Hov lIe Iuacas Weve TIe Language oJ SuIslance and TvansJovnalion in lIe HuavocIiv QuecIua Manuscvipl AulIov|s) FvanI SaIonon Souvce BES AnlIvopoIog and AeslIelics, No. 33, Fve-CoIunIian Slales oJ Being |Spving, 1998), pp. 7-17 FuIIisIed I TIe Fvesidenl and FeIIovs oJ Havvavd CoIIege acling lIvougI lIe FeaIod Museun oJ AvcIaeoIog and ElInoIog SlaIIe UBL http://www.jstor.org/stable/20166998 . Accessed 02/09/2014 1231 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . The President and Fellows of Harvard College and Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.138.65.181 on Tue, 2 Sep 2014 12:31:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions How the huacas were The language of substance and transformation in the Huarochiri Quechua manuscript FRANK SALOMON Two of the most important verbs relevant to Andean concepts of being have already been well dealt with by researchers: camay, or roughly "to animate, to impart specific form and force" in G. Taylor's article (1974-1976); and hua?uy, or "to die" in Urioste's article (1981).1 Other clues to assumptions about existence appear in Duviols's (1978) and Taylor's (1980) clarifications of upani, or roughly "shade," which seems related to colonial Quechua supay, or "demon." This essay sketches further usages and implications of the lexicon about being and substance and transformation of beings as we know them from the one and only available early text that presents an Andean belief system in an Andean language, namely the anonymous Quechua manuscript of Huarochiri (circa 1608; for translations, see Taylor 1987; Salomon and Urioste 1991). It is important to understand at the start that, while the Huarochiri book contains origin myths, legends, and priestly lore of clearly pre-Hispanic derivation, the colonial Quechua language and the writing practices in which they are expressed by 1608 had been much influenced by the Church's labors toward making the former "Language of the Inca" into an evangelical interlingua (Mannheim 1991, Duviols and Itier 1993). Thus the concepts of being implicit in colonial Quechua language and writing practices are not necessarily disconnected from the largely Aristotelian and Augustinian philosophic discussion that lies in the background of Peruvian evangelization. The source for the Quechua manuscript is a multilayered compendium containing testimonies by villagers from a group of agropastoral settlements on the western Andean heights overlooking Lima and also containing editorial material by the native researcher who gathered the stories. In the paragraphs that follow, most examples come from passages of the former sort, but a few (such as chapter titles, and so on) come from 1. The orthography is colonial. Throughout the present essay Quechua lexicon is quoted as found in sources rather than rephonologized. the latter. The master argument of the manuscript concerns how a group of formerly marginal herding lineages rooted in the high tundra advanced under the patronage of the mountain deity Paria Caca into the richer middle and then lower valleys, conquering the aboriginal Yunca peoples, and at the same time welding themselves into the complex ritual regimen the Yuncas had possessed. It accords great importance to the aboriginal female deity Chaupi ?amca, who is in some ways Paria Caca's down-valley counterpart. If we curb assumptions that "verbs of being" in the Quechua manuscript correspond to familiar notions of being and becoming, regularities in their semantic domains and usages emerge and become useful for interpreting the manuscript's implicit world view. In this discussion I will occasionally use the word ontology, not with any claim to discovering ontological categories in Andean thought, but rather using familiar western ontological categories as an aid to textual exegesis by making explicit the attributes we think we recognize in Andean assertions about being, substance, and change. Panayot Butchvarov (1995:490) reviews ontology in its Aristotelian sense of "first philosophy," that is, "the study of being qua being, i.e., of the most general and necessary characteristics that anything must have in order to count as a being, an entity (ens).,f The root problem in ontology is that (at least in languages known to European philosophers) the range of "things" that can be subjects of the verb "to be"?that is, the range of percepts that can be recognized as discrete features on a common spaciotemporal grounding?is in most respects a non-set: not apples and oranges, but apples, events, and abstractions. The common ontological categories are, in Butchvarov's summary: individual things (Socrates, a book) properties (Socrates' baldness, a book's rectangularity) relations (marriage, the priority of one book to another) events (Socrates' death, a book's publication) states of affairs (Socrates' having died, the fact that a book is in print) sets (the set of Greek philosophers or books) This content downloaded from 128.138.65.181 on Tue, 2 Sep 2014 12:31:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 8 RES 33 SPRING 1998 Concerns of western ontological philosophy include, for example, asking whether some individual things are "substances in the Aristotelian sense, i.e., enduring through time and changes in their properties and relations, or whether all individual things are momentary"; "whether any entity has essential properties, i.e., properties without which it would not exist/' and "whether properties and relations are particulars or universals" (Butchvarov 1995:490). Do the implicitudes of a nonwestern source, the Quechua manuscript of Huarochiri, allow us to glimpse any Andean assumptions about problems of this order? It may be worth trying out the following suggestions.2 1 : Cay and tiay are in complementary contrast as qualitative and dynamic being versus situated being We can start considering the lexicon of being by noting that the language of the Huarochiri writer tends to place two verbs of being in contrasting opposition, as if suggesting that the two between them name the attributes that make anything or anybody ontologically present. The first substantive chapter (Ch. 1) of the Huarochiri manuscript is one of the six that have Spanish-language headings: Como fue anteguam[en]te los ydolos . . . y como auia en aquel tiempo los naturales, or "How the Idols of Old Were . . . and How the Natives Existed" Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 3 The revealing point here is the Quechua interference in Spanish?not the "incorrect" non-pluralization, which simply reflects Quechua's optional pluralizing rules (for both nouns and verbs), but the fact that the author contrasted "ser" with "haber" in a fashion imparallel to their usual Spanish senses. He did so because he was in need of a way to translate a distinction between two verbs that posit ontological presence?both necessary to the task of introducing huacas, that is, superhuman beings, but neither one semantical ly congruent to "ser" or "haber" (or "estar"). We learn what these verbs are in a later chapter's heading, which similarly offers an introduction to a huaca. This instance is not forced into Spanish: ymanam chaupi ?amca carean maypim t?an, or "How Chaupi ?amca was and where she is [situated]'' Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 141 Here cascan and tiascan stand in complementary contrast; the former concerns what and how she was, that is, acted, and the latter concerns where she was, that is, situated. The distinction concerns being as activity versus being as situated existence. This particular quotation highlights the separability of the concepts by using different tenses; the great female power Chaupi ?amca "was," "acted" (carcan) in a past-tense form, because prior to the time of writing Christians had already desecrated and ritual ly deactivated her, but she "is" at the time of writing still "situated" (tian), because her stone embodiment "is" still hidden where she was buried (at a specified site, Tumna Plaza). Similar contrasts occur in sections 14 and 126 of the manuscript. A being may have either or both of these attributes, with somewhat different ontological implications. We will therefore examine each one separately. Point 1a: Cay denotes qualitative being manifested in action There does not appear to be any such semantic isolate as mere existence, certainly no verb exclusively glossed by "to exist" as opposed to nonexistence. The best colonial lexicographer, Gonc?lez Holgu?n, understood cay as meaning "ser de essencia o de existencia" ("to be, in the sense of essence or of existence," Gonc?lez Holgu?n 1952 [1608]:668). Like similar verbs in many languages, cay can function as a simple copula (for example, pirn canqui, or "who are you" [Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991: sec. 238]). As an auxiliary verb combined with an agentive form it signifies habitual action (muchac carcan, or "they used to worship" [Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 7]). Beyond that, cay brackets together cases of being as specificity (of condition, attribute, identity) manifested via action through time. In usages like: . . . ymanam casac ?ispa tapuspam, or ". . . asking, saying 'how shall I [or we] be?'" Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991 :sec. 472 2. In the examples, references are made to chapters of the original with the abbreviation "Ch." and references to passages are made by section number, for example, (Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 3) meaning section (not page) 3 of the Salomon-Urioste translation. This citation form facilitates comparison with the Quechua original, which is section-numbered in parallel. This content downloaded from 128.138.65.181 on Tue, 2 Sep 2014 12:31:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Salomon: How the huacas were 9 the petitioner merely wants to know a future qualitative state of welfare (similar usages occur in sections 31, 131, and 286). What is distinctive about cay in the texts is a tendency to include senses translatable as "to act" or "to happen." The nominalized perfect form of the verb cay, or "to be"(casca) means "events" not "entities"?that which somebody or something did. Casca can refer to the sum of a being's activities or its characteristic activities. One might accept a remote gloss like the "nature" of that entity, but "deeds" is also often appropriate: cay cunirayap cascanracmi ?ahca vira cochap cascanman tincon, or "this Cuni Raya's deeds ('nature'? Identity'?) almost match Vira Cocha's deeds" Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991 :sec. 7; see also sees. 1, 126 Gerald Taylor, a careful semantic analyst, also includes culto, or "the religious interaction of people and superhumans," among his glosses for casca (1987:50-51). In the latter sense its semantic component "activity" seems far broader than that implicit in the English verb "be." In the two chapter headings cited above, each heading asks an implicit question as to '"how [the huaca] was." The answers to the question "how was s/he?" is not a statement about either momentary condition or about unchangingly predicated attribute, but the whole story of the person's action?that is, the whole chapter (Chs. 1, 10 for the cited examples). All told, casca, the "being" of a Huarochiri actor, seemingly accentuates the notion of event as constitutive of entity. The huacas have, in some contexts, individuality and properties, but in others they are seemingly imagined as long-term overarching sequences of phenomena or deeds. Point 1b: T/ay denotes situated being Tiay in Gonc?lez Holgu?n's dictionary meant "sentarse estar sentado, estar en alg?n lugar morar habitar" (1952 [1608]:340), or "to sit down, to be seated, to be in some place, to dwell, to inhabit." He then gives many derived terms, all implying decreasingly kinetic states. For example, he gives a Quechua phrase comparable to the English transitive usage "to still (something)." Tiaycuchini sonconta (with forced literalism one could gloss this as "I make her/his heart sit") meant "to calm someone's anger." Derivatives meant "to be in an available, motionless state," for example, of merchandise on sale. With the "dynamic modifier" (Urioste 1973:174) -ku, it yields tiacoy, or "to dwell" or "stay." In the Huarochiri text: cananpas sutilla escay runi runahina tiacon, or "two stones just like people are [located] there even now" Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991 :sec. 18; see also sees. 14, 32, 34, 50, etc. Tiay is the verb that seems to emphasize individuality as substance: that singularity of a huaca that endures throughout its changes and relationships. Tiay often expresses the idea of existence in a permanent location and endurance in the form of hard materials, like rock, or in the form of permanent corporations, like villages or priesthoods. Chaupi ?amca, whose casca is spoken of in a perfect nominalized form, is the subject of active verb tian long after her "happening" seems to have ended. 2: Accumulating action and changing situation modify ontological accent Various researchers mentioned below have suggested that in Andean speculation, the trajectory of all being through time is basically uniform. Huacas, like people, plants, and animals, pass through a gradient from kinetic, fleshly, fast-changing being toward static, hard, slow-changing being. The more energetic and fateful their actions, the farther they move from soft biotic states, full of potential, to the hard states, full of permanence, seen in deified mountains and other land features. This point has already been well explored by Allen and other researchers whose work is summarized below. It is useful to notice, however, that though the myths speak of purportedly continuous entities?substantial beings, in the Aristotelian sense of entities that survive changes of property and relations?to refer to them in their successive states entails emphasizing different categorical sorts of being, by which I mean the sorts of being summarized above by Butchvarov. This shifting emphasis might be called change of ontological accent. For example, the being Paria Caca is spoken of as the following: 5 eggs 5 falcons 5 heroic "men," collectively called "the five of him" (pichcantin) a snowcapped, double-peaked mountain storm, red rain and yellow rain, flood and earthslide a person and voice [that is, oracle] This content downloaded from 128.138.65.181 on Tue, 2 Sep 2014 12:31:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 10 RES 33 SPRING 1998 What, then, is Caca the eponym of? The first three instances refer to his theophany, in the form of five eggs that hatched five falcons who became five men, each the founder of one of the five large putative descent groups understood as belonging to a single maximal ethnic entity. In the first three instances then, the ontological category "set" is salient (the ideological implication being the "reality" of the set formed by five ethnically related political units). In the first and third, the category "relation" is salient; the metaphorical tension between human sibling bonds (which have birth order) and the simultaneity of a clutch of eggs (which lack it) is the main implication. Like hatchlings, the five groups are equals by birth, yet like brothers they are not. The fourth, Paria Caca's final form (and his tiascan or located being) accentuates individuality and substantiality. The fifth accentuates the category "event," insofar