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am going to present two ethnographic examples the significance of which was missed a half century ago. The first has to do with the coming and going of a plague. Here is the story, told by Don Alfonso Cruz, a Vicosino. A Vicos grandmother visits her daughter’s home and finds the children alone, crying with hunger. She feeds them from supplies in the house and remains with them until the daughter returns. The daughter speaks sharply to her mother for the latter’s intrusion. The grandmother is angry and strikes her daughter, who replies in kind and drives her mother from the house. A metaphysical wind sweeps through the place, making people, livestock, and crops sick. A neighbor appears before the Vicos varayoq,⁽¹⁶⁾ the authorities, to complain about the damage. Meanwhile, the daughter has gone off to join her husband in Paramonga, a sugar plantation on the coast. The authorities send a delegation there to apprehend her, listen to testimony in the case, and take her prisoner to the regional authorities in Carhuaz, the Provincial capital. In a few days the wind disappears. The event is reported to an interviewer through an interpreter by a Vicos man who was a varayoq at the time it occurred.⁽¹⁷⁾

I have converted an original Andean discourse, distorted by double translation, into an Andeanist discourse, but I am amazed by how much of the original Andean discourse comes through, even though, I am operating as an anthropologist "to disclose, order, and contextualize the practices of others, to reduce the ambiguity of polysemy, and to produce a coherent and plausible text" (Penelope Harvey 1997:40). In so doing I am taking a risk. Regina Harrison (1982:67) reports the "harsh criticism" with which an early seventeenth century Andean chronicler’s work has met in his "efforts to transmit the essence of the Andean world." If an Andean person’s work is treated so, can I reasonably expect less? Still, despite the hazards, here is my reading of the report. In Vicos discourse a sin seems to oscillate between heaven and earth, as a kind of inverted "inalienable possession" which blows into fields in the ghostly shape of a metaphysical wind in negative reciprocity⁽¹⁸⁾ with supernatural beings, where the offense that is given is kept (cf. Weiner 1992).⁽¹⁹⁾ Vicos views of time and space,⁽²⁰⁾ in the form of the pathways the wind takes and along which people can set things right, repetitive sin and redemption, and the overdetermined character of the profane and the sacred are thrust into the interview in which the Vicosino reports on the event to a developer and rationalizer who wants to know how people customarily deal with plant blights, and despite the Limeño interviewer’s distance from this Andean way of talking about such matters. The wind, "viento," a loan word from the Spanish (rather than the Quechua wayra, the word for physical wind) is intrusive, but it is used in an Andean rather than a Spanish way.

"An Andean way." Are there "essences" here which separate informant and interviewer, as there surely are differences? What, then, is "Andean"? I very much like this clear-headed statement by Jeanette Sherbondy (1992:48):

Given the variety of cultural expressions in the past as well as in the present, it seems very limiting to focus only on traits that appear to persist in order to define what is Andean to the detriment of all the forms that may or may not have persisted but should be considered equally Andean. After all, the term Andean itself is a fairly recent invention by non-Andean observers ... . In an attempt to define culture areas anthropologists have applied Andean to this area, especially to the area occupied formerly by the Inca state; and then they posed themselves a problem of identifying what Andean meant in terms of the cultures of the peoples of that geographical area. Although the Inca state covered a good part of this area, the cultural and geographical term extends far beyond its boundaries, so that the problem is posed of trying to identify the traits that define a concept that has no real foundation on any single cultural reality. It is essentially a concept that has meaning primarily for non-Andean anthropologists, and so it is, on a smaller scale, a sort of "Orientalism," a product of neocolonial intellectual nomenclature.

Sherbondy refers to Edward Said’s influential work on Orientalism. Said’s (1978:5) point is that the "Orient" is constructed by Orientalists, but "to believe that such things happen simply as a necessity of the imagination, is to be disingenuous," for "[t]he relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony." Like Orientalism, Andeanism exercises a certain "intellectual authority" over discourses concerning the Andean in the North American and European milieus, discourses which are not Andean but Andeanist. But let us not leave the matter here. Said (ibid.:24) raises the question of "how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, perspective."

Orin Starn (1994:19) suggests that "the absence of the term ‘Andean’ in the self-description of most inhabitants of the [Andes] mountains should be a clue to its origins in the imagination and usage of outside observers ... [P]easants identify themselves by their nation, religion, province, village, or family." Quite true, but I do not think that if I refer to Vicos as an Andean community, or Vicos discourse as an Andean one, that I am imagining communities and discourses that do not really exist. In her reply to Starn, Olivia Harris (1994:27) points out that: "The concept of ‘the Andean’ as developed within the subfield is grounded in the archaeological horizons, especially the Late Horizon of the Inca state. The reaches of Andean anthropology in this sense are those of Tawantinsuyu [the Inca polity]. The effects of Inca policies were profound and in their turn shaped the policies of early Spanish administration. There is a striking parallelism with the concept of Europe; there is general agreement that the effects of the Roman empire—both the Classical polity and medieval Christendom—were decisive in establishing a level of shared meanings that accompanied the play of diversity." Thus we can speak of "the Andean" without lapsing into uncritical essentialism.

The Vicosino interviewed spoke about the metaphysical wind that comes and goes, and the reciprocity of inalienable sin and redemption, despite his awareness of outsiders’ contempt for Vicos views of a world order of cyclic, rather than lineal, change. But this is an Andeanist interpretation of an Andean discourse. Similarly, David Gow (1976:179) presents a short but effective Andeanist statement of his observations in Pinchimuro and Lauramarca, the communities he studied in the Cusco region:

Each stage [of history] ends in a cataclysm to be followed by a new creation which, in turn, ends in a cataclysm to be followed by yet another creation. But it would be mistaken to say that the peasants regard their history as purely cyclical, for they see each stage as fusing with the ones that preceded it and the ones which will follow it. The past is always alive and part of the present; the future exists now and existed long ago. Thus their vision of history is both cyclical, in that a cataclysm or catastrophe ends one stage and creates the next, and cumulative in that the previous stage has not been destroyed but only driven underground, where it continues to exert a powerful influence through its frequent surfacings into everyday life and also through myth, ritual and symbol.

For a "people without history" the past is, strangely, an "inalienable possession." Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic conception of the repetitive acting-out of repressed affect⁽²¹⁾ is exemplified in Andeanist expression which struggles to articulate an autoethnography⁽²²⁾ along with its struggle to comprehend an Andean discourse.

Continued...

