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

4: Between Self and Other

63 CHAPTER FOUR Between Self and Other During that first fieldwork trip, I took a couple of Quechua lessons with a young Peruvian woman named Veronica. I liked Veronica a lot. She was bright and spunky and loved to tell stories. She would tell them to me in Spanish, though she confessed that she preferred speaking in Quechua, as it was much more expressive. “Like poetry,” she said. Quechua, Veronica explained, has so many nuanced words for which Spanish and English have no exact equivalent that it is hard to achieve the same meaning , either in tone or in content.1 The word yanantin is like that, she told me, when I asked her about it. The closest word in Spanish is pareja, meaning pair. But that is too superficial, she said. It does not encompass the whole idea of yanantin. Although Veronica grew up in the rural highlands and was therefore surrounded by many Quechua-speaking people, when she was a child her parents forbade her to speak Quechua to her friends. “But I did anyway,” she told me, looking very pleased with herself. She then launched into another story about how on the mornings of certain Catholic ceremonies her father would lock the door and beat her brothers chapter four 64 and sisters on the back of the legs with a whip as penance. After a few years of this, she began sneaking out through the window in her bedroom . She told the story with much humor and pride. I didn’t learn much Quechua during our time together, but it was fun all the same, and I actually did learn a few things that helped me to understand certain aspects of yanantin. During one lesson, I asked Veronica about the Quechua term tinkuy . Scholars (Allen, 1988, 2002; Bastien, 1978; Harrison, 1989; Joralemon & Sharon, 1993; Platt, 1986; Stone-Miller, 2002; Urton, 1981; Wilcox, 1999) have pointed to tinkuy as being an essential term in the Andean metaphysical outlook. When translated into English, the word tinkuy is usually said to refer to “the place where two rivers meet” (Allen, 1988; Harrison, 1989; Joralemon & Sharon, 1993). Some scholars also translate it as the “encountering or meeting of persons” and/or the “meeting of opposite forces” (Bastien, 1992, p. 159). Amado disagreed with these more common definitions, stating emphatically , “Tinkuy is not the meeting. Tinkuy instead means the active part after the meeting. What do you do after the meeting? What happens? That is tinkuy, whether it is dance, whether it is war . . . anything. Tinkuy at this point is like, ‘Okay, we’ve met. How do I allow myself deeper into you? What can I do for you so that you will never forget me?’” Similarly, Harrison (1989) pointed to the active component of tinkuy: “The emphatic mention of tinkuy in daily conversation attests to its value as one of the primary categories for Andean society. It is a domain where two contrary or opposing forces or concepts coexist and intermingle” (p. 103). Cruz (2007) added, For the Andean man, the world is a dialectical process. Everything that exists in nature is made up of two opposite, contradictory, but at the end of the day, complementary forces. . . . In that dual thinking, that conception of duality, we see also complementarity, because the opposites as in the tinkuy get together to form unity. To create unity. And that is precisely what the tinkuy concept is talking about. When you have a partner or lovers, when they come together they are doing the tinkuy. They are uniting the two opposites , man and woman. Each has its own specific characteristics but when they come together they create the tinkuy, the unity. (n.p.) Between Self and Other 65 Generally speaking, tinkuy is seen as the coming together of two opposing but equal energies in order for a yanantin relationship to take place. The mixing of ingredients in medicine or cooking is sometimes referred to as tinkuy (Allen, 2002, p. 177). In the highland Andes, solteros (single people) from each of the rural villages meet on the pass once a year at Carnivale. There they dance and flirt in order to establish partnerships. This, too, is referred to as tinkuy. My anthropologist friend, Jules, who works closely with the Q’ero people of the highland Andes, tells of how important this rite is to a worldview in which it is believed that things are...