as Paria Caca was the event, a storm of red and yellow rain. The sixth does as well, but also emphasizes "state of affairs/' namely the state of Paria Caca's having ordained a social order. The thinking expressed here embraces the perception of experience as ontological ly heterogeneous, as Aristotle taught. But it deals with this not in the Aristotelian fashion noted above, that is, by sorting out percepts according to different sorts of realness we can accord them, but rather by organizing ontological heterogeneity in terms of single beings that unite multiple sorts of realness and demonstrate them through varied manifestations. Thus the accumulation of eventful being is treated as altering ontological status itself. The conveners of the meeting from which this essay derives called attention to the concept of a continuum from transitory to durable modes of being. This idea derives from insights by Catherine Allen (1982) and George Urioste. Urioste's 1981 essay on the death gradient is itself an exegesis of the Huarochiri manuscript. His conclusion has since the date of writing been confirmed by ethnographic findings (Paerregaard 1987, Valderrama 1980, Salomon 1995). His point is that unlike Euro-American models of death, which treat death as a durationless moment of division between the "live" status before expiration and "death" after it, Quechua hua?oc ("die-er") brackets those soon to expire with those recently expired. The moribund and the recently deceased form a single class of beings, whose duration extends between the "living" (causad) and the enshrined ancestor (aya) phases of being. This L -w , *;V'^' i .^IWHIIIBiii^iiBHBKM^^M^^B mk ^*.-j&?. '-.? - .c^4ii^SiHBB9III^Hfi^H^^^HH^^^^^^^^^HMHHi^^l ^H^BkI^^^HE^^ "^sr /^^^: --> ^^^QIBHHHI^S^I^^^HIB^seP'C^JSv Figure 1. The snowcap Rariacaca, in the western Andean cordillera south of Lima, is a permanent manifestation of the multiply realized deity who dominates the Huarochiri Quechua text. This photograph shows the south peak of the double peaked snowcap, which is probably adjacent to Paria Caca's ancient shrine. Photo: Frank Salomon. This content downloaded from 128.138.65.181 on Tue, 2 Sep 2014 12:31:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Salomon: How the huacas were 11 transition can be seen as one segment of a more inclusive view of life and death in continuum. Duviols (1978) and Allen (1982) have each independently emphasized a pervasive "vegetative metaphor," which connects the tender, juicy, wet character of young beings (new plants, babies) with the ever more firm and resistant, but also dryer and more rigid character of older ones (adults, mature plants) and finally, with the desiccated but enduring remains of beings who have left life and been preserved (preserved crops like freeze-dried potatoes or ch'u?u [mummies]). The most permanent of all beings are geological features such as mountains (Rubina 1992). The dynamizing feature of this cosmology is the circulating and ever re-fecundating relationship among beings differently located in action and time. The "soul" (which in the Huarochiri source is often called by the Spanish word anima, or "spirit") is visualized as a small flying creature that departs from the dead person, much as a seed departs from a dying plant, and conserves its vitality in a sacred space, Uma Pacha. In idolatry trials, some defendants gave voice to an image of Uma Pacha as being a farm where spirits, like seeds, could flourish back toward fleshly life. The destination of souls is sometimes also identified with the origin shrines of ego's group, again emphasizing a circulating principle. At the highest extreme of permanence, beings of prototypical importance?those whose actions actually shaped the conditions of existence?are spoken of as having hardened into everlasting material, namely stone or other land features. These most durable beings provide, indeed literally become, the ground on which new transient beings emerge. The overall direction is to map general structures of congruence among living human collectivities, ancestral or legendary society (whose material substance is shrines and the consecrated dead), landscape forms (mountains and waterways), and cosmological facts (cosmological bodies, the climate). However this is not to assert that the world of huaca devotees was of the sort that Bellah (1964) recognized in speaking of societies where divinity is so close as to be ontological ly merged with society. Although people, mummies, huacas, and the cosmos are kindred beings, they relate to temporality and the laws of nature in dissimilar ways. The individual being passing through eventful time actually changes in ontological accent or association. The mode of life described as characteristic of huaca devotees is characterized by a complex regimen of ritual behaviors governing relationships between beings of unlike standing. 