Landscape and Commerce: Creating Contexts for the Exercise of Power

Abstract

The Southern Peruvian Andes is a region where the mountainous landscape memorializes centuries of political history. This chapter sets out to explore how Andean peoples, aware of historical process and of their own social disadvantage in wider national and global contexts, have over time reproduced a sense of the powerful agency of the land and of the mountains. The sense of landscape as the locus of enduring and historically charged agency is familiar to Andean people. One of the most salient generalizations that can be made about this diverse region concerns the regular attention that people pay to the animate forces of the earth and of the mountains. For both humans and landscape forces, power manifests itself in the ability to act, and such agency requires relationships between persons. These relationships constitute both the possibility and the limits of power. Even the all-encompassing power of the spirits and landowners is fragile in this dependency. Spirits need feeding.

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