Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

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B. Traven and the Paradox of Artisanal Production in Capitalism: Traven's Oaxaca Tale inEconomic Anthropological PerspectiveAuthor(s): Scott CookSource: Mexican Studies / Estudios Mexicanos, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Winter, 1995), pp. 75-111Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the University of California Institute for Mexicoand the United States and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de MéxicoStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1051911 .Accessed: 11/02/2011 14:41

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B. Traven and the Paradox of Artisanal Production in Capitalism: Traven's Oaxaca Tale in Economic

Anthropological Perspective

Scott Cook The University of Connecticut

Por medio de una lectura critica del cuento oaxaqueio "Canastitas en serie" de B. Traven, se pretende determinar su aporte al conocimiento de las pequefias industrias artesanales ubicadas en la frontera Mexico/Tejas y en estados del interior como Oaxaca. Desde la 6ptica de la economia antropologica en el campo de estudios mexicanos, se propone que el aporte de Traven era precoz, sofisticado, perspicaz y ademas que, por su riqueza de imagenes e ideas, presenta un reto a los investigadores actuales. Sin embargo, se recalca que el antropologo debe de consultar las obras de Traven con un cierto grado de escepticismo, debido a su metodo de producir textos que a veces subordinaba el precisar empirico al efecto literario.

Introduction1

On a blistering hot day during the summer of 1993 I made a first visit to one of several small capitalist brick plants (ladrilleras) along the banks of the Rio Bravo in Reynosa, Tamaulipas. I in-

1. The first version of this paper was written for presentation at the conference on Culture/Crafts, Museums/Markets: Mexican Artisans in the Global Market organized by June Nash and Flora Kaplan and held at the Casa Italiana at New York University on April 15, 1994. The conference was sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Museum Studies Program of New York University, the City College of the City University of New York, and the Mexican Cultural Institute, New York. I wish to thank, in addition to June Nash for inviting me to present the paper, Karl Guthke, Joe Spielberg Benitez, Dennison Nash, Jim Faris, Christy McDonnell, Leigh Binford, Francoise Dussart, Frans Schryer, and Frank Cancian for reading and commenting on it. I am especially grateful to Ernst Schurer for his careful reading of the manuscript and for sharing with me insights gained from years of fruitful scholarship on Traven and his work.

Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 11(1), Winter 1995. ? 1995 Regents of the University of California.

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troduced myself to the man in charge, Antonio "Tonio" Reynoso, who was seated upon a stack of bricks on a flatbed trailer that was being loaded under his supervision. I explained to Toiio my interest, as an anthropologist, in comparing the brick industry in Reynosa with that in Oaxaca which I had studied previously (Cook 1984a). To my surprise, after patiently listening to my explanation, Tono started talking about problems confronting the border brick industry by referring to a story dealing with basket makers in Oaxaca written by a famous author whose name he could not recall. As Toio briefly summarized the story line and his interpretation of its relevance to the border brick industry, I soon realized that he was referring to my favorite B. Traven (1993) tale entitled "Assembly Line" which sardonically describes the futile attempt by a New York City businessman to work out an export deal with a peasant-Indian basket maker in a Oaxaca village. As it turns out, Toiio had not read the story but had seen a Mexican movie version of it.2

Having been surprised by this unexpected infusion of literary discourse and meaningful testimony into what was scheduled to be a routine, preliminary first contact with a potentially important informant, I made a special effort to maintain my composure and continued the conversation about the brick business without dwell- ing on the Traven story. Toward the end of our conversation, I promised to get a copy of the story for Toiio so that he could read it prior to meeting me again for a more extensive interview session. The next day I was fortunate to locate a video edition of the movie at Blockbuster in McAllen, Texas, and found it to be a reasonably faithful rendition of the published versions of the story I had previously read. That same day in the public library of Weslaco, Texas, I also found a Spanish edition of the collection of short stories by Traven in which the Oaxaca tale appears and made two photocop- ies, one of which I delivered to Toiio. Since then I have had two formal interviews with Toiio in which the story's relevance to the border brick industry was discussed at length. In addition, I have read or reread several of Traven's novels and short stories, as well as several studies by Travenologists. The focus of my reading has been to evaluate, from the perspective of economic anthropology, Traven's contribution to Mexican studies.

2. I have identified my informant's name with his permission. Toiio is the sole

operator of the ladrillera, but the owner is his older brother and former ladrillero, Sebastian.Tofio's business card contains the following information: Ladrillera "Rey- noso", Ladrillo solido de Barro hecho a mano, Antonio Reynoso N., Oficina: Calle Division del Norte No. 897, Col. Aquiles Serdan, Cd. Reynosa, Tamps. Tel. 22-72-38 y 22-91-79.

The video and film are titled Canasta de cuentos mexicanos after the book of short stories published in Mexico in 1956.

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In retrospect, I undertook this project only because Toiio Reynoso raised the issue while trying to explain to me something of fundamental importance for understanding his industry. To not have done so would have been indefensible in terms of my ongoing research on the border brick industry. Moreover, to have completed it compensates for my earlier failure to address the relevance of Traven's tale during all the years I was actively engaged in research on craft production in Oaxaca. So, for better or for worse, any connection between the recent surge of interest in literary/ hermeneutic/dialogical anthropology and my interest in Traven are coincidental.

Caveat Lector: Problems in Reading Traven from the Perspective of a Skeptical Yet Sympathetic Anthropologist

Background on Traven and His Oaxaca Tale

The enigmatic B. Traven, pen name of Otto Feige born in 1882 in Germany (Schwiebus, Pomerania) who also used the pseudonyms Ret Marut, Traven Torsvan, and Hal Croves at various stages of his life (Wyatt 1980; Schiirer and Jenkins 1987, 5-8), as a political refugee from Europe took up permanent residence in Mexico in 1924 via the port of Tampico, Tamaulipas. He probably visited Oaxaca for the first time between 1926 and 1928 on his way to or from Chiapas (Schiirer and Jenkins 1987, 360), which not only served as a setting for many of his novels and short stories but was his final resting place after his death in 1969 (Baumann 1987; Stone 1977, 85-87).

Traven's Oaxaca tale was first published in German in 1930 as "Der Grog-Industrielle" (B. Traven 1930); in Spanish in 1956 as "Canastitas en serie" (B. Traven 1956); and in English in 1966 as "Assembly Line" (B. Traven 1966, 73-88) (Baumann 1976, 171).3

3. Traven scholars, especially those keenly interested in meanings associated with particular metaphors and with semantics in general, are confronted with a special problem owing to his habit of "making changes in the texts of his books from one edition to the next" (M. Baumann 1976, xii). According to M. Baumann (ibid.): "One gets the impression that Traven kept reworking all of his texts all of the time. It is hard to keep up with the many editions of his novels and stories that have appeared in German, the language they were first published in; it is harder to keep up with the changes Traven made in non-German-language editions. Unfortunately, a good example of this difficulty in determining which is the genuine, definitive version is provided by the title of the Oaxaca tale. According to Ernst Schurer (personal communication), the most accurate English translation of "Der Gro&Industrielle" is"Captain of Industry" who, in Traven's original German version of the story, was personified by"der Amerikaner" and was not specifically identified as Mr. E. L. Winthrop. In the English translation, the title is changed to "Assembly

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Considering that a brickworks provided the setting in which the present article originated, it is coincidental that as Ret Marut in Munich starting in 1917 Traven published a magazine called Der Ziegelbrenner (The Brick Burner or Brickmaker) which was "in format, the size, shape and colour of a brick" (Wyatt 1981, viii). According to Wyatt (ibid.), in this magazine "The bricks were fired by Ret Marut to comment upon the corrupt society in which he lived and to begin the rebuilding of a new and better world....The targets at which these bricks were hurled were the war...and the capitalist society, which had brought the war about."4

Line" and "der Amerikaner" becomes Mr. E. L. Winthrop; and in the Spanish edition, translated from the English, the title becomes"Canastitas en serie" or"Little Baskets in Series" These are only some examples of why Schirer believes the publication history of Traven's Oaxaca tale is "worth a paper in itself" (which, incidentally, he hopes to write some day). According to Schurer (personal communication): "There are different German versions... Apparently the first Spanish version was published in 1946 in Una canasta de cuentos mexicanos under the title'La canasta'. According to Rolf Recknagel this translation was done by Esperanza L6pez Mateos....The story 'Canastitas en serie' in Canasta de cuentos Mexicanos, translated by Rosa Elena Lujan and published in 1956, is a much changed and greatly expanded version....It has more than double its length and introduces the names of the Americans E.L. Winthrop and Kemple. The English story'Assembly Line' is a translation of the Spanish version but again there are some changes, for instance in the prices and time needed to make a basket."

Guthke's (1991, 357-58) is probably the authoritative statement in print of Traven's role vis-a-vis the various versions of this manuscript: "Translations represented another important area of Traven's literary activity in this period, consisting primarily... .of English versions of stories published in the collection Der Busch. The California Quarterly published 'Der Gross-Industrielle' as 'A Legend of Huehuetonoc' in 1952. Traven corresponded extensively with Sanora Babb, the editor of the journal, trying (in vain) to get other stories published. (According to a note to 'A Legend', the story was translated by Esperanza L6pez Mateos, who had presented a Spanish version in the Canasta of 1946; Esperanza can scarcely have translated from German into English, however; at the very least Traven must have been involved in some way in the production of the English version: Probably he had actually prepared such a version for Esperanza for the 1946 collection.)."

In an earlier version of this article, I argued that Traven's use of the "assembly line" metaphor was strictly in the capitalist sense to expose Mr. Winthrop's ethnocentrism (i.e., capitalist mind-set). This interpretation would seem to be quite compatible with the "captain of industry" metaphor. In this version I suggest that Traven intended the metaphor of"assembly line" to be ambiguous or, at least, to simultaneously embrace a capitalist and an artisanal notion of mass production (or production In series). This interpretation of "Assembly Line" seems to be reinforced by the Spanish title "Canastitas en serie" Of course, the thrust of Traven's ironic use of the metaphor is still toward exposing the American businessman's ethnocentrism.

4. The association between B. Traven and brickmaking that arose serendipi- tously in my fieldwork may, in fact, not be coincidental and, like his association with Tamaulipas, has broader implications in Traven studies. If Wyatt's thesis linking

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Unjustified Skepticism?

I first read Traven's story in its Spanish version at some point during my early years of fieldwork in Oaxaca in the 1960s and intended someday to use it as supplementary reading material in an undergraduate course on economic anthropology. It nicely illustrates the principle of contextualized rationality or how specific material and ideational factors of context or conjuncture influence the exercise of practical reason by peasant-artisans. One of the reasons why, until recently, I had not followed through on this intention, or for that matter referred to it or other literary texts in my analytical work in economic anthropology, is probably due to my skepticism regarding the epistemological status of interpretative statements about social reality that lack any explicit concern with demonstrating systematically in empirical terms why they are not idiosyncratic or impressionistic. From my perspective, the operational method of data collection, analysis, and explanation is a necessary restraint on the exercise of perception, ideology, and imagination in the process of knowledge production, and I have shied away from using texts anthropologically that were produced by other methods.

In retrospect, I have probably been mistaken to not make anthropological use of Traven and other literary works. After all, whatever their source, most propositions or interpretative statements about social reality, whether derived from the application of strict operational procedures or not, can be examined against the existing social scientific record or transformed into hypotheses and subjected to empirical testing by those who doubt their reliability. Moreover, in most cases the sacrifice of empirical precision to literary effect, or the commission of errors for whatever reason (e.g., poor transla-

Traven's identity as Ret Marut with that of Otto Feige is correct, then, it follows that the name of Marut's revolutionary magazine Der Ziegelbrenner (The Brick Burner or The Brickmaker) was linked to the fact that Traven's father was employed in a Schwiebus brickworks during his childhood (Wyatt 1980, 310-12). Jonah Raskin, who apparently provided Wyatt with the clues to develop this thesis of Traven as Otto Feige, is skeptical about it but admits that the "brick burer/brickmaker" may not be merely a "symbolic coincidence" (1980, 243-n44). Karl Guthke (1991), the most prominent scholarly skeptic of the Otto Feige/Ret Marut identity, notes that all issues of Der Ziegelbrenner were "brick-shaped and brick red" but views "brick burner" simply as a building metaphor with strictly political rather than personal/ biographical meaning to Traven (1991, 129).

Regarding Traven's association with Tamaulipas, Guthke (1991, 209) points out that the most substantial result of Traven's first six years in Mexico, when he spent most of his time living in a rustic bungalow near Tampico, Tamaulipas, were five novels (The Death Ship, The Cotton-Pickers, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Bridge in the Jungle, and The White Rose) that established his reputation and "even today represent the centerpieces of his fame.'

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tion, sloppy editing), in producing a literary text can be overcome or corrected through subsequent scholarship.5

Therefore, my recent serendipitous encounter with B. Traven during fieldwork in a Reynosa ladrillera has obliged me to seriously ponder the epistemological consequences of oppositional thinking (e.g., scientific versus literary, anthropological versus nonanthropolog- ical, real or empirical versus ideal) (cf. Roseberry 1989, 30-33). More specifically, it has caused me to critically examine Traven's work as a potential source of meaningful images, ideas, propositions, and representations about Mexican peasant-artisans in capitalism. Never- theless, as a result of examining Traven's contribution to Mexican studies, and especially to its economic anthropological branch, I am more convinced than ever of the heuristic importance of developing operational procedures for bridging the boundaries between literary and scientific/empirically-verified domains of knowledge.

Traven's Oaxaca Tale and Reynosa Ladrilleras

Synopsis of the Tale

Before discussing my interpretation of Toiio Reynoso's views regarding the applicability of Traven's Oaxaca tale to the border brick industry, it is necessary to summarize the tale itself. A New York City businessman, Mr. E. L. Winthrop, traveling as a tourist in the state of Oaxaca arrives one day in a peasant-Indian basketmaking village which Traven names Huehuetonoc.6 Attracted by the uniquely

5. Frans Schryer, a friendly reviewer of this manuscript for MS/EM, in reference to the penultimate version of this and the preceding paragraph, candidly expressed his view that I had a rather"simplistic and unsophisticated notion of the relationship between the creation of scientific concepts, positivism and empirical research," and recommended that I read Bourdieu's Craft of Sociology to overcome this deficiency. I long ago decided that a little bit of simple epistemology goes a long way in the process of ethnographic knowledge production and, also, that the more sophisticated (and complicated) the epistemology, the less intelligible the ethnographic analysis and the fewer the ethnographies (i.e., the ethnographer gets so absorbed with the nature and methods of knowledge production that he/she either ceases to practice it or starts producing discursive texts without data). I have tried on more than one occasion to read and understand Bourdieu but decided that the time required for me to do so, in a way that would produce operationally satisfying results, would be better spent in other pursuits like, for example, reading Daniel Little (1986; 1993) who is about as sophisticated a writer on epistemological issues as I can handle.

6. My search of the official list of populated places in the state of Oaxaca failed to turn up this place name. Ernst Schiirer pointed out to me that in the original German version of the Oaxaca tale Traven called this village "Tlacotepec" (Traven 1930, 147), and that in the 1956 Spanish version the village is unnamed. Is it possible that Traven, for whatever reason, used the real name of the village in the German version? According to my search in the official list of populated places in Oaxaca,

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designed baskets he observes one peasant making, Winthrop buys up the basket maker's entire inventory of sixteen baskets for forty- five centavos (about four cents) each (Traven 1993, 75, 78). After returning to New York and discovering a potential market for such baskets, Winthrop negotiates a trial order with "one of the best- known candy-makers in the city" for ten thousand baskets to be used as "fancy packing" for French pralines (Traven 1993, 78-79). The negotiated price is $1.75 each, delivered in the port of New York (ibid., 80-81). Winthrop rushes back to Oaxaca to work out a deal with the peasant basket maker. To his chagrin, he finds that the basket maker is willing and able to make only three dozen baskets over a two-month period. Winthrop, obsessed by the prospect of handsome profits if the deal can be closed as negotiated in New York, urges the basket maker to reconsider the possibility of making more baskets and to do so at a wholesale price per one thousand pieces. The basket maker agrees to rethink the matter overnight and the next day responds to Winthrop as follows (Traven 1993, 84): "If I got to make one thousand canastitas, each will be three pesos. If I must make five thousand, each will cost nine pesos. And if I have

there are four pueblos (all municipios) with the Tlacotepec surname: San Jacinto and Magdalena in the district of Sola de Vega, San Miguel in the district of Juxtlahuaca, and San Agustin in the district of Tlaxiaco. I have not been able to verify the practice of basketry in any of these pueblos but was able to verify the practice of palm plaiting (of sombreros and probably also of baskets) in San Agustin (Marroquin 1957, 194) which could be the village in the tale (though it could also be San Miguel). Another possibility is Santiago Yosondia which is in the ethnographic record (Marroquin 1957, 112) as producing tenates (palm baskets) and is also in the district of Tlaxiaco relatively near to San Agustin Tlacotepec.

Traven is inconsistent in describing the fibers from which the baskets in question are made. In the English version, for example, he (1993, 73, 82, 85) writes that the baskets are made of "bast and...all kinds of fibers," whereas in the Spanish version he describes them as being made out of"paja" or straw (1956, 9), "bejuco" or rattan (1956, 11), and in two places as made of"petate" (1956, 21, 24) which is a mat made from thin, dried strips of palm. It is not clear why Traven is inconsistent (or confused?) over this issue of raw materials, but my educated guess is that the best clue to the identity of the actual raw material comes from his two references to petate (which he must have thought was the word for dried palm strips). If my guess is correct, then the "policromadas canastitas" (1956, 28) or "multicolored canastitas" (1993, 88) might well be tompeates (or tomplates) about which Murillo (Dr. Atl) (1980, 204) writes: "Tompeates...are small baskets woven of palm leaves, dyed in diverse colors. They are quite attractive and are popular among all social classes. Like petates (palm mats), tompeates from Oaxaca are the best made in Mexico. They are very finely woven and...decorated with moderation, they are very flexible, globular in shape and perfectly finished." Incidentally, tompeates may have handles or straps for carrying. Without handles or straps they are also known as tenates. San Miguel Amatlan (district of Ixtlan de Juarez) in the Sierra Zapoteca is among the best-known centers of polychrome tompeate/tenate production in Oaxaca (see Marin de Paalen 1974, 142-43).

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to make ten thousand, in such a case I can't make them for less than fifteen pesos each." Winthrop is dumbfounded by the logic of this response-larger volume, higher cost-and desperately probes for a further explanation which the basket maker provides (Traven 1993, 84-85): "Bueno, patroncito, what is there so difficult to understand? It's all very simple. One thousand canastitas cost me a hundred times more work than a dozen. Ten thousand cost me so much time and labor that I could never finish them, not even in a hundred years."

Next, at Winthrop's insistence, to clarify the reasons why village basket production capacity is so limited, the basket maker explains in some detail the elements of the typical Oaxaca villager's livelihood strategy, combining agricultural production for own-use with craft production for raising cash for additional household needs, and embodying logics that in today's academic discourse are known as subsistence "safety first" (Scott 1976, 15-26) and simple "opportunity- cost."7 Winthrop pointedly asks the basket maker why he does not recruit relatives or other villagers to help out with agricultural or basket production and elicits the following reply: "They might, patroncito, yes, they might. Possible. But then you see who would take care of their fields and cattle if they work for me? And if they help me with baskets it turns out the same. No one would any longer work his fields properly. In such a case corn and beans would get up so high in price that none of us could buy any and we all would starve to death" (Traven 1993, 85-86). In short, Mr. Winthrop returned to New York empty-handed, frustrated, and cursing the stupidity of Mexican peasant-Indian artisans for their lack of business acumen.

Traven's Method

It should be clear from the material presented in the above synopsis that Traven was well-informed about political economy and was also knowledgeable about the realities of daily life in Mexican peasant-Indian villages. He cannot be dismissed as a naive, armchair storyteller. He was, rather, a gifted writer who produced texts on the basis of observations and conversations in the field; selective study of primary and secondary documentary sources; broad life experiences in a variety of sociocultural and international settings; and no small measure of insight, imaginative thought, and ideology.

7. This is the logic of calculating cost in terms of the sacrifice of the alternatives forgone in producing a given commodity or service. For example, the cost of making ten baskets is the five bushels of corn that might have been harvested in their stead by the peasant-Indian basket maker.

