10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4550
application/pdf
2239-625X
4550
2
en
urn:nbn:it:unica-28013
Jonathan Alderman
Anuac
House personhood in rural Andean Bolivia
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
10
Thematic section: The anatomy of houses: Materialities of being at home
2021-12-22
2021-01-31
2021-12-31
2021-12-31
129-154
1
Jonathan Alderman
2021/12/22
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4550
129
Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Germany
2239-625X
2
154
urn:nbn:it:unica-28013
House personhood in rural Andean Bolivia
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/4550/5025
10
                                       2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2021: 129-154




House personhood in rural Andean Bolivia
Jonathan ALDERMAN
Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich




ABSTRACT: In the rural Bolivian Andes, personhood is defined by intersubjective
reciprocal relationships between human and nonhuman beings. This paper examines
the role of the house as a living being in itself and a conduit between its inhabitants and
local place deities. In the rural Andes, houses (traditionally made from adobe but
increasingly from brick) materially connect their inhabitants with a sacred landscape,
and rituals performed at their construction create the house as a living being in its own
right. This article, based on fieldwork with the Kallawayas, an indigenous nation in
Northwest Bolivia, examines the Kallawaya relationship to the house in the context of
Andean ethnography on housebuilding, observing the role of the house in communal
ritual life. The house, for the Kallawayas, is argued to be an assemblage of energy with
its inhabitants and the landscape, a fractal representative of the homologous structure
of the rural Andean community, the ayllu.
KEYWORDS: KALLAWAYA; ANDES; HOUSES; AYLLU; RITUAL.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Jonathan Alderman
House personhood in rural Andean Bolivia
2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2021: 129-154.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4550
130                                                           JONATHAN ALDERMAN




      Introduction
   The house in the rural Bolivian Andes is a foundational unit of community,
and a significant mediator in relations between humans and nonhumans
that are a defining feature (alongside kinship) of a rural Andean community
as an ayllu. This article examines how the house, known in Quechua-
speaking communities as wasi, is constituted as a person in its own right and
the rituals around the house that connect its inhabitants through the house
to sacred places. A wasi is “both a physical space and a group of structures as
well as the people who occupy them” (Rockefeller 2010: 68), and as such
provides ample opportunity to examine ethnographically both the social
organisation around the environs of the house (see Carsten 1995; Janowski
1995, influenced by Levi-Strauss’s 1983 and 1987 concept of House
Societies) and how these social relations are constituted through ritual and
the material nature of the house itself (see Buchli 2013).
   The article draws mainly on ethnographic research conducted in early
2019 in the province of Bautista Saavedra in the North of the department of
La Paz in Northwest Bolivia, in ayllus self-identifying as Kallawaya.
Fieldwork was financed by a grant from the Society for Latin American
Studies for research that proposed to study the relationship between people
in Kallawaya ayllus and their houses. My interest in the topic had been
piqued after returning to the municipality of Charazani (one of two
municipalities in the province) (see figure 1) for six weeks shortly after
completing my PhD (2016), and three and a half years after initial fieldwork
there in 2012-2013 to find that many of the families I knew had new houses,
donated or subsidised by the State Housing Agency (see Alderman 2021).
The nature of the material from which they were built – brick, cement and
ceramic tiles, all construction materials brought from outside the local
region – were in contrast to the adobe houses I had witnessed being
constructed, and indeed helped to construct myself, during my initial
fieldwork (see Alderman 2016, 2021, forthcoming). The objective of my
fieldwork in 2019 was to investigate Kallawaya understandings of, and
relations with, the house, to understand how relationships with houses
might change because of differences in their materiality. Here, though, I
focus on the ritual relationships through which a house’s personhood is
constituted, as understood by the Kallawayas.



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HOUSE PERSONHOOD IN RURAL ANDEAN BOLIVIA                                           131




   The Kallawayas are one of thirty-six indigenous nations implicitly
recognised in Bolivia’s 2009 constitution through their language Macha-
Jujay, an official language of the state (Constitución Política del Estado, 2009
[NCPE]: article 5.1), though the most commonly-spoken languages in the
province are Spanish , Quechua and Aymara. The Kallawayas are most well-
known in Bolivia through their reputation as traditional healers and
shamanic ritualists. While these two professions have been regarded by
some researchers as entirely separate (Bastien 1985), and some, such as
Schoop (1988 [1984]) have defined only those travelling to heal as Kallawaya,
others, such as Rösing (1996: 65-67), find there is not necessarily a
separation of roles. Indeed, Kallawayas regard offerings to place-deities as
vital to individual and collective health. The most powerful places are
mountaintops, referred to as achachilas a n d machulas in Aymara and
Quechua respectively (though both terms are used interchangeably by the
Quechua-speakers), terms literally meaning grandparent. Sacred places are
also often referred to by Kallawayas as lugarniyuq, the Quechua suffix -yuq,
added to the Spanish word for place, ambiguously indicating both belonging
to and ownership over places, as well as in Spanish as sacred places.
Mannheim and Salas Carreño (2015: 63-64) and Salas Carreño (2016: 832)

