Mining and the living materiality of mountains in Andean societies

The living materiality of mountains in Andean societies

The dialogue between science and technology studies and anthropology has been reshaping the ways to address classic anthropological questions (De la Cadena et al., 2015). The former, questioning the idea that reality preexists human practices, has been showing how it is constantly in the making, enacted jointly by human practices in their interactions within broader networks and processes involving non-humans (Haraway, 1989; Latour, 2007; Mol, 2003). This is conveyed by Latour’s (2010) neologism ‘factish’ to point out how what are usually considered ‘facts’ are at the same time constructed ‘fetishes’. A world thus emerges through historically contingent practices inscribed in heterogeneous networks of humans and non-human things and beings. Given multiple sets of practices which carry implicitly different assumptions of how the world is and what is performed in it by very heterogeneous human societies within different environments, it follows that there are multiple co-present worlds or that the world is multiple (Blaser, 2013; Mol, 2003).

These contributions concur with an increasing ethnographic literature that pays close attention to indigenous practices in ontological terms rather than in epistemological ones (e.g. Blaser, 2010; Descola, 2005; Kohn, 2013; Strathern, 1988; Viveiros de Castro, 1998). Both bodies of literature have made possible research into questions such as how mountains, and any other named places – the ‘places’ (following Allen, 1988) or ‘earth-beings’ (following De la Cadena, 2010) – are experienced as sentient beings in Andean societies. In what follows, I briefly present a framework which I have elaborated elsewhere (Salas Carreño, 2012a) to address these issues.

Relatively recent scholarship on Andean kinship has shown that even the closest kin relations are built through implicit notions of commensality and cohabitation. Instead of blood (and descent), Andean societies privilege food as the substance that relates human bodies (Van Vleet, 2008; Weismantel, 1995). It is through processual notions of relatedness involving eating the same food and living together that, for example, the widespread practice of child circulation can be explained (Leinaweaver, 2008).

Extending this logic, I claim that patterns of food circulation and levels of cohabitation are not only present in the construction of the closest kin ties but in all types of social interaction. Crucially, this way of constructing sociality not only entails humans but also places. The practices that mediate the relationships between Andean people and the places where they live and work involve presuppositions that are crucial in enacting worlds in which humans and places co-emerge as social individuals having the thoughts, capacities of action, emotions and intentions of all social beings. Earth-beings are constantly intervening in people’s lives. However, they do so not only by imposing certain material conditions that structure human action (Miller, 2005), but also through will and intentionality. In Andean worlds, earth-beings’ agency does not emerge from human attribution of social agency to actually inert objects (Gell, 1998:15–16), but humans’ and earth-beings’ agencies co-emerge through processes that entail feeding and cohabitation.

These presuppositions are involved in everyday practices such as the consumption of coca leaves. As performed in the community of Qamawara (Calca, Cuzco) where I carried out field research in 2009, by blowing coca leaves towards the surrounding earth-beings the former were shared with the latter before being consumed by humans. This included the recitation of the places’ names followed by requesting them, for example, to take care of relatives while travelling or to grant a good harvest (see Allen, 1988: 127–130, for Sonqo, Paucartambo). This practice carries some presuppositions: that places can hear, consume some substance contained in the coca leaves and may grant requests.

The celebrations honouring different types of livestock in Qamawara are focused on requesting the earth-beings that they provide for animals’ fertility. This is partly done through the preparation and delivery of food-offerings as well as offering alcohol. These quotidian and calendared practices of giving food, coca and alcohol to the earth-beings are but a limited retribution of the food that humans receive from the earth-beings. They give food to humans but also allow humans to cultivate the land, to build houses, to engage in business, to live on them. Thus, earth-beings provide food and cohabitate with humans, and it is not surprising that people refer to them by using kin terms. Qamawarans, as other Andean people of the region, refer collectively to the mountains as fathers (taytakuna) as well as mother for the inhabited land (pachamama).

This sociality beyond the humans is also present in communal celebrations. For example, it is present in the carnival celebrations of the rainy season in Qamawara. These are led by the staff bearers whose term starts in January. ¹ Their leading role in the carnival celebrations involves several ways to walk the communal lands and borders as well as to provide banquets to places and humans. I will briefly mention three practices involved in the carnival celebration in 2009. First, the staff bearers visited each of the community households, bringing some alcohol and coca leaves –whose consumption entailed sharing them with the surrounding earth-beings – and consumed some of the household’s food. Hence, these visits also involved physical interactions and sharing of food with the community’s inhabited places. Second, the community members, led by the staff bearers, carried out the linderaje – from Spanish lindero, border – consisting of walking along the community’s border (see Allen, 1988; Pérez, 2005; Radcliffe, 1990, for similar practices). When they arrived at each of the mojones (cairns) marking the community’s border, each one being a named place, they put a Peruvian flag on it. The staff bearers left their staffs standing around it and adorned it with a cross made of qantu (Cantua buxifolia). Then they dropped alcohol and coca leaves in it offering them also to the surroundings’ earth-beings. Third, on the day before Ash Wednesday each staff bearer prepared a banquet for the community members. From mid morning the staff bearers and the community dressed in their festive attire and gathered in the chapel before going to each of the staff bearers’ houses. In each patio they were received with alcohol first dedicated to the places and a t’impu – a dish of boiled tubers, vegetables and meats typical of carnival. Then they danced for about half an hour before moving on to the next house. The sixth and last banquet ended in the early evening.

It is plausible to interpret these practices, following Durkheim (2001[1912]), as forms of reproducing the community’s social solidarity and territorial rights through ritual intensity. However, from a local perspective, this community did not just consist of Qamawarans but also included the earth-beings that constitute Qamawara. ² This community is reenacted through a series of communal practices that include the provision of food to the places, visiting them and soliciting their generosity in order to ensure the fertility of crops, animals and humans.

This sociality is mediated by the materiality of food, of bodies being fed, of places where people cohabitate. It is only through their materiality that these beings can provide food and living spaces to humans, pasture for animals and productivity to the seeds. It is important to stress that the contemporary use of Quechua words such as apu (lord, used in Cuzco and Puno), wamani (used in Ayacucho and Huancavelica), or hirka (mountain, used in Ancash and Huánuco) neither refers to mountains’ spirits nor to spirits inhabiting mountains but, as Allen (1988: 41) pointed out, to the mountains themselves. ³

This contradicts many studies that have characterized apus and wamanis as (immaterial) spirits (e.g. Bastien, 1985; Favre, 1967; Gose, 2008; Isbell, 1978; Marzal, 1971; Morissette and Racine, 1973; Nash, 1979). Other, but fewer, studies are rather ambivalent, framing them as spirits but describing them as the places themselves (Fuenzalida, 1980; Gose, 1986; Morote, 1956; Salazar-Soler, 2006). To frame these beings as spirits seems plausible partly because, in some contexts, they present themselves not as earth-beings but as humans such as rich landlords (e.g. Earls, 1969: 67; Gose, 2008: 296; Isbell, 1978: 152; Morote, 1956: 290). This, however, does not make them spirits. The mountains’ materiality is animated in a way similar to that of the human body. Just as a living human has animu – an individual animating force allowing him or her to move, see, listen, and so on (La Riva, 2005) – all named places have theirs. During dreams, a human’s animu can meet that of a mountain and receive advice or reprimands. Only exceptionally, mountains’ animus can be seen or heard by humans while travelling through inhospitable highlands. Aside from these contexts, humans need the help of paqus, people who know how to interpret the places’ wishes in the coca leaves, in order to grasp their intentions. In contrast, and due to their higher power, places understand and intervene in human lives with great ease, punishing or rewarding humans according to their somehow opaque criteria. It is also due to this difference in power that humans have to constantly give food to places. Neglecting or improperly feeding them provokes their anger, and results in illness, poor harvest, or ultimately being devoured by them.

