John Monaghan has made an exceptional contribution to the ethnography of contemporary Mesoamerica with his excellent study of Santiago Nuyoo, a small Mixtecspeaking town in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. This study has multiple strengths and virtually no weaknesses. It makes important contributions to our understanding of household organization, interhousehold sharing and gift-giving, the Mesoamerican civil-religious cargo system and festival sponsorship, and the relationship between individual action and culture change.
A central focus of the study is the structure and interaction of domestic activities. Households, which are defined in terms of resource sharing rather than biological distance, form the basis of Nuyoo society. The author discusses indigenous views on the composition of households, which are seen as constantly making and redefining themselves through social interaction. Particularly important are reciprocal exchange obligations indispensable for household participation in the community-wide cycle of rotating festival sponsorship. These sponsorships, referred to as cargos within the civil-religious hierarchy, are costly obligations that deplete household resources while contributing to broader community well-being. Gift exchange helps households meet resource needs at critical times during the festival cycle and creates a sense of interdependency and alliance among the participating households. The author argues that mayordomo positions within the cargo system also perform important economic functions by collecting offerings of food and distributing them to households located in different ecozones.
The author uses an emic definition of the Nuyoo community. Nuyoo is defined by its members as a body of individuals with a collective sense of well-being rather than as a unit based on fixed territorial boundaries, kinship, or a unifying sociopolitical organization. Two corporate images are presented for the community. The first and most important is the community as an association of interacting households. The second and more generalized view of community is the image of the “Great House,” where people sacrifice household well-being for the benefit of the broader society. The tension between these two conflicting views can be found in the ways individuals resist participation in the cargo, which while benefiting the broader community brings economic hardship on individual households. The last vestiges of communal cooperation are found in the institution of the tequio, or communal labor work group, which in Nuyoo mobilizes labor to produce resources used in church ceremonialism.
One of the most important and provocative aspects of this work is Monaghan’s discussion of the relationship between materialist and ideational forces in culture change. The author examines cases in which culture change was prompted by individuals acting in their own economic self-interest. The increase of Misericordia religious activity occurred simultaneously with the expansion of private herds at the expense of church herds, and the shift of communal property into private ownership. The new Misericordia ceremonialism allowed for new socioeconomic action, and far from being simply a passive legitimizing force, it helped make the expansion of wealth at the household level possible.
The Covenants with Earth and Rain is well written and nicely illustrated with drawings by members of the Nuyoo community. It is an ethnography that reveals many precolumbian undercurrents in a turbulent contemporary setting. It is a volume that all serious Latin American scholars will welcome into their personal library.
