Between Reform and Revolution: Political Struggles in the Peruvian Andes, 1969-1991.

Parker, David S.

Anthropologist Linda Seligmann has crafted a fascinating ethnography of one highland Peruvian community during a period of intense change. Her book analyses the impact that Peru's radical agrarian reform, decreed in 1969 by General Juan Velasco Alvarado, had on the district of Huanoquite, sixty-five kilometers southwest of Cuzco. Seligmann argues that the reform, ostensibly designed to end oppression and inequality in the Andes, actually ignited thousands of new conflicts over land and power, and ultimately contributed to the contemporary climate of violence in the region. Her thesis is reasonable and abundantly supported; however, the book remains only a mixed success. On the one hand, Seligmann is convincing and insightful when she traces the complex and contradictory ways in which the reform process played out in "her" community. On the other hand, despite the claims made on the jacket cover, Seligmann's local study does not provide a comprehensive or even terribly original understanding of the conflicts of the 1970s and 80s or the rise of the Shining Path guerrilla movement.

Seligmann is at her best when she details the ways in which the inhabitants of Huanoquite sought to take advantage of Velasco's agrarian reform. A district dominated by haciendas, where peasants had indeed been dominated and abused by a powerful landed elite, Huanoquite was transformed by government policies designed to break the traditional oligarchy and give "land to the tiller." However, this vision of aristocrats versus peons caricatured a rural reality that was infinitely more complex. As throughout the Andes, a dizzying array of land-labour patterns existed in Huanoquite: some land was communally owned, sharecropping was common, and a complex range of landlord-peasant relationships was embedded in an equally complex system of patronage and reciprocity. While the reform mostly succeeded in expropriating the largest landowners, it could not possibly solve the land problem. Instead, it unleashed a flood of litigation that set individuals, communities, and the new co-operatives against one another, often reigniting conflicts that dated back to colonial or even preconquest times. Seligmann describes the legal and extralegal strategies employed by landlord and peasant alike in prosecuting these battles, and brilliantly unwinds the multiple strands of discourse and ideology at work. Chapters four and five are particularly well done, showing how arguments over land could end up involving everything from sixteenth-century documents to conflicting interpretations of pre-Inca kinship patterns.

The strength of the book in its attention to local detail becomes its weakness later on, however. Seligmann tries but largely fails to make the experience of Huanoquite illuminate the general fragmentation of contemporary Andean society and the rise of Shining Path. Admittedly, she makes several good points about the way in which the agrarian reform set subsequent conflicts into motion. The devastation of the traditional landed elite created opportunities for peasants that had not existed before, but the overall effect was to increase individualism and social differentiation. Traditional mechanisms of community cohesion did not break down entirely, but they weakened, as new social networks and alternative sources of prestige began to emerge. Seligmann particularly focusses on the rising importance of a new class of economic and cultural intermediaries who used their education and contacts with die outside to build their own positions within the community. While many of these brokers were in yielding in their defence of community interests, their presence nonetheless undermined traditional rules of authority. In the worst cases, as with some of Huanoquite's teachers, brokers ended up reproducing the ills of the old landed elite as they mistreated and denounced peasants for their alleged laziness, drunkenness, and barbarity. Seligmann is probably correct when she argues that Shining Path recruited most successfully among these intermediaries -- who were in peasant society but not of it -- and that the social and political changes that created these brokers were the same changes that made the Shining Path insurgency possible.

In the end, however, this part of the book disappoints. Similar things have been written elsewhere both about the impact of die agrarian reform and about the social base of Shining Path. Ultimately, Seligmann's material from Huanoquite fails to illustrate much that is new. While local studies ideally allow us to see larger theoretical problems in a new light, Seligmann too often seems to be working in the opposite direction. Frequently she relies on the theoretical insights of other anthropologists, often complete with lengthy and jargon-filled quotes, for no other purpose than to explain events in Huanoquite (see, for example, the superfluous mini-biographies of two brokers in chapter seven). In other words, instead of the particular illuminating the general, she uses the general merely to illuminate the particular. This tendency severely limits the usefulness of the book for anyone other than the specialist. In stun, this book will join the list of important and valuable local ethnographies from the Peruvian Andes, and scholars seeking to understand the complexities of land reform will benefit from the early chapters. However, those seeking a clear analysis of violence in the Andes or the origins of the Shining Path insurgency are best directed elsewhere.