The Iterated Mountain: Things as Signs

in Potosı́
By
Thomas A. Abercrombie
New York University

Resumen
Mineros del icónico Cerro Rico de Potosı́ (en si parte de un sitio patrimónico de
UNESCO y figura central del escudo y monedas nacionales bolivianos) participan
del capitalismo global, en su cabo extractivo y explotador. Junto a las imágenes del
Diablo dentro de los socavones y de los santos en capillas afuera de ellos, los mineros
también participan en la economı́a “espiritual” de la agencia distribuida que allı́ sostiene
a la producción y movimiento de minerales y el dinero, y que motiva un festival
folclórico importante que a su vez es candidato para el estatus patrimonial. El artı́culo
intenta usar la lingüı́stica material (esto es, Peirce) para indagar como es que las
cosas, sean gigantescas, del tamaño del cuerpo humano, o miniaturas, funcionan como
signos materiales dentro de redes de interacción socio-materiales. Ası́ el articulo ofrece
un contrapunto a ciertas estrategias teóricas que siguen, en lugar de cuestionar, los
dualismos cuerpo/mente, materia/espiritu que guı́an tanto al cristianismo colonial
como a la ciencia (incluyendo a la teorı́a antropológica y el reciente “giro ontológico”).
[Bolivia, colonialismo/estudios post-coloniales, ideologı́a semiótica, minerı́a, pueblos
indı́genas]

Abstract
Miners of the iconic “Rich Mountain” of Potosı́ (itself part of a UNESCO patrimony site
and central figure of the nation’s seal and coinage) are participants in global capitalism
at its exploitative, extractive end. Along with images of the devil at mine tunnel shrines,
and saints images from shrines outside mine entrances, miners are also participants in
the “spiritual” economy of distributed agency that locally sustains the production and
movement of minerals and money, and motivates a major folkloric festival that is itself
a candidate for patrimonial status. The article strives to use material linguistics (i.e.,
Peirce) to think through the ways that gigantic, body-sized, and miniature things work

The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 83–108. ISSN 1935-4932, online ISSN
1935-4940. 
C 2016 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1002/jlca.12184

The Iterated Mountain 83

 as material signs within webs of social and material interaction. It thus offers a coun-
terpoint to theoretical strategies that follow, rather than question, the body/mind,
matter/spirit dualism of both colonial Christianity and science (including anthropo-
logical theory and the “ontological turn”). [Andes, Bolivia, colonialism/postcolonial
studies, indigenous peoples, mining, semiotic ideology]

Focusing on the mountain and mining world of Bolivia’s Potosı́ from the
beginning of its life as a colonial silver mining center from 1545 to the present day,
the aim here is to think through the ways in which certain “things” (a mountain,
small piles of ore and pretend “ore,” images of saints and of Satan, and minia-
ture “play” commodities) have been and are iterated as signs within circuits of
communicative and productive social relations.1 My goal is to understand these
things without recourse to the “high modern” concepts of animism or fetishism.
While considering how over the centuries the mountain of Potosı́ and elements
extracted from it have been granted life by indigenous peoples, Spaniards, miners,
and “moderns,” I particularly aim to avoid the supposition of any sort of radical
ontological alterity dividing such groups. An intervention in debates about “the
ontological turn,” this essay takes ontology to mean “theories about,” or “study
of” being. Although sometimes such theories become prescriptive doxa (the right
way to understand God, or the modern way to grasp nature), that does not mean
that being (or God, or “nature”) is actually experienced in the prescribed manner,
whether by “Andeans” or by “Westerners.” Here, I argue that attributing ontolog-
ical difference in the service of doxa has been constitutive of colonial relations and
exploitative regimes, and too often, of anthropology.
Thus, this work begins with the precept that finding indigenous peoples to
be communal or collectivist, rather than individualist, to be at “one with nature”
(treating it as animate or agentive rather than as dead matter), or to be innocent
of distinguishing subject from object, or the transcendent from the immanent,
amounts to the observer’s “ostensive self-definition through negation” (White
1978:150), or to a kind of “back projection” onto others of modernity’s supposed
antitheses (Keane 2007:12). The following is thus offered in a decolonizing spirit,
as an effort to begin to undo anthropology’s complicity in such things by refusing
to reiterate its findings as regards ontological difference.2
What I hope to show is that investing things (such as a mountain, or images of
saints and Satan) with attributes of persons (such as intentionality or agency, care
or nurturance, desire, jealousy, duplicity, or revenge) is a generalized manifestation
of human semiotic practices, “theirs” and “ours.” In the spirit of Bruno Latour,
“we have never been modern.” Our explicit theories of being and of signification

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are ideologies that blind us to the ways we are all animists, particularly with regard
to the things we labor with in making a living, and especially when those things
are held to be the common patrimony of any sort of human collectivity.3

Semiotic Ideology, from Catholic to Calvinist/Scientific

The objects addressed in this article and the practices around them, which do
attribute to things the qualities of persons, have often been analyzed as examples
of fetishism (or its kin—animism, idolatry, or superstition), sometimes in order
to denounce the ontological difference as error, and sometimes to celebrate it as an
appealing alternative. Diagnosing fetishism (or celebrating ontological alterity) in
others is a symptom of Weberian modernity’s (that is, Euro-American and Protes-
tant, or “scientific”) explicit theories of signification—its semiotic ideology.4 The
concept of fetishism, like the social sciences in general, is founded in a particu-
larly Protestant (Lutheran and Calvinist) understanding of the relation between
thought and meaning (or transcendent spirit) and things. From that purview
things are part of a corrupt and corrupting material world, dominated by Satan,
in which God’s grace cannot be found (Carroll 2007); or, from the “disenchanted”
secular–scientific version of the same dualism, things are “dead” objects available
to rational explanation and technical manipulation via the minds of subjects.
Calvinist/scientific semiotic ideology shrank (one might say) out of a more
complex Catholic semiotic ideology,5 with which it nonetheless continued to share
significant ground.6 From the 13th century, Thomist theology held that God (and
hence, truth) could be understood by rational study of his creation. Assuming
Indians to be rational, this led to a certain early openness to indigenous forms
of latria (adoration or reverence). That openness ended with application of the
canons of the Council of Trent, aimed above all at Protestant heresies. To account
for the sacraments, and especially the presence of Christ in the consecrated host,
they taught the Thomist distinction between a thing’s essence (the thing in itself,
or substance) and its accidents (external appearances available to the senses).7 The
same distinction was used to explain why devotions toward saint images were not
idolatrous, as long as the worshipper recognized that the image was in essence
mere wood, shaped and colored to enable the imagination to visualize, through its
accidents, a nonpresent, now heavenly being who used to be earthly and material.
Not quite a straightforward theory of signs, Thomism treated accidents as sensible
signifiers, and essences as something like Saussure’s signifieds, but as substantial,
rather than merely conceptual ideal types.
Protestant revisions of this theology rejected its metaphysics and forwarded
simpler theories of the sign, doing away with Aristotle’s essences and accidents,
abhorring “blended” or “hybrid” concept/things, and making the host into a

