Tyler Cowen is Professor of Economics at George Mason University. His previous books include In Praise of Commercial Culture and What Price Fame?.

Markets and Cultural Voices

The University of Michigan Press

Contents

Chapter One

What happens when poor, Nahuatl-speaking Mexican artists enter global art markets? What choices do they face? What is required for them to succeed? I will address these questions in this book by tracing the theme of liberty versus power in the lives of several Mexican painters, three of them brothers. These individuals have painted both on amate paper (bark paper) and on board-in both cases, for sale abroad and to North Americans in Mexico. They all hail from the small, rural pueblo of San Agustn Oapan in the state of Guerrero in central Mexico.

Throughout this study, the theme of liberty versus power will interlock with two primary topics: (1) how poor rural communities develop and grow richer and (2) how the globalization of culture affects diversity and the cultural voices of the poor.

Economic Development

By the term liberty, I mean the positive ability of individuals to control their lives, support their families, shape their cultures, and speak their minds. Liberty requires wealth, and questions arise about how wealth is created and distributed.

The stories of the artists featured here and the broader story of amate painting present a microcosm of successful economic development. The amate and crafts merchants have succeeded through intense training; investment in unique, nonreplicable skills; marketing to outsiders; and the cultivation of trade networks. The residents of Oapan have developed a "cluster of creativity" to drive their development. Michael Porter, in his Competitive Advantage of Nations (1998), cited such clusters as critical to the economic success of advanced nations; the Japanese electronics industry, Italian shoe making, and Swiss pharmaceuticals are classic examples.

Spatial concentration matters for the developing world as well, arguably to a greater degree. In Mexico (and many other places), it is common that a single art form will be found in one village or a small number of villages and nowhere else. This geographic clustering implies not only that the underlying conditions for creativity are fragile but also that small communities can be extremely dynamic. A village can take off if it captures these artistic and economic synergies. The history of the arts in Oapan shows both such dynamism and such fragility and thus offers a case study in the evolution of a successful creative cluster. Oapan's ability to generate such a cluster has been essential to its economic growth and thus to the liberty of its residents.

Creative clusters have improved the quality of life in Oapan significantly over the last forty years. The extension of the market nexus to the pueblo, rather than impoverishing the community, has provided dramatic boosts in the standard of living. Whether we look at health, food, transportation, household conveniences, or entertainment, village residents are far better off than they were in times past. Amate painting and the general growth of trade in Oapan illustrate the payoffs from successful "indigenous" entrepreneurship. The episode at hand gives us reasons to be optimistic about economic development out of rural poverty.

The story presented in this book is not, however, one of liberty alone. The market means of producing wealth must be distinguished from the use of political power to extract wealth from unwilling victims. The history of the Mexican poor reflects an ongoing race between these differing forces.

Sociologist Stanislav Andreski, in his 1966 book Parasitism and Subversion, puts this distinction at the center of the Latin American predicament. He draws on Franz Oppenheimer's earlier The State ([1908] 1999)-a formative work in German sociology-which developed the theme of liberty versus power. Economist Gordon Tullock (1967) provided a more general contrast between voluntary exchange and predatory "rent-seeking" behavior, which seeks to grab resources from others in lieu of producing wealth. More recently, Hernando de Soto (The Other Path, 1989) has written on wealth creation in indigenous communities. He argues that well-defined property rights and protection against arbitrary confiscations can mobilize indigenous entrepreneurship and raise living standards.

I present the case studies of this book as illustrating these intellectual traditions. The lives of the Oapan painters illustrate the continuing relevance of the distinction between production and predation. While markets have become increasingly important in Oapan, politics has played a significant role as well. Chapter 2 will show how corrupt police have proven an enemy of the amate painters. Chapter 5 will focus on politics and examine the forces that have sought to confiscate the land and wealth of Oapan-to the detriment of the community, its prosperity, and its creativity. Nonetheless, the story of the Oapan painters is on the whole a positive and optimistic one, featuring growth in living standards and creative achievements.

Cultural Globalization

Liberty is not just about wealth; it also concerns having a cultural voice. But a cultural voice requires access to markets, access to audiences, and some degree of financial-and thus creative-independence.

Globalization has enabled the Oapan community and the amate painters to find their cultural voices. High-quality amate painting, despite being tightly clustered in four neighboring rural Mexican villages, relies on global markets. North American buyers, patrons, and technologies have been essential to amate painting since the beginnings of the art in the 1960s. Whatever difficulties and compromises the painters have had to face, amate painting has given them the means to develop a new cultural tradition and express their older cultural identities.

