A Land Without Gods Processs Theory, Maldevelopment and the Mexican Nahuas

About this book

This study explores how institutions change in response to the imposition of a new ruling order, the unequal distribution of the proceeds of nature and society and the confrontation of classes, and parties, genders and age-groups, defending or imposing claims on one another.

Contents

From colonialism to revolution: Coatzacoalcos, a preHispanic state; the colonial period; the liberal land policies; the excesses and limits of the Porfiriato; the lot system; Pajpan and the Mexican revolution; PRI institutions, agrarian law and the cattle industry. State theory and native history (1930-1968): from class politics to political classes; the Gulf Nahuas and the new order. Oil and cattle politics: PRI rancher hegemony and the struggle for land; from hegemony to ethno-populism; factionalism on the rise; Caciquismo, ethno-populism and factionalism. The economics of maldevelopment: class structures, strictures and struggles; class formation and land distribution; cattle economics; small businessesand merchant capital; subsistence and small scale commodity production; wage-labour employment; conclusion. Agroecology and the means of destruction: theories of productivity and irrationality; a tropical ecosystem; turning forest into pasture; the Milpa transformed; hunters and fishers of diversity; conclusion. Dynamics of the patrimonial domain: kinship and process theory; descent, marriage and the household economy; demographic history; Pajapan society in the 1980s; conclusion. Seeds, sex and the aztecs: the social and the mythical; the interpretive method - rudiments of scheme analysis; an old couple and two eggs in a Milpa; the mocking iguanas incident; the pilgrim fathers, the ant and the rock; waking the mother and resurrecting the father; warnings of the plumed serpent. Conclusion: theory and praxis; outline of a theory of process; the Sierra Santa Marta Project.

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