Aymara Conceptions of Love

Love is a social construct created by the smallest social unit: the couple. It can be defined as a way of acknowledging the individuality of the other, of accepting and supporting their happiness.

Photo by Amaru Villanueva Rance

The scientific study of love began in the last two decades of the twentieth century from the research of social psychologists. American psychologist, Robert Sternberg looked into the concept of love and based on factual analysis identified three universal components of love: passion, intimacy and commitment.

Passion refers to the erotic pleasure and the romantic relationship; intimacy refers to the ability of the couple of being empathetic towards each other. Finally, commitment entails a contract, which establishes the rules of the relationship, underlying the principle of emotional and sexual exclusivity.

Prior to my investigation, the concept of love and romantic relationships among the Aymara had been studied from anthropological and historical perspectives. The existing bibliography identifies three key influences for this culture: the Incas, the Hispanic colonial domination, and more recently processes related to globalisation.

Using the methodological parameters of Sternberg, I studied the components of love in a group of 435 Aymara university students of the Unidades Academicas Campesinas in Tiwanaku, Pucarani, Batallas and Carmen Pampa; two thirds of the subjects were female and one third male. The results showed the predominance of commitment and intimacy over passion, thereby defining the Aymara romantic bond as being one of companionship and friendship.

From a historical perspective, it is difficult to establish the forms of love in the pre-Hispanic era. A semantic approach shows that the word used to refer to the affection between couples has changed from waylluna to munaña (to love), a term which was imposed by Hispanic colonisers and which distorts the original meaning of waylluna, which is closer to ‘braiding’ or ‘uniting’, and which has evident erotic connotations. The Spanish wanted the Aymara to understand love as a sublime feeling, which came from the chuyma. This philological analysis suggests that the passional component of love between the Aymara people has been eradicated, both in its erotic and romantic connotations.

The life cycle of the Aymara couple establishes that romantic relations are secondary to the working needs of the family, and even today there are rural communities where parents arrange marriages for their children. The Aymara consider the process of falling in love as a nuisance; insofar as it involves attraction and desire. Sexual pleasure has been repressed and is avoided as a part of married life in both rural and urban areas.
Marital status is crucial in Aymara society, because people are only recognized as such when they are married. The process of ‘becoming a person’ (jaqi) follows a complex system of rituals. Four different stages have been identified by Albó: Sart'asiña [proposal]; irpaq'a [engagement announcement]; sirw i skiwa [pre-marital state, which comes from the spanish servir]; kasarasiña [to get married]. To these four I have added the wayllusiña [to fall in love], which starts the marital life cycle.

An analysis of the life cycle of the Aymara couple necessarily derives from an examination over the situation of the woman subjected to her husband, to her own family and her political family. To create a mature love unit, a childhood history of emotional stability is required. This search of protection and comfort is termed the ‘attachment system’. A safe attachment implies seeking refuge with the adult caregiver in response to threats. An insecure attachment causes the need to escape from the person who should be caring for the child, or them developing intense feelings of anxiety regarding separation.

The Aymara way of parenting produces a form of insecure attachment. Considering how the attachment is closely connected to the way loving bonds are established, it is likely that this type of attachment found in Aymara children leads to a fearful attachment in the couple, bringing about distrust and fear of dependency.

Thus, the configuration of the 'companionship' model of love among the Aymara may be a result of the following three factors:

a) Insecure attachment: Raising children in the Aymara culture, either in the countryside or in the city, is structured around repressing the mother’s affection and tenderness towards her child, compounded by the frequent use of physical punishment.

b) Repression of sexual pleasure: Both the psycholinguistic analysis of the words used to express marital love, and the study of the rites during the life cycle of the couple, demonstrate how little pleasure is valued generally, and sexual pleasure is valued particularly.

c) Aymara Machismo: The levels of passion are lower in women than in men, and they insist less on commitment, which may be associated with the fear of male violence that these women often develop.

Aymara women are victims of abuse perpetrated not only by their spouse, but also by his family. The sirwiñaku is a custom to test the strength of the woman; mother and sisters-in-law seemingly make every effort to make her life impossible, treating her as a maid serving the family. One reason for the migration of young Aymara women into the cities is to escape from the sirwiñaku. As well as this, it’s a rejection of the way formal romantic relationships are structured and what this implies: the restriction of freedom.

