Barter and Social Regeneration in the Argentinean Andes

By Olivia Angé

Despite the pervasiveness of barter across societies, this mode of transaction has largely escaped the anthropologist’s gaze. Drawing on data from fairs in the Argentinean Andes, this book addresses a local modality of barter known as cambio. Bringing out its embeddedness within religious celebrations, it argues that cambio is practiced as a sacrifice to catholic figures and local ancestors, thereby challenging a widespread view of barter as a non-monetary form of commodity exchange. This ethnography of Andean barter considers processes of value creation, both economic and subjective, to further our understanding of how social groups create themselves through economic exchanges.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781785336836

Olivia Angé

Olivia Angé is a Professor of Anthropology at Université Libre de Bruxelles. Besides a series of papers, she is the author of Barter and Social Regeneration in the Argentinean Andes (Berghahn, 2018), and co-editor of Anthropology and Nostalgia (Berghahn, 2014).

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BARTER AND SOCIAL REGENERATION IN THE ARGENTINEAN ANDES

Barter and Social Regeneration in the Argentinean Andes

Olivia Angé

First published in 2018 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2018, 2021 Olivia Angé

First paperback edition published in 2021

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78533-682-9 hardback

ISBN 978-1-80073-211-7 paperback

ISBN 978-1-78533-683-6 ebook

To Maywa,

a daily alegría

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1. Household Economy in an Argentinean Highland Village

Chapter 2. Historical Perspectives on Andean Fairs

Chapter 3. The Fair: A Religious Gathering of People and Goods

Chapter 4. Modalities of Transactions at Fairs

Chapter 5. Barter and the Making of Society

Conclusion

References

Index

Illustrations

0.1. Panorama of the main fair in the Argentinean Andes: the Manka Fiesta in La Quiaca, October 2007.

0.2. A flock of sheep in their pen adjacent to a household in the highlands of Chalguamayoc.

1.1. Landscape of the puna in Chalguamayoc, Argentina, where ecological conditions are propitious for the breeding of llama and sheep herds.

1.2. Landscape of the quebrada in Tupiza, Bolivia, where ecological conditions are propitious for the cultivation of maize and fruits.

1.3. Offering asking the Pachamama to protect the integrity of a truck or even to increase its value through time.

2.1. Llama trains suggest that contemporary fairs stem from precolonial inter-ecological trade routes. Today they have become exceptions, but still persist in some meetings like the Santa Catalina fair.

3.1. Spontaneously formed rows at the Yavi Easter fair in 2005.

3.2. A family packing their encampment and goods at the end of the Santa Catalina fair in 2010.

3.3. Teenagers’ celebration in the sector of the ball tents at the Manka Fiesta in 2008.

3.4. Bolivian potters from the region of Casira in Bolivia, wearing their typical clothes at the Yavi Easter fair in 2010.

3.5. Although ethnonyms are rarely used in fairs’ interactions, the term Kolla is publicly displayed since the legal acknowledgement of Indigenous communities in Argentina.

3.6. A gringa buying a wicker basket from a braided campesina at the Yavi Easter fair in 2010.

3.7. Commodities on sale at the Manka Fiesta in 2008.

3.8. A cultivator gladly setting up her diversified stall at the Yavi Easter fair in 2005.

4.1. According to the elders’ measures, a sheep from the highland is worth two cradles of fruits from the lowland.

4.2. Cambio scale of value is mostly based on volume: a clay pot is worth its content in food – here, dried meat.

4.3. Cambio scale of value is mostly based on volume: a wicker basket is worth its content in food – here, dried fava beans.

5.1. A Bolivian cultivator greeting an Argentinean herder after a good cambio, crowned with a yapa.

5.2. Worshippers pleasing the Virgin with the hustle and bustle of the Santa Catalina fair while the Virgin blesses the fair in hope for fruitful exchanges.

5.3. A peasant bowing his head at the hoisting of three flags (for Indigenous people, the nation and the ministry of agroindustry) during the inauguration of an institutional fair in 2009.

5.4. Peasants displaying their ‘Indigenous identity’ admired by the provincial secretary of agricultural production at an institutional fair in 2009.

6.1. Offering to the Pachamama at the central market of Villazón, suggesting that ritual economics also entail commodity exchanges.

Foreword

James G. Carrier

This book is about barter, one of the ways that people transact with each other. As Olivia Angé notes in her Introduction, in The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith (1976 [1776]: 17) made an assertion that has become famous, that there is a ‘propensity in human nature … to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.’ Although The Wealth of Nations is old it is important, for it presents a view of transactions, and of economic activity more generally, that is reflected in much common modern thought. Ange’s book presents a corrective to that view, and here I want to sketch how it does so. To do that, I start with Smith’s work.

One aspect of that view of transactions is a focus on things. This appears in Smith’s description of the effects of an increased division of labour (e.g. 1976 [1776]: 8–9). That increase is the result of changing the organisation of production, and it affects relations among the people who make things, as well as among producers, merchants and consumers. Smith’s concern, however, is the way that it means that more things can be produced by fewer people, and that it encourages, even necessitates, that truck, barter and exchange of things.

Of course the stress on things is not absolute, for it is people who do the transacting. When Smith invokes those people, however, the concern with things remains, for things are the focus of the desires of those who contemplate transaction. As he (1976 [1776]: 18) puts it, the only way that we can induce others to transact with us is to say to them, in effect: ‘Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want’.

For Smith, then, the economy seems to connect only things and individuals, with their desires and resources, and the only link between people is that of the transaction itself, a link that is dissolved when the transaction is completed. There are, then, only autonomous individuals and things, which can be the things that they desire or the things that are their resources. As he (1976 [1776]: 18) put it, ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest’, so that, in our dealings with our fellows, ‘We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.’

Smith is not the earliest proponent of this view of people and their transactions, but probably he is the most famous one. The view became widespread in Anglo-American thought (Dumont 1977; Macpherson 1962) and following the emergence of marginalism it became enshrined in the discipline of economics. It is, of course, what Karl Polanyi (1957: 243) called the formalist view of economy, and it is manifest every time we see an advertisement that presents us with an impersonal thing, tells us how it provides something that we want and how much we will have to pay to get it.

For a century or so, anthropologists of different sorts have pointed out how wrong-headed that view is, because of its failure to do what this book does: recognise the social aspects of transactions and those who make them. Ordinary people also know that Smith’s view is wrong-headed, or would if they looked at their own lives carefully. Most obviously, they would know it if they thought about the presents given and received on birthdays and holidays. They would know it as well if they thought about less ceremonious transactions, like when they go out to the bar on Fridays with their work mates and take turns buying rounds of drinks. They may think that paying for a tin of tomatoes at the supermarket is an impersonal transaction, and it is, but even that is surrounded and shaped by social relations and intentions (Miller 1998). People know this, for they know that they bought the tin because the tomatoes are an ingredient for the soup that their children like, are part of a recipe that they are trying to master so that they can serve it to their friends when they come over for dinner or that they will use to make something that they enjoyed when they were on holiday in Milan.

While Smith’s view of people and their transactions is flawed, he was right when he said that a growing division of labour leads to an increase in exchange. That is not, however, because of some natural human propensity. It is rather because the increasing division of labour, at least in the history of Western Europe and North America, has been associated with a decline in people’s ability to produce things of value for themselves, very different from the people Angé describes. Land and other resources that had been held in common became private, the skills that people needed to make things became lost.

People may have been happy with these changes, for they were accompanied by a proliferation of consumer goods. Happy or not, however, the vast majority were reduced to having only one thing to sell, their labour power, their ability to work. That is something that they themselves do not produce in any ordinary sense and when it is sold it is used to produce things that belong to their employers, not themselves. All that the worker gets is pay, money that needs to be spent to buy the food, shelter and clothing produced by others. In such circumstances, the things that surround people became much more impersonal than they had been previously.

Another reason why the things that people confront became more impersonal is that the growing division of labour meant that those things are made by no identifiable person. The shirts that people wear, the cars that they drive, even the tins of tomatoes that they buy, are produced by an anonymous workforce, even robots. The woman who runs the small bakery around the corner may be able to point to a loaf of bread and say ‘I made this’, though even here ‘we’ might be more accurate; no one can say this of the sliced loaf wrapped in plastic that is displayed on the supermarket shelf. People do appropriate such things, make them personal, but this requires a lot of work in one way or another. Overwhelmingly that work is done for things that people will consume, like the food that they eat, and the things that they give each other. Also overwhelmingly, that appropriation is largely symbolic: it is not the material personalisation that comes with growing a crop, weaving a cloth, baking a loaf of bread, painting a picture or writing a book.

