I remember speaking to an anthropology class at Lima's San Marcos University back in 1990. The Communist Party of Peru–Shining Path was then still waging its war of propaganda, bombings and assassinations, and San Marcos had become a battle zone. A student rose to interrupt me halfway through my talk with some Shining Path boilerplate about the glorious coming revolution. Others, sick of the Maoists, shouted him down. Chairs went flying and the professor who invited me cancelled the class.
These two books from Carlos Iván Degregori and Pablo Sandoval explore the state of anthropology in Peru today. Education seemed to many Peruvians to be the black box of progress and modernity in the last century. Along with an enormous growth in the primary and secondary school system, the number of universities expanded exponentially from six to 82. Anthropology followed the trend with new programmes both in Lima and in provincial universities in Ayacucho and Huancayo.
And yet, Degregori and Sandoval show a recent decline in hopes for higher education in general, and anthropology in particular. They especially blame former president Alberto Fujimori's neoliberal policies, among them cutbacks for already underfunded public universities. The embrace of privatisation and the market exacerbated the old hierarchies that left provincial universities poor cousins to those in Lima, and public institutions to private ones. Anthropology has suffered especially from new emphasis on technical and business training. Alejandro Toledo, Fujimori's successor, made much of Peru's indigenous heritage, and his wife was an anthropologist who liked to dress up in native garb, but his government did little to address the grim present day confronting the impoverished Andean majorities or an educational system in shambles.
Today, only Lima's Catholic University has a strong anthropology programme. Through interviews and surveys, Degregori, Peru's leading anthropologist, and Sandoval, a San Marcos graduate and doctoral candidate at the Colegio de Mexico, reveal feelings of superiority among some Catholic University students, who are more likely to be white and from well-off families, and a sense of second-class citizenship among their counterparts in poorer and provincial universities. The state of Peruvian anthropology, Degregori and Sandoval conclude, has descended into ‘fragmentation, exclusion, inequalities, abandonment, prejudice, and mistrust’ (Antropología y antropólogos en el Perú, p. 151).
The contributors to Saberes periféricos give us other views of anthropology in Peru and, in two essays, Mexico and Brazil. As Degregori and Sandoval point out in their introduction, Latin America has a ‘mestizo anthropology’ – in other words, a tradition marked by local intellectual currents as well as the influences of the United States and Europe. Yet several contributors also focus on the way in which the ‘peripheral knowledges’ of Latin American anthropologists have been devalued by academics from the more prosperous north. A provocative yet overheated and less than persuasive essay by Raul Romero accuses US scholars not only of ignoring the work of Peruvian academics, but also of replicating crude stereotypes about Peru as a place of suffering, exoticism and danger. Marisol de la Cadena's fascinating contribution uses the debate around anthropologist and novelist José María Arguedas' Todas las sangres to suggest that indigenous intellectuals may be the protagonists of a previously ‘unthinkable’ epistemological revolution that dissolves old binaries between nature and culture, science and magic, reason and religion (Saberes periféricos, p. 123). If embarrassment in the United States over the discipline's real and imagined past sins has led to plenty of ‘anthro(a)pology’, Mariza Peirano argues that anthropology in Brazil has done more good than harm. She cites the discipline's challenge to ethnocentrism and provincialisation of the West in its demonstration of the fuller range of human possibilities. Carmen Salazar-Bondy reminds us about the distinctive genealogy of French anthropology of the Andes.
As elsewhere, Latin American anthropology began as the study of the exotic and the primitive. This made Indians, cast as the internal Other, into the main object of investigation. A wonderful essay by Claudio Lomnitz locates anthropology within what he calls the ‘manic-depressive cycles of disillusion and discovery’ that have characterised dominant thinking about America's first peoples ever since 1492. From Columbus' enchantment with New World marvels to eighteenth-century Spanish disillusionment to the nineteenth-century Romantic ‘rediscovery’ of the Americas, the attitudes of outsiders towards Indians have typically said more about their own mood and agendas than the realities of native experience itself. Lomnitz contrasts the place occupied by Indians in the Mexican imagination with that of blacks in the United States: both historically oppressed, and yet Indians, unlike blacks, were nonetheless also glorified as the touchstone of the modern nation. At least in the early twentieth century with the Mexican Revolution and the likes of Manuel Gamio, anthropology assumed an especially prominent role. It was the science of those conceived as the backbone of the revolutionary project.
Degregori and Sandoval pinpoint the massacre at Uchuraccay in 1983 as a turning point in Peruvian anthropology. Here villagers killed eight journalists and their guide, mistaking them for Shining Path guerrillas; it was the beginning of a peasant rebellion against the insurgents, and the death knell for any orthodox Marxism in Peru (Maoism, in particular, exercised a strong influence in universities, with several top rebel leaders trained as anthropologists). Uchuraccay also marked the end of anthropology's proclivity for exoticising the Andes as a zone of timeless Otherness, of primordial ‘Quechua Indians’. Contrary to the report produced by famed novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, the villagers in Uchuraccay were not Dark Ages peasants cut off from history and the world, but very much a part of modern Peru, with wide experience of travelling to the jungle and elsewhere in search of work. As Degregori notes, you are just as likely to encounter the Indian ‘Other’ nowadays walking down a city street as up in the mountains. Millions of villagers, over many decades now, have headed to Lima and in the process transformed Pizarro's Spanish capital into an Andean city.
For all the changes that have taken place, the anthropology of Peru still smells of colonialism in some ways. The reinvention of anthropology as the study of culture everywhere – and not just putatively exotic peoples – has been relatively slow to take hold. Most anthropologists still ‘study down’, focusing on the brown majorities, and there has been less work as yet on the institutions and sensibilities of the middle classes, elites, corporations and military. Whether white North Americans or middle-class Limans, the majority of anthropologists themselves still come from relative privilege. And there has been a costly brain drain of promising provincial scholars to greater opportunities in Lima or abroad – and of young Liman academics to the better salaries and job stability of North American and European universities. There remain many top-notch scholars based in Peru doing exciting new work, but the panorama of anthropology as a whole is bleak.
In concluding Antropología y antropólogos en el Perú, Degregori and Sandoval advance proposals for reinvigorating Peruvian anthropology. Interestingly, they suggest that an insistence on learning English should be one step, given that it has become a global lingua franca. But adopting any of Degregori and Sandoval's suggestions is another matter in a Peru that seems suspended in an eternal limbo of bad government, terrible inequality and dismal economic prospects. The demographics of Peruvian anthropology have made it an aging profession heavy with scholars in their fifties and sixties. It will be with a new generation of anthropologists that any real hope of renewal lies.
