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Investigating the Past in the Present: Archaeology and Community in Cusco, Peru

R. Sandy Hunter, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology

Peru’s ‘Sacred Valley,’ the drainage of the Urubamba River, is flooded with foreign tourists daily. They flock to its many famous archaeological sites, and use it as a jumping off point for treks and trains to Machu Picchu. By contrast, the Patacancha Valley, which is immediately adjacent, sees very few foreign visitors. Most gringos who visit the Patacancha Valley go for a specific purpose: to visit the archaeological ruins of Pumamarka, an immense Inka settlement surrounded by an impressive wall that sits on a ridge above the valley floor.  A few continue beyond Pumamarka, passing by another archaeological site—Marca Cocha—to visit the Quechua speaking community of Huilloc. In Huilloc they have the opportunity to spend the night with local families, witnessing first hand the lives of agriculturalists living in the Andes Mountains. In Huilloc, tourists might, for instance, accompany local herders as they care for the alpaca and sheep that provide the raw wool for the incredibly intricate textiles produced by hand in the community.

Like those tourists, I am an outsider in Huilloc. I am in the village to speak with community members about the possibility of collaborating on an archaeology project. I am interested in the lesser known of the major archaeological sites in the Patacancha Valley. Marca Cocha, I think, would be an ideal site for my dissertation research on the social and ecological changes that accompanied Spanish Colonialism in the region. Having visited the site numerous times, I know that there is evidence of occupation at the site during both the Inka and the Colonial periods. I want to begin an archaeological project investigating the transition from Inka to Colonial administration, but I must first speak with the community of Huilloc—will they support a project as collaborators?

Each month, the entire community meets to discuss issues that impact them all: land and water rights, the election of community officials, and the administration of community buildings. The meeting is conducted in Quechua. I only know a few words so I am only able to follow along at certain moments, taking my cues from the body language and quick translations whispered to me by other Spanish speakers. The first speakers are not from Huilloc. They came from a larger town within the same municipality to speak against the mayor of the region, they claim corruption and malfeasance, and make their point over the course of almost an hour.  An hour up, they are followed by the very official they are speaking against. The mayor had arrived midway through the speeches against him in order to have the opportunity to defend himself—word does travel fast.

A property dispute is settled, the leader of the community watch ‘ronda’ is elected, and finally it is my turn to speak. As I get up, it is immediately clear that only a few of the several hundred people at the meeting have any interest in what I have to say. I introduce myself and my intentions: I want to initiate a collaborative relationship with community members, wherein we can together investigate the past of the region. There is little reaction. The possibility of a future collaboration with an archaeology project not yet even established is of little relevance compared to the immediate importance of land rights and political corruption.

I am initially disappointed by the lack of lack of interest in my project. Having been unable to catch a car back out of the Valley, I am forced to walk the twelve kilometers. During this walk I reflect upon the meeting and my perspective changes. The meeting reminds me that as much as the landscapes and ruins of the Patacancha Valley fascinate me as historical artifacts and as much as I can see the past through them, these remnants are more than historical reminders of the past in the present. These ruins connect that past to the present, and act in it. They have a contemporary existence that is embroiled in local politics—they are managed by the community and occasionally bring tourists—however, they do not take precedence over the pressing affairs of day to day life.  My concerns—those of a hypothetical archaeological project, a year away—are not important. As an archaeologist I had been concentrating on the past of the Patacancha Valley, the Inka and Colonial ruins that initially drew me to the area. While studying the site of Marca Cocha—its seventeenth-century chapel, Inka buildings, and the ruins of pre-Inka structures—the contemporary Patacancha Valley had faded from prominence. My reception at the community meeting reminded me that an archaeology project based in the Patacancha Valley will only be a success if it both informs on the historical past and contributes tangibly to the lives of the people who live in the Valley.

 

A group of classic Inka elite structures at the archaeological site of Marca Cocha, in Peru's Patacancha Valley.A group of classic Inka elite structures at the archaeological site of Marca Cocha, in Peru’s Patacancha Valley.

A group of classic Inka elite structures at the archaeological site of Marca Cocha, in Peru's Patacancha Valley.A colonial chapel at the site of Marca Cochca, this chapel has been in use for at least 250 years.

 dying, spinning, and weaving are all tasks completed in the community.A woman weaving in the community of Huilloc. In Huilloc textile manufacturing begins with herding sheep and llamas, and includes each step of the process: dying, spinning, and weaving are all tasks completed in the community.

 

 

The contents of this blog do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for Latin American Studies or the University of Chicago.

 

Mobility as Investment in Southern Peru: Notes and Images from a Moving Field

Mobility as Investment in Southern Peru: Notes and Images from a Moving Field

Eric Hirsch | Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology

Photo 1. El Señor de los Milagros.

   There are plenty of ways of getting around southern Peru’s Colca Valley. Many people find themselves in packed Toyota Hiaces, plunging through streams and over rocks as impressively as any off-road vehicle. Others watch the scenery unfold from the windows of nearly empty Mercedes vans used to shuttle tourists between their hotels and the Cruz del Condor, a lookout point marked by a cross where the famous Andean condor can be seen up close. In Colca, a basin of twenty interconnected villages, constant mobility is essential to daily life.

In this context, my dissertation, “Investing in Indigeneity,” investigates the ways development organizations, national initiatives, and municipal institutions are trying to put the idea of local indigeneity and other imaginings of what it means to be Colcan to work for economic growth. One surprise when fieldwork began was that so much of this research has consisted of traversing between Colca’s villages in various forms of transportation, accompanying many different kinds of investors. One of my initial research questions asks, what does it mean to make an investment? Now, as I approach the end of my fifteen-month stay in Peru, one answer to that question can be found in how people move throughout the valley and the region.

