the cultural study of contemporany society

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The Cultural Study of Contemporary Societies: Puerto Rico Author(s): Robert A. Manners and Julian H. Steward Source: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Sep., 1953), pp. 123-130Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2771859Accessed: 27-08-2015 12:31 UTC

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THE CULTURAL STUDY OF CONTEMPORARY SOCIETIES: PUERTO RICO'

ROBERT A. MANNERS AND JULTAN H. STEWARD

ABSTRACT

Four rural communities in Puerto Rico, each with a different crop emphasis, were examined. In addition to the traditional methods of investigation employed by anthropologists, this group studied the available documents, statistics, and historical materials bearing on the communities, on the island, and on the island's relations with other countries and areas. The purpose of the investigation was to analyze and to explain the nature and origins of the insular subcultures. Striking differences among these were revealed by the research, and these appear, at least in part, to be related to the nature of the crops grown.

This paper outlines a few of the methodo- logical considerations and discusses some of the findings of a recent study of Puerto Rico made by a group of cultural anthropologists.2 We shall describe some of the subcultural differences which were encountered in the course of the field work and detail the ways in which these differences appear to be related to specific crop emphases.

The traditional holistic or cultural approach employed by anthropologists in their studies of relatively undifferentiated primi- tive societies seemed, to the investigators involved in this study, to be entirely inade- quate to the examination of a heterogeneous society like that of Puerto Rico, with its population of well over 2,000,000 people. And although several anthropologists have, with little or no modification, attempted to transfer methods suitable for analysis at one sociocultural level of complexity to analysis at a much higher level of complexity, their conclusions have been called in question by many social scientists-' For the most part, the mechanical transfer of method leads these investigators to construct an image of

cultural homogeneity that is false for these complex contemporary societies, or to conclusions about "national character" and na- tionally shared traits which are, to say the least, of doubtful heuristic value. Bearing these considerations in mind, our first need in the Puerto Rican study was to define and delimit the scope of inquiry so that the traditional methods of anthropology could be utilized most effectively. Second, we had to be certain that this very definition and de- limitation would not be so narrow as to lead us to overlook or obscure the sociocultural distinctions which we believed existed on the island. And, third, we concluded that we needed as much documentary, historical, and institutional study at the insular and supra-insular level as was practicable and necessary to illuminate and to frame the findings of the community research.

As our primary objects of investigation, we selected certain subcultures which we believed, on the basis of a preliminary sur- vey, to be of major practical importance either because of the sheer numbers of indi- viduals represented or because of significant trends of social and cultural change.

For the greater part of the four and a half centuries since its discovery, Puerto Rico has been predominantly a country of small subsistence farmers. Since 1815. however.

1 An expanded version of a paper read at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Society, September 4, 1952.

2 The participants were Drs. Sidney Mintz, Elena Padilla, Raymond Scheele, Eric Wolf, and Robert Manners. The study, which was conducted at the invitation of the Puerto Rican govemment and with the co-operation of Puerto Rican social scientists, was under the direction of Dr. Julian Steward.

I Cf. J. H. Steward, "Levels of Sociocultural In- tegration: An Operational Concept," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, VII, No. 4 (1951), 374-90, for a detailed discussion of the problems of cultural research at various levels of integration.

123



124 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

and more especially since United States sov- ereignty was established in 1898, the island has become increasingly a part of the larger world of commerce and has devoted more and more of its tillable area to the production of cash commodities. Its regions have come to rely upon the income from cash crops, of which sugar, coffee, and tobacco are most important. Differences between farm owners, landless laborers, and small farmers have become sharpened. Towns have grown, and their residents have become specialized as merchants, profession- als, servicing personnel, laborers, and government functionaries.

