Nightwatch: The Politics of Protest in the Andes

Organized in the mid-1970s as a means of communal protection against stock rustling and general thievery in Peru’s rugged northern mountains, the rondas campesinas (peasants who make the rounds) grew into an entire system of peasant justice and one of the most significant Andean social movements of the late 20th century. Nightwatch is the first full-length ethnography and the only study in English to examine this grassroots agrarian social movement, which became a rallying point for rural pride. Drawing on fieldwork conducted over the course of a decade, Orin Starn chronicles the historical conditions that led to the formation of the rondas, the social and geographical expansion of the movement, and its gradual decline in the 1990s. Starn moves easily from global to local contexts, and from the 15th to the 20th century, presenting this movement in a forthright manner that makes it accessible to both specialists and nonspecialists. Although an engagingly written story of village mobilization, Nightwatch is also a meditation on the nature of fieldwork, the representation of subaltern people, the relationship between resistance and power, and what it means to be politically active at the end of the century. It should appeal to scholars and students of anthropology, Latin American studies, cultural studies, history, subaltern studies and those interested in the politics of social movements.