Abstract
I often wrestle with my students over what ‘postmodern’ means. While it is relatively easy to outline the characteristics of industrialization and ‘modernity’, postmodernity somehow eludes us. Yes, they can see the dramatic technological changes that have transformed social reality, and they can even perceive how the global capitalist economy has come to subsume us all. But when we try to address the deeper values of the postmodern condition – the rise of individualism, materialism and the underlying cynicism, and social disintegration that are part of our age – they fail to grasp the problem. They believe in individual achievement, personal style, and individual political choices. What could be wrong with these values? It is very hard to see them from a critical viewpoint. Just as Weber and the other grand theorists feared, we are locked in the logic of economic rationality and paralyzed by skepticism and indifference toward anything resembling ‘society’ or community. We cannot see any viable alternative. There is no way out of this iron-clad predicament.
From now on, I am going to have them read University of Rochester anthropologist Daniel Reichman’s The Broken Village. Reichman’s compelling and eloquent case study of a rural Honduran town not only reveals the systemic nature of this predicament using robust ethnographic examples, but, more importantly, he also diagnoses the problem, and even suggests a solution that has the potential to save us all. According to Reichman, we need to look to Durkheim, not Weber (more on that in a moment), and we need to pay much closer attention to how processes of ‘depoliticization’ are changing the way ‘people think about their role as citizens within a defined collectivity’. In particular, the ‘changing orientation of the nation-state’ brought about by globalization is literally breaking the social contract. ‘Depoliticization’ is occurring as individual citizens withdraw from the political process and the nation-state increasingly denies their interests and abdicates its responsibilities toward them. Reichman chose the name ‘La Quebrada’ (Spanish for ‘broken’) as a pseudonym for the remote, coffee-growing village that he studies in order to emphasize this theoretical point. The bonds that are ‘broken’ are the bonds of citizenship (the rights and responsibilities shared between a government and its citizens) and community (what Reichman calls the ‘principles of sociality’). He uses Akhil Gupta’s concept of ‘dehyphenization of the nation-state’ in which the ‘global market eclipses the nation-state as the key organizing principle of human life’ thus effectively deleting the hyphen between ‘nation’ (the collectivity in which one resides) and ‘state’ (the political structures that organize said collectivity).
In response, individuals in La Quebrada must create ‘new strategies for political action, new understandings of citizenship, and new ways of defining “the social”’. Such strategies include transnational migration, and chapters one and two carefully detail the experiences of numerous Hondurans who seek economic opportunities in the United States in order to survive the booms and busts of the difficult coffee business. But they also encompass new religious movements such as evangelical Protestantism (with which Latin American scholars are likely familiar) and the Growing in Grace Church founded in 1997 by Dr Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda under a doctrine of ‘no more sin’, which guarantees its members salvation no matter their actions, brazenly embraces alcohol and ‘the party lifestyle’, encourages its members to open liquor stores, features scantily clad women in its religious services, and even uses the number ‘666’ to promote itself (a fascinating example with which, I imagine, many Latin American scholars are less familiar). Chapter 4 documents how both of these new religious traditions stand in opposition to Honduran Catholicism (with its narratives of community and nationalism) and place importance on individual liberty and individual access to the divine as their central organizing principles. This exclusive focus on ‘individual power’ within new religious movements is what accounts for their growth and popularity at a time when collective disintegration is occurring.
Finally, these ‘processes of individualization’ can also be observed in new social movements aimed at regulating the global economy in ways the modern nation-state no longer can. Such movements are based on consumers making ‘individual choices’ regarding the products they buy such as ‘organic’ foods and ‘fair trade’ products like coffee. Chapter 5 examines the fair trade coffee issue using rich ethnographic observations of the experiences of several coffee growers in La Quebrada, all who use migration to the United States as a strategy to compensate for the economic risks associated with coffee production. What Reichman finds is that ‘these transnational livelihoods are strategies used to cope with extreme volatility in the liberalized coffee market’.
More significant, no grower ‘expressed any faith in the potential of collective forms of market regulation’ such as a fair trade coffee cooperative, something Reichman himself was originally hired to investigate as a Cornell University student through a participatory rural development project that was being carried out by the US Department of Agriculture. What Reichman discovered is that the coffee growers were highly suspicious of such efforts and had little interest in joining together as a community even though doing so may have enhanced their mutual economic well-being. The source of the problem, according to Reichman, is the ‘depoliticized climate in La Quebrada’, which is the result of years of Honduran government incompetence and corruption, the devolution of power to international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) like Aldea Global, and most significantly perhaps, the blatant political persecution and repression of the Honduran left in the 1970s and 1980s. Much like James Ferguson’s ‘anti-politics machine’, the body politic of the Honduran nation is an empty shell, destroyed by neocolonialism, the cold war, structural adjustment, and international development agencies. The only option for those living in this broken village is to pursue individual strategies of self-empowerment and ‘local level’ political agency.
In the final chapter, Reichman takes us to the root of the problem. The destruction of the nation-state by globalization has led to the ‘demise of collective politics’, which is replaced by individualized political strategies. But these individual level politics are no good. Consumers may feel better about buying ‘fair trade’ or ‘organic’ coffee, but as a political effort aimed at reining in the depredations of global capitalism, it pales in comparison to the boycotts and cartels of the past (such as the ‘Boston Tea Party’ or the Indian swadeshi movement) in which consumers engaged in complete nonconsumption. Today’s ‘ethical consumption’ movement places ‘emphasis on individual moral choice as a strategy of social reform’, and as such, it is doomed to fail. For without ‘sociality’, it is ‘the logic of the market – individual choice – [that] becomes the basic organizing principle of social life’.
And here is where Weber and Durkheim come back into the picture. As Reichman reminds us, Weber saw no way out of the individualized logic of the market. In many ways, his book substantiates Weber’s pessimism when it concludes that these new postmodern religious movements and political strategies simply buttress global capitalism. They completely ‘ignore or downplay philosophies that reach beyond the individual’ and ‘view individual choice as the basic engine of social reform’. So if you are looking for a book with a happy ending for ‘fair trade coffee’, this is not it.
Fortunately, Reichman turns to Durkheim, who saw the potential for politics beyond the nation-state. One hundred years ago, Durkheim observed, ‘the more we advance in history, the larger and more important … international groupings become’. Since individualist politics are bound to fail, according to Reichman, then the only solution is transnational governance guided by social science. While his ethnography fails to illustrate how such ‘world government’ structures could truly ‘integrate an ever-expanding complex society’ (which is too bad because his work as an anthropologist within international development agencies gave him a viewpoint onto these possibilities), Reichman points our gaze in a provocative direction. What does ‘postmodern’ mean? It means we are all broken. If we are going to survive, we are going to have to take on the gargantuan task of building an international world political order that can make the global market accountable to all individuals despite the atomized nature of postmodern life.
This pithy and well-written book would be an excellent addition to courses in globalization, international development, migration, religion, social movements, Latin American studies, and cultural studies. It is especially valuable as an anthropological critique of the economistic view of migration and as a qualitative case study that illuminates postmodernity in Latin America. One may think that a small isolated town in rural Honduras would have little to teach us about the larger postmodern condition, but the brilliance of this book is how Reichman carefully traces the transnational lives of the residents of La Quebrada. From the Internet café on the corner all the way to Denver, Hamburg, Chiapas, and Long Island, he takes us on a global journey that has implications for everyone.