William W. Stein begins his ambitious book by asserting that the Cornell–Peru Project (CPP), also known as the “Vicos project,” “is a well known but poorly understood applied anthropological study that took place between 1952 and 1966 in Vicos, a rural community located in Peru’s Callejón de Huaylas” (p. 2). Commenting as one who was closely involved with the project in its last years and as a periodic visitor since that time up to 2004, I reluctantly conclude that Stein’s wordy tome will leave many with a confused perception of the project: how it was conducted and turned out as well as its place in the sphere of applied anthropology.

First, the CPP was not “a study” but, rather, was a long-term and collaborative international multidisciplinary project that succeeded in carrying out the first successful land reform and indigenous development effort in Peru. Peruvian and U.S. anthropologists Allan R. Holmberg (Cornell), Mario C. Vazquez (San Marcos and, later, Cornell), and Peru’s distinguished biomedical researcher, Carlos Monge Medrano, together conceived, planned, and found ways to achieve the program goals. Over the length of the enterprise, almost 100 Peruvian and U.S. specialists (anthropologists, agronomists, nutritionists, educators, photographers, psychologists, and many students) participated as part of the CPP at various times, in addition to the original 1,703 Vicosinos who were, in effect, the major actors and participants. The CPP empowered, enlightened, equipped, reorganized, and energized this denigrated, exploited, and impoverished community of hacienda serfs ensnared for over 350 years in an unforgiving, colonial-style regime. That account is not easily gleaned from this “metaethnography.”

Stein aims “to combine the somewhat autobiographical mode with the critical ethnography of a North American research and development project in relation to the Vicos workers, as well as observe the deconstruction process. My approach is post structuralist… . It may even be postmodern” (p. xiii). The six chapters include his description of the project; a detailed examination of the relationships of the early project personnel to each other and the community; explorations of some of the changes brought through the project’s “potato experiments,” the Vicos workers relations to the project, and aspects of the medical interventions; and finally a “deconstruction” of the project.

Stein, who studied a nearby community, was close to the project during its earliest years and sees this work as a “final statement” about the CPP. He uses extended quotes from the copious research notes in CPP archives at Cornell to elaborate some of the difficult organizational aspects and personnel problems of the first four years as Holmberg, Vazquez, and others were developing a participatory approach that would eventually lead to the community members’ independence from serfdom and ownership of their lands. Although he points out some limited development issues and insightfully analyzes, that is, deconstructs, aspects of these early difficulties, the successful ten-year-long project story up to the sale of the hacienda to the community in 1962 is lost in a welter of commentary and speculation. Despite the author’s considerable erudition, the result is a wandering, postmodern, often psychoanalytical account of the project and some of its personnel that greatly detracts from the Vicos story. The book is replete with such writing as the following excerpt:

If the project was in Vicos not to make a gift but to arrest social unrest, the kind of unrest that threatens the socially rested, the rest of humanity, also with unrest, it aimed to do this by determining scientifically how people may be made more productive, thereby satisfying their needs and losing their restlessness. [p. 286]

Here temptation to judge the past with the benefits of hindsight in terms of current theoretical and literary fashion becomes reality and leads to real misunderstanding. Despite its sometimes detailed reporting of published works and field data, this book is about “discourse” more than Vicos. Primary research material (and the dubious use of the informants’ real names) is liberally interspersed with lengthy quotes from 40 referenced publications of Jacques Derrida (and other postmodern desconstructionists), taking the reader on tangents far from this place in the Andes.

The project history in the first chapters views events as through a camera with parallax problems, omitting key portions of the scene. The pioneering and innovative agreement between Cornell and Peru’s Ministry of Labor and Indigenous Affairs that governed events from the first is mentioned but not examined nor is the ministry program that managed the project in consultation with Cornell after 1956. Important publications by Vazquez and others dealing with such matters as CPP annual reports, education, kinship, demography, and nutrition do not inform the discussion. Thus, although the author ranges over an impressive variety of works, much is overlooked in this “final statement.” At the same time, Stein uncritically quotes such ill-informed opinions of the project as those of John Bennett, Glynn Cochrane, and Javier Avila-Molero, among others. He erroneously says that the hacienda was simply expropriated (pp. 201, 446) but elsewhere correctly notes that the Vicosinos bought their land (and thus freedom from serfdom) directly from its institutional owner, the Beneficiencia Pública de Huaraz, with their own money (which they earned as a result of CPP interventions) in June 1962.

Although admitting that the CPP was a technical success (p. 245), Stein claims (p. 342) that the project never dealt with a needed redistribution of subsistence lands. In a sense, that is correct, although not in the way Stein implies: It was the elected Vicos community council that undertook such redistribution after 1957 under CPP aegis, as Vicosinos progressively assumed direct control of the hacienda and community affairs. Although he laments the CPP’s use of the hacienda power structure to initiate the project he offers limited discussion of the critical later years (1956–62) as power devolved on the community, culminating in Vicos’s purchase of the hacienda.

In his preface Stein notes that the “Oedipal aspects” of his relations with his teacher Allan Holmberg are “obvious,” and these intrude throughout the narrative. The slaps he aims at unnamed CPP personnel for imagined “posturing, fetishing, and self-promotion” (p. 446) strike unsupported sour notes as well. The same applies to his dark notions that someone may have removed material from the CPP files to hide something; that some potential publications were deliberately suppressed to obscure Vicosino desires for their rights (p. 21) or to conform to the holistic Policy Science approach Holmberg used to analyze the community and project efforts; or that Cold War–era thinking lurked ominously in the background. The project began after all, in 1951–52, but it was tightly tied to Peruvian domestic policies concerning indigenous affairs, rural education, and agricultural development and was inspired in part by the newly promulgated UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights ratified by Peru, whose articles were later emblazoned on building walls around the Vicos plaza.

Alas, each chapter is a frustrating mix of Stein’s often interesting observations and reviews of project data accompanied by excursions into Freudian fantasizing, postmodernist critique, factual error, and contradiction. This is so much the case that it overwhelms any review of this nature. In his final pages Stein seems to argue that the CPP need not have promoted any changes because, as one now sees, many things such as land reform and the abolition of peonage were going to happen anyway sometime. The implications of that kind of thinking puts everything in the hands of fate with a kind of Alfred E. Newmanesque “What, me worry?” attitude. In summary, the book leaves the reader with as many questions as are raised, although in the end Stein concludes that, “never a horrible monster, the Vicos project was much more helpful than harmful” (p. 476). Amen. If nothing else, the book points to the insecurity some anthropologists may feel when confronted with active, disciplinary-driven efforts to address human problems and needs.