Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the World 0199793859, 9780199793853

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Subversive Spiritualities

oxford ritual studies series Series Editors Ronald Grimes, Radboud University Nijmegen Ute Hüsken, University of Oslo Eric Venbrux, Radboud University Nijmegen Ritual Efficacy Edited by William S. Sax, Johannes Quack, and Jan Weinhold Performing the Reformation Barry Stephenson Ritual, Media, and Conflict Edited by Ronald L. Grimes, Ute Hüsken, Udo Simon, and Eric Venbrux Knowing Body, Moving Mind Patricia Q. Campbell Subversive Spiritualities Frédérique Apffel-Marglin

Subversive Spiritualities How Rituals Enact the World



Frédérique Apffel-Marglin

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Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2011 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Apffel-Marglin, Frédérique. Subversive spiritualities : how rituals enact the world / Frédérique Apffel-Marglin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-979385-3—ISBN 978-0-19-979386-0 1. Rites and ceremonies—Peru. 2. Rites and ceremonies—India. 3. Shamanism—Peru. 4. Shamanism—India. 5. Peru—Religious life and customs. 6. India—Religious life and customs. I. Title. GN564.P4.A54 2011 201ˇ.44—dc22 2010052038

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For Marc and Jessie and all the other people they have brought into my life for being, from their first day, overflowing sources of blessings.

CON T E N T S

1. Introduction

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2. The Politics of “Wilderness”: The Nature/Culture Dualism Revisited 21 3. Economics and the Making of “Natural Resources”

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4. Re-entangling the Material and the Discursive: Quantum Physics and Agential Realism 55 5. The Spirit of the Gift in the Peruvian Andes: Yarqa Aspiy in Quispillacta 64 6. Supersessionism and the Teaching of Agronomy in Peru

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7. Dancing with the Mountain in the Altiplano: The Festival of the Ispallas 111 8. The State and Feminist Missionizing in Bolivia (with Loyda Sanchez) 128 9. Beyond Absolute Time and Space: From Representation to Performativity in Rituals 149 10. Fair Trade and the Possibility of Bio-cultural Regeneration Epilogue: Performing the Lessons Learned Appendix 205 Notes 207 Bibliography 233 Index 245

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction So drastic is our dependence upon the council of creatures that they are the real auditors of earth’s books. They are the true congregation, the real tribe, the original extended family. And the kind of performance they require is ritualistic. —Ronald L. Grimes, Rite Out of Place: Ritual, Media, and the Arts1

1. ABANDONED BY THE OTHER-THAN-HUMANS

We modern cosmopolitans, heirs to the scientific revolution and to the enlightenment, are like abandoned children. We have lost the safety net of a web of extended relations and human community and find ourselves increasingly on our own, competing with others like us for the social space and the rewards that make us feel like we really belong, really exist, really matter. These feelings are no longer our birth right; increasingly they must be won through tough, solitary elbowing. This social aloneness, however, does not begin to match a vaster, deeper, and more radical abandonment. Before the triumph of modernity—sealed in Western Europe of the seventeenth century by the advent of the scientific revolution—people lived in constant interaction with a host of beings, powers, and spirits who tricked us, protected us, quarreled with us, guided us, taught us, punished us, and conversed with us. We were wealthy in our human and other-than-human communities. There was an abundance of beings to accompany us in our earthly journey. The multifarious beings of this world taught us to share the bounty of the world with them; they taught us the gestures of reciprocity; they taught us to fear greediness and accumulation. They taught us that the wealth of the plant beings, the tree beings, the water beings, the soil beings, the mineral beings, was not only ours, was not there for the sole purpose of

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satisfying our needs. They had their own reason for existing, their own requirements, and their own agency. We needed to ask permission, to share, to give back, and to give thanks. These very gestures made us aware that we were only one strand in an immense tapestry that wove the pattern of life on this earth. Out of the interminable religious wars pitting two equally dogmatic versions of Western Christianity against each other, the scientific restoration of certainty triumphed.2 Europe exhaled a collective sigh of relief when the One Truth reemerged, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the witches’ and other heretics’ burning stakes and the bloody battlefields of the Thirty Years’ War. Europeans had become addicted to certainty during a millennium-and-a-half of church-certified sureties. With the advent of the Reformation, this certainty became sundered in two, each side claiming the possession of the One Indivisible Truth.3 The success of the new certainty was in no small measure due to the fact that it was careful not to compete with religious truths. Protestantism had paved the way for the creation of boundaries between matter, spirit, and mind, which the scientific revolution enshrined as Reality. God, the angels, and all non-visible powers were relegated to the sphere of the supernatural. From hence forward, science would deal with the realm of materiality, and religion with the realm of the supernatural. Peaceful coexistence required such fence building on the collective turf. With Descartes’ cogito, the mind also departed from matter, transmuting the body and the world into soulless mechanisms, transforming us into the only observers of an inert material reality, alone among ourselves, abandoned by all the other beings of the world. We could continue to resort to God and his heavenly retinue, but we had to keep it to the privacy of our own hearts and souls and try not to mix logic and rationality into it. Reality we had to bravely face, unaided by any other powers save that of our own minds. The very act of knowing became an estrangement, a distancing, and a controlling of matter. Knowledge became power, naked, unrestrained by sentiment, moral strictures, or by aesthetic guideposts. Where were the voices to tell us to share the bounty of this world? With whom were we now to reciprocate? To whom were we to ask permission to partake of the wealth of the world? The powers and wealth of this world became voiceless, bereft of their old agency. We gave them a new name: we called them “natural resources,” meaning agency-less and mindless things lying around just for us to use. The limits, the restraints, vanished like starlight in the predawn. God of course never lost his supreme agency, but somehow the new material reality progressively escaped his jurisdiction, reaching a kind of apogee in the Deist view of God as watchmaker, the material universe as

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watch. In this new material world, we humans became indeed the masters. But how effectively could power substitute for our newfound aloneness? It promised fulfillment through the assurance of progress: things would get ever more convenient, ever more comfortable, and ever more plentiful. They would surely comfort us amidst our immense loss. We would have more things, and these would surely satisfy us; they would surely fill the terrible emptiness. The bottomless hole carved by the silencing of all these voices, all these presences, was to be filled by a mountain of money and the goods it would purchase. Our desire for these became defined as infinite: desires as bottomless as our aloneness among our kind. All of this was trumpeted as a great advance of Mankind: the loosening of millennial shackles of superstition, magic, ignorance, and darkness; the dawning of an era of great light, the great light of Rationality that would enlighten the whole world. We were enraptured by our escape from the endless conflict. We were enthralled by the restoration of certainty. Certainty emerged fortified by its redefinition on a new secular basis, opening to constant contestation, its safeguard lodged in methods of investigation rather than in dogma. The old certainty had somehow proven vulnerable to making the word of God accessible to individual interpretation. The new certainty would require the contestation of individual investigators.4 In due time, we came to view religious certainty as a matter of faith, a private matter of the heart and soul. Matter was another matter. We named these new scientific experiments “discoveries.” We felt emancipated and liberated from the obscurantism of the ancien régime. The radical materialism and thoroughgoing mechanicism of the new secular reality is what created a sphere protected from religious conflict. At the same time, the new sphere was free of all restraints, all limits. Truth, now freed from moral, aesthetic, and sentimental constraints, could be pursued into what one university motto calls “its innermost recesses.” All these ever more powerful, ever faster, ever better technologies delivered to us by the new science confirm that this new method of obtaining certainty and truth is not just one more philosophy, one more cosmology, one more ontology and epistemology among the many existing in the world, but the very mirror of nature. As patent proof that we have not invented this agency-less, mindless, and mechanical natural reality, we have triumphantly shown the world how it works, what it is made of, and what its laws are. We are its manipulators; we know how to make it do our bidding, ever more so, forever and ever. We have become the Lords of a secularized eternity. And if on the way we have made the air, the waters, the soils, the seas, and the atmosphere toxic; if on the way we are rendering dozens of species extinct by the day; if on the way our bodies, like the bodies of our animal companions, also become toxic—well, we are confident that the

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new technologies our frontier knowledge delivers to us without pause will take care of these unfortunate but tolerable side effects. In any case, growth, development, and globalization must not be allowed to slow down; we are, after all, on a victorious march to economic and technological salvation. The skeptics, the doubters, and the resisters are romantic dreamers refusing to see Reality as it Really Is. Or worse: people who out of sheer envy and incomprehension want to tear it all down. Today, in the twenty-first century, some two-thirds of the world’s peoples—the world’s social majority—quietly live in non-modern, noncosmopolitan places. Mechanical, voiceless nature has not penetrated there to silence the many voices of the other-than-human world, abandoning humans to their solitude. The multitudinous voices of the spirits, deities, and other denizens of the other-than-human world continue to be heard, continue to be loved or feared or both, continue to accompany human beings in all their activities. It is not that this social majority lives in total separation from cosmopolitan modernity. The radio, the car, the television, the internet and such have all made their appearance, and in many cases have become part of the landscape. But rather than silencing the other voices, they seem to have become just new voices among the more familiar ones. In one of my visits to the Peruvian Altiplano, I spoke with Don Santos Wilca, a farmer and shaman from the community of Aynacha Watasani on the eastern shore of Lake Titicaca. He vividly characterized the relationship between the human, non-human and other-than-human worlds existing among Andean and High Amazonian farmers and herders: For us, all those who live in this pacha [world] are persons: the stone, the soil, the plants, the water, the hail, the wind, the diseases, the sun, the moon, the stars, we are all one family. To live together we help each other mutually; we are constantly in a continuous conversation and in harmony.5

The sense of limits, the sense of responsibility toward the non-human and other-than-human worlds, the sense that one must share and reciprocate with the spirits, depends on their existence. It is with the spirits that humans converse and share, and they do so in a ritualistic manner. Ritual is the medium for communicating, reciprocating, creating, and working with the other-than-humans, who daily remind the humans that the world is not for humans’ exclusive use. It is the other-than-humans who make clear to the humans that human desires are not the only ones. In other words, they make clear that humans are not the masters of this world, and in turn that this world is not agency-less and voiceless, a sum of natural resources to be indefinitely mined to feed the supposedly infinite desires of human beings.

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2. A GENEALOGY FOR THIS WORK

This book is the fruit of a lifetime of anthropological practice, of carrying out ethnographic research and writing in India and carrying out quite different types of activities in Peru. However, in both places my passion and focus has been rituals, rituals that I have eagerly participated in and that have transformed me. It is also the fruit of engaging in critical reflexivity about these activities, and of being initiated in both India and Peru to dimensions of reality beyond the usual academic horizons. However, before reflexivity became a consuming practice for me sometimes in the 1980s, I began my first fieldwork in the temple city of Puri in the eastern state of Orissa, in India as your typical secular aspirant anthropologist who dutifully prepared herself not only linguistically but also by reading assiduously all that Indianist studies—not only the works of anthropologists but those of textualists, historians and others as well—had to offer at the time of my first fieldwork in the mid-1970s. My experience in India since that time until I could no longer continue practicing fieldwork as I had practiced it—something that happened in the early 1990s—is what in great part determined my later work in Peru. Since the rituals I describe and discuss in this book are from my years in Peru and not India, it seems necessary to be clear about the differences and similarities in how I approached rituals in Peru from the way I approached them and wrote about them in India. Several factors contributed to my decision to abandon conventional anthropological fieldwork. The first one was the realization that the reigning theories in the field at the time prevented me from seeing and hearing clearly what I was encountering in Orissa. An altogether different view irrupted for me totally unexpectedly and blessedly very much in spite of this training and previous knowledge.6 The second one was how the postcolonial critiques of anthropology, particularly those written by the anthropologized, resonated deeply and painfully with my own experience of growing up in a colonial and rather racist environment in Morocco. It profoundly affected me at many levels. The third was the realization that even if my first book, the fruit of my first fieldwork, were to be translated into the local language, it would have little interest for the people who had taught me and whose life I had shared for some time. In particular, I became painfully aware that what was of consuming interest to all my friends and acquaintances in Orissa, namely the practice of rituals and the effects such practice has on life in general and one’s own in particular, was totally outside the purview of my book by the simple fact of the book being the work of a professional anthropologist writing for her peers.

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Such a realization impelled me to create some space in my life where I would engage in a ritual activity that could make sense to my friends in Orissa and that would make me feel I was honoring their trust in me. Thus began many years of a ritual practice, begun hesitantly and rather furtively, but that with time took more and more time, space, and importance in my life. I began timidly to start my day by reciting the mantra of an Orissan goddess, Mangala Devi, with whom I had developed a strong relationship. I did this in front of her image, bought outside her main temple in Orissa, India. I lit an incense stick and chanted quietly in complete privacy. My friends in Orissa enthusiastically helped me in getting more proficient and this rather furtive gesture in time grew to a full-fledged one hour morning puja performed in front of a fairly elaborate home altar. At some point it dawned on me that, unbeknownst to me, rituals both in India and at home had transformed me. They had transformed a secular Western anthropologist into a person with a very different relationship to rituals and to the beings that were invoked and conversed with during their enactment. I thus came to Peru a changed person from the aspirant anthropologist who had first come to Orissa. Much of this book is an effort to articulate the nature of the kinds of beings I spoke with and gave gifts to in rituals. Here I attempt to articulate for people like myself what my new manner of practicing rituals has revealed to me about our (i.e., the modernist) way of representing reality. This intellectual effort therefore is also one that speaks of rituals from the standpoint of this personal experience. This transformation cannot be disentangled from my decision to cease engaging in traditional ethnographic fieldwork. Although such a decision seemingly pertains to a different domain, namely that of politics and ethics, separating that domain from the ritual domain turns out to be more of an illusion. In the early 1990s in Orissa, I discovered I could no longer perform traditional fieldwork; I could no longer take out my pen, my notebook, and my questions. All I wanted to do was participate in the rituals without taking notes. When the opportunity presented itself and I was invited to collaborate with a group of intellectual-activists in Peru, I seized it. I thus approached my visits to Peru in a profoundly different frame of mind from the one in which I did my first anthropological fieldwork in Orissa. In other words, Peru was not for me a new fieldwork site. I first arrived there in 1994, invited by members of a Peruvian organization that later involved me for some ten years in their teaching of a graduate-level course they offered in Peru. The rituals I discuss in this book are ones I participated in not as an anthropological fieldworker but as a guest and friend of members of the organization that had invited me in the first place to come to Peru.7 Most significantly, those friends in the organization that invited me (whose Spanish acronym

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is PRATEC) engaged in rituals not as outside intimate observers in the ethnographic mode but as persons sharing what they called the cosmovision of those enacting the rituals. They seamlessly folded their ritual activities in their postcolonial cultural, political practices. This addressed all of my concerns at once and created an immediate and lasting bond. For reasons at once ethical and epistemological, I made the decision to approach Peru completely differently than I had approached my work in Orissa. I decided to let my hosts guide me rather than being guided by the work of professional anthropologists and other academic Peruvianists. I wanted to be guided by this group’s passionate endeavor to make the native cultures of the Peruvian Andes and Amazonia relevant for life today and tomorrow rather than for the advancement of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, that is, as a primarily academic pursuit. It is thus emphatically not as an expert in Peruvian studies that I have engaged in my activities in Peru, which includes the writing of this book. However, before perhaps too hastily concluding that I have gone native, allow me to suggest something different. In retrospect, there are both advantages and disadvantages for my decision to be guided by my intellectual-activist hosts—most of who were trained agronomists and none were anthropologists—while avoiding the professional literature. The disadvantages are clear: I am sure I could have profited enormously from engaging with the professional Peruvianist literature, and I do not mean this in terms of professional advantage but in terms of understanding. However, the advantages may be worth the risk I took in making this decision. Let me try to articulate what I see those advantages as being. I will draw on the remarks of a historian of science, Jim Endersby, in his 2008 book titled Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science. In Endersby’s chapter on botanical illustrations, entitled simply Seeing, he writes the following: Yet, precisely by learning the conventions of depiction . . . naturalists were internalizing a set of rules that helped establish what they could—and could not—see. Drawing is another form of tacit knowledge . . . but [scientific workers] may also be deflected from imagining a completely new experiment. (112)

I had learned as a result of my anthropological work in Orissa to become aware of the tacit knowledge involved in the practice of ethnographic fieldwork and the kind of blindness it had entailed—intellectual, political, and for the understanding I was seeking concerning rituals. The tacit knowledge of ethnographic representation, as in the case of nineteenth-century botanical illustration, is a mode of creating a “mirror of culture,” to paraphrase Richard Rorty’s famous title. What the tacit knowledge involved in both

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botanical illustrations and ethnographic representations share is their assumption concerning the verisimilitude of such representation. This verisimilitude in turn entails that the representor or illustrator remain clearly separate from what is represented. The rituals being intimately observed by the ethnographer are empirical local enactments that can be faithfully represented just as plants are empirical objects that can be faithfully illustrated. What the two kinds of tacit knowledge share is the assumption that the representor is capturing faithfully something outside of herself, objectively existing in the world separately from the act of representation. The critiques of the subject/object dualism in modernity have been many; Richard Rorty’s 1981 book The Mirror of Nature had an early and deep impact on me. In these pages, I draw particularly on the work of mostly feminist scientists or historians of science focusing both on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century as well as on the implications for some feminist quantum physicists of the onto-epistemological implications of the recently enacted famous gedanken quantum experiments. The deconstruction of the separation between observer and observed has the inexorable entailment that one can no longer honestly claim to be simply an observer. I could no longer behave or write as if it were possible to remain unconcerned, untouched, uninvolved, untransformed by what I was experiencing and writing. The inexorable conclusion of these works is that experiencing, participating, observing, or writing implicates one. There is no longer a safe Archimedean point to stand on or, in Donna Haraway’s pithy phrase, an uninvolved and removed sovereign “God’s eye view.” There is no longer an either/or dualist choice between remaining either in a neutral scholarly zone of pure observation and reflection with the aim of advancing knowledge for knowledge’s sake, or becoming an advocate for the people, places, and other-than-humans one encounters. Advocacy and scholarship can no longer be neatly disentangled. It is only through the tacit knowledge of one’s profession remaining tacit that such a choice seems clear.8 I hasten to add that in these pages I have not focused on the subject/ object dualism per se largely because it has been already so ably and so persuasively deconstructed. I focus rather on another related dualism, the one alluded to by Ron Grimes in the epigraph, namely that between the world of humans and the world of non-humans since as he so pithily states, those are central to rituals. Somewhere along this complex journey, I became aware that the tacit knowledge implied in the act of representation raised the possibility that what existed, in the case at hand rituals, were not wholly representable empirical cultural phenomena. Both in India as well as in indigenous Peru, the non-human aspects of the landscape are lively and active presences.

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They participate in the rituals along with humans; they are entities that have acquired personalities, names, and narrative histories, sometimes called “myths.” In their interactions with humans, they become what I call “other-than-humans” embodying both human and non-human aspects. I became aware that to experience these beings as only symbolic or metaphorical imaginative human constructs, projected onto the non-human world, robbed them of their very real presence. I had in fact come to experience such beings as real presences, and communicated with them and exchanged gifts with them in my ritual enactments. The lived experience by itself, however, was not sufficient to pry me away from my very modern way of seeing reality. Especially when I returned home, the experience faded and lost its power to persuade me intellectually. My private and solitary ritual practice helped but could not wholly replace the lack of a community. I needed to plunge myself in the critical science studies literature in order to acquire a more robust and steadfast grasp on another way of being in and experiencing the world. That intellectual journey made all the difference. It is there that I learned about the non-humans having agency. It is also there that I found hard scientific corroboration concerning the agency of the non-humans, thus allowing me to exorcize more effectively the recurring characterization of my work as being “romanticizing” or as dangerously close to “going native.” This book, then, is the fruit of twin journeys, and most chapters reflect this by combining a narrative about a ritual with a more intellectual discussion of some aspect of Science. In capitalizing the word Science, I follow the French philosopher and anthropologist of science, Bruno Latour, who by capitalizing the word intends to refer not to the actual practice of scientists, but rather to the canonical knowledge and ideas that educational institutions transmit to the next generation and to the media at large. In this book I engage in a kind of reverse anthropology. By “reverse anthropology,” I do not mean engaging in ethnographic research on some aspect of American or European culture or society. Rather, I mean an understanding of the processes that have brought about our way of seeing reality—all of it, not just a single, particular aspect. By “our way of seeing reality,” I mean what we take for granted; by “we” I mean people like me, educated in the modern educational system that by now is hegemonic and thus no longer tied to any specific region or ethnic group; by “reality” I mean things as fundamental as time, space, and nature as opposed to culture, the human person, and so forth. I became aware that my way of seeing and experiencing reality differed in some fundamental way from that of the Oriya or the indigenous Peruvian farmers whose festivals and rituals I participated in and with whom I conversed. This “we” turned out to be us (my academic peers, my readers, me), the inheritors of the Great Transformation—to

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use Karl Polanyi’s famous phrase—that occurred in seventeenth-century Western Europe and was eventually deployed throughout the world, albeit very unevenly. For my purposes, the relevance of the Great Transformation is not so much the economic transformation Polanyi wrote about, but rather its intellectual entailments and more specifically the scientific revolution. This is the crucible in which our way of seeing and experiencing reality was forged. Comparing the histories I was reading with my experience as an anthropologist, I realized that premodern Europeans—especially the oral peasantry and the working people—were in very important respects much closer than I was to the people among whom I lived and in whose rituals I participated. I was never satisfied with the label “prescientific” to capture the nonmodern farmers’ sense of reality, a label that conveys that their way of seeing and being has become outmoded, superseded by the accomplishments of the new scientific era. I was even less satisfied with the label “primitive religion” or “magic” to refer to non-Western or Western premodern ritual practices, labels that communicate much more about modern Western religious and intellectual traditions than about non-Western, non-modern, or premodern Western ones.9 The field of science studies became of central relevance in my quest, and in it the new historiography of science figures prominently: not the older hagiographical history of science, but the one that scholars such as Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer exemplify in their ground-breaking study of the debate between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes, published in 1985.10 This was followed by other histories in the same genre. Among them, the work by Elizabeth Potter on the debate between Robert Boyle and Franciscus Linus, a very different opponent than Hobbes, figures prominently.11 What makes this new type of historical work so relevant for my purposes is that it does not take as its starting point the sense of reality bequeathed to us by the scientific revolution and taken for granted for the better part of the four hundred years that have elapsed since, even though it has been criticized and even rejected by various intellectual and artistic currents ever since.12 However, such currents never seem to have deeply impacted the development of science and technology and their deployment throughout modern and modernizing societies. By looking at debates between holders of opposite views at the time when this new reality was being forged and was far from widely accepted, these authors succeed in making visible the constructed, contingent quality of our contemporary sense of reality. This sense of reality is inherited from the victors of those debates, figures such as Robert Boyle; his predecessors, in particular Copernicus, Galileo, Francis Bacon, and Descartes; his collaborators; and his successors, especially Sir Isaac Newton.

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This research had a very powerful effect on me. It succeeded in bringing into sharp focus precisely those assumptions that are so deeply buried, so very tacit, one is simply not aware of them. For me, it was precisely this kind of journey that was required in order to be able to communicate what I was until then only able to experience while in India or Peru and less tangibly in the privacy of my home ritual practice. It enabled me to address issues in the study of rituals without feeling that my only options were poetic license, irony, or art. It enabled me to speak of the pervasive anthropocentrism in modernity with arguments that could make sense even to one steeped in this modern way of seeing reality. It enabled me to make visible the extremely harmful entailments for the non-human world of our thorough-going anthropocentrism. Such deleterious entailments affect also our own health, biological and spiritual at once. These deleterious effects revealed themselves as entailments of a particular onto-epistemology and thus could no longer be safely kept separate in a box entitled “advocacy” or “activism” and left for others, activists rather than scholars, to address. Although I make ample use of the work of several historians, this book is not a work of history but rather the work of an anthropologically trained scholar who makes use of history in the same way I made use of history in my work based on ethnographic research in Orissa. I am, however, well aware that reading and using Indian history as an anthropologist writing on India is a very different enterprise than an anthropologist writing on rituals in Peru using works on the history of Europe. While the former is not only permitted but even encouraged, the latter raises very sensitive issues. The field of European history is a well-trodden and highly specialized one. Encroaching on this terrain by a nonspecialist can immediately signal a lack of depth and precision and raise the specter of amateurism. My reasons for doing so is because addressing rituals in the Peruvian Andes and Amazonia in the manner that I do impels me to question our modern Western sense of the real; indeed, it positively demands it. Such questioning by its very nature has me gravitating to those historical (and other) studies that do not take such a modern view of the real for granted. The anthropological training that led me to draw on history in my work on India leads me here to do so as well and do it in an anthropological manner. That anthropological manner is one that privileges a more holistic approach—sometimes referred to as contextual studies—seeking to make relationships and/or entanglements between canonically separated domains visible. Such a procedure necessarily sacrifices depth and specialization. But again, there are advantages and disadvantages to such a manner of proceeding. The disadvantages are obvious: lack of specificity, detail, and in-depth knowledge; insufficient knowledge of the various fields of European history. The advantages however for me outweigh the

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disadvantages. Seeking a more holistic understanding of an epoch, thus delving with methodological irreverence in such divergent subfields of history as economic history, the history of science, the history of ideas, women’s history, religio-political history, and such allows certain things to become visible that a narrower pursuit might not. It has the distinct advantage of being less prey to the tacit knowledge hidden in entrenched fields and subfields of European studies and in particular in the boundaries creating such fields and subfields. Additionally, the fact that this is a practice not only tolerated but widely applied in the study of non-Western regions which I myself used in my work on India introduces an awareness of the asymmetry in the enactment of a reverse anthropology. My hope is that by looking at this familiar European historical material through more anthropological lenses, especially with respect to gift economies and the place of the non-human and of the other-than-human beings within these economies, it will be possible to cast a new light on this familiar ground. However, I am quite aware that such a procedure might irritate many historians of Europe. This particular form of reverse anthropology is far from being widely accepted in anthropology itself, let alone in other fields. I can only beg their forbearance and hope such forbearance will be at least partially rewarded. The fact that this book is part of a series on Ritual Studies directed by three scholars among who figures Ronald Grimes is for me deeply gratifying, since in his writings I have found strong parallels to my arguments, as the epigraph above testifies. In particular, the two last chapters of his book Rite Out of Place identify non-humans as having agency and recognize that effective environmental action has to be embodied action: in other words that it has to be ritualistic. Ethical action and laws may be necessary, but definitely are not sufficient. Such a realization implies a rejection of modernity’s many dualisms, which Grimes formulates in the following delightfully pithy manner: “But Earth is declaring dualism taboo.”13

3. RITUALS AND PERFORMATIVITY

The chapters in this book build to a theory of ritual, articulated in part 3 of chapter 9. Such a long preamble is necessary since to make this theory understandable as well as credible requires nothing less than a deconstruction of the modernist onto-epistemology. I share Ron Grimes’s view of ritual as action, as performance, and thus I share with him his critiques of other theorists of ritual such a Jonathan Z. Smith. In general, whether one emphasizes temporality as Victor Turner does, or place as Smith does, the dimensions of time, space, “the social structure,” or “nature” are in general

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conceived of as pre-givens.14 For most theorists, rituals work on humans, not on the non-human world, and the work of Grimes is unusual in giving agency to non-humans. In this book I am at pains to show that rituals are radically creative: they enact the world in concert with its humans, nonhumans, and other-than-humans. This is why in chapter 4 I discuss Niels Bohr’s theory of complementarity, which, as interpreted by the quantum physicist Karen Barad, shows that reality emerges from “acts of observation” and different realities precipitate from different acts of observation. These acts of observation are performed not only by the human scientists and technicians, but also by the experimental apparatuses and everything else. Rituals are more akin to these acts of observation than to many other things, and share with them a capacity to precipitate reality, a reality that includes non-humans and other-than-humans. I understand the performativity of rituals in terms of an alternative to the modernist epistemology of representationalism, where a pre-given reality is “represented” by the human mind. I argue that representationalism implies a particular ontology since it requires the existence of a given reality exterior to the representing mind. Such a strong view of performativity and rituals rejoins one of the most ancient recorded texts on rituals, namely the Rig Vedas. For the authors of the Rig Vedas, rituals create the cosmos. In chapter 9, I quote a renowned Vedic scholar on the issue. I vividly recall my utter bafflement when reading these texts for the first time during my graduate studies, finding myself utterly unable to begin to comprehend what they might mean. I was quick to decide they represented a magical view of reality. Labeling such baffling rituals as “magical” was typical of the anthropology of the times (early 1970s) and functioned to keep one from deeply challenging one’s received knowledge. In this I behaved not too differently from Renaissance inquisitors faced with the rituals of the wise women or the so-called heretics and occult philosophers. As discussed in the next two chapters, the centuries of the hunt for “heretics” and “witches” destroyed a non-dualist worldview, clearing the way for the modernist restoration of certainty with the scientific revolution. It has indeed been a long journey for me to arrive at such an understanding of the Vedic view of ritual.

4. BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE CHAPTERS

The next three chapters lay the foundations for the theory of ritual I more fully present in chapter 9. Since in this theory, the deconstruction of the separation between nature and culture plays a key role, I begin in chapter 2 by revisiting the modernist nature/culture dualism. I do this at first rather empirically by examining the category of “wilderness” through its usages,

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especially through the creation of wilderness or nature preserves. I critically examine the rather widespread notion that there are large tracts of the world that are wild and untouched by humans and review the more recent discoveries showing us that what was previously considered to be virgin territory is in fact anthropogenic. I also begin a brief genealogy of how the nonhuman landscape became de-spirited, how it became a material “nature” in dualistic opposition to the agency and culture of humans, a genealogy continued in chapter 3. In chapter 2, I evoke the world of the Renaissance occult philosophers and argue that the many movements to which they belonged all partook of a non-dualist worldview called “hylozoism.” In chapter 3, I focus more on the premodern European oral peasantry and the wise men and women, with their gift economy and lively rituals on the commons around a world axis-tree. I propose a way of understanding the eradication of this world as having everything to do with the enclosure movement and the rise of the market economy. I argue that the transition from the gift (or moral) economy—existing among peasant communities—to the market economy played a central role in the de-spiriting of the nonhuman world. The work of Elizabeth Potter on the debate between Robert Boyle and the hylozoist Franciscus Linus, and the defeat of hylozoism, a non-dualistic, non-mechanistic worldview, is central. Using other historical works, I try to show that hylozoism was the worldview of those who lost out in the struggles of the times, namely the peasantry, the working classes, and the so-called witches and heretics, as well as the occult philosophers. The new order required a new worldview, the dualist mechanistic one we have inherited. In chapter 4, I present the work of the feminist philosopher and physicist Karen Barad on the physics and philosophical writings of the father of quantum mechanics, Neils Bohr. Such work gives both experimental as well as theoretical demonstrations of the deeply flawed Boylian, Cartesian, and Newtonian paradigm. Neils Bohr’s theory of complementarity, as interpreted by Barad, offers us a powerful alternative to the dualist modernist onto-epistemology. With Barad’s elaboration of Bohr’s insights, the mechanist materialist modern cosmology is shown to be a profoundly flawed vision. Her work opens the door to the possibility of what Marshall Berman has called “the re-enchantment of the world.”15 In chapter 5, we are introduced to an indigenous Peruvian ritual. The first part of the chapter is in the voice of an indigenous woman from a Highland Andean community, Marcela Machaca. She was the first one in her community and family to go to university, where she became an agronomist. In her story, she tells us why she rejected the science she was taught and why she formed an organization to revive rituals in her community. The ritual focused upon in this chapter is an annual one involving the whole community.

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The second part of this chapter is a description of the festival of the water, Yarqa Aspiy, in Marcela Machaca’s community whose members festively and ritualistically clean the irrigation canals in the whole community. The description is based on Marcela Machaca’s own publication and that of her siblings, augmented by my own observations and interviews. The offerings and exchange of gifts among humans and between humans and other-thanhumans exemplify the gift economy discussed in chapter 3. The last part of the chapter returns to the scientific revolution, this time focusing on the issue imperative during that age, namely that of restoring certainty. This certainty had been torn asunder by the intractable conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, both claiming possession of the One Indivisible Truth. Here I make use of Shapin and Schaffer’s work on the debate between Boyle and Hobbes. In particular, I focus on Boyle’s famous experimental method for acquiring certainty, one established on totally new bases. The new bases created new boundaries between the physical, the metaphysical, and the spiritual. The latter two were evicted from matter, from the physical, relegating all such things to the privacy of the individual’s heart and mind. This move created an anthropocentric cosmology. The juxtaposition of the indigenous Peruvian festival with this aspect of the history of the scientific revolution makes visible the arbitrary nature of the boundaries created by the rise of Science. It also makes plain why rituals such as Yarqa Aspiy have often been labeled as evidence of a “prescientific” or primitive “magical” mindset. Chapter 6 investigates some of the reasons why the science of agronomy, as taught in Peruvian universities, excludes native agriculture. I again motivate my story by examining the career of Marcela Machaca, focusing on her reasons for abandoning an extensive university training in agronomy and choosing instead to dedicate her life to bringing back to life the rituals and festivals in her native community. Central to Marcela’s decision was the total absence of native agriculture from the academic curriculum. In the first part of the chapter, I look at the history of the teaching of agronomy in Peru for clues as to why indigenous agriculture was (and continues to be) ignored, despite its contributions in the realm of agrobiodiversity and technology. Peru is one of the nine world centers of biodiversity in cultivars and the origins of agriculture. The achievements of pre-Columbian agriculture are evoked in order to highlight the question of why indigenous agriculture is regarded as prescientific, superseded by modern, “scientific” agriculture. In the second part, the prescientific status of native agriculture motivates a focus on the church’s doctrine of “supersessionism,” a view that all religions before the advent of Christ have been superseded by Christianity. Here I draw on the history of the relations between the Catholic Church

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and the Jews by James Carroll in his book Constantine’s Sword. I argue that the doctrine of supersessionism was implicitly taken over by Science even though the church abandoned it late in the twentieth century. In the last part of the chapter, I turn to a history of mathematics that reveals a crucial link between the rise of the market economy and the mechanization and disenchantment of nature, illuminating aspects of the issues raised in the first two parts of the chapter. Chapter 7 is written in a much more narrative voice, since in it I try to vividly capture through an example of a festival I participated in how humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans all dance their world into continued existence. The experience was very intense and left an indelible mark in my memory. It has remained for me a salient example of the manner in which humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans all intra-act, all make and care for their world together. I went to this festival in the company of people similar to Marcela Machaca, many of whom had been trained either as scientific agronomists or foresters and had abandoned their training in order to reinstate the rituals and other customs of their communities. In their own words, they evoke their negative experience with aspects of development projects in the region. My immediate companion during the ritual was a young pregnant woman of the Altiplano working alongside the other people accompanying me. I relate some of her experiences working for the state’s program of family planning, a theme which is taken up in the next chapter. Chapter 8, written in collaboration with a Bolivian scholar-activist, is based on work we did in Cochabamba, Bolivia, trying to address problems that had emerged as a result of state-sponsored feminist research carried out in the community where my coauthor, Loyda Sanchez, had herself done extensive fieldwork. The members of that community were shocked by the manner in which the state feminist researchers portrayed gender relations in their community. The chapter lays out the state’s policy toward women and the research agenda fostered by the state to support that policy, and presents a short summary of both the policy and the research. The critique is based partly on a different understanding of that particular native community, and partly through the strategy of reverse anthropology, the understanding of the mindset of the state-appointed feminist anthropologists as emerging from a tacit adherence to the modernist onto-epistemology elevated to the status of universal principles. I once again draw on critical feminist science studies to deconstruct the notion of the biological body and its implicit individualistic and anthropocentric premises. We conclude that the hidden agenda of the state in adopting a certain kind of feminist methodology is to strengthen its population

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control programs. We underline the problematic nature of such a goal in the context of native communities that have only recently recovered from the catastrophic demographic collapse suffered by the native population with the Spanish invasion of the sixteenth century. Chapter 9 builds on the previous ones and offers a theory of ritual. In it, I argue that the ontology of time and space as universals, time as linear and space as a container, as given backdrops to human actions, render the work of rituals such as the ones discussed in this book invisible. The first part focuses on the category of time and includes a brief genealogy of our contemporary way of measuring it. It also invites us to reconsider history and suggests as an alternative a deliberate playing with memory, often displayed in ritual actions. The festivals of Yarqa Aspiy and of the Ispallas (discussed in chapters 5 and 7 respectively) are taken as illustrations of such deliberate playing with memory. The second part of chapter 9 focuses more on the category of universal space. It argues that the notion of space as pre-given has important entailments for one’s understanding of the human person, leading again to an anthropocentric understanding of the person. The final part is an invitation to see ritual performances in a non-representational mode, as the making or performing of continuity and of a livable common world. This can only come into focus if notions of universal pre-given time and space are questioned. This performativity is one in which continuity and place are achieved through ritual action rather than pre-given as universal time and space. In the concluding chapter 10, I ask the following question: can nonmodern indigenous performative rituals and worldviews survive in the modern world? This last chapter offers a concrete example of a creative and hopeful manner of using a particular contemporary economic movement, namely Fair Trade, for the purpose of regenerating the non-humans as well as the humans—what could be called the ecology. This example argues for how the world of the other-than-humans could be harnessed to the goal of regeneration, one that is both sustainable and non-anthropocentric. The story centers on a very successful Fair Trade–certified coffee cooperative located in the High Amazon of Peru, with which I have been collaborating during the years from 2006 to 2009. My information comes largely from intensive field research carried out in the summer of 2006. I have chosen to end the book with this example to show that we should not see indigenous peoples as locked into a false either/or dichotomy of non-modern practices versus modern ones. Although what Bruno Latour has called the Modern Constitution is thoroughly anthropocentric and dualist, it is possible—given sufficient creativity and vision—to forge hybrid practices full of promise. This chapter investigates Fair Trade as a movement and an alternative to the corrosive effects of the capitalist global

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economy especially in its later phase of neo-liberalism. It also criticizes Fair Trade for its inability to take the worldviews of the southern producers seriously. For those making the Fair Trade rules in the North, how the other-than-humans play a key role in the regeneration of people’s health and the restoration of a sustainable ecology remains completely invisible. This willful blindness has of course enormous negative political entailments. Fair Trade is a creative and hopeful hybrid that is nevertheless seriously marred by the political dominance of its mostly modern Northern leadership. In the epilogue, I recount the lessons learned from all my years in Peru and how I, along with a small group of friends in Lamas in the high Amazon, are going about performing a new reality in collaboration with indigenous Kichwa organizations. I also report how and why we involve U.S. undergraduates in such performances. This new venture tries to materialize and perform what this book has been about and I pray that its success so far proves durable.



CHAPTER 2

The Politics of “Wilderness” The Nature/Culture Dualism Revisited But when you separate mind from the structure in which it is immanent, such as human relationship, the human society, or the ecosystem, you thereby embark, I believe, on a fundamental error, which in the end will surely hurt you. —Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind1

1. WHAT DO NATURE PARKS PRESERVE?

The creation of nature preserves in the United States was a nineteenthcentury response to the growing environmental destruction brought about by industrialization in general and industrial agriculture in particular. The creation of parks such as Yosemite embodied at once an emerging ideology of transcendental, essentialized Nature, and also a strategic amnesia about the people who lived in these lands who had been forced onto reservations. As William Cronon points out, the date of the creation of Yosemite in 1864, the first nature park, corresponds to the end of the Indian wars.2 The history of Native Americans’ use of the forests and other lands were conveniently and deliberately erased or redefined as inappropriate or illegal. As Shiv Visvanathan points out, E. O. Wilson’s “biophilia” is not an attitude that arises from living in and using the forest, but from bounding it and keeping people from using it.3 In the United States, the utilitarian use of the land and the sea and the people produced and continues to produce negative impacts on both the non-humans (what is commonly but problematically referred to as

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“the environment”) and the humans, those who labor on the land, in the factories, and elsewhere.4 The experience of the United States is now a worldwide phenomenon. Utilitarian economic activities have wreaked havoc with both the human and non-human communities worldwide. This has occurred through the worldwide spread of industrialization, industrial agriculture, tourism, and other land development schemes in particular. The notion of “sustainable yield” was developed in Prussia in the nineteenth century and imported to the United States by Berhard Fernow and Gifford Pinchot in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The aim was—and is—to reign in the excesses of capitalism through the state taking an active role in “managing” the natural resources of the country.5 In this management, science plays a central role. Governments, particularly in the South where environmental regulation is often weakly enforced, pursue a strategy of simultaneously engaging in environmentally destructive agricultural, industrial, and other economic practices, while also vigorously supporting the creation of wilderness, nature, and/or biodiversity preserves. Governments in the South today favor the development of an industrial agriculture for export with products such as flowers, winter vegetables, and fruits to be shipped to northern countries, coffee and tea plantations, ranching in the tropical forest for raising export beef, and the like. Simultaneously, these same governments pursue aggressive policies of expanding conservation areas and policies. As Luis Vivanco has remarked, these are contradictory positions with respect to the environment.6 Such practices are in fact not only pursued by southern governments, but also with slight variations by all governments today; the primary difference is that northern countries tend to enforce environmental and sustainability regulations more stringently. But as the environmental justice movement in the United States makes clear, these regulations are extremely unevenly applied and subject to erosion from changes in administration. Thus we seem to be facing worldwide contradictory practices in which “the environment” as well as certain human communities are extremely negatively impacted by economic activities, while others are protected from these negative impacts. As has increasingly been pointed out, strategies to create wilderness or biodiversity preserves marginalize the local inhabitants of these landscapes, perpetuating and globalizing the history of the exclusion of native North Americans in the creation of nature preserves in the United States.7 In fact, given the ubiquity of negative environmental impacts resulting from economic activity and their apparent inevitability, the rational and inevitable response seems indeed to separate out certain areas, chosen

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either for their striking beauty or their especially high diversity of fauna and flora, or their fragility, or for other similar criteria. The protection of certain areas from human utilitarian activities seems to impose itself as the obvious and maybe indeed the only solution. However, while conservation policies may assuage anxiety over the destruction of the environment, they may also function to prevent an in-depth questioning of the logic underlying economic activities. As William Cronon points out, conservation policies function to “give ourselves permission to evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead.”8 The relatively recent emergence of biodiversity as a natural resource for the biotechnological industry—mostly pharmaceutical and agro-industries—made possible by new developments in biochemistry and molecular biology, gives rise to a conflation between conservation and economic exploitation. In the past, economic exploitation gave rise to nature preserves where exploitation is prohibited; essentialized nature was museumized.9 Today, the aim of biodiversity preserves is also that of conserving potential genetic economic resources, making them known and thus available to bio-prospectors. The biodiversity preserve plays a double role of preserving the “biodiversity of nature” and simultaneously securing potential genetic resources for economic exploitation. However, this is not a solution that can be broadly applied since the genetic resources that such preserves harbor only address certain economic needs and not others. Furthermore, such preserves pose complicated and often intractable problems for local populations living in and around them. In the impetus to separate a piece of nature from human economic activity lingers the assumption that human economic activity will negatively impact the environment and deplete its biodiversity. But there is ample evidence that such an assumption is unwarranted, and that in fact the very opposite seems to be the case, as will be discussed below.10 What is at stake, of course, is the type of economic activity involved rather than utilitarian activity per se. The following example of some of the conflicts that have arisen as a result of the December 26, 2004, tsunami will illustrate this point. In the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, in its southern coastal district of Kanyakumari, the Guardian Weekly reports the following: Father Kocherry estimates that 800,000 people dependent on the sea have been displaced and tens of thousands of people have lost their boats, nets and other fishing equipment. But the traditional Indian fisherfolk have been under threat for years, says Father Kocherry, who has led a long campaign against the government’s acceptance of trade liberalization policies that have allowed foreign factory fishing fleets to deplete fish stocks to the point where many of the small local boats cannot catch fish everyday. He is furious that some European charities were last week suggesting that it may not be

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sustainable for all fishermen to return to sea. “Do they know anything about fisherfolk or their lives?” he asks. “I am speaking for the 10 million traditional fishermen who go out in small boats and who practice sustainable fishing, not the giant trawlers that ruin the fish and the environment. My people have carried out this livelihood for centuries. Where are they to go if not back to the sea?11

For these traditional Indian fisherfolk, the sea is not a natural resource but rather is a goddess with whom they interact, whom they respect, whose gifts make them live, and to whom they reciprocate with gift offerings.12 The sacralization of the sea in no way means that it is not to be used. In fact, one could suggest the opposite: it is the bounty of the sea and its life-sustaining quality, as well as its destructive power, that are the central aspects of its sacrality. By inquiring into how the modernist category of natural resource came to be, I hope to be able to understand how it is that modernist economic activities rather regularly engender negative impacts, while non-modern practices such as those of the craft fisherfolk of the Indian coast tend to be more sustainable.13 Jared Diamond, who perhaps more than anyone else has made the public aware that non-modern societies do not necessarily always exhibit sustainable practices, issues dire warnings in his book Collapse: For affluent Western citizens, conditions have indeed been getting better, and public health measures have, on average, lengthened lifespans in the third world. But lifespan alone is not a sufficient indicator: billions of people in developing countries, constituting about 80% of the world’s population, still live in poverty, near or below starvation level. Even in the US, an increasing fraction of the population is at the poverty level and lacks affordable medical care. . . . The prosperity that the richer nations enjoy at the moment is based on spending their environmental capital in the bank. It makes no sense to be content with our present comfort when it is clear that we are on a non-sustainable course.14

This is the contemporary worldwide scene where all governments pursue the contradictory path mentioned. In this now cosmopolitan, worldwide paradigm, economic activity involves the “control of nature” and of all those associated with “nature.”15 This “naturalizing” of non-humans and of certain humans renders them agency-less, in other words, to be controlled. The need to “control nature” in order to pursue economic activities thus legitimizes as well as renders invisible all sorts of power moves. In premodern and non-modern practices, people are much more likely to acknowledge the active nature of matter as well as their own role in the co-creation of matter—their role in mattering, and an awareness of the responsibility

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involved in mattering.16 Such acknowledging comes in the form of actions performed where the non-human is engaged as an active, conscious member of the local community. Such actions are invariably ritualized. As I will try to elucidate below, ever since the Reformation such actions have been labeled “magic,” and those performing them cast as the “abject others.”17

2. THE POLITICS OF “WILDERNESS” AND THE NATURE/CULTURE DIVIDE

Recent scholarship has shown that possibly no landscape on earth with its attendant biological and cultural diversity can be called truly wild, truly innocent of the activity of humans. For example, in his study of the Amazon River basin and his reevaluation of the archaeological data, William Balée finds that the Amazon rain forest with all of its extraordinary diversity is anthropogenic, that is, it is crucially shaped by human activity.18 Such research leads to questioning the boundary between nature and culture, which is commonly taken as given. The notion of wilderness as virgin lands, untouched by human activity, vanishes along with this boundary. The dissolving of the boundary between nature and culture has simultaneous metaphysical and political implications. The political implications of the vanishing of wilderness as a category are important not only for indigenous and traditional peoples, who have vigorously criticized and refused the category, but also for women, who in the Western tradition have long been associated with nature, in turn conceived of as matter to be controlled by manly rationality.19 The act of naturalizing, as has been argued by many feminist scholars, is an act of domination, a colonial act.20 Here I will give an example of an indigenous critique of the act of naturalizing and the politics of “wilderness.” The following Aboriginal Resolution from the 1995 Ecopolitics IX Conference in Darwin, Australia, makes clear the political implications of “wilderness”: The term “wilderness” as it is popularly used, and related concepts such as “wild resources,” “wild foods,” etc., [are unacceptable]. These terms have connotation of terra nullius[empty or unowned land and resources] and, as such, all concerned people and organizations should look for alternative terminology which does not exclude Indigenous history and meaning.21

The basic principles of terra nullius were established by papal decree in the sixteenth century. It denied non-Christian natives the right to own or transfer ownership of land as well as any kind of autonomous political existence. Five hundred years later, “the concept of terra nullius would live on,

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reformulated in East Kalimantan as recently as 1982 as “terra incognito” by mapping “experts” and advisors to the Indonesian government.”22 Wilderness is understood to be the place where plants and animals live without being “domesticated” by humans, and its definition has been extended for several centuries to “wild people” who were seen as living outside of civilization and its control. According to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, “wild” means “living in a state of nature . . . not tame or domesticated . . . not subject to restraint or regulation.” As the Native American scholar Jack Forbes states it: Nature and nation have the same root, being derived from the Latin verb nasci, to be born. From the past participle natus, borned, came “nat,” which with the suffix “ura” gave natura, or nature . . . Most importantly, the idea of borned character had come to be taken away from its original locus of meaning and had been transferred to the hugest imaginable realm, that of all things not created by human art or skill. . . . This extension of the concept of borned character to the nonhuman and nonrational (nonmale) world has very profound implications, setting the stage . . . for the manner in which non-European peoples have been treated, along with women, animals, forests, experimental animals, and other “objects” which came to be linked to the realm of “that which is to be acted upon” as opposed to that which is doing the acting.23

Thus, the categories of wilderness and of nature have been, and continue to be, deeply implicated in colonial-type politics. The issue of whom and what have agency and “act upon,” and whom and what lack agency and “are acted upon” are political issues. For agency to be the exclusive attribute of humans, in particular of certain European male humans, a stabilization of a binary system of human versus non-human had to be previously established. To heed Diamond’s warning, we need to find an alternative to the contradictory practices of destructive economic activity conjoined to the preservation of small parts of the environment and/or biodiversity. We need to reconsider what in this economic activity produces such negative effects on collectivities of all kinds, human, non-human, and other-than-human. The contrast with non-modern practices leads me to posit that the construction of “wilderness,” “nature,” and “natural resources” as separate, agency-less objects to be used exclusively for human purposes is probably a fruitful place to begin.24 But before considering the forces and events that brought this dualist paradigm about, a topic taken up in the next chapter, we need to recall that a very different non-dualist paradigm competed with the emerging one and was defeated with a great deal of violence during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These centuries are simultaneously those of the scientific

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revolution and those of the “Burning Times” and the wars of religion. An investigation of the politics and onto-epistemology of the nature/culture dualism and its corresponding metaphysics of substance is a necessary prelude to a recall of this history. It is through such a prelude that one can better understand the creation of an “abject other” to be ferociously destroyed.

3. UNIVERSAL NATURE AND THE POLITICS AND METAPHYSICS OF SUBSTANCE

I wish to extend Judith Butler’s discussion of the metaphysics of substance from her case of sex, gender, and identity to that of universal “nature.” Butler points out that in a pre-feminist naïve context, “biological sex” is seen as always already being there, given at birth, and the cause of gender identity and desire.25 The identity of sex/gender is stabilized through its opposition to “the opposite sex.” As Butler puts it: “One is one’s gender to the extent that one is not the other gender, a formulation that presupposes and enforces the restriction of gender within that binary pair.”26 Butler goes on to use Foucault’s work on sexuality to make visible the political reasons for such a substantializing view of gender: The institution of a compulsory and naturalized heterosexuality requires and regulates gender as a binary relation in which the masculine term is differentiated from a feminine term, and this differentiation is accomplished through the practices of heterosexual desire. The act of differentiating the two oppositional moments of the binary results in a consolidation of each term, the internal coherence of sex, gender, and desire.27

The politics of enforced heterosexuality is enacted through a whole gamut of medical, psychological, educative, and other discursive practices. Sex, gender, and identity also presuppose the subject. The unmarked heterosexual masculine subject depends for its substance on a differentiation from its other, associated with the feminine, the savage, the primitive.28 This “other” is what Butler names the domain of abject alterity.29 The masculine subject’s dependence on this other is obscured. The constitutive outside of this masculine subject is also a feminized nature construed as agency-less. The masculine modern Western subject construes himself as autonomous, determining his world unilaterally.30 This subject is construed oppositionally through the construction of an agency-less other, namely nature and those seen as belonging to nature, such as women and wild, savage, primitive, indigenous, or backward others. Nature depends for its substance and coherence on its differentiation from its opposite, namely culture, the domain of human subjects with agency. Just as the feminine is what the

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masculine is not, nature is what culture is not. Thus, agency-less nature acquires its substance through its differentiation from its binary opposite, culture. To discern the politics of a metaphysics of substance for nature as agency-less, made up of discrete objects incapable of moving themselves and subject to external, universal laws, we need to turn to a genealogy of this substantialized nature. Agency-less, mechanical nature began to emerge in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Western Europe. Identifying the abject others and what they shared in common might give us a clue to the politics of the substantializing of nature and the binary of nature as not culture. A fruitful place to begin such a genealogy is during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries in Europe. These centuries corresponded to the height of the witch-hunts and to the persecution of the occult philosophers, many of whom became heretics both for the Protestants and for the church.31 In this chapter, we focus on occult philosophy and its non-dualist worldview, leaving to the next chapter a discussion of peasant practices including those of the so-called witches, since they were a major obstacle for the enclosure movement and with it the emergence of the earliest manifestations of the market economy.

4. NON-DUALIST RENAISSANCE OCCULT PHILOSOPHY: A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF ONE GROUP WHO BECAME HERETICAL ABJECT OTHERS

Renaissance Europe saw the revival or invention of a series of movements. New kinds of texts appeared in Europe due to both the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Many Greek scholars left Constantinople for Europe after 1453. The writings of a mythical ancient Egyptian magician-sage, Hermes Trismegistus, became widely circulated and influential in certain circles at that time. The introduction of a Jewish mystical system from Spain, Kabbalah, gained similar readership and influence. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Kabbalah was given a thin Christian veneer by Pico della Mirandola, Ficino, Agrippa, Giorgi, and Reuchlin.32 Christian and Jewish Kabbalah, Hermeticism, the works of Arab physicians and alchemy, neo-Platonism, as well as the practical knowledge of many rural, oral, wise women and men, were the main ingredients in various Renaissance trends referred to as “occult philosophy.” Certain rituals, labeled “magical” ever since the Reformation, effected transformations in this world through incantations and the manipulation of certain objects, were an important part of this movement. In England the leader of Elizabethan Renaissance was the Christian cabalist

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John Dee (1527–1608). Occult philosophy shared the then widely believed theory of the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire with their corresponding qualities of cold, moist, dry, and hot. These elements and qualities pervaded the terrestrial human plane as well as the astral plane. The planets and the twelve signs of the zodiac had predominantly cold, moist, dry, or hot influences, thus linking the human, natural, and celestial spheres in a single and continuous domain. The practitioner of these so-called magical rituals was the mage. He worked to recover lost knowledge by studying the Corpus Hermeticum and the Kabbalah. Animism was central to the mage’s worldview. Picco della Mirandola (1463–1494) writes: “All this great body of the world is a soul, full of intellect and of God, who fills it within and without and vivifies the All . . . The world is alive, all matter is full of life . . . Matter and bodies or substances . . . are energies of God. In the All there is nothing which is not God.”33 Paracelsus (1494–1541) similarly held that God as prime matter was the indivisible substance that originates, sustains, and exists in all things. God was not outside the world and the soul of man was divine. Man’s duty was to unite with the divine completely so that God might be caused to descend into man and man to ascend to divinity.34 Paracelsus assumed that the emperor should communalize land and the means of production. He traveled among peasants and learned from the wise women and men. His worldview was anti-hierarchical: each planet crowns a hierarchy of people, animals, plants, minerals, and elements, but all are bound together so that the action of one affects all the others. All things are connected through the world spirit. Health and happiness can be had through the proper ritualized manipulation of certain plants, minerals, and other things.35 This non-dualist cosmology characterized occult philosophy throughout its history. However, it soon incurred the condemnation of the church as well as of the Reformers. It was associated with “magic” since it involved the manipulation of elements of the world along with incantations and other acts to effect transformations in the world and in the philosopher himself.36 Church doctrine recognized two kinds of efficient causes of events: one through natural causes and the other through signs or symbols. However, only church-designated signs were effective. Other signs, according to Thomas Aquinas, were superstitious, although he did recognize that formally nothing could differentiate them.37 Europe was (and to some extent still is) full of objects and places that were firmly believed to be efficacious in the cure of a variety of disorders and complaints. These were mostly places and objects sacralized by the power of the saints or relics. Thus for Catholics, the differentiation between an efficacious Christian symbol and

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an inefficacious, superstitious, magical, and always potentially satanic one was crucial. However, the vernacular practices of the European peasantry generally made no careful differentiation between church-authorized signs, places, and objects, and those that were not church-authorized. Such practices did not seem to draw the full attention of the church until the fifteenth century. The wise women and men in the countryside had always existed, but only then did they become the abject other and the persecuted witches and sorcerers. The occult philosophers shared many things in common with these rural oral folks, in particular a non-dualist hylozoism, and could perhaps be thought of as literate versions of oral vernacular peasant popular practices.38 The occult philosophers’ use of what was labeled “magic” opened them to the allegation that they were practicing “black magic,” that they were dangerous persons, for they did not restrict themselves to those places and objects authorized by the church as being efficacious. From the point of view of the church, they were thus engaged in superstitious and potentially satanic practices, namely in magic. This associated them with the witches who had become heretics by the end of the fifteenth century. Like popular magic, occult philosophy and magic did not restrict the efficacy of signs to those authorized by the church, but rather saw the whole of nature as alive, infused with the divine and its delegates such as spirits, angels, and demons. The category of hylozoism gathers together this motley group of Renaissance movements, occult philosophies, and peasant practices. What they all have in common is a non-dualist view that matter could move itself, that humans were part of nature and part of the cosmos, and that God pervaded the material world as well as the souls of humans. Some hylozoists were animist, viewing all matter as alive; others may not have thought of matter as alive but as able to move itself, that is, as having agency.39 Hylozoism is characterized by a non-dualist metaphysics in which humans, the non-human, and other-than-humans such as angels, spirits, devils, and even the divinity itself were not ontologically separate. Hylozoism does not partake in the metaphysics of substance as discussed above, nor does it involve the binary of nature as not culture. The binary of nature as not culture was given a particularly forceful expression in the works of certain reformers, such as that of Huldricht Zwingli. Zwingli postulated two radically separate aspects of reality, namely what is intrinsically so or the literal, and what is symbolically true, which referred to the invisible deity. In this Protestant worldview, God and humans could only be united in the human mind through belief and faith, whereas God and the external world became radically estranged.40

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For both Protestants and Catholics—and along with them all forms of institutionalized power, and in particular the state—the witches and many occult philosophers, namely the hylozoists, became heretics. Both Protestants and Catholics unleashed their respective inquisitions against those two groups.41 For Protestants, the Catholics were lumped with practitioners of magic and the hylozoists. The Protestants not only attacked the cult of relics and other sacred objects with magical properties, and the buying of indulgences, but also labeled the core sacrament of the Eucharist as superstitious and pure magic. Protestants insisted on the metaphorical nature of transubstantiation, where the wafer and the wine recalled or metaphorically represented Christ’s sacrifice. The Protestants rejected the Catholic doctrine of an actual transformation into the body and blood of Christ. And of course for the Catholics, the Protestants were heretics who dared question the authority and divine link of the Pope, his bishops, and thus implicitly of the king in France. Along with the hylozoists, they were to be exterminated and purified through burning if they could not be converted.

5. THE DEFEAT OF NON-DUALIST HYLOZOISM AND THE MARGINALIZATION OF WOMEN

In the seventeenth century, many hylozoists became the abject other for the natural philosophers as well through the work of Marin Mersenne. The natural philosophers were those that, following the work of Aristotle, studied the natural working of the world.42 The Catholic priest Mersenne, a close associate of René Descartes and cofounder of the French Académie, paved the way for Descartes’ dualist and mechanical philosophy by publishing in Paris his Quaestiones in Genesim in 1623. In this work, he devoted particular attention to an attack on Giorgi’s occult philosophy as well as on that of the English occult philosopher Fludd and his Rosicrucian movement, both profoundly influenced by Christian Cabala.43 As Frances Yates articulates it: By eliminating Giorgi and all that he stood for in Renaissance tradition, Mersenne banished the astral linkings of universal harmony, cutting off at the roots the connections of the psyche with the cosmos. This appeased the witch-hunters and made the world safe for Descartes, which was what Mersenne was nervously trying to do.44

By the end of the seventeenth century, hylozoism and the view of matter as having agency on par with human agency had been successfully defeated.45 This left its rival paradigm, what Robert Boyle—the father of

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the experimental method in science—called “the Mechanical or Corpuscular Philosophy,” firmly established and fully legitimized. This philosophy deliberately excluded women. Women could not be Boyle’s “modest witness” in the laboratory, their modesty being of the body and not of the mind.46 The politics of women’s modesty lay not only in that they were of the body, of nature, but also in their prominence in the subversive and radical “enthusiast” religio-political movements of interregnum England. The epithet of “enthusiast” referred to women active in the more radical religiopolitical movements such as the levelers and had at the time a rather pejorative meaning akin to today’s term “hysterical.” The prominence of women in peasant rebellions has been well documented.47 The prominence of women among the “sectaries” in interregnum England was not a new phenomenon in Europe. These movements were mostly inspired and legitimized by varieties of hylozoist philosophies.48 The canonical view holds that the victory of the mechanical dualist paradigm was simply due to its epistemological superiority. It produced better, “truer” science, and accounted better for the available evidence. In her work on Boyle’s law of gases, Elizabeth Potter details the experiments of a hylozoist, Franciscus Linus, and the debate between Linus and Boyle. She asks the question: “Was mechanism obviously superior to hylozoism at the time Boyle took it up?”49 She finds that in addition to empirical adequacy, Boyle has recourse to a criterion of intelligibility, or lack thereof. By lack of intelligibility, Boyle means that Linus’s explanation rejects the mechanical philosophy: In [Boyle’s] Excellency and Grounds of the Corpuscular or Mechanical Philosophy, he identifies intelligible causes with physical causes and gives both a mechanical gloss . . . “if the proposed agent be not intelligible and physical, it can never physically explain the phaenomena; so, it be intelligible and physical, it will be reducible to matter . . .”50

As Potter points out, Boyle’s assertion that intelligibility means mechanism begs the question against hylozoic hypotheses and simply rules out Linus’s explanatory framework. For Linus, Nature abhors a vacuum; she has consciousness and agency. Boyle, along with many of his contemporary natural philosophers, held that “God could both create and annihilate, yet Nature can do neither. . . .”51 Boyle’s preference for a clockwork view of the universe, in which God plays the role of builder and winder of the clock, has everything to do with his politics. Potter amasses overwhelming evidence for Boyle’s political preferences and his landholding interests motivating his rejection of the levelers and the enthusiasts and what they represented. The next chapter will focus on the politics of landholding and should clarify the link between Boyle’s landholdings and his epistemological choices.

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Boyle’s preference for mechanism cannot be based on logic or evidence alone, as Potter makes clear in the following passage: A World Spirit or Nature having consciousness and feelings is no less intelligible than God’s having them. Both were supposed analogous to human consciousness and feelings. And explanations in terms of a World Spirit or Nature as God’s subordinate viceregent directing the activities of, for example, mercury are certainly no less intelligible than God’s directing at creation that the universe follow certain regularities—a claim Boyle never found “unintelligible.”52

Potter shows that Boyle’s and Linus’s explanations were both credible and accounted for the experimental evidence equally well. What were the forces that made the hylozoist worldview seem unintelligible to someone like Robert Boyle, who nevertheless had earlier in his career serious interests in alchemy, a hylozoist movement? And as Allen Debus has argued, the scientific revolution was not the result of decades of new discoveries but was in the making for centuries.53 Natural philosophy as well a natural magic were crucial antecedents, and many of their ideas and practices were preserved in the post-scientific revolution decades, even centuries. Boyle’s alchemical past was not lost but rather recast in a profoundly new framework. What was rejected were the non-dualist hylozoist assumptions and worldview.