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Still, the controversy surrounding the mix of fact and fiction in his writings about Chiapas-especially regarding Ladino-Indian rela- tions and the labor process in the mahogany logging industry-seems to be weighted toward support of Zogbaum's carefully documented thesis that Traven purposefully disregarded facts about life and work in the monterfas (logging camps) that conflicted with his pre- conceived vision and either invented or misconstrued others. As will be shown in the course of the present essay, there are also problems related to the omission or confusion of facts in the Oaxaca tale. However, Zogbaum's critique begs the question of how to appro- priately evaluate the work of a figure such as Traven who, after all, never claimed to be a historian, ethnographer, or social scientist of any type-but simply a writer who was both humanistically con- cerned and well-informed about his subject matter through study and firsthand experience.8

8. Traven's writings include a nonfiction work Land des Frhultngs (1928) that M. L. Baumann (1976, 130) describes as "several things at once: an account of a trip on foot and muleback through the state of Chiapas; an anthropological study of the Tsotsil Indians; a sociological report on Mexico in the late 1920s; a comparative study of the white-European-American and the red-Mexican-Indian cultures; and a political-economic-historic vision of Central and North America." E Baumann (1987, 246) appraises this work in a way that shows the degree to which Traven became a Mexicanist: "It is a fascinating document of his philosophical, political, and historical reflections growing out of his confrontation with revolutionary Mexico and his discovery of Indian community life, which, unlike the life in Western countries, seemed to him free from individual ambition and greed. Land also shows his passionate endorsement of the policies of the revolutionary government and his belief in the future greatness of Mexico and its Indian citizens"

Karl Guthke, the first biographer to have complete access to the Traven archives, states that "to the extent possible for a European, Traven lived the life of the Indians in Chiapas" (1991, 194) and concludes from an examination of field notes from Traven's 1928 trip to Chiapas that "the entries confirm...that Traven based his Mexican novels on what he himself had experienced" (1991, 197; cf. 194-202). Zogbaum, on the other hand, (1992, chap. 3) convincingly argues that Traven's understanding of Chiapas and Its Indians as expressed in Land was deficient, but improved through subsequent field trips. Her overall judgment of the man and his contribution to Mexican studies is carefully documented (1992, 170-71, 180-81) and generally sympathetic but highlights Traven's shortcomings as a nonfiction writer. In her judgment (1992, 182-83): "That he failed in some details cannot be held against him, except that his failure prevented what Traven most desired: instead of stimulating debate and calling attention to the dismal socio-economic conditions of the Chiapan Indians, he exposed himself to justified criticism on technicalities. The unevenness of his account of monterfa life ultimately prevented him from being taken seriously as the chronicler of the Chiapan logging industry by those who could judge what he wrote. Traven undermined his own case by delivering into the hands of those he accused the weapons with which to attack him" (1992, 182-83).

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A Ladrillero's Viewpoint on the Meaning of Traven's Tale

Why is Traven's Oaxaca tale, written more than a half century ago, meaningful today to a small-scale capitalist brickworks operator (ladrillero) in Reynosa, far removed in time, place, and presumably level and type of socioeconomic development from rural Oaxaca of the late 1920s?9 Its meaningfulness hinges on Toiio Reynoso's perception of a parallel between Traven's explanation of why the peasant-Indian basket maker was unable to pursue a market-driven, capitalist project (i.e., Winthrop's) and Toiio's own understanding of a similar incapability on the part of artisanal brickmakers in the border brick industry. In terms of formal economic discourse, the incapability of both sets of artisans evokes a scenario from the marginalist model of dual sector economies in which, to quote from an economics textbook, "with the assumed fixity of wants an individual's supply curve of effort to the exchange sector turns back for rates of reward above a certain point; beyond this point the quantity of effort offered varies inversely with the reward per unit" (Bauer and Yamey 1957, 85). In essence, the two cases exemplify the "backward bending supply curve of effort" so familiar to neoclassical development economists but by no means applicable only to developing Third World economies.10

The labor productivity issue was central to Toiio's explanation of his relations over the years with an Anglo-Texan broker, Mr.

9. I consider a small-scale capitalist brickworks to be artisanal along with small- scale noncapitalist brickworks. In other words, I use the term artisanal with reference to labor-intensive unmechanized and to semimechanized brick production in enterprises ranging from small- to medium-scale. The term distinguishes these two

types of brick production from highly mechanized, capital-intensive factory produc- tion. In Mexico, the term ladrillera refers to artisanal as well as to factory forms of brick production. The labor-intensive unmechanized ladrilleras may be of the

household-organized petty commodity type (employing mostly family labor, perhaps irregularly supplemented by wage labor) or of the petty capitalist type regularly employing wage labor. The Reynoso brick plant is the latter type.

10. Benjamin Higgins (1959) was among the first to argue that the backward-

sloping supply curve of effort "appears in any society which stagnates (or slows down) long enough to weaken the 'demonstration effect' provided by people moving from one standard of living to another, as a result of their own extra effort, directed

specifically toward earning additional income" (pp. 286-87). He argued further that "the truth may well be that, in a static world, supply curves of effort and risk-taking are normally backward sloping. Where no other changes are taking place, most people would probably like some additional leisure, or some additional safety and

liquidity, when rates of pay for effort and risk-taking are increased, so that the extra leisure, safety, and liquidity can be had without a reduction in material standard of living" (1959, n on 287). Economic anthropologists will also associate this kind of marginalist logic with Chayanov's (1966, esp. pp. 70-85) analysis of the "drudgery of labor" in the context of the Russian peasant farm.

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Cypher from Houston.11 On his periodic visits to the Reynosa ladrilleras, Cypher always complained about their lack of output capacity and irritated Toio by making invidious comparisons be- tween his ladrillera and another one in the same area which Cypher wrongly claimed was producing one hundred thousand bricks monthly with only four brickmakers. Toiio knew these claims to be wrong through his own periodic observations of what was going on in his neighbor's ladrillera. He knew, too, that during any given week eight to ten brick molders (echureros) were at work in his own ladrillera, and that his average output of fifty thousand bricks monthly was, at least, equivalent to-and often exceeded-his neighbor's. Yet Cypher apparently never got his output estimates in line and caused Tofio even more disgruntlement by telling him on one occasion that he lacked the will to make his ladrillera more productive. ("El decia que yo no tenia animo de trabajar")

Toio tried, in vain, to explain to Cypher the reasons why it was impossible to regularly produce one hundred thousand, or even fifty thousand, handmade bricks monthly in either his or his neighbor's ladrillera: "There are weeks that we make twenty odd thousand; then there are weeks that it is only make, make, make and we produce thirty thousand. But then a week comes along when we have to get, load, and unload firewood, or load unfired brick into the kiln, fire it, unload it from the kiln and stack it or load it on a trailer. And then there are rainy days. It is not pure make, make, make. So I have the desire to work, what I don't have is the desire to lie about the nature of the work. I am not able to tell you that X number of workers on any given day can make me, say, eight thousand bricks. Today, perhaps, but tomorrow they will work at a different pace and they will make me only two thousand. And day after tomorrow, a trailer drives up and has to be loaded so they make me only two thousand again." Toilo's dealings with Cypher were asymmetrical and tensely miscommunicative due to their irreconcilable perceptions of economic reality, and proved ultimately abortive. This parallels the relationship portrayed by Traven between the anonymous Oaxaca basket maker and Mr. Winthrop. Mr. Cypher is Toiio's Mr. Winthrop.

To further substantiate his argument regarding the relevancy of the Traven tale, Tonio described a more recent encounter with a trucker-intermediary who drove up to his ladrillera in a flatbed trailer rig and exclaimed to Toio: "Get to work. I'll buy everything you've

11. I have located and interviewed Mr. Cypher (pseudonym). His recollections of the period when he regularly visited the Reynosa brickworks do not contradict

Reynoso's reconstruction on any important detail. However, Reynoso's memory for detail regarding their meetings is more vivid.

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got. How many [bricks] can you make a week?" Tofo responded to the trucker as follows, a response that in broad outline echoes, if in the language of petty capitalism, the voice of Traven's basket maker: "I can make you fifty thousand or four trailer loads but I can't guarantee exactly when. That's how the workers are around here. With three or four hours work daily, they want to earn an eight-hour salary. When the workers see that I have an order, they will ask me for a raise, not to work more hours but to work less for the same salary. They don't want to work additional hours at a higher rate but want to work fewer hours to earn the same salary. So I can't tell you that with more workers on any given day I can produce, say, eight thousand bricks. Today, perhaps, but tomorrow the workers will work differently, they may make only two thousand bricks. And the day after tomorrow when your trailer arrives, they will make only another two thousand. People who think in terms of mechanized factories simply can't understand me when I tell them that the more brick I try to make the less is my profit."

During our second interview, Toiio was even more explicit in explaining why Traven's story is applicable to the brick industry: "One has a two-sided problem. The customers, since they speak about large volumes, demand a very low price. That's where the case of the baskets [in the Traven tale] is relevant. If I supply the client with, say, ten thousand bricks weekly, I can do so at a price of thirty-five dollars per thousand pieces. But, if I supply him with twenty thousand, logic says that I would sell at a lower price per thousand. But that's not the case. The price tends to go up due to the little problems we have with the workers."

According to Tonio, unlike the nonwage situation in Traven's Oaxaca case, the use of wage incentives by ladrilleros to increase productivity may lead to cost increases, as well as to possible decreases in output. So, a worker who had to work five hours to produce one thousand bricks prior to a wage increase may be able to earn the same income after a wage increase by working one hour less and producing only eight hundred bricks. Despite its many differences with basketmaking in Oaxaca, border brickmaking also confronts a series of constraints on labor input that inhibit the expansion of output for the capitalist market.

A caveat is in order here, however. Whereas Toiio Reynoso is correct to emphasize the parallel between the constraints operating on labor performance and productivity in both cases, it is important to point out that these constraints can be (and have been) overcome in the border brick industry by an increase in the number of small ladrilleras, either as new independent enterprises or as satellites of already existing enterprises. The satellitization strategy is known as

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the "campero" (field boss) system and the satellite brickfields are known as "campos." Only the largest artisanal enterprises, however, have the capital required to employ the "campero/campo" strategy.12

Reading B. Traven as an Economic Anthropologist

Traven and Political Economy

In reading Traven as an economic anthropologist, it is necessary to read him first as a political economist of capitalism. He came to Mexico fully prepared to view its economy as neocolonial capitalist and to view its rural peasant-Indian peoples as, at least, partial participants in capitalist markets for labor and its products. In everything Traven wrote about rural Mexico that significantly deals with economic themes, capital has a superordinate role. It is this understanding of capital, combined with a fascination with its multiple activities and relations in exotic hinterlands of provincial Mexico, that makes Traven's economic anthropology so unique for its time and still relevant today. That Traven was able to convey so effectively and sympathetically the participation of peasant-Indian villagers in this capitalist relational process, as well as in those domains of life where capitalism was peripheral or absent, with insights only mildly tainted by ethnocentrism, accentuates the uniqueness and relevance of his legacy.

Traven was a severe critic of capitalism and statism. He sided ideologically with labor in its historic struggle against capital, and with civil society (the people) in its (their) struggle against the state. John Huston, who directed and wrote the screenplay for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, admitted being attracted to Traven's work because Traven was "above all a passionate defender of the victims of society, a man who hated injustice and had found a great battlefield in Mexico on which to join combat with it" (Wyatt 1980, 134; cf. Guthke 1991, 186). What Huston probably did not know was that in his pre-Mexico days Traven, as Ret Marut, had been a nonpartisan anarchist leader of the Bavarian Revolution of 1919 which established a short-lived populist, antibourgeois Council Republic in Munich that was crushed by the troops of the so-called Majority Socialist government, headed by Friedrich Ebert, in power

12. The"campero/campo" system, as well as other labor and related conditions in the border brick industry are discussed in Cook in press and Cook 1994. Although Traven did not write about it in his story, basket production in Oaxaca may be organized and controlled by merchant capital through a putting-out system as it is in the contemporary valley (see Cook and Binford 1990, 73-74).

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in Berlin at the time (Klein 1991, 160-67; R. Marut/B. Traven 1991). Marut/Traven was arrested for high treason, escaped, went under- ground, and resurfaced in England in 1923 where he was refused asylum and briefly imprisoned prior to departing for Mexico in 1924 (Guthke 1991, 128-65).

Traven was critical of the Communist party (e.g., Stone 1977, 31-32, 47, 52-53) but, like many Marxists, viewed capitalism as a transnational class struggle in which capitalists' profit is derived from their exploitation of a proletarian class that embraces rural and urban workers in both the Old and New Worlds. For Traven, Mexican peasant-Indian ranch or forestry workers, like workers in all colonial and neocolonial countries, were as much a part of the proletariat as were European or U.S. factory workers (Guthke 1991, 186, 263-64 et passim). Raskin (1980, 179) makes this point succinctly: "For Traven the Indian is a proletarian, a worker. To understand the Indian, Traven says, we have to understand labor." As I will illustrate below from Traven's work, his labor-centered approach to capitalist production carries over to his approach to peasant-artisan production.13

The White Rose and Traven's Fascination with Capital

Although many consider Traven to be a proletarian writer, he is perhaps less well appreciated as having an ambivalent fascination with capital and capitalists. The more I read Traven's work from his Tamaulipas period, the more I am convinced that he was intrigued by the strategies, tactics, and mechanisms of capital accumulation and by what makes capitalists tick, every bit as much as he was by the lives and activities of workers. In this sense, I think that Mr.

13. M. L. Baumann (1976, 39) writes: "If Traven were a socialist or a communist there would be no question as to his position in the class struggle, but...he is neither, and he does not regard the worker's struggle as a class struggle." This judgment is compatible with Baumann's project that essentially packages Traven as an egocentric Stirnerite anarchist (1976, esp. chap. 3 and pp. 131-53). In my opinion Traven was too eclectic and independent a radical intellectual to be a true believer in any single ideology or system of thought. In any case, his labor-centered political economy and his interest in labor movements suggest to me that he possessed a sufficient degree of class consciousness, if not adherence to canons of systematic class analysis, to negate Baumann's judgment. The latter rests upon an underestimation of the impact total immersion in postrevolutionary Mexico would have on a perceptive radical intellectual like Traven, exiled from a failed revolutionary experience in Europe. In short, my reading leads me to agree with E Baumann (1987, 254) that Traven "looks at the problems people had in making a living from the perspectives of members of different classes" and with K. Guthke (1991, 272) that from a biographical point of view "Traven's experiences in his new land [i.e., Mexico] molded his theoretical outlook."

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Winthrop in Traven's Oaxaca tale is a precursor or incipient model for Mr. Collins in The White Rose (Traven 1979), perhaps his most ambitious Mexican novel. Especially in the longer Spanish version of this novel (Traven 1969d), Traven develops Mr. C. C. Collins, the president of Condor Oil, as a multidimensional character-we learn a great deal about Collins's background and formation as a business- man and about how he thinks and acts about business, sex, love, politics, and life in general. Traven devotes many more pages to Mr. Collins than he does to his Indian protagonist Don Jacinto, the patriarch of the hacienda Rosa Blanca which is destined to be transformed into oil fields by Condor. Though ultimately a villain, Mr. Collins is more well-rounded-astute, instinctively knowledge- able, philosophical, ruthlessly calculating and manipulative, powerful and successful-than Mr. Winthrop. Much of what Traven under- stood about the political economy and culture of capitalism, as well as about interpersonal (including intergender) relations and other critical areas of private and public life in the twentieth century, seems to find expression through Mr. Collins. It is almost as if Traven harbored a grudging admiration for gringo capitalists! 14

While devoting quite a bit of attention to the battle of the sexes in The White Rose, Traven devotes even more to an exploration, again through Mr. Collins, of the class struggle in U.S. capitalism. He does this by means of a retrospective on Collins's formation as a businessman prior to his association with Condor Oil, focusing in considerable detail on his association with a coal-mining enterprise, Emmerlin Anthracite Company (1969d, 149-222; cf. 1979, 75-92). To make a long story short, Collins devised a complex, cynical, and risky plan to use the coal miners' union (especially the leadership), together with the workers' struggle for economic betterment, to accumulate a huge inventory of coal, then reduce wages and bonuses, slowdown production, force a strike, bust the union, comer

14. For example, after noting that even the powerful president of an important oil company lacks the power to control natural forces, including his own masculinity, Traven (1969d, 98-99) launches into a discussion of the relationship between sex, love, and money that includes the following statement: "With regard to women he [the Wall Street tycoon] was merely an ordinary man, different from others only because he can pay more without receiving in exchange more than any man can obtain from a woman, regardless of her beauty and elegance" (1969d, 98). A few pages later, Traven (1969d, 102-03) introduces age into the equation, and he tells us that at Collins's relatively advanced age he "did not expect to be loved by any new woman attracted by his good looks or his lovemaking ability. If any woman would have told him that she loved him for being himself, he would have laughed affably and would have been flattered, but would have immediately made mental calculations to determine what her flattery would cost him." Given the facts of Traven's biography, this passage may be autobiographical.

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the coal market to make a killing in a seller's market, and, finally, resume production under a less costly company union regime. Collins sold the plan to the board of directors, negotiated his terms, executed the plan to perfection, and became a millionaire.

Traven uses this digression in his novel to present a short course on the political economy of capitalism, the central theme of which he expresses as follows (1969d, 165-66): "Workers do not work because they are stupid...but because they are so compelled by the iron laws of the capitalist system. No matter how much workers do and plan within this social and economic system to which they belong and of which they form part, the only result will be to strengthen capitalism. As long as the system lasts, labor will be inevitably coupled with capital, without possibility of escape. Unions are of greater value to capitalism than to the workers. Workers find themselves tied to the monster of capitalism, no matter whether its end represents death and disaster or life and the culmination of our culture....The active produce, the inactive suffer. Inside this system capitalists are active, workers are inactive because they must receive orders from those who are active. The capitalist knows what he is after. Money, and after money, power. Workers are after only their share, and if this turns out to be sufficient to more or less maintain them and permit them certain comforts, they are satisfied and appreciate the current system." [This and all subsequent quotations in English from the Spanish version of this novel are my translations.] This is a realistic assessment by an ambivalent anticapitalist who had come to the conclusion that, like it or not, the hegemony of capital will persist because "the Worker, in the present system...at heart is as capitalist as the proprietor of a bank" (Traven 1969d, 166). In short, this passage presents us with the gist of Traven's thinking about capitalist hegemony.15

Traven's Labor Theory of Value

An important pillar in Traven's understanding of political econ- omy, and in his economic anthropology, emerges clearly in another

15. Traven (1969d, 167) makes clear that Mr. Collins has learned the secret of capitalist hegemony without the help of formal study of economics, that "he was unfamiliar with anything that could help him to analyze the ups and downs of capitalism," and that he "came only by instinct to understand the laws according to which this very complicated system works." According to Traven, "That same instinct had led him [Collins] to discover the fact that presently no branch of the capitalist system has greater influence over public opinion than the struggle, or if you wish sporting event, commonly called capital against labor or labor against capital. Labor does not benefit much materially from its positive opportunities, nevertheless, it achieves something by impressing the conscience and opinion of the public."

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of his Tamaulipas period novels, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Traven 1969a). Etched in my memory as dramatically associating Traven with the labor theory of value are lines from the movie ver- sion of this novel in a scene when the old prospector Howard (played by Walter Huston) explains to his audience of down-and- outers in a Tampico flophouse his theory of the value of gold: "An ounce of gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that went into the findin' and gettin' of it. There is no other expla- nation, mister. Gold in itself ain't worth nothin' except for makin' jewelry with and gold teeth."16 I have searched in vain for this passage in the novel which suggests that it may represent one of John Huston's academy award-winning contributions to the screen- play (and also to the award-winning performance of his father as best supporting actor)-although it reads and sounds like vintage Traven.

In any case, there are several passages in Treasure (e.g., Traven 1969a, 96, 236), and in another Tamaulipas period novel The Cotton- Pickers (Traven 1969b, 22, 111), that directly invoke the labor theory. Admittedly, in Treasure when he writes about the value of gold, Traven (1969a, 56; cf. p. 210) emphasizes more than once the importance (and risk) of transporting it to market (e.g., "No gold has any value if it cannot be transported to a place where people need it."). Nevertheless, even in one version of this thesis, the role of labor is highlighted (1993, 19-20): "Oil, like gold, is worthless in its natural state. It obtains its value only by handling and being taken where it is needed." In short, my limited search of his Tamaulipas period publications yielded considerable textual evidence for Traven's belief in the labor theory of value but also for his appreciation of the importance of marketing in the realization of labor-created exchange value.

Reading Traven on Peasant-Artisan Petty Commodity Production: Moral Economics, Unequal Exchange, and the "Assembly Line" Metaphor

The Logic of Peasant-Indian Petty Commodity Production

How does Traven's labor-centered approach carry over from his critique of capitalism to his representation of peasant-artisan produc- tion? The answer is through the linkage of cost-price to work- or

16. This is my direct transcription from the video version of the movie. Of course, even if Huston authored these words, it must be remembered that Traven, in the guise of Hal Croves, was a consultant on the movie and read and approved the script (Wyatt 1980, 135). According to Guthke (1991, 331): "Huston initiated an intensive correspondence with 'Croves,' who wrote interminably about the fine points of the screenplay. Though Huston authored the screenplay, Traven had meanwhile penned a script and sent it to Huston."

