Month: July 2024

Categories
Experience

XVII. Reflections

I’ve got nothing serious and final to say. Right now, I am on a flight back home to Vancouver—34 minutes until I land! I’ve been sick these past couple of days since the course has been over and I’ve been staying in Lima. It feels right that I started and ended the trip in sickness.

My favourite moments of our journey were just as much the big events as the in-betweens. Hurried market meals before class. Late-night poop conversations. Karaoke and stupid word games with dangerously patient taxi drivers.

My favourite thing was getting to know all of you. How you all laugh and think. I have so much more respect for each and every one of you and am excited to see where you go.

And I am so very thankful for Jon and Daniel, for taking us on this wild journey and looking after us.

Though this feels like the perfect moment to conclude, right now I really don’t have much to say. It’s still fresh. I’m probably over 50% market food right now. I think a lot of what this trip has meant for us will only become apparent with time. And even then, not always in words. Anyways, I don’t want to do the trip justice here. I couldn’t.

Categories
Blanco

XVI. Practical Socialism

The hacendados or bosses claimed that the real exploiters were the arrendires; this was false, since the sum of the days that the relatives had to work for the arrendires was smaller than the days that the latter had to work for the bosses; the relatives worked on behalf of the arrendire on the landowner’s crops, so these arrendires agreed to the total disappearance of the condiciones, the days of work by the latter for the landowner and those of the relatives for them. (Blanco 27)

I want to highlight a fascinating mode of campesino resistance that Hugo Blanco describes in We the Indians. Basically, as arrendires (tenants) in an essentially feudal system, campesinos in the Andes had to work for landowners in exchange for land to grow their own crops. However, the campesino’s burdens were too great to tend to both the landowner’s and their own crops. So they worked around these impossible conditions by creating a system whereby they could share their responsibilites with their relatives and actually earn some respite. The landowners claimed that the tenants were exploiting their relatives, but it was actually a practice of communal labour which benefited all the campesinos. This practice of communal labour is perhaps a core part of Andean society organized around the ayllu, and perhaps aligns with Mariategui’s notion of Indian “practical socialism.” The campesinos cleverly achieved this without violating any of the rules of the landowners, much to their dismay. The landowners’ projection of the campesinos as exploiters is telling—they don’t understand kinship relations. Unfortunately, the landowners used their authority to strategically evict their tenants and reap the multi-year spoils of their labour. I wonder if any of you have encountered other instances in our readings where communal labour was used to combat colonial or feudal systems of exploitation.

Categories
Degregori

XV. Rebelling in Other Ways

At the core of this lies an analytical vacuum. He does not see that there are people rebelling in other ways. (Degregori 85)

I found Carlos Iván Degregori’s claim that Abimael Guzmán, in his eventual pursuit of the Marxist Idea instead of Marxist analysis, crucially missed other forms of social mobilization quite significant. Degregori argues that Guzmán came to see himself as the prophet and embodiment of the Sendero movement and began to argue in pursuit of a Marxist ideal, replacing materialist analysis. In his division of the country into simply the revolution and the counterrevolution that prepare themselves for violence, he neglected the fact that during the Sendero movement was the years of Peru’s greatest social mobilization of the twentieth century, probably for similar reasons to Sendero’s emergence—widespread modern and critical education and hugely increased campesino ownership of property following Velasco’s agrarian reform. These were years of many labour, peasant, regional and women’s movements. However, Sendero did not align with these other forms of struggle but denied and denigrated them. Even worse, those who took part in them were accused of betrayal. For the act of supporting the other struggles to connote “betrayal” for Sendero implies for me a rigid discourse, fearful and policing of what might escape it. I wonder if Sendero’s denial of other struggles was necessarily linked to what Degregori claims was its swap of material analysis for the pursuit of the ideal. Before this apparent shift in Guzmán, would these other struggles be recognized as antagonistic, or would they be welcomed in solidarity?

