Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political-Economic Perspectives on Human Biology

10. Illness, Social Relations, and Household Production and Reproduction in the Andes of Southern Peru

Chapter 10 Illness, Social Relations, and Household Production and Reproduction in the Andes of Southern Peru Thomas L. Leatherman The central theme of this volume is that integrating perspectives from anthropological political economy and human adaptability provides a useful starting point for new biocultural perspectives on the human condition . The Andes provides an ideal place to address an integration of perspectives , because there is a corpus of work in both ecological and political -economic perspectives, and sharp distinctions can be drawn between the two (Starn 1991, 1994). Important work in human adaptability and biocultural anthropology was carried out in the 1960s using an ecological approach (e.g., Baker and Little 1976; Thomas 1973). Recent biocultural research, however, has attempted to integrate political-economic perspectives into human adaptability studies and draw attention to issues of poverty, social relations, and health in shaping Andean biology (e.g., Carey 1990; Leatherman 1996; Leatherman et al. 1986; Leonard and Thomas 1988; Luerssen 1994; Thomas 1997; Thomas et al. 1988). The contrasting biocultural approaches represented in these studies provide a clear example for assessing the implications ofchanging research perspectives. This chapter has two objectives. The first is to illustrate how integrating political-economic perspectives into a biocultural approach can lead to different questions, analyses, and interpretations about the human condition . This objective is achieved through a comparison oftwo research projects in the southern Peruvian Andes. The first, under the direction ofPaul Baker in the 1960s in the District of Nufioa, focused on human ecology and adaptation to a high altitude environment (Baker and Little 1976). The second was under the direction of R. Brooke Thomas, a member of the original Nufioa research team. It was carried out in the early 1980s in 245 246 Building a New BiocuItural Synthesis the same district as the earlier research and examined the consequences and responses to illness among small-scale farmers (Thomas et al. 1988). The second objective is to summarize key features and findings ofthe later Nunoa project to provide an example of biocultural research that attempted to integrate perspectives from anthropological political economy and human adaptability. It examines the interactions between illness and household economy in three locales in the District ofNunoa, and how differences in patterns of illness, coping responses, and outcomes are shaped by the particular social relations of rural producers in the three sites. Changing Biocultural Perspectives: A Tale ofTwo Projects Orin Starn (1991) has attacked ethnographic and biocultural studies from the 1970s in the Andes as "missing the revolution," the revolt of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) which came to dominate the political landscape in Peru during the 1980s and into the 1990s. He argued that the ecologically oriented community studies in the 1970s tended to erect analytical boundaries around the populations and cultures being researched to the neglect of interregional and national processes. Starn's critique of ecological anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s is not new, but rather, made specific to the Andean context. Ecological approaches have been repeatedly criticized for emphasizing the single case study of functional adaptation within a bounded, self-regulating ecosystem (Wolf 1982, 17). While Starn omits reference to work by North American scholars that are exceptions to this gloss on Andean scholarship, his general critique of much of Andean research is probably fair. Indeed, research from this era was concerned with the uniqueness of the physical landscape (e.g., the vertical ecology, "harsh" climate, and limiting constraints of high altitude hypoxia) to the exclusion of broader sociopolitical and economic interactions . Andean society and economy were seen to exhibit dual themes of complementarity (e.g., integration ofcomplementing ecoproduction zones as in Murra's [1984] vertical archipelago model) and cooperation (e.g., formalized systems of cooperative labor exchange such as ayni reciprocity and minka communal work relations). These foci in both biological and cultural research helped reify the notions of successful adaptation and resilience in Andean populations, and the continuity of tradition over novel responses to changing conditions. Early expectations in mountain ecology and high altitude biology Illness, Social Relations, and Household Production 247 research were that broad adaptive patterns would be discerned through cross-population and cross-cultural comparisons of the Andes with other highland systems (e.g., the Himalayas and Ethiopian highlands). Yet, similarity in adaptive pattern was less than expected. Also, in spite ofthe constancy and presumed forcefulness of hypobaric hypoxia as an environmental stressor, relatively little evidence was found for genetic adaptations...