Pathways of Memory and Power

Pathways of Memory
and Power

ETHNOGRAPHY AND HISTORY

AMONG AN ANDEAN PEOPLE

Thomas A. Abercrombie

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Abercrombie, Thomas Alan, 1951-
Pathways of memory and power: ethnography and history among an
Andean people I Thomas A. Abercrombie.
632 pp. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-299-15310-X (cloth: alk. paper).
ISBN 0-299-15314-2 (pbk.: alk. paper).
1. Aymara Indians-History. 2. Aymara Indians-Religion.
3. Aymara Indians-Rites and ceremonies. 4. Festivals-Bolivia-K'ulta.
5. Ethnohistory-Bolivia-K' ulta. 6. K' ulta (Bolivia )-History.
7. K'ulta (Bolivia)-Politics and government.
8. K'ulta F2230.2.A9A24 1998
984'.12-dc21 96-38814

ISBN-13: 978-0-299-15314-4 (pbk: alk. paper)

 For my parents,
N. Thomas and Margaret Elizabeth Abercrombie,
and for Chloe
 Contents

Illustrations Xl
Preface XV

1. Introduction: From Ritual to History and Back Again,

Trajectories in Research and Theory 3
History and Memory, Narrative and Landscape 10
Ethnography and History in a Postcolonial Interculture 21

Part One. An Ethnographic Pastorale: Introduction

to K'ulta and the Local Sources of History
2. Journeys to Cultural Frontiers 29
From the University of Chicago to La Paz 29
Journey to a Crossroads 37
Cruce: A Cultural Frontier 42

3. The Dialogical Politics of Ethnographic Fieldwork 52

An Ethnographer in Santa Barbara de Culta 52
Getting to Know the Mamanis: Hamlet and Town,
Vila Sirka and Santa Barbara 60
Counterethnography: The Roles and Persona of the
Ethnographer 67
A Balance Sheet of Cultural Positioning 70
Empathy, Trust, and Murder 78

4. Structures and Histories: K'ulta between Gods and State 82

Ethnographic Border Crossings 82
Council and Corregidor, Ayllu and Canton, Fiestas and
Cargos: Some Formal Institutions of K'ulta Life 86
vii
Vlll Contents

Citizenship in Ayllu and Nation 91

Household and Collective Rituals 97
Culture and the Clandestine 103
Rethinking "Syncretism": Coordinates in Space and Time
of a Colonial Interculture 109
From Historical Consciousness to a History of K'ulta 116

Part Two. Historical Paths to K'ulta: An Andean

Social Formation from Preinvasion Autonomy to
Postrevolution Atomization
5. Pathways of Historical Colonization: Stories of
an Andean Past from the Archives of Letters
and Landscapes 129
The Conquest Moment: A Conflict of Histories 131
Killaka and Asanaqi in Colonial and Perhaps Inca Times 153
Spanish Pasts and Memory Techniques 164
Recollections of Andean Memory Techniques 170
Narrative Conquests: Spanish Encounters with Mythic
Andean Journeys 190
Christianizing Qullasuyu Wanderers: Tunupa as
Martyred Apostle 206

6. Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 213

From Negotiated Toleration to Heterodox Synthesis and
Counter-Reformation Response 213
The Colonial Counter-Reformation of Viceroy Toledo 223
A New Center of the Andean World: Mita Pilgrimages
to Potosi 230
Institutions for the Reshaping of Space and Time: Visita,
Reducci6n, and Doctrina 237
An Andean Pidgin Baroque: The Counter-Reformation of
Intercultural Heresies 258
Indian Sacrifices and Indian Eucharists after Taqui Oncoy 261
Composiciones and Boundaries: Circumambulating
New Polities 282
Festivals of Rebellion: Genesis of an Andean
"Revolution of the Communities" 291
Liberalism and Ethnocide: From Land Privatization to
Cantonization and the Law of Popular Participation 304
Contents IX

Part Three. Social Memory in K'ulta: A Landscape

Poetics of Narrative, Drink, and Saints' Festivals
7. Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory: Narrative
and Libation Poetics as Historical Consciousness 317
T"akis of Modern Life: History and Social Memory in K'ulta 317
The Narrated Past: The Solar-Christ Defeats the
Supay-Chullpas 322
Space-Time in the Contexts of Everyday Life 332
Amt'an T"aki: "Paths of Memory" Traveled in Drink 344
Ch'allas in Sequence: Amt'an T"aki as Text and Performance 350
Uywa Ispira T"aki: The "Herd Vespers Path" 351
Corn Beer and Cane Liquor in a Concatenated Cosmos 362

8. Living on Tatala's Path: Uses of the Past in Sacrifice

and Antisacrifice, Saints' Festivals, and Sorceries 368
The Great Fiesta Paths 368
A Jach'a P"ista Performance: The Events of Guadalupe,
September 1982 377
Gods, Men, and Llamas in Herding and Sacrifice: Poetics
of a K'ulta Eucharist 396
Inverted Memories: From K"arisiris to Protestants 401

9. Conclusion: Ethnography and History of Social

Memory and Amnesia 408
Orality and Literacy, Ethnography and Historiography 408
Historicizing the Colonial and Postcolonial Frontiers 413
Postcolonial Social Memory and (Post?) Modernity 417

Documentary Appendix
A. Francisco Pizarro's Grant of Acho and Guarache to
Hernando de Aldana 425
B. Juntas de Indios en Pueblos Formados; Alcaldes
Hordinarios, Regidores Cadaneros 428
C. Chapters and Ordinances for the Town of Our Lady of
Bethlehem 429
D. Extirpation Report of Priest Hernan Gonzales de la Casa
(Late Sixteenth Century) 435
E. Circular Letter to Alcaldes of K'ulta, 1781 437
F. Corcino Perez' Petitions to the President of Bolivia, 1894 438
x Contents

Notes 443
Glossary 516
References 522
Index 559
 Illustrations

Maps
2.1. Bolivia: it's topography and political divisions, with inset
of department of Oruro. 40
4.1. Canton Culta/Ayllu K'ulta: ayllus and hamlets 88
5.1. Qullasuyu: federations of diarchies, suyus, and Inca roads 148
5.2. The Killaka Federation 158

Figures
2.l. Ekeko, the magical mestizo trader 36
3.1. A Mamani hamlet: plan of Vila Sirka 62
3.2. Plan of Santa Barbara de Culta 63
4.1. Jach' a p"ista t"aki: "great fiesta paths," or fiesta-cargo
careers, illustrated as sequences of offices and festivals 89
5.l. Drinking with the ancestors 142
5.2. Structure of the Killaka Federation 155
5.3. Qaranka and Killaka quarter in the field of Colchacollo
(Cochabamba valley), as assigned by Huayna Capac 157
5.4. The ceque system of Cusco 176
5.5. Quipu kamayuq 177
5.6. Painted chullpa tomb of Rio Lauca 183
5.7. The "staff god" of Tiwanaku, as depicted on the
gateway of the sun 202
5.8. Guaman Poma's San Bartolome-Tunupa 210
6.l. Colque Guarache "family path" 228
6.2. Choqueticlla "family path" with "pathless"
beggar Choqueticlla 229
6.3. Matienzo's 1567 recommendation for the layout of
reducciones 240
Xl
Xli Illustrations

6.4. Punishment at a rolla 243

6.5. The cacique at his writing table 245
6.6. Towns and ayllus of the Asanaqi diarchy 254
6.7. Table of contents page of the Libro 1 de Bautismos,
San Pedro de Condo, 1571 257
6.8. Pregunta el Autor: Guaman Poma queries his informants 264
7.1. A chullpa tomb 329
7.2. Drinking with the sun 336
7.3. Patriline-hamlet paths, marriage journeys, ch'alla pathways 338
7.4. Men's ch'allas of uywa ispira and qarwa k"ari 352
7.5. Turu wasu (chicha drinking vessel) 366
8.1. Concatenation of alguacil and jilaqata authority posts,
and the braiding of "our mother" great fiesta paths, among
hamlets and patrilines of Ayllu Manxa-Kawalli, 1973-83 371
8.2. The fiesta as sacrifice: concatenated event sequence 376
8.3. The principal duties of a single career path
(Guadalupe tayksa t"aki), as illustrated by the career of
Hilarian and Virgilio Mamani 397

Photographs
2.1a. K'ulta women sell herbal remedies and magic bundles
in the Tarabuco market 34
2.1b. A Kallawaya curandero with a medicine bag 35
2.2a. A view of Cruce on a market day in 1988 43
2.2b. Main Street, Cruce, on a market day in 1988 44
3.1. Santa Barbara de Culta before the fiesta and the rains 55
4.1. Mamani boy dressed as a soldier of Batallan Colorado 92
4.2a. Julian Mamani and Maria Calque in everyday wear 94
4.2b. Julian Mamani and Maria Calque in their
traveling clothes 95
4.3. Ch'allas at turri mallku ("male condor tower")
and the arku of Santa Barbara; Bartolome Mamani,
wasu wariri 99
4.4. K'ulta jilaqatas pour libations in the churchyard during
the fiesta of San Pedro in Condo 121
7.1. A dance group at a hilltop silu altar 345
7.2. Brewing chicha 363
8.1. Making llamas bloom, Maria Calque and Jose Mamani 379
Illustrations XI11

8.2. Paq"arayana: making the herd bloom 380

8.3. Paxcha: Alax-Kawalli musicians playa dirge after a
pair of llantirus have just been dispatched 381
8.4. The fiesta of Santa Barbara: dancing in the plaza
before tinku 387
8.5. Women and children await the banquet 391
9.1. A historian in his microfilm: author and documents
in the archive 412
9.2. Oruro kindergarteners on parade in tinku dance costumes 419
 Preface

GENEALOGY OF A PROJECT IN RESEARCH AND WRITING

Like peoples and the writings we call histories, scholarly projects also have
a past. The research that gave rise to this book, for example, did not start
out as a study that could have produced the information and arguments I
now advance. A brief survey of the transmutations that led from graduate
school to this book (and from a Ph.D. in anthropology to a job in history)
may help to account for (if not excuse) its lapses and inadequacies.
In January of 1979, a few days after surviving a massive snowstorm
as well as my proposal hearing in Chicago, I set out for Bolivia with my
wife and fellow fieldworker, Mary Dillon, who accompanied me in
Bolivia while carrying out her own research on Aymara language and
culture. I carried with me a faculty-vetted research plan that I thought to
be relatively straightforward. Having read most of the ethnographic
works then available on the mixed civil and religious authority hierar-
chies of the Andes, and naturally having found this literature wanting, I
set out to overturn the prevailing functionalist-materialist interpretations
of Andean fiesta-cargo systems and to replace them with a subtle,
context-sensitive analysis of the cultural meanings inherent in the ritual
duties of fiesta sponsors and the exercise of political office.
Following leads provided by fiesta-cargo research in Mesoamerica
(ably reviewed in Chance and Taylor 1985), those anthropologists of the
Andes who concern themselves with authority structures and saints'
festivals have tended to focus primarily on the costs incurred by festival
sponsors in a potlatch-style outlay of resources, the way that such
sponsors rise by virtue of their festival careers toward local political
office (see, for example, Buechler and Buechler, 1971; Carter 1964; Stein
1961). In the prevailing jargon of such studies, the career "ladders"
climbed by fiesta sponsors and holders of yearly political office constitute

xv
XVI Preface

a "prestige hierarchy," in which the increasing expense of each successive

step up the ladder correlates directly with its occupant's degree of local
prestige and thus political power. Most such studies also subscribe to one
side or the other in the reigning structural-functionalist debate of the
1950s to the mid-1970s, over not if but how these fiesta-cargo systems
and prestige hierarchies promote social solidarity and help to close
corporate communities. If an increase in spending correlates with a rise
in prestige in such a social system, then the question is whether that
system serves to legitimize asymmetries of wealth by granting the rich a
form of ritual mystification of privilege, or whether it serves to level
potential asymmetries of wealth through a redistribution in which the
"haves" are granted temporary power and prestige in exchange for their
material surpluses.
While they attend to the inequalities of sponsor wealth and festival
expenditure, such approaches, I felt, have neglected to analyze (and in
some cases, even to describe) other important details: the exact nature of
the rituals involved, the role of the saints and other sacred beings in the
everyday lives of community members, and the local significance of the
authority roles to which sponsorship of fiestas lead. Without such
information, it is impossible to apprehend the culturally constituted
values that might motivate participation in such a system, other than
attributing to them our own culture's "commonsense" interpretation of
the goal of much symbolic activity, namely, the maximization of indi-
vidual economic advantage.
Not all such studies invoke such terms, but most bring functional
premises in through the back door by calling attention to how fiesta-
cargo systems create "prestige hierarchies," a term usually used as a
euphemism for "hierarchies of wealth." In a way that starkly contrasts
with the care these authors take to seek out native terms and interpre-
tations of other matters, the accrual of "prestige" is applied as a
self-evident (functional and utilitarian) explanation of ritual expendi-
tures, the value that inspires participation in fiesta-cargo systems.
Inspired by the pioneering work of Isbell ([1978] 1985), I proposed to
discover the values that motivate people to engage in fiesta-cargo careers
and the meanings inherent in their activities.
As if that in itself were not enough for a year-long period of research
that was to begin with study of the Aymara language, I planned to do
much more. During the late 1970s anthropological practice began to
shift. Under attack was the discipline's customary concern with suppos-
edly isolated and self-contained traditional societies, an artifact of social
Preface XVIl

anthropology's ongm as a handmaiden to colonialism, and also a

product of the presuppositions entailed in functionalist as well as
structuralist theories. Such concerns led me to qualify my research
proposal in complementary ways. On the one hand, I sought to
understand the transformations suffered by ritual authority systems as a
result of the interface between local orders and more global processes: So
I proposed to study ritual-authority systems in the Lake Titicaca area,
where a rapid process of conversion to evangelical Protestantism and
political fission seemed to go hand in glove with relatively high levels of
participation in the mostly urban national culture of nearby La Paz. I
therefore sought to highlight the interplay between the definition of the
social unit and the meanings encoded in festival and political practice,
which I felt would be clearest in a context where both the boundaries of
social groups and the legitimacy of the fiesta-cargo doxa were being
questioned. Thus I aimed to understand what meanings festival partici-
pation and civil authority posts have for their participants by focusing
on a moment of meaning change.
While I believe that I have been fair in my characterization of the
fiesta-cargo literature, it might appear to those familiar with Andean
ethnography as more a caricature. That is because so little of the
ethnography published in the 1970s and 1980s has dealt with fiesta-
cargo systems (see, however, Rasnake 1988a, whose research-in-
progress was influential when I began to do my own research).
Those decades saw the publication of a considerable amount of
ethnography on the Andes, but ethnography influenced by other research
paradigms, largely ethnohistorical and ecological. In effect, much of
Andeanist ethnography aims to reconcile the pre-Columbian past with
the postcolonial present. At the same time, many of these works have
also sought to reconcile the three most influential approaches to the
Andean past: the predominantly materialist project of John V. Murra to
describe an Andes-specific type of political economy, the historicist
project of John H. Rowe to mine chronicles and archives for material to
construct a chronological history of pre-Columbian Incas and their
colonial heirs, and the structuralist efforts of R. Tom Zuidema to
comprehend complex Andean social structures through the lens of Inca
cosmology.
Seeing as how the reconciliation of such apparently contradictory
approaches has been the aim of much frenetic theorizing in the post-
structuralisms and postmodernisms of the last few decades, it came as no
surprise that some seminal works (like those of Tristan Platt, Deborah
XVlll Preface

Poole, Joanne Rappaport, Roger Rasnake, Maria Rostworowski, Frank

Salomon, Irene Silver blatt, Michael Taussig, Gary Urton, and Nathan
Wachtel, to mention but a few) 1 have enlivened Andean ethnography
while crossing the frontiers of materialism and structuralism, semiotics
and history. Using various theoretical frameworks, they have leapt
beyond the functionalist concerns that characterized 1950s and 1960s
"community studies," landing in the deeper waters of cultural significa-
tion. Most have also heeded Murra's and Zuidema's admonitions that
the pre-Columbian past and ethnographic present can each help to
inform the other. On the other side of the aisle, seminal works by
historians Sabine MacCormack, Karen Spalding, and Steve J. Stern,
among others, have also engaged such matters, drawing on the resources
of social history to blend materialist and culturalist approaches, and,
breaking with an older tradition of treating "indians" * as passive players
in stories about conquering Spaniards, have adopted the anthropolo-
gists' "bottom-up" perspective to seek out indigenous points of view.
We now have many beautifully detailed analyses of not only Andean
forms of political economy, vertical ecology, everyday reciprocity, and
systems of kinship and marriage, but also Andean symbolic practice,

"Throughout this work I have adopted the terms of reference used in sources and in
everyday discourse. Thus "indian," referring in colonial and modern sources to Native
South Americans, amerinds, indigenous peoples, and in some contexts campesinos or
"peasants," is not my analytic category, but a category of ascribed and/or asserted
collective identity that requires analysis. It may have been more correct, but also awkward,
to have left this term in the original Spanish "indio," along with the other group categories
such as "espanol" (Spaniard) and "negro" (African or black), and other terms for mixtures
of these fundamental categories (such as "mestizo," "mulato," "samba," "pardo,"
"castizo," "criol/o," and a host of others). I will argue that in the earlier colony, "indio,"
"espanol," and "negro" were categories of nacion (nation, in an old regime sense), being
transformed into categories of presumed race only in the late eighteenth century, when
"espanol criollo" was displaced by the color term "blanco" (white), and "indio criollo" by
the insult term "cholo," applied to an upwardly mobile indio who had failed to conceal his
true identity (see Abercrombie 1996 for a fuller treatment of this issue).
I have chosen to use common English translations of these terms, but also to violate
conventional capitalization rules. "Indian" is capitalized in English because it corresponds
to the geographic entity India; "Creole" is treated as a proper noun because it signifies (in
the Caribbean) a kind of language or cuisine, which are not among the usages I examine
here. I thus choose to use these terms in the lower case, retaining capitalization only for
more proper geographic designations such as "Spanish" and "Spaniard," "Andes" and
"Andean." Although "Spaniard," "indian," "mestizo," and like terms henceforth generally
appear without quotation marks, I use them always in a qualified sense, as cultural
constructs of difference rather than labels for some prior racial or ethnic realities.
Preface XlX

cosmologies, ritual cycles, and a host of particular rituals in particular

places. The anthropological euphoria over the discovery of many surviv-
ing and beautifully complex cultural forms within Andean communities
has had a salutary effect on the scholarly literature and, ultimately, on
the evolution of new political stances among Andean nation makers
toward "indigenous" cultural forms in rural "peasant" communities.
Yet the appeal or discovering effective cultural resistance, of revealing
the Spanish overlay as merely a thin veneer covering a clandestine but
ongoing survival of a coherent and purely Andean cosmology, has at
times led ethnographers to overshoot the mark. Joseph Bastien's (1978)
otherwise admirable and sensitive account of an aesthetically appealing
Kallawaya hydraulic mountain cosmology, for example, reaches so far
beyond the Christian "overlay" that Kallawaya sponsorship of Christian
saints' festivals, and the political structures that emerge from such
sponsorship, nearly disappear from the monograph. A fine and heartfelt
ethnography by Catherine Allen (1988) captivatingly engages the reader
in the ethnographer's experience, especially in the difficult-to-convey
forms of everyday Andean sociality that operate through the chewing of
coca and the drinking of alcohol. Yet in foregrounding the uniquely
Andean features of consuming, exchanging, and offering coca and
alcohol, the apparently Spanish and Christian features of this experience
rhetorically fade into insignificance. Both ethnographies also avoid much
engagement with the relationship of their communities with nearby
towns that link them, as isolated places, with the road network, markets,
and antithetical identity projects of city people and the elite of the
national state. The elided towns in both ethnographies, not coinciden-
tally, served or serve as ritual and political centers of fiesta-cargo systems
into which the "isolated" communities were integrated.
Such studies demonstrate the degree to which Andean cultural forma-
tions have resisted the predatory encroachments of both colonial- and
republican-period "civilizational" projects. They offer useful tools in the
development of indigenista and indianista identity projects and their
goals of ethnic solidarity and nationalism, which highlight the heroic
qualities of successful colonial resistance and seek to turn this resistance
against systematic discrimination and imperialism. It is relatively easy to
foreground cultural continuities and hence write a cultural-resistance
success story solely by privileging terms that carry "indigenous" inflec-
tions: ayllu rather than canton, jilaqata instead of cacique, rituals
directed towards mountains rather than towards saints. Yet in such
efforts to foreground "an Andean order of things," as suggested by the
xx Preface

title of another recent work (Arnold, Jimenez, and Yapita 1992),

ethnographers sometimes repeat, albeit with different intent, the "idols
behind altars" or "baptized but not evangelized" rhetoric of colonial
administrators and extirpators of idolatry.
Colonial officials created a rhetoric that could portray the failure of
previous civilization and conversion projects so that their own oppres-
sive projects might gain official approval; to preserve the colony, the
process of civilization and conversion had to remain incomplete. Curi-
ously, the staunchest critics of the colonial project forward similar
arguments to prove the inefficacy of colonial indoctrination and the
resistive capacities of the colonized. What can we make of the fact that
indianista "ethnic nationalist" authors and anthropologists romancing
fully "other" others share rhetorical strategies with colonial administra-
tors? At the very least, we can conclude that such rhetorics are deployed
to forward what are essentially historical hypotheses: The most funda-
mental claim underlying theses of cultural resistance or continual ism is
that indigenous cultures have been (heroically) impervious to the contin-
gent stream of colonial events. From there it is only a short step to the
conclusion that indigenous culture is, as ritual was once thought to be,
extra- or even anti historical. Whether we conclude with the extirpators
that indians remain idolatrous because of their ignorant and malevolent
obstinacy, or conclude with the indigenous nationalists and romantic
anthropologists that pre-Columbian culture remains intact because of
the indians' resistance to homogenizing imperialist forces, we forward
theses about the outcome of long-term social processes. Such historical
theses stipulate that indians resist transformation because they are
impervious to history, living in a structural closure that, like the shields
of the Federation Starship Enterprise, can withstand the impact of all
alien events.
I claim no exemption from such sins. By the time I set out for "the
field" after six months of studying the Aymara language in La Paz, I had
decided not to pursue my original, comparative project, because I would
have had insufficient time for more than one community study. At the
same time, I had concluded that to study the transformation of a cultural
order, one must first establish the nature of the status quo ante; I chose,
that is, to jettison the social transformation project in order to focus on
the dynamics of ritual and political life in a single, relatively "tradi-
tional" community. Thus I opted out of history, back to the already
anachronistic "closed corporate community."
My shift towards what I held to be an apparently historically "cold"
fieldsite was a reasoned one, grounded in theoretical concerns. A subtle
Preface XXl

semiotic account of an Andean town's fiesta-cargo system might tran-

scend the limitations of functionalist and economistic approaches, and
account in culturally salient terms for the values that motivated partici-
pation in saints' festivals and town council politics. Such a study could
then serve as a baseline for a future study of social change.
There were other motives for my shift in fieldsite as well. Further
readings on Andean history while in La Paz (under the tutelage of
Tristan Platt, who' took me on an extended tour of his library) led me to
believe that by studying a community where the saints were still revered,
where the town council members emerged from festival sponsorship, and
where social units like ayllus and moieties still clearly persisted, I might
succeed in tracing contemporary social forms back into the documented
past, hence discerning the competing influences of Spanish colonialism
versus pre-Columbian heritage. Ironically, I too chose to work in a
"traditional" community so as to approach history retrospectively.
I stayed long enough in that small town, a place called Santa Barbara
de Culta (capital of a territory and people who call themselves Cultas,
rendered "K'ultas" in modern Aymara orthography),2 to witness the
arrival of Protestantism, to see the people of part of the territory submit
a petition for peasant union incorporation, to note the massive out-
migration of K'ulta people into coca-production zones, and to witness a
rapidly escalating process of community fissioning. But these were not
what I had set out to study.
By tuning out the "invasive" influences from the city and national
culture that were readily apparent in the truckstop town nearest to the
"isolated" community I had come to investigate, I was able to convince
myself that my fieldsite was an extraordinarily "traditional" one, where
pre-Columbian forms still persisted to a degree I could not have
predicted, even by drawing on the most romantic of the resistance
literature. Had I not, for very contingent reasons, spent much time in the
truckstop town of Cruce and also taken the historical turn, I might have
tried to write a resistance narrative as my dissertation (although it would
have been sorely tested by my teachers' own historical turns and the
general displacement of domination-resistance models by hegemony-
counterhegemony ones). At any rate, when I prepared for fieldwork in
1978, I had had no inclination to accept the admonitions of Chicago
anthropologist R. T. Smith that, in conditions like those of the Bolivian
"Aymara,,,3 where a class like asymmetry of power infused all relations
between "indigenous people" and "nonindians," both rural and urban
and indian and nonindian cultural systems interpenetrated one another.
Had I taken his advice (or given heed to the work of Jean Barstow
XXll Preface

[1979], who was completing her dissertation as I prepared to leave for

Bolivia), I might sooner have shifted away from domination-resistance
paradigms towards a more historically grounded and less romanticizing
approach. As it was, that shift was more fortuitous than reasoned.
By the time I left K'ulta territory in July of 1980, my Aymara had
improved enough for me to appreciate how much I still did not know
about the fiestas and politics I had come to study. I had learned that
while K'ultas are adamant Christians, whose saints' festivals are arenas
in which fiesta sponsors gain the respect of their peers, enabling them
subsequently to exercise legitimate authority during turns as members of
the council of Santa Barbara de Culta, the ritual duties of saints' feast
sponsors and council authorities also include more clandestine perfor-
mances, above all frequent animal sacrifices. Offering their most valued
animals, male llamas, to Christ (whom they also hold to be the sun) and
to the Virgin (who is at the same time the moon), K'ultas give their
celestial deities animal substitutes for themselves, and by doing so seem
to take on attributes of herd leader and shepherd, by which in various
speech forms they characterize control over the animal world typical of
their pastoral life-ways, but also typify the pastoral language by which a
biblical deity exercises sovereignty over people.
However, such new avenues for approaching the meanings enacted in
Andean fiesta-cargo systems began to open up only at the end of my
fieldwork period. At the very end of my stay, I also discovered that
festival sacrifices are marked out by complex libation performances,
which, like the myths I heard, seem a rich source for understanding the
meaning of sacrifice, fiesta, and also K'ulta ways of thinking about the
past. 4 Although I had only the barest glimpse of such things after a year's
work, I had heard many local narratives, left my mark on town council
documents, and poured a great many libations for beings from the past
who still live on in the mountains and plains of K'ulta.
Once I realized that a year's work in K'ulta territory was not enough
to enable me to flesh out these understandings, I began to seek funding
for a second year of field research, but this proved impossible. Instead,
several shorter return trips proved invaluable, and eventually I com-
pleted a dissertation exploring these themes, "The Politics of Sacrifice:
An Aymara Cosmology in Action" (University of Chicago, 1986). In the
end, however, I devoted about a third of the dissertation to what I called
an ethnohistory of K'ulta. A serendipitous eligibility requirement for one
of the application forms I had sent for-Fulbright lIE-led me to write a
proposal for "ethnohistorical" research in Buenos Aires, where I had
heard that colonial documents on Bolivia are to be found.
Preface XXlll

In late August of 1980, I launched myself into the laborious grind of

archival research. Seeking to historicize my account of accommodated
cultural resistance, I found that writing a history of the colonized
requires a good deal of creativity. The formerly "standard" sorts of
sources turned out to be quite insufficient; the "vision of the vanquished"
resided in between the lines, in small nuggets of information lodged
within litigation recor:ds, census materials, and the humdrum documents
of notarial books and parish registers. Such techniques had already been
explored for the writing of Andean history by pathbreaking luminaries
such as John V. Murra, Franklin Pease, and Maria Rostworowski as part
of an endeavor called ethnohistory, and were also very much in vogue
among practitioners of analogous efforts that are elsewhere called
history from below.
The end product of this almost accidental combination of ethno-
graphic and historical research was a dissertation, in which a history of
the K'ulta region drawn from written sources uneasily coexists with a
relatively standard sort of ethnography. Neither part of the endeavor
benefited from any particular effort to query the relationship between
my own historical and ethnographic project (as investigation, power-
laden fieldwork, or writing effort) and those of the people past and
present about whom I wrote. A full decade has passed in the transfor-
mation of dissertation to book, during which academic fashions have
changed and I have completed additional research. During that decade, I
also became a historian, successively enamored by new and more
culturally sensitive approaches to popular history, ethnographic history,
and microhistory. Not surprisingly, what I offer here is something
essentially new.
As I began to rework my dissertation for publication, I became
increasingly dissatisfied with both its historical and its ethnographic
parts. The former, it seemed to me, may have offered an "ethnohistory,"
a "history from below" of a non-Western people, but it did so within
Euro-American historical canons. I had created a written past for a
people who had not written their own, but I now found that the past I
provided them was not one they would recognize. Sweeping them up
into the narrative project of colonial and imperial history, my ethnohis-
tory in fact colonized the K'ulta people's past, as well as that of their
ancestors, about whom I wrote without much attention to how they
would have understood their pasts. In my ethnographic fieldwork, I had
realized that the people of K'ulta indeed make their own history,
understanding through mostly unwritten forms of social memory their
relationship to the past. So too, after I had read Spanish colonial
XXIV Preface

writings more closely, it began to appear that the colonial project itself
had in many ways aimed to erase Andean ways of understanding the
past, in order to colonize Andean forms of historical consciousness. At
least some Spaniards even seemed to have understood the nature of their
project, although they conceived it as the substitution of the universal
truth for indian errors and superstitions.
I do not pretend to offer here an objective account of the past and
present of a historically subordinated people. Instead, I present three
interrelated and multivocal stories: an account of my ethnographic
fieldwork (part 1), an account of past conflicts in historical conscious-
ness between rural communities and colonizing states (part 2),5 and a
detailed study of some persisting K'ulta ways of understanding the
relevance of the past to the present (part 3). All three parts aim to expose
the power-laden discourses that produced the evidence presented here,
whether that of my ethnographic encounters, colonial encounters of the
past, or the internalized "intercultural" self-consciousness of K'ulta
people who theorize in their practices about their relationship to
powerful forces not only of the animated landscape in which they live
but also of the national state and international capital.
Juxtaposing in this way a reflexive ethnography and reflexive history,
I aim to unmask the politics of ethnography and of history, but not to
call ethnographic and historical practice into question. Instead, I hope to
demonstrate that, in the study of the people and relationships of colonial
situations, our motives, goals, and discursive strategies are enmeshed in
the very kinds of struggles about which we write. As we strive to hear an
indigenous voice in documents produced for the state's archives, we find
those very documents to be a discursive frontier, a barrier of miscom-
munication erected between colonizer and colonized. And as we carry
out ethnographic fieldwork to find indigenous meaning worlds, we
discover them to be concealed in clandestine spaces.
Once, such frustrating experiences were destined to be relegated to
diaries and working notes, or they were humorous anecdotes to be
discarded when we had overcome the obstacles between us and the
indians. Here I choose to focus on that discursive frontier, in the belief
that it is fundamentally constitutive of the relationship between coloniz-
ers and colonized, states and subordinated peoples, and therefore also
constitutive of the forms of self-understanding of each. By foregrounding
the resistances, silences, lies, and other barriers that we, as ethnogra-
phers or historians, encounter in our efforts to "get into" the lives of
persons in living societies or documented pasts, we may uncover keys to
the intercultural situation that we set out to study. That is my goal here.
Preface xxv

* * *
The writing of a book is perhaps never the product of a single hand. This
book has risen from several years of research nurtured by numerous
teachers, colleagues, and students, and developed in many conferences,
conversations, correspondences, and friendships, making the effort to
recall all the debts I have incurred nearly overwhelming.
To Mary F. Dillon, who accompanied me in much of the field research
and many an archival foray, and offered countless hours of conversation
and collaboration on Andean themes over several years, I am deeply
indebted.
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, the
unique convergence in my life of two extraordinary Australians, John
Earls and Michael Taussig, drew me towards Andean anthropology and
history. Without their encouragement and the continuing inspiration of
their work, this book would not be in the reader's hands. Fellow
anthropology undergraduates Joseph Gaughan and David Stoll have
over the years helped to sustain me through the slings and arrows of
academic and personal life.
Between hammer and anvil at the University of Chicago's forge of
aspiring anthropologists, many persons contributed valuable comments
and criticisms on various chapters of the dissertation that eventuated in
this book. Above all, my friend and mentor Terence S. Turner has lent his
critical acumen and support at several crucial junctures in the production
of this book. For their advice and commentary, I am indebted to John
Coatsworth, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Nancy Munn, Don Rice,
Marshall Sahlins, Michael Silverstein, S. J. Tambiah, Valerio Valeri, and
the late Sol Tax, among other present and past University of Chicago
faculty members. The cross-disciplinary courage and humane scholarly
example of Bernard Cohn and George Stocking have also been impor-
tant. I like to think that at one time or another the late Chicago
luminaries Mircea Eliade, A. K. Ramanujan, and Victor Turner also left
their stamp upon my work. Early drafts of various chapters benefited
enormously from the input of fellow graduate students Fernando
Coronil, Mark Francillon, Paul Goldstien, Carol Hendrickson, Bruce
Mannheim, Rafael Sanchez, Julie Skurski, and Charles Stanish.
For completion of the dissertation from which portions of this book
have been drawn, ethnographic research in Bolivia and archival research
in Bolivia, Argentina, and Spain was supported by Fulbright-Hays
(1979-80); Fulbright lIE (1980-81); the University of Chicago Center
for Latin American Studies Mellon Fund, the Whatcomb Museum, and
XXVI Preface

Sigma Xi (1982). Additional research for this book, ranging from

archival work to brief visits to K'ulta, was completed in the margins of
other postdoctoral projects funded by the Council for the International
Exchange of Scholars, U.S.-Spain Bi-national Commission (1987); Ful-
bright and SSRC (1988); the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropo-
logical Research (1990); Fulbright-CIES (1993); and by University of
Miami Max Orovitz Awards and General Research Awards in 1991,
1992, and 1994.
Numerous other institutions also provided essential support. Part 1
was drafted during breaks from another project while a Fulbright fellow
in Seville, where Jose Hernandez Palomo and the Escuela de Estudios
Hispanoamericanos helped provide critical working space. A prelimi-
nary draft of the Introduction was worked out in context of a February
1994 conference organized in Paris by Therese Bouysse in memory of
Theirry Saignes. Parts of chapter 8 were completed for a 1993 confer-
ence on Andean kinship in St. Andrews, Scotland, organized by Denise
Arnold and Tristan Platt. Chapter 5 and 6 were given impetus by
preparation of lectures for a postgraduate seminar presented at the
Universidad Nacional de Jujuy, Argentina, during August of 1994.
Thanks for the opportunity go to Marta Ruiz, Alejandro Isla, and a
challenging group of scholars in Jujuy. Chapter 7 was first redrafted
from a dissertation chapter for Borrachera y memoria, edited by my late
friend Theirry Sa ignes and published by HISBOL, La Paz, 1993. I thank
HISBOL for permission to republish portions of that article, and Siglo
XXI Editores for permission to reprint drawings of Felipe Guaman Porn a
de Ayala (from EI primer nueva coronica y buen gobierno, Rolena
Adorno and John V. Murra, eds., 1980), which illustrate the text.
The directors and staffs of numerous archives have provided repeated
help. In particular I must thank those of the Archivo General de Indias
(Seville), the Archivo de la Real Academia de Historia (Madrid), the
Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid), the Archivo General de la Nacion de
Argentina (Buenos Aires), the Archivo Judicial de Oruro (Bolivia), the
Archivo del Tribunal de Poopo (Bolivia), the Archivo de Derechos Reales
(Oruro, Bolivia), the Archivo Historico de Potosi (Casa de la Moneda,
Potosi, Bolivia), and above all, the late Gunnar Mendoza, past director
Josep Barnadas, current director Rene Arze, and the excellent staff of the
Archivo Nacional de Bolivia (Sucre). At the Escuela de Estudios Hispa-
noamericanos, where chapters 2-4 were drafted during 1993, special
thanks go to Jose Hernandez Palomo for his help in facilitating work
space in the world's most enchanting city.
Preface XXVll

At various junctures, ideas and issues developed herein have benefited

from discussions with or comments by Xavier Albo, Arjun Appadurai,
Denise Arnold, Monica Barnes, Rossana Barragan, James Boon,
Christina Bubba, Therese Bouysse-Cassagne, Marisol de la Cadena,
Fernando Cajias, Veronica Cereceda, David Cook, Alexandra Parma
Cook, Jean-Jacques Decoster, John H. Elliott, Jane Fajans, Nancy
Farriss, Antoinette Fioravanti-Molinie, Ed Franquemont, Christine
Franquemont, Teresa Gisbert, Martha Hardmann, Inge Harmann,
Olivia Harris, Billie-Jean Isbell, Javier Izco, Catherine Julien, Michael
LaRosa, Brooke Larson, Edward LiPuma, Sabine MacCormack, Gabriel
Martinez, Enrique Mayer, Walter Mignolo, John V. Murra, Scarlet
O'Phelan, Benjamin Orlove, Sherry Ortner, Tristan Platt, Karen Powers,
Susan Ramirez, Roger Rasnake, Mercedes del Rio, Silvia Rivera, Guido
Ruggiero, Frank Salomon, Stephen Sangren, Linda Seligmann, Ray-
mond T. Smith, Geoffrey Spurling, Steve J. Stern, Burkhardt Swartz,
David Tuchschneider, Henrique Urbano, Rafael Varon, Nathan Wach-
tel, Mary Weismantel, Norman Whitten, Juan de Dios Yapita, Elaine
Zorn, and Tom Zuidema. Along with their scholarly input, the
friendship and support of the late Thierry Saignes and Lucy Therina
Briggs were also of great significance.
Students in courses taught at the Departments of Anthropology of
Cornell University, Stanford University, the Universidad 1ecnica de
Oruro, and the University of Chicago have offered insightful challenges
and insights. Graduate students at the University of Miami also provided
comments on draft chapters. Special thanks go to Sarah Elizabeth Penry
and Douglas Trefzger, who commented on the manuscript as a whole
and offered many suggestions for improvements in argument and style.
Anonymous readers for the University of Wisconsin Press as well as
Duke University Press provided important criticism and suggestions for
revision, some of which I have heeded. Paul Gelles, Florencia Mallon,
and Gary Urton each provided detailed and critically important com-
ments on the draft manuscript as a whole, and they have saved me from
many a false turn in argument and indelicacy of style. I am also indebted
to editor Rosalie Robertson of the University of Wisconsin Press, whose
efficient support shepherded this work through the entire publication
process in the most humane manner imaginable. Argument and style
have also benefited enormously from the meticulous efforts of copy
editor Robin Whitaker.
No doubt I have forgotten key names in my litany of gratitude; my
apologies to those I have inadvertently slighted. My thanks also to all
XXVlll Preface

those who have wittingly or unwittingly helped me capture the evanes-

cent idea or elusive connection; it is not possible to repay the debt or
damage for so many ideas borrowed, begged, and stolen from others,
theirs no matter how much I have bent them to my own purposes. My
apologies in advance to the reader of this book, who must suffer the
consequences of my inability to have heeded correctly the sage advice of
so many fine teachers and fellow students.
Pathways of Memory and Power
 Chapter One

Introduction
From Ritual to History and Back Again,
Trajectories in Research and Theory

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by
themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given
and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves
and things, in creating something that has never yet existed,
precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously
conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from
them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new
scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this
borrowed language.
-Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Around the year 1520 (a year in which the commoners of Castile's towns
rose up against Charles V and burdensome aristocrats and, in the
Caribbean, Cortes pursued his conquest of Mexico), the following story
unfolded: An Aymara mallku named Inca Colque, hereditary lord of the
diarchies Killaka, Asanaqi, Awllaka-Urukilla, and Siwaruyu-Arakapi,
dispatches a group of young married men on the great Inca highway to
Cusco. After formally requesting their services and entreating them with
a banquet and copious libations of corn beer, he tells them that it is their
turn, their mit' a, to undertake personal service to the Inca emperor. An
imposing figure dressed in lavish Inca shirts laced with gold and silver
threads, Inca Colque rides in a litter on the shoulders of fifty Uru
retainers when he inspects his territory and people, having earned the
shirts, the right to ride the litter, and the title Inca precisely for his
services to the Inca empire in peace and war. Raised to the status of unu
mallku, "lord of ten thousand households," Inca Colque may well

3
4 Introduction

have received these honors during the Inca ruler's personal inspection
tour of Qullasuyu, if not in the periodic sacrificial pilgrimage-ceremony
of capac hucha, the imperial ritual of the "opulent prestation."l Having
entered on good terms into a personal relationship with the Inca Huayna
Capac and become a stand-in for the Inca administration as well as their
"natural lord," he has become a fearful figure to his assembled people.
But he is also generous, adept at transforming patrimonial gifts into an
asymmetrical obligation. To the assembled group he commits his young
grandson Guarache, who is to learn the imperial language, Quechua,
and take up one of the duties (such as feather-worker) appropriate to
noble youth in the Inca capital, joining them in the carefully orchestrated
stages of their initiation as privileged future rulers.
The group takes to the Inca highway, the qapaq nan ("great road" or
"opulent way") that leads from the farthest corners of the realm directly
to Cusco. Fed and clothed from Inca storehouses along the way and
housed in Inca rest houses and supply depots at regular intervals along
the road, the group wends its way on the well-made road through the
territories of once-hostile neighboring groups.
The group stops at the Inca administrative center of Jatun Qulla,
where the memory of a great pre-Inca warrior-mallku lives on, notwith-
standing his transformation after defeat by the Inca into the leather of a
ritual drum on which the meter of Inca epics is now banged out. Greeted
with welcome food and drink and shown to their night's quarters, the
group moves directly to the great hall facing the town's large plaza.
Great numbers of corn beer storage jars draw their attention, before Inca
priests begin to serve them large cups of the refreshing but intoxicating
beverage. When each one is handed a ceramic beaker, painted with
scenes from the mythic past, he is told to which wak' a he should
dedicate the drink. After many commensal toasts, each one has recalled
a genealogy of the gods that interweaves their own, local past with that
of the ruling Inca.
In the morning, they will continue on the way to Cusco, the Inca
"world navel," where they will participate in more religious rites at the
very center of the Inca empire. Through them, they will learn the
imperial ritual calendar enacted in lyric song-dances and sacrifices at
wak'a shrines along ceque lines. Dancing along ritual paths that radiate
through the Cusco valley from the Qurikancha (one of which reaches
deep into Qullasuyu, corresponding to the "line of travel" of creator
deities that emerged from Lake Titicaca), they will become adept in the
religiously grounded political organization of the empire, and they will
Introduction 5

understand the festive and sacramental value of work they may, seven
years later, undertake in Inca fields producing corn for the vast quanti-
ties of beer that this complex interweaving of Inca and "ethnic" gods and
genealogies requires.
Unlike the others, young Guarache, unmarried son of their para-
mount mallku, Inca Colque, will remain in Cusco to be raised within the
age-graded ritual "schools" in which Incas inculcate the privileged elites
of conquered peoples in cosmopolitan values. 2

Over a period of several weeks in late 1575, don Juan Col que
Guarache, hereditary lord of a people called Killaka (and son of the
Guarache raised in Cusco), assembles Spanish and native witnesses to
answer a set of questions about his genealogy and his family's services to
the Inca state and to Spanish colonial authorities. With the intervention
of Spanish courtroom officials, a scribe, interpreter, and numerous
witnesses, he constructs a probanza de servicios y meritos, a "proof of
services and merit," chronologically recounting an event sequence reach-
ing from Inca times to his own present. Like the thousands of other
legally sworn "curriculum vitae" that crowd the shelves of Spanish and
Latin American archives, Calque Guarache's probanza construes an
account of the past-a historical narrative-that places him at the
subjective center of events in the most favorable possible light. With
special emphasis on support and supply in journeys of Inca and Spanish
conquest, on the provisioning of troops and supplies for the Inca
conquest of Chich as, the posting of spies on the roads to aid the Crown's
war on rebellious conquistadors, and the levying of laborers for the
mines of Potosi, Colque Guarache's services appear as a series of vectors
reaching out from his home territory of Killaka to the farthest corners of
Peru. Directed to Philip II of Spain and to imperial archives via postroad
and dispatch ship, the probanza includes an appeal for specific boons
(assessed in coin and in Spanish-style aristocratic privileges) that his
services warrant. 3

One day during 1549, Pedro Cieza de Leon, in the midst of a journey
from Cusco to Potosi down the qapaq nan, the Inca road that is now
trunk route of Spanish colonial journeys, stops on the shores of Lake
Titicaca to question local native leaders. Eager to understand how the
Andean past can be reconciled with the universal history of a Bible that
mentions neither the Indies nor indians, and to satisfy his curiosity about
how the impressive ruins of Tiwanaku could have been built by
6 Introduction

predecessors of the barbaric people he has encountered here, Cieza

probes with pointed questions about the distant past, and records-in
his travel narrative account about the Incas-the fragments of native
fables that contribute to his own historical theses. The stories his
interlocutors tell him describe the superhuman acts of their culture
heroes, performed during foundational journeys that created the land-
scape through which the events are remembered. Anticipating much later
historical theorizing, Cieza fixes on apparent commonalities between
such stories and biblical narrative, especially the theme of a universal
flood, in an effort to draw the Andean past into universal history. He
records one myth fragment that suggests, to him, that Tiwanaku must
have been built by "people like ourselves," referring to Europeans, who
were subsequently annihilated by less civilized Aymara invaders. In a few
suggestive paragraphs, Cieza lays the groundwork for many other
theorists (from seventeenth-century Spanish chroniclers to Thor Heyer-
dahl and Erich von Daniken) for whom determined forms of social
memory have left no space for an autonomous American history or an
independent Amerindian form of historical consciousness (see Cieza de
Leon 1986).

It is midmorning on September 7, 1982, in the hamlet of Vila Sirka,

not far from the highland Bolivian town of Santa Barbara de Culta. A
group of Aymara-speaking men, mostly brothers and cousins bearing the
patronym Mamani, are seated on stones around a small stone altar
within the llama corral, atop a deep cushion of dried llama dung. Acting
as awarint wasu wariri, the "alcohol cup server," don Bartolome
Mamani offers a small shot of diluted cane liquor, served in an unusual
silver cup (a miniature pair of yoked silver bulls stand in the center,
belly-deep in alcohol). He hands the cup to his cousin Manuel, who
pours a few drops at each corner of the altar, intoning the words jira t' all
misa taki, "for the dung-plain altar." After gulping down the remainder
of the serving, he hands the cup back to don Bartolome, who refills the
cup and urges each man present to imitate don Manuel. Fifty shots later,
thoroughly inebriated, don Bartolome and the other elders in the corral
complete their ritual, which they call amt' an t"aki, a "memory path." By
then they (and their wives, seated on the ground a few meters away,
engaged in a gender-parallel performance)4 have recalled and intoned the
names of many ascendant ancestors and a litany of ever more distant
mountains, plains, and other sacred places, mapping out in their minds a
centripetal journey across the living landscape that embodies their past. 5
Introduction 7

One morning in January of 1988 as I walk through the marketplace in

Oruro, Bolivia, a sidewalk vender calls out my name when I step over
her small array of brushes. At first sight I see only another of the
ubiquitous bowler derby- and pol/era-clad "cholitas" whose wares
dominate urban street markets, but after a closer look and a brief
conversation, I recognize dona Maria, a woman I had first met in 1979
not long after beginning ethnographic work in the countryside. Back
then, she had gone about in the homespun outfit of the rural indigenous
population, as had her husband, Julian Mamani, nephew of the libation
specialist Bartolome Mamani. When I ask about him, dona Maria
explains that he is locked up in Oruro's prison. Not long afterward,
spurred by long-standing mutual obligations, through which personal
relations are transacted in the countryside, I wind up serving as a
combination expert witness and character reference for Julian.
Having rejected what he felt to be a custom-bound and backward
lifestyle, Julian had sought to escape the past by selling pieces of it. He
had already pleaded guilty to several counts of theft, having taken
colonial paintings and silverwork from a series of rural churches in his
home district, after, he argued, he had been duped by a wily antiquities
dealer in La Paz. Caught in the crossroads town of Cruce with his cash
(and unsold loot) in hand, he had nearly been lynched by his own kins-
men, among whom he had become persona non grata. Julian had taken
the easy road to capitalist success (and an urban lifestyle) by converting
the sacred objects of his people's heritage into a more transcultural form
of capital, but he had in fact robbed himself of his own past. Having now
been schooled in the regimes of time and work discipline behind the steel
gate of San Pedro prison, he would not be returning to a rural llama-
herding lifestyle, as he had promised the judge; he would spend his future
eking out a living making brushes and brooms as his jailers had taught
him, as a newly minted member of the urban proletariate.
Finally the day arrives for my testimony on his behalf. Julian Mamani
is escorted from jail to a hearing room of the Superior Court of Oruro,
where I wait just outside the door. When he arrives, he reaches out to
shake my hand and stealthily presses into my palm a many-times-folded
piece of paper. Worried that I might say the wrong thing, he has
concocted my testimony for me. Having learned to read and write during
three years in prison, my friend has been able to instruct me secretly in
my testimony through the silent medium of writing. The note contains a
first-person statement that he hopes I will memorize and repeat in court,
establishing his generally good character.
8 Introduction

On the paper I read the following words: "I have known the peasant
Julian Mamani for many years. He is a simple farmer and herder. An
illiterate, ignorant, and naive indian, he is incapable of understanding
the value of the goods he stole or of planning such thefts without help."
Uneasily, I conclude that, under the circumstances and in the social
context in which I find myself, the statement is the truest thing I might
say. So after being sworn in and granted special credibility on account of
my status as ethnographer of julian's home town, I say more or less what
is on the paper.
Ironically, a now literate Julian had written out a statement for me to
memorize so that I could affirm his illiteracy and his humble desire to
return to the innocent peasant life that he in fact hated and from which
he was in any event now cut off. julian's story is now permanently
inscribed in an expediente, a trial record, filed in the archive of the
Superior Court of Oruro. So too is my own expert witness testimony,
where in future decades or centuries aspiring historians may marvel at
the demeaning stereotype of rural indigenous people offered up by a
late-twentieth-century anthropologist. Or will they instead see in the
record an innocent member of a pristine, "oral," indigenous culture,
caught up in the evil machinations of a neocolonial world of state power
and capitalist culture?6

Sitting in a courtyard in the crossroads town of Cruce late one

afternoon in October of 1979, a septuagenarian, don Pablo Choqueca-
llata, responds to my ethnographic questions with a heroic history of his
hometown, with himself and his personal life-story at the center.
Beginning with his role in building the stretch of the Pan American
Highway where he founded Cruce in the late 1930s, don Pablo names
and dates the standard milestones of progress from first house to first
store to first school. In other conversations, don Pablo reaches deeper
into the past, recalling his childhood in a nearby hamlet and his 1930s
military service in the Chaco War, ending with internment in a Para-
guayan concentration camp. He remembers the 1940s president Gual-
berto Villarroel's National Indigenous Congress, which he attended as a
delegate, and its denouement, when the president was hanged from a
lamp post in La Paz's Plaza Murillo. Don Pablo then narrates a series of
journeys undertaken while serving as one of the yearly rotating authori-
ties of his community, to the archives of Poopo, Oruro, and Sucre, in
search of his people's colonial land titles. 7
Many months later, don Pablo takes down a cigar box from a high
shelf in his bedroom and presents me with a typescript document that he
Introduction 9

has not mentioned before. At his request, I read it to him and an

audience of local authorities. It records their fathers' and grandfathers'
travels to Bolivian archives to obtain this copy of a late-nineteenth-
century document. At the same time, it records eloquent petitions drawn
up by the ancestors of my audience for presentation to the Bolivian
president, some of which contain precise references to articles of the
Bolivian constitution and to what are described as "the principles of
Political Economy." Assembled authorities, however, grow bored with
this part of the document, being very familiar with the kind of legal
petitions they themselves draw up from time to time, when someone
who can read and write can be found to help. Instead, they want to hear
the oldest parts of the document.
When I come to the copies of colonial writings imbedded in this sheaf
of papers that Pablo Choquecallata himself once carried to the president
in La Paz, I find that they are indeed land titles, dating as far back as
1593. My audience's interest rises when I come to the iterations by land
judges of boundary markers along a circuit delimiting the territory to
which they and their predecessors have for the past four hundred years
laid claim.
The document not only lists boundary markers, called (in colonial
Peru as in sixteenth-century Castile) mojones, but also describes the
ritual circumambulation of the border by land judges and the hereditary
native lords of Asanaqi, who stake their legal claim to territory through
this act and subsequently take legal "possession" by yanking up plants
and throwing stones and clods of earth. All such acts are duly recorded
by the notary who accompanies the entourage, describing performative
acts as well as the particular characteristics of each moj6n. The land title
resulting from this recorded ritual is meant for the archive, creating an
"archival memory" by which a rote, word-for-word and act-for-act
recollection of the territory and its possession can be later reconstituted.
Such mojones and possession ceremonies derive from Castilian society,
where, before the ready availability of paper and the rise of archival
culture, these ritual acts were once a Castilian technique for engraving
these legal transactions in the unwritten archive of social memory.
At each boundary marker, the judge reads out a copy of the sequence
thus far constituted in the presence of cross-border neighbors, who
might be expected to protest. When they do not, general consent to the
moj6n's position is recorded on the copy. In an extraordinary act which
both inscribes the ritual circuit and makes inscription into commemora-
tive monument, the judge then inserts this copy of the title into a bull's
horn and places this point upwards into the deepest recesses of the pile
10 Introduction

of stones that makes up the moj6n. As necessary supplements to one

another, writing, ritual, and the landscape itself together constitute a
memory in words, acts, and places by which to moor the quotidian
experiences of future generations in a tangible past.
At least one stretch of the moj6n list in the document is very familiar
to several members of my audience during this reading. As local
authorities of a polity derived from one corner of Asanaqi territory, my
audience finds the document's sequence of boundary markers not only
familiar but also meaningful, notwithstanding their inability to read. For
apart from their roles in adjudicating local disputes, collecting taxes, and
otherwise mediating between the Bolivian state and their local commu-
nity, it is their duty to memorize lists of mojones and walk the border
they define in a yearly commemorative ritual akin both to colonial land
judges' demarcation and possession ceremonies and to Inca wak'a rites
along ceque lines. 8

HISTORY AND MEMORY, NARRATIVE AND LANDSCAPE

Each of these vignettes describes what might be termed a frontier

situation, a moment in the intersection of distinct yet interdependent
cultural realms. As a journeyman of the frontier practice of ethnography,
the act of entering into the space of another culture in order to write
about it for people like myself, I entered into contexts that were already
frontiers, in which many generations have engaged in delicate commu-
nicative negotiations between local society and more global state forces.
Whether Asanaqi to Inca, indian to Spaniard, or rural community or
individual to the Bolivian government, all have found themselves en-
gaged not only in political struggle but also in a struggle to mark out
relatively autonomous spheres in which to gain control over the mean-
ings of their lives. Crucial to this endeavor are efforts to gain and retain
control over the definition, transmission, and interpretation of the past.
As ethnographer, historian, and author of this book, I have not only
thrown my hat into this same arena of discursive contest, but have also
become part of it, if only in transitory ways. In this book, which itself
repeatedly violates the disciplinary frontier between ethnography and
history, I seek to recognize and question the reciprocal impact of my
projects and those of the people whose stories I here relate, by taking a
reflexive turn in history as well as ethnography.
Each of my vignettes also recounts a moment in the realization of
social memory, the many permutations of which are the main subject of
Introduction 11

this book. Following a trail blazed by Connerton's How Societies

Remember (1989), which drew heavily on annaliste sociologist Maurice
Halbwachs' pioneering interwar work on commemoration and collective
memory, I seek to explore past and present forms of social memory in a
single region of the Andean highlands. 9 Examination of the foregoing
examples will help to forward a preliminary definition of what I mean by
social memory and to foreground the shapes it has taken in pre-
Columbian to postcolonial contexts.
In each of the above vignettes, specific individuals address, within
distinct and well-defined contexts, the defining relationship between
persons, social groups, and their pasts, whether through commemorative
enactment, active inscription, testimony in court, or engaged investiga-
tion. They strive to place themselves in a historical context, tapping into
diverse kinds of memory sources in a self-defining act. Existing at a wide
range of historical moments, all share a concern with time and the
implications of its passing. All seek to ground present individual and
collective concerns in temporally distant origin moments tied to them
through duration, generation, and transitive relations to ancestral figures
and places of shared significance. All share a manifest concern with the
intersection of personhood, time, and movement through the landscape
that we call travel.
Although I extract some of these exemplary vignettes from historical
investigation of documentary texts (one account, that of the Asanaqi
mit' a journey to Cusco, being an imagined text) and others from
ethnographic annotations of fieldwork experiences, this distinction in
method and source does not satisfactorily classify the activities described
in the examples. The activities of Asanaqi visitors to the Inca adminis-
trative center of Jatun Qulla share much in common with the ethno-
graphic example of the Mamanis' llama corral libations. So also do
Cieza's efforts as chronicler have much in common with the probanza
production of don Juan Col que Guarache and the archival investigations
of don Pablo Choquecallata, who would surely draw on the written
documents he guards to write his own history, if only he knew how to
read and write.
On the basis of these external similarities and differences, one might
divide my examples into two categories: In some, the written word
mediates past experience, while in others, "traditionally transmitted"
myth and ritual mediate it. Such a distinction, as clear to sixteenth-
century Spaniards (who invariably commented on pre-Columbian Andeans'
lack of writing and the consequent uncertainty of their history) as it is to
12 Introduction

modern observers, suggests that a great chasm divides written from oral
cultures and, perhaps, the disciplinary domain of anthropologists from
that of historians. Since the present work seeks to bridge the gap and
cross disciplinary divides, as the example of simultaneously written and
enacted journeys along sequences of boundary markers suggests, we
must explore such distinctions.
Rather than resort to the unexamined prejudices of easier targets, let
us see how an especially insightful historiographer, Jacques Le Goff,
treats the issue. In a brief sketch of an entity he calls "ethnic memory,"
which he distinguishes from the explicitly historical memory made
possible by the emergence of writing, Le Goff proposes that "the
principal domain in which the collective memory of peoples without
writing crystallizes is that which provides an apparently historical
foundation for the existence of ethnic groups or families, that is, myths
of origin" (1992: 55). Le Goff carefully avoids explicit insistence on a
clear distinction between peoples with historical consciousness (through
writing) and those (without writing) who must make do with mythical
consciousness, but he implies the distinction, nonetheless, in his subse-
quent analysis. Although collective memory in non writing societies
organizes collective identity through myths of origin, genealogies of its
leading families, and the technical knowledge transmitted by practical
formulas imbued with magic, "writing permits collective memory to
make a double advance with the rise of two forms of memory":
commemoration by inscribed monument, and the written document,
which stores information and communicates it across time and space
(ibid., p. 58-59).
Without writing, the Andean past suffered distinct disadvantages
from the Spaniards' point of view and according to traditional canons of
historiography. Apparently responding to this stigma, some (mostly
literary) postmodernist scholars have suggested redefinitions of writing
which level the playing field, bringing pre-Columbian Andeans into the
literate world. In essays that make subtle distinctions between the
writing and reading of linguistic texts and the Andean "representational"
form most akin to them, the system of knotted strings called the quipu
(sometimes spelled khipu), Tom Cummins and Walter D. Mignolo
nonetheless suggest the potential equivalence of such systems, a sugges-
tion underscored in the title of the volume in which their essays appear,
Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the
Andes (Boone and Mignolo 1994). Other scholars privately suggest that
the quipu was more than just akin to writing as a mnemonic device, that
Introduction 13

it actually conveyed a phonological system for the representation of

speech. As I will later argue, it seems more likely that the quipu
functioned as a mnemonic device for narrative purposes by its structure
as an iconic model of transit lines in space, a manipulable model of the
ceque systems that connected significant topographic points, recalling
the ritual movements that helped to shape the boundaries of the social by
linking social groups to narratively coded pasts associated with the
landscape.
Without granting writing to preconquest Andeans, other scholars
have shifted the locus of attention in the study of colonial and postco-
lonial relationships to discourse, privileging linguistic communication (if
only by treating all communication as languagelike) above other kinds of
conception and expression. Studies in the growing field of "postcolonial
discourse" (for example: Seed 1991, 1992; Barker, Hulme, and Iversen
1994) have come under attack for rhetorically downplaying the violence
and coercive use of power attendant to colonial and republican state
relations with indians (see the thoughtful review in Mallon 1994). From
the perspective of our topics, however, the most serious problem in
analyzing colonial relations as discourses, and of suggesting that pre-
Columbian social memory resided in forms of "writing without words,"
is that it marginalizes and obfuscates precisely the kinds of nonlinguistic
modes of conception and communication-the embodied and enacted
forms of social memory-that were (and are) centrally important in the
Andes. It follows, then, that one cannot undo colonial projects by
granting writing to preconquest Andeans or by restoring the Andean
voice to accounts of colonial discourses. Instead, we must first focus on
the process whereby non written and unvoiced forms of social memory
were erased from Spanish accounts of the Andean past.
The advantages of writing and the disadvantages associated with the
lack thereof in the pre-Columbian Andes became especially clear to both
Andeans and Spaniards when they attempted to write Andean histories
(see chapter 5). Like Le Goff, chroniclers of the preconquest Andes,
lacking the apparently context-free transmissions from the past called
writing, surveyed the forms of still-persisting social memory available to
them as sources and chose to privilege oral narrative, especially myths of
origin. Also like Le Goff, many chroniclers marveled at the mnemotech-
nical possibilities of the knotted-string device called the quipu (for Le
Goff a "rare exception" to the absence among nonliterate societies of
serious interest in word-for-word memorization or exact acts of memory
[1992: 57]). Among the chroniclers of early postconquest Peru, only a
14 Introduction

few ethnographically inclined colonial authors, such as Juan Polo

Ondegardo, recognized the power of the memory work carried out in
singing and dancing (performances of a balladlike genre of music and
dance called taquies) between holy sites along the transit lines that
Andeans called ceques, and which we might term topographs. Most
sixteenth-century observers saw only oral narrative as a reasonable
facsimile of and source for the written event chronicle.
By privileging the kind of nonwritten memory that seemingly ap-
proximated written records of event sequences-that is, the origin
narratives that sixteenth-century Spaniards called (abulas, burlerias, or
ironias, and that we call myths-historians and ethnographers of the
past four and a half centuries generated an unfortunate legacy. By
grouping together mythic narrative and the event sequences of eyewit-
ness testimony (recorded in the act by the ethnographer or read out of
old writings) as the "stuff of history," Andeanist historians found
important keys to writing histories of the Andes but obscured Andeans'
own histories, the culturally specific social memory forms through which
pre-Columbian to twentieth-century Andeans have engaged their pasts.
In this book, a work in the disciplinary borderlands where ethnogra-
phy and history meet, I set myself to a double task. On the one hand, I
carry out a familiar sort of "objective history," subjecting ethnographic
observations and documentary sources alike to the techniques of source
criticism, weighing the reliability of each source, the potential distortions
or lies imparted to them by the special interests or the coercive effects of
the colonial power imbalance of scribe and witness. On the other hand,
I aim to represent or reveal some of the ways by which Andeans of the
past and present have understood their pasts through other sorts of
registers, including oral narrative and ritual action. Since evidence of the
latter comes either from historical documents or from ethnographic
writings, which both often sought to portray Andean social conscious-
ness as timeless and ahistorical, the two projects necessarily coincide.
Seeking the soundest evidence, I build up a narrative image of the
Andean past, from preconquest times, through successive colonial and
republican transformations, to the present. In this effort, applied to eth-
nographic sources in parts 1 and 3 and to documentary sources in part 2,
I trace the impact of what I take for the most significant moments of social
transformation, but always with special attention to the changes under-
gone by Andean ways of recounting and accounting for the past.
Everyone engaged in the project of understanding the meaning of
pre-Columbian Andean ceques, wak'as, or taquies knows that serious
Introduction 15

obstacles litter the scholarly path. Sometimes the cultural prejudices of

colonial authors, which dictated what kinds of things were penworthy
(such as myths of origin and other oral narratives), led to silences about
certain Andean memory practices. Conversely, at times Andean cultural
practices were so alien that they remained nearly imperceptible to
Spanish eyes. Likewise, insistent Counter-Reformation condemnations
of the idolatrous, heretical, and diabolical quickly subjected much
Andean practice to "extirpation," exiling it for both Andean and
Spaniard to the clandestine realm of the unspeakable. As a result, in
evaluating documentary sources on the Andean past, we must exercise a
dual kind of source criticism, attending not only to the kinds of events,
practices, and memory forms that colonial chroniclers describe (or to
what twentieth-century Andeans volunteer about their practices) but
also to the structure of their silences.
Thus in part 1, I attend to ethnographic silences-the gaps in the
ethnographic record as well as the structured diffidence on the politics of
the ethnographic encounters that produced them. In part 2, I turn to
documentary lapses, seeking to reconstruct the kinds of social memory-
such as taquies, ceque transits, and capac hucha pilgrimages, as well as
their even less understood colonial derivatives-that were so poorly
inscribed in colonial writings. In part 3, I turn to a different sort of
historical enterprise, suspending the historian's rules of source criticism
and purported empirical objectivity in order to describe ways of under-
standing the past that violate such rules. Only after I have exposed the
politics of my ethnographic fieldwork, in part 1, and provided the most
"other culture"-sensitive historical background of which I am capable,
in part 2, will the full power as forms of historical consciousness of the
myth narratives, libation topographies, and other K'ulta pilgrimages in
space-time (as described in part 3) perhaps become apparent.
The structure of the book, sandwiching a more traditional form of
historical inquiry between large chunks of ethnographic writing, may in
some ways constitute a liability for my project of breaking down old
distinctions between "mythic" and "historical" peoples, and of demon-
strating the analogous ways that, with or without writing, social
memory is constructed, contested, and revised. Dividing the material
according to whether the source is documentary or ethnographic risks
reemphasizing the very frontier I seek to blur.lD
I accept this risk for two interrelated reasons. On the one hand, in
spite (or because) of the fact that my own career has led me to cross the
disciplinary battle front, I recognize that, while the methods, ethics, and
16 Introduction

consequences of historical and ethnographic work share more than their

practitioners might like to admit, there is at least some justification for
disciplinary specialization in the different problema tics of querying and
writing about dead versus live people. On the other hand, I choose to
divide ethnographic from historical sections of the book so as to avoid
suggesting that, by twining the two kinds of sources together into a
single narrative thread, the resulting story would be more complete. The
social memory that K'ultas construct through myth and ritual practice
sharply contradicts the general line of social memory construed by
historians and nationalist ideologues. Rather than trying to reconcile
such contradictions, I hope to illustrate through contrast their distinctly
constituted politics of memory and forgetting. Colonialism produces not
only a contention of societies and cultures but also a conflict of histories.
Yet even as I acknowledge gaps between the predominantly written
(and Spanish-dominated) record of the colonial past and the mainly
nonwritten modes of historical consciousness in contemporary K'ulta, I
also seek to highlight the continuities and similarities between such
techniques. Only by doing so can my account of K'ulta social memory
hope to challenge those who might disparage the K'ultas as a "people
without history" because for the most part they do not write.
According to a much-worn historians' touchstone, highlighted in
yellow in every western civilization textbook, ancient post-Socratic
Greeks initiated the discipline of history by marking the distance
between historical and mythical consciousness (and subsequently be-
tween the historian's territory and the anthropologist's). Historians, the
argument goes, being aware that objective social conditions emerged
from the activities of men like themselves rather than from the activities
of gods, radically undermined the comfortable certainties of mythical
consciousness with their pens, banishing myth to the realm of uncivilized
and superstitious "ethnics." Yet as Le Goff notes (citing Momigliano),
Herodotus, Thucydides, and other "great" historians of Greco-Roman
antiquity chose to write exclusively or preferentially about the recent
past, according primacy to eyewitness testimony (Le Goff 1992: 186
[Momigliano 1977: 161-163]). By default they left the most distant
past, the time of origins, unexplained, susceptible to rationalization by
nonhuman first causes. As generations and centuries of historical texts
have piled up one upon the other, the "recent" past (documented by
now-dead eyewitnesses) has grown very deep and wide. The writing
system perfected by men like "Simonides of Ceos, the son of Leoprepe,
the inventor of the system of mnemonic aids, [who] won the choral
Introduction 17

singing prize at Athens" (264 B.C. inscription on a marble slab in

reference to an event of 477 B.C. [Le Goff 1992: 66]), has left us
mountains of text fragments purporting to be eyewitness testimony
about the impact of human agency on events. But founding moments
remain beyond the reach of documented human agency, relegated to the
poetic memory techniques such as that of Simonides' choral singing.
As Le Goff notes, along with many other authors, the arrival of
writing did not automatically displace all other forms of collective
memory. In the case of sixteenth-century Spain (and the rest of Europe),
the Bible actually served as a charter and touchstone for an immense
range of commemorative activities, providing the rhythmic or habitual
substance of everyday life. The calendar and its eschatology were
reduced to experiential miniature, projected iconically onto yearly,
weekly, even daily routines, thus chaining the supposedly sequential
experience of duration to cyclic reenactments and repeatedly erasing
contingency and the cumulative transformation of life in favor of an
endless recurrence of the biblical narrative of covenant, sin, confession,
penance, absolution, and redemption. Regardless of the fact that their
"charter" was a written document rather than an oral narrative, the
"civilized and Christian" life-ways Spaniards sought to impose on
Andeans could well be judged a form of "mythical consciousness." For
Le Goff, such examples illustrate how the European legacy of prewriting
techniques of collective memory continued from antiquity into the
Middle Ages, leaving a residue in modern times that was still strong in
the Renaissance period, when so many books on the "arts of memory"
emerged, along with so many chronicles. 11
Daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly routines marked out by the ringing
of church bells and regular confession and participation in the Eucharist
accompanied, in Spanish towns as well as Peruvian ones, periodically
enacted obligatory collective rituals such as the processions of Corpus
Christi, an array of saints' festivals, celebration of the monarch's (and
Christ's) life-crisis rites, tribute-collection rituals, rites and pilgrimages of
personal service to the Crown, and regular administrative inspection and
census tours known as visitas. All these events share qualities ascribed to
visitas in a recent landmark reanalysis of such events: "[They] were
understood to enact as visible reality a programmed politico-social order
(policia was a common term for it) as opposed to the ragtag product of
history. Visiting was a theater of ideology, giving that bundle of imagined
patterns called social structure a temporary primacy over practice. In this
respect it had a strict Incaic precedent: the capac hucha . ... As much as
18 Introduction

the capac hucha, a Spanish visita created the social order it pretended to
discover" (Guevara-Gil and Salomon 1994: 4-5; emphasis in original).
We might add that such rites, regarded as hegemonic devices of the
state, simultaneously commemorated and brought into being the specific
relationship among space-time, subordinated social groups and rulers,
and subjectivities (in the ontological as well as political sense). In this
regard, Spaniards' efforts to distinguish themselves from indians on the
basis of a unique European relationship to the past enabled by writing
seem forced or overwrought.
Perhaps we can conclude that the urgency of their efforts to end the
practices they identified as idolatry, and to erase the Andean techniques
of enacted social memory that recalled it, derived not from the great
contrast between barbarous and idolatrous enacted memory and the
civilized and Christian sort inscribed in Spanish ritual calendars, but to
the unnerving similarity between them. Recognition of such formal
parallelism between Spanish Christian ways and the "almost Christian"
and "almost civilized" collective practices of Andeans raised the poten-
tial for relativist social theory. It threatened to make patent the con-
structed and therefore conventional or arbitrary nature of civitas and
Christianity. Unlike the human authors and authorities missing from the
Andean past for its lack of writing, the authority of Spaniards' ritually
enacted civitas and Christianity was God himself, whose deeds them-
selves structured space and time (in calendars and their architectural-
topographic icons of heavenly agency) when mortals recalled and
commemorated them. A recognizably analogous and alternative form of
social memory could be nothing other than satanic mimicry, designed by
the devil to conceal Truth from Andeans. 12 Thus Andean forms of social
memory became errors and superstitions, the very memory of which it
became the Spanish duty to erase.
Similar suspicions are raised by the fact that, ever since the sixteenth-
century arrival of writing in the Andes, written and oral forms of
communication have coexisted with one another, sometimes leading to
reciprocal influences. Perhaps, then, making distinctions between Span-
iards and Andeans along the axis of letters is not as useful as we might
think in characterizing the cultures of either colonizers or colonized.
Even while centuries of experience with the legal effectiveness of textual
memory has led Andeans to venerate pen and ink as well as document
bundles, reverence for writing has not erased their equally deep respect
for the nonwritten arts of memory.
The example of don Pablo Choquecallata-for whom respect for and
engagement with the documented past can coexist with a tradition of
Introduction 19

mythic narrative and the recalling through libations of the social past
"written" on the landscape-might suggest to some readers that the
Spanish civilizational project failed. I think it hasty, however, to con-
clude that Andeans adopted Spanish reverence for writing but preserved
their own alternative forms of historical practice, clandestinely remem-
bering their pre-Columbian ways. For Spanish colonialism was an
exploitative relationship grounded in a civilizational mission, a project
to transform Andean social life. And in this regard, the colonial
confrontation of histories resulting from the Spanish colonization of
Andean pasts did not take place mainly in or through the written text, or
even primarily in the realm of verbal narrative.
Those Spaniards who concerned themselves with the conscience-
assuaging civilizational project that accompanied colonial raids on
Andean silver sought to impose on Andeans the calendars and ritual
commemorative forms of Spanish Christianity. To the degree that they
succeeded, they did so by forcibly transforming preexisting social groups
by abolishing the techniques and locations of preexisting Andean social
memory and by reinscribing Andean social life within new forms of
space and time. The study of long-term shifts in the Andean manner of
engaging the past, therefore, necessarily involves studying changing
institutions, settlement patterns, architectural forms, economies, politi-
cal organization, and modes of travel, of ways of perceiving space and
time inflected with deep implications of power and kinds of social
hierarchy.
I might, then, conclude that this is a book about long-term transfor-
mations of rural Andean "cosmologies" under the unfavorable condi-
tions of subordination to colonial Spanish and creole-dominated repub-
lican state regimes. And so, indeed, it is. It is also, however, about the
forms of counterhegemony that Andeans have been able to deploy
through complex interplays of public and clandestine practice that
invoke ancestral beings in sacred landscapes that are also inhabited by
the saints. Andean culture as a self-contained order of signifiers has not
resisted four and a half centuries of state domination by colonial and
republican forces, because such cultural logics are virtual realities,
imagined by anthropologists. Cultural meanings are always deployed in
social action, in lived contexts, by real people who must experience and
account for unpleasantness like asymmetries of power. Not Andean
culture, but Andeans, like don Pablo Choquecallata, have resisted the
forces of social domination by drawing on a collectively construed social
memory to understand the hegemonies to which they are subject, so as to
redeploy them creatively in the form of counterhegemonies. Theses on
20 Introduction

cultural resistance that locate only a precolonial Andean past in the

clandestine practices of living rural Andeans, it would seem, fail to
recognize Andeans' intellectual capabilities.
Is it only anthropologists and historians who are to be granted the
ability to recognize, understand, and counter the nefarious impact of
historical experience in the Andes? Or must we also account for
Andeans' own ways of undoing the sorcery of history with its memory?
Those who grant exclusive rights to historical and ethnographic method,
and then go on to suggest that their project is to give a history (or a
metacultural analysis) to a group of people otherwise lacking it, must
answer for themselves as well as for their "science." They must explain
how it is that scholarly debates carried out in luxury hotel boardrooms,
or in books published by academic presses, can serve people living in
difficult conditions elsewhere. They must also come to grips with the
degree to which intellectual projects like theirs help to reproduce their
own privileged position, not only vis-a-vis some distant "ethnic other"
but also with respect to the workers in those hotel laundry rooms or to
the homeless people who beg for change just down the street.
Although I do not claim such authority, the same admonition goes for
me when I suggest the possibility of representing in this book some
alternative (and "other") forms of social memory. As I strive to show in
part 1, ethnographic and historical projects cannot be extricated from
power-laden contexts and projects of colonial, imperial, and national
states, nor can ethnographers or historians rise above the fray. This is so,
first of all, because it is through our links to power-indexed by letters
of introduction, affiliations with embassies and research institutes,
signed and sealed authorizations by state or peasant union authorities,
and more generally our relative wealth and status evinced by the ways
we speak and dress and the goods we possess-that we gain access to
archives or rural towns. Whether we treat them as such or not, these
diverse emblems of our powerful connections serve as potent instru-
ments of coercive persuasion and also as comforting safety nets by which
we can quickly escape messy or dangerous situations. I traveled to K'ulta
and to foreign archives with a thick packet of letters signed by consuls,
government ministers, and department and province authorities, all of
which were duly inspected by local authorities in K'ulta.
But when K'ultas invert my trajectory and travel from the country to
the city to trade, file petitions, or seek access to archives, they do not do
so from such a position of power. Likewise, they are not for the most
part in a position to contest what I write about them. No matter what
Introduction 21

strategies of writing I employ here, it is my voice, not theirs, that speaks

through these pages.
At the same time, this work is enmeshed in the rise and fall of
intellectual paradigms and theoretical fashions that are not those of
K'ulta. In an effort to redress such problems in part, I peg my
presentation and arguments not only to debates over authority, objectiv-
ity, and truth, but also to discourses of ethics in work among "ethnics."

ETHNOGRAPHY AND HISTORY IN A POSTCOLONIAL INTERCULTURE

This is, then, a book that draws on a combination of participant-

observation ethnography and archival investigation to explore in the
Andean context the relationship between memory and history, and to
juxtapose ethnographic, historical, and "social memory" records, recol-
lections, reconstructions, and commemorations of the past. Its most
fundamental argument is that historians, and in some cases anthropolo-
gists, have been guilty of extraordinary hubris in their accounts of
ancient or non-European forms of historical memory and in the portray-
als of non-European pasts that they have presumed to reconstruct for
"peoples without history."
I privilege the term "social memory" (of which writing and the writing
of histories constitute a special case) as an attractive alternative to some
uses of the term "culture," because the latter, in noun phrases such as
"Aymara culture" or "the culture of K'ulta," seems always to convey the
existence of a static "system of symbols and meanings" existing in some
virtual "structure," floating in intersubjective mind space. I use the term
"social memory" to convey the embodied ways by which people consti-
tute themselves and their social formations in communicative actions
and interactions, making themselves by making rather than inheriting
their pasts. Recollecting and commemorating the past always takes place
in contingent contexts where power is at play. As a result, alternative
forms of social memory and alternative possibilities for construing the
social are always in contention. 13
Substantiating this pronouncement requires more than further theo-
retical argument. It demands substantive exemplification. I seek to do
just this through the primarily ethnographic cases developed in part 1
and part 3, and the predominantly historical ones developed in part 2. In
my final chapters, I draw on the revaluation of ritual that has ensued in
part from anthropology's historical turn (for a concise account, see Kelly
and Kaplan 1990). Rather than the antithesis of the historical event, as
22 Introduction

ritual was once understood, it may be the case that all ritual (including,
of course, explicitly "historical" commemorations, but also saints' festi-
vals and sacrifices) may be regarded as an instrumentality of history, a
veritable historical engine. 14 At the very least, I will show how the
people of K'ulta construct their own identities, their historical identities,
by ritually formulating and transforming their relationship to the past.
By accentuating the ways in which Andeans have actively engaged
Spanish and Bolivian creole ethnocidal policies and adapted imposed
forms to their own ends, I aim to minimize the risk of falling prey to
anthropological nostalgia for a time when we could pretend to study
beautifully hermetic "other cultural" worlds, untarnished by contact
with the rapacious and polluting "Western culture" or capitalism. The
insistent note of lamentation heard in works by the French practitioners
of anthropological history Nathan Wachtel (1977) and Serge Gruzinski
(1993: esp. 260-281), whose concepts of "destructuration" name a
progressive and conclusive displacement of indigenous forms by colo-
nially imposed ones, has too often led other anthropologies to answer
them with claims about successful cultural resistance. Whether asserting
that native culture has been destroyed or that it persists behind a thin
veneer of feigned Christianity and adherence to colonizers' codes of
values, such arguments rest on semiotic theories of virtual cultural
closure. They err in suggesting that native society before colonialism, or
any society, was ever a static and closed structure.
However, another view of "culture" produces different conclusions. I
do not mean to suggest that colonialism did not "violate" native
societies, only that they were not pure and closed semiotic orders before
the conquest, just as sixteenth-century Spanish society was in no sense
closed and unchanging. Both Andean social forms and Spanish ones
were in the midst of rapid transformation at the time they were thrown
together, and both were also transformed as a result of their confluence.
The meaning orders we call culture are not hothouse flowers, but rather
products and producers of lived experience in all its messiness. From that
point of view, the historian's question ought not to be "How and when
were native cultures destroyed by invading ones?" but "Howat various
points in time have indigenous people (and for good measure, colonial
Spaniards as well) taken account of the colonial experience in the
poetically structured narratives and practices that we call myth and
ritual?"
Moving onto a historical frontier pioneered by Stern (1982; 1993)
and by Spalding (1984), I contend that the institutional matrix and
Introduction 23

cultural meanings of "ethnic" cultural survival in the Andes have been

shaped by native peoples' active and collective engagement with, rather
than flight from, the power-infused cultural programs of state elites. In
response to Counter-Reformation insistence on orthodoxy, which con-
strained natives' room to maneuver in their efforts to synthesize "origi-
nal" and "imposed" institutions and belief systems, the native synthesis
took the form of an active interplay between relatively orthodox public
practice and clandestine supplements, where native intellectuals and
ritual specialists ran less risk of persecution as "idolatrous dogmatizers"
or heretical proselytizers. Over time, the tense relationship between
orthodox Hispano-Christian practice and heterodox and "pagan" Am-
erindian practice not only defined the space of conflict between Span-
iards and indians, but also was internalized within Spanish-creole and
indigenous cultures. Having been defined through their conjunction,
neither was fully imaginable without the other. And so the mutually
constituting work of both hegemony and counterhegemony (also
memory and countermemory) came into play, in Michael Taussig's
memorable phrase, "in the sweaty warm space between the arse of him
who rides and the back of him who carries. Even there-perhaps
especially there on account of its closeness-one glimpses how the
poetics of control operates with imagery and feeling located in the
subconscious realm of fantasy" (Taussig 1987: 288; Guevara-Gil and
Salomon 1994: 27-28 n. 7). How much of that subconscious realm is
collectively displaced into the non present, the past and the future, which
can be newly shaped by grasping hold of its memory? Not surprisingly,
the social memories of groups at both ends of the colonial relationship
summon up pasts that can account for that relationship, whether to
justify or to undermine. And so social memory, which might in technical
jargon be described as conventional sequences of narrative and action
tied to meaningful coordinates in space and time, or in more pedestrian
language be described as the myths and rituals of cosmology, has come
to model the colonial situation itself. And this is as true for the social
memory of colonizers as for that of the colonized.
As I suggested, this anthropological romance itself rests on a thesis
about social memory, one that holds that Andeans' pasts are immutable,
locked up in a closed and virtual purity. As a historical thesis, it echoes
those of colonial priests and republican liberals, who also portrayed the
indian as immutable, albeit for his barbarous ignorance rather than for
his heroic resistance. None of the above, however, represents merely
fabricated images of indigenous ways. Indeed, each may grasp, in its
24 Introduction

own way, an essential feature of the colonial dynamic: Given the degree
to which colonialism was not just coercive exploitation met by "every-
day forms of resistance" (Scott 1985) but also a contest of histories, one
might suggest that both Spaniard and indian forwarded in their respec-
tive social memories philosophies of history that temporalized their
opposing poles in the colonial asymmetry of power.
Above all, this temporalization in the production of the colonial
cultural dynamic is our object of inquiry here. So too must we attend to
how historians and anthropologists have (often without explicitly theo-
rizing about other cultures' historicity) located indigenous cultures in
time (see Fabian 1983). In the chapters that follow, I provide an account
of when and under what circumstances such temporalization of the
colonial intercultural relationship between indians and Spaniards be-
came an essential feature of Andean societies and of Andean studies. At
the same time, I offer a revisionary approach to the study of colonial
formations, suggesting that much error has resulted from misreading
temporalized intercultural syntheses as separable and independent "ear-
lier and original" and "later and imposed" parts.
I also seek here to query the curiously analogous ways by which
colonial peoples and modern anthropologists and historians have theo-
rized about the relationship between specific (other) cultural forms and
history, and about how certain notions of cultural logics (and also
colonial projects) have tended to obfuscate the ways other cultures might
generate other histories (see Thomas 1989).
The colonial project, and the republican project since independence,
has never had solely political or economic ends, but historical ones as
well: Not only have respective Spanish- and creole-dominant sectors
(which is to say, the forces of the state) sought to define their relationship
with subordinated indians as a historically grounded relationship, rooted
in founding past events, but they have also sought to figure their
Spanish-indian and creole-indian relationship as opposed poles on a
time-line on which Spaniards and creoles, striding onto the high-ground
and into the light can make out indians only by an over-the-shoulder
backwards glance, towards the dark and murky past. 15 The projects of
history are deeply implicated in political-economic programs, allied to
interest and power.
It is to be lamented that the nostalgia-driven anthropological romance
has so often played into such schemata, pining (along with nineteenth-
century romantics, 1930s German folklorists, 1940s indigenistas) for the
lost innocence of their own before-the-fall pasts (preindustrial, preimpe-
Introduction 25

rial, and prenationalist), perhaps recoverable in the living fossils that

colonizers, empires, and nation-states have made of their colonized,
subordinated, and marginalized "subnational" alters.
This book has been shaped by such concerns, as well as by the tension
between the poetic forms of historical understanding that I glimpsed in
K'ulta (which I have attempted to translate into a language and prose
form that is alien to it) and the conventions and conclusions of my own
historical investigations. So too has it been shaped by the realization that
the historian's conundrum with regard to interpretation of documentary
evidence, which has invariably been a product of past interest and
power-charged discourses, just as the historian's interpretations are
always in some manner interested and power-infused, differs little from
the readerly concerns that fuel debates over the nature of ethnographic
representation. The "source critical" maneuvers to which historians sub-
ject their sources are just what readers of ethnography hope to do with
reflexive, confessional, or "discourse centered" ethnographic writing.
It is my hope that my efforts here to displace or supplement the
ethnography and history of the "idols behind altars" resistance paradigm
does not appear to undercut all the politically salient identity projects
(from indigenous nationalism to nationalist indigenismo) that now draw
on them so heavily. To portray indigenous societies as transformed by
colonialism may offend those for whom unchanging continuity is a
source of imperialism-resistant national "originality" or of legal bases for
claiming land. Foregrounding the constructed nature of social identities
and the pasts on which they rest, even when one insists that all such
identities and pasts are constructed, is not always politically expedient.
I respond by highlighting the degree to which Andean cultural forms
in all their multiplicity are the products of an active intellectual engage-
ment with encompassing political economies, cultural hegemonies, and
globalized sociocultural fields. To K'ulta intellectuals present and future,
and to indigenista and indianista activists more generally, I do not offer
predigested rhetorical ammunition intentionally suited to the discourses
of nationalism, but a respectful intervention, accompanied by all the
evidence necessary for its disqualification as adequate representation.
 Part One

An Ethnographic Pastorale:
Introduction to K'ulta and
the Local Sources of History
 Chapter Two

Journeys to Cultural Frontiers

FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO TO LA PAZ

In June of 1979, some six months after arriving in Bolivia, I set off from
La Paz with my wife and fieldwork companion, Mary Dillon, on a
journey to a small rural town. My destination in that journey from La
Paz was Santa Barbara de Culta, a small and out-of-the-way town, to
which I often travel in memory on a well-worn imaginary path. Santa
Barbara de Culta, a town of adobe and thatch houses that is a
permanent home for a few families and a political-ritual pilgrimage
center for about six thousand people spread across the treeless but
hauntingly beautiful mountainscape of its hinterlands, has been a
repeated destination in research trips or simply to visit old friends. But
much more often, as I have sat before a keyboard while writing and
revising this book or stood before a classroom full of students in courses
on Latin American ethnography or history, I have conjured images of
that town into being, assembling and reassembling the traces it has left in
my memory.
Representations of such places have a tendency to take on the features
of an exotic travel destination. So after "setting the scene" with accounts
devised to establish our presence in such a place, thereby establishing our
eyewitness authority for what follows, we ethnographers have tended to
disappear from our ethnographies shortly after arrival. In what was once
the norm in ethnographic writing, succ~eding chapters then backed away
from the first-person account, describing rituals and kinship systems and
political economies in a distanced and authoritative third person of the
omniscient narrator. We have done so because, although travel is the

29
30 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

essence of ethnographic experience, ethnographers who travel by plane,

bus, or camel to "Third World" destinations are always subject to the
fear of being little more than an overblown tourist, seeking the most
exotic places and experiences so as to outdo others' accounts of
vacationland exploits. Depersonalized "normative distancing" and dis-
placement of fieldnote chronographies by a logical succession of chapters
on various domains of life helped not only to conceal the author's (and
discipline's) narrative artifice and to obscure the power-laden interper-
sonal dynamics of "data collection," but also to distance the traveling
science-minded ethnographer from the dilettante tourist and his or her
self-centered anecdotes.
Yet the travel account has the merit of foregrounding its narrative line
and, hero or humbug, placing the narrator at the scene of the drama. I
beg the reader's indulgence, then, in bearing with me on a package tour,
a travelogue with commentary, that begins, as I did, in Chicago and
reaches K'ulta only after a series of transit stops. I justify this apparently
subjective writing strategy on aesthetic but also unusually scientific
grounds: It will highlight, rather than conceal, the power relations of
fieldwork, and will thus enable critics to unravel and doubt the evidence
I place into context. I also make the strange case that an account of
K'ulta in tourism terms may be more appropriate than any other kind.
And I refer here not only to the fact that the people of K'ulta are
themselves inveterate travelers. More to the point is the fact that their
ways of life, their genealogies, marriages, politics, and very pasts, are
remembered as itineraries of travel.
On a trip from the United States to rural Bolivia, arriving at the
international airport of La Paz and encountering the city center may be
full of exotic new experiences, but the whole scene is also relatively
comfortable and familiar. Taxis carry arriving passengers to the down-
town hotels of a modern capital city. The traveler discovers upon closer
inspection, not far away from the city center, the city's large population
of Aymara-speaking people, who live around the urban periphery but
dominate its street markets.
For me, of course, La Paz was initially to be only a brief stopover on
a continuing journey, one that would lead to a small rural Aymara-
speaking community where I would complete the fieldwork requisite for
a Ph.D. in anthropology. My journey to K'ulta began as a graduate
student of anthropology at the University of Chicago. Yet in spite of
wide-ranging readings in Andeanist ethnography and history, I had not
yet heard of that place. Indeed, apart from the immediate vicinity of
Journeys to Cultural Frontiers 31

Lake Titicaca, most of the territory occupied by Aymara speakers went

at that time undescribed in the ethnological literature. 1
Most of the llama herders of the Altiplano are speakers of the Aymara
language, which was even more widespread at the time of the Spanish
invasion. 2 Today La Paz is the only major city in which Aymara still
predominates. The trip up the slope from the La Paz city center to the
Altiplano provides the substance for what might be called a vertical
sociology, a study in the correlation of differences in ethnicity and wealth
to those of altitude. Glass and steel (or at least glass and concrete)
skyscrapers at the lower financial-commercial-political core of the city
gradually give way upslope to the old colonial center and, yet farther up
hill, to one-room adobe homes; a predominantly Spanish-speaking nadir
fades into a mostly Aymara-speaking zenith, mediated by the monu-
ments and institutions of the colonial and republican past.
Like the administrative-elite cores of all Bolivia's major cities and
provincial capitals, the city center of La Paz is a bastion of the Spanish
language, which since colonial times has been the language of state and
of the country's ruling elite. In the days of the colony, of course, ruling
elites were Spaniards. From the local seat of royal power, the appeals
court of the Audiencia de Charcas in the city that is now Sucre, the
distant Spanish Crown ruled the territory that is now Bolivia and
presided over the extraction of surpluses from indigenous labor through
the collection of tribute and through forced indian service in mines and
Spanish towns. Such pressures and Spanish projects to acculturate
indians forcibly to Castilian culture and the Catholic faith notwithstand-
ing, indigenous societies managed to perpetuate themselves, trans-
formed, throughout the colonial period. They were aided in this both by
the colonial preference for indirect rule (indian authorities collected
tributes and levied labor for Spanish overlords) and by a succession of
laws and discriminatory practices that strove to keep Spaniards separate
from indians. The latter also made use of colonial institutions-in
particular, the limited autonomies granted to them as members of rural
town councils and urban parish communities-and access to forms of
legal redress due them as properly constituted subjects of Spanish kings
and, later, of Bolivian governments.
If La Paz has a Spanish core, it has an Aymara periphery. For
well-to-do Paceiios, a kind of architectural model of that periphery is
very close at hand, in the kitchen, laundry room, patio, and maid's
quarters, where a pollera- and bowler-clad, Aymara-speaking maid is a
de rigueur sign of respectability.3 Other laboring people, like the maids
32 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

whose employers do not provide quarters, live mostly in the Aymara-

speaking neighborhoods that developed from colonial indian parishes
founded on the outskirts of the Spanish city center. Indigenous neighbor-
hoods rise up steep hillsides towards the very rim of the basin in which
La Paz is located. In the 1780s, it was around this rim, from a base in
indian neighborhoods, that the armies of Tupac Catari attacked colonial
Spaniards and laid waste to the city center during a long siege. Not long
after that great rebellion was quashed, creole Spaniards in 1825 took the
reins of state from Spain after their own revolution, leading to the liberal
program of privatization and ethnocide. Such predations did not,
however, go unresisted. Indian rebels were again on the move in 1900
and again in the 1920s, met always by swift reprisals and exemplary
punishments. 4
In 1952 they again laid siege to the city after the Movimiento
Nacionalista Revolucionario (the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement)
gained power, forcing a reluctant government to enact an agrarian
reform law at the point of their picks and hoes. 5 In the 1980s and 1990s,
rural people have engaged in mass political action to achieve other ends.
Blocking roads to prevent the movement of troops and to keep provi-
sions from reaching the cities, they have protested rises in fuel prices
(which increase transport costs and erode the marginal benefit of
producing for the urban marketplace) and, in 1980 and 1982, helped to
bring down military dictatorships and return the country to democratic
rule. 6 In 1992, to mark their own celebration of the Columbian
Quincentenary, a pan-indian political movement, with leadership from
the La Paz-based indianist parties named after the 1781 rebel Tupac
Catari, chose to reenact Catari's siege of the city rather than to
commemorate the Spanish conquest of their peoples.
Whatever their politics or the details of their local forms of ethnic-
class identification, rural people have been migrating citywards at an
increasing pace. The former indian parishes on the slopes above central
La Paz have been population saturated. Near EI Alto airport on the
Altiplano above La Paz, what was once a small migrant community has
swelled into a city in its own right, with a population nearing one
million. Most migrants to EI Alto and to the peripheral parishes of La
Paz itself were once full-time farmers and herders in the indigenous
communities of the Altiplano. Upon arrival, many join friends, relatives,
and associates from their home communities in forming residents'
associations, complete with social halls and urban versions of the patron
saint festivals of the countryside town (see Alba et al. 1983). This does
Journeys to Cultural Frontiers 33

not mean, however, that one can thus easily identify in the city the large
variety of distinct rural "ethnicities" that can be discerned by dress and
hat styles in the rural highlands. Migrants usually strive to erase from
their persons all external marks of "indio" or "campesino" origins. They
do so by adopting the relatively uniform dress code of the urban
"popular class," a dress code that itself has a long history in Bolivia's
cities.
This cultural frontier, if it can be said to have an existence in
geographic space, is located in La Paz at the junction of the Spanish city
center and its indian neighborhoods, partway uphill in zones that are
marked on tourist maps as the "black market" and "witches market." It
is, of course, to this frontier that tourists and ethnographers are attracted
when they reach La Paz, whether by exotic fantasies or by having read
ethnographies and travel guides. Entering this part of the city, one first
passes by rows of tourist shops laden with reproductions of colonial
paintings, antique coins, and traditional (read "indian") arts and crafts.
Here and there the larger shops face competition from young men in
jeans, running shoes, and sweaters selling indigenous textiles from a
stack placed on the sidewalk. Other ambulating vendors may pass by
with small packets of spices. A bit higher uphill, one comes to the magic
stalls of the witches market, followed by the black market, full of
polyester pants, blankets, wholesale fruits and vegetables, and a host of
other commodities. Higher still, one will find a large and bustling street
market, called Miamicito (Little Miami), full of the commodities that
best satisfy the modernist fancy: stereos, televisions, stoves, refrigerators,
personal computers, and Game Boys. Even if one cannot afford the tour
to Disneyworld and Miami malls, their goods are readily available here.
The witches market begins just above the colonial church of San
Francisco, along Sagarnaga and Linares streets. Here storefront busi-
nesses owned by cholita-clad vendors offer magical wares: ready-made
incense bundles for a variety of ritual purposes and the elements for such
bundles, a variety of herbs, colored seeds, bits of silver and gold foil,
pressed sugar cakes with relief images of saints or cosmic powers, and
dried animal fetuses. There are also soapstone amulets that serve for love
magic and wealth increase, and ingredients for divination rites, sorcery,
and curing arrays.
Ask what these things are for and you will get sparse explanations,
but will surely be told about the pachamama, the "earth mother"
goddess to whom practically all Pacefios will pour a libation in the
presence of a bottle of beer. You may also hear about the power of the
34 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

mountain gods, especially, in La Paz, the great Illimani, the snow-

covered peak that towers above the city. These earth deities, believed to
be sacred to indians, hold powers that can be unleashed by tapping into
indian magical traditions, available here on the cultural frontier of the
witches market.
Although they are the most visible and closest to the city center, these
formal magic shops face stiff competition from other dealers in magic
who sell their wares nearby on the sidewalk. Here and there you may see
a man carrying saddle bags. This will be a Kallawaya sorcerer, a
shamanic specialist from a region north of La Paz to whom many city
folks of all classes and ethnicities give credence (Photographs 2.1 a and
2.1b). From such a man you may obtain insight into the future or find
out why life may be treating you poorly. By appointment, Kallawaya
curanderos will come to your home or business to preside over libations
and the burning of incense bundles to effect a change in fortune. Farther
along up the street, the poorer relations of magic-store vendors hawk the
ingredients of magic bundles from sidewalk displays?

Photograph 2.1a. K'ulta women sell herbal remedies and magic bundles in the Tarabuco
market. A K'ulta herbalist (in the white hat) explains her wares to Mary Dillon and Chloe
Abercrombie. K'ulta women selling herbs and magic-bundle ingredients had accompanied
their husbands on llama-caravan trading trips to maize valley areas, where they are
considered expert in herbal healing. Tarabuco, department of Chuquisaca, July 1988.
(Photograph by author)
Photograph 2.1 b. A Kallawaya curandero with a medicine bag. In the background, up
the street, traveling textile vendors hawk their wares, a common pursuit among young
K'ulta men. Sagarnaga Street, La Paz, 1994. (Photograph by author)
35
Figure 2.1. Ekeko, the magical mestizo trader. Cult to this Tunupa-turned-traveling
salesman aids in the acquisition of material wealth. The figurine should be purchased at the
La Paz Alasitas fair, and should be blessed in the mass of Our Lady of La Paz and by one
of the Kallawaya curanderos who wait outside with their incense braziers. During weekly
or monthly cult, usually on Fridays (day of the supay, when Christ is dead in the weekly
recension of the passion), Ekeko receives libations and likes to smoke a cigarette. (Author's
sketch of six-inch-tall plaster statuette)
36
Journeys to Cultural Frontiers 37

In the January fair of Alasitas, linked to the celebration of Our Lady

of La Paz, one can buy miniatures in street stalls that, when treated with
the proper rituals, may bring one full-scale versions of the items they
depict. A perennial favorite is a plaster doll of a standing male figure some
four to six inches tall, known as Ekeko (see Fig. 2.1), who is himself a sort
of patron of this festival. Portrayed as a mestizo in his poncho and knit
cap with ear flaps, Ekeko is the very image of the successful traveling
vendor: Only the head, hands, and feet protrude from beneath a cornu-
copic profusion of consumer goods bundled in his carrying cloth and
draped round his neck and waist: miniature sacks of sugar and flour, coca
leaves, soap, tinned cane alcohol, boxes of noodles, feather dusters, co-
coa, and candies. God of plenty, Ekeko helps to assure prosperity when
he is properly attended to. Like all Alasitas goods, he must first be doubly
blessed in the La Paz cathedral by a priest at a special mass in honor of
Our Lady of Peace, and outside, on the church steps, by one of the
curanderos who wait with ready charcoal braziers, ritual arrays, and
libations to enliven Ekeko's latent powers. His mouth gapes open in what
looks like a maniacal smile or hearty shout, ready to receive a cigarette
to accompany his libations on the first Friday of every month.
Ekeko may seem a comic and folkloric figure, but his name betrays
profound associations with the past: It is that of a god of ancient
highland myths, a trickster who brought forth the peoples of the Bolivian
high plains in his travels southwards from Tiwanaku, wellsprings of the
world. In spite of these deep ancestral connections, many of the Paceiios
attending the Alasitas fair opt instead for an array of papier-mache,
plaster, or plastic models of goods-laden trucks, market stalls, and
luxury homes. There is also a brisk market in miniature paper certifi-
cates, such as marriage licenses, divorce papers, college degrees, and
titles to property. Perhaps most ubiquitous in Alasitas stalls are wads of
miniature thousand-dollar bills, passports, visas to enter the United
States, and, yes, airline tickets to Miami. 8 Just so can one appeal to the
Virgin and to the ancient powers of mountain and plain, to be trans-
formed into a modern-day Ekeko, returning from a shopping binge in
Orlando and Miami dressed in furs and Mickey Mouse ears, laden with
new clothes, housewares, and high-tech electronic equipment.

JOURNEY TO A CROSSROADS

Laden with trunks and duffle bags full of just such kinds of treasures,
pockets bulging with airline tickets to Miami, traveler's checks in dollars,
and letters of recommendation from powerful government officials, my
38 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

first trip to my chosen field-site of Santa Barbara de Culta followed the

old road running from La Paz to Potosi, now the Pan American Highway
but once, along most of its route, a stone-paved road linking the Inca
capital of Cusco with the Inca empire's southern province of Qullasuyu.
This was the path followed by Inca Colque and his mit' a conscripts on
their way to Cusco. Transformed by colonial Spaniards into a trunk
route between colonial cities and silver mining centers, the same road
carried Spanish census takers, indian forced-labor contingents, and
generations of native lords engaged in long-distance commerce or
pilgrimages to state archives.
The La Paz-Oruro leg of my first journey into the countryside began,
as have many since, deep in the natural bowl in which La Paz nestles.
The road circles up and over the rim and emerges onto the Altiplano
(Map 2.1). Even while still engulfed in the ever-growing expanse of EI
Alto, one gets a clear view of the imposing snow-covered peaks of the
Cordillera Real, marching off past Lake Titicaca to the northwest and
into Peru. To reach Oruro, however, the bus turns southwards. After
emerging finally from the drab sprawl of new settlements on the edge of
EI Alto, one passes by numerous dry-farmed fields. As one moves farther
south, towards Oruro, cultivated fields become fewer, hugging the skirts
of the foothills. In noncultivated areas, a relatively dense cover of spikey
grasses and low shrubs becomes increasingly sparse. The bus races
through some small towns of adobe houses, a few with imposing
colonial churches; on certain days one or more of these towns host a
market, and the roadside is crowded with trucks and rural people
carrying loads on their backs in brightly colored carrying cloths. (Some
of these towns have been service or rest areas-ventas or tambos-since
the Spanish invasion and before, when this road carried colonial mule
trains and llama caravans.) Near the city of Oruro, the countryside
becomes more arid, and ever larger patches of white crystalline salts
begin to dot the landscape, as do, now and then, herds of llamas and
alpacas, cared for by sling-wielding children.
As the geographer Carl Troll (1968) explained, the Andes are a
tropical mountain chain: A rise or fall of just a few hundred feet can
make a great deal of difference in climate. The Altiplano from Lake
Titicaca to the salt flats of Uyuni is for the most part a treeless expanse
of grass and scrub, interspersed with barren-looking rocky hills. Inces-
sant winds, a long dry winter, and cold nights have favored bunch-
grasses and low shrubs that huddle close to the ground. In the cold
months from May to October, the landscape is dominated by shades of
Journeys to Cultural Frontiers 39

yellow and brown, replaced by a light sprinkling of green during the

rainy warmer months of November to April.
Much of this territory is too dry and cold for any flora other than the
grasses and shrubs that provide pasture for the land's sheep and llamas.
But here and there on hillsides and in river valleys, Altiplano peoples risk
their labor and sow the native crops capable of withstanding the rigors
of altitude. Much of the territory can support only the native quinua (or
quinoa) and bitter potatoes, and a variety of Spanish-introduced barley
that is grown, though not to maturity, for animal fodder. In some
more-sheltered and well-watered spots, varieties of potato more familiar
to North American and European palates can be grown, along with
other root crops like onions, carrots, and the native oca, ul/uco, and
broad bean. Visit the marketplaces of La Paz or Oruro, however, and
you will find a large variety of not only root crops and grains but also
fruits and vegetables, as well as spices, chili peppers, and coca leaves.
Most of these cannot be grown on the Altiplano; they are available to
Altiplano peoples by bringing them from warmer lands to the east and
west of the Altiplano's mountain borders, from the valleys of the sparse
rivers that cut deep transverse valleys into an otherwise barren Pacific
coastal desert, and from the meanders of large rivers that wander
towards the wet tropical lowlands of the Amazon Basin and the Rio de
la Plata drainage.
After a change of buses in the old mining town of Oruro (now a city
of nearly 200,000, and the capital of the Department of Oruro), the
traveler can continue the journey (see Map 2.1). By night, it is a bumpy,
dusty, and cold trip, interrupted only when a tire or engine part needs
repair or when the driver stops for refreshment at a roadside restaurant.
In incongruously named places like Hotel Londres or Hotel Paris, one
can shake the dust off and, by the light of a kerosene lantern, sometimes
get a good meal or at least a tin mug of coffee with bread and the
much-appreciated local sheep's cheese of Paria and Challapata. In spite
of the clouds of dust and yellowing hillsides of the winter months, a
daylight ride enables one to appreciate more fully the changing scenery.
From Oruro south to the provincial capital town of Challapata, the
road runs along the foothills of the Cordillera de Asanaque on one side
and the basin of the vast Lake Poopo on the other. In a dry time, the
lakeshore may be several kilometers away from the road, a shimmering
mirage floating over a dusty landscape wandered by whirling dust devils.
But, as happened in 1979, when a series of wet years brought sufficient
water from its feeder streams, including the Rio Desaguadero, which
"'o"

• Ventilla
BRAZIL
AVAROA
D Chaliapata_-_ _ _ _ _ __
~ "-
----'" Khasa. Toro
o Huari Khara Cota 0
PAGADOR
°Castilluma
Bolivar
o
° Cahuayo
o Urmiri KEY
o Vichaj lup; province capital
Cl section capital
o canton capital
• towns seeking
canton status
 SAN T A

KEY
• aboYe5,ooom.
o 3,000 - 5,000 m.
o 0-3,ooom.

m IakeIocean PARAGUAY
8] salIpan

Map 2.1. Bolivia: its topography and political divisions. The inset depicts the cantons and southeastern provinces of the department of Oruro.
~ (Author's renderings, based on Atlas universal y de Bolivia Bruno, "Bolivia, mapa orogriifico," p. 77, and "Oruro, mapa politico," p. 107 [La
..... Paz: Editorial Bruiio, 1995]; and Rand McNally Atlas of the World, Masterpiece Edition, "Northern South America," p. 242 [1993])
42 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

snakes south from Lake Titicaca, the lake expanded until its shore
reached the road itself. Its shallow, cold, and brackish water hosts
abundant plankton and, therefore, also fish and waterfowl. Around Lake
Poopo a wide variety of ducks, geese, and wading birds abound,
including vast flocks of flamingos, which, when disturbed, burst into a
thrashing blaze of red and black.
At several points these same hillsides host groups of squarish adobe
ruins of chullpas, the tombs of the pre-Columbian ancestors of today's
rural people. One such site is built on the slopes of the great mountain
called Tata Asanaqi. Just below them the ruins of the old town of
Challapata cover a flat area on a hilltop (pata) where, perhaps, ritual
libations (ch' allas) were once poured. "New" Challapata, capital of
Abaroa Province, lies nearby on the Altiplano itself, at a fork in the road
at the entrance to a narrow river valley where the Pan American
Highway turns east and begins the climb towards Potosi.
As one approaches Cruce, the road switchbacks up a steep defile and
emerges onto an open plain between high peaks. Fed by mountain
runoff, several small streams begin near here in artesian springs. In fact
it is here, in the midst of high-altitude Canton Culta, that the highway
passes and then becomes a kind of triple continental divide: Up until this
point on the journey, streams have flowed westwards, draining into the
evaporation pan of the Altiplano. From here on, many of the streams on
the north side of the road are tributaries of the distant Amazon, while
waters on the south side flow into the Pilcomayo and pass Buenos Aires
before reaching the Atlantic via the Rio de la Plata. Just past this
junction of drainage basins, the bus rounds a bend and emerges suddenly
onto a high, windy, and rocky pampa, where a small number of
unpromising adobe-walled stores and restaurants line the road at a
different kind of junction.

CRUCE: A SOCIAL FRONTIER

Cruce (Sp. "crossroads") lies at the intersection of the Pan American

Highway and a smaller road that veers off to the north towards the town
of Macha, in the northern extension of the Department of Potosi. Near
the town of Macha (on which see Platt 1978a, 1987b), this smaller road
intersects with a less traveled, east-west road linking Oruro and Sucre.
Along these roads trucks carry highland products, salt, and urban goods
to the northern and eastern valleys and the lowlands that drop towards
the warm and moist foothills of the Amazon basin. They return laden
Journeys to Cultural Frontiers 43

with the potatoes, wheat, maize, and fruits that form not only much of
the urban diet but also that of the highland rural household. Some rural
households of K'ulta, and other towns farther west, choose instead to
carry their salt, freeze-dried meat and potatoes, and highland herbs on
the backs of llamas to those distant valleys; from May through August,
many caravans, some consisting of a hundred or more llamas, cross over
the pass on which Cruce sits.
Cruce Culta, as its residents call it, consists of a few dozen buildings
fronting these roads (see Photographs 2.2a and 2.2b). One of the many
new towns promoted by progress-minded rural people eager for access
to what the highway might bring, it was founded in the late 19305, when
the highway was first habilitated for motorized traffic, by the local man
who had been chosen to lead the work gangs that improved this section

Photograph 2.2a. A view of Cruce on a market day in 1988. An early customer inspects
bulk foodstuffs. In the background, don Pablo Choquecallata's herd of llamas and alpacas
emerges from the corral behind his house, on the way to pasture. Cruce Culta, July 1988.
(Photograph by author)
44 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

Photograph 2.2b. Main Street, Cruce, on a market day in 1988. A truck rumbles along
this unpaved section of the Pan American Highway through "downtown" Cruce. In the
background is the Hotel Copacabana, actually a restaurant. Vendors in "cholita" costume,
wearing full pollera skirt, apron, and bowler derby, sell to predominantly "campesina"
customers, in black bayeta dress, aksu, and white hat. Some vendors, however, are local
campesinas, who have switched to the more culturally appropriate costume for a seller on
market day. Cruce Culta, July 1988. (Photograph by author)

of road. In the 1960s, after the Bolivian revolution and agrarian reform
made universal education a state goal, it was Cruce, rather than the more
isolated Santa Barbara de Culta, that became the seat of a rural school
district. Here the canton's children can complete their primary educa-
tion. For a variety of reasons, including the lack of transport and long
distances resulting from the geographic size of the district, few children
progress beyond the first three grades, which are offered in one-room
schools scattered in widely separated hamlets, some more than four
hours' walk away. Secondary school, available only in the provincial
capital of Challapata, is beyond the reach even of most children who
complete primary school in Cruce. In fact no one I questioned could
Journeys to Cultural Frontiers 45

remember a single child from Canton Culta who had been to high
school. I should take note, however, that local memory does not always
include out-migrants whose local ties have been severed, and over
generations many individuals and families have abandoned their home-
land for urban life. Later on I will introduce a few of them.
Just as emigration has long been a fact of life in rural territories like
this one, so has immigration left its mark. In Cruce it was an early
product of the schools. From the first generation of teachers came the
first restaurant and sparsely stocked general store, operated by don
Antonio. The offspring of a union between a mestizo miner and an
indigenous woman in the mining center of Pulacayo, don Antonio had
opted to remain in Cruce after retiring from schoolteaching in the
mid-1960s and marrying a migrant from the town of Pocoata. Since
then Cruce, along with the localist ambitions of its native founder, has
continued to grow, at the expense of a dwindling Culta some thirteen
kilometers away. Much of that growth has resulted from retiring
teachers and in-migrating outsiders like don Antonio and his wife, who
upon arrival become known as vecinos, "neighbors."
Cruce is home to a variable number of temporary or seasonal
residents. A crew of road workers is sometimes lodged here along with
their machinery, and when school is in session the town hosts the
schoolteachers who staff the canton's nuc/eo, a regional school into
which the children of the canton's many one-room, three-year schools
can in theory (but rarely in practice) continue on to grades 4 through 6.
The town's permanently resident vecinos numbered about twelve adults
in 1979 (there were perhaps twenty by 1992) and came from almost as
many places. A few, like the town's founder (in his seventies in 1979, and
still politically active in 1988) are progress-oriented local folk; others,
like the first teacher-settler, come from Quechua-speaking mining camps;
several, who retain ties to their hometown of Huari, were farmer-herders
themselves once, and began their association with the place and their
storefront businesses as itinerant peddlers and produce bulkers. Depen-
dent on the money economy as well as on patronal ties to the farming
and herding natives of the place,9 vecinos uniformly know Spanish and,
in addition, are more likely to speak to their local clients in Quechua
than in Aymara. Most of them, in fact, distinguish themselves culturally
from the local population, whom they call campesinos (peasants) in
respectful moments but in moments of anger will also tar as backwards
and ignorant indios. Cruce is a young town, and so far the handful of
local rural folk who have moved there from one or another of the
46 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

canton's hamlets, even those few who have opened businesses of their
own, retain the ties to local social units that vecinos generally lack.
Some outside-born vecinos resent this incursion of campesinos into
the territory of social privilege, and insult these social-climbers with the
label "cholo." In moments of outrage the latter, as well as hamlet-
dwelling locals, may likewise insult a vecino, or virtually any represen-
tative of urban national culture, as a q' ara, meaning (culturally)
"peeled," or "naked."l0 The term "mestizo," heard frequently in the
cities to refer to culturally or "racially" mixed individuals, is not much
used in Canton Culta. 11 In fact, all these terms of reference and address
have been stigmatized to some degree by their use to put individuals and
groups in their place in an undesirable stratum of one of Bolivia's
systems of social inequality. The term "vecino," which for sixteenth-
century Spaniards referred to a select number of fully vested (and, of
course, Spanish) town citizens with the greatest degree of privilege, is not
free from stigma nowadays. Some vecinos, aware of the rusticity of their
status from the perspective of high-status city dwellers, would prefer to
think of themselves as criollos, a term with its own history, which since
the independence period has referred to the highest stratum in the social
hierarchy, at greatest remove from "indio." Even "criollo," however, can
be and is stigmatized when pronounced with sarcasm or irony by a social
critic from "below."12
It is certainly true that rural-dwelling, farming and herding speakers
of Aymara and/or Quechua, those whom city people and vecinos call
indios or campesinos, are the least privileged, most maligned and
disfavored sector of Bolivian society, suffering a degree of stigmatization
greater than that of the recent migrant from countryside to city. This
helps to account for the fact that, in most of the countryside, there is for
such people no unstigmatized term of reference or address (as we shall
see, most campesinos in Canton Culta prefer to call themselves com mer-
ciantes on their national identity cards, and few have subscribed to the
indianista parties' suggestion that they wear the label indio with pride).
And when an individual from the canton travels to the city, he or she
most often changes from the homespun and handmade clothing of the
hamlet into store-bought machine-made clothes, purchased in order to
blend in more easily with the urban "popular masses.,,13
As a new-town way station between the life-ways of rural subsistence
farming and herding on the one hand and the wage-labor and capitalist
relations of Bolivia's cities and mining centers on the other, Cruce is an
increasingly common sort of place in Bolivia. To us, an ugly roadside
Journeys to Cultural Frontiers 47

strip of unappealing buildings with tin roofs, it is for many campesinos

a place where dreams are made, and broken. The mutual confrontation
and romance of vecinos and campesinos that takes place there, however,
is not a new phenomenon. During much of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, up until the revolutionary moment of 1952, the old town of
Santa Barbara de Culta, like most other rural "indigenous" towns, was
also the site of such struggles. Before the revolution, however, the
exploitative power of vecinos was much more entrenched, and the battle
lines more sharply drawn. That is because the status of vecino in rural
towns originated in efforts by a long succession of late-nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century governments to ally themselves with those who,
in the countryside, appeared to be forces of progress and modernity.
Thus positions of power went to those who identified with national
culture, acted as economic and political intermediaries between indig-
enous societies and the city, preferred private ownership of land to
collective title, patron-client ties to kinship-based reciprocities, and so on
(see Platt 1982a, 1984, 1987a). For the most part such privilege
evaporated in the revolution of 1952, but the impulses did not. Today in
Cruce (and in a few cases, in Santa Barbara), vecinos might best be
defined negatively as residents of a rural town who lack membership in
its local ayllus, and hence lack access to collective lands and the herding
and farming life that go with them. The status can be defined positively
as well, referring to those who can profit by occupying an advantageous
place in the intersection of two worlds.
Although they often develop ties of compadrazgo, "co-godparent-
hood," with the campesinos who work and lay claim to the land, such
ties imply asymmetrical reciprocities rather than the more balanced
forms of mutual obligation that often link campesino with campesino. It
is in fact the vecinos' refusal to adhere to local rules of the game that
gives them the freedom to profit and to amass capital; it is that same
refusal that makes them so hated. Successful vecinos are outsiders for a
good reason. The pressures that are mounted against local campesinos
when they begin to act as vecinos, failing to share their wealth, become
simply too much to bear.
This does not mean, of course, that K'ulta campesinos do not engage
in rather wily forms of capitalist exchange. Indeed, when I first arrived in
Cruce, I was often approached by campesinos proffering business
transactions. Gringos are rare visitors to K'ulta territory, and on first
sight several K'ultas mistook me for the hippy-capitalist textile traders
with whom they had dealt before. Several times after campesinos
48 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

approached me with warm greetings I was forced to explain that I was

not "Arturo" or "Billy," and that I was not in the market for the textiles
that were then offered to me for sale. One such encounter illustrated the
difficulties inherent in the process that in Bolivia has been called
cholification, that is, an individual's self-transformation from campesino
into vecino.
In 1980 I shared drinks in a Cruce truck-stop bar with a campesino in
his mid-twenties who had mistaken me for such a trader in ethnic
capital. The experience was a strange one, foregrounding for me the
degree to which, as an anthropologist, I had come to collect something
here (ethnographic "data," rather than the hippy capitalists' indigenous
textiles or the tourists' authentic "otherworldly" experiences) redeem-
able for values in my own cultural context. The ironies of the encounter
were heightened by the reason for the young man's interest in speaking
with me, which was to reveal his personal conundrum to someone from
the sort of background that might allow comprehension of his plight.
For years he had plied traditional long-distance trades, but recently
had had unusual success. He had amassed a large number of valuable
textiles from the valley regions where other K'ultas trade mostly for
corn, and he had made contact in La Paz with an enterprising but
unscrupulous American "hippy capitalist." Once he understood the
relative value of certain textiles, he had sought out heirloom pieces that
some of his community members kept in their storehouses, and had also
"found" some possibly pre-Columbian textiles in shaft tombs scattered
about K'ulta territory. Some of these items can bring in thousands of
dollars on the international market, and although my drinking compan-
ion had received only a fraction of their worth from his American
business partner, he had amassed quite a fortune. 14
After numerous drinks, he showed me a thick wad of hundred-dollar
bills and lamented that he could not return to his home hamlet with this
money without sharing it out among his family members, who would
waste it away. Instead, he said, he would invest the money by purchasing
a truck. But that, he felt, would provoke envy among his less-fortunate
kinsmen. His plan, then, was to buy the truck and promptly move to
another town on the highway. My drinking companion was in fact
contemplating a radical shift in status, one that would take him
permanently out of the category of campesino, away from agriculture
and herding and into the role of vecino in some other campesinos'
territory. Not long afterwards, he did just that.
When this young man drove away from Cruce in a new, Brazilian-
made ten-wheel truck to take up residence in another growing roadside
Journeys to Cultural Frontiers 49

town, he did precisely what another of Cruce's vecinos had done some
ten years earlier. Don Cayetano, who owned Cruce's only two-story
house, had moved here with his truck from a hamlet in the Macha area.
The truck no longer runs, and don Cayetano's dream of trading up to
big-time transport and becoming a prosperous member of the Mejillones
truckers' union did not pan out. He now ekes out a living for his
growing family by running a store specializing in school supplies (as well
as a large assortment of other locally useful commodities, including
gasoline and diesel fuel, now delivered to him in fifty-five-gallon drums).
Cruce is thus a point of tension within the territory of Canton Culta,
an active frontier that is home to all the contradictions inherent in
Bolivia's peculiar tangle of ethnicity, class, and culture. It is also a
convenient place to disembark a bus or truck or to wait for one: Many
hamlet-dwelling rural people maintain a storeroom here from which to
market produce and animals. As such a way station, it is also a good
place to find lodgings and to begin the hike into the old town of Santa
Barbara, still the official capital of the canton.
Don Antonio, the retired schoolteacher turned restauranteur-hosteler
and senior vecino in Cruce, kindly consented to rent us a room behind
his restaurant, where a road crew and their dumptruck and grader were
also housed. Home as well to a pack of dogs, numerous pigs, chickens,
and a very loud rooster, don Antonio's patio, onto which our room
opened, became a kind of halfway house sanctuary for several reasons.
There, it was sometimes possible to obtain bottled gas to fuel a heater to
ward off the cold. Given the cultural-frontier facet of Cruce, it was also
a space in which our own identity as outsiders was not so much at issue.
More important for the present work, the interclass and/or interethnic
conflicts that were near the surface there provided insights into phenom-
ena that too easily faded into the background in the hamlets of the
countryside. Cruce also served as an important frontier of another sort,
making possible interviews that would have been less likely anywhere
else in the territory. For as the most vibrant conjunction of local life and
the forces of national culture and the Bolivian state, Cruce is a kind of
neutral territory in which people from the fractious social groups of the
canton intermingle. This is not true elsewhere, even in the old town of
Santa Barbara that used to provide a similar atmosphere.
There are many new towns like Cruce in Bolivia, and there would be
more if the progress-minded movers and shakers in rural communities
were to have their way. As an outpost of the national state erected by
rural people themselves to help bridge the gap they experienced between
their "traditional" life-ways and the city's twentieth-century modernity,
50 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

Cruce is one of very many places along a spongey cultural border, not
only between vecinos and campesinos, but also between ascribed and
achieved kinds of identity-that which others would have one remain
and that which one would become. It is simultaneously a battleground,
where the most stinging insults are sometimes hurled, and a neutral
territory, where individuals may more easily contemplate a change in
identity.
When we first settled there, however, I was unable to appreciate fully
Cruce's advantages, which paled in comparison with the town's lacks, as
seen vis-a-vis my project. I had come to study the intersection of ritual
and politics in the fiesta-cargo system, but at that time Cruce had no
church, and therefore none of the major saints' festivals of the canton
took place there. IS Likewise, the canton's authorities carried out their
weekly meetings elsewhere. Along with the church, the office of the
canton's corregidor, where the town council did meet, was located on the
plaza of the colonially founded town of Santa Barbara de Culta, down the
road a piece and some distance removed from the Pan American Highway.
A few days after arriving in Cruce, therefore, I set out on foot for the more
"isolated and traditional" town of Santa Barbara.
As I reflect on that journey, I am struck by an irony: My method as
ethnographer was to leave behind the cosmopolitan and urban world of
global capital and rampant and homogenizing consumerism, attempting
to shed the implicit knowledge of my own milieu and the privilege and
access to power that comes with it, so as to gain access to another, more
locally anchored and precapitalist world. In this romantic invasion, I had
established a beachhead in a crossroads town, and sought by degrees,
leaving behind electricity, conveniences, motorized travel, monetized
forms of social interaction, and the privacy that results from such
anonymous kinds of sociality, to enter the world of llama caravans, foot
plows, and kinship-based reciprocity. My residence there was temporary,
but my goals and itinerary were in fact precisely the inverse of those
K'ulta people who were building new houses on Cruce's highway, aiming
to transform themselves (through immigration to the city) and their
homeland (through intensified integration with markets, commerce, and
national life). But the relationships between "traditional" values and
those associated with what even in K'ulta is called progress is anything
but straightforward. It is laden with contradictions. I may have hoped to
become an invisible amanuensis through which traditional K'ulta life-
ways would inscribe themselves, but very few among the people of
K'ulta were willing to regard me as such. For some, I was instead a
Journeys to Cultural Frontiers 51

dangerous interloper, practitioner of the dark sorceries of urban life, to

be avoided or driven away. Others, on the contrary, considered me a
conduit through which they might gain access to urban values, govern-
ment development funds, and perhaps cash and manufactured goods.
For the rural people of Santa Barbara, I embodied the potential benefits
and dangers of the city and the crossroads town. In La Paz, Oruro, or
Cruce, where everyone is an outsider, rural people might have expected
to run into unknown entities like me, but not in the countryside. I may
have hoped to leave Cruce behind when I walked out of town across the
plains towards vecino-free hamlets, but that turned out to be impossible.
I was a walking frontier, carrying Cruce and everything it represented on
my back, a kind of Ekeko come to life. This was the predicament I put
myself in as I sought to carry out the frontier practice called ethno-
graphic research, a predicament that shaped my relations with rural
people and led sometimes to frustration, sometimes to insight, and to
consequences sometimes felicitous, sometimes unfortunate.
 Chapter Three

The Dialogical Politics of

Ethnographic Fieldwork

AN ETHNOGRAPHER IN SANTA BARBARA DE CULTA

Where the highway winds east from Cruce, it drops a bit and almost
immediately enters a broad pampa. One can see several hamlets nestled
in sheltered spots in the foothills around the plain. The settlement that I
reached on my way to Santa Barbara was a hamlet on the road,
consisting of a one-room school, with a sign identifying the place as
Palca, and a half-dozen other buildings, only two of which seemed to be
occupied. Yet these were laid out around a sizable plaza, interspersed
among the foundations and tumbled-down walls of at least a dozen
other constructions. Hoping to tryout my still-rudimentary Aymara and
to confirm that it was indeed spoken here, I approached one of these
houses where an older woman, wearing the black dress and white felt
hat characteristic of this area, was peeling potatoes in a doorway. I was
only able to get within fifty feet of the house and to utter a well-practiced
greeting when she put down her potatoes and began to hurl shrieks and
stones in my direction. Chastened, I returned to the road.
Other experiences on that walk increased my apprehensions about
fieldwork. As the road crossed the pampa it led me past two or three
flocks of llamas, alpacas, and sheep. When I came near, sling-wielding
young shepherdesses ducked down behind rocks and turned their backs.
Their dogs, however, were not so reticent, charging at me with fangs
bared. I soon learned to keep my pockets bulging with stones, nearly
absent in some areas, with which to keep the dogs at bay. Farther on, I

52
The Dialogical Politics of Ethnographic Fieldwork 53

crossed paths with two young men, dressed in white homespun trousers,
homemade vest and jacket, and the apparently universal white felt hats,
leading a pair of heavily loaded donkeys towards Cruce. They addressed
me first, in Quechua, asking me where I was going. When I replied in
Aymara, they switched to it, but my language training had not prepared
me to understand their rapid-fire speech and unfamiliar forms of
expression. Switching to a rudimentary Spanish, one of the young men
suggested that it was not such a good idea to cross this pampa or go to
Santa Barbara, since strangers had been found hereabouts dead, naked,
and lacking some of their body parts. With a good deal of giggling, the
two young men and their donkeys continued on their way, as I did.
Now two hours' walk from Cruce, I was running low on optimism as
well as energy. The day, at least, was brilliantly sunny. The previous
night a wintry chill had frozen the pools of water that here and there
dotted the plain, and the small streams that flowed over the graveled
road surface had been reduced to streaks of ice. But the intense radiation
of the midday sun that strikes this fourteen thousand-feet-high plain now
melted the ice and raised the ambient temperature to somewhere near
65 0 Fahrenheit. Herds of llamas, alpacas, and sheep grazed on the
short-cropped green plant growth that covered the pampa's lowest and
wettest spots, while the yellows and browns of winter-dry bunch grasses
faded at the horizon into the reds and purples of the mountains that rose
in the distance on all sides. The warmth and the stark beauty of my
surroundings helped to put my experiences into perspective.
Certainly, I reasoned, indigenous peoples' historical experience with
city people and outsiders justified their wariness and accounted for the
apparent hostility that I had experienced. Just the year before, in 1978,
the government had once again sent a commission into the region to
carry out a survey of individual property holdings (a catastro), as a step
towards imposing a new kind of tax. The people of K'ulta, who continue
to prefer payment of a nominal head tax over a system that would
require formal distribution of individual land titles, dispatched the
commission with a hail of stones, just as they had taken care of many
previous state functionaries over the past century. So, too, only deter-
mined resistance had prevented outsiders during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries from converting ayllu lands into haciendas (even
though, too cold to produce readily marketable crops, K'ulta remained
relatively insulated from such efforts). Finally, I recalled the rural
Andean belief, described in many ethnographies, in the secret identity
attributed to some outsiders as evil and magical pishtacos, naqaqs, or
54 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

k"arisiris, who extract the blood and body fat of unwary indigenous
victims. Given this array of dangers represented in outsiders, it stood to
reason that K'ulta people should shy away from me.
Finally I reached the eastern edge of the plain and came to a narrow
track that turned southwards off the main highway, barely passable by
jeep or truck. This was the road to Santa Barbara, and I took it. I found
myself walking along two barely maintained and infrequently traveled
wheel ruts, which descended gently into a broad ravine cut by a now-dry
stream. On both sides of this ever-broadening ravine, small fenced fields
alternated with expanses of pasture and rocky outcrops. Here and there,
I noticed a viscacha, the Andes' bushy-tailed, rabbitlike rodent. Black
and white raptors called alqamaris, birds something like eagles, circled
overhead. As this track curved and looped down the ravine, I noticed
that it was crossed at several points by a much straighter path, deeply
worn into the ground and even etched into the exposed rock like a series
of closely spaced bicycle tracks. Too steep for motorized vehicles, this
was in fact a major llama-caravan trail that grazed the town of Santa
Barbara as it carried trade between the salt flats of Uyuni and the maize
valleys to the northeast. Indeed, the turnoff for Santa Barbara lay at a
crossroads much older than that of Cruce: Here an ancient artery of
subsistence trade destined for household larders and communal storage
bins was overlain at right angles by the more recent Spanish silver
highway (now the Pan American Highway), a vein that drained these
same larders on the way to marketplace, mine, and European bank. Just
as K'ulta territory was a watershed dividing both the Altiplano drainage
basin from the rivers leading towards the Atlantic and the Amazon
waters from those of the Rio de la Plata, it was another sort of
intersection as well, land that had witnessed the passage of untold
thousands of llama caravans on the north-south route, and as many
Potosi-bound forced laborers and galleon-bound silver bars.!
About a kilometer from this junction, I crested a small rise and Santa
Barbara came into view, a small and quiet town nestled in the folds of a
curving hill just above the point where the stream bed I had been
following joined a larger river valley. Along this crest where the town
came into view I could see other foot trails converging towards Santa
Barbara. One of them, coming from the northwest, was flanked on either
side by tall stone pillars forming a sort of gateway just at the point where
walkers would first (or last) see the town; I would later find that all the
trails converging on the town from distant hamlets were marked in this
way. Off to one side of the road, where a footpath angled over a hill
The Dialogical Politics of Ethnographic Fieldwork 55

towards a hamlet some distance away, I noticed what appeared to be a

stone seat, made of large squarish blocks of smooth stone. This was a
good place to stop and rest.2
From this distance I could make out most of the structure of the town,
laid out along the grid-plan lines followed by most Spanish-founded
rural towns (see Photograph 3.1). Most visible were the gleaming tin
roofs of a large adobe church and its accompanying bell tower, situated
on a large town plaza, and a smaller but still impressive school, standing
just outside the main cluster of town buildings. Sheltered against the
hillsides, the rest of the town consisted of about 120 rectangular,
thatch-roofed houses, arranged around small courtyards in groups of
three or four. Interspersed among these houses were nearly as many

Photograph 3.1. Santa Barbara de Culta before the fiesta and the rains. A Vila Sirka
Mamani herd passes through town on the way to pasture. The tin-roofed church and bell
tower face the plaza (concealed by housetops). In the background is the cemetery, past
which runs the access road leading to the Pan American Highway. September 1979.
(Photograph by author)
56 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

roofless, crumbling house ruins. Clearly, the town had seen better days.
Nearly all the houses were built of earthen adobe blocks. Most were
windowless, and only a few buildings (the school, the church tower, and
a few houses) were whitewashed.
As I approached the town, I noticed very little activity. From a
distance I noticed a few women sitting in a courtyard somewhat above
the main square, weaving cloth on horizontal looms staked to the
ground. A handful of small children played in the otherwise empty
streets. Fifty meters from the main square, the road took me past
artesian springs enclosed within a large stone corral, feeding a verdant
patch of grass. Inside the corral, a pair of donkeys grazed. Entering a
large stone-paved plaza by one of the four entranceways at its corners, I
came to the center of a very quiet, nearly abandoned, Santa Barbara de
Culta.
After my initial experience approaching houses, I thought it prudent
to sit down in the plaza and wait. Looking around, I saw that the church
and the other one-story adobe buildings around the plaza were pad-
locked; some, lacking wooden doors, were closed with rarge stones piled
in the door frames. A few hours later, an old man approached me, again
asking me questions in Quechua. I responded with Aymara stock
phrases, offered him some coca, which I had carried in a small bag
tucked under my belt, and we had a conversation of sorts. I had
difficulty understanding his Aymara; again, it was unlike what I had
learned. He spoke no Spanish, and so with a great deal of fumbling on
my part and patience on his, we made slow progress towards under-
standing while we both studiedly chose coca leaves and put them into
our mouths. I managed to convey that I wanted to meet with the town
authorities, that I was interested in fiestas, and that I would like to stay
in the town. I learned that the town authorities were, perhaps, to meet
on the following day. Soon the old man left me, thanking me for the coca
I had given him. I sat alone for a while in the plaza before returning to
Cruce.
When I returned the next day at an earlier hour, the town was
somewhat livelier, though no authorities arrived in the town hall, or
corregimiento, which remained padlocked on one side of the plaza.
There were a few more of the wary but respectful conversations like that
of the previous day, and I was able to learn the name of the corregidor,
as well as the relative location of his home hamlet. Someone explained to
me that he was the town's highest authority, and that he usually met with
other authorities called caciques, alcaldes, and alguaciles, whose absence
The Dialogical Politics of Ethnographic Fieldwork 57

on this Sunday remained unaccounted for. Perhaps they would meet

Wednesday, someone else suggested. Several more such trips and a
preemptive visit to the corregidor in his home hamlet were necessary
before I finally did meet with the town authorities, accompanied by
Mary Dillon and bearing gifts and official papers.
We arrived in Santa Barbara on the last Sunday of June to meet with
the collective leadership of the place, carrying a quantity of gifts,
including newspapers and books in Aymara, packets of chalk, note-
books, and pencils for the schools, and a map of the area purchased
from the Instituto Geografico Militar. While we waited our turn before
the authorities-others had gotten there before us with a variety of
business-we practiced our Aymara with the women and children seated
on the ground outside the corregimiento and observed the goings on.
Apparently only men were allowed inside, except for occasional
female petitioners. The few women who entered the office did so very
discreetly, sitting on the floor near the door, which offered the only
source of light for the windowless one-room building. Inside, the
corregidor was seated behind a large adobe desk, covered by a locally
produced cloth. On his desk there were some papers, a book titled
C6digo Civil, a stamp pad, the seal of the canton, a Coca-Cola bottle
filled with a clear liquid, and a small cloth holding a pile of coca leaves.
From my vantage outside the door I could clearly make out, above and
behind the desk and corregidor, two pieces of cloth affixed to the wall,
each with other objects attached. High up, near the base of the thatched
roof, there was a Bolivian flag. Three posters were tacked over it: in the
center, a reproduction of the Bolivian state seal, and to each side,
reproductions of paintings of the Liberator, Simon Bolivar, and first
president, Jose Antonio de Sucre. Just below these national icons a large
striped poncho was also affixed to the wall. Hanging from nails at the
center of the poncho were symbols of authority, a bundle of varas
(silver-tipped staffs of office), a braided leather whip, and a silver-
trimmed pututu, a trumpet made from a bull's horn.
Below and in front of these symbolic arrays, the corregidor sat behind
his desk on an adobe bench that followed the wall all around the inside
of the room. Near him, seven or eight other authorities listened to
petitioners and occasionally interjected their opinions. All the men inside
wore the traditional dress of the area: homespun and home-sewn pants
of white or black, held up by a brightly colored woven belt and a red and
black striped sash, the ends of which hung down at one side. The pants
were complemented by a checkered wool vest and jacket, also locally
58 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

produced, worn over a store-bought shirt or sweater. Over these some of

the men wore ponchos nearly identical to the one tacked to the wall,
woven from black wool with bands of brightly colored vertical stripes. A
few men carried their ponchos folded and draped over one shoulder. On
their feet, they wore sandals made from rubber tires (ujutas) and their
heads were covered by ch'ullus, knitted woolen caps with earflaps. Each
man held his white felt hat in his lap, and each also held a small woven
pouch, a ch'uspa, containing coca leaves and the alkaline clay that is
chewed along with them.
A few hours passed while we waited for our turn, and I was able to
observe the standard etiquette of each new petitioner. All began their
petitions by greeting the corregidor and then each of the assembled
authorities with a handshake, embrace, and second handshake. Most
then produced a quantity of coca leaves, which were received in both
hands by the corregidor and then added to the pile. My coca was at the
ready, but I was somewhat alarmed to see that most also presented a
bottle. The corregidor then passed his own bottle to the petitioner, who
poured a few drops at each corner of the altar, mumbling a few words
(which I could not make out) before taking a swig of what I soon learned
was an 80 -proof mixture of water and cane alcohol. Periodically, the
corregidor distributed small handfuls of coca leaves to everyone in the
room, always received with thanks in two open hands. Now and then,
two men or two women would exchange their coca pouches, touching
them to the earthen floor with a few mumbled words, before placing a
few more carefully chosen leaves into the growing wad that made a
bulge in one cheek.
The atmosphere in the room seemed to alternate between quiet speech
making and loud discussions in which all seemed to speak at once,
punctuated by libations, chews of coca, and occasional joking and bursts
of laughter. I learned from some teen-aged boys outside that most of the
petitioners had come to seek resolution of land disputes. The meeting,
then, combined the attributes of a town council session and a sitting of
a law court of first resort. All the same, the desk seemed to be taking on
the characteristics of a ritual altar, with the corregidor appearing
increasingly to be the officiant of an elaborate offering ceremony. I later
learned that this apparent conjunction of politics, law, and ritual goes
very much deeper, while the kind of Ii bating and coca dedicating I was
seeing here is more akin to the small reciprocities of everyday sociality.
By attending many of these meetings and the rituals through which the
authority of these men is made legitimate, I learned that the power
The Dialogical Politics of Ethnographic Fieldwork 59

exercised by them here was vested in them not only by the state, through
their nominal appointment by the subprefect in Challapata, but also by
the gods, through the highly complex system of ceremony and sacrifice
that helps define and bind together the social groups that occupy the
canton's territory. And that, along with the trajectories of mythical
consciousness and historical consciousness that intersect in these same
contexts, is the primary subject of this book.
At the time, however, I had only the faintest intimations of all that;
my immediate concern was to act as appropriately as possible and to
avoid being sent packing. The day wore on, and when finally we were
called into the town hall, it was to hear that the session had ended and
that we should return the following week. Apparently, the assembled
authorities hoped that the delay might encourage us to disappear from
their lives in the least confrontational way.
When we returned a few days later for the next meeting, however
(this time armed with a bottle of alcohol in addition to coca and gifts),
our wait was shorter. Only one, urgent case was heard before we were
allowed to make our petition. 3 I began by presenting the corregidor with
alcohol and coca, after which the already described rituals of libation
and coca chewing began. I then read out a prepared self-introduction in
Aymara and presented my gifts. After consultations among the authori-
ties, the corregidor asked to see our documents. We produced passports
and numerous letters of introduction, including one written by the
prefect of Oruro. In Spanish, the corregidor repeatedly queried our
purposes, and I responded that I planned to write a book about the
history of the town and in particular about its fiestas. At this point, we
were asked to sit; the authorities to the corregidor's left made room for
me on the bench while a space on the floor was allotted to Mary Dillon.
Deliberations in rapid-fire Aymara then began in earnest. After the
first twenty minutes or so, it became clear that the group was divided. At
this level of discourse the Aymara was beyond our understanding, but
from gestures alone we could plainly see that one authority in particular
was disposed against us, while another seemed to take our part. At one
point, the corregidor stopped the discussion and noted that there was no
hotel here. We could not stay unless someone had room for us. Once
again, the room burst into debate, and the corregidor asked us to leave
the building. From outside the door, where we sat with other petitioners
and interested parties, we listened to impassioned speechifying without
comprehension. Finally, after nearly an hour of discussion, we were
called back in. The corregidor informed us that it had been decided.
60 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

Since we had papers ordering them to allow us to do research (which we

did not have), they would do what they must. While some faces from the
other side of the room glared disapprovingly in our direction, a man in
his midtwenties volunteered to put us up. At this, however, there was
more debate. One of the higher-ranking authorities insisted that we
should stay with him instead. The two men briefly argued until the
corregidor intervened to decide the matter. We would stay with the
authority (who, it turned out, was the corregidor's sister's husband) and
later, if we wished, visit the young man's household. It was a propitious
decision.
Not only was our host, don Manuel Mamani, alcalde of his ayllu for
the year, but he also belonged to the ayllu, or social group, within whose
territory the town of Santa Barbara was situated. And unlike most of
those present, who hailed from far-flung hamlets, he lived in a hamlet
very near to the town itself. In addition to being alcalde and because of
his facility with both spoken and written Spanish, he was also the town's
(and canton's) notary and registro civil. Putting pen to paper, he made
out a formal document giving us permission to reside in the canton for
the purpose of writing a book on customs. Signed by the corregidor, it
was then embossed with the seal of the canton. After making arrange-
ments with our new host, we formally thanked everyone present with the
local double-barreled handshake-embrace and returned to Cruce to
prepare our move.
On the following day we moved into temporary lodgings, an empty
house on the plaza belonging to our host's in-laws. Not long afterwards,
our host moved us once again, this time to his nearby home hamlet of
Vila Sirka. We were moved into a building on the courtyard of our host's
own house complex, a thatch-roofed, one-room adobe house (built
initially to serve as a storeroom). Although it was very small-inside
dimensions of about six by nine feet, with an adobe platform on one end
that served as a bed, and an adobe bench against the back wall-it
opened onto a spacious courtyard, in which we often sat to warm
ourselves in the sun, while slowly becoming familiar with the daily
round and working to improve our Aymara.

GETTING TO KNOW THE MAMANIS: HAMLET AND TOWN, VILA SIRKA AND
SANTA BARBARA

Vila Sirka lies almost adjacent to the town of Santa Barbara, and it was
thus possible to experience both the everyday life of a residential hamlet
and the collective sphere of the town. But apart from one day each week
The Dialogical Politics of Ethnographic Fieldwork 61

when the authorities met in the corregidor's office on the town plaza,
Santa Barbara de Culta was extraordinarily quiet during most of that
July of 1979. So too was Vila Sirka. The relative absence of life gave rise
to doubts about the wisdom of settling in a tiny hamlet near an
apparently abandoned town. But don Manuel told us that this degree of
quiet was seasonal, resulting from the absence of those on trading
expeditions in the warm valleys seeking the foodstuffs to sustain them
for the rest of the year. I learned, however, that in spite of the hamlet's
thirteen standing houses, only five houses (six, counting ours) were
occupied on a permanent basis. And despite Santa Barbara's 120
standing houses-the great majority of which remained closed and
locked-the town lacked permanent inhabitants altogether.
Within Vila Sirka, only four households were regularly occupied (see
Fig. 3.1). There was the house in which don Manuel lived (when not in
Santa Barbara performing his duties as notary), along with his wife and
their four children. Each of the hamlet's three other households, don
Manuel informed us, was headed by one of his male cousins. Most of the
land around Vila Sirka (and indeed, around Santa Barbara) is claimed
collectively by the patronymic group to which don Manuel belongs. A
kind of patri-stem, this group of four patronym-sharing households
belonged to a larger configuration, a patriline, claiming descent from a
single, original, male ancestor. In addition to their claim in and around
the town, more distantly related Mamanis also occupied two other small
hamlets within a half-hour's walk. In the center of these settlements, they
defended a large stretch of common pastureland from the territorial
ambitions of other patrilines.
Initially through the exchange of gifts of foodstuffs and visits, we very
gradually came to know don Manuel's immediate family along with
those of his three cousins, and eventually were able to participate in
diverse aspects of their lives. In the early weeks, however, contacts were
infrequent. I busied myself with a survey of Vila Sirka and nearby Santa
Barbara, of which I made two watercolor maps, one of which may still
adorn the wall of the town council office (see Fig. 3.2).
Apart from don Manuel's house in Santa Barbara, the town also held
other, nonpermanent residents. On one side of town, there was a
one-room school, and next to it, sometimes, lived a schoolteacher sent
by the national rural school system. In 1979 and 1980, the teacher was
a trilingual Spanish-Aymara-Quechua speaker from the outskirts of the
city of Oruro. Near the plaza was a house that seasonally became a small
general store when a family from the Altiplano town of Huari arrived to
carryon what for them was a profitable trade. Another house was
0\
N

uywirihill_

silu mlsas asrntu

.;
Figure 3.1. A Mamani hamlet: plan of Vila Sirka. Houses are identified by the name of the head of the
household (the patriline jiliri). The inset contains details of a patio and house. (Author's rendering)
 cI1'isnyamisa " . B .... rock poles

18l'~==
g-

c:::r::::::::J
KEY
CJralline
-pall1
.",,' aytlu neignbarhDOd
c:z:J ruw10d house
~ __ oI_-saya
mtI area 01 manxa-saya

0\
W Figure 3.2. Plan of Santa Barbara de Culta (Author's rendering)
64 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

occupied about six months of the year by a different itinerant trader

from Huari, don Eugenio, a man whose mestizo father had been a
powerful vecino and occasional state-appointed corregidor in the 1930s
and 1940s and had married an indigenous woman from this town. Then
in his late sixties, don Eugenio plied his trade in ambulatory fashion,
carrying a bundle of goods on his back from hamlet to hamlet. Both
shops sold essentials of rural life: candles, kerosene (for lamps made
from tin cans), dyes, coca, candy, cane alcohol from large tin cans,
canned sardines, Alka-Seltzer, and dynamite. Apart from money, the
trade for these goods involved food and also sheep, the meat and pelts of
which they could later sell in the city.
During that cold July, however, the stores remained vacant. A few
times a day, people from surrounding hamlets arrived in hopes of buying
or trading. The proximity of Vila Sirka and Santa Barbara led them
quickly to learn of our presence. Most assumed that we, being outsiders,
would, like good vecinos, have opened a shop. Almost daily, individuals
came to our door asking what we had, and opened their bundles to offer
small quantities of potatoes, toasted corn, eggs, and sometimes meat, in
exchange for what they hoped we would offer. Since we were chronically
short of such foodstuffs, we eventually learned to keep an extra stock of
sugar, oranges, rice, and coca (we did not go in for alcohol and dynamite).
By offering our guests a cup of heavily sugared tea we obtained not only
a bit of food for ourselves but also conversation and friendship. Even
when the storekeepers returned, such exchanges continued. We were poor
businessmen, however, and would often provide tea, candy, safety pins,
barrettes, or store-bought bread to our guests at no charge. We also
provided food and drink to everyone who stopped by. Eventually, many
of our guests reciprocated, especially members of the resident Mamani
families, who would send a child with a gift of eggs or potatoes or the
fresh-baked bread from local ovens.
Generosity in feeding guests was one way of conforming to local
custom, which requires everyone to feed uninvited guests, especially
strangers. Exceptions can be made in the case of proven enemies and
those who are not true human beings. Kuntinarus, the ghosts of the area,
and k"arik"aris, a kind of magical vampire, as well as certain deities in
malignant human form can be turned away if one can identify them in
advance.
Since all but known enemies may disguise themselves as friendly
strangers, they are difficult to recognize, though many stories of these
beings provide clues for their identification. K"arik"aris, who present
The Dialogical Politics of Ethnographic Fieldwork 65

themselves most often in the forms of cityfolk, priests, and foreigners,

sometimes carry backpacks like the one I had worn on my first trip to
Santa Barbara. I learned to carry my possessions in the local way, in a
textile bundle tied around my shoulders, and that first experience of a
hail of stones was never repeated (though the accusation, in a much
more serious form, was). Kuntinarus are incapable of digesting food.
Thus when we stopped in a hamlet on a walk through the territory and
were offered large quantities of food, we made an effort to clean our
plates. Aside from the issue of avoiding suspicion, failing to accept and
to finish food is the height of disrespect and impoliteness. One result of
all this is that visits must be carefully timed. Going from one house
directly to another forces the guest to choose between insulting host or
stomach.
For a variety of reasons, our most frequent conversations during our
early months in Cruce and in Vila Sirka-Santa Barbara, other than those
with don Manuel and the vecinos of Cruce, were with young, unmarried
men. Many of the married men, including don Manuel's three cousins in
Vila Sirka, were off on trading trips during much of the dry and cold
winter months, seeking the abundant harvests of the valleys or attempt-
ing to market in the cities (for cash) some of what they had obtained.
The women and old men who remained, and who spent much of the day
in the hills and pampas herding their animals, were more reticent,
sometimes seeming to avoid us. In addition, because of the relatively
recent arrival of rural schools and the more active travel and marketing
role of men, few of the women or aged men spoke Spanish. And given
their relative reticence, our efforts to converse with them in Aymara were
too brief to be productive. Young, unmarried men under twenty-five or
so years of age were both the most fluent in Spanish and the most eager
to speak with us. They were also the least burdened by time-consuming
work. Many seemed to spend much of their time wandering the hills
with an eye out for fetching shepherdesses, engaging in courtship rather
than in commerce. Dressed to the nines in their homespun clothes, many
young men passed through Santa Barbara in their wanderings, some-
times looking for a small mirror or safety pin that they might purchase
as a gift to a girlfriend. Sometimes they would also while away their time
in conversation with us.
When they did, their curiosity vied with ours, in the oblique style of
information gathering that results from the local etiquette that considers
a direct personal question very impolite. After finding we had little to
trade for, questions often concerned the asking price of what possessions
66 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

they could see or what we might have elsewhere, perhaps in our home
country. From here, it was a short step to wonder whether we also came
from a land with farmers and herders. The market prices of agricultural
products and animals back in the United States were of special interest.
The people of Canton Culta travel a good deal-it is not for nothing that
they label themselves commerciantes-and the distance and airfare
between the United States and Bolivia were often of interest to them.
One young man, juggling the relative cost of airfare and the selling price
of lamb per kilo, seriously considered the idea of marketing his sheep in
Miami.
One of the most oft-asked questions was the price of my hiking boots.
Undaunted by the quoted price, many proceeded to suggest a trade
involving sheep or llamas. When I would politely decline to sell them,
numerous men queried the possibility of ordering a pair through me.
While I found that wearing a good pair of boots helped my feet to resist
the rough terrain and the extreme cold that descended nightly, I later
discovered that reinforced shoes and heavy boots, which some men
indeed owned, were especially desirable for use in ritual battles and
warfare, serving to protect the feet against sling-thrown stones and for
effective kicking in close combat.
There will be much more to say about fighting when we explore the
relationship between feuds and festivals, ritual battles and land wars,
k"arik"aris and the proper way of dealing with them. Understanding the
significance of these relationships requires, however, much more famil-
iarity with the meaning of blood, semen, and the fat that adheres to
internal organs, which is to say the circulating substances involved in the
maintenance and reproduction of human life and human agency in the
forms they take in Canton Culta. Here I will note only that some fighting
takes a playful form.
Towards the end of July, a young Mamani woman came to our house
in search of what might be called beauty aids-the mirrors, barrettes,
and large-sized safety pins that unmarried but marriageable women wear
in quantity. She also, however, was bleeding from a cut on the top of her
head, and we helped her wash and disinfect the wound. When we looked
more closely, we noticed that she also sported a large bump, and she
related that a certain young man who had been courting her had scored
a direct hit with a small sling-thrown stone. Laughing about it, she
reported that she thought she had landed a few shots on him, too. One
of the wandering minstrels had failed to get close enough to sing his love
song.
The Dialogical Politics of Ethnographic Fieldwork 67

COUNTERETHNOGRAPHY: THE ROLES AND PERSONA OF THE ETHNOGRAPHER

The preceding incident was just one of the moments when ethnographic
inquiry was conjoined with another role, this time as first-aid providers.
Others also asked for medical advice and treatment, sometimes far
beyond our competence, which was limited mainly to antiseptic and
Alka-Seltzer. When such cases came along, such as the woman brought
to us in an apparently advanced stage of tuberculosis and the man in
convulsions suffering from a fractured skull, we were able only to advise
our friends to seek aid from a doctor in Challapata or Oruro. This was
also our approach with the especially touchy subject of birth control.
The issue was invariably raised when we were asked why we had no
children. In spite of our evasive answers, many people guessed that we
might know something about contraception, and one or two men, and
many more women, quietly and singly came to our house seeking
detailed explanations. Now, the chimerical story of Peace Corps steril-
ization schemes (made all too vivid in the Sanjines film Blood of the
Condor) was then widely known in Bolivia; one of the indianist parties
based in La Paz had made opposition to such genocidal, imperialist
family-planning programs into a principal plank in its platform. Our
response to such questions, therefore, was to affirm that birth control
was possible and available from a doctor or pharmacist in the city.
Mary, whose research on the Aymara language kept her often close to
the house, where she served innumerable cups of coffee and plates of
food to visiting men and especially women, learned to spin during hours
of polite conversation. To her credit, she was not as insistent about
attending secret rituals and completing libation sessions as I was, and
was therefore also able to minister to me and others when we needed to
be dragged home in a drunken state. This, it turned out, was a charac-
teristic woman's role in festival contexts, where their level-headedness
served to save them as well as their menfolk from embarrassment.
Apart from being a pseudostorekeeper and adhesive-bandage pro-
vider, I was to take on many other roles as well. I carried a camera to
record the place and its goings on, and soon discovered that photograph-
ing people is a highly sensitive business, which my subjects sometimes
sought out and sometimes avoided. Photography was not unknown, but
the people of K'ulta had experience only with Polaroid portraitists of
regional fairs and the box-camera photographers of urban plazas, who
develop their images on the spot. There was much consternation and
suspicion when I could not deliver instant images after snapping a photo.
But once I had been able to have some pictures developed and had
68 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

delivered them to the people they portrayed (to the surprise of many, at
no charge), I was frequently sought out for portraits, to a degree that
severely strained my research budget. I also found that formal poses
were vastly preferred over casual snapshots and that many people greatly
objected to close-ups that "cut" part of their bodies. One of the resident
vecinos was convinced that I had intended him bodily harm; a lengthy
explanation of my aesthetic reasons for preferring close-ups helped to
alleviate his fear and anger, which was completely placated once I reshot
his family's photographs in the stiff, unsmiling, frontal, full-body style
(wearing urban clothing and displaying an array of "national culture"
possessions such as radio and bicycle) that nearly all K'ultas preferred as
a more dignified form of self-presentation.
There were other roles as well. In early August, just before Bolivian
independence day, my comparatively large size and, I suppose, my boots
led the Mamani bunch to invite me onto their soccer team, engaged in a
round-robin competition with many other teams in the canton. But I am
not much good at soccer or at running for long periods at high altitude
(the heavy boots did not help). I was rapidly moved to the goalie
position, where size counts for something, but after just two games was
politely though permanently sent to the bench, replaced by sixty-year-old
don Eugenio. Besides storekeeper, nurse, photographer, and failed
goalie, I also became at various times a member of work gangs,
undertaker, coroner, peasant union typist, and election judge.
Being the notary as well as alcalde for the year, our host don Manuel
kept a small office on the main plaza in Santa Barbara. It contained little
more than two chairs and a desk, on which sat his register books, notary
materials, and typewriter. In the office, he recorded births and deaths
and performed civil weddings. I was present during numerous such
events, all of which were accompanied by the same ritual of coca
chewing and libations at the corners of the desk that I had seen in the
corregimiento. In one marriage ceremony, I participated in libations
dedicated to typewriter, register book, stamp pad, and seal. For each of
these services, don Manuel, the first local man to have passed the
examination to obtain this post, received a small fee.
Don Manuel often complained that the wealth his clients assumed
that he had amassed made him the object of their envy, which in the
Andes, can cause illness. Although he seemed perfectly healthy, he was in
some respects wealthier than most others. His house in Santa Barbara
was the largest and best appointed one in town, consisting of two rooms
rather than one and sporting a window. Yet, along with his wife and
children, don Manuel preferred to spend most of the time in a much
The Dialogical Politics of Ethnographic Fieldwork 69

smaller, windowless house in Vila Sirka. He explained that to live in the

large house in Santa Barbara provoked too much envy among his
ayllu-mates.
Because of his notarial duties, which included the provision of death
certificates, he also kept a pick and shovel for the digging of graves.
Now, a measles epidemic swept across the canton during those cold
months, hitting a large percentage of children under ten or eleven years
of age. In the temporary absence of our host, who had himself gone to
the valleys to trade, distraught men came to our door in search of our
host and his implements. Several times I helped to find don Manuel's
wife to unlock his town house, and helped as well to dig a grave for a
dead child in the cemetery, located several hundred meters outside of
town, where it has been since the late eighteenth century.4 So when
grieving men asked me to pray over a child's grave, I did my best to
oblige. Most seemed satisfied with what I was capable of, which was the
Lord's Prayer in English. That was the extent, however, of my priestly
activities.
Later on, when through similar circumstance I was enlisted to help
with the burial of a young man, I was asked to play the part of a coroner
and to identify the cause of death. I tried to beg off, but the corpse was
nonetheless unwrapped for my benefit before I was able to excuse myself
on the basis of incompetence. By then I was fluent enough in Aymara to
understand that the heightened emotional state of the pallbearer under-
takers, which I had interpreted as grief, in fact included a large dose of
raw fear. Corpses are not buried by members of the immediate family,
but by affines. Burial of his wife's brother or mother's brother is one of
the unpleasant tasks incumbent upon a man, who is to them a perpetu-
ally subordinated and indebted outsider, a thief of sister or daughter.
There is a serious possibility of contagion in the cemetery, not from
disease, but from a kind of possession of which uneasy souls, those
which have not yet gone west, are capable. Certain souls are especially
likely to cause problems, including those who have committed incest and
those who have died while drunk, like the young man I was helping to
bury. These became kuntinarus (Sp. condenados), ghosts who cannot
reach the distant land of the dead, and are thus destined to wander
endlessly across the places they knew when alive. Stories abounded of
strange meetings with a kuntinaru, some of whom may show up on one's
doorstep looking as they did when alive, in search of the solace and food
that their true forms prevent them from obtaining. I had also learned
that to pronounce a cause of death, even an apparently innocent one
(given the circumstances of his death, this youth had most likely died of
70 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

alcohol poisoning), can lead to recriminations and even violent acts of

revenge that may set off, or continue, a long-lived and bitter feud.
In yet another capacity, I became recording secretary in a meeting of
authorities of one section of the canton. The meeting was held to petition
the government for emergency aid after the harvests of 1979 proved
disastrous. My role was to take dictation, typing-in triplicate-requests
for state aid. Among the requests was an appeal for the stocking and
staffing of a posta sanitaria, an emergency nursing station, stocked with
vaccines and medicines, which should have been the prerogative of the
canton. (As mentioned in a previous note, one was eventually built and
staffed, in the mid-1980s, but in Cruce rather than in Santa Barbara.)
The same document included incorporation of part of the canton as a
peasant union, or sindicato, which the authorities believed that state
agencies would require. Many communities have been reformed as
sindicatos, but the syndication efforts I witnessed proved to have been
made to convey an expedient appearance rather than to transform social
life effectively.
I was asked to compile the sindicato roster by copying names, profes-
sions, and numbers from stacks of national identity cards handed to me
by the authorities. These had been recently delivered in preparation for
their distribution after mandatory voting in the presidential elections. 5 We
will later plumb the significance of the fact that the peasant union founded
in the document corresponded only to the social group, or ayllu, to which
my host belonged and the territory in which the town of Santa Barbara
was located, a fraction of the people and territory of the canton.
To round out this survey of the roles that an aspiring ethnographer
may be asked to play in the countryside, I will admit to having served, in
the presidential elections of 1980, as election judge, voting booth guard,
and one of three vote counters. Rural people have had the vote since the
1950s revolution, and my experience confirmed that they use it fully. In
part, they do so because voting is mandatory; one cannot get one's
national identity card validated without the evidence of the ink-dipped
blue thumb that election judges give voters after they deposit their ballot
in the box. The authorities of the town urged me to cast my own ballot,
but I refrained from doing SO. 6

A BALANCE SHEET OF CULTURAL POSITIONING

Just as I struggled throughout the fieldwork period to grasp the manner

by which K'ultas understand events and define themselves, they sought
to place me within the field of possible roles into which gringo (outsider)
The Dialogical Politics of Ethnographic Fieldwork 71

vecinos normally fit. Clearly, I proved inadequate as hippy capitalist,

vecino shopkeeper, nurse, coroner, soccer player, and state official. I
suppose that seeing me flounder on the soccer field, botch up the peeling
of potatoes, pass out after drinking too much at a festival, or act as
uncomfortably as they did in the presence of a corpse, helped to dispel
some of my K'ulta friends' fears about me and to establish a sense of
common humanity. That and the fact that we, unlike schoolteachers,
priests, and other outsiders, had not disparaged their beliefs or practices,
or attempted to enlighten them with rational and scientific wisdom,
made the sharing of more private events more imaginable. It also,
however, opened the way to their more intensive (but always politely
indirect) questioning, to which it was sometimes difficult to respond
without preemptively contradicting the answers I hoped for from them.
It was thus somewhat ironic that we were so often sought out as resident
experts not only on our own culture but also on the questions of the
ages, such as what happens to us when we die, what the stars are made
of, if it is true that the earth revolves around the sun or that men have
walked on the moon. Often, of course, such moments resulted from my
own inquisitiveness being turned back on me. Still, because the people of
Canton Culta were just as curious about us as we were about them, I had
no choice but to answer them. I found that I often learned as much by
their questions and their uptake of my responses as by attempting to ask
my own.
Standing one night under the moon and stars, for instance, I asked
one K'ulta man, a yatiri ("one who knows") widely renowned for his
cosmological knowledge, about the stars and the constellations that
people in the Andes see in dark spaces in the Milky Way. "You," I was
told, "know more about that than I do." Then the questions about
moon, stars, and souls came back at me. How does one take a teacher's
role to explain the heavens to an expert in cosmology, whose knowledge
schoolteachers disparage, and still hope for his explanation? Fortunately,
the Aymara language is especially suited for imparting information
without implying that one believes in it. Rather, it requires one,
grammatically, to state the source of any imparted information, whether
direct personal knowledge (as in eyewitness evidence), reported speech
(what someone has told one), or more distant received wisdom, what
they say (referring especially to information passed down verbally from
generation to generation, often in the form of narrative). Now, personal
knowledge information is regarded as much more reliable than that
contained in reported speech, unless the integrity of the witness is
questionable. Received wisdom from the distant past is generally held to
72 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

be unquestionably true, or at least the best that one can hope for where
personal knowledge is impossible. Received wisdom, however, some-
times fails to provide clear answers to today's questions, and also
sometimes comes in variant versions that leave room for alternative
forms of explanation or clarification. To the yatiri, therefore, I provided
a thumbnail sketch of distant balls of fire, earth's orbit of the sun, and
NASA moon walks, carefully circumscribing it as information read in
books and newspapers, heard from teachers, and witnessed on
television-all these being, to my yatiri friend, eminently fallible sources.
About the destination of souls and the afterlife, I had only to respond
that we would all find out, someday. That, it turned out, was also the
standard reply in K'ulta territory.
The next morning when I walked out of our house into the courtyard,
the yatiri and his cousin, our host don Manuel, asked for a reprise of the
solar system explanation, which don Manuel had also read in his
one-volume encyclopedia. Don Manuel produced his soccer ball and an
orange for a demonstration, after which I quickly excused myself. A bit
later, I ran into don Manuel juggling these two spheres for another man,
a stranger to me, who had come to town on business. Left alone with the
stranger, I went through the usual explanations of my presence (writing
a book on fiestas, preserving a written record of local customs, etc.).
Once again, my guest asked details about where I came from and what
it was like there. He especially wanted to know if my country had farms
and herds, if the weather was the same there as here, if it hailed there
too, and if I also saw the sun and moon there. I began by noting that our
country was very far away, many months' journey by land, and that we
had come by airplane. About the weather, I noted that it was summer
there when winter here, and vice versa. He had been plotting the
trajectory of this journey with a stick in the sand, eyeing me with
increasing wariness. At the reversal of seasons, however, he stopped me,
took a few steps back, and stated that I must come from another muntu
(from Sp. mundo, "world"). I had not mentioned other suns or planets,
and I tried to assure him that there was only one world and that I was of
it, but my ignorance of his culture had led me down the garden path. It
also led him hastily away. I do not believe that I ever saw that man again,
but our conversation, reported to don Manuel, was a source of great
mirth and also of new information. "Muntu," it turned out, is a word for
"the other world," which is to say, the place the sun goes at night, where
much of what we experience here on aka pacha ("this earth," "this plane
of space-time") is there inverted. Muntu is also the abode of the dead.
The Dialogical Politics of Ethnographic Fieldwork 73

Through use of the personal-knowledge grammatical frame and by

assuming too much in the way of shared terminology, I had unwittingly
made myself out as a ghost.
Throughout our stay, our relations with members of the community
wavered uneasily between the kinship-based reciprocity that requires
hosts to feed their guests and kinsmen to palliate relatives' want, on the
one hand, and the asymmetrical relationship of vecino to campesino, on
the other, based not only on tit-for-tat barter transactions but also on
patron-client ties. Kinlike ties were strongest, of course, with our host's
family and finally with all the Mamani patriline. Since marriage here-
abouts is patronymically exogamous, we also developed good relations
with the hamlets and patronymic groups with which the Mamanis have
numerous and strong affinal links. For others, however, our status was
permanently that of potential vecino storekeepers, or worse. This was
true, of course, for the passing strangers who, during these winter months,
regularly graze the town with their llama caravans, going to and coming
from the warm valleys accessible via a trail that leads past the town. It was
also true for the individuals and small groups of people who periodically
show up in Santa Barbara to pay cult to the patron saint's image.
Much later, when I returned to the town alone in February of 1981, a
new batch of authorities (all the yearly posts rotate at the new year)
urged me to bring my wife and settle permanently, offering to help build
a larger house on the very plaza where we could set up shop. But
whether the offer resulted from friendship, progressive civil spirit, or
awareness of our client-advantageous business practices, I cannot be
sure. Yet another man, seeking to obtain some of our goods before our
departure (such as our much-coveted small propane range and kerosene
lantern), seriously proposed that we trade them for alpacas, which could
become, he suggested, the start of a herd, which his wife would keep for
us until our return. This was a more attractive, even flattering, proposi-
tion. Since shopkeeping vecinos born outside the territory can no longer
lay claim to land, the offer seemed to imply that we might claim rights to
pasturage, something that by then I knew to derive only from kinship
ties. Indeed, when I again returned alone for a few months' stay in 1982,
one of the Mamani men went so far as to offer his daughter to me in
marriage, suggesting that, because he had no sons, I might settle in to
claim land through her. Since he knew my wife, I thanked him for his
offer but expressed some shock at it, and said that I knew they did not
take bigamy lightly hereabouts. This he shrugged off with the explana-
tion that, because my wife and I looked to him very much alike and
74 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

because we had no children, he had come to believe that we were siblings

in reality. Yet even if he had been correct and I had been attracted to the
idea of thus "going native," by then I knew that the land claims of
in-marrying sons-in-law are extremely tenuous, expiring at the same
time as the father-in-law. I recalled the words of another Mamani man
about a brother-in-law living on the family's lands and what would
happen upon the father-in-Iaw's death: Roughly translated, he had said,
"We shall bid him farewell with stones."
Towards the end of my 1981 stay in K'ulta territory, while seated at a
ritual altar with the Mamani men and pretending to be unconscious so
as to avoid becoming so, I overheard don Bartolome Mamani describing
me to his distant cousin, who had just arrived in town with his llama
herd from the far-off valley in which he lives, and was hesitant to allow
me to participate in a sacrifice he was sponsoring. Don Bartolome, who
was the officiant of the sacrifice, told him not to worry and that,
although we had seemed strange at first, the families of Vila Sirka had
grown accustomed to us. I was, he said, like a grandfather, always
pestering them about the proper performance of customary rites. Now, I
was somewhat taken aback by being classified as a grandfather by a
fifty-five-year-old man. I might have preferred to have been called
brother or even son (though not brother- or son-in-law). At the time I
thought the classification might have something to do with my beard's
having gone from dark brown to white over the course of fieldwork. On
reflection, however, I see my friend's point about my peskiness. The same
man once bristled when I asked him, during a small-scale hamlet fiesta,
when the "uywa ispira" libations would take place. According to my
calculations, I should have then just walked in on them. In fact, the
family was apparently trying to forgo this phase of libations on that
occasion, but once I had spoken the words, the all-night ritual had to
be hastily prepared and then performed. My eager interest in ritual
practice had made me the nagging voice of customary conscience. On
another occasion, when I had asked him to describe a sequence of
libation dedications, don Bartolome told me that such words cannot be
uttered without in fact performing the libations. When the gods hear
their names (and apparently the names of rituals as well), they get thirsty
and must be given drink. To awaken their thirst only to disappoint them
is to invite their wrath. Therefore to avoid that wrath while acceding to
my requests that he, a specialist in libation language, utter the gods'
names, my friend had on several occasions consumed and sprinkled on
the ground quantities of alcohol. Even if it is the right thing to do,
The Dialogical Politics of Ethnographic Fieldwork 75

properly fulfilling ritual obligations can be costly to the pocketbook as

well as the body.
This should serve to point up the fact that the ethnographer's presence
can have a notable impact on the development of the events he or she
observes and participates in. Some events, in fact, would not take place
at all in the ethnographer's absence. On the whole, I think, we need not
worry excessively about the potential distortions of "data" that might
result. The hastily gotten-up ritual provoked when I caused the moun-
tain gods to salivate was in essence the duplicate of many other such rites
that I did not provoke but managed to see. In retrospect, being a pesky
"grandfather" is as unobtrusive as any other role an ethnographer might
play, except perhaps that of an actual, invisible, ghost.
Such concerns arose only after our improved Aymara, better manners,
and avoidance of the treachery usually expected of outsiders and city
folk had convinced a few people that we had the capacity, at least, for
becoming fully fledged human beings, though perhaps only those of the
lowest order. At the beginning, however, I was admitted to only the most
public and innocuous of events, while other life contexts were carefully
hidden from view. Yet even the most casual of interviews opened up
paths of inquiry, sometimes through my own misunderstanding. And the
most formal or public of arenas, such as authority meetings, soccer
games, or collective labor, exposed tacit understandings and forms of
everyday sociality, which led to significant insight.
Formal interviews, which I employed on just four occasions towards
the end of my first period of research, were helpful in filling in gaps in my
knowledge and in pointing to further areas of investigation. 7 These,
however, were difficult to arrange. Few of the inhabitants of Canton
Culta would consent to lengthy grillings while I scribbled in my
notebook, and no one wanted to be seen so engaged. Besides, such
sessions do not form part of normal K'ulta experience, in which probing
questions are considered rude and information is generally imparted
after a slow circling around subject matter that is somehow related to the
context of discussion. It was therefore through participation in signifi-
cant local events, sharing experience about which more could be learned
in later casual conversation, that I was able to gather the most useful bits
of information on the way of life (and death) of people of Canton Culta.
For example, to the degree to which I have achieved understanding of
ideas about the dead or about the mountain gods' thirst, this under-
standing is a product of collating many distinct experiences over the
course of my research. I was not to appreciate the significance of the
76 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

gods until I had participated in dozens of sacrifices and libation

sequences. To understand the role of the dead required observation of
many rites in the three-year funerary cycle; local beliefs in ghosts became
intelligible only by hearing many ghost stories, including one narrated
before a meeting of authorities in a suit over wrongful death. I learned
then that I was wise to have refused to pronounce the cause of death of
the young man I had helped bury, since most deaths, apart from truck
accidents and those of infants and the aged, are suspected of having been
the result of unnatural causes.
Yet collating bits and pieces of information from a single area of
experience, such as death and burial, proves insufficient to achieve a
truly adequate understanding. Interpretation is most rewarding only
from the vantage of a much wider frame of reference. In Canton Culta it
is often fruitless to ask for detailed explanations of the meaning of
things, since there is no exegetical tradition per se. A well-timed question
in the context, say, of an unfortunate death may evoke stories of
kuntinarus, but understanding the significance of these stories requires a
good deal of presupposed knowledge that one must pick up, as the
people of K'ulta have, from other contexts. To achieve a more embracing
vision of the K'ulta understanding of humanity's place in the cosmos at
large requires participation in the widest possible range of life events.
For better or worse, during the early months of our stay in Cruce and
Vila Sirka-Santa Barbara, I was not only excluded from what most
people thought of as the most significant of events, but was often not
even aware that they were taking place. This was because so much of
ritual life, including critical parts of otherwise very public saints'
festivals, takes place quietly, inside the houses, courtyards, and corrals of
the closely woven family groups to which we did not belong. Some such
events were deemed so "secret" that I was never able to participate. But
as we gained the confidence of our host's kinsmen, we were little by little
admitted into the fabric of their lives. It was in this way, and only by
seeing the relationships among meaning contexts as diverse as llama
herding, agricultural practices, funerals, saints' festivals, town council
meetings, and sacrificial rites, that I eventually began to appreciate the
ritually regulated circulation of the male and female life substances,
which move through time as well as space.
Apart from the coca exchanges and pouring of libations in town
council meetings, I saw very little of the ritual practice I had come to
study during my first months in K'ulta territory. I had learned, however,
that the festival season was nearly upon us, and hoped that, by
The Dialogical Politics of Ethnographic Fieldwork 77

insinuating myself into the activities to come, vistas both broader and
more intimate would find their way into my notebooks. The festival
year, and indeed the yearly round itself from a local point of view, would
soon begin with the secret rites of the first few days of August. Although
the published literature makes it clear that this is a special time of year,
when the earth is held to be "open" and receptive to offerings, my
questions got me nowhere, and I knew of nothing but soccer games. I
later learned that some families within virtually every hamlet had carried
out extremely important sacrifices and offerings during the first few days
(or rather, nights) of August, while I slept soundly.
The rites which I did not see were family-oriented, prepared within
the household and performed at private sites on nearby hillsides in the
predawn darkness. These activities also served to open the agricultural
year and, in consequence, marked the beginning of the return of the
canton's people from their long-distance trading trips. For throughout
the month of july, individuals and small groups of mainly men arrived in
trucks at the roadside or appeared with their llama caravans over the
northern and eastern hillcrests, laden with sacks of foodstuffs that would
fill their stomachs for the months to come. Two of don Manuel's cousins
reappeared during july, and although both made their entrance into the
Mamani hamlet accompanied by a caravan of llamas carrying dried
corn, wheat, fruit, and potatoes, both had in fact traveled by truck up to
the roadhead, where the animals were brought to meet them for their
final entrance. Others from nearby hamlets had left home back in May
or june with llamas loaded with salt, and had traveled great distances to
amass foodstuffs before returning to Ayllu K'ulta in time for the August
rites that open a new agricultural and festival year.
As the days and especially the nights began to warm up, groups of
men gathered to break the ground for new fields, build and repair fences,
and prepare to sow their crops. They were also preparing for the saints'
days of that month, made festive not only for the return of so many
prodigal sons but also for plentiful holiday feasting. 8
During this quiet first month in K' ulta then, I began to piece together
the nature of the local fiesta-cargo system and to appreciate the rhythms
of a pastoral life style. But slow days of pastoral reverie and occasional
conversation were suddenly interrupted in late july by an event precipi-
tated by an unexpected wavering in the council's confidence in me. One
afternoon the corregidor again asked to see my papers and, on verifying
that they did not include research permission from the subprefect in
Challapata (the corregidor's immediate superior), insisted that I seek it.
78 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

My trip to Challapata did in fact help to boost local confidence in me,

especially among the Mamani clan, for whom Vila Sirka is a patronymic
hamlet, but not because of the papers I obtained.

