25 2005 3vargas Cetina COOPERATIVES Chiapas

Critique of Anthropology
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Anthropology and Cooperatives: From the Community Paradigm to the

Ephemeral Association in Chiapas, Mexico
Gabriela Vargas-Cetina
Critique of Anthropology 2005; 25; 229
DOI: 10.1177/0308275X05055210
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Article
Anthropology and Cooperatives

From the Community Paradigm to the
Ephemeral Association in Chiapas, Mexico
Gabriela Vargas-Cetina
Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Mexico
Abstract ■ This article, inspired by June Nash’s provocative vision of postmodern
times in Chiapas, looks at how anthropologists have traced the changing nature
of grassroots organizations to suggest that we need to see cooperatives and other
local organizations in a new way, as ephemeral associations. Through the
example of how the cooperative imaginary has informed different development
programs in Mexico’s recent history, from the early cooperative movement in
the 19th century to the 21st century, it explores the idea that the institutional
arrangements of the recent past have given way to a state of constant flux. A new
volatility is at the heart of both the organizations and their surrounding environ-
ment, so that local organizations now have to re-invent themselves constantly, to
keep up with global and local changes. Through a case study of weavers’
cooperatives in Chiapas, the article points at their internal flexibility and fragility
in the current climate of little support for the projects and activities of rural
producers and the urban poor.
Keywords ■ anthropology ■ Chiapas ■ cooperatives ■ grassroots organizations ■
Mexico
The ideals of the cooperative movement, which emerged at the end of the
19th century, still hold great appeal for members of grassroots organiz-
ations around the world. The notion that an organization can be fully run
by its members, with equal participation in investment, gains and losses, is
at the center of the cooperative imaginary. Today, grassroots organizations
often call themselves ‘cooperatives’, even when they are structured and
operate following very different principles from those supporting classical
cooperatives. While most rural producers who hold lands or other property
under collective arrangements or market their products through a collec-
tively owned or collectively operated outlet have never heard of Henri
Saint-Simon, Robert Owen or Charles Fourier, they nevertheless under-
stand that cooperation transcends individual output and market possibili-
ties. In any case, ‘cooperatives’, including those that see themselves as part
of the international cooperative movement, have proven malleable enough
to adapt in shape and operation to local culture and the larger institutional
context. Cooperatives, in different forms, shapes and arrangements, have
taken hold of planners’ imagination, and also of the hopes and wishes of
Vol 25(3) 229–251 [DOI:10.1177/0308275X05055210]

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230
Critique of Anthropology 25(3)
rural producers and the urban poor. Seen from this perspective, many non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) are but a recent offshoot of the
cooperative imagination.
Professor Nash (2001) compels us to approach grassroots organizations
of all kinds from a new, multiple vantage point. National states and bureau-
cracies, transnational markets, world media, solidarity movements, private
foundations, foreign governments, multinational bodies and institutions
(such as the United Nations, the International Labor Organization and
their branches), human rights defense bodies and hundreds of volunteers
and interested persons now play an important part in the development of
local organizations everywhere. Furthermore, local issues can throw trans-
national financial institutions off-balance, since ‘paradoxically, the process
of integration in world markets gives power to those marginalized by the
global economy’ (Nash, 2001: 11).
I believe that, along with this change of focus so as to see the local in
the global and the global in the local, we also need to look closely at the
changing structure of grassroots organizations, at least in Mexico, as inter-
nally unstable and ephemeral. Ejidos, cooperatives and collectives used to
have clearer purposes and features when the Mexican government
supported and regulated them in many ways. Today, grassroots organiz-
ations change rapidly in size, orientation, form, legal status and member-
ship, responding to their changing economic, political, social and even
religious contexts. Furthermore, as activists and NGOs increasingly take
over tasks that used to be associated with government programs, the
personal attitudes and values of people in key positions as advisers make a
mark in the ways the organizations are structured and function.
In the past, the members of grassroots organizations controlled many
decisions, and often received funding, marketing advice and other forms
of help from the Mexican government. This support included, even in
those cases where government bureaucrats never came close to the local
organizations, a legal structure which gave members rights and obligations
and made it possible for them to claim the benefits they were entitled to.
Today, in-house or outside advisers and individual volunteers are import-
ant in many local organizations, especially when these become associated
with local and regional NGOs. These persons’ visions are often informed
by issues transcending the local, such as a belief in social justice and the
will to help the poor. Since, under the climate of neoliberal policies the
state has largely withdrawn from many areas where it was once important,
these individuals have become crucial. In the case of commercialization
cooperatives, their time and trade horizons now coincide with the market
potential of their products, which sharply rises or falls and is beyond local
control. In the case of other types of organizations, their shapes and
purposes are constantly changing according to their contexts.
In the remainder of this article I trace the way in which anthropology
has approached cooperatives and other types of local organizations, and

