Ironies of Power

Abstract

The Andean region has become synonymous with conflict and disorder (Burt and Mauceri, 2004; Drake and Hershberg, 2006; Mainwaring, Bejarano, and Pizarro, 2006). Every country in the region has experienced at least one major economic meltdown during the past two decades, and all except Colombia have lived through two or more extraconstitutional transfers of political power (sometimes reversed, sometimes not). Both Colombia and Peru have survived extended periods of civil war, and class and ethnic conflicts simmer close to the surface across the region. While the sources of instability and conflict are numerous, the books reviewed here all point to the impact of vast power discrepancies on social order. Conflict and order in the region are shaped by the different ways in which the marginalized and weak confront the dominant and powerful and, by extension, how the powerful respond to these challenges. These books collectively provide theoretical grounding and methodological tools for understanding the exercise of power in ways that can account for situations (rare but real) in which the weak seem to get the better of the strong. Marc Becker, Daniella Gandolfo, and Richard Walter approach these issues from very different perspectives. Becker works to debunk the myth that indigenous peoples in Ecuador were manipulated by leftist political activists throughout the twentieth century. He shows that instead indigenous activist and leftist organizers established a fruitful collaborative relationship that provided the organizational basis for the large-scale indigenous mobilizations that have shaped Ecuadorian politics since the 1980s. Gandolfo, an anthropologist, draws our attention to the implications of a very specific transgressive act (a Lima street sweeper's baring her breasts in public to protest the mayor's decision to privatize urban sanitation services). Her analysis shows how taboos (and their violation) shape the meanings of and possibilities for political activism in societies shot through with inequality of various kinds (class, gender, race, etc.). Walter, by contrast, moves from the distinctly local to the global in his nuanced diplomatic history of U.S.-Peru relations at the height of the cold war.