ABSTRACT
Migration is not a new phenomenon in central Peru. Given that Peruvian social science has been influenced by the early work of John Murra and others on livelihood adaptations to the ecological diversity of the Andes from pre-Hispanic times, there has been greater sensitivity to translocal mobility in Peruvian ethnography (cf. Murra 1975; Favre 1977; various contributions in Lehmann 1982) – often studied under the heading of regional identities (Roberts 1974; Long and Roberts 1984) – than one finds elsewhere. Gavin Smith’s discussion of livelihood and resistance in a Peruvian highland community prior to the armed conflict is another good example (Smith 1989). Smith explores confederations of households through which resources dispersed in space are fashioned into family livelihood strategies. Although belonging to a rural community has not always meant being divorced from a specific geographical locality, the institutionalization of migration has meant that the links established between villagers, not just within the rural area but also between the various work centres (both rural and urban), play a major part in how people achieve their identity. Moreover, the social relationships established between dispersed villagers reflect not only the production of a livelihood
but also the political protection of its continued reproduction. Finally, and most importantly, as migration became an institutionalized way of life, it acted to select out some villagers for ex-residence while confining others to the village. Given that mobility has been the norm rather than the exception, there is a case for taking Smith’s analysis further and exploring the extent to which rural and urban areas constitute a single space. If so, should movements within a single space be conceptualized as migration? And what happens to such spaces when social inequality and political discontent escalate into armed conflict, as it did in Peru in the early 1980s?
