Aymara Quotes

Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you. It comes up from behind your back, surprising and unforeseeable, while the past is always before your eyes, that which has already happened. When they talk about the past, the people of the Aymara tribe point in front of them. You walk forward facing the past and you turn back toward the future.

Aymaras—“children

In the West, people typically gesture in front of themselves when talking about the future. In one study, participants contemplating the future even tended to lean forward, while those recalling the past tended to lean backward. It seems that we're not in a position to decline our inclination to regard the future as something in front of us. In South America, however, speakers of Aymara gesture behind themselves when talking about the future. Why? In Aymaran culture, the past is ahead because it is already known and can therefore be seen. The future, in contrast, is unknown and can't be seen; therefore, it is located behind the speaker. Aymaran and Western embodied concepts of the past and future are contradictory, yet they are based on identical bodily metaphors.

El imperio incaico quedó chico para contenerlos a ambos. Pizarro, convertido en marqués gobernador y caballero de la Orden de Santiago, se quedó en el Perú, secundado por sus temibles hermanos, mientras Almagro se dirigía, en 1535, con un ejército de quinientos castellanos, diez mil indios yanaconas y el título de adelantado, a Chile, la región aún inexplorada, cuyo nombre, en lengua aymara, quiere decir «donde acaba la tierra».

The precision of many of the flat surfaces [at Puma Punku] is astonishing. In some cases, they are almost as flat as laser perfection, and the idea that a Bronze Age culture like the Tiwanaku were responsible for this work is clearly impossible. What is also curious is that much of the stone has been partially or fully excavated from the red clay mud of the area, which infers either extreme age, or that a cataclysmic event occurred here, partially burying the site [...]. Further, there are blocks which appear to have been snapped in half - not by the invading Aymara, colonial Spanish, or more recently, but at a time in the distant past. The logic behind this statement is that there are no apparent tool marks or other evidence of attempts to break the stone.

Ayrıca, kırda ve kentte yaşayan Aymara toplulukları radyo istasyonlarını ele geçirdiler ve kendi mesajlarını ilettiler, ama her şeyden önemlisi iletişim kurdular, burada iletişimi daha derinlikli bir anlamda kullanıyorum, ruh hallerini, deneyimlerini ve duygularını radyoyu dinleyenlerle paylaştılar. Bu, canlı yayın yapanlara oldukça benzer bir şekilde, oldukça duygusal bir etki yarattı. Böylece, vericiler ve alıcılar arasındaki ayrımı muğlaklaştıran bir bağ oluşturuldu.

Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you. It comes up from behind your back, surprising and unforeseeable, while the past is always before your eyes, that which has already happened. When they talk about the past, the people of the Aymara tribe point in front of them. You walk forward facing the past and you turn back towards the future.

There are Bedouins in Arabia, Tuareg in North Africa, Somalis and Maasai in East Africa, Sami of northern Scandinavia, Gujjars in India, Yörük in Turkey, Tuvans of Mongolia, Aymara in the Andes. There are herds of sheep, goats, cows, llamas, camels, yaks, horses, or reindeer, with the pastoralists living off their animals’ meat, milk, and blood and trading their wool and hides.

My goal is to have a Constitution that would be as attractive to nations that are recognized as states as to peoples that are still stateless. The Constitution will fail if the language is not identical for both. Therefore there are aspirations you would have to give up and claims you would have to relinquish. But I think you will see that the same will be true for the states that now occupy territory you claim for the Quechua and Aymara peoples. The principles of majority, viability, contiguity, and compactness would guarantee you a self-governing territory, albeit one much smaller than your present claim.

...en la lengua quechua, al igual que en aymara, las metáforas del tiempo son distintas: el pasado, que ya conocemos, está delante de nosotros, frente a nuestros ojos, mientras que el futuro, incierto, queda atrás, a nuestras espaldas, no podemos verlo

In the 1600s, the Peruvian Inquisition targeted wise Quechua and Aymara women, who kept the indigenous religion alive and often acted to empower their communities and protect them from colonial heads and officials. In 1591, the Brazilian Inquisition prosecuted the Portuguese witch Maria Gonçalves (also known as Burn-tail) for sexual witchcraft and for making powders from forest herbs. She challenged the bishop, saying that, if he preached from the pulpit, she preached from the cadeira (priestess chair).