Since more than 40 per cent of the working population of the island is regularly engaged in agriculture and since more than 80 per cent of Puerto Rico's total wealth is de- rived from agriculture, we selected as our principal object of study the subcultures of the farmers-especially the landless agricultural laborers-engaged in the production of sugar, tobacco, and coffee, the island's three major cash crops. These occupational and regional subsocieties had to be analyzed in the context of the local municipalities, since they provide the framework within which the subcultural groups or classes interact with one another and where, through the marketing of cash crops, the purchase of commodities, and the utilization of government services, they are related to the larger insular and extra-insular forces and institutions. But of the four municipalities or municipios (there are 77 municipios in Puer- to Rico) selected for study, the smallest had a population in excess of 13,000, while the largest included more than 21,000 individ- uals. Thus the sheer size of each municipio, added to the complexity of its social struc- turing, made it impossible for us to conduct ''community studies" in the same sense and following the same methods as those employed in ethnological studies of folk societies.

Although the first order of business was the analysis of the selected subcultures, we assumed that these and the communities of

which they were integral parts could not be understood unless the island as a whole and the sovereign powers-first Spain and then the United States-were taken into account. This led us into lines of investigation which, though perhaps ambitious and not ordinarily followed in a cultural approach, were deemed essential to an adequate functional, cultural-historical study of the special subcultural groups.

The subcultures themselves were studied by the usual methods of the ethnologist. Al- though the community inquiries led into analyses of all socioeconomic segments in their interrelatedness, we devoted our major efforts to half a dozen of these groupings: landless workers on a corporate, American- owned sugar plantation on the south coast; landless and near-landless workers on a Land Authority (project of the insular government), proportional-profit sugar plantation on the north coast; hacienda owners and laborers engaged in coffee production in a west-central highlands community; and the small farmers and landless workers of a tobacco and minor cash-crop adaptation in the eastern highlands. In each community there were perhaps 200-300 representatives of the subcultural types, with whose way of life each major field worker and his assistant became comparatively well acquainted in the course of a year and a half. The larger insular and extra-insular institutional framework within which these subcultures emerged and are today functioning de- manded additional methods of analysis. It required that the staff spend considerable time studying published documents and con- sulting with island authorities in order to understand the basic trends in local land use, internal specialization and trade, over- seas commerce, the manipulation of credit, political patterns, religious institutions, and other factors which have originated outside, yet strongly affected, the way of life within each community and which have helped to create the sociocultural differences found within and among the communities. That is, the analyses of the contemporary subcul-



CULTURAL STUDY OF CONTEMPORARY SOCIETIES: PUERTO RICO 125

tural groups were made against a back- ground of general change on the island.

In the following account we deal only with those subcultural distinctions which clearly appear to be related to the differing crop emphases developed within the con- fines of this small island. Lengthy descrip- tions and detailed ethnographic accounts of each of the four communities studied are, of course, precluded by the required brevity of this report.4

THE SUGAR COMMUNITIES

Under present conditions of the world market, sugar cane is believed to be the crop that can be cultivated most profitably on the land of certain areas. Since the cane is harvested from about February to June, the rest of the year is a time of serious under- employment; hence is locally designated the tiempo muerto or "dead period."5 Among the more important consequences of this seasonality is the elaboration of subsidiary economic activities to insure survival during the six to seven months of scarcity. Another effect of considerable cultural significance is that the wage labor of women and children has become a vital factor in family survival and has given to the former a relatively high status and a position of some authority in the family which is not encountered in either of the mountain communities.

The concentration of land in large, stable holdings-which is required for the most economical use of the expensive and essential processing equipment-discourages ideas and chances of upward economic mobility

and promotes cynical attitudes toward the ultimate value of savings, while substituting a hope for advancement through sudden ac- cessions of money, such as gambling.

