Froemming, Steven John; 1999; Rational Choice and Collective Action in an Andean Community. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Washington, Seattle. Excerpt from Chapter 5 (pages 349-360).

A House Fire

A House Fire

A house burned down while I was in Ccachín. The assumption of the victims was that it was a case of theft concealed by arson. I'm intimately familiar with what happened because I lived with the victims and the house burned during my watch. The case offers the opportunity here to follow from theft to thatch, the latter being as much a part of the cultural logic Gose sees at play as the former. The case also serves to emphasize that it is hard to talk about private appropriation in Ccachín without reference to households and houses. The house is both physically and psychologically central, and to trespass on one domain is to trespass against the other.

The exact cause of the house fire is shrouded in mystery. It could have been an accident, with blame assigned elsewhere for responsibility that no one in the household was willing to admit, a case of some neighbor's envy exceeding normal bounds, or an act of vengeance. The report prepared by community officials simply says that the fire started under suspicious circumstances.⁽¹⁾

After a brief trip to the States in January 1991, I returned to Ccachín two days before Día de Comadres, the fertility ritual for the cattle held on the Thursday before Carnival. I found my host family scattered over the countryside. My hosts were in route to their cattle pasture two days distant. One of their daughters was staying in a cabin on the loma, watching her parent's alpaca and sheep along with her own. Her husband had gone to the cattle pastures to give ground corn and salt to the family herd and perform the appropriate Comadre rituals. One of the younger daughters stayed home, and spent the day weaving. She was glad that I had arrived, because she could then spend the night looking after her sister's house, otherwise in the care of her ten-year-old nephew. Everyone in Ccachín locks their doors when they go out, but no one likes to leave their house unattended at night. People are concerned that thieves will enter their house and gardens while they are away. During dinner, the young woman asked me to keep an eye on the house, so she could do the same for her sister. I agreed.

After eating, I went out visiting and my host cleaned up the dishes, smothered the fire, and went to her sister's house. I was home and in bed within an hour. A little before midnight I was awakened by a soft but persistent crackle. I assumed that mice were rustling around in my papers or a plastic bag as they often did and paid little heed, until I noticed a glow through the cracks around my door. Roused now by the pound of my heart, I sifted through the possibilities. "Is there a full moon?" "No, we're nearing the waning quarter." The light flickered. "Something's burning." I recalled the time my hosts thought that a bruja ('witch') had buried something in a hole outside of my door, and my mind flashed to sorcery. "But who? And why?" Then I hit upon my worst fear: "the tiruku ('terrorists') have arrived and were flushing me out." Shakily, but with few other options, I went to the door and peered through a crack. The kitchen, fifty meters away in a separate building, was engulfed in flame. On my watch! My heart sank.⁽²⁾

I first checked to see that no one was in the burning building. The door appeared locked. I ran to a nearby house to wake a neighbor, but no one appeared to be home. I then ran to another house and awoke a startled comadre. My comadre spread the alarm while I went off to summon the daughter of my hosts. There is no volunteer fire department in the village, but neighbors responded with a bucket brigade.⁽³⁾ After a week of clear weather in the heart of the rainy season, the heat was intense. The flames rapidly consumed the thatch. We hopelessly waited for the ceiling to collapse so that we could water down the remains. Everything within was lost except for eight guinea pig that found refuge below the smoldering woodpile. After three hours of exhausting effort, the fire was put out, it began to rain, and people returned to their homes.

At sunrise, people gathered to recall and retell the events of the night, and speculate on how it happened. A messenger was sent to notify my hosts. A judge and the alcalde de menores ('mayor of the municipality') arrived to write the denuncio, a registered statement of how the fire was discovered, who helped put it out, and what damage was done. The teniente gobernador ('lieutenant governor') prepared a separate deposition describing the dimensions and physical structure of the house. The daughter of my hosts signed for the family, and a few others and I signed as witnesses. Much was made of the fact that the nearest neighbor never appeared during the fire, though I and others had tried to awake him. The fellow is a baptism compadre of my host family -- my hosts are the padrinos of his daughter -- but he was the prime suspect in the mind of the victims and his absence during the night was criticized by the rest. After the community officials finished their work, the fellow invited me to his home for breakfast. He told me that he had attended a party earlier in the evening, and that he was so tired he never heard the knocks on his door or the people calling his name. He described it as being "as if a sorcerer had splashed magical water" in his eyes to make him sleepy.

