In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Somos como Incas: Autoridades tradicionales en los Andes
  • Waskar T. Ari
Somos como Incas: Autoridades tradicionales en los Andes. By Beatriz Pérez Galán. Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2004. Pp. 270. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. $24.00 paper.

For the twentieth century, Peru is often used as the prime example of the extinction of ayllus, the Inka and pre-Inka indigenous political and economic Andean organization. While many histories describe ayllus in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, little systematic analysis of ayllus as a phenomenon throughout late-twentieth century Peru exists. The author tries with some success to remedy this situation in this book.

The study forms part of the rapidly increasing literature on globalization and indigenous peoples in Latin America. Pérez Galán bases her argument on five suppositions: first, that the ayllu system (known in the Pisac region of Peru as wachu) is currently used to legitimize ethnic citizenship; second, Pisac's ayllu system has been converted into a marketable piece of tradition attached to the church, tourism and festivities; third, the wachu system survived in Peru as part of the tradition of hacienda labor; fourth, the wachu as utilized in Pisac is a mechanism for peasants and in some cases women to gain prestige and limited power; fifth, wachu and indigenous identity are perceived as both a curiosity and a reflection of authenticity, at the same time both are linked to longstanding racism through relationships promoted by tourism. The implications are that, once closely examined, wachu's relationship with tourism is not as bad as it first appears and that this case proves that globalization provides a small window of opportunity from which indigenous peoples can speak out and maintain some control through their ethnic institutions.

Based on her doctoral dissertation, the book tackles the institutional and practical meanings of wachu through four aspects: wachu and the ritual universe in Pisac, the construction of tourism discourse in Peru, the relationship between town and villages in Pisac, and the relationship between wachu and power. Pérez Galán considers how the wachu interacted with formal haciendas in Pisac. She also emphasizes the subaltern condition of wachu today and describes how new forces of domination such as tourism emerged. She notes, however, that wachu still enjoys some autonomy in Pisac at the level of the villages. Pérez Galán's description of wachu's today [End Page 466] in the last first three parts is very thorough. She shows convincingly that the wachu maintains a coherent political presence in the village, especially on ex-haciendas, and acts to solve many village problems (e.g., relationships with other villages, the Church, and municipal authorities). The weakest part of her discussion is about ayllu and its relationship with wachu. Thus, she mentions very briefly the importance of ayllu in Bolivia, without going into specifics of how the differences.

Her discussion of wachu and politics, however, is even more disappointing. Here her analysis is almost exclusively top-down, surprising for an essay that presumably discusses the wachu under globalization. Her argument rests exclusively on an analysis of a ritual rather than analyzing the broader role of wachu in politics. She does not analyze why the ayllu system (ie., wachu) is fragmented, hybridized and distorted in Peru, nor does she consider the ayllu in other parts of Peru, such as Puno. Likewise, her discussion of how indigenous peoples fit within the national context rarely takes into account the voice of native peoples themselves. Her framework, in which she asserts that the way to measure indigenous reaction to their place within society is through rebellions, is simplistic and ignores the multiple other forms of participation and resistance that can be uncovered through diligent work in rural archives. Furthermore, although she draws on Olivia Harris' argument throughout, she fails to explicitly acknowledge Harris' path-breaking ideas regarding ayllus in Northern Potosí, Bolivia.

Overall, this book does enable a more sophisticated grasp of indigenous peoples in Peru. These peoples have used wachu in an attempt to legitimate their traditional ruling structures, and globalization has provided a new context of subalternization. I hope that both the author and others will further explore a...

pdf

Share