CONCLUSION

The hylozoists and their view of nature as animate and part of the human community became the abject other during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. During the course of the seventeenth century, the view of a substantivized nature, agency-less, mechanical, made up of separate entities that could not move themselves, and totally estranged from the world of humans, successfully displaced the hylozoist view. By the end of the seventeenth century, hylozoist movements had disappeared or gone underground, which is not the same as saying that many of their ideas and practices disappeared. Rather, these were recast in a dualist mechanicist framework. A hylozoist explanation of experimental phenomena such as that of Franciscus Linus “had the advantage of belonging to the broader Aristotelian world-view which in the 1650s and 1660s had more explanatory power than the nascent mechanical philosophy.”54 In view of the novelty of the mechanical view of nature and the Aristotelian authority for hylozoist views, there must have existed something of a very powerful nature that made Boyle see Linus’s hylozoist framework as unintelligible.

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It is true that mechanism predates Boyle’s experiments in midseventeenth century, and of course the great philosopher of mechanism was Descartes, writing in the first half of that century. The canonical view that sees mechanistic nature as unproblematically a universal given, and hence inherently truer and thus superior to hylozoism, is an anachronism. Mechanism embodied a new political and economic system emerging at the time. The recent critiques of the mechanistic paradigm and of universal nature, critiques emerging from varied fields such as anthropology, science studies, and feminist studies among others, are facilitating a critical rethinking. This chapter has tried to make evident the politics of both the nature/ culture dualism and its attendant politics of substantivizing that produces an abject other. It placed the emergence of the modern understanding of “nature” and of “wilderness” in the context of the dominant paradigm at the time, namely the hylozoism of the occult philosophers. It briefly reviewed how many of those occult philosophers became persecuted abject others in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In spite of the fact that several of the heroes of the scientific revolution such as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton had participated in this movement, the non-dualist framework of hylozoism was defeated and discarded. The next chapter addresses the question posed at the end of this one, namely what were the forces that made the new fledgling mechanistic corpuscular paradigm seem intelligible to someone like Boyle and the more ancient and established hylozoist paradigm unintelligible for him, even though he himself began as an alchemist, one of the occult philosophy movement. Those forces were those that emerged out of the collapse of the manorial system that eventually created a wholly new economic, epistemological, and sociocultural reality.



CHAPTER 3

Economics and the Making of “Natural Resources” Surely nature, like a found dramatic script, deserves to be read for meaning and not merely acted out for profit. —Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind1

T

his chapter argues that the political forces that rendered hylozoism the abject other were in part the ones unleashed by the enclosure of common lands, the privatization of agricultural lands, and the enclosure of bodies with the creation of labor as a commodity.2 These are the main forces that created the Great Transformation with the emergence of the market economy and along with it a new manner of representing it, namely economics. These enclosures entailed the creation and commoditization of grain, the staff of life, and of money in the form of converting usury from a sin to a virtue, spelling the emergence of the market economy and with it a new manner of representing it. The tacit knowledge implied in this new manner of representing the market economy assumed a given separation between representor and the things and processes represented.

1. ENCLOSURES AND THE CREATION OF AGENCY-LESS AND DE-SPIRITED NATURE

I will begin with the enclosure of common lands and the privatization of agricultural lands to highlight the emergence of a new relationship to the non-human world, to the lower classes, and to God.

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The late fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries saw the enclosure movement in England particularly, but in other European countries as well, in which lands previously held in common were forcibly enclosed and “improved” by a wealthy class that asserted exclusive rights over it. Common land was transformed into a private property, into an economic investment, in other words into a resource.3 The new exclusive owners carried out a series of “improvements” on the newly fenced commons. Decisions to “improve” the land through ditching, drainage, fencing, irrigating, and the like were made exclusively by the new owners. The people who had formerly lived off these commons were removed.4 In doing so, the owners—who in the process rendered themselves exclusive owners—were forging new links between market incentives and the use of the formerly common lands. By doing this, the coherence between livelihoods, social life, sacrality, and the visibility of the cycles of gifts from heaven to the community and back were seriously eroded. The fifteenth and sixteenth century expansion of European cloth industry encouraged landlords to convert land to pasturage. They were accused of robbing the poor of their rights in the village commons. Enclosure extinguished common rights to a particular piece of land. It dissolved what economic historian Joyce Appleby calls the “moral economy” in which “[t]he weak, the irresponsible, and the unlucky were knit into the same village responsibilities with the able.”5 It created a new space in which the individual landlord pursued his own activities according to his own “advantage,” independent of the others in the community along with the non-human world and the other-than-human beings that included the spirit realm from where God’s gifts to humankind originated. As Appleby phrases it: “Enclosure disentangled each person from this web of community obligations.”6 Here the word “community” is taken in an anthropocentric (or humanist) manner. But the commons may be seen as the privileged locus where the human community acknowledged the gifts of the non-human world via the spiritual realm of the other-than-human beings. In the words of John Moore, a minister in seventeenth-century England, addressed to the new encloser and improver: “although thou are a civill Owner, yet thou are a spirituall Usurper.”7 The spiritual usurpation consisted in various things, but principally in not depending upon God’s providence and not circulating one’s wealth for the benefit of the poor, but rather hoarding it for reinvestment in profitable activity. In other words, God’s providence can be seen as the origin of the gifts from heaven that humans have the obligation not to hoard, but rather to circulate and pass along eventually back to God through charity. This latter movement was understood as “Christ’s injunctions to lay up their treasures in heaven.”8 The commonality of the land can be seen as a material embodiment of this circulation of the gift, which entangles the

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human community with the non-human world by way of the mediation of the other-than-human being(s), the source of the shared gifts of God from the land. Such circulation of gifts, and exchanges between humans and other-than-humans were enacted in a ritual medium.

2. FIRST CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF THE MARKET ECONOMY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: THE BEGINNINGS OF ECONOMICS

Before turning to the topic of gift exchanges carried out ritually in the commons, let us start by discussing the first conceptualization of the market economy in the seventeenth century. This seems necessary in order to better understand how the disentanglement between the humans, the nonhumans and the other-than-humans occurred, giving rise to the disembedded individual and also to a de-spirited land. The disentanglement of the individual from a web of community and spiritual obligations gave rise to the individual subject acting on the basis of his perceived self-interest. The lower class individual emerges when the body becomes an object that is privately owned. The ownership of one’s body, the source of labor power, was a prerequisite for the emergence of labor-power as a commodity.9 Joyce Appleby’s history of the period gives us rich documentation on the debates occasioned by such unprecedented behavior. The 1620s saw the publication of the first works that began to create a conceptual model of this brand-new phenomenon, the market economy. The new economic forces “presented themselves as artificial and manipulable, a quality clearly lacking in the economic disaster of a crop failure.”10 Declining cloth purchases, coin shortages, erratic exchange rates and widespread unemployment created a crisis in the early 1620s. The first person to treat these phenomena as more than a list of items was Thomas Mun. Mun offered a conceptual model of this new phenomenon, the market economy, in a series of works from 1621 to 1628. He was a magnate of the East India Company and also served on the Privy’s Council’s subcommittee to gather evidence on the crisis.11 In Mun’s model, “the shipment of goods, the exchange of bills, the trading of commodities became parts of an overall, unseen, commercial flow,” independent of the concrete and the personal.12 Not only were individuals disentangled from specific ties to place and community, but the pursuit of their self-interest eliminated the spiritual link, resulting in a general disregard for the effects their practices might have on members of both the community and the spiritual realm. The community here is understood to include the place where the humans lived and from which they drew their sustenance.

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A minister, Joseph Lee, justified his decision to enclose lands in a series of pamphlets between 1653 and 1656. He disavows the landlord’s social responsibility: Let it be granted that our land and businesse lying nearer together fewer servants will be kept; are any bound to keep more servants then are needful for their businesse; or may they not cast how to do the same businesse with least labour.13

Here, Lee justifies a man’s right to take stock of his own advantage. The ties of community to place and people, and the spiritual responsibility toward the poor and the weak, cease to become constraining considerations. Material advantage is separated out from the spiritual-material abundance of God’s providence and people’s giving to the poor. People become labor and its cost is calculated, and so land also becomes an ingredient in the calculations of the landlord’s advantage. The landlord has become the exclusive owner of the land. He calculates the uses he will make of labor and of the land in terms of responses to an impersonal, invisible market so as to maximize his advantage. In other words, the land and the people on it have been transformed from members of a social and spiritual community into resources, both human and non-human. John Moore debated Lee, defending the old moral order. In replying to Lee, Moore scorned the justification for enclosing and improving one’s lands. And in a prescient characterization of the market’s treatment of labor, Moore has this to say about the enclosers of Leicestershire who buy “[t]he poore for silver . . . make chaffer and merchandize of them for gain and profit: they use them as they doe their beasts, keep them, as may best serve their turns to get by them . . .” [Moore also recognized] the wedge that Lee’s concepts of private property had driven between society and the land upon which it depended for survival.14

By 1656—the time when Robert Boyle was doing his experiments with the air pump—Lee’s writing extolled the control of natural forces and the motive of self-interest shown by the improving landlord. But as Appleby writes, Lee’s justification for a man’s pursuit of his own self-interest carried the day since the merchants and landlords realized that this was the effective way by which to grow wealthy. The argument was made that the increase of an individual’s wealth repeated throughout the society would benefit the society at large. Conveniently forgotten was that the exploitation of the laboring poor was necessary to generate this wealth.15 Forgotten as well was the exploitation of nature and the violation of the duty to follow Christ’s injunction of not hoarding one’s wealth, but rather of “laying up one’s treasures in heaven,” or giving to the poor. Lee’s views,

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and with him those of the enclosers, may be the earliest version of the “trickle down” theory. The bond between the land, the people, and the divine had been broken and replaced by the emergence of land as an economic resource, what much later became known as “natural resource,” and of the people on the land as only “labor” or what, also much later, became known as “human resources.” The wedge that Moore sees as having separated society from the land entails that people no longer feel responsibility toward each other or toward the land itself through “the spirit of the gift.” We will examine more closely this spirit of the gift below. The “web of community obligations” is not restricted to the human community, but rather encompasses the land and in general the non-human local collectivity belonging to and living on that land, such as animals, plants, waters, and other features of the landscape. The spiritual dimension—that of the other-than-human beings—ensured that the gifts were not hoarded but rather were circulated and thus “laid up in heaven.” Historians have generally considered the “community” in anthropocentric terms, excluding from it the non-human and other-than-human community with its material-cum-spiritual implications. However, if one looks at the information on popular practices, and particularly on the practices of the rural wise women, the picture that emerges is one very reminiscent of contemporary indigenous and traditional collectivities.16 The similarity resides precisely in the lack of a separation between the human and the non-human members of the local community, entangled through the spiritual dimension embodied in the other-than-human collectivity.

3. ENCLOSURES AND THE ERADICATION OF PEASANT RITUALS IN THE WITCH HUNTS

Before the transformations initiated by the enclosure movement became widespread, the local communities practiced a kind of subsistence agriculture and production for localized markets. They were bound to the manor through the corvée (obligatory work), but in many cases were also able to cultivate their own plots for subsistence.17 Economic historians characterize this type of economy as the “moral economy.”18 However, by this term, such historians generally restrict the scope of the term “moral” to the human community. As the ethnographic record for indigenous and traditional societies abundantly attests—and as evidenced in many of the chapters in this book—sentiments of gratitude, reciprocity, responsibility, and the like are addressed to the non-human world via the spirits: the earth, the animals, the seeds, the mountains, the rains, the waters, and so on.19

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One way of understanding the language of the spirits (or deities) of the forest, the mountain, or the sea, for example, is that it articulates the agency and discursivity of the non-human world as well as our responsibility to it. Rather than apprehending the spiritual realm in terms of a metaphysics of substance in which the spirits or God are separate entities, I find it more fruitful to apprehend the spiritual realm as embodying or concretizing the fact that we humans have our being by virtue of a “constitutive outside,” which not only sustains us, but makes us possible at all. Such a constitutive outside has agency and furthermore is not an absolute outside in that we share matter, mind, soul, and spirit with it. In the next chapter, we will make this argument having recourse to the work of certain quantum physicists. The language of spirits, devils, deity or deities—what I call the otherthan-human beings—enables communication and gift exchange between humans and the non-human world. It embodies the fact that the non-human world speaks through the other-than-human beings and that humans do not monopolize meaningful speech (and mind).20 The commons was the privileged locus where rituals of gift exchange with the other-than-humans took place. This is what historian Silvia Federici says about the European commons: Beside encouraging collective decision-making and work cooperation, the commons were the material foundation upon which peasant solidarity and sociality could thrive. All the festivals, games, and gatherings of the peasant community were held on the commons. The social function of the commons was especially important for women, who, having less title to land and less social power, were more dependent on them for their subsistence, autonomy, and sociality.21

It is not always easy to perceive gift exchange with the other-than-human collectivity in the historical record. However, it is possible to sometimes barely glimpse it, especially when one has in mind contemporary rituals in non-Western societies studied by anthropologists. Federici quotes a sixteenth-century eyewitness to such festivals on the commons. This is what P. Stubbes in Anatomy of Abuse (1583) writes: Towards May . . . every parish, town, and village gets together, both men women and children, old and young . . . they run to the bushes and woods, hills and mountains, where they spend all the night in pleasant pastimes, and in the morning they return bringing home birch bows and branches of trees . . . (T)he chiefest jewel they bring home is their maypole, which they bring home with great veneration . . . then they fall to banquet and feast, to leap and dance about it, as heathen people did at the dedication of their idols . . .22

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It seems clear from this quotation that Stubbes did not accompany the peasants at night in “the bushes and woods.” Stubbes was highly critical of such practices, and we need to rely on anthropologists’ accounts of contemporary practices to retrieve the gift-exchange aspect of such festivals, as well as the bond between the peasants and their “bushes, woods, hills and mountains.” In order to hear more clearly the nature of these relationships, we need to turn to contemporary testimonies. One such contemporary practice is that of the Lakota of North America of ending their prayers with the phrase “all my relations.” This is how Chief Oren Lyons of the Haudenossaunee people of the Northeast part of the United States and Canada expresses the moral community as including human, non-human, and other-than-human beings: The Lakota end all of their prayers with, “all my relations.” This means more than their families or extended families. It includes all life upon this earth. It is the recognition, respect, and love for the interconnected “web of life” that Chief Seattle spoke of . . . We have intimate contact with the life that surrounds us because we are dependent on that life. We personify the natural forces of nature to remind us how we relate and to teach our children respect for these forces. This underscores our connection and our responsibilities as part of these forces to maintain balance and harmony. With indigenous peoples respect is a law: without it there is little chance for harmony or community. With respect comes harmony, justice, law and community: hence “all our relations.” Respect for the laws of regeneration ensures endless cycles of life.23

In the late 1990s, the United Nations Environment Program(UNEP) requested information on how representatives from indigenous and traditional communities from America, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Pacific value biodiversity.24 Almost all the people surveyed articulated views similar to those expressed by Chief Lyons. A few representative statements are collected in an appendix. Nature as an agency-less, amoral entity could only emerge once people bypassed the spiritual dimension and treated the land and the rest of the landscape not as the source of gifts from God and/or the spirits, but as purely material entities to be used for one’s own material advantage. The material and the spiritual were cut asunder. Before this separation became taken for granted, life depended on God’s providence, the generosity of the spirits of the land or sea, which in turn were seen as dependent upon the proper gift exchanges. Regeneration is a term that captures perhaps better than any other the entangled participation of members of human, non-human, and other-than-human communities in the iterations of the cycles of life.25 For premodern and Renaissance hylozoists, nature’s powers of regeneration were not seen as purely material and automatic, separate from human regeneration and from the spiritual. In their studies of the witches’ rituals

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in premodern and Renaissance Europe, Carlo Ginzburg and Peter Duerr establish the shamanic character of these rituals.26 Witches, through the use of psychotropic plants and other rituals, could communicate and become entangled with certain animals, plants, parts of landscapes, and the dead. These are all well-established shamanic traits, widely distributed worldwide.27 Contact with the world of the dead was the prerequisite for the regeneration of the extended community that is the human with its spiritual other-than-human relatives.28 The mystery of regeneration through travel to the underworld had been enacted during some two millennia at the Eleusinian mysteries.29 They lingered in Europe’s forests for a long time, admixed with Christian elements.30 The world axis-tree of the Norse, Yggdrasil—like all world axis-tree— connected the heavens, the earth, and the underworld.31 The maypole mentioned by Stubbes is the most widespread form of this axis mundi in Europe. Midwives in many parts of Europe used to fetch the souls of unborn children at such trees. Some were called “tree mother,” in the region of Osnabrück, or wild wei(b), “wilderness woman,” and waldweib, “forest woman,” in the Bavarian Forest and upper Austria.”32 During the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), precisely the period when Mersenne and Descartes were writing, “nearly all the midwives of the city of Cologne were executed as witches.”33 Women were not the only ones to use the forest; men did also. In 1566, John Walsh of Dorset confessed that he used to meet the fairies around noon or midnight. And in 1668, J. Praetorius published a work on the demonology of Rübezahl, an elf or fairy who was considered to be a master herbalist. He states, “[T]he forestman, or the one who digs for roots and herbs, is said to talk or converse often with Rübezahl.”34 Shamanesses, witches, and shamans in Europe climbed the world tree through the use of psychotropic plants to heal people and keep the human community in balance with the non-human and other-than-human communities. With the enclosure of the commons where the midwives and the herbalists collected their plants and performed their rituals, these practices disappeared. Increasingly, the forests were enclosed and “simplified” for the production of timber, and along with them the forest women, men, and spirits were eradicated.35 The same is happening today worldwide, particularly in the Amazonian forests.36 Silvia Federici argues that the great witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a corollary to the enclosure of the commons and land privatizations that brought about “the annihilation of the world of the witches and the imposition of the social discipline that the victorious capitalist system required.”37 The peasant wise women, along with many of the occult philosophers, became the emblem of the abject others in fifteenth-, sixteenth-,

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and seventeenth-century Europe, as did the “Indian” in New England (see below). They embodied the hylozoic vision of a moral and spiritual community that included the other-than-humans.38 The emergence of the individual who calculated his advantage while responding to impersonal invisible market forces, and who unilaterally acted upon both the land and the people for his own advantage required the disenchantment of nature.39 It required the eradication of these abject others—in often violent ways— during the “Burning Times,” which were the same times as what is canonically referred to as the “Age of Reason,” which in turn was the same era when the new phenomenon of the market economy began to be theorized.

4. REPRESENTING THE ENCLOSER’S ADVANTAGE: THE EMERGENCE OF ECONOMICS

Let us try and capture as clearly as possible the ramifications of the enclosers’ unprecedented behavior for the new ontology in which nature and humans became a calculable homogenous thing disentangled from sociality and spirituality. For the people or the land to become a resource means that the landlord or entrepreneur engages in a certain type of calculation. The land or the people become relevant only in terms of their value in a calculus to determine the most advantageous manner of using them that is only in terms of returns for the landlord or entrepreneur. The crucial act here is not the act of using but the act of calculating the encloser’s advantage. The commons and other lands were used by the people who lived in them for their collective survival, as is the case today with many indigenous and traditional collectivities. The evidence is overwhelming that the sacredness of the other-than-humans did not mean their exclusion from utilitarian activities. This is not to say that premodern or non-modern contemporary folks do not calculate, but rather they do so in a radically different manner than the European enclosers. Arjun Appadurai’s work on measurement among traditional farmers in Maharashtra shows the deliberate vagueness and lack of accuracy in acts of calculation—whether of amounts of land or of its products, or even of the number of one’s children—to be a function of economic activities being embedded in, as well as subservient to, the sociocultural matrix.40 What is rejected in this case is precisely a calculation of the advantage of only one person. Similarly, in a study of the work-sharing practices of Maharashtrian farmers, Lee Schlesinger reports that in pooling bullocks and plows and forming work parties to plow every member of the work party’s land, the participants explicitly refuse to calculate the time spent on each plot or the size of each member’s plot.41 Doing so would show who gains more and who

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gains less in such an arrangement. Such calculations undermine the spirit of cooperation and the cohesiveness of the group. In those two South Asian examples, there is a clear refusal to calculate or measure with exactness. However, we must contrast such behavior with the well-documented practices of very carefully measuring or calculating in other contexts. For example, in South Asian rural weddings, a person is specifically appointed to record the exact nature and/or value of the gift given, who has given it, and the relationship of the giver to the bride or groom. Another wellknown example is that of the Northwestern American potlatch, in which the number and value of the gifts are carefully measured or calculated so as to reciprocate with the appropriate increase, such increase expressing various social relations and statuses.42 The apparent paradox in these two opposite forms of action—one in which there is a refusal to calculate, and the other in which there is very careful and deliberate calculation—disappears under closer scrutiny. In the two Maharashtrian peasant examples, what is achieved by the refusal to calculate is the strengthening of social bonds and cooperation. In the South Asian rural wedding and potlatch examples, the careful calculations function to feed the flow of gifts. The feeding of this flow of gifts is precisely calibrated so as to create or alter certain types of social bonds and statuses. The calculations engaged in by the encloser depart from calculations within a gift economy by having as their sole aim the financial or material advantage of a single individual, the encloser. His calculations and his transactions are separated out from social bonds and from bonds with the otherthan-human collectivity. The encloser’s calculations have their rationale in the manner in which they connect his economic assets—land, labor, and sheep for example—with prices generated in an impersonal, supra-local world market. As Polanyi first expressed it, this new phenomenon, the market economy, disembeds the economy from society and, I would add, from the non-human world and the other-than-human community. Humans, the non-human world, and God and/or the spirits have become disentangled, separated out. Exchanges are no longer carried out as aspects of social and spiritual transactions. In other words, the economy has become purely material and amoral. Such new acts of calculation acquire meaning and their raison d’être in relation to the manner in which the world market has itself been represented mathematically. Such mathematical representation makes it into something impersonal and abstract. In other words, these mathematical representations obscure the social and other-than-human dimensions of commodities. This supra-local, far-flung market becomes abstract and impersonal through the type of mathematics used to represent it. What is relevant here is not that this market is far-flung—as we will see below—but

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that it is abstracted through certain mathematical representations that exclude sociality and spirituality. Furthermore, those representations are allowed to penetrate the local community and place rather than used solely for trade with outsiders. The act of calculating the economic worth of a resource itself responds to market prices. For example, in the case of cloth and the decision to convert common lands into pasturage for sheep to produce wool for the cloth industry, the decision to enclose the commons responded to the price of cloth in the market. By the seventeenth century, this market was a world market. The early theorizers of this new phenomenon abstracted from specific and concrete transactions. The specifics of how commodities are fashioned, who the people making them are, and what the relationships between the people making them and selling them are, and much more besides, become invisible and irrelevant. Innumerable anonymous and invisible commercial transactions were aggregated into market prices, which “reflected transactions over a vast economic empire that knit kingdoms, principalities, republics, and colonies together in the seventeenth century.”43 People perceived and understood the flow of goods and money—commerce—as an impersonal force that followed its own laws. Thomas Mun and Edward Misselden in the 1620s were the first to conceptualize the economy as an independent domain.44 To understand what caused the exchange fluctuations between different currencies, they resorted to the mathematical calculation and aggregation of discrete transactions, such as “if x number of merchants vent y number of cloths in Hamburg.” In such mathematical calculations, the social bonds between persons, the place from which the material was taken or extracted with its spiritual dimensions, and a myriad other specific considerations, are totally lost in an abstracted and generalized aggregate. “The moral quality of his [the encloser’s] decisions was not only hidden from the examiner, but more important, the decisions were divorced from their consequences. The critical link between action and responsibility had been cut.”45

5. THE SPIRIT OF THE GIFT

What Mun and Misselden called “the market” was allowed to penetrate everywhere, including the commons, with its practices of ritualized gift exchanges with the other-than-humans. It abstracted from the concreteness of local markets the dynamics of a generalized, far-flung flow by representing and translating this dynamism into mathematical representations. The mathematical algebra captured the value of commodities on a world market. This clearly proved to be an immensely useful tool for a

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certain class—so useful and so powerful that what it made invisible, or tacit, was eventually forgotten. A “resource” came about through entry into the dynamism of the world market, which was itself mathematically represented. The “resource” is thereby abstracted from the ritualized practices of gift exchange between person and person and the other-than-humans. It also enters into the abstracted calculations of an invisible “market,” escaping the moral responsibility that comes with pertaining to a local community of humans and other-than-humans, as well as to personalized networks of exchange. Far-flung networks of exchange have always existed. For anthropologists, the most well-known one is perhaps the Kula ring in the Trobriand and neighboring islands, unforgettably represented by Bronislaw Malinowski in the early part of the twentieth century.46 There x number of sea-faring Trobrianders do not vent y number of shell necklaces on such and such an island. Rather, there are elaborate rituals of exchange that Marcel Mauss captured with the words “the spirit of the gift.”47 The spirit (of the gift) translates a Maori term, hau, which means both the spirit of the gift and the spirit of the forest that gives the original gift of food. Lewis Hyde explains: In these tribes, when hunters return from the forest with birds they have killed, they give a portion of the kill to the priests, who, in turn cook the birds at a sacred fire. The priests eat a few of them and then prepare a sort of talisman, the mauri, which is the physical embodiment of the forest hau. This mauri is a gift the priests give back to the forest, where, as a Maori sage once explained to an Englishman, it “causes the birds to be abundant . . . that they may be slain and taken by man.”48

In this exchange between hunters, priests, and the spirit of the forest, there are at least three gifts: the gift the forest spirit gives the hunters, namely the birds; the gift the hunters give to the priests; and lastly the gift the priests give to the forest. It is a cycle in which the forest feeds the people who then give to the priests, who in turn feed the spirit of the forest, with the last feeding enabling the cycle to regenerate. As Marshall Sahlins has shown, a direct exchange system in which A gives to B, who then returns to A, shows no increase.49 The increase, the “spirit of the gift,” occurs when there are at least three exchanges. He points out that the term hau enters after the initial transfer when the exchange takes place between the second and third parties. The Maori sage distinguishes between the gift object placed in the forest, the mauri, and the hau of the forest who causes the game to be plentiful. The gift circulates and the forest spirit is nourished. When the birds and the mauri are consumed or disappear, the abundance or the increase of the birds of the forest is secured by the hau of the gift. This circulation of the gift, the hau, generates an increase in sociality in its wider sense of

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cohesiveness between humans, the non-human world, and the spirit realm. In his essay on the gift, Marcel Mauss writes: The hau wants to return to the place of its birth, to its sanctuary of forest and clan and to its owner . . . The thing given is not inert. It is alive and often personified and strives to bring to its original clan and homeland some equivalent to take its place.50

Even though Mauss states that in Maori custom “this bond created by things is in fact a bond between persons,” the above quotation suggests something else.51 The hau of the gift that constrains a recipient to reciprocate (directly or indirectly) is the hau of the forest, the origin of gifts. The hunters give a portion of the birds they have hunted in the forest to the priests who then prepare the mauri offering with those birds. The birds in the offering embody the spirit of the forest since they are part of the forest and thus of its hau. The gift to the priest and then to the forest creates a bond among persons but also among persons and the forest. The forest, the sea, the rivers, and the land are generous and bountiful. The language of spirits and the ritual actions embody this reality, creating the possibility of interactions between humans and non-humans. The bounties of the non-human world are regenerated by constant ritualized gift exchanges between people and the other-than-human beings, such as the hau, the spirit of the forest. The gift increases sociality and “spirituality” if we understand by this term a continuous flow beyond oneself and beyond one’s human community toward the non-human world as well as toward the spirit world that is the world of the other-than-human beings. The ceremony that the priests perform is called “nourishing the hau.” Without the priests, there is a danger that the movement of the gift beyond the giver will be lost. What will be lost is the bond between persons that is between the hunters and the priest, and beyond them, between humans and the non-human world via the otherthan-human beings. When the gift exchange is between only two, a simple give-and-take, the hunters may begin to think of the forest as a place to seek one’s advantage. The spirit of the forest is the whole from which humans receive sustenance through gift-giving to the priests. In giving to the priests, the hunters do not calculate a precise return, nor do the priests calculate a precise return when they give the mauri to the spirit of the forest. “If this were not so, if the donor calculated his return, the gift would be pulled out of the whole into the personal ego, where it loses its power.”52 The European commons were the locus where the human community exchanged with the other-than-human community through ritual enactments. The gifts of the forest—as exemplified in the rituals around the world axis-tree—were, among other things, souls of children, healing herbs, game, mushrooms, and other “plants of the gods.”53 These gifts were consumed, and

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an offering was given to Yggdrasil or its equivalent by the wise women, sorcerers, or magi, ensuring continued generosity. Carolyn Merchant writes that in early modern New England, the land was a living entity for many English colonial farmers. These farmers continued the practices existing in England which included, among many other lively rituals around the maypole, the offering of cakes with cider poured over them that were buried in the fields.54 They would celebrate the regeneration of humans, the non-human world, and the other-than-humans around the tree of life at the center of the village with maypole rites. In these celebrations, native peoples often joined the English farmers. Such rituals were anathema to the Puritans. John Winthrop argued that the settlers could legitimately expel the Indians because they “enclosed no land, neither have they any settled habitation nor any tame cattle to improve the land by.”55 The commons exemplified a ritual enactment of gift exchange among humans and between humans and the non-human world via the spirit realm embodied in the other-than-human beings. Simple barter, as the Trobrianders’ gimwali exemplifies, is devalued. The enclosure of the commons served to treat the community—human, nonhuman, and other-than-human—as strangers with whom one calculates one’s advantage with no thought for the creation of social and spiritual bonds. Pure material utilitarianism is not foreign to non-modern or premodern peoples; rather, it is deliberately kept out of, or at the margins of, the community in its non-anthropocentric sense. It seems to me that such collectivities experience the sustenance they receive from the non-human world—in collaboration with the other-than-human world, as in agriculture—as a gift.56 Such a gift emanates from a boundless generosity. To act toward humans or other-than-humans in a non-generous manner is to invite reprisal. It endangers material well-being, sociality, and spirituality all at once.57 The Trobriand Kula exchange or the Maori hau belong to small-scale societies. However, we have examples of large far-flung trade networks that have not had the consequences they have had in Europe. India participated in such trade for several centuries before the Portuguese arrived on its west coast at the end of the fifteenth century. The Arabs and Indians had hegemony over the Western Indian Ocean trade networks. India’s west coast traders—Bohras, Ismailis, Jains, Parsis, Armenians, various Hindu castes, Moplahs, Arabs, and Jews among others—were engaged in far-flung trade networks. India was also engaged in extensive land exchange networks with China, Central Asia, and West Asia.58 On its eastern seaboard, particularly in what is today the state of Orissa (ancient Kalinga), India had since ancient times also been engaged in long-distance maritime trade with South East Asia, including Cambodia, Java, Bali, and Thailand among others.59 The traders did not import their trading practices into their own world of the local kingdom. In the case of Orissa, villages retained their commons as

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did regional groups of villages and the kingdom as a whole in the form of temple lands and temples themselves. There, the gifts from the land to the priests who offered food to the deities, who in return gave abundance and blessings to humans, followed the pattern of gift exchange discussed above.60 Calculations of one’s purely material advantage were reserved for trade with strangers. By its nature, calculation of one’s purely material advantage draws boundaries between them and us. In contrast, gift exchange connects one to the whole. It connects all those among whom the gift circulates, and beyond those it connects them to the spirit world where the true source of increase and abundance resides. In such a reality, the increase and abundance are materialspiritual; the two have not been pried asunder by enclosers and Reformers. The French sociologist-anthropologist Alain Caillé relates for us a remarkable piece of information. Apparently, the system of supply and demand generating prices on the market had been precisely described in seventhcentury China by Kuan Chong (730–645 BCE), prime minister of the state of Chi. In an exchange with a grandee of the court named Hung who asks him about the possibility of having fixed prices, Kuan Chong answers that it would be useless since the prices need to move with the movement of offers and demands. He further avers that such a measure “would make the movement of prices less fluid, would freeze production and would create obstacles for economic activity.”61 Caillé concludes from this and other examples that the purely material calculating spirit was known in premodern times, but was deliberately refused or severely constrained. According to Caillé, it was refused in order to avoid the poisoning of the social body. I would add that it was also refused to avoid the poisoning of the non-human body and the bonds with the spirits. It is interesting to juxtapose this information with the argument made by Jatinder Bajaj that the reason China did not have a scientific revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries even though it was technologically superior to Europe at that time was primarily due to the fact that there was no ontological separation between the non-human and the human world. Invoking Joseph Needham’s enormous work on Chinese science and technology, Bajaj contrasts the Cartesian mechanist dualist cosmology to the Chinese cosmology in which: Nature was self-governed, unfolding itself according to its own internal harmonies. The object of science for the Chinese therefore was not to decipher the law in order to put nature to human uses, but to find out the way of nature, the Tao of Heaven, in order to be able to go along with it, to live according to the Tao.62

The deities of India or the Maori spirit of the forest, and the spirit of the tree of life in pre-modern Europe, are not projections of the human world

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onto the non-human world, metaphors used by humans to represent the non-human world. Rather, they literally embody that which enables the humans living in a particular place to draw from the abundance of the world, in the spirit in which this original gift is given, that is, generously. In the same spirit as the sender of the original gifts from the non-human world, humans express gratitude and return the gift through priests or shamans who offer it to other-than-human beings. This constitutes a severe constraint on the exploitation of the non-human world, since such exploitative behavior would open one (and one’s group) to the reprisal of the other-than-human beings or, in a more Christian idiom, to reprisal from heaven. In such a world, the increase has not been split into a socio-spiritual side and a material side. This fact is captured by Mauss’s term of “total prestations,” with “prestation” becoming a specialized anthropological term for gift. These spirits or deities impart to the gift some of their power since their gifts embody parts of themselves, giving the gift the power that drives the gift economy.63 The spirit of the gift constrains humans to reciprocate and circulate the gift, thereby engendering an abundance of sociality, of spirituality as well as an abundance of material things. These things, however, are not to be hoarded, just like the forest or the sea and their spirits do not hoard their gifts but on the contrary respond to the gift received. The spirits or deities make possible certain types of action and make other types of action difficult, reprehensible, sinful. The consequences of such actions are entirely material or physical and simultaneously also discursive and spiritual. The difference between a natural resource and God, or the spirit of the forest (or river, or sea, or earth, etc.) who bestow gifts, spells the difference between exploitation and the placing of severe limits on the human uses of these gifts. It is the difference between being part of a community that includes the other-than-humans, and being separated from the non-human world and from God or spirits. In premodern and Renaissance Europe, responsibility to the land, or more generally to the local place, was enacted in a variety of rituals of regeneration in which the regeneration of the human and the non-human collectivities were indissolubly entangled through the other-than-human spiritual sphere. These rituals enacted or performed regeneration through a variety of actions and utterances that embodied the entanglement of humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans. The Reformers called such rituals “magic” due to their insistence on the total separation between humans, non-humans, and God. For the Reformers, agency, voice, and meaning became exclusively human attributes, as well as the prerogatives of a God removed from the material world. Ever since the Reformers’ separation between matter and spirit, such rituals of regeneration could only be understood as humans representing symbolically or metaphorically the

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non-humans who became passive and silent. The church also pronounced such rituals heretical since they did not restrict themselves to those places and things authorized by the church. Just as the Puritans in New England, such as John Winthrop, could feel legitimate in expelling the Native Americans from the land, the conquistadors and the colonial authorities in New Spain felt legitimate in making the laws of “extirpation of idolatry,” which were aimed at preventing the natives from performing their regenerative rituals.64 In the new acts of calculation, the very notion of responsibility to the land (and to people) through the spirit of the gift loses its original meaning, since the land had become a spirit-less, passive object whose value and meaning was dependent upon the unilateral actions and calculations of the encloser in the context of prices generated impersonally by innumerable abstracted and anonymous transactions in the world market. It is this nexus of the unilateral acts of calculating the advantage accruing from “improving” an exclusively owned piece of land that creates “resources” as objectified and passive things. The enclosing of the commons implied the extinguishing of the gift exchanges between humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans, extinguishing the spirit of the gift and thereby transforming the land into a God-less, spirit-less, agency-less “natural resource.” This is the horizon within which the Cartesian dualist mechanist paradigm and the cogito would acquire their persuasive force.

6. PERFORMATIVITY VERSUS REPRESENTATIONALISM

In Mun and Misselden, we have the origin of the methodology current in the discipline of economics, namely “the use of mathematical constructs as metaphors for social or physical phenomena in order to explain these phenomena, solve puzzles about these phenomena, or just generally bring to light non-obvious facts about the phenomena.”65 The economist Peter Spiegler calls the relationship between the mathematical construct and the set of social phenomena under investigation a metaphorical one. The mathematical construct is a metaphorical model.66 Spiegler’s essay makes visible the enormous problem with such unexamined practices of making mathematical constructs or models metaphorically correspond with a variety of social phenomena as if there were an obvious transparency between them. What seems to have been forgotten—or maybe was never very visible—is that the very act of mathematically representing helps create the object or phenomena rather than represent a pre-given object. The difference between the “magical” rituals and gift exchanges of non-modern and premodern peoples (that have been mistakenly called either metaphorical or anthropomorphizing) and the mathematical metaphors of modern

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economics is that the former do not involve a separation between humans, the non-humans, and other-than-humans while the latter do. Another way of putting this is to say that the former do not extricate mind from “human relationships, human society, or the ecosystem” as Gregory Bateson put it long ago, while the latter do.67 The act of representing—whether linguistically, mathematically, and/or graphically—is only possible in a dualist, mechanist metaphysics. It is only in such metaphysics that humans have the exclusive capacity to unilaterally speak of or otherwise represent what is taken to be a pre-given social or physical reality. By disembedding the economy from the social, the non-human, and the other-than-human collectivities, economic representations separate everything from what Butler would call “their constitutive outsides.” Chief Lyons would say that such representations tear at “the webs-of-life” in which everything is enmeshed. It separates things from the non-human world as well as from God or spirits into pure materiality, shorn of discursivity. They become “simplified,” in James Scott’s terminology.68 The human, the nonhuman, or a composite of the two are cut from the local world and from the specific matrix out of which they emerge and in which they are enmeshed, or “embedded” as Polanyi would have it. This then becomes constituted as a manipulable and simplified entity, in other words, as a resource. The only context of relevance in such representations is the economic advantage to be derived from it for a single calculating individual, who thereby creates himself as separate from and bounded off from other humans, from the non-human world, and from God or spirits (or the other-than-human beings).69 This is an extremely narrow, anthropocentric, and humanist perspective in terms of the recipient of the advantage, and in terms of the humans who enter into these representations as resources. Such collectivities are interconnected, or better said, entangled, and co-create each other.70 It is to this that the scholarship referred to in the previous chapter concerning the myth of wilderness attests. This process generates a great deal of material wealth, and materially wealthy and even not so wealthy people have filled the emptiness left by the loss of social and spiritual-cum-material abundance with a glut of commodities. Even if we assume that such a substitution is fulfilling and sustainable—an enormous and unwarranted assumption—this wealth is distributed in notoriously unequal ways. Worse, there seems to be a correlation between the wealthy getting wealthier and the poor getting poorer and their environments getting increasingly degraded.71 But as Jared Diamond puts it in his latest book Collapse: “[I]n the long run, rich people do not secure their own interests and those of their children if they rule over a collapsing society and merely buy themselves the privilege of being the last to starve or die.”72

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To Sum Up

Without the proper enactment of rituals with their gift exchanges, the gifts from the spirits that allow life to be sustained would be endangered. In this sense, the activity of humans is partially responsible for the reality that their activity helps to produce. The spirits embody the entanglement of humans and the non-human world, making evident the agency that animals, plants, and matter generally have; it also makes evident the fact that agency and meaning making are not the monopoly of the human realm. It has been widely recorded that non-modern peoples consider their performances necessary for the continuance of not only the human world but of the non-human world as well. Such an attitude is precisely captured by the comments of a Yavapai Native North American man recorded by Wendy Espeland: God gave Indians the land . . . for use. They don’t really own the land. The Anglo with title say it’s mine, no one else’s. Land is part of nature. Humans are here temporarily. They live from the land where all life comes from. They are one. Without the Indian land can’t be land, because it needs to be taken care of in order to survive life.73

The land can’t be land without the humans and the humans can’t be humans without the land that makes them live; as the Yavapai man says, “they are one.” This is very similar to the case among the Andean farmers in which the cultivators (the chacareros, or the people making a chacra or field) say that they nurture the chacra and the chacra nurtures them in the process.74 These are not metaphorical statements, but literal enactments that refer to actions that create or enact reality. To interpret such statements in a representationalist mode, to turn them into metaphors or anthropomorphizing acts, assumes a dualist ontology in which mind and signification are the exclusive property of humans, and the non-human is pre-given, non-sentient, and agency-less. Such a move is not only distorting but amounts to an act of “conceptual encompassment of local life-worlds.”75 The European commons allowed the collective experience of receiving the bounty of nature, God, and the spirits as a gift that was freely given and freely received. All had access to the commons; all could hunt, gather, fish, and even cultivate and graze their animals in those commons. Generosity is an attribute of the original source of these gifts, and the collectivity of humans followed suit by organizing its life around the exchange and movement of gifts, understanding that the source of gifts was part of the collectivity. Local markets as well as long-distance trade networks were not permitted to encroach on the commons. To take from the land without a return gift, without an offering or a sacrifice, was to endanger the continuity

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of the wealth of nature, to affront God and/or the spirits who would then withhold the gifts. With the enclosure of the commons, the experience of receiving what sustains life as a gift was cut off. Instead of being circulated and/or sacrificed, wealth was accumulated. With the advent of the market economy, what sustains life had to be purchased, forcing those who depended on the commons and God’s providence to rent their bodies out in the factories and manufacturing industries of the cities. I have attempted to argue that these ongoing actions of enclosure, and all that they entailed, were the sociopolitical horizon that fostered the emergence of the Cartesian mechanist dualist worldview, and gave it its plausibility. To posit nature as a non-sentient, unconscious, agency-less mechanism requires that God as well as humans be kept strictly outside matter, outside nature. Thus the generosity of God becomes separated out from the experience of receiving the gifts of nature, separated out from the acts that sustain life. Not reciprocating the gifts of nature could no longer be construed as an affront to God. Max Weber captures the link between capitalism (what in this chapter I have called the market economy), and this new Protestant ethic and theology that sacralized the act of accumulating wealth in the hands of individuals instead of giving it away.76 Today, the same link is preserved albeit in a different idiom: instead of being sacralized, the act of pursuing one’s self-interest is naturalized. The profession of economics enshrines this in textbooks and classrooms: pursuing one’s self-interest is understood as “human nature.”



CHAPTER 4

Re-entangling the Material and the Discursive Quantum Physics and Agential Realism We are of the universe—there is no inside, no outside. There is only intra-acting from within and as part of the world in its becoming. —Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Half Way1

1. PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS

Robert Boyle made metaphysics off-limits for natural scientists by creating a boundary between the physical and the metaphysical in his experiments with the air pump.2 He was attempting to resolve one of the conflicts in his conflict-ridden century, namely the debate between plenists and vacuists over the interpretation of the Toricellian experiments with the tube of mercury. And in so doing, of course, he was trying to reestablish certainty in a new way at a time and place in which it had been deeply fractured with enormous political consequences.3 But as Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have persuasively argued, this boundary was arbitrary and part of Boyle’s rules of the game for what constituted experimental practice. Boyle defined a vacuum as what was in the glass receiver atop his pump after all the air had been evacuated from it and the piston could no longer be activated. He declared all other questions about the vacuum concerning the ontological status of very subtle matter it possibly contained as out of bounds and metaphysical. As Shapin and Schaffer point out:

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Boyle professed himself reluctant to enter “so nice a question” and he did not “dare” to “take upon me to determine so difficult a controversy.” Settling the issue of a vacuum was not what the experiment was about, nor were such questions part of it. They could not be settled experimentally and therefore were illegitimate . . . [Boyle] made the controversy concerning the vacuum a metaphysical one . . . “which therefore we shall here no longer debate . . .”4

This taboo on metaphysics persisted until recently—only twenty years or so ago—among many physicists.5 It was at this time that the famous gedanken experiments—first discussed and passionately argued over by the greats of the quantum revolution such as Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Shrödinger, and others—were actually carried out in the laboratory.6 The physicist Karen Barad has developed a theory that she calls “agential realism” based on her reading and extension of Bohr’s understanding of the new quantum phenomena as recorded in his philosophy-physics papers.7 Agential realism incorporates Bohr’s fundamental insight about physical reality being a function of the agencies of observation rather than preexisting the measurements these agencies produce. Barad explores the ontoepistemological entailments of this fundamental insight, and uses the recently carried out gedanken experiments, as well as post-structuralist and feminist theory, to extend Bohr’s framework. The issue of metaphysics can no longer be avoided, since these experiments touch on the very nature of reality. Here, I will try to present the gist of her argument. It is an argument that cuts through the debates between realists and social constructivists among others, in the (in)famous “science wars” of the mid-1990s, by calling into question their underlying representationalist assumptions.8 Barad’s work shows how matter (materiality/physicality) and human discursive practices are always entangled, thereby making the classical representationalist act impossible. Barad’s work addresses the fundamental issue we have been concerned with here, namely the separation or lack thereof between the observing, measuring (or representing) subject and the observed, measured (or otherwise represented) object. The hold of representationalism and of mathematical realism is in the process severely, if not totally, destabilized. Bohr’s fundamental challenge to the Cartesian-Boylian-Newtonian framework was in great part arrived at through resolving one of the most well known of the quantum quandaries, that of the wave/particle paradox. Matter (and light) sometimes presented themselves to the experimenters in the early twentieth century as a wave and at other times as a particle. The paradox consists of the following: under certain experimental arrangements, light or matter display particle-like properties. Under different experimental arrangements, incompatible with the former, they display wave-like properties. Particles and waves are ontologically mutually exclusive phenomena. Under the classical dispensation, this is a paradox since

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ontologically light and matter must be either a wave or a particle; they cannot be both. Particles are localized objects that occupy a given location at each moment in time, whereas waves are not properly even entities, but rather disturbances in some background medium or field. Waves have extension in space, occupying more than one position at any moment of time, and they can overlap with one another to form interference or diffraction patterns. In Barad’s interpretation of Bohr’s work, this is how he resolved this paradox: the measurement of the object involves a particular choice of apparatus, which provides the conditions necessary to give ontological definition to a set of manifestations at the exclusion of other equally essential manifestations. In so doing, the manifestations and the apparatus embody a particular cut delineating the “object” from the agencies of observation. Bohr called this the “complementarity principle,” referring to the fact that the wave is one manifestation of matter (or light), while under different experimental conditions, a complementary manifestation, namely a particle, becomes apparent. Both manifestations—wave and particle—are equally essential, but they can never manifest concurrently. Bohr argues that theoretical concepts are defined by the circumstances required for their measurements. Therefore, there is no unambiguous way to differentiate between the “object” and the “agencies of observation” since there is no preexisting cut between them. The cut is enacted or performed through the use of a particular experimental apparatus, and so measured values cannot be attributed to observation-independent objects. This lack of distinction between “objects” and “agencies of observation” is what Bohr calls “quantum wholeness.” Bohr uses the term “phenomenon” to refer to particular instances of wholeness. What is central to Bohr’s framework is his intertwining of the conceptual and physical dimensions of the measurement process. In the phenomenon, the physical and conceptual apparatuses form a non-dualistic whole. In Barad’s reading of Bohr, measured properties refer to the phenomena or the physical-conceptual “intra-actions” whose unambiguous account requires a description of all relevant features of the experimental arrangement. Barad coins the neologism “intra-actions” to signify the inseparability of objects and agencies of observation in the phenomena, and eschews the use of “interaction” since this term presupposes an already existing separation between two entities. However, with the enactment or performance of an experiment, a cut is enacted that separates the “object” from the “agencies of observation.” She calls this cut “an agential cut” and the principle it embodies “agential separability.” But objects and agencies of observation emerge only within phenomena; they are always contextual. They do not preexist separately, ontologically, before the performance of an experiment or a measurement, or an observation. But the fact that they manifest through an agential

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cut does not mean they are not real or material. The ontology has shifted from that of a pre-given universal nature, independent of acts of measurement, observation, or representation, to what might be called an “agential reality.” In this framework, the referent can no longer be understood to be an observation-independent reality but rather a phenomenon. Objectivity no longer can be thought as referring to a universal preexisting nature or reality made up of independently existing discrete and separable entities or objects. Bohr, however, does not abandon the notion of objectivity, but profoundly recasts it. Objectivity no longer refers to accurate knowledge obtained about inherent properties of independently existing objects (or aspects of reality), but rather refers to the “permanent marks—such as a spot on a photographic plate, caused by the impact of an electron—left on the bodies which define the experimental conditions.”9 The implications of this new framework are profound. Bohr himself understood the metaphysical implications of the impossibility to separate the object from the apparatus of observation. Apparatuses of observation are no longer passive observing instruments as in the classical CartesianBoylian-Newtonian paradigm; rather, they are productive of and part of the phenomena. For him, this inseparability “entails . . . the necessity of a final renunciation of the classical [i.e., Cartesian-Boylian-Newtonian] ideal of causality and a radical revision of our attitude towards the problem of physical reality.”10 Bohr’s complementarity principle was consciously offered as an alternative to the classical physics framework. Barad creatively, and extremely fruitfully, extends Bohr’s insights through the use of Foucault’s work on the productive and constraining dimensions of practices embodied in apparatuses, such as, for example, the panopticon.11 Such constraining and productive dimensions of practices are what Foucault names “discourse.” In other words, discourse does not refer to linguistic signifying systems, speech acts, or conversations. Discourse is not to be thought of as descriptive written or oral statements. Discourse is not a representation of some externally existing reality (that is, it is not a representationalist tool) but refers to what constrains and enables what is said and done. It thus has performative efficacy. Barad points out that for both Bohr and Foucault, discourses/apparatuses are productive of reality, constraining but not determining particular material-discursive arrangements.12 Replacing Bohr’s notion of physical-conceptual with that of the materialdiscursive overcomes Bohr’s untheorized understanding of the limits of the apparatus as corresponding to its visual limits. Bohr also held an untheorized notion of the human experimenter, the subject. Reading Foucault’s notion of discursivity through Bohr’s notion of the conceptual-physical extends the domain of the former to include the natural sciences and provides an

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account of the materialization of non-human bodies.13 This is how Barad explains what she means by agential reality: That reality within which we intra-act—what I term agential reality—is made up of material-discursive phenomena. Agential reality is not a fixed ontology that is independent of human practices, but is continually reconstituted through our material-discursive intra-actions. Shifting our understanding of the ontologically real from that which stands outside the sphere of cultural influence and historical change to agential reality allows a new formulation of realism (and truth) that is not premised on the representational nature of knowledge. If our descriptive characterizations do not refer to properties of abstract objects or observation-independent beings, but rather describe agential reality, then what is being described by our theories is not nature itself, but our participation within [and as part of] nature.14

So matter does not refer to some assumed inherent fixed property of an abstracted object—as in the Cartesian-Boylian-Newtonian world—but refers to the result of material-discursive intra-actions within the phenomena. The phenomenon is always contextual; it is always a particular instance of what Bohr calls “quantum wholeness.” It can never be a universal. Agential reality cannot be a fixed universal; rather it is always reconstituted through our material-discursive intra-actions. 2. FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS: HEISENBERG’S UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE AND MICRO/MACRO ISSUES

Given that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has been deployed widely in the social sciences and contemporary culture at large, it is important to briefly look at the debate between Bohr and Heisenberg on these fundamental issues. It is also necessary to examine the debate since the ontological entailments of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle are radically different from those of Bohr’s complementarity principle. Barad untangles for us the complexities of this debate. In 1927, Heisenberg and Bohr discussed experiments that involved the measurement of the position of an electron through the use of a photon. As Barad explains, for Heisenberg, the key issue is the discontinuous change in the electron’s momentum, that is, the fact that it is disturbed by the photon in the attempt to determine the electron’s position. This analysis, based on the question of disturbance, leads Heisenberg to conclude that the uncertainty relation is an epistemic principle—it says there is a limitation to what we can know [hence the word “uncertainty”]. In other words, a determinate value of the electron’s momentum is

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assumed to exist independently of measurement, but we can’t know it; we remain uncertain about its value owing to the unavoidable disturbance caused by the measurement interaction.15

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle does not question classical ontology, only classical epistemology. The electron has an independent existence and position we simply cannot know it precisely. What Heisenberg’s analysis— which is based on the discontinuities entailed in measurement interactions—ignores completely is the fact that the experimental conditions for defining “position” and “momentum” are mutually exclusive. To determine position, a beam of atoms (or photons) passes through two fixed slits and the result is captured on a registering screen. The pattern observed is that of a scatter, corresponding to the positions of the particles upon impact. To determine momentum, the slit has to be movable, since momentum can only be registered through a movable part, momentum being the force that produces a recoil effect for a moving object. On the registering screen, a wave pattern is observed. The two features of the apparatuses—stationary slit versus movable slit—cannot be combined. They are mutually exclusive. It is this condition of mutual exclusivity of the two experimental apparatuses for measuring position and momentum respectively that entail the inseparability of “measured object” from “measuring instrument.” Bohr disagreed intensely with Heisenberg on this issue, and they discussed it at the time Heisenberg was publishing his paper on uncertainty in 1927. What is little known is that not only did Heisenberg finally agree with Bohr’s critique of his uncertainty principle, but he also added a postscript to his article on the uncertainty principle to that effect. It seems extraordinary to me that this postscript has been almost totally ignored. Thus I think it warrants quoting: In this connection Bohr has brought to my attention that I have overlooked essential points in the course of several discussions in this paper. Above all, the uncertainty in our observation does not arise exclusively from the occurrence of discontinuities, but is tied directly to the demand that we ascribe equal validity to the quite different experiments which show up in the corpuscular [i.e., particle] theory on one hand, and in the wave theory on the other hand [i.e., that we acknowledge the role of complementarity].16

The difference between Heisenberg and Bohr cannot be overemphasized. For Bohr, the heart of the matter is that the values of complementary variables such as position and momentum cannot be determined simultaneously because they are not simultaneously determinate. The manifestations, the properties, do not exist independently of a particular experimental apparatus. And the corresponding concepts similarly do

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not have determinate meaning independently or outside of the apparatus. Barad suggests renaming Bohr’s principle the “indeterminacy” principle. This term gestures toward the radical ontological and metaphysical implications of Bohr’s framework. In contrast, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle does not ultimately question the ontological and metaphysical commitments of the classical paradigm. Our knowledge of an object may be uncertain due to the constraints on measurement, but the preexistence of the object with measurable properties is taken for granted by the uncertainty principle.17 The other issue we need to address is the often voiced remark that quantum phenomena are restricted to the microscopic, atomic, or subatomic levels, and at the macroscopic level, the classical paradigm is applicable rather than the quantum reality. Bohr remarked that, although the laws of quantum physics are not restricted to the microscopic level but are applicable across the board, including at the macroscopic level, the fact that the deviations in the numerical values predicted by quantum theory are so small means that they went unnoticed at the macroscopic level. This is why quantum effects have gone unnoticed until relatively recently. The reason why we do not regularly observe quantum effects is that they are “of the order of the ratio of Planck’s constant (h) to the mass of the object in question (m) . . . [F]or macroscopic objects . . . the ratio h/m is extremely small . . . [W]e generally don’t notice quantum effects because they are very small (too small to notice without special equipment).”18 The fact that quantum reality is extremely difficult to detect in macroscopic phenomena is not the same as saying that it does not exist.

3. AGENCY AND RESPONSIBILITY

With the abandonment of an ontology of pre-given, universal objects, and with the adoption of the notion of “intra-action” and of “agential reality,” the non-human participates actively in the formation of agential reality. Humans are no longer the only actors, the pre-given “subjects” observing, measuring, and representing the pre-given “objects.” In fact, it is really no longer possible to assume a pre-given cut between something we could call “the human subject” or “the mind” and something we could call “the nonhuman object.” As Barad formulates it: [a]gential realism’s post-humanist [i.e., post-anthropocentric] account of discursive practices does not fix the boundary between “human” and “nonhuman” before the analysis ever gets off the ground but rather enables (indeed demands) a genealogical analysis of the discursive emergence of the “human.” “Human bodies” and “human subjects” do

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not preexist as such; nor are they mere end products. “Humans” are neither pure cause nor pure effect but part of the world in its open-ended becoming.19

The differentiation between “subjects” and “objects” appears only as the result of a given agential cut; it cannot preexist such a cut. Thus “subjects” and “objects” are indeed real but agentially so, not universally, pre-givenly so. They sediment out of specific intra-actions within phenomena and can be stabilized by iterative actions. One extremely important consequence is that we are in part responsible for the reality that is sedimented out since it is in part the result of our agencies of observation. Our responsibility is an unavoidable consequence of the fact that we are epistemologically as well as ontologically involved in shaping reality. However, the agential cuts we are partially involved in enacting always involve exclusions, and always have real material consequences. In an agential realist framework, it is not possible to evade responsibility and accountability for those exclusions and those materializations. As Barad expresses it: “[Agential] [r]ealism is not about representations of an independent reality, but about the real consequences, interventions, creative possibilities, and responsibilities of intra-acting within the world.”20 Intra-actions are emphatically not representations. Rather they are enactments, performances, doings through which we are partially responsible for the reality that emerges.

End Thoughts: Reintegrating Matter and Spirit

There is a sense in which the premodern and non-modern rituals of gift exchanges between humans and the non-human world are enactments, performances, in which humans are partially responsible for the reality that emerges. The reality that emerges is at once material and discursive. I would propose that the other-than-humans, those denizens of a spiritual reality, emerge as the result of particular agential cuts enacted in rituals. Thinking through Niels Bohr’s framework, then, rituals could perhaps be thought of as embodying simultaneously the “apparatus of observation” as well as the conceptual, to use Bohr’s language. Rituals employ objects, plants, waters, other liquids, special arrangements, movements, and a myriad of other kinds of material tools, along with human speech, song, and movements, and are thus best described as material-discursive enactments. Rituals, in their typically iterative or repetitive forms, achieve a stabilization of particular agential cuts. In chapter 9, after several chapters where specific contemporary rituals I participated in in Peru have been discussed, I will

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return to this theory and use it to formulate more systematically a theory of ritual. Different forms of ritual enactments generate different discursive-material realities, or different, complementary aspects of reality. Like waves and particles, these different realities could be mutually exclusive, but nevertheless complementary in Bohr’s sense of the term. That is, these mutually exclusive material-discursive realities embody different aspects revealed by different ritual actions. Like in the phenomena of waves and particles, neither is truer or more real than the other. Rather, they constitute complementary moments of reality, as it were. If we extend the analogy to the spiritual realm, it allows us to affirm, for example, that the mutually exclusive reality of a unique God and of many gods and goddesses or spirits does not force us to choose between them. Instead, it leads us to recognize that different material-discursive actions— such as enacting rituals, liturgies, reading sacred writings, performing sacred music and/or dance, ingesting psychotropic plants, and the like—are all intra-actions that enact different agential cuts and thus different realities. The perspective of agential realism restores a kind of contemporary form of hylozoism. It shows the Cartesian, classical scientific worldview to be deeply flawed. It makes it possible to see contemporary, non-modern practices of humans embodying spirits by wearing masks or other ritual objects, for example, in a different light. Such embodiments then emerge not as purely symbolic, but as instances of the fact that boundaries between the human and the non-human are not pre-given. They are the result of alwayscontextual agential cuts. Through gift exchange and other ritual enactments, land (understood as shorthand for all other aspects of the non-human world) becomes land and people become people, and the earth goddess or spirit is manifested. Agential realism allows us to realize—as non-modern collectivities realize—that the land cannot be land without our actions, just as we cannot be human without the land’s action, which is enacted by God or the earth goddess or spirit. The motivation for one’s actions must shift from a calculus of one’s interest—be it economic or epistemological—to an enactment of generosity that itself flows from the source of generosity in the spirit realm. The Cartesian worldview engendered modern science, which in turn made industrialization possible.21 Agential realism breaks with this classical framework by showing how matter and discursivity are always entangled, and opens the possibility for rediscovering the spirit of the gift and with it a sense of responsibility for the human, the non-human, and the other-thanhuman collectivities.22



CHAPTER 5

The Spirit of the Gift in the Peruvian Andes Yarqa Aspiy in Quispillacta Drinking the water, I thought how earth and sky are generous with their gifts, and how good it is to receive them. Most of us are taught, somehow, about giving and accepting human gifts, but . . . not about standing in the rain ecstatic with what is offered. —Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World1

INTRODUCTION

Water today is a natural resource, one that is becoming increasingly scarce. Many environmentalist pundits predict that the next big crisis will be that of water availability. Already, many in the world have to walk for hours to provision themselves with drinking water. Many of the rivers and streams of the world have been polluted and some have even died. The seas have not been unaffected either. The rain itself in many parts of the world is acid and kills the trees. The tragic fate of water is one that befell it after it became a natural resource. The idea of water as a natural resource is now a worldwide phenomenon, diffused through modern education. The products of modernity have penetrated into the most remote corners of the world, but the adherents, the believers in the superiority of modernity, are overwhelmingly those who have received a modern education. Yet, some two-thirds of the world’s population is comprised of indigenous, peasant, and other traditional peoples whose worldviews are not modern and for whom the phrase “natural resource” is alien.2

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This chapter endeavors to approach water from a standpoint that does not take the ontological assumptions about the world made by modernity for granted. Being an anthropologist does not ensure my ability to step outside the ontological framework of modernity. In order to do that, I needed to do the kind of reverse anthropologizing presented in the previous chapters. Having discussed how natural resources were invented in Europe during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, and having discussed the phenomenon of the “spirit of the gift” rather theoretically, in this chapter I present a concrete example of non-modern ritualized gift exchange with other-than-human beings. It is the example of the festival of Yarqa Aspiy, the festival celebrating the spirit of the water in the indigenous community of Quispillacta, to the south of the highland Peruvian city of Ayacucho. My approach here is to begin by listening to the voice of an Andean woman from the indigenous Andean community of Quispillacta, Marcela Machaca.3 Her voice is highly unusual. She is the first person of her generation in her family and community to go to university. What is unusual here is that her long years of study failed to convert her to the modernist cosmology. This was not due to her inability to comprehend what was being taught to her, for she was at the top of her class. Listening to her voice is intended to make us transition into the world of her community. Her life story will allow us to empathize and hopefully understand why she ultimately rejected what was taught to her. By the end of her story we may be ready to let her be our guide in the second part of the chapter. The second part is a description of the festival of the water in her community. This description is mostly based on Marcela Machaca’s own published writings and in part on my own interviews and observation during a visit to Quispillacta in 2000. There we are plunged, as it were, in medias res, into the very non-modern world of the indigenous farmers of the high Andean community of Quispillacta. Here again, Marcela’s words invite us not to stand on the sidelines as detached observers, but rather to vicariously enter into the world of Yarqa Aspiy, the festival of the water in Quispillacta, to feel its pulse and hear its songs. In the third part of this chapter, I try to understand why the spirits disappeared, why they died, by once again engaging in reverse anthropologizing. Returning to the Europe of the Renaissance, I focus on the issue of certainty and how it was resolved then, underlining the consequences for the tripartite ontology that we have inherited, relegating the spirits to a “supernatural” or “metaphysical” realm and separating nature from culture. Remembering this history, it seems to me, is the first step we need to take toward realizing that the world bequeathed to us by the advent of the scientific revolution is not the world as it really is, but rather the world as it was invented and enacted for certain purposes and not for others. This

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effort is undertaken in the hope that we will once again learn to nurture the spirits of the water, the soil, the minerals, the air, the plants, the animals, and everything that accompanies us in this world.

