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.”