Sacrifice and The Commodity Form in The Andes

Sacrifice and the Commodity Form in the Andes
Author(s): Peter Gose

Source: Man, New Series, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Jun., 1986), pp. 296-310
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
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SACRIFICE AND THE COMMODITY FORM
IN THE ANDES
PETER GOSE
For Andean culture, sacrifice is a necessary consequence of production, property and power,
and an important idiom of social cohesion. Any relationship of tribute involves sacrifice because
wealth is not alienable from the body, but a part of its vitality. The social model provided by
Andean sacrifice exists in a motivated opposition to commodity exchange. By denying alien-
ability, it negates a basic premiss of possessive individualism. Rather than individuate people
and mediate their association through things, sacrifice deindividuates through the annihilation of
the mediating object. In this precise inversion of the commodity form, Andean culture does not
resist capitalism, but expresses a profound historical experience of its dark side.
This article is about the use of sacrifice as an image of social cohesion and power
in Andean culture. Although sacrifice is no longer an official part of the tribute
owed by peasants to the state, as it was under the Inca empire, and despite the
incorporation of the Andean region into the periphery of world capitalism,
commodity exchange has not supplanted sacrifice as the dominant idiom of
social synthesis. On the contrary, capitalist penetration has actually exacerbated
the sacrificial logic of Andean culture, and that is what I intend to document and
explain here. Not only do Andean peasants view their own society through
sacrifice, but they extend it to the innermost workings of capital, and their
relation to it, by means of the nakaq (Que. 'slaughterer', 'sacrificer'), an image of
terror and power that constantly recreates itself in the Andean imagination.
The slaughterer is often portrayed as a bearded white man, wearing a white
poncho or tunic, riding a white mule and carrying a machete at his side. In other
accounts, he may be a mestizo who wears black leather clothing made from the
hide of his flayed human victims, and rides a black mule. Some accounts even
pose a team of two, where one is black and the other white, for the nakaq is a
creature of death and polarity. Often a known resident of the area in which he
works, the nakaq waits in ambush at strategically remote points on paths and
roads. When people move in groups of three or more, he is unlikely to attack,
but the lone traveller is almost certain to be assaulted. As potential victims
approach, his machete rings out: chiring . . . , chiring . . ., to indicate how
many are coming. The crudest of the slaughterers simply slash their victims'
throats with the machete, and drag them off to caves or mineshafts where, hung
upside down, they drip the fat of their bodies into receptacles. Others are more
subtle, and possess a powder ground from the dried foetuses of previous female
victims, which they blow from a distance towards the unwary traveller.
Stupefied by the impact of the powder, the victim turns in a trance towards the
Man (N.S.) 21, 296-3 IO
PETER GOSE 297
niakaq, and kneels down in front of him for the 'operation'. The niakaq removes
the fat from the victim's body with a machete, a long curved needle (yawri) used
for severing the spinal nerves of animals, or a special machine from the United
States. The wound heals instantly, and the victim comes to, feeling weak and
dizzy, remembering nothing, but able to continue the journey. Over the
following days, however, he or she will waste away and die.
The grease thus obtained is often cached by the niakaq at the site of extraction,
or under a bridge. It is held to be an extremely valuable commodity on the
national and international markets (Ortiz I973:I66) because it is essential for all
metallurgy, lubrication of machines and pharmaceutical medicines. Even that
vanguard of capitalist technological development, the US space programme,
has been identified as a consumer of human grease from Peru (Szeminski &
Ansion I982: 2I2). Later in this article, I shall investigate the various uses to
which Andean people think their grease is put. Since virtually every ethno-
grapher of the Andes, including myself, has been identified as a niakaq (see Vallee
& Palomino I973: II-I3), there is by now a literature on the topic that is too
large to be treated superficially. For the moment it is enough to establish that
Andean peasants continue to see their connexion to more global structures of
power in terms of sacrificial tribute.
It has, however, been easier to document this imaginary relationship than to
do it interpretive justice. Precisely because the niakaq can be assimilated into
western notions of imperialism, anthropologists have treated it as a metaphori-
cal representation of a supposedly more real economic exploitation by unequal
exchange. For example, the niakaq is presented as the cornerstone of an ideology
of resistance (Larouche I98I: 83, 87, 90), in which grease signifies the labour-
power of the Andean peasantry (Szeminski & Ansion I982: 2I2; Larouche I98I:
87), as it is appropriated by feudal landlords, sold to city merchants and sold
again to the imperialist heartlands (Szeminski & Ansion I982:2II-I2). Here, the
nakaq becomes a terse allegory of commercial exploitation that not only predates
dependency theory, but gives a more 'correct' class analysis of it (Szeminski &
Ansion I982: 2I2). Something crucial is lost in this substitution of the meta-
physics of political economy for those of sacrifice. Everything proceeds in these
analyses as if grease were alienable from the body in the same way that
labour-power is under capitalism, but the difference is that slaughtering is lethal,
not a repeatable transaction that keeps both parties intact. Indeed, it is difficult
not to accuse these authors of obscuring and sanitising the unmediated violence
of the slaughterer with their own commodity fetishism. Meanwhile, this
habitual economism denies that our construction of the world through ex-
change theory is also imaginary, and that an alternative model of sacrifice might
indeed tell us something about our own way of life.
Few have been more aware than Michael Taussig (I980) of the pernicious
effects of methodologically imposing commodity fetishism. It is therefore with
the greatest regret that I must question his interpretation of the sacrificial rites of
the Bolivian tin miners as 'gift-exhange' with the mountain spirits (Taussig
I980: I44, I57-8, 223-4). Transformed by the analytical intervention of 'the
gift', sacrifice comes to stand for peasant production in the same way that the
commodity relates to capitalism, in a confrontation of 'antithetical exchange
298 PETER GOSE
systems', comparable through their respective 'fetishes' (Taussig 1980: I I4, I i 8,