The Iterated Mountain 85

 signifier evoking a concept as its signified, while remaining bread in substance.
The materiality of signs faded into the background. Images became problematic
to iconoclasts precisely because they called to mind not just spiritual, but material
beings. Overthrowing the Catholic semiotic ideology and applying a rigorous
procedure of purification (to use Latour’s [1993] term) to separate the mental (and
spiritual) from the material, adherents of Calvinist/scientific semiotic ideology then
repeatedly “discovered” that “primitive peoples,” like Catholic theology, failed at
drawing such distinctions.
Indeed, in developing his theory of fetishism as “primitive religion,” Tylor
(1865) drew on 17th-century merchant travelers’ accounts of the use of doll-like
bundles by participants to influence partners in the slave trade on the coast of
Guinea. There, the pidgin-Portuguese term fetisso (derived from a Portuguese
theological term for “man-made thing”) bore witness not to any original African
religion, but to Catholic preaching against idolatry, which was explained in cate-
chisms used since the 16th century in West Africa as well as in the Andes (Taylor
2003): the things of God’s creation—and here the catechisms listed sun, moon,
mountains, and man-made images—have been made by him, but do not contain
him, for he is pure spirit. Rather than being “primitive,” the fetisso was a product of
early modernity, drawing on and described by Catholic semiotic ideology applied
in the context of colonial capitalism.
For Catholicism the brotherhood with others established in collective devotion
to images became an aspect of the good works necessary for salvation. Calvinism,
instead, declared matter to be the antithesis of spirit or meaning, and made the
Word, rather than practices articulated through things, the means of salvation.
In Weber’s (1958[1904–05]) formulation, this freed individuals from the grip of
others and the material world for the development of a morality-free capitalism.
Engagement with things continued, of course, in semiotic registers outside of
Protestant religion (and divorced from the realm of morality): in the rational
technical manipulation of their properties, their entry into and exit from the
commodity cycle, and in their legal–bureaucratic regulation as property. Through
such modern registers, things continue to articulate social relations and kinds of
collectivities.
I will assert here with Latour (1993) that the Enlightenment-era disenchant-
ment with the world did not reduce things to mere matter, or persons to au-
tonomous, possessive individuals. It encouraged us to theorize the world this way,
but did not make us act as if it were. Calvinist/scientific semiotic ideology obscured
from view many of the ways in which things signify—in particular those sign rela-
tions we call property, patrimony, and heritage. In Spanish, all are patrimonio, in
which the property/thing becomes the sign and the material body of this kind of
transindividual being, which is sometimes of a local kind (“family,” for instance,
including its deceased and to-be-born members) and sometimes abstract (like “the

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king’s immortal body” [Kantorowitz 1997[1957]], or its successor, “the people”
[Agamben 1998]).The property-thing becomes a kind of metasubject here—an
element in sign relations capable of becoming the material body of abstract con-
cepts, and the substance of “mutuality of being” (Sahlins 2013); hence, it takes on
features of personhood, such as intentionality and agency.8
To understand such semiotic processes, it is necessary to approach them with
tools other than those offered by Catholic/colonial, or Calvinist/scientific semiotic
ideologies. At the same time we must submit the terms of those explicit theories
of signification to scrutiny. And so, on to Saussure and Peirce.9

Saussure, Peirce, and the Materiality of Signs

This section will focus on how the material properties of things become the basis for
different kinds of sign; for this, I will use (without aiming for complete consistency
or systematization) the terms of the Peircean scheme of semiotics.10
Especially useful in social science’s extensions of Calvinist/scientific semiotic
ideology was the conventional sign of Saussure and of structuralism, where the
signifier (a sound pattern or sequence of printed letters) is related to its signified (a
concept) through a convention—an agreement among members of a community
of speakers (and readers). For example, the (material) signifier and sound pattern
“mountain” points to the immaterial concept, or signified, “mountain.” The object
world in this approach to language lies out of reach, and can be imagined, as in
the strong forms of cultural relativism, to be a product of cultural–linguistic
conventions.
In the Peircean mode, the sign is not a diadic relation between word and
concept, but a triadic one among a material form (a word or image, the sign vehicle,
or representamen), an object (its referent), and the interpretation of the material
relation between object and representamen (its interpretant). For Peirce the study
of semiosis includes attention to processes of acquisition and the social alignment
of interpretation, and is not envisioned as an individual mental operation, but as a
social one, in which speaker or actor, hearer/interactant, and object world interact.
Saussure paid little attention to actual speech, instead theorizing the systematicity
of langue, language, as an object independent of its use by speakers. His image for
langue was that of a virtual dictionary, copied into the minds of all language users
(1983[1915]:19). That model supposed a homogenous or conventionalized world
of reference, which was different from real-world heterogeneity. Saussure’s system,
taken up by structuralism and poststructuralists, removes not only persons, but
also power and politics from the process of semiosis, and puts them (along with
the coherence of langue, which is in many respects akin to the concept of culture)
into a black box. Peirce, however, enables us to theorize how conventions are

The Iterated Mountain 87

 established, fully or partially shared, and contested. Even more so because in place
of Saussure’s conventional sign, Peirce gives us three kinds of signs that point to
different types of material relationships between objects and their sign vehicles. As
taken up by Silverstein (1976) and followers, attention to Peirce’s nonconventional
signs in language (and outside of it) also requires attention to the copresence of
persons and things in the contexts of semiosis.
To Saussure’s conventional sign (which Peirce calls symbol), Peirce adds the
icon, where the sign’s representamen or sign vehicle in some way resembles it, such
as the way an upside-down “V,” or a two-dimensional cone-shaped image, might
diagrammatically resemble a cone-shaped mountain. In addition, Peirce describes
the index, where the sign’s representamen (like the icon, itself an object) is contigu-
ous with (and sometimes causally connected to) its object—“smoke” as an index of
“fire,” for example. Index, by the way, comes from the pointing finger, and even the
conventional link between the word “mountain” and the kind of object for which
it is representamen requires, in the act of definition, the lexical equivalent of that
pointing finger: “This,” says a speaker, “this large mass in front of you that perhaps
resembles a cone or a mole-hill” (gesturing toward the mass), is a “mountain.” So,
if the Saussurean approach is especially useful for theorizing “cultures” as bounded
entities, and for postulating a radical break between mental and material realms,
a Peircean one is better suited for questioning such matters, for thinking about
interpretation as an open-ended process susceptible to change and variation, and
for thinking about the things of Potosı́ and their heterogeneous social context.

