Communication

December 1, 2009To the Editors:In his review (vol. 89, no. 1, pp. 184 – 85) of my book Remembering the Hacienda: Religion, Authority, and Social Change in Highland Ecuador (University of Texas Press, 2006), Mark Thurner graciously praises my writing and my ethnographic material, but his review distorts or omits some of my major arguments.Thurner says that the book “leaves history behind” after an early “background” chapter. It is true that the next five chapters take a largely synchronic analytic approach, while arguing for an alternative to the moral economy school’s common focus on historical memory as an ideological source of resistance. The book’s last two chapters, which the review ignores entirely, return to a diachronic analysis. Here I show that structures of religious authority and notions of respect that were hegemonic in the hacienda era shaped both the agrarian transformation in the 1960s – 70s and the ethnic resurgence and religious change of the 1980s – 90s, even as those structures and notions were themselves transformed and reinterpreted in the process. These chapters make the case that anthropology’s tools for understanding a sociocultural system synchronically, with its internal coherence and contradictions, can enrich our understanding of that system’s persistence and transformations through time. Indeed, any history that aspires to social depth must in practice alternate between and synthesize synchronic and diachronic analytic moments.The reviewer misses much of my argument about the so-called “triangle without a base,” the outworn image of hacienda residents as lacking in any horizontal solidarities. I do analyze hacienda residents’ web of social relations and the ways it sustained resistance, as he indicates, but my argument goes beyond that point in significant ways. First, I demonstrate that relations among kin and neighbors were shot through with a hierarchical dimension linked to hacienda hegemony. While others have described this hierarchical dimension, I believe my book goes further in analyzing its hegemonic force and explaining how even horizontal relations provided openings for hegemony. Second, I build on one point that was central to some of the “open triangle” scholarship, namely, that ties to formal organizations could facilitate the flow of information about the broader political environment. I show that hacienda laborers’ lack of such ties and misunderstanding of the broader environment handicapped them in the agrarian reform period.The main contribution that I would hope historians and others take away from the book concerns what I term the “respect complex,” a topic the review only mentions in a single clause. The book describes rituals of discipline, purification, and authority that had precolonial and colonial roots and were reinvigorated under the late nineteenth-century García Moreno regime. It shows how hacienda landlords, overseers, and religious elders drew on this ritual language as they disciplined laborers, juniors, and quarreling spouses and neighbors, and it analyzes the transformations of this complex in recent decades. Theoretically, my analysis of the respect complex revises common understandings of the relationship between coercion, persuasion, hegemony, and resistance. Despite changes in academic fashions in recent decades, I show that the concept of hegemony remains a powerful theoretical tool, one that new research continues to refine.Thurner also faults me for anachronistically “refer[ring] to colonial composición titles as ‘property.’ ” This is a misquotation — I did not use the word “property” in connection with composiciones — but I would like to know what in Thurner’s opinion was mistaken in my one-sentence reference to composiciones. I do acknowledge having deviated from “the established practices of historians” by using very abbreviated in-text citations of archival documents, though I provide full information on these sources in my bibliography

Agrarian society · Archaeology · Argument (complex analysis) · Epistemology · Ethnography · Hegemony · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Sociocultural evolution · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Law · Philosophy · Politics and Society in Latin America · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies