Lecture given at the Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin .

1990

CONSTRUCTION OF INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE IN THE ARGENTINE PUNAS

Mario A. Rabey

Twenty years after the Stockholm Conference, the main focus on which the environmental
discussion converges remains the controversy between a vision that privileges nature
conservation and another that claims for solving in the first place the needs of human
populations. The debate between both views, conservation of the ecological and genetic
resources against socioeconomic development, is far from being elucidated. But nowadays
it is placed into a planetary dimension that was only outlined in 1972. The risks derived from
growing ecological damages as well as from persistent poverty exhibit currently a global
.(scale, and surpass largely the thin limits of the international borders (Manshard, 1990

The concern is currently devoted to supranational issues or to the whole biosphere and not
to particular nations. At the same time, it is intended to circumscribe critical problems which
could produce non local but generalized risks to the humankind and the biosphere (Clark,
1990). In this paper I will try to contribute to this twofold global perspective, watching a very
general problem, the popular creation of knowledge, addressed into the framework of a
supranational regional context, the high Andean plateaus or punas, which belong to four
Latin American countries: Peru, Chile, Bolivia and Argentina.

In an earlier paper dealing with the relationships that link popular knowledge and practices
to development planning (Rabey, 1990 a), I proposed that the relative failure in recovering
and applying this knowledge in building models of sustainable development may be due to
some hidden aspects of popular knowledge. Those aspects were: (a) a lack of concern with
the relationships between popular and institutionalized Western knowledge; (b) an
overstated interest in indigenous knowledge; (c) a very analytical view that detaches
different types of knowledge; (d) a lack of perception of the dynamics of popular knowledge.
Now I will discuss with more detail the last of these problems that was defined as the critical
one in the conclusions of the above mentioned paper. It must be challenged the classical
analytical difference between "modern" and "traditional" societies and cultures that carries to
practice a fundamental distinction between "Western" and "ethnic' or "popular" knowledge, a
distinction that may prove to be inadequate for designing alternative models of
development.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF POPULAR KNOWLEDGE

Anthropology, like other social sciences, frequently reproduces an assumption deeply

installed in social theory, as well as in more public representations, according to which local
cultures do not perform endogenous changes with a rhythm that is visible to short time
observers. The typical ethnographer arrives to the field searching for the rules that
characterize the studied group and distinguish it from others. That is to say, he looks for
regularities and not for differences. The "Western" culture is often distinguished from the
traditional ones by describing the former as changing and the later as non-changing. A
well-known example of this feature is the Lévi-Strauss (1963) distinction between "hot" and
"cold" societies, that is an actualized version of the "modernity-tradition" opposition
developed by 19th century great social theorists like Tönnies and Durkheim (Philibert
1989).

Thus, the anthropological records, including books, papers, and other academic
exchanges as teaching-learning, construct an Encyclopedia of popular knowledge that
includes philosophy, art, religion and science. Werner and Fenton (1970) proposed that an
ethnography should be an encyclopedic description of all that is known by a people. I am

1
not only speaking of ethnoscience and cognitive anthropology, that is to say, folk
explanations and categories. A great part of the anthropological construction on subjects
as "social organization", "economics" or "ideology" is a translation to academic language of
local popular science. The "informants" are the authors of oral--and sometimes written--
popular science studies, a status that many authors acknowledge. Moreover, local
informants started recently to reach the status of coauthor, like in the book of Bernard and
Salinas Pedraza (1989).

As it happens with all encyclopedias, and as it happens in a more general way with other
systematic and canonical repertories of knowledge, anthropology deals with the current
state of popular knowledge. It includes those systems of knowledge that are widely
accepted and dominant in each respective society on which the anthropologists write. Until
a few years ago anthropology: (a) stressed regularities in local human behavior, including
the verbal or written expressions of meaning used as ethnographic source; and (b) was
generally blind to the domestic emergency of new local behaviors and ideas. Intra-cultural
diversity has been neglected as a source from and an evidence of endogenous change in
social anthropology as well as in archaeology (Leeuw, 1989).

By neglecting non-normal behavior and meaning or by reducing them to the "deviant" part
of the studied society, anthropology put aside a main dimension of cognition: the
dissension. As Kuhn (1970) revealed for the development of modern Western science,
dissension is the key factor in the arise and development of new ideas and explanations.
As it happens in the "natural" world, intra-cultural diversity is the basis for sociocultural
change and evolution (Pelto and Pelto, 1975: 14-15).

