Book Review

Fred Spier, Religious Regimes in Peru: Religion and State Development in a Long-Term Perspective and the Effects in the Andean village of Zurite. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1994. Pp. 328. $29.95 (paper).

     Fred Spier, currently Senior Lecturer in Big History at the University of Amsterdam, first introduced Religions Regimes in Peru in 1994. Big history applies a wide-angled lens to the study of "human, planetary, and cosmic history," and Spier explores broad developmental patterns across 10,000 years of Peruvian history.¹ The monograph traces the co-evolution of religious regimes and state articulation in central Peru between 8000 bce and 1991. Spier's conclusions are based on a combination of anthropological fieldwork, archival research, and a close reading of secondary literature. The study is centered in the village of Zurite, located some twenty miles northwest of the Inca capital of Cusco; however, as Spier points out, analysis vertically "helicopters" from Zurite, to Incaic boundaries, to the whole of Peru. As he moves forward chronologically, Spier develops a second, lateral helicopter examining the relationship between local indigenous religion, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism (12-13).

     Spier's approach is interdisciplinary, but a functionalist sociological framework supersedes the underlying historical backbone. He adopts Norbert Elias's model of conceptualizing society as developing networks ("figurations") of interdependent people and utilizes Johan Goudsblom's theory on the formation of organized religion. Anthropologist Mart Bax's definitions of "religious regime," "religious specialist," and "legitimization" complete Spier's interpretive framework. The author's talent lies in applying the analytic tools developed in a European context to the expanse of Peruvian history and historiography.

     The argument is well organized and closely constructed. Seven chapters chronicle the connection between religious development and state legitimization, consolidation, and expansion. The first chapter concentrates on the paleo-Indian period (8000 bce-1400 ce) and concludes with the rise of the Incan empire. Spier argues that as the intensification of agriculture magnified human connections, new forms of religious and political self-restraint were required. As a result of dependence on the surrounding natural environment, state-religious regimes were based on the idea of "supernatural nature" (43). Spier's argument essentially connects population pressure and increasing levels of social integration and mirrors the ideas more recently, and perhaps more persuasively, expressed by geographer and physiologist Jared Diamond. In his Pulitzer-Prizewinning book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond connects the availability of domesticable plants and animals to population growth and ultimately to the evolution of technology, government, and religion. ²

     Although Inca political organization was rooted in the paleo-Indian period, Spier avers, increased militarization in the early fifteenth century led to the formation of a centralized Inca state. State growth, in turn, led to a greater differentiation between priests and warriors, an increase in religious specialization, and a new reliance on religious legitimization of Incaic executive authority. While the state priesthood gained power via the exercise of religious constraint, it sacrificed the service of Andean peasants' daily religious needs. Oracular and shamanistic regimes filled this breach.

     Spier addresses the conquest and early colonial era in chapter three. He characterizes Spanish Catholicism as a "moral state-religion" whose guidelines developed organically in response to the needs of growing urban networks (100-101). In Peru, Catholic orthodoxy failed to reorient indigenous reliance on the natural environment. The evangelization process was incomplete at best, and shamanistic regimes flourished underground throughout the sixteenth century. The church itself, however, was split between the diocesan clergy and regular friars. The former were appointed by the crown of Spain and tied hierarchically to bishops, and the latter were independently organized and owed their allegiance to Rome. In concert with diocesan clerics, Spanish authorities used the perseverance of idolatry to undercut the regular friars who had spearheaded the conversion effort.

     Stability and gradual change dominated the colonial configuration between 1630 and 1780. Diocesan legitimization of royal power afforded the secular clergy increased political influence, economic success, and social prestige. In chapter four Spier provides a fascinating account of the diocesan regime in Zurite, investigating parish economy, parishioner profile, clerical discipline, and religious constraint. He reiterates that clerical attempts to bridge the gap between the Catholic faith and agrarian religion continued without success, as the Church was unable to convince peasants of the "Christian message as a model for life" (167).

     Chapter five encompasses the Bourbon Reform era, the war for independence, and the early national period. Spier uses the twin themes of state centralization and diocesan decline to connect the decades between 1780 and 1840. He argues that Spain's Bourbon monarchs curbed ecclesiastical economic, judicial, and political power, but that independence in Peru proved an elite-to-elite power transfer. Post independence, conservative authorities and a multitude of national military leaders (caudillos) focused on religious legitimization of executive power and viewed the clergy as essential to internal pacification and integration (200). However, they refused to form an equal partnership with the diocesan hierarchy.