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132                                                           JONATHAN ALDERMAN


have argued that it is wrong to think of there being sacred places in the
Andes, since there is no division between the sacred and the profane; rather,
there are named places that “have a fractal quality, as it is possible to find
more and more names within a given place” that are “vastly more powerful
than humans,” and which “receive privileged attention” (Salas Carreño 2016:
832). Whilst from my observations I agree that naming is critical in
conferring personhood on a place, and that for the Kallawayas it is what
makes a place lugarniyuq, I take the lead from Kallawayas themselves
(including one quoted here) in referring to them at times as sacred places.
Naming confers a sacred quality to a place, making it subject to ritual
offerings, called pagos, or commonly in the Kallawaya context, mesas or
k’intus (burnt offerings) or kuchos (buried offerings). Marisol de la Cadena
(2014; 2015) has argued that through mutual exchanges between humans
(runa or runakuna, pl. in Quechua) and what she calls Earth Beings, the
identity of both, and the ayllu itself mutually emerge together. According to
Ina Rösing (2003: 604-675; 1996: 439), Kallawayas believe that if humans fail
to maintain their obligations towards sacred places, then sacrificial debt
builds up, and, rather than providing beneficial weather for the Kallawayas’
crops, lugarniyuq may instead cause catastrophic events.
   Not just mountains, the most commonly cited named place in Andeanist
ethnographies, but also houses can be lugarniyuq that are both mediators for
offerings to more powerful mountain lugarniyuq (achachilas) and also
recipients of offerings as named places themselves. At its construction, a
wasi is enlivened by rituals that connect it to shrines on mountaintops and
imbue the house with its own personhood through the spirit of Condor Tapa
Mamani (the nest of the condor), the condor being itself a messenger of the
gods. As will be examined ethnographically, exchanges between humans and
nonhumans inhabiting sacred places take place through shrines known as
cabildos (often pronounced kawiltu by Quechua speakers), located in the
patios of houses. It is the cabildo where the Condor Tapa Mamani is
generally understood to be specifically located. Each cabildo is a named
place in its own right, and the name of the shrine is commonly used in
speech as a synechdoche for the whole patio even including the house as
well. The patio is at the centre of communal life, both as the stage for ritual
offerings, but also of family and neighbourhood gatherings. In traditional
Kallawaya houses (rather than those recently built by the Bolivian State
Housing Agency, which are self-contained; Alderman 2021), each room
opens up onto the patio, rather than leading into one another, so is the
common space of the family where visitors are greeted and social life takes
place (Muñoz Morán 2020a: 105).


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HOUSE PERSONHOOD IN RURAL ANDEAN BOLIVIA                                           133


    A central characteristic of the wasi is its recursiveness: “it can refer to a
room, a building, a complex, and also the land that contains these”
(Rockefeller 2010: 68). An examination of the wasi, therefore, provides an
insight into the fractal nature of the ayllu, characterised by its homologous
structure, as has been widely recognised in Andeanist ethnography (see
particularly Allen 1997; 2016), compared to Chinese boxes (Platt 1986: 255)
or Russian dolls (Harvey and Knox 2010: 131). As Catherine Allen (1997: 81)
has described, “[e]very microcosm is a macrocosm and vice versa”. This is
because Andean people like the Kallawayas regard the world in monastic
terms as composed of one substance, and thus acting on one part can have
effects for other parts through flows of energy that materially pass through
the cabildo.
    The article will examine the recursive structure within which the house
and shrine connect their inhabitants to an animated landscape, firstly, by
examining the rituals though which a wasi is understood to attain
personhood, then the cabildo itself and the offerings that are made through
it, and finally how an understanding of Kallawaya houses as assemblages
with their inhabitants and the landscape is experienced practically, by
examining some of the exchanges that take place in the ritual of Irwi in the
Kallawaya ayllu of Amarete, when named places are fed as reciprocation for
providing the first products of the harvest. In this last section I focus most
closely on the role of the male authorities of Amarete (known as jilakatas) in
the Irwi ritual because I personally participated in Irwi most closely with
them, and they at times performed rituals separately from their wives (mama
tallas). Though I have male and female interlocutors in Kallawaya ayllus, the
majority are male and middle-aged. This is partly as a result of my initial
research having been conducted within the male-dominated Kallawaya
autonomy assembly, when I studied the Kallawaya project to convert the
municipality of Charazani into constitutionally recognised indigenous
originary peasant autonomy (autonomía indígena originario campesina) in
2012 (see Alderman 2016; 2018). I was invited to participate in the Irwi ritual
by two men who had participated in the autonomy assembly, and who now
both happened to be jilakatas during the same year. My other interlocutor,
cited in this essay, is a Kallawaya healer from a different ayllu, Lunlaya, who
I have also known since my initial fieldwork in 2012. This reflects my
fieldwork that began as multi-sited across the municipality in an effort to
understand the political project of the municipality and the ritual
relationships within and between them.



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134                                                          JONATHAN ALDERMAN


The nest of the condor
   In this section, I will describe how the wasi develops personhood, with
reference to Andean ethnographic literature, and descriptions of house-
building ceremonies in Kallawaya ayllus, based on my own observations and
the description of a Kallawaya healer, Aurelio. Catherine Allen, who has
written extensively on the relationship between people and houses in the
Andes finds that all matter is potentially alive and imbued with agency, all
material things possessing a kind of personhood (Allen 2015: 24). Houses
live because they are “formed out of the living Earth” (Allen 1988: 44) but
“[w]ithout human intervention, the spot of earth on which, and out of which,
the house is fashioned lies inert and without identity” (2015: 34). Houses
become alive through rituals that activate their latent connection to
mountain authorities, by making the house the centre of the circulation of
animating forces that convert material things into persons (Muñoz Morán
2020b: 16). As will be looked at in more detail later, exchanges occur
between people and the mountain deities (achachilas) through mutual
feeding. By feeding achachilas through the house, they animate it (Gose
2018: 490).
   Through materials used in its construction, the adobe house becomes
what Denise Arnold (1991: 16) has referred to in relation to houses in Potosí
in Southern Bolivia as “a personified representation of the mountain”. The
mountain provides mud for the walls, kindling for the fire, shrubs used in
mixing building materials, wood for the roof, and grass for the roof-covering.
The straw represents the building’s hair, roof-timbers its collar, the rafters
its ribcage, and the outside walls analogous to the cliff-face (1991: 22, 26).
Descola (2013) has characterised Andean society as based on analogism.
Different entities are unique, but connected to one another through
analogous traits. Catherine Allen (2016: 437), however, while agreeing with
Descola’s classification of Andean societies as analogical, argues that they
rely on an underlying animism. In her analysis of inqaychus (small stones in
the shape of figures such as animals, said to be made and animated by
mountains), Allen (2016) argues that in the Andes analogous objects are not
merely connected by representation, but by one being a “literal
instantiation” of another (2016: 436). A house is not just like the mountain,
but through what Allen (2016: 429), drawing on Gell (1998) refers to as
distributed personhood, is imbued with the animating substance of the
mountain itself. This animating force is in Quechua communities often
referred to as animu, though in the Quechua-speaking ayllus of Kallawaya


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HOUSE PERSONHOOD IN RURAL ANDEAN BOLIVIA                                           135


healers, the Aymara word ajayu is more common. Kallawayas believe that
people have two ajayus (souls), a larger one (which leaves at death) and a
smaller one (which can be lost due to fright). One of the specialisms of
Kallawayas is recuperating the latter ajayu (Alderman 2016: 204). Muñoz
Morán (2020b: 9) has argued that the person in the Andes is not understood
unless in the context of these animating forces. The personhood of the
house-wasi has to be understood in these terms.
   How is a wasi animated? Before a brick is laid for the walls foundations are
dug, and in a ceremony called a wajta, attended by neighbours and relations
of the couple whose house is being built, offerings known as kuchos are
buried. At a wajta that I participated in for the construction of my host
family’s house in the Kallawaya ayllu of Amarete in 2012, an offering was
made by a contracted ritualist to the achachilas and Pachamama, consisting
of male and female llama foetuses, provided by the head of the household,
untu (llama fat), and plates made of cotton wool in which were placed a dulce
mesa (coloured sweets in the shape of various figures), a qolqe libro (golden
paper), a carnation, incense and coca leaves. A second offering was made to
the chullpas, pre-Christian ancestors who in stories told across the Andes are
commonly described as having burnt to a crisp when the sun (Christ) rose for
the first time (Abercrombie 1998; Bold 2019; Llanos Layme 2004: 170;
Sendón 2010: 114; Canessa 2012: 132; Rivet and Tomasi 2016: 380). Unlike
the offerings to the achachilas and Pachamama, which are made for the
benefits they might bring, offerings to the chullpas are made so that they do
not sabotage the house (see Alderman forthcoming). This offering consisted
of a pig foetus, pig fat, coca, and plates made of grey llama fibre, containing
a dulce mesa containing all white sweets, rather than of different colours.
Finally, foods native to the local region, such as barley and quinoa were
buried alongside streamers and confetti. In addition, the family and friends
on the male side of the family brought guinea pigs which the ritualist buried
on the right and front of the house to demarcate its male side, and the family
and friends of the female side of the family brought guinea pigs which were
buried on the left and back of the house to demarcate its female side.
Weismantel (1988: 131) notes that to kill a guinea pig for someone is to
declare that you would like to deepen and formalise a friendship between
your two households; alongside the llama foetuses in the corners, they are
buried as an offering to the achachilas and the Pachamama to ask their
protection over the house (Alderman 2021: 106). Arnold (1991: 17) notes
that the corners are considered female in relation to the mountains,
considered male; the offering formalises a relationship between the two.

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136                                                                        JONATHAN ALDERMAN


   The wasi only finally attains personhood with the laying of the roof. Roof-
laying ceremonies described in research from Andean Peru and called
variously zafacasa (Leinaweaver 2009) wasichay (Allen 1988: 44) and wasi
lanta (Gose 1991; Martínez 2019) , involve cutting straw roofs, in a manner
analogous to the first hair-cutting of children, known in Quechua as a rutucha,
the ritual which marks children’s first stage in becoming full persons
(Canessa 2012: 136-139) (cfr. Rivera Andía 2018, who describes the iglesia
qatay – the roofing of the church, as explicitly analogous to the child’s first
haircut, and therefore finds the church building to be analogous to a human
being). In Kallawaya ayllus nowadays families constructing their own houses
commonly use corrugated iron for the roofs. This is called wasi qatay (house
covering). However, a ceremony, called a wasi q’oñichi (house warming) in
which straw is brought and burned in order to energise the house, is still
performed, regardless of the construction material. The house’s completion,
through the roofing ceremony, marks an attainment of personhood. In
conversation with a Kallawaya healer, Aurelio, at his house in the ayllu of
Lunlaya in 2019, he described it as then becoming inhabited by a spirit called
Condor Tapa Mamani. “Condor Tapa Mamani is the god of the house,
because once the house is finished it is like a person. It is living energy”.
Aurelio told me, there are “Kallawaya superstitions” connected to the house
as a result. “So, we sleep there, we live there. That’s why we have to respect
her1. And we can’t fight inside her either”. This is because to do so would fill
the house with “bad energy”.
      “It can even make us sick, the house… Because the house is like a person when
      it is finished. So, inside one mustn’t fight. One mustn’t argue, and one mustn’t
      whistle. So, we have to respect her. And the people who live there, when we
      fight, we can disappoint the house. This is why in a ritual, when a person gets
      sick we say, wasikicha japisunki, wasiki japisunki, or wasipacha onqo jachasunki,
      this means your house has deceived you”
      “She has taken your energy”, I checked.
      “The small soul (pequena alma)”, Aurelio replied. “So, the house can make us
      ill… This is why, before constructing a house, in this place, because it is going
      to be ours, where we will sleep, rest, laugh, talk, this is why in the four corners
      we put a clay pot with all of our foods: q’aya, potatoes, chuño, corn, wheat,
      beans, barley, full, so that this house does not fill with air, so that the house is
      very full, so that there is happiness. So that in this house there is no lack of
      food. It is also a form of offering to the divinities of the place. Because for the
      Kallawayas every place has its divinity. So, we bury this pot before beginning
      the cement”. (see Alderman forthcoming).
      “The house has a small god?”, I asked.

