Changing Consumption in Indian Guatemala

Abstract

The Indians of Guatemala¹ are among the economically underdeveloped peoples, popularly called “backward” and “unprogressive” and by implication static or at least slow to change. Whatever justification may lie in such appellations, as regards the total resulting society, it should not be inferred that individual Indians are less prone to change than individuals in faster changing societies.

Change in an individual is a function of alternatives presented to him; and when given realistic choices, nothing in my experience with Indians indicates that they are slower than we are to accept the ones which seem to them to be in their interest. The difference is of course in the alternatives presented; and if in contrast to us, Indians have changed little from one generation to the next, a sufficient reason is that (in the same contrast) few acceptable novelties are presented. The moral of this observation is that one should not speak of people as conservative, or use the term progressive as a personal characteristic, until it can be demonstrated that they are averse to accepting alternatives that are clearly (and by their own definition) advantageous. I have never seen this demonstrated and must assume that Indians in Guatemala are in this respect no different from people in New York, and that to alter consumption patterns one need only make available new alternatives that from their point of view are worth the cost.

It is the purpose of this paper to show that consumption patterns of the Indians of Guatemala do change in expectable ways, provided one's expectations do not violate this rule, and to show why they do not change more.