Healthy Meat and Natural Animals: Hygiene, Discipline and Veterinary Science in
Bolivian Llama Herds.
Maggie Bolton
University of Manchester
(DRAFT: Please do not quote)
Introduction
This paper is about llama meat in present-day Bolivia and about efforts aimed
towards its commercialisation. Llamas are native Andean animals, believed to have been
domesticated about six thousand years ago (Wheeler, Dransart), and are raised in the
most inhospitable rural highland areas by members of Andean communities who until
recently relied on them as general purpose animals for fleece, meat and the transport of
goods. Unlike their close relatives, alpacas, they have never really attracted the attention
of wealthy livestock entrepreneurs as their fibre was considered too coarse for
commercialisation.1 Their place in Andean religion was recognised by the extirpators of
idolatries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who forbade their slaughter by other
means than slitting the throat in an effort to stamp out native religious practices (Guaman
Poma de Ayala [1615] 1993: 725) and they continue to be of religious importance to
Andean people, for whom they are the quintessential animal of sacrifice. For urban
Bolivians, llamas are animals associated with the Indian sectors of the population.
Racism towards Indians has led to llama meat being regarded as ‘cheap poor man’s
food’, or ‘Indian food more suitable for dogs than humans’ (Healy 2001: 192), and until
very recently this prejudice was reinforced by urban municipal governments which
banned its sale altogether in urban markets.
Recent initiatives resulting from government policy towards rural areas and the
activities of externally-funded NGOs aim to promote llama-rearing as a profitable
enterprise (Ministerio de Asuntos campesinos… 2003). Such initiatives are directed
towards poverty alleviation in the highland regions, but also aim to transform herders
1
This is because llama fleece contains thick guard hairs which have to be removed painstakingly if a fine
quality spun fibre is to result. However, there are different physical types of animal, and the woolly llamas
that predominate in Sud Lípez, where the research for this paper was undertaken, are now held to have
fleece of similar quality (mainly assessed through measurement of fibre diameter) to that of alpacas
(Rodriquez 2004).
1
from subsistence pastoralists to self-supporting entrepreneurial citizens responsible for
their own maintenance operating within a neoliberal framework. One way in which
herding is to become profitable is through the commercialisation of llama meat, the
healthy properties of which are promoted through publicity campaigns. However, for its
successful commercialisation on the home market, urban concerns about the hygiene and
safety of such meat have to be addressed and for entry into foreign markets (as
anticipated by NGOs), international norms for hygiene and the control of animal disease
must be met. A considerable amount of the educative effort from NGO technicians
directed at llama herders concerns the promotion of regimes of hygiene and animal
health-care in the countryside. In such regimes there coincide both a neoliberal concern to
inculcate norms of comportment and self-discipline in citizens, and a concern more
specific to the urban sectors of Andean countries for control over the rural Indian
population.
In this paper I explore how hygiene and veterinary science become sites of
hegemonic struggle between rural herders and dominant sectors in Bolivia. Here, my
understanding of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is in line with those proposed by both
Norman Fairclough (1992) and William Roseberry (1994).2 Neither has been content to
view hegemony as simply a matter of ideological consent, and see it rather as a process
characterised by struggle between dominant and subaltern groups. As Fairclough writes,
“Hegemony is a focus of constant struggle around points of greatest instability between
classes and blocs, to construct or sustain or fracture alliances and relations of
domination/subordination, which takes economic, political and ideological forms” (Ibid
92). Neither dominant nor subordinate groups need be thought of as unified and
hegemony is never achieved more than partially as an unstable equilibrium. What is at
stake in the case of llama meat is not a simple struggle between global science and
indigenous knowledge – herders welcome some aspects of science, and NGO
veterinarians and agronomists would like to explore further some aspects of indigenous
knowledge – but a struggle for a common discursive and material framework for talking
about and managing animals. For the Andean people whose close links with their
2
Although Fairclough (1992) writes about hegemony primarily with a view to understanding the relation
between discourse and social change in Britain, and Roseberry (1994) is concerned with understanding
state formation in Mexico, their understandings of Gramsci coincide in all important respects.
2
animals are at stake, this becomes also a struggle over a way of life and over relations
with powerful entities. Veterinary medicine becomes a cornerstone of this struggle when
herders express scepticism of the benefits of animal vaccination or accuse veterinary
medicines of harming their animals.
From the perspective of many herders, veterinary medicines are simply
inappropriate for llamas owing to the ontological status of the animals themselves.
Discourses about them also appear to articulate concerns about the changing relations
between herders and animals that commercialisation demands In Tim Ingold’s
terminology, it implies making herders into ranchers, encouraging them to move from a
subsistence economy in which protection is extended to herd animals to a predatory
relation with the animals and an economy of monetary accumulation (Ingold 1980: 4).
Andean pastoralists appear to have reservations about making such a move. I argue that
lipeño discourses about the dangers and harm that can come from veterinary medicine
articulate the same sorts of anxieties about modernity, changing relations of production
and failure to observe collective norms that anthropologists working elsewhere in the
Andes attribute to stories of lik’ichiris or kharisiris.3 Lik’ichiris are men, usually white or
mestizo,4 who exist in a predatory relationship with other human beings in that they rob
and sell fat from the bodies of Indians. Whereas in the past the stolen fat was held to be
used by Spanish colonisers to treat wounds or to grease the moulds of church
bellfounders (Rivière 1991: 27), nowadays it is held to have a variety of uses, from oiling
the industrial machinery of capitalism to the US space programme. Tellingly, one such
use is the manufacture of medical pharmaceuticals (Salazár 1991, Gose 1986).
I explore the topic from a variety of perspectives. My first focus is ethnographic,
concerning the non-commercial slaughter of animals in the countryside and relations
between herders and their animals. Following on from this, I focus on the urban classes
of Bolivia and their concerns about the hygiene of llama meat, Indians and Andean
culture. Hygiene also features in a political discussion of neoliberalism, governmentality
and NGOs but here takes on a Foucaultian aspect, as a technique of the self. In the latter
3
Also known in Peru as ñakaq or pishtaco. See Gose (1986), Canessa (2000), Salazár (1991), Riviére
(1991), Weismantel (2001). For the sake of simplicity, throughout this paper I shall use the term lik’ichiri,
since this is most common in the south of Bolivia.
4
The term mestizo combines the idea of racial mixture with that of assimilation to the dominant national
culture.
3
part of the paper I return to the ethnography in discussing herder reactions to veterinary
interventions and explore the connection with stories of lik’ichiris. While using a multiperspectival approach may sacrifice theoretical uniformity in this paper, but it aids the
illustration of what is at stake in a hegemonic struggle over animals and their relations
with humans and for a common discursive and material framework through which to talk
about them and live through. More generally, it is also a struggle over the way of life of
an Andean people in which science plays a pivotal role.
Making meat from clean llamas
As a postgraduate student and near vegetarian, I made the mistake of selecting a
fieldwork site in a community of llama herding pastoralists. Andean pastoralism has
been characterized as oriented towards the production of fibre rather than either milk or
meat and the transformation of the animals’ fleece into yarn and fabric has received far
greater attention from anthropologists of the Andean region than has the transformation
of animal flesh into meat (e.g. Dransart 2002, 11-12, 101-126). However, I soon learned
that that meat eaten in small quantities was an expected and essential part of main meals
and meat was eaten in large quantities on all festive occasions. The meat was usually
llama, sometimes sheep or goat, and occasionally (and clandestinely) donkey.