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labor-time and -effort. This linkage emerges clearly in the haggle between Winthrop and the artisan basket maker but Traven, as the storyteller, makes the connection explicit earlier (1993, 75): "Each basket cost him between twenty and thirty hours of constant work, not counting the time spent gathering bast and fibers, preparing them, making dyes and coloring the bast. All this meant extra time and work." The same connection is explicitly made more than once by the basket maker when he explains to an incredulous Winthrop why the price has to jump so high if he buys more than a hundred baskets (1993, 84-85). Traven's emphasis on the relationship be- tween the cost of artisanal commodities like baskets calculated in labor-time units and market price is paralleled and substantiated in my analysis of the Oaxaca valley metate industry (Cook 1976). This relationship in my judgment and, I think, Traven's as well is critical to the functioning of the peasant-artisan branch of Mexico's commod- ity economy (cf. Cook and Binford 1990, 32-34).

Together with his critical labor-centered view of capitalism and commodity economy in general, Traven also shared with many Marxists a tendency to view the underdeveloped rural sector of developing capitalist countries like Mexico as nurturing a process in which things are produced for their use value rather than for their exchange value; and where the allocation of labor-time is influenced more directly by sociocultural structure (e.g., community and kinship obligations) and the forces of nature (e.g., rainfall patterns and seasonality in general) than it is in metropolitan urban-industrial capitalism. Also, like many economists, political economists, and economic anthropologists who wrote before and after him (see Godelier 1972), Traven flirted with the view that underlying the perceived "backwardness" of economic life among peasant-artisans was their ignorance and illiteracy vis-a-vis the cost accounting rationality of capitalism. Hence, in his Oaxaca tale the Indian basket maker is portrayed as a slow and limited calculator in comparison to Mr. Winthrop. Fortunately, however, the overall thrust of Traven's story is to highlight the contextual appropriateness of the basket maker's rationality, leaving the reader with the impression that, given the conditions of life in a Mexican village at that time, including the lack of formal schooling, the villager's decision making was the same as the reader's would have been (cf. Cancian 1972; Beals 1975, 263-65). In the end, the substantive logic of the Indian peasant- artisan situation wins out over Winthrop's formal capitalist logic.17

17. In modern social science discourse the issue of"formal" versus "substantive" rationality of economic action was first posed and addressed by Max Weber (1947, 184-86). It has been addressed in terms of its relevance for economic anthropology by Cook 1974 and, more recently, by Plattner (1989, 7-15).

The most explicit statement in the tale illustrating Traven's posture is in a paragraph involving his voice directly as commentator and indirectly through the

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This interpretation is sustained by the way in which Traven presents the haggle between Winthrop and the peasant-Indian basket maker as representing a commodity economy dialectic between an exchange value-driven advanced (or capitalist) form and a use value- driven simple (or petty) form (cf. Cook 1981). For Traven, both are commodity forms of business, organized for producing wealth and related through markets; the difference between them lies in their scale, in the type and quantity of wealth they are organized to produce, and in how and why they produce it. In his view, gringo big business, motivated by greed and profit, mass produces commod- ities through machinofacture to generate money capital. Mexican peasant-Indian petty business, both its agricultural main branch and its subsidiary craft branch, soulfully produces commodities on a small scale without machinery for livelihood. Traven's Indian peasant- artisan produces with his heart, as well as with his head and his hands. It is clear from Traven's text, nevertheless, that the basket maker did not lack the desire to increase his earnings by expanding his output of baskets, but that he was prevented from doing so by a variety of structural conditions.

It bears mentioning that Traven did not fall into the "natural economy" trap that vitiated much European economic thought of his time. He did not assume that the peasant economy was autoch- thonous, marketless, and commodityless, and that its peasant-artisan agents blithely ignored material cost-benefit logic, the market-cash nexus, and exchange value as they went about satisfying their culturally circumscribed consumer wants (Cook 1984b, 5-15; Rose-

berry 1989, chap. 8). Traven did not mistake peasant-artisans in Oaxaca for exchange value-, money-, or market-naive participants in autochtonous primitive communes.18 Still, in contrast to his portrayal

basket maker: "That figure was too high for the Indian to grasp. He became slightly confused and for the first time since Mr. Winthrop had arrived he interrupted his work and tried to think it out. Several times he shook his head and looked vaguely around as if for help. Finally he said, "Excuse me, Jefecito...that is by far too much for me to count" (1993, 83; cf. 78, 82). Traven (1993, 86) later reinforces this theme of the Indian's deficiencies in quantitative reasoning by characterizing him as being awestruck "as Mr. Winthrop wrote down...long figures, executing complicated multiplications and divisions and subtractions so rapidly that it seemed to him the greatest miracle he had ever seen.

18. Zogbaum (1992, esp. 34-36 and chap. 2) emphasizes that Traven's early vision about Mexico and its Indian peoples was distorted by a mistaken belief that "anticapitalism is part of the genetic heritage of the Mexican Indian" (1992, 36) and that the "essence of Indianness was safeguarded in the genes" (1992, 80), as well as by his anarchist ideal of the self-regulating small community which colored his understanding of Indian communalism in ancient and contemporary Mexico. The absence of these views from his Oaxaca tale may reflect the fact that Traven's first encounter with Oaxacan peasant-artisans was during his second or third trip to Chiapas in 1927 and 1928, a period when he became aware of errors in his earlier understanding of Indian life and Indian-Ladino relations thanks to course work at

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of peasant-Indian plantation workers in Tamaulipas and forestry workers in Chiapas who are heavily involved in the wage system, Traven (1993, 85; cf. 1956, 25) through the dialogue between Mr. Winthrop and the basket maker envisages the possibility of expand- ing basket output in terms of additional labor recruited through kinship duty not wage payment.

To Traven's credit he accurately portrayed Oaxacan peasant- artisans as petty commodity producers, combining subsistence agriculture with craft production for sale in the periodic town market to make and earn their livelihood. In his words (1993, 74-75): "His principal business...was not producing baskets. He was a peasant who lived on what the small property he possessed...would yield.... Baskets he made when there was nothing else for him to do in the fields...the sale of his baskets...added to the small income he received from his little farm....Whenever the Indian had finished about twenty of the baskets he took them to town on market day."

Mestizo/Indian Relations and Unequal Exchange

Traven (1993, 75-76; 1956, 11-12) realized that when the peasant-Indian basket maker came into town he was in hostile territory, both in the ethnocultural and economic sense. The town, both in and out of the marketplace, was mestizo turf where the peasant-Indian producer-seller was subjected to patronizing discrim- ination that robbed him of human dignity, as well as of a significant portion of the exchange value embodied (through the expenditure of his artisanal labor time and effort) in his baskets. In the market- place haggle, the basket maker ended up receiving less than half of the eighty centavos (equivalent to ten U.S. cents) he originally quoted for a basket that embodied fifteen to twenty hours of his labor (not including procurement and preparation of the fibers and other raw materials)! Not only is the peasant-Indian basket maker compelled to, in effect, give away his embodied labor, but he also had to suffer the verbal abuse and belittlement from mestizo hagglers.19

The situation worsened when the peasant-Indian peddled his

the National University and additional thought and experience (Zogbaum 1992, 81 and chap. 4).

19. Traven (1956, 11; cf. 1993, 77) indicates knowledge of the periodicity of the marketplace system in Oaxaca when he writes, "Al tener listas unas dos docenas de ellas [canastitas], el indio las llevaba al pueblo los sabados, que eran dias de tianguis." This bit of information also reinforces the hypothesis that the "pueblo" (as opposed to "pueblito") or "town" (as opposed to "village") is, indeed, Tlaxiaco in the Mixteca Alta where the "dia de plaza [tianguis]" is Saturday (Marroquin 1957, 168).

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baskets outside of the marketplace. As Traven (1993, 76; cf. 1956, 12 and Marroquin 1957, 207-08) wrote: "Naturally he did not want to take those baskets which he could not sell at the marketplace home with him again if he could help it. In such a case he went peddling his products from door to door where he was treated partly as a beggar and partly as a vagrant apparently looking for an opportunity to steal, and he frequently had to swallow all sorts of insults and nasty remarks." This shabby, patronizing treatment is exemplified in the encounter between the basket maker and a mestiza town resident (Traven 1993, 76-77; 1956, 12-13): "In many instances he would actually get no more than just ten centavos, and the buyer, usually a woman, would grasp that little marvel and right before his eyes throw it carelessly upon the nearest table as if to say, 'Well, I take that piece of nonsense only for charity's sake. I know my money is wasted. But then, after all, I'm a Christian and I can't see a poor Indian die of hunger since he has come such a long way from his village'." In short, when one contrasts Traven's depiction of the international cross-cultural encounter between the basket maker and Mr. Winthrop (a representative of the gringo branch of the global market) with his depiction of the intranational ethno- cultural encounter between the basket maker and town mestiza buyers, the latter is portrayed in more extreme terms vis-a-vis the quality and magnitude of discrimination and exploitation. This provides a basis for inferring that if he could have started doing business with Mr. Winthrop, the basket maker probably would have experienced some improvement in his economic condition and, possibly, less exposure to ethnic discrimination in the market town. Maybe it is more significant that Traven's material lends itself to such an interpretation than it is to definitively determine that this is the interpretation Traven wanted the reader to make.

The "Assembly Line" Metaphor and Traven's Moral Economics

I have just interpreted Traven to have depicted the peasant basket maker as a market- and money-experienced petty commodity producer who hypothetically might earn more and suffer less by finding ways to expand output to participate in the export market. Why, then, do I also feel justified in proposing that during his own lifetime Traven was probably saddened or disappointed by Mexican peasant-artisans' accommodations to the commercial projects of hordes of real life Winthrops? My answer is because Traven's deeper concern was that the more that peasant-artisans play the market game, the faster the commodity economy dialectic moves away from the intimacy of household- and community-based petty commodity

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production toward the impersonality of market-dominated, money- mediated capitalist production. It was clearly Traven's belief that as capital penetrates peasant-artisan production, typically through a combination of credit and piece-rate payment from sources external to the local community, the artistic soul of that intimate production system dissipates.20

In the very title of his Oaxaca tale, Traven implicitly sets artisanal production in opposition to large scale capitalist mass production. His metaphor of the "assembly line" was employed ironically to expose Winthrop's ethnocentrism but, as the narrative unfolds, the metaphor serves to highlight that artisanal production is prevented from meeting the demand of a mass market for two reasons: (1) the artisans are also peasant agriculturists with a subsistence first and opportunity cost orientation who are culturally and emotionally tied to the soil; (2) (and here is where Traven succumbs to a romantic, nostalgic, essentialist, and utopian vision of bucolic, nonindustrial, small-scale production) each and every product of artisanal labor is unique, not only in design and appearance but also because it embodies a piece of the cultural soul or essence of the artisan.21

For Traven, artisans were artistic and, therefore, were artists. Regarding the basket maker, he wrote: "This craftsman had made in his life several hundreds of those exquisite baskets, but so far no two of them had he ever turned out alike in design. Each was an

20. In more literal Marxist terms this subordination of peasant-artisan produc- tion by capital could occur during the stage of "formal subsumption" without necessarily involving the subsequent stage of "real subsumption" (see Cook and Binford 1990, 23-24; also Marx 1977; Foladori 1981, 143-54; Chevalier 1983). This process may also be conceptualized in Marxist discourse as a transition from a use- value to an exchange-value regime (see Cook 1981).

