Work, Reproduction, and Health in Two Andean Communities

By Anne Larme, 1993.

Chapter 5 - Gender and Work

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productive, however, for the competitive aspects of communal work seem to enhance the pace of the work and make up for some of the "lost" time during breaks.¹⁸

Ayni is commonly employed in mining work in Ancoccala, in carrying out fiesta cargos, and especially in house construction. House-raising is perhaps the best example of the blending of work and ritual in Cuyo Cuyo. It represents the final stage of the marriage process during which a married couple becomes fully incorporated into the community. The couple gets a new house, but they are also judged according to their organizational skills in obtaining the necessary construction materials, in mobilizing reciprocal networks of labor, and in providing large quantities of high quality food, alcohol, and coca. Periods of hard work are interspersed with rituals dedicating the house to the Pachamama, meals, drinking, smoking, and coca chewing. A successful house-raising directly contributes to a couple's future standing in the community. Although an ayni houseraising is ostensibly for the married couple, community life is founded upon stable households and comuneros feel compelled to contribute for the good of the community. This probably explains why one comunero had a difficult time distinguishing for me whether the H's house-raising was "ayni" or "faena."

While illiteracy and Andean gender roles exclude women from formal election to political and religious cargos,¹⁹ wives are essential for successful cargo completion. In addition, Ura Ayllu women often stand in for their husbands, managing cargo responsibilities by themselves in their husbands' absence. D2, for example, functioned as Agente Municipal for D1 in 1988; E2 carried out her husband's duties as president of the school committee in 1987; and I2 faced nearly the entire responsibility for organizing Santa Cruz festivities in 1988. While some men stay home from gold mining during the year of their cargos, others do not, especially if they need to earn additional cash.

Ritual Activities

Ritual Activities refer primarily to fiesta participation and to attendance at church services and community assemblies. This category is closely related to Community Work, as Cuyo Cuyeños perceive fiesta participation and rituals, in general, to be necessary for the proper functioning of the community, and, indeed, the universe. The time allocation categories of Ritual, Community Work, and, in many respects, Leisure, must be seen as overlapping categories in Cuyo Cuyo.

As with community work, adult men are more likely than adult women to engage in ritual activities (7.9% compared to 6.2%). Likewise, elderly adults more likely to participate in ritual activities than are younger adults (9.6% compared to 8.4%). This most likely reflects younger adults' greater responsibility for subsistence work and childrearing. Many fiesta and ritual activities take place at night and therefore are not reflected in time allocation data. Nevertheless, these data illustrate the great importance Cuyo Cuyeños place on fiesta and ritual participation.

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Idleness, Leisure, and Visiting

Finally, the category of Idleness, Leisure, and Visiting provides a contrast to the more purposeful activities discussed above. Although the PSE time allocation study separated "idleness/leisure" and "visiting" into two categories, I have combined them into one because, according to my observations, "visiting" was primarily associated with leisure.

As expected, during the hours of observation, juveniles had the greatest leisure time (25.3%). Youth, adults, and the elderly had relatively similar amounts of leisure time (15.1%, 18.0%, and 16.2%, respectively).

Adult women had less leisure time than adult men, 12.8% of their observed time, compared with 18.8% of men's observed time. A tally of men's and women's time allocation in the four principal work categories supports the conclusion that adult women work harder and have less leisure time than men. Women spent 71.4% of their time between 6:30 A.M. and 5:30 P.M. engaged in combined llank'ay, ruway, trabaju, and community work. This compares with 57.2% of men's time engaged in these activities.

Reproduction: The Forgotten Domain of Work

Women's roles in biological reproduction -- pregnancy, childbirth, and breast-feeding -- are another kind of work in Cuyo Cuyo, reflected neither in Andean conceptions of work nor in time allocation data.²⁰ Yet, these roles certainly involve "the exertion of strength to accomplish something" and, even by conventional economic standards, could fit the bill as "work" because women are producing a product -- babies.²¹

Whether or not one agrees with this unconventional rationale for considering reproduction as work, there are other equally compelling reasons to discuss women's reproductive efforts in this chapter on gender and work. Pregnancy, childbirth, and breast-feeding are physiologically demanding tasks that women perform in addition to their economic activities. They affect women's ability to carry out other tasks in Cuyo Cuyo and affect women's overall health status. Finally, they are necessary considerations in order to understand women's lives and work in relation to men's lives and work in Cuyo Cuyo.

Pregnancy

Reproduction is an assumed task for women in Cuyo Cuyo. It is a given that women will be bearing and caring for children along with their other responsibilities during their adult years. Women generally begin to have children soon after marriage in their late teens and continue to bear children until menopause.

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Cuyo Cuyo women rarely volunteered the information that they were pregnant, despite my frequent visits to discuss health concerns. I usually found out through perceptive research assistants or, late in the pregnancies, when the women's swollen bellies finally began to show through their thick layers of woolen clothing.²² There are several possible explanations for this behavior. Pregnancy may be considered so ordinary that it is not worth mentioning; it may not be considered a health concern (my questions were framed in terms of "problems" or "symptoms" they were experiencing); or, women may fear drawing attention to the pregnancy in order to protect the fetus from dangerous outside influences.

