Frank Cancian

New Patterns of Stratification in the Zinacantan Cargo SystemAuthor(s): Frank CancianReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Autumn, 1974), pp. 164-173Published by: University of New MexicoStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3629841 .

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New Patterns of Stratification in the Zinacantan

Cargo System FRANK CANCIAN

Patterns of participation in the system of religious offices in Zinacantan, Mexico, changed during the 1960s. Data for 1961 show men taking successive offices with similar prestige and cost, thereby clearly marking their rank in the community. Comparable data for 1967 do not show this pattern. The change suggests that the breakdown of the system as the major rank-allocating institution in the community is underway. Analysis of differences between mobile and non-mobile men in 1967 reveals some order in the breakdown process, and illustrates a theory of individual response to social mobility.

THIS PAPER HAS TWO GOALS. The first is to describe changes in stratification patterns in Zinacantan between the early 1960s and the late 1960s. These changes seem to be the result of population increase and economic prosperity interacting with traditional rank-allocating institutions. The second goal is to illustrate the usefulness of a general theory about socially mobile individuals that explains some of the

patterns that have emerged as the traditional system heads toward breakdown.

Zinacantan is a Tzotzil-speaking, Maya community of about 11,500 people (1970 census) in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. Vogt (1969, 1970) provides general descriptions, and Cancian (1965) discusses the

cargo system in detail. In Zinacantan a man's community-wide reputation is established in

large part through service in the religious cargo system. The cargos are

year-long offices whose incumbents sponsor religious fiestas at great expense to themselves. Similar systems have been described for many Middle American communities (Cancian 1967). They have been called

variously the ladder system, the civil-religious hierarchy, and the cofradia system.

THE CARGO SYSTEM IN THE EARLY 1960s

In the Zinacantan cargo system there are four levels of offices arranged in a hierarchy. A man seeking honor or prestige in the

community must serve one of about 35 first level cargos to begin his career. After that, he is eligible to serve one of 12 second level cargos,

1 An earlier version of this paper was presented in a session entitled "Trends and Processes of

Change in Contemporary Mexico" at the 1974 Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Mexico City. I am grateful to Francesca Cancian for comments on various drafts.

As will become apparent, in this paper I use "stratification" and "rank" to refer to the same

patterns. I do not mean to challenge the distinction between "rank" and "stratification" in the

literature, but only to finesse it in the present context.

164 VOL. 30, 1974



NEW PATTERNS OF STRATIFICATION 165

then one of six third level cargos, and finally one of two fourth level

cargos. These aspects of the system are represented in Figure 1.

D 2 fourth level cargos

I i i 6 third level cargos Type II

12 second level cargos

High 30+ first level cargos Low

-& Increasing prestige

Type I

Fig. 1. Zinacantan Religious Hierarchy

First service does not usually occur until the age of 35 or 40, and

years of "rest" between service periods are required to earn the money necessary to sponsor fiestas. Thus, many men who hope to compete for the limited number of offices on higher levels die before reaching their

goal. It is possible to discuss two components of prestige in an individual's

career in the cargo system. First, the offices within each level may be ranked according to the prestige accruing to the man serving in them. Both the authority invested in the particular office and the cost of

performing the ritual associated with it contribute to the prestige (Cancian 1965:chapter 8). For example, the Mayordomo Rey is in

charge of a chapel in the ceremonial center. A Mayordomo Rey must

spend considerably more than 10,000 pesos (measured in 1960 pesos) in the course of a year's service. The Mayordomo San Antonio must spend about 3,000 pesos. His principal duties involve ceremonial patterns directed by someone else. Thus, a man who serves as Mayordomo Rey acquires much more prestige because he has more authority and spends more than one who serves as Mayordomo San Antonio. This type of



166 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH

relative prestige within a level is labeled Type I on Figure 1. I have

adopted the convention of using the left hand side of the figure to indicate the higher prestige positions within each level.

The second type of prestige is that acquired by serving in a second or subsequent cargo. To maintain and enhance prestige established

through service in a first-level cargo, a man must progress through higher levels of the system as he becomes older. The ultimate goal is

completion of a fourth cargo. The rewards for completion come mostly in respect and deference, though the "elder" status is also recognized by exemption from local taxes (a small saving compared to the cost of service). This is labeled Type II prestige on Figure 1.

On the basis of data gathered in 1961, I have shown how men who reach the top level of the system usually begin with the relatively high prestige lower level positions, represented on the left side of Figure 1. This pattern is not based on any explicit Zinacanteco ritual practice or rule; rather, it is a behavioral tendency that reflects stratification in the community (Cancian 1965:chapter 10).

