DAYBREAK REPORT
Grimaldo Renfigo Vasquez
May 5, 1995
Before all, I want to greet you. I want to thank the organizers of this
event, Frederique Apffle Marglin and John Mohawk. They have given the
opportunity for the members of PRATEC (Spanish acronym for Andean Project
for Peasant Technologies), en masse, to come and speak to you. We have not
been in the United States before for many reasons. But at this time, in
this way, it is a lovely opportunity.
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 ticuna 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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