Mobility, Markets and Indigenous Socialities: Contemporary Migration in the Peruvian Andes

Description

Exploring how people from Andean communities negotiate their relationship to the dominant Peruvian society, Cecilie Odegaard demonstrates the changing significance of sociality and ritual in urban contexts. While the importance of reciprocity and exchange in people's quest for progress at the margins of society is widely acknowledged, Odegaard argues that people also understand prosperity and progress in inherently relational terms, that is, as dependent on reciprocity and exchange between human beings and with their animated surroundings. This book examines people's access to land and markets in contemporary processes of migration, and discusses this against the historical backdrop of the land occupations in Peruvian cities since the 1930s. Revealing the ambiguous spaces for citizenship created for new settlers in the city, Cecilie Odegaard is concerned with the occult exchanges and economies that these processes of mobility are often entangled with. Through an analysis of the everyday lives of people in a new urban neighbourhood, this book discusses the making and un-making of notions of the Indigenous, communal work, and gender in state-society interaction. The combination of a unique ethnographic account and original theoretical arguments in this book provides new insight into the cultural, cosmological and political dimensions of mobility, progress and market participation.