Women generally remain active up until the day of giving birth. Cuyo Cuyo pregnancy beliefs hold that walking and working hard up until the time of giving birth are important to prevent the fetus from growing too large and thus causing a difficult birth. Women continue to climb up and down the terraces with loads on their backs, walk long distances, and perform agricultural tasks during their pregnancies. Only rarely do they stay home to "rest" and restrict their activities to wasi ruwana. Several women told me stories of how, unable to make it home in time, they had given birth in the chakra and how they managed -- or didn't manage -- to take care of themselves after childbirth (see Chapter 6).

Despite the apparent ease of pregnancy in Cuyo Cuyo, it is obviously an added strain on women. According to interviews and observations, women often did not want to be pregnant, either because they did not want another child or because they feared childbirth. They also felt ill and lacked energy at times, and sometimes they experienced falls from agricultural terraces late in their pregnancies when the added weight affected their balance.

Childbirth and Postpartum

Childbirth usually takes place at home, with the aid of mothers or other experienced older women. There are strong beliefs about the care of women during the postpartum period. Because it is thought to be the time women are the most susceptible to illness entering their bodies, it is the one time I observed Cuyo Cuyo women being pampered and relieved of their responsibilities.

After giving birth women are dressed in layers of woolen clothing and blankets, are kept in bed, and are waited on for several days. Mothers, older daughters, and husbands assist in preparing special foods for the postpartum period and in taking over the woman's responsibilities in cooking, housework, child care, and agriculture. A woman must rest, eat meat and other nutritious foods, and avoid activities that place her in contact with "heat" (cooking or working in the chakra in the sun) or "cold" (washing clothes or dishes). In effect, a woman is relieved of nearly all her normal responsibilities so she can rest and devote full attention to her own recovery and to the needs of her newborn.

According to Cuyo Cuyeños, the ideal period of rest after childbirth is one month. However, women in the sample reported that they commonly returned to their household and subsistence work within one to two weeks after giving birth. Common reasons for

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curtailing the postpartum rest period included the husband's absence or the lack of older children or social networks to take over a woman's responsibilities, or the fact that the postpartum period coincided with a period of peak agricultural activity (planting or harvest time) or with cargo or ayni obligations.

Care of Infants

Infant and child care is performed by women simultaneously with their other responsibilities. The infant is carried in a lliklla on the mother's back wherever she walks, and it sleeps on the ground next to her as the she cooks, weaves, or works in the chakra (Photograph 5.14). Women breast-feed whenever the infant cries, as crying is considered to be detrimental to a child's health. In other words, mothers remain close to their babies at all times until weaning at the age of 18 months to two years (Photograph 5.15). Older siblings, grandmothers, and occasionally fathers help with child care. Adult women also rely on older children to perform housework and herding tasks, and may curtail weaving and communal labor in order to concentrate on agricultural tasks and childrearing during the critical childbearing years.

Childbearing and Women's Work: A Holistic View

To summarize, a woman's childbearing years coincide with her most productive years in agricultural, household, and community work in Cuyo Cuyo. In most cases -- as time allocation data attest -- the effect of childbearing on women's other work is minimal. Women continue to carry out agricultural and domestic tasks while pregnant and return to work shortly after childbirth. They breast-feed and care for small children along with their other activities, whether in the chakra, weaving, cooking, or performing communal labor.

In general, children are more of an asset than a detriment to women's work capacities. Children, especially girls, assist mothers in carrying out their daily responsibilities up until they marry. After marriage, daughters frequently continue to work alongside their mothers, especially in Ura Ayllu when the men are absent. Compadrazgo ties established through children are utilized by women to recruit labor assistance for agricultural tasks and community cargos, facilitating women's work and lives in the community.

Conventional analyses of work in market economies tend to view women's reproductive capacity in negative terms, as a restriction on women's work capacities. Time allocation studies are an improvement in the assessment of women's work, both paid and unpaid. Neither type of analysis, however, captures the holistic reality of women's lives: that women are simultaneously producers and reproducers, simultaneously cultural and biological beings (see Martin 1987).

Despite the additional physiological and sometimes psychological stresses childbearing places on women, and despite temporary incapacitation due to childbirth and frequent interruptions for breast-feeding and child care, Cuyo Cuyo women handle remarkably heavy workloads. In order to fully assess women's work, we cannot separate their reproductive roles from their other work and social roles. They are heavily intertwined; one cannot be understood without the other. My inclusion of childbearing in this chapter on gender and work is one attempt to provide a more holistic view of the intersection of gender and work.

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In the following chapters, we will see how individuals of both genders express symptoms and illnesses related to work and other activities in their lives. I will show how Cuyo Cuyo women themselves understand their productive and reproductive lives in holistic terms, and how this is demonstrated in the symptoms they present