Reciprocity, Communion, and Sacrifice: Food in Andean Ritual and Social Life (original) (raw)
Related papers
Andean Foodways Interdisciplinary Approaches to Pre-Columbian, Colonial, and Contemporary Food and Culture, 2021
Pre-Columbian Andean cultures have generally been characterized as having strong cultural and religious ties to their surrounding landscape and the natural world. Plants and animals associated with this sacred landscape have had, and in some societies continue to have, a particular cultural and religious meaning. Food crops and cultigens that sustained life and their associated preparation were often seen as a sacred act, with strong cultural associations to ethnic identity. Other plants have had direct associations to ritual and religious practices and were seen as sacred, reaffirming the diversity and complexity of Andean foodways and local cuisines. Anthropologists and archaeologists have documented the symbolic complexity of the natural world and the social importance of feasting, rituals and rites in contemporary and historical societies. Cultural perceptions and beliefs regarding the natural world and their associated plants and cuisines were subsequently modified to varying degrees by the Spanish conquest and introduction of foreign plants and animals. Contributions in this volume explore the art history and history to examine the roles of food through particular interdisciplinary lenses. Research from diverse regions of the cordillera further emphasize the diversity of Andean cultures. Contributions explore and analyze these topics in the context of historic and contemporary Andean culture, with examples of how domesticates, cuisines, their preparations, and basic ingredients continue to influence present day foodways and regional tastes.
Andean Foodways: Pre-Columbian, Colonial, and Contemporary Food and Culture
Andean Foodways: Interdisciplinary Approaches to PreColumbian, Colonial,and Contemporary Andean Food and Culture, 2021
Pre-Columbian Andean cultures have generally been characterized as having strong cultural and religious ties to their surrounding landscape and the natural world. Plants and animals associated with this sacred landscape have had, and in some societies continue to have, a particular cultural and religious meaning. Food crops and cultigens that sustained life and their associated preparation were often seen as a sacred act, with strong cultural associations to ethnic identity. Other plants have had direct associations to ritual and religious practices and were seen as sacred, reaffirming the diversity and complexity of Andean foodways and local cuisines. Anthropologists and archaeologists have documented the symbolic complexity of the natural world and the social importance of feasting, rituals and rites in contemporary and historical societies. Cultural perceptions and beliefs regarding the natural world and their associated plants and cuisines were subsequently modified to varying degrees by the Spanish conquest and introduction of foreign plants and animals. Contributions in this volume explore the art history and history to examine the roles of food through particular interdisciplinary lenses. Research from diverse regions of the cordillera further emphasize the diversity of Andean cultures. Contributions explore and analyze these topics in the context of historic and contemporary Andean culture, with examples of how domesticates, cuisines, their preparations, and basic ingredients continue to influence present day foodways and regional tastes.
eTopoi. Journal of Ancient Studies (Berlin), 2012
In anthropology, it has become axiomatic that social relationships are constructed through food practices and embodied in food. This paper suggests that both ritual and quotidian commensality have as either a goal or a consequence the construction of specific relations of sociality, and in this regard are not so different. What may distinguish these spheres of commensality, however, are the types of persons engaged in the act of shared consumption. The paper considers ritual commensality as a means of exploring the social universe and indigenous ontology of native Andean peoples, using both archaeological and ethnohistoric data. The role such commensal activities may have played in the construction of, and engagement with, other-than-human persons in the late pre-Columbian Andes is considered.
Anthropology Theses and Dissertations, 2019
Prehispanic northeastern Honduran communities were situated at the border between southeastern Mesoamerica and lower Central America. Previous studies of pottery style suggest that local groups shifted their affiliation from north to south at the end of the Classic period (ca. AD 1000). This study examines the contexts in which pottery, as a medium for style, was used, and how the food people prepared, stored, or served in these vessels offers a perspective complementary to pottery style for understanding how identity was actively negotiated in this region. In this view, other parts of the foodways system – the foods chosen to be processed or cooked in pottery, the particular methods of preparation or serving – can also have their own form of style that has the potential to be as important in materializing identities as the designs on pottery vessels. Excavation at the Selin Farm site documented shell midden mounds containing large deposits of shell, pottery, and other materials disposed of as part of feasting events that took place throughout the Selin Period (AD 300-1000). These stratified deposits are the result of repeated consumption and disposal practices that represent groups of people that came together to form a community of consumption in the past. Data from excavation, lithic and faunal analyses, and typological, morphological, and residue analyses of pottery point to variation in theform, content, and motivations behind these events over space and time. By tracing the nature and scale of these feasting events over time and space at Selin Farm, this study provides data critical to situating the processes behind identity negotiation at the local level and tying the micropolitics of individual events to broader social and political changes in the region. The timing of changes in local pottery styles and foodways suggests they occurred partly as a result of interaction with groups to the north and south that both spoke to cultural understandings and similarities while also highlighting differences and reinforcing boundaries. However, variation in feasting practices across contexts at Selin Farm demonstrates, for the first time, internal heterogeneity within a northeastern community that helps explain processes of change without relying exclusively on external forces, while also not denying their influence in shaping local change. The study of identity negotiation at Selin Farm demonstrates that aggrandizers, expansionist chiefdoms, or outside influences were not responsible for cultural change in the small-scale societies of Central America. The people who lived and feasted at the site were not passive recipients of innovations from the north or the south. There were complex internal social and political strategies being employed by individuals and groups that led to the structural changes that took place in the region. Through interaction with each other and with outside groups they were continually guiding the formation, maintenance, and transformation of group identity through the manipulation of shared practices and everyday activities, punctuated by the feasting events described here.
From Feasting to Cuisine: Implications of Archaeological Research in an Early Honduran Village
American Anthropologist, 2007
Research at the site of Puerto Escondido in northern Honduras produced evidence of foodways in one of the earliest known villages in Central America. Much of the material recovered is related directly or indirectly to the production, preparation, and consumption of food. In everyday practice, the organization of food consumption in villages like this would have been central to the reproduction of social relations. In other early villages in Central America, the use of food for political ends has been given a causal role in the development of social stratification. Drawing on evidence for one particular food practice, the preparation and consumption of fermented and unfermented cacao beverages, we argue that it is through the elaboration of cuisine-regimes of taste and presentation-that food production, serving, and consumption played both of these roles.
Anthropology and Humanism, 2018
This remarkable book comes at an opportune time when many anthropologists have been reflecting upon what has become known generally as "the ontological turn." Frank Salomon has immersed himself in the lifeways of Andean highland peoples over the course of his distinguished career. Reflecting on what I had learned from his latest oeuvre, I realized that despite the intentions of anthropologists to avoid the pitfalls of distorted continuity, there was, indeed, a welcome continuity to the theoretical framework that Salomon has deployed in making sense over time of Andean conceptualizations of their world. This continuity is found in his exploration of indigenous chroniclers and the struggles they faced in communicating the dynamics of the revolutionary upheaval of spatial and temporal anchors and orientations (in Quechua, pachakuti) ushered in by the Spanish invasion; his translation and exhaustive annotation of The Men and Gods of Huarochirí; and his challenge to us to recognize that the world of letters was far from alien for Quechua-speaking dwellers from the early days of colonial rule-interfacing in distinctive ways with khipus (knotted cords) and other modes of record keeping and mnemonic devices. Salomon has always been attuned to disjunctures and intersections as they unfold through both practice and cognition among Quechua-speaking peoples. Now there is this work, in which he tackles the history, meanings, and uses of two buildings in Rapaz, a central Andean highland village. One is a wind shrine called Kaha Wayi, which houses a hanging rack of khipus as well as a ceremonial table where sacrifices were performed to control the weather. The other, Pasa Qulqa, was used for fertility ceremonials for crops and livestock, and stored the community harvest on its upper levels, while miraculous animals and waterfowl occupied the lower level where there once was a lake. Over eight years, Salomon immersed himself in the lives of Rapacinos, learning about their history and daily lives, and, especially, their relationship to these sites that were desperately in need of conservation. His findings constitute a fascinating ethnography, providing us with fresh ways of understanding how the