231
Vargas-Cetina: Anthropology and Cooperatives
then move on to a short history of how the cooperative ideal has informed
the promotion of cooperatives and grassroots organizations in Mexico. In
a third section, using examples of organizations in Chiapas that call them-
selves cooperatives, I focus on why grassroots associations now have to be
seen not only from multiple vantage points, as Professor Nash teaches us,
but also as constantly changing according to the problems they face and
the available resources. I conclude with a short overview of the processes
that are turning Mexican and in particular Chiapan grassroots organiz-
ations into ephemeral associations, pointing at the need for anthropology
to take these new circumstances into account.1
Anthropology and the study of grassroots organizations
With few exceptions, such as the Hawthorn studies of the 1920s (see
Hamada, 1994; Wright, 1994), anthropologists took a long time to pay close
attention to ‘modern’ organizations, since they were more interested at the
time in exotic places than in their own societies and industrial culture. In
the meantime, in the United States (under the New Deal programs), in the
Soviet Union and other nations under Soviet influence, in new nations such
as Israel, in postcolonial India, in much of Africa and in Latin America,
rural cooperatives emerged as an important development alternative in the
modernization of the developing world (Eckstein, 1987 [1966]; Hyden,
1980; Simpson, 1937; Worsley, 1971).
The general assumption then, in academia as in politics, was that
cooperatives were modern forms of organization that superseded or were
to supersede, in the long run, other, more ‘primary’ forms of association
based on the family, age groups, kinship or tribe (see Rostow, 1960;
Simpson, 1937). By the end of the 1950s, almost everywhere, rural societies
had registered important changes brought about by the new collectivistic
policies. Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, cooperatives and other types of
organization inspired by them began to appear in rural areas of Africa, Asia
and Latin America, supported or even spurred by national governments
(Attwood, 1992; Baviskar, 1980; Hyden, 1980; Nash et al., 1976; Russell,
1995). These collectivization programs immediately caught the attention of
anthropologists working in those regions (see Montanari, 1971). Anthro-
pologists were beginning to pay closer attention to the wider, international
contexts in which the groups they worked with now lived, and to study what
they saw as the modern institutions that were transforming the countryside
in the so-called underdeveloped countries (Dore, 1971; Vincent, 1971).
In the 1960s the ethnographic study of rural cooperatives and collec-
tives became an increasingly widespread practice, and a new field of anthro-
pological enquiry was established. In 1969 Ronald Dore, Leonard Joy, P.S.
Cohen and Peter Worsley organized a conference at the University of
Sussex to bring together academics who were working in the field of rural

232
cooperation at the time. The volume resulting from that conference

(Worsley, 1971) underlined some of the common ethnographic themes and
ideas surrounding the new wave of rural collectivization. The new cooper-
ative organizations were considered an important innovation in productive
and distribution practices, and the ethnography registered the difficulties
inherent in transforming individualistic peasants or existing collective insti-
tutions into efficient and successful cooperative organizations.
In 1972, June Nash and Jorge Dandler drew up a series of questions,
all of which addressed the interface between local practices and the nation-
state’s development projects, and sent out a call for papers for a symposium
at the ninth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological
Sciences in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in 1973. The resulting volume, edited by
Nash, Dandler and Hopkins (1976), was thus prefaced by Sol Tax, who put
the accent on the shift of focus so clearly represented by the book:
For those who still think of anthropology as a discipline concerned primarily
with small traditional communities and exotic cultures, this book will be a way
station. Few if any of the worldwide group of active anthropologists in its
scenario would shy away from the problems of the industrialized and economi-
cally interrelated world. The present volume, however, deals mainly with grass-
roots people as they operate in the larger society. Cooperatives, as the editors
point out in their masterful introduction, are communities of a special sort
which show how people direct themselves to form, out of the same old human
material, new institutions to cope with their changing world. (Tax, 1976: iv)
Grassroots organizations had become the center of a growing anthro-

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

233
But the international schemes of structural adjustment enforced by the

International Monetary Fund and the World Bank from the 1980s (Hewitt
de Alcántara, 1994) meant that state intervention and support were to
shrink rapidly everywhere. The process was accompanied by the rise of a
new rhetoric of entrepreneurship and of business opportunities only
waiting to be discovered. In this new climate, small and micro-producers of
foodstuffs, along with small and micro-artisans in the countryside and the
cities, found themselves increasingly alone before the market. New
economic opportunities did open for some families and individuals, but
many small producers began to join forces through cooperative organiz-
ations of different types, as their only way to economic viability. Middle-class
volunteers and NGOs began to help these new organizations and to support
the older ones (Hirschman, 1984).
The rapid ascendancy of the discourse that elevated private property
to an inherent superiority over other forms of property and resource
management made many anthropologists uncomfortable. The rush to
outright privatization spurred the interest in the documentation and
careful ethnography of collective resource management systems that
actually work well and benefit their members. Some ethnographic work
centered on collective arrangements emerged from this new climate:
ethnographies that took Hardin’s tragedy of the commons as their point of
departure and ethnographies that sought the reasons why in some cases
cooperatives worked well and in others did not (Acheson, 1988; Baviskar,
1980; Netting, 1982; Wade, 1988; see also Mosse, 2003). Also, anthropolog-
ical work reacting to the new climate of neoconservativism (which at that
point started to be called ‘neoliberalism’, especially in Latin America)
centered on what happened to rural producers and artisans who found
themselves, almost overnight, immersed in the logic of supply and demand
without the old safety nets, although sometimes with a broader range of
economic opportunities. The research then being carried out soon resulted
in publications addressing these issues (for example, Cook and Binford,
1990; Stephen, 1992). It was also then that the NGO phenomenon began
to attract anthropological attention.
In this new intellectual climate, Professor June Nash organized in New
York an exhibit and a conference on Middle America artisans, which then
led to an edited volume (Nash, 1993c). The book presented cases of organ-
ized crafters, as well as of families who were relatively autonomous in the
market and crafters employed by transnational businesses. It put the accent
on the new transnational connections between artisans and consumers,
including tourists, local patrons, middlemen bulk-sellers and Bloomingdale
shoppers in the United States. The literature on the transnational links
between local people in developing countries and the international
community was already growing in the field of NGO-related literature, but
ethnography was only beginning to be informed by the theories around
globalization. In the 1990s NGOs became established as an important

