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  • STARN, Orin. Missing The Revolution: Anthropologists and The War in Peru.

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    Missing the Revolution Anthropologists and the War in Peru. Cultural Anthropology, V. 6, n. 1, 1991, p. 63-91.

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    Missing the Revolution Anthropologists and the War in Peru. Cultural Anthropology, V. 6, n. 1, 1991, p. 63-91.

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    328 visualizações29 páginas

    STARN, Orin. Missing The Revolution: Anthropologists and The War in Peru.

    Enviado por

    Jef Scabio
    Missing the Revolution Anthropologists and the War in Peru. Cultural Anthropology, V. 6, n. 1, 1991, p. 63-91.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Missing the Revolution: Anthropologists and the War in Peru Orin Starn Stanford Universi ‘On 17 May 1980, Shining Path guerrilla burned ballot boxes inthe Andean village of Chuschi and proclaimed their intention to overthrow the Peruvian tate. Playing on the nkarei myth of Andean resurrection feom the cataclysm of con: quest, the revolutionaries had chosen the 199th anniversary of the execution by the Spanish colonizers ofthe neo-Inca rebel Tupac Amaru, Chuschi, though, pre figured not rebirth but a decade of death. It opened a savage war between the guerillas and government that would claim more than 13,000 lives during the 1980s." For hundreds of anthropologists inthe thriving regional subspecialty of An: dean studies the rise of the Shining Path came asa complete surprise. Dozens of ethnographers worked in Peru's southern highlands during the 1970s. One ofthe best-known Andeanists, R. T, Zuidema, was directing a research project in the Rio Pampas region that became a center of the rebellion. Yet no anthropologist realized a major insurgency was about to detonate, a revolt so powerful that by 1990 Peru's civilian govemment had ceded more than haf the country to military command. ‘The inability of ethnographers to anticipate the insurgency 1 questions. For much ofthe 20th century, after al, anthropologi principal exper on life inthe Andes. They positioned themselves asthe“ good ‘outsiders who truly understood the interests an aspirations of Andean people; and they spoke with scientific authority guaranteed by the firsthand experience of fieldwork. Why, then dd anthropologists miss the gathering storm ofthe Shining Path? What does tis say about ethnographic understandings of the highlands? ow do events in Per force us to rethink anthropology on the Andes? From the start, I want to emphasize that it would be unfit to fault anthro pologists for not predicting the rebellion. Ethnographers certainly should not be inthe business of forecasting revolutions. In many respects, moreover, the Shi ing Path's success would have been especially hard to foresee. pro-Cultual Revolution Maoist splinter from Peru's regular Communist Party, the group formed in the university inthe provincial highland city of Ayacucho. It was led by abig-jowled philosophy professor named Abimael Guzmén with thick lasses and a rare blood disease called polictimea.” Guzman viewed Peru as dominated by a bureaucratic capitalism tht could be toppled only through armed struggle. {A frst action of his guerrillas in Lima was to register contempt for “bourgeois revisionism” by hanging a dead dog infront ofthe Chinese embassy. Most ob- ‘servers intially dismissed the Shining Path, Sendero Luminoso, asa bizarre but ‘unthreatening sect. This was fiercely doctrinire Marxism in the decade of per- cestoika. ‘What will lai, though, is that most anthropaogists were remarkably un- attuned to the conditions which made possible the rise of Sendero, First, they tended to ignore the intensifying interinkage of Peew's countryside and cities, villages and shantytowas, Andean highlands and lowlands ofthe jungle and coast. ‘These interpenetration created the enormous pool of radical young people of amalgamated rural/urban identity who would provide an effective revolutionary force. Second, anthropologists largely overlooked the climate of sharp unrest, actos the impoverished countryside. Hundreds of protests and land invasions tes- fied to a deep-rooted discontent thatthe guerillas would successfully expt. To begin accounting for the gaps in ethnographic knowledge about the hi lands, the fist half of this essay introduces the concept of eee of Ame Ne sr le cherge se Sere coepe tered cos cursive Sunde ring te 2h cw ty otc cena! me wing of oes pling nd Ck wel sth pct nate pa an oper Theis Anica alo oct ane. an ls xp wy 3 tn chap etn opal tering erect, Sector he roth th Sheath Ana gir wa a te ely nents onamtropaogit of he oan he povng impeach inet stil) othe per abeeondced bograpi Mies ofthe And nth eon al fest ag te en ng oe en nti reception win neo NE Nite ass neem Wg for why mon acyl pe veh profane deacon ‘hte tr uot waste fcr ested eng ltr Sed pd My mopping