21. The importance of this bucolic, quasi-Thoreauian image of the simple, close- to-nature life of the independent tiller of the soil is highlighted in Judy Stone's interviews with Traven (as Hal Croves) (1977, 58-59) when he is quoted as saying, among other things, "This nearness to the soil...is the most frequent and most important element in Traven's books" (p. 59). Nevertheless, E Baumann's (1987, 253-54) perceptive analysis of Traven's Chiapas-based Caoba (mahogany) Cycle works, including Land des Fruhlings, suggests that the author had "no romantic illusions about traditional agrarian society" and "in Land...warns readers against idealizing Indian communes, and...considers conditions even in the worst industrial slums preferable-for everyone but the Indians themselves-to the harsh living conditions in Indian villages." In Land, continues Baumann, Traven "also argues that not the agrarian reform but only industrialization could offer a better future to rural Mexicans. In the Caoba Cycle, Traven makes us aware of how difficult it was in traditional agrarian society to scrape together a living that would mean more than having the sheer necessities for survival." The contradiction here between Traven's statement to Stone and Baumann's interpretation of Traven's views in the Caoba Cycle probably boils down to a fundamental split between Traven as observer/analyst or amateur ethnographer and Traven as imaginative writer and visionary.

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individual piece of art and as different from the other as was a Murillo from a Velasquez" (1993, 76). And, speaking through the basket maker, Traven (1993, 87) waxes even more poetic regarding the nature of artisanal labor: "I've to make these canastitas my own way and with my song in them and with bits of my soul woven into them. If I were to make them in great numbers there would no longer be my soul in each, or my songs." From the standpoint of the ethno- graphic record, the voice of the Oaxaca basket maker here is probably not representative of most twentieth-century Mexican peasant-artisans who have found a way to reconcile their culturally embedded sense of artisanry with their commercial market participation.22

In taking this extreme position vis-a-vis the conflict of economics against morality, or technique against art, Traven placed himself in the company of cultural purists or essentialists who contend that systematic production for sale inevitably results in the debasement of the aesthetic or artistic quality of craft products. Also, he joined company with many radical intellectuals whose romantic, utopian vision leads them to see worker alienation as a necessary concomi- tant of mass production and capitalist development (cf. Sanciprian 1991, 10). These beliefs, together with Traven's special dislike of the U.S. brand of capitalist massification of production and consump- tion (i.e., his anti-Fordism), resonate in the moving and sardonic concluding lines of his Oaxaca tale (1993, 88): "And in this way it happened that American garbage cans escaped the fate of being turned into receptacles for empty, torn, and crumpled little multicol- ored canastitas into which an Indian of Mexico had woven dreams of his soul, throbs of his heart: his unsung poems."23

22. Traven's soulful vision of artisanal production (and even his wording) is paralleled in the following statement by my comadre Teodora Blanco, a renowned potter from Santa Maria Atzompa in the Valley of Oaxaca, recorded by representatives of the Fondo Nacional para el Fomento de las Artesanias (FONART) sometime prior to her premature and tragic death: "Es necesario tener, este, amor al trabajo y ponerle sentido y todo. Nuestro barro o nuestro trabajo tienen un sentido y en ese sentido es el gusto que tenemos, ahi se queda un pedazo de nuestra vida, o sea de nuestro coraz6n" (Becerril Straffon and Rios Szalay 1981, 77). This rings true in comparison with other statements I heard from Teodora during the years that I knew her as an inventive, imaginative, and even dream-inspired artisan. It is pertinent to note that during her own lifetime her imaginative and dream-inspired images were "borrowed" and produced "en serie" by many other potters in her community. A sizeable portion of these Teodora Blanco-inspired products were (and still are) mass merchandised by FONART and by private sector intermediary capitalists.

23. The themes of "Economics and Morality" and "Technique and Art" were provocatively discussed in a thoughtful little book by Godfrey and Monica Wilson (1945). They insightfully argue that "all co-operative actions must be both efficient in their use of material resources-time, energy, tools, material environment, and

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The Ethnographic Record versus Traven's Moral Economics

An anecdote from Panajachel (Guatemala) told by Sol Tax in a lecture at the University of Chicago attended by June Nash (1993, 18) in her student days to illustrate his concept of "penny capitalism"

(Tax 1953) strikes me as more closely approximating the ethno- graphic reality (what Nash refers to as the "ingenuity of entrepreneur- ial artisans") of most twentieth-century Mexican peasant-artisans than Traven's fictional statement: "He [Sol Tax] illustrated this in class with the story of a Panajacheleiio weaver-entrepreneur who had sold him and his wife Gertrude so many pieces that they had no need or desire left, but he continued to return with offerings, each time pegged so much lower in price that they felt forced to take advantage of the offer. Finally, Sol asked the man how he could sell at a price so much reduced from the first items he had sold. The man told him to bring those earlier sale items out, and then he pointed out the progressive reduction in size and complexity of design that made the lower price possible."

In other words, the market orientation of peasant-artisan petty commodity producers in most branches of artisanal production usually conflicts with their practice of any form of aesthetic or artistic extremism in their craft (i.e., practices that result in the maintenance of high but costly quality standards). Their need for cash and their market experience encourages most peasant-artisans to look for ways to assure the competitiveness of their products through a measured sacrifice of artistic or aesthetic quality for economic gain. This does not mean that Mexican peasant-artisans are necessarily money- grubbing philistines or cultural adulterators who knowingly deceive an aesthetically oriented but naive clientele, even though the principle of caveat emptor is very much operative in markets where peasant-artisans sell their own commodities. Rather, it simply high- lights a cultural circuit in the system of commodity production and market economy: involvement in production for sale teaches that time is money, and money lost or time squandered will inevitably lead to reduced sales and income for the noblest and most moral of peasant-artisans.

It is, I would contend, the same "entrepreneurial ingenuity"

objective social relations-and have moral value for the people concerned." In a similar vein they argue that technique which is "concerned with the overcoming of the inherent stubbornness of material, which resists human shaping" and art, the "expression of intrinsic quality" are always dependent upon each other. As they put it, "There is a certain intrinsic quality manifest in every product of craft" (1945, 76-78). Of course, it is necessary to operationalize this notion of"intrinsic quality" in order to avoid essentialism.

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referred to above by June Nash that facilitates artisanal production for the mass market or enables small-scale, labor intensive producers to find ways to work more efficiently and, if necessary, to expand output well beyond levels conceived as possible by Traven and moral economists. Peasant-artisans manage to do this as independent petty commodity producers by working harder, working longer hours, employing additional household members, working more efficiently by making technological innovations that do not involve mechaniza- tion, and so on. Or, they may do it in association with intermediary capital or small-scale industrial capital (e.g., hiring of pieceworkers)-still, it must be emphasized, without machinofacture or significant degrees of mechanization. Most typically, however, they achieve efficiency independently through the formulaic conception and execution of their work. Successful artisanal production for the market is predicated upon the routinization of effort and the standardization of form and style. In sum, artisans economize by producing as efficiently as they can one product after another in serial and replicated fashion. For Traven, by contrast, the "assembly line" metaphor represents mass production as an exclusively machine-driven large scale capitalist process in which artisans are absent.24

The ethnographic record in Mexican studies suggests that when output expansion is the goal in particular craft industries, productivity-enhancing processes inevitably lead to the recruitment of neophyte labor previously uninvolved in craft work. Two illus- trative cases in the Valley of Oaxaca are the embroidery and the

24. This interpretation is reinforced by Guthke (1991, 243) who, in document- ing Traven's activity as a collector of Mexican Indian crafts, found that he "repeatedly sent [to his German publishers] handmade Indian art objects and articles from the daily life of the Indians-objects that [Traven believed] would gradually be replaced by mass-produced varieties and that...would soon have'enormous value',...since the individually crafted items, made with 'patience and a sense of beauty', contained the'personality', the very'soul' of the artisan." Traven's interest in Mexican Indian crafts as art led him to write a manuscript (still unpublished) entitled "Art of the Indians" that incorporates theoretical speculations generally supportive of the idea of the incompatibility of artisanal with mass production (Guthke 1991, 269-72).

Ernst Schiirer (personal communication) offers the following comments on my interpretation of Traven's view of artisanal production: "My theory is that B. Traven in cooperation with his wife Rosa Elena clarified much of his original thinking between 1930 and 1952 along the lines of your thesis. But the basic idea was outlined in the first version [i.e., 1930] in which Traven, however, stressed the artistic quality of the work of the Indian against mass products made in Paris, Vienna, or Dresden....In [the 1930 German version] the Indian also gives as his reasons why he did not conclude the deal although he would have liked the money ('I could have bought the Jersey cow which I had in mind') that all the baskets would have been uniform and'I would not have liked that'. The story ends with the sentence: 'Anyhow, I have enough work and have no wish, whatsoever, to take on more'.

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treadle loom weaving industries. In the case of embroidery, a sort of mushrooming spin-off process has occurred in which the industry leapfrogs from household to household and village to village under the sponsorship of merchant capital and a network of commission agents and outworkers. Embroidery units are replicated as non- embroiderers become embroiderers, embroiderers become commis- sion agents, and commission agents become independent merchant engrossers. It is a competitive, market-driven cycle that seems to be capable of expanding up to the limits of the available labor supply. In treadle loom weaving, three processes occur: the establishment of new, independent weaver enterprises; the expansion of existing weaver enterprises by the exploitation of household and wage labor to develop multiloom workshops; and the intervention of intermedi- ary capital to establish putting-out/buying-up systems in which outwork weavers are exploited through credit arrangements (Cook and Binford 1990, esp. chap. 4; Waterbury 1989).