NOTAS

16. Varayoq means "envarados" in Spanish, "those who hold staves of office." These consist, in Vicos, of a body of seventeen community authorities who regulate water management during the dry season, supervise corvée labor, direct the performance of religious rituals through the year, and settle land and other disputes. In the last century they collected the head tax which funded both regional and national government. They carry whips which in former times were used to punish wrong-doers. They also intervene in cases like the one discussed here, which combines physical aggression with family crime, in which people’s sinful behavior affects the well being of the community. (See Vázquez 1964.) They accumulate "symbolic capital"—which Pierre Bourdieu (1990:120) says "is always very expensive in material terms"—by engaging in progressively more expensive festive celebrations as they rise in rank. Their authority has, in recent years, been stripped from them by the formation of a producers’ co-operative in Vicos, after the abolition of the hacienda system,as well as by Peruvian governmental intervention in and regulation of registered "comunidades campesinas," rural communities. For the functioning of the authorities in Hualcán and the District of Carhuaz, a region just to the north of the District of Marcará, see Stein (1961).
17. This case is a summary of interview materials presented in Chapter 3 of Vicissitudes of Development Discourse in Peru, The Modernity Project at Vicos. See note 8. The interview was conducted by Juan Elías Flores, a graduate student from the University of San Marcos at the time, who was employed by the Cornell Cross-Cultural Methodology Project in Vicos as a guest of the Vicos Project. The interpreter was Don Celso León, a Vicosino. This research was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
18. Catherine Allen (1997:76) writes about Andean reciprocity, known as ayni in southern variants of Quechua, and rantin in Ancash: "At the most abstract level, ayni is the basic give-and-take that governs the universal circulation of vitality. It can be positive, as when brothers-in-law labor in each others’ fields; or it can be negative, as when the two men quarrel and exchange insults. This circulation—be it of water or human energy—is driven by a system of continuous reciprocal interchanges, a kind of dialectical pumping mechanism. Every category of being, at every level, participates in this cosmic circulation. Humans maintain interactive reciprocity relationships, not only with each other but also with their animals, their houses, their potato fields, the earth, and the sacred places in their landscape." Bruce Mannheim (1986:268), who shows how reciprocity and cyclicity "are coded in several forms in Cusco Quechua lexicon and grammar," says: Andean people "live and work, eat and marry, drink and pray, think and fight in a universe governed by reciprocity. Human beings ritually establish relationships of reciprocity with mother earth and the mountain lords ... People reciprocate each other ayni in agricultural and pastoral labor and preparation of food as well as in interpersonal relationships. Children at play are said to ayni with god. But ‘reciprocity’ ... is morally neutral ... " because it may be used, also, in the sense of vengeance.
19. Annette Weiner (1992:33) writes: "Whereas other inalienable properties are exchanged against each other, inalienable possessions" as "symbolic repositories of genealogies and historical events, their unique, subjective identity gives them absolute value placing them above exchangeability of one thing for another." She concludes that "it is the tenacious anthropological belief in the inherent nature of the norm of reciprocity that impedes the examination of particular cultural conditions that empower the owners of inalienable possessions with hegemonic dominance over others. It is, then, not the hoary idea of a return gift that generates the thrust of exchange, but the radiating power of keeping inalienable possessions out of exchange. For even in the most mundane exchanges of greetings or Christmas cards, the social identities of the participants—what they have that makes them different from each other—color the styles, actions, and meanings that create the exchange."
20. A "chronotope," to borrow a term from Thomas Abercrombie (1998:113, 317), who has borrowed it from Mikhail Bakhtin: "A conventional understanding of the relationship between time (chronos), space (topos), and agency (of the person whose life-journey charts a path in time and space)."
21. Laplanche and Pontalis (1973:78) define the "repetition compulsion": "At the level of concrete psychopathology, the compulsion to repeat is an ungovernable process originating in the unconscious. As a result of its action, the subject deliberately places himself [sic] in distressing situations, thereby repeating an old experience, but he does not recall this prototype; on the contrary, he has the strong impression that the situation is fully determined by the circumstances of the moment." Freud (1964:106-107) writes: "We have been struck by the fact that the forgotten and repressed experiences of childhood are reproduced during the work of analysis in dreams and reactions, particularly in those occurring in the transference, although their revival runs counter to the interest of the pleasure principle; and we have explained this by supposing that in these cases a compulsion to repeat is overcoming even the pleasure principle. Outside analysis, too, something similar can be observed. There are people in whose lives the same reactions are perpetually being repeated uncorrected, to their own detriment, or others who seem to be pursued by a relentless fate, though closer investigation teaches us that they are unwittingly bringing this fate on themselves. In such cases we attribute a ‘daemonic’ character to the compulsion to repeat." However, as Jacques Lacan (1978:50) points out, repetition is not reproduction.
22. Deborah Reed-Danahay (1997:9) defines "autoethnography" as "a form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context. It is both a method and a text, as in the case of ethnography. Autoethnography can be done by either an anthropologist who is doing ‘home’ or ‘native’ ethnography or by a non-anthropologist/ethnographer. It can also be done by an autobiographer who places the story of his or her life within a story of the social context in which it occurs."