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Assembling ritual, the burden of the

everyday: an exercise in relational ontology
in Quebrada de Humahuaca, Argentina
a
Dant e Angelo
a
Universidad de Tarapacá
Published online: 20 Mar 2014.

To cite this article: Dant e Angelo (2014) Assembling rit ual, t he burden of t he everyday: an exercise
in relat ional ont ology in Quebrada de Humahuaca, Argent ina, World Archaeology, 46:2, 270-287, DOI:
10.1080/ 00438243.2014.891948

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 Assembling ritual, the burden of the
everyday: an exercise in relational
ontology in Quebrada de Humahuaca,
Argentina
Dante Angelo
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Abstract

In this article, I advance understanding of the political dimensions of ritual in archaeology. Ritual practice
has been commonly identified within a dualistic schema in which common or everyday activities are set
against (and apart from) those practices that have special significance. Conventionally, the latter belong to
the realm of ritual in which the sacred, the mysterious, the symbolically significant and the uncommon
become institutionalized. Such a rationale constrains ritual within the core economic, social and ideological
mechanisms that constitute social structures. After a brief discussion of traditional approaches to ritual in
the Andes, I present an alternative interpretation grounded in a relational approach to ritual. Exploring
contemporary archaeological contexts in Andean north-west Argentina, I attempt to bridge this divide by
emphasizing that ritual is part of social performance.

Keywords

Ritual; assemblage; performativity; relational ontology; everyday life.

Introduction

In this article I challenge the separation of the ritual and the domestic as two apparently
incommensurable realms of social life. In doing so, I examine two key elements in the under-
standing of ritual that is widespread in Andean archaeology. These include: 1) the absence of
domestic artefacts, which renders ritual empty of domestic significance, and 2) a prescriptive
view of ritual that sees its social role in exclusively normative terms. I contend that the
understanding of ritual within this dichotomous perspective has largely neglected or even

World Archaeology Vol. 46(2): 270–287 Archaeology of Performance

© 2014 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0043-8243 print/1470-1375 online
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2014.891948
 Assembling ritual, the burden of the everyday 271

displaced domestic and mundane objects from analysis, failing to see them as ritual parapher-
nalia and sustaining an overly prescriptive view of ritual practice.
Contrary to this separation of ritual from everyday life is an alternative view emerging in
archaeological analysis that ritual entwines the extraordinary and the mundane (Brück 1999;
Insoll 2004). I argue that is precisely because everyday life is constantly imbued with ritual that
it can be situated in the heart of politics. I seek here first to make visible the intimate
entanglements of the two (allegedly separate) realms under the light of political articulation.
My subsequent goals in this article are twofold. First, I explore the relevance of the past for the
articulation of identity and nationality discourses and, second, I consider how a relational
ontological approach, as opposed to a logical positivist one, can foster more nuanced perspec-
tives on ritual. In the examples discussed here, ritual emerges from the assembling of material
things, through discursive narratives about the past, and through performative skills that bring
forward the tensions of social struggle and identity politics.
I stress a relational viewpoint to emphasize the relevance of matter-things in understanding how
the social world is constantly produced (Pauketat 2001) and highlight the performative aspects of
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ritual practice, which I conceive of as a means to scrutinize the work of politics. I argue that
interpretations about ritual – in archaeology or any other field – can no longer be sustained by a
dichotomy opposing the ritual to the secular. Such a view dismisses, if not denying and foreclos-
ing altogether, the political elements. By conceiving the articulation of ritual as an assemblage at
work I draw attention to ordinary objects involved in the poietic process of ritual production, as
well as to the discursive script and bodily practices that surround them. I demonstrate that the
overlapping of temporalities and references to the past are integral elements of an enunciative, and
hence political, process that in turn is intimately related to the materiality of the past.
Understood as a transdisciplinary and transcultural space that challenges a clear-cut distinc-
tion between past and present, the archaeological ethnography presented here highlights histor-
ical intersections of materiality and temporality (cf. Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulus 2009) that
are present in ritual practices. In retrieving the plasticity of material contexts as a means to
approach politics, I argue that ritual is one of the social and cultural expressions from which the
political field emerges most clearly for scrutiny, for archaeologists working on the remote past,
as well as in more contemporary settings.
This approach echoes efforts recently conceived as archaeological ethnographies, a burgeon-
ing niche where archaeology and anthropology overlap (Meskell 2005; see also Castañeda and
Matthews 2008; Hamilakis 2011; Hamilakis and Agnagnostopoulos 2009). Entailing archaeol-
ogists’ sensibility towards material things while acknowledging ‘archaeology’s political
embeddedness’ in its broader social contexts (Meskell 2005), these approaches are both the
basis of the analysis presented here and an ontological reflection about how the social world is
articulated. The case study of the Quebrada de Humahuaca, Argentina – recently named a World
Heritage site in 2003 – is discussed as a palimpsest in which traces of a previously erased past
now delineate a new social reality (Angelo 2010).