During the course of the following year, my host family sought the aid of various diviners to identity the arsonist. The divinations confirmed their suspicions. En route to the community to inspect the damage, my hosts consulted a coca reader who told them that the arsonist would be the first person to visit them on their return. That person turned out in fact to be the sleepy compadre-neighbor. A second consultation suggested that a man and a woman, both neighbors of the family, were the culprits. The bruja in Yanawara (Urubamba), a tarot card reader, confirmed that two people were involved, and identified the man as the suspected compadre and the woman as the "envious" wife of one of my host's cousins. The bruja said that the two stole some textiles and set fire to the house while drunk, later selling the textiles in Cusco. Without tangible evidence, there was no legal recourse, but existing tensions between the families were exacerbated by the divinations, and relations were severed.

A few days after my hosts returned from their cattle lands, a village judge, the alcalde de menores, and a member of the consejo ('municipal council') met with them to prepare a denuncio of the fire damage for the subprefect in Calca. The total loss, excluding the costs of rebuilding, was set at $1520. I determined from those in attendance that reconstruction would require at least ninety to a hundred days of labor and $80 in direct costs. Most homes in Ccachín are one room buildings, and while the losses above are indicative of what one would find in a typical kitchen area, my family was fortunate that the bulk of their valuables -- the harvest and their beds and clothing, sewing machine, tools, documents, and cash savings -- were stored in the larger, tin-roofed structure where we all slept below. While my hosts were among the wealthiest in the village, most families would have lost more had they been so victimized. The family sold two bulls to cover the costs of rebuilding.

All of the fires that the comuneros described to me were caused by human error or malfeasance. Most villagers found it inconceivable that someone in the village would deliberately burn down another's house. It had never happened before. But people accepted that it was the most likely explanation in this case. The closest association that people could make was with a house fire in the mid-1980s at Mawkáw, a small village in the puna above Lares on the route to Calca. There, villagers decided to eliminate a habitual village thief by burning down his house. While the thief and his family were asleep, the perpetrators locked the door from the outside and set the roof afire. The wife and a child of the thief escaped through a window, but they were caught, beaten, and thrown back. The entire family died in the blaze. The arsonists were imprisoned in Calca, and were still in jail while I was in Ccachín.

A few months after the my host family's house fire, MRTA (Movimiento Revolucionario "Tupaq Amaru") guerrillas came to Ccachín and offered to resolve problems in the community. The house fire was discussed at the assemblies called by the guerrillas, but no suspects were named at the meetings. Unwilling to finger anyone in public, my hosts privately expressed the hope that the tiruku ('terrorists') would identify the arsonists and kill them.

House Rethatching

Given the urgency of rebuilding, the wasichakuy ('house thatching´) of my host family took place out of season -- in early March -- two months after the fire that destroyed their kitchen. Wasichakuy are more commonly held from June to September, when the weather is drier and people have more time to devote to construction work.⁽⁴⁾ Twenty-five men and eight women participated in the wasichakuy of my host family, the men fetching the construction materials and doing the building, the women preparing the food. My understanding from the sponsor was that some of the labor was in return for previous favors or would be reciprocated, but whether this represented ayni in the strict sense, with labor service expected at future wasichakuy of others in kind, or a shorter-term and more flexible notion of returning the favor, I am not clear.⁽⁵⁾ Wealthy in cattle but short on male labor to offer, my host family often substituted cow hooves -- a scarce delicacy and important food at certain agricultural ayni -- for repayment of labor. Cow hooves were served at the wasichakuy meal, both highlighting the importance of the consumptive feast in recruiting labor at such events, and displaying the resources available to the sponsor. In the Andes, wasichakuy may be sponsored using a variety of labor recruitment strategies, including mink'a, ayni, yanapay, and the activation of more open-ended pressures and notions of social obligation. Although Gose attributes some of this flexibility to the transitional position of wasichakuy between periods of private appropriation and collective production, I think it more likely has to do with the infrequent character of wasichakuy itself. From the standpoint of individual households, wasichakuy is neither a unique event nor a repetitive task. Long-term calculations of labor debts over periods of ten years and more are required for a system of reciprocation in kind, and while such strict accounting apparently takes place in some areas (Mayer 1974:74), any tendency people have toward discounting future returns would push preference toward shorter-term exchange.