Iterations of Potosı́ as Money, Wealth, Patrimony, and Sovereignty

The Cerro Rico (Rich Mountain) of Potosı́ is known for its massive silver lode, as
well as for its reverberations in human affairs and world history. “Vale un potosı́,”
goes the Spanish saying; “it is worth a potosı́” (meaning riqueza extraordinaria,
“extraordinary wealth,” according to the Real Academia Española dictionary). In
1600, Potosı́ was the largest city in the Americas and one of the largest in the
world. Potosı́—the mountain and the city on its slopes—produced an astonishing
amount of silver in its heyday during the 16th to 18th centuries, enough to float
the economy of the first modern surveillance and archive state. The commodity
produced in Potosı́ was money: its mint generated large numbers of the ocho
reales coins (pieces of eight) that, circulating into the 19th century, indexed the
mountain’s silver and the sovereign claims (over subsoil resources, precious metals,
monetary systems, and trade) of Europe’s first global empire. Such coins were legal
tender throughout Europe, but also in China and (until 1857) in the United States,
where they became the model in size, weight, and purity for the first U.S. dollar.11
Dig deeply enough, and the dollar also indexes Potosı́.

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 The massive population that was drawn to Potosı́ came, willingly or not, to
participate in the world’s principal engine of capitalism and modernity. Indigenous
peoples were coerced into wage labor not only to produce riches for Spaniards and
for Spain, but to learn the value of their labor (in hard cash). Potosı́ was not
a major center of enslavement, but of the more “humanitarian” enwagement of
Indians, few of whom, in Potosı́’s vast labor “basin,” escaped periodic years of
enforced wage labor in Potosı́’s mines. Those stomachs and wages helped to drive
Potosı́’s engine of consumption, by which it drew into its maw the luxuries of
Europe and of China; it generated an exuberant metasemiotic discourse about
itself in processional performance—a robust scene in the theatrical, sonic, and
plastic arts—as well as a well-developed world of vice.12
Since Bolivia’s independence in 1825, the Cerro Rico’s image has been endlessly
reiterated—as the centerpiece of the Bolivian national seal, impressed in Bolivian
coins, and printed on its flag. As with the coin, however, there is a flipside to this
mountain’s majesty: the extraordinary wealth, state power, and luxurious living it
made possible came at the price of incalculable human suffering. Indeed, “Potosı́”
as name, image, mountain, and city, has been a metonym for colonial exploitation
more generally, and a principal source of Black Legend accounts of the Spanish
empire’s nonmodernity.
As patrimony, Potosı́ has been an object of contention from the Inca’s claim,
usurped by the Spanish king, to its transfer to “the people” of Bolivia in 1825. More
recently, it has been a focus of struggle between distinct property regimes (collective
vs. private), from the nationalization of mineral resources in Bolivia’s revolution in
the 1950s, to privatization under International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World
Bank pressure in the mid-1980s. During that neoliberal decade, Potosı́’s state mines
were closed. Private interests grabbed a few lucrative mines, while many laid-off
miners pooled their severance payments to purchase shares in leases (from the
state) of less valuable mines, which they organized as cooperatives. They now own
these, although the Evo Morales government is currently considering nationalizing
them once again.13
As the nationalized mines were being closed and sold, Potosı́’s movers and
shakers successfully put forward Potosı́’s candidacy for UNESCO status; the city’s
colonial center, the ruins of colonial mine works, and the mountain itself (i.e.,
its form not its contents) gained World Heritage status in 1987—a status earned
as much for its fabled wealth as for its infamy.14 Cooperative miners now lead
thousands of tourists per year on tours up the mountain and into the mines, where
they experience and photograph the rigors of mine labor, hear of the many dead
whom the mountain has claimed, and encounter one of the hundreds of devil
images to which miners offer devotions. Thousands of iterations of mountain,
mine, and devil figure images now circulate in virtual form on the Internet, but let
us return to contexts closer to life on and near the mountain itself.15

The Iterated Mountain 89

 Mountains and Persons

Conceptual mountains might be representable in two dimensions via a triangular

shape (or, in three dimensions, via a cone), but actual ones, in everyday English
language use, as well as in Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara (mountain, cerro, urqu,
q’ullu), tend to have heads, shoulders, flanks, skirts, and feet; sometimes they look
like hips, elbows, knees, or breasts. In each of these languages, individuated moun-
tains with which persons interact regularly are thought of as bodies comparable
to human ones, and they are given proper names, often derived from particular
features—their qualia (perceptible qualities of objects that are seized upon in acts
of icon- and index-filled discourse).
An average American engages with mountains as “nature.” But an American
who owns a particular mountain as inherited and heritable property, on which
she lives and draws her sustenance (say, from locally produced goat’s milk cheese)
will invest that mountain with a great deal of affect, and transact relations with
“family,” as well as with the nation state, through it. We must keep such a case in
mind when considering how Andeans attribute “agency” to mountains. For they
do so only with those on which they live or depend on for their sustenance and for
the production of the social bodies (families, patrilines, ayllus, municipalities) to
which they belong.
Around 65 kilometers from Potosı́ is a small mountain called White Nose, on
the slopes of which the Mamanis, members of a patronymic group belonging to
the community of K’ulta, live and farm—herding sheep, llamas, and alpacas. The
fields on the lower slopes are called wirjines, a local term for female generative
earth powers that, collectively, are elsewhere called pachamama. The mountain is
addressed as a male being, an uywiri, or “shepherd.” Mamanis also recognize the
uywiris and wirjines of other patronymic groups (from which Mamani mothers
and wives have come), but they address very few mountains beyond the scope of
genealogically reckoned kinship. Mountains are not in any generic way “sacred,”
and they are generally not imagined to house or give voice to numinous spirit
beings. The beings addressed in Andean “cult to mountains” are the concrete
“places” themselves (see Allen 1988), which have also been called earth beings
(De la Cadena 2010), or chthonic deities, or “genius loci” (Abercrombie 1998).
These have been socialized insofar as they have been interpolated into, and become
generative sources in, the productive practices of social entities. Such mountains
are neither transcendent or abstract “representations” or models of the social (as
Durkheim would have it), nor “nature” invested with human-like agency. Libated
mountains participate in the “mutuality of being” (to use Marshall Sahlins’ recent
[2013] definition of “kinship”) of those who socialize them.16
White Nose’s category as a type of mountain (uywiri or “shepherd”) points
to the agency that shepherd Mamanis attribute to it: a collaborator in productive

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processes. A kind of diagrammatic iconicity (see Mannheim 2000) equates or places
in parallel human and mountain contributions to the insemination, gestation, care,
nurturance, and death of persons, herd animals, and food crops (see Van Vleet
2008:59).
The acts that we might call “devotions” to White Nose, for example, are the
very practices that nurture and reproduce not only the bodies of Mamanis, but
the concept of “the Mamanis” as a patrilineage-being that includes the dead and
the to-be-born. White Nose is not only a nurturer, who herds animals and persons,
but is also the solid, material, and person-like but immortal body that provides
elements of continuity to a social being that, because of the mortality of individual
persons, is always at risk of dissolution.
Contemporary practices like these of K’ulta are intertwined with others that
are aimed at immaterial spirits (the Christian God), and at images of Christ and
the Virgin and the saints. Even White Nose is associated with a particular saint’s
image (that of San Antonio) held in a chapel on its slopes. Almost 400 years have
passed since K’ulta was founded by indigenous people as the site of a chapel and
confraternity dedicated to Saint Barbara, and White Nose is no longer adored,
as it might once have been, through an image (an oracular human-sized wak’a,
“devotional object”, dressed in human clothes).17
Preconquest Andeans did, however, make “idols” that were placed on altars in
order to give a humanscale body and locus of articulation to mountains.18 To a
degree, creating the idols made manifest the otherwise out-of-scale and not-so-
human agency of the socialized mountain. This must have been especially clear
in the case of mineral-bearing mountains such as Potosı́, which were (and are) in
many ways unlike the Mamanis’ White Nose.

