In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

THE GREAT FIESTA PATHS Chapter Eight Living on Tatala's Path Uses of the Past in Sacrifice and Antisacrifice, Saints' Festivals, and Sorceries In the previous chapter we saw that the forms of houses and hamlets and constructed architectural spaces are built from the stuff of meaningful social activity. As gendered persons and social groups like patrilines construe themselves in alignment with Tatala's path through the heavens and a transformative relationship to Chullpa forces, the spaces of daily life and the social processes played out in them become microcosms of cosmic processes. As meaningful action within the hamlet is made to conform to the values which Tatala's action gives to social space, the goal of human society and of each social actor is to replicate the actions of the sun, whose taming of the disordered and wild nature of the previous age made cultural life possible. Thus domesticated food and drink and the fruits of the womb are dedicated to the sun and his realm, always facing the direction from whence the initial order came, while feces, death, decay, and disease are relegated to the west, towards the end of Tatala's path, the future past where generative but fetid manxapacha forces are predominant. Social time and social space are played out in a single arena, in tune with a single primordial sequence which is also the lay of the land. It is also true, however, that these carefully maintained microcosms in social space-time are isolated in the midst of the wilderness: Not only the 368 Living on Tatala's Path 369 west but the whole periphery (the pampa or puruma) is still the domain of natural forces and presocial beings (including laritas, wife givers, and potential wives who come from other patrilines and hamlets beyond the pampa) which must continually be constrained and transformed by human activity to reproduce human society. The wild space outside the hamlet is most "disordered" in the uncultivated, unfenced empty spaces (which are also vaguely defined borders) between patriline lands. Yet these spaces are crossed by ritual paths on which people walk (and which they re-create through ch'alla performances) in the repeated intergroup visits of marriage rites and festival pilgrimage. Marriage is but the first step along what is also a kind of "path" along which individuals become most like the shepherd of men who resides in the sky: authorities over the ayllu and the polity as a whole. This is the jach'a p"ista t"aki, the "great fiesta path," spanning the life career of a couple (and household), from the dawning of the power to unify a herd to the twilight of its dispersion (which is frequently at death, when the persons are sent packing to the west and the underworld with the setting sun, and both herds and lands are dispersed to children). Paths have beginnings and ends, which are at the same time earlier and later points in a sequence, and likewise fiesta sponsorship or civil office, as a step on a career path, is also a moment in an alternation: The incoming sponsor or authority takes over for an outgoing one, who is a step ahead on his own career path. The coming year's sponsor, called a machaqa ("novice"), just starting on his path (that is, of his year of performance, which is the saint-centered analogue of the sun's "yearpath "), is always later than and subordinate to this year's, and the groups in whose stead the rite is sponsored are similarly ranked. As the alphas and omegas of fiesta sponsorship, the new and old sponsors of a fiesta stand in a relation very like that of east and west as directions on Tatala's path, and consequently as alax to manxa, "above to below," "outside to inside." Ayllus and moieties emerged as defined entities of K'ulta (as opposed to being mere parts of Asanaqi ayllus and moieties) out of the rotativeexchange practices through which town council authorities and fiesta sponsors came to be constituted. But the mechanism by which such social units have been constituted is also a kind of historical engine, applicable at more than one level of polity and thus capable of redefining parts as wholes wherever it is applied. In the present moment of local political and ritual life, four of K'ulta's five ayllus are in various stages of secession from the rest in search of [3.149.239.110] Project MUSE (2024...

Share