A look at ritual practice through the modernist split

In proposing a relational ontological approach to ritual, using contemporary examples to discuss

its relevance and its political undertones in archaeological interpretation, I am not advocating
 272 Dante Angelo

the wide application of an a-historical approach to ritual contexts. Although I concur with the
claim that ‘no ritual stands by itself – it sits within “thick” context’ (Insoll 2004, 12), I
acknowledge limitations posed by archaeological contexts, always fractured and incomplete,
that differ significantly from ethnographic evidence. This incompleteness hinders close inspec-
tion of ephemeral contexts and the identification of objects that might cross between spheres of
the domestic and of the votive (cf. Brück 1999). However, taking advantage of the immediacy
of the evidence provided by ethnographic studies, it becomes clear that ritual cannot be
considered outside the practice of everyday, since it is a powerful tool for the negotiation and
internalization of power relations.
Examining ritual in prehistoric Europe, Joanna Brück (1999, 317) states that dichotomous
conceptualizations of ritual as symbolic and non-functional – separate from practical or tech-
nological activities – were ‘central for its constitution as a distinct social phenomenon within
both anthropological and archaeological thought [and] a product of a post Enlightenment
rationalism in which a scientific logic is prioritized as the only way of knowing the world’.
This prevailing modernist perspective led to further mutually exclusive distinctions between
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mind and body, culture and nature and others (Fowler 2004; Viveiros de Castro 1998; cf. Alberti
and Bray 2009; Haber 2009). Related to this view, liberal political theory set the individual as
the central political subject, casting an objectified natural world from any possible intervention
in the articulation of instrumental and political decisions (Brück 1999, 318; cf. Bennett 2009;
Latour 1999, 2005). Anthropologists, however, have disputed and critiqued this Western
ontological dichotomy. Notably, Marilyn Strathern’s (1988) seminal contribution The Gender
of the Gift has emphasized a different understanding in which the nature of the self is rather
fractally and mutually constituted in a continuous relationship with the object-world.1 Different
scholars have elaborated these relationships drawn between humans and things (Gell 1998;
Haber 2009; Hodder 1982a, 2010, 2012; Ingold 2000, 2007b, 2010; Meskell 2004).
The importance of significant events and symbolic markers that emerge as part of rituals,
however, cannot be dismissed in social life. According to Hodder, the Neolithic site of
Çatalhöyuk, for instance, portrays evidences of ritual activities that might have been related to
the ‘interdigitation of religious and everyday life’, but – he remarks – it is also necessary ‘to
recognize that some events stand out’ (2010, 16). In this sense, far from attempting to deny the
very existence of such categories, my aims are rather to soften the discreteness of their
boundaries; this occurs, I contend, with the continual interaction of humans and things involved
in the production of ritual.

Ritual in Andean archaeology

An aspect of ritual that is appealing for archaeologists, particularly those working in the Andes,
has to do with the claim that ritual and myth are primary articulators of social structure and
continuity (Allen 1988; Bloch 1977; Urton 1990; Zuidema 1991). For years, rituals have seen as
instruments through which the social conventions of a given society can function. As Bradley
states, ‘[r]itual has been treated as a particular kind of communication, a way of acting out
fundamental propositions about the world’ (2003, 5; see also Bell 1997; Bloch 1977). Scholars
working in the Andes with archaeological evidence of ritualistic acts have seen them as
mechanisms that regulated ancient Andean societies (Burger 1992; Moore 2010; also Beck
 Assembling ritual, the burden of the everyday 273

