ii

n essence, so to speak, the Andeanist researchers of five decades ago were essentializing the objects of their research. Essentialism, as defined by Andrew Vayda (1994:320), consists of giving preference to "pattern and order" over "variations and variability." Pnina Werbner (1997:228-229) writes: "To essentialize is to impute a fundamental, basic, absolutely necessary constitutive quality to a person, social category, ethnic group, religious community, or nation. It is to posit falsely a timeless continuity, a discreteness or boundedness in space, and an organic unity. It is to imply an internal sameness and external difference or otherness." But she adds: "Attempts to avoid essentializing the social collectivities we study lead ... to a series of conundrums. If to name is to re-present, to imply a continuity and discreteness in time and place, then it follows that all collective namings or labellings are essentialist, and that all discursive constructions of social collectivities—whether of community, class, nation, race or gender—are essentializing." Consequently, if we pursue an anti-essentialist goal, we are well advised not to carry it to the point where we essentialize it!

When Marisol de la Cadena (1991:18) asked her Chitapampa informants about the ethnic status of other Chitapampinos the most frequent reply was that he or she was "in process." This "oscillation between one cultural code and another," a conception that Regina Harrison (1989:58) employs in analyzing an early seventeenth century Andean document, is an Andeanist discursive instrument that we may also use in present times. De la Cadena’s people are neither peasants nor intermediaries nor elites, that is, not "indians," and not mestizos, and not whites. Oscillating from one "essence" to another is about as de-essentialized as one can get. But so are all Peruvians "in process," including the Vicosinos far to the north. People are learning new codes and idioms and unlearning old ones. Thomas Turino (1992:451) quotes one of the Lima migrants from Conima, in the Department of Puno:

In Conima, people depend on nature for their livelihood. Here, we work for wages, for money, and so we don’t need those beliefs any more. As long as they depend on nature, if it doesn’t rain one year, they carry water up the mountain and it always rains; or if there’s a downpour they have a ceremony to hold back the rain. The t’inka and the ch’alla are like prayers. But we work for wages and we don’t need these things.

Turino (ibid.) comments: "This is not a declaration of skepticism with respect to these highland beliefs and practices, it is simply a pragmatic affirmation which maintains that such things are no longer relevant in the present circumstances of the residents. Conimeños in Lima explain that they no longer speak Aymara for similar reasons." Languages can be spoken again in new circumstances, but new codes have a way of "contaminating" them. Yet older codes persist and "contaminate" the new ones. Thomas Abercrombie (1998:414) writes: "When the boundaries and modalities of the social life undergo radical transformation, so will the shape of the past which gives that new social life its significance." Such is the case with the Lima-born children of Conimeño migrants who learn to play zampoñas (panpipes) in Lima, but whose music, because of differences in "musical values and practices," sounds different (ibid.:440).⁽¹³⁾ As Rosaleen Howard-Malverde (1997:14) states:

Spanish colonization of the indigenous people of the Andes produced profound cleavages in existing structures at every level of human experience: in systems of communication, knowledge, religious belief, and social and political organization, to name but a few. The strength of those who resist oppression and try to maintain integrity against all odds is a factor in explaining how five centuries of colonialist domination have not completely eradicated linguistic and cultural diversity and creativity among Latin American peoples of indigenous origin. The very cleavages mentioned here have been moulded into spaces in which innovative forms of cultural expression are produced, acting as tools in the fight against total assimilation. Hybridization is a phenomenon naturally generated at such interfaces."

With such an altered view, we can no longer support an "essential" conception of Andean peoples. "De-essentializing," in the way that deconstruction is also reconstruction, carries with it a "re-essentializing face. James Carrier (1995:28) observes:

[T]he sheer existence of essentialist rendering and selective perception is likely to be routine. Pointing out that existence is not very revealing. Even pointing out that it causes errors and misperceptions, though worthwhile, is not very exciting, for these are inevitable. Instead, it is necessary ... to begin to show how that essentialist and selective vision arises, how it reflects people’s social and political situations, and how it affects their lives and works.

It would also be an error to essentialize rural people who have migrated to the city as "despachamamizados" (a Peruvian way of saying depeasantized, separated from Mother Earth) and/or petty capitalists. Certainly, many of them have learned new languages, not only Spanish but those of the school curriculum: a sense of fatherland, the world, history, and commerce— discourses which situate them as Peruvians, rather than Conimeños, Chitapampinos, Hualcaínos, or Vicosinos. The school is a mixed blessing. What Pierre Bourdieu (1974:32, 35-36) criticizes in the French school is equally true of that in Peru:

It is probably cultural inertia which still makes us see education in terms of the ideology of the school as a liberating force ... and as a means of increasing social mobility, even when the indications tend to be that it is in fact one of the most effective means of perpetuating the existing social pattern, as it both provides an apparent justification for social inequalities and gives recognition to the cultural heritage, that is, to a social gift treated as a natural one.

