Morgan in Peru

How does one, so simple and small as I, sum up a course as great and grand as this one? How does one categorize an experience which was so varied?

Trying to look back and reflect on the course as a whole feels like I’m standing in the middle of a lake and  trying to see it all at the same time. When you look in one direction you miss what’s behind you. And when you change directions, you can’t see the previous angle anymore. Eventually you’re left spinning around trying to see it all at the same time but all you see is a blur of it all.

What did I learn or unlearn about Indigeneity over the course of the trip? I felt during the course there were a few “turning points” where my personal views on Indigeneity or how I perceived Indigeneity in Peru were challenged.

>Lima: Peru, as one of the cradles of civilization, has been continuously occupied by different indigenous groups for thousands and thousands of years. The Inca were literally just the tip of the iceberg that the Spanish happened to run their Titanic into.

• The visit to the LUM gave me insight into how complex the continuance of the indigenous identity has been and gave context for modern Peru
• Our visit to the Larco illuminated how long this region of the world has been occupied by advanced civilizations. The Incas are merely the most recent.

>Cusco: As the capital of the Inca Empire, it was obvious in the architecture and culture just how rich of a history the town has.

• We talked a lot about the performance of Indigeneity but passing the ladies working the land along the road to rainbow mountain wearing the same traditional dress that we observed in the plaza or around town encouraged me to “believe” more in the representations we had been seeing.
• The planetarium and Sacsayhuaman were pivotal in understanding just how advanced the Incas were before the Spanish arrived and I felt a sense of loss for the people that built and used these sites.
• The syncretism of Corpus Christi, along with the reading by Dean, made me think more about how Catholicism has adopted and co-opted representations of Indigeneity for its own benefit.
• Inti Raymi was a spectacle of Inca-ness. I found myself weighing what are the pros and cons of commercializing the Inca experience like this. It’s good to preserve the culture and maintain the customs, but it’s so constructed. Although it seemed like it was made for a foreign audience, Dean argues that it actually is mostly for Peruvians nationals and for the construction of a national identity.

>Pisac: The indigenous (here: Andean, specifically Incan) cosmovision is called more aptly “cosmo-vivencia” to emphasize its relevance in the present.

• The Amaru Visit: see related experience blog
• Frequently, trying to explain what we were doing and why we’re on this trip led to complex feelings and unsure explanations. Often I didn’t want to make it sound like “oh I’m here to study “your people””. What does that discomfort reveal? I’m not sure and I’m still figuring it out.

>Sacred Valley: although presented in the way that it is, Indigeneity is not a Monolith

• The tour at Machu Picchu with Roy “this beautiful tourism”. I had never heard someone describe the industry this way. Maybe he was just saying it for us or maybe he really did feel that way about his career. Once again, I feel I’m being sold something and I don’t know how to evaluate its authenticity.
• the “tourist menu” in Aguas Calientes. Biggest mistake of my life.
• The Ollantaytambo tour with John from Las Orquideas. This was one of the most personalized tours we had and I felt like we actually got an insight into a modern Peruvian person’s relationship with Indigeneity. He told us about how his father is one of the few people who knows how to move the large rocks up and down hill, a secret which westerners have spent years figuring out.

Tourism has become the modern Titanic sailing through the polar night. The packaged and presented face of Incan Indigeneity rises above the water but without knowing it, visitors are passing by and potentially encountering many intertwined history’s under the proverbial water of ignorance (and inherent lack of roots/routes).

“The flip side of this phrase was that well-off common folk who lacked the symbolic capital that a university degree represented did not have access to the social status that their high income could have otherwise granted them” (de la Cadena 49).

Is this not still extremely true today? Even us as a group subscribe to this. We had a graduation ceremony (the getting of the paper) at Machu Picchu to symbolize the accomplishment and honor the new social strata university graduates have access to.