2004; Janusek 2004; Roddick and Hastorf 2010). Rituals are therefore seen as an essential to the
social and political organization of Andean societies, establishing genealogies and sustaining
ideological continuities (Bauer 1996, 1998; DeMarrais, Castillo, and Earle 1996; Bauer and
Stanish 2001; Janusek 2004, Arnold and Hastorf 2008; Moore 2010).
Although many researchers discuss ritual and politics, related either to architecture or to ritual
consumption, their approach tends to be functional. The identification of archaeological features
where rituals would have taken place is commonly equated with public and monumental
architecture (Bauer 1996; Moore 1996; Beck 2004; Janusek 2004, 2008). Citing Sabine
MacCormack’s work on the articulation of myths of origin and ancestral kin among the Inca,
Bauer and Stanish argue that ‘general Andean themes underlie and unify the mythohistories of
most Andean ethnic groups’ (2001, 18). Authors adopt a range of approaches to ritual con-
sumption, arguing that it plays a central role in politics and sociality; they emphasize the
relationships between ritual and consumption, or ritual and memory (notably Hastorf 2001,
Janusek 2004, 2008; Moore 2010; Roddick and Hastorf 2010). Yet relatively few abandon a
functionalist view.
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In spite of a vast body of ethnographic evidence (Bastien 1978; Rösing 1990; Fernández
1995; Abercrombie 1998), most Andean archaeologists neglect less grandiose aspects of ritual
(cf. Swenson and Warner 2012). The functionalist viewpoint implies that ritual is the ideological
matrix that cements society (Moore 1996; Bauer and Stanish 2001; Janusek 2008). Unwittingly
or not, the consequence is a prescriptive view of rituals in pre-Hispanic settings that they are
separate from the minutiae of the everyday (Moore 1996, 2010; cf. Janusek 2004, 2008, ch. 4,
for a nuanced perspective on ritual and domestic settings). For these authors, ritual portrays a
fixed or naturalized order that consolidates the structure of societies while thwarting the
possibility of social change (Bloch 1977).

Relational ontology and agency in everyday ritual

After a brief review of reciprocity, this section sets out a relational ontology as an approach to
an alternative understanding of ritual. Reciprocity is one of the primary institutions structuring
Andean social relations and is perhaps a concept that best characterizes the interwoven
connections among people, things, places and other entities (Sillar 2009, 375). In the icono-
graphy and mythologies of pre-Columbian Americas, things – including mortars and pestles,
cooking pots, grinding stones, dogs and llamas in Catherine Allen’s list – ‘turn on their human
masters’ in moments of cosmic liminality caused by crisis and chaos (Allen 1998, 19). In
ethnographic work in Sonqo, a Peruvian Quechua community, Allen ponders the disruption of
categorical ontologies by means of which utensils (and animals), commonly taken for granted as
part of the routines of everyday life, intrude on and object to life as it is known. According to
Allen, this is how ‘[t]he old order gives way and makes room for new worlds, new sun, and new
people’ (1998, 19; cf. Quilter 1990).
Framed as a particular mindset found in animistic societies, reciprocal relations occur,
providing ‘the ability of people, places and things to communicate with each other’ (Sillar
2009, 369). Conceived as a matrix of networks that signals social integration, reciprocity is seen
as an organizing principle permeating every aspect of Andean life (Mayer 1974). Scholars
working in the Andes have increasingly highlighted the peculiar relationships between human
 274 Dante Angelo

beings and other entities (Allen 1998; Haber 2009; Salomon 1998; Sillar 2009). Thus, for
instance, Frank Salomon states that ‘since ritual consisted of reciprocity among beings of all
classes, human and nonhuman, it implied communication among beings of unlike ontological
standing’ (1998, 11).
However, although models of reciprocity raise crucial ontological questions, with few
exceptions, the modernist ontological tension has been generally overlooked, leaving
Cartesian dualisms unchallenged. When identified at the heart of politics – regulating social
power (Pease 1992) – reciprocity has been understood in essentialist terms. Framed using
Polanyi’s substantivist ideas, reciprocity is viewed as a mechanism existing from primordial
times (Isbell 1977; Mayer 1974). It is, perhaps, precisely because of essentialist and functiona-
listic views that scholars link reciprocity to egalitarianism in past and present, neglecting the
reality of the power relations inherent in reciprocity (cf. Skar 1995). For this reason, in this
analysis I question traditional views of reciprocity in order to address these fundamental
ontological and political contradictions (Alberti and Bray 2009).
In the case study that follows, I focus on materiality and discourses about the past to
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understand how political agency is mobilized by individuals in contention, revealing aspects

