Possessive Places: Spatial Routines and Glacier Oracles in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca

ABSTRACT

This article examines the notions of personhood and property underlying relationships between humans and places in the Rio Negro watershed of the central Peruvian Andes. Through offerings, dreams, and divination, glacial peaks become active participants in social interactions with herders, contrasting with the regimentation of subjectivity involved in the notions of private property that inform common expectations for human–place relationships. I illustrate this argument through an ethnographic account of herders’ interactions with glaciers, starting with their routine work in the high grasslands and the accompanying ritual offerings to and divinatory communications with mountains, then moving to the appearance and communications of the same mountains in dreams, and concluding with an example of divinatory consultation with an individual mountain from a distance. In conclusion, I argue that the kinds of relationships herders form with glaciers are dependent on the spatial routines – the habitual patterns of movement and residence – that allow for their co-presence and sharing of substance.

KEYWORDS:

• Peru
• mountains
• authority
• space
• divination

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the people in the populated centre of Huaripampa and the Peasant Community of Canray Grande for their assistance and participation in this study, particularly Donato Molina Rojas, Pascual Leon Villanueva, Mari Huerta Cacha, Gerson Leon Huerta, Feliciano Rurush Asis, and Brígida Alvarado Blácido for their kindness and insight. I am also grateful to César Vargas Arce for his generosity in sharing his knowledge of Ancash Quechua as a speaker, teacher, and scholar. I would also like to thank Bruce Mannheim, Barbra Meek, Webb Keane, and Michael Lempert for their feedback in planning research and for conversations that were germane to this article’s formation. I am also grateful to David Akin, Stuart Strange, Jeffrey Albanese, Angélica Serna Jerí, and participants in the University of Michigan’s Linguistic Anthropology Lab for their invaluable input on previous versions of this article. Finally I would like to extent special gratitude to Brent Crosson for inviting my contribution to this special edition and for his careful readings of two earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The word ‘chukaru’ is used commonly in Rio Negro to refer to feral or wild animals (and humans, though tinged with dark humour in this usage). It is also commonly used to describe places such as mountains, caves, and bodies of water. Furthermore, it sometimes describes the state of a person’s spirit or essence, their haani, after it has become frightened in a ‘chukaru’ place or by a ‘chukaru’ entity and has abandoned the body, leaving the person in the state of illness known as ‘susto’ or ‘manchay’, both of which translate roughly to ‘fright’.

2. While Santo Toribio’s original writings do not mention his miracles (Benito Rodriguez 2006), a biography of sorts written by the Spanish Dominican priest Antonio de Lorea in 1679 demonstrates that they mostly had to do with water, and that taming venomous rivers was one of his specialties (Lorea 1679).

3. Severin Fowles describes these kinds of actions that are framed with respect to places as ‘doings’. This approach, he argues, focuses on space rather than history, emphasising connections between people and things, including the landscape (2013: 255).

4. In God is Red, Vine Deloria Jr. makes a related distinction between spatial and temporal religions (2003). Deloria argues that Native American religions are spatial because they are rooted in sacred places that entail an ongoing possibility of revelation (65), in contrast to Abrahamic religions in which the fate of a particular group of humans is tied to a history that originates in a singular moment of revelation.

5. While possession is not commonly used to describe ritual practices in the Andes, Gose (1996) provides numerous examples of descriptions of oracular possession in early chronicles, and other ethnographers have described analogous practices involving non-human entities that animate human speech or action (Ricard Lanata 2007).

6. I describe the hirka’s authority in terms of framing because it trains the analysis on the interactions through which actions are accomplished and interpreted as meaningful (Bateson 1972; Goffman 1974; Lemon 2000).

7. Writing about mountains in southern Peru, Peter Gose observed that ‘the political rank of the apus is determined by the offerings that people give, and is not an intrinsic feature of the mountain itself, like its height’ (1994: 215). While I agree with his assessment, I am further suggesting that the offerings people make to mountains are directly related to the spatial routines that mediate such interactions [Apu are the rough equivalents of hirka in the southern Peruvian Andes].

