The Encrypted State: Delusion and Displacement in the Peruvian Andes by David Nugent (review)

The anthropologist David Nugent has produced another theoretically sophisticated and lengthy reflection on the Peruvian state. Although the prose is slightly obscure and entangled at certain points, the central argument of the book is both intriguing and thought-provoking. What happens when states become delusional and paranoid? How do states react to their inability to coerce and compel? When and why do state routines cease to exist? Nugent raises and answers these questions while claiming to center his book on one of the least studied episodes of twentieth-century Peruvian history, one of the most important political subjects of the last century, and one of the most under-researched provinces of the country. Nugent focuses on the military dictatorship of Manuel A. Odría (1948–56), the history of the underground trajectory of the APRA party, and Chachapoyas. This book is the result of transecting a robust theoretical and conceptual framework with a captivating empirical case study that should be equally interesting for scholars of Peru and the state.

Central to many of the ideas and arguments Nugent puts forth, readers will be particularly interested in the notion of sacropolitics. Contrasting Achille Mbembe’s influential notion of necropolitics, the book explores the idea of modernization—and particularly Peru’s modernizing paradigms—as endeavors and quests for bringing defunct matter to life. Whether physical or social matter, landscapes or peoples, the Peruvian state unleashed different projects intended to revitalize and shake up a prostrated nation. Nugent reevaluates infrastructural developments as well as campaigns for military and labor conscription through the lens of sacropolitics, thus unveiling some fundamental tensions. One of them is the difference between projected and available resources. Often, the Peruvian state overestimated the amount of resources or peoples accessible for fueling its manifold projects. Another one is the friction between national and local interests. Equally often, the alleged interests of the central state conflicted and clashed with the pervasiveness of local leaderships and provincial powers. Despite its ambitions, sacropolitical projects ultimately revealed the Peruvian state to be afflicted by the seemingly inescapable tunnel vision that characterizes the state.

Even though the actual treatment of the APRA and its underground activities remain limited, Nugent does provide some interesting ideas that might have repercussions for the study of other episodes in the history of Peru and Latin America. At some critical point, before political paranoia settled in, Chachapoyas’s authorities and central government leaders feared a widespread presence of APRA subversives throughout. Radical teachers, peasants, and other unruly subjects became targets of surveillance and, eventually, repression and renewed forms of individual governance. Scholars of insurrections and counter-insurrections in the Andes and beyond will find striking parallels among this moment of paranoia and delusion, the crisis of power and knowledge that it triggered, and the long aftermaths in reshaping state-civil society relations. Equally under-explored, the question about rural populations and the sacropolitical aim of Augusto B. Leguía’s project of regenerating a human geography of the Andes with indigenous communities at the center should be compelling enough for scholars of indigeneity, rurality, and the Latin American campesinado to engage with, discuss, and perhaps rethink our current understandings of state-community relations.

As commented above, the book’s prose is sometimes riddled with disciplinary jargon that some unseasoned readers might find difficult to digest. Even when carefully explained, terms such as “anti-epistemology,” “non-transmission,” “antirites,” “first order deviation,” and “second order deviation” entrap what could have been a fairly straightforward account of state failure. Equally entangling, some of Nugent’s claims also seem at least worthy of further discussion. These include his understanding of subversive identification as a simplification endeavor (47) and his seeming appraisal of notaries solely as agents of state rule (71). However, these are minor caveats for a book that exceeds disciplinary boundaries, combining in-depth archival research—including the reproduction of truly fascinating documents—and a...