Susan Brown, Women, Men, and Agency

In “Love Unites Them and Hunger Separates Them,” Susan Brown’s mid-1970s study of family organizational patterns and women’s agency in rural, impoverished sectors of the Dominican Republic (from the collection Toward an Anthropology of Women), Brown argues that many of the choices made by women regarding their households (such as to enter into serial monogamous relationships in a matrifocal household, rather than the more highly valued formal marriage) were not irrational or dysfunctional as they had often been represented by earlier (mostly male) scholars, but involved rational choices to make the best of things in the context of extreme poverty.

Men in this poverty sector don’t come off looking so good in Brown’s account. They seem mainly a lot of drinking, gambling, philandering, cock-fighting, macho lay-abouts. The main criticism I have of Brown here is the lack of a sense of proportion. We’re left with no sense of whether this description characterizes all, most, many, or few of the actual men. Still, it seems from the impressions of women and the choices they make that we’re talking about some sizeable number of men that could be so described, regardless of their proportion to the larger set of men in general.

Part of this pattern, which I’ll simply call “irresponsibility,” lacking a more convenient label, can no doubt be written down to the effects of coping with the physical and mental stresses of extreme poverty, and not always coping in the most functional way possible.

I’d like also to suggest, though, that, just as with Brown’s arguments that women are making choices that may seem superficially dysfunctional but are actually functional in the circumstances, despite the apparent and obvious dysfunctionality of much of what many of the men are doing, for at least some, there may be a rational and functional strategy at play.

It’s useful to keep in mind some of the dynamics of Latin American peasant communities. Eric Wolf described two basic types of Latin American peasant communities (as well as several other minor varieties): the closed and open peasant communities.

A closed peasant community is definitely not what we’re dealing with with Brown’s study community. Closed communities tend to occur in highly isolated areas, e.g. in rugged rural terrain in places like Mexico or Peru. While not completely isolated from regional market systems and state intervention (or else they’d be “subsistence farmers” and not “peasants”), they produce primarily for their own subsistence and tend to promote an ideology of social harmony and equality within the community (but see also the enormous literature focusing on such communities and relation between harmony ideology and practice, the idea of limited good and social equality and tension, etc.).

Open peasant communities, as the name suggests, are more “open,” specifically more open to regional, national, and even global economic networks. Making a living more often involves a combination of subsistence farming, small cash crop farming, and wage labor when it’s available. (With the irregularity of wage work typical in such contexts, many men are “shifty” in part because they must always be “shifting.”) Social inequality, and the open expression of it, is also more part of community life than in closed communities.

The route to upward mobility, even slight improvement of livelihood, is difficult, especially in an environment when, especially prior to Grameen Bank and the micro-loan experiment, access to external capital (to buy another plot of land to farm, to buy a truck, etc.) is generally absent.

The route to upward mobility, at the same time, is fairly clear for men – to cultivate loyalty among other men of the community so that one can draw on their labor (in capitalist terms, to be able to extract surplus value from their labor). How is this done? Largely through active socializing, buying drinks generously, and a variety of other “irresponsible” activities – a strategy that will inevitably fail for most, often at the price of deepening poverty, but that for a few is not only not a dysfunctional strategy, but one of the few that will pay off in expanded production and an enhanced standard of living.

Charles Wagley's "On Social Race in the Americas"

Much has been written about race in the Americas since this article by Charles Wagley was first published in the 1950s. This article, though, was foundational for much of the writing on race by anthropologists since then, and with perhaps a few caveats it still functions quite well as an overview of the social organization of race in various parts of the Western Hemisphere. (The most important qualification is that Wagley’s terminology for reference to populations, “negroid,” “caucasoid,” “mongoloid,” is now anachronistic – though the terms were common parlance in social science writing of the day. The terms Wagley uses are often taken to have connotations of biological fixity of the racial groups that his own work did much to help undermine. If the terms are read as “African,” “European,” and “Native American,” that is as simply indicating geographic regions of origin, what Wagley says about the three groups and their interactions remains important.)

Wagley identifies several factors that are influential in shaping three broadly distinguished patterns of social race. Each of the patterns takes into consideration ancestry (i.e. degree of ancestral membership in any of the three areas of geographic origin), physical appearance (e.g. skin color, facial features, hair texture or other physical features that can be taken as signs of race), and cultural factors (e.g. language, dress, occupation). These factors of ancestry, physical appearance, and culture are differentially emphasized, though, generating one pattern with a strongly delineated binary distinction between European and African (i.e. black and white) with a focus on ancestry especially; a second pattern emphasizing a continuum of racial mixture between African and European, with physical appearance especially emphasized in categorization; and a third pattern emphasizing a continuum of racial mixture between Native American and European, with cultural factors particularly important in racial categorization.

