The World of Tupac Amaru: Conflict, Community, and Identity in Colonial Peru (review)

The World of Túpac Amaru: Conflict, Community, and Identity in Colonial Peru. By Ward Stavig. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. xxxiv + 348 pp., introduction, maps, illustrations, glossary, bibliography, index. $25.00 paper.)

Of all the tumults and rebellions of eighteenth-century Spanish America, the Túpac Amaru Revolt of 1780–82 still commands special attention—for its scale, its ethnic complexity, its millenarian components, and the enduring legacy of mutual horror and respect generated by the rebels and their destroyers. Why did it happen in the hinterland of Cusco, springing from the provinces of Canas y Canchis and Quispicanchis? Why did it happen at this time, with this leadership? Was there some special heritage of violent resistance here? Had the conditions of indigenous life reached the intolerable because of some chance confluence of natural and human-influenced factors? Were the issues that fueled the revolt strictly tied to indigenous life in the first place? These are some of the questions addressed by Ward Stavig in The World of Túpac Amaru, a fascinating and detailed exploration of the region and social context that produced the Great Rebellion.

The events of 1780–82 have been recited and interpreted many times (by Alberto Flores Galindo, Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy, Leon Campbell, and others, including Stavig), but this book has a special aim. The World of Túpac Amaru spends little time on the rebellion and its principals, offering instead a close look at everyday indigenous life in the core provinces of Canas y Canchis and Quispicanchis in the century or so before the revolt. Chapters are topical rather than chronological and include discussions of regional geography, sexuality and marriage, cattle rustling and highway banditry, and land disputes. The topic of labor is divided into two chapters, one on nearby hacienda, obraje, church, and other personal service obligations, another on the massively disruptive Potosi mita (these provinces were among the most distant to fall within the service net of the Cerro Rico). Having provided this extensive background, Stavig reserves the last chapter for a guided tour through often misunderstood or overlooked details of the revolt and its suppression, followed by reflections on the aftermath.

This is a valuable contribution to Andean studies and to ethnohistory in general, largely because Stavig has left no stone unturned in his search for the details of everyday indigenous life. The book represents a culmination of more than fifteen years of archival research in Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and Spain, and much of its contents has been pieced together directly from manuscript sources. That said, the book is not without shortcomings, however. The introduction wanders, and throughout the text the author tends to insert awkward quotes and digressions on method and to jump from single examples to broad generalizations. Fortunately, these tendencies fade in later chapters. Stavig’s discussion of land use, for example, is outstanding, as is his treatment of the Potosí mita and its effects on this distant region. Most moving, perhaps, are the heartrending testimonies Stavig has gathered, painful reminders of the miseries suffered by those who trekked to the mines from Canas y Canchis and Quispicanchis in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unfortunately, this new and engaging material is prefaced by an overlong recital of the glories and infamies of sixteenth-century Potosí. These are mostly issues of style, but taken together they distract from the book’s aim of reconstructing a much later and distant social milieu.

When the author stays close to the course, as in the final chapter, the reward is worth the wait. Guided by a firm chronology, this chapter feels more coherent and largely achieves its aim to disentangle the webs of interest and affiliation that linked or alienated rebels, royalists, and nonparticipants in the Great Rebellion. Túpac Amaru, like other curacas in this era, engaged in commerce that crossed into both indigenous and Spanish spheres...