Structurs Of Resistance

11 Pages 2702 Words

in determining rural society? Why do inefficient labour-intensive technology and archaic labour organisation systems continue to determine the process of economic production? And why do state attempts at modernising rural production continually face defeat and fail to effect conclusive change? This paper attempts to answer these and other questions through an analysis of two similar anachronistic structures that exist in the contemporary world: the Italian latifondo and the Latin American latifundismo. Both structures are organised in a very similar manner, and an analysis of both presents a holistic picture of their social and economic organisation. The paper begins by describing the administrative structure of the latifondo, and then goes on to suggest that the socioeconomic peculiarities of the enterprise may be at least partially explained by the rational voluntarist behaviour of the landlord, who allows old structures to persist in light of their cultural peculiarity. In The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, Anton Blok describes the Sicilian latifondo as being ‘in its main features “involutionary”’. Blok invokes this term while alluding to a complex process in which certain structures undergo internalisation and fixity, as suggested by Clifford Geertz in Agricultural Involution. ‘Involution’, according to Geertz, refers to ‘the overdriving of an established form in such a way that it becomes rigid through an inward elaboration of detail’. Blok’s study of the latifondo leads him to conclude that this agrarian enterprise underwent such a process at both the social and the economic level. Before further exploring this process, however, it is necessary to first understand the power structure and organisation of the Sicilian latifondo. According to Blok, the latifondo was typically leased out to a gabelloto, who in turn hired a number of permanent employees to manage the enterprise. These administrators generally comprised ...