, WalterMorris, who spoke the two main indigenous languages of the Highlands,Tzeltal and Tzotzil. Another was the young weaver and draughtsman Petul,who had learned to draw on paper even the most complex motifs found onstrap-loom woven textiles.

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In 1999 the organization had around 800 members, most of themwomen, living in different parts of the Highlands but especially in themunicipalities of Chamula, Zinacantan, Tenejapa and Magdalenas. TheHouse of Weavings owned a store in downtown San Cristobal, at the ex-Convent of Santo Domingo, one of the main local attractions for touristsfrom other parts of Mexico and the world. The aim of the House of Weavingsis to sell their textiles not as cheap crafts but as textile art. The members ofthe organization set the price they want their textiles sold at, and the storesells it for double that price. The organization keeps 50 percent of the saleprice and the weaver keeps the other 50 percent. The House of Weavingsowns three houses and a car and has unlimited access to the Pellizzi Collec-tion of Textiles, funded by anthropologist Francesco Pellizzi, from thePeabody Museum at Harvard University. Part of the collection is exhibitedat the main offices of the House of Weavings, where it is visited and studiedby weavers from all corners of the Chiapas Highlands and beyond.

The House of Weavings runs several programs which have helped itbecome more successful than similar associations in the Chiapas High-lands. One is a program of fellowships that allows weavers to come to SanCristobal de las Casas to learn difficult techniques and weaving motifs fromthe older, most expert weavers and from the Pellizi textiles. This ensuresthe maintenance of the high quality of the textiles. A second program isthe rescue and revival of weaving patterns as represented on Maya stellae.Petul, the organization’s current president and main adviser, teaches theweavers how to draw and collect designs from ancient Maya drawings andsculptures. The organization regularly applies for grants to continue thisprogram, which has much acceptance not only among the clients of thecooperative but, more importantly, among the weavers themselves. A thirdprogram consists of a revolving fund for the direct purchase of weavingsfrom both member and non-member weavers. This has ensured that theweavers continue to be loyal to the organization and take their textiles tothe House of Weaving’s purchase department before trying to sell themelsewhere. In this way, the organization has first pick of the best pieces fromwhat weavers or dealers in weavings bring to San Cristobal.

Morris and Petul have also invested heavily (thousands of US dollars)in the promotion of the organization and the idea of highland weavings astextile art (see Morris, 1991, 1996; Morris and Foxx, 1987). Petul keeps incontact with universities, museums, galleries, government agencies andfoundations; most of these contacts were probably initiated by Morris, buthe has left the organization and now Petul is in charge. The organizationplaces, through sales or through short-term loans, some of their mostbeautiful textiles in galleries and museums around the country and abroad.Sometimes the organization commissions individual members to visit oneor another museum for a live exhibit of backstrap-loom weaving.

Holding festive gatherings on the organization’s premises is discour-aged. This lack of ritualized socializing, and the fact that the members do

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not get together in general assemblies on a regular basis, makes it difficultfor them to create a sense of collective belonging. The organization, in fact,is run by Petul almost like a private store, since he and the administrativecouncil decide which textiles to accept and which to refuse for sale at theorganization’s store. I was assured that most of the important decisionspertaining to the organization were in the hands of the women weavers whoare members, but I found no evidence of this being the case. Most of thewomen do not seem to have a clear idea as to the rights that membershipin the organization entitles them to, or how the organization is managed.At the same time, since membership is free and they obtain many benefits,including the constant improvement of their weaving skills, direct purchaseand relatively high prices for their textiles, they do not care too much aboutmanagement, policy drafting or day-to-day operations (although Eber andRosenbaum, 1993 report otherwise). Besides, through membership theysometimes enjoy periodic stays in San Cristobal de las Casas, in other partsof Mexico and around the world. These occasions are work-related but alsoamount to small holidays from home. Most weavers I have met seem to findthese things agreeable, without the hassle of periodic meetings, expensivetrips to the venues where the assemblies could be held or, given the peren-nial bad state of roads in the state of Chiapas, having to leave their housesand their families for at least an entire day in order to attend long generalmeetings.

In San Cristobal de las Casas and in Chiapas in general, people in otherorganizations severely criticize the House of Weavings. However, this is anorganization that has achieved a highly effective mode of operation. It is,along with the Tenejapa weavers’ organization mentioned above, one of thefew economically successful cooperatives of women weavers, since it doesnot depend on grants or solidarity funds to keep going. Through theirmembership in the organization the weavers have acquired importantskills, have come to know each other, have visited other villages, towns andcountries, and have gained a new sense of pride from the public appreci-ation of their art. Most of them are grateful to Morris and Petul becausethey feel that their lives have improved through their participation in theassociation. In the eyes of the Mexican government and of those fundingagencies that sometimes issue grants for the organization’s programs, thisis a model cooperative: it runs without financial problems, has establisheditself firmly on the international market for crafts, and has achievednational and international recognition for its work and the quality of itsweavings, including the McArthur Genius Award, received by Walter Morrisin 1983 for his work with the House of Weavings, and Mexico’s NationalAward of the Arts, granted to the organization in 1986.