There is a number of ways in which the sugar workers try to meet the problem of getting enough to eat during the dead season. Those in the Land Authority community who live on small plots donated by the government sometimes cultivate subsistence crops to see them through the dead time. But the generally low fertility of their land -as well as several other factors which we do not have the space to discuss-tends to discourage careful or adequate use of these plots by most of the parceleros. Some workers from these communities commute daily during the dead season to one of the large cities in search of work, for example on the docks. Others fish or hunt crabs. Still others carry sand for a local contractor. The making or sale of illegal rum for a commission; acting as agent for the illegal lottery; washing clothes and doing home needlework; part- time artisanry and so on are some of the other devices for surviving the dead period. Thus, the so-called "subsidiary" activities in these communities are numerous and di- versified and have developed, under these conditions of monocrop, seasonal agriculture, an importance frequently equal to that of the prime source of income.

Strong kin, ritual kin, neighbor, and class ties arise or persist in the needs and ex- changes of the dead season; while there has been a concomitant decline in face-to-face relationships between owner and worker, ac- companied by a breakdown of the older patterns of respect and other traditional paternalistic ways. Collective activity through labor unions and political organizations has replaced personal appeals to the landowner as a device to gain economic and political objectives. Among the landless proletariat in the south-coast sugar community the family is bilateral and nuclear rather than ex- tended, and the wife tends to be the stable member. Common-law marriage is just as prevalent among this group as it has always

4 The full report of the Puerto Rico study is now in press.

I Although cane could presumably be planted to ripen throughout the year-especially in the irri- gated areas-the sugar content would be adversely affected. But an even more important consideration dictating the present pattern of production is that it is most economical to keep the existing processing equipment operating continuously during the harvest. Consequently, there is currently a trend-especially on the south coast-toward lengthening the dead season and shortening the total harvest time, in order to reduce even further the overhead costs of processing.




been. There are no new considerations of property, status, or religious orthodoxy to induce civil or religious marriage. Religion is individualized, the state church being weak. Various denominations, especially the evangelical sects, which afford common emotion- al outlets, are increasingly popular and important. Good roads and generally flat country reduce isolation, make electricity and radios available, and raise the general level of sophistication of the rural working class.

The opportunities for upward movement in the socioeconomic scale are so limited that many of the devices which in other lo- calities may be looked upon as offering a way up are generally not so envisaged by the landless of these communities. This is particularly striking in the attitude toward education. There is little interest in education per se, less in the hope that it is the device which will lift an individual or his children out of a depressed position. Besides, to keep a pair of employable hands in school in the hope of creating a better provider later on is too great a sacrifice, too problematic, and too remote.

Despite some distinctive features, the cul- ture of the laboring class on the profit-shar- ing plantations of the government community is strikingly similar to that of the equiv- alent group on the south coast. Although conditions and tenure of work are secured by the government and although many of the workers receive subsistence plots donated by the government, the incentives which are implied in these arrangements are, as we have suggested, more apparent than real at present. New attitudes and patterns of behavior appropriate to having a stake in management and being owners as well as employees seem not yet to have developed to any marked degree, according to the findings of the field workers.

The similarities between these two communities are more striking than the differences, despite the contrasting type of ownership. Thus it seems that the nature of the crop and the techniques required for its op- timum exploitation under existing economic

arrangements have a more profound effect on the way of life of the vast majority of the workers engaged in its production than does the nominal ownership situation. In both kinds of ownership, efficient production demands land concentration and seasonality, encourages the owning of the processing mill by the grower, and requires a large and settled labor supply for at least six months of the year.

In both cases, a group of landless or near- landless wage workers is to be found who have no hope or expectation of moving upward in the community-who see opportunities, if they see them at all, in sudden acces- sions of wealth or in escape to another part of the island or the world.

Both sugar communities have functioning unions of sugar workers. The presence of unions, in turn, seems to stimulate group consciousness and the power of the working groups. Thus the representative to the In- sular House of Representatives of one community and the mayor of the other were, during the period of our study, leaders of their respective locals. This is in contrast with the complete absence of unions, agricultural or other, in the mountain communities, where proletarization of the workers has not proceeded so far, where the nature of the crops and the methods used in their cultivation in the natural environment permit a lower degree of land concentration, dispersed settlement, subsistence crop cultivation, retention of some of the older paternalistic arrangements, and, particularly in the tobacco-minor crops community, the prospect of upward mobility.

