1

Genetic Defects or Generative Prototypes? Competing models for

livestock improvement in southern Bolivia

Maggie Bolton

University of Manchester

Prologue

One of the less remembered effects of Bolivia’s political and constitutional crisis of October

2003, the so-called ‘Gas Wars’, was the postponement of the Third Worldwide Camelid

Congress.1 The event was due to have taken place the very week that saw the fall of president,

Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, when violent clashes between the military and demonstrators in

La Paz left over 60 people dead in various incidents involving gunfire (Ledebur 2003: 2). It

was also a week in which indigenous and urban working-class muscle was flexed against an

elite, ‘white’, businessman president, having been galvanised into action by the proposed sale

of Bolivia’s natural gas to the United States through a Chilean port.2

Potosí, where the Congress was due to take place, had had its share of protests and road blocks

that week, but its departmental government avoided the sort of violent clashes that shook La

Paz. The organisers from the Office of Productive Development were faced with a situation in

which travel within the city, let alone the country, was next to impossible and, after months of

careful preparation, they took the difficult decision to postpone the showcase event. There

followed several anxious days in which private planes were sought to fly prestigious foreign

delegates to the relative safety of Santa Cruz and when it must have appeared that the detailed

and expensive preparations for the event had all been in vain. Below the city, in the Parque

los Pinos, scores of llamas, alpacas and vicuñas fretted in their pens. They were due to

compete in the judging ring of a livestock show that formed part of the event, and had already

been in Potosí for some weeks undergoing training to persuade them to behave well in public.

They were in confined spaces, far from their communities of origin. A herder from Sud Lípez,

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the remotest province of Potosí department, was charged with their care. Like the animals, he

had already been in Potosí for some time and was starting to feel disgruntled: he had other

duties with the regional camelid producers’ organisation, and was far from his own family and

llama herds. Faced with his possible defection, the organisers provided a financial incentive

for him to remain, and, as Carlos Mesa took up the presidential sash the animals waited in

their enclosures.

Introduction

This paper concerns recent initiatives by NGOs and branches of the Bolivian government

aimed at ‘improving’ llama management and productivity in rural areas of the country. It

explores interactions between herders and NGO personnel and between different ways of

knowing about animals. A particular focus is on competing claims to knowledge about animal

improvement and one way that I explore this is through camelid shows, particularly the Third

Worldwide Camelid Congress of 2003. I have begun here with postponement of this event

due to the ‘Gas Wars’ firstly because these wider political happenings in the country formed

the context in which it unfolded. Secondly, both the proposed sale of Bolivia’s natural gas and

the proposed opening up of global markets for camelid fibre and meat derivatives (the ultimate

aim of livestock improvement programmes) are linked by the implementation of neoliberal

policies within the country and by external pressures on the Bolivian government to reduce the

country’s fiscal deficit. Thirdly, the ‘Gas Wars’ in which predominantly indigenous protesters

confronted an elite, white president highlights the continued racialisation of Bolivian society.

Race enters into questions of herding and animal improvement since there are strong

associations between the animals and the indigenous highland population: from the point of

view of herders, the relationship between animals and humans is one of parallelism,

interdependence and mutual sustenance (Dransart 2002: 100), while at the hands of urbanites

the proximity of indigenous people to their animals can become a vehicle for the expression of

contempt for rural Indians.

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My focus on llama shows has come about because these are promoted by the NGOs involved

in livestock improvement programmes with the specific aim of teaching herders about good

animal conformation. Frequently the same experts are involved in judging animals as give

courses to herders about livestock management. Although some effort is made to identify

‘breeds’, the points by which animals are judged are ultimately linked to productive criteria.

Shows therefore are not unrepresentative of interactions between experts and herders in other

contexts. The Worldwide Camelid Congress was ultimately dominated by the voices and

opinions of scientific experts. One aim of this account is to redress the balance and bring the

herders themselves back into the limelight. There has been considerable academic interest in

camelid breeding in pre-conquest times from both archaeology and the biological sciences.

Publications have dealt both with the differentiation of domestic camelid breeds and with pre-

Hispanic breeding strategies (e.g. Kadwell et. al. 2001, Wheeler et. al. 1995,). However, apart

from Healy’s (2001) account of recent initiatives in alternative development in Bolivia, I know

of no other account that deals specifically with llama breeding in a contemporary setting.

Although this paper concerns llama herding, and the ethnographic data presented is specific to

its Bolivian context, its material addresses wider concerns. Ultimately, the paper is about

indigenous people confronting decisions about their livelihoods in an age of globalisation. It

also concerns the use of scientific knowledge in a development context, the nature of expertise

and the power of experts to impose their truths on less-powerful others. In the context in

question, scientific knowledge about animal management – a mobile knowledge that should

‘work’ independently of social factors – is transplanted from the Old World and research

institutes to the rural Andes. Here it encounters a highly racialised environment which,

although its characteristics are specific to the Andes, reminds us of discourses of nationalism,

race and class that surrounded its genesis in the Old World and prompts us to recall that

scientific knowledge itself is a socially embedded and culturally specific way of knowing. In

the Andes, science also encounters indigenous knowledge of animal husbandry. This

encounter is not one of outright opposition: there are moves towards accommodation from

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both sides. Herders are interested in hearing what scientists have to say and in new ways of

working with the animals that are important to their sense of themselves, and scientists,

although they do not give space to certain facets of indigenous knowledge, neither do they find

all such knowledge incommensurable with science. Nevertheless, as this paper explores, the

relationship is not unproblematic. This is exemplified through a discussion of herd

improvement and the presence of animals with certain unusual phenotypical characteristics,

regarded as defects by experts and generative prototypes by herders, in peasant herds.

Camelid politics, projects and NGOs

That the Worldwide Camelid Congress was due to be held in Potosí at all, rather than the

Bolivian seat of government, La Paz, had come about as a result of a natural disaster that

struck the southwest of the country in 2002. On the final weekend in June of that year the

western side of Peru and Bolivia was hit by unusually heavy snowstorms. These were most

severe and devastating in Sud Lípez province in the southwest of Potosí, where thousands of

llamas died either as an immediate result of the storm, or from starvation caused by lack of

pasture in the months that followed.3 The plight of Lipeño herders had made the national and

international news, and the Congress was relocated as an act of homage to the afflicted

herders.4 The snowstorm and its consequences also encouraged the departmental government

of Potosí to make the southwest of the department a priority for ‘productive’ development, and

one its targets became the activity of llama-herding which it aimed to transform into a

profitable concern.