8. The Huascaran National Park’s explicit goals include prohibiting the entrance of any species not native to its territory. Yet local herding practices involve the introduction of cows, sheep, horses, donkeys, and dogs within the park’s boundaries. In the spirit of compromise, as well as in recognition of implementation difficulties, the National Service for Protected Natural Areas (SERNANP) permits local herders usufruct rights to continue maintaining herds within the Park’s boundaries within a structure of cooperative governance overseen by park administrators. To do so, park employees formed Committees of Usufructuaries of Natural Grasses with individual peasant communities to oversee the use of pasturelands within the park’s protected area. Members of these committees are obliged to participate in rotating three-day shifts within the park in groups of three. Failure to appear for a shift is penalised by fines that go into the committee’s treasury and are used to maintain the committee’s fences and shelters.

9. Chakchay is generally translated as ‘to chew’, and I have not found it used in any ethnographies of the Andes to refer to any more than this. Neither have I found it used to refer to chewing anything other than coca. However, in the contexts that coca is chewed, frequently tobacco and alcohol are also consumed, and often in a ritual context.

10. I recorded this particular ritual with a tripod-mounted camera wedged among the stones, and so I have been able to carefully study the exact utterances rather than constructing them from notes or memory.

11. The word ‘willka’, translated as grandchild, also merits further attention. For example, in southern Peru, the word is often translated as ‘sacred’. However, I do not elaborate any more here, as the translation ‘grandchild’ fits well with the characterisation of hirka as awicho, or ‘grandparents’.

12. While Ruriq was unanimously considered hallqa, this designation was spotty in the ‘buffer zone’. Whether some place was hallqa or not varied and seemed to depend on whether or not any crops were planted there and what kind of grasses grew. More importantly, people who lived there tended to consider the hallqa as beginning always just a bit further uphill, whereas people who lived in Huaripampa generally considered the entire ‘buffer zone’ to be hallqa.

13. Puqu is in the part of Rio Negro south of the river, and belongs to the Cordillera Blanca Peasant Community. There is only one family that uses the canyon, and thus there is no Committee of Usufructuaries established through the National Park. As a result, the family is free to herd the kilometre or so of the canyon that is within the ‘natural protected area’ itself.

14. Priests involved in the extirpation campaign followed a biblical understanding of ‘idol’, focusing on objects that could be carried and enshrined (Mannheim & Salas Carreño 2015). These objects were also convenient targets in that they were conducive to physical destruction, unlike mountains and springs. Furthermore, as can be seen in Hernández Príncipe’s account of the extirpation in Recuay, just south of Rio Negro, idols and idolatrous practices that previous extirpators had supposedly eradicated seemed to linger. Hernández Príncipe himself claims to have finally ended the cult to Huantsan, yet this mountain continues to be an important source of authority in Rio Negro. For a more detailed discussion of the campaign, see Duviols (2003).

15. The Inca Empire seems to provide a striking counter-example to state centralisation. Gose argues that it was the inclusion of oracles in the functioning of Inca sovereignty that allowed such a decentralised state to cohere as more than an idea (1996).

16. After the agrarian reform, a state cooperative occupied Ruriq, however this did not interrupt access to the hallqa region, as herders managed the cooperative’s animals during this time. Likewise, from the beginning of the colonial period through the republican period, local herders worked in the region, albeit under the economic yoke of encomenderos and hacendados. Archaeologists have also found that the hallqa region in the central Peruvian Andes has been characterised for at least a thousand years by dispersed multi-family compounds dedicated to camelid herding and distinct forms of ritual architecture oriented towards mountain peaks (Herrera 2005) and water sources (Orsini & Benozzi 2013). This is not to say that significant changes have not occurred, or that the culture has remained the same, but rather that in rough terms, the National Park is the first arrangement that presents significant limitations on the spatial routines that bring people into direct contact with hirka.

17. David Akin offers two interesting perspectives on the relationship between migration and authoritative spirits. Kwaio labourers from the Solomon Island of Malaita negotiated with ancestral spirits through divination before travelling to determine ways of dealing with stringent taboos in foreign cultural contexts, despite the spirits’ inability to perceive their actions from the places to which they were bound on Malaita (2013: 23). On the other hand, Kwaio women – often with families in tow – have migrated in large numbers from the Malaita highlands to the coast in large part to avoid menstrual taboos (2003).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant 1224697] and by the Wenner-Gren Foundation [Dissertation Fieldwork Grant].