Many other examples of artisanal mass production could be given. Indeed, the Mexican artisanal brick industry located in the state of Tamaulipas along the banks of the Rio Bravo, which I am currently researching (see Cook in press), has managed since the 1960s to export billions of handmade bricks into the Texas construc- tion market, in direct competition with the world's most highly mechanized, state-of-the-art brick factories located in Texas. The secret to this industry's capacity to produce for a rapidly expanding mass market lies in the "campero/campo" satellite brickfield system discussed earlier. '

There are, admittedly, branch-specific upper limits on the ex- pandability of output in craft industries-ecological, technological, demographic, and economic in nature. What is true for treadle loom weaving is not necessarily true for embroidery or brickmaking, backstrap loom weaving, metate making, and so on (see Cook and Binford 1990). Nevertheless, it is the relative mass production capacity of artisanal industry to turn out relatively uniform products in sufficient quantities to meet market demand, and the ways in which they realize it, that is noteworthy from the standpoint of economic anthropology, in contrast to the estheticians' focus on the debasement of "authentic" crafts through the practice of artisanal mass production.25

Indeed, if artisans did not practice their version of mass produc- tion, then the entire Crafts in the World Market (Nash 1993) and

25. As I have pointed out elsewhere (Cook 1984b, 35-n18), Herman's (1956) argument that mass production, standardization, and assembly line organization are not only possible but characteristic of some branches of nonfactory industrial commodity production has unfortunately escaped the attention of many writers on craft production.

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Ethnic and Tourist Arts (Graburn, ed., 1976) themes would most likely not exist, and craft scholars today would be debating more esoteric themes dealing entirely with high-priced, made-to-order, scarce, luxury crafts. In other words, the secret to the persistence, and especially to the growth, of craft production in the contempo- rary world market lies in the capacity of labor-intensive artisanal forms of production to flexibly adjust output to fluctuations in demand and, when necessary, to increase output geometrically through innovative labor organization and, perhaps, with appropriate technological improvisation.

Despite the empirical support in the ethnographic record from contemporary Mexico for the decline in the quality of particular crafts for reasons of economic or market expediency (e.g., Stromberg 1976), it is by no means so overwhelming to warrant one-sided, alarmist, and elitist concerns about the proliferation of"ethno-kitsch" (Graburn 1976, 6). Indeed, there is sufficient contrary evidence of artistic creativity and improvement in product quality among capitalist-market-involved artisans to support the thesis that global market participation has been a boon to artisanal production in more than a narrow economic sense (e.g., the resuscitation of the use of vegetable and insect dyestuffs and the use of natural wool in the weavings of Teotitlan del Valle-Cook and Binford 1990, 89; cf. Stephen 1991, 131). Even in the case of the amate bark-painting industry of Xalitla, Guerrero, where Stromberg (1976, 162) points to a decline in artistic quality associated with competitive participa- tion in a mass market, she concludes that "it is still possible to see...artistic forces at work." Furthermore, it should not be over- looked that this entire industry started only in 1959 as an innovative response to economic need and cash-earning possibilities generated by different branches of capitalism (Stromberg 1976, 149).26

26. Scholars like Graburn (1976, 6 et passim) who accentuate the inevitable debasement of the artistic/aesthetic/cultural quality or integrity of so-called traditional crafts via "souvenirization" in the capitalist market seem to overlook the fact that the commoditization of crafts long predates capitalism and also occurs under conditions of simple commodity production. Decisions by peasant-artisans and full- time artisans, pitting economic considerations against artistic or aesthetic ones, have been made about and affected crafts long before the emergence of a global tourist- and ethnic-segmented market. Incidentally, there is every reason to believe that there was no community of shared meanings about craft commodities, either under precapitalist or underdeveloped capitalist market conditions, that crosscuts the dividing line between producers and consumers, makers and users, of craft commodities in a way that would negate the caveat emptor type of decision making implied above. Finally, the entire debasement argument overlooks the fluctuating and differentiating nature and impact of capitalist intervention in commodity economy, as well as its multidirectionality and cyclicality. In short, new market niches for high quality artistic artifacts are created along with those for varieties of souvenirs.

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There is, undeniably, a human toll that may be exacted by craft commercialization, namely, the possible alienation of the artisan. For example, the typical artisans I (Cook 1982; Cook and Binford 1990) studied during my fieldwork in Oaxaca did not practice a particular craft out of some primordial or mystical love or attachment to it but simply because it was the least unrewarding alternative they had to make and earn a living. True, in many cases, their participation in a particular craft reflected how the cards were historically dealt to insert their village and family/household of orientation into the regional division of labor and specialization, thus, restricting their occupational choices. In any case, I found little evidence of craft loyalty unsupported by pecuniary reward. If a more remunerative job alternative became available tomorrow, many of the artisans I have studied in Oaxaca would probably be willing to give it a try. This applies equally to female embroiderers, weavers, and palm plaiters, as it does to male metate makers, weavers, wood carvers, and brickmakers. Of course, the older the artisan the less is the interest in changing jobs; and my impression is that artisans in households with high consumer/worker ratios are probably more open to change than others.

Against Traven's romanticist positioning of the peasant-artisans' creative souls in a battle for survival against the juggernaut capitalist market, I would argue that, by the time he observed and wrote about them, most peasant-artisans had long since been preconditioned by participation in commodity production and market economy to willing, if calculated, collaboration with the capitalist project. It must be noted, nevertheless, that not all Mexican peasant-artisans today appear to display the degree of commercial participation, nor the lack of commitment to ethnified forms of cultural expression, as do those in Oaxaca (e.g., Nash 1993; Eber and Rosenbaum 1993; Carlsen 1993).

Reading Traven on Ethnocultural and Ethnoclass Identity among Artisans and other Peasant-Indians

One last issue that merits consideration regarding Traven's Oaxaca tale is the degree to which he viewed craft production and other types of petty commodity production as somehow represent- ing specific ethnic identities. To rephrase this as a question: For Traven, did the practice of a craft or other "traditional" occupations necessarily involve, in addition to drawing upon and expressing a specific intergenerationally transmitted cultural repertory, the re- inforcement or assertion of claims to a specific ethnic identity such as Zapotec, Mixtec, Nahuatl, Maya, and so on?

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Interestingly enough, in his Oaxaca tale Traven does not raise the issue of ethnocultural identity beyond the level of Indian except by way of mentioning home village. He rarely, if at all, specifies Indian

identity in terms of a particular non-Spanish language marker in any of his Tamaulipas period work. This contrasts with the practice in his writings about Chiapas of usually making such a specification early in the text (e.g., Traven 1969c, 7; 1969e, 7; 1969f, 10; 1994a, 1; 1994b, 1).27 In that sense, peasant-Indians in Oaxaca, and in other states (e.g., Veracruz) serving as settings in his Tamaulipas period writings, may have struck him as being more mestizoized or Mexicanized than the indigenous people of Chiapas and, conse-

quently, less deserving of being assigned a more specific ethnic

identity. There is also evidence from the Oaxaca tale that Traven was

more concerned with ethnoclass identity and relations, that is, with

problems of socioeconomic class structure, than he was with ethnocultural content and process per se. First we have his identifica- tion and depiction of the Oaxaca village Indian's situation as that

of"just a plain peasant" (Traven 1993, 74), followed by a description of the social relations of exchange in the mestizo town marketplace on market day that illustrate the classic scenario of unequal exchange and patronizing, discriminatory treatment involving mestizo buyers and Indian sellers (ibid., 75-77). Traven's vivid description of the

exploitative and discriminatory nature of ethnoclass relations in a

provincial Mexican market town (probably Tlaxiaco as noted above), as illustrated through the peddling of baskets, anticipates later studies

by economic anthropologists (e.g., Marroquin 1957, 202-05, 207-14; Malinowski and De la Fuente 1957, 117-18, 121; Stavenhagen 1975, esp. chap. 15).

It is likely, then, that Traven's handling of ethnic identity was driven by his concentration on class relations. It is to his credit that he quickly perceived how in many regions of Mexico relations between capitalists and workers overlap and interpenetrate those between mestizos (or Ladinos or Mexicans) and peasant-Indians- thus transforming econoclass into ethnoclass. However, Traven's inconsistency regarding ethnocultural identity may also reflect the relative state of his knowledge about Mexican ethnology at the time he was writing a particular text (see Zogbaum 1992, esp. chaps. 3 and 4).

27. The opening sentence of March to the Monteria (Traven 1994b, 1) is illustrative: "The Chamula Indian, Celso Flores, of the Tsotsil nation, had a girl in

Ishtacolcot, his native village." The language-marked method underlying Traven's attribution of ethnic identity is illustrated from a passage in The Carreta (Traven 1970, 135): "About a third of those present spoke only Spanish, a third Spanish and Indian, and of the remaining third perhaps half spoke Tseltal, the rest Tojolaval."

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In the specific case of Oaxaca, at any rate, it is conceivable that Traven's Oaxaca basketmaking village was more mestizoized (e.g., more inclined to use Spanish) and, consequently, less ethnified vis- a-vis any specific language-marked nonmestizo identity (e.g., Mixtec, assuming the village was, indeed, in the Tlaxiaco district) in his day than were the Tzotsil/Tzeltal villages he knew in Chiapas-thus explaining the difference in the way he identified them. It is also surely the case that the ethnoclass struggle in the Oaxaca basketmak- ing village was more submerged and less violent than it was in the monterias of Chiapas.

Whatever the reason for Traven's decision not to ethnify artisanal production in Oaxaca beyond a generic peasant-Indian ethnoclass identity, given his emphasis on the quasi-mystical bond between artisan and artifact, it is still reasonable to infer that he would agree with June Nash (1993, 19-20) that "by maintaining their craft the producers retain an important part of their identity" and "seek to preserve an autochthonous identity distinct from the commercialized identity." In my judgment, we can not go beyond this inference in characterizing Traven's thinking or practice regarding ethnocultural and ethnoclass identity among Mexican peasant-Indians.

Conclusions: B. Traven's Legacy for Economic Anthropology in Mexican Studies

From the perspective of economic anthropology in Mexican studies today, how does Traven's contribution to our understanding of artisanal production in capitalism measure up on the basis of an analysis of his Oaxaca tale and a selective survey of some of his other Tamaulipas period writings? In my judgment he certainly holds his own, especially considering that his contribution was made before World War II. I am hard pressed to identify any contribution to Mexican studies by an anthropologist from that period that contains anywhere near so many significant and researchable ideas about artisanal production, conceived as a peasant-Indian livelihood strat- egy, in capitalism. It is, in my opinion, Traven's implicit con- ceptualization of Mexican peasant-artisans as participants in a global commodity-producing, market-integrated economy in which capitalist businesses dominate petty businesses (including those of peasant- artisans) that is his outstanding contribution. In retrospect, it is regrettable that Traven's conceptualization apparently had little or no impact in the social science branch of Mexican studies.