234
theme in anthropology (Bebbington and Perrault, 1999; Bebbington and

Ridell, 1997; Carroll, 1992; Fisher, 1993, 1997).
NGOs had begun to fill in the void left by the termination of many
national and international development and welfare programs, and had
become important in the eyes of development agencies. The role of NGOs
and advocates, however, was not clearly registered yet by the literature on
rural cooperatives, except at the technical level; that is, at the level of the
literature produced in the form of projects, reports and case studies result-
ing from the interface between advocates and local cooperative organiz-
ations. It was in the 1990s and the first years of the new century that this
literature began to emerge. Nash (1993a, 1993b, 2001), for example, shows
how cooperatives in Chiapas, including ejidos, artisan cooperatives and
other collective organizations, were galvanized into the larger civil society
movements so that their own problems took on different shapes when seen
as part of larger issues. The fight for ethnic identity, for indigenous rights,
for greater opportunities against poverty and marginalization, is a struggle
that transcends the economic objectives of cooperatives and collectives and
lends new meanings to these associations. Nash’s (2001) book brings
together different strands of anthropological inquiry, including the long-
standing interest in cooperative organizations, global markets, the politics
of identity, the importance of national and international advocacy, and the
conflicts between locals and regional and national governments.
The current environment in which cooperatives operate is character-
ized by the great uncertainty as to support funds. Funds are now channeled
to development projects and organizations, including small and large co-
operatives and collectives, through NGOs and through grants that come
and go with assorted government and private programs. Since at this point
rural producers can expect little help from the government in terms of agri-
cultural support, and money has invaded most every corner of the local
economies of developing countries, families find themselves diversifying
their activities and appealing to global movements such as the solidarity
market and fair trade (see Grimes and Milgram, 2000). Mexico is not an
exception to these new tendencies, as we will see in the following sections.
Mexico: cooperativism, corporativism and neoliberalism
Early students of grassroots and institutionalized cooperation (Gide, 1922

[1904]; Holyoake, 1907) stressed the importance of the Rochdale Equitable
Pioneers Society as the main igniter of the cooperative movement that soon
spread around the world. Following the success of this retail outlet, the
movement spread rapidly to the cities of Europe and in the 1880s credit
and work cooperatives became perceived as viable alternatives to employ-
ment in private firms. In many cities, industrial workers united to create
credit unions and cut down their expenses through the joint ownership,

235
supply and operation of cooperative general stores (Gide, 1922 [1904];

Holyoake, 1907).
The cooperative movement was based on a reformist strand of social-
ism (Worsley, 1971). This school of socialist thought saw both industrialists
and labor as producers of wealth, while bankers and middlemen were
considered parasitic. The movement, which had started as a mainly urban
phenomenon, soon reached mainland Europe, the Americas, Asia and the
Pacific both in urban centers and in the countryside (Reynolds, 2002; Rojas
Coria, 1984 [1952]; Sibal, 1996; Vargas-Cetina, 1993). As had been the case
in Italy (Degl’Innocenti, 1981) and in Spain (Arrieta et al., 1998), in
Mexico the cooperative movement initially used the existing structures of
the guilds and the rotating ceremonial and savings organizations instituted
by the Catholic Church (Rojas Coria, 1984 [1952]). In the 1830s mutual
savings organizations began to gain independence from the Church and
organize outside religious contexts, and in 1839 the first popular bank
opened in Orizaba, Veracruz (Enciclopedia de México, 1996: 7364; Rojas
Coria, 1984 [1952]: 111). The first Mexican cooperative organization
modeled after the Rochdale Pioneers Society was founded in Mexico City
in 1873. This organization and similar others were heavily influenced by
the example of the Pioneers Society’s ideals of self-help and workers’
control of their own labor, and of retailing outlets and conditions of retail-
ing (Enciclopedia de México, 1996: 7364; Rojas Coria, 1984 [1952]: 230–44).
Porfirio Diaz, who was President of Mexico between 1876 and 1910, was
unsympathetic to cooperative organizations. He saw them as subversive and
hostile to his liberal capitalism regime (Krotz, 1988: 44; Rojas Coria, 1984
[1952]: 252–363). Diaz, who had been trained in Latin, Philosophy and
Law, believed wholeheartedly in liberal economics and made private
property and foreign investment important parts of his economic agenda.
He supported and promoted international and national investment in
communications. During his governments, Mexican and foreign private
investors created an extensive railroad system, connecting inland regions
to seaports. Steam boats, in turn, connected national ports among them-
selves and with other ports abroad, in the Americas and Europe. Diaz also
favored the concentration of land into a few hands and endorsed a system
of hacienda plantations, where indentured labor and debt-peonage were
the main sources of agricultural wealth (Eckstein, 1987 [1966]: 21–9; Enci-
clopedia de México, 2001; Rojas Coria, 1984 [1952]: 335–363). Socialism,
cooperativism and communism became dirty words during his presidency,
since he perceived them as naming the enemies of liberal capitalism.
After the Mexican Revolution that brought Diaz’s regime to an end,
successive governments saw the cooperatives as potential vehicles for social
and economic change. Through the first decades of post-revolutionary
Mexico, between 1910 and 1950, the dream of a Mexican Cooperative
Republic was very present among urban intellectuals, industrial workers
and Mexican legislators. In 1917 a group of law students gathered support

