Event Title

Losing the Hacienda: The Agrarian Reform’s Effect on Landowners in the Peruvian Andes

Location

Jereld R. Nicholson Library

Date

5-17-2013 3:00 PM

End Date

5-17-2013 4:30 PM

Subject Area

Anthropology

Description

In 1968 the Peruvian government was overtaken by a military coup, ushering in the agrarian reform—a system of land distribution that would irrevocably change the country. Concepción1, a member of the land-owning elite, lived in a time and place at the very heart of the agrarian reform. As both a woman and acting manager for her family’s haciendas during the 1950s and 1960s, she provides an excellent case study of how Peru’s national agrarian reform policies changed the lives of land-owners in the highlands of Ayacucho. I will use her life to do an ethnography of the particular2 to examine the central need for region-level analysis when studying the agrarian reform. Examination of class structure, ethnic tensions, gender, and land-ownership show that rather than being truly revolutionary, the agrarian reform was just the final straw for a system already in steep deterioration.

1 All names have been changed to protect privacy.

2 An ethnography of the particular is a method that uses the particular to study the whole. By deeply examining an individual or a small piece, a greater understanding of the greater picture can be achieved. Examples of this are Nisa: the Life and Words of a !Kung Woman by Marjorie Shostak and Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story by Ruth Behar. In both of these cases, the author used the story of one woman to greater illuminate and examine aspects of the society as a whole (Shostak 1981; Behar 2003). Additionally, this method gives voice to the individual experience in ways that using a larger sample size can sometimes overlook.

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May 17th, 3:00 PM May 17th, 4:30 PM

Losing the Hacienda: The Agrarian Reform’s Effect on Landowners in the Peruvian Andes

Jereld R. Nicholson Library

In 1968 the Peruvian government was overtaken by a military coup, ushering in the agrarian reform—a system of land distribution that would irrevocably change the country. Concepción1, a member of the land-owning elite, lived in a time and place at the very heart of the agrarian reform. As both a woman and acting manager for her family’s haciendas during the 1950s and 1960s, she provides an excellent case study of how Peru’s national agrarian reform policies changed the lives of land-owners in the highlands of Ayacucho. I will use her life to do an ethnography of the particular2 to examine the central need for region-level analysis when studying the agrarian reform. Examination of class structure, ethnic tensions, gender, and land-ownership show that rather than being truly revolutionary, the agrarian reform was just the final straw for a system already in steep deterioration.

1 All names have been changed to protect privacy.

2 An ethnography of the particular is a method that uses the particular to study the whole. By deeply examining an individual or a small piece, a greater understanding of the greater picture can be achieved. Examples of this are Nisa: the Life and Words of a !Kung Woman by Marjorie Shostak and Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story by Ruth Behar. In both of these cases, the author used the story of one woman to greater illuminate and examine aspects of the society as a whole (Shostak 1981; Behar 2003). Additionally, this method gives voice to the individual experience in ways that using a larger sample size can sometimes overlook.