Aymara society has survived the domination of the Incas, the ignorance and racism of the Spanish conquistadores, the infamous subjugation and discrimination of the imperialist ideology in the 20th Century. Although none of the above managed to destroy the Aymara, in order to overcome them, they had to renounce pleasure and remain stoical. The meaning of life was traditionally focused on the welfare of the community at the expense of the individual; working the fields gave refuge to woes and offered a way of achieving something immediately, in order not to have to face the uncertainty of tomorrow. Aymara pride has remained firm through keeping the past alive, maintaining admiration for their ancestors and respecting nature. However, sensuality was diminished, sexuality became limited to reproduction, romance was censored and amorous passion repressed.

Translated from the Spanish by Caroline Risacher

Courtship and Marriage Rites in the Altiplano

Within the Andean conception of life, getting married follows a higher purpose than simply finding a companion for life. The idea of dating for weeks or years with a series of different partners until you find the right one is not a familiar idea around these parts. The marriage ceremony for indigenous people of the Altiplano is a social ritual in which the whole community takes part. After this rite of passage, the individual is afforded a different status which affects their affairs, on a social and practical level. The Aymara word for marriage, Jaqichasiña, literally means ‘the making of a person’. That is to say, personhood is only fully achieved with marriage.

Photo by: Wolfgang Schüler

Come Together
But how do couples find each other in the first place? Large celebrations are organised at key points during the year, in line with the agricultural cycle. These fiestas can bring several neighbouring communities together, and revelers spend up to three days dancing, playing music, giving offerings to the Pachamama and, no less importantly, pairing up.

Carnival (celebrated in February) and Todos Santos (All Saints, held in November) are two such occasions in which bachelors and bachelorettes wear their finest clothes, and come together amidst alcohol and ceremonially-sanctioned euphoria. Dr. Henry Stobart recounts how an evening of ‘singing and dancing from house to house during All Saints later transformed into a sexual frenzy on the hillsides’. Similar accounts are proffered by sociologist David Mendoza and anthropologist Dr. Eveline Sigl in Eroticism, Sexuality and Dances in the Altiplano, where they argue that up to 70% of unions are created during festivities.

Courtship in the Andes may lack passion and romance, as they are commonly understood, yet this doesn’t mean it’s lacking in eroticism or humour. Ritually speaking, dancing is a way to celebrate and summon the fertility of the earth during the sowing of the field and the harvest. It’s no coincidence the reproductive cycle is related to the agricultural cycle, as sexual activity is punctuated by celebrations which mark the planting of the first seeds, and the first harvest months later. In their article, Sigl-Mendoza document the belief that the singing, dancing and enjoyment of the young couples boost the productivity of the crops. Mendoza tells me that, even empirically, ‘there is a marked upsurge of births in November – that is 9 months after Carnival. When people ask who is the father of the baby, some will answer, ‘the wawa was brought by the pepino’; a common way of explaining the baby is a carnival lovechild.

Evolving Indigeneities
The last thirty years saw a change in the love practices and rituals of the Altiplano, and while arranged marriages can still happen, they are no longer the norm. Neither is the kachua, a rite of passage involving teenagers meeting for their first sexual encounters at Munaypata (a name to denote the ‘place of love’ in many rural communities, usually a hill. It is also the name of a neighbourhood in La Paz where couples met in decades past). On their part, urban areas which have received an influx of rural migrants have progressively adopted a more Western approach to dating, and limit themselves to re-enacting traditional dances without necessarily taking part in the corresponding rituals associated with courtship and the harvest.

In rural areas however, these courtship rites are suffused with humour and even involve occasional acts of mutually consented violence, all part of the game, of course. They are, perhaps, personified by the figure of Pepino, an Andean version of Arlequin/Pierrot, and emblematic of Carnival in general. Another figure is the ‘Cholero’, who dances with two women and satirizes adulterous behaviours, as well as the kidnapping of a bride. The characters are lascivious; the Pepino, for example, follows women with his ‘chorizo’ stick and creates an abundantly sexual, albeit jocular, atmosphere.

Pragmatism and Potatoes
The eroticism of the dances is further expressed in the dance costumes, though not in the way we might imagine. In contrast with Westernised conceptions of sexuality, the showing of flesh is neither common nor eroticized. Sigl-Mendoza believe the attractiveness and desirability of a woman is in no small part based on the quantity and quality of the pollera skirts she is wearing. The multiple layers represent fertility, and the quality of the patterning of the dresses (presumably made by the woman herself) signal attention to detail and, ultimately, the ability to be a good wife. Again, attraction and compatibility are not based on passion, but on a more pragmatic rationale which has as its core value a spouse’s ability to work. As Dr. Canessa puts it: ‘There’s no point in finding a guapa that can’t work’. This heightened sexuality surrounding the dances augurs fertility for crops and villagers alike.

