Missing the Revolution: Anthropologists and the War in Peru Orin Star Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 6, No. 1. (Feb., 1991), pp. 63-91. Stable URL hitp:/flinks.jstor-org/sicisici=0886-7356% 28199 102% 296%3 1% 3C63%3AMTRAAT%3E2,0.CO%3B2-N Cultural Anthropology is currently published by American Anthropological Association. Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hup:/www,jstororglabout/terms.hml. ISTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hutp:/wwwjstor.org/jounals/anthro. html ch copy of any part of'a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission, ISTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @ jstor.org. hupulwww jstor.org/ Tue Oct 3 15:30:40 2006Missing the Revolution: Anthropologists and the War in Peru Orin Starn Stanford University On 17 May 1980, Shining Path guerillas burned ballot boxes in the Andean village of Chuschi and proclaimed their intention to overthrow the Peruvian state Playing on the Inkarri myth of Andean resurrection from the cataclysm of con- quest, the revolutionaries had chosen the 199th anniversary of the execution by the Spanish colonizers ofthe neo-Inca rebel Tupac Amaru. Chuschi, though, pre- figured not rebirth but a decade of death. It opened a savage war between the ‘guerrillas and government that would claim more than 15,000 lives during the 1980s." For hundreds of anthropologists in the thriving regional subspecialty of An- dean studies, the rise of the Shining Path came as a complete surprise. Dozens of ethnographers worked in Peru’s southern highlands during the 1970s. One of the best-known Andeanists, R. T. Zuidema, was directing a research project in the Rio Pampas region that became a center of the rebellion. Yet no anthropologist realized a major insurgency was about to detonate, a revolt so powerful that by 1990 Peru’s civilian government had ceded more than half the country to military ‘command, ‘The inability of ethnographers to anticipate the insurgency raises important «questions. For much of the 20th century, after all, anthropologists had figured as principal experts on life in the Andes. They positioned themselves as the “good” ‘outsiders who truly understood the interests and aspirations of Andean people; and they spoke with scientific authority guaranteed by the firsthand experience of fieldwork. Why, then, did anthropologists miss the gathering storm of the Shining ath” What does this say about ethnographic understandings of the highlands? How do events in Peru force us to rethink anthropology on the Andes? From the start, I want to emphasize that it would be unfair to fault anthro- pologists for not predicting the rebellion. Ethnographers certainly should not be in the business of forecasting revolutions. In many respects, moreover, the Shin- ing Path’s success would have been especially hard to foresee. A pro-Cultural Revolution Maoist splinter from Peru's regular Communist Party, the group formed in the university in the provincial highland city of Ayacucho. It was led by a big-jowled philosophy professor named Abimac! Guzman with thick glasses and a rare blood disease called policitimea.* Guzmién viewed Peru as dominated by a bureaucratic capitalism that could be toppled only through armed struggle. 664 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY {A first action of his guerrillas in Lima was to register contempt for “bourgeois revisionism” by hanging a dead dog in front of the Chinese embassy. Most ob- servers intially dismissed the Shining Path, Sendero Luminoso, as a bizarre but lunthreatening sect. This was fiercely doctrinaire Marxism in the decade of per- estroika ‘What I will claim, though, is that most anthropologists were remarkably un- attuned to the conditions which made possible the rise of Sendero. First, they tended to ignore the intensifying interlinkage of Peru's countryside and cities, villages and shantytowns, Andean highlands and lowlands of the jungle and coast ‘These interpenetrations created the enormous pool of radical young people of amalgamated rural/urban identity who would provide an effective revolutionary force. Second, anthropologists largely overlooked the climate of sharp unrest across the impoverished countryside. Hundreds of protests and land invasions tes- tified to a deep-rooted discontent that the guerrillas would successfully exploit. To begin accounting for the gaps in ethnographic knowledge about the high- lands, the first half of this essay introduces the concept of Andeanism.