EMPATHY, TRUST, AND MURDER

I was not especially eager to comply with the corregidor's request, since
I had already once been arrested in Challapata by a member of the local
military police. 9 I had then seen that the subprefect's office is also the
entrance to a very unpleasant-looking jail, which I had so far managed to
avoid. There being no alternative, I set off for Challapata.
Since I had a letter of permission from the departmental prefect of
Oruro, I was not too surprised when the subprefect immediately handed
over a signed and sealed letter granting us permission to reside in Canton
Culta, one of several cantons in his jurisdiction. On leaving the office,
however, I stopped to read a wanted poster tacked to the outside of the
door. Without offering a reward, it called for all good citizens to aid in
the arrest of a group of murderers who had in September of 1978-the
year before our arrival-beaten and kicked a man to death on a country
trail near the town of Santa Barbara de Culta. I was chilled to find that
the wanted men were all named Mamani. A closer reading revealed that
the list of about a dozen names included two of don Manuel's cousins
and one of his nephews, our neighbors in Vila Sirka.
None of the Mamani men had struck me as especially murderous
(indeed, it was with them that we were forming the closest ties), and I
was not inclined to perform a citizen's arrest of our host's kinsmen. At
the same time, the dead man's patronym, Carata, struck a bell. He was a
paternal kinsman of the man who had vehemently argued against us at
our initial meeting with the authorities, when the Mamani family had
been our principal support. I am still not clear on all the dynamics of
that initial meeting, but the Carata man had not in fact held a position of
authority at the time, whereas the corregidor was one of don Manuel's
affinal kinsmen, factors that surely had worked to our advantage. In any
case, our very presence in Vila Sirka and nearby Santa Barbara de Culta,
and within the Mamani household, seemed to have involved us in a feud
between patronymic groups.
A few days later, back in the town, I casually mentioned to don
Manuel the arrest order for his cousins. He explained that there indeed
had been a fight during the 1978 festival of the Exaltation of the Cross.
Afterwards, said don Manuel, the drunken Carata man, on his way back
The Dialogical Politics of Ethnographic Fieldwork 79

to his hamlet of Paxsi Kayu, must have fallen and hit his head on a rock.
Don Manuel's cousin Juan, however, had in fact fallen into the hands of
the subprefect and had been in jail, rather than on a trading trip, for the
month or so before and at the time of the fight. Furthermore, that
particular fight between Mamani and Carata men had not been the first:
Mamani men had been injured in the past, and the two groups had a
long-running disagreement over the use of a fertile plot of agricultural
land. Don Manuel believed that the Caratas had been remiss in taking
their case before the subprefect, rather than resolving it locally in the
corregimiento.
Over the next few days, don Juan's two sons came to me separately in
search of a loan. They needed five thousand pesos in order to replace
some llamas that they owed to some unspecified person. By now my
feeless photography and lack of business acumen in barter transactions
had become legendary in Ayllu K'ulta and had also become a serious
budgetary burden, so I did not immediately cough up any cash. Other
Mamani men, however, were contributing to the pot, and I eventually
did too. The amount, it turned out, was precisely what was needed to
bail don Juan out of the ;uzgado, and he was soon back in the local
picture. Not exactly bail, the money was the established fine for having
broken a pledge, an acta de buena conducta, by which Mamanis and
Caratas, previous to the untimely festival death, had solemnly sworn not
to engage in any further provocations. 10 Because a death was involved,
the matter was not settled with the fine (kept by the subprefect). The
llamas mentioned by don Juan's sons still had to be gathered as a
payment to the aggrieved Caratas. In the context of another wrongful
death case, I learned that the standard blood payment consists of ten
llamas, the number that are needed for sacrifice in the three-year
sequence of funerary rights. The canton's authorities often require
participants in a feud to sign an "act of good conduct," as well as to
deliver blood payments, regardless of whether or not guilt is established.
Since both accusers and accused are treated equally in such procedures,
it is possible for accused parties to make restitution without requiring an
admission of guilt and for accusers to settle without withdrawing their
accusation.
The four Mamani families of Vila Sirka increasingly opened their
doors to us after these events, events that seemed to confirm my status as
a reliable Mamani ally. With increasing frequency Mary Dillon and I
were welcome in the contexts of everyday life. We could now sit with
Mamanis peeling potatoes in the kitchen, work with them in the fields,
80 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

and walk to the pastures with young shepherds and their flocks. I was
able to spend long hours with Mamani men as they wove bolt cloth on
treadle looms, which they often set up during the day in llama corrals
while their children herded in far-off pastures; Mary was able to join
groups of women as they sat upon the ground to weave their amazingly
complex warp-patterned textiles. Contexts like these proved invaluable
for improving language skills and for opportunities to gain essential
understandings. Issues and concerns that to our interlocutors were
quotidian, were to us marvelous.
Still, on some issues, the Mamanis remained wary. They managed to
keep us in the dark, for example, about certain private ritual practices
that were carried out in the first few days of August. Questions about
land tenure were also quite clearly still unwelcome. On the other hand,
on some matters earlier reticence seemed to fall away quickly. It was not
long before an extended weaving session in a quiet corral, a rest break in
agricultural labor, or the evening hush around the cooking fire became
the context for the telling of stories about the distant past, about
mountains that walked, wild animals that could take the form of
humans, ghosts that came back to haunt the living, and about the earliest
times when the sun first rose in the sky. Other conversations focused on
the annual round, trading trips by llama caravan, and the proper
technique for freeze-drying potatoes. We spoke too about the nature of
marriage and relations with affines, and heard fragments of the genealo-
gies by which Mamanis trace their links with one another and with the
patrilines with whom they have intermarried. On each such topic there
were sensitive areas, moments of embarrassment when a question
opened a problematic issue. Learning to master the elements of a K'ulta
etiquette entailed, however, much more than becoming adept at polite
conversation. I would later discover that some things, such as the names
of deceased ancestors or mountain deities, are spoken easily only in
certain ritual contexts (contexts to which I had not yet been admitted),
and that the rules of etiquette I was learning are given order by principles
of cosmology that are also the lineaments of history.
Surprisingly, the easiest topic of conversation was the saints' festivals
I had come to study. In many ways, having announced my purpose as
that of writing a book on fiestas seemed to have been the best possible
research strategy. Mamanis seemed pleased to discuss the details and
timing of the collective festivals that they so much looked forward to.
While some individuals lamented the silence that had overtaken the town
since Cruce had emerged as a new entrepot, they were quick to tell us
The Dialogical Politics of Ethnographic Fieldwork 81

how Santa Barbara came to life during its fiestas, and especially during
the major town fiestas of Guadalupe (September 8), Exaltacion (Septem-
ber 14), San Andres (November 30), the moveable feast of Corpus
Christi, and above all during the patron saint feast of Santa Barbara
(December 4).
From the fragments of many conversations, I was able to piece
together what I thought to be a decent sketch of the three forms of
festival sponsorship that were said to be part of all these major fiestas. At
the same time, discussions with authorities about the nature of their jobs
also promised rapid insight. It quickly became apparent that year-long
religious roles of fiesta sponsors are alternated with the likewise annual
authority posts-"cargos," in local parlance-in the ranked sequences
that throughout Spanish America have been described as prestige hier-
archies. The major forms of sponsorship (mayordomo, fuera, and
alferez) and the most significant of town council offices (alguacil, alcalde,
and jilaqata) provide the ranks in this civil-religious hierarchy. A careful
reading of the literature on such social forms in the Andes, however, had
not prepared me for the true complexity of its workings in Canton Culta.
First of all, there are additional roles in both festival and town council.
Second, I had to account for the post of corregidor, which is not part of
a civil-ritual career. Most important, I had to take account of the fact
that the elaborate system of sponsorship and cargo rotation, about
which I was learning, does not include all the canton's constituent social
groups. Nor, it turned out, do the town council meetings.
The edifice of understanding that I had built by the end of September
(by which time I had witnessed two festivals and assembled a complex
model of both social organization and the concatenated systems of
festival sponsorships and authority positions) began to crumble by the
end of October. The career sequences and schedules of rotation that I
had worked out were not incorrect, but new insight proved such models
to be superficial. Yet they are a good starting point for a more detailed
consideration of the social organization of Canton Culta.
 Chapter Four

Structures and Histories

K'ulta between Gods and State

ETHNOGRAPHIC BORDER CROSSINGS

It is today almost a commonplace in ethnographies such as this to dwell

on the imbalance of power in the ethnographic situation. With research
permissions, ties to the Bolivian government (in permissions and affilia-
tions), U.S. passport, money, and valuable goods, I was in a relative
position of power, reinforced by the fact that it was I who asked the
questions and Andeans who answered them. At the time, however, I
experienced just the reverse sort of power imbalance. I wanted to stay in
the ethnographic game in Ayllu K'ulta and "get information"; K'ultas
seemed to hold all the cards.
We may associate the phrase "Let me see your papers, please" with
narratives of international intrigue and border crossings, but it is also
today an insistent preliminary to fieldwork in the smallest and most
"isolated" Andean villages. Without a sheaf of papers to serve as
passport into a place like K'ulta, the researcher (foreign or Bolivian) will
simply be sent packing. 1 Locally constituted authorities assert their right
to police the borders of their jurisdiction, and the outsider who wishes to
stay more than a few days or has no apparent legitimate business in the
countryside (such as trade) must gain, not only the personal trust of
those authorities, but also a favorable vote of the town council. So too
did the council decide where and with whom we would stay-with
Manuel Mamani, member of the council.
In contrast with our usual border crossings when traveling, say,
between the United States and Bolivia, when passport control is but one

82
Structures and Histories 83

edgy moment dividing stretches of private life, we seemed in Cruce and

Santa Barbara de Culta to have been let in only as far as the transit
lounge. More aptly put, the border was wherever we were.
I had wanted to work my way quickly into K'ulta private life, but
instead found myself engaged with K'ulta authorities and eminently
public life. After I had learned that the very visible saints' fiestas and
authority roles are deeply bound up with a more hidden world of llama
sacrifices and shamanic sessions, and both apparently are tied to
meanings generated in the quotidian practices of the kitchen and corral,
I actively began to seek access to these relatively private and closed
arenas. But instead, I found myself most welcome in the plaza, church,
and town council office. As outsiders living on the patio of a public
official, where K'ulta people came to do business, our presence was
unusual but more acceptable than elsewhere. In such a place, visiting
K'ultas from other hamlets arrived prepared for public business, and
seemed intrigued and honored when we invited them into our house. At
the same time, when I walked unexpectedly into the center of another
hamlet, a silent alarm seemed to have sounded. I would generally be
treated as an honored and powerful guest, seated on a folded poncho in
a patio and presented with huge amounts of food. What passes for
common decency and polite sociality in K'ulta often struck me as a form
of diplomacy; in order to avoid accidental insult, communication is
highly structured, and the flow of information is controlled. In such
situations, the silent pauses in pleasant conversation are heavily satu-
rated by the unsaid.
From the perspective of a U.S. citizen and viewed on the context of
ordinary travel, these experiences may seem unusual. When we cross
national borders or enter another city, we do not expect to be put up
next to Parliament or city hall and escorted into government meetings,
especially when we are not citizens. We expect, rather, to merge into the
everyday life of the private citizen. But if one reflects on the matter a
moment, the private life we expect to enter when we travel is the
alienated world of human relations as mediated by money and bureau-
cracy: hotels, restaurants, stores, businesses, museums, golf courses, and
universities. We are welcome in truly private life, in people's kitchens and
living rooms and backyards, only by becoming friends or relatives.
In K'ulta, the space of public social interaction is extremely limited,
and it belongs to council authorities and sponsors of religious festivals. It
takes place especially at well-marked places and during particular
moments and seasons, in the saints' festivals and accompanying markets,
84 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

which are attended by many outsiders. Even so, during festivals outsiders
tend to stick to the most public places in town-the church, plaza, and
streets. Stone-fenced patios of festival sponsors remain off limits until the
loud crack of an exploding stick of dynamite announces that the patio is
open to all who wish to partake of the banquet feast that certain festival
sponsors offer.
In K'ulta, such sponsors, who are council authorities-in-training and
the authorities themselves, mediate between the hamlet life of patrilines
and the collective society of the canton, which is an officially recognized
unit of the Bolivian state. 2 Indeed, through their activities they represent
the community to the state and the state to the community. Their acts
give "indigenous communities" a territorial and social shape. Yet even
though the current shape of K'ulta, as a collective social group, is a
product of its authorities' negotiations with the state, it would be
misleading to conclude that peoples like the K'ultas are an epiphenom-
enon of the national state. For the Bolivian state and all the intermediate
governmental units between nation and canton are also a product of the
continued insistence of authorities in places like Ayllu K'ulta on defend-
ing their existence and rights as a collectivity.
It is also misleading to suggest that K'ulta is an ancient entity, a
"naturally" constituted people who have successfully resisted all efforts
to colonize and transform them. Having come into existence in some-
thing like its present form during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, K'ulta as a social group has no continuous past reaching back
to pre-Columbian days. Nonetheless, I had already caught glimpses of
certain private or secret practices, carried out before the dynamite blast
and after the festival outsiders went home, that did seem like continuities
with a deeper past: llama sacrifices and myths of origin involving foxes
and condors and the sun, divination with coca leaves and shamanic
seances addressed to mountain gods, all of which K'ulta authorities
seemed intent on keeping out of view. I seemed destined to be admitted
only to sessions where authorities transacted official state business and
festivals in honor of saints that harkened to Spanish Catholicism.
Such experiences have led many ethnographers, myself included, to
believe that their calling is to discover and understand this clandestine
world of meaningful practice. The very existence of the clear boundary
maintained by authorities between a clandestine realm and a much less
indigenous-looking public sphere has suggested to us ethnographers that
the hidden practices are the site of a more authentic and original culture,
while the public practices correspond to the "modern and foreign"
Structures and Histories 85

impositions of the colonial and national states and the Catholic church.
The temptation on reaching such (false) conclusions is to flee from the
authorities and saints' festivals, in the written ethnography if one cannot
do it in fieldwork practice, just as I and many others have fled from
truck-stop "progressive" towns like Cruce into supposedly more "tradi-
tional" places like Santa Barbara de Culta. That was the impulse that led
me-after heeding the dynamite blast invitation to festival banquets,
accompanying processions with saint images around the plaza, and
sitting through many council meetings-progressively to seek the trust of
the Mamanis and to invite myself into their most private ceremonies.
What I found by my end run around the authorities' border defenses,
however, is that secret practices are permeated by Christian and Spanish
themes. Moreover, sacrifices to mountain gods seem often to be the duty
of council authorities or, rather, the means by which such authorities are
trained and designated. K'ulta culture, that is, is not to be found on one
or the other side of the frontier between clandestine and public practice;
it is to be found at the frontier itself. The scale and kinds of social groups
and types of authorities that have confronted and mediated state power
from the Spanish conquest to the present have undergone many trans-
formations; so too, then, has "indigenous culture," shaped for centuries
through the collective interfaces between households or hamlets and
powerful states.
At the same time, we shall see, the authorities put forward by peoples
like the K'ultas are also the principal repositors of social memory. The
ritual techniques they must master on their way to becoming authorities
are those by which K'ultas construe their past. Many of those tech-
niques, indeed, derive from pre-Columbian practices, but the memories
they transmit are very much shaped by present concerns, as are all the
revisionist accounts of the past we call histories. Authorities use their
memory techniques to remember the past in a determined way, for
specific ends, but their duties are not solely to recall the past. They are
also charged with the business of meeting with outsiders and going out
to meet the world, visiting government offices, learning how to file
petitions, and paying taxes, giving out as little information as they can
while playing the part of the community's intelligence officers. Guard-
ians of tradition, authorities are also agents of change.
I had come to Santa Barbara de Culta to question its people about
their customary practices and about their past, but I discovered that it
was a two-way street. I was also subject to interrogation, for the useful
knowledge I might possess about prices and travel and goings on in the
86 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

city, for insights into urban and cosmopolitan culture and also into the
past as I understood it. To remain there, I had to submit myself to
K'ultas' ethnographic and historical queries. If my purpose was to carry
out the frontier practice of ethnographic research, the frontier space of
the authorities was, not the worst, but the best place to do so. It was not
a barrier, but the dynamic and creative edge of cultural invention and
social memory. The systematic discrepancy that I had noted between the
number of council officers that should have been at a meeting of the
canton council and the number who actually attended (a result of
internal factionalism within the canton) was one sign of local dynamism.
Another was that I was intensively scrutinized by some K'ultas, such as
Julian Mamani, not so they might use whatever knowledge they gained
for local purposes, but so they might find a way out of K'ulta altogether.
The frontier on which I worked was a contested space, full of contradic-
tory projects and laced with dissension. For those who stay in K'ulta,
most such dissent and contest is played out in the context of council
meetings. I would later discover that "missing" members of the council
had not simply withdrawn from collective projects, but had formed
themselves into new councils, in search of recognition as independent
cantons. Sparse attendance at meetings in Santa Barbara, then, was an
index not of council weakness but of the strength of the institution. Let
us see, then, just what kinds of powers K'ulta authorities embody and
how they come to hold their several kinds of offices. I begin not with an
insider's perspective, but from the outside looking in, as all visitors to
K'ulta do.

COUNCIL AND CORREGIDOR, AYLLU AND CANTON, FIESTAS AND CARGOS:

SOME FORMAL INSTllUTIONS OF K'ULTA LIFE

Cantonal offices are in theory occupied by elected officials; members of

the cantonal council, according to laws dating back to the early colonial
period, are chosen by popular vote and installed for a yearly term of
office beginning on New Year's Day. These elected officials then choose
three candidates from among the "most apt" for the office of corregidor,
the highest-level authority of the canton, who acts as the state's repre-
sentative in the canton and mediates cantonal affairs to the subprefect.
(As we shall see, the term "corregidor" was used for a quite different
kind of state authority in the colonial period, occupied by royal
appointees to oversee justice and tax collection in colonial-era prov-
inces.) The subprefect in turn reports to the prefect of the Department of
Structures and Histories 87

Oruro. Both are presidential appointees, reflecting the party patrimoni-

alism of this democratic-authoritarian state structure. 3
A new set of yearly chosen cantonal council members do travel each
year to Challapata to be sworn in before the subprefect, and with them
they bring three candidates from whom the subprefect chooses the
corregidor. But although popular elections are indeed held within the
canton for the election of Bolivia's president, there is no voting involved
in the selection of cantonal authorities. Still, one can say that local
government at the level of the canton (like the elected municipal offices
in provincial and departmental capitals) is more representative and
democratic than state authority at the provincial or departmental level.
Who then, are the authorities of the canton, and how do they accede to
office?
Like all the cantons of the region, Canton Culta/Ayllu K'ulta is
internally subdivided. 4 Many local authorities told me that Canton
Culta is composed of five ayllus, which are both territorial units and
units of social organization, membership in which is determined by birth
(Map 4.1). In theory, each ayllu sends three authorities to the weekly
meetings of the cantonal council in the town of Santa Barbara. The
highest ranking of these is called jilaqata or cacique, charged with
resolving disputes within the ayllu and representing ayllu members in
disputes with individuals from other ayllus. Next in rank comes the post
of alcalde, whose job it is to collect the head tax that each head of
household owes to the national government, payable in the office of the
prefect. Alcaldes also act as police officials, intervening with a whip to
break up fights. Finally, there are alguaciles, who act as the deputies of
the jilaqatas, empowered to keep vigil over the jail and to round up the
principals in disputes brought before the council.
In fact, the bulk of the cantonal council's work consists not of the
administration of public works, of which there are very few,S or of
collecting taxes, which requires little time, but of the administration of
justice. Meeting as a collective body, the council constitutes a court of
first resort. Having sat through a great many such meetings, I can attest
that the council's business is largely taken up in mediating and adjudi-
cating disputes over land. But I also witnessed a variety of other legal
cases, including trials for murder, bigamy, calumny, reneged debt pay-
ment, bride theft, wife beating, and witchcraft, as well as an investiga-
tion into a case of visitation by a ghost and another to resolve an
accusation of blood-sucking and body-fat-removing vampirism. In all
such trials, the council acted as judge, jury, and executioner, but also as
88 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

I<EY

EJ~

D~_c:.-bOft\eI 0--
0-
e",1'ftItl

~J5I:O.4COlrIl_"lubotdlr
• XIJ).35(J)R.
-lOg"'"
'- rt-.,

5. lCIII:l2S0,tm

Map 4.1. Ayllus and hamlets of Canton Culta/Ayllu K' ulta. Patriline·hamlets are also
separated from one another by well·known borders. Neither interpatriline nor inter·ayllu
boundaries are absolute; patriline territorial claims often overlap with those of other
patrilines, and the same is true of ayllu territories. Some pasturelands are shared between
patrilines, and others between ayllus. All ayllus hold small patches of land, sometimes
settled by a small hamlet, in ecologically complementary zones outside their main
contiguous territory, in the midst of another ayllu's territory. (Author's rendering, based on
author's field notes and 1:250,000 Carta Nacional, Instituto Geografico Militar: Sheet SE
19-16 [Rio Mulato))

prosecutor, defense attorney, and mediator, with particular roles falling

out according to individual authorities' relationships to accused and
accuser. In no case did I witness a meeting in which the council failed to
reach an accord or final decision. When circumstances prohibited har-
monious resolution of a case, it was referred to the higher authority of the
subprefect, an event I witnessed twice. Most cases, however, are resolved
with the imposition of a fine, formal signing of an act of good conduct,
and ceremonies of reciprocal pardon, in which disputants agree to a
council-decreed compromise and promise to avoid further provocations. 6
Structures and Histories 89

Tayksa t"akls("our mother paths"): festival careers

Including escolar, alguacll, and Jllaqata posts

A. Santa Baroara tayksa t"aki B. Guadalupe tayksa t"aki

Escolar Escolar

Mayordomo of Santa Barbara (Dec. 4) Mayordomo of San Andres (Nov. 30)

Mayordomo of Corpus (June/moveable) Alguacil (installed Jan. 20)

Alguacil (Installed Jan. 20) Fuera of Guadalupe (Sept. 8)

Fuera of Santa Barbara (Dec. 4) Jilaqata (installed Jan. 20)

Jilaqata mayor (installed Jan. 20) Alferez of Corpus (June/moveable)

Merez of Santa Barbara (Dec. 4) Novena of Santa Barbara (Dec. 4)

Capitan of Santa Barbara (Dec. 4)

Awska t"akls ("our father paths"):

festival careers Including alcalde posts

c. San Andres awska t"aki D. Exaltaci6n awska t"aki

Fuera of San Andres (Nov. 30) Mayodormo of Exaltaci6n (Sept. 14)

Fuera of Corpus (June/moveable) Mayordomo of Guadalupe (Sept. 8)

(Alferez of San Andres [defunct]) Fuera of Exaltaci6n (Sept. 14)

Alcalde mayor (installed Jan. 1) Alcalde (installed Jan. 1)

Alferez of Exaltaci6n (Sept. 14) Alferez of Guadalupe (Sept. 8)

Figure 4.1. Jach' a p"ista t"aki: "great fiesta paths," or fiesta-cargo careers, illustrated as
sequences of offices and festivals

As I have said, these year-long posts are held by appointment, not by

election, but the appointments are neither renewable nor repeatable.
Instead, these roles fall to individuals at predetermined points in one of
four fixed-sequence fiesta-cargo careers, called jach' a p"ista t"akis, "great
fiesta paths."
Like the civil posts which they include, these four careers are ranked
(see Fig. 4.1). The two shorter careers lead to the midranked post of
alcalde. They are named for their focus on one of two male saints.
Together they are called awksa t"akis, "our father paths," of which San
90 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

Andres awksa t"aki, the Saint Andrew path, is the higher ranked. The
alcalde who results from this career is therefore of greater stature than
the alcalde who is produced by following Exaltacion awksa t"aki, the
path of the Exaltation of the Cross. The other two careers, which lead to
the post of alguacil on the way to jilaqata, are the tayksa t"akis, "our
mother paths," of which the longest and highest-ranking career is Santa
Barbara tayksa t"aki, leading to the post of "greater" jilaqata.
Formally, the fiesta sponsorship roles that are alternated with "civil"
roles to make up a career are also year-long posts, and a new mayor-
domo takes over from the old one during the very fiesta of the saint in
question. On average, an individual who has embarked on such a career
performs one of these year-long civil or religious roles every three or four
years. Years of each career role are specified long in advance, as are the
"rest" years in between. Every role demands a considerable outlay of re-
sources, sometimes involving the purchase of twenty liters of cane alcohol,
several pounds of coca, the manufacture of large quantities of corn beer,
and the provision of many sacks of potatoes, corn, flour, and up to ten or
twelve llamas to feed festival throngs. Clearly, the two- or three-year gaps
between roles are necessary for the recuperation of resources in order to
continue the career. Rest years are not, however, devoid of duties: There are
ritual responsibilities during every year of a career.
Since the shortest career consists of four roles, and the longest and
highest-ranked, of eight, careers are a minimum of twelve years and a
maximum of twenty-five years in duration. What is more, the first step
on a great fiesta path is not usually taken until after sponsorship of
hamlet-level fiestas in the jiska p"ista t"akis, "small fiesta paths." And
once the "great path" is completed, a man becomes a pasado (from Sp.,
"passed") but is not, therefore, considered "retired." Regarded with
respect, pasados also have the privilege of attending council meetings,
and they play prominent roles as honored guests in the ritual proceed-
ings presided over by current festival sponsors and authorities.
My discussion of fiestas and cargos has not included the office of
corregidor, the putative head of the canton and chairman of the council
meetings attended by jilaqatas, alcaldes, alguaciles, and pasados. This is
because the corregidor is not required, or expected, to sponsor any
festivals. From the midnineteenth century until the revolution of 1952,
this post was the prerogative of resident vecinos (like don Eugenio's
father), one of whom was periodically appointed by the subprefect. Since
then, the post has been controlled by the town council itself, and the
once-powerful corregidor has become little more than a figurehead who
formally executes the decisions of the council as a whole?
Structures and Histories 91

CITIZENSHIP IN AYLLU AND NATION

He may not have a great deal of power or influence (owing to the fact
that, unlike other council members, he has no roles in saints' festivals),
but there is one collective ritual over which the corregidor does preside.
It was also the first large public ceremony I was to see. I refer to the only
civic ceremony celebrated in the countryside, Bolivia's independence day,
on August 6. Although it is held without large-scale participation during
a time when many people are still away on their trading journeys, it is
not lacking in significance. There is organized participation by teachers
and schoolchildren. And the canton's authorities, who must in any case
forgo long-distance trade during their term in office, attend this requisite
part of their duties in force.
The event is programed by the national government, and in 1979,
when I witnessed the ceremony, the corregidor held a copy of the year's
guide to festivities as the plaza was made ready. In essence, the backdrop
for the speech he delivered was half the size of the symbolic display that
hung above his desk in the council office: a Bolivian flag adorned with
the national crest and reproductions of the founding fathers' portraits.
There was a prepackaged speech, which the corregidor haltingly read
out before the assembled authorities, schoolchildren, and a few dozen
onlookers. A special feature in 1979 related to the fact that that year was
the centenary of Bolivia's defeat by Chile in the War of the Pacific, in
which the former lost its coastal department and its ports. There were
allusions to the sacrifices of the country's soldiers and to hopes for a
recuperation of its seacoast. s In tune with the centennial, schoolchildren
were required to march to the plaza dressed in the red uniforms of the
martyred Batallon Colorado, and most managed reasonable facsimiles
made of cloth, painted cardboard, and paper (Photograph 4.1).
The ceremony had begun when these walking icons of national
sacrifice (and of citizenship) raised the Bolivian flag over the school-
house. Then the aforementioned speech was brought to a close with a
series of "vivas." "Viva Bolivia!" the corregidor shouted, and the crowd
responded, "Viva!" Ditto for Simon Bolivar, Mariscal Andres de Santa
Cruz, and Jose Antonio de Sucre. Then, in honor of the Department of
Oruro's hero, also a martyr of that war, there were "vivas" to Eduardo
Abaroa, who had charged to his death rather than surrender, shouting,
"Que se rinde su abuela!,,9 More "vivas" went up to the Department of
Oruro, to the Provincia Abaroa, and to Canton Culta. After this, the
corregidor enlivened the proceedings with a series of pre programed
contests. Young men ran a foot race stripped to their underwear,
Photograph 4.1. A Mamani boy dressed as a soldier of Bata1l6n Colorado. Manuel
Mamani sewed this red-and-white, nineteenth-century uniform for his son's school pageant.
The boy poses before patriotic icons arrayed on a wall of the corregimiento: portraits of
independence heroes frame Bolivia's seal, above a flag bunting, all arranged over a K'ulta
poncho nailed to the town hall facing onto the plaza. Prepared by cantonal authorities
including Manuel Mamani at the direction of the cantonal corregidor, the array will serve
as the backdrop for a civic ceremony honoring Bolivian independence. Normally, essen-
tially the same array adorns an inside wall of the corregimiento, behind the corregidor's
desk-altar. Santa Barbara de Culta, August 6, 1979. (Photograph by author)
Structures and Histories 93

although some, chastened by the taunts and laughter of the crowd, did
not run back to the finish line in the plaza. A group of older men
competed at potato peeling, while women vied for the title of fastest
eater of stale bread. Finally, the corregidor threw handfuls of hard candy
into the air, and adults and children alike scrambled to claim it. These
contests were some government official's idea of good, clean, and
perhaps civilizing fun.
With this the teacher called the children back to the school, where each
was served a cup of hot milk and a piece of bread. The food was provided
by the lowest-level cargo-holder, the escolar, whose regular duty it is to
provide bread and milk (prepared from foreign aid packages). The teacher
then added his own idea of cosmopolitan panache to the proceedings. He
had made costumes for the children, this time of plastic, so that they could
perform an urban dance for their elders.10
Although it was not much of a day for secret religious rituals, and it
lacked the big turnout and intensity that I would later see in saints'
festivals, it was clear that people took their membership in the idea
called Bolivia seriously. It was also a good day for photography, and was
to be my first experience with the chameleonlike identity transforma-
tions that most of the canton's inhabitants can carry out in very short
order. Some people sought portraits of their children in their historical
military uniforms (also worn by the presidential guard in La Paz).
Practically all the younger members of the Mamani crew, as well as some
of the authorities, including the corregidor himself, primped for portraits
before and after the ceremonies (Photographs 4.2a and 4.2b). They did
not, however, want to pose in their everyday homespun outfits, even in
the colorful and festive versions that are kept for special occasions.
Instead, all and sundry sought mementos of themselves standing stiffly
before the flag and founding fathers while dressed in the outfits charac-
teristic of the relatively well-heeled vecinos. Generally speaking, this shift
in clothing went from homemade to store bought, and from wool to
acrylic. For men, homespun white or black pants were put aside for
acrylic trousers, and homemade vest and jacket were replaced by sweater
and (in a few cases) sport coat. All those who owned a pair of shoes put
them on in place of their rubber-tire sandals. The stocking cap ch'ullu
and broad-brimmed, local, white felt hat were put aside in favor of a
hatless but well-combed head. Women, on the other hand, rushed to
change out of their black homemade dresses and white felt hats and into
the cholita outfits kept for travel to cities.
In contrast with the change in clothing undertaken for travel (when
K'ultas strive to obtain maximally beneficial positioning vis-a-vis urban
Photograph 4.2a. Julian Mamani and Maria Colque in everyday wear. The couple stands
for a portrait in the Mamani llama corral during qarwa k"ari. In the background, Mary
Dillon and wives of Mamani men continue their ch 'allas seated around women 's misa (a
cloth laid on the ground). In the distance is the caretaker hill (uywiri) known as White
Nose. In the foreground are sacrificed llamas. Vila Sirka, carnaval 1980. (Photograph by
author)

94
Structures and Histories 95

Photograph 4.2b. Julian Mamani and Maria Colque in their traveling clothes (standing
third and fourth from the right). This group portrait includes the Mamani youths, taken at
their request, after changing into carefully stored city clothes owned by all except the
young woman at the far right. julian's brother and his wife (at the far left) were later killed
in La Paz in 1982, in a truck accident while they sat on a witches' market street selling
herbs and medicines. In the foreground are four unmarried Mamani women of courting
age. All here changed back into "homespun" after posing for the photograph. Plaza of
Santa Barbara de Culta, carnaval 1980. (Photograph by author)

business contacts, to avoid the exploitation and insult that a clothing-

identified indianlcampesino might there experience), my K'ulta friends
carried out this August 6 change of clothes for themselves, to obtain for
posterity an image of an alternative identity associated with national
culture. The cultural value of this identity is indicated by the term used
to describe the change from homespun to store-bought clothes: "civili-
zarse." While it may derive from experience in the military, where
uniforms are contrasted with ropas civiles (civvies), the term "civilizarse"
is also parsed as "to become civilized," in opposition to the insult of
being "uncivilized," which rural people may avoid by wearing these
store-bought clothes. We shall see that the textiles worn as part of
homespun outfits bear a heavy load of meaning in the context of sacrifice
and other rituals that lie towards the "private and secret" pole of a
96 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

continuum of meaning contexts, in which the store-bought clothes,

marking "urban national citizenship," lie at the opposite pole. K'ulta
selves must have room for both sorts of identities (and others as well).
Indeed, in reflecting on the moments of embarrassment or reticence
that I had run into, it began to seem as if silence on certain issues is
regular and structured, corresponding to something like a separation
between overt and covert, published and secret information. One might
characterize this disjunction in subject matter as a distinction between a
public, collective sphere and the business of private life. But I think it is
more complex than that. Surely many of the personal stories and myths
that I heard and activities that I witnessed in kitchen and corral
correspond to a "private" domain rather than a "public" one. In fact, it
became increasingly clear that the "secrecy" of some information is a
result, not of a conspiracy of silence, but of cultural understandings of
contextual appropriateness: Names of dead ancestors are to be men-
tioned only in the context of funerary rites and certain libation sequences
(performed on Mondays); mountain gods will become "hungry" when
their names are uttered and will take vengeance unless libations and
offerings are immediately forthcoming. Such ritual contexts are circum-
scribed not only by schedules of proper time and place of performance,
but also by hierarchies of inclusion as to who must and who may
appropriately perform and attend. At the same time, the separation of
beings and practices into topics of relatively "open" and relatively
"closed" forms of discourse does not obey some abstract opposition
between public and private domains (and as we shall see, there are closed
and secret aspects of large-scale public events just as there are open and
unrestricted features of private, intrahousehold life), but follows a set of
cosmological principles that are also historical ones: The most circum-
scribed subjects are actions directed towards ancestors and mountain
gods and unorthodox sacrifices to Christian beings. All such powerful
agents from the past are invoked and made present to effect changes in
the current state of affairs. So even the most secret of magical rites are at
the same time of history and for history.
In examples like these, a relatively straightforward opposition
emerges from what is actually a more complex continuum of contexts
from maximally private to maximally public. The contrast between the
roles, the means of election, and the kind of legitimacy achieved by the
corregidor as opposed to the fiesta-cargo participants is one such set of
opposed poles, but so too can we see the contrast in the very activities
within the conjoint council (composed of corregidor and rotative au-
Structures and Histories 97

thorities). In the Mamani-Carata murder case, for example, a legal

action inscribed on paper (and involving the provincial subprefect)
assessed a five thousand peso fine; a verbal agreement reached within the
council chambers established the blood payment of ten llamas, by which
rites unknown to the state might provide both sanction and resolution of
the conflict. While I attended the saints' festivals of September, I began
to take note of another example of such bifurcation, between loudly
trumpeted collective acts performed for all to see, hear, and participate
in and other acts carried out in hushed tones and closed circles of invited
guests, in sponsors' home hamlets before and after public events in the
town. The anthropological romance made those private and secret
events into magnets. Unfortunately, they were charged to repel rather
than to attract the outsider's gaze.

HOUSEHOLD AND COLLECTIVE RITUALS

During the month of September I was able to attend two major saints'
festivals in Santa Barbara, the September 8 festival for the Virgin of
Guadalupe, and the festival of the Exaltation of the Cross on September
14. During these festivals, the town of Santa Barbara burst to life. Each
festival is presided over by three kinds of ritual sponsors, the mayor-
domo, fuera, and alferez. In preparation for festival duties, each sponsor
kills a large number of llamas and brings the meat, along with vast
amounts of foodstuffs, to Santa Barbara from his home hamlet by means
of llama caravan. And with the foodstuffs, the sponsor brings his
relatives, especially the people of his patriline. The younger men among
the entourage form a music and dance group, dressed in special clothing
(with matching jackets) and playing musical instruments (in September,
the panpipes known as sikus). Thus on the day before the feast of
Guadalupe large groups of people descend upon the town from various
directions. Upon arrival, each group repairs to a specific patio in the
town and to the house kept there by each hamlet and patriline.
On the basis of the ideal model of social forms that I had put together,
I imagined that sponsors from K'ulta's five ayllus would descend upon
the town and that I would see some pattern of alternation among ayllus
and between the two moieties (the upper moiety consisting of Ayllus
Qullana, Yanaqi, and Ilawi, and the lower moiety, of Alax-Kawalli and
Manxa-Kawalli). Apart from the vibrance and color of the event as it
began to unfold, my first surprise was that all the sponsors and all the
entourages of llama caravan, dancing musicians, and festival followers
98 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

came exclusively from the two ayllus of the lower moiety. Qullana,
Yanaqi, and Ilawi did not participate. I soon learned that their failure to
arrive was one product of a long-running factional battle underway
within Canton Culta and Ayllu K'ulta. This realization began to account
for the shortage of authorities in the council meetings I had attended, in
which the two Kawalli ayllus had been well-represented; Yanaqi and
Ilawi, sporadically present; and Qullana, missing altogether. But I will
save description of the fascinating background of K'ulta's factional
disputes and analysis of their implication for ritual and political life in
the canton for a later moment. Partial as they may have been, the saints'
festivals of Guadalupe and Exaltacion were already complex beyond
measure, and the meanings enacted in them, beyond my grasp (Photo-
graph 4.3).
The three sponsors that preside over each festival-mayordomo,
fuera, and alferez-were accompanied by their wives. Now, each spon-
sorship role involved a different set of activities, but all performances
shared some features. When each entourage arrived in town on the day
before the saint's day itself, provisions were unloaded from llamas and
four posts were set up at the corners of each patio's stone misa (an
altar-table). The posts held a canopy, which provided shade and shelter
for the long sessions that then unfolded around the misa. Each misa was
immediately covered with a textile, and the low benches around it were
occupied by the sponsor and his male coterie. Nearby, the sponsor's wife
and her female guests arranged themselves around a square textile laid
upon the ground. Cans of alcohol and large jars of corn beer were then
brought out, and a session of libations began. In each patio, a pair of
llamas was rather quickly killed and butchered, and not long afterwards,
the entourages began a series of visits among themselves. Later, these
groups also processed through the town, visiting the church, the council
and corregidor office, the tiendas of the resident vecinos, and a few other
patios in which certain misas received special attention. At specified
moments, the mayordomo's group moved to a misa near the church in a
precinct formerly constituting the parish house, the fuera carried a
bundle containing a miniature saint's image to the church, and the
alferez group retrieved a banner from the church with which he (as
always, accompanied by his wife) would lead a procession on the saint's
day itself.
Manuel Mamani had told me there would be three sponsors. Yet, as
the day before the saint's day (called Vespers) wore on, the number of
active patios in town grew to six, with each sponsor's replacement for
Photograph 4.3. Ch 'allas at turri mallku ("male condor tower") and the arku of Santa
Barbara. Bartolome Mamani, wasu wariri, is at the left in the foreground. Santa Barbara
de Culta, December 1979. (Photograph by author)

99
100 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

the following year arriving to take office. At dawn the next morning, the
day of the saint, the bands played near the church tower, after which
there was another series of visits, now more complex and involving the
incoming as well as the outgoing groups. Such visits culminated in
banqueting at each outgoing sponsor's altar-table, at which the incoming
sponsors were honored guests. After the food was eaten and prodigious
amounts of drink consumed, dance groups gathered in the plaza, now
incorporating dancer-musicians from incoming sponsors' entourages.
Initially, six separate dance groups formed small circles in the plaza, each
playing its own repetitive melody. The effect was cacophony to my ears.
As the dancer-musician groups jostled against one another, they began to
merge, forming two large circles according to ayllu affiliation, for each
outgoing sponsor from Ayllu Alax-Kawalli was in the process of being
replaced by an incoming sponsor from Manxa-Kawalli (and vice versa).
Alax-Kawallis and Manxa-Kawallis now challenged each other in a duel
of melody and volume, the circles moving in opposite directions to one
another, opposed dancers bumping and challenging one another. Finally,
fighting began to break out, first in pairs and then en masse, in the ritual
battle known in Quechua as the tinku (and in local Aymara as izuwasi,
"knuckler"). The traveling vendors who had set up their wares around
the plaza's perimeter gathered up their goods and scuttled into open
doorways as darkness fell and blood flowed, and so ended the principal
day of the saint's festival. On the following day, grudges apparently
forgotten, each outgoing sponsor turned over sponsorship to his incom-
ing counterpart. Before midday, all entourages had set out on the return
walk to their home hamlets, again accompanied by a caravan of pack
llamas carrying banquet leftovers.
Apart from the identities of the sponsors and the saints as well as
some other accidents of difference, the festivals of Guadalupe and
Exaltaci6n, which occurred with hardly an interval between them,
seemed to follow essentially the same script. At the same time, they were
alike in relative participation: only two of K'ulta's five ayllus had been
involved. Alax-Kawalli and Manxa-Kawalli had been present, but Qul-
lana, Yanaqi, and Ilawi had not been. Over the next few weeks I
pondered what I had seen and recovered from the exhaustion induced by
nonstop festival activities. In spite of my exclusion from most of the
libation sessions, I was nonetheless hung over from the intake of large
amounts of alcohol and corn beer. Perhaps only two of K'ulta's five
ayllus had participated in the festivals, but the dual organization for
which the Andes are famous was still fully present. Also fascinating were
Structures and Histories 101

the manipulations of saint images, the distribution of body parts of the

butchered llamas, and a host of other festival features. Overall, these
festivals had been full of new opportunities for observation and under-
standing, but the experience remained something of a disappointment,
largely because, apart from a few isolated occasions, I had not been
welcome within the closed circles around ritual altars, where libations
had been poured and meaningful utterances pronounced. Exceptions to
this exclusion took place at moments when the council authorities were
invited to sponsors' altar-tables to be honored and during sponsors'
visits to the council office.
On one visit to a sponsor's altar, I had been told to pour a bit of my
cup of corn beer in honor of Guadalupe and other cups for Tata Awatir
Awksa, "Our Father Shepherd," and Tayksa Mamala, "Our Mother,"
and it was explained to me that these were the title for Christ and one of
the titles for the Virgin Mary. But I saw dozens of such libations, and
was sure that I had heard other dedications (especially to uywiri and
mallku). And when I asked others to explain these dedications to me, I
was told by several entourage members that the men around the altar (as
well as the women around theirs) were "engaged in superstition,"
"Ii bating some supays" (demons).l1 Even these meager insights into
clandestine practice (and techniques for keeping it so) were rare. For the
most part, I stood at the periphery of ritual events with Santa Barbara's
two vecino shopkeepers and the low-status unmarried men, served at the
feast but not allowed at the table.
Apparently, my standing with Mamanis and authorities was sufficient
to give me a place among them, but I will admit that I was not then certain
that this was a good thing. In fact, it seemed that these authorities,
specially constituted to mediate between their ayllus and the outside
world, had served very well as insulation between me and the semiclosed
ritual practices I had wanted to understand. Further questioning con-
vinced me that even more "secret" events, including what sounded like
elaborate llama sacrifices, of which the relatively public llama killing I had
seen was a pale imitation, took place in the privacy of the sponsors'
hamlets before and after the collective and public events of Santa Barbara.
I began to despair that an invitation to the ritual altar would have to wait
until Mamanis themselves served as sponsors, and it was possible to
follow the whole sequence of saint fiesta ritual from beginning to end,
from the household altar to the church altar and back again.
There were other significant events and conversations between late
September and mid-November, but the attention of most K'ultas turned
102 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

to pursuits other than festivals in Santa B£ubara. The town was once
again quiet while K'ultas sowed their crops. Out in the hamlets,
however, there was much ado, as small-scale hamlet saints' festivals were
celebrated, honoring miniature images kept in hamlet chapels.
At the same time most K'ultas spent long hours sowing potatoes and
other high-altitude crops in their own fields and those of others.
Breaking the soil, planting the crops, and building fences to keep the
herds off fields are accomplished through collective forms of labor. Work
gangs are brought together through a variety of mechanisms, including
the conscription of one's ritually subordinate wife takers, and through
the use of various sorts of payment for service. But collective work is
above all a patriline affair, during which patriline mates exchange days
of labor through the reciprocal arrangement known as ayni. It is also a
patrilineal affair because it is the patriline that claims title to agricultural
land and the patriline that becomes a solidary unit to defend lands when
disputes arise. And, of course, when ground is broken for new fields or
fences built in previously unfenced areas, disputes do arise, and patriline
work gangs are sometimes rapidly transformed into battle units.
Thus the September festival emergence of patronymic dance-fighting
"platoons" coincides with their engagement in cooperative labor and in
skirmishes over land. 12 Like the well-known tinku battles of the Macha
or Laymi versus Jukumani just north of K'ulta, K'ulta's festival iiuwasis
are ritualized fights between the dancer-musician groups of opposed
moieties, but they may also escalate into more serious fighting when
there are active interayllu land disputes. Indeed, several K'ultas told me
that it had been the escalation of festival iiuwasis into full-scale battle, a
land war called ch' axwa, that had driven the deep rift between K'ulta's
moieties and led Qullana, Yanaqi, and Ilawi to abandon the festivals of
Guadalupe and Exaltaci6n. 13
This period of collective labor and festival performance is a time of
patriline solidarity, ayllu cohesiveness, and rapidly shifting "fission and
fusion" of alliances over land disputes, but it is also a time for other sorts
of collective labor. Quite apart from agricultural work, fence building
(often a source of intergroup friction) and the like, this is also the period
during which ayllu labor is most easily mobilized for projects that benefit
the community as a whole, such as construction and upkeep of the town's
access road and communal buildings. Such collective labor built the access
road in the first place, as well as the Pan American Highway and its earlier
incarnations (dating back to the Inca and pre-Inca roads that cross the
region), the church, town council building, jail, parish house, and schools.
Structures and Histories 103

CULTURE AND THE CLANDESTINE

It was to ask the jilaqatas, alcaldes, and alguaciles to send their people
for a collective work project that the corregidor called an extraordinary
meeting of authorities in mid-October. Now, a crumbling church wall
had been repaired through collective labor during the months before our
arrival. Normally, a priest resident in the parish seat of Huari visited this
vice-parish but once a year, during the feast of its patron, Santa Barbara.
This year, however, he had returned in early June to check the repairs in
the church wall and had found the work wanting. In addition to some
cosmetic repairs to the new interior plaster, he had demanded that the
church's earthen floor be paved with stones. He had also asked for
improvements in the parish house. From its appearance-a three-room
thatched-roof, adobe structure with shuttered windows, terra-cotta
floors, and fading murals-the parish house had been in existence since
at least the late nineteenth century. Located on a courtyard adjacent to
the church, it was the largest residential structure in town. It sported its
own stone-lined canal to bring water from local springs, but also
featured the Spartan adobe bed and benches of local dwellings. Now in
a sad state, lacking windows for its stone-linteled frames, it was the
home of a resident priest until 1938. From 1779 until that date, Santa
Barbara had been a parish seat, with two vice-parishes of its own. The
house's only regular occupants nowadays were the hummingbirds that
nested under its roof beams. During our stay in the town, the priest spent
only one night there, his yearly average. He had not been present during
the festivals of Guadalupe and Exaltaci6n.
Apparently, to inspect the work he had ordered, he had promised to
return on a date that was rapidly approaching. There was a good deal of
discussion, some authorities arguing that recruitment efforts were ham-
pered by the fact that so many men were still away on trading trips in the
valleys and cities. The corregidor reminded the other authorities, how-
ever, that the priest had also threatened them that, should they fail to
properly make Santa Barbara's church ready, he would have a new
church built, in Cruce. Finally, the council agreed to begin work on the
church the next week, forgoing repairs to the parish house, apart from
adding some thatch to its roof.
To speed up work that had been too long delayed, the corregidor set
out for Challapata to request a platoon of soldiers for additional
hands. 14 To my surprise, four young rangers showed up a few days later.
Sleeping in the school, now in recess, they stayed only long enough to
help amass a pile of paving stones near the church door. All spoke
104 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

Aymara, which is not surprising, given that many rural youths volunteer
to perform the military service required of all male citizens. (Other, less
willing, soldiers are caught up in periodic sweeps of market towns and
city streets in "recruitment drives.") Some local youths as well as adults
admired the soldiers' uniforms, and several locals stood at attention for
photographs dressed in the soldiers' uniforms, while the soldiers donned
local homespun and posed in fierce stances, topped by the local cowhide
and tin monteros, hats modeled long ago on conquistadors' helmets and
worn in festival dances, ritual battles, and land wars.
When the soldiers left, the corregidor issued a final call for laborers,
but very few heeded the call. In fact, some of the authorities themselves
were missing. Those from Qullana, of course, were absent as usual, but
so too were two of the three authorities of Ayllu Alax-Kawalli. Had they
failed to show, hoping that the work would not satisfy the priest, thereby
leading to a church in Cruce, within their territory? I do not know.
Apart from this partial roster of authorities, I recognized two of the
mayordomos who had served as banquet hosts during the fiestas of
Guadalupe and Exaltacion. Before beginning work in the church, they
joined three other mayordomos in pouring libations at a misa in a small
room adjacent to the church, within the parish residential compound. In
addition to their service as banquet hosts, these men were also respon-
sible for the upkeep and security of the church and its images. They also
each took two five-week turns residing in the town of Santa Barbara,
during which each had possession of the keys to the church. Periodically,
individuals and small groups of pilgrims came to town to pay homage to
one of the saints-usually the town's patron, Santa Barbara-and the
resident mayordomo would open the church and supervise the proceed-
ings. I had knelt with two such groups in the previous months and
watched as they lit candles, burned incense with llama fat in charcoal
braziers, and poured libations. Most such devotees, I later learned, were
yatiris, a kind of shaman specializing in spirit-mediumship, for whom
Santa Barbara serves as intercessor or awukatu (from Sp. abogado,
"attorney").
Normally each mayordomo ceremoniously ended his turn as key
bearer with the arrival of his replacement. The two men together poured
libations of alcohol and sweetened tea, and the new mayordomo
accepted the keys only after checking off the church valuables against a
tattered list. (It was during one of these changing of the guards that I had
seen the contents of the locked chest kept under the altar; once saints'
clothing and crowns, priestly vestments, and other ornaments had been
removed, mayordomos accounted for a series of leather-bound parish
Structures and Histories 105

register books, which I eventually convinced one mayordomo to let me

see.) In preparation for work in the church, however, the assembled
mayordomos now moved from their chapel to the bell tower, where they
poured (and drank) more libations at its base. This time I heard a few of
the libation dedications, including those to turri mallku ("male condor
tower"), turri mallku sap"i (the tower's "root"), Tata Asanaqi (a moun-
tain peak near Challapata), and Churi Asanaqi (a high hill not far from
the church). Then they removed the images and valuables (except for the
massive gilded colonial retable that rose against the back wall behind the
adobe altar) for safekeeping in the corregidor's office.
Joined by these mayordomos, the authorities were now ready to begin
their labors. Seeing such a miserable turnout, I decided to lend a hand
myself and joined a group of about twenty men in laying the new stone
flooring. The work lasted only a few days, during which the authorities'
wives baked bread in an earth oven and provided meals of corn mush
with potatoes and chili peppers.
We finished our labors around noon on the third day. The mayordo-
mos replaced the images and valuables while I joined the authorities in
pouring and drinking more libations at the base of the church tower. It
was then that I witnessed an astonishing turn of events. The jilaqatas,
with whom I had just been drinking, led two rams into the plaza.
Directly in front of the church door, they threw the rams to the ground
and cut their throats, collecting the blood in bowls and intoning
mumbled words while flicking some blood towards the east. Couple by
couple, the authorities and mayordomos, accompanied by their wives,
knelt in pairs near the rams, facing the church door. Each person was
then presented with a small board with a pair of clay braziers on it,
containing burning charcoal onto which pungent herbs, incense, tablets
of sugar, and pinches of other substances were placed. Since the man and
woman in each couple raised a pair of braziers, a total of four sets of
incense offerings were raised in the air while the couple quietly intoned
some words. After most of the authorities had finished, Mary and I were
urged to kneel and take up the braziers. Don Bartolome, the ex-authority
who seemed to be officiating, approached us and explained that the
right-hand brazier on each board was for "Dios," and the left-hand
brazier for "La Virgen." Once the fragrance of the incense was rising
well, he told us to say the words "Tata Awatir Awksa taki," and "Paxsi
Mamala taki." I was able to parse these Aymara phrases as "for Our
Father Shepherd," and "for the Moon Lady," and I later learned that
these are indeed the honorary titles applied to Christ and the Virgin and,
at the same time, to the sun and the moon.
106 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

While I pondered this candid performance, by those whom I had

thought most culturally constrained, of what seemed a quite un-Catholic
ritual, a young boy on the hill behind the plaza spotted the priest's jeep
approaching and shouted out an alarm. The incense, the rams, the bowls
of blood, all were quickly dragged out of sight into a nearby house while
another authority spread fresh sand on the blood-stained ground. I was
left alone in the plaza while everyone else scrambled to wash their faces,
hands, and feet, and to send out messengers that the priest was in town.
The priest stepped out of his jeep and gave the church a quick inspec-
tion, spoke to a mayordomo, and got back into his jeep. With some
difficulty, the authorities finally convinced the priest to stay long enough
to say mass. Meanwhile, a small crowd began to assemble in the plaza.
A chair and table were set up in the center of the plaza, and the priest got
out a cash box and receipt book and began collecting fees: Some indi-
viduals paid for funeral masses; others, for baptisms. Five or six couples
paid the fee for a church wedding, and a number of the sponsors of recent
saints' festivals paid for masses in honor of their saints.
Fees collected, the priest then went about the task of reconsecrating
the church, sprinkling salted holy water about the walls and floor. By the
time he began the mass, some two hours after his arrival, there were
perhaps sixty people in the church. All seemed in dead earnest in their
devotions during the ceremony, first quietly suffering through a sermon
that was more like a litany of abuse. The priest began with reference to
the new floor, which he judged the product of poor workmanship and a
lack of proper Christian zeal. Speaking in a rarified Chilean Castilian
(marked by the vosotros verbal declinations) that was, fortunately,
largely unintelligible to most of this flock, he admonished all present to
take the gringos among them as their guides, to wash themselves more
frequently, dress in livelier colors, eat at table with knife and fork, and
rebuild their homes to make separate bedrooms for parents and children.
The priest pointedly addressed these chidings to the assembled au-
thorities, to whom he repeatedly referred as his hijitos ("little children").
All in all, the sermon struck me as profoundly insulting and deeply
ethnocentric, in which the priest painted himself (and the ethnographer)
in the well-known, patronizing pose of civilizing missionaries. 1s Yet no
one seemed to take offense. In fact, when he emphasized each point by
asking his "hijitos" if they understood him, the authorities humbly
chimed, "51, Padre." Shortly afterwards, when the wine and wafer were
eucharistically transformed and consumed by the priest (confirmation
and thus direct participation in communion being rare in the country-
Structures and Histories 107

side), all present seemed deeply moved, as they were, too, by the images
of Christ and the saints, to which many lighted candles and fervently
prayed.
After he had finished his complex yet relatively rapid combination
mass (baptisms, weddings, and funerals included), and while newlyweds
and new godparents celebrated in the plaza, the priest headed quickly to
his jeep and prepared to depart. I approached the jeep along with a
group of authorities. While he sat in his seat with the door standing
open, the priest noticed blood seeping through the sand where he had
just walked. Pointing towards the blood-stained earth, he called out to
us, "What happened here, did you kill a cat?"
The authorities turned towards me, seeming to wait for my response,
so I shrugged and played ignorant. After a few difficult moments, the
highest-ranking jilaqata finally replied that, no, someone had only been
butchering a sheep, for meat. With that, the priest closed the door with
a smile, saying, "Next time, give me some of it." And he drove off.
It is only remotely possible that the priest did not know, after more
than ten years of visiting churches like these in his far-flung parish, at
least something about what had actually taken place. Most likely, he had
simply learned to live with the knowledge that a clandestine form of
religiosity took place in parallel with that which he controlled. In a later
interview with this priest, he argued that these campesinos were good
Christians, devoted to God in their own way. Neither fully taking the
part of indigenous religiosity, as I have heard some Bolivian priests do,
nor despairing the futility of priestly dedication among such unevange-
lized pagans, as others have done, this priest towed a middle path,
turning a blind eye to their heterodox practice while condemning their
cultural backwardness.
This kind of laissez-faire missionizing has been characteristic of the
Church's role in the rural highlands since the midseventeenth century,
when the last of the idol-smashing and orthodoxy-imposing "extirpation
of idolatry" campaigns fizzled out. Combining cultural blandishments
with a routinized priestly functioning lacking in curiosity has at one and
the same time served to underscore the colonial nature of the mission-
ary's presence and made room for, and even cultivated, parallel and
presupposed forms of heterodox religiosity such as that which I had
witnessed.
Although I had not joined the authorities of Santa Barbara de Culta in
the worship of a golden calf, I had nonetheless become part of the
congregation in the performance of an animal sacrifice. Its performers
108 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

(as well as the priest) clearly preferred that such practices remain
clandestine, and I had not betrayed their trust. Earlier, I had earned the
trust of my host's patronymic group by my response to the murder case,
and doors had opened. Now I seemed to have crossed another threshold,
this one opening onto the semihidden aspects of K'ulta's religious
UnIverse.
All doors did not, however, open overnight. In fact, by the time I
reached the plaza the next morning, blood had been splashed above the
lintel of the church door, and I was not then to learn whether it was from
the previous day's rams or another sacrifice altogether. It was months
before I learned just what the sacrifice was for. At the time, I missed
much of the symbolic import of this ritual and, in fact, did not see
significant parts of the rite. Some of the libations had been performed in
private as the work in the church reached completion; others, around the
church tower and in the corregimiento, were simply outside my hearing
or beyond my comprehension of Aymara at the time. Since the dead
rams had been hustled out of sight, I was not able to note the
distribution of the meat or the libations that accompany it, and I
apparently slept through the moment when blood was splashed upon the
door lintel.
In retrospect, I know that the rite was complex, combining aspects of
two relatively common kinds of sacrifice. On the one hand, the blood
over the door lintel relates this rite to the wilara, a sacrifice performed
upon the inauguration of any new (and, apparently, repaired) building,
before its owners take up occupancy. The term "wilara" is also applied
to sacrifices performed at regular intervals by authorities in honor of
their staffs of office. Wilaras are also performed by nonauthorities at
moments of special danger. The term might best be glossed as "blood
offering"; in fact it is the simplest sort of sacrifice in the K'ulta sacrificial
repertoire.
K'ultas distinguish many kinds of sacrifices, above all by the nature of
libation dedications and by just how the animals' meat and body parts
are distributed among gods and men. This particular sacrifice, however,
was more than just an ordinary building dedication. The church, first of
all, is not just any building, but a dangerous one, containing the
powerful saint images in whose honor great festivals are regularly
performed. During their removal from the church and subsequent
replacement, the saints had been disturbed, and the special rite known as
lurya misa had therefore been performed. Lurya misas, which include the
doubled and redoubled incense offerings as well as the special libation
Structures and Histories 109

dedications that I had witnessed, are always accompanied by sacrifices;

this one included special blood aspersions required by the physical
alterations to the building.

RETHINKING "SYNCRETISM": COORDINATES IN SPACE

AND TIME OF A COLONIAL INTERCULTURE

At first sight, the incense offered to Paxsi Mamala and Tata Awatir
Awksa, the references to Turri Mallku and Tata Asanaqi, and sacrifice of
rams in the plaza seemed to add up to a rather profound degree of
cultural resistance, an entire cultural order preserved under the very nose
of Church authority, performed by those local people who had seemed
most implicated in the local administration of state authority. What
could be less Catholic than animal sacrifice dedicated to mountains, to
the sun, and to the moon? The temptation was very strong to adopt the
interpretive stance of the "Christianity as a thin veneer," the "idols
behind altars," the "baptized but not evangelized" variety of cultural
continualism, by which all that I had seen might be analyzed and
understood as uniquely Andean, intelligible according to pre-Columbian
cultural logics. If K'ultas hear "sun" when the priest says "Christ" and
"moon" when he says "Virgin Mary," and if, instead of exemplary
Christian lives, they see in each saint the transformative and communi-
cating power of lightning to intermediate for men between the sun and
moon in the heavens and the underworld's masculine mountain gods and
the feminine plains, then their apparent humility while attending mass
and their efforts to pronounce Catholic prayers correctly (in both
Spanish and Aymara) must be an elaborate hoax, a centuries'-rehearsed
mask behind which their original, pre-Christian belief and ritual system
lives on. From this interpretive vantage, one might find the pure,
unadulterated Aymara signal by simply filtering out from fieldwork
communications the foreign, Spanish-Catholic noise.
Yet when I saw the blood upon the lintel, I did not think only of
pre-Columbian Inca sacrifices; I was also put in mind of the sacrifice that
Yahweh asked of the Hebrews in Egypt, that of the original Passover
from whence derives the symbolism of the Last Supper, and the
identification of Christ as the Pascal Lamb, the Lamb of God. Animal
sacrifice is central to Old Testament worship, and even if Andeans have
seldom been exposed to Leviticus, the Christianity they have for centu-
ries been taught is itself shot through with sacrificial metaphor, not least
of which is the Eucharist. Might we then not understand this K'ulta
110 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

sacrifice, and the sacrificial sequences by which all K'ulta saints' festivals
are structured, as a K'ulta reworking of the Christian Eucharist? As we
shall see, this is indeed a potent interpretive frame for understanding not
only K'ulta sacrifices and saints' festivals but K'ulta authority as well.
We shall see that the festival sponsors who become authorities undergo a
transformation very like that of the eucharistic Christ, being equated
with the victim of an animal sacrifice to symbolically appease a vengeful
God and redeem their flocks. But they also quite transparently strive to
become more directly like Christ, to achieve a leadership role and
legitimate their positions of power by internalizing some of Christ's
qualities.
So too did the devotion to the saints, which as far as I could see was
entirely heartfelt, betokening something other than a "thin veneer" of
Christianity. And the lurya misa itself was certainly in some ways the
counterpart of the priest's water-sprinkling reconsecration of the church,
an act that can be interpreted as sacralizing space or as a form of
de sacralization that makes it safe for one to enter.
As I learned more about the "private and secret" aspects of saints'
festivals and sacrifices, I was even further disabused of the idea that I
ought to separate analytically the Christian-Spanish from the Andean in
this K'ulta cultural synthesis. It is possible to distinguish relatively "more
Christian" and relatively "more Andean" cosmic spheres in the contrast
between alax-pacha (heaven) and manxa-pacha (underworld), a contrast
that also seems to correspond roughly to ritual practices in "more
public" as opposed to "more private" performance contexts. But the
qualities and characteristics of "Christian" and "Andean" deities seem to
have interpenetrated one another so thoroughly that the contrast seems
in some ways vacuous. Try as I might to seek out the secret and private
rites, to plumb local sorceries and sacrifices, I seemed always to find the
saints, Christ, and the Virgin at the heart of "native" ceremonies. By the
same token, I also found shamans and mountain spirits in the church at
High Mass. So too did the K'ultas' Christ and Virgin partake of some
decidedly non-Catholic qualities, and underworld gods sometimes dis-
played quite biblical features.
Indeed, all the gods and saints, rituals and myths, of K'ulta share both
Spanish-Catholic and Andean characteristics. The K'ultas' Christ, for
example, is in many ways unlike the Christ of the priests. For K'ultas,
Christ is a man whose death, at the hands of Supay-Chullpas, led directly
to his apotheosis, a rebirth into the heavens as the sun. Yet surely as
enemy and tamer of the native Supay-Chullpa "demons," whose exem-
Structures and Histories 111

plary death must (through self-sacrifice) be recalled and repeated over

and over again, this Solar-Christ shares common ground with the priests'
Jesus, whose iconography in colonial times was unabashedly solar.
Likewise for K'ultas, as for missionary priests, the relationship between
these two sorts of beings and powers is essential to the order of things,
part of the human condition. The difference is that K'ultas juxtapose
such powers so as to make themselves kinds of persons distinct from city
people, vecinos, and priests.
From an analytical perspective, K'ultas' relatively orthodox, public-
sphere Christian practice and their relatively heterodox clandestine
practices are alike in addressing deities of both heavens and underworld
which partake of qualities deriving from mixed Christian and pre-
Columbian sources. But we cannot explain K'ulta religiosity simply by
asserting that it is a syncretic blend of two traditions. For K'ultas
themselves make a distinction between relatively "more Christian" and
relatively "more Andean" deities and activities, which the logic of their
practice divides between opposing spheres-open and public versus
clandestine and private-knowing that, from the priest's and outsider's
point of view, libations and sacrifices to mountain gods appear to be a
diabolic kind of antireligion. Indeed, that is why they hide some of their
practices. K'ultas may believe that some of their clandestine practices are
just as Christian as their public ones, but they also know that others will
not see it that way.
To understand the apparent paradox of hiding Christian practices
from priests requires an alternative approach to the old problem of
so-called cultural syncretism. In part 3 of this book, I layout in greater
detail some of the features that this alternative approach must have to
enable us to extricate ourselves from old ethnological dilemmas, such as
the assumption of closure in structuralist and semiotic (as well as
functionalist) analysis that has long turned attention away from the
active cultural frontier of societies in contact. Here I will only suggest
that the dynamics of what might be called an interculture are profoundly
historicized in the consciousness of all Bolivians, whether from the city
or the countryside and whether self-identified as campesinos, mestizos,
or criollos. Both urban-national and rural-"indigenous" cultural forma-
tions have come to presuppose one another's presence, producing in each
kind of class- and ethnicity-marked position on the Bolivian scene a
means of positive identity through contrast with culturally distinct
others. In both La Paz and K' ulta, such presuppositions acknowledge the
existence of asymmetries of power within the country as a whole;
112 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

indeed, the structured system of inequality that was colonialism, subsist-

ing still in ethnically marked "class" distinctions, is directly addressed at
the heart of the creole and indian meaning worlds. As we shall see,
inequality is perceived as a result of a primordial form of cultural
opposition involving conquest of a cultural alter. Achieving effective
social agency in K'ulta, like the creation of adequate national citizens,
leads rural indians and urban creoles to locate the origin of inequality in
a foundational "first time," and in some way to invert or symbolically
transcend such inequality through ritual manipulations of historical
consciousness. In short, both urban nationalists and K'ulta festival
sponsors predicate their personal and collective projects on the existence
of the other, and such otherness is an indelible and inevitable part of the
world of experience. The division of practice between public and
clandestine spheres, then, has been structured by the power asymmetry
of intercultural discourse under colonial and postcolonial conditions; it
also exists to enable K'ultas to come to grips directly with such
asymmetries of power.
Generally speaking, the church of Santa Barbara and the hamlet
altar-table, the heavens and the underworld, may be regarded as rela-
tively "Catholic" as opposed to "Andean" spheres, but the ritual activi-
ties I saw in both sorts of contexts, related to both sorts of deities,
seemed always to strive to bring the two spheres into contact with one
another. Without letting the priest catch them doing it, they sought to
bring about such controlled contact through the intercession of the
saints. Indeed, I learned that most of the pilgrims who I had seen arriving
at Santa Barbara's church were engaged in one part of a lurya misa of
their own. Santa Barbara, I learned, is especially charged with lurya (it is
not for nothing that she is the patron saint of electricians), and is often
the intercessor, or awukatu, of yatiris, who seek knowledge from the
hidden "other worlds" of above and below.
Soon after the priest's visit interrupted the council's sacrifice, I learned
that there were yatiris among my neighbors and hosts. Don Juan (who
had been released from jail) was a specialist in the reading of coca leaves,
and people from nearby hamlets periodically sought him out to discover,
by throwing coca leaves upon a cloth, whether tomorrow would be a
good day for travel or whether they should sell some sheep to a traveling
butcher now or later. Both don Bartolome and his wife were highly
respected curers, capable of determining the cause of illness and remov-
ing it from the sufferer's body for disposal elsewhere. I had already
noticed that don Bartolome and dona Basilia were often chosen to pass
Structures and Histories 113

around the chicha bowl or alcohol cup during libation sessions. They
were, in fact, wasu wariri (Sp. vaso, "cup," and Aymara wariri, "one
who bears"), which is to say specialists in libation dedications. Although
I did not grasp much of what was involved in libations until months
later, don Manuel assured me that his "brother" don Bartolome was
nearly always chosen to officiate at Mamani festivals and sacrifices.
As libation specialists, don Bartolome and dona Basilia well knew the
complex and poetically organized sequences of drink dedications known
as amt'an t"akis, the "memory paths" by which human beings recall and
address the gods, both the Christianity associated beings of heaven and
the spirits of the underworld, which more than one K'ulta commentator
likened to demons. 16 Eventually I would hear their names called out to
come for their portions of alcoholic drinks, and I would understand that
the yatiris' special task, and by extension that of festival sponsors and
authorities, is not so much to keep incompatible "Andean" and "West-
ern" orders apart as to bring two kinds of powers within a single cosmic
order into controlled contact with one another. Gods of the heavens and
gods of the underworld each bear their own kinds of dangers, dangers
deriving from their generative and transformative powers, from their
roles in foundational "first time" events, and from their association with
(or opposition to) the kinds of power wielded by the urban-national-
priestly sector. The yatiri, sponsor, and authority share the task of
manipulating such godly powers to the benefit of the local community.
This task involves engagement not only with generative forces of the
earth and sky but also with the powers of church and state and "world
system"; through ritual means, such K'ulta ritual-political specialists also
become kinds of historians, capable of recasting their position in the
present by manipulating and reformulating the past.
Yatiris are therefore kinds of specialists in history, masters of the arts
of social memory, and their libation-sequence "paths of memory" are
keys to the genealogies of gods and men, social structures, and the
meaning of events. Yatiris tend also to specialize in storytelling and are
especially fluent in accounts of foundational moments that took place in
the distant past. Many such stories are linked directly to specific places
on the K'ulta landscape, places that are themselves gods that require
drink in libation sequences.
Libation-sequence memory paths serve as one form of K'ulta chrono-
tope, a conventional understanding of the relationship between time
(cronos), space (topos), and agency (of the person whose life-journey
charts a path in time and space), such as those that Bakhtin describes for
114 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

certain forms of the novel (for instance, the Spanish picaresque).

Through performance of memorized sequences of libations, the K'ulta
memory path becomes a form of historical consciousness with remark-
able properties. By mentally moving along the trajectory of deity-places
named in a libation sequence, K'ultas move from the here and now
backwards in time and outwards in space and, paradoxically, also
towards the future. Like a trip along the inside-outside of a Mobius strip,
these mental journeys abolish temporal distance and bring the visible
past into the present while projecting it towards the invisible future.
Remarkable as they are, however, such journeys along K'ulta memory
paths do not abolish the Spanish invasion and the long history of
colonialism. Indeed, the relationship of indian and Spaniard, of the
Chullpa underworld and the Christian sky, is as deeply implicated in
K'ulta historical consciousness as it is in local institutions like the town
council and saints' festivals. K'ulta memory paths, the sacrificial saints'
festivals in which they take place, and the verbal narratives about the
past told in the form of myth can best be seen as efforts to come to grips
with colonial and postcolonial situations, to internalize the logics
implicated in the systems of inequality in which K'ulta and K'ultas must
exist, and to construe themselves as effective social agents in and of that
world. To be adequate, an analysis of K'ulta's cultural forms must take
account of these imbalances of power and, like the people of K'ulta,
understand the impact of those imbalances on the constituted social
world. At the same time, such an analysis, like that carried out by
K'ultas in their own media, must achieve historical understanding. It
would not do to privilege one or another strand of the complex
intercultural weave that colonialism produced, to subordinate K'ulta
chronotopes to the chronologic of the West, or, the opposite, to claim
that K'ulta history is superior to the historian's book. Instead, one must
acknowledge their differences and similarities while building up a
comparative understanding. Thus I prefer to develop two different sorts
of accounts, each internally multiple and laced with dissent and contra-
diction, rather than producing a single interwoven narrative.
As, by describing in this text forms of social memory that are
culturally K'ulta, I seek to build up an intercultural understanding, I
also, then, seek to understand the "interculture" in which K'ultas
participate. Like an "intertext," this interculture must be found in the
convergences and intercommentaries produced over time by K'ultas and
their interlocutors on the temporal relationship between colonized
indigenous and colonizing Christian or Spanish presumptive ancestors. I ?
Structures and Histories 115

The interculture to which I refer was produced through centuries'-

long interactions along a cultural frontier that has been the site of a great
deal of violence, exploitation, resistance, and accommodation. Its rela-
tive indian and Spanish poles have been invented as contrasts of race,
ethnicity, class, and estate. Such contrasts were required by colonialism
and reinforced by Spaniards' need to prevent indians from becoming
Spaniards and indians' simultaneous efforts to resist Spanish civilizing
and Christianizing strategies. Spanish colonials sought to impose Chris-
tianity and civilization on Andeans and to enforce orthodoxy in belief
and practice, importing to the Andes not only Catholicism but also the
Counter-Reformation. Under such circumstances, discourse between
asymmetrically empowered cultural "others" entrenched a relationship
between clandestine and public, between "pagan" and "Christian"
activities and powers, making this relationship into a reflex of cosmo-
logical principles that were first established when the colonial cosmos
was brought into being.
Thus town councils, saints as intercessors, and a sacrificial Eucharist
performed for the Solar-Christ have become means of harnessing the
magical power of history for the transformation of the present and
assurance of the future. Over the centuries a relatively Hispanic, state-
and church-linked sphere has become just as necessary in indian con-
structions of their own identities as a magic-inflected indian sphere tied
to earth deities has become for the nationalist ideologues of the creole
state.
This is not the place to explore in depth how this interculture works
within the meaning contexts of the city and the national political scene;
I reserve such an endeavor for another book. 18 Yet as I have elsewhere
argued, one can see in urban nationalist pageantry as in K'ulta sacrificial
rite, how memories of founding days are "hegemonic fictions read into
the past as an outcome of the ideological struggles of the present-an
invented tradition, fictions held by both Christianized Indians, such as
those of [the Andes], and the Church, as well as by the colonists as a
group" (Taussig 1987: 377). Yet if "history has put memory at the
service of colonization," certain kinds of intercultural shamanism may
yet be able to rework or undo "the history of sorcery with its memory"
(ibid., 391-392). In part 3, I will discuss at length how K'ulta ritual
forms seek to do just that.
Fortunately we are seeing less and less of an anthropological sorcery
that strives to do the same, by rescuing the purely "indian/Andean"
through magically making the Spanish and the Christian disappear. It
116 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

would not have been difficult here to have stripped away references to
saints' festivals and town councils, cantons and corregidors, in favor of
a language of ayllu and jilaqata, sacrifices and generative substances,
sun, moon, and mountain gods. True, I might thereby have construed yet
another example of successful Andean cultural resistance, but I would
also have engaged once again in an anthropological romance that seeks
out the maximally "other" other, a satisfying proof of the fallibility of
cultural imperialism and the shallow emptiness of Western culture.
Instead, I became convinced that a K'ulta cosmology and philosophy of
history rest on understanding the relationship between underworld and
heavens, between more-Christian and less-Christian beings and powers,
and between domestic and collective spheres. And all these mediations
are accomplished by understanding and manipulating the relationship
between the present and the past, by engaging the services of social
memory.

FROM HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS TO A HISTORY OF K'ULTA

Unlike a former anthropological romance, the historical consciousness in

K'ulta eucharistic sacrifices and libation journeys through space in time
actively remembers events of conquest and colonialism and construes
Christ, fiesta-cargo systems, and cantons as critical features of K'ultas'
lives, as important as mountain gods and ayllus. Their constructions of
their past do not lead back to the glories of an Inca empire or Aymara
kingdoms. A long colonial and republican history has intervened be-
tween the pre-Columbian past as it is known by Western historical
canons and the past as it is construed by K'ultas, and the latter can best
be understood as a product of the long-running intercultural discourse in
which it is still engaged. 19
In K'ulta the past lives on in a variety of modes, it is present in the
gods of mountains and plains from the distant past, who surge into the
present in the landscape itself, in the relatively anecdotal recounting of
events from individual experience, in the ancestral wisdom of myth, and
in the genealogies of persons as well as in those of the gods. The people
of K'ulta also call upon personal and collective stores of written
documents, often held as guarantors of rights as well as of memory. As
among ourselves, long-past events, those which no living person has
witnessed, are recalled to help inform the present, whether to bolster the
conviction that things are rightly so the way they are or to explain why
some situations must be avoided. Also as among ourselves, certain
Structures and Histories 117

specialists are considered particularly authoritative in the historian's

craft, which in K'ulta consists especially in the arts of memory.
Memories, however, are best kept when well-ordered, and best
ordered when they are carefully selected. The arts of memory, that is,
require not only remembering but also what might be called structured
forgetting. This was made abundantly clear to me when I asked
questions in a vein that might have led my interlocutors in K'ulta to
dredge up stories of how things might have been before the Spaniards
came. By reading works of ethnohistory, I knew that the ancestors of the
people of K'ulta must once have belonged to one of the large, dual-
organized federations of "kingdoms" that were incorporated into the
Inca empire not long before the Spanish invasion of the Andes. I knew as
well that the populations of such polities were resettled from far-flung
hamlets into towns like Santa Barbara de Culta by Spanish colonists,
where colonial officials came to collect tribute, to levy labor for mines,
and to indoctrinate indians into the Catholic faith. For at least two
hundred years after the Spanish conquest, these now-colonized peoples
were ruled indirectly by descendants of the hereditary authorities, who
Spaniards called caciques. Without knowing any of the details of the
particular case of K'ulta, I was certain of those basic historical facts.
I found, however, that the people of K'ulta would have none of it.
When I asked about the history of the town itself, I was told a story
about a miracle in which the image of Santa Barbara had appeared to a
shepherd, and then refused to be moved from the spot where her church
was eventually built?O When I asked about the Incas, I found that the
only ones most people had heard of were stones, the ones that were
especially good as ammunition for slings during fights?1 Only one man
had heard of the Incas as a people, conquered by Spaniards long ago. He
expressed some sympathy for those unfortunate folk he had learned
about from the schoolteacher, and then related a story of another
conquered people he knew about. He thought of neither group as
ancestral to his own people. Queries about hereditary caciques elicited
only unknowing shrugs. The word "mallku," the Aymara title for such
lords recorded by early Spanish writers, struck a familiar note, but in
reference to condors and mountain gods, not humans. When I asked
about the distant ancestors of modern K'ultas, the ones who lived here
before the Spaniards and before Christianity had arrived, my interlocu-
tors became indignant.
As far as the people ofK'ulta are concerned, they are surely Christians,
and so, too, were all their ancestors. To suggest otherwise is taken as an
118 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

insult, an imputation against local honor. It is just the sort of thing that
visiting priests and urban elites say about and to them. Several individu-
als told me that, of course, they had heard about the non-Christian
people who lived before the coming of Christ. I then heard the story of
Christ's coming, in the form of the sun, and his conquest of the Chullpa
people. Although the Chullpas were not Christians, they were most
assuredly not the ancestors of anyone in K'ulta. I was told that the only
descendants of those early people were certain fishermen on Lake Poopo
who are deprecated for their primitive ways at the same time that they
are feared for their ties to primordial powers, powers that also give them
a privileged place among shamanic sorcerers. Unlike the Chullpas and
Urus, the people of K'ulta, I was repeatedly told, came after Father
Christ, as Spaniards did.
Frustrated in such efforts to square even the roughest "ethnohistori-
cal" chronology with local historical consciousness, I eventually learned
to listen patiently, in the proper contexts, rather than to pursue unwel-
come lines of questioning. Thus, I eventually did hear some clues that
would be useful to me in my efforts to reconstruct K'ulta's past, by
pointing me in the right directions while I did archival research. I also,
however, learned that K'ulta ways of reckoning the past are for them as
valid as and more satisfying than the "factually" trustworthy chronology
of events that I worked towards for my own purposes. In retrospect, it's
clear that my purposes, as a historian, are rather more like those of the
chroniclers among the Spanish conquerors than those of the indians they
conquered. The story of the fall of a great pre-Columbian empire to a
small band of European adventurers, and the subsequently directed
acculturation of the former by the latter, is one that Spaniards (and
creoles) may like to hear but is not so edifying to the conquered. The
people of K'ulta have other ways of conceiving the past and its
relationship to the present that suit them much better. And it is not, as
one might suppose, simply to deny an ancestral defeat, but to learn from
it, turning their past to their own purposes, as we do ours.
Historical consciousness is not limited in K'ulta to myth, genealogy,
and libation sequence, but also draws upon the documentary record and
"personal knowledge" oral history of relatively recent events. I heard
stories about land wars, such as the one that had driven a wedge
between K'ulta's moieties, about grandmothers struck by lightning,
young men whose musical instruments had been charmed by sirens, and
hauntings by local ghosts. Often, stories of local feuds opened towards
the miraculous: One attempt by Ayllu Alax-Kawalli to secede from the
Structures and Histories 119

remaining festival system in Santa Barbara was foiled by the Virgin of

Guadalupe, whose image brought such unrelenting bad weather to the
Alax-Kawalli hamlet to which she had been "kidnapped" that her
"thieves" voluntarily returned her to the Santa Barbara church.
However, oral accounts of events involving named persons and actual
ancestors reach back no further than four or five generations; they are
far removed from forgotten people (and sometimes, forgotten social
forms) whose stories are told in the documents of archives. In K'ulta I
found no one versed in both mythic narrative and the history of
documents who, like Paez described by Rappaport (1994) or Arnold's
Qaqachaka "titleholder" (Arnold, Jimenez, and Yap ita 1992), attempted
systematically to harmonize written and oral accounts of the past. I did,
however, find documents in the hands of K'ultas and a profound respect
for the written word, especially for the kinds of documents that might
detail and guarantee K'ulta rights to the lands on which they live. Apart
from Cruce's Pablo Choquecallata, several other K'ulta authorities had
journeyed to Sucre, La Paz, and even to Lima to scour the archives for
"original" copies of colonial land titles that might be used to defend local
boundaries. While I searched out the structures and meanings of a K'ulta
historical consciousness, accounts such as these also served as sources for
my own historical endeavors, bits of "data" abstracted from the meaning
contexts in which I heard of them, and as clues in a quest for a history of
K'ulta according to Western canons.
By following a K'ulta ritual pilgrimage to Condo and the mountain
called Asanaqi and by reading the parish registers kept in the Condo
church, I was able to envision a research path that, like the memory paths
of K'ulta libation sequences, led at the same time away from K'ulta and
into a still-visible past. For K'ultas, of course, the sacred "resting places"
along their ritual pathways are physical and topographic, objects that in
their invisible interiors still pulse with breath and life from signally im-
portant past events, veritable repositories of historical process. On my
journey, following the pathway of colonial messengers and documents as
well as K'ulta authorities in their quests for legally valid land titles, the
resting places were the sacred sites of historians, the archives of colonial
church, province, judicial capital, and of the Spanish metropole itself. In
those places, the dusty breath of the past speaks out in a cacophony of
voices, mostly Spanish ones, and is terribly cluttered with legalistic stock
phrases and bureaucratic niceties. Only occasionally does a native voice
(almost always interpreted, translated, and shaped for a Spanish audi-
ence) rise momentarily above the noise.
120 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

As I learned about K'ulta ways of thinking about the past and also of
certain customary activities in the present, I was not always stymied in
the search for clues for my own historical endeavors. True, the people of
K'ulta did not recall a glorious Inca past or accept that they descended
directly from pre-Christian peoples. But exposure to some of the means
by which K'ultas regard the past led to less-distant connections that
oriented me in archival research. Let us see, then, some of the ways that
another people's cultural heritage, the contents of their social memory,
can be mined as building blocks for our own constructs in cultural
history.
One of the duties of authorities in K'ulta is the preservation of docu-
ment bundles, which few can read but all revere. Thought to contain the
community's titles to land, such bundles hold varying sorts of documents,
sometimes contained within one another as parts of law suits and legal
petitions. One document that I was able to read and study-the Choque-
callata document described in a chapter 1 vignette-was thought to con-
tain land titles granted by the king of Spain. It did. Composed of imbed-
ded documents from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, it also
recorded the efforts of many generations of authorities to safeguard their
peoples' land claims. But the maximal authorities of the document were
hereditary lords, mallkus, of an entity called Asanaqi, its capital in Condo.
This was a surprise to my audience.
San Pedro de Condo, as well as Asanaqi, came up in other contexts as
well. Tata Asanaqi, "Father Asanaqi," was invariably at the head of a list
of hierarchically named mountains Ii bated in the ritual sequences the
people of K'ulta call memory paths. As a potent mountain deity, he is
also addressed as mallku, once the title applied to hereditary lords of
Aymara diarchies, now a kind of god (and the form that the mountain
god sometimes takes, that of the male condor, also called mallku). Then
too there was the customary ritual practice of the jilaqatas that required
them to travel in a group each year to attend mass in the church of
Condo during the fiesta of San Pedro. In fact, they had gone there
without my knowledge while I waited to meet with the town council
during my first month of fieldwork. I later learned that they had walked
the fifty kilometers to San Pedro de Condo, so that their varas, or staffs
of office, could hear the mass. I inquired further, of course, as to what
Condo, Saint Peter, and Tata Asanaqi had to do with the jilaqatas and
their varas. Indeed, in 1988 I had an opportunity to discuss such matters
with two of K'ulta's jilaqatas while they awaited the arrival of the priest
for the fiesta of San Pedro in Condo itself (see Photograph 4.4). I learned
Structures and Histories 121

Photograph 4.4. K'ulta jilaqatas pour libations in the churchyard during the fiesta of San
Pedro in Condo. After walking to Condo with their varas and carrying whips, jilaqatas of
K'ulta drink puro from a bottle in honor of the cross in Condo's arcaded colonial
churchyard. They await the mass, during which their varas (now resting inside at the feet
of the patron saint) will hear the mass in honor of San Pedro, whom they address with the
name of the mountain that looms above Condo, Tata Asanaqi. San Pedro de Condo, June
29, 1988. (Photograph by author)

only that the journey was required because the varas need to hear this
mass and must pay respects both to the great mallku, Father Asanaqi,
and to the holder of the key to heaven, Saint Peter, to whom that festival
mass is dedicated.
In K'ulta as well as in Quntu (Condo), Tata Asanaqi is considered to
be the most powerful mallku in the region. We shall see that this shared
homage bespeaks a common past that guides and empowers the present.
For it is through acts such as this sacred pilgrimage that the varas, called
tata reyes in the ritual language of libations, are transformed into
something more than mere emblems of office, and the authorities into
something more than just tax-collecting officials. 22
We have seen that authorities like jilaqatas are "elected" to office
through a long-term ritual apprenticeship involving the performance of
saints' fiestas. Among other ritual duties, the jilaqata-to-be performs a
122 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

great number of llama sacrifices, mostly during calendric rites. Such

sacrifices always include dedications of alcohol and chicha libations
(ch'allas). Some libations are poured to the saints and the gods of above,
most especially to Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. Interwoven with
them, however, are many libations to gods of manxa-pacha, the under-
world. Always such libations are performed in an orderly series of
hierarchies, naming first the local gods of men, the altar, guardian hill,
and mallku mountains of the performers, followed by dedications to
similar hierarchies of place deities pertaining to the herd animals,
foodstuffs, and the performer's male and female ancestral lines. In the
context of the place deities of libators, the top of the hierarchy is almost
invariably the mallku Tata Asanaqi. Just behind Tata Asanaqi in status
comes the most powerful local mallku, a mountain very close to the
town of Santa Barbara de Culta called Pirwan Tata, "Father Store-
house." In the ritual language of libations, this mallku is called Churi
Asanaqi. Now, "churi" is a Quechua, not an Aymara, term, meaning
"son ...23 As we shall see, this way of expressing a hierarchic relationship
between Quntu and K'ulta reflects historical circumstances, for both
authorities and gods of K'ulta were once validated in San Pedro de
Condo.
Two of K'ulta's jilaqatas told me that they were not the only ones to
make the pilgrimage to the town of Condo. Jilaqatas from the nearby
towns of Cacachaca, Challapata, Cahuayo, and Lagunillas had also
traditionally carried their varas to Condo's church, although the atten-
dance of some had been irregular in recent years. 24 Queries about nearby
towns, those within the territory described in the colonial land title, the
same ones that sent jilaqatas to Condo, produced yet further clues. I had
already learned that among the ayllus of Condo were some that shared
the same names as those of K'ulta. My K'ulta friends assured me that
these like-named ayllus were in no sense "the same," but at the same
time they acknowledged a distant connection between the two places.
Seeking explanations beyond shrugs in regard to the coincidence of ayllu
names or the self-evident power of a great mountain and a powerful
saint celebrated at the fiesta in Condo, I chose to follow the social
organizational evidence of the land title, which I felt might account for
both ayllu names and mountain hierarchy.
About eight months into my fieldwork, I was able to leaf through the
parish registers kept in a chest of valuables in Culta's church, jealously
guarded by K'ulta's mayordomos. They were interesting but recent.
"Book one" of priests' records of baptisms, marriages, and funerals
Structures and Histories 123

dated only to the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when Culta was
erected as an autonomous ecclesiastic unit, a doctrina or rural parish.
My curiosity next took me to Condo, where under the watchful gaze of
four mayordomos I was able to scan a few parish registers, beginning
with that town's "book one," dating to 1571.25 Although all of K'ulta's
ayllus were listed there, along with ayllus not present in K'ulta but found
in other towns of the area, there was no mention of the town of Santa
Barbara de Culta. Later baptismal registers of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, however, did contain references to a series of
vice-parishes visited periodically by the priest of Condo. Alongside the
vice-parishes of Cacachaca, Cahuayo, and Lagunillas, Culta first appears
as Santa Barbara de Aguas Calientes. Apparently, its current icy artesian
springs were once hot. 26 It also appeared that Canton CultalAyllu K'ulta
was a late arrival on the territorial scene, very probably a historical
descendant of the larger entity called Asanaqi, produced through some
process of political subdivision. Only in the pilgrimage with varas and
the libation to mountain gods can we see a memory of a former
regionwide political entity called Asanaqi, recalled from a time before
historical contingencies-and, in particular, activist town councils-rent
it into pieces. 27
By the end of December, I had made significant progress towards
understanding festivals and sacrifices, saints and underworld gods,
herders and foxes. As to history, I had amassed leads that pointed in two
very different research directions. One set of facts-the jilaqatas' ritual
duties in Condo, the homonymous ayllu names in K'ultalCulta, Quntul
Condo, QakachakalCacachaca, and Challapata, the reverence displayed
in K'ulta for the mountain called Tata Asanaqi, and the knowledge that
K'ultalCulta had once "pertained" to QuntulCondo-led towards a need
for archival research to uncover the historical basis for such connections.
But other data led in a different direction. With few exceptions, K'ultas
have little interest in documentary investigation of K'ulta's origins in
pre-Columbian polities, largely, it seems, because they already possess
valued and trusted techniques and media for the structuring and preser-
vation of historical knowledge: The story of the origin of modern
humanity after the defeat of Chullpa people by the Solar-Christ, tales of
the exploits of wild animals that seem linked to ideas about contempo-
rary kinship and affinal relations in a way that historically valorizes
them, the profound interest in genealogy, the "roots" of sacred places,
and the arts of memory in libation sequences, all suggest that an
authentic "ethnohistory" of K'ulta already exists: their own.
124 PART ONE. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PASTORALE

These techniques and media do not, however, tell a single story, but
many interlaced though divergent ones, linked to individual, patriline,
ayllu, and cantonal pasts. Factional disputes have multiplied these
divergences and have created yet more separate pasts to underwrite the
separatist futures of annexes and ayllus seeking an autonomous exist-
ence. Sometimes, stories about interayllu fights recall more than just a
structured ritual opposition; they trace moments of definitive rupture. At
the same time, a generational divide cuts across these other kinds of
historical heterogeneity, with increasing numbers of disaffected youths,
schooled and ambitious, questioning the efficacy of the old techniques.
Some are tempted to convert to one or another form of evangelic
Protestantism, as Manuel Mamani did between the time I left K'ulta in
1982 and my return in 1988. Others, especially those young traders
seeking to make and keep a large profit from the textile business, search
for new kinds of libations and new kinds of sacrifices, such as those
performed by miners and the urban "popular classes," that might help
them to achieve goals and ambitions of which their fathers never
dreamed.
Sometimes, indeed, the new rituals developed by such dissenters
appear to their elders as kinds of diabolical antirituals. Many young
traders now keep a skull, taken from the cemetery, in their storehouse,
where it serves as a macabre sort of bank. Placing their dollars between
their skull's closed jaws, they pour libations and burn incense to it on the
Tuesdays and Fridays when evil forces are most active, in order to cause
the money to come back to them and grow. Many older K'ultas are
aghast at such behavior, which inverts their values. For them, Tuesdays
and Fridays are days of evil sorcery. And to remove skulls from the
cemetery is not only a sacrilege against the ancestors but also a positive
danger, since exposing them to the sky can cause the rains to fail.
The techniques and contents of social memory that I describe in this
book are active and changing tools, not inert traditions. The forms that
I describe here, and thereby freeze in time, belong to one brief moment in
a continuing process of creative collective transformation. As such, they
have histories, as well as make them.
In subsequent visits to K'ulta and to archives in Bolivia and Spain, I
set myself, then, to a double purpose. On the one hand, I began a
sometimes dry and tedious investigation, according to the lights of a
Western historical canon, of the documentary record produced by
Spanish colonial scribes, which, if laid out alongside other advances in
archaeology and "ethnohistory" on this Andean region, might tell a
Structures and Histories 125

K'ulta story as a congruent supplement to the stories we tell ourselves

about the Spanish and Amerindian past. On the other hand, I strove to
use the techniques of the ethnographer to appreciate K'ulta brands of
history and to plumb not only their multiple conclusions but also their
techniques. It is my hope that the gap between these accounts (a gap
unavoidably narrowed by the fact that both accounts flow from my pen
in the final instance) may serve not to undermine but to supplement each
one, and perhaps to cast a critical shadow over the interpretive effects
that have ensued from the manner in which indigenous cultural forms
have been (mis)placed in time by Spaniards and creoles, historians and
ethnographers.
The forms of K'ulta historical consciousness developed in narratives
and embedded in rituals, however, may be most intelligible to non-
Andeans when we are better disposed to appreciate the conditions in
which they have been forged. I offer in part 2 what, to most readers, will
be a familiar sort of historical presentation, drawing on documents and
interpreting them according to disciplinary canons. Subsequently in
part 3, the conclusions of this investigation may then be confronted with
my constructions of the less-familiar K'ulta styles of doing history.
 Part Two

Historical Paths to K'ulta:

An Andean Social Formation
from Preinvasion Autonomy to
Postrevolution Atomization
 Chapter Five

Pathways of Historical
Colonization
Stories of an Andean Past from the
Archives of Letters and Landscapes

Recollection of the past is an active, constructive process, not a

simple matter of retrieving information. To remember is to place a
part of the past in the service of conceptions and needs of the
present.
-Barry Schwartz, "The Social Context of Commemoration"

One of my purposes in this chapter is to plumb the Spanish documentary

social memory of archives and chronicles for what they might tell us about
K'ulta's past." At the same time, however, I aim to sketch what forms
social memory has taken in the Andes. I do so, at least, to the limited
degree possible for pre-Columbian and colonial times and, foreshadowing
the substance of part 3, the present. I endeavor to juxtapose Spanish
colonial and colonized Andean ways of registering the past, not to con-
trast them as written versus oral, modern versus traditional, or "Euro-
pean" versus "native," but to highlight the convergences of as well as the
differences between ways of putting the past to work for the purposes of
the present. Above all I seek here to understand the mutual interferences
between Spanish and Andean forms of social memory, to help explain
how it was (and is) that two "traditions" in contact over a period of
centuries can have so largely failed to register one another. Yet, while I
may characterize Spanish and Andean techniques of social memory to
highlight their similarities and differences, I also strive to foreground one
of their most misunderstood patterns of congruence: Neither Spanish nor
Andean ways of thinking about the past were (or are) homogeneous. In
Spain as in the Andes, doing history has been a contentious affair.

• All the translations of Spanish sources in part 2 are my own unless otherwise noted in
the References.
129
130 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

Andeans came to value writing, and Spaniards did seek out Andean
pasts in indians' oral narratives. But neither came to displace or
encompass the other completely. At first sight, it might appear that the
people of K'ulta have been deprived of their past. They know Asanaqi
and Killaka only as the names of a mountain and a miracle-working
saint in a town they think named for him (Santuario de Quillacas, where
the image of Tata Quillacas is kept), and they register no memory of
mit' a journeys along the qapaq nan to a fabulous Cusco or of hereditary
rulers like Guarache, who ruled over K'ulta territory as a small part of a
great pre-Spanish federation. They have instead remembered things
differently. By querying K'ultas, it is possible to know the past that they
make and what they make of that past.
Drawing on a variety of written sources may make it possible to
construct a story about K'ulta's distant past, its prehistory, so to speak,
but it may not be possible to understand the pasts of K'ultas' ancestors
in the way they do. As I have suggested, most of the forms of social
memory in K'ulta are not inscribed on paper, and much of their meaning
world is not even construed or construable through oral narrative in the
form of stories. Instead, it is to be found in the landscape around them.
Through the ways that they walk on it, pour libations to it, name it, and
live on it, K'ultas embody in that landscape the lineaments of genealogy
and the heritage of their social groups.
Only a few extraordinarily perspicacious Spanish chroniclers began to
discover such Andean matters or to write about them. For the most part,
Spaniards, who thought of history in terms of books, especially the
Book, would have had difficulty in grasping how histories encoded in
three-dimensional objects and practices (such as quipus, ceques, queros
[wooden chicha vessels], cumbi, and pilgrimage rites at wak'a sites)
might be understood. Oral narratives constituted a more familiar genre
of historical knowledge, but not in the way Andeans told (sang and
danced) them. And of course no Spaniard could put aside the notion that
all such practices were connected to that which they called idolatry,
superstition, and error.
In any case, not even the most insightful Spanish chronicler actually
aimed to understand, as an end in itself, how Andeans recalled their past.
When Spaniards made inquiries, they did so in order to achieve prag-
matic ends (to collect tributes, to determine which properties might be
seized, or to search for buried wak'a loot). Their goal in uncovering the
Andean past was usually to destroy it rather than to record it.
Spaniards did engage in methodical rescue of certain kinds of Andean
oral narrative, in order to systematize it and discover whether or not it
Pathways of Historical Colonization 131

might be squeezed, like a round peg into a square hole, into their own
universal history. Often enough, they sought out in Andean narrative
providentialist evidence of the Christian God's presence in the Andes
before the conquest in order to foreshadow and legitimate their own
enterprise there, and perhaps to account for some of the otherwise
inexplicable greatness and signs of civilization that they found in the
Andes.
Almost all such endeavors, unfortunately, were concentrated on the
imperial Incas and their capital of Cusco. The memory work of non-Inca
peoples was of very little interest, except as something to be eradicated.
Among the texts at our disposal that make reference to preconquest
times, there is a great quantity of information on the Incas and very little
on the peoples of Qullasuyu, and all of it must be treated with great care.
Very little can have escaped transformation in the colonial process of
inscription. A host of serious scholars have applied rigorous techniques
of inquiry to those sources, tweezing out Spanish influences here,
separating truly pre-Columbian information there. My interpretation of
the pre-Columbian Andes is based largely on the work of those who
specialize in retrieving such information from "contaminated" sources. I
then consider the process of contamination itself to plumb the effects of
the colonial relationships that produced our documents.
Our efforts to read the documented past of the Aymara-speaking
peoples south of Cusco must proceed first to uncover the particularly
Spanish meanings and uses of the writings they bequeathed us. We may
then ponder what they did and did not learn about Inca life-ways and
Inca forms of social memory. That done, we will be in a far better
position to plumb the pre- and non-Inca social forms, such as those
found in Asanaqi, and subsequently to trace colonial and postcolonial
transmutations of sociocultural life. From our vantage (though not from
a K'ulta perspective), the pathways in space-time that connect K'ulta's
present with its pre-Columbian past intersect not only the Cusco of
Huayna Capac but also the Castile of Charles V.

THE CONQUEST MOMENT: A CONFLICT OF HISTORIES

It may appear on first sight that K'ultas suffer from historical amnesia,
since they do not recall a glorious past of hereditary native lords,
pre-Columbian autonomies, or their ancestors' heroic resistance to
Spanish conquest. Yet they tell a "first-time" story that does seem to bear
upon the Spanish conquest of Andeans. It is a mythic narrative that tells
of ancient times, when the soggy and dark earth was inhabited by a
132 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

people called Supay-Chullpas. These almost precultural beings-who

lacked what K'ultas take to be the essence of their own lives: mortality,
animal herds, and an agricultural life regulated by the seasons-were
visited by an old stranger named Tatala. The latter is also referred to as
Jesucristo, and when the Supay-Chullpas sought to kill him, he did not
die but escaped them and, rising into the sky as the sun in the first dawn,
destroyed the Chullpas, sending the survivors into the wet and dark
underworld, where they still exist.
Very clearly the story has sources both in pre-Columbian oral
narrative and in biblical stories imparted by Spanish priests. Told and
retold over many generations, it has become an account of the colonial
situation itself. Let us begin to sketch our own history of that situation,
by turning to the conquest moment of which K'ulta storytellers speak.

Invading Iberians: Feudal Values and Modern Bureaucracy

The unification of Castile and Aragon in the marriage of Ferdinand and
Isabel set the stage for the completion, at Granada in 1492, of what had
been a slow process of displacement of Moorish control over peoples of
the Iberian Peninsula by Castilian, Catalan, and Galician overlords.
Although this process is often called the Spanish reconquest, it is in fact
a mistake to imagine the existence of a political entity called Spain much
in advance of the reconquest's end.
Centuries of reconquest created a "society organized for war," which
was also oriented towards religious conversion. To encourage military
campaigns in and settlement of the ever-moving southern marches,
Christian kings had offered concessions to the military nobility, as well
as to the settlers of the towns established on the fortified frontier. We
shall later explore the nature of the rights claimed by noblemen to
"caretaking" and tax collecting of the inhabitants of the encomiendas
and seiiorios, the lordly domains granted to them by kings during the
reconquest and the competing rights granted to townsmen-and Span-
iards were insistently townsmen-by virtue of the {ueros, or written
constitutions, granted to them by the Crown. Here it is enough to note
that the existence of such concessions of power to nobles and towns
alike created a serious obstacle to the consolidation of royal prerogative,
even after the unification of Castile and Aragon in 1469. It is no accident
that the unification of the crowns and the completion of the reconquest
(in 1492) coincided with royal efforts to wrest power back from
overweening nobles and town councils in order to invest it in a more
centralist state apparatus. Under Ferdinand and Isabel, and then their
Pathways of Historical Colonization 133

Habsburg grandson Charles and his son, Philip, nobles were drawn by a
combination of threat and enticement away from their castles and into
the patrimonial court, while the towns were progressively stripped of
their autonomies and made subject to royal administrators called co-
regidores. 1
The election of Charles I of Castile to the crown of the Holy Roman
Empire and an attempt to manipulate the voting rights of town repre-
sentatives in the cortes, the parliament through which royals obtained
their subjects' consent in state matters, led to a final outburst of violence
in the ill-fated revolution of the communities of 1520 (Haliczer 1981;
Maravall 1963), just as Hernan Cortes was venturing into the Aztec
realm far to the west. As Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, the new king
presided by virtue of a legitimacy granted by the pope over a Catholic
realm with universal pretensions. It was his duty to convert the Indies
and to hold fast against Protestantism in the north.
The Crown was enveloped in a vast new bureaucracy; through it,
Europe's first centralized absolutist monarchy became more adept at
taxation, took direct control over castles, and installed salaried royal
representatives to rule the towns. Consubstantial with the centralization
of the Crown and the development of the bureaucracy, Castilian mon-
archs were leaders in the cataloguing, visiting, and representation of
their realms. Philip II can be credited with the invention of the question-
naire, created to help take account of his vast territory. The "geographic
relations" thereby produced were to be housed in a new palace and
symbol of empire, a building called EI Escoria1. 2 It was adorned with
views of Spanish cities (as they might have been seen from a bird's-eye
view) and large-scale painted maps of the provinces in the domain that is
represented (Kagan 1986), thus becoming a visual and architectural icon
of the surveillance and encompassment possible only by focusing the
gaze of the state into the private lives of the king's subjects. Such efforts
at global summary were an important complement to the daunting bulk
of archival documents that crowded the shelves of the Crown archive in
the old castle of Simancas (see Kagan 1981; Guevara-Gil and Salomon
1994).3
The completion of the reconquest and consolidation of a bureaucratic
state, however, did not lead to a significant change in the values by
which an aristocratic elite distinguished itself from lowly plebeians
(Bennassar 1979). Within Castile, the kingdom from which state struc-
tures were extended to the rest of empire, there was no lessening of
aristocratic disdain for plebeian manual labor, and possibilities there for
134 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

the emergence of an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie (which elsewhere led to

revolutions both bourgeois and industrial) were slight. Indeed, while the
unification of crowns and the squashing of the comunero rebels had
reduced Castile's need for fortresses and city walls, the new frontier of
the Indies provided an alternative outlet for Spain's legion of would-be
nobles, a new arena full of infidels to be subdued, where warrior virtues
could still lead to ennoblement and, as Sancho Panza hoped for as a
Crown reward for helping Quixote in serving the king, insulae to
govern. And just as the Crown's intake of American metal wealth
underwrote its continued imperial pretensions against Protestant rebels
in the north, new indian tributes and increased taxation of Spanish
plebeians enabled the Crown to continue to purchase the loyalty of its
more ambitious subjects, through grants of rents and honor-filled
aristocratic titles. 4
Spain rose out of fractious multiplicity just as, an ocean away,
Tawantinsuyu did. Likewise, the rise and expansion of both empires
hinged on the creation of a centralized state bureaucracy. But the Inca
and Spanish empires were, of course, radically different, as were the
constituent units out of which they were built. In contrast with the
Andean case, it is much easier to characterize the kingdoms of Iberia and
their unification under imperial rule, largely because the Iberians had
inherited a system of writing from an earlier empire, whereas the
Andeans had not. The absence of written preconquest sources on the
Andes, however, is not our only obstacle. For the written sources we do
have on, but not of, the preconquest Andes were for the most part
produced by Spaniards, and in the Castilian language. They were also
produced not simply for a Spanish readership but for an official Spanish
readership, for the archive. Spanish accounts of things Andean involve
the translation of alien concepts into familiar ones, whether intention-
ally, to establish a familiar ground for readers, or unintentionally,
because the writers were blocked by their own ethnocentrism from
apprehending an unfamiliar reality in its own terms.
Atahuallpa, whom Andeans called Sapa Inca, became for Spaniards
"el Rey Inca"; his empire, Tawantinsuyu, became a "reino," a monarchy.
Lesser, regionally powerful hereditary rulers, those whom Andeans
called mallkus and kuraqas, became "senores naturales" to Spaniards,
soon simply called caciques, after a Taino term for chieftain. These were
regarded by Spaniards as an Andean analogue of Iberian noblemen,
while the social units headed by mallkus and kuraqas were interpreted
as "seiiorios," lordly domains, like those which many conquistadors
Pathways of Historical Colonization 135

aspired to govern through an ennobling merced, a grant by the king

rewarding their loyalty and service to the Crown in the Andean
enterprise.
Just as they found in the Andes an analogue to the Iberian aristocratic
estate, so too did Spaniards find equivalents for Spain's priests and
tribute-paying vassals. Given conquistadors' designs in the Andes, their
attitude towards "native lords" was deeply ambivalent. But towards
native "priests" and "plebeians," there was much greater clarity. Con-
quistador religious intolerance, heightened by the religious justifications
for conquest in the first place, turned indian priests into devil-inspired
pagan dogmatizers and sorcerers, to be eliminated as quickly as possible.
Indian tributaries, on the other hand, were a blessing, once the conquis-
tador and Crown could interpose themselves between the "native lord"
and his indian "tributaries."
These initial identifications, of native lords, native kings, native
vassals, and native tributes, certainly aided both Spaniards and Andeans
in making sense of their cultural interlocutors, but they also produced a
vast gap in understanding. Such is the effect of cultural pidgins, the
communicative vehicles of contact that are created through these hasty
equations. Cross-cultural understanding and misunderstanding are si-
multaneous effects of this kind of communicative situation, which
produces a meaning gap. The spark that jumps it can turn the motor of
domination as well as the motor of resistance. A few perspicacious
Spanish and Andean authors sought to narrow it, but this kind of
communication gap is narrowed only by heightening the cultural con-
trast, bringing difference into sharper relief. Fortunately the paper-happy
colonial bureaucracy archived ample clues about just where the equa-
tions of cultural translation were least successful; that is where we must
look for colonial Andean meaning worlds.
For various reasons (which cannot be fully summarized in the words
"colony" and "empire"), the Spanish state did not choose to extend the
discovery of coincident institutions to full recognition of Andean equiva-
lents to Spanish social forms. The Crown might have simply granted to
native lords the titles and emoluments of Spanish nobility, and trans-
formed mallku into senor, mallkuna into senorio. But formidable
obstacles lay in the path of such a maneuver. On the one hand, there was
the question of native loyalties and the problem of the missionary project
that underlay the whole colonial enterprise. It was inconceivable to do
without Spanish supervision of the process of civilization and conver-
sion. And a yet more intransigent barrier to an Inca-like indirect form of
136 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

rule was to be found in the Spaniards themselves, both in those who had
migrated to the Indies and those who had invested in the enterprise of
colonialism: A multitude of relatively poor and lowly Spaniards hoped
to displace the native lords in order to become enriched and ennobled
themselves.
In fact, the combined social and scriptural techniques that Spaniards
used to achieve their social-climbing goals had already been routinized
and legalized in the Caribbean and in New Spain before the Pizarro-
Almagro expedition was outfitted for the exploration of the South
American Pacific coast. Numerous powerful investors had sunk good
money into the project of conquest, and most members of the expedition
had nothing else on which to pin their hopes but the future tributes of
indian vassals. The die was cast for Inca Tawantinsuyu, determining how
it would be shaped by sword and word for Spanish imperial consump-
tion, long before Spaniards made landfall on the coast of what they
called Peru.
Although K'ultas do not remember it, some of their ancestors were
deeply engaged with the Inca state project. So when Spaniards began
their invasion of Tawantinsuyu in 1532, reaching places like Cajamarca
and Cusco within a few years, they encountered peoples from Qullasuyu
long before they actually conquered Asanaqi and Killaka. Just what
happened during those years has been the focus of much historical
writing, debate, and revisionism. Because the relaciones and cronicas
that record conquest events were submitted in interested efforts to gain
the king's favor, there are perhaps as many versions of the events I am
about to describe as there are sources. The same can be said of
indigenous sources on the same moments, which were also composed as
parts of curriculum vitae. I will, nonetheless, attempt a synthesis,
drawing on the work of other historians.

Spanish Incursions on the Inca Opulent Way

Scholars of postinvasion Peru often find themselves searching for expla-
nations for what is commonly supposed to have been an astonishingly
swift and easy conquest of a great empire by a small band of European
adventurers. Accounts of Francisco Pizarro's conquest of the Incas
invariably cite the superiority of Spanish weaponry and armor, a
superiority grounded in part on Andeans' unfamiliarity not only with
steel, gunpowder, and horses but also with audacious and treacherous
Spanish strategies of warfare. Accounts also point to the Spaniards'
extraordinary good luck, first in the early offshore capture of indians
Pathways of Historical Colonization 137

who later served as interpreters, and then, by virtue of the ensuing

communication, of being in position to take advantage of deep divisions
and resentments among Tawantinsuyu's varied peoples. Spaniards were
also fortunate in arriving during a bitterly divisive succession struggle
that pitted two potential heirs of a recently deceased Inca emperor
against one another. What is more, this Inca war of succession took place
against a backdrop of considerable internal dissatisfaction with Inca rule
on the part of recently conquered Inca subjects. Many were all too eager
to join with the Spaniards once they had captured the Inca leader,
Atahuallpa. 5
That decisive moment, concluded without the help of disaffected Inca
subjects, was perhaps the greatest cause for wonder among all the events
of conquest. Indeed, the capture of the great Inca lord, at a time when he
was traveling with an army numbering in the tens of thousands, by
Pizarro's puny band of Spaniards seems almost miraculous (although
accounts of the Cajamarca events do not describe, as do those of the
Spanish victory in the later rebel-Inca siege of Cusco, the intervention of
saints [see Silverblatt 1988a]).
The event, however, must be taken neither as miracle nor as evidence
that indians mistook Spaniards for gods, their horses for all-powerful
demons, and their harquebuses for the power of thunder. For Atahuallpa
had ensured that Spaniards were carefully watched, and kept an account
of all the damage they had done, as well as a detailed list of the supplies
they had removed from Inca storehouses. As the Spaniards prepared
their trap in the Inca administrative town of Cajamarca, the Inca
emperor and his vast retinue stalled for time on an open plain. Atahu-
allpa had agreed to a parley with the Spanish leader. He planned to enter
Cajamarca only after sunset, when the Spaniards would be vulnerable,
so he delayed, apparently because his spies had concluded that the horses
were ineffective in the darkness (Hemming 1970).
Pizarro's response was to send out a messenger to convince Ata-
huallpa to enter the trap during daylight hours. The man chosen for the
mission was one Hernando de Aldana, a relatively lowly Extremaduran
whose linguistic talents made him, it appears, the first Spaniard to have
learned the Quechua language.
Precisely what Aldana said to Atahuallpa was not recorded in
surviving accounts. Apparently Atahuallpa asked for or attempted to
seize Aldana's sword, and Aldana hurried back to the Cajamarca plaza
(Lockhart 1972: 213). Following this parley, Atahuallpa mounted his
litter and was carried into the plaza while there was still sufficient light
138 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

for the Spaniards to aim their sword thrusts. Fray Vicente de Valverde,
the priest who supposedly presented Atahuallpa with the book that
doomed the Inca, remembered Hernando de Aldana as "the first and
most important cause of Atahuallpa's capture.,,6 Lockhart provides a
capsule biography in his study of the Spanish men of Cajamarca:
At the founding of Cusco in 1534 Aldana settled there and received a
good encomienda. Within a few years he seemed on his way to
becoming one of the principales or leading men of Peru. He
performed well during the year-long siege of Cusco by the Indians,
and in 1537 was on the city council, closely associated with the
Pizarro party, as was normal in view of his Caceres-Trujillo
connections. Yet in the following years he was little heard of, and
failed to cooperate with the rebellion of Gonzalo Pizarro in 1544. So
alienated did he become that in 1546 a lieutenant of Gonzalo's
hanged him for suspicion of plotting against the Pizarro cause. His
death, accompanied by prolonged laments, was a pitiful spectacle
that turned many against the rebellion once and for all. (Ibid., 213)
It is true that Hernando de Aldana was little heard of in Cusco
between 1537 and his death in 1546, but that is a result of the peculiar
identity of the encomienda granted to him in 1534, which pulled him
away from the Cusco area and into Qullasuyu. For Aldana's prominent
action in Cajamarca was rewarded with an encomienda, not in the
Cusco area, but in the still-unconquered region to the south, the part of
Qullasuyu that four years later came to be called the province of
Charcas!
To understand this unlikely turn of events one must accompany
Francisco Pizarro and his band of Spaniards (including Aldana) while
they collected Atahuallpa's ransom (of which Aldana received a foot
soldier's share), executed Atahuallpa, and then marched towards Cusco
in triumph.
By the time they garroted Atahuallpa, Spaniards had been joined by
vast numbers of indian allies, recently conquered or resentful Inca
subjects (such as the Canaris of the Quito region, the Huancas of the
area around Jauja, and the followers of the now-murdered rival Inca
Huascar, who had been mercilessly harassed by Atahuallpa's troops),
who must have mistakenly regarded Spaniards as a means to achieve
their liberty. Once Atahuallpa was dead, Pizarro crowned a replacement,
a "puppet Inca" whose leadership might more swiftly bring all Inca Peru
under Spanish control. The first appointee, however, died on the journey
from Cajamarca to the Inca administrative city of Jauja, where massive
stores of food and clothing provisioned Spanish troops. Once Jauja had
Pathways of Historical Colonization 139

been refounded as the new Spanish capital city (soon replaced by Lima),
Pizarro set out, again with large numbers of indian "auxiliaries," to take
Cusco.
Now, among the dispersed and terrified relatives and followers of
Huascar, the Cusco-based claimant to the Inca throne, was a surviving
son of Huayna Capac named Manco Inca. This Manco had disguised
himself as a common indian to escape Cusco and death at the hands of
Atahuallpa's armies. Not far outside Cusco in late 1533, Manco and a
small retinue threw themselves at the mercy of Pizarro. Among the
followers was Guarache, a hereditary lord, a mallku, from Qullasuyu.
Guarache's son don Juan Col que Guarache, much favored by the
Spaniards, related in his 1570s probanzas how his father Guarache had
been a member of Manco's (and Huascar's?) "council of war," and how
he delivered himself into Spanish hands at Manco's side? One wonders
if it was not Guarache who stepped forward first to negotiate Manco's
surrender and, if so, whether the Quechua-speaking Aldana played a
part in the event. At any rate, shortly afterwards Pizarro crowned
Manco as the new puppet Inca emperor during ceremonies that gave
Spaniards their first wide-eyed glimpse of Inca imperial rites.
During a month of banqueting in the great plaza, Manco Inca was
accompanied by his mummified predecessors, each of whom received
large quantities of the libations that the living offered to them (and
drank for them). Miguel de Estete observed the proceedings of 1534:
... the deceased Incas, each accompanied by his own retainers, were
carried into the square in a procession that was headed by Manco
Inca in his litter with the litter containing Guayna Capac's mummy at
his side. Having arrived in Haucaypata, the mummies were placed on
their seats. The feasting, interspersed with sung recitations extolling
the "conquests made by each one of these lords and his valor and
accomplishments," began at sunrise and continued until dusk, when
the mummies were escorted back to their abodes. The entire
celebration lasted for over a month. s
Each mummy would have eaten and drunk with the rest of the
celebrants, thus participating in death in the order of sacrifices and
libations directed towards wak'as and other deities. In the center of the
plaza, stone steps led to a throne of solid gold, on which Manco Inca sat;
next to him was the ushnu, which was reduplicated in the plaza of every
Inca city and administrative center. The ushnu was a kind of well, but
rather than providing water, it received the ashes of burned food
offerings and large amounts of corn beer. In this way the gods and
mummies "ate and drank" their portions of such commensal banquets.
140 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

The liquid then flowed away through a system of covered canals that
eventually, after passing through the temple of Qurikancha, emptied into
the river (MacCormack 1991: 66-71). Like other Spanish witnesses of
such rites, Estete was astounded by the power that Inca mummies
continued to exert over the living, and by the quantities consumed. For
Incas, this was an index of the exhaustiveness of the sacrifices made and
libations dedicated. For Estete, however, it was extraordinary excess:
There were so many people and ... so much [chicha] in their [wine]
skins, because their entire business is drinking without eating, that
... two covered drainage canals more than half a vara wide that
emptied out into the river and which must have been made for
cleanliness and to drain off the rains ... ran all day with the urine of
those who urinated into them, and in such abundance as if they were
springs that flowed there; certainly, given the amount that they
drank, and the number of people who drank it, it is no wonder,
although to see such a never before seen thing is cause for
wonder.... These festivals lasted for more than thirty days running,
and so much of that wine of theirs was consumed that, if it had been
our wine, according to its cost, all the gold and silver that we took
would have been insufficient to have paid for it. (Estete 1987: 141,
quoted in Randall 1993: 86)9

And so the Andean libation rituals came to be inscribed as forms of

excessive drinking, and memory techniques were taken for drunkenness
and amnesia, even as the productive capacities that led to such massive
consumption were deemed laudable. However, those activities that were
associated with ritual drinking, such as taquies, the use of quipus, and all
the public gatherings in which mallkus and kuraqas engaged in obliga-
tory feting of their people, were progressively assimilated specifically to
"drunkenness" and generally to the devil-inspired vices such as idolatry
that justified the Castilian colonial project. As Randall suggested (1993:
83), given the January-February calendric moment of Manco's corona-
tion, the event coincided with the dates of rituals known as Q"ullaq
Chi away, during which the Inca sent ambassadors to eat and drink with
all the kuraqas in great quantity, seeking as well more fields for state
production or more production in state fields. Under normal circum-
stances, that is, in the absence of Spaniards, one would also expect a
recently invested Inca ruler to have carried out the capac hucha, the
empirewide pilgrimage ritual of the "opulent prestation," through which
his personal relationship of mutual obligation with each and every local
lord might be reaffirmed or the hierarchic relationship among them
changed. If the new Inca had been able to follow in his predecessors'
Pathways of Historical Colonization 141

footsteps, he might also have taken to the highways to personally visit,

inspect, and set to rights the most distant reaches of Tawantinsuyu.
Perhaps he would also have been forced to pacify rebellious subjects.
Very likely he would have engaged as well in new campaigns of
imperial expansion, seeking to bring yet more peoples and lands under
the broad wings of the Inca state. As Conrad and Demarest (1984)
argue, and Polo Ondegardo made very clear, when an Inca died he
founded a new lineage; his descendants then cared for his mummy
within the palace he had built during life, carrying him to each major
sacrificial event, just as Huayna Capac had attended Manco's investi-
ture. 1O The Inca's descendants were charged with providing him (and his
gods) with food and drink, which was poured out into jars before the
mummies, as Guaman Poma depicts. (See Fig. 5.1.) The dead Inca's food
and drink requirements were, however, enormous: Vast quantities were
expended daily and in a host of calendric rituals, not only poured out for
the mummies, but also consumed by the members of the lineage that he
founded in death and consumed in the banqueting of those who
continued to work the dead Inca's estates, which remained under
production in the name of the dead Inca to provision all the foregoing. If
a new Inca did not gain access to the palace, personal subjects, or lands
of his predecessor, he was forced to make new arrangements by making
new conquests or by redefining relationships that bound conquered lords
to Inca lineages. Thus occurred the need for both prolonged personal
inspection tours accompanied by armies of conquest, and for the citua
and capachucha ceremonies that restructured the social hierarchies of
empire by realigning the hierarchies of the gods.
Manco, however, was in no position to do such things. Shortly after
his investiture, his star began to decline precipitously. Manco found
himself a virtual prisoner of the Spaniards, who kept him under a tight
rein while they set about a project of systematically looting the empire.
Apart from his dignity, the first of Manco's prerogatives to go were his
gods: Temples were pillaged, idols were smashed or smelted. The palaces
of deceased Incas were taken over by Spaniards, along with the personal
servants, the yanakuna, who had been charged with caring for the
mummies. Spaniards' thirst for gold led to the destruction of many
shrines; the mummies and some important gods were spirited away for
safekeeping in secret locations. Finally, Manco also lost the one thing
without which there was no Inca state: access to the labor of his very
subjects. For once Cusco was in his hands, Pizarro began to divvy up the
most valuable spoils, the indians themselves. Local lords of the district
around Cusco were delivered into the hands of deserving Spaniards in
 ( .., k e........
Figure 5.1. Drinking with the ancestors. The wording at the top translates as "First
Chapter. Tomb of the Inca. Inca IIIapa Aia [Inca lightning corpse], deceased." The wording
at the bottom of the page translates as "burial" (tomb). The Inca and a female companion
share a drink of chicha with a pair of mummified ancestors (seated, labeled "IIIapa-
deceased"), whose drink is poured into the large container. In the background are bones
within a chullpa-type tomb, labeled "pucullo." (From Guaman Poma de Ayala 1980: 262)

142
Pathways of Historical Colonization 143

encomienda, which granted the Spanish lord the right to collect tribute
from his new subjects and to make use of their labor in productive
enterprises like mining and the transport of tribute goods, for the
construction of new palaces, and as servants in his house. It was not
Manco who would carry out personal visits, new conquests, and
capac huchas, but, in their own ways, Spaniards.
Among the native lords given away to Spaniards in Pizarro's early
encomienda grants was Guarache, Hernando de Aldana's prize for his
services outside Cajamarca. The unu mallku of the Killaka federation,
lord of ten thousand vassals, was handed over to Aldana in encomienda
fully four years before the battles through which Spaniards conquered
the region in which Killaka indians lived. Possibly, Aldana was able to
collect some booty through long-distance delivery ordered by Guarache.
He must, though, have been chomping at the bit to gain more direct
control of Killaka tributes and labors, Killaka treasures, and perhaps
Killaka silver mines. But from 1534 to 1538, Spaniards had other
preoccupations. The conquest and visitation of the land of Aldana's
encomienda had to wait because there were more pressing matters to
attend to: civil war between the Almagro and Pizarro factions over
possession of the Cusco region, and a full-scale rebellion led by the
puppet Manco Inca, including a prolonged siege of Cusco, during which
Aldana served well. Even then, a hard-fought Spanish invasion of
Qullasuyu was necessary before Aldana was able to take full legal
possession of the Killaka indians in September of 1540. When he did so,
in the former Inca mining center of Porco, where his indians were
already at work, he insisted that the scribe take note of his protest at
participating in the ceremony of possession (in which he held the hands
of his indians' native lords) "notwithstanding that I have already been in
possession of them for seven years" (AGI, Charcas 53, item 1, fol. llV.)l1
Although Pizarro may have promised Aldana an encomienda of
Guarache's indians, the grant itself could not have taken place until after
Pizarro had refounded Cusco as a Spanish town. In Manco's investiture
ceremonies of January and February 1534, Spaniards had a chance to
gain insight into a world of Inca meanings: Pizarro's act of refoundation
in March of that same year ought to have been equally instructive to
Andeans. In order to gain the jurisdiction necessary to place indians
under the protection of individual conquistadors in the act of en-
comienda (giving the encomenderos the right to collect tribute on behalf
of the Spanish king from his indian vassals), he first had to assert Crown
sovereignty over the conquistadors as settlers and citizens of a munici-
144 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

pality, the instrumentality through which Spaniards enjoyed rights

delegated by the king. Crown sovereignty over citizens of the municipal
jurisdiction of Cusco arrived in the same manner that it had earlier come
to Jauja, and years before to Cortes' Vera Cruz: Pizarro erected a pillar
called a rollo (also called a picota [see Bernaldo de Quiros 1975]), a part
of every Castilian town foundation and still to be seen in Castile as in the
Indies, from which criminals would be punished for crimes committed in
the municipal territory. It was built in the main square atop preexisting
steps, which MacCormack suggests may have been the foundation of the
ushnu into which the corn beer was formerly poured and offered to gods
and mummies during every Inca rite, including Manco's coronation (Mac-
Cormack 1991: 72). After thus closing off the conduit through which
offerings had traveled to the unseen world, Pizarro then extended Crown
sovereignty to Cusco, and thus to its town council and to himself, by
carving marks into the rollo with his dagger (MacCormack, Ibid., citing
Betanzos 1987: 52b). After that ritual act, all that was left was the
assignment of house plots to the town's new vecinos, those granted the
rights of citizenship. Unlike a Castilian town, however, Pizarro excluded
a majority of the town's inhabitants from citizenship. For in the Indies,
only Spaniards merited the full civil (or more correctly, civic) rights of the
status of vecino, and even then such status was limited to those Spaniards
who held indians in encomienda. But there was no law against punishing
indians on that rollo. Nearly forty years after it was first erected in Cusco's
plaza, the site of Manco Inca's coronation and the most sacred rituals of
the Inca empire, that place of punishment was to be the scene of the
execution of the last of the rebel Inca rulers, Tupac Amaru I.
So it was through his encomienda, by having been granted tributes of
Guarache's people, that Hernando de Aldana became a vecino of Cusco,
eventually becoming a member of the privileged city council. I will
return in chapter 6 to the to the issue of municipal rights and the deep
significance of urban life for Spaniards, which, forty years after Pizarro's
whittlings on a rollo inaugurated civilized life in Cusco, came to haunt
indians in their own home territories. For now, however, I return to the
story of how Aldana came to control more effectively Guarache's indians
of Killaka. Like the Spanish refoundation of Cusco, that story also leads
to blade marks on a symbol of sovereignty and jurisdiction, in the ritual
act that founded the City of Silver, La Plata, hometown of the encomen-
deros of the province of Charcas.
During the years intervening between 1534 and 1538, when Gonzalo
Pizarro and his brother Hernando led a force of a few hundred Spaniards
Pathways of Historical Colonization 145

and several thousand indian allies into Qullasuyu, Spaniards had faced
continuing resistance from Inca armies. When they were not engaged in
the gathering of booty, they were sallying forth in armed conflict with
indians and with one another.
In July of 1538, six years after Spaniards had captured the Inca
Atahuallpa in Cajamarca, a band of about two hundred Spaniards led by
Hernando and Gonzalo Pizarro rode south from Cusco accompanied by
upwards of five thousand indian auxiliaries under the command of the
new puppet ruler named in Manco's stead, Manco's brother Paullo
(Barnadas 1973).12 Their goal was twofold: to crush remaining pockets
of indian resistance and bring the southern reaches of the Inca empire
firmly under Spanish control, and to gather booty in the form of gold
and silver, which Hernando Pizarro might carry with him on a second
return trip to Spain. A new haul of precious metals, he must have
reasoned, might soften the news of Hernando's murder of Almagro,
which in fact did not sit well with the Crown, coming on top of the
matter of the regicide of Atahuallpa. Once Qullasuyu and the king were
pacified, Francisco Pizarro, as marquis of the conquest and governor of
Peru, would be in position to administer the extraction of indian
surpluses, which would be accomplished through the institution of
encomienda.
Stretching from Cusco southwards as far as the northern highlands of
present-day Argentina, Qullasuyu was perhaps the most populous of
Tawantinsuyu's four constituent suyu districts, and as time would tell, it
was certainly the richest in the precious metals that Spaniards held so
dear. Progressing southwards, the invaders no doubt followed the Inca
highway along which the inhabitants of the region had traveled when
contributing their labor service to the state, or when delivering agricul-
tural products, minerals, and animals produced under Inca administra-
tion. On leaving the immediate vicinity of Cusco, the Pizarro brothers
and their fellow conquerors would first have passed through the territory
of a people called Kanchi, and then through that of the Qana, before
arriving at the shores of Lake Titicaca and successively entering the lands
of the Qulla people, the Lupaqa, and, at the southern and eastern sides
of the lake, the Pakax. It was these peoples, whose territories reached
south to the Inca tambo of Caracollo, who were in the most proper sense
termed Collas by the Spaniards. Spaniards traveling beyond the tambo of
Carcaollo entered into the lands of peoples they dubbed "los aullagas y
carangas," "los carangas y charcas," and later, "los carangas, aullagas,
quillacas, charcas, y chichas."
146 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

Spurred to action by their experiences with Almagro, the native lords

of the region around the lake resisted the Spaniards' advance, beginning
by removing the bridge of tethered reed boats that provided passage
across the Desaguadero River, which flows southwards from Lake
Titicaca to Lake Poopo. For their intransigence (or just as likely, for
failing to deliver the gold and silver sought by the Pizarros) the native
lords of the region paid dearly. Perhaps two hundred of the lords of the
Qulla and Pakax were gathered together in a large building in a town
called Pucarani, where Hernando Pizarro had them burned alive (Saignes
1985b). Intent on "pacifying" a vast new region so as to swell the
numbers of new indian subjects and find new sources of precious metals,
the invaders and their indian auxiliaries pushed on to the southeast,
along the Inca highway.
The well-constructed Inca road that the expedition must have fol-
lowed provided not only secure footing for men and horses but also a
series of well-supplied rest houses. Some of these, indeed, had numerous
storehouses filled with dried corn, freeze-dried potatoes, and quantities
of cloth, certainly enough to have supplied both Spanish expeditions,
with enough left over for subsequent Spanish needs during the civil wars
of the 1540s and 1550s. This system of tambos and the road connecting
them were the products of Inca intervention in the domains of several
major pre-Columbian polities, uneasily united under the Inca domina-
tion that commentators have regarded, in explicit comparison with
ancient Rome, as a "Pax Incaica."
However long the societies of Qullasuyu had been beholden to Inca
rulers and their pilgrimages diverted to Cusco, it was too brief to have
erased local memory of pre-Inca autonomies. Once Cusco had fallen and
the central Inca administration had come unglued, the native lords of
this high plain, unencumbered by the presence of Inca administrators,
were in a position to act in their own interests. Thus, Spanish efforts to
gain administrative control of Qullasuyu came just as the large, Inca
state-run system of agricultural production in Cochabamba, the Inca
silver mines of Porco, and the elaborate systems of transportation,
storage, and imperial cult began to break down. To the invaders' great
advantage, the vast camelid herds and supply stores formerly under state
control remained in place, along with the silver deposits that had been
worked under Inca directive. Everything was in place, that is, to provide
Spaniards with the motive (mineral wealth and a new supply of vassals)
and the means (stored supplies of food and clothing for the short term,
and for the long term a self-reproducing labor pool accustomed to the
Pathways of Historical Colonization 147

provision of services to extralocal powers) for a profitable colonial

enterprise. With the collapse of the Inca state structure, state fields,
supply stores, herds, and highways were under the control of the native
lords of Qullasuyu. The peoples of the social units led by these lords had
every reason to continue supporting their leaders and providing the
periodic labor service on community lands by which elite households, as
well as the communities' gods, were maintained. All that Spaniards had
to do was to bend such lords to Spanish will, to make them deliver
tribute and labor service to support Spanish households and social-
climbing designs.
Accounts of the 1538 Spanish expedition into southern Qullasuyu are
sketchy, and its exact route cannot yet be determined. We know,
however, that after defeating a major indigenous offensive, the bulk of
the Spanish force laid jurisdictional claim to the territory as a whole in
the customary way, by founding a new town and seat of government on
the site of the indigenous settlement of Chuquisaca, dubbed La Plata, or
the "City of Silver." There are few passable routes between Lake Titicaca
and Chuquisaca. Most likely the invading party followed the main Inca
highway south along the plains between Lake Titicaca and Lake Poopo,
a route that was not only self-evident but also known to those members
of the expedition who had traveled it three years before with Diego de
Almagro's expedition to Chile. On the east side of Lake Poopo, which
then was called Lago de los Aullagas, a major branch road led east-
wards, first to the storehouses and tambo (and Inca administrative
center) of Paria, and then on to the enormously productive state-run
maize fields of Cochabamba (see Map 5.1).
Along the way, Hernando Pizarro decided to return to Cusco, his
quota of precious metals apparently fulfilled. He left the expeditionary
force under the leadership of his brother Gonzalo. Not long after that,
Gonzalo's party met a serious native challenge at a place named
"Cotapampa," probably Cochabamba.13 There, a concerted force of
warriors of unknown number (the lords concerned might have mustered
many thousands of soldiers) cornered the Spaniards in some Inca
buildings. A messenger managed to escape through enemy lines to plea
for reinforcements in Cusco, and Hernando Pizarro himself answered
the call at the head of a detachment of six hundred Spaniards, enough to
break the siege and dishearten native resistance. 14
Back in Cusco the following year, Franciso Pizarro assigned the
tributes and labor power of the new territory's indians to those Span-
iards deemed most deserving. 15 Not surprisingly, native lord Cuysara, in
148 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

KEY
• over 5,000 m.
_ approximate
federation border [J 3,000 - 5,000 m.

--Incaroad
D 0-3,ooom.
~ lake or ocean
• Inca administrative
center or tambo
Q saltpan

M
A
AMAZON

BAS I N

Map 5.1. Federations of diarchies, suyus, and Inca roads of Qullasuyu. Federation
boundaries are notional approximations. Inca roads have not been fully mapped in
Qullasuyu. (Author's rendering; drawn after information in Bouysse-Cassagne 1987: 211,
Fig_ 13; Julien 1983: 14, map 2; Hyslop 1984: 258, Fig. 17.1)
Pathways of Historical Colonization 149

whose lands the Inca mines of Porco had already been located by the
Pizarro brothers, was handed over to Gonzalo Pizarro. 16 Hernando
Pizarro was granted the caciques and indians of "the province of the
Chichas," located just to the south of Porco. For himself, Francisco
Pizarro set aside the lord and indians of a district he called Puna,
consisting of the diarchy of Siwaruyu-Arakapi, one of the four parts of
the Killaka federation. Its appeal, no doubt, was its location, sandwiched
between the indians of Gonzalo's and Hernando's grants and in easy
reach of the Porco mines. Along with their shares of the booty from the
distributions of Cajamarca and Cusco and their control through en-
comienda of many other indian groups between Cajamarca and Qulla-
suyu, these new grants laid the foundations for a vast Pizarro fortune,
much of it converted into land and interest-producing investments in
Spain after Hernando Pizarro's return there (see Varon Gabai and Jakobs
1987).
With Franciso Pizarro's seizure of the "Repartimiento de Puna," the
Siwaruyu-Arakapi diarchy was separated from Guarache's control as
principal mallku of the Killaka federation. A Pizarro associate, General
Pedro de Hinojosa, was given the indians of Awllaka-Urukilla, cutting
another large slice out of the Killaka pie. We have seen that the
remaining two diarchies of the federation, Killaka and Asanaqi, had
already been granted to Hernando de Aldana as a result of his role in
Atahuallpa's capture and the fortuitous presence of Guarache at Manco
Inca's surrender on the outskirts of Cusco in 1533. The surviving
encomienda title (presented by Aldana's descendants) dates from late
1539, signed in Cusco by Francisco Pizarro; the ceremony of possession,
in which he held his caciques' hands, took place in Porco, the Inca silver
mine that caciques had shown to Gonzalo Pizarro, on January 22, 1540.
Like many such early encomienda grants, the documents do not
provide much detail about the nature of the Killaka and Asanaqi
diarchies. Other than legal niceties and a summary of Aldana's warrior
services to the king, which still formed the basis for claims of mercedes
and hopes for ennoblement, the title mentions only the names of
Guarache and Acho, the two "cacique governors" of the Aldana grant,
and a list of further names, some being towns or hamlets, others
corresponding to the names of Killaka and Asanaqi ayllus still in
existence, and yet more being the names of subordinate caciques and
principales under the authority of Guarache and Acho, and after each
one the number of indian tributaries who would henceforth deliver
goods and labor to Aldana. I ?
150 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

It seems unlikely that Aldana even knew where all these places were,
much less that he was able to confirm the numbers or fathom the social
structural logic that tied these people and places together. Part of the
logic, after all, was a vast network of paqarinas (the openings in the
earth from which pre-Columbian ancestors sprang) and ritual pathways,
linked to narratives of origin and sacrificial calendars that were at that
time quite unknown to Spaniards. Certainly the forms by which these
social groups were tied to land was poorly understood. Many of the
places listed in the grant are distant outliers in ecologically distinct
zones; others were held under Inca arrangements which, concealed from
Spanish administrators, could be converted into "community lands" held
under tutelage of Guarache and Acho.
The new encomenderos no doubt immediately put their new subjects
to work, under the relatively free-wheeling conditions that prevailed. In
theory, encomienda did not provide title to land, but only a right to
collect reasonable tributes from a group of indians through the auspices
of their "natural lords. " According to the political theory of the day, such
grants could be made only to further the cause that justified the Spanish
conquests, the evangelization of idolatrous indians. But not much
evangelization seems to have taken place during the 1540s and 1550s.
Tributes were collected, and indians were sent to work in silver mines
and gold beds, yes. Spaniards, however, were busy founding cities,
building lavish houses, and investing the easy proceeds of their conquest
in Spanish and Peruvian land and bonds. They were also busy fighting
with one another in the extended civil wars that began with the
Pizarro-Almagro controversy and became more generalized when the
Crown and the Council of the Indies moved to curtail conquistador
pretensions. The fame of Peruvian silver spread quickly among Spanish
adventurers, who were now crowding Caribbean and Mexican haunts.
Others began to pour into Peru from Spain. Polo Ondegardo, for
example, came to Peru in 1543 (in the fleet that brought the new viceroy,
Blasco Nunez Vela) as an agent and business partner of Hernando
Pizarro. With all the new arrivals, there were far too many claimants to
encomienda for the number of indians there were to go around. And the
Crown rightly feared that encomenderos would soon be clamoring for
greater rights, for title to land and the perquisites of the titled nobility.
Such a combination was a recipe for political secession, and the Council
of the Indies, moved as well by the moral arguments of Bartolome de las
Casas, voted in 1542 to end encomienda.
The rebellion of the encomenderos led by Gonzalo Pizarro and the
killing of the bearer of bad tidings, the viceroy Nunez Vela, are too well
Pathways of Historical Colonization 151

known to merit retelling here. Suffice it to note that Hernando de

Aldana was one of the Spanish victims of the war, put to death as a
suspected royalist by order of Gonzalo Pizarro. Indians also suffered:
Juan Colque Guarache carefully relates in his probanza the travails
brought upon Killaka and Asanaqi peoples as a result of the Spanish
civil warfare. In 1548, a respite of sorts came their way in the person of
Pedro de la Gasca, the "pacifier" who is credited with the final defeat of
the rebels. The defeat came at a high price: Encomienda was reinstated
and even expanded. Many encomiendas were divided and redivided to
accommodate the maximum number of conquistadors in need of
"pacification." With Hernando de Aldana and Francisco Pizarro out of
the picture, the Killaka diarchies were reassigned. Puna went to the
mestizo son of a notable royalist; Aldana's Killaka and Asanaqi were
initially given to a man named Diego de Ocampo, who did not live to
see much return. Subsequently, it was divided in half, between two men
who had served Almagro in the Chilean venture and had made
themselves useful to the royalist camp during the rebellion: don Pedro
de Portugal and Diego Pantoja (AGI, Patronato 126, section 6, 1582).
General Hinojosa, who had held Awllaka-Urukilla, went on to greener
pastures. Until his death by sword thrust during another short-lived
rebellion in 1553, he enjoyed a large portion of the Qaraqara
federation, perhaps the richest encomienda to be had in the territory (see
Platt 1978b). When Awllaka-Urukilla became vacant, it was granted to
a follower (and retainer) of the murdered viceroy, a morisco (descendant
of Muslims converted to Christianity) in flight from lowly status in
Castile, named Hernan Vela. I8
The 1550s and 1560s marked an indigenous awakening to the true
nature of the Spanish project. Far more than simply the imposition of
state-managed indirect rule to extract tributes and labor services, it
aimed to transform indigenous society radically, to annihilate idols,
taquies, ancestral mummies, and now even the limited privileges and
possibilities that were still granted to the native nobility for mediating
colonial policies. What responses to these pressures could Andeans
muster? On the one hand, there was the possibility of continued armed
resistance, represented in the rebel Inca encampment in Vileabamba. But
their continuing marginality and lack of major successes seemed to close
off the military option. On the other hand, caciques began to seek more
effective forms of accommodation, turning to Christianity for the moral
force and to writing and the legal system for the communicative means
to safeguard their positions, using God and king in the courtroom to
bring colonizing Spaniards to heel. There was precedent for this option
152 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

in the active collaboration between mallkus and Incas, which had given
the former considerable autonomies and favorable terms in meeting the
tributary expectations of the latter. Under the conditions of Spanish
colonialism, however, accommodation offered less advantageous terms.
Caciques might thus remain in power, but they first had to master
Christianity, the legal system which operated through writing, and
Spanish ways of registering the past, exercising authority, and transmit-
ting it from one generation to another. They received some help in these
endeavors from Las Casian allies and from the "protectors of indians"
appointed to Crown appeals courts to represent indigenous peoples
before the law. Innumerable lawyers and notaries were also available, at
a price. Priests paid special attention to the conversion of native lords.
And from 1568, when Jesuits began to organize schools for young
indigenous nobles, a new generation gained great advantage in under-
standing Spanish ways.
Caciques turned to writing and to Spanish law and Christian argu-
ment in the same period that Spaniards more seriously began to query
the Andean past. Indeed, the intercultural process of chronicling it and
of producing probanzas like that of Juan Colque Guarache translated
coercive measures of colonial domination into a collaborative, but still
power-laden, colonial discourse. All our sources on pre-Columbian
forms of social memory are filtered through this double movement of
cultural translation. The relatively stable 1550s and 1560s saw an
increased priestly presence in the Andean countryside and more atten-
tion to the active conversion of Andeans to Christianity; Polo Onde-
gardo in his role as corregidor of Cusco queried Andeans about the
ceque system in order to destroy their wak'as. Realizing that memory
was kept in the relationship between people and places and in song-
dances and libation sequences, Polo outlawed public gatherings in which
such drinking, singing, and dancing took place. The more Spaniards
learned about how Andeans remembered the past, the more effective
they were in forcing them to forget it. Ironically but predictably, effective
collaboration on the project of reinterpreting and writing the Andean
past was itself but one of the means Spaniards used to colonize it, which
is to say, to erase it and rewrite it in their own image. This project might
be termed the colonization of Andean narrative. As a result we have no
good sources on Qullasuyu mythic narratives or the contexts in which
they were told. From the writings of Spanish administrators and the
curriculum vitae of native nobles, however, it is possible to paint a
somewhat stilted portrait of Qullasuyu diarchies, and of Asanaqi and
Killaka, as they existed during the early colony and may have been in
Pathways of Historical Colonization 153

pre-Columbian times. Drawing on an administrative report from 1585

(Capoche 1959), Therese Bouysse-Cassagne (1978) and Catherine Julien
(1983) have mapped out the federations of diarchies that colonial
Spaniards recognized before beginning the process of dismantling them
(Map 5.1). The division of such groups into the categories of umasuyu
and urqusuyu, "water side" (female) and "mountain side" (male), evinces
a pre-Spanish social logic that these authors (and Platt 1987b) explore in
greater depth. Both federation divisions and the pan-Qullasuyu uma and
urqu moieties likely correspond to Inca administrative units, and possi-
bly also indicate pre-Inca sociopolitical arrangements in Qullasuyu.

KILLAKA AND ASANAQI IN COLONIAL AND PERHAPS INCA TIMES

There has been a significant advance in the understanding of Qullasuyu

realities over the past few decades,19 but given the sparseness of sources,
we may never be in a position to describe pre-Inca or, for that matter,
Inca-period political-ritual organization. Cusco-centric Spanish
chronicles give scarce attention to Qullasuyu realities, and writings like
the probanzas of caciques are pitched to official Spanish audiences,
careful to remain silent about what they knew they should not say. Platt
(1987b) provides a valiant effort to parse from such fragments, with the
help of Aymara and Quechua dictionaries, something of what a native
political philosophy might have been like.
The fact that most of his and our sources are fiscal and legal
(definitions of ownership of property, legitimate succession, tribute
owed, etc., all according to Spanish categories) should not lead us to
conclude that Altiplano culture was so motivated. On the contrary,
Andean thought and the categories which organized it were radically
dissimilar to the European. It may not seem so, because caciques20
learned to manipulate European categories and logics in order to
legitimate their rule and protect their own and their subjects' interests in
the Spanish legal system,21 and in so doing were forced to fragment their
cultural vision to meet the demands of the radical cultural translation
required by the colonial courts. 22
The cultural progenitors of the K'ulta belonged to a group that goes
unnamed in chronicle accounts of the Inca invasion of Qullasuyu. I refer
to the diarchy of Asanaqi, which in the best of early colonial sources is
subsumed within a people called Killaka. It is quite possible that in the
Inca period Killaka too was subsumed within another dual-organized
macro federation, with four-part Killaka paired with another four-
diarchy federation called Qaranka (Riviere 1983).
154 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

The people of K'ulta today know of a town called Quillacas, and

there they celebrate a miraculous image of the crucified Christ, named
Tata Quillacas. But Killaka was once the dominant kingdom in a
federation including three other kingdoms, wherein the name Killaka, as
an unmarked term, could refer to both the highest-ranking part (diarchy
Killaka) and the whole (federation of Killaka), as well as to the capital
town of both (Quillacas) (see Fig. 5.2).23
Today the people of Condo, Culta, Challapata, and Pampa Aullagas
exhibit a "historical amnesia" about Asanaqi and Killaka that helps to
underwrite the autonomy from such hereditary polities that they
achieved during republican times. But colonial caciques were at pains in
their probanzas and memoriales to recall to Spaniards the nature of the
pre-Columbian social arrangements.
As part of their plea for the rectification of colonial administrative
distortions of their realms, the caciques of Charka took great pains to
make clear the distinctiveness and independence of the "nations" of the
Spanish Provincia de los Charcas. The "Memorial de Charcas" lists them
as Charka, Sura, Killaka, Qaranka, Chuwi, and Chicha, "each one
different in nation, habits and clothing."
In our province of Charcas, before the Incas and after them there
were natural lords of greater than ten thousand vassals and others of
eight thousand indians and others of six thousand indians and
vassals. Some of the said lords and gentlemen were superior to the
other caciques and lords that there were in each nation .... And thus
each one of these lords would have eight second persons and ten as
well, each [lord] of one thousand indians, and four principales of
each ayllu of five hundred and of one hundred, and four mandones
[headmen] in each ayllu, each one in his nation of anansaya and
urinsaya. And in this order the Incas governed us. (Espinoza Soriano
1969: 18)24

So Killaka was a "nation" of ten thousand or eight thousand or six

thousand vassals (adult male tributaries). To learn more, however, we
must turn to other sources. One of the most valuable is a litigation
record from the 1560s and 1570s, published by Morales (1977) and
Wachtel (1981, 1982), offering useful information on the pre-Columbian
Killaka, as well as the institutions through which Incas ruled them. The
documents record the struggle between colonial officials and the lords of
Killaka, Qaranka, and Sura over the administration of the mitimas
("permanent" laborer-settlers from far-flung home regions) placed there
by the Inca ruler Huayna Capac, successor of Tupac Yupanqui. 25 Since
Pathways of Historical Colonization 155

Killaka Federation

KUlaka Asanaql Awliaka-Urukilia slwaruy,u-ArakaPI

dlarchy dlarchy dlarchv "d archy"

a/axsaya manxasaya a/axsaya manxasaya a/axsaya manxasaya Siwaruyu Arakapi Marlca-

Suraqa
MaUkcqa SlJ'aqa Qullana Yanaql Qulana Taka Qurcqa Qasa QuUana
QuIana Sinaqo KaUapa Chankala Jilasakalii Jiwapacha Suraoa Chikcqa QIJ'Uqa
Mamanuqa Sakan Kawali llawi Sullkasakalili Awliaka SuIikakaru Jilasuaa Sinaqu
Musquqa Anqaxuqa SuUkayana Slilka Sinaqu SuUkavsuqa Saraqara
Ouruqa Saka Antamarl<a Urus of Town of Aullaaas Antuqa T8lJ<a Suraqa
Saraoara Takawa UrumaY\. Quruma Ari Mamanuqa
SUQlita ChiUisawa Jiakar1<as MaJlkuqa
Uru Alii/us 01 Killaka Uru Alii/us of Asanaai Satu Sullkakar1<asi
Qua .. . ras KlJukuUu Alii/us of Town of Hua"
WichaQi Chiquri Wari
Yuqasa
MaJlkuqa
QuchuQa
Chawara
Walqa
Sulika
Alii/us of Town of Salinas
Watari
Sampar;
Urukillasol
Challaoota

Figure 5.2. Structure of the KiJlaka Federation, reconstructed from sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century documentary sources. Named Uru ayllus appear and disappear from
census to census, becoming rare by the end of the seventeenth century. Ayllus found within
Salinas de Tunupa (later Salinas de Garci Mendoza) and within the town of Santiago de
Huari are not found within the reduccion of Aullagas, but nonetheless belong to the
"repartimiento" of Aullagas UruquiJIas, under the authority of Awllaka caciques. Some of
Huari's ayllus are homonymous with those of the Killaka diarchy. Asanaqi ayllus Sullka,
Antamarka, and Ilawi are found only within the territory of the reducci6n of Challapata.
Antamarka is likely a former outlier of the Qaranka group of the same name. A few
KiJlaka ayllus were also reduced to Challapata_ The diarchy Siwaruyu-Arakapi, within
which all Siwaruyu ayllu names are homonymous with KiJlaka ayllus, became a three-part
entity after Vicery Toledo granted lands to KiJlaka mitima ayllus in the "parcialidad" of
Marca Soraga. These Killaka ayllus, whose names were homonymous with Siwaruyu
ayllus, were clearly not "of a piece" with the latter ayllus. (Based on information provided
in AGI, Quito 45; AGI, Charcas 49; AGI, Charcas 53; AGNA, 9.17.1.4; AGNA, 9.17_2.5;
AGNA, 13.18.4.3; AHP, Cajas Reales 18; AHP, Visitas y Padrones, Cuaderno de la visita
del duque de la Palata, Repartimiento de Puna)
156 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

Inca-owned lands (especially those devoted to religious cult) could be

expropriated for Crown purposes, the proceedings included some rela-
tively detailed ethnographic investigation, producing detailed geographic
and toponymic information along with descriptions of the manner in
which the Incas assigned long strips of land to be worked by particular
ethnic groups within each large chacara (field). Such detail enabled
Wachtel to map clearly the distribution of ethnic groups within one of
the chacaras (see Fig. 5.3).
What interests us here is the assignment of the southeast quarter of
the chacara to the Qaranka and Killaka. Each group was assigned four
suyus in this quarter, one strip of land for each of the four diarchic
subdivisions within each "naci6n" or federation. Among the Charka
lords' accusations against the machinations of Juan Col que Guarache,
the slur that the Guarache mallkus had originally been "of urinsaya de
Qaranka" is suggestive. Perhaps Charka lords were correct in portraying
Guarache as a mafioso, a manipulator of the truth who converted service
to the Spaniards into a higher office than his pre-Columbian position
merited. Indeed, consistent grouping of Killaka and Qaranka together in
assigned lands and the fact of their joint suit might also indicate some
kind of formal connection between the two groups (perhaps like that
between the Charka and Qaraqara).26 Let us focus upon the four
subgroups of the Killaka sector within the Colchacollo field.
The four groups are listed in the document in an unvarying order
(sometimes, in the listing of suyus in other chacaras, in reverse order):
1. Arakapi de Puna, 2. Killaka, 3. Urukilla de Awllaka, 4. Killaka
Asanaqi. Another of the lists, this one of the suyus of a chacara named
Yllaurco, sheds more light on the Killaka subdivisions. Here Killaka
federation groups occupied the sixth through ninth strips of land across
the valley:
6.... "aracapi que son yndios del repartimiento de puna"
7.... "quillacas de Juan Guarache"
Quillacas 8.... "uruquillas de aullagas
9 .... "asanaques que son del repartimiento de quillacas"
(Wachtel 1982: 226)
The text serves to emphasize the embedded nature of the federation.
The term "Quillacas" appears three times, first as the name of the
federation as a whole; second, as one of four subdivisions, "quillacas de
Juan Guarache"; and third, as the colonial repartimiento into which
Asanaqi was lumped with Killaka. Putting aside for the moment this last
usage, the pattern is reminiscent of the use of the term "Charka" to
Pathways of Historical Colonization 157

IIIIIIIIII Soras (Caracollo)

IIIIIIIIII Soras (Caracollo)

Caquiaviri (Omasuyo) Soras (Tapaeari)
IV. Tiaguanaco Soras (Tapacari) II.
Qull. Sur.
Quarter Chuquicaehe Soras (Paria) Quarter

Pacajes de Callapa Casayas (Paria)

Chueuyto Soras (Sipe Sipe)
Pauearcolla Soras (Sipe Sipe)
TOlora IIIIIIIIII NORTH

Oaranka Chuquicola IIII IIIIII

Samancha Caquiavire (Omasuyo)
III. Andamarca Urinoca Tiaguanaco
Q.",nka I.
and Ouillacas Asanaques Chuquicache Qull.
Kill .... Quarter
Quarter
Uruquillas Aullagas Paeajes de Callapa
Killaka Quillacas Chucuyto
Aracapi (Puna) Paucarcolla

IIIII Suyus at1ributecl direclly to tI1e indians

(para su ccmida)

Figure 5.3. Qaranka and Killaka quarter in the field of Colchacollo (Cochabamba
valley), as assigned by Huayna Capac. Suyus were strips of land that transected the
Cochabamba valley, running from hilltop to hilltop. Note that the four-part Qaranka
Federation and the four-part Killaka Federation were grouped together in the southeastern
quadrant of this large field. Sura peoples (including Casayas) divide in a four-part pattern
in the northwestern quadrant, with highland peoples (Caracollo, Paria) alternating with
valley peoples (Tapacari, Sipe Sipe). "Collas" (Qullas) are also assigned plots according to
a pattern, this time duplicated in the northeastern and southwestern quadrants. Note that
"Qulla" here designates the peoples of a specific sector of the Inca Qullasuyu, including
Qulla people per se (Paucarcolla, Chuquicache), Lupaqa (Chucuito), and Pacax (Caquia-
viri, Tiaguanoco, and Pacajes de Callapa). Both Qulla and Pacax included Urqusuyu and
Umasuyu sectors. Here the "macro-Qulla" peoples appear to be spatially divided in the
field into three Umasuyu groups (Caquiaviri, Tiaguanaco, Chuquicache) and three Qulla-
suyu groups (Pacajes de Callapa, Chucuito, and Paucarcolla). Possibly, Suras are also
divided here by the Urqusuyu and Umasuyu sectors. All the Qaranka and Killaka peoples
grouped in the southeastern quadrant, however, apparently belonged to the Urqusuyu
macromoiety. (After Wachtel 1982: 212, Fig. 8.2)

designate both the federation of Qaraqara-Charka and one of its

component moieties (see Platt 1987b). The Arakapi and "Urukilla de
Awllaka" groups were separately assigned to Spaniards in encomienda,
torn apart from the greater Killaka federation. Other Spanish adminis-
trative divisions also sundered the federation: Core territories of three of
......
<..n
00

II rmn. pe.s ._. . _ant

[J0\I'eI'4.000m.
• redl.lcCi6nOy1570s
o 3,00Q-.4,00Q m.
o .-ntX Of IM:., r«tuOoOn

~t.nd«3.000m. C::. ouUier semement of K'1ILaka.

