Between Reform and Revolution: Political Struggles in the Peruvian Andes, 1969-1991

Between Reform and Revolution: Political Struggles in the Peruvian Andes, 1969-1991. By Linda J. Seligmann. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. 268p. $39.50 cloth, $15.95 paper.

Cynthia McClintock, George Washington University

The core argument of this book is that Peru's agrarian reform initiated political changes in Peru's highlands that culminated in the advance of the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla movement in the 1980s and early 1990s. To make this argument, anthropologist Linda Seligmann seeks to bring to bear evidence from her field research in Huanoquite, a rural district in the department of Cusco. Her research spanned a year in 1984 and several months in 1989 and 1991--years when field work in the Peruvian highlands was a challenge that only a brave and committed scholar would assume. The author's discussion of various questions--especially the role of the schoolteachers in Huanoquite and the conflicting perceptions and needs that the teachers and peasants had of each other--reflects close knowledge of the district and sensitivity to its residents.

However, in my view Seligmann does not successfully demonstrate her thesis. Given that she is arguing that "the unmet promises of the state and the often paradoxical efforts of rural inhabitants to combine their moral principles, their conceptualizations of their ethnic and class identities, and their interpretations of the legal tenets of the reform law directly and indirectly contributed to the emergence of Sendero in the district" (p. 21), the reader would assume that there was considerable support for Sendero in Huanoquite. In fact, there apparently was not. In her introduction to the book, Seligmann reports that "few peasants in Huanoquite have chosen the option of...