I92-3, 225-6). Certainly this persistent reduction of sacrifice to exchange has
venerable roots in anthropology (Hubert & Mauss I898: I00; Mauss I925:
I3-I5), but it largely neutralises the difference between Andean culture and
capitalism that Ijoin Taussig in wanting to emphasise. As an analytical category,
'the gift' is far too clearly inspired by the commodity, and tends to universalise
exchange as the only possible form of social synthesis, when this is an open
question at the very least.
On the one hand then, we have the Andean peasantry revelling in sacrifice,
and on the other, we have the anthropologists busy trying to clean up after them
with exchange theory. It would be both fruitless and presumptuous to judge
who, if anybody, is describing the true workings of reality. Instead, I would
prefer to look for a more complex interrelation than mere identity or difference
between these contending points of view. If exchange is the process by which
people individuate themselves and mediate their relationships through things,
then sacrifice could be seen as its counter-concept: the violation of a mediating
object to produce communitas, or an even more radical assault on individuality
in the sacrificial community's transcendental assimilation of one of its own
members (cf. Bataille I962: ch. 5). This article will pursue the idea that sacrifice
is a motivated negation of the possessive individualism of exchange, and use it to
explain how capitalist penetration has helped develop Andean sacrifice in its
modern form.
Andean sacrifice
What follows is a synopsis of my experience in the town of Huaquirca, Province
of Antabamba, Apurimac, Peru, and of the growing literature on Andean
sacrifice.
The sacrificial rites of Apurimac are known as t'inkas (Que. 'libations'), a
name that also applies to the sprinkling of alcohol on the ground or wafting of
its vapours towards the mountains, acts which precede all Andean drinking
sessions. At Carnival during February, and around Santiago on 25 July, every
household in the Antabamba region that owns horses, cattle or wool-bearers
(llamas, alpacas and sheep) will perform separate rites for each of these cat-
egories of livestock, with cattle receiving additional rites on San Marcos
(25 April). Animal fertility and wellbeing are the primary concerns of the t'inkas,
but their correspondence to the part of the year when the crops are consumable,
and labour-sharing across household boundaries is at its lowest ebb links them
significantly to the agricultural cycle, at least in predominantly agricultural
communities. The seasonal nature of these offerings is less marked among those
who specialise in herding, but when the term 'libation' is used to denote these
rites, it suggests a restitution of fluids spent by the mountain spirits during the
growing season, whose end is marked by Carnival (cf. Harris I982: 57). These
same mountain spirits, in addition to controlling rainfall, are thought to regulate
animal fertility, and it is for both these reasons that they receive burnt offerings
and sacrifices.
Andean mountain spirits go by a variety of regional titles (see Morote Best
PETER GOSE 299
I956: 289-go; Earls I969: 66), but are generally called apus in the Antabamba
Valley. Everywhere, they are said to be the owners of the territory under the
sway of the mountain that gives each its individual name. The apus may appear
as condors, falcons, pumas and other wild animals, but when they take human
form, it is stereotypically as large, blonde, blue-eyed men, dressed in the fancy
clothes and riding boots that would have been worn by a hacendado in the earlier
part of this century. Apu was the title of local and regional rulers in the
precolumbian Andes, and this sense of rule is maintained in the contemporary
mountain spirits' sovereignty over particular territories, and their appearance as
powerful white men. Many accounts have the apus constantly paying tribute to
each other in gold and silver, for which they use the wild vicufia as a pack
animal. In some areas, these tribute networks are held to culminate in Lima,
where they provide the Peruvian state with its revenue (Earls I969: 69-70).
According to the height of the mountains they are associated with, the apus form
hierarchies, sometimes represented as segmentary lineages, through which this
imaginary tribute flows. More commonly, however, these hierarchies are cast
in an administrative idiom, and closely parallel the various levels of local and
regional government (cf. Favre I967: I40; Earls I969: 70; Isbell I978: 59, i5i).
Apus may also be united by limited divisions of labour in which each takes
charge of a certain sort of livestock or crop, or carries out a certain social control
function, such as doctor, lawyer, judge, priest or policeman (Earls I969: 67).
The focus of sacrificial rites in the Andes is something known as a mesa. This is
a Spanish word that acquires two meanings due to the intermediate Quechua
rendering of the Spanish vowels e and i. As mesa (table), it refers to a rectangular
piece of cloth that is spread on the ground, from which a series of 'servings'
(platos) are prepared and offered to various groups of mountain spirits during the
course of the rite. As misa (mass), it marks the semi-sacrificial nature of this
consumption. The sense of mass is reinforced by the fact that the man of the
household sponsoring the rite, who constructs and burns the offerings, is given
the title of 'priest' (cura) for its duration. This is a position of extreme responsi-
bility, for should the 'priest' be incompetent, the mountain spirits, or the mesa
itself, could take their revenge on the ritualist, his family or animals. The
frequent use of 'altar' as a synonym for 'table' confirms the connexion between
the active and the objective aspects of these rites.
As these offerings are being constructed and burned, pairs of men and women
come to the table, where they are served a large cup of corn beer and a small one
of cane alcohol. From these, they sprinkle libations on the various offerings and
items of ritual paraphernalia present on the mesa, while invoking the vital force
of animals of other households, and attempting to fix it on the grazing territory
of the sponsors through the use of magical names. When the libations and
invocations have been duly completed, each member of the pair drains first the
cup of corn beer, then the cup of cane alcohol, and places both cups rim-
downward on a pile of coca leaves at the foot of the 'table'. If many leaves adhere
to the cups, this indicates the success of the invocation, and that there will be an
analogous adhesion of imported vital force to the sponsors' herds. This process
of libation and invocation is overseen by a figure known as the 'son-in-law'
(qatay), who seldom actually stands in this relationship to the sponsors, but is
300 PETER GOSE
simply a non-consanguineal 'outsider' thus categorised (cf. Quispe I969: I4;

Earls I970: IOI; Fonseca I974: 99; Isbell I978: I I4). Most people in attendance
will also be non-kin, and this affinal cast to their presence accords well with their
service of introducing vital force from without. The 'son-in-law' determines the
sequence of the rite by naming items of paraphernalia on the mesa to be libated,
and exercises a mock discipline over those who come to the 'table', constantly
threatening to whip them for the slightest breach of procedure. In this way, he
complements the sponsor's directive role as 'priest', and figuratively prevents
his handling of the offerings from becoming incestuous.
In the Antabamba Valley, these offerings form a rough hierarchy. At its
lowest level are 'servings' prepared in maize-husk 'plates', which are always
arranged in rows of three on the 'table'. Into these, the 'priest' may put coca
leaves, incense, kernels and special flour (llampu) of white and yellow maize,
chama'n leaves, red and white carnations, crabapples, peaches, llama chest fat,
and scrapings from a special bundle sometimes known as the potosf, after the
silver mines of Bolivia. This bundle takes its name from an antique coin,
preferably of colonial origin, but may include modern coins, various metallic
rocks, sea shells, and deer's hooves. These same objects, especially the rocks,
may be rubbed on the animals during the course of the rite. Shavings from these
items are rasped with a flint or steel knife into the husk 'plates'. The exact
mixture of contents is determined by a coca-leaf divination of the needs and
tastes of the mountain spirits by the 'priest', and the number of offerings will
depend both on the size of his herds and the importance of the group of
mountains being fed. When the offerings are complete, the husks are lashed
together (there may be as many as twelve, in four rows of three); they are burned
on a fire at the edge of the corral where the rite is being performed.
Next is the 'flower serving' (t'ikaplato), which consists of a row of three husks
with all of the above-mentioned contents except llama chest fat, and includes
any unusual wild flowers that might be available. In the words of one of my
informants:
The flower serving is given to the most important mountains; it's like serving a big meal,
something extra, to the authorities while the lower bundles are for the plebeians, that is, the
mountain spirits of less value. 'Town Council' is the name of the highest ranking mountain, and it
[i.e. the flower serving] is like serving a glass of champagne to the prefect.
Thus the hierarchy of offerings denotes rank among the mountain spirits.
The third offering is also served in a husk 'plate', and consists of three animal
figurines made from llama chest fat and flour of white and yellow maize
(llampu). Collectively, they are called 'vital force' (Que. kallpa), and it is this
aspect of the animals, especially their sexuality and fertility, that the figurines
embody. Like previous offerings, this one is also burned, but unlike them, may
sometimes be interred at a strategic location within the corral where the rite is
being performed.
The agricultural peasantry of the Antabamba Valley profess no ability to
make higher offerings than this, and thus do not follow their pastoralist
neighbours through to the culmination of these offerings in sacrifice. I now take
PETER GOSE 301
a closer look at the nature