AsanaQa. Of AwIIb-
0 ..... IJn.i6oIL Not ShoWn:
outliers in Coc:tI.a:.nbe
YaIey It'd Poc:ona: 0U1tiers
---- .... 01 oIhef tederaftOnl.
",,'_al""_ 25,,".
I:J.--....... -

Map 5.2. The Killaka Federation (author's rendering, based on archival information and map in Platt 1978a).
Pathways of Historical Colonization 159

the four diarchies of the federation were located around the southern
end of Lake Poopo (see Map 5.2), forming a large part of the colonial
Provincia de Paria, while the Arakapi of the Repartimiento de Puna,
located farther to the east and separated from the rest by other ethnic
groups, found themselves incorporated into the colonial Provincia de
Porco. But what was the social structure like before the conquest?

Event Chronologies of Colonial Mallku

Our most useful sources for inquiring into the social organization of
pre-Columbian Killaka are three successive "proofs of services and
merits" (probanzas de servicios y meritos) advanced by don Juan Colque
Guarache, cacique principal of all Killaka, during the years 1574-75,
and 1576-77, and again in 1580. Like similar probanzas and memori-
ales (such as the well-known memorial de Charcas produced by Charka
lords [Espinoza Soriano 1969]) these documents correspond to the
curriculum vitae format of petitions to the Crown, carried out in order
to extract concessions from the Audiencia (the subviceroyalty court in
the town of La Plata [modern Sucre]) and the king. 27 Their format is
very much akin to the probanzas sent in by Spaniards. So too are they
like Spaniards' efforts to legitimate and extend aristocratic privilege.
They were produced, in other words, by native lords in the process of
transculturation as they made themselves into the frontier between their
subjects and the Spanish state.
What is remarkable in the proceedings, themselves relatively uncom-
mon events, is that the Killaka lord found it expedient not only to
recount his own and his father's considerable services to the Spanish
Crown-in expeditions of conquest and "pacification" of rebellious
natives, civil war actions, and the regular collection of tribute and
administration of Potosi mita services-but also to detail the services of
his ancestors to the Incas in their conquests, wars, and colonization
projects. The questionnaire amounts to an event chronology covering
two successive waves of conquest, as told from the vantage of a single
ruling lineage within an Aymara-speaking federation. As such, it is also a
heroic history.28 Yet even as it affirms the grandeur of a native noble
house and stresses the relative independence and antiquity of the Killaka
"nation," this is a distinctly Castilian kind of narrative.
The witnesses in the probanzas represent an impressive array of the
important persons of the time,29 including caciques who were already
adults at the time of the Spanish conquest. Since the witnesses were
chosen by the claimant and not cross-examined, it is not surprising that
160 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

none contradicted Colque Guarache's claims. As a result of the proce-

dure followed, the most interesting material is provided in the question-
naires themselves and in answers based on "eyewitness experience" (vista
de o;os) which affirm-and only occasionally expand upon-the infor-
mation supplied by Colque. By the time of these proceedings (1574-75),
neither Col que Guarache himself nor any of his witnesses could affirm
through "vista de oj os" the first few links of the genealogy, which reaches
back four generations (two generations before Huayna Capac and three
generations prior to the Spanish conquest).
Confirmed in the post of cacique gobernador of the Repartimiento de
Quillacas y Asanaques by Viceroy Toledo just prior to initiating his first
probanza, Colque Guarache claimed for his ancestors the distinction of
being "lords of vassals and caciques of the said parcialidades of Quilla-
cas Asanaques <::ibaroyos and Uroquillas and Haracapis" (ATP, Expedi-
ente 11, fol. 22r of the first probanza, question 3).30 They were lords,
that is, of the very same kingdoms as were given lands in Cochabamba
by Huayna Capac. 31 Killaka, Asanaqi, and Urukilla were three diarchies
based around the southern end of Lake Poopo (Lago de los Aullagas).
We shall see that Siwaruyu (<::ibaroyos) and Arakapi (Haracapis) to-
gether formed a fourth diarchy, centered just south of Potosi and
christened by Francisco Pizarro as the Repartimiento de Puna. More-
over, Colque Guarache continued, these ancestors were such lords even
before the Inca conquest, and recognized no superiors, being legitimately
descended lords of the region, as well as lords who held the duo, a
stool-like throne (ibid.).
The first eight questions give Colque Guarache's genealogy-from his
great-great-grandfather to his father-with reference to Incaic succes-
sion, despite the fact that question 4 (ibid., fol. 22v of the first probanza)
claims that his lineage predated the Inca conquest of the Killaka. The
genealogy begins with a cacique named Colque (Juan Colque Guarache's
paternal great-great-grandfather), who first submitted to Inca Yupanqui
Inca. Confirmed in his title and possessions, this Colque, says question 5
(ibid.), then aided "Ynga Yupanqui Ynga" in the conquest of the "Chichas
and Diaguitas," in which he acted as "captain general of the people of his
provinces" and was awarded the privileges of using the honorific title of
Inca Colque and of being carried by fifty indians in a litter (ibid.).32
The questionnaire's genealogy continues with Inca Colque's son, Inca
Guarache (who succeeded his father during the reign of the Inca "Tupa
Yupanque"), who, in addition to the litter and fifty indians to carry him,
was given " ... three shirts, one with threads of silver and one of gold
Pathways of Historical Colonization 161

and others with precious stones called mullu ... " (ibid., fol. 7r of the
first probanza, question 6).33 Question 7 continues the genealogy with
the succession, during the reign of Huayna Capac, of Inca Guarache's
son, called simply Colque, about whom we learn nothing more than that
he was succeeded by his son (also during Huayna Capac's reign) named
Guarache (ibid., fols. 22v-23r). It was this latter Guarache who, we
learn in question 7 was in Cusco at the court of the Inca ruler (Manco
Inca, Huascar's successor) when Pizarro arrived in Cajamarca, where-
upon Guarache, in company with the Inca (on whose war council
Guarache served [ibid., fol. 23r, question 8]), submitted to Spaniards. 34
We will return to these remarkable probanzas, produced by native
lords in the process of assimilating and manipulating not only Spanish
law and the Spanish society of orders but also Spanish notions of event
chronology. For now, I focus on what these sources can tell us about
pre-Spanish relations among native lords and Incas.
References to gifts of rich Inca cumbi cloth and to other perquisites of
nobility, such as being carried in a litter, are symptomatic of a key
technique of Inca statecraft, delegation of authority through indirect
rule, with loyalty in part ensured through a personal relationship of
mutual obligation between Inca ruler and native diarchy lord. The
account of Killaka and Asanaqi presence in Inca fields in the Cocha-
bamba valley helps to illustrate how mutual obligation between Inca and
regional noble translated into access to "ethnic" labor for imperial ends.
Diagnostic of this sort of imperial rule is the personal dimension,
which was possible, given the vast territories subject to Inca rule, by
virtue of the efficacy of the state's bureaucratic and ritual techniques.
Native lords like Guarache were taken as young men to the Inca capital,
where they not only learned the "general language of the Incas," the
lingua franca Quechua, but were also inculcated in the Inca social
calendar, an elaborate historical engine that created as it commemorated
a past which now explained and justified the subordination of conquered
diarchies and the continued privilege of diarchy lords like Guarache. In
effect, the Inca state translated personal obligation between local noble
and "his indians" into a form of state labor tax without breaking the
personal tie, the give and take of mutual obligation, that continued to
make voluntary service for collective ends worthwhile from the perspec-
tive of the ordinary householder.
How did the mallku rule? What were the social values (in the absence
of a means of absolute coercion) which motivated submission and
service to the whole hierarchy of mallkus? That is, what made such
162 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

submission worthwhile? What was the nature of intra-ayllu relations

and authority at that level? In what way were ayllus interrelated within
a moiety, and moieties within a diarchy?
In considering such questions for the Asanaqi diarchy and the Killaka
federation in which it was enmeshed, it is essential to keep in mind that
the "groups" we talk about were constituted by asymmetrical patterns of
reciprocal relations among hierarchically ranked individuals. Let us
begin at the top and try to account for the superordinate position of the
mallku, maintained through his increased access to the labor of house-
hold heads. How was this disproportionate access to labor gained?
The first thing to note is that the service given to mallkus was of a
voluntary sort. The mallkus had to ask for the labor that sustained them,
and they had to fulfill certain obligations in return. What is more, the
paramount mallku had to ask his subalterns, who in turn asked their
subordinates, down to the level at which a local ayllu authority asked the
"common" individual to perform a task. Among the "levels" making up
society at large, rule was always mediated through a hierarchy of
authorities, at ever further levels of remove from the uta ("house," or
domestic group) itself, which of course had its own patterns of asym-
metrical power as well. And "domination," which we might define as the
asymmetrically distributed right to expect a prestation of labor service
when properly requested, was always couched in the language of the gift
and of the reciprocal obligation it incurred. At the very top of the social
hierarchy, the federation mallku was personally obligated to the Inca,
who refrained from turning the mallku's hide into a drum and gave him
rich shirts and other marks of privileged status. Under such terms, the
mallku mediated the Inca's requests for labor service (and later, those of
Spanish encomendero and corregidor). But what was the return for such
services?
From the Inca and the Spanish king, the mallku received rights to
sumptuary goods, preeminent social position as expressed in seating and
drinking order, and affirmation of his hereditary privilege more gener-
ally.35 But what was in it for the members of an ayllu? The received
wisdom of "social contract" theory would suggest that what the domes-
tic group received in return for its labor prestations was a guarantee of
limited autonomy, access to land and animals, and defense of its territory
from invasion by others. But these were (and are) not Andean terms.
Rather, the return for them was (and is) explicable only when one takes
account of the nature and shape of social memory and the singularly
important role that mallkus and Incas (and later priests and kings) took
on in its perpetuation.
Pathways of Historical Colonization 163

Great Inca administrative centers such as Paria and Hatuncolla,

through which armies of mit' a workers as well as great maize-laden
llama caravans passed and rested on their journeys to and from the fields
of the Inca, were also places in which Inca regional administrators
dwelled. They were called kamachiklkamachikuq; "governor or over-
seer, or one who commands or rules" (Gonzalez Holguin 1952: 47).36
As Morris (1979; Morris and Thompson 1985) has shown for the
analogous Inca administrative center of Huanuco Pampa, the officials of
such sites did not sit in their elite quarters dryly keeping records and
giving commands but from the number of chicha storage jars found
there, appear to have presided over what was a kind of Incaic beer hall.
Morris concludes that administrative centers served a kind of hospitality
function, feting there, as reciprocal prestation, the laborers who worked
for the Inca.
As I have suggested through one of the vignettes with which I opened
the introduction to this book, we might be better off conceiving this
drinking in more sacramental terms and the rooms in which it was done
more as cathedrals than beer halls, for drinking was (and is) a part of
serious devotional practice, a corollary of dedicated libations. And
libations were simply one part of a whole constellation of sacrificial rites
that must have been directed in the administrative centers. It would be
impossible here to catalogue the complex system of calendric sacrifices
which linked the provinces to the Inca capital, in which cloth, camelids,
and the makings of corn beer (the three principal items of sacrifice) were
brought into Cusco and then systematically offered to a hierarchy of
deities (such as wak' as, themselves "heads" of polities) that radiated
from Cusco into the periphery.
Polo Ondegardo describes the most general ordering principal of the
empire:
... Among these indians and their way of living ... the kingdom as
a whole was divided into parts, that each one was made up of ten
thousand indians, that they called uno, and that each one of these
had a governor over the caciques and mandones-as has been said.
There was also another more general division, that they called
Tawantinsuyu, which means four parts into which the whole
kingdom was divided, called Qullasuyu, Chinchasuyu, Antisuyu,
Kuntisuyu. This division began from Cusco, from which four roads
depart, each one towards one of these parts, as can be seen in the
map of the wak'as. And with this order and division it was easy to
account for everything, as they did, which I will not describe here or
recall, but only [mention] so that it is clear that, when it was decided
in Cusco to bring in 100,000 fanegas of corn, in a moment each
164 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

governor knew how much fell to his district and to his storehouses.
There were no differences of opinion or quarrels or lawsuits, and
each province knew how much fell to each subdivision, so that the
accounting began with the headmen and was then distributed to
lower levels, so that all was done with great ease. One should not
imagine that this distribution was equal ... rather it was divided
among them according to the quality of soils, and in the same way as
foodstuff obligations were divided so were those of cloth and
animals, by quotas. (Polo Ondegardo 1990: 121_122)37
Polo's administrative report, produced to determine how best to
collect tributes from indians, reveals a degree of admiration for Inca
state efficiency that Spaniards were incapable of maintaining once they
began to appreciate just how much of that efficiency of production and
administration was directed towards ritual and religious ends, the sort
that for Spaniards were idolatrous. That such practices also served as the
channels of Andean social memory may help to explain why Spanish
chroniclers used so extraordinarily few of their pages to recount them.
Let us see what other sorts of interferences occluded Spanish understand-
ings of Inca (not to mention Qullasuyu) pasts.

SPANISH PASTS AND MEMORY TECHNIQUES

There is considerable truth, though not of the literal sort, to the

infamous story about the event that sealed Atahuallpa's fate in Caja-
marca. Supposedly, the priest Valverde presented the captured Inca
Atahuallpa with the Bible (some accounts specify a breviary), explaining
that it contained the word of God. Atahuallpa then held it to his ear and,
hearing nothing, let it drop to the ground as so much worthless flotsam
(see MacCormack 1988a). Through a complex rhetorical maneuver, the
account transforms a Spanish legal fiction into an apt moral argument
and allegory of colonialism.
Titu Cusi, a rebel Inca of Vileabamba who in the end capitulated and
converted to Christianity in return for rich estates, described the same
events from an indigenous perspective. Once he arrived in the plaza and
was met my Valverde's delegation, he produced an itemized account
from a quipu record of all the damage to Inca properties and looting that
Spaniards had carried out, demanding prompt repayment.
Atahuallpa received them very well, giving one of them [chicha] to
drink in a golden vessel. When the Spaniard reached out with his
hand and spilled it out, [the Inca] was greatly angered ... ; After that
Pathways of Historical Colonization 165

those two Spaniards showed him ... a letter or book ... saying that
it was the qui/ca [the writing] of God and of the king, and ... as he
had been affronted because of the spilled chicha, [Atahuallpa] took
the letter ... and threw it down there, saying, "What do I know of
what you give me? Go on, get out of here." (Titu Cusi Yupanqui
1985; quoted in Randall 1993: 73)38

For Titu Cusi, the gestures of rejection are analogous, of a kind. What
kind of drinking act does Titu Cusi ascribe to the encounter? Betanzos
tells us that this particular kind of drinking, in which offerer and receiver
drank simultaneously, was especially esteemed among the Incas:
These lords [Incas] and all the others of this land have a custom ...
of good breeding. It is that if a lord or lady goes to visit another in
their house ... she has to carryon her back, if she is a lady, a jar of
chicha. On arrival ... the visitor must set up two glasses of chicha,
one of which he or she gives to drink by the lord being visited, and
the other is drunk by the lord or lady who gives the chicha. Thus the
two drink together. And he who is visited does the same, taking out
another two glasses of chicha ... and this is the greatest honor that
there is among them, and if it is not done when visiting, the guest
takes it as an affront .... In the same way he is affronted who offers
a drink to another, and the other does not want to receive it.
(Betanzos 1987: 72_73)39

So the Spaniard's (Valverde's?) spilling of the chicha was a grave

breech of sociality. It was most probably much worse. Titu Cusi does not
specify if libation and dedication were to have accompanied the mutual
drinking, but we may guess that they were. If the act, which Spanish
eyewitness accounts do not describe, actually took place, words of
dedication would have called upon the gods of Andean memory. Andean
drinking made the gods present in an act of communion. Imagine for a
moment that Valverde had presented Atahuallpa with a chalice of
Christ's blood, and the Inca had spilled that upon the ground. Valverde's
sacrilege was at least equal to Atahuallpa's (see Randall 1993: 73).
Titu Cusi's account, of course, is as self-serving as any Spanish
description: All seek to foreground the moral virtue of one or another
participant in the fateful event. One thing, though, is certain. Spanish
horsemen, footmen, and a cannon were primed and ready for a surprise
attack on the Inca's immense ceremonial retinue, awaiting the sign of a
dropped handkerchief to spring their deadly trap. Likewise, if Valverde
in fact held forward paper with writing, it was most likely to read out a
text of the requerimiento, a brief explanation of Christianity ending in
166 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

an ultimatum: If the natives to whom it was read refused to submit to the

Spanish bearers of the True Faith on the spot, they would become
apostates against whom a just war could be waged. Substituting an
unread (and for Atahuallpa, unreadable) Bible for the legal document
and active disdain for mere incomprehension, the Spanish chronicler at
once marks Atahuallpa for a blasphemer's death and exculpates his
executioners and, by extension, justifies the conquest by locating the gulf
separating Spaniard from indian in the distinction between the written
word and the spoken one (MacCormack 1988a). The gulf between
written communication and the imbibed form was yet too wide to be
noticed; when Andeans were found to have something akin to writing, it
was not in the drunken or sung word and certainly not in sacrificial acts
at wak'as along ceques, but in the quipu and, in a way, in the narrative
texts that Spaniards would extract from quipu kamayuqs.
No matter that the leader of the Spanish expedition, Francisco
Pizarro, was himself illiterate: He knew very well the importance of
writing for his project, and employed scribes to write the documents he
signed (with the aid of a metal template to guide his hand), giving his
endeavors the stamp of legality. Like don Quixote, members of the
Pizarro expedition, most of whom were of lowly plebeian status in their
Spanish home towns (Lockhart 1972), read or listened to readings of
chivalric literature. They may not have thought that they too might gain
wealth and nobility through the rescue of damsels in distress or the
recovery of the Holy Grail, but like don Quixote they knew the value of
honor and, with Sancho Panza, no doubt dreamed of finding great
treasures and becoming governors of insulae (Leonard [1949] 1992). Yet
even the delivery of Atahuallpa's fabulous gold and silver ransom did not
necessarily satisfy their desires.
As James Lockhart has pointed out in his study of the (European) men
of Cajamarca (1972), only a few immediately returned to Spain with
their share of the loot (along with Hernando Pizarro, who went to the
royal court to negotiate terms for his half-brother Francisco, to invest
some of the capital in Spanish properties, and to line up a contingent of
lawyers and business stewards to administer their Peruvian enterprise);
most remained, hoping for greater glory. Those who stayed in Peru did
so, no doubt, for a variety of reasons. For some, their satchel of silver
may still have been too small to guarantee a permanent rise in fortune.
All, no doubt, aimed to gain a permanent rise in social estate, moving
from their former relatively low social positions into ranks of the
aristocracy. And in sixteenth-century Spain, aristocratic status came only
Pathways of Historical Colonization 167

with guaranteed rents, best when in the form of tributes paid by vassals.
There could be no question that a man who lived on the tributes of
vassals was not himself plebeian. But vassals could be gained only by a
grant from the king. And in the sixteenth century, such grants came as
rewards for service to the Crown, especially soldierly service.
All Pizarro's fellow adventurers and business partners therefore de-
pended on a good royal review of their book of deeds. Hernando
Pizarro's visit to the king was part of a signally important effort to put a
good spin on the chronicling of Francisco's actions. By gaining the status
of governor of the Crown's new indian subjects, Pizarro hoped to gain
license to reward his men with indian vassals granted in the king's name.
Like Pizarro, each of his social-climbing men needed to be written into
the empire's event record. Both as a business enterprise and as legally
justified imperialism, the conquest required notaries; as a means of rising
in the Spanish society of estates, it needed chroniclers.
From long before sixteenth century and in places far from Castile,
writing had become a privileged locus of social memory, contract, and
obligation. Social status was guaranteed in baptismal records, census
lists, and testaments; it was improved through notarized and sworn
narratives of personal valor and service, backed up by more official,
authorized chronicles and histories. For recollecting the deeds of men
long dead (and indeed, of gods) and for transmitting social status from
generation to generation, the written document had become essential.
Although respect for letters was deeply ingrained in all conquistadors,
including illiterate men such as Francisco Pizarro, it was never more
deeply ingrained as in the scribes, notaries, and lawyers employed by
men like Pizarro to record every worthy deed and every significant
transaction. Yet even men like these, whose livelihoods depended on
respect for the written word (and whose pledges of a document's faithful
recopying sometimes made or ruined reputations), nonetheless also
respected certain nonwritten forms of social memory. Among the con-
quistadors at Cajamarca, for instance, was a man whose profession was
given as town crier (Lockhart 1972), whose services were still required
for the legal execution of transactions (like the sale of vassals or the
ennoblement of a soldier for his service to the king) that were also
written on paper and posted on church doors. The deeds of founding
heroes like the reconquest's El Cid, whose struggles and rewards served
as models for social-climbing adventurers, were told not only on paper
but also in oral epic cantares. The life of Christ could be learned by
reading the Holy Book, but for most illiterate Spaniards, it was
168 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

witnessed, in the dramatic tableau vivant of commemorations like the

autos sacramentales of Corpus Christi processions. Indeed, the Church's
leading theologians had found ritual to be of critical importance as a
teaching tool for the masses. Just so, all good Christians received a
weekly history lesson when they participated in the Eucharist, the ritual
commemoration of Christ's exemplary self-sacrifice (Rubin 1991). Writ-
ing's superiority as historical evidence was tied not only to its context-
free nature and its potential for lasting unchanged across generations,
but also to the sanctity Spaniards granted to their principal source for
history of origins, the Bible, and to links between writing and the
authority of God and, hence, of the divinely appointed monarch.
The ritual significance of biblical history and its status as the under-
girding of monarchic authority and source for the justifications of the
king's claim of sovereignty over indians led rather directly to interest in
the indians' relationship to Scripture. When thoughtful scribes and
chroniclers of Spanish deeds found time for the task of discovering how
an Andean past fitted in with their own, the first source queried,
naturally, was the Bible itself. Neither indians nor the Indies are there
mentioned, and the more scholarly chroniclers tended to reject the easy
explanations that indians either were not men or were descendants of the
lost tribes of Israel. The history of Andean indians, then, had to be
discovered from the indians themselves. But Spaniards quickly found
that native Peruvians lacked writing systems comparable to their own.
In 1492, Nebrija justified the publication of the first Castilian gram-
mar by reminding the Catholic kings that "language is the handmaiden
of Empire," a maxim that was never so true as it became a few decades
later when the Spanish empire rose to power. The machinery of the first
modern empire was fueled by papers produced by an ever-growing stable
of professional lawyers and notaries. Fortunately for us, the Catholic
kings' state apparatus insisted on punctilious record-keeping, as a result
of which many sixteenth-century writings on native Andeans have been
preserved for our eyes.
It is worth remembering that most written documents of the period,
including the memoriales, relaciones, and cronicas which serve as our
sources for appreciating sixteenth-century Andean oral narrative, were
intended by their authors to end up in the archive of the Spanish Crown.
Its addition to the archive was, indeed, one of the means by which such
writing was expected to produce its desired effects. The most frequent of
these effects, of course, was the extraction of boons from the king in
return for services rendered, which could be expected only when
Pathways of Historical Colonization 169

supporting documents were properly preserved and evaluated by a

readership made up mostly of state functionaries.
The shelves of the Archive of the Indies are jammed with thousands of
"proofs of merit and service," usually containing detailed accounts of
services rendered to the Crown by a particular boon seeker (and when
possible, his lineal ascendants.) Relaciones were more formal narratives
of conquest events, often produced for the same purpose as the proban-
zas, but composed in a somewhat more distanced and exhaustive format.
These in turn provided a primary source for writers of cronicas, accounts
in which the composer/narrator fades further into the background and
which sometimes tackle material outside the writer's personal experi-
ence. Cronicas then became fodder for writers of historias, works of a
much wider sweep that brought universal history to bear in the interpre-
tation of the material found in cronicas and relaciones. No personal
experience was assumed of the writer of a historia, although greater
authority was required to presume to write one. Such works were
subjected to greater scrutiny, since the breadth of interpretation required
of historias could lead their authors into the territory of heresy or
sedition. The most authoritative historia, presumably, was that produced
by the Crown's official chronicler, whose task it was to decoct from his
contradictory sources a reliable official story.
Once validated by publication or by the act of being archived,
historias and cronicas authorized new claims on the part of those whose
meritorious acts they documented; they are frequently cited and quoted
in colonial agents' service records as authoritative proof of an individu-
al's merit, completing the documentary circle. If authorized accounts
could help a claimant reap his just reward, they could also, mutatis
mutandis, become obstacles in one's career path, at least when the acts
recounted therein were deemed inauspicious. Gonzalez Echevarria
(1990: 71-87) vividly recounts the lifelong, and fruitless, struggle by the
~estizo chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega ("EI Inca") to overcome the
infamy attached to his father's name by a historical account that
described his gift of a horse to the unseated rebel Gonzalo Pizarro on a
crucial battlefield.
Under such circumstances, the production of historical narrative was
thus freighted with political significance; with questions of honor,
wealth, and status at issue, it was also fraught with danger. On the one
hand, there was the risk to truth: With so much at stake, writers were
inclined not only to embellish their own actions but perhaps also to
invent laudable portrayals of sufficiently deep-pocketed others. On the
170 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

other hand, unfavorable accounts of others' actions could and did lead
to prolonged and expensive civil litigation, or worse. Such fears no
doubt prompted Cieza, before his untimely death in 1554, to ask his
relatives to take care with his still-unpublished writings. These consisted
of his account of the Inca empire (which expresses sympathies that might
have led to complications, given the developing imperial policies of the
day) and a history of the Peruvian civil wars, the accounts of which were
career making or breaking for the hundreds of individuals mentioned
therein. 40

RECOLLECTIONS OF ANDEAN MEMORY TECHNIQUES

So writing in sixteenth-century Spain and Peru was inextricably bound

up with legal functionality and questions of power. 41 As we shall see, the
"field techniques" used by chroniclers of the preinvasion past were
themselves conditioned by the techniques and style of the legal deposi-
tion and even of inquisitorial interrogation (a confession was also a
relaci6n). Indeed, Gonzalez Echevarria (1990) has rather cogently ar-
gued that the legal functionality and archival character of writing in the
Spanish empire have been a significant influence on the development of
fiction writing in Spanish America from colonial days to the present.
Consider, then, that the reporting of Andean oral traditions in our
sources is invariably conditioned by the ends desired by our authors, as
well as by the strategies of rhetoric and argument they employed in order
to achieve those ends.
If such considerations apply to all forms of narrative reportage (and
most particularly to the recounting of past events, which is to say, to
historical discourse), then they apply in a very special way to written
accounts, in Spanish, of oral narratives dictated in other languages. Such
accounts were subjected not only to the Spanish author's intentional
elisions, supplementations, and reorderings, but also to the vagaries of
translation. Yet even if we had been so fortunate as to have inherited the
works of a sixteenth-century scribe who had been both willing and able
to serve as a direct and invisible amanuensis to Andean raconteurs (and
alas, there are no such cases), we would still be faced with difficulties in
our efforts to disinter sacrificial meanings from their entombment in
letters.
As Polo argued, most products of Andean labor prestations were
destined for sacrifices, some of which were carried out on a regular daily,
weekly, and monthly basis at shrines in Cusco and in the provinces.
Pathways of Historical Colonization 171

Another such sacrificial ritual was the capac hucha, not a calendric rite
per se but one performed at the accession of a new Inca to the throne.
From each of the provinces of each of the four quarters of the empire,
every polity supplied a set of items for sacrifice, including camelids,
cloth, metals, and children. These were carried into Cusco, where they
were received by the Inca with great pomp and dignity in the main plaza.
In Cusco, the children were dressed in the finest cloth and then sent back
out, along straight lines from the center rather than on the roads, and
great care was taken that every single sacred place received part of the
sacrifice. A child would then be sacrificed to the wak' a of his or her own
polity, in one of several possible forms, including removing the still-
beating heart and anointing the face of the wak'a image with blood,
"almost from ear to ear.,,42 In provincial places like Killaka the sacrifices
were directed by a hierarchy of local ritual specialists devoted to the
wak'as' care. Cristobal de Molina (El Cuzquefio) provides a detailed and
succinct account that merits quotation at length:
Pac hac uti Inca Yupanqui also invented the capac hucha, which was
done in this way: The provinces of Qullasuyu and Chinchaysuyu and
Antisuyu and Kuntisuyu brought to this city from each town and
lineage of peoples, one or two little boys and girls, ten years of age;
and they brought clothing and herd animals and sheep of gold and
silver and mullu. And they kept them in Cusco for the purposes to be
described. And after all this was collected together, the Inca sat down
in the plaza of Aucaypata, the great plaza of Cusco, and there those
children and other sacrifices walked around the statues of the
Creator, sun, thunder, and the moon, which were in the plaza for
that purpose. And once they had circled them twice, the Inca called
the priests of the provinces and had them divide the said sacrifices in
four parts for the four suyus: Qullasuyu, Chinchaysuyu, Antisuyu,
Kuntisuyu, which are the four parts into which this land is divided,
and he said to them: "Each of you take your part of these offerings
and sacrifices, and carry them to the wak'a, and there suffocate the
children and bury them along with the silver figures of sheep and
persons of gold and silver, and burn the sheep and rams and cloth,
and also some small baskets of coca." From Cusco the people carried
the said sacrifices to Sacalpina, which was one league from Cusco
where the indians of Ansa received them. And in this manner they
continued passing them along until reaching the place where the
sacrifices were to be done, and through this arrangement they were
carried to the other provinces as well.
They performed this sacrifice when the lord Inca began his reign
so that the wak'as should give him health and he should keep his
172 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

kingdoms and lordships in peace and calm, and all should live
without illness into old age. In this manner not a single wak' a, place
of reverence [mochaderol, or shrine, no matter how small, was left
without its sacrifice, because it was arranged and agreed in advance
what was to be sacrificed in each wak' a and place ....
All these sacrifices were put in the aforesaid place, and then the
priest in charge of the wak'a of Yanacauri, from which they believe
one of the brothers who came out of the cave of Tambo was turned
to stone (and because we treat this fable at length at the beginning of
the "Historia" that Your Illustrious Lordship has,43 I do not treat it
here, Your Illustrious Lordship may see it there) ....
And then in all the places, springs, and mountains that where held
in Cusco to be shrines, they threw the sacrifices that had been
dedicated to each, without killing for this purpose any child.
There were so many places to which sacrifices were dedicated in
Cusco, that to write them down here would be very prolix, and
because in the "Relaci6n" of the wak'as that I gave to Your Most
Reverend Lordship, all are indicated, and the manner they sacrificed
to them, I do not put it down here.
And once they were finished with the sacrifices in Cusco, the
priests were sent out with the sacrifices that were to be carried, as I
say. The traveling order with the sacrifices was that all the people
who went with the capac hucha (who by another name were called
Cachaguaes) formed into a flank, somewhat separated from the
others. They did not travel directly along the royal highway, but
without deviating in any way, they walked straight ahead through
ravines and over mountains that they came to until each one arrived
at the place where those who were to receive the sacrifices awaited ....
When they arrived at each place destined for sacrifices, the wak' a
kamayuqs, which means "guardians of the wak'as," in whose charge
they were, each received the sacrifice that fell to his wak' a, and he
sacrificed and offered it, burying the sacrifices of gold and silver and
mullu and other things that they used, and the children who fell to
that wak' a, having first been suffocated. The rams, sheep, and cloth
set aside for the wak'a were burned in sacrifice.
Note that not all the wak' as received children in sacrifice, but only
the principal wak' as of lineages or provinces.
And by this order they went walking through all the lands that the
Inca had conquered, through the four districts, and making the said
sacrifices until each one came on his pathway to the ultimate limits
and boundary markers established by the Inca.
They kept such good accounts of all this, and all the sacrifices
destined for each place were so well divided in Cusco, that although
this sacrifice was in great quantity and the places to which they were
Pathways of Historical Colonization 173

sent were numberless, there was never any error or mistake in

destination. For this purpose the Inca had in Cusco indians from the
four suyus or divisions, and each one kept account of all the wak'as,
no matter how small, that there were in the district of which he was
quipu kamayuk or accountant, and they were called willka
kamayuq . ... (Molina 1989: 120_128)44

If such efforts were not enough to interlink the destinies of Inca rulers
and conquered peoples, there were other techniques. Once a people like
the Killaka federation had been conquered, the Inca practice was to
transfer their principal idol as a kind of "hostage" to Cusco, where it was
placed in the Qurikancha, the "Golden Enclosure," where the empire's
deities dwelled. 45 Subject peoples were thus motivated to contribute
their energies to the maintenance of state-supervised ritual practice,
which fed their own gods as well as those of Incas.
In the capac hucha, the elevation in rank of a regional mallku went
hand in hand with the elevation of his group's chief wak'a. In one of the
most detailed descriptions of capac hucha from the perspective of the
provinces, Hernandez Principe (1923: 60-63), another "extirpator of
idolatry," reported that the rise in status of wak'a and kuraqa (as
mallkus were called in Quechua) was connected with the willingness of
the kuraqa to sacrifice his own daughter, after her consecration in
Cusco. She was dressed in Inca finery and, after her demise, became an
intermediary, through spirit mediums, between her father's people and
their own gods. The girl herself was then called capac hucha, as were
pieces of fine cumbi cloth (gifts of the Inca) in which the elevated wak' a
girl, and kuraqa were now dressed (ibid., 62-63). Thereafter, her cult,
along with that of the local wak'as, was directed by a hierarchy of ritual
specialists in each ayllu (ibid., 26-46).
Imperial rituals like the capac hucha came to an end with the arrival
of Spaniards, although other public rites in Cusco and elsewhere
continued unabated for a short while after the conquest. For obvious
reasons, don Juan Colque did not report in his probanza of services to
Incas and Spaniards the sacrifices that his people had carried out in such
contexts. Nor have any complete descriptions of wak'a rites in Killaka
territory survived. We know, however, that even when the imperial cult
was brought to an end by the radical transformation of social order
brought by Spaniards, local wak'as, places, idols, and mummified
ancestors, sacred as a group's anchors in the foundational past, contin-
ued to receive cult for well over a century after priests began actively to
hunt them down and sermonize against them.
174 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

Compared with the detailed accounts of seventeenth-century extirpa-

tors of idolatry in the diocese of Lima, there are few sources for the
Killaka region (though as we shall see, extirpators were active there too).
Owing to an apparent loss of documents from ecclesiastic archives, there
is but one late sixteenth-century report of a pilgrimage site frequented by
Killaka and Asanaqi peoples (a shrine maintained by a wak'a kamayuq
named Diego Iquisi, dedicated to five idols made of silver), and a
mid seventeenth-century discovery by the priest of Coroma (a settlement
belonging to the Siwaruyu-Arakapi diarchy) of three "reverencing
places" and over seventy idols that were still receiving cult from
specialist lineages in 1658 (see chap. 6).
Every province had shrines known as wak' as, some of which were
called (in Quechua) paqarinas, "places of blooming," marking where the
first ancestors had emerged. Once again, Polo provides an account of
how such local shrines were incorporated into empire:
[In this way the Incas] went for many years without being able to
lord it over more than the Cusco region, until the time of Pachacuti
Inca Yupanqui .... After [defeating the Chanka] their requisite was
that of the accounting and inventory of ... sacrifices, and to oblige
those who they placed under their dominion to carry them out. And
they led [their subjects] to understand that the city of Cusco was the
house and resting place of the gods, and in that place there was no
fountain or step or wall which was not said to hold mystery, as can
be seen in each manifest of shrines of that city and the map, that
from their accounts were more than four hundred and some. All of
this lasted until the Spaniards came, and up until today they venerate
them all when no one is watching, and the whole land cares for and
venerates the wak'as that the Incas gave them. To prove the manifest
produced from their own registers, I removed many [wak'as] from
the provinces of Chinchasuyu and Qullasuyu. Because that material is
inappropriate here, this much will suffice to understand what follows.
(Polo Ondegardo 1990: 44-45)46
A consummate administrator, Polo paid close attention to the nature
of local obligations to the state; in combination with his zeal for
discovering the treasure associated with Inca idols and mummies, such
searching led him first to understand the shrine system of Cusco and then
to seek out analogous systems elsewhere.
Cristobal de Molina also writes of a map of Cusco's shrines. Like
Molina's account, Polo's full treatise on Inca religion, including the map
of the ceques and wak'as of Cusco, "produced from their own registers,"
has perhaps been lost, but another account (which seems to have been
independently produced) survives. The chronicler Bernabe Cobo (1990)
Pathways of Historical Colonization 175

provides a list of ceques and of the shrines that these radial lines
connected; John Rowe (1980) has also published Cobo's list. From them
and from allied information on the land claims of the lineage and
clanlike social groups of Cusco itself (these were panakas, founded by
the descendants of embalmed Incas and dedicated to the perpetuation of
the Inca's palace and the social relations with peoples he conquered, and
ayllus, clanlike groups of the valley'S "original" inhabitants), an increas-
ingly clear picture is emerging of an astoundingly complex calendric
cycle of commemorative rituals. Through them, these groups recalled the
pasts that gave them their shape, land rights, and place in the imperial
social hierarchy. Much of that work has been done by Zuidema (1964,
1977, 1989a, 1989b, 1990) and his students (see Fig. 5.4, an idealized
representation of the ceques of Cusco), and to date it has most clearly
brought into view the ways in which the ceque system served as a form
of specialized astronomic and calendric knowledge, linking yearly solar
cycles and lunar cycles not only to the calendric timing of agricultural
tasks and rituals but also to the deeper past of myth and genealogy, and
therefore to the founding events of all the social groups that composed
the empire. As MacCormack (1991: 194-195) phrases it, "Apart from
exemplifying the political and spatial ordering of Cuzco, and by impli-
cation of the empire, the ceque shrines guided worshipers through
mythic and historical time. Finally, some of these shrines were also
markers of calendrical time."
The specifics of this system, which required a large number of
specialist priests and quipu kamayuqs (with their "registers") to function
smoothly, are much more difficult to reconstruct from the available
sources. Such specialists were queried by Polo and others for practical
purposes, to help find mummies and treasures and to understand
precisely which idols, shrines, and memories were to be eradicated.
The complex specifics of the system in operation, which harmonized a
large number of panaka and ayllu pasts within the Cusco valley and tied
these to both the past and the working social arrangements with
conquered peoples, led Spaniards to pull their hair. The sheer heteroge-
neity of Inca social memory, which admitted into a harmonizing whole
the multiple origins, repeated and conflicting accounts of "changes of
worlds," and relatively autonomous pasts, ritual cycles, and social forms
of the empire's diverse social components, was for Spaniards the anti-
thesis of the "future past" they would give to Andeans by bringing them
into the single time-line of universal history.
Enough is known, however, to suggest that Inca, and more generally
Andean, forms of social memory were "registered" in multiple and
176 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

Figure 5.4. The ceque system of Cusco. Forty-one sighting lines radiating from the
Coricancha, the "Golden Enclosure" that housed major Inca deities, led to 328 wak'as and
divided the lands of Inca panacas and ayllus. Certain other lines (represented by bold
arrows), corresponding to astronomic observations, divided the moieties of Cusco and the
quarters of Tawantinsuyu, "Land of the Four Parts." Wak'as are placed here arbitrarily.
(Author's rendering, based on Zuidema 1964; and Wachtel 1973)

intersecting media. First of all, there were the quipus that so impressed
Spaniards as an exact form of record-keeping. Rarely did Spaniards
praise other Andean memory techniques, since they seemed inextricably
linked to the practices that Spaniards regarded as idolatrous, such as
drinking, singing and dancing, and the rites performed at shrines dotting
the landscape. Chroniclers continued, however, to single out the quipu
as a remarkable and accurate recording device, one that continued to be
used well into the colonial period. Guaman Poma illustrates a quipu
kamayuq standing amid Inca storehouses. (See Fig. 5.5.) Remember,
Figure 5.5. Quipu kamayuq. The wording at the top translates as "Storehouse of the
Inca, collca." The wording at the bottom of the page translates as "Storehouses of the
Inca." Framed by rows of storehouses (collcas), an Inca ruler, labeled "Topa Ynga
Yupanqui," points to a quipu in the hands of a man labeled "Administrator. Suyoyoc. Apo
Poma Chaua." (From Guaman Poma de Ayala 1980: 309)
178 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

however, Polo's revelation that his map of ceques and wak' as was taken
from "their registers," referring, no doubt, to quipus. Likewise, the
origin narratives that Spaniards sought to use as dynastic chronicles for
history making (as we shall see in chapter 6) were most often heard from
quipu kamayuqs, who in some way recalled their stories while manipu-
lating quipu cords. The historian Jose de Acosta was especially im-
pressed with quipus, one of the few pre-Columbian memory techniques
still in accepted public use at the time he visited Peru.
Before Spaniards arrived, the indians of Peru had no form of writing,
through either letters or characters or ciphers or little figures such as
the Chinese or Mexicans used; but for this they did not conserve the
memory of their antiquities any less, nor fail to keep accounts of all
matters of peace and war and government. Because in passing
traditions from one to the next they were diligent, and the youth kept
and guarded what their elders told them as a sacred thing, and with
the same care taught it to their own successors. In addition to this
care, they made up for the lack of writing and letters in part with
paintings such as those of Mexico (although those of Peru were very
gross and rough), and in the greater part with quipus. Quipus are
certain memorials or registers made from branching cords, on which
various knots and diverse colors signify different things. It is
incredible what in this way they were able to accomplish, because
whatever books may convey of histories, laws, ceremonies, and
business accounts, all of this quipus [recorded] so accurately that it is
a thing to admire. To keep these quip us or memoriales, there were
appointed officials still today called quipu kamayuqs, who were
obliged to render all sorts of accounts, just as the public scribes do
here, and thus they were given complete faith. Because for diverse
genres such as war, government, tributes, ceremonies, and lands,
there were diverse quipus or branching cords. And in each handful of
these, so many big and small knots, and little strings tied to them,
some red, others green, blue, or white. In the end there were so many
distinctions, that just as for us by rearranging in various ways
twenty-four letters we can construe an infinity of words, so they were
able to make innumerable significations of things with their knots
and colors. (Acosta 1977: 410-411)47

Quipus are well-known to have served as a device for counting and

accounting; they were also clearly used to account for the ritual
obligations of social groups to wak'as along the ceque to which they
were assigned (and which may have served too as a kind of border
defining their lands). Quipus could thus be used as a kind of social
Pathways of Historical Colonization 179

calendar. It seems likely that in encoding numeric amounts of certain

groups' sacrificial obligations to wak'as along ceques, quipus might also
have served as iconic representations of ceques themselves; the form of
the quipu, a main cord from which a series of secondary cords depend,
the latter segmented by groups of knots, itself recalls the shape of the
ceque system. Could one have served as the trace of the other? It is an
intriguing possibility, and one that provides an alternative to thinking of
the quipu as "merely" an arithmetic device or, in some way, constituting
a form of writing.
Indeed, there are reasons to think that quip us were icons of ceque
systems (d. Zuidema 1989b). The latter, after all, constituted a topo-
graphically inscribed mnemonic system, which projected onto the very
landscape the nature of the relationships among the people who inhab-
ited it. And those relationships were figured in relation to the past that
landforms embodied, as permanently frozen moments of foundational
times. Along a ceque path, certain springs, notable rocks, as well as
constructed shrines and idols, which were wak'as, constituted records of
event sequences, the results of which were the human groups who
remembered them. Yet more, ceques were pathways (in today's Aymara,
t"akis, closely related to the colonial Quechua taquies), dance paths that
led from one such foundational moment to another, providing a choreo-
graphic diagram that wove a series of still-living memories from the past
into a narrative whole. Not surprisingly, the song-dances performed on
them, called taquies, were also like epics about the creative beings and
creational moments that the dance paths connected. To sing and dance
was also, then, to enact a story, rehearsing in bodily action the narrative
of the body socia1. 48
Wak'a figures were embodied, however, in their textile clothing; like
humans they became agents capable of social action by being dressed in
a social skin (Turner 1980). As extirpators of idolatry discovered, idols
might be smashed or burned, but if their clothing, generally the elabo-
rately worked cloth called cumbi, survived, the indians were able to
bring the wak'a into being again by clothing some fragment of the old
idol in the cloth that identified it. 49 Murra (1989) has highlighted
numerous aspects of the role of cloth in the pre-Columbian Andes. Gifts
of textiles from lords to subjects were a fundamental expression of the
institutionalized generosity by which "common indians" suffered the
privilege and pretensions of their lords; mallkus like Guarache of Killaka
proudly wore shirts given to them by the Inca. Not just any cloth would
do for such gifts: cumbi, which clothed Inca nobles, subordinate diarchy
180 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

lords, and wak'a idols, was a particularly finely woven cloth, laden with
iconographic significance that may have carried references to founda-
tional narratives, origin places, and the gods and ancestors who vali-
dated social hierarchy. Although their full significance has not been
"decoded," the most elaborate cumbi shirts include numerous figurative
or geometric iconographic elements, called tukapus, in checkerboardlike
arrays, often arranged in what appear to us as random sequences,
suggesting that we might find in them complex messages if we only knew
how to "read" them. 50
In any case, textiles, which were also offered to the gods in vast
quantities along with the frequent llama sacrifices and chicha libations
that marked out the Andean calendar (Murra 1989), served as yet
another medium through which humans ordered their own social
relations by calling upon the gods, and hence the past, to intervene in
their lives. Franquemont, Franquemont, and Isbell (1992) show how
both the learning and production process of iconographic design panels
in Chinchero weavings in contemporary Peru take a single form. Both
weaving and the task of learning to weave textiles follow a formal
process of recursion of minimal units into ever more complex ones, a
process which resembles (as we shall see in chapter 7) how libation
sequences and embedded hierarchies of social space are conceived and
remembered in K'ulta. So it should not surprise us that textile design
bands are also a kind of t"aki ("path"), often taking a zigzag form.
Embedded within such zigzags in pre-Columbian as well as modern
textiles are the frequent design elements called layra ("eye"), serving
perhaps as a mnemonic doorway into the underworld and the past,
which is sometimes called layra timpu ("eye time"). Likewise a common
iconographic motif of the past as well as today is the warawara, the
heavenly star that serves as a guidepost along celestial pathways of
memory. When provincial lords like Guarache put on the cumbi shirts
given them by the ruling Inca, they donned more than an opulent symbol
of power; they clothed themselves and the local ancestry that upheld
their right to station in the Inca state's more universalist narrative of the
past.
Textile "eyes" recall the generalized Andean concept of paqarina,
which, as we've seen, were the openings in the earth from which ancestors
sprang in pre-Columbian narrated pasts. Into these openings and ushnus,
the portals to other worlds that the Incas dug at the center of their
ceremonial plazas, quantities of corn beer were poured in acts of remem-
brance. Spanish chroniclers paid scant attention to the words uttered
Pathways of Historical Colonization 181

along with the ceremonial draughts of chicha that Andeans thus shared
with gods and ancestors, but as we shall see in part 3, the complexity of
twentieth-century Andean poetics of libation dedications suggests that, in
pre-Columbian times, drinking and the spilling out of maize beer that
accompanied it formed yet another channel of social memory, no doubt
congruent with narrated, knotted, and woven "registers."
When Atahuallpa, in Titu Cusi's account, offered to join Valverde in a
libational drink, the Inca offered the cleric a vessel called a quero. On
surviving examples of such vessels we can see that some of them, at least,
bore figurative designs associated with the calendric moments and pasts
that their libational use was to evoke (Randall 1993: 108-110, citing
Liebscher 1986).51
One place where the social memory registers of queros, libations,
quip us, and perhaps ceques came together in Qullasuyu was at ancestral
tombs, called chullpas. In contrast with the shrines called paqarinas, the
ancestral places of emergence such as the Incas' Paqariqtambo, chullpas
were places where humans-especially high-ranking mallkus and
kuraqas-went into the other world. Portals to the "inner space-time"
that Aymara speakers call manxa-pacha, chullpas were potent places of
social memory from the very moment of their construction, in which the
social ties binding future elite occupants to the groups over which they
held sway were given expression.
Witnesses to the probanza of a colonial cacique of Macha in the early
seventeenth century, for example, recalled a regionally significant lord
named Tata Paria, whose tomb was built by the collective efforts of
workers from a multitude of Qullasuyu diarchies. On March 21, 1612,
don Felipe Ochani, a principal ("more than one hundred years old")
from Ayllu Paro of the anansaya, or upper moiety, of Macha declared
that "[Tata Paria was] lord of all the nation of the Caracaras of the said
parcialidad [of anansaya], and of the Quillacas, Soras, Carangas, and
Chuyes, and all of them obeyed him and he made them come together in
Macha, and this witness knew the said Tata Pari a very well when this
witness was a boy, and saw that the indians carried him on their
shoulders like a great lord ... and all the said nations came together in
order to make him tombs ... " (AGNA 13.18.7.2, 1612, fol. 309r).52
From moments like this to periodic rites of commemoration, when the
mummies were brought out like the Inca emperors in Cusco and feted by
the members of social groups they had ruled, chullpas served as yet
another pivot around which social groups made vivid to themselves the
bonds that united them, and recalled their common links to a shared past
182 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

and destiny. This was in part why the old burial places, as well as
wak' as, were so worrisome to Spaniards concerned with the potential
reemergence of "countermemories" during a time when Christian priests
endeavored to give Andeans a new past.
Polo had warned in 1571 that indians were secretly disinterring the
bodies of loved ones buried in churches and cemeteries, moving them to
surreptitiously "enclose them in the wak' as, or mountains, or plains, or
in old tombs ... so as to give them to eat and drink at [the proper] times.
And then they drink and dance and sing, gathering their relatives and
allies to this end" (1916c: 194). Especially in Qullasuyu, and no doubt
among the Asanaqi ancestors of K'ultas, as among the Pakax, hereditary
lords were placed in tombs "outside the town, squared and tall, in the
manner of a crypt, with a stone floor, and covered above with large
stones, and painted on the outside with several colors. And they
buried the deceased with the best clothing and offered much food and
drink ... " (Mercado de Pefialosa 1965: 339).
Just as mummified ancestors (like wak'a images) were draped with
textiles that helped to recall the narrative whose source they embodied,
so did above-ground chullpa towers become commemorative emblems.
In a survey of numerous painted chullpas in the district of the Qaranka
people, Gisbert and colleagues (1996) illustrate how design bands
around the tombs' "waist" reduplicate common design elements of elite
textiles, including the motif known as the layra, or eye. (See Fig. 5.6.)
What is more, just above the narrow east-facing door opening, many
such chullpas seem to have eyes; a pair of openings formed by queros
laid mouth-outwards into the tomb wall. Here it all seems to come
together: Gazing upon the chullpa "face," mourners could see into the
past (itself suggested by the symbolism of eyes and the layra motif
pointing to originary "eye time"), while the still-present deceased peered
out at his or her own future and heirs through the every medium of
sacrificial drink.
Human beings were not all that originated from and returned to
another world through landscape gateways; domesticated and cultivated
foodstuffs came with them, and consequently could serve as substitutes
for the winking out of life that was otherwise necessary for people to
complete their journey fully in space and time back to orginary mo-
ments. As many chroniclers noted, some ritual moments required human
sacrificial victims to establish a stable conduit for communication
between society and the gods. But most of the time, and in far greater
quantities, it was domesticated vegetable and animal matter, killed and
transformed through human activity (such as butchering, cooking,
Pathways of Historical Colonization 183

Figure 5.6. Painted chullpa tomb of Rio Lauca (Author's sketch of photograph in Gisbert
et al. 1996: 33)

brewing, and, in the case of llama wool, spinning and weaving), that
enabled humans to conjure up and address the gods of the past.
Especially interlinked were the destinies of humans and llamas, who
traveled together from paqarinas in origin times and who travel together
to the other world upon death. Still today, in K'ulta, funeral rites include
holocaust sacrifices of llamas (and a black dog) to accompany the dead
in his or her spiritual journey to manxa-pacha. Accompanied by cloth (a
manufactured "social skin" deriving from the animals' natural pelt), corn
beer, and coca leaves, llamas were (and are) the sine qua non of sacrifice,
in part because Andeans have envisioned llamas as enjoying a kind of
social life comparable to that of humans. Guaman Poma illustrates
several rituals in which the Inca emperor speaks "llama language,"
saying "yn, yn," as he prepares to send sacrificial llama messengers to the
beyond (Guaman Poma 1980: 292). In some rituals, sacrificial llamas
were led to their fates dressed in many-colored woven shirts, gold
earrings dangling. They were fed on coca leaves and corn beer, and a
quero full of corn beer was placed at their feet. By kicking it over, they
participated in the libation offering. 53
184 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

So for pre-Columbian Andeans, llamas were an important way of

conceptualizing social power, and llamas as stand-ins for humans
became the most suitable intermediaries for bringing the power of the
past into the present. Molina (1989: 121) describes llama sacrifices in
some detail, as Polo does (1916c). Both also make reference to the
importance of human sacrifice on certain occasions. Taking issue with
Polo on the existence of human sacrifice (and on many other points), the
chronicler known as the Anonymous Jesuit (1879) argues that Polo
made a simple error in interpretation, resulting from the fact that terms
for age categories of llamas and humans were alike. The Jesuit is no
doubt wrong when he suggests that when Polo heard the Quechua word
for "child" he misunderstood an Andean's reference to a young llama,
called by the same term (ibid., 142-146). But he nevertheless highlights
the parallelism between llamas and humans that makes llamas suitable
subjects for humans to think about in attempt to change their own social
relations. Drawing on the quip us of "Juan Collque, Senor de los
Quillacas," as one of his authorities, he adds further depth to our
understanding of the importance of the Andean analogy between human
beings and llamas that made the latter suitable for sacrifices. Given their
pivotal role as a means of crossing the boundary between this world and
the other, inhabited by the powerful forces of eye time, we begin to see
how sacrifices constituted (and still constitute-see chap. 8) another
important technique of social memory. 54
In the pre-Columbian Andes, then, the past was remembered through
its locations in the landscape, the sequence was encoded in woven cloth,
in twined and knotted cords, and in the poetically "woven" song-dances
and stories whose rhythms were stamped out by footsteps danced in
taquies or imagined along t"aki pathways through the landscape that
linked the wak' as. A narrative past was also to be seen in a heavenly
pathway, the river/road of the Milky Way, along which a series of figures,
discerned in the black spaces between the stars as much as in the stars
themselves, nightly and seasonally progressed (Urton 1981). Along the
bright pathway a man led a llama with its young, pursued by a fox,
towards a spring, and just to the side of the pathway, a multitude of
heavenly storehouses (qullqa) could be seen in the constellation of little
stars we call the Pleiades, which they called Unquy. When these store-
houses came into view in the first hours of night, they signaled that the
time was right to set out on long-distance caravan journeys to stock up
on food products to be stored in one's own qullqa. This was unquy
mit' a, a time of renewal when certain cleansing rites were performed in
Cusco, while crops were dried in preparation for transport and storage.
Pathways of Historical Colonization 185

One might, then, imagine the quipu kamayuq charged with the
memory of ceque and wak'a rites with quipu in hand. As his fingers
moved along a major cord to its dependent cords and to the groups of
knots along them, he may well have mentally traveled the ceque itself
and stopped at the wak' as along it. And if myth cycles were themselves
tied to the actions of narrative heroes who, turned to stone or spring,
still lived as wak'as and breathed life and social meaning into the people
who sang and danced to them, then ceque systems and quipus as their
twined trace might well have encoded foundational mythic and dynastic
narrative.
Recall too some of the other forms of Andean social memory.
Mummified ancestors, as actual relics from the past whose acts still
reverberated in the cult organization that gave form to living social
groups, each had their own stories to tell through ceque and quipu as
well as taquies. And the cloth in which mummies, living persons, and
stone wak' as were dressed was also rich in iconographic significance,
largely still undeciphered. Recall how important these pieces of cloth
were in capac hucha rituals, as a kind of "social skin" through which the
inner essence of one kind of being could be visibly transferred to another
(textiles being made from camelid wool, cloth also provided a link
between the human social world and the herds on which humans
depended in so many ways). Likewise maize, converted into beer, served
as an important medium of social memory. Shared in events of commun-
ion with the gods and ancestors and simultaneously with other persons
with whom the offerer established or reaffirmed social ties, drinks were
given significance by words of dedication to ancestors and gods who
themselves, as the defining focal points of social groups like lineages,
gave meaning to the human relationships so forged or reaffirmed. A long
sequence of libations poured from queros, sucJt as those carried out
during virtually all ritual events (requiring the massive quantities of beer
that helped drive the imperial system of labor tribute in maize fields) was
therefore a means for imbibing the past into the bodies and memories of
the libators.
But to what degree were the imperial forms of social memory like
those of the provinces? It is once again Polo who describes how the
Cusco system of ceques and quipu accounts, linking the present shape
and hierarchy of social groups with the past remembered in them, was
extended into newly conquered territories. In the first place, there was
the Inca administrative practice of seizing and dividing certain lands.
This was a necessary complement to the incorporation of subjugated
peoples into the sacrificial system of Cusco, by which they were also
186 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

absorbed into a generalized social hierarchy through their relationship to

the Inca who conquered them and to the deities with whom he held
court after his death. As Polo explains, the greater part of tribute was
itself a labor prestation carried out to feed and clothe the wak'as, and
also the laborers themselves, in the process of producing the corn which
made the beer subsequently offered up in state-administered sacrifices.
So the Asanaqi people who worked their assigned strips of land in the
Cochabamba valley (strips divided by sight lines connecting, one imag-
ines, a set of wak'as, cult to which reshaped the social structure of the
groups that participated in these labors) generated corn surpluses that
were largely turned to beer; on ritual occasions such as their own
celebratory self-sacrifice in performing such labor, they also drank it.
The product of tributary herding labors, of course, was cloth, which they
came to wear on their backs, just as their mallkus and their wak'as did.
So administrative centers and Inca production zones themselves were
laid out as icons of the social order of the peoples who worked in them
(recall the arrangement of Killaka and Qaranka diarchies into demar-
cated suyus of the Cochabamba valley). At the same time, Polo suggests
with a certain Inca-centrism that it was Incas who provided such
mnemonic techniques for the peoples they conquered:
[The Inca] brought the same order to each town, dividing each
district into ceques and lines, and established shrines of diverse
advocations, such as all things that seemed notable like springs and
artesian wells and puquios and large stones and valleys and peaks,
which they call apachetas, and for each thing he placed persons, and
showed them the order that they should follow in sacrifice, in each
place and for what end, and he assigned teachers to show them when
and what kinds of things [to sacrifice]. Finally, although nowhere
were there so many shrines as in Cusco, the order elsewhere is the
same; having seen the map of the wak' as of Cusco, in each town, no
matter how small, they will depict it in the same way and will show
the fixed ceques and wak'as and shrines, knowing about which is a
very important business for their conversion. I have proved it in more
than a hundred towns, and the lord bishop of Charcas [Domingo de
Santo Tomas] asked if it were indeed so universal. When we went
together about the business of perpetuity by Your Majesty's order, I
showed it to him in Pocona [an Inca coca production zone] and the
very indians depicted for him there the same map, and in this there is
no doubt because it will be found exactly as I say....
Sowing and reaping [the fields] and filling up the deposits that
were prepared for this purpose were a great part of the tribute that
Pathways of Historical Colonization 187

they gave. Some of it they spent in sacrifices in the town itself and
most of it they carried to Cusco for the same effect from all
places .... It was a huge quantity, because there they had the
principal houses of all the gods and in each one many people who
did nothing else, and every day each one sacrificed in the plaza and
on the hills, and this we see in the general manifest. I do not believe
that among any other sort of people of whom we have knowledge is
so much, and with so many ceremonies, spent on sacrifices.... (Polo
Ondegardo 1990: 47-48)55

Polo may have been an especially insightful observer of Andean ways

and may even have found among them much to laud, but their
techniques of recalling the past were not among the Andean traditions he
found worthy of preservation. A few chapters later in the same account,
Polo returns to the matter of the ceques and wak'a cult:
It is necessary in all the towns to make them depict the map, after
showing them the map of Cusco, so that the priest should be well
informed of each of these things, as much so that he should
understand it and carry out punishments, as to enable him to preach
against it and move them with clear reasons so that they understand
the illusions and trickery of the devil. (Polo Ondegardo 1990: 102)56
One must, in other words, discover the secrets of Andean techniques
of social memory in order to force the native to forget. Even in places
that were inhabited largely by mitimas, laborer-settlers moved by Inca
administrators to important state production zones such as the coca
production zone of Pocona, where Polo demonstrated his knowledge of
ceque systems to Santo Tomas, memory of the founding acts of ancestors
and gods was kept alive. Crist6bal de Alborn6z discovered to his horror
that Andeans had already rehearsed ways to preserve their commemo-
rations even after the idols had been smashed:
Among these indios mitimas, those who the Inca moved from one
place to another, there are other kinds of wak'as. Of great
importance and kept most hidden are those of a piece of clothing
taken from the wak' a paqarisqa of their homeland, which is given to
them by the priest or kamayuq of the said wak'a in their land,
charging them not to forget the name of their origin and that, in the
same way that they had in their homeland, they should reverence and
worship their paqarisqa creator. And this they did, taking out this
piece of their wak'a clothing in their dances and general taquies.
They keep these pieces with great care and have given them service
and property. They take and carry them as if they are wak' as: If
188 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

there are springs in their lands, they bring with them a cup of water,
throw it with great ceremony into the springs in the places to which
they are transplanted, and give it the name of their paqarisqa with
great solemnity, and if it is a stone, they put the piece of clothing
they have brought over another stone, and in the same way all the
things that they held as paqarisqas ....
It must be known that the majority of wak'as, apart from their
properties, have clothing of cumbi that they call capac huchas, of the
same grandeur as the wak'as. And the first thing one must do so that
no relic of the wak'a remains is to procure these capac huchas,
because if they remain in their power, they will dress any stone they
like with it. (Alborn6z 1989: 171, 196)
Not only, then, were occasional rites of rule and sacrificial children
called capac huchas, "opulent prestations," so too were the pieces of
highly valued cloth, gifts of the Inca, that had traveled the pathways
between Cusco and local shrines.
We have surveyed some of the better Spanish sources on pre-
Columbian forms of social memory in the Andes. Within a generation
after Polo, Albornoz, and Cristobal de Molina wrote their accounts,
investigation into such things became a matter for antiquarianists: No
longer performed, most such rites, especially those tied to public
contexts and Inca state activities, disappeared into the past, recoverable
only through the writings of those closer to the events. This was, of
course, precisely the end that our perceptive authors had in mind when
they carried out their investigations.
It remains to be seen, however, how Spaniards began the process, not
of erasure, but of reinscription of Andean social memory. On the one
hand, they sought to drag the narrated Andean past into universal
history, which is to say, to reconcile it with biblical narrative. On the
other, as we shall see in chapter 6, they began a long process of
reshaping Andeans' relationship to time and space, providing an archi-
tectural and choreographic substitute for the intimate sacrificial ties that
had bound Asanaqi householders to their mallkus and Inca overlords.
That substitute would instill in them the good customs, the "buena
polida," by which they would, for the benefit of their everlasting souls,
more readily submit to the Castilians' two majesties, God and king. But
first, there was the business of transforming tributary labor organized for
a sacrificial system that reproduced Andean social structures into labor
that would produce bars of silver, capable of producing and reproducing
aristocratic privilege for the conquistadors and the machines of war for
the European enterprises carried out on God's behalf by their king and
emperor. Let us put such things into context.
Pathways of Historical Colonization 189

In studying the uptake by Spaniards of Inca forms of social memory

and the Andean response, we must pay close attention to a pair of
interdependent winnowing processes carried out in Spanish minds and
writings. First of all, we must examine how a wide gamut of Andean
forms of social memory was marginalized or erased by Spanish histori-
ans who, in the absence of writing, privileged the spoken word above
nonlinguistic communications, and gave special place to kinds of oral
narrative that was recognizable to them as dynastic epic, a genre from
which early Castilian history was itself drawn. As our chroniclers
consider the consequences of the absence of writing in the Andes, they
note, here and there, some of the vehicles of an Andean art of memory.
Andean memory had inhered in song and dance, rite and topography,
textile designs and painted drinking vessels, as well as in oral narrative.
Most such expressive forms soon became suspect and subject to erasure
as the vehicles of native idolatry and error. Yet Andean social memory
began to wither even before the imposition of systematic persecution. It
did so because the conduits of social memory were always and every-
where attuned to the shapes of local social groups and their ways of
articulating with the now-collapsed Inca state. A variety of Spanish
colonial practices then conspired to reshape the ways in which social
groups were constituted, and some brands of social memory were cut
loose from their moorings, becoming irrelevant in accounting for the
new past (one including Spanish conquistadors and encomenderos)
which now haunted Andeans. In such circumstances one might expect a
burst of creativity in which new songs, rites, and narratives surge to the
fore to recapture the past, or to revise it for congruity with new ways of
constituting collectivities. And there was indeed such movement. But it
was just here that Andeans slammed full tilt into the barriers erected by
the Spanish state precisely as prophylaxis against such creative out-
bursts: Andean efforts to adapt the tenets and rituals of Christianity to
their own ends, or to reshape their narratives so as to account for the
Spaniards and their colonial practices (and perhaps to undo them), were
subject to the apparatuses of surveillance and discipline characteristic of
"the first modern state"; they were censored by Counter-Reformation
heterodoxy-sniffers.
Most of the details available to us about pre- and postconquest
Andean forms of social memory are written in the censors' books.
Captured in moments of crisis, under hostile conditions, and just as a
creative burst of innovation overtook somewhat routinized forms of
pre-Columbian practice, such records should signal us to be wary,
especially in using them as guides to truly precolonial social forms.
190 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

Nearly all the sources on Andean culture were produced under inquisi-
torial conditions, by figures in positions of great power. Polo's study of
Inca religion was done while he was corregidor of Cusco; Domingo de
Santo Tomas wrote as a privileged cleric, often trusted with high-level
administrative responsibilities. And the administrative sources often
mined for information on Andean ways-visitas, records of idolatry ex-
tirpation, parish registers, notarial records, compilations of Inca narra-
tives, and even grammars and dictionaries of indigenous languages-were
all generated as tools for changing native life-ways: calling indians to-
gether to be counted, interrogating them and preaching to them, reshap-
ing social subjectivity in baptism, marriage, and funeral, inscribing new
links between individuals and property, transforming multiple oral nar-
ratives into a single written history, and establishing equivalences between
indigenous meanings and Spanish ones. All such sources are marked by
the colonial imbalance of power that hyperprivileged Spanish pens to a
degree far greater than the discursive imbalances of ethnography.
Not many "ordinary Spaniards" wrote convincingly on Andean topics
(most could not write at all), but even when they did, "ordinary
Spaniards" were not ordinary in the Indies, but held what often
amounted to life or death power over indians. Nonetheless, one rela-
tively ordinary Spaniard is credited with having written the most
valuable of the early participant accounts of Andean ways. Pedro Cieza
de Leon traveled the length and breadth of Peru in the 1540s with
notebooks in hand, later transforming his writings into the massive
Cronica del Peru. This is a good place to begin the business of the
chapters that follow, on the effects of the active Spanish effort to
colonize the Andean past as remembered both in oral narrative and in
forms of meaningful action. Next I treat the textualization of the Andean
past, specifically the double movement through which Spaniards initially
privileged oral narrative as the most "historical" Andean source and then
proceeded to transform it, to invade first the logic of epic event-sequence
and then the master narrative of universal history.

NARRATIVE CONQUESTS: SPANISH ENCOUNTERS WITH MYTHIC

ANDEAN JOURNEYS

The Spanish chronicler Pedro Cieza de Leon had arrived in Peru not
long after the conquest and led a soldier's life in the northern reaches of
South America, far from the splendiferous center of the Inca empire.
Having travailed through the period of civil wars that almost immedi-
ately broke out among the conquerors after the events of Cajamarca, he
Pathways of Historical Colonization 191

must eagerly have taken advantage of an offer from the "great pacifier,"
Pedro de la Gasca, to carry certain letters to Potosi in 1549. His journey
took him to and through Cusco, and everywhere he went, he queried
people about themselves and the places he encountered, jotting down
notes in his journals that he later revised into a chronicle. At one point
Cieza lamented the Andes' lack of writing: "Being so blind about these
things, one is led to say how fortunate is the invention of writing, that by
the virtue of its sounds memory lasts for many centuries, and news of
events spreads throughout the universe. And having readings in our
hands, we do not remain ignorant of our desires. But since no writing
has been found in this new world of the Indies, we must take our best
guess on many things" (Cieza de Leon 1984: chap. 105, p. 284).57
Other chroniclers marveled at the accomplishments Incas were able to
achieve without writing, and even praised the Andes' other forms of
social memory, from quipu to quero. Almost as asides, they also referred
to Inca songs and dances (in which much mythic narrative was imbed-
ded) and to other kinds of ritual commemorative and state theater. But
few went so far in their praise as to describe systematically the contents
of such memory forms, and those who did (such as Polo Ondegardo, on
the ceque system) did so for combined pecuniary and missionary ends, as
the first step in confiscating the treasuries of pagan idols and smashing
idolatries, as well as erasing idolatry's memory.
The single exception to this rule of erasure was the Incas' orally
transmitted accounts of the past that were not to be found in the Bible.
Cieza, like Betanzos, Sarmiento, and many other chroniclers, had
recourse to oral narrative as the most reliable Inca source for the
histories of the Incas they sought to write, histories that would bring
Andeans into Europe's and Christianity's universal history. Chronicling
the Inca past, that is, was the scribe's contribution to the colonial
project. Conquered by the sword, Incas were also to be colonized, it
appears, by the pen.
Spanish chroniclers expressed qualms about the process of inscribing
native narratives. Virtually every writer of Andean tales worried about
the apparent incommensurability of spoken word and written text. One
set of concerns derived from the very orality of native narrative, which
led chroniclers-and even Andeans-to bemoan the absence of writing
in the pre-Columbian Andes.
The compiler-author of the Quechua Huarochiri manuscript began
this late-sixteenth-century compilation of a provincial oral tradition and
account of ritual life with reference to writing: "If the ancestors of the
people called Indians had known writing in earlier times, then the lives
192 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

they lived would not have faded from view until now. As the mighty past
of the Spanish Vira Cochas is visible until now, so too, would theirs be.
But since things are as they are, and since nothing has been written until
now, I set forth here the lives of the ancestors of the Huaro Cheri people,
who all descend from one forefather" (Salomon and Urioste 1991:
41-42).
In a footnote, Salomon points out how Quechua verbal usage
emphasizes the "visibility of the new Spanish mnemotechnology, writing,
as opposed to the audibility of the endangered oral tradition" (ibid., 42
n. 8; emphasis in original). More difficult to grasp for both Spaniards
and Andeans, however, was the contrast between the Spanish emphasis
involving two senses, visible writing and audible speech as mnemotech-
niques, and the polysensual Andean techniques of social memory. Father
Bernabe Cobo, for example, was willing to concede that in spite of their
lack of writing, Andeans remembered rather too much: "The most
notable aspect of this religion is how they had nothing written down to
learn and keep. They made up for this shortcoming by memorizing
everything so exactly that it seems as if these things were carved into the
Indians' bones" (Cobo 1990: book 1, chap. 1, p. 9).
Here Cobo introduces his account of Andean memory of things he
called religious, that is ceque systems and wak'a rites. Such things are
not, however, what Cobo regarded as sources of specifically historical
knowledge. Where he speaks of history, understanding the term as both
reliable record and the recorded event chronology, he finds Andeans at a
disadvantage, weighing in with an opinion which both grants reliability
to an Andean approximation of writing and denies its value for the
historian of antiquities:
Since the Indians had no writing, the information we find among
them concerning their antiquities is very meager. Although it is true
that the Peruvians used certain strings or cords to preserve a record
of their deeds (as we shall see), nothing was kept on these records
except what occurred from the time that the Inca Empire started its
conquests ... but upon moving from there back, everything is
confusion and darkness, in which hardly any trace or vestige can be
perceived that would guide us on an inquiry into earlier times. (Cobo
1979: book 2, chap. 1, p. 94)
For these authors, the lack of a writing system is itself linked to both
the proliferation and mutability of texts, a multiplication of oral
accounts that complicated the chronicler's task. "Here in these provinces
of Peru," wrote Cieza, "men, though blind, give great account of
themselves, and tell so many fables that it would be harmful to write
Pathways of Historical Colonization 193

them down" (Cieza de Leon 1986: chap. 3, p. 3).58 Harmful, at least, to

both writer's hand and reader's patience. But one wonders if the multi-
plicity of Andean creation "fables" was not also in some sense unthink-
able to Spaniards, from whose perspective an assertion that empire and
heterodoxy could be compatible might be interpreted as heresy.
Although Cieza recounts few pre-Inca tales, others were somewhat
more forthcoming. Cobo, for example, briefly summarized some Andean
origin myths (taken from earlier writers) as a sort of preface to what for
him was a more reliable post-Inca narrative corpus. Before beginning
this "true" history with Manco Capac's acts in Cusco, he concluded that
" ... they tell a thousand other foolish tales and stories, and trying to
write them all down here would be a never-ending task. The ones that I
have just told will suffice to show how uncertain and obscure the
beginning and origin of the Incas is. But it is customary for true histories
to be filled with such fictitious stories, and all those on this subject that
the Indians commonly tell point to certain facts ... " (Cobo 1979: book
2, chap. 3, p. 106).
In a two-step process, writers such as Cobo (and earlier authors like
Sarmiento and Betanzos) quickly swept aside the most variable sorts of
narrative, those concerned with ancient origins, in order to focus upon
less distant stories collected from more reliable sources, the high-ranking
nobles of Inca Cusco. The ordinary indians of Cusco, not to speak of the
indians of the conquered provinces, were held to be as unreliable in such
matters as Castilian peasants. But if descendants of great noble lineages
and imperial memorialists, holding quipus in their hands, were admired
by a Sarmiento or a Cobo, the compilation of a "true history" nonethe-
less required careful treatment of informants' testimony, precisely to
reduce the multiplicity of native narrative to a single account.
In the manner of an expert witness called by the prosecution,
Sarmiento describes the procedures he used to "correct" the stories told
him by his Inca memorialists:

And thus by examining ... the most prudent and oldest men, to
whom more credit is given, I extracted and compiled the present
history by showing the declarations of each [witness] to his enemies,
or better said to his contraries, since they fall into opposed sides ....
What is written here has been refined by having contraries check and
correct each others' memoirs (all of which are in my power), and
finally ratifying them in the public presence of all contraries and
ayllus (sworn in by judicial authority), with expert translators and
very curious and faithful interpreters (also sworn). (Sarmiento de
Gamboa 1942: chap. 9, p. 60)59
194 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

The technique closely resembles the methods employed a decade

before by the extirpator of idolatry, Cristobal de Albornoz, whose
inquisitorial style had successfully extracted confessions from members
of the taqui oncoy movement of the 1560s (Albornoz 1990). Sarmiento,
however, sought confessions, not of idolatrous acts in the present, but of
historical memories. There can be no clearer account of the historical
method as judicial procedure. As an appointee of Viceroy Francisco de
Toledo, Sarmiento used such procedures not only to guarantee the
accuracy of his history but also to underscore its admissibility as
evidence in the court of public opinion. Thus, he continues: "I have
worked so diligently in order to establish the truth in a business as grave
as that of proving the tyranny in this land of the cruel Incas, so that all
nations of the world should understand the juridical and more than
legitimate title, that the king of Castile has to these Indies and to other
lands neighboring them, especially to these kingdoms of Peru"
(Sarmiento de Gamboa 1942: chap. 9, p. 60).60
As Sarmiento was aware, the process required a careful surgery by
which narrative was extracted from its context. What he sought to
eliminate were discrepancies among the narratives presented by Incas
from different ayllus, each with its own "particulares intereses" (ibid.,
chap. 9, p. 59). In so doing, he produced an authoritative account, the
authority of which depended both on the judicial nature of his proceed-
ings and upon the depersonalization and decontextualization that they
were intended to achieve, in which the battle of informants' antagonistic
interests (determined by affiliation to particular social units) would
cancel out the distortions in each other's account. The written end
product thus might achieve the permanence and hermeneutic closure
associated with the printed page. In Sarmiento's case, such closure was
also sought to help preclude further dynastic claims by the very men
chosen (by virtue of their dynastic claims) as informants! When a long
list of myth tellers signed off, in the presence of a notary, to the veracity
of Sarmiento's compilation, they also in effect admitted to being the
successors of illegitimate tyrants. Or so thought Sarmiento, along with
his patron, Viceroy Toledo.
However, as Gary Urton (1990) has demonstrated, Sarmiento's care-
ful inquisitorial procedures were not sufficient to eliminate entirely the
"particular interests" of his informants. Among his witnesses was a
significant and influential contingent of regional nobles whose claims to
noble succession were greatly strengthened by leading Sarmiento to
locate Inca origins confidently in a place called Pacaritambo. And so
Pathways of Historical Colonization 195

Sarmiento authorized a single origin point, privileging a particular social

group, while he vitiated other origin points and other claims to legiti-
mate power. 61 In spite of Toledo's attempt to prohibit further indian
appeals to the Crown, such claims, like those on which Urton draws,
were nonetheless made. Following Urton's line of argument, we may
suggest that the Spanish desire for a single official story in effect led to
the erasure of narrative multiplicity, thereby obscuring one of the
features by which Andean narrative traditions differed from Spanish
historical consciousness.
Frank Salomon (1982) has argued that the contradiction that ensued
from efforts to reduce oral narrative to writing lay in the irreconcilability
of Andean and Spanish notions of time and history. Spaniards' percep-
tion of historical time as a single, linear, and nonrepeating sequence of
events made it impossible for them to recognize, much less understand,
the very different perception of historical time current in the Andes, one
in which the sequence of episodes in one narrative did not require
validation by being fitted into a single master narrative. Contradictions
between narratives were of little significance, since each narrative
evinced an instance of a cyclic pattern of events. As Salomon also
recognizes, however, Spaniards' biblical outlook produced its share of
cyclicity; not to speak of the liturgic calendar by which salvation history
is played out on a yearly, nay weekly, basis. It is also rather likely that,
when an Inca emperor was well established, his own particular lineage-
interested past was purveyed as an authoritative story into which
subordinate peoples' pasts were supposed to fit. Dynastic struggles or
rebellions might then have taken the form of not only a contest at arms
but also a battle of histories. Circumstances of dynastic instability, such
as the entire period during which Spaniards collected accounts of the
Inca past, would then predict the emergence of multiple and contradic-
tory accounts.
Such speculation, however, begs a number of questions. First of all, it
rests on the rather dubious assumption that the narratives elicited for the
record by Spaniards were, as they assumed, dynastic histories. While
they disparaged narratives that competed with biblical event sequences,
chroniclers like Sarmiento gave credibility to stories of the succession of
Inca kings and their conquests, stories which no doubt struck them as
analogous in kind to the postbiblical chronicles of Castilian dynasties.
But Zuidema (1990) has argued that stories of Inca rulers were no less a
part of an Andean mythical consciousness than clearly "mythic" ac-
counts of cosmogenesis were. For Zuidema, all such accounts had more
196 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

to do with describing and validating forms of social hierarchy and

political relations among their tellers than with historicity. As Salomon
suggests:
In Spain, historians read cronicas, and the writers of cronicas appear
to have read relaciones. For Andeans, the sources of diachronic
knowledge were completely different and had never been organized
on the principles of absolute chronology, cause-and-effect, or
eschatology. The useful past was embodied in dynastic oral tradition,
the knot record, the constellation of royal mummies, and the
spatial-ritual calendar round framed on the system of shrines around
the Inca capital. (Salomon 1982: 11)
As Salomon notes in the essay quoted here, "Chronicles of the
Impossible," which is an analysis of the chronicles produced by the
native Andeans who sought to reconcile their own pasts with the
conventions of the Spaniards in the latters' very language and writing
conventions, such authors had been "formed within a tradition which
admitted the concept change-of-worlds (pachakuti) and gave humanity
multiple, not unique, origins (paqarinakuna)" (ibid., 32). It is precisely
this latter contrast I would like to emphasize, rather than claims of a
fundamental disjunction between linear (Spanish) and cyclic (Andean)
notions of time.
Our Spanish chroniclers were clearly disturbed when they found in
the Andes nearly as many variations of origin stories as there were
storytellers. Their discomfort, I suggest, resulted, not from some vertigo
caused by a novel encounter with cyclic time, but from the juxtaposition
of empire and narrative heterodoxy. The very multiplicity of the Andean
past needed to be homogenized before Andean peoples could be properly
ruled by a monarch whose mandate to rule rested on the propagation
not only of the true faith but also of universal history. Writing in a
Counter-Reformation age of orthodoxy, Spanish chroniclers gathered
native narratives precisely in order to colonize the Andean past, to write
Andeans into the master narrative that underwrote the Spanish project in
the New World and that interlinked the authority of the two majesties
(earthly and divine) whose scribes our chroniclers were. It is little
wonder, then, that Spaniards so routinely scoffed at the multiplicity of
Andean origin stories.
As Spaniards saw it, Andeans' insistence on locating the creation of
man in their own local territory evinced an astounding degree of
shortsightedness, if not hubris. Many chroniclers were willing to over-
look such hubris in the case of the Incas, whose origin stories could be
Pathways of Historical Colonization 197

taken as dynastic histories; it is the non-Incas whose stories for the most
part failed to merit pen and ink. Let us turn to the "predynastic" Inca
narratives that Sarmiento and Cobo recount as amusing prefaces to their
serious historicizing work.
Spaniards first learned about pre-Inca times on the Altiplano from the
Incas themselves, and only occasionally and incidentally took into
account the Altiplano peoples' own views of their past. As do-all
empire-building colonizers, Incas saw themselves as civilizers, whose
arrival brought light and order to peoples without them. Inca memori-
alists told Spaniards of the military campaigns by which certain Inca
emperors had annexed the warlike peoples of Qullasuyu to the south of
Cusco, bringing the benefits of civilization to a previously brutish
population. But they also told stories that made certain Qullasuyu places
into the very origin places of the early Incas, those who had lived
generations before the conquest of Qullasuyu. An island in Lake Titicaca
and the site of Tiwanaku, which Incas controlled only after many
hard-fought battles against peoples called Lupaqas and Qullas, were
nonetheless repeatedly cited in Inca oral histories as their own place of
origin, a veritable axis mundi far more ancient than the one they created
in the imperial capital of Cusco.
The quandary of this conflict of histories, which raises the people and
territory of Inca subjects to the ontological (or perhaps, cosmogenic)
status of Inca rulers, has fueled a great deal of research and informed
speculation about the question of Inca origins, always in conjunction
with origins of Altiplano peoples. Unfortunately for students of Qulla-
suyu, nearly all the explicitly and self-consciously historical material at
hand is Inca-centric: gathered directly from Inca noble informants or
construed as ancillary to a history of the Inca empire. Apart from
fragmentary accounts, no Spaniard attempted to interpret the historical
or mythic consciousness of a Qullasuyu group from within its own
tradition. Instead, Qulla or Lupaqa stories were curious departures,
generally unworthy of the pen, from the more reliable, state-sanctioned
accounts of the past that were systematically collected in Cusco. Yet the
Inca fixation on Titicaca and Tiwanaku suggests that they may have
imported Altiplano perspectives on the past into their own past. Indeed,
there are almost no sources in transcribed and translated oral narrative
in which Cusco and Titicaca, Incas and Qullas, are not co-implicated.
It is, then, worth our while to survey the fragments of Inca oral
history touching on Tiwanakuffiticaca that have come to us through
chronicles produced during the Spanish colony, in light of the more
198 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

fragmentary accounts of sixteenth-century Altiplano peoples' own oral

traditions about their pre-Inca past.
In 1549, Cieza de Leon traveled southwards from Cusco onto the
Altiplano to see for himself this populous and silver-laden territory,
which had become famous for its riches even in wartime. Cieza himself
had been a participant in conquests in the region of Popayan and in the
civil wars that wracked Peru in the decade of the 1540s, and had lived
essentially a soldier's life until freed from it by a short-lived peace in the
wake of the rebel Gonzalo Pizarro's defeat by the "pacifier" Pedro de la
Gasca in 1548. Throughout his travels, Cieza seems to have kept a series
of diaries and notebooks which, to judge by the works he drew from
them, were written in a blunt and fact-laden style, descriptive, to the
point, and free of the literary mannerisms and metaphor of some other
authors of his day. In fact, all Cieza's writings read like travelogues, and
none more so than part 1 of his three-part Cronica del Peru (published in
Seville in 1553). Like most travelers of the day, Cieza followed Inca
highways, and his travel narrative moves in episodic leaps from place to
place along these roads.
As Cieza moved southwards from Cusco into the lands that Incas
called Qullasuyu, he followed in the footsteps of the Inca invaders whose
conquest narratives move through the same sequence of places: first
passing through the land of a people called Kanchi, Cieza proceeded
through the lands of Qana, Qulla, and Lupaqa peoples before reaching a
narrative resting place in Tiwanaku. These are the peoples whom he
most queried about the past and about the curious topographic features
and antiquities in their lands. Cieza continued farther south, but his
interest in indians and their stories seems to wane as he neared the
fabulous mines of Porco and Potosi.
Several factors led Cieza to locate Altiplano peoples as part of a dark
past transcended by Inca imperial glories. First of all, there is the
narrative flow of his own travel account, which follows an episodic
trajectory of its own. Episodes of Altiplano narratives appear only as
fragmentary supplements to Cieza's own narrative logic. Yet quite apart
from the influence of the book's narrative itinerary, Cieza's response to
Altiplano stories of the past is also conditioned by another narrative
sequence, the chronology of a biblical universal history against which his
informants' pasts are invariably judged. Of special interest to Cieza were
episodes from native narrative that rang out familiar notes in his own
tradition. Usually unwilling to commit Altiplano oral histories to paper,
he relaxes his guard against native fabulas and bulerias to recount
Pathways of Historical Colonization 199

Andean stories of a deluge: "Many of these indiannell of hearing from

their forefathers that in times past a great flood took place (as I wrote in
chapter three of the second part). And they explain that their ancestors
are of great antiquity" (Cieza de Leon 1984: 273).62
Cieza recounts the myth fragments used by others as evidence of a
preconquest Andean evangelization, but he does so only to debunk such
theories. He is unwilling to grant that Andeans of the pre-Spanish age
had access to biblical truth or the precepts of Christianity. For him
Andean accounts of a great deluge could not reflect a memory of the true
Universal Flood: the multiplicity of Andean languages suggested to him
that this Andean flood must have taken place only after the division of
languages in the tower of Babel, long after Noah's day. Note that Cieza
does not doubt the facticity of a universal flood, but simply rejects
Andean narrative after comparing its event sequences with biblical ones.
Andean flood stories, then, are mere fables. And Cieza derides Altiplano
origin narratives at a further remove from biblical truth: "Of their
origins they have so many sayings and fables, if they are that, that I
should not take time to write them down. Some say they emerged from
a spring, others from a rock, and others from lakes, and on their origins
one can get nothing else from them" (ibid., 274).63
Unfortunately, we can get little more from Cieza's encounters with
Andean oral tradition than such scattered references and out-of-context
episodic fragments. No doubt the very multiplicity of Qulla origin stories
worried Cieza, especially after having collected in Cusco a more homo-
geneous "great tradition."
Most chroniclers saw fit to locate the beginnings of potentially
historical Andean narrative after the emergence of the first Inca king,
Manco Capac, from a place called Pacaritambo. In most accounts, four
brothers and four sisters emerge (after the flood or after creation
elsewhere and an underground journey) from a window on a hilltop
"house of origin," or "way-stop of the flowering," as "paqariq tambo"
may be parsed. They then proceed on a transformative journey towards
the Cusco valley, during which a series of episodes establishes the
identity between these ancestral figures and deity-shrines of great impor-
tance in Inca religion.
A central feature of this myth is its references to actual topographic
features of the Cusco area: The journey of the ancestors established not
only a narrative thread by which to unfold the episodic development of
its protagonists, but also an actual path, which as a pilgrimage route
connected a series of sacred places. Thus narrative sequence marked out
200 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

a relationship between time and space, which could then be ritually

commemorated in calendric sequence by the descendants of these par-
ticular ancestors-the Inca nobles who belonged to Cusco's qapaq ayllu.
Founded in the acts of ancestral beings of primordial times, these sacred
places, called wak' as, became the reference points of social groups defined
as such precisely through their transitive relationship to the wak'a. The
relationship among such groups was then given order with reference to
both territory and hierarchy by their wak' as' positions in space and in
temporal sequence. Here, in the narrative particular to the noble qapaq
ayllu, we have the basis for understanding the significance of the ceque
system of Cusco, the coordinated system of such vectors, or transit lines,
that radiated from a central point near Cusco's temple of the sun.
As the empire expanded, Incas had to take account of the forms of
ritual and cosmological organization that defined the political structure
of the groups they sought to bring under state control. That, certainly, is
one possible explanation for the equivocal standing of the origin stories
emanating from Lake Titicaca rather than Pacaritambo. Whether Incas
revered Titicaca because it was an ancient origin place of their migrating
ancestors or because it was a powerful shrine among the Qullasuyu
peoples they conquered (or in another scenario, simply because it was
the alternative origin story of a noble Inca lineage whose story vied for
preeminence with Pacaritambo-linked groups) is for the moment irrel-
evant. Instead, let us focus on the Titicaca stories to see what parallel-
isms might link these alternative (or consecutive) accounts.
Sarmiento, whose work was carried out as part of Viceroy Toledo's
project to transform Andean society, introduces an account of creation
in Titicacaffiwanaku that multiplies the single creator god Viracocha
into a group of four, reminiscent of the four Ayar brothers of well-
known Pacaritambo origin stories:

The natives of this land say that in the beginning, or before the world
was created, there was one called Viracocha, who created the world
in darkness, without sun, moon, or stars .... And thus he created
men, like those who live now, in his likeness. And they lived in
darkness ....
But among these men the vices of pride and avarice arose, and
they overstepped the precepts of Viracocha Pachayachachi, who,
indignant, confounded and cursed them.
And then some of them were converted into stones and others into
other forms; some were swallowed by the earth and others by the
sea. And over all of them he sent a general flood, which they called
Pathways of Historical Colonization 201

unupachakuti, which means "water that turned the land upside

down." ...
In the same manner the rest of the nations tell fables about how
some from their nation were saved, from whom they trace their
origin and descent ....
It is said how all was destroyed through an unupachakuti deluge.
At this point one should know that Viracocha Pachayachachi, when
he destroyed this land as has been told, kept with him three men, one
of whom was named Taguapaca, so that they should serve him and
help him to raise the new people that were needed in the second age
after the Flood. And this is how he did it:
When the Flood was over and the earth dry, Viracocha determined
to people it a second time, and in order to do so with greater
perfection he decided to raise up luminaries by which to see. To do
so, he went with his servants to a great lake, which is in the Collao,
wherein there is a island called Titicaca.... Viracocha went to that
island and commanded the sun, moon and stars to come out and go
up into the sky to give light to the world. And thus it was ....
Viracocha ordered his servants to do some things, but Taguapaca
disobeyed Viracocha's commandments. And he, angered by
Taguapaca, ordered the other two to take him, to tie him by his
hands and feet, and throw him into a boat in the lake. And thus it
was done. As Taguapaca blasphemed Viracocha for what had been
done to him and threatened to return to take his vengeance, he was
carried away by the waters of the river that empties that lake (el
Desaguadero), and was not seen again for a long time. This done,
Viracocha fabricated in that place a solemn wak'a as a shrine to
signal what he had done and created there. (Sarmiento de Gamboa
1942: 48-54)64
Sarmiento then relates how the remaining three deities traveled
through the other three Inca suyus (Qullasuyu being left to the prodigal
son) to create men. Then Sarmiento pauses to relate an alternate version
of the story, in which Viracocha creates all men at Tiwanaku, sending
nations out from there. These men build the constructions of Tiwanaku
as a home for their god (here Sarmiento may refer to the "staff god" of
Tiwanaku Stelae; see Fig. 5.7), and when they leave, their languages
diverge, as if the ruins of Tiwanaku are some tower of Babel. Drawing
on Betanzos' account of a description of a statue of Viracocha that
Spaniards saw in Urcos, Sarmiento more bluntly describes Viracocha as
a white man of medium height, dressed in a long white robe tied at the
waist, and carrying in his hands a staff and a book (Betanzos reports that
it was said to look like a breviary).
Figure 5.7. The "staff god" of Tiwanaku, as depicted on the gateway of the sun. Is this
the deity who gave rise to Tunupaffaguapaca, and hence to the miraculous pre-
Columbian visitation of the Apostle of the Andes, and finally to the mestizo trader
Ekeko? (Author's sketch of drawing in Moseley 1992: 206, Fig. 94)

202
Pathways of Historical Colonization 203

Returning to his original narration, Sarmiento follows Viracocha to

Cacha (between Titicaca and Cusco), where he is poorly received by
some people there, whom he punishes by calling down from the heavens
a rain of fire. He then disappears across the waters of the Pacific, off the
coast at the northern reaches of Inca territory. Before he goes, he warns
people to beware of false gods who may call themselves Viracocha. Here
Taguapaca makes a final appearance:
Some years after Viracocha left, they say that Taguapaca, who
Viracocha had ordered thrown into Lake Titicaca in the Collao, came
back, and that with others he began to preach that he was Viracocha.
But although initially they held people under their sway, people in the
end knew them to be false, and ridiculed them.
About their creation these barbarous people tell this ridiculous
fable, and they affirm it and believe it as if they had actually seen it
take place. (Ibid., 54-55)65

Synthesized from Sarmiento's informants' stories in 1572, this narra-

tive already bears the marks of efforts (whether by Sarmiento or his
informants, we cannot easily determine) to bring Andean narrative into
line with biblical narrative. First of all, there is Sarmiento's own
preoccupation with locating (a single) deluge at an appropriate chrono-
logical point. But we may also discern an effort to assimilate Viracocha
to both the Christian creator and a pre-Columbian apostle. As in Cieza's
account of the people of Titicaca, Sarmiento portrays him as a
European-like man with the appearance of a priest.
Can we read such accounts as versions of stories told in Qullasuyu? In
the absence of sustained texts of Qulla or Lupaqa or Asanaqi origin
stories, we cannot know how successfully Incas integrated Qullasuyu
peoples' mythic traditions into their own. The only exception to the
Inca-centric rule of thumb is the well-known collection of stories (apart
from catechetic works, the only extant substantial text in a native
Andean language) compiled and written down in Quechua in Huarochiri
by, or under the direction of, the Jesuit priest Francisco de Avila around
the beginning of the seventeenth century. Although Huarochiri is rather
far afield from the peoples of Qullasuyu, reference to it here can serve us
in a variety of ways. First, it serves as an example of the richness of local
traditions that have been lost as a result of chroniclers' generalized
Inca-centric obsessions. More important for the purposes at hand, the
Huarochiri corpus, produced by peoples who had been drawn into the
clutches of the Inca empire before most of Qullasuyu had, evinces a
204 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

surpnsmg degree of autonomy from the Inca accounts. Originary

moments in Huarochiri are local, with scant reference to the Titicaca
area. They illustrate, however, the sort of narrative heterogeneity and
multiplicity of origin places that Inca-centric chroniclers often lamented
for Inca provinces like Qullasuyu, brushed aside so as not to divert
attention from Viracocha and Manco Capac.
Apart from providing accounts of origins differing considerably from
those collected in Cusco, the Huarochiri corpus also admits multiplicity
even within the relatively small district in which the tales were gathered.
Indeed, each ayllu is tied to its own places of creation. Likewise, the
ranking of deity ancestors of neighboring local groups within an
overarching polity is clearly open to question; no collective subject has
achieved narrative hegemony of the sort consolidated in tales told in
Cusco. Rivalry between gods (along the lines of the bad blood between
Taguapaca and Viracocha) is directly linked to rivalries between distinct
ethnic groups who have found together a form of modus vivendi without
a flattening of narrative pasts.
Chroniclers' assertions of narrative heterogeneity in Qullasuyu sug-
gest that a similarly autonomous narrative tradition might have been
found in Qullasuyu, even within a single polity such as the Lupaqa one.
If such narratives were collected, they have not survived. Perhaps,
though, some preconquest and Inca-independent Qullasuyu interpreta-
tions of the past still subsist in those Inca stories pegged to the
Tiwanakuffiticaca axis.
Had an Inca interpretive perspective slighted and demeaned Tagua-
paca as the "least" member of a "gang of four" culture heroes? Or had
Incas simply transformed one of many alternative creation stories into a
unique event of universal significance, creating an appropriate charter
for state encompassment of divergent and autonomous narrative tradi-
tions? Had there been a Qullasuyu narrative tradition in which Tagua-
paca, in other stories called Tunupa, occupied the highest rank? We
cannot answer such questions.
Let us see, however, how a Qullasuyu mythic tradition, or at least a
Qulla-centric reading of an Inca myth, might have survived embedded
within the accounts of Taguapacaffunupa: Two early-seventeenth-
century writers contest the interpretative stance that made Taguapaca an
adequate simulacrum of the devil. Transforming tricksterish ways into
miraculous powers, he radically transforms his struggles with other
mythical heroes when he shifts from a diabolic role to an angelic one. On
the surface, one might not have expected our two revisionist authors, the
Pathways of Historical Colonization 205

priest Ramos Gavil£m and the indigenous cacique Joan de Santa Cruz
Pachacuti Yamqui, to have shared the same interpretive ground. But the
seventeenth century was an age of not only idolatry extirpators but also
progressive approximations of Andean and Christian ways of under-
standing. Shared participation in colonizing discourse motivated both
priest and parishioner to seek new narrative theorizations of the past
that led to, made sense of, and even justified the manifold tactics and
auxiliary colonial impositions that were employed to facilitate conver-
Sion.
For both the cleric Ramos Gavilan and the Christianized Qulla noble
Pachacuti Yamqui, Taguapacaffunupa's tricksterish rebelliousness is no
longer evidence of diabolic associations, but of his saintliness. In both
accounts, he has absorbed the Christian associations of Sarmiento's
Viracocha in the process of being assimilated to Santo Tomas or San
Bartolome as a pre-Spanish evangelizer of indians. Bouysse-Cassagne
(1987) and Gisbert (1980), who have studied these stories at length,66
hold that in spite of the stories' manifest Christianization we can
nonetheless discover in them some features of Qullasuyu cosmology, if
not of cosmogeny. Bouysse-Cassagne and Gisbert bring a variety of
etymological associations and lexicological sources to play in an effort to
disentangle Taguapacaffunupa, as an Altiplano deity, from the Inca
creation synthesis of early chronicles and the Christian synthesis of later
ones. (And now see Bouysse-Cassagne's important reanalysis of these
myths' derivation from Christian hagiography [In Press]. For yet another
perspective and a modern Tunupa tale, see Wachtel 1990.)
Rather than to attempt to peel away the "foreign and imposed"
characteristics of Gavilan's or Pachacuti Yamqui's hero trickster so as to
reveal the pre-Columbian figure, my aim is to use their accounts to
discover a creative moment of intercultural production. We will find that
both authors use a tale of Tunupa in the guise of Christian apostle in
order to carry out their own creative memory work. As they follow the
creative journey of an Andean-Christian martyr whose activities funda-
mentally transform a prior people and bring a new order into existence,
they conjoin two "chronotopic" traditions (of stories in which full
human agency is achieved through a trans formative journey in space and
time) and produce a third, intercultural one, capable of accounting for
key features of the colonial order. In this conjoint tradition, the insepa-
rability of "Andean" and "Christian" narratives is central, since clarify-
ing the relationship between them, in particular their temporal or
historical relationship, is what the story is all about. The stories of
206 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

Ramos Gavilan and Pachacuti Yamqui also, of course, help to motivate

subsequent pilgrimage journeys in imitation of the storied "first jour-
ney." These too, as we shall see, were means to carry out work in social
memory to produce a kind of human agency capable of flourishing under
colonial conditions; pilgrimages to Copacabana and other sites of
miraculous interfaces between pre-Columbian and Christian worlds
reenact an originary narration of the colonial relationship. Work in
intercultural social memory is carried out when recapitulating mythic
journeys as well as when historicizing them.

CHRISTIANIZING QULLASUYU WANDERERS: TUNUPA AS MARTYRED APOSTLE

Because accounts of the Qullasuyu figure of Tunupa serve as a bridge

between the Inca-centric creation stories collected and systematized by
Sarmiento and the K'ulta story of Tatala's (Jesucristo's) destruction of
the Supay-Chullpas, it is worth our while to linger briefly on the
combined Spanish and indigenous effort to discover in Andean myth an
account of the Andes' evangelization.
Fray Alonso Ramos Gavilan is best known as the author of the 1621
work (republished in La Paz in 1976) Historia de Nuestra Senora de
Copacabana. Ramos Gavilan endeavors throughout the book to spread
the fame of the miraculous image whose pilgrimage shrine he served,
beginning with the destruction of the pagan idol which once stood where
the Virgin's temple was erected, and the image's first miracle, the journey
from a workshop in Potosi to the spot she selected for herself.
After a long discourse on the disciples' efforts to spread the good
news throughout the world, Ramos Gavilan suggests that we should
assume that they also reached Peru .
. . . for there is among the indians a story very consonant with this,
of having seen a new sort of man, never before known, who
performed great miracles and marvels. And as some very old indians
affirm, they gave him the name Tunupa, which is the same as saying
great Sage and Lord (Matt. 9). And because of his preaching, that
glorious saint was persecuted and finally martyred in the following
manner. (Ramos Gavihin 1976: 29)67
Here Ramos Gavilan describes this disciple's destruction by fire of
Cacha, and relates how the disciple, who wanted to destroy the famous
altar and shrine of the Qullas on the island of Titicaca, was set down
there from the sky, as if an angel had lifted him up and set him back
down by the hair. He arrived during a great fiesta at the shrine of the sun,
and began tirelessly preaching against the Qullas' sacrifices. Finally,
Pathways of Historical Colonization 207

... the indians were irritated to such a degree that they cruelly
impaled him, running him through from head to foot with a pole
that they call chonta, made of palm, of a sort that these indians until
this day use in warfare as a not little offensive weapon. They have
used this form of martyrdom other times as well, as in the case of
what they did to the sainted fray Diego Ortiz of the Order of Our
Father San Agustin ....
After he was dead, they put the saintly disciple on a balsa [a reed
boat] and threw it into the great lake Titicaca, where it was subject
to the providence not of wind or of wave, but of heaven. The old
ones say that a violent wind blew the boat and carried it as if by sail
and oar, with such velocity that it was cause for wonder. And thus it
made land at Chacamarca, where the Desaguadero River, which did
not exist before, is now. The balsa's prow made an opening sufficient
for the waters to run, and continued sailing on the waters all the way
to Aullagas, where as I have said, the waters disappear into the
bowels of the earth. And there, they say, the sainted body remained,
and each year on one of the holy days, at that time at least, there was
seen there a very fresh and green palm, although others say that the
palm was seen on a small isle that the Desaguadero River makes near
the coast of Chile.... Everything is possible on God's earth, but one
may still doubt. What I can affirm is having heard of old indians
from Copacabana, and especially of one who today serves in the
convent to teach reading and singing to the boys of the town, so as
to serve the choir and the Holy Virgin, that he heard his ancestors
tell that, on that island of Titicaca, the footprints of Tunupa, as they
called the glorious saint, are miraculously preserved in the stone.
(Ibid., 30-32)68

Of course, Ramos Gavilan was a priest, and his account falls squarely
within his history of the miraculous Virgin of Copacabana. One would
not expect him to relate a Tunupa tale that fails to sanctify the ground on
which his temple was built or to prefigure the miracles of the virgin that
is today Bolivia's patron saint. This concern leads some analysts to
privilege the myth texts offered by the Qulla native author Pachacuti
Yamqui, also a favorite source of information on Inca cosmology. It is
true that his text is unusually full of native expression missing from the
works of Spanish chroniclers. But a close reading of his account of
Tunupa reveals another agenda, where temporal priority is tied not only
to the problem of sorting out relations between Qullas and Incas, or
Qullas and Pukinas/Urus, but also to the problem of Andeans' relation-
ship to Christianity.
Himself a convert to Christianity, Pachacuti Yamqui strives in his
1613 text to demonstrate the essential Christianity of pre-Columbian
208 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

Andeans by finding the word of God prefigured in ancestral myth. 69

Thus during his purunpacha period, during a time of presolar darkness,
the beings of that age, called hapinunus (whom Pachacuti Yamqui
glosses as demonios), suddenly begin shrieking, "We are doomed!"
whereupon they disappear. "By this," adds Pachacuti Yamqui, "we
understand that the demons were defeated by Jesus Christ Our Lord
when he was on the cross at Calvary Hill" (Pachacuti Yamqui 1968:
282).
Sometime later, continues Pachacuti Yamqui, an old bearded man of
medium height, wearing long shirts and carrying a book, arrived in
Tawantinsuyu. Everywhere he went he addressed all as sons and daugh-
ters, everywhere speaking the language of natives even better than they.
He also performed miracles. He cured the sick by touch alone, and
without taking any payment or showing interest in material wealth.
"They called him Tonapa Viracochampacachan. Must he then not be the
glorious apostle Santo Tomas?" (ibid.).
Coming first to the town of a cacique called Apotampo, Pachacuti
Yamqui's Tunupa arrived, very tired, during a festival. The townspeople
paid him scarce attention, but fortunately Apotampo treated him well.
As a result, Tunupa granted to Aputampu ("lord of the tambo") a staff,
through which he taught them almost all of God's commandments,
lacking only the name of the Lord our God and his son Jesus Christ.
Thus smiling benignly upon the Incas, Pac hac uti Yamqui's Tunupa
struck down the inhabitants of towns that did not receive him well. In
Yamquesupa, his preaching was unwelcome, and the townspeople vitu-
perated him and ejected him from town in his long shirt, book in hand.
Tunupa responded by drowning the town beneath a lake. As we've seen,
upon the people of Cacha, worshipers of an idol he hated, he visited a
scorching fire, "and until this day there are signs of that terrible miracle"
(ibid.). In other places, such as Pucara, he turned his enemies into stone.
In a place called Caravaya, Tunupa made a very large cross and
carried it on his shoulders to a hill near Carabuco (a town on the
northeast side of the lake, where stories of the miraculous cross are still
told), and there he preached loudly and shed tears. As a lesson to the
people of Carabuco, he made their idol fly like the wind, until it landed,
head down and weeping, on a desolate and unpopulated high plain. So
the people jailed him and sentenced him to a cruel death. At dawn, with
the help of a beautiful slave, he escaped from Carabuco by laying his
blanket upon the water. With his new companion he floated away on the
blanket, reaching the island of Titicaca. Later, he passed southwards
Pathways of Historical Colonization 209

past Tiquina and headed down the Chacamarca River (known by others
and still today as the Desaguadero). When he reached Tiwanaku, he
found the people engaged in drunken dances, and he preached to them.
They failed to respond, and as he left that place, all the people who had
been dancing were turned into stone, and one can still see them there.
Then he continued until he reached the sea (and from there through the
straits until he reached the other sea)?O
Notice that Pachacuti Yamqui's Tunupa, rather than being impaled by
a palm stave, gives a staff to the Incas, presumably the one which, where
it sank easily into the earth, marked the Inca's promised land of Cusco.
And rather than sailing in a strong wind after his martyrdom, he uses the
wind to banish pagan idols.71 The tricksterish behavior that marked
earlier Tunupas or Qullasuyu Viracochas as prefigurations of the devil
has been converted into the performance of godly miracles, and his
suffering at the hands of Qullas, into an exemplary Christian martyr-
dom.
For both Ramos Gavilan and Pachacuti Yamqui, Tunupa is associated
with a stave or staff: He is impaled by it in one account; in the other he
gives the staff to the first Inca, who impales the earth with it and thereby
founds the Inca empire. As Urbano (1981: xxx) has noted, his very name
also conveys an association with what one might call a vegetable axis. In
sixteenth-century Aymara, tunu signified the root of large plants and
trees (Bertonio 1984), a large-scale variety of sap"i, the root of smaller
plants. Just so, when K'ulta people pour libations, the liquid is thought
to travel to the beings to which it is dedicated, through underground
pathways that begin in the sap''i, the root, of each altar. In some Aymara
dialects, "tunu achachi" refers to the most distant male ancestor recalled
when pouring libations to the dead, as it were, the "root of the lineage."
Naturally Tunupa's miracles (including the erection of a cross in
Carabuco, on the shores of Lake Titicaca) and his subsequent martyr-
dom at the hands of the natives who were deaf to his preaching (after
which he floats downriver) take on new significance as prefigurations of
the actions taken during Pachacuti Yamqui's day by Spanish extirpators
of idolatry. In effect, Pachacuti Yamqui's act of writing, like that by
Guaman Poma and the scribe who recorded, reordered, and commented
upon the myth corpus of Huarochiri, has frozen in time an act of mental
gymnastics, an effort by a convert to reinterpret the historical conscious-
ness carried by mythic narrative so that it could account not only for
relationships among Andean groups through the conflicting agencies of
their gods, but also for the now unavoidable and just as hierarchized
 APOSTOL

Figure 5.8. Guaman Poma's San Bartolome-Tunupa. The wording at the top reads
"Apostol S. Bartolome." The label on the cross reads "Santa Crus de Carabuco." The note
above the kneeling indian reads "Anti Uira Cocha, Colla. Fue bautizado este yndio" (note:
resembles item in baptismal register). The wording at the bottom of the page reads "En la

210
Pathways of Historical Colonization 211

relationship between Andeans and Spaniards. To do so required that

they go beyond the importation of Christ into their hearts, as the priests
urged, and import him into their pasts.
Just so did Guaman Poma locate the miraculous events of Cacha and
the origin of the cross of Carabuco in the distant Inca past, identifying
the pre-Columbian apostle as San Bartolome. (See Fig. 5.8.) By estab-
lishing and authorizing shrines such as the miraculous cross of Carabuco
and the temple of the Virgin of Copacabana, colonial priests actually
fostered a new mythic synthesis focused once again on Tiwanakul
Titicaca. In the end, and still today, this ancient axis mundi, home to the
ruins of civilization past, serves as a vanishing point of cultural and
linguistic difference and, indeed, of time itself: recall how the pretempo-
ral age of darkness ends there with the emergence of a solar clock.
The myths we have surveyed share numerous themes and features.
Creative culture-heroes fan out from a central origin point to bring forth
multiple ancestors throughout Andean territory from rocks, springs, and
hills that thereafter become conduits through which human societies
have access to the gods and powers of initial times. The above- as well as
below-ground paths through which creators and creation have flowed
remain in the storytellers' world as icons of the relationship among
founding agencies. As such, they become paths or vectors through which
to affirm the identities received as differentia of clothing, language, and

Figure 5.8. (Continued)

provincia del Collao, de como se quemo el pueblo de Cacha. De 1570 anos de la santa
cruz." (Guaman Poma locates the event 1,570 years before his present, 1612-13, or in the
year 40 [see Guaman Poma de Ayala 1980: 1132 n. 92.2].)
Here Guaman Poma (1980: 72) depicts the "apostle of Jesus Christ" San Bartolome
with the pre-Columbian cross of Carabuco. The Qullasuyu apostle faces an indian
sorcerer, Anti. In the accompanying text, Guaman Poma reports how San Bartolome, after
his destruction by fire of Cacha, entered a cave to avoid the cold. Anti habitually consulted
his idol there. But with San Bartolome's arrival, the cave demon fell silent. Later, the
demon appeared in Anti's dreams, ordering him to avoid the cave. San Bartolome
explained all to Anti, went with him to the cave, and exiled the demon. Then Anti was
baptized as Anti Vira Cocha (recalling one of the four Viracochas of Tiwanaku). In
memory of this miracle, San Bartolome left the cross of Carabuco. In this left hand the
saint holds a knife, symbol of his martyrdom, having been flayed alive for refusing to
abjure Christianity. The cave, contest with the devil, and flaying of San Bartolome are
central today to Potosi's major pilgrimage festival.
Elsewhere Guaman Poma (1980: 606) depicts the saint carrying his own flayed hide.
There he argues that the Peruvian miracles of San Bartolome, the Carabuco cross,
Santiago, and Santa Maria de Pena de Francia should be celebrated as major holy days.
(From Guaman Poma de Ayala 1980: 73)
212 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

ancestors, and to become reassociated with divinity, through human

pilgrimage and through the unseen underworld movement of the sub-
stances of sacrifice.
Around the south end of Lake Poopo, at the end of the aquatic axis
created by a floating Tunupa, the name still survives in local memory.
While the people of K'ulta had not heard of him, he is better known
among the descendants of the Killaka and Awllaka. Tunupa has also
survived in toponymy. At the extreme south of the territory of the
diarchy known as Awllaka-Urukilla, there is a mountain peak bearing
the name Tunupa, rising precisely where the waters flowing southeast-
wards from Titicaca disappear onto the immense salt flats of Uyuni.
Perhaps in the area one cannot find full-blown tales of a Tunupa
arising from Titicaca to sojourn southwards, but we shall see in part 3
that elements of the Christianized Tunupa tale have been locally recast,
placing his origin in an unknown place far to the east and identifying
him, not as an apostle, but as Christ himself. It would be a grave mistake
to take contemporary myths for rote copies of pre-Columbian or even
early colonial ones. Like all forms of social memory, the value of mythic
narrative lies in its adequacy as an account of the origins of contempo-
rary life-ways. Myths of origin must change when the social forms they
account for, forms that structure the historical consciousness of their
tellers, have changed. And in midcolonial days, Titicacaffiwanaku, like
the Inca "world navel" of Cusco, was displaced by other destinations in
Andeans' actual and imaginary itineraries. Aymara-speaking Andeans
called Tiwanaku taypi q' ala, the "stone in the center," from which the
miraculous image of Copacabana (served by Ramos Gavilan and revered
by Pac hac uti Yamqui) had sojourned to displace the Inca shrine of
Titicaca (site of Tunupa's origin). Although the Titicaca site of Tunupa's
departure and Copacabana's shrine would remain an important Andean
intercultural pilgrimage site, their new taypi q'ala, destination of fre-
quent and transformative journeys, was to be the frigid silver-mining
town of Potosi. And for his part, Tunupa was to be displaced in Andean
consciousness by the traveling cultural interloper named Ekeko, for
whom Potosi was a lucrative marketplace. 72
 Chapter Six

Colonial Relandscaping of
Andean Social Memory

FROM NEGOTIATED TOLERATION TO HETERODOX SYNTHESIS AND

COUNTER-REFORMATION RESPONSE

Both Spaniards and Andeans may have likened Tunupa or Viracocha to

a Christian apostle, but neither was completely reducible to Santo Tomas
or San Bartolome. As long as the full range of significance of the stories
about European apostles and Andean creator deities remained inacces-
sible to indians and Spaniards, the cross-cultural equivalences estab-
lished in hybrid stories told by a Pachacuti Yamqui, a Guaman Poma, or
a Ramos Gavilan maintained cultural difference even while bridging it.
The imbalance of power in the discourse of colonialism, which autho-
rized Spaniards and de-authorized indians, always read the indian back
into the Andean, and did so most insistently to the most cross-culturally
eloquent Andeans. This was because, of all indians, the most Hispanized
and Christian ones presented the greatest danger to the colonial order,
which would collapse should the contrast between Spaniard and indian
fade away.
By the late sixteenth century, those demoralized indians who had
survived three-quarters of a century of epidemic disease, rampant
violence, and death in their midst were also subjected to ever more
thorough-going miss ionizing and "civilizational" strategies, and they
must increasingly have come to regard colonial rule as inevitable. But in
spite of ever more efficient means of Spanish and priestly surveillance,
making it more difficult for indians to practice techniques of resistance,
to find clandestine corners in which to author themselves in a language

213
214 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

of practice unknown to Spaniards, the process of intercultural transla-

tion remained a two-way street. Indians were taught abbreviated forms
of Christian liturgy and biblical history through a "missionary Quechua
or Aymara," by which partly fluent priests translated "San Bartolome"
into "Tunupa," "the devil" into "supay," "hell" into "manxa-pacha." But
Andeans, most of whom had little grasp of the Castilian language (much
less Latin) and no access to their priests' full texts, were free to interpret
San Bartolome as Tunupa, the devil as supay, and hell as manxa-pacha,
endowing each with a range of significance that differed from the
Spanish gloss.
Colonialism created metaphoric equivalences through which both
Spaniard and indian could gloss a limited range of one another's cultural
forms, and with metaphor came license of poetic interpretation. Neither
Spaniard nor indian could ignore the equivalences, once established. And
indians' interpretive license expired when they usurped the priests'
public pulpits and the hearing rooms of colonial courts to declaim
interpretations at odds with orthodoxy.
In this chapter I explore the creative tension, often located precisely in
a cross-cultural arena of social memory, that has unfolded over roughly
four centuries of the power-laden relationship between Spaniards and
indians, and between aristocrats and plebeians within (and across)
Spanish and indian societies. My story moves in fits and starts, concen-
trating on moments of the greatest upheaval and change. The first of
those moments is the repression of the taqui oncoy movement in the late
1560s and early 1570s, a time when the last vestiges of rebel Inca
activity in Vileabamba also came to an end. That moment of repression,
signaling a shift in Spanish attitudes towards the "Andean content" of
colonial practice, coincided with the arrival of the reformist Viceroy
Francisco de Toledo, who brought a sea change to the strategies
employed by the Crown to rule over both colonizing Spaniards and
colonized indians.
I then pursue a series of case studies in a hopscotch between the
sixteenth and twentieth centuries. For the mid- and late seventeenth
century, I query the impact of the civilizational practices that Toledo had
implemented, and new ones destined to transform indians' relationship
to the land. I suggest that the combined effects of the Counter-
Reformation Church and the routines of life within Toledan-era resettle-
ment towns had brought about a simultaneous "destructuration" (Wach-
tel 1973) and "restructuration" of indigenous life, leading not to
"acculturation" but to new kinds of "indigenous" cultures at various
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 215

cultural frontiers of the colonial world. Jumping ahead a century, I then

examine the indigenous rebellions of the 1770s and 1780s for evidence
of the full flowering of a colonial interculture, one which made little
room for a hereditary native elite. The creative interface in which
collective understandings of life were produced, I argue, had by this date
shifted definitively from collective practice performed at the cacique's
behest, to the saints' festivals and rotative "commoner" councils within
Toledo's resettlement towns. Leaping into the postindependence period,
I then show how little changed in the early years of the republic, and
proceed to describe the impact of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-
century liberalism and its version of a civilizational program based on
privatized land tenure and policies aimed towards abolishing collective
ownership and town council rights. These had been a hallmark not only
of colonial indian society but also of sixteenth- to nineteenth-century
Castile, Spaniards' model of "civilization." I conclude the chapter with
attention to another moment of revolution and rapid change, the period
of 1952 to the present, in which old liberal privatization schemes
combined with a renewed vitality of town-based communitarian rights
have led to ever-increasing atomization of old collective identities,
producing ever-smaller new towns (linked to the state as canton capitals)
on the model of Toledo's sixteenth-century Castilian-style resettlement
town.
In my survey of a series of significant moments between the 1560s and
the present, my goal is always to understand the implications of
transformed social conditions for the reconstruction of the past, which is
reborn in ever-shifting forms to help account for ever-shifting realities of
life. The first great shift, of course, was the conquest itself and the
destruction of the idols, ceque systems, and orderly state-regulated
rhythms of sacrifice, to which so much of "political-economic" activity
had been oriented. The twilight of the Andean idols also coincided,
however, with implementation of certain draconian Toledan policies.
For us they are of paramount importance, since (among other things,
such as the promotion of Philip II's absolutist state) they did no less than
mandate the destruction of Andean social memory and its replacement
with other habits of life, another religion, and another "universal" past.

Taqui Oncoy
The late 1550s and early 1560s saw the tightening of the Spanish
colonial grip on Andean ways of life. The visitas of the Gascan tasa
commission had taken account of those life-ways and had begun the
216 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

process of their systematic transformation. Encomenderos were now

more stringently enjoined to send priests to their indians and to
guarantee effective evangelization. Polo's 1559 investigation and de-
struction of Cusco wak'as and mummies signaled the beginning of
similar efforts by zealous priests throughout the countryside.
For a time, pecuniary interest in some cases outweighed the drive to
extirpate idolatries and erase Andean memory: "At the beginning of the
seventeenth century, a priest overheard a corregidor say that he would
not get involved in [caciques'] business, only please them. As long as
they provided him with indians, they could live according to any law
they liked."t
Accusations that priests and colonial officials permitted idolatries,
drunkenness, and other sins in exchange for satisfaction of their eco-
nomic interests are a relative commonplace in colonial archives (see also
Stern 1982; A. Acosta 1987). So long as there were priests more interested
in profiting from the sale of communion wine than in ensuring that
indians fully benefited from the Eucharist, caciques could maintain some
control over how they levied labor and in what form they collected
tributes, as well as control over a larger "clandestine" space for public
libations, taquies, and wak'a cult. But during the period in question,
Spaniards increasingly took note of the subtle means by which Andeans
kept alive the memory of their idolatrous past. While corregidor of Cusco,
Polo had not only investigated and destroyed the ceque system but also
outlawed "public and solemn drinking sessions." He nevertheless permit-
ted such drinking "within private houses" (Acosta, quoted in Saignes
1993: 48). This was precisely the opposite of the Inca policy. No doubt
Polo's policy, which was seconded by Matienzo (1967: 80), resulted from
Spanish views of public drunkenness. It also, however, responded to
Spanish conclusions about the linkage between drinking and idolatry.
"They drink, dance, and sing all at the same time," Cieza had noted (1984:
84). As Luis Capoche, administrator in Potosi, wrote in 1585: "They are
accustomed to drinking in public. Many men and women gather together
to carry out great dances, in which they practice the old rites and cer-
emonies, bringing to memory through their songs the gentile past" (Ca-
poche 1959: 141). Acosta condemned this predilection for drunkenness
by referring to an ancient Mediterranean dictum: "Drunkenness ... leads
one to forget all things and, as Pliny says, is the death of memory." It
would appear that Acosta disapproved Andean drinking in order to save
their memories. But a short while later in the same account, Acosta
contradicts Pliny, and suggests that drinking might be prohibited in order
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 217

to erase memory rather than to preserve it. "They now scarcely conserve
any of their old idolatry, apart from the occasion of these solemn drinking
and dancing sessions ... in which in an orderly way they mix epic song
[cantares] with wine" (Acosta, quoted in Sa ignes 1993: 59).
In public gatherings where drink, dance, and song all intervened, ca-
ciques had been able to maintain the social memory that had undergirded
their authority and given form to society, even in the absence of idols and
mummies. Now, however, that nexus had been discovered by the Span-
iards, and public space claimed exclusively for Christian performances.
And on top of all this, the early 1560s' perpetuity question (during which
Polo and Santo Tomas had traveled the countryside explaining perpetuity
and, it seems, investigating ceque systems), foregrounded for indians just
what was at stake in continued submission to Spanish demands.
Spanish encomenderos had banded together to offer the king a huge
payment if he would grant them perpetual title to their indian vassals
and, yet more, give them title to land and civil and criminal jurisdiction
that Spanish landed nobles enjoyed back in Castile. No doubt with an
eye to his fiscal deficits, Philip II was eager to accept, but the Council of
the Indies induced him to investigate further the potential consequences
and to seek alternatives. 2 It was for this reason that Polo and Santo
Tomas traveled the land, explaining to indian caciques the pros and cons
of the encomenderos' perpetuity proposal. In Cusco in 1561, a delegate
from Santo Tomas outlined the proposal in the most alarming terms,
suggesting to the caciques that they themselves, along with their wives,
indian subjects, lands, and privileges, were to be sold to Spaniards, like
the merchandise commodities Andeans were only just learning about.
Perhaps, they would be branded on the face like chattel slaves (AGI,
Justicia 434, Pieza 1, January 23, 1563, fol. 9v). On hearing such things,
said don Pedro Ochatoma, cacique of the town of Puna Quiguar, "many
indians wept, and this witness wept, understanding that it would have to
be thus ... [that] now that I was of God they should sell me" (ibid., 25r).
According to don Juan Guancoyro, cacique of Sallay in the en-
comienda of Garcia de Melo, " ... as the said indians heard this, many of
them began to weep and to cry out and say that neither before nor after
the Inca, never have they been sold; how is it that now they were to be
sold, being neither coca nor meat? And thus all gave power of attorney
[to petition the king]" (ibid., 17v).3
Don Pedro Comsa offered his appreciation of the events: " ... the said
indians felt it deeply and some caciques said that they would first throw
themselves into the rivers, or leap from cliffs, before being branded on
218 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

the face; in the time of Guayna Capac they had never been slaves. Why
should they now, being vassals of the king?" (ibid., 23r).4 The experience
induced them to collect funds to produce a counterproposal, an even
larger cash offering to the king to abolish encomienda.
The possibility of perpetual encomienda disturbed Spaniards as well
as indians. The anticipation that all land and indian labor might soon be
under the permanent control of a new landed aristocracy led some of the
Spaniards in Cusco who lacked encomiendas, along with mestizos and
even Inca elites who were not subject to encomienda,s to a panic reaction
of their own. While the caciques who had assembled to hear the perpe-
tuity arguments signed petitions to the king and returned to their far-flung
rural districts, the urban rabble (as citizen-encomenderos sometimes re-
ferred to the rest of the urban population) began to stir. Fearful of being
left without resources, they reacted to the idea of perpetual encomienda
with a revolutionary cry. Thus Cusco in 1561 saw an abortive anti-
aristocratic revolt "in the name of liberty, and to the shout of comu-
nidades." Such terms, reminiscent of the rebellion of the commoner-led
Spanish towns against nobles and Charles V in 1520-21, led Crown
officials to respond swiftly and harshly (AGI, Justica 434, Pieza 1, fols.
2v-3r).
During the early 1560s caciques from many Peruvian provinces re-
sponded to end-of-an-era fears raised by the perpetuity proposal by circu-
lating petitions. But not all Andeans were assuaged by sending paper to the
state's archive. For at about the same time, Spanish priests discovered in the
countryside a very different response, a social movement called taqui on-
coy. 6 It has been thoroughly studied by many scholars, beginning with a
brilliant analysis by Steve J. Stern (1982: 51-71)? Here I draw on such
analyses in order to highlight certain features that show how taqui oncoy
serves as a bridge not only backward to pre-Columbian Andean realities
but also forward to more resolutely Christian forms of Andean contestation
of colonialism. Writing about 1573, Cristobal de Molina provided a suc-
cinct restatement of the matter based on an eyewitness account:
About ten years ago, more or less, there was an irony among the
indians of this land, which took the form of a song [canto], called
taqui oncoy. Since the first person to see the said irony or idolatry
was one Luis de Olivera, cleric presbiter, who at the time was priest
of the repartimiento of Parinacocha, in the bishopric of Cusco, he
puts down here the way that they did it and why:
In the province of Parinacocha, of the bishopric of Cusco, the said
Luis de Olivera, vicar of the province, understood that not only
there, but in all the other provinces and cities of Chuquisaca, La Paz,
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 219

Cusco, Huamanga, and even Lima and Arequipa, the majority of

indians had fallen into great apostasies, separating themselves from
the Catholic faith that they had received, in order to return to the
idolatry they had practiced in the days of their infidelity. It was not
possible to discover who had started this business, but it is suspected
and assumed that the inventors were sorcerers kept in Vileabamba by
the rebel Incas .... (Molina 1989: 129)8
Now, "taqui oncoy" is a compound term which is not glossed in
surviving sources by its actual practitioners. "Oncoy" refers to the
constellation of stars known as the Pleiades, which for Andeans repre-
sented storehouses. "Oncoy" also seems to have meant "sickness." We
have already encountered the term "taqui," which meant at one and the
same time "to dance and sing." Literally, then, "taqui oncoy" may have
meant "song-dance of sickness," or "song-dance of the Pleiades." But
while examination of the social movement called taqui oncoy reveal that
widespread epidemic disease may have been an important factor in
motivating the movement, its goals were not exclusively to find a cure
for Andeans' bodily ailments. Rather, taqui oncoy practitioners rejected
Spanish admonitions to cease all customary practice, and insisted on
performing again the song-dances called taquies, in which, through
celebratory song and dance (and also libations and sacrifices), the deeds
of gods and ancestors were recalled and their significance for the present
and future made patent. Taqui oncoy was, then, a struggle over memory.
It was a war of the gods, yes, but also a battle of histories.
So the native "dogmatizers" of this apostasy (suppressed by the
decisive extirpation campaign of Cristobal de Albornoz, in which
Guaman Poma served as faithful interpreter) danced and sang and strove
to recall the pre-Columbian past to living memory. But many of the
wak'as, as physical entities, had been destroyed and ancestral mummies
burned by activist priests or administrators like Polo. How then to bring
the wak'as back into this world? Taqui oncoy principals preached that,
while idols had been destroyed, the wak'as themselves continued to float
in the air as insubstantial but hungry and vengeful presences. So in 1565,
... there were diverse apostasies in various provinces. Some danced,
suggesting that the wak'a had entered their body; others trembled to
the same end, suggesting the same thing; still others walled
themselves into their houses with stones and gave out great laments;
some threw themselves off cliffs, dashing themselves to pieces; yet
others jumped into rivers, offering themselves to the wak'as. All this
until Our Lord, through his mercy, was served to enlighten these
miserable people, so that those of them who were left could see the
220 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

foolishness of what had been preached to them. And now they

believe, when they see the Inca [Tupac Amaru] dead, and Vileabamba
Christianized, that none of that could have happened. Instead,
everything is to the contrary. (Ibid., 132)9
The suicidal desperation of the adherents of taqui oncoy certainly
resembles that of the caciques to whom perpetuity was explained in
Cusco just prior to the taqui oncoy events. But the sacrificial nature of
these acts made them, not just efforts to escape from a fate worse than
death, but desperate measures to bring the wak'as back to life. We know
that mitimas, deprived of the wak'as of their homeland, could recon-
struct them in their adoptive home by clothing any stone in a fragment
of the original wak'as' cumbi clothing (Alborn6z 1989: 171). Here,
however, there is a difference. Believers thought that disembodied wak'a
spirits might help Andeans solve worldly problems by becoming re-
embodied within exemplary humans. to That fact, and the extirpation
report that some devotees took the names of Mary and Mary Magdalen,
has led some analysts to conclude that Christian preaching, which had
sought to defeat wak'a superstitions by differentiating between the
world of creation and that of divine spirit, had provided Andeans with a
solution to their own spiritual crisis. And that solution was to grasp hold
of the techniques of social memory, to retake control over what was to
be forgotten and what remembered. Yet doing so in the 1560s, by which
time much of the imperial past had been erased, required a good deal of
innovation. Increasingly, elements of Christian theology and Spanish
mnemotechnics would become useful tools in Andeans' efforts to hold
back the dark tide of enforced colonial amnesia.
Crises and indigenous solutions were also being felt in the day's
largest urban center, the silver-mining town of Potosi. In 1565 the city
council of Potosi sought to abolish the importation of mill-ground flour
to stem the flow from chicha jars. Introducing the theme, the corregidor
Gaspar de Saldana noted,
... it is public and notorious ... that ... [the importation of] maize
flour has caused among the indians and naturales who reside in this
villa great drunkenness, since it is from ground corn flour that they
make the asua [chicha] that they drink, they make much more than
they used to, giving them occasion to drink much more than before,
which is a vice to which they are very susceptible. They are drunk
almost all the week, from which results much incest and other sins that
they commit, even homicides, in great disservice of Our Lord and your
majesty, and a great impediment to their conversion and to the Christian
doctrine that is preached to them, and it impedes the mine labor for
which they came here.... (AGI, Charcas 32, item 12, fo!' 92r)11
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 221

In their testimony, several priests of Potosi's indian parishes waxed

eloquent on the evils of drink. The very reverend father Frair Alonso
Trueno, provincial of Potosi's Dominican community, repeated all the
evils referred to above and added more:
· .. many die from their drunkenness and commit other homicides
and deaths and hang themselves, and in particular this witness is
aware of six indians that died from their drinking, losing their speech
and dying naturally, and many others 193rl lose their speech by the
power of medicines and drinks [bebedifosj that have been given to
them, and after having been three or four days without speech have
been made to return to themselves. And when drinking I have seen
them get up and vomit, and then return to their drink, and one time
when I tried to make them stop drinking they wanted to kill me ....
This witness knows and has seen that it is the principal impediment
to their conversion and Christian indoctrination, because every time
they are drunk they commit and carry out their old idolatries and
rites .... (Ibid, 92v-93r)12

The canon Juan de Villa Miera, who for several years was priest and
vicar of the parish of the Qarankas in Potosi, further specifies the
idolatries tied to drunkenness:
· .. This witness ... has seen the indians who reside there, especially
in the doctrina of the Carangas over which this witness had charge as
vicar, carry out many and great drunken binges ... and it seems to
this witness that the said drunkenness is an impediment to their
conversion and indoctrination, and he has heard from some priests
who understand 193vl the tongue and have long been in this land
that, when the indians are drunk in their drinking binges and taquies,
they commit idolatries and other rites to the offense of God Our
Lord .... (Ibid., 93r-93v)13

The very reverend father and canon Cuellar de Ocampo adds more:
· .. [They] make sacrifices in diverse ways to their wak'as, and have
many other kinds of sorcery, confessing with their confessors, sending
cachas to the wak'as hanobicamayos [sic: jampi kamayuqs?j, and
contradicting Christian doctrine. And they practice many other rites
and ceremonies and sins, such as women taking one another, and
committing various sins of incest, and carrying out the fiestas of
capse pacxi, and other lesser [festivals] that they celebrate during all
the months of the year.... (Ibid., 93v)14

So in the same period that taqui oncoy was in progress in Huamanga,

the indians of Potosi continued to carry out taquies and libation sessions
222 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

dedicated to wak'as and sacred moments in the pre-Columbian calendar.

Given the irregular Spanish effort to represent Quechua and Aymara
phonology in Spanish characters, it is difficult to say just what "capse
pacxi" might be, but the most likely possibility is sapsi paxsi, "moon" of
the "community fields." Cachas, or offerings, sent to wak'as called jampi
kamayuqs (caretakers of medicine) suggest that Potosi indians, like taqui
oncoy practitioners, sought a cure for the ills that ailed them. And
references to medicines and bebedir,:os that caused several days of
speechlessness suggest that taqui oncoy's hallucinogen (the cactus called
achuma) was also being used. One might have expected theologians to
take issue with the loosening of constraint on the imagination produced
by all these drinks and medicines, facilitating the devil's work rather
than mine owners'. But all the priest witnesses come back in their
testimony to the issue of laziness raised by the corregidor. In this colonial
context, as Sa ignes (1993) noted, the operative triumvirate is drunken-
ness, idolatry, and avoidance of labor.
Elsewhere, in Parinacocha, Andeans were in the process of developing
a new interpretation of the nefarious means and goals of the Spanish
colonial project, one that provided ever more compelling reasons to flee
by one means or another. Again Molina quotes the priest of Parinacocha:
... the year seventy but not afterward, the indians held and believed
that from Spain they had sent to this kingdom for the body fat of
indians in order to cure with it a certain illness for which there was
no other medicine but the said body fat. As a result the indians of
those times went about very cautiously and kept away from
Spaniards to such a degree that they refused to carry firewood, herbs
and other things to the house of a Spaniard, saying they did so to
avoid being killed there within so that their fat [unto] could be
removed. IS All this was understood to have proceeded from that den
of thieves in order to create enmity between indians and Spaniards
... until the lord viceroy Francisco de Toledo undid them and threw
them out of there, in which he greatly served God Our Lord ....
(Molina 1989: 129)16

Sober scholars have doubted the existence of a generalized conspiracy

linking rebel Incas in Vileabamba to taqui oncoy (Varon Gabai 1990).
All the same, it is worth remembering that certain high Inca priests in
Vileabamba were called by the metonymic designation "iiaqaq," for the
blood-letting that they performed as sacrificers. 17 An Andean interpre-
tation of colonialism as an inverted and anti-social form of state-directed
sacrifice may reveal, not a Vileabamba plot, but a way through which
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 223

non-Inca Andeans appreciated both similarities and differences between

Inca and Spanish state practices.
Throughout the 1550s and 1560s, the indigenous peoples of the
Andes sought freedom from encomenderos and encomienda and simul-
taneously managed, by engaging the pecuniary interests of priests and
encomenderos, to negotiate a Spanish blind eye to some Andean prac-
tices. As with the anti-perpetuity petitions, which sought a form of
auto-purchase like that of many towns up for auction in Philip II's Spain,
their goal was to become vassals of the king and only the king, paying
tribute and performing labor service while conserving as much au-
tonomy and collective self-determination as possible. Ironically, the
Spanish policy that emerged from this period of tumult aimed to give
them just what they asked for, cast in a distinctly Castilian form.
With the arrival in Peru of Francisco de Toledo as its new viceroy, the
colonial order was in for major revamping. I8 Toledo had himself
participated in discussions of the Council of the Indies over the inter-
linked problems of the colony and how best to solve them. Encomen-
deros were still agitating to gain perpetual title to their encomiendas, and
thereby becoming a powerful and difficult-to-control landed artistoc-
racy. Caciques had demonstrated their ambition to defend and expand
their own aristocratic privileges. The taqui oncoy movement suggested
that the process of conversion was still far from complete, and had also
awakened fears of widespread indian rebellion to accompany potential
Spanish colonial secessionist movements. And finally, the Crown's peren-
nial shortage of cash and deep indebtedness demanded more Crown
control over revenue production, over collection of indian tributes, and
over silver production under indian labor. The reforms that Toledo came
to Peru to implement led to the utter transformation of the structure of
relations among Spanish and indian aristocrats, common indians, and
the state; to direct Crown involvement in mining production (especially
in Potosi); and to a systematic reorganization of Andean living spaces
and life-ways, with profound consequences for Andean social memory.

THE COLONIAL COUNTER-REFORMATION OF VICEROY TOLEDO

By the time Toledo arrived in Peru, taqui oncoy had been ended through
harsh priestly repression. But Toledo set to work on other projects,
capturing the rebel Inca, moving to suppress the pretensions of the
Cusco Inca elite, and beginning a thoroughgoing shake-up of the
colonial project. The "Toledan steamroller" was to have far-reaching
224 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

consequences. It consisted of a massive and thorough inspection tour, a

program of forced resettlement of indians into Spanish-style towns, and
transformation of both encomienda and cacicazga (native lordship),
which brought both encomenderos and caciques down many notches.
With Toledo's arrival there was also renewed fervor in the process of
Christian evangelization, led by the Jesuits, who, along with Toledo,
were to implement the Counter-Reformation strategies of the Council of
Trent, displacing the utopian and tolerant Dominicans and Franciscans.
Toledo's mission was prepared in 1567. Philip II had been enamored
of the possibility of a major windfall of silver from encomenderos or of
indians as a result of the perpetuity "debate," but the Council of the
Indies forestalled both outcomes. Its instructions to Toledo were to grant
neither the encomenderos the perpetuity they sought nor the indians
their wish for an end to the institution. Instead, they devised a subtler
plan.
Toledo's policy more strictly enforced the long-standing policy of lim-
iting inheritance of encomienda to two generations; when this term was
up, encomiendas were often shifted permanently into the Crown, just as
caciques had petitioned some ten years earlier. A gradual form of aboli-
tion, it went essentially unchallenged, in part because encomienda itself
had lost not only much of its profitability but also its capacity to generate
honor, which had inhered in its similarity to Spanish-style senario. Toledo
definitively abolished any resemblance to feudal institutions by imposing
state intermediaries-provincial corregidores modeled after Castilian
Crown administrators-between the remaining encomenderos and their
tributes. Encomenderos were now to be paid their tributes from royal
banks, after collection by the corregidor. In Spain the Crown had long
used corregidores to undercut seignorial powers. In the Indies their in-
tervention between encomenderos and indians turned would-be noble-
men into lowly, salaried bureaucrats. A potentially secessionist, landed
aristocracy had been eliminated and absolutist ends achieved.
Yet this was not time for indian rejoicing. European diseases, along
with the social disruptions of Toledan policies, contributed to a free fall
in population: tribute burdens and the new labor levies became corre-
spondingly more onerous. At the same time, other reforms undermined
an earlier state of relative indian autonomy in mining operations and,
with the new mercury-amalgamation process, made mill and foundry
labor deadlier for indian laborers (Bakewell 1984).
Nor did native lords fare well with Viceroy Toledo, for the same
Toledan policy that undercut encomendero ambitions attacked caciques'
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 225

privileges. Caciques became paid state functionaries with few powers

apart from collecting tributes and delivering levied labor. At the same
time, new arrangements placed them under closer Spanish supervision,
by corregidores and more ubiquitous priests, undercutting their ability to
use traditional reciprocities to cushion their subjects from the impact of
Spanish demands. 19 As Karen Spalding (1984) has argued, the indig-
enous elite thus tended increasingly to collaborate in the exploitation of
their own peoples; when the elite strove instead to resist, it was much
more difficult to do so now than it was before.
Toledo's transformations of the tribute and labor regimes undercut
encomendero and cacique roles, but were also aimed at a more general
transformation of indians. Tribute was changed from a collective obli-
gation to something closer to a head tax, like that of Spain's pecheros,
payable in silver rather than in goods and services (see Murra 1968; Platt
1978b). To earn that silver, indians were forced to give up their habitual
"slothfulness" and go to work for wages. Thus, forced wage labor under
Crown direction was made to serve high moral purposes. If the king's
conscience was not salved, his authority and pocketbook were.
To the great satisfaction of the growing non-encomendero majority of
Spaniards, who had rejected perpetuity because it would have deprived
them permanently of indian labor and the rents it produced, Toledo
made the levy a state enterprise, with laborers to be given to whoever
was able to find the most profitable use for them. The star of mining and
milling entrepreneurs suddenly rose. From the territory between Cusco
and what is now northern Argentina, the domain of the former Inca
quarter of Qullasuyu, nearly fourteen thousand indigenous laborers
were to make the yearly pilgrimage to Potosi. A strong factor motivating
indians to participate in the mita was the monetization of tribute. To
earn that coin, indians would be forced to labor for wages (even for the
token wages of the forced labor draft). Such measures were justified as
means to encourage industrious behavior among an indolent people; all
were part of a more thoroughgoing program to "civilize" indians, to
inculcate in them an appreciation of the beneficial effects of proper work
discipline, so that they might pull themselves up by their own (store-
bought) bootstraps into the capitalist world. They were to learn, in other
words, how to conduct social relations and construct social position and
obedience to the laws of god and king through the medium of money.
The transition was a difficult one, requiring radical techniques. As
Polo noted in his report on the pre-Columbian economy, labor intended
for surplus production had always been carried out in festive form, and
226 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

the bulk of the surpluses had been consumed in collective gatherings,

much of it in drink. Surpluses were stored and redistributed to the needy;
poverty and hunger of the sort that in Castile resulted from aristocratic
accumulation were virtually unknown. 2o
Indians were known for their lack of enthusiasm for wage labor and
their fundamental disinterest in money and lack of respect for (Spanish-
style) status achieved through its accumulation. But in principal, so were
sixteenth-century Castilian aristocrats, who found the wealth and posi-
tion achieved by bourgeois (which is to say, plebeian) merchants and
traders to be ignoble (Bennassar 1979; Gongora 1975; Maravall 1972,
1979, 1984). Old-regime values were living on remittances in imperial
Castile even while an industrial (and social) revolution was being forged
in northern countries that had not found silver-rich indians. Yet in the
colony that provided the silver that kept Castilian aristocrats (and
Crown) in silk and cannons (Elliott 1970), merchants and (extractive)
industrialists displaced encomendero-style aristocrats on city councils
and in state offices. This colonial revolution of the aristocracy did not,
however, redeem the value of work or of industry. Indeed, in the Indies,
only indians (or to the preference of social reformers like Bartolome de
las Casas, Africans) were thought suitable for the performance of
manual labor. Mutatis mutandis, in the Indies, to labor was now not
only to be a tribute-paying plebeian; it was to be indian. It was therefore
critical to colonial Spaniards that indians learn to labor.

Indian "Dukes, Counts, and Marquises" Write for the Archive

In the same period that Toledo's reforms put Castilian-style nobility on a
high shelf that encomenderos could not reach, the native elite was in the
process of learning what Castilian nobility actually meant. If they were
the Indies' equivalent to Castilian dukes and counts, they began to argue,
they should be treated as such. So the drastic limitations on their
privileges imposed by Toledo came as a special insult. It was to such
insults to honor and privilege and to Toledo's deformations in the
bounds and hierarchic structure of rule that caciques like Juan Colque
Guarache, lord of Killaka whom we have now repeatedly met, re-
sponded in their probanzas and memoriales. Just to draw them up,
however, these native lords had first to learn new ways of engaging the
past. 21 This had to conform increasingly to the canonic chronicled
narrative to be useful in the colonial context, in order to, for example,
forward a genealogical claim of Inca noble status or, in the provinces, to
prove that one's native lordship had been inherited from father to son
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 227

since pre-Inca times. The latter was necessary because of a Toledan-era

anti-Inca policy: To justify his attack on the Inca elite, Toledo drew on
the political philosophy that made regicide and conquest morally accept-
able in overthrowing illegitimate tyrants. In revisionist Toledan histori-
ography, tyrants are precisely what Incas became. Thus was the legiti-
macy of the Spanish conquest and title to the Indies affirmed.
Just so does the event chronicle of Juan Colque Guarache's probanza
(like those of his contemporaries) reach back through the generations,
dating each forebear through linkage to a named Inca emperor until
reaching back before Inca times. In one fluid sweep of narrated events,
Col que Guarache reaffirms an Inca king list (the Spaniards' temporal
frame of reference, carefully constructed by chroniclers), claims to have
followed a Spanish-style rule of primogeniture (concealing the more
probable Andean pattern of succession, which hinged on birth order and
admitted preference for those with ability), and founds his Killaka
dynasty in firmly pre-Inca times. Later generations of caciques time and
again referred to Col que Guarache's claims, having recourse to the
documents that indigenous noble families guarded in archives that have
outlived earlier quipu registers. Indeed, one of the most complete later
references to the Colque Guarache testimony (also including his will and
that of his father, Juan Guarache) is to be found in litigation dating from
the early nineteenth century, between noble families seeking confirma-
tion of appointment to a cacicazgo. 22 The expediente (ANB, EC 1804,
no. 193) includes genealogies depicted, not as a family tree, but as a
genealogical path (see Figs. 6.1 and 6.2). Both are drawn by the same
interested hand; the noble descendants of Juan Colque Guarache (iden-
tified as the first to be baptized, eliding Juan Guarache) are portrayed
with their staffs of office, while opponents (the Choqueticlla family,
which for several generations had gained the cacicazgo of Killaka) are
depicted without them; a particularly ignoble Choqueticlla stands in a
separate box, holding out his beggar's cup. Yet in conformity to colonial
legal preferences, this early nineteenth-century litigation, begun just
before hereditary native lordships were abolished, includes eighteenth-
century materials, and in them appear wills, baptismal records copied
from parish registers, and bits of other documents dating to the sixteenth
century, including recollections from Juan Colque Guarache's probanza.
As the colonial relationship between Spaniards and indians matured,
the Andean uptake of the written text and its various incarnations as
legal artifact seem to have become the shrine of social memory, at least
for caciques.
Figure 6.1. Colque Guarache "family path." (From a photograph courtesy of Karen
Powers; original in ANB, EC 1804, no. 193)

228
Figure 6.2. Choqueticlla "family path" (with "pathless" beggar Choqueticlla) (From a
photograph courtesy of Karen Powers; original in ANB, EC 1804, no. 193) 229
230 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

However, let us not go too far. As an individual and as representative

of a generation, Juan Col que Guarache bridged the watershed of the
Toledan era. His father may have served as member of the Inca's war
council, but was a confirmed Christian by the end of his life, command-
ing his kinsmen to bury him in the church of Hatun Quillacas rather
than preserve his body in an ancestral shrine. Juan Col que Guarache
reports no direct knowledge of pre-Columbian ways, having been too
young in 1532 to remember things Andean except in relation to
Spaniards. Yet he knew which aged indigenous witnesses to his father's
deeds to bring forward in his probanza (as well as which esteemed
Spaniards to lend it credibility in the colonial context). He sure-footedly
scrambles through the terrain of Castilian legal writing, never letting a
single idolatrous or mythic element slip into his genealogy and event
chronology. Having learned the Castilian way of writing the past as
successive life histories, preshaped for inclusion in cronicas and summa-
tion in historias, he must have forgotten, the reader might conclude, his
own ancestral mnemonic techniques and ways of construing the past
that might contradict the new and politically more useful form. What is
more, his entire career as a native nobleman was lived out in Potosi,
helping to deliver indian laborers to Spanish silver mines and mills,
rather than in Inca Cusco or even in his own Hatun Quillacas. What
other kinds of social memory could have survived in such circumstances?

A NEW CENTER OF THE ANDEAN WORLD: MITA * PILGRIMAGES TO POTosi

Toledo's systematic methods for supplying workers to the mines are in

many ways novel, but they also redeployed older techniques and logics.
The number of mita workers (fourteen thousand) and the Qullasuyu
districts from which they came were nearly identical to the mit' a system
used by the Inca to work maize fields in the Cochabamba valley, which
were now mostly in encomendero hands. Polo had obtained a rich
encomienda there, and in fighting a legal challenge brought by the
caciques of Qaranka and Killaka, he had learned much about the
Cochabamba mit'a. It is quite possible that Toledo's famous mita of
Potosi was modeled on that Inca productive system (and perhaps also on
the Inca system for providing laborers to the mines of Porco). If Polo was
the conduit for the knowledge upon which the Toledan mita was based,
'The Spaniards were unable to effect the glottalization in the Quechua and Aymara
term "mit'a," which essentially means "turn" or "time." Thus in Spanish contexts, this term
is spelled without the glottalization mark.
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 231

his writings might also prove useful in understanding the meaning for
Andeans of participation in the Potosi mita. Not only had mit' a service
to the Inca state in places like Cochabamba been carried out in a festive
mode, marked by chicha libations and ritual performances important to
both Inca and subject peoples, but also the work process itself came to
reflect internal sociopolitical realities of diarchies and federations that
participated, including their relative ranking among themselves and their
relationship to the state and ruling Inca lineage. On the ground in
Cochabamba, the division of fields (with their boundary lines and, we
assume, associated wak'as) formed a microcosmic icon of the Qullasuyu
quarter of the empire, just as the population and layout of Inca
Copacabana reflected the structure of the empire as a whole.
So when Toledo construed the mita in a familiar form, he perhaps
inadvertently provided an opportunity for native lords and levied
laborers to recoup some features of pre-Columbian ways, most of which
Toledo sought in other policies to erase. Such apparent contradiction or
waffling is a familiar note in Toledan policies, no doubt because the
bottom line of the reforms was the bottom line: In the interests of
efficiency and profit to the Crown, it was necessary to go with adminis-
trative forms that worked, and to get indians to work, Toledo was forced
to rely on the native lords they respected.
Just so the mita came to be organized by dividing Qullasuyu into units
called capitanias: Sixteen large districts, which as Julien (1983) shows
are fundamentally the same as the provinces rallied to Inca labors under
regional lords, were called to provide workers to Potosi, led by native
lords assigned the role of captains of the mita. Juan Colque Guarache's
services to the Crown did not lead to recuperation of pre-Columbian-
style rule over the greater Killaka federation, which remained divided
into distinct encomiendas and repartimientos, but he gained preemi-
nence as captain of the mita of Potosi. 23
On the surface, it seems to be a job that only status-hungry native
nobles could covet. It involved commanding the delivery of forced
laborers from all four Killaka diarchies into dangerous and ill-rewarded
minework and the day-to-day supervision of those mitayos in Potosi. Yet
by commanding the delivery of forced laborers from all four Killaka
diarchies, Colque Guarache was able to reintegrate his rule, notwith-
standing the fact that only two (Killaka and Asanaqi) were under his
more direct command, as parts of the Repartimiento de Quillacas y
Asanaques. The Awllaka-Urukilla diarchy had long been divested from
the federation as a separate encomienda; it had now been incorporated
232 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

into the Crown. The Siwaruyu-Arakapi diarchy had likewise been

sundered from the Killaka federation. With the promulgation of new
province boundaries, it now lay in the territory of the Province of Porco,
subject to a corregidor different from that of the other three diarchies
(which were grouped in the Province of Paria with Sura peoples). All
Killaka federation maize lands and coca fields were now located in yet
other provinces, rather than being (however unclearly) parts of diarchy-
based encomiendas. The territorialization of rule imposed new bound-
aries and new chains of colonial command that made old land-tenure
patterns increasingly difficult to maintain. So the chance to lead mita
workers again from all these diarchies, to reintegrate the federation even
in microcosmic form within the confines of mine labor, must have
seemed a rare opportunity. Indeed, other caciques claiming greater status
than Colque Guarache bristled at the insult of not being named to such
a post.
In his 1576 probanza, Colque Guarache expounded his services in
Potosi. Having once gathered up a year's contingent of laborers from
their far-flung homes, subordinate caciques sent them to Potosi, trans-
porting food supplies on the backs of llamas that were themselves
destined for the table or for the transport of minerals. Toledo had set
aside an entire indian parish within Potosi for Killaka and Asanaqi
laborers. Streets full of houses were assigned to the ayllus represented in
the labor poo1.24 Colque Guarache was proud to have helped pay for the
construction of the church of San Bernardo, the Killaka and Asanaqi
parish center, where a priest, whose salary their tributes paid, was to
work at their indoctrination. Awllaka-Urukilla and Siwaruyu-Arakapi
laborers went to their own parish, a neighborhood surrounding the
church of San Pablo on the very slopes of the silver mountain to which
they had gone since the days of Hernan Vela. Riding back and forth
between these parishes on the horse that he was privileged to ride,
Colque Guarache ensured that the full contingent of workers gathered
on the mountain slope every Monday to await their work assignments.
He also seems to have directed work in a series of fields (many of which
he or his father had purchased) in the vicinity of Potosi, where mita
workers during their periods of rest could recuperate and provide for
workers' meals.
In early colonial days the territory of K'ulta and the town itself were
no more than pastures and a small annex belonging to the town of San
Pedro de Condo, where the native lords of the pre-Columbian diarchy of
Asanaqi were installed by Toledo as "caciques gobernadores" with
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 233

jurisdiction over essentially the same people and territory as they had
governed as mallku before the Spanish invasion. So the ancestors of
today's K'ulta, who once took their turns working in the Inca silver
mines of Porco, were in Toledo's day recruited by the caciques of Condo
(and Asanaqi) to be marched off to Potosi. There, they settled into the
parish Toledo had set aside for them, San Bernardo, where they were
once again beholden (as they would have been in pre-Columbian times
when working Inca fields in Cochabamba or Inca mines in Porco) to the
highest-ranking mallku of the four-diarchy Killaka federation, Juan
Col que Guarache. Although Spanish division of the diarchies into
distinct encomiendas and repartimientos, and even into different colo-
nial provinces, began a process of disaggregation of large-scale indig-
enous social structures, the continued preeminence of the high-ranking
Killaka mallku over the mita of Potosi gave Colque Guarache a means of
reasserting the significance of pre-Columbian social hierarchy. In the
parish of San Bernardo, the children and grandchildren of K'ulta:s
conquest-era people would be reminded of Colque Guarache's Inca-era
stature, even as he oversaw their labors in mine work and in the
construction of the cathedral-sized church of San Bernardo or shep-
herded them into the church for mass.
The details of Colque Guarache's management of the mita and the
gruesome conditions of labor and terrible hardships on the Killaka
federation population merit greater attention than I will give them here.
Suffice it to say that the journey was arduous and the mine work
dangerous. Whereas under the Incas Asanaqi and Killaka mit' a workers
had traveled to Cochabamba fields and Cusco neighborhoods to carry
out labor at the Inca's expense and had made their journey into a sacred
pilgrimage, the trip to Potosi was marched to a more somber, funerary
dirge. On passing through Inca administrative centers, mit' a workers
were invited to pour vast amounts of chicha libations; they sang and
danced while performing labors destined to feed their own, as well as
Inca, ancestors and gods. This was not the case in Spanish times. Tristan
Platt has described a ritual of colonial Pocoata in which mita workers
were dispatched as if to their graves, while their relatives mourned their
loss with plaintive wails (Platt 1983). So linked did the mita become with
death that in K'ulta, until 1978 (more than a century after the mita was
abolished), a ceremony marking the departure of youths appointed as
mitayos was carried out in the cemetery as part of All Souls' Day. Labor
within the Potosi hill of silver that K'ultas call Blood Mountain (a
libation name they also give to money) formed an indissoluble whole
234 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

with the process of mourning and the recollection of ties between the
living and the underworld dead. 25
Yet this shift in the pilgrimage axis linking local group to the state did
not entirely displace earlier forms of social relationship through institu-
tionalized generosity or the techniques of social memory that inhered in
gifts of food and drink from cacique to "common indian." The very same
colonial authors who condemn Andean drinking for the "forgetfulness"
it brought on as well as the memories it carried also describe the prodi-
gious drinking that accompanied the Potosi mita. As the largest city of the
viceroyalty, Potosi was also the largest marketplace; it was a focal point
for the economic pilgrimages of long-distance importers as well as for the
export of silver bars. Drawing on Garcia de Llanos' 1603 "Descripci6n de
Potosi" (ANB, Fotocopias, 1603), Sa ignes (1987) calculates an annual
consumption of 1.6 million botijas of chicha by a population totaling
about eighty thousand adults. At 11.5 liters per botija, total chicha con-
sumption reached 18.4 million liters per year, or 230 liters per adult.
Much of this was consumed in pulperias and chicherias, where mine
workers spent their meager salaries. Women and girls also carried jars of
chicha to the cancha where mita workers gathered on Mondays, leading
to the custom of drinking before entering the mines (Tandeter 1981).
No doubt the new Toledan disposition against toleration led to the
repression of idolatry-associated drinking in Potosi; they may not have
said so, but Spaniards certainly preferred a "secular" drunkenness in
Potosi's manifold chicherias to the old "solemn" public gatherings in
honor of idols and ancestors. But Spanish policy was not that consistent.
Capoche (1959: 141) gives us another clue about the nature of at least
some of Potosi's prodigious drinking: The first to get drunk, he reports,
are the caciques and captains of the mita; experts in "feasting and
drinking and storytelling," they regaled their subjects with a simulacrum
of Inca-period hospitality, and perhaps with a reshaped social memory in
libation dedication and oral narrative. Juan Colque Guarache, whose
subjects from the K'ulta region came to Potosi and lived there under his
authority, was especially well-known for his drinking and storytelling.
We may assume that he provided chicha in quantity to the indians of
Asanaqi on their arrival in Potosi, as part of the customary redistributive
generosity that common indians expected of their lords when they were
asked to perform their mit' as. As we shall see, Col que Guarache was
also known for his quipus, which the Anonymous Jesuit (1879) cited on
matters of pre-Columbian lore, especially in connection with questions
of sacrifice. As his will makes clear, Colque Guarache also kept cumbi
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 235

kamayuqs in his employ to fashion for him the iconographically rich and
status-affirming cumbi cloth, which may have carried semantically
complex meanings in pre-Columbian days and clearly continued to
signify in colonial times. 26 Yet we should not imagine Colque Guarache
and other native lords in Potosi attempting to continue pre-Columbian
rituals carrying purely "Andean" social memory. Deployed under new
circumstances, making patent the meaning of new kinds of pilgrimage
and new forms of social hierarchy, in connection with new deities (as
well as, we must remember, old ones), drinking and storytelling, quipu
accounts and cumbi cloth, and even the llama sacrifices that Colque
Guarache explained to a curious Jesuit, necessarily began to carry
colonial meanings. For caciques were required to participate and take a
leading role in the Christian festivals and ceremonies by which priests
sought to inculcate in indians a new appreciation of the relationship
between time and society. Just so, Christian bells, prayers, and rituals
were now to mark out for indians the time of day, the sequence of days
forming the week, and the segmentation of time into monthly and yearly
cycles. What is more, the human life career itself was now to be
segmented and given meaning in an allegoric synchrony with Christian-
ity's universalist narratives. So native lords like Colque Guarache were
given opportunities not only to reintegrate former social hierarchies but
also to weave new linkages between economic activity, obligation to
cacique and state, and communion with gods and ancestors. Only the
gods, the ancestors, the state, and the channels of transmission between
them and "ordinary" indians had all been revalorized and transformed,
as the nature of tribute and labor obligation had.
Apart from welcoming ceremonies and the prodigious drinking said
to have taken place on mine workers' off days, another outlet for chicha
sellers was the Christian festivals promoted by those same priests who
decried drinking that was outside their public orbit. From the earliest
years of mining in Potosi, its festivals had been as lavish as its mines were
rich. Awins (1965, studied in Hanke 1956-57) describes the production
of processional plays during the Corpus Christi celebration of 1608, in
which indians played major roles in a representation of Pizarro's defeat
of Atahuallpa, and other sacramental plays were also a common part of
religious festivities there. Indeed, Toledo's ordinances for life in urban
indian parishes specifically required participation in such processions
and performances:
In the festival of Corpus Christi they shall take out their image and
dance in each parish and go in procession with their cross and flags,
236 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

and the brothers of the cofradia, with the priest, shall rule them,
examining above all the platform on which the image is carried
[andasJ so they carry no idols hidden there, as has happened in other
cities. And before they set out the priest shall tell them in their
language the reason for that festival, so that they understand it and
honor it with the veneration they are obliged to give. (Sarabia Viejo
1986: 414)27

While Toledo was swift to condemn public drunkenness, like Polo he

did not prohibit private drinking; and even public drinking was all right
when done in moderation under priestly supervision, precisely during
Christian festivals! This newly created distinction between public and
private spheres, combined with ambivalent ordinances, seems an open
invitation to indians to carry out manifestly Christian rites in public,
glossing them in private, in what was an openly tolerated clandestine
sphere. Which private rites glossed public liturgies, of course, is anyone's
guess. Under such conditions, Potosi became a new taypi q'ala, modeling
now the peculiar asymmetries of the relationship between indigenous
peoples and the Spanish state. Toledo's post-Tridentine concerns for
vigilance and idolatry extirpation, along with his inversion of Incaic
distribution of drinking between public and private spheres and the
always-prominent contrast between productive underground mine labor
(always done in clandestinity) and the aboveground exploitative surplus
extraction by the new entrepreneurial Spanish aristocracy, provided the
grist for some new native interpretations of colonial life, which in
modern forms have been explored by Nash (1979), Taussig (1980), Platt
(1983).
Toledo's changes to the statuses of encomenderos and caciques and to
colonial tribute and labor regimes were dramatic and far-reaching,
substantially altering the colonial equation (while making indians ever
more subject to control by Spaniards, specifically the Spanish state). The
sort of microcosmic model of empire that Incas had established in the
state production center of Cochabamba was reconstrued to model
colonial relations and to fuel the metropole's imperial machinery. It may
appear, then, that to a degree Spaniards had merely displaced Incas at
the head of the empire, leaving old techniques of rule and memory
largely intact. As we shall see, such appearances are illusory. For Toledo's
transformations of authority, tribute, and labor levies were only the
beginning. In the coherent colonialist program he sought to impose,
these changes were to accompany further and more systematically
radical transformations of indigenous society.
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 237

INSTITUTIONS FOR THE RESHAPING OF SPACE AND TIME: VISITA, REDUCCION,

AND DOCTRINA

The Visita General

In the first three decades of Spanish activity, earnest efforts to evangelize
indians had taken a back seat to more practical concerns of looting,
battling, and laying claim to the spoils of conquest. By the 1560s
Andeans in their rural hamlets were more likely to be rounded up into
newly built churches to hear priestly sermonizing, to be baptized, and to
be counted in the census visits of Crown bureaucrats. And Francisco de
Toledo's "general visit" was the most penetrating and systematic census;
it was simultaneously the last state-sponsored direct investigation into
pre-Columbian affairs and the most thoroughgoing effort to transform
Andean society. Among its consequences, it can be said to have contrib-
uted many of the social practices through which K'ultas now constitute
their social memory. The process of the visita and the shifts in space and
time it brought about thus deserve our careful attention.
The written results of personal inspection tours called visitas have
become a favored source for extracting information on Andean states of
affairs. Yet as Guevara-Gil and Salomon (1994) argue, the visita was
anything but a noninvasive technique of observation. It was a slow-
moving, highly disruptive social event, punctuated by a series of rituals,
and it was intended to achieve transformative effects. No visita could
have been more transformative than Toledo's visita general. Beginning
with the usual census taking, which for the common indian involved
both trauma and endless boredom, waiting in line to be registered on a
list as a subject of a faraway king, this visita went far beyond counting
and questioning; it aimed to reshape indigenous society utterly, breaking
it up into new collectivities, pushing them into a new and more
homogeneous relationship to space and time and to one another.
Following Castilian notions of the kind of living that could be called
civil and Christian, repeated royal orders had required that indians be
resettled in Spanish-style towns. The title of a royal d:dula of 1549
provides a general idea of what the king had in mind: "Gatherings of
indians in well-formed towns; year-long posts of mayors and aldermen
(AGI, Indiferente 532, fol. 27v).28
While some indigenous settlements had already been "improved" by
the addition of church and pillory, movement of all indians from
scattered hamlets into larger population centers was an enormous
undertaking that had not been systematically carried through. Toledo's
238 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

visita general was to change that. "Visitors" like Pedro de Zarate, who
took Toledo's instructions with him to Killaka and Asanaqi territory,
were to scout out healthy sites for a radically reduced number of
settlements, layout their plaza and streets, and see that the towns were
built and the indians removed to them from their old and remote haunts.
The visitor Pedro de Zarate treated the Repartimiento de Aullagas y
Uruquillas, now a Crown encomienda owing to the Awllaka suit against
Hernan Vela, to "reduction" in the manner that was also applied in the
other Killaka diarchies. From "19 pueblos in a district of 20 leagues,"
Zarate reduced a total population of 4,851 persons to three new towns.
The old Inca tambo of Awllaka became Villa Real de Aullaga (modern
Pampa Aullagas), with 824 tributaries. On the opposite shore of Lake
Poopo, Zarate founded Santiago de Guari (modern Huari) with a paltry
two hundred tributaries. Far to the south, on the edge of the great salt
pan of Uyuni, he settled three hundred tributaries and their families in a
town he called Salinas de Tunopa (modern Salinas de Garci Mendoza),
recalling an old traveling hero whose name is linked to a mountain
thereabouts (Cook 1975: 5).
Zarate visited three of the four Killaka diarchies (now two "rep-
artimientos"). Another man, Captain Agustin de Zaumada, performed a
similar task in the diarchy of Siwaruyu-Arakapi, Francisco Pizarro's
former encomienda, now called the Repartimiento de Puna. There,
5,968 people who had lived in twenty-eight pueblos were squeezed into
two new reducciones, Nuestra Senora de Talavera de Puna with 713
tributaries (modern Puna, located just south of Potosi), and Todos
Santos de Quiocalla with 413 tributaries, later renamed Tomahavi (ibid.,
23-24).29 This town was established just south of Killaka and Asanaqi
territory, quite far from Puna; the mining center of Porco was located
between them.
Turning his attention to the two diarchies of Killaka and Asanaqi,
grouped together into the Repartimiento de Quillacas Asanaques, Pedro
de Zarate reports the "reduction" of the population, formerly scattered
over an immense area in a total of twenty-one old "pueblos," to but four
new towns. 3D Each of these "new" towns may already have existed as a
settlement, but they were renamed and transformed. The Guarache
headquarters of Hatun Quillacas was refounded as Oropesa de Quilla-
cas, and one thousand tributaries were settled there (with their families,
totaling about 4,529 individuals). Condocondo, the town near Asanaqi
Mountain where lords of that diarchy dwelled, became San Pedro de
Condo, with five hundred tributaries (totaling 2,265 persons). It was in
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 239

this district that a small annex called Santa B£ubara, later Culta, would
be founded in the seventeenth century. Nearby, Zarate founded San Juan
del Pedroso, which later reverted to its indigenous name of Challapata,
settling there some seven hundred tributaries (with families, 3,170
persons). Finally, after what would have been a very long trip, he
founded the town of San Lucas de Pabacolla (modern San Lucas), with
three hundred tributaries (1,358 persons).31 The first three towns are all
located near Lake Poop6 in the Altiplano heartland. San Lucas, how-
ever, was located in maize lands far to the southeast, where Killaka,
Asanaqi, and Awllaka peoples had long before obtained lands from the
Inca in exchange for maintaining forts to defend against Chiriguano
invasions. Their presence as a cushion between Chiriguanos and Spanish
interests in Potosi was still required.
The Toledan ideal, deriving apparently from an earlier proposal by
Matienzo (1967), was to settle about five hundred tributaries in each
new town. The numbers in this case do not work out perfectly, but the
effect was nonetheless dramatic. Unfortunately only a summary of
Zarate's visita has turned up, and no copies of the ordinances he must
have established. 32 Only a brief visit to these town suffices to indicate the
general plan carried out in each, which closely resembles the "ideal"
reducci6n depicted by Matienzo (Fig. 6.3). In each, a regular grid plan of
streets focuses upon a spacious public plaza, on which was built a church
with its parish house, a town council hall, a jail, and a "tambo," a house
for visiting Spaniards. And along parallel lines and right angles, the
indians who were forcibly settled there built their own new homes, also,
if surviving examples tell the truth, according to rectilinear principles. 33
Now, these were not merely new settlements; they came with a new
set of institutions and clearly bounded territories. Arbitrarily, visitors
decreed which old settlements within the district of a repartimiento
would move to what new towns, and the lands pertaining to those that
were moved into a new town now fell under the town's jurisdiction. This
pattern repeated the manner in which the territory of Castile was
segmented, into the alfoz districts of Castilian villas (Nader 1990).
Indeed, nearly all the institutions that Toledo instructed his visitors to
establish had precedents in Castilian villas.
Each new reducci6n town was also called a doctrina, and from the
tributes of its new population a priest's salary was to be paid. Such
priests, called doctrineros, or "indoctrinators," were charged with keep-
ing careful watch over their indian charges, providing frequent instruc-
tional sessions in addition to regular weekly (and daily) mass. Above all,
240 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

tucurico
(native overseer)

house of
corregidor jail priest's, house

guestl house
I church
for
plaza
trav~lin~
spaniar s

council
house house
of the
hospital
corral

Figure 6.3. Matienzo's 1567 recommendation for the layout of reducciones (Author's
rendering after Matienzo 1567, New York Public Library, MS Rich 74, fol. 38r)

of course, they were to make sure that indians left their idolatrous ways
behind in the origin communities which they had abandoned.
Toledo's initial project plan, drawn up in Quilaquila (near the City of
Silver) on November 7, 1573, urged visitors to take care when caciques
begged them to leave more old settlements standing than were absolutely
necessary. For reducciones were principally intended to force the indians
"to leave the places and sites connected with their idolatries and the
burial places of their dead, and for this reason, under every shade of
piety, have [the caciques] deceived and continue to deceive the visitors so
they are not moved from their old pueblos" (Sarabia Viejo 1986:
281-282). The move, then, was necessary as a technique of amnesia, to
distance indians from their past. And active erasure of memory encoded
in living space (and commemorative space of burial places) was carried
out through demolition. Former homes were to be leveled, along with
monuments like burial towers, or chullpas, in which ancestral bones
were kept. These were to be thrown together into a common pit and
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 241

buried. The new towns would have their own cemeteries, located within
the church and in its immediate environs. But only Christians could be
buried there. Once the old ancestors were gone, new, Christian ones
would be left to commemorate in the rituals in favor of the dead that
were a specialty of sixteenth-century Catholicism.
This, of course, was preparatory not only to pulling indians into the
future but also to giving them another and different past, which is to say,
transforming their social memory. But reconstruction of social memory
in the Castilian and Christian mold was a complex task, to be performed
under constant vigilance lest indians lapse back into their old ways.
Indeed, in many ways "vigilance" is the watchword in the Toledan
civilization project.
To help the priest round up his parishioners for indoctrination (and to
aid in the delivery of tributes and mita laborers), each town was also
allotted its own town council, just like those that Castilian villas
enjoyed. For Andeans, this was another radical break from the past. The
diarchy mallkus had directed their own subalterns, called principales or
jilaqatas, of whom there was at least one for each of the subdiarchy units
called ayllus. Very likely, such authorities in the past had filled inherited
posts, perhaps linked to lineage ritual duties in honor of the ayllu's
ancestral mummies, wak'as, and paqarinas. Now, however, the Castilian
way was to prevail. The new towns were not only to take the shape of a
Castilian town but also to be ruled by a council of officers charged with
applying a strict order of behavioral rules.
The record left behind by the visitor and founder of K'ulta's neighbor
to the east, the reducci6n of Nuestra Senora de Belen de Tinquipaya,
helps to illustrate the process. When their lands were threatened by
invasion by Spanish landholders in 1610, the caciques of Tinquipaya (a
reducci6n into which three separate social groups, the Colos, Caquinas,
and Picachuries, were mixed together) produced their copy of the visita
performed by one Diego de Sanabria (see Documentary Appendix, part
C). On January 15, 1575, Sanabria attested to having completed his
visita, carried out at the order of Toledo. His purpose was to "give order
in government and good living, a just order like that of the Spanish
vassals of His Majesty" (AGI, Charcas 49, fol. 7r). A unique and rich
document, his ordinances are divided into two sections, one addressed to
the duties of the town council, and the other to the desired transforma-
tion in social habits. The layout of the town is not described; it was still
under construction in 1575, but mention is made of a plaza, a church, a
hospital, and town council offices. One may surmise from references to
242 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

"imprisonment" that the town was to have a jail (although "imprison-

ment" might also refer to stocks), and that delinquents subject to the lash
would have been punished, in Castilian fashion, tied to a pillory like that
erected in Cusco by Pizarro, a picota or rollo (Fig. 6.4).
Inside the town council offices (referred to as the cabildo, consejo, or
regimiento) there was to be a locked room and, in it, a lock box with
three keys. This "community chest" was to contain two chambers: one to
hold the community archive; one in which to deposit moneys from
tributes, salaries earned by mita workers and others who hired them-
selves out, fines and rents collected in the name of the community, and
profits from the dairy production and wool of the community herd. In
1575 the community herd, endowed through an encomendero restitu-
tion payment, consisted of 250 head of cattle and 400 head of Castilian
sheep.
The care of these herds and distribution of meat and profits from
dairy products and wool are elaborately described; indeed, various
works of charity, especially for widows and orphans, are prescribed. So
too are the punishments for those who break the ordinances themselves
or other strictures of moral or natural law that go unspecified. Impris-
onment is often mentioned (up to thirty days), along with the cutting of
indians' hair (regarded with special horror by Andeans) and the whip
(not to exceed one hundred lashes in locally decided cases). The nature
of the whip used is carefully prescribed: It should be of cured leather
rather than of rawhide, and should have no more than four "tails," each
no thicker than a finger on a man's hand. Serious punishment was
reserved for perpetrators of serious crimes, who were to be sent for
judgment to Spanish authorities. Only Spaniards were allowed to impose
the death penalty, amputate limbs, or cut off ears.
The ordinances, provided as specific local laws complementing a
variety of other ordinances given and still to be given by Viceroy Toledo,
also specify just how tribute was to be collected from tributaries between
eighteen and fifty years of age, and how laborers were to be levied for
work in mines and urban "plazas." Determining tributes, and indeed
everything involving money, was a matter for the record, but one kept in
the Castilian manner: The first endowment of the community chest
holding the community archive, an archive of written books, was to be
these very ordinances, brought out from the chest by Tinquipaya
caciques in 1610. It was also to hold the padrones and visitas of census
takers, by which to guarantee that no one was overlooked or charged
beyond retirement age (when the able bodied began to take turns serving
 -- ---
Figure 6.4. Punishment at a rolla. The wording at the top translates as "Alcaldes. How the
corregidor punishes His Majesty's poor alcalde ordinaria." The dialogue written within the
picture is: Corregidor: "Give it to him." Whip-wielding slave: "Bring the two eggs you owe."
Alcalde: "Ay, for the love of God." (From Guaman Poma de Ayala 1980: 742)

243
244 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

the caciques). In conformity with Toledo's instructions to reduce the

burden on Spanish appeals courts of "frivolous indian lawsuits," the
interrogations of criminals carried out by indigenous authorities was
especially not to be recorded. The books to be deposited in the
community chest were to be account ledgers, wills, and census materials.
Social memory of the written sort was distinctly oriented towards
preserving a record of the transmission and reproduction of the human,
animal, and property forms of colonial capital.
Archives require both authors and archivists, and the new sorts of
registers were to be written and deposited (and signed in good faith) by
a scribe appointed from among the indians of the town (Fig. 6.5). Yet
without administrative supervision, without a town council, there would
be no business for a scribe or need for a townhall. Without eliminating
the old sort of authority (the caciques principales of the Caquinas and
Picachuris, their "second persons," and principales for each of the town's
five pachacas [an Inca decimal term for a unit of a hundred tributaries,
likely here referring to ayllus]), the ordinances call for the creation of a
host of new kinds of authorities.
Each new town was simultaneously a unit of civil administration
(reducci6n) and a unit of ecclesiastic ministration (doctrina). The priest
assigned to religious ministrations of the town, the doctrinero, was
charged with carrying out stringent measures to convert his flock to
Christianity and make sure they did not wander back to old idolatrous
ways. Chief among these measures was weekly and sometimes daily
preaching, especially to children. But the regular Christian calendar of
holy days was also to be observed, and to guarantee properly performed
rites and full devotion to Christian beings, several sorts of specialized
roles were assigned to indians, ranging from choirmaster and musicians,
to mayordomos, alferezes, and other funtionaries of regular cult to the
saints. Taken together, they reduplicate the kinds of devotional offices
attached to all Spanish churches and the kinds of posts that in Spain
belonged to semiautonomous lay confraternities (cofradias) charged
with cult to the saints.
On the civil side of things, administration of the community chest, the
collection of tributes, levying of laborers, capture and trial and punish-
ment of delinquents, and also services to aid in the indoctrination efforts
of the new town's priest were entrusted to a town council, a consejo or
cabildo or regimiento (meeting in the building so named), composed of
several kinds of offices and numerous individuals. These were to be
elected every New Year's Day by the outgoing members of the council.
The new council included four regidores (aldermen), two alcaldes
Figure 6.5. The cacique at his writing table. The wording at the top translates as
"Principales should be examined. The good principal, of Spanish letters and speech, who
knows how to make a petition, interrogatory, and lawsuit, and who is not a drunkard,
coquette, gambler, or liar, in this kingdom." (From Guaman Poma de Ayala 1980: 718)
245
246 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'UlTA

(mayors), and one alguacil mayor (major bailiff), and two alguaciles
menores (minor ones), along with a scribe, a fiscal (prosecutor), a
schoolteacher, and a majordomo. What is more, each office was to be
occupied for one year by men elected to office by the previous year's
authorities, new ones replacing old ones like clockwork on January 1 of
each year. Toledo's general ordinances specify that no more than half of
these posts could be held by privileged relatives of the noble cacique
lineages; the rest were to belong to common indians.
The duties of these new kinds of authorities, familiar to Spaniards but
novel to those Andeans who had not yet served time in Potosi, were also
clearly spelled out in the ordinances of Diego de Sanabria as well as the
general and specific ordinances of Toledo (some of these are collected in
Levillier 1929; and Sarabia Viejo 1986, 1989). These included all the
labors already described and many more as well. Coexisting with the
cacique principal of the multi-"ethnic" repartimiento to which this town
(along with others) belonged, even meeting jointly with him, they were
nonetheless required to report secretly on any misdoings engaged in or
denounced by native nobles, especially the usurpation of lands or misuse
of indian labor for their personal ends. And although the cacique
principal held the tie-breaking vote in council matters, he could not hold
sway on any issue if the council was unanimous against him.
In establishing this balance of power, which closely resembled the
balance between town councilmen and feudal lords in Castile's seignorial
towns (Nader 1990), Toledo struck yet another blow against what he
regarded as the overweening power and pretensions of an essentially
tyrannical native nobility. The freedom of action of caciques and the
town council was constrained further by granting final say on many
issues to Crown administrators, especially the corregidores (who in
Castilian towns defended the king's interests against both lords and
councils). Encomenderos were enjoined from visiting their encomiendas,
deprived of indian labor, and effectively eliminated from the equation.
All these changes in Andean rural life can be (and have been) summed
up as a new politics of state, massing subjects to control them more
efficiently, to guarantee proper deliveries of tribute and labor extending
the reach and security of the absolutist Crown. And so it was. Yet the
concern for charity, for community property, and for punishment of a
wide range of crimes without apparent impact on the king's pocketbook
attests to the fact that state control was much more than a matter of
collecting tributes. For the sixteenth-century Spanish state, rule in Castile
as well as in the Indies meant the extension of the techniques of
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 247

surveillance and discipline into the most intimate corners of subject

peoples' lives. It meant an exactitude and comprehensiveness of obser-
vation and recorded representation that had not been seen before among
European colonizers. Into the community chest visitors deposited a copy
of new rules and regulations, to be observed in a town drawn up by rule
and regular pattern. Like Castilians, all indians were now to live in
towns with virtually identical structures and institutions; and the de-
tailed censuses and accounts of community chests were also to be
carried, along with the observations of regularly repeated visitations, to
the capital of the empire. Philip II, under whose lead this visita general
and similar comprehensive inspection tours of Castile were devised, was
also famous for his effort to totalize his realms, to gain a global
understanding, represented in maps and painted views (Kagan 1986) and
"geographical relations" (Jimenez de la Espada 1965) deriving from
Crown questionnaires, displayed and archived in his own "memory
palace," the Escorial.
As Timothy Mitchell (1991) has argued for the nineteenth-century
colonization of Egypt, peoples and practices that were irregular, un-
usual, or hidden from view were not susceptible to the totalizing
representations required by European modernism and its epistemology,
which postulated a positivist mirror relation between sign and referent.
Philip II may have operated on prepositivist principles, but his urgency
to envision his realms globally from a single Archimedean point led him,
like colonizers of Egypt, to force his subjects to become representable, to
conform to the units and readily observable identities that his statisti-
cians and geographers required. Andean indians, that is, were to be
forced into a homogeneous mold, based on Castilian models. 34
So far, so good. But to imagine the reducci6n as no more than an
epistemological effect, a means of representing subject peoples and
therefore the empire, and to insist on the primacy of the visual image as
a tool of colonial encompassment is to shunt aside a vital issue. In his
work Colonising Egypt, Mitchell deploys Bourdieu's (1977) work on the
habitus of the Kabyle house to develop a promising approach to
understanding colonizers' obsession with reshaping their subjects by
reshaping the spaces in which they live. Drawing also on Michel de
Certeau (1984) Mitchell also touches on the inculcation of new experi-
ences in time, meant to produce the work discipline required by
capitalism.
Once again, nineteenth-century Egypt seems an echo, not of
nineteenth-century epistemology, but of the sixteenth-century Spanish
248 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

empire. In his 1573 "Instruccion para los visitadores," Toledo ordered

visitors to layout reducciones with
... wide and straight streets and blocks, leaving an open space for
the plaza and a site for the church ... and a large space for the
council houses and the offices of justice for alcaldes, and jail with
different rooms for men and women, and a room for the jailer.
Item: You shall layout the indians houses with doors opening
onto the public streets, so that no house opens into the house of
another indian, but that each have a separate house.
Item: You shall procure that the houses of indians are layed out
such that the room of the wife and daughters and maids, is separate
from that of the male children and other male indians of the house.
(Sarabia Viejo 1986: 34-35)

So the town plans were explicitly oriented towards the gaze of the
colonial observer, so that behavior regulated in new ways could be
monitored, by the priest and corregidor, but also by the appointed
members of the town council, who had to go out on scheduled circuits of
the town to keep the curfew and guard, mostly, against idolatries, public
drunkenness, and sin, especially of the sexual sort. 35 The disciplining
colonial gaze was to be internalized within indigenous society itself, in
the form of mechanisms for social control oriented towards acts defined
by new logics of "wrong," and also as conscience, to be activated in
confession and directed into penitential acts in public processions.
In Spanish colonial parlance, all that is stated in a few simple phrases.
In the words of the visitador Diego de Sanabria, " ... the reduccion of
these indians is made in the town of Our Lady of Bethlehem so that by
coming together they live together in policia as Christians, to be better
indoctrinated .... " (AGI, Charcas 49, fol. 11 v). To live together in
policia as Christians was a straightforward business for Spaniards. The
phrase describes what for them was the taken for granted of life, the
habits and deeply ingrained patterns of thought and practice by which
they were Spaniards and Christians. In the sixteenth century the term
"policia" was usually combined with "buena." "Buena policia" can be
glossed as "good customs," but for the theorists of empire who designed
reducciones (where indians were to be reduced to buena policia), it
encapsulated all the aspects of social and civil life that constituted
prerequisites for understanding and living the Christian faith. These
were not easily described in words, precisely because so much was
implicit, habitual, even preconceptual. It could not be explained; it had
to be lived. 36
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 249

Toledo had allotted two full years for the building of each new
pueblo, and during that time he continued to solicit advice from
Spaniards and indians, and revised and refined his ordinances. While still
in Potosi in February of 1573, for example, he had accepted a "memo-
rial" from Juan Colque Guarache, acting as representative of many of
the caciques who had brought mita workers to that mining center.
Making explicit reference to Col que Guarache and specific complaints,
Toledo proceeded to act on them (Sarabia Viejo 1989: 23-33). On
March 4, in the introduction to a provision forgiving the indians a
half-year's tribute on account of the work time they were investing in the
construction of their reducciones, Toledo concisely summarized the
reasons for the resettlement campaign:
Given that the principal effects that have been pursued in the visita
general that His Majesty ordered me to carry out in these realms, for
which I have come personally ... is that the natives be reduced and
congregate in towns where they can be taught and exercised in buena
policia, natural law, and evangelic doctrine, and that they cease their
rites, gentilities and abuses that they have practiced up until now, no
longer living as barbarians without policia or government, being as
they have been so separated from one another in ravines and plains,
with neither contact nor commerce with rational people .... (Ibid., 85)
If the reducci6n process was to bring such contact and commerce,
something that certainly resulted from the regular pilgrimages of indians
to the mines and parishes of Potosi, the visita itself was especially
instructive. In another provision issued in Potosi on March 12, Toledo
reported that no one might claim ignorance of this particular order, since
"at present all or most of the kuraqas and principales of this province
[Charcas] and of the Collao and of other parts of this kingdom, and the
corregidores of natives, visitors and reducers and other persons ... ," are
gathered together in Potosi (ibid., 36). One might think they were all
there to the practical ends of the mining mita, but when Toledo set out
on his return trip to Lima some months later, the entire group seems to
have accompanied him in a moving viceregal court reminiscent both of
the massive caravansary of the Catholic Kings and of the Inca ruler
(Rumeu de Armas 1974; d. Guevara-Gil and Salomon 1994).
During his viceregal progress, Toledo continued to issue and revise
ordinances, in some cases radically amending his project, always, it
seems, in the midst of a throng of caciques and corregidores and visitors,
as well as the usual batch of individual Spaniards and representatives
from councils of towns seeking privileges. In June, numerous orders were
250 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

issued in La Paz; by the middle of July, his papers were signed in the
king's encomienda of Chucuito.
In August this movable feast reached Arequipa, from which an espe-
cially large number of instructions and provisiones were issued. There on
September 10 he gathered together "most of the caciques of the province
of Arequipa, Cusco, and Collao" (Colque Guarache and other Charcas
lords were also present) to explain to them the meaning of the new
ordinances. In simplified language translated, no doubt by the official
interpreter, Gonzalez Holguin, Toledo delivered a speech from a prepared
text. Beginning with blandishments about Philip II's benevolent plans for
them, Toledo quickly got to the point; he made no bones about the link
between reducci6n and the extirpation of idolatries, and he explained to
caciques their special role as models and exemplars of the Christian faith.
The principal thing that was missing [before reducci6n] was
indoctrination and the priests who might carry it out, and it was
impossible to achieve when all lived sprinkled about, so many leagues
distance from one another, in so many hidden corners and ravines,
and that is why they have been ordered reduced to towns ....
It is convenient that caciques and principales be good Christians
and thus be an example for their indians, and help reduce those who
have not yet been. And he who does the contrary shall be taken as
suspect, and it shall be understood that they have adored and given
reverence to the wak' as, and shall be subject to proceedings against
them ....
Curacas who give reverence to the wak' as and carry out other
rites or superstitions, or know of others who keep and reverence
wak'as and do not denounce them, shall be punished ....
The best title for the cacicazgos and their succession shall be that
of being the best Christian and of greater ability. And the [office)
ought to be given to such an indian, whether from among the
legitimate sons [of the cacique) or the other ones, or to another
indian in whom these qualities coincide ....
After the matter of idolatries and wak' as, which is such a grave
business, no offense is greater than borracheras and thus, although
His Excellency will not refuse to them what is permitted of the other
vassals of the king of Spain, which is to drink, they will be severely
punished if they are excessive in their drinking, particularly the
curacas, since they can ill govern their indians while drunk. (Sarabia
Viejo 1989: 91-95)

In this speech Toledo reiterated the connection between the former

dispersed settlement pattern, drinking, and idolatry, and clarified the
connection between settled town life, sobriety, and Christian virtue. He
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 251

also underscored the personal connection between himself and the

caciques. Before concluding, he remarked:
Never before have they seen a viceroy or governor of this kingdom
walk among them, and they should know that the reason he now
walks among them is to eliminate the vexations that many persons
have caused them, such as visitors, scribes, bailiffs and reducers, and
other persons and royal officials .... 37
And His Excellency has commanded that justice be done equally
to indians as to encomenderos ....
[The caciques] must keep well in their memory that which His
Excellency has said, because if they do not keep to what has been
commanded and ordered, His Excellency will not forget to have them
punished.
Because they are poor, the king has taken them as his vassals, and
for being so His Majesty takes them as his children.
For specific business His Excellency will give them audiences, and
that is the general business he had to say to them. (Ibid., 91-95)
Records survive detailing some of the specific business Toledo carried
out through audiences with individual caciques. Juan Col que Guarache,
whose intervention had led in Potosi to numerous addenda to the mining
ordinances safeguarding indians and especially mita captains from
abusive Spaniards, also obtained special treatment in Arequipa. It was
not for nothing that the lords of Qaraqara had called him a manipulator.
Colque Guarache's descendants managed to keep hold of noble
privilege and the role of cacique governor, but factional disputes, the
passing of generations, and the contradictions between Spanish notions
of succession to office and Andean ones led to the multiplication of
distinct noble houses, tied only to a particular reducci6n town more
often than to its "mother" diarchy. Challenges to them eventually came,
however, from new kinds of social groups, led by new kinds of
authorities, which were reconstrued, conceived, and enacted within these
new, smaller and more "Spanish" spheres of action.

Christian Space-Time Enacted by Town Ayllus and Town Boundaries

After attending to caciques' business and other matters, such as the
ordinances of the city of Arequipa (which specify how indian parishes
are to be governed and the manner in which Christian festivals and
processions should be performed), Toledo issued his "general ordinances
for communal life in indian towns" on November 6, 1573 (ibid.,
217 -266). From these very detailed ordinances and others directed
towards corregidores and officials entrusted with judging indigenous
252 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

crimes, one can clarify just how reducci6n and doctrina were to achieve
the effects of instilling buena policia and hence Christian life.
Far from their old wak' as and burial places the new towns were first of
all places of amnesia. But Toledo called upon caciques to remember well his
ordinances, and asked priests and town councilmen to instill habit memory
of a distinctly Spanish and Christian sort. Toledan ordinances indeed refer
to the ringing of church bells to mark out the hours of work, prayer, and
rest, and to the adaptation to new calendars and metaphors of old Incaic
turn systems for labor levies, now calculated through the use of models of
rotation called wheels. But life for indians in the reducci6nes was meant to
transform the relationship between space and time in more fundamental
ways. The Christian calendar that now marked out times for daily mass and
indoctrination, weekly observance of Christ's passion, recalling too as a
"day of rest" the very sequence and timing of cosmogeny, pointed towards
something more than work discipline. The round of festivals in which
indians were now to participate constructed the year as a spiraling repeti-
tion commemorating Christ's life and death, its cadence sung in Te Deums
and beat out in the confessional mea culpas leading to eucharistic com-
munions linking the beginning of time to its end. By practices carried out
within the space of reducciones, indians were not just to learn but also to
become part of a universal history of which Spanish kings and colonial
officials could think themselves coauthors.
All this might suggest that the colonial project in Toledan guise was not
just coherent and thorough but also fully successful. Yet just as practical
concerns (the need to collect tributes efficiently and to rule indian sub-
jects) led Toledo to reinforce the authority of native lords who he oth-
erwise sought to undermine and displace, other exigencies brought im-
portant features of Andean society into the very towns that were supposed
to undo it. Let us see how the process played out in the favored Colque
Guarache's Killaka federation, especially within the diarchy of Asanaqi,
the pre-Columbian diarchy that held sway over K'ulta ancestors.
The process of reducci6n divided the territory of diarchies arbitrarily
into the jurisdictions that visitors established for each new town. As they
traced new boundary lines and mojones (boundary markers) upon the
ground, stringing a conceptual rosary or circular ceque line around each
town, they also arbitrarily dissected the social units internal to diarchies.
In this way each new town was peopled not only by individuals but also
by the ayllus to which the individuals belonged.
Diarchies like Asanaqi were composed of people and the territory
they could claim. In fact, the principal landholders were ayllus, each of
which seems to have been composed of an assortment of lineagelike
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 253

entities. Now, like the diarchies that they collectively made up, ayllus
held land in discontinuous form, keeping an extension of pastures here
and a group of fields there, in such a manner as to have access to a wide
range of ecological conditions and therefore of foodstuffs (Murra 1972).
As a composite made up of its ayllus, Asanaqi itself was such a
discontinuous entity, with a large extension of lands in the Altiplano core
territory (in the midst of which other diarchies had claims on small
pockets of land), other chunks of territory in far-flung districts, such as
in the region of San Lucas on the banks of the Pilcomayo River, and
other plots here and there within the districts of the Charka, Qaraqara,
and Yampara peoples. In the Cochabamba valley, Asanaqi peoples still
stubbornly laid claim to maize fields worked under Inca auspices, though
their coca fields in Pocona had been lost.
Even within the highland core territory, small differences in ecological
conditions translated into large effects in the crops that could be harvested
and animals that could be herded, and so, within the Asanaqi area west
of Lake Poopo, each Asanaqi ayllu was an assortment of patches within
a territorial quilt rather than a single continuous area. Since visitors
established town locations and boundaries according to their own logic
rather than any Andean one, their boundaries dismembered the patches
of land, and hence the populations, that had composed the ayllus of
Asanaqi. Each town thus received the arbitrary assortment of ayllu frag-
ments which held patches of land within the town's jurisdiction.
Just so, San Pedro de Condo, although it had been and remained the
capital of caciques of Asanaqi, was not settled by all of Asanaqi's ayllus.
Some held no patches of land in San Pedro's new jurisdiction. Asanaqi
ayllus lived, farmed, and pastured their animals on lands much more
extensive than the relatively small territorial jurisdiction granted to San
Pedro de Condo; Asanaqi peoples were settled into other towns as well.
Within the territory of the old Asanaqi diarchy, another town was also
created, with its own jurisdiction. When the peoples of the lands granted
to it were gathered together in their new town, San Juan del Pedroso,
today's Challapata, the town obtained a different arbitrary selection of
ayllus from the "parent" diarchy of Asanaqi than the town of San Pedro
de Condo did. And because the district of Challapata included patches of
land worked by Killaka ayllus (and the two diarchies were joined as a
single colonial repartimiento), into Challapata were forced not only
some fragments of Asanaqi ayllus, but also several pieces of Killaka
ayllus, and even an ayllu called Antamarka, which had clearly been an
outlier settlement occupied by peoples from the Qaranka diarchy of
Antamarka (Fig. 6.6). Of course, since ayllu landholdings and hamlet
 Aylluaa/ A.-qI Condo ayIIur C,*- iyllua' Cacachaca aylluaS Lagunilia
IIId eI.where'
ChlllIIpIIa
""iVilus3 :0 iYllua1
CUIIrIa QUIa1a Q\.iIana fOUlana)
KIIIIpa AJax-KalaDa IKallam KaIIapa-Arava
MIrlxa-KaIaDa
AJax-KawaJI AJax-KawaiU (AJax-KaWal~~1
Kawalll Uwichultu &J" u 1
Manxa-KawaHi KawaHl Manxa-Kawali (Manxa-Kawali) -+
Jujchu 2 & Kimsa Cruz
I SUlalvana Sulbvana Sulkavana
ChriaJa Chankaa) I(Chankara)
IIIwI llawi llawi
SUb llawi Sullka
IITakawa!8 Takawa tTakawa) -+ Juichu 2
~18 YlIlaIIi YanlIli
Al8narka9 i 'Anlamarka) Anlamarka
, ChiuHUrus\'o I(CIiwn)
Cl*JcuIo fUrus) 10 CiJIocuItJ) , (CuIocui1o)

I HlDlmfUrusl'O I fHanaro\
0uiIca (Urus)'o , (Quisea)
Yuaasa fAwllaka)l1 Yuqasa
Wilt (Awlaka)" War!
, AnaIxula fKilaka)'2 , (AnQax1JQa)
I .A __• 1InII,.,"2 I(~\
Salta f/aalcaJl2 I(Salta)
, Q\wQa fKlakapi , (()JruQa)

Figure 6_6_ Towns and ayllus of the Asanaqi diarchy. 1. Ayllus of pre-Columbian diarchies
reconstructed from colonial sources (see the sources listed for Fig_ 5.2). Territorial interdigita-
tion left varying segments of various Asanaqi ayllus arbitrarily within the boundaries of one or
more towns_ Not shown: the town of San Lucas in distant valley lands, where Asanaqis were
settled along with Killaka and Awllaka ayllus_ 2. Condo was a reduccion founded well before
1571, when the church required repair. Ayllus Changara and Antamarka have disappeared
there. Condo progressively lost jurisdiction over the people and territories of Culta, Cahuayo,
and Cacachaca_ Since the 1950s, Condo's remaining territory has been fragmented into at least
four separate cantons. 3_ Challapata was a reduccion founded by 1574, when it was divided into
three parcialidades: Ayllus alax-saya Asanaqi, manxa-saya Asanaqi, and manxa-saya Killaka_ 4.
Culta was a Condo hamlet (Santa Barbara de Aguas Calientes) by 1591. It emerged as an annex
of Condo in the mid-seventeenth century_ It became an independent curato while still a civil
annex of Condo in 1779_ Culta became an independent canton in the mid-nineteenth century_ It
lost its priest and became a vice-parish of Huari in 1932. 5. Cacachaca (church built in 1612)
was an annex of Condo by the mid-seventeenth century. It remained an annex and vice-parish of
Condo until becoming a canton in the 1950s. Since then, a portion of its territory has seceded
as Canton Livichuco_ Ayllu Qullana of Cacachaca has disappeared; Ayllus Alax-Kawalli,
Manxa-Kawalli, and Takawa gave rise to new ayllus Jujchu 1, Jujchu 2, and Kimsa Cruz
(Arnold 1988: 127-131).6_ Masce Cahuayo was founded as a Condo milling center after 1591.
It became an annex and vice-parish of Condo by 1645, a vice-curato of Culta in 1779, and a
civil annex of Canton Culta during the nineteenth century, gaining canton status in the 1960s_

254
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 255

settlements were scattered through the larger territory rather than being
of a piece, Condo and Challapata in several cases received parts of the
same ayllus. Just so are there ayllus named Kawalli in both towns today,
and also in Santa Barbara de Culta, which fissioned from Condo's
jurisdiction in the late eighteenth century.
To collect tributes efficiently and levy laborers, Toledo had left
cacicazgos and ayllus in place, but now, in the context of reducci6nes,
ayllus were to take on a new form. Within the architectural space of each
new town, ayllus were assigned particular streets, and so colonially built
space itself became a microcosm of a colonially created new social
whole. A good example of this process comes from the reducci6n of
Tacobamba, where members of the Asanaqi ayllu Ilawi worked outlier
lands. Testimony from 1610 avers that they went to those productive
fields to recuperate after serving in the mita of Potosi. In 1573 Juan
Col que Guarache had pointed out to the visitor Pedro de Zarate that, if
they disoccupied those lands to settle in Condo or Challapata (Ayllu
Ilawi had lands in each jurisdiction), they might lose them, so Zarate
went to Tacobamba and assigned them a street there (ANB, EC 1611,
no. 8, fols. 23r-24v).38
So just as the new town plans and boundaries sundered diarchies and
town councils cross cut the authority of hereditary lords, "traditional"
forms of social organization like ayllus were reintegrated into the towns,
but in a partial manner that began the work of undoing the structure of
diarchies themselves. And when the social obligations and work duties
under the direction of rotative town councils were distributed according
to ayllus, as they no doubt were even in the initial construction of the
towns, then such work not only enacted the individual tributary's
subordination to the council, priest, and state, but also refigured the

Figure 6.6. (Continued)

7. Lagunillas was a colonial tambo pertaining to Huari by 1574; it became a civil and
ecclesiastic annex of Huari in the seventeenth century. With Huari, it was an ecclesiastic
annex of Condo during the eighteenth century. Lagunillas became a vice-parish of Culta in
1779 and an annex or vice-canton of Culta in the nineteenth century, gaining canton status
in the 1960s. 8. Neither Takawa nor Yanaqi (the latter now very populous) are listed as
present in Condo in earliest document, but they appear later. 9. Ayllu Antamarka may have
originated from the Antamarka diarchy of the Qaranka Federation. 10. These Uru ayllus
were short-lived, disappearing from the record by 1645. 11. Yuqasa and Wari of Lagunillas
were settled there from the town of Huari for tambo service. 12. These ayllus of Challapata,
grouped as the "parcialidad de los Quillacas de Challapata," were originally Killaka diarchy
ayllus "reduced" to the new town with jurisdiction over the territory they occupied.
256 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

ayllu in terms of these colonial officials and institutions. Gary Urton

(1988) provides a visible example of the resulting effects: In the
reduccion established near the Inca origin place of Pacaritambo, periodic
sweeping of the plaza (like festival obligations and other work duties)
was divided up among the town's ayllus by dividing the plaza into strips,
where each ayllu swept a separate strip and repaired the corresponding
section of the plaza's surrounding wall. Over centuries, what was once a
single wall came to be clearly divided into stylistically varying segments,
visibly "concretizing" the social differences embodied in ayllus.
The most imposing structure in each new reduccion was its church,
and the most intrusive Spaniard, its priest. With them came a festival
calendar and a wide range of social obligations oriented towards the
rituals of Christianity. These too came to be divvied up according to
ayllu organization, and hence the Christian calendar and the historical
theses encoded in its cyclic repetition became another vehicle through
which native society was reintegrated around new colonial focal points.
From among the local population the priest chose musicians and singers
to adorn the mass and to accompany processions of the saint images that
came to populate the church. And ayllu by ayllu, as Toledo had specifi-
cally ordained for the celebration of urban holy days (and especially for
the festival of Corpus Christi, the militant and totalizing procession that
expressed the Catholic doxa and underwrote the sovereignty of the
Crown, lending the authority of God and king to the social hierarchies
that visibly paraded through town in such processions [Rubin 1991]),
Andeans played their parts in dramas where religion and politics, the via
crucis and the social drama of colonialism, were one and the same.
Agents of colonial transformation had traveled the countryside in the
visita general, and they left copies of the social forms they inscribed on
paper and on human society to ensure that Andeans would periodically
recall and revisit such activities. Inspection of the padrones, the census
lists produced in visitas, shows one result of Toledo's instructions to
visitors: indians were called forth to be registered according to their
ayllus, led by their principales. A practical measure to ensure that all
were accounted for by the authorities who knew them best, this
technique also had the effect of regularly reinscribing ayllu organization
within the new towns. Likewise, when priests began to record baptisms,
marriages, and funerals systematically in their own registers, they too
usually organized their books into sections headed by the names of
ayllus, grouped into the moieties to which they belonged. The indexes of
the first baptismal registers of Challapata and Condo illustrate precisely
this kind of division (Fig. 6.7).39 The order of moieties and ayllus within
 · ablaOclos
~aiUOS .
tf-i! illo Oc(ollllna~.9f/
CF:~ilbClnal'~. af;- 5 C
¢!llillo'3u~[1(:"'-Jf~ 108
«t~illOfill(;1L111;1.~ .,1f/ _~·r
'F ~illo Cb.1n gltr:l..!If / . .2.0=,-
'F ~in0i1110!l'n~fc.1. ~f) Z+)

'F1~iUObilh\1Ii. .•1f> =77

cr~\illofi,lcll:)ili1l1l.1lf/ 31"Z.
1~ilIO~I~jflU riy (Illlo eLi 110
qucfo"l'"os. :If ~f1·
Figure 6.7. Table of contents page of the Libro 1 de Bautismos, San Pedro de Condo,
1571. (Photocopied from the original, formerly in the church of San Pedro de Condo, later
transferred to the Archivo Diocesano de Oruro, with permission; also on microfilm in the
Mormon Family History Archive)
257
258 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

such documents, we might surmise, may have established the rotational

cycles, the "wheels," by which intratown social units took turns at
fulfilling the social obligations performed at the behest of town councils
as well as priests. 4o Just so did the new obligations within reduccion
towns and their churches come to provide an armature through which
ayllus and moieties, and indeed other Andean ways, were woven into
new patterns within the ambit of the colonial state, even as old ways
came unraveled.
As we shall see, the integrative powers of such activities, their capacity
to weave social wholes out of arbitrary fragments, was to prove decisive
in the ultimate defeat of hereditary lords and definitive dismemberment
of diarchies as the colonial state was displaced by the republican one.
But the process of formation of new kinds of sociality was a long one,
marked by struggles between competing kinds of authority, competing
registers of social memory, and competing pasts. Given the absolutist
nature of the colonial state and the link between Crown sovereignty and
the universal history of orthodox Catholicism, we should not be sur-
prised to find that challenges posed by new kinds of authorities to old
ones are treated as seditious rebellions, and alternative interpretations of
the past as diabolic heresies.

AN ANDEAN PIDGIN BAROQUE: THE COUNTER-REFORMATION

OF INTERCULTURAL HERESIES

Just as Andean men like the mita captain Juan Col que Guarache turned
to writing and to Spanish-style registers of the past, such as event
chronologies, wills, and the quotidian documents of lawsuit, visita, and
account book, they also continued to engage the past through more
"traditional" registers. They still told stories, poured libations, and even
used quipus. It is more difficult to judge, however, what kind of new past
they construed with old techniques. In Potosi, we might imagine Col que
Guarache in the process of lubricating with chicha libations the path-
ways of social transmission that gave them the power to claim his
subjects' labor there. And in a diatribe aimed at Polo Ondegardo's
account of the Inca past, the Anonymous Jesuit (1879) repeatedly cites
for his evidence "the quipus of Juan Colque Guarache" (especially in his
effort to prove that Polo had misunderstood Andean testimony on the
issue of human sacrifice). Chicha libations were subject to new strictures,
and quipus to replacement by the pen and ink of reduccion scribes, but
both were still in use in the 1570s. Can we judge what they recorded?
Records from the previous generation already attest to new contents.
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 259

We have seen several examples of quipus in use to report on tribute

payments and services to Spaniards in the sixteenth century. Very soon,
however, the categories and kinds of social relations registered in quipus
underwent considerable change. They recorded goods and new kinds of
labors owed to encomendero and priest, carried in very different sorts of
journeys to new kinds of places. To accomplish this shift to colonial uses,
it was not only the numbers and categories twined in quipu cords and
knots that had to change. As a trace of meanings embodied in the
landscape, iconically standing with pathways and loci that gave signifi-
cance to social life, the very logic of the quipu had to change. Ritual
journeys and social landscapes traversed in them had to be radically
rerouted. Registering how many loads of corn or potatoes had been
taken to their encomendero's house, how many families had shifted to
the mines of Potosi, how many silver marks had been smelted and
delivered to the encomendero, indigenous quipu kamayuqs created a
chronotopograph, a map of places in time, of the colonial world, not the
pre-Columbian one. The pathway of memory in their quip us does not
seem to have led to the founding ancestors and wak' as that in Inca times
underwrote the tributary order. It led, rather, to the marketplace, to the
parish house and church, and to the hearing rooms of the Spanish legal
system, from whence it was translated into thin and wavy lines traced on
paper, then deposited in imperial archives.
By the 1570s, the process of transformation had progressed yet
further. The chronicler Jose de Acosta, who toured the rural Andes with
Viceroy Toledo, reported at length on his observations of quipus (and
allied techniques using stones or grains of corn) in use:
... It happens today in Peru, that after two or three years of service
when it is time for a Spanish administrator to give account of his
period in office, the indians come out with their detailed and
ascertained accounts. They note that in such a town they gave him
six eggs for which he failed to pay, and in this house a chicken, and
there two bundles of hay for his horses, for which he paid only so
many coins, while he still owes so many others. And in order to do
all this, they complete their cross-checking with a quantity of knots
and handfuls of cords, and these they take for valid witnesses and
certain writing.
I saw a handful of these strings which an indian woman carried
and in which was written a general confession of her entire life, and
through them she confessed, as I would do with a handwritten paper,
and I even asked about certain little strings that seemed somewhat
different from the others, and they were certain circumstances
required to confess some sins fully.
260 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

Apart from these quipus of strings, they have others of small

stones, through which they punctually learn the words they seek to
know by memory. It is quite something to see certain old men with a
wheel made of these stones, learning the Our Father, and with
another the Ave Maria, and another the Creed. They know which
stone it is that was conceived of the Holy Spirit, and which one
suffered under the power of Pontius Pilate. There is nothing like
seeing them correct themselves when they err, for the whole
correction consists of looking at their stones. For me, on the other
hand, to forget everything I know of choral music, just one of those
wheels would suffice. There are usually not a few of these for this
effect in the graveyards of the churches.
It is an enchanting thing to see another kind of quipu, using grains
of corn. A very difficult account would force a very good accountant
to use quill and ink, to see how to fit in so many entries, so many
contributions, taking out so many from there and adding so many
here, with another hundred little notations. These indians, in
contrast, will take their grains and put one here, three over there, and
eight who knows where; they pass one grain from here, exchanging
three from there, and in effect they come out with their account very
exactly made, without even a single accent mark out of place. Much
better do they know how to give account and reason of what falls to
each one to payor give than we know how to do with quill and ink
and careful checking. If this is not ingenious and if these men are
beasts, men are free to judge. What I judge for certain, is that in that
business they have great advantages over us. (1. Acosta 1977: book 6,
chap. 8, pp. 411-412)41
As ingenious as Acosta knew them to be, these mnemonic devices
were now being used to recount sins and to remember prayers that
themselves contained condensed versions of Christian narratives on
which priests expounded at length in doctrina sessions. This was a
watershed generation for Andean social memory. The techniques may
have remained the same, but the content, the memories, were changing.
The medium had been adapted to carry a new kind of message.
Pre-Columbian quipus had not recalled the Hail Mary and the Paternos-
ter or the Christian categories of sin. And as for more narrative, more
"historical" media, such as the quipu used to register a sequence of
sacred places tied to ancestral events and social boundaries: What past
now merited repeated tellings in the context of the Colque Guarache
mansion in Potosi? What libations, to what deities, along what ceques,
might he have poured there in the presence of the forced laborers who
had followed the colonial pilgrimage to the mountain of silver? Once the
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 261

reducci6n process had taken effect, many wak' as and burial places had
been destroyed, and new channels of social relations focusing on town
councils and Christian festivals had become inescapable aspects of
experience, these very facts must have been the things most requiring a
satisfying historical foundation. As with the narrated past, the past
encoded through non narrative techniques must have undergone a pro-
found transformation under colonial conditions.
When Juan Colque Guarache died he left behind a detailed will that
made restitution for his sins just as the wills of Spanish encomenderos
did (ANB, EC 1804, no. 193). He was succeeded by his son of the same
name, who had been trained in the Jesuit school for native nobles in
Cusco. Surely, this was a different sort of training from that which this
pupil's grandfather, Juan Guarache, had taken in Inca Cusco. Juan
Guarache would have learned the calendric and topographic intricacies
of the ceque system; if Juan Col que "el Mozo," as Capoche called him,
knew how to use quipus, we can be sure that the stories he told with
them were about Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ rather than Viracocha
and Tunupa. What is more, he may well have done so in Latin, in which
Jesuits trained their charges. 42
As historians or anthropologists of the pre-Columbian past, we must
conclude with Murra (1964, 1967, 1968, 1970) that pre-Toledan
chronicles and visitas are more trustworthy, providing a clearer view of
the Andean past than the colonially transformed narratives of later dates
do. Yet when our goal is to understand the emergence and transforma-
tion of the colonial world, that very same breaking point in the colonial
record becomes significant in other ways. When one learns to read in this
record the dramaturgic effects of visitas and the discourses of power and
"collective subjectivity" carried out in them and in other colonial
procedures (Guevara-Gil and Salomon 1994), this documentary "break"
opens rather than closes a scholarly window, granting us a view of how
the Andean past came to be transformed through Spanish colonialism
and how Andeans increasingly came to understand Spaniards and the
colonial experience.

INDIAN SACRIFICES AND INDIAN EUCHARISTS AFTER T AQUI ONCOY

Toledo's execution of the last rebel Inca, Tupac Amaru I, upon the place
of punishment erected by Pizarro over the Inca ushnu signaled to
Andeans the inviability of military resistance to Spanish rule. The
inquisitorial techniques of Spanish extirpators of idolatry, unleashed on
262 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

Andeans in the wake of taqui oncoy, helped to teach Andeans that the
Castilian king and Christian god could not be defeated in an outright
war of the gods. But Counter-Reformation disciplines and punishments
also served to train Andeans in more inaudible and invisible interpretive
tactics.
The result of this concerted repression and increased surveillance was
double. On the one hand, Andeans were taught a new difference
between public and private activities; their heterodox practices were
channeled into clandestinity, where they could be carried out only by
small groups of people behind closed doors or on faraway mountain-
tops. On the other hand, these private and clandestine practices were
simultaneously ever more closely tied to the rituals that could still be
carried out in public as large-scale collective performances. Those, of
course, were Christian festivities, directed towards the Virgin and the
Holy Trinity and towards a host of images that for Spaniards were not
idols: the saints and advocations of Christ and the Virgin. Dancing and
singing in native languages still persisted, but translated into adjuncts of
Christian liturgy. Heterodox meanings could still be parsed in these
public performances, especially when clandestine practice was employed
as a supplement to public cult. Just so, libation sequences and animal
sacrifices were increasingly deployed, in clandestine meetings in the very
context of Christian rites, as a means of glossing public liturgic practice.
The transformation of Tunupa into an Andean apostle (Urbano 1981,
1990), like that of the moon into the Virgin (Harris 1986), the thunder
god Illapa into Saint James (Silverblatt 1988a), and the sun into Christ
(Platt 1987c), was not a matter of Spanish invention alone. Although
some priests in an early period of the conversion of indians saw fit to
introduce such equations, and other Spaniards, seeking to account for
the strange parallelisms they saw between Christian and Andean prac-
tices and beliefs, were ready to admit the possibility of a preconquest
evangelization, they were just as likely to see the devil behind Andeans'
distorted creator gods, confessions, and flood narratives. Certain priests,
like Perez Bocanegra (1631), sought to take advantage of such parallel-
isms in their efforts at conversion; adapting Andean devotional forms to
the worship of Christian divinity, they aimed to interest Andeans in their
own indoctrination. Sometimes they succeeded all too well. Just as they
strove to transform Andean narrative to strip it of its non-Christian
content, missionary priests repeatedly told stories to Andeans, giving
greatest emphasis to the redemptive narrative of God's descent into man
in the person of Jesus Christ. In spite of Spanish claims to the contrary,
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 263

Andeans began to understand and internalize colonial projects of civili-

zation and evangelization, and also to appropriate what they learned for
their own ends.
The miracles performed by the Virgin of Copacabana on the site of
the Inca ritual center on Lake Titicaca drew Andeans to a now-Christian
site that had long before been consecrated as a place of miracles, an Inca
shrine in sight of the very place of the sun's (and Tunupa's) birth. 43 But
the taquies performed in the new context were radically transformed, as
Estenssoro Fuchs (1992) makes plain.
Much as we might like to attribute such facts to the conversion
strategies of wily priests, we must also recognize that Andeans them-
selves were adept at the process of cultural translation. The image of the
Virgin of Copacabana was itself the product of an indigenous sculptor's
hand, carved in an "Andean baroque" mestizo-indian workshop. In the
indian parish of Copacabana in Potosi, indigenous people had already
attested to numerous miracles brought about by this advocation of
Mary, who often gave aid to indian miners at moments of danger (see
Arzans 1965).
Some Andeans, such as the earnest student of Christian apology and
universal history Pachacuti Yamqui, the anonymous compiler-translator
of the Huarochiri manuscript, and the itinerant epistle writer Guaman
Poma, were active voices indeed in the process of cultural translation
(Fig. 6.8). Juxtaposing Spanish and Andean meaning orders in an effort
to account for the colonial realities they lived, they actively interwove
what had been two incompatible worlds into a single colonial whole.
The establishment of translated equivalences of semantic and enacted
meanings produced an interculture, but one which under sustained
colonial conditions, where an asymmetry of power based on cultural
difference was always to be maintained, made complete synthesis
impossible, unthinkable to most Spaniards and most indians. On the
colonial vanguard, certain intrepid interlopers may have worked to undo
difference, to assert, as many caciques did in the 1570s, the essential
equivalence of native lordship and Castilian nobility, or (like Pachacuti
Yamqui) to laud the fundamental Christianity of Andean religiosity or
even (as Guaman Poma repeatedly asserts) the moral superiority of
Christianized indians to most miss ionizing Spaniards.
However, it was precisely at these creative junctures, when Andeans
had seemingly appropriated Castilian social forms and Christian liturgy
and theology in their own terms, that Spaniards most insistently reas-
serted difference. When Andeans played an authoring role in Christian
Figure 6.8. Pregunta el Autor: Guaman Poma queries his informants. Here the cultural
interloper Guaman Poma, wearing full Spanish dress, questions Inca elders. This one-time
aide to Cristobal de Albornoz, extirpator of idolatry, was well-versed in sixteenth-century
Spanish ethnographic techniques, and like most ethnographers was not averse to taking
advantage of his relative position of power to gain information about the past. (From
Guaman Poma de Ayala 1980: 338)

264
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 265

thought and practice, Spaniards insisted on remaining missionary colo-

nizers. Like the Jews and Muslims of Iberia, who posed the greatest
threat to Christianity when they converted to it (thus becoming special
targets of the Inquisition), it was converted and "acculturated" Andeans
who seem most to have worried the extirpators of idolatry and colonial
administrators. Especially problematic were those who seemed to usurp
priestly authority or Castilian noble prerogative. When they were
discovered, they provoked Spaniards to search out the idols hidden
behind altars, to question the diabolically heterodox logic of incomplete
or "mixed" indigenous Christianity, and to assert the insufficiency of
native elites for the honors and privileges of Castilian nobility. And none
of these faults was difficult for Spaniards to find. Because colonial
Spaniards also "spoke" the intercultural pidgin of colonial discourse,
they knew the general location of its "impurities" in advance.
The taqui oncoy movement of the 1560s suggested to Spaniards that
too much toleration of indigenous celebratory practices in new Christian
contexts did not lead indians to grasp the faith more readily, but gave
them opportunity to continue worship of old gods in clandestinity. In the
wake of that movement and especially with the arrival of Viceroy
Toledo's visita general and the newly strengthened institutions of surveil-
lance that accompanied the process of "reduction," ever more ubiquitous
priests turned their attention to sniffing out the heterodox practices of
their indian parishioners.
As it happens, Toledo's arrival in Peru with orders to institute a
sweeping transformation of the colonial order coincided with another
major shake-up that was to affect all regions of the Spanish empire,
indeed, all of Catholic Christendom. The Council of Trent called for
drastic improvements in the methods by which priests taught doctrine;
they were empowered to infiltrate communities of the faithful in an
effort, first, to make clandestine heterodox practices and beliefs visible
and, then, to eradicate them through strenuous preaching, exemplary
punishment, and continued surveillance.
The cause for such extraordinary measures was the spread of heresy,
and in particular the Protestant heresies, often in Spain glossed simply as
"Lutheranism" for the heretic dogmatizer whose teachings were causing
the most serious political crises of the empire. In Castile, another
concern was the growing influence of Erasmus, whose suggestions about
how the faithful might gain direct and personal contact with divinity
(without the mediation of a priest in the Eucharist) had led to a
generalized movement called illuminism. Illuminist "cells" had sprung up
266 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

throughout Castile, gaining adherents within religious convents, but also

leading to the emergence of many "third-order" communities. In the late
sixteenth century, increasing numbers of ordinary men and, especially,
women were induced by dogmatizing priests or nuns to join "irregular"
orders, groups of adherents who met privately to share their religious
experiences. 44
Like all practices deemed heretical, illuminism became a special
province of the Inquisition, which in 1559 arrested a large group of
Erasmians-including some leading citizens-in Valladolid, then the
capital of the empire. Santa Teresa of Avila was herself questioned, as
was Peru's Santa Rosa of Lima. Many of the suspect came from the
ranks of the highly educated and well-to-do, but some of their practices
had spread into more popular circles as well. One of Santa Rosa's
favorite techniques, self-flagellation, an old form of penitential practice
which was also cherished for producing spiritual ecstasy, was a regular
part of confraternal processions, although it had not displaced the autos
sacramentales that were still a con fraternal staple.
In Lima, Santa Rosa's circle of devotees included women of indig-
enous descent (Iwasaki 1994). Unfortunately for the upholders of
orthodoxy in the Indies, indians were by this date no longer in the
jurisdiction of the Inquisition. Individual parish priests did, however,
report suspect practices to their bishops and archbishops, and by the
1560s special sections within Church archives were being set aside to
hold the documents produced in ecclesiastic visits carried out with the
express end of extirpating surviving idolatries. Extirpators discovered,
however, that clandestine performance of pre-Columbian religious prac-
tice was not their only problem. For indigenous peoples in their new
towns, influenced by incessant priestly harangues and also by the pomp
of Christian ceremonies in which they participated in their hometowns
and in the Spanish urban centers where they periodically went to work,
had begun their own process of transculturation, selectirtg suitable pieces
of Christian belief and practice and knitting them into their lives in their
own manner. Counter-Reformation activities in Peru had to contend
now with indian brands of Christian heresy.45

Diego Iquisi, Confessor and Wak' a "Doorkeeper," Says Mass

Careful scrutiny of the evidence suggests that taqui oncoy adepts
embraced certain ideas taken from Christianity even as they declared a
war of the gods. Taqui oncoy was suppressed and religious indoctrina-
tion became more insistent, increasing the likelihood of transcultural
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 267

borrowing. Andeans' aberrant Christianity, rather than their idolatry,

became a serious concern.
In the early 1570s, perhaps arriving along with the visita general, a
young priest named Hernan Gonzalez de la Casa took on the Wisixsa
diarchy towns of Toropalca and Caisa, where he worked for seven years.
At some point during that period, Gonzalez de la Casa heard reports of
an idolatrous cult still practiced within his district, and he set out with
his alcalde, scribe, and factor (fiscal) to undo it, traveling via a circuitous
route to the remote valley of Caltama so as to catch the idolators by
surprise. What he discovered seems at first sight quite pre-Columbian.
He found a native sanctuary where a native religious leader named
Diego Iquisi, identified as a punku kamayuq, a "porter" or gatekeeper of
a wak'a, was revered as a great sorcerer. In the community of Caltama
itself, numerous "pagan indians" lived with their still-unbaptized chil-
dren. Diego Iquisi, it turned out, performed sacrifices in honor of five
idols. Finding the blood and bones of animals and what he believed to be
human children, Gonzalez de la Casa investigated Iquisi's cult. He found
that the wak' a, the shrine where the idols were kept, was a center of
native novenas (calendric rites) and romerias (pilgrimage processions).
Now, Caltama itself was located near both Porco and Potosi, and Iquisi's
five idols were all associated with mines. The principal idol, named Tata
("Father") Porco, was a large chunk of native silver from the mountain
and mine of Porco, and the other four were also named for and probably
came from mountains with mines. Quite probably, Iquisi had discovered
the clandestine home of the idols once kept at the very mines they were
named for. Perhaps, he had found the idols by which Manco Inca had
lured Diego de Almagro towards Chile in 1535.
Many principal Inca wak'as had already been smashed; cultic centers
in Inca administrative sites had largely been abandoned along with the
flow of mit' a pilgrims along Inca highways. But whatever the disruptions
to pre-Columbian social life elsewhere, these particular idols may still
have had currency in the late sixteenth century because of their mining
focus. These idols, and Iquisi's cult to them, drew pilgrims from
"Cochabamba and the entire district of Charcas, Caracaras, Yanparaes,
Chich as, Juras, Visisas, Asanaques, Carangas, and Chuyes" (AGI, Char-
cas 79, no. 19, fol. 3v), which is to say, from the southern half of
Qullasuyu (the northern federations of Qana, Kanchi, Qulla, Lupaqa,
and Pakax go unmentioned). A major cultic center, this wak'a was an
appropriate clandestine counterpart of the centripetal motion of forced
colonial mita laborers. We must ask, however, what kinds of practices
268 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

Andeans schooled in reducci6n Catholicism engaged in under Iquisi's

direction.
Gonzalez de la Casa's discovery and destruction of Diego Iquisi's
cultic center is told through references to a proceso filed in the extirpa-
tion archive of the archbishopric of La Plata, written into his "proof of
merit and service." Gonzalez, rather than Iquisi, is the story's protago-
nist. Even so, the account contains some unusual details of Andean
practice. 46 First of all, pilgrims seem to have come to the shrine for the
purposes of divination, to inquire of the gods what their future might
bring, and then to carry out sacrifices in conjunction with certain other
rites destined to cleanse them of sins and to restore the balance in their
relationship to gods so that, we must assume, their futures would be
vouchsafed. The testimony of Juan Perez, an apostolic notary familiar
with the extirpation record, fills in further details:
... information that was taken against him and by his confession
[shows] that he was a famed sorcerer and invoker of the devil, an
idolatrous priest {sacerdoteJ who confessed the indians, giving
penances to those he confessed. These he washed in the currents of
the rivers, taking sand from the river and throwing it over their
backs, after which their sins were washed away. And he led them to
understand that he said mass, and that he was empowered to say it,
and sacrificed sheep and guinea pigs and some children, as witnesses
say after seeing the bones the priest found. [Iquisi carried out] these
and other superstitions against our holy Catholic faith, and said that
he preached to the indians at the command of the devil, with whom
he said he had communicated, from which there seems to have been
a great scandal in the entire province of Charcas. To this Diego
Iquisi, it appears, flocked indians of Charka, Qaraqara, 19r/Chuy,
Qaranka, Yampara, and Chicha to consult with the demon and find
out if they would die from their illnesses, or whether their marketing
and agreements and plantings would come out prosperously or
adversely. And he led them to have novenas romerias [pilgrimage
processions] to the wak' a, and had them fast and revere it as a god,
and [likewise] the sun and the moon and the god of the rains and
lightning bolts. (AGI, Charcas 79, no. 19, fols. 8v-9r)
Even as Gonzalez de la Casa and his witnesses sought to portray
Iquisi and his following as heathens, clear references to Iquisi's usurpa-
tion of priestly roles abound. First of all, he was Diego Iquisi, certainly
a baptized indian. Furthermore, this sorcerer, who somehow "commu-
nicates with the devil," also performed confessions, assigned penance,
and washed away his followers' sins in the river. Were these Christian
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 269

practices? One cannot categorically affirm it, since forms of confession

and the washing away of "sins" were practiced by pre-Columbian
Andeans. But pre-Columbian punku kamayuqs were not named Diego,
and did not lead their followers to believe they were saying mass or that
they were empowered to do so. For sixteenth-century Spaniards, when
any but an ordained priest did such things or made such claims, it was
certainly the devil's work, as Iquisi's practice seems to have appeared to
his extirpators, constituting a dangerous mockery and a threat to the
authority of God and the Church.
In this probanza, witnesses characterized the rites performed in
Caltama as confessions, penances, and absolutions, but also as novenas
and romerias, rites that to Spaniards were associated with the calendric
celebration of miracle-working saints. But these idols were a sort suitable
for the smelter. Gonzalez carted them off and, on the site of the idols'
shrine, built an open-air chapel (a humilladero) in which indians might
adore the crucified Christ. When he gave his deposition, twenty years
after the events, the indians were now said to mock their old idols and to
adhere devoutly to Christian practice. Things had not been so simple,
however, at the time of the events.
When Gonzalez carried away the idolators along with the idols and
their precious ornaments, a mob of indians attacked him and shouted
out, revealing at least one of the miracles performed by the greatest of
the idols, the silver Tata Porco. They wanted to know why Gonzalez was
taking him away, and threatened to kill Gonzalez unless he gave back
their "Father Porco," the god who had given them victory over the
Chicha (in a battle in which Colque Guarache also participated, carried
out in colonial times under Martin de Almendras). Gonzalez survived the
rain of arrows and boulders they sent down upon him from above, but
nearly died, he tells us, after they poisoned him with a witch's brew of
potent herbs. He survived only because an indian woman was able to
undo the sorcery with a counterpotion, causing him to vomit up "a knot
of worms the size of a hickory nut" (ibid., 3v). Gonzalez believed in
Iquisi's powers if not in those of the idols.
After delivering part of the silver to the royal treasury in La Plata and
sending Iquisi before an ecclesiastic extirpation judge, Gonzalez was
promoted to the richer parish of Macha, where he claims to have helped
definitively reduce the indians to good customs (and to the tribute rolls).
There he helped to build an impressive church and endowed it with
precious ornaments, the Christian equivalents of the elite goods found
with Iquisi's idols. At the same time, he also gave the indians of Macha
270 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

(where he had also extirpated idols) suitable Christian replacements for

the miracle-working intercessors of idolatrous pilgrimages: He brought
them imagenes de bulto (ibid., 2d cuaderno), miniature images of
potentially miraculous saints, enclosed in wooden boxes (also called
retablos), which could be carried in novenas and romerias between the
town's church and newly founded chapels in its hamlet annexes. Within
a few years, such chapels and saints' images provided the grist for further
indigenous experimentation with Christianity.

Miguel Acarapi (alias Miguel Chiri), Indian Christ, Performs

the Eucharist with Chicha
Not far from Macha, Viceroy Toledo had created the town of Taco-
bamba, where Asanaqi's ayllu Ilavi had been settled on a street. Around
the turn of the century, some extraordinary events took place there,
recorded in the 1613 probanza of the priest who was sent there to
investigate them, one Fernando de Mesa. Like the probanza made by
Gonzalez, this too was a curriculum vita constructed through notarized
testimony, the Castilian stuff of event history that led to Crown rewards.
As always in probanzas of priests, various important ecclesiastics praise
Mesa highly. He had always enlivened his Christian rites with "very
good piccolo music and singing" by indians trained to the task (ANB, EC
1613, no. 19, fol. 5v, testimony of Lic. Pedro Ramirez del Aguila). What
is more, he had passed the Toledan-era exams in both Aymara and
Quechua, and because of his linguistic skills had done marvels through
his teaching and indoctrination, keeping his indians well practiced in the
things of the holy Catholic faith (ibid.). So good was Mesa in his work
that the indians of Condo (who knew him through their mitima residents
there) had asked the archbishop to assign him to their parish of San
Pedro de Condo (ibid., 5v-6r). Fortunately, Mesa was also a curious and
energetic man. He was forced to walk about the territory of his doctrina
to carry the faith to those who lived in the hamlets (like Ayllu Ilawi's
settlement) that the reducci6n process had left intact (ibid., 2r), and there
his curiosity led him to understand the risk in giving indians too detailed
an account of the mysteries of the faith.
Mesa had been sent to Tacobamba in the wake of a discovery there,
under the watch of his predecessor Father Pedro de Porras, of a very
dangerous business. Around 1594, it came to the bishop's attention that,
in Tacobamba,
... an indian named Miguel Acarapi, by another name called Miguel
Chiri, carried out confessions saying that he was Jesus Christ. And
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 271

with this trickery he had attracted many other indians who followed
him in his rites and abuses like disciples. In meeting together they
took and drank the herb called achuma. About eight days ago that
indian died violently when another indian called Juanillo killed him,
because Miguel Acarapi had said that the chicha [they drank] was the
blood of Jesus Christ. The murderer in defense said it was not so,
and stabbed him with a butcher's knife, from which he died. (Ibid.,
21v-22r)47

The followers, or "disciples," of this martyred Christ continued to

meet in the countryside, where they buried him
... next to the chapel where before they killed him, they say, he had
carried out ceremonies leading them to believe that he was saying
mass. And at present his followers still go to the chapel and tomb to
that same effect, from which, if there should be any delay in
punishing and correcting such offenses, some sect might come about,
damaging to a people who are new to our holy faith. (Ibid., 22r)
In the bishop's commission to Mesa to investigate the matter, he was
instructed to find out who was involved, where it took place, precisely
what doctrine the indians might have been teaching one another,
whether there were teachers, if the teaching was in public or in secret,
and how widespread the business might have been in the surrounding
area. Of particular interest was discovering if such practices were limited
to indians or whether Spaniards might have been involved, and whether
such practices were performed only in drunken meetings or without
drinking (ibid., 21 v). Clearly, concern over the emergence of a "sect"
suggests more than the usual worries over indigenous apostasy into idola-
try. The problem now was their experimentation with Christianity.48
Over the succeeding baroque century of idolatry extirpation and
indigenous uptake of Christianity, references to collectively adored
graven images, widely attended specialist-directed sacrifices to wak'as,
and regionally salient pilgrimage rites gradually fade from the record.
Extirpators in the latter part of the century find no more public wak'a
cults, and for the most part contented themselves with discovering
small-scale superstitions, magical practices, and curing rites, usually
restricted to the private intrahousehold sphere into which sacred drink-
ing had been exiled. Most large-scale rites and regional pilgrimages
performed in honor of graven images were now carried out in churches,
under the leadership of Spanish priests. Yet in these activities, too, even
without declaring themselves to be Christs or claiming to perform the
Eucharist with chicha, Andeans got themselves into trouble.
272 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

Foundation of Santa Barbara de Culta as a Clandestine Confraternity

Until June of 1996, my years of research on K'ulta and Asanaqi had
turned up only vague intimations of the origin of the town where I did
my fieldwork. In the late seventeenth century, it had been an ecclesiastic
annex of Condo, to which Condo's priest traveled to say mass and carry
out baptisms, weddings, and funerals once or twice a year. It was once
called Santa Barbara de Aguas Calientes for the hot springs that have
since gone cold, and is now called Culta (pronounced K'ulta), say its
residents, for the gutturing sound the artesian springs now make. When
I asked about the town's origins, I was told that they had something to
do with Condo and much to do with miracles wrought by Culta's patron
saint, Santa Barbara. Long ago she had appeared to a shepherd boy, who
had seen Santa Barbara and her sister, Our Lady of Bethlehem, walking
in human form downriver from the headwaters of the Aguas Calientes.
When the boy saw her, some distance from Culta (about a league away,
people say), Santa Barbara was frozen in image form, while Belen
continued walking downriver until reaching Tinquipaya. At a later
point, Santa Barbara was brought to Culta, and though an attempt was
made to move her from there, she refused to go.
Now, just uphill from the church and plaza of Culta stands a group of
ruined stone houses, arrayed around a small flat area known as Awka
PIasa, "Father Plaza." Several people told me that these were the ruins of
the original settlement to Culta, which had long ago been destroyed. In
construing my own narrative of Culta's foundation, I had set aside the
miracle stories, so much like those told of patron saints everywhere, and
had imagined the ruins around Awka PIasa to have been a pre-
Columbian settlement, burned and destroyed when people of these parts
were resettled in the reduccion of San Pedro de Condo in the 1570s.
New Culta, I supposed, had come into being as a result of the
impositions of doctrina-spouting priests, when the population began to
recover from epidemic collapse and the lands around Condo had become
insufficient. Certainly, the rectilinear layout of the "new" Culta was
more akin to the standard reduccion than to the haphazard arrangement
around Awka PIasa.
Yet a ten-folio document that I ran across in the Archivo y Biblioteca
Arquidiocesanos de Sucre in June of 1996 reveals that miracles per-
formed by Santa Barbara are, for Culta, closer to the truth than any
suppositions about high-handed Spanish reduccion practices. For in fact
Santa Barbara-or, at any rate, Culta peoples' devotion to her-had
everything to do with the destruction of an early settlement as well as
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 273

with its rebirth, when against the wishes of Spanish priests, Culta rose
phoenixlike from its own ashes. Experience with heterodox cults like
that of Tacobamba's Miguel AcarapilChiri made seventeenth-century
priests wary of letting Andeans take Christianity into their own hands.
Perhaps that is why members of Ayllu Kawalli bearing the surname of
Chiri, who had purchased an image of the saint and constituted
themselves as a confraternity, were forced to take their Christian
devotions into clandestinity, when successive priests of Condo sought to
confiscate their image of Santa Barbara and demolished the chapels the
people had built for her. Their cult cannot be considered a Spanish
imposition. To the contrary, the founders of what has become Santa
Barbara de Culta (whose namesakes live on in a Manxa-Kawalli hamlet)
struggled for many years for the right to celebrate their saint's image.
According to their later testimony, it was in the year 1616 that don
Pedro and don Diego Chiri purchased an image of Santa Barbara, along
with all the accoutrements of the mass, and built a chapel in their hamlet
of Junt'uma (or Uma Junto, the Aymara term for Aguas Calientes, or
"Hot Waters"). The two men then founded a confraternity of their peers,
of which one was prioste,49 and the other, mayordomo. Writing a letter
of complaint to the archbishop of La Plata in 1625, the two Chiris50
explained how they had done all this nine years earlier in the hope that
the priest of Condo would come to celebrate the saint's day and perform
mass for all those whose fields and pastures in this distant region kept
them from easily attending church in Condo. But their priest, far from
aiding them in their devotions, had refused to visit the chapel. And what
is more, he had confiscated the chalice, paten, saint's banner, and other
goods connected with the sacrament of the mass. As a result, the old
people of their region were dying without last rites and were deprived of
the benefits of their pious works. 51
Convinced by their arguments, don Pascual Peroches, the provisor
and vicar general of the archbishopric, ordered the priest of Condo to
return the purloined goods and henceforth to visit the chapel and carry
out his duties there, under pain of excommunication. The priest,
Gonzalo Leal Vejarano, immediately drafted an indignant response
challenging the Chiris' "sinister and false" account and providing a
history of Junt'uma confraternal insolence going back to his predeces-
sor's time. Leal's reply of January 16, 1626, begins by asserting that
never, since the 1570s foundation of the reducci6n of San Pedro de
Condo, had there been any custom of celebrating the mass in Junt'uma
or any priestly obligation to do so.
274 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

... in the jurisdiction of this town four or five chapels have been
ordered demolished, so as to reduce the indians to Condo, thereby
avoiding the great borracheras, idolatries, superstitions, incests, grave
faults, and deaths that [the chapels] caused, and in particular in the
case of the chapel referred to in the [Chiris,] petition. Some years ago
the indian referred to in the petition, in order to absent himself from
his town and avoid service and hearing mass there, so as to live in his
infidelity with others like himself, built a chapel. With this pretext,
they thought that the priests would, with bribes, let them live there in
their liberty. Knowing that many sins would be committed there
against God Our Lord, and knowing that the indians who gathered
there did not come to hear mass or receive the other sacraments, my
predecessor Diego Arias refused ever to go to the said chapel to
celebrate mass or any fiesta whatever, even though [the indians]
beseeched him to go. (ABAS, Causas contra Ecclesiasticos no. 5020,
fols. 4r-4v)52

When the Kawallis of Junt'uma first built their chapel, Arias had been
ordered to say mass there after the Chiris had obtained an order from
the archbishopric. At that time, Arias had won an appeal and obtained
an order for the destruction of the Junt'uma chapel and transfer of the
image and ornaments to a new chapel in Condo. But Arias had died
before putting the order into effect.
Not long after, taking over the parish in 1616, Leal also fell victim to
the Chiris' sinister ways. He too obtained an order from an ecclesiastic
visitador (Doctor don Pascual Peroches, the same man who in 1525,
now provisor of the archbishopric, favored the Chiris' petition) to
demolish the chapel and confiscate the image and ornaments, so as to
force the Ayllu Kawalli indians to return to Condo. Leal explains what
then happened:
... again these orders had no effect, even though the corregidor of
this district went after the indians, because they fled and hid the
image and the ornaments. And he found that the roof of the chapel
had been removed, and afterwards they had built another chapel a
league farther away. And to accomplish their evil intention, the
indians went before the lord archbishop, don Geronimo de Rueda,
with a sinister relation and another request like the present one ...
to which I replied with the reasons expressed above, and ... I sent
the lord archbishop the orders and opinion of the lord visitor, and he
responded ... that I should insist that the corregidor burn the
indians' houses and bring them back to their reduccion, since it was
in the service of Our Lord ....
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 275

... Yet none of these orders has had any effect, because [the
indians of Junt'uma] are the most evil indians of the whole kingdom,
ladinos, proud, free, and untrustworthy. In the visit that he made to
this town, the Lord Doctor Bartolome Cervantes wrote to the Real
Acuerdo about all of this, seeking to remedy it. And in his visita he
left ordinances and constitutions [directly addressed to the chapel in
Junt'uma] written in the book of this church where other visitas have
been recorded. (Ibid., 4v-Sv)
At this point Leal introduced a copy of the constitution-an ecclesi-
astic rule of order-that directly addressed the Chiris' chapel in Jun-
t'uma:
Constitution:
Item: Experience has revealed the great damage and inconveniences
that follow when indians have chapels in their hamlets and fields,
celebrating in them mass and fiestas. Living in the countryside the
indians are at greater liberty to carry out their borracheras, cantares,
and taquies, to the dishonor of our Catholic faith, and carrying out
the said fiestas does notable damage to their conversion and the faith
that is taught to them. I [therefore] order and command that the said
priest not celebrate mass in such chapels, nor any festival whatever
pertaining to their confraternity or any other saint, unless such fiestas
are carried out and celebrated in this town of Condo or in Huari its
annex .... (Ibid., SV)53
In other words, argued Leal, the 1625 order commanding him to
perform mass in Junt'uma was a grave miscarriage of justice, contradict-
ing the repeated opinions and policies of the archbishopric and its
visitors that under no circumstances should indians be allowed to build
chapels or celebrate saints in the countryside.
The constitution written into a Condo parish book and priestly
denunciations repeatedly refer to borracheras and hechicerias (sorceries),
but no evidence of such practices is actually forwarded. Clearly, the
ritual practices the priests actually sought to stamp out, and of which
they have explicit evidence, involve the construction of chapels, founda-
tion of confraternities, celebration of saints' fiestas, and requests for
priests to visit them and celebrate the holy sacraments. Priests were able
to justify the stealing of saints' images and destruction of Christian
chapels by interpreting indian acts and requests as cynical maneuvers
and indian faith as false. Apparently, the Kawallis of Culta used
Christian devotion as a convenient cover behind which to conceal their
pre-Columbian practices.
276 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

Readers inclined to celebrate indigenous resistance to Christianity

may be tempted to disbelieve what the Chiris themselves say and to take
as gospel the Spaniards' insistence that the Chiris of Ayllu Kawalli built
their chapel in Culta only to gain the freedom to continue with their
"idolatrias, borracheras, taquies, and hechicerias." Indeed, the sacrifices,
t"akis, and other shamanic practices that are today associated with cult
to Santa Barbara in Culta might be taken as evidence in support of the
priests' arguments. But one has only to witness streams of tears from the
eyes of today's Kawallis as they kneel in prayer before the image of Santa
Barbara to understand that their Christianity is in no way cynical. It is as
earnest as it is heterodox.
Just such heterodoxy was the target of Counter-Reformation practices
often attributed to decisions of the Council of Trent. When common
people began to interpret Christianity for themselves, without proper
guidance by priests, and even to believe that through their own faith and
deeds they might gain direct contact with God, they strayed onto the
primrose path of error and heresy that Satan was ever preparing for
them and that had led the followers of Luther, Calvin, and Erasmus to
join satanic sects. Therefore good Catholics of the Spanish empire were
to be subjected to heightened levels of priestly surveillance. As secular
sodalities which often operated without priestly interference, Spain's
confraternities, riddled with heterodox devotions to local patron saints,
were a special target of the Spanish Counter-Reformation. From the
Church's perspective, too many within such groups had followed Eras-
mus' advice to develop a personal relationship with God through private
devotions, challenging, as the breakaway Protestants did, the Church's
monopoly over eucharistic and confessional intercession between God
and the faithful. The premier institution for safeguarding Christian souls
from such errors and heresies was the Inquisition, which held sway over
Spaniards of both the Old World and the New. But the Inquisition lacked
authority over indians. The latter could not be fruitfully accused of
heresy. Their lapses could be redressed only by first classifying them as
idolatry or witchcraft, there being no other way to justify destruction of
their chapels and confraternities.
We must be careful, then, as we seek to interpret the priestly
denunciations of Andean sorceries and idolatries, to remember that
Spaniards were predisposed to find pre-Columbian practices lurking
behind apparently Christian indigenous practice. Even when the "super-
stitions" described by idolatry extirpators lack any sign of Christianity, it
is more prudent to suspect their ability to recognize Andean Christianity
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 277

than it is blithely to accept conclusions based on prejudice, a tendancy

towards essentialism, and juridical expedience. Nonetheless, idolatry
extirpators sometimes did describe details of practices that still resonate
with ethnographic accounts of Andean religiosity.
A case in point is an extirpation record from 1649, quoted in the
1658 probanza of another priest (AGI, Charcas 96, no. 11), this time
one who worked in the Siwaruyu and Arakapi town of Coroma. Located
just south of Quillacas and Condo, Coroma is home to llama caravaners
who routinely travel through Culta on their way to maize lands in the
vicinity of Tacobamba. Encountering three mochaderos, sacred reverenc-
ing places, and more than seventy small idols, some of which had been
"inherited among the indians for 60 years," the priest sent for an
extirpator of idolatry, who is said to have produced a proceso more than
two hundred folios in length. 54
None of these extirpations was carried out by the Inquisition, but the
extirpators nonetheless followed inquisitorial policies. Using repeated
interrogation of suspects held incommunicado, they ramified their sus-
pect list by eliciting accusations of third parties, who were then also
questioned about their friends, relatives, and co-conspirators. Such
techniques cast an ever wider net of surveillance over the dark sea of
clandestine practice, but, rather than pulling all heterodox practices up
into the daylight, forced them into ever deeper waters. Sacred sites were
destroyed, sorcerers punished, and evangelization carried out with
renewed fervor. Even so, sacrifices and libations at sacred places in the
landscape, like local cult to saints at scattered hamlet chapels, continued
unabated. Perhaps Andeans thus learned to differentiate orthodox and
acceptable Christian devotions from "idolatries, superstitions, and sor-
ceries." But at the same time, heterodox practices, whether directed
towards mountain deities or saint images, were forced underground in
intimate proximity to one another.
By the later seventeenth century, the Church began to ease up on such
surveillance. Chapels in Culta, Cacachaca, Lagunillas, and Cahuayo
were formally recognized, and the priest of Condo was required to visit
them on a regular basis, with no hope of legally avoiding the arduous
journey. Not indigenous peoples' resistance to reduccion, but their
stubborn insistence on replicating the institutions of reduccion and on
celebrating their very own patron saints finally won the day. A combi-
nation of factors even led priests to aid and abet the sprouting up of
hamlet chapels, new annex towns, and indigenous cult to the saints. On
the one hand, priests fattened parish revenues by collecting rich fees
278 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

from alferezes and mayordomos and came to depend on the subsidy

known as ricuchico, a banquet of foodstuffs such fiesta sponsors
delivered to the priests along with their payments of silver and wax and
incense. Such payments were increasingly subject to limits set by bishops,
fee scales known as aranceles. When priests charged more than pub-
lished aranceles allowed, as seems to have frequently occurred (ricuchico
was always prohibited but usually collected anyway), they opened
themselves up to their parishoners' accusations of corruption. By the
mid-seventeenth century, accusing indians of idolatry or meddling with
their saints' cults or residence patterns could lead to costly litigation.
Along with such practical reasons for tolerance, a general lessening of
priestly credulity occurred at the end of the seventeenth century. The
activities of the Peruvian "extirpation of idolatry" fell off sharply in this
period, just as the Inquisition's prosecution of witchcraft did in Europe
(Caro Baroja 1965: 20 Iff.). An increasingly rationalist mentality made
the Catholic clergy less likely to believe in the efficacy of "witchcraft" or
the presence of Satan in indigenous popular religiosity; they were more
inclined to regard any straying from orthodoxy as harmless superstition.
Prosecutions for superstitious practices by the end of the seventeenth
century were as likely to be carried out by the state as by the Church.
And rather than trying to prove that indians involved in heterodox cult
had made pacts with Satan or worshiped the golden calf, the prosecutors
found a more effective accusation: that these indians, like some modern
television evangelists, had defrauded the credulous. In seventeenth-
century civil and ecclesiastic trial documents, we see sorcerers trans-
formed into flimflam men. Such was the fate of Martin Nina Willka, a
cofradia-founding devotee of the Virgin of Copacabana, and either a
native iilsa (prophet) or an embustero (con artist).

Martin Nina Willka and the Dove of the Holy Spirit

In the 1670s a man named Martin Nina Wilka, from the region of
Kanchis, escaped during his mita pilgrimage to Potosi in order to adopt
a new home, a place where, as one among a growing legion of
forasteros, he would be exempt from mita and subject to smaller tribute
payments. But such escapees did not run off to uncharted territory; they
settled into the lands of already established reducci6nes and sought out
the protection of local caciques (see Powers 1991). With such escapees,
caciques and town councils were able to strike private deals, among
which, most likely, working of community lands and fulfillment of
obligations to the community might have loomed large. Nina Willka,
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 279

who settled in a hamlet outside the town of Mohosa, not far from the
old tambo of Paria, seems to have specialized in carrying out religious
obligations. In 1680 they got him into serious trouble when he practiced
them, on trip to Oruro, in the indian parish of that mining city. Caught
up during the alcalde's nightly rounds, some of Nina Willka's clients
denounced his practices to the city's civil authorities, and an investiga-
tion was carried out, after which he was tried for being an embustero, a
con artist, and for his "superstitious practices" (AjO, Leg. 1680-82).
Nina Willka's crime involved devotion to a miniature image of the Virgin
of Copacabana, a devotion which he habitually practiced as the founder
of a chapel in his hometown, surrounded by local members of the
virgin's confraternity. According to his testimony, he had taken on his
obligations after having made another sort of pilgrimage, a religious one,
to the temple of the Virgin of Copacabana on the shores of Lake
Titicaca, to honor the very same image that Ramos Gavilan (chronicler
of Tunupa/Santo Tomas' journeys) had served. Nina Willka had gone
there with an injured leg, and had in good Castilian fashion made a
promise to serve the virgin if he were cured. Because his leg immediately
and miraculously healed, he purchased a miniature wooden image of
that virgin contained in a wooden box known as a retablo, to take home,
where he kept his promise. To render her appropriate cult, he founded a
small chapel near his home and a cofradia-a confraternity or
"brotherhood"-to organize cultic practice, as was quite usual in those
days.55 The size of the following that his particular devotions drew,
however, was not so usual. Going essentially unnoticed in his adopted
home, his practices came to light because, after his image had been
damaged, he brought it to Oruro to be repaired by an image maker in
the artisan district of Oruro's indigenous parish. Apparently in need of
funds, he also opened up a miracle business in the house where he was
lodged.
His practice, as extracted from many participants and witnesses, was
this: Assembling his disciples at night within his chapel or in the house of
one of the faithful, he set the image before the altar, with a crucifix in
front of it and two candles burning, and then for some hours led his
assembly in the standard prayers of the rosary. For this purpose he kept
several rosaries hung over one arm of the cross, while over the other he
draped several scourges of the cat-of-nine-tails variety, very much in
vogue after the publication of hagiographies of Santa Rosa de Lima
(canonized in 1670), who had used such measures to achieve ecstatic
union with the heavenly host. He then led devotees in penitential
280 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

self-scourging while they continued to pray. Participants describe how he

then fell to the floor in a trancelike state for some time. When he arose,
he doused the candles and began to ring a small bell kept with the saint's
image. It was then that, in the darkness, the sound of flapping wings was
heard. This, Nina Willka explained, was a dove, the Holy Spirit. And
when it had descended, fluttering about and even brushing against some
of the participants, it brought with it the voices of Jesus and the Virgin.
Nina Willka would speak with them, asking them questions, and they, as
oracles, answered questions posed to them, and even aided the faithful to
communicate with and help to save souls in hell.
At least, that is how his actions and words are described in the
Spanish of the trial transcript. But Nina Willka normally spoke with his
devotees, and with God, in Aymara, which the trial record does not
preserve. I must ask, What Aymara words would have glossed his
activities? Almost certainly, "hell" would have been rendered as "manxa-
pacha," the underworld where, indeed, Aymara souls (and the precon-
quest beings called Chullpas) dwelled. And what Aymara term might
have been translated as "Holy Spirit" or "dove"?
For what his judges took to be a form of ventriloquism and for
"bilking" his followers of payments for his services, Nina Willka was
condemned to two hundred lashes, public shaming (he was ridden
around town backwards aboard an ass), and a term of forced labor
served in a Potosi bakery, after which he was remanded into the custody
of a priest. There was, however, sympathy among his followers. During
his trial, the people of his neighborhood were overheard to say that his
prosecutors and indeed the whole city, for their crimes against God, were
to be punished, destroyed by a rain of fire (recall the destructions
wrought by the Viracochas, Tunupa, and the Titicaca saints Tomas and
Bartolome upon inhospitable unbelievers). For, according to witnesses,
this Nina Willka (whose name means, in Aymara, "solar fire") was held
to be a jilsa (literally, "our brother" or "our elder"). The trial interpreter
added that "jilsa" also means "holy man, saint, or prophet." Indeed, the
trial record was entitled "proceso de jilsa"; apparently, the term was well
enough known to constitute a generally understood category of offense.
Rather than for heathenism, Nina Willka was tried for being a little
too Christian, that is for usurping priestly authority. Though he, a rude
indian operating in ruder circumstances, was prosecuted as a fraudulent
prophet, there was in fact very little difference between the practices he
carried out and those that brought other would-be prophets of the same
period, such as Santa Rosa, to sainthood. The principle difference
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 281

between them, perhaps, lay in their qualifications for sainthood: Santa

Rosa had been a virtuous Spanish woman, properly enclosed and bound
by the rules of a religious order. No ordinary mortal, and especially no
indian, could hope to be considered so virtuous.
Let us sum up. The cases of Diego Iquisi, Miguel Acarapi, Culta's
Chiris, the idolatrous indians of Coroma, and Martin Nina Willka span
a century of priestly evangelizing, indian mita pilgrimages, and Counter-
Reformation extirpations of idolatry. This was a century during which
indigenous religiosity as well as Spanish responses to it underwent
sometimes dramatic and often subtle changes. Mass pilgrimage centers
devoted to non-Christian idols gave way to an unholy combination of
public devotions and pilgrimages to saints' shrines and to continued but
clandestine performance, within the private sphere, of rites for miniature
"idols," the many mamas or conopas that later extirpators (like that of
Coroma in 1649) found buried within indian houses. One might
conclude with Serge Gruzinski (1993; also see Bernand and Gruzinski
1988), who has studied similar phenomena in Mexico, that by the end of
this period native religion and the social forms in which it was imbedded
had been effectively destabilized, or, in Wachtel's (1977) terminology,
"destructured." Likewise, early indigenous attempts at transculturation,
efforts to actively reinterpret and manipulate Christian teachings and
practices to indigenous ends, outside priestly control, were suppressed.
Nina Willka did not, as his predecessors had done, pretend to usurp the
priest's role of performing the miracle of the Eucharist. Although his
oracular practices were thought excessive and superstitious, his efforts to
seek the intercession of saints were just the kind of religiosity granted to
laymen by the Catholic hierarchy, and brought to indians by priests like
Gonzalez de la Casa in the form of portable images replete with
miraculous hagiographies taught in native languages.
At the same time, the century saw a sea change in Spanish reactions to
such practices. Diabolic sorceries with real effects (like the witchcraft
perpetrated on Gonzalez de la Casal gave way to misguided superstitions
and phony flimflammery. As students of the European Inquisition have
noted, churchmen's faith in the reality or effectiveness of witchcraft gave
way in the same period to more "rational" theses about human gullibil-
ity. The devil was no longer everything he had once been cracked up to
be.
For a variety of reasons-among them the spread of a new rational-
ism among Spaniards, a more pragmatic modus vivendi between priests
and indians, the general waning of the evangelic mission in the colonial
282 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

project, and above all, perhaps, the disappearance of large-scale collec-

tive rites devoted to non-Christian idols (most of these adduced by
Duviols 1977, 1986; Silverblatt 1987)-campaigns against idolatry and
native superstitions faded away by the end of the century. There is also,
however, another way of looking at this business. Rather than lamenting
the destruction of authentically indigenous ways, one might well con-
clude that Andeans learned how to negotiate the distinction between
public and private spheres that Spaniards taught them about in the
architecture and ordinances of buena policia; they successfully discov-
ered the times and places when unorthodox practices might remain
private and clandestine; they learned the limits of their authority in the
conduct of Christian practice. As hand fits glove, they had, in Certeau's
terminology (1984), devised tactics of resistance fitting the strategies of
domination imposed upon them.
It is nonetheless true that the forces set in motion by repartimiento
and reducci6n, as well as by doctrina and extirpation, led to the
progressive disarticulation of indigenous social forms. Tawantinsuyu fell
to the Spanish sword; federations, diarchies, and, finally, native heredi-
tary lordship fell to Spanish institutions and Christian practices. Another
sort of repeatedly enacted colonial pilgrimage ritual, the circumambula-
tion of territorial boundaries, contributed to this disarticulation or
"destructuration," but also to the successful synthesis of new social
forms through which transformed indigenous societies more effectively
defended themselves under colonial as well as republican conditions. Let
us see how portable saint images placed in chapels like those of Miguel
Acarapi, the Chiris of Culta, and Martin Nina Willka became the cultic
foci of new kinds of indigenous collectivities.

COMPOSICIONES AND BOUNDARIES: CIRCUMAMBULATING NEW POLITIES

Escape from the mita pilgrimage to settle as an outsider in another

people's territory was not an option exclusive to men like Nina Willka.
Throughout the seventeenth century, forasteraje, the process by which
indians avoided mita and high tribute payments by negotiating terms
with the caciques of adoptive provinces, had become a nightmarish
problem for Spanish administrators. The percentage of fully vested
"original" inhabitants of mita districts fell precipitously, and numerous
administrators sought to resolve the issue, whether by returning escapees
to their homeland or simply converting them by fiat into mita-owing
"originals." This matter has received much historical attention (see
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 283

Powers 1991). The issue that I would raise, however, is the significance
of this massive movement of indigenous migration to social memory.
Clearly, permanent migrants seeking to dissolve their former social
identities within a new social context would have sought to enmesh
themselves quickly in their new territory and reduccion, rather than
always referring to the homeland's ancestors or wak'as. The most
straightforward way of harmonizing in the seventeenth century was to
participate in the ritual system centered in church and town. This is the
case because that same century saw the ever clearer demarcation of
intertown boundaries, a rapid increase in the number of land wars and
lawsuits between towns over those boundaries, and the progressive
erosion of the coherence of diarchies and, therefore, of the authority of
hereditary caciques. It was also a period during which the turn system
called mita was complemented (or, in the eyes of mita administrators,
undermined) by increasingly complex turn systems for sponsoring (and
paying for) the celebration of Christian calendric festivals. And newly
arriving forasteros also linked themselves to the calendric life of the
reduccion by founding their own hamlet or household saint shrines,
linking hamlet to church through the procession path by which their
miniature "token" images might visit the full-size "type" image kept in
the town's church. Possession of such images provided a private context
linked directly to the public one. As a result, thousands of Nina Willkas,
perhaps not all so entrepreneurial, carried out heterodox rites in honor
of saints. Given the degree to which the collective groups defined by
reduccion life defined themselves through the participation in buena
policia and cristiandad, this was the only way-a much more generalized
and transportable one than genealogical ties to immobile and particular
wak'as-to join a new community. By the end of the seventeenth
century, ritual systems established to honor saints had, indeed, become a
principal means by which town-based social groups defined themselves.
The establishment of hamlet chapels like those of Culta's Chiris went
hand in glove with a process that some analysts have cited as evidence of
the failure of reduccion and doctrina: Almost from the very moment that
reducciones were completed, indians began to return to their scattered
rural hamlets, initially, perhaps, as caretakers of fields and herds for
which town ordinances had made provision. Yet the fact that newly
repopulated hamlets seem always to have contained chapels in which
were carried out Christian activities (heterodox or not), even (or
especially) in the absence of the priest, suggests that priestly teachings
had made a profound impact rather than a slight one. During the
284 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an ever growing number of such

hamlets were granted the status of "annex." Given a church and a patron
saint and constructed along rectilinear reduccion lines, annexes became
legitimate hamlets and obtained their own councils as well as periodic
visits by the priest of the "mother" parish. That is how places like Santa
Barbara de Culta, Vera Cruz de Cacachaca, and La Concepcion de
Cahuayo, all within the ambit and under the political and ecclesiastic
umbrella of San Pedro de Condo, came into being. All of them had
already existed as hamlets of annexes by the end of the sixteenth century;
Culta was raised to the status of independent doctrina, with a perma-
nently resident priest, in 1779, when Cahuayo became its annex.
If the division of diarchies into town districts had arbitrarily sundered
one territory into many, willy nilly severing fragments of ayllus from one
another and binding the pieces into multiple new wholes, the
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century expansion of fully vested reduc-
ciones and doctrinas considerably advanced the process, leading to an
increasing number of squabbles over the increasing number of borders.
Likewise, the possibility that annexes might be promoted to independent
town and doctrina, thus obtaining a full town council and the legal
protections that ensued, along with a resident priest, no doubt led to a
general rise in envy, pretension, and factionalism. At least that is how we
may interpret the precipitous rise in litigation over lands and boundaries
during the period, by town against town and by town against cacique, in
addition to some perhaps very injudicious proceedings, carried out in the
1590s, the 1640s, and periodically thereafter, known as composiciones
de tierras.
It was such procedures that gave rise to the older kernels within the
encrusted document that Pablo Choquecallata showed me in Cruce, and
which had led to the Asanaqi cacique's use of his visita fragment in
litigation with the people of Tacobamba.
A hybrid legal text, Pablo Choquecallata's document had been created
when successive generations of, first, caciques and, then, town council-
men called on old documents they considered to be land titles. Some-
times, they had the documents in their own possession, but often they
traveled to archives, as cantonal authorities still regularly do, to get
copies of documents previously submitted in litigation. The modern
notary's transcription of sixteenth-century handwriting is flawed, some-
times finding modern entities like "cantones" in a sixteenth-century text
and often muddling dates, but it progressively improves when it reaches
the pages added in 1647, 1695, 1711, 1746, three dates in the nineteenth
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 285

century, and two in the twentieth. The document records a long series of
legal actions on the part of indigenous authorities to defend their
territory, and serves as witness to the progressive separation of a
once-unified polity into multiple fragments, which again sought to act in
concert in the 1940s. 56
The first and earliest item in that document dated from 1593. It is the
record of an auction conducted by Fray Luis Lopez, bishop of Quito, as
one small contribution to the general sale of indian lands that was called
composicion. In effect, cash-hungry kings ordered people like Fray Luis
to inspect the countryside, seize all "excess" and unused lands in his
name, and then sell them off to the highest bidders to improve the
Crown's cash flow. Applied in Castile as well as in the Indies, composi-
cion was for "unoccupied" land the equivalent of the Castilian sale of
villas (such as the one purchased by auction by Awllaka encomendero
Hernan Vela) for settled places.
In this case, a huge swath of the highland extension of Asanaqi lands
had been declared vacant, including the entire region of Culta and
Cahuayo. At auction, the highest (in fact, the only) bid of seven
thousand pesos came from the cacique gobernador of the Repartimiento
de Asanaques, an man named Taquimalco. Composiciones led to am-
biguous titles, sometimes appearing as private property and sometimes
recorded as communal lands. Understanding the possibilities,
Taquimalco had purchased a separate title to an extension of the
well-watered land "Masce Caguayo," within which hot springs, salt
mines, and the strong-flowing Cachimayo River were all combined. In
the early seventeenth century, he petitioned for license to construct
water-driven flour mills there (one of which, incidentally, is still used to
grind corn into flour). In 1647, one of his grandsons, who had become a
cleric of minor orders (an unordained priest), had this property recorded
as a private hacienda. Almost immediately, the Taquimalco still in office
as cacique petitioned for amparo, Crown protection against land inva-
sion by his own cousin as well as by the peoples of Tinquipaya.
Producing the title from the 1593 composicion, the Taquimalco caciques
also sought protection from the Crown representatives in process of
again claiming vacant land for composicion sales. Successful in their
efforts, the Taquimalcos this time achieved a deslinde y amojonamiento,
confirming their title not only to the Culta and Cahuayo region and the
(inca of Masce Cahuayo (centered on the flour mills), but also to the
entire territory of the Repartimiento de Asanaques. With a land judge,
they walked the perimeter of these lands, naming the boundary markers,
286 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

mountain peaks, and rock piles called mojones, which the land judge
read out from an original amojonamiento dating to the visita general of
the 1570s. Into each moj6n, the judge inserted an inverted bull's horn
containing a copy of the amojonamiento (later documents specify use of
a clay pot).57
Present-day jilaqatas still circumambulate their territory each year
after taking office, following a path defined by some of the mojones
listed in the 1646 document. But Taquimalco's border pilgrimage did not
circumscribe only the territory of K'ulta, dividing its lands of the town of
Culta from those of Cacachaca, Challapata, Condo, Lagunillas, and
Cahuayo; Taquimalco's mojones included all these territories within a
single district that divided the "Asanaques de los Taquimalcos" from
peoples it calls "Tinquipayas, Machas, Pocoatas, Jucumanis, Aymayas,
Carangas, Quillacas, and Urmiris." The late-twentieth-century town
councilmen to whom I read the document were puzzled by its references
to hereditary lords and a vast realm called Asanaqi.
In fact, interpretation of such documents was already problematic by
the end of the seventeenth century, owing to the fact that visitors and
composici6n judges sometimes took money and provided titles as many
as three times for the same bit of land, for three different classes of
buyers. A cacique governor like Taquimalco claimed title to the territory
of all Asanaqi. But caciques and town council alcaldes from Challapata,
and from annexes like Santa Barbara de Culta and Cahuayo, also
clamored for titles to the lands within their town jurisdiction (Diego de
Sanabria, remember, had established a string of such mojones around
Tinquipaya). As a result, later land litigation is rife with conflicting
claims backed up by conflicting colonial titles.
Many such documents still survive in the paper bundles transmitted
every New Year's Day from outgoing town council members to incoming
ones; others have become part of the personal patrimony passed from
father to son. In K'ulta, it is a rare privilege for a historian or
ethnographer to be shown such jealously guarded documents; Pablo
Choquecallata was the only one to open up his kitchen archive to me. I
have nonetheless seen copies of many more composici6n documents;
hundreds if not thousands of them have been copied into the property
ledgers of republican fiscal archives as proof of ownership, in efforts by
town councils to avoid alienation of their lands at the hands of the
Bolivian state. In Derechos Reales, the active judicial office within the
Corte Superior de Oruro, people of that city come to search for old title
deeds, and on any given working day so do groups of rural authorities
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 287

come in search of their own land titles. Between the 1880s and the
1960s, the town councils of all the town districts cut from Asanaqi
diarchy territory have brought titles to be copied into the record. Some
date from the 1590s, but most record composicion sales carried out in
1646-47 by one Jose de la Vega Alvarado, signed always by a scribe
named Garcia Morato. 58 His signature is affixed not only to the land
titles granted to diarchy caciques and to town councils, but also to those
delimiting the separate territories of "parcialidades" within those towns
(the "Asanaques de Challapata" obtained separate title from the parcial-
idad called Quillacas de Challapata), to annexes like Santa Barbara de
Culta and Cahuayo, and even to the individual ayllus within those
annexes, each of which paid separately for the paper safeguarding their
nested and contested claims to firm borders: In the 1647 composicion,
for example, Vega Alvarado declared certain lands belonging to "Quil-
lacas de Urumiri" to be vacant. They were purchased by the Taquimalco
governor of Condo "para sus indios del ayllu Yanaque." The sale set in
motion a struggle over the new boundaries that continues to this day,
and it established mojones and legal title for Ayllu Yanaqi. 59
Territorial circumambulations, called amojonamientos, were not just
practical acts of land division; they were also ritual pilgrimages. Accom-
panying the land judge, a whole host of authorities moved en masse
along sight-lines connecting mojones. At each one, the judge was to send
for the authorities of the social groups on the other side of the line;
discussions over the history and proper placement of each mojon then
ensued, and are sometimes recorded in the documents.
One seventeenth-century cacique of Challapata underscored the deep
historical significance that was attributed to mojones. Domingo Choque-
callata, perhaps an ancestor of Cruce's don Pablo, argued that the
mojones of Asanaqi had been originally established by Huayna Capac
himself. Almost certainly they were traced or retraced in the 1570s by
Toledo's visitor Pedro de Zarate, and again the 1590s by the bishop of
Quito, and in the 1640s by Jose de la Vega Alvarado. At each of these
moments, however, a hierarchy of authorities would have been present;
mojones marked out not only diarchy boundaries but also those of the
moieties and ayllus within them. So boundary pilgrimages were more
than an enacted discourse between the authorities of distinct diarchies,
working out the differences between them as well as shared obligations
to the state that granted such boundaries. Each "level" of authority
within a diarchy carried out its own sort of boundary pilgrimage,
circumambulating a portion of Asanaqi territory. In their boundary
288 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

pilgrimages, many sorts of social groups moved along pathways that

coincided at some mojones with other groups of the same order:
Sometimes, alcaldes from a particular ayllu of one town, say Ayllu
Kawalli of San Pedro de Condo, might have encountered the alcaldes
representing Ayllu Kawalli in Challapata. What had been a single ayllu
before reduccion boundaries were established had now become two,
each with representation in a town council capable of asserting its rights
against the other. Boundary pilgrimages around reduccion jurisdictions
not only fragmented the diarchy of Asanaqi but also caused the
fissioning of its component parts. As in the process of cell division
known as mitosis, each "daughter" ayllu gained its own authorities and
its own boundaries, but unlike biological reproduction, the daughter
ayllus sometimes shared some of their mojon boundaries, and the
resulting territorial and social units were reduced in size. At other points
along its border, a town ayllu's mojon also marked a diarchy boundary.
These different sorts of mojones may have looked the same, but the
social action carried out at or because of them took different shapes and
had distinct consequences. When a disagreement erupted between two
patrilines within a single ayllu belonging to a single reduccion, the
dispute would be settled by the ayllu's own authority. If the squabble
involved a fight between hamlet patrilines of two different ayllus, say
Kawalli and Ilawi of Challapata, it might be resolved through the
mediation of Challapata's council as a whole. But when a land fight
between two small groups erupted over one of the new mojones dividing
the now distinct parts of the formerly entire Ayllu Kawalli (and this
mojon also divided one reduccion from another), the resulting fights and
litigation now involved two distinct sets of reduccion authorities, each
with a land title. Under the leadership of the two councils, the multi-
ayllu populations within each came together to confront those of the
other town. Such actions reinforced the legitimacy of reduccion councils
while undercutting that of the old diarchy mallku. This was especially
true when the diarchy lord, say that of Asanaqi, residing in San Pedro de
Condo, took the part of his own reduccion against, say, Challapata. Yet
at a different point along the border of Ayllu Kawalli of Challapata,
another mojon separated its lands from those of an ayllu belonging not
just to a different reduccion but to a different diarchy. Differences over
that sort of mojon led not to further fragmentation and fission but to
fusion: A fight between Ayllu Kawalli of Challapata and Ayllu Laymi of
Chayanta typically escalated, first, to a battle between reducciones and,
then, when each called upon old allies, to a dispute between diarchies,
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 289

which thus repeatedly came back into existence as something more than
a cacique's tax-collection district. Eventually, the rancor and longevity of
intradiarchy disputes led the reducciones of Asanaqi to autonomy,
driving Asanaqi out of existence and, with it, any remaining sense of
common destiny. The people of Challapata and Condo became to one
another Nuers and Dinkas, rather than members of sister towns with a
common ancestral past.
Another document, an early-twentieth-century title kept by K'ulta
authorities and copied in the 1970s into the departmental tax registry,
includes pieces of another of the composiciones of Vega Alvarado.
Although nineteenth-century interpolations are mixed into this docu-
ment, it illustrates the issue at hand. Its list of mojones delimits the lands
of a single ayllu of K'ulta, Manxa-Kawalli, from those of Ayllus Qullana,
Alax-Kawalli, Yanaqi and Ilawi of the same town, and from Ayllu
Sullkayana of Cahuayo as well as from the territories of Tinquipaya and
Macha. One mojon is singled out for special mention:
... arriving at Pachuta which is a hill they ask to serve as a mojon of
both Ayllus Kawalli and Qullana, and from there continuing through
a very long plain towards the east, to the hamlet of Tolapampa, and
continuing towards the east along a little river to the mojon called
Quintiri, and then to a rock called Pairumani, and from there
continuing to Cruz Pata, and again continuing to Churicala, which is
the mojon where from time immemorial each one planted his vara,
and from there to Chiaraque ... (Archivo de Hacienda, Prefectura de
Oruro, "Protocolizacion ... )60
The "planting of varas" was a ritual act without other documentary
exemplars from colonial or republican times, and I was unable to find
out if the act continues to be performed as part of the annual boundary
rituals that still recapitulate the border pilgrimages of Huayna Capac or
Spanish composici6n judges. 61 Whether they were placed there by
hereditary caciques or by town council authorities, the act underscored
the connection between sacred boundary pilgrimages and the legitimacy
of the authorities who represented the collectivity as a whole, or in this
case, it seems, the authorities of the competing social groups that came
together and sometimes clashed over just such landmarks. These cross-
cutting and intersecting boundary pilgrimages both reflected and created
rivalries and factional disputes, between social units of the same kind
(say, ayllus within the annex town of Culta) and between those that
directly challenged the legitimacy and efficacy of another's authorities
and rights.
290 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, diarchies like

Asanaqi were riven with such disputes; the boundaries around Asanaqi
as well as those that dissected it into townships became the fault lines of
colonial destructuration and restructuration. Asanaqi was legally still a
single "continent," but one now made up of numerous "plates" pushing
and straining against one another, creating "rings of fire" defined by the
mojones, where social struggle sometimes created volcanic heat. At
times, as Tristan Platt has shown (1987b), even fighting between social
groups, carried out as a ritual tinku, served to fuse them together as
constituent parts of a larger social whole; but sometimes escalating ritual
battles led to ch'axwa, wars where the victors took the spoils and
defined themselves, not as complementary to their opponents, but as
autonomous entities.
Mojones had more than just a practical value as boundary markers,
and the violent confrontations that sometimes took place over them were
also more than just "senseless violence." Both were (and continue to be)
meaningful in other ways. Mojones were sacralized as sites of social
memory, recalling the link between present social groups and the
founding generations. Likewise, the blood that was shed at these places
of intersection of ayllus, moieties, and diarchies took on a sacramental
or sacrificial caste. Certainly, the moj6n where the lands of Condo,
Challapata, Huari, and Lagunillas met was one such sacred place: Not a
rock pile, that moj6n was the actual peak of the mountain-and god,
now called mallku-named Tata (Father) Asanaqi, a being who is still
offered the blood of sacrificial victims.
Furthermore, boundaries were also pilgrimage routes defined by a
sequence of mojones resembling a string of pearls (or perhaps a rosary,
or a succession of subordinate cords dangling from the master quipu
cord). As such they were t"akis, pathways of social memory. So the
disputes and litigation and land wars that broke out with increasing
frequency along these transit lines were more than just fights over land;
they were struggles over the definition of social groups and the legiti-
macy of the authorities who led them. They were also historical
arguments, performed through mnemesis in the act of circumambulation
and by reference to documents in the courtroom. The victors in such
struggles were the authorities who were best able to rally their followers,
perhaps by making the moj6n-to-moj6n boundary pilgrimage broadly
meaningful to their constituents. One might guess that a cacique of a
formerly great diarchy called Asanaqi, bearing the name Taquimalco (or
t"aki mallku, "lord of the path"), ought to have come away with all the
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 291

honors. But honorific names, once perhaps titles but now surnames,
were legion in the Altiplano. What was more vital in obtaining the
consent to be ruled that constitutes legitimate authority was to be able
actually to constitute authority by perpetuating and leading the kinds of
t"akis, song-dances on ritual pathways, that were possible in the colonial
world. As local-level tribute collectors, justices of the peace, mediators in
local squabbles, and organizers of community activity, entrusted with
distributing usufruct land rights to townsmen and with regular patrol-
ling of each ayllu's and each town's boundaries, the alcaldes and
regidores and alguaciles of the town councils were well positioned to do
just that. As we shall see, their authority was reinforced by their mastery
of other sorts of t"akis, ritual paths defined with reference to the
churches and chapels and portable saints by which divine power was
now incarnate and able to walk upon the earth. The authority of town
councilmen was underwritten by the saints. Town councilmen, rather
than the hereditary lords, were the heirs to the religious leadership
enjoyed by the innovators in social memory Diego Iquisi, Miguel
Acarapi, the Culta Chiris, and Martin Nina Willka.

FESTIVALS OF REBELLION: GENESIS OF AN ANDEAN "REVOLUTION

OF THE COMMUNITIES"

By the early eighteenth century, councilmen in the town of Asanaqi

territory regularly drew upon composici6n titles and references to town
rights granted by Viceroy Toledo when they began to challenge the
authority of the caciques of the old diarchy-based social units called
repartimientos. Following Toledo's ordinances, one year's regidores,
alcaldes, and alguaciles were to elect those of the next year, and
parcialidades and ayllus within the town were to take turns occupying
the offices. But what were the criteria for election to office? And on what
basis, other than mere legalism, was the authority of town councilmen
taken to be legitimate by other town inhabitants? In addressing such
questions, we enter the vexed arena of debate over the historical
development of fiesta-cargo systems.
Twentieth-century ethnographers have recorded the existence of
fiesta-cargo systems throughout Spanish America. From rural Chiapas to
rural Bolivia, town council officers are chosen, not by popular election,
but by the performance of specific periodic duties connected to saints'
festivals. The resulting interlacement of religious and civil offices into
fixed sequences constituting fiesta-cargo careers (see Fig. 4.1) seems to be
292 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

a very widespread but exclusively colonial phenomenon. There is no

direct Castilian model for the straightforward merging of civil and
religious posts into individual career sequences. In Castile, religious
festivals were organized and underwritten by associations known as
cofradias, "confraternities" or "brotherhoods," each of which was de-
voted to a specific saint or advocation of Christ or the Virgin.62 Within
the urban context in Spanish America, the Spanish model predominated;
artisan guilds as well as voluntary associations were organized as
confraternities, whose memberships paid fees and costs for processions
and masses in honor of their saintly patron. In rural reducci6n commu-
nities, however, confraternities did not generally take this urban form.
Instead, the confraternity devoted to each image seems to have included
the whole community in its membership. The term "cofradia" may not
be entirely appropriate to describe the institutional structure that re-
sulted. For just as each parcialidad and ayllu was to take its turn
providing officers to the town council according to a fixed rotational
system, so do rural festivals in honor of saints seem to have been
sponsored.
Under the priest's direction, three kinds of "sponsorship" offices were
filled each year for each of the festivals celebrated in any particular
community. Across Spanish America, terms and festival posts varied; in
the Charcas area, however, they were quite consistent, most likely owing
to the control exerted by the archbishop of La Plata over the number and
kinds of festivals celebrated in rural doctrinas. 63 The most costly festival
post was that of alferez, the individual chosen to carry the saint's banner
in the procession. Mayordomos were charged with the care of the actual
saint's image and with organizing the carrying of the image during the
procession and the costs associated with its direct cult {provision of
candles, incense, etc.}. In colonial San Pedro de Condo, the third post
was that of the mayordomo de afuera, the "outside mayordomo." Here
we have the origin of the K'ulta festival post known simply as p"wira, or
fuera. These individuals were charged with paying cult to a saint and
keeping a miniature image of that saint, an imagen de bulto, which spent
each year in a different hamlet chapel, coming to visit the matrix church
during the saint's day itself. 64 The superstitious and heretical cults of
Miguel Acarapi and Martin Nina Willka were closely related to legiti-
mate practices introduced by doctrina priests.
The documentary record does not enable us to say just when the turn
systems regulating the allotment of religious festival posts merged with
those distributing town council offices. 65 This is so in part because such
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 293

fused systems were clandestine; there was no provision for them in

colonial law. Indeed, K'ultas still maintain the public fiction of town
council election; they tell neither priests nor subprefects about the
complex rotational systems by which alcaldes, jilaqatas, and alguaciles
are automatically "elected" a specific number of years after sponsoring
the last in a career of saints' festivals. As complex as their turn system is,
they do not write it down. The pattern of moiety alternation in each
office and the orderly, interwoven succession of civil-ritual careers are
the stuff of unwritten social memory. Historians are unlikely to find
written records of merged systems in archives.
If we begin with the question of not when but how civil and ritual
posts came to be merged, answers are more forthcoming. In each
reduccion, both kinds of authority were supervised most closely by a
single individual, the Spanish priest, who was charged in Toledo's
ordinances with making sure that obligations of all sorts were fairly
distributed among the reduccion's constituent units. Priests knew the
hierarchic order of such units through their parish registers, just as town
councilmen knew them through padrones locked in the community
chest, and more permanent scribes or quipu kamayuqs knew them
through one or another accounting technique. We might speculate, then,
that inhabitants of towns construed the two kinds of rotational systems
(and those regulating other duties such as service in tambos and turns in
the mita) by the same principles. Ultimately, they may have been
harmonized within a single mnemonic order simply for the sake of
mnemonic efficiency. Why keep elaborate and perhaps contradictory
records, when all the social groups within the reduccion knew which
formal duties and obligations fell to them by simply knowing who came
before and who after, according to their position in the kind of turn
sequence Spaniards thought of as a wheel?66 If the reader finds it difficult
to imagine how a simple mnemonic system might keep track of three
kinds of festival sponsors for each of several festivals, various town
council posts, and their rotation between moieties and among the
moieties' constituent ayllus (and even among the patrilines within
ayllus), turn to the modern K'ulta examples in chapter 8, carried out
entirely without the intervention of priest, state authority, or written
record. 67
The best evidence for the colonial emergence of fiesta-cargo systems
comes from litigation records, trial transcripts, and administrative re-
ports from the period of the 1780s rebellion. Such evidence reveals that
hereditary lords in the Charcas region were more often targets of rebel
294 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

violence than leaders of it. And as many students of the rebellions have
noted (most provocatively, perhaps, Szeminski [1987]), priests were
usually spared by rebels who, according to an earlier generation of
scholarship, were engaged in an anti-Spanish millennial movement (see
Lewin 1957; Rowe 1954). Why did priests, unlike corregidores and the
caciques who collaborated with them, enjoy immunity from immediate
execution by rebels? The answer is that priests, like saints, had become a
fundamental part of the new order. As Nancy Farriss so aptly put it for
the Yucatan, priests had become not so much directors of Christian cult
in which indians participated as a kind of honored part of the hired staff,
required for certain functions in the indians' own cosmos and polity-
sustaining ritual system (1984: 343).
More evidence for the centrality of this reduccion-based ritual-
political order comes from descriptions of the actual fighting in late-
eighteenth-century uprisings. For Andeans contrived to use perfor-
mances of Christian festivals to overwhelm their enemies in a Trojan
horse manner; arriving in traditional moiety groups to perform a ritual
battle in the saint's honor, moieties united to transform what normally
was a ritual battle between them into a rout of Spanish observers. 68 The
first to die in late-eighteenth-century revolts, however, were native lords,
targets of the social groups that now defined themselves through festival
sponsorship in reducciones. Festival processions, of course, were orga-
nized by alferezes, mayordomos, and mayordomos de afuera. If we
suppose that it was by taking on such roles that individuals were
subsequently "elected" to town council posts, the two sorts of leader-
ship, exercised through the township's usual means of "collective self-
representation," led rather directly to events such as the following.
The case of the 1774 rebellion of San Pedro de Condo is instructive.
In that year, a mass of indians descended upon the house in which the
caciques of the town were sleeping. The cacique gobernador Gregorio
Feliz Llanquipacha and his brother Andres (the cacique's "second
person") had taken over the lordship from the Taquimalcos in the late
1740s. More than twenty-five years after claiming the hereditary posts,
the two brothers were held by Spanish officials to be apt and capable.
But apparently they had failed to impress their own subjects with the
legitimacy of their rule. When members of the mob began to pelt their
house with stones, the brothers emerged from the doorway, threatening
rioters with a gun. In those days only one shot could be fired without a
lengthy reloading process, so shooting one of a large and riotous crowd
was not a wise move. Pelted by sling-thrown stones, the brothers fell to
the ground, where rebel women finished them off.
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 295

Soon after the events, Crown authorities began to search for and
arrest the culprits, many of whom had fled to distant maize outlier lands
in the multi-"ethnic" valleys of Chayanta. The suspects, it turned out,
came from a single ayllu, Sullkayana, most of whose members lived
around Condo's annex (and former Taquimalco redout) of Cahuayo.
When asked to explain their motives in the murder, they gave a strange
reply: According to the testimony of the accused assassins and witnesses
(including the cantor of the local church), the murders resulted from an
affair concerning the local priest. According to these accounts, the
murderous crowd had just finished accompanying the priest to the edge
of the parish, from which they believed he had been expelled by the
moiety lords. Outraged and pained that they had to lose "such a fine
priest, who had done them so much good," there was nothing left but to
avenge the insult (ANB, EC 1781, no. 83, fol. 76r).
So the "common indians" of an annex town-and from a single ayllu,
that of Sullcayana-had assassinated hereditary lords of the Asanaqi
diarchy, defending a priest who was at odds with the native elite. In the
aftermath of the violence, the widows of the slain men (one of these
women being named Colque Guarache) fled to valley lands that they had
converted into private estates. With no heir yet of age, the Crown
appointed interim governors. At this point descendants of the Taquimal-
cos (who now called themselves Fernandez Acho, and produced an entire
genealogy of that lineage without using the name Taquimalco) litigated
to regain the cacicazgo of Condo's urinsaya, or lower moiety; they lost
to a man claiming descent from Colque Guarache (ANB, EC 1775,
no. 165). In September of 1776, the "comun de indios de Condocondo,"
led by the town's alcaldes (joined by the alcalde of the annex of Culta),
filed a complaint against the interim governor "Luis Barachi" (no doubt
Luis Guarache) and also against the corregidor's "cobrador de repartos,"
a Spaniard who the corregidor had delegated the job of collecting
payments for the forced sale of mules (ANB, EC 1777, no. 139; the
corregidor's appointment of alcaldes is attached). The leaders in the
revolt claimed that the cacique governor charged two pesos more than
the proper rate. The corregidor responded that the instigators were all
notorious for their involvement in the Llanquipacha murders. One of
them, indeed, had publicly told the widows of the slain caciques that he
would drink chicha from their skulls (ibid., 20r).
Two months later, the situation heated up. The lieutenant of the
corregidor had dispatched to Culta the "cacique cobrador" Luis Colque
Guarache along with a Spaniard sent to collect reparto debts. On
November 5, the people of Culta mutinied. Announcing that they had
296 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

learned from Juan de la Cruz Choque (one of the litigants over the
cacicazgo of Challapata) that they legally owed only half the tribute and
reparto debt, they stood firm against the authorities' arguments. Finally,
men and women together attacked the two men, throwing them to the
ground and then dragging them about the territory until they managed
to escape by a night-long mule ride (ibid., unfoliated pages). When they
reached Challapata, however, news had preceded them, and they were
forced to retreat to the province capital of Poopo.
The whole picture now begins to emerge: Native lords had become
heavily "hispanized" functionaries of the colonial state, acting as the
right arm of corregidores by collecting tribute and mita laborers and
helping corregidores collect payments for the mules and cloth they
forcibly sold to indians. Denouncing such abuses, the priests became yet
further allied with the "commoner" authorities who had sprung up from
below, the town councilmen, whom Toledo had intentionally set up as a
counterweight to native noble pretensions. There were reasons, too, why
priests encouraged the support of "common indians": The Bourbon
Crown had made corregidores and their native lord allies into their tools
in an effort to "secularize" the state (Farriss 1968; Penry 1993).
Encouraged to denounce the excessive burden of festivals imposed by
priests, as well as the numbers of indians whose service in saints' festivals
exempted them for a year from mita duties, corregidores and caciques
initiated countless legal actions against priests, including the priest of
Condo. Striking back, priests throughout the region aided preparation of
commoners' denunciations of corregidor and cacique abuses. 69
Rebel violence against Spaniards and native lords ran rampant
through 1780 and, by early January of 1781, had infected the city of
Oruro, where creoles with an independence project of their own planned
to make use of indian violence to rid themselves of peninsular Spaniards.
The plan backfired when masses of indigenous rebels failed to make the
subtle distinction between Spaniards born in the Indies (criollos) and
those born in Iberia (peninsulares); surviving creoles fled town disguised
in the clothing of their indian servants (Cajias de la Vega 1987). Many of
the rebels came from the town of Challapata, where not long before both
the cacique governor and the province's corregidor had been slain (ibid.).
But a Royalist army approached from the south, soon to end both the
abortive creole independence movement and a siege of La Paz by rebel
forces led by a former sacristan named Tupac Catari. Challapata leaders
learned of the army's advance and sent out letters to rally reinforce-
ments. One such letter was then intercepted by the priest of Santa
Barbara de Culta:
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 297

To the cabildo [council] of Colpacaba: To the principal lord I give

certain news ... that all those of Peiias and Hurmiri have been
driven away. They say that more than two thousand soldiers have
done harm, and that another such number is on its way via Chichas.
We will be encircled. They would arrive tonight without fail to
depopulate us, leaving not one of us in the entire province. And thus
for God's sake, having seen this, take and give the news to all, to
Culta, Cahuayo, and Lagunillas, and to all the hamlets, to come with
all fury and the greatest urgency, in the manner of soldiers, without
even an hour's delay. And I beseech by Holy Mary that all come,
come what may, all the commons as one. God Our Lord will help
us .... Challapata. Changara. (ANB, SG 1781, no. 42, follr)

The circular was written by a would-be cacique of Challapata, a man

named Chungara, who hailed from that town's "parcialidad urinsaya de
Asanaqi," and his information was good. 70 A large army was indeed on
its way. The priest of Culta noted that the circular was addressed to the
senior alcalde of Culta, one among the councilmen (and festival spon-
sors) with whom Chungara had allied himself in his hometown in a
struggle with the cacique governor of that town's upper moiety, who was
soon killed. The worried priest, hoping, it appears, to be recalled to the
safety of Potosi, attached a letter with his own observations and sent the
two missives with a young indian letter carrier to the intendant and
governor of Potosi, Jorge Escobedo.
Culta, February 18, 1781. My companion and lord. I do not know
how to ponder the difficulties I live with in this curacy, since daily
there is trouble with these indians who wish to live without God or
king, making themselves into judges of their own causes without any
veneration of God or his ministers. I attribute it all to the great
rapacity with which they have acted until today, taking lives and then
robbing them of all they have had.
I have some news that the priest of Condo expressly wants to
leave for that villa [Potosi] to take refuge, because the indians have
tried to move against him, giving three motives. The first is because
he had hidden a Curaca whom they wanted to kill.71 The second is
their suspicion that he intends to turn them over to the soldiers. And
the third is because they are certain that the silver of don Diego
Cosido is in the hands of the priest. And moved by that interest they
want to carry out this inhumanity, and they themselves have
proffered such words, in this curacy.
On the eleventh of this month there was a wedding, and the next
day an end-of-year [anniversary of death], in which many of our
indians gathered together, and some from Macha and Tinquipaya.
298 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

And among them they read out a circular letter written by a principal
of Challapata (it is attached) and sent to this curacy, as Your Mercy
will see, and after those of this place read it, they convoked those of
Tinquipaya, begging them to go to Challapata, [saying that] if not
they would be lost. The next day the alcaldes of our curacy went out,
and gathered up many of the indians, and sent each one with two or
three slings, sticks, and other things for their defense.72 On the same
day, the eleventh, the indians were speaking in their gatherings,
saying that the priest of Macha had turned over the keys to the
church so they might be on the lookout, preventing any of the
Spaniards or Cholos or other people among their contraries, by any
means from taking refuge there in the church. (ANB, SG 1781,
no. 42, fols. 2r-3rf3
At this point, the priest began dramatically to report indian speech in
the first person:
In the same way that the priest of Macha has offered us, shall be
carried out here, and will come out to defend us as the
above-mentioned priest has offered, similarly giving us the equity of
weddings, and that all things should cost 13 reales, following the
letters of favor that our departed Catari sent us, which have been
usurped by the priest here who has come out against us, making us
pay the tasa. He should not do this, but should defend us, but all will
be seen to. (Ibid., 3r)
Catari's "letters of favor," perhaps invented or at least written down
by the priest of Macha, Merlos, were the privileges he claimed to have
won from the viceroy in the new viceregal capital of Buenos Aires, to
which Catari had gone on foot to pursue his claim to the post of cacique.
The king, he reported to his indian followers, had decreed a reduction of
tribute and had abolished certain ecclesiastic fees, but corrupt colonial
administrators had hidden the king's merciful orders. Indians here
accused the priest of Culta of hiding these measures. Our priest then
continued on the issue of Catari's letters, providing some personal proof
that the people of Culta also credited their existence:
We have been given news that the curacy of Macha is without priest,
helper, sacristan or singer, because all of them have become fugitives
for what they have seen. They have also told us that they will not
give mithanis, pongos,74 or any other things, following the letters of
favor written by Cathari. And in fact when I went to carry out the
election of alferez and mayordomo in the annex of Cahuayo, they
gave me no pongo or mithani, and kept me in the dark, dying from
the cold and the other things they did. (Ibid., 3r)
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 299

In the midst of regionwide upheaval and danger, this Mercederian

priest continued on with the election of festival sponsors such as alferez
and mayordomo, and complained of the indians' lack of attention to his
personal comfort. Yet he waxed most eloquent on the matter of an
unaccustomed indian insolence:
On the 15th, Godfathers' Thursday [just prior to Carnaval] while I
was going to marry some of my little parishioners [filqueritosJ I ran
into three indians who had been elected by our alcaldes, but had
been in surplus?' One of them approached me to ask what news I
had of the soldiers. And I, as if ignorant of everything, answered that
I knew nothing at all. But this was not sufficient. Giving me some
blows on my left side, he told me that I had hidden all within my
heart, and that I did not wish to let them know anything. And with
these demonstrations, they said good day, and went away very
contented, with their wives ....
. . . preserve Your very important Mercy many years, who my
affection desires, and of your parents, to whom I give care of my
heart. Your faithful companion and sure chaplain, Joseph Balzeda.
(Ibid., 3r-3vf6

Escobedo's reaction to the letter was panicky. Noting that he had

news of risings in Yura and Puna, towns near Potosi, where caciques had
been assassinated by their subjects (ibid., 7r; see also Rasnake 1988a),
Esobedo sent threatening letters to the indians of Yocalla and Tarapaya
("buffer" towns between Potosi and rebellious Culta and Tinquipaya),
suggesting that by joining the rebels they would lose their fields and
herds and wives.
Once we realize that council authorities and the means of social
articulation within reducciones were deeply implicated in Christian
practices that required priestly participation (so deeply implicated that
alcaldes continued to carry out elections of festival sponsors even during
the height of rebellion), then many of the otherwise problematic features
of rebellion fall neatly into place. The local-level leadership of alcaldes
and alguaciles in rebellion events, the murder of so many native lords,
and the sparing of priests, while corregidores and other Spaniards were
routinely executed, all make sense if we regard the rebellion as a kind of
Andean "revolution of the communities," more like that 1520s Castilian
revolt than like a neo-Inca movement. Rebels, as Penry (1996) convinc-
ingly shows, did not act in the name of Incas or diarchies such as
Asanaqi. Instead, organized through many intercommunicating town-
based public spheres, they acted as collective bodies defined by the
300 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

names of their towns. It was not the indians of Asanaqi who rebelled
against Spanish and cacique misrule, but "EI comun de indios de
Condo," "EI comun de indios de Challapata," and a host of other
commons led by rotative town councilmen and festival sponsors.
Perhaps local authorities and festival sponsors were not central to
each town's "self-definition." What made the rotation of such officials so
important that they were still being appointed on schedule even at this
moment of special danger, just when everyone anticipated major rebel
actions and Spanish repression? The answer lies in the nature of
indigenous authority as well as the fighting tactics. The legitimacy of
rebellious town councilmen was directly connected to their rotation
schedules and the festivals in which they participated. The latter also
provided the most effective channel for mobilization. In September of
1780, at a time when the Catari revolt was getting under way, the
coronel of the militia of the mining town of Aullagas (not the town in the
Awllaka diarchy, but another in the province of Chayanta) reported that
Spaniards' problem there was what might happen in a fiesta: "Rumor
has it that the assault of this mining town is planned for the twenty-ninth
of this month, which is the day of the celebration of the feast of the
patron, the archangel San Miguel, with the indians' plan being to come
to the feast for their customary rock throwing between those of the
towns of Pocoata and Macha, uniting on this occasion to do away with
all Spaniards and mestizos who are the objects of their insolence"
(AGNA 9.5.2.1.).
As Szeminski (1987) has shown, Tupac Amaru, the great rebel leader
in the Cusco area, claimed to be on a mission from God, and promised
continued loyalty to both God and king.?? Colonial Spaniards, however,
deserved to die, because they were apostates. Having turned against the
faith they professed, they had become obstacles in indian efforts to lead
good Christian lives. Priests were to be spared and the faith saved in a
revitalized "Spanish" colony under indian leadership. This was a "puri-
fication" movement, aimed at the corrupt and unworthy native lords and
Spanish administrators who had failed to open their ears to their
subjects' pleas and had hidden away in their hearts the justice of God
and king.
How genuine were these Andean professions of the faith? The
Spaniards of the day easily dismissed them. For them, "indian" and
"Christian" were mutually exclusive terms. The Spanish chronicler of
Tupac Catari's siege of La Paz recorded many acts of apparent Christian
devotion among the rebel forces, but took them all for a mockery of the
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 301

faith (see Diez de Medina 1981). Christian indians would not, after all,
insolently challenge colonial authorities; buena policia involved not just
orderly Christian ways but also submission to Crown authorities. Tupac
Catari erected an altar in sight of this chronicler at besieged La Paz, and
had his captured priests say daily mass and lead processions during
Christian holy days. This rebel leader, formerly a sacristan rather than a
cacique, also sought advice from a portable oracle, a miniature image of
the Virgin of Copacabana. 78 To us, if not to our chronicler, the sincerity
of Tupac Catari's devotion was dramatically proved in an event wit-
nessed by one of the priests he kept in his company: When the rebel
leader heard two of his own indian lieutenants mock the Virgin of
Copacabana, the patronness of the campaign and the image in his
retablo, he had them summarily put to death at the same scaffold where
Spanish prisoners were hanged. 79
Even before the sacristan Julian Apaza became the rebel Tupac Catari,
his namesake predecessors had already established a pattern of action
and express motive that is a far cry from millennia I revitalization of
pre-Columbian ways. In the Bourbon era of "enlightened" reform,
priests may have seen new state policies as an attack on Church
prerogative and purse. But indians and, especially, town councils (and
the occasional, usually marginalized cacique who retained close ties to
priest and church) regarded attacks on festival cycles as a threat to their
ritual means of articulation as collectivities and as a challenge to the
techniques and calendric institutions in which social memory was now
embedded. From this vantage, it is easier to explain why so many rebel
actions took place during Christian festivals, often actually through
ritual processions. The custom in which the moieties of the Chayanta
province mining town of Aullagas threw stones at one another during
their celebration of San Miguel's day is a case in point: The ritual battle
known as tinku had been transposed into a processional moment when
Spaniards, in their festivals, played out dramatizations of the defeat of
Satan by the archangel, or of Moors by Christians. Blood let during such
Spanish and indian "holy wars" had a sacramental quality. In the
Aullagas case, the structure of the ritual itself dramatized the relation-
ship between town moieties and ayllus, Christian God, and Spanish king
(see Platt 1987c). This was precisely the moment in which new kinds of
polities crystallized around "common indian" town councils and in
which the saints of the Church might redefine their relationship to
leading figures of the colonial world. Through such acts, town councils
displaced hereditary lords, towns supplanted diarchies, and saints' rites,
302 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

dominated by common indians rather than by native lords, took the

place of now-prohibited public "idolatries" through which native lords
had once reciprocated for their subjects' labors with generosity in
collective rituals. By the end of the colonial era, indigenous social
memory had definitively shifted along with the channels of authority and
boundaries of salient social collectivities.
By the 1790s, hereditary lords were about to become a thing of the
past. Successful repression of the 1780s rebellions enabled authorities of
the Crown, whose end was also in sight, to appoint new and more loyal
caciques. They also, however, continued to reduce native lord preten-
sions, a process reinforced from below, while hereditary caciques exerted
always less influence over ever-shrinking territories. In San Pedro de
Condo, the surviving son of the murdered Llanquipacha cacique gover-
nor was now of age and regained the cacicasgo for his family. But Lucas
Feliz Llanquipacha oversaw the final days of the Repartimiento de
Asanaques and even contributed to its definitive rupture.
In 1792, a very characteristic sort of Andean squabble ended up in the
courtroom, to be decided by colonial judges. According to the initial
report, a denunciation and petition for Crown amparo (protection)
brought by the cacique gobernador of Challapata, it all began when a
peaceful hamlet of Challapata citizens was suddenly overrun in a violent
raid by indians from the Condo annex of Cacachaca. The Qaqachakas
had burned the Challapatas' houses and then demolished them to their
foundations. The Challapata authority, one Ambrocio Miguel de la Cruz
Condori, governor of the Ayllus Sullka, Antamarka, and Chankara
(which is to say, of Asanaqi lower-moiety ayllus that had been settled in
Challapata), had then produced a copy of the 1593 composici6n title
(with its references to Toledo's mojones) to prove that the lands were
within his territory, as a descendant of the legitimate caciques of the
Repartimiento de Asanaques. But when it came time for the accused
raiders to give their side of the story, Lucas Feliz Llanquipacha stepped
into the fray. Declaring in his opening remarks that "his subjects" from
the Condo annex of Cacachaca had indeed carried out the raid, he
argued that it had been entirely justified. Since the land was within the
jurisdiction of Condo, his indians were entitled to evict trespassers. To
back up his arguments, he too produced a set of land titles, this time, the
amojonamiento of the reducci6n San Pedro de Condo (ANB, EC 1792,
no. 108).
Not only did Llanquipacha interpret his own documents, but in
well-practiced Spanish and careful legal language he also undid his
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 303

opponent's interpretation of the documents. The Challapata cacique, he

suggested, had misread history. The boundaries he had cited were those
of the Repartimiento de Asanaques as a whole, not the separate and
much smaller area of Challapata as a town-district. The larger and more
embracing territory was from a bygone era, having no legal standing
under mid-eighteenth century circumstances. 8o
An ever-increasing number of border wars marks the definitive
separation of the collateral lineages of caciques created through Toledo's
appointments. More and more, competing lineages of caciques were also
litigating over rights to cacicazgo. Increasingly unlike the "original"
native lords from whom they claimed descent, and ever more conscious
of the similarity of their prerogatives to those of Spaniards, such
caciques, draped in silk and using lawyerly language in elegant Castilian,
rankled like Spaniards at insults to their honor carried out by insolent
"plebeian indians. ,,81
It was just about this time that the term "cacique" came into use in a
new way, applied no longer to hereditary nobility but to members of
rotative town councils. In Santa Barbara de Culta the term is first used in
this way in 1797 (displacing the term "regidor"), when such a cacique
and other Culta natives (including many Mamanis) once again insisted
that they were being overcharged for tributes (ANB, EC 1797, no. 25).
This time the collector is their very own cacique cobrador, rather than a
cacique gobernador from Condo. The subdelegado of the Partido de
Paria responded that he had arrested Culta's cacique for delivering a
written demand drawn up by Mamanis and for lacking five hundred
pesos of tribute. He concluded that he could not release the cacique lest
the indians be encouraged in their insolence,
... especially the indians of Culta and Peiias, who are the most
perverse in all the realm, and the most seditious and rebellious,
without subordination to the /6r/ judges, and not just me, but to all
my predecessors. The cause is not having been punished for all the
iniquities that they committed in past years. (Ibid., 5v-6r)

At the end of the document, the "protector de naturales," a kind of

court-appointed public defender, added his evaluation of the K'ultas:
There is not the least doubt that the unhappy indians of Culta are the
most unfortunate of all those in this vast partido, short on land, with
ridiculous resources, with the exception of the little they can make of
their everyday activities, although always full of misery. The richest
one owns a hundred llamas, and one or another poorly constructed
304 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

shack; the most gallant is draped in rags. I offer Your Grace a

succinct description with physical speculations, so that he may see fit
to decide what his invariable insight judges to be in accordance with
Law and Justice. Doctrina de Culta, February 9, 1797. Jose Anselmo
Alarcon. (Ibid., 7r-7v)

LIBERALISM AND ETHNOCIDE: FROM LAND PRIVATIZATION TO

CANTONIZATION AND THE LAW OF POPULAR PARTICIPATION

After creole Spaniards achieved a direct hegemony over their "half-caste"

and "indian" labor force, becoming in the process simply "creoles"
differentiated from the rest not by being "Spanish" but by being "white,"
the principles of Bourbon liberalism were enshrined in more thorough-
going socioeconomic theses. Just as colonizing Spaniards had done, they
sought to "civilize" the indians whose collective forms of land tenure and
adherence to a nonaccumulative subsistence economy seemed the great-
est obstacle to national progress, always measured in terms of the
industrialized nations of the Northern Hemisphere. 82
In republics like Bolivia, the liberal solution to the "indian problem"
took several forms. Some recommended the physical elimination of
indians, known as the American solution (carried out in Argentina);
others proposed to dilute unsound indian stock through immigration by
white Europeans. Less draconian proposals sought to civilize the indians,
beginning with the cancellation of communal land tenure and the
introduction of private and alienable titles. In a more principled varia-
tion on the auctions of seventeenth-century composici6nes, the republi-
can state seized lands collectively and inalienably possessed, and once
again sold them to the highest bidders. In theory, private enterprise
would then work its magic, leading to capital improvements, increased
productivity, and the promotion of industry. Through a process of land
seizure known as exvinculaci6n, the nineteenth-century republican state
abolished the entities known as ayllus and demanded that all indigenous
communities register property in an alienable form. 83
As Tristan Platt (1982a, 1984) has shown, nineteenth-century politi-
cal necessities led creoles to ally themselves with the interstitial "mes-
tizo" sphere; the latter gained political power at the expense of combat-
ive town councils. And even though places like Culta were too barren for
large haciendas, the favor shown to mestizos gave them room to extort
what good lands there were for their private uses. This was the manner
by which a "nonindian" political and economic elite came to impose
itself over indian town councils in towns like Culta. The post of
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 305

corregidor, once a provincial colonial post reserved for Spaniards and

creole-Spaniards, was miniaturized and imposed in every rural town as
master of the town council. The republican state's new provincial
administrators, subprefects, invariably preferred creoles or mestizos to
occupy this post.
This new rural elite, the figurative (and often literal) heirs of colonial
caciques, came to impose its will over the rotative indian town councils
of former reducciones, forming a new privileged class known collectively
by the old Castilian term "vecinos." Recall that in the 1550s, only
encomenderos were entitled to the status of vecino in Spanish-dominated
cities like Potosi and La Plata. And only vecinos enjoyed full civil rights.
Once reserved in the urban setting for Spaniards alone, the term and its
attendant privileges now fell, in rural indigenous towns, to those whose
"mixed blood" racial status and relation to capital (as private owners of
shops and lands) made them the rural vanguard of "civilization and
progress." Indigenous persons, however, did not see things that way.

