Grief-Singing and the Camera: The Challenges and Ethics of Documentary Production in an Indigenous Andean Community

Abstract

This article discusses the ethical challenges of producing the DVD documentary Kusisqa Waqashayku (From Grief and Joy We Sing, 2007) on the musical rituals of the indigenous Quechua community of Hatun Q'eros in the Peruvian Andes. Issues examined are the experience of and responses to video-taping intimate grief-singing in animal fertility rituals, the reception of the documentary amongst various audiences (US and Peruvian academia and general public, and the Q'eros community), and the tension of expressed jealousies within the community resulting from the documentary, with some proposed ways of approaching such situations. The ethnographer's experience contributes to ongoing concerns about the ethics of representation in ethnographic video production.

Keywords:

• Quechua
• Andes
• Q'eros
• Filmmaking
• Ethnography
• Indigenous documentation
• Ethics
• Music and Ritual
• Grief singing
• Fertility ritual

Notes

1. I would like to express my gratitude to Peter Frost (Cusco, Peru) for his diligence and insight in reading and commenting on this article.

2. My original field footage is housed in the audiovisual archives of the Instituto de Etnomusicología de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (Lima). The footage is available for anyone to view (in the institution), and use, with my permission. Should the Q'eros so wish, they have access to this material.

3. The editing process consisted of the following: I wrote a general script and then selected nine hours of field footage from the original 30 or so that I had shot. This was the process of ‘logging’ and then ‘capturing’ in the editing program the nine hours that I felt represented the script. We edited a rough cut of one hour and 40 minutes, and then pared the documentary down to its current 53 minutes. Because the documentary was made from pre-shot field footage (as opposed to shooting footage to a pre-planned script), it is largely ethnographic in nature.

4. The term ‘Q'eros’ refers to both the cultural group and one community of the five within this group. While the community is legally called ‘Hatun Q'eros’, the Q'eros people simply refer to the community as ‘Q'eros’. Throughout this article, I also use the vernacular name for the community, ‘Q'eros’. Many researchers have published ‘Q'ero’ without the ‘s’. The people of the community more commonly say ‘Q'eros’, which is the basis of my decision to employ that usage.

5. Anthropologist and ethnohistorian John Murra pioneered studies about exploitation of vertical ecology in the Andes as primary means of sustenance and commerce in pre-Hispanic Peru (see Murra 1972, 1984).

6. Mestizo is a charged and difficult term to define. Originally, in colonial Peru, the term was based on racial background, and a mestizo in early post-conquest years was literally the offspring of a Spanish man or Spanish born in the New World (criollo) with an indigenous woman, so that the blood was ‘mixed’. Nowadays the term is more of a cultural reference. A mestizo is a person (urban or rural) who has incorporated influences such as formal education, Catholicism, speaks Spanish as well as Quechua, wears factory clothes (pants, shoes, jackets), to name a few examples. Many of the mestizo attributes (such as education, electricity, health posts, Spanish language) are considered desirable by the Q'eros, as has been the case throughout indigenous Andean cultural adaptation. For more about Q'eros musical adaptation and modernisation see Wissler, 2005.

7. For more sources on llama and alpaca fertility songs in the Andes, see: Flores Ochoa (1988); Mamani Mamani (1990); Cohen (1991) [1964]; Tomoeda (1996); and Arnold and Dios de Yapita (1998).

8. The vocal technique of the sustained tone has a specific purpose that is related to Q'eros cosmological belief and maintenance of a relationship with the mountain gods. See Wissler, 2009, forthcoming dissertation.

9. Allen (2002, 147) and Stobart (2006, 38) have written about the necessity of unbroken sound in Peruvian and Bolivian Andean ritual singing.

10. Pukllay (‘play’ in Quechua) in the Andes traditionally referred to a time of courtship among the youth, so Pukllay taki are ‘play songs’. The Pukllay celebration in many Andean communities, with its Pukllay taki and days of merry-making, is now linked to the pre-lent period of Carnival on the Catholic liturgical calendar. Many of the song topics are heard in other Peruvian and Bolivian Andean communities, yet the specifics of the songs (melody, sound production, structure, and so on) are recognisably Q'eros, just as other Andean communities have their own recognisable style.

11. La Prensa, Lima, Perú, 22 August 1955, quoted in Flores Ochoa and Fries 1989, 9.

12. Wiracocha is an old term for both an Inca elite and a God-like figure, and today is used to denote utmost respect.

13. The song form of ‘Pantilla T'ika’ is verse-refrain-verse. The refrain, Pantilla t'ikay wamanki or Pantilla phallchay wamanki translates as ‘My lovely pink flower, wamanki [hawk/falcon]’ or ‘Scatter the little pink flower, wamanki’. The layers of metaphore refer to: animal procreation, the beloved female llamas and alpacas, animal and human lineage, the sacred birds who are messengers of the Apu and the Apu itself. The verses are the points of personal improvisation, and the refrain, which expresses the essence of Q'eros life-sustenance and cosmology, is immutable.

14. Many scholars have published about sung forms of grief amongst indigenous cultures (Feld 1982, 1995; Urban 1988 Briggs 1992;). Unlike these sung forms of grief, however, the Q'eros’ grief-singing is not a distinct and separate song form. Wept improvisation is either momentarily or extensively expressed through spoken conversation or improvised song text in existing fertility songs, and sometimes the sung improvisation of sadness is not expressed at all during an entire fertility ritual.

15. See Mountain Music of Peru (1984) and Carnival in Q'eros (1990). In the latter, Juliana Apasa Flores cries and sings about the death of her sister, footage she witnessed for the first time on my television screen 15 years later. Juliana is the main female informant in my documentary.

16. My various donations for permission to work in Q'eros have been: medicines for treating the external parasites of the community's llama and alpaca herds; liaison with a US-based charitable foundation and the Municipality of Paucartambo (Q'eros district capital) to help build a bridge that connects the middle zone area with the monte; and school supplies, to name a few. The very first request by the Q'eros for my entrance into the community was an accordion to accompany their newly adopted dance (Qhapaq Qolla) at the regional pilgrimage festival of Qoyllur Rit'i. (see Wissler 2005).

17. DVD purchases are made through ‘The Mountain Fund’, a non-profit organisation based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, dedicated to aid projects in Peru and Nepal. In this way, purchases made in the US are tax-deductible donations that go to the Q'eros community. I had raised all funds for post-production costs from friends, family and Wilderness Travel office and clients on my tours in Peru who had met some Q'eros in person. Therefore, I had no reimbursement costs and am able to dedicate all sales to Q'eros.

18. See Heider 1976; Nichols 1994; Rosenthal 1996; Ruby 2000; and Afonso, Kürti, and Pink 2004.

19. This has historically been the case in the meeting between the indigenous Andean (runa) and urban mestizo populations. Runa have been marginalised from the social and political spheres of the middle and upper classes, which often manifests in their feeling a sense of shame.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Holly Wissler

Holly Wissler holds Masters degrees in both flute performance and music history, from the University of Idaho, and is completing her PhD in ethnomusicology at Florida State University, with her dissertation on the musical traditions of the Q'eros community. She is the producer of two ethnographic video documentaries: Qoyllur Rit'i: A Woman's Journey (1999), about the largest pilgrimage festival in the Peruvian Andes, and Kusisqa Waqashaykus (2007), the topic of this article. In addition, she has worked as an adventure travel guide in the Andes of Peru and the Himalayas of Nepal for over 20 years