Fractals of a mountain: human-environment relations in the Peruvian Andes

Abstract

This thesis is about the personhood of mountains in the southern Peruvian Andes and the ways in which Quechua-speaking people called Runakuna attempt to enter into reciprocal yet asymmetric exchange relations with them. As I slowly came to understand, mountains are incredibly powerful persons who crystalize and control the flow of a life-giving and death-dealing “force” or “power” called animu that is unequally distributed throughout the region. In this thesis, I show how animu tends to get consumed, stored up, and concentrated in some “things” more than others—above all, mountains—and how different ritual techniques are employed in order to get the animu opened up and flowing again along less congested and contained lines. These ritual techniques of “opening up” include actions such as blowing on coca leaves, pouring alcohol into the ground, throwing holy water into the air, taking crosses from a glacier, dancing in a corral, and walking with icons to a pilgrimage shrine. I propose that these practices, among others that I describe, are ways of sharing animu with the mountains in the hope that the mountains will give animu in return; however, given the hierarchical structure in which these exchanges take place, that return is not always guaranteed. Mountains are capricious, and I argue that exchange relations with them follow a logic of sacrifice which can end up reinforcing and not only reproducing but even exacerbating the very structure that is being contested if no return from the more powerful mountain is made. Without a return to the initial sacrificial gift, mountains just get bigger through the consumption of the sacrifice, and the mountain’s fractal and hierarchically encompassing structure expands. In addition to making a contribution to Andean ethnography, this thesis aims to participate in conceptual debates about nonhuman personhood through discussing the ways in which rituals make various features of the environment into particular kinds of persons that are continually being reassigned to different positions in the socio-cosmic hierarchy.