In recent years, evidence appeared that shows the inadequacy of the prevalent theories
and descriptions where local cultures are presented as relatively static. These models
cannot incorporate data on the short-run endogenous emergence of new knowledge and
practices into local groups. Some authors presented evidence that, although spare, was
reported for societies and regions so very different as the Maquiguenga of Peruvian West
Amazonas (Johnson, 1972), the Mexican Maya (Konrad, 1980), the West African
traditional farmers (Richard, 1985), and the Kolla of the South-Central Andes (Rabey,
1989a). However, self-organizing change (Adams, 1988) continues being a largely hidden
aspect in the anthropological literature on popular knowledge. It appears as a theoretical
black box and there is no available model that explains how and in what context common
people construct their knowledge (Rabey 1990 b). A preliminary exception could be found
in some recent postmodernist appeals for the inventive condition of the culture (Clifford,
1986), as well as in the renewed emphasis on processual analysis (Rosaldo, 1989), that
stresses the relevance of local change over rules and static structures in cultural
interpretation.

In this paper, I will present data about the Kolla of the Provincia de Jujuy, in the
Argentine Andes (Fig. A), to illustrate how people do produce knowledge. Three aspects of
the construction of the popular knowledge will be emphasized: (1) the context of
construction; (2) the sources of variation; and (3) the processes. The relationship that
exists between diversity and processes into the framework of the popular knowledge also
will be noted.

A DIVERSIFIED AND CHANGING HERDING SYSTEM

The case I will present to discuss the construction of the popular knowledge is the human
control on llamas, sheep and goats, in the high Andean plateaus or punas. A main device
in Andean control over animals is the transhumance between different vegetation zones,
according to the relative abundance of the pastures and water needed to feed animals
(Merlino y Rabey 1978, 1983). The availability of these resources in each zone changes
through the year and causes the annual cycle of herding transhumance. It is also the basis

2
for a settlement pattern the main feature of which is that each family has two or more
seasonal residences to permit control of resources that are distant from one another.

At the Jujuy punas, there are two main systems of transhumance (Fig. B) that are built
upon opposite answers to the cyclical droughts (Rabey, 1989b). In the first, basic model,
people move up to the mountains at the beginning of the dry season, searching for
pastures that grow in the moist ground formed by the daily thawing of ice. In the second
transhumance system, the herders and their animals move down at the beginning of the
dry season, searching for the pastures that grow in the coast of rivers and lakes.

In the first system, named del cerro (hills transhumance), the llamas go alone, followed by
their owners. This system includes and applies basic knowledge on some aspects of the
animal behavior, like territoriality and, specially, the periodical movements that the animals
do as a part of their patterned behavior. The herders know well where their llamas will
move to, and this knowledge condition their spatial and temporal decisions, as well as the
territorial agreements they establish with their neighbors (Fig. C).

In the second system, locally named del campo (plains transhumance) the herders must
guide the llamas in their movements, working out a great deal of effort because llamas,
when the dry season begins, try to go up to higher pasture grounds. This system applies a
basic knowledge on some aspects of the llama behavior that are partially different with
respect to the one used by the moving-up herders. Here, the herders need to know more
closely the social behavior of their animals, including the dominance pattern where one
male masters a group of 30 or more animals.

This two-system description of herders' control over animals in the Jujuy punas draws,
however, a somewhat simplified model. The inhabitants of the region are always designing
variations of these two basic systems to cope with local conditions of the natural
environment, such as the wind and sun exposure, topography and types of soils. As far as
they respect the llamas' migratory pattern, the herders can perform a little pressure on
them to avoid their climbing. Then, they rotate between different areas remaining into the
same altitudinal belt. This variation results in the shaping of many different spatial
configurations--and annual cycles of movements--for the households, each building
different numbers of temporary residences and locating them in many different forms.
Each family makes a complex frame of decisions determined by land characteristics, herd
size and compositions, and by their own family size, composition, and history.

