Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnography from fieldwork conducted in El Alto, this paper aims to discuss the notions of attentionality and intentionality, as suggested by Ingold (2015) How are intentionality/attentionality relevant? How is the (indigenous) memory (re)imagined, and how is imagination remembered?

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographical and pictorial insights from fieldwork conducted in El Alto, the fast-growing and most populated city on the Andean Altiplano region, this paper aims to discuss the notions of attentionality and intentionality, as suggested and differentiated by Tim Ingold (2015) in his book "The life of lines". By tracking the flows of material and the lines of movement (Ingold; 2012) that result in the design, construction and inhabitation of the Cholets, an eye-picking, controversial and innovative architectural style that (re)interprets Aymara identity in an urban context, I will try to deliver a description of the interwoven nature of intentional and attentional ways of making (urban-indigenous) architecture.

Heterogeneous actors (construction workers, providers, designers and q'amiri clients, among others) intervene in distinct and decisive manners with flows of heterogeneous resources and materials (from capital and muscular force, to industrial products, semi-artisanal crafts and creativity) for the material and symbolic realization of these buildings. This realization occurs as a partially ritualized process of bringing-them-to-life, by means of drawing, building, shaping, merging, painting, etc., as practices of educated or learned attentionality in the messy construction sites.

From this background, several questions about the status of these buildings emerge: is the difference intentionality/attentionality relevant for their cultural specificities? How are the indigenous, urban/modern or ch'ixi (Rivera Cusicanqui) worlds knotted together? Are traditional Aymara thakhis (Arnold) or mnemonic pathways still playing a role in construction? And more generally, how is the (indigenous) memory (re)imagined, and how is imagination remembered?

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to examine the terms by which the human and non-human components of a Quechua-Cañaris group of northern Peruvian Andes conceptualize and establish their relationships with the landscape in a context saturated by different external-driven actions of ruination.

Paper long abstract:

Leaving open the possibility of a radical alterity and multiplicity of an environment with whom humans relate in terms that exceed modern worldings, I will try to describe Cañaris' practices and conceptions relating to the construction, uses, inhabiting and renovation of a sacred building made with ancient techniques in one of its most important towns. The non-human entity that emerge from this ontogenic exploration is called Iglisya. It is a building of thatched roof and sun dried bricks that is simultaneously less "indigenous" and more "artificial" than what has been usually the focus of Amerindian studies. I argue that since its clandestine construction by "indios" of the eighteenth century, this temple represented the Cañaris landscape and, more importantly, constituted it in a specific form. In fact, this Iglisya is not distinguishable from the relationship between the Cañarenses and their land, and this relationship is conceived and made in analogy to that one between parents and children. In sum, the landscape is treated and understood by Cañarenses as their child. This assertion is in contrast to those entities usually invoked by publicised indigenous movements and protests, such as Pachamama. Finally, the paper considers the material and ritual aspects of a relationship with a more-than-human entity that constitutes a landscape and provides Cañarenses with a cosmopolitical device with which they become able to contend on their own terms an increasingly threatening ruination context.

Paper short abstract:

Highlighting differences and similarities between llamas shearing and chaku ritual practices, the presentation discusses how people archive relational enskilment by being attentive and corresponding to other lifelines, such as animals and Pachamama, in Laguna Blanca, Northwestern Andean Argentina.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation draws on the concept "relationality" as a meshwork of relations among "becomings" or "lifelines" (human and non-human beings) according to Tim Ingold, and conceives of "uywaña" as an Andean indigenous practical theory of relationality. It shows how people incorporate, enact, produce, and are produced by, such a relationality through ritual practices, focusing on the llamas shearing and the chaku of vicuñas in Laguna Blanca, Northwestern Andean Argentina.

Here, shepherds rear herds of sheep and llamas as well as they rear children, whereas wild vicuñas are said to be the personal herd of the Pachamama-Mother Earth. In order to shear both llamas and vicuñas, people have to ask Pachamama for permission, making offerings, feeding and "paying" her by burying goods. During the llamas shearing, shepherds associate themselves and their children with animals, decorate both people and llamas, and bind woolly colorful bows on the animals' back that will "pay" the Pachamama for the pasture by falling to the ground. Through these and other circular ritual practices, people relate each other within the family and the community rearing animals and being reared by them mutually, they protect and are protected by Pachamama, being careful to her and caring of her, thereby putting into practice "uywaña" (mutual rearing) as an indigenous theory of relationality.

Highlighting differences and similarities between llamas shearing and chaku ritual practices, the presentation discusses how people archive relational enskilment by being attentive and corresponding to other lifelines, such as animals and the Pachamama.

Paper short abstract:

We draw upon never before analyzed artefacts used during therapeutic rituals in the Bolivian Altiplano, called uywiri (as are the family's cattle's protecting gods), to understand how healing consists of relating with sacred places which enable the domestication of subjectivities hence good health

Paper long abstract:

In the Bolivian Altiplano, Aymara curanderos use during therapeutic rituals - deemed to cure lethal diseases caused by the predation of untamed non-humans entities inscribed in the territory - concave artefacts never before analyzed in the literature, called uywiri. Curanderos' clients receive one, filled with a powder to be drunk while pronouncing her name as well as the uywiri's: uywiri is also the generic term referring to the family's domesticated cattle's protecting gods - embodied in places of the family estate related to kinship and practices of socialization - enabling growth, good health, and merciful weather throughout the year.

Drawing on the works of Classen (1990), Allen (2002) and Abercrombie (1998), we intend to show how an artefactual grammar - involving uywiri, plants, incense and other items of the curanderos' paraphernalia - works as a corporeal mnemonic device through which one constitutes herself by sensorially mapping out her relations with sacred places which index the non-written history of individuals and the collective, but also kinship relationships and socially accepted, hence domesticated, behaviors.

Curanderos, by acting both on the sensorial and linguistic levels in a counterintuitive way, make her client attentive to other forms of "relationality" with sacred places - or rather with contexts situated in specific places of the family estate - in order to inscribe back her subjectivity in socialized places, whose agentivity forces us to go beyond the Western concept of landscape, which supposes an ontological separation between the subject and the environment that does not prevail here.

Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Andean-Chocó region in Ecuador, this paper offers an insight into the social-environmental strategies of youth to cope with a constantly contested territory. This work stands as an exploration of resistance and re-imagination in a rural context.

Paper long abstract:

As global the “climate crisis” may sound, it is not caused or felt homogeneously. It is caused by a western-colonial-extractivist-patriarchal system. Therefore, the resistances to this system can’t and shouldn’t be homogenized either. It is utterly important to acknowledge lifelong resistances form the “Global South” grounded in popular knowledges, relational worlds, but also in the constant ontological occupation of the Territories.

“The Resistance” is an organic process, constantly being re-define by the struggle and the ones who live it. This is an important moment in time because the climate crisis cannot be ignored any longer, and “Nature” must not be considered an object of study or exploitation anymore. Therefore, the western interpretation of nature must be reimagined and redefined, and the presumptions of being the only valid creators of knowledge must come to an end. It is time to learn from those who have been resisting, those who can give the Western World different ideas to redefine affiliations with the “rest of nature”, and work alongside each other for another more just world, understanding that climate justice is social justice and upside down.

Thus, through the ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Andean-Chocó region in Ecuador, this paper offers an insight into social-environmental strategies of youth to cope with a constantly contested territory. This work stands as an exploration of resistance and re-imagination on a rural context under the theoretical framework of Epistemologies of the South (Escobar, 2016), new social Latino American movements (Sierra, 2018) and new ruralities (Rosas-Baños, 2013).