Potosı́ as Mining Mountain, Speaking Subject, and Sign

Mamanis regularly perform libations, and flick some cane alcohol in the direction
of certain mountains outside of their domain. These more distant mountains are
those from which wives (and animals) may have come, or where their trading
partners grow maize. They also pour libations to Jatun Mundo, the mountain that
some say is the abode of the dead, and the Cerro Rico of Potosı́, which they call Wila
Q’ullu, “Red,” or “Blood Mountain.” The term used here has a double meaning:
Wila Q’ullu is also the ritual name for money, of which the people of K’ulta have
great need. Over the centuries, people from K’ulta (and from a vast region of the
Andean highlands) have migrated there to work in the mountain’s mines.
Before the conquest, they gave labor service to the Incas in the mines of Porco,
not far from Potosı́. There they produced silver, which was monopolized by Inca
nobles and used for status-marking ornaments and for the decoration of temples

The Iterated Mountain 91

 to the sun and the moon. Working such mines did not produce kinship sociality or
nurture individual and collective bodies, but produced invidious social distinctions
and a hierarchy that helped to maintain state domination. In the Spanish colonial
era, Mamani ancestors were pressed into coerced wage labor known as mita (after
the also-coerced mit’a service they performed for Incas), but they also went as
volunteers to work for wages.19 They still do. Unlike White Nose, the mountain of
Potosı́ does not produce foodstuffs and succor herd animals. It consumes them (and
the lives of miners), and produces money, both as the product of the mountain’s
ore, and through the wages that are earned by working in its mines.20
Before the silver of Potosı́ was revealed to Spaniards in 1545, the mountain
was already named Potocsi or Potocchi. It was worshipped at a temple altar via a
large lump of native silver that would have been adorned with rich clothing and
treated as an oracle—that is, it would have been expected to speak. This much we
know from early sources and from archaeological investigation.21 The Jesuit José
de Acosta (2002[1590]:173) recounts a legend that the mountain’s silver had been
“virgin” before the Spaniards took charge, because the mountain had spoken to
the Inca, telling him to desist from mining because it was reserved for others who
would come later. Conflating the voice of the mountain with the voice of God,
Acosta’s providentialism should make us wary of his claim. It is possible that Potosı́
was believed to have spoken to Indians before the Spanish invasion, but it certainly
seems to have spoken to Spaniards, and in its own silvery voice: “I am rich Potosı́,
treasure of the world, the king of all mountains, and the envy of all kings,” said
the mountain to Spain’s king, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. At least, that is
the motto he provided for the first coat of arms granted to the city, which already
existed on the mountain’s slopes in 1547, just two years after Spaniards began
working in the mines. It shows an image of the mountain between the crown’s two
Pillars of Hercules, above the mountain’s first-person expression.22
The transfer of the supposedly virgin mountain signaled the transfer of
sovereignty, affirming the legitimacy of regime change, and the resulting shift
in the kinds of sociality that were anchored by things. The transfer is depicted by
Guaman Poma, who in his early 17th-century drawing reproduces the essence of
Potosı́’s coat of arms but makes clear the degree to which Indian subjects sustain
the Spanish king’s sovereignty: the four “kings” of Tawantinsuyu support the Pil-
lars of Hercules, now located atop the silver mountain (see Fig. 1). Here is what he
wrote about the mountain:

Potosı́. By the said mine Castile exists, Rome is Rome, the pope is pope and the King
is the monarch of the world. Holy mother church is defended, and our holy faith
guarded by the four kings of the Indies and by the Inca emperor. Now the power is
with the pope of Rome and our Lord King don Pheblipe the third. (Guaman Poma
[1987:1057] quoted and translated by MacCormack [2007:233])

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Figure 1 Guaman Poma’s Potosı́. Drawing made by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala in El Primer Nueva
Corónica y Buen Gobierno (Murra and Adorno 1992: 976).

As it had been for preconquest Andeans, Potosı́ now became an earth being for
Spaniards. Speaking up to the Spanish King and emperor, becoming a lynch-pin
in new forms of sociality and sovereignty, a place of pilgrimage in the world of
money, wages, commerce, and political power, it was now seen as nothing short of
miraculous—where God interceded on earth to advance the true religion.

Cult to the Saints in Potosı́

To mark the presence of the true religion in Potosı́, Spaniards did more than destroy
Indian idols. They rebaptized “sacred places”—at least those of interest to them
(the newly or reestablished human settlements, but also features of the landscape,
such as the Cerro Rico)—not just with new names, but with new images: of Christ,
the Virgin, and the saints. Like Andeans, Spaniards addressed the material entities

The Iterated Mountain 93

 central to the production of their varieties of collective being through humanscale,
material interlocutors. Every Spanish town (and every neighborhood within it)
had its patron saint, as did the fields and pastures in which townspeople worked,
involving (as with Andeans’ cult of “earth beings”) diagrammatic iconicity
between analogized human and nonhuman processes of nurturance and reproduc-
tive generativity. Popular tradition (and sometimes, the church itself) holds many
of these saintly arrivals to be miraculous apparitions, ceding the agency of foun-
dation and conversion to the transcendent, heavenly beings that Catholic semiotic
ideology holds to be the referents of the concrete images’ representations.23 Just so
did saints such as Bartholomew, and even the Virgin herself, walk onto the Andean
landscape.
Planting Christian images (and reporting their miraculous apparitions) in the
idolatrous Indies was a teaching tool in the conversion process, and an element
of idolatry extirpation. After the Jesuit Arriaga destroyed traces of an idolatrous
temple dedicated to the mountain of Potosı́, he replaced it with a chapel con-
taining the image of the devil-conquering apostle Saint Bartholomew (Arriaga
1974[1599]:688). The later exuberant history of Potosı́ completed by Arzáns in
1735 reports that Jesuits in the 1580s had discovered idolatrous worship by In-
dians who celebrated “a demon” in a cave (at a cultic site a few miles from the
mountain called La Puerta (“the doorway,” from the Quechua punku). They erected
a small chapel nearby and placed in it a statue of Saint Bartholomew. Immediately,
a satanic figure came flying out of the cave, dashing itself in a burst of flame against
the rocks, leaving only a burn mark. Since then, the devil has been captive under-
ground, in the rock, and the city’s people engage in a procession from the city to
the chapel on the saint’s anniversary on August 24 (Arzáns 1965[1735], book 1, p.
40).24
Soon after mining began, hundreds of mining tunnels pierced the Cerro Rico’s
flanks, and the cone-shaped mountain became, on closer inspection, a fractal
mountain, made up of countless small cone-shaped piles of the mountain’s viscera.
Enter the Queen of Heaven. It is not hard to imagine how the mountain was
assimilated into a baroque image of the Virgin in Potosı́’s Andean hybrid baroque
art workshops (Bailey 2010), as in the Virgen del Cerro, an anonymous painting
dated 1720 (see Fig. 2).
Drawing an analogy between their mine labors and agricultural work (and the
work of mountain’s rock and field’s soil), miners today say that the mountain is also
the (Virgin-associated) Pachamama, the mother earth, wearing 12 richly patterned
polleras (the gathered skirts of the urban cholita); when they ask the mountain for
a new, rich vein of silver, they ask her for one of her polleras (Absi 2005:287).25
However, in order to receive that gift, they work through manipulable, portable,
addressable, humanscale images—of Virgins, of the Crucified Christ, and of the
devil. The distribution of these images’ labors directly follows from the plot line of

