The Culture of Collaboration: The resilience of the peasantry in San Pablo Coatlan, Oaxaca, Mexico

Despite predictions they would disappear, peasants have been resilient. I argue that this resilience warrants renewed anthropological attention. In 2009, I conducted participant-observation research in a peasant community, San Pablo Coatlán, Oaxaca, Mexico. During my fieldwork the community was torn between a powerful minority who sought to bring "modernization" by reorganizing the political structure and privatizing the land and the majority who supported the traditional political structure and communal land. This political conflict provided an excellent opportunity to understand the resilience of the peasantry.;I define peasants as those who have the ability to practice subsistence farming, but do not have the ability to accumulate wealth. I argue that the resilience of the peasantry is largely a result of two factors: liminal livelihoods, and social capital. First, peasant livelihoods are liminal: they are at the edge of subsistence production, market production, and wage labor. Peasants are not an intermediate stage between "primitive" and "modern", their livelihoods are active strategies to combine available opportunities. Peasants' ability to practice subsistence farming provides a productive use for household labor. This ability is important even for those who are dedicated entirely to wage labor because the ability to return to subsistence farming is a form of insurance. The second factor which contributes to the resilience of the peasantry is social capital. Peasants can rely on the support of their fellow community members. In San Pablo, people use unpaid cooperative labor for farming and home construction. I show that much of the farming would not be possible if farmers had to hire workers when they needed additional hands. I explore the various motives to collaborate in private production and in public life. I argue that there are several instrumental motives to participate: direct rewards, reciprocity, and prestige. There are also several consummatory motives: enjoyment, value introjection, and bounded solidarity. I organize these motives into a framework to understand participation that connects the motives to material, structural, and ideological factors within the community. In the conclusion, I argue that this framework has applicability beyond peasant communities to better understand the motives to contribute to the common good.