What is valuable about community studies – those ethnographic monographs that analysed holistic research in a single community – and what was lost when anthropology turned away from them? To respond to this provocation, the geographer Francisco Ferreira draws together eight essays by distinguished anthropologists of the Andean region reflecting on the ‘community ethnographies’ they authored between the late 1970s and early 1990s. Ferreira suggests that today's anthropological research treats the communities it is based in as ‘just another research setting used to study particular phenomena’ (p. 35). His distinction between past and present strikes me as slightly overdrawn, an artefact of today's anthropological conditions of possibility (namely the constraints in funding, time to degree, and page limits at presses). But it is also undeniable that, as this book shows, community studies captured something true about Andean people and places.
Ferreira's route to geography passed through history, art history and museum studies, an orientation toward longer trajectories that helps explain his affection for studies that made a deliberate point of considering those links to the longer past. His background echoes those of other scholars considered in this book: like Catherine Allen, who initially planned to specialise in Old World archaeology (p. 69), or Tristan Platt, who studied classics and philosophy at Oxford (p. 201), or the influential ethnohistorian John H. Rowe, who studied classics and art history (p. 20 n. 27). That historical orientation allows Ferreira to highlight ‘one of the most distinctive characteristics of Andean anthropology, the importance of the past as a fundamental reference point’ (p. 13).
Ethnographic work informed by the past is often characterised as highlighting lo andino, or ‘the Andean’ – a theorised complex of characteristics that are particular to the region and that have deep roots (p. 22). Lo andino is also associated with Levi-Straussian structuralism: as Billie Jean Isbell writes of her first visits to Chuschi, with tongue implanted in cheek, ‘I thought I had died and gone to structuralist heaven’ (p. 49).
Lo andino is nicely detailed in Francisco Ferreira's introductory chapter that sets up the eight essays. This exemplary review of ‘community ethnographies’ is complemented with his observations of how the 1990s postmodern turn helped to ground a critique and turning away from these self-contained and comprehensive studies. As Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld – trained during that period when anthropologists were reflexively critical of the ‘village study’ – remarks, at that time ‘simply going abroad for fieldwork was cast by some as a colonising venture’ (p. 156). Ferreira's introduction should be required reading for any student of the region – its assessment of the debates in Andean anthropology over several decades is informed, sensitive, balanced and valuable.
The same can be said of this book itself. Ferreira writes that he originally proposed the idea of revisiting these scholars’ books, not in the form of re-studies, but rather through reflections by the authors themselves on the work they did in that period as well as beforehand and afterwards. The result is often personal, autobiographical discussions of individual paths to fieldwork. In this, it feels like a gift to the next generation of Andean ethnographers. It's an unusual book – I can't think of another one quite like it – set apart by the distinct manner in which these chapters were written to answer a specific set of questions about the community study as a form and a moment.
There are two particular audiences to whom this book will therefore be of interest. One group is those scholars who know the texts discussed, those of us who studied the same books Ferreira did in preparing to undertake our own research in Andean communities. For this group, it will read like a partial family history of some of the key figures of Andean anthropology.
A second, larger group is those who care about the history of anthropology, who will take lessons from life trajectories of individual anthropologists on how scholarly work is shaped by particular circumstances and itself goes on to inform subsequent scholarship in unpredictable ways. For this audience, the book also gives a valuable window into the funding, advisory and political structures that constrained and supported research in that period. (Imagine a time when, as Enrique Mayer describes, ‘[m]ade possible by the boom in funding for young PhD candidates, a great wealth of detailed ethnographic description, analysis and interpretation was produced on many a community in the Andes’, p. 238.) For example, many of the scholars writing here did their fieldwork accompanied by spouses and children, and they comment on how that subject position informed their incorporation into a community.
But there are still others who will find this book a productive read, because it reveals some intriguing themes, evident already in these decades-old community studies, which feel very contemporary in their connections with current theoretical frameworks. For example, those following recent work on the ‘political ecology of things’ will be struck by Catherine Allen's enduring interest in objects, like the drinking vessels that have a ritual resonance with the past but are still in use (p. 71), and in Frank Salomon's discussion of khipus, the knotted cords from pre-colonial times which we cannot precisely ‘read’ but which are still today ‘patrimony of a living community’ (p. 177). And the vibrant field of environmental and ecological anthropology, concerned with the social dimensions of anthropogenic climate change, will find fruitful the long history of this work in the Andes. For example, Carmen Escalante and Ricardo Valderrama point to how climate-change scholars can learn from Andeans who, like their ancestors, adapt to their ecosystems by modifying their environments and landscapes (pp. 133, 145), and Peter Gose notes how his interlocutors’ understandings of ‘the landscape's generative surfaces’ extend to critiques of its ‘extractive scarring’ through mining (p. 114), an issue of continued concern in the Andes and beyond. For all these reasons, this book is a welcome contribution that should travel beyond the community of Andeanists for whom it is of such immediate interest, to reach readers interested in the history of anthropology and in some original views on current theoretical approaches.
