In the Andes, Nurturance is at the Very Heart of Life

~ speech by Grimaldo Renfigo Vasquez, spokesman for (PRATEC) El Proyecto Andino de Tecnologías Campesinas /The Andean Project for Peasant Technologies

In the the south of the Andes, the people do a ritual to the seeds that they plant. Their ceremony takes place in February when the plants have already matured. They take the first fruits of harvest and put them on the altar and they put in front of them the potato harvest from the previous year and in the ritual the Andean priest, at one moment, pronounces that the old potatoes say to the new ones, "Just as we have nurtured this human community, you also have to nurture them". Thus, nurturing and growing is not only an attribute of human beings but it is also something the plant themselves must do, they nurture human beings.

In the Andes, nurturance is at the very heart of life. For example, the alpacas belong to the sacred mountain called Apu. And they come to the earth from the invisible world or the world that is behind the visible world, through the springs - where the water comes out - so that the human communities can continue this nurturance. And there's a myth among the Aymara which says that the day when there will be no alpacas , life will end. This means that nurturance is central to the regeneration of life. This means that when we elaborate a discourse on Andean wisdom and compare it with modern western knowledge, we establish a first order of difference.

Whereas in the modern west the act of raising a crop is unidirectional - from the humans to the crop - in the Andean world we are all nurturers: the potatoes, the waters, the sacred mountains, the alpacas , the human community. To extend the expression, we say the Andean world is a pan-culturalist world in the sense that cultural is not only an attribute of the human community. It's an attribute of all that is alive. This cannot be understood unless one understands that in the end, everything is alive. The waters, wind, rocks, alpacas , are all alive.

This establishes another difference, vis-a-vis, the modern west where there is a very sharp difference between what is alive and what is not alive. It is not that we are all alive and we are all persons, but that we are all equivalent beings. It is not a scale with humans on the top, which is the way of the modern west. So this is what we understand by conversing with those equivalent to you. One can only converse with those that are similar to you. The one who does not feel him or herself as equivalent does not converse, but gives orders. Before continuing I want to make something very clear. When we make a comparison with the modern west it is not to denigrate this way of attaining knowledge. Our problem with modern knowledge is that it has colonized us. In order to affirm our own culture -- to see it and to live it -- is inseparably linked to a process of internal decolonization. When we speak of modern western knowledge we speak of that knowledge as we know it, as we have been taught it. We do not write a history of modern western knowledge. So the difference is in function of the way we live it, because it has everything to do with the well-being of our people.

Another aspect that differentiates the Andean world from modern western knowledge is the issue of diversity. Nature by definition -- and this includes the human community, the human community being within nature --is diverse. In the Andes, this diversity is extreme. In a very small space one encounters a great diversity of climates. According to one academic, there are 103 zones of life, and 83 of those zones are represented in the Andes. Another characteristic is that the weather is extremely changeable, just like here in Northampton, Massachusetts. The issue is how to maintain and increase diversity through conversation with all, and how in the modern west the tendency is to reduce this diversity. We say that the Andeans converse with all, at least with everyone, and they converse about everything. And this conversation is about variability, which means of circumstances and of specific contexts. Since there is a great deal of variability, one must be very attentive to minute changes in order to converse with life and to regenerate life. In the Andes, for human beings to help pachamama , the Earth Mother, to raise crops, the human community has to converse and work with the constellations, the sun, the moon, the soils, the wind, the water, and many other things. This is what is known in the modern west as holism.

And this is different from abstraction. In the process of abstracting, one divides the world into categories: those things that are important and those things that are accessories. One does not converse with the world, rather one constructs a world that one imposes on reality. Therefore one does not converse with the person as it is, as he or she is, and the circumstances it finds itself in, but rather you're dealing with a representation of what is.

Another aspect that is important to us are the spaces in which nurturing -- growing -- can take place. Our entrance into Andean culture has been through agriculture and this has given us enormous strength because in the usual academic study of Andean cultures, culture is understood as something superstructural. For example, in the studies of the clothing, the song, the language. So that many anthropologists when they see that the people no longer wear their the clothes they used to wear or no longer speak the languages they used to speak, they say they have lost their culture. So they say that what the conquistadores of old haven't managed to do or haven't finished off, it's going to be done by Mitsubishi or Sony.

Ten years ago, the agricultural researches under the auspices of the International Center for Potato Research located in Peru did its census of all the cultivated plants found in the Andes. They found 9,000 cultivors. A year ago, my friend was at a conference where you had the cream of international scholars who know about plants. And they were all in agreement there were not 9,000 but there were 20,000 cultivors. And these are just in potatoes. There are 3,500 varieties of sweet potatoes. It is very clear that this is the result of nurturance by the Andean community.

This regeneration did not emerge from the international research centers. This has been the patient work of the Andean communities, and this strengthens us. This has allowed the members of PRATEC to elaborate a concept on Andean culture which we call agrocentric. We feel we must understand the chacra . The chacra , at one level, is a cultivated field. It has a broad meaning which will emerge in the session. If we do not understand the chacra, understanding will always be tangential, because the language, the clothing, the astronomy and other knowledges and practices have as their central knot, agricultural.

But what is the chacra? The chacra is the place where plants are cultivated. But the Andean people say of the llamas, "the chacras with legs". And when they go to the rivers to pan for gold, the space that is theirs to pan for gold, they call it "their chacra of gold". But it is not only human beings who do chacra, (not have chacra,) but it's also, for example, the ticuna, a wild animal, related to the llama. The vicuna is the chacra of the apu, the protector mountain. But there are also chacras of nature, where it is said "the fox has its potato chacra". So what we have is a community of chacrararoos, the persons who do chacras. So the chacra is at the very heart of the regeneration of life. So the chacra is really the scenario, the place where conversation takes place between human beings, nature and the community of sacred beings, called dieties or spirits. This right here is a chacra. If it is lived as a space of nurturance. But also I let myself be nurtured.