1. AN ANDEAN WOMAN’S TRAVAILS WITH MODERN EDUCATION

In 1975, when I was a little girl and had finished elementary school, my parents and all their children migrated to the city of Ayacucho . . . We were five related families of one ayllu [this is a local kin group that also comprises all the other local other-than-human beings] with 10 children entering high school in the city. This was a time when development had come to our community in a big way. Various development projects, originating from the Agrarian Faculty of the University of Ayacucho through its extension programs as well as from a Swiss development project (COTESU) reached Quispillacta in the 1960s and 1970s. They brought chemical fertilizers, pesticides, improved pasture land, etc. These professionals of agronomy trained many community members to become promoters of scientific agriculture in our community. My father became one of these promoters. My own chacra [cultivated field] was given by my father to be used as an experimental plot by the agronomists. I remember clearly as a child that I did not plant in it what we normally ate such as corn and beans and Andean root crops. Rather we used urea, a lot of agro-chemicals and we planted hybrid seeds in the chacra. In our pastures where we fertilized our native grass species with chemicals, the grass grew tremendously tall. Now, conversing with my father, we tell each other what a mad venture this all was. What struck me then was the attitude of the professionals who came to teach these technologies and these practices, which were said to be of universal validity. These professionals possessed the solutions and these had to be adopted by the families of Quispillacta who were pressured to abandon their own ways of doing things. One of the professional agronomists in charge of a project later became the dean of the Agrarian Faculty where I studied and where I defended my thesis. All the professionals were arrogant and aloof; they knew it all and bossed the promoters around telling them what to do with the other farmers. These memories of my father as an agricultural promoter in projects of rural development have impacted me deeply and stayed with me. In those years my father used to tell us children: “You have to study to become agronomists. You must go to the University and become professional agronomists.” But I think that what my father had in mind was not for us to acquire the arrogant attitude of professional agronomists. Rather, he wanted us to learn how to improve our potatoes, our crops. He wanted us to help our community, not become arrogant professionals, and not look down on the native people. Later, I understood better his motives for having his children become professional

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agronomists. It was because one is the target of a great deal of scorn. There is a great deal of aggression aimed at native life, and for the migrants to the city, such as we were, the aggression is very strong and one way to not be aggressed was to become a professional agronomist. So I began my university studies in a technical institute that trained professionals in agronomy and animal husbandry. I had set for myself the clear goal of finding ways of somehow supporting our community. I spent five years in this institute but when I graduated I had not found what I was looking for, namely a way of relating to our own way of life, the life of the chacra. What I learned were only technical questions, formulas such as how much fertilizer is needed, how many seeds, how many inputs, and the like. So I left the Institute disappointed. Then I was admitted to the Agrarian Faculty at the University in Ayacucho. My sister Magdalena and I entered the Faculty of Agronomy at the same time. We got our degrees after five years of study. I graduated first in my class and got a prize for being the best student. I mention this, so that my subsequent choices may not be viewed as stemming from a lack of ability in agronomy. In spite of this, I did not succeed in satisfying what I was looking for in the University. I was not able to find answers to the questions I had put to myself when I entered the University . . . As a member of my community (comunera) I have my own experience of living in the community and the knowledge I lived with is for me extremely valid and important. For example, let us take the case of a sign [in Spanish, “seña”], a plant whose state tells me that in that year there will be a lot of rain and this knowledge will enable me to have good crops. One does not find reference to this type of sign in any course; nowhere in the University is it taught that such a signplant can teach you how to cultivate crops. Quite the contrary, they teach you to see things separately: the plants separately, the soil separately, etc. . . . not even the whole plant but parts of plants, segmented, very separate. In contrast, in my community, plants are sacred. The first two years of University study I learned basic science, such as the carbon cycle, photosynthesis and the like. It was not possible to talk about what is done in the native communities, such as the signs. Nowhere was Andean agriculture or the native people mentioned; rather the talk was of a beautiful form of agriculture with tractors, pesticides, and about when a plant does not grow properly one has to put hormones, accelerators, inhibitors, all these things. Whenever one wants to, one can accelerate the harvest, just when one desires it, wills it . . . Fortunately, I finished the University at a time when the experiments of development, the projects, the agricultural extension programs bringing the knowledge of the University to the communities failed utterly. I also experienced such a failure in an experiment I carried out as a requirement for graduation. I tried to do an experiment testing certain hormones that would produce more roots in certain

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Andean root crops on the model of experiments that had been done on the potato. Working with Andean root crops such as the oca and the olluco, which are crops not promoted by the University, I felt that I could contribute something to native knowledge. After having done with my sister the experiments, we went back to our community to apply the findings. We found that it is not possible to apply them because there is no infrastructure, no hormones, and the natives have no time either to cut the plants or test the sandy soils and all that. Ashamed of what I did, I began instead to look for what exists there. And I found that in fact there was a practice almost identical to our experiment, which we ourselves used to do in our own chacra. This technology is called ixmi: one harvests early, then covers the plant plucking out its leaves and covers it again so that it produces again . . . After graduating, the work of writing a thesis remained. What to do it on? My sister and I decided to reject all the research methodologies we were taught and to do it in our own way even including Quechua words. This would have nothing to do with the technical type of work required of an agronomist. When we presented our proposed thesis project, they wanted us to transfer into the department of anthropology and sociology. Our professors were very disappointed. Because we had been such good students, they expected us to become efficient agents of development. They used to point us out as examples for other students. After that they never again used us as examples to other students. However, due to the fact that we had been such exemplary students, our proposal was finally accepted. They in fact were curious to see how we would carry the project out. One of the requirements to doing a thesis is to be able to document what you do in the literature. So we began looking for works on Andean agriculture and we found none. That is, none that could be used by us, writing specifically on agriculture. Yes, there were works of anthropology, of native economy that spoke of the native communities, but they did not write about how the life was lived; they were written from a perspective very different from that of lived experience. They did not help us at all to say what was in the community. So I desperately searched for books for our bibliographical references because with such a different approach we really needed bibliographic references. It was at that moment, miraculously it seems, that Professor Julio Valladolid gave a lecture in the Faculty of Agronomy speaking of Andean agriculture. There he spoke beautifully and for the first—and last—time (it was his farewell lecture) of the community of Jasanjay (in the province of Ayacucho). I had never heard him or any other professor speak in that way. Jasanjay is a community very similar to my own. He, or any other professor at the University, had never talked about Andean agriculture, as if the topic would dirty them. He did so just at the eve of his resignation, and then he vanished. Fortunately, I ran into him somewhat later and spoke of Andean agriculture and timidly said the following: “Professor, I have this problem; I am looking for references on Andean agriculture. Can you help me?” He said that there were others working on the topic and he would let me know.

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He was referring to Eduardo Grillo (of PRATEC). A month later two books from PRATEC arrived for me. I read them avidly. They were very different from the perspective of anthropologists, sociologists, and economists. You could see reading them how life is lived in the communities; they were wonderful. I read those books several times and was able to finish the thesis. Those books were my only references. For the thesis work, my sister and I went back to our community to collect knowledge, testimonials in Quechua as well as in Spanish. I did my work on the basis of native testimonials. The time for the thesis defense arrived. There was a great deal of anticipation; how would we defend an indefensible thing, without graphs, statistics, without a scientific method? But as I was going to defend something that existed, that was alive, I was not afraid. I defended with a great deal of cheek [frescura], in the Andean manner. The dean of the Faculty of Agronomy was there and so was Professor Valladolid. Fortunately, by the time I finished the thesis, several of the faculty had attended the PRATEC course on Andean Culture and Agriculture and the topic was being discussed. The Faculty was divided between a pro–Andean agriculture faction and a proscience faction. At the end the dean asked me a question that marked me a lot. He asked why I distanced myself from my peers, from my professors who loved me so much and became something that was no longer an example for others at the University. He said: “You have shown the knowledge of your community; we know that you have been a brilliant student; of what use is this going to be to you?” What I understood him to be saying to me is the following: how will the knowledge imparted to you at the University serve you to carry out cultural affirmation? Since the necessity for cultural affirmation was the conclusion of my thesis. I answered him in what I thought was a diplomatic fashion, namely that the knowledge of the University would not be of use in my work of cultural affirmation. He took my answer as a total rejection. With this “no” my professors concluded that all that they had taught me was thrown overboard. One of my professors got very angry. He said that this type of student should no longer be admitted in the University and that we did not deserve the degree. This created great difficulties when our younger brother Gualberto wanted to start his studies there. We had to fight for him. This professor had done his studies in the United States and said, “How is it possible that at the end of the twentieth century you talk about native knowledge and about ritual?” He wanted to take away my degree. He said that I was ruining the reputation of the professional agronomists of Ayacucho, who were highly valued in the professional market and putting in jeopardy their market value. How could I throw away everything that was being taught in the Faculty of Agronomy? This is where I understood very clearly that the training at the University is to make us into efficient agents of development . . . We had returned to our community after 1987, during the period of violence [due to Shining Path and the Army] and were carrying out work for our thesis.

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From the development projects that started in the 1960s, nothing remained. Many irrigation channels, reservoirs, and other things are left as witnesses to these projects of development. My sister Magdalena and I also tried then to find out why there were so many development efforts and why they did not work. We began working with our own relatives. One of the first things we did was to document how these efforts at development in the community had deteriorated the soils, the seeds, and life in general as well as the whole of the culture. A central activity of ours became acting for the return of traditional seeds, the return to the community’s own wisdom, and centrally, a return to the practice of rituals. Eventually we and other siblings of ours as well as some friends from Quispillacta created the non-governmental organization Asociacion Bartolome Aripaylla (ABA). All of us in ABA have done the PRATEC course. Magdalena and I were the first; the others followed. We carry out this work now within ABA. This narrative illustrates that science—in this case the science of agronomy—and its various applications in the form of rural development schemes scorn Andean ritual agriculture for being backward, obsolete, and ineffective. As elaborated in the next chapter, Andean agriculture is not taught in any of the twenty-four Faculties of Agronomy in Peruvian universities. This is a remarkable fact since the Andes are one of a handful of world centers where agriculture first emerged and are recognized as one of the regions of the world with the highest level of biodiversity in cultivars.4 Marcela, her sister Magdalena, and her brother Gualberto’s refusal to entertain the suggestion to shift into departments of social sciences such as anthropology or sociology is emphatic. They are agriculturalists and agriculture—along with animal husbandry and herding—is one of the principal activities of Andean farmers. Andean culture is an agrocentric one. Their hope in entering the university was not only to escape the scorn meted out by professionals and other university-educated folks toward the peasantry, but also to acquire a knowledge that could be used to make improvements in agriculture and animal husbandry in their communities. This latter goal could not be attained in departments of anthropology or sociology. Why the insistence on the part of ABA on rituals? Much of the activity of ABA consists in revitalizing collective rituals in Quispillacta. Are we here dealing with a version of the well-known centuries-old tension, if not contradiction, between religion and science inaugurated by Galileo’s trial? In the preceding pages, Marcela Machaca has spoken eloquently about the close connection between development efforts and science, of development as applied science. She has also repeatedly associated Andean farmers’ wisdom and knowledge with ritual activities. However, before

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delving in greater depth into the specifics of the ritual to water in Quispillacta, it may be useful to situate such rituals vis-à-vis established religions in the Andean context. I can do no better than quote the words of Marcela’s brother Gualberto Machaca Mendieta on the subject: In Peru, since 1916 there has existed the freedom to practice different religions. But this law is really a dead letter. Although there are several official religions they all have the same intent: to de-legitimize Andean attitudes and practices. The spirituality of the native people is based on the protection of and great respect toward all the beings present in the Pacha [local time/place]. This spirituality is alive today in spite of having suffered constant aggression and in spite of the fact that officialdom tries to erase it. The Andean life forms are found at every step, including in urban areas, and are not only found petrified in museums, as the scholars of sociology and anthropology affirm. In Peru, the official culture understands by “religion” a manner of honoring or worshipping God as the only omnipotent being. Nevertheless, in the Andes it is not appropriate to refer to the practices of Andean people by the term “Andean religion” because there does not exist an all-powerful God. Many try to make comparisons between the “native religion” and Christianity without understanding that the so-called “Andean religion” is simply a way in which the natural communities live together within an agricultural cycle. Andean spirituality has been the object of tenacious persecution, first on the part of the Catholic religion during the colonial period, and in the last several decades on the part of evangelical sects which have intensified the persecution. By their exclusionist attitude, evangelical sects label Andean spirituality “mundane” and call the Andean deities “evil spirits” and the like.5

It would seem that in the past, various types of Christians persecuted Andean spirituality; some forms of Christianity continue to do so. In particular, many Christians consider the existence of spirits or deities that inhabit the world blasphemous. As one of my friends who is both an anthropologist and a Lutheran missionary said to me, “There are no spirits left. Jesus did away with all the spirits.” In what follows, I will discuss the origins and implications of the similar ways development professionals approach Andean ritual agriculture in terms of their reliance on science and on various forms of Christianity. What characterizes Andean practices is that all the inhabitants of the pacha—including the rocks, the waters, the sun, the moon, and the stars, as well as the plants, the animals, and the people—are alive and communicate or converse with the human inhabitants through a multiplicity of signs. Marcela mentions a plant-sign, but signs can also be animals—their cry, the number of eggs or offspring in a given season—the brilliance or lack

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thereof of the stars, the shape and color of the clouds, the quality of the winds, and so forth. Some of the inhabitants of the pacha are considered to possess more wisdom and greater ability to protect and guide human beings; these inhabitants include certain mountains, the earth, certain springs and mountain lakes, and certain animals such as the condor. These are generally referred to as huacas, wamani, or apus, all terms that could be glossed as “spirits.” These are the recipients of offerings and prayers, though during certain moments of the agricultural cycle, seeds, crops, flowers, the soil, irrigation canals, water sources, and the like are also the recipients of offerings. One of the development schemes in Quispillacta had to do with “improving” irrigation in the lower altitude where every community has an irrigated chacra. Many of the ancient earthen canals were lined with cement, and as a result, water no longer reaches as far as it used to. In the words of Modesto Cisnero of Quispillacta: Before, our grandparents had only earthen irrigation channels, but the water reached to the place called Puchquyaku, but now that these are lined with cement the water does not even reach the Soqa chapel, that is only half as far; it does not even reach far enough for the animals to drink; instead of more water, there is less. Before it was a fiesta to bring the water, drinking lots of good chicha [fermented corn drink] at the spring and burying the offering there. Like that the water traveled happily and quickly. Now we are ashamed of doing these things. Pressured by the Evangelical religion, now instead of chicha they drink colored water and we clean the channels without enthusiasm; so with what strength will the water travel? Like that the water, too, will be lazy. And like that we have forgotten the Wamanis [sacred ones]; we no longer bring offerings to the water, neither to the frost nor the hail. Because of that they will have become wild just like when we do not take care of our animals they get emaciated and die; just like that the Wamanis are lost and forgotten, and the frost and the hail also.6

Besides lining the existing irrigation channels with cement, this development project also created a small reservoir and cement-lined channels leading to and from it in a certain location of the irrigated part of the community. I visited the community with Magdalena and Lorenzo Nuñez of ABA in 2000. The reservoir had only recently been cleared of an overgrowth of water plants in it. It had not yet been used by anyone, nor had anyone used the channels leading into and out of it. Instead, the farmers had dug earthen channels that by-passed the reservoir. The official (as opposed to the traditional) leadership of the community wanted to convince everyone to use the reservoir and the new canals. They feared that a rejection of this small project might close the door to further projects. The response on the part of ABA has been to support the enactment of the traditional festival

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of Yarqa Aspiy, the annual cleaning of the irrigation channels. This festival has been enacted in full force in the last few years. It is a major communal event, mobilizing all 1200 families (some 5000 persons) in Quispillacta. Marcela and Magdalena told me that now everyone participates, including the official leadership as well as those belonging to evangelical sects. The only concession the adherents of evangelical sects make to their religious affiliation is that instead of drinking chicha they drink sodas. In ABA’s office in Ayacucho, I asked Marcela why ABA promoted rituals. This question generated a lengthy, shocking, and fascinating response, which I recorded in writing at the time. Her response dwelt on the role of the Maoist guerilla movement Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso in Spanish) in eradicating shamanism, as well as the role of the evangelical churches in the same endeavor. I reproduce my translation of her response here: Everything that has to do with agriculture is related to the feelings of the people. The most important thing is those feelings. When agriculture deteriorates it is because this relationship of affinity with nature is being broken; with the soil, the trees, the water, a relationship of exploitation begins to emerge. This is beginning to happen in Quispillacta. It has its origin in modern agricultural practices, which separate productive activity from social activity. It begins in the 40s and 50s, but really comes in force in the 60s. What is most important is to recuperate those feelings. The evangelicals openly promote individualism. The festivals are communal and create solidarity and reciprocity. The evangelicals say that these are mundane festivals; any rituals that have to do with nature they call mundane. They call the Apus and other sacred beings demons and evil spirits. Evangelical religion is a more radical form of Catholicism; they are fundamentalists. Evangelism entered in Quispillacta between the 60s and 70s with members of the Swiss development project COTESU that in turn came in through the Peruvian government. And with them also came bilingual programs Spanish/ Quechua as an evangelizing project. They captured the allegiance of some leaders. Those who promulgated evangelism and those who promulgated development were the same people. It created a great deal of conflict in the community and it has caused great damage to the communal rituals. It became worse in the 80s with the dirty war that began when Shining Path burnt the electoral urns in Chuschi the 18th of May 1980. [Chuschi is the district headquarter and on the other side of the stream from the town of Quispillacta. This event was the first act of violence in Peru on the part of Shining Path.] There was an enormous amount of violence on the part of Sendero and the military. Both sides used the community as a shield. Sendero gathered together all the shamans of the community, some eight of them, and shot them dead. Only one survived, pretending to be dead. This one is my uncle. Sendero went to get them in their houses and told them to come and bring along their ritual bundles. They gathered all the people in the main square in order to witness the shooting. Before shooting them,

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they were told to throw their ritual bundles in the fire. My uncle’s bundle did not burn. For everybody, the question of ritual is difficult to eliminate and a major danger. It poses a serious obstacle to their actions. The function of the shamans is to harmonize the health of the community with that of nature. It goes much further than simply the health of an individual. It is during that time that the majority of communities became evangelists, as a protection. The idea of the communities was as follows: “I am neither a senderista nor pro-military; I practice the Bible, believe in God, and am impartial.” The Machaca Ayllu had a meeting and swore to never become evangelicals. During the violence about 80% of the community became evangelicals. Now only 40 to 50% still are. Since the 1990s, due to the activities of ABA there is a very marked return to the situation before the violence. We do not discuss religion with the evangelicals. We simply promote communal rituals where communal labor is required from everyone and everyone participates. The festival of Yarqa Aspiy was never totally interrupted. Now it is done with more enthusiasm and the participation of everybody. We only speak of mutual respect, not only between persons but also between all that exists. We do not engage in theological debates. We say that we respect you and we ask you that you respect us. And that helps a lot. It circumvents their attitude of rejecting everything because they are the possessors of the sole truth. We do not speak of truth; we only say that there are different ways of doing things. We saw that at the communal level it was possible to recuperate the rituals, although at times the evangelicals have treated those of us in ABA as demons. It became worse when another development project allied itself with the evangelicals and said that those of ABA were promoting underdevelopment. For the evangelicals the liberation of the soul signifies to be modern, to be an individual. They do not want communal events. At one point things got very bad for us and we were obliged to leave the communal organization. This displeased the other ayllus; they said that everything had become fragmented. When there was a change of leadership, we conversed with the new leaders and now things are well again. We work with rituals a lot because they have always been the target of attack. The latest in a long history are the evangelicals and the developmentalists. What we say is that when there is no ayni [reciprocal, mutual action] between persons and nature, everything deteriorates. As Gualberto Machaca points out, Andean spirituality has been the object of persecution on the part of both the Catholic Church and the evangelical protestant sects. From Marcela’s two narratives, it becomes clear that to this list must be added developmentalists, both local and foreign, as well as the Maoist Shining Path. For all of them, Andean spirituality is seen as a danger, an obstacle to their actions. The state, although legally committed to the freedom of religious expression, ends up joining most of these in its official support of the developmentalists, particularly the local ones in the state universities, as the quote from Gualberto Machaca makes clear.

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From these narratives, it is clear that Andean spirituality means essentially ritual agriculture, ritual animal husbandry, and the activities on the part of the shamans of healing through harmonizing humans with the non-human world via the other-than-human beings. The world is alive and populated with sacred beings such as plants, water in its many forms (rivers, lakes, springs, rain, frost, hail, etc.), the earth, the stars and other heavenly bodies, the mountains, and so on. Among these are also found the Christian God, Jesus Christ, Mary, and many saints. But as a shaman explained to me during a ritual I participated in, after he had recited a very Catholic-sounding prayer, God is the sun, Mary is Pachamama (the earth), and Jesus is the moon. Although such exegeses diverge greatly among shamans and others, what they all share is that these Christian figures are not located in a “supernatural” realm beyond the pacha. Andean ritual activity could be characterized as the mutuality between the human collectivity and the other-than-human collectivity; very specifically, the doing of ayni between and among these collectivities. The other-than-human world is sacred and it nurtures humans; in reciprocity, humans nurture all the beings of the pacha as well as know how to let themselves be nurtured by these beings. This is a process that requires humans to act collectively, in solidarity and in mutuality among themselves, for only thus can the nurturing of the human collectivity by the beings of the pacha be received and reciprocated. In other words, Yarqa Aspiy shows us that the precise orchestration of human action can only be understood in terms of efficacious reciprocating action toward, in this case, the water, whose saint’s day it is. The language of nurturance (crianza in Spanish) captures what Marcela underlines as being the most important thing, namely the feelings humans have for the beings of the pacha. The state’s and developmentalists’ language of “the management of natural resources” is eminently inappropriate in such a context. Such language reflects an ontological rift between the human collectivity and the non-human and other-than-human one, and also captures the hierarchical and non-reciprocal nature of relations between these collectivities.

2. QUISPILLACTINOS CONVERSE WITH THE SPIRIT OF THE WATER

Yarqa Aspiy takes place on September 7, inaugurating the planting season.7 All the families of the territory of Quispillacta gather in the town the day before. Very early on the morning of the 7th, around 5 AM, all the traditional authorities—husband-wife pairs—as well as the elected official authorities gather in the municipal building where they talk about the water, how the

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water nurtures all the people, and how the people in return must nurture the water. This mutual nurturance between the people and the water is enacted on a grand scale during the festival. Cleaning the irrigation channels is nurturing (in Spanish, criar) to the water by enabling it to travel. When the water is able to travel, it is then able to reach all of the community’s fields and thus make the crops grow, which in turn nurtures the community. It is the men who do the arduous work of cleaning the channels, and it is the women who prepare the food that enables the men to work. At one point, some of the women even become the running water and run fast and freely. At the end, all the young men and women dance together in pairs along the channels, spiraling like water eddies. Women sing the “passion of the water,” becoming its voice. Some folks are in charge of making everyone happy, the water as well as the runas (people), by performing funny skits. Without laughter, the water and the people would become sad and tired, the water would not reach the fields, and nurturance would not happen. And of course, after the cleaning is done, everyone feasts.

YARQA ASPIY During the month of September irrigation water becomes the most beloved, pampered being as well as the central deity . . . For certain anthropologists, the festival of Yarqa Aspiy is . . . “a cultural presence that has not yet vanished but is in a slow process of disappearance” (Condori, 1987). However, this is not true. Yarqa Aspiy is more than a festive communal activity; it is all of Andean life in a dense form, making visible the relationships between all the members of the Andean world. Humans, water, seeds, stars, etc. all participate in the festival in order to fully re-initiate life and make it bloom after a period of rest.8

June to August, the three months prior to Yarqa Aspiy, are the cold winter months in the High Andes, and are a period of almost no agricultural activities. The cattle have been brought down from the high puna region to the lower quechua region, and people dedicate themselves to bartering products from one ecological level to another, to building and fixing their houses, and to weddings. Yarqa Aspiy marks the beginning of the season’s large-scale agricultural activity. Humans do ayni with the water: humans prepare the path of the water and the water makes it possible to plant. The water is both a living being and one who gives life (Grillo, 1991), and because of that it requires care and love; one aspect of this mode of caring or nurturing is to prepare the path so that it may travel without complaints and help to plant the corn. Don Julian Nuñez, from the barrio of Puncupata, says the following about the festival: “Yarqa Aspiy is work, getting tired in the cleaning of the channels and

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above all it is joy . . .” We can then define Yarqa Aspiy as the festival of work and joy; joy being the abundance of food served by the Alvaceres/Alvaceras, Hatun Alcalde/ Alcaldeza and the Regidores/Regidoras. Yarqa Aspiy is first of all the cleaning of the irrigation channels, the ones that are very old and have always been there; they are from the grandparents of our grandparents, as Don Alfonso Galindo of the barrio of Pampamarca told us. These canals continue today to be maintained by the communities through communal work done by the communities of all the 12 barrios of the community. The cleaning begins early in the morning and lasts until about 3 in the afternoon; each work party cleans about two kilometers of canal. All the communities arrive early in the morning and gather in the plaza of the town of Quispillacta. From there they go in many work groups to the assigned segment of canal that belongs to their barrio, carrying their hoes and shovels and most of all with great enthusiasm and joy so as to make the work seem lesser and lighter. One comes to the communal work with one’s best clothes or with new clothes. All decorate their hats with the wild matawayta flowers brought from the high mountains by the Sallqa Alcalde . . . All participate in the cleaning: youths, children, adults and even elders . . . In this world-view, water is nurtured just like another person and like a person it also has its saint’s day on the 7th of September of each agricultural year, which marks the beginning of the corn planting in the quechua zone.9

Yarqa in the Quechua language means canal and aspiy means cleaning and/ or making a furrow. The authorities in charge of Yarqa Aspiy are the ones chosen on the first of January for the duration of the year. They are the ones who are in charge of all the rituals of the community as well as of various communal tasks for any given year. The authorities are always husband-wife pairs. Bachelors are ineligible as are widows and widowers or divorced or separated persons. To be chosen as an authority is spoken of as pasar un cargo, which can be translated as “taking on a responsibility for a (year’s) time.” These cargos rotate, and everyone in the community is expected to fill this responsibility at least once in a lifetime. The highest authorities are those who have already “passed” all the other cargos and who are exemplary members of the community, good agriculturalists, of good moral character, and living in harmony with their families. These people are referred to as the traditional authorities, for they are chosen by the community according to an ancient pattern. In addition to the traditional authorities, there are also the “official, elected authorities.” These are individuals—as opposed to the husband-wife pairs—and are typically male. Their election fulfills a requirement of the state, which does not recognize the traditional authorities. They are primarily in charge of the relationship between the community and the exterior, including various institutions of the state, public health and development projects, the university’s extension program, as well as foreign projects.

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AUTHORITIES AND THEIR RESPONSIBILITIES

The traditional authorities are collectively referred to as the varayoqs and they are as follows: The Hatun Alcalde and the Mama Alcaldeza

Those two, the husband-wife pair, have passed through all the other cargos and are called father and mother by all. They are in charge of both feeding and teaching the seven Alvaceres/Alvaceras couples that work for them during the whole year. The feeding is not daily, but takes place during festival times. They teach them how to be good chacareros (nurturers of the chacra). The Mama Alcaldeza also teaches the Alvaceras how to be good cooks, how to wash clothes, spin, and take care of the children. The Alvaceras/Alvaceres are supposed to present themselves in the house of the Hatun Alcalde/ Alcaldesa around 4 AM when there is work to do. If they fail in this or in any other duties, they receive the lash (five for the men, three for the women). This way they learn how to become responsible, moral communities. During their year of tenure, the Alvaceres/Alvaceras thus learn also how to become elder authorities, how “to shepherd” the community, as it is said. Two Pairs of Regidores and Regidoras

These are two couples that already have several children and have passed one or preferably two other cargos. They work with the Hatun Alcalde/ Alcaldeza. They also have the responsibility of feeding and teaching the seven Alvaceres/Alvaceras couples that work for them for the whole year of the cargo. The Campo Alcalde and Alcaldeza

This is a mature couple in charge of looking after the chacras from planting until harvesting. They are responsible for seeing that no animals enter the fields while crops are in them. The Sallqa Alcalde and Mama Sallqa Alcaldeza

Their responsibility is the herds of the community. They must count the animals twice a year, are in charge of the festival of branding the cattle, monitor the health of the cattle and take care of their illnesses, and appoint

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the shepherds. They also are in charge of visiting all the households in the community and seeing to their cleanliness and orderliness. When this is found wanting, they give out five lashes to men and three to women in punishment.

Fourteen Couples of Alvaceres and Alvaceras

These are recently married couples that generally do not yet have children. Seven of these couples work for the Hatun Alcalde and Alcaldeza and seven for the two couples of Regidores/Regidoras. They chose whom they will work with: the Hatun Alcalde/Alcaldeza or the two Regidores/Regidoras couples.

Six Couples of Ministros/Ministras

These six couples work for the Campo Alcalde/Alcaldeza, and they are recently married couples.

OFFERINGS AND ASKING PERMISSION

It falls to the Sallqa Alcalde and his wife to gather a species of wildflower from the puna zone, above 4800 meters altitude. It is an arduous task, taking two days by horse just to reach the place where these sacred flowers are found. They must gather flowers to adorn the hats of each and every comunero (some 5000 persons) during the festival. The task takes one whole week to accomplish, but these flowers are extremely important; without them, the festival would be sad. According to Lorenzo Nuñez, these flowers are the spirits of the water, and they sacralize the whole ritual. The night before the festival, the Campo Alcalde and Alcaldeza prepare the pago (the offering) for the water, gathering sacred coca leaves, fruits, white and red carnations, liquor, and many other things. They meet with their Ministros and the two waqrapukus, who blow on curled horn trumpets around 10 PM and, after having set out the various items in the offering on a mesa (altar), they hold a vigil. In this vigil, they ask permission of the water to start the communal work. Then, just before the light of dawn, the Campo Alcalde and whoever wants to accompany him walk in darkness upstream to where the river water feeds the irrigation channels. There they offer the pago or offering to the source of water, and then bury it nearby under a rock.

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Meanwhile, in the predawn, all the authorities go to the church to ask permission of God and the saints carrying three crosses, which they then bring to the municipal building. There the senior authorities kneel in front of the elected official authorities and ask them permission to carry out the cleaning of the irrigation channels. They all converse about how the water nurtures the community and how the community must nurture the water in return, in mutuality, in ayni. The conversation also bears on how everyone must behave during the festival, how not to become excessively drunk. A little drunkenness is a good thing, though—a sign of joy at the heart of the festival. By the time this conversation is happening, all the communities have arrived and crowd the plaza, with the men carrying their hoes and shovels for the work of cleaning the canals. At that moment, all the authorities, traditional and elected, place their hats on the table in the municipal building and the Alvaceres/Alvaceras of the Sallqa Alcalde/Alcaldeza place the sacred matawayta flowers brought from the puna in the high mountains on all the hats in the form of a cross. The remaining flowers are distributed to the people outside who place them on their own hats. The moment is extremely sacred. Once sacralized by the matawayta flowers, everyone walks to a small chapel higher up, close to the irrigated fields. One of the crosses brought from the church is left there, and all the official elected authorities kneel in front of the traditional elder authorities (varayoqs) asking them permission for the festival, just as the traditional authorities had asked their permission earlier. The voices of the Mama Alcaldeza and the two Regidoras can be heard singing the “passion of the water” to the sound of the waqrapukus’ horns. Here is a brief excerpt to give a sense of the songs10: Crystalline water, dark water Don’t carry me away Don’t push me. Muddy river, blood-red river Where will you reach? Where do you have to reach? You have to reach all the way. Do what you have to do. Where you are going, There I go too. Where the muddy river goes There goes the crystalline river, There I go with you At the moment when some of the men are carrying the remaining two crosses to some of the barrios, the Mama Alcaldeza steals away, running toward her house. When the Alvaceras realize that she has left, they all run

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after her: they are the water flowing, running in the channels. The energy with which they run is the energy of the water running when it is released in the cleansed channels. Meanwhile, the compadres of the elder authorities offer bowls of chicha to all the authorities. The moment has arrived: fortified, all the men go to the irrigation channels to clean them. The women go to prepare the food that has been brought from the chacras of the parents and relatives of the Alvaceras. These parents and their relatives are the parents-in-law of the Alvaceres (husbands of the Alvaceras) and are their awras (in-laws). When the work of cleaning the channel is done in the mid-afternoon, everyone gathers in a cleared field near the irrigated lands to feast.

THE ANTICS OF THE INVISIONES

While the men work cleaning the channels, a group of men impersonating various characters and accompanied by musicians walk from work-group to work-group, entertaining people at work as well as while they feast after the work is done. I was fortunate to see a video that Magdalena made of Yarqa Aspiy, and I confess that I laughed so hard at the antics of one of these groups that tears were running down my face. The topics of those skits refer to historical events that have deeply affected the community. In the video that I saw, a pair of men impersonated a Catholic priest and his sacristan, parodying the mass and performing mock weddings and baptisms. The priest, holding an upside-down comic strip, chanted in mock solemn tones a hilarious imitation of Latin while liberally sprinkling people with a bunch of twigs he kept dipping in a pot containing urine (as I was told) in mock benediction, shoving people to make them kneel. Meanwhile, the sacristan wildly swung an incense holder with burning dung, smoking everyone out. I found their exaggerated gestures, tones of voice, clownish frocks and other antics hilarious. I simply assumed that this parody was the Quispillactinos’ revenge for the sordid and brutal history of “extirpation of idolatry.” However, to my surprise, when I voiced this opinion everyone present seemed bemused by my interpretation and insisted that there was no animosity whatsoever against the Catholic religion in this, and that it was simply meant to make people laugh. I was told that people insisted on having the priest marry them and baptize their children, and that the whole community came out devoutly and in force to celebrate the community’s saint’s day, officiated by a Catholic priest. Another skit was acted by a group of men dressed up as people from the lowlands (the Amazonian region), wearing feather headdresses and beads. These people were called the chunchos. With them was another group of

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men whose faces were painted black and who held wooden machetes. They mock fought with each other, and the black faces pretended to try to disembowel and slice the throats of the chunchos. Those with the black faces were after the chunchos’ fat because it was said that the Catholic priests needed this fat to smear on church bells so that they would sound better. After all the food has been eaten, and the entertaining skits, called invisiones have finished, the younger men and women hold hands and run along the cleared channels where the water is running fast, singing. At intervals, they pause and form muyunas (eddies) echoing the movements of the water. Everyone returns to their barrios, the men playing guitars and the women singing along with the laughing, rippling water. In perusing a volume such as John Grim’s Indigenous Traditions and Ecology, in which many of the contributors are indigenous intellectuals and activists from around the world, the ubiquity of the notion of gift exchange between the other-than-human collectivities and the human collectivity is particularly striking.11 If we add peasant societies where such gift exchanges between humans and other-than-humans are also the rule, these seem to characterize all but the map of modernity, and cover some two-thirds of the world population.12 The earth, forests, oceans, rivers, and sky give humans sustenance and humans reciprocate not only with gratitude, but also with material gifts or offerings.

3. A NEW NON-RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY

In this final section of the chapter, I return to the genesis of our modern worldview in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Western Europe, focusing on the issue of certainty and how it was resolved during these turbulent centuries. I once more discuss René Descartes and Robert Boyle, but this time concentrate on the problem of certainty and how Boyle resolved it with his experimental method. In his book Cosmopolis, Stephen Toulmin gives us the context of Descartes’ life.13 Toulmin focuses mostly on the conflict between Protestants and Catholics, and in particular on Henry IV’s assassination and the Thirty Years’ War, both of which touched Descartes’ life directly. It is, however, also vital to include in this context the attack on occult Renaissance philosophy and popular magic, and their successful erasure through the witch-hunts. Descartes’ dualistic and mechanical philosophy was the antithesis of that of the hylozoists, and it was clear by his time that the nondualistic hylozoism was doomed. Descartes built his philosophy on the epistemological terrain that the two warring Protestant and Catholic factions had in common. This common

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terrain was the realm of natural causes that could be explained by the use of reason, a terrain brought into Europe by the Arabic and Jewish translations of Aristotle in the thirteenth century. This terrain was separate from the world of signs for both Catholics and Protestants, albeit in different ways. For the Catholics, the world of signs was one in which the power of the saints resided in certain objects or places, that is, in the world itself. For the Protestants, the world of signs referred only to human linguistic metaphors, products of the mind. The success of the new mechanistic dualistic philosophy was in great part due to the fact that this philosophy did not challenge either Protestant or Catholic doctrines. According to the Finnish philosopher Georg von Wright (who succeeded to Wittgenstein’s chair at Cambridge University), with this move “[t]he new science [became] a welcome ally in fighting heresies and exorcising the inferior ghosts, leaving the one superghost, the Christian Trinitarian God, sovereign ruler of the universe.”14 In the maelstrom of the early seventeenth century, escaping the wrath of the inquisition and escaping from the deadlock between the two warring factions of Christianity were not only epistemological moves, but also survival tactics. These moves were eminently political, and as argued by Toulmin, consciously undertaken to restore the fractured certainty and unity without which Europe could not imagine itself. It remained for Robert Boyle to render operational and institutionalize this philosophy. To do so, Boyle had to clearly and decisively distance himself from his alchemical past, which he did through several moves. First, he made the laboratory a public space; for occult philosophers, it had been a secret, private space. In this public space, Boyle devised the method of public witnessing, inspired by courtroom procedures, so as to establish through consensus what had happened in the experiment. This was the foundation upon which he would build his method: the matter of fact (what later became known as the scientific fact). Both the suspicion of occultism and the skepticism of reliance on the fallible senses were addressed by having several reliable people witness the experiments; Boyle’s “modest witness” had to be a gentleman of good reputation, which meant that he could not be suspected of occult leanings.15 The modesty of the witness referred to his self-effacing manner and his restraint. In the laboratory, talk of religion and politics was strictly out of bounds as were ad hominem, or personal criticisms. The aim was to eliminate human bias, whether due to politics, religion, or the senses. The modest witness could not be a woman since her modesty was of the body rather than of the mind.16 David Noble points out that in addition to women being associated with a derided “enthusiasm,” their associations with heresy dated back to earlier links with the Cathars, whom the church exterminated in

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the thirteenth century. Such an association had resurfaced with the witches and the enthusiast movements in which women were highly visible. Thus, the flight from heresy by the men of science was also a flight from women.17 The first woman to gain entrance into the Royal Society, founded in London in 1660 as its first scientific institution, did so only in 1945. Francis Bacon, an alchemist and natural philosopher, had already advocated the use of instruments to question nature. By taking these instruments for questioning nature out of the study of the alchemist and into the public laboratory, Boyle effectively removed the experimenter from the equation. No longer was the manipulation of matter also a refinement of the philosopher’s soul. The divide between the human observer and questioner of nature and the non-human world was thereby operationalized. Broadly, then, Boyle employed three “technologies”: first a material one, namely the use of a machine, the air-pump, to produce facts; second, a social one, namely the kinds of people the modest witnesses could or could not be; and third, a literary one that made known the findings to non-witnesses, or the style of writing which today we call the “objective” style.18 The goal of all three technologies was to establish a method that would be a perfect “mirror of nature,” bypassing men’s unreliable and trouble-making opinions and senses. Through this method, certain knowledge could be established in a manner that totally separated it from the religious and political sphere where conflicts raged. Boyle not only separated his science from religion and politics, but also from philosophy. Here again he operationalized the extreme dualism and materialism of Descartes. This method was exceptionally fruitful and was much later imitated by those who inquired into human affairs; they eventually called themselves the “social sciences,” highlighting their template. The arts and humanities remained separate since the three technologies did not apply to them. The fields of knowledge were thus fragmented in the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, a new method that gave birth to the sundering of life and knowledge. The defeat of occult philosophy, popular magic, and other Renaissance movements—in short, the defeat of the hylozoist worldview—by both the Catholics and the Protestants severely constrained the parameters within which science was to finally establish itself. In other words, the non-dualist hylozoism of Renaissance movements, as well as their pluralism, became non-options for what David Noble has called the Scientific Restoration.19 When the church encountered the native societies of the Americas, it declared all their spirits to be “demons” or “devils.” This appellation recognized the agency of these beings of the non-human world, but declared it to be an evil one. To this day, when the Kichwa-Lamistas of the Peruvian High Amazon refer to their spirits in Spanish, they call them diablos or

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demonios, devils or demons, their consecrated appellation in the Spanish language.20 The church, however, seems to have implicitly recognized the potency and agency of most of the native sacred places by erecting churches or installing crosses in or on them. For the church, only the specific nature of that agency and its church authorization was relevant. From the church’s point of view, it transformed the malevolent local spirits into beneficent Catholic ones. For the Protestants, however, meaning no longer disclosed itself directly from the world to humans. The non-human world became voiceless and without agency, whether good or bad, foreclosing the possibility of reciprocity between the non-human world and the human world. Intentionality, consciousness, and agency became the exclusive attributes of humans. By the time of Boyle in the second half of the seventeenth century, the crumbling of the manorial system was all but accomplished, and the economic transformations, due to the processes discussed in chapter 3, had been going on for approximately some four centuries. As is well known, Protestantism found an echo with traders, merchants, and artisans, in addition to capturing a portion of the aristocratic and in some instances the royal elites as well. I would argue that there is a kinship between the way economic value replaced the concrete processes of exchanging and making things, discussed in chapters 2 and 3, and the disappearance of the spirit of the gift, signaling a growing notion that things have no agency, volition, or consciousness. Value is akin to the new meaning of the symbol given by Protestants, namely something that is entirely the product of a human thought process. Placing an economic value on merchandise or a transaction, or placing meaning on an act or object, are actions that are undertaken exclusively by humans’ mental activity. Today in Quispillacta, Marcela refers to the orientation of those communities who do continue to perform the rituals as “catholics.” Indeed, as the description of Yarqa Aspiy makes clear, the festival is done in a Catholic idiom. The evangelical sects—varieties of Protestantism—which have swamped the Andes in the last several decades are, in contrast, totally opposed to the performance of such rituals and strictly forbid them to its adherents, threatening them with hell and damnation. The new scientific language did not infringe on the domain of religion, a domain that especially since the advent of modernity has been concerned with the “supernatural,” or what is beyond the visible world as well as in individuals’ personal and private relations with that invisible world. In other words, the language of science is a secular one. From a Eurocentric perspective, Andean practices and languages confound fundamental ontological separations such as that between the natural and the supernatural, between

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the natural and the cultural, between ritual/spirituality and technology/ science, between the divine and the human, between the secular and the sacred, between the public and the private, and probably many more. Such violations of boundaries—boundaries erected at the price of many bloody civil and international wars in Europe—cannot but be perceived as a threat to the power that such boundaries yield to those who wield them: power over the non-human and over those humans seen as being closer to “nature.” These ontological separations in Western Europe were associated with the ideology of progress. Francis Bacon in the late sixteenth century confidently wrote of the new knowledge bringing us mastery over the natural world, which in turn would free humans from the bonds of necessity, a theme that has echoed down the centuries to our own day. That new knowledge has indeed produced awesome powers; but at the dawn of the third millennium and at the close of one of its most violent and destructive centuries, the growing questioning of the assumptions undergirding modernity is pregnant with new possibilities, new ways of seeing, and the opening of other choices. The view that the universal truth of science should progressively enlighten the whole world, reaching into its furthermost corners, was forcefully articulated by one of Marcela’s university professors who in anger exclaimed: “How is it possible that at the end of the twentieth century you talk about native knowledge and ritual?” The underlying assumption here concerns an evolutionary-like inevitability to the spread of Western (classical Cartesian/Newtonian) science and technology, and to modernization in general. Marcela told me how often she and the others in ABA have been called “backwardists,” accused of wanting “to go backward.” Thus history is conceived of as an inclined plane, a rectilinear process, and all those resisting the inevitability of it are simply unrealistic dreamers and romantics, doomed to the dustbin of history.

End Notes: Nurturing the Spirits Back to Life

We are now in a better position to understand the collusion of opinions concerning indigenous spirituality or ritual performances among a variety of scientifically committed developmentalists—liberal, conservative, or radical, local or foreign—and a variety of Christian denominations. Indigenous ritual performances violate the separation between matter and spirit, between the utilitarian and the spiritual, boundaries that in the last instance guarantee as well as legitimate modern arrangements in the political, religious, and epistemological spheres.

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It is in fact difficult to find appropriate words in modern English that adequately capture these practices. Both the words “spirituality” and “ritual” in their current connotations somehow imply that such practices belong to a non-utilitarian, non-materially-efficacious domain. It is precisely such connotations that lead to the conviction that indigenous ritual performances are inefficacious in the material world. Such a view is born out of the assumption that indigenous and other traditional people practice their kind of ritual agriculture and other utilitarian activities out of an irrational attachment to their customs and their traditions, since these are intertwined with what is perceived as “religious” or “spiritual” (in the accepted sense of the word) “beliefs.” With the advent of secularization—both political and epistemological—in Europe, whatever contravened scientific understanding of reality became increasingly relegated to a private domain of religious or metaphysical beliefs. This has led to a division between perception and knowledge on the one hand, and belief bearing on a supernatural or metaphysical reality on the other. The response to communal rituals such as Yarqa Aspiy are in the last instance based on the threat they pose, if taken seriously, to the legitimacy of the separation between religion, the state, and science. These rituals challenge as well the denied but implicit collusion between the state and science. And for these purposes it does not matter whether the state is liberal, conservative, dictatorial, or socialist/communist. The beings of the pacha, such as the human beings, the water in its many forms, the earth, the plants, the animals, the stars, the sun, and the moon, all share the same world. Some among them, on the model of the human authorities who take turns with communal responsibilities, the cargos, have greater authority. These beings are concrete, tangible, and can be experienced just like the water is experienced during Yarqa Aspiy. When new beings are introduced into the pacha, such as the Christian God, Jesus Christ, Mary, and saints, these also become identified with tangible beings, losing their supernatural status. The deities or spirits are not “believed in,” people experience, converse and reciprocate with them. The people do ayni with them, nurture them just as they are nurtured by them, as is shown in the case of Yarqa Aspiy. As the French anthropologist Pouillon remarks about the Dangaleat of Chad, the world for them, like for native Andeans, is not divided between a this-worldly reality and an other-worldly reality. The spirits are experienced rather than believed in, and this experience is above all a local one. Such spirits do not necessarily exist in the very same way everywhere. He concludes that “[w]hile the encounter with otherness relativizes Christian belief in an otherwordly absolute, it confirms the Dangaleat experience of the world, which is relative from the beginning and so cannot be disturbed by diversity.”21 Diversity, as we have seen, has been Europe’s nemesis.

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The secularization of the new knowledge transposed other-worldly absolutism into a this-worldly or material absolutism or certainty, so much so that Newton’s true opinions concerning the spiritual nature of gravity could not be revealed without endangering his reputation and even his life, and thus remained secret until 1930.22 This accounts for the attitudes of the agronomists who came with development projects in Quispillacta, and for Marcela’s professors’ reactions. In this case, there is absolutely no doubt in the minds of agronomists that native Andean agricultural practices are backward because they are not scientific and, furthermore, because they are encumbered by rituals which do nothing to improve the technical efficacy of their agriculture. The cement-lined irrigation channels in Quispillacta can be taken as cases in point. As Gualberto reported, the water in the cement-lined channels reaches only half as far as the water in the earthen channels. It no longer reaches the place where the cattle drink, and it does not reach many chacras. I asked Marcela and Magdalena how they understood this. They told me that it is due to the fact that the engineers who designed these lined channels did not know how to nurture the water. They did not know how to do ayni with the water, and they did not respect the water by asking permission of it and making offerings to it. They added that they did not tell this to the engineers because it would have been a waste of time: they would not have understood or taken it seriously. What they did tell them is that due to the drastic reduction in vegetation that can grow on the borders of the cement-lined channels, the water surface is more exposed to the sun, causing a much higher degree of evaporation than in the shaded unlined channels. Respecting and nurturing the water means that its ways of traveling are intimately known. At the place where the water is diverted to enter the irrigation channels, the stream is surrounded by lush vegetation; in fact, the whole stream is thus surrounded. These plants are the water’s companions, its familiars. The water and the plants have an affinity for each other, and the ancient earthen channels are made lovingly, respectfully, so that the water will not feel abandoned by its companion plants and will travel happily. The villagers’ actions are ever mindful of the respect due to the beings of the pacha. The earth, the water, the sun, the seeds, and all that is needed to provide the sustenance for life is respected. Offerings made to the water in the night before Yarqa Aspiy, and asking the water’s permission to undertake cleaning the channels, are ways that the Quispillactinos recognize their own need for irrigation water for their own sustenance, while at the same time recognizing that their needs and desires, their will, cannot be imposed unilaterally on the world. The water has its

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own needs and requirements, has an integrity which must be respected. All the other beings of the pacha have their own needs and requirements; all depend mutually on each other, and this includes the humans. To ignore this is to go against the very requirements of life. The next chapter inquires into how agronomists like Marcela’s professors are trained in Peru’s premier Faculty of Agronomy, reproducing the attitudes reported by her in this chapter.



CHAPTER 6

Supersessionism and the Teaching of Agronomy in Peru The troubling features of high modernism derive, for the most part, from its claim to speak about the improvement of the human condition with the authority of scientific knowledge and its tendency to disallow other competing sources of judgment. —James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed1

INTRODUCTION

When I first learned sometime in the 1990s that native Andean/Amazonian agriculture was not taught in a single one of Peru’s twenty-four National Faculties of Agronomy, I was stunned. How was this possible? The Andes— where contemporary native and many mestizo farmers are the heirs to an agriculture independently invented over eight thousand years ago, where the greatest level of diversity in cultivated crops in the world can be found, where archaeological evidence gives ample proof of extremely sophisticated systems of irrigation, terracing, and storage, many of which are still in use today—are not your average agricultural backwaters.2 However, as soon as I began poring over the history of the creation of the first school of agronomy in Peru, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2002, I realized how naïve my first reaction had been. Nevertheless, the question revealed that the issue of state sponsored knowledge, in this case agricultural knowledge, could not be disentangled from issues of cultural, political, and economic power. At stake is not only whose knowledge is recognized as knowledge— the native farmers or the experts—but also the political effects of drawing boundaries between different fields of knowledge.

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Agronomy is the scientific study of agriculture; work on the ritual agriculture of native and poor mestizo farmers who have adopted this indigenous form of ritual agriculture is left to the social sciences like anthropology, sociology, political science, and economics. The effect of this specialization and compartmentalization of fields of knowledge is that very little from the social sciences penetrates into the scientific study of agronomy. But the problem runs deeper: all of these disciplines overwhelmingly share the assumption of progress, more specifically, the assumption that the sciences are the vectors of progress.3 More specifically still, they share the view that native ritual agricultural knowledge is pre-scientific and in need of advancing to a scientific status. These disciplines tend to see native agricultural practices not as expressing an alternative way of being in and seeing the world that increases the bio-cultural diversity of the planet, but rather as practices placed further back on an upward-sloping time line. However glorious the achievements of pre-Columbian Andean agriculture might have been, however much the contemporary native farmers may carry forward that inheritance, with the advent of scientific agriculture in the nineteenth century all other forms of agriculture were immediately transmuted into “traditional,” “backward,” or “subsistence” agriculture. All of these non-scientific modes of agriculture suddenly belong to the past, even though they are currently practiced by the vast majority of contemporary native and mestizo farmers in the Andean and Amazonian regions and beyond. The only way in which contemporary native and peasant modes of agriculture can be classified as belonging to the past is by stating that these farmers are ignorant of the “advances” in agricultural knowledge provided by science. Obviously, it is neither the people nor their practices that are classified as being in the past, but rather their knowledge and beliefs, which have been superseded by the discoveries of science. Supersessionism is deeply anchored in the Western psyche. It has been a core teaching of the Roman Catholic Church for most of the past two thousand years, a teaching that was shared by the dissident Protestant churches when they separated from the mother church.4 With the advent of modern science, the pattern persists. That which is superseded has migrated from pagan and Jewish doctrines and beliefs, to a vast and variegated array of practices, beliefs, and knowledge all gathered into a medley of things inevitably and irrevocably destined to the dustbin of history by the magic of labeling them “pre-scientific.” We have come a very long way from religious supersessionism. Interreligious dialogue, ecumenism, various papal apologies, scholarly studies of the flourishing of religious diversity, and the scholarly field of Comparative Religion all attest to this. Such efforts, though, as we now are all too

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painfully aware, have taken place alongside and simultaneously with the emergence of an opposite religious tendency captured most frequently by the term “fundamentalism.” Fundamentalism has many aspects and is generally recognized as emerging not much earlier than the nineteenth century in various religious traditions and parts of the world. In the accepted sense of the term, namely a desire for a return to basics, to the fundamentals of the tradition, it is recognized by some scholars to be a modern phenomenon.5 If, however, we extend the meaning to refer to extreme intolerance of other religious traditions, meaning by this the impulse to destroy these other traditions, pre-modern and early modern Christianity cannot be seen as innocent of such an impulse. We only have to mention the words Crusades, or Cathars, or witch hunts, or pogroms, or extirpation of idolatry to be reminded of this dark history. The triumph of James Carroll’s epic journey through two thousand years of the history between the Roman Catholic Church and the Jews is his success in making visible that the need to teach, to persuade, to change, and when this fails, to eradicate the other’s ways, is not an epiphenomenon depending on the vagaries of history, but constitutive of the tradition at its birth.6 Supersessionism refers to the Roman Catholic Church doctrine stating that the event of Christ has superseded, or rendered obsolete and mistaken, traditions antedating that event, such as Judaism and what the Christians call “paganism,” which was in turn named “animism” by a later secular tradition. From a Christian point of view, members of these traditions stand in need of instruction. They have not had the opportunity to hear the Good News, which must be brought to them for their own good and salvation. Historically, things have turned sour only when these innocent folks have refused to accept the Truth that Saves and stubbornly, irrationally, stuck to their ways. Matters are otherwise with those people who are fully aware of the new message, but adhere to a different faith that post-dates the advent of Christianity, like Muslims or Cathars. By and large, Science as a secular pursuit has been perceived as wholly outside all of these religious dramas. However, as argued in chapters 2, 3, and 5, Science was in fact constituted in response to them. The terms supersessionism, religious dialogue, pluralism, and fundamentalism have overwhelmingly been separated from the realm of Science. Times seem ripe for the treatment of Science—classical Cartesian-Newtonian modern Western Science—as the religion of modernity, and thereby for the recognition of all of these currents within it.7 As argued in chapter 4, with the advent of the quantum revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century, classical Newtonian physics was relativized.

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Previous chapters have attempted to make visible the embededness of Science in the Western cultural and historical tradition. We can now hope for the appearance of a new scholarly field of Comparative Scientific Traditions and the opening of Science to a new horizon of diversity of scientific or knowledge traditions. Re-embedding Science in the soil that gave birth to it enables one to see more clearly the continuities between Science and religion.

1. SUPERSESSIONISM AND THE CREATION OF THE FIRST SCHOOL OF AGRICULTURE IN PERU

In the centenary history of the first school of agronomy in Peru, we learn that it was created by executive order of the president of the Peruvian Republic, Lopez de Romaña, in 1901.8 With the unanimous backing of his ministers, the president decreed that a school of higher learning should be created that would, after a five years course of study, confer the degree of Engineer in Agronomy. The new institution would belong to the newly created Ministry of Improvement (or, in Spanish, fomento). This term was replaced after Truman’s famous 1949 speech by the word “development.”9 Furthermore, Lopez de Romaña decreed that such a university would be staffed by professors chosen from among the graduates of a prestigious faculty of agronomy in Europe. This decision made sense since schools of agronomy at the university level had only begun to be formed in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. They appeared somewhat later in the United States—toward the last two decades of that century—and nowhere else in the world. Agronomy was then a very young science. The university selected was the Institute of Agriculture in Gembloux, Belgium, and the first professor, who became the new school’s first director, arrived from Belgium in 1901. The first National Peruvian School of Agronomy opened its door to its first class in 1902. The centenary history of the School of Agronomy in Lima, which later became known as the National Agrarian University La Molina, was written by one of its former chancellors, Orlando Olcese.10 It begins with a history of the emergence of agronomy as a science. After a brief survey of pre-Columbian agriculture, the situation is summarized in the following manner: Little or nothing was known of the physiological mechanisms of plants and animals, of the chemical processes in cells, or of the laws that determine inheritance. Neither was there any knowledge of microbiology. Similarly, the relationship between plants, soil and the environment was not known. As a consequence, there did not exist in

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the world centers of learning that based their teaching of agriculture in scientific knowledge . . . The world was really stuck in an agriculture that had been practiced in Europe nearly without change for almost 2000 years . . .11 In taking a retrospective look at agriculture in the world, we can conclude that the systems of agricultural production that were used until the [end of the] 18th century, were practically those that had been inherited from the times of the Romans . . .12 On the coast had been created holdings of relatively large sizes, a result of the plundering of the lands of the ayllus of the natives and their accumulation in the hands of the most influential Spaniards . . . The work was done by a combination of natives and black slaves . . . The productivity of crops on the coast was higher because on the one hand the lands were very fertile and on the other hand, irrigation was practiced. But as agriculture, it was not efficient. What was cultivated was mostly subsistence crops for supplying food to the urban centers and the consumption of the rural sector.13

Speaking of an earlier attempt to create a school of agriculture at the level of elementary and middle school, rather than a university-level school, this history explains the failure of that institution as follows: An elementary-middle level school would produce graduates with a rudimentary knowledge of the agriculture practiced during those times in the country. Namely this would be a school that was not oriented to forming experts of a high level who would change national agriculture and make it progress . . .14 Agriculture, in order to make dramatic progress and in order to revolutionize agricultural practices and bring about an extraordinary development of the productivity of crops needed to create experts and scientists of the highest level.15

These passages reveal that the historical event that rendered all previous agricultural practices obsolete and backward is the advent of scientific agriculture in Europe at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. Agricultural practices of the pre-scientific, pre-Columbian past receive praise as having reached a level superior to agriculture in all other parts of the world. Those aspects selected as deserving praise include the egalitarian distribution of land, the irrigation and soil conservation infrastructures, the systems of composting, the systems of storage of agricultural products, and the statistical systems of accounting of the quipus, which registered quantities on knotted strings of different thickness and colors.16 Here, the pre-Columbian culture plays a role parallel to that of the ancient pre-Christian Israelites who wrote what became part of Christian scriptures, the Old Testament. The pre-Columbian Andean peoples were the best agriculturists in the world for their times, and they bequeathed the present-day Peruvians treasures such as the tomato, the potato, quinoa,

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oca, olluco, mashwa, kañiwa, sweet potato, and chilies among other major cultivars. As we all know, some of these, in particular the potato, have been credited with nothing less than saving European civilization.17 The attitude toward the more contemporary Andean farmer is altogether different and betrays a supersessionist gaze. It can be glimpsed in what Olcese’s history tells us about guano, manure produced by various sea birds that had accumulated on rocky islands off the Peruvian Pacific coast: [T]he generalized and systematic use [of guano] that took place during the Inca period had disappeared during the colonial period. Instead, its use by agriculturists, mostly native ones, continued on a small scale in the South of the Republic where its value as a fertilizer was known since pre-colonial times.18

The text continues with the tale of von Humboldt’s trip to South America in 1802 where, while in Peru, he observed some farmers using guano and was deeply impressed with the devotion those farmers showed it. He is said to have brought some guano back to a university in Germany for its analysis. Some maintain that von Humboldt’s writing inspired the father of scientific agriculture, Baron Justus von Liebig, in his study of fertilizers.19 In any case, it was von Liebig who first analyzed guano from the Peruvian islands in 1840 and “concluded that it was an excellent fertilizer. In that way the doors of world agriculture began to open for the use of this extremely valuable resource.”20 Olcese’s history, however, immediately adds that perhaps it was also the doings of some Peruvian entrepreneurs who in 1839 succeeded in interesting British growers in the miraculous fertilizer. The story of the guano boom in Peru from 1840 to 1870 makes for lively reading. So does the story of the United States and guano. Guano very quickly came to fetch such high prices on the international market that other sources were looked for and found off the coast of South Africa as well as in Patagonia. However, Peruvian guano remained far superior as a fertilizer and continued to fetch outrageous prices. United States farmers complained to their government, and at least one scholar has located the birth of United States imperialism in the government collusion with entrepreneurs, under pressure from United States farmers, to find stable and cheaper sources of this “black gold.”21 The Peruvian government quickly established its monopoly on guano and the windfall allowed it to pay off its external debt. The story ends badly, though, with the exhaustion of the sources of guano in 1870.22 This brought about a severe fiscal crisis, insurrections, and revolutions, and even contributed to the debacle of the War of the Pacific, where Peru lost badly to Chile. Von Liebig’s own account of the virtues of guano leaves out entirely the Peruvian native farmer and von Humboldt’s account. In his letters on

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agriculture written to Maximillian II, king of Bavaria, von Liebig puts it in the following words: Guided by a careful study of the elements of the food of plants, science, in the year 1840, pointed out to the agriculturist guano as one of the most infallible means of raising the produce of corn and flesh, and most urgently recommended its application. Before 1840, guano had never been used as manure on a European field . . . It is true guano would have found its way to Europe even without the recommendation of science . . . [b]ut guano would probably not have made its way so speedily . . . [T]he prediction of its utility had been simply based on the results of its chemical analysis . . .23

Von Humboldt’s own account is strikingly different. Von Humboldt traveled as a natural historian and an early ethnographer, whereas von Liebig worked mightily at establishing agronomy as a science. Here are some extracts of von Humboldt’s report on Peruvian guano in 1802: The name Huano (the Europeans always confuse hua with gua, and u with o) means, in the language of the Incas, fertilizer with which one fertilizes. The verb used for signifying fertilizing is huanunchani. The aboriginal inhabitants of Peru all believe that guano is deposited by birds; only many of the Spaniards doubt this . . . In Arica, all along the sea shore, large storage buildings were built where the guano was stored. If one considers that since the 12th or at least the 13th century, there existed the custom of fertilizing the fields with guano, and that many millions of cubic feet were deposited in the sandy parts of Peru (since the feasibility of agriculture all along the coast depends only on this valuable material) . . . one is amazed by the many centuries, or by the mass of birds that was necessary to accumulate such deposits of guano . . . Under the regime of the Incas, guano was considered an important object of the fiscal economy. It was forbidden, under penalty of death, to kill the birds in these islands. Each island had its guardian and each one was assigned to a certain province, given that from Arica all the way to Chancay, along a distance of some 200 nautical miles, they fertilize only with guano (Garcilaso, Historia de los Incas, Vol. I, p.134). It is understandable that due to this care, guano was able to increase considerably. All this good order is altered. Now it is exploited in all seasons of the year.24

Von Humboldt not only gives us a positive account of native use of this miraculous fertilizer during his time, but also mentions its long preColumbian history and gives as a reference one of the main chroniclers of the sixteenth century, Garcilaso de la Vega El Inca, so called due to his mixed parentage and known to posterity as simply El Inca. In contrast, the mention of guano in Olcese’s centenary history follows closely von Liebig, making the most superficial and vague reference to its use by native farmers.