     Spier ties the growth of religious pluralism in Peru to the impact of industrialization and democratization. Between 1840 and 1915, he asserts, political legitimization came to rest on constitutional law rather than on religious legitimization, and economics replaced religion as a conduit to political power. The government continued to favor the Catholic Church, but it faced new competition from heterodox (largely Protestant) regimes as modernization opened Peruvian borders to foreigners and foreign missionary influence. Protestant regimes responded to both religious and worldly needs, particularly needs involving health and education.

     The final chapter covers the period from 1915 to 1991 and outlines the privatization of religion in Peru. Spier focuses on the 1970s and 1980s, linking religious regime development to the breakdown of the Peruvian state and to the fallout of national agrarian reform. While he considers the Marxist, guerrilla terrorists of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) movement as a "functional equivalent of a religious regime" (233, 242), Spier focuses on accommodation between Catholic, Protestant, and shamanistic regimes. The strategies and tactics of Christian regimes, he demonstrates, converged as both Catholic and Protestant leaders began to address Peruvians' spiritual and worldly needs. Spier's portrait of hopeful, pragmatic Padre Huiclla, the first Indian parish priest in Zuritan history, offers a powerful case study of this process.

     Spier describes big history as an effort to place human history "against the background of a coherent overview of the entire known past, from the beginning of the universe to life on earth today."³ In the text at hand, he suggests that Peruvian religious-state development "might probably serve as a model for the analysis of religion in the history of humankind as a whole" (271). The monograph is breathtaking in terms of breadth. In depth, however, certain sacrifices are made. Religion is broadly defined (17-18), but it exists primarily in relation to the state. Religious or spiritually centered interpretation, such as that offered by Inga Clendinnen's work on the Aztec and Maya, is absent in the Peruvian case.⁴ A complete portrait of the state, the central figure in the binary relationship, also fails to emerge. For example, the 1542 New Laws are not discussed, and assessment of the Shining Path is limited. Historical inaccuracy at times also intrudes on analysis; discussion of colonial tithe distribution (104, n. 5), for example, and of clerical academic training and theological formation (150) is inexact. Finally, no comparative analysis is attempted, either in the text or bibliography, and obvious connections with religious-state development in Mesoamerica/New Spain/modern Mexico are left unexplored.

     Given the 10,000-year time frame of his study, Spier's conclusions are principally framed from the secondary literature. His discussion of the village of Zurite is based on primary documentation, but unfortunately Zurite is virtually absent in the first two chapters of the text and is sometimes unevenly connected to central arguments presented in the remaining five. In 1995 Spier published what he termed a "small-scale anthropological account" of San Nicolás de Zurite.⁵ Also advanced along Elias/Bax constructs, the study was intended as a companion to Religious Regimes in Peru, and here Zuritan religious regimes stand alone and are deeply textured. The festival of the village's patron saint, for example, is richly assessed in the third chapter.

     Spier skillfully applies a sociological framework to Peruvian historiography in Religious Regimes, but two problems cut across the text. First, while he works with a voluminous bibliography, interpretation based on cutting-edge sources--which were available in 1991--is sometimes lacking. He adopts Spanish chroniclers with little critique, draws from a narrow selection of sources on modern Peru, and occasionally cites undergraduate textbooks in his footnotes.⁶ Second, while Spier's approach and scope are unique, his conclusions often blur amidst the summary of secondary material. Researchers, particularly historians, seeking depth across time may be disappointed.

     Spier's text is shortly to enter its third decade. Even as he completed the manuscript in December 1992, Spier was keenly aware that the present was irrevocably "becoming part of history" (268). His analysis ends just as Alberto Fujimori was installed as president of Peru and neoliberalism began to shift Latin American social and economic policy. In the past two decades the weight of historiographic analysis has also shifted. A movement towards personalism, individual experience, and the import of the quotidian--spearheaded by Natalie Zemon Davis, Carlo Ginzburg, and Eric van Young among others--has overtaken the theoretical functionalism Spier advocates.⁷ Lastly, electronic advances have revolutionized the research process; nearly a dozen Spanish archives for example, including the Archivo General de Indias, a linchpin in the study of colonial Spanish America, are linked through the Portal de Archivos Españoles [http://pares.mcu.es/].

