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MARfA ROSTWOROWSKI DE DIEZ CANSECO. Histoty of the
Inca Recilm. Translated by HARRY B. ICELAND. New
York: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. x, 259.
Cloth $49.95, paper $14.95.
In some sense, Marfa Rostworowski de Diez Canseco's
book represents a summation of her life's work, which
has been dedicated to interpreting indigenous Andean
society through the analysis of a diverse array of
Spanish colonial period documents, including chronicle and ecclesiastical literatures, administrative reports, census records, and litigation dossiers. Rostworowski's four decades of assiduous archival research
have revealed new primary source materials as well as
generated fundamental analytical insights into the
nature of complex social formations in the precolonial
Andean world. In particular, her work has convincingly
demonstrated the social and cultural importance of
economie specialization keyed to distinct ecological
adaptations and sustained interethnic relations among
Pacific coastal populations during the pre-Hispanic
past. Rostworowski's long and unfailingly provocative
stream of publications on the particularities and dialectics of coastal versus highland models of native
Andean political economy continue to animate and
nourish ethnohistorical scholarship in the region.
This book is a synthesis of ideas and source matenals that by and large have been published in other fora,
so scholars already familiar with Rostworowski's work
will find little new here. The book is, however, a
valuable resource for non-Andeanists and readers
looking for a concise precis of theories of Inca state
formation and the social dynamics of territorial expansion from an ethnohistorical perspective. The first half
of the text is given over to a rapid historical survey of
the formation and expansion of the Inca empire (although in her preface, the author eschews the term
"empire" as a Western category inappropriate to the
native Andean world).
Intercalated with this historical narrative, Rostworowski identifies specific social institutions that
shaped and facilitated the Inca's extraordinary construction of the largest pre-Hispanic political formation in the western hemisphere. Specifically, she singles out the deeply rooted institution of reciprocity as
a critical politico-economic tool in the early formation
of the Inca state, but astutely remarks that this institution subsequently became a burden and an impediment to the territorial ambitions of Inca kings. According to Rostworowski, in the initial stages of state
expansion, Inca rulers established and continually renewed strategie political ties with allies and conquered
populations through a prodigious flow of gifts—including various forms of luxury goods, prestige items, and
women—to subject lords. These political alliances
were often reaffirmed publicly in the context of rich,
exquisitely ritualized banquets hosted by the Inca.
Rostworowski succinctly notes that as "the state
grew, so did the number of lords who had to be
satisfied" (p. 46). The Inca responded to the ever
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increasing demand for gift commodities by conquering
new territory, by increasing productivity in subject
provinces through alienating more land and extracting
additional tribute in the form of labor, and by creating
new categories of "citizens" outside of the system of
reciprocity who were tied directly to the Inca state and
not to their autochthonous communities of origin.
The inherent instability of this system is evident:
new territorial conquests generated new revenues, but
also new demands from more elite clients who anticipated a flow of gifts. The Inca rulers' drive to escalate
production in subject communities through increased
taxation of land and labor generated deep hostility
among the ethnic lords who were their erstwhile allies.
Not surprisingly, many of these subject lords and their
populations eventually rebelled against the Inca and
readily made the (ultimately woeful) decision to ally
themselves with Francisco Pizarro in his conquest of
the Inca.
In the second half of the book, Rostworowski turns
to a synchronie analysis of the "organizational aspects"
of Inca society in which she treats various issues of
social structure, class formation, and economie systems. This analysis breaks no new intellectual ground
but does serve as a concise, if somewhat fragmented
and incomplete, summary of Inca principles of sovereignty, class structure, and modes of production. Rostworowski's analysis is seriously weakened by its lack
of recognition that systems of belief, imperial cults,
and various religious ideologies and counter-ideologies also played critical roles in the formation and
expansion of the Inca, as well as in the inevitable local
resistance to their hegemony.
In sum, this book is an excellent Baedeker to
Rostworowski's fundamental contributions with respect to the documentation and interpretation of
pre-Hispanic Andean political economy. It is not,
however, a comprehensive interpretation of the internal social dynamics of the Inca state.
ALAN L. KOLATA
University of Chicago
Red Rubber, Bleeding
Trees: Violence, Slavely, and Empire in Northwest Amazonia, 1850-1933. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press. 1998. Pp. xvii, 270. Cloth $60.00, paper
$21.95.
MICHAEL EDWARD STANFIELD.
The "Putumayo scandal" of 1907-1914 focused attention on the ill-treatment of laborers who extracted
rubber from trees in the Northwest Amazonia region
of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. The late nineteenthcentury demand for rubber for use in the industries of
Europe and North America "opened" the upper Amazon to commodity production and, because of its
profitability, to geopolitical contention. Rubber from
this region and from the African Congo dominated the
world trade, producing over ninety-nine percent of the
exported rubber in 1906, although not without negative human and environmental consequences. Roger
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Casement's 1912 Blue Book alleged that perhaps
30,000 Indians had been killed in the extraction of
rubber from Amazonia, while thousands had been
subjected to torture and conditions of slavery. Coincidentally, just as Casement made his report to the
British Parliament, Amazonian rubber lost its global
monopoly, as rubber produced on plantations in southern Asia completely replaced the "harvested" jungle
rubber in a span of ten years.