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 Figure 2 Virgen del Cerro. Anonymous painting, Casa Nacional de la Moneda, Potosı́.
Photo taken by author.

the colonial conversion story of Saint Bartholomew’s miracle: Saints, Christ, and
Virgin receive their devotions above ground, while Satan receives his beneath the
earth’s surface, inside the mines.
Saint Bartholomew figures centrally in Potosı́’s cosmogeny, but the miners
took up their own devotions to saints. On the one hand, as residents of the
14 Indian parishes established for mita workers, colonial miners celebrated
the patron saints of their parishes, and belonged to parish confraternities. On
the other, as workers assigned to particular mines, they joined the celebrations
for the patron saint images of their mine tunnels and labor organizations (see
Abercrombie 1998:225–236). To find images for their guilds, and for the chapels

The Iterated Mountain 95

 they built outside of mine entrances, miners did not have to go far: Potosı́ was full
of indigenous and mestizo sculptors and painters working in an industry devoted
to a burgeoning cult of the saints.26
Saints’ images are icons, tokens of a heavenly type; sometimes they are also
indexes (when parts of the saint’s dead body are stowed as relics within them) that
serve as channels via which humans call upon the saint as their lawyer to intercede
with God. The images serve as nodes uniting many individuals with a corporate
entity via their shared filiation as the saint’s “children.” That shared filiation
establishes a kind of metaphorical siblingship (cofradı́a, “confraternity”) that is
often reinforced by interwoven patterns of compadrazgo (co-Godparenthood). All
of these practices rehearse a mutuality of being through collective iteration of
bodily dispositions (folkloric dance and collective labor, for example), and the
sharing of common substance in sacramental meals, tying individuals to each
other as pseudosiblings.
Since early colonial days, miners as members of work teams, guilds, and con-
fraternities have carried out devotions to their mine’s paired images (a crucifix
called Tata Q’aqchus and one or another advocation of the Virgin). Such devo-
tions have included a danced–procession in which miners carry the images from
the mine entrances down to the city center at Carnival time. They were (and still
are) greeted with hostility for their habit (from the mid-18th century to the present
day) of exploding charges along the way—then of gunpowder, now of dynamite
(Abercrombie 1996).27 In his bird’s-eye view of Potosı́ painted in 1758, the Potosı́
painter Gaspar Miguel de Berrı́o included some miners descending the mountain
in disorderly fashion with their portable image of the Virgin (see Fig. 3). The
images still receive such veneration, and are brought down the hill during the
Miners’ Carnival (held on jueves de compadres, the “Thursday of co-godfathers”)
to a celebration of Mass in the city center.28

Images of Satan: Cult to the Tı́os

Inside every mine tunnel entrance miners pay regular homage to human-sized
images of beings called tı́o (literally “uncle”), which they also refer to as el Di-
ablo, the devil, or Satanás, Satan.29 I have also heard el tı́o identified by a yatiri
(shaman) at a llama sacrifice at a tunnel entrance as el principe de las tinieblas,
the prince of darkness. Hundreds of mine tunnel entrances host many tı́os; since
miners’ cooperatives purchased the mines from a bankrupt and neoliberal state
in the 1980s—and shortly afterwards the mineworks and mountain gained World
Heritage status—these tı́os have become a feature of mine tours.
On entering the mine for work, especially on Tuesdays or Fridays, miners turn
into a side tunnel/chapel to greet their tı́o image, to offer a drink of alcohol, a
cigarette, a handful of coca leaves, and to ask for permission to extract the ores that

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 Figure 3 Berrio’s view of Potosı́ with Q’aqchas descending, 1758. Museo de Charcas, Sucre, Bolivia.
Photo taken by the author.

belong to the tı́o. The images vary in size and features, but all are man-made, life-
size statues of a red, horned, pitchfork-wielding devil with a pointed tail. Hands
outstretched to receive offerings, mouth open for cigarettes, the tı́o also generally
sports a large and erect penis, and often wears a miner’s helmet and rubber boots.
Like the crucifix and the Virgin’s image outside the mine, the tı́o is treated as an
icon—as something that looks like and stands for, and is a communicative portal
(with eyes, ears, and mouth)—to something else.30
Miners’ tı́os, and their crucifixes and Virgin statues, are bodily–scaled, ad-
dressable images of other, less addressable or less clearly person-like things: the
mountain’s generative powers, and the miners’ cooperatives and work teams.

The Iterated Mountain 97

 Figure 4 A miner with his Tata K’aqchus crucifix. Procession of Carnaval Minero, Potosı́, January 2005.
Photo taken by the author.

Unworked mines, and mountains without mines, do not have tı́os. These, like
the named uywiris, mallkus, and wirjinis of peasant farming and herding com-
munities, exist only in relation to peoples’ work and the desired product of their
labor. Tı́os are not just devils, they are miners, just as uywiris are “herders,”
and wirjines (the multiple “virgins” that encompass the singular Pachamama) are
earth-wombs—agricultural fields, which help to make the earth, in concert with
human labor, generate its fruits.
On special days like the miners’ Carnival, tı́os receive more than their usual
weekly gifts of coca leaves, cigarettes, and alcohol: llama sacrifices are carried out
at the tunnel entrance. The tı́o eats the blood and the bones and small pieces from
every part of the animal that, taken together, represent the whole, while miners
roast and eat the meat (Absi 2005:169–171). At the same time, and while the Virgin
and crucifix are being carried into town (see Fig. 4), the tı́o is asked to inseminate
the tunnels with veins of ore, in an overtly sexual penetration of the mountain’s
passages, not unlike miners’ own vigorous drilling (Absi 2005:289).

