The Spirit of Place: The Andes

One of the world’s oldest ethnicity-based discriminatory system is the “castas”, the Spanish colonial system of government, the social and cultural impacts of which are strong even today in the Andean countries.  After achieving independence in the nineteenth century, the young republics repealed the caste-system.  In reality, however, only the educated, urban people, and the property owners counted as citizens enjoying equal rights.  In ethnic terms, these were the creoles and mestizos, who appropriated the power of the old native nobility, the curacas, and who took the land of the indigenous communities.
The five authors in this thematic section explore different issues related to the Andean countries. Peruvian sociologist Carlos Ivan Degregori gives a comprehensive historical account of the above described process, and demonstrates that the only possible way of social mobility is to assimilate, to become mestizo.  Juan Carlos Estenssoro, Peruvian art historian, analyzes the fiesta culture that was central to the cultural life from the end of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century.  The article examines the religious and secular campaigns against joyful dance culture, against the cultural representations of indigenous people and the urban poor population.  
Ecuadorian scholar Andrés Guerrero explores the practice of the ethnic-based division of labor that has survived in the countryside, while Xavier Albó, Bolivian anthropologist scrutinizes what it means in this world to be indigenous.   Albó explores the ethnic meanings of the different words for native identity–the indian, the indigenous, the campesino (peasant), the urban citizen, the miner, and others.  In the last article of this thematic section, the Chilean sociologist Larissa Adler Lomnitz analyzes the meanings and conditions of belonging to the urban middle-class, which is partly determined by the membership in the mutual aid network called “compadrazgo”.