This volume contains several papers presented at an SSRC-funded conference on Andean rebellion from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Steve Stern has arranged them into chronological and thematic categories with appropriate introductions. Some of the essays represent new research and approaches, others have been republished, represent summaries of longer works, or are primarily historiographical.
The most original and provocative papers on the eighteenth century are those by anthropologists Jan Szeminski and Frank Salomon. Szeminski draws upon his knowledge of Andean culture and languages to unravel psychological aspects of rebel behavior during the Túpac Amaru Rebellion. Rebels judged Spaniards’ religious hypocrisy and greedy exploitation of natives as unnatural and inexplicable behavior for Christian subjects of the king of Spain. Spaniards and their mestizo and Indian allies were therefore considered evil, heretical, nonhuman, and treacherous, and deserving of death, mutilation, and consumption. Once the rebellion had succeeded, a new order free from hypocrisy and exploitation would emerge under the Inca emperor.
Salomon discusses the use of ancestor cults as a method of resisting tribute collection and Christianity in the village of Andagua, Peru. The local cult leader was a merchant-priest who maintained a shrine of ancestor mummies worshipped by the villagers. He urged them to withhold tribute payments in part because he wanted their capital to remain in the village where it would benefit him. The authorities eventually destroyed the shrine and apparently reinstituted tribute collection, although the documentary record does not permit a clear ending to the story.
The best essay on nineteenth-century revolts is Tristan Platt’s analysis of the impact of liberal reforms on Indian villages in Chayanta, Bolivia. Platt combines research in provincial archives with a knowledge of local ethnography to comprehend the impact of reforms at the community level. Under the guise of a free-market economy, the state sold off communal land and introduced land registers and property taxes. Natives resisted these in favor of maintaining a neocolonial equilibrium based on tribute payments at harvest time. Their efforts were largely successful and helped to prepare for later peasant participation in the MNR revolution of 1952.
The two essays on the twentieth century concern the changing political consciousness of Bolivian Indians from 1945 to the 1980s. Jorge Dandler and Juan Torrico discuss President Gualberto Villarroel’s efforts to abolish personal services (pongueaje) demanded of Indians and to forge a paternalistic political bond with natives. Villarroel’s sponsorship of a National Indigenous Congress in 1945 horrified hacendados and contributed to his overthrow and lynching a year later. Natives in Ayopaya subsequently rebelled and were brutally suppresed.
The events of the 1940s were a prelude to Indians’ growing political participation. Xavier Albó shows that native support was courted by the MNR, leftist parties, and some military leaders. More recently, Indians have formed their own movement, named after Tupaj Katari, to protest government policies that undercut their economic well-being.
Other essays in the volume include Magnus Mörner’s and Efraín Trelles’s correlation of socioeconomic data with incidence of rebellion in the Cuzco region, 1780-82 (also available in Histórica, July 1986); Alberto Flores Galindo’s summary of his award-winning Buscando un inca; and Heraclio Bonilla’s thoughtful critique of recent writings on nineteenth-century Peruvian peasant revolts.
It is a pity that there are no contributions on native rebellions in Ecuador, the great Atusparia Rebellion in Ancash, Peru, or peasant movements in twentieth-century Peru. In the latter case, lacunae include insurrections in Ayacucho, Cuzco, and Huancayo during the 1960s; agitation and changing consciousness during the Velasco agrarian reform (1969-75); and the peasant roots of Sendero Luminoso.
