The focus of this thesis is rational choice and collective action in an Andean community. It's based on twenty-eight months of field work in a highland village north of Cusco, Peru, in the province of Calca, conducted between May 1989 and January 1992. I have organized my writing around three goals, 1) to provide ethnographic documentation of the community, 2) to establish the place of rationality in Andean social life, and 3) to examine collective action problems and solutions therein. I draw a portrait of Ccachín as I found it in the late 1980s and early 1990s, separate out the influence of rational, nonrational, and irrational motivations and thought processes in the carrying out of characteristic practices, and determine how and to what extent community residents are able to overcome collective action problems in the management of communal resources and the production of collective goods. I attempt to create an account that is both personal and analytical. Some of the cultural features I discuss, such as the annual door-to-door inspection of households by new officeholders ("residencia"), have been little described in the Andean literature, while others, such as the collective rounds of community boundaries ("deslinde") and the giving of animals as gifts during fertility rituals for the herds ("suñay"), provide comparative perspective.
I approach the explanation of specific acts and practices in the Andes from the perspective of rational choice theory, but my application of the theory is not doctrinaire. While I take the elementary unit of social life to be individual human action and consider rational choice theory to currently be the best-grounded model for explaining such action, I see no reason to believe that rational choice is paramount in all instances of individual action, nor that most practices can be explained in terms of a single process or motivation. As Elster (1989:9) points out, the social sciences can isolate tendencies, propensities, and mechanisms that have implications for behavior, but they more rarely are able to state the necessary and sufficient conditions under which the various mechanisms are switched on. Identifying, isolating, and weighing the mechanisms that have implications for behavior in specific contexts is no small task, and the bulk of my work here is taken up in trying to do it well. I'm perhaps a bit more sanguine than Elster about the prospects of identifying patterns in switching between different mechanisms, especially along the continuum of information costs, and when possible, I indicate what these patterns are.
The majority of decision making contexts that I concern myself with involve interdependent choices, in the sense that the outcomes for each individual depend on the choices of all, and each has to make decisions based on his or her expectations of what others will do. Among these contexts are communal regulation of sectoral fallow, theft, altruism among herders, holding of public office in the civil-religious hierarchy, fund-raising, sanctioning, the construction of public works, defending territorial boundaries, and social security and mutual aid. I consider the role that conditional cooperation, decentralized sanctions, institutional constraints, political entrepreneurs, and cooperative ideologies and values played in determining the outcome of such strategic interactions.
The data I provide on the nature and success of the sanctioning system used to ensure compliance with collective decisions and community norms is especially important, both because sanctioning itself is a second order public good on which the success of first order projects largely depend, and because too often in the Andean literature, the success of collective endeavors is attributed simply to communal values, or sanctions, when acknowledged, are treated as following automatically and unproblematically upon transgressions. The biggest collective action problem in the Andean community under study, the one that underlies all others, is the failure, despite widely-shared values and goals, to maintain a credible sanction system. Nevertheless, a remarkable amount of energy is expended in collective contexts and a lot of public work gets done. Accordingly, I seek to provide a convincing explanation for how collective action is actually achieved in Ccachín, and by extension, similar communities in the Andes and elsewhere.
References Cited
1989 Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.