Meanings and Materialities
Meanings and Materialities
Exhibition 6–15 June
Open every day 12:00-18:00Daniel Spotswood
Mountains in the Peruvian Andes are regarded by many Quechua-speaking people to be incredibly powerful persons called Apus (“Lords”). Substances such as coca leaves and alcohol are often given to the mountains in the hope that the mountains will give something beneficial in return. Relying on the Quechua concept of ayni, which is often translated as “reciprocity,” ethnographers have observed that human-mountain relations in the Andesfollow the same logic of exchange that governs relations between humans. While this idea extends the Maussian framework of reciprocity by including exchange with non-humans, this paper problematizes the distinction between humans and non-humans altogether and questions if “exchange” is the most fitting category for the Andean context. In the Andes, the distinction between humans and mountains is not always so clear since mountains can take on human form and humans can assume the position of a mountain through the sharing of a “vitalising energy” called animu.
Instead of a clear separation between human and mountain, this paper proposes that the relation is better understood in terms of a particular type of “fractal personhood” (Wagner 1991) in which humans are “hierarchically encompassed” (Dumont 1980) by mountains. Given this non-duality, exchange is not the most fitting category to describe human-mountain relations because there are no clearly distinct and separate entities to carry out the exchange. Rather, within this monistic and hierarchical arrangement, “transfer” is a more fitting descriptor than “exchange,” and the paper discusseseveryday efforts to transfer animu to different positions in the hierarchy.
Dr. Daniel Spotswood completed a PhD and MSc in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. My research focuses on a religious pilgrimage to a glacier in the Peruvian Andes and recent transformations which have occurred in the ritual practices of the pilgrimage in response to climate change. I recently moved to Finland where I am beginning new research on human-environment relations in the Subarctic with a particular interest in human interactions with sea ice.