Structures of Resisitance
The nature of interaction between traditional agrarian society and the 'modern world' has remained a controversial debate amongst anthropologists, sociologists and political theorists. It remains contentious as to whether the dominance of modern values over traditional is desirable; whether the arrival of the market and modern commerce betters or worsens the conditions of rural society and its relationship with the metropol; whether such change is received with apprehension or optimism by the members of rural society. Joel Migdal, for example, puts forth certain arguments proposing the concept of 'culture contact'-'that exposure and contact are the causes of change.' Migdal identifies three reasons suggesting why such change would be likely to occur: (1) The benefits of the modern far outweigh the benefits of the traditional. (2) The individual is free from severe institutional restraints which would prevent him from making an unimpeded decision. (3) Those individuals who select the new are rational and are optimisers, and those individuals who do not accept the modern fail to do so because of "wrong" or nonrational values.' Most theorists, however, tend to agree that modern society, for good or bad, is clearly encroaching o
According to Blok, the latifondo was typically leased out to a gabelloto, who in turn hired a number of permanent employees to manage the enterprise. The overseer was the gabelloto's 'man of confidence' - 'he dealt with the peasants set to work on the estates and took care of the general protection of the enterprise. The peasants' obedience of tradition thus made the landlords' job easier; where grievances did arise, they could be ignored, or at worst suppressed, without having to significantly alter the social structure. He asserts that 'for the rural worker almost every estate owner is an absenteeist, as the bulk of the large estates is managed by administrators'; the latter appearing to be Latin American counterparts of the soprastanti. We may therefore conclude that such socioeconomic structures, which at first glance appear to be anachronistic in the extreme and anomalous in the context of contemporary modes of production and social organisation, appear to defiantly face the challenge presented by modern society by undergoing a process of 'involutionary' change. Scott describes 'involution' in agrarian enterprises at the economic level as involving 'the shift to more labour intensive techniques in return for minute, but vital, increments in yield per unit of land. Consequently, the latifondo characteristically faced a lack of investments from the side of both cultivators and entrepreneurs. Blok describes various attempts by the Fascist government to introduce new agrarian technologies and to implement agrarian reform; as may be expected, the 'new techniques of cultivation were applied on a small scale', 'the Fascist agrarian policy did not promote the development of more intensive methods of cultivation and inhibited the expansion of a more balanced agriculture', and even after the post-Fascist agrarian reform law of 1950, 'the type of agriculture that had always characterised the inland region did not substantially change .
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Acceptance Essays