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The two accounts show a sharp contrast between the Peruvian government’s unregulated exploitation of guano leading to its exhaustion, and the well-regulated use of it by the Incas. This is what Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca, writes concerning guano: Along the entire coast, from Arequipa to Taracapa, which is a distance of over two hundred and fifty leagues, the only fertilizer used was that of seagulls [guano], unbelievably numerous flocks of which were to be found there. These birds, both large and small, live on islands not far from the shore, which are covered with such quantities of their droppings that they look like mountains of snow. Under Inca rule, the birds were protected by very severe laws: it was forbidden to kill a single one of them, or even to approach their islands during the laying season, under penalty of death. The development of the valuable wealth of these islands was also subject to regulation, each one being assigned, according to its size, to one, two, or three specified provinces . . . Lastly it should be stated that no one could take more fertilizer than was needed for his own fields from the island or plot allotted to him, under penalty of severe punishment for wastefulness.25

El Inca continues to describe the organization of various kinds of tribute for the Sun God and his virgin brides, the acllas, the Inca, and the warriors. These tributes were stored in specially built granaries and warehouses located in each village and along roads. Agriculture was the main activity of the people, imbued with the greatest of dignity and spiritual meaning. El Inca gives us a vivid picture of the ritual first plowing done by the royal Incas themselves in Cuzco, “which served as a model for all similar festivals celebrated elsewhere.”26 The edition I consulted includes the drawings of Guaman Poma de Ayala, a sixteenth-century codex where the depiction of the festival and activities for the month of August seem to represent this first plowing, with the men plowing with the chaquitaclla (Andean hoe) and the women kneeling to turn the clods of earth.27 All-purpose money had not made its appearance: “Nothing could be bought or sold in their kingdom, where there was neither gold nor silver coin, and these metals could not be considered otherwise than superfluous, since they could not be eaten, nor could one buy anything to eat with them.”28 Both tribute as well as redistributions from the Inca to his subjects in the form of wool, cotton, shoes, and food in times of need was all in kind. I will return to the significance of the absence of all-purpose money and contrast it to the rise of this phenomenon in medieval Europe and its significance for the development of modern mathematics. For now, this invocation of ritual agriculture during the Inca Empire will be our introduction to contemporary native agriculture in Peru.

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There are two histories of the National Agronomy University in Peru, one written for its fiftieth anniversary and the other for its hundredth.29 Both make it abundantly clear that this institution was created for the national agricultural and cattle industry. That is, it was explicitly set up to train experts to improve the productivity of the large agricultural and cattle-raising enterprises in the country. These histories simply do not mention smallholder agriculture, which is native and smallholder mestizo agriculture, except to say that agriculture in general was in a primitive state of backwardness at the time of the school’s founding in 1902. The emphasis of the curriculum is overwhelmingly on industrial agriculture and cash crops such as sugar cane, rice, cotton, cattle ranching, and the wool industry. Other crops such as potato, corn, fruit trees, as well as other specifically Andean cultivars were included, but did not form the center of gravity of the school. Interview material from graduates of La Molina such as Julio Valladolid, Eduardo Grillo, Mario Tapia, Carlos Samaniega, Ulysses Moreno, Hector Garayar, Salomon Helfgot, and Carmen Felipe Morales among others, make it abundantly clear that this was a training to produce scientific experts (ingenieros) who would work in the agricultural and cattle industry for the national interest. The State continued to create other institutions requested by La Molina, such as the Experimental Station at La Molina in 1927, the Agricultural Bank in 1931, and finally the creation of the Ministry of Agriculture.30 Native agriculture was invisible, so much so that Julio Valladolid, a graduate of La Molina from native Andean parentage, while working in the experimental field station associated with his University in Huamanga, said the following: For 17 years we did research in Apachaca [the University Faculty of Agronomy’s experimental station] . . . I did experiments on fertilizers, the control of diseases, planting density—the whole package of data of those crops. The idea was to use technology to improve the Andean cultivars . . . You know, when I look back on it, there is something very strange about my work then. Apachaca is surrounded by Andean peasant communities, but I did not know it. I had eyes only for my experimental crops. Peasants from the local communities were hired by the University and worked on the experimental crops. But I only saw them as workers there to follow my orders. I did go out to the fields of the peasants in the area but only to evaluate the incidence and rate and severity of the diseases of the crops. I would only ask about planting season and the varieties that they had planted. Despite the fact that I was standing there in their fields, the peasants were invisible to me . . . The project was designed to include all elements of the system and their interactions. In this model everything had to be quantified. The hope was that everything could be put into a grand mathematical formula . . . I began to realize that it wasn’t through the path of science that we would help the peasants and that we had to find another way.31

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The leftist military government of General Velasco in the late ’60s and early ’70s did implement a remarkable land-reform program, which in fact made official what was happening on the ground, namely the take-over or buying of landed estates by the peasants themselves. The agrarian reform legally did away with the large landholdings called the haciendas, formed by Spaniards from lands either taken from or abandoned by native farmers due to the demographic collapse that followed soon after the conquest. The Velasco government replaced the hacienda system with a cooperative scheme meant to be run efficiently, using scientific principles, by the native people themselves in order to increase productivity. These cooperatives hired experts who had graduated from La Molina. Today, however, most if not all of these cooperative schemes have disintegrated and the lands have reverted to the native people. One of the major reasons for the collapse of the cooperative project of the 1970s was that the land was not owned by the farmers themselves or by native communities, but rather by the government.32 The number of officially recorded indigenous communities has risen dramatically in Peru since the land reform of the Velasco government and its promulgation of laws for the creation of native communities in 1974 (la ley de comunidades nativas), with native farmers opting to organize themselves along ancestral cultural lines.33 Today the native farmers own about 20% of the agricultural and cattle-raising lands, the rest being in the hands of large enterprises. On this 20% of the country’s agricultural land, the farmers grow about 60% of the produce that is sold in the country’s markets.34 The kind of agriculture practiced by smallholder native and mestizo farmers is a ritual agriculture. The Peruvian non-governmental organization PRATEC, founded in 1987 by dropouts from university, government, and agricultural research institutions as well as development projects, has dedicated itself to documenting this ritual agriculture as it is lived today. Two of the three original members of PRATEC were graduates of La Molina: Julio Valladolid and the late Eduardo Grillo. In 1990, PRATEC started teaching a graduate course called “Andean Culture and Agriculture.” In the next chapter, I record through the voices of two of the early native cofounders of this course, Nestor and Walter Chambi, why and how this course came about, and the effect it has had on its graduates. I will mention one more example that will allow me to make a connection with the colonial past and illustrate the legacy of church supersessionism among the native peasantry. The region is that of the Kichwa-Lamistas in the High Amazon. Legend has it that this native group is said to be descendants of the Chancas who rebelled and fought against the Incas, were defeated in the fifteenth century, and fled to the area. The High Amazon is a region of tropical cloud and rain forest, and the traditional agriculture practiced there is itinerant: the forest is cleared by partially cutting down the trees

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and then burning the clearing to both clean it of pests and plant growth, and to enrich the soil as the ashes provide needed phosphate. Crops are then sown, and the field is allowed to return to forest after a few years of use, the number of years being dependent on the fertility of the cleared soil. The trees left standing regenerate, and the fruit trees planted become part of the new forest growth. Field and forest form a single unit. The example comes from a book published by PRATEC, reproducing a child’s drawing of the spirits of particular species of trees.35 One of the spirits is labeled shapingo by the child, its Quechua name, and the other is identified as a diablo, a Spanish word meaning “devil.” The animal drawn is labeled “venado,” a deer. This picture recapitulates a long history dating back to the colonial period when both the church and the colonial government instituted the laws of “extirpation of idolatry” and identified all of the native spirits or deities as aspects of the Devil, calling them diablos. For the contemporary Kichwa-Lamistas, the word diablo, (devil) seemingly has no pejorative connotations; it is simply another word for “spirit.” This is how Fray Jerónimo de Loayza, the first Archbishop of Lima, instructs those who will carry out the laws in his Instrucciones, dictated in 1545, thirteen years after the arrival of the conquistadores in Peru: trabajarán de saber si ay hechizeros o yndios que tengan comunicación con el Demonio, y hablen con él, y asy mesmo los alumbren desta ceguedad y torpeza, haciéndoles entender la gran ofensa a Dios en tener comunicación con el Demonio y creer mentiras que les dize [ . . . ] y también los amenazarán con la pena y castigo que se hará en los que lo hizieron. they will work in order to find out if there are sorcerers or Indians who have communication with the Devil, and speak with him, and in that way enlighten them [and remove] this blindness and stupidity, making them understand the great offence toward God in having communication with the devil and in believing the lies that he tells them . . . and also they will threaten with the pain and punishment that will be meted out to those who have done so.36

All the native deities and spirits are labeled demonios, or demons. According to Henrique Urbano, all of the Spaniards who arrived in the “Indies” knew these laws, which in any case were almost natural for them due to the affirmation of the “Truth” of Catholicism. The norm was to destroy temples and bring down everything that smelled of idolatrous practices. Over the ruins of the religious pre-Hispanic past one had to build Catholicism.37 As PRATEC’s many publications have amply documented, ritual preHispanic agriculture and animal husbandry are alive and well in Peru today, having survived some of the most truly horrendous attempts at destruction as well as a demographic collapse that killed nine out of ten persons.38

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Today, the native population in Peru is more or less back to its original size at the time of Conquest, and the practice of native Andean and Amazonian agriculture is evident in many parts of the country. This agriculture is not represented in the curriculum of La Molina or in any of the approximately twenty-four provincial Faculties of Agronomy that began to be created in the 1960s.39 Recently, a course in agro-ecology has been added to the curriculum at La Molina in response to the growing loss of biodiversity in cultivated plants brought about by industrial agriculture, which practices monoculture and the heavy use of agrochemicals and has many other negative environmental side effects. I was told that the inclusion of such a course was also in response to student demands.40 Agro-ecology recognizes that many indigenous practices are extremely valuable and beneficial, and advocates adopting these and combining them with aspects of scientific agriculture.41 The Peruvian sociologist Antonio Rengifo and I had the opportunity to visit the agro-ecological farm of an agronomist couple, both of them trained at La Molina. Both of them had acquired their PhDs abroad in Gembloux, Belgium, and in the United States respectively. At their farm, they practice and teach an organic form of agriculture using intercropping, rotation, biological pest control, the creation of an organic fertilizer made from the manure of guinea pigs raised on the premises, and also produce methane gas for energy from this manure. It is an inspiring experiment. One thing, however, that is totally absent is any form of ritual practices, in spite of the fact that the husband comes from an Andean farming family in the highlands. From a whole in which the ritual and spiritual are not separated out from the material, agro-ecology extracts the material part. Such a method is, of course, deeply rooted in the modern scientific paradigm. One of the father figures in anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski, in his book Coral Gardens and Their Magic on the agriculture of the Trobriand Islanders in Melanesia, understood magic as “pre-scientific” or as a “false science.”42 The term “magic” is used to refer to action designed to affect the external material world.43 Malinowski argued that there were two clearly separate parts to these practices: one that actually affected the material aspect of the endeavor, namely the “efficacious technical action,” and another that was purely symbolic. For example, making a hole in the ground and putting a seed in it belongs to the former, while uttering an invocation to some spirit while doing this belongs to the latter. Ever since Malinowski’s writings in the early part of the twentieth century, this separation between a materially effective action and a “merely” symbolic or metaphoric action has become canonical in anthropology. Anthropologist Stanley Tambiah has questioned the association of magic with false science and along with it the differentiation between magic

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and ritual, the former referring to actions intended to affect the “external material world” and the latter referring to actions of supplicating a deity.44 Tambiah critiques the view of either magic or ritual as false science with his performative theory of ritual. In this theory, Tambiah basically states that the symbolic part does have an effect, but that effect is on the humans, not on the non-humans and/or other-than-humans. Although Tambiah gets rid of the label of false science for such indigenous agricultural practices as well as the distinction between magic and ritual, both of them crucial and much needed shifts, he nevertheless maintains the ontological division between an external material reality and an internal psychological and/or mental human reality.45 In other words, Tambiah maintains a matter/mind dualism.

2. SCIENTIFIC SUPERSESSIONISM

There exists a persistent mythology concerning science: Science courageously challenged the church and suffered for this effort to free the human powers of inquiry from the authority of the church. The trial of Galileo has the status of a founding myth for modernity. However, if we shift our gaze to the relationship between Science and those forms of spirituality that see spirits in the world, that consider the world to be alive, active, and full of beings that interact and communicate with humans, a very different image emerges. Copernicus published his treatise only two years before Archbishop Loayza dictated his Instrucciones for the extirpation of idolatry in New Spain. The church would have probably tried Copernicus, but he died that year in 1543. However, the church did condemn his findings of a sun-centered universe that contradicted sacred scriptures. He had sacrilegiously penetrated into a sacred, divine, and perfect heavenly realm and dared find it otherwise than God and the church had decreed it to be. The church had a monopoly of knowledge and truth, and Copernicus and all the other early natural philosophers that accompanied and followed him were challenging this monopoly. But the early natural philosophers were not the only ones to challenge church teachings. As discussed in previous chapters, Renaissance hylozoism in its many elite and popular manifestations became the abject other for both Catholics and Protestants. At the same time in the Americas, the animism of the native peoples similarly incurred the condemnation of church and state. The inquisition was battling a varied array of heretics in both Europe and in the Americas. The Reformation of the early sixteenth century added to the violent brew of those times. The church could not use the supersessionist argument against the Protestants, making the conflict between the two an unresolvable confrontation between two versions of what both saw as the One Indivisible

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Truth. With the end of the Thirty Years’ War and the signing of the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the new centrally administered Nation State was born. Science almost immediately became the indispensable tool to administer this new political entity. As James Scott has argued in Seeing Like a State, the standardization and centralization of a diverse on-the-ground reality required the rationalizing and simplifying tools of the new Science.46 But Science’s triumph was also due to the fact that its new cosmology did not challenge Christian cosmology in the way the varied Renaissance hylozoist movements did. Protestants and Catholics alike could adhere to the view of the universe as a Great Machine, Great Clockwork, a view that positively required a Great Maker and a Great Winder of the Clock. This mechanistic view of the world became an ally against the heterodox Renaissance hylozoists. Although with his invention of the scientific experimental method Robert Boyle created a domain where talk of religion was forbidden, this did not mean that the natural philosophers banished God from their worldview. The secularism that Boyle instituted was narrowly methodological and was designed to avoid conflict in the laboratory. In his 1660 New Experiments, Boyle established a new game and new rules of the game for establishing truth. But with all that, it was inconceivable at the time that God should be excluded from the new cosmology. The new Science continued the supersessionism of both Catholic and Protestant Christianity, its very cosmology entailing it. It was this that made Science a powerful ally against the heterodox Renaissance hylozoists and various radical political movements known in England as “sectaries,” as well as against the indigenous spirituality of New Spain. The hylozoists, European and Amerindians alike, were not simply theologically wrong; they became “factually” wrong. Science, on grounds different from those of Christianity, had proven this hylozoism to be a mistaken view: it was less a matter of not having the privilege of having heard the Good News, and more an issue of being ignorant about the discoveries of Science. Still, the new Science academies were just as intolerant as the Inquisition, although the form if its violence was, as Foucault phrases it in Discipline and Punish in particular, capillary rather than overt.47 In The Edge of Objectivity, historian of science Charles Gillispie characterizes Science in words worthy of Constantine himself and of his sword pitilessly drawn against both Jews and Pagans.48 Speaking of Goethe’s alternative science in which, in Gillispie’s words, the world is subjectively penetrated rather than objectively analyzed, he has this to say: “Such survivals are relics of the perpetual attempt to escape the consequences of western man’s most characteristic and successful campaign [i.e., Science], which must doom to conquer.”49

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Although the genealogy of Gillispie’s military trope can be made to stretch all the way back to Constantine, its more immediate ancestors are to be found in words like those of Frederic Farrar, one of the more vocal and aggressive advocates of nineteenth-century European colonialism and global hegemony. Farrar argued that scientific and technological backwardness explained and justified the decimation or, as happened in the case of the Tasmanians of Australia or of the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, the “utter extermination of primitive peoples [who had not] added one iota to the knowledge, the arts, the science, the manufactures, the morals of the world.”50 In the early 1800s, the Frenchman Julien Virey articulated a view that has had remarkable staying powers. According to him, all non-Western peoples had not risen above the level of savages in terms of their ability to control and exploit the forces of nature. They were ignorant of the workings of nature; in a word, they were pre-scientific and subject to nature’s every whim. A softened version of this latter view informed the teachings I received in graduate school in the 1970s. With the quantum revolution and more specifically with Neils Bohr’s notion of quantum wholeness and of complementarity as argued in chapter 4, the door is open for a reconsideration of what has come to be taken as reality tout court. This modernist reality is made up of two non-overlapping parts: one internal to the human mind, consciousness or reason; and the other wholly external to it, purely material and unconscious. The boundary between these two realms is strictly policed allowing transgressions only for certain well-delimited purposes such as poetry and the arts, or children’s play. Such transgressions are examples of a “participative consciousness,” to use Tambiah’s phrase. Outside of these, a participative consciousness is more likely to become the hallmark of pathology or of “the primitive.”51 Here I would like to make a very brief addendum to what was discussed in chapter 4 by referring to two additional quantum experiments. These two are simply so outrageously contrary to rational and logical expectations that I cannot refrain from mentioning them to further illustrate how shockingly quantum physics destabilizes classical Science. In brief, one runs as follows: the experiment is designed with a light source that emits one photon at a time. The photon is directed onto a beam splitter that should divide the photon in two and send the halves in two different directions. However, the receiving screen records not two halves or two things, but one indivisible thing that goes in two directions, delivering for the classical scientist a logical as well as an ontological impossibility. In a different type of experiment, called the delayed choice experiment, the outcome depends on the choice made by the experimenter. Such experiments challenge the conceptual framework we modern cosmopolitans

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bring to everything. The experiments show that all depends on the apparatus used and the questions asked.52 The great divide between reality “out there” and reality “in here” seems to have been a construction. Quantum physics may be seen as an ally in the effort to re-entangle self and world.

3. OF BANKS AND MATHEMATICS

As was argued in chapters 2 and 3, Boyle’s mid-seventeenth-century articulation of the experimental scientific method was an effective response to the irresolvable religious conflicts of the times. Theology and metaphysics were proving incapable of delivering the certainty to which European civilization had become totally addicted.53 The emptying out of all meaning and agency from the world also necessitated a revolution in mathematics, which preceded the enclosure movement. This revolution in mathematics made possible the development of the kinds of markets that pushed proto-entrepreneurs in Europe to enclose common lands and privatize agricultural lands. According to historian of mathematics Richard Hadden, the homogenization and mechanization of nature could only take place after a previous profound transformation in mathematics.54 For the classical Greek philosophers and for Aristotle in particular, “the world of nature remains a realm of quality, genus, and difference. In his ethics, Aristotle compares incommensurables, but not in his physics.”55 Aristotle’s (and Archimedes’) physics is entirely theoretical; there are neither measurements nor a theory of real numbers, but rather a theory of proportions. Those things related as proportions are always commensurable: force to force, time to time, distance to distance. This prevents the construction of formulas or algorithms for calculating force, time, and distance.56 The development of geometry and mathematics in classical Greece led to Aristotle’s view that numbers and magnitude are different “things.” Magnitude is infinitely divisible, while the unit of calculation is discrete and indivisible. The unit of calculation cannot be a real number since numbers refer to multiplicity. According to Hadden, the birth of modern mathematics—which historians seem to place as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—happens when one, the unit, becomes a real number; that is, it becomes itself infinitely divisible. When one becomes a real number, number and magnitude are reunited, allowing the measurability of unlike quantities, of incommensurables. Velocity, for example, is neither time nor distance. It is something that can be precisely represented only through a mathematical revolution in which a ratio between unlike things such as time and distance can be produced.

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According to Hadden, Tartaglia and Galileo read the works of the ancient Greek authors through the lenses of modern notions of commensurability, namely number, magnitude, and the nature of physical bodies.57 The abacus and the Andean quipus are closer to the ancient Greek reality that numbers are derived from sense objects, from counting multitudes. On the quipus, the knots stood for quantities of some good, and the position of the knots on the rope indicated magnitudes: 10s, 100s, 1000s, 10,000s, and occasionally 100,000s. The color of the rope indicated the kind of goods counted.58 For one to become a real number, writing was necessary but not sufficient. It also required an entire socio-economic context. This context was the rise of trade and commerce, and with it the appearance of double-entry bookkeeping as well as all-purpose money, or money that could buy any kind of merchandise, including human labor. In other words, totally incommensurable things such as wool, or land, or labor could all be compared and measured with the use of a common denominator, money.59 The early modern mathematicians were merchants and accountants such as Leonardo Fibonacci whose book Liber abaci in 1202 “marks the earliest of modern European mathematics.”60 Hadden writes: By the thirteenth century, money changers were becoming merchants of exchange. By 1338 there were eight banking houses in Florence and by 1400 there were 120. The firm became an entity in itself whose property could be measured by calculating the legally established gains and losses in goods measured by money.61

With the rise of commerce and long distance trade, value as the quantity of money a thing was worth eventually came to be seen as an intrinsic property of things themselves. The shift between the pre-Columbian quipus on the one hand, and double-entry bookkeeping and modern mathematics on the other, is also a shift from a world in which things are primarily for use to a world where their importance as exchange values becomes dominant. The ability of quantifying incommensurables made it possible to confuse an abstract value with the thing itself. This is what Marx famously called “the fetishism of commodities.” This momentous transformation is what makes possible to see the world as homogeneous, quantifiable, and abstract—in other words what accounts for the emergence of the mathematical representation of the non-human world. In Saving the Appearances, Owen Barfield qualifies all modern Western representations as mechano-morphic.62 Furthermore, he characterizes the equation between these representations and reality by the term “idolatry.” Marx’s fetishism and Barfield’s idolatry turn the tables on nineteenthcentury apologists for colonialism such as Farrar and Virey.

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The terms “fetishism” and “idolatry” refer to the fact that abstract quantities and mechanical measurable forms come to function in the market economy and the centralized Nation State as concrete rather than abstract realities. When the commodity in question is labor, the abstract quantity “labor force” is one of the factors of production, and as such must enter into all economic calculations, regardless of whether they are of private enterprises or the State. In order to achieve the “efficiency” and “profitability” of private enterprise, or “revenue” with respect to the State, “labor force” must be quantified. In order to be quantified, it has to be abstracted into a homogeneous continuous magnitude. This renders irrelevant concrete persons, their lives, their communities. Bodies become disciplined and functional to the market. We can recall how for Julio Valladolid, the native workers on the experimental station of Apachaca were invisible. Valladolid was not an entrepreneur; he was a scientist working for a State university. However, the mental, perceptual, and ethical habits of the entrepreneur and the State university scientist are arguably similar since they arise from the same abstracting, quantifying source. In the name of the transcendent truth and reality of “efficiency,” it is not only possible to destroy local communities, but it becomes ethically justified.63 The term “natural resources” is one used in economic calculations, which take the mathematical representation for reality, mistaking the map for the territory. We are confronted with a very extreme form of anthropocentrism in which the only reality is what the human mind can abstract and quantify. The quantum revolution happened early in the twentieth century. Its implications, outside of physics, were resisted with the twentieth-century rise of logical positivism.64 However, the unprecedented violence and horror that the century has seen finally may have played a role in breaching the defenses that the old order erected with positivism. It is important to note, however, that the century has also spawned post-modernism, feminism, and science studies in particular. However, the institutions whose very form and function depend on the classical scientific cosmology are very much with us. Many would say that they are more powerful than ever and are now no longer a Western phenomenon, but a global, cosmopolitan one. The Renaissance northern Italian firms and banks have, ever since the thirteenth century, grown exponentially, becoming the powerful transnational financial institutions and multinational corporations of today. The Nation State is now everywhere, as is the modern university. But one could look at all this in another way: the contemporary manifestations may be the end of the road for the shopworn and frayed modernist paradigm, to recall Wolfgang Sachs’s words.

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Jane Jacobs, in her epoch-making 1961 study of the effect of urban planning on the diversity and life of city neighborhoods, parallels the writings of Jose Sabogal, a Peruvian scholar and writer.65 Both authors vividly and unforgettably capture processes that started in the Europe of the Renaissance and continually pushed—and continue to push— beyond its borders with trade, conquest, and economic globalization. Sabogal graduated from La Molina at the end of World War II, and after a brief time working for an hacienda, fled and never returned to agronomy. In the following passage, Sabogal writes about the Moche valley of the northwest coast of Peru, where the transformation of the sugarcane plantations into efficient enterprises have wreaked havoc with the life and diversity of the native communities. Sabogal credits his discovery of an alternative reality to a visit he made as a young student to the native community of Moche: Esos blancoides dirigentes, entre los cuales habría de desenvolverse mi futuro, consideraban a Moche como irracional. Por esto los agrónomos más destacados de aquellos tiempos intentaban demonstrarnos el absurdo económico (y en consequencia social) de la persistencia de estas campiñas, improductivas, diferentes y retrógradas. Y es en aquel momento vesperal que Moche me revela la posibilidad de una “realidad” alternante . . . este atardecer festivo encajaba en el continuum, en el cual actuaba un todo humano, a la vez palpable e intangible. Su autenticidad nos había capturado por un instante, y habíamos evadido aquella programación lineal minuciosa que procuraban instilar dentro de mi mente de muchacho no del todo socializado, augurándome un futuro minuciosamente cuantificado. These “whitish” leaders among whom my future would have to evolve considered Moche to be irrational. Because of this the most renowned agronomists in those times tried to demonstrate to us the economic absurdity (and consequently social absurdity) of the persistence of these rural areas, unproductive, different, and retrograde. And it was in that twilight moment that Moche reveals to me the possibility of an alternate “reality” . . . this festive dusk fitted in the continuum in which a whole humanity was active, at once palpable and intangible. Its authenticity had captivated us for an instant, and we had eluded that linear and detailed programming that they succeeded in instilling in my mind, that of a not altogether socialized adolescent, preparing for me a minutely quantified future.66

Final Remarks: Science and Ethics

The Italian word for reason, ragione, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries referred to a firm’s statement of account, and derivatives of the term referred to bookkeeping and its practitioners.67 The modern meaning of

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rationality is thus rooted in accounting and trade, which gave rise to modern mathematics. The science of agronomy condemns all forms of agriculture different from itself to the past, namely to a superseded “pre-scientific” past. Speaking in such terms implies that these pre-scientific folk must be brought up to speed or, as the hallowed phrase has it, “brought into the twenty-first century.” Such pre-scientific ritual agriculture is not sinful or ethically bad, it is simply mistaken, wrong. Science, as we are all aware, defines itself as ethically neutral. It does not pronounce on the good (or the beautiful), only on the true. In Einstein’s words, “The concepts which [the scientific way of thinking] uses to build up its coherent systems do not express emotions. For the scientist, there is only ‘being,’ but no wishing, no valuing, no good, no evil—in short, no goal.”68 We are, it would seem, very far indeed from the extirpation of idolatry. The term “objective” refers to both sides of the Great Divide: not only to the world out there, but also to particular aspects of the internal world of the scientist, and to the proper way of keeping the two worlds apart. In fact, the word “objective” or “objectivity” refers to a protocol of proper behavior in scientific inquiry. This protocol of proper behavior demands that scientists strictly refrain from leaking anything originating in the forbidden “in here” into the “out there” where the object of inquiry resides. However, the leaking or projecting of the inquirer’s subjectivity onto the object of study “out there” is considered not so much an ethical breach as an epistemological confusion. Given the ontological separation between the “in here” and the “out there,” mixing the two is epistemologically mistaken and confusing, leading to a required bracketing of one’s subjectivity—one’s emotions, intuitions, imaginations, desires, and so forth. From this, then, emerges the archetype of the cool, distant, detached, and equanimous scientist. An unmistakable Christian legacy can be identified here since the status of reason transcends the “in here” and ends up mysteriously corresponding to the “out there.” Reason is our “higher faculty,” while emotions are the passions arising from our embodied condition which, as Descartes taught us, we share with animals. They represent our “lower self.” I would like to highlight some of the ethical implications of this methodological protocol. The view of the self that the objectivist stance implies is one in which biases of various types are purely personal, individual. The self is posited as an isolatable unit. Collective or cultural biases that get sedimented into language and even into mathematics, as we have seen above, become very difficult to identify.69 This renders invisible the metaphorical nature of collective or cultural categories such as the viewing of persons as

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“objects” of study, or of the universe as being made up of discrete objects, or of things relating to each other in mechanistic and mathematical ways that can be measured. Equally difficult to bring into focus are the ethical entailments of such metaphors. One of the most damaging ethical entailments of such realist metaphors is that once the scientist has “the facts” and the objective truth has been established, all that remains to be done is to bring all others into conformity with this objective truth. There is no further need to engage in dialogue, to listen to a different point of view, to recognize the existence of other-thanhuman beings. Furthermore, the scientists need not question themselves or be reflexive since they did not project their subjectivity onto the facts. However, as philosopher/educator Parker Palmer points out, “We become manipulators when our knowledge leaves the inner self unexamined for it is there that the drive for dominance arises.”70 Palmer also captures something fundamental about objectivity: The Latin root of “objective” means “to put against, to oppose.” In German its literal translation is “standing-over-againstness.” This image uncovers another quality of modern knowledge: it puts us in an adversary relationship with each other and our world. We seek knowledge in order to resist chaos, to rearrange reality, or to alter the constructions others have made. We value knowledge that enables us to coerce the world into meeting our needs—no matter how much violence we must do.71

The late David Maybury-Lewis, a Harvard anthropologist who founded the organization Cultural Survival after he saw what had happened to the Xavante, the indigenous group in the Amazon he had studied twenty years earlier, has called the contemporary phase of development and globalization more destructive to indigenous peoples than the Conquest.72 Thus the image Science has constructed for itself of explaining natural phenomena and of ethical neutrality begins to look more like an illusion. As the discussion of Bohr’s complemenarity principle and Barad’s agential realism in chapter 4 argues, it is also a false one. The times seem to be ripe for devising a way of knowing in which accountability is built in. By realizing the illusory nature of the division between the “in here” and the “out there,” we can begin to see that the world is in us as we are of the world. Self and world are entangled. As quantum physicist Arthur Zajonc has poetically put it, “The light of the mind must flow into and marry with the light of nature to bring forth a world.”73



CHAPTER 7

Dancing with the Mountain in the Altiplano The Festival of the Ispallas They see no life When they look They see only objects. The world is a dead thing for them The trees and rivers are not alive. —Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony1

T

he impossibly rutted road to Conima on the eastern shore of Lake Titicaca seemed more like the bed of a mountain creek than a motorway. Busses full of native people, roofs piled with bundles big and small, navigated deep rocky pits with nonchalance. Walter Chambi, at the wheel of the pick-up truck, eyed my hand tightening on the passenger’s handle as we approached a blind curve on the thin edge of a steep cliff above the lake. The view almost made me forget the knots in the pit of my belly. I was simultaneously petrified and spellbound. “This is called the curve of the trafficker. You know why? This guy had escaped with a load of drugs and the police were chasing after him. Right here, in the curve, he chose to go straight, too late for the police to stop and they all plunged in the lake with their cars and all!” Walter roared with laughter at the terminal trick the man played on the cops and at his bravado in buying freedom with death. I could see the cars flying in the crisp air over the shimmering emerald water and shuddered visibly. “Don’t worry,

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Federica, the Achachillas [mountain deities] accompany me always when I drive. Isn’t that right, Nestor?” His brother reassured me, “Yes, nothing has ever happened to Chuymita with Walter driving. He calls on the Achachillas and they protect us.” The name “Chuymita” for the hefty, all-wheel-drive pick-up seemed incongruous to me. It is the diminutive of Chuyma, the name Nestor gave to the NGO he and two friends created in the late 1980s. Diminutives pop up in every other noun in the Aymarized Spanish of the place, trying to squeeze this language into the soft intimacy of an oral tongue. Words—sung, murmured or shouted by humans—are never the only meaningful utterances in the world of the Aymara. In the case of the black marks on the white field of pages, these draw the reader’s exclusive attention, muffling the sounds of the world into background noises that no longer speak to us. The aural, when it has not been usurped by the visual, envelops one from all sides, our words only one of the many signifying sounds of the world. Chuymita is much beloved and I was surprised to learn her age—16 years—for she looks resplendent, testimony to the loving care lavished on her. We were approaching a forested area, the first on our journey. So far the barren rocky slopes had been interrupted only by the green of the small patchwork fields, the chacras of the native people nestled in the coves, sometimes climbing up the terraced slopes. When we reached the trees I saw they were all eucalyptus, planted among stone-walled terraces. “What a crying shame! See how all these beautiful andenes [terraces], lovingly nurtured by the native people are being destroyed? These stone walls, who do you think made them? People: lovingly, patiently. And then they nurtured the soils, grew them, so they could plant their seeds and live.” Walter’s voice had grown serious. “Who planted the eucalyptus trees and why?” I asked him. “I wish I could say I had nothing to do with it. But the truth is I planted these damn eucalyptus trees for a good many years when I worked for the Ministry of Agriculture. I didn’t know any better then. That’s the way I was trained. I believed in the experts, I was an expert myself! The first agronomist in Conima to boot! We based our work on a whole system of maps produced by ONER—the National Office of Natural Resource Evaluation. These maps designated what the different areas of the country were good for. The greatest part of the Altiplano was determined to be only good for forestry and not for agriculture.” Turning toward Nestor I asked him, “Were you also involved in the forestry department before you dropped out and created Chuyma?” Nestor replied, “Yes. I also worked in the forestry department. This whole area was classified as a forestry one. Almost nothing was classified for agriculture. We clashed with many families here who had terraces on

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the slopes. Because on the maps they were designated for forestry, we felt authorized to plant these eucalyptus trees. That was an enormous mistake. But in those days, it didn’t even cross our minds that we were mistaken.” I could understand their remorse at destroying the beautiful andenes that made agriculture possible, but part of me clung to the notion that trees are inherently a good thing. “Nestor, was it destroying the andenes the thing you regret?” He explained, “Not only that. We were taught that those trees were going to conserve water. The experts had decided this region had to be returned to its original tropical climate. Our work had to follow all these postulates. But with the passage of time we saw that instead of making the region more humid, the eucalyptus trees were making it drier. Walter can tell you more, he was the regional director of the forestry department.” “So, Walter, let me hear your confession of sins.” “Well, Federica, you know one always thinks of one’s place, of helping one’s people. So we were trying to bring to Conima the largest quantity of trees. Never mind that the people did not want them. We just knew better, we were the experts. Unfortunately, the eucalyptus trees grew very fast there. The knowledge that you receive in forestry school does not tell you the streams are going to dry up, the rivers are going to dry up, you are going to ruin the andenes, you are going to ruin everything. They never tell you this. Absolutely never. So with the little knowledge that you have learned, that knowledge which fits other places, other realities, you apply it. What we have done is to ruin everything.” He gestures at the andenes covered with eucalyptus trees. “See all this? Before it was used for agriculture and they got good harvests here. Today they are good for nothing. We used to produce some 3 million saplings in nurseries here. Of these, about 95% were eucalyptus, 5% were pines and cypresses, and a few native species. We did this work just like any other professional would; not because we intended to harm the communities, not because we were bad people. The problem is that they have taught you in that way, and with great good will you go to help the people without even realizing that you are doing damage. Then later, much later you realize the atrocities that you have committed in the communities. Well all these things, they finally made me think hard. In January 1991, I quit the Ministry of Agriculture. Nestor had already established Chuyma Aru in 1988, so I joined it.” I had heard Nestor speak many times about the meaning of Chuyma Aru, the name he gave to his NGO, but always in the context of the courses we all participated in and contributed to for the past several years in Lima. I wanted to hear it again, in this landscape. Perhaps now it would open to me with greater depth the manifold meanings packed in those two Aymara words.

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“Nestor, could you tell me again what the meaning of Chuyma Aru is?” “Well, Federica, it’s really difficult to translate. Chuyma, perhaps the closest to it is something that is very intimate, that is deep inside one. Something like the inner heart or soul. Aru means “word.” So, in a way it’s about speaking about what is deeply inside of all of us. This is what we try to do: to speak of our culture from inside, deep inside. Find the words, make them heard.” Now these words took on a whole new dimension for me. The work Nestor and Walter had done in the 1970s and 1980s working in the Ministry of Agriculture and with development projects was like the ONER mapping of the altiplano: an imposition from outside, classifying and defining what was there or what should be there according to alien dictates. Like these maps, this was a view from above and outside, made according to “other realities,” as Walter had put it, ones that seemed to deliberately ignore what was already there. Echoing the conquistadores’ Terra Nullius, these were views in which there was no room for the spirits of the place. The very name Chuyma Aru declared in only two Aymara words their intention to start from the “inside” of Aymara speakers and give them voice. I had met Nestor and Walter in 1994 when I first came to lecture in the course the NGO PRATEC was teaching in Lima. PRATEC—the Spanish acronym for Andean Project for Peasant Technologies—and Chuyma Aru emerged at roughly the same time, around 1988, and for the same reasons. They have worked closely together ever since. PRATEC dedicated itself to a national graduate course whereas Chuyma Aru works regionally in the Altiplano. I have participated and lectured in the PRATEC course during ten years, between 1994 and 2004, regularly meeting with Nestor and Walter as well as with persons from other regional NGOs founded by graduates of the PRATEC course. There are now some twenty such regional NGOs, offshoots of the PRATEC course. Like Chuyma Aru, PRATEC is dedicated to giving voice to the local native reality in the dominant language and discursive forms, thereby placing the oral Aymara and Quechua culture on a par with the dominant national Spanish-speaking culture. This is an unprecedented occurrence on the Peruvian scene, something unheard of during the course of a university education, as Marcela Machaca so eloquently says in the narrative of her life in chapter 5. PRATEC arrived at this position through encountering experiences such as those of Walter, Nestor, and Marcela and her siblings. I was on this trip finally able to honor Nestor and Walter’s long-standing invitation to come and participate in the festival of the Ispallas in their birthplace of Conima on the eastern shore of Lake Titicaca in the Peruvian Altiplano. We were accompanied by three of the seven young persons working in Chuyma Aru, all of them graduates of the University of Puno. Wilson

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was Nestor’s son; Elizabeth, called Eli by all, was the daughter of Chuyma Aru’s administrator; and Arturo was a university buddy of theirs. I had met them briefly before and was looking forward to getting to know them better. They were returning to Conima from their monthly one-week stay in the main office in Puno. They worked and lived in Conima, located at some six to seven hours by car from Puno. The other younger members of Chuyma Aru worked in communities on the other side of the lake. Nestor and Walter traveled among all the communities and organized workshops, courses, and meetings in the main office. We had been following the lakeshore. The eastern shore of the lake was very different from the one on the western side. It was dotted with small villages in coves surrounded by green chacras on the flat lands and by andenes up the slopes, interrupted often by groves of eucalyptus trees. The village houses were surrounded by explosions of colors from flowers of all kinds. Some I knew, some were exotic: carnations, dahlias, gladiolas and the bright red cantuta bell-shaped flower, a national symbol of Peru. I was not disappointed. Everyone had told me how beautiful Conima was and they were right. The small town spilled down the slope with its balconied adobe houses surrounded by flowers, with the whole enveloped by a patchwork of flowering chacras. The potato chacras were blooming with a rainbow of colors from reds to blues to purples, according to the varieties. I was in the original home of the potato, the queen of the agricultural products, the much-beloved papa. It was the time of the hilling of the potatoes—the aporque—when the first new potatoes were ripe. The chacras were immaculate, with deep furrows between the high hilled rows of potatoes and not a weed in sight. It was the rainy summer season, and during the day the temperature climbed into the low 60s, though at night it plummeted close to freezing. It was decided that we would participate in the fiesta in the villages of Kukuraya and Mililaya farther south, very close to the Bolivian border. It was there that the natives danced up and down a mountain. Many of my friends in PRATEC had attended the festival in years past, and the way they reported their experiences made it evident I had to come there and participate in it. I knew it would be hard: I was not used to climbing mountains at an altitude of 14,000 feet let alone dancing my way up such mountains! On the morning of Thursday, February 1, Eli and I were slowly climbing up the mountain where the first offering was to take place on the main day of the festival. I was glad Nestor and Walter had sent us ahead. I was puffing hard halfway up the mountain. We had to go from 12,500 feet up to almost 14,000 feet, and I could hardly manage a slow progress often interrupted to catch my breath. There was no question of our dancing up the mountain with the natives and the musicians.

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I had suspected that Eli was pregnant when I had noticed the way she had stood up the day before. The way she had lifted herself off the floor, holding on to her haunches, betrayed her condition. She always wore a very ample jacket which made it hard to see her stomach. On one of our rests, I finally did ask her whether she was indeed pregnant. She assented and confirmed my suspicion that Wilson was the father and that they were a couple. “We only told our parents last month.” “And how did they receive the news?’ I queried. “Oh they are very happy. I worried because we Aymara women customarily don’t marry ‘til we are thirty and I am only twenty-seven. But our parents seem to be OK with this.” “So you are going to make Nestor a grandfather! How does he feel about that?” And so we chatted about how she and Wilson would adjust to life in Conima with a baby. “So you must be just four or five months along?” I ventured. “No, I’m due in three weeks.” I gasped. “What are you doing climbing up this mountain? With the first one it can often be early!” She smiled. “I am not worried. I am OK. I feel strong. But Nestor asked me to go with you and walk slowly.” “I should hope so!” I exclaimed. I thought of what Eli had told me the previous day. She had said that during the period of aporque, from January to March, Pachamama—the earth deity—was pregnant, pregnant with new life, the new potatoes, and other root crops growing in her womb. She had added that the T’alla, the wife of the Kawilto Marani, was pregnant then. In fact, during that time she is Pachamama. This couple is the authority in charge of the festival for the year, a responsibility that rotates among the married couples of the community. The last part of the climb was the most challenging. We had to leave the path and cut through the scrub vegetation and climb over old stone walls. The air was fragrant with the smell of muña, the wild mint growing everywhere between the rocks. It had given its name to the mountain, Muñapata. I picked a fistful and buried my nose in it. Eli said: “You know, Federica, this plant keeps the bugs away. We keep it in drawers with our clothes and the peasants line their storage bins with it. When the potatoes are stored in the phina, they cover them with muña and that way they keep fresh for the whole year.” I made a mental note, determined to find its equivalent at home and use it. Its aroma would bring me back here. Finally we reached the summit of Cerro Muñapata and sat on the rocks facing the lake. A silence made of wind and bird calls held us. The clouds shifted the shafts of sunlight on the surface of the lake. To our left, a black curtain of rain clouds was advancing threateningly, undulating slightly. Yes,

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the black ritual shawls—the alpaca wool phullo—we had taken with us for the ceremony wrapped our shoulders like the rain curtain wrapped the hills. That’s why they are black, we were told, the rain clouds. Just before reaching overhead, the black curtain made a sudden turn toward the lake. When it reached the water, we could hear the raindrops hitting the surface of the water. To the north, sunshine poured, illuminating a small island and the water nearby, brilliant turquoise shining amid the black water under the rain curtain. To the south, the peninsula of Aynacha Watasani where we had gone the day before was encircled by the pampa, the flat lands where the lower chacras spread themselves all the way to the edge of the water. The houses of the villages of Kukuraya and Mililaya dotted the slope rising from the pampa. The green of the chacras and the house gardens gave way farther up to the rocky grey soil of the slopes. The sky changed constantly, illuminating this bit of shoreline, then that patch of water or island. All enveloped in a windswept silence, unmarred by machine noise. Eli and I sat there for a long time, our gaze held by this landscape, hung in a warp of time. Slowly a memory emerged and then gave way to a shock of recognition. I had seen this very landscape before. I had seen it in a dream a year or two earlier. Exactly this landscape. I was flying in some round slow and silent contraption with large glass bay windows, looking down, the way I was looking down now. I had marveled at the ability of the people to cultivate in such an arid, rocky place. I had seen a few people working the land with ancient tools and was struck by the calm silence of the place, its aura of timelessness. Exactly the feeling this landscape breathed right now. I turned toward the east and noticed slightly below the summit a potato chacra in bloom. Its rows neatly hilled, the green leaves emerging from black earth. Where did this soil come from? I lifted my eyes and noticed that the next mountain, in fact all the slopes, were covered with a quilt of stone-delineated fields. The green of a chacra in use stood out here and there. A shepherd grazing a flock of llamas appeared below us and silently walked out of sight with the long-necked, big soft-eyed, elegant animals. Eli pointed out to me some ruins on the top of the next mountain. She said they were pre-Columbian and that many more were to be found all over the place. These were ancient fields, ancient agriculture. After all, Lake Titicaca was the birthplace of the ancestors of the Incas. They emerged from the water and the earth on the Islands of the Sun and the Moon not so far from here, to the south. It was easy in this place to remember that agriculture was born here almost ten thousand years ago. Eli pointed to the house of the T’alla and Kawilto Marani way at the bottom, where Nestor and Walter had joined the other natives. Wilson and Arturo had been delegated to go to a different community. The group was still gathered in the courtyard and showed no signs of getting started

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up the mountain. Eli and I fell into conversation. “How did you get involved with Chuyma Aru, Eli?” “Well, after graduating from university in anthropology, I looked for a job. They were advertising temporary positions in the Department of Health. They needed women who spoke Aymara to interview peasant women on their fertility history. I applied and got the job.” “What did you have to do?” “I had to speak with native women and ask them how many children they had, how many miscarriages, how many abortions. I also had to ask them about their contraceptive practices.” “That is quite sensitive work. Was it easy? Did the women open up to you?” “Well, actually, it was quite an experience for me. I found out many things. Most women did not want to talk about these things. I drew them out and discovered that they resented the Department of Health deeply.” “Why was that?” “I learned from the women that several years ago many of them went to the posta de salud [community health center] because they were told they would receive clothes for themselves and their children, food, and even money. Many of them went. But it turns out that those who went and got the goodies were sterilized if they already had more than two kids. If they had two or less kids they were fitted out with IUDs. Many of these women had severe side effects and there was no follow up. They were not informed or told anything. And you see, now that I have come to know the native women much better after working several years in Conima with Chuyma Aru, I know that a sterilized or infertile woman is severely handicapped in her work.” “How is that?” “Well, the chacra is sort of a sacred place and women who enter the chacras must be fertile, otherwise you can harm its generative power. It’s as I told you with this ritual of the Ispallas. The T’alla is Pachamama and like her she is pregnant from around January to March. And all the other women are Ispallas, the root crops. The men are much’os, grains. That’s because grains grow outside the earth. You’ll see in the ritual; women call each other ‘Ispalla.’ The women are the ones who select the seeds, they are the ones who can touch the phina, the storage place where the harvest is kept. They are the ones who plant the seeds. They say that women’s hands are hot, unlike men’s hands, and that is why they can do all that. Men are not supposed to touch the phina. But if the women are altered, the chacra suffers.” “So, how did it go for you in the job?” “Well, you know what we did, my co-workers and me? We were paid according to the number of interviews we did and the information we

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gathered. We were given quotas and were paid only if we could fulfill these. All the interviewers invented the statistics. At first I was afraid to do this but eventually I did what the others did. We invented the numbers and filled out our quotas and got paid. These are temporary jobs and we did not feel responsible to our employers.” “I am not surprised. I heard of similar things in other places. I have also heard that in the department of San Martin (in the northeast) pregnant women are fined if they do not go to the nearest hospital for prenatal care and for delivery. Did you hear anything like that here?” “Yes. Also, a few women told me that at the hospital some women were sterilized without their knowing it. They suspected later when they never got pregnant. So now all the women are angry with the health officials and don’t want to have anything to do with them.” “This is very frustrating work. Is it because of this experience that you chose to work for Chuyma Aru?” “Actually I had not heard of Chuyma. I just wanted a job, preferably one that was interesting to me. It was my father who told me one day that Chuyma was looking for a woman. They wanted a woman to work specifically with native women. All the others working at Chuyma are men. You know my father? He is the administrator of Chuyma.” “Yes, I met him the day I arrived in Puno. Had he been telling you what Chuyma was doing?” “Actually, hardly anything. He only began telling me more of its activities and approach when the job opening came along. So I applied and got in. You know, at first I found it very hard to live and work in Conima. I missed the city and its life style. I had never lived among native people. My parents came from the countryside, but that was before I was born.” “And now, how do you feel about living and working in Conima?” “Now I have come to love it. I think it is just ignorance and the prejudice of the city against native culture that stood in my way. Now, I recognize in many things my mother does her native roots. I have come to appreciate these a whole lot.” We continued conversing about this and that. I was curious about how she would approach her first birth. Would she go to the hospital or not? What would her parents advise her to do? I thought of the very moving chapter on birth in a book written by a woman from Puno. I had brought the slim volume with me, wanting to reread it in context. I took it out and looked for a passage to read to Eli. “Eli, this is Greta Jimenez’ book. Do you know it? She is from Puno and in there she has transcribed the stories that many Aymara native women told to her over the years” “You mean her thesis for the PRATEC course?”

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“Yes, that one. It was later published in Bolivia.” “Yes, I know of Greta; Nestor knows her. She went to the University of the Altiplano in Puno. But I have not read the book.” “I brought the book because I love it so much. I thought that reading it here during the festival of the Ispallas would deepen its meaning for me. I want to read you something from the chapter entitled ‘The placenta nurtures Pachamama.’ In this passage, the woman’s mother has arrived just after her daughter gave birth to her fourth child, and her second son. The mother is first angry because she was not called to help. Her daughter was helped by her husband and her eldest daughter.” “Yes, Federica, here it is a custom that the laboring woman is helped by her husband. He holds her and massages her during labor and he cuts the umbilical cord, delivers the placenta, and buries it in the house. He also prepares her all sorts of herbal teas which help with delivery.” “Yes, Greta has all this in this chapter. The husband also cooked a huge meal for all the relatives that came soon after the birth. Is Wilson going to do all that for you?” We both laughed. “I don’t think he can do any of this. You know, us urban folk, our education has ingrained in us that there is nothing to learn from the native people; that their ways are ignorant and backward. I am learning all that now, since I started working in Conima and so is Wilson. But I am not delivering in the hospital. My mother has arranged for a native midwife.” “I think that is wise. My own hospital deliveries were terrible ordeals! And maybe for your second child Wilson will have learned what to do and do all these things for you. I want to read you the new mother’s description of what her mother did and said to her newborn grandson: She cradled the baby in her arms, putting her mouth on his forehead saying: you are my son, you are my son, son of my mother, of my grandmother and of the mother of my grandmother; of our ancestors; your children will be my children and like that for ever we will be in this world, in this life . . . You have arrived auspiciously. Holy Earth Pachamama, with love you have received him. Elder Achachillas, we will nurture this wawita [baby] well . . .”2

In silence we beheld the grandmother’s words, caught by their power, her prayer calling forth our reverence. I could not help but think about the amazing vitality of these Aymara natives. They had endured through unimaginable odds. For me, the grandmother’s words “and like that for ever we will be in this world, in this life” conjured up the near-ethnocide that had befallen the native population shortly after the European conquest, what in the literature is more delicately

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referred to as the demographic collapse. The words also recalled for me the determined efforts of the conquerors to eradicate native rituals, what the colonial State enacted as the laws of “extirpation of idolatry.” In such a context, the State Public Health drive to reduce native women’s fertility began to look like a modern, secular version of the colonial policy. I had been told that only recently the native population regained the numbers of its preColumbian level. How could such a history not leave an indelible imprint on the grandmother’s soul? The irony was that native people were cognizant of herbal and other methods of contraception. I had become aware of this through one of Chuyma Aru’s publications focusing on native healing. Eli had informed me that the Department of Public Health was not doing any research on these practices. In light of my experience in India, such news did not come as a surprise. Such information tended to confirm for me my friend Arturo Escobar’s view of development as a tool of the State to impose its control on more autonomous segments of the population seen as potential sources of sedition. The sounds of the musicians’ drums and fifes began to grow in intensity. The sound of the singing voices of the native people quickly grew louder as they approached the summit. We got up and saw a farandole of brightly clothed people wind its way upwards, led by the musicians and the flag bearers. The women wore their brilliantly colored llijllas, a handwoven cloth slung over their shoulders, and the men had on their ritual ponchos of red and black stripes. They all wore flowers in their hats. The men wore their handwoven bags slung over their shoulders, and the women had tied with a knot on their chest their bulging llijllas, full of the first fruits from the chacras. I stared in amazement at one of the women who had a child in her llijlla. She was keeping pace with all the others, not seeming to need to slow down. All of a sudden they were upon us, and two women grabbed my hands and pulled me along, fairly running and jumping over the rocks. I immediately fell hard against an ancient ruin, unable to find my footing fast enough. Fortunately nothing seemed broken and I was on my feet and dancing away, held by solicitous hands. We circled three times the round, waist-high stone hearth, the qhecha where the offerings would be burned later on. I did as the others did, bent down, made the sign of the cross on the ground and brought my fingers to my mouth to kiss them. We were thus asking permission to enter this sacred space. Then we climbed down a few stone walls and danced three times around the place where the Kawilto Marani had planted his staff and the male pasmados, those who had “passed” the cargo in years past, already had seated themselves. Everyone drew a cross on the ground and kissed their fingers. Last, we circled three times around the area where the T’alla Marani and the female pasmados had already sat down on the ground, asking permission in the same manner.

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The women’s circle was only a few feet away from the men’s area in the same flat opening near the summit. Eli and I were asked to sit at the T’alla’s mesa where all the women gathered; this was the place where the offerings were prepared. The men had their own mesa around which they all gathered as well. The women untied all their llijllas, placing them close together. I saw that besides the new potatoes, ocas, ollucos and other Andean roots crops, and varieties of beans and grains collected from the chacras the day before, there also were bananas, coffee beans, oranges, rice, and other products from the selva in the Amazonian tropical slopes. Eli had explained to me the day before that native people spend about half of the year in the selva, growing tropical produce in chacras there. A woman put a flower in my hat and in Eli’s, the black phullos and the hat with its flower being the minimum ritual attire expected of us. Still, I felt out of tune with my jeans and straw hat. I wished they could have found a pollera—the native women’s billowing skirt—big enough for me and a felt bowler hat to match. But at least Eli too sported city attire, although her features and skin tone matched those of the native women. The T’alla Marani opened another cloth bundle and placed other ritual items alongside the first fruits such as coca leaves, small white squares of llama fat, red carnations, llama wool, tobacco, and bottles of alcohol. The women immediately commenced to separate the coca leaves into two piles. Each of us pushed a pile of coca leaves from the original pile into a new pile on a separate cloth on one side of the kumana, the cloths with the first fruits in them. We held the corners of our black phullos and invoked the Ispallas into the kumana. The concentration and intensity of the women was palpable and contagious. Each product was invoked with its ritual name, different from its common denomination. I of course did not know these names, and simply said in Spanish, “May the spirit of the potato (or other product) come to this kumana. May all the chacras bloom; may the harvest be plentiful,” hoping that the sincerity of my intention would offset my ignorance of Aymara. We began gifting each other small bundles of coca leaves, addressing each other as Ispallas. “Here, Ispalla. Please take these leaves.” “Thank you, Ispalla!” The women courteously shifted to Spanish when addressing me. This was done rapidly and I tried to keep up, making sure to reciprocate with those women who had offered me leaves. I chewed on as many leaves as I could stuff in my mouth, placing the rest in the tari, the small ritual cloth I was given for this purpose. I could see that the men were engaged in the same exchange, and Eli said that they addressed each other as much’os. This did not mean that the men had only grains in their bags. They also had carried all the products of the chacras even though Nestor later said that men tended to carry more grains than root crops and the women more root

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crops than grains. But what stood out for me was that men as well as women carried both kinds of produce, and that the men invoked all the produce by the same term Ispalla. It seemed that maleness was restricted to grains, whereas the feminine term Ispalla adhered not only to root crops, but also to all the agricultural products more generally, inclusive of grains. As the younger, single women got up and started dancing, pairing themselves with the single men, it began to rain. When the rain quickly turned to hail, the dancers sat down and everyone got out their tarps. Eli and I huddled under the ample plastic poncho Nestor had provided us. The hail began to fall hard and the temperature plummeted. The ground soon became white. We were shivering and hugged close to each other to keep warm. A small boy crept under the back of our poncho to keep dry. We were enveloped by clouds and I could not see beyond a few yards. Here it was, the famed unpredictability of the Andean weather I had so much heard about. Just a while earlier, Eli and I had been shedding our outerwear during the sunny climb up the mountain. Now we had put everything on again. I settled in for the wait, trying to imbibe through osmosis the patience of the native people, hoping to attune myself to the rhythm of the mountain and of the clouds. Everyone fell silent. After a long while, one of the elder women in our circle shouted something to the men. Eli explained: “She is the wife of the kiya, the shaman, and she is telling the men to make a cha’lla to the hail with alcohol. That is because when you throw an offering of pure alcohol to the hail, it stops.” Eventually a man stood up and filled a glass with alcohol and threw it in an arc to the sky, invoking the hail, asking it to please go somewhere else. Indeed, a few minutes later, the hail ceased. Everyone put away their rain gear and everything resumed. As the dancers circled around us, pairs of wooden glasses were offered to each of us in the circle. First was beer, then we graduated to wine, then to some dark liquor, and finally to pure alcohol. The last burned my mouth, and I quickly learned to just wet my lips and offer the rest to Pachamama, spilling it on the ground. If I was not surefooted sober, what would the descent be like after all these ritual drinks? I definitely did not have the resilience of my native women hosts. But partake of the offering I did since this stimulated joy and happiness in the Ispallas whom we embodied at this moment. It also delighted and pleased the mountain Muñapata, who was the Marani of the Ispallas on this occasion. The T’alla Marani lit a cigarette and offered more around. We all smoked the sacred tobacco. Eli remarked that originally the alcoholic offerings were different varieties of chicha, the water from boiling corn which is then fermented. Alcohol, especially pure alcohol, had, according to her, deteriorated native people’s health. But somehow it was there to stay, having become an indispensable element in ritual offerings, consumed only on those

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occasions. Chicha was not offered on that day, since native women know that it calls the rain. There had been too much rain and I could see that the lowest lying chacras in the pampa were beginning to be flooded. The T’alla Mitani stood up, having gathered the tari cloth with the new pile of coca leaves we had made, and of all the other offerings she had brought up which we had added to and prayed over in the circle. She and the Kawilto Marani stood together and spoke. Eli provided a quick translation: “They are asking permission from everyone here; they are thanking everyone as well as all the beings of the pacha: Pachamama, Cerro Muñapata, the rain, the hail, the wind, the animals, the plants, the insects, the worms, and so forth; all the beings who live in this place.” The Kawilto Marani and the T’alla Marani each held one of the special wooden drinking cups. These were filled with liquor. Crossing arms, they exchanged goblets and drank. Only then did they hand over to the kiya half of the mesa de pago [the ritual offerings] each circle had been praying over. The other halves were reserved for the second offering that would be done down below, on the pampa. The kiya had prepared a fire. As he was about to burn the offerings he invoked the Ispalla Wallas, the spirit of the Ispallas, calling all the products by their ritual names: “May nothing be scarce this year. May the hail not come and eat everything in the chacras; may the rain please stop a while. Oh Pachamama, Oh Ispalla Wallas, Oh Mallku Marani, please receive this offering. We give these to you with all our love and respect. Please forgive us any mistakes. In exchange, send all the products to all the chacras, make them flourish . . .” The musicians stood by him and their sounds grew in intensity. The flames leapt high as the offering was burned. Nestor had underscored for me the importance of the exchange between the T’alla and the Kawilto Marani. At this moment the mesas of the men and women were joined, and only thus could the offering be made to the qhecha, who was the Marani of the Ispallas and seemed to be identified with the mountain Muñapata itself at that moment. As with everything else, all had to go in pairs, male and female. The offerings, like the circles of men and of women, like the pairs of dancers, were symmetrically arrayed and joined together. The offerings that had been placed on the mesa de pago ever since the night before and all through the day also went in pairs. As Eli expressed it, “People say that the pair, it is a married couple, husband and wife. From two everything is born, whatever the pair be: earth, bottles, money, chicha, flowers, everything.” The kiya seemed to flaunt the pervasiveness of the pair. I had asked the kiya in Anacha Watasani the day before whether women could do the burning. This is what he told me: “No. And that is because women are the Ispallas and the Pachamama. The offering is for the Ispallas. They can’t offer it to themselves.”

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This offering had been first prepared the previous night in the house of the T’alla and Kawilto Marani by the kiya and his wife. It had been accompanied throughout the night by these two couples as well as many other native couples. That night the new potatoes that had been ritually gathered in the afternoon from the chacras in the pampa were laid out next to some of the old potatoes from the previous year. At the ritually appointed time in the night, the T’alla Marani and the Kawilto Marani held these aloft. They gave thanks to the Ispallas, the Mallku Maranis, and to all the spirits of the place and of the chacras. Becoming the voice of the old potatoes, they addressed the new potatoes with these words: “Just like us, just like we nurtured these inhabitants, all of you also, now it is your turn; now you have to nurture them in the same way we did.” Eli and I had missed the morning preparatory rituals followed by a big feast in which the old potatoes along with some of the new produce had been eaten. It was during the morning preparatory rituals in the Marani couple’s house that permission was asked of all the spirits to climb Cerro Muñapata. Later we learned it was rumored that by climbing without having properly made offerings and asked permission, Eli and I were perhaps responsible for the hail. But at the moment nobody seemed put out with us. It was time to go down the mountain. The women gathered their kumanas, the cloths with the produce and offerings, and slung them on their backs, tying the ends in a big knot on their chests. “It’s time to go and do the kumanthana of the chacras!” Walter exclaimed to me. Before I had time to ask him what that meant, hands grabbed me firmly on both side and off we were running, keeping time with the musicians. This time I paid much greater attention to where I placed my feet, marveling at the sure-footedness of my companions who wore simple rubber sandals. The dancing farandole ran down some stone walls and approached a flat area with a lovely potato chacra in full bloom. As we reached it and began circling it, each one of us bent down and made a cross on the earth and kissed our fingers. The woman in front of me was mouthing the words slowly and clearly for my benefit and I was beginning to get the last word of verses which sounded the same, with a trailing last syllable: Ispallawallan Urupawaaaaaay Paris tarimpi jawsayataaaaaa Qerompi Jawsayataaaaa Jawsayatansa, Jawsayataaaa Kumanapuru jawsayataaaa . . . Today is the fiestas of the Ispallawallas With a pair of sacred cloths we invoke you

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With a pair of wooden goblets we invoke you We call you, we invoke you We invoke your Kumana. . . . The colorful human line unfurled and went downhill full speed. Eli and I quickly had to abandon the hands holding us, and we accompanied the one native woman carrying a baby in her llijlla at a measured pace. We were going down on the opposite side that we had climbed up. The native woman told us that people did the kumanthana both going up as well as going down. So there was a word for dancing and singing around chacras. That word—kumanthana—had indeed the same root as the word kumana used for the llijlla when it held the first produce and the offerings. Going slowly and carefully downhill, Eli and I conversed with the mother carrying her baby in her llijlla who introduced herself as Silveria. Eli said to me: “You know, this llijlla, the one Silveria is carrying her baby in, it is no longer called a llijlla when the dancing women carry it with the first produce. They call it a kumana then.” Silveria added that the kumana was the chacra itself, pregnant with root crops. “So what does it mean to do the kumanthana of the chacras?” I asked. “It means to sing and dance around the chacra and do the kumana to it. The kumana is sacred and the chacra is also sacred. By doing this we call the spirit of the Ispallas to come and reside in our kumanas and in our chacras. You know, we women we treat our chacras as if they were our daughters, just like this baby daughter I’m carrying here,” said Silveria. “And like this baby Eli is carrying in here,” I said, patting Eli’s belly. We laughed. Chatting and walking, we finally arrived at the pampa where everyone else had already formed the two circles of men and of women and the dancers were dancing against the cobalt blue of the lake, the men twirling wool bands dotted with colorful pompoms. We enacted in the sunny pampa on the lakeshore the same ritual as we had on the summit. More offerings, more drinking. I was beginning to feel tipsy. The air was permeated by a sense of joyful abandon, of careless gyrations. In my inebriated condition, I managed to be impressed with how intently and precisely the offerings continued to be made. These were burned in the lower qhecha that a moment earlier we had circled dancing, holding hands. I looked back toward the mountain seeing the chacras up the slopes. These belonged to the upper suyo, the upper area of rotation of the crops, and the chacras in the pampas belonged to the lower suyo. During this day, the native people had wrapped first their upper suyo and then their lower suyo from one side to the other of the mountain with a multicolored, living, dancing, human chain. By dancing, singing, praying, and making offerings to

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the chacras, to the kumanas, and to the Ispallas, they had not only sanctified their landscape but become part of it, part of its community of spirits. The women were literally of the same substance as the earth and the Ispallas. The men were the very much’os. Nestor, Walter, Eli, and I were drunk with joy, the joy of having made this place sacred, of having danced and sung with its spirits. Those of Chuyma Aru had found again the spirits of their place of birth. The spirits had left them during their time as development experts, leaving them abandoned, alienated. The spirits had abandoned them because they looked at their birthplace coldly and rationally, insensitively. Their birthplace was simply a space where natural and human resources had resided, waiting to be exploited according to an alien logic. But now, they had spoken with the spirits again, they belonged to them and to the place; it became once again alive and sacred. They were whole again, one with the land, the water, and the spirits.