Table 1 displays a small part of the data used to support this analysis and interpretation. It shows that there is consistency in the

Type I prestige of successive offices taken by men climbing the ladder. That is, there is a statistical tendency to "high-high" and "low-low" careers among those who manage to serve two offices. This table includes the careers of all men age 55 and older who lived in two hamlets (Apas and Hteklum) that were censused in 1961.

TABLE 1

Prestige Rank of First and Second Level Cargos of Individuals: 1961

First

High Low

High 11 4

Second

Low 3 12

On the basis of these and other data I concluded that the cargo system in Zinacantan reflected stratification in the community. Cargos cost enough so that even the rich were straining their resources by taking expensive ones. These data show that the wealthy repeatedly took expensive, high prestige cargos, whereas the relatively poor were confined to lesser careers. My analysis showed that the operation of the

cargo system transformed economic rank into prestige rank in a manner that usually did not destroy the economic standing of the individual.




Even in the early 1960s, when this analysis was made, it was clear that these functions of the cargo system were being threatened by population growth and economic prosperity in Zinacantan. In what

might be called the "old equilibrium" there were roughly enough cargos to go around, and virtually all of the adult men of the

community participated in the system to some degree. Further, the economic resources of the participants roughly matched the demands of the system. That is, few people took cargos that required vastly more than they could afford and few took cargos that cost so little relative to their wealth that they emerged from the year of service without debts. But even in 1961 it was clear that population growth was producing many more adult men than could be accommodated in the cargo system, while economic prosperity was producing a great over-demand for the most expensive and prestigious cargos.

Though the number of cargos available increased slightly with the construction of chapels in some of the hamlets of Zinacantan, the number of men wanting cargos increased even faster. Waiting lists were created about 1950 and expanded in the next decade. For example, the waiting period for the most expensive and prestigious first-level cargo, Mayordomo Rey, grew from nine years in 1952, to 16 years in 1958, and to 20 years in 1961. Less expensive, less prestigious cargos were available with shorter waiting periods.

From the individual point of view, men who had the desire and the economic ability to pursue highly prestigious careers were frustrated by the long delays. From the community point of view, the cargo system was becoming unable to provide a controlled mode of expression that would commit men to the community by exchanging their money for

prestige good only in Zinacantan. Alternative status systems based on consumer goods from the outside

world were already apparent in 1961, and have since expanded. Men who did not need their money for service in the cargo system bought radios, watches, and record players, and installed electric lights in their homes. Even trucks began to absorb the economic surplus. These items from the national culture undermine the former unitary scale (based on

cargo service) that reflected high economic rank in a specifically Zinacanteco way. They open the road to the national culture.

On the basis of these trends, I predicted (Cancian 1965:chapter 16) that the cargo system would lose its function as a major institution maintaining Zinacantan as a closed corporate community. While the cargo system as a system of offices might persist, the concentration of most of the disposable income of most Zinacanteco families in the cargos would not continue-simply because there are more men than




available offices. And, if the community is to retain its boundaries, the unity of Zinacanteco identity must depend more heavily on something other than the cargo system. In sum, I predicted that the cargo system would lose its integrating, boundary defining functions in Zinacantan.

Of course, the cargo system is not the only boundary maintaining feature of Zinacanteco culture. Language, among other things, also

separates Zinacantan from the national culture. If the community or "ethnic" identity of Zinacantecos does substantially decrease in the near future, the causes of the decrease will certainly include important factors in addition to the demise of the cargo system.

NEW PATTERNS OF STRATIFICATION IN THE LATE 1960s

Data on cargo careers gathered in 1967 do not undermine the overall prediction made above, but they do reveal an interesting pattern that illustrates the resilience of the cargo system and suggests that the breakdown is not a substitution of chaos for order.

For 1967 I have data on the first two cargos passed by 43 men (see Table 2). These data are comparable to the data from 1961 (Table 1) in that they are also the result of censuses of two hamlets (this time Apas and Nachig). Note that the clear statistical tendency to "high-high" and "low-low" careers has disappeared. Stratification, as I interpreted it in

my earlier analysis of the cargo system in Zinacantan, is simply not

present. If I were to use the data in Table 2 as the basis for an analysis of the cargo system, I could not argue that they showed stratification, and I could not make the subsequent interpretation of integrating functions for the community. Distinctions between the rich and the poor, the

prestigious and the ordinary, have not disappeared in Zinacantan, but the pattern of service in the cargo system shown in Table 2 certainly does not reflect them.

