The nature of interaction between traditional agrarian society and the
‘modern world’ has remained a controversial debate amongst anthropologists,
sociologists and political theorists. It remains contentious as to whether the
dominance of modern values over traditional is desirable; whether the arrival of
the market and modern commerce betters or worsens the conditions of rural
society and its relationship with the metropol; whether such change is received
with apprehension or optimism by the members of rural society.
Joel Migdal, for example, puts forth certain arguments proposing the concept
of ‘culture contact’—‘that exposure and contact are the causes of change.’
Migdal identifies three reasons suggesting why such change would be likely to
occur: (1) The benefits of the modern far outweigh the benefits of the
traditional. (2) The individual is free from severe institutional restraints
which would prevent him from making an unimpeded decision. (3) Those individuals
who select the new are rational and are optimisers, and those individuals who do
not accept the modern fail to do so because of “wrong” or nonrational values.’
Most theorists, however, tend to agree that modern society, for good or bad,
is clearly encroaching on traditional agrarian society and gradually moulding
its values, economic systems and sociopolitical institutions into variants of
the modern equivalent. However, this consensus fails to account for one
extremely significant fact: that despite the overwhelming economic, political
and cultural dominance of the modern world, traditional agrarian structures
continue to persist in various forms: the feudal estates of Third World
countries, plantations and latifundismos in Southern Italy and much of Latin
America, and so on.
The questions thus arise: why do such traditional social relations persist in
spite of the modern impulse? Why do customs and rituals and social codes play
such an important part 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.
