The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community

Catherine J. Allen is an anthropologist, and this Smithsonian Institution Press book is her ethnographic study of Sonqo, a Quechua speaking community in the Peruvian Andes, based on her own fieldwork there. Its strength is sustained direct observation of coca's actual social and ritual role, as an offering, a medium of divination and a bond of reciprocity between people and the mountain spirits, distinct from its better known status as the raw material of an alkaloid drug, a distinction the book is careful to draw. Its limit is that it documents one specific highland community's practice in the period of Allen's fieldwork, so a claim about coca's ritual use elsewhere in the Andes, in a different community or era, should be checked against a source specific to that place and time rather than generalized from Sonqo alone.