Commentary

This commentary examines the pioneering research on Andean women that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. This researchtended toward two divergent poles. The first consists ofanalyses, like the author’s on the community of Vicos, that emphasized the “complementarity” of gender roles in the rural sector and suggested that a gender hierarchy was the result of externallyimposed ideas and practices, whether from colonialism or contemporary urban culture. The second pole consists of analyses that, in contrast, held that patriarchal relations were rooted in “traditional” rural communities and would be altered only with “modernization.”In many ways, the initial debates on the lives and prospects of Andean women set an agenda whose traces may be seen to extend through the present, even if the pace of scholarly research in Peru’s rural sector slowed during the 1980s as a consequence of the conflict and violence in the country that cost nearly seventy thousand lives. Babb was among a very small number of researchers who continued work on the Peruvian Andes (and migration to the coast) in that turbulent decade.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter argues that it is not at all coincidental that today Andean women are the emblematic figures in the national imagination, representing both a rich cultural history and the last vestiges of a perceived “backward” and recalcitrant culture. This book offers a close examination of the ambivalent ways in which gender, race, and cultural heritage intertwine to position Andean women as the quintessential subjects of both national pride and everyday scorn and neglect in Peru. Studies from the former hacienda community of Vicos, the highland city of Huaraz, and the migrant stream to Lima, placed in relation to broader regions of Latin America, provide ample ethnographic material to support that argument. The book has engaged in a self-critical process of locating the author’s writings in the historical contexts in which they were written and then reexamining them from the present vantage point of emergent decolonial feminisms. Ultimately, her objective has been to work toward a decolonial feminist anthropology of gender, race, and indigeneity that recognizes culturally diverse lives in all their complexity, as neither saints nor sinners, neither iconic heroes nor pitiable victims. The work should inspire others to undertake their own reflections and contribute to what she hopes will be a growing and vigorous discussion of gender, race, and other axes of power in Latin America and beyond.

Market/Places as Gendered Spaces

This chapter discusses two decades of scholarly work on women marketers. When the author began her research on the subject, there were just a few pioneering studies to guide her. Ester Boserup’s well-known Woman’s Role in Economic Development had noted that “in no other field do ideas about the proper role of women contrast more vividly than in the case of market trade,” and studies began to appear by Judith-Maria Buechler, Beverly Chiñas, Niara Sudarkasa, and Sidney Mintz. The approaches of the 1970s ranged from functionalist to structuralist, but in general they were critical of the historical impact of Western development on women’s marketing. Studies of market women in the 1980s and 1990s built upon the early works, but they also benefited from the growth of feminist analysis, and they reflected changing currents in anthropology and related fields. The author considers the emphasis on history and political economy through the eighties and the turn toward cultural analysis in the 1990s and traces several currents in research of that time. She concludes by offering remarks concerning her own changing perspective over twenty years of conducting research among market women in the Peruvian Andes.

Women and Men in Vicos, Peru

The Peru-Cornell Project inthe community of Vicos (1952–1962) was the cooperative effort of Cornell University and the Peruvian Indian Institute. The late professor Allan R. Holmberg took the opportunity to lease the Hacienda Vicos in 1952 in order to direct and study social change, and many social scientists and technical personnel worked with the project over the next ten years. This chapter draws heavily on unpublished field data of members of the Peru-Cornell Project, as well as the published literature on Vicos, to document the changing conditions in women’s and men’s lives. Vicos is not unique in Peru, for much of the country underwent similar land reform a few years later, but it is unique in the conscious way that many changes were introduced and reported by researchers. This makes Vicos particularly appropriate for a study that traces the effect of capitalist development on the fabric of human relations.

Commentary

This commentary introduces works that consider how we can assess the nature of women’s participation in economies and societies when so much depends on the suppleness of our interpretations. The first piece was written at a time when feminists still needed to make a case for the inclusion of women and gender in social analysis, while the second, written a couple of decades later, could take the legitimacy of gender analysis for granted and argue some of the finer points regarding ways in which indigenous women in areas of Peru and Mexico are inserting themselves in the work of tourism development. Both pieces had somewhat mixed responses as a result of the rather novel positions taken by the author, and so she begins this commentary by looking back to discover where the heat was in those debates. She goes on to discuss the “impossibility of women” as taken up by contemporary feminists who wish to dismantle fixed notions of gender. From there, she raises related questions concerning cultural representation and identity among Andean women. The chapter concludes with some observations about the politics of the transnational Latin American women’s movement as we enter the new millennium.

Producers and Reproducers

Since the florescence of research on women in society, the gender division of labor has been viewed as a key to understanding women’s socioeconomic position. By the mid-1970s, the view held sway that women’s cross-cultural subordination could be explained by their universal or near-universal attachment to the domestic sphere of activity, while men enjoyed the higher prestige of the public sphere. A flurry of studies appeared, documenting the unequal and undervalued role of women in the family and household. By calling attention to the previously “invisible” activities carried out daily by women, analysts undertook to transform the androcentric social sciences. This chapter suggests that while the production/reproduction framework moved us forward to important new lines of inquiry, taking these conceptual categories as unproblematic may result in some confusion. The author considers the case of market women in Andean Peru to illustrate what she views as the strengths of the concepts discussed here, as well as some shortcomings, for an examination of these Latin American women workers.

Women in the Marketplace

Conceptualizing women workers in the informal urban sector of developing economies poses certain problems. Researchers disagree as to the class position, productive activity, and political consciousness characteristic of these workers. Focusing on women in small-scale commerce—a growing population in cities of many underdeveloped areas—this chapter questions some commonly held views and suggests a need to refine our analysis of women in the distributive trades and the services. As one effort in this direction, the results of research on marketers in a provincial city in Peru are presented to show that while there is some ambiguity in the class status of market women, owing to the various forms of their participation in the capitalist economy, these women may be termed productive workers with evident potential for mobilization.

Introduction

The introduction argues that recent discussion of ethnic and racial inequality in Peru has largely overlooked gender differences, an absence this book seeks to redress. The author contends that a critical feminist perspective is essential to contend with complex social realities, past and present. This reconsideration reveals the strengths in Andean women’s “traditional” social position and the new purchase in being female and Andean, though these women are subject nonetheless to subtle and durable forms of discrimination in contemporary Peru. Frameworks examined range from the analytic of gender complementarity (positing balanced male-female roles) to theories of production and reproduction (as aspects of women’s work) and to intersectionality and decolonial feminism. Babb takes a self-critical perspective on her past work and then turns to consider how earlier research and writing might be understood anew in light of the approach she is setting forth. Drawing together discussions of race and of gender, she provides a fuller and more accurate understanding of interwoven inequalities in Peru.

Theorizing Gender, Race, and Cultural Tourism in Latin America

Theorizations of gender and race in Latin America have led to wide-ranging views concerning women and men in subaltern groups, whether indigenous or Afro-descendant, rural or urban. Views are similarly wide ranging when theorizing turns to the implications of tourism development for subaltern peoples in the region. Just as it is customary to emphasize the historically subordinate status of women and racial minorities in Latin America, so too it is customary to show that tourism in the neoliberal era has particularly harsh consequences for these marginalized social sectors. At a time of indigenous mobilization, increasing migration, and urbanization, we must recognize the complex and often surprising ways in which gender, race, and tourism intertwine. Ethnographic cases from Andean Peru and Chiapas, Mexico, suggest that indigenous women play more or less prominent roles in tourism depending on several factors, with women who are active in the wider society holding more substantial positions in community-based cultural tourism.

Commentary

By the 1980s in Latin America, as elsewhere, there were emergent women’s movements and popular feminisms on the one hand and self-identified, often middle-class, feminists of various political stripes on the other. Frameworks of analysis that had already emerged were further refined, among them a good number that embraced Western dualisms such as private/public, traditional/modern, informal/formal, and production/reproduction—all of which influenced Babb’s thinking and that of many others in both the global North and the global South as a result of the geopolitics of knowledge and its circulation. During this period, there was increased attention to race and ethnicity, as well as to gender as a social relation rather than a fixed category. In her commentary, the author traces some of these currents in feminist thought and politics during that period as a backdrop for discussion of her work presented here from that time. The chapters that follow in this section were based on research on Andean market women of Huaraz, Peru.