Just as ‘nature’ is an undisputed reality in dominant Spanish-speaking worlds, so the named places are actual agents in these indigenous worlds. As mining clearly shows, these worlds are not isolated but rather always partially connected (Strathern, 1991) and articulated through equivocations, instances of ‘referential alterity between homonymic concepts’ (Viveiros de Castro, 2004: 5). For example, De la Cadena’s (2010) analysis of a protest against a mining concession in Cuzco shows how the Ausangate glacier emerged as an equivocation articulating different co-present worlds: while for some protesters it was a powerful earth-being provider of fertility and owner of life, for others, protesting or favouring the concession, it was an inert mineralized deposit.

Mountains and underground mining

Underground mining is possible only through directly affecting the mountains’ bodies, penetrating them like no other human activity does. An example showing the importance of this material extraction is reported by Peter Gose for Antabamba (Apurimac) in the late 1970s. The continuous underground mining ‘since at least the early colonial period’ of apu Utupara affected his material body in such a way that when he was seen in human form he was ‘doubled over and limping on one leg that has been crippled by mining’ (Gose, 1986: 303). Apu Utupara’s animu as seen in dreams shows how underground mining by extracting parts of the mountain threatens its well-being. In the same text, another example regarding a conflict between two mountains – Kuqchi and P’isti – follows the same logic:

As the mining of Kuqchi is becoming increasingly thorough, P’iste assumes responsibility for it and gleefully yells: ‘Hey Kuqchi, I’m getting close to your balls!’ Mute with rage, Kuqchi sends a burst of water through the mineshafts, killing all the workers and destroying the entire operation. (Gose, 1986: 304)

Underground mining not only mutilates the body of the mountains but ultimately threatens their fertility and, hence, their capacity to provide food and sustain life. Given the extraction of parts of their bodies, it is not surprising that these mountains are prone to anger and notably hungry. Mountains that do not regularly receive food eat humans, but mountains that have been mined have stronger reasons for doing so.

Mining presupposes a reciprocal relation between those who extract the mineral and the earth-being that is allowing this extraction. Local community members usually assume that mining is only possible if the engineers and the mountain have made a prior agreement. In the case of Utupara, the head engineer was framed as responsible for communicating with the mountain – having the role of an expert mediating human relations with earth-beings – and agreeing on the number of miners to be given in order to satisfy the mountain’s hunger (Gose, 1986: 303). Similarly, in San Marcos (Ancash) I was told how the engineers in charge of the Contonga underground mine had a similar agreement with Mount Tawlli when the mine was operating in the 1980s (Salas Carreño, 2002: 340).

While some people frame mining as an activity that is carried out at the expense of the earth-beings’ bodies, others have slightly different understandings of these processes. For example, in Huancavelica, Oruro and Potosí the mountains being mined were regarded by local workers as producers of metals. This emerges through a diagrammatic iconicity ⁴ between agriculture and mining activity in which the mined earth-being as the agricultural lands is feminine. Just as agriculture is framed as a sexual act in which male agriculturalists put seeds in a female earth, the miners penetrate the earth to extract minerals. Miners in Huancavelica said that the earth had given birth when they found a new vein (Salazar-Soler, 2006: 175–178). Miners in Oruro gave food offerings to the mine not only for preventing accidents – i.e. becoming food for the earth-being – but also for ensuring the yield of minerals (Nash, 1979: 134–135) . Similar ideas were reported also for the cooperative miners of Potosi (Absi, 2005: 99).

