Non-Humans in Amerindian South America
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Non-Humans in Amerindian South America

Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals and Songs

Juan Javier Rivera Andía, Juan Javier Rivera Andía

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eBook - ePub

Non-Humans in Amerindian South America

Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals and Songs

Juan Javier Rivera Andía, Juan Javier Rivera Andía

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About This Book

Drawing on fieldwork from diverse Amerindian societies whose lives and worlds are undergoing processes of transformation, adaptation, and deterioration, this volume offers new insights into the indigenous constitutions of humanity, personhood, and environment characteristic of the South American highlands and lowlands. The resulting ethnographies – depicting non-human entities emerging in ritual, oral tradition, cosmology, shamanism and music – explore the conditions and effects of unequally ranked life forms, increased extraction of resources, continuous migration to urban centers, and the (usually) forced incorporation of current expressions of modernity into indigenous societies.

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Year
2018
ISBN
9781789200980

Part I

Securing Body and Wealth

1

On the Wings of Inspiration

Ritual Efficacy, Dancing Flamingos and Divine Mediation among Pastoralists and Herd Animals in Isluga, Chile
Penelope Z. Dransart
At high altitude in northern Chile, the winds have sculpted the steppe-like terrain into a largely treeless scrub. Large expanses of wind-torn soil, scoured from rock formations, give way to swampy bottomlands where water sources sustain areas of continuous vegetation. At altitudes greater than 3,700 metres above sea level, land used for cultivating quinua becomes exhausted, turning it sterile and bereft of the dry shrubby vegetation and isolated grass tussocks that ought to cover it.
Isluga, in this highland zone in Tarapaca, which forms part of II Región of Chile, borders the international frontier with Bolivia. Herders here put a great deal of ritual effort into enhancing the vital strength of their llamas, alpacas and sheep, as well as of the land that nourishes them all. They recognise that the regeneration of fertility or potency in people, herds and the earth itself is a property of the uywiris, the divinities of the hills and water sources, who are powerful grantees or withholders of good fortune. People are reluctant, however, to leave matters of fertility to chance, and they direct much ritual effort to complement the daily and annual round of caring for their herd animals. They also seek to dar fuerza (give strength) to the land itself, whom they address as Wirjin Tayka (Virgin Mother), using a half-Aymarised Spanish, half-Aymara term of respect.
My aim in this chapter is to examine the notion of efficacy in connection with a ritual action involving the burning of feathers as part of a major ceremony called the wayñu, which is celebrated in Isluga by individual households in honour of the herd animals. Part of the effort that humans undertake is to co-opt herd animals as active ritual agents into the ceremonies. Elsewhere I have demonstrated that the wayñu brings to the fore a sense of parallelism between the lineages of llamas, alpacas and sheep and those of human beings (Dransart 2002a: 89, 95–98). Here I will argue that the co-option of the herd animals into ritual observances contributes to the idea that nonverbal communication between species is possible via the mediation of other-worldly beings. For the purposes of this discussion I extend the notion of the term ‘species’ to refer to mortal and divine beings as well as human and non-human species.1 Among human participants, the motivation for undertaking the wayñu is to ensure the well-being of their llamas, alpacas and sheep. As the thread of my argument emerges below, another element comes into focus. It is based on a principle I call inspiration in reference to the divine influence that animates people and herd animals with feeling. In other words, inspiration infuses feeling into them. My exposition therefore differs from that of many authors who tend to concentrate on the interests of the human contributors in the performance of rituals.
