Routledge Mobility, Markets and Indigenous Socialities: Contemporary Migration in the Peruvian Andes (Vitality of Indigenous Religions)

Exploring how people from Andean communities seek progress and social mobility by moving to the cities, Cecilie Ødegaard demonstrates the changing significance of kinship, reciprocity and ritual in an urban context. Through a focus on people´s involvement in land occupations and local associations, labour and trade, Ødegaard examines the dialectics between popular practices and neoliberal state policies in processes of urbanization. The making and un-making of notions of the Indigenous, communal work, and gender is central in this analysis, and is discussed against the historical backdrop of the land occupations in Peruvian cities since the 1930s. Through its close ethnographic description of everyday life in a new urban neighbourhood, this book reveals how social and spatial categories and boundaries are continually negotiated in people´s quest for mobility and progress. Cecilie Ødegaard argues that conventional meanings of prosperity and progress are significantly altered in interaction with Andean understandings of reciprocity. By combining a unique ethnographic account with original theoretical arguments, the book provides new insight into the cultural, cosmological and political dimensions of mobility, progress and market participation. Review 'With an eye for detail and a focus on central themes, Cecilie Ødegaard brings to life the way Andean people make a place for themselves in a new urban context. Claiming a space in the city of Arequipa, Peru, the rural folk build a social life that gives meaning to concepts, such as "progress," the fertility of trade, godparenthood, and gender identity. In this vivid study, Ødegaard reveals the tensions as traditional culture, national forces, and adaptive practices are brought together.' Stephen Gudeman, University of Minnesota, USA and Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany This book beautifully captures the fluidity of urban Andean life, through the focus on migration, mobility, progress, gender, the circulation of goods, and reciprocity. Based on ethnographic work of remarkable depth and insight, it is an important contribution to anthropology of the Andes and to urban anthropology more widely. Sian Lazar, University of Cambridge, UK About the Author Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard works as a research fellow and teacher at a masters programme in Gender and Development, Department of Health Promotion and Development at the University of Bergen and has conducted several periods of fieldwork in Peru over a period of ten years. She has published several articles based on her work in Peru, on a range of different themes such as language and identity politics, gender and state policies, indigenous socialities and the participation in markets.