Choice Review

Lagos combines ethnographic and archival data in a detailed analysis of the complexities of class and culture in a Bolivian highland province. Many peasants became landowners in the early 1950s when, organized into powerful unions, they seized hacienda lands. With the hacendados' exit, however, both landowning and landless peasants became vulnerable to Bolivian state pressures and to an emergent merchant class. To preserve their autonomy, peasants must now intensify their production of cash crops. To do so, however, they need to borrow money (for fertilizer, insecticides, and the like) and they become indebted to money-lending merchants. The author analyzes the involvements between lenders and borrowers as constituting ties of mutual dependence, structured around credit relations and sharecropping arrangements. Networks of fictive kin bonds and prevailing ideologies of equality and reciprocity permeate most social relations. The author implies that, in the end, the dominant elites manipulate these networks and ideologies to maintain their hold over production and exchange. Upper-division undergraduate; graduate; faculty. E. Wellin University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee