Peru Reader

Sixteenth-century Spanish soldiers described it as a land filled with gold and silver, a place of untold wealth. Nineteenth-century travellers wrote of soaring Andean peaks plunging into luxuriant Amazonian canyons of orchids, pythons, and jaguars. The early-twentieth-century American adventurer Hiram Bingham told of the raging rivers and the wild jungles he traversed on his way to rediscovering the "Lost City of the Incas," Machu Picchu. Seventy years later, news crews travelled to Peru to report on merciless terrorists, starving peasants, and Colombian drug runners in the "white gold" rush of the coca trade. As often as not, Peru has been portrayed in broad extremes: as the land of the richest treasures, the bloodiest conquest, the most poignant ballads, and the most violent revolutionaries. This revised and updated second edition of the bestselling Peru Reader offers a deeper understanding of the complex country that lies behind these claims. Unparalleled in scope, the Reader covers Peru's history from its extraordinary pre-Columbian civilizations to its citizens' twenty-first century struggles to achieve dignity and justice in a multicultural nation where Andean, African, Amazonian, Asian, and European traditions meet. The collection presents a vast array of essays, folklore, historical documents, poetry, songs, short stories, autobiographical accounts, and photographs. Works by contemporary Peruvian intellectuals and politicians appear alongside accounts of those whose voices are less often heard--peasants, street vendors, maids, Amazonian Indians, and African-Peruvians. Including some of the most insightful pieces of Western journalism and scholarship about Peru, the selections provide the traveller and specialist alike with a thorough introduction to the country's astonishing past and challenging present. Orin Starn is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. He is the author of Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian and Nightwatch: The Politics of Protest in the Andes (also published by Duke University Press). Carlos Ivan Degregori is Professor of Anthropology at the National University of San Marcos in Lima. He served on Peru's government-appointed Truth and Reconciliation Commission and has written dozens of books and articles about Peru. Robin Kirk is Co-Director of the Human Rights Initiative at Duke University. She is the author of More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs, and America's War in Colombia and The Monkey's Paw: New Chronicles from Peru.