Natives making Nation is an interesting collection of papers that examine relations of race, gender and class in the Andes (Bolivia and Peru). The papers address ‘identity making’ in two different and distinct ways: through analysis of cultural practices (singing, dancing and ways of dressing) and through analysis of practices within particular institutions and socio-economic contexts (schooling, tourism and the army).

Bigenho examines the meaning of six urban mestizo-creole women performing songs in the 1940s and 50s that were produced by Indian men, Stephenson analyses the ritual dance ‘Chuqila’, and Vleet discusses the role clothing plays in identity making for young girls in the highland region of Sullk'ata. The three papers all examine how individuals, through different cultural practices, reinterpret and cope with complex historical processes of nationhood of exclusion and inclusion, marked by gender, race and class. Bigenho argues that mestizo-creole women performing songs by Indian men tamed ‘dangerous’ Indian sounds which then became part of a nationalist narrative to which mestizo-creole could identify and feel ‘Bolivian’. The female singers themselves felt that they were pioneers by turning something previously despised into being cherished and central to nationhood. The young girls in Sullk'ata in Vleet's essay may have had a similar feeling – albeit at a personal level and from the opposite direction – when they returned from the urban setting to participate in the local carnival, and displayed their simultaneous belonging to the local rural community and the urban world by wearing expensive polleras that illustrate urban success. Just as the mestizo-creole singers bring ethnicity into nationhood in the urban setting, the Sullk'ata girls bring urban nationhood into the rural community. Quite differently – and in contrast to bridging rural and urban worlds through processes of nation-making, the chuqila dance challenges national discourses of elimination of indigenous people, Stephenson argues, through the enactment of a ritual in which (at the high point) ‘strangers’ become ‘relatives’ invited by young women: ‘Chuqila dares to imagine a national space wherein ethnic differences can coexist and one group does not require the suppression of another’ (Stephenson, p. 102).

In contrast to these three anthropological studies of particular cultural practices in specific settings and times, three papers in the book explore the issues in broader contexts of societal-change and institutional systems and practices of the state. Larson looks at the politics of rural schooling between the 1920s–40s and examines how various political regimes used schooling for larger political and ideological projects. Canessa looks into the role of the army in shaping young men to become ‘citizens’ (by learning to speak ‘proper’ Spanish and obtaining identity cards), providing them with full membership of the community when they return (because they have been in the army), a status which is not unproblematic to the men themselves who often choose to embark on seasonal migration. This has consequences for the complementarity of the couple and intra-household violence, Cannessa suggests. From a different perspective Zorn examines the struggle between islanders of Taquile Island, Peruvian authorities and ‘outside’ tourist agencies. Thorn points to a paradox in which the islanders of Taquile are able to attract resources and certain privileges granted by the authorities because of the island's ‘peasant status’, but how these resources, when translated into concrete improvements, become a threat to a tourism which is built around experiencing the ‘authentic’ Indian peasant community.

Two features are central for providing the book with an internal logic beyond a number of separate discussions on identity making in a particular geographical area with its own distinct history (the Andes). One is the role of the state and the elite's projects of nation-making in shaping identities and real life opportunities for indigenous people. This is, the book convincingly shows, not something that is simply imposed, but something that is also actively used or at times even rejected by those on the margins who themselves ‘make nationhood’. It is not a matter – if anyone should still have this idea – of the dominant exercising power of the dominated, but about more complex and fluid processes where the more powerful also appropriate elements of the culture of those they reject or despise.

A second feature – and the most interesting one – is the intersectionality of gender with other identities. Many scholars have shown that in the Andean context ‘women are more Indian’, with the elite actively using gender in creating boundaries of differences and sameness (Larson) at times involving profound discriminatory practices. The book shows that while this is true, there is also much more to gender, with women being powerful agencies of change albeit within certain contexts and up to certain limits. Canessa argues that women become more ‘masculinized’ and independent as a result of their husbands' seasonal migration, but not ‘whitened’ as men are in the army. In Bigenho's essay the historical white man possessing the Indian woman (often sexually) is reversed with the white woman performing the Indian man's song which, however, is only acceptable when the woman is single. In Stephenson's essay women's powerful agency is spelled out when young women enact the ritual of inviting the hunters in the Chuqila dance (‘the others’) to become relatives (‘us’). In Sullk'ata, Vleet shows, women are the local carriers of modernity and thus invert the idea of women being ‘more Indian’. Finally Zorn illustrates how women battled for control over transportation to the Taquile Island in a more direct confrontational way than men because of their different experiences of tourism and relations with the Peruvian authorities.

For scholars and students interested in identity making in the Andean region this book is obviously a ‘must’. The limits of the book lie in its chosen perspective where people's own perceptions of opportunities and constraints in their lives is ignored at the expense of the authors' interpretation of the meaning of their practices, and where the contemporary politics of poverty (social movements, party politics, systems of governance, etc.) is less interesting than the politics of labelling.