Contradictions of community: capitalist relations in highland Peru

Abstract

Peru’s peasant communities (comunidades campesinas) are collectivities organised around common land tenure. By tracing the development in organisation in a particular peasant community in highland Ancash, this article argues that the communally owned businesses were fundamental to the success of the community in its struggle to consolidate itself, and in the recovery of its ancestral lands. I explore emergent arenas of social struggle, arguing that these pivot around tensions between agrarian and non-agrarian business activities, the use of human and natural resources and, ultimately, local definitions of peasant identities, no longer rooted in agro-pastoral practices.