Eric Hirsch, Columbia University
“Pueblo Indio: Progress, Modernity and Cultural Performance in an Andean Village”
Bio: Eric Hirsch is an undergraduate at Columbia University in New York City and originally hails from the north shore of Long Island. He is double majoring in Anthropology and English Literature, and is just back from five months of study, travel, and fun in South America. He plans on continuing his research in graduate school and expects to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology or political science. From his research in Peru, specifically in a small Andean village called Yanque, his work has been focused on conceptions and discourses of time and space, along with political, economic, and social relationships between that which is constructed as “center” and that which is constructed as “periphery.” In addition to his research, this summer he became the padrino of a small family-owned coffee shop for mostly tourists called “A Yankee in Yanque.”
Abstract: This research focuses on the significance of progress according to the modern, western definition as it manifests itself in a small village on the fringes of the Andes of Peru, politically and economically an increasingly westernizing region of the world. The work is centered in what has been defined as a peripheral space: the village of Yanque, located several miles away from the nearest town and four hours away from Arequipa, the regional capital and Peru’s second-largest city. The definition used is this: “progress,” as manifested in and imposed upon the village of Yanque, incorporates dichotomies of time and space and illustrates their tight interconnectedness. A paradoxical progress dynamic was uncovered, and it is the sense that Yanque rests at the “remote” margins or on the periphery of Western modernity and, along with that spatial removal, it also rests temporally “behind” the world’s most advanced societies. This question allows us to explore discourses and discrepancies of time and space, the politics of cultural authenticity, and the problematic but by no means evil tourism industry. This paper attempts to investigate what it means to be pulled by “progress” in opposite spatial and temporal directions.