Categories
Degregori Mariátegui

XIV. Feudalism and Modernism

We are not satisfied to assert the Indian’s right to education, culture, progress, love, and heaven. We begin by categorically asserting his right to land. (Maríategui 50)

In his Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, José Carlos Maríategui argues that the problem of the Indian is essentially socio-economic. He disputes any attempt to reduce it to an exclusively administrative, pedagogical, ethnic or moral problem. “Indian” is essentially a class position: that of farmers and land tenants in servitude to landowners within a feudal regime. He dismisses the concept of inferior races outright as outmoded, claiming it helped rationalize European imperialism. He also rejects humanitarian appeals to “the Indian’s right to education, culture, progress, love, and heaven”—these have not halted European imperialism. This is an interesting and refreshing position, but I wonder if the concept of the Indian has had an influence that extends beyond the economic. Maríategui claims that feudalism is fundamentally opposed to the education of the peasantry—modern education is incompatible with the mechanics of the Indian’s servitude. The problem of the Indian is a problem of land—the alternative to feudalism is not distributing smaller slices of private property (as it largely happened) but communal ownership in the sense of the ayllu. 

The end of feudalism in Peru did not happen in the way Maríategui proposed. I want to put Maríategui’s discussion of feudalism in dialogue with the emergence of Sendero. In the wake of Velasco’s agrarian reform, students in the Peruvian countryside had more access to modern education, including critical and Marxist ideas, than ever before. However, they were caught between ideas of modernity, universality and progress and the “traditional” lifestyles of their families, still feeling the impacts of feudalism. According to Degregori in How Difficult it is to be God, it was this particular tension which motivated a lot of these students to join Sendero, and some to participate in mass murders. While they were seeking liberation from their material conditions, I think they were also, like Maríategui, moved in pursuit of a (perhaps?) higher ideal. It is fascinating that the conflict Maríategui sets up between feudalism and modern education, and by extension, modernism perhaps led to the emergence of Sendero. I wonder if this is a fair assessment.

Categories
De la Cadena

XIII. Ethnicity

The academic repudiation of biological notions of race was significant for anthropology, as it meant the emergence of the concept of “ethnic groups” to explain human differences. As Stolcke has suggested, it implied the reification of culture, which thus potentially prolonged the naturalization of sociohistorical differences earlier contained in the European notion of biological race. (de la Cadena 28)

I want to question our contemporary use of the term “ethnicity.” I don’t like it. In Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991, Marisol de la Cadena argues that the repudiation of biological notions of race after the horrors of Nazi Germany in World War II did not eliminate the “naturalization of sociohistorical differences.” The replacement concept of “ethnic groups,” grounded in culture and not biology, still carried a lot of the same associations from the earlier concept of race. This replacement concept explained group differences with the idea that people have a propensity to reject strangers which necessarily produces hostile relations among cultures, rather than the previous idea that different races had different essential strengths and weaknesses. “Ethnicity” also had the effect of reifying or essentializing cultures—and these cultural groups very often aligned with those previously essentialized as races. I think it is worth emphasizing that ethnicity, just like race, is an irreducibly political concept—not a clean anthropological framework to describe human diversity. Drawing on Rama’s idea of the precedence of the ideal over the real, I think that concepts of ethnicity not only describe the reality of human groups but also create them.

De la Cadena questions the Peruvian colonial and then culturalist hierarchies of race but does not question to the same extent her use of the term “Indigenous.” She uses “Indigenous culture” as synonymous with “Andean culture” and uses the term Indigenous to describe various people and groups. She asserts that “indigenous culture and Indianness are not synonyms,” and takes the grassroots Cuzqueño intellectuals’ definition of Indigeneity as compatible with being Mestizo (de la Cadena 319). She does this to frame Indigeneity as relational and open to change. Still, I suspect that the concept, though in flux, carries a lot from “Indianness,” just as ethnicity carries the legacy of racial discourse (and is in dialogue with its contemporary forms), even as it seeks to redefine itself. I wonder if you agree with my criticism of ethnicity, and wonder to what extent you think the contemporary Peruvian use of the term “Indigenous” continues to carry the associations of “Indianness”?

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