Ethnographers who study the Andes of South America have re-cently begun questioning some of the underlying assumptions of our profession. The hallmark of much traditional Andeanist ethnography has been an emphasis on discovering in the lives of contemporary people those cultural practices that are of Native American origins. This approach is now decried as yet another example of cultural imperialism, the Western impulse to search for exotic" Others." Our fascination with Indians, we fear, has led us to a distorted portrayal of the complex lives of contemporary people, for many of whom indigenous culture is only a single aspect of a multifaceted identity (Weismantel 1991). In our desire to defend Andean cultural values, we have perhaps overlooked the realities of Andean societies, and so reduced their histories to a static and timeless" culture" that has little to do with the lived experience of those we study.

The entire notion of cultural continuities between the preCo-lumbian past and the present is under attack. A consensus seems to have been reached that the earlier paradigm of lo andino, the idea of a shared Andean culture still existing in remote peasant villages and within rural households, having outlasted the demise of its fullblown manifestations in great civilizations such as that of the Inca, must be abandoned as an essentialist fiction.