Antonia Quispe Aucafuro, Kaccllaraccay peasant community.
What Antonia just said makes me happy, from that emotion of doing field work and finding a situation that makes sense. The ways of appropriating my camera when I am in the field are sources of information. It is about going beyond the illustrative function of photography by making it a method of knowledge for the social sciences.
There are different attitudes in front of a camera:
1.) the subject is unaware that he/she is being photographed and his/her gestures are not affected; 2.) the subject is aware of the camera and despite continuing to act normally, his/her gestures and postures may be affected; and 3.) the subject appropriates the camera to put him/herself on stage. In the latter case, the setting – spaces, people, objects – to be captured says a lot about the imaginary associated with certain practices. The camera frame indicates the scene of pride.
I have been researching for MATER the social relations between Mil and the neighboring peasant communities, as well as the representations of agriculture along the production chains. Preparing the land is the first stage of production in the new agricultural year. It corresponds to the month of August, when the harvest is over and the first rains are expected to start planting. The land is turned over and left to rest from all activity.
A couple of days after the disappointment expressed by Antonia, we hire a machine to turn the soil in Mil’s farm. The tractor draws a furrow, a fast-moving border that divides the farm into two spaces. We are very slow. Following the furrow but in the opposite direction to the tractor, we scrutinize the soil with our eyes in search of hidden pests.
By chance, Antonia is among the members of the communities present that day. Suddenly, I am reminded of her pride in working her farm “with a machine” – implying that body strength is not needed to work the land. Usually, using the plow, despite the mediation by animals, the farmer’s body is involved in a technical cooperation that requires a lot of physical effort to guide the cattle. With a tractor, the farmer’s body is dissociated, replaced by the body of a third, seated, driver. Turning the soil becomes an activity that involves another technique, that of driving.
I assume that this relief of the body is associated with representations of modernity, of progress, when other traditional and laborious techniques of the body relate more to the past. Isn’t this the case everywhere? It is often the case that technological advances aim to offer greater comfort for the body, such as the elevator or the delivery of food at home through an application.
I see it as normal to look for what is most efficient. Depending on the size of a plot, a farmer always makes the balance between time gain and economic costs to make the decision to hire machinery or not. Therefore, traditional tools such as the chakitaqlla are reserved for smaller plots or plots inaccessible to the tractor or plow – when they are not no longer used…
The chakitaqlla is a useful and indispensable pre-Hispanic tool in Andean terrace agriculture. Only once, I was able to observe one that had been stuck between shovels, picks and rakes. It was precisely in the terraces of Mil’s orchard, a smaller area, where it proved to be very effective. I had watched with fascination as Mario used it in a series of leg and arm movements that were unreadable and irreproducible to me. Modesta and a child had also been watching Mario’s precise and successful technique.
These considerations remind me of the phrase of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss: “I call technique an effective traditional act”[1]. It is transmitted from generation to generation by imitation: children or adults reproduce successful acts that they have seen performed by others. It is in the mediation by the other that lies the social dimension of the techniques of the body, even for those that seem to us the most natural, such as the way we walk, run, sit. Participating in different land preparation works, always equipped with my camera, I started to accumulate a series of photos of people in farm work. The practice of photography allows me to have a reading of bodies in space that might have escaped my understanding if I had worked all the time. Taking a picture from time to time allows me to capture postures, cooperations and routes necessary for the fulfillment of the work.
In Mil’s farm, the technology of the machine has replaced the technicality of the bodies… only for this moment. And after the passing of the tractor, another arduous task remains: that of destroying the clods of earth with a pickaxe. This tool reminds me of my childhood, my grandmother more precisely, gardening in her house in the south of France. I had a miniature version of the pickaxe that I used as a tool and toy. I understand now that by playing at imitating her I was educating my body to a technique that would serve me well today.
Knowing that everyone is waiting to test my pickaxe skills, I start pounding the earth with force and regularity. They watch me for a while, approve of my gestures, and go back to concentrating on their task. I feel as if I have passed an entrance exam.
In certain parts the soil is hard as stone and I get tired. I feel a little ridiculous realizing that I get blisters on my hand. I take advantage of the situation and change pickaxe for camera for a while. I see a group of three people whose postures also express tiredness. Gabina has put her pick on the ground and is looking at her hands, I assume that she is also in pain. Leonarda rests leaning on the same pickaxe that became a cane for a few minutes. Gabino, back bent, keeps pounding the ground. They don’t see me and I try to capture that moment of general tiredness.
We are already halfway through the farm when I realize that our bodies have traced a very orderly route. Was it like this from the beginning without me noticing? I am not quite sure. Now, we form a line of people moving together, talking and joking, tracing as one, in the same movement, an important piece of the chakra. I extract myself from this general mechanization and I remain observing the series of movements that sometimes we all manage to synchronize.
What is a material technique if not the use of a tool taken to its maximum power, profitability, efficiency? And today, observing the orderly and efficient cooperation of which I was a part, I understood that there is also a technique of collective work.
From technique to technification, those who believe in the narrative of progress will see an irreversible arrow leading from an archaic and stable past to modernity. But, because of their social dimension, techniques have always been subject to adjustments, adaptations, transformations. The integration of new elements only redraws the type of social relations that the farm offers.
In today’s collaboration, as we shared the same physical effort, I felt that we were forming a collective that throughout the day we sealed by sharing chicha de jora. And it is precisely because the chacra is a space of socialization that it is a crucial space for my integration and my research.
[1] MAUSS MARCEL, Sociologie et anthropologie, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1968 (Article originally published in Journal de Psychologies, March 15 – April 15, 1936).
