Guinea Pigs

Food, Symbol and Conflict of Knowledge in Ecuador

Eduardo P. Archetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781859731147
• eBook ISBN: 9781000323832
• Subtopic: Religion

Guinea pigs have been reared and eaten by indigenous people in the Andes since ancient times, and it seemed rational to development planners to 'modernize' their production. When these development projects ran into trouble, a team of anthropologists was invited to study the reasons for this lack of success. This intriguing book is the product of that study.What the author shows is that guinea pigs have a meaning in the social and ritual life of Ecuadorian peasants which is far from mundane. Rejecting the attempts of some anthropologists to reduce the production of guinea pigs and the festive life of the Andean community to a quest for protein, he explores the full complex of social and cultural practices which centre on this animal, and uses his study of its role within Andean culture to provide telling insights into how that culture itself is constituted -- its values, beliefs and attitudes. By working in a variety of communities with different ecological and ethnographic characteristics, the author has made a major contribution to ethnographic accounts of Ecuador and to the more general study of ritual, consumption and indigenous knowledge. He points us, in particular, towards the importance of the knowledge of women, who are those principally responsible for the care of an animal which is prized for its role in healing and central to Andean sociality. The book not only presents us with a colourful description of the range of cultural practices surrounding the guinea pig, ranging from the way the animals are reared, through a rich and complex cuisine, to their role in ritual life, but also highlights the way the gender dimension is central to understanding resistances to 'modernization' and the power of 'experts'.

CHAPTER ONE
History of a Projet

DOI: 10.4324/9781003135715-1

This book is the result of an investigation and evaluation carried out for the Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry.¹ One part of the programme of agrarian modernization, part of the plan of Desarrollo Rural Integral (DRI) (Integrated Rural Development), was the transformation of the traditional production of guinea-pigs. Guinea-pigs had to be removed from peasant houses and kitchens. They had to abandon their reproductive and ancestral habitats, be moved away from their owners and the warmth of the household and be placed in new hutches. This logic implied that it is not possible to increase the production of the guinea-pigs without the producer obtaining maximum supervision and control over the animals' behaviour. The kitchen - the 'natural' habitat of this animal - is dark, and people believe that these animals live in a sort of reproductive chaos, where age and genetic relations are mixed randomly. Genetic engineering and the control of reproduction are central in this modern model of production. Once the guinea-pigs have left the houses, the first step in the modernization process is the achievement of improving reproductive indices. The second is to avoid genetic degeneration via careful control of breeding. The third is to place one male for any ten females in each hutch. The fourth is to avoid the rearing of very young females with characteristics that will not guarantee genetic improvement in the long run. The fifth is to sort the animals in homogeneous lots by age and by sex. The sixth is to control reproduction by removing females that are not fertile enough. The seventh is population control to maintain a low percentage of strong, sturdy reproductive samples which come from large broods. The eighth is a good handling of the newborn and to take them away from the mothers when they are twenty days old. The last point, which does not exhaust the package of possible measures, is to implement 'rational' commercialization. This means eliminating those females that have given birth many times - the oldest reproductive subjects - as well as those females that have a low level of fertility and also sterile and underweight males.

Any modern model of reproduction has to take into account food as an important variable. The provision of suitable food, related to the size, sex and general conditions of the guinea-pigs, guarantees, in principle, a better transformation into food. Their diet should be based mainly on fresh vegetable matter, although the ideal diet would be a mixture of concentrated fodder.

A strong and fat guinea-pig needs to stay healthy. Therefore its health care has to be changed in order to discover quickly and precisely illnesses that afflict guinea-pigs. This implies a policy of preventive care that includes temperature control of the hutch, the elimination of humidity from the cubicles and their periodic disinfection. Once a sick animal has been discovered, it is important to treat it promptly to avoid the spread of the disease. Peasants believe that guinea-pigs are delicate animals that are continuously attacked by parasites. It is therefore necessary to disinfect them regularly.

Obviously modern handling of guinea-pigs entails controlling many variables at the same time. Genetic results depend upon food and upon health, which is itself part of a good diet. A healthy guinea-pig is, in principle, one that lives in a good habitat and has a good diet. A healthy guinea-pig grows well, puts on weight fast and reproduces quickly. In other words, the modern model of guinea-pig production calls for good planning on the part of producers, who learn to maximize the results and, therefore, behave 'rationally'. The producer has to control the context and the phases of production, to identify the distinct variables and understand their interrelations and to be aware of any variations in order to implement the necessary corrective measures. In other words, the producer (more specifically the female producer, because the rearing of guinea-pigs, as explained below, is almost entirely a female activity) needs to abandon her existing production 'code', which is determined by traditions, for a new 'set of rules' that have not yet been tried out or elaborated by others. In this way, the producer is placed in an almost experimental situation of social and cultural change, due to the fact that a change of 'code' often implies altering rules, knowledge and strategies that traditionally guide the culturally accepted productive practices.

The declared objective of the programme was to increase production and productivity, which would enable peasant families both to eat more guinea-pigs and to sell them in larger numbers. In this process, the guinea-pig would be transformed from a use value into a commodity of exchange value. Likewise, experts thought that the use of guinea-pigs would allow the active incorporation of women into the process of integrated rural development. The idea was that the transformation of a traditional system of breeding into a modern one would entail a better use of the female and domestic labour force. During this period, it was hoped that programmes of development would raise employment and income and improve diet. In this modernizing context, guinea-pigs constituted an important strategy of intervention on the part of the rural development workers and technical experts of the Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry. The guinea-pig was also a well-known, accepted and appreciated animal for the indigenous and non-indigenous peasant population in Ecuador.

