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This chapter asks why so many Huanoquiteños were exploring a wide range of entrepreneurial ventures and how they differed from state- and NGO-sponsored development initiatives. The ventures challenge the assumption of a unidirectional arrow leading to migration from countryside to city. While they showed ingenuity and entrepreneurial verve, they were partly catalyzed by the needs of households that were being squeezed to find complementary economic activities permitting them to remain in Huanoquite and farm their lands. Villagers had a deep appreciation of the beauty of their home’s landscape, history, and culture, which has grown due to social media, tourism, and a celebration by Peruvians of Indigeneity.

This chapter delves into food politics, food sovereignty, and sustainability. It argues that Peru’s government has paid more attention to incentivizing its rural inhabitants to produce healthy foods for the rest of the world than ameliorating conditions that contribute to malnutrition or hunger among the same inhabitants. Racial discrimination and stigmatization of Indigenous foodstuffs, inequitable land tenure regimes, and the need to encourage the development of accessible regional markets make major impacts on food security among Indigenous Quechua agrarian households. The chapter also asks if the promotion of quinoa worldwide is wreaking havoc with Indigenous control over biogenetic resources in Peru, local seed selection and crop diversity, marketing practices, and domestic consumption patterns.

The Introduction argues for an ethnographic examination of the effects of the boom in quinoa consumption on those who cultivate it. It contextualizes the book’s in-depth analysis of quinoa expansion in Huanoquite, one agrarian district in Peru’s Andean highlands, and points to the ways food politics underpin these dynamics. It introduces the concept of pragmatic spirituality to depict how Indigenous Quechua households situate themselves and act in the cosmos and juxtaposes it to a philosophy of extraction that guides many modernization and development initiatives in the Andes. It reflects on the nature and importance of long-term fieldwork and then provides a summary of the chapters that follow.

The conclusion reviews the intimate relationships among extraction, agriculture, development, and the expansion of quinoa in Huanoquite. It cautions that Indigenous inhabitants often become a commodity, experiencing manipulation and exhaustion as their culture and labor are extracted, distilled, highlighted, and broadcast to increase the value of quinoa. Despite the world’s enthusiasm for quinoa, it has not substantially changed Indigenous Quechua people’s life circumstances for the better, and COVID-19 has made Huanoquiteños more aware than ever of the benefits of shorter supply chains and localized food production. It concludes that Huanoquiteños rarely withdraw from the plurality of worlds in which they find themselves but rather wield their weapons of pragmatic spirituality to combat deep inequalities and systemic racism while recognizing that the universe itself is porous and historically constituted.

This chapter documents quinoa production, processing, and marketing, and analyzes the efforts of state and nonstate actors to expand quinoa production in Huanoquite. It shows what motivated some households and not others to cultivate quinoa in greater amounts; the important roles women played; and the differences in the assumptions and expectations that the Regional Government of Cusco, INIA (the National Institute of Agrarian Innovation), and a branch of the Ministry of Agriculture (MINAGRI), on the one hand, and Indigenous farmers, on the other, held with respect to quinoa cultivation and marketing.

This chapter funnels outward to discuss current and prospective environmental damage caused by mining in Huanoquite’s environs and reviews problems with the legal framework that governs mining in Peru. Whatever might be the immediate successes or failures of their quinoa project, Huanoquiteños knew the mines were not minor harbingers of collateral damage. They confronted the prospect that the entire region might become uninhabitable due to pollution of their water source from five lakes that they consider sacred. Huanoquiteños drew on the forces of cryptids, storytelling, organizing, and political resistance to challenge the development of the mines. They also selectively used borderlands knowledge to fight back against these powerful destructive forces.

