PREFACE 



The title of this book is intended to be catchy, 

 but it should also convey in two words what the 

 book describes: a society which is "capitalist" on 

 a microscopic scale. Hiere are no machines, no 

 factories, no co-ops or corporations. Every man 

 is his own firm and works ruggedly for himself. 

 Money there is, in small denominations; trade 

 there is, with what men carry on their backs; free 

 entrepreneurs, the impersonal market place, com- 

 petition — these are in the rural economy. But 

 commerce is without credit, as production is with- 

 out machines. It turns out that the difference 

 between a poor people and a rich one is the differ- 

 ence between the hand and the machine, between 

 money and credit, between the merchant and the 

 firm; and that all these are differences between 

 the "modern" economy and the primitive "under- 

 developed" ones. 



In laj^ing bare the bones of an underdeveloped 

 economy, this study hopes first to contribute to 

 the understanding of what such an economy looks 

 like. The community dealt with has only SOO 

 people (although the regional economy of which 

 it is part has a thousand times more) ; it is an in- 

 significant place m a rural area which Guatemala 

 thinks of as its backwoods. But it is just the 

 "backwoods" which must be explored, for an 

 economically undeveloped nation is undeveloped 

 to the degree that it has backwoods. The com- 

 munity which this book describes is in that way 

 typical of the thousands which must be changed. 



From place to place m the world, on the other 

 hand, such communities are very different. Each 

 continent and each region has its own kinds, and 

 in the end, of course, every one is unique. The 

 culture of Mexico and Guatemala is very different 

 from that of Pakistan or Kenya. The first advice 

 one offers the administrator of a program is to 

 know the place and the people and the character 

 of the culture. In this instance a striking peculiar- 

 ity is the combination of a childish, magical, or 

 "primitive" world view with institutions reminis- 

 cent in microcosm of the Great Society. In most 



"primitive" societies about which anthropologists 

 write, people behave in our terms irrationally, 

 since they try by devices strange to us to maximize 

 different, hence curious, satisfactions. This hap- 

 pens not to be the case in the part of Guatemala 

 about which I write, where the social institutions 

 and cosmology, strange as they may be to us, are 

 as separated from the processes of making a living 

 as are our own. For this reason the institutions 

 need concern us but little in a description of the 

 economy; for this reason also it is possible to use 

 the same terms to describe their economy that 

 are used to describe our o^vn. 



There is no economic theory in this book. I am 

 simply describing the way a people live, picking 

 out those elements to describe that I understand 

 fit under the rubric of "economy." It might be 

 argued that by selection of the same things to 

 describe that economists select m writing about 

 our society, I prejudge the similarity of Panajachel 

 economy to our own. This really says that I am 

 asking about Panajachel some of the same ques- 

 tions that are asked by economists about our own 

 society. This is true. But the significant thing 

 is that I am able to answer the questions; and that 

 is because the Panajachel economy is like ours. 

 If I tried to ask about a tribe of Australian 

 aborigines what is its balance of payments, I 

 should soon have to reinterpret the question so 

 drastically that it would not be the same. 



Although I purpose to describe the economy of 

 Panajachel, and at least by inference to show why 

 the material level of life is low, no solution is 

 offered. A very good reason for this is that while 

 the problem has its consequences locally, its cure 

 involves the whole region, the whole of the larger 

 society, and, indeed, much of the world. I have 

 studied a cell in an organism, an example of many 

 that are like it; but the organism consists of differ- 

 ent kinds of cells in complex interrelation, and 

 studies of the larger whole are essential to planning 

 its solution. For such studies, the theory, 

 methods, and techniques of disciplines other than 



