Each monograph has a separate flaw in i t s editing and production. Handelman has put much data in his footnotes that could have been included in his text. Aronoff, who does not use any footnotes, has also omitted an index from his book. Considering the fact that he deals with named public personages, this omission makes his book less usable by historians and others.

Despite these qualifications and limitations, which are self-imposed, both monographs

serve to deepen our understanding of Israel and offer us methods for the study of modern industrial societies. They make good use of both traditional anthropological techniques

and of symbolic interactionist theoretical approaches. Both Aronoff and Handelman have demonstrated that “ritual man” and homo ludens have survived modernization.

references cited

Handelman, Don 1976 Bureaucratic Transactions: The Development of Official-Client Relationships in Israel. In

Transaction and Meaning. B. Kapferer, Ed. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. pp. 223-276.

Marx, Emanuel 1975 Anthropological Studies in a Centralized State: The Bernstein Research Project in Israel

Jewish Journal of Sociology XVI I:131-150.

Nanacatlan: Societe paysanne et lutte des classes au Mexique. PIERRE DURAND. Beaucage, preface. Montreal. Les presses de I’universite de Montreal, 1975.257 pp., appendice, bibliographie, cartes, figures, matrices, tableaux. $14.25 (paper).

/AMESDOW Oakland University

In the catalogs of separatist anthropology this contribution to “la scPne ethnologique quebecoise” may stand as a monument, but in the wider science of man it must be

viewed in more modest proportions. I t pretends t o be the herald of an enlightened Marxist

approach to Mesoamerican peasant politics. I t i s an ethnographic study of politics and economics in a small Totonac town in the Northern Sierra de Puebla of Mexico. The Marxism i s rather unsophisticated, but the ethnographic facts are fascinating.

It i s obvious that this book has a strong ideological commitment to French Marxism and i s trying to noJrish a special New World French-Canadian branch of it in anthro- pology. Thus the theoretical stance i s rather dogmatic, designed to pound home basic Marxist principles rather than to creatively extend the theory of peasant exploitation. To readers who do not want more blows from the heavy hammer of Marxist dogmatism, the theory may seem rather dull. They wil l be told over and over again that the dominant mode of production among the Totonac peasants is capitalism, that there are three classes based on land holding, that the upper two classes exploit the surplus value of the labor of the lower class, and that the political and economic systems reproduce each other.

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A more unique part of the book i s the ethnography. Most of the data i s well presented within the Marxist framework that, being more pretheoretical than theoretical, leaves room for discussion of the peculiarities of the Nanacatlan village political structure Nanacatlan i s a mountain village of some 750 people in the municipio of Zapotitlan de Mendez in the state o f Puebla. A few mestizos control large amounts of land; coffee and sugar are the important commercial crops; a religious hierarchy has no place in the systems of power and authority; access to high positions in the civil hierarchy is depem dent on land holding. Eleven percent of the families own 49 percent of the land and 52 percent are landless. The village grows only half the corn i t needs for subsistence. Thus its agricultural economy i s dependent on exports and involves a great deal of sharecrop ping and wage labor. Mesoamericanists wil l find the analysis o f career paths in the purely civil hierarchy of this village a valuable contribution to the literature Even more inter- esting and thought-provoking i s the careful analysis of the institution for lending public funds to private individuals, which the author sees as this village's means for preventing the introduction of outside capital.

As i s typical for Mesoamerican peasants, an ideology of egalitarianism and community service i s maintained to cover up the highly stratified access to political and economic power The author deals with this as a difference between the structure of authority, the formal hierarchy of political posts, and the structure of power, the distribution of deci- sion-making positions among the economic classes. Ideally al l men have access to al l the political posts, but actually it i s much easier for wealthy men to reach the higher posts The author would have the reader believe that there are actually two covert, dichotomous sets of paths, one consisting of paths that take men of wealth to the top and another consisting of paths that shunt aside the poorer men. Although structurally and ideologi- cally very elegant, this hypothesis i s not fully proven by the data. Some men of the landless class slip by and some men of wealth do not achieve high posts; yet i t is clear that wealth carries with it a higher probability of achieving political power. The number juggling and matrix manipulations that accompany the tweset hypothesis seem to be designed to obscure the covert dropping of the cases that do not prove the point from the sample. Here the book achieves a high point in the art of using mathematical tech niques to obscure data.