This chapter looks at the power of infrastructure and its intervention in choices Huanoquiteños face. Changes in roads and communication technology over the last half-century have been as important as agrarian policies in transforming the livelihoods of Huanoquiteños. Improved infrastructure between Huanoquite and the tourist mecca and market nexus of Cusco has permitted far more connections among people, places, and goods, and more entrepreneurial opportunities. However, Quechua meanings and uses of place, regional space, and health have also been called into question. Villagers have become aware that many state improvements in their vicinity have taken place because of the state’s support of mining concessions, thus overshadowing positive changes underway.

This chapter documents Huanoquite’s agrarian history the impact of a radical agrarian reform in 1969 and its reversals, the brutal civil war between the Shining Path movement and government and paramilitary forces, and the growing privatization of land. These changes in land tenure regimes help explain how the demand for quinoa has affected Huanoquiteños’ lives. Community household rights to land have become more tenuous because the rise of private holdings and the ability of communities to act in a unified fashion is challenged by growing inequality among households and their individualized efforts to find ways to sustain themselves, albeit in often innovative ways.

This ethnography examines efforts to expand quinoa production for export in Huanoquite, one dynamic agrarian district in the Cusco region of the Andean highlands of Peru. Consumed by millions of people because of its healthful properties, quinoa has been cultivated by Indigenous Quechua farmers of the Andes for millennia. Based on the author’s long-term fieldwork over forty years, part 1 offers a backdrop to understanding the quinoa boom, showing how Huanoquite’s agrarian history and infrastructural and development projects, initiated by state and parastatal agencies, have been experienced by villagers. It takes account of the effects of neoliberalism, enduring racism, gender dynamics and discrimination, generational dynamics, and meanings of development. Part 2 turns to the quinoa project, discussing quinoa’s properties, its cultivation and processing, food politics surrounding its promotion and consumption; obstacles to its expansion, and why quinoa cultivators, consumers of quinoa, and government agencies entertain divergent assumptions regarding food security, sustainability, and food sovereignty. The final chapter addresses villagers’ resistance to mining activities that will pollute the entire region’s water supply on which its agriculture depends. Through a close analysis of the quinoa boom, the book shows the tensions between an ontology of pragmatic spirituality that grounds Quechua Indigenous villagers’ efforts to keep their world in balance and affective and economic modes of extraction that threatens the sustainability of their lives.

This article reviews innovations in ethnographic methods that have developed over the past 25 years, specifically the emergence of multisited and short-term fieldwork, digital ethnography, various kinds of participatory and collaborative ethnography, and the use of interviews. Ethnographic methods, once primarily employed by anthropologists, have now been embraced by many other social science practitioners. The article discusses the strengths and weaknesses of how these methods are being implemented and applied; the ethical challenges their use raises; and the kinds of novel modes of interpretation, analysis, and representations of research findings they are producing.

This essay provides an overview of how development ideologies catalyze diverse displacement and resettlement dynamics among market traders in Vietnam. Case studies presented by authors in this section analyze the kinds of policies and practices that structure market space and the different ways that traders themselves engage the efforts of bureaucrats and state authorities to transform them into malleable citizens. The ethnic identities of traders, their sociopolitical networks, knowledge of complex temporal cycles of trade and spatial mobility, as well as the state’s contradictory objectives create margins in which traders resist state control. The effects of scale, biopolitics, and the power of discourse on the part of traders’ ability to pursue more sustained political mobilization constitute significant future research directions.

(2013). Race and Power in the Shadows of Family Making. Anthropology Now: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 118-121.

