Correspondences between contemporary Aymara and the uywiri-mountains (Bolivia)

Koen de Munter, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago de Chile

08/09/2021, 17:00-19:00, hybrid, in presence (Campus unibz Bessanone-Brixen, viale Ratisbona 16, room 2.21) and in zoom: LINK

Correspondences between contemporary Aymara and the uywiri-mountains (Bolivia)

In my talk I will share some experiences about how Andean families relate with uywiri-mountains, seen from the perspective of an anthropology of life, which I conceive as the study of the sympoiesis between human and other-than-human becomings and presences. I draw upon Ingold’s recent writings about correspondence and attentionality in order to study, together with the Aymara relatives, how the uywiri can be  said to raise, protect and educate people and how they are, in turn, visited by humans in intense and respectful ways.  These corresponding dynamics however are not void of contradictions and frictions, both local and global. 

Koen de Munter

Koen de Munter is a Belgian philologist, anthropologist (University of Ghent) and a painter. He works as an associate professor at the Anthropology Department of Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago de Chile. He has been carrying out fieldwork with Aymara families in Bolivia since 1995, first studying intercultural dynamics and postcolonial frictions and currently focusing on what might be learned from ecological-social practices in Aymara cosmopraxis. In 2017 he co-edited a volume on Ecology and Reciprocity with Plural Editores in La Paz.