Froemming, Steven John; 1999; Rational Choice and Collective Action in an Andean Community. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Washington, Seattle. Excerpt from Chapter 8 (pages 559-565).

Anniversary Committee

The Anniversary Committee is charged with organizing the festivities for the anniversary of the official recognition of Ccachín as a comunidad campesina on November 28th, 1966. The celebration has been an annual event since the early 1980s. Members are selected by the asamblea general a month before the anniversary and the committee disbands after the event. The committee organizes a serenata ('serenade') on the vigil on the anniversary, and a dance competition, invitational soccer tournament, and community feast on the day of the event.

As far as I could tell, there is no set criteria for selection, other than the expectation that committee members will do a good job. In 1990, the president of the committee was a man who had been named to serve as a barrio de varayoq for the coming year, and other committee members had substantial community service records as well. By oversight, however, the committee neglected to issue a formal invitation to the school, and the head teacher did not organize the school children to participate. He blamed the problem on the president of the committee, who he described as an analfabeto ('illiterate'). The high school students, on the other hand, were invited and contributed a lot of energy to the event. The hard feelings of the primary school principal were probably exasperated by competition between the directors of the primary and secondary schools. In 1991, the assembly selected young, schooled, and worldly men who had not yet held community offices. After having comuneros tease me for the better part of the year about taking on a cargo, the assembly chose me to be treasurer of the committee, saying that it was the easiest job of all -- "all you have to do is count the money!"⁽¹⁾

Considerable expense is involved in purchasing the prizes awarded for the dance competition and soccer tournament and in buying the food served by the committee. The principal income for the festival comes from fines for daños in the fields.⁽²⁾ From my experience as participant-observer, being treasurer wasn't easy. Not only does the treasurer keep track of income and expenses, the treasurer is given the keys to the corral and is responsible for collecting the fines from those whose animals have been caught damaging people's fields -- a thankless and conflict-filled task. Management of the corral was beyond my abilities, and the secretary assumed the chore in exchange for my typing all of the letters inviting community clubs and dignitaries to participate. Committee members impressed upon me that we needed to prove out capabilities to the community ("Tenemos que mostrar"), and I took it that they considered this to be a test, a showcase, and a catapult to other community positions and honors.

Since the bulk of the committee's time leading up to the anniversary goes into rounding up stray animals, participation on the committee provided me with a good vantage point to observe the collection of damages in the community. The anniversary falls at the start of the rainy season, soon after the planting of the potato and corn sectors, a time of critical importance for the community to have an effective means of controlling damage by the animals. Given the immediacy of their need to raise funds, members of the anniversary committee approach the task of patrolling the fields with a much stronger motivation than the varayoq, who normally have responsibility for the task, and their coverage of the community is more comprehensive and persistent. The varayoq do not usually patrol the fields but rather respond to individual complaints and receive animals captured and brought to them by irrate comuneros who have suffered damage to their crops.

The morning after the committee was constituted, members arose hours before sunrise to drive all of the pigs out of Pampallaqta, a nearby fallow sector from which they had been banned. While the prohibition against pigs in Pampallaqta was long-standing and based on the comuneros' fear that the pigs spread potato blight with their rooting (through their "aire" -- 'air', 'saliva'), the day before we arrived, at least eighty animals were counted in the sector. There had been even more, but anticipating the formation of the committee at the assembly, people had begun to relocate their animals to other areas. With the benefit of a full moon, the majority of people were able to get their pigs out of the sector before we arrived. At 4:00 AM, I encountered one of my comadres in route to retrieve her two pigs, but my companions on the committee beat her to it, resulting in a 5,000,000 intis ($5.00) fine. All told, we captured twenty-two pigs in the sector, drove them the forty-five minute walk to the village, and locked them in the corral. Many (including my host family) told me privately that they intended to take their animals to Pampallaqta again when the committee's work was done, aware that the ban was unenforced most of the year. There are few areas where one can legitimately pasture the pigs, and they don't grow well on the scraps, refuse, and excrement they live on when pastured in the streets. The committee discussed strategies for getting the most animals in one fell swoop. While we knew that about thirty cows and horses regularly crossed over into Ccachín's cornfields from Choquecancha, the day we went to capture them, there were only three, leading the committee to decide to leave them alone and return another day, maintaining the element of surprise to bolster revenues. Knowing that people are less careful -- or have more constrained labor options -- in caring for their herds on days of community work parties and on Todos los Santos ('All Saints Day'), the committee scheduled roundups for these days. In this way, the committee aggressively served it's mandate, contributing to a recognized public good (there were at least two involved: the reduction of risk to everyone's crops, and a public celebration) while causing a certain amount of private anguish.

