Categories
Experience

XVII. Reflections

I’ve got nothing serious and final to say. Right now, I am on a flight back home to Vancouver—34 minutes until I land! I’ve been sick these past couple of days since the course has been over and I’ve been staying in Lima. It feels right that I started and ended the trip in sickness.

My favourite moments of our journey were just as much the big events as the in-betweens. Hurried market meals before class. Late-night poop conversations. Karaoke and stupid word games with dangerously patient taxi drivers.

My favourite thing was getting to know all of you. How you all laugh and think. I have so much more respect for each and every one of you and am excited to see where you go.

And I am so very thankful for Jon and Daniel, for taking us on this wild journey and looking after us.

Though this feels like the perfect moment to conclude, right now I really don’t have much to say. It’s still fresh. I’m probably over 50% market food right now. I think a lot of what this trip has meant for us will only become apparent with time. And even then, not always in words. Anyways, I don’t want to do the trip justice here. I couldn’t.

Categories
Blanco

XVI. Practical Socialism

The hacendados or bosses claimed that the real exploiters were the arrendires; this was false, since the sum of the days that the relatives had to work for the arrendires was smaller than the days that the latter had to work for the bosses; the relatives worked on behalf of the arrendire on the landowner’s crops, so these arrendires agreed to the total disappearance of the condiciones, the days of work by the latter for the landowner and those of the relatives for them. (Blanco 27)

I want to highlight a fascinating mode of campesino resistance that Hugo Blanco describes in We the Indians. Basically, as arrendires (tenants) in an essentially feudal system, campesinos in the Andes had to work for landowners in exchange for land to grow their own crops. However, the campesino’s burdens were too great to tend to both the landowner’s and their own crops. So they worked around these impossible conditions by creating a system whereby they could share their responsibilites with their relatives and actually earn some respite. The landowners claimed that the tenants were exploiting their relatives, but it was actually a practice of communal labour which benefited all the campesinos. This practice of communal labour is perhaps a core part of Andean society organized around the ayllu, and perhaps aligns with Mariategui’s notion of Indian “practical socialism.” The campesinos cleverly achieved this without violating any of the rules of the landowners, much to their dismay. The landowners’ projection of the campesinos as exploiters is telling—they don’t understand kinship relations. Unfortunately, the landowners used their authority to strategically evict their tenants and reap the multi-year spoils of their labour. I wonder if any of you have encountered other instances in our readings where communal labour was used to combat colonial or feudal systems of exploitation.

Categories
Degregori

XV. Rebelling in Other Ways

At the core of this lies an analytical vacuum. He does not see that there are people rebelling in other ways. (Degregori 85)

I found Carlos Iván Degregori’s claim that Abimael Guzmán, in his eventual pursuit of the Marxist Idea instead of Marxist analysis, crucially missed other forms of social mobilization quite significant. Degregori argues that Guzmán came to see himself as the prophet and embodiment of the Sendero movement and began to argue in pursuit of a Marxist ideal, replacing materialist analysis. In his division of the country into simply the revolution and the counterrevolution that prepare themselves for violence, he neglected the fact that during the Sendero movement was the years of Peru’s greatest social mobilization of the twentieth century, probably for similar reasons to Sendero’s emergence—widespread modern and critical education and hugely increased campesino ownership of property following Velasco’s agrarian reform. These were years of many labour, peasant, regional and women’s movements. However, Sendero did not align with these other forms of struggle but denied and denigrated them. Even worse, those who took part in them were accused of betrayal. For the act of supporting the other struggles to connote “betrayal” for Sendero implies for me a rigid discourse, fearful and policing of what might escape it. I wonder if Sendero’s denial of other struggles was necessarily linked to what Degregori claims was its swap of material analysis for the pursuit of the ideal. Before this apparent shift in Guzmán, would these other struggles be recognized as antagonistic, or would they be welcomed in solidarity?

