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

Hispanic American Historical Review 83.2 (2003) 433-434



[Access article in PDF]
Vicisitudes del discurso del desarrollo en el Perú: Una etnografía sobre la modernidad del Proyecto Vicos. By WILLIAM STEIN. Prologue by NELSON MANRIQUE. Translation by MARUJA MARTINEZ. Lima: Sur Casa de Estudios del Socialismo, 2000. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. 426 pp. Paper.

Vicos, a feudal estate, was rented by Cornell University in 1952 for the conduct of an experiment in applied anthropological research. Over the following 14 years, the estate and its Quechua-speaking population became a "laboratory" for the study and promotion of modernization and development through social engineering guided by scientific knowledge (p. 38). Allan Holmberg, the project's director, thought that it could generate a universal model for resolving problems of poverty, racism, and exploitation (p. 42).

As the title suggests, rather than examining the transformations that took place in Vicos, Stein turns the Cornell research team into the "exotic" object of his analysis (p. 37), presenting an ethnography of certain project activities: the testing of research methodologies, efforts to improve production, and the disciplining of vicosinos who violated established rules and resisted attempts to improve health conditions through modern medical practices. [End Page 433]

Stein succeeds in conveying the "exotic" and even irrational character of the project's interventions. Most remarkably, no attention was paid to relations of power. Thus, although the project goal was social transformation, Cornell accepted to work within a rental contract that stipulated the maintenance of the existing servile social relations on the estate. That is, peasants continued to pay for the right to cultivate their individual plots by providing unremunerated labor on estate fields, which became the sites of agricultural experimentation. Perhaps even more amazingly, the former mayordomowas retained in his position of managerial authority, a man who is quoted to have said: "The Indian is like a domesticated mule" (p. 52). In effect, without realizing it, the project leaders became the feudal lords of Vicos (p. 47).

If all this were not strange enough, some of the principal researchers had a deficient command of Spanish, none thought it was important to learn Quechua (p. 370), and all relied to a great extent on mestizo intermediaries—Peruvian assistants and technicians, the mayordomo, and others who were regarded with suspicion by indigenous workers. Holmberg and his colleagues for the most part remained stubbornly blind to the ways in which project goals and research results were compromised by all these factors.

In preparing this volume, Stein enjoyed access to the archives of both the Vicos Project and the Methodology Project (which functioned in Vicos in 1953) and could draw on his own experiences. He had visited Vicos on many occasions in 1952 when he was engaged in field research in the area. Later, he worked for 12 months in 1954-55 as a project assistant in Ithaca, and for a few months in 1962 as an instructor at the project's Summer Field School. After the project closed down, Stein conducted research on oral histories in Vicos. Thus it could be said that the book was in the making for almost 50 years.

The volume can be criticized for being ponderous: its arguments are sometimes convoluted and rely too much on extended quotations from a body of theoretical literature in which the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault feature prominently (p. 18). The frequency and length of quotations tend to be distracting and blur the principal lines of argument. Nevertheless, Stein does provide a rich, fascinating, and often insightful account of the Vicos Project: the manias, ideological biases, blind spots, good intentions, failures, and achievements of the Cornell team. Along the way, he also provides very extensive and informative (edited and previously unpublished) material from the project archives, especially from interviews conducted with vicosinos.

The book will be of particular interest to scholars of the ideology and history of modernization in the Andean region of Latin America.

 



Lisa L. North
York University

...

pdf

Share