Organización social y cultural del sur del Perú is concerned with the sociocultural organization of the Department of Puno and its relationship to the development or modernization process.
The main focus of the first chapter is on the political, religious and education aspects of life. The roles and functions of the various political-legal statuses and organizations such as Gobernador, Teniente Gobernador, Juez de Paz, Guardia Civil, teniente escolar and licenciado are discussed, noting variations in a number of communities. In the second section, the religious structure is outlined and the functions of the pre-Columbian and Catholic beliefs and practices are examined, particularly those of the fiestas. Formal education and the socialization process are discussed in the third section.
The second chapter contains a description and analysis of the values, particularly as they are distributed and vary among the postulated four social classes. The manifestations of values in the social structure and the relationship of values and socio-cultural change are discussed at length, with attention focused on the possibilities and mechanisms of changing those values which impede the development process.
The third and last chapter is concerned with social stratification and mobility, status and role of women, the political structure and its relationship to social and economic development and the religious structure and its relationship to the political and economic structure.
Many of the values and attitudes and much of the social structure of the lower class (cholos) are seen throughout this analysis as being propitious for modernization.
Los Pastores de Paratía is an ethnography of a herding community 4,300 meters above sea level in the Department of Puno, Peru. It is an important publication as there is very little information on such communities in the New World, their very existence being denied in some anthropological texts.
Since this ethnography is based on no more than three months of field work, the depth is somewhat limited but one still gets a good overview of the community. The various sections of the ethnography deal with the geographical setting, demography, residence patterns, clothing, life cycle, political organization, religion, folktales and myths, subsistence base, textiles, and trading expeditions. The main subsistence base is raising alpacas and to a lesser extent, llamas. Textiles made from alpaca wool, along with meat, fat, hides, and wool are carried by llamas to agricultural communities to trade for grains and tubers. Men from Paratía also serve as middlemen on such trips.
In the last chapter, Flores points out that Paratía is not one of a kind, but that other herding communities exist elsewhere in the Department of Puno as well as in the Departments of Cuzo, Apurimac, and Moquegua. He also addresses the question of the origin and antiquity of such communities and mentions at least three logical possibilities: 1) an adaptation going back into pre-Columbian times, 2) agriculturalists who fled from the Spanish and found themselves in an area unfavorable for agriculture, so they took up herding, and 3) herders for agricultural people whose relationship was broken by Spanish invasion and who remained herders. On the basis of scattered archeological and historical data, Flores feels that these communities are pre-Columbian, possibly of considerable antiquity.
