The urban and the rural in Puno, highland Peru

This article describes and analyzes important aspects of the relationship between the urban and the rural in the south of the Peruvian department of Puno. The author argues that the assumed arbitrariness of the border between the countryside and the city, between the urban and the rural, is extremely widespread and that Andean peasant communities are undergoing more and more integrating processes at different levels which, rather than determining the disintegration of these communities, are resulting in their redefinition. Kinship networks create flows that include people within much broader contexts than in the past, and both cities and peasant communities can be seen to exist within forms of modernity that do not necessarily correspond to Euro‐American patterns.