in order to determine the kind of relationship that they establish between people
and mountain spirits.
The most commonly stated purpose of these offerings is to increase the herds
of the household that makes them. Since the maize-husk encloses diverse
elements that are sometimes related to different qualities in the animal, it could
be seen to facilitate the synthesis of new life, and even resemble a foetus. It is the
principle of transformation, however, that appears to be paramount: things are
broken down into elements and the choicest parts are selected and recombined
into new syntheses of animal, vegetable and mineral, before being burned for
their rarified ingestion by the mountain spirits. Thus the magical function of
herd increase seems to demand that things be destroyed and the apus satiated.
We have already seen the alimentary metaphor running through these
offerings in terms such as 'table', 'serving', and 'plate', and thus it is no surprise
that this whole process can be described as 'feeding' the mountain spirits. The
various hungers attributed to the mountain spirits derive from the particular
activities in which they engage, and thus to feed them is to restore what they
have come to lack - this has something of a sense of mink'a to it, the Andean
principle by which labour is compensated in food. For example, Andean culture
has long attributed to sea-shells the power to cause rainfall, and thus they have
long been served to mountains also thought to be important in this regard (see
Murra I975: 257-8), as they still are in the Antabamba Valley.
The notion of tribute comes to the fore in the most common name for burnt
offering in the Antabamba Valley, alcanzo, a term which appears to result from
an attempt to translate the Quechua hayway: 'to hand over' into Spanish as a
noun (cf. Urbano I976: I36). Those offerings that are made by interment are
widely called 'payments' (pagos) , further emphasising this idea. It is in these rites
that the tributary networks of the apus originate. The mountain spirits are
sometimes held to have machines inside their subterranean abodes, by means of
which they convert offerings into gold and silver (Earls I970: 70) that they then
pass up their hierarchy. Indeed, specially-prepared niches for interred offerings
are sometimes known as 'safes', and are covered by slabs known as the 'lock' and
'keys' (Quispe I969: 34-7).
As we move into the higher offerings, this sense of payment is increasingly
stressed, but it does not conflict with the concern for the creation of new life that
characterises the levels considered so far. This is particularly well-illustrated by
the use of money in these rites. At two of the rites I attended, all the non-kin
present contributed coins to the potosf of the sponsoring household. Similar
contributions of money are made to a couple on marriage in many parts of the
Andes (Carter I977: 200; Isbell I978: I2I). Money thus comes to be closely
assocated with affinity, and like the invocations of the non-kin, introduces
life-force from outside the household. The point about this money, however, is
that it must not be spent, and in the case of the antique coin, cannot circulate, but
rather uses its previous circulation history as a kind of magnet to attract life force
and other riches (cf. Oblitas Poblete I978: 244). Having become fixed to one
household, it no longer plays the role of the universal equivalent, and can only
re-enter circulation in the same way as any other element in these offerings,
302 PETER GOSE
through a sacrificial breakdown and recombination. This indissoluble fusion of

organic fertility and metallic wealth is fundamental in Andean sacrifice.
The seasonal nature of these offerings and their convertibility into means of
'payment' give an appearance of exchange to the t'inkas, but the power of the
apus makes them difficult to regulate as exchange partners. For example, the
apus (or agencies closely associated with them) may violently reclaim an animal
at any time of year, typically by lightning-strike. This calls for the immediate
performance of an additional t'inka. When this happened to the calf of an
informant of mine several years ago, he went to an oracle (pongo) and arranged a
seance in which they asked the various local apus who was responsible. One of
them owned up, saying that he had 'sold' the animal in question because my
informant's offerings had been inadequate. The idea that animals can be 'sold' by
killing them is an outgrowth of the notion that the coins and metallic stones of
the potost enter into their very makeup, and that in sacrifice, these elements can
then be 'cashed in'. Ever since, my informant's offerings have been made with
great care, and his cattle have increased notably. It seems that the apu was
effectively drawing him into a closer relationship by killing his calf. He now
'pays' more in his offerings, and his herds prosper accordingly, but this is the
result of an offer he could not refuse, not a freely contracted exchange.
This same principle of intensified interaction can be seen in the higher
offerings made exclusively by the pastoralists of the Antabamba region. Since
pastoralists live close to the peaks, they are in a much closer physical relation to
the apus, and have developed a correspondingly greater ritual competence to
make the higher level of payments necessary. In addition to the husk bundles
already mentioned, they regularly make interred offerings of the dried foetuses
of wool-bearing animals, or submerge them in lakes. In the words of one
informant: 'Foetus is the highest offering there is, it's like paying a doctor
in dollars'. The t'inkas of Carnival, however, usually feature an even more
efficacious offering. Pastoralists from the headwaters of the Antabamba and
Vilcabamba Rivers converge on a lake named Kuchillpo at the foot of the most
powerful mountain in the region, Supayco. T'inkas done here are especially
elaborate, and take a whole day to perform. Their culminating act is the sacrifice
of an alpaca by cutting through its ribs and extracting its still-palpitating heart.
This the 'priest' hands to the elegantly dr-essed 'son-in-law' who, mounted on a
horse, gallops off to deposit it in the lake.
Particularly successful herders are thought to owe their prosperity to an even
more effective offering, that of a daugher as a concubine to the local mountain
spirit (Favre I967: I3 3-4; Fuenzalida I980: I62). In some areas this notion is so
systematically developed that not only do women draw the spirits of particular
grazing territories into human kinship systems (the term apu can mean FFFF in
Quechua), but they give birth to further mountain spirits, and thus mediate their
descent hierarchies (Favre I967: I23; Earls I970: 9I). Here we may return to the
figure of the 'son-in-law' in the rite itself, who like the apu, is supposed to
orchestrate an influx of fertility to the herds, while the 'priest' makes burnt
offerings of the animals' vital force. There is a definite structural equivalence
between these offerings and the imaginary daughter offered to non-kin and apus:
both are counterbalancing payments for the desired animal fertility. Substi-
PETER GOSE 303
tution of a daughter for these offerings is a logical outgrowth of the symbolic

