Skip to content
IUScholarWorks Journals
Megan Solon - Review of Justin Jennings, and Brenda J. Bowser, editors, Drink, Power, and Society in the Andes

Abstract

.

Click Here for Review

Justin Jennings and Brenda J. Bowser’s edited volume on drink, power, and society aims to “demonstrate the pivotal role that alcohol has long played in the Andes” (2). Combining ethnographic material with historical and archeological records of alcohol production and consumption practices, the collection’s ten chapters offer a well-rounded account of the centrality of beverage and its accompanying activities and practices in Andean society of past and present. In their introduction, Jennings and Bowser review the history of research on alcohol and especially that focused on South America. Beginning with Dwight Heath’s work on the Camba of Bolivia in the 1950s and John Murra’s contemporaneous research on the role of corn in the Inca empire, there has been, they suggest, a long line of researchers who recognize the significance of alcohol to the structure of social relations in the Andes (3). This volume, then, builds on that previous scholarship, providing a more long-term perspective to the study of the role of alcohol and drinking in Andean life.

Jennings and Bowser highlight three main themes that thread through the volume’s subsequent chapters; they are reciprocity and power, identity and society, and continuity and change. The chapters, written from a variety of disciplinary, theoretical, and geographical perspectives, touch on such topics as the production of chicha, indigenously brewed alcoholic beverages that can be made from a variety of plants such as maize, manioc, molle, and peanuts; the vessels in which chicha was and is prepared, served, and consumed; and the ceremonies and rituals that inform consumption and can express favor, power, hierarchy, tradition and change. Their authors skillfully argue for the significant role of alcohol, especially chicha, and its accompanying production and consumption practices in the expression and affirmation of social hierarchies and gender roles, in the expansion of the Inca empire, in specific agricultural practices, and as a marker of status and ethnic identity. They also emphasize the importance of research on drink and drinking for understanding both continuity and change in Andean society. Temporally, the volume spans more than 1,500 years, including data from the Middle Horizons period (AD 500–1000) up to the present, and discusses research from a variety of ethnic groups, including pre-Hispanic Wari and Tiwanaku populations, the Inca empire, as well as present-day Quechua-speaking and mestizo groups. The volume concludes with an entertaining and enlightening account by Mary Weismantel of the performative aspect inherent to drinking culture in South America that, regardless of the beverage involved, transforms the beverage’s symbolic meaning (one that encompasses the “tensions between inequality and shared identity”) into “concrete and dramatic form” (273) as the chicha bowl, beer bottle, or carbonated soda is passed, often in front of an audience, from guest to host and back again, constituting and communicating meaning to all involved.

Most significantly, not only do the contributing authors highlight the central role of chicha and its associated drinking rituals in social relations, societal structure, and social change, but they also address practical and methodological issues central to research on drink in the Andes. These include a much-needed discussion on how to define and use the term chicha, and an important and critical look at the tendency to assume the continuity of seemingly traditional activities and practices at the expense of recognizing inevitable and important interruptions and changes. The inclusion of these dialogues, coupled with the explicit calls various authors make for further study of drinking practices in Andean society, makes this volume an excellent addition to a fertile body of literature, and one that offers insight into and pushes scholars toward new, rich avenues of future research on this dynamic subject.

--------

[Review length: 602 words • Review posted on September 15, 2009]