People of the Volcano: Andean Counterpoint in the Colca Valley of Peru (review)

In this dense and authoritative volume, Noble David Cook and his collaborator Alexandra Parma Cook provide a summary of three decades of inquiries into the social history and human geography of Peru's Colca Valley, located to the southwest of the former Inca capital of Cuzco, and near the city of Arequipa. As Cook mentions in his preface, the initial trigger for such a geographical focus was his interest in an unusually detailed 1591 visita for the middle Colca Valley, which led him to study a set of fairly complete parish registers from 1685 to the present and various other colonial censuses for the region, a documentary corpus that was complemented by research at other archives in Spain, Peru, and the U.S. The end result is a painstakingly focused microhistory that portrays this region in three crucial moments that give the book its structure—initial encounters and the emergence of a colonial hegemony, the legal and social solidification of a regional colonial Andean system, and local transformations due to the encomienda system and Old World diseases.

The first section places the emergence of a colonial system in the Colca Valley in the larger context of sixteenth-century Andean history. Cook notes the presence of two distinct polities in the region: the mostly Aymara-speaking Collagua, divided into kurakuna, or ethnic chiefs, residing in Yanque and Lari, and the Quechua-speaking Cabanas, closely allied with the Inca lords at Cuzco. He then traces the insertion of these two groups into the colonial system by following three distinct threads: the allocation of their moiety components in the 1540s to encomenderos, or Spanish conquerors presiding over their charges' tribute collection, the impact of the wars between the Pizarro and Almagro conqueror factions in the area, and the destruction of Andean sacred objects, or huacas, by Franciscans missionaries. This part closes with an assessment of the debate regarding the perpetuity of encomienda grants, which prompted five local kurakuna deeply concerned with the heavy burden of encomienda obligations to join a broader 1562 legal maneuver asking that such grants revert to the Spanish crown after an encomendero's death.

The second section is this book's pièce de resistance, for it depicts the establishment and development of local colonial political and tributary structures in the valley in revealing and precise detail. Cook begins with a sketch of an "Andean utopia" project fostered by Viceroy Toledo, which focused on the reshifting of population centers or reducciones, the introduction of corregimientos as an administrative domain mediating between kurakuna and the Spanish crown, and the formation of indigenous town councils. According to Cook, Toledo's project selectively allowed for the continuation of preconquest social norms: kurakuna could conduct public feasts and serve as paragons of social behavior, but they could not preserve their polygamous marriages, foster the drinking of the alcoholic beverage known as chicha, or transmit their office through direct inheritance. Strikingly, Cook shows that the idealized tripartite division of the foremost Andean social and kinship unit, or ayllu, proposed by Tom Zuidema for Cuzco is echoed by early seventeenth-century subdivisions in the Colca Valley. Even though the author shows how the types of tribute demanded by colonialists was severely restricted under Toledo, he does stress the highly exploitative nature of tribute collection in kind, which was acquired locally at a set price, and sold at a profit in colonial markets. He also explains the absence of Spanish haciendas in the region by arguing that communities closely controlled land devoted to agriculture and pastoralism. Moreover, Cook describes the 1570s Spanish adoption of traditional Andean labor drafts, or mit'a, as a "perverse" solution that rotated one-seventh of an administrative unit's tributaries in and out of a labor pool every year. Of course, mit'a labor conditions near mining centers (like Caylloma) or public inns alongside major trading routes (like Siguas) were excruciatingly difficult, and some technically illegal enterprises—such as weaving workshops staffed by...