Places are Kin: Food, Cohabitation, and Sociality in the Southern Peruvian Andes

“Who Would Watch the Animals?”: Gendered Knowledge and Expert Performance Among Andean Pastoralists

“…Whereas practitioners of Western scientific knowledge production might hide the social contingency of scientific practice lest it diminishes its unobjectionable quality, relationality for Andean herders is both constitutive of knowledge and key evidence of its legitimacy (Harvey 2007). In high Andean ontologies, humans, herd animals, and sentient landscape features are all nodes in a vast network of social obligation animated by practices of feeding and care (Allen 1998; Carreño 2016, 2019; de la Cadena 2015; Mannheim and Carreño 2014). The relationships between human communities and their landscapes are governed by an enduring system of reciprocity and social contract (Alberti and Mayer 1974; Boillat and Berkes 2013; Bolin 1998; de la Cadena 2010; Paerregaard 2017; Salomon and Niño‐Murcia 2011).…”

“The Mountain Ate His Heart”: Agricultural Labor and Animate Land in a Protestant Andean Community

“…When considering the filial character of human–nonhuman relationships, it is notable, but not surprising, that in P'iya Qayma, tirakuna remain in everyday, nonsacred relationships with the community during the post‐conversion time. However, while other authors have emphasized building houses, living on the soil and giving offerings of alcohol (Allen ), caring, rearing, and respect (De la Cadena ), as well as feeding and cohabitation (Salas Carreño ), as the central components of this productive relationship, I wish to draw the analytical gaze to the role of agricultural labor. Of course, elements of commensality, religious ritual, work, and feeding cannot easily be separated—agricultural work produces food and is therefore essential to acts of feeding.…”

“…Among other things, evidence from this region demonstrates that kinship often acts as a blueprint for relationships between human and nonhuman subjects. The well-documented usage of kin terms in reference to animals, plants, and landscape in the highlands suggests that people include animate nonhumans into their familial and nondivine worlds (Allen 2002;Canessa 2012;Salas Carreño 2016). Allen (2015), and Mannheim and Salas Carreño (2015), persuasively argue that wak'as (generally defined as a sacred thing or place) are beings that are kin, rather than spirits.…”

“…While the dramatic passing of Don Facundo appears to invite an analysis where the shifts in religious practice and scaling back of ritual and quotidian sacrifices have resulted in an angry apu , which is now taking life, my argument is in fact the opposite: the presence and actions of the mountain confirm that the ayllu has maintained its vitality, and the changes in religious practice has not seriously impacted on the relationship between people and land. Both revenge and violence are well‐documented elements of “normal” interactions between runakuna and tirakuna (e.g., Harris ; Salas Carreño ). I suggest that continuity has been maintained through a vernacular relationship predicated on agricultural work, thus the Protestant experience of human and nonhuman relationships is not so different from the previous Catholic one.…”

Indexicality and the Indigenization of Politics: Dancer–Pilgrims Protesting Mining Concessions in the Andes

“…Performances, due to the presuppositions present in their poetic structures enacted within larger sociopolitical contexts (Mannheim 1998), reproduce implicit indigeneity. Some of these presuppositions are ontological (Salas Carreño 2016). This is the case, for example, of all forms of verbal art in indigenous languages or the dance performances that take place in the pilgrimage (Mannheim 2016; Poole 1990).…”