Our visit to the Kusi Kawsay school in Pisac highlighted how important the option of alternative education is. We learned about how they use holistic learning practices, emphasize outdoor spaces, incorporate Andean cosmoviviencia, and strive to maintain the Indigenous cultural practice such as weaving and traditional dance. Even with all these clear personal and community benefits, not all parents want to send their children to a school like this. We heard from one father who said that in order for his child to end up being a “professional”, Kusi Kawsay wouldn’t provide the correct preparation. The development of his son as a member of the neo-colonial definition of success in Peru was more important to him and his family than an Waldorf-type education. This was interesting to me. Growing up in the public school system, I’ve felt for a long time that there are few efforts made to develop youth as people rather than only develop their skills as students. At university, there is more emphasis on learning to question and think critically but by that time it may be too late. Something is being lost by putting so much social value on the outcome and forgetting to focus on the development of the individual.

Additionally it seems westernized education has gotten less and less community-based and instead focuses on individual achievement. We saw in Amaru how important community ties are. The imposition of the colonial education system is slowly reconstructing the ways communities interact as young students learn that success comes from personal effort instead of communal effort. In Amaru, the farmers took time out of their weeks to plow and prepare each others fields because it benefits the community as a whole. This type of reciprocal work was an important element of the Incan work culture as well. You worked your own land, but you also helped out with the community plots, the plots of those who were sick or disabled, and the land of the community leader (but always last).

Our new-found obsession with personal achievement, such as a piece of paper that says you completed things to a satisfactory level at a certain place with a certain level of cultural prestige, is erasing some of community-mindedness that previous forms of life and education were adept at maintaining.

¨If the imagined Inkas are imagined as once-living, active individuals, then agency cannot be so easily denied their descendants, even those now called campesinos¨ (Dean 216) in Inka Bodies

Dean argues that the presentation of Inti Raymi as increasingly “accurate”, as opposed to catering to the preconceptions of international tourists, advances the fight for campesino agency as the Inca reality cannot be denied. The campesino is identified as the modern-day remainder of the Inca and we perceive Peruvian Indigeneity much more through them than mestizo Cusqueños or Limeños. The Inti Raymi festival is a route to large-scale representation. This, a representation which many campesinos do not have the resources or privileges to maintain in an outward-facing event of this scale.

The festival itself is entirely designed to be a spectacle. It is a construction designed to be perceived by a curated audience. This could be Peruvian nationals who enjoy it as an annual day of rest and celebration, or wealthy (relatively) foreign tourists like ourselves who travel specifically for the ceremony and shell out the 461soles to sit on the bleachers. Many of the viewers on the hillside had to arrive early to secure a spot in the ruins, as opposed to the bleachers attendants who could arrive and leave at any time while maintaining their assigned seat. Although this creates a separation in both space and time, the ceremony as the focal point creates a unity between the groups. Everyone ingests the same representation, although from different perspectives.

In comparison, the experience we took part in at the Amaru community is predicated completely on selling the you are peeking into a non-outward facing representation of Indigeneity. The motivation for our group to attend is that we would get a “real” look into indigenous life of a campesino community. This seems self-contradictory as taking a guided van trip to an organized field day is inherently an outward-expression. Dean argues in the quote above that this experience is dependent on the one we had with Inti Raymi. So which is the more real representation and can they be extricated from each other? I think the agency which derives from the promotion of Indigeneity through Inti Raymi allows for the agency of campesino communities to curate an experience to be outward facing. The large-scale commodification (for all its pros and cons) of the Peruvian indigenous story creates the space for small-scale commodification of the campesino experience. So are we getting a “real look” into Amaru? Maybe or maybe not. But what we are getting is the opportunity to understand a life experience different than our own as foreign visitors.

The last week in Peru has been somewhat of a whirlwind. We’ve seen Ollantaytambo, Aguas Calientes, Machu Picchu, and returned to Pisac all in the matter of a few days and nights. We’ve taken 2 Don Abelino transports, our very own diesel-scented PeruRail car, a behemoth tourist bus careening around switchbacks at 7am, our own two feet (and two hands at some points), and yet another PeruRail (this time with more gen pop). It’s been a lot of seeing, moving, and even a little bit of shaking (gracias amigo Carlos). And it’s not even over yet, we’re headed in another convoy back to Cusco for a quick Inti Raymi jaunt.

