Paper short abstract:

In the rural Bolivian Andes, personhood is defined by intersubjective relationships with nonhuman beings, including houses. This paper examines how the ontology of the inhabitants of houses and their relationship with nonhuman beings and the state is affected by changing materiality of their houses.

Paper long abstract:

In the rural Bolivian Andes, personhood is defined by intersubjective reciprocal relationships with nonhuman beings. This paper examines the role of the house as a nonhuman being in itself and as a conduit between its inhabitants and local place deities, and following a recent state social housing programme, how houses act as mediators with the state. In the rural Andes, houses are traditionally made from adobe (mud and straw). The house materially connects its inhabitants with the deities that reside on mountainsides, since it is made of the same substance as the mountains themselves, and it is this materiality that Catherine Allen (2014: 74) has described as constitutive of the house as a sentient being its own right. This paper will examine the social effect of changing materiality of houses, following a recent Bolivian state housing programme that has donated red-brick houses to rural families. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork with the Kallawayas, Bolivian shamanic-healers, for whom the physical and emotional wellbeing of their patients depends on their reciprocal relations with the nonhuman beings around them. I will argue that through the changing materiality of the house reciprocal exchanges become partially redirected towards the state, as an assumed actor in relations of reciprocity through the houses as a "gift" from the state. Where the consubstantiality of the people and the adobe house created one assemblage involving the mountains, the state becomes part of a new material assemblage involving people and red-brick houses.