People in Sud Lípez consider llamas to be more ‘original’ or ‘natural’ to the area than
their human owners. In a long-ago mythical past when humans and animals were closer,
and when animals could talk, llamas are held to have spoken Aymara, like the lipeño
people encountered by early colonial Spaniards, and unlike present-day lipeños who are
Quechua-Spanish bilinguals.5 Regarding the animals’ origins, one man told me they had
emerged from a place near San Antonio de Lípez, called Llamayoqpata (literally, on top
of the llama owner) where there was a samiri6 – a generative power – producing the
animals. Many people, however, claimed not to know where they came from and stated
that they have always been there. Sheep, European imports in colonial times, are held to
5
See Capoche (1959: 129), Lozano Machuca Lipeño (1992: 31). The Quechua language became
established in Lípez during the seventeenth century, probably due to the influx of indians from other areas
to work the mines of San Antonio del Nuevo Mundo. In late colonial times, its people were classified as
agregados (incomers) rather than originarios (natives) as they were considered by colonial officials to be
the descendants of mine workers of previous centuries (Bolton, forthcoming).
6
Samiri – from sama (Aymara, ‘breath’) + -iri (Aymara, ‘one who [gives]’) (Abercrombie 1998: 357).
Abercrombie notes that one type of samiri is a large boulder, vaguely animallike in shape (Ibid.).
4
have formerly spoken Spanish, but paradoxically are credited with a local place of origin
or paqarina: a lake called Rinconada which now lies across the Argentine border.
Slaughtering a llama is an occasion that is intimate to a family but also social. It
involves not only the family that owns the animal, but also usually more distant kin and
neighbours who help with the work of slaughter and butchering in return for a meal and
the portion of the meat they earn through their labour (achura).7 A man from a
neighbouring family is frequently called upon to slaughter the animal, while his wife and
children assist with the butchering and the preparation of the meal.8
A llama to be slaughtered – usually an aging animal or a castrated male – is separated
from the family herd inside or close to the family corral, and is forced to the ground.
Someone holds the animal down, while a man slits its throat with a sharpened kitchen
knife.9 The blood is collected in a basin and, once the death throes cease, the butchering
commences. The man with the knife makes a slit in the skin under the ribs and peels it
back out of the way. He opens up the abdominal cavity, taking care not to puncture the
gut, and cutting away the last rib (which will form part of his achura) he starts to remove
the viscera. Sometimes abnormalities are noticed – unusual pieces of fat attached to the
gut (called warakas or slings) are regarded as ill omens and discoloration suggests that
the llama is already in mourning (de luto) for a person who is going to die. Someone
usually comments on whether the llama is fat, thin or regular. Throughout my recent
fieldwork, animals were almost invariably said to be thin as an effect of an unusually
heavy snowfall in 2002 from which pastures were still recovering.
7
Achura was also the name given to a portion of mineral ore to which indian workers in the seventeenth
century in the nearby mines of San Antonio del Nuevo Mundo regarded themselves as entitled and without
which they would not work. Contemporary use of the term is for the share a helper earns from a host of a
product to which he or she has contributed through labour. The early Quechua lexicon produced by
Domingo de Santo Tomás (1951:230) defines achura as a ‘piece of meat’, while González Holguín’s
dictionary (1989:14) gives as one of its definitions ‘the portions or parts from a division or distribution’
(Bolton 2002).
8
The tasks of slaughtering are gendered, although this does not mean, for example, that women never kill
the animals or that men never make morcilla (black pudding). However, one of my compadres found it
amusing that his unmarried sisters-in-law sometimes killed their own animals, and don Mauricio, Rosario’s
only divorcé, was described as being ‘like a woman’ because he made his own morcilla and chicha.
9
Flannery et. al. (1989: 83) describe another method of slaughter in Peru, with the knife blade applied to
the back of the neck which the authors consider a more Andean method. Guaman Poma illustrates a llama
slaughter by the extraction of the still-beating heart from the animal and states that this method was
forbidden by colonial priests (Guaman Poma de Ayala [1615] 1993: 725). Certain occasions for sacrifice
in the contemporary Andes involve the removal of the animal’s heart while it still beats – but after the
throat has been cut.
5
Lengths of intestines are removed and handed to women and children who carefully
carry them away to empty their contents without tearing and put them to one side, either
on the inside of the skin or in a basin ready for use. It sometimes takes two men to
remove the distended stomach without spilling its contents and to carry it to a nearby pit
for emptying. As the abdomen and thorax are opened up, the remaining organs are
removed and hung outside the house, out of the reach of the family dogs, and a piece of
fleece is used to mop up any blood spilled in the body cavity. One or two people with
knives and fists then work to skin the body and legs. Large joints of meat are formed
from the four legs, back and neck. The feet are left with the skin attached as is the head,
although the facial meat will find its way into the pot in the days that follow. Throughout
the butchering operation the hide and fleece are used skilfully to prevent the meat from
coming into contact with the earth and becoming soiled. When the meat and organs have
all been removed, the skin and fleece are finally folded in half and set to one side – an
empty llama lying on the ground.
Once the butchering is complete, it is time to eat and for the workers to be rewarded.
A pot with mote (maize) will have been set to boil, usually on a fire outside the house.
The woman of the household will have started work as soon as the animal’s throat is cut,
stirring the blood in its basin to prevent clotting, and once lengths of intestine are
available she starts to make black pudding (morcilla) which boils away while the
butchering continues. Other parts of the intestines are fried, sometimes with onions and
part of the liver (although some of this is needed for achura). When the butchering is
finished, all partake of the meal that has been prepared to use up those parts of the llama
that will not keep.
Sometimes, if a truck is going to Tupiza, several animals will have been killed and
the meat is loaded into sacks for transport to town. Live animals should not enter into
transactions as this is to effect a separation from the herd, and undermines the
reproductive force of the group (Bolton, under review). Slaughtering, however, taking
place close to the family corral, does not involve a conceptual separation from the herd
and maintains the unity of the reproductive group while allowing the animal to be
transformed and its products to enter into commercial exchange. The idea of sacrifice is
always present – although the family members look forward to eating the meat, they lose
6
an animal that is almost a family member.10 Although llamas are held to have come from
the ancestors (almas), they are also of the living earth, and following a slaughter the sac
surrounding the heart is often retained and used as a receptacle for pieces of the animal’s
ears, toe clippings, heart and liver, which are interred in a hole in the ground. As Gose
(1986: 309) has argued, rather than being explicable in terms of exchange, the sacrificial
tribute demanded by Andean powers of the landscape involves the breakdown,
transformation and assimilation of organic matter, in this case of the living animal. If the
meat is not to go to the city, some may be sold locally, some will made into ch’arki 11and
some used for the daily consumption of the family in the following weeks.
It is worth noting here that lipeños regard llamas as intrinsically clean animals that do
not smell when butchered and are particular about what they eat and drink and where
they place their droppings. They are cleaner than sheep, which will eat anything and
smell when butchered, and far cleaner than donkeys, whose flesh is held to stink.
Lipeños claim they do not eat donkey, but they are happy to supply Chileans with donkey
ch’arki (known in Chile as ch’arki de pardillo) in a clandestine cross-border trade. My
landlady’s daughter, doña Eustaquia, told me that donkeys should not be eaten as they
have teeth like people – they have upper and lower dentition, while llamas and sheep
have a hard palate in place of an upper row of teeth – and another woman declared
(bringing Mary Douglas’s (1966) work to mind) that the Bible forbade their consumption
because of their teeth. In practice, lipeños, especially the less well-off, do eat donkey
since an old animal is cheap to buy and yields enough meat to feed a family for quite
some time. It is generally held that people will not eat donkey willingly – the idea
disgusts them or makes them feel sick (“Me da asco”, commented my compadre, don
Carlos) – and that some unscrupulous people will deceive their guests serving donkey
meat.12 Don Carlos assured me that with all the time I had spent in Lípez, I was bound to
have eaten donkey on more than one occasion.
10
Dransart has noted that, although animals and humans are regarded as distinct, llamas like humans have
genealogies which are regarded as parallel to and mutually interdependent with those of their owners
(Dransart 2002: 10).
11
Ch’arki or charque in its Hispanicised spelling is meat that has been cut into thin slices before being
salted and dried.
12
I have heard that donkey was served as a communal meal on one occasion, when the sindicato (peasants’
union) held a meeting in Rosario during the incumbency of a mayor who was particularly hostile to that
organisation.
7
Dirty llama meat in the city
In a recent article on the interplay of biomedicine, hygiene and ethnicity in early
twentieth-century Bolivia, Ann Zulawski comments, drawing on Mary Douglas (1966)
among others, that concerns about contamination and disease can be metaphors for fear
of loss of control over society’s lower orders and hygienic controls a means of
maintaining the social hierarchy (Zulawski 2000: 116).
That food should become the object of hygienic regulations is unsurprising.
Famously, a large part of Douglas’s work concerns the biblical food prohibitions set out
in the Book of Leviticus. Here certain animals are prohibited as food, being as Douglas
comments animals that fit uneasily into schemes of classification and are dangerously
transgressive of boundaries (ref.). Only those considered ‘clean’ are suitable to
transgress that most radical boundary between the inside and the outside of the human
body. In similar vein, Julia Kristeva writes of the abject, that which inspires such horror
in us as to induce physical reactions like dizziness and nausea, as something that shows
us we are at the border of our condition as living beings. ‘Death infecting life’, as
Kristeva puts it (Kristeva: 3-4). It is hardly a coincidence that the regulations set out in
Leviticus overwhelmingly concern conditions for the eating of the flesh of dead animals.
Returning to the Andes, Marisol de la Cadena (2000:71) describes how women
meat vendors became the target of early twentieth-century attempts to clean up Cuzco’s
market place through the imposition and surveillance of hygienic controls. Such meat
vendors not only dealt in the flesh of dead animals but also transgressed another
boundary: between city market where meat is sold and the countryside where animals are
raised, which in the Andes is also a racial boundary between the white and mestizo urban
population and rural Indians.13 Meat vendors were either troublingly interstitial persons
or Indians trespassing beyond their ‘racial proper place’ (de la Cadena 2000: 68-72,
Weismantel 2002: 40). Control over the hygienic habits of meat vendors thus expressed
concern over loss of control over lower sectors of society and a means for reinforcing
such control.
13
The term mestizo combines the idea of racial mixture with that of assimilation to the dominant national
culture.
8
Zulawski’s work on medicine and hygiene in Bolivia of the same period as that
discussed by de la Cadena draws out the particularities of the Bolivian situation. She
shows how the urban population of cities such as La Paz and Sucre associated the Indian
population primarily with a lack of hygiene and propensity to disease which at times
threatened also to engulf the cities. She also notes how physicians of the period laid the
blame for this perceived lack of hygiene squarely on rural Andean culture. Some doctors
took an overtly racist stance in which the Indian was cast as a person who displayed a
‘horror of any hygienic measures that oblige him to change his habitual mode of
existence’14 and for whom strategies to combat disease should be devised accordingly.
Others, of different political persuasion, considered Indianness, or Andean culture,
something that would be best eliminated through the proletarianisation of the Indian
population.
Llama meat seems symbolic of all that for the urban population seemed unhygienic
about Andean culture. Whereas for rural herders llamas are the cleanest of animals, in
cities their meat has long attracted attention for being just the opposite. Meat sold in
Bolivian cities has a hierarchy. Central markets have stalls selling beef, pork or chicken.
Anyone wanting to buy lamb or mutton, at least in Potosí and Sucre, must walk to more
out-of-the-way spots (the streets outside the Mercado Vicuñas in Potosí or the Mercado
Campesino in Sucre) to find vendors. Until very recently the sale of llama meat was
effectively prohibited by municipal authorities in just about all urban markets and, as
Healy (2004: 31) notes, most meat that found its way into cities was marketed
clandestinely, disguised in sausages and hot-dogs. During the Third Worldwide Camelid
Congress, held in Potosí in November 2003, the mayor of the city, a man of rural origins,
commented in the local newspaper, El Potosí, that during his childhood, ‘It was little
short of a crime to sell llama meat in the city, we had to do it clandestinely because if we
were caught it would be confiscated’.15 One of the leaders of the llama producers’
organisation in Sud Lípez further commented to me that the meat confiscated would be
burned.
14
15
Nestor Morales 1913. Revista de Bacteriología e Higiene, 18, 706, Quoted in Zulawski (2000:119)
El Potosí, 20/11/2003: ‘La carne de llama era despreciada’.
9
Urban concern about the safety of llama meat was twofold: that the meat was
produced in unhygienic conditions, and that it carried disease. City dwellers’ sensibilities
were offended by the idea of animals slaughtered in ‘corrals full of dung’ (Healy
2001:213) and the presence of small, white cysts in some meat gave rise to the erroneous
belief that llama meat was infected with trichina (trichinella spiralis) the nematode
parasite found in pork responsible for the disease trichinosis. The cysts are known in
Lípez as arrosillo16 and often present in the meat of older llamas and are of a parasitic
species sarcocystis aucheniae which is harmless to humans and seems to have no adverse
effect on llamas. As Healy (2004: 31) notes, fear of contagion from llama meat, the
exemplary indian food, was an outward expression of racism on the part of the urban
population towards indigenous herders and the presence of cysts enabled this fear to be
rationalised.
In the late 1990s, as Healy (2004: 32) notes, persistent campaigning from llama
producers in Oruro department led to the repeal of legislation discriminating against
llama meat. Now herders are able to sell their meat legally in cities and llama is on the
menu of expensive city restaurants frequented by foreign tourists (not all of whom are
vegetarian). Llama meat has made many converts, but an aura of ‘dirt’ and ‘indianness’
still attaches to it – as was apparent on the face of a (working class) chuquisaqueña friend
when I presented her with a pound of ch’arki (dried meat) from Lípez as I was about to
leave for the UK. In my final days of fieldwork, a friend had given me the meat in
repayment of a loan, which I could hardly refuse, but which HM customs would not
allow me to import into Britain.
It seems that the acceptability of llama meat to urban Bolivian consumers depends on
its separation from its Indian origins. It is not only that urban consumers have a
sarcophagan logic, wishing to consume an abstract substance that cannot readily be
traced back to the animal, while Andean peasants want to acknowledge the animal in
what they eat (Vialles 1994: 127-8). It might be closer to say that for Andean peasants,
life requires sacrificial tribute to the powerful deities of the animated landscape and this
is accomplished through the death of llamas. For city dwellers, the death of an animal
infecting life is abject unless is known to have taken place in clean, impersonal,
16
Arrocillo – from Spanish arroz (rice).
