Berkley Center

The Aymara are an indigenous group whose members live across the borders of Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. With members from my program, I completed an excursion to Arica, Chile, where we stayed with host families of an Aymaran community in Putre, part of the altiplano (high plain, 11,483 feet above sea level). There, we learned about the Aymaran cosmovision, economic ways of life, and preservation of cultural identity.

The Aymara of the altiplano are an agricultural people, meaning that agriculture was historically (and still is) a central part of their lives. In the Aymara cosmovision, nature and the earth are revered for the life and sustenance they provide humankind; to express gratitude for the year’s harvest, community members demonstrate their syncretized practice of Catholicism and cosmovision in their harvesting rituals.

One of the community’s persistent concerns is who would remain to maintain the existing agricultural practices, which is important not only because it is a primary source of income for the community, but also because it forms a core aspect of their cultural identity. The primary demographic that currently maintains agriculture is the elderly. Youth in Putre are unable to because they tend to migrate to Arica or nearby urban cities motivated by the greater educational and work opportunities offered there, leaving the elderly to maintain agriculture by themselves. 

Parents commented that their children were deterred from pursuing agriculture as their primary profession on account of the hard, manual labor that is required. Despite having reservations about technology and some of its detrimental impacts, community members looked to technology as the solution to make the work less labor-intensive and thus more attractive to younger generations. After doing some research, I learned that the relationship between the Aymaran planter and their agricultural technology is an equally important element in their relationship to the land. The act of production is a spiritual one as the planter initiates life in nature and tends to it afterwards, engaging in a continued act (of production) marked by reverence. Aymara technology was developed to facilitate this ethic of care and is considered divine itself. In contrast, Western technology involves the “imposition of man” and “manipulation of natural processes” to optimize production and monetary gains.  

Because the community members did not explicitly mention these dynamics in their lecture on agriculture, I was left with several unanswered questions about the “tainting” of technology considered divine. I wondered whether this point was of importance to them. Was it was being vocalized and adequately tended to in discussions with local government about efforts toward developing such technology?

I have no doubts that the community has previously been forced to choose between retaining their technologies and adopting Western ones. After all, there was a greater context of macro-level development activities taking shape in the country with which the community had to conform. Considering how the community’s cultural identity is deeply tied to the cultivation of life, I hope that the various actors involved in spurring development in the area do not give in to the idea that preserving cultural identity and starting economic development initiatives are mutually exclusive.