Andean Worlds: Indigenous History, Culture, and Consciousness under Spanish Rule, 1532-1825 (review)

This book fills an important gap for students and nonspecialists on the colonial history of indigenous Andean peoples. Andrien draws freely on a tremendous outpouring of recent scholarship by historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, and art historians in Europe and the Americas. In particular, he introduces students to the vivid historical figures who make this subject so exciting for those who study it, from the early colonial chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, to Tupac Amaru II and his generation of eighteenth-century rebels.

Andrien organizes his book thematically: following a general introduction to Andean culture at the time of the conquest, each chapter takes one area of colonial life and follows it from the beginning to the end of the period. He makes the most of this structure to present a series of tightly organized narratives. However, in doing so, he sacrifices the coherence that an overarching chronological structure would have provided, leaving the book less accessible to students encountering this material for the first time.

Andrien's first chapter, on native Andeans' relationship with the colonial state, describes three successive stages: a first century of intensive exploitation and heavy-handed rule, a second century of relatively benign neglect, and finally a renewed attempt at intensified control following the eighteenth-century Bourbon Reforms. The next chapter focuses on the colonial economy, beginning with James Lockhart's metaphor of trunk line and feeder lines branching out from Potosí in the sixteenth century, and continuing to explore the more diversified economy that followed. Another chapter addresses literature and art, including the writings of Guaman Poma and el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the Cuzco School of painting, and the iconography of native textiles (with good black-and-white illustrations); it draws especially from the work of Rolena Adorno and Tom Cummins. The fourth chapter deals with Andean popular religion through the lens of Catholic anti-idolatry campaigns, studied by Pierre Duviols and Kenneth Mills. The final chapter addresses native resistance to Spanish rule. Beginning with the last Incas of the sixteenth century, fighting their rear-guard guerrilla war from the eastern jungles, the chapter proceeds to the eighteenth-century visionaries who fought to restore an Inca utopia in the Andes: Juan Santos Atahualpa, Tupac Amaru II, Tomás Katari, and Tupac Katari. Andrien tells this exciting story very well.

Andrien does an excellent job of synthesizing the best original scholarship (including his own on colonial administration), while always bringing out the most interesting anecdotes and characters. However, the book sometimes fails in trying to address both a student and a scholarly nonspecialist audience. Unwilling to leave out any important topic, Andrien sometimes introduces a concept (for example, Andean "vertical archipelagos") without adequately explaining it. The book might succeed more fully either as a textbook—introducing concepts more selectively and developing them more fully—or as a longer, more scholarly survey. Overall, the book is a pleasure to read and should have considerable success with both audiences.