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Originally published in 1952.

Book Description
This is a fascinating social anthropological study of the migration of Peruvian highlanders to the jungle east of the Andes and to urban coastal areas in and around Lima. Departing from traditional approaches, Sarah Skar emphasizes the individual problems within the new communities. Working
within this context, she goes on to analyze significant themes for this group of migrants, namely the traditional conceptions of separations and connectedness. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Do not miss this incredibly important addition to Andean and indigenous studies!!!
Maria Elena Garcia, an anthropologist who has worked for years in the Cusco area of the Peruvian Andes has written an amazingly smart, compact and readable work on indigenous Quechua organizing. Combine this with Marisol de la Cadena's Indigenous Mestizos and you have the most complete, historically profound discussion of the eternal question: In a country with so many indigenous, why has Peru not established a national Indian movement like its neighbors in Ecuador (Quichua), Chile (Mapuche) and Bolivia (Ayamara/Quechua)?? Garcia smashes our preconceived notions of what counts as indigenous and who dictates the form of how indigeneity is perceived from a transnational perspective. This book fills a huge gap in the literature on indigenous movements in the Andes: it should be on the bookshelves of every student of indigeneity or the Andes, it would be an excellent assignment for undergraduate or graduate classes and it should also interest people who simply want to better understand this fascinating and long-suffering country. Wonderfully profound and enjoyable work from an exciting new scholar.Also recommended in combination is Orin Starn's Nightwatch. ... Read more

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The people of Taquile Island on the Peruvian side of beautiful Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the Americas, are renowned for the hand-woven textiles that they both wear and sell to outsiders. One thousand seven hundred Quechua-speaking peasant farmers, who depend on potatoes and the fish from the lake, host the forty thousand tourists who visit their island each year. Yet only twenty-five years ago, few tourists had even heard of Taquile. In Weaving a Future: Tourism, Cloth, and Culture on an Andean Island, Elayne Zorn documents the remarkable transformation of the isolated rocky island into a community-controlled enterprise that now provides a model for indigenous communities worldwide.

Over the course of three decades and nearly two years living on Taquile Island, Zorn, who is trained in both the arts and anthropology, learned to weave from Taquilean women. She also learned how gender structures both the traditional lifestyles and the changes that tourism and transnationalism have brought. In her comprehensive and accessible study, she reveals how Taquileans used their isolation, landownership, and communal organizations to negotiate the pitfalls of globalization and modernization and even to benefit from tourism. This multi-sited ethnography set in Peru, Washington, D.C., and New York City shows why and how cloth remains central to Andean society and how the marketing of textiles provided the experience and money for Taquilean initiatives in controlling tourism.

The first book about tourism in South America that centers on traditional arts as well as community control, Weaving a Future will be of great interest to anthropologists and scholars and practitioners of tourism, grassroots development, and the fiber arts. ... Read more

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On the eve of the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, peoples throughout the Andes brewed beer from corn and other grains, believing that this alcoholic beverage, called asua, was a gift from the gods, a drink possessing the power to mediate between the human and divine. Consuming asua to intoxication was a sacred tradition that humans and spirits shared, creating reciprocal joy and ties of mutual obligation.

When Butler began research in Huaycopungo, Ecuador, in 1977, ceremonial drinking was causing hardship for these Quichua-speaking people. Then, in 1987, a devastating earthquake was interpreted as a message from God to end the ritual obligation to get drunk.

Holy Intoxication to Drunken Dissipation examines how the defense of drinking and getting drunk ended abruptly as the people of Otavalo re-evaluated their traditional religious life and their relationship with the wider Ecuadorian society, and defended a renewed traditional indigenous culture with increasing pride. This account presents both the local people’s views of their struggles and a more general analysis of the factors involved, and concludes with thoughts about how their culture will adapt in the future.

Holy Intoxication to Drunken Dissipation examines how the defense of drinking and getting drunk ended abruptly as the people of Otavalo re-evaluated their traditional religious life and their relationship with the wider Ecuadorian society. ... Read more

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This second edition of Catherine J. Allen's distinctive ethnography of the Quechua-speaking people of the Andes brings their story into the present. She has added an extensive afterword based on her visits to Sonqo in 1995 and 2000, and has updated and revised parts of the original text. The book focuses on the very real problem of cultural continuity in a changing world, and Allen finds that the hold life has in 2002 is not the same as it was in 1985. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

The best available book on Q'ero
This is a wonderful book written by an anthropologist who spent several years in an isolated Andean ayllu (community) located a good number of miles from the provincial center of Colquepata. The attraction of this book is that, unlike most authors responsible for the ever proliferating literature on Andean peoples and their practices, Allen actually lived with the Indians, participated in their ceremonies, potato planting, festivals and travels. The book provides priceless descriptions of the labor divisions between men, women and children and of the interactions between the runa (i.e.,Qechua for "people") themselves, between the runa and the city-dwelling mestizos and, perhaps most poignantly, between the people and the land.The land for the Andean peasant is a living breathing organism that needs to be loved, feared and placated with gifts.Each and every horizon marker has a personality, every hill possesses power and there are spirit beings inhabiting different "power spots" from the time immemorial.The interactions between the people, the ancestors, the spirits and the land are part of the reality that needs to be reinforced every single day through little rituals, such as greeting the sun as one steps out of the door early in the morning.

Coca represented here part of the glue that held everything together. The rituals that underlie coca chewing bind people in a neverending cycle of mutual obligation; in addition, coca is used as a main ingredient of despachos (ritual offerings) and a source of quiet energy during exhaustive labor on potato fields. Unfortunately, as a result of the demand for processed coca, cocaine, in the US, and the resulting pressure on the Andean countries by coca dealers and foreign goverements alike, the Peruvian peasants have found their access to raw coca leaves (non-addictive) severely limited, which affects a crucial aspect of their culture and cultural identity.

Allen depicts all these elements (and much much more)in a simple yet poignant narrative. Everything is exactly where it should be - she brings us close to the individual members of her extended ayllu so that the reader herself can participate. I found the frequent inserts of Quechua phrases especially useful, providing a direct link into the mode of the Andean thought.

I highy recommend this book. probably the best one available, if you want to visit Qero regions in peru.

A rather intricate look at rustic Andean life and rituals
Allen's work was rather fascinating.She provided an in depth look at the Runa, a small group of townspeople who adhere to customs of ancient Incan and colonial Spanish civilization.She does an especially good job atexploring the role that Coca chewing plays in their society and indeterming their identity.Their rituals and customs will fascinate you. Beware, this book is not for the unsophisticated reader.It's a good read,but requires some thought and exploration to truly appreciate it. ... Read more