While the amate arts are but a single example, they suggest how a U.S.-Mexico cultural partnership might be fruitful and at least partially supportive of indigenous cultures. Critics frequently charge that poorer indigenous societies are corroded or ruined by outside contact with larger and richer societies. Amate markets, a case study in globalization, show how cross-cultural contact can mobilize creative energies.

The history of amate production does not fit the usual story about how globalization or cross-cultural exchange wipes out the artistic production of smaller indigenous societies. Oapan residents tend to look favorably on their contacts with the United States, which they view as providing a counterweight to the larger national Mexican culture surrounding them. Selling to foreigners has helped them maintain, extend, and preserve their cultural achievements. In essence, the very large culture (United States) is helping the very small culture (Oapan) survive against a larger surrounding culture, mestizo Mexico.

The history of amate illustrates another twist on standard accounts of globalization. Very small cultures often need to trade and exchange ideas with their immediate neighbors-namely, other very small cultures-to realize their cultural voices. Much larger cultural units, such as Mexico and the United States, can support such a trade of ideas across the smaller cultural units. The spread of high-quality amate painting from Ameyaltepec to Oapan shows this mechanism at work. The two pueblos are very close together, both in space and in terms of cultural origins. Yet the painting of complex amate "stories" (historias) spread from one pueblo to the other only in the environments of Taxco, Cuernavaca, Acapulco, and Mexico City, where larger marketplaces brought indigenous painters together and helped them share ideas.

The history of amate also suggests that it is hard to draw a clear distinction between forces preserving indigenous communities and forces corrupting them. In this instance, contact with the outside world, trading for the amate paper itself (from the San Pablito Indians), transportation to Cuernavaca, and sales to American tourists all mobilized the creative achievements of San Agustn artisans. Forces of this kind, however, also led to subsequent cultural declines. A ten-hour trip on burro, from the pueblo to the city, has become a three-hour trip in a car, truck, or bus. As the citizens of Oapan have had more contact with the outside world, they have taken less care to preserve their native traditions, such as dances and mask making. Social customs have changed or eroded. Many people have left the community, either for larger Mexican cities or for the United States, never to return on a permanent basis. Amate production itself has ended up as largely unprofitable for many of the artists (see chapter 6).

Oapan thus provides one indication of how cross-cultural contact mobilizes the creative fruits of a society before transforming that society beyond recognition. In an earlier work, Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures (2002), I examined this phenomenon more generally and noted a common pattern (the "Minerva model"). An initial meeting of cultures often produces a creative boom, as individuals trade materials, technologies, and new ideas. In many cases, a richer culture will hire the creative labor of the poorer culture and provide financial support for its creations. Temporarily we have the best of both worlds, at least from a cultural point of view: the core of the smaller or poorer culture remains intact, while it benefits from trade and markets its unique worldview. Over time, however, the larger and wealthier culture upsets the creative wellsprings of the poorer culture. The poorer culture is so small, relative to the larger culture, that it cannot remain insulated. The poorer culture ends up more modern, richer, and often better off, but it is also less creative, if only because it is less unique.

The question, therefore, is not whether cross-cultural contact is either uplifting or destructive, for frequently it is both. Cross-cultural contact often "cashes in" the potential creativity embedded in a culture. By accepting the eventual decline of that culture, we are also mobilizing its creative forces to unprecedented levels, at least for a while.

The field of cultural economics typically focuses on institutions in those countries where it has evolved, namely, the United States and Europe. It neglects poorer societies and the special problems (and opportunities) they face in producing and funding their creative outputs. I part from mainstream cultural economics by examining what is sometimes called "folk art," "outsider art," or "naive art." Whatever we may take these terms to mean, the creative activities at hand fit neither the model of Western high art nor that of Western popular culture.

In the case of amate, we have an art popular in its society but sold almost exclusively to wealthier outsiders. Unlike high culture, the amate arts do not have many close or direct links with institutional gatekeepers, such as museums, fund-raising networks, government subsidies, and historical scholarship and canonization. In these regards, the amate arts resemble folk art. The amate arts are not, however, a mere generic repetition of given themes and techniques, as are many folk arts. Many amate artists produce works of two different kinds: (1) cheaper generic works for immediate sale to uninformed audiences and (2) higher-quality original creative works (often commissioned in advance) for patrons and better-informed clients.

