Many different levels of interpretation of the complex wayñu ceremony are possible. First, the llamas are ‘flowers’ in ritual language – they are the p”aqalli of the herders. Don Marcos explained some of the meanings of the term by indicating the muru p”aqalli flower design woven by women in their shawls and blankets, and by referring to ‘llamas, both male and female’ (personal communication 25 February 1987). During the ch’allta of his llamas and alpacas on 28 February 1987, Don Ambrosio gestured expansively and commented: ‘My p”aqalli are my bank’. Elsewhere in the Andes, the earpieces are called tika, which means ‘flower’ in Quechua (Tomoeda 1985: 290). The flowering ceremony is performed to help ensure that the lineages of camelids flourish and multiply, an imagery that is also conveyed through the gnarled and deeply symbolic qiñwa trees. Both herd animals and trees represent a stock, whether livestock or rootstock.
In Aymara culture the notion of flowering is laden with resonance; it has to do with both memory and inspiration.5The Aymara verb p”anchayaña can be used for the opening of a bud and the opening of the heart, as one is inspired to create something. Denise Arnold observes that in Qaqachaka, Bolivia, women say ‘heart, make me flower’6when they seek inspiration in their weaving (Arnold 1997: 108). There is a gendered aspect to this notion of flowering because women, in particular, act as sources of memory and inspiration, as well as having the capacity to bring forth lineages. Similarly, female llamas and alpacas bear animal lineages. Herd animals, too, are encouraged to flower, just as their ears flower with blood when their ears are notched.7During the butchery of a sacrificed llama, the manner in which the blood drips from the heart is examined as an augury of good fortune. With the intestines, the heart is one of the first internal organs to be eaten by the human participants at the wayñu ceremony.
The flowering of the herd animals is enhanced by their ritual investiture with significant items (the ear and neckpieces and the dyed fleece). Nevertheless, these items will not have effect without the singing of certain songs. Mournful sounds are the essential complement of the strong colours (red, pink, orange, and the tonal gradations of green, orange and red). It should be remembered that Isluga people regard brightly coloured hills which are devoid of vegetation as ambiguous by nature, possessing dangerous qualities but also containing minerals. Anything which is glittery or highly charged with colour is held in awe: for example, rain- bows, which have the power to enter the stomach of a woman, causing severe stomach pains, or to make people ill. Traditionally, women weavers incorporated very restricted narrow bands of strong, dyed colour in their textiles, which contrasted with wide expanses of natural colour. Nowadays, younger weavers are
introducing more colour in their weavings, and they are extending the range of tones in a specific combination of colours called a k’isa.8Verónica Cereceda regards the Isluga k’isa as the ‘mirror’ of a rainbow, but it is not an exact copy (Cereceda 1987: 215). In my analysis, the tonal gradations of colour are the visual equivalent of music, hence the importance of k’isa, which are used in the neckpieces and two of the earpieces (the tilantir sarsillu and wantilurita) worn by the female guides and the males, respectively. In textiles, k’isa are incorporated into certain woven items, and weavers say that it is important that the colours should ‘sing out’. They are therefore the visual counterpart to the making of music by men. In some parts of the Andes, the Aymara word k’isa means ‘wrinkled fruit’ or, in other words, fruit which is sweet and over-ripe, indicating that, on another level of contrasts, the almost over-bearing sweetness of the colours is opposite to the sombre and plaintive character of the sounds of the music. As the ceremony progresses, the owners begin to cry for their animals; the wayñu is a sorrowful event.
Colourful meteorological phenomena like the rainbow are perceived to be awesome, but also propitious because of their association with beneficial rains. A distrust for strong colour is paralleled by the Bororo in lowland South America; Lévi-Strauss (1970: 321) mentions their avoidance of colour and pattern in their clothing and pottery. Similarly, older people in Enquelga show a marked reluc- tance for too much polychromaticism in everyday contexts, and their preference for natural colours is in marked contrast to the textiles produced elsewhere in the Andes. However, the use of chromatic colour arrangements in the wistalla, which are tied round the llamas’ necks, and in the tilantir and wantilurita sarsillu, takes place in a context designed to promote the fertility of the animals, and in a ceremony which pays homage to the spirits of the hills.
