The Möbius Strip: A Spatial History of Colonial Society in Guerrero, Mexico - Hardcover

Amith, Jonathan D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804748934 ISBN 13: 9780804748933

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2005

Synopsis

The Möbius Strip explores the history, political economy, and culture of space in central Guerrero, Mexico, during the colonial period. This study is significant for two reasons. First, space comprises a sphere of contention that affects all levels of society, from the individual and his or her household to the nation-state and its mechanisms for control and coercion. Second, colonialism offers a particularly unique situation, for it invariably involves a determined effort on the part of an invading society to redefine politico-administrative units, to redirect the flow of commodities and cash, and, ultimately, to foster and construct new patterns of allegiance and identity to communities, regions, and country. Thus spatial politics comprehends the complex interaction of institutional domination and individual agency. The complexity of the diachronic transformation of space in central Guerrero is illustrated through an analysis of land tenure, migration, and commercial exchange, three salient and contested aspects of hispanic conquest. The Möbius Strip, therefore, addresses issues important to social theory and to the understanding of the processes affecting the colonialization of non-Western societies.

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan D. Amith is an independent scholar who has been affiliated with Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, Gettysburg College, and the University of Chicago. He has previously edited a volume on the politics and culture of indigenous art: The Amate Tradition: Innovation and Protest in Mexican Art (1995).

From the Back Cover

"...this work presents what is arguably one of the most detailed socio-political and economic analyses to be written on any given region in colonial Spanish America."—Itinerario
"Jonathan D. Amith's book is one of the most important works on colonial Mexican history to be published in the last decade."—American Historical Review

From the Inside Flap

The Möbius Strip explores the history, political economy, and culture of space in central Guerrero, Mexico, during the colonial period. This study is significant for two reasons. First, space comprises a sphere of contention that affects all levels of society, from the individual and his or her household to the nation-state and its mechanisms for control and coercion. Second, colonialism offers a particularly unique situation, for it invariably involves a determined effort on the part of an invading society to redefine politico-administrative units, to redirect the flow of commodities and cash, and, ultimately, to foster and construct new patterns of allegiance and identity to communities, regions, and country. Thus spatial politics comprehends the complex interaction of institutional domination and individual agency. The complexity of the diachronic transformation of space in central Guerrero is illustrated through an analysis of land tenure, migration, and commercial exchange, three salient and contested aspects of hispanic conquest. The Möbius Strip, therefore, addresses issues important to social theory and to the understanding of the processes affecting the colonialization of non-Western societies.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Mbius Strip

A SPATIAL HISTORY OF COLONIAL SOCIETY IN GUERRERO, MEXICOBy Jonathan D. Amith

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2005 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-4893-3

Contents

List of maps.....................................................................................................................ixList of figures..................................................................................................................xiList of tables...................................................................................................................xiiiAcknowledgments..................................................................................................................xvConventions......................................................................................................................xixOrientation maps.................................................................................................................xx1. Introduction..................................................................................................................1Part 1. Terrain and Territoriality: The Natural and Social Context of Land and Property..........................................292. The Lay of the Land...........................................................................................................313. The Law of the Land: Crown Policy and Iberian Custom in the Colonization of New Spain.........................................70Part 2. Eppur si muove! The Dynamics of Economic Transformation in Rural Central Guerrero........................................1174. Land Acquisition during the Early Colonial Period.............................................................................1195. Hacienda Formation and Market Structure: Landholding in North- and South-Central Guerrero.....................................1546. Place Making and Place Breaking: Migration and the Development Cycle of Community.............................................2177. The Politics of Economy and Space: Interjurisdictional Migration into the Iguala Valley.......................................2558. Spaces of Capital and Commerce: Rural Society and the Interregional Economy of Central Guerrero...............................2929. The Transformation of Rural Society: Commercial Capital and the Monopolization of Resources...................................386Part 3. Absolute Property and Spatial Politics: Struggles for Control over Grain in the Late Colonial Period.....................45710. The Political and Moral Economy of Subsistence: State Control of Grain Markets...............................................45911. Seeds of Discord and Discontent: Grain, Regionalism, and Emerging Class Conflict.............................................497Conclusion.......................................................................................................................54512. Conclusion...................................................................................................................547Reference Matter.................................................................................................................555Glossary.........................................................................................................................557Bibliography and abbreviations used in notes.....................................................................................569Index............................................................................................................................611

