Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, Individual, and Nation in the Northern Peruvian Andes, 1885-1935 (review)

The marriage of the methods of anthropology and history in recent decades has been mutually satisfying and intellectually fruitful. But even the best such relationships, as evidenced by the historical anthropology in Nugent’s book, do not always work out.

Modernity at the Edge of Empire is a book of lofty and worthy aspirations, some telling to historians and anthropologists alike, even beyond its Andean setting. Its central theoretical message—that scholars have reflexively and wrongly assumed an “oppositional model” between state expansion and marginalized social groups (usually peasants)—makes a fine corrective to much recent literature. Instead of tirelessly resisting, sometimes popular groups strive for inclusion in a more national and “modern” state. The book also nicely stresses state formation at the “margins”—in this case, the edge being the rarely studied subtropical Chachapoyas region of the northern Peruvian Andes. Though not exactly “proctological history” (Cohn’s endearing term), this book pursues politics and state practices from below, at the local, grassroots, or everyday scene. ¹ An anthropologist by training, the author has dug deeply into the archives, to focus on the locally formative period from 1900 to 1930.

Nugent thickly describes two conflicting arcs in Chachapoyas’ sociopolitical history. The first era, 1900 to the 1920s, was dominated by local elites organized in fragmenting, feuding (and feudalist) political clans termed castas. They were the state—the aristocratic white family groups of Burga-Hurtado, Pizarro-Rubio, and Rubio-Linch—but their necessarily republican, universalist, or regional-justice discourse was a legitimating cover for a different brand of violently coercive political practice. In the 1920s, a concerted opposition emerged from below, which took republican rhetoric at its word and equated modernity with material progress (such as roads and popular education) and local democratization (including greater ethnic pluralism). At first, it centered around the newspaper Amazonas. After the fall of the national Oncenio dictatorship in 1930 (the eleven-year rule of Augusto Leguía), this movement energized around Ricardo Feíjoo, a disaffected lawyer who led the successful overthrow of traditional political clans. Now, “el pueblo” reigned locally, strengthening ties to the central state in Lima, while working to broaden regional political culture through labor, fraternal, and sports clubs. We do not learn much about events after the early 1930s or about the impact of bygone actors on the Chachapoyas of today.

Despite interesting aspects, this book seems divorced from a large body of work on Andean and Latin American history—which makes its discoveries and revelations seem far grander than they actually are. Indeed, many are historically banal or naive. Nugent discusses his elite castas as if they had nothing in common with “caciquismo” (classic Latin American clientelist bossism) or its infamous Andean variant, “gamonalism.” Similarly, the romanticized popular-liberation movement of Chachapoyas of the 1930s is (for the most part) the manifestation and movement of Allianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA)—the well-studied “anti-oligarchic” political party of Victor Haya de la Torre. On this score, Nugent is studiously vague, eluding a literature (far more critical) on the Aprista “populist,” modernizing, or millennial vision. The effect is to exaggerate and mystify the theme of state building from the edge, since APRA was more likely a national (or internationalist) movement that gained resonance and support in places like Chachapoyas. Local followers look, as elsewhere, to be largely middle-class artisans and professionals—who become elevated into “subalterns,” by semantic wizardry, by book’s end.

Methodologically or stylistically (which some now consider the same), Modernity at the Edge of Empire builds relentlessly upon an authenticating series of quotations or literal examples from archives and periodicals, many of which add little relevant to its analysis. In timing, it arrives too late on the field to score its goals. Daniel Nugent, our sadly gone brilliant historical anthropologist (with historian Gil Joseph), already mapped a sublime Latin American...