Es verano en el Chaco; cinco hombres, un niño y un perro trepando un río en una pequeña embarcación no preocupan a nadie. Nadie los ve, porque el ímpetu del momento es otro. Todos se quieren ir. Para ese entonces ya han desertado más de once mil hombres, diez mil del lado boliviano, mil entre los paraguayos. Los bolivianos han sido traídos del altiplano, han llegado a las tierras bajas en ferrocarril y desde Villa Montes han tenido que caminar por semanas a través de polvo, matorrales y el calor asfixiante del Chaco hasta las líneas del frente. Han perdido casi todos sus caballos en el trayecto. Al llegar están extenuados y desnutridos. Solo algunos camiones han sobrevivido. La tierra es árida y los soldados, en su marcha, no arrancan nada de ella. Los soldados rasos que hablan quechua y aymara no pueden comunicarse con sus comandantes que dan órdenes en castellano. Los paraguayos han corrido con mejor suerte, han trepado desde la capital en barcos de vapor por el río Paraguay, por el mismo río por el que ahora sube Andrei, y han descendido en Puerto Casado, donde una locomotora de vía estrecha los ha llevado hasta la Isla Po’i, a cuarenta y seis kilómetros del frente. Todos hablan guaraní. Los refuerzos de ambos han seguido esos mismos caminos durante tres años. Si alguien preguntara a los hombres por qué pelean, recibirá pocas respuestas. Se disputa una tierra árida en el corazón de América. La disputan los dos únicos países del continente sin salida al mar. Es una guerra en la que soldados poco preparados pero valerosos, descalzos pero decididos, luchan con la tecnología bélica más avanzada del mundo. Perfeccionada durante la contienda europea. Ninguno de los dos fabrica armas o aviones pero agotan sus economías para crear grandes ejércitos y equiparlos con el mejor armamento posible. Las fuerzas armadas de ambos países han sido asesoradas por oficiales europeos, pero no solo eso: el comandante en jefe del Ejército boliviano es un general alemán, Hans Kundt; las líneas de defensa paraguayas han sido planificadas por exoficiales bielorrusos, feroces anticomunistas, veteranos de la Gran Guerra, que se han establecido en territorio guaraní y que ahora fungen como oficiales paraguayos. Se matan en vano, en el infierno gris -salpicado de pantanos y de la espesa vegetación de matorrales y árboles espinosos- donde, a más de no existir petróleo, no hay agua. Ningún río lo cruza y hay que cavar pozos para buscar fuentes subterráneas. Lo único que existe en abundancia allí es sed y muchos mueren de ella antes de que las bayonetas enemigas los atraviesen.

What explains their advantage? Contrary to one popular theory, it’s not a high red-blood-cell count. Compared with Caucasians, Sherpas actually have fewer red blood cells per liter of blood. Nor is the difference explained by diet, acclimatization, metabolism, iron-deficiency, or environmental factors. At sea level, Sherpas have such a low red-blood-cell count that they are technically anemic, but, curiously, they don’t show symptoms. Overall, Sherpas require as much oxygen as anybody else, but they have less of it dissolved in their blood. Scientists initially found this puzzling. Red blood cells ferry oxygen around the body, and other populations well adapted to altitude, such as the Quechua and the Aymara of the Andean highlands, have veins teeming with red blood cells. How do Sherpas manage with less at a much higher altitude than the Andes? Probably by circulating blood faster. Sherpas have wider blood vessels. They breathe more often when at rest, providing their blood with more oxygen to absorb, and they exhale more nitric oxide, a marker of efficient lung circulation. There is also a genetic explanation. Sherpas’ red-blood-cell count stays low because of Hypoxia Inducible Factor 2-alpha, a gene that regulates response to low oxygen and turns on other genes. In addition, Sherpas have inherited a dominant genetic trait that improves hemoglobin saturation, allowing their red blood cells to soak up more oxygen. Sherpas’ thin blood, in turn, may prevent the sort of clotting that crippled Art Gilkey on K2. This genetic advantage only enhances the Sherpa mystique. Lowlanders clutching the Lonely Planet guide are convinced they want to hire “a sherpa,” even if they don’t know what a Sherpa is, and, after three generations of gathering tourist dollars, Sherpas now rank among the richest and most visible of Nepal’s fifty or so ethnicities. They didn’t start out that way.

To this end, Argentinian feminist anthropologist Rita Segato (2015) introduces a distinction between the “world-village” (mundo-aldea) of communal worlds, with their dual-gender ontology (based on complementary dualities, organized on the basis of relations of reciprocity, and not on a binary between intrinsically independent pairs), and the “world-state,” with its dualist ontologies, which progressively occupies communal worlds through the constitution of a public sphere dominated by men and an increasingly subordinated feminine private sphere. It was thus that the low-intensity patriarchies of communal worlds gave way to what Segato calls the high-intensity patriarchy of capitalist modernity. From this perspective, patriarchy is at the root of all forms of subordination, including racial, colonial, and imperial domination, along with the resulting pedagogy of cruelty, as Segato names it, imposed on all societies. There is agreement among the growing cadre of Latin American autonomous, decolonial, and communitarian feminists, as Aymara intellectual-activist Julieta Paredes (2012) puts it, that it was on the bodies of women that humanity learned how to dominate. The corollary is to always analyze historically the entanglement of diverse forms of patriarchy, from the autochthonous and indigenous to the modern.

In La Paz, during January, the Bolivians hold a traditional festival called Alasitas. For three weeks, markets . . . are full of tiny objects, tiny everything: tiny horses, tiny computers, tiny diplomats, tiny houses, tiny jeeps, tiny llamas and tiny llama steaks, tiny passports. People buy models of whatever they need most. . . . They offer their miniature figurines to miniature man—Ekeko the midget, the Aymara god of abundance, a smoking doll cloaked in bright wool. They pin their miniature desires to his miniature poncho.