The Putumayo scandal forms the backdrop to this
detailed analysis of the regional impact of production
of, and commerce in, rubber. Stanfield weaves two
analytical themes throughout his account: the system
of rubber production and the geopolitical maneuvers
to dominate the region. Together, these themes enable
him to "place the scandal into the larger historical
context of the Putumayo, [by] stripping away the
nationalism and hyperbole that have surrounded the
region, [and] to illuminate how life evolved during and
after the rubber boom" (p. xvii). The author opens his
study with a geographic analysis of the region, an
inquiry into the importance of rubber in the nineteenth
century, and an overview of the indigenous peoples
who provided the bulk of the labor in the rubber
industry. Subsequent chapters track "pioneers" of the
industry, including the Colombian Rafael Reyes and
Peruvian Julio César Arana, and the different strategies pursued by Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru to
dominate the region. Finally, he traces the development and impact of the scandal.
Stanfield is at his best in the analysis of the aviamento system of production and the geopolitics of
rubber. The aviamento system linked the import/export
houses of the port city of Iquitos to aviadores, who
delivered imported goods to rubber collectors; they in
turn either dominated lesser rubber collectors or
worked directly with the laborers who bled the rubber
trees to acquire the latex. Credits and debts dominated
the aviamento system, building into it both fragility and
dominance, characteristics that are well-documented
in the development of the Casa Arana that controlled
most of the trade. At the bottom of the system were
indigenous and Barbadian laborers who were subject
to considerable physical abuse and economie dependence. Transportation and commercial networks enabled the Casa Arana to achieve its preeminent position, a position carefully guarded by the Peruvian
government. The importance of rubber and import
exchange is well illustrated, as is the function of the
rubber collectors that facilitated that exchange. More
information on the role of indigenous and other labor
bosses could have better illustrated the local functions
of the aviamento system. As commodity production
created the region of Northwest Amazonia, it transcended (and helped to define) national boundaries.
The author painstakingly reconstructs the efforts by
individuals, local political bosses, and national politicians to develop policies and strategies to control the
rubber trade. Peru's successful linkage of timely investment, military presence, and commercial relationships
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allowed that nation to dominate the region, a domination that was facilitated by the ineptitude of Ecuador's
Liberal regimes and by Colombia's cycles of civil
conflict. Equally well developed are the international
dimensions of the rubber industry and the scandal
itself.
Stanfield achieves most of his objectives in this
well-written and well-researched book. He pays meticulous attention to the international competition surrounding the rubber industry, although more information on Brazilian patterns would have rounded out the
account. His detailed ethnographic survey of the Indians of Northwest Amazonia is notable, but he offers
the reader less information on how the collapse of the
industry affected social and economie patterns of the
region. This book makes a valuable contribution to our
knowledge of the Amazon, especially at the start of
commercial exploitation of the region that continues
to the present.
DAVID SOWELL
Juniata College
THOMAS M. COHEN. The Fire of Tongues: António Vieira
and the Missionaty Church in Brazil and Portugal.
Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1998. Pp. viii, 262.
$49.50.
Padre António Vieira, the Portuguese Jesuit missionary, statesman, diplomat, preacher, author, and administrator, was one of the most remarkable figures of his
age. He was a man of diverse talents, at times of
considerable political influence, and sometimes of
such bizarre millenarian ideas that he has always
defied simple generalizations. There is no full biography of him in English and few good ones in any
language, including his own native Portuguese, but
there are some excellent monographic studies that
examine various facets of his career, and Thomas M.
Cohen's book must now be counted among them.
Cohen's study concentrates on Vieira the missionary
and it seeks to demonstrate how Vieira's missionary
experience in Portugal's vast Amazonian territory, the
Maranháo, and the theory he derived from it influenced the conduct of his life and the way in which he
perceived the role of Portugal and its empire within a
divine plan for the salvation of the world. The book is
very much in the tradition of intellectual history and it
is based on a close reading and analysis of Vieira's
principal texts, but it has avoided the old pitfalls of that
approach through its attention to actions as well as
ideas and by a sensitivity to the way in which ideas
change over time. Much of this story has been told
before, but Cohen's emphasis on the importance of
Vieira's missionary experience provides a new perspective.
The structure of the book is simple. Cohen first
describes the arrival of the Jesuits in Brazil in 1549 and
their early missionary work under the direction of
Manuel da Nóbrega. Cohen is not so interested in the
actions of the Jesuit missionaries as he is in the theory
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