236
from textile and railroad workers, teachers and students to form the
National Cooperative Political Party (Leon Portilla, 1995: 946–7; Rojas
Coria, 1984 [1952]: 378). This party was very successful in subsequent
national and state elections, so that by 1920 their candidates had been
elected Governors in five states and occupied 60 seats in the National Legis-
lature (Rojas Coria, 1984 [1952]: 378–9). Charles Gide’s (1922 [1904])
book on consumer cooperative societies had caught the Cooperative Party
members’ imagination and in 1922 they began to propose the idea of a
Cooperative Republic (Rojas Coria, 1984 [1952]: 386–94). The Party’s
platform was based on the ideas of Fourier, Owen and Gide, and relied on
the Rochdale Pioneers’ success as an important example of cooperative
endeavors and potential.
The influence of the cooperative movement in Mexican legislation is
evident in the laws enacted by Congress during those years, and particu-
larly in legislation concerning the program of agrarian reform that had
been announced in the 1917 Mexican Constitution. In October 1922 a
document of the Agrarian Bureau established the need to create coopera-
tives throughout rural Mexico, including agricultural machine pools, credit
societies, marketing organizations and irrigation societies (Eckstein, 1987
[1966]). The Cooperative Party supported Adolfo de la Huerta, a presi-
dential candidate who organized an armed rebellion in 1923 against
General Alvaro Obregón, then President of Mexico. De la Huerta was soon
defeated, and General Plutarco Elías Calles was elected President of Mexico
(Eckstein, 1987 [1966]; Rojas Coria, 1984 [1952]). The dream of a
Cooperative Republic seemed to have been halted by the new turn in
Mexican politics.
In 1924 Plutarco Elías Calles, whom the Cooperative Party had
opposed, traveled to Europe and was very impressed by the Schultze-
Delisch and the Raiffeisen savings and credit cooperatives. As soon as he
returned to Mexico he called on Luis Gorozpe, who had written a
cooperative manual, in order to draft a Cooperative Law applicable to all
sectors of the economy (Rojas Coria, 1984 [1952]: 395). This law, finally
approved by Congress in 1926 and published in 1927, established the legal
bases of institutionalized cooperation in Mexico, with cooperatives as
the most important instruments for the modernization of the Mexican
countryside.
The first law for the creation of ejidos, the production units established
by the agrarian reform program for the redistribution of land to the
peasants, dates from 1920 (Eckstein, 1987 [1966]: 48). Legislation
promoted by Calles in the sectors of education, irrigation, communications,
land redistribution and credit firmly established new grounds for the ejido
land reform, supported by a system of credit and marketing societies based
on the Schultze-Delisch and Raiffeisen cooperative systems. President
Lazaro Cardenas, who undertook the distribution of land to ejidos as the
main program of his presidency (1936–40), promoted further legislation

237
making it possible for ejidatarios to hold land collectively in those areas

where private exploitation would not have been advisable. He also
promoted the law that in 1936 created the legal framework for the opera-
tion of fishing cooperatives, which continues to inform current legislation
regarding Mexican fisheries to this day (Enciclopedia de México, 2001).
Eckstein (1987 [1966]: 61) points out that even though the agrarian reform
program was continuously accused of Bolshevism and Soviet influence in
general, in fact the ejidos, and particularly the collective ejidos (where land
was collectively owned and work was collectively organized), were conceived
of as agrarian cooperatives rather than as Kolhoz-style agricultural units
(see also Reyes Osorio, 1979 [1974]).
Post-revolutionary governments considered cooperatives a good
alternative to socialism and to capitalism alike, but during the government
of Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–45) cooperatives lost their place of privi-
lege in Mexican government projects. In the years that followed, the ejido
system, other types of rural and urban cooperatives, and the system of
cooperative pools and banks were rapidly transformed into marginal
production units and inefficient bureaucratic institutions. It was, however,
from the 1960s and on that anthropologists turned their attention to the
ejido as such and to rural cooperation, including fishing cooperatives –
when, although these institutions were only a shadow of what the reform-
ers had intended, they were already thoroughly assimilated by the rural,
often indigenous, peasants of Mexico.
Three major strands of social thought were important for the creation
of post-revolutionary Mexico: liberalism, cooperativism and socialism.
Successive governments took it upon themselves to harness these ideolo-
gies to the interests and purposes of the Mexican state. While cooperativism
gave shape to the policies and programs for the rural areas of the country,
socialism, in its peculiar Mexican form of trade unionism, gave shape to the
relationship between the state and urban labor. In the meantime, liberal-
ism and the promotion of what in Mexico was called ‘private initiative’
shaped the relations between the state and capitalist entrepreneurs
(Carmona et al., 1983 [1970]).
Between 1940 and 1970 the Mexican state consolidated a corporativist
political system whereby the dominant political party (Partido de la Revolu-
ción Institucional, or PRI) was supported by the three main corporate
‘social sectors’ of the country: the National Confederation of Peasants
(Confederación Nacional Campesina, or CNC), the Confederation of
Mexican Workers (Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos, or CTM)
and the Confederation of Popular Organizations (Confederación Nacional
de Organizaciones Populares, or CNOP). CNOP was the most hetero-
geneous of these three corporate organizations, since it included urban
middle classes, professionals, intellectuals, employees, fishermen, teachers,
shop owners and rural small producers (Carmona et al., 1983 [1970]:
185–8; Hardy, 1984: 31). This way, much of Mexican society from both the

238
left and the right end of the political spectrum was brought into the differ-
ent sections of the PRI’s organizations.
In the 1970s President Luis Echeverría tried to revive the withered
cooperative movement. His efforts included the revitalization of the collec-
tive ejido, through state-directed vertical integration of agro-industries.
Echeverría’s government tried to turn ejidos into subjects of credit again,
so that they could not only supply food for peasant families’ needs but also
for the urban markets. He turned the old Department of Agriculture and
Colonization into a Secretariat of Agrarian Reform, which, along with the
newly instituted Bank of Rural Credit, was to ensure a continuous flow of
raw materials to state-controlled industrial processing plants. Echeverría
also continued the existing policy of import substitution, which shut
national borders to many foreign goods, and maintained a policy of parity
control between Mexico’s currency and the US dollar. Under Echeverría’s
government peasants enjoyed a comprehensive policy of crop price support
and the extension of socialized health care to all agricultural producers and
their families (Enciclopedia de México, 2001).
Subsequent governments, however, returned to the old liberal ideas of
free market, opening the national borders to foreign imports and dimin-
ishing the subsidies to peasants and the poor. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher
had become prime minister of Britain. She carried out important reforms
that undermined the power-base of British trade unions, reduced taxes and
put national industries in the hands of private investors. She was a strong
promoter of free trade. Thatcher, along with Ronald Reagan, who came to
power in 1980 in the United States of America, created a new style of
government based on neoconservative liberalism. They also undertook an
aggressive foreign policy aimed at establishing an international climate
favoring free trade and transnational corporations. As a result of their
policies, governments around the world began to turn to liberal economics
once more, and away from many of the welfare provisions then in place.
In the 1980s, when neoconservative economic thinking was already
fashionable again, the governments of Mexico and other developing
countries defaulted on the payment of their foreign debts. Many develop-
ing countries had supported their agricultural subsidies and extension
programs with money they had borrowed from international financial insti-
tutions. The international debt crisis of the developing world that finally
exploded in 1982 brought about important changes in the configuration
of international relations. In particular, the World Bank and the Inter-
national Monetary Fund began to make financial help to indebted
countries conditional, through what came to be known as the programs of
structural adjustment (Hewitt de Alcántara, 1994). Structural adjustment,
which is still an important part of the World Bank’s and IMF’s development
policies, is predicated upon the neoconservative ideas of unhindered free
trade and the withdrawal of the government from most sectors of the
economy. This amounts to a reduction (and eventual ending) of subsidies

