8 - Rethinking Economy

Summary

When I began fieldwork in Panama, the themes of economic development and growth were becoming prominent in the political imagination. They were not new but were freshly influenced by the effects of the Great Depression, the success of the Marshall Plan in Europe and the onset of the Cold War. They were fueled as well by growing economic and political discontent in Latin America and other parts of the world. Shortly after he took office in 1961, President Kennedy created the Agency for International Development (AID) within the U.S. State Department and initiated the Alliance for Progress, which was an aid program for Latin America. Economists and others had also been turning their attention to modernization and development. In 1960, W. W. Rostow published an influential book, The Stages of Economic Growth, which carried the subtitle, A Non-Communist Manifesto. It was a five-stage story about economic growth and modernization. Rostow's chapter titles, including “traditional society,” “take off,” and the “drive to maturity,” suggested that economic change followed an evolutionary path and could be hastened with appropriate policies. My fieldwork was conducted in this political and intellectual environment, and was sponsored by the Agency for International Development. Rostow, who was then advising the State Department, first cleared the project.

My research was financed through a grant to the Harvard Business School where I had just finished my degree before returning to anthropology. My task was to provide cases for use in a Central American business school that Harvard was helping to establish, to work with the local leaders of an agricultural cooperative movement that was forming under the umbrella of the Catholic Church in rural Panama, and to carry out my anthropology fieldwork. I approached the tasks with apprehension because I knew little about fieldwork, had never written a business case (and had never read one about rural inhabitants in Latin America), and knew little about economic development. We achieved some of the goals. One of the business cases became a best seller at the Harvard Business School where it was used as a final exam for first-year MBA students. I drew on the field materials to write a PhD on a very different subject, and one of the reports that I helped produce was taken up by General Omar Torrijos when he headed the government of Panama (1968-78).