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Once there was a Quechua folktale. It begins with a trickster fox's penis with a will of its own and ends with a daughter returning to parents who cannot recognize her until she recounts the uncanny adventures that have befallen her since she ran away from home. Following the strange twists and turnings of this tale, Catherine J. Allen weaves a narrative of Quechua storytelling and story listening that links these arts to others—fabric weaving, in particular—and thereby illuminates enduring Andean strategies for communicating deeply felt cultural values. In this masterful work of literary nonfiction, Allen draws out the connections between two prominent markers of ethnic identity in Andean nations—indigenous language and woven cloth—and makes a convincing case that the connection between language and cloth affects virtually all aspects of expressive culture, including the performing arts. As she explores how a skilled storyteller interweaves traditional tales and stock characters into new stories, just as a skilled weaver combines traditional motifs and colors into new patterns, she demonstrates how Andean storytelling and weaving both embody the same kinds of relationships, the same ideas about how opposites should meet up with each other. By identifying these pervasive patterns, Allen opens up the Quechua cultural world that unites story tellers and listeners, as listeners hear echoes and traces of other stories, layering over each other in a kind of aural palimpsest.

My paper addresses perspectives on powerful stones among rural farmers and pastoralists in the contemporary Andes. Stones are considered sites of transformation that transcend temporal dimensions. Some boulders are considered to have been people in previous ages; their petrification is an ongoing process that affects human beings in their vicinity, suggesting an ontological orientation in which time, place, materiality, and consciousness are intimately interrelated. Significant stones, ranging from miniature livestock to huge monoliths, are connected with powerful mountains through a play of fractal relations that animates the cosmos.

In highland Andean communities, certain miniatures inspire complex emotions that go beyond the aesthetic. I have previously examined “pebble play” during pilgrimages, in which devotees make requests of a mountain/saint by building miniature stone house compounds. Here, I explore other types of miniature, in particular tiny stone camelids (inqaychus) considered as gifts from powerful places that invigorate the herds. Guided by Quechua terminology, I explore the ontological assumption that material things such as inqaychus possess subjective personhood. Materiality, composed of nesting hierarchies, is not independent of human activity and moral relationship. I amplify my earlier analysis—which interpreted “pebble play” as characterized by synecdoche and play with dimensionality—using terminology drawn from fractal geometry to approximate a world characterized by dynamic changes in scale and interchangeability of parts and wholes. I conclude by contrasting inqaychus with alasitas (mass-produced miniatures purchased on holy days, increasingly popular among urban migrants).

In Quechua- and Aymara-speaking communities of the high Andes, certain small stone objects contain the well-being of their human owners. Described as “living ones” and “loving ones,” they are thought to be gifts bestowed by powerful places that control the vitality and reproduction of herd animals. These objects originate in times of cosmic readjustment and transition. In these moments a fortunate individual may come across a beautiful animal that, when captured, shrinks until it becomes a tiny stone. This paper explores the animacy of these stones, emphasizing challenges to our established modes of thought, analysis and practice posed by the living quality – the personhood – of these “loving stones.”Andean culture, Quechua, Aymara, animism, ontology, talisman

The Andean idea of death differs markedly from the Western view. In the Central Andes, particularly the highlands, death is not conceptually separated from life, nor is it viewed as a permanent state. People, animals, and plants simply transition from a soft, juicy, dynamic life to drier, more lasting states, like dry corn husks or mummified ancestors. Death is seen as an extension of vitality.Living with the Dead in the Andesconsiders recent research by archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, ethnographers, and ethnohistorians whose work reveals the diversity and complexity of the dead-living interaction. The book's contributors reap the salient results of this new research to illuminate various conceptions and treatments of the dead: \"bad\" and \"good\" dead, mummified and preserved, the body represented by art or effigies, and personhood in material and symbolic terms.Death does not end or erase the emotional bonds established in life, and a comprehensive understanding of death requires consideration of the corpse, the soul, and the mourners. Lingering sentiment and memory of the departed seems as universal as death itself, yet often it is economic, social, and political agendas that influence the interactions between the dead and the living.Nine chapters written by scholars from diverse countries and fields offer data-rich case studies and innovative methodologies and approaches. Chapters include discussions on the archaeology of memory, archaeothanatology (analysis of the transformation of the entire corpse and associated remains), a historical analysis of postmortem ritual activities, and ethnosemantic-iconographic analysis of the living-dead relationship. This insightful book focuses on the broader concerns of life and death.

[...]we know that khipus were used to represent things and relationships in powerful ways that facilitated Inka administration of a highly centralized, expansive, oppressive (but not modern) state.1 My point was not to enter into a conversation about khipus, interesting as that may be, but to express reservations about what seems like over-hasty framing of the analysis within the postcolonial critique of representation. “Always-mutual-care” does not convey the inner dynamics of ayllu relationality as an often-brutal process of mutual consumption. [...]in spite of her disclaimer, it’s likely that non-Andeanist readers are left with exactly the idealized impression that de la Cadena wants to deny.2 Reading de la Cadena’s response along with Hornborg’s rejoinder was an ironic experience of partial connections. [...]Earth beings conveys an admirable and provocative message about the importance of learning to converse across radical difference. 1.Note that imperialist expansion was not, in the Inka case, driven by Western modes of objectification. 2.For example, a review of Earth beings by an anthropologist who works outside the Andes includes as its penultimate sentence, “To long for the purity of the prose of Mariano’s in-ayllu (in which there is no separation between event and its narration, signifier and sign) is to long for the impossibility of the perfect, stable translation” (Yates-Doerr 2016: 176).