A Contribution to the Andean Animistic Ontology: Roles, Powers and Figures in Telluric Worships of South-Peruvian Andes

Abstract

This article analyzes the symbolic aspects with which the Quechua Andean worldview humanizes the Andean environment, and includes it in a social dimension in which some natural elements, phenomena and animal beings live and act similarly to humans. Based on ethnographic data collected in two Peruvian rural communities about the symbolism of the telluric worship, it is explained how this humanization is a form of symbolic interaction that Quechua people keep with their environment, and especially with topographic places like earth and mountains, in order to understand and propitiate their rigid ecological mechanisms. At the same time, the article proposes a theoretical categorization of the symbolization process of the Andean earth and its varied biological aspects, by contextualizing to the ethnographic case some anthropological notions of the Older and New Ecologies. The aim is to establish an analytic continuation with other anthropological studies about the Andean religious worldview, and to contribute to the interest of the Americanist Anthropology currently in finding scientific definitions more suitable to the Amerindian worldviews, and to how they describe the «nonhumans » beings and elements that share spaces and representations with the human beings.