Abstract

The chapter by Rivera Andía examines the terms by which the Cañaris Quechua-speaking people of the Northern Peruvian highlands establish their relationship with the land in a context marked by a ghostly extractivism. Leaving open the possibility of a radically distinct multiplicity of an environment with whom humans relate in social terms that exceed modern conceptions of private property, he describes local practices and conceptions relating to the production, access, and administration of land. What emerges is an entity that is less ‘natural’ and ‘indigenous’ than what is usually the focus of Andean ethnographies: the Iglisya. Clandestinely built of earth and plants by eighteenth-century Indians, this land- and child-temple does not only represent the land but constitutes it. Rivera Andía considers the material and ritual aspects of the human-land relationship that produces the Iglisya as a truly cosmopolitical device with which Cañarenses are able to contend on their own terms with the threat of extractivism.