We’ve gotten to the point in the trip where we’re coming back to places. Driving into Pisac yesterday afternoon and arriving to Roxana awaiting us in the lobby of the Pisac Inn, doling out the same oddly phallic room keys, felt like coming home. I remember when I was a kid and I had the pattern of turns to get home from the main highway memorized. I knew it so well that I’d wake up from my car nap right around the same curve nearly every time. There was no excuse for not helping unload the car…

It’s interesting how fast a place becomes home when you’re away from what you’re used to. I’ve gotten familiar with the walk from my room to the Mercado, I know exactly how late I can leave for class at the Florencio, you start seeing and snickering at the same NATs around town. We have a dog. Esteban and Henry know I’m not ordering food at breakfast until I’ve had a coffee and orange juice. Roxanna gave me muña tea to take with us to Calca when she heard we were having a parrillada. Dina knows our orders and I will make mine with extra veggies instead of French fries (she does make great fries too though, no shade).

My trip won’t be ending when LAST315 concludes in a couple weeks (cry). I still have at least till the end of August to explore around. I miss my friends. I miss all the routines that make Vancouver home. I miss my favorite beers and I miss my little balcony BBQ. To my surprise, I even miss my home home. I rarely feel nostalgic for Oregon and my parents house when I’m in Vancouver but I just miss it. I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the summer rituals from before I moved away. Maybe it’s just due to where I’m at in life. Everything is changing and maybe I’m looking for grounding in all that.

All this is to say, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be home. And I feel amazed at how quickly I’ve adapted to consider a new place home. I think it’s a testament to the flexibility of the concept, but the longing I feel for what I feel really connected to also exemplifies the grounding effect of place. We’ve been talking a lot in the course about displacement and I think it’s fitting we ourselves have been moving around, constantly not knowing the plan or having things change out of our control.

I think the sense of home is an important facet to Indigeneity. How does the balance between human adaptability and innate sense of place play into creation of identity?

“And yet a permanence of stone and language/upheld the city raised like a chalice/in all those hands: live, dead, and stilled,/aloft with so much death, a wall, with so much life,/struck with flint petals: the everlasting rose, our home,/ this reef on Andes, its glacial territories” (Neruda 29).

This stanza comes from section VII of Neruda’s epic poem “The Heights of Macchu Picchu”. This section plays with the contrast of the permanent and the vanished. Neruda paints the sacrifice of the Incan people in the construction of the citadel as a noble sacrifice, contrasting from the doom he feels in the first few sections about urban life. He grapples with the reality of the lives that went into the construction and describes the rock as having embodied the spirit “in all those hands”.

The contrast of life and death is an important motif for the poem in general and this section highlights it well by the permanence of both the stone (inanimate) and language (animate). There is a transference to the stones itself as a way to show the life that can come from the nobel death. The permanence of the stone maintains the permanence of the language, representative of the living. There is another example of this contrast by the description of the walls. Neruda uses “a wall” as a flexible dependent clause. The “wall” is preceded by “aloft with so much death” and followed by “with so much life”, showing a transference between life and death through construction.

There are 2 interesting images represented in this section which are also found throughout the poem – the chalice and the rose.

The image of the chalice appears early in the poem as a symbol of Neruda’s negative outlook on urban life. Later in Section VII the image is converted to a positive symbol. In Christian tradition, the chalice is the vessel that Jesus uses to share his blood at the last supper, and can also represent the womb of Mary. In the chalice, there is an emptiness but there is also opportunity as it is used to connect man to God. Neruda describes the citadel as such to emphasize the spiritual nature of the site. Additionally, the raising of the chalice represents success or celebration.

Finally, the image of the rose is used in this section as well. Throughout the poem, Neruda employs feminine/sexual imagery and the rose is no exception. The rose is representative of beauty, femininity and the fleeting nature of time. It’s interesting that Neruda uses such a feminine symbol to represent the citadel, which to me feels masculine in its blocky construction. Nonetheless, Neruda wants to emphasize how the site represents the “bloom” of the Incan empire. The entire bush is not rose flowers, but Macchu Picchu is highlighted as one of the bloom to illustrate its fertility and importance to the empire.

“What had those pots done to that Christian to make him kick them?” (Asunta, 133)

A welcome switch up in our reading schedule, Andean Lives falls under the genre of Testimonio which also includes Rigoberta Menchú’s revolutionary work “Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia”.

