Flexible Production, Households, and Fieldwork: Multisited Zapotec Weavers in the Era of Late Capitalism

Like other crafters catering to tourists and international ethnic art markets, Zapotec weavers have become more closely tied to international capital and to increasingly flexible and dispersed schemes of production. Some Zapotec families have responded to such flexibility and now maintain several households in the Southwestern United States, U.S./Mexico border towns, and Oaxaca. The study of household petty commodity production thus requires a multisited field methodology for what are today dispersed Zapotec households enmeshed in the transnational production of Zapotec textiles. (Mexico, Zapotec, Chimayo, New Mexico, textiles, flexible production, multisited ethnography) In a provocative essay, George Marcus (1995:95) outlined the contours of an emerging ethnographic strategy that responded to what he referred to as "more complex objects of study ... such as the capitalist world system." He described a developing set of ethnographic practices more appropriate to the increasingly nonlocalized nature of the lives of those whom anthropologists study that at the same time captured and helped to configure the limits of their ill-defined social geographies. What Marcus called "multi-sited ethnography" delineated new understandings of particular social worlds that became increasingly dispersed in the later half of the twentieth century. Multisited ethnography, Marcus (1995:96) maintained, embodies a research design best suited to examining the "circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space." The ethnographic practices he outlined would follow people, things, metaphors, plots, stories or allegories, lives, and conflicts for new and better understanding. Resulting changes in the fieldwork habits of anthropologists would include a shift from prolonged field stays in a single location to shorter forays to multiple locations. Definitions of what constitute the field and fieldwork would in consequence be reworked to the extent that anthropology departments, professional organizations, libraries, museums, and institutions that fund social science research, as well as electronic spaces such as Web sites, listservs, and chat rooms frequented by anthropologists would become field sites in and of themselves. Many who study household petty commodity production in Mesoamerica do so through intense periods of residence and participant observation in a single location; usually a single community but sometimes a single household. Especially in the case of petty household commodities produced for touristic consumption, a great deal of recent research in Latin America, for example, has described how international capital has inserted itself into and reconfigured relations of production that were once internal to individual households. Complicated systems of subcontracting and the extraction of surplus value by intermediaries (whose economic and cultural capital is subsequently both enabled and recreated) are well described (e.g., Nash 1993; Ehlers 1993; Stephen 1993; and Stromberg-Pellizzi 1993). These studies, however, frame productive strategies unproblematically in terms of local connections to a generally conceived global system. Latin American ethnographers working in Mesoamerica, for example, having worked through legacies such as the closed corporate community and having long recognized the limitations of constructing rural communities as social universes unto themselves, reinvigorate the very divisions they attempt to overcome. Local/global distinctions treat the global and the local as entities that exist a priori even though researchers embraced a world-systems perspective; precisely in response to criticisms that they had either assumed or created ethnographic locales disconnected from their wider social and historical universes. Instead, a conceptual framework is needed in which these kinds of distinctions are blurred, where the local is seen to be riddled with the global and the latter is seen as the product of multiple locales. …