     Spier intends his text for a wide-spectrum audience (23), but as the preceding discussion suggests, it couples a complex sociological structure with detailed historiographic analysis. It would be a spectacular addition to a graduate course focusing on Latin American religious history or a course on Peruvian historiography, but the work as a whole does not lend itself to entry-level interpretation. Nonetheless, Spier tracks religious regime development across vast historical epochs and in macro terms successfully articulates a framework in which to assess change across time. At the micro level, his success is rather different: he chronicles the sheer persistence of the past in Zurite's present.

E. K. Haywood is an assistant professor of history at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA. Her research focuses on the secular clergy in colonial Mexico, and she teaches a broad range of courses on Latin American history. She can be reached at khaywood@allegheny.edu.

[Editor's Note: Dr. Spier took exception to some aspects of the above review. His comments, and the reviewer's reply which appear below are extremely useful in teasing out the deeper meaning of this work, which is an early example of micro-to-macro research that is today called "little Big History." It was reviewed here due to its to its ground-breaking character. Like most ground-breaking works of research, it has attracted some criticism, though this has always been leavened by its critics' admiration for its scope and ambition, as is the case here]

Dr. Spier writes:

I would like to react to the review of Religious Regimes in Peru by E.K. Haywood in this issue of World History Connected. I am happy with the praise, of course, but disagree with what I regard as several misrepresentations and tendentious statements. I offer the following corrective comments on only the statements that I find most problematic.

EKH: "However, as Spier points out, analysis vertically "helicopters" from Zurite, to Incaic boundaries, to the whole of Peru." My meaning is lost. After mentioning "the whole of Peru", I added. "Ascending even more, we take a view of larger parts of South America, or whole continents" (12). This is important, because examining links between events in Zurite and in Spain, most notably, but also elsewhere in the world, not least the Vatican, helped me to understand better what had been going on in this Andean village.

EKH: "Spier's approach is interdisciplinary, but a functionalist sociological framework supersedes the underlying historical backbone." I am not sure what "supersedes" means within this context. I never wrote that myself. I used my sociological theoretical approach in order to make sense of historical processes.

EKH: "Anthropologist Mart Bax's definitions of "religious regime," "religious specialist," and "legitimization" complete Spier's interpretive framework." This is not correct. In addition to changing Bax's definition of religious regime as well as Clifford Geertz's definition of religion, I specifically added a systematic analysis to their theoretical approach in terms of what I called religious needs and religious constraints, which I explained at length in the Introduction (19-20). This I see as my major theoretical innovation.

EKH: "Spier argues that as the intensification of agriculture magnified human connections, forms of religious and political self-restraint were required. As a result of dependence on the surrounding natural environment, state-religious regimes were based on the idea of "supernatural nature" (43). This is not a correct representation of my position. I never used the term "magnified," but placed emphasis on incisive societal changes as a result of the emergence of agriculture. I argued that Andean early state religion evolved out of tribal religions while basically using the religious vocabulary and symbolism that had emerged earlier in these Andean tribal religions, for reasons mentioned by EKH.

EKH: "Spier's argument essentially connects population pressure and increasing levels of social integration and mirrors the ideas more recently, and perhaps more persuasively, expressed by geographer and physiologist Jared Diamond. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond connects the availability of domesticable plants and animals to population growth and ultimately to the evolution of technology, government, and religion." I am a little puzzled about a possible link between Diamond's analysis and my book. I see Diamond's argument as an attempt to explain why Eurasian societies took off earlier, developed quicker, and became more powerful than societies in the Americas and Oceania. In my book I never tried to make such a comparison, and I therefore wonder why my book is (unfavorably) compared to Diamond's work, while we were working on quite different research questions. Both of us understood the importance of important aspects such as population growth and increasing societal complexity, but our aims were surely very different.

EKH "While the [Inca] state priesthood gained power via the exercise of religious constraint, it sacrificed the service of Andean peasants' daily religious needs. Oracular and shamanistic regimes filled this breach." This is not entirely correct, even though, interestingly, in this quote the key terms religious constraint and needs appear that the reviewer did not mention earlier while summarizing my theoretical approach. I argued that the Inca state religion added another religious layer to an already-existing situation of local and regional agrarian regimes. The Inca religion became the dominant public religion since it was based on the exercise of religious constraint backed up by state power, while the other religions became more localized and less powerful, but continued to exist because they served local religious needs.

EKH: "Spier addresses the conquest and early colonial era in chapter three. He characterizes Spanish Catholicism as a "moral state-religion" whose guidelines developed organically in response to the needs of growing urban networks (100-101)." EKH fails to mention an important step in my argument, namely that after Christianity became a state religion in the Roman empire, one of its tasks became to legitimize state power. This led to a change from mostly serving religious needs to exercising considerable religious constraint. This was the type of Christianity that was much later transplanted into the Andes.

