Crafting Tradition: The Making and Marketing of Oaxacan Wood Carvings

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Conclusion

235 c o n c l u s i o n CONCLUSION CHAPTER THIRTEEN The trade in Oaxacan wood carvings is an almost paradigmatic example of globalization. The wood-carving boom would not have been possible without large-scale tourism , air transport, a weakened peso, and multinational tariff agreements. Carvers travel to the United States to exhibit their craft in schools, museums, and shopping centers . Their pieces are advertised in websites and auctioned on eBay. Artisans and local intermediaries use cellular phones to take orders from U.S. wholesalers. The effects of globalization in impoverished areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America have been debated endlessly . Some writers (e.g., Friedman 1999) note that the rural and urban poor have often improved their standard of living in recent years by taking advantage of an expanding world marketplace. Others (e.g., Barry 1995; Ross 1998) point out that globalization typically leads to increased socioeconomic stratification, erosion of local selfsuf ficiency, and the exploitation of peripheral regions by multinational enterprises. These interminable arguments echo earlier disagreements between proponents of mod- c r a f t i n g t r a d i t i o n 236 ernization and dependency theorists. Yet there are important differences between the globalization of the past several decades and earlier immersions of local cultures into world systems. “Globalization” has become a buzzword that refers to diverse interrelated phenomena. The term is perhaps most often used as a shorthand description of the increasing integration of particular regions into the world economy. A recent edited volume entitled Commodities and Globalization (Haugerud et al. 2000), for example, includes articles about the local socioeconomic effects of the export of Sardinian cheese (Vargas-Cetina 2000), Congolese popular dance music (White 2000), and Brazilian grapes (Collins 2000). Global economic integration, of course, is not new. Although the editors of Commodities and Globalization call the period from the 1870s to 1914 the “first age of globalization” (Stone et al. 2000:2), worldwide commodity chains for products such as sugar, cotton, and tea were established hundreds of years earlier. The reason why globalization is so much in the news nowadays is that rapid improvements in transport and communications have tightened and multiplied economic connections among various parts of the world. The increased local integration into world markets has resulted in new types of multinational economic agreements and a remarkable diversity of products available for consumers. The wood-carving trade depends on methods of transportation and communications that did not come to Oaxaca until the middle and later parts of the twentieth century. The commercialization of Oaxacan crafts became important only after the Pan-American Highway reached the Central Valleys in the mid-1940s. The building of the highway led to an increase in the number of tourists interested in buying local crafts. The state therefore provided incentives for craft production; private entrepreneurs opened ethnic arts stores. When air transport to Oaxaca became more frequent in the 1970s and 1980s, the state improved the zócalo and expanded its tourist agencies. New hotels and restaurants opened every month. Technological developments such as jets, faxes, and cellular phones have made it much easier for entrepreneurs from the United States and Europe to create businesses importing Oaxacan crafts. These improvements in communications and transportation allow dealers to place orders from outside the country and to transport textiles and carvings quickly to the United States, Canada, and Europe. By the end of the twentieth century, the Internet had made it possible for Oaxacan crafts to be bought by anyone with a credit card and access to a computer connected to the worldwide web. The ever-faster means of transport and communications have influenced 237 c o n c l u s i o n recent changes in the world economic system. Since the 1970s multinational agreements have removed many barriers to the movement of capital and goods and led to increasing instability of currency values and commodity prices (Stone et al. 2000:2). Many indebted nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have been compelled by global financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund to adopt neoliberal “free-market” policies . Other countries have adopted such policies more or less voluntarily. One result has been an explosion in the number of vertically integrated commodity chains run by transnational firms. These chains rely greatly on flexible accumulation systems involving subcontracting and dispersed sites of...