Part C: The Geography

10. Apu and Pachamama

If chapter 2 says that everything is animated by relation, here is with what.

Apu

apu — literally “lord”. The mountains.

And they are not deities on the mountains. They are the mountains themselves, as beings.

Characteristics:

They have hierarchy, broadly proportional to their size and significance. Ausangate and Salkantay are among the greatest in the Cusco region
They have personality: one strict, one generous, one dangerous
They eat. And they expect to be fed (chapter 17)
They answer — in certain practices, through the healer
They are local: each community has its own, and who is significant depends on where you stand

Pachamama

Pachamama — “Mother Pacha”, that is, mother-earth-time-world.

Two corrections:

First, she is not “Mother Nature”. The Western ecological reading makes her a mild, benevolent feminine archetype. In the Andes she is demanding: she is hungry, she asks, and if she is not given, she takes for herself (chapter 21).

Second, the unification is partly later. Historically, the earth is worshipped also as a local entity — this field, this slope. Pachamama as a unified, pan-Andean goddess is to some extent a product of the colonial and modern period.

The structure of the relationship

It is, again, ayni:

The mountain sends water. So you owe it.
The land gives harvest. So you owe it.
You pay before and after: before ploughing, before building, before travelling, after harvest.

And the first act in any drink is the ch’alla: you pour a little on the ground before you drink yourself.

It is the most everyday Andean rite, is performed everywhere, and requires no priest.

11. Wak’a and paqarina

Wak’a

wak’a (Spanish huaca) — and the word is difficult precisely because it is so broad.

A wak’a can be: a mountain, a rock, a spring, a lake, a temple, a mummy, a statue, a boundary marker, newborn twins, a person with an unusual form.

The common denominator is not “sacred”. It is something like:

Whatever is charged, singular, un-ordinary — and therefore has power and requires relation.

The wak’a had property: land, herds, servants, priests. They spoke, through oracles. They had disputes among themselves. The Huarochirí Manuscript is, in large part, a narrative of the relations and conflicts among wak’a.

The ceque system

And here lies one of the most striking things in the Andean world.

From the Qorikancha, the central temple of Cusco, 41 notional straight “paths” (ceque) radiated outward in all directions. On them lay 328 wak’a.

Each ceque was assigned to a specific kinship group, which was responsible for maintenance and offerings for its own wak’a.

And the number is not accidental. 328 equals twelve sidereal lunar months of approximately 27.3 days.

That is: a calendar inscribed in the landscape, with its maintenance distributed as a social obligation.

(The reconstruction is due mainly to Tom Zuidema, from the description of the chronicler Cobo. The details are debated; the basic structure is broadly accepted.)

Paqarina

paqarina — from paqariy, “to dawn, to emerge, to be born”. The place from which your group emerged.

A cave, a spring, a lake, a rock. Each ayllu (kin-territorial group) has its own.

And it is where you return when you die.

This is critical for understanding what the conquest did: when the Spanish forcibly concentrated populations into new villages (reducciones), they did not simply move people. They cut them off from the place that animated them.

In the terms of chapter 2: they interrupted the camay.

12. Mallki: the dead who held land

mallki. And the word means simultaneously “mummified ancestor” and “sapling, a plant for transplanting”.

This is not coincidence. The ancestor is the root from which the group grows — and the language says it directly.

The practice

The dead did not leave. They were preserved — by natural desiccation, which the Andean climate favours exceptionally — and:

Kept in caves (machay) or towers (chullpa)
Brought out for festivals, dressed, adorned
Fed and watered — literally
Consulted for decisions
Held land and herds

The last point is not metaphor. It is legal reality.

And the structural consequence in the empire

Dead Inca kings kept their palaces, their estates and their staff. The group that maintained them was called panaqa.

So the new Inca inherited nothing. He took the title, but his predecessor’s property remained with his predecessor.

And therefore he had to acquire his own — by conquest.

One of the most serious proposed motives for the dizzying expansion of the Inca empire is that the dead did not relinquish their property.

It is perhaps the clearest example in the document of how a conception of death produces political economy.

Why their eradication was targeted first

The 17th-century “extirpation of idolatries” campaigns focused with particular ferocity on finding and burning the mallki.

It was not fanaticism without logic. It was accurate understanding of the system: if you destroy the root, the group loses its camac.

And the Andeans knew it too — which is why they hid them, moved them, and buried them again elsewhere.

13. The body of altitude

This chapter breaks the form of the whole series, and deliberately.

In every previous system, “the body as a place” was metaphor or model. Here it is measurable fact.

The problem

At 4,000 metres, the partial pressure of oxygen is approximately 60% of the sea-level value. Andean settlements have been permanently at these altitudes for thousands of years — the plateau has been inhabited for at least 12,000 years, with permanent high-altitude settlement for at least 7,000.

The Andean solution

Andean populations show:

Higher haemoglobin concentration — more oxygen carriers per unit of blood
Larger lung volumes and larger chest
Higher tissue oxygen saturation at a given altitude
A developmental component: part of this is shaped by growing up at altitude, not only genetically

And the Tibetan solution, which is different

Tibetan populations, at roughly the same altitude, have:

Normal haemoglobin — not elevated
Higher resting ventilation rate
Higher nitric oxide levels, meaning greater flow
Genetic variants in specific genes that regulate the hypoxia response

Two populations, the same problem, two independent evolutionary solutions. The Andes: more carrier. Tibet: more flow.

And the Andean solution has a cost

High haemoglobin increases blood viscosity. And there is a recognised disease, chronic mountain sickness (Monge’s disease): excessive erythrocytosis, cyanosis, headache, dyspnoea, cardiovascular strain.

It is clearly more frequent in Andean populations than in Tibetan. The Tibetan solution appears more efficient in the long run — and a plausible explanation is that Tibet has been inhabited at high altitude for longer.

Why I include it in this document

Two reasons.

First, because it is the one place in the whole series where the phrase “the body is shaped by place” is not philosophy.

Second, because it gives a real substrate to things that otherwise are read only culturally: why breath, the rhythm of work, walking and resting have such central place; why weight and heat matter so much; and why coca (chapter 18) became the plant it became.