The further you go into the Colca Valley from Chivay, the provincial capital, the more you have to wait, and the more of an investment of time, money, patience, and physical endurance it entails to move from place to place. Peru has adopted a large-scale policy of political and economic decentralization over the past decade (see, i.e., The  Economist 2014). But in the Arequipa region, where Colca is located, this has not meant a true local autonomy, but rather a series of hubs and spokes, where the hubs today have much more power than they used to with respect to Lima, but in their zones remain a highly centralized focus. This means, in practice, that participants in so many different economic sectors, from merchants to manufacturers, to healthcare workers and teachers and development experts, must make constant regular commutes to the capital city of Arequipa (see photo 2). In a contemporary variation on what Andes historian John Murra famously called the “vertical archipelago” (1972)—in which families, since before the Inca and Spanish invasions, would colonize land at distinct altitudes in order to diversify their crop supply—many families maintain an archipelago of homes, terrains, businesses, family members, and contemporary social networks in multiple sites in the region that crisscross through the capital city.

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Photo 2. On the Road to Arequipa.

   It is not only where people are going, but also the way they move, that can reveal a great deal about what it means to belong to these communities. The details I note here may not be completely unique to Arequipa and Peru, but what I want to suggest in these moving scenes is that at the level of ethnographic methodology, the textured ways in which people circulate through space deserve our attention. For a great number of Colcans, much of economic life here depends upon spending a great deal of time on buses. Most of the longer journeys between Arequipa and its hinterland take place on large coach buses such as those of the Señor de los Milagros line (see photo 1), some of which are so old that they cannot exceed 40 miles per hour, even on the puna’s desolate open highways. What happens on the bus is a kind of opportunistic convergence: near the city and the rest stops, men and women board for some fifteen minutes at a time selling snacks, sodas, and newspapers, spending their days zigzagging back and forth along the bus route selling their wares; passengers may also be witness to the occasional infomercial-like lecture from a representative of Herbalife or somebody selling magazines or self-improvement videos, advertising the value of reading and the idea that “culture begins at home” to a captive audience. People who caught the bus at the last minute or who could not afford a seat might sit and sleep on the cold floor, trying their best to make themselves comfortable. Spending so much time on buses seems a peculiar, and perhaps even unnoticed, form of labor: the labor required to bridge the gap between hub and spoke, center and periphery, town and country, always reinforcing and reforging that relationship in a way that goes much deeper than simply passing time. The time spent on the bus is full time. It’s eventful; it is in turn relaxing and tedious. It’s a public in motion.

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Photo 3. Combi

   Shared Hiace, or combi, rides become a form of delivering supplies—sending packages to work around an unreliable mail system, transporting corrugated tin for making rooftops, and driving the occasional alpaca to pasture along the combi route. When they fall on religious holidays, these rides are sometimes an occasion for singing Church songs. A person’s habits and practices of getting in and getting out of the van index his or her respect for the elderly. In the afternoons, young students pile in, excited to be on their way to the nearest Internet café. Long rides and long waits become fora for public debate about the upcoming elections, collective reaction to Profesor Celso’s radio talk show about local politics, and arguments over the merits of a combi timetable. In sum, moving publics at various scales put both what communities value and what people aspire to on display.

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Photo 4. Pickup truck.

   The pickup truck has its own role as a moving stage of investment (see photo 4). For an ethnographer, there is something special about getting into a truck. These were the vehicles of choice for contracted trips used in focused interventions. Pickup trucks became the lifeblood of some of the most important investment projects happening throughout the valley ranging from a development visit to a political campaign, and as in many places around the world, were the highly conspicuous indicator that members of the NGO class were approaching. At the core of my research was a group of twenty young entrepreneurs living in Colca who had won seed capital investment from the Desco NGO, and thirty others who had won non-monetary support, for business plans they had proposed. Much of the daily work on a development intervention was spent in the NGO’s Mitsubishi truck traversing the valley. Rides lasting more than an hour, for example between the NGO’s offices in Chivay and its entrepreneurs in Lari, would often become informal staff meetings.

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Photo 5. Sierra Sur INTERCON.

   A second intervention I’m following, the Sierra Sur initiative, a program run out of Peru’s Ministry of Agriculture, gives us a distinct image of development investment as a movable system of staged exchanges: Sierra Sur staff hold periodic contests in public squares throughout the region—spaces founded in the Spanish colonial reducción, or massive effort to resettle a dispersed Andean population into dense, gridded, Christian villages—which they transform into sites of evaluation that cultivate the newly valued figure of the indigenous Colcan entrepreneur (see photo 5). Between these and the many other investors who make daily trips traversing the valley and the region—political candidates (see photo 6), construction workers, miners, farmers reaching their far-off terrains—we can begin to paint a picture of investment in Peru’s Colca Valley as a process of keeping communities in motion.

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Photo 6. Ricardo Ramos


References–

The Economist. “Divide and bribe.” 7 October 2014. [Accessed 14 October 2014.]

Murra, John V. 1972. “El ‘control vertical’ de un máximo de pisos ecológicos en la economía de las sociedades andinas.” In Iñigo Ortiz de Zúñiga (1967-1972[1562]), Visita de la provincia de León de Huánuco en 1562. Vol. 2. John V. Murra (ed.). Huánuco: Universidad NAcional Hermilio Valdizán, 427-476.

Please note:

The contents of this blog do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for Latin American Studies or the University of Chicago.