CHAPTER 8

The State and Feminist Missionizing in Bolivia ( WI T H L OYDA S ANCHEZ )

Sex is taken as an “immediate given,” “a sensible given,” “physical features,” belonging to a natural order. But what we believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an “imaginary formation,” which reinterprets physical features . . . through the network of relationships in which they are perceived. —Monique Wittig, “One Is Not Born a Woman”1

INTRODUCTION

This chapter addresses how in a development context, mainstream liberal feminism carries forward a missionizing impulse that robs natives people’s rituals of their central place in their world. The example is from Bolivia, where Loyda Sanchez invited me to teach and do some work with her and her associates in her native city of Cochabamba. She and colleagues had done fieldwork in a native community in the mountains near Cochabamba with an eye to gender issues. Loyda and I went to visit that community and together wrote the following chapter that takes a critical look at the State’s policies concerning women and development. Bolivia began neoliberal reforms in 1985. As part of these structural changes and also as part of a new emphasis on “sustainable development,” the Bolivian State eventually established the Under Ministry of Gender, Generations, and Family Affairs.2 This institution is responsible for integrating as well as fostering a gender focus in all development plans, programs, and projects. In this framework, gender is a category of analysis

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for the planning of sustainable development, within which the focus on women—now called gender—is one of the most important. In its emphasis on women and gender, Bolivia typifies what has been happening in other Andean countries and indeed throughout most of the global South. In this chapter, the unexamined epistemological assumptions underlying the focus on gender are examined in order to make visible their negative impact on native ritual enactments. A contrast with native men’s and women’s intraactions with the beings in their pacha puts in sharp relief the cultural and epistemological basis of the State’s “women and development” framework. We will also make a suggestion concerning the hidden agenda of the State’s policies concerning women, and of international development organizations and their firm embrace of a particular version of gender, which we are here calling “developmentalist feminism.” The coupling of concerns with women and/or gender3 and development is a phenomenon whose widespread implementation in southern countries was intensified by the 1987 publication of the United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development known as the Brundtland Report, entitled Our Common Future.4 As is well known, the Brundtland Report proposes “sustainable development” as a solution to its own diagnostic of the situation of the environment globally. The report gives a picture of the environmental impacts resulting from several decades of unchecked industrial development. Among the most serious environmental effects the report highlights are the dramatic decrease in genetic and cultural diversity, the increase of the ozone hole over Antarctica, the progressive heating of the atmosphere, the steady growth of desertification, the steady loss of forests, population growth, and the growth of a disparity between rich and poor both within as well as across nation states. The report is concerned with the fact that the rate of development in the North, translating into increased consumption—a goal pursued as well by elites in the South—seems to be incompatible with nature’s ability to regenerate itself. However, the solution it offers does not fundamentally call into question these trends. For reversing the environmental damage, the report relies essentially on more efficient managing of resources as well as on lowering fertility rates through human resource development. What happened at the UNCED Rio conference in 1992, which addressed the concerns of the Brundtland Report, fully confirmed that the emphasis on reducing fertility rates correctly reflected the mood of governments both North and South. Although envoys from the South did point out that the North’s rate of consumption puts a much greater burden on the environment, and tried, unsuccessfully, to put this on the agenda, this did not mean advocating a radical rethinking of the whole enterprise of industrialization and development. Southern governments stood for the “right to development,” and

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President George Bush Sr. simply asserted that “the lifestyle of the U.S. would not be up for discussion at Rio.”5 The problem was conceived in terms of managing the environmental crisis globally. However, as Wolfgang Sachs states so clearly: [T]he task of global ecology can be understood in two ways: it is either a technocratic effort to keep development afloat against the drift of plunder and pollution; or it is a cultural effort to shake off the hegemony of aging Western values and gradually retire from the development race.6

In this chapter, we will focus on one set of aging Western values that are being institutionalized widely in the South, taking a Bolivian example. These values come wrapped up in a discourse of gender and development that promises women’s emancipation, viewing it as a necessary correlate to sustainable development. This emancipatory discourse means to extend to women the rights of the citizen. We will attempt to make visible the dark side of this discourse and its link to colonial mindsets when it is deployed in native Andean communities.

1. DEVELOPMENTALIST FEMINISM AND THE STATE IN BOLIVIA

The Brundtland Report focuses on the role of women in development mostly in its chapter on population and human resources. The report points out that by attaining the basic right of self-determination, women will then be in a position to control the number of children they have and thus contribute to reestablishing the right equilibrium between resources and population. Women’s ability to have at their disposal the means to exercise a choice is by itself viewed as an index of the level of development in the nation. Emphasis is placed on the development of the human potential, which both furthers development as well as the right to a full life with dignity for all. The report links sustainable development and equity with lowering population growth in the following manner: [S]ustainable economic growth and equitable access to resources are two of the more certain routes toward lower fertility rates. Giving people the means to choose the size of their families is not just a method of keeping population in balance with resources; it is a way of assuring—especially for women—the basic human right of self-determination.7

The report thus makes a tight connection among sustainable development, equitable access to resources, women’s right to self-determination, and lowering of fertility rates. In implementing this vision in the native

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communities, the Under Ministry of Gender in Bolivia has emphasized women’s right to self-determination and their equity with men in terms of access to resources. It has established agreements with various international cooperation agencies in order to receive support—both financial as well as conceptual—to carry out its plans. The platform of the Under Ministry of Gender is as follows: 1. To respect the organizational, political, physical, and economic autonomy of all the forms of organization adopted by women, especially those relating to the equality of opportunity in the implementation of the Law of Popular Participation. 2. To strengthen the self-esteem, negotiating capacity, decision-making capacity, and self-determination of women by creating juridico-legal conditions for the exercise of citizenship. 3. Respect women’s decisions concerning their sexuality and fertility and democratize roles both within the family and the society at large. 4. Consolidate women’s right to education and to their own cultural identity. 5. Strengthen and value the productive role of women by consolidating their right to dispose of property as well as equity in their usufruct of goods and income.8 In order to implement this platform, the Under Ministry formulated a strategy to train the personnel of all organizations in charge of development programs in native communities. These training programs focused on the deployment of gender equity. They have also been established in the Under Ministry of Popular Participation and Municipal Support and in city halls and prefectures throughout the country. In 1994, the Under Ministry of Gender signed an inter-institutional agreement with the National Secretariat of Agriculture, Cattle Ranching, and Fisheries to implement a strategy of education in gender and rural development, with the general objective to facilitate and strengthen the participation of women in the processes and benefits of rural development. This agreement focuses on three strategic goals: 1. The participation of women in local management and decision-making. 2. Women’s access to and control of productive resources. 3. Women’s access to services to achieve an improvement in the quality of life of the female population. The goal of development itself is, of course, taken for granted. What these programs are meant to ensure is gender equity within development

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programs and all that this implies in terms of women´s access to resources, decision-making ability, and so on. The world for which women are being prepared is emphatically not that of their native communities, a world where the performance of rituals, festivals, and the like is central. They are being prepared to be individuals and citizens, with their own autonomous access to “resources,” decisionmaking, services, education, their bodies, and so on. In other words, they are being prepared to relate autonomously to the market, to commodities, to productive resources, to reproductive resources, mainly to their bodies. The State uses a developmentalist feminist discourse to create individual female citizens. Such a discursive move is at once creative and destructive; the female individual citizen emerges from the destruction of the community and of her world. The wisdom of such a path can be questioned on many grounds. One obvious one is the fact that concerns with gender equity in matters of access to economic and other resources in native rural communities must be placed in the larger context of the Bolivian economy. An education no longer assures one of a job, unemployment rates being extremely high. One cannot but wonder what the State’s agenda is in placing such emphasis on gender inequity in access to productive resources within native communities when these communities collectively own only 10% of cultivable land, despite forming 80% of the agricultural population. This glaring inequity is not focused upon with the same enthusiasm. There is, however, one area in which the State’s programs to transform comuneras into individual citizens has more direct returns in terms of the State’s development goals, and that is women’s ability to control their fertility. The State’s campaigns among rural native communities to foster reduced rates of fertility must be placed in a wider context. The glaring inequity of access to agricultural land is the historical legacy of a five-hundred-year history in which the European conquerors, and later their creole descendants, expropriated the land of indigenous inhabitants. The indigenous inhabitants of the Andes have experienced a severe demographic collapse as a consequence of such a history. It is only in the last fifty years that the indigenous population has begun to rise and is now approaching its original size. Given such a history, it would be surprising if natives perceived efforts to curb the growth of their population with equanimity. They have displayed a very remarkable ability to survive and even thrive under the most difficult of conditions. They are not likely to envisage population control in the way the State does. It must also be borne in mind that the population density of Bolivia is quite low, standing at approximately seven persons per square kilometer. We need to question the unspoken assumptions of the State’s developmentalist feminist discourse that the creation of the autonomous woman who has control over her body and access to economic and political

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resources represents progress. We need to question the unspoken assumption that the body should become an entity to be possessed and controlled. We need to question the unspoken assumption that gender arrangements in native communities are a priori to the detriment of women. We need to question the unspoken assumption that the transformation of the nonhuman world into “resources” is an improvement over native peoples ways of being in the world. In this chapter, we attempt to make visible the reasons a view of the human person as being universally separate from the non-human and the other-than-human as well as being an individual is an indispensable prop for developmentalist feminist discourse and the State’s purposes.

2. WATER AS TEACHER ENCOUNTERS DEVELOPMENTALIST FEMINISM

The Under Ministry of Gender has commissioned many institutions to carry out basic research on the theme of gender to guide its programs. In this chapter, we will take a look at one such study carried out in a community where Loyda Sanchez has been doing work for several years. The study commissioned by the Under Ministry of Gender was conducted in 1993 by researchers in the Program of Training and Research in Andean Irrigation, which is itself part of the Universidad Mayor de San Simon in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Although this study is almost twenty years old, it illustrates well the issues we want to address. When the results of this investigation on gender and irrigation reached the community members, they did not recognize themselves in it and requested an explanation. This incident led the National Program for Irrigation (PRONAR), which had been working in that same region, to commission its own research. Loyda Sanchez was the person charged with explaining the first study by the Bolivian State feminist researchers to the communities. Along with Marina Arratia, Sanchez was commissioned by PRONAR to do the second study.9 The first study, which we will call the official gender study, takes as a basic unit of the community the nuclear family. Within this nuclear family, it endeavors to establish the roles of men and women through a documentation of their activities, the time spent by each gender in these activities, the differing access to and control of resources by men and women, and their differing participation in decision-making. The assumptions underlying this methodology are several. One we have already noted is the boundary drawn between the human, the non-human, and the other-than-human. A second assumption is that the non-human has no agency and exists for the use of humans. This is particularly vividly conveyed by the expression “access to and control over resources.”

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Such phrasing also indicates an anthropocentric relationship between humans and non-humans. Another assumption is that of linear, measurable time since a stopwatch was used to measure the time spent in each activity by men and women. Yet another assumption is the applicability of the separation between a public and a domestic domain in these farming communities. Finally, there is the assumption that the relevant unit of analysis is the nuclear human family. Underlying all these is the assumption of “individualism,” namely that agents are individual human beings and action is taken on the basis of their decision-making powers. What Sanchez and Arratia found in their own research in this community is that agency in all affairs involving irrigation could only be located in the relationships among several entities: a source of water, a human community, a community of deities, a network of irrigation channels, and the fields to be irrigated (the chacras). In other words, agency is held not only by humans, but also by the several non-human entities involved, as well as by other-than-human beings. And very importantly, they found that agency could only be located in the orchestrated activity of all of these entities together. They have reached this conclusion not only on the basis of what the native people themselves say, but also on the basis of what they themselves observed.10 However, it is not easy to render verbally this reality that is so profoundly at odds with what we moderns are used to calling reality. The problem in formulating it in this way is that these five entities are not always or even necessarily discrete entities. Rather, they often flow and leak into each other. Furthermore, in all irrigation activities the leadership that shapes the activities, teaches how things are done, and organizes the human community is the water. The relationship of the human community to the water follows the form in which the water presents itself. The ritual activities that take place with the water are different according to the type and source of the water. These intra-actions are what give rise to what they call the “community of waters,” referring to the ritual intra-actions among all the participants listed above. To give a flavor of these ritual conversations or intra-actions, let us listen to the voices of the native people themselves. The following quotation is taken from the publication by one of our colleagues in the Andean Altiplano who also uses the term “community of waters.” The native in this quote is referring to the building of irrigation channels: To build a jich’a (the path where the water will travel), we do not use a meter or a level. To build a channel the first thing we do is to make offerings (t’inkha and ch’illt’a) to Pachamama and then to the Awichas (the sources of water, the springs). After that we commence the work; the water all by itself leads us, we only follow it, that’s all.11

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The next quote refers to the “leaking” between these entities. In this case it is between the human community and the water: To go and bring the water, the paqo [Andean shaman] designates the persons that have been accepted by the Achachilas [grand-parent mountains]. They go two by two, in pairs and they carry clay jars for the water. We well know how to bring tollqa [the son-in-law] from this particular spring, in order to marry him with a young virgin girl of our community. The water is a person, and he marries a girl here. When the tollqa [the water son-in-law] arrives to participate in the ceremony, we do it exactly like a wedding between a human couple. The communities must not know who the daughter-in-law or the bride of the water is going to be. If they knew, she could die. That is why all the participants in the ceremony, we address each other asaukch’is and taych’is. We are all mothers-in-law and fathers-in-law to each other because the water is marrying the community. That is how we address each other.12

The official gender methodology makes this reality invisible. It is clear that the boundary between the human and non-human is drawn very differently, that the notion of agency is completely different, and that it would be doing a fair amount of violence to the communities’ world to speak of a unilateral, instrumental relationship between individual human beings, males or females, and non-human “resources.” The authors, along with Marina Arriata, have held workshops, conferences, and meetings trying to make the government aware of the difficulties of using its methodology and theoretical framework in the context of Andean native communities. We have pointed out that the categories used in the interview protocols are based on notions inapplicable in these communities, notions that aggress against such communities. Notions such as the division between a productive and reproductive domain, the sexual division of work, access to resources, decision-making, empowerment and autonomy of women, and linear, measurable time among others have been shown to do violence to the world of the native people. We have endeavored to show that these notions are anthropocentric and Eurocentric, as well as deeply implicated in individualistic assumptions. In their study, Sanchez and Arratia make clear that one of the central assumptions underlying the official gender research is that women are oppressed by being treated as walking wombs, marginalized in a feminized reproductive domain. Access to power and autonomy is valorized and sought through participation in the public domains of production and economic and political decision-making. In Bolivia, developmentalist feminism rejects the modern construction of women as “two-legged wombs”— that is, as defined solely by their reproductive capacity—but it does not reject the other assumptions we have mentioned above. The official gender

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critique focuses on the construction of women as mindless wombs, destined by their biology to the sole role of motherhood in the now-isolated nuclear family. The division between a public domain of production and a private domain of reproduction cannot be found in Andean native communities, or at least not in those that are only marginally integrated into a national or international market economy.13 In Andean native communities, all the members comprising the pacha—human, non-human and other-thanhuman—collectively act to generate and regenerate the pacha, the place, with its human, non-human, and other-than-human participants. Through ritual action they take collective moral responsibility for the outcome of their actions. In such a context, all activities can be said to be at once “productive and reproductive,” regardless of whether they are carried out by men, women, or the other beings of the pacha. Human regeneration does not happen without the concurrence of the non-human and other-thanhuman participants, and the reverse also holds true. The notions of individuality, rationality, and autonomy are profoundly alien to that world.

3. DEVELOPMENTALIST FEMINISM AND INDIVIDUALISM

Developmentalist feminism asserts women’s rationality and individuality which professionalized bio-medicine and the new bourgeois order institutionalized in eighteenth-century revolutions in Europe and the United States had deprived them. As historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese states, “Feminism as an ideology developed in interaction with the development of individualism and cannot be understood apart from it.”14 The eighteenth-century bourgeois revolutions in the United States and France marked the consolidation of capitalism and the triumph of bourgeois individualism. The sovereign individual was the atom that made up the political and economic public order. This supposedly universal “man,” representative of all “mankind,” was in fact—if not in rhetoric—a propertied white male. This fact was pointed out somewhat later by non-white males as well as by women. The United States’ Declaration of Independence uses the universal “man”: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This is the public man and voting citizen. Non-propertied white males, as well as most non-white males and all women, were excluded from this category, could not vote, and thus had no public role. Women were cast as men’s appendages, restricted to the domestic sphere and the role of the mothers of individuals.

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The bourgeois sovereign individual is constructed in universalistic terms, and this creates the contradiction that has fueled most modern emancipatory movements, including the feminist movement. Since the enlightenment, the individual has been imagined as the basic atom of the economy, of the polity, and of civil society, preceding all collectivities. The modern liberal State and the modern market economy are both based on this individual. The sovereign individual is stripped of all relationships, all particularity of time and place, and all specificity. It is also, of course, radically separated from the non-human and other-than-human worlds. The modern bourgeois individual is an abstraction. The bourgeois democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century created “man” as free of bonds to community and place, and as prior to such bonds. It is precisely because this new individual is an abstraction that the rhetoric of the new bourgeois State did not and indeed could not give it specificity as a propertied white male. Abstraction, along with the construction of a radical separation between the realm of the semiotic and that of materiality, enables the construction of a universal discourse. Such a universal discourse was a keystone of the new bourgeois order and of the new modern Science since it made certainty and, with it, social order possible. In the case of the non-human world, as discussed in previous chapters, Science has redefined it on its own terms, excluding from it all evidence for a non-material reality, all non-repeatable and non-measurable phenomena, as well as all evidence for the impossibility of separating the observing subject from the observed object. It is only through such a move of redefining reality in this way that modern bourgeois man was able to secure universality and hence certainty and social order. The effect of such a discursive move is that the white propertied male becomes the abstract universal “man,” or “everyman”—meaning every male human being. This discursive move thereby creates a standard, a norm. “Universal man” as an abstraction does not really exist; what really exists under its guise is the white propertied male who becomes the norm, the standard making all persons who do not fit the mold into an “other.” White Western feminists in particular have made the “othering” of woman visible. Needless to say, this othering pertains to all those who do not fit the mold, not just women.

4. INDIVIDUALISM AND OTHERING

In a similar way, the creation of the autonomous sovereign individual casts those who do not fit its mold into the devalued “other.” This “otherness” has often been cast in biological terms. For a long time, women’s biology was seen to make them unable to be rational and autonomous.15 Non-European

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races’ inferiority is seen to be grounded in their biological or, more recently, in their genetic makeup. In this perspective, the universality of biology guarantees the universality of the autonomous individual.16 The autonomous individual’s thoughts and actions are unilateral; he is an independent agent with the power to act. This subject is constituted on the premise of its independence, namely the denial of its inter-existence with others, human, non-human, and other-than-human. This subject can maintain the illusion of autonomy and self-originating thought and action solely by concealing and denying that reality emerges from intra-actions, as discussed in previous chapters. Self-originating action means unilateral action. The discrete, separate individual bounded by his/her skin perceives and defines all difference as otherness. This “other” becomes the objectified other upon whom this modern subject acts. The other’s object status is grounded in objective biology. The subject/object or knower/known dichotomy of Science becomes a self/other dichotomy in society. Bourgeois political individualism established the rights of citizens as a parcel of sovereignty. Thus this subject is constituted by power, and the idea of the individual is conflated with the concept of a self. The construct of the self as essentially containing power constitutes the ideal of autonomy.17 The ability of this individual to establish a set of norms that are considered ultimate or beyond question is a way of disguising as well as extending its own power through recourse to universality.18 The universal individual’s sense of self renders other ways of being in the world invisible or illegitimate, thus establishing itself as a universal norm. Although developmentalist feminism has rejected the status of “other” for women, it seems to have done so by grafting women onto the autonomous male individual, while denying an exclusively masculine essence to such an individual.

5. DOES UNIVERSAL WOMAN OR MAN EXIST?

In the United States, it is precisely the universality of the language of individualism that enabled white women (as well as persons of color) to conceive of them as individuals similar and equal to white propertied men. Liberal feminist criticism has focused from the beginning on the masculinity of this universal subject. Early nineteenth-century liberal feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill pursued what seemed to be the obvious answer to the masculine subject: they appropriated it in order to open up the category to include women. They believed, as did socialist feminists, that the “belief in a rational, agentic subject is crucial to the argument for women’s equality.”19 They posited a universal “woman” to match the universal “man,” focusing intently on the de-masculinization of the modern

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individual. Given the political and legal structures of the United States, this may have been necessary for the purpose of access to public life. The difficulty arises from extending such a politico-legal notion of the person to all other areas of life. This has been the path followed by most emancipatory struggles in the United States, be it the women’s suffrage movement of the late nineteenth century, the civil rights movements in the early 1960s that focused on, as it were, the “de-whiting” of the universal individual, or the liberal women’s movement of the same period. The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir is at the center of this approach. Her widely read and highly influential book The Second Sex discusses the ways the subject of modernity is defined in masculine terms and how it thereby makes woman into the “other.”20 She argues that this subject is incidentally rather than inherently masculine and that by purging it of its masculine elements it would truly become universal and include women. While de Beauvoir is generally highly aware of racism, classism, and imperialism, her analytical strategy of attempting to isolate sexism led her to focus on white, middle-class Christian women. She argued that because this group of women was free of class, race, religious, or imperialist oppression, it was possible to focus on the nature of oppression solely based on sex. While de Beauvoir acknowledges the differences among women, she dismisses these as “irrelevant to understanding the condition of ‘woman,’ insofar as she takes the story of ‘woman’ to be that provided by the examination of the lives of women not subject to racism, classism, imperialism, and so forth.”21 De Beauvoir essentially took what was the modern masculine individual subject and grafted woman onto it. The following quotation from The Second Sex reveals de Beauvoir’s motivation in her choice of analytical strategy: On the biological level a species is maintained only by creating itself anew; but this creation results only in repeating the same Life in more individuals. But man assures the repetition of Life while transcending Life through Existence [i.e., goal-oriented, meaningful action]; by this transcendence he creates values that deprive pure repetition of all value. In the animal, the freedom and variety of male activities are vain because no project is involved. Except for his services to the species, what he does is immaterial. Whereas in serving the species, the human male also remodels the face of the earth, he creates new instruments, he invents, he shapes the future.22

De Beauvoir wants women to be like white bourgeois men, to exercise their power to remodel the face of the earth and shape the future. In her separation of a biological level from a mental/cultural level, all value goes to the latter and the former is demoted to mere mindless repetition. The power to create and change the world, so admired by de Beauvoir, is the same

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unilateral power nesting in the very notion of the autonomous sovereign individual that necessarily makes of that individual one who dominates both non-human nature as well as those people who do not fit its mold. In de Beauvoir’s reality, there is no room for intra-action among humans, nonhumans, and other-than-humans, and the diversity of peoples, places, and spiritualities it creates. Since de Beauvoir’s foundational book, many brands of feminisms— liberal, socialist, and Marxist in particular—have appropriated the rational transcendental subject and focused on sexism and male dominance or patriarchy. In so doing, they have reproduced the very domination that they sought to escape, erasing non-white women by such expressions as “women and blacks.” Black feminists and other non-white or non-Western women have pointed out how this generic, universal “woman” is in fact white, middle-class, and Christian. This is the inevitable consequence of the appropriation of the transcendental, autonomous, independent, rational agentic subject.23 Liberal feminists have sometimes argued that by jettisoning the transcendental subject they would lose what women have wanted, namely the power to act, the power of their own voices, in a word, agency. Some feminists see the critique of the autonomous individual as a conspiracy against the gains that women have made in this century. It would seem that in the very struggle toward emancipation, liberal feminism and its offshoot of developmentalist feminism have reproduced the very domination by which they saw women being oppressed. Developmentalist feminists in Andean countries seem unaware that domination also works through the construction of a particular type of person and a particular epistemology and ontology.

6. PACHAMAMA AS BODY AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE BIOLOGICAL BODY

In Andean native communities, the basic scientific assumption of the body as the object enclosed by the skin is not found. The following dialogue between an Aymara grandmother and her granddaughter from a community in the region of the Altiplano, recorded and translated from Aymara into Spanish by Greta Jimenez Sardón, makes this clear: Grandmother: Blood is sacred as well, you have always seen, surely, how you ch’alla [spill a liquid offering] with the blood of the llama, or with the blood of the alpaca, when you raise a house, that also is used to nourish the house . . . Granddaughter: So quiet was I, listening hard to hold on to each word, all of my bodies were sweating, everything went puth, puth, puth in my bodies.24

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This passage goes on to recount in the granddaughter’s words how her grandmother instructed her about the “white waters” and the “red waters” in men’s and women’s bodies, and how those waters are also in the rain, the rivers, the springs, and so forth. The granddaughter retells her first union with the man who became the father of her children and her life-long companion, and how all the beings of the pacha [the place] were participants in this first sexual encounter, protecting and blessing the couple. After their first union in a carefully selected spot near where she grazed her alpacas, the couple, having made a circle of stones, knelt and spoke with Pachamama, the earth deity, as follows: Holy Earth Pachamama receive us then, nurture us then, protect us then, as we are your children we want your protection, we need your care . . . Holy earth Pachamama may our waters from inside [us] also nourish your body . . . These waters that before birth already ran in our body, these waters which we kept for you, we offer to you . . . May our waters be good, to have strong children, good children.25

The red and white waters that run inside as well as outside the couple’s body, those waters which existed before birth in “our” body, conjure up a world where the unitary materiality of the biological body makes no sense at all. Pachamama is the womb in which the seeds of all life reside and from which they generate/regenerate. So before birth, these waters already ran in this couple’s “body,” Pachamama. Such utterances by Aymara women are variously interpreted by different modern disciplines ranging from the social sciences such as anthropology to the natural sciences such as biology as being either a belief—a symbolic or metaphorical statement—or, less generously, a superstition. However, as historian Barbara Duden has shown, the “real,” “ biological” body is in fact a unique historical creation of the past three hundred years or so in the West.26 The modern, biological, universal body is a creation of a certain time and place, specifically Western Europe beginning in the seventeenth century. As one of the many consequences of the seventeenthcentury Cartesian separation between res extensa and res cogitans, this biological body was created as a new kind of object, a discrete, isolated, objectified, and material body. This biological body was also a consequence of separations among the realms of nature, the semiotic, and the sacred, established in mid-seventeenth-century Europe with the scientific revolution, as discussed in earlier chapters. Women’s bodies were experienced quite differently in pre-modern Europe. Particularly in popular European peasant experience, women’s bodies were the vessels of life and death. Old women could divert a thunderstorm by baring their buttocks and virgins could influence the weather by opening

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their bleeding vulvas to heaven. Women’s periodicity and fertility were the wellsprings of many village rituals of life and death as they still are today in rural Orissa, India and the Andes. The body was not a discrete entity, enclosed by the skin and separate from the outside, the larger cosmos, both human and non-human. It was open and fluid.27 By the seventeenth century, the work of the inquisition had essentially succeeded in severing the connections between the body and the cosmos. During the centuries of witch-hunts and the burning of hundreds of thousands of women—and perhaps millions according to Carolyn Merchant—the body as an embodiment of local community vitality was destroyed.28 Although the inquisition and the witch-hunt were exported to South America with the conquistadores, there it was not able to fully eradicate native ritual performances.29 In Europe, however, on the ashes of the witches’ and other heretics’ stakes and scaffolds, the new centralized State gained power. The enclosing of the body by the skin, which made it a discrete object, enabled a relationship of property between the discrete body and the self. This new self, anchored in a discrete and separate biological body, became the individual economic and political actor, as well as the civic individual, the citizen. In the late eighteenth century, the French philosopher Volney considered the body to be the most elementary form of property.30 This reflected the culmination of a process during the eighteenth century that created the bourgeois body that is the human being as an economic factor in its physicality, with its closed, clean, and restrained body.31 However, peasants and women of all classes did not fully participate in this new biological body and the new individual self. The act of progressively, albeit unevenly, transforming all bodies into biological bodies and all people into individuals deployed itself in the West throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This same movement continues today beyond the West, not only in the Andes, but indeed globally. What is particularly interesting in Duden’s work is her discovery that the notion of “health” was foreign to an eighteenth-century German doctor’s women patients. For Duden, this was a challenging realization since the idea that all people strive for good health has become self-evident for academics today. This led her to investigate the history of the category of health. The 1788 Economic Encyclopedia by the German author Krunitz speaks thus of health: Whoever neglects the precious treasure of health offends all of society, of which he is a member. Society rightly demands of him that he sacrifice a part of his energies and time to her needs and for her benefit, who every day contributes so much to his needs and benefit.32

Such exhortation was needed since the lower classes resisted the medical concept of the body. A quite precise parallel can be made with the native communities in the Andes. Such behavior reveals a resistance to the interests

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of the new political and economic authorities in the objectification of the body and the individualization of persons for the purpose of increased productivity and the increased power of the centralized state. Medically defined health did not correspond to how people experienced their lives and what they felt they could put up with in early modern Europe, and nor does it in contemporary Andean native communities. The biologization of the body and the medicalization of health created norms and therefore deviance from those norms, or pathologies. As Duden puts it: By attributing this desire [for a healthy body] to humankind and grounding it in human nature, the human right to the “pursuit of happiness” (as laid down in the Constitution of the U.S.) took on concrete form as a right to health, and a new dependence on unrealizable professional promises was born.33

The biologization of the body and the medicalization of health hide the political and economic agenda embedded in these practices. Biology and medicine were practices of Science by the seventeenth century. In the seventeenth century, Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes together invented our modern world in which the representation of things in the laboratory and the representation of citizens through the social contract are separate from each other.34 The effectiveness of this arrangement depends on rendering invisible the dependence of the State on Science, and the dependence of Science on strict separations among the realms of politics (society), religion (God), and nature (Science). These separations are, of course, arbitrary, and at the time of their creation were the subject of vigorous debate. Society, Hobbes’s Leviathan, depended solely on the calculation of human atoms totally separate from the larger cosmos. As argued in chapters 2, 3, and 4, these deeds of the founding fathers of modernity instantly created a superstitious and obscurantist pre-modernity in Europe and in the rest of the contemporary non-Western world. The concept of the modern body as “real” and “biological” arose in the context of the political establishment of the bourgeoisie, the creation of the centralized State, and the deployment of capitalism.35 The body became a mechanical object of scrutiny to be dissected, internally explored and defined. This biological concept of the body was deployed through education and public propaganda, as well as through the professionalization of medicine. When applied to the human body, the term “biology” assumes a given or natural boundary between the human and the non-human, as well as between the biological and the cultural. Thus the Aymara vision of a woman’s red waters and a man’s white waters—blood and semen—flowing in the earth even before birth completely muddles the human/nonhuman boundary that the term “biology” (when referring to the human body) implies.36 The speech of the Aymara woman quoted above evokes

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a continuity and boundlessness between bodily fluids moving from the earth, to human bodies, and back to the earth when she speaks of offering these “waters” of intercourse to nourish the earth. In fact the human body as well as its waters are spoken of as continuous with and flowing out of and into the earth’s body, and back again in a human body. The Aymara woman’s words also confound the biological/cultural divide in making Pachamama a mother, their mother, as well as their child’s mother. At stake here is the divide between the human and the non-human, and its implication for agency. Karen Barad uses Monica Casper’s work to make the following point: In a special issue of the journal American Behavioral Scientist, devoted to the “Humans and Others: the Concept of ‘Agency’ and Its Attribution,” Monica Casper offers a politically astute critique of the debates on nonhuman agency within science studies. She argues, for example, that they have failed to consider how the very notion of nonhuman agency is premised on a “dichotomous ontological positioning in which [nonhuman] is opposed to human” (840). She points out that these approaches to nonhuman agency exclude a crucial factor from analysis since “the attribution of human and nonhuman to heterogeneous entities” is always already the consequence of particular political practices.37

Our brief notes on the historical emergence of the biological body in Western Europe try to make more visible some of the political practices that went into the making of the biological body. In chapter 3, the economic aspect of the necessity of exclusively owning one’s unitary body in the formation of labor as a resource was already discussed. As Sarah Franklin has pointed out in her work on assisted reproduction, the modern biological model of the “facts of life” can no longer be taken as a universal absolute. It “expresses a particular view of the power to know . . . It is no longer possible to assume this particular view of the power to know unproblematically . . .”38 The term “biology” refers both to the phenomenon of life and to the study of it, thus betraying an implied perfect transparency between the two. More generally, the transparency between reality and the scientific study of it can no longer be innocently held. The quantum experiments discussed in chapter 4 force us to reconsider such transparency between things-inthemselves and their scientific explanations and representations. Barad affirms that reality is things-in-phenomena rather than things-in-themselves. According to Barad, phenomena “constitute a non-dualistic whole so that it literally makes no sense to talk about independently existing things as somehow behind or as the causes of phenomena . . . what is being described is our participation within nature, what I term ‘agential reality.’ ”39

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Moving from things-in-themselves to the things-in-phenomena makes it impossible to separate the cultural from the natural, the semiotic from the material. Donna Haraway uses the expression “material-semiotic actors” to capture the same thing.40 The difference between the world of the Aymara woman quoted above and the industrialized world suddenly seems to begin to evaporate—so much so that Bruno Latour’s science studies lead him to proclaim that “we have never been modern.”41 The singularity and boundedness of the biological body is taken by developmentalist feminists as a universal given, thus holding constant the correlation between an unchangeable biological body and a variable socio/ cultural “gender” (the sex/gender differentiation). Although “gender” is recognized as variable across time and place, what is not variable is gender’s anchoring in a universally given biological body and with it the notion that gender is something that characterizes individual human men and women. This entire construction presents insuperable difficulties in the postquantum, post-modern West, as we have seen. When deployed by developmentalist feminists in an Andean context, it links up with a long history of missionizing. In the Andean world, under certain ritual contexts a person can be a plant, a seed, an animal, a mountain, and any number of other things; the notion of the person is radically non-essentialist. Within the person nest in potentia numberless other forms of life, for it is understood that everything in the pacha is alive, not just humans, animals, and plants.42 These other forms of life—whether seeds, constellations, or animals—can manifest themselves under the proper ritual circumstances. One such circumstance is the festival of the Ispallas, described in the previous chapter. During this ritual, women become seeds of root crops.43 Such fluidity extends to gender, and under certain circumstances a woman can be a man and vice versa. Another important Andean notion—that of uj or juk depending on the dialect of Quechua—further helps to dissolve the modern unitary nature of the biological body, as well as its exclusive relationship to a single gender. Uj literally means “one” or a “unit”; however, it is a unit made up of two, of a pair, and in the Andean world everything goes by such dual units.44 The following words of an Aymara native woman capture this unitary duality: In life all goes in two, male and female, there is no one alone; you well know that it is thus with plants . . . not to speak of animals and humans. It is just the same with the mountains, they all have their pair [or opposite]; there are male Qullus [protector mountains] and female Qullus; with the rivers, lakes, and ocean, they are male and female; the warawara [constellations], the wind, the clouds also live like that. The departed also have to be accompanied by their pair; you do know that when they are alone, so that they do not suffer from [the lack of their] pair, one has to find one for them.45

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While both partners in a couple are alive, the unit is made up of both male and female. However, upon becoming single through the death of one of the partners or through separation, only one “gender” becomes the dual male/ female unit. It is thus clear that the developmentalist notion of gender does not correspond to Andean reality. This is further compounded by the fact that neither the Aymara nor Quechua languages have grammatical gender. The term “gender” (género in Spanish) has forced itself on many Andean communities since the establishment in Bolivia of the Under Ministry of Gender (and in Peru of a corresponding Ministry of Women’s Affairs) in the last two decades or so. In these countries, developmentalist feminism has become officially institutionalized feminism. The official notion of gender cannot be mapped onto Andeans’ notions of what is male and female. This became evident in the several workshops that the authors organized (with others) to discuss these issues with members of the Under Ministry of Gender in Bolivia. We were not able to pry open the official notion of gender. The official notion of gender, institutionalized into laws by the government of Bolivia, remains anthropocentric as well as Eurocentric.

TO SUMMARIZE: GENDER AND THE HIDDEN AGENDA OF THE STATE

Family planning is a goal congruent with developmentalist feminism’s notion of the autonomous individual. It is indispensable for bringing about women’s control over their fertility, enabling an individual woman to voluntarily and autonomously make a life plan. The work of Kathryn Pyne Addelson indicates that in the world of the autonomous agent, family planning transcends the community by becoming an individual act to control the course of one’s fertility. Her example is based on the national organization Planned Parenthood in the United States and the epistemology of family planning. She illustrates that the white middle-class value of planned fertility is rooted in the ideology of individualism and in rational choice. Individuals are able to and should choose the number and timing of the births of their children. Such individualistic stances presume that the same planning outlook should be espoused by all persons and that they should all plan ahead and orient themselves toward a universally presumed goal. She recounts how poor black teenage mothers whose communities welcome the new baby are publicly stigmatized as deviant by school, medical and other professionals. The strategy that Planned Parenthood wanted was one of educating the “they,” these poor black “others,” in the individualistic planning ethics of the “we,” the normative white middle-class individual. These poor black others are morally condemned for their lack of “responsibility” as the following remark by the liberal writer Theodore White about the

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“black pattern of mating and breeding without responsibility” makes clear.46 International Planned Parenthood exports worldwide such colonizing dynamics. Planned Parenthood—whether nationally or internationally— understands the common good to be achieved by aggregation, with each family or each woman individually deciding how many children they can afford. The common good is achieved by individuals acting in their own self-interest, thereby adhering to the basic paradigm of bourgeois economics and society.47 The autonomous individual who controls her fertility acts with carefully planned intent. She determines the world according to her own needs. The modern bourgeois epistemology of individualism and its value of selfcontrol transmute all those who do not live their lives in that fashion into deviant “others” who need to either be educated or failing that, coerced into the proper, normative behavior. Professionals—therapists, educators, doctors, and so on—construct rational and individualistic models to be applied universally. Universality is inextricably linked to the idea of normalcy, for it imposes a singular sense of self on a wide variety of people. The universality of this context-less subject accounts for its unilateral determination of the world, for it does not change its views according to circumstances. If things do not go its way, it must change the world, violently if need be. Removed from context, it is untouched and hence portrays a false reality in its removal from daily relationships of mutuality, from intra-actions. The idea that the individuals have absolute control over themselves, their bodies, and their lives establishes a unilateral vision and action as well as a barrier between it and the world of different humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans. Given the economic and political situation in countries such as Bolivia and Peru, the State’s investment in creating autonomous female individuals can hardly be motivated by its desire to give native women access to education or jobs. Education no longer guarantees one a job and jobs are extremely scarce. Access to land, the most important “productive resource” to use the State’s idiom, is overwhelmingly in the hands of non-natives. The State’s gender agenda is clearly not designed to lead native women to have more control over land outside their communities. It is difficult to avoid the impression that the State’s gender discourse is mostly functional to its family planning agenda. The language of the Under Ministry of Gender in Bolivia wraps its agenda of fostering women’s autonomous decision-making power over their fertility and their sexuality in a seductive language of “respecting women’s decisions and women’s rights,” as well as respecting their right to their own cultural identity. However, as we have argued, the discourse of developmentalist feminism does create the object desired, namely the woman receptive and pliable to the State’s family planning agenda.

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This would be problematic in any context, but in the Andean context, given its history of demographic collapse and low population density, and given native communities’ remarkable resilience and ability to survive and thrive, it is simply unacceptable. Furthermore, abuses in population control programs carried out either by States or international agencies or a combination of the two—as referred to by Eli in the previous chapter—seem to be endemic in the Andes and elsewhere.48 Whether intended or not, too often such developmentalist gender agendas have not only led to abuses but inevitably also to the erasure of other realities and other lives. Family planning can be seen as diametrically opposed to the manner in which the human collectivity in Andean communities lives its own regeneration as part of the regeneration of the whole pacha with all its inhabitants, humans, non-humans, as well as other-than-humans. In such a world, there is no pre-existing socio-political-economic order within which autonomous individuals make choices. The Andean world is continuously generated and regenerated through ritual intra-actions among all its parts.



CHAPTER 9

Beyond Absolute Time and Space From Representation to Performativity in Rituals How we represent space and time in theory matters, because it affects how we and others interpret and then act with respect to the world. —David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity1

INTRODUCTION

The social sciences, as separate academic pursuits, emerged only in the nineteenth century, much later than the natural sciences, taking the latter as their model since by then, those had acquired enormous prestige.2 Following the approach of the natural sciences, the social sciences took human actions as “facts,” objectifying them in order to represent them. The person who most influentially formulated this approach was Emile Durkheim, founding figure in both sociology and anthropology. In his Régles de la méthode sociologique, he argued that the human social and cultural activities and creations were as much “facts” as the “facts” of the natural sciences, and these were to be represented objectively and precisely.3 For the sociologist or anthropologist, social and cultural reality is constructed of social and cultural facts, which are the data of the social scientist. The practice of the social sciences consists in representing these facts, collected and observed by the trained investigator, in an accurate and objective manner. It is on the basis of these facts that the investigator can analyze the findings.4 This chapter argues that the act of representation—whether of time and space, or of a cultural phenomenon—is a form of knowing entailed by the

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modernist ontology. In the first part of the chapter, I try to make visible the implications of the modernist paradigm for a certain view of temporality. I want to try and make visible the tight embrace between the modernist ontology of nature that includes time, and the notion of progress. From a modernist standpoint, rituals such as Yarqa Aspiy and the festival of the Ispallas are not seen as creating a certain type of continuity as well as a certain type of place. With time and space seen as pre-given containers for the actions of humans, this could hardly be the case. This chapter tries to make visible that in these examples, continuity is an achievement; time is not a given, a force that moves at a given and inexorable pace; and place is made through such ritual performances rather than being the pre-given space as container of the action. In the second part of the chapter, I explore some of the implications of the critique of individualism begun in the previous chapter, attempting to flesh out what a non-individualistic understanding of the person looks like. The concept of identity as referring to human groupings is critically examined. One major difficulty is that it is anthropocentric and thus excludes the non-human and the other-than-human as integral to identity. Identity is a concept that is based on an ontological chasm between the human and the non-human, usually conveyed by excluding what belongs to “nature.” In the last part of the chapter, I explore a particular notion of temporality, one that is not separated from normative considerations, one that is achieved through ritual performances. Temporality in non-modern worlds is not a universal given, and instead of being a universal container, space becomes a particular place. I argue that rituals should more fruitfully be understood as collective actions engaging humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans for the purpose of generating and regenerating continuity and a livable common place. The chapter begins to articulate what a non-anthropocentric view of collective action might look like, one that involves not only humans but also the manifold beings of a place, jointly creating continuity and place. Such a place can be, according to circumstances, very small, or it can involve an immense heterogeneity of beings. By the term inter-collectivity, I wish to invoke a multiplicity of beings, humans, non-humans and other-than-humans, all engaged in intra-actions that create a world—or worlds. In inter-collective action, and aspects of the world such as time, or rather continuity and place—are collectively made. Humans do not act upon a pre-given nature, strutting and fretting in a given space propelled by an irreversible temporal arrow. The world and its continuity are carefully created in rituals and ceremonies in which all the collectivities participate. These practices are not acts of representation; they are performances or enactments. In these performances, all participants are called upon to jointly weave a world with a pattern in which all

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contribute to the outcome—a world in which the “we” is emphatically not anthropocentric.

1. PROGRESS: PERFORMANCE ON THE ARROW OF TIME

Science, Again

Universal nature—characterized by its being already and always there—is the non-variable backdrop against which all human dramas are played. But as previous chapters have attempted to make visible, whether we are speaking of plants and soils, of the biology of the human body, or of “natural resources,” these “matters of fact,” as Robert Boyle called them, turn out to be entangled with social, cultural, and political matters. The “facts” were not lying around to be discovered. They required a specific framing and specific actions to emerge. Since the seventeenth century, one way in which the chasm between observer and observed has been articulated is in the differentiation between “primary properties” and “secondary properties.” This is a differentiation affirmed from Galileo to Newton, and one that continues to hold sway in Science. Primary properties belong to the physical world, to things-inthemselves, independent of our knowledge, perception, or experience of them. In other words, they refer to reality outside of humans. This view harks back to the Platonic myth of the cave in which the Ideas lie outside, transcendent, eternal and immutable, and cannot be directly apprehended by mere mortal humans who live in the dark interior of the cave. Secondary properties refer to how humans perceive, experience, and know the world. Atoms, particles, photons, genes, molecules, and gametes belong to the world of primary properties, while colors, odors, lights, and sensations of various kinds are secondary properties. The enterprise of Science is a bridge between the two. Science is a way of knowing—an epistemology—that will make us understand and give us the laws of the objects in nature, of things-in-themselves, that is, of ontology. Reality is to be found outside the cave, and those who deliver it to us are the Scientists, who alone have access to reality due to their mathematical and other specialized methodologies.5 Primary qualities refer to the supposedly universal things of the world, so the world of primary qualities is the same for everyone on this planet. Secondary qualities filter our knowledge of primary qualities through our consciousness, which is multiple due to our varied languages, cultures, and worldviews. Primary properties unify everything, while secondary properties divide humans among themselves. Cultural or social anthropology

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has dedicated itself in large part to recording the myriad ways in which “other”—that is, non-modern—people see, understand, and experience the world; however, with very few recent exceptions, it has seen them all against the same background of a universal nature, time, and space.6 This accounts for the pervasive sense of melancholia, of tristes tropiques, and the corresponding sense that the coming of modernity is inevitable and inevitably erodes non-modern collectivites. There is a fairly widely shared view that this means progress: more control over nature, more choices for individuals, more bio power, and so forth.7 Similarly, in the Modern Constitution (Bruno Latour’s phrase) unilinear homogenous time is the complementary temporal universal backdrop to the spatiality of universal nature. All human dramas play themselves out on the same straight arrow of time and in the same three-dimensional space. Time is the stage, the backdrop of men’s brief strutting and fretting: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.”8 The exteriority of time means that different peoples can march at different tempos on this universal line. Those who “advance” rather than lag behind in the archaic or traditional past can be recognized by their ability to differentiate primary qualities from secondary qualities, and their ability to transcend all secondary qualities through their understanding of nature. They also can be identified by fully belonging to history, by having a history. In this schema, spirits, ancestors, deities and the like are all seen as projections onto the reality of primary properties. Projections are imaginings arising in the psyche of humans, and thus have no intrinsic reality. They are akin to hallucinations, visions, dreams, and other elusive constructs—imaginings belonging to Art, not to Science. Such imaginings, however, are recognized by the social sciences as having the ability to profoundly affect the human world. Nevertheless, this ability is seen as belonging exclusively to humans, and not to non-humans or other-than-humans.

A Thumbnail Genealogy of Time

Although the unidirectional linear view of time in the West is extremely ancient, dating to the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible, the modern sense of time and history emerged much later in Europe. The earliest clocks are said to have been built around 1300, and according to David Landes, “It is the mechanical clock that made possible, for better or worse, a civilization attentive to the passage of time, hence of productivity and performance.”9 Time pieces such as sun dials and clepsydras (time pieces powered by water) existed from antiquity. However, what had not existed before was the ability to measure the passage of time with standard, equal units of measurement.

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In rural India, for example, today as in the past, time units called praharas are of different lengths. What was emerging in Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries gave rise to the birth of modern mathematics, and this in turn to the mechanical clock.10 Landes rhetorically asks of the medieval man: “How much reckoning could he do in a world that knew no uniformity of measurements?”11 Measurements before early modern times were not standard. Weights varied from place to place and were often based on a local basket, for example, as is the case in many rural areas in southern countries today. Distances were reckoned in feet, elbows, hands, thumbs, and the like. Time on the whole was marked by the coursing of the sun and the moon, as well as by church bells ringing prayer times such as matine and angélus. The old church bells ringing the canonical hours for prayer did not mark equal units and hence did not lend themselves to arithmetic, to addition and subtraction. David Landes continues: But the new bells [that kept time in manufacturing workshops arising in this period] and the calculations they made possible (how long until? how long since?) were a school for all who listened and began to organize their lives around them. Meanwhile the church clung to old ways and so doing, yielded the rhythm of life and work to the lay authorities and the bourgeoisie. Equal hours announced the victory of a new cultural and economic order.12

As both Lewis Mumford and David Landes have pointed out, the mechanical clock is a machine, a man-made device that by its essential nature dissociates time from human events and from the non-human world, what is often called “nature.”13 When speaking of the dissociation of time from nature, Mumford and Landes probably mean nature as it is perceived and experienced by humans. In fact, rather than dissociating time from “nature,” the mechanical clocks place time in the same ontology of a Reality beyond or behind human perception and experience. It is clear that the dissociation of time from human events with the mechanical clocks parallels the dissociation between things-in-themselves, or primary properties, and secondary properties. Time becomes an independent variable, dissociated from human events, from human action, and from the perception of celestial movements and the seasons. In modernity, time becomes a homogenous magnitude behind all human activity and perception. This revolution in time could not have happened without the mathematical revolution discussed in chapter 6. For the emergence of the ability to measure equal time units, there had to be a previous step, namely the invention of the category of “general magnitude.” Time had been the province of the church through the early and medieval period in Europe and in the

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Americas since the Conquest. Different periods of the day and of the year were imbued with the feel and meaning of the corresponding prayer and liturgy. Time may have been unidirectional, but it was not uniform; time was heterogeneous. For time to become a homogeneous general magnitude, for it to become the stage for human action, the mathematical revolution that created general magnitude and enabled the quantification of incommensurable entities by making the unit a real number had to happen first. And as we saw in chapter 6, this occurred as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the innovations in accounting that took place in the first banks of northern Italy.

History versus Playing with Memory

The modern view of time as homogenous and quantifiable in equal units, as abstract, and as the backdrop for all human action is necessary for the emergence of history in its modern form. Modern history, like modern Science, proposes obtaining the “facts” of what “really happened” in the past, although lately such a positivist view of history has come in for hard knocks. The view of history as the recording of the acts of humans ordered along a homogenous timeline is a modern European invention.14 Although the post-modern critique of positivist history has pointed out the impossibility of an objective history, of extracting the historian from his or her gender, age, religion, culture, and such, very few have questioned the existence of an independent homogenous measurable timeline.15 Undoubtedly, postmodern history is vastly preferable to positivist history. However, history continues to be the privileged discourse of modernity. Those who ignore history are seen as stuck in mythical thinking, in the superseded past. They belong to archaic, primitive, or traditional societies that are destined sooner or later to become modern. By being brought into history, they will acquire citizenship and dignity in the modern world. Under the post-modern critique, history has become ever more sensitive to the excluded, the marginalized, the invisibles. History is ever more inclusive, ever less Eurocentric, ever more multicultural with more minority histories, ever less essentialist. Hybridity has become the hallmark of fashionable post-modern history.16 These developments are surely welcome ones. It remains, however, that for many people history is not an idiom that is relevant or meaningful. One striking example of this is the Indian case of the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque in the North Indian town of Ayodhya, said to have been the site of a much more ancient shrine to the Hindu god Ram and his birthplace. Local vernacular tradition made room for both Ram and his wife Sita as well as Allah in the same locality.

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It deliberately chose to forget stories of conquest by Muslims. But with the coming to power of the fundamentalist Hindu Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJP) party, two historical camps battled it out: the Hindu fundamentalist party historians and the universities’ liberal historians, both marshaling facts to prove respectively that this was indeed the site of Ram’s birthplace or that it was not. The people of Ayodhya, meanwhile, suffered deeply from the ensuing riots generated by the destruction of the mosque where the State turned a blind eye to Hindu BJP workers going on a Muslim-killing rampage. Perhaps the people of Ayodhya suffered even more deeply from the attempted killing of their obliviousness to history. This obliviousness tends to be read as ignorance. However, as Ashis Nandy, Vinay Lal, and Ramachandra Gandhi all suggest, it is not ignorance but rather a deliberate alternative stance, one in which temporality is not a line but a made memory, in this case one made by acts of inclusion and simultaneity. These were embodied for centuries in the fact that within the mosque there had always existed a shrine to Ram and what was known as Sita’s kitchen (Sita was Ram’s wife).17 Each community made room for the other. The subcontinent is full of examples of sites at which both communities worship.18 The existence of the two sites nested within each other and the ability for people worshipping there to do so without feeling the presence of other practices to be an intrusion or, worse, an insult, seem to have become impossibilities.19 As Nandy so eloquently phrases it: Perhaps one can extend the insights of psychological studies into individual creativity to larger aggregates, to claim that social creativity requires, among other things, some capacity to play with one’s past-as-a-part-of-one’s-self. [A]n ability to play with the past is a necessary counterpoint to the dredging of the past that has become a standard marker of official enquiry commissions all over the world . . . I believe that social and political creativity requires this capacity for play. As the intellectually accessible universe expands, and as we confront disowned cultures and states of consciousness about which the present dominant global middle-class culture of knowledge knows nothing, we need more than ever our capacity to recognize the alternative realities that we are daily coerced to bury.20

This enactment of play with regard to “history” is nowhere more pithily and perhaps shockingly articulated than in the words of Eduardo Grillo of PRATEC; speaking of South American native peoples he writes, “We have never been conquered.”21 It is also exemplified in one episode of the festival of Yarqa Aspiy described in chapter 5, in which there is an enactment of people dressed as chunchos, or Amazonian peoples, being disemboweled by other people disguised as black people. This refers to well-documented incidents during the rubber boom in particular when the bosses hired African

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slaves to “discipline” the Amazonian natives. Such “disciplining” typically took murderous forms.22 The enactment is part of the invisiones, the part of the festival in which a group of comuneros entertain those who are cleaning the irrigation canals. When asked about the meaning of the play, I was told that this was just for fun. Another part of the invisiones is a very comic and slapstick imitation of the Mass. When I queried whether this represented a critique of the church and its practice of “extirpation of idolatry,” I was told it had nothing to do with this and was simply meant to make people laugh, which it certainly did. In both of these cases, history is playfully re-enacted and creatively remembered to achieve a sense of joyful continuity, an acceptance of difference, as well as a healing of extremely painful memories through selective remembering and playful re-enactments. When the homogenous, unidirectional timeline is no longer taken as a given backdrop to human action, the necessity for history as the record of the past ceases to be self-evident. Conversely, an ontology in which homogenous unidirectional time is an absolute given inevitably leads to the view that non-historically minded peoples are backward. These people have not yet come to understand time properly. Whether we are speaking of time, space, or nature—in the sense of those primary qualities of things-in-themselves—we are speaking of absolutes, of universal backdrops to all human activity, the given coordinates of all existence. This is what Bruno Latour has called the Modern Constitution with its two chambers: one representing things and events both spatially and temporally, and one representing people. Those representing the former are the Scientists, and those representing the latter are the historians and social scientists. In this schema, what exists—ontology—and how we know about what exists— epistemology—are separate. To put it more vernacularly, to know is to know about things, people, and events, with events taken as given independently of our knowing them. We can know them more or less accurately, more or less inclusively, more or less sensitively, more or less profoundly, and so forth. Our knowing these things, however, is kept separate from our doing, our living, and our making the world in intra-actions with the humans, the non-humans, and the other-than-humans. How to act and how to live are ethical issues, not epistemological or ontological issues. The separation of facts and values, canonical in the Modern Constitution, is implied in this separation of what is to be known and the life of those who know. Without such separations, the act of representing is replaced by the ritual performances of the generation or regeneration of the world. Since the worlds in the Andean and Amazonian regions are multiple, we are here speaking of how to inter-collectively make livable worlds across different collectivities. These differences are not just those among more or less delineated human groupings, but also those among the non-humans

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and the other-than-humans. At minimum, “livable” worlds are meant to signify a cohabitation, a living together, in which all participants in those worlds can thrive, and in which an inclusive pattern is crafted. This does not imply that conflicts do not arise or even that rituals cannot also enact conflicts (I have in mind ritual warfare, called tinkuy in the Andes and the High Amazon), but rather that what is sought, either through inclusivity or through conflict, is regeneration. In such non-modern worlds, people do not stand against or apart from the non-human and the other-than-human world as an ontologically given. As Parker Palmer phrased it, objectivity, or the existence of an objective reality independent of human action, sets people up against all that is.23 In the case of modernity, the challenge of seeing ritual performances as generating and regenerating livable worlds is enormous for all the reasons adduced throughout the present work. Modernity privileges itself since it alone has access to what is really real and what really happened. Further, it can only act in terms of bringing people to modernity or post-modernity, but not to varieties of non-modernity.

2. HUMAN IDENTITY: BEYOND ANTHROPOCENTRISM

The State and its agencies, as well as the church in the Andean and Amazonian regions, have more often than not seen the human individual as an Aristotelian “rational animal,” or as the creature of God with body and soul, or as an individual and a citizen as discussed in the previous chapter. Regardless, a human being cannot be confused with an animal, a plant, a rock, a spirit, a deity, or a house. The identity of a human being is to be a human being and not something else. In this process of defining the individual, the church, the universities, the State, and even international agencies such as the United Nations have played and continue to play a crucial role. The principle of identity is coterminous with that of non-contradiction and of the excluded middle. In other words, what is cannot at the same time and under the same aspect be both what it is and also something else, something that it is not. Thus, a human being cannot also be an animal, a plant, a rock, a spirit, a deity, an implement, a house, or whatever. The self is constitutively different from the world around it, that is, from the world exterior to it.24 The modern self emerges simultaneously with the emergence of nature, time, and space as given backdrops. Modernity, it has often been said, began with the discovery of perspective. It was Leonardo da Vinci who first articulated precisely the principles of perspective at the turn of the sixteenth century. With perspective, the placement of the person—and more specifically of the person’s two eyes—

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is key. The eyes define the person not as what is seen, but rather as the source of seeing, and thus as separate from the objects viewed. It is only with perspective that a given exterior world of Nature can emerge spatially. Pondering perspective makes visible the way in which the exterior world is coterminous with the identity of a human being as separate—as not nature, not world, not object, but rather as seeing subject. Erwin Panofsky captures a triumphantly modernist evaluation of the perspectival dispensation: The history of perspective [may be] considered equally as a triumph of the sense of reality with its detachment and objectivation, and a triumph of human striving for power with its negation of distances, just as it can be seen as a process of establishing a systematization of the external world and an expansion of the ego sphere.25

Panofsky’s engulfment in the modernist paradigm is betrayed by his use of the phrase “a triumph of the sense of reality.” It is this modernist viewpoint that makes the non-moderns appear as being “dreamlike” or as living in a trance, to use the Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser’s words.26 Gebser sees the dangers of “perspectival man” not only in the rationalization and objectification of the world, but also in a corresponding hypertrophy of the “I,” the ego, which is in confrontation with the external world. However, he considers pre-modern “unperspectival man” to be in a dream-like trance and advocates for a future “aperspectival man” that can already be seen emerging in the West, according to him. The non-moderns or the unperspectival “men” must perforce come to consciousness of their human identity and see reality for what it really is. Many who see the dangers and shadow side of modernity, like Jean Gebser or Ken Wilber among many others, do not jettison the notion of progressive evolution embedded in the modernist paradigm. They continue to see the West as the point “man” for such a progressive evolution that will usher in “aperspectival man.”27 The Eurocentric masculine imperium has many and subtle incarnations. The word “nature” can be rendered in Aymara and in Quechua respectively by sallqa and sacha, words that refer to those entities and beings that are under the care and nurturance of the protecting deities, the Apus, Achachillas, Animas, and so on rather than under the care and nurturance of humans or non-humans. It is closer to the modern notion of the wild, but cannot be equated with wild since sallqa or sacha are far from a pre-given Nature, and are rather the fruit of intra-actions between the protecting deities and the non-humans. Furthermore, humans are not constitutively separate from the sallqa/sacha since under certain circumstances, humans can incorporate or even be sallqa/sacha. One example of the latter is that of the preparation for the hunt by the men of the High Amazon region of

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Peru. Before entering the forest, they take the extracts of certain plants called “purges” under ritual conditions and concomitantly observe a strict diet.28 This process of purging and dieting changes their scent as well as other more subtle characteristics, and they become one more animal or plant of the forest since they no longer smell like humans, and no longer drive animals away by their presence. Nor are humans separate from the huacas or animas [deities, spirits, etc.], as the examples from the festivals of the Ispallas in chapter 7 or Yarqa Aspiy in chapter 5 demonstrate. During the festival of the Ispallas, the women address each other as ispallas, or the spirit of the new root crops, and the men address each other as much’os, or the spirit of the grains. During Yarqa Aspiy, the people become the water. The self is thus porous and within it nests other forms of life. The world is not seen perspectivally, divided between an external physical reality and the seeing subject as the foundational point for this construction. The pacha or sallqa or sacha are all comprised of humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans. However, these are not bounded categories that exclude each other. Rather, they point to different kinds of beings that inhabit this world. The fundamental characteristic of this pacha, this world, is that all of its members are porous and they all intra-act, making, growing, nurturing each other. This pacha includes constellations, winds, hail, frost, rocks, soils, and so forth, as well as animals, plants, people and their artifacts. It is alive since all its members act, and these actions are what create or make all these beings/entities. It is agential in all senses of the term. The action of making or creating is always an intra-active one that brings into being various entities/beings through this activity. Bruno Latour, unlike Gebser or Wilber, does not consider the relatively recent recognition in the field of science studies in the West of the agency of non-humans to constitute the vanguard of evolution.29 Latour recognizes that for the West, this is the first time that this recognition is taking place, whereas “it seems that the ‘others,’ which are called ‘cultures’ with slightly condescending respect, have never really lost the habit of politely greeting this outside that sustained them.”30 The beings of the world make each other live, create each other, and inhabit the same world. This is in fact what Latour himself has in mind when he says of Pasteur and his work that the microbes and the instruments were as much the authors of the discovery of infection as Pasteur himself.31 As the biologist Richard Lewontin puts it, “Organism and environment create each other.”32 For Latour, the task is not to reach a new stage of evolution, but rather is one of making livable common worlds, both within and between worlds. Perspective allowed humans to be able to represent the world in terms of measurements, diagrams, and of course paintings. It made technical

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drafting feasible and thus initiated the technological age.33 However, “perspectival man” could not have emerged without the previous invention of the Greek phonetic alphabet. David Abram has proposed that phonetic alphabetic writing created a complete severance between the written sign and the world. The letters of the Greek phonetic alphabet (out of which grew the Roman and other European writing systems) refer exclusively to sounds made by the human voice; in other words, it is completely anthropocentric. The written notations on the page bear no link to anything but the sounds of the human voice; they do not point to anything in the nonhuman world. In this respect the phonetic alphabet differs from many other writing systems.34 As Abram argues, this writing system profoundly changed consciousness and produced the phenomenon of classical Greek thought, captured in the Platonic myth of the Cavern.35 The phonetic alphabet made possible a consciousness of one’s self and one’s thoughts as separate from a wider reality. Thoughts became materialized as strings of written signs on paper. It became possible to link one thought to another in some logical, abstract order, not unrelated to the grammar of the thinker’s language; it was an order that was motivated by the organization of sentences and ideas on the page. With phonetic alphabetic writing, there emerges a separation between what becomes an exterior world and an interior world of thought. Written words come to represent the world. This transformation of consciousness in classical Greece displaced oral consciousness to the category of remnants of a superseded world.36 Alphabetic consciousness became intensified with the invention of the printing press in fifteenth-century Europe. Books could be mass printed, making them widely available in a way that manuscripts could not be. The world of the aural, in which the sounds of the world envelop and penetrate the person from all sides, was replaced by the world of literacy in which the visual becomes the main focus, as with perspective. Reading became an increasingly solitary and silent activity, cutting one off from the sounds of the world, focusing the mind and mind’s ear on the human sounds to which the letters correspond. The sounds of the world ceased to be meaningful. In the pacha, an oral and aural world, all speak. The sounds as well as the sight of animals, wind, rustling plants, rushing water, thunder, all communicate with the humans. These are intimately known and become signs [señas] that speak about the coming weather and other events. With the ingestion or smoking of certain plants such as the Amazonian plant brew known as ayahuasca, spirits, ancestors, and deities come and speak to the humans, as do the spirits of the plants, the animals, the mountains, the rivers and so forth.37 In the world of orality, there “cannot be language on one side and

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the world on the other, with reference in between, establishing a more or less exact correspondence between these two incommensurable entities.”38 In other words, in orality the Platonic myth of the cavern cannot exist. Thus the “we” in the Andean and Amazonian worlds is not made up of a collectivity of human selves, but of a heterogeneous collectivity of humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans. This was made poetically vivid in the quote reproduced in the previous chapter of an Aymara woman’s description of the white and red waters of conception. The Peruvian writer/activist Grimaldo Rengifo states that in Quechua, this state of affairs is captured in the word noqanchis: As is known, the Andean notion of noqanchis includes not only members of the human community, but—in the sense that the Andeans have of ayllu—it incorporates also the natural community and the huacas, since the Apus and the Pachamama [mother earth] are also relatives, are also part of the “we.” The ayllu is the Andean family . . . Heterogeneity is an Andean attribute that nests in each form of life as in the fabric that all forms of life weave.39

This heterogeneous woven fabric is constantly moving, constantly rewoven, unwoven, frayed, and restrung. The trope of weaving should not lead one to the conclusion that this world is in constant harmony. Disharmony and conflicts are part of life. But what it does mean is that the human person is not set up against, in opposition to, and in antagonism with an exterior Nature over which he/she exercises power and an exterior Time to which he/she must submit. At this point, it may be necessary to remind ourselves that aspects of the Andean and Amazonian worlds have been invoked in order to show that the term “identity” cannot be understood in its usual anthropocentric sense. Another way of saying the same thing is that talk of absolute and universal Time, Space, and Nature have deeply problematic political implications. The universality of Nature, Time/Space, and Man, “discovered” with modern Science in Western Europe and refined and deployed by the Enlightenment, means that the modernist gaze is a privileged gaze.40 It alone has access to things as they really are. In order to be able to see Andean and Amazonian worlds in ways other than how they appear through such a gaze, it is necessary to reveal that the modern world has been under the illusion that it is modern. Or, as Latour so simply puts it, “We have never been modern.” Anthropology, with only a very few recent exceptions, has seen “other cultures” as having different points of view on a single Nature, Time/ Space, and Man. However interesting these points of view have been portrayed to be, the bottom line remains that sooner or later those “other cultures” will have to arrive at a true understanding of Nature, Time/ Space, and Man. Many seem horrified by the rejection of this progress or

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inevitable evolution, and invoke the nightmare of relativism to prevent one from going down that road. But relativism comes into being only in opposition to absolutism. Without the latter, it simply evaporates. Without absolutism (or universalism), we in fact have no other choice than to make livable worlds together, which is not to be confused with advocating multiculturalism.