1. The interview was conducted in Spanish, so Aurelio told me “hay que respetarla”, refer-
ring to “la casa” as feminine. In reality, the house is composed of both male and female gen-
ders, though Arnold (1991: 17) writes that corners, in particular, are considered female in
relation to male mountains.


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HOUSE PERSONHOOD IN RURAL ANDEAN BOLIVIA                                                   137



      “Exactly. So, we also plant llama foetuses. With carnations, with k’intus
      [offerings]. So, with the objective that in this house we are always content,
      happy, not in a bad mood, because there are people that get moody in their
      house, and when they go out they are happy”, he laughed.
      Becoming serious Aurelio emphasised that “we have to pray [salmear], …
      [because if a person hasn’t] offered anything, then this house will always be
      filled with negative energy… So, we have to salmear so that the house is very
      fertile, so that when people come to this house it is always content, because
      happiness has to reign within the house”.
      Aurelio went on: “You always have to do that, even if it has a cost. Because a
      llama foetus costs 70 bolivianos2, but you absolutely have to plant (plantar) the
      llama foetus in the house... This Condor Tapa Mamani is the god of the house.
      Yes, this is what contains the heat, the energy within a room. That is where the
      children are, the family. This is where we sleep, so we have to respect it. And it
      is always like this. From the time of our grandfathers, our grandmothers, we
      always do this, before beginning the cement, we always do this. Because where
      we are building, that is where the owners of the place are, and we have to ask
      for permission from them”3.

   Aurelio’s description of Condor Tapa Mamani as a god inhabiting the
house matches similar ethnographic descriptions from elsewhere in Andean
Bolivia of kunturmamani (condor-falcon) as a house spirit “that is most
closely associated with the birth of humans as he presides over household
production”, and who Andrew Canessa’s (2012: 121) informant elsewhere in
the department of La Paz describes as “the ‘pachamama’ of the house”, and
Denise Arnold’s (1991: 35) finding that in the North of Potosí, the house was
addressed as mother nest (tapa mamala in Aymara) “from the moment when
the walls stand up and the construction is complete” or alternatively the
“nest of the condor and the falcon”.
   In both my conversations with other informants and in Ina Rösing’s
research in the Kallawaya region, there are variations on the interpretation
of this spirit. Another friend, Juan, in the town of Charazani (see figure 2),
the son of a noted local healer, explained to me that Condor Tapa Mamani
was in a much broader sense “the energy of the universe” that can be
invoked anywhere, “in the field, in the house, on the road”. One of Rösing’s
interlocutors regarded “nest of Condor Mamani” as not just restricted to the
house, but everything connected to the earth: “it’s the Pachamama, it’s our
cabildo, it’s our house…”, another that “the cabildo is Condor Mamani, the
nest of the Condor. Our village is Condor Mamani, wherever it is found; our
village, our house, that is Condor Mamani” (Rösing 1990: 158).

2. Roughly €8.50, as of 04.07.2021 (source: XE.com).
3. Interview (in Spanish) with Aurelio Ortiz, in ayllu Lunlaya (15th January 2019).

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138                                                           JONATHAN ALDERMAN




The cabildo in the ritual healing of the Kallawayas
    If Condor Tapa Mamani is both a house spirit and one inhabiting sacred
places in general, it is through the cabildo as a physical shrine in the house’s
patio that the house is connected with these other sacred places. Rösing’s
interlocutors inform her that “the nest of the condor, of Condor Mamani, is
always the cabildo. Nest of the Condor, it accompanies us through life, as a
mother or father” (1990: 159), (the current man ritualist of Amarete has
similarly told me that the spirit of the house looks after one as one grows up)
but also that the Condor Mamani is a messenger for the gods. When an
offering is made, he takes it to the sacred places (Rösing 1990: 157). In a
fractal-homology typical of the ayllu, Condor Tapa Mamani both inhabits
and is the cabildo. In prayers, the cabildo of the house is referred to directly
a s condor tapa, the nest of the condor (Rösing 1990: 156). The Condor is a
sacred bird in the Andes, significant for what it represents. In Penny
Harvey’s (1997: 34-36) research in Andean Peru she refers to the condor as a
powerful visitor, whose wild presence represents supernatural forces in the
nonhuman landscape that are potentially dangerous because they are


