ABSTRACT
This chapter explains about the maintenance of non-wage labor relations on haciendas in highland Ecuador in the early 1980s. It addresses several issues in anthropological approaches to third world economic development. The chapter presents some of the economic and inter-ethnic history of the study region, the Riobamba area of Chimborazo Province, and describes the results of field work conducted there between 1980 and 1982. In the 1980s an increasing number of scholars have sought to correct for a tendency common to all of the "globalist" approaches; a tendency to assign all causality to the world capitalist system, and, in the process, to ignore the impact of local-level actors. The 1950s saw an expansion of Ecuador's economy related to the production of bananas for export, as well as an increase in urbanization, resulting in a growth in the urban middle-class market for dairy products.