In years gone by, no one from the educated circles of Bolivian society could have cared less

how peasants managed their animals. In fact Healy (2001:193) comments that ‘…as recently

as the early 1970s it was hard to find any Bolivian veterinarians who specialized in camelids’

and notes that even development initiatives involving livestock until recently concentrated on

introducing foreign breeds of sheep and cattle to Bolivia rather than on native animals (ibid:

25). The contempt with which llama herders were held by urban mestizos and ‘whites’ in

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Bolivia does not lack documentation and this contempt extended to their animals and llama

products. Llama wool was considered coarse and as recently as 1990, the sale of llama meat, a

food ‘more suitable for dogs than humans’ (ibid: 192) was prohibited in Bolivia’s urban

centres. The mayor of Potosí, commented to the local newspaper during the congress, that

during his own rural childhood, ‘It was little short of a crime to sell llama meat in the city, we

had to do it clandestinely because if we were caught it would be confiscated’.5 Urban

prejudice against llama meat was rationalised as a fear that the meat contained the cysts of the

nematode parasite responsible for the disease trichinosis.6 As Healy (2004: 31) notes, this fear

was the outward expression of racism towards indigenous herders.

A change of attitude towards llamas came about in the 1990s, firstly due to demand for llama

meat from neighbouring Chile, and secondly because of promotional campaigns highlighting

the meat’s healthy properties: low fat content, low cholesterol (Healy 2001: 213). Tourism

was a further factor, since (non-vegetarian) backpackers arriving in the country wanted to be

able to sample llama meat in city restaurants. This has led gradually to a transformation in the

regard with which llamas and their products were held – now tourists can eat llama in the

smartest restaurants in La Paz, and trucks arriving from the llama-herding regions are besieged

by buyers from butchers’ shops as they arrive into Bolivia’s cities.

Far from being the despised animals of former years, llamas now appear to have been

transformed into national treasures. A poster advertising the regional camelid producers’

association on display in the city of Tupiza showed a woolly llama or thampulli, with her

young. Beneath the photograph, the caption read ‘Genetic wealth of the southwest of Potosí’

(Riqueza genética del sudoeste de Potosí), its ownership abstracted from individual peasants to

a rather ill-defined geographical region. Several of the papers presented at the Potosi

Congress made statements along similar lines. Llamas became ‘… a strategic genetic resource

for insertion in the process of globalization’ (Carasili and Chiri 2003: 91), or an ‘economic’ or

‘ecological’ resource. The authors of a paper on genetic defects in llamas introduced their

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study by describing the llama as ‘Bolivia’s national and ancestral heritage’ (Carrasco and

Calani 2003: 233) and the organizers of the congress produced for sale a glossy brochure

entitled Qhapaq Kayninchis: Nuestra Riqueza (Our Wealth), which, judging by its price, was

hardly aimed at a readership of peasant herders. Proprietorship of llamas has slipped

discursively from herders to the wider nation and hence their improvement is the concern of

all. As a corollary to this, knowledge about the animals has been displaced to new sites (c.f.

Mitchell 2002: 90-93): away from herders and towards professionals. Llamas have become an

appropriate object for scientific study and, as this paper explores, a congress about them came

to dominate the elite social scene of Potosí for almost a week. At a time when the Bolivian

state is held to be ‘in retreat’ (Gill 2000) as a result of neoliberal ‘structural adjustment’ – not

that its ‘advance’ into the remote Lípez highlands was ever very noticeable – those taking up

the concern to improve and commercialise camelid production in Potosí are not so much the

officials of the departmental government as the technicians and scientists working for NGOs.

Some outside interest in the llamas of southwest Potosí predated the snowfall of 2002.

Camelid projects in Potosí, following a lead taken by organisations in Oruro Department

(Healy 2001), got underway in the mid 1990s. At this time an NGO called PROQUIPO,

operated out of the altiplano city of Uyuni.7 This organisation had as one of its remits to

encourage the ‘rational management of camelids’. 8 It was also instrumental in the formation

of a regional camelid producers’ organisation (ARCCA) (established in 1996) and of smaller

local groups (AZCCAs)9 and coordinated a pilot study into the sustainable capture and

shearing of vicuñas. There was a focus in the southwest of Potosí on the production of llama

fibre (rather than meat as had been the case with earlier projects in Oruro) since several studies

had indicated that the fibre of the llama population of this area has characteristics that

resemble alpaca (Rodriguez 2003). The hope is that its production could follow the precedent

set by the production and commercialization of alpaca fibre in Peru, where monochrome herds

of alpacas supply the international luxury wool trade.10

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PROQUIPO concluded its operations in 1997. Since then a further organisation, ACRA, an

Italian NGO with headquarters in Milan and finance from the Italian government and the

European Union, has initiated a project focused on capacitación (capacity-building): the

training or education of rural herders in such topics as genetic management, animal health, the

processing of camelid products, entrepreneurship and marketing. The idea is that local herders

should improve their stock and become entrepreneurs – the owners of small businesses

(microempresas), with the local and regional producers’ organisations functioning to facilitate

the marketing and sale of camelid produce. An important part of the training concerns

camelid breeding and the education of the rural herding population in how to manage the

reproduction of their animals and how to improve them. This is seen as necessary for the

entry of their products into global markets and the formation of successful small-scale

businesses. In other words, the improvement of camelid stock is a necessary step towards the

alleviation of poverty in the region, which in turn involves the improvement, through

entrepreneurship, of the peasant herders themselves. The organisation of shows for camelids,

first by PROQUIPO, later by ACRA in association with the producers’ organisation (ARCCA)

is one means through which the education of campesinos in the finer points of camelid

conformation is to be established. During 2003 shows were held in different parts of the

southwest of Potosi, and included an international event held in a frontier village on the

Argentine border. The livestock show section of the Camelid Congress was held to be the

culmination of all such events that year and was given the status of ‘world championship’,

even though no livestock from outside Bolivia was in attendance.

