Religious regimes in Peru: Response to a review

Abstract

I want to react to the review of my book Religious Regimes in Peru by Andrew Canessa in a recent issue ofthe Bulletin of Latin American Research. I strongly feel that the reviewer both misunderstood and misrepresented my book in a number of serious ways to the extent that I hardly recognised my own work. Since Dr Canessa did not mention it, he apparently completely missed the central theme ofthe book, namely a simple comprehensive theory of religion and politics with novel features, with the aid of which the book was constructed. I stated this goal in the first paragraph of the Introduction. In my more detailed comments, I will follow Dr Canessa's arguments. I would have argued that the military or political expansion of polities such as Tiwanaku and Wari was impeded by ecological factors and that 'the only way to expand the influence was to emphasise religious prominence' (p. 41), while citing Isbell's work in support. This is a rather unusual reading of my text. My quotation referred to early coastal societies, while Isbell's quotation only related to Tiwanaku's influence in the Ayacucho region. I refrained from making any detailed statements about the politico-religious developments in both the Wari and Tiwanaku heartlands, since I think that current scholarship does not provide sufficient information to do so. Dr Canessa observed next: 'Here lies a problem with the way the book is presented. Spier lists the sources on which each section is based in a footnote and it is unclear to what extent the ideas presented are Spier's or those authors in the initial footnote, let alone which of these writers is the source of any point being made.' When writing a study of this kind, it is impossible to make references to all the authors all the time. This would lead to a great number of extended references and discussions after almost every sentence in which factual information is stated. This would make the book unreadable. So I opted for a joint footnote in every section, in which I stated on whose work the section was based. When quoting and/or making references I thought were important for the argument, I did so in the main text. Since I presented my theory in simple sociological terms, I hoped that any thoughtful reader would have noted where my representation of established scholarship ended and my analysis began.