3: Communication among beings of unequal metaphysical or ontological standing occurs through "slides" along the vital gradient Since ritual consisted of reciprocity among beings of all classes, human and nonhuman, it implied communication among beings of unlike ontological standing. The rituals described in the Quechua source, as well as some ethnographical ly observed rites, which embody continuities with them, have a common metaprogram or genre scenario for achieving this. As was suggested in the example of Paria Caca, huacas were cultural postulates whose interest was rooted precisely in the fact that they united in "persons" heterogeneous perceptions of reality as substance, event, category, and so on. The attributes of beings in different parts of the vital continuum with their differing ontological accents, appealed to differing ritual needs, with the predominant mode being approach to more exalted, permanent, and empowered beings by lower, softer, more mutable ones. These approaches tend to be governed by a fairly regular program. The actors are: (1) at least one sacred being; (2) a person, generally acting as part of a collectivity, transacting a reciprocal gift; and (3) at least one person who acts as mediator. The collectivity and the mediator engage in divergent actions. The collectivity enters ritual states of heightened vitality and solidarity, in which they display themselves as themselves only more so; alcohol (Saignes 1987) serves to liberate huge discharges of social and physical energy and appetite. Invocations to deity are made in first person plural?interestingly, in the inclusive voice, implying that the deity addressed partakes of the condition or action of the collectivity. The role of the mediator is more complex. I would describe mediating roles as "slides" along the continuum of being, in which humans assume statuses closer to those of the superhuman person addressed. These "slides" often have an aspect of transient death, or transient return from death: Abstention (sa?iyj from "lively" behavior. The mildest degree of distancing from daily life is the preparation required of persons about to perform duties to huacas or recently in contact with them. Persons returning from a visit to the female power Urpay Huachac had to abstain from sex and seasoned food for a year (Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 183), because this huaca unlike others had no priest and demanded personal contact. Parents who had to ritual ly avert the bad consequences of This content downloaded from 128.138.65.181 on Tue, 2 Sep 2014 12:31:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 12 RES 33 SPRING 1998 a twin birth?namely, a death to make up for the anomaly of an extra life?likewise accompanied their sacrificial gifts with a year of abstention. These were conditions for dialogue with Paria Caca. The common denominator of ritual abstentions seems to be avoidance of intense bodily sensations. 5/eep (po?oyj and dreaming (muscoyj: The human sleeper, a person temporarily removed from daily vitality, is brought into contact with nonhuman beings and knowledge. In chapter 5 (Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 42), Huatya Curi, while sleeping and presumably dreaming, learns from two talking foxes the secret of the illness that afflicted the fraudulent lord Tamta ?amca. This supernatural knowledge would prove the seed of their reciprocal role reversal. The crucial example is chapter 21, entirely concerned with a dream, in which the protagonist Don Crist?bal Choque Casa, comes into apparent contact with his deceased (hua?uc) father and into dialogue with the huaca whom that "die-er," that is, recently dead man, worshiped (Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 248). Assumption of a deathlike aspect or wearing dead skins: Repeatedly, humans achieve crucial dialogue with superhuman powers by placing on themselves the skins, that is, outer appearances, of dead animals or people. Huatya Curi acquired the magical power to beat his challenger by turning into (tucoy) a dead guanaco and thereby stealing power from a rival huaca (Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 60). The most dramatic acting of wearing death is the donning of the huayo or flayed-face mask, made from a sacrificed captive, which imbues the wearer with the power of Uma Pacha, the mythical high farm wherein the departing anima of the dead were replanted and regenerated (Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991 :secs. 322-324, 404). The skin of a dead animal also empowered a person to approach the sacred patron or owner of the animal and was among the most common ritual gestures (Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:secs. 21, 64, 150, 455-458); it is still practiced in at least one of Huarochiri's communities today. Paria Caca consoled his people for the loss of a treasured headdress by giving them a wildcat skin: And as he'd foretold, on Chaupi ?amca's festival, in the courtyard called Yauri Cal I inca, on top of the wall, a very beautifully spotted wildcat appeared. When they saw it they exclaimed joyfully, "This is what Paria Caca meant!" and they held up its skin as they danced and sang with it. (Hernando Cancho Uillca, who used to live in Tumna, was in charge of it. But by now it's probably gone all rotten.) Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991: sec. 314 4: Passage between states accenting dissimilar ontological statuses are expressed with tucoy In passages concerning the assumption of a magical disguise, as with Huatya Curi "turning into a dead guanaco," the verb employed is tucoy. This is among the most important words signifying transformation. It may usefully be contrasted with cay, or "to be." It has a usage as an auxiliary verb comparable to that of cay, but emphasizing process, like English "get": ynataccho pincay casac, or "shall I be shamed so?" Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 313 and man carcoy tucorcan, or "they got swept away into the jungle" Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 9; see also 228 and 100, an ambiguous instance As a freestanding verb, tucoy covers processes in which a being assumes a new outer aspect. Some of these could well be translated as "become": ?a paria caca ru ?aman tucuspas, or "Paria Caca, becoming human" Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991: sec. 74 tuylla pachampitac rumi tucorcan, or "right then and there she turned to stone" Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991 :sec. 69 But tucoy is more inclusive, covering as it does the sense "to feign, pretend to be": cay cuni raya vira cochas ancha ?aupa hue runa ancha huaccha tucospalla purircan, or "In very ancient times this Cuni Raya Vira Cocha used to go around posing as a miserably poor man" Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 9 ancha yachac tucospa pissi yachascanhuan, or "pretending to be very wise with the little that he knew" Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991 :sec. 40 chaypim huanaco tucospa hua?usca siriconqui, or "there pretending to be a guanaco you'll lie dead" Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 58 These instances show that the semantic scope of tucoy includes change of aspect without any premise about whether a change of what Gonc?lez Holgu?n called "essence" is entailed. Because this noncongruence occurred close to the core meanings of conversion, which Christianity taught This content downloaded from 128.138.65.181 on Tue, 2 Sep 2014 12:31:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Salomon: How the huacas were 13 Figure 2. Today, inhabitants of Tupicocha, Huarochiri, still don animal skins?most importantly, the puma?to perform festival dances. This puma skin, used by dancers of the Sibimol Society in the Pascua Reyes cycle, is reminiscent of the spotted wildcat skin mentioned in the Quechua Manuscript's chapter 24. Photo: Frank Salomon. This content downloaded from 128.138.65.181 on Tue, 2 Sep 2014 12:31:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 14 RES 33 SPRING 1998 people like the editor/compiler to think of as a change of essence, the language of "becoming Christian" is itself ambiguous when it talks about religious change. huaquin runacunaca christiano tucospapas manchaspallam pactach padrepas pipas yachahuanman mana alii cascayta, or "some people becoming/feigning to be Christians [said] 'Watch out, the padre might find out how bad we've been'" Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991 :sec. 134 Knowing that in at least one of the languages they used, Andean converts employed a semantic isolate that classed together changes of form regardless of "authenticity" of motive, helps one understand why the period in question saw so many attacks on the sincerity of "Indian" Christianity. Spanish Catholics thought the Andean powers' way of influencing native people was by "lying" (llollaycuy) to them, and this may be influenced by the notion that Andean metamorphoses (tucoy) were deceptions, the typical practice of European demons. Converts, on the other hand, may have understood the requirements of Christianity as a matter of changing appearance appropriately (much as one did in huaca devotions) in order to partake of connected ontological accents, rather than a matter of changing "essence"?a concept perhaps unavailable to them. The assertion that Andean people engage in a "double" religious life has been a longstanding one; it is still prevalent in middlebrow media representations of Andean Christianity as a "veneer" hiding an authentic "core" of Amerindian culture. This representation, with its subtextual imputation of intentional deception, arises from (among other things) a failure to grasp local notions about appearance and reality. It is perhaps the saddest of many misunderstandings?because it is the most damaging?that went into the making of colonial relations between the Church and rural society. This exegesis illustrates why, within the sphere of the huacas, one made transits toward beings of more durable standing by taking on a second skin, an appearance, closer to their standing as durable, dry, "dead" beings. One might communicate across diverse states of being by process of tucoy, changing outer appearance, for example, by costuming oneself as a huaca's animal to commune with it or by putting on the flayed face of a dead man to communicate with the place of the dead. From the huaca devotees' point of view, in which the "ontological categories" appear as attributes or evidences of single beings in different instances of their existences, no such problem arose. The human who "becomes/pretends to be" a dead guanaco is not substituting an unreal for a real identity because his humanity is not imputed to him as an unchanging essence in the first place. 