Food, Power, and Resistance in the Andes: Exploring Quechua Verbal and Visual Narratives

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Food, Power, and Resistance in the Andes is a dynamic, interdisciplinary study of how food's symbolic and pragmatic meanings influence access to power and the possibility of resistance in the Andes. In the Andes, cooking often provides Quechua women with a discursive space for achieving economic self-reliance, creative expression, and for maintaining socio-cultural identities and practices. This book explores the ways in which artistic representations of food and cooks often convey subversive meanings that resist attempts to locate indigenous Andeans-and Quechua women in particular-at the margins of power. In addition to providing an introduction to the meanings and symbolisms associated with various Andean foods, this book also includes the literary analysis of Andean poetry and prose, as well as several Quechua oral narratives collected and translated by the author during fieldwork carried out over a period of several years in the southern Peruvian Andes.

By following the thematic thread of artistic representations of food, this book allows readers to explore a variety of Andean art forms created in both colonial and contemporary contexts. In genres such as the novel, Quechua oral narrative, historical chronicle, testimonies, photography, painting, and film, artists represent Quechua cooks who utilize their access to food preparation and distribution as a tactic for evading the attempts of a patriarchal hegemony to silence their voices, desires, values, and cultural expressions. Whether presented orally, visually, or in a print medium, each of these narratives represents food and cooking as a site where conflict ensues, symbolic meanings are negotiated, and identities are (re)constructed. Food, Power, and Resistance will be of interest to Andean Studies and Food Studies scholars, and to students of Anthropology and Latin American Studies.

Reviews

Alison Krgel practices the best in Andean cultural studies. Her book is an excellent interdisciplinary study of the Quechua Food Landscape. She focuses her study on such sites as an Andean market and chicheria and also interprets visual, written, and oral narratives. Her historical, gender, economic, literary and anthropological approaches involve local, national and global contexts and help us to understand why Peruvian Cuisine is becoming fashionable in the most cosmopolitan cities all over the world. I highly recommend this book as reading material for an Andean Cultural Studies Course. -- Ulises Juan Zevallos-Aguilar, Ohio State University
Alison Krgel has written a lovely book about food, language and culture in the Peruvian Andes. Moving back and forth between past and present, novels and folklore, cooking and representations of cooking, this book is a delightful introduction to the Quechua language, to the native food crops of the Andes, and to the subtle interactions between the two. -- Mary Weismantel, Northwestern University, Northwestern University
This is an impressive, comprehensive historical analysis of the nutritional qualities and symbolic meanings of Andean foods from pre-Columbian times to the present. Krgel analyzes Quechua riddles, colonial art, modern day cinema, and the Free Trade Agreement to provide a coherent analysis of the role of food and cooks in situations of domination and resistance. Food, Power, and Resistance in Quechua Verbal and Visual Narratives is a fascinating and thorough study that provides a new understanding of the relationship between food and power in the Andes. -- Rachel Corr, Florida Atlantic University

Author Bio

Alison Krgel is assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Denver.