Another feature that alters the transhumance systems is the relationship between the
household and the market. This relationship is arranged by a set of physical and social
conditions. First, there is the physical access, as allowed by the presence of roads. In the
social side, personal links with traders and other townspeople are important modifiers in
the marketing of animal products, meanly meat and wool. During the last three decades,
this feature stimulated an increasing pressure on the plain lands better suited to be
traversed by roads and reached by urban middlemen, with the correlative intensification in
the plains herding system.

A third important source of variation in the Andean transhumance is the species

composition of the herd. Each family takes different decisions about the breeding of each
species--llama, sheep and goat--, according to the market, the household expected
requirements, and its cultural orientation. In turn, these decisions will change the
transhumance pattern. Sheep and goats are not well adapted to the extremely cold
temperatures of the high Andean mountains. Thus, when the herd is mainly or completely
composed of them, the herder could decide to invert the del cerro transhumance scheme.
At the beginning of the dry season he or she will move down, instead of moving up.
Eventually, the herders can remain in the same altitudinal belt the year round, doing only
daily movements with their herds aimed to the rotation of pastures. The families that own
llamas and sheep usually manage them in a separate but coordinate way, with different

3
members specializing in the management of each species.

Now, let us turn into an analysis of the transhumance variations from a different
perspective. Taking an idea that aroused early in social sciences (Comte, 1830-1842),
Boserup (1965, 1981), Harris (1977) and Johnson & Earle (1987) proposed population
growth as a greater force in human evolution. The general mechanism involved in such
causal relationship is the intensification of production. A sustained population growth
demands for increases in production that in turn require techno-social changes. An old
productive system that cannot feed a growing human population will be changed for a new
one to increase the subsistence production. This increase will generate greater returns
and, finally, utmost social and political changes.

The herders of the punas of Jujuy are an appropriate case to test this theory of population
growth/intensification of production/ techno-social change, because we have a good deal
of ethnographic evidence on their intracultural variations and innovative processes. In fact,
the variations in the two main models of transhumance already mentioned do not seem
consistent with the theory. The local processes of invention and their resulting
technological variations are not the result of population growth alone, and they do not
function by replacing an old system of knowledge for a new one. On the contrary, they
function by diversifying the available sets of knowledge and techniques. This diversification
is related with an intricate situation where some different mechanisms are involved.
Population growth is only one of these mechanisms, and it works jointly with individual and
household histories, and with changes in the articulation of the local group with other
groups and with the dominant institutions of the greater society, such as the market or the
State policy.

NEW HOME, NEW KNOWLEDGE

Another ethnographic cases will throw additional light on this subject, and will depict a
more detailed picture of the processes of construction of popular knowledge in the high
Andes. The first set of cases deals with colonization of lands into the same region; the
second one, with the intensification of production without moving. Most of my records on
the first kind of events are related with population growth but they particularly show
movements as performed by people without land that were searching for unoccupied
places.

The inter-regional colonization of rain forest lowlands by Andean peasants is quite known,
and so are the temporary migrations performed to work for a salary at the lowland
plantations (Casagrande et al, 1964; Reboratti 1978; Whiteford, 1981; Reboratti et al
1985). Less well known are the intra-regional relocations. In different localities of the Jujuy
punas, I found people who moved from their native land, according to three different
patterns of migration: (a) single isolated families moving from a place to another; (b)
isolated families from different departure points moving to the same place; and (c) a group
of families from the same community establishing a new one (Fig D). In order to adapt
themselves to the new environments, people constructed knowledge into this complex and
changing population dynamics.

The first pattern, isolated moving families, is exemplified by a family that moved from
Queta, a village in the Cochinoca 3,500 m valleys where there is an archaeologically-
grounded combination of herding and agriculture, to El Toro, a highest area at some 4,050
m where people practice herding without agriculture (Tecchi et al, 1988). During the 1930's,
a couple with two children migrated. Their elder, ten years old son remained with his
grandparents in Queta, learning agricultural techniques such as building and repairing
cultivation terraces, little channels and dams, and selecting seeds.

Ten years after, the eldest son married in Queta and also moved to El Toro, where he

4
started to develop experiments aimed to adapt his agricultural knowledge to the new
conditions. These experiments included the selection of maize and potato seeds, the
introduction of vegetables, the use of watersheds to make irrigation systems, and the
building of a little set of crop terraces on an archaeological site, where the soils had a high
rate of organic matter. When I first met him during 1983, in his 60s, he was actively
engaged in enlarging the terraces' field. One year later, he was trying to grow some trees
in an area where these were completely absent.