An analysis of the economic system i s also included in the book. Production i s analyzed in three categories, the capitalist mode of production, the feudal mode of production, and the mercantile mode. These Marxist categories are interpreted in the case o f Nana- catlan in the following manner: capitalist mode, the use of wage labor to make a profit from agriculture; feudal mode, tenant farming; and mercantile mode, subsistence farming by small property holders. What these categories gain one in understanding the mix of agricultural activities that exist in Nanacatlan i s di f f icult to see. When the author insists that the capitalist mode i s "dominant," the roles of tenant and subsistence farming are thrown into confusion. What he evidently wants to indicate i s that he regards the economy of Nanacatlan as a nontraditional, nondual, straight-out capitalist economy that has been set up as part of the national capitalist economy of Mexico. The defense of such a position i s di f f icult when i t i s obvious that landlord-tenant relationships are important in the economy and that subsistence corn farming makes a big contribution to it. I t i s true that the commercial cultivation of sugar cane and coffee has influenced the economy of Nanacatlan, but the system of exploitation exhibits a more typical mix of tenant farming, wage labor, and unequal exchange. The noncapitalist modes of production are discussed with understanding, but s t i l l the author insists that at the basis of it all i s the exploitation of the surplus value of the peasants' labor through capitalistic production. in introducing

380 american ethnologist

these other modes the author has inhibited his analysis of the exploitation in terms of transfers of surplus value. The economy is not a classic paradigm of capitalism, but, because all products are marketable, the concept of surplus value could have been used with better results to understand exploitation.

The most curiou:i economic institution in Nanacatlan is the lending of public funds to local farmers. This i s described in rich detail both in the present and in the past. It is justified in the ideology of community service as an aid to the poor farmers who would otherwise be forced to seek loans at higher interest rates from private individuals or outsiders. However, the bulk of the money goes to the upper and middle classes, who use it to support cash crop farming, particularly coffee farming. The author's analysis of this institution i s concerned mainly with how i t supports the class structure. Curiously the bulk of the funds now go to the middle-class peasants, not to the larger landholders. The author feels that this is due to the saturation of capital among the large landholders. They do not need as much because they own enough land and make enough profits to support their commercial agriculture.

How much does this Marxist approach to the politics and economics of a Mexican peasant village help in understanding the system? i t helps to focus attention on the existence of class exploitation, exploitation of landless peasants by landed groups. In- sisting that it i s capitalism, however, leaves unexplained the differences between it and industrial capitalism. Why, for instance, do not outsiders with large amounts of capital, buy up the profitable businesses and farms in the village? The society seems to be gov- erned by cultural forces that prevent the power of national capitalism from fully pene- trating the village. From a Marxist perspective one could see this as the operation of special "cultural" forces in peasant society that are outside the political and economic forces of pure capitalism-as Shanin, in fact, does see it (1971:254). Durand, however, sees it as the need to develop a special local version of capitalism in the peasant village. Historically the capital of the outside commercial centers was separated from the capital of the local upper class, The village political structure with i t s egalitarian ideology and i ts hierarchy of posts taken on by all members maintains the domination of the local upper class.

The reader i s left with a rather unsatisfying paradox to resolve. How can the political economy of the peasant village be a manifestation of larger national capitalism and yet still resist the penetration of i t s institutions so much? The approach fails to resolve this paradox because it does not try hard enough to develop a model of exploitation appra priate to the data arid relies too much on orthodox Marxism. I t does not investigate the role of kinship and ipatron-client relationships in maintaining the structure. I t does not integrate production by wage labor with that by sharecropping, although the two modes work together. The way in which the hierarchy of classes i s supported by social relation- ships i s not brought out. Nevertheless an excellent case i s presented for the domination of the political and economic life of the village and the exploitation of the lower classes by a landed class. Orice again we see that the egalitarian ideology of comciunity service bears about the same relationship to the structure of power in Mexican peasant villages as the ideology of democracy and free enterprise bears to the structure of power in the United States and Canada.

reference cited

Shanin, Teodor 1971 Peasantry as a Political Factor. In Peasants and Peasant Societies. Teodor Shanin, Ed. Har-

mondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.

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