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Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century. Kenneth J. Andrien and Rolena Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. viii + 295. $45.00 (cloth). ISBN 0–520–07228–6.

The Allure of the Foreign: Imported Goods In Postcolonlal Latin America. BENJAMIN ORLOVE. ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. viii. 226 pp., bibliography, contributors, index.

Manufacturing against the Odds: Small-Scale Producers in an Andean City. HANS C. BUECHLER and JUDITH-MARIA BUECHLER. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992. 311 pp. $46.50 (paper). ISBN 0–8133–8448–6.

The Two Miipas of Chan Kom:. Study of Socioeconomlc and Political Transformation In. Maya Community. Alicia Re Cruz. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. xii. 203 pp., figures, tables, references, notes, index

Creating Context in Andean Cultures. ROSALEEN HOWARD-MALVERDE, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997; 253 pp. The writers of this volume strive to show how "texts and textualizing practices are active agents in the shaping of experience and . . . the creation of context" (p. 7). In the spirit of a more dialogical approach to understanding cultural expressions, "texts" include a range of cultural activities and artifacts. Howard-Malverde emphasizes that the central aim of scholars should be to grasp how cultural agents themselves "engage in the chain of reception, interpretation, and production of meaning" (p. 9). She also cautions that to reject an overly western notion of culture as text does not mean that one should ignote how the Andean highland peoples studied here have become producers of western kinds of texts themselves, incorporating alphabetic literacy and legalistic discourse and symbolism into their lives. These arguments, set out in the introduction, guide the volume's contributors as they examine rituals, various material objects, dialogues, letter-writing among non-literates, and shamanic sessions. Some of these efforts succeed better than others in teasing out how people receive messages, the paths those messages take, how and why their respective interpretations differ or resemble each other, and, finally, how these interpretations may then produce new meanings, misunderstandings, or simply reiterate existing ones. The authors stress the dynamism and flexibility of communication among Quechua peoples living in the Andean highlands. The first section concerns the production of meaning, history, and memory through various media. Harvey shows how Peruvian Independence Day celebrations, while they convey intended meanings, also leave space for alternative interpretations that go against the grain of "hegemonic histories." She argues as well that Shining Path guerrilla members consciously recognized the power of official narratives and therefore expended considerable energy disrupting the festivities. Rappaport's reprinted article traces how the Cumbales and Muellamueses of Colombia produce militant dramas which serve in part to teach young people "how to remember history" rather than what they should recall. She compares these historical narratives to those produced by memoristas, another kind of local historian. The second section examines such material culture as textiles and pebbles that are highly significant communicative forms in the Andes. Allen's "When Pebbles Move Mountains" is extraordinary in its insightful analysis of why hundreds of thousands of Quechua villagers who make the annual pilgrimage to the high glacial sanctuary of Qoyllur Rit'i spend much of their time en route playing with pebbles, creating miniature scenes from their lives, making requests to the ancestors with them, and exchanging them among themselves. She shows that iconic textuality is multifaceted, complex, interactive, and dynamic, and carefully demonstrates the relationship between thought and matter by tracing the use of these pebbles as power objects. The articles by Arnold and Dransart reveal the impressive work of skilled ethnographers but fall short in adequately moving beyond unmediated interpretations or in making distinctions between texts and contexts. Arnold argues against anthropologists who, she claims, do not heed native interpretations and, instead, fall back on western-anchored analyses, over-determined by a vision of Aymara people as "vanquished." Yet she herself falls prey to overdetermined interpretations, linking diverse native explanations to each other in a highly subjective and selective manner. The third section examines how textualization through written discourse takes place. Adelaar and Dedenbach-Salazar Saenz take as their subject the seventeenth-century Huarochiri texts. Adelaar explains how the relatively abrupt transition from orality to incipient literacy is reflected in the texts. …

Conzedera que en un pueblo tienen sacado unas asecyas de los rríos o posos, de las lagunas o de estanques. En tiempo antiguo lo sacaron con tanto tavajo que ci avía de pagar y gastar se gastaría dies o doze mil pesos o veynte mil pesos. Que antes que fuese Ynga, como avía tanta suma de yndios y no tenía más que un rrey y señor, lo abrieron y lo sacaron las asecyas y todas las sementeras, andenes que ellos les llama para, chacra, larca. Y lo sacaron con mayor facilidad del mundo a mano cin herramienta; que parese que cada yndio alsava una piedra. Aquello bastava de la tanta suma de gente que avía.

When I did my first field research in Peru in 1974, I was struck by the forceful, energetic, and at times bawdy market women known ascholas. They stood out because they appeared fearless, astute, different, and unpredictable. I could ot find a counterpart among Peruvian males. The cholas feigned neither humility toward rich white foreigners nor unbridled admiration for their ways. They inhabited a world distinct from that of either the Quechua peasantry or the westernizedmestizobut easily interacted with bothcampesinosandmestizos. They freely insulted whom they pleased; they engaged in wheeling and dealing and stood their ground but could also be surprisingly generous, almost religiously so.

The Quechua concept wallpa refers to the chicken, to the experience of the Spanish Conquest, and to prehispanic notions of power and authority. Ethnohistorical, lexical, and ethnographic evidence is used to decipher the puzzle of how a word for a European import can symbolize precolonial structures and concepts. This evidence indicates that concepts are juxtaposed in a process that transforms particular historical events into markers punctuating time. Events with similar consequences or analogous structure become telescoped and placed together side by side. Native people interpret their experiences of daily life and of unusual and dramatic events in terms of their received categories. The content of their categories and the relationships among them are shaped and transformed in the course of practical engagement. The intertwined processes of change and continuity occur simultaneously, resulting in a familiar yet new topography of cultural order. Thus, myth and history are not opposed to, but rather feed each other actively in the Andean world. Quechua concepts of time and linguistic categories continue to confound and bedevil scholars' attempts to sort out the autochthonous foundations of Andean social organization from post-conquest introductions. Final resolution of these problems is probably impossible, but we can use the vital oral traditions among contemporary Quechua speakers, travelogues, chronicles, and administrative documents from the colonial period, and the archaeological record to isolate possible definitions for particularly crucial or revealing categories of thought. Wallpa, the chicken, is one such category; it refers to an animal imported from Europe but is laden with multiple and complex connotations that evidently predate the arrival of the Spaniards. This paradox impelled early chroniclers, among them Acosta (I977 [I590]), Cobo (I956 [I653]), Garcilaso de la Vega (I960 [I609]) and Santacruz Pachacuti (I968 [I6I3]), to engage in convoluted arguments on how the Quechua word wallpa came to denote the chicken. I will show in this article that the QuechuaEthnohistory 34:2 (Spring I987). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc ooI4-I80I/87/$I.50. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.58 on Sat, 17 Sep 2016 04:44:58 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms