Hi Friends:
It is very late at night but I´m determined to write this entry because time just keeps flying and I feel hopelessly behind in telling you about what we´re seeing! Our group of 24 archeologists, anthropologists, art historians, ecological engineers and language teachers is having the time of our lives meeting the folks who have made spectacular discoveries and advances in Peruvian archeology recently.

My clever title to this post is a reference to a children´s book called “It Happened In Pinsk” in which a Russian Jewish man named Irv Irving loses his head out of envy – he actually wakes up one day and finds he has lost his head, so his wife sews him one out of a pillow case while he goes in search of his lost head.

I thought of this book when viewing an effigy head from one of the Paracas mummy bundles made by the Nazca people many years ago, here is an image which I am too tired to try to paste in at this moment – see http://www.kumihimoconf.org/R1.jpg

A very comforting and silly looking head for a people who were involved in headhunting and decapitation as a major ritual… Actually this very large head is supposed to be the large outside display for ancestor worship of a person who has passed from the status of corpse and morphed into a giant ancestor worthy of worship. Textile expert Mary Frame has an excellent article describing the images on the weavings which wrapped the Paracas mummies – some of the finest weavings in the world, with incredible detail. Here is another image of just the outer layer of a corpse which been bundled up for the afterlife:
and http://www.allposters.co.uk/-sp/Peruvian-Mummy-from-the-Paracas-Cemetery-Wearing-Gold-Jewellery-circa-900-BC-Ad-400-Posters_i1732939_.htm

These beautiful weavings were created a couple of thousand years ago and preserved by the arid sands of the Paracas peninsula.

More tomorrow…

Hi Friends:
We rode ten hours on a bus today to see the ruins at Caral on Peru´s North Coast. On the way, I saw an ad at a gas station for a popsicle called egocéntrico. It has a strawberry filling (go figure…)

The ruins at Caral were dated about 3000 BC and consisted of a large number of big flat-topped pyramids in a desert valley surrounded by desert mountains (no trees.) These huge structures were built presumably for big gatherings and pilgrimmages – a kind of event still practiced in some Andean communities today. A Peruvian archaeologist named Ruth Shady has been supervising the excavation and the Peruvian government is excited to bill it as America´s oldest city. One of the pyramids had a large number of ancient flutes in it made of pelican and llama bones.

I had a very distinct recollection of the soundtrack from the movie 2001 when we saw a large standing stone set ahead of one of the temples. Did I say that we were surrounded by mountains? The place was so absolutely desert, devoid even of birds, and all you could see was the pyramids which seemed to imitate the mountains, and the standing stone which our guide said could also be interpreted as a likeness of a mountain in some sense. Mountains are sacred here and are said to be spirits.

Another sacred concept in Quechua is Tinkuy which is the junction of two rivers. This joining point is said to symbolize the coming together of opposite forces and has been re-enacted in events such as symbolic battles (with real bloodletting and dying) and also gatherings for youth to come together and dance. Around the bend from the arid sacred place of Caral is a Tinkuy of two rivers and all of a sudden we could see green and hear birdsongs! I felt that even the accoustics were altered in the enormous sacred desert space – it was silent compared to the green area.

This seems like as good a moment as any to reflect on ideas about different kinds of spirituality which I have been chewing on for a few weeks. I´ll start with a vivid memory: as a 16 year old arriving in Bolivia in 1976, I sometimes couldn´t believe my eyes. The world was full of Native American women in black braids and men in sandals with funny knit caps. I had thought that ¨Indians¨ were a thing of the past – but here they were overwhelmingly present.

On the train ride from La Paz to Cochabamba, I saw a group of three or four people walking near the tracks wearing black, and one of the men had a dead bird on his head. I realized with a chill that this had something to do with a ritual sacrifice or offering and I was simply shocked. In the world I was familiar with, (Judeo-Christianity) people had practiced animal sacrifice dating back to Passover to stories about the first two sons of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel (the farmer vs. the shepherd.) Blood sacrifice and conflicts between farmers and shepherds seemed to me a thing of the distant past. Yet here in the Bolivian highlands all I could see for miles was the occasional farmer or shepherd, now pilgrims engaged in some kind of blood sacrifice.

This was one of my first sensations of time travel. Had I arrived at a re-enactment of my spiritual culture´s distant past? Many of the first Europeans who spent time in the Andes asked themselves this same question. They equated the Andean present with a vision of their own past and assumed that the Andean natives were living at an ealier stage of a linear spiritual development. Those who cared about the natives assumed that their beliefs were a naive or childish precursor to their own beliefs and practices. One proponent of this view was the famous Catholic sympathizer and defender of indigenous people, Bartolomé de las Casas.

