This book emerged from a conference organised at the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Studies at the University of California, San Diego. As such, the volume presents all the advantages and disadvantages of publishing the results of such a conference. Some individual chapters are valuable contributions despite the lack of a clear common thread. Each author examines the dynamics between power, culture and violence in the Andes from different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives and based on different case studies; all deal either with Peru or Bolivia.

The book is divided into two sections, one on ‘Histories of Violence’ and the other on ‘Ethnicity, Power and Violence’. In the first section, Rodrigo Montoya, in a meandering essay, tackles the issue of violence in the Peruvian Andes. He resorts to insights from Sigmund Freud, going from the present-day ritualised violence between Canas and Canchis provinces in Cuzco to the violence inflicted upon criminals, to the legacy of the Catholicism of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda of the sixteenth century, and ending with the Shining Path and the Truth Commission of 2001–3. Rachel O'Toole's essay on the violence between slaves in colonial Peru is more interesting, showing how slaves defended themselves from accusations in courts by claiming that they were ‘savages’ but also men of honour. Ana Peluffo analyses the way in which Manuel González Prada, the anarchist intellectual firebrand of the late nineteenth century, used gender to explain the defeat of Peru by Chile in the War of the Pacific (1879–84). Peluffo posits that González Prada blamed the effeminate Peruvian Indians for the defeat and pushed for a revitalisation of Peru by making its men more masculine. This contribution fits well with Christine Hunefeldt's chapter, preceding Peluffo's, which shows in a case study of Puno that the Peruvian army's press-ganging of Indians, the state's deficient financial support for the military and the divisions between the National Guards and the regular army inevitably led to the Chilean defeat of Peru.

On the whole, the second section contains the best essays. Misha Koskotovic demonstrates how Mario Vargas Llosa's literary production has veered to the ideological right through his reinterpretation of the mistreatment of the cacique Jum, a pivotal event in The Green House and a later book, The Storyteller. She points out the way in which Vargas Llosa's understanding of violence against the natives changed to one in which he considered it an inevitable, and in the long term positive, consequence of modernisation. Miguel La Serna's chapter on the violence between the neighbouring communities of Chuschi and Quispillaccta (Ayacucho) prior to the Shining Path insurgency is one of the best of the volume. In a very fully documented and densely argued essay, La Serna suggests that the violence that exploded after the 1980 Shining Path declaration of war was most of all a manifestation of inter-communal hostility among Andean indigenous communities.

The last two essays concern Bolivia. Herbert Klein provides a masterful reinterpretation of indigenous political participation after the 1952 Revolution, asserting that the electoral triumph of Evo Morales ‘is not an accidental phenomenon nor is it the national progression of political awareness typical of emerging groups within the Latin American political scene’ (p. 145). Rather, Klein shows that after the 1952 Revolution the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario accepted the indigenous communities as peasant unions and gave the vote to illiterates, leading to the emergence of peasants into national politics. Initially, the peasants supported white minority governments in return for their backing of the 1953 agrarian reform and agrarian price supports. This schema broke down in 1974 when the Banzer dictatorship attacked peasant protestors. The 1970s brought about the rise of urban Indians, in particular in El Alto, perched above the city of La Paz, and a growing identification of the Bolivian popular classes as indigenous. It was Evo Morales who was able to harness the potential of the indigenous political majority, through the cocalero movement that survived by creating broad alliances with national and international progressive groups. In addition to being inclusive (unlike his rivals in the Aymara indigenist movement) through the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party, Morales' redefinition as an Aymara contributed to his soaring political fortunes. As Klein shows, the rise of the indigenous component of the Bolivian population was possible because of Morales' predecessor. President Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada's decentralisation campaign brought power to the countryside and the destruction of the old parties. This finally led to a majority of the Bolivian electorate voting for Morales and MAS. Nancy Postero's chapter on the symbolism and use of Andean utopias complements well Klein's more structural essay. She traces the history of Andean utopian visions and Morales' use of them, analysing the advantages and disadvantages of such utopian rhetoric.

Thus, the book has many different takes on violence and power in the Andes. Given the diverse disciplinary composition of its contributors, including historians, scholars of literature and anthropologists, it is less coherent than other books, such as the one published by the Centro Bartolomé de las Casas in Peru on the same topic in 1991.Footnote ² Many individual contributions are worthwhile. Unfortunately the book has not been copy-edited properly, and Section 1 especially is full of awkward terms, poorly translated sentences and many outright misspellings that greatly detract from the content. For this reason I can only recommend the book for graduate students and scholars who are interested in the region. Since this volume is the first in a series on Latin America, one hopes that the press and the editors will take better care with the following ones.