Froemming, Steven John; 1999; Rational Choice and Collective Action in an Andean Community. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Washington, Seattle. Excerpt from Chapter 11 (pages 677-683).
Household Labor Investment in Phayna
The number of days that a household is expected to contribute to communal work projects depends on the intensity of construction activity during a given year. Of this, the amount of time invested in communal agricultural production and in the sectoral fallow system is relatively constant. On the other hand, the amount of labor dedicated to public utilities and buildings varies depending on the organizational abilities of community leaders and the resources available. Subsistence activities place an upper limit on the number of phayna ('communal work parties') that can be called without affecting people's livelihood. Collectively, the comuneros have ultimate say about the number of phayna and timing of phayna activity at the community assemblies. Individually, people can vote with their feet. Nonparticipation may increase when scheduling conflicts with other activities.
While I found it hard to get a precise overall count of the number of days each household was expected to contribute to community undertakings, I can give a fair -- and for comparative purposes sufficient -- approximation based on a combination of participant observation, informant recall, and review of a few phayna rolls. By my estimate, twenty to twenty-five phayna were called on average per year in Ccachín over the study period 1989-1991. This is an average of about two phayna per month (disregarding seasonal distribution). Over the three years, phayna were held during every month of the year, but in any given year, there were some months where phayna were not held. The greatest concentration of communal work parties occurred in August and September. Over thirty phayna were called in 1989 (because of my limited presence in the community in 1989, I have to go by the comuneros' reports on this rather than by my own observation). Approximately twenty-eight phayna were held in 1990. Around twelve phayna were held in 1991, the fewest in any of the three years. Of these phayna, six to eight each year were related to agropastoral production and land use. Nearly all the rest were called to build or maintain roads and community structures. The largest single project was the remodeling of the church. Between May of 1989 and April of 1990, there were thirty-two phayna held for the church, the majority of them falling between June and September of 1989 (according to comuneros, because of the church project, the start of the primary potato planting in 1989 was delayed by a few weeks). The other two major projects during my research stay, the construction of a road to bring the tractor to the community and erection of the walls for the new high school -- both in 1990 -- involved eight phayna days each.
In addition to the community-wide phayna above, different community groups held an undetermined number of work parties of their own. The Padres de Familia de la Escuela held work parties to repair the stone wall around the school yard and to work the corn and potato plots maintained by the school. The Madres de Familia maintained their own gardens and plant nursery, and held a work party to plant seedlings in the community's tree nursery. Both of the two major dance groups, Qhapaq Qolla and K'achampa, held several work parties each to construct chapels to house their láminas ('icons') for the Qoyllur Rit'i pilgrimage. Besides public works by the Club de Madres, the women worked in rotations to cook for the Vaso de Leche Program, for each of the school lunch programs (PRONOEI, inicial, the primary school), and for government engineers and troops. They also worked in rotation to decorate the statues of the saints during certain seasons of the religious calendar. The amount that any particular woman worked depended on the number and size of the interest groups they were associated with (whether they had children in PRONOEI and in primary school, whether they were signed up for the Vaso de Leche program, etc.). The rotation for the 1989 PRONOEI program in the anexo of Qochayoq, for example, was such that the sixteen women with children in the program would be called upon to work once every three weeks during the months that donated foods were available. While these public labor demands averaged over all the women probably never exceeded 10-20% of that expected of the men, in particular instances they could be significant, and the labor invested needs to be included when calculating overall household contributions to community welfare (something that is rarely done in economic analyses of the economía campesina).
To get an idea of the relative magnitude of the contribution of household labor to communal activities, it's useful to compare the figures above from Ccachín with those provided by Gonzáles de Olarte (1984) for a sample of communities in Antapampa, Paruro, and Canchis, all in the Department of Cusco. While Gonzáles's work has the advantage of including a wider population sample (649 households in twenty-two communities distributed over three microregions), it is based on household surveys asking people to recall their economic activities over the previous year, a procedure likely to yield data as rough -- if not more so -- as my own.
Gonzáles's data lumps together all collective activity -- ayni, mink'a, and phayna -- as communal activity, while my own figures focus on community-wide phayna alone. While as noted above, this understates total communal labor by ignoring the communal activity of women and community groups, for comparative purposes, I think it's prudent to focus on the phayna activity, both because my confidence in the data is higher, and because it allows for the most conservative estimate. A novel aspect of Gonzáles's analysis is that he relates all household labor allocation to "the total potential labor force" of the household ("la fuerza de trabajo potencial total"). This concept attempts to measure not only the number of persons potentially available to the household work force, but to take account of age and gender differences in productivity, using adult men as the standard. To do so, Gonzáles uses the coefficients: children 6-12 yrs. = 0.25, men and women 12-16 yrs. = 0.5, men 17-50 yrs. = 1.0, women 17-50 yrs. = .75, men and women 50 yrs. = 0.5. Accordingly, the average number of family members in a household -- 5.1 -- translates into the work potential of 3.05 adult males, while the average number of potential work days annually per household, assuming 250 potential work days per work year, is 763.(1) While Gonzáles's methodology may raise some eyebrows, it captures the idea that the campesinos themselves make discriminations in productivity by age and gender. For my purposes, nothing hinges on the accuracy of these coefficients (they could just as well be 1.0 across the board); their value here is that they provide a fixed point for cross-community comparison of phayna labor in relation to the total household labor expended.(2)
In terms of these figures, the twenty to twenty-five phayna days per year in Ccachín are 8%-10% of the 250 potential work days of a male head of household (or 5%-7% of a 365 day year). When considered in terms of the household labor potential, it is 3% (22.5/763) of the total labor power available. The phayna of the various community associations and the communal service of the women adds, at most, another 25% to this, so total average communal labor contributions probably do not exceed 4%.
