Cultural study of the lives and struggles the women in the open-air markets of the Andean highlands of Cuzco face. For more than twenty years Linda J. Seligmann has walked the streets of Peru in city and countryside alike, talking to the women who work in the informal and open-air markets of the Andean highlands of Cuzco. In this readable ethnography, composed of vignettes and accompanied by a superb series of photographs, Seligmann offers a humane yet incisive portrayal of their lives. economic, social, and political networks market women establish, although they may appear disorderly and...

“ This is a lively, original, and carefully researched study of the transformation of political cultures in highland Peru during and after the agrarian reform of the late 1960s. It makes an important contrubution to our understanding of the relationship between community and state in Latin America in general, and in the Andes in particular, by analyzing the ways in which law is translated at the local level.” — Joanne Rappaport, University of Maryland
“ Between Reform and Revolution is much more than the standard ethnography. Rather, this is a wide-ranging...

This innovative volume studies women as economic, political, and cultural mediators of space, gender, value, and language in informal markets. Drawing on diverse methodologies--multisited fieldwork, linguistic analysis, and archival research--the contributors demonstrate how women move between and knit together household and marketplace activities. This knitting together pivots on how household practices and economies are translated and transferred to the market, as well as how market practices and economic principles become integral to the nature and construction of the household. Exploring...

The reform programme introduced by Peruvian President General Juan Velasco Alvarado in 1969, a year after he seized power in a military coup, ushered in one of the most ambitious agrarian reforms in Latin America. This book argues that the economic, political and cultural dynamics set in motion by the reforms are central to understanding the brutal civil war that ensued in Peru between the state and members of the Maoist-Leninist Shining Path guerrilla movement. Based on five years of fieldwork in the southern Andean district of Huanoquite, it portrays the extraordinary complexity of the...

Family-making in America is in a state of flux--the ways people compose their families is changing, including those who choose to adopt. Broken Links, Enduring Ties is a groundbreaking comparative investigation of transnational and interracial adoptions in America. Linda Seligmann uncovers the impact of these adoptions over the last twenty years on the ideologies and cultural assumptions that Americans hold about families and how they are constituted. Seligmann explores whether or not new kinds of families and communities are emerging as a result of these adoptions, providing a...

Family-making in America is in a state of flux--the ways people compose their families is changing, including those who choose to adopt. Broken Links, Enduring Ties is a groundbreaking comparative investigation of transnational and interracial adoptions in America. Linda Seligmann uncovers the impact of these adoptions over the last twenty years on the ideologies and cultural assumptions that Americans hold about families and how they are constituted. Seligmann explores whether or not new kinds of families and communities are emerging as a result of these adoptions, providing a...