The second pattern of intra-regional migrations, families moving from different points to the
same place, is represented by the village of Barrancas, an area that received, from the
beginning of this century to the 1940s, people coming from not less than five departure
places (Rabey and Rotondaro, 1989). According to a colonial census, at the end of the
18th Century there were 88 inhabitants in Barrancas, against the 356 I found during my
fieldwork in 1983. But the contemporary barranqueños do not seem to be the
descendants of the colonial inhabitants. In fact, only 23 over the 88 18th Century people--a
24 %--had family names nowadays existing in Barrancas. This contrast is congruent with
the accounts of contemporary people, according to which the current population of
Barrancas arise from the five population flows above mentioned.

Each family brought a different stock of knowledge to the new community where as we will
see later, there is a much diversified array of technological practices. Some of these
techniques were imported from the departure places, but other were locally developed in
the last few decades, by introducing innovations from abroad or by employing indigenous
inventiveness. In all cases, people tested the knowledge by means of intentional
experiments.

The third pattern of intraregional migration, community schism, is illustrated by the

detachment of Coranzulí from an older village, Susques. According to the parish files of
Coranzulí, its first church was built in 1897, probably near the time when the village was
established. Susques is an ancient village, whose existence is reported by early Spanish
documents of the 17th century, and the Coranzulí schism was already mentioned at the
beginning of the present century by the first anthropologist that worked at this area
(Boman, 1908). Due to not well known reasons, a group of susqueños families decided to
quit the village and to found a new one. Seemingly, this relocation was triggered by a
factional conflict.

In 1977, when I did fieldwork in Coranzulí, this was a forty household village at a height of
3,750 meters. The greater part of the householders possessed a house in the village and
some temporary residences in specific territories, following the del cerro transhumance
system, which herders practiced here in a more typical way than in Barrancas. But, like in
Barrancas, coranzuleños have built farming fields in the village where they have small
harvests and also grow alfalfa to improve their animals' feeding. It is important to mention
that Susques, located only a hundred meters higher than Coranzulí, has no noticeable
current agriculture nor did it when Boman visited it 90 years ago. Coranzuleños, in their
move from Susques to create a new community, adopted and adapted agriculture
knowledge from neighborhood areas, mainly the knowledge linked to the building and
maintenance of terraces and irrigation devices.

Is Coranzulí, in spite of its technological uniqueness, a community with a more uniform

system of knowledge than Barrancas is? When Rodolfo Merlino and I wrote our first paper
on the herders of the Jujuy punas (Merlino and Rabey, 1978), we described Coranzulí as a
somewhat homogeneous place, although mentioning the fact that it was different from
other puna villages we reported. Yet by reviewing my field notes and cards I found that
there was also much intra-community ideological and technological variation in Coranzulí.
We did not see this diversity at that moment, and I conjecture this blindness must be
related to a theoretical bias that drove us to static and non-variation, classically
ethnographic descriptions.

5
INTENSIFICATION WITHOUT MOVING . . .

Like the peasants of the last set of examples, now I will move in another place, just to
depict a related set of cases that will illustrate the construction of knowledge among people
that do not migrate. The first case is contemporary Barrancas, a Jujuy puna village with a
population density of 1.5 inhabitants/km2, in comparison with an average of 0.5
inhabitants/km2 for the rural areas of the region. It also has a low emigration rate: some
20% of the alive barranqueños emigrated, as compared with figures of 50 and 60% in
nearby villages like Casabindo (Bratosevich 1988).

This demographic trend is primarily linked with the subdivision of land among relatives, but
it was only viable by applying new techniques, learning and innovating. Water and pasture,
in this order, are scarce and limiting resources for the herd animals. The first obstacle that
faces a barranqueño couple that wants to leave their parent's house and establish their
own household is to have water and pastures for the animals. The barranqueños
developed different answers to the problem. Some of them excavated deep wells to obtain
water when it was not available on their land. Other families built long channels to take
water from rivers, creeks or watersheds and carry it to their houses.

