Froemming, Steven John; 1999; Rational Choice and Collective Action in an Andean Community. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Washington, Seattle. Excerpt from Chapter 7 (pages 481-484, 505-507, 509-514).

The Civil-Religious Hierarchy

In Ccachín, as in most Andean communities, there is a dual political structure. On the one hand there are the varayoq, traditional authorities named for, recognized, and empowered by the staffs of office ("vara") that they bear. On the other hand, there are government-mandated officials that, while locally elected, have their job descriptions defined by and their chain of authority formally integrated with district, regional, and national governments. The varayoq have their origins in pre-conquest Andean leadership, prestige, and power structures that were later legalized and reinforced by the Spanish Viceroy Toledo in 1571 (Skar 1982). While most twentieth century legislation in Peru has been designed to undercut or abolish traditional village authority, it has had mixed results, and the current situation is one of a syncretic blend of old and new structures throughout the highlands. In many remote areas, the local power elite and government officials have found it to their advantage to work through the varayoq rather than supplant them. Such seems to be the case in Ccachín, where, before agrarian reform, the arrendire of the hacienda lands at Pan de Azucar is reported to have acted "like an hacendado," taking center position at the swearing in ceremony of the new varayoq on January 1st, and using the varayoq to organize work parties in his own fields and for the hacendado. In a formal sense as well, the varayoq have never been independent of outside authorities. Until the early 1980s, when Ccachín got its own judges, the varayoq had to go to Lares to be sworn in. Some villagers suggest that further back in time, the varayoq had to go all the way to Calca. While they may have been selected within the community, their tenure was always ratified by regional officials.

The Four Tiers of the Varayoq System

There are four levels to the varayoq system in Ccachín. They are hierarchically organized in terms of prestige and status both within and between each level. The highest-ranking official in the system is the Inca alcalde. Immediately below him are three sub-mayors, the alcaldes de barrio. Below them are several alguaciles. The lowest ranking positions in the hierarchy are occupied by three regidores. The anexo of Rayankancha is tied into Ccachín's system with two representatives at the level of alguacil. The anexo of Qochayoq, however, has its own varayoq system, with the levels of the hierarchy replicating those of Ccachín, though the positions are fewer in number. The anexo of Yerbabuenayoq does not have designated varayoq positions. It is a market annex rather than a residential community, with several outside merchants, and those from Ccachín that have shops and houses there maintain their connections and are listed on the roll of households in the village nucleus.

The Inca alcalde, also known as hatun alcalde, alcalde mayor, or alcalde de varas, occupies the most prestigious, time demanding, and expensive cargo in Ccachín. As the top-ranking official in the varayoq system, he directs and guides those under him, and bears ultimate responsibility for assuring that all of the duties of the varayoq are carried out fairly and according to convention. The Inca alcalde arrives at his position with accumulated knowledge and experience, having previously served in lower positions in the system. He's typically in his late 50s or 60s, and has sufficient wealth in cattle to meet the demands of office. The Inca alcalde butchers a cow and feasts the entire community on two occasions during the year, once on January 1st, the day he is sworn in, and again on Carnival Monday. He also provides the Sargento dancers for the festivities at the beginning of the New Year. In one way or another, the Inca alcalde plays an important role in all of the public rituals and ceremonies in the community, and the position is central in assuring that cargos are completed and traditions are carried out.

As a group, the alcaldes de barrio or barrio de varayoq are second in prestige and power to the Inca alcalde. They are ranked first, second, and third according to their order of selection. While commonly referred to as barrios ('ward mayors'), Ccachín has not been formally divided into barrios or ayllu in living memory; people say that the title is "por costumbre," not an organizational fact. After their inauguration, the alcaldes de barrio divide up responsibilities for the various sectors of the village with the alguaciles according to the convenience of vicinity, with deference to the varayoq with higher rank. While Seibold (1990) indicates that the subalcaldes of Choquecancha have distinct thematic roles (alcalde de municipalidad, alcalde de fiestas y faenas, etc.), this does not seem to be the case in Ccachín. The responsibilities described to me are quite general, with considerable overlap between the duties of the alcaldes and the alguaciles. The principal distinctions between the positions appear to be that of age, prestige, and rank.