Categories
Degregori Mariátegui

XIV. Feudalism and Modernism

We are not satisfied to assert the Indian’s right to education, culture, progress, love, and heaven. We begin by categorically asserting his right to land. (Maríategui 50)

In his Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, José Carlos Maríategui argues that the problem of the Indian is essentially socio-economic. He disputes any attempt to reduce it to an exclusively administrative, pedagogical, ethnic or moral problem. “Indian” is essentially a class position: that of farmers and land tenants in servitude to landowners within a feudal regime. He dismisses the concept of inferior races outright as outmoded, claiming it helped rationalize European imperialism. He also rejects humanitarian appeals to “the Indian’s right to education, culture, progress, love, and heaven”—these have not halted European imperialism. This is an interesting and refreshing position, but I wonder if the concept of the Indian has had an influence that extends beyond the economic. Maríategui claims that feudalism is fundamentally opposed to the education of the peasantry—modern education is incompatible with the mechanics of the Indian’s servitude. The problem of the Indian is a problem of land—the alternative to feudalism is not distributing smaller slices of private property (as it largely happened) but communal ownership in the sense of the ayllu. 

The end of feudalism in Peru did not happen in the way Maríategui proposed. I want to put Maríategui’s discussion of feudalism in dialogue with the emergence of Sendero. In the wake of Velasco’s agrarian reform, students in the Peruvian countryside had more access to modern education, including critical and Marxist ideas, than ever before. However, they were caught between ideas of modernity, universality and progress and the “traditional” lifestyles of their families, still feeling the impacts of feudalism. According to Degregori in How Difficult it is to be God, it was this particular tension which motivated a lot of these students to join Sendero, and some to participate in mass murders. While they were seeking liberation from their material conditions, I think they were also, like Maríategui, moved in pursuit of a (perhaps?) higher ideal. It is fascinating that the conflict Maríategui sets up between feudalism and modern education, and by extension, modernism perhaps led to the emergence of Sendero. I wonder if this is a fair assessment.

Categories
De la Cadena

XIII. Ethnicity

The academic repudiation of biological notions of race was significant for anthropology, as it meant the emergence of the concept of “ethnic groups” to explain human differences. As Stolcke has suggested, it implied the reification of culture, which thus potentially prolonged the naturalization of sociohistorical differences earlier contained in the European notion of biological race. (de la Cadena 28)

I want to question our contemporary use of the term “ethnicity.” I don’t like it. In Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991, Marisol de la Cadena argues that the repudiation of biological notions of race after the horrors of Nazi Germany in World War II did not eliminate the “naturalization of sociohistorical differences.” The replacement concept of “ethnic groups,” grounded in culture and not biology, still carried a lot of the same associations from the earlier concept of race. This replacement concept explained group differences with the idea that people have a propensity to reject strangers which necessarily produces hostile relations among cultures, rather than the previous idea that different races had different essential strengths and weaknesses. “Ethnicity” also had the effect of reifying or essentializing cultures—and these cultural groups very often aligned with those previously essentialized as races. I think it is worth emphasizing that ethnicity, just like race, is an irreducibly political concept—not a clean anthropological framework to describe human diversity. Drawing on Rama’s idea of the precedence of the ideal over the real, I think that concepts of ethnicity not only describe the reality of human groups but also create them.

De la Cadena questions the Peruvian colonial and then culturalist hierarchies of race but does not question to the same extent her use of the term “Indigenous.” She uses “Indigenous culture” as synonymous with “Andean culture” and uses the term Indigenous to describe various people and groups. She asserts that “indigenous culture and Indianness are not synonyms,” and takes the grassroots Cuzqueño intellectuals’ definition of Indigeneity as compatible with being Mestizo (de la Cadena 319). She does this to frame Indigeneity as relational and open to change. Still, I suspect that the concept, though in flux, carries a lot from “Indianness,” just as ethnicity carries the legacy of racial discourse (and is in dialogue with its contemporary forms), even as it seeks to redefine itself. I wonder if you agree with my criticism of ethnicity, and wonder to what extent you think the contemporary Peruvian use of the term “Indigenous” continues to carry the associations of “Indianness”?

