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Karen Spalding: Huarocbirí: An Andean Society

under Inca and Spanish Rule. (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1984, \$38.50) Pp. v
+ 384.

David Cahill

Journal of Latin American Studies / Volume 17 / Issue 01 / May 1985, pp 230 - 233
DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X00009275, Published online: 05 February 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/

abstract_S0022216X00009275

How to cite this article:

David Cahill (1985). Journal of Latin American Studies, 17, pp 230-233
doi:10.1017/S0022216X00009275

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230 Reviews
reports of episcopal visitations, or ecclesiastical cases relating to breaches of
discipline — focus attention upon deviations from the accepted norm, and thus
probably present a distorted picture of convent life.
Further chapters on the institution of marriage also rely heavily upon cases
brought before religious tribunals, and thus highlight problem cases rather than
harmonious relationships. Many examples are cited to show that the arranged
marriages of the colonial period provoked frequent grants of annulment, which
left women free to remarry, or legal separation which at least gave them control
over their dowries. The grounds for these proceedings included lack of proper
consent to marriage, often cited by child brides; legal impediments, such as
evidence of bigamy by husbands; impotence and battering (occasionally of
husbands by wives). Most suits brought to court were initiated, it is suggested,
by women, for unhappy or wronged husbands tended to resort to the simpler
expedients of leaving their wives and/or resorting to concubinage.
A final chapter on beatas and tapadas juxtaposes the contrasting images of the
chaste, holy recluse, personified by St Rose of Lima, and the provocative,
emancipated woman peeping from behind her shawl, and capable of shocking even
a French visitor to Lima. Professor Martin argues strongly that it is the second
of these stereotypes whom he compares with the modern bra-burner, who
represents the more enduring vision of colonial Peruvian womanhood. He waxes
almost lyrical in suggesting that the tapada, symbolizing spiritual and mental
freedom, is as deserving of a monument in Lima as the heroes of independence
who provided political emancipation from the Iberian heritage. Except, perhaps,
on this final point his argument is persuasive, and his presentation of it is always
clear and articulate.
University of Liverpool JOHN FISHER

Karen Spalding: Huarochiri: An Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule.
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984, $38.50) Pp. v+384.
The fundamental theme of the interaction of traditional Andean social and
economic structures with the overlay of imposed institutions and relations
attendant upon the Spanish conquest has been, for all its surpassing importance,
very much at the margin of contemporary historiographical concerns. In great
measure, this has been due to the differing emphases of those who have sought
to elucidate the evolution of the colonial state and its more visible impact on
indigenous society, on the one hand, and those 'ethnohistorians' who have
devoted their efforts to the reconstruction of pre-conquest social organization -
most notable among whom are John Murra and Maria Rostworowski - on the
other. Only rarely have these two orientations coincided, but there is ample
indication that the gap is beginning to close in tandem with the widening of
traditional disciplinary boundaries. Steve Stern's recent study of Andean response
to the first century of colonialism in the province of Huamanga was symptomatic
of this rapprochement, but the trend is most visible in the writings of the present
generation of historians in Peru and Bolivia, many of whom take their cue from
Murra, Rostworowski and their ilk. Such studies move beyond the blows dealt

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 Reviews z 31

one another by the historical protagonists, penetrating deeper into Andean society
beyond the closed corporate community and the hispanicized kuraka, often seen
anachronistically as a modernizing entrepreneur and harbinger of a market-based
prosperity that curiously never came to pass, save for the lucky few. For the story
is rather more profound than the impact on indigenous society of the more
palpable mechanisms of exploitation; it is, as Karen Spalding reminds us in her
new book, the story of why a land which by all sixteenth-century accounts
produced such bounty for its producers should have come to generate such
widespread misery. Beyond the cumulative effect of the well-known extractive
devices, the answer is to be sought in the changing internal structures of local
society which, even where traditional forms survived, saw the devastation of the
very basis of that prosperity - the celebrated Andean co-operation and
reciprocity - though the process varied widely in time and in space. The result
was a more individualistic ethos within the communities in which the strong
became wealthy (in local terms) and the weak went their several ways to the wall.
There is much to be said for such a view, though one is reminded that
reciprocity and co-operation continue to flourish throughout the Andes even now.
But one takes the author's point that these traditional relations are now situated
within a very different social and economic context. However, there is a suspicion
that what we know of post-colonial developments may have coloured the
portrayal here of the end-product of the colonial process; the principal lineaments
of indigenous society do not always come into focus in this study. Nevertheless,
if the notion of the closed corporate community is assuredly overdrawn and
idealized, the author is emphatically right to have focused on the community as
the prime object of study. It is the point of entry for any analysis of Andean
society, to land_tenure, social organization and social conflict; in a very real sense,
it is the measure of all things Andean in the colonial world. The alternative focus
for analysis is the kuraka, especially attractive because of the temptation to take
the short-cut through notarial records. But we fail to understand the kuraka unless
in relation to his community; most obviously, the hierarchy of kurakas was an
expression of the size of the community within which he exercised authority,
whether repartimiento, parcialidad or simple ayllu. The larger the community, the
larger the labour force, produce and lands at his disposal. Professor Spalding
presents a view of the kuraka as increasingly estranged from the community, and
of communities progressively riven by internal disputes and conflicting claims to
resources as the colonial period wore on.
Some recent work on the central and southern sierra indicates, however, that
communities demonstrated surprising vigour in defending their interests against
incursions by local elites (including kurakas) and sundry outsiders in the late
colonial period. At times this resistance was led by 'kuraka y comun', at other
times by the community alone, and most curiously by the officials of the cabildo
de indios. This last institution, familiar from New Spain, is little known in its
Andean manifestation. What is to be made of its long-delayed leap into the
limelight in late colonial Peru? Is it merely a recognition that community claims
would be enhanced if expressed through a Spanish corporation, or is it indicative
of the changing character of authority within the communities, even of the nature
of the Indian community itself? Does one need to accept that the process of

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232 Reviews

'fragmentation and eventual dissolution' of communities was always linear?