THE COFFEE COMMUNITY

The coffee community shows a much larger spread of landownership than either of the sugar communities. There are more than 1,300 farms in the municipality. Of these, about 90 are larger than 100 acres. The general tendency within recent times has been for the larger farms to grow larger, the smaller to grow smaller. Because coffee production is most economical in large units,




where processing operations may be conducted by the producer, the smaller units are at a competitive disadvantage. They compensate for this in part by the high proportion of family to hired labor, the smallest farmers using family labor exclusively.

Because coffee is a perennial, land devoted to it cannot be used for the cultivation of subsistence crops as in the case of tobacco. Therefore, the land devoted to coffee must be extensive enough to provide cash income for all needs, or the farm itself must be large enough to permit a combination of coffee and subsistence crops, which insures subsistence plus the income to purchase supple- mentary food and other commodities. Owing to this nature of the crop and the average market price of coffee, the amount of land required per family is greater in the coffee region than in the region of tobacco-minor crops. For example, the gross return on an average acre of coffee would be about $25 at the highest market price per pound during the ten years from 1937 to 1946. The gross return on an average acre of tobacco at the highest market price during this same period would be about $342. And, while labor and fertilizer costs in tobacco would account for a little more than half the gross, the net return per acre of tobacco is likely to be many times higher than in coffee. Add to this the the fact that corn generally follows the tobacco and that beans may follow the corn before it is time for the next tobacco plant- ing, and the much higher value of an acre of land devoted to tobacco becomes even more apparent.

Because coffee is a perennial, it is never worked by share-croppers, always by day- work or piecework. Thus, unlike the tobacco sharecropper, who participates in any profit made from the sale of the crop, the landless coffee worker depends upon his wages, much as does the worker in the cane fields. Like the latter, the day worker of the coffee community has little hope of accumulating any excess-especially since his weekly wage when he does work is considerably less than that of the cane-field worker.

Often the landless worker is permitted the use of one or two acres of generally inferior land for the cultivation of subsistence crops for his own use. This insures the landlord a dependable labor supply and provides the worker with part of his annual subsistence needs. The effort devoted to the care of these plots here contrasts sharply with the careless handling of their plots found among the parceleros of the Land Authority community. This difference is related at least in part to the wages paid in the two regions. The sugar worker earns from two and a half to three and a half times the daily wage of the coffee worker. Even a solid week's work in coffee may provide little more than the family requirement for food alone. Thus the scrounging which becomes so acute during the dead period in cane is an almost per- manent condition of the landless agricul- turist in the coffee region. And a plot of one's own is likely to seem more precious to the coffee worker than to the cane worker, who contrasts the meager returns from the work on his own plot with the much greater return from work for wages.

Off-season subsidiary activities of the coffee worker are generally agricultural. He may migrate to the cane fields to compete with the coastal cane cutters, or he may find some work in the preparation of the tobacco seed beds on farms in the highlands. Non- agricultural activities are more restricted here than on the coast, some of the more important being the making and peddling of illegal rum and the selling of illegal lottery tickets. But the main difference in dead- season patterns between this and the coastal areas is the presence in the coffee community of some subsistence crops, either on the field loaned by the landlord or on the field of a friend, neighbor, or ritual kinsman. Often, therefore, there is a way to stretch small favors or obligations into enough vegetables to keep one's family going until the next season.

Because accumulation is difficult, land prices relatively high, and credit hard to come by, saving is not here looked upon as a




"way out." Here, too, the illegal lottery is popular. As in the coastal communities, the illusion of upward mobility is not very strong, and education is not looked upon as a way of climbing from landlessness to landownership.