Categories
Neruda

XII. Macchu Picchu

There is a light in the valley:
bodies gather from the horrible dark
and find a couple, many-feathered and bright
weaving a tapestry of song
into the dead reality of night.

There is a man at the door
in a mask with golden eyes:
better to burn the sacred gift
than to let him re-divine
the old and knotted matter of our lives.

And there is a word in the street
among the old and the blind:
they say you can find
(if you are ever so benign)
a single fabric untouched by the violence of time.

Categories
Mamani & Huamán

XI. Idiot Wind

What kind of holdings could this nameless wisp of wind have? My daughter’s not interested in the lice this unknown drifter has got stockpiled away. (Mamani 38)

Andean Lives brings together the testimonial narratives of Gregorio Condori Mamani and Asunta Quispe Huamán, an older Indigenous couple who have lived in the Andes all their lives. Their testimonies were recorded by Ricardo Valderrama Fernández and Carmen Escalante Gutiérrez, who “had them provide more detail on certain passages, amplify certain themes, return to others that they had quickly passed over” (Gelles 5). The interviewers’ questions and the couples’ “many repetitions” were removed from the transcribed text, which was edited to present two chronologically ordered narratives. The text was then translated into English by Paul H. Gelles and Gabríela Martinez Escobar, who had a North American and European readership in mind. So it’s important to note there were many layers of mediation—many perspectives and decisions between the original Indigenous voices and the printed text that made the stories accessible for a particular audience

The quote above shows how Mamani was rejected as a marriage prospect by the father of a girl he was interested in. The father calls Mamani a “nameless wisp of wind” and a “drifter” without property, suggesting that stability and a name are incompatible with Mamani’s vagabond lifestyle. I was interested in the other times wind is mentioned in the text. Throughout Andean Lives, Mamani and Huamán blame cases of ill-fortune on “ill wind,” which the translators contextualize as an “evil breeze … a kind of sickness that moves through the air itself and that is generated by malignant spirits, such as those ‘exhaled’ from the body of the recently deceased or from ancient tombs” (Gelles & Escobar 163). Mamani similarly understands his adriftness, and his inability to find a stable home or job as his curse and misfortune. Another time Mamani mentions the wind is when he recounts an elder named Laureano Cupita’s story of how Cuzco was built by the original Inka. Originally, Cuzco was completely flat “and the wind would come roaring through like a rushing bull, knocking down any wall or house Inka put up” (Mamani 22). The original Inka built mountains around Cuzco to protect it as a fortress against the wind. The wind symbolizes a natural force of terror that prevents security and settlement for these people.

The father who rejected Mamani was kind of right—Mamani was adrift under horrible colonial and economic conditions, and could not shelter his loved ones and himself from the storm. He understands his lack of place as his fate and tragedy, and perhaps that of many runas like himself. However, as we discussed in class, Mamani’s forced mobility allows him to experience many different kinds of life in the Andes. It allows him a range of knowledge and perspective that the landed hacienda owners might not have. This is a possible advantage to his position, though it is surely not something he would value over better living conditions.

This got me thinking about Che Guevara in the film The Motorcycle Diaries, and perhaps ourselves, who were able to travel without having to do so to sustain the immediate conditions of our lives. At least as it showed in the film, Che’s range of experiences while traveling contributed to his revolutionary awakening. Though he did get into precarious situations, I think they were not as threatening to his existence as Mamani’s in his testimony. The dangers Che faced were often chosen by him in a way Mamani’s were not.

I’m wondering to what extent our travels allow us the possibility of experiencing diverse and challenging perspectives, or if our economic condition or orientation to travel restricts the kinds of experiences we can have. I think these conditions can determine whether travel and mobility are a gift or a curse. I don’t think that more travel necessarily grants you more diverse or accurate knowledge. I think you can travel the whole world and change your understanding less than if you walked a block from where you live.

