On Place, Well-Being, and Illness in the Andes

Abstract

Andean places are animated by agential beings embodied in and associated with features of the local landscape. Some of these powers are generally benevolent and oversee the productivity, health, and wellbeing of households, crops, and herds, while others are primarily malevolent and may cause misfortune, illness, and ill-being. Andean people provide ritual offerings for the mountain spirits and Pachamama so as to ensure agricultural fertility and prosperity, and they make ritual payments to diablos in order to restore health and wellbeing. While ritual feeding attempts to act on these place-based spirits, it is efficacious because these agential forces may act on highlanders in turn. Andean people find themselves to be addressed by place-based powers who demand to be fed: they experience a corporeal interpolation of place through the bodily and material conditions of household members, their crops and herds, and their livelihood activities.