[1999] MAYER, Enrique; GLAVE, Manuel. «Alguito para ganar (a little something to earn): profits and losses in peasant economies». American ethnologist, 26(2): 344-369. May.

We explore various ways in which small-scale peasants in the highlands of Peru conceptualize the everyday concept of profit in the contemporary context of neoliberalism.

Through a process of approximation, we use the results of a survey of potato fields in two comparables valleys in Peru to clarify the differences between a strict business accounting procedure to establish profits or losses and the procedure that peasants use to evaluate the profitability of cash crops. We suggest that peasants evaluate profits or losses of cash crop in terms of a simple cash-out and cash-in flow. We indicate that this kind of calculus carries and implicit subsidy that permit market participation but provides little or no long-run benefit under prevailing productivity conditions and price levels.

We also look at how farmers evaluate the status of their subsistence crops by showing that they ignore important cash expenses that are necessary to produce them. Finally, we describe accounting procedures characteristics of Andean peasants to understand how they monitor resource flow in their household-based farms. Analysis of the data leads as to question the «subsistence first» model of peasants economies and to posit and interdependent relationship between subsistence and commercial sectors in which money plays an important but perverse role as it cycles through to the market and the household.