The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity

by Eugene McCarraher

While the white invaders marauded the country with their money and brutally extractive technology, the Indians “spent their ingenuity in another direction, in accommodating themselves to the scene in which they find themselves.” Likewise, the Mexicans examined by Chase displayed a grandeur and grace inaccessible to acquisitive and industrious whites. In Mexico: A Story of Two Americas (1931), Chase juxtaposed two very different communities: Tepotzlan, the Mexican village studied by the anthropologist Robert Redfield, and “Middletown,” the Midwestern city explored by Robert and Helen Lynd. Although Tepotzlan was not unaffected by modernity, Chase made clear that to the extent they retained their mixture of handicraft, farming, and pagan-Catholic festivity, the villagers were spared the anonymity of gargantuan cities, the visual and ecological blight of industry, the callous pursuit of accumulation, and the oblivion of the numinous by calculation and enterprise.