Froemming, Steven John; 1999; Rational Choice and Collective Action in an Andean Community. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Washington, Seattle. Excerpt from Chapter 6 (pages 383-390).

Suñay in Ccachín

Two of the most important rituals that households conduct for their flocks and herds in Ccachín occur in the weeks immediately leading up to Carnival. Compadres P'unchay is a moveable feast held on the second Thursday before Ash Wednesday. A marking ceremony is conducted for the sheep, goats, llamas, and alpacas. A week later on Comadres P'unchay the cattle are similarly feted. Elaboration of these ceremonies varies from household to household and from year to year depending on the economic resources, composition, and religiosity of the families involved, but the ceremony generally includes providing salt to the animals, sprinkling them or decorating them with flowers, throwing chicha and other alcoholic beverages over the animals and the pastures, prayers to the apu ('mountain lords'), coca chewing, and ritual drinking.⁽¹⁾ In the case of the cattle, often pastured a day or more walk from the community, a family may send someone with a salt-corn mixture to give to the animals and carry out the rest of their Comadres P'unchay ceremony together at home. Elaborate uywa t'inkay ('animal marking ceremonies') are accompanied by music and dance, the burning of incense and a ritual offering "despacho"), ceremonial bundles containing enqaychu, illa, and other ritual objects, blessing of the children responsible for herding, the "casamiento" ('wedding') of pairs of young male and female animals, and the distribution of live animals to family members, compadres, or others in attendance.

Barbara and I received a young male goat as a gift from some compadres at a t'inkay ceremony during the 1990 Carnival season. The t'inkay ceremony was held in a level clearing surrounded by bushes on a hillside near the village, the general area where the family pastured their herd. Our compadres had few animals by Ccachín standards -- six sheep and nine goats -- and with the small herd, predominance of goats, and reliance on their youngest son to herd them, they pastured their animals closer to the village than most. The ceremony was simpler than others we attended. The site was swept clear of dung and debris and three rows of salt were laid out. The salt was served directly, without the typical base of toasted-and-ground corn. We threw pebbles at the family's two horses to drive them away from the salt. The eldest son brought his radio, which he played through the ceremony. Sitting together around a manta, we prepared necklaces of phallcha flowers (Gentiana scarlatina) and phuña leaves (Culcitium rufescens) for the sheep and goats. After sufficient collars were made, the remainder of the flowers were torn into bits and mixed together. A separate collar was made of scarlet ñukch'u flowers (Salvia spp.). We exchanged k'intu and chewed coca. From time to time the chewed coca wads ("hach'u") were collected with a prayer in a carrying cloth. Our compadres had not prepared chicha for the occasion, but we drank rounds of trago, occasionally flavored with the Tang we had brought as our contribution. After we were finished preparing the necklaces, our comadre drank a number of tragos in succession, naming a child and saying a prayer with each drink. Next, first year animals were caught two-by-two, and we placed the floral collars around their necks. While doing this, our compadre announced that they were going to give us a young male goat. They fit the goat with the ñukch'u collar. The gift was given without the speech and fanfare that we were accustomed to at public events and first haircuttings. After placing the collars, each of us gathered a pile of the mixed flowers and threw them over the animals. The animals scattered, and we chewed more coca and drank more trago. At the end of the ceremony, our compadre buried some oranges and the chewed coca wads on the hillside above the site.

Since we were in no position to take care of our kid goat on our own, our compadres agreed that they would keep it with their herd and watch over it. We gave their youngest son, the family's herder, a new set of clothing and some notebooks for school for his help. Nine months later, right before Barbara was scheduled to leave for the States, our compadre determined that it was time to butcher the animal and did so for us. We butchered the animal on a Saturday, a propitious day for doing so. We chewed coca leaves in preparation, and our compadre stuffed a handful of coca leaves into the goat's mouth before slitting its throat.⁽²⁾ By mutual agreement we divided up the carcass a medias ('by halves'). We took home the head, hide, and a side of meat, leaving the blood, internal organs, and the other side with our compadres.