of Anda nro rs wh ili ean els 7 Deen ues: Eo and an a nen Vilage TT. Tgh ‘erating tis es and wy el tng, tatinte impo Adeanis on ntsc king do xp owe ey Acpyimote clo andl apes lobe nist poll term inthe county ele tk hs pclae ese fan ign Gt ant eee Shing Pa sea woul Caps ut yes eis pare Thayne Fo Den Ors wt maa a itn bok cal atc: Hanger an ope 98) by a Aen ton ans and fe Shing Path ame Antonio ar Mantes er an Hoe proves was pn formu ery rene fe glands {hat of most Andeanist anthropology. While Isbell and other ethnographers de picted diserete villages with fixed traditions, Diaz saw syncretism and shifting identities. Most anthropologists found a conservative peasantry. Diaz, by eon- tras, perceived small farmers as on the brink of revolt. Passages of Hunger and Hope foreshadow the Shining Path’s subsequent dogmatic brutality. Yet the man Who would become the reputed “number three" in the Maoist insurgency, ater [Abimael Guemin and Osmiin Moroe, discovered an Ayacucho that escaped the ‘voluminous anthropology literature, countryside about to burs into conflict. ‘Through criticism of Andeanist anthropology. my account points to alter tives. [press for recognition of what historian Steve Stem (1987:9) calls “the anifold ways whereby peasants have continuously engaged in their political jorlds; and [argue for an understanding of modern Andean identities as dy- ‘namic, syncretic, and sometimes ambiguous, Finally I seck to develop an anal ysis that does not underplay the Shining Pat’s violence yet recognizes the inti= ‘mate tes of many of the guerrillas tothe Andcan countryside andthe existence of ‘ual sympathies forthe revolt ela certain unease about writing on the Andes and the Shining Path “Senderology""—the study of the guerilas—is a thriving enterprise. In my view, a sense ofthe intense human suffering caused by the war too often disap pears in this work. The terror becomes simply another field for scholarly debate (Ch pi aN xe tervention-—and certainly not by anthropologiss—is at present likely to change the deadly logic ofthe war. hope, though, that sharper anthropological views of the situation will help others fo understand the violence and to join the strugele for lie, Isbell wrote To Defend Ourselves from fieldwork in 1967, 1969-70, and 1974-75, Closely observed and richly detailed, the book presents the village of (Chuschi as divided into two almost cast-like segments: Quechua-speaking peas- ants and Spanish-speaking teachers and bureaucrats. An intermediate category appears more peripherally, migrants from Chuschi to Lima. Like other Andean- iss, Isbell positions herself firmly with the Quechua-speaking comuneros. The ‘mestizos, even the dir-poor teachers, figure asthe bad guys. domineering and ‘without Isbel’s knowledge or appreciation of Andean traditions. sbell’s analysis revolves around the proposition that Chusehi’s peasants had ‘turned inward to/maintain ther traditions against outside pressures. The comu- netos, she argued, had built @ symbolic and social order whose binary logic stressed their difference from the vecinos, Chuschi's mestizos. Melding the then- popular structualism of Lévi-Strauss with Erie Wolfs concept ofthe closed cor- Porate community, Isbell (1977:11) made her mission to document “the structural ‘defenses the indigenous population has constructed against the increasing domi- ration ofthe outside world. [shell registered that Chuschi was a regional market center witha church, school, and health post. She noted that trucks pied the ditt highway beween (Chuschi andthe city of Ayacucho. We learn ofthe constant traffic in people and goods between Chuschi and not only Ayacucho but also Lima and the coca-grow- Ing regions ofthe upper Amazon. More than a quarter of Chuschi’s population hhad moved to Lima. Many others migrated seasonally. Even the “permanent” ‘migrants maintained close tes in their native village, returning periodically and keeping animals and land. ‘When it came to representing Chuschino culture, however, Isbell down: played mixture and change. Instead, she concentrated on how the ritual, kin e- lations, reciprocity, cosmology, and ecological management of Chuschi's co- ‘muneras embodied the “stabil of traditional customs (Isbell 1973). She rows parallels between the annual ritual eyele ofthe Incas aeconing to the 16th century chronicler Guan Poma de Ayala and the calendar of madera Chusehi nos. A long section presents marriage practices a if they were unchanged since the Ineas. Another elucidates the Santa Cruz harvest festival in the same ahistor jeal language. The photographs reiterate the feeling of stasis. Two farmers till with oxen. Men drink at a ritual cleaning of irrigation canals. A woman offers ‘cor beer to Mama Pacha, Cultural identity in To Defend Ourselves appeats as ‘matter of preservation, Despite change, villagers had conserved thie distinctly ‘Andean traditions, “‘maintainfing] the underlying order oftheir society and cos mology” (Isbell 1977:105), Isbell’s emphasis on continuity and non-Western "otherness in Chuschi rnoeds tobe situated in elation to the tration of representation that I want to call "Andeanism.” In Orientalism, as James Clifond (1988:258) deftly summarizes id, the tendency is “to dichoromize the human continuum into we-they con trass and to essentalize the resultant “other’—to speak of the oriental mind, for example, or even to generalize about ‘slam’ or the ‘Arabs.’ °” Andeanism has a similar logic. It dichotomizes between the Occidental, coastal, urban, and mes- tizo and the non-Western, highland, rural, and indigenous; it then essentalizes the highland side ofthe equation to talk about “To andino,” “the Andean world- view.’” “indigenous highland culture” or, in more old-fashioned formulations, “the Andean mind’ or “the Andean Indians." The core ofthe “Andean tradi tion” is presented as timeless, grounded in the preconquest past. Words like “in ‘igenous,” “autochthonous.” “native.” and “Indian” are attached to modern peasants. (Of course, Andeanism represents only one face of what Johannes Fabian (1983:147) calls “the ideological process by which relations between the West and its Other... [are] conceived not only as difference but as distance in space and Time.” Like other discourses about the Third World, though, Andeanism also as ts own special history. It emerged in the early 20th century. Amidst the ‘decline of evolutionism, the intellectual and political movement called indigen {smo atacked earlier views of Andean peasants as degraded subhumans and ar fed that highland faemers were instead the bearers of a noble precolonial her lage. Thanks 10 indigenismo, wrote a leading figure inthe movement, historian Lis Valearcel(1938:7), “no longer does anyone doubt thatthe Indian of today isthe same Indian who, a millennium ago, created dynamic and varied eiiliz- tions inthe vast cultural area of the Andes." ‘Questions of national identity spurred the writing of indigenistas like Vat carcel and Manuel Gonzalez Prada, A view of Andean peasants as stewards ofthe Inca past fit the desire of many intellectuals and politicians to see @ potential al temative tothe discredited legacy of Spain und the capitalist culture inthe north Socialists such as Hildebrando Castro Pozo and José Carlos Mariitegui hoped “Inca sciaism'*—which they took tobe embodied in contemporary Andean in- sttutions—could be the foundation for & more just postcolonial order. By the 1930s, the concept of an unbroken Andean heritage had expanded beyond the label of indigenismo to become common sense across art, polis, and science. The powerful novels of Ciro Alegria and José Maria Arguedas cel- brated the “pure” traditions of mountain farmers. Documentaries like The Spirit Possession of Alejandro Mamani (1978) and Inthe Footsteps of Taytacha (1988) gave visual expression to Andeanism with their images of a ritualistic, natue- loving, and tadition-bound peasantry. Wilderness Travel Company in Berkeley plays on Andeanism to advertise treks for 1990 that answer tothe hunger af West- em travelers for authenticity In ournewest Andean escapade... We encounter] splendidly dressed Quechua In- dans, bets of lamas and lps corte wit rightly colored ribbons gazing in iylie alpine meadows - local inhabitants speak no Spanish, and main ‘ai(ing) mystical attache othe lad A tour leader assures us that You fe you've stumbled int time warp when you sit in slepy village plaza and realizes. remained Vituly unchanged sce lnc ines.” ‘This is Andeanism in pure form. Nowhere does the ten-page tex sclose that & major wari raging in Peru's highlands. The hetoric of Wilderness Travel signals a key irony. On one hand, Ande- nism has an egalitarian and antraist thrust. Writes from Castro Pozo to Isbell ‘want to show the richness of Andean culture and the exploitation of Andean peo: ple under colonial and postcolonial rule On the other, residues of paternalism and. hierarchy persist in Andeanist discourse, Midle- and upper-class city people te ‘ain their unquestioned privilege to speak for poor farmers in the mountains; and evolutionism recurs with the depiction of 20h-century peasants as the holders of premodern beliefs. Luis Valearcel believed in racial equality. Yet in 1950 be could still invoke evolutionist thinking to proclaim that within Peru's “rugged confines, people of occidental background live together with others who belong ‘epochs long submerged inthe tide of history” (1950: would be a mistake to overstress the coherence ae reach of Andeanism, Ia Orientalism, Said expends his critical energy to demonstrate the dependence of Westem representations ofthe Middle Easton tropes of distance, exotcism, and 65. CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY timelessness.” The pathbreaking yet overly tidy polemics ofthe book do not ex= plore variations and tensions across and within the partly autonomous Orientalis, Aiscourses of travel writing, fiction, history, ethnography, and journalism. As ‘many crits have observed, Said performs the same essentalizing operation of which he accuses Orientalists.