TABLE 2

Prestige Rank of First and Second Level Cargos of Individuals: 1967

First

High Low

High 11 8 Second

Low 11 13




I would like to consider three possible interpretations of these two sets of data (Tables 1 and 2). The first is that the numbers are too small and the trends too weak to be taken seriously. It might be argued that the 1967 data simply show that the 1961 data were a statistical accident, and therefore that all the interpretations based on them should be thrown out. Or it might be argued that the 1967 data are a statistical accident. I choose to reject these arguments and to take both sets of data

seriously. Taking both sets of data seriously means that the differences

between them must be explained. The most straightforward explanation is that the cargo system (as represented by the measures I am using) did reflect the stratification system in 1961, and that by 1967 the breakdown of the system as the central stratification institution in Zinacantan was almost complete. This would be extreme interpretation, especially since, in 1967, many Zinacantecos seemed to retain the traditional interest in cargo careers. Though casual observation indi- cated that many men were becoming more interested in other things, at least the rhetoric of respect for cargo service remained very broadly diffused in the population. Nothing like an open gulf between traditionalists and modern elements had emerged.

Thus, I would like to choose a third explanation. I will try to show that the old prestige-allocating functions of the system were still

operating to some degree in 1967. The data displayed in Tables 3a and 3b show that when the 1967

population is broken down by rank of the individual's father, the mobile individuals adhere to the old "high-high" "low-low" pattern, whereas the non-mobile individuals do not. Interpretation of the difference between mobile and non-mobile individuals suggests that the old standards of prestige allocation remain despite the difficulty of all men

meeting them in the overcrowded system of offices.

TABLE 3

Prestige Rank of First and Second Level Cargos of Mobile and Non-mobile Individuals: 1967

Table 3a. Table 3b. Mobile Non-mobile

First First

High Low High Low

High 6 3 High 5 5 Second Second

Low 2 7 Low 9 6




Part of a more general theory that I developed before analyzing these data (Cancian n.d.) provides the interpretation. Informally stated, the theory goes like this: in prestige rank systems, upwardly mobile

people must avoid behavior that is atypical of their newly acquired rank. If they revert, even temporarily, to "lower" behavior patterns, the social alters on whom they depend for their prestige will remember their

past and assume that they are backsliding. Non-mobile people do not have this problem. When they do something atypical and "low," attention is also focused on their background. But this attention simply confirms the idea that their behavior is temporary. In fact, the

consistently high past position of the non-mobile person may even lead the social alter to interpret deviant behavior as intelligent innovation.

Another way of stating the theory is to say that prestige rank is very sluggish, and that upwardly mobile people must avoid drawing attention to the past if they want to make the most of their recent achievement. By contrast, non-mobile people can use the sluggishness of their rank to free them from the threat of a sudden change in rank.

This theory is relevant to the dilemma faced by many men in Zinacantan. Since the waiting lists for the most prestigious cargos on each level are longer than the waiting lists for the less prestigious cargos, a participant must decide between the immediate prestige of a highly ranked first or second level cargo and the ultimate prestige of attaining the top level of the system. If he does not hurry, he will die before

reaching the top. If he hurries, he must take lesser cargos along the way. If the theory stated above is correct, upwardly mobile men should

opt for a delay between first and second cargos, because a low-ranking second level position would be inconsistent with their newly established

image and remind others of their family origins. Non-mobile men of

comparable rank should be more free to opt for a lower ranking second level cargo that is available immediately and that speeds them on their

way to higher level service and the ultimate in Type II prestige. These ideas motivated the reanalysis of the 1967 data that showed

no consistent pattern of "high-high" and "low-low" careers in the cargo system. All of the 43 individuals in that population are relatively high ranking people, for they have passed two cargos. I divided them

according to the cargo performance of their fathers. Eighteen had fathers who passed no cargos or only the lowly position of Mayor, which involves less than 100 pesos expense and little authority. The other 25 had fathers who passed at least some respectable Mayordomo cargo. This analysis led to the results presented in Tables 3a and 3b. Though the numbers are very small, it is clear that the traditional "high-high" "low-low" pattern that was lost in the aggregated data for 1967 reappears




in the data for mobile individuals. The difference between Tables 3a and 3b is even statistically significant at the .05 level of probability (Goodman 1965).

These data show that mobile individuals have held onto the traditional pattern, while non-mobile people have compromised to avoid the delays and frustrations brought about by population growth, economic prosperity, and the consequent over-demand for expensive, high prestige cargos. In a sense, the non-mobile people, who could afford to do so, have used the memory of their fathers' accomplishment to augment the supply of prestige normally available through service in the cargo system. They have tried to create a new kind of high prestige in the face of a short supply of the traditional kind.

In my earlier analysis of the changing cargo system, I suggested that the waiting lists have a similar function (Cancian 1965:183-186). While men cannot get cargos as soon as they want them, they can at least say they are waiting for a distinguished position. When the waiting lists are publically read at the major fiesta in August, word spreads about who is waiting for cargos. Thus, those who are actually serving the position and those waiting both have some prestige in the community, whereas before the development of the waiting lists, only the prestige of actual service was available to the men of the community.

