The title of this book is aptly ambivalent: this is a work much less concerned with the study of Túpac Amaru and the formidable indigenous upheaval he headed than with the history of “his world,” broadly understood as the rural area where the leader and most of his followers came from. Focused on Quispicanchis and Canas y Canchis, two provinces of colonial Cuzco that became the core of the Andean insurrection of the early 1780s, this study pursues a very appealing and ambitious goal to present “a close, even intimate, view of the daily life of indigenous villagers” (p. xv). Each chapter, in effect, explores with a great wealth of detail and craftsmanship a particular sphere of the everyday experience of the Andean communities. The mass rebellion itself is only addressed in the last chapter. What the book offers is a painstaking and nuanced portrayal of an Andean society.
After...
