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Appendix A Foreword to Bonds of Mutual Trust (Vélez-Ibáñez 1983) by Eric R. Wolf Foreword Anthropology has always been at its best when it could place seemingly ordinary features of everyday life in a new light, and deduce unforeseen implications from that examination. This is what Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez has done in his study of rotating credit associations among Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. He has not only shown the prevalence of this institution among different categories of that population, but he has demonstrated how much at variance are the resulting modes of behavior and thought from prevalent stereotypes of the shiftless poor or the distrustful Mexican. Participation in the rotating credit associations requires postponement of gratification, as well as prudential forethought. It also requires, as Vélez-Ibáñez shows, “trust in the trustworthiness” of fellow participants . Vélez-Ibáñez’s account of how people save money through joining rotating credit associations is thus also an anthropological brief against myths that justify social discrimination by falsifying the picture of the victim. Becoming accepted as an associate in one of these credit associations, and accepting others, depend on the cultural construct of confianza—the willingness to engage in generalized reciprocity with others. The concept derives from Marshall Sahlins, who saw it as a form of exchange in which gifts of goods and services are offered without the requirement of an immediate or equivalent return, in the expectation that prestations will balance out in the long run. Sahlins contrasted this form of open-ended reciprocity with “balanced reciprocity,” in which a gift tended is immediately requited by a counteroffering of equal value. Confianza extended by the participants in a rotating credit association expresses the evaluation that offerings will continue over time, without an immediate calling in of shares extended. Trusting in each other’s trustworthiness thus also expresses a shared sense that the self of each participant is culturally constructed to maximize long-term commitment and mutuality. The social actors of Vélez-Ibáñez’s account adapt to their economic circumstances , but they do not do so in the Darwinian sense of winning against competitors. Rather, they engage in their arrangements of mutual credit to meet biologically and culturally defined needs through the use of a cultural invention. The rotating credit association possesses this cultural referent, even while it can be used to meet the exigencies of widely varying circumstances. 188 Appendix A Vélez-Ibáñez argues that confianza does not constitute a bundle of culturally uniform understandings, but rather is a “cultural intersect” allowing people of quite varied backgrounds and interests to communicate sufficiently to act in concert. He thus contributes to our theoretical perspectives on culture by using an action-oriented conception in place of the older views of culture as inert tradition handed down from the dead to the living. George Herbert Mead, Marcel Mauss, A. I. Hallowell, and Erving Goffman have all shown how the self is not given a priori, but is constructed socially and culturally. Vélez-Ibáñez’s model, however, recalls the work of an earlier social scientist, Adam Smith, who understood that the search for utilities in the market was not carried on by atomistic maximizers, but by human beings whose behavior was constrained by what he called “propriety.” Seven years before The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote in his Theory of Social Sentiment that social interaction was governed by “sympathy ,” the great socializing force that ensued because each social actor, motivated by an “inner spectator” to maximize praise from others, strove to make himself praiseworthy in the eyes of the “real external spectators” who interacted with him. Sympathy gave rise to propriety, and only the desire for propriety made possible interaction in the market. In showing how people construct notions of trustworthiness in the marketplace , Vélez-Ibáñez also points to a dimension of ethnicity that goes beyond current definitions of an ethnic category as a population occupying an ecological niche or acting as a political pressure group in competition with other economic or political groups. He suggests that economics and politics also involve notions of who can be relied on and the limits of such reliance. Sometimes the very strivings to build and maintain confianza go awry, as Vélez-Ibáñez shows in the ethnodrama. At other times there may be contradictions between the quantitative demands of the money economy and the qualitative...

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