The committee was diligent in its task, but it was not merciless, and it was not all-together even-handed. When I caught DC with a pig and four piglets in Pachawala, she begged that I let them go, saying that she was only there for the day, she didn't make a practice of going there, and I could do better by catching the other three troops of pigs she pointed out below. She was clearly upset, and when she started to escape with her pigs, the president of the committee advised me to let her go. One day the twelve-year-old daughter of my hosts came home to report that someone on the committee had captured one of the sheep she had been herding that had strayed into a corn field, but she cried until he let the animal go. Everyone on the committee encountered excuses and everyone had different ways of dealing with them, but to avoid confrontation, most animals were let go without a penalty if the owners could retrieve them before they could be closed into the corral. One of the biggest complaints was that committee members showed favoritism by providing inside information to family members so that they could avoid a fine. Several comuneros grumbled that they had to pay fines when the families of committee members, who grazed their animals in prohibited areas right alongside everyone else's, were tipped off and removed their animals from a sector to be raided while the rest got caught.

Another complaint was that the information about which sectors were closed to daño was not known to all. The decisions of the asamblea general were not posted, and word of mouth was not always sufficient, so if one missed a meeting, one might not know. Ignorance did not exempt one from the rules, but when the rationale for a rule strayed too far from common knowledge, common sense, or consensus, the rule was more frequently violated and was more difficult to enforce. The comuneros made careful assessments of the damage that different animals in cropped sectors could do, but their consensus broke down when it came to pasturing pigs in fallowed areas. There was wide agreement about the damage that animals could do in the corn, lisa, and potato fields, but much less about allowing pigs into the sectors nearest the village that were being allowed to rest. Don AC, for example, had been grazing his pigs near the cornfields, but when that sector was closed to the animals, he moved them to Pachawala which was uncultivated for fear that they would otherwise break in and destroy someone's corn. Despite his best intentions, he was fined anyway, and he considered it unfair. He argued that the committee should focus on real damages rather than hypothetical ones (he did not consider his pigs to be doing any damage since there were no crops), and considered it unfair that Pachawala was targeted when the day before fifteen cattle were in Ankawachana eating the emerging bunch grass and doing far more damage (to resources reserved for construction) than his pigs.

To organize the festivities, the committee met frequently and reached decisions by informal consensus. Meetings started late, lots of time was spent on trivial details, and important items were overlooked -- not unlike many informally structured work-groups in the United States. Still, at critical moments, enough got done that the celebration was later considered to be among the best by community standards.⁽³⁾ Several small crises, however, emerged during the course of the committee's work. The first was more of a personal crisis for me than a group one, because most of the committee never knew about it. The question was whether to disclose what I knew. When it came time to purchase the awards for the soccer tournament, the person authorized by the committee to do so did a price comparison of soccer balls in all of the stalls in Calca, bought the cheapest, and then persuaded the shop owner to write out the receipt at the highest price offered by his competitors for the same item. The committee member pocketed the difference. The amount was not much, and I suspect that others on the committee would have been tempted to do the same had they been in a similar position (he justified it as a perk for doing all the legwork, and the ease with which the storekeeper agreed to falsify the receipt suggests that it was common practice). But it clearly was a deception, and he was aware that it would have caused an uproar had the rest of the committee found out. I opted for the role of outside observer over inside accountant, and decided not say a thing.⁽⁴⁾

The second crisis occurred at the soccer tournament. Sometime during the event, the secretary of the committee reported that he had lost 5,700,000 intis (about 5% of the committee's total income). He said that the money had fallen out of his pocket (the story was believable, because I had heard of it happening to others under less suspicious circumstances). The committee took his word on the matter, but pressured him to make up the loss out of his own funds. He did not have the money (equivalent to about three days' labor) and wanted the committee to absorb the loss. He did not want the news to go beyond the committee, because he feared that if the loss was reported to the asamblea general, people would think that he pocketed the money. Since he did not repay the loss, the committee reported it in its final account to the assembly, and he was asked to explain what happened by the head teacher. The assembly accepted his explanation, and determined that since the money was lost "during service to the community, " it need not be repaid (the fact that the committee's accounts were in the black and that the committee turned over the net proceeds of its work to the assembly undoubtedly influenced this decision).

