Shaping Society through Dance: Mestizo Ritual Performance in the Peruvian Andes (review)

During the past forty years, Latin America has experienced a resurgence of festival arts both within the traditional context of the fiesta and in new venues, such as staged performances and contests. With the rapid dissemination of a global mass culture, local traditions have become important markers of distinction for particular groups, even as these traditions are incorporated into regional and national folklore repertoires and fiesta performances are televised to nonlocal audiences. Folklorists have therefore turned their attention to the politics of cultural production and reproduction in their examinations of festival. Zoila Mendoza's study of the comparsas (dance troupes) participating in the San Jerónimo Patron Saints Fiesta in the Cuzco region of Peru is a welcome addition to this burgeoning scholarship. Shaping Society through Dance provides a larger-than-local conceptual frame and abundant ethnographic and historical detail on the San Jerónimo comparsas and their performances.

Particularly valuable for comparative studies is Mendoza's second chapter, in which she traces what she calls the "folklorization" of the Cuzco region's cultural traditions. Here we learn how early twentieth-century middle-class urbanites identified and codified "Indian" and "Mestizo" (mixed-race) dances and subsequently formed folklore institutes to preserve and disseminate their notions of local and regional culture. Although this refashioning of local traditions promoted stereotypes of subordinate groups and harnessed potentially dangerous oppositional forms, it also laid the groundwork for the emergence of comparsas among groups at the social and geographic margins. Mendoza's claim that the comparsa performers were able to contest the stereotypes that had been created in the folklore repertoire, however, is not supported in subsequent chapters.

Mendoza then moves to a consideration of her central subject: the Mestizo dances of the Cuzco region. She examines four different comparsas: the Majeños, the Quollas, and the Tuntuna and Mollos, all of which perform at the Patron Saints Festival of San Jerónimo, a town straddling the urban and rural worlds of Cuzco. Because the comparsas are relatively recent additions to the town's fiesta, Mendoza can identify the social and historical factors that contributed to their creation. She deftly illuminates how modern and traditional symbols of power and distinction are combined in the choreography and costuming of the dance, allowing dancers to place themselves at the top of a conservative social hierarchy.

The earliest troupe, the Majeños, projected and consolidated the prestige of an emerging elite. Arising later, the Quollos comparsa constructed their performance in antithesis to the Majeños, privileging wit, carnivalesque movements, and "Indian" authenticity over the rigid, white decency of the Majeños dance. Their performance successfully competed with that of the Majeños in the festival context. Nevertheless, because it was associated with a low status group, it did not provide the social prestige that the Majeños dancers enjoyed outside the performance context. The Quollos' challenge to the Majeños' assertion of dominance was limited by a hegemonic social reality that continually privileges "whiteness" over "Indianness."

The mixed-sex Tuntuna and Mollos comparsas provide a recent challenge to the symbolic constructions of the gender order presented by the older all-male comparsas (in which women are either completely absent or passive). The new comparsas provide a space for the active, exuberant participation of young women and men and, Mendoza argues, reflect changing roles for women in the larger society. Because local dances that include women are nonexistent, these younger dancers are attracted to pan-Andean performance forms, particularly those that have developed in the Puno region. Thus, what counts as local culture is being creatively redefined, albeit not without resistance from older performers and folklore "authorities." Mendoza easily demonstrates that all the comparsas display a bodily discourse about social roles. She cautions that traditional dances can assert conservative visions of gender, class, and ethnic relations. The Majeños dance in particular is an elaborate assertion of...