239
to food, agricultural inputs, and health and retirement programs. Along

with these changes, national governments are forced to implement policies
that favor investors while they undermine trade unions.
The privatization of national industries and the dismantling of trade
barriers to foreign goods and capital are also important tenets of structural
adjustment programs (Hewitt de Alcántara, 1994). The nationalist wave
that characterized most agricultural collectivization systems had run its
course, and developing countries began to drop the protectionist policies
they had implemented so as to shield national industry from outside
competition. Post-industrial nations, however, maintained many of their
subsidy programs and are taking longer to dismantle their national welfare
systems (Mingione, 1990).
As of 1982 rural producers and the urban poor in developing nations
began to experience a level of hardship that was almost unthinkable in the
1970s. In Mexico the pressure exerted by international development insti-
tutions brought to an end much of the support for agriculture. For rural
and urban cooperative organizations in Mexico, it has meant the end of the
protection of collectively owned property in favor of private capital, the
waning or complete disappearance of previous subsidies for farming
supplies and basic foodstuffs, and the extinction of guaranteed prices for
agricultural goods and specialty crafts (Mata García, 1992). Cooperatives
found that they had to compete in the international markets with very little
or no help from the national government. In the cities and the country-
side, individuals, families and collectives felt the effects of the new
economic policies in the form of a rapid pauperization (Calderón, 1990).
Mexican cooperatives are now in the same situation as others in the
developing world. The connection between rural and urban organizations
(including cooperatives) and the market is now handled, under the ambiva-
lent gaze of the national government, mostly by non-governmental organiz-
ations, small entrepreneurs, private foundations and individual volunteers
who take it upon themselves to support indigenous peoples, rural produc-
ers and poverty-stricken people everywhere (see Ayora-Diaz, 2002; Canto
Chac, 1998; La Piedra Barrón, 1992; Nigh Nielsen, 2002; Vargas-Cetina,
2002; Zapata Martello et al., 2003). In the next section, through a case study
from Chiapas, I show the way the new wave of liberalization reforms have
affected grassroots organizations and have transformed many Mexican
grassroots organizations into ephemeral associations.
The cooperative imaginary and the ephemeral association in

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

240
Individual advisers and civil organizations dedicated to different political

and economic goals have sprung up in most of Mexico. A good part of those
organizations, which can be characterized, after the related literature, as
grassroots support organizations (GSOs) (Carroll, 1992; Fisher, 1993,
1997), work to connect local producers’ organizations with national and
international markets, government programs and private foundations’
funds. These organizations are usually staffed by highly idealistic volun-
teers, who want to help people help themselves, following their own dreams
of empowering rural dwellers or the urban poor.
In the past, many government development projects did not reach
Chiapas in their original form. Chiapas was seen as bound by atavistic
relations; a ‘backward’ region of the country, only suitable for paternalistic
projects aimed at transforming indigenous people into Mexican citizens
(Ayora-Diaz, 2002; Köhler, 1975 [1969]). The government tried to imple-
ment different types of development scheme, including rural cooperatives
running through subsidized funds, but did not envision self-sufficient local
associations successfully competing in the world market. Ejido land reform
did take place in the 1930s and 1940s; peasants gained ownership of their
lands and control over their own agricultural practices, but the federal
government never managed to break the stronghold a few families had on
the politics and social life of the state (Benjamin, 1995 [1989]). With a few
exceptions (see Ayora-Diaz, 2002), cooperatives formed under the auspices
of the National Indigenous Institute (INI) tended to be subsidized for a
while until they disappeared without having fostered any real interest
among agriculturists or craft producers.
It was because of concerned priests, private citizens and social activists
that local producers’ organizations and other grassroots associations finally
flourished and prospered in Chiapas. The Indigenous Congress of 1974
brought together people from different ethnic groups and spurred a wave
of rural organizations in the Chiapas countryside. The most common form
of grassroots organization in Chiapas became that of a group of people
coordinated by an outside adviser or by a team of advisers. These media-
tors were in charge of making contacts with government agencies, private
and public foundations, donors and niche market gatekeepers. Hirschman
pointed out in 1984, regarding the general development of the grassroots
movement in Latin America, that young urban intellectuals teamed up with
peasants in order to help these enter international markets and trans-
national social movements, turning disadvantages into strengths. This was
the case in Chiapas too. The Mexican and state governments, in turn, tried
to submit the new organizations to the general rules of operation obtain-
ing for ‘social capital societies’ (that is, organizations that are not expected
to bring in major profits but only to help their members get by).
Most grassroots organizations in Chiapas registered their charters
under some form of ‘social capital’ legal status. With few exceptions, that
situation persists to date. Through this acceptance of a set of legal