It is hard to compare these figures directly with those obtained by Gonzáles because as already indicated, he puts ayni, mink'a, and phayna labor all in the same category, but a general comparison is still suggestive. Including all three categories of collective labor, he found that 2.2% of the total in Canchis, 4.2% of the total in Antapampa, and 14.5% of the total potential household labor in Paruro went into communal activities. Unfortunately, I do not have any numbers on how many person days per year, on average, households in Ccachín work in reciprocal labor relations (ayni and mink'a). I'm hard-pressed to believe that one can get very accurate information on this through informant recall in survey questions, so I don't have a high degree of confidence in the numbers provided by Gonzáles either.(3) My impression is that the number of days worked in ayni in Ccachín is at least two to three times the number of days that the comuneros are expected to attend phayna. Put another way, I judge that for 20%-33% of the time dedicated to subsistence and household maintenance, at least one member of the household participates in a reciprocal work group. If this is the case -- and I want to emphasize that at this point it is at best an informed estimate based on the average size of yapuy, hallmay, allay and other reciprocal work groups that I attended -- then at least 12% of total potential household labor in Ccachín is reciprocal or communal in nature. This would put Ccachín closer to the communities of Paruro (14.5%) than to Canchis (2.2%) or Antapampa (4.2%). Phayna activity alone in Ccachín probably equals or surpasses the ayni-mink'a-phayna activity of the survey communities in these latter two microregions.
There's a pattern to these differences. As Gonzáles notes, the intensity of collective activity varies according to a) the principal subsistence activity in the area, agricultural zones marked by more intense collective activity than pastoral ones (actually, it may be the particular agropastoral mix that is important, as some of the phayna in Ccachín come about because of incongruities between the two), and b) the extent of market participation in a community, collective labor declining as the opportunities for wage labor increase. Ccachín and other major communities in the Lares area have a strong agricultural base, and in relative terms, are still weakly integrated into the market. But the latter variable is more complicated than Gonzáles suggests. Reciprocal labor tends to decrease with market penetration, but it's less clear that the same can be said of phayna labor. Much of the phayna labor in Ccachín is a response to opportunities created by increased access to resources funneled through urban institutions, and communal projects are partially financed by an increased ability to tax community members as their participation in the market grows. On the other hand, the opportunity to migrate outside of the community to seek wage labor during slack periods in the agropastoral calendar conflicts with the community's need to schedule communal labor during the same periods. As I indicated in Chapter 9, comuneros are finding it increasingly advantageous to work elsewhere and meet their communal obligations, if need be, by paying off the resulting fines.(4)
As a percentage of total household labor, the 3%-4% dedicated to phayna may appear relatively minor. In aggregate terms, however, it represents a significant investment in the community, the equivalent of twenty people working full-time. The burden on households can also be substantial. Communal labor requirements affect certain household members more than others, and then, more at certain times of the year. While phayna tend to be scheduled for times when the opportunity costs of the communal labor are the lowest, the opportunity costs to phayna participation increase as access to labor and production markets increase. Because of differentiation within the community, the possibilities of comuneros vary in this regard. The opportunity profile of the community likewise not only differs from others, but changes over time.
It's important to remember that phayna participation is but one aspect of the total community investment expected of the comuneros. In Chapter 7, we saw that a system of universal service is used to rotate men though traditional offices. In Chapter 8, we saw that household heads (again, especially male) are expected to participate in decision making by attending the all-household assemblies. If one household member or another is present at every assembly, assembly attendance adds another ten to twelve days to a household's community-directed time profile. In addition, leadership positions in the comunidad campesina are unsalaried, and require the investment of time over and above assembly and phayna attendance. These positions generally offer greater personal reward for the individuals who take them on than the duties of common membership, but the work loads are substantially higher, and because they can interfere with subsistence activities, the positions need to be rotated regularly.(5) While there is a public good element involved to leadership and it is possible to free-ride, the direct and indirect benefits accruing to community officials are also substantially greater than those motivating phayna participation. Because of the small number of comuneros active in the junta directiva, consejo de menores, and other major leadership positions at any one time, however, if one averages the time investment over all the households in the community, it is only a small fraction of that invested in the phayna.
