Olivia Angé

Barter Fairs, Ethnic Configuration and National Multiculturalism in the Argentinean Andes

ABSTRACT In the Argentinean Andes, fairs constitute the main setting where lowland and highland Kolla peasants barter their agricultural production. In order to preserve these encounters – seen as traditional – in a context of peasants’ growing participation in capitalist economy, public organizations invest money for boosting old fairs and instituting new ones. The author proposes to qualify these fairs as ‘institutional’, compared with the ‘spontaneous’ ones that come along with religious celebrations. Alluding to Bourdieus concept of institutional rituals, this expression enlightens how such meetings assert social categories, whose boundaries are otherwise blurred. Drawing on an analysis of institutional fairs’ social and symbolic performativity, the paper argues that rather than ‘safeguarding ancestral customs’, as claimed by the organizers, these specific festivals publically state the conditions for the ethnic group at play to be integrated within the nation state.

Materializing Virtues: Crafted Miniatures as Moral Examples in the Argentinean Andes

In the Argentinean Andes, people craft miniatures in order to please Saint Anne. Most literature on Andean miniatures focuses on their exchange and use. This paper addresses their production process in an attempt to show that the value of miniatures is entangled in practices. Ethnographic description shows that miniatures should please the saint because they are said to be much more complicated to craft than their normally scaled homologues, and thus their production requires more diligence and faith. In this light, it is argued that miniatures are more than a physical reproduction of a larger-scaled model; they are examples in the sense that they completely incarnate key moral values. Yet, their coexistence with industrially manufactured items accounts for the exercise of individual choice in the realization of ritual scaling practices. In the context of an ongoing ethical turn in anthropology, this paper explores the articulation of collective morality and freedom as it relates to ritual scaling practices. In so doing it also highlights the entangled transmission process of technical skills, religiosity, and morality.

Miniatures in Mesoamerica and the Andes: Theories of Life, Values, and Relatedness

The fact that we find miniatures in many societies, past and present, attests to their broad attractiveness to human beings. Scholars from a wide array of disciplines, such as history of art, ethnology, philosophy, and archaeology, strive to tease out the complex mechanisms behind their production and use (Mack 2007). The abundant literature related to this topic demonstrates ongoing efforts to unfold these artifacts’ status and functions, whose identification is complicated by the fact that they are embedded in multiple systems of relationships. Before we review the main streams of research into miniature, it is important to note that the concept of miniatures itself appears to be reductive because it stresses their small size, but this does not account for the relativity of scale. Dimensionality implies a relationship that is established between someone who is looking or manipulating and the object being viewed and handled. When seeing a miniature, adults may experience the realization that they have grown up. Conversely, when handled by a child, some miniatures may seem normally scaled to them. As Susan Stewart puts it: “There are no miniatures in nature; the miniature is a cultural product, the product of an eye performing certain operations, manipulating, and attending in certain ways to, the physical world” (1993:55). For this reason, even if we conventionally, and conveniently, talk about miniature and miniaturization—including in this special issue of Journal of Anthropological Research—we should not forget that we are actually dealing with issues raised by variations in scale. Claude lévi-Strauss (1962) aptly pointed this out in his description of the intellectual satisfaction rising from the contemplation of a miniature. Such a relational dimension not only frames the perception of an object, it also entails its fabrication. less famously, lévi-Strauss asserted that in addition to the aesthetic pleasure of perceiving an object as a whole, the impression of grasping how it is fabricated is delightful—as if the reduction in

Instrumentaliser la nostalgie. Les foires de troc andines (Argentine)

Ce texte etudie les interactions qui accompagnent les echanges entre les cultivateurs et les bergers qui se reunissent lors des foires de troc dans les Andes argentines. Au fil de leurs transactions, les partenaires regrettent regulierement l’effritement contemporain de la complementarite ideale qui aurait autrefois uni les paysans des hautes et des basses terres de la cordillere. L’analyse de ces dialogues montre que la morale economique des ancetres peut etre habilement evoquee lors des negociations sur les ponderations du troc. Elle revele d’autre part la figure relationnelle instauree par cette rhetorique nostalgique et souligne finalement l’interconnexion entre la performativite sociale et l’efficacite economique de ces lamentations. Ce faisant, l’article eclaire la maniere dont la nostalgie prend place dans la structure dualiste qui se manifeste sur cette scene d’echange andine.