At the Mountains' Altar: Anthropology of Religion in an Andean Community by Frank Salomon (review)

At the Mountains' Altar: Anthropology of Religion in an Andean Community, the latest addition to Frank Salomon's distinguished oeuvre, continues a trajectory beginning in the 1970s with ethnohistorical research on Inka-period polities in Ecuador (cf. Salomon 2009). Next came the monumental annotated translation from Quechua of the colonial Huarochirí Manuscript (Salomon and Urioste 1991). Fascinated by Huarochirí's mythic landscape, Salomon turned his research interests to the ethnography and historiography of this mountainous region in the Peruvian province of Lima. In 1994, in the village of Tupicocha, he happened upon an anthropological gold mine—a full set of patrimonial khipus, complex string devices of the type used to administer the Inca's far flung empire. These Tupicocha khipus—unique in the Andean ethnographic record for their complexity and degree of preservation—became the subject of his next book. In The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village (2004), Salomon draws on a broad swath of semiotic theory to contextualize the khipus within the social organization and dynamics of village life. Intrigued by the persistence of khipus in a contemporary context dominated by alphabetic literacy, Salomon teamed up with sociolinguist Mercedes Niño-Murcía to explore how "two pristinely different graphic technologies" have interacted to produce a distinctly local tradition of writing in the villages of the Huarochirí region (Salomon and Niño-Murcía 2011:83). The Lettered Mountain: A Peruvian Village's Way with Writing (Salomon and Niño-Murcía 2011), provides a fascinating look at grassroots literacy and the performative contexts in which it occurs.

While conducting research in Tupicocha, Salomon got wind of another village in the same region with a large complex of khipus. This was Rapaz where, in 2004, he found khipus enshrined in "a working temple of Andean mountain veneration" (1), a little stone and adobe house, called Kaha Wayi. At the Mountains' Altar tells of Salomon's eight-year encounter "with the people who conduct rites in the Kaha Wayi, about a partnership with the community that treasures it, and about the continuing enigma of its origin" (1). Unlike his previous work, this book is explicitly intended to be read by students in anthropology courses. Each chapter explores aspects of the Kaha Wayi from a different theoretical vantage point, in order to "put before students' eyes one case, an Andean temple, and treat it as an example for pondering the possibly pan-human matter of sacred ritual… Why is there any religion as opposed to no religion? In other words, how shall we study Anthropology of Religion" (9)?

Salomon designs the book as an advanced course in the anthropology of religion, presenting different facets of a single ethnographic case, each with a different theoretical "handle" (15). The result is a deft inter-weaving of anthropological theory with history, archaeology, social organization, and poetics. He aims not to argue for any single theory, but to present theoretical perspectives in conversation with each other. As in The Cord Keepers, Salomon marshals different theories as they prove useful, without privileging one over the others.

That the book is geared to students should not imply that it is an "easy read." Salomon has advanced students in mind, possibly sophisticated upper-level undergrads but mainly graduate students; this is clear from such asides as, "If you go this route, you are likely to hear a member of your doctoral advisory committee charge…" (214). I think anyone with a theoretical bent, at any level, will find much food for thought in Salomon's "take" on the various schools of thought running through today's anthropological discourse. His appreciative overview carries us through the sweep of socio-cultural theory, while the final chapters appraise contemporary developments, placing the often abstruse discourse of the "ontological turn," "new materialism," and "post-humanism" in a concrete ethnographic context. The ethnography itself is fascinating, especially to an Andeanist like myself, written in evocative prose that draws the...