241
definitions generated by the state, the multiplicity of grassroots organiz-

ations in Chiapas became subsumed into a few categories, which condition
their membership modalities and forms of operation. For example, under
Mexican civil law, the social solidarity society is a form of organization that
has to have a rural base and cannot have openly gainful objectives. National
legislation was not amenable to non-agricultural cooperatives (although
the Cruz Azul complex of cement cooperatives and the Cooperative Bank
of Orizaba are two success stories in spite of the difficulties posed by such
legislation). Small producers’ associations were treated almost as market
stock-based private businesses, and thus not many grassroots organizations
in rural Chiapas took this legal form (see Nigh Nielsen, 2002; Vargas-
Cetina, 2002).
Between 1995 and 1999 I was able to work with four different organiz-
ations of women weavers in Highland Chiapas. Three of them were in fact
networks of smaller organizations. For the sake of brevity I will only present
here the case of the House of Weavings (La Casa del Tejido), which is the
oldest, most successful and internationally best known of these organiz-
ations. It is important to point out that at the time of my fieldwork, most
project drafting and the management of these organizations were in the
hands of non-indigenous advisers. Two exceptions to this were the House
of Weavings, in San Cristobal de las Casas, and a small, very independent
cooperative in downtown Tenejapa (see Mosquera Aguilar, 1995; Vargas-
Cetina, 2002).
The House of Weavings was the felicitous result of the concerted efforts
of many people. In 1974 the Mexican institute for the promotion of folk
art (FONART) opened a store in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. The
objective was to buy handmade crafts from the artisans of the Highlands
and commercialize them at a national level, along with the crafts of other
parts of Mexico. Some of the people who purchased crafts on behalf of the
store had already been actively collecting textiles and studying their struc-
ture and possible meanings. The subsidies to run the store dried up in
1977. The artisans, still impelled by the ideas generated during the 1974
Indigenous Congress, created a weekly crafts bazaar in San Cristobal de las
Casas, with help from the former employees of the FONART store. This
marketplace soon proved difficult to sustain and protect, as one night
someone broke into the warehouse where the goods were kept during the
week and stole most of them. With help from anthropologists and Mexican
officials who were interested in the preservation and promotion of indigen-
ous crafts, the advisers were able to collect enough money to pay the
artisans for their work, and created the House of Weavings Civil Society.
One of these advisers was an American student of anthropology, Walter
Morris, who spoke the two main indigenous languages of the Highlands,
Tzeltal and Tzotzil. Another was the young weaver and draughtsman Petul,
who had learned to draw on paper even the most complex motifs found on
strap-loom woven textiles.

242
In 1999 the organization had around 800 members, most of them

women, living in different parts of the Highlands but especially in the
municipalities of Chamula, Zinacantan, Tenejapa and Magdalenas. The
House of Weavings owned a store in downtown San Cristobal, at the ex-
Convent of Santo Domingo, one of the main local attractions for tourists
from other parts of Mexico and the world. The aim of the House of Weavings
is to sell their textiles not as cheap crafts but as textile art. The members of
the organization set the price they want their textiles sold at, and the store
sells it for double that price. The organization keeps 50 percent of the sale
price and the weaver keeps the other 50 percent. The House of Weavings
owns three houses and a car and has unlimited access to the Pellizzi Collec-
tion of Textiles, funded by anthropologist Francesco Pellizzi, from the
Peabody Museum at Harvard University. Part of the collection is exhibited
at the main offices of the House of Weavings, where it is visited and studied
by weavers from all corners of the Chiapas Highlands and beyond.
The House of Weavings runs several programs which have helped it
become more successful than similar associations in the Chiapas High-
lands. One is a program of fellowships that allows weavers to come to San
Cristobal de las Casas to learn difficult techniques and weaving motifs from
the older, most expert weavers and from the Pellizi textiles. This ensures
the maintenance of the high quality of the textiles. A second program is
the rescue and revival of weaving patterns as represented on Maya stellae.
Petul, the organization’s current president and main adviser, teaches the
weavers how to draw and collect designs from ancient Maya drawings and
sculptures. The organization regularly applies for grants to continue this
program, which has much acceptance not only among the clients of the
cooperative but, more importantly, among the weavers themselves. A third
program consists of a revolving fund for the direct purchase of weavings
from both member and non-member weavers. This has ensured that the
weavers continue to be loyal to the organization and take their textiles to
the House of Weaving’s purchase department before trying to sell them
elsewhere. In this way, the organization has first pick of the best pieces from
what weavers or dealers in weavings bring to San Cristobal.
Morris and Petul have also invested heavily (thousands of US dollars)
in the promotion of the organization and the idea of highland weavings as
textile art (see Morris, 1991, 1996; Morris and Foxx, 1987). Petul keeps in
contact with universities, museums, galleries, government agencies and
foundations; most of these contacts were probably initiated by Morris, but
he has left the organization and now Petul is in charge. The organization
places, through sales or through short-term loans, some of their most
beautiful textiles in galleries and museums around the country and abroad.
Sometimes the organization commissions individual members to visit one
or another museum for a live exhibit of backstrap-loom weaving.
Holding festive gatherings on the organization’s premises is discour-
aged. This lack of ritualized socializing, and the fact that the members do

243
not get together in general assemblies on a regular basis, makes it difficult