Categories
Experience

X. Uno Gringo Chino

Waiting for the train from Aguas Calientes to Ollantaytambo, I asked Daniel how to see and write in terms of affect. Of course it’s important to talk about ideology. But I think I think too much in categories and broad concepts and don’t pay enough attention to how bodies move and are affected by other bodies. I said my writing has been too detached. I’ve been afraid to fuck up. Daniel said I should pay attention to the moments of intensity.

I journal every night in bullet points recounting the day’s events. At the very least a single line, but sometimes I write a few pages. If there’s something I need to flesh out or give more detail I linger on it. I scanned through my journal this past week and found no moments that screamed out at me. Until I noticed something I’ve noted down almost every day here: people confronting me or yelling at me in the street about my race. I feel disgusted whenever I hear the word race but it just feels more honest than the word ethnicity. Ethnicity is race in the language of tolerance. And tolerance is at best a conditional acceptance of difference. Cleansed, aestheticized difference. Difference kneeling in its right place. Ethnicity is not just “cultural,” it is irreducibly political. 

I’ve been bothered by people yelling things like “Chino!” and “Japonés!” here before but I’ve never really been mad. I assumed it was just a crude recognition of difference. One of my favourite race moments was when I was eating chaufa de carne at one of my favourite stands in the Pisac market and the owner, Dina, poked me: “Better than your country, right?” I asked her: “What is my country?” She didn’t reply. But she was right. It was among the best I’d had.

The worst moment was probably in Aguas Calientes. As it’s primarily a tourist town for Macchu Picchu, there are already so many people in the streets and in front of restaurants harassing people and trying to get business. One day a man stopped me as I was leaving the market to ask me where I was from. When I said I was from Canada he refused to accept it. He said: “You don’t look like a Canadian.” I asked him: “What does a Canadian look like?” No response. I gave him a friendly glare and walked off. But on the way back to the hotel a man started yelling at me in the street. I hardly remember what he was saying. It was like all the times before but more intensely aggressive and patronizing. This was the first time I wanted to yell back. I wanted to scream at him like a real righteous fucking racist. I wanted to match him and get all of our ugliness out in the open. Because if you know what it is it’s to be seen as a caricature of all the worst associations you can imagine and to see yourself as that, to become that caricature at the same time. I wanted to take away his humanity. I wanted to make him into a figurine on a shelf. I wanted him to feel on what level it hurts and on what level it works. But I didn’t turn around. I just walked away.

Yesterday after Inti Raymi I stopped at a mercado for water. A few women were chatting there, most likely the owner and her friends. One asked me where I was from: “Canada.” She made a gesture with her fingers and her eyes. “Oriental?” I let her guess a couple times until she got it right and she cheered a little like they always do. But she was very sweet. With the warmest smile, she said: “Welcome to Peru.”

Part of me likes this treatment better than back home. I often feel these impressions implicitly even when it’s unsaid. Sometimes my mom and I notice it in the way a waitress treats us. Without words, we know it’s there. I don’t know if I like pretending it’s not. It doesn’t give us a chance to speak back.

I wonder if any of you have had similar experiences here you’d like to share, and if you feel similarly about them?

Categories
Garcilaso

IX. Barbarians

Finally he told them: ‘When you have reduced these people to our service, you shall maintain them in reason and justice, showing mercy, clemency, and mildness, and always treating them as a merciful father treats his beloved and tender children … I wish you as children of mine to follow this example sent down to earth to teach and benefit those men who live like beasts. And henceforward I establish and nominate you as kings and lords over all the people you may thus instruct with your reason, government, and good works.’ (Garcilaso 46-47)

Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, completed in 1612, is a history of Peru that describes the high rationality and civilization of the Incas to argue that the Spanish conquest was not wholly legitimate. Garcilaso was writing in response to Spanish authors who claimed that the barbarousness of the Indians justified their subjugation—that it was the correct duty of the Spanish to educate the Indians in the civilizing force of Christianity. Garcilaso does not refute Christianity; he argues that the Incas were not obstacles to it but paved the way for its introduction. The real obstacle to the full realization of Christianity was the greed of the Spaniards. Garcilaso was of the first generation of mestizos, of mixed Spanish and Incan blood, and proudly claimed the legitimacy of his argument from his roots in both societies.