Differences in the size and nature of the operations here promote stronger face-to- face relationships between producer-owner and worker than can be found in the coastal communities. The owner or his surrogate knows all tenants by name. And although the paternalistic patterns which flourished under these productive arrangements are reportedly much weaker than in former times, the landlord may still count on the support of the tenant in such matters as, for example, political allegiance. These strong face-to-face relationships and their concomitant paternalism seem further to have preserved social class distinctions and attitudes of respect more rigidly than in the cane regions, where the higher degree of proletarization and the disappearance of the old face-to-face arrangements have been ac- companied by a decline in the respect forms and an increase in the formal assumptions of equality or democracy.

Catholicism in the isolated rural areas of this region is strong, in contrast with the growing importance of the evangelical sects on the coast, and tends to emphasize the cult of the saints. These are manipulated for practical purposes. Among the landless and the submarginal landowners, the family pattern is strongly patrilineal, with the father controlling the family labor, either on or off the farm. He determines inheritance and disposal of any land, and he dictates the social relationships of his wife and children. Marriage in this community is usually ritual, even among the landless, and may thus reflect the importance of property as well as of the traditional religion.

The rugged terrain of this area, as con- trasted with the coastal plains of sugar production, has prevented the development of good roads. And the crop itself has not de- manded good roads, as does the cultivation of sugar. Transportation of sugar cane is too

costly when performed by mule or human carrier. This is not the case with coffee. Proof of this relationship between good means of communication and the crop may be seen in the island-wide tendency for new roads to follow the spread of sugar cultivation into the more hilly regions.

Thus the isolation fostered by the nature of the landscape is heightened, in contrast to the coast, by the lack of good communication. The implications of this contrast in terms of mobility, conservatism, general slowness of change, and so on, are profound.

THE TOBACCO-MINOR CROPS COMMUNITY

In contrast with the coffee community, where over 90 of about 1,300 farms consist of more than 100 acres, in the tobacco- minor crop municipality, only 21 of almost 1,100 farms are larger than 100 acres. On the other hand, the number of farms here with less than 15 acres numbers 875, and no single farm is as large as 500 acres. There is a rapid turnover in landownership from generation to generation, the dominant pattern being one of inheritance fragmentation, with holdings re-formed under different families. The sucesi6n or other managerial types of inheritance are much less common here than in the coffee region, where heavy investment in processing machinery on the large farms acts as a deterrent to fragmentation.

Tobacco is the principal cash crop in this community, with minor crops a strong con- tributor to cash income. The combination of a cash crop requiring little acreage and a subsistence-plus-cash crop makes survival on small holdings more feasible here than in any of the other communities. Nobody in this community devotes himself exclusively to the cultivation of the major cash crop, as in sugar-cane or, to a lesser extent, in the coffee community.

Because tobacco may be cultivated profitably on small plots, requires no machinery, and calls for no long wait to realize a return on investment; because production credit is readily available and family labor may supply all the labor for an average-sized plot; because tobacco occupies the land for only




four months of the year and important food crops may be sequentially intercropped; because a natural catastrophe, which may wipe out the cash crop, does not necessarily condemn the grower to total loss of annual income-for all these reasons, tobacco has been called the "poor man's cash crop."

In this community the sharecropper seg- ment of the landless workers hopes for betterment in a way not found among the landless of other areas. The sharecropper may accumulate enough money in a single year of good crops and prices to buy a small piece of land. This is the ideal, the dream. And to the extent that low-priced, small parcels of land are often available through the usual breakup of farms upon the death of the owner, the dream is often realizable. Each year of good tobacco prices has witnessed at least a few such conversions of the dream into reality.

As a matter of fact, the largest proportion of the big landowners of this municipality were found to have reached their present status from poverty or nonownership. The example of their success makes the goal real to today's landless workers. Thus, econo- mizing and saving through thrift are found more commonly here than among the landless of the other communities. And gambling, instead of appearing to them as the most likely road to betterment, looks more like a means of losing one's way on the road. That is not to say that there is no gambling in the municipality. There is, but there is significantly less of it; and the illegal lottery, which flourishes in other areas, has virtually disappeared here.