5: The hierarchy of durability versus transience often represents received ideas about social rank Up to this point the argument has concentrated on the emic viewpoint, sketching implicit ideas expressed in ritual and myth. But these beliefs, of course, expressed an orientation toward a particular observed social system as its members understood it. (The oral authors of the stories, and the Quechua compiler/editor themselves had different viewpoints about this system, the latter being apparently a strong Christian convert alienated from the world view of the tellers.) In discourse that refers to the upper brackets of social/superhuman/cosmological hierarchy, the salience of the category "set" (as opposed to "thing," "person") is high. Ancestor-focused imagery, which places durable beings at apical positions in the natural-social world, expresses an ideology that reifies the real-life processes of social reproduction into segmented kinship corporations. A common example of this is the usage of inca or sapa inca to identify the person who stands highest in the set containing all incacuna (persons affiliated to Inka descent groups). In effect the eponymous use of the term Inca as the name of a supreme god-king denotes the entire "set" of Inkas. The same structure is pervasive at lower levels, for example, in the various Huarochiri instances where the firstborn of a sib bears a name that is also that of the sib, so that his name is the name of a category. When the tellers assigned Paria Caca supremacy among the deified mountains, and attributed to him a fivefold essence manifested through five heroic anthropomorphic selves and their respective "children," each "child" being the ancestor-hero of a major branch of the dominant population, the tellers appear to have been recognizing and explaining a taxonomic likeness (perhaps of language as well as cultic practice) among disparate and politically separate, but mutually known and sometimes allied invading populations. (Of course in doing so, they may have been appropriating a Paria Caca cult older and more multiethnic than the This content downloaded from 128.138.65.181 on Tue, 2 Sep 2014 12:31:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Salomon: How the huacas were 15 manuscript allows; Guarnan Poma 1980 [1615]:113, 185, 264, 268, 269, 329, 335, 884, 915). These apical beings themselves, including Paria Caca once he "ascended" to expel older deities, existed in the form of completely hardened and durable geological matter? social practices "reified" in the strictest sense. Beings embodying medial and lower nodes of segmentation are imagined as former humans or humanlike, typically "hardened" by mummification and enshrinement, Tutay Quiri of the Checa being the most elaborated example, and ?an Sapa apparently another such. The historical origins of mallkis taken to embody the heads of medial taxa are unknown. But to allow for their relative exaltation thousands of other bodies must have received relative neglect. The passion for protecting important mummified "mothers" and "fathers" of corporate collectivities (which so fascinated the "extirpators of idolatry") was a part of political symbolic process, in which kurakas attributed to ancestors of leading (putatively senior) descent lines whatever prosperity the community achieved and voiced the community's needs to them. We know from extirpation inquiries into the funerals of Huarochiri lords who died in the era of the manuscript that the aggrandizement of political leaders to primacy among ancestors continued after Spanish conquest (Salomon 1995, Marzal 1988, Saignes 1998). The passage to durable being was accordingly distributed unequally though society in favor of persons through whom the interests of kinship corporations were effectively transmitted. And the landscape over which ancestor shrines, huacas, and deified land features were spread could be taken as an integrally naturalized map of social hierarchy, so that one lived enclosed by an all encompassing correspondence structure across ontological levels. The idiom of ancestor cult, as opposed to that of apical deities, did concretize taxa in focalized persons, but their names never stood for whole sets as do the highest names. Rather their ontological accent seems to fall on the category "relation." They were like milestones for measuring the spaces of relatedness. A milestone is a thing, but a thing whose significance is to express the relation between it and other points in space, and the relation called "mile" has no meaning except the space between such points. So major ancestors became not just markers of relation but were accented to relational concepts of genealogy and political affiliation. 