ACRA employs a variety of experts. These range from an Italian economics graduate who is

in overall charge of the operation to a number of local facilitators who have received a year’s

training at the University of Puno as veterinary technicians. In between there lie the

scientifically-trained technical staff. Those I knew included a veterinarian from Peru, who has

worked for a number of years on development projects involving camelids, and two

agronomists, one a recent graduate, the other a veteran of previous camelid projects. These

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people can with justification be termed ‘scientists’ as they are involved, or have aspirations to

be involved, in research into camelid management as well as with the implementation of

projects. They are based in Uyuni and La Paz, and are involved in the production and delivery

of training courses rather than with the practical side of animal health and husbandry. The

local facilitators are involved with the courses when these come to their areas, and at other

times are available to herders for consultation. Although I observed technically-trained

professionals work practically in animal vaccination programmes (most notably, as disaster-

aid following the snowfall of 2002), overwhelmingly, knowledge of the practical and physical

side of working with the animals remained with the herders, while experts acted in an

educative and advisory capacity.

Stock-breeding, race and commerce

Although, as Wheeler et. al. (1995) suggest, there was a great deal of selective breeding of

llamas and alpacas for different qualities and colour of fleece before their management was

disrupted by the arrival of Europeans in the Andes, the science of livestock improvement as

experts intend to apply it in the region today has its origins in the Old World. In Britain

systematic attempts were made to improve the quality of livestock in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, when the breeds of sheep and cattle we know were differentiated from

what the historian Harriet Ritvo has termed ‘a mishmash of local strains’ (Ritvo 1987: 64).

Ritvo’s work illustrates well the social factors that surrounded the development of an

apparently mobile knowledge supposedly disembedded from social relations. At its inception,

the notion of improvement had connotations both of class and nationalism. Ordinary

stockmen could not afford the luxury (and necessary culling of ‘reject’ animals) that breeding

experiments entailed. Instead, ‘improvement’ was left in the hands of enthusiastic aristocrats

who had both the time and the capital to spare to invest in the production of prestigious

animals for display at events like the Smithfield show (Ritvo 1987: 54). In the nineteenth

century, such events celebrated the pre-eminence of both the beasts and their aristocratic

owners at a time when animal ‘improvement’ had become conflated both with nationalism and

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patriotic duty. Herd books were established for the different breeds that were being

differentiated, in which genealogies of individual animals were recorded – in the manner of

those of their aristocratic owners. The animals themselves became ‘art objects’, appreciable

by connoisseurs ‘in the know’ with an acquired aesthetic taste: the aristocratic breeders

themselves and their peers. Such an aesthetic taste was not always held by those outside these

circles and many stockbreeders and butchers, seeking more practical and profitable animals,

did not particularly appreciate the efforts of the improvers.

The exception among early livestock improvers, being a mere tenant farmer rather than a

member of the aristocracy, was perhaps the most famous improver of all, Robert Bakewell

(Trow Smith 1959: 45-69). Bakewell is thought to have borrowed techniques of repeated in-

breeding from the breeders of English racehorses and to have applied them first to longhorn

cattle and then to Leicester sheep.11 At a time when a ‘driving force of high profit’ (Trow-

Smith 1959: 45) had come about with the rapid growth of the industrial towns of Britain and

their consequent demand for meat, he made his name through being a shrewd businessman

who courted publicity, and made his profits through renting out the services of ‘improved’

bulls and tups at prices that were astronomical for his day. Ritvo sees his business techniques

as the genesis of the idea of what she calls ‘genetic capital’: the ‘ownership’ of some

intangible property in his animals that is heritable and can be transmitted to their offspring and

will dominate that heritage of potential mates (Ritvo 1995: 418-9). She comments that issues

raised in Bakewell’s day have resurfaced only superficially transformed with recent advances

in genetics and its commercial repercussions (Ritvo op cit: 424).

Borneman (1988) points out that these days it is acceptable to draw conclusions about the

qualities and attributes of endogamous and physically similar groups of animals that are not

acceptable for similar groupings of people. In the first half of the twentieth century, however,

the model of animal breeding provided a model for those intent on improving the human race.

As Condit (1999: 26-45) demonstrates, eugenicist writings regularly employed the metaphor

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of stockbreeding. In this era the infant science of genetics suggested that animals could be

bred in an orderly fashion with specific intended goals and eugenicists looked for ways of

applying the science to the human population. Human improvement was not to be limited to

physical types, as was the case with animals, but had a moral element. The feeble-minded, a

vaguely defined label that seemed to fit those whose behaviour and values were at variance

with those of the dominant sector, were to be discouraged from breeding (Condit: 36).

Transposing livestock improvement to the Andes involves taking a science that already grew

up amid certain contexts of thinking on race, class and commerce to a region with its own

history of ‘race thinking’.12 This is a history that stretches back to colonial times when the

population was segregated into Spaniards, Indians and African slaves, each group with its own

rights, privileges and obligations. Mobility between groups, particularly on the part of Indians

seeking to become more like white Spaniards (and so avoid payment of tribute and/or

compulsory labour drafts) was not unknown. Well into the twentieth century, at least in Peru,

debates raged about racial mixing. Some elite factions of Cuzco society extolled the merits of

the pure ‘Inca’ race – so long as their present-day descendants remained in their place in the

countryside – while others extolled the ‘hybrid vigour’ of racially mixed mestizos as the key

to eugenic success (de la Cadena 2000: 64-68 and 140-145). In early twentieth-century

Bolivia urban intellectuals were of the persuasion that the culture of the Indian population

stood in the way of progress and modernization. Ann Zulawski cites the case of the socialist

physician and novelist from Sucre, Jaime Mendoza, who advocated the proletarianisation of

the rural population in part to distance them from customs he saw as responsible for the spread

of disease (Zulawski 2000: 124). Proletarianisation together with mestizaje (racial and cultural

mixing) was promoted as a national ethos at a later stage, following the National Revolution of

1952 when the rural population was encouraged to assimilate to a national ideal. More

recently, in response to recent international legislation on the rights of indigenous people,

Bolivia has redefined itself as a multi-ethnic and pluri-cultural nation. It is nevertheless easier

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to amend the national constitution than it is to eliminate entrenched ideas about race from

popular imaginings. Bolivia remains a highly racialised society.

What then are the implications of transposing animal-improvement science to this highly

racialised environment? As I have already argued, llamas have a strong association with the

stigmatised rural Indian population. “Smelly llama-woman!” is one of the insults Linda

Seligman heard aimed at a customer of rural origin in a Cuzco market place (Seligman 1993:

196). Today, rural llama-owners, rather than become proletarians, are expected to improve

themselves by embracing neoliberal commerce and entrepreneurship. They are encouraged to

improve their animals through outbreeding or hybridisation and through assimilation to

externally imposed standards. While outbreeding is a standard strategy used by scientists in a

variety of contexts to improve stock and increase genetic variation, in the Andean environment

it is difficult not to read hybridisation through the lens of mestizaje. In the case of llamas the

analogy seems particularly apt since improvement aims to produce more white animals

(because of the enhanced value of their fleece in the marketplace), while human mestizaje

aimed to ‘whiten’ the indigenous population. Tellingly, when I discussed the strategy of

hybridisation with herders, they were willing to incorporate animals from elsewhere into their

herds (although, as I discuss below, not to transfer their own animals elsewhere), but almost

invariably spoke of animals from countries outside the Andean region, particularly from the

United States or Europe. As was the case in colonial times, hybridisation provides a chance to

approximate oneself to more powerful others.

Into the judging ring: seeking the ideal llama

The Camelid Congress was rescheduled for mid-November 2003. The event itself dominated

the local daily newspaper for the four days of its duration, involved just about every local

dignitary and intellectual imaginable and was inaugurated by the vice-minister for agriculture

livestock and fisheries. It was an extraordinary mixture of scientific conference and livestock

show: in the town centre, in the lecture theatres of the Universidad Autónoma Tomás Frías,

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learned and international delegates gave scientific papers on nearly every aspect of camelid

breeding and management: genetic improvement; camelid health; pasture management and

nutrition; and the commercialisation of camelid products. Meanwhile, below the city in the

Parque los Pinos, herders from different highland communities exhibited their animals before

a team of international judges from the United States, Argentina, Peru and Bolivia. Traffic

between the two events was overwhelmingly in one direction. The scientists and civic

dignitaries would listen to or present papers in the mornings at the University, and would

descend to the park to watch or preside over the animal judging in the afternoon, but the

herders seldom, if ever, found time to catch a bus to the city centre to attend the conference.

The scientists thus judged the llamas, but the herders had little opportunity to comment on

what was being said about their animals in the university.

The animals to be judged were divided into different classes according to age, sex and type.

Alpacas were divided into haucayas and suris (curly-coated and straight-coated), and llamas

were divided into q’aras and thampullis (short-haired and woolly) as though these were

separate ‘breeds’. Llamas managed in Sud Lípez tend to be of the woolly variety, but do not

necessarily breed true to type and no attempt is made to separate them for breeding purposes.

This was a point on which the coordinator of livestock production at the event, an Argentine

breeder, criticised peasant management of Bolivian herds. He wanted to see more emphasis

on the differentiation of breeds. Such discourse, however, was rarely heard from NGO

personnel: they were overwhelmingly concerned with production and emphasised

hybridization as necessary for the improvement or enrichment of genetic material.

The llamas and alpacas in Potosí had been transformed in two respects from the animals that

had arrived from their communities. Firstly, they had been renamed and a glossy show (or

sales) catalogue had been produced with their photographs and descriptions under their new,

and often transnational, names – ‘Mister’, ‘Diana’, ‘Limber’, ‘Cameroon’, ‘América’ and so

on. Llamas do not receive names like these in the countryside. They are given a Quechua (or

13

Aymara) name at birth that reflects their colour and markings and often makes comparison

between the animal and different species of Andean aquatic birds (Dransart 2002: 76-78). The

name serves to identify the animal and also to describe it to a neighbour if it has strayed. In

Potosi, the original names of the animals on show had themselves been lost – as in many cases

had their distinguishing ‘flowers’ – the woollen tassels they wear in their ears in rural

communities that aid identification. Secondly, they had undergone a period of training, so that

they could be halter-led with ease and could perform a few tricks: kneel down, shake hands,

jump small obstacles or carry designer luggage. Animals entered the ring not with their

owners, but with their trainers. A group of teenagers, from both city and countryside, had

been involved in their training prior to the event, and these young people, wearing blue

overalls prominently displaying the Congress logo, exhibited the animals. Winners in each

category were presented with a sash in Bolivia’s national colours a ‘presidential sash’ as one

woman spectator commented to me, recalling Carlos Mesa’s televised investiture a few weeks

earlier. They were no longer ordinary animals from the countryside. In order to become

acceptable to urbanites as ‘Bolivia’s national and ancestral heritage’ they had been stripped of

the tassels from their ears, were led by anonymous teenagers in overalls and bore transnational

names. Although the analogy is not exact, one could say that all had become q’ara, in the

sense that the adjective, meaning ‘naked’ or ‘peeled’, is applied disparagingly to people by

indigenous Quechua speakers. They had become like people whose dress shows no sign of

ethnic affiliation or who have deliberately changed their dress to obscure their rural origins in

an effort to secure social advancement.

Genetic Defects

Certain sorts of llamas, identified as distinct types by their owners in the countryside, had not

been allowed to compete at all. These were animals that were aesthetically unpleasing to the

‘experts’ and were designated as ‘genetically defective’. Any such examples had been

‘weeded’ out in the regional shows prior to the event. Such animals included murus, which

have unusually short ears, and llallawis or t’aritas, which are polydactyl (have more than the

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usual two toes on one or more feet). In the General Guide to the Potosí event, three of the

international judges explain some of their evaluative criteria and are unequivocal that defects

should be disallowed. The Argentine judge, for example, starts off by conceding that regional

differences between animals are to be expected, but terminates his contribution by stating:

In that which relates to the admission of animals to the judging ring, it is [my] opinion that

the presence of defects and/or malformations must result in automatic exclusion.

(Guía General, III Congreso Mundial Sobre Camélidos, p. 56. My translation and italics.)

Similar sentiments are expressed by the Peruvian judge who specifically identifies the

‘defects’ as genetic:

If observation gives us an initial appreciation of the animal’s characteristics, it is important

to complement this by inspection before taking any decision in the election of the ideal

animal. It is possible with this technique to identify any defects that the animals present at

the time of their judgment. These are generally related to genetic defects (malformed

testicles, presence of only one testicle, incomplete development of the testicles, protruding

jaw, polydactilism, etc.).

(Guía General, III Congreso Mundial Sobre Camélidos, p. 57. My translation and italics.)

The same Peruvian vet had headed the camelid team of PROQUIPO, the NGO that worked in

the southwest of Potosí in the 1990s and continued to work for ACRA. A booklet produced

by PROQUIPO, to complement the courses in llama management that its personnel had given

to peasant producers, also highlights certain defects as characteristics that should be eliminated

by ‘genetic management’. Whereas the best animals that should be chosen for reproduction

have good conformation, coats of one single colour, uniform fibre and good-sized testicles,

herders are urged to reject animals with a range of common ‘defects’. Once again these

defects are described as ‘genetic’:

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…For example, the most common defects are: parti-colour, lack of pigment in the eyes,

protruding jaw, short ears, polydactilism – or supernumerary toes – and, in males,

malformed or small testicles. These defects originate through bad management and in-

breeding, that is, the crossing of animals that are related (fathers with daughters, mothers

with sons and brothers, etc.)

(PROQUIPO, n.d.)

While the good characteristics identified are related to the production and reproduction of the

animals, some of the defects appear to be cosmetic and unrelated to the production of either

meat or fibre. Neither PROQUIPO nor the authors of a paper on genetic defects presented at

the conference (Carrasco and Calani 2003) give any reason why they should be considered so

harmful. Here there are some echoes of the nineteenth-century show-cattle discussed by Ritvo

(1987), and discrimination against certain characteristics appears to fulfil a function of

legitimising social difference (c.f. Bourdieu 1984). The recognition and rejection of defective

animals, which as we shall see in the following section are particularly associated with peasant

herds, distinguishes experts ‘in the know’ from indigenous farmers. The non-expert breeding

practices of the latter were blamed for the presence of such defects which were said to result

from consanguinity or in-breeding. The labelling of these sort of defects as ‘genetic’ and as

resulting from ‘consanguinity’ had, with repetition, become common parlance both among

NGO personnel and herders in Sud Lípez. Herders also had started to refer to their stud males,

known locally as jañachus, as los genéticos. Experts advised careful selection of reproductive

males, but considered this an insufficient remedy for a perceived loss of genetic capital. The

long term remedy would be hybridisation with outside stock.

One of my compadres from Rosario in Sud Lípez had made the mistake of taking a ‘defective’

animal to the show at Río Mojón on the Argentine border. He had not been very forthcoming

about his experiences there or about why, unlike other herders who had attended, he had not

been invited to show his animal in Potosí. Some time after the event, his cousin from a

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neighbouring community told me his animal had suffered immediate disqualification from the

competition.

The foundations on which herds are built

Llama owners in Sud Lípez would like very much to earn more money, and if they could do so

through their llamas, then they would be following a long tradition whereby these animals

have provided for them an opening into wider markets, for example, through the transport of

silver in colonial times. Those Lipeño herders who have had the opportunity, or have felt

motivated, to attend also claim to have enjoyed the livestock shows that have been organised

by the regional camelid producers’ organization together with the NGOs. However, it should

be noted that those attending shows are a minority. Those who had exhibited animals saw the

shows as social events where it was possible to meet herders from other areas to exchange

news and ideas. To most, the exception being the leaders of the producers’ organisation from

Ingenio, who had become great enthusiasts, the process of judging or ranking the animals –

usually carried out by an invited expert – was not obvious but something that had to be learned

through participation.

Early in my fieldwork I had tried to get people to tell me what a ‘good’ llama should look like,

but this line of questioning produced nothing more interesting than comments that the wool of

white llamas fetches a higher price than that of piebald or speckled animals, or that large

animals had more meat. I tried replacing ‘good’ with ‘beautiful’ in my interviews, and got

similar answers until eventually one young herder replied, ‘Look, Margarita, for us all llamas

are beautiful!’ Some were obviously suited for one purpose rather than another, for meat

rather than wool, or vice versa, or as pack animals, but they did not appear to be ranked

hierarchically by their physical features.

Herders had to learn which sort of llama could do well in a show class. Whether a llama did

well did not depend only on how close that llama, and others in the class, approached an

17

assumed ideal, but on how well the owner had succeeded in guessing the judging criteria. One

man told me about his mother’s experience in a show at Uyuni:

They took a llama belonging to my mother to the show at Uyuni, and it won there, didn’t it?

But it was not quite in first place… I don’t know… I’m not sure in which prize it won. But,

according to what my mother says, she has only recently realised which characteristics a

llama needs in order to compete…

… So, my mother, as she had had no experience in this, perhaps had taken one according to

her own judgement. But, seeing those [that won] in the shows, she said, ‘now I have an

idea… you have to take one with these characteristics’, she said, ‘with a well-composed ear,

with a long ear. Then, that it should be a whole-colour, and then that it should have a more-

or-less good stance’. Like that, then, those types. And we have llamas like that.

[Porfidio, Comunidad Urullajta]

In spite of her lack of knowledge of appropriate llama conformation, the animal had won a

prize. The woman, however, had refused to sell it even when offered around US$ 150. Such

events inevitably attract dealers aiming to sell animals at high prices to foreign buyers – a

tendency that worries anthropologists like Jorge Flores Ochoa (2000), who sees the

competition of foreign breeders as potentially damaging to the commercial opportunities of

Andean producers and laments the lifting of protectionist restrictions in the Andean countries

on the export of live animals of reproductive age. In Uyuni, Porfidio’s mother refused to sell,

not for concerns about exporting its genetic capital, but from her belief that to sell a live

animal is to sell the ‘luck’ of the herd. Her younger son told me about the offer:

I don’t remember exactly… It must have been, she said, if I’m not mistaken, a hundred

dollars, two hundred dollars, I don’t know. But they offered her a good sum. And my

mother has this belief that my grandparents, and great-grandparents… She had decided to

sell, but she asked if they were going to take it alive or as meat. So, they told her they were

going to take it [alive] by plane… [in a] light aircraft, because… I don’t know where they

were from… They must have been North Americans. Well, they offered her a good sum.

18

My mother said, as my grandparents had always counselled, that [the llama] is a blessing

from God, a Pachamama that… it’s one’s life. So, you can’t sell it alive. Meat, yes, you can

sell that. It was as if my grandparents had left a message for my mother, wasn’t it? So,

remembering this then she said, ‘No, no I won’t sell’.

[Santos, Tupiza]

Llamas are inherited from parents and grandparents whose souls continue to watch the herd

after death. They can affect the herd’s reproduction or can strike an animal with mange if they

are displeased. The herd should stay together as a reproductive group and live animals should

not enter into transactions.13 Selling an animal is to separate it from the herd, and this

undermines the reproductive force of the group as, notes Urton (1997:103), does counting the

animals which effects a conceptual separation. Killing an animal for meat, nevertheless, does

not present problems. The potential for increase or multiplication (Quechua - miray), in the

herd resides with the females of the group and Urton (1997: 160) associates this specifically

with the female genitalia. Unfortunately, in the case described above, even though the souls’

instructions were followed, a week after arriving home the llama had fallen into a river and

died as a result of its injuries. ‘We lost the money, we lost everything!’ Santos, now the owner

of a travel agency in Tupiza, reflected.

It did emerge eventually from my questioning that some animals were more beautiful (or

according to some people, more interesting) than others. When I asked about murus and

llallawis, the young herder who had told me that all are beautiful commented:

Well, for us, those are the most beautiful… that’s what it seems to us…

They have always existed, these types of llama, the murus or those that have a… we call

them t’aras or they [others] call them llallawis. They are the beautiful llamas for us …

although they have told us just lately that these llamas are not normal, as one could say...

We say that we have beautiful llamas because to have a short ear or to have an extra toe is

19

not an abnormality. It doesn’t harm them…. [It does] absolutely nothing. So, to have a

llama that is different from the others …it is more beautiful to us.

[Edgar, Comunidad Rosario]

Other herders described these types of llama as the ‘elders’ (mayores) or chiefs (jefes) of the

troop. Some people find them a bit alarming. My best friend in Rosario, don Mauricio, was a

very experienced herder in his 60s. In describing to me the rituals surrounding the cutting of

notches (señales) in the llamas’ ears, he mentioned that murus and t’aritas were treated apart

from the other animals, were festooned with streamers and received ample libations.14 He

explained that this was:

Why? Because they are llamas, they are the elders. The payrumas are a similar case. We

call them illas… We have to ch’allar [pour libations] well so that we have more of these

illas… because, well, the llamas have to be like a house with good foundations so that it

won’t fall down.

[Mauricio, Rosario]

Payrumas belong to a further type of unusual llama mentioned in the technical literature on

genetic defects, although they do not constitute an obvious phenotype, being sterile females.

My comadre, doña Cristina, explained to me that they were the mamas of the herd. It is said

that they are only normally present in the larger herds, and conversely, that in a herd where

there are payrumas, there will be many llamas. They should also be given special treatment

during herding rituals. Doña Cristina drew a comparison between this type of llama and the

jañachus, the stud males and fathers of the herd. 15 Rather than being seen as a useless,

unproductive animal, the payruma is celebrated, and according to another informant, should

preferably not be killed for meat. Although she has no offspring of her own, her presence as

mama or illa, along with that of the murus and llallawis, is indicative of the herd’s fertility.

20

Several ethnographers of the Andean region, particularly those who have worked in herding

communities in neighbouring Peru, have noted the presence in livestock rituals of small

effigies of animals made from stone, sometimes carved and sometimes naturally shaped.16

These stone llamas are given the collective name of illas (or sometimes enqas or enqaychus).

According to Allen (1988), illas concentrate special generative powers in themselves, while

for Flores Ochoa (1976), illas possess enqa which is a generative and vital principle. Both

authors describe how such objects are guarded by households in bundles which are kept

hidden out of sight outside the occasion for certain rituals, and even then are concealed from

those outside the immediate family. Flores Ochoa adds that, in the Cuzco region, seat of the

Inca Empire, these figurines are often of pre-Hispanic origin. He explains how herders have to

care for the figurines, as they have to care for their animals as both are delivered, or lent, to

humans by the pachamama, the living, generative earth, through the mediation of the high

mountains – themselves deities. If either the illas or the animals themselves are treated badly,

then the deities can become annoyed and take them back.

In Sud Lípez, I never saw a bundle of stone carvings like those Allen and Flores Ochoa

describe. Families do, however, have natural stones, thought to resemble llamas, that are used

in rituals concerned with the well-being of the herd, but which are kept beside a hole in the

earth, where libations are poured and offerings made, called a virgen – virgen, deriving from

the Virgin Mary, is the term that many Quechua speakers prefer to pachamama when referring

to the living generative earth (Howard-Malverde 1995: 143). In Lípez, llamas ultimately come

from the living earth, and are described as the fleas of the high mountains, but they also come

from the souls of the dead as inheritance. Rather than perform a ritual for the illas, as Flores

Ochoa describes, before the llama-marking ceremony Lipeño herders perform a ritual for the

souls of the dead called waki (Bolton 2002).