It is important that, with the abundance of strong colour during the ceremony, human beings should not be silent when confronted with the superiority of the mallku and t’alla. Perhaps herein lies the significance of ritual drunkenness dur- ing the marking ceremony. This is the one time of the year when women allow themselves to become drunk; during other ritual events they take alcoholic drink but they maintain their sobriety and act as intermediaries between their drunken menfolk, who may become aggressive towards each other in such a state. During the wayñu, the mother of the household is expected to imbibe an excess of alcohol: ‘You have to drink until you fall down’, Doña Luisa instructed me. Alcohol gives courage to call on the fiercest of the uywiri with enthusiasm, as related to Martínez by an Isluga man who visited a powerful juturi alone, under the darkness of night: ‘With a little drink you . . . have more head . . . you call on the juturi with more enthusiasm, Jutur Mallku! . . . Jutur T’alla!’ (Martínez 1976: 286–7). The need for lower-status humans to speak respectfully to higher-status uywiris also helps to explain why songs are sung all night and for a greater part of the time spent in the corral. There is one moment of respectful silence when obeisance is made to these spirits, when the human participants lie down, head to the ground, in an act of humility. This is followed by the offering of black maize ch’uwa to the t’alla (‘lady’ uywiri), and white to the mallku (‘lord’ uywiri).9Respect for the uywiri is also shown at the very beginning of the ceremony before the all-night vigil, and again at the
entrance to the corral, when the married couple who are celebrating the wayñu kneel and ask the spirits for permission to proceed with the ceremonies.
During the daytime activities at the site of the kancha, people periodically return to the flat stone on which is laid the ritual table (plate 4.2). The layout of ritual items is an important aspect of the ceremony, and not only in Isluga.10There are three main objects which form the basis of the misa in Isluga: at least two plaited ropes and an inkuña, a small rectangular cloth containing coca leaves and sugar. Ropes are spun and plaited from camelid fleece by men. For daily use, they are made from naturally coloured fleeces, but for the ritual table they may include one or two dyed red or orange strands. The inkuña, on the other hand, is one of the typical products woven by women. When the ritual table is laid out, the inkuña is placed between the two ropes. These items are arranged on a carrying cloth (awayu), which is also the product of women’s work. This cloth wraps the items of the ritual table when they are not in use, and for the greater part of the year the bundle of potent items (q’ipi) is stored in the dark corner of a house. Both women’s and men’s success in herding is reflected in these highly charged items that are the product of their own labour – spinning and weaving by women, and spinning and plaiting by men.
For the purposes of the wayñu, many more items are piled on the ritual table. When the awayu is spread over the large, flat stone outside the kancha, different
Plate 4.2 Laying out the items (chimpu, wistalla and sarsillu) with which the llamas will be ritually dressed during the wayñu ceremony. In the background is the mamaqullu misa, the ritual table laid on a large flat stone for the ritual dressing of the female animals. Note the stuffed wild cat, spiritual guardian of the camelids.
types of waña (dry) and uq”u (wet) pasture are placed in front. During the ceremony, the lower legs of the slaughtered llama are piled on top of the ropes, and the whole ritual table is regularly sprinkled with libations of chicha, alcohol and coca leaves. Other items included in the misa are a bell on a rope (formerly, these were used by the leading animals of a llama caravan) and mummified wild cats and chullumpi birds. A family may own one or two such mummified felines, stored inside the q’ipi bundle. They are placed on each side of the ritual table. Titi is the Aymara word for a wild cat, but during the wayñu, it is never referred to as such. Instead, it is called awatiri (‘the herder’), for Isluga people regard this wild animal as being the supernatural herder of the llama and alpaca herds. Chimpu is tied round the neck and inserted into the eye sockets of the mummified awatiri. Similarly preserved chullumpi are also wrapped in lengths of chimpu, recalling the ropes with which the mythical bird was constrained in the narrative reported by Martínez in Chapter 3.
