Pathways of Memory and Power: Ethnography and History among an Andean People

Preface

Preface GENEALOGY OF A PROJECT IN RESEARCH AND WRITING Like peoples and the writings we call histories, scholarly projects also have a past. The research that gave rise to this book, for example, did not start out as a study that could have produced the information and arguments I now advance. A brief survey of the transmutations that led from graduate school to this book (and from a Ph.D. in anthropology to a job in history) may help to account for (if not excuse) its lapses and inadequacies. In January of 1979, a few days after surviving a massive snowstorm as well as my proposal hearing in Chicago, I set out for Bolivia with my wife and fellow fieldworker, Mary Dillon, who accompanied me in Bolivia while carrying out her own research on Aymara language and culture. I carried with me a faculty-vetted research plan that I thought to be relatively straightforward. Having read most of the ethnographic works then available on the mixed civil and religious authority hierarchies of the Andes, and naturally having found this literature wanting, I set out to overturn the prevailing functionalist-materialist interpretations of Andean fiesta-cargo systems and to replace them with a subtle, context-sensitive analysis of the cultural meanings inherent in the ritual duties of fiesta sponsors and the exercise of political office. Following leads provided by fiesta-cargo research in Mesoamerica (ably reviewed in Chance and Taylor 1985), those anthropologists of the Andes who concern themselves with authority structures and saints' festivals have tended to focus primarily on the costs incurred by festival sponsors in a potlatch-style outlay of resources, the way that such sponsors rise by virtue of their festival careers toward local political office (see, for example, Buechler and Buechler, 1971; Carter 1964; Stein 1961). In the prevailing jargon of such studies, the career "ladders" climbed by fiesta sponsors and holders of yearly political office constitute xv XVI Preface a "prestige hierarchy," in which the increasing expense of each successive step up the ladder correlates directly with its occupant's degree of local prestige and thus political power. Most such studies also subscribe to one side or the other in the reigning structural-functionalist debate of the 1950s to the mid-1970s, over not if but how these fiesta-cargo systems and prestige hierarchies promote social solidarity and help to close corporate communities. If an increase in spending correlates with a rise in prestige in such a social system, then the question is whether that system serves to legitimize asymmetries of wealth by granting the rich a form of ritual mystification of privilege, or whether it serves to level potential asymmetries of wealth through a redistribution in which the "haves" are granted temporary power and prestige in exchange for their material surpluses. While they attend to the inequalities of sponsor wealth and festival expenditure, such approaches, I felt, have neglected to analyze (and in some cases, even to describe) other important details: the exact nature of the rituals involved, the role of the saints and other sacred beings in the everyday lives of community members, and the local significance of the authority roles to which sponsorship of fiestas lead. Without such information, it is impossible to apprehend the culturally constituted values that might motivate participation in such a system, other than attributing to them our own culture's "commonsense" interpretation of the goal of much symbolic activity, namely, the maximization of individual economic advantage. Not all such studies invoke such terms, but most bring functional premises in through the back door by calling attention to how fiestacargo systems create "prestige hierarchies," a term usually used as a euphemism for "hierarchies of wealth." In a way that starkly contrasts with the care these authors take to seek out native terms and interpretations of other matters, the accrual of "prestige" is applied as a self-evident (functional and utilitarian) explanation of ritual expenditures , the value that inspires participation in fiesta-cargo systems. Inspired by the pioneering work of Isbell ([1978] 1985), I proposed to discover the values that motivate people to engage in fiesta-cargo careers and the meanings inherent in their activities. As if that in itself were not enough for a year-long period of research that was to begin with study of the Aymara language, I planned to do much more. During the late 1970s anthropological practice began to shift. Under attack was the discipline's customary concern with supposedly isolated and self-contained...