* Here 1 refer to representation that portrays contemporary highland peasants as outside the flow of modern history. Imagery of Andean life as little changed since the ‘Spanish conquest has stretched across discursive boundaries during the 20th cen- tury to become a central motif in the writings of novelists, politicians, and trav- clers as well asthe visual depictions of filmmakers, painters, and photographers. {believe Andcanism also operated in anthropology, and helps to explain why so ‘many ethnographers did not recognize the rapidly tightening interconnections that were a vital factor in the growth of the Shining Path GEER thowgh. was not the only influence on anthropologists of the 1960 and 1970s, The growing importance S160) 3 baIG AEB in international anthropology theory of the period also conditioned ethnographic views of the Andes. In the second half of the essay, I argue thatthe strong impact of these two theoretical currents produced an intense preoccupation with issues of adaptation, ritual, and cosmology. This limited focus, in turn, assists in account- ing for why most anthropologists passed over the profound rural dissatisfaction with the status quo that was to become a second enabling factor in Sendero's rapid My mapping of Andeanist anthropology starts with Billie Jean Isbell’s To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village (1977). Through close reading of this synthetic and widely read ethnography, I begin to outline the imprint of Andeanism on anthropological thinking and to explore how the heavy deployment of ecological and symbolic approaches led to the oversight of political ferment in the countryside. Isbell’s book has a special significance because its ‘Andean village was Chuschi, the hamlet where the Shining Path’s revolt would explode just five years after Isbell’s departure 1 juxtapose To Defend Ourselves with a remarkable but little-known book called Ayacucho: Hunger and Hope (1969) by an Andean-born agronomist and future Shining Path leader named Antonio Diaz Martinez.* Hunger and Hope proves it was possible to formulate a very different view of the highlands fromMISSING THE REVOLUTION. 65 that of most Andeanist anthropology. While Isbell and other ethnographers de- picted discrete villages with fixed traditions, Diaz saw syncretism and shifting identities. Most anthropologists found a conservative peasantry. Diaz, by con- trast, perceived small farmers as on the brink of revolt. Passages of Hunger and Hope foreshadow the Shining Path's subsequent dogmatic brutality. Yet the man ‘who would become the reputed “number three" in the Maoist insurgency, after Abimael Guzman and Osmén Morote, discovered an Ayacucho that escaped the ‘voluminous anthropology literature, a countryside about to burst into conflict. Through criticism of Andeanist anthropology, my account points to alter- natives. 1 press for recognition of what historian Steve Stern (1987.9) calls “the ‘manifold ways whereby peasants have continuously engaged in their political worlds”; and I argue for an understanding of modern Andean identities as dy- ‘namie, syneretic, and sometimes ambiguous. Finally, 1 seek to develop an anal- ysis that does not underplay the Shining Path’s violence yet recognizes the in ‘mate ties of many of the guerrillas to the Andean countryside and the existence of rural sympathies forthe revolt. | feel a certain unease about writing on the Andes and the Shining Path nderology"”—the study of the guerrillas—is a thriving enterprise. In my View, a sense of the intense human suffering caused by the war to0 often disap- pears in this work, The terror becomes simply another field for scholarly debate ‘This essay is open to criticism for contributing to the academic commodification ‘of Peru's pain, But I offer the account in a spirit of commitment, No outside it tervention—and certainly not by anthropologists—is at present likely to change the deadly logic of the war. | hope, though, that sharper anthropological views of the situation will help others to understand the violence and to join the struggle for life Isbell wrote To Defend Ourselves from fieldwork in 1967, 1969-70, and 1974-75. Closely observed and richly detailed, the book presents the village of ‘Chuschi as divided into two almost caste-like segments: Quechua-speaking peas- ants and Spanish-speaking teachers and bureaucrats. An intermediate category appears more peripherally, migrants from Chuschi to Lima. Like other Andean: ists, Isbell positions herself firmly with the Quechua-speaking comuneros. The ‘mestizos, even the dirt-poor teachers, figure as the bad guys, domineering and Without Isbell's knowledge or appreciation of Andean traditions. Isbell’s analysis revolves around the proposition that Chuschi's peasants had ‘ured inward to maintain their traditions against outside pressures. The comu- neros, she argued, had built a symbolic and social order whose binary logic Isbell (1977:11) made her mission to document “the structural defenses the indigenous population has constructed against the increasing domi- nation of the outside world,(66. CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY Iselregsred that Chuschi was a eglonal market centr with a church, stool and Health pos. She noted tha tucks pled the dit highway between Cust and the iy of Ayacucho. We ea ofthe constant in people and foods between Chuschl and not only Ayacicho ut alo Lin andthe coc gow: ing eglons of the upper Amazon, More than a quan of Chusch's population had moved wo Lima, Many others migrated seasonally. Even he pean inigrane maintained closets in thet naive village, rtuning prod and ieepng ails dnd. When it came to representing Chuschino cule, however, Ibell dow played mine and change. Instead he concentrated cn how terial kine ios, reciprocity, ctumology, and ecological management of Chuschi's