In exploring such human interests, Humphrey and Laidlaw (1994) have suggested that participants may appeal to the authority of ancestors to disavow their own intentions in conducting the ritual. The title of their book, The Archetypal Actions of Ritual, drew attention to the prototypical qualities of such practices. In Isluga, people often defer to the concept of costumbre (custom) in order to explain their ritual actions. Yet it is their custom to avoid providing a verbal exegesis of what a costumbre might mean; as Marietta Ortega Perrier (1998: 92) observed, in Isluga costumbre es (custom is). Juan van Kessel (1989: 50) treated such a concept as a means of authentication, which also indicates that the rituals follow a standard model. Superficially, at least, the argument might be applied to the ritual actions of Isluga people: they engage in them because their ancestors did. Catherine Bell (1997: 150) argued that whether or not the ritualised practices are as authentic as the practitioners maintain, the appeal to a sense of tradition provides them with values that are coherent and have the potential to endure.
These authors therefore consider the events of a ritual to carry a strong charge derived from the perceived legacy of the participants’ forebears. Humphrey and Laidlaw’s argument additionally carries with it the notion that these human pursuits differ from those activated in other spheres of practice. They thought that a ‘different standpoint, the ritual stance’ transforms such acts (Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994: 121). But the correct performance of ritual action is insufficient for it to be efficacious; in their view, participants should be conscious agents in giving meaning to the archetypal actions of ritual practice because they share some meanings but not others (ibid.: 13). In particular, they thought that the devotees they studied developed their subjective experiences to the extent that their fervent devotions become ‘the animating force of ritual efficacy’ (ibid.: 42).
Johannes Quack and Paul Töbelmann (2010: 18, 24 n.17) approached the problem from a different angle in expressing the conviction that one cannot study ritual or ritualised practices in isolation, as though it were possible to separate them from other aspects of social life. They also drew attention to the effects that a certain ritual may have, depending on whether one assesses its efficaciousness from the perspective of a native practitioner or that of an analyst. Social actors have desires when they perform a ritual, and those desires provide sufficient grounds for undertaking it. Quack and Töbelmann argue that it can be difficult for academic observers to distinguish between intended and unintended consequences of ritual practice. Certain consequences may be incidental to the intended action, and they maintain that the explanations and intentions of the practitioners are privileged because ‘only they can explain why the people performed the ritual action at all’ (ibid.: 25, n.13).
In the ritual practice examined here, the purpose Isluga people give for burning flamingo feathers is to discourage their llamas, alpacas and sheep from wandering and to keep them together as a tightly formed herd. This small act constitutes a particular moment in a larger complex of events celebrating the coming into sexual maturity of the herd animals. In the Andes this ceremony is often called, in Spanish, the floreo (flowering) or herranza (branding), but in the Aymara of Isluga it is the wayñu, which is a type of dance (Mamani Mamani 2002: 169). There is a pronounced liturgical aspect to Isluga people’s celebration of the wayñu, and they are scrupulously careful to observe its correct sequential performance despite the convention according to which the couple who host the event are expected to consume an excess of alcohol (Dransart 1997: 85; 2002b).
This chapter draws attention to the effects participants seek to accomplish in conducting such actions by exploring the motivation for undertaking particular ritual movements as well as considering potential founts of inspiration. A desire on the part of the herders to avoid spending time and energy looking for errant llamas supplies the motive for going in the dark of night on the eve of the wayñu ceremony to the pastures that their animals frequent during daylight hours. If motivation has to do with initiating movement or action – bearing in mind that the ceremony itself, significantly, is called a dance – then inspiration has to do with the drawing in of breath and the offering of smoke to divine beings. The animation of feeling that accompanies the ceremony as a whole springs from sources broader than the immediate cause of motivation, and is related to the notion that it is possible for divinities to communicate non-verbal incentives to herd animals.