The House of Weavings questions current ideas about what grassrootsorganizations ought to be, since it does not run on a participatory basis. Itis not through intensive member participation that the organization plotsand steers its course. The relation between Petul and most of the weavers,

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including the members, resembles more a patron–client bond than thestanding of a democratically elected leader before his constituency. This,however, seems to have many operational advantages. Since individualproblems and needs have been taken out of the collective framework, itdoes not suffer from members’ interpersonal conflicts, excessive expensesrelated to feasting or problems involving witchcraft, as happens in mostother weavers’ associations in the Chiapas Highlands. The House ofWeavings is one among the few weavers’ cooperatives in Chiapas that haskept its promise to better the life of its members, although when looked atclosely it is not a cooperative at all.

Other cooperatives in Chiapas are in fact networks of producers thatrun a common store, with the help of in-house advisers or local NGOs. Prac-tically none of them charges membership fees or keeps a very strict list ofmembers. They all participate in exhibits and individual weavers competefor national awards for craftsmanship excellence. Some weavers’ coopera-tives often engage in political demonstrations as representatives of indigen-ous women, indigenous people or the rural poor (Nash, 2001;Vargas-Cetina, 2002). None of them are legally registered as regular busi-nesses, so they are bound in terms of membership composition andaccounting by Mexican laws regulating non-profits. Most of them (theexception being the Tenejapa organization) receive help from altruisticindividuals, government programs, and national and international founda-tions. They all call themselves ‘cooperatives’ so as to invoke the spirit ofcooperation and collective work, but they are all far from what the classicalcooperative used to be. Their membership changes constantly, sincemothers often include their daughters as new members, some membersleave to join other cooperatives or come back after months or years, andother members prefer to sell their textiles to private stores and other coop-eratives. This is especially the case when weavers are pressed for money andcannot leave their pieces on consignment at the cooperatives’ stores. Theyoperate with the help of either an in-house adviser (who often supports himor herself through self-secured grants and solidarity circuits funds), withthe advice of local grassroots support NGOs, or a combination of both. Theideals of the person or group of persons who help them find and managefunds may steer the organization toward, for example, political demonstra-tions against the World Bank or support for the Zapatista rebels, or maylead them to suppress any political participation, so as to keep the organiz-ation clear of political trouble (Vargas-Cetina, 2002). Through the advisers’good offices the organizations may receive help from governmentprograms, or from altruistic persons in Mexico or abroad (see Eber andRosenbaum, 1993); or they may come to rely on the international solidar-ity market and political participation to keep afloat, as in the case of aChiapas weavers’ cooperative that, with the NGO it receives help and advicefrom, has participated actively in demonstrations in San Cristobal andCancun against world leaders and international financial institutions.

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Where the classical cooperatives tried to keep a sense of stability and perma-nence, these organizations continuously change in size and operation,constantly adapting to their changing social, political and economicenvironments with the help of their advisers.

Conclusion

In the introduction to their compendium of case studies in rural cooper-ation, Nash and Hopkins (1976: 4) expressed their belief that it was necess-ary to ‘place our studies thoroughly within the path of development thatthe real societies we study may take’. They saw the study of cooperatives aspart of what they called a new, ‘prospectivist anthropology’ in the form ofan ‘“urgent anthropology” that consists of understanding the social formsinto which we may be about to move’. As the theoreticians of postmoder-nity and speed remark (Harvey, 2000; Lyotard, 1984 [1979]; Virilio, 1986[1977]), today it is very difficult just to keep up with the times and thechanges they bring with increasing velocity. Because of this, our theoreticalintentions now have to be humbler; where Nash and Hopkins wanted tolook into the future, we find ourselves trying to grapple with the constantlychanging present.