Both the waiting lists and the more recent use of memory here illuminated by distinguishing mobile and non-mobile cargoholders stretch the supply of high prestige positions to meet the number of Zinacantecos able to serve in them. But they are feeble gestures in the face of growing population and prosperity, although both indicate that Zinacantecos have not yet turned away from the cargo system.2 Zinacantan has not yet followed the example of some communities where cargos are filled from a dwindling subgroup of traditionalists.

Still, I believe that thinking eventually follows behavior. These delaying mechanisms will be shortlived. First, the flush of new meaning

2 The creation of new cargos over the last 20 years has been the most important adjustment to population increase. However, these new cargos have not kept pace with population (Cancian 1965:chapter 14), and the present analysis takes for granted the increasing gap between the number of adult Zinacanteco males and the number of cargos available.

The parallel "obvious" adjustment to prosperity (as contrasted with population) would be an increase in the cost of cargos through elaboration of ritual. As noted in my earlier analysis (1965:141, 193n referring to page 141 and not to Chapter 11, 217n) Zinacantecos seem to reject this option. Schneider's grumbling (1974:114) that somebody or something (Zinacanteco behavior or my analysis) is blameworthy because this response predictable from simple microeconomic theory has not happened is topsy-turvy. It insists that people's behavior should fit theory, when in fact theory should fit people's behavior.

Insofar as the important feature of the cargo system is inclusion of virtually all adult males rather than leveling of all wealth differences, this differential response to population and prosperity makes sense.




and new prestige added by the waiting lists 15 years ago is bound to fade. Even before waiting lists, there were people who avoided cargo service at the last minute when they faced the actual financial and ritual burden. Soon Zinacantecos will accumulate experience of men who evade service after 15 or 20 years on the waiting lists and the

"surplus" prestige created by the waiting lists will diminish. Second, as a new generation enters the cargo system, jogged memories will find the

compromised careers that already appeared among non-mobile men in the 1967 data. Eventually the behavioral model of an ideal high prestige cargo career that was repeatedly displayed 15 or 20 years ago will be rare. People's ideals about cargo service will change to fit the new

practice. More population, more economic prosperity, and more alternative

systems for acquiring prestige will probably contribute to the further demise of the cargo system as the central prestige-allocating institution in the community. And, with this will go the clear ranking within the community that was associated with the cargo system. Whether these

changes undo the distinct lines around the community previously maintained in large part by the definite commitment demanded by cargo service depends on many other factors. While the cargo system served Zinacanteco identity, it was never equivalent to it. If present day theory relating the maintenance of ethnic boundaries to basic economic conditions (Collier 1975) is correct, there is every reason to think that Zinacanteco identity will remain important.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

This paper has described and interpreted changes in stratification

patterns reflected by the Zinacantan cargo system. The consistent

prestige rank of successive cargos evident in the early 1960s had

disappeared by the late 1960s. The consequent rank-allocating function of the cargo system for the entire community has diminished, and

boundary maintenance dependent on the cargo system is breaking down. Cargo service and cargo ritual has not changed appreciably: only their meaning for the community rank system is changing. However, change in meaning may eventually lead to change in concrete institutions, for the rank system is probably more stable than the institutions that embody it at any particular time.

Distinguishing the careers of mobile and non-mobile individuals in the late 1960s has shown that the breakdown is orderly, not a substitution of chaos for order. I hope that the theory briefly outlined here and similar ones will be useful in ordering other change processes.




BIBLIOGRAPHY

CANCIAN, FRANK

1965 Economics and Prestige in a Maya Community: The Religious Cargo System in Zinacantan. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

1967 Political and Religious Organizations. Pp. 283-298 in Handbook of Middle American Indians (Robert Wauchope, general ed., and Manning Nash, vol. ed.) vol. 6. Austin: University of Texas Press.

n.d. Multiple Systems of Stratification (mimeograph). COLLIER, GEORGE A.

1975 The Fields of the Tzotzil: The Ecological Basis of Tradition in Highland Chiapas. Austin: University of Texas Press (in press).

GOODMAN, Louis A. 1965 On the Multivariate Analysis of Three Dichotomous Variables.

American Journal of Sociology 71:290-301. SCHNEIDER, HAROLD K.

1974 Economic Man: The Anthropology of Economics. New York: Free Press.

VOGT, EVON Z. 1969 Zinacantan: A Maya Community in the Highlands of Chiapas.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1970 The Zinacantecos of Mexico: A Modern Maya Way of Life. New

York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA



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