The quote I included above is from Garcilaso’s account of the sun’s instructions for his first son and daughter on Earth. Garcilaso claims that the sun was the sole god of the Incas. Here the sun tells his children how they should treat non-Inca people. Notice the patriarchal attitude he assigns the Incas: to treat others “as a merciful father treats his beloved and tender children” and to be “kings and lords” over them. The sun is the father of the Incas who are to act as the fathers of the rest. While this patriarchal attitude seems to be benevolent, it creates and maintains a construction of non-Inca peoples as (effectively) children, whose ways of living and understanding are primitive in contrast with that of the Incas. Non-Inca people are granted a patronizing innocence. Incan and non-Incan groups are not antagonistic equals—the non-Incas have yet to be educated and civilized. Compared with the “reason, government, and good works” of the Incas, the non-Incas “live like beasts.”

I think Garcilaso draws his argument from the very discourses he wanted to combat, creating a barbarous non-Incan other to define his Incan ideal. Garcilaso does not do away with the idea of “barbarians” but instead recasts who embodies that category. The barbarians are no longer the “Indians” but the non-Incas; Garcilaso insists the Incas were a people as civilized as the ancient Romans (except for the fact that they lacked writing) who lived according to reason. While Garcilaso still held Christianity as his highest ideal for a people (it is important to remember: this was a necessity for him to receive a Christian audience), he managed to create an ideal conception of a non-Christian people, the Inca, palatable to a Christian audience. Like the distinction Guaman Poma creates between the Christian line of Topay Capac and the heathenous line of Manco Capac, Garcilaso’s casting of the Incas as rational and opposed to the non-Inca barbarians allows him to assert that not all “Indians” are the same. Barbarism then justified the Inca’s colonization of non-Inca peoples but not the Spaniard’s conquest of the Inca empire. I think it is significant that Garcilaso possibly adopted from the Spanish the argument that barbarism justifies colonization as well as the strategy of taking a patriarchal and infantilizing attitude toward the other to maintain them as barbarous. While these strategies may be abhorrent, Garcilaso’s Royal Commentaries are an early surviving example of the Spaniards’ justifications for colonization being used against themselves by an Indigenous writer.

I wonder if Garcilaso’s aim is common to all processes of colonization: propping up the image of the disparaged other to be more similar and worthy of value and respect from the standpoint of the colonizer. I also wonder to what extent casting other people as barbarous is necessary to assert the value of a culture. I’m thinking of how at the Inca ruins we have visited, like Sacsayhuamán, our tour guides have often claimed that the magnificence of the sites makes the fall of the Incas lamentable. What does this say about cultures that don’t have similarly surviving ruins? Do these claims disparage the value of these other cultures?

Categories
Experience

VIII: The Real Deal

A few days ago, most of our class paid for a “Traditional Community Day” a small way from Pisac. This is how it is advertised in a brochure I discovered after the day was over:

Delight in a 45-minute drive into the majestic high Andes and a twenty minute walk through the patchwork fields replete with potatoes, fava beans and corn in the traditional highland community of Amaru, where a genuinely authentic way of life is still practiced to this day. Members of the community who are consciously preserving their ancestral heritage will welcome you. Through participation in a communal workday a beautiful cultural exchange unravels as you experience this incredible opportunity to step back in time and appreciate a quality of life with an admirable simplicity that is strikingly moving and profound. Enjoy a traditional lunch prepared with prized agrarian products from their fields, as the women begin to spin their naturally dyed wool. Others meditatively set up their back strap looms to share their ancestral weaving skills with us. This wonderful opportunity to purchase textiles directly from the weavers is not to be missed. Upon return to Pisac Inn in the afternoon, enjoy some time to relax and reflect on your own.

