188 



FUNCTIONS OF WEALTH 



Style clothes. Ladinos for the most part live in the 

 "center" of town, where there are streets; the 

 Indians are scattered among the gardens and coffee 

 fields. Ladinos are more-or-less educated store- 

 keepers and pharmacists (although some are 

 illiterate and poor and in some ways "live like 

 Indians") who live in houses with plastered walls 

 and windows with shutters, and doors with hard- 

 ware and floors covered with tiles, and stoves with 

 chimneys in the kitchen, and so on. On each of 

 these criteria borderline cases may be found, so 

 that none of them can be taken too seriously. For 

 example, for years I kept on my list of Indians 

 several families of "Indians" who had Indian 

 surnames and lived at least half like Indians; 

 members of the family were married to Ladinos; 

 and I finally decided they were best considered 

 Ladinos because they participated socially with 

 Ladinos rather than in the Indian community. 

 When it could be seen that there are two societies, 

 participation became the final test. The critical 

 test of that came to be obligation to serve to the 

 Indian politico-religious system. A family served 

 in the system or it did not. 



Having established the presence of two societies, 

 the decision had to be made whether to ask our 

 questions about one or the other or both. For 

 purposes here, let us choose the Indians. ''' In 

 large part we did in fact choose the Indians. One 

 good reason is that the Ladino society is part of a 

 generalized Ladino society that goes beyond local 

 communities, and it would be difficult to answer 

 our kind of questions by studying the Ladinos only 

 of Panajachel. 



It is almost equally apparent that there are 

 "foreign" Indians to be distinguished from Pana- 

 jachelenos. They are spoken of as Sololatecos, 

 Totonicapenos, Catarinecos, etc.; they have differ- 

 ent surnames; they wear different costumes (of 

 their towns of origin) and speak dialects different 

 from those of Indians whose families have long 

 been resident in Panajachel. Again, however, the 

 distinctions are not clear-cut. A few Indians of 

 other towns change costume or marry Pana- 

 jachelerios. Some households are "mixed." 

 Some of the most typical Panajacheleno families 



'"Anthropologists traditionally study Indians (1. e., people of very alien 

 culture) but the tradition has rapidly broken down in recent years. Indeed, 

 during our period of study an anthropologist (Isobel Sklow) joined us especial- 

 ly to study the Ladino community of Panajachel. Recently the Committee 

 on Latin American Anthropology of the National Research Coimcil has out- 

 lined a program for such studies (Amer. .^nthrop., 1949). 



are descended from immigrant Indians of gener- 

 ations ago. The useful test therefore becomes 

 one, again, of participation. The concept is clari- 

 fied not of a Panajachel Indian society but of a 

 Panajacheleno Indian society; if a family fuUy 

 participates in its organization and rituals, it is 

 part of the more restricted society. For some 

 purposes we shall be satisfied to study the "foreign" 

 Indians less completely than the Panajachelenos. 



Having now limited the community concerning 

 which we shall ask the questions posed, the prob- 

 lem becomes one of defining it. Who are the 

 people, how many are they, where do they live, 

 how are they interrelated, etc. ? 



Any pretense of working by simply checking 

 casual impressions now ends. We must begin to 

 collect records, systematically. The work may be 

 divided into four parts: 



(1) Taking a house-to-house census, with identi- 

 fication of each of the inhabitants as to ethnic 

 affiliation (Ladino, Sololateco, Panajacheleno, 

 etc.), relationship within the household, approxi- 

 mate age, and so on. 



(2) Making a careful map on which are spotted 

 all the households. The "spotting" is more 

 difficult than it seems; the first time around, with 

 a Ladino helper, I missed about a third of the 

 Indian establishments hidden from the paths by 

 coffee bushes. The object is to get all of the houses 

 spotted and identified; then the possibility of 

 omission is reduced to those within households. 

 Map and census were made together. Although 

 in another town the officials accompanied me on 

 a tour to get a correct census (with attendant 

 disadvantages), in Panajachel I depended upon 

 Indian friends and a long period of time. After 2 

 years or more I was still correcting mistakes; but 

 the time came when I never heard of a person I 

 could not easily place and never came upon a 

 house whose whole family I did not know; and 

 although children's ages, and sometimes the sex of 

 infants were occasionally left undetermined, we 

 had a complete census. 



(3) Collecting genealogical information which, 

 when put together shows how everybody is (or is 

 not) related to everybody else. The "foreign" 

 Indians were included, as a check on their sepa- 

 rateness. Genealogical information is obtained by 

 asking one's friends for the names of their sibhngs 

 and siblings' children, of their parents and parents' 

 siblings' children, grandchildren, etc.; of their 



