Cultivating Diversity: Field Scattering as Agricultural Risk Management in Cuyo Cuyo, Department of Puno, Peru

By Carol Goland, 1993.

Footnotes to Chapter 4

¹ The importance of such recognition is that it incorporates the community as a legal corporate landholding entity. Land may not be alienated from it. The laws legislating this recognition were part of the Peruvian constitution of 1925. At that time, communities were given official status as "Indian Communities." In 1969, the Velasco government ordered that term Indian be replaced with peasant (campesino) for this and all other legal uses.

² Anexos are "daughter" communities of the main settlements. They have their own sets of authorities.

³ During much of my field work (May 1986 - September 1987), the exchange rate remained stable at 17 intis to the U. S. dollar.

⁴ The figures cited for schooling of men and women include the anexos of Sayaca (for Puna Ayllu) and Aripo (for Ura Ayllu) and are based on Recharte (1990).

⁵ Many women who have given up this traditional style wear instead the pollera, a short, very full skirt, along with machine made sweaters and shawls. A bowler hat replaces the traditional montera.

⁶ Saignes (1983) has done an extensive ethnohistory of the Carabaya region, particularly the lower moiety, Calabaya la Chica, located in modern day Bolivia. Recharte (1990) has compiled the most complete ethnohistorical information on the Cuyo Cuyo region to date.

⁷ An encomienda is an institution used by the Spaniards which gave particular European individuals the right to collect tribute from a specific indigenous group or groups.

⁸ The precise definition of ayllu has engendered considerable debate in the Andean literature. Here I use it to denote a corporate landholding group. I use the terms community and village interchangeably with it.

⁹ Recharte (1990) suggests that the immigrants were fleeing from Spanish imposed corveé, labor in other regions.

¹⁰ Weather data in Ura Ayllu were collected by all project personnel. In addition, a smaller weather station was maintained in Puna Ayllu. Here temperature (current at noon, 24-hour minimum and maximum, and 7-day clock continual) and precipitation data were recorded by either a project assistant or a paid Puna Aylleño school teacher. We attempted to maintain additional weather stations in the Awi Awi Valley and in Aripo, but the data are patchy and of questionable reliability. The data presented here were circulated to PSE project members in an internal memo, July 1988.

¹¹ Serv¡cio Nacional de Meteorolog¡a e Hidrolog¡a in Peru.

¹² Much of the data in this section is drawn from Winterhalder and Evans's (1990) preliminary GIS analysis of the Cuyo Cuyo District. This analysis is on-going.

¹³ The following discussion in drawn entirely from Bennett's (n.d.) preliminary report on his survey of plant communities in Cuyo Cuyo. This survey covered areas from 2800 to 4500 m in elevation. This excludes some of the lowest lands of Ura Ayllu, which are ecologically quite distinct.

¹⁴ This would place this experience around the turn of the century.

¹⁵ A chua pukana is a small ceramic dish or basin used in spinning. The bottom of the twirling spindle is placed in it.

¹⁶ In Chinchero (Cuzco), Franquemont et al. (1990) identify murmuntu as Nostoc commune, an alga which floats in shallow lake water.

¹⁷ It is difficult to speculate on what the precise etiology may have been. Story-tellers reported that people were struck with a high fever and died within 3 days.

¹⁸ This practice is contemporary. During my field work, one man indicated that Ura Aylleños had travelled to the Lake Clavelqocha within the last 10 years. In January of 1989, I received word by letter from Cuyo Cuyo that there was talk again about going to waraq'ar because of concern of drought (though the rains finally began falling before the community mobilized).

¹⁹ In fact, my research originally was planned as an analysis of food storage as a risk buffering strategy in Cuyo Cuyo.

²⁰ Study of household diet and nutrition in Ura Ayllu confirms that by October or November, fresh tubers drop out of the diet and are replaced by purchased foodstuffs (noodles and rice) (Graham 1991).

²¹ After the harvest llama caravans descend from distant herding communities to barter meat and wool in exchange for fresh produce. Other caravans ascend from jungle zones trading fruits for the tubers and habas of Cuyo Cuyo. However, the amount of present-day inter-zonal exchange apparently has diminished greatly from that which older adults remember as children. I do not consider inter-zonal exchange as a risk buffering strategy, given that it is so fully dependent on the production of surplus in Cuyo Cuyo.

²² A day's labor is termed a jornal. During the period of my field work, jornaleros (day-laborers) were paid the equivalent of U.S. $1.

²³ The measure of hara is actually more complex than this. A hara (used only in the harvest of tubers) is also described as the produce of 3 furrows. It is easy to see, however, that depending on field size (and thus length of the furrows), it is unlikely that this standard of measure of hara reported by some informants could produce the standard weight reported for a hara of 1 - 1/2 arrobas.

²⁴ Llama cargas have a fairly consistent weight of 25 kg.

²⁵ The PSE project undertook a study of household income and expenditures for the 20 families. These data have not yet been analyzed. However, households in both communities make small purchases almost daily. Food items purchased include bread, sugar, canned tuna, noodles, rice, and oil. Candles, soap, matches, and school supplies are other common purchases.

²⁶ Most cite the higher returns from gold mining in Maldonado as the primary reason for abandoning cultivation of these fields.

²⁷ The resin from the waturu tree is used in ritual in Cuyo Cuyo and elsewhere in the Andes (Recharte 1990).

²⁸ These include native and improved varieties.

²⁹ These materials were submitted to the International Potato Center in Lima, where electrophoresis analysis will be used to identify genetic similarities based on protein patterns.

³⁰ Most researchers describe harinosa as "floury", i.e., having a high dry matter content. I am not convinced that this is the proper translation of this term. I heard several other foods also described as harinosa, once in reference to squash, another time in describing some meat. Taken together, I believe that harinosa may be more properly understood as consistency, or creaminess, of texture.

³¹ Examination of tubers alone (as opposed to foliage and flowers) means that the results discussed here are tentative.

³² One exception to this may be the management of Yana oca in Puna Ayllu. This variety is planted especially in the oca fields of Awi Awi, which are located at relatively high altitude (above roughly 3800 meters). Because this is the hardiest of the ocas, it is frequently the only variety planted in these fields. This variety is also considered bitter, and a large portion of it is processed as kaya.

³³ The average number of fields reported here are for all fields in which the crop appears. Since some fields are polycropped, the actual number of fields used is smaller than the total implied by these figures.

³⁴ Although Cuyo Cuyeños recognize this value, the question of origins is a separate issue. The primary mechanism whereby households field have been dispersed is through partible inheritance (see Chapter 5). On the other hand, some families with a limited land base from inheritance have purchased and/or rent land wherever they can, and this can create even greater levels of dispersion. Family H's landholding in 1986-87 is an extreme example of this.