Corcino Perez and the "New Caciques" Movement in the Towns

of Asanaqi
In 1868 Corcino Viscarra, "Cacique de Culta, canton de la subprefectura
de Paria," appeared before a judge in Potosi, where he had found a copy
of the Taquimalcos' 1593 and 1646 composicion titles, copied into a
1698 document:
... for years we have been perturbed in the possession of the lands
of Culta that as originarios we possess, by the originarios of
Tinquipaya. But divine providence has restored our tranquility, with
the discovery of the titles that accompany this in fifty-two folios. In
them it can be seen that our interests had purchased the lands of
Culta and the mills for the sum of seven thousand pesos. Thus we are
hacienda owners, not colonos, and we can dispose of our acquisition
as owners, and neither the government nor particular individuals may
impose unfair duties upon us, nor usurp even a hand's breadth of
what our money purchased. So that with the said titles we may make
use of our rights, we ask that the notary don Miguel Calvimontes
provide us a complete transcript of the accompanying fifty-two folios,
with approval of the fiscal. As the representative of the community of
Culta, that is what I ask of you. Potosi, August 5, 1868. Corcino
Viscarra. (Choquecallata document)84
No republican governmental officials seem to have taken Viscarra's
briefly stated assertion of ownership seriously.
306 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

By 1880, when ayllu and council authorities came before state

officials to complain, they represented entities now called ex-ayllus and
ex-comunidades, and their chances of success were even less. In that
year, members of the town council of Challapata gave power of attorney
to a local man, one Juan Mamani, to carry their composici6n titles
(copies from a different source) to the Bolivian Senate. Mamani's
argument, like Viscarra's before him, was that the townspeople of
Challapata had already purchased private title during colonial days.
They therefore had no need of new land titles, and sought exemption
from the exvinculaci6n process. The Senate returned the petition and
suggested that it be presented to the land boundary judge of the
province. These efforts were not the local invention of Challapata or
Culta leaders. Hundreds of other ex-communities tried similar maneu-
vers with their colonial titles during the 1880s, many of which ended up
in the books of the Derechos Reales archives kept in each Bolivian
department.
Viscarra's document, however, somehow got into the hands of a very
creative jilaqata cobra dar, a tax collector-council authority, who repre-
sented Ayllu Sullkayana on the town council of San Pedro de Condo.
Corcino Perez, as the jilaqata was called, personally carried Viscarra's
documents to the Bolivian capital in 1894, but not before writing his
own testimonial to accompany them and obtaining power of attorney
from Condo and many other nearby towns to represent their collective
interests. Perez' astute and passionate arguments, preserved now in the
typescript obtained by don Pablo Choquecallata in 1942 from an Oruro
archive, deserve publication on their own merit. What makes them truly
exceptional, however, are the powers of attorney that Perez obtained.
Signed by the entire town councils of Condo, Cahuayo, Culta, Ca-
cachaca, Huari, and Lagunillas, these poderes, issued by towns that for
the preceding century had sought recognition of the boundaries that
divided them, granted Perez the right to act in their collective interest.
Perez' arguments to these town councils must have been just as compel-
ling as his memorial, directed to the president of the republic and
actually received by the Senate before being buried in a judicial subcom-
mittee. 85
He begins by summarizing the Taquimalco titles and repeating
Viscarra's assertion that the inhabitants of the territory so demarcated
are hacendados rather than colonos, and should be exempted from
tributes and other impositions demanded only of indians. Then quoting
articles of the Bolivian constitution and civil code, and the "principles of
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 307

political economy," he explains why the president should listen to the

demands of the "indigenous class, who have been humiliated since
colonial times and even more since our emancipation" (ibid., fourth
item). In his last paragraph, Perez calls upon the president's patriotism
and rephrases tenets of liberalism:
Sixth. Because of indigenous oppression, this caste prospers neither in
its property nor in its intellectual enlightenment, which is the waning
of our nation, and at the same time deserving of the compassionate
gaze by which other states criticize us. It is therefore necessary for the
supreme government to carry out this passage to civilization for the
good of our republic, raising up this oppressed caste, which cries out
before its misfortunes, notwithstanding the fact that its strong arm is
that which carries out agricultural production and the most difficult
and arduous labors. Founded in this and other reasons that are too
many to enumerate .... Sucre, October 21, 1894. Corcino Perez.
(Choquecallata document, 1894 petition of Corcino Perez; see part F
of the Documentary Appendix for the full text and the original Spanish)

Nevertheless, Perez does enumerate them, in another petition ad-

dressed to the Senate in the following year. This time, he seeks a Senate
vote to approve a budget to pay salaries of land judges who might
reaffirm the boundaries laid out in the Taquimalco titles. Perez continued
with a litany of neocolonial abuses ranging from overly high tribute
charges, to postillonaje, road repairs, mine labors, and personal service
performed for corregidores (who by this date rule over every town
council). Rounding out this second petition, Perez finally reveals the
extent of the "hacienda" his titles demarcate and, in a rising crescendo of
sarcasm and cynicism, practically threatens regionwide rebellion:
Finally, I have said that this solicitud is founded in the public good,
because verifying the boundaries, recognizing and reactivating
borders and mojones [of Condo], and those of the cantons that
neighbor it, Quillacas, Tinquipaya, Macha, Pocoata, Ucumani,
Chayanta, Laimes, Tapacari, Peiias, Huancane, Isla Morato de San
Agustin, Puiiaca; (so many cantons, and even within the parcialidades
that make up each one) [this measure] would prevent the killing of
the indigenous race that is carried out under the pretext of rebellions
that are invented in calumny. Such calumny is enough excuse [for our
oppressors] to jail and shoot the indigenous race, from which they
are harmed much more than by epidemics.
They would have much to say, Supreme Lord, but there they are
now demanding justice at the feet of Your Lordship's throne. So
308 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

much innocent blood and so many tears have been spilled as a result
of a simple calumny thrown out by covetous ones, who want even
the poor indians' rags. All this has resulted from the never well
enough damned laws of the authorities, voted without consultation,
understood even worse, and cruelly executed.
I will not molest the Sovereign Lord with other reflections. It is
enough to say that I demand justice in favor of the indigenous race of
Canton Condocondo, asking them to vote the quantity of money
sufficient to pay for the commissioners who might practice the
above-mentioned operation. And it should be entrusted to a person
even middlingly honorable, with even an atom of sense, and perhaps
a little patriotism and morality.
Moreover, in the name of all and everyone of the propertied
indigenous people of the Department of Oruro, I entrust what has
been expressed to the Sovereign Senor, about the fact that indigenous
people are not obliged to pay the tax of postillonaje, solely to the
interest of the corregidores, ordering the immediate return of lands
that have been taken under the pretext of postillonaje.
Given that the indigenous race of Bolivia deserves some
consideration and justice, given their ignorance, timidity, and
defenselessness, and above all the wealth they produce and develop
for all the ciphers of society and of the republic, which cannot escape
the penetrating wisdom of the Sovereign Lord, for these reasons we
also seek the naming of commissioners to validate our property titles
to the boundaries and mojones given long ago. I wait in the name of
those I represent. Let justice be done. Sucre, October 12, 1895.
Corcino Perez. Seal of the secretaria of the National Senate.
(Choquecallata document, 1895 petition of Corcino Perez; see part F
of the Documentary Appendix for the original Spanish)

Seeking the revivamiento, the "resuscitation" of the boundaries of

Asanaqi (and beyond-Huari and Lagunillas, former settlements of the
Awllaka diarchy not encircled by Taquimalco's mojones), Corcino Perez
was one among many apoderados (representatives given power of
attorney) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who tried
similar legal ploys to safeguard their lands from "covetous" creole and
mestizo latifundistas and vecinos (see Condori Chura and Ticona Alejo
1992). In 1899, an indigenous captain in the Bolivian civil "war of the
capitals," a man from Nina Willka's Mohosa, who happened to be
named Zarate Willka, refused to lay down his arms when the war was
ended, leading an indian army against the very enemies Perez cites.
Other widespread rebellions against the rural oligarchy followed in the
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 309

1920s (little studied in the Asanaqi region). Unforeseen effects of massive

mestizo and indian mobilization in the 1930s Chaco War, combined
with the arrival of trade unionism and socialist platforms, led in the early
1940s to the emergence of indigenism, which had a realpolitik side in the
National Indigenous Congress called by President Villarroel in 1942. It
was in that year that Pablo Choquecallata, a survivor of the Chaco War
and then leader of the work gang for the construction of the Pan
American Highway in its Culta extension, became Culta's delegate to
Villarroel's National Indigenous Congress. The congress came to an
abrupt end when Villarroel was assassinated by a joint mob of Commu-
nists and Falangists, but the experience likely galvanized the spirit of
solidarity that had earlier given rise to daring efforts like those of
Corcino Perez.
In 1952, mine workers, indigenistas, and a wide array of left-of-center
activists took control of government in the revolution forged by the
Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, devoted above all to nation-
alization of mines and oil fields. Promulgation of the Agrarian Reform
Act, however, had not initially been a high priority of government. It
became so when indigenous peoples mobilized on a grand scale, once
again laying siege to the city of La Paz. The Agrarian Reform Law
established a means by which indigenous communities could recuperate
lands usurped by hacendados, and legally undermined the nonindian
rural oligarchy (the town vecinos) by turning over election of cantonal
corregidores to the councils of ayllu alcaldes, jilaqatas, and alguaciles (or
to the "peasant unions" that began then to emerge). Revolutionary or
not, the MNR government's agrarian reform allowed seizure of hacienda
lands only by granting private (but nonalienable) titles to individual
"peasants" (as indians were now officially called). Peasants were also to
be pulled into the national project through universal education and
mandatory military service, through which men like Manuel Mamani
have learned to speak, read, and write Spanish, and to read the Civil
Code and instigate petitions to the government. Such petitions are
legion, in part because the revolution was not an indigenous project and
did not truly aim to empower rural people. The Napoleonic state
structure by which the power of national government filters down to the
department and province through presidential appointees, rather than
upwards through elected local representatives, remain in place. Under
this patrimonial authoritarian state, only those local communities that
can find a direct link to government coffers can hope to gain the
development aid they seek.
310 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

Cantonization
Since shortly after independence, there has been great advantage to those
towns that have been designated as province capitals, for they became
the seat of state authority in the person of the subprefect, who presides
over a provincial courthouse and jail and, often enough, has access to
state patronage money. "Advances" and infrastructural improvements
came first to the country's capital and then to the department capital, but
at least something also came to province capitals, even though that
something has often included a battalion of soldiers. Such capitals were
the first to get schools when the 1950s nationalist revolution brought
them into the countryside, along with other icons of national culture,
including medical posts, electricity, and a dependable water supply.
Provinces are in turn divided into sections, and these into cantons, most
of which began as reducciones and their districts. Now, canton capitals
are too far down the hierarchy to have received much benefit from state
and party patronage-most is siphoned off in department and province
capitals-but they are in a better position to obtain schools and other
development aid than the dependent towns and hamlets within the
canton's jurisdiction are. Not surprisingly then, there is much fervor in
the countryside to achieve the status of canton capital, and among
cantons to become the head of a new province.
During ethnographic fieldwork I first learned of the business of
cantonization very indirectly, when I asked why all of K'ulta's ayllus did
not participate in most of the festivals in Santa Barbara. Don Manuel
explained that this was no longer possible owing to the outbreak of
serious interayllu fighting in the previous few years. Ayllu Qullana had
entirely withdrawn from meetings and now attended only the patron
saint feast of Santa Barbara. Even then, the council routinely requested a
detachment of soldiers to help maintain the peace during that important
festival.
A few years earlier, he explained, a traditional ritual battle, which has
for centuries been fought as part of that saint's fiesta, had gotten
seriously out of hand. The usual controlled fighting, which is called to a
halt with the first serious injury or death, had suddenly become out-and-
out warfare. Dynamite had been thrown, houses burned, and several
deaths had occurred.
Difficulties in maintaining the ritual order were the result of another
dispute that had erupted in 1968. In that year the authorities of Qullana
petitioned the government for the status of canton; this is not possible
without a roadhead for a capital town, so they laid claim to a piece of
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 311

land on the Pan American Highway where they might build their town.
Their claim to the land, however, was disputed by the ayllu neighboring
them, Alax-Kawalli. The town that Qullanas had sought to build was
Palqa, just a few kilometers from Cruce. When they started work on
their new town, a land war ensued, in which hundreds of fighters
participated. Each of the two principal parties called upon their allies. To
the sound of cattle-horn battle trumpets, numerous skirmishes over a
period of four days produced many casualties on the pampa that lies
between Cruce and Santa Barbara. The Qullanas had been joined by a
handful of allies from two other ayllus, llawi and Yanaqi, which together
with Qullana had formed K'ulta's upper moiety. But they also called
upon men from the territory of Macha, from hamlets near Qullana's
northern border. Alax-Kawalli on the other hand (in whose territory
Cruce is located) drew large numbers of allies from Manxa-Kawalli (to
which the Mamani belong). In addition to standard-issue slings and
macelike weapons of leather and stone, knives, axes, and picks also came
into play, along with a few rifles dating to the 1930s Chaco War.
According to don Manuel and the corregidor, the Qullanas were
roundly defeated and were saved an even greater thumping by the fact
that Alax-Kawalli leaders had run short on provisions for their soldiers
(the principals in a land war are expected to feed the soldiers who heed
their call). In Cruce, however, vecinos told a different story, insisting that
the fighting, clearly visible from the highway, was ended after a few days
by a detachment of soldiers sent from the barracks in Challapata.
Much later, in 1988, I was to find the Qullanas' petition for
cantonization filed away in an office of the prefecture in Oruro. It
contained a map of their boundaries, drawn up by a certified land judge,
and an architect's plan for their new cantonal capital. In filing their
petition, the Qullanas had also incorporated themselves as a peasant
union, a sindicato. They were the first ayllu in the area to have done so.
Filed with their cantonization petition was an appeal for amparo
administrativo: Qullana authorities had sought emergency military sup-
port, alleging that their new town (now visible in the ruins of Palqa,
where I had been greeted with stones) had been burned and demolished
in an unprovoked Alax-Kawalli raid. In their denunciation, the Qullanas
named the principal promoter of violence against them: none other than
the septuagenarian founder of Cruce, my friend Pablo Choquecallata
(Archivo de Hacienda, Prefectura de Oruro, Expediente de Amparo
Administrativo, 1968). In the same office, I also saw a petition from
Alax-Kawalli authorities, including the always progress-minded Pablo
312 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

Choquecallata, seeking to transform Alax-Kawalli into a canton head-

quartered in Cruce (ibid., Expediente de Proceso Administrativo, August
20, 1987). What is more, Ayllus Ilawi and Yanaqi had also begun the
costly process of seeking cantonization.
So apart from Ayllu Manxa-Kawalli, in whose territory Santa Barbara
is located, all the ayllus of Canton Culta had begun efforts to secede
from the union, joining a trend that is far advanced in the rest of the
Altiplano. Furthermore, cantonization is but one of the mechanisms of
fragmentation that push rural communities towards ever greater atomi-
zation. Since the late 1950s, some of these same groups, but also smaller
fragments of ayllus such as patronymic hamlets, have had recourse to the
office of the Agrarian Reform to settle land disputes with their neigh-
bors. What they seek, in essence, is a semi-private kind of land title. In
1980 in the archive of the Agrarian Reform in La Paz, I saw three
requests for visits by surveyors and land judges that were then under
consideration for the district of Ayllu Manxa-Kawalli alone.
There was little talk about either sort of petition in K'ulta territory.
Although a Qullana jilaqata once showed me his architect-produced
plan for Palqa (when trying to convince me to become his ayllu's factor
in La Paz), Pablo Choquecallata never mentioned his petition to me. Nor
had Manuel Mamani ever told me that he and some (but not all) of his
brothers and cousins had filed in the Agrarian Reform office for private
title and a deslinde defining their lands. They did talk about differences
and fights, raids and land wars, but always prefaced by accusations
against their contraries for stealing land, stealing people (by convincing
a patriline from a neighboring ayllu along their border to switch ayllu
affiliation), or stealing saints' images or church bells to outfit a new
canton capital church. Ayllu Yanaqi, which is already divided into upper
and lower moieties, took an image of San Antonio from Santa Barbara's
church to place in the oversized hamlet chapel on the town square of
their planned capital town. I do not know if cantonization or Agrarian
Reform petitions were involved, but the Alax-Kawalli people of the
former tambo of Thola Palca had in the mid-1970s tried to carry away
the image of Guadalupe and one of the bells from Santa Barbara's
church tower when they built their own church. However, a series of
natural and personal disasters there convinced them that they had
angered the saint, and they returned both items within a few weeks. 86
The cantonization process provides one key to unlock the secrets of
the cultural synthesis that has emerged from the old reduccion fiesta-
cargo system under republican circumstances. Just as local authorities
Colonial Relandscaping of Andean Social Memory 313

must undertake to defend local interests, procure a more advantageous

interface with national society, and generally serve as intermediaries
with the state apparatus, only those who are properly constituted may
legitimately play this role. In K'ulta, which has not yet undergone
massive conversion to Protestantism, authorities are made, not elected,
through a nearly lifelong ritual process that legitimates them. In seeking
cantonization, the authorities involved in drawing up the petition may
appear to the outsider to be undercutting the ritual order, by withdraw-
ing from a more embracing ritual political order. At the same time, this
process of community fissioning signals that the promoters of cantoniza-
tion, acting as representatives of the constituent groups of Canton Culta
that are now seeking autonomy, believe that the collective interests of
their fragment of the canton will be better served standing alone as a
whole, directly dealing with the Bolivian state.
In the 1960s Cahuayo, which had been relegated to the status of
annex to Culta since the end of the eighteenth century after their
unsuccessful bid for independence of action in the 1774 murder of the
Llanquipachas, also became a canton capital (ibid., Expediente de
Proceso Administrativo, September 23, 1966). Citizens of Cahuayo then
went on to commit the ultimate rebuke of both Culta and Condo; when
census takers arrived in the 1976 census, they declared themselves
inhabitants of the department of Potosi and were so recorded. Seeking to
hark back to an earlier time, when the main road between Potosi and
Oruro passed close to Cahuayo before reaching the tambo of Lagunillas,
the Cahuayos sought a new road project that would link them to a major
thoroughfare and leave Cruce and Santa Barbara de Culta marginalized.
Hundreds of such petitions are filed away in Bolivia's archives.
Does all this mean that the sociocultural order bound up in the ritual
politics of Canton Culta is a dying world, in the process of accultura-
tion? If so, it is difficult to understand why each of the seceding ayllus
has sought to reproduce key facets of that order on a reduced scale. S ? To
meet state requirements they draw up a grid-plan capital town with
corregimiento, church, jail, and school, located on a serviceable road: A
canton capital, it turns out, must have all the features of a reduccion.
Furthermore, petitions uniformly emphasize the "progressive" mentality
of their promoters, directly engaging the state's aim of "civilizing
peasants." At the same time, local, rather than state, mandates reproduce
moieties in each new canton candidate, along with a system that
concatenates ritual sponsorships and political offices. While the canton-
ization process underlines the seceding group's lack of commitment to
314 PART TWO. HISTORICAL PATHS TO K'ULTA

the previous manifestation of the ritual-political order, its reinscription

into a more circumscribed social space with the same kind of cultural
features characteristic of the old, larger one proves to be a reaffirmation,
rather than a rejection, of its commitment to the values that motivated
participation in their ritual-political synthesis in the first place. It cannot
be denied, however, that cantonization continues a process of atomiza-
tion of indigenous social formations, at the encouragement of state
authorities, that began in the distant colonial period with the process of
reduccion.
To explore these facts adequately, however, we must plunge more
deeply into the forms of social memory by which the people of Canton
Culta's would-be daughter cantones apprehend the significance of such
transformations.
 Part Three

Social Memory in K'ulta:

A Landscape Poetics of Narrative,
Drink, and Saints' Festivals
 Chapter Seven

Telling and Drinking the

Paths of Memory
Narrative and Libation Poetics as
Historical Consciousness

In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators

are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as
it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible;
likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements
of time, plot, and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of
indicators characterize the artistic chronotope.
-Mikhail Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and of the
Chronotope in the Novel"

T"AKIS OF MODERN LIFE: HISTORY AND SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

In part 2, I traced the outlines of a history that, since it is drawn from

writings emanating from and addressing non-K'ulta frames of reference,
we might call a history of K'ulta but not a K'ulta history. I have sought
to illustrate the profound impact of colonial policies and of incorpora-
tion into an overarching state upon the life-ways of the people of this
corner of pre-Columbian Asanaqi territory. At the same time, I have
tried to suggest the degree to which sociocultural forms have been in
motion over a longer time span. Asanaqi was not a stable, objectlike
entity that survived over many centuries. A pattern of social relation-
ships, Asanaqi has been reborn in many incarnations in relation to rising
and falling states and empires. Sometime around the transition from
membership in the Spanish colonial empire to the Bolivian national state,
Asanaqi simply ceased to exist, in spite of the efforts of men like the
nineteenth-century Corcino Perez to resurrect something like it. Colonial
and republican civilizational measures and techniques of rule gave
preference to other sociopolitical forms: the colonial towns and councils
from which daughter polities have arisen from Asanaqi's ashes. The

317
318 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

people of K'ulta do not regard K'ulta as a reincarnation of Asanaqi. For

them Asanaqi is a mountain, a powerful mallku, and also San Pedro,
guardian of heaven's gate.
Some brands of K'ulta social memory tell a story very different from
the one I have laid out in part 2. To defend themselves against the insults
of colonial and republican states that excluded indians from political
participation so as to exploit them, the people of K'ulta might have been
expected to give themselves a glorious pre-Spanish past, to imagine
themselves the descendants of powerful primordial beings with continu-
ing secret powers that can be used to resist invading and foreign
interlopers. One might expect it, because that is precisely how Andeans
have been regarded by late-twentieth-century elite nation builders in
need of a "natural citizenship" that only indians seem to possess
(Abercrombie 1992). In a logic derived from colonial missionaries and
administrators, urban "nonindians" imagine "indians" to have access to
ancient earth deities through magical and fundamentally non-Christian
techniques inherited from the pre-Columbian past. In this way of
thinking, indians occupy a timeless world that preserves uniquely
Bolivian customs from the depredations of imperialist and transnational
modernity. So far, K'ultas' past does not respond to the needs of nation
builders, but helps to account for the social realities K'ultas must live;
their past provides keys to understanding their present situation, includ-
ing the hegemony of Christianity and the creole-dominated state, the
continuing centrality of the powerful distinction between indians and
non indians in Bolivian social life, and the primordial powers that
nonindians impute to indians. 1
In part 2, I depicted how pre-Columbian techniques of social memory,
all of which construed social time and space as a sequence of places and
moments along pilgrimage itineraries, were reshaped along colonial
pathways that made sense of changing contexts of social life. I also
discussed the progressive uptake in the countryside of the cultural forms,
themselves serving social memory, that Spaniards called buena pol ida
and Christianity. Yet the reorientation of tribute pilgrimages away from
wak'as and Cuscos and towards mining centers and markets, the shift
from wak' a cults to the cult of the saints, and the rein scription of native
social groups within the cyclic calendar of Christian universal history did
not eliminate all Andean techniques of social memory; they only gave
those techniques new content. The processes of reducci6n and doctrina,
the formation of annexes with their own churches and festival calendars,
and the provision of new boundaries through composiciones and
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 319

amojonamientos made town councils and the rituals that undergird them
into the successors of hereditary nobility and social forms of diarchies.
Even in the current wave of this continuing fragmentation of rural social
formations, that of cantonization, ayllus and moieties continue to be
essential features of rural life, reinscribed in each new town and canton
through the performance of calendric rituals founded in a colonial
cultural synthesis.
K'ultas preserve old documents and forge new ones in their petitions
to the state, but rarely do such documents make explicit reference to the
techniques of oral transmission and customary ritual action through
which they also bring the past to bear on the present. Those kinds of
social memory can be discovered and understood only by engaging in the
kind of face-to-face social relations that forged them.
While trying to arrange my first interview with the septuagenarian
patriarch of Cruce, don Pablo Choquecallata, I saw him engage in one of
the libation sessions that the people of K'ulta call memory paths. During
that first interview, don Pablo also had recourse to another genre of
historical memory, the narrative of the past we call myth and that for
K'ultas is a form of t"aki, another pathway. K'ultas value "eyewitness"
testimony, but reaching back beyond the individual lifespan to find
deeper truths, they resort not to suspect hearsay but to primary sources.
Written documents containing colonial land titles are one such locally
respected source, and as we saw in part 2, don Pablo himself engaged
with the documented past notwithstanding his lack of letters. Old truths,
however, are not only recorded on paper. They are present in customary
action sequences, rituals such as structured libations, sacrifices, and
commemorative events, as well as in another "customary" form of
sequentially coded information, mythic narrative. In the present and
following chapter, my goal is to provide an account of such living K'ulta
ways of construing and using the past.
A few cautions may be in order. I describe here the varieties of
narrative, libation sequence, and sacrificial saints' rites through which
processes of life and death, the human life cycle, and longer social cycles
involving marriages and feuds are harnessed to deeper pasts. Being a
written account, this can never provide more than a partly adequate
understanding of ways of knowing that reside in practice and daily habit
as much as in verbal narrative. At the same time, the memory forms I
describe are neither long-term cultural survivals from the preconquest
past nor "traditional" practices about to be lost forever. The give and
take of cultural discourse, the continuous transformation of individuals
320 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

and groups and their continuous reinvention of their own pasts within
multiple contested arenas of culture and memory, ensure that what I
describe here is ephemeral rather than stable. Written and published, my
account freezes out of time the enacted social memory of specific peoples
during what, in the larger scheme of things, is but one brief moment in
the stream of transformative social process which it helps to shape and
by which it is shaped. Culta was reborn as a saint cult center and
cofradia sometime before 1616, became an official civil and ecclesiastic
annex of the reduccion Condo later in the seventeenth century, and
achieved independence as an autonomous doctrina (encompassing Lagu-
nillas and Cahuayo) in the late eighteenth century. Becoming a canton
including those other groups in the nineteenth century, it ceased to be a
parish and then lost jurisdiction over its own annexes in the mid-
twentieth century. Accompanying each of those historical conjunctures,
the patterns of collective practice carrying social memory have been
overhauled, and the past has been revised to account for a new present
and a new social formation.
The complex fiesta-cargo system I freeze on paper here, integrating
only two of the five ayllus that less than thirty years ago were woven into
it, and the reduced scale of border pilgrimages that has ensued from
these secessionist movements should be enough to indicate the irritability
of social memory and its institutional frameworks, which are as fragile
and inventive as the people who create them in the process of creating
themselves. Today, Canton Culta is in the process of fragmenting into yet
further autonomous social entities, just at a moment when a rising tide
of conversion to Protestantism, only now underway within K'ulta
territory (since completion of my most recent extended fieldwork there),
begins to sweep away the mythic narratives, saints' festivals, sacrifices,
and libations of alcoholic beverages that are at the core of the techniques
of social memory I describe here. Even so, certain techniques of social
memory are in K'ulta surprisingly stable. And all of them (including
Protestantism, which is the "path of Jesus") take the name t"aki. What
does the term now mean?
The term "t"aki" is applied to a variety of phenomena, from paths on
the ground by which people travel on foot, to oral narrative, and to
various kinds of individual and collective sequences of fiesta-sponsorship
careers. All these things are t"akis because they are sequential strings of
action in movement which begin, subjectively, in one place and time and
end in another: They may all be conceived as kinds of travel itineraries.
By examining the several forms of t"aki in K'ulta, we may discern the
outlines of what might be called a K'ulta poetics, which is at the same
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 321

time a way of encoding social process and of transforming young and

unformed K'ultas into fully adult social agents. As we shall see, today's
t"akis may be quite different from the taquies of yesteryear, but they are
the locus of a contemporary Andean history.
Chief among the means by which K'ultas recall, address, and manipu-
late the past in the present are three forms of t"aki: narratives (and also
songs); libation sequences, called amt'ana t"akis, "paths of memory";
and p"ista t"akis, "fiesta paths" or fiesta-cargo careers. All such t"akis are
actual channels of social transmission with both spatial and temporal
coordinates, through which K'ultas make their lives into meaningful
journeys. In the opening epigraph, Mikhail Bakhtin's application of
Einstein's theory of relativity to the analysis of narrative also applies
nicely to the organization of space and time as itinerary in K'ulta t"akis.
Forwarded in an effort to understand the novel as it has developed
since Lazarillo de Tormes and Don Quixote, Bakhtin's "chronotope"
mirrors K'ultas' interpretation of human life as moving patterns in space
and time. It has precedents in the pre-Columbian borracheras, taquies,
and ceque systems and in many features of social memory that can also
be found in Iberia. But I am only incidentally concerned with tracing the
etymological or derivational history of K'ulta myths, libation sequences,
sacrificial rituals, and festival careers. I am much more interested in
understanding the fact that K'ulta people categorize all of them as kinds
of t"akis, "pathways." T"aki may be described as a poetic category of
exceptionally broad scope, encompassing all the techniques that K'ultas
use to transmit social memory.
I begin with the most familiar of such vehicles, oral narrative, through
which K'ultas understand the social implications of the most distant and
encompassing structure of space and time, that of the cosmos at large.
We will then see how a narrower range of living spaces, from the
structure of the house to that of the town of Santa Barbara de Culta, is
given meaning in relation to more universal processes.
K'ultas deeply value mythic narrative, not because it places founda-
tional moments outside history (regarded as the flow of contingent
events shaped by human action), but because mythic events are not
contingent, and none is the exclusive product of autonomous human
action. The most "rote" form of memory in K'ulta, mythic narrative is
relatively immune to the distortions of untrustworthy and interested
individual reporting. It is also valued as the most generalizable topos of
socially significant space-time. It sets out the ways in which human
activity can be given meaning as episodes in living narrative, as parts of
a larger and more encompassing story, a universally salient history.
322 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

THE NARRATED PAST: THE SOLAR-CHRIST DEFEATS THE SUPAY-CHULLPAS

Don Pablo Choquecallata enjoyed recounting stories of his own life

experiences, and it was from him that I first heard tales from the days
when animals as well as mountains could speak. He told me the story of
how the condor wooed and kidnaped a young shepherdess, carrying her
to his high cliff where she languished on a diet of rotten meat. He
recounted the time that fox (fari) took a ride on condor's (mallku's) back
to a banquet in heaven, but ate so greedily that the condor could not
carry him home. Braiding a rope, fox tried to climb back down to earth,
but could not keep himself from insulting some parrots that flew past;
they cut the rope with their beaks, and fox fell down upon the hard
earth, whereupon his overstuffed belly burst open, giving to earth the
heavenly seeds of maize, potatoes, and beans, which had not grown
there before. Don Pablo also told the tale of the mountain Wila Jaqe
(Red/Blood Man), who in a competition with Turu (another nearby
mountain), had ended up with vicunas as his lot, while the deer had gone
to Turu. 2 Pointing up at the hillsides, where exposed sedimentary layers
were bent and dislocated from the geological processes that made these
mountains, don Pablo told me that there was evidence enough that the
mountains had once moved about.
Events of the time before time, what K'ultas call layra timpu, are
significant because such stories convey information about the signifi-
cance of this past for the present. Indeed, for K'ultas, the past is present.
Also called layra, the past may be seen lying open like a book in the
landscape and social space of the living. "Layra" can also refer to origin
places, specifically mountaintop springs from which herd animals sprang
and, in the Kaata case described by Bastien (1978: 174), the place to
which human souls return. K'ultas also add the term "layra" as a
qualifier (in variation with the term "laq' a," "dust") to the most remote
ancestors in a genealogy, the generation of the layra (or laq'a) ;ach'a-
mothers and fathers, forming the apex of genealogies, from whom each
person traces his relationship with kin and therefore, applying K'ulta's
rules of the prohibited degrees of marriage, can work out whom he may
marry. In the mountain-as-body metaphor recorded by Bastien (ibid.),
the well-springs of human existence are the eyes of the mountain god on
which the community is located.
After hearing several stories about layra timpu, I asked don Pablo
about the early days when men first lived in K'ulta territory. The story he
told me then resonates with tales of Tunupa and Viracocha, yet also
provides a local setting and local meanings for another tale repeated
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 323

thousands of times by Spanish priests, that of Christ's passion. The tale's

protagonist, Tatala, also known as Jesucristo, is an old and bearded
stranger who was ill-received on his arrival in a settlement of primordial
men known as Supay-Chullpas. Widely told throughout the Bolivian
highlands, this story is given pride of place in my considerations upon
the position of oral narrative in contemporary social memory. Many
other narratives of the kind that K'ultas call kwintu are just as widely
known and often told, but "Tatala-Jesucristo and the Supay-Chullpas"
more clearly helps to understand the dialogical origins of the structures
and processes of space-time that frame all contexts of K'ulta social
action. 3 Rather than continuing here with don Pablo Choquecallata's
recension of the story, I turn to a version told by a man renowned for his
storytelling and other varieties of poesis.
September 1, 1982. We are sitting around a small table that I have
carried into the house, on which a tape recorder whirs, illuminated by a
single candle. Smoke rises from a cooking fire in the far corner of the
dark house, where dona Basilia stirs a pot of corn mush over a clay
stove. Every now and then, she adds some sticks to the fire. The pungent
smoke rises up towards the rafters and seeps out through the roof thatch.
Three small children lie in a row on the bed nearby, listening to
nighttime stories they have heard many times before, though not in these
circumstances. Don Bartolome warms to his storytelling. The children,
and even the usually serious dona Marta, inspired him with their
giggling when the wily and philandering but hapless fox lost his penis in
the denouement of the last story. I ask again for the story of Tatala,
which I heard a few days before while don Manuel worked at his loom
in the llama corral outside. Ari, ari (yes, yes) ...
Jesucristo-Tatalantix Supaytinsi-Chullpantix
Tatala and the Supay-Chullpas were enemies, they say. The Chullpas
chased Tatala, a foreign, old man, and finally were able to kill him
because they were many and he only one. They buried him in the
earth and put thorns [ch"api] on top. They waited, then went away.
Later they discovered that he had escaped. They caught him and
buried him again, this time putting a large stone on top. They waited
and waited, but when they left, again he escaped. They went after
him. While following his trail, the Chullpas asked some other people
if they had seen the fleeing old man. These people pointed out the
ashes of his cooking fire, and from the ashes' appearance the
Chullpas believed that he was long gone. [Here don Bartolome
explains that this is a deceit in which the ashes, from a bush called
sak'a sunchu, only appear to be old.] Exactly at this point the
324 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

Chullpas became frightened. They learned (or remembered) that it

had been foretold that the old man would conquer them if he got
away. Frantically, they built strong houses; and since Tatala had gone
off to the west, they built all with doors facing east, to protect
themselves from the heat and light of Tatala's fire. Tatala rose into
the sky as the sun from the east, and the Chullpas died in their
houses, burned and dried up by the heat. To this day, one can see
their remains, and the sun, Tata Awatiri, continues to travel across
the sky. Some of the Chullpas, however, managed to escape by diving
under the water of Lake Poopo. That is why there are still some
Chullpa people alive [that is, the Chipayas and Urus Moratosl. 4

History of a Myth
The contexts which produced tellings of (or references to) the story may
help to locate it within the K'ulta symbolic universe. Told not just to pass
the time, this story provides a sometimes satisfying explanation for some
otherwise disturbing facts. Pablo Choquecallata told it when I asked
where the first K'ultas had come from. Others usually avoided respond-
ing to this question, deferring it to others. "The schoolteachers must
know", "It must be from Adaneva" (though no one seemed to know that
story); "The layra jach'a talas must have known." I was often told that
I must know better than they. Most often this and other stories were
drawn upon or even told in their entirety to answer other, less loaded
sorts of questions.
K'ultas are aware that their ancestors must have existed before the
arrival of the Spaniards, and yet that idea establishes the ancestors as
non-Christians, like the babies who die unbaptized, who are moros
(deriving from the Spanish term for Moors); K'ultas find this conclusion
unacceptable, since it links them to a class of wild and disorderly
humans who belong to the past (and continue in the present as
hunter-gatherers on Lake Poop6). Chullpas, unlike Tatata, did not keep
herds or understand cultivation. They were not jaqi, persons who live as
rule-governed human beings. How can such non-jaqi be ancestors of
K'ultas, whose lives are governed by the processes that Tatala's defeat of
Chullpas set in motion? When asked if they are descendants of con-
quered Chullpas, K'ultas firmly deny it. They are aware that their origin
story does not specifically recount the arrival of the first K'ulta person or
even the first jaqi, and some K'ultas therefore make reference to Adaneva
stories (though none knew the story) to fill in the gap.5
K'ultas hold the myth's Chullpas in low esteem-just as Aymaras,
Incas, and Spaniards regarded the Vrus of colonial days-because of
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 325

what they do (living by hunting, fishing, and gathering of "wild" foods)

and what they do not do (cultivate or herd). As such, they are consistent
with Bertonio's characterizations of the hunting Choquela people in the
Lupaqa area (1984: book 2,89), as well as of the larilaris who, like foxes
(laris) and wife givers (laritas), live through hunting and occupy the
pampa and puruma (open and uncultivated space). Like Vrus,
Choquelas, and Larilaris, the Supay-Chullpas lack social hierarchy and
order, living "outside of town" and without submitting to authority
(ibid., 191).
Another time I heard the story told was while sitting in Manuel
Mamani's llama corral as he wove woolen cloth on a treadle loom,
which as we shall see is another social process made possible by Tatala.
I had been asking about the plants that I found growing wild around
Vila Sirka, some of which, I had been told, are edible but not usually
eaten by people. They were chullpa foods. In the corral I noticed many
small plants that looked to me like miniature potato plants; when I
pulled one up, I found some very small tubers that looked all the world
like miniature potatoes. And so they were. Don Manuel explained that,
like the other wild foods he had told me about, people did not eat them,
apart from children at play and desperately poor and starving folks. Like
other uncultivated and undomesticated plants and animals (which are
edible but not food), K'ultas presume these to be the food sources of the
Chullpa people, who did not know how to cultivate and herd. Don
Manuel then told the Tatala versus Chullpas story. Questions about the
origin of the sun also led to this story, for Jesucristo is the sun.
If we view the myth not only as a colonial history qua history but also
as a philosophy of conquest and the identity transformation it entails, it
would seem that the conquest pushed unbaptized dead (such as the
diarchy lords who were buried in the "chullpa" tombs the myth
describes) into the past that in Tunupa and Viracocha stories preceded
their trans formative journeys, that of the "orderless" age of natural
beings who existed in a state of natural and cultural lawlessness. If that
is so, then Jesucristo here takes on the world-transforming role once
granted to Tunupa and Viracocha. As told today, the Solar-Christ and
Supay-Chullpas story makes no room for today's K'ulta people to claim
pre-Christian ancestors.
As long as we seek in it an account of historical events or the gene-
alogies of its tellers, this myth is problematic and apparently antihistori-
cal. A Christ figure (with some un-Christlike characteristics) is already
present at the beginning of time. Rather, he makes time; like another god
326 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

who divided the land from the waters and the earth from heaven, calling
up light with his words, Tatala did so through his struggle with Chullpas.
How can a story that does not refer to fully human (jaqi) ancestors of
its tellers account for their origins? I suggest that K'ultas' ambivalence
about their origins and their unwillingness to trace their ancestry either
to Chullpas or to Tatala express the colonial contradiction at the heart of
the story, and that the contradiction itself and the story's method of
resolving it explains K'ultas' ontology. Our historical investigation
revealed that those interred in chullpas were K'ultas' actual pre-
Columbian ancestors (or at least ancestors of the hereditary lords whose
legitimacy expired with the colonial period). Incessant colonial preach-
ing insisted that those who had died without baptism were condemned
permanently to hell, which Spaniards' glossed as "manxa-pacha": The
process of translation laid one conquest and succession of epochs over
another. Pre-Columbian ancestors were pushed into the pre-Christian,
diabolic space of pagan Romans and perfidious Jews who, in Spanish
accounts of Christ's passion, tried and failed to kill Christ. Such
preaching assimilated the pre-Columbian dead to the idolatrizing, pagan
antithesis of enlightened Christianity and buena policia. The pidginized
intercultural discourse of missionary Christianity then facilitated the
equation of Christ (whose radiance and enlightened teachings Spaniards
portrayed in straightforwardly solar terms, such as Christ's radiant halo
and the sun-shaped monstrance in which the consecrated host was
displayed) and the sun (in whose golden brilliance and glittering rays
pre-Columbian Andeans had envisaged their redemption from a disor-
derly and watery past). The equation of Christ and the sun, and of pagan
Romans or Jews and the warring and unreciprocating people of awka-
pacha (era of warriors/rebels) or purunpacha, was Andeans' way of
understanding the cataclysm of conquest, reducci6n, and conversion to
Christianity. It is true that Christ's radiant, solar powers have much in
common with those of Viracocha and Tunupa, but like the miracles of
Ramos Gavilan's or Pachacuti Yamqui's Tunupa/apostle, those powers
are Christian ones-heterodox, perhaps, but accessible only through the
intercession of saints, the mass performed by consecrated priests, and
some truly heretic practices through which Andeans have learned to
perform their own Eucharists in clandestine chapels.

Narration of Cosmic and Calendric Process

The story's Chullpas live in a cool, dark, and wet place; they are
well-supplied by the self-generating foodstuffs which sprout in their
moist and fertile domain. Such characteristics link the Chullpas with
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 327

both nocturnal and hydrophilic creatures like K'ultas' mythic foxes, and
also with a space that still exists, the underworld domain of manxa-
pacha. The Chullpa realm, however, is not yet manxa, an "under" or
"inner" domain, because their world is spatially undifferentiated, just as
it lacks the alternating segmentation of experience into days and years
that we call time. As a result, there is no change and no death in the
Chullpa world. Those things come to Chullpas only through their
struggle with Tatala.
In their initial encounter with him, the Chullpas take the initiative,
striving to "kill" him and to encompass him within a tomb. But people
incapable of change and to whom death is unknown cannot hope to kill
death's very master. 6 Nor can they enclose him in their tomb, since they
are exceptionally inept at activities involving the division of space into
inside and outside, a kind of dimensionality that their world lacks.
After Tatala's resurrection from the Chullpas' tomb, he escapes their
pursuit precisely through his control over temporal process. The deceit
of the ashes in his first trick, and in other recensions his second trick
involves a maize crop. * These Chullpas may know the "how" of fire and
of harvesting foodstuffs, but it is Tatala who controls the "when" as well
as the "where." So when Chullpas once again try to make enclosures,
building "strong houses" in which to hide, they place the doorways
opposite the direction in which Tatala has gone, facing the east.
However, Tatala does not reverse course, but continues around, com-
pleting a circuit and completely encompassing the Chullpa domain. By
doing so, he reduces Chullpas to dimensionality and, more specifically,
to an interior and inferior space enclosed within the exterior and
superior space that he himself represents. The Chullpas may have built
strong houses, but once again they fail to enclose space properly: Their
east-facing doors expose them to the desiccating heat and light emitted
by Tatala when he emerges at the eastern horizon in the very first sunrise.
Completing his circuit, Tatala makes enclosure possible for the Chullpas,
but within tombs rather than fortresses. The changeless, dark, and damp
Chullpa life-way becomes untenable on the dried surface of the earth.
So, too, does Tatala bring Chullpas' unchanging timelessness to a close.
When he completes one circuit of his pathway he begins another,
repeating his journey on a regular schedule that segments the seamless
'In Pablo Choquecallata's version of the story, the Chullpas, while chasing Tatala,
encountered a man harvesting his maize field. When they asked him about the old man
(Tatala), he reported simply that such a man had passed through the field when he was
sowing it. What the Chullpas did not know was that Tatala had caused the crop to grow
and set fruit just by passing through.
328 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

flow of the Chullpa era into the days, seasons, and years of cyclic
alternation. Time brings change and death to the Chullpas. A few dive
beneath the standing waters into the depths of space that is now both
past and "interior," and Chullpas are relegated to the dark night of
manxa-pacha.
Just as Tatala does not remain always in the sky, the Chullpas did not
entirely disappear. Their dried bones, relics of the layra timpu that is
now the past, can still be found in their tombs, which are the burial
towers of pre-Columbian hereditary lords that archaeologists call
chullpa tombs (Fig. 7.1). These are still powerful and dangerous forces in
K'ulta's landscape. Touching such bones causes a swelling infection;
exposing them to the sky can lead to prolonged drought. 7 Living
descendants of the Chullpas who dove into the waters, the Vrus Moratos
and Chipayas of the Lake Poopo region, are themselves powerful
sorcerers, sought after for certain kinds of magical effects. And beneath
the surface of the earth, in the dark and watery manxa-pacha, autoge-
nerative powers that cause seeds to germinate and rains to fall must still
be called upon to make use of Tatala's heat, light, and seasons for
agricultural production, as well as for the reproduction of herds and
humans. Chullpa powers must also be regularly banished when the
growing season is over.
While Tatala triumphs in the myth, both he and the Chullpas are
relegated to opposed otherworldly zones, outside this earth and the
horizontal space in which the initial action of the myth takes place, and
into a vertical (and spherico-concentric) opposition in complementary
and mutually exclusive realms. As constituted in the denouement of the
myth, Tatala's journey takes place simultaneously in both horizontal
space (east to west) and vertical space (first above to below [his
interment in the tomb], then below to above [his escape]). It is in this
form that Tatala recapitulates the journey along the path towards and
away from the Chullpa's realm every twenty-four hours (in setting and
rising again), as well as every six months (in ceding to the rains and then
overcoming them).
As agents in the story of cosmogeny, Tatala and the Chullpas carry
out their struggle as a social drama, and so cosmological bodies and
events continue to be invested with the creative agency and subjectivity
of the people who tell the story. As gods (or analogues of gods, for the
Chullpas provide but a "natural" model for the caretakers of herds and
crops, which can be "controlled" only through the intervention of
Tatala), the forces described in the myth become the ultimate sources of
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 329

Figure 7.1. A chullpa tomb. (From E. George Squier, Peru: Incidents of Travel and
Exploration in the Land of the Incas [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1877], vol. 1,243)
330 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

social power and limits to human action; that is, they become a
humanized nature. Outside the direct control of human agency, the
cyclic alternations set in motion by the mythic struggle are those to
which human social processes must conform. That does not stop
humans, of course, from trying to conform alax-pacha and manxa-pacha
powers to their own purposes.
Thus the rhythms of rites of passage are attuned to the change of
seasons, with funerary rites beginning at the start of the rains (Todos
Santos period, about November 1) and carrying through to the begin-
ning of the harvest (carnaval). During that time the dead, allied to the
watery and autogenerative underworld but not yet fully committed to it,
remain nearby to quicken the growth of crops, the birth of herd animals,
and the successful rotation of the authorities (see Harris 1982; Rasnake
1988b). K'ultas mark the rainy season in a variety of ways, including
musical performance. From November 1 and 2 (All Saints' and All Souls'
days) to the beginning of Lent, they play recorderlike t' arkas, flutes that
are considered "wet" instruments and that play melodies composed by
deities of rivers and waterfalls, to which the dead and rains are attracted.
Once the end of carnaval (and the growing season) comes, however,
t'arkas must be put aside, replaced by "dry" wind instruments such as
panpipes. Marriage rites, as well, are tied to this schedule, taking place
just after the carnaval ban on mandolinlike charangos and panpipes has
been lifted, and after the dead have been dispatched to the netherworld.
In the workings of the seasons, however, we already see that the
alternation between Tatala and the time of the Chullpas is no simple
opposition: each realm also incorporates, as a subordinated element, a
reflection of the power of the other. Thus alax-pacha is also inhabited by
the moon, the sky's version of the feminine underworld, while the
underworld has its gods of above in the high mountains. In diurnal
alternation the relative values of above and below are partly inverted, as
the darkness and cold take over alax-pacha and the sun warms the
netherworld on his journey "inside." Similarly, the time when the sun is
at the height of his power (rising higher and remaining longer) is
precisely when the warmed earth most needs to be watered, and the dead
help to bring this about, along with the intermediary saints who are
called upon for just this purpose. In the dry and cold season, when
K'ultas travel to the low-lying and wet, feminine valleys, the reverse
process takes place. The dead keep the rains in manxa-pacha, so that the
weakened sun remains sufficient to dry the surface of the earth. Now
twenty-four-hour cycles come into play. The alternation of long and
freezing cold night with sunny and dry days provides the conditions that
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 331

enable men to "domesticate" cosmic processes to transform their "wet"

crops into storable dry forms. Intentionally applying to their foods the
process that Chullpas once underwent against their will, K'ultas layout
potatoes and strips of meat upon the ground for several days and nights.
Freezing hard during bitter cold nights and thawing in the desiccated
daytime, such foodstuffs (along with corn still on the ear) are freeze-
dried, producing the dried corn, beans, ch'uiiu, and jerked meat that
become K'ultas' sustenance for the rest of the year. The original pattern
of social process established in primordial times becomes the basis for
the processing of foods. 8
None of these processes is fully within human control, however, and
it behooves humanity to call upon just those aspects of each zone which
are nearest its opposite in order to bring a measure of success to their
endeavors. To channel Chullpa powers, and for that matter Tatala's,
K'ultas call upon a whole host of messengers and intermediaries associ-
ated with one or the other realm, and especially upon certain beings who
are both humanlike and practiced in mediating the divide between the
seen and the unseen: the human dead and the saints. With both, living
persons share some affinity; communication with either helps the living
reach into the heavens or underworld to tap into their powers. As minor
refractions of sun and moon (and unbeknownst to K'ultas, as exemplary
but now-dead persons in heaven), the saints are capable of descending to
the earth in controlled or uncontrolled forms. As emissaries of persons,
they are palpable images capable of moving in horizontal, social space,
while as agents of unmediated vertical contact between the above and
below, they may strike in the form of lightning.
Likewise in manxa-pacha there are the mallku, the condor peaks who,
most like Tatala, look down on this world from lofty heights and are
capable of rising into the sky in the form of predatory birds in order to
confer with the saints. Establishment of control over the relationship
between these opposed forces, in fact, requires the human regulation of
the interaction of saints and mallku, whether through shamanic sessions
in which the two confer or through fiesta rites in which the saints'
images on earth (and the hierarchy pertinent to alax-pacha) communi-
cate with the space and time of manxa-pacha across ritual paths
(themselves icons of the paths of the cosmogeny's antagonists) which
make alax- and manxa-derived diagrams of social process into icons of
one another.
K'ultas understand the human life cycle and all social processes in
relation to the path of the sun, Tatala's t"aki, by which ordering
processes of layra timpu are endlessly reenacted. 9 To gain some control
332 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

over such processes in social life, indeed, to be human, people must

conform the spaces in which they live to the vertical, horizontal, and
concentric coordinates established in the Tatala-Chullpa struggle. Social
action gets its most fundamental meanings from the east-to-west, inside-
to-outside, and male-to-female coordinates according to which all social
space and social time is built. Many of those coordinates also coincide
with reducciones and the kinds of orderly activities carried out to the
patterned-time rhythms of buena policia.

SPACE-TIME IN THE CONTEXTS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

The daily routines of K'ulta life take some of their significance from
already-understood contexts of social space and social time; they per-
form the rigorously structured and nonroutine activities that we call
rituals in order to have an impact on their relationships with those
contexts, changing the contexts or aspects of their identities. To do
either, social space and social time themselves must first be constructed,
hewn from the building blocks provided by the Tatala-Chullpa struggle.
To set up an independent household, and thus take the first step on the
"great fiesta path," a fiesta-cargo career that provides the itinerary of a
lifetime, the house must first be built.
Unlike the proposed canton capital, which must follow an abstract
representation embodied in an architect's plan in order to meet the
criteria of "townness" established by the state (thus also meeting the
entry requirements of modernity, which is what the state hopes to bring
about by promoting such petitions), the K'ulta house does not result
from implementing a preconceived and abstract plan or model. IO K'ulta
home builders follow no architect's plan, but K'ulta houses are nonethe-
less as similar to one another as if they did. That is because the proper
sort of house emerges directly from K'ultas' familiarity with the proper
spatial and temporal coordinates of the activities that take place inside
and outside a house, and because the kinds of social relationships that
make a new house can be properly conducted only when the house takes
the shape those relationships give it.
The space within the house is divided into opposed domains (see inset
in Fig. 3.1). To the right as one enters there is a raised sleeping platform
(and near it, a raised altar). This end of the house is pata (a raised, flat
place), and it is here that men and boys sleep or pour libations. At the
other end of the house (to the left as one enters the door) is a low floor
and (if there is not another building for this) the fireplace for cooking.
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 333

This is a pampa (a low, flat plain), where women and girls sleep (on the
floor), cook, and pour their libations. l l
When libations are performed, the pampa, with the addition of a wom-
an's lliqlla (carrying cloth/shawl), becomes the women's altar, while the
raised altar of the pata end of the house (with a man's poncho) becomes the
men's altar. Because most houses face the north (seeking in this Southern
Hemisphere region the maximum of sunlight through their doors), the
men's end of the house is on the west side, and the women's on the east.
To achieve this end K'ultas do not need to layout their houses
according to a plan with cardinal directions indicated on it, because the
pouring of libations is one of the ritual acts that accompany the
construction of the house. All libations must be carried out while men sit
at raised altars facing the east and while women, a few yards away, sit
upon the ground facing the west. So in performing the rituals of house
building, the orientation of the house takes shape through the orienta-
tion of its builders, who always include a married couple with children
and two complementary groups of construction workers, the husband's
patriline brothers and the wife's patriline brothers. The house, that is, is
a product of the social relationships brought into being through mar-
riage. First of all, there is the complementary relationship of husband
and wife, whose attributes and activities also shape the house. But since
land in K'ulta is transmitted only through men and residence is prescrip-
tively patrilocal, the house is built within the confines of the husband's
patrilineal hamlet, among the houses and patios and corrals of patriline
mates with whom the husband shares his surname. These conform a
landholding corporation, a fighting unit when it comes time to defend
land claims, and a collective body that engages in relations through
marriage and saints' festivals with other patrilines (see Map 4.1). The
house, that is, also takes form as a relationship between groups, that of
the husband and the patriline from which the wife comes. 12
As an enclosed space, the house expresses the gendered relationship of
the couple who occupy it, by virtue of its replication of the structure of
cosmological process originally established in the Tatala-Chullpa rela-
tionship. It is a feminine, flat, and open space, a pampa, gendered
precisely by being enclosed with vertical and masculine walls. Beneath
the floor, its builders bury a ritual bundle granting the house and its
altars "roots" that reach out to the uywiris and mallkus of husband and
wife. The floor and its altars become, then, a feminine entity called is kin
mama/a, "corner mother," in reference to the house corners where walls
meet. Foundation stones, called inkas, are then laid in place, helping
334 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

through their connection with "Inca" times (referring to layra timpu

rather than to Incas of Cusco), when stones could move of their own
volition to ease construction. Walls are raised with adobes. When they
are completed, the unroofed house receives the blood of sacrificed sheep
in a wilancha like that performed when Santa Barbara's church was
refloored. At a later ritual, roofbeams and thatch are installed. Walls and
roofbeams are given masculine attributes; the house as a whole is then
called by the ritual name kuntur-mamani tapa, "condor-eagle nest." It is,
like the home of great flesh-eating birds, a nest, an enclosed nurturing
space (consequently also called tapa mamala, "mother nest"), in which
male and female generative powers are combined, linking past genera-
tions to future ones. The house is, then, the cosmos in miniature,
manxa-pacha defined by its enclosure within alax-pacha walls and roof.
The corral and house patio are also built forms, which recapitulate
the cosmographic structure of the house on a larger scale. They are like
houses in being enclosed spaces to the degree that they are walled, and
thus are also partly feminine forms (jira t' alia, "dung female," and uta
uyu or uta anqa, "house corral" or "house outdoors"), but unlike the
house they are open to the sky (and to direct contacts between alax and
manxa). Within the patio, a stone altar with stone bench constitutes a
collective libation space where all members of the patri-stem group with
houses on the patio (brothers and cousins) address the uywiri and
mallku they share. Each hamlet is composed of multiple patio groups;
one of these is usually recognized as the jach'a misa, the "great altar"
built by the hamlet's apical patriline ancestor.
Outside of the patio and house entrances, a series of additional en-
closed spaces are reserved for herd animals. Corrals should ideally open
to the east, and in the seating arrangements in ch'allas there the men are
again assigned the west side, against the corral wall and associated with
it. Women sit again on the ground in their enclosed pampa, this one made
of dung. Again the men face the east, and the women, west. The patio
configuration is much the same, though here the raised (pata) men's altar
backs up against the house on the west side of the patio. Women sit in the
midst of the eastern pampa space, the open space, facing the men.
The order of the cosmos is given only through such opposition,
always framed in terms of a struggle or process, and so the relationship
of women to men is thought to be one of complementary opposition,
through which the cosmogenic model is made to order social life. As a
kind of yanani (a pair), like llantirus (lead llamas), men and women, as
husband and wife, are mutually necessary in order to bring the mutually
exclusive realms towards which they are oriented to bear on human
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 335

affairs. K'ultas carry out all their rituals in gender parallel, men Ii bating
male deities, altars, animals, and souls, while women libate the feminine
realm, so that men's and women's ch'alla paths proceed apace.
The human life cycle also conforms to the process described in the
Tatala-Chullpa myth. When they are born, infants are like wild animals
and Chullpas, eating naturally produced, unprocessed, and uncooked
foodY In the human life cycle, people originate from an enclosed yet
undifferentiated pre-manxa-pacha space, and only by stages along a path
of progressive differentiation do they come to internalize the formal
hierarchizing attributes of social process which make them finally human.
After death, they must follow a similar but inverse path. Provisioned
by their mourners for the journey with llantirus and every kind of
cooked and uncooked food, they follow the sun's path to the west, and
finally enter the mountain of souls, a manxa-pacha place where the
rhythms of life invert those of this earth.
The dead are dispatched for a return journey to the underworld on
two separate harvesttime occasions, both linked to Christian moveable
festivals. Men are sent packing on the Monday before carnaval Tuesday,
and women on the Monday before Easter. I was able to participate in
only one such event, when Virgilio Mamani, while carrying out festival
duties in his father's place, sent his father away for good.
In the midst of many other rituals associated with carnaval, Hilarion
Mamani came back for a final visit through the intercession of his tullqa.
Hilarion's sister's husband arrived in Vila Sirka early on Monday
morning and took the dead Hilarion's best suit of clothes and hat out to
Vila Sirka's jach'a misa, the "eldest" patio altar in the hamlet. Atop the
altar he set up a wooden cross, pouring libations over it, dedicating them
to Hilarion's bones. The cross then became the dead man's bones: the
tullqa (the dead man's sister's husband, then in his sixties) used it as a
mannequin, dressing it in Hilarion's clothes. When it was finished, the
widow and her son Virgilio joined the other Mamanis at the altar amidst
a great deal of lamentation and tears, each one taking a turn speaking to
and drinking with the image of Hilarion as if he were actually present,
and finally presenting him with plates heaped with food for his last
supper. As the alma cargo of a ritual sponsorship in progress, Hilari6n
wore a bread crown (a pillu) atop his hat; his mourning relatives were
clothed in black capes and ponchos for the event. I took my turn
drinking with Hilarion, and offered him a pack of cigarettes, an act for
which his widow thanked me. At the time, however, the image that came
to mind was Guaman Poma's drawings of ch'allas to the sun (Fig. 7.2;
see also Fig. 5.1, p. 142). Not long after his last smoke, Hilari6n rather
 Figure 7.2. Drinking with the sun. The wording at the top translates as "June.
Hacaicusqui." The word at the bottom of the page is "qusqui." The words within the
drawing translate as "Drinks with the sun in the fiesta of the sun." Here Guaman Poma
depicts the Inca ruler sharing a drink with the sun. The Inca drinks from one quero

336
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 337

suddenly announced (through the voice of his tullqa helper) that it was
time for him to leave. The tullqa then removed the bread crown and gave
each mourner a piece; we were to eat it as quickly as possible while the
tullqa carried Hilari6n's image away. A few moments later, however,
Hilari6n reappeared. The tullqa had dressed himself in Hilari6n's clothes
and was carrying the whip that belonged to Hilari6n as a former alcalde.
Bursting upon the group of mourners, he began to shout and scold,
striking each one with the whip. "Stop your crying," he told us in an
authoritative voice. "Take off your mourning clothes, and think of me no
more." When the assembled Mamanis began to remove their black
mourning clothes, Hilari6n then announced that he was leaving, never to
return. Having become Hilari6n, the dead man's wife taker now rushed
about picking up the black ponchos and shawls, the bits of uneaten
bread, and several plates of food. With a last goodbye and a stern order
not to follow him, he rushed away from the altar, out of the patio, and
onto the western path leading away from Vila Sirka, until after a few
hundred yards he disappeared behind some rocks. There, he would
remove the clothing by which Hilari6n had returned to life, make a
bonfire, and burn all that he had taken with him. Other relatives then
held back Hilari6n's widow and son, keeping them from following him
to manxa-pacha. Placing piles of cacti on the path, they then barred the
dead soul from any change of heart.
The western path taken by Hilari6n leads towards manxa-pacha, the
destination of the dead. So, too, does the preferred path taken by all
"naturally cooked" (digested and/or rotting) substances and the diseases
that yatiris transfer from a person to a ritual bundle to be carried out of
the hamlet. All such things are said to have a bad or fetid smell, to be
t"uxsa, in contrast with the sweet smell of the incense bundles that are
offered on the eastern path to the rising sun. Thus the solar path, when
projected onto horizontal space, becomes an icon of the narrative
sequence which produced the fundamental oppositions of the cosmos
and of the social processes thereby produced.

Figure 7.2. (Continued)

while another, on the ground before him, reaches the sun in spirit, which the Christianized
Guaman Poma depicts as the action of a demon. In the accompanying text, Guaman Poma
explains: "This month they carry out the moderate fiesta of Inti Raymi, and they expend
much in it and sacrifice to the sun. And in the sacrifice called capac ocha, they buried 500
innocent children, and much gold and silver and mullo." (From Guaman Poma de Ayala
1980: 220)
 en
~lo~-
Q)D

010~E-----------~
o
mother's ego's patriline UYW'"
patriline and hamlet
B A

o
000
bD Do
cD
D~
father's mother's
patriline
C

enoo~ IE--~~~ ~oo

oQ,[JO
000
0 cD
mother's father's father's father's
mother's palJ'iline mother's patriline
F E

en oD~
Qo
~o:?
mother's mothel's father's mother's
mother's palJ'illne mothel's palJ'illne
H G

Figure 7.3. Patriline-hamlet paths, marriage journeys, ch'alla pathways. Here patriline-
hamlets, which in reality are widely scattered through K'ulta territory and connected by
meandering pathways, are shown connected by straight-line paths. At the upper right,
ego's patriline-hamlet (A) is linked by a t"aki (a path, shown here as a horizontal line) to his
or her mother's patriline hamlet (B). This is the path taken when a male ego serves his larita
(mother's brother) in subservient tullqa roles. Ego's father's mother's brother (C) and
mother's mother's brother (D) are also laritas to him. All eight patrilines are origin-homes
of ancestors recalled in ch'alla t"akis performed at the male sponsor's altar; the male
sponsor's wife toasts an identical pattern of ancestral patrilines, but all eight should be
different patrilines from those libated by her husband. These patrilines correspond to
patronyms listed by a prospective bride and groom when determining whether or not their
marriage is proscribed. Actual visits from kinsmen in life-crisis rites, from pillu carriers in
fiesta-linked rites, and from miniature images in fiesta exchanges follow paths and include
stops at samarayafias, "breathing places."
Libations are thought to travel underground from the "roots" of the misa, where they
are poured to the roots of the entity libated. Conceptually, ch'allas reorder the landscape
genealogically, beginning with the concentric hierarchy of misa, uywiri, and mallku of ego's
own patriline. Successive libations reach ever further back in time, ending in the patrilines
of the generation of ego's great-grandparents. Although ego is prohibited from marrying

338
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 339

All the built forms discussed so far are both alax and manxa entities,
with a lower inside and a higher outside. K'ultas construct their life-world
from complementary opposites. But if the opposites are of the same kind
(features defining a divided whole), they are not unranked, and the hi-
erarchy of conquest penetrates even the household. The alax wall (which
is the elaborated, built part of a house, corral, and patio) defines the
unelaborated low and feminine by enclosing it, giving cultural order to the
"natural" or "wild" form of feminine space, the pampa, or plain.
At the level of the whole hamlet, however, the pampa (a feminine space
in contrast with the masculine hills and mountains that surround it) is not
what is inside the hamlet space of houses and patios, but the wild and
unordered space outside it. From this perspective, the hamlet itself be-
comes an alax entity, while the surrounding territory becomes manxa
space. This fact inverts the concentric hierarchy established through Tata-
la's journey and serves to demarcate what, on this earth, is human and
"cultural" from what is animal and "natural." At the same time, the
boundary around the hamlet separates what is not yet whole (the partial,
solely manxa beings, foodstuffs, and social processes from outside the
hamlet) from the locus of production of the whole, where such items are
transformed through the solar-derived process of cooking and herding.
The pampa also separates the hamlets of distinct patrilines, but is
crisscrossed by footpaths linking one hamlet and one patriline to another.
These become pilgrimage pathways along which patrilines engage one
another as groups during several stages of marriage rituals (house build-
ing being one of them). In rites connected with the exchange of saint
images and sponsorships, the paths are the routes taken by exogamous
patrilines in order to appropriate the sources of the manxa-type genera-
tive power, which they cannot themselves produce: wives(Fig. 7.3}.

Figure 7.3. (Continued)

someone bearing any of these eight patronyms (or from the corresponding patriline-
hamlets), ego's children will not recall patrilines E, F, G, or H in ch'allas. Ego's children
will likely travel to them in courtship visits during the carnaval season. The same hamlets,
or rather the corral altars, caretaker hills, and mallku mountains connected with them, are
recalled when Ii bating the origin places of herd animals.
All interhamlet pathways conceptually converge at the town of Santa Barbara de Culta.
Each patriline travels to its house there for litigation, baptisms, weddings, funerals, service
on the town council, voting, and payment of taxes. For major festivals, contingents from
several patrilines allied through intermarriage and reciprocal festival duties, having visited
during the year, merge together as they near the town. Miniature images held in hamlet
chapels also travel to town to visit with the corresponding "main" image in the church.
Likewise libations to patriline place deities converge upon Churi Asanaqi, the hierarchi-
cally superior mallku-mountain of Santa Barbara. (Author's rendering)
340 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

Marriage and Predation

Owing to the nature of incest prohibition and marriage rules, the men of
a patriline must seek wives elsewhere, just as the sisters and daughters of
patriline men must find husbands with different patronyms from their
own. In fact, marriage is prohibited not only with those who share the
same patronym but also with all those who share any of the patronyms
and matronyms of the grandparental generation. This corresponds to the
prohibition of marriage with any descendant of one's eight great-
grandparents. Since one's proposed spouse must then libate eight patro-
nyms (and patrilines), sixteen distinct patrilines must be recalled. This is
clearly a tall order, since Ayllu Manxa-Kawalli, for example, has only a
few more patrilines than the required minimum. If all marriages were
ayllu endogamous (which they are not), it would be almost certain that
the remaining, permitted patrilines would have been prohibited to the
prospective couple's parents. After casting sisters and daughters out of
the patriline for four generations, the patriline brings its female descen-
dants back into the fold in the fifth generation. 14 To ensure that the rule
is adhered to, every stage of the long and drawn-out marriage rites,
including the initial betrothal stage, is accompanied by libation se-
quences poured to the bride's and groom's ascending ancestors,15 thus
tracing a mental journey backwards in time along most of the paths that
connect patrilines and link them through marriage. 16
When memory fails the prospective bride or groom, they may have
recourse to the birth records kept by the registro civil, where one can
find out what one's great-grandmother's patronym was. Sometimes, it is
an unpleasant discovery, and genealogical amnesia is the best measure to
keep the marriage intact. K'ulta's registro civil told me of several
occasions when written social memory was best forgotten; with suitable
recompense, he was able to lose the evidence.
There is great force to patrilineal biases in K'ulta, in which most
hamlets correspond to a single patriline. 17 Genealogical memory tends to
falter beyond the grandparental generation apart from one's direct
patrilineal ascendants. Don Manuel Mamani, for example, could re-
member the names of seven ascending ancestors in the male line (father,
father's father, etc.); all of them had lived in Vila Sirka. His wife, dona
Marta Cariri, recalled only four ascendant male ancestors of her
patriline. But just as many North Americans do, don Manuel had
difficulty recalling the matronym of either of his grandmothers. Dona
Marta, in contrast, knew the matronyms of her grandmothers and of
their mothers as well.
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 341

Of course, the deeper genealogies, of patronymics or matronymics,

often collapse several generations into one. All the Mamanis knew the
name of the first Mamani in K'ulta, but different individuals placed him
at different degrees of remove, and none went back far enough in time to
account for the Mamanis who, in the late 1770s, had pummeled the
unfortunate cacique gobernador of Condo. Ancestors that far back, the
forgotten ones, are nonetheless still libated, because they form a vital
part of the mujuts kasta, the "seed line," which defines membership in
the patriline. Likewise, distant matrilineal ancestors, whose names must
be forgotten so that marriages can occur, are nonetheless recalled as
"generic" ancestral beings of the wilats kasta, the "blood line."
All K'ultas are aware that in the deep past, usually, in fact, only five or
six generations back, mujuts kasta and wilats kasta fade into one
another; all members of the ayllu, in the end, are "blood" relatives,
related to one through the substance that, in the K'ulta theory of
conception, is the woman's contribution to reproduction. Women, who
concern themselves more deeply with recalling the transmission of cloth,
pottery, and herd animals from mother to daughter, remember more
matrilineal connections than do men, to whom the main rights of
inheritance are to patriline land. To this degree, Arnold's (1988, 1992)
assertions about the importance of matriliny as a complement to
patriliny have much merit, notwithstanding the fact that in reality, both
mujuts kasta and wilats kasta, as forms of genealogical reckoning, are
constructed according to patrilineal principles. In K'ulta, the blood-line
genealogy traces kin related to one through one's mother; emphasis even
in women's libations to ancestors is upon their patrikinsmen, who of
course constitute a different patriline from that of their husband. Is
There is even more merit to the matriliny argument when we turn to
the genealogies of herd animals rather than those of humans. Corrals,
like houses and patios, are also built upon "roots" that connect them to
the ancestral hill and mountain caretakers of animals. Since, unlike
lands, herd animals are passed from mother to daughter, a genealogical
litany of the animals' guardian deities does recall matrilineal transmis-
sion.
Yet parallel transmission of moveable property through a female line
is, after all, a matter of degree, since men also inherit animals; likewise
the notion that the ayllu is a kind of circulating connubium in which
patrilines are linked through transmission of blood does not erase the
probability that ayllus were once also conceived as clanlike "super"
patrilineages, linked together through a shared ancestral paqarina.
342 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

Evidence for the latter claim (quite apparent in the Huarochiri myth
corpus) comes from the Aymara term that Bertonio's seventeenth-century
dictionary reports for the Quechua term "ayllu": "hatha," meaning not
only the social form Quechua speakers called ayllu but also "seed."
"Hatha" seems to have had nearly the same range of meanings as today's
"muju." At one time, "ayllus" were, as patrilines are today, conceived in
terms of shared male generative substance (and perhaps also female
blood). And regardless of how strong matrilineal ideas might be, they do
not in the end mitigate the primacy of patri-biases in everyday life. Such
biases grant to men, not to women, positions of authority on the town
council, and make land, houses, and fiesta-cargo careers into patriline
property: A widow does not inherit her husband's fields or her husband's
ritual career, which pass to a son if one is available and, if not, to a brother
or patri-nephew of the dead man. A widow without children is sent
packing unless she remarries within the patriline.
K'ultas conceptualize authority itself in a manner that underscores the
biased gendering of political life. As we shall see, men become authori-
ties within the hamlet, ji/iris, only by first being equated with the lead
llamas of the domesticated herd, the llantirus (Sp. delanteros), that is, by
domesticating and leading other human beings, beginning with his wife,
who forms the nucleus of a man's herd. Internalizing Tatala's encompass-
ing qualities as "our father shepherd," pascal lamb, and herder of men, a
new husband draws his wife into the patriline in order to reproduce it.
The fact that authorities should be thought of as herders is itself ironic,
since men regard the role of actually taking animals to pasture as a
demeaning and feminine activity. Men's herds are human ones, and their
herding is domestic and collective politics in a patriarchal vein.
Of course, all this is a matter of perspective. The man who gathers a
wife, herds, inlaws, and a ritual following may become a domesticator of
the wilderness, a herder of men, for his patriline mates, but he is a wild
predator to those whose sister and herd animals he takes. Likewise, the
debt incurred by taking a wife transforms the woman's brothers into
predators, bent on stealing from their new brother-in-Iaw's flock of
sisters.
To a newly married man, his wife's male patrikin become larita, a
term that also means "fox." The animal reference notwithstanding, it is
a term of respect, and a man is permanently indebted to his laritas.
Laritas call the man who marries their daughter or sister tullqa. Every
time the wife's brother or father carries out an important ritual task, the
tullqa must aid his laritas in the most subservient ways; he can never
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 343

fully undo the sting of his theft of their daughter and sister, remaining
permanently indebted. 19
Harris (1982) reports a house-thatching ritual among the Laymi (a
people who border Qaqachaka just northwest of K'ulta) that makes
explicit the complementary forms of predation played out between
patrilines. The groom dons a costume made of a dried condor, trans-
forming himself into a mallku. He then dances, carrying his wife's
brother, his larita, on his back, recapitulating the mallku's journey with
larita to heaven, from whence larita fell with the seeds of domesticated
crops. From one another's patri-centric vantage, each is a wild predator
on the other's "herd," even while both seek the powers of heaven. Of
course in this instance, the one who has succeeded in domesticating a
wife is the groom, the condor, while the fox's efforts backfire.
Sister exchange is a relatively common form of marriage alliance in
K'ulta, so in real life the predatory larita sometimes exacts vengeance on
his sister-stealing tullqa by taking away his tullqa's sister in marriage.
The two men (and women) then enter into a completely reciprocal
relationship, each alternatively serving the other as subordinate tullqa
and demanding service as larita. Each as larita will carryon his back the
other, in the form of a condor. Since all the same-generation men and
women within a patriline are classified as brothers and sisters, and since
the most common form of sister exchange is of the classificatory type,
the reciprocal relationship of debt and obligation (or predation and
vengeance) established by marriage is as much an interpatriline affair as
it is an interpersonal one.
There are many opportunities for men to win the hearts of women
from other patrilines in the collective interpatriline visiting of marriage
rituals and saints' festivals. From the vantage of young people, the best
of all are the nighttime courtship visits that take place during carnaval,
when patriline entourages visit the hamlets of their contraries for
competitive singing and dancing and a good deal of sexual play. In all
such visits, each patriline seeks to use their superior "metaherding"
powers, gained through their efforts to emulate Tatala, to "domesticate"
the women of other patrilines, turning the unruly predation of Chullpa
times and the wild forces of the pampa to the purpose of reproducing the
regulated life of the patriline household and hamlet.
I have surveyed how hamletlpatriline settlements are interconnected
through paths of social transmission made manifest in every practical
and ritual act within household and hamlet social space. It remains to
point out that each house in the hamlet is also endowed with a patron
344 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

saint, a miniature image called a riwusyun (again, from Sp. devoci6n). So

in addition to the underground channels linking household roots to the
patri-stem group's uywiri (hill) and the patriline's mallku (mountain),
aboveground pathways lead from each house to the hamlet chapel
(called, in Aymara, pukara, a term once applied to hilltop fortresses).
Within it, the hamletlpatriline as a whole keeps its patron saint, also one
of the "imagenes de bulto" first introduced by doctrina priests. From
every hamlet chapel, a straight ritual pathway, made (like the famous
Nasca lines) by clearing away stones and plant life, leads to and up a
nearby uywiri, ending at an altar (called the saint's silu, from Sp. cielo,
"heaven") and a stone-built tower topped by a cross (much like the
humilladero erected by Gonzalez de la Casa atop Diego Iquisi's wak'a
shrine) (Photograph 7.1). Just as in the town of Santa Barbara, the
hamlet's patron saint is celebrated by an annual festival. Sponsoring that
festival is the first task incumbent on a newly married couple while they
progress towards full adulthood and an independent household. Such
sponsorship is a step on another kind of path, the jiska p"ista t"aki,
"small fiesta path," which leads to full adulthood and to authority within
the hamlet. All male members of the hamletlpatriline may consider one
another "brothers," jilata, but some brothers, by participating in the
hamlet festival system, become "elder brothers," jiliri, leaders of the
patriline. That is when they begin the jach'a p"ista t"aki, the "great fiesta
path," traveling the road that leads to the church and the town council
office, and perhaps to the status of jilaqata, the highest-ranking of all the
elder brothers.
The first step in such a life career, however, presupposes that one
knows how properly to carry through another sort of t"aki, the "path of
memory" embarked on through drink. Only then can one begin to
plumb the sacrificial logic by which men are able actually to grasp the
powers of Tatala to transform themselves first into herders and agricul-
turalists and concomitantly into herders of men.

AMT' AN T"AKI: "PATHS OF MEMORY" TRAVELED IN DRINK

In his foundational journey, K'ulta's Solar-Christ episodically con-

founded a timeless and immortal humanity with tricks of time and space,
and created the very fabric of space-time with which modern humans
must contend. His original itinerary became the t"aki, or path, through
which as the sun he continues to move. Human society is now inextri-
cably bound up in the cyclic alternation of night and day, and the
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 345

Photograph 7.1. A dance group at a hilltop silu altar. Young men of Sikuyu Hamlet and
accompanying sisters doH hats while saluting the hamlet chapel and its image of the Virgin
of Purification. They play a tune on octave-graded panpipes. Behind them, a flower-
bedecked cross juts from a stone pillar atop the hill, which serves as the saint's silu (from
Spanish cielo, "heaven"). A cleared processional path links chapel and hilltop. Near Sikuyu
Hamlet, Ayllu Manxa-Kawalli, Canton Culta, February 2, 1980. (Photograph by author)

spiraling cycles of warm rainy season and cold dry season, of life and
death. I have tried to show how critical to K'ulta social life are the
myriad ways of trying to regain control over the processes that Tatala set
in motion. In the first place, they must ensure that the patterned activities
of social life conform to Tatala's rhythms. And like a mythic Inca who
was able to lasso the sun to lengthen the day, they also seek to
manipulate those rhythms to serve social ends. That is possible because
Tatala, as master of social space and social time, is also a social being,
who can be convinced to accept the prestations that incur obligation
towards the humans who offer them. Likewise, the very alternations
produced by the original battle between Tatala and the Chullpas left the
latter a critical role to play. They killed Tatala, but like Tunupa at the
346 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

hand of Viracocha, he never did die. In the same way the Chullpas, who
did not know death, came insistently back to life, and their dark and
autogenerative powers, ruled by Tatala's clock, must also be engaged in
social relations with humans (through the dead and in the darkness) if
they are to gain control over the temporal patterns on which the
processes of life now depend.
Like Tatala, K'ultas must become masters of time, and this is possible
only by mastering the relationship between the present and the past. For
K'ultas, the past is located in space, in the relationship between encom-
passing heavens (alax-pacha) and the hidden under or inner world
(manxa-pacha). As we have seen, it is also clothed in the architecture of
their life-spaces and embodied in the features of the local landscape. For
the people of K'ulta, the story of Tatala and the Chullpas provides a key
to the past. As a travel narrative, it is itself a form of t"aki, an episodic
sequence of interactions that describes the temporal dimension of space
and of human life. As such, the story is a narrative icon of the original
journey remembered through it. This, and all, oral narrative is remem-
bered and shaped by poetic rules of composition, character development,
and plot, all of which are embodied in the social space-time established
by the sun's movement along his itinerary, which is the primordial t"aki.
In K'ulta, the road one travels through drink is not that of amnesia
but of its opposite, memory. That drinking alcoholic beverages should
serve as a mnemonic technique is surely at odds with the commonplace
in so-called Western culture that one drinks in order to forget. Even
those perceptive sixteenth-century Spaniards who recognized the link
between borrachera and idolatry had difficulty imagining drink as a
memory technique. 2o Nevertheless, sequences of libation dedications, or
toasts, that are pronounced in the moment of throwing back one's drinks
are called amt'an t"akis, memory paths. 21 To understand drinking in the
Andean countryside, we must take stock of the way that a shot of
aguardiente (or, as the K'ultas pronounce this Spanish term, awarinti)
becomes a measure of meaning. 22

Ch' alia in K'ulta

In K'ulta and throughout the countryside, solitary and secretive drinking
is exceedingly rare, in contrast with drinking in cities and among town
vecinos. Drinking is instead most often associated with collective ritual
events, in which the sharing of alcoholic beverages is an important
medium of reciprocity, a sign of hospitality, and in sum a significant
medium of organized social interaction. Rather than taking the form of
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 347

the occasional drink shared informally among friends, drinking in K'ulta

usually involves extraordinary outlays of time, effort, and funds. It is
almost invariably done "for something," in a ritual context in which
drinks are almost always dedicated and offered to divinities. Drinks do
not, however, simply mark birthdays, Friday nights, formal occasions,
and holidays, as they may in the city, but serve to bring to mind the
distant past, reinforce the sense of self, family, genealogy, and mark out
the organization of the cosmos and man's place in it. They do so through
the ch alia form that is fundamental to all kinds of ritual in K lulta.
I

Ch' alias provide the structuring backbone which gives sequential form
to the llama sacrifices that mark out virtually every ritual context, from
naming ceremony to funeral, and from curing rite to saint's festival. 23
A ch alia, essentially, is a libation involving the partial spilling (or
I

flicking from the finger tips) of a liquid upon (or towards) a sacred altar
or other deity. But that is not the end of it. The place of libation itself
then becomes a channel through which additional ch' alias reach more
distant beings. Nor are libations simply poured out: a few words of
dedication direct the libation to its final recipient. The drink is therefore
a kind of offering, one type among many.24
It is late evening of the Thursday before carnaval, 1981. With Virgilio
Mamani and his cousin don Bartolome, several other senior Mamani
men, and their wives, I enter Virgilio's father's house in Vila Sirka.
Virgilio's father, who died the previous year, had nearly completed a
long career of festival sponsorships and town council posts and, had he
lived, would have been preparing to sponsor his last festival in the
coming month of December, in honor of Santa Barbara. Fiesta careers,
however, are inherited. So Virgilio is preparing to take his father's place
to complete the career. Since he is unmarried, his mother will accompany
him. We enter the house in order to carry out the ch' alia sequence of
uywa ispira t"aki, the "memory path of the herd vespers." His mother
begins by lighting a pair of charcoal braziers, pouring an incense mixture
onto the hot charcoal, and encircling the inside of the house, enclosing it
within ritual time. Don Bartolome and his wife, dona Basilia, prepare
two quantities of alcohol diluted to 80 proof with water. Onto the misa
on the right side of the house, Virgilio places a poncho, and in its center,
a coca cloth. Next to the coca he places his father's varas, wrapped in an
ancient vicuna scarf, and a bull's horn pututu.
The menfolk take seats around the altar, while Virgilio's mother and
dona Basilia sit upon the floor on the left side of the house, around a
woman's carrying cloth and a quantity of coca leaves upon it. Several
348 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

other Mamani men and their wives take their respective seats. Now
Virgilio and his mother give each participant a double handful of coca
leaves, received in open palms and transferred to each one's ch'uspa.
Several then exchange their coca ch'uspas, touching the other's bag to
the floor and saying "Tata Santissimo taki," or "Tata Mustramu Awksa
taki" ("for Our Holy Father Sun"), dedicating the chew to the God
whose trials on a Thursday, before his Friday death, make this his day.
(The suffix "taki"-which is unaspirated, differentiating it from "t"aki,"
"path"-indicates "for" in the dedications.) Then don Bartolome and
dona Basilia get down to business, each with a can of alcohol and a small
tin cup.
Finally, the amt'an t"aki session is underway. Like any other, the
session begins with a single ch'alla. Don Bartolome begins by filling a
tiny silver cup with his alcohol mixture. He then dribbles a few drops at
each of the altar's four corners. Then, just prior to drinking the
remainder of the cup in a single draught, he says the words "Iskin
Mamala Misa taki." He then refills the cup and hands it to Virgilio, who
repeats don Bartolome's action and words. In the hierarchic order of age
and social privilege (I am next, reflecting the eminence the Mamanis
have bestowed upon me as a wealthy outsider), the rest of the men
seated on stones behind the altar then repeat the words and acts.
"Kuntur mamani tapa misa" refers to the very altar (misa) at which
we sit, belonging to the house, the "altar of the condor-eagle nest."
Subsequent ch' alias are then dedicated to the altar's "root," the channel
of transmission connecting the altar below the ground to other sacred
places, and then to a whole hierarchy of deities located elsewhere,
beginning with Janq'u Nasa Uywiri taki "for the herder hill [named]
White Nose," the deity inhabiting the hill that stands close to Vila Sirka,
sacred to all the Mamanis of the hamlet. Next the cup makes the round
again, this time dedicated to Pirwan Tata Mallku taki, or Churi Asanaqi
Kumprira taki, alternate names for one and the same mountain deity, the
mallku, "male condor," or kumpira, "he of the peak," who goes by two
names, Pirwan Tata, "Father Storehouse," and Churi Asanaqi, "Asanaqi
the son." This is a mountain near both Vila Sirka and Santa Barbara of
higher rank than a mere uywiri; all Mamanis of K'ulta revere him as
their mallku. 25
While the men carry out these libation offerings, which prepare the
way for dedications to many more sacred beings, the women are not idle.
Seated behind their altar cloth, facing the men, they pour their own
ch'allas, led by don Bartolome's wife, dona Basilia. They follow the same
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 349

sequence of gods, but their words are not precisely the same. Ch'allas
must always be performed in gender parallel, and women pour not to the
male misa, uywiri, and mallku with whom men share their drinks, but to
those beings' female counterparts, iskin mamala misa t' alla taki, Janq'u
Nasa Uywiri T'alla taki, and Pirwan Tata Mallku T'alla taki: "for the
corner mother lady," "for the lady of White Nose Herder-hill," and "for
the lady of Father Storehouse Condor-peak."
When don Bartolome, acting in the specialist role of wasu wariri ("he
who passes the cup") gives me the alcohol cup, and I intone the words
"Pirwan Tata Mallku taki" while pouring out a few drops, I enter into a
complex social relationship. The alcohol has been provided by Virgilio,
acting as alma cargo, stand-in for his dead father's ghost, who is the
sponsor of the rite. Mediated by don Bartolome as "drinking path"
specialist, I also enter into a relationship with the alter and its root,
which receive and transmit the liquid offering, via underground chan-
nels, to a thirsty being, the "uywiri of White Nose Hill," who lives within
the hil1. 26 This libation, then, involves four persons (wasu wariri, ghostly
ritual sponsor, the latter's stand-in, and myself as pourer) and a variable
number of gods and their intermediaries. Indirectly, since libations must
be carried out in gender parallel, the performance also links each pourer
with his or her opposite-gender complement, the opposite-gender spon-
sor (in this case, Virgilio's mother), and each of the opposite-gender
consorts of libated gods, beginning with those that have been built into
the house, patio, or corral. 27
Such social relations are indexed by gifts, beginning with the spon-
sor's prestation (through the specialist server) of the cup of alcohol to the
pourer. The pourer then passes the gift on to the gods through the
mediation of the altar and its root. This kind of gift is paq"ara (literally,
a "flower" or "blossom"), which incurs a debt of obligation in the
recipient(s) of the gift, who must reciprocate at some point in the future.
The gift is also often itself a reciprocation of a prior obligation. Just as
the pourer becomes obligated to the sponsor for the gift of alcohol, the
inverse is true; the sponsor is obligated for the pourer's participation in
the ritual, without which the sponsor's obligations to the gods may not
be sufficiently met. By participating in the rite, the sponsor and pourer
become (or reaffirm) their roles as ayni to one another, coparticipants in
a gifting relationship, and both seek to establish (or reestablish) a similar
relationship with the gods. Gods receive liquid alcohol "flowers," but
return the debt in another kind of flower: crops, newborn herd animals,
and power over men. 28
350 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

In this schema an offering to a god is made through an exchange

between persons. Conversely, exchange between persons is understood
as a form of exchange between people and gods. Similarly the hierarchy
of gods is called upon to pass the offering on up the line and deliver the
return in reverse order (rather than in a disruptive direct form such as
lightning or hail or disease). K'ultas explained to me that their aim is to
provide control over generative forces that the ethnographer might
prefer to interpret as biological, meteorological, and social processes.
This kind of fetishized understanding in which relations among persons
are objectified in the cosmos at large, however, is not mere mystification,
because it in fact makes expressible the cultural ordering which gives
specific form to the relations of social production that themselves
produce the participants in the rite.
A ch'alla, however, never travels alone; it is always soon followed on
the altar and down the gullet by a seemingly endless caravan of similar
drinks. 29 But there is more to the sacrificial bargain than mere quantity.
Ch' allas are not a haphazard business, but a precisely performed
sequence of dedications.

CH' ALLAS IN SEQUENCE: AMT' AN T"AKI AS TEXT AND PERFORMANCE

Ch'allas occur individually only as elements in rigidly adhered to

sequences, unwritten "scripts" which mandate the order and recipients
of a long series of libations. Each kind of ritual occasion demands a
specific ch'alla sequence. K'ultas call such sequences uman t"akis (drink-
ing paths), or amt'aii t"akis (amt'ana, "to remember," + t"aki, "path!
road," = "path of memory").
It would be impossible to catalogue here all the kinds of ch'alla
sequences practiced in K'ulta, much less the actual contents of such
sequences. A description of just the sequences forming part of a single
fiesta performance would severely tax the reader's patience. Suffice it to
note that there are specified sequences for each stage of a sacrifice, as
well as for other subparts of fiesta performance. There are sequences
connected with the calendric rites associated with agricultural and
herding tasks, with the duties of civil authorities, with warfare, with
healing and other forms of shamanism, with each of the steps of each of
the marriage rites, and with a whole set of funerary rights, just to name
a few. Such sequences are remembered as idealized or abstract conven-
tional forms (lists of generic deity types like misa, uywiri, and mallku
that correspond to the purposes of a particular rite; in practice, the
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 351

generic deity types are always replaced in performance with particular

named "tokens" of the type (such as Janq'u Nasa, Pirwan Tata, etc.).
Which specific deities will be named hinges on the social identity of the
sponsor and his wife and the place of performance.
Certain ch' alia "paths," like the other ritual action sequences with
which they are associated, form "modular" segments that are inserted
into a particular rite when called for. For example: all rites of passage,
including the fiesta, are built from the stages of llama sacrifice, and each
stage of the sacrifice has a corresponding ch'alla path to accompany it.
Thus, whether in a marriage or a saint's feast, the segments dedicating
the animals to be killed (uywa ispira), slaughtering the animals (qarwa
k"ari), and dedicating the meat of the feast (ch'iwu) will be carried out.
Within each sequence, too, there are lower levels of segmentation. All
begin with ch'allas to the altar, root, uywiri, and mallku of the sponsor
and place of performance; each of the above also includes dedications to
gods of the herd animals. Uywa ispira includes a long sequence dedicated
to the ancestral dead, as the memory paths of funerary sacrifices do. As
abstract sequences of kinds of gods, animals, foodstuffs, and ancestors
(and of the gods and sacred places associated with each), the modular
segments are well-known throughout K'ulta, but the "personal names"
of such gods, places, and dead ancestors vary. The performances of two
brothers would be very similar, but each one would begin with a
different house or corral altar, and the social ties that come through their
wives would also differ.

UYWA ISPIRA T"AKI: THE "HERD VESPERS PATH"

Seated next to Virgilio Mamani in his father's house, I had begun the first
few ch'allas of uywa ispira t"aki. Always performed when preparing for
a llama sacrifice,30 it is a complex and lengthy poetic form. Figure 7.4
shows the sequence of ch' alias that I reconstructed from notes, partial
tape recordings, and repeated attendance at Virgilio Mamani's uywa
ispira rites, which he had to perform every time he prepared to sacrifice
llamas in fulfillment of a festival obligation. Rather than recounting the
personal names of gods and ancestors, which are often the actual words
spoken, I present for purposes of analysis the names of the categories of
gods and genealogically reckoned kinship to which K'ultas have recourse
when they do not know the personal name or place-name in question.
Note well, however, that I list here only those libation dedications
performed at the men's altar. Seated on raised benches or stone seats,
 Libation dedications Free translation

1 iskin mamala 'comer molher": Ihe house itself

2 misa 'allarltable": allar of Ihe house
A 3 I uywiri "one who nurtures": household caretaker hill
'4 kumprira [or mallkuj mountain peak/condor: palrilinedeily

5 . jira t'all mispa 'manure plain" altar: altar of the llama corral
6 I yanan jira I'all mispa conceptual "twin" of llama corral altar
7 ch"itan iira t'all misoa altar of sheep corral
8 yanan ch"itan jira I'all mispa "twin" of sheep corral altar
B
9 I jira t'all misa uywirpa caretaker hill of llama corral altar
10 I vanan iira t'all misa uvwirpa "twin" of caretaker hill of llama corral altar
'11 I jira t'all misa kumprirpa peak of llama corral altar

12 warmin iira I'all misoa allar of wife's corraP

C 13 warmin iira t'all uywirpa caretaker hill of w~e's corral
'14 warmin jira t'all kumorirpa mountain peak of wne's corral

15 mamaliian jira fall mispa altar of mother's corral2

II D 16 mamaliian iira t'all uywirpa caretaker of mother's corral
'17 mamaliian jira I'all kumorirpa I peak of mother's corral

18 taykch'in jira I'all mispa altar of wife's mother's corral3

E 19 taykch'in jira t'all uywirpa caretaker hill of wife's mother's corral
'20 tavkch'in iira t'all kumorirpa mountain peak of w~e's mother's corral

21 I jach'a malan jira t'all mispa altar of grandmother's corral4

F
22 I iach'a malan iira t'all uvwirpa caretaker hill of Qrandmother's corral
'23 I jach'a malan jira fall kumprirpa mountain peak of grandmother's corral

24
G 25
'26

Figure 7.4. Men's ch'allas of uywa ispira and qarwa k"ari. This reconstruction of a
performance sequence is based on repeated participation, tape recordings, and inter-
views. In actual performance, many of the deity types (uywiri, kumprira/mallku) are
replaced by secret "personal names" of the hill and mountain deities invoked. In qarwa
k"ari, the initial sequence begins with "jira t' all misa," the alter within the llama corral.
In qarwa k"ari, section K, deities of the vegetable foodstuffs are replaced by the

352
 Libation dedications Free translation
'll lIantiru awki Sp. "deiantero"/Ay. "awki": father herd leader
28 Iyanan llantiru awki "twin" of father herd leader
29 t'arnaD llantiru awki father herd leader's herd
:J) wavnaoat llantiru awki father herd \eader's VOUnQ male offsorinQ
31 DaQ"arap llantiru awki father herd \eader's "flower": newbom offsoring
H
32 llantir awki misoa father herd leader's altar
33 llantirawatiruvwirmisoa attar of father herd \eader's shepherd uvwiri
-34 llantir awatir kumorir mispa attar of father herd leader's shepherd peak
-35 lIantir samirpa herd leader's "breath giver" (stone icon)
-$ lIantir muntu herd leader's "mountain" (underworld)
III

'.fT ram
38 ram's newborn off ri
39
40
-41
-42

43 father bull
44 "twin" of the father bull
45
J
46
47
-48
-49

~ ~~~--------------~~~~~~~~~==~~
~ ~~~~------------~~~~==~~--------~
IV K ~ ~~==~~~ ________-+~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ ~~~~~----------~~~~~~~~~~==~
-54 alrnasina

Figure 7.4. (Continued)

cooked-food sequence known as ch'iwu t"aki, interrupted by the delivery of cooked
llantiru "heart" and the frolicking of the jaiiachus, the male sponsor's sons-in-law (or his
sisters' husbands) dressed in lIantiru pelts.
The numbers preceded by * designate dedications that are also libated in puro from
the sponsors' bottles. During qarwa k"ari, k'usa (chicha) libations are carried out
between lettered segments. Every item in practice terminates with the suffix taki,

353
354 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

libation dedications
55
V L 55 'ataJa
'51
*58

VII M I I51 surti

ED yanan sUlti
ISp. 'suerte"; luck
'twin" of luck

Figure 7.4. (Continued)

meaning "for," which has been omitted here. Some items here include the infixed pa, as
in "mispa taki," "for his (or her) misa," indicating nonpresent entities pertaining to
named others.
Regarding the translations followed by superscripts: l"Wife's corral": that of her
patriline; her father's. 2"Mother's corral": that of her patriline; mother's father's corral.
3"Wife's mother's corral": that of the wife's mother's patriline; wife's mother's father's
corral. 4"Grandmother's corral": usually that of ego's paternal grandmother, perhaps
maternal. Reference is to her patriline; father's mother's father's, or mother's mother's
father's corral. 5"Wife's grandmother's corral": usually that of the wife's father's
mother's father, sometimes the wife's mother's mother's father corral. Altogether, these
corral libations refer to corrals of the closest six (sometimes eight) patrilines of
husband's and wife's ascending kindred, which will be invoked to proscribe patrilines
the couple's children may not marry.

adult men arrange themselves around a tablelike altar in an order of

seniority and status. Women, on the other hand, sit down a few yards
away around a cloth laid upon the ground (or house floor). As in all
libation paths, uywa ispira ch' allas are carried out in gender complemen-
tarity: men pour ch' allas to male beings while women carry out a
parallel performance, pouring to female ones. Working as a team, the
man and woman who act as libation specialists ensure that the two
groups remain synchronized, pouring to gendered pairs of gods. Gender
complementarity in performance, that is, mirrors the fertile and genera-
tive complementarity of action they seek from the gendered landscape
and past. Now back to the men's altar, where I dribbled away many
hours in libations.
Since every participant should pour (or blow) a libation for each of
the gods listed, while sharing a single small cup, the herd animal vespers
path takes several hours to complete. At irregular intervals, there are
short breaks to refill the pail of alcohol or the sponsor's bottle. Between
major segments (indicated in the figure by uppercase alphabetics and
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 355

roman numerals), the master of ceremonies pauses, setting down the cup
in order to pass to each man present some coca leaves from a clothful
kept on the altar. These are also the moments that the sponsor of the
ceremony chooses to offer a drink from his bottle of puro. Dedicated
always to the highest-ranking mountain gods, this 97 percent pure cane
alcohol (from which the dilute awarinti is made) is unadulterated
firewater, potent stuff for powerful gods. Not present in the uywa ispira
context, but critically important during other memory path libation
sequences, are libations of home-brewed corn beer (Sp. "chicha," called
k'usa in Aymara), offered during these s ~ breaks between awarinti
cup "stanzas," but to saints and gods of the sky rather than to earth
deities and ancestors. On receiving proffered coca or a bottle of alcohol,
each guest utters not only a dedication but also thanks, yuspagarpan
("God will repay you").
The memory path begins, not with the most distant and unfamiliar
beings, but with those very close at hand. The first libation is always for
the place of performance itself, here, the house altar: kuntur mamani
tapa misa or iskin rna mala misa. The next one is for the personal
guardian hill (uywiri) of the sponsors (and their house) and the mallku
or kumprira to which that uywiri is subordinate. 31 Each compound or
group of households, corresponding to a sibling group around their
father's homestead, has its own uywiri,32 whereas there is only one
kumprira for the entire hamlet. This first set of ch'allas (segment A,
group I) moves outwards from low and nearby to high and faraway
beings. Like a series of concentric circles, these ch'allas provide a mental
map of the relative inclusiveness of embedded social groups, ranging
from the household itself to the compound and patriline hamlet. From
the sponsor's alcohol bottle, further and more inclusive rings of social
and territorial inclusion are marked out by naming the great mallku
peaks of the Ayllu Manxa-Kawalli as a whole, the sum of ayllus that is
K'ulta, and the distant peak of Tata Asanaqi, to which the major
mountain gods of K'ulta and many other towns and cantons are
subordinate. At the women's altar, meanwhile, a very similar series of
events unfolds, naming the female counterparts or companions of these
mountain deities. The sponsor's wife does not innovate here by naming
the uywiris and mallkus of her own patriline, which are not "connected"
to the altars of her husband's house, compound, or patriline; instead she
names the t' alias, the plains that are the wives of her husband's sacred
mountains and also the places where her animals now graze and crops
ripen. 33
356 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

Back to the awarinti cup, the master of ceremonies, wasu wariri, once
again begins his rounds, carrying to each man a cup to be dedicated to
one of a long series of deities specific to corrals and herd animals
(segments B-G, group II; and H-], group III).
Segment B refers to the corrals attached to the sponsors' household,
including the altar of their male llama corral (5), the altar of the "mate"
of the male corral (that is, the female llama corral) (6), the male sheep
corral altar (7) and its mate (8), and the uywiris and kumprira (9-11)
which correspond to them. The last are sometimes, but not always, the
same as the humans' uywiri and kumprira; but because animals are
pastured in many areas, they have need of more caretakers, not always
well known by the animals' herders. The term for corral, "uyu," is not
employed in these ch'allas. Instead, as in many ch'allas, K'ultas prefer a
respectful ritual name: jira t'alla, meaning "dung-Iady/plain.,,34 Women
pour their ch'allas not to altars, but to the t'allas themselves. 35
The progression of segments B-G (within group II) moves from the
corrals of the sponsors of the rite outwards (and backwards in time) to
genealogically receding branches of herd ancestral deities. As such the
intersegment order recapitulates the internal ordering of each segment,
but in inverse form: The first item within each segment is a single
particular, subordinated to an encompassing form (uywiri) which, in
segment A, relates the household to other patri-stem households, and the
uywiri is subordinated to a kumprira, which encompasses all hamlet!
patriline uywiris. Within segment B, differentiated corral altars and
uywiris (note the plurals) of already hierarchically evaluated types of
animals (first camelids, as an unmarked form, and then corrals marked
"sheep") are encompassed by a single kumprira. In the hierarchy of
corrals, then, the corrals of reference (of the sponsors' herd) "encom-
pass" more numerous ascending-generation herds and sets of corre-
sponding territorially dispersed deities belonging to the landscapes of
other patrilines, other ayllus, and sometimes (since people occasionally
buy animals at the fair in Huari) other regions of Bolivia, beyond the
reach of the mountain Tata Asanaqi.
Segments H-] (within group III) are dedications to the animals
themselves, rather than to their corrals, and at the same time dedications
to the animals' own deities (that is, the deities of the pastures on which
they graze, which often lie in collective, interpatriline and interayllu
lands). The herd animal segments each begin with libations to the
animals, starting with the most esteemed mature animal and progressing
downwards in age hierarchy. This is most pronounced in segment H: The
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 357

came lid sequence is always more developed than those for other, less
favored animals. Llantirus (and /umpris, "bulls") appear with yanani
(partner) repetitions. Llantirus are the lead male llamas of the herd,
those that "go before," as the Spanish origin of the term "delantero"
suggests, and like yoked bulls, they should always travel in pairs. Item
29, tama llantiru awki taki, refers to the herd (tama) which the llantirus
define through their totalizing practice of "leading.,,36
The hierarchic movement of items 2 7 - 31 progresses, then, from the
dominant adult males, to the herd they lead, to the subordinate young
who will eventually replace them. The sequence also points towards one
desired result of the sacrifice it anticipates, which is the increase of the
herd, through the reciprocation of the "flowers" given to the gods (drink
and sacrifices) in the form of newborn animal "flowers."
Items 32-36 of the llantiru sequence form a subset which is analo-
gous to the last four items in both the ram and bull sequences (segments
I and J) and yet differs in having an extra term. The progression from
misa to uywiri to kumprira repeats the form of each previous segment in
the performance, but we see the deity form samiri for the first time.
Samiris take two forms, collapsed here into a single entity. The term is
derived from sama, "breath" (samaiia = "to breathe"; samaraiia = "to
rest"), which when made agentive with the -iri suffix becomes "one who
[gives] breath." The first type of samiri is large boulders vaguely
animallike in shape, high in the mountains, which are kinds of ideal
types of ancestor forms. 3? Second, a samiri is the locally more common
equivalent of an illa, the miniature stone figurine in animal form which
is kept buried in the corral with llama ear pieces from yearly marking
rites of carnaval time. Both samiri forms are repositories of the life-
principle of animals, which is carefully nurtured with the aid of the
animals' ultimate owners, the uywiris and kumprira.
Item 36 stands out as unique among uywa ispira libations. Muntu or
llantiru muntu is the most mysterious of all the deity forms, because no
one is quite sure where or what it is. While all conceive of it as a mountain,
which as the ultimate source and repository of great herds encompasses
the llamas' kumpriras, it does not lie within K'ulta territory.38
Each category of animal herd (and especially the camelid, as repre-
sented by the llantiru)39 is thus treated as analogous to human society, as
if it has its own set of deities, like the human ones libated in segment A.
In some cases, sponsors actually name specific place deities (associated
with particular pastures) here, sometimes enumerating several for each
category, sometimes giving the dedication in the plural. 40
358 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

What is important here is that in the very enumeration of animal

types as internally hierarchic (in terms of age) they are related as a herd
through a hierarchy of encompassment, making them like humans and
gods. One of the goals of the rite is precisely to establish an equation
between humans and herd animals, who are prepared for sacrifice
through uywa ispira.
Next in the ch'alla sequence come the lumpris, "bulls," which have no
corrals. 41 Finally, segments K-M refer to neither human nor animal
place deities. The beings of segment K control the production of
nonanimal foodstuffs, beginning with the general form awiyaru, from
the archaic Spanish verb "aviar" ("to provision"). These are uywiri-like
deities at the heads of valleys producing the bulk of vegetable food that
K'ultas eat. Virgilio here names the deities corresponding to the valleys
to which he travels during the dry season. Items 52 and 53 name the
awiyarus controlling corn (referred to metonymic ally as paqulakutan,
"golden hair") and potatoes (tuna ('irisa from Santa Teresa, being both
patroness and ritual name for potatoes). Item 54, almasina (Sp. almacen,
"storehouse"), recalls the store where it was purchased.
Once sponsors have remembered the animals and foodstuffs, they
turn to long-dead ancestors. In the performance of segment L, Mamanis
called to the deceased by personal names (when they remembered them)
rather than specifying what kind of relative they were. In other circum-
stances, for memory paths performed in other contexts such as marriages
and death rituals, they may be drawn out to a much greater genealogical
depth, back to the laq' a jach' a, "great-dust," generation, which is to say
back to the apex and limit of memory and genealogical significance. In
the context of a festival sacrifice like this one, it is forbidden to ch' alla
those who have been dead for less than three years, for whom funerary
rites are still ongoing. Recent dead are addressed only on Mondays (the
day of the dead), during which no part of nonfunerary sacrificial rites
may take place. In any case, the dead are remembered, like the corrals, in
progressive backwards steps from most recent to most distant, the
mayruwiri.42
The final segment of the sequence, segment M, is more of a request
than a dedication, and terminates all ch'alla sequences: "for luck" and
"for the yanani of luck" (surti, from the Sp. suerte)43 addressing the
imponderable factor (the genius vocati) which makes performance of
rites such as this productive for some but not for others. To paraphrase
one Mamani, "For some people the fiesta is not their luck, and no matter
what they do their children die and their herds do not increase." These
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 359

have to seek their luck in other places, through other rituals engaging
other pasts. 44
By the end of the sequence, all present (with the partial exception of
don Bartolome and dona Basilia) were quite drunk. But all had nonethe-
less engaged in a mental journey, following an itinerary progressing ever
further from the immediate concerns of the household, branching out
into ever more distant realms. The ch'alla path organizes space concen-
trically, focusing always on the specific altar of performance and the
social unit indexed by it. Recapitulating the internal hierarchy of
inclusion of each segment, the progression of segments (and of major
chunks of segments) also forms a concentrically focused hierarchy of
inclusion (see Fig. 7.3).
As illustrated in Fig. 7.4, the ch'alla sequence moves from deities
specific to Virgilio Mamani (rather, to his father), to those shared with
all Mamanis (segment A), to Virgilio's corrals (segments B-G), to the
realm of herd animals and their faraway pastures and hill protectors
(segments H-J), the more distant sources of vegetable food (segment K).
Outside K'ulta and its ecozone, ch'allas then continue to the ancestral
"other world" (segment L), and finally to "luck" (segment M), that
which is furthest outside Virgilio's control and understanding.
As a "path of memory," this sequence of libation dedications describes
a series of places across the territory, recalling the actual channels of
social transmission which, like a journey, have both spatial and temporal
coordinates. As a single itinerary, a path with a beginning and an end, it
also integrates spatial and temporal hierarchies into a single order,
moving simultaneously across territory and back in time.
The most encompassing form of metaphoric equation in this ch'alla
poetics is achieved through its recursive stanza like structure, which like
poetic devices, make it possible to equate seemingly unlike entities and to
imbue one kind of hierarchic logic with the sense of another kind. The
sequence "misa, uywiri, kumprira" describes a vertical hierarchy of
inclusion, one that conforms as well to the principle of patrilineal
descent through which K'ulta's patronymic groups define themselves.
Thus a single apical "ancestor" mountain controls and encompasses all
its "lower" descendants. At the same time, however, the relationship
among animals' corral deities moves in hopscotch fashion across K'ulta
landscape, expressing the matrilineal links which multiply the number
and horizontal reach of salient kumpriras. Finally, in the latter segments
of the sequence, distance is not correlated with genealogical depth or
encompassing height, but with categorical difference. The realms of the
360 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

awiyarus, city merchants, ancestral souls, and even of luck are all
extrasocial in a more profound manner than the animals and the
genealogically and vertically ordered gods are. Each is also lower, more
dangerous, less subject to control.
To grasp fully the kinds of metaphors brought about by equating
distinct forms of hierarchy, we must turn to the correspondingly distinct
cosmic levels that are juxtaposed in the performance of amt'an t"aki.
During this uywa ispira t"aki sequence, all libations are poured in
water-diluted cane alcohol by don Bartolome and dona Basilia, acting as
awarint wasu wariris, "aguardiente cup servers." All the deities libated
belong to the underworld realm of manxa-pacha. But this particular
memory path is only part of the larger sequence that accompanies the
llama sacrifice and frames the fiesta performance.
While libations were in progress, Virgilio and his mother set to work
preparing an incense offering that would link the ch'allas of uywa ispira
to other parts of the sacrifice.

The Q'uwa
The q'uwa is a burnt incense offering made at several junctures during
fiesta performance, as on many other occasions during the year. The
heads of all herding households prepare and burn q'uwas as part of
major calendric rites, and also at full and/or new moons. A special q'uwa
is offered by sponsors at the new moon immediately preceding the fiesta
proper and at the full moon immediately following it. During the actual
fiesta (the named rites commencing with uywa ispira and ending with
ch'iwuru [from ch'iwu uru, "meat/dark cloud day"]), two q'uwas are
burned by the sponsor:45 The first of these is prepared in the sponsors'
home, by the male sponsor's tullqa assistants, during the performance of
uywa ispira ch'allas, and burned by the sponsoring couple at dawn of
qarwa k"ari uru ("llama cutting day"); the second, prepared in the
sponsors' town house during ispiras (the night before the feast), is
burned at the dawn of p"isturu, the saint's day itself. The preparation is
the same in each case, as is the name of the place in which the q'uwa is
burned, called the q'uwana.
The centerpiece of the q'uwa offering is a pair of miniature llamas
(called, as one might expect, llantirus, the highly prized lead males of the
herd), which the sponsors' assistants sculpt from a llama's dried pectoral
fat while the sponsors and ch'alla-eligible adults finish their uywa ispira
libations. Such fat, called untu, is burned during many other ritual events
as well, and is, along with the blood of the paxcha (the "spurting of
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 361

blood" in the sacrifice), the part of the llama given directly, through
destruction (as opposed to human consumption), to the gods of the
sky.46
When finished, the figurines are "made to flower" (paq"arayana), as
the sacrificial llamas will be during the coming day. The sponsor's
assistants decorate the figurines' ears and back with the flower tips of an
aromatic herb which is itself called q'uwa. Around these figures are
placed twelve coca leaves, twelve coca seeds, a sprinkling of sugar,
cinnamon, and other aromatic spices from the valleys. When incense is
added (both chunks of copal and pressed cakes in the form of charms,
purchased in the city), the offering array is complete.
The offering is made at the break of dawn, in a spot always located on
a hillside to the east of the settlement; these spots differ from household
to household and are kept secret. The q'uwafia is often the same place as
the asintu is buried, which is a place where herd fertility offerings are
made during the "open earth" rituals of early August and February.
Aside from being located to the east of the hamlet or town, the q'uwafia
should also receive the rays of the rising sun, to which it is dedicated.
Just before sunrise, the male sponsor is roused from his sleep by his
assistants. He carries his prepared q'uwa bowl, with its special array of
aromatic and inflammable ingredients, and, after a few ch'allas, he
dumps the contents into a pile of burning coals, when the first rays of
morning sun appear on the eastern horizon.
The burning of the q'uwa prefigures the sacrifice (also a pair or pairs
of llantirus) to come, but it does more than that. Not only are the q'uwa
llantirus icons (diagrammatic representations) of the "real" llantirus, as
are the yanani in the chicha-drinking vessel and the samiri llantiru buried
in the corral; q'uwa llantirus are, in addition, metonymic icons, made
from a part of a llantiru that is its generative substance. Making the
q'uwa llantirus entirely from this substance and other inflammable and
aromatic substances also makes the sacrifice (here, if not in the killing of
flesh-and-blood animals) a holocaust offering. 47 The significance of the
untu as male generative substance also points to the meaning of the
sacrifice as a whole, as an offering of the "patrilineal" force by which the
fertile llantiru creates and circumscribes a herd. This is the very kind of
generative encompassment, of course, of which the sun (Tata Awatir
Awksa, as he is called while the fragrance of the untu and incense rises)
is the origin and prototype.
On the day following uywa ispira, Virgilio and his mother would
sacrifice four llamas, the select llantirus, in the male-llama corral just
362 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

outside the sponsors' hamlet house. This event, known as qarwa k"ari,
"llama cutting," is carried out during a much longer ch'alla sequence,
one that takes several hours to complete. The memory path of qarwa
k"ari repeats the basic structure of the uywa ispira t"aki but elaborates it
further. First of all, ch'allas are interrupted not only by ch'allas from the
sponsors' puro bottles, but also by other ch'allas poured in corn beer,
and are directed to Christian-inflected deities (Christ, the Virgin, and the
saints).
Qarwa k"ari libations in cane alcohol are always accompanied by
libations in chicha, the home-brewed corn beer called K'usa in Aymara.
Prepared in advance, the chicha arrives at the corral where qarwa k"ari
libations are to be performed in large jars. Another pair of serving
specialists, the k'usa wasu wariris, make ready to serve the chicha at
breaks in the alcohol ch'allas between major segments. Everyone present
then receives two or three large servings of this maize beer in a special
vessel. In contrast with the libations performed in alcohol, directed
towards underworld beings, chicha libations are offered to the gods of
alax-pacha, in other words to the Lunar-Virgin, the Solar-Christ, and the
saint in whose honor the sacrifice is performed. Through the orches-
trated concatenation of libations directed by these two specialists, the
beings and attributes of alax-pacha and manxa-pacha are given distinct
diagrammatic sensibility and differently mapped onto the local terrain.
As we shall see, the interrelationship of alcohol and chicha libations
serves to address the colonial asymmetry of power, within which the
people of K'ulta have carved out a space for themselves.

CORN BEER AND CANE LIQUOR IN A CONCATENATED COSMOS

Most amt'an t"aki performed in saints' feasts and rites of passage include
libations in chicha as well as in cane alcohol, and kinds of libation
liquids are in complementary distribution with kinds of sacred beings.
Nowadays it is only the sky gods who receive the endogenous form of
libation liquid, fermented k'usa, "chicha." This locally manufactured
drink, extremely time-consuming to make, is thus reserved for the more
"Christian" of gods (Photograph 7.2). In the past, before the colonial
availability of distilled liquor, the byproducts of chich a manufacture
were also used for libations; chich a was at one time subdivided into its
sedimentation strata for different classes of deities. 48
While it may be ironic that the drink of pre-Columbian Andean gods
was assigned to the sky deities of Christianity, it is doubly ironic that a
Photograph 7.2. Brewing chicha. A woman stirs a pot of chicha during fermentation.
Yucras of Vintu Hamlet engaged in the enormously labor-intensive process of chicha
brewing in preparation for festivities connected with Eleuterio Yucra's Guadalupe tayksa
t"aki fiesta career, which he inherited from his brother. Vintu Hamlet, February 1980.
(Photograph by author)

363
364 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

type of distilled spmts-a frequently proscribed drink for indians-

became the drink of choice for the prohibited, clearly "non-Christian"
gods. Of course, since both kinds of spirits (hard liquor and mountain
gods) were prohibited, they came to occupy the same clandestine space.
Too, the very strength of distilled spirits, which colonial administrators
regarded as dangerous in "indian" hands, may have made it particularly
appealing for libations to the gods who had been pushed underground.
The sixteenth-century practice of Miguel AcarapilChiri, however, sug-
gests another interpretation. The sacramental beverage par excellence,
chicha, became the indians' communion wine used in their own versions
of the mass. 49
In some phases of sacrifice and fiesta performance, such as qarwa
k"ari, most of the ch'allas of uywa ispira are repeated with the inclusion
of alax-pacha gods, libated in pure alcohol (puro) from the sponsors'
private bottles, as well as in chicha. Indeed, puro and chich a are offered
to a whole array of church-associated sacred places, such as the church
tower (called turri mallku) and its gender complement, the plaza (piasa
t' alia), the saints' "seats" and altars in town, as well as the altars on top
of the hamlet uywiri and the "nino," a cross-topped pillar in front of the
hamlet chapel. All of these, alongside the sun, the moon, and the saints,
are given puro as well as chicha. 50
Chicha/k'usa, is served by the k'usa wasu wariri from a large "cup,"
for the libation of sky deities. These deities both reside in and constitute
alax-pacha, the upper or outer space-time which dominates and encom-
passes manxa-pacha. They are, of course, also the deities of conquest,
simultaneously of culture over nature, human beings over animals, the
present over the past, and of Spaniards over indians. The sun is the most
distant and foreign agency, a latecomer who became the first cause of a
new order wrought in his struggle with the old, but, like the moon, is
more distant and less accessible to humans, who must make offerings
insubstantial (smoke, breath, etc.) for them to reach alax-pacha. In this
respect the celestial gods are quite unlike those of manxa-pacha, which
are everywhere perceptible in the landscape: Layra timpu, the time when
Christ and Chullpas, mountains and animals, freely moved about the
earth, now lies frozen in the landscape in the residues of these beings'
activities, directly visible to the eye (layra). Substances offered and
poured out to the gods of the landscape flow, like rivers, away from the
here and now and into the past. Only the saints, who are refractions of
the Solar-Christ and Lunar-Virgin, are embodied on this earth, and it is
through them that offerings to alax-pacha pass. Saints' images are also
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 365

the channels through which alax-pacha powers descend to the realm of

men. As such, they are like embassies of alax-pacha, through which the
vertically assigned attributes of gods can be reworked as horizontal
relations among social groups. Just as the dead mediate to the living the
powers of the manxa-pacha Chullpa realm, the saints stand between
living humans and the gods of above. Both, of course, are also conduits
through which people gain access to the powers of the past; they are
emissaries of history.
In the ch'alla sequences of qarwa k"ari and ch'iwu (the commensal
banquet at which the llamas' meat is eaten), all three kinds of libation
are concatenated into a single order of performance. Just how complex
any particular performance will be hinges on whether or not it includes
another patriline, ayllu, or moiety among its collective participants.
The uywa ispira sequence by itself lacks chich a because it is
performed in a house and because it is a "private," intrapatriline (not
to say intrahousehold) affair. Interpatriline rites (and phases of rites)
take place at the outdoor altars of the sponsors' house patio (and the
jach'a misa of the apical hamlet founder). Libations in chicha, puro,
and diluted alcohol are concatenated in these contexts because they
involve a relation between structural opposites (groups evaluated as
complementary inverses, like the levels of the cosmos), in which the
discourse between them is conceived in terms of that between cosmic
levels. In rites like marriage ceremonies and saints' festivals, where the
relationship between patrilines is precisely the issue at hand, one group
always plays the role of host, and the other, that of visitor. In an
oppositional confrontation that sometimes includes ritual violence, the
meeting of patrilines is something like a sporting event: Hosts play
visitors, who are treated with a certain circumspection as potential
enemies or predators, but in the expectation that the visit will be
reversed in the future. In the final marriage rites, for example, wife
givers visit the patriline hamlet of wife takers, sealing a pact which is
fundamentally asymmetrical and which creates a social debt to be
repaid in kind when the shoe is on the other foot. The entire group of
a wife's patriline brothers becomes for the husband's hosting patriline a
pack of marauding foxes, intent on stealing away a replacement for
their lost sister. One group's act of alax-pacha-style "herding" is the
other group's act of manxa-pacha predation. So relations between
patrilines, whether in sealing a bond of marriage or in exchanging a
saint's image, themselves reflect the fundamental oppositions of
cosmogenic process.
366 PART THREE . SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

Figure 7.5. Turu wasu (chicha drinking vessel). This bowl, eleven inches in diameter with
yoked bulls at the center, is carved of wood. When filled with chicha, the bulls stand in a
"lake," amidst the abundance they help to bring people. (Author's sketch)

A fitting symbol of this discourse is to be found in the wooden bowls

used for chicha libations (Fig. 7.5). These vessels are called yanan tuTU
wasu (or k'iru; "quero," as Spaniards wrote the term). At the bottom of
the turu wasu is a matched pair (yanani) of carved wooden bulls, yoked
together. A less common but even more esteemed alternate form, the
yanan /lantir wasu, contains a pair of llamas. Whether bulls or llamas,
the figures bear a marked resemblance to two other miniature forms
(both llantirus): the untu (chest fat) figures standing in their q'uwa
(incense) bowl, which are burned and sent to alax-pacha at dawn in the
q'uwa rite as an advance on the blood sacrifice to come; and the illa (also
called samiri), the stone figures of llamas and alpacas which are buried
(with llama ear pieces) during carnaval-time llama-marking rituals in the
center of the male-llama corral. When it is filled with chicha, the turu
wasu or llantir wasu becomes a lake (q'uta) in which the yanani stands
immersed. The camel ids are held to have originated in miniature
Telling and Drinking the Paths of Memory 367

"illa/samiri" form in highland springs (which are layra, "eyes,") and, as

passageways to the underworld river (doorways to layra timpu), and
when the chicha is drunk from the bowl, the pair of animals within
appears to emerge from such a spring. Such miniature animal pairs, then,
serve as iconic signs of the complementary opposition of like but
opposed social units. In qarwa k"ari ch'allas this becomes explicit, when
llantirus (that is, the paired sacrificial victims) are addressed as tinkur
awkis, "fathers [who go] to tinku.,,51
Signifying fundamentally "a meeting of opposites," tinku is applied to
a range of phenomena, such as the meeting (that is, forking) of rivers or
of branches on a stem (see Urton 1984; Platt 1987b). The most salient
use of the term here is perhaps its application to a form of ritual battle
which constitutes a central element of many rites. While actual ritual
fighting occurs only in the ritual center town in moiety-level fiestas, it is
also implicated in all interpatriline rites (including marriage ceremonies)
where the musician-dance groups exchanged by patrilines appear as
"platoons" of warriors prepared for fighting and for the "sacramental"
spilling of human blood.
Both the implied tinku of interpatriline rites and that to which the
paired llantiru victims are sent represent, simultaneously, the meeting of
opposed social units and the conjunction, in sacrifice, of otherwise
opposed cosmic zones. But while the conjunction may appear at first
sight to be between balanced, complementary opposites, it always has
the character of the conquest and subsummation of one unit by the
other, just as the presence of "Christian" deities in the sky, enclosing
"indigenous" gods of the below, brings these opposed realms into an
asymmetrical but complementary relationship.
To substantiate such claims, I must turn to a closer view of festival
sacrifices and to the human careers, the p"ista t"akis, that form through
cult to the saints.
 Chapter Eight

Living on Tatala's Path

Uses of the Past in Sacrifice
and Antisacrifice, Saints'
Festivals, and Sorceries

THE GREAT FIESTA PATHS

In the previous chapter we saw that the forms of houses and hamlets and
constructed architectural spaces are built from the stuff of meaningful
social activity. As gendered persons and social groups like patrilines
construe themselves in alignment with Tatala's path through the heavens
and a transformative relationship to Chullpa forces, the spaces of daily
life and the social processes played out in them become microcosms of
cosmic processes. As meaningful action within the hamlet is made to
conform to the values which Tatala's action gives to social space, the
goal of human society and of each social actor is to replicate the actions
of the sun, whose taming of the disordered and wild nature of the
previous age made cultural life possible. Thus domesticated food and
drink and the fruits of the womb are dedicated to the sun and his realm,
always facing the direction from whence the initial order came, while
feces, death, decay, and disease are relegated to the west, towards the
end of Tatala's path, the future past where generative but fetid manxa-
pacha forces are predominant. Social time and social space are played
out in a single arena, in tune with a single primordial sequence which is
also the lay of the land.
It is also true, however, that these carefully maintained microcosms in
social space-time are isolated in the midst of the wilderness: Not only the

368
Living on Tatala's Path 369

west but the whole periphery (the pampa or puruma) is still the domain
of natural forces and presocial beings (including laritas, wife givers, and
potential wives who come from other patrilines and hamlets beyond the
pampa) which must continually be constrained and transformed by
human activity to reproduce human society. The wild space outside the
hamlet is most "disordered" in the uncultivated, unfenced empty spaces
(which are also vaguely defined borders) between patriline lands. Yet
these spaces are crossed by ritual paths on which people walk (and
which they re-create through ch'alla performances) in the repeated
intergroup visits of marriage rites and festival pilgrimage.
Marriage is but the first step along what is also a kind of "path" along
which individuals become most like the shepherd of men who resides in
the sky: authorities over the ayllu and the polity as a whole. This is the
jach'a p"ista t"aki, the "great fiesta path," spanning the life career of a
couple (and household), from the dawning of the power to unify a herd
to the twilight of its dispersion (which is frequently at death, when the
persons are sent packing to the west and the underworld with the setting
sun, and both herds and lands are dispersed to children).
Paths have beginnings and ends, which are at the same time earlier
and later points in a sequence, and likewise fiesta sponsorship or civil
office, as a step on a career path, is also a moment in an alternation: The
incoming sponsor or authority takes over for an outgoing one, who is a
step ahead on his own career path. The coming year's sponsor, called a
machaqa ("novice"), just starting on his path (that is, of his year of
performance, which is the saint-centered analogue of the sun's "year-
path"), is always later than and subordinate to this year's, and the
groups in whose stead the rite is sponsored are similarly ranked. As the
alphas and omegas of fiesta sponsorship, the new and old sponsors of a
fiesta stand in a relation very like that of east and west as directions on
Tatala's path, and consequently as alax to manxa, "above to below,"
"outside to inside."
Ayllus and moieties emerged as defined entities of K'ulta (as opposed
to being mere parts of Asanaqi ayllus and moieties) out of the rotative-
exchange practices through which town council authorities and fiesta
sponsors came to be constituted. But the mechanism by which such
social units have been constituted is also a kind of historical engine,
applicable at more than one level of polity and thus capable of redefining
parts as wholes wherever it is applied.
In the present moment of local political and ritual life, four of K'ulta's
five ayllus are in various stages of secession from the rest in search of
370 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

cantonization and autonomy. Each of Ayllus Qullana, Yanaqi, and Ilawi

has independently initiated its own system of rotative fiesta sponsorship
(and its own internal moiety division) through which the authorities
defining them as polities are now produced. Alax-Kawalli, which initi-
ated a cantonization petition (promoted by Pablo Choquecallata) in
1987, for the present still participates in a reduced system of festival
alternation with Manxa-Kawalli. Until recently, the two had together
formed K'ulta's lower moiety; today they are its moieties, participating
together in a complex system of alternation and rotation of town council
posts (three for each ayllu) and festival sponsors (three each for five
collective festivals). All told (including more minor posts like numerous
posts of alcalde escolar and the prestigious sponsorship roles that cap a
career), members of the two ayllus fill over forty separate civil and ritual
offices every year. A three- to four-year rest separates different posts in a
single individual's career, so over a span of three years we might very
conservatively estimate that 150 of the two ayllus' approximately 600
adult married couples sponsor a feast or occupy a town council post. 1
Although K'ulta's fiesta-cargo system--centered on the town of Santa
Barbara-has been periodically restructured and is essentially ephemeral
rather than an enduring tradition, the present two-ayllu system nonethe-
less presents itself as a stable order projected well into the future. The
sponsorship roles of five different major saints' feasts are interlaced with
council posts in a predetermined order of rotation and alternation that is
fixed for years in advance, well beyond the point that current political-
ritual arrangements are likely to last. Figure 8.1 illustrates the system
over a period of years for which I have adequate information. From
another perspective, what are concatenated are four different types of
ritual careers, in each of which an individual occupies an office or feast
sponsorship role every three or four years, in a fixed order. 2 An
individual who enters one of the two careers leading, after several
religious cargos, to the post of alguacil will eventually (after more
religious cargos) reach the post of jilaqata. As it happens, the two
jilaqata careers are also called tayksa t"akis, or "our mother paths," since
each involves sponsorship of major roles in female saint fiestas. One who
wishes to become jilaqata-mayor must carry out the highest-ranking
(and also longest and most costly) career, Santa Barbara t"aki, which
takes over twenty years to finish.
Entering a great fiesta path is incumbent on any man who wishes to
be well respected in his hamlet and ayllu. A man who has finished his
career is also said to be "finished" or complete as an adult, a pasado and
 Living on Tata/a's Path 371

JILAQATAS ALGUACILES
Whose
~
LaSt
y.,. Name Hamlet Age raki fiesta f'aki? Name Hamlet ACle T'aki fi~
fuera mayordomo
1973 Zacharfas Paxsi 70 G. G. his own Benedlcto Paxsi 36 S.B. cO:f;US his own
Carata Kayu 1970 Carata" Kavu 1 71
rtJera mayoraomo
1974 Antonio Chiyuta 60 S.B. S.B. his own Zacharlaa Vintu 34 G. S.Andres his own
Quispe 1971 Yuc .." 1972
lU!l'a mayordomo
1975 Hi\ari6n Vila 60 G. G. his own Ws Paxsi 41 S.B. Corpus his own
Mamani Sirka 1972 Carata Kavc 1973
fuera mayordomo
1976 Bentl6a Chipana 40 S.B. S.B. his own Tornas ViIaSirka 37 G. S.Andres hiS own
Anco 1973 Mamani 1974
.1143" to mayordomo
1977 Juan Q'asa 50 G. none father's Urbano Q'asa 36 S.B. Corpus his own
Canalliri brother Canalliri 1975
fuera mayordomo
1976 Donato Janq'uyu 25 S.B. S.B. heir to Cayetano Paxsi 45 G. S.Andres his own
Mamani 1975 father Garata Kavu 1976
uera nelrto mayoraomo nlsown,
1979 RlIino Sikuyu 55 G. G. father's Alejandro Vintu 46 S.B. Corpus heirEleut.
Vazquez 1976 bro's son YIJaa 1977 Yucra
f:::"~
,!!era
1960 Eduardo Chikuyu 32 S.B. S.B. heir to Daniel Paxsi 25 G. none
Mamani 1977 father Carata Kayu brother
lu!'"a mayordomo
1961 Bernardo Vintu 50 G. G. his own Gasiano Paxsi 45 S.B. Corpus his own
Yucra 1976 Carata Kavu 1979
uera mayoraomo
1962 Benedlcto Paxsi 45 S.B. S.B. his own Mariano Kayuma 45 G. S.Andres his own
Carata" Kavu 1979 ua 1960
luera Mayoraomo
1963 Zacharias Vintu 43 G. G. his own Andres Chiyuta 43 S.B. CO~US his own
Yucra lt 1960 QuisPe 1 81
G. - Guadaluoe S. B. = Santa Barbara

Figure 8.1. The concatenation of alguacil and jilaqata authority posts, and the braiding of "our
mother" great fiesta paths, among hamlets and patrilines of Ayllu Manxa-Kawalli, 1973-83. 'Here
Benedicta Carata and Zacharias Yucra, alguaciles in 1973 and 1974, respectively, also appear at the
bottom of the "Jilaqata" column in 1982 and 1983. In 1985, the 1975 alguacil, Luis Carata,
became jilaqata, and so on. Yearly alternation of Guadalupe and Santa Barbara t"akis is shown in
the "T"aki" column, and the "Last fiesta" column indicates the role, festival, and date of the fiesta
most recently sponsored by each man. Career paths are heritable; in the "Whose t"aki?" column,
note that some authorities inherited their careers from others. The two alcalde posts and their
respective "our father" great fiesta paths are likewise concatenated and braided.

jach' a jiliri (great elder-brother), whose voice commands respect in

public decision making and who is regarded as having thus gained the
full capacity for oratory and myth telling, maximally free from con-
straint. Boys and young men may be shamed in such contexts; when
before a gathering of "finished" men, they are supposed to be "fearful,"
which is to say fearful of being called yuqalla, which is not only a
reference term for young boy but also a powerful insult for young men.
Spoken to a man's face, the term is an open invitation to fight and (along
with other terms comparing adversaries to women and their roles in
372 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

both domestic and sexual life) is hurled with great frequency during
actual fights. Thus it is no small matter that a man who has not
embarked on a fiesta career is also thought to be of little weight among
his peers and is called (usually behind the back) a yuqalla.
Unless they leave K'ulta (or nowadays, become Protestants), even
those couples who do not take up a "great fiesta path" will undoubtedly
sponsor saints' festivals during their lives. First of all, of course, there is
the weekly cult to the riwusyun image that rules every house. Next, the
patron saint of the hamlet's chapel demands sponsorship, which rotates
among a hamlet's households and is often the first extra house sponsor-
ship engaged in by a newly wed couple. Many patriline hamlets,
however, also engage in limited festival systems with other patrilines,
alternating in sponsorship of a single "miraculous" saint image, which
then takes turns residing for a year in each patriline hamlet's chapel.
These kinds of festival alternations are considered extensions of the
"small fiesta path," but they also include many features of the great path.
Often, patrilines that have become deeply intermarried choose to enter
into such a festival system in order to maintain the kinds of group-to-
group visits that characterize weddings, after incest prohibitions prevent
them from further exchanges of women. When they do so, the asym-
metrical (but reversible) relationship of wife giver to wife taker is
supplanted by other forms of alternating asymmetries, more akin to
moiety rites. This, no doubt, is how moieties within groups like Yanaqi
and Ilawi have come about.
Even within the great fiesta path, in which sponsorships and council
posts alternate between Manxa-Kawalli and Alax-Kawalli, visiting
among intra-ayllu patrilines is required. Two years in advance of his own
sponsorship year, during the "rest" period between major sponsorships
or council offices, an "entering" sponsor must visit the hamlet of his
ayllu's "standing" sponsor. Such visits are extremely complex. Suffice it
to note that within the ayllu, numerous patrilines thereby enter into a
relationship of structured opposition, but also alliance. In these
carnaval-time visits, which double as interpatriline courtship rites, such
future sponsors must also erect a kind of maypole in their patio, a
flower-covered pole called a jurk"a. There the subordinate couple, two
years prior to their year of sponsorship, travel to the patio of the
dominant couple (who are in their year of sponsorship) to bring a
banquet and place pillus, crowns of flowers and bread, on their heads. 3
The crowns and the banquets are reciprocated, but the dominant role is
to receive a visit, not to go on one. As far as festival sponsorship goes,
the visits are received only by the novena and alferez of Santa Barbara,
Living on Tatala's Path 373

the fuera and alferez of Guadalupe, and the fuera of San Andres
(sponsorships in each of the four paths). But since standing council
authorities, couples who have recently completed marriage rites, and
sons at the moment they receive their inheritance from a deceased parent
also erect such poles and receive visits from future civil authorities of the
same ayllu, in-law patrilines, and godparents, very many interhamlet
paths are traveled by visiting groups during the carnaval visiting season.
These visits are not individual affairs; rather, they are between
patrilines. The pillu-carrying sponsors-to-be bring with them the meat of
two sacrificed llamas, a quantity of food, and a large dance-warrior
group, who in this rite are called the soldiers of Santa Barbara and carry
mock rifles and flags in special dance formations. The host group also
puts up a dance group, and the two carry out a competition which is not
supposed to end up in real fighting. The pillu-carrying duties of the
presponsor also correspond to the responsibility to provide a dance
group (and warriors) when the sponsor who receives the visit actually
"passes" his fiesta. (It was during such a visit that I first met the
simulacrum of Hilarion Mamani, Virgilio's dead father and novena for
the year his mannequin hosted a visit and wore a crown of flowers
brought to him by the following year's alferez of Santa Barbara. A few
hours later, Hilarion's ghost set off on the westward path to manxa-
pacha, bequeathing his fiesta path to Virgilio.) So in any given saint's
fiesta in the town of Santa Barbara several groups of allied patrilines
within each ayllu converge on the town along their ritual paths, brought
together by the crosscutting obligations among sponsorship roles and
career types.
Of the three sponsors in a Guadalupe fiesta, two (the mayordomo and
the alferez) are from one moiety, while the fuera comes from the opposite
moiety. Mayordomo, as the most subordinate role, is required to assist in
the alferez's sponsorship, and his own patio and patriline thus tend to
become overshadowed by those of the alferez, just as the machaqa
sponsors, with the dance groups they must bring, join the activities and
dance groups of this year's sponsors from their own moiety while they
oppose the old sponsor (of the same type) from the opposite moiety.
During the course of the fiesta, these same-ayllu groups (which have
"practiced" their musicianship and joint battle formations during the
previous carnaval) merge into a single "army" for a ritual battle against
the opposite moiety's congregation. When they merge, they become
something other than an army and something other than patrilines: they
are unified as a single herd and ayllu and are addressed by the sponsor
(whom they call father herder and lead male llama) as his "herd."
374 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

All the sponsors and future sponsors converge together on the town of
Santa Barbara during the feast of the patron saint, joining Santa Barbara's
sponsors in massive conjoint ayllu-moiety groups. Each separate patriline
must acknowledge the "passing" of the sponsorship from finishing spon-
sor to entering one, after which the ayllu-moieties as wholes face off
against one another in ritual battle, enacting their own dance of encom-
passment. Kulta society as a whole and all its parts reflect the continuing
import of the cycle set in motion when Tatala battled the Chullpas.

Sequences of a Saint's Feast

Within the context of these multipally concatenated and ranked alterna-
tions, each type of sponsor (mayordomo, fuera, alferez)-and for each
type, both the outgoing and the incoming sponsor-performs a segmented
set of ritual duties. The duties of one sponsor very much resemble those
of another, but they are differently timed in a complex interweave. A fiesta
is segmented, first of all, by space and movement: Sponsors carry out
initial and concluding ritual acts in the hamlet, bracketing the central rites
performed in the town. Second, a single sponsor's fiesta duties are divided
into discrete chunks of action as large as a full day's events. The names
of such stages of fiesta performance suggest that the sequence of major
segments follows the logical and temporal order of two partly overlapping
llama sacrifices. Named segments of the fiesta corresponding to parts of
a sacrifice (which are also carried out on many other ritual occasions) are
uywa ispira (dedication), qarwa k"ari (killing), and ch'iwu (banquet,
distribution). Other major segments of the fiesta reprise these steps in
condensed or expanded versions. Within each major chunk there are more
numerous named events, and these are further subdivided. Within qarwa
k"ari, for example, there are subsegments called q'uwa, paq"arayana,
tinku, paxcha, ch'iwu, jaiiachu, and qurpa, each of which recurs in other
segments within the fiesta.
Some kinds of named ritual action (again, those which are parts of a
sacrifice) are repeated several times during the fiesta. Thus there are four
events qualifying as paq"arayana, two q'uwas, three performances of the
ch'allas called ch'iwu, and so on. The multiple and overlapping repeti-
tion of the sacrificial sequence establishes stanza like formal parallelisms,
which repeatedly mirror in microcosm the overall structure of the fiestas
as a whole. Sacrifices are carried out again and again, but the identities
of sacrifier, sacrificer, victim, commensals, and deities of dedication,
differ in each case. 4
A fiesta performance in K'ulta lasts from four to six or seven days,
depending on issues of scheduling. 5 Regardless of the number of days
Living on Tatala's Path 375

involved, a fixed set of named ceremonies must be performed in a

determined order and in specific localities. From one perspective, a fiesta
works through the symbolic relations between hamlet and town by the
staging of events: Libations are performed for the herd and hamlet
deities, and some llamas are sacrificed in the hamlet; then the ritual
participants become pilgrims in a sacred journey to the town, where
more sacrifices are performed, banquets given, a battle fought, and
sponsorship relinquished. Finally, a reverse pilgrimage takes place, bereft
of the foodstuffs expended in the town, and final libations are poured to
the hamlet deities.
Such a scheme divides fiesta rites into public (town centered) and
private (hamlet centered) types. Only the former are likely to be
observed by outsiders. Without close familiarity with fiesta sponsors,
nonparticipants will systematically misunderstand the meanings of town
events (determined in relation to hamlet ones). The corollary form of
structured miscommunication results from interpreting only the clandes-
tine practice as an authentic indigenous meaning world. 6 The colonial
situation created a divided space and communicative barriers between
public acts and clandestine ones; the observer who takes the part for the
whole is deceived by the legacy of colonialism, constitutive now of
postcolonial predicaments and the interpretive debates of folklorists,
ethnographers, and historians, and of indigenistas and indianistas.

The Unifying Metaphors of Herding and Sacrifice

Sacrifice is not only a secret practice tied to herding and hamlet, but is
also absolutely fundamental to the fiesta performance as a whole.
Indeed, the stages of sacrifice structure the division between hamlet
"privacy" and town "publicity." Uywa ispira uru, "animal vespers day,"
when the sponsor makes dedications in his hamlet house, comes first,
followed by qarwa k"ari uru, "llama cutting day," when animals are
ceremonially killed within the hamlet corral. After a journey with the
llama herd and patriline to town, in a reprise of the food-laden return
from valley caravan trips, comes the more public marka qarwa k"ari uru
or wallpa k"ari uru, "town llama cutting day" or "chicken cutting
day," actually a second llama sacrifice, perhaps reduced to a chicken
slaughtered when a zealous priest is around. Finally, there are p"isturu,
"fiesta day," and ch'iwuru, "meat/cooked 'heart'/shade/black cloud!
llama young day." The first two days and last half-day of the feast are
those performed in the hamlet. Consequently, the casual (outsider)
observer of public events in the town is unlikely to see the festive
banquet, drunken boisterousness, and saint image-related ceremony as
 376 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

fiesta day LIturgical TIme Q'uWllllllllru Tuiquaa 0.-.

SaInt Image ftauri_
moment ~a11IChu. muslclllll
~!'lP'ra PM. paq·arayafta paq-arayafta 1
day one I'extiles) Iq'uwa leaves)
(1....mlll)

dawn pucha 1 Ib"ned)

paq a'ayalla 1
,\M. . Iv".
QlrWllk'lfi paq arayanal
pucha 1 llianliru polls)
day two
lin hamlet) jlucha 1 lfeigned)
noon eMwul
caravan to !own romeris P.M. P::':~':)2
A.M. DlXCha 2 flinku
Wallpa A.M. ch'lwu2 ~~~::.~
k"Ifi noon pucha 2 lfelgned)
paaacalil
day""
I_pi,")
I~ town)
'oSoerS P.M. ~:.":~~
DlXCha2 _
laIwl)'I"" dawn
Imusna
P'I1IUru waku ,\M. 11..:.a:::"hia)
dlylaur processIOn
and ..... A.M.
Ilnlown) IqulllI:
ttvow bread P.M.
P,~ .,.ylll,
iI'exliIes
qUllll banquel
inte,-o.,rillne
P.M. ~i
CMwuru IIsI"",,"a) ,\M. ~~:~=~n, ID;:k::"... ,
dlyftve
Qll'lYanklhlmlet romerl. ,\M. I::":'::'::) 1&:":'::'::) I::":':::)
lin hamlet) P.M. I=n:"c"hq::,~)

Figure 8.2. The fiesta as sacrifice: concatenated event sequence. The days and names of the fiestas,
as well as the locations of activities, are indicated in column one. Column two describes the
corresponding "official" liturgic sequence (the items not within parentheses), all of which may be
completed if a priest is present for the fiesta, Approximate time of day is shown in column three.
Columns four through nine display the concatenation of "actual" and "metaphoric" stages of
sacrifice experienced by all principals of the fiesta: At two separate moments llantirus are "made to
flower" (paq"arayafia), "made to flow" (paxcha), their "hearts" are eaten (ch'iwu), and their meat
is divided and eaten in a banquet (qurpa). One set of sacrificial acts takes place in the hamlet, and
the other in the town. This dual sacrifice is also experienced by small llama-fat figurines of llantirus
and wife takers (tullqas); the saint image, sponsors, and dancer-musicians undergo a single
sacrificial sequence, each predicated on the other. Yet more complex forms of concatenation link
one sponsoring couple's event sequence to those of other sponsors in the town, as well as to
other-ayllu machaqa sponsors who will replace them: Machaqas begin a full sacrificial sequence one
day later than sitting sponsors. The liturgic sequence performed when a priest is present also
involves a metaphoric sacrifice with its own stages of dedication, consecration, and consumption.

integral parts of an imbedded pair of llama sacrifices dedicated not only

to the saint and Christian deities of the town but also to a plethora of
underworld deities and ancestors tied to the altars of the hamlet.
Repeated and more intimate participation in fiestas, which for me was
possible only after staying in Vila Sirka for over a year and gaining the
Living on Tatala's Path 377

friendship and trust of Mamanis, who were drawn to me by their own

frontier leanings,7 revealed that each of the named days of the fiesta is
segmented into a multitude of named ceremonies, the majority of which
are also connected with sacrifice. The sequenced metaphors of fiesta rites
(see Fig. 8.2) establish the formal equivalence of llamas, persons, saints,
and gods, expressing their analogous powers in terms of their exercise of
hierarchic control (such as "herding"). It is by metaphorically transfer-
ring such powers from distant sources into themselves, through herd
animals and saint images, that K'ultas create themselves as herder
authorities and as fully formed human adults. Having located the
originary sources of human agency in processes of long-past events, they
must bring that past (fortunately for them located just around the
corner, in the landscape that holds their memory of it) to bear on the
present in order to take control over the way the future will unfold.
Saints' festivals and sacrifices are for them a means of "writing" a history
that supports their present projects and the futures such projects build.

A JACH'A pI'ISTA PERFORMANCE: THE EVENTS OF GUADALUPE, SEPTEMBER 1982

In September of 1992 I returned to K'ulta, forearmed with the knowl-

edge that another Mamani would then carry out a sponsorship role as
the fuera of Guadalupe. This time it was the turn of Tomas Mamani to
fulfill his festival obligations. 8 I had not seen much of Tomas during
carnaval of 1981, when Virgilio and his father's mannequin, as that
year's novena of Santa Barbara, were visited by the 1982 alferez of that
festival, because Tomas had gone on a visit to the hamlet of the 1981
sitting fuera of Guadalupe.
Having prepared quantities of chicha and amassed large amounts of
corn and wheat for the coming banquet, Tomas and his wife carried out
their uywa ispira memory path on the night of September 6, two days
before the saint's day of September 8. Through the night, they had
prepared their q'uwa bundles, containing miniature pairs of llantirus
made of fat and the aromatic q'uwa herb, and had burned them at dawn
at their secret q'uwafia place on the slope of their household's uywiri hill.
Early in the morning, when I arrived to accompany them, along with
Bartolome Mamani and his wife, Basilia, who had been asked to serve as
wasu wariri libation specialists, Tomas and his wife, Petrona Gomez,
prepared to carry out the memory path of qarwa k"ari, that of "llama
cutting," in the corral where they kept their male llamas. Qarwa k"ari
libations are very similar to those of uywa ispira, although they begin
378 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

with a ch'alla to the corral altar and its t'alla "mate" rather than to that
of the house. In contrast with uywa ispira libations, qarwa k"ari also
includes chicha, and therefore much more attention to the gods of the
sky and the saint to whom the fiesta is dedicated. Since during qarwa
k"ari the llamas that provide the meat of the festival banquet are actually
killed in the definitive moment of sacrificial offering (uywa ispira and the
banquet in town being other parts of the sacrifice as a whole), the focus
in qarwa k"ari libations is very much upon the animals that are killed,
the tinkur lIantir awki, the "father (awki) caravan leaders (llantiru) who
go to ritual battle (tinku).,,9 As in uywa ispira, libations recall animals,
animals' altars, and the herd's ancestry through a listing of corrals. But
there are also ch'allas to the animals' patron saints' towers (in chicha),
especially to San Antonio, who is patron of the male herds. At their
altar, women drink ch'allas for Guadalupe, who is a patroness of the
female herd. In addition, chicha is poured and drunk for the Solar-Christ
and Moon-Virgin, for their attributes and those of the saints such as
lightning, and for the saints' altars upon the hamlet's mallku hill. As the
ch'allas proceed, there is also a good deal of talk, mainly about the
llamas and their individual histories.
During qarwa k"ari of 1982, Tomas Mamani's larita (his father's
sister's husband) arrived in the corral somewhat late, well after the corral
had been dedicated by encircling it with incense braziers, and after the
men's altar had been consecrated with libations to jira t' all misa, "the
altar of dung lady plain," as they call the stone corral altar, surrounded
by a thick layer of dried llama manure. At the women's altar, Tomas'
wife, Petrona, had poured the first libation to jira t' all misa t' alIa, the
women's altar laid out flat on the ground, around which the women sat
on the thick mat of dried llama dung. 10 Tomas' father's sister's husband
was immediately inserted into the seating order next to Tomas himself
(that is, second in line), and given a rapid series of ch'allas to catch up
with the rest of the group. In the ch'alla performance, each participant
must drink for each entity libated, so Bartolome moved around the men's
altar (Basilia did the same a few yards away) proffering drinks and
coaching the drinkers on the libation dedication accompanying each one,
in a fashion known as wasu muyuyaiza ("encircling with the cup").

Paq"arayaiza and Paxcha (Making Bloom and Spurting Blood)

Interruption, competition, and joking are all built in to qarwa k"ari.
When the elders had begun the wife's and mother's corral sequence, the
service personnel, including Tomas' tullqas (the husband of one of his
sisters, accompanied by a younger brother and another young man who
Living on Tatala's Path 379

Photograph 8.1. Making llamas bloom, Maria Colque and Jose Mamani. Vila Sirka
llama corral, carnaval 1980. (Photograph by author)

is godson to Tomas), decorated the herd of llamas, which still huddled

together within the corral, impatient to get out to pasture, by sewing
colored yarn through the animals' ears, an act referred to as paq"arayana
(see Photographs 8.1 and 8.2).
380 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

Photograph 8.2. Paq"arayaiia: making the herd bloom. Manuel Mamani prepares to sew
paq"ara, "flowers" made of colored tufts of yarn, into ears of a llama. The rest of the herd
awaits the same fate, while women, facing west, pour libations at their altar. Hidden from
view by the llamas, Mamani men sit at their raised stone altar, facing east, a few yards
beyond the women. Mamani corral, Vila Sirka, 1980. (Photograph by author)

When all had been thus decorated, including female llamas and the
alpacas brought to the corral for this purpose, Tomas pointed out four
llamas that would be killed, and his tullqas tied their legs and pushed
them down in a kneeling position. Tomas' young daughter then drove
the other animals out of the corral while Tomas and Petrona threw
bowls full of ch'uwa (a clear liquid byproduct of chicha manufacture)
over their backs.
While the corral libations were in progress, the tullqas pacified the
bound llamas. They gave the llamas coca to chew and chicha to drink by
pouring it into their forcefully opened mouths, calling the chicha the
animals' lake ("so that the chicha does not run out") and referring to the
coca as their grass ("so that the pastures flourish").
Living on Tatala's Path 381

Photograph 8.3. Paxcha: Alax-Kawalli musicians playa dirge in a Culta patio, honoring
sacrificed llamas. A pair of Ilantirus (herd leaders) have just been dispatched in the paxcha
("flowing") after this sponsoring group's arrival at their hamlet house in Culta. Culta,
September 1982. (Photograph by author)

When the corral sequences were finished, the llamas to be killed were
directly libated in pairs, with ch'allas for tinkur llantir awki, the
"herd-leader father [who goes] to tinku," and for his yanani, the second
such llama. Just before killing them, the tullqas held up to their noses a
special bag of coca, so that the tinkur awkis would breathe their life into
it, "and their colOr/pattern type will not die out in the herd."ll Then, in
a moment called the paxcha (flowing), the tullqas pulled back the llamas'
heads and quickly cut their throats through to the bone, making sure
that the blood spurted toward the rising-sun side of the corral (see
Photograph 8.3 ).12
While the blood flowed out, Tomas (who up until this point had been
leading ch'allas at the men's altar) scooped up handfuls of blood and
smeared it across the faces of each paq"arayana and paxcha participant,
in an act reminiscent of Inca sacrifices when blood was smeared on the
face of the wak'a idol, "almost from ear to ear." Flicking some drops
of blood towards the sunrise point on the horizon, Tomas dedicated the
flowing blood to the sky deities Santisima Mamala (Moon-Mother) and
Tata Awatir Awksa (Sun-Father Herder).13 The Solar-Christ thus
382 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

partook of a K'ulta Eucharist and of the llama blood, which here, as we

shall see, stands for the sacrifice of himself, in which Tomas was
engaged. Chich a ch' alias were then given again for the patron saints of
the herd and for the sun and moon. While the animals lay upon the
ground and tullqas began to butcher them, a dance group of Mamani
youths approached the corral and began to play a dirge on their
panpipes, ending on their knees in an open circle outside the corral.

Death and Resurrection of the Tinkur Awkis

After spilling the blood of the sacrificed llantirus, the tullqas and other
low-ranking followers (such as unmarried sons, younger brothers, etc.)
butchered the carcasses as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, the men at
their altar inside the corral began the ch'alla list called ch'iwu (again,
meaning "meat," "shade," "black rain cloud," and "llama progeny"),
which is directed to the deity-guardians and "ideal types"I4 of all forms
of foodstuffs and to every desired type of herd animal (not including,
however, terms for sterile males or, at the men's altar, females).
At the same time, Petrona's assistants, collectively called yuqch' as
("daughters-in-law," though they included unmarried Mamani girls
along with young Mamani wives), took away the animals' chullmas, or
"hearts" (in our anatomical terms, the lungs and liver), and stomachs,
and rushed to cut up and boil the organs as swiftly as possible. IS At this
point the continuation of the ch'alla, the butchering of the llamas, and
the cooking of the "heart" were all carried out in a kind of competition,
in which Petrona's assistants sought to interrupt the ch'alla as quickly as
possible with the presentation of small bowls of cooked pieces of liver
and lung (rather, semicooked, this being how the women win this
particular competition) at both men's and women's altars. After the
plates of ch'iwu, they served bowls of potato and stomach soup. With
this, the ch' alia was interrupted, and we all ate our portions, awaiting
the next interruption.

The "Infertile Studs" (Jaiiachu)

Moments after the chullma was served, that is, while we were still eating
the internal organs (and vital essence) of the tinkur awkis, a pair of
tullqas burst into the corral wearing llama bells and the pelts of the
sacrificed llantirus, still including the heads and feet. Bleating like frantic
llamas, they began attacking and mounting all present in feigned llama
mating. After some minutes of raucousness and laughter, Tomas and
Bartolome pacified these "human llamas," newborn members of Tomas'
Living on Tatala's Path 383

herd, giving them paired draughts of chicha and mouthfuls of coca,

saying, "Here is your lake, here is your fodder," just as they had done to
the animals before killing them. The jaiiachu, as the ersatz llamas are
called,16 were then driven out of the corral by Tomas' whip- and
sling-wielding younger patriline brothers. Not far away, these herder-
assistants captured the tullqa-llamas, throwing them to the ground.
Feigning the action of cutting their throats, they then pretended to
sacrifice the tullqa-llamas, who had become a humorous kind of "anti-
llantiru," and had relieved the sponsors' sense of loss after having killed
a significant number and valued part of their herd.
At this point, Tomas and Petrona and their wasu wariris began the
ch iwu ch alia list anew from the beginning, this time to be carried
I I

through to the end without further interruption. During the second and
complete performance of the ch'iwu ch' alia path, the sponsor's dance
group, now including the tullqas, formed again and circled the corral.
Once finishing the ch' alias in the corral, Tomas and Petrona returned to
their patio altar, where they hosted a repast for their followers.

Hamlet-to-Town Pilgrimage
On the afternoon of the same day, the assistants of Tomas and Petrona
loaded their llama troop with all necessary provisions. Dressing the lead
llamas, the llantirus, with articles of human clothing, the entire entou-
rage then began a pilgrimage to the ritual-center town of Santa Bar-
bara. 17 The entire herd had already been "made to flower" with colored
yarn in the ears, and the lead males were adorned in significant items of
mature men's dress (taken from the sponsor and his close followers), such
as long scarves, coca bags (ch'uspas), charm bundles (carrying cloths
worn by men around the waist, containing a supply of coca and items
bringing luck in travel and fighting), and, topping it all off, monteros,
battle helmets in the conquistador style. The overall effect of these adorn-
ments is the same as that which caravaners strive for on the last leg of their
return trips from the valleys, similarly laden with foodstuffs, after yearly
winter expeditions for provisions. It is not dissimilar to the effect of the
image of Ekeko for city folks. But it also continues the metaphoric equa-
tion of humans and llamas, granting to the living llantirus a status like that
which Tomas is in the process of achieving. Later on in the fiesta, these
metaphoric transfers of leaderly qualities become yet more apparent, for
Tomas will become a llantiru of the human herd.
On the journey from the hamlet to the town of Santa Barbara, in this
case a short one, Tomas as fuera carried the sacred miniature retablo
384 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

image of Guadalupe that he had kept in his hamlet chapel all year, now
wrapped in numerous weavings (in this case, women's outerwear lliq-
llas). After an entire year of caring for the saint in their hamlet, Tomas
and Petrona prepared to give the saint high honors, before handing it
over to the incoming sponsors from Ayllu Alax-Kawalli.
Following one of the six (major) ritual paths which enter K'ulta from
outlying hamlets, they stopped every now and then in order to place the
image upon a series of sacred stone altars for "rests" and special
libations. 18 At each stop their band of musician-dancer-fighters played a
tune on their panpipes, dancing in a circle around the altar, image, and
libation-pouring sponsors and elders.19 The members of the dance group
dress as for battle, wearing monteros, heavy shoes or boots, and
matching jackets. 20 Though they do not partake of the sponsors'
libations, they do perform alcohol libations according to their own
special ch' alla lists while they accompany the sponsors from hamlet to
town and back again. Throughout the fiesta, they play at numerous
appointed moments, becoming a fighting unit in the tinku, or ritual
battle. We have seen that these dance groups "practice" their perfor-
mances during the previous year's carnaval rites, in which they play an
instrument called a t' arka while also in military guise. In the sponsors'
own hamlet and in the journey to town, the dancers are those recruited
from the sponsors' patriline and subordinate individuals. Arriving in
town, however, they will be challenged, and then joined, by the dance
group of the entering sponsor who visited with pillus in the previous
carnaval. The joining of same-ayllu sponsors and dance groups, when
they converge on the town along their individual paths, is an important
aspect of fiesta rites, leading, among other things, to a tinku (a term
which also refers to merging paths or rivers, as well as to intermoiety
battles).

Town Qarwa K"ari (Wallpa K"ari) and Ispiras

When the entourage arrived in town, they proceeded to their hamlet's
house, on a patio shared with other Mamani hamlets. As some of the
helpers unloaded the caravan herd, and Tomas and Petrona rather
unceremoniously poured some quick libations upon the patio altar there,
while the tullqas sacrificed more llamas, without the benefit of a full
ch'alla performance. 21 Accompanied by the Mamani dance group, they
all then proceeded on a round of visits in the temporarily lively and
well-peopled town, giving special ch'allas to the church tower and
plaza 22 and paying special visits to the council office and the houses of
the occasionally present vecinos.
Living on Tatala's Path 385

In the town qarwa k"ari, ch'allas are conspicuously fewer and more
haphazard. There are very few of the numerous alcohol libations for
uywiris and mallkus (such as those performed in the hamlet qarwa k"ari;
in their place there is a decided predominance of chicha libations
directed towards the more "Christian" saints and sky gods. Receiving
special attention are the highest, most universal alax-pacha gods, Tata
Awatir Awksa ("Our Father Shepherd," referring simultaneously to the
sun and to Jesus Christ), and Santisima Tayksa (or Paxsi Mamala), "Our
Most Holy Mother" (or Moon-Mother), referring to the moon and to
the Virgin Mary, whom K'ultas regard as Tatala's wife.
This contrast between hamlet ch'allas, emphasizing the manxa-pacha
mountain deities, and town ch'allas, emphasizing the alax-pacha sky
deities, no doubt reflects the proximity of the town to the saint's
residence and the more encompassing quality of the performance and the
authority to which this proximity leads. It also, however, seems a
product of priestly surveillance and the Counter-Reformation practices
that bifurcated the Andean cosmos along lines resembling the division
between "Spaniard" and "indian." K'ultas are well aware that outsiders
(such as the priest, visiting provincial officials, and the enterprisers who
come to fiestas for commercial purposes) regard rites to the mountain
gods as sacrilege, and they willingly mislead such observers about the
purposes of town libations?3
But we need not imagine that the hamlet-town contrast results from
an intentional effort to keep local practice clandestine. My interviews
with don Bartolome suggested that wasu wariris recall their "paths" as
generic kinds of hierarchies, which take specific shape according to the
place of performance. In the town, altars are connected to saints' paths,
not to patriline uywiris and rna Ilk us; likewise there are few corrals in
town, and none that are consecrated with ritually active altars. Thus the
corral sequences get short shrift in the town performance, while other
segments of the "type" list are greatly expanded (that is, those pertinent
to sky deities and to the extrapatriline hierarchy of mallkus). Nor is
Tomas Mamani's town patio altar connected directly to the Mamani
uywiris and mallku, but to uywiris and a mallku of the town, which are
shared by all K'ultas and are thus of a considerably higher rank than the
others.
The "type" ch'alla sequences boil the particularity of the gods of
distinct contexts down to their essentials; the result amounts to a
narrative diagram of the hierarchy of gods and also the channels of
social hierarchy. Thus this mnemonic device serves to reproduce the
underlying and resultingly shared understanding of social-cosmic struc-
386 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

ture, and to equate metaphorically the hierarchies of hamlet and town,

creating a basis for linking local and global orders.

Formal Visiting in the Town

Once the town qarwa k"ari has been completed, a round of formal visits
begins. The displacement of manxa-pacha deities from the context of
the Christianity-dominated town implies an encompassment of the
hamlet (and local, "indigenous" uywiris and mallkus) by the hegemonic
forces of town-centered alax-pacha. So too, formal visits in the town
foreground an imbedded set of subordinations: The patriline is
subordinated to the ayllu-moiety; each moiety is subordinated to the
other; and all participants are subordinated to the town's symbolic state
representatives.
During formal visiting, Tomas and Petrona and their followers
proceeded from altar to altar through the town, stopping to pay homage
to their hamlet's places in the town; then to the church and its male turri
mallku (tower peak/condor); to the corners of the female plaza (the pIasa
t'alla); to the altar of the saints on the slope above the church, a stone
table carved out of the living rock that is called Inka Misa; to a series of
altars associated with town government; to the former parish house,
kitchen, and corrals; and then to the office (and its altar, an adobe desk)
of the corregidor, who, along with his jilaqatas, alcaldes, and alguaciles,
waits there for the sponsors' homage. In Photograph 8.4, don Bartolome
Mamani serves as wasu wariri during visits of the town in the fiesta of
Santa Barbara, 1979. After this, the entourage visited the altars of the
two occasionally resident outsider-storekeepers. Finally, the dancer-
musicians and the sponsors visited the compounds of the other sponsors
in the town.
The town as a whole is a kind of condensed diagram of the social
space of the whole of K'ulta, with separate neighborhoods divided
among K'ulta's ayllus, and a line running diagonally east to west through
the plaza separating the former moieties. Visits along the altar-to-altar
paths in the town therefore become icons of visits (and the relations
thereby construed) among patriline-hamlets during the rest of the year.
The intersponsor visits, which are initially among sponsors of the same
ayllu-moiety, recapitulate carnaval pillu visits between patriline hamlets.
Once same-moiety sponsors have merged their dance groups and coor-
dinated their activities, however, the oppositional and hierarchic form of
intramoiety (and interpatriline) visits is generalized to the inter-ayllu-
moiety level, during which the schisms among intra-ayllu patrilines are
Living on Tata/a's Path 387

nullified. During the latter VISItS, the year's authorities (sometimes

accompanied by armed soldiers or, as in the fiesta of Santa Barbara in
1979, by the province's subprefect with his pistol)24 wield their whips
and strive to keep order. 25
During the night before the feast itself, called ispiras, the sponsors,
important guests, and young people drink and dance around bonfires in
the plaza, with jula-jula groups of each sponsor encircling their sponsors
in multiple and separate formations. Merging of the groups is avoided,
because the tinku between conjoint groups from each moiety should not
take place before the saint's mass (of the following day). Those ayni
contracted for the service roles spend the night preparing quantities of

Photograph 8.4. The fiesta of Santa Barbara: dancing in the plaza before tinku. Notice
the matching jackets and the cowhide and lard-tin helmets. Visiting merchants hawk their
wares (mainly foodstuffs) around the plaza. Patriline dance groups merge into two
opposed moiety groups, striving to outplay and outdance one another. When jostling leads
to individual fights, dance groups become fighting platoons, moving onto the nearby plain,
called tinku pampa. Santa Barbara de Culta, December 4, 1979. (Photograph by Mary F.
Dillon, used with permission)
388 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

food for the following day's feast. When public dancing in the plaza
breaks up (when the firewood is depleted or the cold too intense), the
sponsors and libation specialists repair to their house to prepare another
q'uwa, an offering to be burnt at dawn, this time on the uywiri to the
east of the town. The authorities independently prepare similar q'uwas
of their own. Young people, meanwhile, break up into small groups and
couples, dancing through the streets most of the night, singing popular
Quechua love songs to strummed charangos.

P"isturu (Fiesta Day)

P"isturu is the day of the fiesta proper. On this day, the events held to be
most important (and of most interest to noncentral participants and
observers) take place: the formal transferral of sponsorship from old to
new alferezes and mayordomos (the fuera transfer takes place the next
day); the banquets offered by the sponsors of both moieties; the ritual
battle; one of two annual tasa collections (held by the assembled
authorities at Kawiltu Misa ["kawiltu" from Sp. "cabildo")); and, if the
priest comes to town (a rare occurrence apart from the patron saint's
feast of Santa Barbara), a procession around the plaza of the principal
saint image (normally kept in the church), and a mass held in its honor.
If the priest is present, p"isturu is also a day of numerous weddings,
baptisms (and other rites of compadrazgo), and funeral masses. 26
P"isturu opens with a predawn performance of the q'uwa, followed by
ch'allas at Inka Misa, Kawiltu Misa, and the sponsors' (and authorities')
town patio altars. While the q'uwa burns, the dance-musician groups of
each sponsor proceed from their patios to the church door for a formal
visit, known from Spanish liturgies as alwa (Sp. alba, "dawn"): As dawn
breaks, they playa solemn tune, hats off and facing the rising sun. After
this the group visits the patio of each sponsor in turn. While playing a
song, the visiting group is given (by each sponsor in turn) a bottle of
alcohol and the cooked ribs (pichu) of one llama. The musicians then
return to their own sponsors' patio for breakfast.

Kawiltu Kupraiza (Tax Collection)

During the festival of Guadalupe (and again at a minor festival in
a
January, reflecting colonial custom), council members lea a special
ceremony, that of tax collection. At about ten in the morning, the
authorities (who have received visits from the musician-dancers and
accompanied the sponsors on their round of visits) begin their own
round of conjoint visits. Assembled jilaqatas, alcaldes, and alguaciles
Living on Tatala's Path 389

tour the town while blowing their bulls'-horn trumpets (pututus), calling
the gods and the members of their ayllus to attend the kawiltu misa.
Beginning with the church tower, the authorities (carrying bundles of
varas wrapped in vicuna wool scarves) proceed to Inka Misa, then visit
the patio of each sponsor, where they both present and receive ch'allas
while their vara bundles and pututus rest on their sponsors' altar. Finally
the authorities arrive at Kawiltu Misa, where they begin their own
ch'alla sequence specific to tax collection.27
When the authorities are ready to receive payment, they set off a pair
of dynamite charges. When the sponsors and their followers enter the
patio in which Kawiltu Misa is located, they are presented with more
ch'allas of alcohol and chich a and asked to libate the great mallkus by
the authorities, who act as their own wasu wariris. Again, a women's
altar has been laid out opposite Kawiltu Misa, and the sponsors join the
authorities (and authorities' wives) behind their respective altars, jointly
receiving tasa payments. Authorities and honored sponsors are here
addressed by tasa payers as tata awatiri and tata awki ("father herder"
and "father-father"), and when each man pays his tasa, he is addressed by
the authorities as llantiru, and dances around the altar and the authorities,
braying like a llama and blowing a pututu taken from the altar.
Recently married young men paying for the first time are accorded
special respect and may carry a patriline vara as they dance. As part of a
kawiltu performance (both here and during the other collection on
January 20), the authorities name the following year's sponsors, again
giving special homage to those who are just beginning their jach' a p"ista
career (who are the same young men paying for the first time).28
While the payment takes place, all the musician groups play (each
their own tune) and dance simultaneously, crowding the kawiltu patio.
Each dancer wears his montero, now decorated with greenery from the
molle (pepper tree), for this performance (as well as all performances to
follow). Meanwhile, the assistants of the fuera and alferez erect tents
over the (men's) altars of their patios, in preparation for their banquets.

Kiyun, Bandera, Qurpa, and Procession

When the tax collection is finished, in the early afternoon, each sponsor-
ing couple and their retinues proceed to the church, where more ch'allas
are poured. If the priest were in town, he would begin saying mass at this
time, and the procession would shortly follow. Normally, however, there
is no priest and no (major image) procession. The sponsors nonetheless
enter the church with their small images, which they place in front of
390 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

corresponding saint elder while the dance groups play on their knees just
outside the door. Lighting candles and llama untu for both large and
small images (which visit one another briefly before another year-long
separation), the sponsors offer incense and ch'allas of sugared tea and
ask the saints for a blessing. From the alcove behind the image, the fuera
(and other male sponsors) takes a kind of velvet flag on a pole, called a
kiyun (Sp. guion, "guide"), as a symbol of his sponsorship of the rites of
the major saint image. Sponsors' wives receive a small white flag called a
pin('una.
When the sponsors emerge from the church, with their standards and
miniature images (and the major image, if the priest is present), the
church bells are rung and all go forth in a procession around the plaza,
stopping with their image bundles and standards to pour ch'allas at each
corner of the plaza. As they finish this circumambulation, with musicians
dancing in circles in the center of the plaza, their assistants throw
miniature loaves of bread (qurpa) from the tower into the plaza, which
those in the assembled crowd, including pilgrims from afar who have
come to pay personal devotion (related to shamanism) to the saint,
scramble to pick up.
"Qurpa" is a term with many meanings, most of which seem related
to hospitality functions. 29 On the one hand it refers to a guest, and on
the other, to a meal served a guest or to a banquet (such as that which
the sponsors will soon serve). Here it refers to the small loaves which
sponsors' assistants throw from the top of the turri mallku. It is quite
possible, as Tristan Platt (1987c) suggests, that the act is also an allusion
to the myth of origin of cultigens, which burst from the stomach of the
overstuffed fox (who the mallku condor could not carry) when he hit the
ground on his return to earth after a banquet in heaven. The profusion
of small round loaves may also allude to the self-multiplying host (which
in the countryside is not given to participants of the mass).30 Thus the
sacrificial sacrament is linked to the sacrificial communion about to take
place in the sponsors' patios.

Ilija (Election) of Machaqa Sponsors

After the procession and qurpa, each sponsor proceeds with his standard
to the patio of the incoming machaqa sponsor of the same sponsorship
role. Here they mark the formal "election" (ilija), already prefigured in
the authorities' nomination, by receiving two large (two- to three-liter)
gourds of chich a for each participant, which must be dedicated to the
saints and then passed by sponsors to their followers, who each say
words of dedication and then drink. Not long afterwards, the machaqa
Living on Tatala's Path 391

sponsors visit the patio of this year's sponsors, and each is given a meaty,
cooked shoulder blade (kallachi, which is the charango of the suitor-fox
in another myth of the trickster cycle) from the sacrificed llantirus.

The (Qurpa) Banquet(s)

Once they had finished ch'allas and visits of ilija, Tomas and Petrona
(like the other sponsors) served a banquet at their patio altar. Announced
by the concussions of a few sticks of dynamite, the banquet drew a large
crowd. Descending on the meal, the sponsors' arkiri ("followers"), the
authorities, and the opposite moiety contingent assembled. If the spon-
sors meet expectations, enough food is distributed so that all are sated
and carry home hats and ponchos full of excess food. The sponsors will
be condemned if the food and drink do not exceed the appetites of the
crowd. 31 This feast must demonstrate a generosity of spirit and an
ability to constitute a congregation of followers, to lead and subsume
and contain, akin to that of the gods they celebrate (Photograph 8.5).

Photograph 8.5. Women and children await the banquet. The fiesta of the Exaltation of
the Cross, Santa Barbara de Culta, September 14, 1979. (Photograph by author)
392 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

Paq"arayana of Sponsors
After serving the high-ranking guests, Tomas and Petrona moved to one
side of the patio and began to dance to the accompaniment of their
dancer-musician group. This began a ceremony called paq"arayana, like
the decoration of llamas' ears before the hamlet qarwa k"ari. This time,
however, it was not yarn sewn into the ears. Instead, Tomas and
Petrona's close followers-especially their cohamlet residents, brothers
and sisters, and other Mamanis, but also their tullqas and subordinate
helpers-gave their thanks by dunning Tomas and Petrona with gifts.
With each gift, Tomas and Petrona served the giver a pair of especially
large cups of alcohol, called t'inkas.
Gifts--called paq"ara ("flowers"}-were invariably articles of clothing
such as ponchos or lliqllas, or other woven or twined goods such as
blankets, carrying bags, belts, llama-hair rope, or slings. These were
draped over the sponsoring couple's shoulders. In the act of "making the
sponsors flower," participants make an explicit as well as implicit
reference to the paq"arayana of the llamas before their sacrifice.
The equation is accomplished, in part, through the name of the rites:
"paq"arayana" also carries the connotation of "making fertile," and
"paq"ara" is the ch'alla term for newborn camelids. But the most explicit
equation of sacrificial llamas and sponsors is in the terms of respect by which
giver and receiver address one another at this moment. In drinking the t'inka,
the gift givers called Tomas llantiru and awatiri (and called Petrona llantir
t'alla and awatir t'alla, the female counterparts of the male terms), and the
sponsors responded by addressing givers as tamana ("my herd"}.32 When the
paq"arayana and the serving of food at the sponsors' altars are finished, the
whole crowd moves on to other patios to yet further, equivalent banquets.

Town Ch'iwu and Janachu

Once back at their own patio, Tomas and Petrona presided over another
round of ch'iwu events (reduplicating the corral events of the hamlet
qarwa k"ari. This time, however, the libations were begun within the
privacy of their town house, and it was there that the ch'iwu (the boiled
liver and lungs) was eaten. Afterwards, they began the ch'alla sequence
ch'iwu t"aki, preparatory to a secondary banquet eaten by their helpers.
Again the meals are interrupted by the appearance of the wild and
uncontrollable janachu. 33

The Tinku Battle

During the feast of Guadalupe, Ayllus Alax-Kawalli and Manxa-Kawalli
engage in the ritual battle known as tinku (or nuwasi). Though these
Living on Tatala's Path 393

may be quite serious in their consequences, such battles are regarded as

mere practice sessions for the Santa Barbara tinku, in which the two
Kawalli ayllus merge to face Ayllu Qullana, which as of 1982 still
participated in this festival.
In many ways the tinkus of K'ulta are less formally organized than
those of neighboring Macha (reported in Platt 1978a). The authorities
make a show of trying to break up individual fights, though some
secretly plan (with feast sponsors) for the organized fighting which often
follows fist fights. Though often precipitated by a series of individual-to-
individual fights in and around the plaza, the face-off between upper and
lower Kawalli fighters takes place on a small plain just above the town.
Most fighting is by the dancers, well prepared with helmets, shoes, and
padding under their clothes. As the fiesta progresses, the dancing takes
on increasingly aggressive forms, and while all sponsors visit the church
tower and authorities, their dance groups (swollen by the addition of
late-arriving members) compete in wide and menacing circles, with
increased jostling when the two circles meet. When fighting actually
breaks out, the groups-joined by other non dancers-rush to the tinku
pampa. Here the battle elevates from individual fist fighting to an affair
of strategy, in which the two sides rush one another in turn and hurl
rocks-often provided by wives and sisters-with their fighting slings,
while elders (and women in particular) shout encouragement to their
side and hurl insults at the other. 34
I was unable to witness fighting on the tinku pampa. Once the
subprefect began firing his pistol to stop the plaza melee, panicked food
sellers jammed into our house seeking protection, and my friend Manuel
Mamani pushed me inside as well. Insisting that this was dangerous
business for me to watch or photograph, he locked us all in, so when
night fell along with a hail of stones, we settled into a huddled mass to
sleep. He was certainly correct that it is dangerous business, since the
immediate object of each side is to cause serious injury or death to a
member of the opposed group and, if possible, to rush in and drink some
of a fallen enemy's blood in a coup de grace. We have seen that such
events have also become strategies of rebellion; vecinos in larger towns
know what they are doing (and why) when they arm themselves behind
well-closed doors. The battle ends with nightfall, serious InJury, or
fatality, not to be repeated until the next major fiesta.

Ch'iwuru or P"wiruru (the Day after P"isturu)

The final day of ritual action in the town is a short one. Sometimes called
ch'iwuru (day of meat/cooked"heart"/young/dark clouds) and sometimes
394 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

p"wiruru ("day of the fuera") because the central acts are carried out by
the outgoing and incoming fueras, the day is given over to preparations
for the return trip to home hamlets and to the passage of the saint's
image from the old sponsors to the new ones, all of which is usually
accomplished before midday.35
After breakfast, Tomas and Petrona prepared to send their retablo
image of Guadalupe on a journey into the territory of Alax-Kawalli as
their last public ritual act (which is the first one for the incoming
sponsors). At first sight, the act is straightforward enough: Outgoing
sponsors demonstrate to the incoming ones that the image and all its
possessions are intact, hand it over, and then all leave town. But a closer
look reveals that the saint's passage, in a rite called isi turka ("changing!
exchanging of clothes"), is structurally parallel to that of other fiesta
events. Once again, it is a form of sacrifice.

lsi Turka
Fundamentally, the ceremony of "clothes changing" is a sequence of acts
among three parties: the outgoing fuera couple and their followers, the
incoming (machaqa) fuera group, and the image which is passed from
the former to the latter. During a round of ch'alla visits to the tower and
plaza, in which Tomas as fuera carried the sacred bundle one last time,
some of his lower-ranking aides loaded the assembled herd and headed
off on the return trip to Vila Sirka. The elders, the wasu wariris, and
most others remained behind for a while to assist in the image's last rites.
When their ch'allas were finished, Tomas, Petrona, and their retinue
returned to their patio and laid out a new misa on the ground between
the men's and women's altars.36 Laying the saint bundle on the altar,
they served another form of ch'alla,37 meanwhile carefully removing
each piece of "clothing" that covered the image box of the saint.
The first articles to go were a dozen lliqllas and ponchos, the
iconographically complex outerwear items worn by adult women and
men (and made by women), which had been wrapped about the image
box (just as Tomas and Petrona had been draped in such items as
paq"arayana gifts during the banquet). When all of these were removed
(and lay beneath the wooden box containing the miniature image), the
box was opened and the saint's possessions were laid out and counted.
These consisted, first of all, of a large number of miniature items of
clothing (patterned on local dress), from among which fueras dress the
saint image itself. 38 There was also a small box containing the saint's
money, consisting of bills and coins (primarily antiques) and receipts
Living on Tatala's Path 395

from priests for festival masses, added to the pot over many generations.
Then with much reverence, Tomas and Petrona undressed the image
itself.
After they had completely disrobed the image, they prepared an
incense offering, like the supliku of a lurya misa. The placed two plain
ceramic bowls filled with burning embers on each of a pair of small
planks of wood. The bowls on one plank (that to the right, facing the
saint) were dedicated to the Solar-Christ (Tata Awatir Awksa), and the
left-hand pair of bowls were dedicated to the Moon-Virgin (Santisima
Tayksa). Then, kneeling together before the image (Tomas on the right,
Petrona to his left), each held a plank and raised it repeatedly while
assistants sprinkled powdered incense and small pressed incense cakes
over the coals and smoking untu. As they raised the planks, the couple
intoned dedications to the saint and again to the gods of the sky, in the
usual gender parallel form (so that the left-hand bowl on the husband's
plank was dedicated to the yanani of each of the deities of dedication,
while the right-hand bowl of his wife was for the yanani of the feminine
counterparts of Tomas' dedications). Asking for a bendici6n ("blessing"),
they put the incense bowls down and each touched a corner of their own
outerwear garments (poncho for the man, lliqlla for the woman) to the
exposed image, through which the blessing passes. Then the sponsors'
followers repeated the same procedure, always in pairs.39 When the
Mamani group finished this procedure, they waited in silence while those
in the machaqa group took their place.
When all had finished receiving the image's blessing, the machaqas
tallied the articles by type and compared this with a list kept in the
saint's money box. 40 Finally, the machaqas replaced the saint's clothing;
first the miniature clothes, then, adding the ponchos and lliqllas pro-
vided by their followers, they rewrapped the image's box in a new set of
outerwear. While the image was being dressed, Tomas and Petrona
sorted out the outerwear textiles in which the image had been wrapped
for the previous year, and draped them over their own shoulders and
those of close followers who had lent the weavings to begin with.

