Places are Kin: Food, Cohabitation, and Sociality in the Southern Peruvian Andes

This article is a contribution to current scholarship reevaluating classic assumptions about kinship and sociality, and it proposes that Quechua forms of social interaction in the region of Cuzco (Peru) emerge through embedded notions of food circulation and cohabitation. The implications of this sociality are that the relations among humans and the places where they live and work are built upon exactly the same notions through which human social relations are constructed. Named places are social individuals and are attributed the thoughts, capacities of action, emotions, and intentions of all social beings. Humans cannot exist except by cultivating social relations with places. This article proposes a framework that focuses on presuppositions prompted by semiotic forms to analyze ontological particularities grounded in face-to-face interactions.