The alguaciles are in an intermediate position between the alcalde de barrio and the regidores.⁽¹⁾ In the absence of the regidores, they serve their superiors as pututeros ('conch shell trumpeters'). On the other hand, they share many of the same responsibilities and pleasures as the alcaldes. The age grade system insures that there are men of all ages to meet the collective responsibilities of the varayoq. The more physically demanding tasks go to the alguaciles, both because they are at the most appropriate age to carry them out effectively, and because, as the lowest-ranking adults in the hierarchy, they are assigned them by their superiors.

The regidores are the town criers of Ccachín. They are also known as pututeros for the conch shells ("pututu") that they carry. They use their pututu as trumpets to herald the movement of the Inca alcalde and other varayoq through the community during ceremonial functions, to emphasize key moments of rituals, to signal the commencement of work and rest breaks at general assemblies and communal work parties, and to alert villagers to community announcements. At one time, regidores in the Lares area sounded out the hours 9:00 a.m. and 12:00, 3:00, and 6:00 p.m. daily (Zúñiga Rivero 1955), but their function as a village clock is now limited to pacing public events. Many evenings, the regidores pass through the village after the comuneros have finished dinner. Working together, the pututeros stop at resonant points in the neighborhoods, blow their pututu in sequence, and shout out announcements of community assemblies, meetings, work parties, festivals, presentations, and other community affairs.

The pututeros are at the command and disposition of the Inca alcalde during their year of service, and they are provided beds in his house. Because of these demands, they are young -- typically in their mid to late teens -- and unmarried. The responsibilities of Inca alcalde are time consuming, and the pututeros are expected to free up some of his time by helping him work his fields. Perhaps because of their close association with the Inca alcalde, the three pututeros are referred to as paña rikra, lloq'e rikra, and chaki ('right shoulder', 'left shoulder', and 'foot'). They are hierarchically ordered, generally by age, and their status is marked by the size of the conch shell that they carry. The pututu they carry are likewise referred to, from largest to smallest, in terms of this body metaphor. Fifty years ago Gutiérrez Pareja (1949) reported that the smallest of the pututeros was known as the chhullachchhaphchi ('dew shaker'), because he went ahead of the entourage of varayoq with a stick or broom to clear the path and shake off the dust or dew, but I didn't hear the term used while I was doing fieldwork....

Carguyoq (Cargo-Holders)

During the years of "rest" between varayoq positions, individuals are called upon to serve a series of religious cargos. These cargos vary in cost and prestige. Sponsorship of the waylla ("green pasture") dancers at Corpus Christi, for example, involves little outlay and is usually born by younger men. The galluyoq ('rooster owners') for the gallut'ipiy ('rooster jerking') event during the fiesta of Santiago, on the other hand, have to provide several roosters for the competition and butcher a bull to feed all the riders and community notables, a cargo that can only be taken on by someone who is relatively well off. The most expensive cargo of all is sponsorship of one of the dance groups that make the pilgrimage to Qoyllur Rit'i. The carguyoq of the pilgrimage must not only provide food, alcohol, and coca for their dancers and musicians for an extended trip, they must outfit some of their dancers, pay part of the transportation costs, and provide a donation to the sanctuary. Except for the galluyoq of Santiago, all the carguyoq for the local saints (San Isidro, Guadalupe, etc.) sponsor dancers. It's considered to be more prestigious to present dancers from other areas, such as Kunkani and Patakancha, or to hire an organized group, but this entails greater expense: besides food, drink, and hospitality, they must be paid in cash, the equivalent of $.33-1.00 per dancer per day for their participation. To cut costs, most carguyoq draw upon their network of kin and fictive kin for dancers.

The number of cargos fluctuates over time, with festivals growing and waning in interest and prestige. The number of galluyoq, for example, has doubled from two to four in recent years to provide more opportunities for those who wish to participate. Along the same lines, the pilgrimage to Qoyllur Rit'i is a recent addition to the ceremonial calendar and in the first five years the number of dance groups that attend went from one to three. On the other hand, the cargo associated with the pilgrimage to Wank'a is on the decline. Besides these long-term changes, there is some unpredictability from year to year as one or another of the carguyoq fails to meet his responsibility. After successfully sponsoring the ch'unchu dancers for Santiago in 1989, for example, Don LZ passed on his cargo to Don JC, who failed to provide any dancers for the fiesta in 1990. The cargo stayed in his hands, and he completed it in 1991, passing it along to another. Likewise, Don FZ had a cargo for the Señor de Wank'a pilgrimage that he failed to complete two years in a row. The cargo is a minor one, outside of the rotation of cargos for Ccachín's saints (each with a statue in the church), and with sponsorship of a second Wank'a lámina ('icon') passing through the village, few noticed. Failed sponsors suffer a loss of face that corresponds to the seriousness of their cargo. A failure to provide dancers for the patron saint of the community is more substantial than the failure to follow through on a pilgrimage that is attended by only a few people from the village. Though he failed to do anything for Señor de Wank'a in 1990, Don FZ's service as carguyoq for Misti Carnaval in 1991 was a great success, and he went on to be named second alguacil for 1992. He failed to do anything for the Wank'a pilgrimage again in 1991, but by then, with five young children and few resources, all of his energy was going into preparations for his upcoming varayoq service.

The festival cargos are tied to the varayoq system indirectly. Experience, visibility, status, and prestige are gained though such service, and successful sponsorship of religious cargos is one of the criteria for advancement through the varayoq system. New fiesta carguyoq are selected by their predecessors during the latter's actualization of their cargo. In the case of Misti Carnaval, they are determined by a combination of luck and desire (the cargo goes to the pair of dancers that fells the kapuli tree). Passing on of a cargo is celebrated in a private observance of the two parties, usually at the kacharpari of the event. There is a rough correlation between the expense of a cargo and the sponsor's age, but there is no set order or clear hierarchy of religious cargos. Catherine Allen puts it nicely when, speaking of the cargo system in Sonqo, she says:

Counting all of the religious cargos, steps in the varayoq hierarchy, and mayordomo positions, there are at least twenty cargos in the civil-religious hierarchy that a man could potentially fill. One would have to accept a cargo every two to three years to complete them all. One is not likely to become Inca alcalde without first taking on several religious cargos, but few, if any, nowadays, attempt to take on all. As Allen notes, omissions can be an Achilles heel for ambitious individuals: they can be thrown back in their face. On the other hand, the flexibility and loose integration of religious cargos with civil ones has the potential to make recruitment for the former more difficult. One need not do everything, only enough....

Competition and Conscription

Beyond age grading, hierarchical ordering, and credit given for equivalent service, three other features of the varayoq system stand out: it is a community-level form of universal service, positions are rotated annually, and only males are eligible -- there is no equivalent hierarchy of public service for women.

Whether ethnographers focus on the onerousness of cargos or on the competition for power and prestige underlying them seems to depends on who one's informants are, the state of the community at the time, and the eye of the beholder. Allen, for example, provides the following account of the election of one alcalde that she witnessed:

On the other hand, Skar writes:

On one hand, recruitment of varayoq appears to have something in common with a draft. All men are expected to serve, and those who resist doing so are pressured to accept when called upon. In the case of the alcalde-elect described by Allen above, most men disapproved of his recalcitrance, but it took a haranguing and public humiliation by his mother in front of the church to eventually get him to serve. In the case of Don EZ in Ccachín, who has refused overtures to serve as Inca alcalde several times, community members seem to be gambling that persistence will pay off. On the other hand, rights, power, and prestige are bestowed on those who hold the office by the community, and recruitment sometimes has the appearance of a contest between political factions, with well-placed individuals marshaling resources for their own, and their allies' advantage.

