Witness to an early Kennedy cause

Witness to an early Kennedy cause
By Steve Nelson
Updated: 09/15/2009 04:32:55 PM EDT


Monday, Aug. 31
WASHINGTON, MA.

In the summer of 1961, baseball fans were riveted as New York Yankees sluggers Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris chased Babe Ruth's hallowed record of 60 home runs in a season. I was one of those fans. To let me follow the action, every Monday morning my mom airmailed me the sports section from Sunday's New York Times. It arrived in the remote Peruvian village of Vicos, where with six other American college students I was doing anthropology field work for a project run by Cornell University. Later that summer, Ted Kennedy would also arrive.

Spread over more than 40,000 acres in the Andes and rising from 9,000 to 14,000 feet above sea level, Vicos was home to fewer than 2,500 descendants of the Incas. Towering close by was snow-capped Huascaran, at 22,200 feet the second-highest mountain in South America. After the conquest of Peru by Francisco Pizarro in 1532, the people of Vicos lived as serfs on a hacienda owned by an absentee landlord. Under that feudal system, which persisted well into the 20th century, they lived on and farmed plots of land in exchange for three days of labor a week. They subsisted on a diet of potatoes, corn, hot peppers and quinoa, a high-protein grain native to the area.

A decade earlier, Cornell's anthropology department had hoped to study the effects of rural electrification in the region, but a hydropower dam planned for a nearby river was canceled. In 1952, the lease for Witness to an early Kennedy cause Vicos became available. For $500 a year it entitled the leaseholder to the services of the Vicosinos. Cornell signed on, but not for the cheap labor.

Traditionally, anthropologists had conducted their field studies, notepads in hand, as passive observers and interpreters. The Cornell team in Vicos took a very different approach. Under the direction of its visionary department chairman Allan Holmberg, it became actively engaged with the community, a move that provoked controversy in some academic circles. The team helped build a school and taught improved farming techniques. Working as a cooperative, the Vicosinos began selling their potato crop in Lima, a difficult day's drive away, and with the profits bought a truck to facilitate that enterprise. When the Vicos lease came up for renewal in 1957, they themselves took it over.

More:
http://www.berkshireeagle.com/otheropinions/ci_13236664