Reading blog 7

“But one thing’s for sure, you have to return each ayni you’ve received with all your heart.” (Andean Lives, p. 43)

In this passage, Gregorio is describing the ayni system of labour exchange, in which people do favours for their fellow community members with the reassurance that the favour will be returned when they one day need it. Indeed, it seems that reciprocity is a founding tenet of these communities because it is an important part of their worldview or cosmovision. In Gregorio and Asunta’s context, reciprocity extends beyond humans to more-than-human beings and Earth Mother. Throughout their stories, we see a strong connection to land and place, especially evident when Gregorio says:

“You can neglect your wife and even forget all about her, but never the land, never Earth Mother. If you forget about Earth Mother, she’ll forget about you too. That’s the way it is when you till the soil.” (p. 41)

Moreover, in the introduction, Gelles writes:

“The reader needs to keep in mind that implicit in the narrators’ use of these terms is a sense of kinship, belonging, and participation in terms of the place itself, a spiritual connection that bonds together a people, the town they live in, the surrounding landscape, and the deities that reside there” (p. 9)

I think this one of the most important distinctions between Indigenous and colonizer. Whereas someone Indigenous to the Andes sees themselves as existing within kinship webs that include the living apus, rivers, and plants of the land; the colonizer sees themselves as existing outside or above that web — the colonizer sees these beings as strangers rather than acquaintances. Without the existence of such relationships, the colonizer feels no responsibility towards these beings. They don’t feel a need to give, nor to receive.

I think we oftentimes forget that a reciprocal relationship doesn’t just mean giving, but also receiving. Reciprocity means giving meaningfully, and also receiving meaningfully. Forgetting about Earth Mother can mean forgetting to care for her, but also forgetting to receive the abundance of her gifts. Why should she continue to provide them if there is nobody to accept them? I believe the Spanish failed to do both.

Rather than recognizing the abundance of native crops provided by Earth Mother, they introduced wheat, sugar cane, and cotton in vast quantities. These crops required a huge amount of labour, land, and external inputs, and the Spanish exploited the land without giving back. This lack of reciprocity towards the land reflects the lack of reciprocity within the social systems they implemented. I think the way people treat each other often reflects how they treat the land.

On another note, I’m thinking about how this translated work will never be able to fully convey what the original coneys. And even if I could read the original Quechua, I still wouldn’t be able to truly understand. Because I feel like language is so much about cultural context, and I will never have the lived experience to understand the nuances of Quechua. Sometimes it feels like there is such a vastness between humans and there are so many things that I don’t have the words to convey. What does it mean to truly know someone?