One family had suffered a great deal of bad luck and had lost many llamas during the year previous to its wayñu in 1987. As the mother of this family spread out the awayu and its contents on the misa stone, she picked up a rope and symbolically ‘whipped’ each of the awatiri while she berated them in Aymara for being ‘lazy’ and for not protecting the llamas. The wayñu is a time of heightened emotions, when herders attempt to put right all that is held to be wrong. Similarly, another woman vehemently berated one of her tilantir llamas and castigated it by kicking the animal for constantly wandering.
In contrast, Don Apolinario and Doña Luisa’s family had had more success with their herding. I attended their wayñu on Saturday, 21 February 1987 and their ch’allta on Saturday, 1 February 1997. By 1997, their herd of alpacas produced two animals with a very light brown-coloured fleece (plate 4.3). Up until that year, people had been insistent that although alpacas sported the full colour range in other parts of the Andes, in Isluga alpaca herds do not contain animals with very light brown fleece. In contrast, it is commonly found in herds of llamas within Isluga. Various people in Isluga have told me that Sajama in Bolivia is an area where alpaca herds contain the full colour range in their fleece. The fortunate family with the two light brown alpacas is convinced of the effectiveness of the marking ceremony. During the ch’allta in February 1997 Don Apolinario’s alpaca was referred to as his ‘vicuña alpaca’. It was decorated profusely with dyed chimpu fleece down the length of its spine and also on its flanks. The herd, or tama, was seen as the generative source of this unusual vicuña-coloured alpaca, but the family also recognized the beneficence of their uywiri following their wayñu in 1996, to which they paid tribute during their subsequent ch’allta in 1997.
A theme that is made evident through the ritual of the marking ceremony is the symbolic transformation of pasture into fleece. Tomoeda (1985) discusses the use of coca leaves and waylla grass as symbols of the increase and abundance of wool among the herders of llamas and alpacas in the Apurímac region of southern Peru (in Isluga waylla is the name of a grass found alongside certain rivers). Tomoeda argues that, figuratively, wool derives from vegetable material (ibid.: 296). Thus, pasture is transformed into fleece, which is spun into yarn, which is
then converted into clothing. In the Isluga marking ceremony, different types of pasture are given a prominent place in front of the ritual table, and the fleecy skin of the sacrificed llama is placed alongside the plants after the animal has been sacrificed. Coca leaves are also chewed and offered to the Wirjin Tayka by the human participants. Some families possess a special bag for holding coca leaves, normally stored inside the q’ipi bundle, and it is worn round the neck of the father of the family during the marking in the kancha. This bag, which is called k’illpaña in Isluga, is made of camelid skin with white, lustrous fleece. It resembles the pukuchu described by Flores Ochoa (1977: 215), a bag made from the skin of alpacas which die at a very young age, hence the beautiful sheen of the fleece. Every time the rows of llamas or alpacas representing the different categories of animals (tilantir guides, female llamas, female alpacas, llama and alpaca sires, castrated male llamas and alpacas) are selected and lined up to receive the songs and libations, animals with particularly long and lustrous fleece are chosen. Such animals are called saxsali, the significance of which is discussed further in the next chapter. The colour of the individual animals thus selected is important, too: they are also selected for their ‘good tone’.
Thus the marking ceremony may be seen as the celebration of two different kinds of relationship: that between the uywiri (mallku and t’alla) on the one hand, and human beings and herd animals on the other. Human beings also celebrate the relationship between the married couple and their children, with that of their llamas and alpacas. The Wirjin Tayka and the uywiri constitute an animated Plate 4.3 Light brown-coloured alpaca belonging to Don Apolinario Castro during the
landscape with regenerative powers and creative potency seen, for example, in the juturi. The design of the kancha and the use of the ritual table and of sarsillu, chimpu and wistalla help foster the fertility of the animals. All these items are made potent in ensuring increased fertility because of the magical situation created by the performing of the marking ceremonies.