The intensification of artisan production and sociocultural change in San Pedro de Cajas, Tarma, Junin, Peru

The Marxist prediction of destruction of peasant artisan production has not occurred uniformly throughout the central highlands of Peru. In the last sixty years, this activity expanded in many communities despite the simultaneous growth of capital-intensive mineral production in this region. Artisan production has actually intensified and is marked by changes in technology, the use of new materials and reorganization of how work is done. San Pedro de Cajas, Peru is the site of an expanded and diversified textile industry. At the present time, weavers of this community manufacture wool tapestries for tourists and shawls, or mantas, for rural Andean mass market. For fifteen months, weavers were interviewed, and documents from community, district and national archives were examined on order to analyze the changes which have occurred in San Pedro over the last 30 years. From this field work, the following observations are made: (i) there has been a loss of access to resources since the beginning of the twentieth century. Significantly, subsistence agriculture, which today supports weaving, was not affected; (ii) concomitant with the loss of resources, there has been a reorganization of textile manufacture, especially manta production with loss of preparatory tasks and subsequent emergence of weaving as an assembly industry. Changes in technology, especially in loom construction, have been aimed at increasing labor productivity; (iii) changes in community organization and how it articulates to national political and economic structures mark significant aspects in development of new worldviews within the community and how this group maneuvered to achieve some political control within the existing power structure; and (iv) the San Pedro weaver is a part-time capitalist, who employs wage laborers, and is a part-time subsistence farmer. Despite formal similarities to capitalist factory owners, the weavers cannot hold a labor force. Accumulation is possible only at point of sale. Because they face better organized forces at that stage of production, the textile industry of San Pedro de Cajas remains static with regard to development.