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Chantal Caillavet. Étnias del norte: Etnohistoria e historia de Ecuador. Quito:

Ediciones Abya Yala, with Casa de Velázquez, Madrid and Instituto Francés de
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Article  in  The American Historical Review · October 2003

DOI: 10.1086/ahr/108.4.1193

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 Caribbean and Latin America 1193
a traditional gender ideology that identified femininity
with maternity and the domestic sphere. To what
extent did this ideological prescription actually corre-
spond to the everyday experiences of Chilean women
and men? Were there ways men and women built
alternative understandings of gender or employed the
formal precepts of this gender ideology differently,
even while they operated within its parameters? It
would also be interesting to consider the historical
changes in gender ideologies and relations produced
during these years. It could be that the virulence of the
Right's hatred for Allende and the violence unleashed
by the military coup resulted not just from the UP's
threat to class hierarchy but also from its challenge to
a system of patriarchy embedded in Chile's capitalist
modes of production. Does the fervent assertion of
traditional gender ideology as an instrument for at-
tacking the UP suggest that Allende's opponents, male
and female, feared both the demise of the class
privileges of Chile's elite and changes in the traditional
patriarchal social order?
Power has made a valuable contribution to the
history of women and gender in Chile. Her book both
explains the history of right-wing women's political
activism in Chile and raises important questions about
the role of gender in U.S. Cold War policy and the
military coups in Latin America during the 1960s and
1970s.
THOMAS MILLER KLUBOCK
State University of New York,
Stony Brook
CHANTAL CAILLAVET. Etnias del norte: Etnohistoria e
historia de Ecuador. Quito: Ediciones Abya Yala, with
Casa de Velázquez, Madrid and Instituto Francés de
Estudios Andinos, Lima. 2000. Pp. 499.
This volume is a very welcome innovative and imagi-
native addition to the study of the indigenous past in
the Andes. Chantal Caillavet organizes the twenty-
three chapters—each a rigorously researched, data-
rich, and documented entity in itself—under four
headings. In the first section, on the ecological orga-
nization of ethnicities, she does detective work to
locate the prehispanic location of Otavalo. In other
chapters, she discusses salt production, the prehispanic
exchange of seashells, the Inca frontier, and cannibal-
ism, among other topics. Of particular interest are her
analyses of historic toponyms and the settlement pat-
terns of a chiefdom. The second section, on traditional
textile production, discusses tribute cloth, female
work, Otavalo's integration into the colonial market,
and exchange and credit in the mining economy of
Loja from 1550 to 1630. The third section, on the
symbolic world of the northern Andeans, includes
chapters on ritual (in which Caillavet discusses the
body language of the Andeans), celebrations, and hair.
The volume ends with analyses of primary sources and
transcriptions.
This book should be required reading for historians,
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2003
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anthropologists, and archaeologists for several rea-
sons. First, it is a model of the ethnohistorian's craft.
Caillavet's analyses are based on critical reading of the
primary manuscripts found in thirty-six archives in six
countries on two continents. She complements this
with her own and others' ethnographic observations
and also takes into account archaeological research. In
numerous cases, she has personally verified the topo-
graphical information from colonial manuscripts. Sec-
ond, Caillavet uses new ways to find the native voice,
employing direct testimonies, but also toponyms and
their translations. Place names, she argues, can be
used to recreate linguistic frontiers and determine the
strength of Inca control. They also testify to the
scattered fields and settlement patterns of individual
households and multiethnic resource sharing. Third,
Caillavet admits cases where the data are ambiguous
and conclusions indeterminate, like her doubts as to
whether or not there was private ownership of land.
Fourth, she follows the prehispanic and early colonial
leads across modern, geographically defined national
boundaries to depict better the presence of one ethnic
group or another. Finally, she explicitly recognizes the
biases of the standard chronicles, considered classics
by many, and reminds readers that the discipline needs
close and critical study of these manuscripts to under-
stand more completely why they contradict each other
and at times confuse.
The one problem with this book is the author's
confusion of political jurisdiction and sovereignty with
a bounded and locally recognized territory. Cacicazgos
and principalazgos were defined as people under a
political authority with a common ancestral heritage,
regardless of where subjects lived. Numerous citations
indicate that followers of one ethnic lord could live
among subjects of another. Yet, the author seeks to
define territories with fixed boundaries where, I would
argue, none existed. The native conceived of his/her
identity more through social and kinship networks
than in relation to a coherent, contiguous physically
defined territory. In other words, what we should be
looking for are "social frontiers," not geographical
ones.
SUSAN E. RAMIREZ
Texas Christian University
NANCY E. VAN DEUSEN. Between the Sacred and the
Worldly: The Institutional and Cultural Practice of
Recogimiento in Colonial Lima. Stanford: Stanford
University Press. 2001. Pp. xvii, 319. $60.00.
The last decade has witnessed a boom in literary and
historical studies about colonial Latin American
women, especially in the arena of convent history and
writing. Nancy E. van Deusen's book is a masterful
study of the less-studied and poorly understood insti-
tutional and cultural practice of recogimiento. This key
cultural concept of the early modern Hispanic world
originated in Spain around 1500 as a spiritual method
that soon became an important element of Hispanic