Chapter One

Introduction

We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness. -George Eliot "The Natural History of German Life"

The Realist and the Romantic: Visions in Historical and Anthropological Writings

Literary realism-its critique of the quixotic epitomized by Eliot's spiny phrase-is associated with ideas not now in vogue. Contemporaries of Eliot saw it as a counterweight to a morally based idealism, in which the author would present "models of irreproachable excellence for readers to imitate." The Realist author, by contrast, would often distance him- or herself from moral authority and omniscient control by feigning cognitive (though not material) ignorance of the scene created. Yet this facade of a distanced and impersonal perspective was belied by a type of structural involution in which a complex series of narrative techniques would allow an offstage presence of authorial intentionality through which morality and commentary were reintroduced into the text by a backstage door. As the literary critic David Williams has noted, "one of the paradoxes of Realism is that the novelist's passion for the real results in a fuller exploitation of the expressive possibilities of the form and a more self-conscious craftsmanship. Once the novelist has bowed out of the novel, it is necessary for him to engineer 'an elaborate orchestral or suggestive structure whereby meaning emerges-as a function of the structure itself.'" Realist authors were certainly aware of their commanding role-Flaubert was able to discover, and then state, that "Madame Bovary, c'est moi"-but they would insist on a discretionary voice that would (or should) disappear behind the text, at least in comparison with the intrusive narratives that had preceded their literary revolution. In this way the Realist movement offers a counterpoint to much recent social science, for, while Realist authors receded from view, leaving behind a structural foundation of authorial intervention, (post)modern anthropologists and historians often take an almost contrary approach by directly intervening in the text, and indeed recognizing this intervention as the sine qua non of reflexive, discursive social science. Such intervention is both celebrated as a personalized vision and, somewhat paradoxically, presented as the means to achieve a heteroglossic narrative, allowing other perspectives to pierce through the rhetorical fabric-giving voice to people without voice and history to people without history.

The question of the impact of authorship-of "subjectivity" on "objectivity," and therefore of both "factual accuracy in the art of the imaginary" and its mirror image, the impact of the imagination in the proffering of facts -is but one aspect of narrative that was brought to the forefront by the Realists (and "rediscovered," in the aforementioned mirror image, by those who assert that "the notion that literary procedures pervade any work of cultural representation is a recent idea in the discipline [of anthropology]"). A second question for the Realists was the nature and identity, as well as the most adequate representation, of the subject of any given text. Here the novel (along with the painting), increasingly sought the commonality of human existence. It found this in the mundane, shared experiences of everyday life, an initially shocking-at least for late nineteenth-century literary and artistic sensibilities-descent into the most quotidian of events: a rejection of both classical ideals and the Romantic "inner vision." In history a parallel movement turned away from the narratives of great men and their politics and wars and toward a new social "history without names," one of the early practitioners of which was Michelet, who aspired to write "the history of those who have suffered, worked, declined and died without being able to describe their sufferings."

Yet the subjects of the "new history," particularly as it developed in the early twentieth century, were not simply those who had been unable to write of and reflect on their own experiences. Rather, this history, epitomized by the Annales school, had a strong materialist and analytic tendency that was paralleled by a functional, impersonal trend in anthropology. The Romantic tinge so conspicuous in Michelet (and so absent in Realism) faded further out of the picture. Yet recently, in both the social sciences and the humanities, the pendulum has swung back to the Romantic image of struggles "against the current," toward a new exaltation of resistance and agency, and (contrary to Realism) toward the implicit belief in "a scale of dignity in subject matter." The history of those who "died without being able to describe their sufferings" has become re-romanticized through a constant search, in the best Romantic tradition (though the modern Romantics deal with collectivities, while their nineteenth-century counterparts stressed the individual), for those who have broken free of the structural constraints on thought and action. Flaubert had remarked, "Let's have no more heroes and no more monsters," a sentiment that echoes the epigraph opening this chapter in its search for a middle ground of narrative that, in avoiding moralistic extremes, seeks to portray "the psychological ambivalence and social complexity of [being]." Certainly a parallel can be drawn between the Realist writer satisfied with the "peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness" and the modern academic seeking to document the lives of popular and plebeian society. Both approaches seek to bring into closer focus society as it "really is." Yet whereas in the Realist era this discussion derived from the question of whether a literary exposition or artistic expression should tend to some ideal of beauty and truth or whether it should seek elegance in the patterns of everyday life and veracity in the common experiences of social interaction, the recent proliferation of terms of opposition in the historical and anthropological literature-counter-culture, counter-hegemony, and counter-mapping, among other locutions-points to another direction in much contemporary research, a move toward studying those social groups that challenge dominant social formations. This literature is more prone to document action over apathy, selflessness over selfishness, heroes over monsters; it implies, therefore, "a scale of dignity in subject matter." From Michelet's concern with "those who have suffered, worked, declined and died without being able to describe their sufferings," the concern is now more on those who have died without being able to describe their defiance.

Finally, Realism, in exploring "the organic, indissoluble connection between man as a private individual and man as a social being, as a member of a community," was the first literary movement to take this bond seriously, and in this sense it foreshadowed much of what is now considered the modern historians' and anthropologists' concerns with agency and structure. The link between individual and society was forged by situating fictional characters within historical contexts, the details of which were of primary concern to the novelist. Realist writers sought to anchor the truth and authenticity of their fiction by weaving the minutiae of the material world and the certitude of historical events into their texts. The detailed description of the printing process in Balzac's Lost Illusions, Melville's erudite exploration of whaling custom and law in Moby Dick, and Robbe-Grillet's repetition, in Jealousy, of a neurotically meticulous accounting of banana trees are all ways of centering privately imagined fictional characters in the midst of a historical and material world of public reality. This is truth by association (the opposite effect of that achieved by historians, who highlight the imagined element of historical narrative by mixing fiction, or reflexive contemplation, into their documented text). Again it was Flaubert who took this effort to anchor the imagination in the material to an early extreme in Sentimental Education, for "despite the fictional nature of the main events, the novel is still regarded by historians as an invaluable source of information about the period extending from 1840 to 1851 and in particular about the year 1848."

Realists, as Lukcs noted, resolved the tension between individual and society, between fiction and fact, through the literary creation of the type and the definition of reality not as what did happen but as what could (and often did) happen. The historian and anthropologist utilize a similar type-token approach, for their case studies are implicitly culled from more general patterns; and an implied "typicality" adheres to the particular events that they present. This raises a question of representativity, captured in turn by the tension between the general and the particular, between nomothetic "science" and idiographic "description." Yet the problem of the relationship between the individual and society has multiple facets. Thus one can also focus on the possibilities of individual action in engaging, countering, or negating structural constraints. Whatever the terminology employed (be it, for example, the structuration theory of Giddens or the habitus concept of Bourdieu), the theoretical difficulty resides in presenting an analysis that intrinsically embraces both structure and process, both sociocultural constraints and individual agency. Yet whereas the problem of the representativity of a "type" affects Realist literature as well as both anthropology and history, questions of structure and process, of social reproduction and agentivity, lie solely in the domain of the latter two academic disciplines. That is, while Realism was the first literary movement to problematize the relationship of social milieu to individual identity and action, the issue is of theoretical significance only in the social sciences and some endeavors in the humanities, such as history.

The Geography of Structure and Process

In the preceding section I have used Realist literary theory (its proscription of authorial intervention, its allegiance to quotidian experience, and its sensitivity to the weight of the social milieu on individual identity and action) and the sensibilities of Romanticism (its celebration of genius and the iconoclast, its exaltation of agency, and its belief in a scale of dignity of subject matter) to provide a literary analogy for contemporary trends and debates in the social sciences and humanities. These involve, particularly, the interplay between structure and agency, between society and the individual, and, in a very broad sense, between material and cultural history. It is to these issues that I now turn in exploring how the present study has been organized to highlight the constant tension between spatial structures and spatial practices, and between socioeconomic and discursive aspects of structure and agency in historical geography.

In this book I offer a spatial history of colonial society as a particularly effective way to explore the dynamics of structure and process. At the same time, the book's focus on land, labor, and capital as the basic parameters that influenced geographic patterns in colonial Mexico is the result of a calculated authorial intervention in the structure of presentation. The form of this book has been in a sense engineered in a "suggestive structure whereby meaning emerges-as a function of the structure itself"-and this meaning involves a commitment to the importance of both structure and agency and of political economy and ideology as key elements to understanding the development of social forms. A spatial approach likewise has intended consequences for the identity of the object of study, for by focusing on spatial patterns, no single collective social group (indigenous or colonist, elite or subaltern, rural or urban) has been put forth as the dominant theme. The central concern is what may be called the geography of social interaction, the fields on which a wide range of groups and individuals act. Here again a spatial history is particularly pertinent, for perhaps more than any other social phenomenon, spatialization involves a constant interaction between society and the individual, between social structures that are imposed on individuals and groups (i.e., the economic, legal, political, and administrative frameworks or parameters of space) and individual action (processes) by which human agents affect the contours of space around them. At one end of a continuum, spatial formations are profoundly personal and responsive to or reflective of individual practice. At the other end, spatial formations constitute a central element of authoritarian state politico-administrative power. An analysis of the spatial domain, therefore, involves an awareness both of the role of power in imposing a top-down definition and delimitation of space (the Realist perspective) and of the role of spatial practices of social groups and individuals in replicating or reconstructing the spatial arrangements of institutionalized systems (the Romantic perspective). From the vantage point of a geographic perspective on political economy, colonization develops and plays itself out in myriad conflicts over spatial patterns; some conflicts in New Spain have been quite well studied (the forced nucleation of indigenous peasants in "rationally" planned centers) while others are less understood (late colonial struggles between traditionalists and liberals over the right of provincial authorities to limit and control the spatial extension of grain and labor markets). Space thus becomes a highly contested arena of dispute, in which state efforts at politico-administrative and sociocultural control are pitted against social groups and individuals who struggle to change state-imposed rules, redraw administrative boundaries, transform the way in which the state links the individual to locality, and create dissident social and cultural spaces within a context of domination and control. These same individuals and collectivities forge their own spatial identities, patterns of movement, and definitions of community and place, often in overt or covert opposition to more institutionalized arrangements. Colonization, therefore, involves not simply the occupation of space, but its very definition.

The attempt to create meaning through form engineered in the text itself is most salient in part 2, a series of six chapters centered on the rural province of Iguala and two adjoining jurisdictions: that of Taxco to the north, with its urban mining center in the town of that name; and that of Tixtla to the south, a relatively poor area located along the trade corridor to the Pacific coast (all located in the modern-day state of Guerrero; see orientation maps). These chapters deal with questions of land, labor, and capital and their spatial concomitants: territoriality and the rural enterprise, migration and place making, and patterns of capitalization and commercial exchange. I have chosen this structure of presentation to underscore the importance of political economy in social analysis and to highlight the spatial component of the essential factors of production and distribution in the rural environment. The themes chosen emerged from a belief in the advantages, and indeed the necessity, of "historically and theoretically deep immersion in specific regions and locales" for understanding the complex social fabric of rural society in colonial New Spain. The socioeconomic processes explored in part 2 are intrinsically related and closely intertwined. Thus, for example, to arrive at a full understanding of the influx of commercial capital into the hinterland during the late colonial period, extensive work on other facets of the regional milieu, particularly demographics and shifting state policies on trade, need to be fully explored.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804748934
• ISBN 13: 9780804748933
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 688