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  • Women’s Place in the Andes: Engaging Decolonial Feminist Anthropology by Florence E. Babb
  • Susan C. Bourque
Florence E. Babb, Women’s Place in the Andes: Engaging Decolonial Feminist Anthropology. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. 277 pp.

For those who wish to understand the recent intellectual history of the study of Peruvian Andean women, Florence Babb’s remarkable book will be essential. In Women’s Place in the Andes, Babb provides us with an extensive review of the last half-century of anthropological thinking, theorizing, and debate regarding gender relations and the roles of women in rural Andean Peru. The author has done extensive fieldwork in Peru (as well as Nicaragua and Mexico) and has engaged over the past 40 years with Peruvian and Latin American, US, and European scholars, feminists, market women, and campesinas. She gives us a perceptive account of her own involvement with the significant theoretical and political questions with which scholars have struggled, such as the differential impact of modernization efforts on women and men, and complementarity versus subordination in Andean sex roles. She revisits and revises previously held ideas through a re-examination of her work with the perspective of a mature and confident scholar, eager to understand what combination of theoretical lenses is most useful for understanding Andean women’s lives. As Babb notes, she has been engaged in rethinking her own work in light of the research and debates among Peruvian scholars and feminists and in light of the political and economic changes that have occurred in Peru over this tumultuous half century.

The book begins with a reconsideration of a paper Babb wrote as a graduate student on the impact of development efforts on gender relations. Babb was one of a small group of scholars who argued that well-intentioned efforts at “development” and “modernization” did not have the same outcomes for women as they did for men. Access to new tools [End Page 1297] and technology often gave preference to men and this subsequently undermined the previous distribution of roles and power between men and women. This position was a significant challenge to the dominant theories of modernization in the late 1950s and 1960s and was often dismissed. In contrast, Babb assigned agency to the women who resisted development efforts that undermined their sources of control. Her respect for the subjects of her research and her effort to understand the constraints under which their choices were made are found throughout the trajectory of Babb’s work.

Subsequent chapters trace her extensive fieldwork among the market women of Huaraz and the communities of the Callejon de Huaylas in central Andean Peru. This long association with Peru gives Babb a rich basis for reflection. She notes the degree to which questions of what constitutes “lo andino” and the issue of “complementarity” versus subordination—questions that sparked scholarly debate in the late 1970s—remain key parts of today’s conversations about Andean women’s status. These core debates center on how Andean women view themselves, their contributions to their communities, their roles in the family and the economy, and not insignificantly, the attitudes of others (primarily urban mestizos) toward them.

Babb traces these changes through the discourse and debates at the international meetings of feminists and activists. This includes Latin American feminist meetings held in Lima, UN women’s meetings in Mexico, and lectures at regional and national universities. She was frequently on the program as a researcher or a discussant, and recalls in detail the challenging exchanges that led to revisions in her interpretations. Her review of what were often contentious encounters provides an anthropologist’s insight into how intellectual growth, insight, and change occur. This alone is a valuable contribution to the intellectual history of feminist scholarship in Latin America.

Babb’s respect for the contributions of others to her own intellectual development is evident throughout the recounting of her scholarly journey. She relates her conversations with Maruja Barrig, the brilliant Peruvian scholar and activist, who challenged Babb’s interpretation of complementarity in Babb’s early work on Vicos. Babb describes how Barrig clarified the negative impact of notions of “complementarity” on the work of NGOs attempting to...

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