of the relationship between politics and ritual. I move from a concept of agency framed with
reference to structural conditions (Barrett 2000, 65–6) – towards an approach highlighting
relationality and the ways that the assembling of people and things enables further scenarios
(Angelo 2010; Ingold 2007a; Robb 2010). I am convinced that taking into account the ‘force to
revolt’ of objects or entities – whatever they may be – and making room for a relational
ontology opens the possibility of a more nuanced perspective on ritual, politics and power. This
strategy highlights the importance of ritual in the agonistic relationships of politics, as much in
the present as in the past.
Philosophers Karen Barad (2003) and Manuel DeLanda (2006) discuss the concepts of
phenomena and assemblage. Defined as part of a new materialist approach, their work resonates
with recent critiques posed in archaeology that emphasize the importance of matter-things for
understanding social reality (Hodder 1982a, 2011; Ingold 2000, 2007a, 2007b; Olsen 2003,
2010; Webmoor and Witmore 2008). In brief, this critique argues that, with positivist and
constructionist views, we are commonly left with the notion that the material is always bypassed
and the role of things is never to be themselves but always to represent something else (Brown
2003, 82). This criticism facilitates my view that agency is ‘not an attribute but the ongoing
reconfigurings [sic] of the world’ (Barad 2003, 818) and further incorporates the notion of
performativity in relating ritual and politics. The recourse to performativity, as something that
takes place in and through the assembling of the human and the non-human, is fundamental to
my analysis (Barad 2003; DeLanda 2006).
Additionally, an assemblage defines entities or ‘wholes constructed from heterogeneous parts’
(DeLanda 2006, 3), the material (involving the physicality of things, objects and bodily acts)
and the expressive (in terms of both discursive and performative aspects), constituted as such by
contingent and context-dependent relations. According to this relational ontology, ritual emerges
in the form of concrete and fully engaged manifestations of collective interactions of people
with ordinary and everyday objects, instead of being limited to the expressions of abstract
representations of ideological power and political discourses. By conceiving of ritual as an
assemblage of things and discourses about the past and present, I move through the different
levels of connections ritual generates in relation to other components. The result is the
 Assembling ritual, the burden of the everyday 275

identification of the relations through which interpersonal networks, different temporalities and
things become entwined. It is precisely here that concepts including performance and poietics
become important. Barad states that ‘a performative understanding of discursive practices
challenges [the] representationalist belief in the power of words to represent existing things’
(Barad 2003, 802) and, therefore, enhances performance as a hinge that connects – through
action and becoming – humans and non-humans (Domanska 2006).
I contend that ritual takes place via this poietic or creative enactment of boundaries that shape
a ritualistic performance without containing it in a representation. Moreover, as Shanks (2004,
150) suggests, the performative implies an eidetic turn, which actively blurs the temporal and
spatial boundaries in which it takes place, fusing what is real and what is represented. In other
words, ritual performances or trends of ritualization like the ones I discuss here conform to
eidetic acts: the production of vivid imagery that is not framed by an authoritative or monolithic
source – that, in reiterating authentic or invented practices, conjures their political potential.
Understood as such, ritual practice becomes separate from the domain of the purely spiritual,
ideological and sacred – which characterizes ritual in a representational and oppositional
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ontology of dualisms (Rappaport 1999) – and becomes instantiated only in the complicity of
practice, task skills and things.
To fully grasp the workings of power in which ritual enables political agency, we also need to
acknowledge that the production of power to act is not limited to the domain of the social, or
rather – following DeLanda – we need to understand ‘the social’ in broader ontological terms
(cf. Olsen 2010; Webmoor and Witmore 2008). An inclusive relational perspective on sociality
will consider things and their ‘force to revolt’ in the instantiation of the social not as ‘secondary
or epiphenomenal to some cultural or social “first instance”’ (Olsen 2007, 580) but rather as
crucial enabling factors. In Barad’s words, ‘to figure matter as merely an end product rather than
an active factor in further materializations, is to cheat matter out of the fullness of its capacity’
(2003, 810).

Palimpsests and fleeting objects: an example from contemporary archaeology

The contexts I discuss in the following sections are not typical archaeological evidence; at best
they are contemporary archaeological contexts (Buchli and Lucas 2001). Nonetheless, these
settings cannot be characterized as only archaeological or ethnographical. Although, resorting to
an archaeological gaze, I report and describe different artefacts and materials and their uses, I
introduce comparative notes to situate them in ethnographic settings of performative action. The
case material therefore belongs to a modern context of ritual, composed of a series of objects
and materials that, extracted from a past imagery, are interconnected.
In linking data, recorded both archaeologically and ethnographically, the notion of chron-
otope is useful2 (Holquist 1981). In brief, the chronotope is a literary category by which a
spatio-temporal relation that sustains a narrative takes shape; I have recourse to the chronotope
as a way to approach materiality while bridging different temporalities, incorporating a sense of
the past interacting with a present in which ritual provides the backdrop for political contention.
Politically, under the light of the chronotope, ritual presents itself as a historical time, a pre-
modern (or pre-colonial) time that is recreated. Ritual provides a setting in which space and time
are connected, ‘it evokes a ritualized present’, if you will, and, finally, allows us to recognize its
 276 Dante Angelo

formal construction, properties and relations with other, usually antagonistic, political
discourses.

