Chapter 5 Pilgrims and Other Sorts of Personifications: Nonhuman Animals as Ritual Participants in Isluga, Northern Chile

In: Sentient Entanglements and Ruptures in the Americas: Human-Animal Relations in the Amazon, Andes, and Arctic
Author:
Penelope Z. Dransart
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Abstract

Human and nonhuman animals go on pilgrimages as wayfarers, but usually only the human participants are accorded the status of pilgrim. Based on the author’s ethnographic fieldwork among Aymara-speaking carers of llamas, alpacas and sheep in Isluga, northern Chile, this article demonstrates how herd members are co-participants along with human beings in ritual practices. Wayfaring as an activity is considered in relation to human personifications of other living beings, as well as of landforms in which the wayfaring takes place. Because the ritual inclusion of nonhuman animals takes place in a perceptual world that does not rest on an axiomatic split dividing ritual herders from non-ritual herded participants, the ethnographic evidence presented here indicates how dualistic principles in Isluga do not have the same contrastive force often imputed to Western ways of thinking and that commensurabilities between Andean and Western dualisms are partial, associated with different moral judgments.

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