Yanantin and Masintin in the Andean World: Complementary Dualism in Modern Peru

8: The Symbolic Versus the Actual

119 CHAPTER EIGHT The Symbolic Versus the Actual In January 2009, I returned to Cuzco for my final fieldwork trip. I arrived with a list of the remaining topics that I wanted to cover, among them the distinction between “symbolic” versus “Actual.” This felt like an essential dichotomy to explore, for the Andean spiritual system is thick with symbolic vocabulary. Foremost in my mind was the Andean shaman’s mesa, which contains various ritual items, each of which is said to represent a certain energy that can be used within a ritual and/or healing. I had never really understood the significance that these symbols held for the practitioners, which made them such an essential aspect of their work. But I wanted to. I wanted to know what the relationship was between the various spiritual tools and the actual energy that they were said to represent and even re-create. Truth be told, I had arrived in Peru for that fieldwork trip thinking that I had already figured it all out, and that all I needed was a few quotes from my participants to help me support this “understanding” that I had. Months earlier, during my readings of some of the literature on Andean philosophy, I had come across a statement by an Andean scholar who, when chapter eight 120 critiquing Western “representational thought,” wrote, “For the Andean, the illa [symbolic representation] of the llama is not a representation of the llama, but actually is the llama” and that, therefore, it “makes no sense to speak of the symbol and of the symbolized” (Vasquez, 1998, p. 178). Doing so, he argued, was a purely Western construction, an anthrocentric bias intended to create a rationalist “split” between symbolic action and “real” action, thus accentuating the Western divide between consciousness and reality, mind and matter. Certainly, the scholar’s argument is understandable and likely fueled by a certain frustration at the biases that Western anthropologists have historically brought into the field—biases that imply that symbols are merely products of the psyche rather than having a reality as energies in and of themselves. When cultural “informants” have reported their visionary experiences within dreams or ritual, Western anthropologists have more often than not passed off the content of these visions as metaphors. That is, nonliteral. The reality of the experience is denied, reduced to a psychological stand-in. This bias is a reflection of how we treat our own visionary experiences. In the West, we analyze dreams to determine what the images “mean” at the psychological level. Perhaps in part we do this to understand, and even to tame, the unconscious (and therefore uncontrollable) part of the mind that generates these images. With this assumption as the basis, everything becomes reflective of our own selves. For example, after having a dream of a crow we might ask ourselves, “What part of me does the crow represent?” or “As the crow is a part of me, what message does the crow have for me about me?” Dreaming thus becomes a narcissistic or even solipsistic endeavor, one removed from everything that is not ourselves, a means of controlling the psyche rather than reflecting a reality beyond us. In contrasting it with the more Western perspective, the aforementioned scholar seemed to be suggesting that within the Andean philosophical model “symbols” are not just symbols but literally are the thing that they are meant to represent. Certainly, when considering some of what had come out of my own fieldwork, this idea rang true. When traveling with Amado and Juan Luis, we would often discuss our dreams of the night before. With the two of them, there was never any talk of what the dream meant in an analytical sense. Instead, images within the dream were spoken of as messengers that had an existence beyond our personal worlds, The Symbolic Versus the Actual 121 a means by which actual knowledge of the world could be acquired. As Apffel-Marglin (1998) noted, “It is clearly not a matter of speaking metaphorically when they say that Andean peasants converse with the stars, the moon, the plants, the rocks, etc.” (p. 26). The scholar’s statement that the illa is not like the llama but actually is the llama fits in very neatly into the dualistic framework that I had been unconsciously developing—a framework that implied that whatever way we in the West do things, in the Andes...