In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1990-1995 (review)

We anthropologists have developed enough blindspots in our political economic investigations that once central concerns about power relations now pass unseen in our analysis. Not that we don't have insightful work on either globalization or identity-based struggles for economic justice. Indeed, much of the writing on globalization examines how the international financial institutions, national governments, and corporations produce conditions—mobile capital, weak labor movements, insecure employment—that shape careers and consciousness among the people we study. Yet few ethnographies detail how these generalized conditions consolidate into self-perpetuating structural relations. Writings on race, gender, and new social movements deliver understanding of how categorical social divisions produce economic exclusion. But the specifics of the Pan-Mayan movement in Guatemala, say, or Afro-reggae in Brazil are portrayed without spelling out any obliging connections to international economic processes. Briefly put, an eye on globalization can track local experience as emblematic of neoliberal capitalism; an eye on race and gender can observe structural relations at work reproducing poverty and instigating resistance. But structure as product of new global realities rarely comes into view. Steve Striffler's excellent new book will help politically economic minded anthropologists get their vision back. His richly detailed account of the United Fruit Company and peasant struggle in Ecuador highlights the element missing from much of current economic writing: class.

A social history the Hacienda Tenguel and the surrounding south coast peasant communities (the epicenter of Ecuador's world-leading banana industry), Striffler's In the Shadows of State and Capital covers most of the twentieth century. He sets out to answer two fundamental questions: "How did one system of producing and marketing bananas (large foreign-owned enclaves) give way to another (contract farming), and in what ways were the struggles and daily practices of people like Jacinto Lozano [a worker and long-time resident of the zone] central to this transformation?" (p.4). Striffler's sources encompass papers of United Fruit officials, testimonies of workers and peasants, interviews with regional activists, and other archival materials. The breadth allows him to track a variety of social actors. Indeed, among its strengths, Striffler's study succeeds as a great ethnography of the state, as well as of corporations and peasants.

The narrative opens with rival transnational corporations trying to prepare the political ground prior to cultivating actual territory on the coastal plain. Often imagined as the quintessential protagonist of an extractive export industry, United Fruit company's strength was its ability to move from site to site "to spread risk and maintain a sufficient level of profits" (p. 33). However, it was not invulnerable. When it began its exploration for land and political favor in Ecuador in the 1920s, United Front was a corporate institution shaped through labor struggles, agricultural diseases, and confrontations with governments elsewhere in Latin America. Small wonder that it arrived shrouded in secrecy and rumors, rather than fanfare and bold acquisitions.

From the outset, Striffler clarifies that the story of United Fruit and its massive operation at Tenguel (covering 22,000 hectares, employing 2,500 people and producing 80,000 stems of bananas every week at its height in the 1950s) was never representative of the Ecuadorian banana industry. The majority of output came from mid-size, Ecuadorian-owned operations. Tenguel and other large-foreign owned operations thus did not monopolize production so much as catalyze it. Ecuadorian capitalists and peasants alike turned to the corporate enclaves for credit, advice, inputs, and markets. Crucial sites for the birth of Ecuador's banana export industry, the enclaves then erupted as arenas of union and peasant organizing that would unravel foreign direct production.

Worker militancy did not seem an inevitable outcome during the hacienda's heyday in the 1950s. United Fruit preferred...