Corran, 1

Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Anthropology and Biology Major

Papas para Prosperar (Potatoes to Thrive):

Lessons on Andean Ethnography, the Study of Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Living

Initially, I had very few expectations about my summer in the Peruvian highlands, only that I would be involved in research on community issues while engaging participatory methods; and experiencing a brief life as an anthropologist abroad. Little did I know the scope of what I would participate in and learn. From meeting a local woman working for change, to challenging misconceptions I had about traditional and western medicine, I gained invaluable experience that will affect my future life as an anthropologist and as an individual committed to making change in the world.

While living at the ecological ranch in the Andes, I had the opportunity to conduct field research at the nearby community of Shilla. Thanks to previous considerate interactions on the part of Dr. Hammer, the anthropologist leading our group and working there, our research teams had access to numerous individuals and resources within the community.

At the beginning of our field school, a paper was passed around, and we were to sign up for a group: herbal medicine, ritual and ceremony, or community organization. I was interested in the herbal medicine group, but, predictably, by the time the paper got to me, there were 10 people there, and only two men in the community organization group. I signed up for it, resigning myself to my second choice: but this ended up being one of the most fortuitous moments of my tenure in the land of the Inca.
When we first visited Shilla, my group was dropped off at the municipal building (the only building in town not made of adobe with flush toilets.) We had prepared questions addressing what we considered to be critical issues in community organization.
Dr. Hammer had arranged for us to meet with local officials, and possibly the mayor. We sat on the steps of the building and waited. And waited. And waited. My two group members and I began playing a game of catch with a group of local kids that had been gathering nearby, pointing and trying to conceal stares. After about 30 minutes standing around and playing, a man walked up. He identified himself as a member of the town council and began to answer some of our questions, but often when we asked a question he wouldn’t understand the idea we were trying to get at. Only after a frustrating hour did we realize our error. Our pre-prepared questions were from a completely ethnocentric view. Elections were important, but campaign advertising was limited to painted ads on people’s houses. Local government was loosely tied to departmental and federal governments, but (as Americans) we incorrectly assumed these dictated local projects. In fact, we found that local projects originate locally (for the most part) and are deliberated very seriously before coming into play. Additionally, there are no workers employed by local government, every family that wants to utilize the public work (irrigation, waste disposal, schools, etc.) has to contribute at least one worker for the project. A small crowd had gathered, and even together, the six or seven men often couldn’t understand what we were getting at. After about 50 probing questions (25 of which received only puzzled looks for a response) a woman approached. She was the twenty-something wife of one of the men being mystified by our questions. Almost immediately, the groups split up…the two men in my group continued on with their questions (and the hedgy answers) while the woman, Santa, and I talked. She would overhear something the men were saying, about corruption in government or party loyalty, and roll her eyes at me. Then she would whisper, “That isn’t really how it is. Actually, the church gives all their money to the members of Somos Peru, and….” We began our own conversation, and I adapted the questions we had asked earlier, incorporating some of the things the men were saying. I really felt like we connected, and our quiet discussion next to the officious interrogation (it became even more like an episode of “Crossfire” after I left my two companions with the group of men,) was full of information. Santa told me about language barriers for many women in the community (most of the men know Quechua and Spanish, but women are less likely to learn Spanish) that prevent them from holding higher offices in the community. Also, she described the influential women’s groups in the town, Vaso de leche (glass of milk) and Madre, that are formally responsible for keeping schoolchildren fed and safe, but in reality represent the voice of women in local politics—dictating public works that would benefit women and children in the community. Additionally, she gave me a local history and economics lesson, describing the changes that had taken place in her lifetime, and her parent’s generation, who witnessed the land reforms of the 1960’s and 70’s. She described and economy based on small scale farming and marketing, with some foods being produced for subsistence, but most being sold to other local farmers. This parallels the national trend of smallholder commercial production and cooperative marketing (Long 1975:76). We chatted for hours, and I felt like I was learning so much more just by conversing. While my classmates struggled to get a shred of information, I was discovering how the town really worked (according to Santa, which seemed to be the most accurate information we acquired in all our time in Shilla.) At the close of the interview, which had by then felt like a friendly chatting session, I felt like I had gained both a wealth of ethnographic information and a potential friend. Santa and I agreed to meet again at the Fiesta de San Juan, and she could introduce me to the rest of her family. It wasn’t until much later I learned (from Dr. Hammer) that Santa was the first woman to serve in local government, and a veritable font of political knowledge (which I found out on my own.)