From both voices in the text, resiliency in the face of imposed hardship is a consistent motif. I’d like to explore the differences and similarities in resiliency faced by Gregorio and Asunta, although they share commonalities, there are marked differences in the type and extent of violence experienced based on their gender.

The testimony of Gregorio recounts his struggles to find and keep reliable work over the course of basically his entire life. From the time he was a young boy, orphaned, he was abused and taken advantage of by almost every employer he came across. His experience mirrors the picaresco, a young and migratory boy trying to survive under violent and unjust labor conditions. Some of his stories of losing livestock or playing with other boys while on the job remind me of Lazarillo. Additionally, Gregorio struggles with reliable housing, constantly being evicted/displaced/removed and being forced to start over. There’s a general attitude that these hardships are an uncomfortable but unavoidable reality to those born with the same social standing as Gregorio.

Gregorio describes account after account of unwarranted violence against him, but the nature is never sexual. On the other hand, the resiliency Asunta must engage in centers on her identity as a female and the expectations of a woman in the described society. Asuntas story was hard to read in ways that hit closer to home. Asuntas story was one of a loss of agency and identity as a woman. She not only endured abuses due to her identity as an Indigenous Peruvian but as an Indigenous Peruvian Woman.

I think it’s especially interesting that Gregorio doesn’t talk about Asuntas food business in his testimonio. For her this was one the biggest moments of victory and was a form of empowerment in the face of hardship. It wasn’t worth mentioning to him. Not to be forgotten, the domestic abuse she endured as his wife was also only mentioned by her. And mentioned in the same sentence praising his fatherhood as if the two must be inextricably linked and at least it’s not as bad as before.

I chose this quote because I think its exemplifies the need for resiliency that Gregorio and Asunta feel as Indegenous people facing the impacts of a colonial political and economic system.

Has resiliency become a condition of Indigeneity?

this is gonna be a long one …

okay so we went and we did it. We went and experienced what was supposed to be potentially the most “Indigenous” experience we are going to get during the course. Let’s run it back.

At a totally not 9am SHARP, we all piled into 2 trusty vans to drive up into an Andean community called Amaru. This community is connected? Supported? Somehow related? To our hotel and the foundation that runs it. Winding up into the hills, Pisac and its NATs (New age tourists) quickly faded into the rear view as the roads turned dusty and the cliff-side drop off was enough to make your stomach churn (more on that later…). Arriving in the community, we were greeted by men and women in their traditional dress getting ready for a day of working one of the land plots. I would say fields but as it is the dry season, the field was really just dirt. We found out later the village takes turns plowing and tending to each other’s fields when necessary, an example of the Incan theory of reciprocity we have heard about in IGV and Guaman Poma. Little did we know we were about to reciprocate. After our guide told us a few facts about the treatment of the indigenous under colonialism we were gifted with rounds of coca leaves and a charcoal-looking rock that makes your mouth numb. I would’ve liked more facts but nonetheless, experiential learning. We sat there for a while. We weren’t quite sure what was going on. That’s ok. There’s a lot of value in feeling out of place as a white westerner.

De repente, pick axes and hoes appeared. We were going to till the field. Okay. We are going to till the field. Okay. Um how? No worries, we’ll show you. Oh I forgot to mention, at this point we had been dressed in the traditional garments of the village. Beautiful textiles and hats including ponchos and toques for the Men and skirts and shawls for the ladies. So there we were, clad and ready to reciprocate. It was a sight to see, I’m sure. Jon rolled a cigarette while he “facilitated the learning”. Some people enjoyed this 1.5hours(?) more than others but I think we all learned we weren’t quite up to expectations. In the soil we unearthed potatoes, legos, rocks (which Orla threw at me) and a better understanding for what it takes to produce the food we eat.

The sun blared down from above, still strong even this close to its Winter equinox where we will have to give it our energy. We moved over to an adjacent field (maybe plowed by a previous weeks vans?) where they showed us how potatoes can be cooked in a sod-fueled mound. It smelled delicious. Apparently they had gotten it going a few hours ago and the potatoes would be ready in 30 mins or less. It felt like when the cooking show has a whole baked turkey ready to go. Jokes aside, it was actually really cool and I enjoyed watching the ladies bury the potatoes under the coals. Back to Pachamama they go.

