Letter to the Editor

Dear Editors,

In the Winter 2000 issue of the Journal of Social History (JSH) I had the privilege of joining a rather lengthy list of scholars who have been “savaged” in reviews or comments by Robert Jackson. Since his all too frequent surliness as a critic is well known among Latin Americanists, I chose not to respond. But after further reflection I decided to write you because the readers of JSH come from a variety of disciplines and may not know of his reputation and because too many of us decide, as I probably should have, that discretion is the better part of valor—it is more prudent just to let such things go. However, I thought it was time to question such tactics, particularly since his review of my book—The World of Túpac Amaru: Conflict, Community and Identity in Colonial Peru—was so off the mark as to leave one wondering if he had actually read the book.

Interestingly, I had criticized his tendencies, in a polite and oblique way, while having lunch together in Quito at the Americanists conference a few years ago, little suspecting that he would one day be doing the same thing to me for which I had been taking him to task. The two main concerns I have with his review are its inaccuracies that reflect a lack of thoughtful reading and his unwillingness to engage the book on its own terms. The first is the most important.

Jackson begins by stating that “In this volume Ward Stavig sets out to understand the rural society of colonial Cuzco... toward the end of the eighteenth-century at the time of the massive rebellion launched in 1780 by Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui, better known as Tupac Amaru.” Even something as simple as the chronology he has wrong. The book covers the period from the late seventeenth century through the period he suggests it covers. This could not have been too hard to discover since a different reviewer wrote, “The World of Túpac Amaru spends little time on the rebellion and its principles, offering instead a close look at everyday indigenous life in the core provinces of Canas y Canchis and Quispicanchis in the century or so before the revolt.” Yet another reviewer states that, “Focusing primarily on the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, the author adds a fascinating portrayal of the indigenous populations.”

A careful reading of the introduction alone would also have given Jackson more of a clue as to what the book was about. He would have noticed, for example, such statements as “One of the main objectives of this work is to understand and bring forth the historical agency of the men, women and children whose lives were filled with the (extra)ordinary human experiences that are the substance of this workThe book is about much more than the rebellion. It is about the world that gave shape to Túpac Amaru, the everyday world of the peoples of Quispicanchis and Canas y Canchis, and the colonial-indigenous society they formed” (xv–xvii).

Jackson actually had little to say about the book. Instead of dealing with the themes the book addresses, he decided that it should have been a quantitative rather than a qualitative study and criticized it for not being what it was never intended to be. If he had read with more care he might have discovered why I did not emphasize quantitative analysis to a greater degree. In endnote 9 in chapter 3, an endnote that someone interested in quantification should have read (not to mention that one hopes a reviewer reads with an attention to detail in any case) I wrote, “...Recording of cases and preservation of documents... were not consistent throughout time...Rather than generating statistical tables and using specific figures that create the illusion of precision where such exactness cannot exist, I have chosen to avoid illusory precision” (pp. 282–283) Notes 45 and 95 in chapter 8 also provide cautionary remarks about statistics that the reviewer either did not read or ignored. In reality, my research was painstakingly thorough. A different reviewer even observed that...