3. RITUALS: PERFORMING LIVABLE COMMON WORLDS

I would like to suggest that rather than seeing a bundle of attributes residing within preexisting beings, beings can be seen as emerging differently according to the intra-actions taking place. Such intra-actions take place at many different levels of the collectivities: from the very local, such as one person’s chacra, to between different pachas, and even to between different manifestations of Andean or Amazonian worlds and the collectivities beyond them. At all of these levels, what is common is that the world comes into being through intra-actions that typically take the form of rituals, those carefully orchestrated intra-actions meant to bring about a livable world. To give a concrete example, a chacra comes into being through the actions of the sun, the moon, the soil, the constellations, the winds, the waters, the seeds, the plants, the insects, the birds, the tools, other animals, the actions of humans, and so forth. We need to remind ourselves that this does not mean that harmonious or successful results will necessarily be the outcome. Crops can fail, people, animals, or plants can get sick, the earth can tremble and heave, and communities can sink into conflict. In order to increase the possibility of successful results, humans along with the non-humans and the other-than-humans have collectively devised careful actions to generate and regenerate the world, actions referred to as rituals, ceremonies, and festivals. These nonanthropocentric collective actions endeavor to bring about not just any common world, but a livable common world. Such outcomes are not made once and for all since such worlds are dynamic entities, hence the necessity for periodic iterations of such ritual actions. Making a livable common world simultaneously involves making a livable continuity of life. Time and space are not separated; in fact, the word pacha refers to both time and space. Making a livable common world involves repeated actions that propel the continuity of this common world. Things move and change, are born, grow and die; conflicts erupt; new beings appear and need to be incorporated into (or rejected from) the common world. When neither nature, nor time/space, nor “Man” are given, but rather are made, nurtured, and woven in intra-actions, the very modernist

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separations between facts and values, and between theory and praxis, vanish. One is no longer faced with the cold, immutable facts on one side, and the endeavor to live a livable life on this given stage on the other. The Modern Constitution is probably unique historically and geographically in seeing the non-human world as inanimate and without agency. One of the earliest articulations of such a dynamic, action-oriented view toward the world is found in the Rig Veda, one of the earliest extant literatures of the world in which rituals—specifically the sacrifice that creates the cosmos—are detailed.41 Vedic scholar Lilian Silburn describes the making of continuity in the hymns: Temporal continuity takes the aspect of a perpetual weaving done by two young girls, the day and the night, one unweaving what the other has woven . . . What is primary is not a time that flows in a uniform continuous manner; it is a rhythm of which the solar rhythm appears as the prototype . . . To weave this weft one has to know its knots, the ritus . . . the actions that propel the coming duration . . . the return to the womb . . . the night [that] unweaves what the day has woven. But this return expresses primarily a cycle of rebirth, of regeneration, and thusly, of immortality.42

Temporality refers to the abstract general magnitude called Time. In contrast, continuity has an evaluative component to it. It implies not just the passage of time regardless of the actions of humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans, but an achievement: the achievement of the continuation of a livable world made collectively, non-anthropocentrically. The livable world must be constantly rewoven for its fabric gets frayed or even unraveled in the very process of the rhythmic actions of the collectivities; because of this, rituals must be constantly reiterated. It is attending to this fraying, this unraveling, that I name regeneration. The world is enacted, the world is performed, the world is made through intra-actions.43 In the making of this continuity, the ritus, according to Silburn’s translation of the Vedic hymns, play an essential role. The Sanskrit word ritu is made of the root ri and the suffix -tu, the latter making it an action word. The substantive rita is most often translated as “cosmic order,” such order being understood as simultaneously in time and space. The Sanskrit ritu is etymologically related to the Latin ritus, meaning rite or ritual.44 Rituals, ceremonies, and festivals are actions that create continuity in the sense of weaving or reweaving livable common worlds. I take rituals (I will keep this term to cover all the others since it gestures toward its Sanskrit roots) not in the sense commonly given to the word of repeated patterned actions, but rather as actions by which humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans intra-act, and mutually weave each other into an achieved continuity, into an achieved livable and regenerated world. These rituals exist at many levels

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from the very small, involving perhaps just one person conversing with the collectivity in her chacra, to large community-wide festivals such as Yarqa Aspiy or the festival of the Ispallas, to still larger rituals in which many local collectivities encounter each other, such as the Koyllor Riti pilgrimage to the sacred Ausangati mountain in the Peruvian central Andes where some ten thousand people converge during the June solstice. What separates out ritual action from everyday action is that in the former, the patterning of actions is designed to focus awareness so as to synchronize the awareness of the different participants—humans, nonhumans, and other-than-humans—enabling them to weave each other into a continuous world, a regenerated world. The specific actions, gestures, movements, and utterances are specified ones; they are specified so as to orchestrate this intra-action between the humans, the non-humans, and the other-than-humans. Rituals are like the scores that enable a musical performance and, as such, rituals are never the same in each subsequent performance. They are in fact rarely annotated, even in literate contexts. Like the performance of a symphonic piece of music, the performance and enactment of these actions, gestures, and utterances is what makes, creates, and achieves the sought-after continuity and regeneration of the world(s). The performance may be better or worse or may even fail entirely. It is precisely this characteristic that makes continuity an achievement. Anthropology’s commonly held view of rituals as symbolic action misses the point. Anthropology itself, being dedicated to the representation of other worlds, has been rather weak in efforts to contribute to creating better dynamics between the societies it has studied and the modern northern world. The size of the anthropological archives is rather inversely proportionate to the well-being of the worlds these archives represent, as several writers from among the anthropologized have pointed out. As a representational activity, anthropology is fully engaged in the reproduction of the privileging of the Modern Constitution. Similarly, with history as the representation of the past, knowing such history has not prevented people from repeating its “mistakes.” Representation by its nature cannot contribute to the achievement of a positive continuity. Quite the opposite: it contributes to the reproduction of the Modern Constitution. Only mutuality and intra-actions are capable of achieving a continuity of worlds, particularly as crafted in rituals.

Endnote: Subversive Spiritualities

Today, rituals such as that of Yarqa Aspiy or the Ispallas draw the interest of anthropologists and tourists alike. For both, they more often than not evoke a sentiment of nostalgia or melancholy so unforgettably captured

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by Lévi-Strauss in his justly celebrated book Tristes Tropiques. However, as Marcela Machaca’s brother Gualberto writes: “The spirituality of the native people is based on the protection and great respect toward all beings present in the pacha. This spirituality is alive today in spite of having suffered constant aggression and in spite of the fact that officialdom tries to erase it.”45 This aggression began with the colonial government policy of “extirpation of idolatry,” itself an export from the witch-hunts raging at that time in Europe.46 Economist Stephen A. Marglin points out the following in his discussion of the famous debate between two celebrated sixteenth-century opponents, Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, concerning the status of the natives of the Americas: The danger to indigenous culture from conquistadores imbued with notions of difference and hierarchy needs no explanation. But Las Casas’s idea of identity and equality was in its own way even more subversive of non-European ways of understanding and being in the world. Anticipating mainstream economics, it came with its own syllogism: everybody is the same; thus you are like me . . . And my Truth is your Truth. Like his opponents who believed in difference and hierarchy, Las Casas had no doubt that he was doing the natives a favor by bringing them Christianity and European culture.47

Marglin goes on to give a revealing tour of the historical vicissitudes of this European attitude and its transformation into a later secular discourse, captured in the title of his chapter, “From Imperialism to Globalization, By Way of Development.” Marglin shows the contemporary, mainstream economics view that it is human nature to act as a maximizing, self-interested individual to be a direct descendant of the sixteenth-century conquistadores. I would add that this homo economicus, as argued in chapter 3, emerged with the enclosure movement in fourteenth-, fifteenth-, and sixteenth-century Europe. From its inception, this individual, acting to secure his own advantage as it was then phrased, necessitated the de-legitimizing of the collectivity of beings that shared the commons and the enclosing of those commons. The collectivity of beings was quite successfully eradicated in Europe along with the so-called witches, though in southern regions of the globe this collectivity has exhibited a much greater capacity to endure. The rituals that have generated and regenerated the commons—such as Yarqa Aspiy and the Ispallas—have embodied a subversive spirituality ever since the conquistadores first encountered them. Marglin’s work makes clear why they have remained subversive well after the church abandoned its policy of extirpation of idolatry. As Gualberto Machaca puts it, they have always suffered from aggression, an aggression that has not abated. As Marglin argues, “Thinking like an economist undermines community.” A community Marglin however, understands in anthropocentric

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terms only. Moving beyond social-scientific boundaries as I have done in this book, and focusing on the basic parameters of the classical scientific cosmology, it is clear that thinking within this cosmology undermines the community of beings Gualberto Machaca speaks about and that Grimes invokes in the epigraph to the introductory chapter. In other words, the classical scientific cosmology accounts for these kinds of practices continuing to embody a subversive spirituality. Subversive because, if taken seriously, it would undermine the Modern Constitution that still rules public policy. Lest one think that I am advocating for the world of the Andean and Amazonian communities remaining unsullied by any aspect of modernity, I am turning in the next and last chapter to a rather successful example of a creative encounter between aspects of modernity and aspects of a native Amazonian world. To question the Modern Constitution is not at all the same thing as advocating for something like “the preservation of cultures.” To juxtapose a supposedly inevitable march toward a better future with a stance for something like “preserving the cultures of the world” is to remain caught in modernity’s dualism.



C H A P T E R 10

Fair Trade and the Possibility of Bio-cultural Regeneration The whole point of Fair Trade is to elicit a response from the consumer based on solidarity with producers, a pole apart from an economics which understands consumers in terms of the calculation of individual self-interest. From the economist’s perspective . . . Fair Trade mixes up two things which ought to be kept separate, charitable redistribution and efficiency. But in terms of its own perspective, Fair Trade introduces a whole new dimension into the analysis, a dimension that cannot be comprehended within standard economics: community. —Stephen Marglin, The Dismal Science1

INTRODUCTION

Fair Trade in its present incarnation is a relatively new phenomenon, dating from the late 1980s. Even though it is considered to be mainly an economic phenomenon, its hybrid character has some interesting implications. First and foremost, it is a phenomenon that, as Stephen Marglin’s epigraph makes clear, promotes community bonds between (human) producers and consumers. Since most Fair Trade producers are organized in small cooperatives, it also fosters solidarity among producers who are typically smallholder southern farmers. These characteristics of Fair Trade imply that it is a system that does not tend to generate a homo economicus. For poor southern farmers, access to the northern Fair Trade markets has on the whole meant protection from the vagaries of the commodity world market with its wild fluctuations in prices. Such fluctuations have often spelled catastrophe for poor southern farmers. Protection from the slings and arrows of the commodities market has given poor southern farmers a measure of security and sustainability. Even though the disparity between poor southern producers and the consumers in the North remains glaring,

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Fair Trade has often made the difference between a hand-to-mouth existence and a measure of security and sustainability. Without such security, poor farmers have too often been obliged to sell their lands and migrate in search of a livelihood. This security is what has made it possible for poor farmers in the South to turn their attention not only to the well-being of their families, but to their practices of regenerating their human communities, their nonhuman places, and the other-than-human beings of those places. In this chapter, I try to capture these different practices of regeneration by using the short hand expression “bio-cultural” to refer to humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans. In order to speak concretely of regenerating practices, I have chosen the example of a Fair Trade–certified coffee cooperative in the Peruvian High Amazon whose membership is overwhelmingly made up of indigenous and mestizo poor farmers. It is a cooperative with which I collaborated for a few years, between 2006 and 2009. The first part of the chapter includes a brief description of what Fair Trade is and is not, how it came about, as well as the critiques leveled against it by mainstream economics. It includes interviews conducted with members of the Oro Verde Fair Trade Coffee Cooperative in the Peruvian High Amazon in order to bring what Stephen Marglin calls “the economics of tragic choices” to life. The second part addresses the environmental and social aspects of Fair Trade practices and understanding. In particular it addresses some of the problems in Fair Trade and organic certification, pointing out some of the contradictions at the heart of many Fair Trade requirements. The final part addresses what in fact are cultural, ritual, and spiritual possibilities within Fair Trade, but that now are there only in potentia. Currently such aspects remain largely invisible, and the intent of this chapter is to redress such obliviousness so as to potentially harness the power of the other-thanhuman beings. These efforts must begin with the local form of spirituality, namely shamanism. This last section attempts to illustrate how Fair Trade and organic production involve not only human actors, but also non-human actors such as trees, earth, and water, and other-than-human actors, such as the spirits of the forest and the spirits of plants among others. However, the prospects for this recognition to actually happen are dim indeed. How I have responded to such dim prospects is detailed in the epilogue.

1. FAIR TRADE AND MAINSTREAM CRITIQUES

What Is Fair Trade?

Fair Trade is a movement that started in the 1980s, and the umbrella organization Fair Trade Labeling Organization (FLO) was founded in 1997.2 This organization has seventeen members that are national initiatives in fourteen

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European countries, Canada, Japan, and the United States.3 Fair Trade can be “understood as a particular type of relationship between ‘ethical consumers’ and low-income producer households through international trade.”4 The following widely accepted definition makes this clear: Fair Trade is a trading partnership, based on dialogue, transparency and respect, that seeks greater equity in international trade. It contributes to sustainable development by offering better trading conditions to, and securing the rights of, marginalized producers and workers especially in the South. Fair Trade organizations (backed by consumers) are engaged actively in supporting producers, awareness raising and in campaigning for changes in the rules and practice of conventional international trade.5

It is a noteworthy and unique feature of Fair Trade that the first thing mentioned in this official definition is a trade partnership based on dialogue, transparency, and respect. In the second sentence it mentions the rights of marginalized producers. What is emphasized right away is that the economic aspect—conveyed by the word “trade”—comes in a package along with social and political (“the rights of ”) aspects. Those social and political concerns refer to rights of marginalized producers and to equity between producers and buyers. The words “sustainable development” add to those aspects an environmental dimension. By 2006, FLO had vastly increased its environmental requirements for certification, from a one-page paragraph to an eighteen-page list of requirements. Fair Trade joins economic goals to social, political, and environmental ones; one could perhaps dare to say that Fair Trade seeks to re-embed trade in society, the polity, and the environment.6 In so doing it departs radically from capitalist and especially neoliberal economic relations.7 However, as I will discuss below, there is no attempt to re-embed the economy in rituals or spirituality. However, the term “development” is one that I avoid, as does the cofounder of the Fair Trade movement, Francisco (Franz) Vanderhoff Boersma, a Dutch Catholic, worker-priest who founded the Fair Trade movement in collaboration with an organization of indigenous coffee growers from the Tehuantepec region of Mexico with whom he has been living and working for the past twenty-five years. This is what Vanderhoff Boersma says about “development”: Development and underdevelopment came out of a factory producing glamorous fantasies . . . In fact, for the excluded social majorities, development signifies undertaking a path that others know better, towards a goal that others have already reached . . . in a oneway street . . . The so-called “poor” . . . propose the restoration of what development denied them: the opportunity of creating their own ways of life, of establishing and regulating their own communal spheres, of producing organically, of commercializing their products professionally and of living with dignity . . . The opposite of development is not

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underdevelopment . . . [but rather] hospitality . . . The creation of the Alternative Market, of Fair Trade, is the result of this hospitality. The other who needs my product is part of my family.8

I will later attempt to identify how the FLO requirements exemplify as well as bring about what Vanderhoff Boersma calls “a path that others know better, toward a goal that others have already reached . . . in a one-way street.” But before turning to what I consider to be drawbacks of Fair Trade, encapsulated in the word “development,” it is imperative to make very clear its positive benefits. Fair Trade brings smallholder agricultural producers—via their association into cooperatives—into direct and equitable relationship with northern buyers, obviating the many intermediaries of capitalist trade.9 It also guarantees to the producers a price for their product that not only covers the cost of production, but that also allows them to support their families and improve their living conditions according to local community standards. In other words, Fair Trade has a minimum price for products such as coffee or cacao, or cane sugar or other tropical agricultural products, and also guarantees additional premiums for Fair Trade and organically grown products that are given at the end of the agricultural season. These prices are independent of the commodity price (C price) generated on the world market, except in the case where the C price climbs above the Fair Trade price, in which case the latter is reset to match the C price. The price of coffee on the world market has fallen dramatically ever since the United States abandoned the International Coffee Agreement in 1989.10 This was soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. The United States and other capitalist countries supported such an agreement as a way of promoting coffee-growing southern countries’ allegiance.11 With the end of the Cold War, such support was no longer sought. On occasion since then, the price of coffee on the world market has climbed to or even above the Fair Trade price. In such a situation, Fair Trade matches the world market price while continuing to give premiums. The Fair Trade label assures northern consumers that the additional amount they are paying for the product does actually benefit the producer, while the organic label assures consumers that the product has been grown under strictly monitored organic conditions. Since 2004, the organization that certifies producers as Fair Trade has separated from the one that maintains and governs the standards: FLO maintains and governs the Fair Trade standards, while FLO-CERT registers producers and issues licenses to international traders that certify specific quantities of a product. FLO is a not-for-profit independent organization with its seat in Bonn, Germany, and seventeen national organizations.

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It certifies both southern producers organized into cooperatives as well as northern roasters and buyers, and inspectors for both the producers and the buyers are locally trained and based. Thus, the cost of certification is born by both the producers and the buyers. While both parties must fulfill certain conditions to be admitted to the Fair Trade market, there are important differences between certification methods for producers and buyer companies. The requirements for producers’ cooperatives to obtain certification are many: transparency of accounts; democratic organization; overseeing of the running of the cooperative by democratically elected representatives from all the member producers that include women representatives; practice of organic agriculture in the whole farm and not just in the cash crop fields; prohibition to cut mature forest; and many more. In contrast, for companies to be certified and sell under the Fair Trade label, they need only to prove that the products they are selling have been purchased from Fair Trade cooperatives. One of the national initiatives of FLO-CERT, such as TransFair USA, will examine the supply chain and verify that the Fair Trade prices have been paid. The implications for this method of certifying buyers is that it opens Fair Trade products to big multinational companies (MNC) such as Starbucks and Procter and Gamble. This has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that it increases enormously the quantity of products that can be sold under the Fair Trade label. The disadvantage is that these MNCs are not committed to long-term relationships with southern cooperatives, nor to implementing any aspect of Fair Trade practice in the rest of their business. This contrasts sharply with small buyers such as New England’s Dean’s Beans, which buys 100% Fair Trade and not only commits itself to long-term relationships with producing cooperatives, but also gives out grants to them for projects of their own choosing and offsets CO2 emissions due to transport by planting the equivalent number of trees.12 In resistance to the MNCs’ half-hearted commitments, Dean’s Beans has withdrawn from the FLO system and joined the Fair Trade Federation (FTF). The FTF has emerged in recent years as an alternative system for certifying companies as a whole, a system in which member companies must adhere to Fair Trade principles in all their business dealings as a precondition for admission. In what follows, I will discuss and illustrate the manner in which Fair Trade contradicts certain basic tenets and assumptions of mainstream economics and the capitalist economy. It is important to recognize that societies have engaged in long-distance trade ever since humans roamed the world, as was discussed in chapter 3, and that the capitalist world market is only one particular type of long-distance trading system. Mainstream economics would have us believe that it is the most advanced, most

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efficient, and most beneficial of all possible trading systems, and that other systems including Fair Trade are inefficient and downright harmful. This discussion will be followed by an interview in which we can hear what some of the producers themselves say about participating in a Fair Trade cooperative.

Fair Trade and the Economics of Tragic Choices

The fact that Fair Trade is an international and even globalized phenomenon shipping products from southern countries to northern ones is sometimes interpreted as being tainted with all the problems of free trade and globalization. In chapter 3, I discussed varieties of non-modern longdistance trade. In fact, Fair Trade was deliberately created to counter the often-catastrophic effects of free trade and neoliberal economics on marginalized producers in the South. Writing in Mexico, the cofounder of Fair Trade, Francisco Vanderhoff Boersma, states: We demand and struggle for a different kind of market, for a different economy, one where the profit principle as well as the principle of increased productivity are no longer the yardsticks but rather the dignity of all those who make up the chain and the adjustment of the rules of the market to this basic principle. This is why Fair Trade is a fundamental corrective to the neo-liberal market system.13

Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) treaty in 1994.14 This treaty has had a cruel effect on the great majority of smallholder agriculturalists in the country, sending many of them to the slums of Mexico City or to face the dangers of crossing the border into the United States illegally. Nevertheless, devotees of the market economy view such an effect as the birth pangs of a more efficient, more competitive market. This view was articulated at the time of Vanderhoff Boersma’s writing by the Mexican Secretary of Agriculture, who publicly declared that there were twenty million small producers in Mexico who should get out of agriculture and find different employment.15 The lucky ones might find employment in the infamous maquiladoras, those sweatshops where labor is often paid poorly and working conditions are atrocious.16 The unlucky ones would join the other millions involved in the often illegal, often dangerous, and insecure informal economy. Faced with such forced choices, economist Stephen A. Marglin has called this “the economics of tragic choices.” In his chapter of the same name, he points out that most economists regard the choice between sweatshops and worse alternatives as no more tragic than any other. To illustrate such a view, he quotes the

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economist and World Bank official turned university president, Lawrence Summers: [M]any believe that it is wrong to buy imported products produced by workers who are paid less than a specified minimum wage of some sort. We all deplore the conditions in which so many on this planet work and the paltry compensation they receive. And yet there is surely some moral force to the concern that as long as the workers are voluntarily employed, they have chosen to work because they are working to their best alternative.17

The “best alternative” is declared to be best because it is assumed that individuals maximize their self-interest. Thus, working in a sweatshop is an individual’s best alternative. Mainstream economists further point out that such a choice is not only the best possible one for the individual worker, but also for the society at large since it supports enterprises that provide jobs and make needed products. For the Mexican Secretary of Agriculture as for most economists, these are not tragic choices but the functioning of an efficient market system. Small agricultural producers are inefficient and should be replaced by large agro-businesses and other enterprises (as has been the case in most of the United States, Canada, and Europe, where peasants have all but disappeared). In such a view, the small agricultural producers will find the best alternatives for themselves, while simultaneously the free functioning of the market will allocate in the most efficient manner possible all the factors of production as well as all the products. The critics of capitalism and of globalizing this form of market economy have all pointed out that since the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s—namely the application worldwide of the unrestricted functioning of this market—the disparity between the haves and the have-nots has increased.18 The neoliberal counter-argument here is that the culprit to blame for the increase in global inequality during this period is not globalization per se, but technological change, which increased the relative returns to certain types of skilled labor. The empirical evidence collected since the late 1990s on this debate in fact shows a role for both.19 For those not washed in the blood of Economics 101, as Stephen Marglin puts it, the fate of marginalized peoples is perceived through the twin premises of the self-interested individual and the efficient allocation of resources by the Invisible Hand, namely the free functioning of the market economy.20 Labor is a (human) resource and one of the factors of production, as are capital and natural resources. In such an economistic perspective, the bio-cultural patrimony of historical collectivities deserves to survive only insofar as it can be marketed and given an economic value, primarily in the tourist industry. It has little intrinsic value so that if there is no market for

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it and it disappears due to the free workings of the market and/or policies such as the one voiced by the Mexican Secretary of Agriculture, it is evidence of a process of allocating resources more efficiently.21 Concern for the dignity and even survival of marginalized folks and their bio-cultural patrimony is left to bleeding-heart liberals or radicals who are labeled naïve romantics. Hardheaded realists know better than to intervene in the free workings of the market. For redistributive goals as well as for assuaging consciences, there is charity. Naïve people mix what should be kept carefully separate, namely charity and efficiency. To conflate the two is risky in that it will inevitably lead to damaging efficiency and thus, it is firmly believed, to damaging everyone’s well-being. For a thorough and illuminating critique of the basic assumptions of economics, making visible their Western cultural ideological nature, I can do no better than refer the reader to Stephen Marglin’s above-mentioned work. This is a task much better left to a trained bona fide economist who can best address the myriad justifications and persuasive and very logical explanations (logical within the given premises) proffered by most members of the discipline of economics. I will therefore not attempt a critique of efficiency since it has been done by others much better equipped than I. Charity, though, is another matter, and something I am more qualified to address. The issue of dignity, so fundamental to the vision of Vanderhoff Boersma and of his indigenous Mexican cofounders, is one that directly addresses the issue of charity. The recipients of charity receive along with it the confirmation that they are needy and dependent on what is handed out. Receiving charity does not equip them with the wherewithal and/or skills necessary to provide for their own needs and those of their families and in general, of their bio-cultural collectivities. They are thus robbed of the dignity of standing on their own feet and pulling their own weight. They are robbed of their agency and confirmed in their dependency. Furthermore, charity, being voluntary, cannot be a systemic solution. The same holds for the act of separating out certain landscapes and declaring them “nature parks” or “biological preserves” as I have argued in chapter 2. The creation of such areas does not address the issue of environmental degradation systemically, but only on the basis of particularly “deserving” pieces of landscape due to a variety of factors. Like the “deserving poor,” these parks are saved from the ravages of the free workings of the market economy due to some characteristic found pleasing to a donor or policy maker. Herein lays a paradox of Fair Trade: coffee, the flagship product, was itself a colonial commodity in most of the world, introduced into Latin America and South East Asia by elites who used a combination of force and deception to lure peasants onto the large plantations. In Mexico, peasant rebellions led to the first indigenous plantings of coffee as the principal cash crop for newly independent smallholding peasants.22

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Fair Trade specifically intends to avoid creating dependency among small agriculturists. It enables marginalized peoples to stand on their feet and produce a product of high quality that they can justly be proud of and that has the potential to enable them to regenerate their bio-cultural patrimony. The northern consumers who are willing to pay the little extra for a Fair Trade–labeled product are moved by solidarity with such marginalized producers and, it must be assumed, by either the conscious or implicit rejection of the entailments of charity. Empathy and solidarity stem from an ability to put oneself in the shoes of such marginalized peoples and wish for them what one wishes for oneself, namely the dignity of being able to sustain oneself and one’s bio-cultural patrimony. To reject Fair Trade in the name of efficiency requires one to believe as divinely revealed truth that consumers will automatically always pursue their self-interest and thus buy the least expensive equivalent product. The fact that the Fair Trade market is growing rapidly in the United States should alert devotees of the doctrine of the self-interested individual that something else is afoot.23 I would also suggest that with the benefits of globalized communications, many more northern consumers are traveling to southern climes and are likely to witness first-hand the destructive effects of neoliberal measures such as structural adjustments and the general workings of unrestrained free trade on a variety of bio-cultural loci. Their willingness to pay more for Fair Trade organic products may signal their desire to preserve bio-cultural diversity in the world. Devotees of mainstream economics might interpret this as a selfinterested desire on the part of northern tourists to consume in situ (rather than in museums or ethnographic texts) exotic bio-cultural configurations. It seems to me difficult to evaluate the authentic motivations of northern tourists as an undifferentiated category, but it does not seem to stretch the imagination to entertain the notion that for some and perhaps for many of them, the motivation to see southern bio-cultural configurations not simply survive but even flourish might be motivating their willingness to pay more for Fair Trade products. The growth in eco-, ethno-, and spiritual tourism indicates that at least in this category of tourists, the consumption of exotic architectural and/or environmental wonders as spectacle is not the prime motivation for traveling south.24 After all, in the United States itself there is a vibrant grassroots movement to save a variety of bio-cultural loci from the depredation either of developers or of unrestrained commercial exploitation.25 The evidence for a willingness on the part of an increasing number of people to value local bio-cultural diversity in the United States is found in the burgeoning growth of farmers’ markets, local agricultural-cum-crafts festivals, as well as in the flourishing of the Slow Food movement.26 There is no reason to think that the same class of northern consumer does not similarly value southern bio-cultural diversity for its own sake as well as for its own delights and enrichment, and for the health of the planet.

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The Economics of Tragic Choices as Lived Experience

Let me make the economics of tragic choices come alive by quoting at length from a remarkable interview with one of the members of the Fair Trade Coffee cooperative I worked with, called Oro Verde [Green Gold], Don Hernán de Aguila Canayo from the village of Pamashto.27 Don Hernán gives us a vivid history of the cooperative through his own life journey. He went from being a coca producer for the illicit drug trade to being a founding member of Oro Verde, and was at the time of the interview the vice president of the general assembly representing all 450 families that were members of Oro Verde in 2006. His story gives the economics of tragic choices flesh and blood, and illustrates how he and all the other members who were cocaleros [coca growers] have escaped from it. It is representative of all the interviews I carried out, voicing views that I heard from everyone. F. Since when have you been a member of Oro Verde? H. I came nineteen years ago from Iquitos [a major town on the Amazon river] where I met my wife who is from here. So in 1987 we decided to move here, to her native land. I am a founding member of Oro Verde, which was created in 1999. F. Why did you join the cooperative? H. In the decade of the 1990s, the coffee trade was destroyed and I was a cocalero.28 In the 1990s there started a strong anti-drug campaign and we all lost our coca farms. So we decided to join forces with others in the same situation and formed the cooperative and shifted to coffee production. F. Were you given any economic incentives? H. No, only certain tools, seeds, manual fumigators and technical assistance. The manager was our support.29 All the technical personnel in the cooperative were paid by the United Nations during the first three years. During the first three years, we had very serious problems in commercializing our coffee. We lost a great deal economically, especially in 2001–2. The price of coffee was very low. We could not cover our cost of production and this resulted in the cooperative losing many members. Beginning in 2003, another stage began. Our manager began going to the international SCAA meetings in the US.30 These visits helped a lot in securing buyers. They came and visited the communities. That is when we entered the Fair Trade market. F. How do you understand Fair Trade? H. It is a just commerce in which producers’ organizations participate. They pay us good prices, higher than the stock market price. We call these prices refuge prices.

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F. Can you give me details about these different prices? H. For example now [August 2006] a quintal [46 kg] of non-organic coffee sells in the Fair Trade market for $129 and the price of organic coffee is $132. The stock market price oscillates between $105 and $110. It rises and falls. The stock market price can even fall to $80 or $90, whereas the Fair Trade price remains the same. It even happened that the stock market price went higher than the Fair Trade price. The Fair Trade price then rose to $5 per quintal more than the stock market price. F. Even so, I heard that some members left the coop recently in another village. H. Very few have left. What happens is that other organizations come offering incentives to steal members away. Many let themselves be seduced. For example there is a coop in this region called Cristo Rey involved in coffee [this is not a Fair Trade coop], which is subsidized by Caritas and USAID. F. Did they steal members from Oro Verde? H. There is only one case from this village and now this member has sold all his land. That is what we always are extremely careful to avoid. F. Why did he sell his land? H. Well, sometimes the price paid by local intermediaries is very good and he sold to these instead of to Oro Verde. After the prices dropped he lost out and had to sell his land. In the committee we all look out for each other so that no one has to sell their patrimony and also that they do not enter in competition with the cooperative.31 F. How does coffee production compare with coca production? H. For me there are two considerations. From an economic standpoint, coca is a little more profitable. But from a social point of view it was a disaster. Such a society could have no future. Life had become a total social disorder: alcoholism, drug addiction, crimes, violence, assaults, corruption at all levels. They bought out judges, lawyers, tax officials. What future could there be for one’s children? F. You learned a lot, no? H. Yes, a lot. The coca drug trade was associated with the subversives.32 It was the deep pocket of subversion. The guerilla chiefs asked their share of the crop, about 10%. They got the people together and imposed their conditions. There were no mayors or any other officials to defend one. The guerillas dominated. F. Were you aware of the risks? H. Yes, I was aware but there was no other choice. If you did not grow coca you were suspected of being an informant. F. Have there been many killed? H. Quite a lot in the whole region.

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F. And what did the military do? H. They patrolled. There were constant battles between the guerillas, the police, and the military. We went through extremely hard times. The military had to be hard. The people gave no information due to their fear of the guerillas. This led to abuses on the part of the police and the military in order to get information out of the natives. F. How long did this go on? H. About twenty years; from the 1980s and all through the ’90s. It came from Ayacucho and reached San Martin around 1985. It lasted until about 1999. F. Did the guerillas kidnap the youths? H. It paid them, youths of sixteen and seventeen. They could not study due to the violence. They made money. It was much worse in the countryside than in the cities. In 1988 I went to Tocache [a town to the south] for the coca production. I lasted only five months. I could not tolerate that life. There the guerillas gained a lot of strength in 1990. There still is coca production in Tocache. There is resistance to eradication. Shining Path is still active there. From another coop member whom I interviewed I received exact figures about the money made in coca. This is what Isau Coronel, also of Pamashto and president of the Pamashto committee told me: I did not grow coca here. I came in 1997 for coffee because it is a legal crop. Many who grew coca are now in jail. Coffee is less money but it’s calm. 12 kg of coca leaves sold for 100 Nuevo Soles [$31.25]. One kg of cocaine paste sold for S/[nuevo soles] 1,500 [$469] On the border near Manaus in Brazil, it sold for S/6,000 per kg [$1,875]. Some producers manufactured coca paste in hidden, makeshift labs in rural areas of this region.

I did not press Isau Coronel on his previous life, but I suspect that he used to be a coca and even coca paste producer in the region close to Brazil, given his precise information on prices. Let me return to Don Hernán’s interview, which shifts to the issue of food security and the farmers’ food chacras for their own consumption. I will discuss this topic briefly since some of the critics of cash cropping argue that it endangers the food security of marginalized producers. I want to include here what Don Hernán says about the topic as it relates to coca growing. F. Do you think that producing coffee as a cash crop has endangered your food security? H. During the times of the coca drug trade, we bought 100% of our food. Instead of eating plantains [a staple food in this region] we used to

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buy potatoes from the highlands. Now everyone has his or her food chacra. However, no one consumes 100% from the chacra. One always buys some things such as rice, meat, fish, sugar, salt, soap, and kerosene to give us light when we live in the forest in our chacras. [Hernán’s chacra is a 1.5 hour walk away from his house up the mountain in the forest.] We buy batteries, matches, some food. We bring everything from here. During the coffee harvest, that lasts four months, we go there and stay going up on Monday and coming down on Saturday. Does the rest of your family stay home? In my home, yes, my wife stays in order to care for the son who is now in school. My eldest is in the teacher’s college in Lamas and the middle son works at Oro Verde in Lamas. So when I go to the chacra I take with me one family of agricultural workers; the wife cooks and the husband helps me in the chacra. When the children are not in school, they all go to the chacra. This, though, does not mean that my wife does not contribute to the chacra work. I harvest the coffee cherries and she dries them [after they are depulped, fermented, and washed]. She dries them in the sun and then picks out the bad ones; she sorts them out. My sons leave the house very early and come with the horse to carry the harvest down. Do you always hire workers during the harvest? Very few and only during peak harvest times. We are three close neighbors and we normally use the choba-choba mutual aid.33 Do all the coop members do choba-choba? The majority of them do. One cooks yucca, plantains, chicha [a boiled and fermented corn drink], and of course fish. It’s more like a fiesta.

Lastly I asked Don Hernán about what he felt Fair Trade had brought him. This is what he told me: H. Before Oro Verde entered the Fair Trade market, we could not aspire to anything. Our lives were unsustainable and were not secure. One could not have a goal. Now with Fair Trade, if we fulfill the requirements of Fair Trade, besides sustaining ourselves we can also set ourselves goals. The most important among those is to give our children an education and also to improve my lands. I have chosen to quote at length from this interview with Don Hernán de Aguila Canayo because he was one of the most articulate coffee producers I interviewed. Another reason is that the manner in which he narrates his journey to membership in the cooperative is a particularly vivid and rich illustration of the economics of tragic choices theorized by Stephen Marglin. His case

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is representative since the vast majority of the producers in the region who joined the cooperative were coca growers, and most of those I interviewed in various communities had been cocaleros. Thus Don Hernán’s experience is typical of most members of the cooperative, regardless of whether they are native, mestizo, or migrantes. The fact that the Oro Verde cooperative not only recouped the 150 or so lost members when coffee prices crashed in 2001–2002 but has expanded to 1000 member families in 2009 is clear evidence of the enormously positive impact that access to the Fair Trade market has had.

2. ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF FAIR TRADE

Environmental Impact of Fair Trade and Organic Requirements

The province of San Martin where the small town of Lamas is located (the home of Oro Verde) has the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of deforestation of all the provinces in Peru. The rate of deforestation is currently on the order of 57,000 hectares per year.34 This trend began when the area was opened to development in the 1960s with the attendant influx of land-hungry migrants from other regions of Peru. The flow of these migrants has not abated since. The government as well as international development agencies have all promoted intensive chemical agriculture and monoculture, namely the diffusion of green revolution technologies.35 This followed on the heels of a policy that granted title to mestizo agriculturists simply for clearing (thus deforesting) and fencing a given area.36 It is only since the late 1990s that native communities have been granted the option of gaining title to their common collective land holdings instead of title to individual land holdings. Securing a title is a complex and very bureaucratic as well as expensive procedure, which most small-scale agriculturists have not undertaken. Thus the land available for cultivation by the native population has drastically diminished, leading to extremely shortened periods of fallow to allow for the regeneration of the forest: today, land is typically left fallow approximately five years, though it takes twenty to twenty-five years to regenerate a really healthy forest cover. Before the opening of this region to the outside world, the practice of slash-and-burn agriculture was entirely sustainable and non-degrading of the forest cover, even contributing to the overall biodiversity of the forest.37 There was plenty of land to allow for the regeneration of a healthy forest cover that incorporated the tree and plant species planted in the polycultural food gardens.38 The Oro Verde cooperative undergoes a yearly certification procedure by both FLO-CERT and by Bio-Latina, the former for Fair Trade certification

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and the latter for organic certification.39 One of the most fundamental of requirements in both these certifications is that coffee and cacao are shade grown. This means that the forest cover must be regenerated. If the coffee and/or cacao fields are planted in a deforested area, they begin as part of a polyculture with leguminous trees and plants such a guavas, bananas, and manioc, all of which are part of local subsistence crops. These fast-growing leguminous trees and plants fulfill several purposes: they regenerate the fertility of the soil by fixing nitrogen; they give food crops for the growers; and they provide shade relatively quickly for newly planted coffee and cacao plants. Other local species of trees with longer maturation periods are also planted in order to regenerate a forest cover. Furthermore, all new crops are to be planted following the contours of the slopes to prevent soil erosion. The regeneration of the cloud and rain forest in this region is not only crucial to reduce soil erosion, secure water sources, provide habitats to local as well as migrating species of birds, and provide habitats to local medicinal plants, but as is well known, preserves the forest cover in the Amazon Basin which plays a crucial role in neutralizing CO2 emissions. Since coffee is not original to this region and the Arabica variant cultivated for the specialty organic coffee market was only introduced in the mid-1990s, there are no ancestral practices for coffee cultivation. In contrast, cacao originated in the High Amazon region and has been ancestrally cultivated and used. Arabica coffee requires a fairly complex processing to secure the high-quality bean the market demands. The principal organic requirements for its cultivation and processing are: 1. The prohibition of clearing mature forest growth. 2. The composting of the pulp of the coffee cherry for obtaining a local organic fertilizer. 3. The treatment of the water in which the beans are washed (a process releasing an organic but toxic compound) so as not to contaminate the environment. 4. The use of organic traps to deal with insect plagues. 5. Various practices such as weeding, selective harvesting, clearing of all remaining cherries on the coffee plant, clearing all berries fallen on the ground that would attract insects, and pruning coffee bushes and shade trees for optimum shade and sun exposure. All these stipulations amount to extremely labor-intensive cultivation requirements, which at peak times necessitate the hiring of extra-familial and extra-communal labor. Another central concern for organic certification is that the whole farm— including the subsistence or food chacra, the house, and the farm animals such as cattle, pigs, and fowl—be organic, or free of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, planted as a polyculture (instead of a monoculture), and with the

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animals free roaming.40 In other words, it is not only the cash crops that fall under the supervision of the organic certifiers, but the whole bio-cultural landscape. The organic certification requires as well the practice of composting and the proper disposal of non-degradable and/or toxic items. Although native ancestral agricultural practices have of course always been organic, in the recent past (approximately the last fifty years) not only agricultural chemicals have been introduced to the region, but also many other toxic or contaminating materials. Gasoline, for instance, is used for indoor cleaning purposes, a common practice throughout the region. There is also a widespread use of all kinds of plastic containers, which number among other modern contaminants. Since all of these were introduced as entirely beneficial vectors of progress, everyone including the native population has eagerly adopted them. They are still, unfortunately, considered marks of being advanced. These environmental contaminants are not recognized as such, creating a situation in which the term “organic” is unfortunately often not understood. This situation necessitates training local peoples, natives and non-natives alike, in organic practices. At first glance this may seem peculiar since native peoples are the inheritors of non-contaminating, highly sustainable ancestral practices. However, taking into account the growing trend towards accepting contaminants as signs of progress, it becomes clear why there is a need for such training. A term like “organic” only becomes necessary when its opposite, namely toxic or contaminating products and practices, makes an appearance and is recognized as such. Native peoples do not have words in their languages corresponding to the term “organic,” and nor do they have the ability to recognize polluting from non-polluting products and activities since the former were all introduced relatively recently as being entirely beneficial signs of progress. However, it is important to recognize that the need to educate local people in what constitutes organic practice unfortunately has also been an occasion to perpetuate certain colonialist types of behaviors in which the global North continues to exercise an intellectual dominance over the global South. The fact that local native peoples seldom understand the meaning of “organic” becomes one of the justifications for making northern organic practices the main model for the South, and this results in rendering invisible local ancestral sustainable and organic practices. In an interview of a staff member of Bio-Latina in its central Lima office, I was told that the organization IFOAM (International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements) is the mother of all the organic norms used by BioLatina.41 These are the norms used in Europe, the United States, and Japan in a field called “agro-ecology.” As I argued in chapter 6, much of the field of agroecology draws its inspiration from indigenous and traditional agriculture. However agro-ecology excludes the ritual or spiritual aspects of indigenous

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and traditional agriculture. Such exclusion perpetuates the invisibility and/ or lack of value accorded to ancestral ritual practices, in which the other-thanhumans play an important role. Furthermore, agro-ecology also embodies practices invented in the North—like permaculture—as responses to the contaminating nature of industrial agriculture. By the time agro-ecological norms travel back to the South through the organic requirements enforced by certifying agencies such as Bio-Latina or FLO-CERT, their roots in marginalized southern peoples’ practices have become all but invisible. The spiritual aspects of sustainable and organic practices, such as shamans harvesting the most powerful medicinal plants in primary forests and following strict personal ascetic and ritual practices while doing so, remains invisible to the certifiers, as indeed to most of the cooperative’s professional staff. In fact, my own practice of observing a series of behavioral and dietary restrictions after participating in a shamanic curative ceremony elicited guffaws on the part of most of the professional staff at Oro Verde. None of them had ever participated in such ceremonies, and some of them specified that they would never do so, considering the ceremonies superstitious. Despite the drawbacks of the organic certification procedures, it must be emphasized that the impact of Fair Trade and organic certification on the local environment has been positive. The government has almost completely failed to do anything about the intense rate of deforestation, and the accompanying soil erosion and loss of fertility entailed by short fallow periods. One of the cooperative members I interviewed (identified below by the letter “I”) even affirmed that the government colluded with illicit practices, a view that was voiced by several interviewees: F. How would you characterize the attitude of most coop members toward deforestation? I. In the cooperative, we are responsible to conserve the environment. It is one of the requirements of Fair Trade and we do it. Aggressive deforestation is due to the high level of migration from the coast and the highlands. They are the ones who deforest. F. Do you see any ways of controlling this? I. Yes there are. There are governmental institutions responsible to see that it be done but mostly they dictate laws and regulations but they do not execute them. The National Institute for Natural Resources (Spanish acronym is INRENA) is responsible for coordinating with mayors and governors. But they are not doing it. Whereas we as a cooperative, we train our members. However, as a cooperative we can only reach our membership. Policies must not sleep but must be executed. There are huge mafias in timber. INRENA itself is trafficking in timber. There is a lot of corruption.

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F. What kind of mafia? I. Mayors, functionaries of the Ministry of Agriculture, even the police who close their eyes when the timber is transported through the roads. F. Do you think this might encourage the migration? I. Yes, because it benefits them [i.e., the officials]. F. Do you think that the new president [at the time of the interview, 2006] Alan García might be able to do something about this? I. I am mostly confident that he will. We wish him luck but we have seen various governments and they all end up the same. The bureaucracy does not let one go forward. The practices enjoined by both FLO-CERT and Bio-Latina are regenerating the forest, the soil, and the whole landscape. They are also almost the only force contributing to the health of the bio-cultural landscape and to sustainability. All three groups—native, mestizo, and migrante—that are cooperative members contribute to regenerating the forest. It is clear that the difference with non-cooperative migrantes is that migrante cooperative members (migrantes, [migrants] being the group blamed as most responsible for deforestation) voluntarily comply with the many environmental requirements since it delivers them from the economics of tragic choices and gives them security.

Social Requirements and Entailments of Fair Trade Certification

Rather than attempting an exhaustive listing of all the FLO-CERT regulations, I think it more fruitful to highlight some of the major ones through practices I have been able to observe directly. The Fair Trade requirements for producers allowing them to secure the Fair Trade label comprise many aspects of a cooperative and typically take several years to achieve. Furthermore, the cooperative bears the cost of inspection, which can be as high as $5,000. This cost is a major economic challenge for many organizations. It is thus not easy to gain access to the Fair Trade market. Such access is, of course, highly coveted, since it alone will ensure economic security and deliverance from the economics of tragic choices. Fair Trade social requirements are based mainly on standards of equity, democracy, and transparency. These standards and the manner in which they are to be fulfilled are determined unilaterally by FLO in Bonn, Germany. Although there are undoubtedly many positive and necessary aspects to these standards, they also betray a problematic ignorance of local conditions, practices, and realities. Such ignorance, or perhaps more precisely such invisibility, leads in some respects to the perpetuation of a colonialist

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type of relationships. It is my contention that such ignorance and unilateralism is the inevitable entailment of a developmentalist discourse. During my fieldwork in the summer of 2006, I was fortunate to observe an election in one community as well as the triennial general election. Furthermore, during the triennial general election the FLO-CERT inspector gave his report. This gave me an unprecedented opportunity to observe directly FLO-CERT in action. I will start with the yearly sectorial committee (i.e., a committee set up wherever there are at least twenty families that are members of the cooperative in a community) election in one of the native communities. It took place in their newly built warehouse, the only cement brick building in the village of approximately one hundred ten families. It is spacious and solidly built. The professional agronomist in charge of this committee of forty-six families acted as moderator (they are referred to as Ingeniero/a). She clearly had established a warm, easy, and trusting relationship with all those present. Supervising the proper electoral procedure was a member of the central committee in charge of elections (comité electoral) who had traveled to this community especially for this occasion.42 At the beginning of the proceedings the Ingeniera read the electoral rules. A total of thirty-three men and seven women participated. They were electing the junta directiva, namely the president, the vice president, the treasurer, the secretary, two delegates (with one replacement delegate in case the other two cannot make it), and additionally a woman delegate.43 The election was carried out in a remarkably open and democratic manner. Most persons present freely expressed their opinions. Those present proposed the candidates, and those nominated either accepted or declined the nomination. The actual vote was by show of hands in which both men and women participated. The Ingeniera wrote on a blackboard the names of the candidates, the number of votes, and so forth. The results were registered in a book that constitutes a required legal document checked by the FLO-CERT inspector on his yearly visits. I was impressed by the proceedings. One glaring difficulty was with the requirement of electing a woman delegate. First of all, very few women showed up. When it was time to elect the woman delegate, none of the women present accepted nomination. After extremely lengthy discussions of possible candidates in absentia, one woman was eventually called from her house and she reluctantly accepted to be the delegate. The Ingeniera confirmed my observation that attendance by women at a meeting scheduled during the time when women are preparing the main meal of the day (the meeting took place between 9:30 AM and 1:30 PM) is extremely problematic. Furthermore, there were no small children at the meeting and mothers of preschool-aged children cannot attend since child-care is not provided and the presence of children is discouraged by FLO-CERT

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requirements. As to the difficulty in finding a woman candidate, the women present declined on the basis of their lack of experience. When I suggested to the Ingeniera that older women possessed such experience (since the women who showed up were all young), she answered that they lacked the requisite alphabetic and numeric skills; since it is only the younger generation of females that have sufficient schooling to fulfill the FLO-CERT requirements of recording all meeting minutes, electoral results, as well as other information in legally certified books, this constitutes a major obstacle. The woman delegate will have to participate in an all-women general committee and carry out such tasks. I will return below to the issue of alphabetic literacy. However, first it is important to point out that the women of this community play a central role in the week-long festival for the community’s patron saint. I observed how they organized female work parties to prepare a great variety of dishes and enormous quantities of the traditional fermented corn and manioc drinks for all the members of the community, men, women, and children, numbering approximately eight hundred in total. They worked efficiently, with an easy camaraderie and bantering, having secured all the ingredients, fuel, and large cooking utensils rented for the occasion. The distribution and sharing of food and drink among all the members of this village constitute the heart of the festival. Men are of course also involved, mainly in procuring the food and fuel and transporting goods to the community. Nevertheless, the women visibly play a very central role and are singularly competent at such an organizationally challenging endeavor. The alphabetic literacy requirement for effective participation in the affairs of the cooperative transforms these competent and skilled women into incompetent, unskilled, and insecure women. Nevertheless, the FLO-CERT requirement that women must participate in the affairs of the cooperative is a positive one, without which women would be marginalized. Ideally, the local situation—such as the other-than-alphabetic skills and experience of women and the constraints in terms of their familial responsibilities—should be recognized. This is not possible, though, since the norms are unilaterally created in and imposed from the North. The Ingeniera also shared with me her experience of having accompanied this community for the past two years. In her experience, many husbands resent their wives’ participation in public meetings and especially resent that women delegates might be elected to be representatives in the national forum, requiring them to travel to Lima. It is bad enough that the woman delegate has to travel to the town of Lamas, but Lima is ten times worse. These travels arouse the jealousy of husbands who seem to assume that their wives will find occasions for unfaithfulness. Furthermore, the Ingeniera confided that when inebriated, husbands are prone to beating their wives.44 But whether they beat or not, husbands make life very dif-

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ficult for wives who attend meetings, especially out of town. All of these factors combine to make it extremely difficult for women to attend and fully participate in the affairs of their cooperative. According to the manager of Oro Verde, in the initial years of the cooperative, the United Nations required gender equity. The cooperative management spent a great deal of energy on improving the situation since initially no women participated at all. Now, at least men agree in principle that women should participate, and their participation has increased, though it is far from evincing parity with men. A related issue became visible for me when I attended the triennial general assembly elections and listened to the FLO-CERT inspector’s report. The general assembly gathered several representatives from each sectorial committee, including one woman per committee as required. For this crucial event, located in a beautiful rented hall-cum-restaurant, all the women delegates attended.45 However, I observed the presence of only three preschool-aged children. The election for membership in the five central committees and councils that run the cooperative were carried out in the same outstanding fashion as the sectorial committee elections. The proceedings were orderly, with the names of all the candidates written on large posters and all the candidates themselves seated in front of the assembly, each displaying an identifying number. Each candidate delivered a brief personal message before the election proceedings. This was repeated for the election of the women delegates. The votes were by paper ballot, ensuring secrecy. Two members of the electoral council tallied the votes in the presence of everyone. The cooperative professional staff helped with writing on the posters and other minor tasks. The general manager remained mostly silent and inconspicuous. Democracy and transparency were clearly in evidence. The professional staff took a back seat, and it was evident that the cooperative was owned and run by all of its members. The electoral proceedings lasted most of the day. It was interrupted for lunch provided by the cooperative management. The restaurant had set up tables for the more than eighty participants, and I could see that natives, mestizos, and migrantes shared tables. This camaraderie between ethnic groups was also reflected in election results. Natives, mestizos, and migrantes were elected to the same committees. There was no evidence of either formal or informal segregation along ethnic lines. The elections ended around 4 PM, and the floor was given to the Peruvian FLO-CERT inspector for his report. He stated that he had just spent three days visiting committees (without previous notification), inspecting their books, inspecting coffee groves randomly, as well as inspecting the financial books of the cooperative.46 He reminded the assembly of the

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letter of evaluation and recommendations he had sent the previous year. He asked if anyone remembered what they were and whether anyone knew the required norms. One member responded that in the past few knew them but that the situation had improved through training sessions. The inspector took the members to task on various issues, mostly having to do with their lack of awareness or understanding of all the requirements of FLO-CERT certification. He pointed out that if those were not fulfilled, certification could be withdrawn. He complained that the use to which the sectorial committee put the Fair Trade premium was not transparent, not properly recorded. He also took the assembly to task for not having delivered a complete set of data regarding its list of members, the total area of cultivation, the quantity of coffee produced, how many laborers were hired, and more. In sum, the forms provided by FLO-CERT were not duly filled out. He quizzed the members, asking them whether they fully understood the concept of Fair Trade. One native member who had recently traveled to France invited by the French national Fair Trade organization to promote the cooperative’s coffee, responded by saying: “There is a conflict in our heads; there are many requirements in the chacra and here there are many others.” This and other similar comments highlighted the enormous amount of new learning the producers are expected to fully integrate and digest. Not only new agricultural practices including the meaning of the term “organic” are required, but also an enormous amount of paperwork that borders on bureaucratic. Given the crushing amount of new learning required of all members—both men and women—and the very labor-intensive character of organic production, I was surprised not more members left the cooperative. In fact, very few members have defected since Oro Verde’s entrance into the Fair Trade market in 2003, and membership has soared. For me, this is the most convincing evidence of the enormous advantages Fair Trade offers to marginal southern producers. The inspector’s style of communication made repeated use of quiz-like questions, putting the members in the position of school pupils who have not done their homework properly. Furthermore, it became increasingly uncomfortable for me to listen to the inspector, since he was using a vocabulary and style of speech that I knew were little understood by the majority in the assembly. In fact, at one point a neighbor sitting a few seats from mine whispered to me that he did not understand most of what the inspector was saying and asked me to intervene. I responded that as an observer I could not intervene but encouraged him to say something. After a very long while he gathered the courage to raise his hand and voice his views. Many loudly assented to his comment. The inspector perfunctorily acknowledged his

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comment only by saying that many educated professional persons like him also found such language difficult and then went right on in the same vein. The inspector’s lack of sensitivity and awareness of the plight of most members was compounded by the fact that he went on and on, keeping them until 10 PM. I knew that many of them had walked hours to attend the meeting and would have to walk hours in the night to get back to their houses. The women in particular had left children and animals to the care of others and were particularly worried. It must be acknowledged that the inspector concluded by congratulating the assembled members on a job mostly very well done, but this consisted of just a few phrases at the very end. He also certified the cooperative, to everyone’s immense relief. His concluding remarks did not succeed in softening my scandalized reaction at witnessing a process whereby the inspector spent most of his time berating the members for not understanding, writing, or knowing enough. That aspect of his speech communicated itself very clearly through the manner in which he challenged the audience with his questions. What communicated much less well were his explanations of the concepts underlying Fair Trade and all of the requirements for certification. Members were confirmed in the deficiency of their alphabetic and numeric skills, in their lack of information and ability to process an enormous amount of new knowledge packaged in rather alien forms. In my interview with the secretary and one other member of the National Coffee Organization ( Junta Nacional de Café, JNC) in Lima, I discovered that this problem has been troubling the organization as well as many cooperatives for quite a while. The secretary remarked that cooperatives are powerless to challenge certification norms and inspection procedures since they are utterly dependent on certification for access to the Fair Trade market. In a written reply to an article that appeared in the Financial Times in the summer of 2006 reporting alleged exploitation on the part of Fair Trade cooperative members in the San Martin region of Peru of their hired laborers, the JNC writes the following: We must recognize that in our organizations, a very strong debate is taking place concerning the role of FLO-CERT inspectors. We consider that the standards and cost of certification are excessive for the organizations of small producers, where a significant percentage of families are either chronically or functionally illiterate, that many times when being interviewed by various visitors, respondents are confused about economic terms and factors, as has happened in your recent newspaper report.47

Fair Trade Labeling Organization is based on principles of a trading partnership, dialogue, transparency, and respect, as stated in the first sentence of the official FINE (see note 5) definition of Fair Trade quoted at the beginning of

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this chapter. In the second sentence, this definition states that Fair Trade brings about sustainable development. It is clear that in some important respects FLO-CERT completely contradicts the principles enumerated in the first sentence. Its norms are unilaterally devised in the North without any possibility of inputs from the recipients. Furthermore, many of these norms betray a total lack of knowledge of local realities and local modes of knowing and doing. As the remarkable scholarship of Walter Mignolo on the tight link between the wielding of alphabetic literacy as a tool of colonial domination in the conquest and administration of Latin America by the Spaniards abundantly demonstrates, alphabetic literacy has marginalized all other forms of reading.48 Mignolo contends that there is no language that does not come also with reading. However, how such reading is done varies greatly among languages, from the reading of signs such as those left by animals, or the configuration of constellations, to ideograms or other non-alphabetic visuals. As discussed in the previous chapter, the alphabet (meaning by this all the writing systems derived from the ancient Greek one) is the only written sign system that refers exclusively to the sounds made by the human voice. This is surely to be seen as one of the necessary—although by no means sufficient—requirements for the invention of the modernist radically anthropocentric cosmology, one in which the only meaningful utterances emanate from humans. I would suggest that the unreflective, unilateral creation of certification requirements by FLO-CERT is an entailment of its developmentalist discourse. Alphabetic literacy is equated with the basic requirement for access to knowledge, thereby rendering invisible all other forms of literacy and modes of knowing and being in the world. This organization devises its requirements implicitly assuming either that farmers in Peru are individuals along the same model as citizens of northern countries, or that they should become so, and so their requirements will make them such citizens by bringing about “development.” In the process, they should leave behind their supposedly less developed oral and other ways. This conclusion is not to be interpreted as meaning that I think farmers should not acquire alphabetic, numeric, and civic participation skills on the model of the North. They need to do so, for otherwise they remain vulnerable to exploitation. The local intermediaries who buy any and all types of coffee, regardless of its quality, are well known for swindling those farmers who cannot verify for themselves the weight and amount per kilogram they are selling. The civic participation skills imparted by the committee structure and democratic electoral process are also necessary. They are not needed for farmers to function effectively and intelligently in their own native communities, but rather in the larger non-native polity so as to make

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their voices heard and protect their interests.49 It is also important protection from vulnerability to ideologues of all stripes, from leftist guerillas to rightist generals.

3. BIO-CULTURAL REGENERATION AND THE ROLE OF THE OTHER-THAN-HUMANS

Bio-Cultural Regeneration

Let me now turn to the other set of terms in the title of this essay, namely bio-cultural regeneration. The term “regeneration” is meant to convey that what is already there is refreshed, renewed, renovated, and rejuvenated. The term regeneration intends to obviate altogether the “forward/backward” temporal frame that the term “development” entails. “Regeneration” has a close affinity with related terms such as “generate” and “degenerate.” It is meant to convey that, like plants and most things in the world including humans and their artifacts, there is a process of birth (generation), growth, and degeneration, all of which form a necessary and inevitable cycle. The term is meant to bypass the linear evolutionary connotations of such a term as “development” with its linear temporal frame that necessitates a forward or progressive movement and demands the abandonment of what is seen as a “backward” stance. By contrast, regeneration alludes to a non-linear and more cyclical process in which elements circulate, generating, degenerating, and regenerating with the possibility not only of renewal, but also of loss and creation. Although at first glance both terms seem to naturalize these processes, since both “development” and “regeneration” can be thought of as natural processes of growth, the qualifier “bio-cultural” added to the term “regeneration” is meant to obviate such an interpretation, as I will argue below. The choice of “regeneration” for me implies a non-linear, multi-directional process, underscoring that there is something valuable already present in the process of renewal rather than radical transformation or downright abandonment. This valuable something is both biological (organic and inorganic: the prefix “bio-” is understood as a shorthand that includes animals, plants, rocks, water, and the like) and human made, namely cultural. The term “regeneration” is also particularly appropriate for the High Amazon region since Fair Trade organic coffee and cacao are grown under the canopy of the rain and cloud forest, thus ensuring reforestation and the preservation of the existing forest cover in a region of extremely rapid deforestation. The forest cover is being regenerated by the practice of organic coffee and cacao growing.