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 Although through diagrammatic iconicity miners analogize the generative
powers of uywiris and of the Cerro Rico, tying both to their own (re)productive
powers, they are aware that mining is not agriculture, that mineral ores and silver
are not food, that work teams and cooperatives are not family, and that other kinds
of practices and rituals are needed to transform monetary wages into nourishing
substance in contexts of circulation and consumption that are progressively distant
from those of production. It is for the reproduction of necessary sociality that
certain pieces of ore take on special roles.

Circulating Pieces of Ore

Apart from their regular removal of ore from mines, miners ritually circulate certain
special pieces of ore beyond the realm of mines and mineworkers. Such practices
may have originated in an early colonial wage supplement—the carrying away of
purloined pieces of ore by which the Q’aqcha guilds, the ancestor organizations of
today’s mining cooperatives, came to define themselves and regard their labor as
in some way un-alienated, for the production of themselves (Abercrombie 1996).
Especially rich chunks of ore still circulate today, as gifts to the tı́os, and as gifts
to miners’ co-godfathers and co-godmothers, that is, to the cast of metaphorical
kin through which individual miners build a collective life of shared risk and
reward. Co-Godparenthood aims to distribute parental responsibility, care, and
moral force as widely as possible, and to increase sources of generative nurturance.
Co-godparents deliver to one another especially valuable pieces of ore, products
of their work, and the inseminating forces of below-the-ground beings. Some of
these pieces are kept with the tı́o as an archive of desirable kinds of ore, while others
are gathered up and sold; they are converted into money by which people feed and
clothe themselves and their families. The monetary value of these chunks of ore
should not be exaggerated: they are symbolic sums. But they also iconically resem-
ble and indexically point to larger loads of ore, and sums of money, that might be
taken from the mountain. At the same time, the social relations established among
miner, tı́o, and the mountain’s materiality index and also iconically resemble some
aspects of human social relations—particularly the generative powers of repro-
duction and of sustained nurturance and care—that these ore exchanges help to
create and sustain.31
Taken directly from the Cerro Rico, these pieces of ore are signs in and of
circulation. They are evidence of a miner’s successful labor and tokens of its value;
they are also equivalent to a certain amount of cash (miners are good at estimating
the “ley” of ores, the parts per ton [or ounce] of silver they contain, and their value
at sale to millers and refiners of ore). So, in addition to carrying with them traces
of the productive process and labor, and metonymically being a part taken from
a whole mountain, these pieces of rock index their own metallic content, and its

The Iterated Mountain 99

 value in money. They also index miners’ partial control over the products of their
labor, or the latter’s incomplete alienation from it. Gifting and exchanging these
chunks of ore, then, indexes the value of the social ties that they thereby create and
nurture.

Alasitas and the Portal: Rocks “Standing For” Ore Chunks, and Commodity Fetishes
Miners’ rural “cousins” work upon and with the earth for the production of food
and clothing, and circulate such products in contexts that lead to and include
consumption: festive banqueting makes consubstantial with them both the earth
being that gives body to abstract forms of social being and the living members
of such collective entities. But miners do not produce food and clothing. Their
consumption practices are mediated through money and market exchanges with
trading partners who perhaps define themselves by contrast to indigenous peoples
and their supposedly “non-modern” ontologies. So when miners find it necessary
to semiotically figure, so better to control, the acquisition and consumption of
commodities, they join in the practices of the city’s nonmining population, in an
attempt to seize control of the world of consumption.
As one might expect, the time and place to gain a better understanding of
circulating commodities is the celebration of Saint Bartholomew at his chapel near
La Puerta. At this event, pilgrims (miners, bourgeois elites, and everyone else)
arrive for the anniversary of the miraculous event and its special powers. Those
powers might be summarized as the saint’s power to entrap demonic agency
in materiality, and the indigenous demon’s resulting power to supply generative
capacity to things. Here, underworld powers can be summoned under heavenly
protection; one can supplicate the devil for things produced by others, while calling
on the saint to bless the social productivity that ensues from having them.
To do so, supplicants from the full range of Potosı́’s social universe attend a
special fair called alasitas. Alasitas (a miniatures fair known by an interlingual term
in which the Aymara “buy from me” is also interpreted, via the suffix read as a
Spanish diminutive, “little sales/purchases”) is best known and documented in La
Paz, but is today part of patron saint festivals throughout Bolivia.32 At the alasitas
fair of Saint Bartholomew, dozens or even hundreds of vendors sell miniature goods
of all kinds. Saints’ images (sold to serve as the guardians of “mini-portals” for the
home) abound, but also in plentiful supply are small cars, trucks, chalets, household
appliances, cooking utensils, crates of beer, sacks of flour, branded canned goods;
plastic bags of mini-macaroni, cookies, tins of lard, bottles of liquor, rolls of toilet
paper, facial soap, tools, musical instruments, newspapers, college degrees, birth
certificates, bank books, credit cards, marriage licenses, passports, and visas (Allen
1997). Many of the consumables are not only icons of the things they “represent,”
but are made from those things, and are indexes of them.

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 In the festive atmosphere of a holiday marketplace, participants “buy” the
goods of their hearts’ desire, acquiring an assortment of miniature things in an act
that iconically resembles a future purchase of the real thing. Modeling themselves
as mine owners, they hire children as “miners,” paying them a wage to hammer
a handful of little pieces of rock from the hillsides near La Puerta. The pieces of
symbolic “ore” (ordinary rocks that share many of ore’s stony qualities but without
any metal content), along with the miniature goods they have bought, are then
blessed by specialist shamans (presumed to be Kallawaya curanderos) in rites that
call on indigenous underworld beings.33 Participants then take their little things to
the chapel to be blessed by a priest, and then settle down to play with them. Here
on the urban periphery, families do not sit around a picnic blanket, but a model
of a house plot with its gardens and goods, engaging in playful householding; they
rehearse possession of desired commodities, and indulge in the collective social
being that having them helps to produce.
Afterwards, participants take their mini goods home, where they keep them
on a household altar. There they are presided over by a miniature image of Saint
Bartholomew, and a doll-sized plaster figurine called Ekeko, a “god of fortune,”
a moustached mestizo trader laden with his goods for sale.34 The “silver” rocks
and miniatures, brought together in a kind of hope chest, receive weekly liba-
tions (while Ekeko gets a cigarette) until the real things come along, or until the
rocks and miniature goods are replaced the following year. As with miners’ rela-
tions with mountains, saints, tı́o, and chunks of ore, these middle-class little things
gain potency by sharing in the intentionality of those whose productive relations
they enter and mirror.
Fake licenses and passports, plane tickets, visas, bank books, title deeds, and also
professional degrees, and even birth certificates of future children—all signaling
desired properties of individual and collective persons—are in plentiful supply at
alasitas, pointing to the places in “modernity” at which agency or intentionality
is distributed to certain things, enlivened also through the materialized speech
of writing and the rituals of law and bureaucracy.35 But the most ubiquitous
counterfeit commodity on offer is money. Not pieces of eight, but tiny to life-sized
replicas of bundled 100 dollar bills or 500 Euro notes: alasitas money differs from
the real thing only by the quality of the paper and the name of the issuing “banco
de la fortuna.” Little two-inch briefcases stuffed with tiny bundles of cash point not
just to the magical production of money (as an emblem of the abstract sovereign
“people”), but to its sometimes extra-legal circulation in the “informal economy”
that employs, perhaps, the majority of active workers in Bolivia.
To the degree that participants or onlookers envision such alasitas purchases (or
miners’ dealings with tı́os) as a “shortcut” to fulfilling individual material desires,
the morality tale of Potosı́’s cosmogeny points to the possibility of antisocial
Faustian pacts.36 Such beliefs make clear how well Potosinos have learned the

The Iterated Mountain 101

 moral entailments of Catholic/colonial semiotic ideology (the double-edged sword
of their attachment to materiality) that is the logical armature of the practices
described here. It is thus that these practices make clear that it is not enough to
have things as a possessive individual; such things serve as the instruments of good
works through which they make themselves an obligation-fulfilling part of a social
being. Even in the fantasy of a future escape (as cosmopolitan world citizens) to
the Cayman Islands with a suitcase full of cash, which some alasitas goods might
suggest to their purchasers, most participants envision themselves, like Scrooge at
the end of A Christmas Carol, as parts of a collective future.

Conclusion: On the Fetishism of Others

By drawing on ideas from Peircean semiotics to think through the role of the
Cerro Rico of Potosı́ (and of the things drawn from it) in local processes of
signification, we have seen how the mountain and its ores are more than the
conceptual “signifieds” of such sign vehicles as the words “mountain,” “Cerro
Rico,” “ores,” or “silver.” By considering the kinds of signs called icons and indexes,
which involve the copresence of interacting persons and things, it has been possible
to see how these things, through the perceptible qualities of their very materiality,
themselves become material sign vehicles embodying properties of social being
such as intentionality and agency.
These small steps toward a more complete analysis have involved some perhaps
obscure jargon and neologisms, like “trans-individual” or “social being”, but have
had the benefit, I hope, of having avoided the rigorous purification (as Latour
[1993] calls the effort to distinguish mental and material realms, or subjects and
objects) of the sort of social science analysis that invokes the idea of fetishism.
Since such signifying practices are shared by “Andeans” and “Westerners,” this
analysis has also avoided the supposition of radical ontological alterity. Along with
the suggestion that in the Anglo-American world “private property” constitutes
social being in ways analogous to Potosı́’s cult of the mountains and alasitas goods,
refusing radical alterity has been my decolonizing strategy that aims to begin to
undo the “sorcery of history” that was entailed in Tylorean anthropology (and by
the Calvinist/scientific semiotic ideology of Weber and Durkheim).
Catholic/colonial semiotic ideology postulated ontological difference and
made its reproduction central to colonialism’s exploitative regime. In contem-
porary Bolivia, such practices continue in the moralized attribution of ontological
difference to others on the basis of their distinct positions (or degrees of expertise)
in relations of production, circulation, and consumption. Thus, the bourgeoisie
seek Indians’ personal relations to earth beings to bring commodities to life, invok-
ing the cheerful (but exploitative) trading powers of Ekeko, a figure representing
a mestizo trader, who in real life in the countryside is often suspected of being a

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pishtaco or k”arisiri (Weismantel 2001) who steals legitimately produced indige-
nous body fat in order to illegitimately produce money and gain power (Aber-
crombie 1998:64–65, 404–405; Gose 1991). Caught between these two poles, both
rural people and the bourgeoisie demonize the miners whose social force ensues
from their relations with the mountain’s metals and images of the devil. When
we laud indigenous people for the supposed radical alterity of their ontologies (as
per Viveiros de Castro 2004), we entrench the effectiveness of Catholic/colonial
semiotic ideology through the terms of the Calvinist/scientific one. Such moves
make anthropology complicit in the perpetuation of the tools of colonialism, now
in the service of modernity. Perhaps such moves can be justified by noting the
political potential of strategic essentialism. Yet so far the only notable effects have
been to reinforce state sovereignty and corporate power, rather than to challenge
them.
The Bolivian government has recently raised the stakes on the ontology ques-
tion, demanding legal personhood for the Pachamama, and thereby perhaps also
for human rights (de la Cadena 2010). Giving Pachamama personhood might be
satisfying to us in an era in which global corporations, which would turn us all
into precarious wage workers if they could, seek the same protections. It also might
have effects in the world, if it can be agreed just whose social body she material-
izes, how she speaks, or who speaks for her. The question of voice is not a trivial
one. So far, Pachamama has not successfully blocked new mining concessions in
mountains locally revered, and she has been legally ventriloquized only by agents
of the Bolivian state, a situation not so different from that of the 16th century
Cerro Rico, whose only reported words were in the service of empire.
Who can or should speak for mountains? Should the rights of indigenous
communities trump those of the nation state or of the transnational corporation?
And what about miners? What it is to be “indigenous” is also a matter of ambiguity
and contention, as Potosı́’s miners remind us and as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
(2010b) notes in her defenses of the right to be ch’ixi, or mixed. One might try
to chart “degrees of ascribed indigeneity” by measuring relative participation in
communal versus private property regimes, and/or through degrees of relative
familiarity or expertise with the distinct semiotic registers (Agha 2005) associated
with particular contexts of production, circulation, and consumption of different
sorts of things; thus, an attempt could be made to describe how “ritual” practices
(in so–called “modern” contexts, these might be scientific experiments or legal–
bureaucratic acts) serve as metasemiotic techniques for gaining such expertise.
Such analysis will not undo the contradictions or settle the ethical questions that
arise when differing sorts of social formations are entangled with things (including
mountains and the environment more generally) in overlapping ways. Nor is it
likely to fully correspond with descriptors of self-identification. Here, I must be
satisfied with acknowledging the collective forms of being that miners, in their

The Iterated Mountain 103

 cooperatives (and, along with nonmining alasitas practitioners, in their families),
seek to build by tracking the qualities of things as signs of their sociality, and with
striving to recognize in them ourselves, and our struggles with that old black magic
theology, reborn in the semiotic ideology of the “modern West” and rebaptized as
the neoliberal project.