Potatoes are central to the economy and metaphysics of communities in the Altiplano – they represent fecundity and sustenance. Mendoza explains that, like potatoes, women are meant to reproduce abundantly. P’itikilla potatoes, famous for their manifold ‘eyes’, are furthermore used in some villages to test the dexterity and attention to detail of a bride-to-be. It takes considerable skill to peel them without them losing their shape, and doing so with skill is desirable (among other reasons) because it indicates a waste-not attitude. Further parallels can be found between women and potatoes in the Andes: ‘some potatoes, which grow into the shape of a woman, are blessed during the first harvest and put back into the ground’, Mendoza tells me. Interestingly, while it is men who plough the fields and open up the earth, it is the women who are in charge of planting the seed. That is to say, in this apparent inversion of roles, women are imbued with seminal properties, whereas men prepare the space within which life will germinate.

Love can be hard
As part of the celebration and enjoyment, there is a ‘violent’ component to the dances, albeit one of a playful nature, which can be understood as a game symbolizing attraction and desire between the partners. It goes something like this: the man steals a garment from the women he is interested in, such as a hat or a scarf. If the girl is interested, she can then go and retrieve it reciprocating the attraction. Whatever happens next, happens. They may even run off, disappearing for a couple of days. The man has ‘stolen’ the woman away.

Upon their return, heads hanging low, they must confront the girl’s parents who wait indignantly at her house. The reception involves a combination of anger, shame, and even physical chastisement of the young man, who must take it as his due. ‘It is the role of the bride’s parents to beat the young man for taking away their daughter, although the blows may be hard enough, there is no anger behind them’, writes sociologist Dr. Andrew Canessa in his book Intimate Indigeneities, Race, Sex, and History in the Small Spaces of Andean Life. During our interview he adds: ‘it’s all a bit of a drama, but no-one’s acting it out. Everyone knows it’s going to happen and no-one is surprised when it does’. It is more of a symbolic gesture meant to establish the balance of power within the family. However, Mendoza explains how a woman’s violent gestures towards a man become part of their sexual repertoire, emphasising the erotic nature of these displays.

Love without Love
These encounters are not romantic nor do they involve passion in the way we are accustomed to. Dr. Canessa provides an account which explains this dynamic: ‘Nobody talks about falling in love, there is no discourse of falling in love’. When asked how they met, couples often give a response which can be summarised as: ‘He came to me and asked me if I wanted to be with him. And so we were together’. Kissing and physical affection are not common between partners, nor is it present in their accounts of their relationship history. Dr. Canessa also points out that the average age of first sexual intercourse is 4-5 years higher in the Andes than it is in tropical regions, an important and telling difference. In general terms (and although accounts vary in some measure depending on the village), the Andes is not a region which places a high importance on sexuality, nor is it a place where it’s openly explored. Referring to his experience in the village of Wila Kjarka, Dr. Canessa explains that ‘sex is not a big thing there, certainly not in this community. Of course they do it and they enjoy it, but they don’t talk about it at all’. This doesn’t exactly mean they are prudish. Although it’s not talked about, ‘no-one is embarrassed by the fact it happens. People live in the same room so you’ll grow up listening to people having sex, your parents for example. They’re quite quiet and happen under the cover. People don’t take off their clothes to have sex’.

It’s important to understand that the apparent absence of romantic passion doesn’t denote a lack of love. Yet, insofar as it can be understood as such, it is a love based on a different, more pragmatic vision of life. The Andean conception of life ultimately values the ability to create a family and work the land.

""When the sun shines, he comes close to me and he can see the sparkle in my eyes', says Fernanda while embracing Franklin.

They are both gradually losing their sight and are almost completely blind. He is 28 years old, works as a civil servant at the Identifications Office. She is 23 years old and intends to study psychology. They met on a Thursday, April 19th 2012 to be precise. On the 22nd of the same month, they already had decided to be in a committed relationship. Since they started going out, Franklin would say jokingly: 'Marry me! Marry me!' One day, she mischievously replied with an unexpected 'yes'. This left her boyfriend silent. Shortly after he went to ask for her hand and they set about planning the wedding which was to take place on December 22nd, 2012, at the Maria Reina Church in Alto Sopocachi.

Estanislao ‘El Cha tito’ Lazarte Y Lucía Limachi: A Blind Couple Of Musicians In The Prado/Photos by Amary Villanueva Rance

Everyone told him that Fernanda was pretty and that she had lovely eyes. She was told that Franco, as she affectionately calls him, had the handsome face of a doll. For this blind couple, physical attractiveness has been important in their relationship, in a similar way it is for the sighted, despite the fact that experts point out that among blind people, falling in love transcends physical attraction. ‘It’s amazing, in this institute people can’t see but they know everything’, says Franklin, telling me how he found out about the physical appearance of his then girlfriend and now wife.

