This interesting little book exemplifies the kind of overview of a local region that social anthropologists do so well. It discusses both the Peruvian city of Ica and the surrounding rural area. The study, a reworking of data collected during 1957-1958 for E. A. Hammel’s dissertation, will probably be of more direct interest to the social scientist than to the humanist. Nevertheless, this rather specialized case study may communicate to the latter something about the wholeness of a culture that is not reflected in its literary, artistic, or political life alone.
The work is divided into two principal sections. The first half of the book deals with the major physical and economic factors making up the environment, and the second half with life styles, represented by personal sketches of individuals typifying differing social sectors. After a very short methodological introduction, Hammel starts with five chapters covering physiographic and historical data, agriculture, industry, transportation and trade, and what he terms the history of power in Ica. Each chapter considers its topic historically, usually under some such divisions as the Preconquest Period, the Colonial Period, the Republican Period, and the Modern Period. Individual historians will accept or reject the logic of the periods according to their own predilections; Hammel selects them more for convenience than as part of some embracing schema of Peruvian history.
The second half of the book describes individuals as prototypes of Ica’s population groupings, somewhat in the style of Oscar Lewis’ five Mexican families. Hammel includes representatives of the upper class, the upper middle class, the lower middle class, the lower class, and the lower lower class, with examples of both rural and urban types where appropriate. Given extreme space limitations and a diference in reporting style (tape recorded quotations are not used, for example), the reader does not carry away the same intensity of identification with these Iqueños as with Lewis’ Tepoztlecos, but he does gain a sense of the complex relationships among the subunits making up the population of the Ica valley.
As a political scientist, I was somewhat disappointed that the study did not quite live up to its title, Power in Ica. Although a great deal of essential information about the sources of economic influence and social prestige is included, it did not seem to me that the implied promise of the introduction to demonstrate the nature of power and the political process in the region was fully achieved. Still, the material provided does give us a most helpful foundation upon which to construct such an investigation. I hope that some social scientist will take advantage of it to consider the local power structure of Ica.
Such an undertaking would be especially valuable just now, because during the decade since Hammel carried on his field research important changes have occurred in Peru and more specifically in Ica. No one who has been there lately could fail to mention the ubiquitous transistor radio and its socializing effects. And in the departmental capital a so-called university was organized during the early 1960s, with interesting shifts in attitudes among the area’s young people. Furthermore, the military regime that took power late in 1968 has decreed a land reform which cannot help but affect the power bases in the valley. These and other momentous events need investigation based upon data such as this book has already given us.