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The term “bio-cultural” captures the increasing recognition that most— and perhaps all—environments are in part the product of human activity, in other words are anthropogenic as was discussed in chapter 2. Qualifying the term “regeneration” with the word “bio-cultural” is intended to signal as well as emphasize the non-anthropocentric nature of the process of regeneration. That is to say, regeneration is not exclusively achieved by humans.

Drawing on the Spirits for Bio-Cultural Regeneration

In my interactions with the professional staff at Oro Verde, I realized that most, and perhaps all, of its members not only lack any interest in pursuing this topic, but also have a condescending attitude toward it reflecting their university training in which such practices and knowledge are generally qualified as being obsolete or backward. The situation is otherwise with the membership, especially—although not exclusively—with the native members. However, such concerns only surface if one actively elicits them, as I did. Otherwise they remain invisible and inaudible. Farmers of all ethnic backgrounds will regularly turn to a curandero/a [shaman/ess] if the nurse or doctor at their local health clinic cannot help them or their medicines are inefficacious. Many members will also occasionally undergo a shamanic cure to restore strength and vigor as well as to purify (or purge) themselves, or simply to go hunting since the shamanic cure transforms the hunter into someone that the animals consider one of them, as we have seen in the previous chapter. There are a remarkable number of medicinal plants native to this region, including several psychoactive ones that induce visions. Many of the nonpsychoactive plants are in great commercial demand both nationally as well as from the North. I cannot here deal with the enormous issue of bio-piracy by pharmaceutical multinational companies since it would require its own separate essay. I wish rather to focus on the category of other-than-humans, and particularly on those that are associated with plants.50 My reason for doing so is that the most powerful and spiritually relevant among them are to be collected only in old growth forest. They are not to be cultivated in one’s garden since they belong spiritually to the forest and their power is also the power of the forest itself (in Quechua the forest is itself a deity/spirit called Sachamama, experienced as being embodied in an immense snake). With increasing deforestation, the habitat for such plants is fast disappearing, and with it shamanism itself is threatened.51 In order to illustrate and enrich the foregoing, as well as to introduce the spiritual power of plants, let me quote from an interview with a native shaman, from a cooperative member household.52 His name is Segundo Pastor Huamán Salas, and his father was also a cocalero.53

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F. Are you a member of Oro Verde? S.P. I work with my father and he is. Oro Verde is a private cooperative. Medicinal plants and agriculture are two different things. F. Where do you find your plants? S.P. Some of them I grow around the house so as to have them ready at hand. But others are far away and are untouchable. F. What do you mean by “untouchable”? S.P. I have a chacra of medicinal plants up the mountains of almost one hectare. There I have several plants, which I take care of. I put up signs in front of it that say: Private Zone, Entrance Forbidden, because those who do not know about medicinal plants may collect them to use as rope or for other such purposes, or they may even cut them down. Every three months I go there to weed. However, for the extremely powerful plants I go to Yurilamas [which is six hours by foot from his village, up the mountain where there still is old forest cover] and I collect them from the forest. I have to collect them before breaking fast in the morning, before eating or drinking, at the break of day. The plant is alive. A serpent lies next to it; it is poisonous. It is its ánima [spirit]. I blow on it with tobacco and I enchant it with an ikaro [shamanic song] and the serpent falls asleep. F. Can you enchant plants in your chacra? S.P. One could, but 95% of the plants in our coffee chacra are not for curing. One touches them, grabs them, one prunes, one puts up insect traps and so forth. It is not really feasible for curative purposes. The chacra of medicinal plants must be very separate, no one must see it. The plant must grow in its own way. When you weed, you must abstain from alcohol, from sex and if it’s done by a woman she must not be menstruating. It is very delicate; during the two or three days of weeding, one must take great care. Allima kuirpuyki. [Quechua for “you must have a good/pure body”) F. How do you know what plants to give a patient? S.P. One cannot decide oneself what to give a patient. I first have to take ayahuasca [a very powerful psychotropic plant brew used throughout the Amazon Basin54] and ayahuasca tells me what plant to give and at what dosage and how to prepare it. If you do it badly the patient can go crazy. One has to see the illness. I take ayahuasca in the name of the patient. It opens up the private life of the patient to me. What he/ she suffers from, what he/she thinks of me. The patient sleeps but the spirit [of ayahuasca] brings him/her to me. Ayahuasca communicates to you what plant to use, what dosage. I sing the spiritual ikaros [shamanic song] that the plant gives to me. They emerge by themselves. And for the patient they get rid of his/her stress.

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The plants communicate directly to the shaman, as well as to other persons taking the plant brew under the proper ceremonial conditions. Such direct communication from the other-than-human world is not considered possible in the modernist dispensation; this is why such plants are typically called “hallucinogens.” The understanding is that one hallucinates, or creates visions emanating from one’s doped-up brain. The possibility of parts of the world directly communicating to humans is simply considered a false notion in the Modern Constitution. Jeremy Narby, an anthropologist who was cured of an intractable back pain by a shaman while doing fieldwork in the Amazon Basin, decided finally to take what his shaman told him seriously. What the shaman told him is the same as what Segundo Pastor told me, namely that the plants communicate with one directly and tell one what medicinal plant(s) to take and in what dosage, how to prepare them, and what kind of diet to follow. In the case of the ayahuasca brew, in which the ayahuasca vine is boiled along with the leaves of the chakruna plant until the mixture is reduced by a factor of twenty, Narby calculates the likelihood of this knowledge having been achieved through a pragmatic process of trial and error. He arrives at such an astronomically high number that it persuades him it was totally impossible for such knowledge to have been obtained by such a method.55 He concludes that what the shaman told him must be true. He himself took the brew and the experience transformed him.56 The developmentalist framework of Fair Trade necessarily leads to requirements that simply take for granted that modern knowledge is superior to the kind of knowledge evinced by Segundo Pastor. It precludes a relationship of dialogue and reciprocity between ways of knowing and doing as well as between different spiritual traditions. This in turn precludes the possibility of drawing on the power of the other-than-humans—the spirits of the plants—and of shamanism to regenerate the habitat of the powerful plants, namely the forest. To protect such a forest from the aggressive depredations taking place today, leading to an increase in global warming as well as to a host of local problems, without drawing on the power of the other-than-humans, the spirits of the plants themselves, and of shamanism, is to foolishly ignore what exists there. It amounts to a continuation of a colonialist type of domination, where indigenous modes of knowing and doing are marginalized and delegitimized, and the other-than-humans are dismissed as mere projections, mere anthropomorphizing.57 Fair Trade deprives itself of what surely would amount to drawing on another powerful tool to achieve the regeneration of the forest. Shamanism enables one to experience directly—and thus to understand—how the humans, the non-humans, and the other-than-humans are entangled. The regeneration of the bio-cultural heritage of this region means the

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simultaneous regeneration of shamanism and of the forest with its otherthan-human plant spirits. Ignoring the nexus between shamanism, the forest, and the plant spirits is all the more regrettable since it could be easily achieved given that it does not at all compete with the pursuit of subsistence or cash crop agriculture. The two pursuits have not only always coincided, but are conjoined in the person of the shaman him/herself who is also always an agriculturist.

FINAL REMARKS

In spite of its serious drawbacks, Fair Trade enables marginalized peoples in the South to escape the economics of tragic choices and to gain a modicum of security and hope for the future of their families, and in general for their bio-cultural collectivities. Fair Trade is definitely an impressive corrective and alternative to the unfairness of Free Trade and of neo-liberal policies. It enables marginalized southern producers to sell their products directly to northern buyers at a fairer price. And it does this by creating direct horizontal relationships between buyers and sellers. My hope is that Fair Trade might be able to divest itself of the deleterious and debilitating constraints entailed by its developmentalist discourse as well as by its representationalist mindset and become not only fair and dialogical in economic and social terms, but also in bio-cultural terms. I dream of the creation of training sessions for members of FLO-CERT staff that would require them to participate in a series of shamanic ceremonies, among other activities. The hope would be to introduce these persons to another worldview, one in which it would be possible to draw on the power of the other-than-humans for bio-cultural regeneration. It would open them to the possibility of achieving true partnership, dialogue, and respect with marginal southern humans and other-than-humans. It would hopefully initiate these northerners to a non-anthropocentric paradigm, one in which humans recognize that they are not the only actors on the stage of this world, that they are not the dominators of the non-human world, and that their desires and needs are not the only ones—a lesson indeed desperately needed in the North. However, I am well aware of the quixotic character of such wishes. The likelihood of something like that happening is not only slim but probably nil. Furthermore, my association during three years with the Oro Verde Fair Trade Coffee cooperative in Lamas has also shown me that their professional staffs, consisting of university-educated mestizos, are themselves quite reluctant to engage in ritualistic exchanges and communications with the local spirits.58 They view such practices with suspicion bordering on

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contempt. Such attitudes combined with the fact that running a Fair Trade cooperative is a more-than-full-time occupation for the staff, has made it clear to me that it is not only the northern Fair Trade staff members that have no interest in the other-than-human beings of this region but the local professional staff as well. It is this realization that has led me to decide to leave the Oro Verde cooperative and attempt to create a different organization. I finally had come to realize that in order to perform rituals for the biocultural regeneration of the humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans I needed to creatively draw on the lessons learned during my years of collaboration with both intellectual activist groups such as PRATEC as well as with the Fair Trade cooperative. Each of these organizations had succeeded in achieving wonderful and very important results and each had taught me important lessons. However, I had learned that what was needed was to creatively and performatively combine all of these lessons. The following epilogue briefly reports on how I have attempted to carry this out.

Epilogue Performing the Lessons Learned

B

y early 2009 I had come to the decision that it was time to strike out on my own in Lamas. I had been coming to this town for fifteen years and had gathered a number of friends, godchildren and co-godparents. My attachment to the place, the people, and the spirits had steadily deepened. I had regularly participated in shamanic ceremonies and felt that it might just be possible to create an organization where what I had learned not only through my collaboration with groups such as PRATEC and Oro Verde but very much also through those ceremonies could be creatively used for something new. Through my deep involvement with a local outpost of PRATEC in Lamas, which I helped build, I had learned a great deal about the indigenous people, their practices, and their spirits. In encountering and coming to know many of the people in this place, I also came to realize certain limitations of the PRATEC approach. I shared with PRATEC a keen concern for the cultural-environmental (or bio-cultural) destruction that development or modernization as well as globalization and neoliberal policies are bringing about. PRATEC and its many local outposts throughout Peru are dedicated to the cultural affirmation of its native peasantry. Collaborating with them, I acquired a deep seated admiration for this peasantry’s agricultural knowledge and its practices that are at once sustainable and rich in agro-bio-diversity. Along with those organizations, I reject the reality and concept of development and other such penetrations of those aspects of modernity and capitalism criticized in this book. With them, I explored the possibility of per-

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forming ancestral practices as alternatives to development, which meant a rejection of production for the market, rejection of monetization, rejection of the capitalist market economy, and rejection of modernization/ Westernization. However, through prolonged contact with the most marginalized of the indigenous farmers we worked with in Lamas, I became aware that they wanted and needed money. Peruvian law now requires them to send their children to school wearing uniforms and having school materials, all of which have to be purchased. But more significantly, indigenous farmers want roads and motorized transport to carry their produce to market, so they can earn some money to send their children to school and even to university and to the clinic, as well as buy some consumer goods such as transistor radios or TVs in order to be connected to the wider world. These needs cannot, on principles be determined by any ideology, and rejected as threats to the native culture. Denying access to such amenities to the most cash-poor indigenous farmers and urging them to live as their ancestors did eventually seemed to me ethically questionable, since I, along with the members of the organizations I collaborated with, used and enjoyed them. Furthermore, the market economy has penetrated deeply into most parts of Peru and certainly in the Lamas region, and it is a reality that simply cannot be wished away. This is what propelled me to investigate Fair Trade as a possible alternative to autarchy, to the capitalist model, and I hoped against hope to the representationalist cast of mind as well. More broadly, I understood that alternatives to the hegemonic development project need not be conceived as its complete antithesis, rejecting anything connected with the development or modernization project. Such an attitude partakes of the modernist either/or dualist mind set and is itself therefore deeply problematic. Given the fact that indigenous farmers need money, as well as are entitled to many of the benefits money can bring, I felt that I wanted to examine a potentially viable alternative, namely Fair Trade cooperativism. It is thus that I began in 2005 exploring the possibility of an association with the Oro Verde Fair Trade Coffee Cooperative in Lamas. Between 2006 and 2009, we jointly cooperated in carrying out a course in Lamas for U.S. undergraduates on Fair Trade, sustainability, and ecology.1 The course was an attempt on my part to realize a vision of pedagogy where intellectual engagement could be integrated with activism and the performance of bio-cultural regeneration through ritualized action. However, it eventually became clear that the Fair Trade label attracted a type of students with little to no interest in rituals and

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the indigenous worldview. Furthermore, the cooperative itself had little interest in shamanism (and other indigenous ritual actions), shamanism being a major form of local indigenous bio-cultural enactment for regeneration. For these and other reasons, along with a close group of friends in Lamas, we created our own nonprofit organization in June of 2009. We named it after the spirit of the forest, Sachamama. The name Sachamama for our center seemed to me to capture the entanglement of the human, the non-human, and the other-than-human aspects of the local world. It conveyed at once our interest in ecology, in indigenous culture, and in the other-than-human beings of the place. We changed the title of the course, dropping the Fair Trade label and including the words “indigenous spirituality.” The syllabus, besides reading assignments, also requires students to participate in several rituals, fasts, led by a local shaman, without of course ingesting any Amazonian plants, however. The course also includes an immersion in two native villages where they learn indigenous crafts and other practices. The course as well involves the students in one of the major ecological project of our center, which we call the “chacra-huerto” project. The course during the winter interterm of 2010 attracted a very different type of students. They were almost all very interested in spirituality and rituals and found no tension between those interests and more pragmatic involvement with the chacra-huerto project. The course was extremely successful, much more so than it had ever been when held with the coffee cooperative. Let me speak briefly of the chacra-huerto project since it is there that we have tried to enact bio-cultural regeneration drawing on the spirits and also on all the lessons learned. The Oro Verde Coffee Cooperative has been involved in the last few years in finding a solution to the diminishing amount of forest available for the continuation of the local slash-andburn, or swidden, itinerant agriculture and it had started a small project of creating a permanent agricultural field on its premises. Through Oro Verde I traveled to Costa Rica to learn directly from farmers there a method of collecting micro-organisms from the forest floor and fermenting them as a crucial ingredient in organic manure. Slash-and-burn agriculture consists of making a clearing in the forest by cutting down most of the trees (fruit trees and other useful trees are left standing). The trees are not uprooted but are cut at waist height. The trunks and branches are burned. The ash gives the poor reddish tropical soils badly needed phosphate. Using a digging stick, the farmers plant a mix of many staple crops, fruit trees as well as cotton, and a variety of medicinal plants, all interspersed in these polycultural gardens. The garden is used primarily

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for subsistence, the surplus, if any, being sold in the local markets. Such gardens are used from one to four years depending on the fertility of the soil and then have to be abandoned since the soil has lost its fertility, letting the forest regenerate. However, given a rapid demographic increase, mostly due to land-hungry migrants from other parts of Peru, there is no longer sufficient forest cover to make this method sustainable. Experts say that an average family requires at least 100 acres to make this method sustainable and allow sufficiently long fallow rotations for healthy forest regeneration. Nowadays the average land holding among farmers is between 6 and 16 acres per family. This has led to a progressively shortened fallow period and thus the deterioration of the forest cover. Since for the poorest farmers the prospect of having to buy their subsistence is unrealistic, the cooperative took an active interest in trying to find a solution for the food security of its poorest members. I had been involved in this project while working with the coop and had gone to Costa Rica to learn this method from an organic farmers’ association. There I learned how to gather microorganisms from the floor of the forest ferment these and mix them with organic manure. The Costa Rican farmers had successfully grown organic vegetables for twenty years on the same plots of land that they regularly fertilized with this organic manure also using fallow rotations. They sold the produce to supermarkets in the capital and were remarkably prosperous. Their agriculture was permanent, organic, economically successful but had completely lost (if it ever had) any ritual performances. The farmers belonged to the dominant social class and were totally severed from any contact with indigenous ritual practices. They were not very different from successful small farmers in the United States. The coffee cooperative was no more interested in ritual than the Costa Rican farmers. So when we created Sachamama, we immediately sought to work with the largest of the indigenous cultural/political organization, CEPKA (Spanish acronym for Ethnic Council of the Kichwa People of Amazonia). The latter organization, to which one of my godsons, who is a member of Sachamama, belongs, as well as two other indigenous members of Center Sachamama, is deeply committed to the regeneration of Kichwa language, culture, and spiritual practices. Furthermore, in 2009 I had become aware of archaeological discoveries in several parts of the Amazon Basin, including the Peruvian High Amazon where Lamas is situated, of artificial soils created on a large scale by the pre-Columbian inhabitants. These soils, called in Portuguese (since they were first identified in Brazil) terra preta de indio, meaning black soil of the Indians are still fertile today. Archaeologists have dated some of them as being

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seven thousand years old. Clearly this anthropogenic soil displays a most remarkable sustainability since it is still used for plantations and for selling potting soil.2 The composition of these soils has been studied by a soil scientist at Cornell University, and through his publications we have been able to identify with greater precision how to make it. We have also adapted the ingredients for making it with inexpensive or free locally available organic components in order to insure that the resulting black earth would be affordable even for the most cash-poor of farmers. The result is an improved variant on the method I learned from the Costa Rican farmers and one, furthermore, that revives an ancient indigenous practice. So together with our indigenous farmer collaborators we created terraced fields, which we fertilize with this black earth to which we have given the Quechua name of yana allpa, meaning “black earth.” What we also do is that before gathering microorganisms from the floor of the forest, we ritually invoke Sachamama, the spirit of the forest, ask her permission, and give her an offering of ritual tobacco smoke. Microorganisms are collected only twice a year and do not affect the health of the forest. Before planting we also invoke Pachamama, the spirit of the earth, asking her permission, and giving her a traditional libation of chicha [corn beer]. Since at the initial phase these crops require water, the two fields we have so far created in two native communities are both located near available sources of water. When using this water, be it from a river or from a spring, we also make offerings to Yacumama, the sprit of the waters. At every step of the agricultural process, we exchange gifts and communicate with the spirits. Our indigenous collaborators are very keen on this, as we are, since the seductions of modernity have eroded these practices especially among the younger generation. We involve our interterm U.S. undergraduates in these rituals, asking them to speak from their hearts in their own words. Some find this impossible and decline, but many are able to speak. I recall one vivid case where the student told me she could not possibly speak to the soil. Then I saw her with her bowl of chicha at a distance speaking at great length to the earth. When she returned I commented that she seemed to have been able to overcome her reluctance. She answered that she had explained to the earth at length how and why she could not speak to her! Such performances help create a reality in which the non-human world is not an unsentient inert mechanism there solely to fulfill our needs, indefinitely exploitable. In these ritual performances, we always ask permission before undertaking any agricultural action. Our hope is that in this manner we will all enact a reality in which humans are only one part of a living larger

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world that has its own needs and desires. The spirits, with whom we communicate and to whom we offer gifts, enable us to acquire and act upon this awareness. Besides those ritual actions around our chacra-huerto project undertaken with the undergraduates who participate in our course, I with the staff of Sachamama and our volunteers also perform regularly larger rituals during the two solstices where we make offerings to the spirits as a group. The two permanent fields that have been created for and with indigenous farmers have been extremely successful. Two harvests have taken place by the time of this writing. The emphasis is on growing food for consumption by the members of the communities. Some families have inquired about the possibility of creating raised beds of yana allpa in their own gardens behind the house. CEPKA wants to bring this to as many of its members as possible. Of course, only time will tell how successful these efforts will turn out to be. But all indications point to a very positive future. At Sachamama, on our own land, we are experimenting with a traditional polycultural subsistence plot since our hope is that if successful it might be adopted by many farmers for their subsistence needs, thus reducing deforestation as well as CO2 production through slash-and-burn agriculture. At Sachamama we harvest rain water from our gutters for irrigation since town water contains chlorine that kills the micro-organisms. Such chacra-huertos have the enormous advantage of being close to the dwellings and communities of the farmers. In the present conditions, they have to walk often many hours to reach their food fields in the forest and thus have to carry the crops to feed their families long distances, strapped to their foreheads. One of the key ingredients of the pre-Columbian anthropogenic soil is bio-char, a charcoal made from agricultural bio-mass that is burned without oxygen at very high temperatures in a process called pyrolisis. The production of bio-char thus does not involve emitting CO2 into the atmosphere. Since it simultaneously produces heat, it is an extremely promising clean technology for producing not only bio-char but energy. It is being produced industrially in several places in the United States. This bio-char has the crucial characteristics of being able to retain the nutrients in the organic manure preventing them from being washed away by the great force of the local tropical rains. This key ingredient presented us with an enormous challenge since no one in the region or even in Peru was producing it. Fortunately one of the students from the January term 2010 course named Nick Nugent returned to Sachamama in October of 2010 as a volunteer and became deeply involved in the chacra-huerto project. He

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took up the challenge of finding an affordable backyard method of producing bio-char. He spent almost a full month on the internet searching for the perfect method. His hard work was successful and he built a back yard bio-char oven on our premises that has been reliably producing high quality bio-char from freely available coconut husks that only costs us some $300 to build.3 Our own chacra-huerto provides our kitchen with many of the fruits and vegetables we consume. Besides the chacra-huerto project we have another project involving Kichwa youths who are interested in speaking with their elders and transcribing their words in Quechua. The local variant of Quechua has almost no written material for the bilingual classrooms in the native communities and Sachamama is publishing these transcriptions as desktop publications for local use. The project has been named by those involved the Qinti Qartunira project. Qinti means “hummingbird” in Quechua. This bird is the messenger of the spirits and when seen around the house signals good news. Cartoneras exist in all the major Latin American cities where local volunteers publish non-copyrighted Spanish literature as desktop homemade books with recycled cartons (hence the name cartonera) to make literature affordable and available to everyone since books are very expensive. Our project is the only one in Peru producing books in Quechua, based on the interaction between local youths and their elders. In order to signal that our Cartonera is not in Spanish but in Quechua we have replaced the initial “c” with a “q.” Heading this project is a young woman from Recife in Brazil with an MA in Peruvian indigenist literature, who is also our Spanish-language course instructor, named Barbara Galindo Rodrigues. She is passionate about this project which she leads brilliantly in collaboration with one of our Kichwa members, the bilingual teacher Felipe Cachique Amasifuen.4 The latter will be presenting our first Qartunira book at a conference on Indigenous Peoples of the World and Education taking place in Cusco in August 2011. The administrator of Sachamama is a young self-taught painter whose paintings are all inspired by his ayahuasca visions. His mother manages the buildings and grounds and rules the kitchen and the gardens with brilliance. She is a gifted herbalist able to successfully treat students’ ailments with her plants. One of my godsons is the Quechua teacher at Sachamama and the ex-president of the Kichwas council’s youth organization. As a member of the elected team of the new mayor of Lamas, he is one of the youngest indigenous Kichwas to enter the municipality. He is a brilliant and very dynamic young man who is also doing a long-distance course in law, hoping to be the first Kichwa lawyer in the Lamas region.

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Our membership also counts on the most senior of the bilingual teachers in Lamas, Profesor Inocente Sangama Sangama. Our small team of intimate friends is tightly bound by the same desire to bring about a livable common world through the performance of ritualized actions,5 ones that also create more economic security for the poorest farmers.

Appendix

Indigenous notions of biodiversity excerpted from “Voices of the Earth” in Darrell Addison Posey, ed., Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity (London: UNEP/Intermediate Technology Publications, 1999), 119–166. “The entire environment around us is pretty much the way of life of our own people.” Henrietta Fourmile, Polidingi, Australia, page 125 “What is equivalent to the biodiversity here, to the things that surrounds us, is my life.” Pera, Bakalaharil, Botswana, page 130 “Biodiversity is a Western concept that has no correspondence in the language of the Paraci people.” Daniel Matenho Cabixi, Brazil, page 132 “When Sibö decided to create this world, the earth, the first people he made were the indigenous people. He brought corn seeds from the other world and planted them in the soil of the earth, and they grew into the first indigenous people. We are called /dtsö/, which means corn seeds.” Report from a group in Costa Rica, page 135 “We believe—and it is true—that there are lakes and big hills in the jungle where our souls and the souls of our ancestors live. We communicate and live together with everything that is alive because everything has a spirit which strengthens us.” Cristina Gualinga, Quichua, Ecuador, page 136 “The spiritual element is the yachag, an indigenous wise man, that is curing. This means that not only the physical part is biodiversity but also the spiritual part, and human society must be included.” Bolivar Beltran, report on workshop, Ecuador, page 142

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“In our language, there is something called ‘adat,’ an unwritten understanding of common things that everybody should know . . . Adat is not only important in how we deal with our resources but also in how we live. It isn’t like the concept of managing, but rather that two things happen at the same time. While you might manage something, what you manage is also managing you. A person is a part of a greater single action, a larger balance or harmony. Adat is often described as a traditional legal system but, to the indigenous peoples, it is much more, encompassing a set of beliefs and values that affect all aspects of life. Further, adat is a set of unwritten rules and principles that extends to everything and to relationships within both the physical world and the spiritual world.” Patrick Segundad, Kadazan, Malaysia, page 147 “I can say unequivocally that the term biological diversity is not easily translatable into an indigenous culture, such as Maori . . . What does biological diversity mean for me? Ultimately, it means that anyone who commodifies biological resources; separates them from cultural heritage; attempts to exert exclusive individual ownership, is consigning the diversity of life to solitary confinement in a prison that condemns all those who regard nature and peoples as being more important than trade.” Aroha Te Pareake Mead, Maori, New Zealand, page 151 “[My life] includes everything. We say ‘lotwantua,’ which means everything is included. When I think of biodiversity it is the same: everything is included. I could not be a reindeer herder without it. It is a necessity. Biodiversity is both art and necessity.” Johan Mathis Turi, Saami, Norway, page 152 “Personally, when I look at the word bio-diversity, there is a very spiritual connotation to the word. Biodiversity has a more spiritual sense than in the sense that ‘bio’ means life and ‘diversity’ means having different kinds of things in life . . .” Michael Kapo, Papua New Guinea, page 156

NO T E S

CHAPTER 1 1. Ronald L. Grimes, Rite Out of Place: Ritual, Media, and the Arts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 155. 2. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990). 3. It is astonishing to me that in his book The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Edward Grant, in his quest for understanding why the scientific revolution happened in Western Europe, which at its dawn in the fifteenth century was much less advanced that the Arab world, does not even mention the advent and role played by the Reformation, the wars of religion, and the loss of certainty. 4. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985). 5. Terre des Hommes, Children and Biodiversity in the Andes (Lima, Peru: Terre des Hommes, 2001), 10. 6. Publications on my anthropological work in Orissa detail the nature of this experience. See in particular my early work: Wives of the God-King: The Rituals of the Devadasis of Jagannatha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986) and edited with John Carman, Purity and Auspiciousness in Indian Society (Brill 1986). 7. See my book with PRATEC: Frédérique Apffel-Marglin with PRATEC, The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronting Western Notion of Development (Zed, 1998) for a discussion of this shift. 8. Even though Jim Endersby in Imperial Nature: John Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) speaks of colonial collectors in his history of botanical science in the nineteenth century and even mentions those European colonial collectors’ relationships with the local indigenous peoples whose knowledge of local plants was indispensable, at no point does he discuss the epistemological issue of the standing of indigenous knowledge and that of European knowledge. His discussion of center/periphery colonial dynamics refers overwhelmingly to relationships between Europeans in the metropolis and Europeans in the colonies; indigenous people almost totally disappear. 9. A well-known example of this is Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971) in which the author uncritically uses the term “primitive religion” as well as the difference between rituals and magic seen as residing in what is in fact a very Christian (as well as modern) distinction between a prayerful petition to the divine versus a mechanical action forcing one’s will on the outcome. Although Thomas’s book is an extraordinary scholarly achievement and a treasure

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10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

Notes to pages 12–22

trove of information, it is deeply marred by a lack of awareness of its Euro- and Christiancentric assumptions. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Elizabeth Potter, Gender and Boyle’s Law of Gases (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). I have in mind such works as Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006) or Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (New York: Vintage, 2008). Grimes, Rite Out of Place, 153. For a critique of Van Gennep’s and Turner’s reliance on the concept of “the social structure,” see my book Rhythms of Life: Enacting the World with the Goddesses of Orissa (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008). Marshall Berman, The Re-enchantment of the World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981).

CHAPTER 2 1. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973), 493. 2. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1996), 72. 3. See Shiv Visvanathan, A Carnival for Science: Essays on Science, Technology and Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) and Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). In his book The Idea of Biodiversity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), David Takacs argues that the term “biodiversity” was consciously created at the National Forum on Biodiversity in Washington, D.C., in 1986 by the biologists who organized the forum, who included E. O. Wilson. The idea of biodiversity preserves was to move the public from the “is” of environmental degradation toward the “ought” of a biodiversity-friendly moral response. Takacs insists that scientists are interested not only in environmental protection, but also in “simultaneously appropriating for themselves the authority to speak for it, to define and defend it.” See Takacs, p. 99, and Edward Grumbine’s review of Takacs’s book, “Review of The Idea of Biodiversity: Philosophies of Paradise,” Terra Nova 4, no. 2 (1997): 102–110. Biology and biologists have a central role in consistently separating local communities and economies from their tropical surroundings, which are partly constituted by them. See Luis Vivanco, Green Encounters: Shaping and Contesting Environmentalism in Rural Costa Rica (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 292. 4. The term “environment” posits the humans at the center and separates them from it, both profoundly problematic moves. I may occasionally use the term simply for ease of communication since it has become ubiquitous. However, in those contexts I am not focusing on the core issues of anthropocentrism/humanism and the separation between humans and other-thanhumans. 5. See Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 145. Worster argues that the idea of sustainable development is not new to the 1987 Brundtland Report, but dates from this earlier period. The only new departure is that the notion of sustainable development is now to be applied to the entire globe and it is now Planet Earth that is to be managed. On the history of scientific forestry and sustainable yield, see James Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998). See also Carolyn Merchant’s critique of conservation consciousness in

Notes to pages 22–25

6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

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Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.) On page 230 she writes: “Conservation consciousness was a utilitarian homocentric ethic subservient to pragmatic means, not an ecocentric ethic . . .” Vivanco, Green Encounters. See Jonathan Adams and Thomas O. McShane, The Myth of Wild Africa: Conservation Without Illusion (New York, Norton, 1992); J. Peter Brosius, “Analyses and Interventions: Anthropological Engagements with Environmentalism,” Current Anthropology 40, no. 3 (1999): 277–309; Arturo Escobar, “Cultural Politics and Biological Diversity: State, Capital, and Social Movements in the Pacific Coast of Colombia,” in Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest, ed. Richard G. Fox and Orin Starn (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 40–64; Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York: Longman, 2000); and Vivanco, Green Encounters. Cronon, “Trouble with Wilderness,” 81. As Luis Vivanco points out, biodiversity forest preserves “reflect and confirm authoritative concepts of museumized and unpeopled wilderness.” See Vivanco’s Green Encounters. Such spaces are as much constructed and artificial as the dioramas of “wild” Africa in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, so brilliantly deconstructed by Donna Haraway in “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” in Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), 26–58. In certain places, this realization has brought about different practices that encourage indigenous people to continue to live in the preserves; see Vivanco, Green Encounters. Mari Marcel Thekaekara, “India Beachside Development may have Worsened Tsunami’s Impact,” The Guardian Weekly, January 14–15, 2005, 8. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, Rhythms of Life: Enacting the World with the Goddesses of Orissa (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008). An AP photograph appeared in my local paper The Hampshire Gazette, January 19, 2005, depicting women in Port Blair, India, praying at the sea shore, identifying them as making offerings to appease the Goddess of the sea. As Jared Diamond demonstrates in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton and Company), non-modern practices do not guarantee sustainability. However, responsibility toward the other-than-humans may be a necessary, if not a sufficient, requirement for sustainability. Excerpted in The Guardian Weekly, January 14–20, 2005, 16. I use the term “cosmopolitan” to refer to those classes anywhere who have espoused a modernist framework, recognizing that on the ground, people may hold contradictory views regarding the other-than-human world. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’ ” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–21. William Balée, Footprints of the Forest: Ka’apor Ethobotany: The Historical Ecology of Plant Utilization by an Amazonian People (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). See also William Balée and Darrell Addison Posey, eds., Resource Management in Amazonia: Indigenous and Folk Strategies (Bronx, N.Y.: New York Botanical Garden, 1989); Nigel J. H. Smith, The Amazon River Forest: A Natural History of Plants, Animals, and People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Darrell Addison Posey, “Voices of the Earth,” in Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity, ed. Darrell Addison Posey (London: UNEP/Intermediate Technology Publications), 125–166; Arturo Gomez-Pompa and Andrea Kaus, “Taming the Wilderness Myth,” BioScience 42, no. 4 (1992): 271–279; Vivanco, Green Encounters; Luisa Maffi,

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19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

Notes to pages 25–27

“Language and the Environment,” in Cultural and Spritual Values of Biodiversity, ed. Darrell Addison Posey (London: UNEP/Intermediate Technology Publications, 1999), 21–35; and Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (New York: Vintage Books, 2005). Maffi, Luisa, ed. On Biocultural Diversity: Linking Language, Knowledge, and the Environment. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. On “manly rationality,” see Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Among others, see especially Donna Haraway, Primate Visions and Modest_Witness@ Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997); Marilyn Strathern and Carol McCormack, eds. Nature, Culture, and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988) and After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Butler, Gender Trouble and “Contingent Foundations,” 3–21; Sarah Franklin, Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception (London: Routledge, 1997); Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E. Longino, eds. Feminism and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Sandra Harding, ed. Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007); Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs 28, no. 3 (2003): 801–832; Karen Barad, “Reconceiving Scientific Literacy as Agential Literacy, or Learning How to Intra-act Responsibly within the World,” in Doing Science + Culture, ed. Roddey Reid and Sharon Traweek (New York: Routledge, 2000), 221–258; Karen Barad, “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism without Contradiction,” in Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science, ed. Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Jack Nelson (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996); and Lynn Morgan and Meredith W. Michaels, eds., Fetal Subjects, Feminist Postitions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). For a non-feminist critique of the act of naturalizing, see also Bruno Latour’s work: The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988); We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); and The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). See also Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Fact (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986). Northern Land Council, Ecopolitics IX: Perspectives on Indigenous Peoples’ Management of Environmental Resources (1996), quoted in Darrell Addison Posey, Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity (London: UNEP/Intermediate Technology Publications, 1999), 8. Brackets in original. Stephanie Fried, “Shoot the Horse to Get the Rider: Religion and Forest Politics in Bentian Borneo,” in Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: the Interbeing of Cosmology and Community, ed. John A. Grim (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 75. Jack D. Forbes, “Nature and Culture: Problematic Concepts for Native Americans,” in Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community, ed. John A. Grim (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 103–124. By 1870, the term “resource” had acquired its contemporary meaning from an earlier meaning in which it referred to the earth’s ability to restore itself; resource originally meant “to rise up again.” Merchant, Ecological Revolutions, 11. The work of biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling has shown how biological sex is also the result of normalizing practices. See her book Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

Notes to pages 27–31 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

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Butler, Gender Trouble, 22. Butler, Gender Trouble, 22–23. As Butler remarks, today one has to add “the Arab” to this list. Butler, “Contingent Foundations, 12. See also Butler, Gender Trouble. On this point, see especially chapter 8. The witches were declared heretics by Pope Innocent VIII in 1484. See David Noble, A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1992). Frances Amelia Yates, in her book The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1979), points out that the first Christian Cabala (Christian and Jewish spellings of this term differ) was written in Spain in the thirteenth century by Ramon Lull in 1274, contemporarily with the flowering of Jewish Kabbalah. Lull wrote in Arabic and did not use the Jewish letters so important in Jewish Kabbalah. Pico and Ficino, though, used Jewish letters and the mysticism of their number (gematria). Lull was the first to argue that the Tetragrammaton, using the Cabalistic method, revealed the name of Jesus, thus proving that it was the name of the Messiah through ancient Jewish texts. Pico and Ficino followed in this path. Quoted in Elizabeth Potter’s Gender and Boyle’s Law of Gases (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 89. Potter, Gender and Boyle’s Law of Gases, 92. Potter, Gender and Boyle’s Law of Gases, 91–93. All the known occult philosophers were men; this does not mean that women did not participate, but they have disappeared from the record. Women, however, were predominant in popular magic and healing. Nicole Belmont, “Superstition and Popular Religion in Western Societies,” in Between Belief and Transgression: Structuralist Essays in Religion, History, and Myth, ed. Michel Izard and Pierre Smith, trans. John Leavitt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 9–23. On hylozoism, see endnote 39. On hylozoism, see Potter, Gender and Boyle’s Law of Gases, 108. Potter points out that in Boyle’s case, many scholars maintain that he held on to a residual belief in the activity, though not the animation, of some kind of matter. Her view is that Boyle’s alchemical residues were framed in a mechanical philosophy and not a hylozoic one. The etymology of the word is from the Greek hulé, meaning “matter,” and zoon, meaning “living.” Jit Singh Uberoi, Science and Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978); Peter Burke, “Historians, Anthropologists and Symbols,” in Culture through Time: Anthropological Approaches, ed. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierny (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 268–283. François Bayrou gives evidence for the existence of both Protestant and Catholic Inquisitions in his book Ils portaient l’écharpe blanche: L’aventure des premiers réformés, des guerres de religions à l’édit de Nantes, de la Révocation à la Révolution (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1998). Edward Grant in his book The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), gives pride of place to natural philosophy and especially its institutionalization in the European universities as the main reason for the scientific revolution, minimizing the universities’ role as Church institutions that impeded the creation of a field of inquiry totally separated out from the religious sphere. In keeping with such a perspective, Grant gives almost no role to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ wars of religion in the creation of such a sphere, whereas Allen Debus in his book Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) argues that many occult philosophers’ practices and ideas were a new attempt to unify nature and religion, something not too far removed from the role of natural philosophy as discussed by Edward Grant.

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Notes to pages 31–39

43. Jewish texts generally spell the word as Kabbalah, whereas Christian ones generally spell it as Cabala. 44. Yates, Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, 174. 45. The fact that Isaac Newton kept totally secret his hylozoist beliefs and writings until they were revealed to the world in 1930 when a descendant sold Newton’s unpublished works is a testament to the degree to which hylozoist ideas had become dangerous by the end of the seventeenth century. See Morris Berman, The Re-enchantment of the World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981). See also Isabelle Stengers’s fictional historical play on this subject, La Guerre des sciences aura-t-elle lieu? Scientifiction (Paris: Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2001). 46. Haraway, Modest Witness; Potter, Gender and Boyle’s Law of Gases. 47. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 2004). 48. Potter, Gender and Boyle’s Law of Gases. 49. Potter, Gender and Boyle’s Law of Gases, 130. 50. Potter, Gender and Boyle’s Law of Gases, 134–135. 51. Cited in Potter, Gender and Boyle’s Law of Gases, 143. 52. Potter, Gender and Boyle’s Law of Gases, 156. 53. See Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance. 54. Potter, Gender and Boyle’s Law of Gases, 154.

CHAPTER 3 1. Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind (New York: Bantam Books1993), 303. 2. On the enclosure of bodies, especially women’s bodies, see the work of Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 2004). 3. The term “natural resource,” however, does not emerge until the second half of the nineteenth century. See Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). 4. Both the lords and the peasants conflictually claimed rights to the commons, with such conflicts periodically erupting in “peasant wars.” Thus, the claims to exclusive ownership of the commons by landed aristocracy culminated in a long history of conflicts. See Federici, Caliban and the Witch; Stephen A. Marglin, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like An Economist Undermines Community (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). 5. Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 59. 6. Appleby, Economic Thought, 59. 7. John Moore, The crying sin of England, of not caring for the poor (1653), cited in Appleby, Economic Thought, 62. 8. Appleby, Economic Thought, 59. 9. Federici, Caliban and the Witch. 10. Appleby, Economic Thought, 37. 11. Appleby, Economic Thought, 37–38. 12. Appleby, Economic Thought, 41. 13. Quoted in Appleby, Economic Thought, 61. 14. Appleby, Economic Thought, 62–63. 15. Federici, Caliban and the Witch. The whole of Federici’s book is a historical tracing of the transformations in the exploitation of the lower classes and the key role in this played by the witchhunts. Federici, however, does not stress the link between enclosures and the exploitation of nature. 16. See n. 24 for a definition of “traditional.”

Notes to pages 39–42

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17. Federici, Caliban and the Witch. 18. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Rinehart and Co., 1944); Appleby, Economic Thought. Carolyn Merchant tracks the transformation of Nature from a living member of the community to a mechanism and a resource in both The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980) and Ecological Revolutions. 19. See the appendix for statements by representatives of different indigenous groups that illustrate this. 20. David Abram’s book The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996) uses Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to argue this point in great detail and with persuasive force. Gregory Bateson does as well in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973), as do some quantum physicists such as Karen Barad and Arthur Zajonc. See also Alf Hornborg’s The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy Technology, and Environment (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira Press, 2001). Hornborg also argues against such a separation between matter and mind. See quantum physicist Zajonc’s book, Catching the Light. 21. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 71. 22. Quoted in Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 195. 23. Quoted in Darrell Addison Posey, ed., Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity (London: UNEP/Intermediate Technology Publications, 1999), 450. 24. Posey, ed., Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity, 4, uses a definition of “traditional” borrowed from the Four Directions Council of Canada, which emphatically eschews any notion of tradition as what is frozen from the past, but rather refers to livelihood systems constantly adapting to changing conditions, while always embracing principles of sustainability. These principles, however, are not universal but always contextual. The category of “traditional” is not restricted to that of “indigenous” and can include native people and peasants. In order to collect the desired information, UNEP commissioned the Environment Liaison Center International (ELCI) to carry out this task. Local NGOs were used to organize workshops in many parts of the world where people came together to articulate what they understood by the term “biodiversity.” The results have been published in “Voices of the Earth,” in Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity, ed. Posey, 125–166. 25. In a series of articles, now collected in a book, I have written about this entanglement in the case of menstruation festivals in coastal Orissa, in eastern India, where all members of the community celebrate the menstruation of women, the earth, the sea, and the goddess to ensure the regeneration of the human and the other-than-human communities. Frédérique ApffelMarglin, Rhythms of Life: Enacting the World with the Goddesses of Orissa (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008). 26. Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991); Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization, trans. Felicitas D. Goodman (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985). Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller. Translated by John and Anne Tedeschi. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. 27. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Williard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964); Piers Vitebsky, Shamanism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001). 28. Robert Jay Lifton associates the eradication in modernity of initiatory rituals that incorporate a death experience to the collective death wish embodied in the nuclear arms race. See Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979). 29. Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hoffman, and Christian Rätsch, Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers (Rochester, Vt.: Healing Arts Press, 2003). 30. Pierre Hadot in his book The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press / Harvard University Press, 2006) takes us on a

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31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

Notes to pages 42–45

wonderful journey from Ephesus to Wittgenstein, revealing the astounding continuity of the notion of new life through death and how humans and nature co-participated in this. Laura Rival, ed., The Social Life of Trees: Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1998); Laura Rival, “Trees and the Symbolism of Life in Indigenous Cosmologies,” in Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity, ed. Darrell Addison Posey (London: UNEP/Intermediate Technology Publications, 1999), 358–368. Duerr, Dreamtime, 194. Duerr, Dreamtime, 195. Cited in Duerr, Dreamtime, 123. On these timber management practices, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998). On the current situation of the Peruvian Amazon, see my article “Under the Guns” in Cultural Survival Quarterly 33, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 20–27. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 202. The hylozoist worldview led to more egalitarian and democratic politics, which explains why the radical sectaries such as the Levelers in seventeenth-century England were mostly hylozoists. One prominent hylozoist, Campanella, was tortured by the inquisition in 1600 in Naples for his plans to set up a “universal republic” described in his City of the Sun (1623), which was to be led by Hermetic magicians, with communal ownership and living in love with equality between men and women. See Elizabeth Potter, Gender and Boyle’s Law of Gases (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001: 111). So did Paracelsus as mentioned earlier. As Karl Polanyi has taught us and as Appleby also details, usury as well was converted from a sin to a virtue and capital became the other major economic resource, or, in Polanyi’s terms, “factor of production.” Polanyi, Great Transformation. In The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), Margaret C. Jacobs traces the history of four generations of Watts brothers, and uncovers irrefutable evidence for the pursuit of economic advantage from the discoveries of the new science ever since its beginnings. She insists that besides economic factors, the genealogy of the Industrial Revolution must include what she terms the “culture of science.” Here, however, I am suggesting that the formulation and then acceptance of the mechanistic paradigm itself by the early scientists had everything to do with the transformations in economic life, the enclosure movement, and the appearance of the market economy. This “great transformation” as Polanyi has termed it is the broader context in which the scientific revolution should be understood. Federici shares this view in Caliban and the Witch. Arjun Appadurai, “The Terminology of Measurement in as Peasant Community in Maharashtra,” (manuscript, 1988). Lee Schlesinger, “Agriculture and Community in Maharashtra, India,” Research in Economic Anthropology 4 (1982): 233–274. Helen Codere, Fighting with Property: A Study of Kwakiutl Potlatching in Warfare, 1792–1930 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966); Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Random House, 1983). Appleby, Economic Thought, 50. Mun wrote three pieces in the 1620s: A discourse of trade, from England unto the East Indies (1621), England’s treasure by forraign trade (1623), and The petition and remonstrance of the governor and company of merchants of London trading to the East Indies (1628). Misselden wrote Free trade (1622) and The circle of commerce (1623). It is relevant to point out that Francis Bacon published his utopia New Atlantis in 1624, in which knowledge is conceived as power over nature and women are not allowed in his temple of knowledge, the Temple of Solomon. It is also relevant to recall that Marin Mersenne, Descartes’ close associate and cofounder of the French Académie, published in 1623 Quaestiones in Genesim, in which he viciously attacked

Notes to pages 45–51

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

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some prominent occult philosophers and thus cleared the way for Descartes’ dualist mechanist philosophy. See Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1979), 174. Appleby, Economic Thought, 53. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific ( New York, E. P. Dutton, 1961). Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967). Hyde, Gift, 18. Marshall David Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 1972). Mauss, Gift, 9–10. Mauss, Gift, 10. On page 13, Mauss asserts that the spirits of the dead and the gods “in fact are the real owners of the world’s wealth.” Hyde, Gift, 128. Schultes, Hoffman, and Rätsch, Plants of the Gods. Merchant, Ecological Revolutions, 117. Cited in Merchant, Ecological Revolutions, 102–103. Following Bruno Latour, I wish to reserve the term “collectivity” to refer to the human, nonhuman and other-than-human communities. Alain Caillé, in his most recent book, Dé-penser l’économique (Paris: La Découverte/MAUSS, 2005), 122, argues that the purely material calculating spirit is an analogue of war in non-modern collectivities. The global ecological crisis we are experiencing currently can be construed as reprisals for violating the “spirit of the gift.” See Vinay Lal, “Provincializing the West: World History from the Perspective of Indian History,” in Writing World History: 1800–2000, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 279–280. Lal does not mention Jews, but Jewish communities had existed in Malabar (what is today the state of Kerala) since the early years of the Common Era. For a fictional account of this incredibly cosmopolitan and sophisticated world of far-flung trade during the twelfth century, there is the marvelous novel by Amitav Ghosh, In An Antique Land (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), in which the central protagonist is a Jewish trader from North Africa who ends up in Malabar via Cairo and Aden, and then returns. Karuna Sagar Behera, “Maritime Trade in Ancient Orissa,” in Sidelights on History and Culture of Orissa, ed. Manmatha Nath Das (Cuttack: Vidyapuri, 1977), 115–121; Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, Ancient Indian Colonies in the Far East, vol. 2 (Delhi: Gian Publishing House, 1986). Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, “Smallpox in Two Systems of Knowledge,” in Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance, ed. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin and Stephen A. Marglin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 102–144. James L. Y. Chang, “The Doctrine of ‘Light-Heavy’ and Kuan-Chong’s Economics Policy,” in Perspectives on the Administrative Tradition: From Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, ed. S. Todd Lowry, vol. 7 of Perspectives on the History of Economic Thought, ed. Donald A. Walker (Aldershot, Hants, England: Elgar, 1992). Quoted in Caillé, Dé-penser l’économique, 123–124. Jatinder Bajaj, “Francis Bacon, the First Philosopher of Modern Science: A Non-Western View,” in Science, Hegemony, and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity, ed. Ashis Nandy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 57–58. Bajaj disagrees with Joseph Needham as to the manner in which such a conception arose, but not on the difference between the two cosmologies. In the Kabbalist/Hasidic mystical Jewish traditions, these are spoken of as sparks of divinity existing in everything and everyone. In the Amazonian shamanic tradition, they are spoken of as the “mothers” (mama) or “spirits” of the plants, trees, rocks, waters, mountains, and so on. Whether sparks or mothers, the non-human world is entangled with a spiritual dimension. Fine, Lawrence, ed. Essential Papers on Kabbalah. New York: New York University Press, 1995. Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken Books, 1995. On this point see especially chapters 5 and 6 of this book.

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Notes to pages 51–55

65. Peter Speigler, “The Ontological Commitment of Economics” (PhD diss., Harvard University, Department of Economics, 2004), 2. 66. Peter Speigler has this to say about the metaphorical nature of mathematical modeling: “The manner in which the math works itself out is meant to be relevant to the manner in which the puzzling social or physical phenomena might be more clearly understood. The process of illumination just described is precisely that of metaphor. A metaphor is, by definition, ‘a figure of speech (or trope) in which a word or phrase that literally denotes one thing is used to denote another, thereby implicitly comparing the two things’ (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy).” See Speigler, “Ontological Commitment of Economics,” 8. 67. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of the Mind, 493. Here I probably differ from Stephen Gudeman’s argument in his book Economics as Culture: Models and Metaphors of Livelihood (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986) in which he contrasts the modeling of economics to the metaphors of non-modern societies. 68. Scott, Seeing Like a State. 69. This single calculating individual was soon also constituted as a corporation, which is nevertheless legally treated as an individual most likely in order to preserve and stabilize its self-contained and separate character. This calculating individual eventually becomes transformed into a natural, universal, given in neo-classical economics, the individual who maximizes his selfinterest and who is possessed of infinite wants. For a critique of this naturalized construct see Marglin, Dismal Science. Note, too, that this ideal-typical sketch is of course somewhat softened by the force of environmental laws. 70. See the work of biologist Richard Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993: 63), who has argued that organism and environment co-create each other: “Organisms do not find the world in which they develop. They make it.” However, in terms of Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism, such a formulation still posits a given separation between a pre-given organism and an environment. See chapter 4. 71. This correlation has been made abundantly visible by the environmental justice movement, and is succinctly captured in the bumper sticker that reads, “Live simply so that others may simply live.” 72. Excerpted in The Guardian Weekly January 14–20, 2005, 16. 73. Wendy Nelson Espeland, The Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality, and Identity in the American Southwest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 201. It is striking that this comment was made after the Yavapai won their case against the building of a dam on their reservation by the Bureau of Reclamation that would have flooded their reservation. They felt betrayed by the environmentalists’ cost-benefit analysis that secured this victory since it totally ignored their moral and spiritual reasons for refusing the dam. 74. Eduardo Grillo, Caminos andinos de siempre (Lima, Peru: PRATEC, Proyecto Andino de Tecnologías Campesinas, 1996). 75. Alf Hornborg, “Environmentalism, Ethnicity, and Sacred Places: Reflections on Modernity, Discourse and Power,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 31, no. 3 (1994): 245– 267, see page 264. Hornborg notes that this is done not only in economics and political sciences, but also anthropology and sociology. I would add that it is also done in the classical mode of the natural sciences. 76. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner, 1976). In Alain Caillé’s latest book, Dé-penser l’économique, Caillé argues against separating the two. CHAPTER 4 1. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 396.

Notes to pages 55–61

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2. It is this move by Boyle that by the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the abandonment of the term “natural philosopher” in favor of “natural scientist.” 3. On the quest for the reestablishment of certainty in seventeenth-century Europe, see Stephen Edelston Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990). 4. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 45. 5. The taboo is, however, well-entrenched in most natural sciences and in most educational material on the natural sciences, including physics. 6. Some of these are reported and discussed in George S. Greenstein and Arthur G. Zajonc, The Quantum Challenge: Modern Research on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (Sudbury, Mass.: Jones and Bartlett, 1997). However, many important results came too late to appear in this text; these are discussed in chapter 7 of Karen Barad’s book, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Barad refers to these experiments as “experimental metaphysics.” 7. In her book Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad discusses in great detail the recently performed gedanken experiments and offers a striking resolution of the measurement problem in quantum physics. 8. The “science wars” were initiated by physicist Alan Sokal, who had a phony post-modern article published in the non-refereed journal Social Text. As the article was about to come out, Sokal wrote to another journal, Lingua Franca, saying the Social Text article was a fraud; he also let the New York Times know about it. This unleashed an acrimonious debate between realist natural scientists and a variety of post-modern scholars, as well as science studies scholars. It also generated a lively debate on the Left between Marxist and post-Marxist scholars. 9. Niels Bohr, Essays, 1958–1962, on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, vol. 3 of The Philosophical Writings of Neils Bohr (Woodbridge, Conn.: Ox Bow Press, 1963), quoted in Karen Barad, “Reconceiving Scientific Literacy as Agential Literacy, or Learning How to Intraact Responsibly within the World,” in Doing Science + Culture, ed. Roddey Reid and Sharon Traweek (New York: Routledge, 2000), 232. 10. Niels Bohr, Essays, 1958–1962, on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, vol. 3 of The Philosophical Writings of Neils Bohr (Woodbridge, Conn.: Ox Bow Press, 1963), 59–60, quoted in Barad, “Reconceiving Scientific Literacy,” in Doing Science + Culture, ed. Roddey Reid and Sharon Traweek (New York: Routledge, 2000), 232. Brackets added. 11. The whole of Michel Foucault’s oeuvre is relevant to Barad, but perhaps most important are Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977) and The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970). Barad is also profoundly inspired by the work of Judith Butler and Donna Haraway. 12. Barad, “Reconceiving Scientific Literacy,” 243. 13. Barad, “Reconceiving Scientific Literacy,” 235. 14. Barad, “Reconceiving Scientific Literacy,” 235–236. 15. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 116. 16. Werner Heisenberg, “The Physical Content of Quantum Kinematics and Mechanics,” Zeitschrift fur Physik 43 (1927): 172–198, quoted in Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 116. The second bracket is Barad’s. 17. And this may give us a clue as to why it has become so popular while Bohr’s complementarity/ indeterminacy principle has not become similarly widely known. As I have argued in this chapter, the dualist mechanist classical paradigm is entangled with the politics (and economics) of the landed and merchant class, more generally, the capitalist class. 18. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 279.

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Notes to pages 62–82

19. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs 28, no. 3 (2003): 821. 20. Karen Barad, “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism without Contradition,” in Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science, ed. Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Jack Nelson (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), 188. 21. Margaret C. Jacobs, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). 22. I do not mean to assert that hylozoist movements restricted God to nature. As the quotes from some hylozoists given earlier show, it is rather that God pervades the material world as well as our souls. Thus a hylozoist world view does not necessitate a strictly animist theology. God can both pervade this world and be greater than it. I have tried in this work not to enter into properly theological terrain.

CHAPTER 5 1. Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World (New York, W. W. Norton, 1995), 43. 2. For a definition of tradition not as indicating antiquity but rather as a certain manner of sharing and learning knowledge, a knowledge that as often as not is new, see n. 24 in chapter 3. 3. Marcela Machaca spoke at the following conferences: “Decolonizing Knowledge: Indigenous Voices of the Americas,” organized by Frédérique Apffel-Marglin and John Mohawk at Smith College, Mass., May 5–7, 1995; “Mutual Learning in Theory and Practice,” organized by Frédérique Apffel-Marglin and Kathryn Pyne Addelson, Shutesbury, Mass., October 13–15, 1998; and the symposium on “Mutual Learning: Decolonizing Communities,” organized by Frédérique Apffel-Marglin and Kathryn Pyne Addelson, Smith College, Mass., October 16, 1998. Her presentations were recorded and her words reproduced below are based on the recording of the 1995 conference. Marcela also read a Spanish translation of this essay and made the corrections she saw necessary. Translation from the original Spanish by the author. 4. Jack Kloppenburg, Jr., First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 5. Marcela Machaca, Magdalena Machaca, Gualberto Machaca, and Juan Vilca Nuñez, Kancha chacra sunqulla: La cultura agrocéntrica en el ayllu Quispillacta (Lima, Peru: PRATEC, 1998), 75. Translated by the author. 6. Quoted in Machaca et al., Kancha chacra sunqulla, 86. Translated by the author. 7. This description is based mostly on Marcela Machaca’s published account of Yarqa Aspiy in Machaca et al., Kancha chacra sunqulla, 1–69. I also visited Quispillacta in 2000 and gathered further information. 8. Machaca et al., Kancha chacra sunqulla, 61. 9. Machaca et al., Kancha chacra sunqulla, 60–63. 10. I had asked Marcela in ABA’s office to sing me some of these songs of the passion of the water. She found it very difficult to do so, out of the context of Yarqa Aspiy. She sang a few lines in Quechua and translated for me into Spanish, all the while emphasizing how impossible they were to translate, since every Quechua word has a wealth of meaning and evokes many more moods and images than the Spanish could. I translated her Spanish translation into English. 11. John Grim, ed., Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Community and Cosmology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). 12. On this point, see Darrell Addison Posey, ed., Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity (London: UNEP/Intermediate Technology Publications, 1999), 3–16. 13. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990).

Notes to pages 83–94

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14. Georg H. von Wright, “Images of Science and Forms of Rationality,” in Images of Science: Scientific Practice and the Public, ed. S. J. Doorman, (Aldershot, Hants, England: Gower, 1989), 17. 15. On Boyle’s method, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985). 16. On this, see especially Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_ Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), 23–45. 17. See David Noble, A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1992), 206, 211. 18. The terminology is Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s. See chapter 2 of Leviathan and the AirPump. 19. Noble, World Without Women. 20. See Asociacion Choba-Choba, PRATEC, Crianza del Monte en los Quechua-Lamas (Lima: 2001), 13, 101–102. 21. Jean Pouillon, “Remarks on the Verb ‘To Believe,’ ” in Between Belief and Transgression: Structuralist Essays in Religion, History, and Myth, ed. Michel Izard and Pierre Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 8. 22. Morris Berman, The Re-enchantment of the World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981). CHAPTER 6 1. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 93. 2. On crop diversity, see Jack Kloppenburg, Jr., First the Seed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 3. For an excellent review of the role of science in anthropology see Sarah Franklin, Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception (London: Routledge, 1997). 4. See James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001). 5. See Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000) and Trilokinath Madan, Modern Myths, Locked Minds: Secularism and Fundamentalism in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). 6. See Carroll, Constantine’s Sword. 7. Following Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), I will use capitalized Science to refer to the way Science is represented in educational institutions, the media, and other public venues, and distinguish it from “science,” which refers to the actual practice of scientists in the conduct of their research. On Science as the religion of modernity see, among others, Raimon Panikkar, “Modern Science and Technology Are Neither Neutral Nor Universal,” in Europe-Asia: Science and Technology for Their Future (Zurich: Forum Engelberg, 1996). 8. References to Orlando Olcese’s text are to the first five chapters in manuscript form that he gave me after I interviewed him in January, 2002. The manuscript was published in time for the 100th anniversary celebration in the month of August of that year. Orlando Olcese, “Enfrentando la adversidad camino a la gloria”: historia de la Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina, 1902– 2002 (Lima, Peru: Ediciones Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina, 2002). 9. On Truman’s speech and the birth of “development,” see Wolfgang Sachs, ed., The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (London: Zed Books, 1992). 10. Olcese, Enfrentando la adversidad camino a la gloria. 11. Olcese, Enfrentando la adversidad camino a la gloria, 10–11. 12. Olcese, Enfrentando la adversidad camino a la gloria, 21. 13. Olcese, Enfrentando la adversidad camino a la gloria, 28.

( 220 ) 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

Notes to pages 94–101

Olcese, Enfrentando la adversidad camino a la gloria, 52. Olcese, Enfrentando la adversidad camino a la gloria, 71. Olcese, Enfrentando la adversidad camino a la gloria, 6. See Lee Schlesinger, “Agriculture and Community in Maharashtra, India,” Research in Economic Anthropology 4 (1981): 233–274. Olcese, Enfrentando la adversidad camino a la gloria, 31. Olcese, Enfrentando la adversidad camino a la gloria, 31. Olcese, Enfrentando la adversidad camino a la gloria, 31. For the story of the Peruvian guano boom, see Paul Gootenberg, Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru’s “Fictitious Prosperity” of Guano, 1840–1880 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). For guano as the impetus for U.S. imperialism, see Jimmy M. Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Overseas Expansion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). Olcese, Enfrentando la adversidad camino a la gloria, 33. Baron von Liebig, Letters on Modern Agriculture, ed. John Blyth (London: Walton and Maberly, 1859), 265–266. Letter from von Humboldt to M. H. Klaproth, quoted in Estuardo Núñez and Georg Petersen, El Perú en la Obra de Alejandro de Humboldt (Lima, Peru: Librería Studium, 1971), 133–134. Author’s translation. Garcilaso de la Vega, The Incas: The Royal Commentaries of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, 1539– 1616, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Orion Press, 1961), 118. De la Vega, Incas, 117. De la Vega, Incas, 164, 228, plate 1. De la Vega, Incas, 123. The fiftieth anniversary history is the following: J. Alberto León, Oswaldo González Tafur, and Alberto Vargas V., La escuela nacional de agricultura en sus bodas de oro: 1902–1952 (Lima, Peru: Colegio militar Leoncio Prado. CMLP, 1952). León, González Tafur, and Vargas, La escuela nacional de agricultura, 178. Julio Valladolid, interview by Frédérique Apffel-Marglin and Kathryn Pyne Addelson, Smith College, North Hampton, Mass., August 1998, “Working Papers from the Center for Mutual Learning at Smith,” pages 22–30. For a very useful history of the failure of this form of cooperativism, see Francisco Vanderhoff Boersma, Excluidos hoy, protagonistas mañana (Oaxaca, Mexico: Uníon de Comunidades Indígenas de la Región del Istmo, Editorial Mario Bladimir Monroy Gómez, 2005). Roger Rumrill, interview with Carlos Noriega, June, 2009, http://www.prensa-fragor.blogspot.com (accessed July 5, 2009). These statistics were produced in the mid-seventies by the then-director of Agricultural Statistics of the Ministry of Agriculture, Eduardo Grillo. No more recent and comparable statistics were available to me at the time of writing. PRATEC, Crianza del Monte en los Quechua-Lamas, Lima, n.d., p.13. Pablo José de Arriaga de la Companía de Jesús con Estudios preliminar y notas de Henrique Urbano, La Extirpación de la Idolatría en el Pirú (1621) (Cuzco, Peru: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolomé de Las Casas, 1999), XXIV–XXV. Translation is the author’s. Arriaga, La Extirpación de la Idolatría, XXI. On the demographic collapse, see in particular Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (New York: Knopf, 2005). The earliest of these faculties was created in 1961 in Huanuco, and many were founded by graduates of La Molina. A course in Agro-ecology is part of the catalogue of La Molina, which I acquired in February 2002, dated 2000–01. The information about the students’ request was obtained in an interview with one of the senior professors there, Salomón Helfgot. Two anthropol-

Notes to pages 101–105

41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53.