EKH: "In Peru, Catholic orthodoxy failed to reorient indigenous reliance on the natural environment." This I never wrote nor intended to write. I said that being the upholders of a moral religion with very little attention to people's relations with the natural environment, Roman Catholic priests found it hard to serve many of the Andean farmers' religious needs, since these needs resulted from a great many uncertainties in their relations with surrounding nature. This left room for local religions as long as they served such a purpose.

EKH: "The church itself, however, was split between the diocesan clergy and regular friars. The former were appointed by the crown of Spain and tied hierarchically to bishops, and the latter were independently organized and owed their allegiance to Rome." This is not entirely correct. As I emphasized in the book, both diocesan and regular hierarchies depend on the Vatican. The Spanish court tried to exercise intermediary control over both.

EKH: "In depth, however, certain sacrifices are made. Religion is broadly defined (17-18), but it exists primarily in relation to the state." This is absolutely not correct. I made a great effort to show why the different players adhered to their religions. The problem is that after states emerged, no religion could be seen as totally uninfluenced by the state it found itself in. To think otherwise is to miss this important point entirely.

EKH: "Religious or spiritually centered interpretation, such as that offered by Inga Clendinnen's work on the Aztec and Maya, is absent in the Peruvian case." I don't know these studies, but I would have liked to see an explanation of how this would have changed my analysis. More in general, I think that it is very tricky to interpret people's spirituality (whatever that may mean exactly) in academic ways, and even more so when based on fragmentary documentary evidence or possibly biased representations, which is all we have for most of history.

EKH: "A complete portrait of the state, the central figure in the binary relationship, also fails to emerge. For example, the 1542 New Laws are not discussed, and assessment of the Shining Path is limited." I might indeed have included a more explicit reference to the Leyes Nuevas, but I did mention the general situation as it evolved." (105-106) But it is well known that these laws were largely unsuccessful in Peru and did hardly affect the development of Spanish colonial society in Peru, if at all, other than leading to a struggle in the 16^th century between the emerging landowners, the encomenderos, and representatives of the Crown, a struggle that the Crown lost. Surely, any long-term analysis set forth in a limited number of pages can easily be accused of not being complete (which makes one wonder whether any study is ever complete). And surely, more could have been said also about Sendero Luminoso. But if this is all that is lacking over roughly 500 years of Andean state history, I would feel very satisfied with the result.

EKH: "Historical inaccuracy at times also intrudes on analysis; discussion of colonial tithe distribution (104, n. 5), for example, and of clerical academic training and theological formation (150) is inexact." My footnote (104, n.5) is very explicit about how the tithes should be distributed, but EKH does not inform us what is inaccurate or inexact about my statements. This leaves the reader in the dark.

EKH: "Finally, no comparative analysis is attempted, either in the text or bibliography, and obvious connections with religious-state development in Mesoamerica/New Spain/modern Mexico are left unexplored." As I explicitly explained in the Introduction (24), such comparisons were not my aim.

EKH "Given the 10,000-year time frame of his study, Spier's conclusions are principally framed from the secondary literature. His discussion of the village of Zurite is based on primary documentation, but unfortunately Zurite is virtually absent in the first two chapters of the text." Surely, if one wants to report on 10,000 years of history, secondary sources is almost all that we have. One cannot be expected to peruse all the primary studies that have been done in all these different fields. What matters to me is whether the developments that I sketched fit the known details and not whether all the details are mentioned in the book. That would obviously be impossible. As I explained in the book, Zurite is mostly absent in the first two chapters because it did not yet exist, while documentation about what happened in that area (Antapampa) during this long early period is very scanty, which regrettably did not allow me to report much detail about the area.

EKH continues: "and [Zurite] is sometimes unevenly connected to central arguments presented in the remaining five." Uneven or not, the connections that I could make very much depended on the available information, as I explained in the book, as well as on the limited number of pages available for the entire text (about 250).