To solve the problem of the scarcity of pasture, the barranqueño's answer is to acquire
more knowledge. The herders who lack grassland habitually know more about plants than
do their neighbors; they are better folk botanists than their fellows. Furthermore the
combination of water-procuring knowledge with botanical knowledge allows them more
easily to modify the conventional transhumance system. In fact, the Barrancas' popular
knowledge could be characterized as a set of differently oriented popular projects of
research and development, into the framework of particular theoretic orientations and
empirical contents (Rabey, 1990c).

. . . AND WHAT ABOUT INCREASING RETURNS?

If we return to the evolutionary question derived from the population growth argument
posed early in this paper, we find that in Barrancas there are no such increasing returns,
accumulation and differentiation, that the theory invited us to expect. The barranqueños
are not conquerors of nature nor vanquishers of the neighboring communities. They just
construct knowledge, culture and landscape, as the painter who puts brush strokes here
and there but never finishes the picture.

There are however some puna people that are increasing their revenues because of their
innovative behavior. Those are a segment of the people who live in the fringe of the
Pozuelos lake (Rabey et al, 1986), as well as in other puna plains. They apply the del
campo transhumance, that is well suited to their environment, but have introduced some
major modifications in it. Among these modifications the more conspicuous are the
following: use of fences and enclosures to facilitate the control of animals; the planting of
artificial pastures; and the buying of fine animals to improve their sheep flocks. It is
meaningful to mention that all this changes resulted from different kinds of combinations
between their initiative and that sponsored by government agencies.

These people, unlike barranqueños, are intensifying their production without the stimulus
of a growing population. For them, the motivation came from the market, and from the
roads that traverse their possessions. And here the social change arrived: they became a
local class of farmers socially separate from their peasant neighbors and with an evident
inner differentiation.

6
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: THE AUTHOR AND HIS PEERS

Most of fieldwork where I gathered the data that are mentioned in this text was carried out
together with several colleagues, academic as well popular. As usually, none of those
colleagues must be considered responsible for the mistakes of my text. Some of them
could be regarded as coauthors of the ideas here presented, although it would be difficult
for me, if not impossible, to bring the accurate credits to each of them, and so I must offer
the pertinent apologies. Among these colleagues, I will firstly mention the anthropologist
Rodolfo Merlino, with whom I did fieldwork in Coranzulí and other places not reported here
like the quebrada de Don Valentín (Don Valentin's gorge) (Merlino and Rabey, 1978),
where it was gathered the main empiric basis to model the del cerro herding system.

With the cooperation of the biologist Rodolfo Tecchi we carried out fieldwork in El Toro and
in the Pozuelos basin, where we firstly recognized the presence of the del campo
transhumance (Rabey et al, 1985). The architect Rodolfo Rotondaro sometimes worked
with me at the territory of Barrancas (Rabey and Rotondaro, 1989), where Tecchi also
acted, in El Toro and in other places. The archeologist Alicia Fernández Distel mentioned
the 17th Century census I discussed while examining the peopling of Barrancas.

The inhabitants of Barrancas patiently and friendly supported my presence and that of my
changing collaborators, endowing us with the contents of their precious and open popular
system of knowledge. In fact, most of the understanding reflected in this paper must be
regarded as a product of a knowledge contract (Rabey and Kalinsky, 1991) between
Barranqueños--and other puna folk--and us. I feel myself awarded for thinking about my
own research career as included in the Kolla popular knowledge system, as well as in the
academic one. My main local partner, Don Héctor Alancay arises here to the place of
another author of this anthropology.

The first version of this paper was given on april 1990 at a Seminar organized jointly by the
ILAS (Institute of Latin American Studies) and the Department of Anthropology, University
of Texas at Austin, while I was enjoying a Fulbright Senior Research Award. I wish
acknowledge to the Fulbright Commission that gave me the chance to stay in USA during
three months and discuss diverse topics with many American colleagues. I am grateful to
those who attended the above referred Seminar and commented on my draft, particularly
to Steven Tomka, Henry Selby and Richard N. Adams, the formerly ILAS Director. A slowly
modified draft was presented at the VII Convención Internacional de Especialistas en
Camélidos Sudamericanos, that took place in San Salvador de Jujuy, Argentina, on april
1991, where it was usefuly commented by Rodolfo J. Merlino and Hugo Yacobaccio. A
slightly modified and translated to Spanish version was published in Buenos Aires (Rabey
1999).

7
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