* All Western representations of the Middle East from Homer to Flaubert are swept into the eategory of Orientalism Andeanist ethnographers of the 1960s ax! 1970s often cut against the pare digm. The late 1960s had brought the beginnings of eiicism agains synchronic models of socal analysis, and new attempts to pu history into ethnography. By the early 1970s, some anthropologists cated the attack on aistoricism ito An- {dean studies. Frank Salomon's (1973°465) insightful work on Otavao, forex ample, spoke agains the ‘stereotype of Indian societies as hermetically sealed, atc, and historically doomed.” From a Marxist perspective, ethnographer like ‘Thomas Greaves (1972) and Rodrigo Montoya (1979) showed the transformations ‘ht capitalist expansion had wrought on the lives of mountain peasants, By the rmid-197Ds, a sense of history's importance had spread into most anthropology on the Andes, But Andeanism also remained very much alive in Andeanist ethnography. Images of a timeless Andean tradition continued to appear aeross anthropological ‘writing on all aspects of mountain life. Isbell's graduate adviser R. T, Zuidema and Quispe (1973:362) used an old farm woman's dream to show that modern highland social structure was "stil similar to that of indigenous communities of the XVIth century . . essentially the same as the Incan one.” Gioggio Albert and Enrique Mayer (1974:21) described Andean economics in similar fashion: “In spite of the pasing of four centuries many of the forms of symametial re ciprocity existing in the times ofthe Incas and even before... continue to work in the present,”” J. V. Nuiez del Prado (1974:250) concurred about religion: ‘We find thatthe supernatural world has characteristics very similar to those it had during the Inca Empire.” "Many ofthe private and domestic observances of the ola teligion survived and ae stl practised today.” confiemed Hermann Trim bom (1969: 145). ‘The juxtaposition of Western and Andean aso persisted, Andanism tended to plot the conrast in terms ofthe presumed individualism and alienation ofthe West against the communal ideals and closeness-to-nature of Andean culture Many anthropologists followed uit. "What we have possessed, we have also de- soyed,” as Joseph Bastien (1978:xx0) concluded the preface to Mountain of the Condor, ““Andeans. in contrast, are in harmony with thee land.” Stephen Brush (197-7) invoked the same vision of Andean closeness fo the earth and collective values: Even though he may speak Spanish, highlander is easily rcognizable by a coastal personas such: a sano. He comes rom a are where the pace of lie slowey, there a ails Ge tothe land till primary. and wher there su sense of com munity derived rom certs homogeneity that bas bec fst in he cites, Paul Doughty (1968:1) melded his formulation ofthe Andean/Westem contrast, with an assertion of Andean timelessness: “the Indians have survived in provin= cial aloofness, rately affected by the vicissitudes of time, polities, society and {technological innovations which have so stirred Western civilization.” ‘Andeanism, I should stress, did not just infect ethnographies primarily by and for area specialists. I alo spilled ino more broadly conceived anthropolog- ical writing abou the Andes. Especially notable was Michael Taussi's influential The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980). ‘This original and passionate book atracted wide tention across the social sciences. BUC i, (00, was loaded with Andcanism. In classic Andeanist fashion, Taussig insisted on portraying highland culture a a survival from precolonial times. Thus he could ‘overlook almost five hundred years of constant change t argue that "preconquest institations still flourish in the Andes” and that modern peasants live in ‘precap italist” communities” and possess “pagan’” beliefs (Taussig, 1980:159-160). “Taussig(1980:27, 161) also recycled te standard juxtaposition ofthe Occidental, and Andean traditions to contas the “atomization and bondage" of Western cap- italism with the beliet inthe all-encompassing unity that exists between persons, spirits, and the land” in “Andean metaphysics.” Filten million diverse inhab- itants of 2 3,000-mile mountain range became unspoiled “Andean Indians” for ‘the purposes ofa vastly oversimplified usthem dichotomy. In fairness, Taussie's (1987) recent book on tertor and bealing in southern Colombia moves away from The Devil's romantic and essemialized view of a pure" Andean culture" and to- ward picture of the Andes asa place of multiple, sifting, and synthetic ident ities all fashioned within the common context of colonial and neacolonial expan: sion. Yet Taussig's analysis in The Devil trom an ethnographer who has always. viewed himself as challenger of convention, reveals just how far Andeanism reached into anthropological imaginations. Ethnographic visions of the perennial “otherness” of lo