"Land, Humus, Humans: Rationality and Ritual in Andean Agriculture.”

By Dr. Jorge Legoas, Associate Professor, Political Science, Universidad Central del Ecuador

Rationality and ritual in Indigenous milieus have never been seen as separate. We can see this fairly well in the relationship to the land among Quechua people of the Andes. This relationship involves specific local knowledges about the nature of the environment. In this presentation Dr. Legoas analyzes the affective-pragmatic everyday strategies of relating to the land in an Andean village, from the ethnographic (and somewhat oxymoronic) perspective of emotional concepts, political affect, pragmatic ritualizations, material spirits, names that alter instead of stabilize, nonhuman persons, living and dying places, suffering seeds, and acting words, which are brought together in cosmo-political relationships among the naturalcultural beings that constitute the Andean worlds.