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HOUSE PERSONHOOD IN RURAL ANDEAN BOLIVIA                                                  139


unpredictable and outside human control, but is necessary for the re-
generation of the community. The condor’s name in Quechua and Aymara is
mallku, a name also applied to sacred mountaintops and the highest
authority of an ayllu (Rösing 1990: 158-159).
   The house cabildo functions as “the centre of communication with the
sacred places” (Rösing 1990: 109) because they are materially connected to
other cabildos located in sacred places such as mountaintops (Rösing 1990:
36). This is because of what Gose (2018: 492) refers to as “ontological
blurring… between the mountain and the lesser beings it animates and
encompasses”: they are both separate and the same. In Platt’s (1997)
description of a shamanic session in Potosí, an ayllu’s ritualist is possessed
by the spirit of a condor and able to communicate with mountains. This is
because mallkus are both the mountains’s messengers and instantiations of
the mountains themselves. Rösing (1990: 108) describes the significance of
the cabildo as follows:
     There is no house, there is no village, there is no sacred mountain or sacred
     lake without a cabildo. The cabildo is the sacrificial place of the house, village
     or mountain. Usually, the cabildo consists of nothing more than a large stone
     that rests upon the ground. The stone of the cabildo is lifted up so that the
     offerings can be burned under her. In special cases, the offerings are buried
     beneath the cabildo. The faith in the sacred places and the faith in the cabildo
     are inseparable. The cabildo has a meaning so large that a curandero [healer]
     told [Ina Rösing] once that a house without a cabildo is worthless, it isn’t even
     worth entering such a house.

   The shrine in the patio known in the Kallawaya region as a cabildo has
different names in other parts of the Bolivian Andes. In the Toracarí valley in
the North of Potosí, Into Goudsmit finds them called iskinas, “small stone
tables everyone has in their courtyards and houses” (2016: 32), which are
themselves “deities that form a partnership with male cumbres
[mountaintops]” (2016: 39). Arnold (1998: 106, cited in Goudsmit 2016: 39)
“describes Isquinas as the foundations or roots of houses” (Goudsmit 2016:
39). In Rockefeller’s (2010) ethnography of Quirpini in the department of
Chuquisaca the patio shrine is called a wirjin; “to have a house without a
wirjin to ch’alla [make a ritual libation to] at Carnaval is, in some sense, not
to have a house at all”, because “a decent family must have a space in which
to offer hospitality to guests” (Rockefeller 2010: 93).
   The designation cabildo, though, is a particularly apt term to refer to the
family shrine because rather than refer simply to a physical space the term
encapsulates its characteristic as a gathering place where lugarniyuq
congregate to eat and talk (Mannheim and Salas Carreño 2015: 62). In
common parlance, cabildo is a term used to refer to a public meeting –

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140                                                                     JONATHAN ALDERMAN


especially a cabildo abierto (open meetings, where political decisions are
made), but perhaps more significant in this context is Platt’s (1986: 231)
description of cabildo as a synonymous term for a minor ayllu (large ayllus
being divided, as fractals into smaller ayllus, with each family a member
both of a maximal and a minimal ayllu; for example, Athun [large] ayllu
Amarete is subdivided into four sullk’a [small] ayllus) (see also Arnold and
Hastorf 2008: 125; Goudsmit 2016: 131). This usage of the term could
probably be traced back to the 1570s-1580s, when Viceroy Toledo’s reforms,
regrouping 1.5 million Indians into 600 reducciones (model Spanish-style
towns arranged around a central church and square), required each
community to install government institutions, especially the cabildo or town
council (Saignes 1999: 63). “The cabildo system as instituted by Toledo”,
writes Abercrombie (1994: 103), “was modelled upon Spain’s ‘democratic’
communities. It included yearly rotating elective authorities, specifically
alcaldes and alguaciles, posts inherited by the Spaniards from the Moors”.
These developed into
      elaborate intra- and inter-ayllu turn systems […] to spread the weight and
      honours of the responsibility equitably around’ and ‘[s]ome time during the
      seventeenth-century, probably, but certainly by the mid-eighteenth, these
      systems of civil and ecclesiastical obligations merged into a single system
      throughout the region, becoming what is called, in the literature, the fiesta-
      cargo system, a “prestige” ladder or fixed individual career of ritual and civic
      obligations’ (Abercrombie 1994: 106).

   Saignes (1995: 190) feels that cabildos, amongst other colonial insti-
tutions both “reflected and promoted a profound reordering of social
relationships”.
   As I have described elsewhere (Alderman 2015), in the Kallawaya region,
mountains are understood to take on rotative positions of authority or
cargos. Each ayllu has their watayuq (the authority for that year, wata in
Quechua meaning year, and the suffix -yuq ambiguously meaning both
belonging to and owning) from among the mountains that surround them,
that is specifically named as receiving a “plate” of ritual food within
offerings to sacred places. In Aymara-speaking areas this mountain is known
a s marani, and in Jesús de Machaca, according to Orta (2013: 50), the
rotation of the marani evokes political offices, with the marani spoken of as
constituting a cabildo. In the Quechua-speaking area around Rapaz in the
Checras Valley in central Peru, Salomon (2018: 28) describes the mountain
range referred to as the “cabildo (town council) of the hills”, while Platt
(1997: 38) also uses the term cabildo to describe a shamanic session,
therefore a meeting between humans and nonhumans. According to Juan, in
Charazani, mountain authorities hold meetings that parallel those of the

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local sindicato, in which there is a General Secretary, a Secretary of
Relations, a messenger, etc. When the Kallawayas elect their leaders, they
replicate the meetings of the achachilas who elect their own authorities by
throwing rocks (Alderman 2015: 38). The cabildo then, as a sacrificial shrine,
is itself a fractal subdivision of the ayllu, and is its very centre, since the
exchanges that take place through the cabildo characterise the ayllu qua
ayllu.