andino had a self fulfilling opi. In thei desire to study “indigenous” Andean culture, anthropot- ‘ogists searched out the most ostensibly traditional regions fo their research. Most wanted, as Harold Skar (198222) frankly explained his choice of Mataquio in Apurimac, the places “where traditional Quechua culture seemed to be most in tact.” In Peru, ethnographers flocked tothe southern mountains, where the peas ants spoke Quechua or Aymara, had ayllus and prestige hierarchies, and lived in the historic heartland of the Inca empire. They largely ignored the entre northern highlands of Spanish-speaking and more ‘acculturated™ rural people. The vial elision of northem Peru from the ethnographic record helped maintain the image ofthe Andetn countryside asthe province of ayllus and speakers of native lan: guages a place little changed from the ancient pas. ‘Arsiving a ther chosen field sites, most ethnographers again highlighted the ‘mot traitional-looking aspects of mountain life, Sell farmers who could fit the par of "Andean Indian" captured most space in ethnographies. Schooltachers, ‘nurses, agronomists, teachers, bureaucrat, ad priests were relegated to marginal soles. Thus Isbell devoted most of To Defend Ourselves to Chuschi's comuneros. The town’s large mestizo population appears only inthe brief passages tha mark 70. CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY them as evil foils tothe peasants. Many ofthe mestizos must have spoken Que- ‘hua, a language common among not only rural people but the mide classes in the Ayacucho region. Some were third-generation Chuschinos. But Isbell’ use ofthe “natives""—as ina section subheaded "The Natives’ Conceptualization of ‘Their Ecology"*—encompassed only the comuneros. Peasants became the only real Andeans in Chusehi ‘The strong grip of Andeanism was summed up in the insistent deployment by ethnographers of the contrast between “Indians” and “mestizos.” With cho: {os asan intermediate category this classification placed ethnographers lke Isbell squarely in the pattern of seeing the lives of mountain peasants through lenses that accented ther pre-Columbian roos. Small farmers were herded ino the eategory ‘of “Indian.” This was a word seldom used by peasants in Peru. They identified ‘hemseives, depending on the context, as Peruvians, campesinos, agricultores, ‘orby thei region, village, or family. But the term that has always signified “th ermess” in Western thinking was perfect for anthropologists who wanted to depict, Andean peoples as fundamentally non-Western. An Andean “Indian,” Michael tien (1973245) could write, is “a person who wears sandals lives ina mud walled, thatch roofed house, maintains “pagan beliefs" and speaks Quechua oF Aymara.” Coos and mestizos were presented as progressively more Westemn- ied, abject lessons ofthe corruption of authentic Andean culture, Tt was precisely as a consequence oftheir emphasis on the isomorphism of Andean traditions that anthropologists tended to ignore the fluid and often ambig- ‘ous quality of Andean personal identity.” The typology of Indian, cholo, and ‘mestizo suggested three separate spheres of personhood. This contravened the fat less clear-cut experience of hundreds of thousands of highiand-born people. From 1940 10 1980, poverty droveat least quarter of a million Andean farmers to settle in the jungle and more than a million more to Lima (ef. Martinez 1980), Seasonal ‘migrations took thousands of others on frequent journeys between the mountains and the Anazon and coast." This mass mobility meant that many people i the most remote" highland hamlets had visited the bustling coast. Conversely, ‘many inhabitants of the sprawling shantytowns of Lima, La Paz, Quito, Ayacu- ‘cho, Cuzco, and Huancayo kept strong bonds to the countryside, The distance between thatch-oofed adobe Andean peasant dwellings and city shacks of tin, cardboard, and straw mats was not that hetween “indigenous” Andean society and “"Westerized”” modernity. Rather, it was the space bewoen differen points fn single circuit that was integrated by family ties, village loyatis, and con- sant circulation of goods, ideas, and people. Indian, cholo, and mestizo were not lisrete categories, but partly overlapping positions ona continuum, ‘The rise of the Shining Path highlighted the continuities between different locations along the city’county citcut, Urban intellectuals led by Abimael Guz- ‘min founded the movement during the late 1960s at Ayacuecho's University of uamanga. But university and high school students of mostly peasant origin were the cadre ofthe evolution, These young people had friends and family in thei hhome communities; yet most had studied in the city of Ayacucho and been poi ically radicalized by exposure to a revolutionary discourse that answered to their ‘own experience of poverty and lack of opportunity. They became the errlls ‘who fanned across the countryside during the 1970s to begin underground org nizing, and then took up