Power, Culture, and Violence in the Andes

Scholars from Anthropology, History, and Literary and Cultural Studies present their current research on culture and violence in the Andean region. Within an interdisciplinary approach, the contributors to this volume explore the complex and mutually constitutive relationship of culture and violence in Peru and Bolivia, countries with large indigenous populations who have largely preserved their culture and way of life in spite of centuries of colonial domination and the encroachment of capitalist modernization, including its latest free-market variant. The intertwined histories of culture and violence in the Andes are examined through analyses of the indigenous and popular mobilization that brought Evo Morales to power as Bolivia's first indigenous president, conservative Latin American intellectuals' response to this popular rejection of neoliberal economic and social policies, the work of Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the legacy of the Shining Path war, and nineteenth-century intellectual and political discourses on race, gender, and the incorporation of indigenous peoples into the nation-state.

Christine Hunefeldt is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies at UC, San Diego. Her publications include, Comunidades indigenas entre Colonia y Republica (1992); Paying the Price of Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and A Brief History of Peru (rev. edn., 2004). Misha Kokotovic is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Director of the Latin American Studies Program at UC, San Diego. His publications about the Andes include The Colonial Divide in Peruvian Narrative (SAP, 2005, 2007).