An enormous danger of this kind of view is the misinterpretation of what you are seeing. For example, according to Regina Harrison, Quechua-speakers throughout the Andes have a word for powerful forces and spirits which can mean either a positive or negative force: Supay. Guess how Supay was translated into Spanish? Diablo/devil/demonio/demon. The assumption of a one-way evolution led to the conclusion that these people were either at an earlier stage of development, or errant – have strayed from the path altogether.

Are there other possibilities?

I had two recent conversations that gave me food for thought. One was with my Quechua teacher Hipólito Peralta Ccama. His opinion is that the ancestral spiritual traditions passed on to him by his parents are not naive or childish (he´s the one who told me about Bartolomé de las Casas´ view) but rather, deep and well-tuned to the natural forces around him.

The other conversation was with a friend on the bus today, and anthropologist named Robin. I pointed out that Judeo-Christian-Muslim beliefs are the product of millenia of active debate and writing and intensive human contact and thought. She pointed out that Andean beliefs (and many North American native belief systems) are the product of societies in which there is not a great deal of contact between humans in a lifetime and the major selective force which one must attend to is nature. So our values and spiritual traditions have had to fine-tune to a very differet set of forces.

That´s it for today, and hopefully more enlightening than the popsicle egocéntrico.

Hi Friends:
Bolivia lost its coast sometime since independence from Spain. I learned that 30 years ago in Bolivian high school, but didn´t catch the significance.

After my year in Bolivia I ended up eating lunch with a Peruvian man from Lima once in college, and I remember him smiling condescendingly and telling me ¨Hablas como las serranitas” meaning, ¨You talk like the little women from the hills¨ (ie hillbillies/ or in this context, indigenous people. It is true: the Spanish I learned in Bolivia is distinctly highland Spanish.

So what is the Andean world really made of? I used to think it was made of the mixed indigenous and Spanish traditions of the highlands. I also knew that the highlands stood in a special relationship with their opposite extreme, the tropical lowlands. But now during this institute I am learning what was missing: the coast!

Long before the Spaniards arrived, people from the coast, highlands and tropical lowlands had developed special relationships and views of one another dating back around three thousand years to the Chavin civilization. (The Incas ruled only 100 years, but this Andean world of interaction is much older!)

The coast here is not like our East coast of New England. It is not wet and green. Believe it or not, it is a long, narrow desert! My taxi driver told me that it hasn´t rained in Lima since the 1970s. But the Humboldt current along the coast is super cold and makes conditions really productive for fishing. Reliable sources estimate that you can get 1000 times as much fish off the coast of Peru as anywhere on earth!

The highlanders are proud of their ways of living and of speaking. They see the coastal and lowland folks as softies and degenerates in contrast to their tough lives at high altitudes.

A Peruvian comedian recently described the highlanders as people who not only get up at dawn – they get up before dawn and kick the rooster and tell it to wake up and crow!!

But now I am down on the coast, the desert coast.
I have learned more in the last 24 hours about early coastal life than I could begin to tell here. The coast has been settled for around 11,000 years, and settlements are well preserved because of the desert sands. We are visiting one of the oldest sites tomorrow, called Caral.

Some of the earliest known textiles which were dug up from the coast are now in a tiny display case outside the entrance to the Latin American galleries of the Museum of Natural History in NYC. They are so tiny people always walk right by them.
More later…

I first went to the Andes as a teenager on a year-long cultural exchange program in Bolivia, in 1976.

In 2000 I returned to Bolivia to collect linguistic data for my dissertation; which is a book about how people learn abstract, untaught things about their second language, and how their first language might influence (or not) the way they structure the second language in their minds. While in Bolivia, I sent a descriptive journal entry to my thesis advisors, and after defending my thesis, the Latin American member of my committee said “Now you have to write a non-theoretical book about your trip.”

I finished the thesis, but I didn’t write the book about my travels. What would I write about? There were at least two kinds of books that I didn’t want mine to be like. The first kind of book seemed to be of the genre “how cool am I?!” You may have seen books like these, in which young people describe their treks and discoveries in the Andes, often journeys of self-discovery more than anything. The second kind of book is of the genre “how strange are the natives?!” in which very bizarre and unfamiliar situations and behaviors are reported. When you read these books you may marvel at the different extremes of human experience, but you will most likely feel more distance than kinship with the subjects.

When I examined my most thrilling stories about Bolivia, they seemed to fall into these two categories.

As a young teen I remember reading three books set in Africa – a continent as different from my own as South America. One of them, by Rudyard Kipling, I disliked intensely: “Jungle Book.” I remember feeling in my gut that it was racist, condescending and distorted – and didn’t answer in any believable way what African people could be like. This is not to say that a book can’t be playful and convey truths – but that one didn’t, for me. Or maybe I misread it. A second book, “Cry, the Beloved Country” written by South African novelist Alan Paton in 1948, was intensely sad, but struck me as true in a satisfying way. (My siblings may be surprised to know that it was given to me by our father, the arch political conservative, and Kipling was recommended by our mother, the activist.)

