In all respects this is an excellent book. The fruit of a year’s research in the field in 1972-73 with the INAH Seminar on Peasant Societies, another year’s learning at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, and yet another year’s freedom to write, thanks to a Guggenheim, it proves the wisdom of the judges who bet on Warman. It also proves his deep devotion to his subject and his superb command of his craft.
The subject is the peasantry of eastern Morelos. Warman first outlines its social history from Olmec times to the Echeverría administration. He then studies it closely in four periods, the Porfiriato, the Revolution (1910-20), the redistribution of land (1920-40), and the latest years (1940-72). In each period he examines in detail how the peasants managed to maintain their economic base and way of life, despite terrific onslaughts on them by hacendados in the Porfiriato, big business since the 1930s, and again and again the State, which has protected them from capitalist markets only so far as to insure their indirect exploitation. The keys to the peasants’ endurance as peasants are two: the household and the community, variously organized as the strategy for survival has required, but always intact and ready to improvise—anything, to get com for the family’s food.
Warman’s particular craft is from the venerable school of Eric Wolf. From such strength he refers to many other masters, A. V. Chayanov on the peasant mode of production, Clifford Geertz on ecological analysis, Rosa Luxemburg on capital accumulation, and Richard Adams on power. But he has become a master in his own right. Standing solidly in the creative Marxist tradition, he has achieved a convincing synthesis of anthropology, economics, and history that sets the standard for any scholar now proposing to study rural Mexico. Occasionally in this book the reader may wish for yet more detail, for example on the families that turned revolutionary and those that did not, or on the groups promoting “agrarian reform.” But it is Warman who has educated the reader to want the detail. The greatest significance of the high standard he has set is to authorize new insights and discoveries.
Moreover, for all the complexity of his argument, Warman has put it simply. He says the peasants themselves were his best teachers —not least, though he does not say so, in the language to use to explain their lives. The writing is clear, straightforward, modest, wry, earthy. The morelenses have done exceptionally well by their best student.