Where Andean peoples became involved in underground mining they performed practices of food-giving to the earth-beings from whom the minerals were being extracted. These practices have a similar structure to those carried out in agricultural contexts: before consuming coca leaves, miners routinely offered them to the earth-beings being mined and twice a year they delivered complex food offerings with the help of experts. The latter was also done whenever there was a clear sign that the mine was hungry, such as when a fatal accident took place. The ethnography is quite consistent on this: Nash (1979: 134–140) for underground tin mines in Oruro (Bolivia) during the 1970s; Salazar-Soler (2006: 153–155) for their counterparts in Huancavelica (Peru) during the early 1980s; and Absi (2005: 185–195) for small-scale cooperative miners in Potosi (Bolivia) during the mid 1990s.

These offerings are framed as offerings to the pachamama (the local mother earth), and to a devil-like man with horns, red eyes and a gigantic penis who is regarded as the owner of the metals: muki in the Peruvian underground mines (Salazar-Soler, 2006) and tío in the Bolivian ones (Absi, 2005, Nash, 1979). The Bolivian tío ⁵ and (less strongly) the Peruvian muki have associations with the Christian devil. Normally the mountains are associated with celestial figures, such as condors or angels (Abercrombie, 1998; Gose, 2008), but in the case of underground mining, they are associated with the devil. Taussig (1980) suggests that in agricultural contexts people work within the morality of gift exchange and therefore are not alienated from their labour power. The relationship between humans and the benign ‘spirits of nature’ is one of relative harmony. In contrast, in underground mining, people work for a wage, alienated from their labour and from the ore that they have extracted, which becomes a commodity to be sold in the international market. While their relation with the tío, the ‘spirit that owns the mine’, was negotiated through food offerings, he is a fundamentally malevolent being who often kills miners. Miners who grew up in a social world organized by gift exchange, still unfamiliar with commodity fetishism, experience their place in mining production and capitalist exchange as unnatural and evil. Thus, for Taussig, the tío is the culturally particular way in which Andean mine workers fetishized this evilness.

As Sallnow (1989: 219) points out, there have been many other contexts, over a long history, in which Andean peoples’ labour and production have been exchanged for wages and commodities without being associated with devil-like fetishisms (see also Platt, 1983). Furthermore, the contrast that Taussig makes between the apu and the tío is exaggerated. All these beings are morally ambiguous, with the right material capacity all can give or take life, and all have voracious appetites when they are not properly fed. Instead of thinking of the apu and the tío (or the wamani and the muki) as radically different spirits, it is more illuminating to understand them as the mountain and the mine, as earth-beings. Both have similar materiality that is affected by mining. As Salazar-Soler (2006: 184–186) points out, in mining contexts the wamani share similar attributes with the muki – crucially, both are owners of the metals – and in some contexts these words are used interchangeably. The devil-like being of the mineshafts should be understood as an alternative embodiment of the earth-being affected by mining.

As I mentioned earlier, Taussig’s argument rests on a claim that people who are ordinarily involved in production through (positive) gift exchange are thrust into the sphere of commodity production. My position is that the evilness of the guises through which the mine makes itself evident to the miners rather has to do with a problem of ownership of the ore extracted under extremely hazardous working conditions. Taussig’s discussion builds on the first volume of Marx’s Capital, which pays primary attention to two factors in the capitalist mode of production: capital and labour. Nevertheless, by the end of the third volume, Marx included a third fundamental factor: land. Here land stands for ‘natural resources’ understood not as things but as social relations. These are issues of property rights and the politics of access to natural resources (Coronil, 1997: 56–66; Lefebvre, 1991: 324–326). Rather than commodity fetishism, it is a problem of the ownership of natural resources (the actual earth-beings) that is at stake in the ways in which Bolivian tin miners related to the tío. Andean perspectives differ from Marx’s in so far as earth-beings, rather than humans, are the ultimate landlords of all that we understand as natural resources. Hence, in Andean worlds, to use ‘natural resources’ entails negotiations with earth-beings. Any type of food offering carried out by Andean people deals with this issue.