None the less, the modernization programme did not progress at the pace that the planners expected. When this happens, it is common to attribute the problem to the existence of technical socio-economic 'bottlenecks' or cultural determining factors. Cultural conditioning and determining factors are normally associated with the weight of 'tradition', 'beliefs' and individual 'inertia'. These are generally the subjects of study of less quantitative social sciences, in this case social anthropology. Therefore the Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry consulted social anthropologists in order to unveil the 'cultural logic' that lay behind 'traditional' habits of livestock breeding.² Consequently, fieldwork was planned in an almost standard ethnographic way without any intention of testing theories and models that would have adequately explained the resistance to the new technological packets of measures. Moreover, this position was necessary because of the lack of previous work in Ecuador concerning the relation between peasant culture and the animal world - and in particular the guinea-pig.³ Finally, an explanation of this resistance would have implied studying the existing relations between the modernization programme, and its implementation by the extension team and the subjects whose behaviour was to be changed. This went beyond the terms of reference of the study. Interestingly enough, the problem did not reside in either the technological model proposed or in the new form of animal breeding that was introduced, but in the open rejection by the women who had to carry it out.

Ecuador is a complex society, and there is no need to argue this at length. It is sufficient to mention the existence of distinct categories of female and male peasants, and their different regional, religious and ethnic traits. Since the 1960s, as a consequence of recent industrialization and increased urbanization, peasants have reproduced their cultural and productive practices in a much more complex context, in which oral tradition, coexists with written, traditional medicine, with modern medicine, and traditional technology with the world of tractors and modern inputs. Interaction between these different logics and cultural codes takes place continuously in everyday life. A clear example of this context is the active intervention-of the state, through this programme of modernization and many others, in the lives of people who have kept guinea-pigs inside the house for centuries and for whom productive practice is also a way of defining domestic space. A peasant house without guinea-pigs is not, obviously, a complete house.

Social anthropology seeks to describe and explain cultural behaviours and logics by studying communities with a limited number of actors, where, by virtue of proximity and length of stay, it is possible to observe all aspects of social life together with the symbolic and ritual world. Sociologists, on the other hand, study many actors, and only a few variables. The most cited criticism of anthropological studies is their lack of 'representativeness'. In our case, we were unable to carry out traditional fieldwork, in which the guinea-pig would be located within a wider system of classification of both animal and plant worlds. We have therefore focused on the social and symbolic world of the guinea-pig. In order to minimize the consequent drawback of this focus, our approach has been twofold: carrying out the study of the guinea-pig in the greatest possible detail in an attempt to define productive and symbolic worlds, which range from economic processes through to magical beliefs, and at the same time choosing different communities on the basis of certain 'objective' criteria which, in principle, give us the opportunity to identify possible variations. The first aspect will be developed in depth in the next chapter. The second calls for a few paragraphs of explanation.

The fieldwork was carried out in eight communities. In the area of Salcedo we chose Llactahurco, Chirinche and Tigualó; in Guamote, Chismaute and Palmira Dávalos; in Guaiaceo, Sharván; and finally in Quimiag-Penipe, Ayanquil and Guzo. These communities were selected according to the following criteria: type of and control over productive resources; ethnicity; religious affiliation; and the presence or absence of a modernization programme for the breeding of guinea-pigs. Why were these criteria chosen rather than others? We thought it important that any project examining improvements in production and productivity should take into account factors which influence access to more and better pasture, but which, at the same time, increase the workload of some members of the domestic group. Consequently, we considered it a priority to delineate the location of the communities in different ecological niches, since this influences soil conditions and the possibility of increasing the production of food for guinea-pigs. At the same time, we investigated the quantity of available soil, productive strategies, the availability of pastures and grass fields, both in the mountains and in the high plateau, and the existence of irrigation, which is a fundamental factor in the production of alfalfa. All these aspects explain the importance of the first criterion. Let us analyse the remaining three.

In the world of Ecuadorean rural producers, the ethnic aspect is an important criterion for defining different systems and sociocultural logic. Generally speaking, the importance of community relations and the conservation of a busy religious and festival cycle is intimately connected to the prevalence of an indigenous peasantry at both local and regional levels. The presentation of our results will try to show - when necessary - the relevance of ethnic identity in the analysis of changes both in practices and in belief systems.

In recent years, and especially in some regions, a division between Catholic and Protestant has developed within the indigenous peasantry. We think that, if Protestant ideological discourse emphasizes aspects such as soberness, decency, cleanliness and saving, it was possible to foresee that these new values would have a precise impact on openness and receptivity to the proposed innovations. In parallel, Protestant c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• CHAPTER ONE History of a Project
• CHAPTER TWO The Cultural Complexity of the Guinea-pig
• CHAPTER THREE The Meat Produced
• CHAPTER FOUR The Meat Transformed
• CHAPTER FIVE The Healing Meat
• CHAPTER SIX The Meat as Commodity
• CHAPTER SEVEN Social and Cultural Logics
• Bibliography
• Index