From Devil Pacts to Drug Deals: Commerce, Unnatural Accumulation, and Moral Community in “Modern” Peru
Author(s)
Nugent, David
Abstract
“Resistance to the market” has been a trope commonly employed by anthropologists to explain local response to market expansion. Indeed, an extensive literature has documented the myriad forms of material and cultural resistance to the market undertaken by those who perceive it as a dangerous intrusion into their lives. In this article I argue that the use of this trope has contributed to the reproduction of a series of familiar but problematic dualisms in anthropology: modern/traditional, present/past, subject/object. Focusing on Chachapoyas – a region in the northern Peruvian Andes – I explore a series of changing social and political conditions, contingent in time and through space, that have encouraged radically different reactions to the realm of the market. In the 1930s local discourse concerning increasing market integration presented the market in terms verging on the millenarian, as having the potential to usher in an era of social justice, harmony, and community cooperation. By the 1980s, however, discourse on the market had undergone a complete inversion. The market was depicted as a dangerous and alien presence that threatened to dissolve the primary bonds of a community-oriented way of life, which had retained its purity and harmony because of its distance from the realm of exchange.