Upon reflection, the information gathering session with Santa was one of my most productive ethnographic endeavors. However, our rocky start made me realize just how tough an objective-anthropology can be. I had considered myself a conscientious, thoughtful anthropologist, who always tried to remove my Western biases. Of course, I discovered ethnocentrism was coloring my ideas about everything from how the federal government should interact with local governments, to representative input to local authorities. In the future, I will be careful to do a lot of information gathering before formulating formal interview questions (which I knew in theory but forgot in practice.) I got the sense the men would have been much more talkative had we not assaulted them with a barrage of obscure questions right off the bat. After the interview, I tried to erase much of what I had understood as universal, and become (truly) culturally relativistic.

The balance of our Community Organization fieldwork was an informational flop, but and experiential boon. Because we missed talking to the mayor in our first visit, we were to stop in and interview him on our next trip out. We revised our questioning strategy (less of an assault, more of a conversation) and were ready to go. The day after the three-day Fiesta de San Juan, we returned. First we stopped at the municipal building, hoping to find him in his workplace. After a disappointing search there, we set off for what our local friend identified as his residence. Upon arriving, fresh and ready to learn and understand every aspect of the political structure in every small village in Peru, we knocked. No answer. After a few minutes of sitting on the curb outside his house (with a woman staring intently out the window at us) a man came to the door. We leapt into action, pens and papers ready, game faces on. “Señor mayor, tell us everything you know!?!” Of course, it wasn’t the mayor. It was his friend, and newly appointed ambassador to the gringos: “What do you want?” We explained our objectives, our grand plan to understand community organization, and thereby understand the world. Overwhelmed, the ambassador ducked back into the house, only to return a few minutes later. The mayor couldn’t meet with us today, he explained. “But why? Is he attending to some urgent town business? Is he mitigating a fight between rival families? Has he gone to the city to appeal for paved roads?” The ambassador giggled. We waited. Then came the mumbled response: “He is still drunk from the Fiesta. You will have to come back another time.” In this moment I realized the nature of anthropology: humanity. To think we could ever seek the testability a hard-line scientist would expect is absurd: we study people. They are as predictable as earthquakes and as objective as a romance novel.

Later, we visited the local Centro de Salud. I noticed that every village is equipped with one of these blue buildings, and I wondered what their role was. We were fortunate to have happened upon the one doctor in the town at the time, working at the center. My group had no questions prepared, but this didn’t hinder our information gathering. The two others in my group were not particularly interested in talking to the doctor (they argued health has nothing to do with community organization,) so I did most of the interviewing. I inquired about the role of the health center: Was it a government-sponsored service? Who pays for the staffing? What services are available? He spoke animatedly of his training at a university in Lima (as an obstetrician.) Shilla was just one of his stops: each week he traveled to several neighboring communities and was the resident ob-gyn for a day. Supplies come mainly from the central government, but because Shilla is such a small community, they have little more than a few bandages and a few bottles of iodine. The obstetrician explained, he brings his own tools, and when someone needs any care more supplies or care than can be provided, they traveled to the next bigger town, and if nothing was available there, the next bigger town, and so on. The government gives small salaries to the doctors and nurses that staff the clinics, and supplies, but, the doctor speculated, this was just a gesture toward improving “health” in Peru. He indicated he saw little true concern on the part of government officials to care for people in really rural communities like Shilla. Additionally, services are (in theory) paid for by insurance each member of the community is to pay (roughly $1 per year) but the doctor said no one pays, until they come to the center, and find they will be refused treatment if they don’t pay.

He did clue us in to one government program that seemed to have a great effect (in his opinion.) The former president, Fujimori, enacted a program that ensured the health of mothers and infants: women are to receive free prenatal care and supplementary food rations during the infancy of her child (at this point the doctor pointed to a large sack of corn meal donated by USAid.) So, he reasoned, pregnant and nursing women are well cared for by external sources.

Nourishment was the doctor’s primary concern among people of Shilla, but he voiced his concern with little sympathy. “All they eat is potatoes. They don’t know how to eat well. They sell their livestock at the market and just live on boiled potatoes.” He blamed the local reliance on potatoes for a high incidence of tuberculosis, in his estimation also the most common disease he encountered. This is divergent from national data that indicate a 6% decrease in TB incidence in Peru since 1993, thanks to improved drug therapies (Greer 2001:15). However, a national diversification of treatment options and decline in incidence may not have trickled down to the most rural (and arguably most susceptible) communities.