Minerals, like plants and animals, are products of the living earth, and the mines of Sud Lípez

have their own illas in the form of choice lumps of mineral guarded in recesses in the walls of

21

their principal galleries. Writing from Potosi, Pascale Absi notes that such illas are venerated

by miners to increase production and she recalls that similar practices are recorded in

chronicles of the colonial period. Then, the pieces of metal were given the name mama and

were both first fruits of a mine and the sources of its fertility (Absi 2003: 88). They were the

wakas of the mine, where waka was and is an Andean term that in Salomon’s words could be

‘any material thing that manifested the superhuman’ (Salomon 1991: 17). The colonial

extirpator of idolatries, Cristóbal de Albornoz similarly relates the concept of waka to mama

when he writes of Andean people:

There are other types of wakas, which they revere and serve with great care, which are the

first fruits that they gather from a particular ground which was not sown. They choose the

most beautiful fruit and they guard it and, in its image, make others from gold or silver, such

as a maize cob, or a potato, and they call them mamasara and mamapapa. And so on and so

forth with the other fruits and in the same way with all the minerals of gold or silver or

mercury which in ancient times they discovered. They chose the most beautiful stones of

the different metals and guarded them, and they wet them, calling them “mothers” of those

mines…

[Cristóbal de Albornoz [1584] 1989: 165]

Harris (2000) notes that mama can, but does not necessarily, imply female and may mean a

“source of fertility” rather than mother.

There is also a continuing association with things that are somehow ‘out of the ordinary’ and

wakas or mamas. This is perhaps conveyed best in the description given by the Inca Garcilaso

de la Vega, a colonial mestizo of noble birth, in his attempt to convey the importance of the

term huaca (waka) to a Spanish readership:

… The same name is given to all those things which for their beauty and excellence stand

above other things of the same kind, such as a rose, an apple, or a pippin, or any other fruit

22

that is better or more beautiful than the rest… On the other hand, they give the name huacas

to ugly and monstrous things… the great serpents of the Antis… everything that is out of the

usual course of nature, as a woman who gives birth to twins… double-yolked eggs are

huaca…

[cited in Salomon 1991: 17 ]

Things that are out of the usual course of nature are beautiful and monstrous at the same time

and are also powerful. They also may have been touched by lightning (ibid: 17). Llamas with

unusually short ears, those with more (or less) than the usual number of toes, and females that

do not give birth are all unusual, and are also beautiful and powerful. The presence of these

animals aids the reproduction of the herd in general and they should receive good care. Flores

Ochoa (1979: 83-84) notes an origin myth for alpacas, in which the animals emerge from the

inner world Ukhu Pacha with their shepherdess and a tiny alpaca that is their illa. That this

illa that is a live animal is also a miniature links the living illas of Lípez with Catherine

Allen’s discussion of the role of miniatures in Andean ritual. Allen (1997) sees playing with

pebbles that represent herd animals, houses and consumer goods on ritual occasions as iconic

textual communication with, or requests to, powerful beings (the generative earth or the high

mountains): texts that serve both a communicative and a coercive purpose. For her, they are

indicative of what she calls ‘synecdochal thinking’: whereas synecdoche is a figure of speech

whereby part may stand for whole or whole for part, synecdochal thinking comprehends the

world in terms of ‘mutually enveloping homologous structures that act upon each other’ (ibid:

81). Miniatures, even when made of stone are homologous with the things they represent,

since they share a ‘matrix of animated substance’ (ibid). Unusual llamas represent the herd

synecdochally and embody requests for more llamas to powerful beings. Improvement, in the

form of multiplication, is understood to originate from within the reproductive group and its

unusual animals, rather than from outwith the herd through hybridisation and transactions in

genetic capital.

23

Indigenous Knowledge and Science

On the whole, the scientific staff of ACRA and other NGOs did not regard indigenous

knowledge as worthless or as entirely incommensurable with science. The Peruvian vet on

ACRA’s staff who acted as a judge at the congress was particularly interested in indigenous

herbal remedies for animals and explained to me how he had collected data on the subject and

had recorded interviews with elderly women informants. An agronomist working with another

organisation told me she planned to publish a book on the same subject. Such interest is in

part stimulated by environmental concerns – the vet explained his interest in finding

environmentally-friendly alternatives to the chemicals used in anti-parasitic animal dips – and

in part by a general interest in herbal medicines in the Andean countries. Healy (2001: 32-34,

48) notes that after years of suppression, economic hardship and hyperinflation in the early

1980s led the Bolivian Ministry of Health to approve the use of native medicines. Another

point on which scientists endorsed indigenous knowledge was the practice of separating herds

of male and female animals, still current in some areas but abandoned in Lipez, which they

saw as a good basis for genetic management.

Those parts of indigenous knowledge endorsed by scientists, however, are those parts that are

readily amenable to scientific explanation in terms of action on nature. Other facets of

herders’ knowledge are not unknown to them but are not accorded a place in modern scientific

animal management. The authors of the paper on genetic defects cited above mention the

difficulty in eliminating defective animals from peasant herds since these animals are

considered by herders to be ‘amulets’ (Carrasco and Calani 2003: 234). The Spanish gloss

‘amuleto’ on the Andean concept of illa distances the authors from this sort of localised non-

expert knowledge. It is not necessarily the case that scientists despise Andean culture. The

vet from ACRA told me enthusiastically about the Aymara culture discussion group he had

joined in La Paz. He added that several people in the group were special from an Andean

point of view in that some were twins, someone had been struck by lightning and another had

a hair lip. These characteristics are out of the ordinary and manifest the superhuman in exactly

24

the same way as short ears and supernumerary toes in llamas. He was unable or unwilling,

however, to extrapolate from his enthusiasm for the unusual people in his discussion group to

herders’ enthusiasm for animals that are out of the ordinary. Here, Latour’s dissection of what

he terms the ‘modern constitution’ is illuminating. Scientific professionals working for NGOs

(Latour’s moderns) make a separation between the natural world and that of human society,

thereby denying that science and the ‘things’ of nature are also constructed, construed and

explained by humans – and are therefore part social – and that at the same time the social

world is sustained by things. Those parts of indigenous knowledge that can readily be

assimilated to descriptions of nature are adopted, while others considered merely ‘culture’ are

rejected, or at best become oddities for discussion outside the professional environment. Some

parts of indigenous knowledge can be assimilated to a description of nature by a process that

Latour terms a work of ‘translation’, or abstraction from a knowledge that is rooted in the

social and spatial particularities of its Andean environment. Through their juxtaposition with

the scientific knowledge of articles and experiment, they add to a knowledge that is universal

or independent of place. Other parts that are not abstracted in this way are left behind.

That science is held to be a universal knowledge applicable irrespective of place lends it

authority over other ways of knowing, and those with the authority of scientific expertise (who

have been educated in science subjects) get to impose their truths on less-powerful others.

