In the Valley of Oaxaca in Mexico’s Southern Highland region, three facets of sociocultural life have been interconnected and interactive from colonial times to the present: first, community land as a space to live and work; second, a civil-religious system managed by reciprocity and market activity wherein obligations of citizenship, office, and festive sponsorships are met by expenditures of labor-time and money; and third, livelihood. In this book, noted Oaxacan scholar Scott Cook draws on thirty-five years of fieldwork (1965–1990) in the region to present a masterful ethnographic historical account of how nine communities in the Oaxaca Valley have striven to maintain land, livelihood, and civility in the face of transformational and cumulative change across five centuries.

Drawing on an extensive database that he accumulated through participant observation, household surveys, interviews, case studies, and archival work in more than twenty Oaxacan communities, Cook documents and explains how peasant-artisan villagers in the Oaxaca Valley have endeavored over centuries to secure and/or defend land, worked and negotiated to subsist and earn a living, and striven to meet expectations and obligations of local citizenship. His findings identify elements and processes that operate across communities or distinguish some from others. They also underscore the fact that landholding is crucial for the sociocultural life of the valley. Without land for agriculture and resource extraction, occupational options are restricted, livelihood is precarious and contingent, and civility is jeopardized.

Markets in Oaxaca is a study of the regional peasant marketing system in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. It relates the marketing system to other aspects of the regional economy, to neighboring regions, and to the Mexican national economy. Combining ethnographic, theoretical, and regional analyses, it suggests new directions in the fields of peasant and development studies.

Contributors to the volume describe the operation and nature of several marketplaces in the region, analyze village-based artisan production and various specialized economic roles (particularly the role of traders), and describe the operation of several total regional marketing systems. The editors then consider their findings against the background of political, economic, and social structures from the pre-Conquest period to the present. In their conclusion, the editors find the regional peasant economy to be responsive both to the influence of the urban metropolitan sector, on the one hand, and to its own indigenous structural integrity and internal dynamism, on the other.

In addition to the editors, the contributors to Markets in Oaxaca are Ralph L. Beals, Richard L. Berg Jr., Beverly Chiñas, Herbert M. Eder, Charlotte Stolmaker, Carole Turkenik, John C. Warner, Ronald Waterbury, and Cecil R. Welte. Their essays combine analyses of the elements of the system within a comprehensive theoretical framework. Together, they present a complete and integrated view of a peasant economy.

For centuries throughout large portions of the globe, petty agriculturalists and industrialists have set their physical and mental energies to work producing products for direct consumption by their households and for exchange. This twofold household reproduction strategy, according to both Marxist and neoclassical approaches to development, should have disappeared from the global economy as labor was transformed into a producer as well as a consumer of capitalist commodities. But in fact, during the twentieth century, only the United States and Britain seem to have approximated this predicted scenario. Tens of millions of households in contemporary Asia, Africa, and Latin America and millions more in industrialized capitalist economies support themselves through petty commodity production alone or in combination with petty industry wage labor.

Obliging Need provides a detailed and comprehensive analysis of small-scale peasant and artisan enterprise in the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico. The authors show how commodity production is organized and operates in different craft industries, as well as the ways in which it combines with other activities such as household chores, agriculture, wage labor, and petty commerce. They demonstrate how—contrary to developmentalist dogma—small-scale capitalism develops from within Mexico's rural economy.

These findings will be important for everyone concerned with improving the lives and economic opportunities of countryfolk in the Third World. As the authors make clear, political mobilization in rural Mexico will succeed only as it addresses the direct producers' multiple needs for land, credit, more jobs, health insurance, and, most importantly, more equitable remuneration for their labor and greater rewards for their enterprise.