The world as a nest, and the nest as a world

                                      For the world is a nest, and an immense power
                                      holds the inhabitant of the world in this nest
                                      (Bachelard 1964: 103).

   If the cabildo is the place of communication between human beings and
the sacred places around them in the Kallawaya ayllu, then the medium of
this communication is the k’intu. A k’intu is an offering that can take
different forms. A k’intu is firstly a name commonly used to refer to gifts of
carefully arranged coca passed from one person to another. In many
community meetings I have sat in, while all present have been pijcheando
(chewing) coca, I have been passed a k’intu of coca by the person next to me.
This is often four or five leaves in good condition (not with holes in!),
sometimes with one leaf wrapped around them. The minimum is two. As
various anthropologists have noted, the usual etiquette, before consuming
t h e k’intu is to acknowledge significant sacred places, motioning or
sometimes blowing the k’intu towards them to share in its essence, often
while naming them aloud or under one’s breath (Mannehim and Salas
Carreño 2015: 63, 68; de la Cadena 2015: 94; Salas Carreño 2016: 822-823;
2019: 156-157; Gose 2018: 494).
   According to Aurelio, “You give a k’intu for an official conversation”. If
one goes to ask for ayni (reciprocal assistance) from a neighbour, one will
take coca and offer it to begin the conversation. In a previous generation it
was common for parents to look for a bride for their son, taking a bag of coca
with them as an offering to begin a conversation with parents of the
potential bride. To accept the coca means that a proposition has been
accepted.
   A k’intu can also refer specifically to the offering made to the sacred
places of the ayllu. Often referred to in Spanish as a mesa blanca (mesa from
the Spanish misa [mass], an allusion to the Catholic ritual), the Kallawaya
offering for general health is also called in Quechua a yuraj (white) k’intu
(offering). Aurelio explained:


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      When you put a k’intu on the offering of the mesa, it is a mesa blanca; when we
      speak like this, when we speak between ourselves, it is a form of speaking
      officially, an agreement, in which we are arriving at an agreement. An activity,
      a business, etc. But when the offering is put in the mesa, and we are performing
      a ceremony, then we give coca, so this is to talk officially with the Pachamama
      and with the sacred places. With the k’intu of coca that you have in your hand,
      and which you are going to put in offerings you are not talking with people.
      With this k’intu you are talking with the Pachamama, to the sacred places, to
      the divinities. You are saying that you are going to change, that you are not
      going to fight… if you have made mistakes asking for the Pachamama to forgive
      you. It’s a direct conversation with the Pachamama and the divinities4.




4. Interview (in Spanish) with Aurelio Ortiz, ayllu Lunlaya, 15th January 2019.


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HOUSE PERSONHOOD IN RURAL ANDEAN BOLIVIA                                                143


   The yuraj k’intu5 consists of various “plates” (see figure 3). The plate “is a
‘nest’ made with cotton, with sheep, alpaca or llama wool, in which offerings
(for example, coca leaves) are placed. This is also sometimes called q’into in
the callawaya region. In other regions – not far from the callawaya villages –
q’into refers to a bunch of coca leaves placed in a plate” (Rösing 1990: 36-
37).
   The nature of the k’intu as both a plate of offering and a nest makes it
homologous with the cabildo in which the offering is made. The k’intu/tapa
is a fractal, because it is both the offering and the place where the offering is
made. It is itself an ayllu within an ayllu.

Ritual communication in the Irwi ceremony in Amarete
   In this section I will examine the communication between humans and
achachilas through ritual feeding in the Kallawaya ayllu of Amarete, lying at
3,800 metres in altitude, and four hour’s walk from the eponymous town at
the centre of the municipality of Charazani. De la Cadena (2014; 2015) and
Salas Carreño (2016) argue that it is through the relationship between
humans and places that humans themselves emerge as persons, but, as I
have argued, in Kallawaya ayllus it is also through exchanges between
humans and achachilas that the house emerges as a named place. While
earlier I discussed the spirit of Condor Tapa Mamani inhabiting the house as
a messenger of the mountains, here I will look at the relationship between
people in Amarete and cabildos also as individual named places in their own
right.
   In February 2019, I accompanied the authorities (known as jilakatas or
more properly in Quechua jilakatakuna, pl., positions of authority that rotate
annually) of the ayllu of Amarete in the collective ritual of Irwi, which takes
place annually the week before carnival to mark the first harvest. Irwi
literally means “to try” and partly involves the 14 jilakatakuna, being given
the first vegetables of the year’s harvest to taste. Irwi has been described in
great detail by Ina Rösing (2003), who was invited to participate by the ayllu
authorities in 1993. I will only present certain aspects of the ritual that took
place in the house of the sponsor of the ceremony, known as the alférez, and
in the house of the ayllu’s ritualist, the wata purichiq, which highlight the
relationship between its inhabitants and an animate landscape. Wata

5. Although Ina Rösing uses the spelling “q’into”, when asking my friends and interlocutors
in Charazani as to the correct spelling, I found disagreement between “k’intu” and “q’intu”.
I am following the spelling set out in Jesús Lara’s Quechua-Spanish dictionary (2001), and
Felix Layme Pairumani’s (1992) Aymara-Spanish dictionary, which both give “k’intu” as the
correct spelling.