A third book set in Africa, which I loved as a teen, was a non-fiction collection of letters between a Dutch protestant missionary and a young African Christian man accused of rape. The book is called “I Loved a Girl” by Walter Trobisch. Two things struck me about this book. First, it was about love and sex, always exciting, and especially unusual since it was actually mentioned in church! Second, one of the things the Dutch and African authors wrote about explicitly was colonialism; at the beginning the African man bitterly accused the European of disrespecting and misunderstanding his culture, and the Dutch man demonstrated over the course of their correspondence that he did, in fact, respect and know the other’s culture deeply. Colonialism, paternalism, unfair cultural and religious influence are acknowledged squarely in the book, whether you like or dislike the sexual advice the European man gives the African, or the fact that he is giving advice at all.

So – back to my book.
What’s so bad about a book of self-discovery?
What’s so bad about a book in which bizarre and foreign situations are recounted?
After all, mixed-race Bolivia through the eyes of a white, Anglo-Saxon, deeply religious protestant teenager (which is how I first started my journey) seems ripe for a study in contrasts. Especially if you freeze either the Bolivians or the teenager in time, set them up as caricatures, and feel like laughing.

The problem for me with such a book is that neither the teenager nor the Bolivians could be frozen. They were moving targets. They met each other, they accommodated, they got to know each other, and neither seemed so strange anymore. Also, I happen to like all the characters involved. I liked myself back then, and I liked the people I met, even when some of us seemed to have dropped in from different planets.

And then there is the ugly problem of colonialism and of unequal power and unequal distribution of resources. How can I avoid writing a book that feeds into that unequal power, in a place where the rich always seem to get richer and the poor, poorer? Certainly, an acceleration in unequal distribution of resources has marked the time period which I would be describing, both in the US and in the Andes from 1976-2008.

I tried to solve that problem when writing my thesis in the following way: I gave the book (for whatever it was worth) back to the Bolivians. I paid my informants and sent them a copy of my thesis. I gave copies of the tapes of the data I collected to Andean researchers and teachers at the University of San Simón in Cochabamba. They can easily tell you a different story about what I wrote, if it is of significance to them. Well, not easily, because the book is written in English and relates to a framework that requires a lot of study. But there is at least one linguist at San Simón who understood the thrust of my studies and found it worthwhile. Many, many others who did not understand the details of the study, did appreciate that my premise was to uncover aspects of universal grammar and to place Spanish, Quechua and English on equal theoretical footing.

But the book I am writing now can’t be as cozily abstract. Equal theoretical footing doesn’t buy you lunch or save your child from the agony of early tooth decay (and I have heard the wailing, in Chuquisaca.) Equal theoretical footing doesn’t erase the reality by which persons from one nation visit another and profit fabulously from the human and natural resources at low cost to themselves. Equal theoretical footing doesn’t change the fact that I am casually typing words that flow out of my fingers onto a computer screen, while somewhere in Yamparaez there is a group of adults and children who jealously guard scraps of pencils and paper and travel two hours on foot Sundays to learn to write lists of sentences such as “My name is Segundina. My husband’s name is Lorenzo.”

If I can bring myself to trust that my book will transcend self-discovery and serve the needs of Segundina and Lorenzo and their children as well as my own, I can start writing. But how will I structure the book? Where will it begin and end? It would be nice to write a historical novel like Barbara Kingsolver does, for example. Real identities could be conveniently disguised for the protection of all involved, and I could get some distance and have poetic license to make things develop and turn out in ways that illustrate what I want to get across. Conversely, it might be nice to write a book that answers a few questions that I set forward from the start, like the hugely revealing “Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond. Or I could ask a few leading questions and let Andean people speak for themselves, as my friend and colleague Helena Halperin did in “I Laugh So I Won’t Cry: Kenyan Women Tell the Stories of their Lives.” (2005.)

In the absence of the clear questions or novelistic talent mentioned before, I think I will follow the advice Ted Thomas gave me over lunch at Roxbury Community College. “Write a travelogue.” After all, I am about to embark on a very special journey through the heart of the Andes with a group of scholars, and I hope to meet up with dear friends, fellow linguists and teachers, and my Bolivian host family from 1976 along the way.

I’m sharing this travelogue as I write it, as a “blog.” Some of the people who will read it have been with me for parts of the journey, and everyone has had their own journeys. So I look forward to your comments and reactions, and I will not use them in my “book” except by permission.

¡Adelante! (Forward!)
Tinkunachiskama. (til we meet again)

Hi Extended Family and Friends: