Andean kinship and marriage 9780686365594

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Preface (Ralph Bolton, page v)
Bilaterality in the Andes (Bernd Lambert, page 1)
Kinship and Affinity in a Native Quechua Community (Steven S. Webster, page 28)
Descent, Alliance, and Moiety in Chucuito, Peru: An Explanatory Sketch of Aymara Social Organization (John M. Hickman and William T. Stuart, page 43)
Beyond the Nuclear Family (Enrique Mayer, page 60)
"Those Who Love Me": An Analysis of Andean Kinship and Reciprocity Within a Ritual Context (Billie Jean Isbell, page 81)
The Limitation of Obligation In Saraguro Kinship (Jim Belote and Linda Belote, page 106)
Peasant Kinship, Subsistence and Economics In a High Altitude Andean Environment (Glynn Custred, page 117)
Kinship and Land Use In a Northern Sierra Community (Stephen B. Brush, page 136)
Commerce and Kinship In the Peruvian Highlands (Norman Long, page 153)
Trial Marriage in the Andes? (W. E. Carter, page 177)
The Qolla Marriage Process (Ralph Bolton, page 217)
The Inca Kinship System: A New Theoretical View (R. T. Zuidema, page 240)
References Cited (page 282)
Contributors (page 293)

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edited by RALPH BOLTON and ENRIQUE MAYER

a special publication of the American Anthropological Association number 7 |

Published by the AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

1703 New Hampshire Avenue, N. W.

Washington, D.C. 20009

Copyright ©1977 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Contents may not be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the publisher. Printed in USA. Copies may be obtained from the publisher at $7.50, non-members; $6.00, members. Payment in full should accompany all orders. Please include zip codes.

(ALT OF HR em F&F

CONTENTS

v / Preface Ralph Bolton

1 / Bilaterality in the Andes Bernd Lambert

28 / Kinship and Affinity In a Native Quechua Community Steven S. Webster

43 / Descent, Alliance, and Moiety in Chucuito, Peru: An Explanatory Sketch of Aymara Sociai Organization John M. Hickman and William T. Stuart

60 / Beyond the Nuclear Family

| Enrique Mayer

81 / ‘‘Those Who Love Me”: An Analysis of Andean Kinship and Reciprocity Within a Ritual Context Billie Jean Isbell

106 / The Limitation of Obligation

| In Saraguro Jim Kinship Belote and Linda Belote /117 / Peasant Kinship, Subsistence and Economics In a High Altitude Andean Environment Glynn Custred

“136 / Kinship and Land Use In a Northern Sierra Community Stephen B. Brush

153. / Commerce and Kinship In the Peruvian Highlands Norman Long

177 / Trial Marriage in the Andes? W. E.. Carter

217 / The Qolla Marriage Process Ralph Bolton

240 / The Inca Kinship System: A New Theoretical View R. T. Zuidema

282 / References Cited

293 / Contributors iii

To our ritual kinsmen in communities throughout the Andes

PREFACE

The anthropological literature on the Andean region contains few detailed

studies of kinship and marriage. With the intention of inducing Andean specialists to focus attention on basic issues of social organization, the editors of

this volume decided to organize a symposium devoted to this topic. The response to a call for papers was overwhelming. Twenty-four contributions were

volunteered initially, and the final program of the Symposium on Andean Kinship and Marriage, which was held at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Toronto in 1972, consisted of nineteen papers and the remarks of three discussants. The two sessions of the symposium were well attended, with standing room only at times. The discussions of questions raised by the papers were extremely spirited, and the event helped to generate a sense of common purpose and community among Andeanists. Unfortunately, it was not possible to publish all of the contributions to the symposium in one volume. However, I can report that many of the papers not

included here have already been published or will be published shortly (see References). In addition to the authors in this volume, the following scholars presented papers in Toronto: Xavier Albo, CIPCA, Bolivia; Roderick E. Burchard, University of Manitoba; Joseph B. Casagrande, University of Illinois, Urbana; Gabriel Escobar, Pennsylvania State University; Thomas C. Greaves, University of Texas, San Antonio; Anne B. Hyde, University of Pennsylvania; Jacques Malengreau, FNRS, Belgium; William W. Stein, SUNY, Buffalo; and Freda Wolf, Cornell University. The discussants were Professor William P. Mangin of Syracuse University and Professors Bernd Lambert and John V. Murra

of Cornell University. I wish to thank all of the participants in the symposium for having taken part. As editor, I must express my gratitude to the contributors to this volume for their generous collaboration as well as for their understanding and patience during the long interval between the writing of their papers and the appearance of those papers in print. I am particularly grateful to Professor Bernd Lambert for having undertaken the difficult task of analyzing and summarizing the issues contained in the papers from the symposium and for writing the introductory : _ chapter for this volume. Professor David Maybury-Lewis, of Harvard University, also deserves special thanks for his interest in this project; in his role as editor of Anthropological Studies, he gave us valuable assistance. The Faculty Research Committee of Pomona College provided funds to support the organization of the symposium and the preparation of the manuscript. Finally, for their work on

one or more of the tasks associated with this endeavor, I am indebted to Charlene Bolton, Corinne Bybee, Harriet King, and Christine and Lynn L. Thomas.

Ralph Bolton V

THE CENTRAL ANDES

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4 oo _ 3 - Tangor oY s. \ 1-Saraguro | NS, 19== Bolivia ' 2-Uchucmarca ae oat

45 -- Matahuasi Vicos Yyny, ‘[ 67 -- Cuzco Chuschi \ ( 8 - Q'ero )\ oar

9 - Alccavitoria 10 - Incawatana 11 - Chinchera 12 - Irpa Chico

Location of Communities Mentioned in the Text

vi

BILATERALITY IN THE ANDES Bernd Lambert CORNELL UNIVERSITY

The study of kinship and marriage in any region of the world may be said to have attained maturity when the anthropologists working there find it necessary

to modify the concepts they have imported from elsewhere. They begin to discover unsuspected principles of social organization by analyzing cases of cooperation and dispute, by determining statistical regularities in behavior, and

by noting symbolic references to kinship in speech and ritual. Students of African kinship reached this stage in the 1930s and 1940s, and summed up their

achievement in the collection African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (Radcliffe-Brown and Forde 1950), with its emphasis on corporate unilineal descent groups. Investigations of the social organization of Polynesia and adjacent areas have been greatly stimulated by Goodenough’s (1955) and Firth’s

(1957) thinking on ambilineal (non-unilineal) descent. Barnes’s short article,

“African Models in the New Guinea Highlands” (1962), marked another breakthrough, which was followed by many analyses of particular New Guinea societies. Now we have a collection of ethnographic studies that describe Andean kinship, marriage, and godparenthood in terms that elegantly reflect indigenous concepts. Although accurate description is their primary objective, good ethnographies

|1

also facilitate interregional comparisons. They often show that previously

accepted generalizations apply only to a restricted series of cases, or at least that they did not take into account all of the characteristics of social structures of a

certain type. For example, recent New Guinea ethnographies have called

attention to the distinction between patrilineal descent as a cultural concept and quasi-patrilineal clans as territorial and political groups; these differences could be overlooked in most accounts of African societies, which generally adhere more closely to descent principles in determining the group affiliations of men and women. Analogously, the present collection of Andean studies highlights

some of the consequences of bilateral kinship that are less in evidence in societies previously described. It is these characteristics of bilateral systems that

are the main topics of this essay, although other characteristics will be mentioned that have long been familiar to anthropologists.

, My examples will be drawn mostly from the papers on contemporary peasant

communities in highland Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia that were presented at the Symposium on Andean Kinship and Marriage in 1972, although references to other works are sometimes necessary to put these data in context. J realize that,

in my attempt to arrive at general statements, [ have not taken regional

variations sufficiently into account. Future work will probably reveal many distinctive structural features that are confined to restricted geographical areas, or that have resulted from the extension of the market economy, migration to

the cities or to new agricultural colonies, and land reform. ,

Bilateral descent relates an individual to all the descendants of his recognized

ancestors within a certain number of generations, regardless of whether a particular genealogical connection is traced through males or through females (Radcliffe-Brown 1950:13). The aggregate of all persons with whom one is

believed to share a relevant common ancestor constitutes one’s kindred. Although the kindred has been called a group by some authors, Freeman argues convincingly that it lacks the characteristics of a group in the sociological sense. It is, rather, a category of persons ‘“‘who have in common the characteristic that they are related cognatically in varying degrees to the same person (the central ego or propositus), though not necessarily to one another” (Freeman 1961:202). The propriety of including affines in the kindred has been a subject of debate. Freeman (1961:201-202) excludes them from his definition, on the grounds that

every society makes a distinction between consanguineal and affinal relationships, while Murdock (1964) and Gulliver (1971:7-9) insist that, in some societies, affines are included in the “‘kindred matrix’? on much the same terms as consanguines. In the Andes, affines have no rights to the inheritance, but tend to be treated as full members of the kindred in ceremonies and working parties. The principal reason that the kindred cannot be considered a corporate group

is that only full siblings (and not even they if spouses and their kinsmen are

included in the kindred) can have exactly the same relatives, so that the memberships of all the kindreds of a community overlap. Hence bilateral relationships can only be activated from time to time, especially when the propositus is the focus of attention. A wedding or a funeral, for example, brings together many members of the kindred of bride, groom, or corpse. Action sets composed of consanguineal kinsmen and affines may be assembled for specific purposes, which can range from building a house to waging a vendetta (Freeman 1961:203, 211-214). The more remote the relationship, the less likely it is to be activated, and the more exiguous the contributions or services expected. In some regions where kinship is traced bilaterally, including the Andes, a kindred is regarded, for many purposes, as consisting of stocks descended from pairs of grandparents or great-grandparents (Freeman 1961:204-207: Mayer). A stock can serve as the framework for a cognatic descent group, especially when it

is identified with a particular place of residence. In such cases, some of the persons descended from the ancestral pair, through either men or women, utilize their inherited lands or herds collectively and may be represented by a common

spokesman in their dealings with outsiders. Other descendants are still

recognized as kinsmen, but are excluded from the estate. As long as inheritance is bilateral, however, a particular descent group seldom persists for more than two or three generations. Once this period has elapsed, more recent ancestors will be selected as the foci of new groups, and group boundaries will be shifted accordingly.

Bilaterally organized kindreds may coexist with unilineal modes of reckoning descent. Patrilineal genealogies, for example, may receive special recognition in | certain contexts, even though the sex of linking ancestors is irrelevant in others.

Patrilineages have, in fact, been reported for societies in which ego-centered kindreds or cognatic descent groups also fulfill important functions (Gulliver 2

— 1971:12; Groves 1963). The unilineal reckoning of descent, whether in the male line for both sexes (Vazquez and Holmberg 1966), or in the male line for men

and in the female line for women (Belote and Belote) does not seem to be of major significance in contemporary Andean societies. Generally speaking,

Andean peasant communities, like the well-known bilateral societies of Southeast Asia and Lappland, lack corporate kin groups that endure for more than two or three generations (Murdock 1960:5).

In societies of this type, new solidary groups must be created in each generation from the debris of dissolved families. Usually it is the new conjugal or

nuclear family, or a household based on it, that eventually gains first claim to the energy and loyalty of its members, at the expense of the ties they continue

to maintain with their siblings and other consanguineal kinsmen. As my colleague Ruth Borker has pointed out, the single nuclear family gradually emerges as an autonomous unit in the politico-jural domain—that is, it can deal directly with the communal authorities. Elsewhere siblings continue to depend

~ On one another in political and economic matters to such an extent that the | autonomous unit comprises a group of nuclear families living near each other and connected by sibling bonds. Persistent sibling groups may in turn give rise to the temporary cognatic descent groups mentioned earlier. Since in fact adults are

generally supposed to divide their allegiance between their spouses and their siblings, neither set of ties comes to predominate absolutely in most bilateral societies. Thus, while a married couple can look forward to becoming the center of an autonomous household in the majority of Andean communities, brothers

and sisters continue to be more significant there than they are for most -- middle-class adults in North America. But it is only in a few communities—those

most dependent on pastoralism—that sibling ties become the basis for the

- formation of solidary groups. | Although the two models of solidarity are easiest to distinguish in terms of

the respective political and legal statuses of nuclear families and sibling groups, they differ in certain other respects as well. Ideas about the ownership of land, herds, and valuables also provide clues to the relative importance of sibling and conjugal relationships. Where the nuclear family is legally autonomous, husband

and wife generally gain their subsistence independently of their kinsfolk. In societies where the sibling group habitually acts as a collectivity, brothers and sisters cooperate in exploiting their patrimony, although individual shares have probably been marked out and will be inherited separately by the children of each sibling. There is much variation, even within the Andean region, in the

customs that govern the property rights of heirs who move to their spouses’ territory after marriage. In some places, these women and men must relinquish

| control over their own inheritances to brothers and sisters who remain at home; | elsewhere they contribute inherited resources to the estates of the groups they | join. The rule followed in a particular community depends on whether land or | livestock constitutes the main form of wealth, on the scarcity of land, on the

| average distance between intermarrying families, and on cultural attitudes toward female ownership. It does not depend consistently on whether the unit

; of production is a household or a sibling group. | Another clue to the locus of solidarity is the treatment of affines, especially siblings-in-law. When a married couple is treated as a unit in economic and legal

, affairs, sibling ties between adults serve to connect nuclear families, not individuals. It will probably matter little whether the husband of a related family 3

is one’s brother or brother-in-law. A couple with many brothers and sisters can even choose the ones with whom it will cooperate most closely. In the other sort

of bilateral society, where sibling ties retain their economic and political importance, a nuclear family is usually free to split from one sibling group and

join another, but must assist the group to which it currently belongs. It is possible that the marriage tie will be considered primarily as a bond between sibling sets, and hence is likely to be overridden, in the event of conflict, by the greater loyalty of brothers and sisters toward one another. In-marrying spouses may then be treated as subordinate or peripheral to the persons who belong to the group by right of birth. The importance of the marital relationship prevents the latter possibility from being realized in most bilateral societies, however.

Most of the descriptions of nonindustrial bilateral societies in the anthropological literature emphasize the importance of sibling bonds, as well as the terminological and conceptual distinctions between consanguineal and affinal relationships. One such society, that of the Mountain Lapps, will be examined here, partly because Pehrson’s (1957) ethnography covers the points under discussion, and partly because structural parallels exist between the reindeerherding Lapps and pastoral communities in the Andes. Reindeer are owned by individual men, women, and children, but the large herds brought together on the summer pastures require the attention of bands made up of several sibling groups (1957:38, 96). One of the sibling groups is dominant, the others being normally allied to it by marriage (1957:92). There is about an equal chance that a couple will join the husband’s band or the wife’s, although various factors, including the membership of one spouse in a dominant sibling group, are taken into account (1957:66-67). The component sibling groups act on their own when the band breaks up for the winter (1957:92-94). They are occasionally treated as corporate groups on other occasions as well; the herding leader usually chooses one member of each sibling group for any given work-shift of the regular herding force, for example (1957:96). Descent from siblings constitutes a barrier

to marriage, and can serve as a justification for joining a new band, for three generations (1957:23-24). The sibling group is not prolonged into a descent

group, however: the band histories collected by Pehrson show that one dominant sibling group can be replaced by another within a generation or less,

and that the second is not necessarily composed of children of the first (1957:90). But despite the importance of the sibling bond in Lapp society, the sibling

group as a residential unit and working team is really made up of married couples and their children rather than of individual brothers and sisters (Pehrson 1957:94-95). Both spouses are apparently treated as full members of the band,

although most of the time only one of them will be a near consanguineal kinsman of the other members. The son of a settler who “hires out as a servant to a Lapp and then eventually marries the daughter of his employer, taking on the Lappish dress and abandoning cottage life for tent life, will be referred to as a Lapp, even if he never learns to speak the Lappish language (1957:101-102). As Pehrson puts it, one’s “own siblings and spouse’s siblings are conceptually equivalent in the sphere of social action,” just as kinsfolk on the father’s side and the mother’s side will be for one’s children (1957:107). In arguing that

affines should be included in the concept of the bilateral kindred, Gulliver implies that a man who joins his wife’s band or moves into her community

probably behaves in everyday life as though he were his wife’s brothers’ brother 4

(Gulliver 1971:8-10). I will try to show that this generalization is applicable to almost all Andean highland communities. The case for conjugal solidarity is even stronger for the Iban of Sarawak (East

Malaysia), among whom a person who moves into the apartment of his or her spouse’s parents after marriage becomes a full member of the family residing there, shares in its property, and is eligible for a position of leadership within it;

in return, the person relinquishes all claims to the estate of his or her natal family (Freeman 1958:29-31). In the Andean region, too, households based on nuclear families (sometimes

referred to as “house-families”: la casa or wasi-familia) control productive resources and allocate consumer goods. Households, rather than individuals, are

conceived of as the units of ceremonial and economic participation (Stein 1961:127-128; Mayer; and Orlove and Custred 1974 are only a sample of the

sources that make this point; for a theoretical statement, see Murdock 1964:131). The ideal is for each complete nuclear family to maintain a household of its own. Partial families headed by an unmarried mother, or by a divorced or widowed parent with immature children, may either continue to occupy separate households or join those of married kinsmen (Brush; Mayer).

The nuclear families of the parents and of a married son (most often the youngest son), or of two married brothers, may share the same compound or courtyard, or even the same house, but distinguish themselves by storing their crops separately, cooking their food over different hearths, and consuming it apart from one another (Brush; Stein 1961:54-55, 72-73). Most of the rest of this chapter will be devoted to exploring the implications -. that the institution of the autonomous household has for consanguineal, affinal,

and ritual relationships. I will also discuss some of the ways in which the existence of such households has been reconciled with notions of patrilineal and

parallel descent, which of course contradict the principle of bilaterality. A preliminary summary of the geography of communal and household control of resources will provide a background to the sections that deal more specifically with kinship relations. THE AUTONOMOUS HOUSEHOLD AS AN ECOLOGICAL ADAPTATION

Murra (1972) has demonstrated that before the European invasion of the Andean world many highland ethnic groups maintained small but permanent colonies both above and below their principal centers of population in order to _keep themselves supplied with the products of as many ecological zones as possible. The inhabitants of these colonies retained their homes and other rights - in the population nucleus. Nowadays many Andean communities still control lands in several adjacent, but vertically distinguished, ecological zones. The same

policy is followed by smaller groups within the community. Platt’s (1975) research among the Machas of Bolivia has shown that while each of the subdivisions of the community (moieties or major ayllus, minor ayllus, and “minimal ayllus) is based on the cold puna, it ideally has a duplicate segment located in the warm, maize-growing valley. A framework thus exists for the constant exchange of produce between close consanguineal and affinal kinsmen.

In other mountain villages, too, households strive to attain self-sufficiency, either through exchange or by securing direct access to land in several zones. Such vertical control also enables the group to utilize the labor of its members 5

most efficiently, and provides it with some insurance against the disruptive

effects of localized frosts, hailstorms, and excessive rainfall (Thomas 1973:118-119; Fonseca 1972:323-324). The nucleated village at an intermediate altitude probably corresponds to the commonest Andean settlement pattern. For example, each of the twenty or so communities in the Quebrada of Chaupiwaranga has its nucleus located at the approximate boundary between an upper agricultural and pastoral zone (jalka) and a lower agricultural zone (kichwa). The distinction is not absolute, since the

lands of the communities at the upper end of the valley lie at much higher elevations than those belonging to communities at the lower end, but is the basis

of the villagers’ economic and ritual conception of their environment. The lowest subzone of the kichwa produces maize and other subtropical crops, sometimes from irrigated fields; in the upper kichwa and lower jalka maize gradually gives way to potatoes, oca and other tubers; the highest ja/ka contains

some fields of bitter potatoes (which can be preserved by a freeze-drying process), but serves mainly as a pasture for sheep and llamas. In order to utilize aS many microclimates as possible, each family possesses between five and thirty diminutive parcels of land at different altitudes, but even so may be unable to erow all the food it requires for subsistence. In Tangor, one of the communities in the guebrada, every family has access to land on the temperate slopes devoted to potato production, and to the high mountain pastures. Land along the river valley is more unevenly distributed, however, and so warm-climate crops and products must often be obtained through a complex system of barter (Fonseca

1972:317, 324, 1974; Mayer). Far to the north, among the Saraguros of Ecuador, every family owns land in each of the highland zones, and may also

raise manioc, bananas, and sugar cane in tropical-forest plots (Belote and Belote).

Custred and Orlove (1974) have recently described a system of landholding, found throughout the highlands of central and southern Peru and Bolivia, under which individually owned parcels are grouped into large named fields supervised by the community. The authors use one of the Quechua terms, laymi, for these fields; the Aymara equivalent is avnoka; suerte and turno are among the Spanish

terms. In some areas, such as many Aymara communities in Bolivia and the island of Taquile in Lake Titicaca, every household is supposed to own at least one plot in each field, although holdings vary considerably in number and extent (Carter 1964:65-72; Matos Mar 1964:127, 141). Elsewhere some families may be excluded altogether from a relatively scarce kind of land, as Mishkin points out (1946:420): “In Kauri, for example, where there are 6 suertes of land in the pampa coinciding with 6 on the slopes, several families have no hillside land at all. Many own plots in but four or five sections of pampa.”’ Community officials control the rotational cycle in the fields, fix the time for plowing and harvesting, and afford ritual protection. All the plots in a given field

are planted to the same crop—potatoes the first year, followed by barley or / quinua the next, and then perhaps by broad beans—or left to lie fallow, when they can be used as grazing land. Some communities hold annual ceremonies at

which the local authorities (e.g., in the quebrada of Chaupiwaranga) or the mestizo district governor (e.g., in Kauri) publicly confirm the rights of the owners of parcels that are to be brought back into cultivation. This is a good time to settle old land disputes or to begin new ones (Custred and Orlove 1974: Carter 1964:69-70, Fonseca 1972:326-327, 1974; Mishkin 1946:422). It may 6

also be an occasion for reassigning plots to village families—often newlyweds—

who have inadequate lands. A parcel will not be reassigned unless an entire family line has died out, or has been so reduced through death or emigration that the remaining family members can no longer cultivate all their holdings (Carter 1964:69-70; Fonseca 1972:326-327). The concept of a communal framework that gives scope to family enterprise and permits appreciable differences in wealth is characteristic of Andean social and economic organization. On some of the steepest mountainsides, elaborate systems of transhumance make it feasible to combine stockraising with agricultural activities conducted in

entirely different ecological zones. The usual productive unit in these communities is an extended family or small localized descent group composed of from two or three to about seven nuclear families with their dependents. Such a group normally maintains a house, and controls resources, in each of the major ecological zones. Probably the best-described of the transhumance systems is that practiced in Q’ero on the eastern ridge of the Andes. The people of Q’ero

exploit a territory that descends from heavily glaciated peaks at 5,300 m. to

subtropical forest at 1,800 m. in only 30 km. of rugged trail (Webster 1973:118). The primary domiciles of Q’ero families are clustered in hamlets at the 4,000 to 4,500 meter level, which serve as the base of operations for the care

of llamas and alpacas, and for the cultivation of potatoes intended for preservation. The ceremonial center of the community is a village of stone and thatch houses located just above 3,300 m. Except during fiestas and on other

ritual occasions, this village is occupied mostly by people cultivating middle-altitude crops, the most important of which are potatoes eaten fresh. Between 1,800 and 2,000 meters is a group of wooden buildings used by people

who grow maize, sweet potatoes, and other tropical crops in forest clearings (Nifiez del Prado 1964:278-280; Webster 1973:118-120). While each family | cultivates independently, the community coordinates seasonal agricultural activities, as well as the cycles of crop rotation and fallowing. Webster explains that “family labor resources are hard pressed to maintain the tempo of the several cyclic regimes or herding and cultivation in widely dispersed localities, but are generally successful because the various tasks follow in a manageable sequence and no two tasks coincide which both require the joint labor of most

,7 of the family’ (Webster 1973:118-119). In an unpublished paper, Orlove

(1974a) describes an annual cycle of transhumance in Espinar Province that is governed by the availability of pasture rather than by agricultural activities. Peasant households maintain permanent dwellings both in the upper zone, where they have their dry-season pastures, and in the lower zone, where they move their herds in the rainy season and where they cultivate tubers and grains.

: Some communities are restricted to the highest elevations that can be

| inhabited at all. A few of these possess no cultivable lands whatever; others have | none in the temperate ecological zones and consequently cannot harvest enough

, crops to support themselves. The people of Alccavitoria, for example, whose : lands extend from 3,920 to 4,890 m. above sea level, have sufficient pasture for

! their herds of sheep, llamas, and alpacas, but can grow only a six months’ supply : of potatoes even in good years. All of these high-altitude communities specialize : in pastoralism and in the exchange of dried meat, wool, and homemade woolen

| goods for maize and other agricultural products. Although men of different : households often join together on village trading expeditions, each trades on

behalf of his own household. He may also depend heavily on ritual kinsmen and

trading partners in the host community for hospitality and for advantageous terms of exchange (Custred; Webster 1973:128-129; Fonseca 1972:327-330). Throughout the region, families that cannot produce most of their own food

strive to retain their economic autonomy through labor exchange, sharecropping, production for the market, or wage labor. The typical pattern in Uchucmarca is for a family to combine farming with some occupation such as carpentry, herding, weaving, or construction. The less land it has, the more time its members are likely to devote to these nonagricultural tasks (Brush). In the more isolated districts, men and women have to leave their communities to earn cash. If the members of the household decide that they can spare someone to work on the outside, a section of the household will be established on the coast,

in a city, or in the subtropical valleys north and east of La Paz. There is an intermittent exchange of persons between the sections. The emigrants provide lodging for relatives arriving to look for work or sell produce, and return to the altiplano themselves to attend fiestas and help with the harvest (Mayer; Stein

1961:127-128, 344-345: Isbell 1972; Buechler and Buechler 1971:43-46, 60-62). THE DEVELOPMENTAL CYCLE OF THE HOUSEHOLD

A new family’s road to social and economic independence begins with an extremely long matrimonial procedure, in the course of which bride and groom emerge symbolically from their parents’ households, are endowed with capital goods, and finally move into a house of their own. The stages of contemporary Quechua and Aymara marriage have been comprehensively described by Price (1965), Bolton, and Carter, and analyzed symbolically by Alb6é (1972) and Platt

(1975). Price and Carter are particularly concerned with the functions of the intermediate stage called watanaki or sirvanakuy in Quechua, a period of residence with the groom’s parents (or occasionally with the bride’s parents) that precedes the religious wedding. This phase can last anywhere from a few weeks

to several years; a period of from 12 to 15 months appears to be typical. A youth living in watanaki remains economically, and in matters of authority, fully subordinate to his parents. His bride’s competence as a cook, housekeeper, and herder must be demonstrated before the critical eyes of her mother-in-law. Alb6é

makes the astute observation that the germ of a new family’s autonomy has sprouted when a young husband, perhaps to his own surprise, finds himself taking his wife’s part against his mother. He goes on to remark that a married woman should attempt to mediate disputes between her own family and her husband’s, but that she will take her husband’s side even against her own kinsmen if push comes to shove (Price 1965:317; Albd 1972; Stein 1961:126). Several authors have stressed the stability of marriage in some parts of the Andes, but no one, to my knowledge, has explained why marriages are often unstable elsewhere in the region. There are certainly many communities where separations are infrequent even during the watanaki phase, and where divorce after a church wedding is very rare indeed. Price (1965:317) reports that only 17% of the watanaki unions in Vicos were dissolved between 1951 and 1960. Mishkin (1946:455) gives an even lower figure for Kauri, where “fewer than 5 percent of the trial marriages do not end in permanent contracts.” Among some Aymara, once the matrimonial process has culminated in a formal wedding, ‘the 8

kindreds are bound together by so many symbolic acts that breaking the tie is

painful and difficult” (Carter), while among other Aymara it seems to be relatively painless and easy (Tschopik 1946:545-546). Even the isolated pastoralists of Q’ero and Paratia, who do not practice watanaki in its usual form, differ sharply in their attitudes toward divorce. In both of these communities, a

young couple is considered married once the suitor’s father has paid a formal

visit to the father of the prospective bride; the Catholic wedding can be postponed indefinitely. In Q’ero, no cases of divorce are remembered. In Paratia, on the other hand, it is enough for husband and wife to disagree on something

for the arrangement to be terminated and for each spouse to return to the parental home (Nufiez del Prado 1964:285-290; Flores Ochoa 1968:75-80). A

comparative study of divorce in the Andes must await the application of a uniform statistical method to samples of marriages in a number of communities. The Catholic or civil wedding ceremony, and the indigenous ceremony that usually accompanies it, are a signal for the transfer of fields, animals, and other

property to the young couple, and hence is a crucial event in the social maturation of both men and women. The allocation of property may actually have begun years before the wedding, however, and will probably not become definitive until after the parents’ deaths. In the Callej6n de Huaylas, land, tools, animals, and clothing are earmarked for each child from the time of his first haircutting, a ritual held there when he is about a year old. His first plot of land is bought with the money that relatives contribute as they snip off locks of his hair (Price 1965:319; Stein 1961:54, 279-280). The sons and daughters of the pastoralists of Paratia are assigned alpacas at birth, at baptism, and at the ritual haircutting, which takes place before they reach the age of seven. The alpacas contributed by the godfather of the haircutting must be replaced by the child’s own father, if necessary, so that the child is assured of coming into possession of a small herd at marriage (Flores Ochoa 1968:69, 78). Similar customs have been reported from southern Cuzco and northern Arequipa Departments (Orlove and Custred 1974), and must surely be practiced elsewhere. It is usual for parents to augment a child’s property at marriage by giving him control of a major portion

of his inheritance. The matrimonial godparents normally contribute some movable property, the amount depending on their wealth. The long interval

between betrothal and wedding gives the two families and their kin an opportunity to raise money for the wedding expenses and to assemble the property that will constitute the estate of the new household. There is undoubtedly a great deal of variation, even within the same village, in

the exact kind and quantity of property donated, in the identities of the secondary donors from among the kinsmen of the bride and groom, and in the

timing of the ceremonial transfers. It appears that most of the property is usually transferred either at the time of the church wedding or afterward, when the new household is establishing itself. The Bolivian Aymara newlyweds whose marriage was observed by Carter first received sums of money, from the bride’s mother’s sister as well as from their parents and their matrimonial godparents, at the feasts accompanying the wedding itself. (I was particularly intrigued by the Aymara custom of adoring large amounts of cash with alcohol and kisses.) The ceremonial transfers of property are all aimed at uniting, at least symbolically, the contributions made by the two sides. During the Carnival Week that followed

the wedding, first the bride’s, and then the groom’s parents provided some household equipment and set aside some domestic animals for the couple. The 9

inheritances were symbolically merged by a “sheep marriage.” Later, at a ceremony called satt’api, the households of the groom’s parents, the bride’s

parents, and the godparents planted a field for the newlyweds with a cross-section of all the varieties of potato they possessed. Finally, at the utacht” api, a roof was put on the new family home, the front being constructed by men from the groom’s kindred, the rear by men from the bride’s. The significance of the relationships created by marriage is underlined by the dramatized reluctance of the parents and their kinsmen to allow them to come into being. As a counterpoint to the gradual formation of a new family estate, the marriage ceremonies first acknowledge, and then symbolically overcome,

two sorts of hostility: that of the parents toward their children, who are becoming at least partially emancipated; and that between the kindreds of bride

and groom, one of which loses a daughter while the other must assimilate a stranger. These rituals are best described for the Bolivian Aymara (Carter; Alb6

1972). They may, of course, take a different form elsewhere in the Andean region. The parents have several opportunities to display severity toward their adult children. Before agreeing to the betrothal, the girl’s parents catechize the

kneeling couple on the subject of their future behavior. And even after bestowing their blessing on the newlyweds, both sets of parents deliver speeches

emphasizing the worthless traits of their children’s characters (Carter). Albd compares the wooing of the girl’s kinsmen by those of the youth to the storming

of a fortress. The parents of the prospective groom must kneel before the parents of the bride to plead for her hand on their son’s behalf. As the groom’s party escorts the bride away from her home, her kinsmen make a mock sally against them, and her father must be prevented by force from following her (Carter). As Alb6 points out, the groom’s kindred symbolically enacts the male

role, and the bride’s the female role, during these proceedings. They thus recreate the opposition between the male and female principles that is a recurrent theme in Andean cosmology and ritual (Platt 1975). Their conflict is mediated in part by the matrimonial godparents, whose role will be described below. The final reconciliation, however, is enacted only at the house-raising, and demands the participation of the community as a whole. At the conclusion of this ceremony, a dance is held in which people pair off without regard to sex or kinship affiliations. The dancers first threaten one another, then whip one another, and at last display complete amity (Carter). The parents’ unwillingness to emancipate their children is sometimes real as well as symbolic. A father may use his power over his son’s property to delay the son’s marriage. In the 1950s, some young men in the Callején de Huaylas stayed unmarried until they were past their mid-twenties, because they were needed to fulfill the household’s obligations to an hacienda, or because the family’s own

fields could not be cultivated without their assistance (Stein 1961:47-48). Conversely, land reform and opportunities for wage labor on the outside have enabled many young men to establish their own households much earlier than would have been possible a generation ago. In the Aymara community of Compi, for example, a couple may now move into a new house even before the formal wedding (Stein 1961:47-48, 345; Buechler and Buechler 1971: 42-43). Even after all their children have married, parents retain a portion of their

land or herd that is probably about equal in size to the share allocated each child. The nuclear family of the youngest son, or of the last son to malry, usually resides permanently with his parents. In return for caring for his parents 10

until they die, he generally receives the house and other property they have

reserved for themselves, in addition to a normal share of the rest of the inheritance (Alb6 1972; Buechler and Buechler 1971:40, 43; Flores Ochoa 1968:30-31; and other sources). There are some variations in local customs, as might be expected. In Tangor even the land reserved for the parents’ support is designated in advance as the future property of particular heirs, although the youngest son inherits the family home and the parents’ movable possessions (Mayer). On the island of Taquile, the rights of the youngest son have become stereotyped to the point that he receives an extra share of the inheritance even if

he was too young to care for his parents (Matos Mar 1964:125-126). The responsibility of caring for the parents may be assumed by a daughter and her husband in the absence of sons, or by a grandchild if the parents are still capable of rearing a child when the last of their sons marries. Another alternative is to

share the task of caring for aged parents among the households of all the : children (Custred; Bolton; Orlove and Custred 1974; Webster). The attachment of married offspring to their parents, as well as to one another, is strengthened by the survival of the parental household. It provides them with a meeting place and an alternative domicile (Buechler and Buechler 1971:39-40; Vazquez and Holmberg 1966:294). They may also join forces to carry out the tasks that are regarded as repayment for the care they received in childhood (Orlove 1974b). A father, like other persons in a superior position,

| has the right to call on his children to render unpaid agricultural labor, to undertake herding tasks, and to trade on his behalf; he expects them to take his side in any dispute. In retum, the father will assist his children with loans of money and gifts of building supplies and other material goods when he can (Alb6 1972; Orlove and Custred 1974). Since cases of neglected old people are not entirely unknown, “some parents make certain of their children’s care and attention by retaining their property until they die.” The love and respect that elderly people in general, and parents in particular, inspire is usually sufficient to assure them of good treatment, however (Stein 1961:162-164; the latter author and Buechler and Buechler 1971 :40 give specific instances of neglect). Sibling ties, especially when reinforced by residential proximity, are usually reason enough for acts of mutual assistance and generosity between households. The families of married brothers or sisters occupying different floors of the same house, or houses opening onto the same patio, or sharing huts in high mountain

pastures, are likely to help one another in daily tasks for a lifetime (Brush; Custred; Orlove 1974b). People who give substantial aid to their brothers or sisters generally expect to be repaid, however, and under certain circumstances help can be refused altogether. Siblings are probably most dependent on each other as adolescents or young adults, just after their parents have died or become less active as farmers, traders, Or wage-earners. When a man dies leaving minor children, his eldest son often

becomes their guardian and the distributor of the inheritance (Buechler and Buechler 1971:41; Matos Mar 1964:125). Elder brothers tend to act as central figures for the dispensation of favors, gifts, and assistance. There is an implicit understanding that younger brothers will later be in a position to return the favors (Long). Once all the siblings have started households of their own, however, the authority of the eldest brother tends to disappear. (The exceptions are pastoral communities where siblings continue holding property in common; these will be discussed in the next section.) The relationship between a pair of 11

siblings (or other relatives) may be either egalitarian or hierarchical, depending largely on factors outside the domain of kinship, such as personality, wealth, and ties to influential persons (Long; Albé 1972; Vazquez and Holmberg 1966:294).

Long illustrates the latter generalization with two case studies of entrepreneurs in Matahuasi. Oswaldo received help in setting up a tailor shop

from two of his brothers and a sister, but not from his other siblings. He maintains relations of “balanced reciprocity”’ with the ones who helped him, but is by no means dependent on them. In contrast to Oswaldo, Julio, the owner of

a complex enterprise, had several siblings and brothers-in-law working as his subordinates in various branches of the business. The death of either parent in Julio’s or his wife’s family could seriously affect the pattern of authority by making it easier for relatives of the same generation to drift apart. The phase of the developmental cycle is thus one variable affecting the solidarity of the sibling group, just as it affects the composition of the household. SHARED AND DIVIDED INHERITANCES

In most Andean peasant communities, the most important jural link between adult siblings is their shared patrimony. All the authors who discuss inheritance agree that the patrimony is not definitively allocated to the children until after the deaths of the parents, and sometimes not for another generation after that (Alb6 1972; Bolton; Carter; Custred; Webster; Mishkin 1946:422: Buechler and Buechler 1971:43; Stein 1961:48; Carter 1964:55). The retention of legal title

to land works to the parents’ advantage, as was mentioned in the previous section. They can punish unfilial behavior, or show favoritism, by later giving the

same plot of land to another child, or even to a sibling’s child, as has been reported for Cusipata (Malengreau 1972).

As a general rule, the inherited properties of husband and wife are never brought under common ownership. At Hualcan, and undoubtedly elsewhere in the region, the products of the joint agricultural enterprise are divided at the harvest, especially if there is a surplus which can be sold (Stein 1961:54: Albé 1972; Belote and Belote). Among the Saraguros, only property acquired after marriage is regarded as jointly owned by the spouses (Belote and Belote). The property rights of an adult who dies childless revert to his or her parents or siblings. These residual claims represent a married person’s enduring ties to consanguineal kinsmen, even after day-to-day control over resources has been transferred to a new family of procreation. Broken ties may be reflected in an altered pattern of landholding. In Kauri, “‘disputes also occur in which one member of a family will insist upon separate demarcation of his own plot within the family land” (Mishkin 1946:422).

If the legally binding division of the patrimony is postponed until long after the parents’ deaths, the sibling group becomes for a time the collective owner of the lands that are utilized by its members and their families. The sibling group’s estate may even remain undivided for another generation, and thus provide the material basis for the sort of localized cognatic descent group, comprising the

descendants of a common pair of grandparents, that I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter. Collective Ownership or control of cultivated land and pastures, and a sense of solidarity among the members of the group, are more likely to arise in areas where valuable land is scarce and the community 12

consists of scattered hamlets, since this settlement pattern inhibits interaction among kinsmen who do not live together (Orlove and Custred 1974). Organized _ groups of families under centralized authority are also more efficient than single households at managing herding operations, and especially the complex division of labor required to carry on several integrated herding and cultivating cycles

(Webster 1973:124). All these conditions are fulfilled in the pastoral communities at the highest elevations in the south-central Andes, which is where

such localized descent groups in fact occur. They have been reported from Alccavitoria in the Province of Chumbivilcas (Custred; Orlove and Custred 1974), from the Province of Espinar (Orlove 1974b; Orlove and Custred 1974), from Q’ero in the Province of Paucartambo (Nufiez del Prado 1964; Webster 1973 and this volume), and from the district of Paratia in the Province of Lampa (Flores Ochoa 1968). The structure of a localized descent group in a place like Q’ero or Alccavitoria resembles that of a sibling group in a Mountain Lapp band. Despite the existence of a weak norm of virilocal residence (followed by 65% of the couples in Q’ero), a married couple generally chooses to join the wealthier and more influential of

the two parental descent groups, which tends to be the one possessing more grazing land and other resources. When a family has no sons, at least one of the daughters and her husband inevitably reside uxorilocally to care for her parents and to make use of their land. Neolocal residence, away from any descent group, is an acceptable alternative for households with enough working members and sufficient land at their disposal (Webster 1973:123; Orlove 1974b; Custred). Animals are regularly inherited by children of both sexes, and consequently accrue to the herd of the descent group that attracts the young couple (Webster 1973:123; Flores Ochoa 1968:78). Rules governing the inheritance of land are more variable and complicated, but tend to concentrate both cultivated fields and pastures in the hands of resident members of the descent group. In Q’ero, females rarely receive land if residence is virilocal; males marrying uxorilocally

can usually contribute a small portion of land to the estates of their wives’ kinsmen (Webster 1973:123). In Alccavitoria, small estates are shared by the resident members, who are generally male, but larger ones are divided among all the children of the family (Custred). In the Province of Espinar, a person who moves to the descent group of his spouse renounces rights in the group of his birth in return for a cash settlement (Orlove 1974b). Authority in economic, social, and ritual affairs is mostly exercised within the descent group. The elders of the group usually exert a preponderance of control

, 13

and influence over the younger members, their offspring, and their claims to | property, regardless of whether the latter are residing patrilocally or matrilocally

: (Webster 1973:123; see also Flores Ochoa 1968:80). Obligations to kinsmen : residing in other parts of the community are correspondingly reduced, which would not necessarily be the case in a nucleated village. Another characteristic of

| the pastoralists’ kinship system is that one of the elder sons succeeds to much of

| the authority formerly wielded by the father. He acts as spokesman for his siblings in marriage arrangements and other negotiations, and must take

precedence over his younger brothers in filling communal offices (Webster). But Webster (1973:124) also emphasizes that: Whereas elder siblings enjoy priority in the authority which devolves among kin, younger siblings have priority in the inheritance of larger and choicer portions of the herd, land, domiciles, and camps, and usually come to control the feast house. As a

consequence, elder siblings early begin the quest for a spouse with an assured inheritance

and access to promising pastures, usually achieved in the case of males through

matrilocal marriage into another valley. The youngest son eventually succeeds to the residence and property remaining with his parents, sometimes shared with brothers who have maintained patrilocal residence in a promising herding habitat.

Webster is surely correct in identifying the separate inheritance of the father’s

authority and the core of his property as a mechanism for the dispersal of descent groups.

The long interval between the traditional marriage ritual and the Catholic wedding in Q’ero and Paratia appears to be connected with the married couple’s

junior status within the localized descent group. Husband and wife remain subordinate to one set of parents until their own children have reached the age of six or eight, when they are old enough to herd alpacas without supervision

(Custred; Webster 1973:123). If the adults had to care for the family herd themselves, they would be too busy to attend to their fields further down the mountainside. The prevailing poverty (Nufiez del Prado calls the typical Q’ero family herd ‘“‘el rebafio miserable’’) makes many couples prefer the advantages of shared resources and cooperative labor over emancipation. But even those who

want to establish their own residence and to take control over their own

property must wait for the head of their descent group to arrange a religious wedding for them; the pastoralists follow the general Andean custom in this respect, although their weddings are performed much later in life (Webster 1973:124). It is possible that the assumption of the dignity of alcalde, which Nufiez del Prado (1964:290-292) gives as a motive for Catholic marriage in Q’ero, also marks a step in the attainment of social matunity.

It seems to me that the descent groups described by Webster, Custred, and Orlove resemble federations of nuclear families more than they do corporate lineages, to which these authors occasionally compare them. In the first place, the families associated in a landholding group have the same sorts of exchange relationships with each other that they have with other kinsfolk. They rely on one another for mutual assistance, especially in construction and in plowing and other heavy agricultural work, and undoubtedly supply one another with food and goods in time of crisis. But anyone who helps to build a house is regarded as engaging in mink a labor and must be given meat, potatoes, chicha or alcohol, and coca, and any household that helps another with its agricultural work must also be repaid with an equivalent amount of similar labor (ayni) or in food and

drink (mink a), whether or not both belong to the same landholding group (Custred). (The households of brothers in Espinar who cultivate their land. together and then divide the harvest evenly may be an exception to this generalization.) In most societies that have corporate unilineal groups, no account is kept of goods and services provided by fellow lineage members, exchange being limited to dealings with outsiders, especially affines. In the second place, the effective boundary between members and nonmembers of a landholding group in Alccavitoria or Q’ero is defined primarily by residence and not by genealogical criteria. An affine can become a member of such a group for almost all purposes. A man who resides with his wife’s kinsmen has the same access to her group’s resources that her brothers have, although in Q’ero his status as a “‘wife-taker” puts him at a disadvantage. He can even deputize for his wife in public affairs, assuming the status to which she is entitled by virtue of her relative seniority in the sibling group (Webster; Webster 1973:124). The 14

pastoralists have adapted their social structure to a harsh and_ peculiar environment not by creating new institutions, but—to put the matter in a nutshell—by stretching out the developmental cycle of the domestic group. THE QUESTION OF PATRILINEAL OR PARALLEL DESCENT

In the nucleated villages, as among the people who practice transhumance at

high altitudes, virilocal residence is preferred and sons take priority in the division of the inheritance, particularly when land is scarce. The favoritism shown toward male offspring reflects a cultural ideal rather than economic requirements, since the division of labor by sex is not rigid and a day’s work by a woman is, in fact, reckoned as the equivalent of the same amount of work by a man. The inequality of the sexes in matters of inheritance was probably greater in the last century than it is now, especially among the Aymara and around Lake Titicaca. In some Aymara communities, all the daughters traditionally inherited a share of the parental lands equal to that of a single son (Carter 1964:55). On

the island of Taquile, the share of a man’s land inherited by all his daughters together amounted to no more than a quarter of the total (the rest went to his brothers if he had no sons), and became the property of their husbands when they married (Matos Mar 1964:123, 126). National laws requiring an equal division of the estate among all the children, when not evaded, are said to have

increased litigation and sown confusion (Mishkin 1946:456; Tschopik 1946:546). Yet everywhere some married men reside uxorilocally, usually because they have several brothers, while their wives have few or none, or because their wives come from families wealthier than their own (Alb6 1972; Hickman and Stuart). An out-marrying son may even be equated with an out-marrying daughter: among some Bolivian Aymara any child who leaves the vicinity of the paternal home at marriage is assigned a few furrows in each parcel

as recompense for occasionally helping his or her father or elder brother (Buechler and Buechler 1971 :40). Neolocal residence is increasing among the Bolivian Aymara (and probably in

other areas, too) as young couples take advantage of opportunities to settle on uncultivated or abandoned land. Land reform encourages neolocal residence by making more land available, and indirectly, by encouraging the formation of new, small market towns (Alb6 1972). Neolocal residence increased in the

former hacienda of Vicos, partly because population pressure forced the community to grant lands in places distant from the center of the village and from the homes of the heads of extended families (Vazquez and Holmberg 1966:293-294). - A long-standing preference for patrilocal residence has, however, produced

local aggregations of kinsmen with the same surname in various parts of the region (Alb6 1972; Mayer). Some authors are also convinced of the existence of true patrilineages (castas), which have been reported from Vicos (Price 1965; Vazquez and Holmberg 1966), Hualcan (Stein 1961), and ‘‘Puquio Panpan”’ in

the Department of Hudnuco (Burchard 1972). In all three communities, the castas are associated with patrilineally inherited surnames, although not all persons bearing the same surname necessarily belong to the same casta, and sexual relations are prohibited between ego and any member of his father’s or mother’s casta. Alb6 (1972) and Bolton report that castas have both of these characteristics among the Bolivian Aymara and the Qolla, but neither author 15

refers to castas as descent groups. In Chuschi (Department of Ayacucho), where the term casta is unknown, a prohibition against sexual relations with persons bearing one’s own paternal or maternal surname is nevertheless observed (Isbell).

Finally, in Tangor, a casta comprises all the descendants of a pair of grandparents, through either sons or daughters; it thus corresponds to the cognatic landholding group reported from several other localities (Mayer). Patrilineal genealogies are occasionally used to support claims to land both in |

Vicos and in the Qollao (Vazquez and Holmberg 1966:300; Bolton). Bolton suspects, however, that the descendants of female members assist the casta on such occasions.

The castas of Vicos, like the cognatic landholding groups discussed earlier, provide channels for inter-family cooperation in religious ceremonies, public festivals, and communal labor. Mutual assistance is limited to persons who are no more than three or four generations removed from a common ancestor, so that

the larger castas exhibit little solidarity. Distant kinsmen bearing the same paternal surname join together in public verbal duels and brawls, when they feel that their honor and reputations are at stake (Vazquez and Holmberg 1966:295, 298-299; Price 1965:319-320). Another ethnographer maintains that only a few

Vicos castas are strong enough, either in number or in resources, to provide consistent examples of multifamily corporate unity (Fried 1962:773-774, 779). Neither Stein (1961:119-121) nor Burchard (1972) attributes any political or economic functions to the castas of Hualcan or ‘“‘Puquio Panpan.’”’ The Andean

castas seem to illustrate Leach’s (1973) contention that when surnames are inherited in the male line in bilateral societies, successful men are likely to stress

long agnatic pedigrees in order to increase their prestige, and thus create the illusion that patrilineages exist as corporate groups. Zuidema has suggested that the Inca kinship system recognized both male and female lines of descent. It is just possible, according to this author, that names were inherited in parallel lines from parent to child, or bestowed in parallel lines

by ritual kinsmen. There is a greater possibility that there was parallel transmission of certain land rights, ritual mghts and obligations, and ritual objects. Recent ethnographic data from scattered localities give some support to Zuidema’s conjectures. For example, the belief that boy babies are implanted in the womb by the father, while girl babies are made by the mother herself after the father has stimulated her, has been reported in almost identical form from

the Saraguros of Ecuador (Belote and Belote) and from the Qollahuayas of Bolivia (Bastien 1974). Hence it is considered natural for sons to resemble their

fathers and daughters their mothers, cross-sex identifications being rejected (Belote and Belote). Elsewhere persons bearing the same surname and coming from the same neighborhood either benefit or suffer from a vague belief in the patrilineal transmission of physical characteristics and personality traits ( Mayer; Vazquez and Holmberg 1966:293). The Saraguros are also unusual in having parallel hierarchies of religious offices for men and women, and in possessing sacred images that can be inherited only in the female line (Belote and Belote). Traces of parallel descent also occur in the conservative communities of Q’ero and Chuschi, where many men were assuming their fathers’ names, and many women their mother’s names, in the 17th and 18th centuries (Nufiez del Prado

1964:284-285; Isbell). Webster found that, in Q’ero, persons descended from a | common ancestor in parallel lines (i.e., the descendants of two brothers in the

male line or of two sisters in the female line) recognized a mutual relationship for several generations longer than those descended from a brother and a sister. In Chuschi, “preferred inheritance of land, goods, and animals is parallel. People state that men should inherit from their fathers and women should inherit from their mothers” (Isbell). There are indications, then, that an idiom of parallel descent has persisted in some present-day Andean societies as a way of thinking about kinship. This assumption may explain both the emphasis on patrilineal genealogies discussed above and a puzzling aspect of affinal relationships to be considered in a later section. KINSHIP NETWORKS AND FORMS OF EXCHANGE

‘As if it were in the nature of the universe, relatives aid one another” (Stein 1961:114), but some give help more readily than others. Almost everyone who is not still dependent on his parents or on the elders of a landholding group is free to activate some of his consanguineal, affinal, and ritual relationships and to

: neglect others. Assistance once given must normally be repaid in kind, so the yparticipants in one task, or the partners in a particular transaction, are likely to cooperate again in the future. Hence the benefits to be derived from activating some relationship are always weighed against the obligations that are certain to be incurred. The goal of many households is to remain as nearly self-sufficient as possible (Belote and Belote; Bolton 1973c; Brush; Mayer; Stein 1961:177). The nuclear family, the strongest solidary group, is surrounded by concentric circles of decreasing obligation and increasing suspicion (Stein 1961:335-336). The duty to offer assistance seems to be nearly inescapable only within the same household and between parents and children. While brothers find it difficult to - deny one another’s requests, they may do so on occasion. As the Belotes put it: “Even between siblings there may be no visiting between households, no more than casual greetings upon meeting on the trails or in town, no borrowing or lending of tools, money, or other goods.” Fried describes the plight of a sick Vicos man who was unable to ask any of his three brothers to replace him at work, because he had quarreled with them over land. Even without the hostility generated by a disputed inheritance, siblings may be estranged by a difference in occupation or place of residence, or just by the necessity of favoring their own children in the struggle for existence (Fried 1962:774-776; Bolton 1973c; Long; Belote and Belote). First cousins generally stand at the boundary beyond which

regular cooperation is no longer expected. Many close kinsmen whose relationship is inactive for everyday purposes continue to attend one another’s life-crisis rituals and to assist one another in sponsoring fiestas, since failure to do so would be tantamount to a denial of the kinship bond (Belote and Belote; Webster 1973:125). Whether people cooperate frequently or rarely, however, they act as representatives of their households, and not just in their personal

, 17

capacities.

There is a rough correspondence between different kinds of reciprocity and

degrees of social distance, as Mayer has shown in his careful analysis of the forms

of exchange practiced in Tangor. He agrees with Albdé (1972) and Orlove (1974b) that on ordinary occasions only the families of parents and children, and sometimes the families of siblings, help one another without being asked (de

voluntad) and without expecting any precise repayment. A more formal exchange of equivalent goods and services is known as waje-waje in Tangor and

the other communities of the Quebrada of Chaupiwaranga, as rantin in the Callejon de Huaylas (Stein 1961:109-110), and as ayni in most other places. Ayni is regularly utilized as a method for assembling teams of workers to plow,

cultivate, or harvest, and for obtaining temporary assistance in herding or domestic tasks. The household that recruits outside labor makes an implicit promise that it will later provide a man, a woman, or an older child to work the same number of days at a similar task. Workers in ayni also have to be supplied with food, coca, and home-brewed beer or cane alcohol (Fried 1962:775; Mayer

1972: Orlove 1974b: Mishkin 1946:419-420; Stein 1961:109-110; Carter 1964:49). Avni partners are usually close consanguineal or affinal relatives; a man often exchanges labor with his father and brothers once he establishes his own household (Tschopik 1946:543; Carter 1964:49). Nonkinsmen seldom exchange services on an ayni basis. Loans of large quantities of foodstuffs, which may be essential after a bad harvest, are also regarded as a form of ayni (Matos Mar 1964:120-121). Shipton (1975) suggests that the more highly valued crops,

especially maize, may only be exchanged between households that feel themselves to be closely related. Entering into an ayni relationship implies a longterm commitment, regardless of the purpose intended (Carter 1964:49-50; Orlove and Custred 1974). If exchanges connected with feasts are taken into

account, a household’s ayni network is likely to include everyone whom members of the family actually treat as a near kinsman, even though they acknowledge genealogical relationships to many other people.

A large job, such as harvesting a field of grain or constructing a house or corral, may be the occasion for a mink’a, which will be attended by distant kin and unrelated neighbors, as well as by some of the sponsor’s ayni partners. A festive mink a@ organized by a well-to-do older man resembles the parties held at

fiesta time. The organizer provides his workers and their families with great quantities of holiday foods, plenty of alcohol, and sometimes with a musician to enliven their labors. Those who have helped with the harvest receive a share of the crop or the traditional equivalent in money. A craftsman engages in mink’a when he exchanges his products for customary gifts. When shorn of its festive trappings, minka blends into wage labor (jornal), an arrangement considered inappropnate between kinsmen. Casual workers, who are often poor or landless

villagers, receive besides their pay only two ordinary meals a day, coca, sometimes alcohol, and perhaps a small share of the crop harvested (Mayer; Orlove and Custred 1974; Stein 1961:107-110; Carter 1964:49-50; Malengreau 1972).

The politico-religious officials rely on their kinsmen and a few friends to help them prepare and stage the fiesta that climaxes their year in office, although the

officials themselves must bear the brunt of the expenses (Carter 1964:42: Webster 1973:125). According to Mayer, the close kinsmen of a fiesta sponsor

contribute work, food, and money de voluntad, as an expression of their sentiments. If these contributions are insufficient, the sponsor may have to rely

on ayni (waje-waje) labor that must be reciprocated when the donor holds office, or on loans that must be repaid within a year. (The Buechlers’ statement,

that all contributions to fiestas are considered ayni and must be repaid with interest, seems overly rigid, unless the Aymara are more formal than the Tangorinos in these matters.) Some of the major preliminaries to the fiesta are beyond the capabilities of the small circle of near kinsmen, however. When the time comes to harvest a cash crop that has been planted to defray the sponsor’s 18

costs, to chop firewood for baking the bread to be consumed at the fiesta, or to assemble a troupe of dancers, the sponsor recruits all available kinsmen and compadres for a kind of mink’a called manay in Tangor. A final demonstration of kinship and other ties occurs at the private party that is held at the same time as the public fiesta. Real and figurative kinsmen, friends and neighbors, and other officials, past, present, and future, all turn up at the party, bringing plates of food or other small contributions. The expectation of reciprocity extends to

this ceremonial occasion, as Isbell demonstrates: Guests attending a feast sponsored by an alcalde of Chuschi were served anything from a bowl of soup to a large piece of meat, depending on how much cash and cane alcohol they had brought (Mayer; Buechler and Buechler 1971:68-76; Stein 1961:107; Fonseca 1972:325; Isbell; Belote and Belote). Trade between real or figurative kinsmen differs from buying and selling in

the market in the same way that the exchange of services in ayni differs from wage labor. In Uchucmarca, for example, maize, wheat, and other surplus crops

are exchanged with kinsmen or other comuneros at a lower rate than the identical quantity would bring if it were sold for cash in the market town (Brush). The herders who live in the highlands north of Lake Lauricocha and

° their trading partners in the Quebrada of Chaupiwaranga and the valley of the Ambo and Huanuco show one another the same consideration. The partners are willing to accept a lower price for their mutton and maize than they could get if they sold their produce “‘for silver,’ because they derive other benefits from their relationship. A trading partnership, like an active kinship tie, represents a commitment to engage in a series of transactions—a maize field in the valley may be temporarily exchanged for a potato field on the upper slopes, for example, or a highlander may drive pack mules in return for a sack of grain—which gives each partner access to the other’s ecological zone (Fonseca 1972:327-330). Mink’a and sharecropping (sociedad) arrangements, while not necessarily , hierarchical, can give rise to enduring asymmetrical relationships that transform

poorer peasants into clients of richer ones. For the relationship to retain its reciprocal character, the parties must take turns playing the role of employer. They cannot do so if one of them has only his labor to offer. In Uchucmarca, where landholdings are unevenly distributed among the ecological zones, the borrowing and lending of fields in return for a share of the harvest permits many families to produce a greater variety of crops (Brush). Elsewhere sharecropping may be a matter of survival for families with insufficient land or with no land at all. Such families become dependent on peasant landowners, who may imitate

hacendados by requiring their clients to work the patron’s land three days a week, or to send their children to herd the patron’s sheep. The resemblance of asymmetric mink ‘a to wage labor has already been mentioned. In a case recorded

by Orlove from the Province of Espinar, one man owned most of the sheep in the flock of his localized descent group (rancho) and utilized various forms of exchange to obtain shepherds. The reduction of siblings, godchildren, and other relatives to the status of clients provides a rather brutal demonstration of the autonomy of the nuclear family (Mayer; Orlove 1974b, 1974c; Orlove and Custred 1974).

Some poor families are dependent on richer ones even in a traditional community like Q’ero, since resources are seldom distributed in accordance with family size (Webster). It is often said, however, that differences in wealth and power are being augmented because participation in the market economy makes 19

it possible for some peasant families to purchase land and domestic animals far in excess of their subsistence requirements (Albé 1972; Malengreau 1972). Some of the mestizo owners of the island of Taquile were bought out by groups of the more prosperous Indian families, who had pooled their earnings from crop sales

and wage labor (Matos Mar 1964:131-132). Other men get their start as middlemen transporting village products for sale in other communities or in the

cities, and later invest their profits in farmland and livestock (Orlove 1974b; Fonseca 1972:337). Unless they escape into mestizo society, however, these “Indian bosses” (gamonales indios) will probably be forced to expand much of their wealth to meet the demands of reciprocity. Their kinsmen are likely to be insistent in asking for loans and contributions, and the community as a whole will expect them to assume positions of leadership and sponsor feasts, and even

to sell some of their surplus land to other comuneros (Fonseca 1972:327; Malengreau 1972; Matos Mar 1964:140-141; Webster 1973:125-126). The ethos of Andean systems of exchange is egalitarian. AFFINAL RELATIONSHIPS

A logical consequence of treating married couples as structural units is the equation of affines with consanguines, at least in everyday life. That is to say, a relationship with one’s married brother or sister necessarily implies a similar

relationship with the sibling’s spouse. Some of the ethnographic data that support this deduction have already been referred to. Men tend to collaborate more frequently and more closely with their sisters’ husbands or wives’ brothers than with their own cousins (Stein 1961:128-129, 137). In fact, Long asserts that: ...In many instances bonds between brothers-in-law tend to replace the close ties between brothers which often diminish after each of them has attained independence from the parental home. ... Relations with parents-in-law and in-laws of the parental generation are treated with the same degree of deference as one’s own parents, certainly during the early years of marriage when the son- or daughter-in-law may live in the household of his or her spouse. On their part, parents-in-law are supposed to assist the spouse just as they would their son or daughter.

The unusual custom of village exogamy in “Puquio Panpdn”’ and neighboring

communities assumes that brothers-in-law and other affines will practice reciprocity. A man marries a woman from another village so that he will be able to exchange low-altitude crops for high-altitude ones, cultivate land in another ecological zone as a sharecropper, or borrow plow-oxen from his brother-in-law (Burchard 1972).

The equation of siblings and siblings-in-law is sometimes facilitated by atranging marriages between affinal kin. This end is accomplished by sister exchange, by the marriage of several brothers in one family to several sisters in another, by the marriage of two siblings to two cousins, and by the levirate and sororate. Affines of different generations are considered suitable partners, too, so there is an occasional marriage between a woman’s brother and her husband’s

daughter by another man (Bolton; Belote and Belote; Isbell: Tschopik 1946:544). The Belotes suggest that the principal function of marriages of this

kind is the limitation of obligations through the consolidation of kinship

networks. Another important result is the creation of a double bond between couples. A wife whose brother is married to her husband’s sister, for example, is 20

less likely to begrudge the help that her husband may give to his sister or to her children. The sharing of wives by two Qolla men has similar effects (Bolton 1973c).

In addition to the symmetrical relationship between siblings-in-law, which

appears to affect behavior throughout the Andean region, an asymmetrical distinction between spouse-givers and spouse-takers is observed in some areas, mainly on ceremonial occasions. Four examples of asymmetry in affinal roles were reported in papers presented at the Symposium. Three of these occur in communities which show traces of parallel descent.

Among the Saraguros, married men and women = sponsor fiestas independently of their spouses, a practice the Belotes attribute to the concept of parallel descent. The sponsor’s brothers and sisters and their spouses and unmarried children, along with the sponsor’s own children and children-in-law, parents and parents-in-law, and children’s parents-in-law, constitute the “‘kitchen

kin”? who help prepare the food that the sponsor’s spouse’s siblings and other ‘living-room kin” will eat. The sponsor’s husband’s or wife’s siblings participate

in the fiesta in less intimate roles. They are among the persons whom the sponsor chooses as mufedores or empleados to help pay for masses, to provide

incense and uncooked food, or to obtain musicians and costumed dancers (Belote and Belote).

In Tangor (Mayer), Chuschi (Isbell), and Q’ero (Webster 1973 and this volume), the daughter’s husband and sister’s husband (their term for both is masha or masa in the Ayacucho dialect of Quechua, g’’ata in the Cuzco dialect) are opposed either to the wife’s father and wife’s brother (kaka in Cuzco) or to the brother’s wife and son’s wife (lumtshu or llumchu in Ayacucho, gachun in Cuzco). The ritual opposition of wife-givers and wife-takers, or of inmarried women and inmarried men, takes a somewhat different form in each of the three

localities. A common feature is the principal masha’s or q’ata’s role as the largest contributor and master of ceremonies at feasts sponsored by his wife’s father or brother. Another, at least in Tangor and Chuschi, is the correlation of

the masha/lumtshu opposition with a symbolic conflict between male and female principles. Since full descriptions of these affinal relationships are now available, I will limit myself to indicating some of the structurally significant differences among the three localities.

In Tangor, the masha/lumtshu relationship is entirely compatible with the bilateral mode of reckoning kinship and with the autonomy of the nuclear family. At roof-raisings, funerals, and fiestas, daughters and sisters are identified

with their husbands as mashas, and sons and brothers with their wives as lumtshus. The assignment of outmarried consanguines to affinal categories draws a symbolic boundary around the sponsor’s household. The mashas play a male role at these ceremonies: they provide the vertical components of the new roof,

and supply the food and drink that the Jumtshus will prepare and serve at the funeral (Mayer).

I mentioned earlier in this chapter that the semipastoral communities of

Chuschi and Q’ero still make some use of the principle of parallel descent, as a

way of regulating inheritance and as a criterion for classifying kinsmen, respectively. They are alike, too, in recognizing cognatic descent groups, generally consisting of the descendants of a pair of grandparents (such groups are , called ayllu in Chuschi) as ritual and economic units (Isbell; Webster 1973:125). In certain contexts, the wife-takers (masa in Chuschi, qg’ata in Q’ero) are not 21

only treated as persons outside the descent group, but as occupying a lower status than the wife-givers (Isbell; Webster 1973:124). The affinal categories seem to be identified with parallel descent lines in terminology and behavior. Webster’s analysis of Q’ero kinship terminology reveals a category of kakay, which the author glosses as “‘wife-givers” and which also stands in relation to ego’s cognatic kin group as male descent lines to female; the kakay include ego’s mother’s brother, his wife’s brother, and his son’s wife, among other relatives. The category of q’atayniy (“‘wife-takers”), which includes ego’s father’s sisters and their husbands, his sisters and their husbands, and his daughters’ husbands, gives rise to female lines running parallel to ego’s own kin group. The way in

which Spanish affinal terms are used in Q’ero indicates that all kakay are classified as belonging to the wife’s father’s generation, and all qatayniy as belonging to the generation of the daughter’s husband (Webster). The material support of the masas is crucial when the father or brother of their wives accepts responsibility for a communal fiesta in Chuschi. The sponsor’s masas play female

roles at his feast: they serve chicha to the other guests, for example. The principal masa, in fact, apparently takes on both male and female attributes, behaving as a clown or trickster (Isbell). Since the sister’s husband may become

the ancestor of a female line corresponding to the male line founded by his wife’s brother, the female role would seem to suit him better than the male role he plays in Tangor.

The distinction between consanguines and affines can be ignored or overridden even in these communities, however. In Chuschi, the members of intermarried ayllus, except for actual brothers-in-law and sons-in-law and young people who may later want to marry one another, can be ritually transformed into aura, who are “‘like siblings” (Isbell). It has already been mentioned that an inmarried husband in Q’ero assumes his wife’s status in her local descent group. RITUAL KINSHIP RELATIONSHIPS

Ritual kinsmen play significant roles all over the region. The most prominent are the wedding godparents, who may later act as baptismal godparents for the ' couple’s children, although other sponsors are often appointed for other rites of passage and even for new possessions. Any godparent/godchild (padrino/ahijado) relationship implies a compadre relationship between the godparents and the natural parents of their godchild. The relationship can sometimes be extended to

the children of the godparents and godchildren as well (Alb6 1972). Godparenthood takes its place alongside consanguinity and affinity as a third structure of kinship in the Andes. In many localities, compadres are defined as a separate category of kinsmen by a rule that they must be unrelated to one another, either consanguineally or affinally (Malengreau 1972; Belote and Belote; Isbell). When parents can select

one of their brothers or cousins as their child’s padrino, as in Matahuasi, or a distant relative, as in Compi, they transform an existing relationship into one

marked by a higher level of commitment (Long; Buechler and Buechler 1971:47). The custom of the Callején de Huaylas appears to be exceptional in preferring the groom’s grandparents (or an older brother and sister) for the role

of wedding godparents, and the father’s parents as baptismal godparents,

especially for the first child (Vazquez and Holmberg 1966:294-295; Stein | 1961:131-132, 278). As a rule, members of the same family are eventually 22

separated from one another, but tied to the rest of the community, by different compadrazgo networks (Malengreau 1972). Compadrazgo relationships are set off from affinal ones by the canon-law prohibition against the intermarriage of spiritual kin, which is everywhere sanctioned by custom. Ritual kinship relationships can assume most of the functions associated with

relationships of complementary filiation in unilineal societies (i.e., the relationship between mother’s brother and sister’s children in a patrilineal society, and the relationship between father’s sister and brother’s children in a matrilineal one). That may be the reason why compadrazgo has flourished in

those Latin American Indian societies where older kinship institutions succumbed to the shock inflicted by the Spanish invasion (Foster 1953:21-26). A ritual kinsman is concerned with one’s personal qualities and experiences more

than he is with the exercise of authority or the problems of inheritance (Malengreau 1972). As Pitt-Rivers puts it: ““The godparent can be viewed .. . as the guardian of the individual self in opposition to the social self which is under

the protection of the parents.’’ He cares about the baby, not the potential heir (Pitts-Rivers 1973:102, 103). He may also be a spokesman for communal and religious values in opposition to narrow family interests. These characteristics of ritual relationships are in the foreground at rites of passage, and particularly at weddings.

As Alb6 points out, wedding godparents among the Bolivian Aymara make it

possible for the young couple to begin liberating itself from the two parental households without denying the general values associated with kinship and marriage. The acquisition of a new social identity is vividly symbolized by making bride and groom behave like small children who cannot feed and undress themselves, much less get drunk, before the “great godparents” (jach‘a padrino and madrina) and the “weaning godparents”’ (t’aqa padrino and madrina) have

guided them ta adult status (Alb6 1972; Carter). If necessary, the wedding godparents will later arbitrate marital disputes in their role as benevolent spokesmen for communal morality. They have the right to beat their godson, the

husband, or threaten him with the police, for mistreating his wife. The godparents also make handy scapegoats if the marriage ends in divorce (Albo 1972; Bolton and Bolton 1976; Price 1965:317-318; Buechler and Buechler

1971:47; Stein 1961:133, 148). A baptismal godfather in Kauri has the authority to compel the child’s father to alter his treatment of the godson (Mishkin 1946:452-453). Relative wealth and respectability are usually important criteria for selecting prospective padrinos or compadres. They are expected to make a considerable

contribution to the ceremony at which they act as sponsors. Baptismal

godparents, in particular, should bestow gifts of personal property on their godchildren in later years. Among the Saraguros, they traditionally give their seven- or eight-year-old godchild a cow to start a herd with (Belote and Belote). Clearly, people look to their godparents or compadres for substantial help in time of need. Albé makes the following apt comparison: Los parientes camales sera4n como la propia caja de ahorros. Los parientes rituales seran como la compafiia de seguros a la que se ha ido pagando una prima para garantizar su ayuda incondicionada en el momento oportuno. La ayuda de los demas se concebira mas bien como un sistema de pequefias transacciones de compra-venta y préstamos mutuos [ Alb6 1972]. 23

Whether the godchildren or their parents can demand help regularly seems to depend largely on the symmetrical or asymmetrical character of the relationship. Local custom varies a good deal in this respect, as the following examples will —

demonstrate. The pattern that seems to be most widespread makes the godparents superordinate to everyone in the godchild’s family, although their superiority is most marked in relation to the godchild himself. Albo describes the Bolivian Aymara as following this pattern, presenting as evidence the terms used between ritual kinsmen and the two families’ reciprocal obligations. The forms of address indicate that the godparents and their children are placed in a higher generation in relation to the godchildren and their parents. For example, the children of the godparents call the parents of their own parents’ godchildren ‘“compadre,” and the godchildren themselves ‘“ahijado.” Among the Aymara, eodchildren and their parents assist the godparents in sowing and harvesting, and

receive a portion of the crop in return (Albo 1972; Buechler and Buechler 1971:48). Among the Saraguros of Ecuador, a padrino may at any time ask his ahijado or the ahijado’s parents for help in the fields or in the house, while the deference they must show him prevents them from making similar requests (Belote and Belote). Godparents also have a unilateral right to demand mink a labor from their godchildren in two localities in the Department of Cuzco: the Province of Canchis (personal communication from Benjamin Orlove) and the village of Kauri (Mishkin 1946:452-453). In Cusipata, on the other hand, the

characteristic expression of compadrazgo is the mutual exchange of unspecialized services (ayni). Male compadres can ask one another for help in farmwork and house-building, and for loans of animals and tools; compadres

occasionally borrow kitchen utensils or help one another herd animals (Malengreau 1972). Finally, in Uchucmarca, the most important form of mutual assistance, sharecropping, is largely restricted to consanguines and affines; it is very rare to find compadres who are sharecropping partners (Brush). The asymmetry is greatest when the sponsor is an unusually affluent villager or a mestizo from outside the community. In such a “vertical” compadrazgo relationship, the padrino plays the role of patron and the ahijado that of client (Mintz and Wolf 1950:342). The client may receive access to land, loans, or backing in a lawsuit, but often finds himself exploited by the patron, who is in a position to demand the client’s services, or to require the client to sell him his entire surplus crop at a “friendly” price (Albé6 1972; Malengreau 1972; Orlove

1974c). Many of the external padrinos are only itinerant Indian traders and truckdrivers, however—scarcely figures of overwhelming wealth and power (Mishkin 1946:435, 458; Fonesca 1972:335; Orlove 1974c). Davila (1971:405) has proposed, mostly on the basis of Mesoamerican data, that peasants tend to enter vertical relationships when changes in village society or greater accessibility to persons in superior positions outside the village allow them greater freedom and mobility. The recent increase in vertical compadrazgo in the Andes, which has been noted by several authors, supports Davila’s hypothesis. If vertical compadrazgo can serve as a ladder for ambitious comuneros, it also provides a safety net for downwardly mobile mestizos. Two households of the de los Cuentas family, which once owned the entire island of Taquile and much else besides, were living in 1957 on the remnants of their inherited lands. Except for their use of mestizo clothing and the Spanish language, their way of life was

indistinguishable from that of the other islanders. They acted as padrinos to 24

their few remaining tenants, mostly in order to assure themselves of some help in sowing and harvesting their crops (Matos Mar 1964:116-117). CONCLUSION

This chapter has been an attempt to use the autonomous household, based on the nuclear family, as a starting point for interpreting the bilateral aspects of Andean kinship. A summary of the results of this investigation will serve as a conclusion. New households can be created from old ones only at the cost of an implicit

conflict between parents and children, and among siblings. As the young husband and wife cooperate in supporting themselves and their children, and gradually take over direction of their own affairs, they inevitably begin to

withdraw from the authority of their parents, although they will remain subordinate in some respects as long as their fathers live. At the same time, the

relationships among married siblings come to be defined more as an equal exchange of goods and services (ayni) and less by the sort of spontaneous sharing that occurs within the household. The children of siblings will probably feel less

committed to each other than their parents did. This developmental cycle is fairly uniform throughout the region, although the emancipation of the junior generation can occur at any time from youth to middle age. The timing of separation depends largely on whether sufficient resources are available to launch a new household without crippling the old one. In some pastoral communities, men can become elders in their local descent groups without ever having established autonomous households.

Husbands and wives share property rights only with their own siblings, but they behave for practical purposes as though they belonged to both sibling groups. Each group must be content with something less than the undivided

allegiance of the couple and its children. The balance of solidarity and cooperation frequently tilts toward the husband’s side, partly for ideological reasons, but mainly because postmarital residence is predominantly virilocal. Kinsfolk readily adjust to couples that do not adhere to the virilocal norm. Where land is in short supply, outmarried sons and daughters tend to be treated much the same with respect to property rights. Conversely, a man is more likely to share chores and exchange fields with a brother-in-law who lives nearby than with a brother who has moved away.

A nuclear family usually chooses to cooperate closely with some of its collateral kinsfolk, to limit itself to attending the feasts of others, and to neglect some others entirely. These decisions, which need not be made at any particular time, are influenced by genealogical distance, but also by factors such as place of

residence, relative wealth or poverty, shared experiences as herders or wage-earners, and personal likes and dislikes. The factors that bring some collateral kinsmen together occasionally create close ties between people who are neither consanguineal nor affinal relatives. Two unrelated men who have worked and drunk together for several years often begin attending one another’s feasts, and may eventually formalize their friendship by becoming compadres (Buechler and Buechler 1971:47-48; Orlove and Custred 1974; Stein 1961:203). Formal relationships resembling kinship ties also regulate behavior in certain

contexts where genealogical relations are irrelevant or absent. Trading partnerships between men from different endogamous communities are one 25

example of such relationships; the bonds between men who have held office or sponsored fiestas the same year, or who have served together as a sponsor's assistants, are another (Fonseca 1972:328; Stein 1961:202, 257). Pitt-Rivers (1973:95-96) has proposed the term “‘figurative kinship” for ritual

relationships that are morally but not jurally binding, and that are otherwise similar to consanguineal relationships. The denotation of his term may perhaps be broadened to include Andean trading partnerships and fiesta relations, which also require the parties to treat one another as brothers. Sometimes the rights

and duties of figurative kinship are extended to near kinsmen of the original

parties, thus creating a set of secondary relationships. The latter are distinguished from primary relationships by criteria, such as differences in

generation, that also apply in the sphere of consanguineal kinship. Godparenthood creates a strong bond between compadres and, as Albo has shown, a weaker one between the children of the padrinos and their parents’

ahijado and compadres. It is this extension of obligations that makes compadrazgo an integral part of modern Quechua and Aymara kinship systems,

complementary to consanguinity and affinity. The fraternal obligations of trading partners and fiesta sponsors may also involve their wives and children, but information on this point is lacking. The complementary role assigned to godparents enables them to mediate the latent conflict between parents and children (Pitt-Rivers 1973:102). They stay

close friends with their compadres while guiding their godchild toward an identity of his own outside the framework of the parental family. The influence

that godparents can exert over both their compadres and their godchildren is enhanced, in a number of communities, by their superordinate status in relation to the natural parents. Wedding godparents not only help their godchildren set

up a household and keep it together, but also endow one (or more) of the godchildren’s children with his first items of personal property if they become | godparents again for the child’s baptism and first haircutting. At least among the Bolivian Aymara, some of the godparents’ personality traits are also said to be

transmitted to the godchildren at these ceremonies (Alb6 1972; Buechler and Buechler 1971 :97-98).

The relations between consanguineal and marital ties I have described probably occur in similar forms in other parts of the world. Comparisons may nevertheless prove difficult, because bilateral kinship systems are shaped by cultural and social factors that can differ greatly from one region to another. The sibling groups that constitute a Lapp band or an Iban longhouse community

are usually linked together by affinal bonds and are free to join either consanguines or affines in other communities. Corporate sibling groups in the highlands of southern Peru, on the other hand, are permanently affiliated with endogamous communities that are not organized according to kinship principles. There are coral islands on the margin of Western Polynesia where parents assign lands provisionally to their married children and usually retain a portion of their property for their own support. Some of the consequences of this practice, both for the distribution of cultivated plots and for the sort of behavior expected among near kinsmen, are strikingly similar to those that have been reported from the Andes. But Western Polynesians and their neighbors tend to conceive of the relations among families in terms of segmentary lineages, instead of in the idiom of parallel descent that may once have prevailed among Quechua-speakers. Even such tentative comparisons as these would have been quite impossible as recently 26

as 1970, however. The present generation of Andean ethnographers deserves

credit for enriching the literature of social anthropology with so many previously unsuspected data. NOTES

Acknowledgments. This chapter has benefited greatly from the advice and criticism of several knowledgeable Andean specialists: Ralph Bolton, Glynn Custred, John V. Murra, Patricia Netherly, Benjamin Orlove, and Freda Wolf. I also wish to thank Joseph Bastien, Glynn Custred, Benjamin Orlove, and Tristan Platt for permission to cite unpublished papers of theirs that were not included in the Symposium on Andean Kinship and Marriage, and my colleagues Ruth Borker and Thomas Gregor for their ideas and encouragement. I am

indebted to Victor Turner’s conception of structure and communitas for parts of my analysis. The shortcomings of the chapter can be attributed to my amateur status in the field of Andean studies.

2/

KINSHIP AND AFFINITY INA NATIVE QUECHUA COMMUNITY Steven S. Webster UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND

Ethnographic studies in the Andes have recently been enlightened by increasing interest in fundamental domains of social organization neglected in earlier research, especially the family, kinship and marriage, and ecological determinants of the community. Understanding of Andean social organization is being advanced by the convergence of ecosystematic and social systematic analyses, radically different but complementary approaches. Articles in this volume reflect these new interests, some emphasizing social structural bases of kinship and marriage, and others interpreting these fundamental institutions in the light of local or regional ecology. My paper favors the sociological approach, but my research was carried out in a particularly intricate community ecosystem which determined social organization in manifold ways. In discussing Q’ero kinship and affinity, I will briefly note some ecosystematic aspects of these institutions. My primary concern, however, will be to discuss (1) the principles of an apparently different kind of cognatic kin group which may bescommon in native

communities of the south Central Andes, and (2) the framework of affinal

alliances integral to the organization of this kin group and the native community. The analyses presented by Isbell, Mayer, and Zuidema seem most immediately relevant to my discussion; our conclusions may correspond only fortuitously, or contradict through oversight, but in any case they raise still more interesting questions regarding social organization in the Andes. My information is based on research between October 1969 and December 1970 in the Quechua cultural region of Q’ero, situated on the eastern cordillera

flanks of Cuzco Department, Peru.’ Most of my research was carried out in a highly traditional native community of about 370 persons centrally located in this rather isolated region. The community is comprised of a ceremonial center and a dozen hamlets dispersed through the several valleys of a steep basin which

(Webster 1973).

drops from glaciers at 14,000 ft. to subtropical forest at 6,000 ft. Its members are engaged in mixed pastoralism and transhumance throughout this basin THE PARALLEL KINDRED

Concern with systems of kinship or marriage in the south Central Andes has

been slight, but where information has been reported it has usually been 28

assumed to reflect patrilineal or, in a few cases, bilateral organization.” Corporate organization has likewise rarely been carefully considered, although

the term ayllu has often been used loosely to imply local or consanguineal solidarity of this sort. The kin group of the Q’ero Quechua is best characterized as bilaterally organized and ego-centered. Kin group membership is reckoned with emphasis on collateral relationships, and there is little ideology of descent: when ancestors are considered at all they are usually viewed as a group of real or Classificatory siblings from whom one’s own collaterals have descended. A slight patrilateral bias in the bilateral organization appears to have no jural basis in kinship, but rather to arise from circumstances outside of kinship. Accordingly, Murdock’s “quasi-unilineal”’ or Carib subtype of cognatic kin group (1960), suggested to account for atypical features especially frequent in South America, would not be an appropriate characterization of the Q’ero kin group. Murdock’s paradigm appears to assume that patrilineal structure enjoys some degree of jural or aboriginal precedence and that cognatic features are merely symptomatic of other exigencies. In Q’ero, on the other hand, the cognatic kin group is based on ° an ideology of consanguinity and affinity which enjoys normative authority per

sé. Patrilateral biases which emerge in this organization are not a matter of

kinship, but rather are justified in terms of the male role in political and economic domains.

The only true corporate groups in Q’ero social organization are the domestic group and the community itself, comprising about 52 domestic groups. Nearly half of these domestic groups are extended, most as stem families but several as

collateral families. Rights to herds of alpaca and llama, agricultural plots, domiciles, feast houses, camp shelters, and ritual symbols are held in common by

the domestic group, which is headed by a leader with authority to decide all issues within that group. Although held and inherited among domestic groups, community territory may not be alienated to outsiders without permission of the community. The community is headed by kamachikuhkuna (“those who cause it to be done’’) who deliberate on issues arising between domestic groups

or between the community and the outside. The kin group is intermediate | between domestic group and community, corporate only occasionally or in certain contexts. It is denoted by no special term. The term ayllu, sometimes used, is applied more appropriately to the entire community or to its constituent \ hamlets rather than to kin groups, which are dispersed among these localities. The kin group holds no lien on the property of its constituent domestic groups, having no right prior to any other community members in the event that this property is deserted or without heirs. Although there is no particular kin group leader, a residual order of authority emerges in arbitration or alliance when routine resolution of an issue is not achieved by either the domestic groups ii olved or the community leaders. Similarly, the kin group organization of rights and obligations emerges in management of community ritual, mutual support in subsistence crisis, and resolution of internal conflicts. In addition to such occasions the kin group may also be viewed as corporate in certain ongoing contexts; one of the most important is established in marriage of its members to other kin groups. The boundaries of kin groups are clearly defined only in the context of affinity, because marriage can be undertaken only with a person who

is considered to be completely .unrelated consanguineally. Consequently, a marriage juxtaposes two kin groups which are corporate entities with regard to 29

context. .

one another, although the membership of each may not be so clear in any other

The Q’ero kinship terminology appears anomalous among cognatic systems. Native terms for parents and their collaterals is bifurcate merging, and CIrOSS cousins are distinguished terminologically from siblings and parallel cousins, at least in spontaneous reference (Figures 1, 2). M and MZ are both termed mamay, and MZC are termed the same as siblings; F and FB are both termed tatay, and FBC are termed the same as siblings. MB and FZ, on the other hand, are termed kakay and ipay, respectively, and sibling terminology is extended to the children of these relatives only in direct address and when interdependence is close. In

abstract discussion of kinship terms the Q’eros may also report that sibling terminology is appropriate for cross cousins, but in concrete behavior either no

relationship term is used or the relationship is genealogically described as kakaypa wawan or ipaypa wawan (“the child of” MB or FZ, respectively). Spanish kinship terms are sometimes used in the presence of bilingual outsiders,

but their reference is inconsistent. Generally, Spanish sibling terminology (irmanu or irmana) is extended indiscriminately to collateral kin, but when distinctions are drawn, cross cousins are termed “cousin” (primu) rather than

Stsibling. ° be)

Nhe

ipay (unrelated)

a = (unrelated) | _ ipaéay pawawan LN 2y machul ay O(ipa panay a wayqey

\tatay = ) i

4 machulay a-meéShulay ; ; wayoey | ususiy OC

O machulay yipay O panay Achur] A

A machulay ots ayqey O Q machulay D tatay ~ r= O machulay rs “kuraq yusus iyRenuriy i haway O_ -/\ (unrelated) wayqey O qoway = -@ kuraq pana Opanayfa wawa haway:

7- O “Qtatay warmly _ rOususi O mamayOBGO susiy ____[ haway A machulay A (unrelated) “0 nawa O machulay _A sullka way geyl Oususily QO y = Tr haway

Q machulay = gr 10 OQmamay a machulay ~ = A O

= machulay ==eb meney) Wa O 7 O a panay aka wawan © LA ay qey;kakay ) O A

qoway Su nr? a )waw A haway QA machulay kakay panay =, ~ m a) Wa _ (wayq A wayqeypa waway elated

{kaka & (unrelated) a (panaturantimpu wawanchis)

Figure 1. Kinship terminology (male ego). 30

; waway O a Apa O _— a ra O

= Satay | (unrelated A ve -turay

Oususi

a ojuras taney | - churiy

,OW.=~aa. O O

Siaraq vray |, (reveal wawan )

(aN

Aq osay O

omnis turay —[ (turaypa wawan)

-O fiafiay =O Ne O mI haway A turay [wavy 4 O

a, (unrelated) ~ eves A

F M == FB MZ FZ MB#M #F

FZ # MB

B = MZS = FBS B # MBS # FZS Z = MZD = FBD z # MBD # FZD

Figure 2. Kinship terminology (changes relevant to female ego).

Such bifurcate merging and Iroquois terminological features are generally associated with unilineal systems of kinship. In the cognatic system of the Q’eros, however, these characteristics appear to reflect a simple but fundamental structural principle that merges collateral kin of the same sex but diverges those of opposite sex. Either sex equally transmits kin group membership, i.e., gender itself appears irrelevant. However, the cross or parallel relationship between the gender of collaterals is crucial in the organization and development of the kin group. Terminology between siblings of parallel sex is reciprocal (wayqey ‘male ego’s brother’; fafay ‘female ego’s sister’), but distinctive non-reciprocal terms denote cross-sex siblings (panay ‘male ego’s sister’; turay ‘female ego’s brother’). Although terminology for one’s own children and those of parallel-sex siblings is the same, the children of cross-sex siblings are usually genealogically described as panaypa wawan or turaypa wawan, and paternal-child behavioral patterns are much less apparent. Although I did not encounter distinctive cross niece-andnephew terminology in Q’ero, early colonial sources indicate that mulla was the

reciprocal of ipa (FZ) and kuncha was the reciprocal of kaka (MB) (Rowe 1946:250; Zuidema 1964:73). Extending the parallel-sex and cross-sex discrimination in Q’ero, parallel cousins of parents are termed the same as parents 31

(mamay and tatay) or distinctively (kKakay and ipay) depending on whether reciprocal or non-reciprocal sibling terminology is extended to them by the linking parent, i.e., depending on their sex relative to that parent. Parents’ cross cousins, on the other hand, being classified descriptively by parents, are usually not accorded kin terms at all by ego, and their children are often considered sapah, i.e., “separate”? or unrelated. Elders may attest to a relationship which had faded from the conscious genealogy of younger kin: in one case a Q’ero became angry when I continued to suggest that his FMBS was his kinsman, but conceded that it might indeed be so when I told him that his father’s sister had confirmed this relationship. As this particular case also implies, children of cross

cousins tend to become estranged from the ego-centered kin group. Vigor or

atrophy of kinship interrelations contingent upon other factors, such as significance or insignificance of marriage alliances, influences the rate of kinship dissolution among cross collaterals. However, parallel collaterals remain members of the classificatory sibling group no matter what their fortune until, after five Or six generations, genealogical remoteness and frequent change of residence obscure their common origin.

Collateral kin who recognize themselves as such are commonly classified by

the native locutions waygentimpu wawan (‘the children of brothers,” or “children with ‘brothering’ parents’), fafantimpu wawan (“the children of sisters” or ‘“‘children with ‘sistering’ parents”), or panaturantimpu wawan (“the

children of a sister and brother” or “children with ‘brother-and-sistering’ parents” —by different spouses, of course). These locutions discriminate cross cousins (panaturantimpu wawan) as well as the two sorts of parallel cousins.

They are also correlatives of the bifurcate merging terminology, insofar as collateral kin who refer to one another’s parents as kakay (MB) and ipay (FZ) are panaturantimpu wawan, those who refer to one another’s parents as fatay (F, FB) are wayqentimpu wawan, and those who refer to one another’s parents as mamay (M, MZ) are fiafantimpu wawan. Although these locutions ideally denote

only first cousins, they are actually used classificatorily, being extended to include children of any of the parents’ collaterals who are termed as siblings, i.e., to children of parents’ parallel cousins. Extension may occasionally be through

cross cousins, when it is propitious for either or both parties to maintain the claim of common kinship. But generally, conscious consanguinity attenuates rapidly among descendants of panaturantimpu wawan. On the other hand, insofar as successive generations maintain the parallel sex structure of waygentimpu wawan or Hafantimpu wawan among collaterals, the extension of parental or sibling terminology is appropriate and conscious common kinship is perpetuated, at least through several generations. Q’ero kin group membership, then, devolves

through collaterals of either sex, but descendants are thinned out by the divergence of cross-sex collaterals as well as remoteness. The result is an ego-centered cognatic kin group which can be termed a parallel kindred. The community of Q’ero is relatively small and predominantly endogamous; consequently, I was able to detect consanguinity in about 25% of the marriages

(24 out of 93). The usual remoteness of this consanguinity indicates that the prohibition of marriage among cognates is taken quite seriously, contrary to frequent practice in mestizo towns even under close parochial supervision. lronically, ethnic distance between Peruvians and the highland natives has been reinforced since earliest times by the imputation of incest to the natives. Most of 32

the connubial consanguinity which J discovered was four or more generations remote, only a few cases occurred at two generations remove and only one possible case involved first cousins. Fuller genealogies than mine would reveal a higher incidence of consanguineal marriages, but only at a greater remove than four generations. The features of these marriages also indicate that when the prohibition of marriage between cognates finally lapses, the integrity of the parallel kindred remains intact. That is to say, consanguineal marriages occur almost exclusively among individuals whose common kinship has atrophied in cross collateral antecedents. Of the 24 cases, only one could be construed to be between classificatory fanhantimpu wawan, i.e., children of “sisters” related through antecedents of parallel sex in each preceding generation. However, apparent consanguinity was more than five generations remote in this case, and there may well have been an obscured cross-sex collateral. There was no case of marriage between classificatory wayqgentimpu wawan, parallel descendants through male collaterals. In a four-generation scheme, more than 11% of all logically possible permutations of sex links result in parallel descendants in this sense, so an effective prohibition of marriage with parallel kin appears likely even at this remove. Aside from the single dubious case, all consanguineal marriages were between distant panaturantimpu wawan. In 70% of these cases the cross-sex collaterals had initiated divergent consanguinity two or more generations before, but in the remaining cases cross-sex parents of the spouses

were themselves distant parallel cousins. In these latter cases, definitive disjunction of the parallel kindred into separate kin groups was accomplished by the consanguineal marriage itself.

Siblinghood, filial or classificatory, is the nexus of the parallel kindred. Kinship is primarily a collateral structure and, as mentioned earlier, if descent is reckoned at all it too refers to an antecedent sibling group rather than an apical

ancestor. Coherence of siblings arises in dependence on a joint herd of the domestic group which is not divided until their children, a third generation, have matured sufficiently to care for the animals. After dispersion of these developed households, cooperation is continued by a rigid order of authority established in

birth sequence and manifested in community ritual, politics, and other such corporate occasions of the kin group. Regardless of sex, the senior sibling eventually succeeds to moral authority among his siblings tantamount to that wielded by their parents, and each sibling shares in this status with regard to his junior siblings. Sibling terminology is usually prefixed by the terms sullka or kuraq, denoting younger or older sibling status, respectively. This terminology continues to be applied to collateral kin and affines of the parental generation, denoting age and authority relative to the linking parent. Cousins often succeed to their parents’ order of authority, and such residual distinctions may persist in the parallel kindred for several generations even though descendants may come to have a reversed disparity of age. The sequence of authority has especially significant consequences among siblings, however, because status elevations, including accession to political office, must follow in accord with birth order. As a result of this rule, siblings tend to represent their kin group in several separate

marriage alliances and in several of the political alliances developed among colleagues in the civil-religious hierarchy. Propitious management of these status developments by domestic group leaders is a key factor in kin group influence and prestige. Jurally, sisters play a role in these developments functionally equivalent to that of their brothers. Although the complementary role of the 33

sister's husband is paramount in practical situations, it is often strongly influenced by his wife’s status among her siblings. Priority in inheritance of the domestic group estate is the reverse of the order of authority, with the youngest son falling heir to all of the key family domiciles

and the feast house, most of the domestic group herd and ritual paraphernalia, and the choice parcels of land. Daughters are generally expected to gain access to such property through patrilocal marriage, but if youngest or without brothers,

often become the primary heirs of the domestic group estate and marry matrilocally. The opposed priorities of succession to property and authority in the sibling group tend to conserve the integrity of the prime components of the

domestic group estate. Siblings slighted in property are compensated by precedence in authority and vice versa. The result of this arrangement, however,

is usually a dispersion of siblings in quest of pastures and cultivable land, sometimes facilitated by antipathy among them. This process is a key motive in the development of marriage alliances and the dispersion of kin groups through the several valley habitats of the community. Because alpaca herding is crucial to

the family economy and because the alpacas are closely adapted to pasture niches of limited capacity and availability, such changes of residence respond closely to imbalances in the community ecosystem.

All new conjugal couples take up residence with one set of parents until economic independence is gained, and this does not occur until children of the third generation can care for the herd. Extension of families into larger domestic groups is correlated with both greater wealth and more promising local herding potential. The moves involved are undertaken by female siblings in the majority

of cases, but senior brothers, frequently without sufficient patrimony to establish an independent household, tend to marry women with some assurance of inheritance and settle with their wife’s parents in order that they and their children may benefit by this property. Nearly one-third of Q’ero marriages are matrilocal. These tend to be unevenly distributed in the several valley habitats, reflecting response to relative herding potentials. Tendencies in translocation of mature families and their primary domiciles, frequent among the Q’eros, also appear to respond to the shifting imbalances of herd, population, and pasture.

Eventually, kin groups come to be dispersed widely in the community and frequently ancestral homesteads are left behind entirely, perhaps returned to generations later if local conditions once again appear promising. However, as I

will discuss later, at certain stages of local habitat development the group of

siblings forming the nexus of the kin group, male and female, tend to consolidate in one valley of the community. Funeral ritual in Q’ero reveals an important principle of kinship organization.

At first glance this principle appears to reflect complementary filiation, but closer examination suggests that it is based instead upon affinal alliances. In the pusachanin or funeral wake, the ancestors of the deceased, prevailed upon to guide his spirit to the nether-world, appear to be called in a regular order of priority that ritually marks status relationships among relatives. No particular order is said to be required, but in practice precedence in the task of spirit guidance is almost invariably given to patrilateral ancestors of the deceased’s mother, and if any patrilateral ancestors of the father are prevailed upon, they are named last of all. In between, other ancestors are called with precedence usually being matrilateral. If Q’ero kinship were patrilineal this ritual format could be conveniently analyzed in terms of matrilateral filiations submerged in 34

successive generations, reappearing in the guise of pre-eminent supernatural power. However, the other side of the complementary filiation coin is marriage alliance, and this perspective enables further analysis of the Q’ero parallel kindred as a cognatic kin group. The matrilateral orientation in the appeal to.

ancestors appears to reflect the extension of the term kakay to many matrilateral relatives beyond the MB (Figure 3). The term also is applied by ego

to all of his mother’s male parallel cousins, whom she calls turay (‘‘female’s

| brother’). The MB in turn has his set of kKakay, ego’s mother’s matrilateral relatives. Ego’s father’s matrilateral relatives are similarly kKakay from the father’s

point of view. The appeals made to ancestors at Q’ero funeral wakes seem implicitly to acknowledge a special relationship between the deceased and different groups of kakay, his own, his mother’s, and his father’s, usually in that order of precedence.

, _ A ipaypa wawan ms = ipay _O(qachunmasiy) rrqoway AN O [ Aq atayniy || [— "atayniy Qipay 5 aoway aq" atayniy -~fA\ lpaypa wawan

a

Aq’atayniy D

LA | z q"atayniy =qoway © mamay O (q"atay | =tatay)[ Aq=atayniy (machulaypa > | Ogachun mamay rO_qachuniy

| “ene = —_ QQ" ba nem 4) qatayniy A |warmin) O QqQ epa ATAYNTY “O __ _ O warmiy 7O J-O

| | wAN =O qachuniy -O “> a®3h osce22

(. fei: \8sm@22a sogzrta : = 0 pampo>—- Wh \\ E ~- o © ° © “ee, =. 3: RIic= : =\ .z=ws w : &5 = = © ° : &sa : aan a2 *3 ; ° : 2 wi owae-& — a. ° gS . > " naoaanaaadadad ‘NX. "0 cath e fr o |

cq

_? oy x» “aN =

haFf ,/ ::@

\\¢5 r a\ » 4 r oo 8 !eA, e : a

| £2 \|ir So 8 14 ~S

e ~~ ; ae 4.9 o*G \

8

82

... if anarchy is to be avoided, the individuals who make up a society must from time to time be reminded, at least in symbol, of the underlying order that is supposed to guide their social activities. Ritual performances have this function for the participating group as a whole; they momentarily make explicit what is otherwise a fiction [1965:16].

The Yarqa Aspiy embodies both the social and ecological order underlying Chuschino society. Furthermore, the success of the ritual depends upon the individual members of the prestige hierarchy who in turn depend upon “‘those who love him,” his kuyaqg, for the aid required to fulfill his ritual obligations. Without this network of kin-based reciprocal aid, the prestige system could not

function, and, in turn, if the prestige system did not function, the annual reaffirmation of social and ecological order could not be reenacted.

We might say that reciprocity is the “glue” that keeps kinship, social hierarchy, and ecological order intact. The complexities of the interrelationships of these three important cultural domains are difficult to explicate. Goodenough has stated that the problem of describing other people’s culture is like describing a game: There are different categories of person, which correspond to the different pieces on the board or the several positions on the team. There are the different categories of object, both natural and manufactured, which bound and define the universe or playing field of

the game. Within the restrictions imposed by these bounds and by the physical constitution of the players, there are additional restrictions on the moves that any one category of person can make in relation to each category of object and each other category of person. These restrictions are the rules of the game. The game has its agreed-upon objectives: wealth, honor, many attentive grandchildren, power, whatever it is that is publicly accepted as indicative of personal fulfillment, success, or the good life [Goodenough 1970:104-105].

We shall extend Goodenough’s analogy and say that reciprocity in this Andean village is a game played by different categories of person, the Kuyaq. The definitions of these categories of players, the kin-network, are reflected in

the rules for appropriate reciprocal behavior. By considering kinship and reciprocity in a specific “playing field,” in our case a ritual context, we can: (1) elucidate the rules of appropriate behavior for the various categories of

: players,

(2) clarify the objectives of the game, and (3) generate hypotheses to be tested by future research. Admittedly, one can argue that this procedure will tell us the rules of reciprocal behavior for the specific ritual under consideration, the "arqa Aspiy. However,

by starting with a specific behavioral context which has formal boundaries agreed upon by all participants, we have a basis for future investigations and comparisons. Having abstracted a set of rules for appropriate behavior for one context, we shall be able to examine subsequent contexts to determine whether the same rules are operative. This paper has been organized into the following sections: (1) an explanation of the comuneros’ definition of ecological order, (2) adescription of the Yarqa Aspiy of September 1970,

(3) a description of the kuyaq- and kin-based reciprocity which

accompanied the Yarqa Aspiy, and (4) conclusions. The structural models set forth in this paper are the constructs “built up after

the social relations” (Lévi-Strauss 1963) and symbolism observed during the 83

Yarqa Aspiy. These constructs provide the constraints and principles for the comuneros’ ‘“‘games of reciprocity and kinship.” COMUNERO DEFINITION OF ECOLOGICAL ORDER

Chuschi is located in a deep valley at an altitude of 3,145 meters. Directly above the village to the southeast is the mountain peak, Chuschi Urqo, to the west of the village is the tributary of the Pampas River, the Taksa Mayo, which is the boundary between Chuschi and the neighboring village, Quispillaqta. Chuschi is dominated physically and supernaturally by the mountain peak, Comafiawi (also called Humankikila) and the powerful mountain deity, wamani, believed to reside there. This peak rises to an altitude of approximately 4,750 meters and is

located south of Chuschi across the Pampas River in the province of Victor Fajardo (see Figure 2).

Owners of all plants and animals, the wamanis are the most powerful indigenous deities of the Pampas region. Their residences are the highest mountains and puna lakes, which villagers never approach alone. A sickness called pukyo ungoy may be inflicted upon anyone who walks beside a puna lake at night or who neglects necessary rituals and offerings. The wamanis must be

placated with ritual payments to insure personal safety and fertility of one’s animals. If angered, the wamanis can devour the hearts of men. Ritual payments are made by individual families twice a year, during August and February, when the earth is “open’’ and the wamanis are especially receptive to offerings. An

informant in the village of Sarhua, in the Province of Victor Fajardo, told Palomino (1970:120) that during these two months: ... The earth opens and the gods want to eat and they receive our offerings easily —also, they can eat the hearts of men who dare walk alone in the mountains at this time—the rocks talk, the JLLAS walk, the grass turns into rope, the trees move and the ravines cry out [my translation] 2

During these potent periods, ritual payments are made in a carefully prescribed

manner by an appointed officiant to insure the fertility and safety of the family’s herds. =ncorrect execution of the ritual or lack of reverence could bring the wamani’s wrath upon the family and cause the animals to die and the family to be ruined or its members to suffer illness or even death. The most powerful wamani of the region resides in the puna lake, Yanaqocha, northeast of the village beyond the communal puna lands, called Chicllarazo in the District of Paras. This particular wamani commands the other wamanis of the region just as the highest varayoq commands those under him in the prestige

hierarchy. He is also believed by many to communicate directly with the national president in Lima. Two subordinate wamanis reside in the mountain

Ontaqarqa and in the lake Tapagocha, both located in the high puna. The wamanis preside over a territory and have an organizational hierarchy likened to

provincial governmental structure. They are described as tall, white, bearded males who dress elaborately in western dress. Their palaces, inside the mountains and lakes, are sumptuously furnished in gold and silver. The wamanis transform themselves into condorg and are associated with crosses and chapels. A group of children asked to draw pictures of wamanis depicted them as: (1) richly dressed (often bearded) living inside the mountain, (2) condors flying over the peaks, or (3) simply as mountain peaks and lakes with crosses located nearby. 84

° =7| «3 7) 2, s@ Zz *z ry 2 E £° 27° es S& ce2 ao

a. o = 0 Le ~“aN\i2 ef¢

| \ c ‘3s Bo | A ra & § 5 res\ ”a s/ ee O Gun

c2LiJ S o 5 \° Bad 4 / papa

eC. M— mama

3. OB wawge 4h. OB —> tura

5. Os —~ pana

6. os —>fiafia T. s— churi~__

8. O’a —> ususi— — = 9. Os,d 3 wawa

b) Affinal Relations

| contract/ 10. H — 3 ghari, gosa

qhari/serwinakuy, i.e., peasant marriage gosa/married by Church or civil official/

ll. W—» warmi

Range II: Parents’ Siblings' Nuclear Families a) Consanguineal Relations 12. FB, MB — > papa, tio papa/base term/

tio/specify collaterality/

13. FS, MS —> mama, tia

mama/base term/

tia/specify collaterality/

14. O FSibs, O'MSibs —» wawge, primo

wawge/base term/

primo/specify collaterality/ 15. O FSibs, 0 MSibs —» tura, primo tura/base term/ primo/specify collaterality/ 16. O FSiba, O'MSiba —» pana, prima pana/base term/

prima/specify collaterality/

17. O FSibd, O MSibd —» Alafia, prima fiana/base term/

prima/specify collaterality/ 18. Sibof —————> wawaesobrino, sobrina

; 125 b) Affinal Relations

19. FSH, MSH ——————> papa, tfo

papa/base term/

tio/specify collaterality/

20. FBW, MBW ——————> mama, tia

mama/base term/

tia/specify collaterality/

21. WSibOf, HSibOf —— > wawaesobrino, sobrina 22. WB,WSH,HB,HSH ——— ghata, cunada

qhata/base term/ cufiada/specify generation/

23. WS,WBW,HS,HBW ———} ghachun, cunada

ghachun/base term/ cufiada/specify generation/

2h. WB, WSH ———————~> wawge/solidarity/

25. HB, HSH ———————> tura/solidarity/ 26. WS, WBW ——————~ pana/solidarity/ 27. HS. HBW ——————4 fiana/solidarity/

Range III: Second Generation Lineal. Ascending and Descending

28. FF, MF ————— abuelo, machu, papay

abuelo~wmachu/reference/

papay/address/ 29. FM, MM ————- abuela, hatun mama, mamay abuelatwhatun mama/reference/ mamay/address/ 30. Ofs —————————— _nieto

31. Ofa ———————— nieta Range IV: Other Kinsmen

a) Consanguineal Relations 32. Collateral O’+ 1 Generation & above —— > tio 33. Collateral 0+ 1 Generation & above ——>» tia 34. Collateral &% 0O Generation ———————— primo

35. Collateral O o Generation ——___—_——> prima

36. Collateral O’- 1 Generation ————————» sobrino 37. Collateral 0 - 1 Generation ———————— > sobrina

b) Affinal Relations 38. WF, HF ——————— > suegro, papay

suegro/reference papay/address/

39. WM, HM —————> suegra, mamay | suegra/reference

mamay/address/ 4O. dH ——————_—-— ghata 41. sW —————————} ghachun

From this analysis of the patterned use of the kinship terminology we have indicated the logic of kin relations as well as the marking of different solidarity groups within the network. Let us now proceed to a description of certain social coalitions which operate in the realm of subsistence and economic activities and

which correspond to the same pattern in the economic sphere as that encountered in the sphere of kin term application. PEASANT ECONOMIC COALITIONS

The basic economic coalition in peasant society is the household which is based on the nuclear family. This group is the primary unit of labor mobilization and of production, consumption, and management, a group which corresponds 126

to range I of the kinship network. A less central and more flexible, but nonetheless basic, coalition is seen in the co-operation of siblings and their families.

In several activities a single nuclear family is unable to supply all the labor needed for the tasks at hand, and under peasant conditions, where no cash is available to pay wages, the reciprocal exchange of labor, known as ayne, is therefore necessary. Since the strongest bonds within one’s own generation are those among siblings, the mobilization of labor for aynes is most frequently within this range of the kinship network, i.e., range II. That is, even though one can arrange ayne contracts with any person who is willing, those approached

first are one’s siblings and their spouses. This extension of basic mutual cooperation thus corresponds to the extension of the basic kin terms.

Another kind of coalition consisting of range II kinsmen is that which can best be described as agnatically organized lineage-like land holding corporations which in turn parallel the agnatic residence groups which typify the residence

pattern of high altitude communities. Let us now examine in more detail each of | these social groupings. THE HOUSEHOLD

A household consists of individuals who live and eat together and who share domestic duties. In high altitude peasant society domestic duties include the basic production and exchange activities of agriculture, herding, marketing, and interzonal trading which form the tasks of central concern and of the greatest expenditure of time and energy. Households can be composed of any individuals from unmarried siblings, childless couples, even unrelated people, to single individuals such as childless widows or widowers. The amount and kind of labor available to these various kinds of households, their differing abilities to manage resources, and their different provisioning needs determine which subsistence strategies they will adopt within the range of contingencies possible under the conditions of high altitude peasant life. The most frequent household type by far is the nuclear family, namely a man, a woman, and their offspring. Economic operations are thus inseparable - from the needs and abilities of this basic social unit. Labor is divided between men and women; women cook and care for the house and the children, while men carry out the strenuous tasks of plowing and the long-distance trading. Herding, weeding, digging potatoes, spinning, and weaving are shared by both sexes. Ideal economic conditions, therefore, are those in which men and women contribute their complementary services, thus the economic rationality of a bisexual partnership beyond purely sexual attraction. Marriages of widows and widowers even beyond childbearing age confirm this.

The bilaterality of inheritance corresponds to the bilaterality of descent. Marriage involves not only the starting of a new family, but at the same time the formation of a new capital holding partnership for its support. This capital is in the form of land and animals brought into the marriage by both partners.

The labor of a man and a woman and their offspring (on land and with animals originally acquired by the couple at marriage) yields the goods necessary

for the subsistence of the group as well as for its necessary ceremonial expenditures seen in (1) the rites of passage in the life cycle of its members, and

(2) in the occasional obligation of affluent households to sponsor the feast of 127

the community patron saint. Likewise the goods brought back from the middle altitude zones are not invested in any nonsubsistence related way, but rather "supplement the household diet, or supply the food and drink necessary in labor mobilization for primary agricultural production.

As the basic production and consumption unit in peasant society, the household is also the basic managerial unit where factors of need and resource availability are assessed and where the crucial subsistence decisions are made. In studying peasant economics, therefore, and in designing models of peasant economic decision-making, one must focus on this central social unit. Another indication of the basic importance of the household is seen in the ritual burning of offerings which consist of token bits of the central resources of Andean life, (1) the animal products of meat and wool (symbolized by llama or alpaca fat), (2) corn, and (3) coca. This ritual forms a basic component of all agricultural and herding activities as well as long-distance interzonal trading, since it is believed that such offerings, made to the spirits of the hills and the earth, decrease risks in these vital subsistence activities as well as preserve the

health and well-being of household members. This ritual, therefore, like agriculture, herding, and long-distance trading, is seen as a basic part of subsistence activities. And in turn we observe that these activities are the responsibility solely of the peasant household. An individual belongs in reality to two different nuclear families, and thus has responsibilities during his life time to two different households. In one family he plays the roles of offspring and sibling, while in the other his roles are spouse

and parent. These primary ties lay the basis for not only his production activities, but also for (1) his basic capital acquisition, and (2) his old-age security. It is this situation which I call generational reciprocity and which plays a central role in peasant economic life, a role which is acted out on the stage of nuclear family filiation, and which at the same time broadens these basic nuclear family ties into an expanded range of interpersonal cooperation. When an offspring decides to marry, his or her parents divide the livestock

into equal parts and present him (or her) with his share. If a household, for example, consists of parents with four children, the livestock is divided into five

equal shares, each share going to an offspring on the occasion of his or her marriage. If a child never marries but remains with the parents until their death, his share remains with that of the parents. These three individuals then form the

household. In cases where all four children marry, the parents remain with one-fifth of the livestock they herded when all the children made up a single nuclear family. The mandatory distribution of livestock at marriage thus provides each newly married couple with the capital necessary for starting its own family. Since each partner brings resources into the marriage a couple ideally has enough animals to support it as an independent unit. Since the peasants of Alccavitoria are primarily herding people, livestock forms the basic

capital asset, and this rule of distribution is always followed in the case of animals. In the case of land distribution the same rule holds under ideal conditions, which are not always present in Alccavitoria. When all children within a nuclear family are married, the parents remain as

an independent household. This independent status is maintained even when they become too old to work; they retain their animals and their land, and for

the most part decide how they are to be used, although it becomes their children’s duty to supply the necessary labor. 128

In Alccavitoria, despite the rules of bilateral descent and inheritance, there exists a male dominance which is exercised in all areas of life. In generational

reciprocity, this is expressed in what appears to be a somewhat stronger obligation on the part of the sons of a nuclear family to provide the labor necessary for the support of their aged parents. In cases where there are no sons, but only daughters, the full weight of this responsibility falls upon either one or all of the daughters and upon their husbands since male as well as female labor is

necessary in order to carry out the basic subsistence activities of planting, herding, and interzonal trading. In most cases, however, one child takes over the responsibility of supporting

aged parents and consequently inherits all their resources when they die. In other cases, the responsibilities and the inheritance are divided equally among the children.

The central peasant concern of subsistence is therefore assured through the

economic arrangements of division of labor, resource ownership, capital ‘financing’ of new economic units, and old-age insurance, all of which are organized on the primary consanguineal ties of parent—offspring, sibling—sibling

solidarity, as well as on the primary affinal tie of marriage. Kinship thus determines the form and the operation of these basic economic coalitions. SIBLING NUCLEAR FAMILY COOPERATION

As a nuclear family divides upon the marriage of the offspring, the strong sibling bond remains and acts to unite the nuclear families created by the marriage of siblings in coalitions of mutual cooperation. These ties act as the basis for necessary interhousehold alliances. In cases where siblings cooperate in the support of parents, such cooperation and its equitable distribution among households is an important element in both the provisioning decisions made by these households as well as the smooth operation of reciprocities among them.

Examples of the latter are mutual aid in the building of houses and in the difficult task of plowing the fields.

In both cases the pattern is as follows: the sponsor of the work must supply food in the form of meat and potatoes. He must also provide coca and chicha (corn beer) to each helper. In the case of agricultural labor, a regular annual occurrence (as opposed to the rarer occurrence of construction), we observe the added stipulation of the return of an equal amount of time in labor in the same kind of work. In fact, this reciprocity is so regulated that balanced accounts are always kept. If, for example, one peasant works three masas of land this year

while his work partner has no land to cultivate during the same period, compensation will be made not in an equal amount of time in labor, but in cash (S/. 3.00). This arrangement is called the mink’a. Due to the shortage of cash the most profitable arrangement is the ayne.

Ayne arrangements mean careful planning in (1) the convening of an adequate number of helpers, (2) the acquisition of the necessary amounts of meat, potatoes, coca and chicha to give them, (3) the scheduling of tasks so that all the helpers can be paid back on their plowing days, and (4) the acquisition of cash for the mink’as which may be contracted. Aynes may be contracted among any individuals who find the arrangement

mutually beneficial. First priorities, as well as the most reliable partners, however, are among the closest kin. Inventories of aynes observed in Alccavitoria 129

reveal this very pattern. That is, the largest number of participants is from kinsmen in range II or close by, while the second largest is from among compadres. Very few observed aynes included people not related either consanguineally, affinally, or through compadrazgo.

Since nuclear families form the basic economic units in Alccavitoria, and since kinship is a principal base for interhousehold cooperation, we observe that affinal ties play a very strong part in peasant life since such ties create nuclear families in the first place. Siblings’ spouses, therefore, are often involved in close cooperation so that people within informal coalitions made up of related nuclear families tend to regard the affinal relationships of sisters-in-law and brothers-in-

law in much the same way they regard their siblings. This accounts for the

application of primary kin terms to some affines. The kin relation is strengthened by economic interdependence, just as this very interdependence is

based on kinship in the first place. Under such conditions the affinal relationship, although of a different kind according to the underlying logic of

kinship reckoning, tends in practice to merge to a certain degree with its corresponding consanguineal relationship. THE PREDOMINATE RESIDENCE PATTERN AND LINEAGE-LIKE LANDHOLDING CORPORATIONS

As outlined at the outset, the majority of the community territory of Alccavitoria lies above the limits of agriculture on the slopes and the plateau which extend to 4,890 meters above sea level. Due to the altitude, therefore, herding and the complementary activity of interzonal trading form the basic subsistence strategies. Since animal husbandry demands close supervision of livestock, and since livestock must range over a wide grazing area, settlement

patterns of herding communities are dispersed rather than nucleated. The countryside in Alccavitoria is marked by clusters of houses with their accompanying corrals, at great distances from one another. Of the twelve or so separate clusters of houses in the community only two are

made up of nuclear families from two or more different lines. All the others consist of agnatically related nuclear families. This is another expression of the general pattern of male dominance here indicated by the principle of virilocality.

A typical cluster would break down into brothers and their families along with their sons and their families. Each nuclear family within the settlement has its own house and corrals, and each looks after its own provisioning. Under such conditions of close residence, close cooperation in the ayne and in other aspects

of daily life is the rule. Here we see a case of (1) environmental conditions determining a basic subsistence strategy which in turn determines the distribution of community members in a dispersed, as opposed to a nucleated, pattern of settlement, and (2) kinship bonds based on the close cooperation of siblings and the custom of virilocality which determines the form of residence units and thus increases solidarity and cooperation among its members. These two factors of environment and kinship affiliation also account for another economic coalition in Alccavitoria which we have labeled a lineage-like landholding corporation. Since most of the community territory lies above the limits of agriculture, arable land is scarce. And with the inheritance custom of Alccavitoria minifundismo (or the reduction of landholdings into ever-decreasing

units) often occurs. Also due to the annual dry season the communal land, 130

located on the slopes, is useless for grazing during several months out of each year. The stock must be driven to the higher elevations where the moisture content of the soil is higher and the pasture better. An annual intracommunity transhumance is thus practiced in Alccavitoria. These valuable year-round pasture lands, like the arable fields further down, are in the hands of the households of the community rather than in community stewardship. The ideal household owns a permanent house and corrals, fields in the lower elevations along with huts for temporary living, and estancias, or huts and corrals and pasturage in the highest elevations.

Such lands, like animals, are ideally partitioned on the occasion of the marriage of an offspring. Since these territorial resources are in many cases scarce, we encounter not always a partitioning of the land, but rather joint ownership. In fact most estancias are held under such arrangements, as well as.a

large part of the arable land. The people who share in such joint ownership, furthermore, are the nuclear families of siblings and the nuclear families of their

children. Following agnatic residence custom and the principle of male dominance, these landholding corporations, even though including female siblings, are in essence male-dominated. This is the case not only for those clusters made up of male-linked families but for families, regardless of residence, where small plots of land are at issue. The rule here seems to be that in situations of scarcity male claims predominate.

We refer to these groups as “‘lineage-like’? not only because of this male preference, but also (1) because of joint ownership, and (2) because the claim to

the land is held by virtue of descent and thus inheritance from a common ancestor. Furthermore, we find up to three generations forming such corporate groups, with ego’s brothers and cousins and his father and paternal uncles as active members and possibly also his grandfather as a retired member. Most such groups, however, are not this deep since they consist of a father and his married

sons, or of brothers and their children. A final similarity between these coalitions and lineages is found in the close cooperation in the working of this | land in the form of the ayne and in the sharing of estancias. Unlike lineages, however, such shareholding groups occur only when there is a

scarcity of land; otherwise, land is divided among the constituent households. There is no common ritual practiced by this group since the only local rituals performed are those connected with basic production and exchange activities, and these activities are the responsibility of the individual household.

Despite the joint ownership of such land the family of each son has the usufruct of equal shares. If sister remains unmarried, however, and dependent on her share of this land, it will be worked by her brothers. In each group the oldest male will act as the “executor.”

In sum, then, we see (1) a close cooperation in labor mobilization concentrated within the range of siblings and their children, even though arrangements are made with anyone else when economically advantageous, (2)a residence norm based on virilocality which functions to foster solidarity among siblings, and (3) an attempt at making the best of scarce land resources through the joint ownership by male siblings and their male children. Thus the problems of labor mobilization and the ownership of land are at least partially handled by coalitions based on range II kinship affiliations. 131

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

Our purpose here was to explicate that principle of social organization which

is based on consanguinity and affinity, by analyzing the closely interrelated patterns of behavior of (1) the use of kinship terms, which realize the abstract principles of kin classes and the logic of kin relations, and (2) social coalitions which have arisen to come to terms with subsistence problems and the social conflict inherent in the division of scarce resources. As we attempted to show in this paper these economic problems are partially solved by the operation in this

realm of the principle of kin relations, since inherent in these relations are bundles of affect and mutual obligations which are learned in early childhood

and which present powerful motives for the cooperation necessary in the cohesion and continuity of peasant social groups.

The nuclear family was seen to form the basic social unit in the kinship network as evidenced by the unique use of the primary kin terms. And in a complementary manner the household, based on this unit, was seen to form the basic economic body within peasant society. Furthermore the coordinate use of

both Spanish and Quechua kin terms was shown to mark both kin class and solidarity, (1) in the Hawaiian type usage of Quechua terms and (2) in the Eskimo type structure of Spanish terms for kin types in the range of parents’ siblings’ nuclear families. We then tried to show how this was matched in the economic sphere by both the independence of each nuclear family within this range, but at the same time the continuity of a cooperation begun in the nuclear family to ayne preference and other types of interhousehold reciprocities, and in the way scarce resources are handled. It was also pointed out that residence, under high altitude conditions, reflects this pattern.

What is not marked in the terminology, however, but is evidenced in onomastic practice, is the male preference which is seen in almost all aspects of peasant life and which has been indicated in the data presented here.

This paper can be characterized as ethnographic since its main purpose is descriptive. There are, however, two different types of ethnography, each with its own degree of “delicacy.” One type is like a road map which selects certain

broad features from the empirical field and states these features in a static manner, thus explicating the broad outlines of a system. The other type of ethnography selects more detailed features of the empirical field and with this greater amount of data (much of it quantifiable) constructs a model which will not only reveal the broad outlines of the system, but will also predict, under

variable but specified conditions, and with fair accuracy, what will be ‘“system-intelligible’? behavior to members of the group characterized in the study. In this way a greater degree of detail can be accounted for. This paper (despite the model of lexical application) is of the first type of ethnographic description since its result is to explicate an ideal structure based on the observation of the highest frequency of “normal” behavior. We have

therefore made explicit an underlying organizational principle of great importance in peasant society. What we have not done, however, is to describe the less frequent but nonetheless significant exceptions to this pattern which form patterns of their own, and which in turn build a more coherent picture of peasant life under high altitude conditions. For this reason this paper is filled

with such qualifiers as “normally,” “the ideal type,” and “under ideal conditions.” But what of those cases where peasants do not have enough 132

resources on either side of the marriage to carry on normal subsistence strategies? Or, under what conditions are landholding groups formed and dissolved? Or, what about those cases where variations are seen in arrangements for the support of elderly parents? These things must be accounted for as much as possible in order to present a more adequate theory of the data collected and

to explain how these peasant groups actually operate under their particular conditions of life. As an example, of relevance to a discussion of kinship, let us look briefly at the situation of residence variation in Alccavitoria.

Virilocality varies with neolocality as the accepted norm of postnuptial residence. This is confirmed by all the informants interviewed. Yet many men live near their wives’ relatives, a perfectly acceptable situation despite the ideal pattern. This variation, however, can be accounted for by the economic variables

in the decision on where to live. In some cases uxorilocal residence can be explained by the fact that the man comes from a family of modest means which consists of several brothers, while the woman comes from a family consisting of

sisters or she is an only child. Under the terms of old-age security and the necessity for bisexual labor for a healthy peasant concern, we find it not only economically expedient from the man’s point of view, but also mandatory from a social point of view that he go and live near his wife’s relatives and help her in her filial obligations. The second case of uxorilocality is seen in situations in which the man, due to

the poverty of his family, has either very little or no capital resources to bring into a marriage; thus the only means he has of supporting his family is to join his wife’s group of kinsmen and to work her share of resources from her nuclear family. This represents a perfectly proper decision on his part. Rather than an exception to a “rule of residence,” we note that uxorilocality conforms not only to ideal but also to perfectly acceptable pragmatic behavior. Instead of simply explicating general principles of organization in “‘different”’

domains of activity, therefore, a more adequate ethnography would postulate, | on the basis of empirical observation, (1) “‘ground rules” of custom and the basic conditions of subsistence, and (2) the constraints imposed by the environment as

well as the range of options available within them. The ethnographer would then ! write “rules” which would reflect peasant decisions under fluctuating environmental conditions. In the case of residence behavior, for example, the ground

rules would consist of (1) ideal residence, (2) the rules of generational | reciprocity, and (3) the basic conditions of a viable peasant household. When the economic circumstances of individuals are taken into account one should be able to predict with a fair degree of accuracy what will be the residence choice of a couple. Such predictions could then be checked with cases of uxorilocality in

the field to see if this is indeed the pattern, and if not, the model would be changed accordingly. This, of course, would extend to all areas of what is perceived as the patterned behavior of the social group.

Such an ethnography would naturally be based on a great deal of empirical data gathered on the basis of careful observation, and its value would lie not only in the explanation of why people are doing things the way they are doing them at a specific point in time, but would also more accurately indicate trends and patterns over time and would thus make possible a more accurate theory of the dynamics of peasant populations in the Andes.* This paper has done no more than outline one principle of organization, or one set of “ground rules,’ among others which underlie the orderly pattern of 133

eee nae

behavior. As such, it is merely a road map which indicates the direction to be taken for further, more detailed investigation and the writing of a more accurate ethnography.

APPENDIX. KEY TO THE SYMBOLS USED IN THIS ARTICLE

F = Father

M = Mother B = Brother

S = Sister H = Husband

W = Wife

S = son

d = Daughter Sib = Sibling Of = Offspring When two symbols co-occur the initial symbol identifies the linking

kinsman, thus FB=Father’s Brother, MB=Mother’s Brother, FSs = Father’s Sister’s Son.

6) = Male 2 = Female When a sex sign appears before a kin type it indicates the sex of ego, thus ? B = Female Ego’s Brother, 6 B = Male Ego’s Brother.

> = Lexical application, thus F — papa, would read ‘the lexical item papa is applied to the kin type Father.’

// = Condition of application. Thus WF ~papay /address/, would read ‘the lexical item papa is applied to the kin type Wife’s Father when he is being addressed by his daughter’s husband.

“N/ = Apparent free variation. > = The terms the to the left are included in the superordinate term to the right. In one example in this data churi and ususi are to wawa as ‘son’ and ‘daughter’ are to ‘offspring.’

NOTES

1The term papa does not appear in any sixteenth and seventeenth century Quechua document. Instead, we find the occurrence of the terms yaya and tata (also tayta). Due to the minimal phonetic differences between these terms (especially the latter two) and their identical distributions within the appropriate contexts,-we will consider papa as a Quechua base term. This contrasts with tia, cufiado, and primo, etc., which not only represent the 134

borrowing of Spanish terms, but also the introduction of kin classes different in range from those of the pre-Hispanic system. 2In some localities Quechua and Spanish terms are alternately applied to this kin class;

however, in Alccavitoria the Quechua term was not observed to occur in either formal eliciting or in normal discourse. 3In Quechua the affixing of -y to a noun indicates first person possessive. Thus, mamay

means literally ““my mother” and papay “my father.” In address situations this suffix is always added. *For an example of this type of description, see William Geoghegan’s ‘““Decision Making

and Residence on Taatabon Island.” Working Paper No. 17, Language Behavior Research Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley.

135

KINSHIP AND LAND USE IN A NORTHERN SIERRA COMMUNITY Stephen B. Brush COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY

In surveying peasant communities of the northern Andes of Peru, two features which one encounters frequently are a highly diversified resource base and an extremely flexible kinship system characterized by a diversity of personal

networks (Brush 1973). This paper describes these two features in one community and attempts to show how reciprocal relationships, relying primarily on kinship, function in relation to the social and natural resource configuration of an Andean community. The diversified resource system which characterizes

the northern Andes of Peru differs slightly from systems which have been described by botanists, geographers, and anthropologists for the central and southern highlands (cf. Weberbauer 1945; Gade 1967; Pulgar Vidal 1946; Troll

1968). It does not, however, differ in perhaps its most important attribute, namely, the complex system of microclimates and crop zones which are arranged

primarily according to altitude. The kinship system of most northern communities is a relatively flexible, bilateral system. This is in keeping with the heavy mestizo influence which characterizes the northern highlands, contrasting

with kinship systems of the central and southern highlands where lineage systems such as the castas of Ancash are found (Vazquez and Holmberg 1966; Stein 1961). The village which provides the material for this discussion is Uchucmarca, a

district capital in the Province of Bolivar, Department of La Libertad. It is located roughly 200 kilometers east of Cajamarca and 250 kilometers south of Chachapoyas. Uchucmarca is a Comunidad Campesina (formerly Comunidad Indigena), officially recognized as such in 1941. Uchucmarca controls, by right of Community eminent domain, a valley which runs down from the watershed between the Marafion and Huallaga Rivers toward the Marafion River. In 1971 the nucleated settlement of Uchucmarca comprised 230 separate households with a population of 940 persons. In the rest of the district and Community, there were 267 households located in smaller hamlets or isolated homesteads

with an additional 1328 persons. The total population of the District of Uchucmarca was 2268 (Brush 1973:50). Culturally, the northern highlands (e.g., communities and larger towns in the

upper Marafion drainage system, including Huamachuco, Cajabamba and Celendin on the western edge of the Marafion canyon and Tayabamba, Bolivar, Leimebamba and Chachapoyas on the eastern edge) bear a heavier mestizo stamp 136

than the central and southern highlands of Peru. Perhaps the clearest marker of mestizo influence is the fact that even small and relatively isolated villages in this region, like Uchucmarca, are monolingual Spanish speaking. The best description of the general cultural complexion of this area is found in Ciro Alegria’s three great novels about the central Marafion, Los Perros Hambrientos, La Serpiente de Oro, and El Mundo es Ancho y Ajeno. Uchucmarca is in the same province as Calemar, the setting for La Serpiente de Oro. THE KINSHIP SYSTEM

The kinship terminology used in Uchucmarca is entirely Spanish, i.e., the Eskimo type of kinship system in which cousins are differentiated from siblings.

Within the system of reckoning, two principal units may be discerned: the immediate nuclear household (da casa) and the general kin universe (Ja familia or,

more commonly, Jos parientes). The types of relationships which a person maintains with a kinsman depend largely on whether that person belongs to the household or to the family. Likewise, as one moves out from the nuclear family,

there are differing degrees of closeness which depend chiefly on degrees of relatedness and secondly on factors such as residence.

The household is the basic economic unit of production and consumption. The key to delineating nuclear households as defined by Uchucmarquinos is to determine who eats regularly in which kitchen. Some separate households exist within the same house structure, occupying different rooms and using different hearths. The typical household consists of a husband, wife, and their children. The average number of members is slightly over four persons. The composition of individual households varies considerably from ones in which a single member resides to ones which have numerous individuals of different generations.

This household unit is where the most important and clearly defined bonds between kinsmen exist: those between husband and wife, between parent and child, and between siblings. The most pervasive activities in this sphere are intimate and reciprocal relationships in which the needs of the members are understood and usually need no formal supplication, explanation, or thanks.

Mutual aid and support are freely offered and received in a manner which Sahlins (1965:147) has described as “generalized reciprocity.” Bonds are so constantly reinforced that it is impossible to untangle the exact pathway of any single exchange dyad. Indeed, it is difficult to speak of “exchange” at all in such an intimate setting. The mutual dependency within this nuclear household is similar to the basic European model. Outside the individual nuclear household, there exists a large number of other kinsmen (parientes) who are called upon for a variety of reasons. The reckoning

of membership here is bilateral. As one moves out from the kinsmen of the immediate household, the criteria for assigning the status of ‘“‘pariente” become less and less specific. The rules which determine the boundaries of this group tend to be quite tractable. Many Uchucmarquinos prefer not to press for specific genealogical criteria at the outer fringes. An example of this is the fact that people who share a common surname frequently will refer to one another as “pariente” in the belief that they must somehow be related. Once a person is included in the kinsman category of pariente, he is treated with the same general attitude which characterizes other kinship relations. This may best be described as the “‘rule of deference’? which means that any kinsman 137

should, if possible, be treated with deference over nonkinsmen. The strength of

this rule and the understood rights and obligations of deference become increasingly important as the genealogical reckoning between two persons becomes clearer and vice versa. As one moves from the nuclear household toward the outer edges of the kinship universe, ties become more tenuous and the amount of deference between kinsmen becomes less obvious.

People of the extended family provide the most important social resource base which any villager has outside the nuclear household. Moreover, it is a resource to which most people have ample access. No villager could possibly utilize all of the potential resources which this universe holds at any one time. It is likely that there are people within this universe whom a specific individual

would not call upon throughout his lifetime. On the other hand, no Uchucmarquino can ignore these relationships and their rights and obligations. As in all peasant societies, the role which kinship plays is a pervasive one, serving as a backdrop to all other social relationships. Uchucmarquinos look first to their kinsmen for support and companionship throughout their lives. If it is the

community which mediates the relationships between the villagers and the surrounding social, political, economic, and physical environments, within the

community’s boundaries it is the web of kinship ties which mediates an individual’s articulation with his immediate social and economic environment. SELECTING A MARRIAGE PARTNER

Marriage is one of the most important milestones in the lives of the people of Uchucmarca and not something which the partners and their families enter into lightly. Marriage marks for the village the creation of a new household, the most

important social and economic unit in the village. For the couple, marriage creates the responsibility of being household heads, a step which makes them complete members of the community in terms of rights and obligations. They may live with their parents for a while, but for the average Uchucmarquino, marriage means that the couple must prepare to leave the parental household. For the parents, marriage of a child means that they lose part of their former responsibilities, but in doing so they take on the potential responsibility of caring for another household or for grandchildren. The advantages which accrue to the parties involved in a marriage transaction

have to do mostly with the opening of new linkages which can be used to supplement older ones. Affinal links are recognized between the wider families of the couple and not just between the couple and their “in-laws.” These affinal links may be used as pathways for relationships which provide land, labor, and

other resources. Because of the potential for access to resources which is inherent in these affinal relationships, marriageable sons and daughters may be considered as a resource in themselves which might be “‘invested”’ in setting up new linkages for reciprocal relationships. Thus they are advised closely on the relative advantages and disadvantages in selecting a certain partner. One partner may be acceptable because he or she has access to lands in certain crop zones in the valley. Another may be acceptable because he or she has a number of siblings who can be recruited for labor. Another may be acceptable because he or she has numerous cattle or sheep, both valuable and prestigious. Yet another may be acceptable because he or she comes from a large and prominent village family

and has many kinsmen who can be looked to in the future. These different 138

advantages may be more or less important to a given individual and household according to a constellation of variables involving their resource base and specific

kinship position in the village. Factors to consider here include whether the individuals or families involved are migrants, how long they have lived in Uchucmarca, what type of fields in which crop zones they own, the inheritance position of the individuals, the number of other siblings who are in the village

and the household, and so forth. The complexities of these decisions are indicative of the importance of marriage partner selection and subsequent affinal links in the resource strategies of the villagers.

Although there is no formal rule of endogamy in the village, 59% of the marriages are village-endogamous. Of the remaining marriages, 29% involve native women who marry immigrant males, and 12% are unions of native men and immigrant females. The fact that the majority of marriages are endogamous is indicative of the village’s size and isolation. Moreover, it is indicative of the strategic place which marriage plays in a person’s attempt to gain access to resources such as land and labor and to networks which open up sources of exchange and credit. The number of marriages between immigrant males and native females is also indicative of this. Affinal links are especially vital to immigrants who do not have consanguineal kinsmen to rely on. By marrying outside the village, a man shuts off an important source of new kinship linkages and subsequent reciprocal relationships. Many of the men who do marry outside the community tend to have a relative abundance of land or other resources. In some cases, a man may view links extended outside the village as potentially

more valuable than internal affinal links. For instance, one schoolteacher married a woman from a prominent family in the provincial capital. Through this marriage, he not only established a link which has proven useful in his profession, but he also gained access to lands outside the village which his wife inherited.

Prohibitions against marriage and incest cover siblings and persons related through the compadrazgo link of ritual co-parenthood. There are a number of cousin marriages and unions, several involving first cousins. Within the village there is no formal rule against such unions, but some villagers look askance at them, and most are aware that these violate the rules of the Catholic Church. There does not, however, appear to be any overt prejudice shown to either the couples or their children. RESOURCES AND SUBSISTENCE

The resource base of the Comunidad Campesina de Uchucmarca is the valley

of the Pusac River, a small tributary of the upper Marafién River (Brush 1973:184-91). The valley system controlled by the Community covers lands which begin near the Marafién River at an altitude of roughly 1000 meters above sea level. These lands extend up and over the Marafién-Huallaga watershed (4300 meters) and down into the dense ceja de montana. Within the general zonation of the valley, there is a very large number of microclimates which are determined

by such things as slope, drainage, and exposure. The predominant features of zonation are, however, related to altitude and its concomitant environmental features—biotemperature, moisture, and evapotranspiration. Tosi (1960) depicts

five natural life zones for the Uchucmarca Valley: (1) subtropical thorn woodland, (2) dry forest, (3) temperate moist forest, (4) rain tundra, and (5) 139

cool temperate wet forest. These have been listed in the sequence which one follows moving from the Marafién Valley toward the eastern Cordillera and the Marafidn-Huallaga watershed. This sequence goes from dry to wet and from hot to cold climates. Within this natural diversity, the people of Uchucmarca recognize seven crop zones:

The temple zone at the base of the Valley (800-1550 meters) where sugar cane, coca, and fruit are cultivated on irrigated lands.

The kichwa fuerte zone (1550-1900 meters) in the lower valley where maize and wheat are grown in small quantities when there is sufficient rain. The kichwa zone (1900-2450 meters) in the central valley where maize and wheat are grown in considerable quantity. The templado zone (2450-2800 meters) surrounding the village where field peas (arvejas), barley, lentils, maize, and some potatoes are cultivated. The jalka zone (2800-3500 meters) where potatoes and ocas are grown and where some grazing of livestock is done.

The jalka fuerte zone (3500-4300 meters) where livestock is grazed on natural pastures. The ceja de montafia (2500 meters) where some hunting and lumbering are done.

The subsistence system of the community is closely tied to the valley’s natural zonation (Brush 1973:132-65). The population produces the majority of the goods which it consumes. Historically, we can only assume that this was also true, perhaps to an even greater extent than today. Given the ecological variety of the community’s lands, a fairly broad subsistence base is possible. This base is expanded through trade outside the valley. Trade with the wider market system beyond the village borders appears to be increasing. One major factor in this was the extension of a road link, in 1965, to within one day’s travel from the village. The amount of goods which move in and out of the community is limited by the fact that they still must be carried by mules or men for one or two days. The community produces enough to maintain an adequate diet for most households in the village, but little more than that for things like a piece of manufactured clothing, an occasional beer, or the luxury of a transistor radio.

The maintenance of an adequate subsistence level may be accomplished through a variety of techniques and strategies. Basically, however, all household subsistence depends on the ability to gain access to and use the resources of land

and labor. Ideally, a household should have enough land spread among the various crop zones of the Uchucmarca Valley as well as adequate household labor to produce on all of the chacras (plots) of the household. Because of the small size of individual chacras and the relatively small holdings of the average

household “(some 1.58 hectares), agriculture in Uchucmarca is highly labor

intensive: there is apparently no underemployment in the village (Brush 1973:260-261). The ideal of adequate land and labor for a household is, however, rarely met, and most households need alternative methods of gaining access to these resources. RECIPROCAL RELATIONSHIPS

Every household must weigh its particular needs and wants against a body of

constraints and opportunities inherent in the ecosystem and sociocultural 140

systems in the village. The decision concerning which resources can and will be

used by any one household depends on a set of sociocultural variables, a constellation of factors such as family size, family composition, education, inheritance of land, capital accumulation, and non-agricultural skills (e.g., carpentry, tile production, teaching). As a result, few if any households can meet their needs and wants as an isolated unit without outside support.

In order to compensate for these inadequacies, every household in Uchucmarca is called upon to seek out friends, neighbors and, most importantly, kinsmen and to establish a series of reciprocal relationships with them which will provide land, labor, and exchange. Through these reciprocal relationships the

potential abundance of the Uchucmarca Valley is brought into individual households of the village. Several techniques and strategies are used to establish

and maintain these relationships. In general terms, these strategies set up relationships which accomplish two things: first, they provide access to the means of production, and second, they promote exchange of goods. At least five different reciprocal relationships which involve the exchange of resources and goods may be cited (Brush 1973:295-301): (1) sociedad in which

land and labor are exchanged, (2) huasheo in which labor is exchanged, (3) | minga in which labor is exchanged for cash or crops, (4) faenas during the harvest where labor is exchanged in a festive and ritual manner, and (5) exchange

of goods which is generally non-monetized (canje) but which may involve monetary transaction (compra). The types of reciprocal relationships which weld a village like Uchucmarca together are both numerous and variable. They may vary according to context,

function, duration, number of people involved, and to the very definition of reciprocity. In discussing the way in which kinship is used to establish and maintain reciprocal relationships in agriculture, one has several different relationships in the total repertory of subsistence strategies to choose from. Among the most important, and certainly the most visual of these, is the sociedad or sharecropping arrangement between households. Other reciprocal — relationships such as exchange tend to be much less visible, although they may accomplish much the same thing as sociedad. THE ROLE OF KINSHIP IN SOC/EDAD: CASE STUDIES :

The initiative for selecting or recruiting a socio (partner in sharecropping) may come from either the owner of the plot or from the person who will work the plot. The reciprocity involves an exchange of land for labor. There are, of course, alternative means to obtain both land and labor. Land may be rented, borrowed, or cleared from virgin areas. Labor may be hired for cash or crops, or it may be exchanged under the huasheo arrangement. It is only the sociedad

system, however, which moves the two most important resources of

, 141

Uchucmarca, land and labor, into a reciprocal alignment. Often a particular household has only land, or conversely only labor, to exchange for the other.