To all of the above, we must add the amount contributed to public projects through the community assessments. In Chapter 10, I tried to give an approximation of these monetary assessments in terms of the prevailing day wage for contracted labor in the area. In 1990-1991, the assessments were the equivalent of somewhere between eight and sixteen days of wage labor, but probably nearer the higher end of this scale. Adding together all of these various forms of household contribution to the community, the totals approach 7%-8% of total potential household labor as defined by Gonzáles.
Notes
1. It's standard in the literature to assume 270 work days per year to determine the availability of labor in rural areas, but Gonzáles uses the more conservative figure of 250 days. Either figure is somewhat arbitrary, and should not be taken to imply that campesinos in the Andes maintain a five-day work week as we conceive of it in the industrialized West.
2. As I have already indicated, age and gender distinctions are made in determining who is eligible for participating in phayna. These distinctions are made by adult men, and in particular instances they may be challenged by women (as in the case of the 1991 papa tarpuy phayna I attended). Below a certain age, male labor is not credited toward communal labor service. Above a certain age, men may be assigned an independent and less taxing phayna project. This is especially the case when the phayna is held at a considerable distance from the village, so that travel takes up four hours or more of the day. In this case, the old men form an independent work group to take on projects closer to home. Women are excluded from phayna participation for most tasks. Differences in productivity according to age are implicit in the division of roles among adult male phayna participants as well, but in contrast to the above, all receive equal credit for their work. In part, older men make up for their lack of physical vigor by their possession of information and skills gained through experience, but this lumping of all males in the same category may have as much to do with power as it does with productivity (just as the same might be said about the exclusion of women).
The principal problem I have with Gonzáles's coefficients is that outside of phayna labor -- which most often involves tasks primarily assigned to adult men within the household division of labor as well -- is that it misses the basic principle underlying the assignment of tasks to specific age-sex groups in the Andes: that of energetic efficiency. Since body weight is highly correlated with the energetic cost of most nonsedentary activities, tasks tend to be assigned to the lightest sex-age group that can effectively perform them (Thomas 1972). In terms of global efficiency, it makes no sense to speak of a six-year-old herder as having a quarter of the work potential of a seventeen to fifty-year-old man. While Gonzáles's scheme may have utility for comparing the potential total household labor force with the potential of the household for outside wage labor ("la fuerza de trabajo potencialmente asalariable") given certain assumptions about the job market (he assigns both men and women over seventeen the coefficient of 1.0 in defining this latter category), it can be misleading outside of this context.
3. Some ways of going about it are more valid than others. The most direct questions (How many days did you work in ayni? How many phayna did you attend?) are probably the least useful. The information is better reconstructed by asking comuneros how many people attended their papa yapuy, how many attended their sara t'ipiy, who owes them reciprocal labor, who do they owe, and reconstructing a composite picture of each household in the sample from that. Gonzáles (1984:241-254) is sensitive to the methodological problems, but does not provide a list of the survey questions used.
4. The highest level of phayna activity that I have found reported for any community in the Andes occurred in Masaqkancha (Paccha, Jauja) in the Mantaro Valley (Sánchez 1987). There, in 1979-1980, each comunero had to work sixty days on communal lands alone (Sánchez does not indicate how many additional phayna were called during this time period for non-agricultural tasks), with the earnings from the harvest going into the community's corporate fund . Because of time constraints during the harvest and the fact that community members earned the majority of their income in salaried activities outside of the community, some comuneros had to contract wage laborers to help them meet their phayna obligations. Masaqkancha is a small community of thirty-four households, and its situation was an exceptional one. Two years earlier, the community staged a land takeover of a bordering hacienda, and by 1979 it had increased the lands worked collectively by eighteen hectares. Sánchez notes that the community corporation achieved near universal participation in the phayna and attributes it to two factors: a) title to the land was still being adjudicated and the community needed to present a united front in working the lands to establish its claim, and b) individual access to the pastures obtained in the takeover was conditioned on participation in the agricultural phayna. Poor, cattleless members of the community did not have to participate in the work parties, but they were excluded from the benefits of the communal project as well, further sharpening economic differentiation within the community. The first factor heightens the urgency of resolving the collective action problem but does not in itself resolve it; the second, however, provides individual-level incentives for contributing to the public good. Sánchez stresses that the situation of Masaqkancha is unique, and perhaps a temporary one. The possibility remained that once title to the land was gained, pressures would mount to turn the land over for private use.
5. This is above and beyond the democratic intent behind biannual rotation. At the current levels of aggregate production and of socioeconomic differentiation in the community, there does not seem to be the economic base for political specialization.
References Cited
Gonzales de Olarte, Efraín
1984 Economía de la Comunidad Campesina. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.
Sánchez, Rodrigo
1987 Organización Andina, Drama y Posibilidad. Huancayo: Instituto Regional de Ecología Andina.
Thomas, R. Brooke
1972 Human Adaptation to a High Energy Flow System. Ph.D. Dissertation, Pennsylvania State University.