THE LAND 



35 



animal grazing. One (skunk plant) is used to 

 keep mice out of newly planted corn; another 

 (bitter sunflower) to drive ants out of the milpa; 

 a third (rosemary) is burned in the house to keep 

 out evil spirits. A number of plants, especially 

 flowers, are used in ceremonial adonmaent; 

 among them are "mouth of the dragon," bougain- 

 villea, "flower of death," "easter flower," and the 

 red geranium. Many flowers in addition are 

 cultivated for secular adornment, much less 

 frequently by Indians than by Ladinos. 



LAND USE 



In explaining why the utilization of "wild" prod- 

 ucts is relatively slight one must remember that 

 they are not free goods. It takes time to hunt 

 or fish or gather. Simply, the Indian usually makes 

 more profitable use of his time tilling the fields or 

 marketing produce. The community lives, on the 

 whole, well above a bare subsistence level; it 

 does not eke out a living with what can be found 

 in woods or water; it has an element of choice in 

 the use to which human resources will be put ; and 

 therefore it can put market-selected food above 

 what may be "freely" collected, and does. At the 

 same time, the community is not so rich that it 

 can choose less rather than more profitable em- 

 ployments of time. 



In tliis competition for time, agriculture is the 

 clear victor. The Indians have taken advantage 

 of the alluvial plain, or "delta," and its possi- 

 bilities of dry-season farming to develop a year- 

 round intensive horticulture; and above all else 

 in both an economic and a sentimental sense — 

 above even the cultivation of milpa on the hill- 

 sides — this is their life. 



It is with respect to land use, depending as it 

 does so largely on local conditions, that the vari- 

 ous to\vns of the region differ most greatly. The 

 culture — in the sense of technology and consump- 

 tion habits, of beliefs and customs, and of religious 

 and political organization — follows rather closely a 

 single pattern with but minor differences from one 

 community to the next. But the economic base, 

 in the sense of what the people exploit to earn their 

 living, differs more widely. Most of what is 

 reported here about the use of land in Panajachel 

 is necessarily unique to Panajachel, where the 

 topography makes special demands and affords 

 special opportunities. The argument, however, 

 that the Indians have achieved an adjustment to 



the land that (given the technology) is highly 

 efficient is doubtless more generally applicable. 

 Each community of Indians has developed a 

 modus vivendi relative to its peculiar conditions 

 that may strike the observer as efficient — and 

 there is no intention here to extol as peculiar the 

 efficiency of the Panajachel adjustment. 



To answer the question of how, and how well, 

 the community utilizes its resources and fulfills 

 its potentialities, it is necessary to accept the 

 technologj' as a constant. The techniques of 

 agriculture that are used by the Indians differ- 

 entiate them on the one hand from hunting or 

 gathering peoples, and on the other from societies 

 with machinery; that is not difficult. But those 

 techniques also differentiate Panajachel from other 

 Indian communities; for the meticulous kind of 

 intensive garden agriculture common here is 

 quite different from the field agriculture practiced 

 generally in the region. An acre of Panajachel 

 garden land can require 33 times as much labor 

 as an acre of ordinary mUpa! The problem of the 

 relations between land and labor must be very 

 different in Panajachel from what they are in 

 corn-raising communities like Chichicastenango or 

 in communities which combine milpa agriculture 

 with time-consuming industries like basketry, 

 pottery, rope- or mat-making, or foot-loom weav- 

 ing. The industrial communities frequently 

 employ the time of men, women, and children as 

 much as Panajachel, but not on the land. At the 

 same time, the land may be just as "intensively" 

 used, given the kind of agriculture. The situations 

 are simply not comparable. 



Since technology is evidently not constant- — 

 either in the world, or as between towns in 

 Guatemala — it is evident that one cannot assess 

 the success of a people in making use of its re- 

 sources. When one says that an Iowa farmer 

 "makes better use of the land" because he gets 

 so many bushels of corn per acre as compared 

 with some other place, one means that Iowa 

 technology is more advanced. Given Panajachel 

 technology, it would be difficult to argue that the 

 Indians do not get more out of their land than 

 the best Iowa farmers. But again such compar- 

 isons are meaningless. 



HILL LAND 



The area of the municipio of Panajachel in- 

 cluded in this studv is showTi on the insert in 



