Resiliency in Hostile Environments

This book is the first ethnography of "comunero culture" in an agricultural community in the Coquimbo region of Chile. In this unforgiving environment of limited resources and cyclical drought, the comunidades agricolas make use of indivisible communal land, democratic decision-making, cooperative relations of production and resource conservation, and diverse economic activities closely linked to changing environmental conditions. Based on fieldwork spanning several years, through vivid details of daily life in a peasant community the book brings to light a determined struggle to protect land and livelihood. One particular family's story is told to illustrate the extraordinary resiliency of these communities in response to the sometimes harsh natural, political, and economic development environments in which they are situated. Exploring the ways in which social behavior is shaped by environmental factors and focusing on the strength of cultural expression, this work challenges many conventional ideas about seemingly marginalized people living in marginal lands. Resiliency in Hostile Environments places these issues within the political economy of Chile's 'transition to democracy,' an era of significant interest to students and scholars of post-dictatorship Latin American societies. Although comunero democracy has been revitalized since the return of civilian rule after the Pinochet regime, the failure of some rural assistance programs is often attributed to the government's continued use of the dictatorship's model of economic development. While the state is more attentive to rural poverty in the post-dictatorship era, some programs and policies informed by a discourse of modernization and standardization conflict with local ideals and limit the flexibility of traditional livelihood strategies practiced by community members.