The processes that brought about the growing division of labour have also affected the ways that people transact. They still give and get in personal relations among family and friends. However, impersonal transactions in retail trade have become more and more insistent in people’s lives. The spread and changing nature of that trade has two consequences that deserve mention. The first is that fewer and fewer people from whom we get things are like that woman who runs the small bakery or like the agriculturalists Angé describes. Rather, they are shop assistants whose job is to sell us things that they do not make. The second consequence is that those assistants have no control over what they sell and how much it costs; indeed, in self-service supermarkets the assistant is a mindless machine rather than a human being. This means that, routinely when we buy we are what is called price takers, for we accept the price attached to the shirt, the book and the loaf of bread; if we do not like the price we can not negotiate, all we can do is walk away.

In other words, as retail trade has developed, the transaction of money for the things that we purchase can be carried out silently by strangers. The things that we buy are impersonal commodities that require no discussion or negotiation, or even really allow any, for they are defined by their brand name and by the industrial system of production that assures that one bottle of Coca-Cola, one loaf of Sunblest bread and one tin of Heinz beans is indistinguishable from another. Equally, what we exchange for them is money, which also requires no discussion or negotiation, for it is defined by the value printed or stamped on it and by the state that issues it. Like those bottles, loaves and tins, one $20 bill or 10 euro note is indistinguishable from another.

I have sketched these historical changes in stark terms, and in fact many people in Western Europe and North America do not always purchase things silently and in impersonal ways. For instance, they may patronise small shops and get to know the assistants, or they may frequent farmers’ markets in their towns. For the overwhelming majority, however, nothing that they can do can overcome the fact that what they transact is money, not something of value that they themselves have produced, and the fact that the person with whom they transact is a passive intermediary, far removed from the making of the thing that we buy.

Those historical changes, and many people’s experience of living with the result, is one of the things that make Angé’s book worth our attention. That is because it shows the work that has to be done to allow the transactions between people that we take for granted to occur. I want to look briefly at some of what she describes, and doing so allows us to reflect on what we take for granted.

An important starting point is the fact that the people she describes are at different zones of altitude, which has two, linked consequences. The first is that they produce different foodstuffs, an agricultural division of labour that induces trade for the produce of different zones. The second is that, because the people producing those different foodstuffs are in different zones, they are at a fair distance from each other. That is, they are not neighbours, are not likely to be linked by the social relations that come with neighbourliness. Stated in extreme terms, when those from one zone want to start trading for the produce of another zone, they trade with strangers, just as I do when I walk into a supermarket or buy something on the web.

As Angé observes, Marshall Sahlins (1974: 191–6) argued that reciprocity, which includes transactions, is likely to vary according to the social distance between transactors, simplified into his trio of generalised, balanced and negative reciprocity. The last of these is transactions with those at great social distance, and it is characterised by competition, bleeding over into chicanery and sharp practice. Put more simply, transacting with strangers is risky and unsettling. Two things help account for this. One is that strangers are those with whom we have little or no experience. That means that we know little or nothing of them, and so are hard pressed to know if they will be honest and straightforward or devious and manipulative. The other is that, because they are strangers, we do not transact with them repeatedly. This means that if we think that they have treated us poorly in one transaction, we will not be able to seek redress in a later one.

The situation, then, is like that of the autonomous and self-regarding individuals in Smith’s view of economy. Those are the people most of us confront when we buy, and we deal with the attendant uncertainty with a range of practices and beliefs. For instance, we think in terms of the identity conferred by brands, both the brand of what we buy and the brand of the retailer. Also, as I mentioned, the things on offer are mass produced and so are of a uniform quality, which means that if we buy them once we are able to predict what they will be like if we buy them again. Further, we know that manufacturers have warranties on their products and we expect that stores will offer our money back if something is wrong. Finally, behind this all stands the state, prepared to punish egregious fraud and deception.

In other words, if we do not often think that transacting with strangers is risky, it is because collectively we have done a lot of things to reduce that risk. As Dorothy Davis describes, in England in the seventeenth century this collective work had not been done. Instead, people needed to do it for themselves. As she (Davis 1966: 181) describes:

The shopper of those days, whatever he needed, had to buy a lot of personal service along with the goods, for he depended very heavily on the shopkeeper’s knowledge and skill and honesty. To shop successfully it was important to choose a reliable shopkeeper and come to terms with him. Not necessarily friendly terms; acrimonious terms would do just as well; but at least personal terms.

