By N. H. Gill
May 28, 2018

Like many global hot spots of the twentieth century, the Andes is marked by its history of structural inequality, racial conflict, and legacies of poverty and violence. Tensions between urban and rural areas as well as descendants of European and Andean ancestry still exist and remain a source of conflict, as well as scholarly interest in the region. In the mid-twentieth century, Cold War battles between communism and capitalism spurred many Andean nations to launch a series of agrarian reforms to liberalize stagnant economies still dominated by rural production. Governments also hoped to simultaneously undercut support for Marxist and peasant revolutionary movements, which were igniting across the region. As the social, economic, and political shockwaves of these reforms spread in the decades that followed, historians have increasingly focused on the social movements that resisted these changes, often as a way of informing contemporary debate.

While the historical study of peasant and rural communities is at least as old as Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851), the modern study of peasants grew out of the politically tumultuous years of the 1960s and 1970s. Marked by the early work of historian Eric Hobsbawm and anthropologist Eric Wolf, the movement set the tone for how scholars across disciplines began to conceptualize peasant resistance.^[1] Most importantly, their work sparked a long-running debate among historians about the “apolitical” or “pre-political” nature of peasants as a social class. For example, Hobsbawm’s work on the economic and social history of Europe’s pre-modern peasants focused on their “primitive” forms of organization, while Wolf proposed a series of conceptual categories to analyze peasants’ “phenomena of backwardness.”[2] Proponents of this essentially Leninist view argued that peasant communities required external leadership, often in the figure of a millenarian hero or revolutionary vanguard, to transform their diffuse grievances into organized protest.^[3] For his part, in an influential 1973 article on the question of whether “there can be such a thing as a national peasant movement” without external support, Hobsbawm concluded, “I very much doubt it.”[4]

In the Andes, anthropologist Muriel Crespi built on Wolf and Hobsbawm’s ideas, exploring the disruptive consequences of Western capitalism on rural authority structures in the highlands of Cayambe, Ecuador.[6] Published in 1971, her work dealt with the expropriation of Church-owned haciendas and the rise of Marxist-inspired peasant unions, who would become the backbone of the major Indigenous political movements active today. But while influenced by Wolf and Hobsbawm’s work, Crespi emphasized peasants as central protagonists in their organization against landowners and other elites, a position that would be increasingly embraced by historians over the next decades.[9]

At this same time, anthropologist Thomas Greaves sought to broaden the concept of the term peasant by applying Sidney Mintz’s work on “rural proletarians” to the Andes. Greaves argued that by the twentieth century, many Andean workers were “post-peasants,” whose landless status and dependency on wage labor differentiated them from other types of land-based peasants and rural farmers.[10] Greaves made the case for looking at workers in other industries, including oil, mining, and large-scale agriculture, as “rural proletarians,”too.[11] Greaves also highlighted labor syndicates as the social vanguard capable of organizing rural proletarians. However, in a break from earlier scholarship, Greaves emphasized that rural proletarians’ actually did engage with local and national politics as conscious political actors, challenging theories that stressed their apolitical nature.[12] Still, the debate over whether peasants were inherently susceptible to charismatic leadership, especially revolutionary and millenarian, would continue.

By the 1980s, Andean historians began to explore new sources from local archives in the region to argue that rural peasants and Indigenous groups had indeed played pivotal historical roles, both during the colonial period and after independence. Christine Hünefeldt and Steve Stern are examples of this wave of scholarship, blending elements of historical materialism with cultural history to understand peasant movements and their wider relationships to society.^[13]

Pushing back on Hobsbawm’s conception of peasants as a homogenous social class, Hünefeldt cautioned against viewing peasants merely in terms of their economic position in social hierarchy, concluding that a better concept for studying the multiethnic societies of the region would be “clase-etnía.”[15] In the highlands of Peru where she worked, this meant paying attention to Indigenous groups as key historical actors, both because of their large populations and historical importance in regional development.