10
technified surroundings. An altered perception of llama meat is being accomplished in
part by skilful packaging and labelling which stresses the healthy properties of the
product. For instance, it is now possible to buy llama ch’arki (dried meat) in cellophane
packages. I bought one such package at a promotional fair in San Agustín that bore a
label stating ‘The ingredients and components utilised are authorised according to
international requirements for export and production under strict conditions of control
and health’. Beneath is given compositional table with percentage content of protein,
fats, moisture and ash,17 and below in larger letters the words sin colesterol (‘without
cholesterol’). Such packaging not only separates llama meat from any suggestion of
contemporary Indians, but also suggests a certain ‘technification’ of the product with
control over its hygienic production and scientific analysis of its composition. Such
claims are not made without attempts to introduce such controls into the production of
meat in the countryside, and the introduction of such controls is where the aims of urban
concerns about control over the Indian population coincide with a neoliberal requirement
of producing entrepreneurial citizens.
Neoliberalism, discipline and governmentality
The early 1990s witnessed a series of important legislative changes in Bolivia. On
the one hand, the state constitution was rewritten in response to ILO convention 169 on
the rights of indigenous people to recognise Bolivia as ‘multi-ethnic’ and ‘pluri-cultural’,
and the law of Popular Participation devolved power to local municipalities. On the
other hand, educational reform aimed to improve standards in schools, but was
lambasted by critics as a de facto privatisation of state schools (Gill 2000: 15) and the
privatisation (or ‘capitalisation’ as it became known) of state-owned enterprises and
resources has led to protest and unrest ever since (Arze and Kruse 2004, Hylton and
Thomson 2004).
Such reform followed up and reinforced the pattern of neoliberal structural
adjustment measures introduced by President Victor Paz Estenssoro in the 1980s, aimed
at reducing Bolivia’s national debt in line with IMF demands. As Gill (2000) notes these
measures had grave consequences for Bolivia’s less-well-off. The experience of rural
17
Although excluding salt, even though this was one of the listed ingredients.
11
people resulting from the legislative changes of the 1990s has been mixed. On the one
hand the constitution recognises indigenous forms of social organisation and changes to
the agrarian reform law have given such groups the right to make territorial claims as
collectivities. On the other, there is increasing pressure on individuals to become selfsupporting entrepreneurs operating through national and even global markets.
That camelid herding features in neoliberal policies is stated in a policy document
produced in March 2003 by the Ministry of Rural and Indigenous Affairs and
Agriculture.18 The document acknowledges the poverty of the most remote regions of the
altiplano, but locates the areas in post 1980s Bolivia where capital and ‘the market’ have
been given free rein and the social role of the state minimized.19 It identifies camelid
production as an area where development should be fostered and from which ‘ecological
and exotic’ products could find entry points into national and international markets at the
price of only low governmental investment. It also acknowledges the role of existing
programmes (set in place by NGOs) in encouraging the commercialization of camelid
produce through stimulation of exports and competition. At the level of departmental
government, an Office of Productive Development was established in Potosí around the
same time to prioritize projects in the countryside with a potential for income generation
rather than those aimed simply at infrastructural improvement. One of the areas on
which its attention focused was camelid herding in the southwest of the department.
It could be argued that entrepreneurship is nothing new to Andean rural people –
herders in Sud Lípez have in the past used their animals for the transport of mineral ore
from the mines, have traded clandestinely in wool across the Argentine border, continue
to trade clandestinely in donkey meat with Chile and have maintained relations of nonmonetary exchange with agriculturalists at lower altitude in Tarija. However, in so
doing, they remained unaccountable and unknowable to the state. Adapting their
activities to a neoliberal framework brings new constraints.
In spite of the noted ‘retreat of the state’, as Daniel Goldstein (2004) has commented
in his study of a Cochabamba suburb, neoliberal reforms coupled with a rhetoric of
widening democratic participation have intensified rather than lessened state endeavours
18
Ministerio de Asuntos Campesinos, Indígenas y Agropecuarios, Políticas de Desarrollo en Camélidos,
March 2003.
19
Ibid: 56.
12
to count, measure and generally ‘know’ the national population. Rendering the
population of the highland region ‘knowable’ (or ‘accountable’) recalls Timothy
Mitchell’s argument that an economy is made or fashioned as an artefact – that abstract
mapping, calculating and measuring procedures help bring about a reconfiguration of the
material entities that are mapped or measured (businesses, land-holdings, and so on)
(Mitchell: 2002:82). They not only reflect a reality, but also produce one. In the case of
llama herders, such procedures that render citizens accountable relate in turn to an
attempt to produce or reconfigure the remotest part of Bolivia’s highland region as part of
the Bolivian national economy – that will ultimately contribute to the national treasury –
and in the process reconfigure indigenous llama owners as individual entrepreneurs.
Commentators such as Burchell (1996), Rose (1996) and Gupta and Ferguson (1997,
2002) have analysed neoliberal government using Foucault’s concepts of
governmentality, discipline and ‘techniques of the self’. Burchell, for example, suggests
that neoliberal governments strive to create the legal, institutional and cultural conditions
under which individuals will adopt norms of comportment and self-discipline that are in
line with an entrepreneurial ethos (1996: 27). In adopting such norms, they thereby
reduce state responsibility for their management (Goldstein 2004). Gupta and Ferguson
(2002) extend the analysis beyond individual nation-states to take into account complex
relations of state governments, NGOs with international finance, international regulation,
and so on, which they regard as manifestations of an emerging system of transnational
governmentality.
Making llama meat healthy under neoliberalism
The commercialisation of camelid produce in global markets is a goal of both
government and NGOs working in the sector (Fairfield 2004, Ministerio de Asuntos
Campesinos… 2003). Healy (2001: 211) reports that early efforts at meat
commercialisation in Bolivia were a response to the numbers of llamas smuggled for
slaughter across the international border with Chile, and an NGO official interviewed by
Fairfield (2004: 6) further claimed that niche markets for meat products were being
sought both in Europe and Japan. Norms of comportment and self-discipline that herders
are expected to adopt include regimes for the hygienic slaughter of animals and the
13
systematic use of veterinary medicines to control animal parasites. A large proportion of
the work of NGOs involved in camelid projects is directed towards the education of the
rural population in these areas as well as towards livestock improvement through genetic
management. In order to break into national markets meat has to overcome both the sort
of urban prejudice discussed above and national regulations. Trading in meat products
abroad also involves compliance with international regulations.20
While few would argue against the principle of making food safe for consumers, in
highland Bolivia education aimed at improving the hygiene of meat production
encourages campesinos to replace the sort of intimate and social sacrifice of animals
described earlier in this paper with controlled, commercial slaughter in purpose-built
installations or platforms. Healy (2001: 211-216) describes the construction in the early
1990s of just such a purpose-built abattoir for camelids in Turco, a town in Oruro
department, where slaughter is performed impersonally and carcasses are handled by
workers wearing long, hooded coats and gloves. So far, there are no plans to construct
such an installation in Lípez, as the NGO working in the region prioritises the
commercialisation of fibre from the woolly llamas that predominate there over meat
production. A greenhouse for the hygienic production of charki, where meat could be
dried away from the dust-laden wind, has, however, been constructed in Quetena in the
west of the province with finance from the Eduardo Avaroa National Park.
Educational and infrastructural efforts aimed at improving animal health and hygiene
concentrate on the elimination of parasites through promoting regular vaccination and
other practices. An NGO with finance from the European Union, PROQUIPO, oversaw
the construction of antiparasitic baths in Lípez communities in the late 1990s to combat
the problem of mange. More recently the elimination of the cysts in llama meat that have
fuelled urban prejudice against the meat has become a priority of educational campaigns.
The parasite responsible for the cysts, sarcocystis aucheniae has a complicated two-stage
life cycle involving a phase of asexual reproduction in camelids (secondary hosts), and a
20
International regulations on food hygiene are collated under the International Portal on Food Safety ,
Animal and Plant Health, by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations,
http://www.ipfsaph.org/servlet/CDSServlet?status=ND1jdGh0dHB3d3dmYW9vcmdhb3NoczAyJjY9ZW4
mMzM9KiYzNz1rb3M~, consulted 21/06/05. International regulations applying specifically to animals
are stipulated in the Terrestial Animal Health Code issued by the Office International de Epizooties, OIE
(World Organisation for Animal Health) (2004).
14
phase of sexual reproduction in canine (or possibly human) primary hosts. Dogs egest
new cysts in their faeces and these are ingested by llamas as they graze. Educative
campaigns aimed at eliminating sarcocistiosis focus on the control of dogs and suggest
that they should be eliminated (i.e. killed) or kept under control and not allowed access to
llama meat or blood. There was also some talk of introducing worming medicines for
dogs. The need to eliminate sarcocistiosis was brought up at a couple of workshops I
attended in Sud Lípez, but was not the focus of these events. It was, however, the subject
of a poster campaign on prominent display at camelid shows throughout Potosí
department. Since only a small number of herders attend these events, the posters
appeared targeted at potential meat consumers whom they wished to assure of the
cleanliness of the products for sale.
The World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) guidelines21 stipulate that meat and
meat products traded internationally should be from a zone or country with foot-andmouth free certification,22 and that animals should be slaughtered in approved abattoirs
and carcasses inspected for signs of the disease. Bolivia has long sought foot-and-mouth
free status for its eastern cattle-producing area, and recently the government animal
health agency SENASAG (Servicio Nacional de Sanidad Agropecuaria) has turned its
attention to the altiplano in a bid to obtain foot-and-mouth free certification for the
region. Although there have been no recorded outbreaks of FMD in South American
Camelids under normal herding conditions (Fairfield 2004: 8), the present drive to seek
FMD-free status is in line with the aim of finding international markets for camelid
products. Steps in this direction were already underway during my fieldwork. The
benefit of such certification to a zone such as Sud Lípez where there are currently no
plans to build an approved abattoir is questionable. However, by the time of completion
of my fieldwork, the organisation’s activities have involved livestock census and sample
taking for serological analysis. Herders are reluctant to supply census takers with the
data they request. In part this is due to Andean culture-specific ideas about what should
and should not be counted (Urton 1997). Lipeño herders also state that they fear they
21
OIE 2004. Terrestial Animal Health Code, Chapter 2.2.10 Foot and Mouth Disease, available at
http://www.oie.int/eng/normes/mcode/en_chapitre_2.2.20.htm.
22
Two types of certification are available according to whether or not systematic animal vaccination is used
(OIE 2004).
15
will be taxed on the numbers of animals they admit to owning at some future date, and so
underestimate their herd sizes. Here it could be that a memory of the past, when the
forebears of present-day lipeño herders were charged tithes on their animals, coincides
with the herders’ astute understanding of the mechanics of neoliberal governmentality
leaving them unwilling to cooperate over animal census (Bolton 2005). Reluctance to
furnish animal-census data is also noted by Fairfield (2004).
Although not a measure aimed primarily at hygiene in meat production, it is worth
mentioning at this point that animal vaccination formed part of a package of aid supplied
to the communities of the south of Potosí department following an unusual and
disastrously heavy snowfall in 2002. A considerable number of animals died as a direct
result of the weather conditions, and yet more perished in the following months due to
scarcity of pasture. Veterinarians financed by the international aid organisation CARE
travelled to the province shortly after the event to inject llamas with a fortifying tonic and
with a general antiparasitic vaccine.23 As well as saving the lives of animals weakened
by hunger, the vaccination drive was to encourage the systematic use of vaccines by
herders. As I explain in the following section, although herders initially welcomed the
attention and aid, the attempt backfired when many herders dissatisfied with the results
turned against the use of vaccines.
“Vaccines have ruined our llamas”
The reception of veterinary interventions and campaigns aimed at eliminating
parasites from herd animals has been very mixed in Sud Lípez. That opinion about the
interventions is not uniform or unanimous is no doubt an indication of the sorts of
dilemma that herders are facing – an awareness that commercialisation seeks irrevocably
to alter their relations with herd animals, but that in a changed world where motor
transport is becoming ever more widespread the economic trading activities of their
grandparents are no longer viable.
Hardly anyone to whom I spoke expressed had any doubts that veterinary
intervention to prevent mange (known locally as sarna), caused by the scabies mite, was
23
The vaccine that most widely used in Lípez was Ivomec™ a vaccine developed by the company Merial
Ltd., primarily for cattle and sheep in the US and Britain and which is effective against a wide range of
internal and external parasites.
16
a good thing and all recognised the condition as a problem since it can lead to the death
of an animal. Most also held that the condition is now more prevalent than was formerly
the case. When in 2004 the municipality decided to make some funds available for the
insecticides required to dip animals, the meeting broke up acrimoniously not because of
opposition to their use, but through arguments over their distribution.24 One elderly
woman informant told me that sarna was a punishment from the almas (souls, ancestors)
from whom the animals come and who continue to watch over them. She held that the
only way to treat the condition was to kill the animal and to place its bones in the river.
However, most people blamed vicuñas for its spread. Vicuñas, wild relatives of domestic
llamas and alpacas, are a protected species, and in spite of the actions of poachers (and a
certain Catholic priest)25 they have multiplied dramatically in recent years – during my
fieldwork period a group of about 50 or 60 young males could be seen grazing
downstream from Rosario on most mornings. Herders worry that they will pass mange to
domestic animals and also that they will overgraze pastures.26
The same cannot be said for the educative attempts aimed at the elimination of
sarcocistiosis. Hardly anyone regards the infamous white cysts as a problem or worries
about them. It was usual to hear people dismiss the presence of cysts in llama meat as
normal. Lipeños would point out that they were often present in the meat of older
animals and that no one eating the meat suffered any ill effects. For instance, my
compadre, don Carlos, when asked if eating infected meat had any ill effect replied in the
negative, alluding to a meal we had eaten at his estancia27 a few days previously:
“No, no... How is it that we have lived here for hundreds, thousands of years? How come we
don’t die? Of course I’ve eaten this, all the time! Even the other day, we ate this meat together!
Damn it! Nothing happens! Nothing happens!”
[Carlos, Rosario]
24
The municipality had thought to distribute the chemicals on a per animal basis, but members of the
community with few animals felt this to be unfair since it amounted to giving more support to those who
were already rich (i.e. had a large number of animals) and that it should be divided equally between
comunarios irrespective of the number of animals owned.
25
From the mid-1980s until early 2004, the parish priest for Rosario was an eccentric Pole based in Tupiza
who was notorious throughout the province for his enthusiasm for hunting and for firearms in general.
Most local people were convinced he was either mad or an employee of the CIA.
26
The sustainable management of vicuñas and the commercialisation of vicuña fibre is a further economic
strategy being promoted by government agencies and NGOs. Following a pilot scheme organised by the
NGO, PROQUIPO, in the 1990s Rosario has established an organization with this aim, but organising a
round-up of the animals is difficult and many people would like to see them culled periodically.
27
Lipeños use the term estancia or campo wasi for their house that is near the grazing grounds of their herd
animals, as opposed to their town house in a village centre where they live during the school term.
17
Another friend concurred:
“I don’t believe anything happens. I can tell you, one of my grandfathers, I can tell you... For
example, my own grandfather seemed to prefer that [false] trichina to the meat....”
[Vicente, Rosario]
I never noticed anyone taking precautions to keep dogs away from left-over llama blood
after a slaughter, as they were encouraged to do in the health campaigns. Most herders
liked to keep at least one dog at their homesteads with the herd – to scare away Andean
foxes intent on making a meal of newborn llama. A large dog with a powerful bark was
particularly desirable and a bowl of llama blood was a good way to feed it.
One way in which both parasites carried in the intestinal tract (such as sarcocystis
aucheniae as well as other roundworms and tapeworms) and skin-borne parasites (such as
the scabies mite) can be controlled is by means of a general livestock antiparasitic
vaccine, such as Ivomec. 28 This was the solution recommended for people who did not
have ready access to antiparasitic baths (when the dip is too far from the herd’s grazing
ground). It is given by injection. It was also a measure that met with considerable
suspicion from herders. As mentioned in the previous section, just such an injectable
vaccine, along with a tonic, was given to animals following the snowfall of 2002 as part
of a package of disaster-aid. Herders associate the problems they attribute to the vaccines
primarily to this occasion, which for many people was the first time they had vaccinated
their animals. When speaking of their experiences following these injections, they did
not distinguish between the two types of medication given.
The first problem with the injections seemed to be simply that they did not prevent
the animals from dying. Some people considered the injections to be ‘vaccination against
thinness’,29 no doubt a distillation of the explanation they had been given by the NGO
technicians. When the animals continued to die from malnutrition, they suggested that
the medication must have been ‘too simple’. Even the facilitator for the NGO working
with the local camelid producers’ organisation,30 a local man who had received a year’s
28
Ivomec – a registered trademark., a supplier of vaccines for cattle, sheep and pigs in both the US and the
UK.
29
My compadre, don Carlos described the vaccinations given following the snowfall as vacunas…contra la
flacura ‘Vaccinations against thinness’ and as sueros, así inyectables, eso es para la flacura ‘Serums,
injectables. They’re for thinness’.
30
ACRA, Associazione di Cooperazione Rurale in Africa e America Latina, an NGO with Italian finance
and headquarters in Milan.
18
training as a veterinary technician at the University of Puno, noted their lack of effect
and, in conversation with me, suggested that they might have been watered down
(adulterados). Don Carlos commented that it was possible to buy better medicines in
shops in Potosí. It is worth noting here that ‘thinness’ signifies a lack of fat – as noted in
the first section of this paper, onlookers at a llama slaughter comment on the fatness or
thinness of the animal and base their assessment on the quantity of fat present in the
carcass. Bastien (1987: 46) understands air, blood and fat as vital humours for Andeans,
while Canessa (2000: 709) comments that in the Andes fat, rather than blood, is
considered to give animation to humans and animals. Tellingly, the vaccinations failed to
restore this vital substance to the llamas. A very distressing observation for the herders
was that not only had adult animals died as a result of starvation shortly after the snow,
but many young had been lost either stillborn or had died shortly after birth the following
December:
Carlos: The crías [young llamas] now have died as well. Earlier, in Octobre the adults were dying…
now the young… because they have no milk, there’s no milk… their mothers have no milk, so their
young are dying of hunger…
Maggie: Is that because there’s no water?
Carlos: I think… it could be that. That is er… they are not really thin. We’re fucked! We’re half
fucked! I don’t know about the llama, I don’t know… maybe we should apply a different medicine,
you know, medicines that work in relation to… Nothing good has resulted from them. I think
they’re too simple.
[Carlos, Rosario]
Other people went further and criticised the medicines for not only for inducing stillbirths, but also birth deformities. A conversation with my friend Tomasa, a woman in her
thirties from a herding family, but also a municipal councillor, was typical of exchanges
about the effects of the medicines. Tomasa was at pains to stress that she was a modern
person who would like to use veterinary medicines, but explained how her father had no
confidence in them:
Tomasa: We got them to give the llamas vaccines, didn’t we? But last year, after we had injected
them, the llamas were born differently.
Maggie: How were they born?
Tomasa: They had faces almost like people. They were born without a jawbone… For example, in
our case…
Maggie: Without a jaw?
Tomasa: Yes, without a jawbone. That’s how they were born, and our parents think that the vaccine
has affected them, don’t they? So, that’s almost all of our fathers who don’t want to vaccinate. Of
course, we [the younger generation] could vaccinate them, but they [our fathers] are more the
owners of the llamas, aren’t they. He who cares more is the owner… so, that’s what happened last
year. In our llamas it happened too… We’ve seen it.
Maggie: Did you? What were the young like?
19
Tomasa: Without a jaw, they didn’t have… How can I say? They couldn’t walk, nothing, it’s like
their hands were tied, and they couldn’t move…
[Tomasa, Rosario]
The same sort of experience prompted don Mauricio, an experienced herder in his 60s to
an outburst in a meeting with technicians from an NGO (not primarily involved in
livestock management).
I applied these medicines and they have turned out something bad. The young emerge sort of
twisted, you could say, so that some cannot walk, or the animal has no milk. All these situations
happen….
[Mauricio, Rosario]
It became common to hear herders comment that the injections ‘have ruined the llamas’.
Still-births and birth deformities are problems that NGO personnel attribute to inbreeding, for which they criticise the animal management of indigenous herders (Bolton
2005). Counter-narratives such as these from herders put the blame for these phenomena
squarely back with the NGOs and their interventions and date the advent of the problems
firmly to the snowfall. While unable to offer any sort of assessment of these claims from
the point of view of veterinary medicine, casting one’s mind back to the thalidomide
crisis in Britain in the early 1960s provides ample evidence that medicines given to
humans during pregnancy have induced birth deformities and suggests they should not be
dismissed out of hand.
Further objections against the use of vaccines in llamas seemed more to do with the
nature of the animals and with their status as ‘natural’ animals. Here herders seem to
conflate an idea of ‘natural’, as understood by proponents of ‘organic’ foods, with an
older, colonial usage, where naturales or originarios were the natives of a province and
postulate that it is desirable to raise llamas, native animals, naturally. I was at first
surprised when one young man (Tomasa’s brother) told me that he did not want to use
veterinary medicines for his animals. He was not a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist, but
had been part of an electronic band while at school in Tupiza, had built and operated an
FM radio transmitter in Rosario and had studied veterinary medicine at university for one
semester until his money ran out. His views on llamas however echoed those of his
father that Tomasa had expounded but also drew similarities between llamas treated with
vaccines and vegetables on which chemicals have been used:
In camelids, we give some injections, a few… some medicines, but no everyone accepts them.
For example, my father and my own family… and I myself, personally, I don’t want much [of
20
this]. Science also has its negative side, doesn’t it? Because our llamas and camélidos are
originarios, naturales and they don’t know any type of injection… Thanks to science we get
lots of vegetables, all improved and good to the eye, aren’t they? But they’re poor inside.
[Geraldo, Rosario]
The idea that meat from animals that have been vaccinated might be ‘poor inside’ was a
recurrent theme. Several people connected the use of veterinary medicines to a perceived
loss of taste in meat:
...in years gone by, we didn’t even know [antiparasitic] baths, [the llamas] were just like this,
because it is better that the llama, that the llama meat… that we don’t do those things. It has
more vitamins, and er… we say that we need only a little meat to go in the pot. Now that we do
these things… er… we say that nothing happens with the baths, but regarding the internal
[vaccines]… this is a bit… it seems to me… it does us some… it is not obviously natural. And I
say that the meat is nothing, it doesn’t have any vitamins, it’s more or less like that. We throw
some in the pot and nothing… we put in lots of meat… and it’s the same. But in years gone by,
we used to put a little meat in the pot and it gave it flavour, but now, no, only then. This is a
consequence of some of us managing [our animals] using some medicines internally.
[Mauricio, Rosario]
Geraldo’s uncle, a teacher in the town’s secondary school, expressed a similar opinion –
that meat nowadays has a different flavour, which has probably come from the use of
vaccines.
Despite Andean preoccupations with needles and lik’ichiris – the extractors of fat
mentioned in the introduction to this paper – the problem does not seem to be with
injection as a means of administering medicines per se. Most lipeños after all seem to
have no worries about having themselves or their children vaccinated at community
health posts – although Geraldo’s uncle did suggest that he became sick less often than
did his children who had had far more vaccinations. The problem seems to be more with
the administration of unknown, ill-understood ‘chemicals’ (i.e. synthetic medicines)
judged inappropriate for animals considered intrinsically clean and also ‘natural’ and
their intrusion into the animals’ bodies. Opinion at least in Rosario seems to concur that
llamas are naturales to the area, and are best kept ‘naturally’, without chemical
interventions, conflating a colonial label with newer discourses about chemical-free
foods. Plants found locally and in the valley regions are, however, suitable for treating
animals.31 The meat from llamas raised naturally is said to have a better flavour, but in
order to make this point, don Mauricio has to make his argument using the terminology
of dominant sectors referring to the meat’s ‘vitamin’ content. As Roseberry (1994:363-4)
31
The topic of indigenous herbal animal medicines is explored more fully in another paper (Bolton 2005c).
21
notes, forms and languages of protest and resistance must adopt the forms and languages
of domination in order to be heard. Bastien (2002: 173) proposes that Andeans have an
ethnophysiological preoccupation with the loss, intrusion and circulation of fluids in the
human (and presumably animal) body. In Lípez, while vaccinations where fluids enter
the bodies of animals are regarded with suspicion, other ‘unnatural’ chemicals used
externally in dips appear to be of no great concern.
It should also be mentioned at this point that opinion about veterinary medicine in
Sud Lípez is not uniform. Some lipeños, such as the leaders of the camelid producers’
organisation, AZCCA, expressed no doubts about the efficacy of vaccines and suggested
that those who experienced problems simply did not know how to use them and some
younger people such as Tomasa would give vaccination a chance were it not for the
reluctance of older family members. This should not be surprising if we recall
anthropological accounts of the choices people make for themselves between competing
medical systems. Libbet Crandon-Malamud (1993) concluded that choices between
different medical systems do not only reflect the economic and social standing of an
individual within the community, but that medicine is a site through which people
negotiate identity and shift affiliation. While some medicines may be more appropriate
than others for llamas as naturales some herders seek to negotiate and shift their own
identities through their choice of medical systems for their animals.
Neoliberalism, Sacrifice and Lik’ichiris
As noted at the start of this paper, in many parts of the Andes, lik’ichiris (or
kahrisiris, ñakaqs or pishtacos) are human beings (most frequently white men) who prey
on Indians, from whom they extract fat surreptitiously (Gose 1986, Rivière 1991, Salazár
1991, Canessa 2000, Weismantel 2001). While they commercialise their ill-gotten
commodity in global markets, their unfortunate victims, now lacking the vital substance,
are left to die, or in a few stories to buy back their fat from their assailants at an inflated
price (Canessa 2000). Interpretations of these stories have varied with the anthropologist
doing the telling, but generally feature some variant on Andean disquiet with capitalism
and/or modernity, often coupled with an analysis of how capitalist, possessive,
individualist gain violates Andean collective norms.
22
In a perceptive piece of analysis, Peter Gose (1986) shows how the actions of the
ñakaq (lik’ichiri) amount to a ‘terrible and antisocial extension of the logic of sacrifice’
(Abercrombie 1998: 404). For Andean peasants, the powers of the landscape, high
mountains, living earth and the chthonic deities of Andean mines, demand organic tribute
from human beings in the form of animal and vegetable matter (extracted violently) in
return for the continued fertility of land or mine. They extend this logic of sacrificial
tribute to their connections with global power and the inner workings of capitalism
through the terrible work of the ñakaq, who extracts fat from his sacrificial victims for
sale and individual gain. Gose is ambivalent over whether the ñakaq opposes the
landscape powers, since he takes fat out of circulation and consolidates it in an alien
form, or whether in fact they might both be part of the same power structure – after all,
both ñakaq and mountain spirit are reported to take the human form of powerful strangers
(Gose 1986: 308).
For Gose, that new relations of power demand organic tribute is an amoral assertion.
However, Andrew Canessa asserts that the uses to which the lik’ichiri puts the fat
extracted is anything but amoral. Fat, the Andean vital substance, as we have already
seen, plays an important role in the relations between Andean people and the powers of
the Andean landscape – the latter feed off the fat presented to them by humans in ritual
offerings and in return they provide people with the vitality that inheres in human fat.
Partaking in these offerings and cycles of fat is what distinguishes the members of
Andean communities from outsiders (Canessa 2000: 711). The lik’ichiri, by contrast,
taps into the fat that should be delivered to the earth and uses it for his own ends (Ibid.).
He does not return anything to his sacrificial victims or their communities – unless it is
the modernity with which he is associated.
Of course, the ñakaq or lik’ichiri steals fat from humans rather than llamas.
Nevertheless, Abercrombie (1998) has eloquently described from his fieldwork in Canton
K’ulta in Oruro department how human beings and llamas are intimately linked
metaphorically in the discourse and practices that surround sacrifice. As he describes it,
the entire fiesta of Guadalupe, one of the two most important events in the canton, is
predicated on a logic of sacrifice: at various points in the proceedings, llamas, fiesta
sponsors, wife takers to the fiesta sponsor, dancers and image of the saint, to different
23
degrees become sacrificial victims. It is the llamas, lead male animals of the sponsors
troop, that are actually sacrificed although these animals are strongly identified with their
sacrificial human counterparts. Llamas to be sacrificed are paraded in the clothing of
male human warriors, the fighters in tinkus or ritual battles, and wife takers to the fiesta
sponsor don the pelts of the sacrificed animals. Throughout the fiesta, the sponsor is
metaphorically associated with his sacrificed lead animals and llamas, parallel to human
lineages, stand in for humans as sacrifice (Abercrombie 1998: 376-401). The sacrifices
themselves form an important technique of social memory and llamas its intermediaries.
While Sud Lípez communities do not have such elaborated sacrificial rituals as those
described by Abercrombie, llama sacrifice is an important part of nearly all fiestas, and
their fat is offered to powers of the landscape in various forms: when combined with
white maize flour as llumpaqa it is sprinkled on ritual occasions for purification, and
combined with flour and made into miniature llamas it is offered to the telluric spirits
before herding rituals. The fat from the chest of a llama (ranchu) is also a powerful
medicine (even for llamas themselves).
There is a linguistic association between the butchering of animals and the action of
the lik’ichiri, since the Aymara term kharisiri (used synonymously with lik’ichiri) means
literally ‘the one who slits throats’, and its root, khariña, is the verb used for slitting the
throat of an animal (Rivière 1991: 24). For Weismantel (2002: 194) the work of the
lik’ichiri is literally ‘butchering Indians’. Furthermore, the techniques of this butcher of
Indians, as described by Gose (1986: 296) and Salazár (1991: 18), recall not the sacrifice
of an animal in the countryside, but the anonymous technified slaughter of abattoirs,
described by Healy (2001) in Turco and in the Khapaq Kayninchis booklet (Congreso
Mundial Sobre Camélidos 2003). The lik’ichiri drags off human (rather than llama)
corpses to caves or mineshafts ‘where, hung upside down, they drip the fat of their bodies
into receptacles’ or where the ñakaq removes fat from a victim’s body using a special
technical apparatus with a long needle ‘used to sever the spinal nerves of animals’ (Gose
1986: 296-297. See also Salazar 1991).
Efforts to commercialise llama-meat production aim to convert the animal at the heart
of Andean sacrificial logic into a commodity. They also encourage herders to relate to
their animals as ranchers rather than pastoralists. As Ingold (1980: 4) tellingly explains,
24
while pastoralists extend protection to their animals, who stand in for humans as
sacrifice, ranchers exist in a predatory relation with them – just as the lik’ichiri exists in a
predatory relationship with other human beings. It is perhaps unsurprising that Andean
peasants manifest some unease about this transition. This unease, I contend, is expressed
through a distrust of veterinary medicines. It may be more than a coincidence that the
manufacture of medical pharmaceuticals is one of the uses to which the fat stolen from
human beings is put (Gose 1986: 297, Salazár 1991: 10). In a bizarre twist, this medicine
manufactured from the fat of Andean peasants sacrificed by the lik’ichiri replaces the
llama-fat (ranchu) used to cure the animals that stand in for Andean peasants as sacrifice.
No wonder that such medicines ruin the llamas!
Gilles Rivière (1991) shows how stories about lik’ichiris from Aymara-speaking
communities in Oruro department invariable make accusations against outsiders and
others who do not submit to collective norms. He also describes how they are associated
with times of crisis (economic, climatological, or medical) when through some collective
fault the links between humans and supernatural powers have been broken or disrupted
(Rivière 1991: 36). Like the stories of lik’ichiris that Rivière relates, anxieties
surrounding veterinary medicines have emerged at a time of crisis – the lack of pasture
and rain following the disastrous snowfall of 2002 (Rivière 1991: 36). As in Rivière’s
exposition, the snowfall has blamed on a collective fault. At a workshop on oral history
held by ISALP32 in 2004, some lipeños expressed the opinion that it came about through
the neglect of rituals and sacrifices to the most prominent mountain of the region, Cerro
Bonete. A ritual ascent of the mountain by leaders of the local ayllus, the first for many
years, had been undertaken in November 2003 to reaffirm the sacrificial, tributary
relation with it. The sacrifice of llamas was included as an integral part of this ritual.
Lipeños know about lik’ichiris but do not seem particularly concerned by them: on
asking directly about them I was told there may be some in Challapata (in distant Oruro
department) and on trying to approach the subject in a more roundabout way, my
inquiries were misunderstood by eleven-year-old Silvia as being about the various
garrapatas (ticks) and piojos (fleas) that infest llamas. They are not without their own
32
Investigación Social y Asesoramiento Legal Potosí, an NGO specialising in legal assistance for
indigenous groups.
25
stories that show unease about global trade and the products of their llamas. Many
herders described to me how, in the 1970s and early 1980s they used to sell llama wool
clandestinely to Argentine merchants in the villages immediately across the international
border. The trade came to an abrupt end with the Falklands War, as, they say, the wool
was destined for England. There, a friend in Río Rosario told me, it was used to fabricate
armaments – as everyone knows that llama wool burns with a spark. While this lipeño
tale has less gothic imagery than tales of lik’ichiris, it is perhaps more subtle: rather than
portray Andean peasants as the unwitting victims of the slaughterer, it shows them
through their need to earn cash and feed their families to be complicit with international
capitalism and even the arms trade.
Technified slaughter of llamas in abattoirs has not yet reached Lípez, but there
herders express suspicions of the use of syringes filled with pharmaceutical medicines on
their animals. The manufacture of pharmaceuticals is one use to which the fat extracted
by the lik’ichiri is put. It may be, as Bastien suggests, that the introduction of such fluids
disturbs the balance of fluids in the animals’ bodies, but may also express ambivalence
about a neoliberal modernity that demands the commodification of the quintessentially
sacrificial animal and the loosening of the intimate ties that link llamas and humans.
While meat that has been slaughtered in dung-filled corrals may be abject to urban
Bolivians, for Andeans the abject may be removing fat from its cycle of sacrifice with
telluric beings. It appears that lipeños see clearly that the commodification of their llamas
involving their transformation into meat would mean the reconfiguration of relations
between humans and not just the llamas themselves but also powerful entities. While
some embrace this neoliberal modernity, others have their doubts.
Conclusions
This paper has tried to show how urban middle and upper-class concerns about
hygiene and control over the Indian population, the neoliberal ambition to convert
subsistence peasants into productive, self-supporting, entrepreneurial citizens, the
ambitions of NGOs to alleviate poverty and the concerns of Andean peasants over
modernity all coalesce around issues of veterinary medicines for llamas. As I set out in
the introduction veterinary medicine is at the centre of a hegemonic struggle for a
26
common framework through which to talk about and live out relations between humans
and animals. That Andean peasants should have reservations about modernity, global
trade and reconfiguring their relations with llamas should not surprise us when what is at
stake is the commodification of the animal that lies at the heart of an Andean sacrificial
logic, and is sacrificed to telluric spirits in the place of human beings.
Does the fact that lipeños express their doubts about global trade, modernity and the
inner workings of capitalism through stories of the effects of veterinary medicines mean
that they have less vividly gothic imaginations than their compatriots who come up with
stories of lik’ichiris? I do not believe so. Returning to Roseberry’s essay on hegemony,
the author notes how in situations of hegemonic struggle the ‘forms and language of
protest or resistance must adopt the forms and languages of domination in order to be
heard’ (Roseberry 1994:364-5). Roseberry was thinking of how voices of community
dissent in Mexico must be addressed to the proper state authorities, and must arrive in the
correct offices, but perhaps more subtly lipeño herders express their concerns through a
discourse that cannot be dismissed out of hand as uneducated superstition. Perhaps
vaccines do damage pregnant llamas? Don’t proponents of organic farming say that
natural vegetables taste better? What is more, veterinary medicine is a vehicle that can be
used by Catholic and Evangelical Protestant lipeños alike to express their unease at
changing relations. While don Mauricio would call himself a Catholic, and is an
enthusiast for rituals (costumbres), Tomasa’s father who has the same doubts about
medicines belongs to a Protestant sect.
In another pastoral setting in the Andes, that of Bolivia’s northern border with Peru,
Deborah Caro (1985: 213-247) wrote about herders’ resistance to capitalism in the early
years of the twentieth century. They refused to work as waged labourers on the
haciendas of mestizo landowners, on land that had been appropriated from indigenous
communities in the first place. Their resistance was to an overtly exploitative situation.
Neoliberal capitalism is more insidious and less overtly exploitative than was its earlier
incarnation although it is similarly destructive of community relations and of the
relationship between herders and their animals. Does the failure of lipeños to adopt the
disciplinary measures of animal health and hygiene demanded by dominant sectors,
however, constitute resistance to neoliberalism?
27
For Gose, stories of the ñakaq address the reality of capitalism and comprehensively
explore a long relationship of exploitation by non-Andean societies. However, he is
doubtful that they constitute resistance rather than an ‘erotico-religious desire for
transcendence in the face of power’ (Gose 1986: 309). Other authors such as Salazár
(1991: 16), write not of resistance but of ambivalence: of a simultaneous desire for and
rejection of incorporation into the modern world. Lipeños manifest a similar
ambivalence – a desire to continue working with their animals and to profit from them,
but a simultaneous revulsion at the breaking of cycles of sacrifice and circulation of fat.
Such anxieties become manifest in discourses about veterinary medicines.
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