Entering ritual scenarios

Archaeologically, Quebrada de Humahuaca is a region that does not need further introduction; it
is one of the archetypical Andean settings, with a long-term occupation and plenty of archae-
ological evidence. The compound I describe is located in the eastern foothills of Rio Grande,
right in front of the town of Humahuaca. At this compound, a pipe made of clay portraying a
cat-like figure with a large feather attached with woolen strings rests on top of an aguayo
(woven cloth) on the floor of the room. A bag contains coca leaves and some stones with no
apparent value or use. The pipe and the other objects in the cache are analogous to those
reported by Nordenskiold (1906, cf. Bastien 1978) that populate Andean ethnographies, espe-
cially those related to healing, as part of an enduring tradition (Rösing 1990; Loza 2004).
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Allegedly used for consumption of psychotropics, clay pipes have been found in pre-Hispanic
sites in the southern Andes, along the Pacific coast in present-day Chile and in the Titicaca
Basin region (Torres and Repke 2006, 30–2). These object assemblages date to the Middle
Horizon and Late Intermediate Period (c. 400–1400 AD) (Angelo and Capriles 2000).
Similarly, throughout the Andes, archaeologists report finding textiles and woven cloths in
both domestic and ritualist contexts such as burials and other ceremonies (Boytner 2004), in
addition to those described in ethnographic research (Arnold and Yapita 2003). However, the
present context differs from archaeological contexts in which floor surfaces have been prepared
or elaborated, cleaned and maintained through consecutive occupations. Evidence of use and
occupation of multiple floors in archaeological settings in the Andes is found, for example, in
Feldman’s report on excavations in Huaca de los Idolos (1987), Hastorf’s work in Chiripa
(2008) or Janusek’s works on Tiwanaku (2004, 2008). In the case I report here, the uneven and
rough surface, mainly leveled directly on the coarse reddish terrain with pointy pebbles in its
matrix, revealed improvised use.
Medium-sized cobbles were used as seats, their distribution suggesting that they had been
used for an improvised small gathering. Stains on the floor, also reported in archaeological
excavations, suggest pouring of liquids resulting from libations, part of Andean ritual ceremo-
nies (Abercrombie 1998; Janusek 2004; Sillar 2009). Yet, associated with the artefacts were
plastic bottles, broken cigarettes, cigarette butts, a lighter and burned matchsticks. Goat and
sheep dung littered the ground, while more was found in the corners of the room, indicating
partial sweeping prior to the gathering. A burned candle, a source of light lay at the center, while
others rested nearby. Sleeping bags and comforters revealed the presence of more people than
the small room could host within the minimum space left by the mesa3 (offering) as the
centerpiece (Fig. 1).
The modern arrangement of things, however, eloquently revealed that the room was not a
setting uncovered through a painstaking process of archaeological excavation. What has been
described so far, was part of an improvised ceremony documented ethnographically and
archaeologically. Material evidences attest the ephemeral engagement with ritual. It is about
6.40 am on 21 June 2005, and the event was a celebration of the winter solstice, an equivalent of
Cuzco’s Inti Raymi (De la Cadena 2000), in Quebrada de Humahuaca, Argentina (Fig. 2).4 This
 Assembling ritual, the burden of the everyday 277
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Figure 1 A clay pipe with a cat-like shape and adorned with a feather lies, along with coca leaves, on
aguayos used in celebration of the winter solstice.