for them to create a sense of collective belonging. The organization, in fact,
is run by Petul almost like a private store, since he and the administrative
council decide which textiles to accept and which to refuse for sale at the
organization’s store. I was assured that most of the important decisions
pertaining to the organization were in the hands of the women weavers who
are members, but I found no evidence of this being the case. Most of the
women do not seem to have a clear idea as to the rights that membership
in the organization entitles them to, or how the organization is managed.
At the same time, since membership is free and they obtain many benefits,
including the constant improvement of their weaving skills, direct purchase
and relatively high prices for their textiles, they do not care too much about
management, policy drafting or day-to-day operations (although Eber and
Rosenbaum, 1993 report otherwise). Besides, through membership they
sometimes enjoy periodic stays in San Cristobal de las Casas, in other parts
of Mexico and around the world. These occasions are work-related but also
amount to small holidays from home. Most weavers I have met seem to find
these things agreeable, without the hassle of periodic meetings, expensive
trips to the venues where the assemblies could be held or, given the peren-
nial bad state of roads in the state of Chiapas, having to leave their houses
and their families for at least an entire day in order to attend long general
meetings.
In San Cristobal de las Casas and in Chiapas in general, people in other
organizations severely criticize the House of Weavings. However, this is an
organization that has achieved a highly effective mode of operation. It is,
along with the Tenejapa weavers’ organization mentioned above, one of the
few economically successful cooperatives of women weavers, since it does
not depend on grants or solidarity funds to keep going. Through their
membership in the organization the weavers have acquired important
skills, have come to know each other, have visited other villages, towns and
countries, and have gained a new sense of pride from the public appreci-
ation of their art. Most of them are grateful to Morris and Petul because
they feel that their lives have improved through their participation in the
association. In the eyes of the Mexican government and of those funding
agencies that sometimes issue grants for the organization’s programs, this
is a model cooperative: it runs without financial problems, has established
itself firmly on the international market for crafts, and has achieved
national and international recognition for its work and the quality of its
weavings, including the McArthur Genius Award, received by Walter Morris
in 1983 for his work with the House of Weavings, and Mexico’s National
Award of the Arts, granted to the organization in 1986.
The House of Weavings questions current ideas about what grassroots
organizations ought to be, since it does not run on a participatory basis. It
is not through intensive member participation that the organization plots
and steers its course. The relation between Petul and most of the weavers,

244
including the members, resembles more a patron–client bond than the

standing of a democratically elected leader before his constituency. This,
however, seems to have many operational advantages. Since individual
problems and needs have been taken out of the collective framework, it
does not suffer from members’ interpersonal conflicts, excessive expenses
related to feasting or problems involving witchcraft, as happens in most
other weavers’ associations in the Chiapas Highlands. The House of
Weavings is one among the few weavers’ cooperatives in Chiapas that has
kept its promise to better the life of its members, although when looked at
closely it is not a cooperative at all.
Other cooperatives in Chiapas are in fact networks of producers that
run a common store, with the help of in-house advisers or local NGOs. Prac-
tically none of them charges membership fees or keeps a very strict list of
members. They all participate in exhibits and individual weavers compete
for national awards for craftsmanship excellence. Some weavers’ coopera-
tives often engage in political demonstrations as representatives of indigen-
ous women, indigenous people or the rural poor (Nash, 2001;
Vargas-Cetina, 2002). None of them are legally registered as regular busi-
nesses, so they are bound in terms of membership composition and
accounting by Mexican laws regulating non-profits. Most of them (the
exception being the Tenejapa organization) receive help from altruistic
individuals, government programs, and national and international founda-
tions. They all call themselves ‘cooperatives’ so as to invoke the spirit of
cooperation and collective work, but they are all far from what the classical
cooperative used to be. Their membership changes constantly, since
mothers often include their daughters as new members, some members
leave to join other cooperatives or come back after months or years, and
other members prefer to sell their textiles to private stores and other coop-
eratives. This is especially the case when weavers are pressed for money and
cannot leave their pieces on consignment at the cooperatives’ stores. They
operate with the help of either an in-house adviser (who often supports him
or herself through self-secured grants and solidarity circuits funds), with
the advice of local grassroots support NGOs, or a combination of both. The
ideals of the person or group of persons who help them find and manage
funds may steer the organization toward, for example, political demonstra-
tions against the World Bank or support for the Zapatista rebels, or may
lead them to suppress any political participation, so as to keep the organiz-
ation clear of political trouble (Vargas-Cetina, 2002). Through the advisers’
good offices the organizations may receive help from government
programs, or from altruistic persons in Mexico or abroad (see Eber and
Rosenbaum, 1993); or they may come to rely on the international solidar-
ity market and political participation to keep afloat, as in the case of a
Chiapas weavers’ cooperative that, with the NGO it receives help and advice
from, has participated actively in demonstrations in San Cristobal and
Cancun against world leaders and international financial institutions.

245
Where the classical cooperatives tried to keep a sense of stability and perma-
nence, these organizations continuously change in size and operation,
constantly adapting to their changing social, political and economic
environments with the help of their advisers.
Conclusion
In the introduction to their compendium of case studies in rural cooper-

ation, Nash and Hopkins (1976: 4) expressed their belief that it was necess-
ary to ‘place our studies thoroughly within the path of development that
the real societies we study may take’. They saw the study of cooperatives as
part of what they called a new, ‘prospectivist anthropology’ in the form of
an ‘“urgent anthropology” that consists of understanding the social forms
into which we may be about to move’. As the theoreticians of postmoder-
nity and speed remark (Harvey, 2000; Lyotard, 1984 [1979]; Virilio, 1986
[1977]), today it is very difficult just to keep up with the times and the
changes they bring with increasing velocity. Because of this, our theoretical
intentions now have to be humbler; where Nash and Hopkins wanted to
look into the future, we find ourselves trying to grapple with the constantly
changing present.
The international cooperative movement inspired grassroots organiz-
ations and development projects everywhere, including regional programs
such as the special programs for the development of southern Italy since
the 1940s (Vargas-Cetina, 1993), the settlement of Israel in the 1920s
(Russell, 1995), the Ujamaa villages program launched in 1967 in Tanzania
(Hyden, 1980) and the ejido land reform that took place in Mexico
between the 1930s and the 1990s (Eckstein, 1987 [1966]; Reyes Osorio,
1979 [1974]; Rojas Coria, 1984 [1952]). But these programs were
supported by national governments and by the international community.
Today, the philosophical support for and the actual experience of institu-
tionalized cooperation have changed. We seem to be moving from cooper-
atives inspired by the notion of utopian community to cooperatives more
akin to the current phenomenon of ephemeral association. The coopera-
tive imaginary, however, seems to be stronger than the notion of
community itself, since organizations inspired by the cooperative
movement can operate, as they do now, in environments where the sense
of community is feeble or highly unstable (as in the NGO environment),
where it never existed (as in organizations that establish links for cooper-
ation based on criteria other than location or shared worldview) or where
it did exist but has been lost (as Nash, 1995 has shown to have happened
in many Chiapas indigenous communities in the recent past).
In Mexico, the dismantling of agricultural support programs has meant
that most rural families cannot depend on ejido, communal or small
private plots for their own survival, but rather have to enter the market as