Andrew Canessa, Intimate Indigeneities: Race, Sex, and History in the Small Spaces of Andean Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. 344 pp.The "small spaces" of Wila Kjarka are the focus of Andrew Canessa's poignant and deeply insightful ethnography about the everyday lives of the villagers of this Andean highland community in Bolivia. Canessa draws on over 20 years of field work in Bolivia-dating from 1989-to show how these small spaces are integral to a far broader canvas across which the specters of colonialism, nationalism, capitalism, transnationalism, and the celebration of heritage and indigeneity march. Several major arguments and themes weave in and out of the narrative, much like a fine Andean textile. The overarching question Canessa asks is: what does it mean to be jaqi-"proper people" who are indians-in Wila Kjarka. To answer the question, he delves deeply into a few key themes-the nature of exchange, specifically, reciprocity; the ways in which racialized and sexualized relationships come to constitute differentiation and inequalities both between indians and non-indians (q'ara), as well as among indians themselves; how these inequalities are produced and reproduced by institutions such as the army, the school, and beauty pageants; and the complexity between being indian and being indigenous, especially on the national and even international stages. From the start, he makes it clear that to understand the meaningfulness of indian culture and identity entails collapsing scales in which even the most intimate of sexual fantasies or the daily activities of working, eating, and dressing are bound up with "broader global questions" (32).Narrative has great potential but it is nevertheless an immense challenge to demonstrate at one and the same time the dynamic nature of identity construction, the sustained rhythms of everyday life that people engage in, and the ways these rhythms and dynamics also harden into cultural assumptions, ideologies, and institutional practices at multiple scales. Canessa mostly succeeds in these endeavors. He stretches the narrative genre to its limits, by combining a keen analytical lens and lucid prose. His telling anecdotes and stories, culled from his long acquaintance with the Wila Kjarkanos, draw the reader in, again and again.One of the important arguments that Canessa immediately lays out and then proceeds to provide evidence for in the remaining chapters is that, in the lived reality of Bolivians, their world is not a binary one, divided between white racists and indian victims. Rather, racism is so pervasive that it goes unnoticed. He therefore makes the choice to use "indian" rather than "indigenous" in order to call attention to "the long history of colonial oppression" (32). While he finds that indigeneity plays a significant role in Bolivia, it is not a "meaningful analytical category for distinguishing one group of people from another" (66). Any number of groups of native peoples can be clustered into the category "indigenous." To be labeled indigenous or to call something or oneself indigenous has political and cultural implications, but it does not tell us much about what it means to be an indian living in Wila Kjarka.When Canessa began his field work, Wila Kjarka resembled so many other highland Andean hamlets nestled far from the infrastructure of roads, schools, markets, and mass communications. Yet, they were the site of deep inequalities, some of which lay just below the surface, others that were nearly invisible. What it means to be indian begins with history, but historical consciousness in Wila Kjarka is hardly transparent. Canessa became intrigued by the codes he encountered and the challenges to the assumptions he himself implicitly had about what mattered to Wila Kjarkanos. The reach of large landed estate owners (hacendados) had been felt by the entire region. They wreaked havoc with land tenure and labor regimes. The first puzzle Canessa tries to solve is why-if the Bolivian Revolution and concomitant Agrarian Reform in 1952 were so central to diminishing the power of hacendados-the Wila Kjarkanos hardly speak of this moment, but rather of the battle they fought with another village, Jankho Kjarka. …

The life story of one Peruvian market woman, Felicitas Lucrecia Mamani de Cardona Rios, offers a window into the social context and cultural values that have an impact on her individual struggles. At the same time, less explicit exchange dynamics akin to transference and countertransference between Lucre and the ethnographer dynamically structure the interview process. The ethnographer desired and sought to emulate some of Lucre's qualities—her protective, maternal, yet tough demeanor, whereas Lucre sought to project an image of herself as well-educated and of high social standing, yet also capable of great empathy and solidarity with working class women and Quechua peasants. The sharing of Lucre's life story with the ethnographer and the ethnographer's interpretation of it bring sharply into focus the complexity of lives and the negotiations that unfold at border crossings. [life story, transference, gender, market women, power]