March on we did. The community had set up a beautiful welcome for us where we were bestowed a kantu over our necks and arranged ourselves in the shade for the next phase. Turns out it was shopping and then also a lunch! The textiles on display were handmade by the community and the prices reflected this (as they should). If I wasn’t a student my wallet may have been as hungry as my eyes. Lunch was brought out wrapped in a red, white and black blanket which contrasted beautifully with the green grass and the mysterious sauce that I could put on anything. The bundle contained aforementioned roasted potatoes, fava beans, loose corn and a complement of farmers cheese (almost certainly not pasteurized). But the fun didn’t stop there! The cooks brought out a delicious potato soup. Our guide told us that apparently limeños look down on a soup like this since it’s “poor food”. Well, so was whole wheat and so was quinoa until people decided it was healthy. In bears to mention, at this point our group had had a great casualty. Our fearless and otherwise seemingly indestructible (see diet of cigarettes, Inca Kola, and various manifestations of alcohol) leader had fallen. It didn’t seem to be the roads at fault, maybe the altitude or the 24 flu that everyone seemed to be getting or maybe a combination of all 3 and a brief involvement in the day’s field tilling. Nevertheless we persisted. Lunch lasted 2 hours? Kerri told us this was quite normal for when visitors come to the village. Finally, we had a demonstration of the textiles and the weaving processes. We learned that the women learn the craft very early in their life not only as an occupation but as a way of life. It is a way to foster community, the women sit together and talk and care for the children while the men farm etc. she also told us that often the Andean women are extremely adept at mathematics because of the thread counting, even more so than non-Andean students. 3 cheers for women in STEM!

There was a bit more shopping and a bit more music and a bit more dancing and that was the whole day. I think it’s good we went. Did we get what we came for? I don’t know. I guess I didn’t have any expectations really but I wished there was more information presented. Plowing a field is cool and all but some more context and explanation would’ve enriched the experience. Maybe that’s antithetical to what they’re trying to present to us though.

I wonder the impact the rolling door of foreigners has on the children, children living in a community which is priding itself on remaining unaffected by a western lifestyle. What impact do trips like this have on the youngest?

Last blog post I started it off by basically saying “this isn’t my thing”. This blog post I’m starting off by saying this is 10000% my thing, in fact this is probably more my thing currently than anything else. My good friends will tell you I never shut up about how important shared food, as a nutrient and as an experience, is for relationship building. Every major (and minor) occasion should be marked and celebrated with a meal. This isn’t an original thought, but I think it gets lost in our modern culture of go go go and eat in front of the TV.

“Nonetheless, what I most remember about that night is not a sense of danger but the perfume of the marinade hitting the grill”

I pulled this quote from “How Food Became Religion in Peru’s Capital City” by Marco Avilés in the Lima Reader. This article stood out to me as it connected the personal experience of the author with a larger commentary on how Peru and Lima have changed in the modern age of the culinary boom.

Aviles recounts a story of the “old Lima” where it wasn’t safe to go out, but food was something that held Lima together in the midst of violence. For aviles, food is memory, of his family, of his town and the changes it was undergoing, of the contrast of the daily violence with the daily pleasures still hidden within the spirit of people. Food is an extension of the emotions felt by himself and the community and food is a semi truck transport into a shared consciousness. The types of foods available are representative of not only the current community but of the origins and shared histories brought by immigration to the city. The community is characterized and self identified by how and what they eat, either out of necessity and happily out of pride.

While our other texts haven’t focused so solely on the role of food in community, it is an ever present theme. The Incas cajoled their subjects with gifts of banquets and traditional foods of the Andeans are maintained to this day as an important part of Peruvian daily life and, as we saw in Amaru, Andean ceremony. Meals are communal. Community is built around partaking in ingestion and imbibing as a way to create a sense of sameness. We all eat the same, therefore we are all in some ways the same. Therefore, we are a community.

Jon, please don’t cancel the final dinner.