The practice of suñay among ritual kin is customary in Ccachín, although I can't say how frequent it is. Animals are likewise given as gifts to one's children and compadres attending the t'inkay ceremony on Compadres P'unchay in Chinchero (Angel Callañaupa, personal communication). The pattern appears widespread throughout the Andes, and we are not the only anthropologists that have been so honored. Kent Flannery reports that he received a young llama through suñay while attending a marking ceremony in Toqtoqasa, Ayacucho in 1971 (Flannery et. al. 1989). Since he could not take his gift back to the States with him, Flannery likewise arranged to leave his llama with the parent herd, agreeing to repay the family for the care it would receive. Flannery apparently did not have compadrazgo relations with the sponsors of the ceremony that he attended, but he contributed seven or eight dollars worth of local supplies and a bottle of Jack Daniel's bourbon to the event, so a degree of reciprocity was involved. He reports that in a year where the family was suffering through hard times, it made the difference between their holding the ceremony or not.

Features of Suñay

The features that define suñay are the following: the practice is part of a traditional animal-decorating ceremony, a live animal is given as a gift, and anyone who assists the herd owner or contributes to the ritual offering can potentially receive an animal, whether or not they are a relative. The season in which the ceremonies occur depends on which animals are involved (llamas and alpacas, sheep and goats, cows, or horses) and on regional traditions, but they're typically held during the Carnival season and in late July-August.⁽³⁾ With the mix of New and Old World livestock and syncretism of indigenous and Spanish practices, distinctions between branding, notching ears, cutting tails, sewing ribbons into ears and tails, and fitting animals with floral necklaces has become blurred, with a corresponding interweaving of terminology and practices. Marking may be for ownership, identification, or decoration.

Suñay is associated with marking ceremonies, but it is not a defining feature of them, as for example, gifts of animals are at first haircuttings. Flannery et. al. (1989) liken marking ceremonies to "epideictic displays" that let everyone know how many animals the owner has. Although this implies that communicating such information is one of the intents or functions of the ceremonies, it could just as well be a negative or neutral byproduct. Since information on herd size alters the expectations of potential recipients about an owner's capacity to give an animal in suñay, an incentive is created for herd owners to downplay their holdings to avoid envy and unwanted pressures. The risk of theft furthers this tendency. Herd size is hard to conceal in relative terms, especially for animals pastured on communal lands, as daily herding activity allows for estimation by one's peers. However, there is considerable reluctance among villagers in Ccachín to divulge precise information about their animal holdings to outsiders and to each other, and Flannery et. al. make a similar observation about herders in Ayacucho. Although prestige display and the need to reinforce territorial claims may create counter pressures, reference to marking ceremonies as "epideictic displays," with all the connotations that the term implies, adds unnecessary baggage to the analysis.⁽⁴⁾

Flannery et. al. note that in the Ayacucho area, a ceremonial trumpet is blown at the start and end of the ceremony. They interpret this as a de facto invitation to all willing to contribute to come to the ceremony in the hope of receiving an animal through suñay. But such may be an effect without being the intent. If the custom emerged, for example, to reaffirm a herder's use rights to pasture animals in a given territory, its role in attracting additional participants would be fortuitous.⁽⁵⁾ Trumpeting does not accompany t'inkay in Ccachín. One generally knows where and when someone is conducting a t'inkay ceremony in the village by the accompanying music and dance, but unlike papa yapuy, where there is competition to secure sufficient workers, there is no open invitation to participate. T'inkay are primarily private affairs restricted to kin, compadres, and other invited guests. Most take place on the same day, further limiting the number who are able to attend.

Beyond the features that define suñay throughout the Andes, Flannery et. al. (1989) identify a number of features that are specific to the practice in Ayacucho. These are a) that selection of the animal given in suñay is left up to the recipient with no attempt by the host to protect a prime animal, b) the animal chosen is almost always a young female, c) the exchange value of the animal given is greater than the recipient's contribution to the ceremony, often by a factor of ten or more, and d) there is no expectation that the gift will ever be equaled or reciprocated.

The first three of these features are relatively easy for an outside investigator to determine by observation. The last is harder to ascertain. It may be true of the suñay ideal in Ayacucho, but it is hard to say much more about expectations of reciprocity without following specific relationships and practices over time. Flannery et. al. report that while the norm of giving in Ayacucho is such that suñay is supposed to be spontaneous and not prearranged, in practice, intermediaries often suggested the name of a needy herd owner. Judging by the ethnographic record, most suñay recipients in most communities are relatives or compadres where the expectation of generalized reciprocity holds sway. We need to know more about the relationship history and social characteristics of unrelated hosts and recipients before concluding that there are no expectations of them involved.

Explaining Suñay

Models of kin-selection and reciprocal altruism explain cooperative behavior in terms of individual self-interest. Most suñay animals are given by herders to their children, kin, and compadres, so that the majority of instances are explainable in principle in terms of one or the other of these mechanisms. The feature that makes suñay interesting for rational choice and evolutionary theory is that animals are sometimes given to widows and needy younger men without formal kinship or reciprocal ties.

Some have suggested that a heuristic for discriminating between kin and non-kin was not necessary in ancient family-level societies, and that the generosity and other acts of altruism toward nonrelatives that we see today is a vestige of a very general trait favored in small foraging groups through most of human evolution. However, the substantial variation in genetic relatedness among members of the smallest foraging groups and the human capacity and propensity to make much finer classificatory discriminations makes it unlikely that the forces of kin-selection have produced indiscriminately altruistic behavior (Frank 1988; Dawkins 1989). The kin-selection model is limited in application; genetic relatedness declines rapidly outsides the confines of the nuclear family. For most intents-and-purposes, second cousins are much like strangers where payoffs for helping behavior are concerned. The use of kinship as a metaphor and model for inclusion of nonrelatives into one's cooperative network is an impressive feature of social relations in the Andes, and helps express social expectations. Compadrazgo, in particular, is marked by the use of familial terms to expand and consolidate reciprocal relations between households. Kinship distinctions are maintained, however, and these networks are not indiscriminate.

Reciprocity can explain cooperation among unrelated individuals, whether or not such reciprocity is framed in terms of kinship. In large groups with repeated interactions, voluntary cooperation can arise as people act benevolently toward each other with the expectation of being recognized and rewarded in turn in the future. Indeed, as long as a few key requisites are fulfilled -- that at least some individuals are prepared to reciprocate, that reciprocators can be discriminated from nonreciprocators, and that the "shadow of the future" is sufficiently large enough -- cooperation can emerge, thrive, and be maintained among unrelated individuals in a variety of settings under fairly nonrestrictive conditions. The potential cooperators need not be making conscious or intentional choices, they need not exchange messages or commitments, they need not trust each other, they need not take each others' welfare into consideration, the rewards of their cooperation need not be comparable, symmetric, or absolute (Axelrod 1984).

Flannery et. al. (1989) view suñay as an outgrowth of ayni, reciprocal assistance that is delayed in return, comparable in value, and symmetrical in power. Suñay, however, is not characterized by comparable exchange or symmetrical power. In return for a relatively small contribution to a ceremony's success, the recipient of a suñay gift typically receives a young animal of considerably greater value, without expectation that it will be equaled or reciprocated in the future. Quechua has a term for noncomparable asymmetrical reciprocal relations -- mink'a -- which refers to festive labor where the host provides food, drink, music, and other goods and services in return for help, without any obligation to directly reciprocate the labor recruited. Sometimes, the host is expected to attend the mink'a of others in the group, so an indirect form of balanced reciprocity takes place, and the same could be the case with suñay, with receivers becoming givers when they are in the position to do so. Alexander (1988) proposes that human cooperation may be uniquely supported by complex chains of indirect reciprocity, made possible by our sophisticated cognitive capacities. Boyd and Richerson (1988) have established, however, that beyond relatively small groups of six-ten individuals, indirect reciprocity is much harder to get started in a population than pairwise reciprocity.

Both ayni and mink'a were important pre-Hispanic Andean institutions. Among herders, ayllu members would assist each other in managing the communal herds ("ayni"), and people that helped the kuraka ('local leader', 'chief', or 'headman') often were paid in animals ("mink'a"). Destitute individuals sometimes received animals from the kuraka's herd as well. Whether suñay was a pre-Hispanic practice or not is unknown, but it seems likely, given the Quechua rather than Spanish etymology of the term. Flannery et. al. (1989) suggest that it may have been practiced among the wakchallama ('commoners', literally, 'llama poor'), but they emphasize that given the managerial structure of the Inca state, the practice was largely unnecessary. With central organization, the pre-Hispanic herding system was much less vulnerable to sex-ratio imbalances and the demographic collapse of local herds, and there were alternative sources for new breeding stock. Whether of pre-Hispanic or post-Hispanic origin, suñay could have first emerged as a variant of ayni, mink'a, or the alms-giving of kuraka.

Assuming that this is the case, why suñay became more generalized in the post-Conquest period, and why reciprocal practices among relatives and ayllu members came to include unreciprocated gifts must still be explained. The answer Flannery et al. (1989) propose revolves around the effects of long run ecological processes on cultural transmission. The long term group benefit they identify is not in the immediate interests of suñay givers, nor is it recognized by the herders themselves. Their explanation is functionalist and grounded in the dual inheritance models of Boyd and Richerson (1985). I will explore it here at some length, as it helps draw out the distinctions and relationships between rational, cultural, and functional explanation.

Notes

1. Good descriptions of the Carnival fertility rituals in the Cusco area are provided by Flores Ochoa (1977) and Lira (1985:121-126). However, in focusing on the ideal, Andean ethnographers often misrepresent the range of individual and family approaches to rituals. I was struck by differences in how people carried out rituals in Ccachín. Ritual activity ranged from casual to meticulous and austere to extravagant in everything from prestations of coca leaves to the sponsoring of community festivals. While this applies to the t'inkay for the herds as well, the attention and care put into these ceremonies by each household was generally high. This can probably be attributed to the importance of livestock for agropastoralists' well-being.

2. Andeans are not the only ones who make such offerings to an animal at the time of butchering. Nelson (1983:162), for example, reports that when butchering a wolf, the Koyukon Athapaskans of Alaska put a piece of dried fish in the animals mouth "to send it home to its father."

3. There are three times when such ceremonies take place in Ccachín: during the second week before Carnival for the sheep, goats, llama, and alpaca, during the week preceding Carnival for the cows, and around the Feast of St. James the Greater (July 25th) for the horses (see Appendix 4). Timing need not be exact as long as the ceremony is held on a propitious day (Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday), so there is some variation around these dates. The owners of the largest cow herds brand their animals in August, and some of the features of the pre-lenten celebration for the cows may be put off until this time. Decoration of the llama and alpaca herds likewise occurs in August in many areas of the Andes, especially among puna dwellers.

4. "Epideictic" literally means "meant for display," and as long as what is meant is unspecified, the term is innocuous. I have no problem with Flannery et. al.'s use of the term "epideictic" if it is offered with the purely descriptive goal of coming up with a term for synchronized communal displays, but in ethology the term has come to be associated with adaptive explanation at the population level, and because of this, I would caution care in its use here. Wynne-Edwards, who coined the term, regarded epideictic displays as "especially evolved to provide the necessary feedback when the population is about to be restored, or may need to be shifted, either as a seasonal routine or as an emergency measure" (1962:16). Essentially, Wynne-Edwards proposed that territoriality was a population control mechanism, with epideictic displays serving the thermostatic function of regulating the density of animal populations by indicating the point where individual reproductive restraint becomes necessary for the well-being of the group. This has become so linked with the phenomenon that it identifies that is often referred to as the "epideictic function" of such displays (Lack 1966:311, in a critical review). In applying the concept to human populations, Wynne-Edwards noted that synchronized or collective annual ritual ceremonies are widespread, and "gatherings like these appear to be the only possible source of what knowledge exists regarding changes in numbers in the population, and to be the basis, therefore, on which tribal customs relating to sexual abstinence, infanticide, and other forms of birth control are built up, reinforced or relaxed" (1962:219-220).

Flannery et. al. pick up on the information value of Andean marking ceremonies -- a particular kind of annual gathering -- and rather than following Wynne-Edwards on focusing on the dispersion and population-regulating effects of such displays, reorient the concept toward comparison of the endowments of participants and consequent redistributive effects. Contra Wynne-Edwards, Maynard Smith (1971) has argued that territorial behavior capable of adjusting the population to the available food supply can evolve by selection acting at the individual rather than group level, and the same can be said for the collective displays described by Flannery et. al. as well. While Flannery et. al.'s likening of animal decorating ceremonies to epideictic displays is provocative and a potentially productive line of inquiry, it's unfortunate that they have not sorted though the functionalist baggage embedded in their usage here.

5. Merlino and Rabey maintain just such an argument in attempting to explain why herders in Jujuy, Argentina (who practice a kind of transhumance) retrieve their animals from high pastures to conduct their August fertility rituals at a lower level, despite the fact that the lowland pastures have been exhausted. As they put it,

Whether or not this idea explains herd movements associated with Juyuy animal marking ceremonies, the hypothesis can be extended in principle to ceremonial trumpeting in Ayacucho as well.

References Cited

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