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ogy courses are also in the curriculum, but in an interview with the Professor of Anthropology Blanca Rosa Cespa Bustamante, it became clear that the kind of anthropology taught is the one emphasizing “development anthropology,” namely what knowledge of native culture is needed in order to bring progress to them more efficiently. According to her, the offered courses emphasize techniques of intercultural communication. This focus reflects an effort to address the fact that the way extension agents and other development agents have communicated with natives in the past has created an accumulation of adverse reactions and resentment on the part of natives. She maintained that these experts behaved in dominating ways, expecting the natives to take care of them without compensation during their field visits. She noted that this has been typical since the beginning of the Republic of Peru in 1821, a Republic of white creoles and of mestizos. The government did not interfere with those of the Highlands who had under their control the judiciary system and all of what they referred to as the “indiada,” a pejorative term referring to the indigenous people. This continued until the middle of the twentieth century, according to her. After the agrarian reform, the indigenous masses succeeded in liberating themselves and acquired a great deal of power. However, she maintains, the arrogant attitude of the experts continues today. Even though “participation” is now de rigueur, the way it is interpreted is that during their visit, the experts sit at the same table with some native people and ask them to say what they want. As a result, the native people don’t speak and remain silent. Some of the most well-known proponents of agro-ecology are Miguel Altieri, Victor Toledo, and Merrick Alcorn, among others. Bronislaw Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic, 2 vols. (New York: American Book Co., 1935). A half century later, Keith Thomas employs the same distinctions and the same nomenclature in his influential book Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971). For a brilliant reworking of Malinowski’s Trobriand material, see Stanley Tambiah, Culture, Thought and Social Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). In Stanley Tambiah’s book Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Tambiah states that there are two separate and complementary modes of thought or ways of being in the world: one he calls “participation” and the other “rationality.” Scott, Seeing Like a State. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977). Charles Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960). Gillispie, Edge of Objectivity, 199. Emphasis added. Frederic Farrar, “Aptitudes of the Races,” T.E.S.L. 5 (1867): 120, quoted in Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 204. For a documentation of genocide in the 1960s of Amazonian indigenous peoples and its links with Protestant missions and development, see Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (New York: Harper Collins, 1995). Tambiah, Magic, Science. The two examples discussed were presented by quantum physicist Arthur Zajonc in one of my courses. More insights were gained from reading his book Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind (New York: Bantam Books, 1993). The felt need for a restoration of certainty upon which to rebuild the social order is a need not known in other civilizations such as those in South Asia, or in Andean or Amazonian ones. It is intimately linked to the Church’s millennial monopoly on knowledge and articulation of the

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54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

Notes to pages 105–128

one truth. See David Noble, A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1992), as well as Carroll, Constantine’s Sword. Richard W. Hadden, On the Shoulders of Merchants: Exchange and the Mathematical Conception of Nature in Early Modern Europe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). Hadden, On the Shoulders of Merchants, 80. Hadden, On the Shoulders of Merchants, 63. Hadden, On the Shoulders of Merchants, 65. De la Vega, Incas, 158–159. Charles Mann reports that recent research shows that the different ways of twining the threads also conveyed meaning. See Mann, 1491. In anthropology, all-purpose money is contrasted to special-purpose money where certain things can be exchanged for a range of certain other things, but not for everything. Examples include cows that can be exchanged for brides in some societies, or banana leaf bundles in the Trobriands which can be exchanged for a certain range of things, but for not others. See Annette Weiner’s work on the Trobrianders, The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1988) and Women of Value, Men of Renown: New Perspectives in Trobriand Exchange (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), as well as George Dalton’s classic work Economic Anthropology and Development: Essays on Tribal and Peasant Economies (New York: Basic Books, 1971). Hadden, On the Shoulders of Merchants, 88. Hadden, On the Shoulders of Merchants, 95. Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (London: Faber and Faber, 1957). Julio Valladolid rejected his earlier practices and left the University of Huamanga to join PRATEC. On the rise of empirical positivism in the twentieth century, see Bruce Wilshire, The Moral Collapse of the University: Professionalism, Purity, and Alienation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, (New York: Vintage Books, 1961). Jose R. Sabogal Wiesse, “Nuestros Años Formativos—Un testimonio generacional,” Amaru no. 12, Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería, Lima (June 1970). Sabogal Wiesse, “Nuestros Años Formativos,” 18–22. Author’s translation. Hadden, On the Shoulders of Merchants, 95. Albert Einstein, quoted in Nicholas Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution in the Aims and Methods of Science (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 131. On communities as the primary epistemic agents, see Elizabeth Potter, Gender and Boyle’s Law of Gases (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 170. Parker Palmer, To Know As We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 37. Palmer, To Know As We Are Known, 23. David Maybury-Lewis, lecture delivered at Smith College, 1987. Zajonc, Catching the Light, 6.

CHAPTER 7 1. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York: Penguin Books, 1977). 2. Greta Jiménez Sardón, Rituales de la vida en la cosmovisión andina (La Paz, Bolivia: Convenia Editorial, Secretariado Rural Perú-Bolivia, CID, 1995).

CHAPTER 8 1. Moniqe Wittig “One Is Not Born A Woman,” Feminist Issues 1, no. 2 (Winter 1981): 48; cited in Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 155.

Notes to pages 128–139

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2. This Under Ministry was originally entitled the Subsecretary of Ethnic, Gender and Generations Affairs (Subsecretaria de asuntos étnicos, de género y generacionales). 3. In Peru, the corresponding State institution is called the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (El Ministerio de la Mujer). 4. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 5. Wolfgang Sachs, ed., Global Ecology: A New Arena of Conflict (London: Zed Books, 1993), 3. 6. Sachs, ed., Global Ecology, 11. 7. Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, 96. 8. Secretaria Nacional de Desarollo Rural (La Paz, Bolivia: 1995). 9. On this study, see Loyda Sanchez and Marina Arratia, Género y Riego en Comunidades Campesinas de los Andes: Una approximación conceptual (Cochabamba, Bolivia: PRONAR, 1996). 10. Sanchez and Arratia, Género y Riego en Comunidades Campesinas de los Andes. 11. Jorge Ticona Apaza, “Conversación Ritual entre las Familias del Agua y los Miembros de la Comunidad Humana en Conima y Tilali,” in La Crianza Mútua en las Comunidades Aymaras, ed. Jorge Apaza Ticona, Valeriano Gordillo Condori, and Sabino Orlando Cutipa Flores (Puno and Lima, Peru: Chuyma Aru and PRATEC, 1998), 28. 12. Apaza, “Conversación Ritual,” 29–30. 13. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, “Rationality, the Body and the World: From Production to Regeneration,” In Decolonizing Knowledge: From Development to Dialogue, ed. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin and Stephen A. Marglin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Louise Tilly and Joan Scot, Women, Work and Family (New York: Metheun, 1987). 14. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism without Illusion: A Critique of Individualism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 138. 15. The French nineteenth-century historian Jean Michelet gives expression to a widely held view at the time, namely that rationality is a “manly” power. See Jean Michelet, La Femme (Paris: Grevin, 1842), 174. On the perceived tension between women’s biology and rationality and autonomy, see: Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987); Ruth Hubbard, The Politics of Women’s Biology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1978); Thérese Moreau, Le sang de l’histoire: Michelet, l’histoire, et l’idée de la femme au XIXieme siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1982); Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women and the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). 16. Two contemporary instances of this attitude include: Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994) and Seymour Itzkoff, The Decline of Intelligence in America: A Strategy for National Renewal (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994). 17. Fox-Genovese, Feminism without Illusion, 116; Kathryn Pyne Addelson, Moral Passages: Toward a Collectivist Moral Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 108. 18. Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’ ” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7. 19. Susan Hekman, “Subjects and Agents: The Question for Feminism,” in Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory and Practice, ed. J. Kegan Gardiner (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 195. 20. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Bantam Books, 1961). 21. Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 71.

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Notes to pages 139–145

22. De Beauvoir, Second Sex, 59. 23. Bell Hooks, Ain’t I a Woman? (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Audré Lorde, Sister Outsider (Trumansburg, N.Y.: The Crossing Press, 1984); Spelman, Inessential Woman; Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands (London: Zed Books, 1987); Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Sylvia Marcos, “Embodied Thought: Gender Categories in Mesoamerica,” in Informe del Taller de Género, Regeneración y Biodiversidad (Cochabamba, Bolivia: CAI PACHA, CAM, PRATEC, 1994); FoxGenovese, Feminism without Illusion; Hekman, “Subjects and Agents; Butler, “Contingent Foundations”; Addelson, Moral Passages; Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, “Gender and the Unitary Self: Looking for the Subaltern in Coastal Orissa,” in Rhythms of Life: Enacting the World with the Goddesses of Orissa (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008). 24. Greta Jimenez Sardon, Rituales de Vida en la Cosmovision Andina (La Paz, Bolivia: Convenia Editorial Secretariado Rural Peru-Bolivia, Centro de Información para el Desarollo, 1995), 60. 25. Jimenez Sardon, Rituales de Vida, 65. 26. Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 27. Duden, Woman Beneath the Skin, 8–10; Carlo Ginzburg, Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Penguin Books, 1985). 28. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980). 29. Irene Silverblatt, Moon, Sun and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 159. 30. Duden, Woman Beneath the Skin, 13. 31. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The Development of Manners in Early Modern Times, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978). 32. Krunitz, The Economic Encyclopedia (1788), cited in Duden, Woman Beneath the Skin, 18. 33. Duden, Woman Beneath the Skin, 19. 34. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985); Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 27. 35. Here, most of Michel Foucault’s work is relevant, but see in particular Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977). 36. It also completely muddles the modernist notion of linear time and the beginning of a person’s life. 37. Karen Barad, “Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (1998): 87–128. See page 113 for quote. Casper, Monica. “Reframing and Grounding Nonhuman Agency: What Makes a Fetus an Agent?” American Behavioral Scientist 37, no. 6 (1994): 839–856. 38. Sarah Franklin, Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Reproduction (London: Routledge, 1997), 211. 39. Karen Barad, “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism Without Contradiction,” in Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science, ed. Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Jack Nelson (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), 176. On this point see also the work of quantum physicist Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind (New York: Bantam Books, 1993). 40. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).

Notes to pages 145–153

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41. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. This is not to imply that Barad’s, Franklin’s, Haraway’s, and Latour’s views are isomorphic: they are not. On this crucial point, however, they do seem to agree. 42. Grimaldo Rengifo, “The Ayllu,” in The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronting Western Notions of Development, ed. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin with PRATEC (London: Zed Books, 1998), 89–123. 43. Chuyma Aru, “Rituales de la crianza de las semillas,” in Crianza Ritual de Semillas en los Andes, ed. PRATEC (Lima, Peru: PRATEC, 1998), 17. 44. Zenon Gomel Apaza, “Regeneración de la Colectividad Humana,” in Informe del Taller de Género, Regeneración y Biodiversidad (Cochabamba, Bolivia: CAI PACHA, CAM, PRATEC, 1998), 9. 45. Greta Jiménez Sardon, Rituales de Vida en la Cosmovision Andina (La Paz, Bolivia: Convenio Editorial Secretariado Rural Peru-Bolivia, Centro de Información para el Desarollo, 1995), 129. 46. Theodore White, The Making of the President (New York: Atheneum, 1961), quoted in Addelson, Moral Passages, 114. 47. Addelson, Moral Passages, 104, 112. 48. Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control (Boston: South End Press, 1995); Asoka Bandarage, Women, Population and Global Crisis: A Political-Economic Analysis (London: Zed Books, 1997).

CHAPTER 9 1. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989). Quotations in Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 243. 2. For a detailed treatment of that history see the introductory essay by Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, “Knowledge and Life Revisited,” in The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronting Western Notions of Development, ed. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin (London and New York: Zed Books and St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 1–50. 3. Emile Durkheim, Les régles de la méthode sociologique (Paris: Alcan, 1919). 4. This work of Durkheim was the foundational teaching during my graduate education in a department of anthropology in the 1970s. 5. See especially B. Allan Wallace, Choosing Reality: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 2003). 6. Some of the most well-known exceptions are works by Donna Haraway, Sarah Fanklin, Marilyn Strathern, Gilllian Goslinga, Bruno Latour, and Ron Grimes. 7. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955). In Tristes Tropiques (sad tropics) Lévi-Strauss waxes melancholic about the inevitable passing of indigenous societies swallowed by the onslaught of modernity. 8. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, act 5, scene 5. It is useful to remember that Shakespeare was a contemporary of Galileo. 9. David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983), 7. 10. Landes does not correlate the appearance of the mechanical clock with the previous revolution in mathematics that happened about a century earlier. 11. Landes, Revolution in Time, 77. 12. Landes, Revolution in Time, 78. 13. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1934), 15; Landes, Revolution in Time, 16.

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Notes to pages 154–159

14. Modern history, like modern science, has roots in classical Greece. Thucydides definitely separated out muthos from logos, hearsay and tales from verifiable accounts of events. See Marcel Détienne, The Creation of Mythology, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 15. One of the few who has done this is Vinay Lal. See especially Vinay Lal, The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). 16. But, as Vinay Lal remarks, “Hybridity is for the West: in much of the rest of the world, the ground realities were such that there was always mixing, a term that has attracted none of the pompous posturing that cultural theorists have attached to hybridity.” Vinay Lal, Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 119. 17. See Ashis Nandy, Shikha Trivedy, Shail Mayaram, and Achyut Yagnik, Creating a Nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and Fear of the Self (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); Ramachandra Gandhi, Sita’s Kitchen: A Testimony of Faith and Inquiry (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); Vinay Lal, “The Discourse of History and the Crisis at Ayodhya: Reflections on the Production of Knowledge, Freedom, and the Future of India,” in Emergences 5–6 (1993–1994): 4–44. 18. I have documented one such site in Orissa, the eastern state of India. See Frédérique ApffelMarglin, “Of Pirs and Pandits,” in Manushi 91 (1996): 17–26. 19. In his novel In An Antique Land (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), Amitav Ghosh tells of a similar instance in North Africa. At the end of the book he retells his misadventures upon visiting a saint’s tomb in Egypt that was venerated by both Jews and Muslims. He found it guarded by police who “protected” Jewish pilgrims’ visiting rights and as a Hindu, was never able to enter. The age old practice of members of both Jewish and Muslim faiths venerating at the same saint’s or tzadik’s tomb has become increasingly impossible throughout North Africa, for reasons rather similar to those of the Babri Masjid. With the partition of India into Muslim Pakistan and India, and the partition of Palestine into Israel and Palestinian lands, such mixings have become intolerable. 20. Ashis Nandy, Time Warps: The Insistent Politics of Silent and Evasive Pasts (New Delhi: Permanent Black in association with Ravi Dayal Publisher, 2001), 4. 21. Eduardo Grillo, “Development or Cultural Affirmation in the Andes?” in The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronting Western Notions of Development, ed. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin with PRATEC (London: Zed Books, 1998), 124–145. 22. For a grimly realistic description of such events see Søren Hvalkof, “Outrage in Rubber and Oil: Extractivism, Indigenous Peoples, and Justice in the Upper Amazon,” in People, Plants, and Justice: The Politics of Nature Conservation, ed. Charles Zerner (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 83–116. 23. See chapter 6 of this book and Parker Palmer, To Know As We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993). 24. For a brilliant critique of this concept of the individual, see Marilyn Strathern’s book The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988). 25. Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 287, quoted in Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), 19. 26. Gebser, Ever-Present Origin, 19. 27. See Gebser. Among Ken Wilber’s many publications, see particularly A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality (Boston: Shambhala, 2000). 28. On this practice, see Rider Panduro and Grimaldo Rengifo, Montes y Montaraces (Lima, Peru: PRATEC, 2001).

Notes to pages 159–165

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29. The recognition of the agency of non-humans is found among those who do science studies such as Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Gillian Goslinga, Elizabeth Potter, and Sarah Franklin among others. See chapter 3 in particular on this point. 30. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 164–165. 31. Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). 32. Richard Lewontin, lecture at Hampshire College, April, 2003. See also Richard Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993). 33. Gebser, Ever-Present Origin, 19. 34. This is the argument advanced by David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996). 35. Other important works on orality are Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) and Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 1988). 36. This did not happen in India, where orality or the “heard” (sruti) has always had pride of place. Local oral tradition has the final authority when it comes to ritual practice, superseding the written text. After painstakingly translating a sixteenth-century Sanskrit text with a descendant of its author, a text that described in the most minute details ritual procedures, we read at the end of the text the following: “But if in your region people’s practice is different, follow the local practice.” This took place at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard in 1977. 37. Among many books, see Luis Eduardo Luna and Pablo Amaringo, Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman (Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1999); Holger Kalweit, Shamans, Healers and Medicine Men, trans. Michael H. Kohn (Boston: Shambhala, 1992); Huston Smith, Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam, 2000). 38. Latour, Politics of Nature, 84. 39. Grimaldo Rengifo, Identidad cultural y lenguaje (Lima, Peru: PRATEC, 2001), 37. Author’s translation. 40. As we are all aware, modernists are no longer only Westerners but can belong to just about any part of the globe. 41. The earliest of the Rig Vedic hymns are dated at around 1200 BCE. 42. Lilian Silburn, Instant et cause: Le discontinu dans la pensée philosophique de l’Inde (Paris: Librairie Philosophique, 1955), 13, 20, 36, 47. Author’s translation. 43. On enacting the world, see Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). On performing the world, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). On intra-actions, see Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. 44. For the etymology of ritu, see Emile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1973), 380. The English word “ritual” comes from the Latin ritus which in turn derives from the Sanskrit ritu. 45. Marcela Machaca, Magdalena Machaca, Gualberto Machaca, and Juna Vilca Nuñez, Kancha chacra sunqulla: La cultura agrocéntrica en el ayllu Quispillacta (Lima, Peru: PRATEC, 1998), 75. 46. On the carry-over of the practices of the witch hunt into the Americas at the time of the conquest, see especially Irene Silverblatt’s book, Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). 47. Stephen A. Marglin, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 249.

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Notes to pages 167–172

CHAPTER 10 1. Stephen A. Marglin, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 234. 2. Anna Milford, in her 2004 paper (unpublished) “Coffee, Cooperatives and Competition: The Impact of Fair Trade,” notes that the roots of Fair Trade go back to resistance to unrestrained free trade and globalization, as well as southern countries’ dissatisfaction with their terms of trade voiced as early as the 1960s (see Milford, page 7). Alternative Trading Organizations (ATOs) began selling products from the South to consumers in the North in special shops. Fair Trade products are sold much more widely in supermarkets. However, the formal creation of an alternative market did not begin until the 1980s. 3. Milford, “Coffee, Cooperatives,” 8. 4. Mark Hayes and Geoff Moore, “The Economics of Fair Trade: A Guide in Plain English,” (manuscript, 2005), 3. 5. This is the definition produced by FINE, an informal network that involves the Fairtrade Labeling Organization International (FLO), the International Federation for Alternative Trade (IFAT), the Network of European Shops (NEWS!) and the European Fair Trade Association (EFTA). Hayes and Moore, “Economics of Fair Trade,” 3. 6. The term “re-embed” alludes to the classic work of Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Rinehart and Co., 1944), in which he characterizes the (capitalist) market economy as being disembedded from society and the polity. 7. As Noah Enelow points out in his essay “Fair Trade Coffee in Peru: Building Local Prosperity through Transnational Networks” (manuscript, 2006), while mainstream economists eschew the concept of a “bottom line” that includes social and environmental criteria, the concept has been well received within the business sector itself where many have adopted the “triple bottom line” consisting of equity, efficiency, and sustainability. 8. Francisco Vanderhoff Boersma, Excluidos hoy, protagonistas mañana (Mexico: Union de Comunidades Indigenas de la Region del Istmo, Editorial Mario Bladimir Monroy Gómez, 2005), 132. Translation is the author’s. 9. The most land a member of the cooperative can own is twenty hectares of land worked by the owner him/herself. The mean size in the Oro Verde cooperative is approximately three hectares. 10. The price fell to as low as $0.50 per pound but has climbed back up since; however, the forecast is that it will remain below $1.00 per pound for the next decade. See Bryan Lewin et al., “Coffee Markets: New Paradigms in Global Supply and Demand,” Agriculture and Rural Development Discussion Paper 3 (Washington, D.C.: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, World Bank, 2004), 15, cited in Marglin, Dismal Science, 231. The minimum Fair Trade price is $1.25 per pound and with the organic and Fair Trade premiums it becomes $1.40 per pound. 11. Coffee is a tropical plant mostly grown in southern countries. 12. For more information on Dean’s Beans, see their web site: www.deansbeans.com. 13. Vanderhoff Boersma, Excluidos hoy, 67. Translation is the author’s. 14. The uprising of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, led by Subcomandante Marcos, was timed to coincide with the day of this signing. The major cash crop in Chiapas is coffee. Enelow, “Fair Trade Coffee in Peru.” 15. Vanderhoff Boersma, Excluidos hoy, 69. 16. Perhaps it is worth noting that some of these maquiladoras actually pay higher wages than the farmers previously received in agriculture. In these cases, it is the disruption of livelihoods and communities, and the attendant social ills that accompany such disruptions that are the core of the problem. The pure economic argument for free trade is logically true and yet utterly blind to lived experience. The issue of the worker’s physical safety is a corollary to this point—not only in the plant itself, but in the newly created and hence often chaotic community surrounding the plant. Finally, there is the empirical question of whether the maquiladoras actually do

Notes to pages 173–176

17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

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offer better wages than the farmers had earned pre-NAFTA. That, too, may be false. Noah Enelow, personal communication with the author, October 1, 2006. Lawrence Summers, 2003, quoted in Marglin, Dismal Science, 224. Vanderhoff Boersma notes that twenty years ago the real income of indigenous peasants in Mexico was $900 per year. In the last ten years, this has decreased to $600. Vanderhoff Boersma, Excluidos hoy, 136. Enelow cites the following figures: the share of income distributed among the poorest ten percent fell by a quarter between 1988 and 1993, while the share of the richest ten percent increased by eight percent. Enelow, “Fair Trade Coffee in Peru,” 3. Lant Pritchett, Robert Wade, and Bob Sutcliffe are all excellent sources for this. Noah Enelow, personal communication with the author, October 1, 2006. Vanderhoff Boersma coins an acronym, MAM in Spanish (Muy Alta Marginalidad) and VEM in English (Very Elevated Marginality), to refer to those excluded from the market system who are expendable throw-aways since they are inefficient. Such a statement should be qualified by recognizing that often such vanishing or even totally vanished bio-cultural patrimonies are frozen in ethnographic, art, and natural history museums where they become spectacle for northern consumption. Such museums are typically the objects of tax-exempt charity on the part of “captains of industry.” Maria Elena Martinez-Torres, Organic Coffee: Sustainable Development by Mayan Farmers (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 2006). Enelow, “Fair Trade Coffee in Peru,” 1, cites a 1997 survey for the Social Investment Forum that finds that 84% of Americans would be willing to pay a few dollars more per item for goods not made under sweatshop conditions. In the 2006 documentary “Buyer Be Fair” distributed by Bullfrog Films, it is stated that the U.S. Fair Trade market is currently growing at a rate of 74%. This figure is also cited by Enelow. This statement should not be interpreted to mean that all such tourism is problem free—in fact, far from it. It is only meant to suggest that the motivation of that class of tourist is less for the consumption of sights and more for meaningful in situ experiences of bio-cultural diversity rather than for pre-selected and pre-packaged experiences in museums or texts. However, I am totally aware that a measure of pre-selection and pre-packaging inevitably also occurs in situ in the tourist industry. I would include in this the environmental justice movement, which has made visible the class and race aspects of environmental degradation. This became particularly vivid for me on a fall weekend in 2006 when I attended the Garlic Festival in a town close to my former small New England hometown and could hardly move due to the crowds. Besides garlic and other local agricultural products, there was an abundance of local crafts for sale as well as the Dean’s Beans booth for 100% Fair Trade organic coffee with zero CO2 emissions which had long queues in front of it. On the Slow Food movement spreading the United States, see Carlo Petrini, Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean and Fair (New York: Rizzoli Ex Libris, 2007). I carried out interviews and observations during the summer of 2006 in four communities that had member committees. There were then a total of twenty-two communities dispersed over a very large territory around the town of Lamas. I also interviewed the technical staff at the cooperative, which had then approximately twenty-two Ingenieros on its payroll. These have university degrees, typically in agronomy. Ingenieros work closely with member communities, giving them technical advice and helping them fulfill the requirements of the FLO and the organic certifying organizations (the latter is BioLatina). These requirements are numerous and require a high degree of numeric and alphabetic literacy, more than many of the producers have attained through their few years of schooling. The coca plant originates from the High Amazon and has always been grown for use in the highlands, where coca leaves are chewed to combat high altitude sickness and to give energy. It

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29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

Notes to pages 176–185

is also a sacred leaf, central to highland shamanism (but not to high Amazonian shamanism). The chemically untreated coca leaf has only 2% of alkaloids; this climbs to some 80% after chemical treatment to convert it first into coca paste and then into cocaine for the illicit drug trade. The manager originally hired by this U.N. project to wean producers away from the drug trade has been continuously rehired by the members of the five committees that run the cooperative, who are all producer members. Specialty Coffee Association of America, an international annual meeting usually held in the United States that brings together coffee producers from the South and coffee buyers from the North. Each community where there are at least twenty member families form a committee made up of all the members, which includes the husband and wife pair. The subversives were mainly two guerilla groups: Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and Movimiento Revolucionaro Tupac Amaru (MRTA); both groups espouse varieties of a Maoist ideology. The leader of Shining Path has been in jail since 1994 and both groups have almost, but not totally, disappeared. Choba-choba refers to work parties that work on a rotating basis on each person’s chacra. It does not involve cash payments but does involve feeding the party when they work on your own chacra. Instituto Nacional de Recursos Naturales, Peru, “Para proteger la riqueza natural en el departamento de San Martín crean la primera ‘área de conservación regional’ en el Peru,” January 2006, http://www.inrena.gob.pe/comunicaciones/notas_portada/nota060105-2.htm (accessed July 6, 2009). One of the most chemical-intensive crops in the region is irrigated rice cultivation, which is contaminating most of the local rivers and streams. The other major cash crops are corn and coffee. The legacy of this colonial remnant policy is that mestizo agriculturalists are often the big landowners in the region, and native agriculturists are never large landowners. Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (New York: Knopf, 2005) reviews the scholarly research and debates about slash-and-burn agriculture in this region and comes to the conclusion that it became the norm only with the introduction of steel tools by Europeans, since making clearings in the forest with stone axes is a nearly impossible proposition. Indigenous agriculture was extensive, but it relied on different techniques. This history means that it is impossible to strictly demarcate domesticated from “wild” species and varieties. See chapter 2 on this topic. In 2006, FLO-CERT increased its organic requirements by a quantum jump, from one paragraph prohibiting the use of pesticides and agro-chemicals to an eighteen-page list of regulations. It is giving cooperatives a three-year transition period to fulfill the new extensive environmental requirements. The region is seeing an enormous growth in industrial-style intensive production of chickens and pigs that makes extensive use of chemical pesticides, growth hormones, and antibiotics. The residues from this industry are seriously polluting most local watersheds. Three northern regional certifying agencies have emerged from IFOAM: CEE (Europe), NOS (USA), and JAS (Japan). These are the Spanish acronyms. Bio-Latina is accredited by NOS and CEE, enabling it to certify Peruvian organic products for North American and European markets. There are five central elected committees or councils that run the cooperative. These are: the overseeing council in charge of verifying that due process is being followed by everyone and all committees/councils and that the accounts are transparent; the administrative council in charge of the administration of the cooperative; the electoral committee in charge of supervising electoral procedures in all elections; the education committee in charge of all matters

Notes to pages 185–193

43.

44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53.

54.

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pertaining to training; and the “committee for the development of women” (CODEMU) made up of women only. The members of the five central committees are elected in triennial elections held in Lamas, the seat of the cooperative, by the assembly of delegates. The delegates that elect the members of the five central committees are themselves elected by each sectorial (local) committee. There are four elected delegates per sectorial committee. The delegates sit in the general assembly of delegates that votes on the members of the five councils and committees that run the cooperative. One member from each of these councils/ committees comes together to form the total five delegates, who are the representatives to the national organization that represents all the coffee cooperatives in Peru (the Junta Nacional de Café) and travel to Lima for a yearly assembly meeting. In July 2006, one of the newspapers in Lima reported the result of a poll about violence against women. It was reported that 41% of women in Peru report having been beaten by a man. Since 2008, the cooperative has purchased land and built its own center where such events can take place. Oro Verde had, at the time of writing, not yet secured FLO or Bio-Latina certification for its new cacao and cane fields. JNC, Lima, September 15, 2006. For the Financial Times article, see Hal Weitzman, “ ‘Ethicalcoffee’ Workers Paid Below Legal Minimum,” Financial Times, September 9 and 10, 2006. Two days later the Financial Times published an editorial defending Fair Trade. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). This is particularly urgently needed in the Lamas region today, as evident in the events of the summer of 2009 due to the Peruvian government having given in concession some 75% of the Peruvian Amazon to multinational companies and other enterprises, as well as having promulgated two laws that open native community lands to enterprises and do away with the requirement to negotiate with representatives of native communities on such matters. These decisions were the result of the government of Alan García having signed a Free Trade Agreement with the Bush administration in December 2007. This led the government of Alan García on Friday, June 5, 2009, to send the military police against a road block by native people in the region of Bagua, not too far from Lamas. The official tally reports that twenty-two policemen died and only eleven native persons died, but alternative civic organizations report that between two hundred and five hundred native persons are dead or disappeared. This produced outrage in the country and abroad, and García has publicly acknowledged he made a mistake. During June 2009, the Peruvian congress annulled these two laws and the resistance has since quieted down. See my article “Under the Guns” in Cutural Survival 33, no. 4 (Winter 2009). There are many other categories of other-than-humans such as mountains, lakes, the forest itself, and so forth. The Colombian anthropologist Eduardo Luna writes that the shaman he visited in his youth had given up his practice due to the disappearance of the plants’ habitats when he returned twenty years later. Luis Eduardo Luna and Pablo Amaringo, Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman (Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1999). Native shamans are usually referred to as curandero/a while mestizo ones are called vegetalista, namely plant specialist (from the word vegetal meaning “plant”). As the youngest son in his family, Segundo Pastor (thirty-eight years old) lived with his aged parents as per custom and takes care of them. He died tragically in 2008. His father is also a shaman. They worked together in their common fields. The household consisted of nine persons in 2006. Besides Luna and Amaringo’s book, for ayahuasca one can also consult (among others) Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hoffman, and Christian Rätsch, Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers (Rochester, Vt,: Healing Arts Press, 2001), and Jeremy Narby, The

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55. 56.

57.

58.

Notes to pages 194–204

Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam, 1998). See Narby, Cosmic Serpent. For another anthropological reference that takes the statements of informants literally rather than metaphorically, see David E. Young and Jean-Guy Goulet, eds., Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1994). For publications by a physician on ayahuasca, see Jacques Mabit, ¨Blending Traditions: Using Indigenous Medical Knowledge to Treat Drug Addiction,¨ MAPS Bulletin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies 12, no. 2 (2002): 25–32 and by the same author “Ayahuasca and the Treatment of Addictions” in Psychedlic Medicine: New Evidence for Hallucinogenic Substances as Treatment, ed. Michael J. Winkelman and Thomas B. Roberts (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2007), vol 2, pp. 87–105. For an eloquent argument for the reality of the spirits, see my interview with Jacques Mabit, MD, founder and director of the Takiwasi center for the rehabilitation of drug addicts in the Peruvian High Amazon in InterCulture (Intercultural Institute of Montreal), no. 152 (April 2007): 27–48. See the essay by a Peruvian anthropologist who did years of field work on the relations between natives and mestizos in Lamas: Luis Calderon Pacheco, “Relaciones interétnicas entre mestizos e indígenas Kechwa en Lamas en el contexto de la globalización,” in Comunidades locales y transnacionales: Cinco estudios de caso, ed. Carlo Ivan Degregori (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2003). In this essay, Calderon Pacheco reports on the racism between the upper class mestizos and the indigenous Kichwas. He underlines, however, that the poor mestizo rural class has adopted the native worldview and its shamanic and agricultural practices.

EPILOGUE 1. We carried out this course for three years through the U.S. organization Living Routes, specializing in study abroad and sustainability with accreditation by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst but recruiting nation-wide. Now that the course is held through Sachamama, we continue to do it through Living Routes. For details on the course, see http://www.livingroutes.org/peru. 2. For an extremely readable report on these archaeological discoveries, see Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (New York: Vintage Books, 2006). 3. Nick Nugent has put on the web his findings and his newly built bio-char oven at Sachamama in a blog entitled “SachaChar.” 4. This project is part of Professor Doris Sommer of the Romance Language Department at Harvard University project called Cultural Agents in which the arts and literature are brought to the most disadvantaged segment of the population both in the United States as well as in many parts of Latin America. 5. For those interested in more information on Sachamama Center, our web site can be consulted: http//www.centrosachamama.org.

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INDEX

ABA. See Asociacion Bartolome Aripaylla abject others defined, 27 magic and, 25 occult philosophers as, 28–31, 33 Aboriginal Resolution, 25 Abram, David, 160 Achacillas (mountain deities), 112 activism, advocacy and, 13 Addelson, Kathryn Pyne, 146 advocacy activism and, 13 scholarship and, 10 agency of God, 4–5 of humans, 24, 26, 50, 144 of matter, 30 natural resources and, 4, 28, 35–37, 41, 51 of non-humans, 11, 14, 24, 40, 51, 85, 144, 227n29 responsibility and, 61–62 agential realism Barad and, 55–63, 216n70 defined, 56, 59 hylozoism and, 63 quantum physics and, 55–63 Age of Reason, 43 agrarian reform, in Peru, 99 agriculture first school of, 93–102 industrial, 22, 230n40 slash-and-burn, 180, 199–200, 230n37 traditional, 70, 90–91, 109, 180, 183 agro-ecology, 101, 183 agronomy. See also Yarqa Aspiy defined, 91

Machaca and, 16–17, 66–70 teaching of, in Peru, 90–110 Aguila Canayo, Don Hernán de, 176–80 alcohol, 123–24 all-purpose money, 97, 222 aloneness, other-than-humans and, 3–6 alphabet, Greek phonetic, 160, 190 alphabetic literacy, 185–86, 190 Altiplano festival of Ispallas in, 111–27 mapping of, 114 Alvaceres and Alvaceras, couples of, 79–81 Amasifuen, Felipe Cachique, 203 Amazon anthropogenic, 25 High, 99–100 Anatomy of Abuse (Stubbes), 40–41 “Andean Culture and Agriculture” course, 99 Andean Project for Peasant Technologies. See PRATEC Andes. See also Peru pre-Columbian, 94–95 regeneration in, 148 spirituality, 71–72, 74–75 traditional agriculture, 70, 90–91, 109, 180, 183 animism, 29, 92, 102, 218n22 anthropocentrism, 208n4 identity and, 157–62 in modernity, 13 of natural resources, 107 universal space and, 19, 150–51 anthropology development, 220n40 money in, 222 reverse, 11, 65

( 246 ) anthropology (continued) ritual and, 7–14, 164 time and, 161 Appadurai, Arjun, 43 Appleby, Joyce, 36–38, 214n39 Arabica coffee, 181 Aristotle, 31, 33, 105 Arratia, Marina, 133–35 artificial soil, 200–201 Asociacion Bartolome Aripaylla (ABA), 70, 72–74, 86 authorities, in Yarqa Aspiy, 77–79 ayahuasca (psychotropic plant brew), 193 Aynacha Watasani, 6 Ayodhya, 154–55 Babri Masjid, 154–55 Bacon, Francis, 12, 84, 86 Bajaj, Jatinder, 49, 215n62 Balée, William, 25 banks, mathematics and, 105–8 Barad, Karen agential realism of, 55–63, 216n70 on Bohr, 15–16, 56–61 Foucault and, 58, 217n11 Barfield, Owen, 106 Bateson, Gregory, 21, 52 Beltran, Bolivar, 205 Berman, Marshall, 16 Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJP), 155 bio-char, 202–3 bio-cultural regeneration defined, 168, 191–92 Fair Trade and, 167–96 other-than-humans and, 191–95 biodiversity, 23, 205–6, 208n3, 209n9 Bio-Latina, 180–82, 184 biological body, 140–46 biological sex, 27, 210n25 biophilia, 21 biotechnology, 23 BJP. See Bharatiya Jana Sangh black magic, 30 blindness, 9 body, biological, 140–46 Bohr, Niels Barad on, 15–16, 56–61 complementarity theory of, 15, 57, 63, 104, 217n17

Index Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and, 59–61 rituals and, 62 Bolivia developmentalist feminism and, 129–36 feminist missionizing in, 128–48 botanical illustrations, 9 Boyle, Robert, 31–32, 34, 38, 151, 211n39 experimental method of, 82–84, 103, 105 Hobbes debating, 12, 17, 143 landholdings of, 32–33 Linus debating, 12, 16, 32–33 metaphysics and, 55–56, 217n2 technologies used by, 84 Brundtland Report, 129, 208n5 Burning Times, 43 Butler, Judith, 27 Cabala, Christian, 31, 211n32, 212n43 Cabixi, Daniel Matenho, 205 Caillé, Alain, 49 Calderon Pacheco, Luis, 232n58 campesinos (peasants), 99, 140–43, 220n40 developmentalist feminism and, 130–32, 134–36 fertility of, 121, 132, 146–47 Ispallas and, 111–12, 114–15, 117, 119–23, 125–26 Campo Alcalde and Alcaldeza, 78–79 capitalism, 54 Carroll, James, 18, 92 cash crops, 230n35 Casper, Monica, 144 Catholic Church, 31, 81–85, 156 Jews and, 17–18 symbols of, 29–30, 83 Truth and, 17, 100, 221n53 cavern, Platonic myth of, 160–61 CEPKA (Ethnic Council of the Kichwa People of Amazonia), 200 Ceremony (Silko), 111 certainty, 4–5, 65 new non-religious, 82–86 restoration of, 221n53 science and, 17, 137 chacra, 112–15, 117–18, 122, 126 consumption from, 178–79 medicinal plants in, 193 work parties, 179, 230n33 chacra-huerto project, 199, 201–3

Index ( 2 4 7 ) Chambi, Nestor, 99, 111–17, 120, 124 Chambi, Walter, 99, 111–15, 117, 125, 127 charity, 174 China, 49 choba-choba (work parties), 179, 230n33 Chong, Kuan, 49 Christianity, 109, 207n9. See also Catholic Church; Protestants Andean spirituality persecuted by, 71, 74 Cabala of, 31, 211n32, 212n43 cosmology of, 103 religious wars of, 4, 27 supersessionism and, 91–92, 103 chunchos, 81–82 Chuyma Aru, 112–14, 118–19, 121, 127 Cisnero, Modesto, 72 clock, mechanical, 153, 225n10 coca production, 176–80, 229n28 Cochabamba, Bolivia, 18, 128 coffee. See also Oro Verde Fair Trade Coffee Cooperative Arabica, 181 as colonial commodity, 174 prices, 170, 176–77, 228n10 regeneration and, 191 Collapse (Diamond), 24, 52 collectivity, 39, 150 colonial-type politics, 26 commodity price (C price), 170 commodity world market, 167 commons, 53–54, 212n4. See also enclosures communication, globalized, 175 community Fair Trade promoting, 167 hylozoic vision of, 43 moral, 41 web of obligations, 36–37, 39 Comparative Scientific Traditions, 93 complementarity, theory of, 15, 57, 63, 104, 217n17 The Condition of Postmodernity (Harvey), 149 conservation consciousness, 208n5 economic exploitation and, 23 Constantine’s Sword (Carroll), 18 Constantinople, 28 contextual studies, 13 Copernicus, 12, 102 Coral Gardens and Their Magic (Malinowski), 101

Coronel, Isau, 178 corporation individual as, 216n69 multinational, 171 Cosmopolis (Toulmin), 82 Costa Rica, 199–200 C price. See commodity price creativity, of rituals, 15 Cronon, William, 21, 23 culture mirror of, 9–10 in nature/culture dualism, 15–16, 21–34 dancing, in festival of Ispallas, 111–27 Dangaleat, 87 da Vinci, Leonardo, 157 Dean’s Beans, 171, 229n26 de Beauvoir, Simone, 139–40 Debus, Allen, 33, 211n42 Dee, John, 29 deforestation, 180, 183–84 Deism, 4–5 de la Vega, Garcilaso. See El Inca delayed choice experiment, 104–5 demons, 84–85, 100 Descartes, René, 4, 12, 31, 34, 82, 109 desires, 5–6 development alternatives to, 198 anthropology, 220n40 literacy and, 190 sustainable, 169, 208n5 terminology, 169–70, 191 developmentalist feminism Bolivian State and, 129–36 campesinos and, 130–32, 134–36 individualism and, 136–37 devils, 84–85, 100 Diamond, Jared, 24, 26, 52, 209n13 dignity, 174 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 103, 217n11 discursive, material re-entangled with, 55–63 The Dismal Science (Marglin), 167 diversity, 87 dualism enclosures and, 54 human/non-human, 10 matter/mind, 102

( 248 ) dualism (continued) mechanical, 5, 32, 34, 83, 217n17 nature/culture, 15–16, 21–34 persuasive, 51, 54 rejected, 14 subject/object, 10, 61–62 Duden, Barbara, 141–42 Duerr, Peter, 42 Durkheim, Emile, 149 Dwellings (Hogan), 64 economics beginning of, 37–39 emergence of, 43–45 natural resources and, 35–54 of tragic choices, 172–80 economy. See also gift economy market, 37–39, 44, 52, 54 moral, 36, 39 non-humans, other-than-humans and, 44 Ecopolitics IX Conference, 25 The Edge of Objectivity (Gillispie), 103 eighteenth century, 36 election, sectoral committee, 185–87, 230n42, 231n43 Elizabeth (Eli), 115–27 enclosures agency-less nature and, 35–37 dualism and, 54 premodern European oral peasantry and, 16 witch hunts and, 39–43 Endersby, Jim, 9, 207n8 environment, 22, 208n4 environmental action, 14 environmental aspects, of Fair Trade, 180–84 environmental justice movement, 216n71, 229n25 Escobar, Arturo, 121 Espeland, Wendy, 53 ethics, science and, 108–10 Ethnic Council of the Kichwa People of Amazonia. See CEPKA ethnographic fieldwork, 7–8 Europe, 4, 13, 16, 30 eyes, 157 Fair Trade. See also Oro Verde Fair Trade Coffee Cooperative alternative of, 198 bio-cultural regeneration and, 167–96

Index community promoted by, 167 defined, 168–72 economics of tragic choices and, 172–80 environmental aspects, 180–84 future of, 195–96 introduction to, 167–68 mainstream critiques of, 168–80 non-humans and, 19–20 organic certification and, 168–71, 180–91 regeneration and, 19–20 roots of, 228n2 social aspects, 184–91 U.S. market, 229n23 Fair Trade Federation (FTF), 171 Fair Trade Labeling Organization (FLO) FLO-CERT of, 170–71, 180–81, 184–90, 195, 230n39 origin of, 168–69 principles of, 189–90 requirements of, 169–71, 184 family planning, 146–48 farmers, Maharashtrian, 43–44 Farrar, Frederic, 104, 221n50 Fausto-Sterling, Anne, 210n25 Federici, Silvia, 40, 42, 212n15, 214n39 feminism. See developmentalist feminism feminist researchers hidden agenda of, 146–48 missionizing, in Bolivia, 128–48 state, 18–19 Fernow, Berhard, 22 fertility, of campesinos, 121, 132, 146–47 fetishism, 106–7 fifteenth century, 28, 33, 36 fisherfolk, in Tamil Nadu, 23–24 FLO. See Fair Trade Labeling Organization FLO-CERT certification by, 170–71, 180–81, 184–90, 230n39 social requirements, 184–90 training for, 195 Forbes, Jack, 26 Foucault, Michel, 58, 103, 217n11 Fourmile, Henrietta, 205 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 136 Franklin, Sarah, 144 free trade, economic argument for, 228n16 FTF. See Fair Trade Federation fundamentalism, 92

Index ( 2 4 9 ) Galileo, 12, 106 gases, law of, 32 gender defined, 27, 146 equity, in Oro Verde, 187 relations, 18 as variable, 145–46 general magnitude, 153 Ghosh, Amitav, 215n58, 226n19 gift other-than-human language and, 40 spirit of, 39, 45–51, 64–89, 215n57 gift economy calculations in, 44, 51 commons and, 53–54 mathematical constructs and, 51–52 ritual in, 36–37, 53 ubiquitous, 82 Yarqa Aspiy and, 17 Gillispie, Charles, 103–4 Ginzburg, Carlo, 42 God agency of, 4–5 as prime matter, 29 providence of, 36, 41 Grant, Edward, 207n3, 211n42 Great Transformation, 11–12, 35, 214n39, 228n6 Greek phonetic alphabet, 160 Grillo, Eduardo, 99, 155, 220n34 Grim, John, 82 Grimes, Ronald L., 3, 10, 14–15 Gualinga, Cristina, 205 guano, 95–97 Hadden, Richard, 105–6 hallucinogens, 193–94 Haraway, Donna, 145 Harvey, David, 149 Hatun Alcalde, 78 hau (spirit of gift and of forest), 46–47 health, medicalization of, 142–43 Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, 59–61 Hermes Trismegistus, 28 High Amazon, 99–100 history playing with memory v., 154–57 roots of, 226n14 Hobbes, Thomas, 12, 17, 143 Hogan, Linda, 64 Hornborg, Alf, 216n75

human/non-human dualism, 10 humans agency of, 24, 26, 50, 144 land and, 53 non-humans and other-than-humans intra-acting with, 18 other-than-humans abandoning, 3–6 hunt, preparation for, 158–59 Hyde, Lewis, 46 hylozoism, 102, 212n45 agential realism and, 63 animism and, 218n22 community and, 43 defeat of, 16, 31–34, 82, 84, 103 defined, 30 politics influenced by, 214n38 regeneration and, 41–42 identity beyond anthropocentrism, 157–62 festival of Ispallas and, 159 individualism and, 150 Yarqa Aspiy and, 159 idolatry, 106–7 IFOAM. See International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements Imperial Nature (Endersby), 9, 207n8 In An Antique Land (Ghosh), 215n58, 226n19 El Inca, 96–97 Inca Empire, 97 indeterminacy principle, 61 India. See also Orissa Ayodhya, 154–55 Maharashtra, 43–44 Malabar, 215n58, 226n19 orality in, 227n36 Tamil Nadu, 23–24 Indigenous Traditions (Grim), 82 individualism defined, 134 developmentalist feminism and, 136–37 family planning and, 146 identity and, 150 othering and, 137–38 industrial agriculture, 22, 230n40 Ingeniera, 185–86, 229n27 inter-collectivity, 150 International Coffee Agreement, 170 International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM), 182, 230n41

( 250 ) intra-action, 18, 61 Invisiones (skits), 81–82, 155–56 irrigation, 72–73, 76, 88, 134 Ispallas, festival of in Altiplano, 111–27 campesinos and, 111–12, 114–15, 117, 119–23, 125–26 dancing in, 111–27 identity and, 159 memory and, 19 Ispalla Wallas, 124 Jacobs, Jane, 108 Jacobs, Margaret C., 214n39 Jews Catholic Church and, 17–18 Kabbalah and, 28–29, 212n43, 215n63 in Malabar, 215n58, 226n19 Jimenez, Greta, 119–20, 140–41 JNC. See National Coffee Organization juk. See uj Junta Nacional de Café. See National Coffee Organization Kabbalah, 28–29, 212n43, 215n63 Kapo, Michael, 206 Kawilto Marani, 116–17, 121, 124–25 Kichwa-Lamistas, 20, 84–85, 99–100 knowledge, 4, 207n8 Kula ring, 46 Lake Titicaca, 111, 114, 117 Lakota, 41 Lal, Vinay, 215n58, 226nn15–16 Lamas, 180, 195, 197–98, 203–4, 231n49 La Molina. See National Agrarian University La Molina Landes, David, 152–53, 225n10 landholding, 32–33 language of nurturance, 75 other-than-human, 40 scientific, 85 Latour, Bruno, 11, 159 Modern Constitution of, 19, 152, 156, 163–64, 166 We Have Never Been Modern by, 145, 161, 225n41 law of gases, 32 Lee, Joseph, 38 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 165, 225n7

Index Lewontin, Richard, 159, 216n70 Linus, Franciscus, 12, 16, 32–33 literacy, alphabetic, 185–86, 190 livable common worlds, 162–64 Loayza, Jerónimo de, 100 long-distance trade, 171–72 Luna, Eduardo, 231n51 Lyons, Oren, 41 Machaca, Magdalena, 67, 70, 73, 81 Machaca, Marcela agronomy and, 16–17, 66–70 education of, 65–70 presentations by, 218n3 voice of, 65–70, 73–75 Machaca Mendieta, Gualberto, 70–71, 74, 166 mafias, timber, 183–84 mage, 29 magic abject others and, 25 black, 30 defined, 101 label of, 12, 15, 25, 28 natural, 33 of rituals, 15, 28, 102 Maharashtra, farmers in, 43–44 Malabar, 215n58, 226n19 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 46, 101 Mama Alcaldeza, 78–80 Mangala Devi, 8 manly rationality, 223n15 Mann, Charles, 230n37 maquiladoras (sweatshops), 172, 228n16 Marglin, Stephen A. The Dismal Science by, 167 economics of tragic choices and, 165–68, 172–74, 179 market economy disembedded, 44, 52, 54 in seventeenth century, 37–39 material, discursive re-entangled with, 55–63 materialism, 5 mathematics, 51–52, 105–8, 216n66, 225n10 matter agency of, 30 prime, God as, 29 spirit reintegrated with, 62–63 matter/mind dualism, 102

Index ( 2 5 1 ) Mauss, Marcel, 46–47, 50 Maybury-Lewis, David, 110 Mead, Aroha Te Pareake, 206 measurements, uniform, 153 mechanical clock, 153, 225n10 mechanicism Descartes as philosopher of, 34 dualist paradigm, 32, 83, 217n17 of secular reality, 5 medicinal plants, 192–94 memory Ispallas and, 19 playing with, 154–57 Yarqa Aspiy and, 19 Merchant, Carolyn, 48, 142, 208n5 Mersenne, Marin, 31, 214n44 metaphysics Boyle and, 55–56, 217n2 physics and, 55–59 of substance, 27–28 Mexico, 172, 174, 229n18 Michelet, Jean, 223n15 microorganisms, collected for fertilizer, 199–201 midwives, 42 Mignolo, Walter, 190 migrantes (migrants), 184 Milford, Anna, 228n2 Ministros/Ministras, couples of, 79 The Mirror of Nature (Rorty), 10 Misselden, Edward, 45, 51 MNC. See multinational companies Modern Constitution, 19, 152, 156, 163–64, 166, 194 modernity anthropocentrism in, 13 beginning of, 157–58 modesty, 32 money, 97, 222 Moore, John, 36, 38–39 moral community, 41 moral economy, 36, 39 Morocco, 7 multinational companies (MNC), 171 Mumford, Lewis, 153 Mun, Thomas, 37, 45, 51, 214n44 museums, 229n21 myths defined, 11 Platonic myth of cavern, 160–61 wilderness, 52

NAFTA. See North American Free Trade Agreement Nandy, Ashis, 155 Narby, Jeremy, 194 National Agrarian University La Molina, 93–102, 108, 220n40 National Agronomy University, 98 National Coffee Organization ( Junta Nacional de Café, JNC), 189 National Faculties of Agronomy, 90–91, 101 National Peruvian School of Agronomy, 93 Native Americans, 41, 53 nature parks and, 21–22 spirits of, 84–85 naturalizing, act of, 24–25 natural magic, 33 natural philosophy, 31–33, 211n42, 217n2 natural resources agency-less, 4, 28, 35–37, 41, 51 anthropocentrism of, 107 biodiversity as, 23 defined, 39 economics and, 35–54 management of, 22 sea as, 23–24 water as, 64–65 nature agency and, 4, 28, 35–37, 41, 51 control of, 24 de-spirited, 35–37 preserves, 21–25, 209n9 regeneration of, 41–42 sallqa/sacha as, 158–59 universal, 27–28, 151 nature/culture dualism, 15–16, 21–34 Needham, Joseph, 49, 215n62 neoliberalism, 173, 175 New Experiments (Boyle), 103 Newton, Isaac, 12, 34, 212n45 Noble, David, 83–84 non-dualist paradigm defeated, 26–27 of occult philosophy, 28–31 non-humans agency of, 11, 14, 24, 40, 51, 85, 144, 227n29 communication with, 40 economy and, 44 Fair Trade and, 19–20 in human/non-human dualism, 10

( 252 ) non-humans (continued) humans and other-than-humans intra-acting with, 18 naturalized, 24 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 172 Nugent, Nick, 202–3 Nuñez, Lorenzo, 79 nurturance, 75–76 objectivity, 109 observation, 57–58 occult philosophers as abject others, 28–31, 33 women and, 211n36 occult philosophy, 28–31 Olcese, Orlando, 93–95 One Indivisible Truth, 4, 17, 100, 102–3, 221n53 “One Is Not Born a Woman” (Wittig), 128 orality in India, 227n36 Platonic myth of cavern and, 160–61 premodern European peasantry and, 16, 30 organic certification environmental aspects of, 180–84 Fair Trade and, 168–71, 180–91 by FLO-CERT, 170–71, 180–81, 184–90, 230n39 sectoral committee election and, 185–86, 230n42 training for, 182 Orissa commons in, 48–49 ritual in, 7–9, 13 Oro Verde Fair Trade Coffee Cooperative, 180–81, 185–87, 230n42 Aguila Canayo’s interview and, 176–80 collaboration with, 168 gender equity in, 187 mean land size, 228n9 medicinal plants and, 192 rituals and, 183, 195–96 Salas and, 192–94 slash-and-burn agriculture and, 199 othering, individualism and, 137–38 other-than-humans bio-cultural regeneration and, 191–95 collectivity, 39, 150 defined, 11

Index economy and, 44 Fair Trade and, 19–20 humans abandoned by, 3–6 humans and non-humans intra-acting with, 18 language of, 40 responsibility toward, 209n13 ritual and, 6, 39–43 Our Common Future. See Brundtland Report Pachamama (earth deity), 116, 118, 140–46 Palmer, Parker, 110, 157 Panofsky, Erwin, 157 Paracelsus, 29 participative consciousness, 104 peasant rituals, 16, 39–43 Pera, Bakalaharil, 205 performativity representationalism v., 51–52, 149–66 rituals and, 14–15, 149–66 perspective, 158–60 Peru, 7–8, 13, 16–17. See also Ispallas, festival of; Yarqa Aspiy agrarian reform in, 99 agronomy taught in, 90–110 spirit of gift in, 64–89 phenomena, 57 physics, 55–59. See also quantum physics Picco della Mirandola, Giovanni, 29–30 Pinchot, Gifford, 22 Planned Parenthood, 146–47 Platonic myth of cavern, 160–61 Polanyi, Karl, 12, 44, 52, 214n39, 228n6 politics colonial-type, 26 hylozoism influencing, 214n38 of substance, 27–28 of wilderness, 21–34 population control, 18–19 Posey, Darrell Addison, 205 potlatch, 44 Potter, Elizabeth, 12, 16, 32–33, 211n39 Pouillon, Jean, 87 power, knowledge as, 4 Praetorius, J., 42 PRATEC (Andean Project for Peasant Technologies), 9, 69–70, 99–100, 114, 197 pre-Columbian culture, 94–95

Index ( 2 5 3 ) premodern European oral peasantry, 16, 30 prestation, 50 primary properties, 151 progress science and, 151–52 time and, 151–57 Protestants, 30–31, 84–85 ethic of, 54 supersessionism and, 91, 103 Truth and, 17 providence, 36, 41 Qinti Qartunira project, 203 Quaestiones in Genesim (Mersenne), 31, 214n44 quantum physics agential realism and, 55–63 classical Science destabilized by, 104–5 quipus, 106 Quispillacta. See Yarqa Aspiy Ram, 154–55 rationality, manly, 223n15 reality contemporary, 12–13 defined, 11 secular, 5 study of, 144 reason, 108–9 Reformation, 102 Reformers, 50–51 regeneration, 19–20, 41–42, 50, 148. See also bio-cultural regeneration Regidores and Regidoras, 78, 80 religious supersessionism, 91–92, 103 religious wars, 4, 27 Rengifo, Antonio, 101 Rengifo, Grimaldo, 161 representationalism, performativity v., 51–52, 149–66 resource, 210n24. See also natural resources responsibility agency and, 61–62 toward other-than-humans, 209n13 reverse anthropology, 11, 65 Rig Vedas, 15, 163, 227n41 Rite Out of Place (Grimes), 3, 14 rituals ABA promoting, 70, 73–74 anthropology and, 7–14, 164 Bohr and, 62

in chacra-huerto project, 201–2 creativity of, 15 defined, 87 environmental action and, 14 in gift economy, 36–37, 53 interest in, 164–65 livable common worlds performed in, 162–64 magical, 15, 28, 102 mathematical constructs and, 51–52 in Orissa, 7–9, 13 Oro Verde and, 183, 195–96 other-than-humans and, 6, 39–43 peasant, 16, 39–43 performativity and, 14–15, 149–66 in Rig Vedas, 15 space and, 149 spirit and matter reintegration and, 62–63 spirits nurtured back to life in, 86–89 survival of, 19–20 temporality in, 150 theory of, 19 time and, 149 Rodrigues, Barbara Galindo, 203 Rorty, Richard, 9–10 Sabogal, Jose, 108 Sachamama, 199–202, 232n1 Sachs, Wolfgang, 107, 130 Sahlins, Marshall, 46 Salas, Segundo Pastor Huamán, 192–94, 231n53 Sallqa Alcalde, 78–80 sallqa/sacha (nature), 158–59 Sanchez, Loyda, 18, 128, 133–35 Sangama, Inocente, 204 Saving the Appearances (Barfield), 106 Schaffer, Simon, 12, 17, 55–56 Schlesinger, Lee, 43 scholarship, advocacy and, 10 science, 12, 70, 92 capitalized, 11, 219n7 certainty and, 17, 137 ethics and, 108–10 language of, 85 in natural resource management, 22 progress and, 151–52 quantum physics destabilizing, 104–5 triumph of, 102–3 wars, 217n8

( 254 ) Scientific Restoration, 84 scientific revolution advent of, 3, 27 certainty and, 17 China and, 49 Grant on, 207n3 natural philosophy and, 211n42 scientific supersessionism, 102–5 Scott, James, 52, 90, 103 sea, as natural resource, 23–24 secondary properties, 151 The Second Sex (de Beauvoir), 139 sectoral committee election, 185–87, 230n42 secularization, 87–88 seeing, 9 Seeing Like a State (Scott), 90, 103 Segundad, Patrick, 206 seventeenth century, 26–28, 33, 36–39 shamanism, 192–95, 199, 215n63, 231nn51–52 Shapin, Steven, 12, 17, 55–56 Shining Path, 73–74, 230n32 signs, in Andean spirituality, 71–72 Silburn, Lilian, 163 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 111 Sita, 154–55 sixteenth century, 26–28, 33, 36 slash-and-burn agriculture, 180, 199–200, 230n37 Smith, Jonathan Z., 14–15 social aloneness, 3 social aspects, of Fair Trade certification, 184–91 social sciences, emergence of, 149 soil, artificial, 200–201 Sokal, Alan, 217n8 space rituals and, 149 universal, 19, 150–51 Spiegler, Peter, 51, 216n66 spirit(s) of gift, 39, 45–51, 64–89, 215n57 Ispalla Wallas, 124 matter reintegrated with, 62–63 Native American, 84–85 nurtured back to life, 86–89 water, conversing with, 75–76 spirituality Andean, 71–72, 74–75 defined, 87 subversive, 164–66

Index spiritual tourism, 175, 229n24 Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson), 21 Stubbes, P., 40–42 subjectivity, 109 subject/object dualism, 10, 61–62 substance, politics and metaphysics of, 27–28 subversive spiritualities, 164–66 Summers, Lawrence, 173 supernatural, 85–86 supersessionism agronomy and, 90–110 defined, 17 religious, 91–92, 103 scientific, 102–5 sustainability regulations, 22 sustainable development, 169, 208n5 sustainable yield, 22 sweatshops. See maquiladoras symbols, 29–30, 83 Takacs, David, 208n3 T’alla Marani, 116–18, 121–25 Tambiah, Stanley, 101–2, 104 Tamil Nadu, 23–24 technology biotechnology, 23 Boyle’s, 84 development of, 12 of secular reality, 5 temporality, 150, 163 terra nullius (empty or unowned land and resources), 25–26, 114 Thomas, Keith, 207n9 Thomas Aquinas, 29 Thucydides, 226n14 timber mafias, 183–84 time anthropology and, 161 genealogy of, 152–54 progress and, 151–57 rituals and, 149 temporality and, 163 Toulmin, Stephen, 82 tourism, spiritual, 175, 229n24 trade networks, 48–49 tragic choices, economics of, 172–80 transcendental subject, 140 transubstantiation, 31 trickle down theory, 39 tripartite ontology, 65

Index ( 2 5 5 ) Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss), 165, 225n7 Trobrianders, 46, 48, 101, 222 Truth, One Indivisible, 4, 17, 100, 102–3, 221n53 Turi, Johan Mathis, 206 Turner, Victor, 14 uj (one; unit), 145–46 uncertainty principle, Heisenberg’s, 59–61 Under Ministry of Gender, Generations, and Family Affairs, 128, 131, 133, 147 United States (U.S.) Fair Trade market in, 229n23 nature preserves in, 21–22 Planned Parenthood in, 146–47 universal woman in, 138–39 universal nature, 27–28, 151 universal space, 19, 150–51 universal woman or man, 137–40 unperspectival man, 158 Urbano, Henrique, 100 U.S. See United States usury, 214n39 Vallodolid, Julio, 68–69, 98–99, 107 Vanderhoff Boersma, Francisco (Franz), 169–70, 229n18 Velasco, General, 99 violence, against women, 186, 231n44 Virey, Julien, 104 Visvanathan, Shiv, 21, 208n3 Vivanco, Luis, 22, 209n9 von Humboldt, A., 95–96 von Liebig, Justus, 95–96 von Wright, Georg, 83 Walsh, John, 42 water. See also Yarqa Aspiy as natural resource, 64–65 spirit, conversing with, 75–76 as teacher, 133–36 wave/particle paradox, 56–57 Weber, Max, 54

We Have Never Been Modern (Latour), 145, 161, 225n41 White, Theodore, 146–47 Wilca, Don Santos, 6 wild, 26, 158 wilderness myth of, 52 nature parks and, 21–25 politics of, 21–34 usages, 15–16 Wilson, E. O., 21, 208n3 Winthrop, John, 48, 51 witch hunts, 28, 39–43, 142 Wittig, Monique, 128 women alphabetic literacy of, 185–86 bodies of, 140–46 marginalization of, 31–33, 135 modesty of, 32 occult philosophers and, 211n36 universal woman, 137–40 violence against, 186, 231n44 world axis-tree, 42 world market, 45, 167 Worster, Donald, 208n5 yana allpa (black earth), 200–201 Yarqa Aspiy (festival of water) authorities, 77–79 conversing with spirit of water in, 75–76 defined, 77 description of, 17, 73 identity and, 159 Invisiones in, 81–82, 155–56 memory and, 19 offerings and asking permission, 79–81 songs, 218n10 spirit of gift in, 64–89 Yates, Francis, 31, 211n32 Yavapai, 53, 216n73 Yggdrasil, 42, 48 Yosemite, 21 Zajonc, Arthur, 110, 221n52 Zwingli, Huldricht, 30