Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Less on Atusparia

2000; Duke University Press; Volume: 80; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-80-1-137

1527-1900

Mark Thurner,

Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America

It was gratifying to read in the pages of the HAHR that the eminent anthropologist and emeritus professor William W. Stein both applauds my work and graciously admits to having learned from it. I too have learned much from his previously published work on the Atusparia Uprising, and I said so in the preface to my book, From Two Republics to One Divided. However, I was disappointed by Stein’s latest and in some ways extraordinary “Comment,” which carried the possibly ambivalent title “Next to Nothing: More on Pedro Pablo Atusparia” (HAHR 78:2).I do not wish to respond to each and every of the “Comment’s” many allusions, in part because many of them seem to have little to do with my HAHR article, in part because I am not sure that I grasp them all, in part because I am not sure that all are entirely appropriate to this forum, and in part because “Next to Nothing” is, as far as the substantive issues go, just that. As far as I am able to tell, Stein’s “Comment” adds little (no new facts, no new sources, no interpretations unfamiliar to those who have read his previous published work) to contemporary historical discourse on Atusparia. Although the “facts” attached to Atusparia, many of which have been dug up by the energetic Ancashino historian C. A. Alba Herrera, and which Stein reproduces and expands upon, may not be familiar to many HAHR readers, they are well known to regional specialists. However, it was not my purpose in the HAHR piece to delve into the life either of Atusparia or of Cáceres. Thus, I found it strange and regrettable that my choice of the rhetorical “next to nothing is known” phrase (I had originally written “little is known,” which might in retrospect have been better, since Stein himself, Alba Herrera, and possibly others have used similar terms to describe the state of historical knowledge about Pedro Pablo Atusparia) should “encourage” him to “enthusiastically embark” on a “Comment” that fails to engage what the article as a whole was trying to achieve (for a punctuated appreciation, see “Relación de Mando,” HAHR 77:4, 593). Still, even on the tangential grounds that Stein occupies, “More on … Atusparia” is in certain ways less, since he chooses to ignore my lengthy discussion and historical analysis of the mediating roles and political culture of alcaldes like Atusparia developed in From Two Republics (which he elsewhere cites), including my treatment of the linkages between Atusparia, the other alcaldes, and the cacerista leadership, and then proceeds to imply that I have ignored the social milieu in which Atusparia moved. When I said that Atusparia was “a smallholding peasant residing in a humble hamlet,” I was stating a fact that I was able to document. Perhaps I should have made it clear—in an article that I was obliged to cut substantially to meet the space limitations of HAHR (I do wish to note that the editors graciously granted extra space to accommodate an article that was, after significant cuts, still rather longer than the norm)—that Atusparia was, like many other smallholding peasants in the region, also other things, including at one time an artisanal worker in a small dyeing operation. But I do not think any discerning reader could have missed that Atusparia was an alcalde. As for Stein’s claim that Atusparia was involved as a dependent in the wool trade, I have seen no documentation that confirms such speculations. There is no evidence that Atusparia had met Cochachin in the way Stein describes. Alzamora’s influence over Atusparia, in the first instance as his patrón and in the second as his fleeting cacerista subprefect, was important, albeit in ways that Stein has missed. In From Two Republics, I was able to document taxation-related enclosure conflicts, which are briefly summarized in “Atusparia and Cáceres.” These conflicts involved Alzamora’s indirect and Atusparia’s direct access to woodstands in the quebradas or alpine ravines near the hamlet of Marian; these conflicts included community land which Atusparia’s widow (and most likely Atusparia himself before his death) had a contentious stake in. It was this complex historical conflict—implicating access rights to commons, the system of taxation, social relations, and a system of local political representation—that ignited a series of events which, in the context of the civil war, produced the bloody moment that historiography has named “the Atusparia Uprising.”Other misrepresentations and elisions are evident, some of them carried over from Stein’s earlier work. He repeats once again the erroneous view that Atusparia “was named alcalde of his division of the district of Huaraz for 1885.” As I explained in From Two Republics, Huaraz was not a district. The point is important because it reveals that Stein apparently still does not grasp the organizational structure of the alcalde system in the late nineteenth century, in part because he assumes that it was essentially the same as Carhuaz’s in the 1950s. Other miscues include the one on page 311, where Stein wants to make it appear significant that I do not include “the sixth paragraph of the second [newspaper] report” relevant to the meeting of Atusparia and Cáceres. That paragraph was sacrificed in the editorial process. I let it go with some reluctance, but I was consoled by the fact that it appears as nothing less than an epigraph (!) both in my book and in an article which appeared in the Journal of Latin American Studies. Stein also insists that the “Ayacucho variety of Quechua” is simply “unintelligible” in Ancash, implying that no dialogue could have occurred between Atusparia and Cáceres in that language. But clearly it was not so for one of my research assistants, a native of a village outside Huaraz who took his anthropology degree at the University of Huamanga in Ayacucho; he is a good example of the linguistic versatility of many educated Quechua speakers. The Quechua spoken today in the Callejón de Huaylas is not so strange as not to be understood by those who learned Quechua in other Andean regions; the fact that I was trained in Ecuadorian Quichua did make it difficult but not impossible for me to catch the gist of local speech or to read local writing. But I also do not suppose that the array of usages and inflections found in Quechua in the late twentieth century is the same as it was in the late nineteenth century. In the late nineteenth century Quechua was the unwritten highland lingua franca of trade and labor relations (and caudillo campaigning in Andean villages). Since highlanders of all classes and ethnic backgrounds had ready exposure to this Quechua, I think it likely that transregional and transcultural phrasings were available for certain tasks. In any case, I do not claim that Atusparia and Cáceres understood each other without mediation. Quite to the contrary, my narrative accentuates the fallibility of linguistic communication.The important differences between Stein’s work and mine remain interpretive (although part of the reason for our disagreement is that I found new sources which revealed certain anomalies in his and other scholars’ work, some of which I was able to trace to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century texts). Stein’s reading of Atusparia’s role at the 1886 encounter with Cáceres follows the same line of interpretation we find in his previously published work; for example, Atusparia the client did the bidding of local gamonales. As I noted some years ago in a Revista Andina book review of his pathbreaking El levantamiento de Atusparia, Stein’s clientist reading of “popular” politics (I am not sure that he would allow that peasants have politics) tends at times to be based more on a priori sociologizing and ethnographic upstreaming than local historical analysis. It is not that patron-client relations did not operate in Huaraz and in Lima in the late nineteenth century, but rather that we disagree about how to interpret such relations. Nor is it sufficient to simply proclaim that “rebellion” is always “overdetermined” and then assign it to a timeless set of “conscious and unconscious human impulses.” As I pointed out in From Two Republics, what is missing in Stein’s view of rebellion is the contingency of history. The question is not “why people rebel” but why certain people and not others rebel now and not then, and why in this way and not that. Asking such critical and historically specific questions of texts leads to questions of narration and representation, my central concern in “Atusparia and Cáceres.”Despite these and other differences of sources and interpretation, I think that extensive common ground does exist on which our scholarship meets. I believe we agree on many more things than we do not. And there is no question in my mind that if it were not for Bill Stein’s work my own would have been much more difficult and surely poorer. In the end, the “Comment” was not without its positive effects. It served as the pretext which got Bill and me back in touch again after a long and involuntary hiatus. After all is said and done, that is all to the greater good.