arms in the 1980s The ability of these cadres to start a major upheaval testified tothe interpene- trations of differen postions along the ruralurban loop. Education and the lan _guage of Marxism separated the young revolutionaries from peasants inthe ou ‘uyside, But most ofthe Senderitas were also poor people with dark skin, know! ‘edge of Quechua, and familiarity with the physical peography and cultural tex- tures of mountain life. “Sendero advances." as the Ayacucho-bom historian Jaime Urrutia pointed out in a recent interview, because they ae the ones there [i the mountains ho are the equal with the pop lation They aren't the ml clas, hey arent physialy fret hey speak the sme langage andthe poople fea closet hem. Urata underplays how the arrival of the Shining Path in a village by force of ‘arms can bea sudden and often violent intrusion, Yet he also explodes the favorite ‘ounterinsurgeney metaphor ofthe Peruvian authorities, familiar from Vietnam, I Salvador, and wherever governments fight guerilla uprisings—that the Shin- {ng Path are “infiltrators” and "subversive," a force completely external tothe peasantry. What distinguishes Sendero from the filed Peruvian guerilla move= ‘ments of the 1960s is precisely the close connections of so many Senderistas to ‘the mountains. The Lima intellectuals of Luis de la Puente Uceda’s Cuban-in- spied National Liberation Army wete quickly wiped out by the army. But the young women and men ofthe Shining Path know the hidden tals of the moun- ‘ains, how to survive the cold nights, how to dodge army patrols, how to blend withthe civilian population and regroup when the security Fores withdraw. The guerrillas in shor, frequently have a double status in the peasant communities of ‘Ayacucho. They are part insiders" and part "ousiers. The Peruvian director Francisco Lombardi captures this ambiguity in scene from his recent movie The Mouth ofthe Wolf The film depicts the Army accu- pation of the fictional village of Chuspi, a play on the real-life Chuschi. After Senderistas surreptitiously raise the hammer-and-sickle over the police station, soldiers begin a house-by-house search. We watch as two young recruits kick down the door toa dr-loored house, discover a small workshop forthe beautiful carved retablos typical of the Ayacucho region, and a hidden plan ofthe police station. The two soldiers seize the poncho-wearing, dark-skinned young artisan ashe tres to flee. They beat him, then proudly deliver him to their commanding officer. But the prisoner does not confess even under burns from a lighted ciga- rete, Disturbed by the torture and doubtful whether the prisoner even understands ‘Spnish, the commander decides to take the captive by tuck to Army headquar- ters, Senderistas, however, stage a bloody ambush of the pickup truck to com- rence a series of events that ends with the massacre by the army of more than thirty innocent campesinos. ‘The sequence not ony calls attention to the brutality of the war, but also to the mixed identity of Sendero. For the viewer, like the soldiers, never relly 72 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY knows whether the suspect was a guerilla. The evidence ofthe plan andthe later ambush indicate involvement. Yet the apparent inability of the prisoner to speak Spanish—along with his peasant dress and retabo craft—clash withthe popular image of Shining Path militants as propagands-spouting university students in Wester clothes and red bandanas. The line between indigenous villager and cholo revolutionary turns out to be dificult to establish, The Peruvian soldiers, like U.S. troops in Vietnam, confront an enemy that does not easly sort out fom {he rural population. Rather than doing the hard work of distinguishing Sender- ists, the military wages an indiscriminate terror. was precisely the sense of ambiguous identities developed by Lombardi in his fictional Chuspi that is missing from Isbell’ portrayal of the real-life Chuschi. Andeanist anthropologists carefully documented and analyzed the customs of highland communities. But they tended to gloss over the overlap and partial in: terchangeability of Andean personhood that were to ocome eri in the spread ofthe Shining Path oan in the northern Andean town of Chota, Antonio Disz Martinez gradu sted from the agrarian university near Lima in 1957." Three years as # govern ‘ment development oficial gave the promising young engineer the opportunity to supervise a planned colonization inthe Amazon and to travel briefly to Switzer land, Spain, Egypt, and Chile. But Diaz became disillsioned with state-spon- sored development. By the mid-1960s, he had joined the agronomy faculty tthe University of Huamanga where Abimael Guzmén was consolidating the pro Chinese faction that would become Sendero Luminosa, It was from the charged political climate at the university that Diaz wrote Ayacucho: Hunger and Hope. Diaz built the book through a colloquial blend of description, dialogue, and an- ‘ede from his travels across Ayacucho between 1965 and 1969. But Hunger and “Hope also contained a clear message. The “obsolete colonial structure" of Ay: acucho hid to be overtumed (Diaz 1969-33). The region would progress only through “social-economic change” and the recovery of “"what's worthy in the art, musi, and customs of our people” (1969:265) Hunger and Hope refracts Andeanism. Like most anthropologists, Diaz be lieved inthe survival ofan age-old Andean tradition that could be juxtaposed with the Wester culture of conquest. He, (00, tended to divide between traditional peasants and corupted mestizos. In Dit’ view, the labor exchanges of the minka and the collective structure of the ayllu testified that rural Ayacuchans had inher. ited a communal ethic from the Incas. Much like Peruvian socialist i the frst ‘decades ofthe 20th century, Diaz fel this tradition of cooperation could become the Foundation of a new social onde. ‘The Andeanist favor shared by Hunger and Hope and so many ethnogra- Phies points to the important intersections that have always existed between so- Cialist polities and anthropology research on the Andes. Ethnology and socialist, ing—as well as journalism, archacology, fiction, and travel wriing—were tightly intertwined in indigenismo. Inthe small community of Peruvians and for- eigners writing about the Andes duting the 1920s and 1930s, the socialists José Carlos Maritegui and Hildebrando Castro Pozo could quote historian Luis V carcel and archacologst Julio Tello and in tur be cited by American anthropol ‘ogists Wendell Bennett and Bernant Mishkin. Academic inquiry became more specialized as the numbers of Andeanist scholars expanded after Workd War I amidst the fast growth of European and U.S. universities. But trafic across df= ferent modes of urban discourse about the highlands aso continued. The career of José Maria Arguedss was exemplary. He wrote poetry and fiction about the highlands, worked asa curator of Andean artifats, and published ethnography ‘The southern community of Puquio became Arguedas's subject ina full-length ethnography (see Arguedas 1956) and also in is great novel Yawar Fiesta (1980). If anthropology and socialist polities were no longer so enmeshed as in Marie: ui’s time, Andeanist ethnopraphers remained cousins to the politicians of the 19606 and 1970s who spoke ofa return tothe minka and alu Unlike most other socialists and many anthropologists, however, Diaz made 8 partial break from Andeanism, He recognized the sharp cultural and economic differences that separated a mountan-born farmer fom a coastal bureaucrat. Yet he never lost a sense of mixture and movement. Everywhere in Ayacucho Diaz found people who resisted neat pigeon-holing as Indians cholo or mestizos, We meet poor mestizos who speak Quechua: comuncros who travel constantly to Lima: chidten in the Apurimae who are (rilingual in Quechua, Spanish, and ‘Campa. Diaz's rapid sketches ofthese individuals destabilize boundaries, ques tioning easy separations between “traditional” Andean society and “™madern™ mestizo culture, osé de la Cruz,” he wrote (1969:142), [4S years old, mesic. speaks Spanish very well having let the epon erly when ew ite. As acl he tok er of the dog an arden fora ering then 2 young man travelled tothe jungle valley of Chaney, where Be worked a oon, Hard year, he tells ws. Restless an roving, he later travelled to Usa ali He bilingual, his wife monolingual in Sparsh his children ae learning {Quechua eight years ago he retumod to Cangallo where he ier smal Bit tla, ‘The nomadie De la Cruz spoke Quechua and lived for the moment asa campesino. He cut against the simplified presentation in To Defend Ourselves of mestizos as privileged Spanish-speakers. In a barren Cangallo village, Diaz (1969:144) met Anastasio Alar, a peasant who: has ve Kids, doesnt dink because e's am evangelical... works in consruction in {ima fom May to Octbcr, where he lives inthe spaeroom wih his brother who's a permanent worker. Antonio asthe hectares and plants wheat, cor, pd barley Here a Quechua-speaking villager who should fit inthe “Indian category tumed ‘out to spend part of his time in Lima and tobe a Protestant. Again our sue sense ‘of authenticity, of who fits where, ends up in question Instead of easily dist _uishable Indians, cholos, and mestizos, we find an interconnected population 74 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY shifting along positions in the busy circuit between city and country, lowlands and highlands, village and squatter settlement art of Diaz's insight came from his wide-angle view. He visited apparently traitional communities like Quispillacta and Pomacocha, Bute aso spent much ‘ime in La Mars feudal haciendas. Apurimac’s jungle colonizations, Ayacucho's shantytowns, Huanta’s dusty truck stops—places where the extent of Andean m0- bility and interconnection were impossible to ignore Just as importantly, Diaz wrote as an informed layman without the need to ‘x people in rigid