Steve Stern’s work on peasant rebellions in the Peruvian Andes continued this bottom-up history, engaging with Indigenous and peasant groups as politically conscious actors. Stern described the long-term processes and preexisting patterns of resistance and evolution that peasants engaged in as “resistant adaptation,”[18] identifying Indigenous groups as “continuous political initiators” as opposed to merely reactive protesters.[19] Like Greaves and Hünefeldt, he argued for a recognition of a spectrum of consciousness and political horizons within the peasantry as a social class and argued that “ethnic factors” often played an important role in driving peasants to revolt.[20] Other contemporary scholars who looked at these same questions included Heraclio Bonilla, Florencia Mallon, and Tristan Platt, whose work all contributed to a productive debate on the nature of rebellion and the formation of the Andean nation-states.[27]

As the 1980s ended, the scholars of peasant revolts in the Andes were still grappling with fundamental questions related to socioeconomic transitions to capitalist modernity. At the time, the political rise of neoliberalism and disruptive forces of an increasingly globalized economy were exacting a heavy social price on communities everywhere. In the Andes, resistance to the economic austerity and political corruption that accompanied the neoliberal reforms coincided with the 500-year anniversary of European contact, sparking new interest in the plight of the region’s Indigenous societies. Scholars used the occasion to reflect on the consequences of 1492, with Indigenous actors assuming an increasingly important role in historiographical debates.

In Ecuadorian historiography, debates about citizenship, nationalism and peasant participation in the building of the nation-state came amid a period of severe domestic upheaval. The launching of the so-called levantamiento indígena in 1990 kicked off a tumultuous decade that ended with the overthrow of two presidents, the collapse of the nation’s financial system, and the emigration of as many as a million economic refugees, tangibly demonstrating the ability of Indigenous peasants to organize and fight for their own vision of progress. As Ecuador’s experiment with liberal economic policies unraveled, historians including Mark Thurner, Kim Clark, and Marc Becker began to examine the history of the transition to liberal systems of economic control in the early twentieth century alongside the Indigenous uprising against the state in the late 1990s. By connecting these two historical periods, they sought to better situate the ongoing crisis in its historical context.

Over four decades of scholarship on Andean peasants, a number of historical issues stand out. First, in terms of early challenges of categorizing peasants as a class, the most recent historiography shows the need of factoring in ethnicity, gender, and ideology into our understanding of peasant society, especially in areas like the Andes where Indigenous populations represent a critical mass of rural populations. Second, any claim that peasants are inherently apolitical actors or marginal actors in regional history should be judged with caution. While most scholars no longer assume that peasants are incapable of conscious political action, these ideas still persist. Finally, the role of external leadership in peasant social movements remains a key debate in the field of peasant studies, with important implications for how we understand historical and contemporary social movements that continue to shape life in the Andes.