Pilgrimage from Town to Hamlet and Final Ch'iwu Meal

At this point the transaction was complete. The saint's annual pilgrimage
had brought patrilines and ayllus to the town where their interrelation-
ship is articulated, and now she sent both groups on return journeys to
their home hamlets. Draped in gift cloth, Tomas and Petrona led their
followers back to Vila Sirka, some of them wearing the saint's clothes
396 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

and all having received the saint's benediction and a touch of lurya. 41 On
arriving back home, Tomas and Petrona marked the end of their year of
sponsorship in a final and private ch'alla and banquet (called ch'iwu).
Like the first of these ch' allas and meals carried out in the corral, the
final ch'iwu ch'alla is directed towards the local deities of patriline and
hamlet, rather than the shared ayllu and moiety deities of the town.
When the meal was finished, the fiesta was over. Another year or so
would pass before Tomas and Petrona began the ritual duties connected
with the next step on their great fiesta path. In 1985, that step made
Tomas Mamani a jilaqata of Ayllu Manxa-Kawalli. 42 In the meantime,
the hamlet and patriline rallied on the fiesta paths of other couples.

GODS, MEN, AND LLAMAS IN HERDING AND SACRIFICE: POETICS

OF A K'ULTA EUCHARIST

Two aspects of the fiesta performance deserve our immediate attention.

The first is the priority given to sacrifice in both word and deed. The
second, related to the first, is the expression of a profound identification
between the journeys and powers of person, llama, saint, and gods
above, developed through the formal parallelism between the segments
of the feast and made explicit through the repeated use of a special set of
honorific terms.
A single sponsor's performance includes two complete llama sacrifices.
One sacrifice begins in the hamlet and is concluded with the distribution
of meat in the town; the second begins in the town and is concluded with
a meal in the hamlet. Such counterpointed sequencing and repetition of
the stereotypic acts of sacrifice play a crucial role in establishing the
meanings and achieving the desired ends of a fiesta. (See Fig. 8.3.)
Why carry out two concatenated llama sacrifices (interlaced with
those of machaqa sponsors) in such a complex form? A preliminary step
in answering the question hinges on recognizing the differences between
the town and hamlet gods to whom the sacrifices are dedicated, and the
different character of the "communities" established through the distinct
banquets. Focusing exclusively on llama sacrifices, however, is to miss
the point, for the herd animals and herding metaphors serve to express
sacrifices of persons, saints, and, yes, of Jesucristo. Llama sacrifice grants
K'ultas access to the power of the Eucharist.
Not only does a sponsor sacrifice his llamas (which are killed by his
wife takers), but he also symbolically sacrifices his own followers. In the
janachu he offers up his tullqas in their llama disguises. Then the
 Living on Tatala's Path 397

Role Dates Main Duties Other Duties

Escolar School year S~~ly bread to schoolchildren. Assist teacher in 6 de AQOsto paQeant.
Mayordomo Nov. 30, '62 Perform sacrifice for festival; reside for six With aWerez, make arch (arku) for church
of San Andres to weeks in Culta; care for image, perform twice- during fiesta of Santa Barbara (Dec. 4);
Nov. 30, '63 monthly cun; care for saint's 'gOOds.· maintain until Jan. t.
Machaq Jan. 20, '64 Attend quarterly comunwilara sacrWice In carnavall964, carry flower crowns (pillus)
aJguacil to for varas with sitting authorities. to that year's alguacil duringcamaval.
lalguacilelectt Jan 20, '65
Jan. 20, '65 Attend council meetings; serve as bailiff and During carnavall965, erect jurk"a pole,
Alguacil to jailer under jilaqata; attend ayllu festivals; round perform sacrifice, provision feast, and
Jan. 20, '66 up disputants; walk mojones with jilaqata. receive pillus from next year's alguacil.
Machaq fuera Sept. 8, 70 Perform sacrifice; supply provisions and In carnaval1971 , perform sacrifice, provision
(fuera elect) to dance-group tinku platoon to accompany feast, and c;({ry pillus to sta~:r.g aWerez of
of GuadaluPe Sept. 8, '71 1971 fuera; attend 1971 fuera mid-vearcun. Guadalupe I of Exaltaci6nt"aki .
Sept. 8, 71 Perform cult to image in hamlet on new or full In carnaval1972, erect jurk"a pole, perform
Fueraof sacrifice, provision feast. and receive pillus
Guadalupe to moons; perform sacrifice; supply provisions
Sept. 8, 72 and dance-group tinku platoon for 1972 fiesta. from mach8Clfuera of Guadalupe,
Machaq Jan. 20, '74 Attend and assist in quarterly comun wilara In carnaval1974, perform sacrifice, provision
sacrifices for varas led by 1973 jilaqata. feast, and carry pillus to sitting jilaqata of ayllu.
~~:~a~:::n
to
Jan. 20, '75
I ::sponsor quarte y comun WI ara sacr ,ce or In carnaval1975, erectjurk"a pole, perform
varas; attend weekly council meetings; collect sacrifice, proviSion feast. and receive pillus
Jilaqata Jan. 20, 75
to tasa; walk mo~nes in ritua.1 journey; carry varas from machaqjilaqata of same ayllu.
menor Jan. 20, '76 to Condo for a~~~ro f,esta; mediate
disputes; attend a lu fiestas.

Merezof June '77 Perform sacrWice and provision feast, lead

to procession; with Corpus mayordomo, erect
Corpus June '78 arkUlnCunachurch: maintaintoJan. 1.
I Macnaq novena Dec. 4, '79 Perform sacrifice and supply provisions and In carnavaI1980, perform sacrWice, provision
(novena elect) feast, and carry pillus to standing aWerez of
of to dance-woup tinku platoon to accompany
Dec 4, '80 1980 al erez on Dec. 4, 1980. Santa Barbara (of Santa Barbara raki).
Santa Barbara
Dec 4, '80 n "'~l carnaval, erect lurK' a po e, perform
Perform sacrifices and provision feast on Dec. sacrifice,
Novena of provision feast. receive pillus from
to 4, 1981; provide dance-group tinku platoon to
~~;;"~~~:II~~~ s~~~~T':'~r~Ut7.~t~
Santa Barbara Dec. 4, '81 loin other Manxli-Kawalli groups.

Figure 8.3. The principal duties of a single career path (Guadalupe tayksa t"aki), as illustrated
by the career of Hilari6n and Virgilio Mamani. The sequence does not include hamlet-level and
interhamlet duties of the "small fiesta path" or other principal life-crisis rites of the human
social career as a whole from birth to after death. Such rites entwine individuals in relations of
mutual obligation from the moment an infant is named, through marriage, house building, first
tasa payment, participation in dance groups of both one's own patriline and that of the larita,
and duties performed in spirit and in effigy after death. Although duties were carried out by
Virgilio Mamani after Hilari6n's death in 1978 (with his mother in 1980 and with his new wife
in 1981), Hilari6n was present in effigy through the carnaval of 1981.

subordinate, not-yet-adult dancers are offered in the tinku battle, in

which their blood is spilled upon the plaza and the pampa. In return, the
sponsors' own followers make them bloom by draping over their
shoulders the "social skin" made of the animals' pelts, even as they
exclaim that the true sponsors of the feast are the mallkus and Tatala
himself, whose herds are men. Finally, all together sacrifice the saint's
image, "making it bloom," removing its "clothing," and receiving the
substance of the mediating power it represents.
398 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

The identification of man and llama begins during the rites of qarwa
k"ari in the sponsors' village corral. Here the male sponsor honors the
herd when his assistants decorate the animals' ears and backs with spun
and died yarn and then asperse them with ch'uwa (clear chicha), an act
called paq"arayafia.
Subsequently the sponsor's wife-takers, his sisters' or daughters'
husbands, are transformed into "human llamas" and demand that they
themselves receive paq"arayafia, or at least part of it (the ritual food and
drink). So the sponsor's control over the herd is explicitly equated with
his control over a class of men, through the similitude established by
what amounts to an exchange of "pelts": The tullqas, being an effemi-
nized and laughably ineffectual kind of men, express their adolescent
sexuality in the clothing of the jafiachu, the weak and "laughable" alpaca
stud. The llantirus of the herd, which are soon to be sacrificed in earnest,
are subsequently dressed in the clothing of an admired class of men, the
tinku fighters, for their entrance into town.
Complicating matters is the sponsor's equation with the llama, though
unlike his wife-takers he becomes the llantiru (by being addressed as
such beginning in the hamlet festivities). During the banquet of p"isturu,
he and his wife are again equated with llamas during their own
paq"arayafia. Thus the male sponsor is identified with the sacrificial
victim and with the role of herd leader. But if he is the sacrificer in the
corral, who is the sacrificer of the sponsor? The answer must be the
gods, especially the sky gods (but also the major mountain gods), who
are the herders of men (awatiris). Indeed during the ch'allas just prior to
the ritual banquet, followers exclaim that "the sun is sponsoring the
fiesta" or "the saint is sponsoring the fiesta" or "the mallku is sponsoring
the fiesta."
However, the sponsor is also addressed, during his paq"arayafia (as is
the jilaqata during many of his rites, such as the kumun wilara), as
"awatiri" (herder). As such, he usurps the place of the god (who, as
herder of men, should be the one to sacrifice them). Acting in loco dei,
the sponsor symbolically sacrifices certain categories of followers. He is
the sacrificer of the jafiachu, of course, but also of the not-yet-adult men
of the patriline.
In their roles as dancers, musicians, and warriors, the accompanying
group of young men (who also come to the feast prepared for courtship),
along with the tullqas, become the sponsor's human herd. And in the
tinku, they are compared to the tinkur llantir awkis, the sacrificial llamas
"who go to tinku." The llamas are, of course, killed and their blood and
Living on Tatala's Path 399

fat offered to the gods. In the tinku, the dancer-musician-fighters seek to

injure or kill an opposite-moiety fighter, not to offer the blood to their
gods, but to scoop it up and drink it, inverting the direction of sacrifice.
In the distribution of meat during the day of the banquet, this
equation is again stated in the nature of the dance group portion. In
what constitutes the return of the sacrificed llamas in the form of the
dance group, the sponsors drape the boys' shoulders with the feet and
tracheas of the sacrificed llamas, all the better to sing and dance, run and
shout.
The "sacrifice" of the wife-takers (as janachus) and the young men of
the male sponsor's own patriline (as an unspecified type of llama) marks
both as members of the herd of which the sponsor is at once the lead
male (the llantiru) and the herder (awatiri). So the sponsor takes both the
role of the ideal sacrificial victim in the human herd, the llantiru, and
that of the sacrifier of that herd, the awatiri, and especially of Tata
Awatir Awksa, "Our Father Shepherd," which is to say the Solar-Christ,
Tatala. His dual role is consistent both with the social function of the
authority, who must mediate between the group and state authority by
being simultaneously a member of both orders, and with a vision of the
nature of the internalized hegemonic relationship between the state and
its associated sky gods, on the one hand, and K'ulta society and its local,
underworld animal-herding gods, on the other. 43
In the final "sacrifice" of the fiesta, as the last act carried out in the
town, the fuera gives up the image to the following year's fuera, from the
opposing moiety. In this rite, the spatial configuration of participants
neatly recapitulates both social and cosmic orders. Like the llama which
gives up its blood and fat to the gods, its "heart" and breath to humanity,
and its pelt and body parts to "human llamas," the saint gives up its
blessing after being symbolically butchered. The sponsors and their
followers then go home to their hamlet dressed in the clothes of the
saint.
People thus dressing in the clothing of the gods refers us back to other
exchanges of clothing in the feast. Remember that the llama herd comes
to the ritual-center town dressed in the clothes of men; the sponsor's
human herd (typified by the janachus) dresses in the clothing of llamas;
the sponsors (like the saint image) dress in the transformed pelts
(weavings) during their paq"arayana. All are iconic indexes of the raising
of the clothes givers to the honored status of sacrificial victim and an
appropriation of certain of their substances and/or qualities by the
wearers. In the last instance, the sponsors' followers return from their
400 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

tinku with the opposite moiety, dressed in the saint's clothes, in a

transformed state, embodying the power of mediation enacted in the
fiesta's transformation of human control over llamas into authorities'
control over men.
The ancestral wak'as and mountain gods that were once "created" by
clothing them in precious cloth and the sacrificial pilgrimages construing
social memory still persist in K'ulta, but the visible, tangible, and
portable manifestations of the mountain gods and the ceque paths of the
pilgrimages have been taken over by the saint images and pathways to
churches and chapels. Saints now serve as the intermediaries through
which people can speak with the gods, whether those inside the
mountains or the heavenly shepherd of men. And it is only through being
clothed in the "skin" of the saints that men become authorities capable
of bridging the gap between the gods of the conquerors, the K'ultas, and
the mountains.
Making use of saints' dual powers to travel horizontal pathways
linking social groups and vertical ones bridging the gap between the
here-and-now of this earth and the distant-and-past creative journey of
Tatala, K'ultas appropriate for social use the agentive and transformative
power they attribute to the god of conquest, who first harnessed Chullpa
powers to the seasonal round and not only brought agricultural and
herding life-ways to men, but also made human life itself a journey
leading to death. By appropriating Tatala's powers, K'ultas lay claim to
control over their own destinies. To do so, they have understood those
agentive powers as a relationship between space and time, laid out on
the landscape on which they live. 44 The practices they must use to
control their destinies are historical ones.
Colonial and postcolonial state domination is (and has long been) an
inescapable reality, made into an integral part of peoples like those of
K'ulta, and not only as an external force impinging on the territory at its
political-center town. It is a truism to say that without the forces of
alax-pacha, there could be no human society as envisioned in K'ulta and
no manxa-pacha to oppose itself to the gods and men of the conquest.
But much more fundamentally, such polities have internalized the form
and processes of conquest into their very hearts; the relationship of adult
to child, man to wife, father to son, elder to junior, wife giver to wife
taker, all are construed in terms of the imposition of a form of hierarchic
control appropriated from without, as a species of self-conquest. This is
never so explicit as in the relationship between men and women, in
which men make themselves into privileged "encompassers" of other
Living on Tatala's Path 401

men (and women) by claiming the status of herders, even while they
label the arduous labors of actual herding as unworthy "women's work."
No doubt, as Denise Arnold (1988) insists, women have their own
ways of inverting the value system so that they corne out on top, just as
men have done vis-a-vis the colonial and neocolonial forces of the state.
Such forms of symbolic amelioration of gender asymmetries are very
much worthy of study. But as the (mostly male) activists of Bolivia's
"indian nationalism" might respond, there is no amelioration like taking
hold of tangible political power.
In K'ulta, political power and that of effective human agency, of
which political office is a special case, are achieved by taking a historical
turn, bringing the struggles of founding moments to bear on those of
today. Every K'ulta likens himself (and in a different way, herself) to the
ancestral hero Tatala, seeking to embody the powers that make self-
determination, a fully human existence, and effective political action
possible in daily social life. This would not be possible without the
commemorative monuments engraved on the landscape that link their
personal life-stories and political struggles with those of their anteced-
ents and provide pathways that help to recall, and to make palpable and
manipulable, the historical logic of conquest that established the concen-
tric asymmetries of power in which K'ultas are enmeshed.

INVERTED MEMORIES: FROM K"ARISIRIS TO PROTESTANTS

Not all K'ultas are entirely convinced by the sacrificial ways of doing
history that I have described. Some, especially younger men like the
textile trader-turned-truck driver I had met in Cruce and Julian Ma-
mani, whose efforts to turn the past to his private benefit sent him to jail,
were positively cynical about the old ways. This does not mean,
however, that they no longer believe in miracles-only that the miracles
they seek now require rites more like the ones their fathers condemn as
evil sorceries. This is especially true since the mid-1980s, when pro-
longed ecological catastrophe devastated the crops and herds of the
Altiplano and led massive numbers of K'ultas to emigrate temporarily or
permanently to mining centers, cities, and, especially, to coca production
zones. The mining sector also collapsed in this period, so the high wages
available for the job of treading coca leaves (mixed with kerosene) into
the first stage of refining cocaine were especially welcome. When K'ultas
move to cities, mines, or coca zones, and consequently forsake their
herds and fields in favor of wages, the beautifully elaborated poetic order
402 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

equating men and llamas ceases to convince. New circumstances require

new ways of understanding how man makes himself. Migrants need not,
however, invent themselves from scratch, for centuries of sustained
intercultural contact in the cities have generated a creolized culture,
replete with thousands of native "speakers," out of the former fruitful
miscommunication of cultural pidgin.
I introduced some of these notions in chapter 2, in reference to the
witches' market of Sagarnaga Street, the magical miniatures of the La
Paz Alasitas fair, and the figure of a commodity-laden mestizo Ekeko.
Other related examples are well described in the literature of mining
beliefs. Miners, who are union or guild organized and celebrate festivals
in honor of the patron saints as rural ayllus do, have no uywiris or
mallkus linking their homes to fields and pastures, for they have no herds
or crops. Instead, they dig in the earth for minerals. Deep inside the
mines, as Nash (1979), Taussig (1980) and Platt (1983) have extensively
documented, miners also pour libations and sacrifice llamas to manxa-
pacha beings called tios, revered as devil-shaped statues. The tios
resemble nothing more than the uywiris in their most dangerous,
human-form incarnations, capable of seducing the unwary towards a life
of ease that drains them of their life-substance. So too do tios strike a
bargain with miners, granting them mineral wealth in exchange for
frequent tribute, but also taking their pound of flesh. Tios can be kept in
check, however, by paying heed to the mine's patron saints (a practice
that goes without much comment in the cited analyses). In the mines and
the cities, "Christian" deities of the above and "chthonic," diabolized
indian deities of the underworld appear as caricatures of their rural
counterparts, stripped of all subtlety and cast into a stark Spanish versus
indian opposition.
That being so, it is no surprise that tios, like Ekeko and a host of new
chthonic shrines associated with urban patron saints, all demand tribute
on precisely Tuesdays and especially Fridays, when traditionalists in
K'ulta refuse to sacrifice llamas. In K'ulta, these days are saxra, "evil,"
days, when sorcerers work their dark spells, the kind that cause harm
rather than cure it. Men like the textile trader I had met in Cruce, whose
goal was to accumulate capital and avoid sharing it out among his
patriline mates, are suspected of just such sorceries. Gaining through
mysterious methods forms of wealth that are mysterious in themselves
(resting, not on harnessing the productive capacities of Chullpa powers
through Tatala labors, but on exchanging commodities) cannot be
explained other than through the use of inverted forms of ritual
Living on Tatala's Path 403

production. My wealthy young friend in Cruce was certainly thought to

have "gone to the dark side" in order to accumulate his wad of hundred
dollar bills; and for abrogating the fundamental principles of sociality, he
was also called q'ara, an insult meaning "naked" or "culturally peeled,"
that is, lacking in the social graces of a proper jaqi. In all truth, it must
be said that K'ulta suspicions about his having practiced antisocial
witchcraft were entirely correct.
The young man, who is today a vecino living in some other town,
exiled from K'ulta but more fully integrated into "national culture,"
confided to me that he has found a productive "secret," one which I
witnessed in another textile trader's storeroom. Forsaking the household
riwusyun intercessor that most K'ultas keep, miniature saints' images,
these young men (as I noted in chapter 4) have taken skulls of their own
ancestors from the cemetery, and now pay them a gruesome cult
exclusively on Fridays, in imitation of the urban and miners' preference.
In between trading trips, they keep their dollars locked in the jaws of
their skulls, each of whom is addressed by a personal name. I was able to
learn little more about these practices, which are widely condemned
within K'ulta, but which also may be a wave of the future. In a treatise
on the practices of powerful yatiris in the La Paz region, however, Tomas
Huanca (1989) reports a very similar practice. There, the skull-riwusyun
is purposely collected from the burial place of known, evil individuals,
whose terrible sins make them condenados, souls who shift uneasily
between embodied and disembodied form, permanently wandering this
earth with no hope of entering heaven. Our capitalist practitioners, it
seems, hope to harness and control the condemned soul so as to invest
their money with spirit (very much like Taussig's Cauca valley cane
cutters). Huanca's yatiris, however, use the skulls' malevolence to inflict
damage on their clients' enemies in a form of sorcery that in K'ulta is
also frowned upon.
From a K'ulta purview, both commit an even more fundamentally
antisocial act. No matter whose skulls they are, removing them from the
ground and exposing them to the sky risks bringing about a punishing
drought, presumably because Tatala recognizes in them his old Chullpa
enemies, in need of yet another desiccating blast of fire. To make money
into capital, in other words, is to unbalance the generative powers of
the K'ulta cosmos and to impoverish one's kinsmen. This, at least, is how
a greedy kinsman chooses a path that makes him a stranger. How, then,
do K'ultas understand strangers and interlopers like ethnographers,
priests, urban market intermediaries, and textile traders who come from
404 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

elsewhere, possess no lands or herds, and draw on fat and inexplicable

bank accounts? My own explanations of my source of support, a
"research fellowship," were never regarded as satisfactory. Some K'ultas,
I was to discover, had their own theories about how I prospered without,
apparently, doing a lick of productive labor.

Q' aras and K"arik"aris: Capitalism and Vampires

Not long after Easter of 1980, Mary and I ran out of supplies, money,
and health, and returned to La Paz for a break from fieldwork. We were
gone for about three weeks. I had wanted to return in time for the
preparations for Corpus Christi, one of K'ultas five festivals, and we
made it back in plenty of time. But something had changed the demeanor
of my Mamani friends.
It did not take long to get to the bottom of the problem. Just before
our departure from K'ulta, a Carata man, one of this year's mayordo-
mos, had arrived in Santa Barbara to carry out his duties as caretaker of
the church and its images. During our absence, he had suddenly and
mysteriously died one night while engaged in libations and incense
offerings to Santa Barbara with some visiting yatiris. Now, the Caratas
are the patriline that had sought a warrant of arrest against my Mamani
hosts in Vila Sirka for having murdered one of their men during a festival
fight. Clearly this feud now played into what happened next. It does not,
however, explain it away.
There being no reasonable explanation for his death, the Caratas
threw the blame on me. I was, they said, a k"arik"ari or k"arisiri, literally
a "cut-cut" or "fat cutter." This is a well-known sort of demon in K'ulta:
Many have said that the priest is one; others have reported suspicions
about certain schoolteachers, Cruce vecinos, and marketeer interlopers
in the territory. This being a widely understood and very serious
accusation, I had a good idea from the literature of what was meant and
the sort of trouble I was in. In most of the cases I knew of where
ethnographers (and often archaeologists) had been so accused, they had
been forced to flee, sometimes fortunate to get away with their lives.
That is because k"arisiris are so terrifying to K'ultas and hated by them
that the guilty party must be killed. A k"arisiri, in essence, is a being
capable of putting ordinary humans into a trance and then magically
removing their very life force, leaving the victim no memory of the event
and no scars as evidence of the crime. 45
We have already encountered an early k"arisiri scare, in Molina's
parroting of a priest's 1570 report from Parinacochas, when indians
Living on Tatala's Path 405

accused Spaniards of stealing their body fat. There, the term used was
"iiaqaq," a word that also means "one who cuts," but which additionally
designated the Inca priest who actually put sacrificial victims to the
knife. The difference when applied to Spaniards was the use to which
such fat was supposedly put: It was said to be sent to Spain, where it was
transformed into holy oil.
Nowadays, k"arisiris, whose name also recalls an association with
sacrifice (qarwa k"ari), turn the substances they magically remove from
healthy rural people into money, deposited in banks. Although k"arisiris
have a decided preference for the fat that adheres to internal organs,
especially that around the kidneys, they do not limit themselves to fat.
Their appetites also run to blood. As it was explained to me, the blood
of city people is "bad." So to maintain their vigor, they must periodically
exchange their blood for that of a healthy person. Rather than seeking a
transfusion in a hospital, k"arisiris go straight to the source, performing
a blood exchange with their stupefied victim, in which the victim receives
the exhausted and bad blood and gives up the potent blood of the
countryside.
Body fat and blood: No doubt the reader has noticed, as Gose (1986)
brilliantly deduced by combining Bastien's (1978) account of the circu-
lation of sacrificial substances and ethnographic descriptions of k"ari-
siris, that the substances involved are precisely those that contain the
generative power that is Tatala's due in festival sacrifices. K"arisiri
practice, that is, amounts to a terrible and antisocial manipulation of the
logic of sacrifice. Whereas festival sponsors symbolically offer them-
selves to Tatala by metaphorically equating themselves with the llantirus
that are killed, the k"arisiri takes the god's portion, not of a metaphoric
human body, but of a real one. The k"arisiri performs a travesty of the
herders' Eucharist and takes vital generative powers out of the proper
form of circulation among gods, men, and animals, in order to produce
an antisocial kind of wealth that cannot sustain itself, but must be
periodically renewed through additional knifery.
Don Manuel explained this to me in some detail so I would be
forearmed when the Caratas made their move, which was very soon. I
was dumbfounded. I had in fact been far away from K'ulta when the
death took place, but no alibi could save me here. K"arisiris can become
invisible, so my absence proved nothing.
The situation was no joke. Mamanis informed me that a group of
Caratas had come by Vila Sirka just a few days before, and they had
kicked down a few Mamani doors and thrown some sticks of dynamite.
406 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

They promised to come back until they found me. The very next day I
saw one of the Carata men in Santa Barbara. He made the sign of the
knife across his throat and told me that I would be "butchered like a
llama" for my crime. I had to do something, and ethnographers'
traditional reticence in reporting these kinds of experiences gave me no
clues as to what I should do. Fortunately, I still had friends on the town
council, and that was my recourse. Acting on the advice of Manxa-
Kawalli's jilaqata and alcalde, I made a formal denuncia before the
corregidor, demanding that the Caratas come forward to explain their
threats of violence. Council officials advised me to take the den uncia to
Challapata and to bring the subprefect, and his gun, back with me.
Instead, I got his signature on my demanda, to lead the Caratas to
believe that friends in high places might come to my aid. When I
returned from Challapata, the council issued an arrest order and brought
some fifteen Carata men from their hamlet to the council office, where
we faced off under conditions more to my liking than a lonely inter ham-
let path.
While I was not actually tried for blood- and fat-sucking witchcraft,
the Caratas did repeat their accusation, which I roundly denied. I too
accused them of trying to get at the Mamanis through me. Finally, the
corregidor summoned the registro civil, who wrote out an acta de buena
conducta, a routine measure when no outright resolution of a dispute is
forthcoming. The document that I signed, along with the Carata men,
promised that whoever engaged in any recurrence of violence would face
a fine of five thousand pesos (just the amount that had sprung a Mamani
from jail where he had been held for killing a Carata). The document
itself was not reassuring. More to my liking was the formal apology
ceremony that ended the session. Following the corregidor's instructions,
each of the Carata men knelt in front of me and apologized for any
unintentional affront while shaking my hand and clasping me around
the shoulder. When they were finished, it was my turn to do the same,
and the event came to an end.
I have been back to K'ulta many times since then, and only once has
this business with the Caratas been problematic. Of course, I avoid
taking the long path from Cruce to Santa Barbara, which passes through
the Carata hamlet in an isolated and rocky little valley. And on one visit,
when I discovered that the Carata man who had promised to cut my
throat was jilaqata of the ayllu, I saw fit to cut my stay short.
Fortunately for me and for the feuding K'ultas, such roles rotate to other
patrilines every year.
Living on Tatala's Path 407

As a person enmeshed in the logics of wages and commodified social

relations, I will always be an interloper in places like K'ulta. Joining the
ranks of K'ultas who are themselves alienated from the brand of social
memory expressed in fiestas, libations, and stories of Tatala, I will also
remain a q'ara, a "culturally naked" person devoid of essential knowl-
edge of proper human sociality, suspected of inverting "traditional"
K 'ulta methods of undoing the sorcery of history with its memory.
However, from my perspective, and indeed from the perspective of
disaffected K'ultas who convert to Protestantism or become vecinos in
other towns or proletarianized migrants to the city, sacrificing to tios in
search of money and commodities, my own techniques of social memory
are not inversions of someone else's, but a means to my own personal,
social, and historical ends. As for sixteenth-century Spanish chroniclers,
my effort to encompass and inscribe a history of K'ulta and K'ulta
histories can also be construed as insidiously colonizing and imperialist,
even though I turned down K'ulta offers to settle there as a store-owning
vecino. Whether or not we claim any special ethnographic authority or
scientific objectivism, however, we all seek to understand ourselves in the
mirror of our encounters with "others," even when we construe those
encounters as pasts or as histories. Let us then take stock of the
relationship among the many kinds of social memory I have surveyed.
 Chapter Nine

Conclusion
Ethnography and History of
Social Memory and Amnesia

Our very laws were made by our conquerors; and whereas it's
spoken much of chronicles, I conceive there is no credit to be
given to any of them; and the reason is because those that were
our lords, and made us their vassals, would suffer nothing else to
be chronicled. We are now engaged for our freedom; that's the
end of parliaments, not to constitute what is already according to
the just rules of government.
-John Wildman, Putney Projects

ORALITY AND LITERACY, ETHNOGRAPHY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

I have sought in this book to bring about a cohabitation (if not a

marriage) of historical and ethnographic sources and methods, so as to
write a history of K'ulta and also account for K'ultas' history. Using the
concept of social memory, I have also aimed to question tacit assump-
tions about the supposed gap between oral and written culture that has
helped to shape the disciplinary divide between anthropology and
history. I have not used the term "ethnohistory" to characterize my
enterprise, precisely because the term tacitly routinizes the antinomy
between orality and writing, anthropologist's interview and historian's
source, that I seek to question. Rather than referring to "another people's
way of doing history," along the lines of other "ethno" anthropological
specialties (such as ethnobotany, "another people's knowledge of
plants"), "ethnohistory" has simply served as a label for the ghetto into
which we place the pasts of peoples without writing. It has long been an
anthropological ghetto, populated by book chapters on the precolonial
situation. "Ethnohistory" has not often been used to label the study of
myth and cosmology (apart from the approach of a few who treat them
as oral sources of objective chronologies), because these are the opposite

408
Conclusion 409

of what historians often regard as their own object of study. Historians

have long thought themselves to be debunkers of myths rather than
students of them.
Although today various postmodern turns among historians have led
them to seek out the "secret" and unchronicled stories of subordinated
peoples, dominated classes, and patriarch ally silenced women in various
places in the world and many points in time, devising, in order to do so,
innovative approaches to documents (those of social and cultural history,
for example) such as I have tried to use here, they have still not often
turned their attention to peoples without writing. Even less often are
historians terribly interested in the distinct ways of interpreting the past
in which the past peoples they write about may have engaged. No matter
what inroads the various postmodernisms have made into the profes-
sion, the discipline of history remains that of objectivism, and the
historian's work is judged by the adequacy of his or her writing as a
representation of "what actually happened," or at least "what was
actually written."
In one way at least, historians and ethnographers have long engaged
in similar means of laying claim to disciplinary authority, means of a sort
that have of late come into question in both disciplines. Historians play
on the duality of the term "history" to suggest that their line of work,
writing history, is a relatively unproblematic business of providing an
account of history in the commonsense meaning, the "what really
happened" of the past. Anthropologists, in contrast, use the term
"ethnography" to describe both what they write and the process of
fieldwork through which they learn about the subjects of their writings.
Playing on this slipperiness in comparable ways, historians and ethnog-
raphers grant themselves authority (underwritten by university degrees)
to make pronouncements on the truth or empirical factuality of "what
happened" or "what they were actually like." Through such techniques,
both sorts of scholar have long evaded fundamental questions about the
politics and partialities that underlie their work.
These are the ruminations, the reader should recall, of a symbolic
anthropologist who found himself turned into a historian. Neither my
historian colleagues nor my anthropologist ones will perhaps find my
disciplinary (transdisciplinary?) transgressions amusing. There are some
good reasons for the existence of disciplinary specialization. There are
also, however, good reasons to work on disciplinary frontiers.
There is no arguing, though, the degree to which written and
unwritten pasts supplement as well as challenge one another, or at least
410 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

challenge disciplinary boundaries. When I, as an anthropologist, began

to talk seriously about working in archives to supplement understand-
ings of the past gained through ethnography, a prominent historian
advised me to cease and desist. Orally transmitted memory, he told me,
is unreliable as a historical source after the passage of only a few
generations, perhaps only one. If I was interested in history, he said, I
should gather oral accounts of the past, especially that known to my
interlocutors through personal experience, the results of which might
then be collated with documented facts by a professional historian.
Regardless of the admonitions of such disciplinary gatekeepers, I have
found that writing about the past using documentary sources and
writing about ethnographic presents on the basis of talk and observation
are in many ways not only complementary projects but also similar ones.
The kinds of nonwritten social memory that I foreground in my
ethnography, imbedded in ritual acts and formulaic speech and grounded
in meanings lived in the social landscape, do not often leave written
traces. The colonizing state demanded writings for its archive, and
subordinated peoples were duly represented there. But the colonial self
was divided into public and private, canonic and clandestine. So colo-
nized peoples' most successful contestations of the colonial project
remained largely uncharted. They could not be understood on the basis
of the official public "text" of orthodox practice, but only by "reading"
their hidden and mostly nonverbal commentaries. K'ultas do not inter-
pret the Eucharist through sacrificial metaphors, incorporating into
themselves Christ's powers, for the benefit of priests and other outsiders.
They do so for themselves.
There have been many pitfalls in carrying out my project, not the least
of which is the fact that what I write is itself a representation with
scholarly pretensions, although not necessarily objectivist and scientific
ones. I have nonetheless made sure that readers know I was actually
present in K'ulta, striving through text and photographs to establish my
ethnographic authority (as one who was there, who saw and experienced
and can therefore provide a reliable report), just as I have cited archives
and quoted from documents, grounding historical interpretation in solid
(tangible, seeable) evidence. Regardless of my disclaimers, these are
standard objectivist credentials. To demystify such pretensions at least in
part in the ethnographic sections of the book, I have taken a reflexive
turn, remaining on the scene in my accounts so that readers may judge
the adequacy of my account and recognize its origins in discourses and
power-laden social relations, rather than in antiseptic observation.
Conclusion 411

My reflexive turn in history required a somewhat different approach.

I have described in a few cases my relationship to the documents I quote
or cite, but demystifying the process of historical interpretation and
writing is more difficult. 1 The historian's work methods, such as the
process of determining what constitutes an acceptable topic, the selec-
tion of documents for analysis, and the determination of what is relevant
or irrelevant to the topic, are all easily concealed from the reader;
historical representation is no more transparent than ethnographic
representation, although questions of ethics are less of a problem when
one's sources are dead.
Rather than subject the reader to what would be a very dry and
one-sided account of my dialogues with documents (but see Photograph
9.1), 2 I can only aim to make clear what interested and politically loaded
goals informed my research and writing. I do, though, call into question
the specifically historical consciousness and historical projects of those
who wrote my sources. And so I queried interests and power-infused
projects of Spanish chroniclers, and also the Spanish, indian, and
in-between "informants" and authors of curriculum vitae reports that
are sources for us as they were for chroniclers. One of the reasons I did
so was to highlight the potential distortions and lies of which we should
be wary. But I also sought to uncover the ways that their understandings
of the past and of history interfered with or precluded the possibility of
portraying Andean pasts and ways of doing history.
I have reached the conclusion that Spaniards' insistence on attending
only to oral narrative as historical source for understanding an Inca past
led them to ignore, apart from brief, superficial, and usually disparaging
accounts, the techniques by which Andean social memory was largely
kept. For Spaniards, history was the Word, on the one hand, grounded in
the authority of the Church and the empire and, on the other hand,
grounded in language, specifically in written language. They could not
be expected to understand readily the significance of histories recorded
in three dimensions, in the warp and weft of textile design and in the
fingering of quipus, and replayed in the polysensual experience of
singing, dancing, drinking, and sacrificing. 3
I have tried to characterize how such techniques might have been used
by ancient Andeans, and what kinds of meaningful pasts might have
been conveyed by them. There may be little to go on, but all is not lost.
If one cannot unearth in colonial documents much information on
pre-Columbian pasts that has not been mangled in the process of the
cultural translation into written Spanish, one can focus on the process of
Photograph 9.1. A historian in his microfilm: author and documents in the archive. In the
top frame, the author reads a document in the archive, which is also the chambers of the
juzgado de Poopo and the anteroom of the jailhouse. The photograph was taken with the
author's camera, in use for microfilming documents, by a resident ethnographer studying
hamlets of Vrus Moratos along nearby Lake Poopo. Vrus Moratos named themselves for
the seventeenth-century scribe who wrote land titles they found in this archive, like the
composicion title in the bottom frame. The document is a colonial record of a boundary
pilgrimage between mojones, dividing Vru lands from those of Sura peoples. Archivo del
Tribunal de Poopo, September 1982. (Photograph of author by Darwin Horn; photograph
of document by author)

412
Conclusion 413

cultural translation itself, which is to say, on the genesis of the colonial

interculture that is still very much alive in the Andes. Crossing the border
between orality and literacy (or rather, between polysensual pasts and
the visual ones of writing) was my goal in the chapters of part 2. By
doing so, I sought to foreground neither "pure Andean" nor "pure
Spanish" cultures and histories, but rather the history of the border
culture that resulted from the colonial encounter and the new pasts that
it produced.

HISTORICIZING THE COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL FRONTIERS

Portraying the long-term interplay and complicated development of

forms of social memory belonging to colonizers and colonized is an
arduous task, especially when considering that our sources for under-
standing preinvasion systems of social memory are the writings of men
who sought to erase Andeans' memories, to rewrite the Andean past in
their own image. Although not entirely successful from their own point
of view, Spanish missionaries and administrators did alter Andeans'
modalities of social memory. They did so by substituting Spanish statist
forms for Inca ones; by transforming the relationship between native
lords and native "vassals"; by moving Andeans about, regrouping them
and resettling them into new kinds of living spaces, with new coordi-
nates of time and space regulated by tribute schedules, markets, forced
labor, transport cycles, and ritual calendars; and by interposing between
indigenous people and the recognized realm of the sacred a new set of
powerful intermediaries, the parish priests who oversaw much of the
day-to-day transformation of indigenous life. In fits and starts, rather
than as gradual progression, the kind of social group that shaped itself
by construing its own past went through successive reductions in scale
(for the most part, a progressive shrinking as earlier and larger-scale
formations were fragmented and reconstituted through new kinds of
collective practice in new kinds of settlements). Another important
factor in this process of fragmentation and reconstitution was the vast
trauma of the colonial demographic tragedy, since even before Spaniards
arrived in Tawantinsuyu and the lands of the Asanaqi diarchy, European
diseases had begun a massive attack on the Andean population. By the
early decades of the seventeenth century, at which time the last of the
pre-Columbian Andean memory specialists were dying of old age,
epidemic disease had also killed more than half, and perhaps as much as
three-fourths, of the total population. As Andeans began to regroup
414 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

within reducciones, often those to which they had fled the weight of mita
and tribute to become forasteros, demographic collapse and the succes-
sion of generations contributed their share to a cataclysm that brought in
a new era, with its own shape in space and time. Colonial "indigenous"
groups were then reformed vis-a-vis new nexes of collective articulation:
"Indians" constructed themselves as members of collective social groups
through new kinds of activities, in new sorts of places, according to new
calendars.
When the boundaries and modalities of the social life undergo radical
transformation, so will the shape of the past which gives that new social
life its significance. If we could appreciate Andeans' accounts of their
past at several points along the trajectory in time that begins for us in
1532 and ends in the present, we should expect them to differ from one
another, perhaps in the extreme. Extinct social formations do not
inscribe their genealogies in the consciousness of their members. Instead,
the members of surviving social groups have had to come to grips with
the past that could account for and reproduce new circumstances, new
kinds of articulation with new sorts of states. Indeed, the single most
pressing historical problem for the first several postinvasion generations
must have been to account for the Spanish conquest itself, to understand
a past that now included demographic collapse caused by Old World
diseases, the destruction of pre-Columbian forms of large-scale social
cohesion, the smashing of the old gods by Spanish priests, who brought
new notions of divinity, and the continuing cataclism of colonial and
neocolonial domination.
To the degree that Andeans succeeded in their efforts, they did so by
beginning to share with Spaniards new techniques for interpreting the
past and some of the critical topoi of Spanish and Christian social
memory. Through their colonial relationship, Spaniards and indians
came to share a limited vocabulary of concepts, deployed in recognizably
similar social spaces. They could recognize one another's saints' rituals
and communicate through a mutual cultural pidgin that named the acts
and gods they apparently held in common. And certain indigenous
people who moved permanently into colonial cities, adopting specifically
urban dress styles and other practices, came to share with locally born
Spaniards not only a term of identity (the former, in colonial Potosi,
were termed indios eriol/os; the latter, espanoles eriol/os) but also a
creolized culture. Indeed, the shared understandings, produced by colo-
nial practices, of clandestine meanings (indians' sorceries using saints'
images being one example) led creoles to indian shamans when they
needed to undo colonial sorceries (see Taussig 1987).
Conclusion 415

The social situation that gave rise to Andean pidgin and creole
cultures developed during a historically particular moment for both
Spaniards and indians. Sixteenth-century Spanish society was in the
midst of a struggle between state-sponsored orthodoxies and "popular"
heterodoxies over precisely which "doxa" (collectively construed systems
of belief and practice) were to be tolerated. Popular resistance to state
efforts to homogenize collective practice led to clandestine practices,
which, here and there, came under the harsh light of inquisitorial
surveillance. Within this Counter-Reformation situation, certain inge-
nious methods of veiling cultural critique from absolutist censors pro-
duced the narratives of the Spanish Golden Age and the flowering of the
novel. It is ironic that the form the novel then took, called the
picaresque, should have been that of a story of travel foregrounding the
deeds of the narrator. It is also ironic that, as Gonzalez Echevarria has
argued (1990), this novelistic strategy should be modeled on the relacion
and legal deposition, the colonial curriculum vitae composed for the
archive, through which authors both Spanish and Andean sought
legitimation of their actions and rewards from the king. Full of boastful
swagger and countless lies, hundreds of thousands of pages of such
petitions, personal reports of heroic deeds in service of the king, cram the
shelves of the Archivo General de Indias.
On the basis of such models, the fiction writer (and the philosopher
and social critic) could purvey damning social criticism only by putting it
in the mouths of madmen and the most pitiful criminals, all duly
punished and cured in the denouement. Repression of dissent, then,
would seem to be the midwife of creativity. Cervantes' fellow sufferers in
the Indies, subject to the scrutiny of their local parish priests, did not
have regular recourse to the pen or any compulsion to revise books of
chivalry. The colonial Counter-Reformation, however, targeted indig-
enous resistance to the king's civilizational program and especially
frowned on the misuse of Christian practice, deemed the devil's work.
Such repression did not dim but rather heightened Andeans' creativity as
cultural critics.
As a result of this colonial "pidgin culture of the Baroque" (Maravall
1987), town-based native societies have reproduced a bifurcated cosmos,
in which "Spanish-Christian" forms are apparently distinguishable from
"pre-Columbian-indian" ones. Yet they did so, not to mock Christianity,
but in order to be Christians in their own way. In K'ulta, libations to
mountain and hill deities, poured in alcohol, are strongly associated with
relatively closed and private contexts, while libations to sky deities, such
as Christ and the Virgin, are fully developed in the most open and public
416 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

of ritual contexts. Likewise, the eucharistic mass, procession and ban-

queting associated with the most publicly visible portions of patron
saints' festivals form but part of a larger indigenous liturgy, one that
includes closed sessions that frame the public processions, priest's mass,
and public banquets within the named phases of llama sacrifice. This
sort of bifurcated or interwoven ritual order provides fuel for the
interpretive stance that I called the "thin veneer" resistance paradigm, in
which the more public and "Christian" aspects of the total performance
are regarded as token kowtowing to the power of Church and state
authorities and institutions, while a native culture and cosmology are
preserved, intact and fundamentally continuous with pre-Columbian
cultural traditions, behind the scenes in clandestine form.
I hope to have shown just how mistaken such conclusions are. While
they register an essential feature of Andean societies, both urban and
rural, creole and indigenous, they fail to recognize what is most
characteristic of the Andes' intertwined postcolonial intercultures, which
is precisely the creative tension in the relationship between putatively
distinct prior, conquered underworlds and later, conquering heavens.
There can be nothing more "purely Andean" than the efforts of people in
the Andes, whether rural or urban, Spanish, indian, or in between, to
understand that relationship or to find ways to make use of it.
Once we accept that all parties in the colonial and postcolonial social
context are frontier practitioners, then what were barriers to
investigation-the evasions, miscommunications, lies, and buried truths
of documentary sources, or the analogous distancing techniques encoun-
tered by the ethnographer in search of clandestine cultures-are trans-
formed. No longer barriers to "what truly happened" or "true indig-
enous culture," they become keys for understanding. K'ulta authorities
struggled to keep me close to the realm of public events and orthodox
practices because their role is to mediate K'ulta and the world outside.
Likewise the natural-looking snapshot photographs that I hoped to
make were rejected by K'ultas, who did not refuse to be photographed
but aimed to control the representation by elaborately preparing for
stiffly posed portraits. I caught informality only by my own clandestine
practices and by aiming at children. The division of their practice
between public and clandestine constitutes the colonial and postcolonial
frontier. While I was once frustrated by the difficulty of getting past it, of
"being let in," it now seems that the process revealed the frontier and
that the frontier is the essence of K'ulta culture. The same might be said
for the difficulties encountered by historians when they seek "truly
Conclusion 417

Andean" culture in colonial documents but find that everything has been
tainted by asymmetries of power, by the intrusion of Christian and
Spanish practices and points of view, and by the interested and archival
orientation of writing and recording techniques. Yet practices of colonial
inscription, such as census visits, relaciones, trial testimonies, reports of
extirpation of idolatry, and the writings directed to Spanish authorities
by "transcultural" frontier authors like Guaman Poma or Pachacuti
Yamqui did not just distort prior Andean social realities; they were the
techniques that brought colonial social realities into existence. By
practicing a more reflexive ethnography and reflexive history, we trans-
form the obstacles to investigation into the investigation itself. They are
frontier scholarly practices for frontier societies.

POSTCOLONIAL SOCIAL MEMORY AND (POST?) MODERNITY

In pilgrimage centers dedicated to miraculous saint images, one may find

the Andean shamans of a type called ch'iyar yatiri (see Platt 1992). The
ch'iyar yatiri (literally, yatiri, "one who knows," ch'iyara, "darkness")
brings his client into a darkened house. There, after pouring libations
and burning incense, the lights are put out. The shaman then advises his
clients "to feel themselves not to be Christian," and begins blowing upon
a sort of stone whistle and ringing a little bell. Soon the beating of wings
is heard in the room-the mallku (not a hereditary lord from the past,
but a male condor from the mountain peaks) arrives and, through the
mouth of the shaman, intones the words of the mountain god in answer
to the client's questions.
In a way, the ch'iyar yatiri's ventriloquism is triple: Not only does he
mouth the words of an unseen god through the mouth of a condor that
he has created in the minds of his clients; he also gives voice to the image
of indian powers that his clients confer on him: Indians are the legitimate
heirs of a race of pre-Christian beings and of forces of natural produc-
tion, genesis, and wealth. In the popular urban view, they are maximally
"other" mediators of cosmic realms, upon whom Christianity and
civilization have been unsuccessfully foisted. Indians are said to worship
the pachamama, a pre-Christian earth goddess, and the mountain gods,
the mallkus. It is only through coercion, it is often said, that they also
pay lip service to Christian beings.
The ch'iyar yatiri's invocation to "feel yourself not to be Christian"
points his clients towards the interpretation to which they are already
inclined. This is never so clear as in the urban pilgrimage centers, where,
418 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

on the margin of town, Kallawayas and ch'iyar yatiris ply their trade, on
the edge of the folkloric festivals and carnaval processions linked to
miraculous patron saints in which city people nowadays carryon a
patriotic strut, costumed as indians in homage to their nation's original
citizens (Photograph 9.2). Such postcolonial passions will be the subject
of another book, but it is worth bearing in mind that the indigenous past
has become a critically important theme not only for scholarly books but
also in the identity projects of decidedly nonindian Bolivian national
elites. Nowadays, candidates for political office must do more than kiss
babies to attract sympathy and votes; they must costume themselves as
"authentic wild indians" and burn incense bundles at the urban shrines
of indian earth gods. Sometimes they even hire yatiris and Kallawaya
practitioners to aid them in their quests for political power.4
The ch'iyar yatiri's injunctions urge us towards the temptations of a
former anthropological romance. But taking his advice leads us into an
archaizing endeavor, that of understanding indigenous presents through
attention only to pre-Columbian indian pasts. Published ethnographies
along these lines have played into the hands of a progressivist Bolivian
elite search for a heroic-and still living-ancestral culture, an antique,
mystical-magical, nature and use-value-bound moral economy of signs,
that can serve as a native foil against which to highlight rational,
civilized, and capitalist assertions of modernity. Frontier shamanism like
that of the ch'iyar yatiri, carried out in the pilgrimage centers where the
Andean interculture has developed its most effective pidgin language
(one that foils communication while seeming to enable it), may well
provide Bolivian city folks with the stuff of an anti-imperialist, antico-
lonial, and locally grounded national identity. All this has led to some
positive outcomes, especially a new (though relative) degree of tolerance
by national elites for indigenous cultural difference. Much understand-
ing, however, is thereby sacrificed. By taking up a reductionist vision of
the indigenous present-denuded of Christian and Spanish elements-
urban elites in fact revalorize their old prejudices, now celebrating the
assumed difference that they used to abhor. Celebration, of course, is
preferable to the ethnocidal policies engendered by past abhorrence.
Seeking to separate colonizing and colonized cultures analytically in
the Bolivian context undermines the possibility of understanding to what
degree all participants in the long-running colonial and postcolonial
encounter have internalized one another. From the rural and indigenous
side of things, I hope that I have demonstrated that K'ultas are a
historical product of colonial and postcolonial discursive contests, even
Photograph 9.2. Oruro kindergarteners on parade in tinku dance costumes. Oruro,
August 1988. (Photograph by Mary F. Dillon, used with permission)

419
420 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

as the Counter-Reformation or baroque interplay between cultural

surveillance and clandestine secrecies presupposed and reinforced a
bifurcated cosmos that historicized the colonial situation itself, with
opposed indian and nonindian, wild and civilized, and Supay-Chullpa
and Tatala-Jesucristo as its separate temporally divided parts.
There is a point-by-point correspondence between the jilsa practice
described in the 1680 case of Martin Nina Willka, who helped his
clients, through recitations of the rosary and suitable Christian disci-
pline, to call upon the dove of the Holy Spirit in order to communicate
with Christ and the Virgin, and the pilgrimage-center ch'iyar yatiris'
practice, admonishing their clients, Christians all, to feel themselves not
to be Christians, in order to converse with mountain gods through a
condor. Such practices, like the K'ulta sacrificial Eucharist, are kinds of
frontier sorceries deployed to sunder, like the flash of lightning, the
barriers in space and time that otherwise hinder the project of taking
control of personal and collective destinies. Taken together they illus-
trate the critical role played by colonial and republican agents of the
state and Church in maintaining authorial control over the collective
practices that shape social memory: To a large degree, the wak'a
kamayuq Diego lquisi, the "indian Christ" Miguel AcarapilChiri, the
jilsa Ninan Willka, and the founders of Santa Barbara de Culta were
condemned for the heresy of trying to usurp that authority. Ironically,
today the ch'iyar yatiri survives without undue repression, and indeed
prospers in urban and pilgrimage-center contexts, precisely because his
practice is explicitly dissociated from Christianity. The systematic inter-
relation between the contemporary progeny of the colonial clash of
Spanish and indigenous ways might be said to constitute a Bolivian
metaculture. Understanding it requires us to treat the fuzzy foundary
between Spanish and indian, "national" and "ethnic" cultural realms, as
the object of analysis rather than an obstacle to it.
As an ethnographer-cum-historian I have sought to sew together
tidbits of personal experience, the "eyewitness" testimony of K'ultas,
documents from the past, and some understandings of national (and
nationalist) trends in Bolivia and the facts of international globalization
to provide a portrait of the historical currents that traverse K'ulta
territory and, like the region's highways and llama caravan trails, have
left K'ulta (and of course, Cruce) at a crossroads.
The highways that have diverted K'ultas from old llama-caravan
journeys lead to urban markets and migrant settlements, and also
towards national (and hence global) forms of social memory. Regardless
Conclusion 421

of its specific content, these tend towards kinds of individualized

subjectivity: that of the individual citizen whose rights stem from
membership in the only collective subjectivity that is now globally
salient, the national state erected on the basis of "popular sovereignty";
and that of the consumer within the now global capitalist marketplace.
"Indianist" movements such as the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac
Katari, whose Aymara-speaking candidate became vice-president of
Bolivia, have become palatable to old elite-dominated parties, not only
because the changing electorate and the appeal of populist candidates
necessitated an expedient alliance, but also because they have not
become separatist movements.
The indigenismo to which some Bolivian elites turned in the 1940s as
the basis for a new kind of patriotism has indeed helped to engender a
cross-caste and cross-class romance, along with the literary romances
that Doris Sommer calls foundational fictions (1991). It has also fostered
a level of respect for indigenous peoples that was unimaginable a century
ago. But that respect, even adulation, is a corollary of increased indian
engagement with the national state and participation in national culture
(expressed and generated through electronic media, national transporta-
tion systems, the ubiquitous spread of commodity culture, and massive
rural-to-urban migration). It is in this context that the politically
sponsored urban pageants (derived from old Catholic festivals and
pilgrimages) in the 1980s and 1990s have increasingly admitted and
actively encouraged first the representation (by non indian urban guilds)
and then the self-representation (by "folklore" groups imported from
rural communities) of the Bolivian nation's indigenous traditions. The
state, that is, has fostered respect for the nation's indigenous past, just as
the local media and messages of the social memory of rural collectivities
have been progressively displaced by mnemonic techniques-history
books, parades, and monuments-recalling the nation's past.
However, the postcolonial historical sorceries of Bolivian intercul-
tures are in no imminent danger of disappearing. Ritual action is capable
of transforming the relationship between context and human subjectivity
and, consequently, of transforming the ways in which messages can be
interpreted and by whom. Like the poetics of action employed by Diego
Iquisi, Miguel AcarapilChiri, the Chiris of Culta (Junt'uma), Martin
Nina Willka, the festive rebels of 1781, or the indigenous communities
that now travel to urban pageants and dramatize their llama sacrifices to
show city folks the country's true heritage, such nonverbal techniques of
memory, rather than the textual blips that flow across computer screens
422 PART THREE. SOCIAL MEMORY IN K'ULTA

or the thin and wavy lines that cover this paper, are best suited for
carrying out revolutionary transformations of the past, of the kind that
grant their practitioners control over the circumstances of the present.
From my point of view, when doing social and cultural history, it is
sufficient neither to document the political and economic exploitations
of the colonial situation nor to treat that situation as a discursive event
full of talk and symbols. 5 Instead we must work to understand how
Spaniards and indians of the colonial situation, and the creoles and rural
peoples of the postcolonial one, have themselves used history to under-
stand and represent their power-infused relationships, because their
understandings and miscommunications in the end helped to shape the
colonizers' projects as well as colonized peoples' replies to it.
Documentary Appendix
Notes
Glossary
References
Index

423
 Documentary Appendix

A. FRANCISCO PIZARRO'S GRANT OF ACHO AND GUARACHE TO HERNANDO

DE ALDANA

... I give you in deposit in the province of the Aullagas 823 indians:
260 indians with the cacique Acho in this manner:
a pueblo they call Acalvo with the principal Gualca, 38 indians;
and in another [pueblo] called Berenguela 18 indians;
and in another they call Millme 53 [indians], with the principal Colque;
and in another they call Pisquero, 9 [indians];
and in another they call Yana, 29 [indians];
and in another they call Callapa, 16;
and in another they call Taparo, 37;
and in another they called Yanaque, 21;
and in another they call Pucuro, a field [chacara] of the said cacique, 3;
and in another they call Yanaqui, a field of the said cacique, 21;
and also another pueblo called Sac ina, with a principal Acho, with 14 mitimaes,
of Aullaga who are near the settlement of Chuquisaca.
Indians and pueblos of the cacique Guarache: 560 indians in this manner:
In a pueblo called Quillaca 174 [indians];
and also close to the said pueblo of Quillaca, 30 who are fishermen;
and also another pueblo of the said Guarache called Sacari, with the principal
Talare, 33 [indians];
and another pueblo of the said cacique, they call Guamanoca, and the
principal Condor, with 21 [indians];
and another pueblo called Sacachapi, with the prinicpal Caya, 19;
and another they call Caya, with the principal Caya [sic], 33;
and another pueblo called Liocari with the principal Mollo, with 12;
and another pueblo they call Quilla with the principal Ururo, with 26;
and another pueblo they call Sinago, with the principal Copavilca, 14;
and near this said pueblo of Sinago another, 14;
and two estancias of the said cacique, one of them called Pachacaio and the
other Andaraque, with 11 [indians];
and a pueblo called Gualrarapapi, with the principal Toma, with 28;
and another pueblo called Sogara, with the principal Caquia, with 20;
425
426 Documentary Appendix

and another pueblo called Caracara with the principal Salcacho, 9;

and an estancia of the said cacique they call Llallaua, with 5;
and another estancia of the said cacique called Saco, with 6;
and another pueblo they call Hu Usca, with 40 and 9;
and another pueblo called Aparo, with 47;
and a garden [chacara de sementeras] they call Samancha, with 5;
and another pueblo they call Hu Urca, with 10 mitimaes who prepare food.
In the province of Paria, sixteen leagues from Pari a a pueblo called Xigona,
with the principal Chichina who commands 13 indians, apart from the 25
indians who the cacique Caligoana has there;
also 8 indians in an estancia called Molo in the province of Caracara, with a
principal named Acho. It is a maize field.
Also 25 in a pueblo called Urca, apart from those who the cacique Quita also
has there;
and also a village [una a/deal they call Conacona which is near Chuquisaca,
with a principal named Chilaca;
and also an estancia they call Tuisamo, four or five leagues from Chuquisaca,
3 indians subject to Guarache;
and here nearby a village they call Piusera, with 9 indians subject to Guarache;
and in another village they call Aye, 6 indians subject to Guarache;
and also in a pueblo of mitimaes from Aullagas called Sacasaca, 39 indians
with the principal Copagallo, subject to Guarache;
And also in the Moiosmoios a pueblo which is of Tirique called Suere, with 62
[indians];
and in another village next to this pueblo, 32 indians;
and in another pueblo they call Viroviro, 42 indians who are subject to the
cacique Ylla.

The original Spanish is as follows:

... yo vos deposito en la prouin~ia de los aullagas 823 yndios:
260 yndios con e/ cacique Acho en esta manera:
un pueblo que se dize acaluo con el prin~ipal gualca 38 yndios
y en otro que se llama berenguela 18 yndios
yen otro que se dize millme 53 con el prin~ipal colque
yen otro que se dize pisquero 9
y en otro que se dize yana 29
y en otro que se dize callapa 16
y en otro que se dize taparo 37
y en otro que se llama yanaque 21
y en otro que se dize pucuro chacara del dicho ca~ique 3
yen otro que se dize yanaqui chacara del dicho ca~ique 21
y mas otro pueblo que se llama sacina con un prin~ipal acho con 14 mitimaes
de aullaga que estan junto al asiento de chuquisaca
Documentary Appendix 427

Indios y pueblos del cacique Guarache: 560 yndios en esta manera:

En un pueblo que se llama quillaca 174
y mas ~erca deste dicho pueblo quillaca 30 que son pescadores
y mas otro pueblo del dicho guarache que se llama sacari con el principal
talare con 33
y otro pueblo del dicho cacique que se dize guamanoca y el prin~ipal condor
con 21
y otro pueblo que se llama sacachapi con el prin~ipal caya con 19
y otro que se dize caya con el principal caya [sic] 33
y otro pueblo que se llama liocari con el prin~ipal mollo con 12
y otro pueblo que se dize quilla con el principal uroro con 26
e otro pueblo que se dize sinago con el prin~ipal copauilca con 14
y ~erca de este dicho pueblo sinago I1lrl otros 14
y dos estancias del dicho cacique que la una dellas se llama pachacaio y la otra
andaraque con 11
e un pueblo que se llama gua~arapapi con el principal toma con 28
y otro pueblo que se llama sogara en el prin~ipal caquia con 20
y otro pueblo que se llama caracara con el principal salcacho con 9
e una estancia del dicho cacique que se dize llallaua con 5
y otra estancia del dicho cacique que se dize suco [or saco?] con 6
y otro pueblo que se dize huvsca con 40 y 9
y otro pueblo que se llama aparo con 47
y una chacara de sementeras que se dize samancha con 5
y otro pueblo que se dize hu vrca con 10 mitimaes de hazar comida.
yen la prouin~a de paria diez y seis leguas de paria un pueblo que se llama
xigona con el principal chichina que los manda 13 yndios sin los que alii
tiene el cacique caligoana que son 25
y mas 8 yndios en una estan~ia que se llama molo que esta en la prouin~ia de
caracara con un principal que se llama acho es sementera de maiz
y mas 25 en un pueblo que se llama Vrca sin los que tiene aqui tam bien el
cacique quita
y mas vna aldea que se dize conacona con vn principal que se llama chilaca
que estan ~erca de chuquisaca
e mas vna estan~ia que se dize tuisamo [or trusamo?] a quatro 0 cinco leguas
de chuquisaca 3 yndios subjetos a guarache
yaqui junto vna aldea que se dize piusera con 9 subjetos a guarache
y en otra aldea/11 vi que se dize aye 6 subjectos a guarache
e mas en vn pueblo de mitimaes de avllagas que se llama sacasaca 39 yndios
con el prin~ipal copagallo sujeto a guarache.
y mas en los moiosmoios vn pueblo que es de tirique que se llama suere [or
suire] con 62.
y en otra aldea junto a este pueblo 32 yndios
428 Documentary Appendix

y en otro pueblo que se dize viroviro 42 yndios son sulgetos al cacique ylla.
(from encomienda title, Cusco, 1539: Francisco Pizarro to Hernando de
Aldana; copied into AGI Charcas 53, item 1, Charcas, 1622: "Memorial
de don Diego Copatete cacique principal de los indios Quillacas y
Asanaques")

B. JUNTAS DE INDIOS EN PUEBLOS FORMADOS; ALCALDES HORDINARIOS,

REGIDORES CADANEROS [TITLE IN MARGIN].

AI Presidente e oydores del nuevo reyno de granada, que platicado con los
perlados de las provincias subjectas aquella audiencia horden en 10 que vieren
que conviene sobre si converna que se hagan pueblos de casas juntas en las
comarcas que los yndios e1igeren y sobre que aya alcaldes hordinarios y regidores
cadaiieros entre ellos e otras cosas:

EI Rey
A nos se a hecho relat;;i6n que al bien de los naturales de esas partes e a su
salvat;;i6n convernia que se juntasen e hiziesen pueblos de muchas casas juntas en
las comarcas que ellos e1igiesen, porque estando como agora estan cada casa por
si e aim a cada barrio, no pueden ser doctrinados como convernia ni promol-
garles las leyes que se hazen en su benefit;;io ni gozar de los sacramentos de la
Eucarestia y otras de que se aprovecharian y valdria estando en pueblos juntos e
no derramados. E que en todos los /28r/ pueblos que estuviesen hechos e se
hiziesen era bien que se criasen e proveyesen alcaldes ordinarios para que
hiziesen justicia en las cos as ceviles y tan bien regidores cadaiieros de los mismos
yndios que los e1ijesen ellos los quales tuviesen cargo de procurar eI bien comun
y se proveysesen ansy mismo alguaziles y otros ofit;;iales necesarios como se haze
a costumbre hazer en la provincia a de Tascala y en otras partes y que tanbien
tuviesen cart;;e1 en cada pueblo para los malhechores y un corral de cont;;ejo para
meter los ganados que les hiziesen daiio que no tuviesen guarda y que se les
seiialase las penas que lIevare y que se persuadiese a los dichos yndios que
tuviesen ganados al menos ovejunos y puercos en com un e en particular y que
tan bien en cada pueblo de yndios uviese mercados y plat;;as donde oviese
mantenimientos para que los caminantes espaiioles 0 yndios pudiesen conprar
por sus dineros 10 que oviesen menester para pasar su camino y que se les devia
conpeler a que tuviesen rozines para alquilar 0 para otros usos e que a todo los
suso dicho devian ser los dichos yndios persuadidos por la mejor y mas blanda e
amorosa via que ser pudiese pues hera todo en su provecho y beneficio y visto
por los del nuestro consejo de las yndias queriendo proveerse 10 fue acordado
que devia mandar dar esta mi t;;edula para vos e yo tove 10 por bien por quanto
vos mando que veays 10 suso dicho y platicado t;;erca de todo ello con los
perlados de las provincias subjetas a esa audient;;ia poco a poco ordeneys sobre
ello 10 que bieredes que conviene fecha en Valla do lid a nueve dias del mes de
Documentary Appendix 429

otubre de mil e quinientos y quarenta y nueve aiios Maximiliano la reyna por

mandado de su magestad sus altezas en su nombre. Juan de Samano. En las
espaldas estan seys rubricas y seiiales. (AGI, Indiferente 532, fols. 27v-28r)

C. CHAPTERS AND ORDINANCES FOR THE TOWN OF OUR LADY

OF BETHLEHEM,

which is in Tinquipaya, province of Caquina and Picachuri, for the indians and
vecinos and those who live and stay in the said town and the other towns subject
to the /7v/ province of Caquina and Picachuri, as follows:
Firstly, that each year on New Year's Day the alcaldes who have been
named in the said town ... shall meet jointly with the regidores and the alguacil
mayor and the cacique principal, and through their votes shall elect another two
alcaldes, four regidores, one mayordomo, and one alguacil mayor and two minor
ones, and a scribe, a teacher of children, and a prosecutor. And once elected the
alcaldes, regidores, and alguaciles shall be sworn to do, use, and exercise their
duties well and faithfully in His Majesty's name, always favoring the poor and
orphans and widows and needy, well looking after the republic and its business.
And the other officials, the mayordomos, scribe, schoolteacher, and prosecutor
of the town ... shall be sworn in by the alcaldes and regidores and alguac-
iles .... And if any of them or all for a year or more can find no other capable
persons, they may be renamed as many times as they like.
Item: That no alcalde or regidor may be named again for three years, until
the fourth year or later, after he has once been alcalde or regidor.
Item: That when equal votes occur for one of the said offices, the cacique
principal may elect the one he likes.
Item: The said alcaldes may judge all and whatever matters as alcaldes
ordinarios, in civil cases, without creating procesos or writing anything down,
giving aid and favor always to widows and orphans as have been said.
Item: That in judging civil cases involving fields greater than two almudes
of maize seed, after carrying out an investigation with witnesses inform the
corregidor of the City of Silver or PotosI, or whatever judge of naturales, so long
as the corregidor judges and sentences.
Item: That in the case of gold or silver mines exceeding twenty pesos in
value, after investigating with witnesses inform the judges or corregidores so that
they may judge and sentence.
Item: That the said alcaldes of the said towns named below have jurisdic-
tion over whatever criminal case, such as deaths or injuries to members, and the
imprisoned delinquent or delinquents when sufficient investigation of the case
has been completed, shall be taken and delivered to the justices of the City of
Silver or the Villa of PotosI, if there is no corregidor or judge of naturales.
Item: That in criminal cases where given commission to intervene, [you]
may not cut off limbs or pull out earrings of any delinquent indian, no more than
430 Documentary Appendix

to molest them with imprisonment not to surpass thirty days in jail, or shave the
heads of such delinquents. For those condemned to a lashing, they may not be
given more than a hundred lashes, and the whip shall have no more than four
tails, and be made of cured, not raw, leather. And each branch of the whip shall
not exceed in width one of the four of the hand, understood that the four
branches be as thick as the fingers of the hand.
Item: That a chest of three keys within a locked room in the houses of the
cabildo, and the chest shall have a box in one part where papers, prohibitions,
visitas, tribute lists, census books, and any other writings that ought to be in a
book in an archive.
Item: In the other part of the chest under three keys, shall be kept whatever
silver there is that shall be collected from each of the indian residents of the said
town to pay their tribute.
Item: The three keys shall be kept by one alcalde, one regidor, and a
mayordomo.
Item: Each six months when half the tribute is to be collected, a new book
shall be made, keeping track of the visita that remains in your power, of the ages
of each one; and the boy who reaches eighteen years shall be told to look for his
tribute so that he can pay it at the first semester's collection as well as in the
second. And inform the old man who completes fifty years of age that he does
not have to pay tribute six months hence, nor any other tribute or service, except
what comes to him as his turn of the wheel along with the other old men who are
able to walk or serve in whatever service owed to the curacas and principales.
Item: Likewise keep a book of great account and reason of the indians who
are given for service in the plazas of Potosi and Porco and for mercury or mines,
so that one or more indians do not go to serve twice, before the wheel turns
through all the tributary indians.
Item: That those indians who must serve in the said plaza, mines, or
mercury [works] shall carry food enough for the said month and may not collect
the wages they may have earned without the presence of their principal, so that
all they may have earned may be gathered together and carried to the chest and
handed over to be put inside by those who keep the keys, and the scribe writing
in the book the names of each indian and what each deposits in the said chest.
Item: That if some indian among them collects some silver that he earns and
spends it, unless he is sick or has another great need, the said alcaldes shall
punish him so he does not do it again.
Item: If in the service of the tambo or tambos in their charge, keep account
and reason as in the other services of plazas and mercury.
Item: If any mines are discovered in the lands and province of Caquina and
Picachuri, of gold or silver or soroche or other metals, the said alcaldes shall give
for them some indians to work for wages, and of whatever they earn keep
account and reason as with the other wages.
Item: And if in the ordinances that His Excellency [Toledo] has made for the
mines, it happens that indians may own mines, then the said alcaldes and cabildo
Documentary Appendix 431

in the name of their town may own mines for the said town and council, and put
indians into them to work them and take out metals with which to pay their
tribute.
Item: The said alcaldes and officials, curacas and principales, take great care
to execute and carry out the ordinance that His Excellency has given out about
forests, and carry out the penalties therein.
Item: That the animals owned by the community, which are 250 head of
cattle and 400 of Castilian sheep, the said alcaldes and officials of the council
take great care to assign men to guard them, and take great care with them. And
the said cowboys and shepherds shall remain a full year keeping watch over the
said herds, and from the fruit and multiplication that from them is taken, the
herders' tributes for each semester shall be paid.
Item: Whatever is left over of the increase in the herd shall be sold, or moneys
that are obtained from the said increase, cheeses, milk, or butter, be placed in the
chest of three keys, and from it shall be paid the tributes of sick indians and those
who were unable to work for the six months of the semester, and in the same way
help other poor indians with the said silver, such as those who have many children,
or those who have little strength to work and search out the tribute they owe.
Item: From what remains of the said silver, after this help has been given,
take account that it is distributed among all the other indians of the community,
to forgive that which they are obliged to pay of the tribute, and in this account
and reason the priests may be greatly charitable.
Item: From the increase of the said herds, take for the poor and sick and
needy some meat, by whatever order the priest of the said doctrina gives.
Item: Every year shear the sheep and divide the wool among the widows,
old women, and orphan girls, and for other necessities, and from that which is
left make storage sacks to be sold for your tribute.
Item: The alcaldes and regidores shall name as mayordomo an old indian
who does not pay tribute, to stay in the hospital to take in the sick and poor to
be cured, providing the said hospital with all that is required, before all other
things of the fruit and increase of the said herds.
Item: For the service of the holy church the said alcaldes shall take great
care in the order given to them by the priest who shall have charge of the town
and doctrina. And the said service shall be from among the children of the
principales and those of some rich men, and they shall walk to school serving by
their turns of the wheel the said boys, of whom some of the older ones shall be
taken, after the said town is built and completed and has been populated, so that
after having taught them song and music they shall serve in the church,
officiating at mass when the priest wishes to perform it sung.
Item: The alcaldes and regidores shall take great care to make sure that
neither the curacas or principales take the fields and lands that some indians
have, or that they do them any other damage or injury, nor give them work
taking advantage of the said indians, more than that which they are given and
assigned for service.
432 Documentary Appendix

Item: That the said alcaldes within their jurisdictions, may take charge of
cases within their purview not only of the indians and vecinos of their town, but
also over any other indian, mestizo, or mulato, up to the point of capturing them
and sending them prisoner and well guarded to the justices of the City of Silver
and Potosi, and in the same way they may take charge of any and whatever
indians who are within their territorial limits and mojones, and of any other
repartimiento with yanaconas who are in or reside or pass through your said
province.
Item: Whatever pecuniary penalties that the alcaldes collect may be applied
in thirds, one part for the work of the church and its ornaments, another part for
the hospital, and the other part for the town's public works.
Item: The said alcaldes shall give account to the cacique principal of the
said towns, and in his absence to his second persons, of any criminal or civil suit
of consideration that there may be among the indians, and shall do as he
commands if one of the other judges of the said towns agrees with his opinion.
Item: The said alcaldes may remedy and take ch~rge of any aggrievement
that any of the five principales of the five pachacas [an Incaic unit of one hundred
tributaries] causes to any indian, whether civil or criminal, and may capture and
punish him in the manner already declared. And if the delinquent is one of the
second persons, except the cacique principal, without investigation of the case
may be caught and sent before the justices of the City of Silver or the corregidor
of the said city or the Villa of Potosi.
Item: If the said accusation of crime or quarrel or complaint is made by or
against the curaca principal, without investigation and secretly one of the
regidores shall go to the said justices and apprise them of it so that they might
send for the said cacique and punish him.
Item: In all the things that come before the government of the said province
and town, if the cacique principal wishes to enter the cabildo he shall be supreme
in proposing any business, and if it is his wish, one alcalde or one regidor shall
be supreme above the other votes and opinions, except in the election of the
officials, in which it shall be as has been said.
Item: In the absence of the cacique principal and when the second person is
in town, he shall have the supreme vote as the cacique principal.
Item: The cacique principal or the second persons shall take care if some
indian or powerful principal does not wish to obey any of the alcaldes over
whatever misdemeanor or case he has done or committed, and may see to the
capture of the said indian or principal to be punished in conformity with justice.
Item: The minor alguaciles with the prosecutor shall take care to see what
babies are born to bring them before the priest to be baptized.
Item: The said prosecutor and bailiffs shall bring all the people on the
festival days they must keep, and the other days of the week that men, women,
young boys, and young girls are obligated to go to doctrina.
Item: The said prosecutor shall take care in manifesting to the priest and
telling him who is living in sin [amancebados] so they may be punished.
Documentary Appendix 433

Item: The said prosecutor and minor bailiffs shall take weekly turns making
sure that boys and girls come to doctrina in the afternoon and morning in the
order that the priest gives them for it.
Item: No person whether Spaniard or of any other quality or condition may
take lands and fields that at present are left in the towns that by my order have
been depopulated, so that they may come to live in the said town of Our Lady of
Bethlehem, which are the following towns:

Caquina Saruquira Antora

Yanane Chiquibi Tactari
Picachuri Omaca Guayrarusa
Tomoro Tantaqui Toroma
Tulala Torcopaqui Locroma
Entacalla Torcosasale Colo
Ancoma Pinapina Coapalla
Guacale Coloyo Soycoco
Coayapo Quirula Yurina
Puchula Ynroynro Salama
Yaguacare Aucaqui Quinemiquisi
Sabelico

Item: If it seems convenient to sell some of the said lands and fields because
they are too far away or for any other reason, the caciques may not sell them
unless the alcaldes and regidores meet together in council and seek license for it
from His Excellency and the Royal Audiencia, and if this is not done, the sale
shall be void.
Item: The cacique principal of this town, jointly with one of the alcaldes
and regidores, shall within six months from now divvy up to each tributary
indian and to the old indians and the poor and widows, all the lands and fields
that they might need, for planting maize as well as potatoes and other seeds, and
they may not sell them to any person. And the said lands of each indian shall be
divided from the other and marked with mojones, to the judgment of the cleric
priest who shall be there.
Item: If some necessity should arise that the community pay some silver in
favor of the community, let there be no collections for it except by the license of
the Royal Audiencia or of the corregidor of the city, rather take what is needed
from the fruits and rents of the said herds, when license is given to such effect.
Item: The caciques and principales shall not occupy the male and female
indians by taking them along to the City of Silver or to Potosi or to any other
place, and if it were necessary let them be from among those who have been
assigned in service and from among no others.
Item: None of the said caciques principales shall send any of the said
indians anywhere with letters or messages, and if such messengers are necessary
for the good of the republic, they may not do it for charity, and the master will
434 Documentary Appendix

be Lope de Mendoza, and for this reason they must be free from tribute and they
must be given the salary that the caciques and alcaldes and regidores and the
scribe of the council see fit, and I order that it be taken from the rents of the
community goods.
Item: The said alcaldes and principales shall take care to have trees and
fruits of this land, and those of Castile, planted in their lands, so that there be
gardens and orchards to help with sustenance, since the land is appropriate for it.
Item: The alcaldes of each one of the towns shall whip all and any indians
who plant in their lands, of the [indios quitas] or yanaconas of any Spaniard
whatever, unless they are paid ten loads of any seeds of maize, potatoes, or other
seeds that are sown and harvested by means of a loan or lease.
Item: The said caciques and alcaldes of the said pueblo of Our Lady of
Bethlehem shall convince and compel and command their indians to give and
serve the Spaniards who are lords of fields and herds who might be in their
province, renting themselves to them or working for the wages that His
Excellency has ordered, by days and weeks or by the year. And the said alcaldes
shall make comply and provide to the said Spaniards all the service or wage
workers they might need, under pain or privation of the said office.
Item: Those of Caquina shall have twenty indians on that of Marquez and
Yanamier twenty houses [sic] as the lord president and judges have ordered; and
those of Picachuri ten, understood without the women or children, because they
die, and in the same way those of Picachuri shall have five old men in a house
and shack in Ancoma, so that they might guard the lands and fields, and they
shall be changed as the priest sees fit and gives them license. Diego de Sanabria.

Ordinances for Good Customs

And because the reducci6n of these indians is made in the town of Our Lady of
Bethlehem so that by coming together they live together in policia as Christians,
to be better indoctrinated, the following must be kept:
From here on there shall be no gatherings in drunkeness, apart from some
festival days with the license of the priest of the doctrina, and before the sun sets
the fiesta must end, under the penalty that His Excellency shall set.
And the caciques and principales may not ask for nor take female indians to
have as their concubines, or sleep with them, under the penalty of the chapter
above.
And because of the custom that no l12rl indian wishes to marry a virgin
without first lying with her, and without which they will not marry, neither the
priest of the doctrina nor the cacique shall consent to this, subject to the said
penalty.
And because they name each child in conformity to their rites and auguries
that they keep from the time of their infidelity, giving to some the name of the
moon and to others, of birds and serpents and animals and stones and
mountains, the first name that the father or mother hears at the time of the
Documentary Appendix 435

infant's birth, I order that they give no name to their children except for the name
of their parents or grandparents, subject to the same penalty.
Item: The female indians tend to bind their infants with threads and belts
about the head, from which they die. I order they not do so, subject to the said
penalty.
Item: I command that no indians keep dogs in their houses, apart from the
caciques, and that all be killed.
And the said scribe shall take care to keep the ordinances above, and the
tribute lists, publically each six months, when it is wished to pay tribute and all
are gathered together, and they shall write it down in faith.
Item: Because the indians have their own herds, and for a single sheep in the
field they put a child of theirs to work to guard it, it is a great deal of work. I
command that the cabildo and regiment name each year one indian to guard all
the privately held animals, or two or more as necessary, to whom salary shall be
assigned from the community goods, giving account of it to the corregidor.
In the service of the tambos, keep the order that will be given by His
Excellency.
Item: Every day, eat in the plazas as has been ordered and notified in
conformity with the instruction that on this matter His Excellency has given, and
under the said penalties, and the priest that shall be is charged with carrying out
this ordinance, as well as the others that are made in favor and utility of the
republic, and in works of charity that might be done as obligation in service of
God Our Lord and the good of the republic.
All of which ordinances the said lord visitor made and declared, by virtue of
the commissions of His Excellency, for the good government, Christianity, and
policia that have been declared, all of which keep and ensure they are kept and
carried out just as is contained in each and everyone of them, caciques under pain
of privation of their offices, and alcaldes subject to head shaving and whipping,
and the other indians subject to the penalties that the alcaldes and caciques shall
wish to give. And he signed in his name, Diego de Sanabria, by order of His Mercy
Rodrigo Gar~con, scribe of the visita. (AGI, Charcas 49, fols. 7r-12v)

D. EXTIRPATION REPORT OF PRIEST HERNAN GONZALEZ DE LA CASA

(LATE SIXTEENTH CENTURY)

... While I was priest of the towns of Toropalca and Caisa I heard about a
wak'a [scribe writes "guaca"] and shrine in the town of Caltama where all the
indians of this province sacrificed infants, guinea pigs, sheep, and other animals
and carried out many superstitions, for their illnesses as for the weather,
invoking the god of rains and lightening, and pretending to say the mass. The
one who did this was a great sorcerer named Diego Iquisi. In order to go secretly
I walked twenty leagues to this wak'a, at great risk to my life, and taking with
me my alcalde and scribe 13rl from the town, and my factor. More by divine than
436 Documentary Appendix

human work I took away from the wak'a five idols. One, of tacana ore, was
called Porco, devoted to the mountain and mines of Porco, and the others were
called Cuzcoma, Chapote, Suricaba, and Aricaba, all the names of mountains
where there are mines and shafts of silver and lead. I took away some silver items
from the service of the other idols, and small pieces of silver and chanbis and
taracas and chipanas and queros, much cloth and things made of feathers,
guascas and chuces and macno [all ceremonial and decorative objects] and pelts
of sheep of diverse colors, and other things and the clothing of the other wak' as,
and trumpets. All of which was offered to the other idols. And with the alcalde
and scribe I made an inventory of all this and carried it to this royal audience as
attested by the proceso that is in the office of your secretary Juan de Lossa. And
having taken away the said wak' a, I returned to my town with twenty-four male
and female unfaithful indians, and forty-three boys and girls three and six and
eight years old, still unbaptized. And on fording the river more than one hundred
indians came at me trying to kill me, shooting many arrows and throwing
boulders down upon me. In the space of a single league they made me swim
across the river fifteen times. Close to death, I was hit in the leg by an arrow, and
they followed me down the river more than a league from one shore to the other,
while all the while I carried the wak' as and other things I had found without
leaving anything behind. /3v/ They threatened to kill me unless I gave them their
father [the wak'a Tata Porco] who had given them victory over the Chichas.
Why was he being taken away? And in effect they did try to kill me, giving me
herbs from which I was at the point of death, until an indian women cured me
with a drink [bebedifo] of other herbs, and I vomited up a sack of worms like a
hickory nut. I brought all these things to this royal audience, and half of it was
placed in the royal treasury without costs, all of which I paid. I have spent much
in all this, and at the same time I have removed from the said town and from that
of Macha many other wak'as and idols and pillus [crowns] and other supersti-
tions for which I punished 175 persons who had apparently been confessed by
the other Diego Iquisi and for being idolators. And for this the said Diego Iquisi
has been thrown into the hospital.
In that place they adored the said wak' as, carrying out novenas and the
penances required by their confessions, and sacrificing sheep and guinea pigs and
a three-year-old child. In all of this I have served our Lord and his majesty and
the general good of this entire province, since they came to the wak' a in
pilgrimage from Cochabamba and the entire district of Charcas, Caracaras,
Yanparaes, Chichas, Juras, Visisas, Asanaques, Carangas, and Chuyes, and
ending it as I did the adoration and idolatry ceased. [In that place] I built a
humilladero with the holy cross, where our Lord is adored and given reverence,
and it has been to the great utility and advantage of the naturales, who have been
disenchanted from their blindness. At present they mock the said idols and
wak' as. Also, I am an Old Christian hi;odalgo, son of Hernan Gonzalez, chief
master builder of the holy church of Toledo and of its archbishop, and of Juana
de Alvarado, native of the town of Linpias in the mountains [of Vizcaya] where
I have my house. (AGI, Charcas 79, no. 19, fols. 2v-4r)
Documentary Appendix 437

E. CIRCULAR LEITER TO ALCALDES OF K'ULTA, 1781

AI Cavildo de Colpacaba: AI Senor Principal doy la noticia fijo, que lIego el propio
con la noticia que los havia arrastrado de todos de los de Penas y Hurmiri, una
histima dise que havian hecho los soldados mas de dos mill quinientos. Otros
tantos disen que vienen por arte de Chichas, nos veremos rode ados para esta
noche lIegarian sin falta a despoblar a todos nosotros, sin que quedemos ninguno
todos de esta provincia, y asi por Dios, Vista esta tengan y den noticia a todos
hasta Culta, Cabayo, y Lagunillas, a todas las estancias, pasara a toda furia con
maior empeno, como a modo de soldado sin demora ni una ora, y suplico por
Maria Santisima bengan en todo caso todos los comunes a comforme nos ayudara
Dios Nuestro Senor, sinco de por muchos anos [sic]. Challapata. Changara.
-[marginal note] Es su origen de la esquela dirigida al Alcalde mayor deste
curato.
-Culta dies y ocho de febrero /1 v/ de ochenta y uno. Companero y senor
mio. No se como ponderar los sobresaltos con que en este curato vibo, pues
diariamente tenemos nobedades con estos yndios que quieren vibir sin Dios, ni
Rey haciendose jueses de sus proprias causas sin ninguna veneraci6n aDios, y
sus Ministros, y todo 10 atribuio a la summa rap ina con que ellos hasta la
ocaci6n presente han vibido quitando vidas y de estos robandoles quanta han
tenido.
-Siertas noticias tengo de que eI cura de Condo, tiene animo expreso de
hirse para esa Villa, a refugiarse, por que los yndios han querido dar abanse
contra eI poniendo por objeto tres motibos. EI primero eI haver ocultado a un
Curaca a quien quicieron quitarle la vida. EI segundo tener ellos sospechas, de
que los quiere entregar a los soldados, y eI tercero tener ellos sertidumbre de que
la Plata de don Diego Cosido, para en poder del predicho cura, y mobidos de este
ynteres quieren haser esta inhumanidad /2r/ y estas palabras han proferido ellos
mismos en este curato.
-EI dia onse de este hubo un Casamiento, y al dia siguiente un cabo de ano
a donde se juntaron muchos de los yndios nuestros, y algunos de Macha y
Tinquipaya, entre los quales se ley6 una esquela, escrita por un principal de
Challapata (que ba adjunta con esta) a este curato como V.M. [Vuesa Merced]la
bera, y despues de haverla leydo los de este, combocaron a los de Tinquipaya,
rogandoles bayan para Challapata, y que si no se berian perdidos. AI dia
siguiente salieron los alcaldes de nuestro curato, y juntaron muchos de los
yndios, y los despacharon a cada qual con dos 0 tres jondas, palos y algunas
otras cosas para su defensa. En el dia mesmo onse hablaron los yndios en sus
bureos, diciendo que eI cura de Macha les havia entregado las lIabes de la yglesia
para que estos estubiesen a la mira, por si acaso se dentrasen los espanoles, 6
cholos 6 demas gente, que en sus contras fuesen, para que de estos de ningiin
modo pudiesen refugiarse, en la yglesia. /2v/
[Here the priest begins reporting indian speech:] Asi mismo haran aqui y
del mesmo modo que nos ha ofrecido, eI cura de Macha executa ran aqui, y
saldran a defendernos como nos tiene ofrecido, eI predicho cura haciendonos
438 Documentary Appendix

semejantemente la equid ad de los casamientos, que todas las cosas importaran

trese reales, segun las cartas de fabor que nos embio nuestro finado Catari, las
quales nos ha usurp ado el cura de aqui y ha salido en nuestra contra,
poniendonos exfuerso y que nosotros paguemos la tasa 10 que el no debia de
egecutar, antes a defendernos, pero de todo 10 vera.
-Nos han dado noticia como el curato de Macha se halla sin cura, ayundante,
sacristan ni cantor, por que todos ellos se hallan fugitibos por los que han visto.
Tambien nos han dicho que no pondrian mithanis, pongos, ni demas cosas segun
las cartas de fabor escritas por Cathari, como de facto haviendo ido a haser la eleccion
de alferes y mayordomo al anejo de Cavayo, no me pucieron pongo ni mithani,
y me 13rl tubieron a obscuras, muerto de frio y otras cosas que executaron.
-El dia quinse Juebes de Compadres haviendo estado yendo a casar algunos
filqueritos, encontre con tres yndios, quienes havian sobrado de los electos de
nuestros alcaldes, y el uno de ellos se acerco a preguntarme que noticias havia
tenido de los soldados. Yo como ignorante de todo, respondi no saber cosa alguna.
No basto esto, sino dandome algunos golpes en ellado del corason, me decia que
todo 10 tenia ocultado dentro de mi corason, y que no queria a abisarles cosa
alguna. Y con estas demostraciones, se despidio, y se fueron mui contentos todos
con sus mujeres. Y del mismo modo que los antecedentes.
-Remito a V.M. los treinta y tres pesos los que se han juntado, pues no
hemos tenido mas entradas, por que todas las personas que han muerto han sido
pobres, y estas repentinas, y no nos queda, ni a un medio para nuestro gasto.
-Estimare a V.M. me haga el fabor de atendermelo al Nino 13vl que ba a
esa cosilla hasta el inter de que se socieguen los yndios 0 que V.M. se benga, y al
mismo tiempo, si alguna cosa se ofreciese en mi casa pues no tengo otro alibio en
esa sino el de V.M. y sus padres.
-No se han podido conseguir las Plantas de Lampasos por que los yndios
de Cavayo, no se hallan en ellugar, sino en Challapata.
-Estimare a V.M. procure quanta antes embiarme al yndio y abisarme de
su determinacion, pues como Ie tengo dicho del sobresalto con que bibo en este
curato, que no beD ora como poder estar en su compania, y permita su Dibina
Clemencia, se socieguen quanta antes estos para que nosotros vibamos sirbiendo
a nuestra Patrona Senora de la Mercedes, a quien ruego prospere la importan-
tisima de V.M. los muchos anos que mi afecto decea y de sus padres, a quienes de
cora son me encomiendo. Su fiel companero y seguro capellan, Joseph
Balzeda .... (ANB, SG 1781, no. 42, fols. 1r-3v]

,
F. CORCINO PEREZ' PETITIONS TO THE PRESIDENT OF BOLIVIA

1894 Petition
Senor President of the Republic. With the attached titles and powers of attorney
I seek exemption from the indicated tax. I, Corcino Perez, in my name and as the
proxy (apoderado) of the comunarios of Condocondo, before you through the
Documentary Appendix 439

worthy office of the Senor Minister of Hacienda, say with respect: Because of the
oppression they suffer with the weight of taxes illegally and unconstitutionally
imposed upon this unhappy race, the clamor of the communities does not cease.
Our laws have been written but for us are not executed. Because of this, knowing
today the enlightened judgment of the Constitutional Government that rules us,
we come before your saving protection, so that recognizing the legitimacy of our
property in the lands and mills that belong to the community of Condocondo,
we be excused from the taxes that, supposing us to be tributaries, have been
made to fall upon us, especially the territorial tax, known by the name of tribute.
And to this end we base ourselves in the following reasons that we shall lightly
now formulate.
First. The community of Condocondo through its principal and represen-
tative don Francisco Javier Taquimalco, acquired the property of the lands of
Condocondo and the mills of Masce by the cash payment of nine thousand
strong and assayed pesos, in simultaneous auction and composicion, according
to the titles that in forty-one folios accompany this. They are most clear and
conclusive, and consequently our right to free property is unquestionable, just as
that of all other citizens, in just title as required by article 1,517 of the Civil
Code, by which we have possessed it now for almost four centuries.
Second. If this is the case, we exercise over these properties the clear and full
right conceded by article 289 of the Civil Code, and tribute like the other
obligations that do not fall to the rest of the citizens, are no more than gavelas
that have no reason to exist, and are based upon no legal disposition whatsoever.
Third. Apart from our legitimate property, accredited by titles, as we have
demonstrated, the article of the laws of July 21,1871, October 5, 1882, and July
3, 1883 has declared and recognized the ownership of lands by their indigenous
possessors, with the notorious circumstance that properties composed before the
Spanish Crown, by the payment of money, unlike those who do not have these
titles, have been recognized as free property, and consequently only those who
have not obtained composicion are tributaries. So apart from the title, we are
supported by the said laws.
Fourth. In consequence, any tax, especially the territorial tax, is an
unconstitutional gavela contradicting fundamental principles and statutes of
articles 14 and 16 of our fundamental letter, in part because the said tax has no
legal foundation, and in part because it has no foundation in equality, falling
solely as it does on the indigenous class, who have been humiliated since colonial
times and even more since our emancipation.
Fifth. The imposition is even resented as antieconomical, because if [tributes]
on indigenous properties were thus transformed into the free exercise enjoyed by
the rest of the population, they would produce double or triple the income for the
state, because desert places would become towns, and these would not only
enlarge the republic but would produce more wealth and more taxes, enriching
their owners and consequently the nation since according to the principles of
political economy, the wealth of the citizens constitutes that of the state.
440 Documentary Appendix

Sixth. Because of indigenous oppression, this caste prospers neither in its

property nor in its intellectual enlightenment, which is the waning of our nation,
and at the same time deserving of the compassionate gaze by which other states
criticize us. It is therefore necessary for the supreme government to carry out this
passage to civilization for the good of our republic, raising up this oppressed
caste, which cries out before its misfortunes, notwithstanding the fact that its
strong arm is that which carries out agricultural production and the most
difficult and arduous labors. Founded in this and other reasons that are too
many to enumerate .... Sucre, October 21,1894. Corcino Perez. (Choquecallata
Document; see note 84 of chap. 6)

The Spanish Original:

Senor Presidente de la Republica.-Con los adjuntos titulos y poder pide la
excenci6n del impuesto que indica.-Corcino Peres, por mi y como apoderado
de los comunarios de Condocondo, ante usted por eI digno organo del Senor
Ministro de Hacienda respetuosamente digo:
Que es insesante eI clamor de las comunidades, por la opreci6n que sufren,
con eI peso de los impuestos que graviten sobre esta infeliz raza, ilegal e
inconstitucionalmente; pues nuestros leyes han quedado escritas sin ejecuci6n
para nosotros y por esto conociendo hoy la ilustrada justificaci6n del Govierno
Constitucional que nos rige, acudimos ante su protecci6n salvadora para que
reconociendo la legitima de nuestra propiedad en los terrenos y molinos que
pertenecen a la comunidad de Condocondo, se nos exocere de los impuestos que
en eI supuesto de ser tributarios, se ha hecho pesar sobre nosotros; especialmente
eI impuesto territorial, conocido con el nombre de tributo, y para ella nos
fundamos en las siguientes rasones que Iigeramente pasamos a formular.-
Primero.-La comunidad de Condocondo por su principal y representante
don Francisco Javier TaquimaIco, adquiri6 la propiedad de los terrenos de
Condocondo y los Molinos de Masce con dinero de costado de NUEVE MIL
PESOS fuertes ensayados, en remate y en composici6n a la vez segun 10 acreditan
los titulos que en fojas cuarentiuno acompano que son los mas c1aros y
concluyentes, siendo por consiguiente incuestionable nuestro derecho de
propiedad libre como la de los demas ciudadanos, justo titulo con que poseemos
desde ahora cerca de cuatro siglos, requerida por el articulo mil quinientos
diecisiete del C6digo CiviI.-
Segunda.-Si esto es cierto, ejecemos sobre esas propiedades, eI derecho
claro y nato consagra eI articulo docientos ochentinueve del mismo, y eI tributo
asi como las demas cargas que no son comunes como a los demas ciudadanos, no
son sino gavelas que no tienen rac6n de ser, ni descansen sobre disposiciones
legales alguna.
Tercera.-Ademas de nuestra propiedad legitima, acreditada con titulos,
como llevamos demostrado, eI articulo de las leyes de treintiuno de julio de
setentiuno, cinco de octubre del setenticuatro, asi como la ley de veintitres de
noviembre del ochentitres, confirmando las resoluciones de veintiuno de octubre
Documentary Appendix 441

del y tres de julio del ochentitres, han declarado y reconocido la propiedad de los
terrenos en fabor de los indigenas sus poseedores, con la notoria circunstancia
que las propiedades Compuestas ante la Corona de Espana, mediante el pago del
dinero, a diferencia de los que no tienen esos titulos, se ha reconocido de
propiedad libre, y por consiguiente no ser tributarios sino los que no obtuvieron
la composicion; luego ademas del titulo, estamos amparados por las citadas
leyes.-
Cuarta.-Por consequencia de cualesquier impuesto especialmente el terri-
torial es una gavela inconstitucional contra los principios fundamentales, estatui-
dos en los articulos catorce y diesiseis de nuestra carta fundamental, tanto
porque dicho impuesto no se funda en ley, cuanto porque no descansa en ley,
cuanto porque no descansa tambien ella igualdad, haciendose gravitar tan solo
sobre la clase indigena, que vive humillada desde el coloniaje y continua aun mas
desde nuestra emancipacion.-
Quinta. Hasta de anti-economico se resiente el gravamen, porque
suprimido este las propiedades de los indigenas, entrando en el ejercicio libre
como las demas, produciria el doble 0 triple de los ingresos para el Erario;
porque de lugares desiertas, se constituirian en poblaciones que no solo en-
grandeserian la Republica, sino que producirian mas riquesas y mas impuestos,
haciendo ricos a sus propietarios, por consiguientes a la Nacion, porque segun
los principios de Economia Politica, la riquesa de los ciudadanos constituye la
del Estado.-
Sexta. La oprecion indigenal, hace que esta casta no prospere ni en sus
propiedades ni en su ilustracion intelectual, que es la mengua para nuesta
Nacion, y la mirada compasiba a la yes que critica de los demas Estados. Se hace
ya nesesario que el Supremo Govierno de este paso de civilizacion en fabor de
nuestra Republica y levante esta casta oprimida, que gime en vista de su
infortunio, no obstante de que su braso fuerte es el que se emplea en las
producciones agricolas, en los trabajos mas fuertes y arduos. Fundado en esto y
a otras rasones que seria larga enumerarlos, a usted por el Organo de la
secretaria de Estado, pido que en atencion a nuestro legitimo derecho de
propiedad, se sirva de declarar la excencion del tributo y demas gavelas con que
esta gravado el indigena. Si asi se modificara el presupuesto aumentara.-
Sucre octubre treintiuno de mil ochocientos noventicuatro.-Corcino
perez.-Sello del ministerio de hacienda e industria.-Sucre, octubre treintiuno
de mil ochocientos noventicuatro.-Vista el senor Fiscal del Distrito.-Firma
ilegible.

1895 Petition (English translation on pp. 307-8)

Finalmente he dicho que se funda esta solicitud en el bien publico, porque
verificado el des linde, reconocimiento y revivimiento de los linderos y mojones
con los cantones primero colindante-Quillacas, Tinquipaya, Macha, Pocoata,
Ucumani, Chayanta, Laimes, Tapacari, y Penas, Huancane, Isla Morato de San
Agustin, y Punaca~on tantos cantones, y aun entre las parcialidades que
442 Documentary Appendix

componen a cada uno, se evitara tanta matansa de la rasa indigena bajo el

pretexto de sublevacion que inventa calumniosamente, cualquier afecto a la cos a
ajena, bastante esta simple calumnia para balear y encarcelar a la rasa indigena
a la eual se diesma mucho mas que con las epidemias. Mucho tendrian que decir
Soberano Senor, pero alli estan demandando justicia ante los pies del trono del
Senor, tanta sangre y tanta lagrima inocentamente vertidas; y solo mediante una
simple calumnia propalada por los codiciosos, aIm de los androjos de los pobres
indigenas, a que ha dado lugar las nunca bien maldecidas leyes de las
autoridades, inconsultantemente votadas, peormente comprendida y cruelmente
ejecutada.
No molestare al Soberano Senor en otras reflecciones. Bastante decir que
demandando justicia en mayor fabor de la rasa indigena del Canton de
Condocondo, pidiendo se vote la cantidad de dinero, suficiente para dotar a los
comicionados que deben practicar la operacion arriba mencionada que debe
encomendarse a persona, siquiera mediante honrada, siquiera de un atomo de
justificacion, y que siquiera tenga un poco de patriotismo y moralidad.
Ademas, impetro la declaratoria que expresa del Soberano Senor, a serca de
que los indigenas no estamos obligados a pagar el impuesto de postillonaje, en
solo provecho de los Corregidores ordenandose a la yes la inmediata devolucion
de los terrenos, coactivamente de que se nos ha cobra do, con el pretexto de
postillonaje; y todo cada uno de los indigenas propietarios del Departmento de
Oruro.
Puesto que la rasa indigena de Bolivia cree merescan alguna consideracion
y justicia, atenta su ignorancia, timidez e indefensa, y sobre todo por la riquesa
que produce y desarrolla para todas las cifras de la sociedad y de la Republica,
cual no se escapa de la sabiduria y penetracion del Soberano Senor. Por 10
expuesto pedimos tambien se sirva ordenar a los comicionados para que con
vista de nuestros titulos de propiedad de los linderos y mojones antiguamente
repartido. Espero a nombres de mis causantes. Sera justicia. Sucre, doce de
octubre de 1895. Corcino Perez. Sello de la secreta ria del senado nacional.
 Notes

PREFACE

1. In this anthropological-ethnohistorical vein of the influence and training of

John Murra and Tom Zuidema, one might also mention (without being exhaus-
tive) the works of Alb6 (1975, 1976, 1979, 1980, 1987, 1991, 1992, 1994;
Alb6, Greaves, and Sandoval 1983; Alb6 and CIPCA team 1972); Allen (1988);
Bastien (1978); Bouysse-Cassagne (1975, 1978, 1987, 1988); del Rio (1989);
Earls (1969, 1971); Gose (1986, 1991); Harris (1978a, 1978b, 1978c, 1978d,
1980, 1982, 1986, 1987); Isbell (1977, 1985); Mannheim (1986, 1991); Mayer
(1977, 1982); Rivera Cusicanqui (1978a, 1978b, 1986); Urton (1981, 1988,
1990, 1994); and Wachtel (1973, 1977, 1978, 1981, 1982, 1990, 1992, 1994).
The work of John Rowe (1945, 1954, 1980) and students (especially Julien
1982, 1983, 1995), has also enlivened cultural-historical debate.
Historians have also contributed their share. Among those who have fruit-
fully tempered materialist leanings with cultural interests on Andean topics, see
Bakewell 1984; Barragan 1990, 1992, 1994; Choque 1979, 1986, 1992; Cook
1975, 1981; Cook and Cook 1993; Duviols 1973, 1976, 1977, 1986, 1993;
Langer 1989; Larson 1988; Lockhart 1968, 1972; MacCormack 1984, 1985,
1988a, 1988b, 1991; Mallon 1992a, 1992b, 1994; O'Pheian Godoy 1985; Pease
1973, 1977, 1978, 1992; Powers 1991; Ramirez 1987, 1989; Rostworowski de
Diez Canseco 1981, 1988a, 1988b; Spalding 1974, 1984; Stern 1982, 1987,
1993; Var6n 1982, 1990; Var6n and Jacobs 1987; Zulawski 1995. Literary
scholars have also fruitfully contributed. See Adorno 1982, 1986, 1992; Mi-
gnolo 1993, 1994.
2. Throughout this book, I have chosen to render terms from the Aymara
language in the orthography devised by the linguist (and my Aymara teacher in
La Paz) Juan de Dios Yapita (1968). I continue to use the official cartographic
and state-recognized spellings of proper names, such as towns and persons. I
thus contrast "Culta" (as the name of a town and cant6n) with "K'ulta" (as the
autodenomination of a local group of some of the people living in the town's
territory and as the name of that wider "ethnic" territory, or ayllu, itself.
For more difficult cases, such as the names of historical persons or deities
reported on in chronicles who never themselves wrote or chose an orthographic

443
444 Notes to Pages xxi-4

convention, I have adopted the most widely used spellings (Huayna Capac rather
than the presumably more "correct" Wayna Qapax).
Quechua orthographies differ from Aymara ones, and, while in some cases I
have chosen a linguistically correct spelling over chronicled spellings (e.g., wak'a
instead of huaca or guaca), to avoid confusion I have in a few cases chosen to
render frequently used and widely known Quechua and Aymara terms in their
Castilianized forms. Ceque, quipu, taqui(es), all Quechua words in the uses
reported here, become homographs of different words in Aymara when rendered
in current Quechua orthographies. For readability and simplicity, I have also
followed the convention of using the Spanish -s for the plurals of Quechua and
Aymara terms.
For the same reason, and also to avoid making Aymaras appear to speak in
"dialect," I use Spanish orthography for most Aymara borrowings from Spanish,
for example, puro (for pure cane alcohol). For its relative transparency I use
chicha for the Aymara k'usa. Some terms have developed new colonial meanings
distinct from pre-Columbian ones. Pongo, a house servant, derives from punku,
door; colonial yanaconas were different from pre-Columbian yanakuna; in Potosi
the mita was quite different from pre-Columbian mit' a turn systems. In such cases
orthographic distinctions can help to clarify the phenomena referred to.
Yapita's orthography describes Aymara phonology with the consonant j, I, l/,
m, n, ii, r, s, w, and x. The consonants p, t, k, and q are further subdivided by
differentiating nonaspiration, aspiration, and glottalization-for example, p, p",
and p'-providing a total of seventeen distinct consonantal sounds. Three
vowels, i, a, and u, and the pseudovowel y, suffice to render vowel sounds, since
more rounded 0 and more open e vowel sounds are effects of proximity to the
back-of-the-throat q consonants.
3. This was the linguistically essentializing term that I had then used for
certain "natives."
4. Later return trips in 1981, 1982, 1988, and 1990 provided new experi-
ences and insights into some of those matters.
5. In attending specifically to the clash of colonizing and colonized peoples'
social memory, I have given short shrift to the ethnohistorical project of
reconstructing from various sources an account of the social forms of a
precolonial people. Indeed, that was the goal of the historical portions of my
dissertation (Abercrombie 1986). Readers specifically searching for a detailed
account of the social organization of the Killaka and Asanaqi peoples, pasted
together from visitas, parish records, memoriales, and lawsuits, may find it there.

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: FROM RITUAL TO HISTORY AND BACK

AGAIN, TRAJECTORIES IN RESEARCH AND THEORY

1. Spellings of capac hucha (sometimes joined as a single word, as in

capacocha) vary in colonial sources and in the scholarly literature. Without
actually hearing the term pronounced, it is difficult to determine how to spell it
Notes to Pages 5-6 445

correctly according to one or another orthographic convention. Distinct Que-

chua orthographies would in any case produce different possible spellings, and
some of these would produce homographs of Aymara terms used elsewhere in
the text. This is also true with other Andean terms known mainly from colonial
texts, such as ceque (sight line or ritual path), quipu (knotted cord mnemotech-
nic), and taqui (song-dance). None of these terms is used today by Quechua
speakers for the kinds of signification mentioned in colonial texts. I choose
therefore to maintain the most commonly accepted colonial spellings of such
terms rather than to make arbitrary and possibly confusing orthographic
choices. For consistency I spell the term "Inca" with a c throughout the text, both
when referring to the empire and generic people and when the term is a
constituent part of proper names, which I spell according to modern Spanish
convention.
2. I have drawn this vignette from a number of sources, including my own
imagination. Asanaqi and Killaka subjects undoubtedly served mit'a (turns of
service) to the Inca, but their precise duties (apart from service in the Inca fields
of Cochabamba) are unknown. Guarache was in Cusco at the time of the
Spanish invasion, where he was close to Manco Inca (supposedly as a member of
Manco's war council), but no document suggests when or under what circum-
stances Guarache first went to Cusco. Guarache was indeed awarded cumbi
shirts by the Inca emperor, but ascribing the event to a change-of-status
ceremony during Huayna Capac's investiture or royal visita, or during periodic
capac hucha rites is mere speculation (see analyses of capac hucha in Duviols
1976, Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1988a; of Inca royal visits and the
comparable ritual effectiveness of Spanish visitas in Guevara-Gil and Salomon
1994.) Likewise, it is impossible to say with any exactness that Asanaqi mit'a
workers would have stopped in Jatun Qulla (excavated by Catherine Julien
[1983]) on their way to Cusco, or have performed the sorts of libations I
describe. The idea comes from the work of archaeologist Craig Morris (1979;
Morris and Thompson 1985) on another Inca administrative center, Huanuco
Pampa, where chicha was consumed in quantity within the elite structures that
might have been thought of as the formal work spaces of high priests or ranking
Inca bureaucrats.
3. One of three probanzas produced by Col que Guarache in the mid-1570s,
this curriculum vita in question-and-answer format is published in Espinoza
Soriano 1981 (from the original in AGI, Quito 45). Another almost contempo-
rary Colque Guarache probanza, with significant but not startling variations, is
located in the Archivo del Tribunal de Poopo (see chapter 7).
4. The pouring of ch'allas during amt'aii t"aki sessions is always carried out
in gender parallel, where men, sitting on benches or stone seats, pour libations to
male beings, while women, seated directly on the ground, pour to female beings.
The performances of men and women may be complementary, but their posi-
tion in space (high versus low, east-facing versus west-facing) also underscores
and reproduces a gendered asymmetry of power. Gender complementarity is
446 Notes to Pages 6-11

explored in depth in Harris 1978c, 1978d, 1980, 1986; and in Arnold 1988,
1992, 1993; Arnold and Yapita 1992a, 1992b; Arnold, Jimenez, and Yap ita
1992; and is treated historically in Silverblatt 1987.
5. I provide a description that is a composite sketch drawn from my
participation in many such performances in Vila Sirka over the period of
1980-82, during which I was usually given an honored place at the men's altar.
6. My understanding of julian's case derives from my participation in
courtroom proceedings and from access to the expediente that I enjoyed after
becoming part of it. I also discussed particulars with Julian and his wife at
considerable length. Sent by Julian to K'ulta to round up his kinsmen as
additional character witnesses, I learned another side of the story (see concluding
chapter).
7. Interview with don Pablo Choquecallata (a pseudonym, as are all names
I provide here for the people of K'ulta), October 1979.
8. Very forthcoming and proud of his efforts on behalf of Cruce, Pablo
Choquecallata spoke with me on many different occasions between 1979 and
1982, and again in 1988, by which time he was in his early eighties. He never
mentioned his prominent role in forwarding cantonization petitions by which
Cruce-and Ayllu Alax-Kawalli-strives to secede from Canton Culta (originals
in the Archivo de Hacienda and Archivo del Instituto Geografico Militar,
Prefectura de Oruro). Nor was he forthcoming on the murder accusations leveled
against him for destroying a nearby settlement that members of Ayllu Qullana
had begun to build as their proposed new town and canton capital (Archivo de
Hacienda y Tesoro, Prefectura de Oruro, Expediente de Amparo Administrativo,
1968). See chapter 6 for details.
The Choquecallata document is a typescript made by the notary Eloy Lascano
of Oruro in March 1962, from an earlier transcription that cites the ADRO,
Provincia Abaroa, Libro de Propiedades, 1945, no. 8. It is laden with copyist's
errors. Many other copies of the 1593 and 1646 composici6n titles are also in
existence (though without the nineteenth- and twentieth-century accretions
described here), including those presented in 1757 by the caciques of Challapata
in their denunciation of the Condo indians' raids on their hamlet, and by the
Condo cacique Llanquipacha in his reply and counteraccusation in the same
litigation expediente. Rotative authorities of Challapata, Condo, Culta, and
Cahuayo independently submitted the same titles in defense of their lands during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which were then copied several
times into the bound and dated property registers located in the Juzgado de
Derechos Reales, in the Corte Superior de Oruro.
9. Connerton draws especially on Halbwachs 1925, 1941 (republished in
Halbwachs 1994). Other recent works in the arena of social memory include:
Gillis 1994; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Hutton 1993; Le Goff 1992; Nora
1984. For the Andes more specifically, some recent works mining this vein are:
Arnold, Jimenez, and Yapita 1992; Boone and Mignolo 1994; Burga 1988;
Flores Galindo 1987b; Rappaport 1990, 1994; Sa ignes 1993. Many of these
authors pay respects to Yates 1966.
Notes to Pages 15-21 447

10. I thank Florencia Mallon for pointing this out to me.

11. Indeed, the very sixteenth-century Spaniards who scorned uncertain
Andean oral fables and lamented Andeans' lack of writing, even as they strove to
construe a certain written history of the Andes from the confusions of native
myth, placed the certain foundations of the most vital aspects of their lives in
extrahuman activity: that of Divine Word. In an era when most of the Castilian
population remained illiterate and, indeed, when theologians agreed that literacy
provided untutored minds access to texts they could not correctly interpret, the
teaching of correct doctrine and well-ordered life-ways was generally consigned
to sensual techniques, to bodily habit and public performance, constrained
within controlled public spaces open to the censorial gaze of the Inquisition and
its familiars. An instructive case is the fate of Menocchio, the late-sixteenth-
century miller from the Friuli whose wide-ranging but poorly disciplined reading
enabled the devil to lead him into heresy and eventually to the stake (Ginzburg
1982). Far better for him had he left letters alone and depended on the pedagogy
of liturgical ritual for his instruction in history (which is to say, the tenets of the
faith). At the very least, the twentieth-century reader of his foibles might
interject, the omnipresence of the Inquisition and dangers inherent in frank
discussion of religious matters ought to have led him to keep his own counsel.
What Menocchio seems not to have learned, either from his illiterate artisan
comrades or from the society of aristocratic and clerical literati to which he did
not fully belong, is what Maravall (1987) termed the "culture of the Baroque."
Radical social critiques could be safely articulated in this Counter-Reformation
context only by clothing the wolf in sheep's skin, by simultaneously becoming
clandestine and taking the outward form of the opposite of social critique,
defense of orthodoxy. Thus much of the "popular religiosity" condemned by the
Church hierarchy as dangerously unorthodox moved into the sphere of still
fervently "Catholic" but difficult to parse clandestine practice; the literati found
that they could still publish social critiques so long as they cloaked those
critiques in distancing tropes, as the mouthings of madmen like Cervantes'
Quixote, the ridiculous conversations of dogs miraculously and temporarily
graced with the power of speech, or the confessions of pitiful criminals such as
the eponym of Lazarillo de Tormes.
12. MacCormack 1991 (also Bilinkoff 1989) explores the philosophic and
theological arguments which accounted for how the devil regularly made use of
the imagination, the very means by which men could understand divinity, to lead
them astray.
13. In this reformulation of the project that I began so long ago, I draw on
various semiotic approaches to culture and the linguistic turn towards pragmat-
ics (some precursors: Silverstein 1976; Hanks 1990; Parmentier 1987), along
with Bourdieu's (1977, 1979) analogous retargeting of "cultural coding" from
linguistic abstraction to the plane of embodied and practiced habitus. I also draw
on the results of the collective enterprise of interpreting Gramsci's theses on the
interplay of culture and power, through the now well-worn concepts of hege-
mony and counterhegemony (see especially Comaroff 1985; Comaroff and
448 Notes to Pages 22-31

Comaroff 1991, 1992). All these sources help in conceptualizing how intersub-
jective orders of meaning arise in lived experience, are deployed in habitual
practice, challenged in contests of power, and put at risk in contingent events
(Sahlins 1985). Above all such theoretical schemata, I here prefer the notion of
social memory, meaning context-linked enactments of collective meanings,
whose authority lies in its supposed source in the past. Traditions may be
invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), but social memory inevitably denies
that invention, rooting the specific nature and privileges of subjective identities,
that to us are contingent, in given rather than invented sources and authorities,
that is, in primordial tradition. I thus focus on such collectively validated
practices as oral narrative and ritual, but I take these as the products and
producers of collective authorship, of social groups, and assume that social
memory covaries along with the shape of the social formations to which it
pertains. All histories (both ritual or mythic, and written kinds) are shaped by
the political and personal concerns of their authors, in order to reflect or
validate, challenge or revise, the lived meanings of present social worlds. As
Steve J. Stern has recently argued (1993), there can be no such thing as a
dispassionate and objective historical work, only works by authors who believe
themselves to be without causes. To this degree, I take written and nonwritten
forms of social memory to be alike.
14. Anthropology's historical turn has been deftly reviewed by Biersack
(1989); Faubion (1993); Hunt (1989); Kellogg (1994). The anthropology of
history is treated as part of the discipline's theorizations of time in Munn 1992.
Product of a larger discipline-centered critique of structuralist and "culturalist"
theoretical constructs, which were (unlike the myths and rituals that provided
their grist) kinds of antihistorical windmills, anthropology's interest in history
(now waning as "posthistorical" paradigms of internationalization and global-
ization move to the fore) bore little direct relationship to history's ethnographic
turn. The latter, taken especially by historians with a bent for "history from
below," has been an effort to portray from fragmentary sources the life-world, or
"culture," of some group or class who had been erased from official chronicle.
Paradoxically, history's "ethnographic turn" has tended to favor closed semiotic
models of culture. For an overview, see: Burke 1991; Cohn 1987; Desan 1989;
Sharpe 1991.
15. Sanctified by divine law, positive science, or the law of the marketplace,
imperialist and nationalist projects presuppose teleological trajectories towards
which their subjects and citizens should aim.

CHAPTER 2. JOURNEYS TO CULTURAL FRONTIERS

1. Because of its proximity to La Paz, to the Peruvian rail line to Juliaca, and
to Lake Titicaca, and perhaps also because of the strength of the hacienda system
(by which ethnographers, archaeologists, and travelers more generally were once
guaranteed a position of power on the Altiplano), the Titicaca area has been host
Notes to Pages 31-22 449

to a long series of ethnographies, beginning with Bandelier 1910, Tschopik 1951,

La Barre 1948, and continuing through Buechler and Buechler 1971, Carter
1964, 1968, 1977; and a crop of newer work by scholars such as Barstow 1978;
Crandon-Malamud 1993; Collins 1988; etc. As of 1979, only a handful of works
by Platt (1978a, 1978b, 1982a, 1982b, 1983, 1984, 1987a, 1987b, 1987c) and
Harris (1978a, 1978b, 1978c, 1978d, 1980, 1982, 1986, 1987) had pushed the
Aymara frontier south of the Titicaca Basin. Since then, considerably more has
been published, and an influx of scholarly interest in Bolivia (fed by the scholarly
flight from a dangerous Peru) has dropped large numbers of anthropologists and
historians upon Bolivian territory. Complementing the extensive ethnographic
and historical work by Harris and Platt on the Chayanta and Macha territories,
the early and mid-1970s produced a number of studies on the Altiplano and its
valleys in the Departments of La Paz, Oruro, Potosi, and Chuquisaca. See, for
example, studies of PakaxlPacajes (Alb6 and CIPCA team 1972), Chipaya
(Wachtel 1978, 1990, 1994), Qaranka/Carangas (Riviere 1982,1983), and Lipes
and Atacama (Martinez Cereceda 1991). Field research in the late 1970s and
early 1980s produced ethnographies/ethnohistories of AwllakalAullagas (Molina
Rivero 1986a, 1986b; West 1981a, 1981b), Yura (Rasnake 1986, 1988a, 1988b;
Harmann 1988), PakaxlPakajes (Alb6 1992; Choque Canqui 1979, 1986, 1992;
Rivera Cusicanqui 1978a, 1978b, 1986; Rivera and Platt 1978), Jukumanil
Jucumani (Godoy 1990), Calcha (Medlin 1984), Yampara (Barragan 1994), and
ChallalQuirquiavi (Izco Gast6n 1992). More recently, work has been carried out
in and on Sakaka/Sacaca (Zorn 1996), QuntulCondo (Sikkink 1994), more on
Macha (Torrico, n.d.), Sura (del Rio 1990; del Rio and Gordillo 1993),
Qaqachaka/Cacachaca (Arnold 1988; Arnold, Jimenez, and Yapita 1992), Tarija
(Langer 1989; Presta 1995), and a group calling itself Jallqa (Martinez 1992).
Much more ethnographic fieldwork is currently underway or being written up
on PukwatalPocoata, Tinkipaya/Tinquipaya, Murumuru or Ravelo, San Lucas,
and no doubt other areas in the Departments of Oruro, Chuquisaca, and Potosi.
2. On the Aymara language, see Hardman 1981, 1986; and Hardman,
Vasquez, and Yapita 1975, 1988. Aymara dialectology is explored in ground-
breaking work by Briggs (1993). The shift since colonial days towards Quechua,
especially in mining centers and along major transport routes, has been docu-
mented by Alb6 (1979, 1980). Earlier shifts from formerly widespread languages
called Puquina, Uru, and Uruquilla are studied by Torero (1987, 1990, 1992)
and Wachtel (1978, 1990). Early colonial language distribution attested in a
colonial source is described by Julien (1983) and summarized on a map by
Bouysse-Cassagne (1975).
3. There is a growing literature on such domestic service, especially for the
cases of La Paz and Lima. On La Paz, see Gill 1994.
4. On the Tupac Catari siege, see Diez de Medina 1981; and Szeminski 1987.
On liberalism as ethnocide, see Platt 1984. Indigenous rebellion in the aftermath of
the "War of the Capitals" is treated in Condarco Morales 1966. The 1920s rebel-
lions have as yet received little attention, but see Platt 1987a; and Langer 1990.
450 Notes to Pages 32-46

5. There is a large literature on the revolution wrought by the Movimiento

Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR). See the bibliography in Klein 1992.
6. See Klein 1992. I was able to follow the progress of two such blockades
over the radio from K'ulta.
7. Kallawaya practitioners have received much attention. Among others, see
Bastien 1978; Girault 1987; Rosing 1990. As yet, however, the urban "magic"
system has not been adequately described. Ubiquity of first-Friday ceremonies and
brisk business in "mesas" in markets of Bolivia (see Martinez 1987) warrant much
more study, especially as such practices gain in public respectability and visibility
as the indianista star-and the value of indian magic-rises in national politics.
8. One may also find the tools of nearly every imaginable trade, certificates
of mastery of trades, papal dispensations for divorce, papers granting husbands
license to commit adultery, and, of course, mini household appliances for those
hoping to acquire some of the goods available in Miamicito. Alasitas has yet to
find its definitive ethnographer. It is a folkloric extravaganza in La Paz but can be
found in other highland cities and in the countryside (where beans and stones
stand for money and bulls).
9. The vecinos of Cruce and of Santa Barbara are frequently asked to become
the godparents of campesino children and the patrons of campesino marriages. To
be sure, the resulting obligations of compadrazgo and padrinazgo oblige campesi-
nos to offer their produce and animals to their compadres and padrinos at "rea-
sonable" prices, putting vecinos in a position to supply their stores and restaurants
(as well as kitchens) cheaply, and to "bulk" rural products for profitable resale in
urban markets. Relations of obligation, however, cut both ways. Padrinos must
be generous in providing gifts to their godchildren in the context of certain rites
of passage, and will certainly come to lack in new godchildren if they are overtly
exploitative. At the same time, godchildren and campesino co-godparents often
call upon their vecino padrinos and com padres to reciprocate by providing loans
of urban commodities in times of need, by giving support during festival spon-
sorship, and by offering hospitality at critical moments. Thus when K'ultas travel
to Huari for its annual fair, most have a place to stay in the households of vecino
com padres or padrinos who come from there.
10. Nowadays one Aymara speaker may also apply the term "q'ara" to
another when the latter is perceived as having adopted urban values by, for
example, hoarding cash to buy a truck and thereby refusing to participate in
expected generalized reciprocal relations.
11. In an idealist indigenista moment, I heard a few vecinos refer to
themselves as part of a more embracing naci6n mestiza, thereby adopting, for
self-conscious and politically charged motives, a dual heritage that they most
often deny through their usual strenuous efforts to distance themselves from
indios and cholos.
12. It is all too easy to hypostatize the supposed social categories of indio,
mestizo, and criollo, and to imagine them as clearly bounded and castelike strata
in a society born of colonialism, in which degree of privilege correlates
Notes to Pages 46-54 451

inversely with race or national origin. Such a view of Bolivian social stratification
is overly simplistic even for the sixteenth century, and tallies very poorly with
what I was able to observe in Cruce. One might more carefully rethink such
terms as ethnically tinged markers of social class drawn from the language of
race. These terms were first applied, however, fully two hundred years before
doctrines of racial difference became fashionable in nineteenth-century Bolivia
(see Abercrombie 1996). Analysis is complicated by the fact that the other terms
that are used to euphemize, supplement, or displace them, such as "campesino,"
"cholo," and "vecino," carry meanings from distinct arenas of signification like
"relationship to the means of production," "level of cultural intermediacy," and
"civic status vis-a-vis state-recognized municipality."
13. For Cruce's vecinos, "ethnic/class" identity is also relative. Some vecinos
hail from the town of Huari, and when they return there, where they own herds
and work the soil, they become campesinos to the wealthier and more "criollo"
vecinos of that town. If they are not very careful with their dress and language
when they travel to the larger cities, they are likely to be taken for migrant
cholos, thus merging with those, back in Cruce, with whom they would contrast
themselves. The line separating vecinos and campesinos in Cruce is extremely
thin and highly permeable. The categories meet at a point of indeterminacy. This
fact does not free the relationship between them from conflict; on the contrary, it
only seems to intensify the relationship in a continuing struggle for self-
definition. Although cultural differences, along with levels of economic means,
are much wider between the highest and lowest urban strata, a similar story
might be told of its cholos, mestizos, and criollos.
14. The most celebrated (or lamented) case of textile sales was that of the
ritual textile bundles of Coroma, partly recovered through the extraordinary
efforts of Bolivian anthropologist Cristina Bubba.
15. Since the fieldwork period of 1979-81, Cruce has notably "progressed."
It now has two one-room churches, if Protestant ones, both run by Aymara
evangelists. Another few restaurants also line the highway. The Catholic church
has responded by regularly dispatching a group of catechist nuns to Cruce, to
augment the priest's yearly visits. In addition, Cruce has obtained the canton's
first rural posta sanitaria, where a nurse practitioner dispenses first-aid and
vaccinations. A new Saturday market has also drawn the town's first artisan,
maker of ujutas (rubber tire sandals), and its first chicherias, two bars that sell a
drink that was formerly available only in the festival context. Another addition
is a transit policeman, who mans a new tranca (a "toll booth" where travel
permits are inspected and truck cargoes sometimes searched for contraband).

CHAPTER 3. THE DIALOGICAL POLITICS OF ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK

1. When I asked don Manuel to draw a map of K'ulta territory, he placed

Santa Barbara at the center, dissected by the east-west highway and north-south
caravan trail. The Pan American Highway follows the route of an older road
452 Notes to Pages 55-70

built for mule-drawn wagons sometime during the late nineteenth or early
twentieth century. An earlier east-west road, with gradients too steep for either
wagons or motor vehicles, bypassed Santa Barbara to the south, just as the new
highway bypasses it to the north. I have walked sections of the older road, which
passed through Lagunillas on its way west to Condo rather than to Challapata.
To the southeast, it may well have led to Porco rather than to Potosi. Sections of
this now unused road are clearly Incaic, forming a still-unsurveyed east-west link
in the Inca road system studied in Hyslop 1984.
2. This was one of many samarayaiias, "breathing" places where people and
gods pause on their pilgrimages to and from Santa Barbara's church.
3. A young couple dressed in city finery were hustled across the plaza
towards the office by a large group of angry people, jostling and insulting the
unlucky pair until they were inside the office and the corregidor asked for quiet.
It turned out that they had recently been married in Potosi and had returned to
collect their belongings before setting out on a life together elsewhere. This had
been a mistake, for the young man's belongings were in a house that was still
occupied by his old wife, whom he sought to replace with this new one. His own
patriline kin had taken the newly weds captive and had been joined in the plaza
by his first wife's kinsmen. The couple received a terrible tongue lashing,
punctuated by pushes and slaps, until finally the corregidor called a halt to the
proceedings and sent for the new wife's kinsmen. The bigamist was thrown into
the town's tiny one-room jail (the only building in town made entirely of stone),
while two of the authorities dragged the young bride towards the church. In the
thirty paces between the town hall and the church, women in the crowd
managed to tear her newly bought cholita outfit to shreds. While the authorities
waited for further interested parties to arrive (such as the second wife's kin from
a distant hamlet), we were admitted to the meeting room.
4. The cemetery was moved from the churchyard as a result of an
eighteenth-century hygienic policy.
5. The vast majority of the identity cards I saw on this occasion belonged to
men, though many women also carry them. What I found most noteworthy was
the profession by which most had chosen to be identified. A small minority of
men had elected agricultor, "farmer," whereas the great majority chose to be
identified as commerciantes, "businessmen." The few dozen women whose cards
I handled, on the other hand, were almost evenly divided between pastora,
"shepherdess," and tejedora, "weaver."
6. Since election results have been published, however, it is not remiss to
note that local balloting heavily favored Siles Suazo and his Union Democratica
Popular party. A minority of votes went to Victor Paz Estenssoro and the
Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario. Both of these men had occupied the
presidency before, and their left-leaning political movements had been centrally
important to the national revolution of the 1950s, with its expropriations of
mines and oil fields and its peasant union-forced agrarian reform act. Voting
confirmed continuing sympathy for the changes in rural life that had resulted
from that revolution.
Notes to Pages 75-77 453

7. By formal interview, I mean extended private discussions, seated at a

table with tape recorder and notebook, in which I had prepared extensive lists of
questions in advance. The most extensive discussions were with don Manuel
Mamani of Vila Sirka, over a period of nearly ten days. At don Manuel's
insistence, these interviews were both remunerated and carried out far from
K'ulta territory. His insistence on remuneration, at a rate based on (but higher
than) the daily wage in the mine work he has periodically undertaken, was
supported by sound argument: Ten days of continuous questioning would be
difficult and would take him from other productive labors. In particular, it cut
into his planned long-distance trading trip. He preferred to do the interviews
away from K'ulta to avoid the prying ears of his countrymen, who might think
him involved in unscrupulous dealing or become envious (of his payments and
ties to influence). Precisely the same argument was forwarded by don Jose
Camino of Lakachaka (Ayllu Manxa-Kawalli), with whom I spent five less
fruitful days. In both cases, interviews were carried out in rented rooms in La
Paz. Don Manuel and I encamped for ten days in a somewhat seedy hotel room.
Across the hallway, a textile trader from Tarabuco engaged in deals with a
hippy-capitalist exporter. All of us shared the bathroom with twins from
Colombia, dwarves born without legs, who paid for their room with the
proceeds of their begging on the main street of La Paz. We ate together in the
market and a few times in classier restaurants (after don Manuel convinced me
to buy him better-quality clothes and a pair of coveted soccer shoes, so he would
not feel ill at ease). Don Manuel took time off on market days to spend some of
his pay, mostly on high-quality alpaca pelts.
I twice obtained the consent of don Pablo Choquecallata, founder of Cruce,
to tape-record his storytelling, under almost formal conditions. Don Bartolome
Mamani, the yatiri who officiated in several ch'allas I had attended, also sat for
many hours with me, helping to reconstruct the ch'allas I had missed once too
many had been poured. Since he insisted on pouring and drinking a small shot of
alcohol every time he pronounced the words of a libation, tape recording proved
essential in these sessions. Here interviews were made possible by goodwill and
long-term reciprocal indebtedness rather than by wages. Both men preferred to
work after dark and behind closed doors, for the same reasons that don Manuel
and don Jose had chosen to travel to La Paz.
8. In an ideal year, planting in late September and early October is followed
by the return of the rains from November through February, then harvests in
April. In May, crops of bitter potatoes, the only variety that does well in the
canton's high-altitude fields, are processed into a freeze-dried form called ch'ufzu,
which can be stored for years. Strips of meat are also freeze dried at this time,
producing charki (from which the term "jerky" comes). But rarely is there an
ideal agricultural year in Canton Culta. Hail storms, late or early freezes, and
poorly timed or insufficient rains make farming an unusually risky business.
What is more, none of the canton's lands are suitable for maize farming, and
only a few sheltered spots sometimes permit the harvest of a small crop of the
much-appreciated janq'u imilla ("white girl") or ch'yar imilla ("black girl")
454 Notes to Pages 78-87

varieties of potato. Broad beans and onions can sometimes be grown within the
shelter of the walls of roofless houses, and quinua is also planted in small
quantities. A variety of barley that does not reach maturity here provides animal
fodder, useful when standing hail keeps llamas in the corral.
9. Challapata hosts the Ranger Battalion, U.S.-trained "red berets" famed
for Che's execution.
10. I once witnessed the signing of another such acta in a wrongful death suit
that was settled without recourse to supracantonal authorities. Later, I myself
was to sign such a document.

CHAPTER 4. STRUCTURES AND HISTORIES: K'ULTA BETWEEN GODS AND STATE

1. So sacrosanct are local jurisdictions that authorities in Cruce and Santa

Barbara twice stamped my passport with canton and vice-canton rubber stamps.
Other permission papers quickly accrued a collection of such stamps, signatures,
and thumbprints, the likes of which are also part of all petitions to provincial,
departmental, or national governments.
2. As an administrative unit of the Bolivian state, Canton Culta is one
among the dozens of cantons that make up the next highest administrative
division, the province, under the political leadership of a subprefect. Several such
provinces make up the Department of Oruro, administered by a prefect in the
department capital of Oruro. From shortly after Bolivian independence, Canton
Culta belonged first to the Provincia de Paria, derived directly from a colonial
province. After the War of the Pacific in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, Paria Province was subdivided. Along with Condo, Huari, and Challa-
pata, Culta became a canton of the Provincia Abaroa, with its capital and
subprefect located in the town of Challapata. In 1984, Huari (then capital of the
second section of the province) obtained approval of its provincialization
petition, becoming capital of the breakaway Provincia de Atahuallpa. Condo
and the cantons that had broken away from it (including Condo K, Urmiri,
Culta, and Cahuayo) were charted to join the new province. Resisting the
secession of Huari (which, with its brewery, is the principal tax base of the
region), Challapata (supported by several hundred Qaqachaka fighters) marched
on Huari and bloody fighting (and legal oppositions) ensued, settled finally by
the Bolivian Senate. Canton Culta has remained in Provincia Abaroa, while
Cahuayo, in theory still part of Provincia de Atahuallpa, has declared its
allegiance to the Department of Potosi.
3. Both prefect and subprefect are presidential appointees and, as such,
loyal members of the ruling party or coalition of parties. The vast majority of
government financing for cantonal, provincial, and departmental projects, such
as road construction and provision of water and sewer lines, electricity, health
services, and development loans, has until recently been funneled through the
department's and province's appointed officials. Given the state's scarcity of
resources and the appointed nature of departmental and provincial offices, it is
Notes to Page 87 455

not surprising that most such money has been spent on projects in the
department capital, with some spin-off funding to the provincial capitals from
which subprefects hail. Very little funding has made it to rural cantons, most of
which, like Culta, lack electricity, running water, and most other municipal
services. Recent populist politics and the new Law of Popular Participation have
lately funneled more development funds into the countryside, but their true
impact has yet to be seen.
Apart from their administrative duties (which include control of police forces,
collection of taxes, etc.), these appointed officials also serve as judicial authori-
ties of second resort. The subprefect's office in Challapata is also a juzgado, and
the subprefect there dispenses a certain amount of summary justice, hearing cases
brought before him by the town councils of the cantons of his jurisdiction.
4. Canton Culta (spelled per maps and state documents according to
Spanish orthographic convention) is the social unit and territory understood
vis-a.-vis its relationship to the state and its formal incorporation as a unit of that
state (just as Santa Barbara de Culta is a recognized canton capital). Ayllu K'ulta
(spelled in Aymara orthography as pronounced in that language) is that very
same social group, as it is sometimes locally understood and constituted, and the
territory the group claims and occupies. The two are essentially synonymous.
Both Canton Culta and Ayllu K'ulta were composed of five constituent ayllus:
Qullana, Alax-Kawalli, Manxa-Kawalli, Yanaqi, and Ilawi. Both units are still
undergoing processes of fragmentation. For a period of time in the past, Ayllu
K'ulta was also divided into moieties, wherein Ayllus Alax-Kawalli and Manxa-
Kawalli together constituted K'ulta's lower moiety (manxa-saya), while Qullana,
Yanaqi, and Ilawi joined forces within K'ulta's upper moiety (alax-saya). During
the period of fieldwork, only Alax-Kawalli and Manxa-Kawalli participated
fully in all political and ritual activities of Canton Culta/Ayllu K'ulta. The two
ayllus now engage in cycles of alternation and ritual battles making them into
moieties. The distinction between Ayllu K'ulta and Canton Culta is an analytic
one, not clearly made by the people of the place, but it is not merely heuristic,
since in the past Canton Culta included what are now Cantones Lagunillas and
Cahuayo, although these were conceived of as made up of major ayllus distinct
from the five ayllus of Ayllu K'ulta. According to Platt (1987b), neighboring
Ayllu Macha remains a coherent maximal ayllu (subdivided into constituent
moieties and major and minor ayllus), notwithstanding its division into multiple
cantones, though this would appear to be an unusual case.
5. During my time in K'ulta I have witnessed council-directed collective
labor to repair the church, build a new house for the local schoolteacher, repair
the access road to Santa Barbara, and build the posta sanitaria in Cruce. I also
saw collective action to block the Pan American Highway in national strikes that
brought down military dictators in 1979 and 1982. Formerly, council-led labor
levies were also responsible for construction and repair of the main highway
where it runs through K'ulta territory, but such work is now undertaken with
heavy machinery by state-paid road crews.
456 Notes to Pages 88-101

6. Both the authority and mediating powers of the council are, however,
limited. Individuals against whom substantial evidence of adultery, incest, theft,
or murder has been advanced are well advised to leave town, to avoid the swift
and terrible justice that local "posses" mete out in such cases.
7. To satisfy the subprefect, the successful candidate for corregidor must
speak Spanish, and this becomes an important concern in seeking candidates. But
other criteria also come into play. As a result, perhaps, of long experience with
abusive and peremptory corregidors, the post-1952 system of corregidor election
undermines that official's potential power and legitimacy. In the cases I know of,
candidates were on the young side and had not participated in the legitimacy-
inspiring fiesta-cargo system. While they presided over meetings as chair, they
lacked authority to override the collective weight of the council and tended
literally to rubber-stamp the decisions of their seniors, the assembled jilaqatas,
alcaldes, and alguaciles.
8. A frequently broadcast radio spot that year consisted of a few minutes of
breakers washing over a beach, followed by a solemn pledge to recover "nuestro
mar."
9. Inscribed on the base of a statue to Abaroa's memory in Oruro, the
dictum is the subject of a running joke based on the word play sometimes
attributed to Abaroa himself. "Que se rinde su abuela" is officially interpreted as
"Let your grandmother surrender," but can also be parsed as a vulgar taunt on
the basis of extended meanings of "surrender."
10. The dance of choice was the one called capora/es, a favorite of Oruro's
carnava/ procession that is regularly performed by the children of that city's elite
high school. Derived from another dance, the negritos (a dance of slaves and
slave drivers), caporales are exclusively whip-wielding slave drivers dressed in
brilliantly sparkling colors, but bereft of slaves.
11. The term "supay" was apparently applied in preconquest times (and by
speakers of Quechua) to a category of ancestor (see Harris 1982; MacCormack
1991, Taylor 1980). Used by early missionaries to translate "Satan" or "devil,"
"supay" acquired some of the qualities Spaniards ascribed to "devils" and
"demons." K'ultas also accept "supay" as a designation for the presolar people
called Chullpas, relegated to the underworld by the first rising of the Solar-
Christ. I later learned that the libations I was told were dedicated to "some
supays" were actually poured for uywiris, mallkus, and t' aI/as (feminine, flat
plain dieties). Telling the outsider that these were superstitions performed for
demons served to "diabolize" the performance, simultaneously distancing the
speaker from such activities, raising him towards the cosmopolitan status of the
hearer, and validating the outsider-hearer's presumed preconceptions of indian
ritual practices, thus closing the door on further inquiry. Yet indirectly, the
characterization of indigenous gods as supays also categorized them correctly,
since, like some deceased ancestors, Supay-Chullpas and uywiris and rna Ilk us are
powerful beings from the past, still present in the underworld. Here we see how
differing interpretations of the same acts, events, and numinous beings can thus
Notes to Pages 102-116 457

appear to overlap on a higher level of abstraction, producing a structured system

of limited communication that I shall call cultural pidgin.
12. Long-festering rivalries and feuds and competing claims to land are often
brought to a head when patronymic groups appear en masse to cultivate and
fence new fields in long-fallowed parcels. Given the length of fallow, opening
lands that have not been cultivated for generations, often in puruma areas
considered "no man's land," are especially likely to lead to such disputes.
13. Several members of dancing and fighting groups in the festivals of
Guadalupe and Exaltaci6n told me that these were mere rehearsals compared
with the ritual battle of Culta's patron saint feast of Santa Barbara.
14. I later discovered that, fearing a major fight between Qullana and the
Kawallis, the corregidor had also asked for soldiers to provide a "peace-keeping"
force during the festival of Santa Barbara.
15. Similar rhetoric and specific recommendations for change can be seen in
regulations for orderly town life laid down in the ordenanzas of Viceroy
Francisco de Toledo (see chap. 6 and part B of the Documentary Appendix).
16. Don Bartolome was also an accomplished and admired storyteller, whose
versions of Aymara myths I have chosen to present here. Dona Basilia's narrative
skills were employed elsewhere as a frequent leader of wedding songs and songs
to the animals (on which see Arnold and Yapita 1992a, 1992b).
17. Some forms of cultural analysis insist that every class within a system
such as Bolivia's shares common cultural ground. Maybe so, but the scope of
shared cultural knowledge may be broad or narrow, and interpretations of
apparently shared terms of symbolic actions may still differ considerably.
"Speaking" in a cultural pidgin, everyone in the country understands roughly
that Supay is to indian as Christ is to creole elite, but they do not understand it
in the same way or with the same implications. As a kind of language, pidgin
has the advantage of making communication possible, bringing speakers and
participants of two or more distinct languages and cultures into conjunction
for certain circumscribed ends, which lately have included the building of
"creole" national cultures. Such a "cultural pidgin" exists, of course, because
the intercultural communications of today have a history, dating back to the
first moments of the Spanish invasion of this part of the Andes and to the
mutual accommodations reached by Spaniards and indians in the colonial
situation, and by creole elites and indigenous campensinos in the postcolonial
one.
18. For an indication of where I would take this argument, see Abercrombie
1991, and for first installments on a study of the emergence of a "mestizo-cholo"
cultural zone in which the cultural pidgin of the Spanish and indian frontier is a
native language, see Abercrombie 1992, 1996.
19. The term "discourse" here must be expanded, of course, to include the
history of violence and oppression to which the people called indians were
subjected, as well as the active and passive and the overt and hidden forms of
resistance in which they have engaged (see Abercrombie 1991).
458 Notes to Pages 117-123

20. Another version of the story has it that Santa Barbara was walking down
from the headwaters of the Pilcomayo with her sister, Belen. When a young boy
saw the two of them, Santa Barbara was frozen into image form, while her sister
continued on downriver to the town of Tinquipaya, where she is venerated as
Our Lady of Bethlehem.
21. On Inca stones in nearby ethnic groups, see Platt 1978a; and Arnold
1992.
22. A rich source of data on the symbolism and ritual of the tata reyes (as
well as of the fiestas of authority in general) is to be found in Rasnake 1988a.
23. K'ulta is part of the fluid linguistic border between Quechua and Aymara.
In nearby Macha and Tinquipaya, in the Department of Potosi, Quechua is now
most often spoken in the home. Although almost all K'ultas speak Aymara in the
home and in ritual contexts, the majority of men have learned Quechua as a
second language, necessary in their trading lives for dealing both with Quechua-
speaking valley peoples who grow the produce they need and with the Quechua-
speaking vecino elite of many towns, cities, and mining centers. Young K'ulta
men also spend time working as miners, as ore carriers in mining communities,
and lately as "treaders" in the processing of coca leaves into "pasta." Since their
opportunities for travel to such places are generally fewer and come later in life,
K'ulta women are less frequently fluent in Quechua. The increasing prevalence of
Quechua has led to an unstable process of linguistic borrowing, especially of
certain kin terms and comparative adjectives. For example, "yes" in K'ulta is
most often the Quechua ari, rather than the Aymara jisa, which sounds
old-fashioned to K'ultas.
24. In 1993, none of the jilaqatas of Condo's former annexes arrived for the
fiesta of San Pedro (Lynn Sikkink, personal communication, September 1993).
25. At the end of a week-long process of obtaining the permission of the
priest (in Huari), the town council of San Pedro de Condo, and Condo's
mayordomos, who agreed to let me see the books (kept in a beautifully worked
and painted colonial sacristy), I had a total of two hours with them. I had also
obtained permission to microfilm some of these books, but my camera batteries
died at that moment. Along with Culta's parish registers, dating from 1778, these
books were collected by order of the bishop of Oruro into the new Archivo
Obispal in the mid-1980s, where I consulted them at greater length in 1992.
Many of these registers can be consulted in microfilm in the Family History
Centers operated in the United States by the Mormon church. My thanks to
Family History Center staffs in Menlo Park, California, and Homestead, Florida,
for help in 1989 and 1991.
26. Hot springs are rather common in the Bolivian highlands. There are still
hot springs within K'ulta territory, about an hour's walk south of Santa Barbara.
Elsewhere, in Poopo, site of the colonial archive of the Provincia de Paria, hot
spring baths help compensate for research conditions.
27. See G. Martinez' (1976, 1983) analyses of place deities (including
uywiris) of Isluga, west of Killaka territory, in present-day Chile.
Notes to Pages 133-140 459

CHAPTER 5. PATHWAYS OF HISTORICAL COLONIZATION: STORIES OF AN

ANDEAN PAST FROM THE ARCHIVES OF LETTERS AND LANDSCAPES

1. On the significance of town life in Early Modern Spain and the three-way
struggle among townsmen, Crown, and senores, see Font Rius 1954; Guilarte
1941; Hinojosa 1903; and Nader 1990.
2. On the Buen Retiro palace see Brown and Elliott 1980; Philip II's effort to
catalogue and map both his Castilian and indian realms produced not only
increasingly standardized census taking and visitas but also the Relaciones
Geograficas of both areas (Jimenez de la Espada 1965; N. Salomon 1973).
3. It is arguable that the development of this "first modern state" (Maravall
1972) ushered in the first blush of the "modernity" that, for Timothy Mitchell
(1991), came two centuries later with the rationalism and full-blown positivist
epistemology that led French and British empire builders to model their colonies
on the representations they had first created in nineteenth-century universal
expositions.
4. On the old-regime values that motivated conquistadors, see Gongora
1975; Leonard [1949]1992; and Lockhart 1972. Elliott (1970) underscores the
difficulty for Spanish state building posed by the combination of municipal
autonomy and noble pretensions.
5. Hemming (1970) provides the best overall account of the Spanish
conquest of the Incas. Barnadas (1973) gives greater attention to the invasion of
Charcas, of which Julien (1995) offers an insightful reinterpretation.
6. "La primera y principal causa por do atavaliva, senor de dicha provincia,
se prendiese" (AGI, Indiferente General 422, fols. 206v-207r).
7. Guarache's son Juan Colque Guarache insists that this act of submission
took place in Cajamarca, which is unlikely, since Spanish chroniclers place
Manco Inca's submission to Spaniards on the outskirts of Cusco.
8. Summarized by MacCormack (1991: 71); paraphrasing Estete (1924:
54-56).
9. The Spanish original:

Era tanta la gente y ... era tanto 10 que envasaban en aquellos

cueros, porque todo su hecho es beber y no comer, que ... dos
vertederos anchos de hueco de mas de media vara que vertian por
debajo de losas en el rio que debian ser hechos para la limpieza y
desaguadero de las lIuvias ... corrian todo el dia orines de los que en
ellos orinaban; en tanta abundancia, como si fueran fuentes que alii
manaran; cierto, segun la cantidad de 10 que bebian; y la gente que 10
bebia no es de mara villar aunque verlo es mara villa y cosa nunca
vista .... Duraron estas fiestas mas de XXX dias arreo; donde se
gasto tanto vino de aquello, que si hubiera de ser de 10 de aca, segun
10 que et valia, era muy poco todo el oro y plata que se tomo para
comprarlo.
460 Notes to Pages 141-143

10. Polo describes the form of split inheritance (see Conrad and Demarest
1984: 116ff.) that helped to impel Inca expansion as well as to reshape social
memory periodically:
It was no small affliction, although infrequent, the service that these
gave to the Inca when he succeeded as lord in the kingdom, because,
as has been written, [he inherited] none of the service of his
predecessor, not even the clothing that in the course of his life had
been placed in the deposits of Cusco, nor his utensils of gold and
silver ... nor anything else that he held as his own. Instead, all this
and his servants remained for the corpse, for the support of which
they made fields and had great expenses .... (Polo Ondegardo 1990:
110)

The Spanish original:

No era pequena pesadumbre, aunque se hacia pocas veces, el servicio
que estos daban al Inca cuando sucedia por senor en el reino porque,
como esta dicho, el servicio de su antecesor ni en la ropa que en el
discurso de su vida se hallaba en los dep6sitos del Cuzco, ni en su
vajilla de oro y plata ... ni en otra cosa que eJ tuviese por propia,
sino que todo esto y la gente de su servicio quedaba para el cuerpo,
para el cual y para el servicio se Ie hacian chacaras y tenian gran
gasto.
1l. The act of possession:
En el asiento de Porco termino e jurisdicci6n de la Villa de Plata
provincia de los Charcas veynte e ~inco dias del mes de septiembre de
mill y quinientos y quarenta anos ante el Magnifico Senor Pedro de
Ansures teniente de capitan general de la dicha Villa de Plata e
alcalde ordinario della por Su Magestad etcetera. E por ante mi Juan
de Grazeda escrivano publico de la dicha Villa paresci6 presente
Hernando de Aldana vezino de la dicha Villa y dixo que no
embargante que el tiene la posesi6n de los yndios de aullaga a siete
anos y mas por ~edula del senor marques don Fran~isco Pi~arro
governador 112rl por Su Magestad que agora hazia e hizo
presenta~i6n de la ~edula desta otra parte contenida e pidi6 a su
mer~ed Ie meta en la posesi6n de todos los yndios caciques e
principales e pueblos en la dicha ~edula contenidos....
E luego el dicho senor capitan aviendo visto la dicha ~edula dixo
que metia e meti6 al dicho Hernando de Aldana en la posesi6n de
todos los caciques pueblos e yndios en la dicha cedula contenida
segun y como 0 por su senoria Ie es mandado y en senal de verdadera
posesi6n e por posesi6n Ie di6 y entreg6 a Guarache cacique prin~ipal
e a Tarache hijo que dixo ser de un prin~ipal natural del pueblo de
Notes to Pages 145-149 461

Quillaca y el dicho Hernando de Aldana w;ibio en si la dicha

posesion .... AGI, Charcas 53, item 1, fols. llv-12r, Sept. 1540,
Porco, Posesi6n de Hernando de Aldana por Per Ansures; copied into
"Memorial de don Diego Copatete ca~ique prin~ipal de los yndios
Quillacas y Asanaques," 1622)
The scribe notes Aldana's claim of prior possession of part of the "aullagas,"
of which the indians received now are the "other part." "Aullagas" here refers,
not to the diarchy of Awllaka, but to the entire Killaka region as the "provincia
de los Aullagas," after the Lago de Aullagas (now Lake Poopo). This designation
has led to much confusion in encomienda lists of the period, in which Aldana is
often misidentified as Lorenzo de Aldana, Hernando's relative and encomendero
of Paria (Sura peoples).
12. The first Spanish expedition into Qullasuyu was led by Francisco
Pizarro's partner-turned-rival Diego de Almagro, accompanied by a looting band
of Spaniards on an ill-fated expedition to Chile. Almagro's small group of
Spaniards had been joined in their expedition by a large contingent of indian
allies led by Manco Inca's brother Paullo and the high priest of Cusco, Vilaoma.
The expedition received provisions and reinforcements from native lords of
Qullasuyu, and in particular from Guarache, mallku of the four-diarchy federa-
tion called Killaka. As his son Juan Colque Guarache attested, his help was vital
to this expedition into southern Qullasuyu, because on a southward journey the
storehouses of the Inca tambo of Awllaka afforded the last dependable supplies
before reaching inhospitable desert regions.
13. "Cotapampa" is likely a Hispanized rendition of the local Aymara
compound term "q'uta-pampa," meaning "lake-plain" in Spanish, and is trans-
latable to the Quechua "qucha-pampa," rendered in Spanish orthography as
"Cochabamba." Barnadas disputes this, opting for a highland site of the same
name (1973: 34-35).
14. Apart from already-cited sources in Cieza, Betanzos, and caciques'
memoriales, my account of the Spanish invasion of Charka comes largely from
Barnadas 1973; Barragan 1994; and Hemming 1970.
15. In assigning native lords and their subjects to Spaniards, Pizarro must
have relied on information provided by the lords themselves, coupled with
testimony of Spanish participants in the 1538 invasion of Qullasuyu. Hernando
and Gonzalo Pizarro had learned enough about the territory in their reconnais-
sance, after their victory at "Cotapampa," to claim labor sources in the vicinity
of the Inca silver mines at Porco.
16. A descendant of a native lord named Consara (or Cuysara), present at the
surrender, claimed that this mallku was the first to have surrendered to the
Spaniards. As mallku of the Charka people, a group of hereditary lordships that
formed half the Qaraqara-Charka federation, Cuysara was a man of great local
stature, favored by the Incas and granted major privileges and power. It is
probable that his counterpart, mallku of the Qaraqara portion of the federation,
462 Notes to Pages 149-153

was of even greater stature in Inca times. Yet Cuysara's quick action in
surrendering first led the Spaniards to name the entire region after his group, as
the "province of Charcas" (Espinoza 1969: passim).
17. See part A of the Documentary Appendix: Francisco Pizarro's Grant of
Acho and Guarache to Hernando de Aldana. Marti Parssinen (1992) argues that
pueblo lists such as this were read into Spanish documents from quipu accounts.
But the irregularity of the account, which seems to mix place-names with the
names of social groups and which does not add up to the totals given in the
grant, suggests otherwise.
18. I am currently working on a detailed study of Vela's relations with
Awllakas and his similar difficulties with the vassals he purchased in Spain with
his indian silver. Vela's troubles were set in motion by La Gasca, who inserted a
clause in some of his encomienda grants that fed suits over restitution:
... [The caciques] and the rest of the indians subject to them you
shall treat well and procure their conservation, asking from them
moderate tributes such that they well can give. And if you should
exceed in it apart from being punished you shall be ordered to return
the excess as part of the payment that in the future shall be owing to
you, in conformity with the limits to be put on the tributes that the
said indians shall owe.
The original Spanish:
... a ellos y a los demas yndios a ellos sujetos los trateis bien y
procureis su conserva~ion pidiendoles tributos moderados 13vl y tales
que vuenamente los puedan dar con aperzevimiento que si en ello
ezediecedes allende de ser penado se vos mandar a tomar la demasia
en parte de pago para 10 que adelante ovieredes de aver comforme a
las tassaziones que de los tales tributos que huvieron de dar los
dichos yndios se hiziera. (four-folio item inserted in AGI, EC 497 -C,
Pieza 23, 1560 [unpaginated]; emphasis in original)
19. See especially the forthcoming volume of source materials and essays on
the Qaraqara-Charka federation (Tristan Platt, Therese Bouysse-Cassagne,
Olivia Harris, and Thierry Saignes, eds.). Much of this advance is, of course, due
to the efforts of scholars who have heeded Murra's admonitions (1968, 1970) to
seek out the relatively uncontaminated data of bureaucratic and administrative
reports. Guevara-Gil and Salomon (1994) suggest that such reports should also
be regarded as descriptions of rituals of rule, which created the very social
realities that they recorded.
20. The term "cacique," imported by the Spanish from the Caribbean into
the Andes, was applied to indigenous authorities who might otherwise have been
titled kuraqa (Quechua) or mallku (Aymara). "Cacique" displaced Andean
terms, obliterating the finer Andean distinctions of hierarchy.
Notes to Pages 153-154 463

21. On this point see Spalding 1974, 1984; Stern 1982; and Rivera Cusican-
qui 1978a.
22. See the stricture offered in Salomon's essay (1982) on the insoluble
contradictions inherent in these early attempts to bridge the cultural gap between
the Andean and Spanish worlds: "They necessarily speak partly through ideas
and myths not their own, and partly through those that are too much their own
to be readily conveyed in a foreign vehicle" (32).
23. As among the Macha, members of present-day "ethnic groups" such as
K'ulta (Culta), Wari (Huari), Challapata, or Quntu (Condo) may at times refer to
their society as an ayllu (Ayllu K'ulta, for example). This usage corresponds to
Platt's term "maximal ayllu" (1978a: 1082). Similarly, the component moieties of
each group may be called ayllus (Platt's "major ayllu"), as are the variable
number of theoretically endogamous social groups within each moiety (Platt's
"minor ayllu"). I use the term "ayllu" only for the named minor ayllus of each
diarchy (and now of town-based "ethnic groups"). It is possible that "ayllu" (or
an Aymara equivalent, such as the term "hatha," found in Bertonio's Aymara
dictionary [1984)) may have been used in historical times to refer to diarchy
moieties, diarchies, and federations as well. I use these last terms because the
historical record lacks differentiating indigenous terms.
"Ethnic group" is another problematic term. The most frequent usages in
Andean studies apply the term to the class and racial category of indian (versus
mestizo, white, etc.), to language groupings (Quechua versus Aymara ethnic
groups), to the boundaries of sixteenth-century diarchies or federations (Lupaqa
versus Killaka), or other groupings easily identifiable by observers as "ethnically
distinct" because of clothing styles and so on. As a label for self-defined social
groups, the term may be preferable to the also frequently used and vague term
"community." I choose to use the term "rural social groups" for peoples like
K'ulta or Macha.
24. The original Spanish is as follows:

Lo otro. En nuestra prouincia de Los Charcas, antes de los ingas y

despues de ellos soli a hauer senores naturales mayo res de a diez mil
vasallos y otros de a ocho mil indios y otros de a seis mil indios y
vasallos otros dichos senores y caualleros eran superiores de los
demas caciques y senores que hauia en cada naci6n .... Y ansi cada
uno de estos senores soli an tener ocho segundas personas y diez
tam bien de a mil indios y cuatro principales de cada ayllu de a
quinientos y de cient indios y cuatro mandones en cada ayllu cada I
uno en su naci6n de hanansaya y Hurinsaya. Y en esta orden
governaron los ingas.

25. Colonial encomiendas had separated the mitimas (and their lands) from
their native highland groups of origin. The result of the litigation was the
affirmation of the rights of the highland lords over their indians and some of the
464 Notes to Pages 156-159

Inca-administered lands. Toledo allotted to Juan Colque Guarache, as part of the

"tasa y servicio," "los Yndios que reciden en el valle de Cochabamba Ie han de
sembrar coger y beneficiar una cementera de anega y media de Maiz ... "
(AGNA, 9.17.2.5., fol. 126r). The lands allotted to the Qaranka and Killaka-
called "Ia Chulla"-were in periodic litigation until at least 1771 (see ANB, EC
1771, no. 143).
26. Qaranka and Killaka may have formed a dual federation on the scale of
the Qaraqara-Charka federation.
27. There are some small differences between the partial copy of the
1574-75 probanza which I found in the Archivo del Tribunal de Poopo (ATP,
Expediente 11, 1574-75) and that used by Espinoza (AGI [Sevilla], 1575,
"Primera informacion hecha por don Juan Colque Guarache, ... " [as cited by
Espinoza; actually AGI, Quito 45]).
The second probanza, completed in 1577 and also published in part in
Espinoza Soriano 1981, repeats much of the information available in the first
while providing some new data (AGI, Quito 45, 1576-77, "Segunda informa-
cion ... "). In quoting the first probanza, I have preferred to use my own
transcription of the ATP version where possible, because it was either an original
or a late-sixteenth-century copy. The original encomienda grant is found in a
scribal copy of early documents in a seventeenth-century memorial presented by
a grandson of Juan Colque Guarache (AGI, Charcas 53, item 1).
Fragments of a questionnaire for yet a third probanza, dated 1580, were
inserted and then retained in an eighteenth-century document produced in an
effort (by a member of the Choqueticlla line) to seek the return of the papers
from an "outsider" to whom they had been loaned (ANB, EC 1792, no. 42; also
see ANB, EC 1804, no. 193).
Juan Col que Guarache was succeeded by his brother, don Francisco Visalla,
" ... ca~ique prin~ipal y capitan (en la Villa de Potosy) de los yndios del Rep-
artimiento de los quillacas y asanaques que sub~edio en lugar y como hermano
ligitimo de don Juan Colque Guarache diffuncto ... " (ANB, EC 1588, no. 5, fol.
2v). In June 1575, after the completion of the tasa, Toledo had appointed Visalla,
at the request of his brother, to the post of cacique of San Lucas and his brother's
segunda persona (the Provision was copied into the 1588 document).
28. I refer to the concept as developed by Sahlins (1985). Speaking of the
Maori chief (but also of the divine king and divine chief in general), Sahlins
writes: "The chief's marriages are intertribal alliances; his ceremonial exchanges
trade; as injuries to himself are cause for war. Here history is anthropomorphic
in principle, which is to say in structure. Granted that history is much more than
the doings of great men, is always and everywhere the life of communities; but
precisely in these heroic polities the king is the condition of the possibility of
community" (35-36).
29. Witnesses for the first interrogatorio included three caciques and fourteen
Spaniards. The second questionnaire (as identified by Espinoza [1981: 228])
included four indian and eleven Spanish witnesses.
Notes to Page 160 465

30. The full text of questions 3 and 4 of the interrogatorio:

3-Yten si saven [etcetera] que antes y en el tiempo del ynga los
antepasados y prede~essores del dicho don Joan fueron senores de
vasallos y ca~iques de las dichas par~ialidades Quillacas Asanaques
<;;:ibaroyos y Uroquillas y Haracapis los quales no recono~ieron
superior ni menos sub~edieron en el dicho ca~icasgo por titulo de
mer~edes sino por sub~ession como dicho es y asi mesmo fueron
senores de duo antes y en el tiempo del ynga y despues aca que era
los ynsigma de los cavalleros y como tales fueron allidos y repartados
contribuydos libres ni compelidos a ofy~ios ni cargos digan 10 que
saven.
4-Yten si saven [etcetera] que antes del dicho ynga gozavan de
las dichas libertades 122vl hasta Colque su predecessor que fue el que
dio la obedien~ia al ynga el qual Ie confyrmo 10 que tenia de antes
que fue por el ynga Yupanque ynga el qual conquisto la dicha
provin~ia de los quillacas digan (ATP, Expediente 11, 1574-75, fols.
22r-v)

31. The interrogatorio of Juan Colque Guarache's second probanza, pursued

in 1576-77 (Espinoza 1981: 252ff.), presents, in the first question, a different
list of groupings subject to the cacique principal:

1. Primeramente si conocen al dicho don Juan Colque Guarache,

cacique principal del repartimiento de los Quillacas y Asanaques y de
los Saracapis [sic] y de Puna y Yucasa y Guare, y que ansi 10 fueron
sus padres y abuelos por Ie venir el dicho cacicazgo por justos y
derechos titulos de linea reta de Huno Malleo, que quiere decir senor
de salua [que es] como duques, con des, marqueses en los reinos de
Espana.

