Care and Agency: The Andean Community Through the Eyes of Children

Andean communities occupy a special place in the history of anthropology, having given shape to fundamental theories of kinship, peasant economics, Indigenous medical systems, ritual life and others. Yet children have been shortchanged in research and theory building. Care and Agency, based on detailed ethnographies of six towns in the province of Yauyos, restores children to a central research position. Contemporary children’s studies emphasize children’s agency and autonomy, and these take surprising forms under the conditions of the rural Andes. At the same time, the book incorporates and extends current discussions of caregiving and its organization in human societies. Children in the Andes are involved in the care of each other, of adults, of animals, of the environment. The activities, sociality, and subjective states of children of different ages, genders, and social strata are variable in ways that make it impossible to speak of a single Andean childhood. The future they face is also uncertain, as the Peruvian nation stumbles through cycles of incompetent government whose common thread is the neglect of small-scale family farming and the welfare of rural populations. This book is a fascinating look at Andean childhood for anyone interested in the lives of children.

JEANINE ANDERSON is a professor emerita of anthropology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. She is the author of a wide number of Spanish-language books, including Las Infancias Diversas: Estudio Fenomenológico de la Niñez de Cero a Tres Años en Cuatro Pueblos Indígenas de la Amazonía Peruana.

JESSACA B. LEINAWEAVER is a professor of anthropology at Brown University, Rhode Island. She is the author of The Circulation of Children: Kinship, Adoption, and Morality in Andean Peru and Adoptive Migration: Raising Latinos in Spain.