Highlands Of Peru Research Articles

Value Chain Development and the Agrarian Question: Actor Perspectives on Native Potato Production in the Highlands of Peru

AbstractValue chain development seeks to integrate smallholder farmers into competitive markets to promote economic and social development. This article, conceptually based on the agrarian question, considers how the perspectives of various value chain actors, with particular focus on smallholders, have important implications for the outcomes of these market‐oriented initiatives. Utilizing Long’s concept of social interface, we present a mixed‐methods case study that analyzes how smallholders, an NGO, and agrifood corporations, including PepsiCo, partnered to establish value chains for native potatoes in the Peruvian highlands. We find that a thorough understanding of the various perspectives held by value chain actors provides important insight into why value chain initiatives have divergent trajectories. Based on the findings, we conclude that accounting for how actors are responding to development initiatives and one another helps explain development outcomes and that therefore the agrarian question remains relevant in current agricultural development discourse and practice.

The Chankas and the Priest: A Tale of Murder and Exile in Highland Peru ‐ by Hyland, Sabine

The Chankas and the Priest: A Tale of Murder and Exile in Highland Peru ‐ by Hyland, Sabine

Colonial Andes - The Chankas and the Priest: A Tale of Murder and Exile in Highland Peru. By Sabine Hyland. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016. Pp. 211. $59.95 cloth.

Colonial Andes - The Chankas and the Priest: A Tale of Murder and Exile in Highland Peru. By Sabine Hyland. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016. Pp. 211. $59.95 cloth. - Volume 75 Issue 2

The Chankas and the Priest: A Tale of Murder and Exile in Highland Peru

The Chankas and the Priest: A Tale of Murder and Exile in Highland Peru

Andean Waterways: Resource Politics in Highland Peru by Mattias Borg Rasmussen

Reviewed by: Andean Waterways: Resource Politics in Highland Peru by Mattias Borg Rasmussen Kimberly Munro Mattias Borg Rasmussen Andean Waterways: Resource Politics in Highland Peru Washington: Univ. of Washington Press, 2015. xxv + 2017 pp. Maps, illus., notes, references. $18.14 paper (ISBN 9780295994932); $90.00 hardcover (ISBN 0295994819); $23.99 electronic (ISBN 0295994932). Mattias Borg Rasmussen's work in Andean Waterways explores how a changing climate is enmeshed in all aspects of everyday life. Rasmussen's ethnography takes place in the Department of Ancash, Peru, in the town of Recuay and its surrounding communities and hamlets. Situated in the Callejón de Huaylas, a highland valley flanked by the mountains of the Cordillera Negra to the west, and stunning views of the Cordillera Blanca to the east, Andean Waterways is an ethnography structured around the question of how a changing climate is affecting the Santa River and its tributaries. Rasmussen, based at the University of Copenhagen, utilizes water to frame the complex relationship between Andean peasant communities and municipal and state governments. Water dynamics, specifically, are not part of the same infrastructure at the local level that they are at the state level, having been formed from centuries of water control at the local level in agro-pastoral Andean communities. Receding glaciers and the transformation of the Santa River's "beautiful flow" to a now unpredictable "devil river" (p. 32), further complicates matters. Andean Waterways highlights the conversations, local politics, and actions taken at the human scale within communities on the forefront of this global problem. The theme of "flow" is examined in both a physical and metaphorical sense in Andean Waterways. Rasmussen focuses on five separate [End Page 246] tributaries and canals, following the courses these channels take through different communities and farmlands. Specifically, Rasmussen discusses the flow and interconnectedness of water, and "the configuration of actors, histories, territories, and environmental conditions that enable or inhibit the water" (p. 21). Because basic infrastructure provided by the national government is often lacking in these rural communities, towns like Recuay are "dominated by local power figures … acting in opposition to the Lima-centered national administration. Therefore, the interests of local governments do not always coincide with national interests" (p. 164). These networks of power relations are presented after an insightful discussion on the meaning of place, space, and structuring landscapes. In the Andes, "Water is Life" (a phrase repeated throughout the ethnography), and Lake Conococha, the source of the Santa River, is considered "The heart of Ancash" (p. 157). Andean Waterways presents interviews with community members and detailed accounts of community meetings, government documents, and local protests, all structured around the control of water. Whether it is navigating the politics of constructing new canals through communal plots of land and privately owned chacras, or the protesting of a mine being constructed near Lake Conococha, Rasmussen's work delves into a world of water access, control, and distribution, where "killing the lake is like killing the people" (p. 157). Rasmussen's book complements the work of geographers and historians on mining (Bebbington and Bury 2009), the catastrophic effects of glacial melt (Carey 2010), and social repercussions of climate change (Bury et al. 2013) in the Ancash region, with implications for the central Andes more broadly. Using the classic anthropological approach of ethnographic inquiry of the small Andean community, Rasmussen echoes and amplifies the valuable research of Mark Carey (a collaborator of Rasmussen's; see Carey, et al. 2017). The unique contribution of Andean Waterways lies in its first-hand account of the impact global climate change on the language and livelihood of peasant communities. The local people are at center stage, and Rasmussen eschews scientific jargon in favor of personal accounts of the everyday machinations required to cope with the changing landscape. Rasmussen's ethnography also contributes to conversations on the theme of abandonment, in a multi-scalar way. First, these rural peasant communities have expressed a feeling of abandonment by the state and NGO actors. These rural communities feel this state abandonment not just in terms of water systems, but also in a lack of maintenance and investment in roadways, health services, schools, and other vital community infrastructure. Abandonment is...

Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between: Murals of the Colonial Andes

With the publication of Ananda Cohen Suarez’s book, Andean studies and colonial Latin American art history at last have an English-language treatment of mural painting in highland Peru, one of the most significant artistic genres of the colonial period. This book is guided less by one central claim or question than by an attempt to advance a general approach: Cohen Suarez urges us to contextualize murals within their architectonic settings and the historical moments of their production and reception. Seeing murals as “embedded” (an oft-repeated word) in social frames reveals overlapping registers in which murals could produce meaning for different audiences. Though focused on some of the most well-known and accessible cycles in churches on the route connecting Cuzco with Lake Titicaca, Cohen Suarez suggests her approach could be extended to any example in the broad territory, stretching into present-day Bolivia and Chile, in which mural painting has been was a central-colonial art form.While this methodological approach is not particularly novel—indeed, it characterizes a dominant art-historical paradigm—it represents a significant departure from earlier literature on this topic, which was primarily concerned with cataloguing, stylistic and temporal classification, and iconographic description. Moreover, these works, for which little direct written documentation exists, do not lend themselves to contextual history, and Cohen Suarez should be praised for the wide net she casts to resituate these works within the historical conditions of their making and viewing. Though libros de fábrica (records of church expenditures) constitute her main archival base, the author gains her chief traction through the recruitment of a kaleidoscopic array of sources including archaeological evidence, published sermons and plays, Spanish chronicles, conservation accounts, oral histories, and a large body of secondary historical literature.Four case studies follow an introductory survey of the mural tradition from the pre-conquest era through the colonial period, which touches on issues related to sources, labor, technique, and conservation history. The case studies span the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries and focus on six mural programs, introducing many others as comparanda. These chapters anchor mural programs within overlapping oral, visual, and performative registers of early seventeenth-century evangelization efforts, late seventeenth-century redecoration campaigns, eighteenth-century economic reforms, and struggles to reinstitute state and church control after the Tupac Amaru rebellion. Such colonial agendas are shown to be articulated through or unintentionally complicated by local conditions and indigenous ideologies, such that Inca adornment of sacred huacas, for example, becomes as critical to the legibility of “textile murals” as the Bourbon repartimiento de mercancías and highland cosmopolitanism, and the bodies of water in scenes of Christ’s baptism come to refer both to the river Jordan and to primordial Inca pacarinas. Cohen Suarez thus reveals how static artworks produce layers of dynamic and potentially contradictory meaning that proliferate and shift in changing social conditions. For some, the author’s provocative readings may occasionally tip to the speculative or the implausible: for instance, the proposal that a parrot (a common motif with engraved precedents) in Urco’s Baptism of Christ was meant to signify the Amazon, render St. John a chuncho, and underscore his unbaptized state vis-à-vis Christ.The reader would be well advised to focus a skeptical eye on issues of agency. When Cohen Suarez can pull a historical actor out of the quagmire of anonymity, she tends to ascribe to him—whether a priest, a bishop, or an artist—agency over decisions made about a mural program. She herself acknowledges, however, that commission dynamics and labor history are all but unknowable; there is thus a risk of over-assigning individual intention and responsibility into what were surely complex social negotiations. Moreover, the lack of quality (or entire absence of) reproductions often makes it impossible to follow the subtlety of the author’s visual arguments. Fortunately, the reader can seek out high-quality images that Cohen Suarez went to great lengths to make available online and in earlier publications. These matters aside, the field should be grateful to have this book, both for the scholarly inroads it makes into this corpus and for its unusually readable and well-encapsulated chapters, which make it a wonderful teaching resource.

Buen Gobierno: Chronicles of Violence Committed Against Amerindians in the Andes

Book Review Essay Unlocking the Doors to the Worlds of Guaman Poma and His Nueva coronica, edited by Rolena Adorno and Ivan Boserup. Copenhagen: The Royal Library and Museum Tusculanum Press, 2015. The Chankas and the Priest: A Tale of Murder and Exile in Highland Peru, by Sabine Hyland. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016. Art from a Fractured Past: Memory and Truth-telling in Post-shining Path Peru, edited by Cynthia E. Milton; with an Afterword by Steve J. Stern. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014.

A decade of rapid change: Biocultural influences on child growth in highland Peru.

In the past decade many areas of Peru have been undergoing extreme environmental, economic, and cultural change. In the highland hamlet of Chugurpampa, La Libertad, climate change has ruined harvests and led to frequent periods of migration to the coast in search of livelihood. This biocultural research examines how the changes could be affecting the growth of children who maintain residence in the highlands. Clinical records from the early 2000s were compared to those from the early 2010s. Charts were randomly selected to record anthropometric data, netting a sample of 75 children ages 0-60 months of age. Analysis of covariance was run to compare mean stature, weight, and BMI between cohorts. Percentage of children who fall below the -2 threshold for z-scores for height and weight were compared by age and cohort. A significant secular trend in growth was found, with children born more recently larger than those born a decade before. The effect is most notable in the first year of life, with the growth advantage attenuated by the age of 3 for height and age 4 for weight. While children were unlikely to be stunted from 0 to 3 years of age, 44% of the later cohort were stunted and 11% were underweight from 4 to 5 years of age. Three possible explanations for the rapid shift are entertained: more time spent on the coast during gestation and early childhood, which may attenuate the effect of hypoxia on child growth; dietary change; and increased use of biomedicine.

Sabine Hyland. The Chankas and the Priest: A Tale of Murder and Exile in Highland Peru.

Sabine Hyland. The Chankas and the Priest: A Tale of Murder and Exile in Highland Peru.

Knowledge, attitudes, and practices regarding cystic echinococcosis and sheep herding in Peru: a mixed-methods approach

BackgroundThe parasitic disease, cystic echinococcosis (CE), is prevalent in low-income, livestock-raising communities and 2000 new people will be diagnosed this year in South America alone. The disease usually passes from livestock to dogs to humans, making it a zoonotic disease and part of the One Health Initiative. Control of CE has been infamously difficult; no endemic areas of South America have succeeded in maintaining sustainable eradication of the parasite.For the current study, we aimed to gain a better understanding of the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of rural sheep farmers and other community leaders regarding their sheep herding practices and perspectives about a control program for CE. We also hope to identify potential barriers and opportunities that could occur in a control program.The authors conducted Knowledge, Attitude and Practices (KAP) surveys and semi-structured interviews in rural communities in the highlands of Peru. The KAP surveys were administered to 51 local shepherds, and the semi-structured interviews were administered to 40 individuals, including shepherds, community leaders, and health care providers.ResultsWe found that the shepherds already deworm their sheep at a median of 2 times per year (N = 49, range 2–4) and have a mean willingness-to-pay of U.S. $ 0.60 for dog dewormer medication (N = 20, range = 0.00- $2.00 USD). We were not able to learn the deworming agent or agents that were being used, for neither sheep nor dogs. Additionally, 90% of shepherds slaughter their own sheep (N = 49). We also learned that the main barriers to an effective control program include: lack of education about the cause and control options for CE, accessibility to the distant communities and sparse grazing pastures, and a lack of economic incentive.ConclusionsFindings suggest it may be feasible to develop an effective CE control program which can be used to create an improved protocol to control CE in the region.

Paper Works: Contested Resource Histories in Peru’s Huascarán National Park

Summary Resource histories determine how particular parts of the environment come to be defined as valuable. As elsewhere, protected areas in Latin America link the governance of people, territory, and resources by reinterpreting and reclassifying practices and environments. Set in highland Peru, the article focuses on how such revisions imply contestation of both history and future. It explores particular modes of claiming space through an archeology of the claims to knowledge and legitimacy put forward by a national park and a campesino community, respectively. Claims to space entwine with social struggles about local development where territorial claims are based on different notions of history and interpretations of the esthetic and productive values of the landscape. While the park officials navigate interests of conservation, tourism, and extraction, the campesino community mobilizes a different set of values and interests based on their historical occupation of the territories. These processes of contestation over authority and legitimacy highlight different views on the role of landscapes in the history and progress of local communities. Conservation may not only dispossess people of their land and natural resources, but also of labor and territorial sovereignty. This case shows how an Andean campesino community counters such movements by a wide repertoire of legal and social actions that works simultaneously in legal and extra-legal domains. Paper works mediate claims to territorial sovereignty, people, and resources. These claims involve contestations over interpretations of history which, besides their oral forms, materialize in paperwork such as official communications, community records, and cadastral maps, as well as in visual representations, internal statutes, and deliberate history writing.

A GIS of affordances: Movement and visibility at a planned colonial town in highland Peru

Archaeological GIS is moving towards increasingly detailed, embodied, multidimensional simulations and analyses of human experience in the past. Most of the emerging GIS research synthesizing spatial modeling and subject-centered approaches has been concerned with practices and perceptions of landscape. This paper tightens the analytical focus to the more intimate scale of a single settlement, combining models of movement and visual experience within a planned colonial town in highland Peru. Such a rendering is important, since controlling movement and visual experience were central to the colonial project that built this and other such towns in the Viceroyalty of Peru. This study centers on an exceptionally well-preserved, relict planned colonial town in highland Peru to investigate affordances of movement and visibility within it. Several GIS-based simulations and analytical techniques are brought together, including drone-based high resolution three dimensional modeling, spatial network analysis, walking models, and cumulative viewshed analysis, to simulate aggregate visual experience as people moved through the town. The results are suggestive of how the layout of the town specifically routed transit to facilitate the visual prominence of the church and original Inka plaza of the reducción, as well as the prominence of indigenous elite households. Both continuities and discontinuities of movement and visual experience relative to Inkaic and Spanish colonial spaces are evident. By extension, this paper also provides a pathway for quantitative and reproducible modeling of site-scale movement and visual affordances as dimensions of subject and community formation in other global contexts.

Sabine Hyland. The Chankas and the Priest: A Tale of Murder and Exile in Highland Peru.

Sabine Hyland. The Chankas and the Priest: A Tale of Murder and Exile in Highland Peru.