Wagley points out how these three basic patterns are regionally associated, not so much with three specific regions, but with three types of regions in the Americas. These types of regions are defined by Wagley in broad ecological terms: the temperate zones of northern North America (specifically northeastern North America during the colonial period in which race patterns were first constituted) and southern South America associated with the first pattern; the tropical lowland areas of Brazil, the Caribbean, and coastal Spanish America (and to a lesser extent, the sub-tropical southeastern North America – at least for a time) associated with the second pattern; and tropical to temperate highland zones of Latin America (i.e. Mesoamerica and the Andes) associated with the third.

Equally important for Wagley are two other factors, both of which are intimately connected to the basic ecological characteristics of the different types of regions. First are the predominant economic activities of a region. For example, a critical difference between the first and second type regions is the pervasive presence of extremely labor intensive agricultural practices based for a long time in plantation slavery in tropical lowland areas in contrast to Euro-American farming practices in Northern North America and Southern South America that, while quite distinct in certain ways from one another, had in common the lack of utilization of large pools of intensive labor, i.e. the lack of plantation agriculture or slavery practiced on a large scale.

Alongside economic practices, another important consideration discussed by Wagley is population history. Although Wagley doesn’t quite put it this way, the population history of Native Americans is particularly important in playing a role in shaping the organization of race. Low population densities of Native Americans persisted at least into the 19th century in Northeastern North America and Southern South America, but without being particularly integrated with European society in the form of a laboring group. (The fur trade in North America and cattle ranching in South America certainly involved Native American labor, but with relatively small numbers of laborers involved and in ways and contexts where Europeans still thought of them as largely outside their own social universe.) High population densities of Native Americans in the tropical lowlands were largely wiped out early on, mainly by disease, and were replaced with slave labor imported from Africa on newly introduced plantation systems. Even higher population densities of Native Americas in the Latin American highlands were also decimated by disease, but large numbers of Native Americans remained even after the worst of the plague years of the 1500s and 1600s and were incorporated as labor into a variety of economic endeavors.

In this article and other writings (his work tended to focus on race in the Americas generally or on the ethnography of Brazil in particular), Wagley was an important influence on the shape of anthropological debate in the mid- to late 20th century. He especially influenced the development of ecological and economic anthropology in the 1950s through the 1970s. In most anthropologists’ conception of the history of the discipline, he is greatly overshadowed in this regard by figures such as Julian Steward, and probably rightfully so – Steward’s writings, such as Theory of Culture Change, are more widely read today and were so at the time as well. Wagley’s influence took more the form of teaching and mentorship. He taught at Columbia at a time when many scholars who were to become extremely important in ecological and economic anthropology were studying there as Ph.D. students, probably most prominently Eric Wolf (see Europe and the People without History), Sidney Mintz (see Sweetness and Power), and Marvin Harris (see Cultural Materialism and The Rise of Anthropological Theory). It is clear that Harris was especially influenced by Wagley: Harris’ early work on race in the Americas is essentially a direct development of Wagley’s work, and Harris’ cultural materialist theory builds upon Wagley’s broadly ecological approach (though obviously also drawing on many other sources of inspiration also).

June Nash and "Aztec Women"

June Nash has been a prominent anthropologist for the past few decades. She has written extensively about contemporary Mayan communities in southern Mexico, but also about a variety of contemporary and ethnohistorical topics related to Mesoamerica or Latin America more generally, as with the current course reading.

Nash’s article, “Aztec Women,” was published as part of the collection Women and Colonization, edited by Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock. The collected articles of this book examined the effects of the transition to a global economic system and of colonialism around the world over the course of the past several centuries on women and gender relationships. Nash’s article focuses on this process in the context of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire and the colonization of New Spain/Mexico.

Nash is also concerned here with two topics that could be considered for any cultural context: social production and reproduction, and culture change. She considers the role of gender, of women and men, in the production of economic goods and of persons (through socialization, for example) and in social reproduction (of people and of the conditions and materials for social production). She also writes of how gender roles in relation to social production and reproduction changed through time in the Aztec context, both in the century or so preceding the Spanish Conquest and in the Spanish Colonial period after that Conquest.

For more information on June Nash, see her faculty web page at the City University of New York.