6: Notwithstanding this schema, mythology centrally includes a trickster principle, which upsets and relativizes hierarchies of being One of the most interesting properties of the manuscript is that although it idealizes a priestly order, it also contains, as Fioravanti-Molini? (1987) has shown, a principle relativizing that order, namely the principle of the trickster-demiurge. His name in the Huarochiri source is Cuni Raya Vira Cocha. Half of his name?Cuni Raya?is, as Rostworowski (1989) ascertained, the name of a far-flung coastal deity associated with the transformation of landforms by water. In the desiccated Andean landscape, water signifies two things: longed-for fertility (via rain or irrigation) and dreaded danger (because rain often takes the form of devastating earthslides and flash floods). Thus the mythic persona of water tends to be a life-giving but tricky, uncontrollable, and dangerous one. In the Huarochiri manuscript, Cuni Raya's tricks generally take the form of seduction or sexual provocation by magical means, resulting in unwanted pregnancy (Ch. 2) or elopement (Ch. 31), that is, unpredictable and irregular unions that produce fertility but do so in ways that upset the normal social and productive arrangements?as water does when it gets out of control. The compiler, like many Europeans, was influenced by the misleading but already popularized equation between Vira Cocha and the God of contemporary Catholicism. Cuni Raya's ability to create whole landscapes by fiat?probably an allusion to the way water can transform land dramatically?led the compiler to think of Cuni Raya as a creator deity, like Dios, the Christians' God. He was therefore puzzled by his inability to verify from oral testimony that Cuni Raya had the expected divine attribute of priority to all other superhumans (Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 7, 189, ch. 15). Cuni Raya Vira Cocha is the exception to every rule about huacas. Although at one point he (like most huacas) is said to have lithified in a determinate place (Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 90), a transformation that usually marks the passage from humanlike action to permanence, he is present at all ages and places, popping up in primordial, mythic, legendary, and Inka times. The invasion of the Spaniards in chapter 14 is explained as yet another of his tricks. In all his interventions, he brings people to act by their This content downloaded from 128.138.65.181 on Tue, 2 Sep 2014 12:31:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 16 RES 33 SPRING 1998 normal desires and expectations, yet in such a way as to bring about disruptive and transformative results. Many of these actions include his "becoming/feigning" beguiling appearances of various kinds. On one level, one might guess that Cuni Raya personifies the paradoxes inherent in irrigation technology; the "normal" control of water brings into the landscape the very force that frequently breaks through and reshapes things catastrophically. On a more general level, one could think of him as the anW-huaca, the joker in the deck, who made it possible for the huaca outlook to include a deep appreciation of mutability and the unpredictable. Cuni Raya seems to occupy a category all by himself. In the terminology of Aristotelian ontology, the "thing" he points toward is a permanent "state of affairs." This vivid deity personifies the fragility of all structures and categories and focalizes paradox, even humor. The Andean person struggling to learn appealed to his evasive wit as to the source of amauta cay, which is sometimes glossed "wisdom" but strongly implies "discernment" (Gonc?lez Holgu?n 1952 [1608]:148). In Huarochiri, weavers appealed to the trickster-demiurge before trying to warp a complex design: "Help me work it out, Cuni Raya Vira Cocha" (Salomon and Urioste, eds. 1991:sec. 8). If the Huarochiri manuscript suggests a concept of wisdom, it is the deep appreciation of the attribute of being that Cuni Raya, stood for. To sum up: the Huarochiri manuscript's tellers seem to have been habituated not to analytically separated portions of reality?ontological categories like those outlined at the start of this essay?but to a web of socioritual connections with persons who each in their complexity embodied and familiarized the multiple attributes of "being." Reasoning about such problems as the relations between a set (for example, a corporate kin group), which "exists" in one sense, and those of persons, who "exist" in another, is not abstracted but expressed in the interaction of beings who accentuate different kinds of existence. Routine problems about entities such as taxa, events, and persons were then processed unselfconsciously through the idiom of huacas. What the West troublingly experienced as the fundamental incommensurability of experienced reality's parts?and the need for a metaphysical ground on which to place them together?found expression in these myths as disparity but also connectedness among clusters of meaning personified as superhuman beings but not limited to superhumanity in their manifestations. The coherence of cosmos was, then, asserted not by a unifying theory, but by social mediation on the part of its inhabitants. They were the ones who brought all sorts of beings into relationship. 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