‘It's fairly common to hear that blind people exchange information and rumours about the physical appearance of others. They care about this, even more than sighted people do’, explains Tito Peñarrieta, a blind singer. He adds that rumours on the beauty of those who are part of blindness support groups spread easily, and can be determining in whether couples stay together or not.

Psychologist Natalie Guillén explains that physical attraction always matters, even among the blind. The way one perceives oneself —clothes, tidiness, grooming— are elements that communicate your personality traits and have an impact in your daily life, not only in love.

‘Looking good goes beyond visual perception, it is a biologic, social and psychological aspect’, but superficial judgments also exist regarding physical expectations, even for the blind.

According to Carmiña Andrade, coordinator of the Louis Braille Rehabilitation Centre, many blind people opt to form relationships with visually impaired couples, or some other form of disability in order to feel they are understood and not looked down on. Subjects I interviewed tell me that the sighted often treat them disrespectfully, hiding them or making them feel worthless. For example, Fernanda said that she’s never had a sighted boyfriend fearing that he would get bored and not want to care for her.

A similar case is the story of the regional director of the Bolivian Institute for Blindness, Edwin Ilaya, who has been married for five years with Marlene, also visually impaired: ‘I was ashamed to be with girls who could see me bump, drop things, make mistakes'. Ultimately, what bothered him the most was the feeling of dependency; sighted people made him feel helpless and were constantly being attentive to him, which he did not like. Marlene genuinely cares: 'In my life, very few people have cared for me. She did not care about my blindness like other people'.

There are sighted persons like Edwin who can regain control of their lives, but not everybody can; the loss of sight can trigger a deep depression which comes out of the neglect and lack of affection they face, says Carmiña Andrade. ‘You should take into account that it is common for sighted persons to leave their partners when they become blind as in many cases they can't work anymore, become dependent and are no longer attractive to them’.

The case of a woman who recently lost her sight is another good example. She was the trophy wife of a military man 30 years older than her. When she became blind, he left her saying that he didn't love her anymore as she turned into an inconvenience, a nuisance. In another case treated at the Louis Braille Centre, a husband abandoned his wife and their eight children after she became blind. The woman had to abandon two of her children. Her sixteen-year-old daughter, already a mother, helps her sell instant soups at the El Alto market.

The pain caused by the abandonment might be appeased when finding a new partner —as is happens with sighted persons— but there is an important difference; the blind rely on physical attributes that they can't see, these they can only imagine. Andrade says that they look for a partner based on what they perceive of the other: the voice, demeanour, charisma, etc. Franklin supports this idea by referring to Fernanda saying 'I love how bubbly she is, the way she talks, how she treats me. If she were pretty and pedantic, I would have told her no...'

In the process of falling in love, other attributes are valued, explains Dr. Bismarck Pinto, Doctor in Psychology and Health. Beyond physical appearance, for blind couples there is a need to feel, to touch the other, draw with the hands on the other's face. In blindness, the strength of the partner is valued over and above sympathy and pity, which are rejected.

Before Fernanda, Franklin had a relationship with a sighted person. He remembers, with discomfort, that when they argued in the street, she would leave him alone in places he wasn't familiar with. She would then feel sorry and come to him, but he systematically rejected the support and went where he had to go alone to show her his strength. With Fernanda, the situation is very different: ‘She wouldn't leave me somewhere, we would both just stand there. If she goes, she would get lost... of course, that’s not in her interest’, he says mockingly.

However, Franklin believes that there is something essential that separates love between the blind and the sighted: the pain of losing their sight. 'We have both moved forward, we wouldn’t argue and fight over small things as the sighted often do. We’ve been through worse, these things won’t get in the way of us being together. This unites blind couples more strongly’. He adds: 'plus, we value physical contact more highly because when you hug the one you love, you feel like you've known that person all your life.'

In the end, there is a common reality among sighted and blind persons when it comes to love, explains Dr. Pinto: 'Don't fall in love with anyone, you fall for the person that you like and that makes you feel good'. He points out that love is a construction between two people who, by deciding on common goals, form a bond for life. It's a process of discovery, encounters, missed connections and farewells. He adds, ‘a person in love is blind, even if he can see. The one in love is stupid, irrational, crazy’.

Translated from the Spanish by Caroline Risacher