Professor Spalding appears to accept that such was the case in Huarochiri', even
to demonstrate it, but inasmuch as the discussion peters out around 1750, coeval
with the suppression of the Huarochiri uprising of that year, one is left to doubt.
More dubious, the author avers that groups which had once gathered to celebrate
traditional feasts no longer did so by the eighteenth century. Were not the
indigenous cofradias an expression of just such a tradition? Even if the author had
not wanted to discuss religious themes - lacking, apart from an acute analysis of
the extirpation of idolatry campaign - the cofradia was an important vehicle of
communal cohesion and, whatever the larger socio-economic processes in local
society, usually ensured that at least a portion of lands and income remained
inviolate in communal hands; always providing, that is, that they were not
misappropriated by the cura. To discuss the transformation of the communities
under colonial rule demands a closer juxtaposition of cabildo and cofradia with
kuraka and community.
Yet Professor Spalding has written an important book. It is not, as she points
out, a 'microhistory', but a regional study, the analysis of which is fortified and
enhanced by constant reference to developments elsewhere in the viceroyalty. To
a degree the author was obliged to adopt such a measure of discourse in order
to overcome a liability apparent at several points in the discussion: that Huarochiri
is far from being the best-documented region of colonial Peru. That liability,
however, only really mars the analysis in chapter 4, much of which is a prosaic
blow-by-blow account of the Spanish conquest of the Incario. The wider
counterpoint has greatly enriched the ensuing three chapters, among the finest
ever penned on the interaction of the two cultures. The emphasis is consistently
upon structure and the changes wrought therein; the argument is always
stimulating and frequently deft, representing a considerable advance on the kind
of atomized social history so much in vogue a decade ago. This is the core of
the book, but its contribution to our understanding of the evolving colonial
structures is the more authoritative because it is securely grounded in a penetrating
analysis of pre-conquest society in the region. Here we detect the influences of
Murra and Rostworowski, but this tightly integrated section draws heavily on
the rich but difficult cronista literature as well as on Professor Spalding's own
archaeological fieldwork. Noteworthy, too, is the author's exemplary use of the
myths and rites of Huarochiri in order to reconstruct pre-conquest social and
economic organization.
Our knowledge of these myths and rites derives principally from a compilation
painstakingly made in 1598 by Francisco de Avila, a decade before he instigated
the brutal and brutalizing crusade for the extirpation of idolatry. This episode,
and the response of local society to its inquisitors, are dissected in the penultimate
chapter, revealing for the use made of the records of the 'extirpation' for what
they can tell us of tensions and fissures in the communities in the mid-seventeenth
century. Those fissures were subtly exploited by the extirpators to set neighbour
against neighbour, community against community. Similar skills were spectacularly
employed by local Creole elites in 1750 when their familiarity with indigenous
enmities allowed them to destroy, effortlessly, a serious and skilfully organized
Indian uprising that had threatened to engulf Lima. Professor Spalding devotes

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 Reviews 233

a chapter to this movement on the basis of new documentation, which she reads
against the grain principally in order to support her thesis of the fragmentation
of communal ties. Even so, this is a significant contribution to the burgeoning
literature on Indian rebellion in eighteenth-century Peru, though the discussion
is not set within that context. To have done so would have revealed some
interesting parallels with the great uprising of 1780; the comparison is not merely
phenomenological, for it is known that Tupac Amaru was feted by the Indians
of Huarochiri there on his return from Lima in 1777. None the less, this account
of the rising of 1750 contains more than one moral for those interested in the
failure of indigenous movements in the viceroyalty.
Professor Spalding has written a densely argued book, richly suggestive for
further work on the Andean peoples under colonial rule. Her colleagues will find
grist to their mill on almost every page, and it seems destined, at least for the
immediate future, to serve as a sounding-board for those researching kindred
themes in the Andean area. As for Huarochiri, it has already found its historian.
University of Liverpool DAVID CAHILL

Nancy M. Farriss: Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise
of Survival (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984, Cloth
£55.40; paperback £13.90). Pp. xii + 585.
The pre-Columbian Maya, or more precisely the lowland Maya of Yucatan - the
subject of the book - have often captured the public imagination, not only
because of the magnificent monuments they built, but because they do not
conform to the generally accepted rules governing the evolution of human
societies. How did the Maya civilization, supposedly based on shifting cultivation
and lacking cities, emerge in such an inauspicious environment, and why did it
collapse so dramatically? Although these questions remain unanswered, through
the works of Roys, Thompson and Hammond amongst others our factual
knowledge of the pre-Columbian Maya has increased substantially. What we know
less of, is what happened to the Maya in the colonial period. Was their colonial
history equally exceptional or was their fate similar to that of other Indians in
the New World? The thesis of this book is that, unlike many other Indian groups,
the Maya were able to survive until the last quarter of the eighteenth century due
to the unattractiveness of Yucatan for Spanish settlement and due to the ability
of the Maya collectively to take advantage of the breathing space they were
afforded before the Bourbon reforms and the expansion of commercial agriculture
undermined their communities. As a result Maya culture was modified and
retained rather than destroyed. The study is based on extensive research in
archives and private collections in Mexico and Spain, and on ethnographic and
archaeological work in Yucatan.
The book is divided into four main sections. The first examines the nature of
Spanish rule in Yucatan, emphasizing that the lack of minerals and potential for
the development of commercial agriculture discouraged large-scale European
immigration, and resulted in the establishment of a form of indirect rule where
the Spanish were content to live on Indian tribute. By the end of the colonial

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