Vicos and Beyond

From 1952 to 1962, anthropologists funded by Cornell University sought to apply anthropological knowledge to improving life in Vicos, a village of about 1,800 people in the Peruvian Andes. This collection evaluates the methods and results of the famous, and even infamous, Vicos Project.

In 1952, Professor Allan Holmberg arranged for Cornell University to lease the Hacienda Vicos, an agricultural estate in the central Peruvian highlands on which some 1800 Quechua-speaking highland peasants resided. Between 1952 and 1957 Holmberg, with colleagues and students, initiated a set of social, economic, and agrarian changes, and nurtured mechanisms for community-based management of the estate by the resident peasants. By the end of a second lease in 1962, sufficient political pressure had been brought to bear on a reluctant national government to force the sale of Vicos to its people. Holmberg's twin goals for the Vicos Project were to bring about community possession of their land base and to study the process as it unfolded, advancing anthropological understanding of cultural change. To describe the process of doing both, he invented the term 'participant intervention.' Despite the large corpus of existing Vicos publications, this book contains much information that here reaches print for the first time. The chapter authors do not entirely agree on various key points regarding the nature of the Vicos Project, the intentions of project personnel and community actors, and what interpretive framework is most valid; in part, these disagreements reflect the relevance and importance of the Vicos Project to contemporary applied anthropologists and the contrasting ways in which any historical event can be explained. Some chapters contrast Vicos with other projects in the southern Andean highlands; others examine new developments at Vicos itself. The conclusion suggests how those changes should be understood, within Andean anthropology and within anthropology more generally.

Chapter 1 Introduction
Part 2 Part I. Remembering the Vicos Project
Chapter 3 Chapter 1. Who Was That Gringo? Holmberg before Vicos
Chapter 4 Chapter 2. Early Years of the Vicos Project from the Perspective of a Sympathetic Participant-Observer
Chapter 5 Chapter 3. Lessons from Vicos
Chapter 6 Chapter 4. Anthropological Journeys: Vicos and the Callejon de Huaylas 1948-2006
Part 7 Part II. Evaluating the Vicos Project
Chapter 8 Chapter 5. Anthropological Hope and Social Reality: Cornell's Vicos Project Re-examined
Chapter 9 Chapter 6. Modernizing Peru: NegotiatingIndigenismo, Science, and the "Indian Problem" in the Cornell-Peru Project
Chapter 10 Chapter 7. Reflections on Vicos: Anthropology, the Cold War, and the Idea of Peasant Conservatism
Chapter 11 Chapter 8. Vicos as a Model: A Retrospective
Part 12 Part III. Alternatives to the Vicos Project
Chapter 13 Chapter 9. Globalizing Andean Society: Migration and Change in Peru's Peasant Communities
Chapter 14 Chapter 10. Chijnaya: The Birth and Evolution of an Andean Community; Memories and Reflections of an Applied Anthropologist
Chapter 15 Chapter 11. The Case of Kuyo Chico
Part 16 Part IV. Vicos Today
Chapter 17 Cornell Returns to Vicos, 2005
Chapter 18 Remembering Vicos: Local Memories and Voices
Chapter 19 Conclusion
Chapter 20 About the Authors
Chapter 21 Index