The third crisis was likewise related to money. On one occasion, when the community president needed to travel, there were no funds in the community treasury, and he was given a loan out of the anniversary committee proceeds, with the promise that he would repay. The loan basically represented the movement of money from one community account to another, but since funds are earned by and earmarked for the work of the respective committees, it was taken seriously. In this case, the threat of taking the problem to the community had an effect, and the president repaid the loan on the morning of the asamblea general.

The committee was so successful in its fund-raising endeavors in 1991 that it raised $27 more than it spent. Committee members wanted to use the money to buy something for the community and generated several ideas -- a flag of Tawantinsuyo, a Peruvian flag with shield (one of the community's two had been lost), a Petromax kerosene lantern (they feared, however, that it would break), or a typewriter (it cost too much) -- as they felt that it was better to purchase something for the community rather than turn the money over to the junta directiva. They didn't want the funds to get used up in administrative functions. However, no one was able to make the purchase before the next asamblea general, so ultimately, the committee gave the money to the community. The teniente gobernador spoke at the assembly and thanked the committee, saying that in past years the committee didn't operate this way, and that any money that was left simply disappeared. He supposed that if previous committees had any surplus, they drank it up. The assembly thanked me for my service and for my "guidance" of the committee, but other than taking it upon myself to prepare a final income and expense report, other committee members took the initiative, did all the critical tasks, and guided me along the way. The celebration itself was similar to those of other years. The other committee members were responsible for generating a surplus, not me. The ultimate honor for me would be to say that my presence had no effect whatsoever, that is, that I totally fit in. Such was not the case though, and most likely, the accountability of the committee internally and before the general assembly was heightened by my presence.

Notes

1. My name had come up one other time during a nomination process -- for a fund-raising committee for the school -- but villagers laughed at the suggestion and didn't act upon it. On another occasion, a comunero -- chosen to be the next carguyoq for the Virgin of Guadalupe -- told me about a dream he had the night he was chosen in which I was named the carguyoq instead of him. People who heard him telling the story referred to me as "recipiente" ('recipient') for the rest of the festivities, but the cargo was never passed on to me. After being named treasurer of the Anniversary Committee, several men addressed me as "comunero," in honor of my finally taking on a community position.

2. For the 25th Anniversary, the committee set a goal of raising 100,000,000 intis ($100), and surpassed it. The breakdown of income and expenses was as follows:

3. The biggest complaints came from visitors from neighboring communities. The soccer team from Lares complained that dance competition started late, that the lines had not yet been chalked to mark the boundaries of the field, and that by the time all of this was done, the soccer championship would be set back (they had a point, as everything was running five hours behind the announced times, and they had a two hour hike to return home ). The Lares team likewise recoiled at the team entry fee (about $3.00) that the committee asked for with a soccer ball as trophy, arguing that there should be no entry fee at all as this was an anniversary celebration, not a kermesse ('kermis', 'fundraiser'). After a heated discussion, during which the committee was chastised by the visitors for its poor organization, it was decided that the four visiting teams would play first at half the price with a lamb going to the champion, following by a tournament among the home teams for the ball.

4. Besides the ethical dilemma facing me as a participant observer, there was another factor involved in the way I resolved it. As noted in Chapter 6, sanctioning creates a public good, and it is difficult to explain in terms of rational choice when it entails person cost. In this case, the costs to me were both personal and professional. On the personal level, it would have caused bad feelings toward me on the part of the committee president and placed me at the forefront of a conflictive public scene. On the professional level, whatever prestige I might gain in the community from moral impeccability would be outweighed by serving notice that I could not be trusted with a secret. The latter is not something anyone -- much less an anthropologist -- can take lightly.