These eleven articles and essays were collected by the editor to trace the major institutional and policy factors that forced Peruvian Andean communities to change and adapt through the colonial and republican periods. The final chapter brings the historical loop up to the present with Deborah Poole’s discussion of Chumbivilcas province as a rough land of rustlers on the margin of the nation. Poole, like most of the other contributors, bases her examination of peasant life on the premise that the force of Spanish colonialism led to the elaboration of many characteristics of Andean behavior that in turn furthered the consolidation of provincial and national ruling classes.
Throughout the volume, discussions of Andean demography, ethnicity, comunidades indígenas, and rebellions provide the reader with detailed cases that illustrate the emergence of provincial political and social-structural forces over three centuries. Trelles reviews the economics of the encomienda. In a thirty-three-page chapter (the longest), Glave studies the “Canas” region south of Cuzco and the evolution there of local ayllu organization from 1575 to 1928, and Scarlett O’Phelan turns away from the common view of peasant rebellions as localized spontaneous outbursts to demonstrate that these occurred in response to the application of colonial policies. Her long discussion of eighteenth-century rebellions shows the pronounced difference in their incidence between the coast (14) and highlands (126), owing to the pressures felt as a result of labor policy.
In the second part of the volume, Flores Galindo’s short review of religious persecution and confusion in the central highlands does not provide much new information. Víctor Peralta Ruiz, on the other hand, documents the basis of agrarian conflict in the Lambayeque valley in the eighteenth century in an interesting fashion. Ward Stavig contributes a succinct account of the impact of the Potosí mita on its extraordinarily large hinterland. Magdalena Chocano’s study of population and ethnicity in the Callejón de Conchucos (Ancash) opens relatively new historical territory for this important but obscure region, by illuminating the nature of intergroup relations with some interesting archival case material. In a chapter on parishes in Espinar province, Iván Hinojosa reconstructs demographic trends from parish records from 1750 to 1798 and evaluates the effects, or lack thereof, of epidemics and the Túpac Amaru rebellion.
Unfortunately, the book lacks any overall analysis. Interrelationships among the chapters are explored only in a limited and, one supposes, accidental fashion by Heraclio Bonilla’s short introduction, written well before the rest of the chapters. The book nevertheless compiles a significant amount of primary data that Andean specialists will find useful in documenting events in the specific areas. The “permanence” of custom and condition suggested in the title, however, is not as clear as the convincingly demonstrated historic changes.