The international cooperative movement inspired grassroots organiz-ations and development projects everywhere, including regional programssuch as the special programs for the development of southern Italy sincethe 1940s (Vargas-Cetina, 1993), the settlement of Israel in the 1920s(Russell, 1995), the Ujamaa villages program launched in 1967 in Tanzania(Hyden, 1980) and the ejido land reform that took place in Mexicobetween the 1930s and the 1990s (Eckstein, 1987 [1966]; Reyes Osorio,1979 [1974]; Rojas Coria, 1984 [1952]). But these programs weresupported by national governments and by the international community.Today, the philosophical support for and the actual experience of institu-tionalized cooperation have changed. We seem to be moving from cooper-atives inspired by the notion of utopian community to cooperatives moreakin to the current phenomenon of ephemeral association. The coopera-tive imaginary, however, seems to be stronger than the notion ofcommunity itself, since organizations inspired by the cooperativemovement can operate, as they do now, in environments where the senseof community is feeble or highly unstable (as in the NGO environment),where it never existed (as in organizations that establish links for cooper-ation based on criteria other than location or shared worldview) or whereit did exist but has been lost (as Nash, 1995 has shown to have happenedin many Chiapas indigenous communities in the recent past).

In Mexico, the dismantling of agricultural support programs has meantthat most rural families cannot depend on ejido, communal or smallprivate plots for their own survival, but rather have to enter the market as

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independent producers in very disadvantaged circumstances. Politicalmovements protesting against the current liberalization of trade and thedismantling of previously existing safety nets are responding to these newcircumstances of rapid pauperization of large sectors of the Mexican popu-lation (Canto Chac, 1998). But since people do have to live within the newcircumstances of unbridled market forces, they also have to look foreconomic alternatives that allow them to keep themselves and their familiesafloat. Crafts, in this context, have often become an important source ofcash for rural families and the urban poor, as has happened in the state ofChiapas.

In the Chiapas Highlands, since textile weaving is not a highly profit-able occupation, the weavers join organizations to market their piecescollectively, but they also have to be sensitive to the everyday needs of theirfamilies. This precludes weavers from marketing their products solelythrough the artisans’ marketing organizations in which they are members,even when these organizations supply them with raw materials atdiscounted prices and help them support themselves and their families.The flow of cash from the solidarity market, private foundations, and thelimited governmental and international support to indigenous causes areattracting the attention of grassroots organizations, and particularly of theiradvisers, who constantly try to refashion themselves and the organizationsthey work with to give them the characteristics sought by donors and theirprograms’ aims. But it would be a mistake to see these organizations astrying to take on fake new features; their members and advisers are tryingto make do in a highly uncertain economic and political environment.They have to rely increasingly on the communications infrastructure inplace (roads, public and private transport, telecommunications and theInternet) to find the best alternatives available to communicate with theorganizations’ members, locate possible donors, translate the organiz-ations’ aims into suitable proposals, and invest much time and resources tobring scant resources to local organizations. Local organizations, in themeantime, have to make room for the constant turnover of members, andthe continuous implementation and termination of new programs, sincethey have no way of controlling the niche markets their products aredirected to or of securing long-term funding to help defray their opera-tional costs when the markets for their products fall. As a result, grassrootsorganizations are increasingly becoming – as happens with weavers’ co-operatives in Chiapas – so many instances of ephemeral association.Anthropologists will have to take this new fluidity into account, if we wantto keep up theoretically with the new circumstances surrounding andconditioning the structure and day-to-day operation of local organizations.

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Acknowledgements

I thank June Nash for the honor and the pleasure of her constant feedback on mywork since 1994. Thanks also to Igor Ayora-Diaz, Lynn Stephen and Florence Babbfor their feedback, encouragement and patience while I wrote this paper, to StacyLathrop for her comments and to two anonymous readers who made valuable obser-vations that sharpened the final version. All conceptual problems and misrepresen-tations, however, are my sole responsibility.

Note

1 What I am calling here ‘ephemeral associations’ are those I have identifiedelsewhere as having the following general features (see Vargas-Cetina, 2003):they are ephemeral in the sense that they are not expected to last indefinitelyby their members, and in fact, may be seen as highly contextual and in constantflux; their membership is fully voluntary; their structure, membership, aimsand purposes change continuously; their internal governance structure is weak,and their authority figures are contextual; and, finally, they are highlydependent on communications technology, from simple trails connectinghamlets to roads, to long-distance travel means, phone lines and electronicfora. Because of this, they are less dependent as collectives on meetings wheremembers are physically present than previous types of associations.

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! Gabriela Vargas-Cetina is Professor of Anthropology at the Autonomous Uni-versity of Yucatan, in Mexico. Her research has focused on cooperatives and grass-roots organizations, and the politics of music and dance. She is the author of articlesand book chapters on the Powwow dance circuit in Alberta (Canada), shepherds’cooperatives in central Sardinia (Italy) and weavers’ cooperatives in HighlandChiapas (Mexico). She is currently conducting fieldwork for a book on Trova musicin Yucatan, Mexico. Address: Facultad de Ciencias Antropológicas, UniversidadAutónoma de Yucatán, Calle 76 #455-LL entre 41 y 43, Mérida, Yucatán, México.[email: [email protected] and [email protected]]

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