As processes of elimination occur throughout the whole of the period spent in education, we can quite justifiably note the effects they have at the highest levels of the system. The chances of entering higher education are dependent on direct or indirect selection varying in severity with subjects of different social classes throughout their school lives ...

[H]andicaps are cumulative, as children from the lower and middle classes who overall achieve a lower success rate must be more successful for their family and their teachers to consider encouraging further study. The same method of double selection also comes into operation with the age criterion: children from peasant and working class homes, usually older than children from more privileged homes, are more severely eliminated, at an equal age, than children from the latter. In short, the general principle which leads to the excessive elimination of working and middle class children can be expressed thus: the children of these classes, who because of a lack of cultural capital have less chance than others of exceptional success, are nevertheless expected to achieve exceptional success to reach secondary education.

At the same time, the school is a context for cultural hybridization. Education does not accomplish its goal of breaking the codes children bring with them, although such codes may not be so easily observed in action. What intrigues me, then, is the possibility that in Peru commerce and capital accumulation/concentration, de-essentialized and Andeanized, may turn into something very different from orthodox interpretations of such activities.⁽¹⁴⁾ As David Nugent (1996:263) points out, in twentieth century Peru, commerce and accumulation have been seen as liberating and empowering at one time, but as evil and dangerous at another. The extension of the state into the Andean hinterland also has an oscillating significance, Penelope Harvey (1991:5) notes, as "both a source of progress and a source of oppression."⁽¹⁵⁾ Similarly, "commodity", "development", "integration," and "modernization" are not signifiers with only single meanings, any more than "essence." Diana Fuss (1989:20) observes:

There is an important distinction to be made ... between "deploying" or "activating" essentialism and "falling into" or "lapsing into" essentialism. "Falling into" or "lapsing into" implies that essentialism is inherently reactionary—inevitably and inescapably a problem or a mistake. "Deploying" or "activating," on the other hand, implies that essentialism may have some strategic or interventionary value. What I am suggesting is that the political investments of the sign "essence" are predicated on the subject’s complex positioning in a particular social field, and that the appraisal of this investment depends not on any interior values intrinsic to the sign itself but rather on the shifting and determanitive discursive relations which produced it ... [T]he radicality or conservatism of essentialism depends to a significant degree, on who is utilizing it, how it is deployed, and where its effects are concentrated.

"A statement is always an event that neither the language nor the meaning can quite exhaust" (Foucault 1972:28). It interacts with context. So "essence," paradoxically, has no "final" meaning. It is undecidable.

Continued...

NOTAS

13. Turino (1993:155) says of the middle-class Puneño musicians in Lima, the Asociación Juvenil Puno [AJP]: "Since the members of AJP Base Puno were primarily reared in urban Peruvian society, where the Western tuning system predominated, and they learned to perform panpipes largely while living in the city, it is understandable that ... they did not yet tune, or hear, their tropas precisely as rural Andeans do. AJP’s attitudes about rehearsing music ... were also logically different from those of musicians in the ayllus [Andean local groups]; AJP members had different goals for performance, and a different social style and philosophy that aided them in approaching their goals."
14. James Clifford (1997:331) writes: "Commodities and markets release forces that tear down borders and unsettle empires; they also consolidate dominant polities. Because economic globalization works both with and against national attachments, it is premature to decree either the end or the consolidation of nation-states. And although the centers of capitalist power are still largely in the European and North American ‘West,’ this is changing. Asian economic power is an inescapable reality, whether centered in Japan, Korea, Indonesia, or—most powerfully perhaps—in diasporic and mainland China. Can we still say that global economics, because it is capitalist, is inherently ‘Western’? As Marx understood, capitalism is revolutionary, destructive and productive. And it does not usher in a unified, ‘bourgeois,’ or ‘Western’ sociocultural order as it spreads. It has proved to be flexible, working through as well as against regional differences, partially accommodating to local cultures and political regimes, grafting its symbols and practices onto whatever non-Western forms transculturate its logic. It does business with monarchies, dictatorships, oligarchic bureaucracies, and democracies, with neo-Confucians, Hindus, Orthodox Jews, a range of Islamic societies."
15. Harvey (1991:4-5) says of Ocongate in southern Peru: "The Spanish-speaking state is seen as a force for both positive and negative intervention in the locality. Positive interventions include the building and maintenance of schools where people learn to read and write in Spanish; institutions that provide services such as drinking water or the hope of services such as electricity; the market economy and the possibility of cash incomes to buy ‘comforts’ ... such as two-story houses, tile roofs, kitchen utensils, clothes, blankets, radios, tape recorders, even trucks. However, people also perceive the state as a source of danger, a capricious and negative force that affects the community adversely. They are conscious of their marginalization from the potential benefits of the rich Spanish-speaking world; they remember the unfulfilled promises of electioneers and, further back in time, the abuses of the landowners of the large estates and subsequently of the state employees who administered the new Cooperatives after the Agrarian reform of 1969. Many people directly experienced the power of the army and of the police during violent land disputes associated with a local estate ... They know that the education they receive is not very good and that the money they earn does not provide for their needs."