Notes

1 I draw here on my historical and ethnographic work in and on Potosı́ (carried out with the

support of a variety of research grants over many short periods since 1979; see Abercrombie 1996,
1998, 2003). I am indebted to Sandra Rozental for inviting me to the 2012 American Anthropological
Association Meetings panel that gave rise to this. Salas Carreño (2014) was influential, and Absi (2005)
particularly important. I also thank Amy Lasater-Wille for extensive comments, and Sonia Das, Helena
Hansen, Emily Martin, Bruce Mannheim, and Bambi Schieffelin for important suggestions, not always
taken up. Like 16th-century priests and today’s miners, I use the Hebrew name Satan interchangeably
with its Greek-derived equivalent, the devil.
2 The terms “Indians” and “Spaniards,” “indigenous,” and “nonindigenous” are used as a short-

hand. Potosı́ has always been a place of pervasive hybridization (see Rivera Cusicanqui and El Colectivo,
2010).
3 The Spanish concept of patrimonio includes everything covered by English “patrimony,” but also

“net worth” and “heritage.” See Rozental (2014) and Ferry (2003).
4 I take the concept of semiotic ideology from Parmentier (2002) and Keane (2007:17), who draws

on Woolard and Schieffelin (1994), among others. Keane’s useful rethinking of (Calvinist) religion and
modernity has been helpful here.
5 I treat these semiotic ideologies ahistorically, without regard to their revisions. In the early 18th

century, “idolatry” became mere superstition (Canessa 2012:51). In the 1990s, responding to the rise
of indigenous Pentacostalism, the “theology of inculturation” opened to once persecuted practices as
“Andean Christianity” (Orta 2004).
6 One aspect of that shared ground was to postulate the devil as materiality’s agentive force. Of

course scientific rationalists exiled this figure from things and located it in the mental realm of libidinal
drive, or the false consciousness produced by a conspiracy of capitalist oligarchs.
7 On accidents and essences, see MacCormack (1991:20–29). Idolatry was mistaking accidents for

essences (MacCormack 1991:231).

8 It is for another essay to spell out how treating things as property (whether private or common)

makes them signs of the sort detailed here for Potosı́’s big and little things. More on property in Hann
(1998), and in Verdery and Humphrey (2004).
9 As a student of Taussig during the writing of his 1980 book, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism

in South America, I was inspired and influenced by him and his arguments there. Some Andeanist
responses to it may be found in Gose (1991) and Platt (1993).
10 Manning (2012) and Keane (2003, 2005) concisely introduce Peircean semiotics.
11 See http://www.govmint.com/pages/Morgan-Silver-Dollar.asp. A trace of that origin can be

heard in the expression “two bits,” for a quarter of a dollar. See an ocho reales coin and its Potosı́
mintmark at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Potosi Real.jpg.
12 On the history of Potosı́, its size, mineral production, 14 Indian parishes, mita system, and mining

practices, see Hanke (1956), Bakewell (1984), Saignes (1986), and Tandeter (1981). See Assadourian
(1979) on its role as commercial hub; Mangan (2005) on its maize-beer halls; Arzans (1965) for an
encyclopedia of Potosı́. Absi (2005) provides an ethnography of cooperative mining.

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 13 On the mining crisis and emergence of the cooperatives, see Abercrombie (1996) and Absi
(2005:25–27).
14 On Potosı́ as a UNESCO site, see Absi and Cruz (2005). For more images of the mountain, which

is part of the heritage site, see http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/420.

15 Even as the iconic mountain’s life iteratively expands, the actual mountain shrinks, collapsing

at the peak over the last several years. UNESCO has declared it endangered patrimony. In 2012 an
engineering project began to buttress it internally by filling voids with foam. There is also a project to
add a prosthetic peak to cover its broken crown.
16 See Abercrombie (1998, part III) for a full treatment of devotions to hills and mountains and

plains, and for an account of sacrifices offered to Christ in K’ulta.

17 On the foundation of K’ulta by persons as a saint’s chapel (or by a saint through its apparition),

see Abercrombie (1998:272–275). Compare the “intercultural” shamanistic practices of ch’iar yatiris
(knowers of darkness), who make mountains speak through the possessed voice of the shaman, the
intermediation of Santiago, and a condor (mallku) that descends into the seance like the dove of the
Holy Spirit (Abercrombie 1998:417–420). Most rural people believe them to be frauds. Platt (1992)
points to Spanish legal forms in such practices, analyzed extensively in Vericourt (2000).
18 Sometimes they sacrificed children on mountain peaks to lend more humanity to the mountain’s

voice, and to deepen the channel connecting mountain and society. See the literature on Capac hucha,
cited in Abercrombie (1998:171–173).
19 Until the late 1970s, long after the mita was abolished at Bolivia’s independence, they performed a

ritual “send off” of mitayos to Potosı́ during All Soul’s Day, accompanied by mourning. See Abercrombie
(1998:508, n.20); Platt (1983) describes a similar rite in Pocoata.
20 For more on Andean meanings of money, see Harris (2000).
21 On the Inca mining cult in relation to Potosı́, see Cruz (2006); Platt, Bouysse-Cassagne, and

Harris (2006); Platt and Quisbert (2008).

22 The coat of arms is reproduced on the frontispiece of Arzans (1965).
23 Christian (1981) details such relations in early modern Spain.
24 On this founding thaumaturgy, see Absi (2005:144–146), and Absi and Cruz (2007). On La

Puerta and cult there, see Cruz (2006) and Platt and Quisbert (2008). On Porco’s wak’a, Tata Porco,
see Platt, Bouysse-Cassagne, and Harris (2006:135–206).
25 Pachamama is a generalized earth being in contemporary Andean (rural and urban, indigenous,

and nonindigenous) thought, which shares discursive terrain with, without being identical to, the
Virgin (Abercrombie 1998:105).
26 Places like Cuzco, Quito, and Potosı́ produced an Andean hybrid baroque style in the decorative

arts (Bailey 2010), producing not only works such as those seen in Figure 2, but also portable saint
images, often sold at sites of miraculous apparition.
27 Analogous practices involving the descent of crosses from uywiri hills to town church are attested

to in agricultural zones of the area (Platt 1996).

28 On colonial era Q’aqchas, and for citations of the archival sources, see Abercrombie (1996) and

Tandeter (1981, 1993). On the contemporary procession of miners’ carnivals, see Absi (2005:222–224).
29 The tı́o is also known as supay—a term for a preconquest type of human soul used by priests to

translate “Satan”; see Taylor (1980). Some scholars and miners etymologize tı́o to a mispronunciation
of Dios.
30 On the tı́os, see Taussig (1980) and Nash (1979); see also Abercrombie (1996), Absi (2005),

Fernández Juárez (2000), Salazar-Soler (1997), and Schramm (1987).

31 On these special ore chunks, see Absi (2005:198–205).
32 On La Paz Alasitas, see Martinez (1995), Paredes Candia (1982), Butrón Untiveros (1999). On

apparitions and alasitas in Oruro, see Abercrombie (2003).

The Iterated Mountain 105

 33 For cash payments, men from K’ulta (sometimes rather cynically) take on this professional role
in Potosı́ and other Bolivian cities, taking advantage of urbanites’ perception of their indigeneity and
presumed familiarity with earth beings.
34 On Ekeko, see Tassi (2010). The Ekeko figurine is perhaps the closest thing to a “fetish” to be

found in the practices under analysis here.

35 I draw the concept of distributed agency or intentionality from Gell (1998).
36 Absi (2005:210–216) argues that increased devil pact rumors result from share owners hiring

wage laborers to do their work for them.

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