celebration is one of many recently instituted as a new array of ‘invented traditions’5 that I have
documented in towns of Quebrada de Humahuaca and form part of the political discourse used
to legitimate emergent indigenous movements6 (Angelo 2010).
A further significant development in Quebrada de Humahuaca is a landscape of houses made
of adobe and thatched roofs, in theory reminiscent of ancient vernacular architecture of the
region.7 Since the listing of the region as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003, pre-Hispanic
architectural motifs extracted anachronistically from Andean archaeology have become com-
mon, bearing strong ritualistic aspects and interpenetrating another elements as part of attempts
to establish continuity in the articulation of heritage and political discourses in Quebrada de
Humahuaca. For some, as in the case of Cochinoca community, a small town located north of
Quebrada de Humahuaca, an adobe house and its materiality – the shape of the roof, adobe
walls, as well as the other materials – were decisive in the decision of the courts to acknowledge
the owners’ ethnic and cultural continuity since pre-Hispanic times and, therefore, their rights to
lands (Dandan 2003; Angelo 2010, 120).
Additionally, the return of an architectural style that was not only proscribed but also strongly
despised previously highlights the dynamics of populist politics. Evident not only in the
Argentine state’s acknowledgment of the intrinsic value of ‘authenticity’ in vernacular archi-
tecture, legitimating indigenous cultural rights, but also in its adoption as a mechanism to
represent itself as a welfare state (see Fig. 3). Vernacular architecture, previously despised as
characteristic of peasants has undergone a process of sublation, endowing these house forms
with an aura of authenticity and social communion. Daniel Miller (1987) equates the Hegelian
use of sublation with a process of consumption by means of which something that has been
previously externalized and objectified is re-appropriated. In that sense, many recent cultural
manifestations (rituals, vernacular architecture and other practices) thought of as ‘the other’
against which modern Argentina was conceived are now being revalorized and reincorporated
 278 Dante Angelo
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Figure 2 Offering to Pachamama at the 2005 solstice.

Figure 3 Houses built as part of the housing program sponsored by the Argentinean Sub-Secretary of
Housing and Urban Development Program, in Sumaypacha, Tilcara, Argentina.

into a different ‘sense of self’ and of the nation. Such a sublated image, of a past in which
indigenous peoples were in fact cast out and stigmatized, is now being re-appropriated as part of
the state’s discourse.
The UNESCO’s declaration of Quebrada de Humahuaca as a World Heritage Site in 2003 has
catalyzed a multi-cultural discourse that has smoothed both recognition and revalorization of
 Assembling ritual, the burden of the everyday 279

indigenous ancestry among Argentineans (particularly in the rural north-west). The debate, part
of a wider historical and political struggle that characterizes postcolonial societies, is being
rephrased in terms of identity politics and issues of social inclusion. Many countries are dealing
with similar issues in a struggle that is now grounded in materiality, seen as the ultimate
arbitrator in the debates. Far from achieving consensus, fierce disputes continue among the
parties involved.

Discussion

Rituals like the one described above, which date as far back as the beginning of the 1990s
(Rivolta 2004), were previously proscribed and portrayed as ‘backward’ by Argentinean
discourses of modern citizenry. Despised by some and praised by others, the rituals are central
to the arguments in recent claims to political legitimacy advanced by emergent indigenous
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peoples. Whereas their detractors dismiss these rituals as counterfeit acts, ‘a vulgar representa-
tion of “real rituals”’, they are constructed on the highest premise of authenticity and performed
politically (Fig. 4). Most of the items used for ritual, as is the case of the pipe and textiles
described earlier, bear striking resemblances to those reported for ceremonials of pre-Hispanic
settings (Fernández-Distel 1980; Pérez-Gollán and Gordillo 1994; Torres and Repke 2006, 12,
30–1, 47–9), some of which are exhibited in the Museo Arqueológico Provincial de Jujuy and
other regional museums.
Hodder has argued that ‘[u]nlike both religion and magic, ritual refers to performance and
the associated rules rather than to abstract concepts and beliefs’ (1982b, 159, emphasis added).
While my work draws upon the ethnographic present and its materiality, it also engages directly
with the past and with archaeological narratives, giving particular attention to performative
aspects as ‘part of a contested cultural field’ (Shanks 2004, 149). I argue that recent adoption of
vernacular architectural forms in the Quebrada de Humahuaca is part of the performative
engagement with a particular historical context, one in which heritage establishes guides for
social structure, revealing another domain in which ritual is manifested. Just as with material
components that comprise a ritual assemblage, the use of particular language utterances is
important element in the poietic articulation of ritual.8 Architecture is deeply rooted in the
competing disputes of neo-indigenous discourse and the state politics of cultural recognition.
The (re)incorporation of materials such as mud and thatch, houses with stone foundations of
quadrangular shape and other ordinary objects reifies the meeting of temporalities within which
political contention unfolds. Chronotopically, this process is an act of ritualization of the
everyday unfolding mainly in the political realm. On the one hand, ritual performances
conducted privately or publicly constitute claims to ancestral continuity and statements of
political and cultural identity. This has positively boosted the legitimation of indigenous cultural
rights through notions of authenticity vested in the materiality belonging in the domestic sphere
par excellence, as in vernacular architecture. On the other hand, institutional recognition has
also established new forms through which the state can mark its presence discursively and
materially (Angelo 2010). What are at stake here are questions of political articulation related to
ritual contexts emerging from, among other things, archaeological knowledge projected onto
objects that resist such conceptual framing by actively intruding into eidetic performances.
 280 Dante Angelo
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Figure 4 Virtual reality modelling of a house in Cochinoca, northern Quebrada de Humahuaca. The interior
depicts some of the most characteristics elements and furniture of rural houses (credits Fabian Alfaro).