The novelty of his approach becomes clearer if the best early contributions to economic anthropology in Mexican studies are examined. For example, in George Foster's study of Popolucan

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peasant-artisans in Veracruz published in 1942, one finds a dualist conceptualization that inserts Mexican peasant-artisans in a "prim- itive" non-Western economy separate and distinct from what is referred to as "our own Western European economy" (Foster 1942, 2-3). In other anthropological studies completed in the 1940s or 1950s, one finds an indigenous regional economy conceived as separate and distinct from the national economy (e.g., Malinowski and De la Fuente 1957; Drucker-Brown 1982) or as precapitalist yet coexisting with an underdeveloped capitalist system (e.g., Marroquin 1957; cf. 1978, 41). In the 1960s and 1970s, a neoclassical approach emerged that had the merit of emphasizing a common logic of rational decision making which crosscuts all economic behavior without violating cultural specifics, but it still retained the residual notion of a separate "peasant economy" within the wider capitalist economy (e.g., Cancian 1972). Finally, during the 1970s and into the 1980s, an effort was made to address capitalist development in peasant-artisan regions. Whether or not the authors of these studies did (e.g., Cook and Diskin 1976, chaps. 1 and 12; Cook 1982, esp. chaps. 1 and 8) or did not (e.g., Greenberg 1981, chaps. 5 and 7) highlight the significance of petty (or simple) commodity production, they still clung to dualistic discourse by inserting the corporate peasant community into a pre- (or non-) capitalist mode of produc- tion articulated with the dominant capitalist mode.

Only in the last decade or so has dualistic discourse been seriously challenged in the economic anthropological branch of Mexican studies. Presented as an alternative to the "peasant economy- in-capitalist economy" concept is that of a single market-integrated commodity economy, comprised of multiple forms and scales of enterprises differentially located in the national economic space (e.g., Foladori 1981; Cook and Binford 1990, esp. chaps. 1 and 7). With regard to this fundamental conceptual problem, then, only recently is economic anthropology finally catching up with Traven.

On the other hand, Traven's essentialist thesis linking artisan to artifact in a process of cultural transmission was not unique. In the context of Mexican studies, the same thesis was presented in the book Las artes populares en Mexico by Geraldo Murillo (Dr. Atl), first published in 1922 and by many other indigenistas during the 1920s and 1930s. The popularity of this thesis, of course, reflected the pursuit of a key strategy in the postrevolutionary nation-state project to build hegemony for the mestizo bourgeoisie. Flora Kaplan (e.g., 1993, 120) and Lynn Stephen (e.g., 1991; 1993), along with several others (e.g., Novelo 1976; Martinez Pefialoza 1978), have elaborated upon this political ethnification of Mexican crafts. Traven, as I have pointed out, did not address these issues but, rather, was

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more concerned with the moral economics of a global struggle between two different approaches to livelihood through commodity production.28

As previously noted, Traven showed considerable insight into ethnoclass relations in rural Mexico and gave us a description of the dynamics of asymmetrically discriminatory and exploitative peasant- Indian/mestizo relations in market towns that anticipates later contributions in economic anthropology. At the same time, he presented the peasant-Indian artisan as also involved in the tourist market (Winthrop made his purchase of baskets as a tourist) and, potentially (through Winthrop's failed deal), in a global mass- merchandising market for craft commodities, once again in antic- ipation of a direction economic anthropology would subsequently take (e.g., Nash 1993).

Despite my criticism of his emphasis on the idea that mass production is incompatible with artisanal production, Traven de- serves credit for exposing the role that ethnocentrism plays in

28. Traven's circle of friends and associates.in Mexico City included Frances Toor, Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Diego Rivera, D. A. Siqueiros, and Alberto Beltrin with whom he undoubtedly had many substantive discussions regarding artistic, cultural, and political themes. He also enrolled in several Mexican studies courses at the National University that would have covered the indigenista movement from many perspectives (Guthke 1991, 187-89). Zogbaum (1992, 76-81), largely on her reading of his Chiapas travelogue Land des Frihltngs, accuses Traven of introducing "a racial element Into the indigenista debate that was not part of the Mexican discussions" but admits that shortly following its publication in 1928 he "became aware of his misunderstandings and saw that although mestizaje for him promised the beginning of a great future for an Indian Mexico, for the federal government it signified the completion of the Spanish conquest after four centuries of tenacious Indian resistance to Mexicanization" (p. 81).

With the possible exception of its most sophisticated anthropological practitio- ners influenced by Gamio (see Aguirre Beltrin 1970, 131-32), Zogbaum is wrong that Mexican indigenista discourse was innocent of a conflation of race and culture or racialism (e.g., Knight 1990; Cook and Joo forthcoming). On the contrary, as Americo Paredes's (1993, 45-46) devastating critique of Octavio Paz's thought reminds us, the conflation of culture and biology continues to plague intellectual discourse about Mexican identity. Moreover, Zogbaum's (1992, 210-11; cf. p. xx) argument that Traven's disillusionment with the indigenista project (attributable to his wrong perceptions of Indian customs and organization) caused him to conclude by the end of World War II that "Mexico was no longer worth writing about" (1992, 210-11; cf. p. xx) and, therefore, ended his career as a serious writer is unrealistic, unfair, and unconvincing. It is more likely that, as a man in his sixties, Traven in the last two decades of his long and eventful life had more than enough to keep him occupied intellectually between movie projects and revising and translating his previous writings. It is also clear that during the 1950s, and until his death in 1969 at the age of eighty-seven, Traven deservedly altered his life style to enjoy the benefits of his fame and the company of his attractive younger wife and her daughters from a previous marriage.

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economic relations between representatives of developed and under- developed economies. Mr. E. L. Winthrop from the pages of his Oaxaca tale, along with Mr. C. C. Collins from the pages of The White Rose, should occupy permanent places in the literary museum of unsavory capitalists and "ugly Americans." Traven also presented an ethnographically grounded explanation of why peasant-artisan simple commodity producers and capitalist entrepreneurs often cannot do business together. There are, indeed, many such cases, and he recognized the importance of the problem and provided an explana- tion for it, long before any economic anthropologist did.

By way of conclusion, I propose that the most convincing proof of B. Traven's status as a very special storyteller is this exegesis by an economic anthropologist about a Mexican ladrillero's explanation of why Traven's Oaxaca tale helps to understand artisanal production in petty capitalism on the banks of the Rio Bravo in the 1990s. My guess is that Traven would relish the irony of the serendipitous and unconventional way in which this project to "read" him as an economic anthropologist in Mexican studies was initiated, and it is my sincere hope that he would not be overly displeased by its results.

References Cited

Aguirre Beltran, Gonzalo. 1970. "Los simbolos etnicos de la identidad nacional." Anuario indigenista 30 (diciembre):101-40.

Bauer, Peter T., and Basil S. Yamey. 1957. The Economics of Underdeveloped Countries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Baumann, Friederike. 1987. "B. Traven's Land des Friulings and the Caoba Cycle as a Source for the Study of Agrarian Society." In Schiirer and Jenkins, B. Traven, 245-59.

Baumann, Michael L. 1976. B. Traven: An Introduction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Beals, Ralph L. 1975. The Peasant Marketing System of Oaxaca, Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Becerril Straffon, Rodolfo, and Adalberto Rios Szalay, eds. 1981. Los artesanos nos dijeron... Mexico City: Fondo Nacional para Actividades/Fondo Nacional para el Fomento de las Artesanias.

Carlsen, Robert S. 1993. "Discontinuous Warps: Textile Production and Ethnicity in Contemporary Highland Guatemala." In Nash, Crafts in the World Market, 199-224.

Cancian, Frank. 1972. Change and Uncertainty in a Peasant Economy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Chayanov, A. V 1966. The Theory of Peasant Economy. Homewood, Ill.: Irwin.

Chevalier, Jacques. 1983. "There is Nothing Simple about Simple Commodity Production" Journal of Peasant Studies 10, no. 4:153-86.

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Cook, Scott. 1974. "Economic Anthropology: Problems in Theory, Method, and Analysis." In Handbook of Social and Cultural Anthropology, edited byJohnJ. Honigmann, 795-850. Chicago: Rand McNally. . 1976. "Value, Price and Simple Commodity Production: The Case of the Zapotec Stoneworkers." Journal of Peasant Studies 3, no. 4:395-427. . 1981. "Crafts, Capitalist Development, and Cultural Property in Oaxaca, Mexico." Inter-American Economic Affairs 35, no. 3:53-68. ? 1982. Zapotec Stoneworkers: The Dynamics of Rural Simple Commod-

ity Production in Modern Mexican Capitalism. Ianham, Md.: University Press of America.

._ 1984a. Peasant Capitalist Industry: Piecework and Enterprise in Southern Mexican Brickyards. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America. ? 1984b. "Peasant Economy, Rural Industry and Capitalist Development in the Oaxaca Valley, Mexico." Journal of Peasant Studies 12, no. 1:3-40. . 1994. "Labor Discourse in the Artisanal Brick Industry along the Mexico/Texas Border: The Issue of So-Called 'Cheap' Labor." Paper presented at the Seventeenth International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, 10 March, Atlanta, Georgia.

_. In press. "Bricks and Capitalism in the Lower Rio Grande Corridor: Issues in Theory and Analysis from Ongoing Research." In Economic

Analysis Beyond the Local System, edited by Peter N. Peregrine. Society for Economic Anthropology Monograph Series. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America.

Cook, Scott, and Leigh Binford. 1990. Obliging Need: Rural Petty Industry in Mexican Capitalism. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Cook, Scott, and Martin Diskin, eds. 1976. Markets in Oaxaca. Austin:

University of Texas Press. Cook, Scott, and Jong-Taick Joo. Forthcoming. "Ethnicity and Economy in

Rural Mexico: A Critique of the Indigenista Approach through the Oaxaca Valley Case." Latin American Research Review 30, no. 2 (Spring 1995).

Drucker-Brown, Susan, ed. 1982. Malinowski in Mexico: The Economics of a Mexican Market System. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Eber, Christine, and Brenda Rosenbaum. 1993. "'That we may serve beneath your hands and feet': Women Weavers in Highland Chiapas, Mexico." In Nash, Crafts in the World Market, 155-80.

Foladori, Guillermo. 1981. Polemica en torno a las teorias del campesinado. Mexico City: Escuela Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia (INAH).

Foster, George. [1942] 1966. A Primitive Mexican Economy. Reprint of American Ethnological Society Monograph no. 5. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Godelier, Maurice. 1972. Rationality and Irrationality in Economics. New York: Monthly Review Press.

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