But there is something more. For example, Huaman Poma de Ayala was an Andrean chronicler in the early seventeenth-century and he was, at the same time, a missionary of Catholicism. So the Catholic priest asks a man to draw a picture of Adam and Eve in order to help his missionizing. So when he does that he shows Adam with his chacata club, which is the foot hoe of the Andes, and Eve in the role as is lived in the Andes so when you push the hoe, you loosen the earth then the wife turns the earth over. And that is what he has drawn. That shows that the chacra has existed forever in Andean life.

Normally, in modern western knowledge, agriculture is presented to us as a form superior to hunting and gathering. And they say that agriculture is a mode in which humans became more independent, vis-a-vis nature. And this shows their conception of humans as different and separate from nature.

Even today, the human communities do, at the same time, agriculture and chaco, which is hunting and gathering, which means that chacra is another form to contribute to the regeneration of life and not as a superior stage to chaco. Very strangely it seems that those two words are also found in the Mayan language. Chacra, and chaco. Chaco is the place to speak in a western way of hunting and gathering. There is a western vision of chacro in which human beings are seen as confronting nature. We see el chacro as a ritual manner of nurturing nature.

Still today, in the alteplano which is the high plateau in the south of Peru, people practice the chaco of the vicuna. In the very same manner, in which it is shown in rock painting, very ancient ones, this ritual of chaco of the vicuna is shown there. It is still done today. Today, in my own community, before going out to do chaco, people prepare themselves through a very lengthy diet regime, and drinking certain plants. Through doing this, one's own aroma is the same as that of the plants. And when they go ritually into the forest the animals don't smell the humans as being different and so the wild animals come right by us, even brushing our body. So you don't have here a person with a lance confronting nature. Rather what you have is a conversation with nature in which you cull, just like you prune trees, in which you take the old and sick. And it's very possible that during this process nature does the chacro of human beings. And that is experienced as meaning that nature is going to be very prodigal in the next year.

We use the word "knowledge" to refer to the modern west. That is,
knowledge is the word we use to refer to what exists in the modern west and this word presupposes that there is a knowing subject who knows about an object, as separate from the knowing subject. This is related to an emergence of the individual in the modern west. In it's struggle to dominate nature, human beings have separated themselves out from nature, from god, and from other humans. In this context emerges the western project of education. In order to give people the skills, the knowledge, the dexterity, to be able to exploit and control nature, it is very common to find in the universities courses entitled, "Exploitation of Soils, Plants and Animals." There is even a book called, in English, "Cultivors That Are Little Exploited", and this book is financed by a project for sustainable agriculture.

The PRATEC courses/discourses are held within a context of Andean culture and agriculture. This course is directed at university teachers, workers at non-governmental organizations and government people who have all gone through the university system. So it is very important for us in this process to elaborate a discourse on Andean culture as well as one that reveals the roots of modern western knowledge.

When these people graduate from university, and go on to their Ph.D. in agronomy or science, whatever they study, they continue to study more in the same vein, meaning modern western forms of knowledge. They never learn where or when emerged the very notion of soil and resource, for example. So we, PRATEC, have been engaged in something that is not done in Peru anywhere, but we felt it was absolutely necessary to do so. We do this "reflection on" modern western knowledge. We do this because we cannot
unlearn western knowledge unless we know it very well from its very roots. It is in this way that when we can understand why, for a culture such as ours, development is impertinent, not relevant. So this course, along with the people who come into it, those who come from many universities, is a course aimed at such people, people like us, we the professionals, or we who were professionalized. Its aimed at us. Also people who come to the course are of indigenous peasant origins. Our discourse is not aimed at the farmers themselves, but rather we learn from them. Many people will ask us how is it that the people from original cultures ask for schools. In the Andean world, you don't know something only because you have been told about it but much rather you know something because you have experienced it. So the school, just like the "improved potatoes" and the "Catholic Church," have entered into the Andean community but the manner in which the Andean community lives those processes is very particular. For example, the Catholic saints are lived and experienced as "huacas". Huacas are the sacred beings in the Andean world. Not like transcendent beings that one worships and adores but rather like real beings that are there and with whom one converses.

In the same way the "improved potatoes" have been introduced by the Green Revolution. They have been received and welcomed. Those that have let themselves be nurtured, and with whom the farmers could converse well, have stayed Those with whom they could not converse well have left. Like that the school has come and entered the community. The people need to learn to read and write in order to communicate with this other culture. But this has not led people to abstract nor to make of their language a dictionary.

The Andean world is all about nurturance, nurturing, and letting oneself be nurtured in the process of regenerating life. In my former incarnation as a development expert, I used to think I needed to make people conscious so that they could take their distance from nature in order to transform it. This was part of the revolutionary political discourse of the decade of the 1970s, and centered around what one had to do to prevent people from continuing to believe in their dieties. Peru is one of the countries in which there has been the greatest experience of popular education in the process of conscientization which, of course, came out with Paulo Friere. But now more than ever, people continue to visit their apus. Even in the city of Lima, the cemetery is not the place where people bring flowers to the tomb, rather it is a place that people go to dance, eat and converse with their ancestors. This is the strength that the people give us to accompany us in the process of nurturing. Thank you.

(Grimaldo Renfigo Vasquez is a leader and spokesperson for PRATEC. This article was adapted from a speech he gave at a conference held at Smith College to introduce PRATEC and the Andean agricultural culture to North Americans. The event was co- hosted by Smith College and DAYBREAK Magazine. The speech was translated by Professor Frederique Apffel Marglin, professor of Anthropology at Smith College and organizer of the
Conference.)
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