No Bells to Toll

No Bells to Toll: Destruction and Creation in the Andes

Barbara Bode

On May 31, 1970, an earthquake and avalanche devastated a remote valley in the Peruvian Andes, burying entire villages under mud and ice and killing more than 75,000 people. Sixteen months later, anthropologist Bode, who teaches at the University of Rhode Island, came to the valley for a year to assess how the survivors interpreted the catastrophe and how they were adjusting to current conditions. At the time, both the national government and the Catholic Church were moving toward radical reform; there was also an influx of foreigners to the valley, including evangelical Protestant missionaries. These events had a profound impact on the surviving natives, both mestizos and Indians, who practiced a Catholicism that overlaid ancient religious cultures; they personified inanimate objects and statues of the saints. The author sees the situation as palimpsest: in the aftermath, new ideologies appeared without displacing old beliefs as the survivors attempt to cope with the proposed overhaul–religious and secular–of their lives. Bode has written an engrossing and sympathetic report of people caught in events beyond their control. Photos. (July)

In 1970, a huge earthquake in the Peruvian Andes dislodged a mass of ice and rubble that careened down the mountainside, scouring out the contents of the valley below. The greatest recorded natural disaster of the Western hemisphere, it claimed 75,000 lives. At the scene the following year, anthropologist Bode studied the effects of the disaster–how the victims survived; how they coped or didn’t cope with loss of family and homes; the rifts in the Church; and the breakdown of social classes in the aftermath. Her follow-up ten years later documents the healing that took place, how long it took, and what accommodations to reality the survivors made trying to tease meaning or purpose from their survival. An absorbing study that will be welcome in all types of libraries.– Louise Leonard, Univ. of Florida Lib., Gainesville