organisation of the t'inka. Thus the 'son-in-law' turns out to be none other than
the apu himself! A comparable merging of affines and mountain spirits has been
shown by Harris (i982: 65).
Certainly the relation between people and apus can be further intensified, but
this is dangerous. For example, if men have a chance meeting with an apu in
human form, or sleep in a cave or near the peak of a mountain, the apu is likely to
castrate them. Once a vicufia hunter is said to have shot the leader of a troupe
bearing precious metals for the supremely important apus Qoropuna and
Solimana. They were so enraged on discovering the dead animal that they
castrated the hunter from a distance. One account proposes that such testicles are
converted into miniature muleteers by the apus, in order to help them in their
payment of tribute (Morote Best i956: 295). Again, fertility is bound up with
the distribution of precious metal.
Substantial public works which change the face of the earth, such as terracing,
road, railway, tunnel, bridge and church construction are all said to require
human sacrifice because they 'derange' the mountain spirits (Favre I967: I 3I-2;
Vallee & Palomino I 973: 14; Velasco de Tord I978: I97; Ortiz 1980: 8 5). While I
do not agree that human sacrifice necessarily does take place when these works
are initiated, there is little doubt that any deaths taking place on thejob would be
interpreted as a 'payment' extracted by the apus for the reconstruction of their
generative surfaces.
Mining is the culminating violation of the most central manifestation of the
apu: the mountain itself. It represents a quantum leap beyond any other
productive activity in the intensity of relations between people and apus, and
constitutes a definite strain on both. For example, Utupara, the most important
apu near the town of Huaquirca, has been mined since at least the early colonial
period. People tell stories of Utupara in which he appears as a very old man with
long white hair and a beard, doubled over and limping on one leg that has been
crippled by mining. Continuous extraction of ore has made Utupara 'very
demanding' on the lives of his miners. He communicates his needs to the head
engineer of the mines, who is nothing less than apongo, or servant/medium who
can summon the presence of the apus, the highest accomplishment of Andean
ritual. On one occasion, Utupara is said to have presented himself to the head
engineer in a dream, demanding fifteen 'chivos' (goats, i.e. victims). Word got
out in the nearby town of Antabamba as fifteen miners happened to be arriving
from Huancavelica to start work in the mines. On hearing the news, they
boarded the next lorry out of town and never returned. The luxury of escape is
not afforded the head engineer, however. People would say that certain death
would result from his transfer to another mine, presumably because he has
undertaken an unbreakable agreement to serve the apu.
Very few local people have had anything to do with the mining of Utupara,
and see it as being fraught with danger. Even to enter abandoned mineshafts is
courting disaster, for they may lead to a lake at the mountain's core, that is often
equated with his testicles. Human presence here so infuriates the apu that he will
invisibly extract the heart and lungs of anyone who intrudes, causing them to die
spurting blood from the mouth and nose (hallp'asqa). By seizing these organs,
304 PETER GOSE
the mountain attempts to reconstitute the generative capacities of its own body,
although Utupara's withered leg suggests that permanent damage is possible. A
similar point emerges from a story of the rival apus, P'iste and Kuqchi. As the
mining of Kuqchi is becoming increasingly thorough, P'iste assumes responsi-
bility for it and gleefully yells: 'Hey Kuqchi, I'm getting close to your balls!'
Mute with rage, Kuqchi sends a burst of water through the mineshafts, killing
all the workers and destroying the entire operation. Here mining is tantamount
to castration of the apus, and would similarly seem to jeopardise their ability to
convert offerings into precious metals. Even in their negation, organic fertility
and the production of riches are inseparable.
A significantly different view emerges from the Bolivian tin mines. Studies
show that the miners sacrifice to promote regrowth of the ore (Nash I979: 226;
Platt I983: 49), as if it were like the animal and vegetable life addressed in
agrarian rites. Furthermore, sacrifices of white llamas during Carnival and on
i August are normally thought to be sufficient to prevent the mountain spirits
from taking human victims (Nash I979: I23, I34-5). To maintain sacrificial
substitutability while entering into the mountain, that embodiment of power
and totality, and to direct it through work, is a tremendous accomplishment in
Andean culture. Here is the grounding of class consciousness in Andean culture
that Nash (I979: 3) so rightly insists upon. Not only does the suspension of
offerings by management threaten the lives of the workers (Nash I979: i 56), but
it would also seem to stunt the sacrificially-induced growth of ore, and thus
demonstrate management's incompetent direction of the productive process.
The miners themselves have taken over the shamanistic duties elsewhere
entrusted to the head engineer, and although they lack the autonomy to
exchange with the mountain, they have managed to mediate their relationship
to it through the sacrifice of animals.
Only the experience of working in the mines, and confronting the combined
forces of capital and the mountain makes this sacrificial substitutability credible,
for in enclave areas such as the Antabamba Valley, mining appears as a kind of
sacrificial holocaust in which all mediations between worker and mountain
disappear, and each destroys the other. Of course it is historically true that
Andean peasant communities were forced to send men to the mines during the
