Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration n the Andes: At the Crossroads of History and Anthropology.

Edited by Brooke Larson and Olivia Harris with Enrique Tandeter (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995. viii plus 428pp.).

To what degree have markets corroded pre-Hispanic Andean norms, institutions and practices during the four and a half centuries of colonial and post-colonial European penetration? The twelve essays collected in this volume offer eloquent, albeit hardly surprising answers to this question at the center of Andean studies for the past three decades. Nearly all contributors are prominent figures of the first and second generations of modern Andean anthropology and history who began publishing on these issues between the 1960s and early 1980s; in fact two of the contributors, John Murra and Carlos Sempat Assadourian, established the anthropological and historical models of exchange for the Inca and colonial eras which have dominated the field for the past quarter century. Most contributions, originally written for a conference in 1983 and previously published in Spanish in Bolivia, extend and complicate those models stressing agency of an ever broader range of Andean peasants, herders, miners and traders. But the models themselves, it would appear, are essentially left standing, with only murmurs of critique at the margins.

Coverage is densest for the colonial period and for the region of Alto Peru/Bolivia although the introduction by Larson and the conclusion by Harris make thoughtful comments on the broader Andean region. Two contributions are outright defenses of Murra's paradigm of the pre-colonial Andean political economy, which stressed non-market exchange within ethnic kingdoms or the pan-Andean structures created by the Incas, based on notions of reciprocity and the vertical integration of different ecological spaces. Murra himself reviews recently published evidence for pre-Hispanic "merchants" and long distance "trade," and cites comparative studies suggesting that even exchanges over hundreds or thousands of miles can be organized as highly regulated, communal undertakings. In a much more emphatic style Susan Ramirez reaffirms that all supposed cases of long-distance trade in pre-Hispanic Northern Peru in fact represent exchange under the auspices of ethnic lords. During the early colonial period - in contrast to later periods - non-mercantile forms of exchange controlled by ethnic lords remained more vigorous in the north than in the southern Andean region incorporated into the labor and commodity markets of Potosi, the hub of silver mining. In an erudite discussion of some of the crucial early colonial sources used by Murra to construct his model of vertical exchange within ethnic corporations, Carlos Sempat Assadourian discovers evidence for horizontal exchange among various ethnic groups, and for ethnic lords' appropriations of commodities produced in the settlement archipelagos, suggesting polite corrections to Murra's paradigm.

Most contributors elaborate on the now commonly accepted point that post-conquest Andeans participate(d) in monetarized trade much more broadly and creatively than the long-standing image of the "self-sufficient Indian peasant" had suggested. In a painstaking study of the volume of American "imports" into Potosi during the 1790s Tandeter, Milletich, Oilier and Ruibal convincingly demonstrate that Indian traders supplied the major share of some key commodities (such as coca leaves, woolen bayeta and cotton cloths) entering the city. Steve Stem's thoughtful, largely methodological essay outlines "European colonial," "traditional Andean" and mixed "colonial Andean" models of exchange, but calls attention to the difficulties of categorizing the economic behavior of specific communities and their kurakas (e.g. the "European colonial" personal enrichment of a kuraka serving to buttress the resources of his community). Tristan Platt shows how during the early post-independence period peasants and lifestock herders in the arid southwestern Bolivian altiplano province of Lipes developed intricate seasonal schedules of monetary trade and barter to defray the head tax, cover ceremonial expenses and sustain family subsistence. But he is still not willing to concede that the decline of this type of indigenous trading activity since the 1870s, just as his famous case of the Chayanta grain trade, owed less to liberal trade policies than to changing transport infrastructure and costs. Harris' sparkling and evocative, if at times somewhat speculative, essay on the dual symbolic meaning of money (expressing both fertility and order, or the spheres of the "devil" and of lord/God) in an Aymara community closely associated with mines does suggest the full acceptance, in principle, of monetarized trade in that particular Bolivian communal culture. The article by Larson and Rosario Leon compares trading regimes during the late eighteenth and late twentieth centuries in Tapacari, until recently a strategic transit corridor from the altiplano to the fertile Cochabamba valley. On one level the authors go somewhat against the grain by suggesting that peasant traders there have gained in autonomy in recent decades due to the decay both of vertical control of trade by kurakas/mallkus and by the town's urban mestizo elite. But they neglect to discuss the structuralist research on the development of central place trading patterns (Gordon Appleby's work on the northern altiplano), which while confirming the greater decentralization of market places, ultimately sees them subsumed into now truly national, but hierarchical marketing networks. By contrast, Harris's judicious and comprehensive concluding essay suggests that from the late sixteenth to the late twentieth centuries "Indians" in the Andes have been increasingly marginalized from large-scale autonomous trading activities. But she notes as one of the tragic causes for this outcome the "processes of rupture, amnesia and denial that separates the Indians from their more successful and entrepreneurial kin" (p. 376), i.e. those who have chosen or felt forced to adopt a mestizo ethnic identity to promote their commercial activities.

This complex tie between participation in markets and ethnic identity takes center stage in two contributions. In the most thought-provoking and innovative essay of this volume, Thierry Saignes discusses the massive streams of Andean migrants during the seventeenth century and their ambiguous strategies of rupture from or continued ties to their home communities as revolutionary social change marked by a lessening of hierarchical vertical relations and growth of more horizontal and contractual relations. Marisol de la Cadena's article on a small community near Cuzco in the late twentieth century convincingly demonstrates how social, ethnic and gender hierarchies are intertwined, and how patriarchal norms and practices, inscribed into underlying notions of ethnic hierarchy, have assigned women the most traditional, more "Indian" peasant status, just when power and wealth in local society are increasingly measured by greater integration into Cuzco city's world of trade, consumption and labor.

Most of these insightful and well-crafted essays still adhere to the notion of a fundamental incompatibility between Andean economic rationality and monetarized commerce for personal gain, as John Murra had originally posited it for the pre-Hispanic Andean world some forty years ago. The authors are concerned with showing the creative adaptability of Andeans, as involvement in trade in a myriad of forms during the colonial and post-colonial era increasingly became a matter of family and cultural survival. Yet even with evidence for massive indigenous trading activities at least since the late sixteenth century most authors insist on inserting a conceptual fire-wall, to wit Stern's differentiation between "European colonial" and "traditional Andean" models of exchange, according to which some rationales guiding individual Andeans' trade may help to sustain the Andean cultural logic while others corrode and betray it. The problem with this view is the very ethnic identity of the "Indian", which, as Saignes demonstrates, in some places was becoming highly fluid according to individual, family and communal strategies for survival and improvement even by the seventeenth century. "Indian", as Harris reminds us, was a categorization imposed by colonial and post-colonial elites, and most people in the Andes did not identify with it. What a more fluid notion of ethnogenesis and ethnocide, as recent studies of ethnic identity, hybridity, diasporas and migration have developed it, might mean for the relation of trade and culture in the post-conquest Andean world and, yes, even in the pre-Hispanic Andes, is an issue not fully engaged in this volume.

Still, this volume offers an excellent way of accessing many of the crucial issues debated about Andean markets and exchange during the past quarter century.

Nils Jacobsen University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign