The record keepers: maintaining irrigation canals, traditions and Inca codes of law in 1920s Huarochirí, Peru (original) (raw)

2022, The Social and Political Life of Latin American Infrastructures, edited by Jonathan Alderman and Geoff Goodwin

Can infrastructures facilitate communication with sacred ancestors? What role do record-keeping practices have in supporting infrastructures ideologically? This chapter seeks to explore these questions through focusing on Andean canalmaintenance customs. 1 These customs require social and political coherence, achieved through adherence to codified precepts associated with the Inca era. The historical and anthropological study of irrigative infrastructure in the Andes has focused heavily on social organisation and ritual (Gelles, 1984; Mitchell and Guillet, 1994; Sherbondy, 1998; Valderrama and Escalante, 1988). The reason for this is quite simply because life in Andean communities makes it impossible not to acknowledge ritual's centrality in infrastructure maintenance. Appel (2018) points out that visible infrastructure requires recursive substrates conducive to its construction and maintenance, such as legal climates. In canal-cleaning rituals which accompany the technical aspect of maintaining the canals prior to the dry season, community regulations simultaneously give order and structure to social organisation and cooperation (de la Cadena, 1989, p. 83). Community regulations for water rituals cover the fine detail; most Andean villages have strict rules on what ritual items are needed and who should contribute what (Rösing, 1995, p. 74). In this respect, channelling water through the canals is as much a socio-legal matter as it is an economic or religious one: how to make sure all contribute what they are obliged to? From the pre-Hispanic era to the 20th century, irrigation system maintenance was documented by material infrastructure in the form of knotted string records 1 I am grateful to the authorities and members of the Comunidad Campesina de San Pedro de Casta for supporting this research with their time, insights, and trust. I also wish to thank Sabine Hyland, Jonathan Alderman, and Geoff Goodwin and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and Silvia Soriano and Cesar Urrutia for their support. This chapter is an output from the project 'Hidden Texts of the Andes: Deciphering the "Khipus" (Cord Writing) of Peru', led by Professor Sabine Hyland and funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The University of St Andrews funded my fieldwork in Casta.