The Andean Ayllu and the Weaving of Borders
A painting representing the relational and interdependent bonds between community and Nature that animate the Andean ayllu. Extractive mining projects can be seen in the background. Uncredited artist. Originally published by Instituto Cultural Pachayachachiq. 8 September 2023.
The construction of borders and the production of literature share a crossroads in the development of national identity, space, and customs. For better or worse, nations and their literatures are bordered spaces. Yet history lays bare that political and literary revolution hinges on pushing established boundaries to their limits. In the Latin American context, Angel Rama’s popular notion of the lettered city presents how institutions of centralized sociopolitical power enforce dominant hierarchical models, structures, and values that subjugate Indigenous peoples and their communal autonomy. Evident across the Americas is the reality that the lettered language of the law acts as a political tool to center imperial power and impose new territorial configurations over rural regions. Stripped of their agricultural and communal lands, Indigenous communities struggled to defend their territories against the implementation of state policies and extractive projects.
Themes of Indigenous deterritorialization and displacement are predominant in novels of Peruvian literary indigenismo (1910-1970), such as Yawar fiesta (1941) by José María Arguedas and Redoble por Rancas (1970) by Manuel Scorza. These canonical novels focalize the sociopolitical consequences of rapid rural modernization brought about through “legal” deterritorialization and land grabs by state and/or private interests. From a broad sociopolitical perspective, these novels reveal how political urban discourses of ethnic and cultural assimilation, or mestizaje, rupture the boundaries of Indigenous self-determination and territorial autonomy. Moreover, they reflect rural communal strategies to reclaim sociopolitical autonomy, often through mobilizing local epistemologies and practices related to place-making in the Andes.
As I consider here, the Andean notion of community, or ayllu, acts as a form of border thinking grounded in relational and reciprocal interactions between the land, its resources, and its inhabitants. I think with rather than about Andean epistemological categories not merely as a means of critiquing dominant political structures, but to propose models of engaging our increasingly globalized world from within Andean thinking. Thinking through ayllu, I consider how Andean notions of place-making and communal formation challenge dominant political ideologies that regard the border as a legal space to instead propose border policies wherein Nature is an embodied social agent. Moreover, I demonstrate how ayllu informs both a sense of sociopolitical space as well as constituting individual and collective identity. It is my contention that ayllu can be mobilized as a counterhegemonic response against the territorial ambitions of centralized political and industrial power through relational and reciprocal social practices engaged with the natural world to offer meaningful alternatives to dominant political ideologies of border thinking.
Ayllu is an Andean Quechua term meaning “community” or “family” often defined in anthropological terms as an autonomous Indigenous political, economic, and social structure bonded by kinship ties located in communally owned territory (Allen; Preiswerk; Grillo Fernandez; Murra; Condarco Morales). Defined from modern place-based attention to established geographic and legal edges, ayllu is a bordered space from which community members enter and exit despite these boundaries not being easily visible nor defined. Absent from such common Western academic considerations of ayllu, however, is the vital role of Nature, the landscape, and its resources in the generation and sustainment of ayllu. In her seminal study Earth Beings (2015), which centers on the bonds between ayllu and contemporary regional political action, Peruvian anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena positions ayllu as “a socionatural collective of humans, other-than-human beings, animals, and plants inherently connected to each other in such a way that nobody within it escapes that relation” (44). This inescapability presents challenges to dominant constructions and enforcements of contemporary regional borders and communal autonomy.
Andean educator Justo Oxa situates the vital role of the interdependence, or inescapability of ayllu, saying that “ayllu is like a weaving, and all the beings in the world—people, animals, mountains, plants, etc.—are like the threads, we are part of the design. The beings in this world are not alone, just as a thread by itself is not a weaving, and weavings are with threads, a runa is always in-ayllu with other beings—that is ayllu” (ibid). Within collective and relational thinking, ayllu exceeds the notion of a legal spatial border to refer to a broad network of reciprocal and relational bonds beyond the bounds of the human (or runa in Quechua, runakuna as the plural) to understand the presence, participation, and personhood of other-than-human beings and elements (spirited deities of social influence known as tirakuna). Oxa stresses the notion that runakuna are always “in-ayllu,” when understood as a series of interdependent and animating relationships rather than a mere structured spatial orientation.
Oxa emphasizes the primacy of relationality over spatiality in the construction of communal borders when describing how “[t]he community, the ayllu, is not only a territory where a group of people live; it is more than that. It is a dynamic space where the whole community of beings that exist in the world lives…It is important to remember that this place is not where we are from, it is who we are. For example, I am not from Huantara. I am Huantara” (Oxa 239). A constituting element of place as well as the self, ayllu is inseparable from notions of individual as well as collective identity among human and other-than-human elements. Quechua personero (a figure of ayllu political authority capable of communicating with tirakuna) Mariano Turpo reflects a similar notion when arguing that in modern representational politics, one never speaks for but rather from ayllu (de la Cadena, Earth Beings 43). Thus, such inescapability refers to Andean relational modes of experience where to move beyond ayllu would be to deny individual as well as collective being. This intimate relationality creates a dynamic social structure that inverts Western notions of community by displacing the centrality of the social body to include Nature and her resources within the collective sense of self. Such a view offers a radically divergent conceptualization of how societies manage their territories and resources within local, regional, and national economic structures.
While ayllu offers an alternative concept of collective and individual citizenship in terms of individual communities, it equally extends to neighboring ayllus. For example, resource management between neighboring ayllus takes place through practices of reciprocity, or ayni. Through ayni, neighboring ayllus engage in processes of mutual aid through resource sharing which can extend to the overlapping of borders in the sharing of fertile fields (chacra) and pasture lands (puna). In this sense, ayllu borders are open to processes of transformation to meet the needs of local communities, resources, as well as deities. Beyond the sharing of resources, neighboring ayllus come together in the exchange of non-material energies through ritual acts, such as ritual competition (atipanakuy) which seek to appeal to and/or appease tirakuna. Ritual performances in ayllu are, in fact, practices of dialogue between runakuna and tirakuna to receive permission to access pasture or agricultural lands, as well as to ensure the abundance of harvests, prevent the proliferation of illness, among other considerations. That is, ritual becomes a form of political discourse that negotiates the interwoven boundaries of ayllu.
As Quechua and Aymara thinkers such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Simon Yampara Huarachi, and Mariano Turpo offer, modern political structures and the introduction of private property and extractive capitalist industries throughout the twentieth century fragmented the interdependent and relational bonds sustaining the woven design of Andean territorial organizations (Rivera Cusicanqui; Yampara Huarachi; de la Cadena, “About ‘Mariano’s Archive’: Ecologies of Stories”). A common theme in literary indigenismo, the privatization of chacras and punas prevented the exchange of material and non-material resources, leading to local movements of resistance that aim toward the restructuring of ayllu relationality and communal autonomy. In other words, the imposition of static legal borders has had devastating consequences for modern ayllus.
Constructed and maintained under the lettered language of the law, modern political borders evidence a form of internal colonialism where ayllu autonomy has given way to “the biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora and fauna within the ‘domestic’ borders of the imperial nation” (Tuck and Yang 4). In this way, centralized urban institutions of public and private power convert Nature from a communicative agented being into exploitable property wherein human relationships to land and her elements are no longer social nor dialogic. Rather, they become restricted to the hierarchical relationships between capital and labor.
Despite the fragmentation of the modern ayllu, it remains a foundational principle of collective Andean thought which weaves beyond geographic, legal, and humanistic borders to compose a form of contemporary revolutionary sociopolitical discourse in the Andes. As Andean activist Hugo Blanco considers, contemporary movements toward the reclaiming of ayllu and territorial autonomy set a framework for the emergence of revolutionary political discourse and action (Blanco). Andean land-body relations challenge the construction of national and regional borders given that in Andean epistemological and political thought “living, non-living, and often times supernatural beings are not seen as constituting distinct and separate domains” (Escobar 151). The consolidation of the living and non-living, human and other-than-human within a collectivity of social, cultural, and political agency creates a relationship to place that cannot be defined in purely legal nor political terms.
The generation of ayllu and the establishment of its borders reject the political and economic demotion of Nature and her resources to exploitable private property. In thinking with and through ayllu, the notion of border is not defined nor articulated according to rigid modern sociopolitical structures. Rather, ayllu relationality elevates Nature to a position of sociopolitical agency that weaves individual and communal identities together around the sharing of vital resources and access to spirited geological formations, tirakuna. In moving beyond the borders of the human, practices of place-making in the Andes offer alternative conceptions of dominant border thinking where it ceases to be a static legal boundary to refer to a sense of community grounded in the multifaceted collective interests and experiences of all beings within a particular space.
In the contemporary context, ayllu has shifted from a conception of community and identity to a counterhegemonic political discourse against state and private power. In this way, ayllu is reminiscent of government policies of sumaq kawsay, or “buen vivir,” in Bolivia and Ecuador that prioritize harmonic relationships between Nature and Culture within the lettered language of the law. The political potential of ayllu, then, rests in the recovery of ayllu relationality toward the restoration of communal autonomy strengthened by intercommunal dialogue and action that reclaim local agency and ownership over territory and its resources. Such political action pushes dominant conceptions of borders beyond their limits and into alternative practices of thinking and being.
About the Author
Stephen D. McNabb is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University. His dissertation project, "Writing the Runa: Indigenous Narrative Practice in Twentieth Century Andean Literature" examines how Andean and Amazonian epistemologies and cultural practices offer counter-hegemonic textual and literary strategies that invert archetypal representations of "el indio" from a sculpted object of study to an active subject in their own lettered expressions. Alongside Dr. Jorge Coronado, Stephen recently published the anthology "Anarquismos y marxismos en Bolivia, Ecuador, y Peru" (2023, Ediciones Achawata) that considers the cultural and political crossroads regarding Indigenous autonomy in Andean nations throughout the twentieth century. His work has additionally been published in "Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana" (Vol. XLVIII, No. 96, 2023) and "Periphērica" (Vol. 1, No. 2, 2020).
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