The people Angé describes have no brands, warranties or the like that make dealing with strangers less unsettling, and much of what she describes in her book looks like beliefs and practices that, whatever the intention, help turn unsettling strangers into people with whom we can transact. I want to illustrate this with a couple of examples.

One is the association of trade with religious events and places. They attract people and so facilitate trade, but they do more than that. That is because the religion that they express provides a moral order that helps to identify and unify those people as fellow believers, less unsettling than pure strangers. Similarly, she describes how people invoke the ways of the ancestors. This provides a moral order as well, whether people adhere to those ways or lament that the younger generation departs from them. In either case, a moral commonality is invoked. Another example is more personal. Practices like yapa, the little extra added at the end of the transaction, help to produce and sustain durable relationships by indicating that the transaction is not simply an economic exchange of like for like, but that it has a social dimension as well. From what I have said already, it should be clear that this is not simply an economistic desire for repeat business. Rather, it is a way to turn anonymous strangers into known and predictable transactors.

There is much in Barter and Social Regeneration in the Argentinean Andes and it can be thought about in different ways. What I have tried to do here is present one of those ways, a way that encourages us to look at what Angé describes in terms of a problem that people have long confronted and that they seek to deal with in different ways. That is the problem of transacting with strangers. I have mentioned some of the ways that societies in Western Europe and North America, as well as in other parts of the world, have dealt with it. Those ways turn people’s attention from the individuals with whom they transact to the identity of the objects transacted and the institutions involved. The people Angé describes deal with the problem in a different way. They attend to those individuals and engage in practices that help turn them from unsettling strangers into familiar and predictable fellows.

References

Davis, D. 1966. A History of Shopping. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Dumont, L. 1977. From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Macpherson, C.B. 1962. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Miller, D. 1998. A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Polanyi, K. 1957. ‘The Economy as Instituted Process’, in K. Polanyi, C.M. Arensberg and H.W. Pearson (eds), Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory. Glencoe, Ill: The Free Press, pp. 243–70.

Sahlins, M. 1974. Stone Age Economics. London: Tavistock.

Smith, A. 1976 (1776). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Acknowledgements

After centuries of abuses of all kinds, Indigenous people in the Argentinean puna have learned to be suspicious of strangers’ gazes. They have become experts in the art of conducting confusing interactions by which they avoid complying with others’ expectations without any confrontation. This is how they have been able to transmit cultural practices that were mocked, sometimes even forbidden, on the national scene. In such an interethnic context, I received every sign of trust and care as an important benefaction. And I received many. In the hope that this book will honour the original gift, I took the greatest care to remain faithful to my hosts’ discourses and experiences, shared in the intimacy of courtyards, or publicly at the fair. I am aware, however, that this is a debt that I would hardly be able to cancel; I will better keep it alive in memory and enduring reciprocity.

There are some houses in Chalguamayoc (Jujuy, Argentina) where I was constantly welcome. At the home of Telesforo Benitez and his wife, Sylberia, as well as Justo Benitez and Isabela, I could find warm refuges when wandering in the highlands. I want to thank them for their unconditional hospitality. In Yavi, my neighbour Lola Tintilay and Mariel, her daughter, befriended me. I am indebted to the staff of the local NGO. They accepted my awkward presence in meetings, and they satisfied my curiosity about their affairs, while my interventions ended up being of little use to them. In particular, Lucio Martinez, and his wife, Julia – they are not only leaders, they are exemplary.

Fairs are settings of very rich sociability. I would not be able to name all the people who helped me to navigate the fiesta, through the masses, barters and balls. But I do remember them, with immense gratitude. Some of them came from the village of Chosconty, such as Perfecto and Simona, Genoveva and Masimo. Thank you for never failing to rendezvous at the Yavi and Manka Fiestas. Thank you as well for initiating me to the elder’s measures.

Further away, Anne Marie Losonczy from the Université libre de Bruxelles and Gilles Rivière from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales also helped me to apprehend fairs and look at them with new eyes. Their teaching stimulated my interest in these complex transactional scenes. They are outstanding thinkers, meticulous ethnographers and generous supervisors, and I feel very fortunate to have had them close to me throughout. While continuing this investigation as a postdoctoral researcher, I received the beneficial support of my sponsors Laura Rival at Oxford University, Anne Christine Taylor at the Musée du quai Branly and Alberto Arce during the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship at Wageningen University. I thank them for hosting me in their departments, for nurturing my thought and for giving me the opportunity to pursue my research in new directions.