The process of extracting the ore, of disturbing the earth-being’s body, is what creates the danger for the workers. Notice that the attribution of accidents to the agency of the earth-being does not contradict the explanations that can be elaborated through physics. Whether explained through physics or through the anger of the earth-being, the primary cause is human negligence when attempting to extract ore. Whether mining consumes the body of these beings or consists of harvesting what they produce, it directly disturbs their bodies and makes them mortified and hungry. These disturbances are the source of what Taussig interprets as their evilness.

Underground mining directly affected the fertility of these earth-beings. Serious environmental degradation is obvious in many exposed tailings that filtered directly into water courses. Yet even though this damage is clear, there is no ethnographic information that frames underground mining as endangering these beings’ existence.

Mountains and the recent open-pit mining

Mining in Peru has shown an impressive growth since the 1990s: the surface allocated to mining exploration increased from 4 million to approximately 24 million hectares between 1993 and 1997 (De Echave, 2005: 10). This has continued due to the high prices of metals and the strong support of a neoliberal state (Bebbington et al., 2008; Bury, 2005). According to 2012 statistics, mining accounted for 60 per cent of Peruvian exports, 16 per cent of tax income to the state, and 10 per cent of Peru’s gross domestic product (Instituto Peruano de Economía, 2012: 8).

There is a strong contrast between the social worlds described in the ethnographies of underground mining and those of the recent open-pit mines. ⁶ Due to their technology, large open-pit mines employ highly specialized workers, such as heavy equipment operators, but markedly in smaller numbers than underground mines. Wages and working conditions are dramatically better compared to those of underground mines. Workers with the skills required by open-pit mines rarely can be found in the local community; hence, it is very unusual for open-pit mines to draw workers from the surrounding rural communities (Salas Carreño, 2008: 186–195).

The pre-boom underground mine camp was typically a town where workers lived with their families. It provided services such as formal education and health centres and served as a marketplace for the surrounding rural area (see Ballard and Banks, 2003: 292). In contrast, newer mining camps tend to be restricted to workers only. They have relatively short periods of work coupled with periods of rest (for example, 10 days of work followed by 10 days of rest). During the resting days they are transported to the cities where their families reside (Gerritsen and MacIntyre, 1991: 41). The access to the mine installations and camp are restricted and under permanent surveillance. In the newer mining camps local people do not interact with the miners nor are they markets for local products.

Because of the heterogeneous origins of the workers as well as the discipline and safety standards implemented in the new open-pit mines, practices such as food offerings are absent. While in underground mines the relationship between the local community and the company was to a large extent carried out through the workers’ union, in new open-pit mines these relations are carried out through mine representatives and the communities’ authorities (Helfgott, 2013; Salas Carreño, 2008: 186–195).

While underground mining centres had strong hierarchical differences between engineers and workers, the recent open-pit mines have even more dramatic inequalities, with an increase in social distance between those inside the camp and those outside. Within the camp almost any urban service (electricity, potable water, health services, heating, phone, internet, cable, etc.) is available; outside most, if not all, of them are absent. Seen from the perspective of a highland subsistence economy, the miners’ camp is a luxurious place (Salas Carreño, 2008). Hence, in recent open-pit mines, the Andean understandings of the relations between earth-beings and mining activity are no longer constructed by the workers but by the surrounding communities.

Open-pit mining technology makes it all too clear that some earth-beings are being destroyed. In a clear contrast with underground operations, open-pit mining literally removes entire mountains, destroying them. Open-pit mining consists of processing the corpse of earth-beings, extracting the metal and leaving the rest as poisonous rubble accumulating in tailing dams or in new mountains that go through heap leaching. ⁷ For example, Yanacocha, the second largest gold mine in the world – operating in Cajamarca since 1993 – has reshaped the landscape of at least 5,000 hectares (Apoyo, 2009: 2).

Given this strong difference in relation to the earth-beings as well as the different structure of the relations between mining companies and communities, Andean understandings that address how the earth-beings are affected by open-pit mining become invisible for non-indigenous people. While in underground operations Andean practices were carried out within the mines and non-indigenous people were exposed to them, in new open-pit mines these practices are absent and non-indigenous mining personnel are isolated from the practices of the surrounding communities.