As with other collective work situations in the Andes, there is an important ceremonial element to wasichakuy. Many of the festive and ritual features common in wasichakuy are found in agricultural rituals as well, particularly papa yapuy ('potato plowing'). The cows hooves mentioned above are a feature of papa yayuy meals, and the nonseasonal foods on the menu -- guinea pig, lamb, egg and corn tortillas -- are also the same. The spatial arrangements, gender divisions, and organizational roles are nearly identical.

The most solemn moments at the wasichakuy of my host family were the placing of crosses on the roof and the ch'allay of the tools. As the last straw was being placed on the roof, one of the oldest participants made three wood crosses and decorated them with flowers. He made two crosses for the roof, and a third for the wall niche inside of the house. The bases of the crosses for the roof were set in ceramic jugs filled with chicha and taken to the peak by two young men. There, they removed the crosses from the jugs and planted them on the peak, with careful guidance by the sponsor from the ground below. The two men then knelt and said a prayer.⁽⁶⁾

As in papa yapuy, the tools used in wasichakuy receive special ritual treatment. After the crosses had been placed, all of the participants in the wasichakuy of my host family seated themselves around the mesa ('table') composed of mantas spread out upon the ground, with the lluku ('net') used for transporting the straw placed upon it. The men sat in a U-shape around the mesa, the women sat huddled together downslope of them, and the chicha from the jugs used for the crosses was served one-by one. Each first poured a bit of chicha on the lluku, or flicked some with their fingers toward the new house. Upon drinking, each person said a prayer. Further rounds of chicha, trago, and coca ensued. After a collective prayer, the two servers, carrying two lluku each, presented them to each of the participants. Both sets of lluku were first presented to the female head of household. She kissed them -- three times each -- and everyone else followed suit. The lluku were then put away and a final prayer was said. With this, the exterior, public stage of the wasichakuy concluded. A scoop of glowing embers was brought up from the makeshift hearth that had been used for cooking the last two months, and they were placed in the corner of the new kitchen where the old hearth had been (a new one had yet to be constructed). The party continued -- a dinner, drinking, music, joking, and conversation -- with only the immediate family and their more intimate friends and relatives present.⁽⁷⁾

I attended various wasichakuy during my time in Ccachín, including one where sheet-metal was used in place of thatch, and the organization, sequence of activities, and ritual aspects were much the same in each. Gose (1991) has written extensively about the symbolic aspects of house rethatching, and he provides a wealth of comparative detail. It's not my purpose to add more here. It's important to note, however, that when it comes to interpreting the symbolic value of the features exhibited in wasichakuy, Gose relates them to the seasonal contradictions between collective production and private appropriation already described. From his perspective,

Thus,

There would be little reason to question this interpretation if it were based on associations that Andeans themselves make, but it is not. Everything hinges on the validity of the assumption that a seasonal contradiction between collective production and private appropriation exists at some level of Andean thought. I have questioned that assumption in my discussion of theft, and the same reservations hold true here. There is a difference, however. In the case of theft, it's unclear whether Gose offers the contradiction to explain the existence of theft, the timing of theft, or the way theft is carried out. The ambiguity leaves room to conclude that it is all three. In the case of house rethatching, he takes the practical need of periodic rethatching of roofs for granted, and uses the contradiction to explain the coherence and meaning of certain features associated with the event (the implication being that expressive intent explains why some features are present and others are not). Whether he takes the seasonal morality of property rights to explain the timing of wasichakuy, the timing to explain the expressive features, or both is unclear. There are a host of ecological, economic, and social reasons why house rethatchings are normally scheduled during the dry season, but they are not limited to late August and early September in Ccachín as they are in some communities. I suspect that the timing explains the presence of certain expressive features, but not necessarily in the way proposed by Gose.⁽⁸⁾

Theft and Sorcery

In the house fire recounted above, my host family went beyond conventional investigative techniques to employ diviners to determine the identity of the arsonists. They were eclectic in their choice of ritual experts, seeking the services first of traditional coca-readers, and then of a new age tarot-card reader. Taken alone, both techniques yield arbitrary results, but in practice, the feedback received from the diviners tends to be a mixture of chance, counsel, and lay criminology. As I have indicated, both brujos confirmed the suspicions of my host family, reflecting the information they were provided back with added authority. A witch or shaman attempting to collect an optimal amount of evidence on which to base a reading may do well to assume that the parties involved know the most about a case, but to do so leads to a vicious circle in which counsel and client each turn to the other for expert witness.⁽⁹⁾ In the introduction to Part II I noted that among the requirements of rational belief formation, a person must collect an optimal amount of evidence, neither too much nor too little. In this case, it's not so much the amount of information at issue, but the kind.

As noted by Stein (1961), the identity of most thieves is never discovered through conventional investigative techniques (of the cases that I list [elsewhere in this chapter], for example, only 33% had a firm suspect, and of those, fewer than half received any kind of sanction). Given this, Andean peasants frequently rely on such magical and supernatural devices as divination, prayer and offerings, oaths, and sorcery in their search for justice. As Bolton (1974) notes, theft and sorcery are sequentially-linked behaviors, with sorcery serving as an appropriate response to theft under certain conditions. The campesinos are likely to use physical force when a thief is caught red-handed. They rely on strategy (appeals to authorities, attempts to expose or entrap the thief) when detection is less immediate and the identity of the offender is less clear. They resort to supernatural detection and sanction when it appears that neither physical skill nor strategy have a high probability of satisfying their desire for justice. The greater the uncertainty about who the culprits are, the greater the likelihood that techniques based on chance will be used to reveal their identity and punish them.

In the last chapter, I cited an observation by Stein (1981:50) that healthcare is a domain where people in the Andes prefer hope to despair and some action to none in the face of uncertainty. The same can be said of the way that they cope with theft and other varieties of malfeasance. It may well be that the type of heuristics employed in dealing with uncertainty in these two domains are much the same, so that a detailed analysis of how people cope with wrongdoing would find "fixed strategies" (whereby certain kinds of assaults mandate a unique and particularly well-defined response; for example, sorcery), "ordered sequences" (as in the pattern discussed above, where alternatives are sought when higher-ordered options fail or are unavailable), "delegation" of detection and sanctioning to others (older family members, community officials, diviners and sorcerers), and "simultaneous use" (adopting several measures at the same time in the hope that one of them will bear fruit), following Mathews (1982), as in Chapter 4. Here, as in medical decision making, people appear to rely on rules of thumb rather than on directly assessing the costs and probabilities of success, though choice among these rules of thumb may be roughly ordered by cost and effectiveness.⁽¹⁰⁾

Like disease, victimization by thieves and thugs causes pain. Bolton emphasizes that sorcery rituals provide catharsis for victims, reducing their anxieties and frustrations, and that perhaps as associated social benefit, they reduce interpersonal tensions. The existence and strength of any social benefits is unclear to me, as the remedy for one party's anxieties and frustrations in a dispute may exacerbate a second party's anxieties and frustrations, and the idea that social tensions are reduced does not necessarily follow from the reduction of one side's individual ones (it may just as well further an indefinite action-reaction-action chain). The benefit to individuals is sufficient in itself to explain both the practice and the institution of sorcery. To this end, as with supernatural healing, diviners and sorcerers both address the naturalistic causes and treat the social and psychological conditions of their clients.

I suggested in Chapter 4 that coca-reading and other randomizing processes, while failing to contribute to their ostensible purpose of identifying natural causes, help ritual experts legitimatize the decisions delegated to them with a shared supernatural idiom. To this extent, I'm in agreement with Vroonhoven when he says that "action characterized as magic action is directed towards the realization of a metaobjective that does not coincide with the action itself" (1990:12). But this can't be the whole story, as it does not explain why people put their faith in such randomizing processes in the first place. Making a decision with the flip of a coin may be legitimatized in some instances by fairness or urgency, but neither of these are a factor when random processes are used to detect and sanction (I allow that the latter may enter in, however, to the extent that even misdirected sanctions can deter). The answer seems to be, as is usually the case with faith, that the structure of the belief makes it hard to dismiss through empirical information-gathering processes. The probability of sorcery having a successful outcome is high because of the vague and general nature in which it tends to list potential suspects and specify the time period in which justice will take effect (Bolton 1974:214). In terms of detection, for example, Stein (1961:214) cites the case of a mass said to admonish an unknown thief, after which, 'they [the villagers] knew who was the thief because he was the one who died after mass." In the case of sanctions, the high rates of misfortune, morbidity, and mortality in Andean villages increase the odds that cosmic justice will be done.

In reviewing the steps taken by my host family to respond to and cope with their house fire, it appears that physical force against the arsonists was ruled out by the absence of the victims from the community at the time of the event, and by the corresponding failure to identify and catch the arsonists in the act. Discovering the theft and arson as a fait accompli, they resorted to strategy, documenting their losses with community and regional officials with an inventory of their losses, and making a formal denuncio against the yet-to-be-determined aggressors. Intent on discovering the identity of the arsonists, they talked to everyone in the community that they could think of, and kept an ear out for every clue, hoping that someone would be caught red-handed with the missing textiles, or that witnesses would be forthcoming. They heard rumors of suspicious unravelings and sales of textiles, and of confessions made by people when drunk, but these were accepted or dismissed by the family to the extent that they confirmed already-formed suspicions (as justification for one dismissal, I was told that a certain person was not malicious enough to do it, and that "you can't trust what people say when drunk").

As time went on, without a modicum of evidence against the people who were suspect, it became increasingly unlikely that my host family would be able to obtain justice through official channels. They raised the issue at the assemblies called by MRTA when they came through the village, but without evidence, the only relief they could obtain was by expressing their pain. Over the course of a year, they employed the services of four coca-readers from four separate communities to determine the identity of the arsonists. Their consultation with the bruja of Yanawara took place a full ten months after the house fire at a time when other leads had gone cold. They cut off relations with the prime suspects to the extent that this was possible, but as far as I am aware, they did not employ any sorcerers in retribution (their appeals for supernatural justice where channeled through the saints). It's worth noting that one of the principal suspects suffered the loss of their herd of sheep in a grass fire a few months later, and with it, a certain sense of divine justice was thought to be achieved.

Without formal resolution though either official or unofficial channels, the frustrations were dampened but not extinguished, a year later, when I left the village. Besides doing most everything within their means to detect and sanction the perpetrators, its important to mention the steps taken to provide supernatural protection of the reconstructed building: the placement of a wood cross on the ridge,⁽¹¹⁾ the reading of the "prayer for houses" from San Ciprián in a ritual blessing conducted by a brujo, and a blessing of the house by a Catholic priest.

Notes

1. There were two house fires in Ccachín while I was doing fieldwork, but people reported that such fires were extremely rare. Besides the one reported on here, the other started from the sparks of a trash fire set by a child. People recalled that twenty years earlier a house burned when a girl accidently set fire to the roof with her mechero ('kerosene lamp') when she went to the attic for food. Most houses in Ccachín are thatched, but there are no chimneys. Firewood is placed on top of the hearth to dry at night and there is a slight chance that a spark could ignite it, as embers are insulated with ashes so that they can be revived in the morning, but no one could recall a case where a spark from a hearth had set a house on fire. However, it occasionally happens in the small straw huts that people build in the potato fields during harvest. Gade (1983) notes that the combination of thatched roofs and intense lightning storms in higher mountain areas is a leading cause of house fires in rural areas of the Andes. No one recalled an instance of fire resulting from lightning in Ccachín. Scattered huts on open hillsides are more susceptible to lightning strikes than low buildings clustered together, and there is a good possibility that destruction of outlying herding cabins is underreported.

2. Villagers suspect a few of their own to be brujas. On occasion, someone will allege that a rival has contracted the services of a sorcerer to do them harm. Such accusations are more frequent in times of conflict, and the tension carries over to people's dreams. One woman told me that upon dreaming that a sorcerer had buried something in her house, she awoke the next morning to find the suspected objects: a small bundle containing a black thread, a cross of thorns wrapped in black thread, and animal teeth, the latter associated with family quarrels. Another woman reported that a male sorcerer came to visit under the pretext of selling coca, and sat in the doorway "like a woman" ("warmihina"), waiting for the opportunity to hide a bundle under the doorsill. Witchcraft was suspected because the woman began to grow weak, and her mother cured her with a special tea and holy water. Among the accepted cures for witchcraft are the sprinkling of blessed water, the burning of the witchcraft items with kerosene, and the reading of San Ciprián, a pseudoChristian book of witchcraft liturgy. Each of the cures is intended to return the curse to the person who has contracted it. The second woman above reported that this was what happened in her case, as the woman who contracted the witch took sick a day later and almost died of vomiting. Ever fearful of contagious magic, when people comb their hair they throw it into the hearth to keep it from falling into the hands of "envious neighbors" who might do them harm, and many weavings, especially those worn by community officials on ritual occasions, bear a bit of lloq'e ('left-handed, counter-clockwise, S-spun yarn') as protection against witchcraft and other hazards.

3. While the volunteer fire department is part of small town lore in the U.S., to understand the situation in Ccachín, we need think back to a time in our own history when firefighting lacked formal organization. In the early 17th century, Boston became the first town to pass regulations against the use of thatched roofs and wood chimneys, and New York followed suit with the appointment of fire wardens to inspect homes for compliance, and the appointment of night patrols. Our modern fire departments developed out of the mutual fire societies and private firefighting clubs first established among the colonists in North America (McChesney 1986).

4. Gose (1991:48) finds a more truncated period for wasichakuy in his research community of Huaquirca -- from the end of August to mid-September. This period fits well with his image of house thatching as intersected by the opposing seasonal moralities of private appropriation and collective production. In contrast, I have recorded wasichakuy as taking place in Ccachín in several months.

5. In terms of the composition of the group, five men were relatives, one was a compadre, one was a godchild, one was a renter, two were neighbors (exclusive of the neighbors counted as relatives), five were friends of the family (most of whom were involved in ongoing ayni exchanges with the family), and ten were, as far as I am aware, none of the above. Three of the women were members of the immediate family, one was a more distant relative, one was a comadre, and the relationship of the two oldest women to the family is unknown.

6. There are differences between communities in who prepares the cross for the roof, and in the symbolic understandings about the cross that are ritually highlighted and expressed. The old man who prepared the crosses at this wasichakuy appears to have taken on the task because of his elderly status (the elders typically are the ones who lead the rest in prayer and are considered to have the greatest religious expertise), and because it was the best way for him to be useful, most other tasks requiring a great degree of physical agility. He led the other prayers as well. Gose (1991) reports that in Huaquirca, a "son-in-law" -- not necessarily an actual son-in-law of the sponsor but someone who has been designated as such after finding a bundle of goods hidden in the field where the straw is cut -- is the one who makes the crosses for the roof. In some areas, the crosses are made by compadres. Gose attributes both of these assignments to the role of the cross as a mitigating force against incest. As far as I am aware, none of these features or symbolic associations are part of thatching parties in Ccachín.

7. Gose (1991) reports that in Huaquirca, a mock remarriage of each member of the sponsoring couple to someone spontaneously chosen from the opposite sex often takes place at this time, but such was not the case here. The banter was not even filled with sexual innuendo as is common at vigils, wakes and other late night gatherings, but I suspect that this was because of the particularly upright character of the hosts rather than because of any cultural rule.

8. Gose (1991), for example, makes much of the fact that during the drinking session that follows wasichakuy, a few of the men present may make a figure of a fox out of the remaining hay and straw rope. He concludes that the fox carries a heavy symbolic load in this context. As a creature of gluttony it "transfers these qualities to the roof, as a repository of the privately appropriate harvest, and . . . the two share a common opposition to the productive order" (1991:54). As a symbol of the origin of agriculture, the presence of the fox in rethatching rites reenacts the origin of the crops on an annual bases. "In both cases, gluttonous concentration and consumption of the crops must give way to a productive dispersal marked by death" (1991:55). As a symbol of the "parent-in-law" or sponsors of the thatching, it represents "those unruly and exploitative proprietor/consumers who also resist unto death their incorporation into the productive order" (1991:55). Provocative as these interpretations are, they are totally dependent on the opposition between collective production and private accumulation already described. As a simple matter of timing, all I wish to add is that the season for house rethatching coincides with the mating season of the fox.

9. It's probable that my presence influenced my host family here, as the female head made the trip to Yanawara to visit the tarot-card reader after hearing of my experiences with the same. Among the highlights of my reading, I was told that I would move to Spain, that I would write a book, that I needed to guard against theft, and that I would have trouble with my lower back. When I returned to Ccachín, my hosts took particular interest in the latter (perhaps because it was the one thing that they felt that they could help me with), and immediately set about preparing herbal teas to treat the problem, which they attributed to my heavy pack. A week after my trip to Yanawara, my host made a special trip to visit the bruja there. Besides fingering the two neighbors that she already suspected as the true arsonists, the bruja told her that they had set the house afire while drunk, that the shawls that they stole in the process had been sold, that they destroyed the unfinished poncho that they stole, that her son had fallen into bad company with friends who were not good for him, that he had spent the money missing from the sale of the family's cattle on a school field trip, and that steps needed to be taken to improve the health of the rest of the family's cattle.

10. Among the observations made by Bolton is that as uncertainty increases, so does the severity of the punishment:

Bolton speculates that the reason may be that only a dramatic punishment such as death can reduce the uncertainty felt by the aggrieved in these cases. Despite the conformance of this theory with the literature on the rationality of deterrence (for example, Becker 1976), I suspect that the actual reason has more to do with the constraints of social life in contrast to the dream and spirit world. The desire to inflict harm may well be the same in both instances, but the consequences of doing so vary dramatically. In the latter, in fact, uncertainty provides cover, allowing those who seek retribution with the assistance of the sorcerer to themselves avoid detection.

11. Gade (1983) associates these crosses with protection against lightning and hail. Gose (1991) interprets them as a sign of agricultural abundance (a sign of the crops stored beneath the roof) and a means of protection against "flying heads" (because of the symbolic connections, he considers it possibly an effort to prevent incest). Here, I take it that for many if not most people in Ccachín, they signify supernatural protection of the household in a general sense.

References Cited

Becker, Gary S.
1976 The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bolton, Ralph
1974 To Kill a Thief: A Kallawaya Sorcery Session in the Lake Titicaca Region of Peru. Anthropos 69: 191-215.

Gade, Daniel W.
1983 Lightning in the Folklife and Religion of the Central Andes. Anthropos 78:770-788.

Gose, Peter
1991 House Rethatching in an Andean Annual Cycle: Practice, Meaning, and Contradiction. American Ethnologist 18(1): 39-66.

Mathews, Holly F.
1982 Illness Classification and Treatment Choice: Decision Making in the Medical Domain. Reviews in Anthropology (Spring): 171-186.

Mayer, Enrique
1974 Las Reglas del Juego en la Reciprocidad Andina. In Reciprocidad e Intercambio el los Andes Peruanos. Giorgio Alberti and Enrique Mayer, eds. Pp. 37-65. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.

Mc Chesney, Fred S.
1986 Government Prohibitions on Volunteer Fire Fighting in Nineteenth-Century America: A Property Rights Perspective. Journal of Legal Studies 15: 69-92.

Stein, William W.
1961 Hualcan: Life in the Highlands of Peru. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

1981 The Folk Illness: Entity or Nonentity? An Essay on Vicos Disease Ideology. In Health in the Andes. Pp. 50-67. Washington D.C.: American Anthropological Association.

van Vroonhoven, Laurens
1990 Cultura Andina y Ciencia. In Desarrollo Autosostenido Andino: Vía Campesina. Marco A. Villasante Llerena and Laurens van Vroonhoven, eds. Pp. 1-18. Qosqo—Cusco: Instituto de Investigación UNSAAC-NUFFIC, Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco.