ACAP - The American and Canadian Association of Peru

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September 2004

Literary Review -
"Peru: Society and Nationhood in the Andes"
by Peter Flindell Klarén

Editor's Note: Readers of the ACAP Newsletter will note that the “Literary Review” column has been concentrating on books in English about Peru. Should you wish to review a particular book, or have it reviewed by me, please contact me at Editor@acap-peru.org

Front cover

The Oxford University Press, which has brought us some of the best English-language histories of Peru published in recent years - including “Peru: a Cultural History” by Henry Dobyns and Paul Doughty - has given us another winner with “Peru: Society and Nationhood in the Andes” by George Washington University professor Peter Klarén. The product of over three decades of work on Peruvian history and published in 2000, Dr. Klarén's 500-page volume is nothing less than the best overview of Peruvian history available in the English language.

Klarén's narrative concentrates on sociopolitical issues in Peru's history. His primary concern is the struggle between Hispanic elites and indigenous, mestizo and Afro-Peruvian “masses” over power and inclusion. He makes a special effort to get away from the traditional Lima-centered history of the elites and, instead, recounts the unfolding of “the tapestry of human history” in the mosaic of Peru's microregions, and thus offers the reader an examination of the daily lives of ordinary citizens.

Klarén is also very conscious of the tendency, especially of foreign analysts of Peru, to look at Peru as a country shrouded in mystery and the exotic. Citing tales of legendary wealth, bloody conquest, Spanish nobility, and fanatic revolutionaries, he argues that a tempered overview of Peru's history is, in fact, a very different tale of tenacious survival amidst periodic, often horrific, natural and man-made disasters.

Like the vast majority of historians of Peru, Klarén is by-and-large pessimistic. He faults the modern state for failing to overcome the legacies of colonialism and underdevelopment and thus, inhibiting the integration and consolidation of the Peruvian nation to this day. He does find trends that provide reasons for optimism at the turn of the new millennium, however, in the emergence of women as central actors in Peru's social movements and politics; the increasing imprint of the subaltern classes on Peru's culture and institutions; and the increasing practice of democratic politics, however imperfect they may be.

The volume closes with a sober assessment of Alberto Fujimori's first term in office (1990-1995), when “the restoration of political and economic order [came] at the expense of the 'withering' of democracy, the weakening of the state, and the widespread social deterioration of the population.”

The closing pages of “Peru: Society and Nationhood in the Andes” offer a six-page Chronology of major events in Peruvian history, a group of tables that includes a listing of the governments from independence in 1821 until 1995 (65 in all!), an outstanding and very thorough bibliographical essay (38 pages!) that covers mainly books and important articles published in the last quarter century, and a highly useful index. The text is also graced with numerous maps and photos that help illustrate relevant to the period under discussion.

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I asked the author to grace ACAP members with his own words on “Peru: Society and Nationhood in the Andes.” His e-mailed reply is reprinted below. - JR

What turned out to be my life/work odyssey and adventure in Peru over the past 35 years was in its beginning phase fraught with professional and personal challenges. I had embarked in 1965 to Peru to collect material for what I overly ambitiously conceived as a dissertation project to write the history of APRA. The super polemical nature of Peruvian politics quickly disabused me of that task, particularly after I happened onto a mother lode of archival material in Trujillo that opened the path to my discovery of the historical origins of the party along the north coast. I recall feeling particularly elated on my return trip to Lima with the sense that I had made what would turn out to be a scholarly breakthrough on the subject, something akin to the elation of “striking it rich” that must have overwhelmed those Europeans at Cajamarca in 1532.

The downside to my original field work in Peru, however, was my susceptibility in those days, like many of my North American colleagues, to virtually every known microbe and stomach virus lurking in Lima's contaminated environment - from Salmonella to hepatitis - all in the span of 18 months. My current book and the subject of this review, while consuming 7 years in the writing, was, happily, easier on my health and in many ways gave me as much satisfaction as the writing as Las haciendas, but for different reasons. Unlike the scholarly breakthrough of the latter, it was intellectually stimulating to encounter and try to synthesize the extraordinary bonanza of historical scholarship produced by Peruvians and outsiders like myself over the past three decades. For that opportunity I will be forever grateful.

Peter Klaren, Washington, DC

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