Cover photo: Cangagua, Ecuador, 2018, by N. H. Gill.Notes:
[1] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International publ, 1990); E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, The Norton Library N328 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965); Eric R. Wolf, Peasants, Foundations of Modern Anthropology Series (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966), 108–9. [2] Wolf, Peasants, viii. [3] E. J. Hobsbawm, “Peasants and Politics,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 1, no. 1 (October 1, 1973): 3–22. For more on the role of the revolutionary vanguard, see Vladimir Lenin’s seminal essay “What Is To Be Done? Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement,” in V. I. Lenin: Collected Works, vol. 5 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 347–530, Digital Reprint 2009, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm. [4] Hobsbawm, “Peasants and Politics,” 9. [5] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd Beacon Paperback ed (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001). [6] Muriel Crespi, “Changing Power Relations: The Rise of Peasant Unions on Traditional Ecuadorian Haciendas,” Anthropological Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1971): 239. [7] E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, The Norton Library N328 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965); Eric R. Wolf, Peasants, Foundations of Modern Anthropology Series (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966), 108–9. [8] Crespi, “Changing Power Relations,” 238. [9] Ibid., 223. [10] Thomas C. Greaves, “The Andean Rural Proletarians,” Anthropological Quarterly 45, no. 2 (1972): 65. [11] Ibid., 66. [12] Ibid., 74–75. [13] Christine Hünefeldt, Lucha Por La Tierra y Protesta Indígena: Las Comunidades Indígenas Del Perú Entre Colonia y República, 1800-1830 (Bonn, República Federal de Alemania: Bonner Amerikanistische Studien BAS 9, 1982); Steve J. Stern, ed., Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries (Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). [14] Hünefeldt, Lucha Por La Tierra y Protesta Indígena, VII. [15] Ibid., II. [16] Ibid., 24–26; 55–57. [17] Hünefeldt, Lucha Por La Tierra y Protesta Indígena, 119. [18] Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries, 10; authors included in this edition are Steve J. Stern, Magnus Morner, Efraín Trelles, Leon G. Campbell, Frank Salomon, Jan Szeminsky, Alberto Flores Galindo, Heraclio Bonilla, Florencia E. Mallon, Tristan Platt, Jorge Dandler, Juan Torrico A. and Xavier Albó. [19] Ibid., 9. [20] Ibid., 8–9. [21] Heraclio Bonilla, “The Indian Peasantry and ‘Peru’ during the War with Chile,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries, ed. Steve J. Stern (Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 72–73. [22] Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries, 11. [23] Bonilla, “The Indian Peasantry and ‘Peru’ during the War with Chile,” 34. [24] Wolf, Peasants, 108–9. [25] Bonilla, “The Indian Peasantry and ‘Peru’ during the War with Chile,” 76. [26] Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries, 15. [27] See Part III, Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries. [28] Ibid., 214. [29] Florencia E. Mallon, “Nationalist and Antistate Coalitions in the War of the Pacific: Junín and Cajamarca, 1879-1902,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries, ed. Steve J. Stern (Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 233. [30] Ibid., 267–69. [31] Bonilla, “The Indian Peasantry and ‘Peru’ during the War with Chile,” 220. [32] Ibid., 228–29. [33] Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Oppressed But Not Defeated: Peasant Struggles Among the Aymara and Qhechwa in Bolivia, 1900-1980, Environment Department Papers: Participation Series (Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1987). [34] Ibid., 97-98. [35] Ibid., 101–2. [36] Ibid., 149. [37] Ibid., 150. [38] Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). [39] Ibid., 14. [40] Ibid., 4. [41] Ibid., 5. [42] Ibid., 228. [43] Ibid., 65. [44] Ibid., 90. [45] Ibid., 243. [46] Crespi, “Changing Power Relations,” 229. [47] Mark Thurner, “Peasant Politics and Andean Haciendas in the Transition to Capitalism: An Ethnographic History,” Latin American Research Review 28, no. 3 (1993): 42. [48] Ibid., 42–43. [49] Ibid., 42. [50] Gavin A. Smith, Livelihood and Resistance: Peasants and the Politics of Land in Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). [51] Ibid, 22-24. [52] Florencia E. Mallon, The Defense of Community in Peru’s Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1860-1940 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1983). [53] Smith, Livelihood and Resistance, 23–24. [54] A. Kim Clark, The Redemptive Work: Railway and Nation in Ecuador, 1895–1930, Latin American Silhouettes (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1998). [55] Ibid., 2. [56] Ibid., 199. [57] Ibid., 73. [58] Ibid., 42. [59] Ibid., 154. [60] Marc Becker, Mariátegui and Latin American Marxist Theory, Monographs in International Studies, no. 20 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1993). [61] Ibid. [62] Marc Becker, Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador’s Modern Indigenous Movements. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). [63] Becker, Indians and Leftists, 16. [64] Barry J. Lyons, Remembering the Hacienda: Religion, Authority, and Social Change in Highland Ecuador, 1st ed (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006). [65] Becker, Indians and Leftists, 189.