Comuneros have a collective interest in the maintenance of the varayoq system, or something like it, because it provides important collective and public goods. Other communities in other places, with different economic and institutional conditions, provide the same kinds of goods in different ways, through a system of public taxation, or by patronship, with production of the good conditioned on its publicity value. Thus, for example, in Idiazabal, Spain, a town roughly the size of Ccachín, the municipal government prepares a massive paella ('rice and seafood dish') for community members in the central plaza on the feast of San Blas, the patron saint. Likewise, it serves corn tortillas and hard cider to the public for a merienda at the same festival. The costs of these collective goods come out of general revenue collected through taxation, not the pockets of the alcalde and individual town council members. In contrast, the Fourth of July fireworks displays in Seattle are sponsored by two commercial enterprises in quest of name recognition, and there is competition between them to provide a display that will attract the biggest audience. The cargo system in Latin America is best judged with reference to such alternative forms of provisioning. The patron system is closer to a competitive status hierarchy than one based on taxation, with the difference that it takes place in the context of the market and a highly capitalized system, and the actors are corporate rather than individuals or ego-centered networks. Given the limited powers of coercion at the institutional level in an acephalous system, it appears easier to consolidate informal social pressures around focal individuals, than it is to marshall the same to enforce a general system of taxation.

The universality of the recruitment system brings egalitarian values to bear, which helps to resolve the sanctioning problem discussed in Chapter 6. Appropriate behavior is often framed in terms of identity, thereby rendered it less negotiable. In the case discussed by Allen, Eustaquio's mother effectively challenges him with the question, "Iman kanki? Runachu kanki?" ('What are you? Are you a runa?' 1988:114). But the system is less identity-based, and behavior more conditional, than this might lead us to believe. Fairness plays an important role. Eustaquio does not argue for either an individual exemption or a general revision of the system, but rather, he frames his argument in terms of following customary rules: it's not yet his time nor his turn.

Norms of fairness are inherently conditional. As Elster (1989:133) notes, people motivated by fairness don't want to take a free ride on the cooperation of others, but they do not want to cooperate when few others do either. Clearly, even if we allow for social motivations, self-interest incentives are not thereby rendered irrelevant. Margolis's (1982, 1990) modeling of rational choice around the observation that people seek to be "neither selfish nor exploited" is relevant here. He suggests that there are two predispositions or rules of thumb that underlie this intuition:

1) Other things being equal, the more good a bit of resources would do if used socially compared to what it would do if used for my private interests, the more likely I would be to use that bit of resources socially.

2) Other things being equal, the more I have already used my resources socially, the more inclined I am to spend the next bit of resources on myself.⁽²⁾

While his account of the evolutionary origins of these dispositions is open to question, I take his underlying empirical observations that people 1) compare the private and social payoffs of their resource use, and that 2) people compare their own behavior with that of others at the time of making a decision on how to employ their resources, as accurate. It appears not only that both rules are important in individuals' decisions about participation in the varayoq system in Ccachín, but that recognition of these propensities is collectively accepted and institutionalized. This, along with universality and simple rules of equity, assures that people are willing to participate in the system at all.

Bases of Cooperation

Early explanations of cargo systems in Latin America were based on hypothesized group-level functions. As articulated by Wolf,

Much has been written since then pointing out problems with the group-level benefits posited by such analyses (usually "community integration," but also sometimes the benefits of "exploitation" to the exploiters) and the lack of a plausible feedback mechanism that takes into account the desires and interests of the participants. I have reviewed and critiqued this literature elsewhere (Froemming 1986).

What warrants emphasizing here is that despite the considerable material and social costs that go into cargo service in Ccachín, and despite a rotation of cargos that on the face of it might suggest egalitarianism values and the systematic redistribution of wealth, the cargo system does not have any significant leveling effect on households in the intermediate or long term. Some households participate more actively in the system than others, the ones that do tend to have the economic and social resources to do so, and their economic status is not reduced in the process. While not all well-off families actively participate in the system, those that do continue to have high economic status.

A second point worth emphasizing is that while cargo-holders produce various collective goods that are accessible to all community members, they also redistribute many private goods, with priority ranking of those who receive and how much they are given. Kin and compadres not only contribute materially to the success of a particular household's cargo, they are also among the principle beneficiaries, especially in the case of festival sponsorship. Despite the public nature of the ceremony, cargo-holders are able to pick and choose to a considerable extent among the recipients of their generosity. In this sense, such festivals have a bit in common with wedding celebrations in the village -- access is usually open to the community, and there is competition to provide the biggest and best -- but they also have many of the trappings of a private party. In fact, as events unfold, they usually alternate between the use of public and private spaces.

