iv

et us conclude with the second example, a Quechua word (or root), ampi.⁽²³⁾ Ampi, as it is used in the Province of Carhuaz, is impossible to translate into Spanish or English because it has oscillating signifieds: it can mean either "remedy" or "anti-remedy," "medicine" or "poison."⁽²⁴⁾ It is like Greek pharmakon which, Jacques Derrida (1981:70) says, was used by Plato as "both remedy and poison [and which] already introduces itself into the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence ... as antisubstance itself." He points out that the usual translation of the word as "remedy" is accurate but that this "nonetheless erases, in going outside the Greek language, the other pole reserved in the word ... It cancels out the resources of this ambiguity and makes more difficult, if not impossible, an understanding of the context ... thus excluding from the text any leaning toward the magic virtues of a force whose effects are hard to master, a dynamic that constantly surprises the one who tries to manipulate it as master and as subject" (97). The translation "can thus be neither accepted nor simply rejected" and, also, there can be "no such thing as a harmless remedy" (99). Moreover, the difficulty is that "two objects cannot coexist in the same place," yet "without changing places, a same object can become ‘other’" (160). Ampi is like that. Something quite marvelous, something powerful, something magical.⁽²⁵⁾

We are confronting a Quechua medical discourse of ill-being and well-being, of healing and anti-healing, of remedy and anti-remedy, and, in no manner incidentally, of medical practice and malpractice. Bilingual mestizos understand this overdetermined meaning of ampi, as well as that of ampeq, one who practices ampi, but they tend to view the negative meanings as "false beliefs" subject to correction. Colonizers, missionaries, government officials, and dominant elite sectors have been doing this for centuries in their unceasing efforts to erase "social memory," a term used by Thomas Abercrombie (1998:21) "to convey the embodied ways by which people constitute themselves and their social formations in communicative actions and interactions, making themselves by making rather than inheriting their pasts." Thus, bilinguals translate ampi as "remedio," cure, and ampeq as "curandero,"⁽²⁶⁾ curer. As Regina Harrison (1989:49) suggests: "The semantic imprecision" of such terms "would argue that the language of the victor avoids the problem of accuracy." Persons who know only Spanish, or Spanish and English, are removed even farther, and are in no position to anticipate how the oscillating signifieds bounce, tumble, change places, erase each other and reappear, like unquiet ghosts. Translations which suppress the negative phases, repress signifieds, oppress the living language. Spanish attempts to neutralize Quechua are nothing less than linguistic intimidation, linguistic terrorism, where one learns to fear and hate one’s own language. Roland Barthes (1983:31-32) writes:

My teacher’s speech is, so to speak, never neutral; at the very moment when he seems simply to be telling me that red signals an interdiction, he is telling me other things as well: his mood, his character, the "role" he wishes to assume in my eyes, our relations as student and teacher; these new signifieds are not entrusted to the words of the code being taught, but to other forms of discourse ("values," turns of phrase, information, everything that makes up the instructor’s rhetoric and phraseology). In other words, another semantic system almost inevitably builds itself on the instructor’s speech, i.e., the system of connotation ...

I no doubt receive an objective message: Red is the sign of interdiction (the proof of this lies in the conformity of my behavior), but what I actually experience is the speech of my teacher, his phraseology; if, for example, this phraseology is intimidating, the meaning of red will inevitably include a certain terror: in the rapid process (as experienced) of the message, I cannot put the signifier of the terminological system to one side, and the signified of the rhetorical system to the other, dissociating red from terror.

For nearly five hundred years Spanish-speaking Peruvians have been translating anti-remedy into "brujería," witchcraft. At first "work of the devil," later "false belief," and still later "false consciousness," successive generations in the Andes have learned to hide their language. If we substitute for "teacher" and "pupil" in Barthes’s text the terms "public health official" and "peasant," we can begin to see how linguistic essentializing works with Quechua. As Pierre Bourdieu (1977:648) points out: "Language is not only an instrument of communication or even of knowledege, but also an instrument of power. A person speaks not only to be understood but also to be believed, obeyed, respected, distinguished. Hence the full definition of competence as the right to speech, i.e., to the legitimate language, the authorized language which is also the language of authority." In bilingual situations:

In order for one form of speech among others ... to impose itself as the only legitimate one, in short, in order for there to be a recognized (i.e. misrecognized) domination, the linguistic market has to be unified and the different class or regional dialects have to be measured practically against the legitimate language. The integration into the same "linguistic community" (equipped with the coercive instruments to impose recognition of the dominant language—schools, grammarians, etc.) Of hierarchized groups having different interests, is the precondition for the establishment of relations of linguistic domination. When one language dominates the market, it becomes the norm against which the prices of the other modes of expression, and with them the values of the various competences, are defined.

At the same time, I am not at all sure that ex-peasants, persons "in process," easily lose their linguistic codes, their grammars —indeed, I think the reverse is true. Thus, in popular Spanish, "remedio" can have an oscillating meaning for people, and "resistance to biomedicine" turns out to be resistance to biomedicine’s endeavor to dominate medical discourse, erase its rivals, and impose a piously straight significance into what it is and what it does.

Resistance. A sign the polysemy of which defies analysis. Derrida (1998:2) writes:

Ever since I can remember, I have always loved this word. Why? How can one cultivate the word "resistance"? And want to save it at any price? Against analysis, to be sure, but without "analysis" and from analysis? And from translation? ... This word, which resonated in my desire and my imagination as the most beautiful word in the politics and history of [France], this word loaded with all the pathos of my nostalgia, as if, at any cost, I would like not to have missed blowing up trains, tanks, and headquarters between 1940 and 1945—why and how did it come to attract, like a magnet, so many other meanings, virtues, semantic or disseminal chances?

In psychoanalytic discourse, resistance is the "hidden meaning [that] exceeds the analysis" (4). Here the object is to transform "the patient, the resister, into a ‘collaborator’ (that is Freud’s word) to whom one supplies explanations and in whom one arouses an investigator’s objective interest in himself," to break down the resistance. "At stake, then, are sense and truth" (17-18). But when something exceeds, rather than resists, analysis? Derrida (30-31) leads us back to "Plato’s Pharmacy" and the pharmakon where, "in the back room of the pharmacy," the pharmacist (analyst) "would still like to separate, like chemical elements, the good remedy from the bad poison." Similarly, ampi exceeds analysis, exceeds biomedical intervention, exceeds biomedical discourse. It exposes medical practice/malpractice for what it is.

So Andean discourses have something essential to teach Andeanists, something that seems to be missing in North American life with its emphasis on linear progress and unlimited economic development without significant social growth. Just as "remedies" have their side effects and unanticipated consequences, so too does anthropological practice. Struggles for hegemony⁽²⁷⁾ and outright domination among Andeanists are nothing less than malpractice.⁽²⁸⁾ I think that the challenge for the Andeanism of the twenty-first century is to become more social and socialized. My Andeanist utopia is a collective in which I would not affix my signature to what I wrote out of self-love, but where I would write in the name of the collective out of love for Andean people and my sisters and brothers in the collective, where symbolic power would be reciprocal, and where the accumulation of symbolic capital would be a collective, not an individual enterprise. This does not mean that I think it is possible for any of us to be "born again," and I agree with Derrida’s (1982:24) clear statement: "I do not believe in decisive ruptures, in an unequivocal ‘epistemological break’ ... Breaks are always, and fatally, reinscribed in an old cloth that must continually, interminably be undone. This interminability is not an accident or contingency; it is essential, systematic, and theoretical. And this in no way minimizes the necessity and relative importance of certain breaks, of the appearance and definition of new structures." "Breaks," thus, are undecidables. Since no discourse is immortal, I think we can struggle harder to see the meaning of our endeavor as "always-already" deferred, undecidable. Thus, Andeanist discourse turns out to be as de-essentialized as the objects of our study. This suggests, also, that we Andeanist anthropologists are undecidables as well.

References

NOTAS

23. This section of the essay is based on material which appears in Chapter 6, "Being ill in Vicos: The erasure of well-being," of Vicissitudes of Development Discourse in Peru, to be published in Spanish and English versions. See note 8.
24. Gary Parker has done excellent, pioneering work on Ancash Quechua. However, in the Parker and Chávez (1976:61) dictionary, which appears to be based on the linguistic variant in the southern part of the Callejón de Huaylas where ampi is spelled and pronounced with an h, hampeq, hampi, hampikuy, and hampiy are defined respectively as "curandero (curer, healer) ... remedio, curación, medicina (remedy, cure, medicine) ... curarse (to get well, be cured) ... curar, medicinar (to cure, medicate or treat medically) ... ", not incorrect translations but incomplete ones.
25. I am impressed with this theme of oscillation in Andean discursive formations, as is apparent throughout this essay. Tristan Platt (1997:198), studying shamanic dialog with Santiago de Pumpuri, far to the south in Bolivia, says this of the saint: "He is known for his medical powers: he can kill and he can cure, and he is sometimes invoked as the Angry Doctor. ... His treatments are perceived either as disasters (disgrasiya), with which he can punish ritual neglect and moral misdemeanors, or as good fortune (surti), with which he rewards the devout." In this Quechua discourse, peppered perhaps even more with borrowings from the Spanish than in Ancash but indelibly Quechua nonetheless, the Andean is obvious.
26. Bilingual peasants and persons "in process" are likely to translate ampeq as "curioso," curious or strange person, which is closer to the ambivalence of the word.
27. My thanks to Ralph Bolton for suggesting to me in a personal communication that there existed a "hegemony of romantic essentialists" in the field of Andean studies.
28. My work on the Atusparia Uprising (Stein 1988) was an ethnohistorical account of a nineteenth century peasant rebellion. With the exception of one scholar, who has almost built a career out of re-doing it and whose mission seems to have been to discredit it, the book has been greeted with an almost stony silence. I wrote it at a time when my personal life was wreckage and my professional career was fragmented, and I think that shows in the work I produced. There are many errors and omissions in the book—and if I were to write it this year it would be completely different, though not error-free—but I think the main "fault" in it was my failure to elevate peasants to "extraordinary individuals," a superhuman condition. The reality was that the Ancash peasantry of 1885 lost its struggle because it was composed of ordinary human beings like you and me.

    Mark Thurner’s (1990:300-304) review of the book, more of a tirade, details its mistakes, misinterpretations, false starts and stops, and other faults, including my failure to cite a source that was being published at the same time that I was sending the corrected translation back to my publisher in Lima, and even putting words onto paper that I never wrote, e.g., that "campesinos ... would be incapable of leading their own movements" (301), or that the 1885 movement was "essentially antifiscal" (302). In the penultimate paragraph of the review, Thurner (303) writes that "there is much to recommend" in the book," although he does not really specify what that "much" is. It seems to me that simple incompetence would not elicit what I read as symbolic violence. This outburst suggests to me that in addition to the errors, which I freely admit, there may have been something so subversive in the book as to cause acute discomfort, not just in Thurner but in others in the Andeanist field of symbolic power.

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