Nightwatch: The Politics of Protest in the Andes (review)

In his ambitiously understated book Nightwatch, Orin Starn offers an ethnography of peasant patrols (rondas campesinas) in Peru. The book traces the rondas from their emergence in the mid-1970s through their apparent decline in the late 1990s. These dates bracket a set of strikingly transformative moments in a range of overlapping fields of inquiry of interest to Starn. In Peru they span a period marked by increasing evidence of the limits of land reforms implemented in the late 1960s, by economic crises of debt and spiraling inflation, by the increasing violence and terror resulting from the Sendero Luminoso and Tupac Amaru guerrilla movements as well as from government counterinsurgency efforts, and by the socioeconomic impact of neo-liberal economic reforms and correlated political and social developments under the regime of Alberto Fujimori. These dates also bookend a period of shifting conventional wisdom about the politics and possibilities of peasant mobilization and revolutionary reforms in post Cold War Latin America, as well as elsewhere. Finally, the period of the rondas is marked by sharp challenges to anthropology and the questioning of many of the conventions of Andean ethnography. One way to view this book is as an effort to line up these various issues as they are refracted through the lens of the rondas-or, perhaps better, through the lens of Starn's encounter with the rondas. While this effort is largely successful, the breadth of themes Starn strives to weave together sometimes limits the depth of analysis presented in the book.

The rondas emerged as a local response to a moment of crisis. Despite land reforms that promised to end generations of oppression and injustice, these conditions endured compounded by a national economy spinning out of control. Faced with what is remembered today as a period of chaos and lawlessness characterized by an epidemic of cattle rustling, highlands farmers organized nightly civil patrols. On the nightwatch, peasant ronderos did more than keep their cattle from being poached. They sought to reestablish conditions of local integrity, a sense of social order that was not being provided by the state. In many cases the community they consolidated came to be defined in part through participation in the rondas themselves, and through tenets of law, order, and right conduct enforced by the patrols. Marital disputes and sexual scandal along with rustling and thievery became objects of ronda vigilance. So too did the corruption and laziness of local police and government officials. From their point of origin in the town of Chota, the rondas emerged as a widespread self-conscious peasant movement, celebrated by NGOs, by some political parties, in media accounts, and in popular music.

Analytically, Starn's account is poised somewhere between the situated texture of a given ronda (focused largely on two cases: the community of Tunnel Six in northern Peru, and the Chota valley in the vicinity of Cajamarca) and a wider view of the rondero movement. His main chapters review the history of the rondas, the practices of ronda justice, the position of women in the rondas, the articulation of the rondas with translocal and transnational networks of NGOs, and the eventual decline of ronda leadership in the confluence of local in-fighting, the corruption of power, and the shifting terrain of Peruvian civil society in the last decade. The account is larded with rich ethnographic data evocatively presented; this is a nicely written book. Yet Starn's dogged commitment to leaving no levels of analysis unlinked has the curious effect in places of flattening the ethnographic texture of the work, of rendering what is a well fleshed out narrative as a string of thinner anecdotes. The multifaceted insightfulness of Starn's analysis-with regard to Andean themes, with regard to scholarship on Latin America, and with regard to broader discussion in anthropology and cognate disciplines-is impressively evident throughout the book. However, the breadth of issues he touches upon means that few receive detailed treatment.

In part, this has to do with the ways Starn has chosen...