ANTH 252

Peoples and Cultures of the Andean World

The Andean countries are those on the Western mountainous spine of South America: Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and parts of Argentina and Chile. What makes the Andes a coherent whole is partly their remarkable geomorphology, but mainly it is due to their common pre-conquest (and post-conquest) cultural heritages. These are the nations whose boundaries overspread the Inca empire, defeated by Pizarro in 1532. The Inca, themselves, were only the top-most layer of a cultural lineage that stretches back more than 4,000 years. This pre-Spanish cultural development, and the kinds and numbers of people whom that development generated, conditioned strongly the configuration of society the Spanish colonists were able to build and, in turn, what the Andean republics became after independence.

Today the Andes are a rich and complex culture beset by particularly harsh versions of problems facing Third World countries generally. Two Andean countries are massively distorted by the cocaine trade; another was virtually prostrated by one of the contemporary world's most effective guerrilla movements and is only now beginning to believe that those times are past. The others are impaired by the aftermath of harsh dictatorship, political ineptitude, crushing foreign debt, and/or hyper-inflation. Through this onslaught, Andean countries exhibit a cultural resilience and character that is distinctive, engrossing, and worth our attention.