Those less-powerful others at their specific locations have to bear the social and material

consequences of these actions. This is ably illustrated in Mitchell’s (2002) study of twentieth-

century Egypt, where new technologies for irrigation combined with movements of people and

vehicles in the Second World War to bring about the outbreak of a particularly virulent strain

of malaria, and new procedures of mapping and measuring land led to a reconfiguration of

Egyptian landholding and the relocation of decision-making in agriculture. Those with

scientific expertise have received education and, as de la Cadena observes, in the Andes

education has become a new source of social discrimination that may converge with dominant

racism. As we saw at the Camelid Congress, educated, and predominantly white, scientists

25

debated camelid improvement while less-educated, indigenous herders remained with their

animals and were expected to follow expert advice. Social consequences from the application

of animal breeding science and the commercialisation of llama production are likely to involve

the reconfiguring of animal-human relationships and relations between herders and the land as

they move from subsistence pastoralism to something more akin to ranching (c.f. Ingold 1980:

4-5). Although Bebbington (1996) notes that modernization in farming methods can

strengthen indigenous identity, in Lípez through reconfiguring such relationships

commercialising animal husbandry may equally well erode it.

Andean peasants do not stick rigidly traditional ways of doing things. In the article cited

above, Bebbington explains that Ecuadorian communities that formerly supplied bonded

labourers to large estates, and whose members associate old methods with former relations of

domination, actively welcome new agricultural innovations (Bebbington 1996). Harvey (n.d:

15-17), gives a nuanced discussion of the mobilities of knowledges, and the relations between

science and practical knowledge, using an Andean example. She notes that even though

Andean peasants draw upon local knowledge of restricted mobility, this knowledge grows

from an open an motivated curiosity and concern with empirical outcomes. It is the

achievement of favourable practical outcomes that concerns them most, but the favourable

practical outcomes for Andeans, are not always those of scientists and developers: they

include such non-economic results as the renewal or affirmation of relations between human

beings, between humans and their animals and between humans and the powerful forces of the

landscape (ibid.). In Lipez, relations with the souls of the dead could be added to the list. It is

similar outcomes involving the renewal and affirmation of relationships that lipeño herders

seek through their attachment to the unusual animals that experts consider defective. It is also

these relations that commercialisation and scientific expertise threatens to alter. In this age of

science and globalisation, lipeño herders are faced with important decisions about their

livelihoods and their relations with other living beings and the forces of the environment. At

26

present they seem ambivalent about the outcomes achievable through the application of

science.

Concluding Remarks

Many lipeño herders appreciate that in order to continue working with the animals that give

them a sense of themselves, they will need not only to renew and affirm relations with

humans, animals, souls and landscape, but to find ways to adapt their herding to present-day

economic relations and the spread of technology. The challenge for both herders and

developers is to find ways that expert knowledge can achieve economic goals without ignoring

the non-economic factors important to indigenous people. Recent academic work stressing

that attention should be paid to sociocultural factors and the non-economic goals of livestock

keepers in the management of animal genetic resources appears to reinforce this viewpoint

(Anderson 2003). In Bolivia, at a time when indigenous movements are growing in strength,

and when new social movements are becoming more confident about challenging existing

hierarchies and exercising their political muscle, such approaches appear more necessary than

ever.

27

Notes

Fieldwork took place in Bolivia (2003-4) with the support of a research fellowship from the

ESRC. I am grateful for comments from the four anonymous reviewers for JRAI and

particularly to Penny Harvey and Kate Degnen at Manchester for detailed comments on earlier

drafts.

1 Tercero Congreso Mundial Sobre Camélidos. South American camelids form a group of animals

comprising domestic llamas and alpacas together with wild guanacos and vicuñas.

2 See Ledebur (2003).

3 According to Zapana (n.d.), there were 11133 llama fatalities in Sud Lípez (approximately 18.25%).

4 El Potosi 20/11/2003, p. 3, “Homenaje a los Lípez”.

5 El Potosí, 20/11/2003 p. 3, “La carne de llama era despreciada’.

6 Llama meat does sometimes contain cysts, but these are of the species sarcocystis aucheniae, which,

unlike trichinella spiralis, has little or no effect on humans.

7 PROQUIPO (Proyecto Quinoa Potosí) was primarily concerned with the promotion of quinoa-growing

in the provinces of Nor Lípez, Daniel Campos and Eduardo Baldivieso.

8 http://www.delbol.cec.eu.int/sp/proyectos/proyectos_concluidos/proquipo.htm, consulted 13.11.04.

9 ARCCA – Asociación Regional de Criadores de Camélidos. AZCCA – Asociación Zonal de Criadores

de Camélidos.

10 For an anthropological account of the Peruvian alpaca industry, see Orlove (1978).

11 Although it is difficult to know exactly what Bakewell’s techniques were, since he kept them a closely

guarded secret (Trow-Smith 1959: 53, Ritvo 1995: 414-415).

12 ‘Race thinking’ is the term that Silverblatt (2004: 17), following Hannah Arendt, chooses to use since

it encompasses more than the narrow nineteenth-century connotations of ‘race’ or ‘racism’.

13 They are, however, given by adults to their children on certain occasions, but usually remain with the

family herd until the children are ready to establish their own households.

14 These days señales are still cut in the animals’ ears, but the full ceremony is hardly ever held. Ideally,

señales should be cut every three years.

28

15 In Lipez, even though Quechua is the indigenous language spoken, the Aymara term jañachu is used

to denote a stud male llama. This usage is reported also by Dransart (2002) for northern Chile, where

Aymara is spoken. However, Abercrombie (1998: 382-3), writing from K’ulta in Oruro department, uses

the term to denote an infertile (i.e. castrated) male. In a footnote to his text he explains the derivation of

the term is from jani = “not” and anachuña = “to produce” (ibid: 507). This renders the comparison

with sterile females still more pertinent.

16 For example, Flores Ochoa (1976), Allen (1988).

29

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Note on Contributor:

Maggie Bolton has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of St. Andrews. She

currently holds an ESRC research fellowship at the University of Manchester and has

conducted fieldwork in southern Bolivia.