246
independent producers in very disadvantaged circumstances. Political

movements protesting against the current liberalization of trade and the
dismantling of previously existing safety nets are responding to these new
circumstances of rapid pauperization of large sectors of the Mexican popu-
lation (Canto Chac, 1998). But since people do have to live within the new
circumstances of unbridled market forces, they also have to look for
economic alternatives that allow them to keep themselves and their families
afloat. Crafts, in this context, have often become an important source of
cash for rural families and the urban poor, as has happened in the state of
Chiapas.
In the Chiapas Highlands, since textile weaving is not a highly profit-
able occupation, the weavers join organizations to market their pieces
collectively, but they also have to be sensitive to the everyday needs of their
families. This precludes weavers from marketing their products solely
through the artisans’ marketing organizations in which they are members,
even when these organizations supply them with raw materials at
discounted prices and help them support themselves and their families.
The flow of cash from the solidarity market, private foundations, and the
limited governmental and international support to indigenous causes are
attracting the attention of grassroots organizations, and particularly of their
advisers, who constantly try to refashion themselves and the organizations
they work with to give them the characteristics sought by donors and their
programs’ aims. But it would be a mistake to see these organizations as
trying to take on fake new features; their members and advisers are trying
to make do in a highly uncertain economic and political environment.
They have to rely increasingly on the communications infrastructure in
place (roads, public and private transport, telecommunications and the
Internet) to find the best alternatives available to communicate with the
organizations’ members, locate possible donors, translate the organiz-
ations’ aims into suitable proposals, and invest much time and resources to
bring scant resources to local organizations. Local organizations, in the
meantime, have to make room for the constant turnover of members, and
the continuous implementation and termination of new programs, since
they have no way of controlling the niche markets their products are
directed to or of securing long-term funding to help defray their opera-
tional costs when the markets for their products fall. As a result, grassroots
organizations are increasingly becoming – as happens with weavers’ co-
operatives in Chiapas – so many instances of ephemeral association.
Anthropologists will have to take this new fluidity into account, if we want
to keep up theoretically with the new circumstances surrounding and
conditioning the structure and day-to-day operation of local organizations.

247
Acknowledgements
I thank June Nash for the honor and the pleasure of her constant feedback on my
work since 1994. Thanks also to Igor Ayora-Diaz, Lynn Stephen and Florence Babb
for their feedback, encouragement and patience while I wrote this paper, to Stacy
Lathrop for her comments and to two anonymous readers who made valuable obser-
vations that sharpened the final version. All conceptual problems and misrepresen-
tations, however, are my sole responsibility.
Note
1 What I am calling here ‘ephemeral associations’ are those I have identified
elsewhere as having the following general features (see Vargas-Cetina, 2003):
they are ephemeral in the sense that they are not expected to last indefinitely
by their members, and in fact, may be seen as highly contextual and in constant
flux; their membership is fully voluntary; their structure, membership, aims
and purposes change continuously; their internal governance structure is weak,
and their authority figures are contextual; and, finally, they are highly
dependent on communications technology, from simple trails connecting
hamlets to roads, to long-distance travel means, phone lines and electronic
fora. Because of this, they are less dependent as collectives on meetings where
members are physically present than previous types of associations.
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■ Gabriela Vargas-Cetina is Professor of Anthropology at the Autonomous Uni-

versity of Yucatan, in Mexico. Her research has focused on cooperatives and grass-
roots organizations, and the politics of music and dance. She is the author of articles
and book chapters on the Powwow dance circuit in Alberta (Canada), shepherds’
cooperatives in central Sardinia (Italy) and weavers’ cooperatives in Highland
Chiapas (Mexico). She is currently conducting fieldwork for a book on Trova music
in Yucatan, Mexico. Address: Facultad de Ciencias Antropológicas, Universidad
Autónoma de Yucatán, Calle 76 #455-LL entre 41 y 43, Mérida, Yucatán, México.
[email: gabyvargasc@prodigy.net.mx and gvcetina@tunku.uady.mx]


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Critique of Anthropology

Anthropology and Cooperatives: From the Community Paradigm to the

The online version of this article can be found at:

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Anthropology and Cooperatives

Vol 25(3) 229–251 [DOI:10.1177/0308275X05055210]

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Anthropology and the study of grassroots organizations

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cooperation at the time. The volume resulting from that conference

Grassroots organizations had become the center of a growing anthro-

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But the international schemes of structural adjustment enforced by the

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theme in anthropology (Bebbington and Perrault, 1999; Bebbington and

Mexico: cooperativism, corporativism and neoliberalism

Early students of grassroots and institutionalized cooperation (Gide, 1922

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supply and operation of cooperative general stores (Gide, 1922 [1904];

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making it possible for ejidatarios to hold land collectively in those areas

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to food, agricultural inputs, and health and retirement programs. Along

The cooperative imaginary and the ephemeral association in

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Individual advisers and civil organizations dedicated to different political

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definitions generated by the state, the multiplicity of grassroots organiz-

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In 1999 the organization had around 800 members, most of them

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not get together in general assemblies on a regular basis, makes it difficult

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including the members, resembles more a patron–client bond than the

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In the introduction to their compendium of case studies in rural cooper-

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independent producers in very disadvantaged circumstances. Political

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Harvey, David (2000) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Popular Participation in Social Change: Cooperatives, Collectives, and Nationalized

■ Gabriela Vargas-Cetina is Professor of Anthropology at the Autonomous Uni-

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