Reciprocity and Redistribution in Andean Civilizations (ePub)

John V. Murra's Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, originally given in 1969, are the only major study of the Andean "e;avenue towards civilization."e; Collected and published for the first time here, they offer a powerful and insistent perspective on the Andean region as one of the few places in which a so-called "e;pristine civilization"e; developed. Murra sheds light not only on the way civilization was achieved here-which followed a fundamentally different process than that of Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica-he uses that study to shed new light on the general problems of achieving civilization in any world region. Murra intermixes a study of Andean ecology with an exploration of the ideal of economic self-sufficiency, stressing two foundational socioeconomic forces: reciprocity and redistribution. He shows how both enabled Andean communities to realize direct control of a maximum number of vertically ordered ecological floors and the resources they offered. He famously called this arrangement a "e;vertical archipelago,"e; a revolutionary model that is still examined and debated almost fifty years after it was first presented in these lecture. Written in a crisp and elegant style and inspired by decades of ethnographic fieldwork, this set of lectures is nothing less than a lost classic, and it will be sure to inspire new generations of anthropologists and historians working in South America and beyond.