Drink, Power, and Society in the Andes

8 Pots, Brewers, and Hosts: Women’s Power and the Limits of Central Andean Feasting

8 Pots, Brewers, and Hosts Women’s Power and the Limits of Central Andean Feasting Justin Jennings and Melissa Chatfield Among their many possible functions, feasts are events that create and maintain social capital by perpetuating a durable network of relationships that link actual and potential resources (after Bourdieu 1986: 248). Social capital is important in the Andes and in other regions of the world because reciprocity forms the backbone of the economy (Dietler 1996: 92–97; Dietler 2001: 66; Earle 1991: 3; Hayden 2001: 38; Mayer 2002; Perodie 2001: 187). A host’s generosity, measured in part by the amount of food and drink served at the feast, creates a network of indebted participants (social capital ) that the host can later call on for labor, agricultural products, or other services. The smaller the required labor force to produce food and drink at an event, the less social capital a host needs to expend before a feast takes place. Chicha, a fermented beverage made out of maize, manioc, molle, and/ or other plants (Goldstein, Coleman Goldstein, and Williams, this volume; Hayashida, this volume) was likely fundamental to feasts in many regions of the central Andes by at least the Early Intermediate Period (200 bc– ad 750) (see, e.g., Cavero Carrasco 1986: 23–30; Gero 1990, 1992; Hastorf 1991; Hastorf and Johannessen 1993; Lau 2002; Moore 1989; Morell 2002; Shimada 1994; Stanish 1994). One of the easiest ways to increase yields per brewer is to increase the size of the brewing and fermenting vessels used (Jennings 2005; Perlov, this volume). Professional brewers (chicheras) today , for example, can produce more than double the typical household rate of chicha, because they use large brewing and fermenting vessels (170 liters or more in volume). Using bigger pots, therefore, could allow for the accumulation of more social capital by increasing production rate per brewer. Women’s Power and the Limits of Central Andean Feasting 201 Despite the advantages of bigger pots for hosts, however, beer for feasts today is usually brewed in smaller pots that are typically found in household assemblages (80 liters or less in volume) (Chávez 1985: 163; Cleland and Shimada 1998: 116; Hildebrand and Hagstrum 1999: 33; Sillar 2000: 151–155, 177). Both small and large brewing and fermenting jars are common in the prehistoric central Andes. This chapter examines the use of smaller pots for household-level feasting in the central Andes today in order to explore the implications for the production and use of big beer pots for state-sponsored feasts in the past. We argue that smaller pots are used today because women often produce chicha in the home. A shift in vessel size is outside the interests of these women for three reasons. First, the material, social, and technical demands of making large vessels stress the capabilities of most households. Second, significant increases in vessel size render jars increasingly less mobile, and thus cumbersome, for a single woman to use within the home. Finally, and most important, the use of smaller beer pots in the home allows women to have significant control over feasting events by serving independently produced beer. We argue that these factors restricting vessel size likely operated in the past as well. Scholars have long noted a gendered asymmetry in central Andean feasting, as has been noted in other areas of the world (Dietler and Hayden 2001: 11). Men, especially since the Spanish Conquest (Silverblatt 1987), often hold the highest political offices, which benefit from large-scale feasts, while women frequently do much of the brewing and other culinary work that makes feasts possible (Allen 2002: 96–98; Bolin 1998: 179; D’Altroy 2002: 195–196; Hamilton 1998: 64–65). Although the relationship between the men, who tend to host the feasts, and the women, who actually rally the resources, is seemingly exploitative on the surface, women are deeply integrated into the political process through their own social networks and private (and, on rare occasions, quite public) conversations with husbands and male relatives (Allen 2002: 97; Hamilton 1998; see Bowser 2000 and 2004 for Amazonian examples). Women’s influence is based in part on their collective control over the production and distribution of the beer and other items consumed at feasts (Allen 2002: 97). Since beer often spoils in less than a week, a host cannot stockpile it over the course of several months or years (Jennings 2005, but see Hayashida, this volume). The social positions of hosts are therefore dependent upon maintaining...