Method

Amate painting, like so many Mexican commercial enterprises, is organized in terms of the individual artistic entrepreneur and the entrepreneurial family. Amate painters typically do not work through larger firms or cultural organizations. My investigation therefore uses the medium of economic biography, a neglected method in cultural economics. Economists profess a strong interest in "methodological individualism," but rarely do they take these strictures literally. Many empirical investigations of culture move quickly to larger institutions, such as museums or multinational entertainment corporations. In statistical work, economists measure the actions of particular individuals (through panel data sets), but they commonly ignore individual histories and biographies.

Unlike many artistic biographies, this book looks at failure as well as success. History uses paper trails, which favor well-known artistic episodes and highly literate eras, such as French Impressionism and the Italian Renaissance. In reality, most artists do not have their lives recorded on paper and do not achieve widespread celebrity, even when their work is of high quality. This study examines how some lesser-known creators try to survive as artists-and the choices they face in seeking to pursue their art and earn a living. Such a focus illuminates aspects of art markets that a study of Michelangelo or Monet does not.

The narratives presented here attempt to reflect broader truths about questions of general interest. The stories concern only one small part of Mexico and offer no proof of generality per se. Nonetheless, the case study and biographical methods speak to generality in a number of ways.

Consider, for instance, the issues surrounding foreign buyers, cultural imperialism, and the supposed corruption of indigenous art forms. A narrative can offer general insight in a number of ways. First, particular cases can weaken the plausibility of general claims to the contrary. For instance, if it is argued that wealthy American customers corrupt third world artisans and silence their cultural voices, the history of amate painting offers a useful corrective. Second, cases show us what to look for in other investigations. For instance, in a globalizing world, we find an important role for foreign buyers in Australian Aboriginal art, Persian carpets, reggae music, and many other creative art forms (Cowen 2002). Third, particular cases teach us how general mechanisms operate. We learn how the existence of foreign buyers confers prestige on amate art and partially counteracts negative ethnic stereotypes within Mexico; we see that many painters start trying to market themselves to the foreign buyers as "Aztec" and "exotic"; we better understand the role of tourist centers, such as Cuernavaca, in bringing together buyers and artists; and so on. Studying cases allows us to take general mechanisms and make them institutionally richer and more persuasive.

This investigation thus stands in a broader methodological tradition. Several essays in the volume Social Mechanisms edited by Peter Hedstrm and Richard Swedberg (1998) have fleshed out the idea of mechanisms as a central part of social science. Hedstrm and Swedberg there call for "an analytical approach that systematically seeks to explicate the social mechanisms that generate and explain observed associations between events" (1). Jon Elster there defines a mechanism as "intermediate between laws and descriptions." He explains, "Roughly speaking, mechanisms are frequently occurring and easily recognizable causal patterns that are triggered under generally unknown conditions or with indeterminate consequences" (45).

Social science mechanisms of this kind stand on a middle ground between pure theory and pure descriptive empirics. They tell us how theory regulates the relationships between variables in a setting with some institutional richness. To better understand these mechanisms, we need to see how they operate in practice. More specifically, we cannot understand the theme of liberty versus power in a purely abstract setting. This bring us back to concrete histories and stories, informed by a broader theoretical understanding; in this context, it brings us back to the lives of the amate painters.

The Protagonists

Marcial Camilo Ayala Marcial was born in San Agustn Oapan, a small and remote Mexican village in Guerrero populated by indigenous Nahuas. Since the 1960s, most households have been involved in producing amate (bark paper) paintings and ceramics for sustenance.

Marcial is the leading amate painter in the region and the only family member who is fully literate. Born in 1951, Marcial taught himself Spanish in his early twenties, working from a Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary. He used Carlos Castaneda's Teachings of Don Juan-still a favorite book of his-as his reading text. Marcial reads voraciously, at least when he has free time from art and from village politics and when his diabetic condition does not interfere. He has read Dante's Divine Comedy twice and has several times painted his vision of the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. He has painted the cave allegory from Plato's Republic as well. Marcial loves Beethoven (his favorite), Mozart, Dvork, and Bach. Marcial is a political leader in Oapan, in part because of his eloquence at town meetings, and he is a strong advocate for the rights of indigenous cultures.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Markets and Cultural Voicesby Tyler Cowen Copyright © 2005 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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