The presence of ordinary things instantiates the ritual context in which the participants of any
event are thrown not only into a representation of the past but into an eidetic construction of a
chronotope that is politically charged. The imagery of a ritualistic past is therefore embedded
and embodied in a set of skills, reinforcing the role of the performative (Barad 2003). Objects
from which notions of continuity, tradition and legacy emanate bear witness to a special or
unique experience of culture and ancestral identity. In that sense, the whole of the Quebrada de
Humahuaca is invested with an aura of oddness, since claims to authenticity make it a ritual
time/place destination sought out by ‘heritage consumers’, desired by a state confronting its
history of colonial exclusion and longed for by communities craving historical recognition. The
recognition of the ‘true colors’, represented by a telluric sense of the past in the mud-battered
walls and related materialities, which work subtly by imposing a new set of social prescriptions
(Angelo 2010), could also be seen as a process of ritual purification taking place mainly within
the political realm.

Conclusions

In a recent article, Swenson and Warner caution us that ‘declaring Andean “meta-physics of
being” as relational as opposed to substantivist or representational (Cartesian) leaves many
questions unanswered and poses the threat of reductively obscuring considerable diversity in
Andean social and religious philosophies’ (2012, 315). I contend that it is precisely the
Cartesian ontology that has led us to conceive ritual and other religious manifestations as the
archetypical means of reproducing existing social structures. A non-relational view rigidly
 Assembling ritual, the burden of the everyday 281

defines ritual as a supra-structural mechanism acting on individuals and things, defining what is
socially established and prescribed while emptying it of any possibility of enabling agency and
historicity (Rappaport 1999). I encourage researchers to move away from these conceptions of
ritual and agency that emphasize human-centered action as able to act only within strict
structural conditions towards an approach that encompasses action and performance as part of
an wider and more intricate process of interrelationships (Ingold 2007a, 2007b; Hodder 2012).
In so doing, I aim to re-center the analysis of ritual on its ‘de-stabilizing potential’ (Pauketat
2001), recognizing the need to understand ritual as imbuing different levels of social life. The
example discussed here demonstrates an overlapping of temporalities and references to the past
as integral elements of an enunciative, and hence political, component that in turn is intimately
related to the materiality of heritage. As Pauketat cautions, however, it is necessary to consider
the differences between a micro-scale of interactions, instantiated in ceremonies, and a macro-
scale that becomes manifest in processes like commodification, ethnogenesis and others (2001,
87). Resurgent traditions have been one avenue for communities to articulate a counter
discourse and to express resistance to processes of global commodification of culture that
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reduce rituals and other practices to commodities. Although these re-emergent traditions have
created or reinforced solidarity within some factions of new indigenous communities, as is the
case in Quebrada de Humahuaca, they are also the means through which a domesticated version
of culture, from which all the political tensions are dissipated, is gradually internalized.
Both the ethnographic present and the past, and their materialities, require attention to
performative aspects as ‘part of a contested cultural field’ (Shanks 2004, 149). In countless
rituals that now take place regularly in a ritualized Quebrada de Humahuaca the contested
cultural field is enacted every day, blurring the boundaries of a real past and one that is
constantly invented and performed as part of an ongoing political struggle. What are these
rituals for? Can we identify the participants in the agonistic relation involved in this hegemonic
struggle? Can we even talk about these actors acting through a (dogmatic) script?
The answers to these questions, I conclude, cannot be provided by analyses framed within a
single scale, temporal or of any other kind. Investigation of different scales to which ritual is
related elucidates the power relations inscribed in their enactment as a political tool. Although
this is not necessarily an easy task, especially considering the limited evidence accessible to
archaeologists – especially those dealing with more ancient pasts – a relational approach to
ritual will help to broaden understanding of its role in the construction of the social and political
and, at the same time, to encourage inclusive consideration of the acting components, be they
human or non-human.