This buffer from the community’s practices tends to happen even for the company’s representatives who are in constant interaction with community members. While I worked as a Community Liaison Officer for the Antamina mining project (Ancash), I asked people from the surrounding communities about the relations between the mining company and the mountains. Usually they answered me with references to the nearby and then-abandoned Contonga underground mine (Salas Carreño, 2002). However I cannot recall contexts in which earth-beings were referred to as participating in the relations between the company and the community. Rather than this being evidence of how the earth-beings were not at play in their perspectives regarding this open-pit operation, this response may reflect their perception of my position as a representative of the mining company as it inevitably shaped the frames through which I interacted with community members. The frames of interaction that emerged between community members and company representatives were structured in ways that presupposed the exclusion of reference to earth-beings.

However, local people referred to earth-beings in relation to open-pit mines in contexts where I had a different structural position. In 2000, as part of a visit to the Tintaya open-pit mine (Cuzco), I had a conversation with the manager of a communal micro-enterprise that provided services to the mining company. He was a member of a neighbouring Quechua community. The broader context was marked by claims regarding negative social and environmental impacts held by the surrounding communities that led to protests. The resulting negotiations ended in important agreements in 2003 when the company agreed, among other commitments, to contribute 3 per cent of its profits for community development (Durand, 2009; Scurrah, 2008).

Towards the end of our conversation I was curious to know how giving services to the mine would have influenced the manager’s attitude towards the company. I asked ‘Do you think that this work opportunity shows that the mine can be a good neighbour?’ He gave a short answer: ‘The [mining] company doesn’t give us work; the mountain does’ (‘La compañía no nos da trabajo, el cerro nos da’). Through this remark he bluntly settled his position delegitimizing possible claims about positive effects of the mining company by attributing the source of job opportunities to the agency of the mountain.

The mountain’s agency is plausible when assuming that the earth-being is still alive and, even when part of its body is being taken away, it can still exert influence in the distribution of the revenue. Or the earth-being might be already dead and the company is processing a corpse. Through the market that transforms the metals into money, part of the mountain’s body produced job opportunities and development funds for the community. In the context of the mountain being seriously damaged or dead, it follows that the community obtained benefits through protests and negotiation with the mining company that mediated the extractive process.

Mountains opposing and allowing mining

While many mountains have been mined, there are others that successfully refused mining. A case was told to Salazar-Soler (2006: 180–181) in the early 1980s in Huancavelica. This was a conflict between a community and some engineers who wanted to mine the mountain Ayaurqu. The engineers started the paperwork to obtain a mining concession in the regional capital, Huancavelica. Worried that the community could lose its lands, the communal authority also went to Huancavelica. In the middle of the path he found a white man wearing a vicuña poncho (a sign of wealth and power): the mountain Ayaurqu in human form. He gave the communal authority a little box with stones that would turn themselves into gold when he arrived in Huancavelica. The mountain ordered: ‘Go and hire a lawyer for the trial against the engineers.’ The authority did so but the community lost the case: ‘It is said that the mining company bought the judge’ (Salazar-Soler, 2006: 181). When the miners arrived they were received with an earthquake. Scared, they nevertheless made perforations but could not find any metal. Ayaurqu had hidden his minerals and, finally, was able to get rid of them. While initially the mountain tried to use the mediation of a state institution to avoid being mined, finally he had to use his own powers to make the mining activity worthless.

During the 1990s, the Peruvian state introduced legal environmental standards as well as legal framework promoting mining investments. However, the social aspects of mining remained unregulated (Salas Carreño, 2008). State institutions have been notoriously absent mediating the relations between mining companies and local communities (Bury, 2005; Revesz and Diez, 2006). It is not surprising, then, that mining activity has become the main source of social protest in the Peruvian countryside. ‘Socio-environmental conflicts’ accounted for 50 per cent of the 248 conflicts reported by the Peruvian Ombudsman for July 2010 (Defensoría del Pueblo, 2010: 6). The corresponding figures for June 2012 are 60 per cent of 247 conflicts (Defensoría del Pueblo, 2012: 10).

