Favre has written an important book, and many historians will find in it additional support for a view that there is little to learn from the empiricist concern with communities which has so long characterized the work of anthropologists, particularly those from the U.S.
The Maya populations he studied were the Tzotzil-Tzeltal of the state of Chiapas, who for the last twenty years have been the subject of intensive field research by scholars and students from Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford. In fact, it was within the institutional cocoon of one of these teams that M. Favre began his own fieldwork. His argument shows that he is familiar with and dexterous at handling their kinds of problem in his part II, where he deals with kinship and descent groups, dual and multiple “sections” as well as religious and political authority. His argument is also conditioned by what he thinks U.S. anthropology misses or ignores.
Historians will be most attracted to his third part and the conclusions. (Part I reviews what Favre calls the “two colonial systems”: the first ending in the rebellion of 1711 and the readaptation of highland Maya to changes in European pressures just before independence; the second colonial system has not yet ended).
Throughout four and a half centuries of colonial rule, the Tzotzil-Tzeltal have been in continuous contact with European and Mexican cultures. “Indian culture is neither a pre-hispanic culture, nor is it one formed from pre-hispanic and hispanic elements” (p. 342). It is, according to Favre, “a cultural synthesis which was created and is still being formed in our time in the crucible of dependence, exploitation and oppression” (p. 342). In so far as the Tzotzil have a distinctive culture, “it locks them in an artificial universe, increasingly disconnected from reality, in a world almost pathological since it is the increasingly vulgar caricature of the real world. It makes them, thus, more dependent and more exploitable. It alienates them to the point of making them participate in their own oppression” (p. 342).
How does Favre reach this conclusion? He insists, and most colleagues will follow him here, on the profound changes which the encomienda, European religion, the reducción and the latifundio, depopulation in the XVI and work for wages in the XIX and XX centuries have meant for the highland Maya. He shows how deeply Europeanized was the ideology of the rebellions of 1711 and 1869. Many of these changes were “adaptive responses in an effort to maintain the community” and he even wonders if the “modifications in the internal organization of the community did not take place just in order to avoid change in the communitarian structure” (p. 267). Throughout these centuries and despite the adaptive changes, the low, colonized status of a Tzotzil in Chiapas and in Mexico has changed much less. In fact, marginal groups of Europeans and Africans have been “indianized” in Chiapas, as George Kubler has shown for the Andes.
This historical survey leads Favre to the conclusion that “less than a reflection of a glorious tradition . . . Indian culture is the expression of ignominious conditions of existence, defined by the national society . . .” (p. 342). “To accept the Indian is to justify implicitly the domination which created him. To accept him in his specificity, is to legitimize implicitly the colonial phenomenon of which he is the result” (p. 344).
This is not the only conclusion that can be reached from his rich analysis and I wonder what Tzotzil anthropologists, who are now emerging from that other crucible, intensive observation by outside scholars, will think of the ethnic doom which he prescribes.
