The House: A Vertical Entity

Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space: “ A house is imagined as a vertical being. It rises upward. It is a concentrated being. It appeals to our consciousness of centrality.” People never forget the house where they were born and raised. When they return to the hometown of their youth, they often visit this house, perhaps walking through it or at least driving by it. It is imbued with values which remain after the house is gone. The family home is a cherished image in society.

If within their home their fathers and mothers worked producing something, which in turn was stored in the basement of the house, the home also is remembered as a place of sustenance and supply. It evokes memories of banquets in the living room and parties in the yard. A certain room, for example, evokes scenes for me where my grandmother was laid out for burial. A home constitutes a body of images that give us proofs or illusions of stability.

The house is a familial and cultural institution that deserves understanding and respect from anyone attempting to improve it. Even though some houses are environments conducive to sickness, they are endowed with sacred, social, and economic meanings.

For Andean peasants, the house is the coming together of the vertical and the horizontal. Andeans frequently relate their homes to gender relationships and to land and body concepts. The Kallawayas of Bolivia understand their homes according to a mountain‑body metaphor (see Bastien 1978). If they take care of the mountain and feed its earth shrines, corresponding geographically to parts of their body, then their homes, households, and bodies will be synchronized and they will be healthy. Health is the metaphorical synchronization of the house, household, and environment. These relationships are symbolically expressed in elaborate rituals which can also be used to explain the relationship of the vector, host, and parasites in Chagas’ disease.

The Aymaras of Qaqachaka, Bolivia, for example, think of their houses as the cosmos and cosmogony (Arnold 1992). Qaqachaka is located in valleys of the Altiplano, Department of Oruro. When a house is being constructed, the Aymaras sprinkle the foundation and walls with blood and sing about it as nido del cóndory el halcón (“nest of the condor and hawk”) and la madre nido (“mother nest”). The rooms of the house are symbolically associated with the woman and uxorlocal residence. The house is an entity within a system of parallel descent, and the feminine spirit of the house is what unites theoretically incompatible dualities, such as matrilineal and patrilineal descent, filiation and residence, and hypergamy and hypogamy, as Lévi‑Strauss (1979) writes.

In Qaqachaka, the floor plan and arrangement of buildings within the patio are carefully arranged to synchronize with certain cosmological axes in order to connect the house with cosmic centers, such as those of the Incas, and ground the household firmly within cultural traditions. Each step of construction is preceded by a challa, a ritual sprinkling of blood, accompanied by prayers. “By analogy,” Arnold (1992:54) writes, “in the construction of the house, the sprinkling of animal blood provides power to the house as the mother nest to stand erect for generations and to maintain its honor.” The people of Qaqachaka say that the walls are made to stand with blood of the female. The roof is understood as the masculine zone and is related to the mountain.

These cultural practices and understandings indicate the sacredness of the house to Andeans. It is a shrine to the earth and their ancestors. Any endeavor to stereotype such houses as “sick” is not entirely different to someone referring to one’s religion as “sick.” This explains why Andeans accept vinchucas as part of their households, not because they enjoy being bitten or getting sick, but because they are there, attached to the household. Insects in themselves have neither a positive nor negative value; they simply are part of the universe. The discovery that vinchucas are killer bugs is easy for outsiders; but, for Aymaras, they are “kissing bugs.”

This adds an important consideration for anyone attempting to modify “sick” houses. Technicians in vector‑control projects to improve housing have to respect these cultural values. Unfortunately, technicians of the pilot projects discussed in subsequent chapters paid little heed to the culture context of the house.

Conversely, cultural considerations can be assets in eliciting community members to participate to improve housing. These values can be used to help make houses vinchuca‑proof. One culturally sensitive approach is to precede any construction with a ritual to the earth shrines of the home. In an even more practical vein, housing construction rituals, such as in laying the foundation, building walls, and thatching roofs can be used as occasions for instructing Andeans about preventing triatomine infestation.

Roof thatching is an important Andean institution, including a ceremony. Broadly, although there is much regional variation, this ritual as found among the Kallawayas, near Charazani, Bolivia, consists of a ritual to dispel the misfortunes of the surroundings, another to feed the earth shrines of the ayllu (communal land), the laying of the roof, and a festive banquet.

The first part is a symbolic sweeping of the house to dispel misfortunes (such as triatomine insects). A diviner arrives on a Friday night, throws coca leaves to discern what misfortunes are found within the house, and then goes throughout the house symbolically sweeping with ritual symbols and breaking string. As an adaptive strategy, the community health worker could participate in the coca seance to volunteer information about vinchucas and how this misfortune carries another tiny misfortune (T. cruzi ) that injures the chuyma (heart and other central organs) and can cause muerto subito (sudden death) and empacho (constipation). The worker would instruct the inhabitants that this remedy requires continual vigilance, housing hygiene, and use of insecticides. After the shaman has ritually swept the household, the health worker could spray the house (see Bastien 1981, 1992). When the participants take the kintos (bundles of sacred items that attract the misfortunes) to the river, they could also take clothes to wash in efforts to dispel the evil. This ritual behavior could be used in this context to explain the importance of keeping the house clean.

The second part of the ritual consists of misa sumaj suertepah wasi (“Good Luck Table for the House”), where a yachaj (diviner) and the family prepare symbolic products corresponding to the head, trunk, and legs of the three major ecological levels of the ayllu: llama fat and fetus for the head, highlands, and herder; guinea‑pig blood for the heart, central levels, and potato and oca fields; and coca leaves and chicha (corn beer) for the legs, lowlands, and cereal farmers (see Bastien 1978).

Implications for health workers include the fact that Andean peasants closely identify body and house concepts with community and environmental concepts. Health workers can assist at the sumaj suerte ritual to discuss erosion, deforestation, and animal depletion, and the relationship of these factors to migration, urbanization, impoverishment, and Chagas’ disease. More readily than most Americans, Andeans thoroughly accept the relationship of bodily health to environmental well‑being.