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purichiq literally means in Quechua, the one who makes the year walk, and
he makes the year walk by making sure that the agricultural rituals,
including offerings for lugarniyuq, are performed correctly. The alférez
sponsored Irwi by gathering together the relevant ritual equipment,
including purchasing the sacrificial animal. As I go on to describe, the rituals
in which the authorities collectively recompensed the alférez for this
sacrifice demonstrate an understanding of the house and its inhabitants as
an assemblage of shared energy, as referred to by the healer Aurelio in an
earlier section.
    On Wednesday morning, ritual offerings were made in the cabildos of the
alférez and the wata purichiq as well as the surrounding house and patio. The
cabildo in the patio of the wata purichiq is named Chukisán, but also called
Qhowa Isqani, because it is understood as the wife of Isqani, the most
powerful mountain in the Kallawaya region, and particularly important to
Amarete because of its proximity. In the wata purichiq’s patio, he and
jilakatakuna made offerings to named places in the region, including the
cabildo itself, using a carnation to sprinkle wine in the direction of each
named place in turn. These included local mountains like Isqani and
Atichamán, but also mountains further afield (the wata purichiq named
Machu Picchu, for example). While the jilakatakuna fed achachilas through
ch’allas (libations) with the carnation, the wata purichiq invited each of
them to add water that they had collected from springs around the ayllu the
previous day to pots boiling on two pyres to which the wata purichiq also
added black and white corn. When both pots were well boiled, the wata
purichiq added to each the carbonised heads of two llama foetuses that had
been heating with coca leaves and llama fat on a third pyre. Everyone
present then took a wooden oval cup called a mat’i (Rosing 2003: 312), filled
it with some of the mixture, drank some and sprayed the rest around the
patio in a circular motion from left to right, covering the house, those
present, and the street outside over the patio’s outer wall (see figure 4). This
ch’alla was a way of strengthening their relationship with the gods around
the ayllu by feeding them vital substances. Salas Carreño (2016: 827) writes
that from a Quechua perspective, “named places are the primary givers of all
types of food to humans--food that constitutes the substance of their bodies
and their social relations”. Feeding them in this way was the ayllu’s way of
recognising that they owe their lives to the harvest provided by the
achachilas and Pachamama (Allen 2002: 29) and reciprocating.




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HOUSE PERSONHOOD IN RURAL ANDEAN BOLIVIA                                           145




   Salas Carreño (2016: 830) and others (Weismantel 1995: 695; Mannheim
and Salas Carreño 2015: 61) have argued that this feeding relationship
makes places and humans kin (though Gose 2018 is critical of this idea, since
the punishing losses that named places are understood to inflict would not
be acceptable from human kin). Allen (2015: 39) has argued that “Feeding
and eating is not an idiom through which a group of people symbolically
communicates with the dead – it is communication, and the corporate unity
of living and dead thus achieved is corporeal”. Through food, different
bodies become related as the same substance (Salas Carreño 2016: 821).
Through the offerings flung in all directions, both the house and patio,
which received the food directly, and named mountains in whose direction
the offering was sprayed, shared food with humans in the ayllu (Salas
Carreño 2016: 824).

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   As the most powerful mountain locally, Isqani is fed with a ritual meal
buried in cabildo Chukisán in the patio of the house of the wata purichiq.
Each jilakata brought with them a guinea pig to sacrifice, which they pass to
the wata purichiq along with two coca leaves. The wata purichiq removed the
heart of the guinea pig while it is still beating and inserted the two coca
leaves in its stead. Rösing (2003: 310) calls this part of the ritual much’in.
Once all of the jilakatakuna had finished performing libations of wine with
the carnation, they collectively dug a hole in the cabildo and the offering of
guinea pigs called a kucho, the local Aymara term for a buried offering or
pago (see Gose 2018: 494), was buried within (see figure 5).


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HOUSE PERSONHOOD IN RURAL ANDEAN BOLIVIA                                           147