32. It is certainly possible that these lords had had the Inca title of unu
mallku, "lord of ten thousand households," bestowed upon them, as question 1
of the second questionnaire claims. As of 1574, when counted in the Toledan
visita (after significant demographic decline), the Killaka federation was still
populated by more than twenty thousand souls. If we assume that four-fifths
of the population had died in the years following the conquest, Juan Colque
Guarache's father may have ruled the approximately 100,000 individuals
necessary to have deserved the title of unu mallku. Nonetheless, question 2 of
the second questionnaire, in which the term is defined as "senor de cinco mill
indios," casts doubt on the centrality of the decimal terminology to the
conception of authority in this group of (mostly Aymara-speaking) diarchies
(Espinoza 1981: 252). All four indigenous respondents to this questionnaire,
however, corrected the error in their answers to this question (ibid.,
258-265).
466 Notes to Pages 161-163

33. The original reads: " ... tres camisetas la una de chaperia de plata y otra
de chaperia de oro y otras de piedras prec;iossas que llaman mollo .... "
Responding to question 6 of the questionnaire, the octagenarian cacique of
Moromoro (today's Ravelo), don Pablo Humoro, revealed his familiarity with
such sumptuary gifts:
6-A la Sesta pregunta dixo que este testigo era criado del dicho
guayna capa que Ie aderoc;ava las plumas que se ponia e vio que un
dia el dicho ynga llamo antesi al dicho Colque Guarache ynga y en
sefial de amistad e por querrelle mucho en presenc;ia de este testigo Ie
dio tres camisetas de su vestir el qual las rrecivio y en aquel tiempo
10 suso dicho era negoc;io muy sefialdo y esto dize a la pregunta.
(ATP, Expediente 11, 1574-75, fo!' 7r; d. also Espinoza 1981: 242)
Nevertheless this same Pablo Humoro-spelled "Humiro" in Espinoza's
copy from a different MS (Espinoza 1981: 241)-raises some questions about
the veracity of Juan Colque's genealogy. Presumably in a position to know, he
made it clear in his response to question 5 that the individual who received the
shirts was" ... el abuelo del dicho don Juan, padre de su padre ... " who had
gone with the Inca in the conquest of Chichas, and upon his return had come"
... en andas y a elllamavan todos Inga Guarache Col que ... " (ibid.).
34. Up to the point at which Guarache (Juan Colque Guarache's father)
became Juan Guarache, the names in this genealogy appear to alternate: Guarache
succeeds Colque succeeds Guarache succeeds Colque. I cannot explain this regu-
larity. Note, however, that these names appear to be honorific titles, and were
certainly not surnames. Secondary sons of the Juan Guarache (and of Juan Colque
Guarache) were given different names altogether, a practice which continued
(among the commoners, especially) into the first half of the eighteenth century.
35. An excellent survey of such signs of authority is found in Martinez
Cereceda 1995.
36. "Kamachik" is the Quechua form (spelled here in the seventeenth century
lexicographer's orthography) of what in Aymara is kamachiri (formed from the
root kama, plus the causative -cha and the "agentifier" -iri), "one who causes to
be ordered/obliged/accomplished," applied to figures of authority from the father
in the household, to the "elder brother" of the hamlet, to the highest authorities
of the ayllu. We will see in part 3 that it is the kamachiris who make sacrifices,
as well as the sacrifices that make kamachiris.
37. Polo Ondegardo 1990: 121, "De la orden que los indios tenian en dividir
los tributos y distribuirlos entre si." The Spanish original:
Entre estos indios y su manera de vivir, es notorio que todo el reino
estaba dividido por partes, que cada una era de diez mil indios, que
llaman uno, y de cada uno de estos habia un gobernador sobre los
caciques y mandones-como esta dicho-allende de otra division mas
general, que llama ron estos Tahuantinsuyo, que quiere decir cuatro
Notes to Pages 165-170 467

partes en que todo el reino estaba dividido, que lIamaron Collasuyo,

Chinchasuyo, Andesuyo, Condesuyo, la cual division empieza desde
el Cuzco, del cual salen cuatro caminos, cada uno para una parte de
estas, como parece en la carta de las huacas, y con esta orden y
division era facil tener cuenta con todo, todo, como ellos la tenian, la
cual no se pone aqui ni hace memoria de ella, sino solamente porque
se entienda que en estando acordado en el Cuzco que se trajese cien
mil fanegas de maiz, en un momenta sabia cad a gobernador cuanto
cabia a su distrito y a los depositos de el sin diferencia ni porfia ni
pleito, y cada provincia cuanto cabia a las parcialidades, empezando
la cuenta por las cabeceras y luego se iban distribuyendo por
menudo, de manera que todo se hacia con la facilidad que esta
significado y no se ha de entender que la distribucion de esto era
igual ... sino que estaba repartido conforme a la calidad de la tierra,
asi el pan como la ropa y ganado, por cotas ....

38. The Spanish original:

[Atahuallpa] los res~ivio muy bien y dando de beyer al uno dellos
con un vasa de oro de la bevida que nosotros usamos, el espanol en
res~ibiendo de su rna no 10 derramo, de 10 qual se enojo mucho ... ;
y despues desto aquellos dos espanoles Ie mostraron ... una carta 0
libro ... diziendo que aquella hera la quilca [escritura] de Dios y del
rey e ... como se sintio afrentado del derramar de la chich a
[Atahuallpa] tomb la carta ... y arrojolo por ay diziendo: "que se yo
que me dais ay, anda bete."

39. The Spanish original:

... tienen una costumbre ... be buena crianza estos senores e todos
los demas de toda la tierra, y es que si un senor 0 senora va a casa de
otro a visitarle ... ha de lIevar tras si se es senora un cantaro de
chicha y en lIegando ... hace estanciar de su chicha dos vasos y el
uno da a beber al tal senor que visita y el otro se be be al tal senor 0
senora que la chicha da y ansi beben los dos y 10 mismo hace el de la
posada que hace sa car ansi mismo otros dos vasos de chicha y da el
uno al que ansi Ie ha venido a visitar y el bebe el otro ... y esta es la
mayor honra que entre ellos se usa y si esto no se hace cuando se
visitan tienen por afrentada la persona que ansi va a visitar al otro y
esta honra no se Ie hace de darlle a beber y excusase de no Ie ir mas
aver y ansi mismo se tiene por afrentado el que da a beber a otro y
no Ie quisiera rescebir....

40. Cieza asked that, apart from the colorful travel account of part 1, the
remainder of his writings be held for a period of fifteen years before possible
publication (Pease, Introduccion, p. xx, in Cieza de Leon 1984). Another
468 Notes to Pages 170-173

colonial chronicler, Agustin de Zarate (Polo Ondegardo's brother) succinctly

described another danger inherent in the act of writing:
No pude en el Peru escrivir ordenadamente esta Relaci6n (que no
importara poco para su perfecci6n) porque solo averla alla
coment;:ado, me huviera de poner en peligro de la vida, con Maestre
de Campo de Gont;:alo Pit;:arro, que amenat;:aba de matar a qualquiera
que escriviese sus hechos, porque ententi6 que eran mas dignos de la
lei de olvido (que los Athenienses llaman Amnistia) que no de
memoria, ni perpetuidad. (Zarate 1862, quoted in Gonzalez
Echevarria 1990: 73 n. 69)
41. Another indication of which is rather forcefully preserved in the writings
of Bernabe Cobo. Like Acosta, Cobo found the Andean knotted-cord records, or
quipus, to be their closest approximation to writing. To demonstrate the system's
praiseworthiness, Cobo related an anecdote in which a quipu served the role of
state's evidence to prove the identity of an indian guide who, years before the
trial, had murdered a Spaniard (Cobo 1979: 253-255).
42. Compare this practice with the larita's (mother's brother's) role in the
Sucullu vicuiia sacrifice (Bertonio 1984: part 2,323), and with the annointing of
the sponsor's aides in K'ulta sacrifices (see chapter 8).
43. Molina refers to his "Historia de los Ingas" manuscript, now presumed
lost.
44. My translation. The original Spanish:
La Capacocha ynvent6 tambien Pac hac uti Ynga Yupanqui, la cual
hera desta manera: las provincias de Collasuyo y Chinchaysuyo y
Antisuyo y Contisuyo trayan a esta ciudad, de cada pueblo y
generaci6n de jentes, uno 0 dos niiios y niiias pequeiios, y de hedad
de diez aiios; y trayan ropa y ganado y ovejas de oro y de plata de
mollo. Y 10 tenian en el Cuzco para el efeto que se dira; y despues de
estar todo junto, se asentava en la plaza de Aucaypata el Ynga, que
es la plaza grande del Cuzco, y alli aquellos niiios y demas sacrificios
andavan alrededor de las estatuas del Hacedor, Sol, Trueno y Luna
que para el efecto ya en la plaza estavan. Y davan dos bueltas, y
despues de acavado, el Ynga llamava a los sacerdotes de las
provincias y hacia partir los dichos sacrificios en quatro partes para
los quatro Suyos: Collasuyo, Chinchaysuyo, Antisuyo, Contisuyo, que
son las quatro partidas en que esta dividida esta tierra; y les det;:ia:
'Vosotros tomad cada uno su parte de esas ofrend as y sacrificios, y
llevadla a la principal huaca vuestra, y alli las sacrificas; y tomadolas,
llevavan hasta la guaca, y alli ahogavan a los niiios y los enterravan
juntamente con las figuras de plata, de ovejas y de personas de oro y
plata; y las ovejas y cameros y ropas 10 quemavan, y tanbien unos
cestillos de coca. La jente del Cuzco llevavan los sacrificios ya dichos
Note to Page 173 469

hasta Sacalpina, que sera una legua del Cuzco y ado los recevian los
yndios de Ansa. Y desta manera yban entregimdolos hasta donde se
avian de ha~er los sacrificios; y por esta horden los lIevavan a las
demas provincias.
Hacian este sacrificio al principio que el Ynga seiior empe~ava a
seiiorear para que las guacas Ie diesen mucha salud y tuviese en paz y
sosiego sus reynos y seiiorios y lIegase a biejos, y que veviese sin
enfermedad, de tal manera que ninguna guaca, ni mochadero ni
adoratorio, por pequeiio que fuese, no quedava sin recevir sacrificio,
porque ya estava diputado y acordado 10 que en cada guaca, lugar y
parte, se avia de sacrificar....
Todos los sacrificios ya dichos se ponian en ellugar ya dicho, y
luego el sacerdote que tenia a cargo la guaca de Yanacauri de do
ellos se jatan quedo echo piedra Ayarcache, uno de los quatro
ermanos que dicen salieron de la cueva de Tanbo, y porque en la
fabula que desto tratamos al principio de la Historia que Vuestra
Seiioria Ilustrisima tiene, trate largo delio, no 10 trato aqui; alia 10
podra ber Vuestra Seiioria....
Y luego en todos los lugares, fuentes, y cerros que en el Cuzco
avia por adoratorios, hechavan los sacrificios que para ellos estavan
dedicados, sin matar para esto ninguna criatura.
Heran tantos los lugares que dedicados tenian para sacrificar en el
Cuzco, que si se ubiesen de poner aqui seria mucha prolijada, y
porque en la Relacion de las guacas que a Vuestra Seiioria
Reverendisima di, estan puestos todos de la manera que se
sacrificauan, no 10 pongo aqui.
Y asi concluydo con 10 que en el Cuzco se avia de sacrificar,
sacauan los sacerdotes con los sacrificios que se avian de lIevar, como
ya esta dicho, la horden del camino con los sacrificios, era que toda
la jente que con la Capaccocha que por otro nombre se llama
Cachaguaes, yban hechos un ala, alguna cosa apartado los unos de
los otros, sin ir por camino real derecho, sino sin torcer a ninguna
parte, atravesando las quebradas y cerros que por del ante hallavan
hasta lIegar cada uno a la parte y lugar que estavan esperando para
recevir los dichos sacrificios....
Y asi lIegados a cada parte y lugar, los que auian de hazer los
sacrificios, los guacacamayos, que quiere decir 'guarda de la guacas',
y que a cargo las tenian, re~evia cada uno el sacrificio que a su guaca
cavia y los sacrificava y ofrecia, enterrando los sacrificios de oro y
plata y mollo y otras cosas de que ellos usa van; y las criaturas,
aviendolas ahogado primero, las que aquella guaca cavian, quemavan
en sacrificio los cameros, corderos y ropa que la cavian.
Es de notar que no a todos las guacas sacrificavan criaturas, sino
solo a las guacas principales que provincias 0 generaciones tenian.
470 Notes to Pages 173-174

Y por esta horden yban caminando por toda la tierra que el Ynga
conquistada tenia, por las quatro partidas, y haciendo los dichos
sacrificios hasta llegar cada uno por el camino do yba a los postreros
limites y mojones que el Ynga puesto tenia.
Tenian tanta cuenta y ra~on en esto, y salia tan bien repartido del
Cuzco 10 que en cada parte y lugar se avia de sacrificar, que aunque
hera en cantidad el dicho sacrificio y los lugares do cavia de hazer sin
numero, jamas avia yerro ni trocavan de un lugar para el otro. Tenia
en el Cuzco el Ynga para este efecto, yndios de los quatro Suyos 0
partidas, que cada uno dellos tenia quenta y ra~on de todas las
guacas por pequenas que fuesen, que en aquella partida de que eI
hera quipocamayo 0 contador, que llaman uilcacamayo.
45. Polo Ondegardo, who as corregidor of Cusco in 1559 investigated Inca
religious practices, comments on this technique of rule:
· .. each conquered province gave its principal idol and placed it in
the city of Cusco, along with the very body of the lord who had
conquered it. And thus all the bodies and the idols were in that great
hall of the house of the sun, and each idol had its servants and
expenses in women .... I was much surprised by it, since the Romans
did the same, keeping the principal idol of each conquered province
in that house that in Rome they called the Pantheon, which was later
made into a church, and very appropriately was given the advocation
Omnium Santorum [All Saints]. (Polo Ondegardo 1990: 85-86)
The Spanish original:
· .. todas las provincias que se conquistaron dieron el idolo principal
y se puso en la ciudad del Cuzco, el cual estaba con el mismo cuerpo
del senor que Ie habia conquistado, y asi todos los cuerpos y los
idolos estaban en aquel galpon grande de la casa del sol, y cada idolo
de estos tenia su servicio y gastos en mujeres .... me causo gran
admiracion por la misma orden tuvieron los romanos; y asi tuvieron
los idolos de todas las provincias que conquistaron el principal de
cada una en aquella casa que llama ban en Roma panteon, que
despues se hizo iglesia y muy a proposito se Ie dio por advocacion
Omnium Santorum.
46. The Spanish original:
· .. Asi con este titulo anduvieron muchos anos sin poder senorear
mas de aquella comarca del Cuzco hasta el tiempo de Pachacutec
Inca Yupanqui .... Despues [de conquistar los Chancas] siempre su
titulo fue esto de la relacion y inventariada el dia mas generoso de
Notes to Page 178 471

sacrificios y obligar a ellos a todos los que metian debajo de su

domino, y dar a entender que aquella ciudad del Cuzco era casa y
morada de dioses, y asi no habia en toda ella fuente ni paso ni pared
que no dijesen que tenia misterio como parece en cada manifestacion
de los adoratorios de aquella ciudad y carta que de ellos
manifestaron que pasaban de cuatrocientos y tantos; todo esto duro
hasta que vinieron los espaiioles, y hasta hoy se hace veneracion a
cada uno cuando no los yen y toda la tierra guarda y venera las
huacas que los incas les dieron y yo por sus mismos registros para
ensayar la manifestacion saque muchas de las provincias de
Chinchaysuyo y Collasuyo. Por que esta no es la materia que
tenemos presupuesto, basta esto cuanto a este articulo para
entendimiento de los demas.

47. The Spanish original (I have modernized the orthography):

Los indios del Piru, antes de venir espaiioles, ningun genero de

escritura tuvieron, ni por letras ni por caracteres, 0 cifras 0 figurillas,
como los de la China y los de Mexico; mas no por eso conservaron
menos la memoria de sus antiguallas, ni tuvieron menos su cuenta
para todos los negocios de paz, y guerra y gobierno. Porque en la
tradicion de unos a otros fueron muy diligentes, y como cosa sagrada
recibian y guardaban los mozos, 10 que sus mayores les referian, y
con el mismo cuidado 10 enseiiaban a sus sucesores. Fuera de esta
diligencia, suplian la falta de escritura y letras, parte con pinturas
como los de Mexico, aunque las del Piru eran muy groseras y toscas,
parte y 10 mas, con quipos. Son quipos, unos memoriales 0 registros
hechos de ramales, en que diversos iiudos y diversas colores,
significan diversas cosas. Es increible 10 que en este modo alcanzaron,
porque cuanto los libros pueden decir de historias, y leyes y
ceremonias, y cuentas de negocios, todo eso suplen los quipos tan
puntualmente, que admira. Habia para tener estos quipos 0
memoriales, oficiales diputados que se lIaman hoy dia quipo camayo,
los cuales eran obligados a dar cuenta de cada cosa, como los
escribanos publicos aca, y asi se les habia de dar entero credito.
Porque para diversos generos como de guerra, de gobierno, de
tributos, de ceremonias, de tierras, habia diversos quipos 0 ramales.
Y en cada manojo de estos, tantos iiudos y iiudicos, y hilillos atados;
unos colora dos, otros verdes, otros azules, otros blancos, finalmente
tantas diferencias, que asi como nosotros de veinte y cuatro letras
guisandolas en diferentes maneras sacamos tanta infinidad de
vocablos, asi estos de sus iiudos y colores, sacaban innumerables
significaciones de cosas. (Acosta 1977: 410-411)
472 Notes to Pages 179-184

48. "Ceque" is a Quechua term from colonial sources, for sight lines and
paths that radiated from Cusco and connected wak'a sites. The colonial
Quechua term "taqui" (pI. "taquies") labeled song-dances akin to Spanish
cantares, epic poems sung while dancing, which narrated the deeds of gods and
ancestors. Such deeds were tied to specific places, such as the wak'a shrines
found along ceque paths, and taquies were likely performed while dancing along
such paths, in conjunction with festivals honoring gods and ancestors at their
wak'a sites. Thus if the system of ceques was a kind of abstract social map
projected onto the landscape as paths, taquies contained the oral narrative
performed while moving through that landscape. The modern Aymara term
"t"aki," which is used both for paths on the landscape and for narrative
sequences such as the myths and libation performances which give voice to paths
and take the mental shape of a journey across the landscape, covers the semantic
ground of both the colonial Quechua terms "ceque" and "taqui."
49. "It must be known that the majority of wak'as, apart from their
properties, have clothing of cumbi that they call capac huchas, of the same
grandeur as in the wak'as. And the first thing one must do so that no relic of the
wak'a remains is to procure these capac huchas, because if they remain in their
power, they will dress any stone they like with it" (Alborn6z 1989: 196).
50. On tukapus see Harrison 1989: 60-62, who cites additional sources.
Also see Cummins 1994: 188-219, who advances a subtle argument similar to
that presented here on the Andean use of quipus, textiles, and queros in
recollecting the past and bringing it to bear on the present.
51. See, however, the interpretive cautions of Cummins (1994: 205-211)
and accompanying illustrations.
52. The Spanish original: "[Tata Paria fuel senor de toda la nacion de los
caracaras de la dicha parcialidad [de anansaya] y de la de los quillacas soras
carangas y chuyes y todas elias Ie obedecieron y las hacia juntar en Macha yeste
testigo conocio muy bien al dicho Tata Paria siendo este testigo muchacho y vio
que Ie traian en onbros de yndios como gran senor ... y todas las dichas
naciones se juntaron para hacelle sepulturas ... " (A GNA, 13 .18.7.2, 1612 - 19,
fol. 309r).
53. See discussion in MacCormack 1991: 173-181, and references there.
54. According to Cobo, "The sacrifice of domesticated animals was valued
and esteemed second only to that of humans. And sacrifices were made only of
the domestic animals, not of wild animals. The reason they gave for this is that
sacrifices should be made only of those animals that were raised [by the Indians]
and not of the others that were born and raised on their own" (Cobo 1990: 112).
Cobo goes on to dispute the labor theory of value that he here ascribes to the
Incas, by saying that hunting wild animals is clearly more work than raising
domesticated ones. What Cobo missed, the Old Testament Yahweh was able to
make clear (as does Valeri 1985): Domesticated animals participate in human
society, and are therefore more apt to bridge the gap between humans and gods.
Notes to Pages 187-191 473

55. The Spanish original:

[EI Inca] en cada pueblo puso la misma orden y dividio por ceques y
rayas la comarca, e hizo adoratorios de diversas advocaciones, todas
las cosas que parecian notables de fuentes y manantiales y puquios y
piedras hondas y valles y cumbres que ellos lIaman apachetas, y puso
a cada cosa su gente y les mostro la orden que habian de tener en
sacrificar cada una de elias ... ; finalmente, aunque en ninguna parte
fueron tantos los adoratorios como en el Cuzco, pero es la orden una
misma y vista la carta de las huacas del Cuzco en cada pueblo por
pequeno que sea la pintaran de aquella misma manera y mostraran
los ceques y huacas y adoratorios fijos, que para saberlo es negocio
importantisimo para su conversion, que yo la tengo ensayada en mas
de cien pueblos, yel senor obispo de las Charcas [preguntando] el si
aquello fuese tan universal, cuando vinimos juntos al negocio de la
perpetuidad por mandado de Su Magestad, se 10 mostre en Pocona y
los mismos indios Ie pintaron alii la misma carta, y en esto no hay
duda porque se hallara como digo sin falta ....
[F]ue una gran parte del tributo que daban el sembrarlas y
cogerlas y poner 10 que se cogia en los depositos que para esto
estaban hechos, parte de 10 cual se gastaba en sacrificios en el mismo
pueblo y 10 mas se lIevaba al Cuzco para el mismo efecto .... [E]ra
una grandisima cantidad, porque alii tenian las casas principales de
todos los dioses y gente mucha en cada una que entendian en otra
cosa, y cada dia sacrificaba cada uno en la plaza y en los cerros, que
cierto ver en esto la manifestacion general, no creo yo que se halla en
ningun genero de gente de la que tenemos noticia que tanto ni con
tantas ceremonias gastasen en sacrificios....
56. The Spanish original:
Es necesario en todos los pueblos hacerles que pinten la carta y
viendo la del Cuzco luego 10 hacen, que al sacerdote Ie quede noticia
de cada cosa de aquellas en particular, asi para la que entienda y
haga castigar, como para predicarles contra ella y moverlos con
razones claras a que entiendan las ilusiones y enganos del demonio;
que es negocio que por ser general va mucho en eI y es gran
fundamento para su edificacion y conversion.
57. The Spanish original: "Por estar estas cosas tan ciegas, podemos dezir,
que bienauenturada la inuencion de las letras, que con la virtud de su sonido
dura la memoria muchos siglos: y hazen que buele la fama de las cosas que
suceden por el vniuerso: y no ignoramos 10 que queremos, teniendo en las manos
la letura. Y como en este nueuo mundo de Indias no se ayan hallado letras,
vamos a tino en muchas cosas."
474 Notes to Pages 193-201

58. The Spanish original: "Ad. [en estas provin<;ias del Peru] aunque <;iegos
los honbres [dan mas] razon de si, puesto que quentan tantas fabulas que serian
daiiosas si las oviese descrevir.... "
59. The Spanish original:

Y asi examinando ... los mas prudentes y ancianos, de quien se tiene

mas credito saque y recopile la presente historia, refiriendo las
declaraciones y dichos de unos a sus enemigos, digo del bando
contra rio, porque se acaudillan por bandos .... Y estos memoriales,
que todos estan en mi poder, refiriendolos y corrigiendolos con sus
contrarios, y ultimamente ratificandolos en presencia de todos los
bandos y ayllos en publico, con juramento por autoridad de juez, y
con lenguas expertas generales, y muy curiosos y fieles interpretes,
tambien juramentados ....

60. The Spanish original: "Hace hecho tanta diligencia, porque cosa, que es
fundamento del hecho verdadero de tan gran negocio, como es el averiguar la
tirania de los crueles ingas desta tierra, para que todas naciones del mundo
entiendan el juridico y mas que legitimo titulo, quel rey de Castilla tiene a estas
Indias y a otras tierras a elias vecinas, especialmente a estos reinos del Peru."
61. Among the quipu kamayuq gathered in Cusco by Cristobal Vaca de Castro
in 1542 were two individuals from Pacaritambo named Callapiiia and Supno,
who portray Manco Capac as something of a con artist. His father, they assert,
was a lord in Pacaritambo, and the Inca claim to priority as sons of the sun was
nothing more than a politically motivated lie (Vaca de Castro 1929: 6-12).
62. The Spanish original: "Muchos destos Indios quentan que oyeron a sus
antiguos, que ouo en los tiempos passados vn diluuio grande, y de la manera que
yo escriuo en el tercero capitulo de la segunda parte. Y dan a en tender, que es
mucha la antigiiedad de sus antepassados .... "
63. The Spanish original: " ... de cuyo origen quentan tantos dichos y
fabulas, si 10 son, que no quiero detenerme en 10 escreuir: porque vnos dizen que
salieron de vna fuente: otros que de vna peiia: otros de lagunas. De manera que
su origen no se puede sacar dellos otra cosa."
64. The Spanish original:

Dicen los naturales de esta tierra, que en el principio, 0 antes que el

mundo fuese criado, hubo uno que lIamaban Viracocha. EI cual crio
el mundo oscuro y sin sol ni luna ni estrellas .... Y asi crio, los
hombres a su semejanza como los que agora son. Y vivian en
oscuridad ....
Mas como entre ellos naciesen vicios de soberbia y codicia,
traspasaron el precepto del Viracocha Pachayachachi, que cayendo
por esta transgresion en la indignacion suya, los confundio y maldijo.
Y luego fueron unos convertidos en piedras y otros en otras
formas, a otros trago la tierra y a otros el mar, y sobre todo les envio
Notes to Pages 203-206 475

un diluvio general, al cual ellos lIaman uno pachacuti, que quiere

decir "agua que trastorno la tierra." ...
Y asi de esta manera las demas naciones tienen fabulas de como se
salvaron algunos de su nacion, de quien ellos traen origen y
descendencia ....
Dicho es como por diluvio uno pachacuti todo fue destruido: es,
pues, ahora de saber que el Viracocha Pachayachachi, cuando
destruyo esta tierra, como se ha contado, guardo consigo tres
hombres, el uno de los cuales se lIamo Taguapacac, para que Ie
sirviesen y ayudasen a criar las nuevas gentes que habia de hacer en
la segunda edad despues del diluvio; 10 cual hizo de esta manera.
Pasando el diluvio y seca la tierra, determino el Viracocha de
poblarla segunda vez, y para hacerlo con mas perfeccion determino
criar luminarias que diesen claridad. Y para 10 hacer, fuese con sus
criados a una gran laguna, que esta en el Collao, y en la laguna esta
una isla lIamada Titicaca.... A la cual isla se fue Viracocha y mando
que luego saliese el sol, luna y estrellas y se fuesen al cielo para dar
luz al mundo; y asi fue hecho .... Y como Viracocha mandase
algunas cosas a sus criados, el Taguapaca fue inobediente a los
mandamientos de Viracocha. EI cual, por esto indignado contra
Taguapaca, mando a los otros dos que 10 tomasen; y atado de pies y
manos, 10 echaron en una balsa en la laguna; y asi fue hecho. E yendo
Taguapaca blasfemando del Viracocha por 10 que en eI hacia, y
amenazando que eI volveria a tomar venganza dei, fue llevado del
agua por el desaguadero de la mesma laguna, adonde no fue visto
mas por muchos tiempos. Y esto hecho, Viracocha fabrico en aquel
lugar una solemne guaca para adoratorio en serial de 10 que alii habia
hecho y criado.
65. The Spanish original:
... Y al cabo de algunos arios, que el Viracocha se fue, dicen que
vino el Taguapaca, que Viracocha mando echar en la laguna de
Titicaca del Collao, como se dijo arriba, y que empezo con otros a
predicar que el era el Viracocha. Mas aunque al principio tuvieron
suspensas las gentes, fueron conoscidos al fin por falsos, y burlaron
de ellos.
Esta fabula ridicula tienen estos barbaros de su creacion y
afirmanla y creenla, como si realmente asi la vieran ser y pasar.
66. Also see Urbano 1988, 1989, 1990 and references therein.
67. The Spanish original: " ... pues tan consonante es a esto, 10 que entre los
Indios se trata, de que se vio un hombre nuevo y jamas otca vez visto, el cual
hacia grandes milagros y maravillas, por 10 cualle pusieron por nombre (segun
afirman algunos Indios antiquisimos) Tunupa, que es 10 mismo que decir gran
476 Notes to Pages 207-209

Sabio, y Senor (Math. 9). Pues aqueste glorioso Santo por su predicacion fue
perseguido y finalmente martirizado de la manera que se sigue."
68. The Spanish original:

... Con las quales los Indios se iritaron de suerte que Ie empalaron
cruelmente, atravesandole por todo el cuerpo una estaca, que llaman
ellos chonta, hecha de Palma, de que estos Indios usan hasta hoy en
la guerra, como arma no poco ofens iva, forma de martirio que han
usado otras veces, como se ve en el que hicieron al Santo fray Diego
Ortiz de nuestro Padre San Agustin ....
Pusieron pues al Santo Discipulo despues de muerto, en una balsa
y echaronle en la grande laguna de Titicaca, a la providencia no de
los vientos, ni de las ondas, sino del cielo. Refieren pues, los antiguos
que un recio viento soplo en la popa de la balsa y la llevo como si
fuera a vela, y remo, con tanta velocidad que ponia admiracion; y asi
toco en tierra de Chacamarca, donde ahora es el Desaguadero que
antes de este suceso no Ie habia y la abrio con la proa de la balsa,
dando suficiente lugar, para que las aguas corriesen, y sobre ellas fue
navegando hasta los Aullagas, donde como arriba queda dicho, se
hunden las aguas por las entranas de la tierra, y alli se dice, quedo el
Santo cuerpo y que cada ano en una de las Pascuas, 0 por aquel
tiempo, se veia alla una muy fresca y verde Palma, aunque otros
afirman se ve esta Palma en una isleta que el Desaguadero hace
vecina a la costa de Chile .... Todo es posible aDios, aunque yo no
Ie vendo por indubitable. Lo que puedo afirmar es haber oido a
Indios ancianos de este asiento de Copacabana y en especial a uno,
que en el mismo con vento sirve hoy dia para ensenar a leer y cantar
a los muchachos del pueblo, para ministerio del Coro y servicio de la
Santa Virgen, el cual dice, que oyo a sus antepasados, que en la
misma isla Titicaca, quedaban impresas en las pen as las plantas de
los pies del Tunupa, que asi llama ban al glorioso Santo, por ser
milagroso.

69. Pierre Duviols and Cesar Itier have recently suggested, in the introduction
to a new transcription of Pachacuti Salcamayhua's text (1993), that the whole
constitutes a kind of homework assignment produced for his missionary teach-
ers. Drawing on a preaching manual, Duviols also convincingly argues that
Pachacuti's famous and much republished drawing of the gods of the Qurikan-
cha temple in fact constitutes a representation of a retablo used by priests to
depict (in the native's own categories) the works of the God's creation in heaven
and earth that the misguided mistake for gods in themselves.
70. Summarized and paraphrased from Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Salca-
mayhua 1968: 282-284. Also see Urbano 1981: 19-22. The foregoing analysis
has benefited greatly from MacCormack 1991.
Notes to Pages 209-218 477

71. For Pachacuti Yamqui, the aquatic axis from Titicaca to Aullagas seems
of little concern. And it is unclear what he intends to convey by his comments on
Tunupa's final destination. Does the Apostle Tunupa's journey downriver to the
sea, and then through the straits to another sea, refer to a passage through Lake
Poopo and then to the salt pan of Uyuni (where a mountain named Tunupa now
stands)? Or is this a way of sending an apostle from the Pacific through the
Straits of Magellan into the Atlantic, to reach the Old World only after preaching
the gospel in the new one?
72. Ekeko is certainly an appropriate figure for veneration by the traders
who now plied their caravan routes along old pilgrimage axes (Glave 1989). On
the relationship between Tunupa and Ekeko, see Ponce Sanjines 1969. In his
1612 Aymara dictionary, Bertonio links the two figures: "Ecaco, 1. Thunnupa:
Nombre de uno de quien los indios antiguos cuentan muchas fabulas: y muchos
aun en ese tiempo las tienen por verdaderas: assi seria bien procurar deshacer
esta persuasion que tienen, por embuste del Demonio" (1984: part 2, 99).

CHAPTER 6. COLONIAL RELANDSCAPING OF ANDEAN SOCIAL MEMORY

1. Balvi, "Memoria sobre las reducciones y mita," La Paz, 1609, ADI;

quoted in Saignes 1993: 49; my translation.
2. Encomendero requests for perpetuity had been incessant; the king lit the
fuse to perpetuity fireworks in a cedula of 1556, when he ordered that perpetuity
be immediately established (AHN, Seccion de Diversos, Docs. de Indias, no.
145). The first Las Casas-Santo Tomas memorial on the matter arrived at court
in late 1560 (ibid., no. 152; catalogue note cites presentation in corte at end of
1560 or before February 7, 1561). The king asked the Peruvian viceroy's advice
in early 1561 (ibid., no. 171). Santo Tomas reinforced his opinion a year later
(ibid., no. 181).
3. The original Spanish: " ... como los dichos yndios 10 oyeron muchos
dellos encomen\=aron a 1I0rar y a sentirse e a dezir que antes ni despues del inga
nunca an sido vendidos que como avian de ser 10 agora que ellos no heran coca
ni carne para que los ovyeresen se vender e ansi die ron un poder todos."
4. The original Spanish: " ... los dichos yndios syntieron mucho e algunos
ca\=iques dixeron que se hecharian antes en los rrios aver se herrados en la cara
e despenarse e pues que en tiempo que heran de Guayna Capa nunca avian sido
esclavos que porque 10 avian de ser siendo vasallos del rey... ?"
5. Non-encomienda Inca elites in Cusco had joined with the anti-perpetuity
effort, fearing that they might lose their own aristocratic privileges should
encomenderos become a landed aristocracy. Don Juan Tambo Uscamayta, Inca
of Cusco, testified that he initially balked at joining with this contradiction of
perpetuity, because" ... la perpetuidad se entenderia con los demas yndios que
estan encomendados y no con ellos que heran libres y los susodichos anton ruiz
lengua e gon\=alo de mon\=on dixeron que el mesmo avia de ser de ellos que de los
otros e ansi dieron poder ... " (AGI, Justicia 434, piece 1, fol. 14v).
478 Notes to Pages 218-220

6. The term "taqui" (in its colonial usages) has been recently scrutinized by
Estenssoro (1992).
7. See also Spalding 1984: 147ff., and the superb analysis of Varon Gabai
(1990).
8. The Spanish original:
Abra diez anos, poco mas 0 menos, que huuo una yronia entre estos
yndios desta tierra y era que hacian una manera de canto, al qual
llama van Taqui hongo, y porque en la provincia de Parinacocha, un
Luis de Olivera clerigo presbitero, que a la sa~on hera cura del dicho
repartimiento que es en el ovispado del Cuzco, fue el primero que vio
de la dicha yronia 0 ydolatria, eI pone aqui de la manera que 10
hacian y por que ....
En la provincia de Parinacocha, del ovispado del Cuzco, el dicho
Luis de Olivera, vicario de aquella provincia, entendio que no
solamente en aquella provincia, pero en todas las demas provincias e
ciudades de Chuqicaca, La Paz, Cuzco, Guamanga y aun Lima y
Ariquipa, los mas dellos avian caydo en grandisimas apostacias
apartandose de la fe catolica que avian recevido y bolviendose a la
ydolatria que usa van en tiempo de su ynfidelidad. No se pudo
averiguar de quien uviese sa lido este negocio, mas de que se sospecho
y trato que fue ynventado de los echiceros que en Uiscabamba tenian
los Yngas que alii estavan alcados ....
9. The Spanish original:
Durante esta tiempo obo diversas maneras de apostacias en diversas
provin~ias, unos baylavan dando a entender tenian de la guaca en el
cuerpo, otros tremblavan por el mesmo respeto, dando a entender la
tenian tam bien; otros se encerravan en sus casas a piedra seca y
davan alaridos, otros se despeda~avan y despenavan y matauan, y
otros se hechauan en los rios ofreciendose a las guacas, hasta que
Nuestro Senor, por su misericordia, fue servido alumbrar a estos
miserables y que los que an quedado dellos y an visto la burleria que
se les predico y creyan con ver al Ynga muerto y a Uileabamba de
cristianos y ninguno de 10 que se les podia aver sucedido, antes todo
al contrario. (Emphasis in original)
10. Molina's account puts it this way: " ... que ya bolvia el tiempo del Ynga
y que las guacas no se metian ya en las piedras, ni en las nuves, ni en las fuentes
para hablar, sino que se yncorporan ya en los yndios y los hacian ya hablar y que
tuviesen sus casas baridas y adere~adas para si alguna de las guacas quisiese
pasar en ella" (Molina 1989: 130-131).
11. My translation. The Spanish original:
... Es publico e notorio ... que ... la harina que se haze de maiz se
a causado en los yndios y naturales que rresiden en esta villa grandes
Notes to Pages 221-222 479

borracheras porque como hallan el maiz molido de que hazen la a~ua

que beuen hazen mucha mas cantidad della de la que antes soli an
hazer 10 qual es oc~asion y causa de beber mucha mas cantidad que
soli an que es bi~io que esta en ellos muy arraigado y estan casi toda
la semana borrachos de que se sigue muchos yn~estos y otros delitos
que cometen y aun omi~idios en gran desserui~io de dios nuestro
senor y de su magestad y es grand ympedimiento pa su conversion y
dotrina cristiana que se les predica y ara la labor de las minas que
fue el efecto para que aqui fueron venidos ....
12. The Spanish original:
· .. muriendo muchos de sus borracheras y cometiendo otros
omi~idios e muertes y ahorcandose asi mismos y en particular a
enterrado esta testigo seis yndios que de su borrachera sea muerto
quitandoseles la habla y muriendo naturalmente y a otros muchos
quitandoseles la habla a poder de mede~inas y bebedizos que les a
dado auiendo estado tres 0 quatro dias sin hablales a fecho boluer en
si y los avisto estar beuiendo y levantarse y gomitar y tornar a beuer
y vn dia por les qui tar este testigo la borrachera Ie quisieron
matar.... Sabe este testigo y a visto que es el pren~ipal ympedimiento
para su conversion y dotrina cristiana por que todas las vezes que
estan borrachos cometen y hazen sus ydolatrias y rritos antiguos ....
13. The Spanish original:
· .. Esta testigo ... a visto a los yndios que en el rresiden
espe~ialmente la dotrina de los carangas que este testigo tubo a cargo
siendo vicario hazer a los yndios muchas y grandes borracheras ... e
que Ie pares~e a esta testigo que las dichas borracheras es
ympedimiento para su conversion y dotrina y a oydo dezir algunos
sacerdotes que entienden la lengua y antiguos en la tierra que los
dichos yndios estando borrachos en sus borracheras y taquies
cometen ydolatrias y otros rritos en ofens a de dios nuestro senor....
14. The Spanish original:
· .. hazer sacrifi~ios en diversas maneras a sus guacas y otras muchas
maneras de hechizerias que tienen confesandose con sus confesores
enbiando cachas a las guacas hanobicamayos [sic] contradiziendo la
dotrina cristiana y otros muchos rritos y cerimonias que usan y pecados
asi como tomandosse las mugeres los vnos a los otros y cometiendo
diversos pecados de yn~esto y para hazer las fiestas del capse pacxi [sic]
y otras menores que celebran en todos los meses del ano....

15. Such fears, which echo modern beliefs about fat- and blood-sucking
witches (see the concluding chapter), may seem improbably superstitious. But see
480 Notes to Pages 222-226

Wachtel 1994, and listen to Bernal Diaz on some conquistador activity in

Mexico: " ... with the unto of a fat indian, from among those we killed there,
who was opened up, we cured our wounds, since there was no oil" ("con el unto
de un indio gordo de los que alli matamos, que se abri6, se curaron los heridos,
que aceite no 10 habia") (Diaz del Castillo 1964: 177).
16. The Spanish original:
... el ano de setenta y no atras, de aver tenido y creydo por los
yndios que despana avian enviado a este reyno por unto de los
yndios para sanar cierta enfermedad que no se hallava para ello
medicina sino el dicho unto, a cuya causa en aquellos tiempos
andavan los yndios muy recatados y se estranavan de los Espanoles
en tanto grado, que la lena, yerba 0 otras cosas no 10 querian lleuar a
casa de Espanol, por dezir no los matase alla dentro para les sacar el
unto. Todo esto se entendi6 aver salido de aquella ladronera por
poner enemistad entre los yndios y Espanoles ... hasta que el senor
visorey don Fran\;isco de Toledo los deshizo y hech6 de alli, en 10
qual sirvi6 Dios Nuestro Senor mucho.
17. In the words of the Anonymous Jesuit, "Nacac, carniceros 6 desolladores
de animales para el sacrificio" (1879: 170).
18. Discussion of Toledan projects from various angles can be found in
Bakewell 1984; Fraser 1990; Spalding 1984; and Stern 1982; among others.
19. Stern (1982) shows how such cushioning, before Toledo, was possible in
part by private deals struck with encomenderos.
20. Polo's argument condemning this productive system (even while marvel-
ing at its efficiency) is itself a marvel of sixteenth-century sophistry. To para-
phrase Polo liberally, he concludes that in taking from each according to his
ability and giving to each according to his need, the Inca system had been guided
by Satan himself, depriving Andeans of sufficient opportunity to witness poverty
and hunger, and therefore to practice the cardinal virtue of charity (Polo
Ondegardo 1916b Uune 26, 1571]: chap. "Del servicio de las huacas"). Polo
knew well the importance of charity for Castilian Christians, who, given some
Castilians' love of money and accumulation, had no end of opportunities to feed
the poor and bury the destitute. (On the practice of charity within Spanish
confraternities, see Flynn 1989.) Fortunately for Andeans (as Polo would have it)
the brusk changes introduced by Toledan reforms restored to them the condi-
tions under which the virtue of charity might develop.
21. We have seen in chapter 5 how Spanish chronicler-historians like
Sarmiento (in the service of Toledo) used inquisitorial techniques to carry out a
systematic inscription (and transformation) of the Andean past, reducing mul-
tiple channels of social memory to narrative alone, and then forcing narrative
multiplicity into a single homogeneous and written text. For later, antiquarianist
chroniclers (and twentieth-century historians), this kind of deformed product of
Notes to Pages 227-235 481

Spanish narrative colonization became the Andean past. Insofar as the chroni-
cling process was itself a colonial ritual with real effects in the world of power
relations, it came to transform Andeans' visions of their own past.
22. The litigation record was found in the ANB by the historian Karen
Powers, who kindly made the citation and a partial transcription available to me.
23. First of all, the federation had once been moiety organized. Following the
southern Andean custom of diarchic organization at both diarchy and federation
levels, a counterpart cacique, only slightly less elevated in stature than Guarache,
should have been in command of the federation's lower moieties. Indeed, in
Hernando de Aldana's possession ceremony of 1540, there had been a second
native lord from Killaka. Apparently, Colque Guarache or his father Juan
Guarache had somehow pushed this lineage into the background, for they are
not heard from again. (The same process seems to have taken place in the
Asanaqi diarchy and in Awllaka-Urukilla. Only in Siwaruyu-Arakapi was a pair
of lords consistently named after Toledan days.)
24. The acts of foundation of these parishes are in ANB, ALP Minas, tomo
125. Surviving parish registers prove that some diarchies remained intact in their
parish microcosms into the eighteenth century.
25. Of course, as Olivia Harris (1982) shows, the seasonal return of the dead
from the warm and watery underworld to the surface of the earth, between All
Souls' and Carnaval, is essential for germination and growth of the crops.
Taussig (1980) argues that miners' devil beliefs are a transmutation of agricul-
tural sacrifices to mountain gods, generated by miners to help them understand
the nature of their alienation as newly proletarianized wage laborers, recently
arrived at an exchange-value world from a use-value subsistence economy.
Contesting Taussig, Platt (1983) argues that the analogous ties between agricul-
ture and the dead, and between mineral (and money) production and the
tio-supays of the mines, form a single, fundamentally" Andean" whole and are to
be found (at least since early colonial days and perhaps since pre-Columbian
times) in both mining camp and rural countryside; when colonial mitayos
journeyed to Potosi they called their destination the chacara del rey, the "king's
field." From the perspective developed here, however, they appear as contextu-
ally varying theses on the colonial and postcolonial situation, which has included
at least partly alienated wage labor (supplemented by other kinds of relations of
production) since the establishment of the Potosi mita. As an interpretation of
the intercultural conjunction produced in intercultural contexts, it is neither
specifically Andean nor Spanish in origin, but is generated by and addresses the
relationship between the two.
26. See the Colque Guarache will in ANB, EC 1804, no. 193. Claims for the
communicative content of certain kinds of cumbi cloth, such as the shirts given
by Incas to certain provincial lords (like Juan Guarache, Juan Colque's father)
appear in Harrison 1989: 60ff.; and Cummins 1994: 198ff. Further sources are
cited therein.
482 Notes to Pages 236-255

27. The Spanish original:

En la fiesta de Corpus Christi saquen sus andas y danza en cada
parroquia y vayan en procesion con su cruz y banderas y sus
hermanos de la cofradia los rijan y el sacerdote con ellos,
examinando ante todas cosas las andas que llevan por que no lleven
excondidos algunos idolos, como se les han hallado en otras
ciudades, y el sacerdote antes que salga les diga en su lengua la razon
de aquella fiesta para que la entiendan y honren con la veneracion
que son obligados.
28. See the Documentary Appendix, part B, for full Spanish text.
29. Evidence that Quiocalla became Tomahavi and that its ayllus (and those
of nearby Coroma) belong to Siwaruyu and Arakapi is in the 1683 visita of the
Repartimiento de Puna (AHP, Cuarderno de la visita ... ).
30. I draw here on the summary published by N. D. Cook (1975) and an
unpublished "tasa" (as such summaries were called) located in AGNA, 9.17.2.5.
These summaries vary in the level of detail provided for particular repartimien-
tos. Another unpublished tasa is to be found in AHP, Cajas Reales 18.
31. Ziirate gives a total of 11,526 persons in the repartimiento de Quillacas
y Asanaques, and a total tributary population of 2,545 (he rounded tributary to
pueblo numbers). By simple division, those numbers give 4.5 persons per
tributary. I have multiplied each town's tributary population by this reasonable
figure to estimate total populations of each town.
32. The Toledan visita of Tiquipaya has been published by del Rio and
Gordillo (1993).
33. The classic on reducciones is Miilaga Medina 1974. More recently, see
Fraser 1990.
34. As Fraser (1990) has argued, towns of the Indies were built from scratch,
more or less all at one go. As a result, they in fact became much more regular and
alike than the actual towns of Castile were, which after all had long histories and
Visigothic as well as Muslim pasts, leading to irregular plans (though with all the
structures and institutions established in indian towns).
35. See Sarabia Viejo 1989: 236 ("Que los alguaciles ronden de noche y
hagan tocar la queda," in the "Ordenanzas generales para la vida comun en los
pueblos de indios," Arequipa, November 6, 1575).
36. On the concept of buena policia, see Lechner 1981; and Fraser 1990.
37. Here Toledo anticipated Guaman Poma's lament: "Free me, Jesus Christ,
from fire, from water, from earthquake. Jesus Christ, free me from the authori-
ties, the corregidor, the bailiff, the magistrate, the investigators, the visita judges,
the teaching priests ... " (Guaman Poma, quoted in Mayer 1982; Guevara-Gil
and Salomon 1994).
38. When the lands were under attack again in 1592 (owing to the process of
composicion), the cacique principal of the Asanaqi, don Diego Malco, named the
fields and the hamlet Chiucori, which belonged to Ayllu Ilawi in Tacobamba
Notes to Pages 256-260 483

territory, and (no doubt from his community chest) produced the visita docu-
ment itself, the only part of the Zarate visita that survives. Zarate conducted his
house-by-house survey of "the site and town of Chiucori" on May 28,1573, and
produced the "padron of the indians of this said repartimiento ... visiting the
houses and indians of the ayllu called Hilavi, of Anansaya, in the following
manner.... " Zarate goes on to list fourteen men of tributary age, the names of
their wives or concubines and children, the animals they possessed, and their
current whereabouts. All but four of the men were absent, mostly in the mining
centers of Potosi, Guariguari, or Porco (ANB, EC 1611, no. 8, fols. 25r-28r). In
1610 Juan Colque Guarache "el Mozo" was still involved in the suit.
39. Condo's "book one of baptisms" was begun in 1571 by "Father Peiia-
losa." Initial pages are all written and decorated in a fine gothic hand, beginning
with page one, a depiction of the crown, keys, and other emblems of San Pedro.
I first took notes on this volume in Condo itself in 1980. Since then it and other
parish registers have passed into the Archivo Obispal de Oruro.
40. Some church posts, however, were not initially rotative in nature. Into
Condo's 1571 baptismal register were bound ordinances from a 1575 ecclesiastic
visit requiring appointment of mayordomos to take charge of church ornaments.
As of a visita in 1580, two men appointed were still mayordomos (AOO, Libro
1 de Bautismos, San Pedro de Condo, fols. 374r-378r). The same register
records a meeting of the town cabildo (written by an indigenous "escribano del
pueblo") when this priest left the parish. At this time the priest turned over
responsibility for safekeeping of church property to the collected authorities
(along with the two mayordomos).
41. The Spanish original:
... hoy dia acaece en el Piru, a cabo de dos y tres aiios, cuando van
a tomar residencia a un corregidor, salir los indios con sus cuentas
menudas averiguadas, pidiendo que en tal pueblo Ie dieron seis
huevos, y no los pago, y en tal casa una gallina, y aculla dos haces de
yerba para sus caballos, y no pago sino tantos tomines, y queda
debiendo tantos; y para todo esto, hecha la averiguacion alli al pie de
la obra con cuantidad de iiudos y manojos de cuerdas que dan por
testigos y escritura cierta. Yo vi un manojo de estos hilos, en que una
india traia escrita una confesi6n general de toda su vida, y por ellos
se confesaba, como yo 10 hiciera por papel escrito, y aun pregunte de
algunos hilillos que me parecieron algo diferentes, y eran ciertas
circunstancias que requeria el pecado para confesarle enteramente.
Fuera de estos quipos de hilo, tienen otros de pedrezuelas, por donde
puntualmente aprenden las palabras que quieren tomar de memoria.
Y es cosa de ver a viejos ya caducos con una rueda hecha de
pedrezuelas, aprender el Padre Nuestro, y con otra el Ave Maria, y
con otra el Credo, y saber cual piedra es que fue concebido de
Espiritu Santo, y cual que padeci6 debajo del poder de Poncio Pilato,
484 Notes to Pages 261-266

y no hay mas que verlos enmendar cuando yerran, y toda la

enmienda consiste en mirar sus pedrezuelas, que a mi para hacerme
olvidar cuanto se de coro, me bastara una rueda de aquellas. De esta
suele haber no pocas en los cimenterios de las iglesias, para este
efecto; pues verles otra suerte de quipos que usan de granos de maiz,
es cosa que encanta. Porque una cuenta muy embarazosa, en que
tendra un muy buen contador que hacer por pluma y tinta, para ver
a como les cabe entre tantos, tanto de contribucion, sacando tanto de
aculla y anadiendo tanto de aca, con otras cien retartalillas, tomaran
estos indios sus granos y pornan uno aqui, tres aculla, ocho no se
donde; pasaran un grano de aqui, trocaran tres de aculla, y en /292/
efecto ell os salen con su cuenta hecha puntualisimamente, sin errar
un tilde; y mucho mejor se saben ellos poner en cuenta y razon de 10
que cabe a cada uno de pagar 0 dar, que sabremos nosotros darselo
por pluma y tinta averiguado. Si esto no es ingenio y si estos
hombres son bestias, juzguelo quien quisiere, que 10 que yo juzgo de
cierto, es que en aquello a que se aplican nos hacen grandes ventajas.
42. When Juan Colque the Younger took over his father's role in Potosi, he
came dressed in Spanish-style silks, but without his father's knowledge of
Andean ways or his grandfather's personal experience of Inca society. Luis
Capoche, a Spanish bureaucrat reporting on the labor system of Potosi's mines in
1585, said this about the young Colque Guarache:
Don Juan Colque eI Mozo, natural de los Quillacas, es capitan de los
asanaques y quillacas, del partido de Urcusuyu de esta provincia de
los Charcas. Ha oido gramatica en eI colegio de la Compania de
Jesus yanda vestido a nuestro modo, con mucha seda. No se hallan
bien con eI los indios, asi por eI traje que para sustentarlo es
menester robarlos, porque no es cacique, y tam bien porque no
entiende el estilo y usanza y costumbres de su gobierno, ni trata a los
indios con afabilidad. Dieronle este cargo por ser hijo de un indio
paramucho y que habia servido mucho a Su Magestad. AI presente
esta con los soldados de los chiriguanaes, que fue por capitan de los
indios que lIevo eI factor Juan Lozano Machuca. Tiene por sujetos a
estos pueblos: ... [Puna; Quillacas y Asanaques; Aullagas y
Uruquillasl. (Capoche 1959: fol. 52v)
43. On the pre-Columbian image of Copacabana and its displacement by the
Virgin, see Bouysse-Cassagne 1988; Gisbert 1980; MacCormack 1984; Urbano
1988, 1989, 1990.
44. Essentially, illuminism entailed the imposition of strict self-discipline,
involving fasting and other privations (such as sexual abstention), self-inflicted
discomforts including flagellation, wearing a crown of thorns and a sackcloth
shirt, and especially long hours of prayer, all done in order to induce a
Notes to Page 266 485

heightened state of spirituality, one that freed the imagination to serve as God's
channel to man. Of course, from the Church's perspective, this was an exceed-
ingly dangerous practice. Outside the direct mediation of cautious priests using
theologically approved ritual, direct communication with God was itself a
Protestant act. But more to the point, private nonconventual worship outside
priestly control led to heterodoxies and heresies. Also, opening the imagination
to divine truth also opened it to diabolic purposes, and only priestly supervision
could ensure that the illuminists practitioners had not been misled by the great
deceiver.
Erasmianism and its offspring illuminism themselves derived from the
Thomist philosophy of cognition and imagination elaborated by Aquinas from
Aristotelian principles (summarized in MacCormack 1991, see esp. pp. 17-49).
Aquinas also explained, however, why consecrated priests were the only ones
who should access the divine power of human imagination for use in that cen-
tral rite of the faith, the Eucharist: "Although the priest was only human, he
repeated Christ's words by virtue of his institutional power. Accordingly, the
consecration of the Eucharist, and by implication eucharistic visions, exemplified
a social order in which priests exercised divinely delegated functions in a
hierarchy of authority that descended from god via the priesthood to laypeople.
Theology, philosophy, and social order, religion and politics, went hand in hand"
(ibid., 35).
The Eucharist was also, of course, the centerpiece of Spanish Christian social
memory, an act of commemoration capable of bringing the effects of past acts
(themselves future directed) into the present and its future (see Rubin 1991). It is
no wonder that the priestly authority, embodying the very logic of the eschato-
logical history upon which the king's authority rested, needed ever to be guarded
by exerting control over the independent exercise of unruly imagination.
45. As MacCormack suggests, however, the situations of Castilian as op-
posed to indian religious innovators may have been susceptible to the same
subtle means of distinguishing divine from satanically inspired imaginations, but
those means were not brought into play equally in the two parts of the empire.
MacCormack argues that, in the face of indians great numeric preponderance in
Peru, the unfamiliarity, the total otherness of indian culture, came to displace the
need for a careful tweezing of truth from lies that was an inquisitorial specialty
in cases of Castilian heterodoxy. "When Spaniards confronted Andean people,
therefore, the familiar scale of nuances that had served in the peninsula to
distinguish truth from error, and god from demons, collapsed into a consolidated
sense of a difference that was total" (1991: 48).
Other forces also militated against nuanced interpretations of the indigenous
imagination, especially when indian practices seemed to approximate or borrow
from Christian ones. The maxim that religion and politics go hand in hand was
never so true as in the colonial situation, where the cultural difference that was
total translated into the contrast of social estate. There could be no tributes or
forced labor from successfully converted indians, who would in theory gain the
486 Notes to Pages 268-273

rights of any Crown subject along with their civilization and Christianity. To
serve God by preserving the empire, and to preserve the empire by maintaining
its colony, indians had to remain fully "other."
46. This probanza (AGI, Charcas 79, no. 19) was found and partly tran-
scribed by Thierry Sa ignes and further transcribed and photocopied by me. A
full, corrected transcription is to be published (with notes by Tristan Platt) in
Platt, Bouysse-Cassagne, Harris, and Saignes, eds., in press. See a partial
translation in part D of the Documentary Appendix.
47. These events are studied in Saignes 1993: 65; the document is to be
published entire in Platt, Bouysse-Cassagne, Harris, and Saignes, eds., in press.
Separately, the priest Pedro Ramirez del Aguila, who had served in Tacobamba,
also reported an indian Christ there (1978: 135).
48. Thierry Saignes (1985b: 436-439) reports authorities' suspicions that
Juan Colque Guarache was involved in such activities, also in the vicinity of
Tacobamba, where the priest Pedro Ramirez del Aguila reports that Colque had
been found with a gathering of five thousand indians. Ramirez del Aguila's con-
cern was that this gathering was somehow related to "messages" directed to
indians from Francis Drake, the great "Lutheran," reported amidst other panic-
filled claims by coastal authorities. Since no other sources confirm Colque Guara-
che's involvement in any such matter, I conclude that this was more likely prepa-
ration for one of Colque's efforts in the Spanish war against the Chiriguanos.
49. The term "prioste" seems to be an alternative for "aW:rez."
50. The "dons" before their names suggest that they were hereditary lords,
perhaps principales of Ayllu Kawalli, although a noble house by the name of
Chiri appears in no other documents. Note that they share this name with
Miguel Acarapi, for whom Chiri was an alias. See Thierry Saignes' discussion of
the significance of these names (both common in K'ulta territory) vis-a-vis
shamanistic practice.
51. ABAS, Causas contra ecclesiasticos, no. 5020: "Condo, li\=en\=ia para
capilla, 1626," 10 fols. My thanks to Dr. Josep Barnadas, director of the Archivo
y Biblioteca Arquidiocesanos de Sucre, for his help in locating the document. The
Chiris' letter:
Don Pedro Chiri prioste y don Diego Chiri mayordomo y de los
demas fundadores de la cofradia de Santa Barbara del Pueblo de
Condocondo. Digo que en la estancia de Uma Hunto tengo mis
ha\=iendas de chacaras y ganados de ella en la qual abra nuebe afios
poco mas 0 menos que con asisten\=ia del cura del dicho pueblo
fundamos la dicha cofradia con los cargos y condi\=iones que por ella
consta para fundalla se lleuo li\=en\=ia del ordinario y con ella se a
continuado hasta oy dia. Y sin embargo de que en la dicha confradia
y yglesia don de esta fundada tiene todo rrecaudo para celebrar el
culto diuino, sin que les falta cosa alguna comprado a nuestra costa,
el padre Gon\=alo Real Vejarano nuestro cura que es al presente se
Notes to Pages 274-275 487

rretiene en si los ornamentos y todo 10 demas necesario y no quiere

continuar en la celebrazion de la dicha cofradia ni acudir a la dicha
estancia a cuya causa muchos de los yndios biejos que ay poblados
en las dichas tierras carezen de los sacramento de la confission y se
an muerto sin ella ni tam poco oyen misa por auer faltado esta buena
yntroduzion y para que no se deje de consiguir tan buena y pia obra.
A V Md. pido y supplico me mande despachar Racaudo en forma
con penas y aper~iuamentos para que el padre cura continue en la
dicha obra pia, pues demas de ser seruicio de dios esta a sido para el
bien de los naturales y que asi mesmo buelba todos hornamentos
calises y las demas cosas que tiene en su poder pues no Ie pertene~e
por ningun derecho sino a la dicha cofradia por ser suya que en ella
re~iuiremos bien y merced con justicia que pedimos. (firmas: don
Pedro Chiri/don Diego Chiri)
E vista por su merced mando se notifique al beneficiado Goncalo
Leal Uejarano cura de Condocondo guarde la costumbre que ay en la
~elebra~ion desta cofradia y en acudir a la administracion de los santos
sacramentos a esta estancia [sic] y buelba a los yndios [entre renglones
= mayordomos] los ornamentos que della obiere lIeuado so pena de
excomunion mayor sin dar lugar a que los yndios buelban a quejarse.
(firma = Doctor Pasqual Peroches. Ante mi, Paulo Garzes) (Ibid., lr-l v)
52. The Spanish original:
... que an sido quatro 0 ~inco capillas que en la jurisdi~ion de este
curato abiase mandaron derribar y rreduzir los yndios a este dicho
pueblo por evitar las grandes borracheras ydolatrias suspersti~iones
ynsestos graues penden~ias y muertes que dello se causauan como en
particular 10 ay en aquel sitio donde esta la dicha capilla contenida
en el pedimiento, la qual pocos anos a el yndio contenido en el por
ausentarse de este su pueblo y no acudir al servi~io del ni oyr missa y
bibir en su infidelidad con otros tales como ellebanto una capilla
para que so color de ella los dejasen bibir alii en su libertad pensando
que con dadibas los curas los dejarian y asi Diego Arias su antesesor
conosiendo y sabiendo los muchos pecados que alii se cometian
contra dios nuestro senor y que los yndios que alii se juntaban no
benian a oyr missa ni ser administrados de los demas sacramentos,
no quiso jamas a yr a la dicha capilla a ~elebrar ni hazer les fiesta
alguna aunque Ie rresalaban para ella mucho ....
53. The Spanish original:
... y no tubo effecto aunque el corregidor de este partido fue por
ellos a caussa de que se huyeron y escondieron la ymajen y
ornamentos y la dicha capilla hallo destechada y despues hizieron
488 Note to Page 275

otra capilla una legua mas adelante y por conseguir su mal yntento,
ocurieron al senor arcobispo, don Ger6nimo de Rueda, con rela~i6n
siniestra y otro pedimiento como el presente a 10 qual ... rrespondio
... por las caussas que ban espresadas, y ... Ie ynbi6 el
mandamiento y pareser del dicho senor visitador ... y Ie rrespondi6
... que ynstase con el corregidor quemase las casas a los yndios y los
trajese a su rredu~i6n pues hera serui~io de dios nuestro senor....
. . . y porque 10 uno ni 10 otro no a tenido effecto a caussa de ser
los yndios mas malos que ay en este rreyno ladinos soberbios y libres
y que no puedan ser abidos, el dicho senor doctor Bartolome
Serbantes en la visita que hizo en este dicho pueblo por constarle de
todo 10 que de si suso ba dicho escribi6 al rreal acuerdo para que 10
rremediase y prebiniendo el rremedio para 10 de adelante dej6
ordenado por obra de bisita escritpo en el libro de esta dicha yglesia
donde se an fecho las demas visitas unas constitu~iones y ordenansas ....
[margo izq. = constitu~i6n] Yten por quanto se a bisto por
espirien~ia los grandes danos e ynconbinientes que se an seguido y
siguen de tener los yndios capillas en sus estan~ias y chacaras y
celebrar en ellas missa y fiestas y que con mayor libertad los yndios
estando en el campo hazen borracheras cantos y taquies en desonor
de nuestra ffee cath61ica y bienen aser las dichas fiestas en dano
notable de su conbersi6n y ffee que se les ensena, ordeno y mando
que el dicho cura no ~elebra missa en las dichas capillas ni haga fiesta
alguna de cofradia ni otro sancto alguno sino que las dichas fiestas se
hagan y ~elebren en este pueblo de Condocondo 0 en el de Guari su
anejo, y si las dichas capillas tubieron bultos ymajenes y ornamentos
los traygan y rredusga a la yglesia de este dicho pueblo de
Condocondo en que ponga todo cuydado como negocio que tanto
ymporta al augmento de la ffee de los naturales.
Yen quanto a la capilla de Sancta Barbara que estaua fundada en
la estan~ia de Huntuma se cunpla y guarde 10 orden ado y mandado
por el Senor Doctor don Bernadino de Alman~a arzedecano de La
Plata visitador general que fue de este ar~obispado, derribando la
dicha capilla hasta sus simientos y se traje el bulto de la sancta y sus
ornamentos y se acaue el edifi~io de la capilla de la dicha sancta que
esta enpesada a deficar [sic] en este dicho pueblo y en ella se ~elebre
la fiesta de la sancta y en el campo con apersebimiento que haziendo
10 contrario se Ie hara cargo en la visita.
Y los curacas e hilacatas del ayllo caualle que tienen sus estan~ias
en el asiento de Huntuma traygan la jente a ~elebrar la dicha fiesta de
la dicha sancta y los traygan a misa todos los domingos y fiestas
suyas y que asistan en el pueblo para que asi el cura bean si estan
doctrinados y los doctrine y en sene y los mesmos curacas derriben la
dicha capilla y traygan los sanctos y ornamentos que obiere y 10
Notes to Pages 277-285 489

cumplan todo so pena de ~inquenta asotes y de cada dies pessos [sic]

corrientes aplicados a la fabrica de esta sancta yglesia con
apersebimiento que no cumpliendo con 10 aqui ordenado en la visita
que sub~ediere a esta se yra a executar a su costa y seran castigados
con mayor rrigor como a c6npli~es de los delictos supersti~iones y
hechizerias que en eI dicho asiento de Huntuma se cometen contra
dios nuestro senor y nuestra sancta ffee cath61ica y mando que estas
hordenansas se notifiquen al cura y curacas. La qual dicha
constitu~i6n es como se contiene a la letra de su original y esta
firmada, Doctor Bartolome Basques Cerbantes y rrefrendadada [sic].
Ante mi Gaspar Martin notario, y eI dicho benefficiado Gonsalo Leal
Vejarano di6 por su rrespuesta todo 10 que de suso ba declarado ....
54. Yet the most interesting detail is difficult to interpret: Coroma natives
also adored certain "heads" in the manner of skulls with sculpted and painted
facial features and certain sculpted figures of horses, one of which was endowed
with a horn protruding from its forehead "in the manner of a unicorn." I cannot
explain the unicorn or horses, but the skulls with artfully reconstructed faces
resemble certain of the "mummified" ancestors revered in Cusco. In modern
Bolivia, they also resemble the skulls adored as "riwusyun" (from Sp. "devo-
ci6n"), bones of those whose sins make them condenados, condemned to wander
this earth (for a detailed account of such rites, see Huanca 1989). They are
addressed as oracles for divination, especially for nefarious purposes, and usually
on the "evil" days, Tuesdays and Fridays, when sacrifices to Tatala (Christ) or to
the moon (the Virgin), or libations to the ancestors in "heaven" (or rather, in
manxa-pacha, the underworld) are not performed. In K'ulta the term "riwusyun"
also refers to miniature saint images kept in nearly every domestic unit.
Like the extirpation records detailing the Diego Iquisi and Miguel Acarapi
scares, this proceso has not been found. When taken together, however, they
amply support the argument that extirpation campaigns had not been limited to
the archbishopric of Lima, as some scholars have suggested.
55. In the same year Oruro authorities tried still another man for very similar
practices. Domingo Ramirez, who advertised himself as an "hilsa," directed his
devotions to an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and the holy spirit that
descended into him conveyed the words of "Our Lord and the Virgin and the
glorious apostle Saint James" (AJO, Leg. 1779-82). Ramirez had erected his
chapel in the hamlet of Guaguaxasi, in the doctrina of Paria, from whence he
had been brought under guard. There may have been a connection between
Ramirez and Nina Willka; Ramirez had once been punished by the priest of
Mohosa for carrying his rituals there. The ubiquity of hamlet chapels and images
entirely under indian control became a more general concern of both civil and
ecclesiastic authorities at about the same time.
56. For their indigenous content, Gruzinski (1993) studies faked "titulos
primordiales" in Mesoamerica. Apart from documents such as the one shown to
490 Notes to Pages 286-292

me by Cruce's founder, I came across no further colonial "titulos" in K'ulta com-

parable to the often recopied and reworked documents described by Joanne Rap-
paport for the Paez. Nor did any K'ultas I met seek to synthesize ancestral myth and
colonial documents into a coherent founding narrative. And although I did meet
men in Challapata and Condo who claimed to own large collections of titles, I was
not able to convince them, in my brief sojourns in those towns, to show them to me,
much less produce an exegesis. On a foray into the archives of the prefectura de
Oruro, however, I found a fragmentary colonial title, dating from the Vega Alva-
rado composici6n of 1647, that had been submitted in prosecution of a land claim
by none other than don Manuel Mamani. Having lived on don Manuel's patio for
over a year and in his house for months, I was surprised to find that he had kept
this document from me. Such documents are a sacred business indeed.
57. The bull's horn, incidentally, also serves as a trumpet called pututu, an
emblem of authority and the instrument through which ayllu members are called
together to defend their lands, whether by paying tribute or through battle.
58. Morato, it seems, may have given his name to the social group created
from the Urus of Lake Poop6, who call themselves Urus Moratos.
59. Most probably that ayllu was once the lower moiety of Asanaqi; today it
is one of the ayllus of Santa Barbara de Culta (ADRO, Provincia Abaroa, Libro
de Propiedades, 1931-33, part 27, fols. 38-40).
60. The document was poorly copied from an earlier document from the
council archive by the cant6n's corregidor in 1914 before being deposited in an
Oruro archive in 1970. It was carried to Oruro in an effort by don Manuel
Mamani to defend certain lands from incursions by Ayllu Qullana by none other
than my host in K'ulta, who never made mention of the document's existence.
The Spanish original: " ... llega a Pachuta que es un morro y pide sirve de
moj6n de ambos aillos Cahualli abajo y Collanas, de hay sigue por una pampa
muy larga rumbo al Este allugar de Tolapampa, y sigue al Este por un riachuelo
al moj6n llamado Quintiri sigue a una roca llama do Pairumani, de hay sigue a
Cruz Pata, prosigue a Churicala que es el moj6n desde tiempo inmemorial que
hay plantaron sus varas cada cual, de hay Chiaraque ... "
61. Colonial varas, or staffs of authority, are still carried by the jilaqatas,
alcaldes, and alguaciles of K'ulta. Often tipped and banded with silver, they were
also a Spanish emblem of authority. They are usually also still made of chonta
palm wood, as the staff carried by Tunupa was or that carried by Manco Capac,
which, when plunged into the fertile earth of Cusco, defined an Inca promised
land; varas also complexly resonate associations deriving from both Spanish and
Andean sources. Called tata reyes (king fathers) when ritually addressed or
libated (Rasnake 1988a), they now synthetically embody external sources of
power from which that of council members emanates.
62. An excellent overview of sparse European literature and a history of
confraternities in Early Modern Spain is Flynn 1989. Christian (1981) surveys
rural religiosity in New Castile, drawing upon another of Philip II's totalizing
questionnaires.
Notes to Page 292 491

63. Few studies of the merger of civil and ritual hierarchies have been
published for the Andean area. Chance and Taylor (1985) and Farriss (1984) for
the Mesoamerican area provide useful guides to the methodological and histo-
riographic problems encountered. Rasnake (1988a) and Platt (1987c) are among
the few studies of the phenomenon in the Charcas region. For Peruvian cases,
Celestino and Meyers (1981) provide a comparative study of cofradias, mostly
within larger towns, where they more strongly resemble the Spanish and urban
model. Varon (1982) suggests that the cofradia was a principal means by which
ayllus were (re)articulated within reduccion communities. See also Hopkins and
Meyers 1988.
64. In 1756, when an "indio principal" of Condo's ayllu Sullcayana, named
don Joseph Guarcaia, brought a complaint against his parish priest, ten festivals
were celebrated there .
. . . Digo que en el dicho mi pueblo tenemos dies fiestas entabladas
desde muchos anos como son el Nombre Santo de Maria, San
Miguel, San Francisco Xabier, San Salbador, Nuestra Senora de
Candelaria, la Resurreccion de Nuestro Senor, la fiesta de Corpus,
San Pedro, Santa Rosa, y la Natividad de Nuestra Senora, y en cada
fiesta se ponen tres indios, dos mayordomos, y un alferes, y estos
contribuien de limosna ciento y catorse pesos que en todas las fiestas
se exercitan treinta yndios con mas otros gastos que hasen, de 10 qual
quedan pobres y enpenados de manera que quedan peresiendo
deviendo y vendiendo quanto tienen y no tienen con que pagar sus
tributos: con mas otras dies fiestas que tienen en los sinco anejos que
tiene el dicho pueblo quedan de limosna en unos anejos quareinta
[sic] y quatro y en otros treinta y tres con mas otros gastos que
tienen en las dichas fiestas por 10 qual mucha gente del dicho pueblo
se ban ausentando y consumiendo por no tener con que pasar las
dichas fiestas por que quedan enpenados deviendo y vendiendo
quanto tienen; y 10 otro los derechos d-- dos de los entierros
casamientos y olios sin atender al Real Aransel dispuesto por
sinodales de este Arsobispado y a las Reales Cedulas que su Mages
11 vI tad que dizque asido servido de despacharnos como a miserables
vasallos de su Catholica y Real persona de veinte y nuebe de Junio
del ano proxssimo pasado de setecientos sinquenta y dos .... (ANB,
EC 1756, no. 41, fols. lr-lv)
65. I suggest that merged fiesta-cargo systems reached something like their
modern form during the late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries. The
convincing work of S. Elizabeth Penry (1996) focuses precisely on this conjunc-
ture for both San Pedro de Condo and towns in the colonial province of
Chayanta. On the 1780s rebellion in the Charcas region, see also Arze 1991;
Cangiano 1988; Cajias de la Vega 1987; Hidalgo 1983; O'Pheian Godoy 1985;
Penry 1993; Serulnikov 1988, 1989; and Thomson 1996.
492 Notes to Pages 293-299

66. In Tinquipaya, the visitor Sanabria specified how alcaldes should assign
certain children to the service of the church: " ... serving by their turns of the
wheel the said boys, of whom some of the older ones shall be taken, after the said
town is built and completed and has been populated, so that after having taught
them song and music they shall serve in the church, officiating at mass when the
priest wishes to perform it sung" (AGI, Charcas 49, fol. 9v [see the Documentary
Appendix, part C, for full text]).
67. Chance and Taylor (1985) survey the received wisdom on fiesta-cargo
systems in Mesoamerica, suggesting that it has been predisposed to opposite
conclusions (such systems are said to give evidence of acculturation or of cultural
resistance) because of a serious historiographic flaw: modern fiesta-cargo systems
studied ethnographically have been contrasted with pre-Columbian social forms
to find survivals or the lack of them, without first historically investigating the
successive intermediate forms of the colonial period. The issue is fruitfully taken
up in Carmagnani 1988; Farriss 1984; and Penry 1996.
68. The strategy is widely reported in local-level rebellions in both country-
side and city. Spalding (1984) analyzes a 1750 conspiracy in Lima, where rebels
planned to use weapons carried in an auto sacramental during the festival of San
Miguel to attack the viceregal palace. The link between festival and rebellion is
well attested among the many eighteenth-century revolts summarized in
O'Pheian Godoy 1985.
69. Many such priest-instigated or -aided suits by commoner indians against
corregidores and hereditary lords are recorded in AGNA, 9.14.8.7 and 9.14.8.8.
See AGNA, 9.36.6.1, for the involvement of a loyalist descendant of Juan
Colque Guarache (through the San Lucas collateral lineage), who gained a
cacicasgo in Chayanta for his role in fighting 1781 rebels.
70. Chungara and his ancestors had engaged in many disputes with the
caciques of the "parcialidad de los Asanaques de anansaya." See ANB: EC 1738,
no. 62; EC 1743, no. 9; EC 1759, no. 139. In January of 1781, Challapata
rebels, led by Lope Chungara, killed the corregidor of the province of Paria,
along with the anansaya cacique (Cajias de la Vega 1987).
71. This was almost certainly Lucas Feliz Lianquipacha, surviving son of the
murdered Gregorio Feliz Lianquipacha (see below for the son's difficulties with
his "plebeian" indians in the 1790s).
72. Note that it was the alcaldes who mobilized rebels.
73. The priest of Macha, one Gregorio Joseph de Merlos, was later tried as a
rebel collaborator and accused of having personally written Catari's correspon-
dance.
74. Mitanis and pongos were kinds of personal servants that the town
council supplied to the priest.
75. Apparently the alcaldes presented the priest with a roster of candidates
for festival posts, from which he chose the "lucky winners." These three men had
not been given festival duties.
76. See text of Spanish original in part E of the Documentary Appendix.
Notes to Pages 300-304 493

77. The studies of a landmark reanalysis of late-eighteenth-century Andean

revolts (Stern 1987) have questioned earlier interpretations of revolt as messianic
or millenarian movements or as patriotic anti-Spanish movements foreshadow-
ing independence. Stern's introduction provides a masterful overview of the
literature.
78. His portable image and shrine were similar to the image through which,
a hundred years earlier, Nina Willka had communicated with Christ and the
Virgin. Such images can still be seen in today's commercialized Ayacucho-style
retablos, available in Miami shopping malls, and in the imagenes de bulto kept in
every house and hamlet chapel in K'ulta.
79. Between 1680 and 1780, sponsorship of rituals devoted to saints within
merged cofradia-town council frameworks had become the centerpiece of polity
formation, and it is likely that a systemic division of labor-or division of the
cosmos on cultural lines-was also in place, one that gave priests control over
authorized ritual performance relating to the Eucharist and the word of God,
and left indian fiesta sponsors control over unauthorized, indeed increasingly
clandestine and cryptic, ritual forms pertaining to the sacred beings of the
underworld (Nina Willka's souls in hell), as preconquest or "heathen" indian
ancestors, lurking just below the surfaces visible to priests, are considered to be.
80. What is more, the Challapata cacique, named de la Cruz Condori,
claimed descent from the Taquimalco lineage of hereditary lords, based in Condo
rather than in Challapata. The Llanquipachas had managed to displace the
Taquimalcos in the cacicasgo of Condo only a few years before, claiming descent
from Martin Pacha, a cacique named in the tasa of the visita general of the
1570s. The Llanquipachas did not present a full genealogy to prove their link to
Martin Pacha; by the mid-eighteenth century, such proof was not necessary to
gain office, only the approval of the corregidor. The Taquimalcos, for their part,
claimed descent from one Acho, perhaps the man named in Pizarro's encomienda
grant to Hernando de Aldana.
81. The phrase belongs to Lucas Feliz Llanquipacha (ANB, EC 1792, no. 108).
82. For this rapid summary I draw from Klein 1992; and Platt 1984. It
should be noted that nineteenth-century Spain saw the application of precisely
the same sort of policies, known there as desamortizacion. In Spain, liberalism
meant the confiscation of lands pertaining to "dead hands": the common fields,
forests, and pastures owned collectively by council-led towns, and the vast
properties owned by the rentier class, including the Church and absentee noble
landlords. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the corporate towns of
Spain lost most of their communal lands; the Church and some great noble
families lost their feudatory titles. Yet between theory and practice there were
difficult obstacles.
In their own history, Castilian townsmen had never seen servitude such as
that which nineteenth-century liberalism brought to indians, at least until
becoming "peones" on the nineteenth-century private estates into which their
former commons had been transformed.
494 Notes to Pages 304-313

83. Although many lands were stolen from indigenous communities, the
project was not successful. On the one hand, indigenous communities put up
concerted resistence. And on the other, privatization of indigenous peoples' land
often meant the establishment of great latifundios where a new hacendado class,
rather than investing in machinery, retained as pongos the very same indians who
had formerly held the lands (Klein 1992; Larson 1988; Platt 1982a, 1984; Rivera
Cusicanqui 1986). Warm and irrigated fields in the valleys where Killaka and
Asanaqi peoples still maintained access to croplands were also attractive to the
growing ranks of neocoloniallatifundistas (Platt 1982a). As a result, the nine-
teenth century saw the progressive loss of Altiplano peoples' rights to valley lands.
84. The original Spanish:
Corcino Viscarra, Cacique de Culta, cant6n de la sub-prefectura de
Paria, ante usted me presento y digo: Que hace aiios que hemos sido
perturvados en la posesi6n de los terrenos de Culta que como
originarios poseimos, por los dichos originarios de Tinquipaya; mas
la divina Providencia nos ha restituido la tranquilidad con la
imvenci6n de los titulos que en fojas cincuentidos acompaiio, por
ellos se ve que nuestro interi!S habian comprado los terrenos de Culta
y los molinos por la summa de siete mil pesos; asi pues somos
hacendados, no c610nos, podemos disponer de nuestra adquisici6n
como propietarios, y al Govierno y los particulares, no pueden ni
imponernos gravamenes, ni usurparnos un palmo de los que cost6
nuestra plata; a fin de que con los titulos mencionados podamos
hacer uso de nuestro derecho pedimos que el notario don Miguel
Calvimontes nos franquee un testimonio integro de los titulos que
acompaiiamos en fojas cincuentidos, y sea con sitaci6n Fiscal. Es 10
que a usted pido como representante de la comunidad de Culta.
Potosi, agosto cinco de mil ochocientos sesentiocho. Corcino
Viscarra. (Choquecallata document, unpaginated)
This document is a typescript that was made by the notary Eloy Lascano of
Oruro in March 1962, from an earlier transcription. There, "ADRO, Provincia
Abaroa, Libro de Propiedades, 1945, no. 8" is cited as the source. I could not
locate that original.
85. See the text of Perez' petition to the president of Bolivia in part F of the
Documentary Appendix.
86. One of the Agrarian Reform petitions for deslinde and amojonamiento
(the same procedure that Challapata caciques sought in the mid-eighteenth
century and for which Corcino Perez had lobbied in the nineteenth century) that
I briefly saw in La Paz had been submitted by two neighboring patronymic
hamlets of Ayllu Manxa-Kawalli.
87. As Xavier Alb6 (1975) has noted for the much more atomized Lake
Titicaca region, the struggle between tendencies towards factionalism and group
solidarity visible in cantonization conforms to structural features inherent to
contemporary "Aymara culture" itself.
Notes to Pages 318-331 495

CHAPTER 7. TELLING AND DRINKING THE PATHS OF MEMORY:

NARRATIVE AND LIBATION POETICS AS HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

1. K'ulta social memory, that is, serves K'ultas rather than indigenistas,
folklorists, or the Bolivian state. In the conclusion of this book, I pursue the
question of whether the heroic past and timeless cultural stasis imputed to
indians by Spanish missionary priests and creole folklorists may yet serve
indigenous interests as indigenistas gain a voice on the national political scene.
2. For a collection of such stories from Qaqachaka, see Espejo Ayka 1994;
and for perceptive analyses of stories about sallqa, wild animals, see Arnold and
Yapita 1992a, 1992b; and Yapita 1992.
3. For a more detailed analysis of the myth, see Dillon and Abercrombie
1988. Much of the substance of the present analysis derives from the collabora-
tion that produced this coauthored article.
4. This free translation of "Jesucristo-Tatalantix Supaytinsi-Chullpantix"
was made by Mary Dillon and the author from a version I tape recorded in an
interview with a K'ulta research consultant in September 1982. It conforms well
to versions heard in other contexts (also in K'ulta, in 1979 and 1980). The myth
is well-known and widespread in the area, often told, as other myths are, after
dark within the home and during rest breaks in collective labor.
5. Arnold (1993) reports such a story from Qaqachaka, and asserts that
Qaqas do accept descent from Chullpas. Arnold takes exception to the treatment
of the Tatala versus Chullpas myth presented in Dillon and Abercrombie 1988,
asserting that in Qaqachaka territory, Tatala may be called Jesucristo, but their
Christ bears little resemblance to the Christ of the priests. Of course, as Arnold
insists, Tatala is also the sun. I disagree, however, that Tatala's solar associations
make him a fundamentally non-Christian figure. Preferring one of his names and
certain of his qualities over other names and qualities to advance theses on
cultural resistance is a time-honored Andeanist tradition. From my point of view,
it seriously underestimates Andeans' abilities of intellectual synthesis and, like
colonial extirpators, refuses to grant Andeans (such as Miguel Acarapi, Martin
Nina Willka, or Tupac Catari) the interpretive space by which to suit Christian
doctrine to their own ends.
6. In a myth of these pre solar times from Huarochiri, such autochthones are
clearly immortal (Salomon and Urioste 1991).
7. That is why elders are so concerned about the practices of their
textile-trading sons, who rob such tombs for valuable cloth and artifacts and
take skulls from them (also sometimes from the cemetery or from older, colonial
graves found in the churchyard).
8. Freeze-drying is one of the techniques that Murra (1984) has lauded as
the "domestication of the cold," since it facilitates transport and long-term
storage. In the manufacture of freeze-dried potatoes (ch'uiiu) and meat (charki),
the central process takes advantage of the alternation between the extreme cold
of night and the temperate daytime temperatures and low humidity resulting
from the strong solar radiation at Altiplano altitudes. Water released from tissues
496 Notes to Pages 331-335

through freezing is pressed out and then evaporates. Compare this with the
transformation of the Chullpas from wet- and dark-loving, "natural" men into
desiccated corpses, inhabiting their own kind of long-term "storehouse."
9. Space does not permit discussion of the heavenly path which appears
when Tatala sets at night. The Milky Way is also conceived as a path (and as the
river that carries manxa-pacha moisture to the heavens, from which it may fall as
rain). As a t"aki, the Milky Way is a pilgrim's path, traveled by man and llama
(who are trailed by a fox), on a neverending journey between food-production
zones and highland storehouse, represented in the qullqa, the storehouses that
K'ultas see in the Pleiades (see Urton 1981). It is no coincidence that it is through
observations of the Pleiades that K'ultas determine when it is time to prepare
their caravans to valley production zones and begin the process of freeze-drying.
10. On the contrast between house building as implementation of a plan and
a product of social enactment, see the classic analysis in Bourdieu 1979. Mitchell
(1991) amplifies Bourdieu's discussion and applies it (with perhaps too much
insistence on enlightenment origins) to the study of the "modern" epistemology
of colonial states.
11. This does not mean that east is feminine and west masculine; on the
contrary, ch'alla performance demands that men face the east and women the
west, and the space is correspondingly inverted to allow for this. Such inversion
corresponds to the inverted recursion characteristic of the cosmos as a whole, in
which each pole incorporates a subordinated aspect of its opposite.
12. House construction rites have been the focus of many Andeanist ethnog-
raphies. See Arnold 1992 for a detailed analysis for Qaqachaka.
The complementary and hierarchic relationships between these groups are
ritually expressed in the specific building supplies and construction tasks allotted
to each; the house as an end product expresses in great detail the social relations
that brought it into being as a place of human activity. They are expressed in the
names, uses, and meanings of all the house's component parts, from foundation
stones to walls and corners to roofbeams. Indeed, even before construction
begins, the house is invested with social life, given "roots" through which
libations that are poured within may reach the ancestral dwelling places of the
lineages that have been conjoined in husband and wife.
Once the house is completed, its walls and door define a relationship between
inside and outside that also carries social meanings. In Aymara, "house" is "uta,"
and the open space outside its door is "utanqa" ("house-outside") usually an
enclosed patiolike space shared with other houses belonging to the husband's
patriline.
13. The sucullu rite described by Bertonio, which makes the infant's larita the
one who brings the infant into humanity (by naming him), does so through a
kind of "natural" sacrifice, equating the larita to the predator/hunter-gatherer
and anointing the infant, as a wild equivalent of the herd llama, with vicuna
blood. It was in this rite, as Bertonio noted, that the infant was first given
gender-marked clothing to wear, with vertical stripes worn by boys, and
Nates ta Page 340 497

horizontal stripes by girls. In K'ulta the same contrast in alignment of striped

outer garments is still a strongly marked form of gender definition (Bertonio
1984: book 2, 323).
14. This logic conforms to the Inca marriage rules analyzed by R. T. Zuidema
(1977).
15. Let us consider the implications of a serious invocation of the four-
generation exclusion, both when applied through patronymics and when applied
through strict genealogizing. Manxa-Kawalli and Alax-Kawalli are both en-
dowed with more than the necessary sixteen plus one patronymics required, and
so the patronym exclusion rule may well work for a prospective couple. Of
course, there is also the complicating factor of ayllu exogamy, which in my
calculation occurs in nearly one in four marriages. In fact, K'ultas were
universally adamant that there was no need to marry within the ayllu. There is a
slight preference, however, which was explained quite pragmatically. Serious
land wars, and indeed ritual battles which in K'ulta are called iiuwasis, are
generally fought between ayllus rather than within them. Marrying within the
ayllu, then, is a way of avoiding situations in which one might be forced to go to
war with one's affines. At the same time, it becomes considerably more difficult
for a husband or children of a woman to claim usufruct rights to her father's, or
patriline's, land if the wife and mother are from another ayllu, or even worse,
from another canton, than if she share's the husband's and children's ayllu
affiliation. Of course, on the other side of the coin, a daughter who chooses to
marry a complete outsider presents very little problem. Apart from these
practical inconveniences, I was assured, there is nothing wrong with ayllu
exogamous marriages, and many were pointed out to me when I raised the issue.
Still, most marriages in K'ulta, perhaps 80 percent all told, are ayllu
endogamous, with the least endogamous hamlets being those near ayllu borders.
What accounts for this? Simply put, young men and women in K'ulta most often
marry a partner with whom they have fallen in love, after a prolonged period
of courtship. Courtship takes place most often in festivals and in furtive
meetings in the hills, where young men become wandering minstrels singing love
songs to pretty shepherdesses, and the latter flash invitations to their suitors
with the mirrors hanging on their clothes (an action that has the advantage of
frightening away possible ghosts). Endogamy results from propinquity rather
than prescription.
16. It should be noted that the custom of tracing lineage through surnames
was imposed by Spaniards, who found it difficult to convince Andeans to accept
their practice of name inheritance. Before the 1730s, padrones and parish
registers show that few Andeans apart from hereditary lords (who were forced to
demonstrate their genealogical rights) gave their name to their children.
17. There are some exceptions: a few hamlets have more than one patriline
"neighborhood," whose lands are kept distinct from one another; some
patrilines, like the Mamanis, occupy several hamlets while remaining a single
unit for the defense of land rights.
498 Notes to Pages 341-346

18. Clearly, muju contrasts with wila in many ways. Muju, which means
"seed" as well as "semen," is repeatedly planted over the generations in a single
spot, in the hamlet and lands that are passed from father to sons. Wila, on the
other hand, is a circulating, generative substance. Rather than being rooted to a
single place, it moves throughout the territory along well-worn channels of
transmission, linking the mosaic of patrilineal hamlets and, ultimately, unifying
them as a single ayllu. Both kinds of generative substance are critical not only to
human well-being and reproduction but also to communication between human
and nonhuman realms. As we shall see, it is blood and three forms of
muju-semenlseed, breath, and congealed seed in the form of visceral fat-that
give both humans and herd animals their vitality and that Tatala receives in great
quantity in K'ultas' brand of eucharistic sacrifices.
19. Although the etymology of "tullqa" is unclear, the final marriage ritual,
performed as a relationship between two patrilines, illustrates that wife takers
are also conceived as a kind of wild predator, as a mallku (condor). Arriving en
masse at the groom's hamlet, the bride's patrikin are all welcomed as laritas. In
turn, they address members of the groom's patriline as ipalas, a term for a
father's sisters. The groom's patrikin have meanwhile completed a sacrificial
sequence and have prepared most of the elements of a banquet they will serve to
the arriving pack of "foxes." For their part, the laritas bring a quantity of stones
to the feast. Along the path that connects the two patriline hamlets, they select
certain flat and rounded stones of a sort that can often be found on riverbottoms.
Those chosen are said to be fox's kinsmen from layra pacha, a time when (as one
story recalls) fox challenged his cousin, stone, to a downhill race and ended up
suitably flattened. Even today, K'ultas say, the only way to kill a marauding fox
is to throw this sort of stone at him. So the wife-giving laritas bring their wife
takers precisely the ammunition needed to drive them away. The stones,
however, have another purpose. The wife will henceforth use them for a certain
sort of ritual cooking, beginning at the moment they are received. The groom's
kin build a bonfire, and the laritas put the stones into the flames. Later they are
dropped into a pot (often a wooden one) to cook a special stew called qala p"iri,
prepared without a cooking fire, a cooking method that might well date to
preceramic times. When the stones become hot, laritas and ipalas, couples from
the bride's and groom's patriline, leap over the bonfire in a wedding dance,
during which they tease each other in song. The laritas sing: "Nax apasjapini-
may. Kullaknan chukt'aiiapar chukt'askapinitaw" (I shall take you away. In my
sister's seat you shall be seated). The ipalas then reply: "Atxasmati janipi
atxasmati" (Shall you? I think you shall not) (Arnold 1988: 483-484). Seeking
to reverse the relationship that has made them into foxes, the laritas hope to take
wives from the groom's patriline, and often they do just that.
20. Europeans and North Americans commonly regard alcoholic beverages
as a social lubricant, the disinhibiting qualities of which help to ease the
awkwardnesses of some social situations-hence the folk theories that give rise
to arguments of functional utility.
Notes to Page 346 499

21. In pondering the meaning of drinking in the Andes, I leave aside the
theses on high-altitude hypoglycemia that have for decades plagued the study of
Aymaras, and the supposed genetic susceptibility to alcoholism by which some
scholars characterize all Native Americans. Such arguments, along with the
steam engine functionalism of "safety valves" and "stress release," have often
been adduced to account for drinking patterns among rural Andeans. But
because consumption of alcoholic beverages in the countryside is quite
uncommon outside ritual contexts, ethnographers of highland Andean drinking
have begun to move beyond such determinisms to pursue, not the question
of what makes Andeans drink, but what meanings they make by drinking. For
the most detailed account of contemporary Andean drinking, see Meyerson
1990.
22. Like coca and coca chewing, drink and drinking in the Andes have
received a great deal of anthropological (and more recently, historical) attention.
The late Thierry Saignes (1987, 1993) brought together a significant part of the
surviving Spanish colonial considerations of indian drinking. From Tschopik
1951 and La Barre 1948 to Buechler 1980 and Carter and Mamani 1982, and
from Allen 1988, Bastien 1978, and Harris 1978d, to Meyerson 1990, Platt
1978a, 1987b, Randall 1993, Rasnake 1988a, and Urton 1981, to mention but
a sample of ethnographic sources, the ch' alla form of Andean ritual drinking has
been repeatedly foregrounded, to the point where it has become a leitmotif of
Andean cultural practice. In none of these sources, however, are extensive
libation sequences actually described. An exception to the rule is to be found in
Tomoeda 1985. Also, Arnold 1988, 1992, invokes Yates's Arts of Memory to
explain amt'aii t"aki as a mnemonic technique. Arnold also invokes the Greek
technique of drinking a potion of the goddess Mnemosyne in preparation for a
journey to the land of past generations. My analysis of ch/alla practice hinges on
information gathered under circumstances that might seem to make a mockery
of ethnography's scientific pretensions. Seeking to understand the meaning of
drinking while becoming drunk foregrounds the pitfalls of participant observa-
tion as a field technique; the more I participated, the more disorganized my
observations became. But it is not possible to gather information about ch'allas
without in fact drinking them. Without the collusion of don Bartolome Mamani,
the yatiri and libation specialist of Vila Sirka, where I lived during most of my
fieldwork, who agreed to make my servings small, my observations on ch'allas
would have been reduced to a few spare paragraphs. Don Bartolome's private
reprises of his ch/alla performances, carried out with alcohol but in the presence
of notebook and tape recorder, were also crucial. My own limitations as
observer required that I use mechanical memory techniques to remember later
my own (prompted) libation dedications; under proper performance conditions I
could not remember later portions of long K'ulta "memory paths" long enough
to jot them down in my notebook.
Fortunately, libation specialists like don Bartolome have practiced techniques
that enable them to name long sequences of beings, uttering them into the
500 Notes to Pages 347-349

present from the past in which they dwell. As we shall see, historical conscious-
ness can indeed reside in practices leading to unconsciousness.
23. I do not mean to gloss over the serious consequences of drinking to
excess even in ritual contexts. This was brought home to me when, in 1980, I
more than once helped to bury young men who had died, apparently, of alcohol
poisoning during fiestas.
24. Not all K'ultas are allowed to carry out these offerings. Only adults
(which is to say, married individuals or those long beyond the usual age of
marriage) should chew coca or drink alcohol or chicha, and children (and
marriage-age single youths) remain on the periphery of the ritual performances
in which these substances are used for offerings.
25. I simplify here. Each of these libations is also paired with a dedication to
the yanani, a "helper" or "spiritual double," of the altar, root, uywiri, and
mallku.
26. Uywa = "domesticated grazing animal"; uywaiia = "to care for" or
"raise." Adding the agentifier -iri, "one who," we have "one who raises," or
"caretaker of herds."
27. Following local convention, I always sat at the men's altar. My under-
standing of women's ch' alias is therefore necessarily limited. Dona Basilia and
don Bartolome always tried to remain closely synchronized, so that male and
female deities and ancestor pairs received their drinks apace. One might perhaps
produce an adequate, if not full, list of women's uywa ispira ch' alias by adding
the term "t' alia" to each of the place deities in the men's sequence. And when
they arrive at ch'allas for the deceased, women pour for dead women and
reaffirm not only the matrilateral links in the men's patriliny, but also the female
sponsor's lines of matrilineal transmission, those through which most of the herd
animals were transmitted. This is where men's and women's libation paths truly
diverge. For no matter how far back they go in their genealogizing, men's
patrilineal ancestors travel very little distance in space: they are firmly rooted to
the male-transmitted patriline territory and to a narrow set of uywiris and a
single mountain mallku. The matrilineal links elaborated in women's memory
paths, however, reach far and wide across the territory, jumping each generation
back to the territory and gods of a different patriline, and making reference to a
wide range of mallkus. Ties through men are exclusive; those through women,
inclusive, reaching out to embrace the ayllu as a whole.
A full analysis of the significance of gender in memory paths would have to
account both for the respect and honor accorded to those women who complete
a fiesta path with their husbands and for some striking inequalities. For in spite
of the importance of complementarity in this symbolic schema, women's
sponsorship is nonetheless culturally subordinated to that of men. In K'ulta a
fiesta career, like territory, is the collective and inalienable property of the
patriline. If a man is widowed, he can carryon with his fiesta career with or
without a new wife, but unless a widowed woman remarries one of her deceased
husband's patriline brothers and the latter inherits his brother's career, she
forfeits the fiesta career.
Notes to Pages 349-351 501

The processes associated with women---<:ooking, the bearing of children, and

caretaking of the herds-may themselves require the intervention of alax-pacha
forces to civilize and cultivate manxa-pacha ones. But in men's purview, their
festival internalization of Our Father Shepherd's (Tata Awatir Awksa's) transfor-
mative and encompassing powers is at least in part done so that they can
"domesticate and cultivate" women, and therefore reproduce the patriline and
their own privileged roles in it. In the cultural synthesis evinced in K'ulta's
cultural poetics, gender domination becomes inseparable from that of colonial
domination.
28. Newborn animals and first fruits are themselves referred to as "flowers"
in libations.
29. It is true that becoming intoxicated, which not everyone wishes to do, is
a necessary part of rites and is itself an offering of the body (Saignes 1987).
Intoxication is but a visible sign of repletion, of having become filled with so many
offerings. On the one hand, copious drinking of libations calls forth an attribute
of the god (that of boundless containability, all-encompassing completeness),
while on the other, one sacrifices one's body in repletion to index the generosity
and earnestness of the sponsor, which is otherwise suspect. The demonstration of
both repletion and surplus (as there should always be more than enough food and
drink to satiate all participants in a rite) also points to the desired return for the
sacrifice, which is the gods' help in providing just such plenty. As the sponsor thus
takes the place of the gods in provisioning this demonstration of bounty, so also
is it incumbent on ritual sponsors (as well as their assistants, and in particular the
libation specialist wasu wariris, "cup bearers") to imbibe more and longer but
nonetheless remain sober. It is bad form should a sponsor become incapacitated
before the conclusion of a rite (and worse, in consequence, should his wasu wariris
"forget" their paths). Of Andeans, the sixteenth-century Anonymous Jesuit
chronicler remarked: "They hold in great esteem those who can drink much and
still keep their heads," a maxim that remains true today (1968: 176). The mallkus
of the colonial period were capable of great acts of consumption. As Capoche put
it while describing mita captains like Juan Colque Guarache: " ... they are the first
to get drunk ... and are so fat and heavy they cannot get around" (1959:
140-141, quoted in Saignes 1987).
30. Llamas must always be sacrificed in pairs, and given uywa ispira, qarwa
k"ari, and ch'iwu ch'allas, apart from certain exceptions which preclude these
ch'allas, such as: wilara (when the animal and its blood are offered to dedicate
an architectural form or symbol of office, and head, feet, pelt, and bones are
buried in the salient mallku mountain); funerary sacrifices, in which the blood
must be consumed by the mourners, and the head, feet, pelt, and bones burned
for the use of the dead person in his or her journey; and healing sacrifices, in
which the animal explicitly represents the patient and is given his disease before
being given to the gods in lieu of the person. Sacrifice of but a single animal is
acceptable in all these exceptions, and in all but funerary rites, sheep (or lesser
animals, when the occasion is slight) may be substituted. For more detail see
Abercrombie 1986; see also Van Kessel 1992.
502 Notes to Pages 355-357

31. "Mallku" and "kumprira" are alternate terms for a single entity, the god
of high mountain peaks. The condor is one form which the kumprira may take
when "outside" his mountain chamber.
32. The number of uywiris in a hamlet corresponds rather well to the
genealogical depth of focal ancestors linking households. Nonetheless an elder
son, forming a new household "neolocally" within the hamlet, may create his
own uywiri. Thus a profusion of uywiris in a hamlet may index social schisms as
well as genealogy. On uywiris and other genius loci in the Aymara-speaking
Chilean Andes, see Martinez 1976, 1983.
33. Only adult, which is to say married, women with children and separate
houses participate in the drinking and dedication. All present share in the status
of having come from other patrilines, linked to other uywiris and mallkus. The
female sponsor, however, also serves puro from a bottle to the major mountains
of the ayllu and beyond, shared by all women present.
34. As we shall see "t'alla" is qualified by deity-type terms or names to give
the "wife" of the deity. In the center of town, the male tower is coupled with the
plaza before it (piasa t'alla) as a "married" couple. Here the term refers to the flat
area enclosed by corral walls, which is, of course, covered in a deep layer of dry
dung, used for cooking fires and fertilizer.
35. Segments C-G within group II also dedicate hierarchies of corral deities
(misa, uywiri, and kumprira), but this time, of corrals from which the sponsors'
household herd derives. The progression is the same as that used in wedding
ch'allas, beginning with the "wife's corral altar" of origin, that is, her father's
corral altar, and progressing through the wife's mother's, father's mother's, and
wife's mother's mother's corral deities, all from the perspective of the male
sponsor. If the sponsor has not inherited his father's corrals, these will also be
included, between Band C, as jach'a jira t'alla, "great corral." In wedding
ch'allas, however, the deities of persons and patrilines are given, not those of
corrals.
36. Items 30 and 31 progress downward in age status, waynapat being a
not-yet fully grown male (similar to the human youth term "wayna" or
"maxta"), while "paq"ara," "flower," refers to the newborn animal. One might
argue that the more elaborated recognition of camel ids reflects their greater
similarity to human beings, or rather creates a greater similarity.
37. K'ultas told me that a few patrilines in K'ulta have their own samiris of
humans, which these lines ch'alla after their own kumprira in sequences
corresponding to segment A, but I was unable to confirm it.
38. Some say that muntu or Ilantir muntu is "near Yura" to the south and
west, while others believe it to be very far to the west, that is, not on this earth
at all, but in the land of the dead. What matters is that it exists as a space (inside
the mountain) within which great herds are kept. Though it is analogous to the
muntu (or mayruwiri qullu, "ancestors' mountain") which is given libations in
funerary sacrifices, consultants were very ambivalent about making the analogy
explicit, because the dead and the uywiris must not be "mixed." A paramount
extra-K'ulta mallku known as Tata Kusqu ("Father Cusco") is also sometimes
Notes to Pages 357-361 503

said to be located somewhere to the southwest, but others associate it with the
former Inca capital, and yet others think it to lie in the "other world," under and
behind, where the sun goes at night.
39. Both llamas and alpacas are subsumed within a single category by
metonymic inclusion of the entire herd of camelids in the term "lIantiru."
"L1antiru" in its more restricted use signifies only the leader(s) of the herd, those
which are especially honored (and given bells to wear) because they actually take
the lead (and unify the herd) when going to pasture or on caravan trips. While
the uywa ispira ch'alla sequence presented here is the most commonly heard
form, some performances nonetheless differentiate llamas and alpacas ("ulu" in
K'ulta Aymara), in a separate segment (after segment H in group III), as ulu
llantiru, ulu llantir waynillu, and ulu llantir paq"ara. Nonetheless, they remain
assimilated to the lIantiru type, which prototypically corresponds to llamas.
40. Mamanis were unsure whether the ram's uywiri was the same as that of
its corral. Unlike the human deities, in which knowing their names is crucially
important, the specifics of the animals are not always attributed (they are, after
all, the animals' gods).
41. The exclusion of bulls from corrals (which they could in any case knock
down in short order) is undoubtedly also related to the fact that, unlike other
esteemed herd animals, they neither produce wool nor carry loads. Instead, pairs
of bulls symbolize a bountiful agricultural labor force and production, and as a
result cattle are libated even when a household has none. I estimate that there are
on the average fewer than one pair of bulls per hamlet in all of K'ulta.
42. I am unsure as to the etymology of "mayruwiri." On the one hand it may
be a frozen composite of "mayura" (from Sp. "great/elder") + "uywiri." See also
an entry in Bertonio's dictionary: "Mayruru, vel Marmuru: Kidney, and also the
best of the wool; and of the earth" (1984: book 2, 220).
43. In a fiesta performance, as with other rites in which musicians and
dancers participate, another wasu wariri is contracted in order to serve special
libation sequences (in alcohol) related to music and dance, as well as to fighting,
since dance groups are also battle "platoons" at times.
44. Initially I thought the term was used to signify certain metal (copper?)
balls, also called surti or surti wala ("luck baIVbullet"). These are thought to be
the product of lightning strikes, and are used by shamans (who are "called" to
their profession by being hit by lightning) to "call" their awukatu familiars.
45. Other q'uwas are burned during the fiesta by the visiting authorities, as
part of their duties.
46. Since untu is held to be a form of solidified, stored male essence (a form
of muju, or "semen/seed"), and blood the female contribution to conception, we
see that the gods of alax-pacha are favored, in q'uwa and paxcha, with the
generative aspects of the llama's body.
47. Although consultants did not freely make this connection, one might also
see this holocaust at the emergence of the sun as a reference to the initial sunrise,
which burned the autochthonous beings in a sacrifice, making herding and
cultural life possible.
504 Notes to Pages 362-370

48. In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Aymara lords made use of their
herds to become great market intermediaries, and one of the products thus
transported was wine in quantity (see Murra 1977).
49. While both dilute cane alcohol and chicha are served to participants by
memory path specialists, the sponsors themselves serve pure cane alcohol from
small bottles. In the uywa ispira sequence of Fig. 7.4, asterisked items receive
puro from the sponsors' bottles (while also receiving cups of dilute awarinti).
Puro, that is, goes to the mallkulkumprira, the samiri, and to muntu mountain,
which is to say, to the most powerful and predominant manxa-pacha powers.
What these deities have in common is genealogical depth as links between
disparate households and herds, as well as height, dominating the multiple and
partial uywiris and misas under their purview. It is appropriate that the sponsor
should present pure alcohol directly to the pourer, since ritual sponsors in all the
events calling for libations of mallkus are themselves traveling a path, leading
them towards kinds of totalizing activities like those of the highest mallkus.
Indeed, rituals like this one aim precisely to transfer successively to sponsors the
attributes of leadership that are possessed by the gods.
50. There are also preparatory ch' alla sequences performed by the sponsor
and his wasu wariris and the service personnel (tispinsirus) in charge of alcohol
and chicha supplies. Upon opening a new can of alcohol, the first ch' allas are for
the "factory" which produced it. For chicha, the first ch' allas address the storage
vessels as a "lake," that the chicha should be as much.
51. The concept of tinku is treated well and at length in Platt 1978a, 1987b.

CHAPTER 8. LIVING ON TATALA'S PATH: USES OF THE PAST IN

SACRIFICE AND ANTISACRIFICE, SAINTS' FESTIVALS, AND SORCERIES

1. Some of these couples, say a hundred of the total, will have completed
their careers and be exempt from further duties, while others (perhaps fifty to a
hundred) have not yet set up independent households or are still engaged in
hamlet-level festivals so have yet to begin a "great fiesta career." So our of 450
"eligible" couples, at least a third are in the midst of a career at anyone time.
Not all will complete, or even begin, a jach' a p"ista civil-ritual career, but there
are no patrilines or hamlets without representation in the career system.
2. Such sponsorship rotation systems were at an apogee in scale in the late
eighteenth century, when diarchy and federation ties among reducci6n towns
were played out in macrocycles which included several towns. Visits of K'ulta
jilaqatas to Condo for the feast of San Pedro are most likely a remnant of such
a macrosystem centered in the former diarchy capital, when sponsorship roles in
Condo may have been part of the investiture of annex council officers. Such
complex regional systems are best recorded for the province of Chayanta in
1793-97 (see chapter 7, and for the 1770s, see Platt 1987c). Fiesta systems
which unite highland polities with valley outlier kinsmen are still in existence,
such as that by which authorities of Ayllu Qullana are chosen today.
Notes to Pages 372-375 505

3. Among fiesta sponsors, pillu carriers are as follows: During the year
before receiving the sponsorship, the fuera of Guadalupe carries pillus to the
present year's aW:rez of Guadalupe. In the following year's carnaval, the same
fuera (now in his year of sponsorship) receives pillus from the -1 year alferez of
Guadalupe (a different man from the same ayllu). This exchange, of course, is
between role types of a single saint, but corresponding to the Guadalupe jilaqata
path and the Exaltaci6n alcalde path.
The -1 novena of Santa Barbara takes pillus to the year's alferez of Santa
Barbara, and the following year the novena (now a sponsor) receives pillus from
the - 1 alferez of Santa Barbara. This exchange is between sponsorship roles of
Santa Barbara, but between men in the two jiiaqata paths.
The - 1 fuera of San Andres takes pillus to the same year's alferez of
Guadalupe and receives pillus, the following year, from the -1 alferez of
Guadalupe. Here the exchange is between saints and between the two alcalde
paths.
Finally, two of the lowest-ranking sponsors take pillus during their year of
sponsorship, without receiving return visits: the mayordomo of Guadalupe (in
the Exaltaci6n alcalde path) carries crowns to the same year's alferez of
Guadalupe, while the mayordomo of Santa Barbara (in the Santa Barbara
jilaqata path) carries pillus to the same year's alferez of Santa Barbara, in the
same Santa Barbara jilaqata path.
4. Along with the poetic device of recursion and imbedding of microcosmic
icons in macrocosmic form, other poetic forms are also employed. Metaphoric,
metonymic, synechdochic, indexical, iconic, and symbolic signs amplify, modify,
and refer such parallelisms to a wide range of extraritual referential orders,
reorganizing them in a totalizing metacommunicative form. In combination, the
symbols and metaphor-making structures of fiesta ritual establish equivalences
and disjunctions with the power to affirm, create, and transform the social
identities of participants as their roles in the progression of sacrifices are
transformed.
5. Monday (mayruwiri uru) is considered the dead's day and is reserved for
funerary rites. Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday are called awksa uru, "our father
day," but only Thursday is considered truly propitious for male saints' feasts and
sacrifices. Tuesday and Friday are the saxra uru ("evil" or "secret" days), thought
most appropriate for sorcery and for rites to the mining gods of money. Friday is
also called qinsa milakru, "three miracle day," when Tata Mustramu (the sun),
Tata Exaltaci6n (Exaltation of the Cross, also called Tata Killaka), and Santiago
(Saint James) are unified in a kind of trinity. Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday
are tayksa uru (our mother day), of which only Sunday (the day of Mama
Rusario) is considered relatively unpropitious. Consideration of the qualities of
these days is always brought to bear on scheduling for collective work, travel,
and ritual, and each deity form is given coca dedications during its day.
6. On urban and mining frontiers, ethnographers' efforts to get past mine
entrances and showy fiesta pageantry to the hidden sacrifices to tio-supays of the
506 Notes to Pages 377-381

mines and associated earth shrines (as, for example, in Nash 1979, taken up
[along with Bastien 1978] by Taussig 1980) seem to blind them to the
constitutive relationship between such clandestine practices and the public cult
of miraculous saints carried out in the light of day, such as the devotions to
patron saints of mines organized by mine workers' unions, and those to city
patron saints by confraternities and folkloric brotherhoods. But this is the
subject of another book.
7. In a way, both the ethnographic goal of gaining deep insight into hidden
practices and the aid in that project afforded by inquisitive and ambitious (and
semi-alienated) frontier spirits like Manuel Mamani and Pablo Choquecallata
mirror the productive link between the inquisitorial project of extirpators of
idolatry such as Cristobal de Albornoz, who investigated the idolatrous secrets of
the taqui oncoy movement with the aid of Guaman Poma. 50 modern ethnog-
raphy reduplicates some of the very strategies by which clandestine realms were
investigated (at the moment they first began to appear) and became more deeply
entrenched.
8. A cousin of Virgilio, Tomas had married a Jallqa woman in his father's
adoptive home, where he had grown up. Arriving in distinctive Jallqa clothing
styles, Tomas and his wife, Petrona, changed into K'ulta costume before
beginning their ritual duties. Both Virgilio and Tomas regularly returned to their
grandfather's birthplace of Vila 5irka, driving their llama herds before them, in
order to perform the duties that made them K'ultas and guaranteed their rights
to Mamani lands.
9. They are not likely, however, to actually be the lead llamas of the herd,
which are too valuable for sacrifice. Although K'ultas would not consider sub-
stituting vegetables or noncamelids for the required llamas (unlike the Nuer, who
substitute cucumbers for oxen), they do substitute sterile females or old and weak
males for sacrifices that take place in the hamlet. They are, however, concerned
about appearances during public sacrifices in the town, and the animals killed
there are actually males and generally strong and large ones at that. Whether male
or sterile female, however, the animals killed are called llantirus.
10. Used for fertilizer after several years of composting, llama dung is in the
form of small dry pellets, which are used as fuel in cooking fires. On the
symbolism of jira t'alla, see Arnold 1988.
11. Manuel and Bartolome Mamani told me that the coca bag used for this
purpose is kept aside for use in the sacred bundles, which all herders bury in the
corral during herd fertility rites of ear-marking carried out during carnavales.
12. I point out again that a pair of llamas must be killed together, rather than
only one. But in a major fiesta, much more meat than this is needed for the
banquets to follow, and two to five pairs of llamas will actually be killed.
13. All consultants agreed that the entire rite of qarwa k"ari must be
scheduled so that the paxcha takes place before midday, while Tatala's strength
is rising (and he is on the ascending part of his path), rather than in the
Notes to Pages 382-383 507

afternoon, when Tatala begins to sink into the feminine manxa-pacha (and is
outshined by Paxsi Mamala, "Moon-Mother").
A different procedure is employed in the sacrifices performed as part of
mortuary rites. For these events, in which the blood must be collected in its
entirety (to be cooked in corn meal and eaten by mourners), the animals are
killed while standing, by inserting a knife between the neck vertebrae. Blood is
then collected in the animal's thoracic cavity by severing the aorta while the heart
still beats. In the case of mortuary sacrifices, the killing should be done after
noon, on a hamlet's western path.
14. By "ideal type," I mean that a ritual name for each foodstuff is used, in
some cases a metonymic reference to the food item, in others the name of the
saint thought to have special power over the item. The deity-guardians of
foodstuffs include the valley-area mountains called awiyaru (from the sixteenth-
century Sp. noun aviadora, "provisioner").
The cup used to serve ch'iwu ch'allas is different from that used in other
alcohol ch' alias: it is larger and, if available, is a miniature copy of the wooden
bowls used for chicha ch' alias. These have a pair of lIantirus or turus ("bulls")
carved in the bottom.
15. I use the word "heart" here advisedly, notwithstanding the fact that the
organs which are cooked and eaten in the corral are the liver and lungs. When
confronted with an actual carcass and the organs in question, the term "chullma"
was unhesitatingly applied to the liver and lungs, which are considered the seat
of the animo (Spanish term for "soul") and samana (an equivalent Aymara term
which also means "breath"). My K'ulta consultants also insisted that "chullma"
translates into Spanish as "coraz6n" (= the English "heart"). I believe that the
vehemence behind this translation derives from the cultural importance of the
roughly equivalent "figurative" meanings of "chullma" and "coraz6n," which are
used interchangeably in poetic discourse, love songs, and prayer to approxi-
mately the same effect as "heart" is used in English popular music. When
rechecking the meaning of "chullma" with consultants on two separate occasions
(and with an array of internal organs present to index), I was unable to convince
them that the blood-pumping organ was a coraz6n. It took a Spanish-Aymara
dictionary, referring to the action of the heart and translating it in the physiologi-
cal sense as "lluqu" (the Aymara term for the pumping organ) to convince
(rather, astonish) them that only my Aymara, not my Spanish, was faulty.
16. "Janachu" may literally be parsed as "sterile" (jani = "not," achuna = "to
produce," as in young, foodstuffs, etc.). It is also a term which is applied to stud
male alpacas, which are thought to be weak and less likely to breed successfully
than male llamas. Janachus thus seem to differ categorically from the strong
llantiru males, which should be sacrificed. Indeed, the relationship of janachus to
llantirus is much like that of the sponsor (who is also a strong, fertile, lead male)
to his tullqas (who are dependent, effeminized subordinates) and of the eldest
brother to the youngest brother.
508 Notes to Pages 383-384

17. Usually the llama herd precedes the sponsor's entourage by up to several
hours. However, even with frequent stops for ch/allas along the way, the
sponsors and their followers often overtake the slow-moving llamas before they
arrive at their destination.
18. Names of these rest stops are numerous, but several are recurrent: The
most common is samarayaiia (lit., "place to breathe"), but q/ asa (a toponym
referring to a saddlelike depression between hills, often passes with views of
other sites or of the town) is also frequent.
19. Between Todos Santos (November 1) and the end of carnaval (March-
April), the band plays carved, wooden, recorder-type instruments called t/ arkas.
During the t/arka season (a period when, as Olivia Harris [1982] asserts, the
dead have returned from manxa-pacha to reside in the highlands and aid in crop
growth), the ukelelelike charangos (on which love songs are played) are put
aside. A rite at the end of carnaval enacts the throwing down of t'arkas (and the
jurk"as, or maypoles) and the renewed playing of charangos.
20. The jackets are made of homespun, in the style worn by all K/ulta men.
What differs is the color and design (width of stripes, size of checks, etc.). Most
young men (those known as maxtas, in particular) own a set of such jackets-
one in a style particular to the hamlet, the patriline, the wife's and mother's
patrilines, and one in the most "generic" of styles (such as the common
brown-white-black jackets with small pinstripes or checks) particular to the
ayllu.
The group has its own structure, composed, ideally, of maxtas (mature but
unmarried males) who are the sponsors' patriline mates, plus (when free of other
duties) his tullqas and sutiyuqas, "godsons." The ;ula-;ulas are led by a "captain"
(or "mayura"), who "herds" the dancers with whip and sling, and they are
accompanied by a pair (or pairs) of unmarried "daughters," called mit'anis, who
may be real or classificatory daughters of the sponsors.
The organization of the dance group appears related not only to the
generalized military form common to many aspects of ritual sponsorship (and
deriving in part from the nature of a sixteenth-century cofradia organization) but
also to the organization of local contingents of laborers on their way to the
Potosi mita. Until abolished in the nineteenth century, local men were "taken" to
the mita by appointed mita captains, and were accompanied by wives or women
chosen to serve them while in the town. A now-defunct rite performed during
Todos Santos' festivities until 1977 (and described to me by various individuals)
made the connection between fiesta dance groups and the mita more explicit: In
that rite, those who served as jula-julas in the year's fiestas participated in a kind
of race (from the cemetery to a pass on the path to Potosi), in which, paired with
unmarried girls, they carried large stones to a large apacheta on the pass. When
they returned, they were "married" in a mock ceremony by a mock priest, with
mock European officials looking on. Partly as a result of a series of especially
violent intermoiety battles (between the assembled "dance" groups of maxtas),
and partly because, as one collaborator put it, "no one knew why it was done
Notes to Pages 384-387 509

any longer," the rite was abolished in 1978, during a general reshaping of the
Todos Santos ritual which now keeps the moieties and ayllus apart by scheduling
them to arrive on separate days. Three large stone monuments remain, however,
on the trail to Potosi, as a reminder of the abolished rites.
21. The town sacrifice, qarwa k"ari, is sometimes referred to as wallpa k"ari
(rooster cutting) because of the former practice of killing chickens on arrival for
use as gifts to the priest. Since 1932, however, there has been neither resident
priest nor need for gift chickens in K'ulta.
22. They also ch'alla an altar just above the plaza which is a large rectangu-
lar boulder in the hillside, called Inka Misa. The altar is not so much associated
with the Incas as given the ritual name for building (and fighting) stones: it is
thought to be the saints' principal altar outside the church, connected to the
saints' silu altars in the subordinate hamlets, just as the hamlet Pukara chapels
and their niiiu "towers" are connected through their roots to the church and
tower of the town.
23. Indeed, during the performance of the first fiesta that I witnessed in
K'ulta, I asked another (K'ulta) observer what was happening at a stone altar
(Inka Misa) on a nearby hill where a crowd had gathered. He replied that the
"indios" were drinking to the "supays." The latter term translates as "devils" in
the usage of city dwellers, who apply the term to all the mountain deities; locally,
the term is applied to the dangerous and destructive forms sometimes taken by
neglected mallkus. These may take the form of a vecino or city person in order to
capture the unwary indian's spirit, or they may try to strike nasty bargains with
the avaricious. In this, the local supay closely resembles the frequently reported
wamani of the Quechua Ayacucho area (see, for example, Earls 1971; Isbell
1985). It must be added that the individual who, in speaking to a stranger-
outsider (myself), distanced himself from devil-worshiping indios (a term which
is always disrespectful in use) later proved to be fully involved in a fiesta career
of his own.
24. In 1979 the subprefect used his pistol during p"isturu of Santa Barbara,
trying to stop a fight that was rapidly escalating into a tinku in the town plaza.
After firing all six shots into the air to no avail, he got into his jeep and fled the
town.
25. When the evening of the day before p"isturu approaches, the same-ayllu
sponsors (with their own and their borrowed dancer-musician groups giving
musical accompaniment) carry out ch'allas for their respective images and then,
at their patio altars, prepare the money to be paid to the priest for the mass.
After a set of ch'allas in the patio, all the sponsors together visit the kitchen (now
collapsed) of the parish house, repeating (if the priest is not present) the ch'allas
of this rite, called limusna waku, "collection of the alms."
Limusna waku takes place regardless of whether a priest is present, and the
money is held for a future mass, sometimes in the nearby town of Challapata.
The ch'allas for lim usn a waku, interestingly, for the first time in the fiesta include
libations to the gods of money: Wila Qullu ("Blood Mountain," the famous
510 Notes to Page 388

mountain of Potosi and source of silver), wanku ("the bank"), and the tiu (Sp.
tio, "uncle"), who is a malevolent form of mallku presiding over the extraction of
minerals from the mines. Apart from their performance in the town, especially in
connection with the priest's exactions, such ch'allas are thought to be dangerous
and best restricted to rites for the increase of money, normally performed during
the saxra days of sorcery (Tuesdays and Fridays).
Individuals who are successful in marketing transactions involving money
(which most exchanges for foodstuffs do not involve) are thought to practice
secret rites for these infernal deities in their homes on a periodic basis, rites
which always involve inversions: Money that is capital is thought to be kept in
the mouth of an ancestral skull stolen from the cemetery, which is wrapped and
stored with unbaptized (and dried) human fetuses, and their rituals bringing life
to this money are supposed to be held always on the saxra days of sorcery.
26. Because the priest-during the research period, part of the regular clergy
of the obispado of Oruro-normally gives but one mass a year in K'ulta, on the
day of Santa Barbara, and is not present for the fiesta of Guadalupe, it would be
inappropriate to enter into great detail about his activities here. I offer but a few
comments: The priest lives in his central parish, in the brewery town of Huari
(part of the former Awllaka-Urukilla kingdom), from whence he makes yearly
trips to Culta, Lagunillas, Cahuayo, San Pedro de Condo, and Cacachaca. On
his arrival in the town of Culta (by jeep) the day before p"isturu of Santa
Barbara, the priest sets up a table in the plaza, where he receives gifts (of
foodstuffs, including chickens) and collects payments for his ritual services.
These amount to a considerable sum, since most K'ultas wait until this day to
carry out church weddings and baptisms, ask for masses for the dead, and pay
for masses to the saints of the great and little fiesta careers of the area. In 1979,
the priest collected over a hundred payments, averaging a few dollars each. All
the masses paid for, of course, are taken care of in a single actual mass, at the
end of which the weddings and then baptisms are performed en masse. Apart
from these trips to the ritual-center town, he also may give masses at settlements
on the road, such as the crossroads (and district school center) town of Cruce
Culta (located some thirteen kilometers from Santa Barbara), and the settlement
(with church) of Thola Paica, the location of a former tambo in Alax-Kawalli
territory. The priest is both feared and respected, and the services he performs are
considered essential. On another day when the priest's presence is thought
crucial (but when he is never present), during Easter, a set of stored vestments are
used to make a local man into an ersatz priest for the recitation of prayers and
the "walk of the cross" performed at that time. The importance of the priest's
function seems to make the severity of the priest's admonitions against local
custom (delivered in sermons when he does come) more acceptable for K'ultas.
The fact that the sermons are delivered in formal Castilian Spanish, a language
(and register) most K'ultas do not understand, must also diminish their effect.
We must, of course, find it ironic that the indigenous deities (or transforma-
tions of them, those associated with money and mining) find their most satanic
Notes to Pages 389-392 511

forms only in closest proximity to the town, church, and priest. Yet as we shall
see, the priest, and indeed all outsiders and the mining centers and cities where
they come from, are thought to be particularly apt at an insidious form of this
"devil worship" in which the sacrificial victims are not llamas but rural people.
27. Ch'allas presented by authorities, whether at sponsors' altars or at
Kawiltu misa, have a different character from those of fiesta sponsors, because
only authorities are entitled to give ch'allas to the great extra-K'ulta mallkus, to
which the mallku of K'ulta is subordinated. K'ulta's premier mallku is named
Pirwan Tata ("Father Storehouse," because of a rock formation on its peak) and
Churi Asanaqi ("last-born son" of Asanaqi, the predominant mallku of Condo,
former capital of the Asanaqi kingdom). The ch'alla path of kawiltu kumprana,
of course, also includes the gods of money, which the authorities begin to collect
from their "subjects" when they have finished their own ch'alla sequence.
28. Most of those "named" to sponsorships, of course, are already in the
midst of their careers, and the date of their sponsorships has long been
predetermined.
29. One meaning of "qurpa" is "boundary stone," which I take to be a
homonym.
30. In towns with a resident priest (which K'ulta lost in the 1930s), the feast
of Corpus (which is in honor of the host) includes a procession of the host, kept
in a solar-form monstrance which K'ultas regard as the image of Tata Mustramu
(who is Christ as well as the sun).
31. Following an order of hierarchy, the servers hand out small bowls of lawa
(a wheat or maize porridge), boiled maize, soup, quinua, potatoes, and meat
(and sometimes exotic dishes such as rice or lentils) to the whole congregation,
along with ground chili peppers as a condiment. As in the serving of ch'allas,
men serve men from supplies at the men's altar, and women serve women from
bowls at the women's altar. Especially honored individuals (the authorities, those
who have finished their careers, and elders in general) sit in rank order around
the altar, and are served first and given select pieces of meat (such as long rib
bones). Less senior, married adults sit nearby, still within the confines of the
patio, and are served next. Finally, the sponsors' aides serve the younger people,
unmarried individuals and children, who often sit or stand outside the patio and
have been excluded from participation in ch'allas. The cooks, food servers,
jula-julas, and other contracted ayni are fed in a later meal.
32. As I have explained, these are the same terms by which authorities and
ayllu members address one another during tax payment (kawiltu) and during the
kumun wilara (the "blood for the community"), a sacrifice for the benefit of the
ayllu which the jilaqata performs when he takes office.
33. First, the sponsors' tullqas again don the pelts of the sacrificed llamas.
Shortly thereafter, they are chased by their mock shepherd into the patios of the
other sponsors in the town for visits. Similarly, the janachus of other sponsors
visit the fuera's patio. One cannot placate these janachus, however, with
individual servings of chicha and coca. Instead, an altar is set up on the ground
512 Notes to Pages 393-394

(between the sites of the men's and women's patio altars), and a large bowl of
chicha and quantity of coca are placed there, as if they were supplies for a
libation series. The jaiiachus drink and eat on all fours, and then are driven out
of the patio. When the fuera's own jaiiachus return from their cavortings, they
are again mock sacrificed by their "herder" (who, carrying a whip as well as a
sling, resembles a cross between authority and herder). Only after this interrup-
tion can the helpers' banquet be served and the ch'iwu ch'alla sequence be
finished.
34. It must be added that the line between tinku (a controlled form of
fighting) and ch'axwa (a more unrestricted sort that may also occur outside
calendric feasts and for the control of territory) is not always clearly drawn. As
Platt has pointed out for the Macha case, long-standing feuds (usually over land)
may be prosecuted in fiesta tinkus in which one group plans in advance to exceed
the bounds of tinku and engage in ch'axwa. Whether in tinku or ch'axwa,
vengeance for previous losses plays a crucial role in the motivation of fights. As
we have seen, the term for vengeance "ayni" is the same as is used to describe the
exchange of labor prestations. In addition, it is used to refer to the exchange of
sponsorship which takes place during the fiesta, to coparticipants in the gifting
relationship therein, and to those who sponsors tap for service roles in the fiesta.
35. Indeed, the other sponsors may leave town before the fueras perform
their final rites.
36. That is, the isi turka misa was, on two occasions I witnessed, placed in
approximately the same spot that the jaiiachu misa was placed during the
previous day's rites. It may be that the exact location is unimportant, so long as
it is not on either men's or women's ch'alla misas. The seating arrangements
which I observed, however, seemed to point to the significance of gender
attributes of patio space in the placement of individuals around the isi turka
misa. The first time that I saw isi turka, the rite was carried out in the church
itself, and with the opposite moiety's mayordomo standing in for a no-show
fuera couple. Afterwards, the image was left in the church in the care of the
mayordomo until it was reclaimed (the next day) by the machaqa fuera.
37. As is also the case within the church (but not within the hamlet
"chapels," or pukaras, which also contain saint images), the ch'allas of isi turka
are done neither with chicha nor with alcohol. Rather, the liquid poured and
drunk, called chuwa (a term otherwise referring to the clearest, top-skimmed
part of a newly brewed vessel of chicha), is a sort of sugary tea.
38. Each saint, of course, has its own special characteristics. All have some
attributes of herders, and carry small slings and the like. Male images (such as
San Andres) may possess a number of miniature war helmets, coca pouches, and
so on. The main saint images, located permanently in the church, tend to have
fewer articles of indigenous clothing but possess other things which the minia-
ture images lack. The main image of Guadalupe, for example, owns a herd of
"toy" (under six inches tall) llamas and alpacas. All main images also possess
small metallic balls (from pea to cannonball size), which are the concrete token
Notes to Pages 395-399 513

of saints' gifts of power to shamans. When a man chooses to reject the calling,
the ball, called surti wala (used by yatiris to call his familiar spirit/saint when
needed as an intermediary between himself and the gods) is returned to the saint
from whence it came, during a rite called lurya misa (the "glory mass" or
"lightning altar").
39. If an individual is not accompanied by an opposite-gender companion,
two men may kneel together with the higher ranking (that is, usually the elder)
kneeling on the right side.
40. The number of articles counted should be greater than those counted the
previous year, because fueras are expected to give gifts to the image (during the
twice-monthly clothes-changing which is part of their yearlong sponsorship).
With each item enumerated, the machaqas' wasu wariris serve a round of chuwa
(sugared tea), which has been provided by the outgoing fuera couple.
41. Machaqas begin in the first qarwa k"ari rite of their sponsorship (the
uywa ispira dedications having been performed before their trip to town).
42. The 1982 fuera of Guadalupe became jilaqata in January 1985, and
finished his jilaqataship on January 20, 1986, following the established timing of
career sequences. As jilaqata, his first duty was a visit to each household within
the ayllu, "begging" them with gifts of coca and alcohol to come to the kawiltu
(also his installation) on January 20 in order to pay their tasa. In between the
rogation of payers and the payment itself, he also had to perform a kumun
wilara sacrifice for his vara and his new ayllu-wide herd, followed by a full
circumambulation of his ayllu's mojones.
43. The authority's duality not only resonates with the internalization of
imposed structures (and reproduction of hegemony), but also indicates the
degree to which such domination is thereby resisted: cooptation (and the
sacrificial knife) cuts both ways. Thus it is illuminating to contrast the perceived
role of the ritually established local authority with evaluations of their direct
counterparts, the state- and church-sanctioned, non-K'ulta figures to whom the
K'ulta leaders must pay obeisance. For these outsider authorities are also
understood in terms of sacrifice, but a nefarious and uncontrollable sort of
sacrifice akin to sorcery: they slyly steal (through a kind of invisible surgery) the
body fat and blood of indigenous people, and transform these substances not
only into increased vitality (at the expense of the victim) but also into specie,
through their own network of ties to the more insidious (aspects of) mountain
gods.
The notion that the llamas of sacrifice are substitutes for human victims
(which is explicitly stated in healing rites) implies that humans are appropriate
sacrificial victims, and if the Spanish-associated sky gods are herders of men,
then one might assume that men are their proper offerings as well as offerers.
Human sacrifice was indeed part of the Inca imperial rites known as capac
hucha, and the possibility of the sacrificial use of humans remains ever present.
As it was the foreign, dominating Incas who required such sacrifices of their
subject polities, so it is representatives of the foreign, dominating state who are
514 Notes to Pages 400-411

thought to carry out such sacrifices in the present day. Nowadays, however, one
does not volunteer victims, but the sacrificers nevertheless obtain them through
magical means.
44. At first blush, the relationship of the town, as the locus of state and
alax-pacha intervention and of social domination, to the hamlets, in which
manxa-pacha gods are "surreptitiously" honored, seems clearly to be one of
formal vertical hierarchy, so that town is to hamlet, as above is to below, as
outside is to inside, as whole is to part, and as center is to periphery. But by
quarantining the sky gods and state apparatus within the town, surrounded by
the space of hamlets, and incorporating the sky gods' hierarchizing power within
the elder brothers and father-herders of the patrilines and ayllus, the poetic
devices of the fiesta performance reverse the direction of encompassment and
domination. This, it might be argued, is a fundamental kind of resistance, a sort
that can be practiced by any people who seek to define themselves as an
independent collectivity while being dominated by an unyielding colonial or
postcolonial power.
45. See the excellent overview of the k"arisiri and fiaqaq literature in Wachtel
1994. My first encounter with the literature was the first-person account of
Liffman (1977), the publication of which was at that time heroic. I am also
indebted to Stuart Alexander Rockefeller (1995), who shared with me his
perceptive analysis.

CHAPTER 9. CONCLUSION: ETHNOGRAPHY AND HISTORY OF SOCIAL

MEMORY AND AMNESIA

1. It is curious that historical practice is routinely regarded as "humanistic,"

and ethnographic work is regarded as a social "science." Historical work follows
disciplinary norms using sources that others can hope to read for themselves;
history is repeatable and falsifiable, and can (and, indeed, does) make stronger
claims to being an objective endeavor; anthropology may be based on first-
person observations and experiences, but they are unique and unrepeatable, and
hence eminently subjective ones.
Of course, the very notion that the historian's goal is to construct a single
"reliable" narrative of the past has come into question. "What happened" at any
point in the past was already a matter of interpretation and contention for those
people actually involved; the accidents of which interpretations were then
inscribed on paper and which papers survived the slings and arrows of preser-
vation always leave the historian with fewer contradictory interpretations to
work with, sometimes misleadingly suggesting that fully disinterested accounts
(truth) can be separated from interested ones (lies).
2. A capricious friend captured me with my own camera between frames of a
document I was microfilming in the Archivo del Tribunal de Poopo which at that
time was the anteroom of that town's juzgado and jail.
Notes to Pages 411-422 515

3. I thank Sabine MacCormack for suggesting to me the ways that experience

with the two-dimensional memory device of writing interfered with Spaniards'
comprehension of Andean multidimensional memories.
4. During a recent election campaign, a La Paz television station hired a
panel of Kallawayas to predict for their audience the election outcome.
5. See the recent controversy about "colonial discourse" in Mallon 1994;
Seed 1991.
 Glossary

Alphabetic order has been modified to accommodate the Spanish letter

and phoneme ch and the Aymara phonemic distinction between unaspi-
rated, aspirated, and glottalized forms of ch, k, p, g, and t. Glottalization
is marked by a single prime following the consonant; aspiration, by a
double prime. Una spira ted consonants are unmarked.

Alax-KawaUi (Ay.). A K'ulta ayllu, formerly of the lower moiety.

alax-pacha (Ay.). Upper or outer spaceltime; upperworld; heaven.
alax-saya (Ay.). Upper moiety; equivalent to Quechua anansaya.
alcalde (Sp., from Arabic). "Mayor"; one of the three civil authority types in
K'ulta.
alferez (Sp., from Arabic). Standard-bearer, lieutenant; fiesta career post.
alguacil (Sp., from Arabic). Bailiff, constable; jilaqata's assistant, town council
role.
alma cargo (Sp.). "Soul sponsor," one who inherits a dead man's fiesta-cargo
status.
amt'ana (Ay.). To remember.
amt'an f'aki (Ay.). Fixed sequence of libation dedications; lit: "path of memory."
anansaya (Q.). Upper moiety.
arkiri (Ay.). Followers who give gifts to a fiesta sponsor.
awarinti (Ay., from Sp. aguardiente [agua ardiente, "burning water"]). Diluted
cane alcohol.
awatiri (Ay.). Herder (one who herds).
awayu (Ay.). Carrying cloth, shawl; also, IliqUa.
awiyaru (Ay., from Sp. aviadora, "provider"). Uywiri-like deities at the heads
of valleys producing the bulk of vegetable food eaten in K'ulta.
awki (Ay.). Father.
awukatu (Ay., from Sp. abogado). Lawyer, intercessor.
ayUu (Ay.). Polity self-formulated through ritual.
ayni (Ay., Q.). Reciprocal aid, labor exchange; revenge; persons owing or
owed aid or revenge.

516
Glossary 517

cabildo (Sp.). Civil offices, town council; altar where tribute is collected;
tribute district. See kawiltu.
cacique (Sp., from Caribbean term for "chief"). Used generically in place of
local words for "chief."
cacique cobrador (Sp.). "Collecting cacique," a role jilaqatas fill as tax collectors.
capac hucha (Spanish orthography [spellings vary] for Quechua qapax
jucha[?J). Inca rite of human sacrifice and reordering of regional shrines;
opulent prestation.
ceque (siqi?) (Q.). A sight line or straight path leading from a center point (in
Cusco, the Qurikancha temple) outward, connecting sacred sites (wak' as)
and serving as a pilgrimage or dance path.
cofradia (Sp.). Sixteenth-century Spanish religious and military confraternity.
corregidor (Sp.). Royal/state authority in province (sixteenth century); canton
authority (modern).
corregimiento (Sp.). Province of corregidor's jurisdiction (colonial); offices of
canton (modern).
cumbi (qumpi?) (Q.). High-quality warp-patterned textiles; clothing for nobil-
ity or wak'a images in pre-Columbian times.
chakra (Ay.). Field.
charango (Sp.). Mandolinlike instrument played during the dry season, used
by young men in courtship.
chicha (Sp., from Taino). Corn beer. (Ay. k'usa; Q. asua).
chullma (Ay.). "Heart," metaphorically; lit.: liver and lungs.
Chullpas (Ay.). Autochthonous people of presolar age; preconquest tombs.
chuiiu (Ay.). Freeze-dried potatoes.
ch' alla (Ay.). Libation.
ch'arki (Ay.). Freeze-dried meat.
ch'axwa (Ay.). Land war.
ch'iwu (Ay.). Meat, shade, black rain cloud, llama progeny.
ch'uspa (Ay.). Textile bag for carrying coca.
doctrina (Sp.). Colonial Spanish ecclesiastic district with resident priest.
encomienda (Sp.). Grant of indian labor and tribute to a Spanish conquistador.
fuera (Sp., derived from colonial mayordomo de afuera). P"wira in Aymara.
Fiesta sponsor of intermediate rank; caretaker of portable saint image.
Ilawi (Ay.). K'ulta ayllu, formerly of the upper moiety.
ipala (Ay.). Father's sister (male ego), husband's sister (female ego).
isi (Ay.). Clothing.
isi turqa (Ay.). Clothes-changing ritual, in which the innermost of twelve
textiles covering a saint image is rotated to the outermost position.
iskin mamala (Ay.). "Corner mother," house deity.
jach' a jiliri (Ay.). "Great elder brother," one who has completed a fiesta career.
jach' a misa (Ay.). "Great altar," patio altar of a founding ancestor of hamlet!
patriline.
518 Glossary

jach' a p"ista t"aki (Ay.). "Great fiesta path"; fixed concatenated sequence of
festival sponsorships and terms of civil office conforming an individual
career.
jaiiachu (Ay.). Male alpaca. Etymology, "sterile male"? Lit., stud male alpaca;
term applied to tullqas during their ritual role as mock llamas.
jilaqata (Ay.). Highest-level authority of a major ayllu; also called cacique.
jilata (Ay.). Brother.
jiliri (Ay.). Elder.
jira t' alia (Ay.). "Dung plain," libation term for "corral."
jisk' a p"ista tak"i (Ay.). "Small fiesta path," a fiesta-cargo career.
jula-jula (Ay.). Octave-graded panpipe; dance group playing such instruments.
jurk'a (Ay.). Pole covered with flowers and erected in carnaval rite.
kamachiri (Ay.). One who commands or rules.
kamayuq (Q., Ay.). Specialist, such as the quipu kamayuq, a specialist In
keeping records with the quipu.
kasta (Ay., from Sp. casta, "lineage"). Descent; kindred figured through
mother (wilats kasta) or father (mujuts kasta).
kawiltu (Ay., from Sp. cabildo).
kumprira (Ay., from Sp. cumbre, "peak"). High mountain deity.
kumun wilara (Ay.). "Bloodletting, aspersion for the community"; sacrifice to
dedicate the staff of authority.
k"arisiri (Ay.). "Fat cutter"; also k"arik"ari. (Q. iiaqaq, likichiri).
k'usa (Ay.). Corn beer, chicha.
k'usa wariri (Ay.). Chicha server.
laq' a (Ay.). Dust; tasteless food.
larita (Ay.). Wife giver; mother's brother, wife's brother, father's sister's
husband.
layra timpu (Ay.). An earlier age, a time long past; lit. "eye space-time."
limusna waku (Ay.). Fiesta sponsors' payment to priest for mass.
lIantiru (Ay., from Sp. delantero, "leader"). Lead llama of herd.
lurya (Ay., from Sp. gloria, "glory"). Heaven; lightning; product of contact
with the sacred.
lurya misa (Ay.). Rite aimed at channeling lurya away from those who have
come purposely or accidentally into excessive contact with saint image or
who have offended a lightning-associated saint.
machaqa (Ay.). New, novice; incoming fiesta sponsor.
mallku (Ay.). Mountain peak, mountain spirit, condor; hereditary authority
(pre-Columbian).
mamani (Ay., Q.). Falcon; Inca province below the level of quarter empire.
mama t'alla (Ay.). Town plaza.
Manxa-Kawalli (Ay.). K'ulta ayllu, formerly of the lower moiety.
manxa-pacha (Ay.). Under or inner space-time; underworld.
manxa-saya (Ay.). Lower moiety; equivalent to the Quechua urinsaya.
maxta (Ay.). Youth, marriageable young man.
Glossary 519

mayordomo (Sp.). Post in fiesta-cargo career, in charge of church key (Ay.

mayurt"umu).
mayruwiri qullu (Ay.). Mountain of souls, ancestors' mountain; also called muntu.
mita (Sp., from Ay., Q. mit'a, turn of duty). Coerced labor system of colonial
period.
mitimas (Q., Sp.). Permanent settlers from far-flung home regions, resettled by
the Incas.
mojon (Sp.). Boundary marker, usually a rock pile, pillar, or notable feature of
landscape.
muju (Ay.). Semen, seed.
mujuts kasta (Ay.). "Seed line"; lineage figured through paternal and patrilin-
eal links, or ascending kindred through father; the patriline.
muntu (Ay., from Sp. mundo). World mountain, afterworld, underworld
abode of dead humans and/or herd animals.
ninu (Ay., from Sp. nino, "child"). Cross erected at hill-peak altar, or silu,
belonging to a saint image; also, front pillar of a pukara, a hamlet chapel.
nuwasi (Ay.). Ritual battle; lit. "knuckler." Also tinku.
padron (Sp.). Locally produced census list.
pampa (Ay.). A plain.
paqarina/pacarina (Q.). Origin place, place of ancestor's emergence.
Paqariqtambo: rest house of emergence, origin place of Inca myth. Probably
related to or derived from the Aymara paq"ara.
paq"ara (Ay.). "Flower, bloom."
paq"arayana (Ay.). "To make bloom"; the action of decorating llamas before
sacrifice; adorning sponsors with gift textiles.
pasado (Sp.). "Passed"; one who has completed a fiesta career. (Ay. pasaru).
paxcha (Ay.). Flowing, spurting; moment in llama sacrifice when throat is cut.
pillu (Ay.). Flower or bread wreath; crown.
pongo Colonial and modern Spanish and Aymara term for a form of domestic
labor service owed by indigenous tenants of haciendas to their patrones, by
extension from pre-Columbian punku kamayuq ("door keeper").
principal (Sp.). Colonial term used for ayllu jilaqata, and for past cabildo
officeholders.
probanza (Sp.). Service report in form of curriculum vita backed up by sworn
witness testimony, presented to Spanish Crown in an effort to gain privilege
or position.
pukara (Ay.). Fortress; hamlet chapel.
puna (Q.). High-altitude zone suitable for pasture and bitter potato produc-
tion. (Ay. suni).
punku (Ay.). Door.
puro (Sp.). Pure distilled cane alcohol. (Ay. puru).
q' ara (Ay.). Naked, incompletely dressed; fig., culturally peeled; an insult
reference term for nonindians (mestizos, criollos, Europeans, and, some-
times, traitorous indigenous people).
520 Glossary

qarwa (Ay.). Llama.

qarwa k"ari (Ay.). Llama cutting, part of the llama sacrifice.
quero (q'iru?) (Q.). A pre-Columbian and colonial painted or incised wooden
or metal vessel for drinking chicha.
qullana (Ay.). K'ulta ayllu, formerly of the upper moiety.
qurpa (Ay.). Miniature loaves of bread thrown from the church tower during a
fiesta; banquet.
q'uwa (Ay.). Resinous herb used for incense; q'uwana, incense offering includ-
ing this ingredient.
reduccion (Sp.). A new town within which a scattered population of indians
was to be concentrated.
repartimiento (Sp.). Term replacing encomienda; colonial administrative
district.
samarayaiia (Ay.). Places to catch one's breath along a ceremonial route
between hamlet and town; alternate "resting" years of a ceremonial career.
samiri (Ay.). Deity form, "one who gives breath": (1) a high mountain boulder
that is an ideal type or ancestor form; (2) miniature stone figurine in animal
form that is the repositor of the life principle of animals.
Santisima Paxsi Mamala (Ay.). "Holy Moon Lady," Holy Mother, the Virgin,
the moon.
sap"i (Ay.). "Root" of an altar, house, church tower, or mountain deity.
segunda persona (Sp.). Second in command; Spanish designation for the indig-
enous lord of the lower moiety.
silu (Ay., from Sp. cielo, "sky"). Hill-peak altar of a saint image.
subdelgado (Sp.). Nineteenth-century authority, replacing colonial corregidor;
twentieth-century subprefect.
sucullu (Bertonio) or sukullu (Ay.). Naming rite.
suni (Ay.). High-altitude zone suitable for pasture or bitter-potato production.
supay (Ay.). Devil or evil spirit (meaning was forged in colonial period).
surti walas (Ay.). Metal or stone balls belonging to shamans and saints.
-taki (Ay.). Nominal suffix added to recipient of action or gift.
tama (Ay.). Herd.
taqui (pI. taquies) (Q.). In colonial texts, refers to songdances, glossed some-
times by Spanish cantar, epic poem, in which narratives were sung while
dancing, sometimes along ceque lines, which were ritual pathways connect-
ing sites of memory across the landscape. Colonial observers associated
taquies with borracheras, drunken meetings, and regarded both as vehicles
through which natives preserved memories of their heathen past. Compare
with modern Aymara t"aki.
tasa (Sp.). An assignment of tribute resulting from a census.
Tata Awatir Awksa (Ay.). "Our Father Herder"; Jesus Christ, the sun.
Tata Exaltacion (Ay.). The Exaltation of the Cross. Also, Tata Killakas.
Tata Mustramu (Ay., from L. [?] mostramo, "soliform monstrance"). The sun.
Glossary 521

tata rey (Ay. tata, "father," and Sp. rey, "king"). Libation term for vara, "staff
of office."
tinku (Q.). A meeting of opposites; ritual battle (see nuwasi).
tullqa (Ay.). Wife taker: man's sister's or daughter's husband.
turri (Ay., from Sp. torre, "tower"). Alternate term for mayordomo.
turri mallku (Ay.). Church tower.
t"aki (Ay.). Term with a gamut of meanings linking chronological sequence and
landscape. Most prosaically, "path" or "trail," but modified in a variety of
compound terms, it appears to be an ethnopoetic category akin to English
"narrative."
t"inka (Ay.). Ceremonial pair of repayment drinks, ceremonial return gifts.
t"uxsa (Ay.). Rotten, smelling of decay.
t' arka (Ay.). A type of flute played during the rainy season.
untu (Ay.). Llama fat from the chest cavity.
urinsaya (Q.). Lower moiety.
urqu (Ay.). Male; (Q.). mountain.
Urus (Ay.). Ethnic group thought of as lake-dwelling fishers and gatherers.
uta anqa (Ay.). "House outdoors," patio.
uywa (Ay.). Domesticated animal.
uywa ispira (Ay.). Part of a llama sacrifice, "animal vespers."
uywiri (Ay.). Type of chthonic power, "those who own/raise the herds"; a
household's caretaker hill.
vara (Sp.). Staff of office (see tata rey).
vecino (Sp.). Townsman with fully vested rights (colonial); nonindian towns-
man (modern).
visita (Sp.). Ritualized administrative tour; census, formal census record.
wak'a (Ay.). Sacred place or place spirit.
wasu wariri (Ay.). Drink server; lit: "cup bearer."
wila (Ay.). Blood; red.
Wila Qullu (Ay.). Lit., "blood mountain," mountain of Potosi; fig., "money."
wilara (Ay.). Sacrificial rite.
wilats kasta (Ay.). "Bloodline"; lineage figured through matrilineal or matrilat-
eral links, or ascending kindred on mother's side.
yanani (Ay.). A duality, symmetry, pair; or one that completes a pair.
Yanaqi (Ay.). K'ulta ayllu, formerly of the upper moiety.
yatiri (Ay.). Healer, diviner; lit. "one who knows"; shaman.
 References

MANUSCRIPT SOURCES

Archivo de Derechos Reales, Corte Superior de Oruro (ADRO)

Provincia Abaroa, Libro de Propiedades, 1923-24, partida no. 35. "TItulos de
la comunidad de Aullagas y Arouma en Abaroa." 18 fols.
Provincia Abaroa, Libro de Propiedades, 1923-24, partida no. 136. "TItulos de
origen de la comunidad 0 ayllo Quillacas de la provincia Abaroa."
Provincia Abaroa, Libro de Propiedades, 1934-36, partida no. 79. "TItulos de
origen protocolizados a solicitud de Demetrio Gomez, Hernan Copacallo,
etc." (1895 document citing composicion titles, seeking exemption from
visita and exvinculacion). 15 fols.
Provincia Abaroa, Libro de Propiedades, 1931-33, partida no. 27. "TItulos de
propiedad de los indigenas de la comunidad de Condo. (1619 composicion
in favor of Juan Antonio Martinez Taquimallcu, gob. de Condocondo y
Azanaques)." 40 fols.

Archivo General de Indias (AGI)

Charcas 32, item 12. Charcas, September 5, 1565. "Ynformaciones de la Villa
Imperial del Asiento de Potosi sobre que se Ie hagan las mercedes contenidas
... " 190 fols.
Charcas 49. La Plata, 1610. "Marcos Goncalez de Quebedo en nombre de don
Felipe Soto y don Felipe Conde ca~iques pren~ipales del pueblo de Neustra
Senora de Belen ... sobre ... la posesion a las tierras de Pinapina." 20 fols.
Charcas 53, item 1. Charcas, 1622. "Memorial de don Diego Copatete cacique
principal de los indios Quillacas y Asanaques."
Charcas 79, no. 19. La Plata, 1606. "Ynforma~ion fecha de ofi~io en la rreal
audien~ia de los charcas de las buenas partes del bachiller Hernan Gon~aIez
de la Casa cura de la cathedral de la Plata. Va ante su magestad en el rreal
consejo de las yndias cerrada y sellada [un visto por Fray Diego de la
Barreva de Ayala]." 74 fols.

522
References 523

Charcas 96, no. 11. La Plata, 1658. "Probanza de serV1ClOS y meritos del
bachiller don Sebastian de Aguilar, cura propietario de San Miguel de
Aullagas y San Francisco de Coroma." Ca. 45 fols.
Escribania de Camara (EC) 497 -B:
Pieza 4. Madrid, 1565. "Autos del secuestro de los bienes de Hernan Vela."
Piezas 5-6. "Herederos de Hernan Vela sobre el valor de Siete Yglesias."
1,566 fols.
Pieza 16. "Autos presentados por parte de los yndios aullagas ... contra
Hernan Vela." 68 fols.
EC 497-C. Pieza 23. 1560. "Memorial del pleito entre dona Ana Gutierrez
muger que fue de Hernan Vela difunto ... y los indios del pueblo y
repartimiento de los Aullagas ... " 211 fols.
Lima, July 20, 1563. "Autos seguidos entre don Diego de Carbajal ... contra
el fiscal de S. M. sobre la encomienda de yndios de Guadachiri ... "
EC 844-A. La Plata, 1583. "Lucas de Murga Menchaca, Cathalina Gutierrez,
etc., con los Indios Ullagas."
Indiferente General 422 [L. 16]. Fois. 206v-207 [RC, Madrid, 05-31-1535].
Indiferente General 532. Fois. 27v-28r. Real Cedula directed to the Audiencia
del Nuevo Reino de Granada, 1549. "Juntas de indios en pueblos formados;
Alcaldes hordinarios e regidores cadaneros."
Indiferente General 1624. "Expedientes y respuestas a la pertetuidad de las encomi-
endas de Indias vistas en la junta de la perpetuidad." Fois. 1-904 (1542-86).
Justicia 434, Pieza 1. Lima, 1563. "EI fiscal de S.M. con Anton Ruiz Mestizo
sobre la contradiccion de la perpetuidad."
Justicia 434, Pieza 2. Lima, 1563. "Preceso hecho por el Doctor Cuenca oydor de
la audiencia de los reyes contra Antonio Ruiz, mestizo, y lengua, 0
interprete y vezino del Cuzco. Sobre la contradiccion de la perpetuidad, y 10
que dio a entender a los yndios."
Justicia 651. La Plata, 1571. 3 piezas. "Los yndios de ... Chayanta con dona
Juana de los Rios sobre los demasiados tributos que les pide." 500 fols.
Justicia 653. La Plata. 1579. "Los yndios de ... Sacaca con los herederos de don
Alonso de Montemayor sobre 10 que el dicho don Alonso cobro demasiado
de los dichos yndios." (Entire legajo).
Justicia 667. La Plata, January 8, 1550. "Cumplimiento e diligen~ias que la
justicia de la Villa de Plata hizo cerca de la libertad que los yndios que estan
en las minas de Potosi tienen de yrse a sus tierras sin que nadie se 10 impida."
Justicia 667. Potosi, May 8, 1550. "Suplicacion e ynformacion fecha por parte
de los vezinos de la Villa de Plata y los vezinos de las ciudades del Cuzco y
de La Paz a~erca de mandar salir los yndios de las minas 10 qual se hizo ante
la justicia mayor de la Villa de Plata."
Justicia 1134. April 18, 1551. "Ynformacion hecha por el senor don Lorenzo de
Estopinan y Figueroa sobre quan probechoso les es a los caciques e indios
estar en Potosi." 13 fols.
524 References

Patronato 126, section 6. 1582. "Informaciones de los buenos servicios de Diego

Pantoja de Chaves."
Quito 45. Memorial de don Juan Colque Guarache. (Also contains "Segunda
informacion ... ," 1576-77.)
9.5.1.2. Intendencia de La Plata 0 Charcas 1751-52. (Unnumbered letters).
1751. "Carta de don Pablo de la Vega y traslado de escritos sobre la rebel ion
de Cagchas en Puna y Potosi, hecho por orden de don Domingo de
Xauregui, presidente de la audiencia de La Plata."
"Carta y expediente de Geronimo Gomes Trigoso, Asoguero, al superinten-
dente de Potosi, sobre los Cagchas de Potosi."
9.5.2.1. Intendencia de La Plata 1780-81, Copiador de cartas.
November 15, 1780. "Carta de don Manuel Alvarez Villaroel ... coronel del
Batallon de Milicias en el asiento de Minas de Aullagas ... Escrito en 24 de
Sept., 1780."
9.6.2.5. Potosi 1607-1750. (Unnumbered letters).
1750. "Carta del General don Pedro Flores de Caseres, corregidor de la
provincia de Porco, a los justicias de La Plata y Potosi, sobre la rebel ion de
Cacchas en Puna y Potosi."
9.10.3.7. Representaciones y Quexas de Provincias 1689-91. (Unordered cuad-
ernos).
"Quexas del Cura de Pilaia y Paspaia," 1689.
9.14.8.7. "Potosi mita, 1795-97."
9.14.8.8. "Potosi mita, 1795-97."
9.17.1.4. Alto Peru Padrones 1645-86. (Unordered cuadernos).
"Padron del pueblo de Condocondo," 1645.
"Padron de los yndios de Challapata," 1645.
"Padron del pueblo de San Lucas de Payacollo," 1646.
"Padron de San Miguel de Aullagas," 1645.
"Padron de los yndios Quillacas," 1645.
9.17.2.5. "Retasa de Francisco de Toledo," 1575. Anonymous copy of 1785.
9.20.4.4. Padrones de Indios 1623-46. (Unordered cuadernos).
"Padron del pueblo de Talavera de la Puna," 1645.
9.30.2.3. Interior, Legajo 9.
Expediente 16, "Autos formados ... sobre el tumulto de Condocondo," 1780.
9.36.6.1. Tribunales, Legajo 85.
Expediente 17. "Testimonio de los documentos calificativos de los servicios y
meritos del governador del pueblo de Chaianta, don Diego Colque
Guarache-y comprovantes de su Noblesa," 1796.
13.18.4.3. Padrones La Plata 1616-1725, Legajo 57. (Unordered cuadernos).
"Padron ... indios del pueblo de Condocondo residentes en Potosi."
"Padron ... indios del pueblo de Challapata residentes en Potosi."
"Padron de Aullagas," 1684.
"Padron de Toledo," 1684.
References 525

"Padrones de diferentes pueblos de la provincia de Paria hechos por el

corregidor e la de los Amparaes por haver hallado los yndios de ellos en su
distrito," 1684.
"Informes y Sumarios de Retasas de Paria," 1726.
13.18.5.1. Padrones La Plata, 1725-54 [unordered notebooks].
"Padrones ... de la provincia de Paria," 1683-84.
"Padron del pueblo de Atun Quillacas," 1683.
"Padron del pueblo de Aullagas," 1683.
"Padron y revisita-originarios y forasteros del pueblo de San Lucas de
Paiacollo-y parcialidades de Quillacas, y Azanaques de la provincia de
Paria," 1752.
13.18.5.3. Padrones La Plata 1770-79, Legajo 62. Libro 3, "Retasa de Ullagas,"
1779.
13.18.6.1. Padrones La Plata 1793-95, Legajo 65. Libro 3, "Revisita de la
provincia de Paria," 1795.
13.18.7.2. Padrones Potosi 1612-19. "Rebisita del pueblo de Macha de la
Corona Real por el governador Antonio Salgado," 1619. (Probanza de don
Juan de Castro y Paria, 1612).

Archivo General de Simancas, Spain (AGS)

Diversos de Castilla. Leg. 40, fol. 13, "Rela~ion de los lugares que se an bendido
con sus alcavalas y ter~ias desde el ano de 1557 a esta parte ... "
Mercedes y Privilegios 335. Venta de la villa de Siete Iglesias a Hernan Vela,
vecino de Alaejos, por el importe de 3,400,000 mrs.

Archivo Hist6rico Nacional, Spain (AHN)

Seccion Osuna. Pleitos y alcabalas de Siete Iglesias, s. XVI-XVII.
Seccion de Diversos:
Docs. de Indias, no. 58. "Noticias sobre la batalla entre el Virrey B. Nunez
Vela y Gonzalo Pizarro."
Docs. de Indias, no. 145. September 5, 1556. Gante. "Provision de Felipe II en
que mando que sin mas dilacion se proceda a dar a perpetuidad los
repartimientos de indios a los conquistadores y pobladores del Peru." 2 fols.
Docs. de Indias, no. 152. Principios de 1558. Memorial que el obispo fray
Bartolome de las Casas y fray Domingo de Santo Tomas, provincial de la
Orden de Santo Domingo en el Peru, dirigen al emperador, en nombre de los
caciques e indios de aquel virreinato, contra la perpetuidad de las encomien-
das, ofreciendole a cambio cierta cantidad de ducados de oro y plata. Copia
simple siglo xix, 4 hojas cuarto.
Docs. de Indias, no. 171. February 7, 1561. Toledo. Provision de Felipe II al
virrey del Peru, conde de Nieva, pidiendole informe sobre la conveniencia de
los repartimientos de indios, a perpetuidad, solicitados por los espanoles en
526 References

las provincias de su gobierno, en vista del memorial que Ie han presentado

fray Domingo de Santo Tomas, provincial que fue de los dominicos, y el
obispo fray Bartolome de las Casas, en nombre de los caciques y naturales,
en contra de esta concesion. 2 fols.
Docs. de Indias, no. 181. March 14, 1562. Lima. Carta de fray Domingo de
Santo Tomas, dominico, a Felipe II manifestando que las encomiendas de
indios a perpetuidad eran contra el servicio de Dios y contra la conciencia,
hacienda, y seftorio del rey. 2 fols.

Archivo de Hacienda y Tesoro, Prefectura de Oruro

Expediente de Amparo Administrativo, 1968. "Comunarios del ayllu Collana vs.
Pablo Choquecallata et ai., ayllu Cahualli, poe destruccion, incendio, y
saqueo de casas y escuela." 12 pp. (truncated).
Expediente de Proceso Administrativo, September 23, 1966. "Creacion del
Canton Cahuayo, Provincia Abaroa. Demandante: Comunidad Sullcayana."
26 fols. (with map).
Expediente de Proceso Administrativo, August 20, 1987. "Creacion del Canton
Cruce Culta." 40 fols. (with maps).
Protocolizacion de documento sobre deslinde de la estancia Uncallita y Ja-
chuipifta, del ayllo Cahualli-abajo, Canton Culta. December 16, 1970.

Archivo Hist6rico de Potosi (AHP)

Cajas Reales 18. Tasa de la visita general de Francisco de Toledo.
Visitas y Padrones, Cuaderno de la visita del duque de la Palata (1683),
Repartimiento de Puna.

Archivo Judicial de Oruro (AJO)

Legajo 1680-82. "Cabesa de proceso de jilsa, contra don Martin Nina, Oruro,
1680."
Legajo 1779-82 (misfiled). "Cabesa de proceso contra Domingo Ramirez,
Oruro, 1680."

