front cover of Making Music Indigenous
Making Music Indigenous
Popular Music in the Peruvian Andes
Joshua Tucker
University of Chicago Press, 2019
When thinking of indigenous music, many people may imagine acoustic instruments and pastoral settings far removed from the whirl of modern life. But, in contemporary Peru, indigenous chimaycha music has become a wildly popular genre that is even heard in the nightclubs of Lima. In Making Music Indigenous, Joshua Tucker traces the history of this music and its key performers over fifty years to show that there is no single way to “sound indigenous.” The musicians Tucker follows make indigenous culture and identity visible in contemporary society by establishing a cultural and political presence for Peru’s indigenous peoples through activism, artisanship, and performance. This musical representation of indigeneity not only helps shape contemporary culture, it also provides a lens through which to reflect on the country’s past. Tucker argues that by following the musicians that have championed chimaycha music in its many forms, we can trace shifting meanings of indigeneity—and indeed, uncover the ways it is constructed, transformed, and ultimately recreated through music.
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front cover of Shaping Society through Dance
Shaping Society through Dance
Mestizo Ritual Performance in the Peruvian Andes
Zoila S. Mendoza
University of Chicago Press, 2000
During the patron saint fiesta in the Andean town of San Jerónimo, Peru, crowds gather at sunset in the town square, eagerly awaiting the entrance of the colorful dance troupes, or comparsas. With their masks, music, and surprising interpretations of contemporary events, the comparsas of the Cusco region are the focus of this multifaceted work. At the crossroads of folklore and ritual, mass media and local preferences, and regional and national identity, the comparsas—recorded here on VHS, DVD, and compact disc—have become a powerful way for the local people to make sense of their place in Peru and in the world. As Zoila Mendoza shows, they do more than reflect societal changes, they actively transform society.

In this fluid world, she argues, racial and ethnic identities are shaped more by notions of what is decent, elegant, and modern rather than by skin color or status. As the different troupes vie for the townspeople's recognition as the most "authentic" group, these notions are challenged and reworked. A fascinating look at a rich tradition, this innovative work is also a compelling example of the critical anthropology of performance.
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front cover of Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes
Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes
Olga M. González
University of Chicago Press, 2011

The Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path launched its violent campaign against the government in Peru’s Ayacucho region in 1980. When the military and counterinsurgency police forces were dispatched to oppose the insurrection, the violence quickly escalated. The peasant community of Sarhua was at the epicenter of the conflict, and this small village is the focus of Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes. There, nearly a decade after the event, Olga M. González follows the tangled thread of a public secret: the disappearance of Narciso Huicho, the man blamed for plunging Sarhua into a conflict that would sunder the community for years.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork and a novel use of a cycle of paintings, González examines the relationship between secrecy and memory. Her attention to the gaps and silences within both the Sarhuinos’ oral histories and the paintings reveals the pervasive reality of secrecy for people who have endured episodes of intense violence. González conveys how public secrets turn the process of unmasking into a complex mode of truth telling. Ultimately, public secrecy is an intricate way of “remembering to forget” that establishes a normative truth that makes life livable in the aftermath of a civil war.

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