Acknowledgements

I thank the Convenio de Desempeño Universidad de Tarapacá-Ministerio de Educación (Apoyo

a las Ciencias y las Humanidades UTA-MECESUP) for its support. This article derives from my
dissertation research conducted in north-western Argentina and it is dedicated to Bill Rathje,
who never dismissed or gave up on little things. I don’t know if Bill would have liked this, but
he was certainly an inspirational source for the writing of it. Thanks to Serena Love, José
Capriles and Angela Macías, who shared their insightful thoughts with me and to the two
anonymous reviewers who provided crucial suggestions to improve the manuscript. Finally, I
 282 Dante Angelo

thank Ben Alberti for pointing me to Karen Barad’s work, to Ewa Domanska for her constant
support and especially to Elizabeth DeMarrais for her encouragement and editorial help. The
usual disclaimers apply and any shortcomings remain my own.

Dante Angelo
Universidad de Tarapacá
dangeloz@uta.cl

Notes

1 By object-world I refer to the world outside oneself and one’s mutually constitutive percep-
tion of these material things in it.
2 Thomas Abercrombie’s (1998) work in the Bolivian altiplano presents a previous use of
Bakhtin’s concept to examine how certain versions of the past and history are transmitted
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through ritualistic performances among the K’ulta, an Aymara group of northern Potosí.
According to Abercrombie, the historical consciousness promoted ritually provides the frame
for social structure and for understanding a complex and interwoven history of colonialism.
3 Mesa, Spanish for table, is also close to another Spanish word, misa or Mass, and alludes to
the fact that the offering will be used to feed the Pachamama, as in a feasting (Abercrombie
1998; see also Bastien 1978), and to the mass ceremony in the Catholic church. In this
particular ritual, the mesa consisted of two pieces of aguayos, one bright and multicoloured
striped and another brownish with similar patterns, an important part of the ceremonial
equipment. Stems and broken coca leaves were dispersed around the mesa and the provi-
sionally arranged seats or laid next to them, neatly organized in small piles.
4 Similar celebrations have blossomed throughout the world in the last decades, as in the cases
of the summer solstice at Stonehenge, the winter equinox in Chichén Itzá and countless
others (Bender 1998; Castañeda 1996; Sammells 2012).
5 Although the resurgent traditions have been not only a successful way to articulate a solid
counter discourse but also instrumental in creating bonds of solidarity within some factions of
the new indigenous communities, they continue to be seen and harshly criticized as distorted
versions of authentic rituals. At this point, debating whether or not this is a legitimate
celebration or simply another hitch of the amenities promoted by the heritage industry and
tourism, in order to attract more visitors, only reifies an essentialist tension about their
authenticity (see Benavides 2005). I am not interested in taking an inquisitorial role in
legitimating or condemning these practices for their authenticity or their lack thereof as
that would implicate to deny the importance of ritual as part of the articulation of societies. I
rather focused on ritual as a means to scrutinize the possibilities disclosed by an intense
process of re-territorialization of the social taking place.
6 In my fieldwork in Quebrada de Humahuaca I explored the contradictions and anxieties that
led different actors to perceive and produce heritage as both an option to cope with global
tensions and an anomaly produced by pressures of modernity (Angelo 2010). There I
understand heritage as a compulsive disorder experienced by different stakeholders, exposing
in the process a myriad of interests displayed around it, which are particularly manifested in
the articulation of ritual.
 Assembling ritual, the burden of the everyday 283

7 Although the attempts to revalorize vernacular architecture can be traced back to the first half
of the 1900s, when prominent architects sought to stress some of its elements as expressions
of national identity (Patti 2004), it did not then acquire a momentum like the one that
followed the nomination as a World Heritage Site, in 2003.
8 Abercrombie (1998, 347ff.) reports the uttering of certain salutations proffered in rituals
among the K’ultas of the Bolivian altiplano, which, however, mark a specific hierarchy of
gods and other sacred beings. The use of Aymara or Quechua words, observed and described
in my work, has to do with the fact that they have gradually become a marker of cultural
capital and authenticity for young indigenous activists and apprentices of shamans – like the
one that conducted the ritual here discussed – who, having learnt from other shamans and
anthropology books too, use whatever words they think are appropriate, regardless of proper
language use and disregarding hierarchies at all. See Armstrong-Fumero (2011) for the case
of Yucatán, Mexico, and the use of Maya language as part of a similar identity-building
endeavour.
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Dante Angelo works as an assistant professor at the Universidad de Tarapacá, in Arica, Chile.
He conducted his dissertation work in Quebrada de Humahuaca, Argentina. His topics of
interest include archaeological theory, politics, heritage and postcolonial archaeology.