Andean folklore, therefore, not only reveals the experience of Andean peasants in their rigidly stratified society but also manifests the same human desires, hopes, and fears embodied in symbolic form in the folk traditions of people everywhere.

Glynn Custred is professor of anthropology at California State University, Hayward. He has done ethnographic fieldwork in the Andes of southern Peru and has published articles on various aspects of the life of the Andean rural population. He has coedited a book with Benjamin Orlove titled Land and Power in Latin America: New Approaches to Agrarian Economics and Social Process and is now writing on the linguistic situation in Transylvania.