In putting together an instrumental alternative to functionalist explanations of Latin American cargo systems, and in evaluating the various instrumental motivations that have been proposed in the last forty years, we need to come up with a model that both accounts for why it is in the interests of some people to seek out and invest in public displays of generosity in this way, and why it is in the interests of others to pressure those that are reluctant to do so.

Given the centrality of kin and compadrazgo networks to cargo celebration, conditional cooperation in reciprocal exchange appears to play an important role in sustaining the system. As Montes de Castillo (1989) suggests, the taking on of cargos not only activates existing exchange networks, it builds and reinforces them for future exchanges. Reciprocity cannot account, however, for all features of the cargo system, as important collective goods are produced, and in festival sponsorship a lot of generosity is extended to all comers, whether or not they have a relationship with the host. Given these limits to a reciprocity-based account, it is tempting to posit as an alternative that sponsors cooperate and are generous to gain prestige, but the possibility for beneficiaries to free-ride by receiving the benefits without paying the costs of granting prestige creates problems for prestige-based explanations exactly in such situations where there is no ongoing relationship.

In many cases of cargo sponsorship there are social pressures to participate, suggesting that reference to the mechanism of tolerated theft may have some explanatory utility. Tolerated theft (Blurton Jones 1984, 1987) or demand sharing (Peterson 1993) allows us to reconsider the old idea of the cargo system as a leveling mechanism in a new light, this time with the egalitarian consequence seen as a byproduct of individual-level processes rather than as a group-benefit that can be functionally explained. Tolerated theft, however, does not account for the many instances where cargo-holders seek out their cargos rather than participate out of coercion, and in any case, as I have indicated, we need to be cautious not to exaggerate its leveling effect.

Montes de Castillo (1989) suggests that above all, the civil-religious cargo system is a ritual strategy of power. As he puts it, "The simple fact of exercising the cargo is a way to communicate to the community that one is in possession of sufficient economic and social resources to invest in fiestas (1989:330). I suspect that he is on to something here, and that his observation about cargos signaling social power can be further developed by linking it to the newly emerging theories of conspicuous consumption, costly signaling, and status reinforcement behavior in evolutionary ecology to give it broader theoretical power (see Boone 1998; Smith and Bliege Bird In Press). In explicating the theory, Boone (1998) in fact makes specific reference to recurrent rituals in agricultural communities, suggesting that in large groups an individual's resource-holding power and capacity to dispense benefits must be advertised to be effective, and that since the social fortunes of individuals and households in agricultural communities may fluctuate from year to year, it is quite common to schedule festivals where they are called upon to display their current condition.

Following this lead further is beyond my scope here. Suffice it to say that it provides the basis for plausibly arguing that unconditional generosity and collective goods provisioning can be a means by which individuals compete for status, and that it does so without entailing either reciprocal exchange or self-sacrifice for the good of the group. Ultimately, I suspect that cooperation in the civil-religious hierarchy is multicausal, and that several of the forces mentioned above are at play.

Notes

1. I never saw "alguacil" written, so my use of the term is tentative here. The common pronunciation of the term I heard in the village was alvacer ("al-va-cer" or "al-wa-sir"), as also reported by Knox-Seith (1995). The word appears to be of Spanish origin, but there are no contemporary equivalents in the Spanish language, and I know of no other references to alvacer in the Andean literature. Notably, however, the Spanish term alguacil originally comes from the archaic al-wazir ('the visier') which is quite similar to the pronunciation of alguacil given by contemporary Quechua speakers.

The term alguacil has long been applied in both Spain and the Americas to certain officials of the town council charged with executing the acts and orders of governors, mayors, and justices. Skar (1982:221) notes that in Matapuquio (Apurímac), the traditional names alcalde, campo, regidor, and alguacil have been changed to teniente gobernador, varayoq mayor, varayoq menor, and varayoq alguacil, and Allen (1988) reports that in Sonqo (Paucartambo, Cusco), the parallel positions are alcalde, segundo, regidor mayor, and regidor alguacil. The titles given the various roles in the varayoq hierarchy have been affected by centuries of national legislation and local tradition. The alguacil is an assistant to the head mayor, but the exact position in the hierarchy varies from community to community.

2. If Margolis is right, his approach would help explain why "there are never many Kantians . . ." as Elster (1989:133) assumes without further explanation.

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