when they took the “muni”: political culture and anti‐austerity protest in rural northwestern Costa Rica

Anthropologists have long been interested in capitalist development, in resistance, and in rural political movements, yet few have studied economic structural adjustment programs or the debt‐related protests that are increasingly common in developing countries. In the case of a 1988 peasant “strike” in northwestern Costa Rica, structural changes combined with other misfortunes to spark mobilization. Although the new understandings underlying this movement owed much to state actions, macrolevel policies alone cannot explain them, since local expectations and political culture are the prisms through which actors view their experiences and possibilities. This suggests that anthropologists, whose emphasis on field research and the active historical subject contrasts with other social scientists' “higher” levels of analysis, may contribute to explaining debt‐related upheavals.