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.