Modernity at the Edge of Empire David Nugent (Anthropology) Stanford University Press Although it had been a nation in name for nearly 100 years, Peru in the 1920s was more like a collection of medieval fiefdoms. The central government, based in Lima, was so weak that it had to rely on alliances with the aristocratic class to maintain even a semblance of control in the country's outlying regions. So, even while the government was espousing modern ideals of sovereignty and of popular equality, people in places such as Chachapoyas were controlled byrulers who got power by seizing it--and by virtue of their wealth and racial descent.     Confounding the models of Europe and its colonies, no bourgeoisie arose in Peru to supplant the upper class. All the while, these rulers claimed to be believers in Enlightenment concepts of self-governance and human dignity.The common people saw the contradictions between what aristocrats said and what they did, and the common people acted. Reforms did not come from the top down or from the urban center to the countryside. Instead, marginalized groups in Chachapoyas (which included almost everyone except the elites) banded together, labeled themselves el pueblo (the people) in order to dispense with racial and economic barriers and mounted an armed uprising to unseat the aristocrats. El pueblo brought the Enlightenment to Peru.     The example of Chachapoyas, David Nugent writes, does "much to explain why oppositional models of state-building and coercive understandings of making modern, national cultures are of limited use in understanding the history of state- and nation-building in postcolonial Latin America."