Abstract:

Tiwanaku, Bolivia is an archaeological site, a tourist attraction, a sacred space, a home to walking monoliths, and a contemporary rural Aymara village. It was built by the Aymara, by a pre-Columbian Andean civilization, by extraterrestrials, by Atlanteans, and by chullpas frozen in place when the sun came up for the first time. Being there gives one a sense of connection to Pachamama , a set of nice photos, changed DNA, and illness. The Gateway of the Sun is a calendar, a gateway to another dimension, and a postcard. Despite the multiplicity of narratives surrounding it, one thing is agreed on by most: Tiwanaku is the "capital of the Aymara world," because any attempt to define the Aymara as a political group in the contemporary context must reference this place. This research, based on ethnographic and archival research conducting in 2002-2004, explores the consequences that narratives about Tiwanaku have in unexpected arenas, from the layouts of touristic markets to genres of newspaper reporting, from the quotidian practices of selling souvenirs to the emergence of public rituals.

Tourism to Tiwanaku was fickle. Events such as the June Solstice flooded the village with thousands of visitors, while periodic blockades prevented tourists from arriving altogether. Tourism could provide welcome windfalls, but could not be relied on to provide steady income. As a result, local political systems encouraged mixed household economies that acquired resources not only from tourism, but also marketing, agriculture, livestock, and temporary wage-labor. Souvenir vendors, tour guides, and museum guards employed systems that rotated wage-labor or access to tourists. Although such systems had Andean antecedents, they were not merely holdovers from the past; these systems were reinforced and expanded with increasing local control of the archaeological site, especially since 2000.

Tensions emerged between Tiwanake?os' mixed household economies and modernizing visions of entrepreneurial touristic markets. Permanent market kiosks built for souvenir vendors outside the archaeological site disrupted their system for distributing touristic income more equitably. Whereas previously their tables regularly rotated to allow each vendor more equal access to the primary resource of the market - direct line of sight with tourists - the permanence of the kiosks placed some vendors behind others, literally hiding them from the "tourist gaze."

Touristic networks at Tiwanaku also involved non-human actors in the Latourian sense. Far from being an inert relic of the past, the archaeological site was not only a sacred place, but also seen as an animate actor. At night the stone monoliths were capable of walking, dancing, talking, and making humans fall ill. Similarly, money - the material object that directly ties touristic networks together - had a soul (animo or ajayu ). The ability of physical bills to translate into value can be lost with its soul, leading to money slipping through one's fingers - a very real experience for those working on the peripheries of the capitalist system.