The Struggle for Land in Peru: The Hacienda Vicos Case

Many neo-colonial institutions are today rapidly disseminating the behaviors, attitudes and norms of the Western market economy throughout the world, just as colonial and mercantile institutions spread them earlier. So tribal peoples are becoming peasants, and peasants proletarians. The focus of economic anthropological analysis properly falls, therefore, increasingly upon that process (Cook 1966:337). The present paper examines one instance of diffusion of the Western market economy for one commodity. Prior to the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, land and other commodities were controlled by the totalitarian Inca state (Herskovits 1965:500). Families or individuals apparently acquired only usufruct rights to land. The European conquerors introduced the concept that land could be exchanged for money. As a consequence, that land has been very highly valued by post-conquest Peruvians is an oft-repeated generalization. That land ownership confers high social status upon dominant group landowners has also often been asserted (Ford 1955:2; Dobyns 1962:9-10). Peruvian social organization impels a Peruvian typically to want more land than he has at any given moment, so that a perceived scarcity exists (Dalton 1961:5). At the same time, the observation has frequently been made that the Peruvian nation historically encompassed #relatively uninte-