These protests are being answered by alarming levels of violence from state forces. During the government of Alan García (2006–2011), 191 people died during social protests (La República, 2011). Instead of regulating mining activity, recent legislation allows the intervention of the army to control civilian protests, and makes policemen who use firearms during protests immune to prosecution (Briceno and Bajak, 2012; Silva Santisteban, 2012). The death of 32 people – 24 policemen and 8 civilians – in Bagua in 2009, due to a clash between police forces and Amazonian indigenous people protesting against state decrees designed to facilitate the corporate use of indigenous lands, dramatically points to the divorce between local communities’ interests and those promoted by the central government (see Lombardi, 2010).

These protests are related to several types of concerns held by local communities. Some relate to claims over the lands that the companies use in order to carry out the mining projects. Others seek to ensure that the companies contribute in important ways to the well-being of the surrounding areas. However, the most recurrent concerns of the local populations are environmental ones, particularly complaints regarding the potential loss of water sources (De Echave et al., 2009).

These concerns are built around a strong association of mining with negative environmental impacts that is prevalent in the Peruvian society. Mining corporations, and the media aligned with them, make strong efforts to distance themselves from previous mines’ environmental performance, which are framed as ‘traditional mining’. They claim that they use state-of-the-art technology for preventing negative environmental impacts and that they comply with international environmental standards; they furthermore present themselves as ‘modern mining’ (Salas Carreño, 2008). While dark images of mining activity remain strong, negative mining impacts are not just events of the past. Recent mining operations are repeatedly accused of environmental degradation.

In this context of promotion and conflicts around open-pit mining, earth-beings tend to be perceived as opposed to new mining operations from highland indigenous perspectives. For example, in 2007, there were strong rumours of the presence of a new mining project in the area of the Quyllurit’i shrine. The focus of the main pilgrimage of the region of Cuzco, the shrine is deeply associated with the Qulqipunku glacier and is relatively close to Ausangate, the most important regional apu. The Brotherhood of Señor de Quyllurit’i, which articulates hundreds of dance troupes and thousands of devotees across the region, organized a protest against this project. It paralysed the Cuzco city centre, having as its main protagonists hundreds of dancers demonstrating in their ceremonial outfits. Among those protesting was Nazario Turpo, recognized as a knowledgeable person in mediating the relations between humans and places, who lived close to Ausangate, and who talked in that context with Marisol de la Cadena. She reports that he protested to protect his community’s highland pastures, but also because …

Ausangate would not allow the mine in … a mountain over which it presided. Ausangate would get mad, could even kill people. To prevent that killing, the mine should not happen … Preventing Ausangate’s ire was Nazario’s motivation to participate in the demonstration. (De la Cadena, 2010: 339)

Here, the most important regional apu would be clearly opposed to this mining project. In this frame, the protest was an attempt to prevent a clash between the agency of Ausangate and the agency of the mining company that could potentially end up with deaths.

The 2011 protests in Puno, criticized by the then president García for their defense of apu Khapia, succeeded in keeping mining out of Khapia. The central government recognized its special status, but did so through the acceptable frames of declaring it a ‘protected natural area’ due to its biodiversity and part of the ‘national cultural patrimony’ due to its archeological remains (Normas Legales, 2011a, 2011b). In this case, the defence of apu Khapia was directly and openly related to its status as an important earth-being.

Nevertheless, allegiances of the earth-beings are far from settled. They depend on the social relationships at play in a particular situation. Not all mountains should be assumed to be against mining. Consider the following example. During 2008 there were strong rumours of the presence of miners in the community of Hapu (Cuzco), as they were present everywhere in the countryside. While carrying out fieldwork there, I had the opportunity to ask Hapu people questions like: ‘Why do people worry so much if the apus are so powerful? Would the apus allow those engineers to enter and take the metals from them?’ Some answers pointed towards an internal conflict in Hapu. The apus might be angry because the Evangelical converts – almost half of the community – have stopped giving food offerings to them. The apus might allow mining in order to punish the converts. Other answers pointed towards their differences with mining engineers. Some of my Hapu interlocutors told me that the engineers knew a lot more and thus they might be able to give better food offerings than those given by community members. Hence the apus might allow the engineers to take the mineral from them. Depending on the sophistication of the food offerings, the mountains might shift their will and decide to establish more favourable alliances with the miners, thus leaving unprotected the less sophisticated humans who depend on them.

The first type of answer framed the potential behaviour of the apus as a reaction to an internal conflict among different factions within Hapu. In this case, the mountains would punish even those who kept giving offerings in order to satisfy their anger against the Evangelicals who refuse to acknowledge their power. The second answer framed the potential favourable attitude of the mountains towards the engineers as based on the merits of their offerings and hence on a racial–ethnic hierarchy of knowledge and power between Spanish-speaking professionals and rural Quechua-speaking peasants.

Conclusions

The difference in social arrangements between underground mines and the new open-pit mines might be related to the absence of references to earth-beings in the increasing literature about current mining conflicts in the Andes (but see De la Cadena, 2010; Li, 2013; Salas Carreño, 2012b). The absence of Quechua food offerings in recent open-pit mines fits well within teleologies of modernity that conceive of the disappearance of indigenous practices as an inevitable process of acculturation. As the examples discussed show, these practices are far from disappearing. Rather, they are contemporary world-making practices.

Recent anthropological works have been expanding ethnography beyond human sociality (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010; Tsing, 2013) and have shown how all forms of life are semiotic (Kohn, 2013). However, while challenging the separation between humans and non-humans, they reproduce the opposition between the living and the inanimate that participates in the modern work of purification (De la Cadena, 2014).

Commenting on Kohn’s (2013) work, Pandian (2014) suggests that Peirce’s ideas might be useful not only to show how animals and plants participate in semiosis, but also to explain how mountains can do so. As he elaborates, for Peirce, the difference between mind and matter is one of degree rather than kind. ‘What we call matter is not completely dead … it still retains the element of diversification; and in that diversification, there is life’ (Peirce, 1931–1958: 6.158, quoted by Pandian, 2014: 248). Peirce’s thought seems to converge with recent discussions about animacy. As Ingold (2006:10) claims, if animacy is not understood in terms of ‘a property of persons imaginatively projected onto things’ but a property of the world prior to the ontological separation between mind and matter, it is possible to see how animacy is ‘the dynamic, transformative potential of the entire field of relations within which beings of all kinds, more or less person-like or thing-like, continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence’ (Ingold, 2006: 10).

Andean worlds clearly challenge the animate/inanimate dichotomy and in doing so they can be a starting place for expanding the conception of the living and thereby allow translations of other worlds where mountains, rocks or rivers emerge as other-than-inanimate. As the 19th-century US oil boom shows, capitalist extractive industries, by conceiving lifeworlds exclusively as natural resources to be exploited for the aim of accumulation, have transformed them into sacrificial landscapes: polluted environments inhabited by impoverished communities (Black, 2000). In the current global scenario, ethnographic understandings of worlds that challenge the separation between the living and the inanimate are urgent. Capitalism can not only turn environments into sacrificial landscapes but its consequences can be considered a geological force that impacts the entire planet (Haraway, 2015). The strong opposition to mining by beings such as Ausangate, reported by knowledgeable persons such as Nazario Turpo, can be understood because contemporary open-pit mining entails the destruction of mountains. Within this frame, the common interests between mountains and humans who dwell on and depend on them seem fairly obvious.