On Tuesday Nov 12, 18:30 GMT London time, Prof Denise Arnold explores the mutual rearing practices between Andean populations and water, in its different manifestations, as a key life-giving element in their mountainous habitat. Andean animist ontologies recognise how humans and water flow are constituted mutually, through a dynamic relationality, which extends to other aquatic phenomena, including the sea-shell spondylus princeps. This knowledge is learned and transmitted between the generations in the rites of passage of adolescent girls and boys, when they learn an interdependence with water, establish relations with water beings, and practice equivalences between their own blood flow and water flow. Examined in this context are Inka rites of passage, a school ritual focused on learning about water flow, a female rite of passage when women learn to use particular designs and colours in their weavings, and a ritual offering of spondylus to high mountain shrines. These practices are situated in the emerging discipline of bioclimatology.
DENISE Y. ARNOLD is an Anglo-Bolivian anthropologist. She has been Leverhulme Research Fellow, ESRC Senior Research Fellow, and Research Professor at Birkbeck, University of London. She directs the Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara, in La Paz, Bolivia, is Research Fellow (Hon.) at University College London, and working currently on the project “Death in the Andes. Indigenous and Western Conceptions of Life, death and Religiosity 16th to 21st Centuries, at the University of Pittsburgh. Her interests include Andean textiles, oral tradition, non-verbal systems of communication, and new approaches to Andean iconography. Recent publications include Situating the Andean colonial experience: Ayllu tales of history and hagiography in the Time of the Spanish (2021), A Critique of Andean Reason (2018, edited with Carlos Abreu Mendoza) and The Andean Science of Weaving: Structures and Techniques of Warp-faced Weaves (2015, with the weaver Elvira Espejo).
(Andes, spondylus, rites of initiation, blood flow, water beings)