Narratives

I chose to tell the stories in the first chapter – about Marcel in John Berger's novel, Eloi and Eulalia at Alto, the James Bay Cree and Inuit, the Yavapai Indians and the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Sioux – because they bring out, in various ways and more forcefully than would a general theoretical analysis, some important truths about how humans value and choose. In some, but not all of these stories, the protagonists are unusual; in their choices they were in a minority. But in the form of their valuing and choosing I believe they are not atypical.

It might be thought that the attitude that informed the choices of Marcel and Eloi and Eulalia was a remnant or holdover of an attitude to money and commerce that was once common among the European peasantry. John Berger himself mentions the French peasant's “in-built resistance to consumerism.” Juliet Du Boulay talks of the Greek villager's “basic reluctance to buy and sell at all.” Two different studies of rural Spain describe “a deeply rooted feeling against commercial trading” (Susan Tax Freeman) and “a kind of shame in the pure market transaction” (William Christian). All these studies were done in the 1960s and 1970s. Ruth Behar writes that she too found that “something of [this] old European peasant ethic has remained intact” into the 1980s in the village she studied in Spain, at least among the older people.