| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

Arnold J. Bauer. Goods, Power, History: Latin America's Material Culture. (New Approaches to the Americas.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001. Pp. xx, 245. Cloth $59.95, paper $17.95.

This is a tremendously entertaining yet knowledgeable interpretation of Latin American history viewed through the lens of material culture. Presented in straightforward, oftentimes folksy prose, the book synthesizes a vast array of secondary literature as it traverses the entirety of Latin American history, from preconquest times to the present, in order to address a primordial question: "why do we acquire the things we do?" (p. 1). In the end, what Arnold J. Bauer seeks to understand is the impact of European conquest, an event that set in motion "patterns of exchange, goods, and values introduced from the outside" (p. 46) that, in turn, reconfigured the parameters of needs and wants of people who came to be known as Latin Americans. 1

Why people consume is not simply a factor of production—what can be made available—but also a factor of desire, and of the power relationships that seek to regulate desire. From this premise, the book proceeds chronologically and thematically, beginning with "The Material Landscape," a chapter focusing on patterns of production and consumption under the Aztec and Inca. Although demonstrating an "extraordinarily inventive use of the entire biomass" (p. 43), the vast range of goods produced by these civilizations were distributed within strictly circumscribed regimes of consumption marked by regional, class, gender, and ethnic divisions. The prehispanic material world was by no means immutable, but it was grounded in local systems of production, use, and exchange. All of that changed irrevocably with European conquest. . . .

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