analytical categories. Andeanist ethnographers ofthe 1960s and 1970s joined other Westernized anthropologists in deploying. what Frangoise Michel-Jones (1978:14) calls “absolute subjects” (he Nuer. the Hopi the Do- {800}, Thus in To Defend Ourselves we do not encounter Chuschinos a individ ‘uals. Instead, Isbell (1977-73) talked about how “the comuneros participate inthe [national] economy toa limited degree" or “the vecinos use village exogamy to secure upward mobility” a ifthe villagers andthe mestizos could be considered homogeneous categories whose members shared identical beliefs. * Diaz, by con- tras, always introduced unique characters. Some, lke the tyrannical hacienda ‘owner at Oreasita, work simply as emblems of large eategores. But Diaz de- scribed others ike Alen and Cruz, witha sense of variation and individuality He, too, spoke of “the mestizos” and “the peasants.” But the plural voices and long dislogues between Diaz and diferent Ayacuchans convey a feel for the nu ances and partial instability ofthe larger categories that is largely absent from ‘Andeanist anthropology with its easy confidence about Andean social Boundaries. Finally, Diaz's socialism helped him to sce the intrlinkages of made Per, Side-by-side with thei usually romantic view ofthe “purity of Andean culture, socialists since Martegui had also deployed the concept of class to stress the ‘common position onthe bottom of Peru's economic pyramid of indigenous vil lagers, cholo migrants inthe vast barriadas of Lima, and poor mestizo laborers. The concept of a broad coalition of the poor, bridging ethnic identifications and ‘uralurban divisions, would become the heart of organizing by the United Left party inthe 1980s. Thus while Diaz retained an idealized view of lo andino, he also recognized that poverty connected peoples of disparate identity across Ay- scucho. This economic nexus was one that most anthropologists—largely de- pending on the categories of ‘culture and “‘community"*—were unprepared to explore. The intrest in political economy that began to emerge in North Ameri an anthropology inthe 1970s-sshich might have led ethnographersto look more deeply at issues of class—arrived slowly tothe Andes. ‘The portrayal in Hunger and Hope of the community of Moya, 34 kilometers from the city of Ayacucho, typified Diaz’s (1969.53) recognition of the profound imterpenetrations of Andean life. He began with a description that emphasized the preservation of tradition and pastoral autonomy in Moya: ‘There's o hacienda her, alate smallholders with iy chacos that go from 16 10 12 hectare po family. They al ell themselves art of the comity fan Sometimes practice the am and mings» The Houses othe vila can be found MISSING THE REVOLUTION 75 Aisribted on the gentle hillside: the wed colo ofthe rot ties andthe adobe walls bend ith the dark pren ofthe alder to pivethe landscape a very singular Beary But Diaz was not content to present Moja asa self-contained and stable commu- nity. He entered into conversation with a group of men working to build school ina communal work-pary. Instead of analyzing the event asa pure expression of [Andean collectivity, however, he described the men smoking " National'-brand ‘cigarettes and using lumber and cement solicited from a government development agency. We lear that Moya's population was constantly on the move. Without sufficient land, many had let forthe cities or jungle. Others migrated between the village and coastal sugar plantations where they hired themselves out as fem porary laborers. Though appreciative of the community's success in retaining a ‘measure of communality and stability, Diaz (1969:56) ended with images of “Moya's present fudity and uncertain future: ‘We keep walking, and we talk with few ol campesinos in their houses. Only the ‘ld ay permanenily i the community. the young have become migrants sometimes ‘returning to hep withthe plating ad harvests and then disappearing only 1 appear Sra for fests othe next harvest Here was the sense ofthe interconnections that would help make possible the spread ofthe Shining Path. And here, 100, were the mobile young people with knowledge of both city and country that would form the pool from which Abimael Guzmén, Osmén Morote, and Diaz himself were about to begin recruiting a ev lutionary cadre. Thirteen years later Moya would be pat ofthe "Red Zone™ named by Army intelligence asa stronghold of Sendero. [the thick interchange between city and country made possible the spread of the Shining Path across Ayacucho from the gray-stoned University of Hua- ‘manga, the immediate suecesss ofthe revolutionaries in winning support inthe countryside testified to the explosive discontent of many peasants, Is vital fom {he start to point out thatthe Shining Path also depends on violence. The revolu tionaries have killed campesinos fr reasons from breaking decrees against voting ‘to participating in compulsory Army-

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