In this fascinating book, veteran Andeanist Linda J. Seligmann probes the multifaceted world of Cuzco’s market women. Structuring the book around a mosaic of vignettes, Seligmann plunges into the kinetic frenzy of Cuzco’s permanent and transient markets—stretching from the official indoor arena of San Pedro to the city’s sprawling open-air markets of transient street vendors—to study their internal workings. To probe the cultural logic lying beneath the market’s surface chaos, Seligmann pins much of the early part of the analysis on “spatial relations.” She conceives of space not only as a critical resource and organizing principle of marketplace culture but also as an assemblage of communication codes and meanings that resonate well beyond the marketplace. Through various venues, Seligmann studies the centrality of spatial relations to market women in their daily struggle to gain a livelihood through exchange, as well as in their quest for sociability, knowledge, and security and in their occasional pitched battles against repressive municipal authorities. Readers see, for example, how space intervenes in the structuring of market power relations between the market’s wealthiest wholesale “tomato queens” and butchers, on one extreme, and the peasant ambulantes poised at the precarious spatial–economic edges of the market, on the other. In probing the cultural logic of market space and exchange, the author also traces the long market chain of intermediaries in both the formal and informal sectors, which together formed the local economy’s circulatory system. In this way, Seligmann slowly peels back the surface chaos of the marketplace to reveal the hidden tensions and arteries governing spatial, exchange, and sociability relations that make it work.

Two other aspects of this book deserve mention. First, the book is ample in scope. Early on, Seligmann recognizes the need to engage in “multisited” research using a multiplicity of analytic lenses. Indeed, this book exceeds conventional boundaries of local ethnography by using market relations as a prism to view issues of market women’s participation in politics and popular religiosity, as well as to probe their notions of gendered, racial, and class identities and differences. Especially effective is Seligmann’s discussion of “race recipes,” in which she captures women’s everyday knowledge of the market’s social hierarchy, the varied status markers (dress, territory, education, and wealth) that map the social terrain, and the “appropriate behaviors” correlated to specific racial categories. All this comes across in vivid, sassy, and sometimes hilarious conversations with women throughout the marketplace. Indeed, Linda Seligmann soon found herself cast as a foil (as the blue-eyed gringa with the “pretty” name) in humorous teasing and racy exchanges, which encoded (and challenged) a deeper racial–gendered order of things. Such improvisational street exchange makes for a marvelous dialogic entry into the terrain of racial identities, affinities, and animosities among Cuzco’s vendors and traders.

The book’s other notable feature is its effort to lard each chapter with the voices, knowledge, and emotions of market women. This achievement is testament to the author’s decades of deep and engaged field work. With characteristic openness, Seligmann relates in her introduction that she began working in the Andes at age 18 by “riding in the back of trucks several layers deep with people and their produce, saturated in the early-morning aroma of 80 proof pure grain alcohol, coca leaves, and unwashed wool” (p. 4). There, Seligmann gradually learned “some important survival rules … which I have never forgotten” (p. 4). Her teachers of truck-riding etiquette and survival were the women traders who rode the circuits of overland trade and straddled the city and countryside. “Their strength and their ability to defy existing ideals and categories on those uncomfortable truck rides attracted me, and this book constitutes my effort to set out to try to understand their world” (p. 5). Seligmann reconstructs this world from the varied, often dissonant, voices of market women. Sensitive to the chasm that separated their lives from hers, Seligmann nonetheless managed to achieve an extraordinary sense of trust, friendship, and solidarity among many of the women she came to know. Readers also can see the fragility of the fieldworker’s status and credibility when local political circumstances turned tense and confrontational, suddenly thrusting the researcher into the center of political action. Indeed, the book’s subtext is the story of the relationship that unfolded between the researcher and her subjects. Seligmann not only offers an incisive analysis of Cuzco’s market culture but she also demonstrates the power of ethnographic fieldwork that is engaged, participatory, reflexive, and empathetic.