Throughout the years spent in these institutions, I met some particularly inspiring scholars: Sasha Newell, Joël Noret, Pierre Petit, Daou Joiris, Maïté Maskens, Marc Brigthman, Perig Pitrou, Julien Clément, Jessica de Largy, Emilie Stoll, Élise Demeulenaere and Maité Hernando Aresse are great friends and colleagues. I have learned a lot while thinking with them. Thank you very much. Giovanni da Col, Inge Daniels, Emilia Ferraro, Tristan Platt and Nico Tassi read my work and provided helpful advice to disentangled theoretical conundrums. We did not know each other personally when they accepted to help me. Likewise, I received comments from two wise anonymous reviewers who thoroughly read my manuscript. The free gift exists in academia, and I very much appreciate it.

Last but not least, David Berliner is the one who has been present at all stages, since he shared with me his fascination for nostalgia. His teaching is huge, and it extends beyond academia. He is a guide, a fruitful and funny one. Thank you for clearing up my many, many doubts, for being kindly critical and for taking an interest in my life, even when you could not pay much attention to yourself.

I am very thankful to Marion Berghahn for considering my manuscript and for making this book become a reality; to Lizzie Martinez, Amanda Horn and Harry Eagles, who have demonstrated treasures of patience in bringing this book through the production process; and to Nora Scott, who impressed me by scrupulously translating my thought.

I also want to express my gratitude to non-academics who were life companions while I was writing this book. Javier Briones has devoted a great amount of energy to this research. I want to thank him once again. I am grateful to Silvia, Raul and the Briones family for genuinely opening their arms. Thanks to Martin Maïnoli for his good-hearted creativity. All of them, as well as Chris and Rafa, were generous in giving me a taste of the joys their Argentinean livelihood offers. Experiencing their cultural intimacy was a transformative learning process that I mostly enjoyed. I am deeply thankful as well to my Belgian comadres: Mélanie Van Pelt and Julie Callebaut. They are a constant source of social effervescence and affective relief. My brother, Mikaël has been a master in restoring ontological security. My sisters, Marine and Chloé, have spent extended periods in the puna, helping me to assemble my life dispersed across the continents. Thank you for being as you are.

Since I have been back in Europe, my liveliness has been enhanced by the daily care of my beloved partner, Thierry de Crombrugghe. From him, I received the supreme gift, a flourishing life.

Introduction

This book explores how barter creates social and economic values by addressing a particular kind of Andean exchange: cambio. This trade is a core transaction in fairs that gather lowland cultivators and highland herders in the Southern Andes. Such fairs are usually embedded in the celebration of a Catholic feast day, which also entails sportive, religious and political dimensions. Similar festivals are held throughout the cordillera, where fairs arise in conjunction with religious ceremonies, many times constituting a fundamental asset of the celebration. In fact, this case is not peculiar to the Andes, as the condensation of economic transactions in the frame of a religious celebration is found in many cultural and historical contexts.

Anthropological theorisation of ritual practices has nonetheless been built on a conceptualisation of religious practices as disjoined from mundane economic interests. The opposition is based on the premise that the formalities of ritual revere the collectivity, while exchanges of necessities are chiefly individual. Anthropologists have crafted the concept of ceremonial exchange to account for those transactions at the interface of the economic and the ritual. Ceremonial exchange was the cornerstone of Bronisław Malinowski’s detailed account on the Trobriand kula, in which he argued against the stereotype of the primitive economic man. In his typology of local forms of exchange, Malinowski opposes the pure gift to ‘trade pure and simple’ as extremes of a continuum of transactions that are not always clearly distinguished. Adjacent to trade, he identifies the category of ‘ceremonial barter with deferred payment’. This includes the wasi that he defines as ‘a ceremonial form of exchange of vegetable food for fish, based on a standing partnership, and on the obligation to accept and return an initial gift’ ([1922] 2002: 143). He thus describes these ceremonial barters as made of ‘payments’ and ‘gifts’, stressing that they are compulsorily accepted, without negotiation over the terms of the transactions. Malinowski adds that huge quantities of fish obtained through wasi are intended for ceremonial purposes, thereby suggesting a nonutilitarian character of ceremonial exchange. This character is prominent in the case of the prestigious