The first record of Calomys hummelincki (Rodentia: Sigmodontinae) from the Lavrados of northern Brazil

The South American genus Calomys exhibits a disjunct distribution with most species inhabiting grasslands, savannas, and forest edges from ca. latitude 8° S in the highlands of Peru and the Caatinga of Brazil to ca. latitude 16° S in central Bolivia, and from there south into Argentine Patagonia. Only a single species ( Calomys hummelincki ) occurs in open habitats in northern South America. We report the first known specimen of Calomys hummelincki for Brazil. The specimen is deposited in the mammal collection of Museu de Zoologia da Universidade de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo. It is a young adult female with two embryos collected on 13 March 1989 by C. M. Carvalho at Fazenda Salvamento, Roraima state, during a herpetofaunal survey. The specimen shares qualitative and quantitative characters with specimens from Venezuela and Curacao, but also differs substantially in others. The record presented herein extends the known range of the species about 630 km southeastward from the nearest previous record (in Venezuela, Estado Bolivar, Sipao). This new record was obtained in a locality representative of the savannas of the Rio Branco – Rupununi region that supports a poorly known, but distinctive mammalian fauna. This entire eco-region represents a piece of the biogeographic puzzle resulting from the climate-dependent vegetation shifts that dominated the Quaternary of South America. This new record highlights the need to investigate and protect the biodiversity of the Rio Branco-Rupununi savannas.

The application of 3D geometric morphometrics and laser surface scanning to investigate the standardization of cranial vault modification in the Andes

Cranial vault modification and the social significance of permanent body modification have long been an important topic of interest in Andean archaeology. While previous studies have enriched our understanding of these practices among prehistoric Andean populations, the introduction of 3D surface scanners and geometric morphometric methods in archaeology enable us to examine head-shaping practices in novel ways. In this pilot study, we used a NextEngine 3D Laser Surface Scanner to generate high resolution models of artificially modified crania from four archaeological sites dating to the Archaic (2300–1600 BCE), Formative (500 CE), late Middle Horizon/early Late Intermediate period (LIP) (750–1100 CE) in Chile and late LIP crania (circa 1350 CE) from central, highland Peru. Landmarks were recorded on the 3D digital models of crania and these data were analyzed to assess variation in vault shape within and between the samples. Results of the PCA analysis showed graphical separation of the annular, tabular erect, and some tabular oblique types even when gross morphological assessments proved challenging. We documented marked variation within the general modification type traditionally identified as tabular oblique, which suggests more detailed classifications within this type are needed. We also investigated how standardized (i.e., similar) particular cranial modification types were at each site, and results show that the coastal sites of Morro 1 and Playa Miller 7, and the highlands Huari-Vegachayoc Moqo site show higher levels of standardization than the other four samples. This study highlights the utility of 3D imaging and geometric morphometric methods for straightforward, objective assessments of cranial modification and levels of standardization within sites and within particular modification types. This has implications for understanding the broader social and cultural significance of this practice, such as whether there were shared cultural norms about how a head should be modified, which could have led to highly uniform modification practices and head shapes in the Andes.

Racial Spoils from Native Soils: How Neoliberalism Steals Indigenous Lands in Highland Peru

Racial Spoils from Native Soils: How Neoliberalism Steals Indigenous Lands in Highland Peru

Conversion and Persistence: Analysis of Faunal Remains from an Early Spanish Colonial Doctrinal Settlement in Highland Peru

Initial Spanish colonization of the Central Andes and efforts to transform indigenous society were highly dependent on local social and geographic conditions. In the Colca Valley of southern Peru, Franciscan friars established a series of doctrinas (settlements for the conversion and doctrinal instruction of the indigenous population) at former Inka imperial outposts during the mid-1540s. The inhabitants of one of thesedoctrinas—the site today known as Malata (ca. A.D. 1545–1573)— were subject to one of the earliest mendicant evangelical campaigns in the Central Andean highlands. In addition to religious indoctrination and significant spatial reconfiguration of the village, Spaniards attempted to alter systems of domestic production related to the rearing and consumption of animals. They also imposed new tribute demands. Despite considerable transformations of the architecture and attendant changes in daily life at Malata, zooarchaeological analysis of faunal remains from a variety of contexts provides no indication of the introduction of Eurasian animals to Malata nor the alteration of either indigenous husbandry practices or the consumption of food animals. Ceramic iconography and the abundance of weaving tools suggest that Spaniards built on the local system of camelid husbandry to extract textiles and metallurgical goods as tribute during the first generation of colonial occupation.

Peru potato potential: Biodiversity conservation and value chain development

AbstractAlthough crop diversity has been identified as essential to enhance global food security and adapt to climate change, high loss of genetic resources is occurring due to agricultural industrialization and market requirements. Value chain development is an emerging market strategy that seeks to simultaneously achieve agrobiodiversity conservation and economic goals, though little empirical evidence exists regarding the extent to which value chains encourage biodiversity maintenance. This study considers the conservation of native potatoes among households in the highlands of Peru where value chain development is being pursued to create market niches for certain native potato varieties. Utilizing a mixed-methods case study approach, the findings of this study indicate that the conservers of native varieties are the households with more endowed resource bases as well as those that sell native varieties in value chains. However, the findings suggest that value chains themselves likely have only a marginal effect on conservation. Native potato conservation and potato production for value chains exist as two separate livelihood activities, and households with more resources are best positioned to engage in both. While value chains allow households to capitalize on the economic value of certain native varieties, the production of other native varieties allows households to fulfill cultural values. Based on these findings, this study concludes that value chain opportunities for native varieties should continue to be identified but they alone are not an adequate strategy to conserve agrobiodiversity. Therefore, in addition to value chain development, a full suite of conservation schemes should be implemented simultaneously.

The Evolution and Development of Inferential Reasoning about Ethnic Markers

Social scientists have long argued about the relationship between ethnic phenomena, symbolic markers, and cultural traits. In this paper, we illustrate the potential of functionalist cultural and genetic evolutionary models to reconcile these debates. Specifically, we argue that we must take seriously the role of cultural similarity in delineating certain category boundaries if we are to understand the origins and development of ethnic stereotyping. We examine whether symbolic markers—namely, sartorial ones—are privileged in the development of social stereotypes by comparing how children and adults in the urban United States and rural highland Peru perform a categorization task. We find that arbitrary sartorial markers motivate generalizations about novel traits in all samples except among US children, even when they crosscut body morphology, emotional expression, and socioeconomic cues. Unlike children in the United States, children in the Peruvian sample demonstrate an even stronger reliance on sartoria...

Testing soil fertility of Prehispanic terraces at Viejo Sangayaico in the upper Ica catchment of south-central highland Peru

This study presents a pilot geoarchaeological investigation of terraced agricultural systems near San Francisco de Sangayaico, in the upper Ica catchment of the Southern Peruvian Andes. It aims to assess the evidence for soil fertility associated with agricultural strategies practised throughout the Prehispanic, Spanish colonial and modern occupations in this region. A series of twenty-two test pits were hand excavated through two terraced field systems, and sampled to examine the changes in soil physical and chemical characteristics down-profile and downslope.This study provides the first geoarchaeological analyses of the agrarian soil system surrounding Viejo Sangayaico in the upper Ica catchment. Results demonstrate that the soil system was much modified prior to the creation of the terrace systems, probably about 900years ago. This system was characterised by a weakly acidic to slightly calcareous pH, a consistent but low electrical conductivity, reasonable-but-variable phosphorus content, and a loamy soil texture with a component of weathered volcanic tonalite parent material. The shallow terrace soil build-up on the slopes investigated indicates that slope modification was as minimal as possible. Moreover, the relatively low frequencies of organic material and phosphorus suggest that the terraces were not heavily fertilised in the past, making the stability and management of the nutrient-rich topsoil vital.The results of these excavations and soil fertility analyses are situated within the context of the wider Andean ethno-historic and the archaeological record to address questions regarding how the terraces were built and maintained over time. Agricultural terraces undoubtedly mitigated the effects of slope erosion associated with cultivation. But, the terrace soil features observed at Sangayaico do not appear to be the same as those documented in other geoarchaeological studies of Andean terrace systems. These contrasts may be accounted for by a combination of differing geological substrate and hydrological conditions, as well as variable trajectories in past soil development, erosion factors, manuring/field management practises and crop selection.