The House: An Economy of Exchange

Bolivians have a sacred economy centered around the house. They celebrate fiestas to the saints within their patios. They continually ch’allar (sprinkle) the courtyard, giving the initial drink to Pachamama (Mother Earth). Before they leave the house, they bless themselves and deposit an offering of coca leaves to the cabildo (shrine of the household). Good‑luck tables featuring candies, coca, llama fat, qoa, tinfoil, and a llama fetus periodically are presented to the household shrines. The overriding concept is that, if they offer symbolic foods to the earth shrines, Pachamama, and earth, then the earth will bestow upon them an abundant harvest. Some would call this an imitation magic of reciprocity, but it can be seen as an economics of reciprocal exchange between beings who live on vertically distinct ecological levels, each with its unique products and resources. For rural Bolivians, a “sick” house is one that has turned in upon itself in selfish interest or that has been abandoned. It is sick like a body because it is not in centrifugal and centripetal motion with everything around it.

The economics of exchange fits into this in the following way: peasants throughout Bolivia pass through the countryside and observe that certain houses are chullpa wasikuna (tomb houses) and that certain communities are chullpa llahta (tomb communities). They refer to the fact that these places are without inhabitants, much like their ancient shrines (chullpas ) to their ancestors, commonly found throughout Bolivia. They believe that anyone digging near a chullpa will die from chullpa usu (polio, or osteomyelitis). Chullpa wasi is the peasants’ term for a “sick house.” It is sick, not because of some intrinsic evil but because it is no longer an exchange unit between the people who inhabit it and the surrounding fields. It is a tomb of what was.

In contrast, sayaña is the Aymara word for house, and it refers to the bedrooms, kitchen, and storage rooms. It includes family members, alpacas, llamas, sheep, pigs, guinea pigs, and chickens. It contains the surrounding gardens and plots in the qhapanas (large fields). It includes the above sacred connotations and is considered a shrine. Pablo Regalsky graphically described this concept among the Quechua of Raqaypampa. After the harvest, the house is completely covered with corn so that it is symbolically no longer a building but a pile of corn. The Andean house is continually transformed by the cycle of activities surrounding it.

Sayaña is also founded on ayni and turqasiña, which are expressed in the ritual/work of thatching houses. These important Andean economic structures of the sayaña could be incorporated into housing‑improvement projects to lower costs, increase community participation, and ensure continuity. Community members participate in a system of work exchange, aynisiña, and resource exchange, turqasiña.

Aynisiña is a basic Andean institution wherein peasants set up a system of mutual aid regarding work tasks. For example, someone helps another person thatch his roof; the recipient or his children now owe the helper an ayni for roof thatching or an equivalent task, due at some future time. A local health worker may donate a week at a training course or spray insecticides for a week. In exchange, members of the community owe the health worker an equivalency of work, such as herding the health worker’s sheep or plowing a field.

Community health workers used ayni during the drought in Bolivia between 1982 and 1984 when they encouraged labor exchanges and cooperation in the communities of the Altiplano to prevent the hoarding of water as well as other conflicts (Bastien 1992). They coordinated the activities of digging wells, routing water, and building irrigation canals. One creative way they used ayni was to have the family of a treated sick person do some public‑health service, such as building a latrine or digging a sewage ditch, in return for treatment provided by the local health worker.

Regarding housing improvement, similar festive and ritual ceremonies could be combined with ayni, extending the labor‑exchange process to include construction of a new house or refurbishment of infested houses. In other words, housing projects need to be based on the peasants’ economic and cultural institutions. Foreign aid and outside technicians can assist in this endeavor.

The other economic institution is turqasiña, which refers to bartering produce. Community health workers utilize this practice when patients cannot pay cash for medicine but can provide some produce instead. The health workers get the produce at a discount rate; they then consume, exchange, or sell it at markets, using the money to buy medicine.

Turqasiña can be employed in roof thatching. Participants arrive with supplies to thatch the roof: jichu (bunchgrass) gathered from the surrounding puna, rope woven from llama hide, and poles cut from eucalyptus trees. The implicit understanding is that the recipient can be expected to do the same for his helpful neighbor when that neighbor constructs his house.

Members of the agencies involved in vector‑control projects could enter into the community under the terms of aynisiña and turqasiña. Whatever work and resources were provided to one community would be required to be performed by that community for another community, and so on.

Andeans have an interest in helping each other. Their survival is based on a long‑standing formal system of replication and correspondence. Once a plan is presented to them that works, they will share it with others. They do this by celebrating a fiesta together, agreeing upon a common task, and cooperatively completing it. If models for triatomine‑proofed houses are built that fit into their culture of the house, they will continue to build more of these houses. The culture of Andean housing is embedded within their cosmos and cosmogony. The ability of Andeans to survive at high altitudes has been partially explained by their relation of themselves and their social forms with the land, which is sacred and reproductive.

Global forces of privatization, capitalization, free trade, and individual capitalism have been centrifugal processes away from the communal community toward the world market, as discussed below. In Bolivia, as in the United States, private property and individual wealth are beginning to supplant shared land and cooperative movements. For the majority of Bolivians, this has led to loss of land, increased migration, and the growth of squatter settlements, as well as the loss of Andean traditions such as sayaña, ayni, and turqasiña.