Containing modernity

In rural indigenous communities growing participation in capitalist markets brings changes in social and productive relations. Some authors see this as leading to the breakdown of these societies and a decline in community life. This article analyzes the ways that Tupperware containers — a Western icon of consumerism — are distributed and received in an indigenous village in Mexico, showing how autochthonous use reveals local social structures and practices in ways that question automatic causal links between modernization and Western notions of consumerism.