In response to my questions about invasive or tropical diseases, the doctor also expressed strong sentiments. “There is no AIDS here. And malaria only appears in travelers. No townspeople experience these types of diseases.”

While much of the information the doctor gave us was valuable, and led to many additional questions (our interview was cut short by a woman’s screams: she was giving birth in the next room, and finally the doctor felt he had to pay her a visit) I felt some of his statements were a bit more opinion-based, as opposed to fact-based. I felt like his strong statement about AIDS could have been the result of misconceptions about AIDS and people that may have it. I suspect a combination of local people not recognizing or seeking treatment at the health center for AIDS (for whatever reason) may result in underreporting. And, when I later talked about the results of the interview with Dr. Hammer, she suggested that in general AIDS testing was expensive and hard to come by in rural areas, and that perhaps the report of zero incidence was an indication of zero testing.

I later found out (from additional discussions with Santa and Dr. Hammer) that the (seemingly idyllic) prenatal and infant care is rarely so helpful. In fact, I found, that women were required to visit the doctor at specific times, three times during her pregnancy, and if she didn’t complete all the prenatal visits, as a result of an abundance of other obligations, it was unlikely she would regularly return for help later. So, the doctor’s glowing reviews of the program came only from cases of women who returned to receive the full benefits: other women never returned, and his view was skewed toward success. Only much later in my field experience did I learn what was going on with the women (and everyone, for that matter) who was not visiting the health center.

Finally, the doctor’s statements about local under nutrition echoed in my mind. As a anthropologist that someday hopes to be involved in the medical establishment, working for more sensitive doctors, this was a remarkably unapprised statement. While a diet based solely on potatoes is not nutritionally adequate, I felt the doctor was hasty in his judgment of local eating habits. Not only had I seen a variety of fruits and vegetables being eaten and sold at every market, I saw hundreds of varieties of potatoes, being prepared in infinite permutations. This statement clarified the biases the doctor (a relatively wealthy urban-transplant) held about “country-people.” Assuming they are ignorant to healthful nutrition seemed a product of both his urban upbringing and his medical training: a classic stereotype about rural people, combined with credentialist assumption about the ignorance of the non-medical community. And, that people sell their livestock, as opposed to eating it seems more to me an economic reality than a primitive trading faux pas. The investment of feeding and caring for an animal is hardly redeemed in one chicken dinner, but is more accurately reflected selling it for a few soles to buy a different kind of vegetable to eat or soap to wash clothes. To me, the sale of livestock in the market represents a drop in the bucket of shifting from subsistence to cash economy. Unfortunately, as mentioned in Mayer’s alguito para ganar, “peasants must sell their products [in this case, livestock] below production cost, absorbing the losses at home (1999:346).” In this case, however, I believe the loss absorbed at home is less than the loss absorbed if a family was to simply eat the meat.

Still focusing on health and medicine, I had the opportunity to visit with and interview two curanderos (healers.) Don Pancho was the more enterprising and well-known of the two. He invited a few of us to his healing center in Huaraz. Upon arrival, we had no place to sit: the three beds were full and the two chair waiting area was also occupied. In the most shocking moment of my Peruvian experience, I realized (again) how culture bound I was. The healing center was a dirt-floored room, with papers laying everywhere and herbs littering every horizontal space. There was a shelf that, at first glance, looked like pickled reptile shelf in a biology classroom, with snakes and leaves in yellowish-brown sauces that made my stomach churn.

Quelling the initial urge to turn and catch the next flight back to western medicine, my classmates and I took some chairs (relieved of their stacks of papers and herbs) among those in the waiting area. Don Pancho immediately opened up and began telling us about the women in the beds (with stomach illness) and other ailment he had cured. He proudly showed us his certificates of natural healing, bestowed upon him from the national health department, and a program for a presentation he gave, in which he was the only non-western doctor to present. He brimmed with pride, and the women in the bed grinned widely as living testimonials. My anxiety vanished (in spite of the occasional chicken darting into the room) as Don Pancho described his cures for parasites, coughs, and susto (fright disease.) I asked him many of the same questions I had asked the doctor, and he gave me quite different answers. Primarily, he affirmed potatoes are a staple food, but hardly the source of all health woes in the region. Also, he confirmed tuberculosis is common, but it is not something people visit him for. In addition to being a healer, Don Pancho is a midwife. He assists with births all over the town, and is sometimes called from afar for consultations, and often mitigates complications in pregnancy and birth. Despite his expertise, Don Pancho gave credit to western medicine on several occasions, when we inquired about diseases he considered out of his realm.