El articulo examina desde una perspectiva comparativa las practicas de adopcion transnacionales y transraciales en la sierra sur andina del Peru y los EE.UU. De esta forma, se analizan las diversas actividades y estrategias que los padres adoptivos desarrollan para construir un sentido compartido de lo local y lograr cruzar fronteras culturales, las que tienen un gran impacto en la formacion de la identidad de sus hijos. En los casos de adopciones transraciales que suceden en el mismo espacio fisico, los padres adoptivos no pueden facilmente pasar por alto el racismo y las desigualdades sociales institucionalizadas. En efecto, estos aspectos llegan incluso a adquirir mayor relevancia que la cuestion misma de la adopcion. En cambio, en los casos de adopciones transnacionales, la creacion de practicas innovadoras que permitan cruzar fronteras fisicas y socioeconomicas, y establecer un sentido de lo local, se vuelve fundamental para los miembros del grupo familiar. La distancia fisica facilita la generacion de imaginarios fuertemente influenciados por ideas y practicas relacionadas con la herencia cultural y el multiculturalismo. En algunos casos, el mismo hecho de cruzar fronteras permite desafiar las estructuras de poder, las ideologias, y los modelos normativos de parentesco establecidos

Cross-Cultural Approaches to Adoption. Fiona Bowie, ed. New York: Routledge, 2005. 279 pp. Cultures of Transnational Adoption. Toby Alice Volkman, ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 232 pp.

Burns, Kathryn. Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. xi + 307 pp. including chapter references and index. $49.95 cloth, $17.9...

Jane I. Guyer. Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. xvii +207 pp. Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa is a slim volume that bursts with originality and illuminating insights about matters anthropological and economic. Jane Guyer crafted the book's chapters from the Lewis Henry Morgan lectures, which she presented in 1997. The assumptions with which Guyer begins her discussion undermine purely substantive as well as neoclassical approaches to economies. With considerable empirical ammunition and thoughtfulness, she recommends that a wide range of concepts that anthropologists and economists alike have taken for granted be subject to re-analysis. She has a firm grasp of the history of Atlantic Africa (West and Equatorial Africa) and of the archival material that reveals what we can know of how economic transactions-of slaves, guns, currencies, sacrificial objects, and food-actually worked from precolonial times to the present. This material is not easy to work with, and she is careful to place it in context and consider what is missing from it. Central to Guyer's reasoning is that economies of Atlantic Africa are neither wholly distinctive nor utterly subsumed by Western economic logic. They are enmeshed but not in a dualistic fashion. Let me expand on some of her major findings and contributions to economic anthropology. Guyer concentrates on what she calls "bewilderments," puzzles in how the popular economies of Atantic Africa work: Is there a logic (or logics) that can be discerned from the multiplicity of what served as currencies, their flows and directions, registers, and scales? Why is it that as total expenditures increase, the same proportion, roughly, is expended on food in the personal budgets of poor and rich households alike in Ghana? Or, how does commodity exchange in Atlantic Africa work, given that, even today, most currency that goes into circulation in Nigeria, never returns again to such formal institutions as banks? She reviews the history of economic exchange within and between regions in Atlantic Africa and draws the following conclusions in her first chapter: one must assume that Atlantic Africa and European history and culture are part of the same complex, "a co-production of Africa and Europe over centuries of economic and political engagement" (14). The same item, such as brass manillas (ankle and arm bracelets), could be viewed as barter items between regions, tradable goods within a particular sphere or general purpose currency, depending on who held them, how they were exchanged, whether they were for purposes of export, regional trade, or local barter, and where. Relatively worthless commodities originating from Europe (outdated guns and cowries, for example) could be used to transact purchases of highly valuable items, such as funerary statuary or slaves in Atlantic Africa. Guyer discusses at length "monetary multiplicity" and the astuteness with which Africans were able to make marginal gains, dependent upon the manner in which conversions took place in exchange. She argues that asymmetrical exchange was fundamental to African monetary practices and explains how "margin(s)" that Africans hoped to obtain through their exchanges are constituted and conventionalized in popular economies. In Atlantic Africa, many different kinds of currencies circulated simultaneously, inflationary processes were at work, and one currency might come to dominate at a particular moment in time, only to lose its status eventually as new kinds of goods entered the system. Each moment of transaction entailed a threshold, and it was both the directional flow of transactions and the threshold that participants sought to manipulate or control for purposes of marginal gain. She sets herself an enormous challenge, first because she asumes that multiple scales, rather than a single scale or set of equivalences, such as neoclassical notions of supply and demand, embedded in utility, or Marxian notions of value, such as labor, characterize transactions. …

The street worries the rich, its disorder and daily uncertainty represent a constant threat. … One has to … disperse the populace, control these immoderate gestures of a violence that is only the mirror image of their own daily life … yet to prevent a crowd from forming is not sufficient. … One has to go further: make hygienic, cleanse [and] enlighten these obscure masses. … There follows a determined volition to construct a productive and pacified space.

Passage of the 1969 Agrarian Reform Law in Peru became a critical moment in which various sectors of Andean society invoked distinct principles and deployed particular strategies in order to defend their rights to land and their visions of just labor relations and legitimate political authority. The principles they invoked and the strategies they used were careful responses to the new face and character of the state, the legal content of the reform law, and the dynamics of interethnic and class relations. Using archival evidence and field research from one rural district, this article argues that an examination of the ways Quechua-speaking peoples interpret legal principles and use laws reveals the complex ideological and socio-economic relationships between the nation-state and local communities, the bases for establishing and defending cultural autonomy, and the efforts of rural inhabitants to transform the structure and content of legal principles themselves. [highland Peru, Quechua, law and anthropology, agrarian reform, states and agrarian societies]

tries undermine indigenous mobilization and plurinational initiatives. Some mention should have been made of indigenous struggles and gains in North America; this is a missed opportunity considering the growing political clout of Canada's First Nations and the plurinational proposals found there. And by omitting any mention of indigenous nations in the United States, the volume gives the impression that everything is all right at home. More emphasis could also have been placed on how indigenous people increasingly transit regional, urban, and national boundaries, discovering new worlds, adopting new technologies, and prosperingwithout sacrificing their cultural identities. But the latter, I would argue, are inextricably linked-by representations in popular media, nationalist doctrine, and scholarship alike-to images of poverty and marginality, the implicit message being that to achieve social mobility, indigenous peoples must renounce their identities. The definitions and images generated by the dominant society allow for little else, viewing their cultures as archaic, static, and part of nature, far removed from the cultural mainstream of the modernizing nation. Such stereotypes also impact international institutions such as the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, which list indigenous grievances as "environmental issues." Future work must explore how native peoples are reshaping their images and resignifying the constraining terms "Indian" and "indigenous people." Such work, I believe, will show that the cultural distinctiveness of indigenous peoples is entirely compatible with "modernity," urban spaces, transnational migration, and social mobility. In sum, while real progress has been made, the future of indigenous rights and cultural nationalism is uncertain. On the one hand, as the presence of indigenous senators, reformed constitutions, strategic international alliances, and ethnicity-based federations demonstrates, indigenous people generally have more political clout than ever before. Even in countries such as war-torn Guatemala and Peru, where tens of thousands of indigenous peasants have been murdered in recent years, the authors find hope that the exclusionary creole and ladino political dominance is deteriorating and that politically effective indigenous groups and constitutional provisions are emerging. Yet the legacy of 1492 remains strong, and in countries throughout the Americas, the languages and cultures of "the hemisphere's most marginalized people" (p. 30) are still treated with contempt and excluded from the national mainstream, while assaults on their leaders, territories, and resources continue. Until this changes, indigenous peoples will continue to view the "democracy" found in the Americas as an institutional facade serving the interests of a light-skinned, neocolonial society. I

Covering Ground: Communal Water Management and the State in the Peruvian Highlands. David W. Guillet. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992. 250 pp. $39.50 (cloth). ISBN 0–472–09474–2.