Archivo Nacional de Bolivia, Sucre, Bolivia (ANB)

ALP Minas, tomo 45, no. 5. "Don Juan Francisco Choquetijlla, governador y
casique principal de Jatun Quillacas ... " 1693.
ALP Minas, tomo 125, no. 17. "Don Luis Enrriquez de Guzman Conde de Alva
de Aliste y de Villa Floe gentil hombre de la camara de Su Magestad .... "
1667.
Expedientes Coloniales (EC) 1588, no. 5. "Reclamacion de don Miguel Garcia
Colque sobre el casicazgo del repartimiento de Quillacas."
EC 1611, no. 8. "Los yndios de Tacobamba contra los quillacas, Asanaques
sobre que sean hechados de las tierras de Guache y Sarotala."
EC 1613, no. 19. "Probanza de Fernando de Mesa."
References 527

EC 1618, no. 5. "Los yndios de Santiago de Aymaya con Gaspar de la Rua

Hinojosa."
EC 1666, no. 37. "Don Felipe Choqueticlla contra .... "
EC 1738, no. 62. "Juicio contra don Pedro Norverto Chungara por atroces, por
don Pascual, Estevan, Asencio y Gregorio Mamani y demas yndios ... de
Challapata. "
EC 1743, no. 9. "Don Matheo Alexandro de la Cruz Condori [cacique principal]
contra don Pedro Norberto Chungara [governador] .... "
EC 1744, no. 63. "Demanda por Francisco Caro Campo, casique de Condo
Condo, contra los comunarios de Tinquipaya, Macha, Chayanta, por
despojo de Tierras."
EC 1744, no. 72. "Provision Real de deslinde y amojonamiento de varias tierras
situadas en la doctrina de Sapse (partido de Yamparaez) propias de los
originarios de Jatun Quillacas, Guari, Pocpo, y Aullagas."
EC 1747, no. 12. "Reclamo de don Gregorio Feliz Llanquipacha, para la
posicion de casique principal y governador de Condo Condo. El decreto se
Ie despache titulo en forma."
EC 1755, no. 20. "Autos seguidos por don Francisco Choqueticlla, contra dona
Paula Choqueticlla sobre el arrendamiento de la hacienda y molinos de
Tacovilque en la doctrina de San Pedro de Micani, provincia Chayanta."
EC 1756, no. 41. "Peticion de Jose Guarcaya, indio principal a nombre del
com un de indios de Condocondo, para que se les disminuyen los gastos que
tienen ... en las fiestas .... "
EC 1759, no. 139. "Challapata, para ver a cual de estos por derecho de sangre Ie
corresponde desempenar el cacicazgo del mencionado pueblo."
EC 1771, no. 143. "Testimonio de los titulos de propiedad de Quillacas y
Carangas del valle de Cochabamba, dados por Luis Lopez Obispo de Quito
[in 1593]."
EC 1775, no. 165. "Autos seguidos por Luis Guarcaya, Santos Gonzales, y otros
... sobre el Casicasgo de Condocondo [urinsaya]."
EC 1776, no. 24. "Autos seguidos ... sobre capitulos puestos contra el Cacique
y Comunidad de indios de Challapata."
EC 1777, no. 139. "Expediente de la demanda puesto por los yndios de Condo
Condo contra el cobrador de repartos del corregidor de al provincia de
Paria don Narciso de San Juan y Mansilla."
EC 1778, no. 127. "Testimonio de cuentas del reparto hecho en la provincia de
Paria por el corregidor de ella don Manuel de la Bodega y Llano, ano de
1777."
EC 1781, no. 83. "Autos formados sobre el tumulto que acahecio en el pueblo de
Condo Condo; y muertes que executaron en los Llanquipachas."
EC 1787, no. 39. "Auxilio que piden las comunidades de indios de los pueblos
de Guari y Aullagas de la caja de censos."
EC 1787, no. 101. "Informe del subdelegado de Paria sobre la necesidad que hay
de visitar las tierras de su partido."
528 References

EC 1792, no. 42. "Expediente promovido por dona Narsisa Choqueticlla casica
de Quillacas y pueblo de Pocpo, sobre que don Manuel Mostajo Ie debuelva
los papeles y documentos condusentes a las tierras de su comunidad."
EC 1792, no. 108. "Demanda puesta por don Ambrosio Miguel de la Cruz
Condori, gobernador de los ayllus Sullca, Andamarca, y Changara ... en
nombre de la comunidad de Challapata, contra destrozos y invasiones de
tierras hecho por los indios de Condocondo."
EC 1797, no. 25. "Queja entablada por los indios de Culta contra eI casique
cobrador de tributos."
EC 1804, no. 193. "Expediente seguido en la villa de Potosi por eI testamento
hecho de don Juan Choqueticlla Colqueguarachi en el anD 1707 por la india
Antonia Copatiti Colqueguarachi, indigena principal de los Quillacas."
(Includes sixteenth-century material).
Fotocopias, 1603. Garcia de Llanos, "Descripci6n de Potosi."
SG 1781, no. 42. "Expediente sobre los alborotos de los yndios de Yocalla, Yura
y Puna." 8 fols. (Carta del cura de Culta Joseph Balzeda al Gob. de Potosi
Jorge Escobedo, February 18, 1781).

Archivo Dbisbal de Druro (ADD)

Libro I de Bautismos, San Pedro de Condo, 157l.
Libro I de Bautismos, San Juan del Pedroso de Challapata, 1575.

Archivo de la Real Academia de Historia Espanola (ARAH)

9.29.5.5927. Relaci6n de la villa de Medina y lugares de su jurisdicci6n que
remiti6 a la camara en el anD 1571 eI corregidor.

Archivo de la Real Chancilleria de Valladolid (ARCh V)

Hijosdalgo, 119-7. "Proceso de Hernando Vela vezino de la villa de halahejos
sobre su hidalguia." 1535.

Archivo del Tribunal de Poop6, Dept. of Druro, Bolivia (ATP)

Expediente 11 (without title and incomplete). 1574-75. Probanza de Juan
Colque Guarache.
Expediente 12 (without title, incomplete, and disordered). 1678. Autos sobre las
tierras del repartimiento de Quillacas y Asanaques en eI Cerro de Turqui y
valle de Tarapaya.

Archivo y Biblioteca Arquidiocesanos de Sucre (ABAS)

Causas contra ecclesiasticos, no. 5020. "Condo. Licencia para capilla, 1626."
10 fols.
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 Index

Abaroa, Eduardo: statue and last words actions of Tatala and Supay-Chullpas,
of, 456n9; mentioned, 91 327-31; chicha libations to gods of,
Abaroa, provincia de: in modern state 362-66; Milky Way as path of, 496n9.
administrative structure, 454n2; See also Calendar, contemporary K'ulta;
mentioned, 91 Cosmology; Manxa-pacha
Acarapi, Miguel de (alias Miguel Chiri): Albornoz, Cristobal de: on mitimaes'
as Jesus Christ, 270; chapel Eucharist textile wak'as, 188; inquisitorial
of, 270, 271 techniques of, 194, 506n7
Achuma (cactus). See Hallucinogens Alcaldes: roles of, 87; established in
Acosta, Jose de: on quipu, 178, 259-60, reducciones, 244; and 18th-century
471n47; on drink and amnesia, 216; circular letter, 297 -98. See also
memory through drink, 217 Authorities of Santa Barbara de Culta
Acta de buena conducta: and wrongful Alcohol: provisioning fiestas with, 90;
death suit, 79, 454nlO; signed by dilution of, 347; sponsors' bottle of
author and Caratas, 406 puro, 355, 502n33; as "social
Africans: preferred for mine labor by Las lubricant," 498n20; hypoglycemia, and
Casas, 226 "safety valve," 499n21; poisoning,
Agency. See Social agency 500n23. See also Chicha; Drinking;
Agrarian reform: Bolivian, and Libations, contemporary; Memory
privatization, 309; petitions for land paths
titles, 312 Aldana, Hernando de: role in Cajamarca,
Agricultural crops. See Foodstuffs 137; granted Killaka and Asanaqi in
Aka pacha, 72 encomienda in 1533, 143, 149;
Alasitas, fair of, and magical practices possession ceremony in 1540, 143, 149;
with miniatures, 37, 450n8 as vecino of Cusco, 144; executed, 151;
Alax-Kawalli (ayllu of K'ulta): and fiesta Lorenzo de Aldana confused with,
participation, 97; tinku with Manxa- 461nll
Kawalli, 100; absence of authorities of, Alferez: activities in Guadalupe fiesta, 98;
104; and theft of Guadalupe image, established in reducciones, 244; of
119,312; land war with Qullana, colonial Condo, 292; of 18th-century
310-11; cantonization petition of, Culta, 298. See also Fiesta sponsorship
311-12, 446n8. See also K'ulta Alguaciles: roles of, 87; established in
(people) reducciones, 246. See also Authorities
Alax-pacha (heavens): "Christian" vs. of Santa Barbara de Culta
"native" content, 110; created by Allen, Catherine J., xix

559
560 Index

Almagro, Diego de: civil war with Archival culture: growth of in Spain, 133,
Pizarros, 143; expedition to Qullasuyu 134,415. See also Chronicles; Fiction;
and Chile, 147, 461n12 Probanzas
Almendras, Martin de, and conquest of Archives: research in, xxiii; Spanish
Chichas, 269 imperial,S, 133; indigenous peoples'
Alpacas, 38, 507n16. See also Llamas journeys to, 8, 119, 284; of reduccion
Altars. See Misas towns, 242, 243, 244, 275, 285; of
Altiplano: climate and geography of, 32, extirpation of idolatry, 266, 268, 277;
38, 39; peoples of in Inca narrative, land titles in, 286-87; "kitchen," 490n56
197; ethnography of, 448nl Arequipa (city): Toledan ordinances in,
Amnesia, historical: in K'ulta, 131; as 250-51
colonial project, 152, 220; about Arias, Diego: priest of Condo, vs.
diarchies, 154, 286; and drunkenness, 17th-century Culta chapel, 274
216; reducciones as places of, 252; Aristocracy, Spanish: disdain for manual
selective genealogical, 340, 341. See labor of, 133-34
also Social memory Arnold, Denise, xx, 119,341,401
Amojonamiento. See Boundary markers Asanaqi (diarchy): lords of, and land, 9;
Amt'an t"akis. See Memory paths; T"aki and origin of K'ulta, 123; as Aldana
Ancestors: mummies and social memory, encomienda, 143, 149,425-28,
139,181, 185; emergence from 461nll; Acho, mallku of, 149; granted
paqarinas, 174; clothing of, 182; colonial to Diego de Ocampo in 1548, 151;
displacement of, 241; Christianity of in granted to Diego Pantoja, 151;
K'ulta narrative, 325; libations to, 351, invisibility in chronicles, 153; in Killaka
358; mayruwiri, 358, 502n38, 503n42; federation, 156; map of, 158; parish in
underworld mountain of, 502n38. See Potosi, 232, 233, 445n2; effects of
also Burial; Cemetery; Chullpa tombs; reduccion in, 252-58; ayllus of,
Condenados; Dead; Funerary ritual 253-54; composicion de tierras in lands
Andean culture. See Culture, Andean; of, 285; contemporary amnesia about,
Frontier; Interculture; Resistance, 286, 318; reduccion boundary conflict
cultural in, 289; situationally rearticulated in
Annexes, 284. See also Cantonization; inter-diarchy fights, 290; incarnations
Hamlet chapels; Reduccion of, 317; social organization of, 444n5.
Anonymous Jesuit: vs. Polo on human See also Ayllus of Asanaqi diarchy;
sacrifice, 184; and Colque Guarache Boundary markers of Asanaqi;
quipus, 184,234,258 Caciques, colonial; Composicion de
Ansures, Per: in Aldana possession Tierras; Condo, San Pedro de; Culta,
ceremony, 461nll Santa Barbara de; Killaka (federation);
Antamarka (ayllu of Challapata), 253 Reduccion; San Lucas de Payacollo
Anthropology: discipline of vs. history, 16, Asanaques, Cordillera de los, 39
410-11; ahistoricism of, 448n14. See Asanaques (diarchy). See Asanaqi
also Ethnography Asanaques, Repartimiento de (colonial
Antiquarianism: and cultural continuities, unit): land titles of, 285-86. See also
418; and later chronicles, 480n21 Asanaqi (diarchy)
Apostle. See Evangelization, Atahuallpa: garroting of, 138; ransom of,
pre-Columbian; San Bartolome; Santo 138, 166; and book in Cajamarca,
Tomas; Tunupa 164-65; and Hernando de Aldana,
Apparitions: of Santa Barbara de Culta, 459n6
272; of Belen de Tinquipaya, 458n20. Atahualpa, provincia de, creation of,
See also Santa Barbara de Culta 454n2
Index 561

Audiencia de Charcas, 31 Awllaka-Urukilla (diarchy): encomienda of

Aullagas (diarchy). See Awllaka-Urukilla Hinojosa in 1539, 149; to Hernan Vela
Aullagas (mining center of Chayanta in 1548, 151; map of, 158; and Colque
province), rebellion during tinku in, 300 Guarache in mita, 232; incorporation
Aullagas (town): historical memory in, 154; into Crown, 232, 238; Toledan visita
and Tunupa, 207; reduccion of, 238 of, 238; ethnography and ethnohistory
Authorities of Santa Barbara de Culta: of, 449nl; Aldana possession of,
ritual duties of, xxii; meetings of, 461nll; and Almagro, 461n12; Hernan
57 -60, 86; action of, 82; mediating Vela's troubles with, 462n18. See
roles of, 84, 101; term of office, 86; in also Aullagas (town); Huari, Santiago
state hierarchy, 87; dispute resolution de; Lagunillas; Salinas de Garci
by, 88; pasados as, 90; and collective Mendoza
labor, 103; and eucharistic self-sacrifice, Ayllus: hatha as term for, 342;
110; journeys to archives, 119; and embededness of, 455n4, 463n23;
document bundles, 120; pilgrimage to as matriline, 500n27. See also
Condo, 120, 458n24; ritual Land tenure; Marriage; Moieties;
apprenticeship of, 121; and Potosi mita Patrilines
ritual, 233; succession to office, 286; as Ayllus of Asanaqi diarchy: and reduccion,
town and cantonal council, 455n5; 252-58; lands of, 253; colonial
limits to power of, 456n6; swift justice segmentation of, 255; in padron and
of, 456n6. See also Alcaldes; Alguaciles; parish registers, 256; rearticulated in
Cacique cobrador; Fiesta-cargo system reducciones, 258, 288; as product of
of Santa Barbara de Culta; Jilaqatas fiesta-cargo career alternations, 369. See
Authority: legitimation of, xxii; also Alax-Kawalli; Antamarka; I1awi;
ethnographic, 20, 410; and boundary Kawalli; Manxa-Kawalli; Qullana;
pilgrimages, 289; and expertise in Sullkayana; Yanaqi
t"akis, 291; herding metaphors of, 342; Ayllus of Ayllu K'ultalCanton Culta,
patri-biases in, 342; disciplinary, in homonymy with ayllus of nearby
ethnography and history, 409; towns, 122. See also Alax-Kawalli;
ethnographic and reflexivity, 410; and I1awi; Manxa-Kawalli; Qullana;
authorship, 420 Yanaqi
Authority, priestly: and Protestantism and Aymara (people): peoplehood of, xxi;
Illuminism, 265, 266; challenges to by ethnography of, 449nl. See also
converted indians, 265, 269, 420; and Aymara language
Eucharist, 265, 276, 484n44; and Aymara language: study of, xvi, xx;
Culta's Chiris, 275-76; and orthography of, xxi, 443-44n2; in
imagination, 484n44. See also La Paz, 31; and ethnic or class identity,
Christianity, heterodox; 46; in town council meeting, 59; source
Counter-Reformation; Eucharist validation in, 71- 72, 319; colonial
Autos sacramentales: and exams in, 270; social and historical
commemoration, 167; performed in linguistics of, 449n2; linguistic border
Potosi, 235-36; and rebellion, 301 with Quechua language, 458n23. See
Avila, Francisco de: and Huarochiri also Quechua language; Spanish
manuscript, 203 language
Awka-pacha (warrior-rebel era): Ayni: reciprocal labor, 102; and obligation
assimilated to pre-Christian times in of gods, 349; and reciprocal gift
narrative, 326 giving, 349; and revenge, 512n34. See
Awka Piasa: as original Culta settlement, also Gifts; Paq"ara; Paq"arayafia;
272 Reciprocity
562 Index

Bakhtin, Mikhail: on chronotopes in Sacrifice, pre-Columbian and colonial;

picaresque novel, 113-14,317,321 Sacrifice, structure of; Wilats kasta;
Balseda, Joseph, priest of Culta: and Wilara
18th-century rebellion, 299 Blood Mountain: libation term for Potosi
Banquets: at fiesta of Guadalupe, 100, mountain and money, 233, 509n25
391; surplus and prodigious Bolivar, Sim6n, 91
consumption in, 501n29; serving order Bolivia: journey to, 30; political-
in, 511n31 administrative structure of, 454n2. See
Baptism, payment for, 106 also State, Bolivian
Barnadas, Josep de, 461n13 Boundaries: and reducci6n process,
Baroque: culture of, and dissimulated 252-58; 17th-century proliferation of,
cultural critique, 447nl1. See also 283-84; overlapping nature of,
Clandestine practice; Counter- 286-87; pilgrimages around as t"aki,
Reformation 290,319; Corcino Perez on, 307;
Barstow, Jean, xxi reduced scale of pilgrimages around,
Basilia, dona: as curer, 112; as libation 320
specialist, 113; and uywa ispira Boundary markers of Asanaqi: Castilian
libations, 347-49, 351-60; qarwa k"ari precursors of, 9; in Choquecallata
libations of Tomas Mamani and Petrona document, 9; documents placed in, 9,
G6mez served by, 377-83; as 286; pilgrimage around as ritual drama
songstress, 457n16 and social memory, 9, 287, 319;
Bastien, Joseph, xix confirmed in composici6n, 285; placed
Bata1l6n Colorado, uniforms of, 91 in visita general, 286; and Huayna
Battle, ritual. See Tinku Capac, 287; reconfirmed or contested,
Belen de Tinquipaya, first apparition of, 287; and conflicting levels of social
458n20 organization, 288; encounters at, 288;
Bertonio, Ludovico: on Choquelas and and legitimation of authority, 289;
Larilaris, 325; on hatha and ayllu, 342; Condo vs. Challapata land war over,
Aymara dictionary by, 463n23; on 302; caciques' interpretations of
Ekeko, 477n72; on sucullu naming rite, documents of, 302-3; and Corcino
496n13 Perez in 1894, 307
Betanzos, Juan de: on Viracocha statue of Boundary markers of K'ulta: in
Urcos, 201; on pre-Columbian Choquecallata document, 10; planting
evangelization, 201 of varas in, 289; as memory places,
Bible: and universal history,S, 18, 168; 290; circumambulated by jilaqatas,
and Atahuallpa, 164; and indians, 168; 513n42
and Viracocha statue, 201 Bouysse-Cassagne, Therese, 153
Bigamy: prosecuted by council of K'ulta, British empire, compared to Spanish,
452n3 459n3
Blanco: use of term, xviii. See also Social Bubba, Cristina, 451n14
categories Buen Retiro palace, 459n2
Blood: offering of, to Jesus Christ, 105, Buena policia ("good customs"):
381, 506n13; sponsor annoints indoctrination of indians in, 17, 188; as
participants with blood across face, habitual practice and colonial discipline,
381; as female contribution to 248; Toledan ordinances for, 251-52,
conception and sacrificial substance, 434-35, 457n15; shaping of
498n18; consumed in funerary sacrifice, community through, 283
501n30, 507n13. See also K"arisiri; Bulls: libations to, 358; paired in chicha
Paxcha; Sacrifice, contemporary; vessel, 366; presence in K'ulta, 503n41
Index 563

Bull's horn: and documents in boundary to annex to town, 284; power of

markers, 286; on ritual altar, 347; as attorney to Corcino Perez, 306;
pututu in land wars, 490n57 cantonization of, 313; switch in
Burial, 69, 76, 241, 452n4. See also department affiliation of, 313
Cemetery; Funerary ritual; Chullpa Caisa (town): extirpation in, 267
tombs Cajamarca (Inca town). See Atahuallpa,
capture of
Cabildo. See Town council Calcha (town and people): ethnography
Cacachaca (people). See Qaqachaka of, 449nl
Cacachaca (town): pilgrimage to Condo Calendar, contemporary K'ulta, 330. See
by authorities of, 122; ayllus of, 254; also Jesus Christ vs. Supay-Chullpas
from annex to town, 284; power of myth; Space-time, social
attorney to Corcino Perez, 306 Calendar, pre-Columbian and colonial:
Cacha (town): destroyed by eschatology of Christian, 17; of Cusco,
Tunupa-apostle, 206, 208 175; and constellations, 184;
Cacique, term used for kuraqa and colonization by Christian in reducci6n
mallku, 462n20 towns, 252, 256. See also Buena policia;
Cacique cobrador: non-hereditary post Space-time, social
from 1790s, 303; in contemporary Camino, don Jose, interviews of, 453n7
Culta. See also Jilaqatas Campesino: use of term, xviii, 451n12; in
Caciques, colonial: resistance and reference and address, 45; as
accommodation by, 151,216; probanzas euphemism, 309; vs. vecino, and
of, 154-61, 159-61; under Inca rule, positional identity, 451n13. See also
161-62; and social memory, 162-63, Social categories
227; opposition to perpetuity of Cafiari (people): as Spanish allies, 138
encomienda, 217-18, 477n3, 478n4; Canas. See Qana
undercut by Toledan reforms, 224-25, Canchis. See Kanchi
226, 252; as collaborators, 225; noble Cantares, Spanish, 167
pretensions of, 226; as captains of mita in Cant6n, unit of Bolivian administrative
Potosi, 231, 234-35; and drinking in structure, 310, 454n2. See also
Potosi, 234; and town councils after Cantonization
reducci6n, 246; Toledo's speech to, Cantonal authorities. See Authorities of
250-51; recruitment of forasteros by, Santa Barbara de Culta; Corregidor;
278; reducci6n caciques litigate Town council, republican
boundaries, 284, 286, 302-3, 493n80; Cantonization: process of, 310-14,
Taquimalco purchases in composici6n, 446n8; petition of Ayllu Qullana,
285, 302, 493n80; as targets of rebellion, 311; petition of Alax-Kawalli, 311-12;
294-96, 302-3, 492nn69, 70; of Ayllu Yanaqi, 312; of Cahuayo, 313;
"hispanization" and pacts with as latter-day reducci6n process,
corregidores of, 296, 302-3; collateral 313 -14; and implementation of plan,
lineages of, 303; naming practices of, 332; and fiesta-cargo career
466n34. See also Cacique cobrador; alternations, 370; in Provincia de
Colque Guarache, don Juan; Choqueticlla Abaroa, 454n2
(lineage); Chungara, Lope; Condori, Capac hucha: compared to visita, 17-18;
Ambrocio de la Cruz; Guarache, Juan; as Inca succession ritual, 140; sacrifices
Llanquipacha, don Gregorio Feliz; of, 171; as sacrificed person, 173; and
Llanquipacha, Lucas Feliz; Taquimalco cumbi cloth, 173, 187, 472n49;
Cahuayo (town): pilgrimage to Condo Guarache in, 445n2; Molina on,
from, 122; ayllu of, 254; from hamlet 468n44
564 Index

Capoche, Luis: on public drunkenness, tensions in, 295-96, 302, 492n70;

216; on Juan Colque "el Mozo", 18th-century rebellion in, 296-97;
484n42 power of attorney and composicion
Caporales dance, in K'ulta and Oruro, titles in, 306; in state administrative
456nlO structure, 454n2; juzgado of, 455n3;
Carabuco, cross of, 208, 210 mentioned, 39, 77, 78, 452n1, 463n23
Caracollo (Inca tambo and town), 145 Ch'allas. See Libations
Carangas (federation). See Qaranka Chance, John, xv
Cariri, dona Marta, genealogical memory Chapels. See Hamlet chapels
of,340 Charangos. See Musical instruments
Carnaval: "wet" musical instruments and Charcas (city). See La Plata; Sucre
the dead in, 330, 481n25, 508n19; and Charcas (region), Spanish conquest of,
Hilarion Mamani's ghost, 335-37, 373; 459n5, 461nn13, 14, 15
jurk"a "maypole" in, 372; pillu visits in, Charity, 480n20
372; other visits during, 373; soldiers of Charka (federation), 154
Santa Barbara dance in, 373 Charles V of Holy Roman Empire, 3, 133
Catari, Tomas: letters of, and Chayanta Chayanta (province): Condo rebels flee to,
rebellion, 298-300. See also Rebellion, 295; rebellion in, 295, 297-301;
indigenous Colque Guarache cacicasgo in, 492n69
Catastro, tax survey of 1978 in K'ulta, 53 Ch'axwa. See Land wars
Catholic church: activity in Cruce, 451n15 Chicha: Inca use of, 4; mit' a and
Cemetery: Christian vs. ancestral, 241; production of, 4; provisioning fiestas
and hygienic policy, 452n4; tinku in, with, 90; Ii bated and drunk in Inca
509n20 ceremonial, 139; in Cajamarca, 165;
Census-taking. See Visitas poured in ushnu, 180; as "water" of
Ceque systems: of Cusco, 3; and quipus, Inca sacrificial llamas, 183; as medium
13; investigated by Polo, 152, 185-86, for social memory, 185; and idolatry in
470n46, 473nn55, 56; accounts of via Potosi, 220, 478nll; consumed by
Andean registers, 174; mapped by mitayos in Potosi, 234; as blood of
Spaniards, 174; depicted, 176; and Christ in mass of Miguel Acarapi, 271;
events or genealogies, 179; quipus as drunk from skull, 295; libations in
icons of, 179; reproduced in provinces, qarwa k"ari, to alax-pacha beings,
185-86; of Charcas region, 186; Cobo 362-65; sedimentation strata of, 362;
on, 192; as chronotopes, 321; relation brewing of, 363; serving vessels of, 364,
to taquies and t"akis, 472n48, 473n55 366; as "lake," 366, 504n50; in Manco
Cervantes, doctor Bartolome: constitutions Inca accession, 459n7. See also Memory
of in Condo visita register, 275 paths
Cervantes, Miguel de, 415 Chicha (federation): Inca conquest of,S;
Chacara of Colchacollo, 156-59 as Hernando Pizarro encomienda, 149;
Chaco War, don Pablo Choquecallata in, 8 conquest of in Colque Guarache
Challapata, San Juan de (town): swearing probanza, 160; Tata Porco idol in
of K'ulta authorities in, 87; soldiers conquest of, 269
from, 103; pilgrimage to Condo from, Chicherias: of colonial Potosi, 234; of
122; historical memory in, 154; Cruce, 451n15
reduccion of, 239; ayllus of, 253; Chinchero, Peru, weaving iconography in,
parcialidad land titles of, 287; litigation 180
and land war with Condo and Chipaya (town and people): K'ulta views
Cacachaca, 289, 302-3, 446n8; of as Chullpa people, 328; ethnography
litigation for cacicasgo and moiety and ethnohistory of, 449n1
Index 565

Chiri, don Diego and don Pedro: founders Counter-Reformation, 265, 266;
of Santa Barbara de Culta, 273-76, Inquisition vs. Spaniards', 265-66;
486nSO; accused of idolatry and extirpators of idolatry vs. indians', 266,
drunkenness, 275 268,26~270-71,273,276-7~
Ch'iwu: as meat, rain clouds, offspring, 280-81; of Tupac Catari, 300-301. See
360, 375; day of saint fiesta, 360, also Clandestine practice; Extirpation of
393-95; libation sequence of, 382, idolatry; Hamlet chapels; Inquisition
507n14; in hamlet upon return, Christianity, orthodox: and
395-96. See also Fiesta, saint's, Counter-Reformation, 23; and priestly
structure of monopoly on Eucharist, 265
Ch'iyar yatiri: as conduit to hidden indian Christianization: contemporary, 107; and
powers, 417; mallku familiar, extirpation of idolatry, 107; project of,
possession, and ventriloquism of, 417; 115; and intercultural translation, 214,
pilgrimage center practice of, 417; 456nll; impeded by profiteering, 216;
"anti-Christianity" of, 417 -18; and successes of unrecognized, 263; feigned
cultural pidgin, 418; and frontier Christianity of indians in extirpation
shamanism, 418; and Kallawayas, 418; records and ethnographies, 276. See
practice of, compared to Nina Willka also Buena policia; Civilizational
saint cult, 420. See also Shamanic project; Conversion to Christianity;
practices; Sorcery; Yatiris Extirpation of idolatry
Cholita, costume and social position of, Chronicles: Cusco-centricity of, 131, 197;
32, 93. See also Social categories and interest, 136; and social climbing,
Cholo: use of term, xviii, 46, 451n12, 167; as proofs of service, 169; produced
451n13. See also Social categories inquisitorially, 190. See also Acosta,
Chonta (palm wood): Tunupa-apostle is Jose de; Anonymous Jesuit; Archival
killed with or evangelizes with, 207, 208 culture; Betanzos, Juan de; Cieza de
Choquecallata document: reading of, Le6n, Pedro de; Fiction; Guaman Poma
9-10; K'ulta's reactions to, 120; de Ayala, Felipe; Pac hac uti Yamqui,
composici6n titles in, 284-89; origin Juan de Santa Cruz; Polo Ondegardo,
and contents of, 446n8 Licenciado Juan; Probanzas; Relaciones;
Choquecallata, Domingo (Challapata Sarmiento de Gamboa, Pedro
cacique): on mojones of Huayna Capac, Chronotope: concept of, 113, 317;
287 conjuncture of distinct traditions of,
Choquecallata, don Pablo: document 205; ceque system as, 321. See also
obtained by, 306; delegate to Villarroe!'s Narrative, pre-Columbian and colonial
National Indigenous Congress, 309; oral; Space-time; T"aki
accusation of murder against, 311, Chullma. See Heart
446n8; and cantonization petitions, Chullpa tombs: described, 42; illustrated,
311-12, 446n8; registers of social 142, 183; meaning and construction of,
memory used by, 319; interviews of, 181; as places of social memory, 181;
446n7, 453n7 iconography of, 182; as portals to past,
Choqueticlla (cacique lineage): "family 182; in Qaranka, 182; in Qullasuyu,
path" of, 227, 229; and Colque 182; and Tatala vs. Chullpa myth, 326;
Guarache probanzas, 464n27 of Tata Paria, 472nS2
Christ. See Jesus Christ Chullpas (preconquest people). See Supay
Christ, indian. See Acarapi, Miguel Chullpas
Christianity, heterodox: in Santa Barbara Ch'ullus (woolen caps), 58
de Culta, 107; channeled into Chungara, Lope, pretender to cacicasgo of
clandestinity, 262; and Challapata and rebel leader, 297, 492n70
566 Index

Chuquisaca (city). See Sucre ethnographer's admission to, 108; of

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day heterodox colonial indigenous
Saints, documents microfilmed by, Christianity, 111,266,268,270-271,
458n25 273, 276-77; and postcoloniality, 112;
Church of Santa Barbara de Culta: and Counter-Reformation, 115, 213,
flooring and reconsecration of, 103-5 262,415; colonial training of Andeans
Church tower: ch'allas at, 99; libations to to, 282; and structured
during construction, 105; plaza as t'alla miscommunication, 375, 415;
of,502n34 interwoven with public practice, 375,
Churi Asanaqi. See Pirwan Tata 416; mining Tios and saints, 402,
Ch'uspa (coca pouch), 58, 348, 506nll. 505n6; relation to public practice as
See also Coca leaves postcolonial frontier, 416. See also
Chuyes (people), in construction of Tata Christianity, heterodox; Christianity,
Paria tomb, 181 orthodox; Counter Reformation; Pidgin,
Cieza de Leon, Pedro: journey to Potosi, cultural; Private sphere; Public sphere;
5; travels and Cr6nica, 11, 190-93, Surveillance
198 - 99; and Peruvian civil wars, 170; Class. See Social class
on Andean lack of writing, 191; diaries Closed corporate community, concept of, xx
and notebooks of, 198; style of, 198; Cloth. See Costume; Cumbi; Textiles
and universal history, 198; travels in Cobo, Bernabe: on ceques and wak'as,
Qullasuyu in 1549, 198-99; on 175; on quipus, 467n41
multiplicity of Andean narrative, 199; Coca leaves: in everyday sociability, xix,
on pre-Columbian evangelization, 199; 56; in town council meeting, 58, 59;
on Qullasuyu deluge stories, 199, provisioning fiestas with, 90; Inca
474n62; on dangers of publication, offerings of, 171; as "pasture" of Inca
467n40 sacrificial llamas, 183; as element of
Citizenship (Bolivian): and public ritual altar, 347; gift exchanges and
ceremonial, 91; indigenistas and indian ritual dedication of, 348; llamas' kept
"natural citizenship," 318,418; and with sam iris beneath corral, 506nll
folkloric pageants, 421; and subjectivity, Cochabamba: Andean resistance in, 147;
421 Killaka lands in, 156-59; Spanish
Civic ritual. See Independence day; defeat of Qullasuyu armies in, 461n13
Pageantry, nationalist C6digo civil, 57,439,440
Civil wars, Peruvian: Colque Guarache in, Cofradias. See Confraternities
5; account of, 143; Cieza on, 170 Colchacollo, chacara of, 156-59
Civil-religious hierarchy. See Fiesta-cargo Collas. See Qulla (federation)
systems; Fiesta-cargo careers Colonial situation: modeled in social
Civilizational project: Andean resistance memory, 23; and power asymmetry,
to, xix; Spanish colonialism as, 152, 112,213; accounted for in myth, 132;
213,214; Toledan version of, 225. See and contest of social memory, 413; and
also Buena policia; Christianization; Counter-Reformation, 415; and
Reduccion; Visita creolization, 415; and cultural pidgin,
Clandestine practice: and cultural 415. See also Christianization;
resistance paradigms, xix-xx, 416; as Clandestine practice; Interculture;
supplement to orthodox liturgy, 23, Surveillance; Translation, cultural
262,283,416; performance of, 83, 84; Colonization: of space and time, 188;
Christianity of, 85; ethnographer's narrative, 190; and representation, 247;
exclusion from, 101; in K'ulta, 107; and surveillance, 248
Index 567

Colque Guarache, don Juan: slurred by Vega Alvarado, 287; documents of

Charka caciques, 156; quipus of, used interpreted in 1790s Condo vs.
by Anonymous Jesuit, 184, 234, 258; Challapata land war, 302-3; and
genealogy of depicted as path, 227, Corcino Viscarra in 1868, 305; titles of
228; and mita duties in Potosi, 230, and privatization, 305-9; and Corcino
231-33; reassertion of rule in Potosi Perez petition, 306, 439; and tribute
mita, 233; and libations in Potosi, exemption, 307-8, 439
234-35; cumbi kamayuqs of, 234-35; Com sa, don Pedro, contra perpetuity, 217,
and creation of interculture in Potosi, 477n4
235; special influence on Toledan Concatenation, or braiding: of libation
ordinances, 251; acquires street in dedications, 365; of fiesta-cargo careers,
Tacobamba for ayllu I1awi, 255, 370, 371, 376, 396; of pillu visits,
482n38; Cochabamba fields assigned by 372-73; of hamlet and town centered
Toledo, 464n25; as leader of purported sacrifices in fiesta, 375; of rites of
Lutheran revolt, 486n48 incoming and outgoing fiesta sponsors,
Colque Guarache, don Juan, probanzas 376; of dancing and fighting units, 384,
of: described,S, 159-61, 445n3; service 393. See also Recursion, formal
of father Guarache to Incas in, 130, Condenados (ghosts), 64, 69, 76
159-60; as collaboration, 152; service Condo (people). See Quntu
to Spaniards in, 159; as event Condo, San Pedro de (town): pilgrimage
chronology, 159, 227; as ethnohistorical to by K'ulta authorities, 120, 458n24;
source, 160; genealogy in, 160-61, social memory in, 154; refounded in
227, 465nn31, 32, 466nn33, 34; as visita general, 238, 482n31; ayllus of,
approximation of Spanish relacion 253; parish registers of, 256-58,
narrative, 226; as response to Toledan 483n39; hamlets and chapels of,
reforms, 226; use of by descendants, 273-75; hamlets become annexes,
227; services in Potosi mita in, 232; annexes seek autonomy, 284; litigation
Espinoza version vs. mss, 464n27; on and land war with Challapata, 289,
diarchies of Killaka and Incas, 302-3, 446n8; colonial fiesta
464nn2~ 29, 465n30 sponsorship in, 292, 491n64; 1774
Colque, don Juan, "el Mozo": trained by rebellion against caciques in, 294-95;
Jesuits, 261; Capoche on, 484n42 represented to state by Corcino Perez
Colque, dona Maria: as Oruro vendor, 7; in 1894,306; mayordomos of,
portrait of, 94, 95 483n40
Colque Guarache lineage: "family path" Condocondo. See Condo, San Pedro de
of, 228; mnemonic techniques of (town)
distinct generations of, 261 Condor: addressed as mallku, 120; in oral
Commemoration: of land possession act, narrative, 322; house as "nest" of, 334;
9; Halbwachs on, 11; in 16th-century wifetakers as in marriage rites, 343,
Spain, 17; of War of the Pacific, 91; of 498n19; as familiar in ch'iyar yatiri
Eucharist, 167; of life of Jesus Christ, shamanism, 417; as analog of Nina
252,262 Willka's dove, 420. See also Mallku
Compadrazgo, and patron-client ties, 47 Condori, Ambrocio de la Cruz (cacique of
Composicion de tierras: in Choquecallata Challapata): litigation with
document, 284-89, 446n8; process of, L1anquipacha of Condo, 302-3
284-291; of 1590s by Fray Luis Lopez, Confession: as relacion, 170; quipus used
285; Taquimalco purchase of Asanaqi in, 178, 260; pre-Columbian and
lands, 285, 302; of 1640s by Jose de la colonial, 268-269
568 Index

Confraternities: in foundation of Santa sponsorship, 90; and vecinos, 90; and

Barbara de Culta, 273; and fiesta-cargo collective labor, 103; appointment by
systems, 291; literature on, 490n62. See subprefects as overlords of town
also Fiesta-cargo systems; Fiestas, saints', councils, 305; mestizos or vecinos
colonial; Santa Barbara de Culta (saint) monopolize post, 305. See also Vecinos
Connerton, Paul, II, 446n9 Corregidores (Spanish and colonial):
Conquest of Peru, Spanish: contradictiory appointed to rule Castilian towns, 133,
sources on, 136; rapidity of, 136; 224; systematically appointed in Peru,
Hernando de Aldana role in, 137; 224; relationship to caciques and town
indian allies in, 137; intercultural councils, 246; and reparto, 295; as
communication in, 137; significance of targets of rebellion, 295 -96; killed in
Inca wars of succession for, 137; Challapata, 492n70
miracles in, 137; of Incas, 459n5; of Corregimiento (building). See Town
Charcas region, 459n5 council office
Conquistadors, motives of, 166 Cortes, Hernan, 3
Consecration, of church, 106, 110 Cortes (Spanish parliamentary body),
Constitution, Bolivian: cited by Corcino manipulation of by Charles I, 133
Perez, 306, 439 Cosmology: mountain-as-body metaphor
Continental divide: described, 42 in, xix, 322; transformation of, 19; in
Continuity, cultural: foregrounding of in K'ulta, 110-11, 456nll; Andean us.
ethnography, xix. See also Resistance, Christian-Spanish content of, 113; and
cultural historical consciousness, 114; and
Conversion to Christianity: in Castilian colonialism, 115; in K'ulta, via Jesus
reconquest of Granada, 132; of indians, Christ us. Supay-Chullpas myth,
133, 152. See also Christianization; 326-32; in house, patio, and corral,
Evangelization, pre-Columbian 333-34. See also Space-time, social
Copacabana, Potosi parish of, 263 Costume: "traditional" us. "civilized," 93,
Copacabana, Virgin of: miracles of and 94; gender marking of, in Bertonio,
pilgrimage to, 207, 211, 263; statue of, 496n13; as marker of dual "ethnic"
263, 484n43; Nina Willka pilgrimage identity of Tomas and Virgilio Mamani,
to, 278; Nina Willka cult to retablo of, 506n8; matching patriline jackets,
279-80; Tupac Catari cult to retablo 508n20. See also Textiles
of, 301 Council of the Indies: us. Philip II on
Copatete, don Diego, 461nll perpetuity, 217; and instructions for
Corn: ground to flour in Cahuayo water Toledo, 224
mill, 285; provisioner deities and Council of Trent, and surveillance of
libation names of, 358 heterodoxy, 265, 276
Corn beer. See Chicha Counter hegemony, Andean, 19
Coroma (town): extirpation of idolatry in, Counter-Reformation: and clandestinity,
174, 277, 489n54; textiles of, 451n14 15,262,415; and Andean intercultures,
Corpus Christi, fiesta of, 17, 81, 167, 115, 415; destructuration and cultural
235-36,256,404,511n30 creativity, 214-15; and Toledan
Corrals (uyu): altars of, 334; as built reforms, 224; heightening of critical
forms, 334; as jira t'alla, "feminine creativity, 415. See also Clandestine
dung plain," 334; roots of, 341; practice; Surveillance
libations to, 356, 502n35 Courtship, 66, 343, 388, 497n15
Corregidor: qualifications, selection, and Creole. See Criollo
powers of in Culta, 59, 86, 90, 456n7; Criollo: use of term, xviii; as term of
modern us. colonial, 86; and fiesta reference and address, 46; 18th-century
Index 569

revolt and massacre of in Oruro, 296; Santa Barbara de Culta; Fiesta

fled indian rebels dressed as indians, sponsorship; Hamlets of K'ulta; K'ulta
296; alliance with mestizos, 304; and (people); K'ulta, Ayllu; K'ulta territory
"whiteness", 304; nationalism of, Cultural synthesis. See Interculture
457n17 Culture: and practice, xviii, 252; and
Cronicas. See Chronicles social memory, 21; static notions of, 22;
Crown (bread, flowers). See Pillus and class, 457n17. See also Discourse;
Cruce (town): author's residence in, xxi; Ethnicity; Functionalism; Gender;
foundation of, 8; interview of don Identity; Interculture; Pidgin, cultural;
Pablo Choquecallata in, 8; described, Power, asymmetries of; Practice; Social
42-51; schools of, 44, 45; social agency; Social categories; Social class;
hierarchy in, 45; vecinos of, 45; Social memory; Structuralism;
proposed as canton capital, 312; Translation, cultural
fragmentation of, 320; "progress" in, Culture, Andean: and resistance paradigm,
451n15; protestant evangelism in, xix-xx, 153; vs. Christian-Spanish
451n15; mentioned, 7, 103 culture, 110, 112,413; and colonial
Culta, Canton: schools of, 45; internal pidgin, 414-15; creolization of,
subdivisions of, 87; ayllus and hamlets 414-15. See also Ceque systems;
of, 88, 254; secession of ayllus from, Ethnography; Inca (people and empire);
446n8; place in Bolivian administrative Resistance, cultural
structure, 454n2; distinguished Cumbi: given by Inca to Colque Guarache
analytically from Ayllu K'ulta, 455n4; ancestors, 160-61, 466n33; significance
relationship to Bolivian state, 455n4. of gift of, 161; makes the wak'a,
See also Canton; Cantonization; Culta, 179-80; as symbol of ancestry and
Santa Barbara de (town); K'ulta station, 180; tukapu iconography of,
(people); K'ulta, Ayllu 180; called capac hucha, 472n49. See
Culta, Santa Barbara de (town): also Textiles
description of, 29; journey to, 29, 38, Cummins, Tom, 12, 472n50
50, 52-56; town plan of, 63; plaza of, Curing: curanderos of La Paz, 34, 35, 37;
95; fiestas in, 97; as parish seat, 103, colonial, by Jampi kamayuqs, 221;
320; priest visit to, 103-9; settlement disease and interhamlet paths, 337. See
of, 117; historical memory in, 154; mita also Shamanic practices; Sorcery
ritual during All Souls Day in, 233; Curriculum vitae. See Probanzas
foundation of by Chiris, 273-75; Cusco: Asanaqi people in, 4; Spanish
passage from hamlet to annex to conquest of, 136, 139; Spanish
autonomous town, 284, 320; refoundation of, 143-44; capac hucha
18th-century rebellion in, 295, 297-99, sacrifices in, 171. See also Ceque
303-4; 1790s Mamani-led tax revolt systems; Manco Inca; Qurikancha of
in, 303-4; represented by Corcino Cusco
Viscarra in 1868, 305; power of Cuysara (mallku of Charka): in Gonzalo
attorney to Corcino Perez in 1894, Pizarro encomienda, 149; surrender to
306; shifting boundaries and Spanish,461n16
composition of, 320, as condensed
diagram of patrilines and ayllus of Dancing-fighting "platoons": in fiesta of
K'ulta territory, 386. See also Guadalupe, 100, 102; merging in major
Authorities of Santa Barbara de Culta; fiesta moiety "armies," 373; matching
Cantonization; Culta, Canton; Fiesta jackets of, 508n20; structure of group,
cargo careers; Fiesta -cargo system of 508n20
Santa Barbara de Culta; Fiestas of Diiniken, Eric von, 6
570 Index

Daughter's husband. See Tullqa Discipline, work, 7, 225, 252. See also
Dead: and death, 69, 76, 500n23; abode Buena policia; Mita; Reducci6n;
of, 72; mummies of in 1534 banquets Surveillance
of Cusco, 139; and mita of Potosi, 234, Disciplines, and authority in ethnography
481n25; pre-Columbian, assimilated to and history, 409-10
Spanish narrative Christ-killers, 326; Discourse: and power, xxiv, 13, 457n19;
and the rains, 330; sent to underworld postcolonial, 13, 112; and non linguistic
in carnival and Easter rites, 330, 335; communication, 13; open vs. closed,
compared to saints as intermediaries, public vs. private, 96; intercultural, 112,
331; as alma cargo fiesta sponsor, 335; 116,213,265,418-19; and historical
Hilari6n Mamani effigy, 335; provisions consciousness, 116,418,420; and
and journey of, 335; cactus and thorns dramaturgy in visitas, 261; mutual
to bar return of, 337; return of on All internalization of hypostatized alters,
Souls Day, 481n2S. See also Ancestors; 418; postcolonial, 418; colonial, 515nS.
Burial; Funerary ritual; Condenados See also Frontier; Interculture; Pidgin,
de Aldana, Hernado. See Aldana, cultural
Hernado de Disputes, resolution of. See Town council
de Almagro, Diego. See Almagro, Diego Divination: at colonial wak'a, 268; in jilsa
de practice, 279-80; and ch'iyar yatiri,
de Almendras, Martin. See Almendras, 417
Martin de Doctrina: as ecclesiastic unit corresponding
de Avila, Francisco. See Avila, Francisco to civil unit of reducci6n, 244
de Documents, colonial: accreted nature of,
de Betanzos, Juan. See Betanzos, Juan de 227
de Hinojosa, General Pedro. See Hinojosa, Dogs, sacrifice of, 183
General Pedro de Domestic service, 449n3
de Nebrija, Antonio. See Nebrija, Antonio Domestication, metaphors of, 342, 343,
de 501n27. See also Herding; Predation
de Olivera, Luis. See Olivera, Luis de Domination, colonial and gender,
de Zarate, Agustin. See Zarate, Agustin de SOln27
de Zarate, Pedro. See Zarate, Pedro de Drama. See Autos Sacramentales; Corpus
de Zaumada, Agustin. See Zaumada, Christi
Agustin de Drinking: Capoche on, 216; connection to
Deities: See Gods idolatry, 216; Matienzo against public,
Demographic collapse. See Population 216; Polo outlawing of, 216; in colonial
decline Potosi, 234-36; Toledo on, 250;
Desaguadero River: described, 39; Andean solitary vs. collective in K'ulta, 346-47;
resistance at, 146; created by theses on indian alcoholism,
Tunupa-apostle, 207 hypoglycemia, and "safety valves,"
Destructuration, concept of, 22 499n21; ethnographic literature on,
Devil: and colonial sorcery, 268-69. See 499n22; and memory, 499n22;
also Supay; Supay-Chullpas; Tios of problems and techniques in study of,
mines 499n22, 500n27; and alcohol
Diarchies. See Asanaqi; Awllaka-Urukilla; poisoning, 500n23; K'ulta restrictions
Killaka; Macha; Siwaruyu-Arakapi; on, 500n24; gender in, 500n27;
Wisixsa; Yampara meanings of intoxication, 501n29. See
Dillon, Mary E, xv, 29, 59, 79, 94, 105, also Alcohol; Chicha; Libations;
404 Memory paths
Index 571

Drinking paths (uman t"akis). See Ethnocentrism: Spaniards on indians,

Memory paths xviii, 114, 168; and social memory, 18,
Drum, ritual, of human hide, 4 129, 189; Incas on Qullasuyu peoples,
Dual organization. See Moieties 197; Aymaras on Urus, 324-25
Dung, llama, used as fuel in cooking fires, Ethnographer: as Ekeko, 37, 38, 51; roles
506nlO of, 66-70, 73; effects of presence, 75;
Duviols, Pierre, 476n69 as information source, 86; as latter-day
inquisitor or extirpator, 506n7
Economic activity: as cultural domain, Ethnography: Andean, xvii; politics of,
235 xxiv; reflexivity in, xxiv, 410; authority
Ekeko: figure of, 36; described, 37, 51; in, 20, 410; description vs.
and Tunupa, 212, 477n72; and Tios, interpretation in, 25; description in, 29;
402 narrative in, 30; and travel or tourism,
El Alto, migrant city of La Paz, 32 30; procedures in, 75-76, 80;
El Cid, 167 importance of repeat visits to author's,
El Escorial, as memory palace, 247 377; objectivism in, 410; and history,
Elections, national, 70, 452n6 410-11; resistance romance and
Encomienda: in Castilian reconquest, 132; political utility of, 418; and power,
compared to Senario, 132, 134; 448nl; in history, 448n14; of drinking,
Aullagas to Aldana, 138; Cusco grants 499n22; and extirpation of idolatry,
of, 143; possession ceremony of, 143; 506n7; as social science, 514nl. See
justification for and abuses of, 150; also Discourse; Ethnohistory;
expansion of, 151; evangelical duties in, Fieldwork, ethnographic; Frontier;
216; Polo-Santo Tomas "debate" on Power, asymmetries of
perpetuity of, 217; encomendero Ethnohistory: of K'ulta, proposal to write,
proposal to perpetuate, 217 -18; xxii; research for in Buenos Aires, xxii;
cacique opposition to, 218; non ethics of, xxiii; and history from below,
encomendero opposition to, 218; xxiii; and verbal narrative, 117; and
Toledan suppression of, 224, 246; local historical consciousness, 118; of
grants of Killaka and Asanaqi, 425-28; and by K'ulta people, 123; sources in,
grants and quipus, 462n17. See also and colonial discourse, 152; as ghetto
Perpetuity of encomienda for pasts of peoples without writing,
Endogamy, ayllu, 340, 497n15. See also 408; and other ethno- specialties, 408.
Exogamy, patriline; Genealogy; See also Ethnography; History;
Marriage; Matriliny Historical consciousness; Social memory
Epic, as source of Castilian history, 189 Eucharist: priestly, in Culta, 106; and
Epistemology, positivist, 459n3 sacrificial metaphor, 109-10,396; and
Erasmus, Desiderius, and Illuminism, 265 commemoration, 167; converted indians
Escolar, duties of, 93 and, 265, 269; and priestly authority,
Espanol: use of term, xviii. See also Social 265, 484n44; heretical forms of,
categories 270-71, 326; as social memory, 485n44.
Estete, Miguel de: on investiture of Manco See also Authority, priestly; Christianity,
Inca in 1534, 139 heterodox; Sacrifice, contemporary
Ethnic group: usage of term, 463n23 Evangelization, pre-Columbian: Betanzos
Ethnicity: and class, distributed through on, 201; Sarmiento on, 201, 203;
urban space in La Paz, 30-37; vs. class Ramos Gavilan on, 205, 475n67;
and race, 463n23. See also Social Pachacuti Yamqui on, 205-6, 207-9,
categories 476nn69, 70. See also Tunupa
572 Index

Exaltaci6n (fiesta of), 81, 97 fostered by censorship, 415. See also

Exchange. See Ayni; Gifts; Markets; Archival culture; Chronicles;
Offerings; Paq"ara; Paq"arayaiia; Counter-Reformation
Reciprocity; Sacrifice; Trade Fieldwork, ethnographic: as discursive
Expositions, universal, and theories of frontier, xxiv; politics of, 15; power in,
modernity, 459n3 82; formal interviews in, 453n7.
Extirpation of idolatry: in diocese of 499n22. See also Discourse; Extirpation
Lima, 174; of Diego Iquisi cult by of idolatry; Frontier; Power
Gonzalez de la Casa, 174,267-69, Fiesta-cargo careers (jach'a p"ista t"akis):
435-36; in diocese of Charcas, 174, ranking of, 89, 370-71; civil and ritual
270-71,277,435-36, 489n54; and posts in, 90; completion of, 90; awksa
taqui oncoy, 214, 218-19; reducci6n t"akis (our father paths), 90, 370; length
as, 240-41, 250-51; as Inquisition for of, 90, 370; tayksa t"akis (our mother
indians, 265-66; archives of, 266; and paths), 90, 370; great fiesta path vs.
indian heresies, 266, 268, 269, 270-71, small fiesta path, 344; marriage as first
273,276-77,280-81; of Miguel step in, 369; moiety alternation of, 369;
AcarapilChiri, 270-71; interpreted relation between standing and novice
indian heresy as idolatry, 276-77; sponsors in, 369; duration, sequence
mochaderos, idols, skulls, and unicorn and alternations of, 370; historical
in 17th-century Coroma, 277, 489n54; restructuring of, 370; Santa Barbara
and ethnography, 506n7. See also t"aki, 370; participation in, 370, 504nl;
Christianization; Civilizational project; completion of, and pasado status,
Clandestine practice; Counter- 370-71; principal duties of Guadalupe
Reformation; Reducci6n; Taqui oncoy tayksa t"aki, 397. See also Authorities
Exogamy, patriline, 340, 497n15. See also of Santa Barbara de Culta; Fiesta-cargo
Genealogy; Marriage; Patrilines; system of Santa Barbara de Culta; T"aki
Surnames Fiesta-cargo system of Santa Barbara de
Culta, 81, 89; unwritten nature of turn
Fabian, Johannes, 24 systems of, 293; reduced complexity of,
Factionalism: in K'ulta, 98; and 320; history of, 504n2. See also
cantonization, 313-14; and "Aymara" Authorities of Santa Barbara de Culta;
culture, 494n87 Fiesta, saint's, structure of; Fiesta-cargo
Farris, Nancy, 294 careers; Fiesta sponsorship
Father's sister. See Ipala Fiesta-cargo systems: functionalist!
Father's sister's husband. See Larita materialist interpretations of, xv-xvi,
Federations of Qullasuyu. See Charka; xxi; Mesoamericanist research on, xv,
Chicha; Kanchi; Killaka; Lipi; Lupaqa; 492n67; literature of, xvi; motivation to
Pakax; Qana; Qaranka; Qaraqara; participate in, xvi, xxi; meanings in,
Qulla; Sura xvii; origin and history of, 291-92;
Festival. See Fiesta compared to Spanish cofradias and
Feuds. See Patrilines town councils, 292; clandestinity of,
Fiction, foundational, and patriotism of 293; structures of as unwritten social
indigenista cross-ethnic romance, 421 memory, 293; and 18th-century
Fiction, Spanish: fabulas, likened to rebellions, 294, 492n68; merger of
Andean narrative, 14; Bakhtin on sponsorships and civil cargos, 491n63.
picaresque, 114; don Quixote, and 491n65. 504n2; Penry on, 491n65;
chivalric literature, 134, 166,321; and colonial Chayanta, 504n2; of Condo,
probanzas, 159, 169; shaped by legal 504n2
deposition, 170, 415; creativity in, Fiesta duties. See Fiesta sponsorship
Index 573

Fiesta, saint's, structure of: as Fiestas of Santa Barbara de Culta

concatenated and ranked alternations, (jach'a p"ista): listed, 80, 81; patriline
374-75; division between hamlet and participation in, 97; provisioning of, 97;
town performances, 375; and structured sponsor entourage visits in town, 98,
miscommunication, 375; uywa ispira 100; and memory paths, 114; of town
uru (herd vispers day), in hamlet house, church images (jach'a p"ista), 344;
375,376; major segments of as stages libation memory paths in, 351;
of sacrifice, 375 -76; centraliry of segmented as stages of llama sacrifice,
herding metaphors and llama sacrifices 351, 375. See also Fiesta, saint's,
to, 375-76, 389; sequence of (figure), structure of; Fiesta sponsorship;
376; qarwa k"ari uru (llama cutting Fiesta-cargo careers; Fiesta-cargo system
day), in hamlet corral, 376, 377-83; of Santa Barbara de Culta; Sacrifice,
pilgrimage to town, 383-84, 508nn17, structure of; Saint images
18; wallpa k"ari and ispiras (chicken Fiesta sponsorship: careers of, xv; in
cutting and vespers) in town, 384-87; K'ulta, 80, 81; roles of, 84; preparation
formal wallpa k"ari visiting, 386; for, 97; activities during fiestas, 98;
ispiras dancing, 387; dawn alwa, 388; proliferation of during 17th century,
visits to sponsors by authorities, 388; 283; types of in colonial Condo, 292;
kawiltu kumpraiia tasa collection by principal duties of, in career, 397;
authorities, 388-89; p"isturu (fiesta complaint about in 18th century
day) in town, 388-93, 509n25; guion Condo, 491n64; importance of surplus
and p"intuna flags, 390; qurpa bread and prodigious consumption in,
thrown from church tower, 390; ilija 501n29; naming of future sponsors,
(election) of machaqa (incoming) 511n28. See also Alferez; Escolar;
sponsors, 390-91; qurpa banquet, 391, Fiesta, saint's, structure of; Fiesta-cargo
511n31; ch'iwu meal and jaiiachu of careers; Fuera; Mayordomo; Pasado;
town, 392; tinku battle, 392-93; Pillu
ch'iwuru (ch'iwu day) in town, Fission and fusion of nested social units,
393-95; isi turka (saint's "clothes and boundaries, 288-89, 290
changing" ), 394-95; transfer of Flood, universal: in Cieza, 6, 199,
sponsorship to opposite moiety 474n62; in Sarmiento, 201, 474n64
machaqa, 395; return pilgrimage to Folkloric festivals, 419, 421
hamlet and ch'iwu banquet, 395-96; Foodstuffs: chili peppers, 39; quinua,
parallelism and metaphorical operations 39; long distance trade for, 42, 43,
in, 396-401; mayordomos' limusna 48, 77; preparation during collective
waku libations and collection, 509n25. labor, 105; origin of, 182; wild vs.
See also Banquet (qurpa); Ch'iwu; cultivated, 325, 335; processing of,
Kawiltu kumpraiia; Memory paths; 330-31, 458n8; 495n8; of Chullpas
Pilgrimage-caravan, fiesta; Sacrifice, and infants, 335; and the dead, 335;
structure of; T"aki; Tinku; Uywa ispira; deities of and libations to, 358; and
Visits, fiesta calendar in K'ulta, 453n8; processing
Fiestas, saints', colonial: established in of charki, 453n8; processing of
reducciones, 244; and rebellion, ch'uiiu, 453n8. See also Corn; Chicha;
294-95, 300-301. See also Potatoes
Confraternities; Fiesta-cargo systems; Forasteros: migration to escape mita and
Saint images, colonial lower tribute, 278; distinguished from
Fiestas of hamlet (jiska p"ista), 90, 344, originarios, 282; and social memory,
365. See also Hamlet chapels, 283,414
contemporary; Pillus; Visits, interhamlet Forgetting, structured, 117
574 Index

Fox (lari): as trickster in K'ulta oral clothing, 496n13; and inheritence of

narrative, 322, 323, 390; cooking fiesta careers, 500n27; and landscape,
stones as kinsmen of, 498n19. See also 500n27; and social process, 501n27.
Larita; Predation See also Marriage; Matriliny; Patrilines
Franquemont, Christine, 180 Genealogy: amnesia, 340; gender
Franquemont, Edward M., 180 differences in recollection of, 340; and
Frontier: discursive, documentary and marriage prohibitions, 340-41; and
ethnographic research as, xxiv; between parallel transmission, 341; via herd
public and clandestine spheres, 85, animals, 341; wilats kasta vs. mujuts
416-17; ethnographic, 86; cultural, kasta, 341; and landscape, 500n27. See
111; disciplinary, 409-10; as essence of also Marriage; Memory paths;
K'ulta culture, 416; postcolonial, 416; Surnames
as focus of inquiry rather than barrier Ghosts. See Condenados
to it, 417; Guaman Poma and Pachacuti Gifts: of food, 64; and reciprocal
Yamqui as frontier authors, 417; obligation, 162; and social memory,
scholarly practices for frontier societies, 234; of coca, 348; ayni as
417; shamanism, 417; Manuel Mamani coparticipants in gifting relationship,
and Pablo Choquecallata as frontier 349; libations as, 349; of textiles to
practitioners, 506n8. See also fiesta sponsors, 392; by jilaqatas to
Boundaries; Counter-Reformation; ayllu members to request tasa payment,
Interculture; Pidgin, cultural 513n42. See also Ayni; Offerings;
Fuera (mayordomo de afuera): in Culta, Paq"ara; Paq"arayana; Sacrifice
81; in colonial Condo, 292; Tomas Gods: generative powers of, 113;
Mamani and Petrona Gomez, of equations drawn between Andean and
Guadalupe festival, 377-96. See also Christian divinities, 262; personal
Fiesta, saint's, structure of; lsi turka names vs. category terms of, 351;
("clothes" changing) metaphorical equation with llamas,
Fueros, 132 humans, and saints, 376, 377. See also
Functionalism: and fiesta-cargo systems, Jesus Christ; Mallkus (mountain gods);
xvi, xxi; and cultural closure, xvii. See Misas; Offerings; Sacrifice,
also Structuralism contemporary; Saint images; T' alias;
Funerary ritual: of K'ulta, 183,234, Uywiris; Virgin Mary; Wak'as
481n25; suppressed at Miguel Acarapi Gomez, Petrona: fuera sponsor of
tomb, 271; sacrifices in, 501n30. See Guadalupe fiesta with Tomas Mamani,
also Ancestors; Burial; Chullpa tombs; 377
Condenados; Dead Gonzalez de la Casa, Hernan: and Iquisi
cult, 174, 267-69; extirpation and
Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca, 169 probanza of, 435-36
Gasca, Pedro de la, encomienda and Gonzalez Echevarria, Roberto, 169, 170,
Peruvian Civil War, 151. See also 415
Encomienda Gramsci, Antonio, 447n13
Gender: distinction in moiety opposition, Granada, Castilian conquest of, 132
153; ordering of in social space and Gruzinski, Serge, 22
social time, 333-34; and Guadalupe, fiesta of, 81, 97, 373,
complementarity, 334-35; parallelism 377 - 96. See also Fiesta, saint's,
in libations, 335, 445n4, 500n27; and structure of; Sacrifice, structure of
political life, 342; differences in second Guadalupe, Virgin of: miracles performed
language acquisition, 458n23; and by, 119,312; image of stolen by
Index 575

Alax-Kawalli, 312; chicha libations to of, 344; relation to town in fiesta

as llama patron, 378; herd of toy poetics, 514n44. See also Lakachaka;
alpacas of, 512n38 Palqa; Paths, interhamlet; Paths,
Guaman Poma de Ayala, don Felipe: intra hamlet; Patrilines; Paxsi Kayu;
drawings by, 142, 183, 210; and Thola Palca; Vila Sirka; Visits,
cultural translation, 263, 417 interhamlet
Guancoyro, don Juan (cacique of Sallay): Hapifiufius, doomed by crucifixion of
contra perpetuity, 217, 477n3 Christ, 208
Guarache (Killaka mallku): in Inca Cusco, Harris, Olivia, 481n25
4, 5; submits to Pizarro with Manco Hatha (Ay. for ayllu), 342, 463n23. See
Inca, 139, 459n7; granted in Ayllu; Muju
encomienda to Hernando de Aldana, Hatuncolla (Inca administrative center),
143,425-28, 460nll; in Col que 163
Guarache genealogy, 161; and Spanish Hatun Quillacas. See Quillacas, Santuario
invasion, 445n2; aid to Almagro de
expedition, 461n12; mentioned, 466n34 Heart: figurative meanings carried by
Guevara-Gil, Armando, 18 Aymara "chullma," 507n15; liver and
lungs cooked and eaten in ch'iwu
Habitus, 447n13 banquet during libations, 507n15;
Haciendas: "composed" indigenous "lluqu" as pumping organ, 507n15
properties as, 305-6; broken up in Hegemony and counterhegemony,
agrarian reform, 309 paradigms of, xxi, 23, 447n13
Halbwachs, Maurice, 11 Herding: and Pascal Lamb, 109; and
Hallucinogens: drunk in Potosi parishes, reducci6n ordinances, 242; metaphors,
221, 479n12; used in indian-controlled in concepts of authority, 342, 375 -77,
mass, 271 389, 511n32; as feminine activity, 342;
Hamlet chapels, colonial construction of authorities as herders of men, 342, 377,
and cult in: Miguel AcarapilChiri 398-99; and predation, 342-43;
devotions in Tacobamba hamlet, community herds and cacique
270-71; Chiri cofradia in Culta, marketeering, 504n48. See also
273-75; chapels destroyed in Condo Authorities of Santa Barbara de Culta;
region, early 17th century, 274; Nina Fiesta, saint's, structure of; Fiesta
Willka cofradia in Mohosa, 279-80; sponsorship; Jesus Christ; Jilaqata; Jiliri;
linked to reducci6n town churches, 283, Llamas; Llantiru; Sacrifice, structure of
Guadalupe image in Vila Sirka chapel, Heresy. See Christianity, heterodox
384; Domingo Ramirez cofradia in Hernandez Principe, 173
Guaguaxasi, 489n55. See also Herodotus, 16
Extirpation of idolatry; Saint images, Heyerdahl, Thor, 6
colonial Hybridity, cultural. See Interculture
Hamlet chapels, contemporary: images of, Hinojosa, General Pedro de: granted
344; fiestas of (jiska p"ista), 344; paths Awllaka Urukilla encomienda, 149;
linking to silus, 344, 345. See also death of, 151
Fiestas of hamlet Historians: K'ulta ritual-political
Hamlet practices, us. town practices, 112 specialists as, 113; yatiris as, 113;
Hamlets of K'ulta: mentioned, 51; authority of, in Spain, 169; authority
repeatedly destroyed in reducci6n of, 409; as myth debunkers, 409; and
process, 274; and patrilocality, 333; non-literate peoples, 409; and
authorities of, 344; chapels and fiestas disciplinary gatekeeping, 410
576 Index

Historias, as link between first-person Holy Spirit: in Nina Willka's cult, 280
experience and universal history, 169 Homicide: and Mamanis, 78, 406
Historical consciousness: colonization of, Honor: and conquest, 134; in chivalric
xxiv; vs. mythical consciousness, 16; literature, 166
ritual manipulations of, 112; and Host, procession of, 511n30
cosmology, 114; narrative and memory House in K'ulta: diagram of, 62; form
paths as, 114; and postcolonial follows social relations of builders,
situation, 114; forms of in K'ulta, 332-33; significance of layout, 332-33;
118-19; and myth in chronicles, iskin mamala, "corner mother" deity, 333;
447nll. See also Social memory structure of and cosmological processes,
Historical sources, limitations of on 333; and spatial orientation of libations,
Andean past, 134 333, 496nll; "roots" of, 333, 496n12; as
History: and historicism in Andean "condor-eagle nest," 334; roofing ritual
ethnohistory, xvii; from below, xviii, of, 343; uywa ispira libations in, 348-49,
409, 448n14; materialist and culturalist 351-60; Bourdieu on Kabyle, 496nlO;
approaches in, xviii; ethnographic, xxiii; social meanings of building supplies and
making of, in K'ulta, xxiii; politics of, construction tasks in, 496n12. See also
xxiv, 448n13; popular, xxiii; universal, Space; Space-time, social
and Bible,S, 199, 252; personal, of don Huamanga (province): taqui oncoy in, 221
Pablo Choquecallata, 8; reflexive, 10; Huanca (people): as Spanish allies, 138
Andean registers of, 14; supposed Huanuco Pampa (Inca administrative
Andean lack of, 14; objectivism in, 14, center): libations in, 163; chicha
209,409-10, 514nl; vs. myth, 15; consumption in, 445n2
contests of, 16,24, 195,219,290; Huari, Santiago de (town): priest from,
discipline of vs. anthropology/ 103; Toledan refoundation of, 238;
ethnography, 16, 408; universal, power of attorney to Corcino Perez in
Christian god as authority of, 18; 1894,306; K'ulta campesinos at fair of,
sorcery of, 20, 421; turn toward in 450n9; vs. Challapata in conflict over
anthropology, 21, 448n14; philosophies creation of new province, 454n2
of, 24; as interpretation, compared to Huarochiri manuscript: uniqueness of, as
ethnography, 25; interested nature of, Quechua myth text, 203-4; multiplicity
25,169-70; and cosmology, 96; and of origins in, 204
ritual, 96; and structure, 111; magical Huascar Inca, murder of, 138
power of, 115; K'ulta philosophy of, Huayna Capac: division of lands in
116; oral, and personal knowledge of Cochabamba, 154-55; in Colque
events, 118-19; of K'ulta, clues for Guarache probanza, 161, 466n33;
investigating, 123; written, vs. historical Asanaqi boundary markers of, 287
consciousness, 124; and ethnohistory, Humoro, don Pablo (cacique of
408; of K'ulta, vs. by K'ultas, 408; and Moromoro),466n33
oral vs. written pasts, 408; sources of, Hunu mallku, 465n31
vs. ethnographic interview, 408;
disciplinary authority in, vs. Iberian Peninsula, reconquest of, 132
ethnography, 409; as past events vs. Iconicity, 399, 505n4
interpretive writing, 409; ethics of, 411; Identity: social, categories and terms of,
reflexive, 411; and source criticism, 411; xviii; projects, indigenista and
anthropology of, 448n14; as humanistic indianista, xix, 418, 421; historical,
discipline, 514nl. See also Historical construction of in K'uIta, 22; change in
consciousness; Social memory; Writing cultural, 50; multiplicity of, 96;
Holy Grail, 166 achieved through contrast, 111;
Index 577

construction of, 115; and alterity, 418; Inca highway: and conquistador progress,
national, 418, 421; positionality and 146; rest houses (tambos) on, 146;
relativity of, 451n13; cards, and storehouses serving, 146
profession, 452n5. See also Social Inca Yupanqui Inca, in Calque Guarache
categories probanza, 160, 465n30
Idolatry: linked to chicha-drinking in Incense offering: in lurya misa sacrifice,
Potosi parishes, 221, 479nn12, 14; 105, 108-9; encirclement of ritual
reduccion a move against, 240, 250. See frame with, 347, 378; in dawn q'uwa
also Extirpation of idolatry rite, 360-61, 377; decoration and
Idols: provincial, kept hostage in burning of untu lIantiru figurines in,
Qurikancha, 173; Tata Porco, in Diego 360-61, 377, 388; to image in fiesta isi
Iquisi wak'a, 267 turka rites, 395, 513n39. See also
Jlawi (ayllu of K'ulta): fiesta participation Q'uwa
of, 97, 98; and land war, 102, 311; Independence day: and corregidor, 91;
internal moieties and fiesta alternation and schools, 91; and saints' fiestas, 93;
in, 370. See also K'ulta (people) portraits after, 93-94
IIIimani (mountain of La Paz), 34 Indian: use of term, xviii; vs. Spaniards in
Illuminism: and Erasmus, 265; and Santa colonial consciousness, 114; and the
Rosa, 266; and Santa Teresa, 266; bible, 168; humanity of debated, 168;
described, 484n44 as lost tribes of Israel, 168. See also
Imperialism, cultural, 116 Social categories
Inca (emperor): succession of, 172; ritual Indianismo, xix, 421
with llama, 183 Indigenismo, xix, 25, 421
Inca (people and empire): Zuidema on Indio: use of term, xviii; in reference and
cosmology of, xvii; defeat of Jatun address, 45. See also Social categories
Qulla, 4; storehouses of, 4; in K'ulta Inheritence: of herd animals, 341;
social memory, 117; known today as patrilineal, of land, 342; of fiesta-cargo
building stones, 117, 458n21; compared careers, 342, 500n27; split, among
to Spanish empire, 134; Spanish Incas, 460nl0; of names, 497n16. See
conquest of, 136; indirect nature of rule also Gender; Land tenure
by, 161; personal reciprocity in, 161; Inka misa, stone altar of Culta, 509n23
sacrificial systems of, 163; administrative Inkas, as foundation stones, 117, 333,
practices of, as channels of social 458n21
memory, 164; social organization of, via Inquisition: and Protestant heresy, 265;
description of capac hucha, 171; targeted converts, 265; and Illuminism,
panakas of Cusco, 175; Inca-centricity of 266; lacked jurisdiction over indians,
chroniclers, 197; Cieza de Leon on, 266, 276; role taken up by extirpators
198-99; origin myth as epic journey, of idolatry, 266, 276; and
199; Ayar brothers in, 200; creation by Counter-Reformation as shapers of
Viracocha, 200; commemoration of in culture, 447nll. See also
calendric rites, 200; in Paqariqtambo vs. Counter-Reformation; Extirpation of
Titicaca, 200; Sarmiento on, 200-201; idolatry; Surveillance
as tryants in Toledan revisionism, 227; Intellectual synthesis, Andean, 495n5. See
Spanish conquest of, 459n5; split also Interculture
inheritence among, 460nl0; drinking Interculture: study of, xxiv; synthesis in
practices of, according to Titu Cusi, temporalized, 24; concept of, 111; of
467n38. See also Qullasuyu K'ulta, 114; and national politics, 115;
Inca Calque, in Calque Guarache development of, 115,415-16; and
genealogy, 160 translation between communicative
578 Index

Interculture (continued) Jauja (Inca administrative center),

registers, 170; in T unupa assimilation to storehouses in, 138
apostles, 205, 209-12; and limited Jesucristo. See Jesus Christ
communication, 214, 414-15, 457n17; Jesuits: and education of caciques, 152;
in 18th century, 215; colonialism and and Toledan Counter-Reformation,
asymmetry of power in production of, 224
263; and reinscription of social memory, Jesus Christ: animal sacrifices for, xxii;
318 -19; colonial documents and libations to, 101, 364, 378; invoked as
ethnography in study of, 412 -13; and Tata Awatir Awksa, 105; incense
discourse, 415-16, 456nll; and offering to, 105, 361; apotheosis of,
frontier shamanism, 418; and 110; and Eucharist, 110; internalizing
nationalism, 418; as Bolivian properties of, 110; of K'ultas, 110; and
metaculture, 420; miners' devil beliefs Supay-Chullpas, 110-11,323-32,344;
as, 481n25. See also Discourse; Spanish solar iconography of, 111, 326;
Frontier; Pidgin, cultural; Translation, arrival of, 118; libations to, 122; in
cultural; Tunupa K'ulta myth, 132; life of, 167;
Intertext, and interculture, 114 commemoration of in reducciones, 252,
Iquisi, Diego, extirpated punku kamayuq, 262; Protestantism as path of Jesus,
174,267-69,435-36 320; identification with sun, 325; and
Isbell, Billie-Jean, xvi, 180 origin of time, 325-26; herding powers
lsi turka ("clothes changing"): textiles as of, 342; human emulation of herding
"clothes" of saint, 394, 512n36; powers of, 343; as social being, 345;
inventory of saint goods in, 394, continued presence in underworld,
512n38, 513n40; of saint image in 456nll; identification with solar-form
change of fuera sponsors, 394-95, monstrance as Tata Mustramu, 511n30.
512n36; incense offerings to image in, See also Sun
395, 513n39; libations of with chuwa, Jesus Christ vs. Supay-Chullpa myth:
512n37 properties of Christ in, 110-11, 132;
Itier, Cesar, 476n69 context of narrative performances of,
Itineraries of travel, t"akis as, 320 322-23, 325; myth text, 323-24; and
origins of K'ultas, 324; and Uru
Jach'a p"ista t"akis, or "great fiesta paths." peoples, 324-325; as philosophy of
See Fiesta-cargo careers; T"aki conquest, 325; origin of the myth in
Jail, in reducci6n towns, 242 TunupaNiracocha and Christian
Jallqa (people): ethnography of, 449nl; resurrection narratives, 325 - 26; as
some dual-residence Mamanis as account of colonialism, 326; as
members of, 506n8 ontology, 326; and cosmogeny, 326-28;
Janachu (tullqas in llama pelts): tullqas and human mortality, 327; and chullpa
cavort and "mount" onlookers wearing tombs, 328; social agency, 328-29; and
pelts of sacrificed llantirus, 382-83, seasonal and day to night alternations,
507n16; feigned paxcha of, 383; served 330-31; and food processing, 331; and
coca and chicha, 383, 512n33; in town saints, 331; and cosmology, 331-32;
fiesta, 392, 511n33; etymology of, and initiation of transformative
507n16. See also Herding; Llantiru; journeys on t"akis, 331-32, 496n9. See
Sacrifice, structure of also Cosmology; Narrative,
Jaqi, Aymara category of person, 324 contemporary oral; Social agency;
Jatun Qulla (Inca administrative center), Space; Space-time; Supay-Chullpas;
4, 11, 445n2 T"aki; Time
Index 579

Jews: of Iberia and Inquisition, 265; of Kawiltu kumprafia (tasa collection): by

Spanish Christ stories and Chullpas, jilaqatas during Guadalupe fiesta,
326 388-389; herding metaphors in, 389,
Jilaqatas (or caciques): roles of, 87; and 511n32. See also Jilaqata; Tasa; Tribute
sacrifice of lurya misa, 105-6; and Khipu. See Quipu
pilgrimage to San Pedro de Condo, 120, Killaka (diarchy): granted in encomienda
121; and herding metaphor, 342; fiesta to Hernando de Aldana, 143, 149,
careers leading to, 370; kawiltu 425-28; to don Pedro de Portugal, 151;
kumprafia tasa collection by, 388-89, granted to Diego de Ocampo in 1548,
5lln27; kumun wilara for vara and 151; in field of Colchacollo, 157; map
circumambulation of mojones, 513n42; of, 158; Aldana possession ceremony
visit to hamlets by, 513n42. See also of, 461nl1. See also Challapata, San
Cacique cobrador Juan de (town); Quillacas, Santuario
Jiliri (patriline-hamlet authority): and de (town); San Lucas de Payacollo
herding metaphor, 342, 344; and (town)
completion of fiesta-cargo career, 371 Killaka (federation): diarchies of, in mit'a,
Jilsa ("our brother," prophet): Nina 3; possible dual federation with
Willka as, 279-80; Domingo Ramirez Qaranka, 153, 156, 464n26; mitimaes
as, 489n55 and lands in Colchacollo, 154-59;
Jimenez, Domingo, xx preconquest structure, 154-61;
Jira t' alia (ritual name of corral). See structure of (table), 155; map of, 158;
Corrals; T' alias in construction of Tata Paria tomb, 181;
Jukumani (people), 102, 449nl division into distinct encomiendas and
Jula-jula. See Musical instruments repartimientos, 231; rearticulation in
Juliaca (town), 448nl Potosi mita as capitania, 231-33; social
Julien, Catherine, 153 organization of, 444n5; lands in
Junt'uma (settlement), original name of Cochabamba, 464n25. See also Asanaqi
Culta, 273 (diarchy); Awllaka-Urukilla (diarchy);
Juzgado (of Challapata), 79 Killaka (diarchy); Siwaruyu-Arakapi
(diarchy)
Kallawaya (people): Bastien's work on, K'ulta: vs. Culta, orthographic
xix; saints' fiestas among, xix; as convention, xxi
curanderos, 34, 450n7; as frontier K'ulta, Ayllu: distinguished analytically
sorcerers, 418; and election predictions, from Canton Culta, 79, 455n4; internal
418,515n4 ayllu structure of, 463n23
Kamachikuq, 163 K'ulta (people): saints' fiestas of, xxii;
Kamachiri,466n36 Christianity of, xxii, 109, 117 -18;
Kanchi (federation), 145 description of, 52; people of, and
K"arik"aris. See K"arisiris taxation, 53; relation to state, 84; ayllus
K"arisiris (fat extractors): appearance of, of, 97; moieties of, 97; factionalism in,
54, 64-65, 404; early colonial account 98; inter-moiety tinku, 102; origins of,
of, 222, 404, 479n15, 480n16; author 117; historical consciousness of,
accused of being, 404-6; actions as 118 -19; colonial mita duties of, 233;
anti-sacrifice by evil outsiders, 405, mita ritual in, 233; mojones of, 289;
513n43; literature on, 514n45 separation from Condo of, 289;
Kasta, and lineage, 341 described maliciously in 1797, 303-4;
Kawalli (ayllu of Condo, Challapata, and ayllu composition among, compared to
Culta),255 Macha, 463n23. See also Alax-Kawalli;
580 Index

K'ulta (people) (continued) Land titles: authorities' searches for, 8,

Culta, Canton; Culta, Santa Barbara de 284; in composicion documents, 284,
(town); Ilawi; K'ulta, Ayllu; 302-3,305-9; ambiguity of and
Manxa-Kawalli; Qullana; Yanaqi overlap among, 285; of Manuel
K'ulta territory: departure from, xxii; Mamani, 490n56. See also Boundaries;
maps of and roads through, 451nl Choquecallata document; Composicion
Kumun wilara, performed by jilaqatas for de tierras; Litigation
varas, 513n42 Land wars: Ch'axwa as, 102; Condo vs.
Kuntinarus. See Condenados Challapata in 1790s, 302-3; Culta
Kuraqas, renamed caciques by Spaniards, vs. Tinquipaya in 1860s, 305;
134 Qullana vs. Kawallis in 1968,310-11,
457n14
La Paz (city): antiquities dealers of, 7; Landscape: embodiment of past in, 6; of
death of Villarroel in, 8; description of, Altiplano, described, 38; and social
30-37; markets of, 39, 450n8; siege of memory, 113, 116, 179; gateways of,
by Tupac Catari, 296, 300-301; formal 182; as locus of past in pre-Columbian
interviews in, 453n7 Andes, 184; and quipus in colony, 259;
La Plata (city). See Sucre deities of, 351; gendered in parallel
Labor: and work discipline, 7, 225, 252; libations, 359, 500n27; and ceques,
collective, 102; Spanish aristocratic 472n48. See also Ceque systems; Past,
disdain for, 133-34; access to by native Andean; Pilgrimage, colonial; Social
lords, 162; as tribute to Incas, 162, memory, pre-Columbian and colonial;
186; and sacificial system, 186-87; T"aki
Polo on festive nature of, 225; Toledan Lari. See Fox
tranformation of in Potosi, 225; for Larita (mother's brother or wife's brother):
wages, 225, 226, 481n25; as indian role as predator, 342-43; in marriage ritual,
in Peru, 226; organized by ayllu in 342-43, 498n19; of Tomas Mamani in
reduccion towns, 255-56; in qarwa k"ari performance, 378; role in
Pacaritambo plaza, 256; levying of for sacrifice, 468n42; role in sucullu
roadwork in K'ulta, 455n6. See also naming rite, 496n13. See also Fox;
Buena policia; Mit' a; Mita of Potosi; Ipala; Tullqa
Reduccion; Surveillance; Tribute Lascano, Eloy, 446n8
Lagunillas (town): ayllus of, 254; power Law of Popular Participation, and
of attorney to Corcino Perez in 1894, political decentralization, 455n3
306; old road through, 452nl Laymi (people), 102
Lakachaka (hamlet of K'ulta), 453n7 Layra ("eye"): as entrance to layra timpu,
Lake Poopo. See Poopo, Lake 180; textile design element, 180; and
Lake Titicaca. See Titicaca, Lake paqarina origin places, 180, 322; of
Land tenure: of patronymic groups, 61, chullpa tombs, 182; and flow of
102; disputes and factionalism over, sacrificial substances, 364; and saints,
102; of Killaka federation in 364-65; as llama origin places, 367
Colchacollo, 154-59; of Asanaqi ayllus Layra timpu (origin time): and textile
and reduccion, 253, 302-3; litigation iconography, 180; oral narratives about,
over, 284, 301-3; and Liberalism, 322
304-9; of pasture, patriline, Lazarillo de Tormes, 321, 447nll
interpatriline, and interayllu, 356. See Leader of herd. See Llantiru
also Composicion de tierras; Leal Vejarano, Gonzalo, priest of Condo,
Inheritance; Liberalism and Culta chapel in 1626, 273
Index 581

Legal proceedings: and ritual, 58; and 494n83; Corcino Perez on tenets of,
archival culture, 133, 134; as source of 307-8; as ethnocide, 449n4
Spanish American writing tradition, Life cycle, human: conforms to
170; author's involvement in, 406, cosmological process, 335, 369; and
446n6. See also Archival culture; fiesta-cargo careers, 369. See also
Chronicles; Fiction; Probanzas Fiesta-cargo careers; Rites of passage;
Le Goff, Jacques, 12, 16 Space-time, social
Lent: and "wet" musical instruments, 330. Lightning: and saints, mediating power of,
See also Carnaval 109; and surti wala shaman
Leviticus, 109 instruments, 503n44
Libation specialists (wasu wariri): Lima (city), persecution of Illuminists in,
Bartolome Mamani and dona Basilia as, 266
113; in performance, 347-49; in uywa Lipes. See Lipi
ispira, 355, 356, 360, 362. See also Lipi (people and region), ethnography and
Yatiris ethnohistory of, 449nl
Libations, contemporary: and the past, Literacy. See Orality; Writing
xxii; vignette of, 6; and historical Litigation: documents, as historical source,
consciousness, 15; in town council 154-59; Killaka and Qaranka vs. Polo
meeting, 58, 59; in hamlet fiesta, 74; at over Colchacollo, 156-59; Spanish,
women's misa, carnaval 1980,94; over event records, 169; Colque
specialists of, 113; hierarchy within Guarache vs. Choqueticlla over
series of, 122; of Pablo Choquecallata, cacicasgo, 227, 229; over land resulting
319; as form of t"aki, 321; described from colonial boundaries, 284; Asanaqi
and defined, 347; as form of gift, 349; vs. Tinquipaya over land, 285;
gender parallelism of, 349, 445n4; as Taquimalcos over Cahuayo lands, 287;
complex social relationship, 349-50; as Condo vs. Challapata over land, 289,
sequences, 350-51; types and tokens of 302-3, 446n8; over Challapata
deity forms in, 350-51, 352; variety of, cacicasgo, 295-96, 302, 492n70;
351; taperecording of, 453n7; K'ulta's Ayllu Qullana vs. Ayllu
preparatory, to alcohol distillery, Alax-Kawalli, 310-11, 446n8;
504n50. See also Alcohol; Chicha; Awllaka-Urukilla caciques vs. Hernan
Memory paths; Social memory, Vela over abuses and tributes, 462n18
contemporary; T"aki Liturgy, Christian: clandestine practice as
Libations, pre-Columbian and colonial: supplement to, and gloss of, 262,
Inca mummy participation in, 139, 142; 415-16
described by Spaniards as borracheras, Llamas: and caravan trade, 43, 77, 97;
140; prohibited by Polo Ondegardo, sacrifice of, in capac hucha, 171; food
152; in Huanuco Pampa, 163; doubled, and drink of in Inca sacrificial rites,
in Inca greeting rite, 165; Spanish 183; sacrificial relation to humans, 183,
rejection of in Cajamarca, 165; 184; as intermediaries of social memory,
performed by sacrificial llamas, 183; as 184; deities of, 355-56, 503n40; age
register of social memory, 185; in categories of, in libations, 356-57;
colonial Potosi, 234. See also Capac marking rites of, 357; lIantirus, in
hucha; Chicha; Social memory, libations, 357, 503n39; analogy with
pre-Columbian and colonial; Taquies persons, 502n36. See also Herding;
Liberalism: civilizational project of, 215, Janachu; L1antiru; Sacrifice,
304, 305; and "indian problem," 304; contemporary; Sacrifice, pre-Columbian
and exvinculaci6n, 304, 493n82, and colonial
582 Index

Llanquipacha, Andres (second person of of patrilines, 344; of Vila Sirka and

Condo): killed in 1774 rebellion, 294 Culta, 348, 349; feminine counterparts
Llanquipacha, Gregorio Feliz (cacique of of, 349; as familiars in ch'iyar yatiri
Condo): killed in 1774 rebellion, 294 practice, 417; libations to by
Llanquipacha, Lucas Feliz (cacique of authorities, 510n27. See also Condor;
Condo), land war and litigation with Uywiris; Pirwan Tata; T'allas; Tata
Challapata, 302-3; lawyerly writing of, Asanaqi; Wila Qullu
and insults to "plebeian indians", 303 Mallon, Florencia, 447nlO
Llantiru ("delantero"): llama herd Mamani, don Bartolome: and incense
hierarchy and human authority, 342; offering, 105; as curer, 112; as libation
libations to, 356-57; incense offering of specialist, 113; on Jesus Christ vs.
untu figurines of, 360-61; and stone Supay-Chullpas, 323-32; and
samiri figurines, 366; Iibated before performance of uywa ispira memory
sacrifice as tinkur awki, 367, 378; path, 347-49, 351-60; qarwa k"ari
hamlet to town caravan as tinku libations of Tomas Mamani and Petrona
warrior, 383; tasa payers called, 389; Gomez served by, 377-83; interviews
fiesta sponsors called, 392; replaced by of, 453n7; as storyteller, 457n16;
substitutes in sacrifice, 506n9. See also mentioned, 6, 74
Herding; Sacrifice, structure of Mamani, don Hilarion: varas of, 347;
Lockhart, James, 138, 166 effigy of, 335; visit of spirit of, dispatch
Lopez, fray Luis, and composiciones of to underworld by son and tullqa, 335,
1590s,285 337, 373; as alma cargo fiesta sponsor,
Luck. See Surti 335,373
Lupaqa (federation): Inca conquest of, Mamani, don Juan, 79
197; mentioned, 145 Mamani, don Julian: trial and
Lurya misa (desacralizing sacrifice), imprisonment of, 7-8; portrait of, 94,
performance of, 105, 108-9 95; as frontier practitioner, 401;
author's participation in trial of, 446n6;
MacCormack, Sabine, xviii, 175, 447n12, mentioned, 86
515n3 Mamani, don Manuel: on Carata murder,
Macha (people): and Qullana vs. Kawallis 78, 79; and conversion to
land war, 311; continued coherence of, Protestantism, 124; land title of, 289,
455n4; ayllu composition among, 490n60; on Kawalli vs. Qullana land
compared to K'ulta, 463n23 war, 310 -11; Agrarian Reform
Macha (town and diarchy): Gonzalez de petitions of, 312; on Chullpa foods and
la Casa promoted to, 269; church, Tatala vs. Chullpa myth, 325; on
ornaments, and miniature images in, Carata accusation against author, 405;
269-70; Catari rebellion in, 298, 299, map of K'ulta by, 451nl; formal
300; ethnography and ethnohistory of, interviews of, 453n7; on llama marking
449nl rites, 506nll; mentioned, 6, 60, 68, 72,
Magical practices. See Shamanic practices; 82,98, 113, 309, 323, 506n7
Sorcery Mamani, Tomas: q'uwa offering by, 377;
Maize beer. See Chicha uywa ispira libations by, 377; qarwa
Mallkus (hereditary lords): in K'ulta social k"ari libations sponsored by, 377-83;
memory, 117, 120; renamed caciques by acts as fuera of Guadalupe, 377-96; as
Spaniards, 134; promoted in capac part-time Jallqa, 506n8
hucha, 173. See also Caciques, colonial Mamani, Virgilio: as heir to don Hilarion
Mallkus (mountain gods): names of in Mamani's fiesta career, 335; dispatch of
K'ulta, 96; libations to, 101, 348, 349; father to underworld in carnival rites,
Index 583

335, 337; and performance of uywa Mayordomo: type of fiesta sponsor, 81;
ispira memory path, 347-49, 351-60; term of office of, 90; activities during
quwa performed by, 360-61; llama fiesta of Guadalupe, 98; duties of, 104;
sacrifices of, 361-62; as part-time and libations for church construction,
Jallqa, 506n8 104; Culta church, parish registers of,
Mamani hamlet. See Vila Sirka. 122; established in reducciones, 244; of
Manco Inca: crowned by Pizarro, 139; confraternity to Santa Barbara, 273; of
mistreatment by Spaniards, 141; colonial Condo, 292; of Culta in 18th
submission to Spaniards, 459n7 century, 298; of Condo, 483n40;
Manxa-Kawalli (ayllu of K'ulta): and libations and collection of money in
fiesta participation, 97; tinku with limusna waku, 509n25. See also Fiesta
Alax-Kawalli, 100; land war against sponsorship; Fiesta, saint's, structure of
Qullana, 311; libations to mountain Mayruwiri. See Ancestors
deities of, 355. See also K'ulta (people) Meaning: cultural, deployment of, 19;
Manxa-pacha (underworld or inner sacrificial, entombed in letters, 170;
space-time): "Christian" vs. "native" intersubjectivity of, and habitual
content, 110; libations to gods of, 122; practice, 448n13
chullpas as portals to, 181; creation of Memorial de Charcas, 154-57, 159. See
with alax-pacha, 330-31; western path also Probanzas
to, 337; libations to in alcohol, Memory: archival vs. landscape, 9-10;
351-62. See also Alax-pacha collective, and writing, 11-12; and rote
Maravall, Jose Antonio, 447nll memorization, 13; LeGoff on collective,
Markets: of Oruro, 39; of La Paz, 39, 17; arts of, 17, 189; and
450n8 countermemory, 23, 182; local in
Marriage: and patriline exogamy, 73; and Canton Culta, 45; and landscape, 116;
house construction, 333; genealogical ordering of, 117; Andean techniques of,
reckoning for, 340; libations of, 340; 178; Toledo on caciques', 251;
prohibitions, 340; rites of, 340; herding genealogical, 340; and drink, 499n22;
and predation metaphors in, 342-43; and ethnography, 499n22. See also
and alliance, 343; groom as condor in, Amnesia; Genealogy; Landscape;
343; and sister exchange, 343; rituals Memory paths; Social memory; Writing
of, 343, 498n19; as first step in ritual Memory paths (amt'an t"akis): vignette of,
career, 369; sacrifice in, 498n18; laritas 6; general description of, 113, 346; and
and ipalas in interpatriline relations, colonialism, 114; described as amnesia
498n19; mock, in mita ritual, 508n20 techniques, 140,216; and boundary
Marta, dona. See Cariri, dona Marta pilgrimages, 291; and Pablo
Marx, Karl, 3 Choquecallata, 319; and other forms of
Mass: payment for, 106; indian t"aki, 321, 346; single libation in,
performance of, 270-271; colonial 346-47,349-50; Mamani performance
priests' refusal to celebrate in Culta, of during uywa ispira, 347-49,
273 351-60; gender parallel performance
Materialism: in Andean ethnography, xviii of, 349, 351, 354, 500n27, 502n33;
Matienzo, Juan de: against public kinds of, 350; types and tokens of deity
drinking, 216; plan for reduccion town, forms in, 350-51, 352; modular
240 segments and formal recursion in, 351,
Matriliny: Arnold on, 341; in ayllu as 359; concentric spacio-temporal
circulating connubium, 341; vs. hierarchy in, 359; gendered landscapes
patriliny, 342 in, 359, 500n27; formal parallelism and
Matronyms. See Surnames metaphor in, 359-60; manxa-pacha
584 Index

Memory paths (continued) and men in house, 333, 347; of corrals,

deities libated in alcohol, 360; 334; of patio (utanqa), 334; of silu saint
alax-pacha deities Ii bated in chicha, peak, 344-45; preparation of, 347;
362; qarwa k"ari libations, 362, 364; libations poured to, 348; root of, 348
chich a libations and interpatriline or Mita, colonial: Colque Guarache role in,
interayllu rites, 365; concatenation of 159,231-32; Toledan transformation
alcohol and chicha libations, 365; and of in Potosi, 225; as remedy for indian
tinku, 367; of kawiltu kumpraiia tax slothfulness, 225; basis in Inca mit' a,
collection, 389, 511n27; sponsors' puro 230-31; capitanias in, 231; as
libations in, 504n49; of limusna waku microcosm of Qullasuyu and basis for
by mayordomos, 509n25. See also rearticulation of federations, 231-32;
Alcohol; Chicha; Landscape; Libations, and drink, 234; K'ulta ritual recalling,
contemporary; Libations, 234, 481n25, 508n20; pilgrimage to
pre-Columbian and colonial; Social Caltama wak'as as complement to, 267;
memory, contemporary; T"aki Nina Willka escape from, 278
Memory, social. See Social memory Mit'a, pre-Columbian: journeys of, 3, 38;
Menocchio, 447nll Inca system in Cochabamba fields,
Merlos, Gregorio Joseph de, priest of 230-31
Macha and rebel sympathizer, 298, Mitchell, Timothy, 247, 459n3
492n73 Mitimas: wak'as of, 187-88; in colonial
Mesa, Fernando de, and indian Christ times, 463n25
Miguel Acarapi, 270-71 Mnemonics: techniques of, 85;
Mestizo: use of term, xviii; in reference topographic, 179; colonial
and address, 46. See also Social transformation of, 261. See also Social
categories memory
Mestizo-cholo culture, 457n18 MNR. See Movimiento Nacionalista
Metacommunicative forms, 505n4 Revolucionario
Metaphor. See Herding; Poetics; Mobius strip, and libation dedications,
Recursion, formal 114
Miamicito, market of La Paz, 450n8 Mochadero, sacrifice to, 172
Microhistory, xxiii Modernity: in Spanish colonial project,
Mignolo, Walter D., 12 247-48; and state criteria for canton
Migration, to and from Cruce, 45. See capitals, 332; and Early Modern Spain,
also Forasteros 459n3
Milennial movement, 18th century Mohosa (town): Nina Willka cult in,
rebellion as, 294 278-81; Zarate Willka from, 308
Military: recruitment to, 104; intervention Moieties: Andean, 97, 102, 153, 156,
in Qullana vs. Kawallis land war, 311 464n26, 481n23; reinscribed in
Mills, grist, built by Taquimalcos in reducciones by census-taking and parish
Cahuayo, 285 registry, 256, 258; alternations in
Mining: transformed by viceroy Toledo, fiesta-cargo system, 293; and rebellion,
224; K'ultas' participation in, 458n23; 295, 300; reproduced in new canton
and cosmology, 481n25 capitals, 313; as product of alternation
Miracles, as interfaces between in fiesta sponsorship, 369-70; internal
pre-Columbian and Christian worlds, to K'ulta ayllus, 370; Manxa-Kawalli
209,211 and Alax-Kawalli as, 370. See also
Misas (altar-tables): women's, 94; of Tinku
sponsor's town patio, 98; of women Mojones. See Boundary markers
Index 585

Molina, Cristobal de: on capac hucha, 508n19; sikus, 97, 330; Sirens, and
171, 468n44; his Historia, 172; on Inca musical inspiration at waterfalls, 330;
human and animal sacrifice, 184; on "wet" vs. "dry", and calendrical cycle,
taqui oncoy, 219-20, 478nn8, 9; on 330; t' arkas, seasonality of, 330,
colonial fiaqaq beliefs, 222 508n19; jula-julas and dance groups,
Momigliano, Arnaldo, 16, 17 508n20. See also Carnaval;
Money: diabolical rituals to increase, 124, Dancer-musician "platoons"
510n25; libations for, 233, 509n25; Muslims: Iberian, and Inquisition, 265
mineral production and supays, 481n25 Myth: and the past, 11; as interpreted by
Monstrance, and solar display of host, chroniclers, 14; and historical
326 consciousness, 15; vs. history, 15; as
Monteros (battle helmets), soldiers posing t"aki, 319; historians as debunkers of,
with, 104 409; mentioned, 84. See also Narrative,
Moon. See Virgin Mary pre-Columbian and colonial oral;
Morato, Garcia: scribe in 1640s Narrative, contemporary oral
composicion, 287; and Vrus Moratos, Mythical consciousness: and historical
490n58; libations to in limusna waku consciousness, 16; Spanish forms of, 17
rite in parish house, 509n25
Morisco status in Spain, 151 Nacion, colonial use for "federation", 156
Moros, infants who die without baptism Naqaqs. See K"arisiris
called, 324 Narrative, contemporary oral: as account
Morris, Craig, 163 of colonial situation, 132; about Jesus
Mother's brother. See Larita Christ and Supay-Chullpas, 132, 206,
Mountain gods: Inca sacrifices to, 172. 323-32; as t"aki, 319; told by Pablo
See also Mallkus (mountain gods) Choquecallata, 319, 322-23; K'ulta
Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario dispositions toward, 321; about wild
(MNR): and Bolivian revolution of animals and mountains, 322; told by
1950s, 309; in national politics, 452n6 Bartolome Mamani, 323-24; Jesus
Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Katari, Christ vs. Chullpas myth as philosophy
421 of conquest and history, 325; and other
Muju ("seed"): as male contribution in forms of t"aki, 346; of Qaqachaka,
conception and sacrificial substance, 495nn2, 5; tape recording and
498n18 translation of, 495n4. See also Jesus
Mujuts kasta ("seed line"): relatives Christ vs. Supay-Chullpas myth; Layra
through men, patriline, 341 timpu
Mulato: use of term, xviii. See also Social Narrative, pre-Columbian and colonial
categories oral: and cacique probanzas, 5;
Mullu: precious stones on Colque privileged by chroniclers, 13, 14, 130,
Guarache cumbi, 161; sacrifice of, in 189; as approximation of written event
capac hucha, 172 record, 14; vs. Spanish historical
Mummies. See Ancestors; Chullpa tombs; consciousness, 114, 195; and obscuring
Dead; Funerary ritual of nonwritten memory, 14,411; sources
Municipal autonomy vs. nobility in Spain, of for Qullasuyu, 152; colonization of,
459n4 152, 170; politics of, 169; visible in
Muntu (mundo), 72, 357, 502n38 landscape and heavens, 184; recorded in
Murra, John v., xxiii, 179, 443nl ceque systems and quipus, 185, 474n61;
Musical instruments: charangos, and multipicityof, 192-93, 199; Sarmiento
huayno love songs, 66, 330, 388, on correction of, 193; chroniclers'
586 Index

Narrative, pre-Columbian and colonial Ochatoma, don Pedro, contra perpetuity,

oral (continued) 217
homogenization of, 193, 195-97; Offerings: libations as, 347; as obligating
dynastic, as accounts of cosmogenesis, gift, 349. See also Gifts; Incense
195; Incas privileged and Qullasuyu offering; Sacrifice, contemporary;
silenced by chroniclers, 197; ethnocen- Sacrifice, pre-Columbian and colonial
trism of Incas on Qullasuyu peoples, Olivera, Luis de: on taqui oncoy, 218-19,
197; Cieza de Leon on, 198-99; on 478n8
pre-Columbian evangelization, 199; and Ontology, in K'ulta myth, 326
universal history, 199; on Inca origins in Orality vs. writing: discussed, 12, 170;
Paqariqtambo, 199, 474n61; Huarochiri discussed in chronicles, 166, 191,
manuscript vs. chronicled Inca, 204; of 447nll; as forms of social memory in
Qullasuyu, 204; interculturality of Spain, 167; in Huarochiri manuscript,
Tunupa/Santo Tomas story, 205, 208-9, 191-92; and mutability of texts, 192;
211,213; as account of colonial Salomon on, 195; and disciplinary
relations, 206, 209, 211. See also divide between anthropology and
Tunupa; Writing history, 408; and ethnohistory, 408. See
Nationalism: ethnic, XX; indigenous, 25; also Narrative, pre-Columbian and
and indigenism, 421; and national past, colonial oral; Myth; Writing
421 Ordinances of Toledo: on Christian fiestas
Native lords. See Caciques and drinking in Potosi, 235-36; for
Nebrija, Antonio de, 168 foundation and buena policia in
Negro, use of term, xviii. See also Social Tinquipaya, 241,429-35; deposited in
categories community chest, 242; emendation of,
New Laws: proposed to end encomienda, 249; explained to caciques in Arequipa,
150; and Peruvian civil wars, 150 250; Colque Guarache influences on,
Nina Willka, Martin, jilsa of Mohosa: 251; general ordinances for life in
pilgrimage to Copacabana by, 278; saint indian towns, 251; for mining, 251. See
cult in hamlet chapel, 279-81; also Visita general of Toledo
possession and trance of, 280; use of Orthodoxy. See Christianity, orthodox
rosary by 420, 421 Orthographic conventions of Aymara and
Nostalgia, 24-25 Quechua, 444nnl, 2
Notaries: registers of, xxiii; importance of Oruro (city): prison of, 7; Superior Court
in Spanish empire, 167; establishment of, 7; journey past, 38, 39; Nina Willka
of indigenous scribes, 244, 245, 256; devotions in rancheria of, 279-80;
apostolic and extirpation archive, 268. Domingo Ramirez trial as
See also Registro civil of Culta; Writing; jilsa/embustero in, 489n55
Written documents Oruro, department of: and Bolivian
Novenas, in wak'a cult, 267 political administrative structure, 91,
Nunez Vela, Blasco, first viceroy and 454n2
bearer of New Laws, 150
Nuwasi ("knuckler"). See Tinku Pacajes (federation). See Pakax
Pacaritambo (town), ayllu-directed
Objectivism, in ethnography and history, maintainence of plaza in, 256. See also
409-10, 514nl Paqariqtambo
Ocampo, Diego de, granted Killaka and Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, in Molina
Asanaqi in encomienda, 151 account of capac hucha, 171
Ochani, don Felipe, on Tata Paria tomb, Pachacuti Yamqui, Juan de Santa Cruz: on
181 Tunupa and pre-Columbian
Index 587

evangelization, 205-6, 207-9, 476n69, Paqariqtambo (Inca origin place),

477n71; and cultural translation, 263, "crystallized" as Inca origin place, 181,
417; writing of as catechism project, 194. See also Pacaritambo
476n69 Paria (Inca administrative center), 39,
Pachakuti (change of worlds), 196 147,163
Pachamama, 33, 417. See also Moon; Paria, provincia de, in colonial
T' alias; Virgin Mary administrative structure, 454n2
Padrones, produced in visitas and Parish registers: of Culta church, 104,
archived, 256. See also Visitas 105, 122; of Condo, 119,275, 458n25,
Paez (people), 119 483n39; and visita general, 256
Pageantry, nationalist, 115,419,421 Pasado. See Fiesta-cargo careers
Pakax (federation): territory of, 145; Passover, 109
ethnography and ethnohistory of region, Past: control of interpretation of, 10;
449nl mediation of, 11; construal of, 85;
Palqa (hamlet of Ayllu Qullana): reformation of, 113, 215; presence of,
destruction by Alax-Kawalli raid, 311; 116; K'ulta uses and construals of, 118,
plans for canton capital, 311 319; alternative interpretations of as
Pampa: as extra-social space, 325, 369; as heresy, 258; Spanish vs. "traditional"
floor of house, opposed to sleeping registers of, 258; social processes linked
platform (pata) end, 332; crossed by to, 319; location in space, 346;
interhamlet paths, 369 national, 421. See also History; Social
Pan American Highway: construction of, memory; Space-time, social; Time
102; Pablo Choquecallata and, 309; in Past, Andean: local and imperial,
K'ulta territory, 451nl interweaving of, 4; in Spanish
Panpipes. See Musical instruments historiography, 12; colonization of, 19,
Pantheon: compared to Qurikancha, 152; multiplicity of, 175; remembered
470n45 through location in landscape, 184;
Pantoja, Diego: granted Asanaqi in reconciled with biblical narrative, 188;
encomienda in 1548, 151 textualization of, 190; colonization of
Panza, Sancho: dream of ruling insula, by chroniclers of, 196, 480n21;
166 successive change in, 414; folklore and
Paper, and bureaucratic state, 168 romance of, 421. See also Narrative,
Paq"ara (flower, gift): libation as, 349; pre-Columbian and colonial oral; Social
newborn animals as, 357. See also Ayni; memory
Gift; Paq"arayaiia Pata: as sleeping platform end of house,
Paq"arayaiia (making flower): of llamas contrasted with pampa, 62, 332
during qarwa k"ari, 379; during Path, solar: 331-32, 335. See also
carnaval (photograph), 379; of jaiiachu Cosmology; Jesus Christ vs.
tullqas, with lIantiru pelts, 382; of Supay-Chullpas myth; Sun
lIantiru llamas in human clothes for Paths, interhamlet (t"aki): interhamlet
caravan to town, 383; of sponsoring footpaths, 54; movement and time on,
couple with textile gifts during p"isturu 119; social process and directionality of,
banquet, 392; of saint image, 394-95, 335, 337; ritual use of in Vila Sirka,
397; of sponsors' arkiri followers with 337-40; schematic representation of,
saint's clothing, 395-96. See also 338; and marriage ritual visits, 339; and
Sacrifice, structure of saint sponsorship visits, 339; and
Paqarinas: nerwork of, 150; as generalized genealogy, 340; as conduits of social
Andean concept, 174, 180; and layra, transmission, 343; cross pampa to link
180; and ayllu, 341 hamlets, 369; followed in ch'allas, 369;
588 Index

Paths, interhamlet (t"aki) (continued) bloodletting, 393, 397; metaphorically,

and pillu prestations, 372-73. See also of saint image in bendici6n of isi turka,
Pill us; Visits, interhamlet 395, 397. See also Sacrifice, structure of
Paths, intra hamlet (t"aki): linking chapel Paxsi Kayu (hamlet), 79
and silu, 344 Paxsi Mamala (Mother Moon). See Virgin
Paths of memory (amt'aii t"aki). See Mary
Memory paths Paz Estenssoro, Victor, votes for in
Pathways. See Boundary markers; national elections, 452n6
Fiesta-Cargo Careers; Libations; Peasant. See Campesino
Memory paths; Narrative, Peasant unions. See Sindicatos
contemporary oral; Paths, interhamlet; Pease, Franklin, xxiii
Paths, intrahamlet; Pilgrimage; Social Pechero status, Spanish, equated to indian
memory, contemporary; Space-Time, status in Indies, 226. See also Social
social; T"aki; Visits, interhamlet estate, Spanish
Patriarchalism, of collective politics in Penitential flagellation: of Illuminists, 266;
K'ulta, 342. See also Matriliny; of Santa Rosa de Lima, 279; of Martin
Patrilines Nina Willka, 279-80
Patrilines: lands of, 61; dancing-fighting Penry, Sarah Elizabeth, 299-300, 491n65
platoons of, 102; as labor units, 102; Perez, Corcino, petition to government of,
land claims of, 102; relation between 306-9,438-42
expressed in house construction and Perez Bocanegra, Juan, 262
layout, 333, 496n12; exogamy of, 340, Peroches, don Pascual (vicar general of La
497n15; intermarriage of, and fiesta Plata), and license to found chapel in
alternations, 372; merging in major Culta, 273
fiesta moiety "armies", 373; feuds of, Perpetuity of encomienda: "debate" over
406, 457n12. See also Genealogies; by Polo and Santo Tomas, 217;
Hamlets of K'ulta; Marriage; Matriliny; indigenous response to in Cusco,
Paths, interhamlet 217-18, 477nn2, 3, 4; and millenarism,
Patrimonialism, 87, 309. See also State, 218; and taqui oncoy, 218, 220. See
Bolivian also Encomienda
Patriotism, and indigenista romance of Philip II of Spain: favored perpetuity of
indian, 421 encomienda, 217, 477n2; sale of towns
Patronymic groups. See Hamlets of K'ulta; in Castile, akin to perpetuity, 223;
Patrilines visiting, mapping and cataloguing of
Patronyms. See Patrilines; Surnames realm, 247, 459n2
Paullo Inca, in Spanish conquest of Photography, K'ultas' control of
Qullasuyu, 145; and Almagro representation in, 416
expedition, 461n12 Picaresque. See Fiction
Paxcha ("flowing," moment of cutting in Picota. See Rollo
sacrifice): of "tinku" lIantiru llamas by Pidgin, cultural: 135,265,414-15,416,
Tomas Mamani's tullqas during qarwa 457nnll, 17, 18. See also Discourse;
k"ari, 381; sponsor annoints Frontier; Interculture; Translation,
participants with blood across face, cultural
381; town wallpa k"ari paxcha Pilcomayo River, 42
(photograph), 381; spurting blood Pilgrimage, colonial: to Copacabana, 207;
dedicated to Jesus Christ and Virgin and narrated transformative journeys,
Mary, 381, 506n13; feigned, of tullqa 211; intercultural, 212, 318; Potosi mita
jaiiachus, 383; metaphorically, of as, 225, 234, 481n25; to celebrate
sponsor's human herd in tinku mining wak'as in Caltama, 267-68;
Index 589

Nina WilIka's to Copacabana, 278; to Platt, Tristan, xvii, xxi, 233, 304, 481n25
archives, 284; around borders by Pleiades: as pre-Columbian constellation,
Taquimalco, 286; around boundary 184
markers as social drama, 287; social Pocoata (town): colonial mita ritual in, 233
groups defined through, 287-88; Pocona (Inca coca production zone):
reorientation of, 318 ceque system of, 187
Pilgrimage, contemporary: around Poetics: of libation dedications, 113, 181,
borders, 9; and historical consciousness, 351, 359; in weaving design, 180; t"aki
15; and commerce, 38; to Condo, 119; as ethnopoetic category, 320; recursion
to archives, 284; and intercultural and parallelism in fiesta ritual, 505n4,
shamanism, 417, 418; urban, and 514n44
folklore fiestas, 417-18 Policia. See Buena policia
Pilgrimage-caravan, fiesta: analogy to Political economy: John V. Murra on
trade caravan trips, 383; lIantirus in Andean, xvii; Corcino Perez on
tinku clothes, 383; paq"arayaiia principles of, 307
decoration of herd, 383; caravan from Polo Ondegardo, Licenciado Juan: on Inca
hamlet to town, for fiestas, 383-84, sucession, 141; as agent of Pizarros,
508n17, n18; return caravan to hamlet 150; investigation of ceque system, 152,
and ch'iwu banquet, 395-96; pelts and 185-86; prohibition of public drinking,
textiles as metaphorical operators in, 152,216; on circulation of Inca
399. See also Fiesta, saint's, structure sacrifices, 163-64; on Inca labor levies
of; Trade to supply sacrifices, 170-71; ceque
Pillus (crowns of bread or flowers): bread systems in Chinchasuyu and Qullasuyu,
of ghost's effigy, 335, 337; carried by 174; on ceques and wak' as of Cusco,
junior to senior and by incoming to 174, 470n46; on Andean reburial, 182;
outgoing fiesta sponsors, 505n3. See on Inca human and animal sacrifice,
also Carnaval; Visits, interhamlet 184; on ceque systems in Charcas,
Pirwan Tata (mountain god of Vila Sirka 186-87; on sacrifice, 186-87; on
and Culta): libations to, 122, 348, 349; investigation for purposes of
t'alla of, 349. See also Mallkus eradication, 187; litigation with
(mountain gods); Uywiris; T'allas Qaranka and Killaka over Cochabamba
Pizarro, Francisco: in conquest of Incas, fields, 230; role in design of Potosi
137-39; civil war with Almagro, 143; mita, 230-31; on pre-Columbian
granting of Charcas encomiendas, tribute practices, 466n37; on idols
147-48, 461n15; granted himself taken hostage by Incas, 470n45
Siwaruyu-Arakapi encomienda, 149; Poole, Deborah, xvii-xviii
illiteracy of, 166, 167; grants Acho and Poopo, Lake, 39,42
Guarache to Aldana, 425 -428, 462n17 Popular religiosity, 447nll
Pizarro, Gonzalo: in conquest of Population decline, 224, 413, 414
Qullasuyu, 147; granted Cuysara in Porco (mining center): Aldana possession
encomienda, 149; execution of of Guarache in, 143; Inca mines of,
Hernando de Aldana by, 151; rebellion 149; labor system in, 230; wak'a of,
of, 151; mentioned, 461n15 267-68; Pizarro encomiendas near,
Pizarro, Hernando: gathering of booty, 461n15
145; burning of Qullasuyu lords, 146; Portugal, don Pedro de, granted Killaka in
granted Chichas in encomienda, 149; encomienda in 1548, 151
return to Spain, 167 Possession and trance, in heterodox
Pizarro business enterprise, 149 cofradia practice, 280. See also Ch'iyar
Plate River (Rio de la Plata), 42 yatiri; Nina WilIka, Martin
590 Index

Possession ceremonies: legal act and ritual Priest of Santa Barbara de Culta: visit to
of, 9; Hernando de Aldana of Guarache Culta, 103-9; sermons of, 106,
in Porco, 460n11 510n26; collection of fees, 510n26; and
Postcoloniality, 112,416 plan to relocate church to Cruce,
Postillonaje, Corcino Perez on, 307 510n26; schedule of visits to Cuita,
Postmodernisms, xvii, 409 510n26
Potatoes: provisioning fiestas with, 90; Priests: as profiteers, 216, 278; of
sowing of, 102; wild varieties as reducci6n towns, 256, 273-75, 278;
Chullpa foods, 325; provisioner deities registers of in Condo, 256-58, 275; as
and libation names of, 358; types of in allies of colonial indian rebels, 294,
K'ulta territory, 453n8. See also 295, 298, 300. See also
Foodstuffs Christianization; Extirpation of idolatry;
Potolo (people). See Jallqa Parish registers; Probanzas
Potosi (city): Cieza's journey to,S; Col que Prison, San Pedro, of Oruro, 7
Guarache and mita in, 159; as new Private sphere, 83, 84, 282. See also
taypi q'ala displacing Titicaca, 212; Clandestine practice
chicha-drinking and idolatry in indian Probanzas: Spaniards' compared to
parishes of, 221, 479nn12, 13, 14; cacique probanzas, 159; function of,
Toledan creation of mita, 230-31; 159, 169; of Gonzalez de la Casa, 268,
Colque Guarache fields in vicinity of, 486n46; of Fernando de Mesa, 270,
232; indian parishes of, 232-33, 263, 486n47; of Coroma priest, 277. See
481n24; chicha consumption in, 234; also Caciques, probanzas of; Colque
Christian fiestas in, 235 -36; Guarache, don Juan, probanzas of;
sacramental plays in, 235-36. See also Memorial de Charcas
Potosi, indian parishes of Processions, Christian: and social
Potosi, department of, 42 hierarchy, 256; and 18th-century
Potosi, indian parishes of: rebellions, 294, 300, 492n68. See also
Awllaka-Urukilla and Siwaruyu-Arakapi Corpus Christi; Paths, intra hamlet;
in San Pablo, 232; Killaka and Asanaqi Pilgrimage, colonial; Pilgrimage,
in San Bernardo, 232; foundations by contemporary
Toledo, 232, 481n24; Asanaqi mitayos Progress: as local category in K'ulta, 50
in, 233; Christian fiestas of, 235. See Proofs of merit and service. See Probanzas
also Potosi (city) Protectores de indios, 152, 303
Power, asymmetries of: and cultural Protestantism: in Lake Titicaca region,
meaning, 19; and intercultural xvii; conversion to in K' ulta territory,
discourse, 112, 213; and colonial 124, 320; of colonial indians suppressed
records, 190 by extirpation, 271; in Cruce, 451n15
Powers, Karen Y., 481n22 Provinces. See State, Bolivian
Pragmatics, linguistic, 447n13 Provincialization, in Department of
Prayer, 109 Oruro, 454n2
Predation: as metaphor in interpatriline Public sphere: and authority, 83; vs.
relations, 342-43. See also Lari; Larita; private life, 96; and secrecy, 96;
Marriage orthodoxy of practices in, 111, 456nll;
Prefect: in state hierarchy, 86, 87; colonial distinction from private sphere,
appointment of, 454n3 262; heterodox religiousity exiled from,
Prestige hierarchy: and functionalist 271; Andean understanding of new
analysis, xvi, 81. See also Fiesta-cargo boundaries of, 282; linked to
systems clandestine practice, 283. See also
Index 591

Christianity, orthodox; Clandestine K'ulta, 458n23. See also Aymara

practice; Private sphere language; Spanish language
Pucara (ruins): Tunupa's enemies turned to Quero (drinking vessel): iconography and
stone in, 208 commemorative use of, 181; offered by
Pucarani (town): burning of mallkus in, Atahuallpa to Valverde, lin; as "eyes"
146 of chullpa tombs, 182; in libations, 185
Pukara. See Hamlet chapels Quillacas, Santuario de (town), reducci6n
Pulacayo (mining center), 45 of, 238. See also Killaka (diarchy); Tata
Puna, Nuestra Senora de la Talavera de Quillacas
(town): in Francisco Pizarro Quillacas de Urumiri, lands of purchased
encomienda, 149; Toledan refoundation by Taquimalco for Ayllu Yanaqi, 287
of, 238; 18th-century rebellion in, 299 Quillacas y Asanaques, repartimiento de,
Puna, repartimiento de: as Pizarran 156, 160,231,238. See also Killaka
encomienda, 159, 160; in visita general, (diarchy); Killaka (federation); Asanaqi
238; in Duque de La Palata visita, Quipu kamayuq: illustrated by Guaman
482n29. See also Siwaruyu-Arakapi Poma, 177; compared to Spanish
(diarchy) scribes, 178; and register of colonial
Purification, Virgin of, 345 world, 259; Vaca de Castro interviews
Puruma: as uncultivated extra-social of, 474n61
space, 325; as disputed "no man's Quipus: and Andean literacy issue, 12;
land," 457n12. See also Pampa and narrative, 12-13, 185; Le Goff on,
Pututu. See Bull's horn 13; as icons of ceques and wak'as, 13,
179,185; compared to writing in
Qala p"iri, "stone soup" of wedding rites, chronicles, 166; Spanish admiration of,
498n19 176-78; Acosta on, 178, 471n47;
Qana (federation), 145 functions of, 178-79; of Juan Colque
Qapaq nan. See Inca highway Guarache, 184,258; Cobo on, 192,
Qaqachaka (people), 119, 302, 449nl, 467n41; as colonial chronotopograph,
454n2. See also Cacachaca (town) 259; colonial uses of, 259. See also
Q'ara (insult term), use of, 46, 450nlO. Ceque systems
See also Social categories Quirquiavi (people), ethnography and
Qaranka (federation): possible pairing ethnohistory of, 449nl
with Killaka, 153, 156, 464n26; Quixote de la Mancha, don, and chivalric
preconquest structure, 154; mitimaes in literature, 134, 166, 321
Cochabamba, 154-59, 464n25; in field Qulla (federation): Inca conquest of, 197;
of Colchacollo, map, 157; in their shrine in Lake Titicaca, 206;
construction of Tata Paria tomb, 181; Tunupa-apostle's preaching to, 206;
ethnography and ethnohistory of region, their martyring of Tunupa, 207
449nl Qullana (ayllu of K'ulta): and fiesta
Qaraqara (federation): in construction of participation, 97, 98; and land war us.
Tata Paria tomb, 181; sources on Kawallis, 102, 310-11; cantonization
Qaraqara-Charka macro-federation, petition and denunciations of don Pablo
462n19 Choquecallata, 310-11, 446n8; peasant
Quechua language: mallkus' use of, 4; and union in, 311; internal fiesta rotation in,
ethnic or class identity, 46; use of, 53, 370. See also K'ulta (people)
122; spoken by Hernando de Aldana in Qullasuyu: visita of, 3; early encomienda
Cajamarca, 137; Inca instruction of grants in, 138; described, 145; Spanish
provincial lords in, 161; spoken in conquest of, 145; map of, 148; Inca
592 Index

Qullasuyu (continued) 449n4;of 1920s, 308-9, 449n4; and

administration of, 153; macro-moiety 1950s revolution, 309; of 1750 in Lima,
division of, 153; preconquest social 492n68; of Macha, 492n73. See also
structure in, 154-57; division of suyus Catari, Tomas; Tupac Amaru I; Tupac
in Colchacollo chacara, 157; chullpa Amaru II; Tupac Catari
construction in, 182; lack of narrative Recipocity: asymmetrical, 162; and gifts
sources from, 197; microcosm of in of drink, 349; and revenge, 512n34. See
Potosi mita, 231; pilgrimage to Porco also Ayni; Gifts; Paq"ara; Paq"arayaiia
wak'a and reintegration of, 267; Reconquest, Spanish, as crusade, 132
Almagro looting in, 461n12. See also Recursion, formal: in weaving process and
Inca (people and empire) design, 180; in libations, 351, 359; in
Qullqa (storehouses), of heavens, 184 fiesta ritual, 505n4
Quntu (people): ethnography of, 121, Reducci6n: as transformation in lived
449nl. See also Condo, San Pedro de space and time, 237; Real Cedula of
(town) 1549 on, 237, 428-29; process of, 238;
Qurikancha of Cusco, compared to as doctrina, 239; jurisdictions of and
Pantheon, 470n45 similarity to Castilian villas, 239; layout
Q'uwa: decoration and burning of untu of, 239; Matienzo proposal for, 239;
Ilantiru figurines in, 360-61, 377, 388. civilizational project in, 240; as amnesia
See also Incense offering; Sacrifice, technique, 240, 250, 252; town councils
structure of of, 241-46; imperial mapping, visiting,
and archiving of, 247; surveillance and
Race, vs. class and ethnicity, 463n23. See discipline in, 247-49, 252; Toledan
also Social categories intructions for creation of, 248; of
Ramirez del Aguila, Licenciado Pedro: on Tinquipaya, 248, 429-35; Sanabria on
indian Christ of Tacobamba, 486n47; buena policia in, 248, 434-35; Toledan
on Colque Guarache Lutheran revolt, explanation to caciques of, 250-51;
486n48 effects within Asanaqi diarchy, 252-58;
Ramos Gavilfm, Fray Alonso: on Tunupa Zarate of Tacobamba, 255;
as apostle, 205 -6; on Copacabana depopulation of and conversion to
miracles, 206 ritual center, 283-84; 18th-century
Ranger Battalion of Challapata, and Che, multiplication of, 284; hamlets modeled
454n9 on, 284; diarchy fissioning through
Rappaport, Joanne, xviii, 119 border squabbles among, 288; role in
Rasnake, Roger N., xviii 18th-century rebellions, 294; Malaga
Rebellion, indigenous: caciques killed and Medina on, 482n33; Fraser on, 482n34.
priests spared in 18th century, 294, 301; See also Buena policia; Calendar,
led by town councilmen in 18th century, pre-Columbian and colonial; Discipline,
294; of 1774 in Condo, 294; tinkus as work; Ordinances of Toledo;
platform for, 294, 295, 300-301; in Surveillance; Town councils, colonial;
Culta, 295, 297-98, 437-38, 492n74, Visita general of Toledo
n75; in Challapata, 296-298, 492n70; Regidores (aldermen), established in
in Chayanta, 298-300, 492n69; in reducciones, 244
Aullagas (of Chayanta), 300; Spaniards Registro civil of Culta, 60, 68, 340
called apostates in, 300; Christian Relaciones: interests in, 136; as
devotion in, 300-301; in La Paz, curriculum vitae, 169; and the novel,
300-301; of Tupac Catari, 300-301, 415. See also Archival culture;
449nl; of Zarate Willka in 1899, 308, Chronicles; Fiction; Probanzas
Index 593

Relaciones Geognificas, 459n2 revolution, 309. See also Rebellion,

Relativity, Einstein's theory of, 321 indigenous
Requerimiento: in Cajamarca, 165; and
Just War, 166 Sacaca (town and people). See Sakaka
Resistance, cultural: limitations as analytic Sacrifice, contemporary: as substitute for
paradigm, xix-xx, 22, 25, 109-10; as self, xxii; in lurya misa, 105, 108-9;
historical hypothesis, xx; rhetoric of, historical consciousness in, 116; and
xx; and functionalist assumptions, xxi; ritual apprenticeship of K'ulta
romanticism of, xxi-xxii; via authorities, 122; circulation of
counterhegemony, 19; and colonialism, substances in, 163-64; holocaust, in
115, 116; evidence for in colonial texts, K'ulta, 183; stages of, 351, 374-75;
275; in ritual, 514n44 libations in, 351, 375-76, 377-78,
Retablo, and Pachacuti Yamqui drawing, 382, 512n37; metaphorical equations
476n69. See also Saint images, colonial; in, 376, 377; feigned, in pageant
Saint images of Culta folkloric dramas, 421; blood and fat as
Revenge, termed ayni, 512n34 gods' portions in, 498n18, 501n30,
Revolution of 1952, 32, 309, 450n5 506n13; curing, 501n30; dedicatory,
Revolution of the communities of 501n30; funerary, 501n30, 507n13;
1520-1521,133; echo of in kumun wilara for vara of jilaqata,
anti-perpetuity riots, 218 513n42; k"arisiri practice as
Rites of passage: and the seasonal anti-sacrifice, 513n43. See also
calendar, 330; and fiesta-cargo careers, Eucharist; Fiesta, saint's, structure of;
369. See also Baptism; Fiesta-cargo Herding; L1antiru; Q'uwa; Sacrifice,
careers; Funerary ritual; Marriage structure of; Wilara
Ritual: and the past, 11; as social memory, Sacrifice, pre-Columbian and colonial:
14; as historical instrumentality, 22; Inca mummy participation in, 139;
clandestine, 76, 77; defined, 332; visita Christian, 168; and writing, 170; of
as, 462n19 humans in capac hucha, 171, 173; in
Rollo: erected to found Spanish towns, capac hucha, 171-172; unreported in
144; punishment at in reducciones, 242, Andean probanzas, 173; and social
243 memory, 182-183; Anonymous Jesuit
Romance, anthropological, 23, 116 on, 184; Molina on, 184; Polo on, 184;
Romans, of Spanish Christ stories Colque Guarache quipus on, 234-235;
assimilated to Chullpas in Andean at mining wak'a, 268; Cobo on,
narrative, 326 472n54. See also Eucharist; Offerings;
Romerias. See Pilgrimage Sacrifice, contemporary
Roots: of corrals, 341; of misas, 348; of Sacrifice, structure of: distribution of
house, 496n12; of silus, 509n22; of victim in, 101, 381, 382, 388, 391,
hamlet chapel niiiu crosses, 509n22; 399, 501n30, 506n13; stages of, 351,
interconnections among, 509n22 374-375; sacrificial llamas as tinku
Rosary: and quipus, 178; Nina Willka use warriors, 357, 367; paq"arayaiia and
of in cult to Copacabana image, 279, offering of q' uwa lIantiru figurines in
420 uywa ispira, 360-61, 377, 388; qarwa
Rostworowski, Maria, xxiii k"ari dedications, 362, 377-78,
Rowe, John H., xvii, 175, 443nl 501n30; human tinku as, 367; division
Rural protest: of 1780s, 32; of 1980, 32; between hamlet and town sacrifices,
of 1992, 32; of 1899, 308, 449n4; of 375; uywa ispira dedications, 375-76;
1920s, 308-9, 449n4; and 1950s parallelism and metaphorical operations
594 Index

Sacrifice (continued) rituals of, 512n36, 513n40; attributes,

in, 376, 377, 389, 396-401; powers, and possessions of, 512n38;
paq"arayafia of llamas in corral, main images vs. miniature images,
379-80; paxcha of lIantirus in corral, 512n38; surti walas of "chosen" but
381; blood offering to Jesus Christ and non-practicing yatiris returned to,
annointing of followers, 382; eating 512n38. See also Guadalupe, Virgin of;
lIantiru ch'iwu organs in corral, 382; lsi turka; Santa Barbara de Culta; San
paq"arayafia and paxcha of Antonio; Exaltaci6n
tullqa-jafiachus, 382-83; Saints: and lightning, mediating power of,
pilgrimage-caravan to town of tinkur 109; apparitions of Santa Barbara de
awki lIantirus, 383-84, 508nn17, 18; Culta, 272; chicha libations to, 364; as
wallpa k"ari paxcha in town, 384-87; emissaries between alax-pacha and
town q'uwa offering, 388; qurpa manxa-pacha, 364-65; horizontal and
banquet, 391, 511n31; ch'iwu meal and vertical mediating powers of, 400
jafiachu paq"arayafia and paxcha, 392; Sakaka (town and people), ethnography
paq"arayafia of sponsors, 392; tinku of,449nl
battle, 392-93; isi turka removal of Saldana, Gaspar de, on chicha and
saint's clothing, 394 - 95; return idolatry in Potosi, 220
pilgrimage to hamlet wearing saint's Salinas de Garci Mendoza (town), Toledan
clothes, and hamlet ch'iwu banquet, creation as reducci6n of Salinas de
395-96. See also Banquet (qurpa); Tunupa, 238
Ch'iwu; Eucharist; Fiesta, saint's, Salomon, Frank, xviii, 18, 192, 195, 196,
structure of; lsi turka; Jafiachu; 463n22
L1antiru; Paq"arayafia; Paxcha; Samarayafias (resting places), on paths to
Pilgrimage-caravan, fiesta; Tinku; Santa Barbara de Culta, 452n2;
Victim, sacrificial, distribution of "breathing" stops on pilgrimage, 508n18
Sahlins, Marshall D., 464n28 Samiris: of humans, 281, 502n37; of herd
Saint banner: in fiesta of Guadalupe, 98; animals, 357
of Santa Barbara, confiscated in 1620s, Sanabria, Diego de, reducci6n of
273 Tinquipaya and ordinances for,
Saint fiesta. See Fiesta, saint's, structure 241-46,429-35
of; Fiestas, saints', colonial San Andres (fiesta of), 81
Saint images, colonial: cult to in San Antonio (image of): theft of by Ayllu
reducciones and hamlets, 270; Nina Yanaqi, 312; chicha libations to as
Willka cult to Copacabana, 279-80; llama patron, 378
chapel retablo and church image as San Bartolome (apostle), and Tunupa,
token and type, 283; Domingo Ramirez 205,210-11. See also Santo Tomas;
cult to Guadalupe, 489n55. See also Tunupa; Taguapaca
Copacabana, Virgin of; Santa Barbara San Bernardo (Killaka and Asanaqi parish
de Culta; Guadalupe, Virgin of in Potosi): Colque Guarache church
Saint images in K'ulta: miniature, in fiesta construction in, 232; foundation of,
of Guadalupe, 98; moving of during 481n24
construction, 105; devotion to, 106; San Lucas de Payacollo (town): as fortress
appearance of Santa Barbara, 272- 73; contra Chiriguanos, 239; reducci6n in
thefts of and miracles by, 312; of visita general, 239; don Francisco
hamlet chapels, 344; as household Visalia, cacique of, 464n27
patrons, 344; isi turka rites in saint San Pedro, and key to heaven, 121
fiestas, 394-95, 512nn36, 37, 38, Santa Barbara de Culta (saint): fiesta of,
513nn39, 40; twice-monthly isi turka 81, 97, 374, 387; pilgrims visit with,
Index 595

104; apparition of, 117,272, 458n20; Sermon, of priest of Santa Barbara de

apparition of, 272; foundation of Culta,106
cofradia of, 272-73; purchase of by Shamanic practices: intercultural, 115,
Chiris of Ayllu Kawalli, 273 417-18,420; abogado as saint
Santa Cruz, Mariscal Andres de, 91 intercessor in, 104; Nina Willka chapel
Santa Rosa de Lima, questioned by practices, 278-81, 420; Tios of mines,
Inquisition, 266; penitential practices of, and saints, 402, 505n6; surti wala
279 shaman whistles, 417; 503n44; and
Santa Teresa de Avila, questioned by Bolivian politics, 418; mentioned, 83,
Inquisition, 266 84,414. See also Ch'iyar yatiri;
Santo Tomas (apostle), and Tunupa, 205, Kallawaya; Sorcery; Yatiris
208. See also San Bartolome; Tunupa; Sheep: sacrifice of, 105; libations to, 356
Taguapaca Shops of vecinos, 98
Santo Tomas, Fray Domingo de: shown Sikkink, Lynn, 458n24
ceque system of Pocona by Polo, 187; Sikus. See Musical instruments
and perpetuity, 217 Silences: documentary, 15; ethnographic,
Sap"i. See Roots 15; structure of, 15
Sa psi paxsi, ritual of Potosi mitayos, 222 Siles Suazo, Hernan: votes for in national
Sarmiento de Gamboa, Pedro: inquisitorial elections, 452n6
techniques and Andean narrative, Silu (saint peak), rites at altar of, 344, 345
193-194, 474n59; on Inca origins, Silverblatt, Irene, xviii
200-203; on Viracocha as creator, Simoni des of Ceos, 16
200-203; on Babel, 201; on creation at Sindicatos (peasant unions): formation of
Paqariqtambo vs. Tiwanaku, 201; on in agrarian reform, 309; in Ayllu
universal flood, 201; on Viracocha and Qullana,311
Taguapaca, 201; on destruction of Sister's husband. See Tullqa
Cacha by fire, 203; reads Andean Siwaruyu-Arakapi (diarchy): granted in
narrative into universal history, 203; on encomienda to Francisco Pizarro, 149;
tyranny of Incas, 474n60 disaggregated from Killaka federation,
School teacher, in Santa Barbara de Culta, 149,232; map of, 158; under Colque
61 Guarache rule in Potosi mita, 232. See
Schools: of Cruce, 44, 45; in Santa also Coroma; Puna, Nuestra Senora de
Barbara de Culta, 61; of province and la Talavera de; Tomahavi, Todos Santos
canton capitals, 310 de
Schwartz, Barry, 129 Skulls: in money increase rites, 124;
Scott, James c., 24 chicha drunk from, 295
Scribes. See Notaries Smith, Raymond T., xxi
Scripture. See Bible Social agency: and history, 16,400;
Secret practices. See Clandestine practices construction of, 114; colonial narratives
Seed line. See Mujuts kasta about, 205; and Jesus Christ vs.
Semiotics, and cultural closure, 111, Supay-Chullpa myth, 328-32; and
447n13. See also Functionalism; social process, 328-30; and social
Structuralism memory, 400-401
Senorio: granting of, 132; Andean Social categories: and euphemism,
diarchies and federations interpreted as, 450n12; hypostatization of, 450n12.
134. See also Encomienda See also Blanco; Campesino; Cholita;
Serenas (Sirens), and musical inspiration Cholo; Criollo; Ethnicity; Espanol;
at waterfalls, 330. See also Musical Indian; Indio; Mestizo; Mulato; Negro;
instruments; Sam iris Race; Social class; Spaniard
596 Index

Social class: and ethnicity, distributed Social memory, pre-Columbian and

through urban space in La Paz, 30-37; colonial: non-written forms
and culture, 457n17; vs. race and unchronicled, 13, 189,410; Polo on,
ethnicity, 463n23. See also Ethnicity; 14; construction of, 15; and historical
Race; Social estate, Spanish contestation, 16; politics of, 16;
Social climbing: and historical documents, alternative forms of perceived as Satanic
136; of conquistadors, 151, 166; mimicracy, 18; Spanish investigation of
importance of archival writing for, 167 and assault on, 18, 152,413; equated
Social estate, Spanish, 133-34, 135, 166; with idolatry, 18, 164, 189,216;
and Andean social hierarchy, 135 practiced in Inca administrative centers,
Social memory: permutations of, 10; 163; heterogeneity of, 175; multiple
definition of, 11, 23, 448n13; and media of, 175-76; libations as, 181,
culture concept, 21; embodiment of, 21; 185; chullpa tombs as places of,
arts of, 113; as source for cultural 181-82; and devotions to ancestors,
history, 120; techniques of, 124; 181-82, 185; as countermemory, 182;
mutural interferences of Spanish and and sacrifice, 182-83; llamas' role in,
Andean forms, 129; oral vs. written 183-84; forms of, 184-90; registers
registers of, 129, 166, 167, 448n13; and media of, 185,217; of Inca
non-narrative forms, 130, 166; and provinces, 185-87; colonial erasure and
cultural translation, 152, 153; reinscription of, 188,217,413-14;
intercultural, 206, 212, 214; techniques shifted with changes in social form,
vs. content of, 318; untranslatability to 189,413-14; adapted to account for
written text of, 319; carried in collective Spaniards and conquest, 189,414;
practice, 320; mutability and processual polysensual techniques of, 192,411; in
nature of, 320; vs. ethnohistorical taqui oncoy, 220; visita general and
reconstruction, 444n5; bibliography of, reducci6n as attack on, 240-41,
446n9; covaries with shape of social 251-52; co-exist with Spanish forms of,
formation, 448n13; and social theory, 258; boundary markers and pilgrimages
448n13. See also Historical as technique of, 290; innovation in,
consciousness; Landscape; Libations; 291,414; fiesta-cargo systems as forms
Memory paths; Narrative; Pathways; of, 293, 416; colonial adoption of new
Writing forms and registers of, 414; and cultural
Social memory, contemporary: authorities pidgin, 414-15; and clandestinity,
as repositors of, 85; and genealogy, 113; 416-17. See also Capac hucha;
and landscape, 113; and libation Historical consciousness; Landscape;
dedications, 113; fiesta-cargo systems as Libations, pre-Columbian and colonial;
forms of, 293, 416; vs. written history Narrative, pre-Columbian and colonial;
of K'ulta, 317-18; of Pablo Pathways; Taquies; Writing
Choquecallata, 319; techniques and Social memory, Spanish forms of: 17;
registers of, 319; as t"aki, 320; and documentary type, 129; appropriated by
social agency, 400-401; collective caciques, 152; autos sacramentales as,
articulation of, 414; and cultural pidgin, 167; cantares as, 167; Corpus Christi
414-15; and clandestinity, 416-17; procession as, 167; Eucharist as, 167;
national and global forms of, 420. See co-exist with Andean forms, 258. See
also Landscape; Libations, also Chronicles; History; Writing
contemporary; Memory paths; Social organization, pre-Columbian. See
Narrative, contemporary oral; Ayllus; Ceque systems; Diarchies;
Pathways; T"aki; Writing Federations; Moieties; Qullasuyu; Suyus
Index 597

Social skin: concept of, 179; textiles Spaniard: use of term, xviii; vs. indian in
and llama pelts as, 183, 185,397,399, colonial consciousness, 114. See also
400 Social categories
Social stratification, Bolivian, 451n12 Spanish empire, compared to British and
Sommer, Doris, 421 French, 459n3
Sora. See Sura Spanish language, use of, 53. See also
Sorcery: anthropological, 115; skulls, in Aymara language; Quechua language
money increase rites, 124, 403; Springs: Inca sacrifices to, 172; hot, of
performed on Tuesdays and Fridays, K'ulta and Poopo, 458n26
124, 403, 510n25; of Diego Iquisi, Staff god of Tiwanaku, depiction of, 202.
268-69; interpreted as fraud, 278; as See also Tunupa
frontier alternative to sacrificial order, Staffs of office. See Varas
403; creole use of indian shamans to State, Bolivian: creole state and nationalist
undo, 414; frontier, 420; historical, ideology, 115; Napoleonic
421; magical practices, 450n7. See also administrative structure of, 309;
Ch'iyar yatiri; Shamanic practices cantones in, 310; province
Source criticism, of documents and administration, 310; increased
ethnographic observations, 14, 15, indigenous participation in, 421. See
411 also Cantonization; Elections; Military;
Source validation, in Aymara language, Prefect; Provincialization; Subprefect
71-72,319 Stern, Steve J., xviii, 22, 218, 448n13
Space: colonial forms of, 19; colonization Structuralism: in Andean ethnography,
of, 188,252; co-construed with time xvii, xviii; and cultural closure, xvii,
along itineraries, 318; social meanings 111; criticism of, 448n14
of coordinates in, 332. See also Buena Subjectivity, individualized, and
policia; Cosmology; Landscape; citizenship, 421
Pilgrimage; Reduccion; Space-time, Subprefect: and research permission, 78;
social; T"aki; Time and murder case, 79; in state hierarchy,
Space-time, social: layra timpu portals of, 86, 454n3; council cases referred to, 88;
180, 367; and landscape, 184; firing of pistol, during Santa Barbara
colonization of, 188; and reduccion, fiesta, 509n24
237; quipus as chronotopograph, 259; Sucullu naming rite, in Bertonio, 496n13
construed as itineraries, 318; ceque Sucre, Jose Antonio de, 91
systems as chronotopes, 321; t"akis Sucre (city), foundation of, 144, 147
chart social process in, 321; cosmogeny Suicide, indigenous, 217, 219, 220
of and Jesus Christ vs. Supay-Chullpas Sullkayana (ayllu of Cahuayo), and
myth, 326-28, 330-31, 344-46; murder of Llanquipachas, 295
gendering of orientation in, 333; human Sun: as Inca god, 171; called Tatala and
control of, 345 -46; concentric identified with Jesus Christ, 325;
hierarchy in, 359-60; and agency, 368; movement of as t"aki, 328, 335; and
experiential mapping of social cosmology, 330. See also Jesus Christ
organization in fiesta visits, 386, 388. Supay, etymology, uses and meanings of,
See also Buena policia; Calendar; Ceque 101,456nll, 481n25, 509n23
systems; Chronotope; Cosmology; Supay-Chullpas: and Jesus Christ in K'ulta
Landscape; Libations, contemporary; myth, 110, 118, 132,323-32; K'ulta
Narrative, contemporary; Pilgrimage; infants compared to, 335. See also
Social memory; Space; T"aki; Time Jesus Christ vs. Supay-Chullpas myth;
Spalding, Karen, xviii, 22, 225 Supay
598 Index

Superstitious practice, sorcery amt'afi t"akis as paths of memory, 321,

reinterpreted as, 279 346; and caravan trade, 330; and Jesus
Sura (federation): mitimas in Christ vs. Supay-Chullpa myth,
Cochabamba, 154-59; in construction 331-32; linking hamlet chapel and silu,
of Tata Paria tomb, 181; ethnohistory 344, 345; Solar Christ itinerary as
of, 449nl; encomienda of Lorenzo de primordial, 346; gendered landscapes
Aldana, 461nll in, 359, 500n27; concatenation of
Surnames: and patrilines, 333; Spanish alax-pacha and manxa-pacha
imposition of matronyms and hierarchies and processes in, 365;
patronyms, 340, 497n16. See also analogies among kinds of, 369; Milky
Genealogy; Marriage; Patrilines Way as, 496n9. See also Boundaries;
Surti ("luck"): as libation dedication, 358, Boundary markers; Fiesta-cargo careers;
503n44; surti wala shaman whistles, Libations, contemporary; Memory
503n44,512n38 paths; Narrative, contemporary oral;
Surveillance: as Counter-Reformation Paths, interhamlet; Pilgrimage;
discipline, 133; and Andean social Space-time; Taquies
memory, 189; in reducci6nes, 241; and T'allas (feminine plain): as counterparts of
clandestinity of heterodox practice, 262, masculine deities, 348, 356, 502n34.
415,416; increased after Council of Tambos,38
Trent, 265, 276; and pidgin culture, Taquies: performance of along ceques, 14;
415. See also Clandestine practice; and ritual drinking, 140; as epics
Counter-Reformation; Extirpation of performed in landscape, 179; and
idolatry; Inquisition; Reducci6n; Visitas rhythms of past, 184; transformed by
Suyus, of Killaka and Qaranka in colonialism, 263; mentioned, 185,221,
Colchacollo field, 156-57 321. See also Social memory,
Syncretism, concept of, 109. See also pre-Columbian and colonial
Christianization; Civilizational project; Taquimalco (cacique lineage of Asanaqi):
Clandestine practice; Interculture; purchase of lands in composici6n,
Pidgin, cultural; Translation, cultural 285-86; purchase of Quillacas lands
for Ayllu Yanaqi, 287; 18th-century
Tacobamba (town): reducci6n of, 255; litigation with Colque Guarache
Ayllu Ilawi street in, 255, 270; indian descendants, 295
Christ of, 270-71 Taqui oncoy: repression of, 214; Molina
Taguapaca: as prodigal son of Viracocha on, 218-19, 478nn8, 9, 10; as battle
in Sarmiento, 201; as pre-Columbian of histories, 219; significance of
apostle, 203, 475n65; and the devil, term, 219. See also Perpetuity of
204. See also Tunupa encomienda
Taki, suffix differentiated from t"aki, 348 Tarija (city and region), ethnohistory of,
T"aki: jach'a p"ista t"akis (great fiesta 449nl
paths), 89, 321, 344, 369; jiska p"ista T'arkas. See Musical instruments
t"akis (small fiesta paths), 90, 344; Tasa: of Gasca, 215-16; contemporary,
zig-zag textile design element as, 180; 388-89, 511n32; of Toledo, 464n27,
boundary pilgrimages as, 290; new 482n30. See also Kawiltu kumprafia;
forms of in colonial world, 291; as Tribute; Visita general of Toledo
K'ulta poetics, 320; Protestantism as Tata Asanaqi (mountain god), libations to,
"path of Jesus," 320; definition of and 42,120,122
forms in K'ulta, 320, 346; narrative as, Tata Awatir Awksa ("Our Father
321; and social agency, 321, 331-32; Shepherd"). See Jesus Christ
Index 599

Tatala. See Jesus Christ Thunder, Inca god, 171

Tata Paria (mallku of Qaraqara), Tiendas. See Shops of vecinos
construction of chullpa tomb for, 181, Time: colonial forms of, 19; creole and
472n52 ethnographic location of indigenous
Tata Porco (idol of Caltama wak'a), 267 cultures in, 24, 318, 417; colonization
Tata Quillacas (Christ image), and of, 188,252; linear vs. cyclic, 196;
residual memory of Killaka federation, construal with space via pathways, 318.
154 See also Buena policia; Chronotope;
Tata rey. See Varas Cosmology; Landscape; Reducci6n;
Taussig, Michael T, xviii, 23, 403, 481n25 Space; Space-time, social
Tawantinsuyu. See Inca empire Tinku: sacramental nature of ritual
Tayksa t"akis ("Our Mother paths"). See violence, 66, 290, 301; between ayllus
Fiesta-cargo careers and moieties of K'ulta, 100, 102; as
Taylor, William, xv strategy of 18th-century rebellion, 294,
Taypi qala: Potosi as, 212; Tiwanaku as, 295, 300-301, 492n68; sacrificial
212 llamas compared to tinku warriors,
Teleology, of imperialist or nationalist 357; as human sacrifice, 367; in
projects, 448n15 Guadalupe fiesta, 392-93; as urban
Testament, last will and: of Guarache, folkloric dance, 419; and affinal
481n26; of Juan Colque Guarache, relations, 497n15; vs. ch'axwa, 512n34.
481n26 See also Land wars; Moieties; Sacrifice,
Testimony in court, by author, 7-8 structure of
Testimony, eyewitness: and ancient Tinquipaya, Nuestra Senora de Belen de
historians, 16; and source validation in (town): "ethnic" composition of, 241;
Aymara language, 71- 72, 319 reducci6n of, 241; ordinances of,
Textiles: traded by hippy capitalists, 48; 241-42;429-35
weaving of, 80; in ritual, 95; sacrifice Tios of mines, relationship co saints, 402,
of, in capac hucha, 171; used to clothe 505n6. See also Shamanic practices;
wak'as and mummies, 182, 183, Sorcery
187-88; used to clothe Inca sacrificial Titicaca, Lake: ritual-authority in region
llamas, 183; as vehicle of social of, xvii; and ceque system, 4; basin,
memory, 185; used to create effigy of ethnography of, 448nl
Hilari6n Mamani in K'ulta, 335; of Titu Cusi Yupanqui, don Diego de Castro,
mourning, 337; as altar cloths, 347; in account of Cajamarca events, 164-65,
metaphorical equations of sacrifice, 357, 181
376,392, 394-95, 396-401; as Titulos primordiales, 489n56. See also
clothing of llantiru llamas, 383-84; as Land titles
gifts to sponsor, 392; as saint's clothes, Tiwanaku: ruins of, 5, 37; Inca narrative
395-96; gender marking of stripe sources on, 197; as Inca origin place,
orientation of, 496n13. See also Cumbi; 197; Sarmiento on creation in, 200; as
Sacrifice, structure of; Social skin Babel, 201; staff god of, 202; Tunupa
Thola Palca (hamlet and former tambo of turns people of to stone, 209; as taypi
Alax-Kawalli), church construction and qala,212
saint thieving in, 312 Todos Santos (fiesta): and ritual of mica of
Thomas, Nicholas, 24 Potosi, 234, 481n25, 508n20; return of
Thorns, as barriers to ghosts: in myth, dead on, 481n25, 508n19
323; in dispatch of the dead, 337 Toledo, Francisco de (viceroy of Peru):
Thucydides, 16 changes wrought by, 214; aim to hobble
600 Index

Toledo, Francisco de (continued) on, 413. See also Discourse; Frontier;

Peruvian aristocracy, 223; reforms of, Interculture; Pidgin, cultural
223-25; creation of Potosi mita, based Travel: and personhood, 11; and borders,
on Inca mit'a in Cochabamba, 230-31; 83; by K'ultas, and costume, 93; hamlet
visita general of, 237-56; on cacique to town for fiestas, 97; and itinerant
opposition to reducci6n, 240; execution trade, 100; itineraries of as t"akis, 320.
of Tupac Amaru I, 261; assignment of See also Pilgrimage; Trade
Cochabamba fields to Colque Guarache, Tribute: paid by Spanish vassals, 166-67;
464n25; tasa of, 464n27. See also Visita colonial transformation of, 188;
general of Toledo; Ordinances of Toledo Toledan transformation of, 225;
Tomahavi, Todos Santos de (town): rumored reduction of in rebellions,
reducci6n of, 238, 482n29 296-98. See also Kawiltu kumpraiia;
Toropalca (town): extirpation in, 267, 435 Tasa
Town council, colonial: modeled on those Tribute, preconquest. See Labor
of Castilian villas, 241, 246; community Troll, Carl, 38
chest in, 242; community property Trueno, fray Alonso, on chicha and
administered by, 242; punishment idolatry in Potosi parishes, 221, 479n12
administered by, 242; records kept by, Tukapus (textile iconography), 180,
242, 244; religious duties of, 244; 472n50
composition of, 244, 246; election of, Tullqa (sister's husband or daughter's
246; relation to caciques, 246, 255; husband): subservient ritual roles of, 69,
litigation over boundaries, 284; 342-43, 498n19; and collective labor,
challenges to caciques, 291; as experts 102; and impersonation of deceased
in intersecting t"akis, 291; circular letter larita, 335; of Tomas Mamani in qarwa
among in rebellion, 297, 437-38. See k"ari rite, 378-83; paq"arayaiia of
also Ordinances of Toledo; Reducci6n llamas by, 379; competetive butchering
Town council, contemporary. See of llantiru llamas by, 382; paxcha by,
Authorities of Santa Barbara de Culta 382; impersonation of sacrificed llamas
Town council, republican: subordinated to as jaiiachu, 382-83, 507n16
mestizo/vecino corregidor, 305; powers Tunu: root or founding ancestor, 209
of attorney for petitions to state, Tunupa: stories of and Qullasuyu myth
305-8; resurgence after 1950s agrarian tradition, 204-5; assimilated to Santo
reform, 309; and cantonization, 310 Tomas/San Bartolome, 205;
Town council office: described, 57; Bouysse-Cassagne on, 205; Gisbert on,
proceedings in, 57-60 205; Wachtel on, 205; stories of as
Towns: sale of in Castile, 223, 285; state intercultural narration, 206, 213;
criteria for cant6n capitals, 332; Ramos Gavilan on, 206-7, 475n67,
Spanish significance of, 459nl 476n68; footprints of, 207; martyrdom
Trade: by llama caravan, 42, 43, 48, 77; of, 207; and creation of aquatic axis,
by truck, 42, 43; in textiles, 48; 207,209,212; Pachacuti Yamqui on,
itinerant, 100 207-9, 476n70, 477n71; and cross of
Tradition, invention of, 448n13 Carabuco, 208; and chonta staff or
Translation, cultural: unsuccessful, 135; in stave, 208-9; and destruction of pagan
Spanish interpretation of Andean peoples, 208-9; actions of prefigure
realities, 152-53; intercultural, 170, evangelizers and extirpators, 209;
213; equations among Andean and Guaman Poma's Tunupa-San Bartolome,
Christian deities, 262; efforts of 210; Guaman Poma on, 210-11; and
"transcultural" authors, 263; Awllaka-Urukilla, 212; and Ekeko, 212;
incompletion of, 263; colonial sources mountain named, 212; Jesus Christ as
Index 601

narrative heir of, 325. See also of, 458n27; multiple in hamlet, 502n32.
Taguapaca; San Bartolome; Santo See also Mallkus (mountain gods);
Tomas; Narrative, pre-Columbian and Misas; T' alias
colonial oral; Viracocha
Tupac Amaru I, executed in Cusco by Vaca de Castro, Cristobal, and quipu
Toledo, 144,261. See also Rebellion, kamayuqs of Cusco, 474n61
indigenous Valladolid (city), Illuminists arrested in,
Tupac Amaru II, 18th-century rebellion of, 266
300. See also Rebellion, indigenous Values: and mallku submission to Incas,
Tupac Catari, siege of La Paz by, 32, 161; old regime, sustained in Castile by
300-301; 449n4. See also Rebellion, indian silver, 226, 459n4
indigenous Valverde, Fray Vicente de: on Hernando
Tupac Yupanqui Inca, in Colque Guarache de Aldana's role in Cajamarca, 138; and
probanza, 160 Atahuallpa, 164, 181
Turri mallku. See Church tower Varas: taken to hear mass in Condo, 120;
Tryants, Incas as in Toledan revisionism, planted in mojon in K'ulta territory,
227 289, 490n60; and ritual altar, 347;
symbolism of, 458n22, 490n61; Manco
Umasuyu, 153. See also Moieties; Capac use of, 490n61; kumun wilara
Qullasuyu sacrifice for, 513n42. See also Chonta
Untu (body fat): in incense offerings, Vassals: granted by Crown for soldierly
360-61; as male generative substance, service, 167; indians as the king's, 251
498n18,503n36 Vecino, as term of self-reference, 45
Urbano, Henrique, 209 Vecinos: rise of mestizo vecino elite in
Urqusuyu, 153. See also Moieties; rural towns, 304-5; privileged role of
Qullasuyu in Castilian towns, 305; decline after
Urton, Gary, 194-95,256 1950s revolution, 309
Uruquillas. See Awllaka-Urukilla; Urus Vecinos of Cruce and Santa Barbara de
Urus (fishing people): as Killaka mallku Culta: status of, 47; and compadrazgo,
retainers, 3; K'ulta accounts of, 118, 450n9; distanced from indios and
324; Inca and Aymara deprecations of, cholos, 450nll; relativity of positional
324-25; akin to Choquelas and identity, 451n13; mentioned, 45, 61,
Larilaris, 325; and Garcia Morato of 101. See also Social categories
1640s composicion, 490n58 Vela, Hernan: granted Awllaka-Urukilla
Ushnu: sacrificial well in Cusco, 139; encomienda in 1548, 151; Gasca and
possibly rebuilt as rollo, 144, 180 restitution, 462n18; suit by Awllaka
Uta. See House lords against, 462n18; troubles with
Utanqa. See Patio Spanish vassals, 462n18
Uyu. See Corral Ventriloquism, and possession by deities,
Uyuni, salt flats, mentioned, 38 280,417,420
Uywa ispira (herd vispers): Mamani Vertical ecology, xviii
performance of libations of, 347-49, Vespers, day before fiesta of Guadalupe,
351-61,375-76. See also Fiesta, 98
saint's, structure of; Memory paths; Victim, sacrificial, distribution of: breath
Sacrifice, structure of; T' aki to corral coca pouch, 381, 506nll;
Uywiris (caretaker hills): White Nose, 94, blood and fat to gods, 381, 506n13;
348, 349; libations to, 101, 348, 349; pelt on jaiiachu, 382; liver and lungs
of household, 344, 348; feminine eaten at ch'iwu rite, 382, 506n15; ribs
counterparts of, 348; of Isluga, analyses to other sponsors' dancer-musician
602 Index

Victim, sacrificial, distribution of Quillacas y Asanaques, 482n31;

(continued) Toledan of Tiquipaya, 482n32. See also
groups, 388; feet and trachea to Buena policia; Ordinances of Toledo;
dancer-musicians, 389; cooked meat to Reducci6n; Town council, colonial
general public, 391; shoulder blade Visitas: as theater, 17; compared to capac
given to incoming machaqa sponsors, hucha, 17-18; and transformation of
391; ch'iwu leftovers to arkiri ayllu organization, 256; as rituals of
followers, 396; holocaust offerings, rule, 261, 462n19; significance of such
501n30. See also Sacrifice, structure of census-taking, 459n2; visita of the
Vicuna scarf, as symbol of authority, 347 Duque de la Palata, 482n29; Guaman
Vilaoma, and Almagro expedition, Poma on, 482n37. See also Visita
461n12 general of Toledo; Ordinances of
Vila Sirka (hamlet): libations in llama Toledo; Reducci6n; Buena policia
corral, 6; described, 61; plan of, 62; Visits, fiesta: and experiential mapping of
photograph of, 94; return of deceased social organization in Culta, 386, 388
Hilari6n Mamani to, 335, 337; Visits, interhamlet: and saint sponsorship,
pathways of, 337; Virgilio Mamani 339; and marriage ritual, 339, 343; and
carnival rituals in, 347-49, 351-62; genealogy, 340; and carnaval courtship
libations to uywiri and mallku of, 348; period, 343, 372; pillu prestations,
importance of long-term residence in, 372-73. See also Paths, interhamlet;
376-77; Guadalupe fiesta performances Pill us
in, 377-83, 395-96; Carata dynamite Voice: restoration of Andean, 13;
attack on, 406; observation of libation ethnographic, 21
sessions in, 446n5
Vileabamba, rebel Incas in, 151,214,220 Wachtel, Nathan, 22, 156
Villarroel, Gualberto, National Indigenous Wage labor. See Labor
Congress and assassination of, 309 Wak'a kamayuq, Diego Iquisi and
Viracocha: creation by, in Sarmiento, extirpation, 174
200-203; holding bible in Sarmiento, Wak'as: mitayo dedication of libations to,
201; holding breviary in Betanzos, 201. 4; cult to directed by Manco Inca, 139;
See also Narrative, pre-Columbian and annointed with sacrificial blood, 171;
colonial oral; Tunupa kamayuqs of, 172, 174; Molina on,
Virgin Mary: animal sacrifices for, xxii; 172, 219-20; clothed in cumbi, 173,
chich a libations to, 101, 122, 361, 378; 179,182,220, 472n49; Polo on, 174,
invoked as Paxsi Mamala and Santisima 470n45, 470n46; extirpators of idolatry
Tayksa, 105 on, 179; as social agents, 179; of
Visalla, don Francisco (cacique of Charcas region, 186; embodied by
Killaka): brother and successor of devotees of taqui oncoy, 219-20,
Colque Guarache, 464n27 478n9, 478nlO; mining idols of Diego
Viscacha, 54 Iquisi in Caltama, 267-69. See also
Viscarra, Corcino, petition to Bolivian Ceque systems
senate by, 305-6. See also Corcino Perez Wari (people), 463n23. See also Huari,
Visita general of Toledo: account of, Santiago de (town)
237-58, 482n31, n32, n35, n37; War of the Pacific, commemoration of, 91
Sanabria to Tinquipaya, 241, 248, Wasu wariri. See Libation specialist
429-35; instructions for visitors in, Weaving: by Mamani men, 80; formal
248; as colonial caravansary, 249; recursion in design and learning process
census procedures in, 256; of Zarate to in, 180
Index 603

Wedding, payment for, 106 Perez, 306-8; vs. other registers of

Week, offering dedications for days of, social memory in K'ulta, 319; of don
348, 505n5 Manuel Mamani, 490n56. See also
Wife takers. See Tullqa Choquecallata document; Chungara,
Wilara (blood offering), 108, 511n32, Lope; Llanquipacha, Lucas Feliz; Perez,
513n42. See also Blood Corcino; Viscarra, Corcino
Wilats kasta ("blood line"): and matriliny
argument, 341; relatives through Yampara (diarchy and region),
women, 341. See also Blood; ethnography and ethnohistory of,
Genealogy; Matriliny; Mujuts kasta 449nl
Wildman, John, 408 Yanakuna, of Manco Inca, 141
Willka kamayuq (quipu kamayuq of Inca Yanani: human couple as, 334; as
suyu), 173 "double" in libations, 500n25. See also
Wisixsa (diarchy): and extirpation of Bulls; Llantiru
idolatry, 267 Yanaqi (ayllu of K'ulta): and fiesta
Witches market of La Paz, 33-34 participation, 97, 98; and land war,
Writing: and orality, 12, 18,408; Andean 102,311; lands purchased by
reverence for, 18; co-existence with Taquimalco, 287, 490n59; theft of saint
nonwritten social memory, 18-19; in image by, 312; internal moieties of, 312,
Culta town council business, 60; and 370; fiesta rotation in, 370. See also
social memory, 116, 167; respect for in K'ulta (people)
K'ulta, 119; used by caciques, 151; vs. Yapita, Juan de Dios, xx, 444nnl, 2
imbibed communication, 166; Spanish Yatiris (shamans): devoted to Santa
respect for, 167; and authority of God, Barbara, 104; saint abogado
168; archival and legal functionality of, intercessorlfamiliars of, 104; as
168, 170; and power, 170; and historians, 113; disease bundles of, 337.
sacrifice, 170; Andean lack of, in See also Ch'iyar yatiri; Curing;
Acosta, 178, 471n47; Andean lack of, Kallawaya; Libation specialist
in Cieza, 191, 473n57; Andean lack of, Yura (town and people): rebellion in, 299;
in Cobo, 192; indian scribes of ethnography and ethnohistory of,
reducciones, 242, 244; orality of 449nl
fiesta-cargo turn systems, 293; letters of
18th-century town councils, 297 - 99, Zarate, Agustin de: on dangers of
437-38; lawerly writing of Lucas Feliz publication, 468n40
Llanquipacha, 301-2. See also Archival Zarate, Pedro de: visitador of Killaka,
culture; Orality; Written documents Asanaqi, and Awllaka-Urukilla, 238;
Written documents: and Registro Civil of visitador of Tacobamba, 255
Culta, 60, 68, 340; in K'ulta, 119; and Zarate Willka: as leader of 1899 rebellion,
land rights, 119; interpretation of 308
disputed in Condo vs. Challapata case, Zaumada, Agustin de, visitador of
302-3; of colonial Mamanis, 303-4; of Siwaruyu-Arakapi, 238
Corcino Viscarra, 305; of Corcino Zuidema, R. Tom, 175, 195, 443nl