In Uchucmarca the sociedad arrangement calls for an even division of the yield between the owner of the plot and his socio. The obligation of the owner of the chacra is to provide the principal capital (seed and oxen) as well as the land itself. The socio’s obligation is to provide his labor. If any extra labor is needed in plowing, weeding, or harvesting, the cost in either goods or cash is divided equally.

The importance of the sociedad system for Uchucmarca can be seen in Table

1, which shows the percentage of land in certain crops and zones under the sharecropping regime. Besides the high overall average of land cultivated under

sharecropping arrangements, this table indicates the relative shortage or abundance of lands in different zones. The highest crop zone, the jalka, and its crops, potatoes and ocas, have a markedly lower percentage in sociedad than the

lower, grain producing zones. There is adequate land in the upper zone for pioneer plots, but in the lower zones there is competition for free plots. Table 1. Sharecropping for Different Crops and Zones

% of Crop of Land Crop Sharecropped Zone% Sharecropped

Wheat 63 Kichwa 62 Maize 57 Kichwa Fuerte 45 Barley 51 Templado 45 Field peas Potatoes 24 45 Jalka 25 Ocas 2220 All Zones 43 Broad beans Average for

Case I

Relatively few people choose not to participate in the sharecropping system. For some, an abundance of land matched with an abundance of household labor Or a means to hire peones preclude the necessity of looking for a socio. Sucha household is that of two schoolteachers in Uchucmarca, César and Marta.’ Marta is an immigrant from Bolivar. She and César met while studying in Cajamarca, and they returned to the Province of Bolivar to teach primary school. After their

marriage in 1952, they both came to teach in Uchucmarca. As an immigrant, Marta had no lands or kinsmen in the Community. César, however, is a member of one of the oldest and most prominent families in Uchucmarca, the Alegrias, who frace their lineage back to the last cacique to dominate Uchucmarca in the early 1900s. In spite of the fact that his father had three brothers and six sisters

and César has two sisters and numerous cousins, he inherited a number of chacras in different zones in the valley. He has a large plot in the central kichwa where he cultivates wheat, maize, beans, and barley. The family also inherited plots in the templado where it raises field peas and broad beans. Another plot in

the jalka produces potatoes. Besides these plots which he inherited from his father, César purchased another potato plot from his mother’s brother who was emigrating to Lima in 1968 to join his children. In 1969, César purchased a plot in the kichwa for growing maize. The former owner was not a kinsman of the household. All of these plots amount to some five hectares of land spread out in different crop zones. Apart from these, César and Marta recently purchased a small fondo (one hectare) near Pusac where they have a house, sugar cane and

fruit plantations. They are one of the few families living in Uchucmarca who own land in the temple around Pusac. Besides the houses in Uchucmarca and Pusac, the family owns another house next to its potato chacra as well as an inoperative mill along the river. 142

The holdings of this household are well above average for the village, and the potential labor inputs would exceed the labor resources of most households in

the village. The amount of time which César and Marta could put into their fields is severely limited by the demands of their teaching jobs. School is open Monday through Friday from eight in the morning until noon and then from one until four, leaving insufficient time to hike out and work in the chacras. All the other schoolteachers with chacras use socios to manage the fields. Unlike some teachers, César works in his chacras on days when he is not teaching. César and Marta have found it preferable to hire peones and to use the labor of their three teenage sons. These have left to study in secondary schools on the coast, so that

the household must rely on hired labor in their fields. Their eldest daughter often hikes out to their chacras to keep track of the peones they have hired. Most of their hiring is done for a specific amount of labor (Jornal) such as the weeding of a given number of rows of potatoes or maize. Because of their teaching professions, they have the highest cash income in the village. Cash is scarce to the majority of village households, so the availability of cash to César and Marta means that they can hire peones with cash with little difficulty. Since most households use crops for payment of day labor, a household which uses cash may have a relatively easy time recruiting labor. This has proved to be the case with this household. The only socio with César is a nonkinsman living in

Pusac who works his cane and fruit plantation there. A major part of his responsibilities is to act as a watchman. Case 2

César and Marta have found it preferable not to use sharecroppers since they have both land and cash for hiring labor. At the other end of the spectrum, there are households not participating in the sharecropping system because of a lack of resources. Mateo’s household, for instance, consists of himself and his daughter, Teresa, who is twelve and still in school. Mateo migrated to Uchucmarca from Bolivar. His wife, also from Bolivar, died shortly after Teresa was born, and Mateo has never remarried. He has lived in Uchucmarca for thirty years after having left the hacienda in Bolivar where he was born. Unlike some of the mi-

grants from Bolivar, Mateo has no other kinsmen in Uchucmarca. He is a ‘member of the Peasant Community of Uchucmarca, but the only chacra which he has claimed is a small plot for potatoes, oca, and a few rows of the bitter tubers, mashua and ulluco. This plot produces enough tubers for the household, but he must look elsewhere for other food. Having no kinsmen and no other household _ labor except himself, Mateo has had a difficult time finding someone to become partners with him in sociedad. After several attempts, he has found it easier to work as a field laborer to earn his food rather than be responsible for a chacra not his own. He often works for people with César. His earnings are meager, and they are not bolstered by owning any sheep or cattle. Because of their restricted

landholdings, Mateo and his daughter must rely more on tubers and less on cereals and legumes than the average household which has chacras spread out from the kichwa to the jalka. The two households just described do not participate in the sociedad system for very different reasons. César and Marta have had the advantage of kinship

connections to one of the most prominent families in Uchucmarca combined with strong cash resources. They have inherited and purchased a variety of 143

chacras, and they are able to recruit labor to work their chacras. Mateo, on the other hand, has no such connections to a prominent family, nor to any kinsmen for that matter. The only resource he has is his own labor which he exchanges for food and some cash. On the other extreme of the sharecropping system are those households which rely exclusively on socios in their agricultural activities. Case 3

One such household is that of Didmedes and Maria. Diomedes is native to Bolivar, but he came to Uchucmarca with his family when he was only seven

years old. He is related to a large number of kinsmen who migrated to Uchucmarca in the 1940s after the district had become an Indigenous Community. At 37, Didmedes is the oldest of six brothers and sisters. His father, an active farmer, is aided by three sons in their late teens and early twenties who

still live at home. His parents do not yet have any free Chacras which they are ready to give to Didmedes and Maria. Through his kinship connections Didmedes has obtained the use of the house where he keeps his family. For this, he pays a nominal fee to a cousin who owns the house. He has started to build a house of his own across the trail from his parents’ house. Marta, a native of Uchucmarca, comes from a relatively small family without strong kinship links to the larger extended families in the village. She, like her husband, has not inherited any land in the valley. Diomedes and Maria have five chacras planted in maize, wheat, barley, potatoes, and ocas. These are all owned by other households who have established the reciprocal sociedad relationship with Didmedes. The maize, wheat, and barley chacras are owned by one of the schoolteachers in Uchucmarca who does not have time to cultivate them himself. Didmedes’ father had been a socio with this same teacher on the same chacras until the early 1960s when he began to open up chacras on land for which he had petitioned the Community. Thus Didmedes inherited his father’s sociedades with the schoolteacher. The potato and oca chacras are owned by his father. His father notes that it is important to hold a family like his together, and one way

of doing this is to become socios with his children. The socio relationship between Didmedes and his father is much different than that between Diomedes and the schoolteacher. In the former, Didmedes and his father both work in the

fields, while in the latter, Diomedes works alone or with labor which he has recruited. The teacher visits the fields infrequently. In both relationships, the harvest is divided equally after workers have been paid.

Didmedes has other economic relationships with his father’s and siblings’ households. He regularly exchanges labor under the huasheo system with a younger brother, especially for the long and difficult tasks of plowing and planting wheat. Didmedes and his wife have also begun a small sheep herd. One of Didmedes’ brothers lives on the upper edge of the jalka where he is a full-time herding specialist. Besides caring for the sheep and cattle of nonkinsmen for pay, he is a socio to Didmedes on the sheep herd. The original sheep and occasional salt are provided by Diémedes, while his brother’s household is responsible for herding them. Lambs born to Didmedes’ ewes are divided evenly between his brother and himself. The household of Diédmedes is typical of people involved in the sociedad

system because they have a shortage of land but adequate labor and kinship 144

linkages to set up the partnership. Didmedes has recently petitioned the Executive Council for his own parcels of land, so it may be expected that in the future he will rely less on sharecropping. Case 4

In comparison to the case of Didmedes are households with an abundance of land but a shortage of labor, e.g., the schoolteacher who is the owner and socio of Diomedes’ chacras, Emilio, a patriarch of one of the most prominent families in the village, who has a number of chacras which he is unable to work himself because of his age.

Emilio’s grandfather migrated to Uchucmarca from Leimebamba in the 1880s to found one of Uchucmarca’s major extended families. Emilio’s grandfather and his family cleared many new chacras in the valley and amassed a sizeable cattle

herd. Affinal links to other families, especially that of one of the caciques of Uchucmarca, provided more chacras and other resources. Emilio, now in his eighties, is the youngest and only survivor of four brothers, but he is surrounded |

by numerous nieces, nephews, and their families. He has four sons and no ! daughters; his sons have begun to retire from the demanding agricultural life and | to rely on the help of their own sons and daughters. One of them resides in Lima

with his son for most of the year, returning to Uchucmarca during the dry season and the harvests. Another spends much of the year in Chuquibamba, a day’s ride from Uchucmarca, where his children are enrolled in a secondary school. A third son has opened a small store in the village, but he still puts most of his time into agriculture. The fourth son is the only one who is a full-time agriculturist, and he and Emilio have been socios in growing maize and field peas

for several years. Emilio has also set up sociedades with two nonkinsmen for growing wheat and potatoes. He likes to ride or hike to the different chacras, while leaving the more strenuous work to the younger men. Keeping track of his cattle herd, which numbers in the seventies, has become a principal occupation in his later years. He is the most active and important cattle buyer and seller in the village. Buyers who come to Uchucmarca on their regular circuits, which begin on the other side of the Marafion, usually come to Emilio first to see if he has cattle to sell or to find out who is selling. Thus Emilio relies completely on the sociedad system for the food which he and his wife consume. Their’s is

characteristic of a few households which have an abundance of land but a shortage of labor. Although he has bequeathed most of his former lands to his four sons, he has kept sufficient chacras to provide a subsistence base for his household through the labor of socios. Between the two extremes of households which do not use sociedad at all and those which rely completely on the system for their subsistence lies the majority of households of Uchucmarca which use sociedad as one of the mechanisms in their resource strategies. Most households in the village own and work several chacras by themselves without socios, and most households work in the fields of friends and kinsmen as peones to supplement food which they do not produce directly or which they cannot obtain through exchange. Case 5

The household of Tedfilo and Rosaura is typical of many households in 145

Uchucmarca in its use of sharecropping. Tedfilo is the third son of a prosperous immigrant to Uchucmarca who left three other sons in Uchucmarca. The four brothers live in a family compound with their widowed mother. Their father had claimed a number of chacras after his emigration from Bolivar to Uchucmarca. Once these lands had been divided among the four brothers, each brother had to look for other plots to complement the inherited ones. Tedfilo inherited two chacras from his father, one planted in potatoes and the other in barley which he

rotates with field peas. In 1956 he purchased two other chacras from a nonkinsman for nominal amounts (S.45 and S/.95). One of these he has planted in potatoes and the other in field peas. All of these are either in the templado or jalka crop zones. The only chacra in the kiesi«-a is one which he works as a socio with his wife’s father. His wife is the youngest daughter of a household of one of

the major extended families, but she has nut yet inherited any land for her household. Teofilo and Rosaura do, however, receive the benefit of free use of her father’s team of oxen for plowing their chacras, and the couple also works regularly in the harvests of her father’s chacras to earn food. Moreover, on the birth of their first son, he helped by giving them a cow with which to start their cattle herd. Affinai links have thus provided Teofilo with access to one of the major crop z:nes in the valley as well as to other valuable resources such as oxen.

Teofilo and Rosaura live in a family compound of four siblings and are thus surrounded by close relatives with whom ongoing reciprocal relationships are understood. Teofilo and his brothers frequently use huasheo or labor exchange, in each other’s fields, and Rosaura and her concufiadas (wives of brothers) spin and weave together as well as exchange labor on household jobs. Rosaura’s connection to one of the most prominent and numerous families in the village has proved important to them. In 1965 Teofilo and one of his brothers obtained a cash loan from Rosaura’s grandfather in an effort to set up a small store ina spare room. The store never prospered, and the brothers decided not to continue after the original stock had been depleted. Although they were able to repay the

loan to Rosaura’s grandfather, Tedfilo and his brothers had a difficult time collecting on credit which they had extended and they ended up taking a small loss on their business venture. Case 6

Another household, characteristic of those using the sociedad system, is headed by Juan, a man in his middle fifties who lived alone until recently. He is a widower, and his three children have left Uchucmarca. One is a nurse and another a teacher in 1ama, and the third is a teacher in a small town on Perv’s north coast. In the late 1950s Juan began to sell his chacras, planning to migrate to Lima and live with his son until he got established in something. By 1962, he had sold five of his seven chacras, and he and his wife packed and left for Lima. He sold one chacra to a nephew and another to a cousin of his wife, while the

others went to nonkinsmen. The decision to leave the village was ill-fated. Reports by his sons and daughter about the easy and somewhat glamorous life on the coast proved to be suited to someone younger and more educated than Juan. After a year of looking, the only job which Juan cold get was one as an ambulante—a “walking salesman”—who, with hundreds of others like him, beat a path around the markets, plazas, and other shopping areas of the capital selling 146

anything from mothballs to single razor blades. The more established and successful ones may sell their wares out of a cart, but most, like Juan, sell what they can carry in their arms or in small trays hung around their necks. Many ambulantes depend on selling odds and ends to people who have forgotten something in the formal market or stores. Sales are low and very sporadic, leaving the ambulantes on the lowest margin of subsistence in an incredibly competitive market place.

_ The shift from the life of an independent peasant with sufficient lands to that of an ambulante surrounded by people who were neither friends nor kinsmen strained Juan and his wife. After two years in Lima, his wife became chronically ill, and she died after four months in bed. Juan went into a depression which was lifted only by his decision to return to Uchucmarca and to begin his life where he had left it two and a half years previously. When he returned to the village in 1965, Juan faced two immediate problems: how to acquire land and how to work it. He had retained two chacras of the original seven inherited from his father. One of these is in the potato zone, and the other in the kichwa where he can plant maize. In order to produce crops on these, he went into sociedad with his sister's husband, an immigrant to Uchucmarca from a small town outside of Celendin. This couple also loaned him a room in the back of their house where he could live while renovating an old house near his potato chacra. He had sold his house in the village when he and his wife left for Lima. To complement these two chacras, he petitioned the Executive Committee of

the Peasant Community for two other chacras, one in the templado where he plants field peas and the other in the lower jalka where he has broad beans and barley. He works these chacras without a socio. Luckily, the clearing of these chacras was not too hard, and the crops which he has planted do not take very strenuous work. When confronted with a difficult job, he usually hires a nephew who lives in the village. Juan was foresighted enough to Keep his cattle when he went to Lima, and they now provide him with a small cash income. He had left these in sociedad with a brother, but that relationship was dissolved when he returned to Uchucmarca. Although Juan will probably never enjoy the standard of living which he had prior to his ill-fated move to Lima, his strategies involving

sociedad and petitioning the Community have reestablished him in the Community. The households head by Tedfilo and Juan are characteristic of the majority of

households in the village in that sociedad is used as one of several strategies in producing a subsistence base. The use of these reciprocal relationships is dictated by the need for either land or labor. The ability to form them was enhanced in each case by affinal kinship links. These and the other four cases presented here give an idea of how kinship is used in the reciprocal relationship of sociedad. Another perspective may be gained by looking at the overall statistical impact of kinship on sociedad. THE ROLE OF KINSHIP IN SOC/EDAD: OVERVIEW

Approximately 70% of the households of Uchucmarca are involved to some

extent with the system of sociedad. Of the 30% not involved, many are households comprising single persons who own no land and who have found it

more efficient to work for crops as peones rather than to take on the 147

responsibility of cultivating their own chacras. The rest, like Cesar and Marta, find it more profitable to use household and hired labor in their chacras. One statistical indication of the role of kinship in sociedad is given in Table 2, where the type of kinship relation of the socio partners is broken down into four categories. A basic division is made between consanguineal and affinal kinship categories, and these are in turn broken down into “nuclear” and “extended” categories. The nuclear category includes socios who are either siblings, parents,

or children, while the extended category includes all other people who are defined as ‘“‘parientes” (not only people who can be fixed with reasonable certainty on a genealogy, but also some persons who cannot be so fixed). Besides kinsmen, two other categories of persons are included: the fictive kin relation of compadrazgo, important in many parts of Latin America (Mintz and Wolf 1950), and those people who have no relation to the socio. Table 2. Types of Kinship Relations of Socios (Percentage of Sociedad Relationships Involving Given Categories of Kinsmen and Nonkinsmen)

Type of Relationship

Consanguineal Affinal Compadres No Relation Crop nuclear extended nuclear extended

Potatoes 1313 2614 08 — — 34 29 Maize 162323

Wheat 1623 2223111614 03 34 Field Peas 06 03 29 Barley 14 24 11 11 08 32 Ocas 29 12 12 24 — 23

Average 19 20 15 12 02 32 This table clearly demonstrates the importance of kinship in the recruitment of sociedad partners. Whereas the “no relation” category tends to be significant for each crop, the overall average of kinsmen selected as socios far outweighs that of nonkinsmen. The overall average of kinsmen is 68% while the overall

average of nonkinsmen is only 32%. In other words, two out of every three sociedades involve kinsmen of one type or another. Table 2 also shows the relative weighting of the various types of kinship relations in sociedad. There is an apparent bias toward consanguines indicated by the fact that both nuclear and extended relatives who are consanguines are used to a greater extent than affines of any type. When one combines this understanding with the fact that consanguines are also vital in questions of inheritance, it is evident that although

affinal relations are important, they do not serve as replacements for consanguineal relatives. One interesting sidelight given by this table is the relative unimportance of the compadrazgo relationship in the selection of socios. RECIPROCAL RELATIONSHIPS AS ACTION-SETS

The first parts of this paper presented the kinship system of the village and then looked at reciprocal relationships, particularly sociedad, as they function in relation to the kinship system. From these discussions, it is apparent that kinship 148

plays a very significant role in the establishment and maintenance of these relationships. This in itself, however, does not tell us how these reciprocal relationships actually operate beyond the fact that certain resources, goods, and

services move between two households according to the mechanism of the reciprocal relationship. To get a better understanding of the nature of these relationships, it might be useful to place them in the context of analytical models which anthropologists and others have developed for dealing with similar relationships.

This same type of phenomena has been examined at length for other peasant

and nonpeasant groups. Foster, for example, has described a reciprocal relationship which is characteristically nonkin based as the ‘“‘dyadic contract”

(1961). Wolf has discussed these as ‘‘coalitions” (1966:81f). Each of these conceptualizations fits the type of kin based reciprocal relationships which one observes in Uchucmarca. These models, however, imply a certain degree of

formality and structure not entirely descriptive of the kinship and other relations in the village.

The other large body of analysis which is applicable to this type of phenomena is network analysis. Although primarily designed for urban material, | it may be applied to any situation where one finds an individual putting together

and maintaining specific relationships out of a generalized pool of persons. Recently, Gulliver (1971) adopted this type of analysis for a rural African society. There is, of course, considerable variety in the area of network analysis, from sporadic and very temporary relationships described as “sets” by Barnes

(1954:43) to relatively formal and structured relationships described as “extended networks” by Epstein (1961:57). One model which seems to be particularly suited to the type of reciprocal relationship observed in Uchucmarca is Mayer’s (1966: 108-110) idea of “‘action-set.” Following Mayer we may look for several features which define an action-set. These are: (1) a wide variety of bases for linkage; (2) links which are sometimes, but not always, based on group membership; (3) paths of linkages which yield a

combination of relationships linking people directly to ego and those linking people to intermediaries who are themselves linked directly with ego; (4) the

action-set is a bounded entity, but it is not a group per se; and (5) it is a temporary rather than a permanent entity like a group. Mayer’s model for an action-set is closely related to other models which have been developed in situational analysis. In most of this type of analysis, one is able to note a tendency to describe models which emphasize either structure or process (Aronson 1970). The action-set is typical of those which emphasize process or the constant restructuring of relationships between different people for different reasons. Mayer (1966:97) offers a corollary to the action-set in the same paper, i.e., the “quasi-group” which is considerably more structured and more permanent than the action-set. He suggests that an action-set may evolve

into a quasi-group. In Uchucmarca, the reciprocal relationships which one observes do at times attain a certain complexity and durability which make them

similar to Mayer’s quasi-group model. These more complex and durable relationships tend, however, to be far rarer than the more simple and ephemeral relationships which one encounters in looking at the subsistence and resource strategies of individuals and households in the village. In the following section, the reciprocal relationships discussed above are related to Mayer's five criteria for an action-set. 149

(1) Bases for Linkage The particular bases concerned here are the various subsistence activities which must be planned in the complex Andean landscape. Other bases include

political alliances within the community in organizations such as the municipality and the Peasant Community, connections which link the individual

to the larger economic and political systems outside of the community, relationships which provide support for a variety of tasks and needs from roofing

a house to getting a loan, and relationships which are mobilized in support of some village obligation such as the sponsorship of a fiesta or ritual honoring a specific saint. Within each of these general categories of bases for forming reciprocal relationships, there are many more specific elements which can be analyzed. In looking more closely at the relationships involved in subsistence activities,

three major subtypes, described above, appear. First are the reciprocal relationships designed to promote access to land, such as the sociedad relationship. Second are the reciprocal relationships which provide labor for production, such as labor exchange (huasheo), and the minga labor arrangement (payment in cash or kind). Third are the reciprocal relationships which create

exchange links using either monetized (compra) or nonmonetized (canje) exchange. Thus there are a number of different bases for the formation of reciprocal relationships.

(2) Links Based on Group Membership All of the reciprocal relationships mentioned above may or may not be based on group membership. The most prominent group involved in setting up these

relationships is the group of kinsmen which most villagers have. As the discussion of sociedad pointed out, kinsmen of one sort or another are selected with far greater frequency than nonkinsmen in these reciprocal relationships. Recruiting for these takes place both within the kinship group and among paisanos who are members of the community not having a recognized kinship

affiliation. Very few relationships consistently reach outside the village boundary. One that does is the relationship between individual households and cattle buyers or other itinerant merchants who make regular stops in the village. The bulk of relationships involved in the subsistence activities of the village deal, however, solely with people within the village. Thus most of the links dealing with subsistence activities are usually, but not always, associated with a group of

kinsmen. The clearest indication of this can be seen in Table 2. | (3) Combination of Direct and Indirect Relationships

Mayer’s (1966) third condition for an action-set is that the relationships should involve both direct and indirect linkages with ego. Although the size of the village and the general intimacy which characterizes most social relations among peasants preclude much indirect linkage, it is possible to describe some relationships discussed above in such terms. The links are predominantly direct, as one would expect. Indirect links include such times as when one socio recruits labor or other help on his own. In this case, the recruited person is indirectly linked to the other sharecropper, who will enjoy, in part, the product of the 150

recruited worker’s labor. Indirect linkages may appear, also, in exchange relationships where any one item passes through two or more exchanges. The people who have handled the item at one time are indirectly linked, through an intermediary, to a third person who also handles the item. In general, however, the most important relationships are built upon direct recruitment and linkages. When this aspect is combined with ‘the usual short life span of the relationships, indirect linkages become very difficult to identify. (4) Boundaries

Mayer’s fourth condition is that an action-set be a bounded entity, but not a group. The reciprocal relationships described above are bounded by the fact that

they are predominantly links created for a specific purpose at a specific time. The purpose of the relationship, in a sense, becomes its boundary. On the other hand, there is no movement toward a formal structuring of these relationships into a group with its implication of rules and a formal organization invoiving

status and ranking. The relationships which surround each individual in his subsistence strategies are treated as separate units by that individual. These can be readily enumerated by that individual. There are no instances, however, when the people involved in the various relationships maintained by one individual come together to function as a single unit or group. Most people involved in these relationships are well aware of others also recruited by a certain individual, but this awareness does not carry over into any form of unified action which

might be characterized as group behavior. , (5) Temporary Relationships

The final condition which marks an action-set is that the relationships are temporary rather than permanent. The various reciprocal relationships which are

part of the subsistence system in Uchucmarca tend to be short-lived. The exceptions to this are a few linkages maintained between some immediate family members, especially father and son, in the cultivation of chacras in certain crop

zones, which may be relatively permanent. But the majority of sociedades, labor : recruitment, and exchange relationships are confined to one or two years. The short life of these relations may be an adaptive feature in that over the long run risk is spread out by allowing free and constant reshuffling of partnerships. Individuals prefer not to risk locking themselves into situations which may be difficult to break if and when the relationship becomes undesirable. The attitude held by many is that in relationships such as sociedad, one cannot quite trust the other fellow completely to uphold his end of the original contract, especially if he is not a close kinsman. The constant reshuffling of sociedades and of labor recruitment also tends to dampen any tendency toward regularized dependency

relationships between the owner of the chacra and the person he recruits to work on that land as either a socio or a peon. SUMMARY

I have attempted here to establish that the reciprocal relationships which mark the subsistence and resource strategies of the people of Uchucmarca are similar to what Mayer (1966) refers to as “action-sets.”” No individuals in the 151

village are self-sufficient enough to avoid maintaining at least a few such relationships in their strategies. This lack of self-sufficiency includes a few individuals who own more land in several zones than they can produce on given the demands for labor input on each plot. These individuals must look to either socios or hired field labor to help with the work on their chacras. In contrast to these individuals, there are a number of persons who have either insufficient land

or no land in the necessary crop zones to provide for the subsistence requirements of their households. Such persons must look for sociedades to provide land or for labor and exchange relationships to provide food. Most households fall somewhere between these two extremes, and these use sociedad, labor exchange, and exchange of goods to varying degrees.

In order to understand a household’s use of reciprocal relationships it is necessary to look at how individuals weigh their needs against their resources.

Minimum needs as compared to surplus consumption are very difficult to ascertain, as other anthropologists have recognized (Orans 1966). The resources which any one household in the village can muster for its own use include land in different crop zones, labor, certain craft skills, and exchange networks. The ability of any individual or household to mobilize these resources depends, to a significant degree, on a series of reciprocal relationships which generally involve kinsmen. That is to say, the actual articulation of a household with the resources inherent in the community’s ecosystem and socioeconomic system is in large

part conducted through the kinship system of the village. This system is characterized by an abundance of “‘action-sets’’ which are fairly short-lived relationships forged for a specific purpose. These reciprocal relationships are the basic units of strategies in which the household surrounds itself with as many of these relationships as it considers necessary and is able to maintain. Failure to set

up these relationships can pose a serious threat to the subsistence of any one household. Success often means a surplus in the family’s larder. NOTES

Acknowledgments. The research for this paper was conducted between August 1970 and

January 1972. It was made possible by grants from the National Science Foundation (GS-2836) and the University of Wisconsin. Besides the people of Uchucmarca, I wish to thank Donald Thompson and my wife Margaret Brush for their kind assistance during the field work period. I also wish to thank Arnold Strickon and Andrew Manzardo for their Suggestions during the preparation of this paper. The responsibility for its contents rests, of course, with me. 1 The names used here are fictitious to protect the anonymity of the people involved. It must be pointed out that compadres and comadres are frequently prior kin, and may therefore be included in the other categories.

152

COMMERCE AND KINSHIP INTHE PERUVIAN HIGHLANDS

Norman Long : UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM, ENGLAND

THEORETICAL ISSUES

During the past decade the pendulum of anthropological research has swung

away from institution to actor-oriented approaches to the study of social behavior. This is reflected in the various attempts to develop analyses based on propositions or insights derived from game theory and decision-making models

and-is also shown by the interest generated by situational analysis, network studies and exchange theory.

Basic to actor-oriented formulations is some assumption of rationality. Frequently, this is expressed simply by assuming that when faced with a particular problem and a series of alternative solutions the actor will select whichever solution offers the maximum payoff with minimum costs. However,

the calculation of rewards and costs and the bargaining (tacit or otherwise) which this may entail necessarily take place within some specified sociocultural

context and are thus limited by the resources, information, and culturally prescribed alternatives available. Moreover, decisions and outcomes are also

affected by the actions of other persons attempting to further their own interests. Indeed, it is this latter concern for treating social actions and relationships as the joint products of the parties involved which characterizes the

work of exchange theorists who have emphasized the emergent properties of interactional relationships (Blau 1964; Kapferer 1972). A set of exchange relationships composed of various transactional elements must, however, be analyzed against the background of shared values and norms. These, in effect, constitute the rules by which the transactions are managed and interpreted by the actors themselves. Values and norms derive essentially trom two sources. Certain of them are externally available in that they form part of a common stock of values and ideas currently articulated by members of a society or by certain groups within it. Each actor initiating or renewing a relationship

can draw upon this and appeal to particular values or norms in an attempt to increase the predictability of the outcome of the relationship. In a previous paper (1970) I showed how this operates for Jehovah’s Witness farmers in Zambia who may utilize matrilineal kinship ties for obtaining farm labor but successfully avoid many of the inherent conflicts and uncertainties associated 153

with these relationships by re-casting them in accordance with their religious ideology.

In network analysis (Mitchell 1969) this value content has been termed the “normative context” of relationships; thus if one categorizes a set of ties by such

criteria as kinship, religious, or political affiliation, one is specifying the dominant normative context or set of rules which governs the types of transactions that take place between the participants and the meanings they attribute to them. Obviously, the normative context of transactions may shift from situation to situation or may be differently defined by the actors involved. Also, it is usual to find a multiplicity of normative contexts to which appeal may be made as and when the actors think appropriate.

Another source for values is the exchange relationship itself. Having become parties to a relationship, the actors engage in transactions which, over time, may

generate new standards or values, or lead to a redefinition of existing ones. According to Barth (1963) this is especially true of the role that entrepreneurs play in initiating social change, though clearly every sort of relationship entails the existence of certain implicit rules that are in some sense unique to it. Hence the study of exchange relationships requires an analysis of them from both a transactional and normative point of view. As Anderson (1971) rightly emphasized in a recent study,’ the consideration

of both sets of values is of critical importance if we wish to develop a more sophisticated exchange model of social behavior. Values are of paramount

significance because they serve to increase the predictability of specific relationships by indicating the types of expectations involved and the nature of

the social and ideological commitments of the participants. Much exchange theory, I believe, by assigning analytical priority to a cost-benefit analysis of social behavior, has failed to give adequate treatment of how normative aspects affect the maintenance and outcomes of specific exchange relationships.” This paper, then, attempts to counteract this by analyzing more explicitly the ways in which normative criteria are used to consolidate and define more precisely the nature of transactional contents associated with certain relationships. This is

linked to an analysis of the organization and management of interpersonal resources in the operation of different types of economic enterprise in highland

Peru.

Previously I have analyzed the significance of kinship and associational networks for operating transportation enterprises in the central region of Peru (1972). The present paper extends this analysis by examining the role played by kinship and affinal ties in the running of other types of commercial enterprise. In it I distinguish between two contrasting patterns of organization: the first consists of a series of social exchanges occurring among selected kinsmen and affines each of whom manages his own economic affairs independently of the rest; the second is made up of a group of kinsmen who are differentially involved in the running of a single enterprise. These two patterns, I suggest, are associated with the use of somewhat different mechanisms for consolidating and defining relationships based on structurally similar kinship or affinal ties. I shall focus

specifically on three types of mechanisms: the use of compadrazgo (coparenthood), the membership of fiesta clubs, and the utilization of patron-client notions. 154

THE SETTING

The material for this paper was collected in 1971 during field research in the Mantaro Valley region of the Central Highlands.’ The area is well known for its generally high level of agricultural production and extensive commercial trading

activity. Although a minifundia zone with small, fragmented holdings it produces a wide range of crops (potatoes, beans, barley, wheat, vegetables of various types, and maize) and livestock products (meat, milk, butter, and cheese) for sale in external markets, mainly Lima and the mine towns. In addition, there is handicraft production of textiles, silverware, pottery, decorated gourds, hats,

and furniture, and a growing number of clothing and mechanical workshops. Concomitant with this is a large service sector which provides transport both within the valley and outside. Huancayo, the central town, has increased its population threefold during the past 30 years and represents the most important commercial and administrative center for the region. It is situated toward the southern end of the valley and has direct links with Huancavelica and Ayacucho and through these towns to other parts of the Southern Highlands. It is therefore

a strategic communications point and is linked by tarred road to Lima (some 350 kilometers) and also by train.

Commerce and transportation, however, are not confined to Huancayo as many pueblos (small towns) in the valley can boast of a high proportion of businessmen and transporters among their residents. Indeed, occupations of this

type often seem more profitable economically since many farmers have land resources which are too small for large-scale modern production. One pueblo with a substantial number of people engaged in non-agricultural occupations is Matahuasi, situated approximately halfway between Huancayo in the south and Jauja in the north, on the main road and rail line to Lima and the mine towns.

In 1971 Matahuasi had a de facto resident population of about 3000. An important agricultural community, it, like most valley communities, has been characterized for many years by a steady rate of out-migration due largely it

seems to the increasing pressure of population on land. From available Government statistics it emerges that Matahuasi, together with Sicaya, has the largest number of pueblo-born members living and working outside the valley, mostly in Lima. Considerable numbers of these are working in professional and technical grades, or are the traders, shopkeepers, or transporters. Although Matahuasi conforms to the general pattern of small and fragmented holdings, for historical reasons it exhibits more marked economic differentiation and greater inequalities in land ownership than many other communities in the Mantaro area. Some 15 out of a total of 611 households own between 20 and 30

hectares of land, while the majority has small extensions of less than two or three hectares and some no land at all. Nonetheless, much of the population is engaged in agriculture or related occupations. Others are craftsmen, skilled and unskilled workers who commute to Huancayo each day, drivers, teachers, and businessmen. The latter category comprises some 25 shopkeepers operating shops of varying size, four timber merchants, six transporters with their own trucks, several agricultural middlemen, and a garage and restaurant owner. Like other comparable rural situations, a high proportion of individuals is involved in more than one occupation. 155

FORMAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE KINSHIP SYSTEM

The pattern of kinship is typical of that found throughout the Mantaro Valley and in other mestizo areas of Peru where local communities are closely

integrated into the national sociocultural system (Gillin 1947; Brush). The terminology used is exclusively Spanish and relationships are traced bilaterally. For many purposes patrilateral and matrilateral relatives are considered of equal

importance, and this is buttressed by an inheritance system which divides property equally among all surviving children and thus protects the ownership

rights of both men and women. This means that the social and economic significance of patrilateral as against matrilateral relationships will vary according

to the particular family circumstances and will depend on the interests and personal commitments of the individuals concerned. Within this open and highly flexible system it is the household (a casa) which forms the most persistent and easily identifiable grouping. Often referred to as

simply the family (la familia), the household will consist of either a single nuclear family or an extended group containing one or more married sons and/or

daughters and their spouses and children. There is no clear rule for residence after marriage, but couples normally prefer to set up house independently of their parents if possible. In practice much depends on the respective economic standing of the newlyweds and their families. It is within the household unit or among members of an immediate family (i.e., family of origin before the death of its founder-parents) that exchanges among close kin occur most regularly and in accordance with certain fairly well-defined behavioral norms. Children are

expected to show deference and respect toward their parents and, when old enough, to assist in the work of the household or contribute to its domestic budget if away working. In return parents are required to provide for the basic subsistence needs of their children if the latter have no independent means and to help with their educational expenses. Although authority is said to be vested

mainly in the father of the household, frequently the mother assumes an equivalent role in major decisions affecting the family and is certainly regarded

as the central figure in the day-to-day running of household affairs. For this reason she occupies a prominent place in the ideology of family life which stresses the close emotional bonds that exist between a mother and her children. During the lifetime of parents, when the family property remains integrated

under the control of the father and mother and the question of inheritance seems far off, the relations between siblings tend to be cordial and characterized

by a considerable degree of cooperation. Only later when the division of the

family property has occurred or is imminent, or if their educational and occupational careers diverge markedly, do we see the emergence of open hostilities or social separation among siblings. During their youth, siblings engage in a relatively balanced exchange of services, offer reciprocal aid in the form of

labor and advice of various kinds, and express their solidarity and common interests through membership of the same unit of production and consumption headed by their parents. Later, however, when individuals leave for work outside

the community or for marriage, more competitive patterns develop, and we witness the development of internal differentiation based on occupational, educational, or social status criteria. This may also be accompanied by struggles focusing on the control of family property if considered a valuable resource. Frequently, relations between elder and younger male siblings become strained 156

when the former complain that they receive little or no returns on the investments they have made in financing the education of younger brothers or in aiding them in other ways.

Outside the context of the immediate family we encounter a largely undifferentiated universe of cognatic kin who may be drawn into an individual’s

effective kinship network for specific purposes. There are few clearly stated norms governing the behavior between specific kin categories. These relatives may be traced patrilaterally or matrilaterally and are included within the broad category of parientes (relatives). The same kinship terms are used for both sides of the kinship network and distinguished mainly by generational criteria. Very

few individuals can trace back their cognatic connections beyond three generations and second degree lateral relationships are relatively rare. Occasionally, however, persons sharing the same maternal or paternal surname may talk

loosely about being parientes, suggesting that originally they must have had | some common predecessor. Hence in Matahuasi we find that persons with the surname of Ore sometimes regard themselves as parientes, though this is unlikely

to entail any distinctive behavioral expression. Nonetheless, some members of the “family of Ore’ have organized themselves into a sports club in order to preserve these sentiments and to add prestige to their name. Similar phenomena have been noted for other name-groups in other pueblos of the valley. Marriage brings a widening of the kinship universe since in-laws are also frequently included in the category of parientes and may be utilized for various purposes, although the range of affines considered as kin fluctuates according to the situation and the particular individual. Relationships between siblings-in-law are regarded as easy-going and familiar and are based on a general norm of reciprocity in exchanges. In many instances bonds between brothers-in-law tend to replace the close ties between brothers which often diminish after each of them has attained independence from the parental home. While brothers are frequently placed in a position of rivalry for managerial control of the family property, brothers-in-law are not directly involved in such matters, and this affords the possibility for the development of much more cooperative-type relationships based on notions of status equality. Relations with parents-in-law

and in-laws of the parental generation are treated with the same degree of deference as one’s own parents, certainly during the early years of marriage when the son- or daughter-in-law may live in the household of his or her spouse. On their part, parents-in-law are supposed to assist the spouse just as they would their son or daughter. Like many cognatic systems (see Campbell 1964), the recognition of a wide

range of patrilateral and matrilateral relationships organized in terms of an ego-focused network of kin produces great variability in the operation of kinship

relationships. The structure and content of kin networks will vary strikingly from person to person and depend on a host of contingent factors relating to the personal interests, status, and availability of the individuals concerned. Further-

more, there is a general lack of specification over the norms, rights, and obligations associated with each type of kin relationship. Only in the context of the household or immediate family do we find a reasonably clearly defined set of norms regulating interpersonal relations, and this can only persist for a limited time span, for the dispersal of members through marriage, or work or education outside the community, inevitably eats into the unity of the family and, with 157

the division of the family property, leads to the breakdown of this system of relations and a re-definition of expectations. Given such built-in variations and uncertainties, then, businessmen, like other

Matahuasinos, must employ a series of techniques for defining and removing some of the elements of uncertainty in these kin relationships, if they are to

prove useful or predictable in their outcomes. This normally involves the reinforcement of an existing kinship tie in some way. Take, for example, the sibling relationship which is characterized by elements of both cooperation and conflict. Because of this, particular relationships tend to take one of two forms or fluctuate between them. They can, on the one hand, be structured in terms of

a series of horizontal exchanges based on status equality and balanced obligations, or they can develop into vertical relationships with an imbalance of exchanges and obligations and a differentiation in terms of power and status. With the horizontal type, the relationship may be legitimized by reference to some general notion of reciprocity among close kinsmen, by stressing the unity of siblings and their common interests, or by drawing on some non-kinship criterion of balanced exchange or cooperation. Vertical relationships, which recognize the potentiality of competition and conflict and which attempt to

structure this in terms of status differences, may likewise be justified by reference to age seniority, or in terms of economic criteria or some concept of patron-client relations. In the development of such relationships there always exists a dialectical process whereby there is at some point a strain toward status

equality and at other times a move toward unequal exchanges and power differences.* This process of course is intimately bound up with the changes occurring during the life cycle of the family unit.

The rest of this paper examines some of the mechanisms used in the management of sibling and affinal relationships by individuals operating commercial enterprises. My intention is to analyze the ways in which entrepreneurs use kinship, affinal and other interpersonal ties in the running of their businesses, though many of the points I will make may be generalizable to

the population as a whole. I take the point of view that kinship and interpersonal networks constitute important social resources, just as do capital,

labor and material assets, which can be manipulated and employed in the organization of enterprises.

The main argument I wish to develop concerns the necessity of introducing into an existing kin relationship certain non-kinship criteria in order that the relationship may be more precisely specified in terms of the types of benefits, obligations and patterns of exchanges that can be expected. Because the kinship

universe is open-ended and characterized by a lack of clarity concerning behavioral norms, kinship can seldom provide an appropriate normative framework for this and so appeal to other modes of definition must be made. In

the discussion of cases that follows I shall explore this theme in relation to compadrazgo, membership of fiesta clubs, and patron-client relations. It will be

argued that the addition of other strands to a relationship which is primarily seen in terms of kinship enables the entrepreneur to utilize the relationship more

effectively and to distinguish it from other structurally similar ties which, for some reason, he does not wish to activate. 158

CASE |!

My first example is that of a small-scale businessman who runs a tailor’s shop

and a small grocery business. The former is located in the nearby provincial headquarters of Concepcion and is operated by the owner and one assistant; the

latter is mainly the responsibility of the wife who persuaded her husband to invest some of the profits from tailoring in the establishment of a small corner shop in Matahuasi where they live. The corner shop is managed by the wife who also serves in it, receiving occasional assistance from her young daughter and

husband. Both types of enterprise require relatively little labor input from outside the household: the only person regularly employed is the tailor’s assistant who is paid a commission on the suits he makes and who is unrelated by kinship or affinity. These types of business enterprise contrast with other local entrepreneurial occupations like agricultural middlemen and timber milk operators that require a number of regularly employed workers and a high level of capitalization (Long 1972). Yet despite the low inputs required of capital and labor, the setting up of the tailor’s workshop necessitated the mobilization of initial capital for the purchase of sewing machines, ironing boards, etc., and similar investments were involved in the conversion of the front room of their house into a shop with counters and shelving. The opening of a tailor’s business also required the acquisition of a considerable degree of expertise both in the production and advertising sides of the enterprise. These and other problems concerning the establishment and operation of the business were integrally related to the way in which the owner (Oswaldo) was able to utilize an existing network of ties with certain kin and affines.

Table 1 summarizes the social characteristics of Oswaldo’s close kin and affines (the analysis is restricted to parents, siblings, parents-in-law, and his wife’s siblings, i.e., the immediate families of Oswaldo and his wife) and the types of transactions he has with each of them. I focus specifically on the contribution they make to the running of the enterprise, and in order to simplify matters I have categorized the types of transactions according to resource mobilization. Thus, I distinguish between four basic types of resources: cash in the form of contributions, gifts, or loans, for the purchase of new equipment and to assist generally with operating costs; services which includes both labor, skilled and unskilled, and the provision of various materials like wood for shelving or cloth and cottons for sewing, or larger items such as secondhand sewing machines or the premises for the shop; information, concerning market conditions and new fashions or techniques in tailoring or concerning wholesalers and prices; and clientele network which indicates whether or not the individuals listed provide access to a pool of clients outside Oswaldo’s effective network of kin and friends. The table does not try to measure the intensity or frequency of

transactions, merely whether or not they existed during my stay in the community in 1970-71. I have of course excluded from the analysis other types of social exchanges involving regular visiting, and patterns of conviviality or drinking.

Before discussing the pattern of current transactions, it is important to sketch

in briefly the ways in which the participants assisted Oswaldo during the establishment phase. Although Oswaldo was already married at the time of establishing his tailor’s shop, he received assistance only from members of his 159

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sg $s Although not described in detail, the betrothal ceremonies have been briefly alluded to by several authors. Bourricaud (1967:176-177) gives one of the clearest references: “Servinacuy [sic] is not at all a free union. After the boy in question consults with his parents, he petitions the girl’s family. He, his father and his friends bring presents to the girl’s family (alcohol, coca). If the latter accept the gifts, this signifies usually an acceptance of the boy’s proposal. If the gifts are accepted and the servinacuy refused, the girl’s family will be judged severely, and may have to reimburse the boy’s. But this situation usually doesn’t develop because the boy will not make the initiative unless the girl’s parents have already indicated that his proposal will be decided on favorably. At the meeting the boy first converses politely on other matters, and only after a suitable interlude does he bring up the matter. The girl’s father feigns surprise or even anger, consults with his wife and calls the girl in to interrogate her. The girl pretends to hardly know the boy. After much discussion the boy takes the girl to his home. The trial begins.’’ As will be seen, Bourricaud either missed some important details and nuances, or else the ceremonial sequence in Irpa Chico varies in important and fundamental ways. A similar sequence of events has been described for the Peruvian Quechua by Maclean y Estenos: “En la comunidad indfgena de Wankas, el ‘sirvinacuy,’ llamado alli ‘tinku-

nakuspa, se origina en las labores agro-pecuarias, en el pastoreo de los ganados (‘ushis-michij’), en la limpia de las sementeras para quitarles la mala hierba (‘piruy’), en la siembra (‘talpuy’) en las festividades lugarenas. Después de los primeros encuentros, en los que suelen comprobarse atisbos sentimentales, nota interesante en la sicologia indigena, se produce el ‘pushanakuy’ o sea el rapto de la joven india, generalmente en altas horas de la noche, para ser llevada donde uno de los parientes del raptor, quien hace de intermediario ante las dos familias, noticidndoles lo ocurrido. Ambas familias se reunen en la ceremonia del ‘anyapay’ para dar su consentimiento. En casa de la raptada se verifica el ‘kedapacuy,’ ceremonia andloga al contrato matrimonial, en la que se fija el plazo del matrimonio, que siempre fluctua entre los dos a seis meses, durante el cual se realiza el ‘sirvinacuy (Maclean y Estenos 1952:9). 213

"There must be at least a pretense of surprise on the part of the girl’s parents. In the case of one of Felipa’s neighbors, the girl]’s parents so resisted losing their daughter that the suitor’s family had to tear open the roof to gain access to the room where the ritual was to be held. > Such hazing would appear to be a very old tradition. In a document produced by the

first Augustinians to arrive to Peri one finds the following description: “...el mozo se queria caSar con una moza, pediale por mujer a su padre y el padre si se la quiere dar dicele todas las faltas de la moza y que tiene su hija; y esto dice que hacen porque el yerno no se quexe y rena y si su hija es mala mujer a perezosa; y si el diablo mozo la quiere, entonces ha de venir el mozo a la casa del suegro, cargado de lena y paja y chicha, y entonces el suegro la da a su hija diciendo estas palabras: cata aqui a mi hija, y si ella fuese mala, no me pongas la culpa porque yo te dexe la verdad”’ (Pizarro 1555).

> Though not identified as such, the sarta and the wpaqa seem to be alluded to in Castillo’s 1964 report on the Peruvian Quechua community of Chaquicocha. A summary of his description is as follows. The family in Chaquicocha is based on legal marriage with acceptance of a probationary period called serviciado. This custom is retained by similar

groups in the sierra of Peru where it is called sirvinacuy and huatanacuy. Serviciado is recognized as an essential pre-marital stage which will make the marriage relationship more solid on the basis of mutual knowledge of the two personalities involved. This period is similar to noviazgo but includes sexual relations and living together. Serviciado is formalized when two young people who wish to marry because of mutual affection and who are able to work alone, inform their parents, from whom they must get permission. Once the boy has his parents’ consent, he goes to the girl’s house to ask for her hand, accompanied by his father and sometimes a rich, prestigious person. At the girl’s house there is a gathering and a meal, and the girl’s parents decide the date and place of the future wedding. Sometimes, to give more solemnity or when one of the parties is doubtful, they go before the local justice

of the peace with witnesses to attest to the act. The time set for the wedding is the least possible, and should not be more than a year away (Castillo et al. 1964:25). 'OMany years ago, Van Gennep pointed out that the so-called rites of rape or capture express the resistance of the losing groups. They will vary in intensity according to the value

attached to the departing member and the comparative wealth of the parties involved (1960:124). In light of practices in Irpa Chico, however, one wonders how many reports of supposed bride capture stem from struggles centering around members of the bride’s family

rather than around the bride herself. Unfortunately, other reports on Andean marriage customs contain so few details that it is impossible to tell. A typical description of these

customs is the following one given by Otero in his book on the Callahuaya: “Otra caracteristica del matrimonio callahuaya es la que se refiere a la simulacion del rapto de la futura esposa. La joven luego de ser sometida a la embriaguez, aprovechando la ocasion de una fiesta religiosa, es cargada en hombros por su pretendiente, quién la lleva a su casa, donde se inicia el perfodo de prueba del matrimonio” (Otero 1951:86). '! A common custom is to appoint two sets of wedding godparents, the jach’a patrinu

(big godparents) and the t’aga patrinu (little godparents). The former take charge of all arrangements with the notary and priest, and of the church wedding itself. The latter handle arrangements, ritual, and celebrations within the community, and are the ones on hand to act as continual advisors and confessors for the couple. In communities having close ties with towns or cities, the jach a patrinu tend to be town or city folk, and are expected to act as intermediaries and patrons in dealings with the outside world. In Irpa Chico, however,

the functions of jach’a and t’aqa are normally assumed by one and the same couple, permanent residents of the community.

2 This Suggests a carry over of Inca custom, whereby the marriage ceremony was performed simultaneously for an entire group of couples. It is interesting to note that while Motesinos, Acosta, and Prescott say there was no free choice of marriage partners, others assert that the former were influenced by Spanish sources unfavorable to the Indians. These and other scholars insist that sirvinacuy existed during the Inca regime, and that royal officials of the Inca (during the public marriage ceremonies) were merely legalizing unions freely contracted by the people. The first notice on sirvinacuy was found in the Relacion de la religion y ritos del Peru (1555), written by Augustine friars. Other early sources include Arriaga (1621 original, translated and published in English, 1968), Morta(1577), Lobo Guerrero (1614), Avendafio (1649), and in the Ordenanzas of Virrey Toledo (cf. Maclean y Estenos 1952:6). 214

‘Sor most residents of Irpa Chico, the purif uta is a component of the patronage given by a town dwelling godparent or trading partner. In Felipa’s case, the house belonged to her

father. He rented out all but one room, which he kept for his family’s frequent visits to town.

14This behavior on the part of Felipa’s parents suggests that the church ceremony is perceived as one of the least important in the ritual cycle. Bourricaud, writing about the region of Puno, would seem to support such an interpretation. In that region a Catholic wedding ceremony is not seen as very desirable but, nevertheless, it is done. The main problem with a religious ceremony is its expense. But two factors overcome the financial objection: (1) Priests do all they can to encourage these ceremonies, not only because that is their job but because it gives them a little more income. The percentage of Church-blessed unions varies with the locality’s proximity to a priest’s residence. In Ichu, which is located close to such a residence, couples normally marry during the same year as they begin living together. In more isolated areas where the priest comes but a few times a year, each visit marks a series of marriages. The mayordomo, just before his arrival, counts the couples’ living together and tries to convince them to marry. In areas where access is difficult, people avoid a Catholic ceremony. (2) A man is not considered mature until he is married in regular

form. Only then can he assume a cargo (the same holds true for Irpa Chico). To live indefinitely out of marriage is considered offensive to good manners. A large, costly

marriage gives the groom a reputation of being rich and important (Bourricaud 1967:177-178). 1SThe wawachu is the man appointed to receive and hold in trust all food given in the wayq'a. Ideally, this man is wedding godfather of the couple’s wedding godfather.

‘© an exclamation used frequently during ritual to denote happiness. A rough gloss would be “hurrah.” 7In general, the only persons to whom mistreated wives can turn are the godparents. One of Felipa’s father’s godsons repeatedly made his wife strip off her clothes so as to beat her with his army shoes. The unfortunate woman would run across the fields of Irpa Chico at night to plead for protection from her godfather. To remedy the situation, Felipa’s father finally went to his godson’s home and beat him with a whip. The tables are sometimes turned, however. Wives may beat their husbands, pelter them with slingshot stones, or even send them out to do women’s work, such as tending sheep. Redress in these cases is difficult to come by. Most marital quarrels seem to stem from dissatisfaction with work patterns. Men expect their wives to be quick and accurate workers. When they are, they receive praise; when they

are not, they may be beaten. The disconcerting thing for many women is that praise is seldom direct. It comes in the form of respect, endearment, or an off-hand comment to a man’s peers. : 5 Customarily, the bride’s family gives a cow and the groom’s a bull.

197here seems no reason to doubt that the inheritance is a very old rite. Garcilasso de la Vega, writing of Quechua customs just after Conquest, states that the authorities of each village saw to it that a house was built for each new couple, and the relatives provided the furniture (Garcilasso de la Vega 1869:307-308). How village authorities imposed such a requirement is not made clear. Probably the responsibility lay in the hands of the extended families of bride and groom, just as it does in Irpa Chico today.

*0Women and old men—the t’isiri_separated the grass, and the younger men and teenagers—the supiri—put it into neat piles. *1 An actual village of this name exists in a small valley just south of the canyon in which lies the city of La Paz.

227 my use of the terms ‘“‘ceremony” and “‘ritual’’ I differ from the use suggested by

Victor Turner. He sees the term “‘ritual’? as applying to forms of religious behavior associated with social transitions, while he reserves the term “‘ceremony”’ for religious behavior associated with social status, where politico-legal institutions have greater importance. In his words; “‘Ritual is transformative, ceremony confirmatory” (1967:95). The distinction Turner suggests seems to me to have been much more clearly made by classifying transformational ritual as rites of crisis, and confirmatory ritual as rites of intensification. A more usable distinction between ceremony and ritual would come from roughly equating the former with a single rite, and reserving the latter for a series of 215

interconnected rites. Thus ceremony would be defined as a sacred rite or observance, while ritual would be a body of rites. *° Both Turner and Richards have seen the ontological implications of such transformations. In Richards’ study of Bemba female puberty rites, Chisungu, she speaks of “‘growing a girl” (1956:121). Turner picks up this theme, and suggests that the passivity of neophytes

to their instructors, their malleability, their submission to ordeal, can be seen most meaningfully as necessary steps in their being ontologically transformed (1967:101).

216

THE QOLLA MARRIAGE PROCESS Ralph Bolton POMONA COLLEGE

INTRODUCTION

In the daily life of the individual in Qolla society the only corporate group of any significance is the household. The household is the landholding unit and the

unit which organizes production, consumption, and exchange of goods and services for its members. Political participation at the level of the community is by household. Socialization of children takes place almost exclusively within the confines of the domestic group. And, finally, it is the household which organizes

ritual activities on its own behalf and for the community as well. The importance of the household as the dominant social unit in Qolla social structure cannot be overstressed.

The ideal household among the Qolla contains the members of a single nuclear family, i.e., a husband and wife and their offspring. As a result of the developmental cycle of domestic groups not all households at any given point in

time conform to the ideal pattern. Nonetheless the modal household does consist of the members of a nuclear family, and with few exceptions individuals in the society spend most of their years as members of such households.

The key relationship in the social structure of the household is the one between husband and wife. The establishment and maintenance of the marriage bond lead to the creation and perpetuation of the household. New households are usually formed as a consequence of the successful development of a marriage bond; and, one might add, non-nuclear-family households tend to emerge as by-products of the disintegration of a marriage bond. In this paper I propose to examine some aspects of the Qolla marriage system.

I shall present a decision model of Qolla marriage in which marriage is conceptualized as a complex sequence of interactions and decisions rather than as an event.-Keesing (1967:2) has explained the “decision model” approach as follows: We use “‘decision model’’ in a fairly broad sense to denote an ethnographic description that is actor-oriented and based on the categories of the culture under study, 1.e., one that is “‘emic.” Its minimal properties are that it (1) defines the situation or context in a culturally meaningful way; (2) defines the range of culturally acceptable alternative courses of action in that situation; and provides either (3) a set of rules for making appropriate decisions under culturally possible combinations of circumstances, i.e., a

model with determinate outcomes, or (4) a set of strategies for deciding among

alternatives, i.e., a value-maximization model. 217

Carter has pointed out that “our traditional dichotomization between trial and permanent marriage may be misleading.” Indeed, the Qolla do not make this sharp distinction. By including within our purview the entire marriage process, |

suggest, we can arrive at a closer approximation to the Qolla concept of marriage. A Qolla marriage can be described as the totality of decisions made by the actors during the sequence, beginning with the first move toward setting up a marriage relationship between two potential spouses and ending with the final move in aborting the attempt or in bringing to a close a marital union which was

successfully established. At each step along the way the bonds become progressively tighter or looser as a consequence of the option chosen. In the discussion that follows I shall outline the options exercised by Qolla actors and, where possible, I shall indicate the factors which incline actors to choose one course of action over another.

Every Qolla adult is expected to marry. And without any doubt for most Qolla individuals the marriage decisions are considered the most serious and

crucial steps of a lifetime. The outcome of this decision process largely determines the quality of life to be enjoyed or suffered, as the case may be, by the individual and his or her descendants. The goal of all actors in the marriage process is the establishment of a viable household based on a new nuclear family.

It is this objective, I would argue, which bestows upon these decisions their signal importance for the individuals involved and for the community as a whole. The alliance aspects of marriage are of distinctly secondary significance. Alliance obligations tend to be limited to the domain of ritual during life crises. In fact, it should be noted that the marriage process serves to hasten the disintegration of pre-existing solidary groups in Qolla society, and it contributes to the rupture of pre-existing relationships. Parental households lose members and property to the newly-created household. The strength of sibling conflict intensifies rapidly as each sibling becomes part of a separate corporate group with divergent interests. Finally, friendships with same-sex villagers must be abandoned.! I shall amplify on these considerations below, but before proceeding further

on this topic, I must pause to provide the reader with additional background information on the Qolla. THE QOLLA

The Qolla are Quechua-speaking and Aymara-speaking peoples who inhabit the Qollao, the highland plateau surrounding Lake Titicaca in Southern Peru and Bolivia. This region, which lies at 12,500 feet and more above sea level, contains approximately one and one-half million inhabitants. Ethnographers of the Qolla have tended to concentrate their attention on Aymara speakers, employing the

term “Aymara” to refer to the language and to designate the ethnic-cultural group. As Tschopik (1946:503) pointed out, the origin of this term is obscure; it

replaced the term “Qolla” at some unknown time. For the most part, Quechua-speaking Qolla have been ignored by ethnographers, excepting, of course, Flores (1968), Martinez (1962, 1963), and Matos Mar (1957).

I use the term “Qolla” to refer to all inhabitants of the Qollao, and a word about this unconventional usage is perhaps desirable. Ethnographers and other scholars have rather consistently employed the criterion of language to divide the residents of the Qollao into two ethnic units, the Aymara and the Quechua. However, confusion about who speaks what and where is rampant with respect 218

to the region. Frequently the presence of a large contingent of Quechua speakers in the area is totally overlooked (e.g., in the case of grade school textbooks in

Peru). And where a scholar acknowledges this presence inaccuracies are still widespread. Mason in the Handbook of South American Indians (1950, Vol. 6) notes that Quechua is spoken today by numerous Aymara subtribes, that is, by people who historically spoke Aymara. But he errs in claiming that the Lupaca tribe presently speaks Quechua; its members do not. And again, when he says that the historic tribe, the Colla, continue to speak Aymara, he is wrong: the regions once occupied by the Colla are now inhabited by Quechua speakers. Dew

(1969:55) also mistakenly writes that Quechua is confined to areas away from Lake Titicaca, except for parts of the province of Puno. Whereas, in fact, more than 20,000 Quechua-speaking Qolla reside in lakeside villages in the province of Huancane (Peru) as well.

What this confusion illustrates, I think, is the difficulty of finding any non-linguistic criteria for distinguishing people who speak Aymara from those who speak Quechua. Certainly the so-called Aymara and the so-called Quechua of the Qollao are not politically united. While the Bolivian parts of the Qollao are largely Aymara-speaking, with some Quechua areas away from the lake, the

Peruvian part of the region is equally divided between speakers of the two languages. But neither, as far as we know, were all Aymara speakers ever united,

except briefly under the aegis of the Quechua-speaking Incas and later for periods during the Spanish colonial era and during the confederation of Peru and

Bolivia in the Republican era. Historically the Aymara were divided into independent and warring kingdoms. The same lack of unity holds true, of course, for the contemporary Quechua throughout the Andes.

The cultural differences between communities of Quechua speakers and communities of Aymara speakers are no greater than the differences among speakers of the same language on the Qollao. Although difficult to document without an intensive comparative cultural survey, I suspect that there are much

greater differences between Quechua speakers of the Qollao and Quechua speakers from other regions. Possibly the studies presented in this symposium may help to document this claim. The essential cultural similarity of the entire plateau region is recognized in the terminological practices of neighboring peoples in Cuzco and Cochabamba: these people refer to all residents of the Qollao as Qolla, regardless of the language spoken. The Qolla themselves use no particular term to designate any resident of the region. Instead, identity terms are restricted to those which indicate residence in a village or district (e.g., “I am a Taraqueno” or “He is an Incawateno”’).

On the basis of these considerations I feel that we should adopt the term “Qolla” when referring to the Andean subculture and people found in the Lake Titicaca region, reserving the terms ““Aymara-Qolla” and “Quechua-Qolla”’ for situations when greater precision is required.

The ethnographic literature on the Qolla presents us with few detailed descriptions of marriage patterns. In this volume Carter, and Hickman and Stuart

have helped to fill in the informational gaps for the Aymara speakers. Both Flores (1968) and Martinez (1962) have written brief summaries of marriage customs among the Quechua-Qolla. In the discussion which follows J shall

attempt to provide a fuller account of the marriage system among the Quechua-Qolla.

This essay is based upon research which was carried out by my wife and 219

myself in the village of Incawatana, located in the Quechua-speaking zone of the Peruvian Qollao, from November 1968 through December 1970.”

The residents of Incawatana number approximately 1,200 people living in some 230 households which are dispersed evenly over the flat terrain of the community. The people are peasants, earning a livelihood by engaging in subsistence agriculture. Major crops include potatoes, barley, oca, quinua, beans and wheat. Climatic factors do not permit more than token cultivation of maize at this altitude. Although domesticated animals are highly valued, livestock plays

a secondary role in the village economy because there are neither extensive pastures nor totora reed beds on which to sustain many animals. Indeed, the harsh environment and limited resources per capita make subsistence rather precarious. A majority of adult males migrate periodically to earn additional income by working as cargadores (“burden carriers’’) or construction laborers in nearby cities and in Arequipa. A government elementary school exists in Incawatana, but few villagers have obtained more than two years of formal education. About half of the men, but almost no women, have learned enough Spanish to facilitate conversation in that language. Public life takes place in two domains, the civil and the religious. The

community has a proliferation of political roles, and these are distributed in several organizational structures, some of which are connected to larger national structures (e.g., school board to the education ministry, the lieutenant governors

to the ministry of government, and so forth). Nevertheless, the degree of community-wide cooperation is low, the authorities are relatively powerless, and

local-level political activity is minimal. On the other hand, litigation is an important activity for most villagers, who clash frequently and fiercely with neighbors, kinsmen, and strangers alike (Bolton 1972, 1973a).

Andean folk-Catholicism is the dominant religion in the region, with only minor competition from Protestant sects. Hence, another aspect of public life which receives emphasis in Incawatana is the religious cargo system and the fiesta cycle. The peasants worship Catholic saints as well as the spirits dwelling in

the hills, rocks, and lake, the Virgin Mary as well as Pachamama (“earth mother’’). THE HOUSEHOLD IN INCAWATANA

The Qolla use the term “‘familia”’ in unmodified fashion to refer to relatives in

general. Through the addition of Quechua modifiers the term is restricted to more specific social groupings or categories of relatives. The wasi-familia (“house-family’’) includes everyone who lives in the same house or compound, in other words the household. The household is by far the most important social and economic unit among the Qolla. More inclusive social groupings within the

village tend to have households as their constituent units. To stress the importance of the household, the wasi-familia, is not to indicate, however, that the unit is always highly solidary. In fact it frequently is not. Nonetheless, the household is the unit to which an individual can turn for assistance in meeting

his needs and expect to have those needs satisfied with some degree of regularity (Bolton and Bolton 1975).

The typical house in Incawatana consists of three huts grouped around an open patio. Each hut is an independent structure with a single entrance and with only one or two small windows. Stone corrals adjoin the huts, and the front part 220

of the patio is blocked by an adobe or stone wall which contains the only entrance into the patio and buildings. In a fully integrated household the entire internal space belongs to everyone who is a member of the household. Although everyone has a regular sleeping spot in one of the huts, possessions are not clearly separated in different rooms. The food of the wasi-familia is prepared on a single hearth and eaten at a common meal. As indicated above, the entire household acts as a production unit, holding property in common and with everyone working together. In some cases—particularly where more than one nuclear family occupies a

compound—the residents do not constitute a single household (wasi-familia). The two nuclear families may reside together around a single patio, but the rooms allotted to each are considered inviolate, production becomes separated

and the produce is kept apart, and, finally, meals are no longer shared. Generally, this situation develops when a son and his wife and children remain with his parents in the house he is to inherit when the old folks die (in other words, a stem family). Often disputes arise over the allocation of the fruit of their common labors and a decision to form separate economic units is made. However, the two families may continue to live in one house.

Patterns of household composition are presented in Table 1. The data in Table 1 demonstrate the predominance of the nuclear family as the basic

oO

Table 1. Household Composition in Incawatana

Household Composition Number of Households Single Individual Households .. 10... 1... cece cece ee eee eee 7

One Adult Male ........ cc ccc cee eee eee 5 One Adult Female .......... cee eee eee ee ee eee 2

Husband and Wife Households ....... 0. cece eeeeeneee 17 Nuclear Family Households .... 0... ccc cece ee een eens 107

Households Based on the Nuclear Family With ; Aggregated Individuals ....... 0. cece were ee ence eres 43 Nuclear Family plus a son-in-law ........-. eee ee eens 7 Nuclear Family plus a daughter-in-law ............6-5- 6

Nuclear Family plus a grandchild..............---06- 8

Nuclear Family plus a son-in-law and grandchildren ..... 6 Nuclear Family plus a daughter-in-law and grandchildren . 8

Nuclear Family plus husband’s father ...........-.+.--: 2

Nuclear Family plus husband’s mother ...........---- 5 | Nuclear Family plus wife’s mother ...........-5-2005- 1

Households Based on One Adult With

Aggregated Individuals .... 1... cece eee eee eee eens 26 Father and children .. 1.0... 0... cee ee ee ee ee eee ees 4

Mother and children ........ 2. eee ee ee eee eet eees 9 Father, children, and son-in-law... .. 2.2... eee eee eee 2 Mother, children, and son-in-law .........--- eee eeee 2 Father, children, and daughter-in-law ..........---+--- 1 Mother, children, and daughter-in-law ........-..-50-- 1 Man and grandchild ....... 0. eee eee ee eee eee eees 3 Woman and grandchild ........- eee eee eee eee e teens 3 Woman and male cousin .....-- eee e eee er eee eens 1

tern enn

Miscellaneous or UNKNOWN wee cee renter ee eee ete eeeeees 30

TOTAL ~ 230

221

domestic group in Incawatana. Only rarely do two or more nuclear families reside together, and when this occurs it usually involves some form of stem family. The families of procreation of two siblings almost never form a domestic group. However, quite frequently persons other than nuclear family members do reside in the household.

There are only a limited number of ways in which someone can become a household member. First, he can be born into the household; naturally this is the method by which most children entered the household in which they reside.

Second, he can create a new household, usually a few years after having embarked on the marriage process. Third, he or she can enter as the result of marriage to someone who is a member. Fourth, he or she can be adopted, more or less formally, into a household with few children. And fifth, he or she can be absorbed into a household of a kinsman on either a permanent or rotational basis.

Each household passes through a developmental cycle, adding and sloughing off members in the manner specified by the methods outlined above. Residence

tends to follow a rule of modified neolocality. Sons live in the household of their parents during all or part of the sirvinakuy stage of marriage, bringing their

wives to live with them, for one or more years before establishing their own households elsewhere, normally within the same village. The youngest son, however, remains in the household of his parents and continues there when they die. If the relations between son and father or among brothers are amicable, the son setting up an independent household may build on land in the vicinity of his parental home. If the relations are strained he may move to his own land or to land obtained from his wife in a distant area of the village. Furthermore, deviations from the standard pattern occur as a result of several factors. If the new husband has many siblings or his father and mother own little land, he may decide to reside with his wife’s household for the first year or two after marriage, or even permanently if she is an only child. In Table 1 one can

see that in fact these two options are chosen in almost equal proportions. Although it is the responsibility of the youngest son to care for his aged parents, other children sometimes take up this responsibility. If the children have grown up while their parents are not too advanced in years, separate houses might be

built for all of the children, including the last son. In such cases the parents remain alone. To help them, one or more grandchildren are “lent” to them to raise. If only one parent remains, he or she is absorbed into the household of one

of his children. Another solution to the problem of caring for the aged is to rotate them among their children so that the burden of care is equally shared by

all those who will inherit their property. Indeed, siblings compete with one another to hold onto an aged person in the hope that in that manner they can justify claims to a larger share of the estate. To prevent such claims each sibling cares for the parent for one month at a time. In cases of separation of spouses prior to the establishment of an independent

household, the spouse who moved in the first place will return to his or her parental home. If an independent household has been set up before separation, then the woman is likely to return to her parents until she acquires another

husband.

The household head is usually the senior male in the nuclear family upon which the household is based. He, for example, represents the household before

the authorities of the village. Only when he is absent do other household 222

members stand in to speak for the household. In a few cases in our study there were doubts about who was the household head. In general these cases involved _ households with a senior adult male who married into the village from a distant community and who owned no property of his own in Incawatana, his wife’s village. Some households are headed by widows, usually women of advanced years who have not remarried. DESCENT AND INHERITANCE

Elsewhere (Bolton 1972:68) I have written that both descent and inheritance

in Incawatana are based on bilateral principles. It seems to me now, upon re-examining my data, that the statement requires modification. Further fieldwork on this question will be required for me to make a more definite

this matter. ; assessment on descent principles, but here I shall offer my present thinking on Inheritance is based on bilateral principles. A man’s or woman’s possessions

are divided equally among all sons and daughters. If an individual has no offspring then his possessions revert to his parents or to his brothers and sisters. If he or she has a spouse, the spouse is entitled to keep most movable property but must return the land to the dead person’s kinsmen. A widow or widower is

normally permitted to retain the land if there are young children who will inherit the land eventually. If the children divide up the land—that is, if they are already adults when the parent dies, the widow or widower is permitted to retain a portion of it until death, when it passes to the proper heirs. Land purchased by a man and his wife can be inherited only by the children born to them (although

trouble frequently arises over property of this type, especially if the man or woman has a recognized [legitimized]child with another partner and if he or she

has not raised that child). Additionally, upon the death of a spouse and the distribution of his or her property, a widow or widower is provided with a , portion of the estate (the kinta) for his or her usage. Parents provide their children with anticipatory inheritance (herencia) of land, animals, tools and household goods during the marriage process involving a son or daughter. However, with respect to land this distribution is provisional

rather than definitive. Property markers are not positioned carefully on the borders of fields. The final division of lands occurs after the death of the

several generations. . previous owner. Indeed, such division may be postponed indefinitely, i. e., for

There are no corporate descent groups in Incawatana unless one classifies the “kasta’ as a “‘corporate” group. Vazquez and Holmberg (1966) have described

the kasta as a unilineal decent group which includes all persons who have a common paternal ancestor, a common surname, and a patrimony of common origin. Although for most purposes the kasta is an insignificant “group’’ in Incawatana, the informants questioned about the concept recognized it. They | noted that not everyone with the same surname belongs to the same kasta; the Quispes, for example, may belong to several Quispe Kastas. In my earlier writing on this topic (1972:69-70) I indicated that the kasta is a cognatic descent group

rather than a patrilineal group as in Vicos. I now regard this position to be erroneous. Descent is reckoned in the patriline. Informants are clear about the fact that the kasta includes individuals who trace their relationship through 223

males to an apical ancestor who is also a male. And one is a member of the kasta if one retains the common surname associated with that kasta.

In naming practices the Qolla exhibit a definite patrilateral bias. A child receives the paternal name from its father and mother. That is, for example, the son of Mateo Quispe Parillo and Modesta Supo Huallpa would be called Juan Quispe Supo. A person’s name is made up of his given name and the paternal surname of his father and mother. (In other words, he receives the name of his

father’s father and his mother’s father.) Both surnames are considered important. In contrast to mestizo practice in the region, a woman does not shed her surnames upon marriage, nor does she add her husband’s names to her own.

Each spouse retains his or her birth names without modification except, occasionally, for legal purposes when writing up documents. As a consequence

of this naming procedure the surname passed on through the male line is retained indefinitely, generation after generation. Female links in the descent chain, however, result in the loss of the paternal surname two generations later.

It is our belief, then, that the Qolla have bilateral inheritance and a patrilineal-like descent pattern. The confusion arises because of the unclear nature of the functions of the kasta. From what I was able to discover, the kasta

is relevant in only two contexts, in one of these contexts as a group and in another context as a category of kinsmen. The kasta has no official spokesman, nor does it engage in ritual activities. As a group the kasta comes together only when some members of the kasta decide

to recuperate lands which have been lost in past generations. Kasta members may then act as a unit to regain the lands through litigation or force. The kasta itself is not a land-owning entity. Basically, it would seem that the kasta, as a patrilineal descent group oriented to the recuperation of lands, is incompatible

with the principle of bilateral inheritance. Regrettably our field data do not permit us to resolve this apparent contradiction. However, some observations might provide us with a hint of the solution.

When the kasta acts to recover lands, only those kasta members who participate by contributing of their time and money are entitled to receive property which is regained. This rule is similar to the inheritance rule that investment in the property gives one a stronger claim to receive it. Presumably, lands recovered by the kasta would be distributed then only to

members of the kasta; hence, this patrimony would be inherited patrilineally rather than bilaterally. However, I suggest that what happens is as follows. All individuals who retain the kasta name in their name are entitled to participate in

Kasta activities. Consequently, even though one would not technically be a member of one’s mother’s kasta, one could participate in the recovery of the lands belonging to that kasta and also in the distribution of recovered lands. Moreover, even if one does not retain the kasta name, I suspect that as long as one keeps alive the knowledge of the relationship to a given kasta one could participate in its activities. For example, an individual does not retain the name of his mother’s mother’s kasta nor of his father’s mother’s kasta, and yet, it seems unlikely to me that an individual could be excluded from participation in the recovery of lands which once belonged to the focal ancestor of the group which includes these kinsmen, MM and FM. Since the apical ancestor is generally

not more than three or four generations in the past, most descendants at the time of the activation of the kasta would still retain the kasta name or memory of it having been present in the previous generation. 224

Thus, we might conclude that the kasta at the level of ideology is a patrilineal descent group, but that in actuality it operates more as a cognatic descent group,

at least when it is functioning in its primarily—if not only—manner, i.e., in recovering lands lost through sale, improper inheritance, or neglect. Further, we might assert that the very “fuzziness” of the concept of kasta is related to two factors, first, the conflict between the two principles of bilateral inheritance and patrilineal descent, and second, the lack of overall importance of the kasta since it is only rarely activated as a group. The kasta, however, as a set of relatives, is important in another context, the rules of exogamy and incest prohibitions. I shall now turn to examine this topic. WHOM MAY ONE MARRY?

In the Qolla system of kinship and marriage, sexual intercourse and marriage are prohibited with kinsmen who fall into the category of “‘kaylla familia” or “close relatives.” Informants specified the following relationships as falling under sexual and marital taboos:

(a) mother-son (b) father-daughter (c) brother-sister (d) grandfather-granddaughter (e) grandmother-grandson (f) uncle-niece (g) aunt-nephew (h) cousin-cousin (i) godfather-goddaughter (j) godmother-godson (k) compadre-comadre Additionally, it is stated that anyone who is not at least four grados distant in kinship is prohibited as a marital or sexual partner. In effect the incest and exogamy boundary lies between second and third cousins. Amplifying on this point, informants say that one may not marry into one’s kasta, nor may one marry into any of the following Kastas:

(a) father’s father’s kasta (b) father’s mother’s kasta (c) mother’s father’s Kasta (d) mother’s mother’s kasta It is within these kastas that one must not marry inside the limit of four grados. Everyone within these limits is considered Kaylla familia; consanguineal relatives outside these limits are referred to as karu familia, i.e., distant relatives.

The kasta, however, does not act as a group to prevent incest and the breaking of marriage regulations. Indeed, if a Qolla disregards the prohibitions

and either marries or has sexual relations with an individual within the

prohibited degrees of kinship, no one will take action against the pair. Not even the authorities of the village would step in to prevent such improper behavior. But it is likely, nonetheless, that the couple would on their own decide to leave

, 225

the village because everyone would criticize them severely. Informal mechanisms

would be brought to bear in the situation. Individuals who disregard the

prohibitions against marriage with close kin and incest are said to become “condenados” when they die. Moreover, they do not get ahead in this life (adelantarse) if they engage in incestuous behavior. Instead, they are plagued with constant fighting between spouses, and they do not prosper. Before conducting the civil or religious wedding ceremonies in the district

capital, Qochapata, the authorities—the alcalde and the priests—generally interrogate the persons who are present to make certain that the spouses-to-be are not closely related. They are questioned especially if they have identical surnames. The authorities ask who were the parents and grandparents of each of the spouses, and if they are too close then the couple would not be allowed to

proceed with the marriage. . In examining the surnames of household heads for whom information is complete, we find that eight individuals have identical maternal and paternal surnames out of a total population of 220. Having identical paternal and maternal surnames generally does not indicate a violation of marriage rules by the parents of the person with identical surnames. An illegitimate child not recognized by its genitor will usually be given the mother’s paternal surname for

both paternal and maternal surnames. An adopted child may be given the paternal surname of the person who adopts him for both paternal and maternal surnames. Then, too, having the same name does not necessarily mean being members of the same kasta since several kastas may carry the same names. Again, looking at the household heads we find that in two-thirds of the cases in which our data is complete all four grandparents had different paternal surnames

(112 out of 178), while one-third (66) had at least two grandparents with identical paternal surnames. Until we have completed an analysis of the genealogies, we cannot report on the frequencies with which marriages of a prohibited sort do take place. Villagers were unable to remember any case of first cousins marrying, and they reported few marriages involving second cousins. However, one of the most scandalous events or situations during our two years in Incawatana was a widely-discussed incestuous relationship between a brother and sister.

Qolla genealogies are shallow. In numerous instances people could not remember the names of their grandparents. And when they remembered part of

the name, the forgotten part was almost inevitably the ancestor’s maternal surname. In 27 cases the household head was not able to remember the full name of his parents. Twenty of these cases involved forgetting the maternal surname of his mother, and seven cases involved forgetting the maternal surname

of his father. Consequently, at this early stage one can detect the operation of

the patrilateral bias. These individuals who do not know the name of their father’s mother’s or mother’s mother’s kasta quite obviously could not be expected to participate in kasta activities. Informants reported that it is permissible to marry a sister-in-law. They noted that in the past such marriages were forbidden by the priests, even though the

people themselves did not believe in this prohibition. And, indeed, there are numerous instances of marriage between brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law. On the other hand, it is forbidden to marry a father-in-law or mother-in-law (sonro Or sonra).

Although the kastas are exogamous, the village has no rule at all with respect to exogamy or endogamy. Nor is there any rule with respect to the subdivisions of the village. The village is presently divided into seven geographical areas, and 226

in the past it was divided into two halves, the upper barrio and the lower barrio. No rule prohibits or prescribes marriage into specific village sections. Most marriages are village endogamous, but marriages outside the village and outside the district as well do take place. The in-marrying spouses tend to exist in a permanent state of second-class citizenship, however, and they and their descendants may be considered outsiders (forasteros) for several generations. When exogamous marriages occur they tend to involve spouses from neighboring villages. In a previous study carried out in the district of Taraco (1973b), I found that exogamous marriages, actual and desired, can be accounted for by three factors: (1) contiguity of villages in terms of common borders or position along

a major trail leading to the market town; (2) relative wealth of the two communities involved in exchanging spouses; and (3) ecological advantages offered as a consequence of the exchange (access to pasturelands, lakeshore, and hillside zones).

With this background information on Qolla social structure and marriage, we

are now in a position to turn to the decision-making process involved in the marital relationship. INITIAL SITUATION

In the discussion which follows I shall be referring to three partial flow-diagrams which contain the sequence of decisions in the marriage process. I

have divided the total process into three major segments for convenience of presentation only; these breaking points do not represent sharp disjunctures. The

entire process must be considered as a whole. Nonetheless, decisions can be grouped into three phases: the negotiation phase, the sirvinakuy phase, and the kasadu phase. (The title of the phase indicates the objective of the steps taken during the phase rather than the type of steps taken.) For the most part, the Qolla are monogamous. Further, almost everyone in the society marries. Even individuals with a physical defect, e.g., lameness or

hunchback, obtain a spouse, although they have a more difficult time contracting a marriage, of course. The model which I shall develop describes the marriage process when neither prospective spouse is involved in another marital relationship. Polygyny though rare, does occur in Incawatana, but will not be discussed in this paper. (CF. Bolton 1973c.) Marriage may begin to receive serious thought when a young girl reaches 15 or 16 years of age. Boys tend to be somewhat older when attention is given to

their marital future. Although the marriage process may begin at 15 or 16, generally girls are 18 to 20 when they enter into a marital relationship, and boys are from 19 to 22 years of age. At these ages one can expect the process to get underway.

In Figure 1, I have indicated the marriage process beginning with an “Initial Situation.” One starts with two marriageable individuals, standing in no marital relationship with each other. Members of their respective Kastas or familias may

or may not have entered into previous unions. In some cases the families of prospective spouses have numerous affinal ties between them. For example, one villager, Erasmo Quispe Parillo, a widower, contracted a marriage with Laureana

Carbajal Quispe. Several years later Laureana’s brother established a marital relationship with Pedro’s eldest daughter from a previous marriage.*? I have not

completed an analysis of pre-existing ties of kinship and affinity between 227

spouses and their families. However, it appears that quite often close bonds do exist.

Since Incawatana is not a large village, and since marriages tend to be arranged within the village, most prospective spouses are acquainted with one another, or, at a minimum, they generally know potential mates by name and by sight. In recent years girls have been attending the village school in increasing numbers. Consequently, to a greater extent than ever before adolescents have an

opportunity to interact. This change in the initial situation of youths has undoubtedly resulted in changes in the decision-making process of marriage. As we shall see below, the prospective mates are able to exercise significant choices in the marriage process. WHO INITIATES THE PROCESS?

The marriage process may be initiated as the outcome of a decision by any one of a number of individuals interested in the marital fate of a young man or young woman. Generally, the first move is made by one of the following parties: (a) the prospective groom’s parents (b) the prospective groom himself (c) the prospective bride’s parents (d) the prospective bride herself. For two reasons I have shown only the first two possibilities in the flow-diagram

presented in Figure 1. First, it is necessary to keep the “decision tree” from becoming a “‘bushy mess” (Raiffa 1968), and one way to accomplish that is to eliminate the options of lesser importance. Secondly, even if the prospective bride’s parents or the prospective bride herself initiates the action, they must do so indirectly by promoting action on the part of the prospective groom or his parents. But let me illustrate this point. If the parents of an eligible young girl would like to “‘give” their daughter to a young man of their own choosing, they may seek out the young man’s parents informally, such as at fiestas. And then when everyone is slightly inebriated they might casually mention that they have

an eligible daughter and how nice it would be to become “sonro”’ with the eligible bachelor’s parents. And, indeed, this hinting, or indirect approach, may lead the two sets of parents to call one another “‘sonro”’ even before a formal approach has been attempted. Another option which can be exercised by the girl’s parents is to encourage the bachelor of their choice. They may invite him to come to the house to visit, encouraging him in subtle ways to begin courting their daughter. Parents of the girl may also encourage potential suitors generally by allowing the girl to sleep

alone within the home compound or, if the family owns more than one compound, in the vacant compound (to serve as guard during the night). Likewise, a young girl who has taken a liking to some man in the village can initiate the process by inviting him to visit and by encouraging him to court her. For the most part, however, the prospective groom or his parents are the first to act. That is, one of these two parties makes a decision about the desirability of obtaining a spouse for the young man and a decision about the desirability of a specific young woman. Once these decisions have been made, other decisions

almost inevitably follow. I might point out that the answer to the question “Who initiates the process?” does not involve a decision in the sense that an 222

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