Capital, the rituals and the borders of the closed corporate community

Abstract

Few items in anthropology have had the impact of those two written by Wolf in 1955 and 1957 , where he proposed a typology of rural communities in Latin America and which elaborated his model of the closed corporate peasant community. These two works of Wolf undoubtedly paved the theoretical path . There, Wolf not only outlined the structural features that should be included in a typology of rural communities , in addition , he argued that such structures were the result of some kind of sociopolitical environments created by the larger society . Wolf said , specifically , that the closed corporate peasant communities were a creation of particular colonial policies that set a series of barriers around these indigenous communities in order to not only limit their access to sources of power and wealth in the wider society , but also to ensure that such communities provide the necessary labor for colonial enterprises and produce cash crops necessary for colonial mercantile empires.