Lines in the Water: Nature and Culture at Lake Titicaca

Environmental History, Jul 2004 by Radding, Cynthia

Lines in the Water: Nature and Culture at Lake Titicaca. By Ben Orlove. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xxvii 287 pp. Illustrations, photographs, maps, chapter notes, index. $50.00.

Lines in the Water is a sensitively written anthropological approach to the culture and environment of indigenous, peasant fishermen of Lake Titicaca. Orlove's thoughtful discussions cover over two decades of research on the people and the extraordinary setting of Lake Titicaca, primarily on the Peruvian margins of this highland lacustrean resource shared by both Peru and Bolivia. Poverty and the exigencies of daily subsistence and generational survival are present throughout the book. Orlove's unifying theme upholds the resiliency of local, customary institutions of control over the fisheries, the cohesiveness of local communities-notwithstanding internal class and ethnic divisions-and the adaptive ingenuity of these fishing communities in their approaches to technology and markets. The book is well illustrated with instructive maps and photographs that are memorable for both their aesthetic qualities and their cultural content.

Lines in the Water is clearly written in admirably simple prose, reflective of Orlove's earlier published quantitative articles but without the data. Several footnotes scattered throughout the chapters-for instance, a reference to Peruvian governmental surveys of fishermen and fishing villages (p. 73) lead the reader to Orlove's web site at the University of California, Davis, where the posted appendices provide further information. Chapter endnotes provide a wide range of references and Orlove's commentary on them, but the book lacks a clear alphabetical bibliography. While not a rebuttal to any particular work or literature, this study challenges the proponents of globalization and capitalist modernization within the tenets of economic anthropology.

The seven substantive chapters focus on memory ("not forgetting"), mountains (ending with a geological description of Lake Titicaca), names ("to fish" and "fishermen"), work, fish, reeds (an aquatic plant with several uses for fodder, boat construction, crafts, and food), and paths. Orlove uses several innovative narrative strategies to deliver information and communicate his ideas; for example, the chapter on fish introduces different species through an imaginary museum that serves, as well, to encapsulate several centuries of history in the Andean highlands. Orlove's discussion of the problems that he set out to research and the insights he developed concerning cultural values and contemporary practices is nuanced and thorough in contrast to his treatment of history, which is compressed into an uncomplicated story line that suggests a simplicity not borne out by the complex historiography for the region. Orlove's interpretations of the cultural values accruing to daily life in the highland lakeshore communities based on several periods of fieldwork during the 19705 and 19805 take gendered differences into account, but fall short of an in-depth analysis, especially of the gendered meaning of work, which he finds is largely masculine.

Lines in the Water is autobiographical, employing frequent use of the first person pronoun. Orlove achieves a conversational style of prose, but places himself so often into the narrative that, at times, the indigenous villagers of Lake Titicaca remain in the shadows. In this respect, the final chapter, "Paths," is the least satisfying of the essays included in the book. Although beginning with a visual description of the network of footpaths and roads that link the lakeside villages, it quickly turns to the metaphorical paths traveled by the author after his dissertation research. In all, Orlove's book is a valuable contribution to the fields of cultural and environmental anthropology, of interest to students and scholars for both its content and its methodology.

Reviewed by Cynthia Radding, associate professor of history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, author of Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers, 1700-1850 (Duke, 1997) and a comparative history of environmental and cultural borderlands in northwestern Mexico and eastern Bolivia: Landscapes of Power and Identity, (Duke, forthcoming, 2005). She will assume the directorship of the Latin American and Iberian Institute of the University of New Mexico in July 2004.