I didn’t want to include the entire overview but I found each sentence much too interesting to leave out. It claims that in the community of Amaru “a genuinely authentic way of life is still practiced to this day,” as if the way most people live these days is inauthentic, and the way of life the community has managed to preserve is a precious relic of the past. The community visit is an “incredible opportunity to step back in time and appreciate a quality of life with an admirable simplicity that is strikingly moving and profound.” Here it reinforces the idea that the community exists in a state of the past that we tourists have supposedly transcended. Who wouldn’t pay 150 soles for time travel? At the same time, the community members’ way of life has “an admirable simplicity” that is surely “strikingly moving and profound” for those brined in the vinegar of modernity. I’m concerned that the “Traditional Community Day” is being sold as a special glimpse into an authentic, unspoiled, Edenic source of Indigeneity, and that the “beautiful cultural exchange” it offers is not just between Andean and “Western” cultures, but between premodern and modern ones… though the overview does suggest that their Andean ancestral heritage is being “consciously” preserved. The overview also sets up requirements for the subjectivities of the community members, who are expected to set up their looms “meditatively.” This all brought up a few questions:

  • Is advertising experiences as rare and unlike the tourists’ everyday lives necessary to sell them?
  • Does this advertisement reinforce a reductive and patronizing binary between modernity and Indigeneity, and therefore between the tourists and community members?
  • To what extent is Indigenous tradition being consciously preserved or created for us, the tourists?
  • If the “Traditional Community Day” is complicit in all of this, is it still worth participating in the experience to support the community?

Already so much to think about and I haven’t begun to discuss the experience itself. But my memory of the experience, blurry from sickness, is permanently tainted by the overview. 

The day began when we arrived at a small field in the morning in two minibuses. We were seated in a row, then given bitter coca leaves to chew on and mate to drink. Then we were given traditional ponchos, dresses and hats to wear—clothing that would feel wholly inappropriate on the streets of Pisac but was granted given our invitation into the community. I will admit: the clothing was beautiful and fun. But I felt as though we were paying to wear it in a way that wasn’t culturally insensitive. The “communal workday” was us helping to till a field, which we did for at most an hour and somewhat haphazardly. I’m sure my technique was terrible, but the clothing seemed really ill-equipped for the job—-I wondered if the community members wore it outside of these “experiences”—some of the really little kids who were around had already taken theirs off. When we eventually tired out we were allowed to stop, and it was clear to me that this was always our decision to make. We witnessed many varieties of potatoes being baked in a fire, then we were adorned with pink flower necklaces and white flower petals on our heads as we entered a sort of courtyard and living space. We were told this was traditional Andean hospitality, but it (alongside all the ceremonial hugging and kissing) felt strange to me given that we paid for the experience (though I don’t want to assume Andean traditions are removed from the politics of debt). There we were surrounded by small adobe buildings and hanging Andean textiles for sale. A few women demonstrated textile weaving—they were wonderful but I wouldn’t describe them as “meditative.” The little kids ran around and whispered things in our ears. We danced, bought things, and ate quinoa soup, potatoes, and guinea pig, while our dear captain lay sleeping in the grass.

On the whole, I’m still conflicted about the experience. I don’t know what we brought to the “beautiful cultural exchange” except for good will, money and curiosity. The problems the overview brought to mind were all present. It seemed as though the community members were presenting us with what they thought we wanted to see—perhaps an ideal of Indigeneity. At the same time, I know I should also question what I imagine they didn’t want us to see—it could be just as harmful or more. For better or worse, I encountered just a few interesting people and things—not that “admirable simplicity.”

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