Questioning ‘Ritual Efficacy’

In a handbook published in 1621, the Jesuit Pablo de Arriaga entitled one of his chapters ‘Que ofrecen en sus sacrificios, y como’ (What they offer in their sacrifices, and how). The publication was intended to assist priests in campaigns to extirpate idolatry, and listed in the chapter were pink feathers from flamingos ‘they call pariuna’, which frequented highland lakes (Arriaga 1621: 26).2 Despite the tenor of the language he used – Sabine MacCormack (1991: 406) called it a ‘terminology of contempt’ – his text injects a sense of curiosity and even wonderment into the inventory of sacred objects and ritual practices intended to assist priests to discover prior to destroying them. In a detailed study of the extirpation of idolatry during the mid-Colonial Period (1640–1750), Kenneth Mills (1997: 63) found that witness statements recorded in inquisition trials conveyed local people’s sincerity in their commitment to ritual observance; indeed, one person spoke of his fear of the Catholic Church but also of his greater fear of Andean divinities, so much so that in his ritual practices he was unable to cease invoking them. Despite the efforts of the mid-colonial missionaries, people did not always find the Christian mass to be efficacious (ibid.: 185).
In the light of Stanley Tambiah’s (1981: 128) comment that ‘traffic with the supernatural [is] notoriously uncertain’, it is important to take such historical circumstances into account. He relates how people used to venerate the Sri Lankan smallpox goddess until Western medicine succeeded in eradicating the disease and, as a result, the goddess’s cult became almost obsolete (ibid.: 129). Andean rites to enhance the fertility of the crops and herd animals have followed a different historical trajectory. People continue to celebrate them, despite the severe punishment meted out by the authorities during the Colonial Period and the present-day disapproval emanating from evangelical protestant churches. Today, as Peter Gose (2014: 9) observes, countless herding rituals from many different Andean communities feature on YouTube. Participants in these ritual performances use such media to present their ‘interests and future identities’ to ‘publics’ that are increasingly heterogeneous (Hughes-Freeland and Crain 1998: 1–3. See also Crain 1998). Some aspects of these rituals, however, are so highly charged that they are not deemed suitable for public exposure via electronic communication.
An awareness of changing historical circumstances alerts us, as researchers, to the consequences produced by the style of our questions. Note that Pablo de Arriaga used the relative pronoun ‘what’ in an interrogative manner. Perhaps he relied on information supplied by parish priests who had questioned people, asking them to identify selections from an indefinite number of things or values. For instance, in response to a question such as ‘What do you offer to the deities?’, someone could have replied, ‘We offer the smoke of burnt parina feathers’.
In order to establish the subject of an enquiry, however, pronouns can be employed in a more elliptical fashion. Quack and Töbelmann (2010: 17) therefore proposed a strategy for examining the problem of ritual efficacy by recommending that researchers ask precisely: ‘What or who affects what or whom, and according to whom?’ This tripartite question rests on a distinction between the efficiens and the efficiendum. The efficiens is the element (somebody or something) who/that effects (or produces) a change to an extent that the participants/interpreters regard the ritual as having been worthwhile. The efficiendum, in contrast, is the person, body or thing upon which the ritual is enacted. An interpreter or interpreters comprise the third element in providing an assessment of the degree to which the ritual process results in an efficacious outcome.3
As a starting point, the herders might be regarded as the efficiens because they offer the smoke of the burnt feathers to the spirits of the hills and water sources. The llamas, alpacas and sheep constitute the efficiendum, and the herders evaluate the quality of the rite’s efficacy on the extent of the walking they have to do to bring dispersed herd members back together in the course of their daily herding activities.
These distinctions only provide a baseline for the enquiry because, Quack and Töbelmann argued (2010: 17–18), people who agree on the efficaciousness of the outcome might disagree on how that successful outcome has been achieved. A healer who conducted a ritual, for example, might acknowledge the intervention of divine beings to whom he or she attributed the cure of a patient, but an outside observer might consider that the cure worked instead on the patient’s psyche by removing the anxieties that had caused the problem. Quack and Töbelmann (2010: 17) observe that the efficacy is perceived from the perspective of ‘different “spheres” or “levels”’. They also draw attention to possible alternative interpretations of the ‘means’ used to bring about the efficacious ‘ends’; if participants use offerings to make contact with divinities, do the offerings cause the divinities to intervene positively, or do these offerings have a symbolic role? Finally, they observe that special conditions can serve as context-dependent variables impinging on how people regard the efficacy of a ritual. Admitting that such issues are not always mutually exclusive, they suggest that the analyst ask these questions:
1. Who or what is held to be efficacious in the ritual? (efficiens)
2. What is held to be affected in the ritual? (efficiendum)
3. In what sphere or on what level is the ritual efficacious?
4. By what means is the ritual efficacious?
5. Under which conditions is the ritual efficacious? (Quack and Töbelmann 2010: 18)
These questions will also serve as a reminder that the effects of ritual are achieved through an understanding of its interacting or contextual aspects rather than on just one of its constituent moments (a point also made by Endres 2008: 77). In this light, concerns about the efficacy of ritual action should be situated in the context of the value and worth of other sorts of activity. Peter Gose (1994: 6) regarded ritual ‘as a moment of practice that is intrinsically incomplete and necessarily resolves itself into other moments, most notably labour’. This contextualisation of what comprises ritual provides a framework for a discussion of the feather-burning ritual in Isluga as an integral part of the work involved in the annual cycle of the herding year.
The exploration that follows, therefore, concerns the burning of parina feathers and is based on my fieldwork in Isluga. It is framed in a consideration of relevant comparative ethnographic and historic literature, tracking certain issues that operate on aesthetic and configurational levels. The discussion also takes into accou...

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