The municipality of Zinacantán, located in the central highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, very likely has been the most intensely studied rural community in Mexico over the past three decades. Thanks to the Harvard Chiapas Project and its director, Evon Vogt, a number of dedicated anthropologists have devoted decades to the study of myths, gossip, humor, oral tradition, religious hierarchies, shamanism, settlement patterns, land use, corn farming, ethnic and class relations, courtship and marriage, local history, and more in Zinacantán; its neighbor, Chamula; and other indigenous communities. Few researchers know Zinacantán better than Frank Cancian, the author of two earlier books on the community, who now explains how Zinacantán has changed since he first began his research in the early 1960s.
Cancian announces his thesis in the title of his new book. By decline of community, Cancian means a decline of the closed, corporate peasant community. During the 1970s and 1980s, Zinacantecos found new and more lucrative occupations, the gap between richer and poorer increased, public life became more decentralized (as new hamlets were created, new offices proliferated in hamlets, and hamlets became more independent of the center, Hteklum), open political conflict divided the community, and the cargo system declined as a marker of status. Cancian describes these changes in a careful and detailed manner, and this description is the core of his study. Explanation is another matter. As the author notes: “I believe it is possible to be clear about what happened in Zinacantán, and not so clear about how to interpret it” (p. 200).
Rather than force his data into one neat, theoretical approach, Cancian believes that several frameworks (modernization, Marxism, the historical visions of Eric Wolf and G. William Skinner) should be used to interpret Zinacantán. He shows how each provides insights regarding specific problems of explanation. Cancian ends his study with two conclusions: outside change transformed the work and economic well-being of Zinacantecos, but social life in the community responded largely to local interactions. For those less interested in Zinacantán itself, Cancian explains that what happened there during these years is one example of how a local system relates to larger regional, national, and global systems. In this case “it becomes possible to say that the causal effects of the national and international systems are greater in economic life and less in social life, and that the importance of the local system is greater in social life and less in economic life” (p. 202).