A few interesting notes on “pan” in wheat-heavy culture

• pan means bread. Pan also is the Latin prefix for all.
• In the Middle Ages, not only was bread a religious food (body of Christ etc), it was given out to the poor as charity. So you’re not just giving nourishment, you’re giving a sameness.
• Compañero/companion literally means “who I eat bread with

To be honest, economics is neither my area of expertise or area of interest. That being said, Mariategui does a good job of laying out the economic structurings of Peru in a readable and straightforward way. In relation to indigeneity, his main point in Essays on Peruvian Reality is that “the problem of the Indian” can only be solved by land reform. He also makes the argument that “the oldest and most obvious mistake is, unquestionably, that of reducing the protection of the Indian to an ordinary administrative manner… wise and detailed ordinances, worked out after conscientious study, have been quite useless”.

This made me think about what types of administrative reforms are common to todays (thinking Canadian here, would need to find out more about Peruvian) political sphere. Some things I thought of were status cards, special grants and scholarships, social assistance, and of course land acknowledgments. We’re all very familiar with the boiler plate UBC paragraph that gets delivered at the beginning of most sponsored events. While I’m sure it’s well-intentioned, it often feels performative. Yes, we are acknowledging the rights of the land, but after that, what?

Mariateguis argument throughout the essays seems to highlight the land richness of Peru, and the subsequent mismanagement of the land by Spanish colonizers. He advocates for the Indians right to the land which under colonialism, was swallowed up by feudal latifundios. Could the use of indigenous land to build a university which enrolls mostly non-indigenous students constitute an educational appropriation of land in the same vein that the Spanish colonizers appropriated Indian lands for their own economic systems (systems which were markedly unsuccessful in Peru)?

I think the concept of land acknowledgments would enrage Mariategui. The words-without-action nature of the acknowledgment gives people an out from actual land reform, which Mariategui argues is the only solution.

The last few days in Pisac I’ve had the opportunity to visit a few different Incan ruins in both Pisac itself and in the surrounding towns. Each time we’ve visited I’m struck by the same awe but also an odd sense of confusion or “inquietud” which is a word I seem to only know in Spanish and I’m not bothered to find out in English because it suits me so well as it is.

In Pisac, the ruins are way up high on a hill side as opposed to being nestled in the valley where the modern city of Pisac is. This meant that the residents could not only take advantage of the agriculture by elevation system, but had the advantage of gravity being on their side. A local guide told us the Incans primary weapon against enemies was the slingshot and I noticed Daniel practicing his marksmanship from the tippy top of the fortification. He was confident he could defend the terraces (no tourists or llamas were harmed in this recreation). But the genius of the incas extended even further, they understood that the hillside rock was more stable that the slope across the valley and chose to place their settlement for longevity instead of ease of construction. Note: that unstable hill side is now completely occupied…

In Chinchero and Moray we also got to visit the fruits of Incan labor. Chinchero had more terraces than fort ruins and Moray was basically a really high tech pit. Apparently at Moray, the Incans conducted agriculture research and it was a kind of lab space. The terraces descend from a ledge concentrically like a telescope. They are incredibly symmetrical and obviously precise. The walls are, of course, perfectly designed and aligned. The sheer scale of Moray is hard to describe. We were there during sunset and it felt like the site had eaten up the afternoon sun itself to lend a blueish haze to everything. In the background Salkantay and Ausegante (?) tower over the valley. Imposing and powerful in the same but opposite way as the Moray pit.

And now “mi inquietud”. Real people lived in these places. Real people live laugh loved at the Pisac ruins. They played games, they made jokes, they fought with their siblings etc. And now they’re just not here. And now we just wander around and look at the graveyards of their existence. It’s fascinating but it’s really very morbid. Cissy and I were chatting on the walk around Moray about why the terraces aren’t in use anymore, they seem totally structurally sound and there is a lot of land not being used. We thought about it for a bit and felt that if the lands were being worked on and the site was also open to visitors (which I think it should be as there is value in remembering history), that it would become a sort of zoo. People would come and gawk at the workers, similar to how we all act when we see llamas. It would devalue the site and be disrespectful of the people.

So this made me think, are we still treating these sites as respectfully as we can while also learning from them? Is it effectively a zoo of the past?