EKH: "Two problems cut across the text. First, while he works with a voluminous bibliography, interpretation based on cutting-edge sources—which were available in 1991—is sometimes lacking. He adopts Spanish chroniclers with little critique, draws from a narrow selection of sources on modern Peru, and occasionally cites undergraduate textbooks in his footnotes." EKH does not inform us what the cutting-edge sources are that I missed, which makes it impossible to react to such criticism. Regarding the criticism about my use of Spanish chroniclers: again EKH does not show where I went wrong in my interpretations. I offered a detailed discussion of these issues on p.24-27 and also in Appendix One, where I assessed the strengths and weaknesses of each of the major chroniclers whose work I used. Whether my selection of sources on modern Peru was too narrow can only be seen as a problem if it can be shown that by neglecting certain sources my analysis went seriously wrong as a result. This EKH has not done. Furthermore, I do not understand why I would not be allowed to use information from textbooks. Would this imply that textbooks should be regarded as not containing serious academic information? I hope not!

EKH: "Second, while Spier's approach and scope are unique, his conclusions often blur amidst the summary of secondary material. Researchers, particularly historians, seeking depth across time may be disappointed." To make sure that the reader kept a good overview while going through all the details that I provided, I wrote a 2-3 page summary at the end of each chapter outlining all the major developments and arguments presented in that chapter. EKH appears to have missed that entirely. What EKH means with "seeking depth across time" is not clear to me. More source materials perhaps? As I explained in the Introduction, I intended to write a study of long-term processes. I had no intention of producing a detailed chronicle of events, which would have been totally impossible, given the time span that my study covers and the limited number of pages at my disposal.

EKH: "A movement towards personalism, individual experience, and the import of the quotidian—spearheaded by Natalie Zemon Davis, Carlo Ginzburg, and Eric van Young among others—has overtaken the theoretical functionalism Spier advocates." This may be the case, but I consider this change in focus in many ways an unfortunate development, because such approaches tend to focus on personal experiences without sufficiently taking into account the societal relations of power and interdependency within which they experiences take place. While personal experiences are surely very important, a lack of focus on societies and their evolving interdependencies makes it virtually impossible to show how these societies have changed over time. Portraying long-term change was my aim, not making a catalogue of personal experiences. Surely, in roughly 250 pages there is not a great deal of room for personal experiences of all the people involved over 10,000 years of history, which for 500 years spanned at least 2 continents.

EKH: "Lastly, electronic advances have revolutionized the research process; nearly a dozen Spanish archives for example, including the Archivo General de Indias, a linchpin in the study of colonial Spanish America, are linked through the Portal de Archivos Españoles [http://pares.mcu.es/]." A The statement is correct, but the reviewer does not inform us how this relates to my study. I would draw the conclusion from such a statement that it was much more challenging three decades ago to do this type of research than it is today. However, even today most archives in Peru still appear to be rather difficult to access.

EKH: At the micro level, his success is rather different: he chronicles the sheer persistence of the past in Zurite's present." Where else could the history of Zurite possibly be found other than in its present, or in the information scattered in various books as well as archives in Peru and Spain (and now also in my two books).

Dr. Heywood replies:

This is a book that was controversial when it was first published and may always remain so. This is because what Dr. Spier intends to argue or imply does not always match my (and others') analysis of the text itself (see other reviews available on JSTOR). The vast time period considered, the historiographic detail of the account, the use of an anthropology/sociology model, and the writing style itself allow for multiple interpretations of the book and this may explain why it has not garnered wholehearted approval. I stand by my review which offers its own mixed evaluation. However, the very point that we are still debating the text speaks to its relevance today.

Notes

¹ Craig Benjamin, "Forum on Big History," World History Connected Vol. 6, no. 3 (Oct. 2009) at http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/6.3/benjamin.html. Accessed on September 20, 2010.

² Jared M. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1998). Note that Diamond does not concentrate on population pressure in the Andean context. He does, however, include a section on the Spanish conquest of Peru, and his biological and technological analysis offers an interesting contrast to Spier's emphasis on religious-state development.

³ Fred Spier, "Big History: The Emergence of an Interdisciplinary Science?," World History Connected 6:3 (Oct. 2009). http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/6.3/spier.html.

⁴ Inga Clendinnen, "The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society," Past and Present, 107 (May 1985), 44-89; Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570, Cambridge Latin American Studies, 61 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

⁵ Fred Spier, San Nicolás De Zurite: Religion and Daily Life of a Peruvian Andean Village in a Changing World, Anthropological Studies VU, 18 (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1995), 3. The text is available in electronic format via Spier's webpage at the University of Amsterdam. home.medewerker.uva.nl/f.spier/.

⁶ Textbooks include Benjamin Keene and Mark Wasserman, A History of Latin America, 3^rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988) and Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America, 2^nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

⁷ For examples, see Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Eric Van Young, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810-1821 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).