colonial period, and that thousands of them died there. Platt (I983: 50-I)
describes modern ceremonies that recall the sendoff given to these men, and
treat them as sacrificial victims offered to the state so that the community might
retain control of its land. While the sacrificial cost of agrarian activity is now
considered to be much lower in most parts of the Andes, this dread of mining
remains.
To summarise, as human activity increasingly taxes and destroys the internal
and external generative surfaces of the mountains, so the offerings made to the
apus, or extracted by them, become more violent. Organs wrenched from the
body substitute themselves for sequences of ritually constructed offerings. As
offerings become more potent, the process of making them becomes simpler
and more violent, until finally ritual is eliminated altogether, as people involun-
tarily render their organs to the apus in fatal and unforseen attacks. The aesthetic
efficacy of these higher offerings is probably due to the synthesis and spon-
PETER GOSE 305
taneous activity of the organ, particularly in the case of the palpitating heart. To
substitute the last vestiges of autonomic nervous activity for consciousness is a
small price to pay. For in the extraction of the beating heart we approach
something like a concrete image of birth, in the particularly agonised form that
sacrifice imparts to the emergence of new life from old.
The slaughterer
It is in the nakaq, I would argue, that this trend towards involuntary assimilation
reaches its peak. Like an apu deranged by mining, the nakaq strikes randomly,
and accepts no sacrificial substitutability. His extraction of fat from human
bodies parallels the extraction of the metallic substance of the apus in mining,
and provides a necessary ingredient for its metallurgical transformation. This
grease, like the llama chest fat that is an ingredient in the husk offerings and vital
force figurines, must be combined with other elements to be effective. In
contrast to the organs seized by the apus, it does not have an internal differenti-
ation or impulse towards activity. So while the attacks of the nakaq are as violent
and unpredictable as those of the apus, they do not recognise the organisation of
the human body in the same way. Yet the niakaq is sometimes thought to castrate
(Stein I96I: x; Isbell I978: I64), suggesting a possible generative relation
between grease and testicles, and the familiar nexus of organic fertility and
metallic wealth. According to Bastien (I978: 45-6), fat represents the 'energy
principle' that consists of both vital force and political power, and complements
blood, the 'life principle' which would here seem to relate to the heart and
embodiment. When victims of the nakaq waste away and die, they confirm that
fat is indeed the repository of vital force in the body. I will argue that the various
uses of fat that we are now about to examine all derive from its vitalising
powers, but must supply the life forms that are to be vitalised. Tribute in fat
marks political power because of the way it allows rulers to direct the life-force
of the ruled.
The medical uses of fat are probably the oldest and most persistent part of the
nakaq complex and stress the organic nature of the tributary relationship. The
earliest evidence of something like the modern slaughterer demon comes from
the first millenarian uprising against the Spanish, called the Taki Onqoy
('Singing Sickness'), that took place in the years I564-7I:
[it is] believed by the Indians that from Spain they had sent to this kingdom for Indian grease to
cure a certain illness for which no medicine can be found except said grease, for which reason in
those times the Indians went very timidly, and kept apart from the Spaniards to such a degree that
firewood, herbs, and other things they did not want to bring to the house of the Spaniard, for
saying that there inside they would kill them to take the grease (Molina 1574: 97).
A premiss of the movement was that the smallpox epidemics that swept the
Andes at the time were the revenge of regional deities (including the apus) for
their ritual neglect by the native population, and similar notions seemed to have
informed the subsequent Muru Onqoy (i589) and Yanahuara (i596) move-
ments (see Curatola I978: I 83; Espinoza I973: I46). Thus it was not merely at an
economic level that the Andean peasantry was torn between two groups of
3o6 PETER GOSE
rulers, for each was felt to impose its need for tribute on their very bodies.
Similarly, the Spanish will to power was manifested as disease, a bodily lack that
only the grease of a subjected and sacrificed Andean populace could satisfy.
The idea that the niakaq brings pestilence still exists in the contemporary Andes
(Mostajo I952: I75), even if residually when compared to the Taki Onqoy.
Some accounts mention fissures in the hand that holds the machete (Morote Best
I95I: 75), suggesting that skin disease may remain an immediate motivation for
slaughtering. I was told that in the Antabamba area, there was recently a mestizo
who was getting old and blind, and took to slaughtering to stay alive. People
called him a condenado ('condemned one') to his face, indicating that incest or
some other serious moral corruption lay at the root of his degeneration, but he
nonetheless continued to slaughter people for many years, until not even this
could sustain him. When approached on paths, he would appear above the
maguey plants and hold up one hand, palm towards the face, dropping his
fingers one by one to the ground, where they would writhe like worms, so
transfixing the victim for the 'operation'. This abhorrent display of decompo-
sition allowed the niakaq to appropriate the vitality of his victims. A mestizo
truck driver in Antabamba told me that he had once given a ride to a Japanese
medical student, who began to make discrete inquiries about whether he might
obtain human grease in the area. Many of the accounts collected by Morote Best
(I95I) and Manya (I969) portray the conversion of grease into marketable
medicines as a brisk business in the pharmacies of Cuzco. Other accounts have
the central Peruvian Andes supplying Lima with human grease in order to cure
mange (Quijada Jara I958: I03). The culmination of this vision comes in an
account from Andahuaylas, where major chemical companies in the United
States and Germany foment slaughtering in the Andes in order to obtain the
effective ingredient for their pills, which may then be sold back to Peru (Ortiz
I973: I66). Modern accounts continue to stress that Indian fat is superior to that
of mestizos (Manya I969: I36; Ortiz I973: I67), and it is probably for this reason
that the latter, along with white and black people, are most prone to become
niakaqs. The lack of those who rule is manifested in images of disease and decay,
which only a steady flow of grease from the Andes can forestall. Politics consists
of the transcendental assimilation of the ruled by rulers, and is correspondingly
violent.
If grease is an essential form of sacrificial tribute, then it is not surprising that
the Church should be a major focus for the elaboration of niakaq imagery. An
account given by Casaverde (I970: i8o) depicts the Convent of Santo Domingo
in Cuzco, once the Inca Temple of the Sun, as a clearing house for the traffic in
grease, from which licenses are also issued to niakaqs to prevent an indiscriminate
slaughter of the flock. This relates to the idea that both colonial and republican
states have issued licenses to slaughterers that make them immune to pro-
secution (Quijada Jara I958: I00, I02; Manya I969: I36; Skar I982: 242;
Szeminski & Ansion I982: 2I i), and puts the power of the Church at the same
level as that of the state, as indeed it was throughout most of the colonial period.
Morote Best (I95I: 78) shows how the Bethlehemite order were suspected of
being nakaqs for performing autopsies and operations in their rural hospitals.
This is a particularly sensitive area since the colonial Church's 'extirpation of
PETER GOSE 307
idolatry' campaign was primarily directed against the 'cult of the dead'. By
interfering with death ritual, the Church was effectively breaking a cyclical flow
of vital force between the worlds of the living and the dead, and starving the apus
who mediate that flow (see Gose I984). Autopsy is still considered to be
slaughtering even though the victim is already dead (Valderrama & Escalante
I980: 263). In some areas, slaughterers are thought to live in graveyards where
they extract grease from cadavers, and follow their souls around the com-
munity, seeking to victimise living mourners. Their presence is indicated by the
smell of a skunk (Oblitas Poblete I978: I23), an animal that is associated with
buried treasures (tapados) in the Antabamba area, and in turn, nakaqs can smell
grease from great distances (Vallee & Palomino I973: I3). The ritual collections
of money mentioned earlier are said to have a similar smell called waspi (Isbell
I978: I2I), which may indicate a consolidation of precious metal from rotting
flesh. In Arco, a neighbourhood of Ayacucho, there is an image of the Ninio
Nakaq, or Christ-Child Slaughterer, whose image is given a procession on All
Souls' Eve, and is taken to preside over children dying of disease in their homes
(Morote Best I95I: 79). The Christian appropriation of the energy released on
death could hardly be more directly expressed.
Thus, the clergy become an army of slaughterers, and the Church requires
grease for the holy lamps (Mostajo I952: I75), to polish the faces of the saintly
images (Morote Best I95I: 79), etc. As niakaq, the priest still wears the white or
black tunic of his station, (Manya I969: I36; Oblitas Poblete I978: I23), and may
use a little bell and a call to prayer to mesmerise his victims for the 'operation'. In
the Departments of Apurimac and Ayacucho, priests are not so commonly
thought to be niakaqs as in Cuzco, yet it is widely held that grease is used for
casting church bells, to which it imparts a particularly rich sound, and extra-
ordinary durability (Skar I982: 242; Szeminski & Ansion I982: 2I0).
Ringing metal is indeed an important part of the poetics of the nakaq. In some
accounts, church bells mysteriously ring as the nakaq leaves town on business
(Szeminski & Ansion I982: 2I0). We have already seen how the ringing of his
machete indicates the number of potential victims approaching, and how the
little bell stupefies people for the extraction of their grease. Like the nakaq's
writhing disconnected fingers, the sharp dry voice of his machete articulates a
bodily lack which is partially satisfied in its use to obtain grease for further
metallurgy. Enchanted metallic ringing becomes both the means and the ends of
these attacks, and if grease changes hands as a commodity between the harsh
clang of the machete and the sonorous tolling of the church bell, then the jingle
of money only smooths the transition. This implicitjuxtaposition of disease and
ringing metal may seem strange until we recall that metal is mined from the
mountains, and is virtually the flesh of the apus. Thus the extraction of grease
from human bodies follows the extraction of metal from the mountains, and
facilitates its transformation.
While grease is also mentioned in the casting of streetlamps and objects of
copper in general (Morote Best I95I: 72), it is as a lubricant that it interacts most
extensively with metal. In Huaquirca, the Utupara mining machinery and the
Electroperu generating station were identified as important local consumers of
human grease. Mills, mines and railways are the most commonly identified
308 PETER GOSE
sources of demand throughout the Andes. In Huaquirca, as elsewhere, it is

thought that the niakaq may now have a special machine that he places on the
back of his victim's neck to pump out grease from the spinal column (see also
Manya I969: I36; Szeminski & Ansion I982: 2I2). The machines that need
grease for lubrication also become a means of extracting it. Thus the smelter at
La Oroya has been identified as a place where people, in addition to ore, are
rendered down. Entrances to mineshafts are commonly mentioned as places of
ambush by the niakaq (Morote Best I95I: 70; Manya I969: I35), who apparently
transports grease within the mine (Vallee & Palomino I973: I3), and there are
even reports of fuelling the lamps of colonial mines in Colombia with human
grease (Bray I978: 25). This re-emphasises the interconnected fates of people
and apus, the organic and the metallic.
In summary, mining is a doubly dangerous activity for human beings. On the
one hand, it induces voraciousness in the apus, who seize human organs to
reconstitute their metallic flesh. On the other hand, the metal that is appropri-
ated through mining requires further human sacrifice in order to obtain the
grease that is used to transform it into bells, machinery, etc., and maintain it
through lubrication or anointment. Both of these dangers result from the
indissoluble connexion between precious metals and the vitality of the body in
Andean culture. The niakaq might be seen as an enemy of the apus, since he
consolidates in an alien form the substance wrested from them. Such impover-
ishment is not suffered lightly by the apus. The immensely powerful Apu
Ausangate of Cuzco is said to devour aeroplanes that fly directly overhead
(Valderrama & Escalante I975: I77), planes that are sometimes thought to
transport grease abroad (Larouche I98I: 84). I was once told that one ofthe 'wild
lakes' (bearing the turbulent water found at the core of the mountains) in the
Antabamba area has engulfed several mineral prospecting helicopters. While the
mines continue to be the nodal point in the competition between the order of
machines and the order of mountains over a common reserve of metal and
sacrificial victims, the scenes just described suggest that the apus are not entirely
on the defensive.
From evidence already considered, there is equally good reason to deny any
radical difference between the apus and the powers served by the niakaq. If the
apus represented a wholly different power structure, they would not appear as
blonde-haired, blue-eyed hacendados with mechanised workshops inside their
mountains to convert offerings into precious metals, nor would they pay tribute
to Lima, which would not in turn officially protect the vicufias that deliver this
tribute (Earls I969: 69-70). Mining can arise from the rivalries that exist at
various levels of the segmentary structure of the hierarchy of apus, as the story of
Kuqchi's near-castration by P'iste suggests. There is a sense in which the apus
have always been slaughterers themselves, and this is recognised in alternative
myths that admit the existence of precolumbian niakaqs (Manya I969: I35-6;
Szeminski & Ansion I982:2I0). According to the AnonymousJesuit (I594: I66)
the precolumbian niakaq was a functionary who carried out sacrifices and entrail
divinations for the community and was subordinate to the high priest. 'Walk on,
walk on without turning back, I'm with my boss' is the warning a modern niakaq
serves to an acquaintance he meets on a road (Manya I969: I37). In his service of
PETER GOSE 309
the powers of transformed metal, the nakaq resembles nothing so much as the
oracle-servant (pongo) of an apu.
Conclusion
Thus the machine world served by the niakaq has a place in Andean culture
already well-prepared by the apus. The niakaq is no more a representation of the
evils of capitalism than are the apus, but like them makes the amoral assertion
that production, power and riches demand organic tribute, the transcendental
assimilation of the ruled. I would suggest that the niakaq articulates an erotico-
religious desire for transcendence in the face of power more than an economic
analysis of it, or an ideology of political resistance to it. Why else would the fact
that capital has so little interest in directly exploiting the Andean peasantry only
heighten its imaginary need for their grease?
The existence of sacrificial tribute as a model of social synthesis in the
contemporary Andes cannot, however, be read as a simple throwback to
pre-columbian times, no matter how obviously its roots may lie there. For what
is truly remarkable about the nakaq and the apus is how comprehensively they
explore a 45o-year experience of non-Andean society and its inner workings.
This sacrificial history would not have occurred, or even have been possible, if it
did not in some way address the reality of capitalism. In this article I have argued
that Andean sacrifice denies the possessive individualist framework of com-
modity exchange by asserting the inalienability of precious metals from the
body, and that to appropriate one is therefore to appropriate the other. The
result is an apparent lack of mediation in social relations, whereby their
intensification implies the transcendental annihilation of the individuals in-
volved. This is virtually a precise negation of commodity fetishism, whose
endless reified mediations enshrine individuality at the expense of transcend-
ence. Both sacrifice and commodity fetishism represent the severed halves of a
dialectic in which individuality might be established without becoming rigid,
and transcended without eliminating the body, its lived-in point of departure.
Thus we have to admit that sacrifice will always be present where there is
commodity fetishism, even if its expression is displaced to peripheral areas such
as the Andes, and recognise, therefore, our own participation in these more
baroque moments of Andean culture.
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Sacrifice and The Commodity Form in The Andes

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Sacrifice and the Commodity Form in the Andes

Author(s): Peter Gose

systems', comparable through their respective 'fetishes' (Taussig 1980: I I4, I i 8,

simply a non-consanguineal 'outsider' thus categorised (cf. Quispe I969: I4;

a closer look at the nature

through a sacrificial breakdown and recombination. This indissoluble fusion of

tution of a daughter for these offerings is a logical outgrowth of the symbolic

sources of demand throughout the Andes. In Huaquirca, as elsewhere, it is

Earls, J. I969. The organization of

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