Subsidiary economic activities are strong- est among the landless of the one barrio which is almost completely devoted to the production of tobacco. But landlord credit to sharecroppers during the dead season re- duces the burden of that period for them. In the other barrios minor crops are produced throughout the year and provide a steady, if small, subsistence and salary for most of the landless. Some of the landless workers who are not sharecroppers migrate to the coastal towns for part of the sugar harvest,

but most remain within the municipality, working at odd jobs, borrowing, or exploit- ing kin and neighbor relationships. Peddling or making illegal rum is of no importance in the tobacco barrio; there is only one still in operation, and that is run by an independent large landholder who takes care of most of his own marketing of the product as well.

Despite the dependency relationships of many of the landless, who have neither tobacco, fields for subsistence, nor easy access to food crops, ritual kin relationships are here treated more lightly than in any of the other communities studied. It may be that the lesser severity of the dead season weak- ens these relationships which were reportedly stronger at one time. Also, the greater fluidity and the possibilities and the facts of upward mobility tend to minimize the importance of the compadre ties.

While demands for their labor may often interfere with education of the children, the general tendency is to view education as a device for upward mobility. Parents will frequently educate their children at some sacrifice. And the town supports two private high schools, a Catholic and a Baptist acad- emy, in contrast to the other communities, where no private high schools are found.

Face-to-face relationships are perhaps stronger here than in any of the other communities. Upward mobility and the almost universal direct supervision of farming activities by the owner insure them. And while it is well known that many of the wealthy farmers were once poor men, that does not lead to an informal backslapping relationship; but it does promote an easier accord that is rare in the near-caste rigidity of areas where land, wealth, and power have come down for a number of generations.

The importance of minor crops and the greater bulk of these have stimulated the building of roads. Transportation of tobacco, like that of coffee, may be accomplished by mule or by human carrier, but this is not ordinarily the case with bananas, plaintains, yams, tanniers, and the like. Thus in those areas where minor crops have become important, new roads have been built, despite




the unevenness of the terrain. There has been an attendant decrease in isolation, until now there is no place in the entire municipality that is more than forty minutes' walk from a hard-surface road.

Among the landless and the small farmers of this region the family is bilateral, em- phasizing descent on the side where most property lies. Authority for social relations in the family lies generally-but not always and not so strongly as in the coffee region- with the father. Marriage is consensual only where property is not now or is not likely ever to be a consideration, otherwise it is most often civil or religious. The traditional religion appears weaker here than in the coffee region, with no saint cults and with a minor penetration of evangelicism into the nominally universal Catholicism of the rural areas.

Some of these data will strike students of other world areas as familiar. The homogeneity of agrarian ways of life, which is often assumed to exist in countries as small as Puerto Rico, may, upon examination, turn out to be a fiction. The modes of life may instead be discovered to be heterogeneous, not only in horizontal or class terms but in terms of regional and crop adaptation as well. These data suggest that under a system

of production for profit and in the multiple context of a dependent, class-structured society, which participates in the world market, certain cultural forms and productive arrangements tend to be associated in special ways with the crops cultivated. Thus the nature of the crop-under the above conditions-may favor the predominance of holdings within a certain range in size; may dictate the general patterns of inheritance and the rate of turnover in landholdings; fix the seasonality of employment; determine the proportion of land which will be devoted to the production of subsistence crops; and affect the nature of the family, the local class structure, and the religious and political attitudes of the people.

The cultural-historical and adaptive proc- esses involved in the emergence of these subcultural and regional variations may perhaps be largely duplicated in cultures of other traditions where the development of cash crops, trade, and so on involve the emergence and growth of similar productive arrangements, credit, and marketing facili- ties. It remains for other investigators to test in other cultures these hypotheses which have come out of the Puerto Rican investigation. BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS



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