   Later that same day, the largest offering was made in the patio of the
alférez, called Ch’iñarhuaya: an alpaca, brought by two jilakatakuna in the
early hours. I was taken aback by how calm the animal was, despite its limbs
being tied, though this is probably because it was drunk (see Rösing 2003:
322). It remained calm even after being carried to the centre of the patio,
and when the wata purichiq cut its chest open and inserted his arm up to the
elbow to extract its heart while it was still beating (see also Branca 2018).
Llamas and alpacas are sacred, and according to Ina Rösing (2003: 325; 1990:
119), citing the wife of the wata purichiq in 1993, known as the Mama Thana,
when Amareteños sacrifice a live llama or alpaca it is as if they were
sacrificing their own bodies; when they give libations of the animal’s blood it
is as if they were donating their own. After extracting the heart, the wata
purichiq waved it in the air, invoking the sacred places of the region
(mountains, such as Isqani, Atichamán, Tuana), and further afield (Machu
Picchu) that the offering was being made to.
   While the wata purichiq was invoking the sacred places with the heart of
the llama, the jilakatakuna and their wives, the mama tallas, one by one took
a mit’i, plunged it into the animal, and after consuming some of the blood,
flung the rest in the direction of the house of the alférez, staining its outer
wall a deep red (figure 7). The wata purichiq, meanwhile took the heart,
divided it in two and added it to two pots boiling on pyres on the patio, along
with corn and the remainder of the bottles of water the jilakatas had
collected from springs around the ayllu. His assistant then invited those who
had not already drunk the animal’s blood to consume this mixture and spray
a ritual libation (a ch’alla) over the house. In this action the
consubstantiation between the house and its inhabitant became evident,
demonstrating that “[t]he house is an extension of the person” as Carsten
and Hugh-Jones (1995: 2) note for houses more generally. Rösing (2003:
330), asked a jilakata what it means to drink blood, and was told that “it
means riches, I am going to have a good harvest, a warm house”. For her
interlocutor, the house and their fields related to the person in a
homologous synonymy. Every person, she writes, wants to perform a lot of
libations, because this brings “uj q’oñi wata”, which she translates from
Quechua as a year of nourishment and a warm house. When I asked the
alférez himself about the purpose of making ch’allas of blood over his house,
he explained that he had entered into many expenses as sponsor of the
ritual, and as recompense the other jilakatas were liberal with their libations
of blood, so that he and his family would enjoy a year full of riches, and
abundance. As Branca (2019: 19) has described, in Puno, just across the
border in Peru, ch’allas of alpaca blood against the house after the roof is laid


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148                                                           JONATHAN ALDERMAN


re-establish links between the inhabitants and their ancestors. Similarly,
Allen (2015: 33) has analysed forced feeding as leading to other bodies
connected to the person to also become alimented. This is usually when
people get drunk or eat enormous quantities of food at fiestas. The excess is
understood as consumed by the achachilas through their corporeal
connectedness with humans. As the alferéz of Irwi described it to me here a
similar process is also occurring between the house and its inhabitants. The
house-human assemblage share in the good luck as a result of the libations
by all present. Earlier in this essay, a Kallawaya healer, Aurelio, explained
that a house’s inhabitants can make a house sick through their behaviour. A
transference of positive energy can also happen between house and
inhabitants, and this is part of the motivation for the ch’alla.




    After this, just like in Chukisán, each jilakata handed a guinea pig to the
wata purichiq, who opened its chest with his nails, and extracted its heart
while it was still beating, inserting two coca leaves given to him by the
jilakata and placing each guinea pig side by side in the middle of the patio,
with carnations between each. His assistant dug a hole in the middle of the
patio, and another hole was dug at one side of the patio. Half of the guinea
pigs were buried in each hole. While this appeared to mean that there were
t w o cabildos in his patio, compared to the one in the patio of the wata
purichiq, the alférez explained to me that the cabildo is not one specific place
in the patio, but in reality is the whole patio. However, according to the


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HOUSE PERSONHOOD IN RURAL ANDEAN BOLIVIA                                           149


analysis of Ina Rösing (2003: 319), in contrast to other patios in the region
that only contain one, in Amarete a patio contains various distinct cabildos,
some masculine and others feminine. The female guinea pigs must be buried
in the female cabildo and the male guinea pigs in the male one. As another
of the jilakatakuna later explained to me, each of the patios has a male
(right) side and female (left) side, and corresponding cabildos. The exception
is the feminine cabildo of Chukisán, in the patio of the wata purichiq, whose
masculine pair is the corresponding cabildo at the top of Mallku Iskani. In
contrast to other cabildos located in patios, Chukisán was not the cabildo of
the household, but of the entire ayllu, therefore functioning through
synechdoche as the house of the ayllu itself.

Conclusion
   As Catherine Allen has observed, the Andean ayllu is understood by those
living in it as functioning on a synechdochal logic, because it is itself a
fractal. Fractals are characterised by the same patterns at different levels of
scale (Allen 2016: 425-428), as we see within the ayllu through houses as
nests (k’intus) at different levels of scale. The k’intu as offering at the
smallest level of scale (nest shaped wool containing other offerings to be
burnt in the cabildo for the achachilas) is translated into Spanish both as
plato (plate) and nido (nest), indicating the house as a place to socialise and a
medium of consuming (particularly ritual) food. At a slightly higher level of
scale, Condor Tapa Mamani – the nest of the condor – is located principally
in the house’s cabildo, the main location of socialisation and alimentation of
achachilas in Kallawaya ayllus. Through rituals at the house’s construction
(e.g. the wasi qoñichi ritual to give the house energy) and periodically from
then on (such as the Irwi ritual) the house’s personhood is created and
reinforced through assemblages that it shares with its inhabitants and other
more powerful lugarniyuq. As a hinge through which humans and named
places connect by eating and drinking together, the house is at the centre of
the ayllu’s sociality, a place where the ayllu itself – through the relation-
ships that define it – is made and remade.




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 Jonathan ALDERMAN is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the “Cultures of
 Vigilance” Collaborative Research Centre, at Ludwig Maximilian University. He
 has a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews, an MA in
 Area Studies (Latin America) from the Institute for the Study of the Americas,
 University of London, and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Essex. His
 main interests concern the connection between ritual and politics in the Andes,
 and the material forms in which social relationships are expressed, including
 through housing and infrastructure in its various forms. He has conducted
 fieldwork in Bolivia and San Diego, USA.
 jonathanalderman@gmail.com




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Jonathan Alderman
House personhood in rural Andean Bolivia
2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2021: 129-154.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4550
