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The Huamán Family “Miguel, do you know anyone I can interview in the puna?” “Sí, tío. Anastasio Huamán. He lives in Rumi Puquio.” In 1974 I employed Claudia Velarde’s grandson Miguel to take me around the district in order to study the way San Pedrinos utilized their diverse mountain environment. Leaving San Pedro, Miguel and I crossed the upper maize fields to enter the deep-green eucalyptus plantation, the town’s only wooded section. Abandoning the pungent tree cover, we climbed higher. The air grew colder, and fields gave way to unpopulated communal pasturelands surrounded by dense shrubs and scrub, which provided much of San Pedro’s fuel. Devoid of houses, the landscape appeared wild, but the scrub was kept low by grazing cattle as well as the high-altitude cold. Tutapa ravine plummeted sharply to our left. “Careful,” Miguel cautioned as the path narrowed. An irrigation canal alongside the path funneled fast-flowing water from the Tutapa River to fields far below; its tumult muffled our conversation. As we entered the silent world above the irrigation system, an area subjected to cold days and frequent night frosts, the brush disappeared abruptly, replaced by the low bunch grasses characteristic of Peru’s punas. Rumi Puquio lay straight ahead, just over a sharp rise. As we entered the narrow hanging valley that sheltered the hamlet, the ground leveled and our climb eased. We arrived about five hours after our start; alone, Miguel would have made the climb much more rapidly. Located above the tree line at about four thousand meters, a little more than thirteen thousand feet above sea level, Rumi Puquio is one of the highest settlements on earth—and one of the most beautiful. EIGHT Anastasio FLEEING SHINING PATH 173 Anastasio Stone crags, one shaped like an old man, pierce the sky, guarding a half dozen stone houses in the small basin, but blocking our view of the many isolated homesteads, or estancias, nestled among the great rocks. San Pedro and the Ayacucho Valley lay far below. We made our way carefully through marshy spring-fed areas crowded with small lily-likeplants.Afewplowedfieldshadbeenreadiedforpotatoes,but most lay fallow. Like most residents of the puna, the people of Rumi Puquio were agropastoralists, dedicated to both farming and herding . Their burros, horses, and llamas grazed in the distance, looking like the animal figures in the background of a nineteenth-century landscape painting. Anastasio Huamán was stomping bitter potatoes, using his bare feet to remove the skin. Interrupting his work, he gave us a wry, charming smile and, as is the custom, politely extended his wrist in greeting, his hand too dirty for a handshake. After Miguel briefly explained my work, I introduced myself in Quechua. Anastasio responded in fluent highland Spanish, reflecting his primary and secondary schooling in San Pedro and Ayacucho City. He accepted the coca leaves that I always carried as a gift, but put them aside without chewing them. He told me that he had seen me in thepueblo and said approvingly that I was Pablopa churin, Pablo’s son. I told him about my research, and he readily agreed to tell me about his farming and herding and granted me permission to record the conversation on tape. “What’re you doing?” I asked. Making freeze-dried potatoes, he responded, “chuñu.”1 After he removed the skin from bitter potatoes, a separate species from the white potato, he put them in diverted stream water for fifteen days, subjecting them to alternating freezing at night and thawing in the day, then set them to dry in the sun. Freeze-dried potatoes will last for several years and are eaten in stews and soups. They are delicious, although their chewy texture takes getting used to. Being so high, Rumi Puquio is too cold for most crops, and farmers grow only potatoes and other tubers unknown outside the Andes: maswa, olluku, and oca. Andean potatoes come in many more varieties than elsewhere in the world. Anastasio named and described the thirty-six varieties grown in Rumi Puquio and did the same for the other tubers. In 1974 I also was gathering data on interzonal trade. Unlike other regions of the world, where one must travel far to obtain foods from different environments, the equatorial Andes hosts a range of ecological zones close together. One can walk down from cold Rumi [13.58.252.8] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 03:40 GMT...

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