Few scholars have conducted sustained ethnographic fieldwork in the same region for more than 30 years; even fewer have command of 500 years of history. Enrique Mayer is the rare anthropologist whose life-long commitment to a region has resulted in a remarkable body of work. The Articulated Peasant brings together that work, resulting in a masterful study of Andean peasant economies from the Inca period to the present day.

Mayer’s book is both history and historiography. His impressive analysis of the household and its relationship to other households, the community, and commodity markets is based on his own research and an exceptionally even-handed treatment of 50 years of scholarship. Mayer begins by introducing the reader to the household as an economic unit, relating “home, family, gender, and age with the circulation of goods and services in order to clarify the inner workings of the home and the ways in which it links up with wider spheres” (p. 1). His discussion includes a detailed review of the broader literature on households and introduces the reader to his path-breaking study of Tangor, a small village in central Peru where Mayer first conducted fieldwork in the late 1960s.

Chapters 2 through 9 are based on revised material that has been published over the past 30 years. The chapters hold together well and present a compelling and rich portrait of highland Peru. Mayer starts with the Incas, focusing on trade and commerce. Engaging the work of his advisor, John V. Murra, one of the pioneers of Andean studies, Mayer takes on the well-traveled debate regarding the existence of trade and markets prior to the Spanish conquest. Insisting, as he does throughout the book, that no economic system is as pure as the models that scholars construct for it, Mayer underscores the fact that circuits of trade were firmly established prior to the European invasion.

In chapter 3, Mayer reconstructs a group of households in rural 16th-century Peru. This chapter takes the reader into the household--not the abstract household of scholarly models, but the lived household of a common peasant, Don Agostín Luna Capcha. Readers see firsthand how Don Agostín organizes his time, efforts, and resources; how he is forced to give up much of what he produces in tribute (and what he thinks about it!); and how he thinks about work, domestic affairs, family, and kinship. The testimony’s richness is enhanced by its timing: 1562, just 30 years after the Spanish invasion.

Mayer then takes us into the 20th century and his fieldwork in Tangor. He focuses on reciprocity, explaining in a very readable way how labor services, goods, gifts, and ceremonial exchanges are the expression of a complex network of kinship, social, and political obligations that link households to the wider social world. In chapter 5, Mayer looks at another key feature of Andean life: barter. Once again, he does an exceptional job of demonstrating how abstract models are complicated by the reality of daily life. Here, the reader follows Don Eulogio, a Tangor farmer, on his journey to secure potatoes through bartering. His fascinating voyage not only involves the exchange of goods and labor but also cements (future) ties between friends, families, and communities.

In chapter 6, Mayer takes on the region’s most controversial commodity, arguing that coca is absolutely central to the peasant economy. It lubricates reciprocal exchanges, creating relationships between diverse regions, which in turn serve to sustain even wider networks of exchange. Coca, for Mayer, is both integrated into Andean communal life and actively generates this integration.

Mayer consistently highlights the importance of culture for understanding economic relationships, but nowhere is this more apparent than in his treatment of profit (ch. 7) and the organization of production at the community level (ch. 8). Chapter 9 is the one that anthropologists will perhaps enjoy the most. In it, Mayer brings together the insights of the previous eight chapters through an exceptionally rich case study of communal control and land tenure in the community of Laraos. How is land used? Who decides? And how does land use change over time? As Mayer’s analysis shows, these rather straightforward questions have complicated answers that take us into the complex world of production practices, legal reforms, and local-national politics and history.

A book on the Andes would not be complete without a discussion of neoliberalism, the subject of Mayer’s final chapter. As always, Mayer’s focus is pragmatic, centering on the needs and demands of both peasants and their environment during the contemporary period.

The Articulated Peasant is a must read for Andeanists of any political persuasion or academic discipline; no one interested in Andean peasant economies can afford to ignore this remarkable work. Mayer’s scholarship is impressive both for its ethnographic specificity and its historical breadth. This book will also interest anyone concerned with questions of economic and environmental sustainability, indigenous knowledge, development, and the relationships between culture, economy, and history.