Of Marbles and (Little) Men: Bad Luck and Masculine Identification in Aymara Boyhood

Abstract

This article takes up the way that Aymara boyhood marbles play counts as a spectacle of masculinity. Specifically, I examine the way that a boy's relationship to bad luck qhincha (bad luck) in marbles has consequences for his gender and sexual affiliations. To do so, I analyze the way in which qhincha instantiates as a participant status in marbles and the way in which heterosexual “toughness” and homosexual “weakness” and “transgression” are thereby—that is, in relation to qhincha—made salient. Theoretically, I show that Aymara masculinity requires a semiotically nuanced concept of “identification” in order to capture its processual, task‐like character. [identification, metapragmatic discourse, masculinity, the Andes, bad luck]

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